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[DwarfMeister]

Use Dwarf Therapist.

Well... I have to say that using Dwarf Therapist is only a preference. To be honest, I personally think that it takes away from the immersion of the game. I mean... Isn't DF supposed to be a hard game to play? Kudos to those it helps though.

game hard to play =/= unnecessarily unwieldy due to non game mechanics (poor UI)

The game can be hard enough on its own...especially with mods. The interface limiting usability shouldn't be a part of the game.

Good point. All I'm saying, however, is that when given a choice between clicking a few keys on the keyboard in DF versus clicking a bunch of times with a mouse in DT, DF seems more immersive. I've tried DT and it just doesn't work for me.

Also, I'm aware of custom professions in DT, but, honestly, who has EVER had a dwarf that NEVER changed jobs? Just saying.

DT is mainly useful for lategame when you have 100+ dwarves, or when you get very large migrant waves. Custom professions is very useful for assigning military dwarves, as you can give them a custom profession like 'recruit (melee)' and then easily find them in the military screen.

I would never say it is essential, but the rapist certainly takes a lot of the micromanagement out of labour assignments when dwarf numbers start to increase. I never used to use DT, but I gradually warmed up to it as I played longer and longer forts, and now I find it so useful I dread the thought of playing without it.

Well..I've yet to have that many dwarves. I've gotten close though, so maybe DT will prove more useful in the future. Most of my forts don't last that long, but it's okay 'cause I have a short attention span.

[bluefox]

The best advice I can give is: plan for failure.

Your fort will eventually crumble and die. The point is to postpone that inevitable fate for as long as possible.

A lot of the time we plan for success. But in this game, the power of positive thinking will kill your dwarves. So a couple of examples:

Building a well:
Planning for success: as soon as this well is finished, I'll designate a drinking zone.
Planning for failure: if the water source freezes, that will boost the water pressure here, so I'll build a floodgate. No, better make it a bridge so if the water dries up, letting the goblins into my fort, I can still seal the chamber. And before I fill the aqueduct to the well, I should expect it to flood. If it does flood, how can I prevent it from descending my stairwell and flooding everything below it?

Building a wall:
Planning for success: when the wall is finished, no goblins will be able to get in!
Planning for failure: wall's almost done - I think. But I see a lot of people on the forums saying that they've missed holes in their defenses, so I should put a secondary wall up, and maybe a tertiary wall, and a moat, and a bridge, and train a couple squads ...

Building a pump stack:
Planning for success: pumping magma is just like pumping water, but this way I can use magma forges on the surface!
Planning for failure: this is going to explode in my face the first five times. Time to take notes so I don't repeat the same mistakes.

Training a Squad:
Planning for success: finally got them to spar, and train, and use weapons. Job's done, now to just wait while they get better at their skills.
Planning for failure: if I were a goblin squad, I would ambush right about now, when the military is at its weakest. What can I do to make sure they don't kill my civilians?

[khearn]

Learn to create a civilian alert and burrow to keep your dwarves from running outside to pick up troll fur thongs during a siege. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:Khearn/CivilianAlertBurrow

Anytime you build a lever and connect it to something, use 'N' and create a label. You will forget which of those three levers drowns the goblins in your entrance hallway and which one lets them in.

Good point. All I'm saying, however, is that when given a choice between clicking a few keys on the keyboard in DF versus clicking a bunch of times with a mouse in DT, DF seems more immersive. I've tried DT and it just doesn't work for me.

I find therapist very useful from day 1. Even with just 7 dwarves, it's still a royal pain to figure out who, if anyone, has a given labor turned on using the native interface. For example, say you want to check plant gathering, you have to do u->c->p->l->select Farming/Related->look->ESC->ESC->u->select second dwarf->c->select Farming/Related->look->ESC->ESC->u->select third dwarf and so on through all 7 dwarves. That's a whole lot more than "clicking a few keys".  With DT, you just read the dwarves and look.

[biomatter]

Good point. All I'm saying, however, is that when given a choice between clicking a few keys on the keyboard in DF versus clicking a bunch of times with a mouse in DT, DF seems more immersive. I've tried DT and it just doesn't work for me.

I find therapist very useful from day 1. Even with just 7 dwarves, it's still a royal pain to figure out who, if anyone, has a given labor turned on using the native interface. For example, say you want to check plant gathering, you have to do u->c->p->l->select Farming/Related->look->ESC->ESC->u->select second dwarf->c->select Farming/Related->look->ESC->ESC->u->select third dwarf and so on through all 7 dwarves. That's a whole lot more than "clicking a few keys".  With DT, you just read the dwarves and look.

This is why I recommend Dwarf Therapist. Without it, it feels like I'm trying to manage labors by metaphorically peeking through a tiny hole at what's going on. I have to memorize by name which dwarves have what labors, what skill level everyone is, etc. With Dwarf Therapist, it's like being enlightened on a whole new level - you can really see the grand scope of things! With one snapshot, you can see who has what enabled, what skill level dwarves are at, what they are currently doing, what attributes they have, etc. Being able to view this 'from above' is just amazing, it's like breaking free of a cage, or something silly.

[Mrhappyface]

For those still at the bottom of the learning cliff, just 1 VERY important. DO NOT try learning everything at once. DF HAS to be learned in increments or you will suffer needlessly.

[DwarfMeister]

The best advice I can give is: plan for failure.

Your fort will eventually crumble and die. The point is to postpone that inevitable fate for as long as possible.

A lot of the time we plan for success. But in this game, the power of positive thinking will kill your dwarves. So a couple of examples:

Building a well:
Planning for success: as soon as this well is finished, I'll designate a drinking zone.
Planning for failure: if the water source freezes, that will boost the water pressure here, so I'll build a floodgate. No, better make it a bridge so if the water dries up, letting the goblins into my fort, I can still seal the chamber. And before I fill the aqueduct to the well, I should expect it to flood. If it does flood, how can I prevent it from descending my stairwell and flooding everything below it?

Building a wall:
Planning for success: when the wall is finished, no goblins will be able to get in!
Planning for failure: wall's almost done - I think. But I see a lot of people on the forums saying that they've missed holes in their defenses, so I should put a secondary wall up, and maybe a tertiary wall, and a moat, and a bridge, and train a couple squads ...

Building a pump stack:
Planning for success: pumping magma is just like pumping water, but this way I can use magma forges on the surface!
Planning for failure: this is going to explode in my face the first five times. Time to take notes so I don't repeat the same mistakes.

Training a Squad:
Planning for success: finally got them to spar, and train, and use weapons. Job's done, now to just wait while they get better at their skills.
Planning for failure: if I were a goblin squad, I would ambush right about now, when the military is at its weakest. What can I do to make sure they don't kill my civilians?

Good list!!!

[DwarfMeister]

For those still at the bottom of the learning cliff, just 1 VERY important. DO NOT try learning everything at once. DF HAS to be learned in increments or you will suffer needlessly.

This is true. It also may be a good idea to have someone teach you the basics. You'd be surprised how fast you can learn with a little bit of help.

[RanDomino]

[SmileyMan]

Do not go digging deep until you've got the basics of self-sustaining fortress going.  If you've got something complex in mind, build a small, safe camp out on one edge until you're ready.

And a legendary dining room will forgive many sins.

[Dorfimedes]

I'm sure that there have been people playing this game since it's inception on this forum. Anyway, there's probably some piece of wisdom that the more seasoned of us can pass down to those who are just starting out. What advice will you pass down?

Here's mine-

If you think that you would POSSIBLY need a floodgate, just build the d@$% thing!!! I made the mistake of going, "Oh no... I don't need a floodgate in THE TUNNEL THAT I HAD CONNECTED TO A RIVER... Nothing BAD could happen... Suffice to say, everything was going well until I accidentally flooded my fortress. The lack of a floodgate was the only thing that was keeping me from stopping the flow of water to fix the problem.

This is something I've spent far too much time thinking about when designing my fortresses, and consequentially I suffer less apocalyptic floods. The corollary to this rule is, when floodgates are required, use drawbridges instead. Drawbridges require less labor in general and you can set up many of them in complex water systems at once since they start in the "open" position. As a plus, they will crush anything in their way rather than getting stuck open. The downside to this is that dwarves fall under the "anything" category. If the drawbridge is in a high traffic area you might consider surrounding it with floodgates that you can drop first to deter dwarves from trying to path over the bridge, then drop the bridge.

I have plans in my head for a system that would make areas of the fortress nearly invulnerable to floods caused by mischievous building destroyers, but I don't know if it would work. It's pretty simple, really: Dig drains under any drawbridges meant to hold back water that lead to a cave or something similar you can use to siphon out the water. If a building destroyer comes along and smashes the bridge with the intent of drowning the whole fort, it will harmlessly spill into the newly-uncovered drain. The beauty of this design is that when the bridge is in the open state the drain will be blocked and your pipes will function normally, and it's entirely automated. You don't have to rely on your dwarves to be pull the lever before it's submerged in water or magma, the problem solves itself.

I also like to put weapon traps in my pipes and include systems to manually drain areas for "maintenance." I haven't tried it, but in theory this would make the problem of fire imps moot if your magma pipes were sufficiently trapped. They can swim through searing magma and fortifications, sure, but let's see them swim through a dozen +menacing steel spikes+!

As a final note, put doors in every single- or double-tile wide corridor. Don't be afraid of redundancy. Doors are by far the easiest way to hold back liquids and require zero management, and they make a great buffer for hostile wildlife that your dwarves can hide behind. Two double doors on both ends of a two tile wide hallway will hold back any amount of water unless both doors get stuck open, which isn't a bad trade for how quickly they can be set up. If you were really paranoid, you could put another set of doors in the middle of the hall. Actually, there's nothing technically stopping you from filling every tile of the hallway with doors and putting a chair in some crevice off to the side. Just imagine the happy thoughts you will get from dwarves opening ten sets of completely sublime, tastefully arranged diorite doors!

[i2amroy]

Might as well go all the way and install floodgates absolutely friggin' everywhere to be safe. Just make sure you label them...

As mentioned by slothen, doors works just as well for blocking water as floodgates, so if you install doors everywhere then all you need to do is lock the right ones and it will hold back any flooding problems until you can deal with them (assuming you manage to lock it before some idiot opens it and nothing has been left sitting on the doorstep).

[tolkafox]

1. Label your levers.
2. That lever connected to your farms irrigation floodgate? Destroy it.
3. A dwarf hunter will kill any thief he runs into. 10 hunters will kill most ambush squads. Make more than one dwarf a hunter.
4. Skeletal deer>training sword.
5. Bears have special anti-whip armor.
6. You don't need every industry running at the same time.
7. Bring 100 coal at embark, if not then 100 logs.
8. Lignite is not coal.

[hermes]

DT is mainly useful for lategame when you have 100+ dwarves, or when you get very large migrant waves. Custom professions is very useful for assigning military dwarves, as you can give them a custom profession like 'recruit (melee)' and then easily find them in the military screen.

I would never say it is essential, but the rapist certainly takes a lot of the micromanagement out of labour assignments when dwarf numbers start to increase. I never used to use DT, but I gradually warmed up to it as I played longer and longer forts, and now I find it so useful I dread the thought of playing without it.

I can totally understand this, and used to agree, but recently I've done a bit of an about-face on DT.  Before I wanted to manage every dwarf because I was playing for efficiency, trying to get that idler number down to zero.  Also, I was continuing a habit learnt from Captnduck tutorials where he names every dwarf to more easily identify migrants.

But once I convinced and taught my brother to play and we started a fort with story-logs, I finally realized that the mass of dwarves doesn't matter, and it's much more fun to identify and name those that stand out for some reason or another.  Profession and idling management hasn't been nearly as difficult as I thought it would be one I "let go".  That's not to say that a slightly improved profession management system wouldn't be welcome, but DT isn't nearly as important as I thought it was - the job-chaos is a good kind of chaos.

So my advice for new players would be twofold:

• Don't overly worry about efficiency or micromanagement, keep up a fast pace of play
• Get in on a story game with friends or online, it makes the game worth playing

[SmileyMan]

...snippety snip...

I agree with this.  Especially now that it's possible to turn off default labours for migrants, so you don't get someone grab your precious stack of steel bolts and pump them into a badger when you don't have a butcher yet.  Now I just let them get on with hauling and cleaning and when I need a new specialist, find someone with a bit of basic skill and let them get on with it.

I found that DT was spoiling the fun a bit.

[tolkafox]

I'm afraid these are all subjective opinions and also are way off topic.

Advice for new players: don't listen to debates about opinions. Both sides will just endlessly post that x method is best for x reason and y method is best for y reason both failing to see that x+y=z, and nobody likes z.

DT is a third party utility that hastens labor management and viewing. No one cares if you use it or not just like no one cares if you kill elves or not. Whatever floats your boat.