I disagree. Walling a fortress off from the surface is a challenge of itīs own:
- no trees
- no water
- no caravans
- no outdoor farming
- no fishing
- no hunting
Some of that can be solved by opening the caverns, but they are dangerous, too.
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Anyways, for complete beginners I would recommend to start with an easy world by simply removing some of the FUN features until you understand how to manage a few dozen dwarves and have a stable food and booze production and some crafting going on. I think the countless ways how your first fortresses will horribly fail are certainly fun, but might discourage new users, too.
1. disable invaders until you have some weapons and armor: [INVADERS:NO]
(file: data/init/d_init.txt)
2. lower the population cap until you feel you could use more workers: [POPULATION_CAP:50]
(file: data/init/d_init.txt)
3. forbid pregnancies until you think you can handle a bigger population: [BABY_CHILD_CAP:0:1000]
(file: data/init/d_init.txt)
4. disable aquifers (copypasta from the wiki):
By editing the the raws and removing the [AQUIFER] tag from all of the appropriate entries in inorganic_stone_layer.txt, inorganic_stone_mineral.txt, and inorganic_stone_soil.txt it is possible to remove all aquifers from the world. This can be done before creating a new world or after, if you find a particularly neat location ruined only by the presence of an aquifer. In order to modify an existing world, you must delete the [AQUIFER] tag from the raws in the savegame's folder.
Find the files in Dwarf Fortress/raw/objects (new world) or Dwarf Fortress/data/save/regionNN/raw/objects (already saved world).
Open the three files with a text editor (e.g. Notepad). (inorganic_stone_layer.txt, inorganic_stone_mineral.txt, and inorganic_stone_soil.txt)
Use Edit->Replace, and replace [AQUIFER] with (AQUIFER). (Use 'Replace All').
To restore the tags later, do the same in reverse. (Replacing (AQUIFER) with [AQUIFER]).
5. When creating a world, set savagery to "lowest" and minerals to "everywhere". Maybe also lower the number of populations and sites to get more embark points for yourself.
6. When looking for an embark point, try to find a spot which has:
- a river so you have fresh water without the need to go down to the caverns
- lots of trees (at first you only really need them for beds, but later on for charcoal if you donīt find coal and magma)
- shallow and deep metals
- flux (without flux you canīt make steel)
- avoid evil and savage biomes, in the best case pick something like calm, mirthful or serene.
7. When preparing for the embark, keep in mind that your dwarves can learn almost anything themselves, so itīs not really mandatory to spend a lot of skillpoints on them. Use them to bring a bit more food and seeds and maybe a couple of animals for breeding and food production. Imo dogs and turkeys are a good choice here. Turkeys lay an insane amount of eggs (donīt forget to craft nestboxes!) and dogs can be trained as war and hunting animals and are also not too bad as a source for meat, bones and leather. Bringing an anvil is not really necessary and frees up lots of points; by the time you are ready for a metal industry you usually had the first caravans visit and can buy anvils from them.
8. Use DwarfTherapist:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=66525.0Hm... did I forget something else which can make life much easier? Keep in mind that following all these steps makes the game *extremely* easy and you are missing lots of features. A low population cap for example will lock you out from stuff like becoming a barony. Without invaders it is relatively pointless to build weapons and traps etc. Itīs only intended to get a feel of the gameplay without getting frustrated early on.
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Topic: Could use some tips here! (Read 4196 times)