Well, I started playing Dwarf Fortress last week, and yesterday I witnesses the final months of my first fortress.
Since I am still a beginner, I don't have incredible stories of demons and necromancers or involving pumping magma all over. Actually, I am yet to find any magma. Nevertheless, I thought it was quite a first game, since it lasted long 4 game years, and decided to share it here. I apologize for not being as epic as the other ones, but I thought it was loads of FUN.DWARF FORTRESS DISLIKES CAREFUL NEWBS
I did not take all the reviews saying that this was an absurdly complex game lightly, so I did not try the game before reading about it a lot (but I don't know the HFS yet, so I still have lots to discover!). I bought the "Getting Started With Dwarf Fortress" book, which I cannot recommend enough. The book actually helped me get through the basics almost painlessly and in a few hours I had my fortress running with a self sufficient food production, crafts and booze being prepared, everyone had their own room, it was a dream.
My stock was neatly organized in appropriate stockpiles, I had tons of barrels and hordes of migrants kept coming in. I already knew how to customize their professions, so I had a fraction of the population focused on hoarding and the other fully focused on their specialties.
Needless to say, being a first timer, it felt truly joyous. I read stories of how people usually had everyone die of thirst and starvation in a few days, so I felt good! I thought "well, this fortress might actually WORK!", so i decided to do everything as perfectly as I could, and started digging a lot to find gems and ores. I couldn't wait to make my own metal weapons and armor!
One day, a "Ñ" appeared on the corner of the map. It was a giant ape. I was terrified. When the game was unpaused, it turned back into a human and went home! What about that luck?? It felt like the world wanted me to have this chance to thrive.
Time passed and my population increased to 78 dwarves. It was around that time that an "evil force of darkness" first appeared. It was a small handful of goblins, and it did not seem that menacing. HOWEVER, the book had taught me the basics and I had not yet continued to read. Since no beginner will manage to learn how to build defences and armies while fumbling with the controls and UI, these aspects were only covered later by the book. The author assumed that you would die countless times before understanding those first topics.
In other words, there I was, with 78 dwarves, with NO moat, NO bridge, NO gate, NO traps, NO army and NO weapons, with three tiles large entrance just invitingly gaping towards the goblins. I panicked, I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know about burrows to make my people hide. Needless to say, they massacred us. My population fell from 78 to 33 dwarves in a few minutes, until i actually managed to build a wall and keep them away. They gave up and went home.
I felt stupid, but didn't give up. In a few minutes a bunch of migrants came and I have almost 50 people again. Then they came again. and butchered my dwarves once more. Once again I managed to lock some of them some levels below and waited for the goblins to go away. Now I had 28 dwarves left. I couldn't even find a corpse that was WHOLE in the coffins, everyone that died was dismembered. I noticed it was time to read some more.
I read the book all the way to the end, and learned about the burrows, and the moats, and the bridges, and the levers, and armies, and nobles (insert endless list here). And felt that NOW I was prepared.
So I built my moat. I thought that it would take too much time dig one bigger that the size of the first level of my fortress, so later I discovered I had sun shining through a line in the roof of my fortress (yay! I'm stupid!). Nevertheless, Now I had a bridge and the goblins came again, and they couldn't reach me, HA! Ignorant fools, thought I, how dare they think I would be such an easy target.
And I thrived once more. The population soared to 95 dwarves, and I started building all sorts of workshops, even though I was still unable to use most of them. I finally found ore, but still had to establish a melting system, but I wanted to find magma for that, so that I could same more wood. I was greedy.
Then, the game decided to scare me, and sent a minotaur to visit me! I wanted to save everyone, so I sounded the alarm and waited for everyone that was outside to enter, but it was darn FAST. Also, I had sounded the alarm, which also evacuated everyone from the dining room, where the LEVER WAS. He got in.
It started to bang on the head of a child dwarf while I tried to create an improvised army and sent them after him with my fingers crossed. My army took the long way to where it was, but I was flabbergasted by how many beating that child was managing to receive. Then I discovered that the Minotaur was armed with a SOCK (no, really) and it was actually getting TIRED of beating the child so much. My army got there and beat the minotaur to a pulp with their bare hands in seconds, and my fortress was saved. It was very funny "Nice one, DF, you actually scared me this time!", I thought.
I kept going with my new projects, which were to make an underground bedroom and workshop level, to then dedicate the first level to the military, as proposed by the book. I felt victorious.
Then, another force of darkness appeared. Dragons. 6 of them. But they couldn't fly according to the description and they were far away. This time, I was prepared! I had made a different burrow including the room where the lever was so that it wouldn't be empty after the alarm. Everyone got in, now I only had to give the order: "PULL THE LEVER".
WHERE IS IT? WHERE IS THE LEVER?
Only a mechanism stood in its place. did it break? Did I order it to be taken apart by mistake??? This can't be happening.
I ordered the bridge to be destroyed while I checked how many enemies I was facing.
65 GOBLINS and 6 DRAGONS, including a GOBLIN LORD. I felt the game had decided to give me a message:
My time had come.
I shouldn't have tried to survive, and now all I could do was to watch the results of my newbieness. Obviously I couldn't destroy the bridge on time. I also wasn't able to lock the door leading to the room where the stairs were, because I had MOAT passing tight over it, creating a gap that I couldn't fix, lest the moat be rendered useless.
The dragons entered through the moat and found the corridor that led directly inside the level where all dwarves were gathering (another result of my badly designed defenses), while the three goblin armies swarmed throught the main entrance. Everyone in the first and third levels were mangled, dismembered and smashed in seconds. Leaving only 4 people on the second level.
The dragons liked my cemetery on the third level and just decided to chill out over there, while the goblins, after killing the remaining cats and chickens, entered the mayor's room (the most beautiful room I had) and stayed there as well, all of them. The remaining 4 dwarves,which included the mayor, were terrified and refused to leave the second level and die honorably. They started throwing tantrums and then the first one went mad and ran around naked endlessly through the mining corridors. The mayor after throwing a bunch of stuff around died of thirst, making the doctor mayor. He thought that this was his last chance to shine as an important person and started banning exports and requiring things to be built.
The third one, the miner, had a baby, then went mad, took all her clothes and ran, assuming the place of the other raving mad, which died of hunger. Then the mad miner rushed inside the farm, and killed herself with a bunch of seeds. I actually have the screenshot saying that. Then the doctor died while the baby was "quite content lately". Then the baby died of thirst.
This was the end of Edtûlvabok, my first fortress.