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[Prester]

Hey guys,

i started yesterday and as you can imagine, some questions have accumulated over time.

1. which animals graze and which do not?

so far i know pig, fowl, bear, cat, dog dont graze. anyone knows a complete list? because my goal would be a 100% underground fortress

2. when i just started and after some time a snake / any wild animal appears and wanders towards my dwarfs, what should i do? wait for the dogs tzo fight her? hope my dwarvens are stronger? i red so much farming and stockpile tutorials that i forgot there are enemies in this game ^^

3. is the only plant that produces FOOD (not alcohol) underground plump helmets? so 100% underground means i should rather gather milk / cheese and eggs?

4. when i destroyed a natural wall by mining. can i recover the natural wall again? or can i only build "manmade" walls there to close gaps? is there a difference? can enemies smash dwarfen-made walls but never touch natural walls?
4.1 so when my entire fortress is only one single natural wall away from the outside, is there any enemy that also knows how to use a pickaxe? or is natural wall 100% save (when it has no openings)?

5. how do i deal with aquifer? i know best is to avoid it but i dont want to play in pussyworlds where i  turn any danger off. how does aquifer work? i saw a video of someone creating a world in a 100% aquifer-land and he did just dig his tunnels without a care in the world ...?

6. does cave moss naturally grow on unused underground soil? or do i have to do anything to get it?

7.is there a way to automatically bewater underground stones when i have a river nearby, because i love automizations. (my first goal would be to be able to watch my fortress for 20 minutes without having to interfere once).

8.do animals need any kind of water? or can i chain my dogs into my stone-entrance without them dying of hunger/thirst. ever. ?

9.when should i start building defenses/military ?

10. is there a way to build a "tree farm" ?

[WanderingKid]

1. which animals graze and which do not?

Easiest way would be to look up 'pasture' in the wiki, they're all listed there.

2. when i just started and after some time a snake / any wild animal appears and wanders towards my dwarfs, what should i do? wait for the dogs tzo fight her? hope my dwarvens are stronger? i red so much farming and stockpile tutorials that i forgot there are enemies in this game ^^

Usually I keep a hunter on hand but in general just ignore them until you've got a military.

3. is the only plant that produces FOOD (not alcohol) underground plump helmets? so 100% underground means i should rather gather milk / cheese and eggs?

All plants except Dimple Dye/Blade Weed and PigTails/RopeReed produce food directly.  Seeds and stuff can be cooked into foods too at the kitchen.  It's best to process your quarry bushes however.

4. when i destroyed a natural wall by mining. can i recover the natural wall again? or can i only build "manmade" walls there to close gaps? is there a difference? can enemies smash dwarfen-made walls but never touch natural walls?
4.1 so when my entire fortress is only one single natural wall away from the outside, is there any enemy that also knows how to use a pickaxe? or is natural wall 100% save (when it has no openings)?

Rebuild the wall, and they can't currently break walls of any kind.  There are currently no wall-diggers.

5. how do i deal with aquifer? i know best is to avoid it but i dont want to play in pussyworlds where i  turn any danger off. how does aquifer work? i saw a video of someone creating a world in a 100% aquifer-land and he did just dig his tunnels without a care in the world ...?

wiki: Double slit method

6. does cave moss naturally grow on unused underground soil? or do i have to do anything to get it?

You have to open a cavern to air.  Once it's done you can seal it up again.

7.is there a way to automatically bewater underground stones when i have a river nearby, because i love automizations. (my first goal would be to be able to watch my fortress for 20 minutes without having to interfere once).

bewater?

8.do animals need any kind of water? or can i chain my dogs into my stone-entrance without them dying of hunger/thirst. ever. ?

If it doesn't graze, it never needs anything.  Dogs, cats, leopards, honey badgers... all good for chained guards.

9.when should i start building defenses/military ?

Immediately.

10. is there a way to build a "tree farm" ?

Kinda.  It's a natural growth thing in available land, really.  They're nicknamed tree farms but they're not.  You can't plant a tree.

[deepdowner]

Hi there, I'm kinda new as well and I can say:
9. As early as possible.
When you need the military, it's to late to start the setup.
At the start you can try to rely on traps only, though. Cagetraps are over-efficent, though, so you may want to limit those. Also, beware:
Traps won't be crossed by wagons at all, so leave a 3 square space to your trade depot. Just maze 2 angles or so, because enemies run the shortest way, they will run into the traps. The wagon will curve around them, if you leave 3 tiles space.
Your dwarves won't trigger your traps, UNLESS they get movement-impaired. Which means: faint / passing out etc. I had a handful of cagetraps in front of my drawbridge, sent out some crossbow dwarves to deal with goblins. Turns out one of the goblins had a bow as well, hits my first dwarf in the guts, he passes out from pain and gets knocked right into a cagetrap.
I couldn't retrieve him until I dealt with the goblins, but then he already bleeded out

10. Once you breach a underground cavern open, (underground)trees (along with cave moss etc) will start growing on any underground soil.

[Garath]

2. Most animals are not agressive. This includes animals like lions. Alligators, badgers and some stealing animals are exceptions rather than a general rule

3. Only plump helmets produce food directly, other plants must often be processed or cooked before becomming edible. Eggs are good for providing a lot of food, but need to be cooked too. The most important thing to keep in mind is not to cook all the plants of any type or you might run out of seeds. Another useful thing is to get easy to maintain (no grazer) fast breeding animals to rovide some meat now and then. Dogs are actually great for this. Otherwise, just experiment with how much effort you have to put in everything. Learning that is part of the fun. One fort starving because you didn't get enough food, the other one having too much...


7. The term is irrigate. And no there is no automatic way, mostly because you only need to do it once, to make the tiles muddy. From then on, except in some weird cases (using a cheat command to clean all mud, blood and vomit just as an unhappy dwarf destroyed the farm to reveal the mud), everything works fine. There are some suggestions on how to safely irrigate underground stones. However, if you have a soil layer (sand, clay, dirt, loam and some others), this will support a farm without any extra effort

9. One of the first things you should do is make sure you have a raising bridge at your entrance to close your fort in emergencies. After that you can in theory wait any emergency out, with a few exceptions. The easiest way is to set traps. Both weapon traps and cage traps are extremely powerful. Personally I wait with setting anyone to training untill the first migrants arrive, mostly because I can't spare the manpower, also to wait and see if any migrants have military skills.

[WanderingKid]

3. Only plump helmets produce food directly, other plants must often be processed or cooked before becomming edible. Eggs are good for providing a lot of food, but need to be cooked too. The most important thing to keep in mind is not to cook all the plants of any type or you might run out of seeds. Another useful thing is to get easy to maintain (no grazer) fast breeding animals to rovide some meat now and then. Dogs are actually great for this. Otherwise, just experiment with how much effort you have to put in everything. Learning that is part of the fun. One fort starving because you didn't get enough food, the other one having too much...

My apologies, Garath is quite right.  I'm so used to having surface crops I forget a lot of the underground crops don't work that way.

The best place to look over what can be done with crops is here: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Crops

[Urist McDwarfFortress]

[want non-grazers] because my goal would be a 100% underground fortress

Just because you're underground, doesn't mean you can't have grazers. Once you've discovered and breached the wall of a cavern, moss will grow on any underground soil and muddy stone floors, then your grazers can graze on that.

2. when i just started and after some time a snake / any wild animal appears and wanders towards my dwarfs, what should i do? wait for the dogs tzo fight her? hope my dwarvens are stronger? i red so much farming and stockpile tutorials that i forgot there are enemies in this game ^^

Dogs will scare away the vast majority of wild animals, and will make short work of many of the smaller ones. But, as a newbie, its probably best if you move most of my dwarves inside as quickly as possible, just in case an alligator or something does happen to come along.

5. how do i deal with aquifer? i know best is to avoid it but i dont want to play in pussyworlds where i  turn any danger off. how does aquifer work? i saw a video of someone creating a world in a 100% aquifer-land and he did just dig his tunnels without a care in the world ...?

I would strongly suggest NOT embarking in an area with aquifers for your first few forts. There are plenty of other things out there that WILL wreck your first fort without having to worry about aquifers! Mess around with pumps and machinery for a bit first. Read some wiki articles, then, if you're feeling like a challenge, you can try taking one on. (Some aquifers are only one level, and some locations have spots that you can use to dig around the aquifer without messing around with pumps and double-slits and all that. My guess is, the guy in that video got lucky with his aquifer)

10. is there a way to build a "tree farm" ?

Yes. I'm guessing you mean an underground tree farm. All you have to do is mine out an area of soil and breach the caverns. Cave moss will grow to cover the area, and eventually fungi-trees will start sprouting up. These can then be chopped down just like regular trees and used as "wood."

[Prester]

thanks guys :-)