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[guessingo]

Im a newb and I use Lazy Newb pack. Been around a while. I play off and on. Its hard learning the mechanics. The lets play videos are very long. Which ones or one do you think is the best? If I want to just learn the game mechanics so its not all greek to me. It actually takes motivation for me to learn this difficult of a game. I think once I learn the basics it will be more fun, now its well work and the game is rather tedious.

I did like parts of the Masterwork DF Lets Play since thats the first one to explain the optimization feature in Dwarf Therapist. Im sticking with the vanilla game if your wondering.

Also, What should my primary goals be early? I do a very slow start because I am constantly pausing the game to look things over. The interface alone is difficult to get a hang of.

The application I use mainly with the game is Dwarf Therapist. Should I be  using anything else to make the game more playable (I do use tiles).

How do you guys focus on what is going on? There is so much to look at. Its easy to miss when something bad happens. I believe Masterwork DF has a better system to alert you to things you need to look at. Do you guys constantly pause the game also to verify what is going on?

[Laurin]

The let's play tuts are long, because the do just a normal game, only explaining a lot of stuff.
Lot's of it you won't need to start your own fortress.

Each tutorial has to start with the basics, that would be: Creating a new world, choose an embark location, and some of them also explain how to "prepare carefully", which means how to change skills of your starting dwarfs and how to buy different things to bring with you on embark.
Each tutorial also will explain some basic stuff regarding menus and shortcuts and things like looking around and explore the map.
Also, you will always see how to start a new fortress with digging basic rooms, building farms and basic workshops and stockpiles and so on.
All of this will usually be covered in about the first three videos of a tutorial series. I suggest, you just watch a bit and read the starting guides at the wiki and then try it yourself. There is now way of learning the game completely by watching a few videos.
You will encounter problems and question will arise every so often. Then the wiki, the forums, and youtube are your friends to help you.

Part of the fun is actually to learn the game and to fail (on epic proportions!) and to try to get around the difficulties or avoid them in your next fortress.

Always a good starting point are captnduck's videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHVZtRdtPdo&list=PL06686270DA5FF439

Also, though a bit outdated in some aspects, TinyPirate's tutorial is still very helpful:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=31928.0

[Bandreus]

captnduck's tutorials are great. Those are the only vidtuts I ever watched every episode of, so I can't really speak for others I guess.

One more tip: at times you don't really want to watch multiple hours of content just to be able to take the first steps into the game. You should really refer to the wiki every time you're in doubt about anything, as 99% of the stuff you need to know about the game can be found there.

I found the Quickstart Guide is brief and informative enough to put you up to speed in as little time as possible. That's an extremely good starting point to learn the game basics.

[Tevish Szat]

I found the Quickstart Guide is brief and informative enough to put you up to speed in as little time as possible. That's an extremely good starting point to learn the game basics.

I second this.  The quickstart guide took me from "Constant failure with no learning" to "actually managing a fortress and advancing my knowledge of the game."


A few things I learned in terms of useful designs

Defense (B=raising bridge; Fort Entrance)

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Security (extend as needed)

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Housing.  (π = Cabinet not sure how to get the tall version normally)

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Workshops (in case of failed Mood berserk; Mason's shown)

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