Advice? Try DFhack's "workflow" function, which is the successor to Dwarf Foreman and such utilities of old. More specifically:
1. Design a "generic, do-all" custom profession in Dwarf Therapist for all the unimportant dwarves who will do every job where skill only affects speed, not quality.
2. As soon as you embark, dig the soil a bit and put down two 3x3 farms, set to do nothing but grow plump helmets. You will now not starve until the first big migrant wave.
3. Build some 4 stills or more. Set them all to "Brew dirnk" on repeat.
4. Run workflow in DFhack. Set "workflow amount 200 100" to automatically have those "Brew drink" jobs suspended and unsuspended to keep your stocks within the 100~200 booze unit limit. Of course, later in a fort's life you should change that to a higher limit.
Right, that's food and drink sorted. As for beds and a dining room, I bring 15 pieces of wood on embark so the carpenter can build 7 beds, 4 tables and 4 chairs as soon as the fort starts. Yes it's easy to just cut that wood down yourself and all, but having that peace of mind of getting this small but important-for-happiness task out of the way fast is worth it I'd say. Build the beds in a wide space underground and assign them as 1x1 bedrooms - more happiness for dwarves if they think they have their own bedroom even if we'd see that as a slightly spaced out dorm. Sure the wooden dining room will need to be replaced soon but just getting it out of the way until around autumn is peace of mind, which sounds like a worthwhile investment of embark points in your case.
I'd say you don't need an army until year 3 when the ambushes get bigger and the sieges might start coming. Until then, a sea of cage traps will suffice as well as netting you some goblin weapons (mass dump, mass reclaim, undump cages) if you have no weapons-grade metal on your map. Since the latest version has migrants typically come with a few ranks in military skills, worrying about a training framework is second priority to just having them well equipped and a tactically advantageous architecture (bonus points for using windows so goblin archers can't shoot you but see your dwarves so they charge at you).
Set goals for each year to keep yourself paced. You don't need everything to be perfect right from the start. Sort out when you need X and don't get distracted trying to do Y when it's not needed until later.
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Topic: THE STRESS IS KILLING ME (Read 9508 times)