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[blue emu]

I'm planning to start a game with zero immigration. I'll be limited to my seven starting dwarves plus any children born on-map.

Does anyone have any advice on this? Starting settings? Starting skills? Essential equipment? Priorities?

Should I just seal myself in and avoid any contact with the surface world? Ignore the caravans? Will I even get any caravans?

[vjek]

imo:
Use a truly dead dwarven civ, and have only one in the world history, that single one that died.
Beyond that, if it were me, I would set a goal, first.  If the goal is to establish trade with humans and elves, and trade a certain amount, while also having goblins in the world, that would likely be reasonable.
If you're looking for an extremely difficult challenge, you could always do something like have it be a clown-only lethally frozen world, and your goal is to make a masterwork/legendary clown-meat roast meal, or similar.  With both volcano and water fountains in your dining room.  Oh, and no ores.

[PatrikLundell]

It depends on your goals, as vjek indicates.

Dead civs (the ones recognized by DF as such) are broken in many ways, so I've given up on playing them:
- They can't travel at all (conquest, messenger, etc.), as they'll leave the embark and never progress from there.
- Loss of the expedition leader is crippling, as it's never replaced, so everything that depends on the presence of an expedition leader can no longer be done (when the pop has increased to the level at which you get mayors, that problem goes away).

Dead civ means no dwarven trade, but you can just refuse to trade with them, if you want to emulate that (although you'll probably get a pile of junk every once in a while from scuttling traders when they get attacked by something or other).
Your civ status does not affect trading with other civs. However, the default raws are set up such that you can't trade with humans unless you've previously traded sufficiently with others, so if your civ is dead and there are no pointy-ears nearby, you can't trade with the humies either, but you can change the entity raws to work around that (can be done on an existing save, as the setup is probably made to avoid humies showing up during the first summer).

The default attack triggers mean that it will take a very long time for any (non necro) sieges or (semi)megabeast attacks to happen. I'd suggest lowering the triggers.

I find the default of 1 anvil, two picks, and two axes to be good. I give one axe to a wood cutter and the other to my single "militia" member (for cases where I need to attack something, like e.g. some shell bearing surface critter). I don't care about skills as everything of importance can be trained. I bring all kinds of surface plants on embark to start out surface farming, but that's just my preference.

One thing you do want to check on embark is that you've got at least 2, and preferably 3, viable future couples, i.e. a gender division no more skewed that 2/5 and check their sexual orientation and marriage willingness plus marriage avoiding traits on those (Dwarf Therapist can be used for this). Age difference is less of an issue nowadays when it's no longer a strict 10 years, but it's rather boring to have to wait for 20 years before they come within range. If the couples don't form up, skip out of embark and try again, which will roll new dorfs.

Also note that visitors can arrive, if the world allows for them, regardless of your civ status. This means that you may have opportunity to recruit additional citizens that way (which you may not want to do), and it also means a huge stream of villains once you start producing artifacts (pop 20 required to get any moods).

[NordicNooob]

If you want to have a seven last dwarves world, there are two issues: caravans and migrants. Caravans like to show up anyways, sometimes. Migrants, well, the first two waves are hard coded. You can use DFhack's hermit-enable to remove visitors, caravans, and migrants. I never liked visitors anyways, and hermit-enable will bypass the hard-coded migrant waves. Alternatively you can just set your pop cap to 7 and leave your strict cap high.

Oh right, third problem: be very careful who you bring with you. You MUST get two breeding couples from your starters. That is your main priority. If you cannot, you fail and die, since dwarves will not marry (close) family. Eventually everybody will be like third cousins and stuff like in Archcrystal, but you can still marry distant relatives; two couples is the minimum.

As for general other "oh uhh jeez I have seven dwarves" issues: learn to be patient. Don't over work them, they need to stay not stressed and also need off time to make babies and get married. Do your projects one at a time over the course of years and decades, not months and seasons. Starting skills and equipment are irrelevant (for the most part, might be shockingly relevant depending on your embark location), but you will need a setup that allows you to have a functioning and developed fort with only seven dwarves, so plan your labors carefully.

[anewaname]

I would prioritize getting the dwarfs to socialize, and to write books. Having books to read is fairly important for dwarf happiness and getting them from non-fort sources may be difficult. For skills, I would avoid specialization. Many low-ranked skills is better for happiness than one high-ranked skill.

[Maloy]

If you get bored of waiting for your children to grow couldn't you use the dfhack command "regenerate"?

The script makes them 20 years old and is implied for old dwarves, but it sounds like it'd work for kids

I'm just thinking 12 years is a long time to wait for more sweat shop workers

[NordicNooob]

12 years isn't that long, especially in a low pop fort. Having to wait for kids is like half the point of doing a challenge like this.

[Mobbstar]

If you want more control over the pace of the fortress, you can speed up and slow down the tick-rate (i.e. how fast fortress time goes by) using  Alt =  and Alt -

Or at least that's how it's supposed to work. Never worked for me. Tried it with both Alt keys, numpad and text signs, assigning different keys in interface.txt, but none of that helped.

[Justin]

I've tried something similar, but I start with 20 dwarves. With a few restarts, you can have 10 couples.

With 20 dwarves you also have the magic number to allow moods.

[Quarque]

Most of my forts have been limited to the seven starting dwarves and their offsprint, it's my favorite game mode.

Your biggest decision is whether you just want a hermit fortress (not hard with pop limits), or a truly dead civ. Getting a truly dead civ is harder to achieve than it sounds, because (last time I played) there is a bug that often prevents a civ from being marked as dead, even when the population is zero. I think you need a dfhack script that fixes the bug? Patricklundell knows more about the details, you can also find some really good informative posts in the forum about it.

If you do have a real dead civ, you will get no caravans (personally I like that), but your expedition leader will soon proclaim himself king and start demanding all kinds of crap, while you have a very limited workforce.

In any case, as other people said, your biggest challenge will be to get two married couples. Dwarves may never form a relationship, even if they have the appropriate sexual orientation and ages. The only way to find out is to wait for years and see what happens.. There are a few reasons. First off, dwarves may have too many conflicting values to like each other enough. Second, some dwarves hate the idea of forming a relationship at all.

What I did is edit the raws and tweak the dwarf race a little, so that they at least don't hate the idea of love. I also made all dwarves heterosexual. (Or at least all of them pretend to be. ) Once you succeed and get the two breeding pairs, your fortress will be overrun with children for many years.

[PatrikLundell]

Sorry Quarque, truly dead civs don't ever get a monarch. "Struggling" civs generally saddle you with one quickly, in particular the ones that should be dead (and thus have no other sites or members). In that case the struggling civ with either get the standard "after a polite discussion" appointment, or a different one that happens at the start of the third year (I think, it might be the second), where there's a decent chance the new monarch was the expedition leader (allowing you some control over mandate spewing, and with save scumming you can try several times until they get it right).

Getting compatible dorfs to marry isn't that hard: just subject them to the maritial encouragement suite treatment, and most couples will be married within two seasons. However, it's not always obvious why some still refuse, even though they look compatible.

[Quarque]

Dead civs (the ones recognized by DF as such) are broken in many ways, so I've given up on playing them:
- They can't travel at all (conquest, messenger, etc.), as they'll leave the embark and never progress from there.
- Loss of the expedition leader is crippling, as it's never replaced, so everything that depends on the presence of an expedition leader can no longer be done (when the pop has increased to the level at which you get mayors, that problem goes away).

Could you please elaborate, are there any other important problems with dead civs? I'm starting a new fortress using the latest version of DF, and will also make it a legacy fort of the seven starting dwarves and their offspring. Still undecided if I want a dead civ. The two drawbacks you mentioned above are ok with me.

[PatrikLundell]

Those are the main issues. Your civ won't build hillocks, so those won't be associated to you, but other civs' sites can still get associated to you. Obviously, they're useless, as you can't send anyone there or get anyone from them.

Expelling dorfs without a target probably works, while I believe dwarves expelled with one would get stuck (not that it matters, as the trouble makers are out of the fortress by that time).

I think there's something about the injustice system you can't do, but I don't do it (DFHack script to teleport every villains into the magma sea on arrival to disable the broken nonsense that's Villains).

Another issue affecting any long term fortress (no just dead civ ones, but dead ones tend to live fairly long given their slow start) is that you'll run out of visitors as they die off due to old age and terminal stupidity (such as trying to get through a necro siege), which obviously isn't a drawback if you don't accept any visitors anyway. Villains seem to be exempt from that, with an unlimited supply of new ones claiming your artifacts (a few hundred per artifact, tricking in at 1-2 per month, but it's probably the same villains claiming most of them).

Losing your expedition leader is save scum worthy, though (which obviously isn't THAT big of a problem if you've got backups and the expedition leader wasn't afflicted when you saved, but the symptoms only slowed much later [lost mine to deadly rain, but the expedition leader seemed to have gotten away, only to immediately croak when a save was loaded]).

[Quarque]

Thanks. I don't play with visitors, so no big deal there.