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[Urist McWangchuck]

Newbie here, with my first post.  I'm just starting out trying to learn this game and I ended up abandoning a batch of forts early while I was trying to figure out how things work.  I still don't really know, but I thought I had figured out enough to give it a solid try and I guess I wanted to talk about my first real fortress.

I had this great EZ mode embark all ready for this.  A volcano, good amount of hematite, no coal but lots of trees.  It's on an island with only Dwarves as neighbours.  The actual embark was super sweet - a fair sized plateau at the same z-level as the top of the magma and about a dozen levels above the marble layer.  There's a small aquifer at around the same depth.  A nicer spot for The Rough Gorge to Strike the Earth could not be imagined.

First year everything goes tickety-boo.  Dwarves are super-happy in their new home, productivity is only slowed by the parties they keep throwing all the time.  They feel so secure that we even get a pair of babies in the spring.  A time for rejoicing!  And then the first challenge - a monster migrant wave.  The population of Violencehalls swells from 25 to 66 and from 2 children (not counting the babies) to 17.  I setup a burrow to toss them all in with their dining hall set up like a classroom.

Second year is time for me to learn how to balance all of these labourers.  The extra haulers are greatly appreciated, but I'm certainly not using these guys efficiently.  Number of idlers is pretty high almost all of the time.

I start on a military and have a handful of steel clad soldiers.  Some of the newcomers are Hunters and Rangers and my larders are being filled with meat, allowing most of the farm output to go straight to the stills.  But otherwise it is pretty uneventful, except the migrant waves.  Because of course there are more migrants.  And they bring their children.  At the start of the second winter, I have 102 dwarves with 3 babies and 28 kids (and one thirteen year old graduate - congrats Kubuk Mutegalleys).  Nearly a third of my population.  I had originally envisaged Violencehalls to be an arms factory, shipping out masterwork steel axes and silver warhammers for the mainland Dwarfs to to show to their neighbours.  And yet here I find myself, running a day care centre carved into the side of a volcano.

But I guess running a day care centre is great training for playing Dwarf Fortress - so onwards we go.

[HooliganintheFort]

Welcome to the World of Death and Dwarves. (Also welcome to Bay12)

This Island is a great place for a beginner. You'll get no invasions or ambushes to mess you up hardcore, and you can learn anything there in peace.
You can start your glass industry if you have sand. You can mess around with "mega projects" and etc. Again welcome to the complex and terrifying game of Dwarf Fortress.


(Kinda Spoilers)




Well since your all set. Try to strike "candy" and keep digging through it. After that pit all your children where the hole is when you keep digging down through the "candy". After that. Your baby and children problems are gone.

[Urist McWangchuck]

Thanks.  I'm actually going to keep the kids happy and healthy and constantly socializing so that when tragedy inevitably befalls, the tantrums will rip the fort apart and Violencehalls will earn its name.

This is my learner fort, so that I can start trying to understand how stockpiles work and so forth.  Although I probably should consider a Megaproject of some sort to focus my fiddling around.  Currently I'm thinking about what to do with the magma and aquifer. An obsidian farm for sure, so I can replace all the grey basalt furniture with shiny black stuff. Make it my drowning pit too, although there really is no one to drown on my secluded island getaway.

Definitely going to put a spa in the marble layers, probably as a sculpture garden. Maybe some waterfalls.  Maybe magma powered saunas and hot tubs. I know - what kind of fortress am I making here? All the adults have their own rooms, there's a full time daycare facility, lavish meals of free range critters whenever hunger strikes, and now a spa. It is more vacation resort than dwarf fortress. Yeah, it kinda is I guess.

[HooliganintheFort]

Thanks.  I'm actually going to keep the kids happy and healthy and constantly socializing so that when tragedy inevitably befalls, the tantrums will rip the fort apart and Violencehalls will earn its name.

This is my learner fort, so that I can start trying to understand how stockpiles work and so forth.  Although I probably should consider a Megaproject of some sort to focus my fiddling around.  Currently I'm thinking about what to do with the magma and aquifer. An obsidian farm for sure, so I can replace all the grey basalt furniture with shiny black stuff. Make it my drowning pit too, although there really is no one to drown on my secluded island getaway.

Definitely going to put a spa in the marble layers, probably as a sculpture garden. Maybe some waterfalls.  Maybe magma powered saunas and hot tubs. I know - what kind of fortress am I making here? All the adults have their own rooms, there's a full time daycare facility, lavish meals of free range critters whenever hunger strikes, and now a spa. It is more vacation resort than dwarf fortress. Yeah, it kinda is I guess.

Sounds great, but watch out for vampires. They will suck the life out of your dwarves. I lost a legendary metal smith that way.
Keep on fiddling around with that, and you should try to trap sea animals. Some of them can give you great bones to craft into stuff.

Violencehalls eh? Can't wait till you penetrate the caverns or the circus. Then it'll turn REALLY violent.

A better Dwarf Fort than mine haha. Mine is suffering from booze withdraw, death of pets. Massive sieges. Clowns and the FBs. So your pretty well off. Half of my fort already died after I flooded my noble quarters with magma, and the necromancers are reanimating my military as we speak. They were all in steel. From 128 dorfs to 32. Wondering how long I will survive. But many others have more violence in their forts than mine.

Good Luck, and I hope you have a great time.

[MDFification]

Keeping your kids happy and safe is a good thing. Because they tend to form a lot of friendships. Basically, most tantrum spirals start with the little 'uns.

[Urist McWangchuck]

I'm having a great time so far, even with my FUN-free fort.  The caverns on this embark are super deep.  Like over 100 z levels down.  I will only end up breaching them with serious effort.  Also, with no military threats, I'm guessing the militia dwarfs are going to be pretty unskilled for a long time.  I guess I could Danger Room them or something, but I'm pretty content to plod along and see if I can figure out how to juggle all of these workshops and stockpiles without spending so much time micro-ing everything.

I'm quite afraid of the tantrum spiral.  I'm terrible at keeping the dwarfs busy, so they just socialize all the time.  Even without a party going on, there's usually at least a dozen of them hanging out in the dining hall, gossiping up a storm.  The first sign of trouble and it'll be the entire population taking offense at everybody else.

Maybe the luxury spa will help.  Maybe I need more statues and other fine crafts scattered randomly and hopefully spreading good thoughts.  That said, I'm already plotting out a huge mega-jail.

[Cobbler89]

As much as socialization is feared by many players (due to the formation of friendships, which, barring the same dwarves becoming desensitived to death and destruction, act as fuel for tantrum spirals), I've always found that morale stays high when dwarves have lots of pretty things (gem windows, well-crafted statues, waterfalls, well-crafted engravings) in whatever areas attract parties, wherever they eat, etc. Then again, I've also found that morale stays high when dwarves have their own bedrooms, even if all I do is throw all the beds in one area and assign the tile each one is on as a "bedroom" and let them claim those one-tile "bedrooms" when they go to sleep. We spend so much thought rigging up big things to control our dwarves and yet it's often the little things that make or break a fortress.

[Erkki]

If you ever get bored, remember that with DFHack you can spawn sieges any time you wish... You'll still get visited by FBs and Titans, so be careful about opening caverns.

On tantrum spirals: longest one I've ever had resulted in just 4 deaths in a 250-strong fortress. And I use a drafted military with little traps and restrict myself to iron and bronze gear at best. Good rooms, legendary(=usually just large) dining rooms and statue garders with lots of different kinds of valuable items to look at help a lot! I also have my mayor doing almost nothing for his living so dwarves can get the happiness boost from complaining about their worries to him when needed. Also good meals, drinks, never wearing worn clothing, pets and so forth.

[klefenz]

Am I the only one who opened this thread expecting to read about chidren locked in a tiny cell with some animal for 12 years?

[Victor6]

Am I the only one who opened this thread expecting to read about chidren locked in a tiny cell with some animal for 12 years?

Nope, but give it time; the OP's only just started, so it won't be long before those kids find themselves taking a regular lava bath in the name of !!science!!

[Bwint]

Am I the only one who opened this thread expecting to read about chidren locked in a tiny cell with some animal for 12 years?

I was about to suggest this. 28 kids should be enough to work out some of the fiddly details with the design. Then again, if the kids are sociable, an accident could trigger that tantrum spiral. At least it wouldn't be boring 

If I wanted to summarize the daycare thread so OP and other newbies wouldn't have to read 78 pages to get caught up, would it be better to start a new thread, or necro the old thread?

[MDFification]

Am I the only one who opened this thread expecting to read about chidren locked in a tiny cell with some animal for 12 years?

I was about to suggest this. 28 kids should be enough to work out some of the fiddly details with the design. Then again, if the kids are sociable, an accident could trigger that tantrum spiral. At least it wouldn't be boring 

If I wanted to summarize the daycare thread so OP and other newbies wouldn't have to read 78 pages to get caught up, would it be better to start a new thread, or necro the old thread?

It's not really a necro IIRC, they were posting in it just a week or two ago. Go for the bump, the thread is effectively timeless.

[Urist McWangchuck]

I've seen the Child Care thread.  It is both horrifying and awesome.  I might get to the point where I'll be locking kids up with dogs but the magma mist fat burning is probably too far for me to ever get to.

I had the Pop_Cap at 100 so I skipped a few migrant waves.  Decided to pop it up to 150 just to see if Violencehalls is still well regarded as a child care facility.  Got a smallish wave, but it was 11 adults and 10 children.  How did they make the journey across the sea trying to keep track of that many kids?  Maybe I should up the Pop_Cap some more and see if an all-children wave ever happens.

Almost had a couple of problems.  The meat supply is coming so fast and furious, and I've just been letting the cooks Lavish Meal whatever shows up and I ran out to barrels.  I didn't check until I saw the "Give Water failed, no bucket" message.  Ooops, I guess I should keep closer track of the booze - at least until it gets to truly staggering amounts.  Next issue, I didn't notice I had a Captain of the Guard.  His happiness was down to the eighties when I finally noticed he needed better rooms.  Derp.

The military training is going better than I thought it would.  Not Legendaries yet, but letter grade skill levels already.  I've only got 7 assigned to full-time military - all melee, but I can certainly spare some bodies.  I also transferred the a few Hunters to a military squad.  Live targets means they're also letter grade skill levels.  They've only been shooting bone bolts so far, so I'm hoping that when the titan shows, it's made of something flimsy.  They haven't fought anything.  I'm almost at half a million created wealth and the only incidents were two were-creatures that almost immediately transformed back to humanoids and fled the area.

Got an artifact hatch cover.  It is decorated with an image of chinchillas.  Yayy, I guess?  Anyways will this thing work as Building Destroyer bait?  I should find a spot to put it before the titan shows.

[Miuramir]

...Decided to pop it up to 150 just to see if Violencehalls is still well regarded as a child care facility.  Got a smallish wave, but it was 11 adults and 10 children.  How did they make the journey across the sea trying to keep track of that many kids? 

I keep seeing this sort of reaction, and it continues to puzzle me.  Have this many people never read any historical novels, never studied world history?  Even by comparatively modern standards, a household frequently will have several children; and even early American family sizes were *much* larger, let alone medieval ones.  For example, from one work on early New England, "Most women could expect to bear at least six children and delivered children at fairly regular intervals averaging every twenty to thirty months, often having the last child after the age of forty".  "Samuel Sewall was a New England merchant and magistrate whose meticulous diary, written from 1673--1729, gives us a vivid picture into colonial life. Seven of his 14 children died before age 2; only 3 of the 14 would outlive their father."  " Puritan preacher Cotton Mather saw 8 of his 15 children die before age 2."  For later examples, look at Ellis Island records or even just photos; families with as many or more children than adults are more common than smaller ones. 

You would normally expect a growing, frontier community to be a *minimum* of half children, and 2/3 to 3/4 wouldn't be unusual.  DF fortresses are usually somewhat under that due to dwarves marrying for life, being perfectly loyal, and having a high mortality rate; that's a very rare combination historically.  (Anyone with a dead life partner in DF has permanently removed themselves from having more kids; real societies rarely if ever worked that way.) 

[Urist McWangchuck]

Well, Violencehall is not exactly the New World.  It is an island that takes up one tile on the World map.  Ellis Island might also be pretty small, but it`s clearly just the gateway to the Jersey Shore, or something.  Also, Ellis didn't start accepting immigrants until 1892, centuries after the first colonies were established so I don't think that's a fair comparison.

For me, the disconnect is that I was under the impression that pre-Puritan Great Migration most of the immigrants were indentured servants, i.e. young single men.  Mostly as part of a business undertaking to extract the natural wealth for the empire - an enterprise requiring strong backs and few attachments back home.

Browsing the Winthrop Society's settlers list (http://www.winthropsociety.com/settlers.php#vital) gives me the impression that while children were not unknown as arrivals at the Massachusetts Bay colony, they certainly were not common either.

Perhaps a better comparison would be Nova Scotia.  I`m going to use Wikipedia as a source here, so grain of salt and all, but the following is pretty non-controversial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_colonization_of_the_Americas

Due to difficulties in obtaining a sufficient number of skilled emigrants, in 1624, James VI created a new order of Baronets; admission to this order was obtained by sending six labourers or artisans, sufficiently armed, dressed and supplied for two years, to Nova Scotia...

Sufficiently armed, dressed and supplied for two years!  LUXURY!