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[Neruz]

Neruz:
Sounds awesome! I tried embarking on a 5x5 (which used to be pretty slow on my computer), but the mayday version is getting me 100 FPS. Is this a result of the switch to SDL/OpenGL?

Probably, D11 is substantially faster than previous versions.

[Chromie]

It seems like I always produce alcohol faster than my food supply is increasing, so when I auto-make alcohol, it cuts through my food supply really fast, and a lot of time I don't catch that

In the "kitchen" menu, (hit z for stocks then it's the second option) you can choose what plants to turn to booze and what to cook -- red is no blue is yes. You can cook booze into food again, too, just enable it for cooking.

That should help you out substantially. Also keep a cage of puppies or some kind of animal that you can butcher in a food emergency.

[Neruz]

Cooking booze is generally not such a hot idea though, Dwarves drink twice as much as they eat and i've successfulled cooked up all my booze before

--EDIT--

Havn't come up with anything better than the previous one, so it looks like that's the goer. The lack of flux is a little annoying, but you should be able to trade enough flux to make steel if you want to, otherwise Iron's usually good enough anyway.

Want me to go with the 5x5 version or push it up to 6x6 for the chasm and ug pool?


Actually, the other option is a 6x6 spot with 3 squares of UG river, 2 squares of brook, 7 squares of Chasm, 4 squares of heavy tropical forest (with sand and aquifer on an Conglomerate layer, useful for unlimited water supply.) and marble underneath for flux, HFS, magma pipe up next to the forest and a bottomless pit. Evil mountains too, so a reasonable chance of Undeadly dudes

Choices, choices. here's screenshots of each area if you want to choose.

[Stargrasper]

Stargrasper:
Okay, well one of my big problems is always balancing food production/consumption with alcohol production/consumption. It seems like I always produce alcohol faster than my food supply is increasing, so when I auto-make alcohol, it cuts through my food supply really fast, and a lot of time I don't catch that. Is there any way to make this easier, without constant micromanagement? Or am I doomed to that?

To be honest, that's all I can think of at the moment. It's been about 7 months since I seriously sat down and tried to do a fortress. I'm hoping to get back into it for the summer, since I am stuck in the middle of nowhere for 3 months.

I just downloaded that mayday version to see what it was like, and wow, its about 10 times faster than what I was running last summer. I can't wait to see what a decent fortress actually looks like, I have a feeling I just don't really get the basics, I always try for crazy projects too early on I think.

Thanks for the help.

For the food/alcohol question, when you start, create two fields.  Plant plump helmets(all year long) in one and grow rope reeds in the other(you might want to plant dimple cups in that field in the seasons rope reed can't grow).  Plump helmets can be eaten raw(and return seeds if you do), can be cooked(don't return seeds) and can be brewed(returns seeds).  If I remember correctly, brewing of plump helmets is off by default, which is good.  Rope reeds can't be eaten at all, but can be brewed(which returns seeds).  Doing it like this continues to give you seeds so you won't ever not have seeds to grow crops and it, to start off, completely separates your food crops from you brew crops, preventing you from ever accidentally decimating your food supply.

And if you have enough booze, you can turn the rope reeds into thread and cloth(which also returns seeds, I believe).  The dimple cups are for if you want to dye that cloth to increase its selling price, but honestly, don't worry about it.  To start only use your rope reeds for booze unless you need to turn one into a rope for your well.

Feel free to ask any and all questions regardless of how basic they might be.  We're happy to help...or at least, I'm happy to help.

[Kwilco]

Neruz:
That 6x6 spot look pretty cool, but I'm concerned about the aquifer. Will it block the layers underneath it? Or just in certain places? I usually avoid those because I don't know.

Stargrasper:
I never thought about separating food and drink crops like that, I figured it would be simpler to just have one, but that way makes a lot more sense.

[Neruz]

Neruz:
That 6x6 spot look pretty cool, but I'm concerned about the aquifer. Will it block the layers underneath it? Or just in certain places? I usually avoid those because I don't know.

Sort of; you won't be able to dig straight down through the Aquifer, but you can go around it easily enough since it only covers 5 embark tiles, the nearby magma also makes getting through it relatively easy, and major veins of minerals like Magnetite don't 'support' Aquifer tiles in them, so you'll be able to get at the metal if there's any there.

I'll go with the 6x6 then. The Aquifer will probably be more useful as an infinite water source in this case than as a danger, since it's fairly small.

[Neruz]

And the fortress of Pantlancers is go!


And holy hell i've got Skeletal and Zombie chasm-critters coming out of my ears. If you decide to purge the chasm, that's gonna make life real interesting.

[Neruz]

Hmm, judging by these corpses all the cave rivermen have fallen down the hole, pity, there was a Skeletal Cave Crocodile in there, amongst other things...

--EDIT--

Ok, this isn't actually a very good site after all. There f-all useful minerals, i used Reveal on a backup copy and discovered that it kind of sucks, all things considered.

Hopefully the other site will be better.

--EDIT2--

Yeah, other site is much better, more usable dirt, more useful minerals, more brook to work with. No flux is a bit of a downside, but steel isn't that important anyway, and flux can be imported easily enough.

[Byakugan01]

General rule of thumb: always keep an eye on your plant stocks, and keep a room with animals chained in it for breeding purposes. You should NEVER run out of food. Make sure to have a dedicated brewer too-they can also be an herbalist. This should solve your food problems. Also, the wiki has a myriad of helpful tips, including the "your first fortress" article. Just keep an an eye on your food stockpiles and let the fields lay fallow when your stockpiles are full.

[alway]

The trick to keeping a good food supply is to have both enough fields and enough planters to make sure they are always filled up. In one of my forts, I have over 1000 wine and 1000 plump helmets. You should never have to worry about running out of food or brew as long as you have 1 still and plenty of feilds and farmers. One thing which should help quite a bit is enabling farming (fields) labor on excess peasants/lye makers/other useless proffessions. With sufficient farmers, a 10 by 10 fields of plump helmets should be enough to feed pretty much as big a fort as you want. Also remember, the more types of crops you are growing, the more complicated controlling the food supply will get.

Just keep an an eye on your food stockpiles and let the fields lay fallow when your stockpiles are full.

Now that's not a very dwarfy attitude... When your stockpiles are full, build more barrels and bigger stockpiles!  And more kitchens to turn that excess food into prepared meals for the caravans.

[Neruz]

Here you go; this fort should be self sufficient.

A few important things to note:

The lever nestled in the little alcove in the top right of the valley next to the brook controls the bridges. Pull it to make it impossible to enter the valley (and thus the fort.)

I've got a waterfall machine going down the main stairwell to keep the dwarves happy, the lever next to the walls turns it on and off, the lever next to the staircase opens the floodgate. I suggest not opening the floodgate while the machine is on
If your FPS takes a big hit, turn the waterfall machine off.

I have not cleansed the magma of Fire Imps, although i can try and do that if you really want, these guys are staying pretty deep in though so it might take awhile. I have installed grates over the holes where the magma will flow for magma forges just in case however; you'll probably need to remove the grates if you want to place forges; if you make sure to stick one of the impassable tiles of the forge over the hole, fire imps shouldn't be able to get out.

The Troglodytes started breeding like crazy the moment i got on the map, they bred so fast that alot of their babies fell down teh chasm. If you ever get down there there's gonna be alot of bones.


The seven farms should keep you going indefinitely. In fact they'll probably produce more food than you can possibly use. Odds are you can just ignore it and it'll be fine, but you may want to keep an eye on your booz stocks in case you run out of barrels. I've got the farms producing a wide variaty of crops, some of which is set to brewable, some of which is not, so you should be able to just leave the brewery on repeat and not have to worry about brewing all your food.

There's also a bunch of animals for the slaughterin if you need.


The Elves brought a Bear last time, i gave them a fair amount of profit so you can expect some more useful animals next spring.


And finally, below the dining room i've got a craftsdwarf workshop churning out endless rock crafts for trading; keep an eye on him if you don't want him to clutter up your storages because he's very very good at that.



I can't think of anything else important; the fortress is situated in a nice valley and the only way in or out is via the Brook. There's a metric butt-ton of trees in the valley and even more in the top left corner if you want some. The UG River should be right next to the magma pipe and south of it, the HFS is right next to the pit and east of it, and the UG Pool is right next to the HFS and south of it (or south-east of the pit.)

Have fun! The fort should run just fine by itself, but keep an eye on it all the same. Expect to see alot of slave lab- i mean immigrants, i got 17 on the first wave and then a second smaller wave in spring that pushed it upt to, uh, 32 i think it's at atm.

The site should have copious metals and minerals, i've already run into a hematite vein, a lignite vein and a limonite vein, unfortunately there's no flux to be had, so you won't be seeing any steel unless you order it from the Dorven caravan.

Oh, and the Dorven caravan just arrived, there should be copious rock crafts to trade for stuff.

Interestingly, the game seems to have realised you intend to do major deforesting, as it sent me two extra woodworkers in the first immigrant wave.


Thar Map

--EDIT--

Oh, one of hte Miners is a proficient Weaponsmith, the other is a proficient Armorsmith, if you want to forge stuff.

[Albedo]

The trick to keeping a good food supply is to have both enough fields and enough planters to make sure they are always filled up. In one of my forts, I have over 1000 wine and 1000 plump helmets. You should never have to worry about running out of food or brew as long as you have 1 still and plenty of feilds and farmers.

1 Proficient grower to start, max 2 more apprentices.  Turn off "all dwarfs harvest" and have them do 100% of the food-related work.  Food hauling is not a high priority job, so if you rely on many dwarfs with food hauling and several other hauling jobs, food will often get done last. Having a few dwarfs with only Food Hauling (and other food-related professions) means that when they aren't producing food, they're making sure it doesn't rot.

[Kwilco]

Awesome! Thank you so much, I am going to check this out right now!

[Atlas]

The Troglodytes started breeding like crazy the moment i got on the map, they bred so fast that alot of their babies fell down teh chasm. If you ever get down there there's gonna be alot of bones.

Thats actually one of the things about trogs, they have BABIES, not children. Trog's cant hold their babies, and so the babies get pulled into the suicide script that all babies get when separated from their mothers. I have my breeding tame trogs(modded with [pet]) in a put with no zlevel access, because they kept climbing to the top of my tower and jumping.

[Neruz]

The Troglodytes started breeding like crazy the moment i got on the map, they bred so fast that alot of their babies fell down teh chasm. If you ever get down there there's gonna be alot of bones.

Thats actually one of the things about trogs, they have BABIES, not children. Trog's cant hold their babies, and so the babies get pulled into the suicide script that all babies get when separated from their mothers. I have my breeding tame trogs(modded with [pet]) in a put with no zlevel access, because they kept climbing to the top of my tower and jumping.

Actually alot of the babies are fine; the little ledge the Trogs are on is now about 4 deep in baby Troglodytes.