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[flyingdisc]

Having sat behind someone on a train playing dwarf fortress (what's that?); then read TinyPirate's guidence for new expedition leaders; tinkered and explored and finally generated my very own world, I have embarked my first dwarfs to find FUN (as I'm learning it is called). 

We have had fun, and even a tiny pinch of FUN (our herbalist decided to wait outside the mason's new drawbridge, without a moat, until we lowered it - where apon I discovered the atom smasher ..  and ghosts).  Two modest waves of imigrants (2 and 3) and the redundency of my Herbalist brought our population to 11.  Autumn came and went, as did winter (bringing word of Goblins to my Civilisation screen).  Spring brought my first caravan: the elves with strange beasties in cages (which we've yet to figure out how to open).   Since then Summer and Autumn have turned to winter again with the growing realisation that we are on our own!  No more immigration, no visiting dwarfs,  and the first inkling that there maybe no other dwarf is left in the world. 

That is a lot of responsibility to fall on the shoulders of an expeditionary leader, especially a new one.  We small band of brothers (and sisters) are all that are left.  Scratch that, we'd better not be brothers and sisters.  IF dwarves are once again to make a mark on the world it will be because we rebuild it from here. 

Now, while the muddyboots assure me we will not want for beer, the smithy asserts that it is all pointless as some bloody fool elected not to embark with an anvil, and with neither dwarf nor human to trade with we'd be royally buggered.   So here I sit, contemplating the whitening of my whiskers as I wait for folk to marry and bring smaller small folk into the world, looking for guidance from the carved tablets which are Bay12GamesForums.  Can a band of eleven bring dwarism back to the world, or will the long timescales to FUN and lack of anvil drive me to a personal tantrum spiral?  Should we tell the smith there is something urgent that he needs to check under the drawbridge or is he right and we should abandon the fortress?

[JDF117]

  You can open the cages by designating a zone with i, setting it as a pasture by highlighting it and hitting n, and then hitting N and selecting the animals you can uncaged. Then, when they are in the pasture, you can delete the pasture and do whatever you want with them, be it butchering, breeding , or training.

  If you get lucky, one of your dwarves will get a

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Strange Mood

and make an anvil out of wood or bone. Other than that, tough luck :\

[King DZA]

I say ride it out, See how long you can go. If you manage to overcome the terror and destruction the coming decades bring, you will be one of the few people(that I've heard of) to successfully run a fortress made up primarily of raised dwarves.

If you fail, and succumb to the evils of the land, you had a neat learning experience, and when you embark with a civ that actually sends a good amount of migrants, it will seem far easier since you're used to working with so few.

So yeah, go for it.

[Flodeklojo]

  You can open the cages by designating a zone with i, setting it as a pasture by highlighting it and hitting n, and then hitting N and selecting the animals you can uncaged. Then, when they are in the pasture, you can delete the pasture and do whatever you want with them, be it butchering, breeding , or training.

Or, if you want to release a specific animal, you can also build the right cage (b->j, find the right cage by hitting x), then use q on the built cage and unassign the creature (a->enter). Same method to put all the animals you want in 1 cage...but then the other way around.

[flyingdisc]

Thanks for the vote of confidence KingDZA.  I think I am going to abandon.   Currently all my dwarfs are multi-tasking.  A bit of this and a bit of that.   Lots of micromanagement.  Being my first ever fort, I don't really know what I am doing and this is a very slow way of learning.   I think I need to fail quickly and fail often to start to get an idea (where as this feels like a neither fail/not fail, very slowly experience)

I guess I posted because I was curious about whether other people would contemplate taking 11 dwarfs; no immigrants; no caravans; no anvils and making something of it?  (If you knew what you were doing) is it possible to have success?  How quickly would I expect my population to expand?  What does not having a anvil (and hence metal industry?) have in practical terms (what is off-limits of items/strategies and are there ways around these?)?

BTW Thanks JDF and Flodeklojo for advice with getting the animals out of the cages. 

[lemmily]

I think you'd be pretty bad-ass to try and take on the world with 11 dwarves as a new player. 

Sounds like the civilisation you're a part of died out! Though I think you will get human/elf caravan's arriving with time, and then maybe a goblin ambush which would probably result in lots FUN, and probably requires a new fort, though from personal experience I would say try and stick with the same world and pick somewhere different instead of gen'-ing a new one each time, it makes it feel so much more awesome (unless of course all the dwarven civs have died out)

[Kylarus]

Behold the collected knowledge of the wiki. It has a lot of info to help and was most all the help I had starting out.  You can do it though! Keep at it! Also, get DF Therapist, it makes micromanaging easier.

[numerobis]

No anvil... hmm... that's a tough one.

I've gone with no immigration and no caravans at all -- just goblins and kobolds.  It was fun to build with that.  I built a palisade around most of the map ASAP.  Locked in from the world, I played it for about 30 years or so and had a big project well under way (an upside-down pyramid made of alligator soap).  That was in a prior version, but except for animal husbandry being harder now I think the rest all works out.

By the time of the first goblin thief, you have at most a year before you come under serious attack.

[flyingdisc]

My folk (The Royal Bust) abandoned the fort (Hamecrystals) in the end.  Revisiting via legends showed that my parent civilization (The Arrow of Exaltation) died out 210 years before I completed my embark (dwarf!, that is a long time to be on a wagon).  The other dwarvern folk were wiped out around the same time, as were every single human civilisation.  The world is populated be the many faces of elves and goblins.  Looking at the histories, at the same time we embarked (year 251), a second dwarvern group also attempted to resettle, although from their name (The Steel of Tiredness) the weren't any more opptomistic about success than we were (in time, might they grow big enough to trade with, or is it just your home civilisation who turns up?).

Given that, these questions are for my interest:  I guess I still wondering what could be possible if I had chosen to continue.  It is a similar question to Oddysee's question about no metals, but with no anvil.  Without an anvil - can a military/defense force still be run?   Reading Oddysee's responses, it sounds like bone bolt equiped marksdwarfs can compete with goblins (are there more heavily armoured enemies for which this wont work?  I've read the name "bronze collossus" somewhere but are there others?). 

Some of the other advice (melt down goblinite, trade with humans and dwarfs for the odd bar) I assume wont work in this situation.  I read that goblins are the same size, so their equipment (armour and weapons?) could be reused by my dwarfs.  Is this likely to be enough to equip a small melee force? 

[Quietust]

If you get lucky, one of your dwarves will get a Strange Mood and make an anvil out of wood or bone.

Are you sure that's even possible? Lots of people assume that strange moods can create any type of item, though significant amounts of evidence suggest that this may not be the case (e.g. a mood can never create leather furniture or a stone weapon) - the most common quoted "impossible" items are non-wood beds and gem/bone furniture, but those might actually be exceptions to the rules.

[Necro910]

If you get lucky, one of your dwarves will get a Strange Mood and make an anvil out of wood or bone.

Are you sure that's even possible? Lots of people assume that strange moods can create any type of item, though significant amounts of evidence suggest that this may not be the case (e.g. a mood can never create leather furniture or a stone weapon) - the most common quoted "impossible" items are non-wood beds and gem/bone furniture, but those might actually be exceptions to the rules.

I believe furniture can be made via strange moods. I think I've had a bone table before. I remember it well because it matched the desert embark quite well. 

Citing Planepacked, aren't statues considered furniture?

[Musashi]

If you get lucky, one of your dwarves will get a Strange Mood and make an anvil out of wood or bone.

Are you sure that's even possible? Lots of people assume that strange moods can create any type of item, though significant amounts of evidence suggest that this may not be the case (e.g. a mood can never create leather furniture or a stone weapon) - the most common quoted "impossible" items are non-wood beds and gem/bone furniture, but those might actually be exceptions to the rules.

Emphasis mine.

[Necro910]

If you get lucky, one of your dwarves will get a Strange Mood and make an anvil out of wood or bone.

Are you sure that's even possible? Lots of people assume that strange moods can create any type of item, though significant amounts of evidence suggest that this may not be the case (e.g. a mood can never create leather furniture or a stone weapon) - the most common quoted "impossible" items are non-wood beds and gem/bone furniture, but those might actually be exceptions to the rules.

Emphasis mine.

Ah, sorry, I was looking at the gem/bone part. Re-reading it now I see that it says "may be an exception". Nevermind.

[Satarus]

This is why you start with an anvil.  Don't let a little thing like dwarven extinction stop your fort's progress.

[Ethnar]

Get your dwarves killed, embark right next to your current emark (or close) but this time with an anvil and continue the legacy!

Got to play in a dwarf-less (and human-less) world one day myself...