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[Irrehaare]

Hello everyone! I started playing DF few days ago. Wiki, quickstart guide on it and Uncle Google are all a lot of help, but in a few cases I'm pretty much stuck. I started in nofun noob friendly zone with very deep soil, river, no aquifier, a LOT of trees, very deep soil, metals and other stuff like that. I think I have very basics covered (food and drinks, trade depo, basic workshops, rooms, traps and drawbridges, meeting hall, kitchen, smelters). I'm missing a hospital, army and any textile industry. My first winter is coming.

1. I want to have a flowing water around my fortress. If I made a canal that starts and ends in the river, will the water in it be actually flowing and be able to power water mill? If yes, will there be fishes in it? I've read that one that ends in a map border is OK, but that would require a lot more of digging in my case.
2. Elves don't accept goods in wooden stuff. OK, but can I bring things to trade depot in wooden baskets and barrels and just not offer containers themselves?
3. How soon do I have to worry about clothes beeing wornout? Will dwarves change into newer ones automaticly? Should I buy clothes from caravans?
4. I have wood storage in fortress and the one on the ground that is suposed to be giving to former. Every dwarf has wood hauling activated. There are some idlers. But somehow wood still mostly stays on surface and only a few pieces are transported down. What could be wrong?
5. Kind of a bonus questions. Am I playing too safe? How soon things tend to go fubar on a first attempt?

[Azated]

1: Yes. As long as it's connected, it'll be running, allowing you to make watermills and such, and yes, there will by fish.

2: Sure, just make sure you don't offer that barrel/box instead or they'll get all pissy.

3: To be honest, I never worry about clothing. I really should, just to handle some of the anger, but it doesn't seem like much of a major source of unhappiness to me. From what I understand, once they get damaged clothes they'll just go and grab them on their own. You could buy them from traders, but setting up a basic pig tail fiber clothing industry is pretty simple and better in the long run.

4: If you have wheelbarrows set on the storage, then the dwarves will only haul with those barrows. If all the barrows are already in use, nobody else will haul. This is why I tend to make stockpiles small, but make plenty of them. In addition, you might also want to make sure the second stockpile is set to 'take' from the former aswell.

5: Depends on what you're looking for in gameplay. How many years in are you? If you just want a peaceful megaproject zone, you're doing just fine. If you're looking for serious combat and blood strewn halls, try building a castle on the surface the only houses your military, set them to train 24/7, and have the measly peasants oversee the all the necessities for life as the dwarven 1%. Or you could kill the elf traders in the name of dorfiness and see if they go to war with you.

Either way, usually it's about 4-5 years before anything major happens in my forts. About then is when I expect a large invasion or an unexpected megebeast, sometimes I just forget to feed people and they all starve to death, other times the most popular guy in the fort loses and arm and in response everyone else loses their minds for panic and despair.

It's entirely possible to go 50+ years with nothing exciting happening. At that point, I usually restart next to a tower or re-gen the world with more gobbos.

[PatrikLundell]

2. It's a bit of a pain to first select all for trade, deselect a bin and its contents and then manually reselect every item in it, and repeat that for every bin, but yes, it's quite doable. You can't do that with barrels or pots, though.

3. Clothing degrades one step in two years. If nicer clothing is available (i.e. less degraded or higher quality) dorfs go and get them on their own. They store the old ones in their rooms, though. Using the DFhack command "cleanowned scattered all" once per year or so can get them to gather and dump the clothes (given you've got a dumping zone). You can then unforbid the clothes gathered there and get them hauled to the trade depot for removal by the garbage trucks caravans. I buy underwear (thongs/loincloth) from the elven caravan because dorfs can't make underwear themselves. The rest is produced locally (and everything that's not masterworks is considered unsuitable for dwarven use, and palmed off to the foreigners).

5. As Azated said, it's all about how you want to play. Peace and quiet to work undisturbed on a mega project? Constant danger?
Somewhere in between?
Goblins are honor bound not to attack until your fortress has a population of 80 (provided you haven't changed that parameter) and that goes for titans as well (a different parameter). FBs and necromancers have no honor, though...

[Stormfeather]

Also keep in mind that if you don't have any goblins at all within range of your civ, they won't attack/kidnap/anything. (You can check it when you're looking for an embark point by tabbing through the different fields of info, one includes your neighboring races). I never used to worry about it, but the current set of builds SEEMS (maybe it's just my perception) to be a lot more hit-and-miss about having the other neighbors around you, and have a lot fewer places that actually have all the races as neighbors (which is what I prefer for trading and Fun!).

[Irrehaare]

Thanks for the help! Stockpiles are working fine now, I'm happy I dont have to worry about clothes just yet and I feel a little bit to safe, as only civs I have contact with are Kobold and Dwarven. I guess I'll just try digging deeper once I get a hang of things.

Just to clarify: If a river is on say Z1, had I dug a canal that goes deeper and connect it with fortress it would flood everything lower than Z1? Communicating vessels work in DF?

[Ziusudra]

Just to clarify: If a river is on say Z1, had I dug a canal that goes deeper and connect it with fortress it would flood everything lower than Z1? Communicating vessels work in DF?

The river can flood Z1, too, if you prevent it from flowing off the map edge. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Pressure#Water_in_a_U-Bend

[Irrehaare]

Just to clarify: If a river is on say Z1, had I dug a canal that goes deeper and connect it with fortress it would flood everything lower than Z1? Communicating vessels work in DF?

The river can flood Z1, too, if you prevent it from flowing off the map edge. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Pressure#Water_in_a_U-Bend

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
And I feel kind of stupid that I didn't find it myself xD