Learn from my mistakes: Don't try working with pumps, automated pumps, or pump stacks until you've gotten better at the game. Water and magma both can still be reached by mining open that last tile in beneath workshop/well areas, without risking your dwarfs too much, or your time and nerves if the pump stack doesn't work like you thought it would.
Water pressure. It's HILARIOUS.
When building a bridge over a deep chasm, and you want walls up at both sides for whatever the reason, don't mass-designate the walls to be built. Bridges do not support constructions, so if you have faster dwarves who are going to build a piece of the wall that's somewhere else than starting from the natural walls, or connected to an already built wall tile, the piece will plummit down, taking your dwarf(s) with it.
Grates do not support constructions either.
If you make a trap-tunnel with repeating spike traps, do remember that in case it's a long siege and a lot of enemies are trickling down the tunnel rather than going in a huge bumrush, you should keep dropped items and corpses both forbidden until after the enemy is dead or remaining troops flee. No one likes seeing a few dozen dwarves get impaled. Well, no one within the game's units. Except maybe the goblins. Or elves. Or- you get the picture.
If you think of something awesome and also necessary for fort survival, check first that it can be done.
If you think you know how to build it successfully, double your safe-mechanisms.
When making meals at a kitchen, it is advisable to go to the Kitchen menu earlier on and keeping your booze-plants out of the list of ingredients for cooking. However, this can be used to remove excess plants without spilling seeds all over everywhere, so know when to cook or when to brew your plants.
Also when making meals, check that booze that you buy from humans or elves is out of the ingredient list. Or any booze, for that matter.
There can never be too many barrels. Only too little booze or food.
If you must make a magma pump, for gods sake, make sure it's from magma-safe materials. Wooden pieces do burn.
However, if you have a magma-breach accident but have time to save the situation, even wood stops magma when it's built as a wall.
Booze-explosions are real.
Should your food storage ignite, it is advisable to lock the doors and forbid the contents of the stockpile just in case. If you think you know where the fire is at the moment, it might be possible to salvage some of the food, but even burning barrels can lit your dwarves on fire or cause them horrible injuries.
If you know where you're going, what you're doing and so on, you can use some embark points on other things than a metal axe. Instead, make a wooden training axe. Dwarves are tenacious at their work and have no problems with using those at woodcutting, and since you always have 3 pieces of wood when embarking, you'll always have materials for an axe. Assuming you remember to make it right from the start.
If you find coal before finding the caverns, use it. Odds of finding something horrible down there goes up the more layers you've breached, although all issues can be averted by keeping entries to the fort closed with walls, or drawbridges and so on.
Magma-men hate your smiths.
So do fire-men.
I think that's enough for now.
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Topic: Essential Stuff to Know for the New DF-er (Read 1479 times)