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[rtg593]

I ment that magma can also be used for burning the innocent elves and gobbos. (and humans too).
The normal kind of fun, not the other !!fun!!

I wouldn't recommend magma as a first time project. Or even a 7th or 8th. Get your fortress surviving to the point of boredom; then you're ready to start having fun.

Yup. Magma can be too much fun at first Once you get there, tho, it's nice not needing fuel for most stuff.

Oh, and you have the same amount of food if you cook lavish meals or easy, lavish meals are great for compressing a ton of food onto a few tiles, i.e., all those dog and kitten organs from the mass slaughter taking up space everywhere. They also get a happy thought from eating one. Once I start cooking, I've never seen a reason to cook anything else.

What I did was, every time I was about to do something or saw something new, I looked it up on the wiki. Then I followed the links on that page to each page it linked to. Good info there.

[Callista]

Stuff that I find useful...

Learn your controls. Those are usually the biggest difficulty. You're going to use your number pad a lot. If your arrow keys don't work, the number pad usually does.

Dwarves get very unhappy, very fast. To prevent them from killing each other when they tantrum, make sure there are lots of doors that you can lock to isolate angry dwarves from the rest.

Learn to use bridges. They are probably the single most useful dwarvish invention.

Schedule breaks for the military. Otherwise, they will tantrum.

Think in three dimensions. A wall won't stop a flying enemy.

Use Dwarf Therapist. It's a life saver.

[floundericiousWA]

I wouldn't recommend magma as a first time project. Or even a 7th or 8th. Get your fortress surviving to the point of boredom; then you're ready to start having fun.

Agreed.

I've played through probably six forts in a year and had four of them fail horribly...the other two (one in 31.25 and another now in 34.04) are "marshmallows" in that kobolds and goblins rarely make it inside to do any mischief and sieges get ripped apart by my static defenses.  I have good amounts of industry (this time I'm experimenting with clothmaking and clothing shops to prep for "dammit, the drunken walking beards actually care about having clothes!?!?") and make a huge splash in trading with the dwarves and humans.

I've found a magma tube and have setup a magma industry chamber...I've also encountered some really fun characters way down at the bottom of the world...but I hasten to add that this is the result of a year's worth of experimenting and learning and polishing my DF skills before broaching THAT clowncar of fun.  Now I'm in a better place to bend my 273 drunken schlomos to my will and see if I can conquer the whole world or if I will fail and watch them die horribly.  It will be epic... and THAT is dwarf fortress.

[Fredd]

What will really help, set the pop cap to 5 in the dinit file, and turn invasions OFF. You will normally wind up with 20 dwarves from the hardcoded migrant wave. 20 dwarves are enough to learn the basics, and invasions OFF will give you some peace, that is of course you did not embark on a evil biome.

[Bilanthri]

While magma is clearly a danger to be avoided at first, even water can be devastating when a new player starts manipulating it. MY first cistern/well attempt ended with a flooded fortress and many dead dwarves. And I really thought I had it all worked out. *glub glub glub*

[Morpha]

I flooded my bedrooms with magma once, along with half the fortress in between. NOT a good thing. Caution with magma is advised. Hell, water is lethal.

[Psieye]

What will really help, set the pop cap to 5 in the dinit file, and turn invasions OFF. You will normally wind up with 20 dwarves from the hardcoded migrant wave. 20 dwarves are enough to learn the basics, and invasions OFF will give you some peace, that is of course you did not embark on a evil biome.

This. This. This. I cannot stress THIS enough.

I see a lot of newbies learn enough to survive year 1 and then they're plunged into the deep end. The game assumes you know what you're doing and throws you a huge load because that's taken in stride by experienced players. So many times I find mid-newbies crying out "I HATE MIGRANTS" because they're not comfortable with scaling food/booze/bed infrastructure and that's before they get wrecked by invaders.

DF's steep learning curve doesn't end when you can consistently get past year 1. There's not as much to learn after that but the curve gets steeper as you have to start developing a feel for the game instead of just finding and following some rote instructions. I mean sure, it's possible to get very far in the calendar count just by finding even more instructions and rote obeying them. But DF is a sandbox, you're going to need some creativity to get the most out of it. That means coming up with playstyles that bring you satisfaction and there's enough level of possibility that instructions become guidelines and rules of thumb rather than absolute dogma.