A few points:
1 Definitely NO to adding anything to the embark. Heck, I nearly didn't include an anvil, as it makes trading not technically necessary, thus greatly lowering the difficulty of the challenge.
As to tips on embarking:
BEFORE UNPAUSING:
Set a very small (2 or 3x3) zone as a meeting area. You need your dwarfs to not even consider wandering anywhere. Create only 2 jobs: deconstructing the wagon, and digging. I go for a single down-stair/up-stair, to a tiny room (it's in the upper centre of the main floor in my pictures above), into a 5x5 room.
It's very important to also set orders before setting anything in motion. <o>rders --> <r>efuse --> set skins, hair, and corpses to dump by turning off gathering of those sorts. Also, set the <F>orbid orders - forbid
everything in this sub-menu. When the time comes, you can reclaim things as you need them.
Of course, also set at least one beard as a miner, and one as a carpenter.
DOUBLE-TAP SPACEBAR.
Only let the game run a few ticks, then check the units screen for hostiles. They
will be present on the map; what matters is what and where. In my embark, there were 4 Giant Sparrow Person Corpses from the north-centre of the map, just a few seconds away. This is why you want the first meeting area designated; otherwise, your draft animals are likely to to wander off and alert the mobs.
'The issue's not whether you're paranoid, Lenny, I mean look at this shit, the issue is whether you're paranoid enough.' <"Max," Strange Days (1995; film)>
Keep a close eye on the baddies, but an even closer eye on your dwarfs. As soon as your miner has dug out a few squares of your bolt-hole (you don't need the whole room; waiting is suicide), designate a new meeting area inside. While still paused, set a 3-tile stockpile for wood and a 1-tile pile for furniture. That will bring 3 logs, an anvil, and 4 dwarfs inside. Your animals will path to the new zone as well, along with the other dwarf.
This is a critical moment. Not all of your dudes may be quick enough; relax, they're all skill-less and expendable. More are guaranteed to come, if you can keep at least one of these guys alive until the end of summer, at the latest.
What
is important is that one of your animals makes it in. With this much aquifer to battle, you'll need the meat.
As soon as your dwarfs are in (or the undead get too close, whichever is first), use one of your logs to build a wall across the entrance. In my take at this, this was the 2nd of Granite; I had to abandon 4maskwolf to the undead, as he had for some reason decided to wander AWAY from the stairs when I switched up meeting areas; oh well.
By the time you're all huddled in (expand the meeting area to fill the room to keep whatever beast in place), your miner should be digging down, looking for the aquifer. Once it's been hit, channel a tile or two into it, dig out beside that, and set that to your designated drinking area. Now your beards won't die of thirst.
You now have 2 logs and an aquifer to deal with. Everything from here assumes 'and set someone the proper job' as a given.
Personally, I built a butcher shop (making sure that it was firmly OFF the spooky part of the map; more on this later), dug a little 'just in case' drop pit, and killed the yaks (both bulls anyways, iirc. When I have a female, my habit is to hang on to it until either it, or my dwarfs, are famished).
So, that's food and water taken care of. I deconstruct the butcher's, leaving us with 2 logs again. If I'd been thinking, I'd have kept the skin and hair accessible, to make a leather seedbag and some thread - but more on that in a bit.
While that's happening, I had my miner digging out the place where I planned to pierce the aquifer.
I think it was about the 10th of Granite or so, by this point.
Then, before I forget, I build a carpenter's shop, make an axe, then deconstruct the shop. We now have 1 log, an axe, and a wooden wall which can be deconstructed later in necessary.
That's when I dug out the longish escape tunnel, in the bottom left of the main hall. Then I sent my miner off to dig the big part of the room, and gain a little experience swinging his pick, while we waited for a chance to strike the surface. I think, in my game, that was about a month and a half of sitting on our thumbs, until a non-flyer spawned (Giant Weasel Corpse) in the SE corner of the map. Once the last batch of flyers was off the map, I deconstructed the wall, designated a few trees (making sure my plant gatherers and lumberdorf both had wood hauling turned OFF) and a few shrubs for harvest.
From there, the rest is DF as normal, but with impatient and angry dwarfs.
Right now my most common problem is undead yak skin/hair. The undead butchering thing seems inconsistent; my last embark I was able to butcher, cook, and tan the first yak with no undead involvement, but on the second yak the skin immediately turned and started wreaking havoc. Anyone have any advice on this?
Make sure that any killing and/or butchering you do or have done to you is on the Joyous Wilds part of the map. Then stuff will stay dead. If you butcher, or even stockpile, any skin, corpses, or hair under/on/over the Terrifying parts, they will reanimate and give you a really bad headache.
You can tell which biome is which; the FUN one is brown and covered in dead trees.
Main point of advice: persevere. You'll be surprised just how much you can accomplish, with nearly no resources. I got lucky with the second migration wave: one of them was a hunter, who came with steel bolts. I naturally took him off hunting (just as with fisherdorfs, can't afford to traipse off outside), but those bolts were the only trade item I had when the caravan arrived. Well,
some of the caravan; no freakin' way I'm gonna open up a 3-tile-wide entryway without some sort of bridging mechanism or airlock.
Hope that helps a bit - this embark is a heckofalot of Joyous FUN!
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Topic: Edangzak Utharsanad Gedor [Players and Judges Needed!] (Read 13884 times)