So I've gotten into a rather steady rhythm with my embarks, after figuring a few things out about DF. And after prepping my next 4 fortress embarks (genning world, embarking, saving before unpausing) for after my next fortress falls or I get bored with it, I realized I'd slipped into a standard embark loadout. So I thought I'd ask around and see what your general loadouts are, and general first 2-3 month strategies are. To see how mine stack up and maybe learn something.
EMBARK: Going off the "Prepare Carefully" embark, I only keep the anvil, the seeds, the cloth/bags/rope/etc and the quivers from the embark, occasionally saving some of the food, sometimes not. I then look to see if there's Bituminous Coal or Lignite, and if there is, I grab some, along with 3x of some random stone. From there, I grab some copper, and whatever iron ore there is available. After I get this taken care of, I bring 2x female dogs and a male, a breeding pair of cats, 2x hen and a rooster, 2x turkey females and a male, and a breeding pair of sheep and pigs. Dogs for defense, cats for vermin, poultry for eggs/early food source, sheep/pigs for wool and cheese, and eventually leather/meat/bones. Once I get all those together, I use up the rest of my points on the iron ore/coal. I tend not to spend my points on my first 7 dwarves, since I figure I might change my mind based on what I find.
First few months: Cut down a tree while I build the wood furnace, smelter, and metalsmith's workshop, make a unit of charcoal, then smelt a piece or two of coal. Use the iron to make 7 picks, send them all into nearby dirt to hollow out a temporary living space. While the metal stuff is being built, they're all either cutting down trees or gathering plants. If the metalsmith takes a hell of a long time, maybe even an above-ground farm. After this, I move everything inside, and send someone out to cut trees full time until fall or winter or so, get another 2 to plant crops underground, get a dwarf to make nest boxes for the poultry, make beds, chairs, tables, etc.....if I run low on food, I butcher one or both of the hauling animals (though if I get a breeding pair like I did for my current main fortress I try like hell to leave them alone). At this point it's business as usual. I may have lost a little bit of time to start with, but I'm guaranteed some metal for starting tools, and for the point cost of 1 pick or so I get a lot of tools, plus a guaranteed source of iron to at least start with, if not melt down later and turn into steel if my map doesn't have any apparent iron deposits.
How about you guys? What do you do for your embark settings/first few months?
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Topic: What's your standard embark? (Read 3080 times)