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[Scott Cee]

So, yeah.
I'm currently genning a world and pondering a new embark on a heavily wooded area (hopefully flat, because there will be NO PICKS) and building huts, rather than striking the ground, for my dorfs' living and workshopping needs.
Obviously I need to bring axes and go heavy on the tree-killing and tree-corpse-crafting skills, but what else would be of use to surface-dwelling dwarfs?
They're the claustrophic members of their parent civ, you see.

My eventual goal is a huge wooden skyscraper, in case you're interested.

[Kaitlyn]

Obviously skilled carpenters and woodcrafters would be immensely helpful. I would think you could have a decently effective marksdwarf squad with masterwork wooden bolts. Trading with elves for the seeds of plants not found in your biome would be helpful since you'll likely be relying on above ground farming. Livestock would go a long way as well with a surface focus. On a side note: If you'll be using only wood any doors you make would be vulnerable to the less dangerous variety of building destroyers. Checking the list though, if you're not going to be digging, the only non-cavern dweller among those is the giant desert scorpion... Which I doubt you'd see being in a wooded area. Adding the WOOD_WEAPONS and WOOD_ARMOR tokens to dwarves might allow you to make weapons and armor out of wood like elves as well. Not sure on that.

[Loud Whispers]

Embark on a cave so you have access to the caverns. Use clay or glass when wood is unavailable, and keep a very, very large military.

Gratuitous wrestler spam more than makes up for lack of equipment; and you can start giving them looted weapons as they arrive.

[Scott Cee]

I can trade wooden crafts to humans and dwarfs for metal items and equipment, at least until goblin christmas (if Skybreach the Tree-Kingdom lasts that long), and leather to elves. But the hippies won't be happy about me murdering so many trees, since everything will be wooden.

My first priority, other than checking for beasties that will kill my dwarfs, would need to be throwing up walls and a roof to place beds.
And then it's probably business as normal, except laying walls and floor on Z-levels working up, rather than mining and smoothing on Z-levels going down.

Much fun could be had with drawbridges used fling stuff out the sides of the tower, though... and maybe some way to drop burning booze on seiges...

[oven_baked]

If you allow yourself Open-Cast mining (Quarrying) then you can at least build with stone, reducing your demand for wood.
Obviously your dwarfs are only here because theyy hate it underground so don't think you could dig a hole and then build a roof over it!

[Urist McKoga]

Are you going to build all buildings with wood? If not, you can build a with clay boulders (not bricks, use the raw clay boulder), so you can get infinite amounts of boulders from a single clay floor.

[pisskop]

What about the good old fashioned hunting?  Train up a few marksdwarves and add bone crossbows/bolts to your army as needed.  One copper crossbow in the begining, or just make one wooden one.  Bring at most 50 copper bolts, and at least 0.

Keep your barracks as close to any gate/bottleneck you can and remove acces points if you can.  Ramps?  who needs them?

[Oaktree]

Minecarts can be part of the defense.  Wooden carts, wooden tracks, and run over intruders with carts loaded with logs or clay.  Or use carts to dump loads of items upon them from on high.

[Scott Cee]

I was actually thinking of a series of outside walkways made of lever and/or trap tile activated drawbridges (alright, and stairs which won't need to be demolished after using them to get carpenters up to build the walls) to fling invaders off the outside of the tower - the main entrance being sealed somehow (probably another bridge, this one raising inwards over a river or lake or something) while invaders are tempted into climbing the outside "walkways" by another entrance near the top.
Also, archer stations.

[goblolo]

take one pick with you and dig to the all three cavern layers. Leave entrance open. Cave crocs, welcome to the surface!

[SharkForce]

you may find this handy:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=100585.0

[Triaxx2]

If you're going up, I suggest my sky bridge titan trap. Build pillars up into the air, and a couple of z below the top, use supports in two of them instead of blocks. Link those supports to a pressure plate and have it set so only creatures too heavy to operate the bridge will trigger it. The creature will hit the plate and be in the middle of the bridge when the towers deconstruct. Ensure there's no other support than those supports.

[Scott Cee]

Straight away, the problem I can see with that is having to rebuild them every time they get set off.

[Telgin]

One possible problem I can see coming of not doing any mining is what do you do when you get a strange mood that requires stone?  Are you planning on buying stone from caravans?

My suggestion is to have a quarry of some sort where you mine out stone and any ores near the surface, but don't dig far down or only use open pit mining.  That will give you stone to build with if you need it as well as stone for moods.  You could disable moods instead, but this will be much more viable in the long run regardless.

The other general suggestion is to wall up the fort ASAP, and get a militia going as soon as possible.  If you end up with flying enemies things are going to be more difficult than with a regular fort unless you build a ceiling over the entire fort, and having trained marksdwarves will help mitigate that problem.

[Scott Cee]

One possible problem I can see coming of not doing any mining is what do you do when you get a strange mood that requires stone?  Are you planning on buying stone from caravans?

Nope. Skybreach will burn through wood and dwarfs both - like the infinitely replenishable resources we all know them to be.

Any dwarf that wants stone or metal bars obviously isn't cut out for life in the open air anyway, and them killing themselves off is probably for the best.
Wood and bone everything.