Thanks for the help! Cooking guild is definitely one of the ones Ill start up early then when Im ready to make bloodsteel.
How can I deal with the lack of magma power for fuel? Do I need to mass produce booze?
Just cut down some trees, and use saw mill or the wood splitter block to make each log into 4 logs, and then use a normal smelter to product coke [1] out of wooden planks [1] giving you a total of 4 fuel per tree log. That's pretty damn awesome. If you have a lack of available workers, just use the smelter and go straight to Coke [3] for a single wooden log (an unprocessed one).
Anyway from my third human fort so far, I found that it was really hard to start making any gold coins, when finally I found some gold ore (a shitload actually, I have 200+ bars and still heaps of ore yet to be smelted) it still took ages to smelt enough.
Also I had an immigration wave that was 0, and it gave me a message saying nobody had migrated this season. I was stuck for ages with only 36 people. Then I made a council chamber and demanded more people so I could get my fort moving along faster, and then I got basically a double migration taking me up to ~70-75 people.
I have not found ANY metal other than gold so far, which is awesome of course because I can just buy lots of hematite ore and smelt into ~3 iron bars each so far (does skill of the smelter worker mean i get better yield from a single pure hematite piece??). I managed to get a merchant guild and it's first two extensions and order crates of metal bars from my trade partners which was also a nice way to get stuff.
Meph, may I suggest you adjust the description of the reaction requirements for the merchant guild extensions? I was stumped for almost an hour trying to work out what "Empty boxes and bags" meant as a requirement. Turns out it just wanted a few cloth bags, which I had none spare, but even looking at the raws it was very obscure. There is no such thing as a "Box" in DF or MWDF so it was even more weird and annoying.