Ahh...your first fortress...
Fun times when you don't know how to do anything or what the economy is or what you need to embark with. Suffice to say, my world was generated, it was a good world with a history of centuries. There were islands and mountains and a great sinister rocky plain, but seeing as I was a new Dwarflord I decided to choose a side far away from the sinister haunted realms, the untamed wilderness and choose a rocky mountain realm on the edge of a forest.
A cold forest.
When faced with the choice to embark while I could skill my dwarfs to make a miner, a farmer, an admin guy, a mason/mechanic/engineer dwarf, woodcutter and pair of warriors I thought I was set, yet with items having thrown away the crutches and buckets and hoary marmot lung one was stuck by the form that requests new supplies from the quartermaster. How does one give them something more other than pets.
So two goats did I take! And set of into the wilds.
Even as we arrived it started to snow, the white stuff covering the mountainside and filling me with dread as my dwarfs complained in their thoughts as I set them to carving out an entrance way. The going was hard, I tried to build a farm in the snow and it would not let me. Nor could I get the dwarfs to move the stones from the rooms I had carved. Yet gems I had, and a Depot was built. Trees cut down and the refuse moved outside, and the food inside.
And I cut more storerooms for the stone, and the stone they did move! As the snows melted the rivers and pools did thaw, and lo I saw dirt in the cliff side where I had been mining. So experimenting with the farms I did find a plot to grow dimple cups an cave wheat. As the migrants arrived they wished to fish, yet they also brought goblin snatchers who stole the children and scared the goats. Yet as the snows would begin to fall again with no drink to keep their beer jackets work would slow, they would grow thirsty, the trade caravan would come, yet trade would not happen! For the values of goods were unknown and in the darkness I procured many weapons yet no drink.
As the winter continued many would die of thirst, while a brewery was built I did not know how to make them brew once the migrant brewer died. As winter passed by fortress had a pile of frozen dead at its gates.
With a couple of dwarfs left it was time to leave these terrible lands and abandon the mountain such that I could travel to the Great Library of the Interwebs to educate oneself in the art of fortress building.
(Which resulted my second fort being in the sinister area and my fortress falling to zombie goats created from the vile murk that inhabited that realm.) My 5th fortress has survived the longest and been abandoned twice now and reclaimed since it has been the only one that I've been able to find easy metal in, despite the embark location finder telling me there are metals in other areas I have embarked to.