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[ggoDeye]

I'm on my very first fortress and am bored. Food & booze are self sustaining, elite marksdwarves are slaughtering goblin sieges and my dwarves are generally happy.

I read all of TinyPirate's noob tutorials, and honestly I think they were too good as I have not died yet. I can't seem to create enough wealth to get the big nasties to start knocking in my gates.

My question to the community; what shall I do to increase the FUN enough to result in a good learning experience?

I am considering attacking friendly caravans for more sieges or instigating a tantrum spiral.

[Tolisk]

Attack elf caravans, make lots of metal crafts, and if you have over 140 people you get the monarch, and that tends to lead to more trouble.

Also, Dig deep, and Dig Down, For in the end, the false light can be a curse.

[Garath]

Colonize the caverns and make them safe. Anihillate anything dangerous untamable, capture the rest. It's very likely there are some big nasties down there that you simply havn't seen yet. And yes, otherwise just go looking for the special metal and armor your troops in it.

[Naryar]

Dig very deep. When you find raw adamantine pillars, DIG INTO THEM !

[MenacesWithSpikes]

I'm on my very first fortress and am bored. Food & booze are self sustaining, elite marksdwarves are slaughtering goblin sieges and my dwarves are generally happy.

I read all of TinyPirate's noob tutorials, and honestly I think they were too good as I have not died yet. I can't seem to create enough wealth to get the big nasties to start knocking in my gates.

My question to the community; what shall I do to increase the FUN enough to result in a good learning experience?

I am considering attacking friendly caravans for more sieges or instigating a tantrum spiral.

Dig deep and wait until you get a flying Forgotten Beast with poisonous vapors or some other really really nasty method of syndrome-all-over-your-fort.

Oh, on creating wealth... train up a metalcrafter as high as you can.  Spam gold and platinum goblets and trade them.  Trust me, this works.

[Garath]

get a cook, any cook, and breed some dogs, slaughter some dogs, cook some dogs, buy animal cages from caravans and cook those too. Donate every meal not worth at least 1000 dorfbucks to your home civ.

Seriously, a good cook can easily make meals worth about 10k DB when provided with some egg, meat and flour and do so pretty fast. They were making me 500.000 worth per year, or more.

[greycat]

That assumes he has gold, platinum or similarly valuable metal ores on his map.  Not all maps do.  If he's got steel instead, steel large serrated discs are highly valuable and cost just 1 bar apiece.

Another option for wealth generation is cooking masterpiece quarry bush leaf roasts.  This can be done on any map that has water or a soil layer.

[EmperorJon]

I hope we get powered railing at some point. Attaching a water wheel to cogs would be great fun. Funiculars are very Dwarven!

[Garath]

That assumes he has gold, platinum or similarly valuable metal ores on his map.  Not all maps do.  If he's got steel instead, steel large serrated discs are highly valuable and cost just 1 bar apiece.

Another option for wealth generation is cooking masterpiece quarry bush leaf roasts.  This can be done on any map that has water or a soil layer.

Oh man, I forgot them leaves, thanks. Back to wealth generation.

[ggoDeye]

Thank you for the cooking suggestions, I was not aware that was a viable wealth building method.

Answer to some questions: I have dug all the way to the bottom and excavated much of that level without incident.
I have more silver ore than I could smelt if I could smelt... No magma or coal yet and have a real hard time keeping up wood production for charcoal.

I did steal from the elves and am looking forward to see which race has better marksman.

I appreciate all if the suggestions and look forward to more.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Elves probably won't attack just for stealing.  You've got to kill a diplomat or two.  Same goes for the humans.  When you're getting a siege every single season-- then it starts to get a little difficult.  (Unless you just dump them all in the magma or something.)

Definitely open up the caverns.  You should get metric tons of fun.  Maybe in the form of deadly blood.

If it's your first fort and you're going strong, I doubt that you've actually dug all the way to the bottom bottom.  Look around where you think the bottom is: there's probably someplace else to dig.

Things like megabeasts are generally over-rated.  Something like a hydra or a giant is always going to be easier than a siege.  They only get fun if they do something interesting, like shoot web, or breathe fire.  Or deadly blood.

When things get too easy, you can always start playing with fire.  Sometimes literally.  Sometimes, by coming up with a foolproof (ha) plan to coat all of your bolts in deadly blood.

[greycat]

Answer to some questions: I have dug all the way to the bottom and excavated much of that level without incident.
I have more silver ore than I could smelt if I could smelt... No magma or coal yet and have a real hard time keeping up wood production for charcoal.

If you've truly dug all the way down, you must have found either magma, or warm stone, or semi-molten rock (SMR).  If you hit SMR, then you need to go up a few levels, dig laterally, and then dig down again in a different spot.  Repeat until you find warm stone, which means there's magma 1 tile away (but you won't know in which direction), or magma itself.  Try not to die.

[ggoDeye]

Hhmm, maybe I have made a noob assumption. I dug until "shift >" no longer works. Is there a way to go deeper?

I did some reading on the wiki and it looks like I only have metamorphic layers all the way down to where what I'm callin the "bottom."

[Tolisk]

Yea, dig out the false hope in the darkness of the earth.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Hhmm, maybe I have made a noob assumption. I dug until "shift >" no longer works. Is there a way to go deeper?

I did some reading on the wiki and it looks like I only have metamorphic layers all the way down to where what I'm callin the "bottom."

Well, if > really doesn't work, I suppose that's your bottom.

It's just that most people's bottoms-- erm, map bottoms-- aren't made out of metamorphic rock.  They're made out of something too dense to dig through, and something light and blue and fantastic, and a strange, semi-molten rock sucks up everything you drop into it, and seals itself against pick strikes-- and lots and lots of magma.

It's possible that the world you generated used parameters that skipped these interesting layers.  However, the default parameters (ie, download DF, create world now) shouldn't skip these features.