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[Patriot]

So I've started my first real dwarf fortress now and I have gotten all the essentials up and running, more or less.  I have rooms with doors beds and cabinets for most my long-term dwarves and am working a barracks-style chamber for some of the immigrants who keep pouring in.

I have food, booze and fairly ready access to water.  I have a tower built upon the exit from my fortress and have quarrels but not crossbows to shoot from the tower at potential invaders.  In lieu of actual soldiers, however, I have plenty of wardogs and stone-drop traps in place to keep any potential menaces at bay.

All this to say, things are going fairly well, but I'm not quite sure what to do next.  When I don't have an obvious goal in sight, I tend to lose interest and so my fortress has been put on the back burner the last few days.  So I'm looking for a bit of insight or advice on what to do next so that I can get to work, if for no other reason than that I could hurry up and lose.

I have a few ideas for what to do next, but no idea on how to go about making them happen.  For instance, I'd like to start some sort of production that would let me make finer clothes for my peasants, but I don't know how to get the seeds I'd need to start a cloth-plant farm.

I probably have around 30 dwarves now and I no longer feel I can successfully micromanage them effectively.  Can someone point me to an article on dwarf wiki about effectively managing larger fortresses?

I know I need metals and coal so that I can start getting an armorsmith smithing, but I'm not sure about the best way to go about that?  Just dig down and start tunneling?  How do I avoid tunnel collapse?  Is there a good rule to know when a room is too large?  Do I have to worry about stacking multiple unsupported rooms on top of each other? ie. hallow out 2 30x30 rooms on top of each other would make them more prone to collapse?  Is there a good pattern to use to find minerals/ores while digging?

What are some standard goals to strive for after achieving the basic food/housing goals?

[SoylentNinja]

Well you could start =overly complex but nice looking construct= or you devise a creative way for destroying your fortress.  As to managing a large number of dwarves I think that comes with practice.  I personally take care of my essential workers first(the miners, masons, armourers, farmers,etc.,), and then go on from there.  other than that, I dunno read the forums for ideas.  Trust me there are ideas floating around here, terrible, terrible ideas...*shudders*

[smeej]

I give my important dwarves titles so I can separate them from the rest of the freaks. I tend to strip any immigrants of their preassigned tasks (aside from cleaning and gathering) and give them a title like Prole or Laborer until I find a task for them, when they get a real title.

Give yourself arbitrary complicated goals like installing a sprinkler system in your base or building a giant tower to house prisoners and captured creatures.

Aside from that, export a ton of stuff, build up a military and kill some elf and human caravans to get some action rolling your way.

[Muffy St. Bernard]

Metals and coal...yes, just start digging. There's no point in digging out a large square room while looking for minerals...it's a waste of labour (though, to answer another of your questions, I don't believe that a large room will cause a collapse in the current version). I dig long criss-crossing single-width tunnels in each level, with lots of staircases to speed up pathfinding. When I run into a vein of gems or useful stone I dig it out.

If you're worried about game lag, search each level thoroughly before you go down to the next; apparently each new level you dig into exposes a new bunch of data to the engine and therefore slows the game down. So avoid "exploratory shafts."

As for cloth production, check out the "plants" page in the Dwarf Fortress Wiki. It explains which standard plants can be:

1. Processed at a Farmer's Workshop into thread.
2. Threads turned into cloth at a Loom.
3. Cloth dyed at Dyer's shop if you wish to increase the value (then you'll need to process certain plants into dye -- or buy dye from traders -- see the "dye" page for information).
4. Cloth made into clothing at the Clothier's Shop.

The process for silk is similar (if you have cave spiders leaving silk all over the place).

So, basically, you'll want to plant Pig Tails or Rope Reed in order to make plants that you can process and turn into clothes.

Myself, I just buy cheap bins of cloth from traders, to cut out that somewhat tedious first step.

As for managing dwarves, you need to do a bit of micromanaging whenever new ones arrive or old ones dye -- to make sure their skills don't overlap and that enough skills are represented -- but after each "tweak" you can let them run wild.

If I want a particular job done, I just focus on a particular workshop for a while and wait to see if a dwarf is doing it in a reasonable amount of time. If not, I look in the "u" dwarf list and either

a) Pick out a dwarf that SHOULD be doing the job, then change its allowed skills to stop it doing whatever's distracting it, or

b) Pick a dwarf with "no job" and change its allowed skills so that it can do the neglected job.

Hope this helps!

[Muffy St. Bernard]

Errr...I don't need to change skills when "old dwarves dye." Dyeing isn't necessarily a bad thing. DIEING is.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Try to have one dwarf do each thing. You don't want one dwarf to have to split up his time among all the metalsmithing, for example, as he would never get legendary. As well, if you have three armorers you'll never see any of them get legendary because there's not enough work.

Balance this against the risk of losing your one armorer ...

As for lag, I have heard it said variously that revealing more map makes DF faster, slower, and has no effect. So trust your feelings, you know it to be true. Whatever it is.

I like to dig out the entire bottom level (because by doing this you'll expose anything that you would be afraid of digging down into) and then go back up and dig out each level as I go.

I suppose you could use Reveal. But it's more fun for me to explore, ya know?

As for what to do now, machinery is kind of fun but has no use at the moment. So create a bunch of power generation things and tie them all into just one quern. POWER QUERN, MADE WITH REAL LIGHTNING.

[Fedor]

quote:Originally posted by Patriot:
<STRONG>So I've started my first real dwarf fortress now and I have gotten all the essentials up and running, more or less.  I have rooms with doors beds and cabinets for most my long-term dwarves and am working a barracks-style chamber for some of the immigrants who keep pouring in.

I have food, booze and fairly ready access to water.  I have a tower built upon the exit from my fortress and have quarrels but not crossbows to shoot from the tower at potential invaders.  In lieu of actual soldiers, however, I have plenty of wardogs and stone-drop traps in place to keep any potential menaces at bay.</STRONG>

If you do nothing else, start training up dwarves in wrestling (unarmed combat) and crossbows.  Good wrestling skills make a dwarf harder to hit.  Any crossbow skill makes him deadly to goblins (if you supply crossbows and ammo).

quote:
<STRONG>What are some standard goals to strive for after achieving the basic food/housing goals?</STRONG>

Set up the other industries.  Establish a military and fortress defences capable of withstanding seiges and even megabeasts.  Dig deeper!  Build something special, a fortress that "will forever stand as a monument to Dwarven bravery, inspiration, and unremitting toil".

quote:
<STRONG>When I don't have an obvious goal in sight, I tend to lose interest and so my fortress has been put on the back burner the last few days.  So I'm looking for a bit of insight or advice on what to do next so that I can get to work, if for no other reason than that I could hurry up and lose.</STRONG>

DF is indeed the sort of game that needs you to supply a goal.  This goal could be:

1. Build something creative, a monument to your mad genius.  This could be anything from a statue to your dwarven leader's favorite god, a combat arena, a glass city, a pirate ship, or a dragon mosaic.  People have done incredible, incredible things - and then posted them on the DF Map Archive.

2.  Act out a story, role-playing your fortress and your dwarves towards a known culmination or unexpected doomsday.  Even losing can be fun - because it's often very interesting.

quote:
<STRONG>I have a few ideas for what to do next, but no idea on how to go about making them happen.  For instance, I'd like to start some sort of production that would let me make finer clothes for my peasants, but I don't know how to get the seeds I'd need to start a cloth-plant farm.</STRONG>

There are two ways you can work this.  You can get some hints here, and learn the rest yorself, or you can read the wiki on crops and the pages that link from it.

Hints:
You can gather plants or order seeds from traders.  The Farmer's Workshop (Plant Processing labor, Threshing skill) threshes certain kinds of plants to thread, producing seeds which you can re-plant.

quote:
<STRONG>I probably have around 30 dwarves now and I no longer feel I can successfully micromanage them effectively.  Can someone point me to an article on dwarf wiki about effectively managing larger fortresses?</STRONG>

The most useful solution to this very real problem I know of is a utility called Dwarf Foreman..  It is so useful for managing dwarven labor assignments that I actually delay upgrading my copy of DF until DF Foreman is updated to work with it.

quote:
<STRONG>I know I need metals and coal so that I can start getting an armorsmith smithing, but I'm not sure about the best way to go about that?  Just dig down and start tunneling?  How do I avoid tunnel collapse?  Is there a good rule to know when a room is too large?  Do I have to worry about stacking multiple unsupported rooms on top of each other? ie. hallow out 2 30x30 rooms on top of each other would make them more prone to collapse?  </STRONG>

You do not have to worry about collapses, except if the area has *nothing* supporting it - no walls or floor.  Even the largest dug out space will stay intact.

quote:
<STRONG>Is there a good pattern to use to find minerals/ores while digging?</STRONG>

Yes.  If you're looking for metal ore or coal in veins, you can quickly find most seams by digging parallel tunnels about 10 or 15 grids apart. If you're looking for gems, consider digging vertical shafts three grids apart - I call it "taking core samples".

[Quiller]

There is a wiki section on exploratory mining, it is worth looking at.  Personally, I have one level where I create a grid, and then I dig mine shafts at the interstices.

You need to get a military going.  If you don't have the minerals yet, make trade goods and buy some armor, but the sooner you get high quality armor, the better.  You can make crossbows out of wood with a bowyers workshop or some metals at a metalsmiths workshop, you should have some, make a rock target or two, and start letting some marksdwarves train.  You can get by with putting leather armor on your marksdwarves, but you might want to up the armor level on the elites when you get them.  But, get moving on melee dwarves too, stonefall traps and wardogs won't help much when you get a colossus on your doorstep.

Cloth is low priority.  Lack of clothing won't wipe your fortress out.

If you have someone assigned to be administrator you may want to look into assigning tasks.  Press j to go to jobs and then m to go to manager, and you can start placing orders for goods.  So you can ask for 10 rock tables instead of queueing up 5 rock tables in a mason's workshop yourself and then another 5 when those are through.  In general if you need 1 item you are better off queueing it yourself, if you want to do as much as you can (like brewing, or like I do to make rock into blocks) you can set a task on repeat at the workshop, but if you just want 10 more beds, or 20 plant fiber crafts and don't care where it is done, the job manager works best.  (There is a delay while orders are confirmed so if you need stuff right away you are best queuing it yourself or say, setting up the first 3 jobs, and then adding the next 17 by job manager.)  The one tricky bit, is if you have something like the forge which is used by the metalsmith, the armorsmith, and the weaponsmith, you have to watch your job assignments a bit.  If the armorsmith is asleep, and there are 3 make gauntlet jobs lined up, the make gold goblet job that is after them won't get done by the metalsmith unless you alter the queue.