Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Yaur]

For a total noob embark your tasks are to figure out food production, basic workshop setup, and preparing for immigration. Your stretch goals are setting up metal works and surviving your first siege (in that order).  What you need in an embark for that is:
No Aquifer
Not evil
Not Untamed Wilds
A decent amount of trees
This is the bare minimum, you also want:
Shallow metal(s)

If your shallow metal is tetrahedrite make hammers and armor, if it's an iron ore make axes and armor. Use the wiki to figure out why.
Once you work out the basics you should learn to deal with aquifers IMO at which point the aquifer thing is less important, metals are more important, and you will have a better idea of what went wrong. Flux isn't important until your biggest problem is dealing with invasions.

[Zarnium]

Thanks everyone, you helped a lot.

Is there some surefire way to make sure you embark on a site with a large dirt layer?

[greycat]

Is there some surefire way to make sure you embark on a site with a large dirt layer?

On the pre-embark map, you'll see something like "Deep soil".

Or, did you mean large in a horizontal sense?  That would be a function of biomes.  If your site has multiple biomes, then the soil layer may turn into a stone layer when you cross the boundary into a different biome.  If you want a horizontally large soil layer, make sure the soil-layer biomes span most of the embark site (by moving the 3x3 site around on the local map, and cycling through the biomes with F1, F2, F3, etc. to see where each biome sits).

[Panando]

Thanks everyone, you helped a lot.

Is there some surefire way to make sure you embark on a site with a large dirt layer?

Yeah there is. First select a biome like forest or swamp or desert or some other non-rocky biome, then press the tab key until you see the cliff indicator view. The numbers indicate how steep the terrain is. Choose a site which is mainly 0's, this will result in a site which is basically flat (you can get dead flat sites), because it's basically flat you'll have great expanses of unbroken dirt to dig in. Whether it'll be 2 or 5 layers is a bit less predictable, 3 is probably the most common, you normally only get really deep soil on aquifer sites. Sites which say they have both deep soil and clay are also likely to have good dirt layers.