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[Nameless Archon]

Some things you'll need later, but should consider:

1. A way to get food. This could be hunting, fishing, farming (aboveground crops or dwarven varieties), or picking berries, but every dwarf is going to expect to be fed. Starving dwarves can die, and are terribly unhappy about their lot. Dwarves avoiding starvation by eating vermin are even less happy!

2. A way to get booze. Dwarves basically require alcohol like humans require oxygen. A sober dwarf is a pathetic wastrel, who mutters about betrayals and casts shifty eyes at every other dwarf in the fortress. Keep your dwarves boozed with a combination of trading and brewing picked/farmed crops! (While we're at it, why no alcohol from fermented milk?)

3. A way to get wood. This could be aboveground woodcutting, underground cavern-tree farms, or trading for wood, but beds have to come from wood, and not having beds is asking for trouble. Wood is also a nice source of fuel, ash for fertilizers and soap, and can be used for ammunition if you don't have a meat industry.

4. A way to be secure. Traps, a military, a trench-and-drawbridge. Whatever the form, you need to think about how you're organizing your defenses. Consider merchants only as trustworthy as their exits. Think about how you'll handle intruders who can avoid your traps, come in numbers larger than your military, or even fly!

5. A way to be happy. Unhappy dwarves tantrum at the first stubbed toe. Really happy dwarves don't notice when their entire family is killed by slow rot after a forgotten beast attack. This is a multi-faceted thing, and it's not as important early, but once you have plenty of dwarves and people start to know one another...

[Fredd]

1 good way to assure you have high value trade goods for the first caravan, is to embark with a proficient mechanic. When you discover any ore, go to the stocks screen, under stone, permit that ore for any use. Place a stockpile for that ore next to the mechanics shop.
 A couple of quality natural ore mechanisms, will allow you to buy supplies, and ease the pressure of starting up an industry for trade goods.
 But the best advice, is to turn off invasion, from dinit, and set a population cap of 15, from same folder. its not as much FUN, but will let you learn the basics.
 And if you need cats, only use male ones, lol

[Devling]

That great, but I already know this, sorry. Maybe instead of 5 tips of, "get food", more like, "to build a succesful food supply..."

[Lamphare]

successful food industry = moat+cage traps(massively forbidden of course)+dedicated butchers+dedicated cooks+HUGE refuse stockpile+haulers, many haulers
thusly you can allocate as many plants as possible for brewage. oh, you also get few life time worth of tallows to make soap, so i often just let my dwarf to make xxx tallow pies made of exceptionaly miced xxx tallow and exceptionaly miced xxx tallow and masterfully miced xxx tallow and finely miced xxx tallow. seriously how can they eat that!?
i often start moat when having enough, say 40 dwarfs, or by reaching cavern. one horde of elephants every fifth year could even keep your fort full of elephant meat and organs and elephant bone bolts lol.

[rephikul]

i often start moat when having enough, say 40 dwarfs

I personally dig moat right after I got a sleepy hole and finish it around the time of first caravan and trapping it finish during next spring or so. Waiting till you get 40 dorfs usually push you into 2nd spring or summer, which is quite risky considering the high change of ambushes showing up with the 2nd autumn caravan, when your moat isnt ready yet.

[Lamphare]

i normally take the slightly more challenging half above-ground half underground style of fort building. and would basically have a mininum funtional farming industry autumn of first year. yes it's bit risky w/o moat for one and half years, but i wall enough above ground space for farming, wood related workshop and trade depot, with 20+ cage traps set during winter.
but yes, digging moat during the first year is good, but the nature of moat makes it a bit hard to modify in future.

[Fellhuhn]

And when filling the moat with water or lava be sure not to dig into your own living room when expanding the moat.

[Devling]

And when filling the moat with water or lava be sure not to dig into your own living room when expanding the moat.

Derp.

[Chocolatemilkgod]

Using Dwarf therapist may not be a bad idea. It really helps with organising especially later on in the game.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=66525.0

Lazy newb pack comes with this tool if I remember correctly.

[Jurph]

That great, but I already know this, sorry. Maybe instead of 5 tips of, "get food", more like, "to build a succesful food supply..."

"Success" is a funny term to use when discussing DF, but I'll take a stab at it.  A single high-quality lavish prepared meal stack made with Quarry Bush Leaves or flour can often be exchanged for most of an early caravan's trade goods.  QBLs also stretch your food supply like no other crop, leaving plenty of high-value meals for your dorfs to nosh on while they admire the carvings in your dining hall.

To get that meal made, though, you need to plant seeds, harvest pig tails and quarry bushes, process pig tails to thread (haul it) to cloth (haul it) to bags (haul them), haul the pig tail seeds, process quarry bushes to leaves, haul the rock nuts, cook the QBLs, haul the empty bag to a stockpile, and haul the meal to its stockpile.  Fifteen jobs, all varying in who can do them and how much quality impacts the final product.  An efficient agriculture layout can make this process much faster.  Since the crops grow in a predictable place (your fields) you have the luxury of developing a food industry layout that is optimized from the moment the seeds are planted.  Try to plan the layout so that the shortest hauling trips are allocated to the most skilled dwarves, whose time you would rather see spent in other ways.  Planting seeds and processing the harvested plants requires a minor hauling job at the beginning of each job, so it pays to keep those distances small.

Consider this crop rotation:

• Dimple Cups in winter, for dye
• Quarry Bushes in spring, for food
• Pig Tails in summer, for thread
• Cave Wheat in fall, for booze and flour

In the first year you might want to grow Plump Helmets in spring (or send all of your non-miners out to gather plants), since you won't have bags yet.  Place a single very large (11x11 works, but larger is okay) "harvest" stockpile near the farm plot, and surround it with workshops and stockpiles that you'll need: Farmer's Workshop, Loom, Clothier's Workshop, Dyer's Workshop, Quern or Millstone.  Don't forget a large stockpile for low-quality cloth bags (your high-quality bags can be sold off as trade goods or placed in rooms as containers!), and place the low-quality bag stockpile near the Farmer's Workshop to speed up production of Quarry Bush Leaves, and also near the Quern to speed up flour and dye production.  Each of the workshops should have a small stockpile either above, below, or surrounding it that will accept that workshop's primary input -- the input is the item that the skilled craftsdwarf must haul.  I like to use 5x5 work areas with the 3x3 workshop centered in the middle, and a single tile of input storage ringing the facility.  This also keeps me from worrying about where the workshop's blocked tiles are.

Your kitchen and brewery could be nearby.  The kitchen should help the chef maximize the value of his time; that means short trips to grab high-value ingredients.  The nearest ingredient stockpile to the kitchen should accept only your highest-value foods:

• Any Cheeses
• Quarry Bush Leaves
• Any flour
• High-value creature byproducts
• Dwarven Syrup
• Dwarven Sugar

...and make sure that your KITCHEN menu specifies which of your crops you wish to cook or brew.  The kitchen also shouldn't be too far from a stockpile that accepts prepared meals only, no barrels (save 'em for booze, fish, and meat).  One last note: to really make this setup go, you'll need a Proficient Grower (big stack sizes) and a Proficient Cook (high chance of masterwork prep) early on.  Weaving, Clothesmaking, Milling, and Harvesting don't require any great skill but the first two will start you down the road to having a clothing industry.  Dyeing is optional at this stage but a skilled dyer can also help rake in the dorfbucks.

[Shambling Zombie]

I like to make the trade agreement with the liason have maximized priority on all boozes and a few types of food. That way I can churn out trade goods, sell them, and have 800 or so extra food roll into my fortress every year.

Get some cats and you'll never have to worry about meat supply again though, those things breed like crazy.

[Sutremaine]

They also adopt dwarves like crazy. Get dogs instead.

There is one thing of not about having cats (so long as they've had their adopting habits disabled). Culling them as kittens means you get just a skull and some bones (maybe the skin too?), which means less hauling.

[obeliab]

Some very basic tips:

Location is very important.  Of course this is very true when establishing the basic fortress necessities, but also about mid-game, when you realize that you really want some steel stuff and OMG What the Flux happens.  You may also want to remove aquifers from your first few worlds, because they can really be a, ahem, damper on your learning experience.

Also, as a new player I grew frustrated when my FPS dropped to awful levels as my fortresses would grow.  DF has a lot of "optional" features that can be turned off for increased application speed.  I really didn't want to turn off temperature and weather, but it's really hard to argue with such a noticable framerate bump in my game.

I didn't see it above, but it's important to have a Manager early on, even if you don't know much about nobles and administrators.  While the manager screen is integral for quickly creating jobs in workshops, it has the added benefit of showing you mostly everything you can do or create in your fortress.  After you promote a Manager, you can scroll through a huge list of potential commands and even search for tasks you'd like to have done.  If you don't know the particular materials you'll need for an object you want to produce (say, for instance, soap), you can start this job through the manager or workshop and the game will give you an announcement about what's missing, e.g. "Urist McSoaper cancels create soap: Needs lye-bearing bucket."  Since the tech tree and materials lists can be daunting, this can help if you want to know how to make something specific.

When all else fails, look it up on the wiki!  Or even if not all of it fails.

[Devling]

I'm hoping noobz will stuble opun this and IT WILL BLOW THEIR MINDS. Beacuse you guys have some really good tips and tricks. I'm just to lazy to read most of them.




(Can I haz a LOL?)