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[edgefigaro]

Two Miners: Minimum two picks. I like to start with one skilled miner and one untrained miner. These two don't need other skills, you have so much more mining to do than anything else. One is skilled just if you need to get to ground FAST. Generally, mining out the starting staging area in sand/clay layers is sufficient, and you will skill up quickly.

Protip: You can sneak a cheap hunter loadout by giving your unskilled miner 1 rank in ambusher. He will come in as a dabbling hunter, and bring a crossbow, quiver, and a set of bolts.

Dwarves 3 and 4
I like to have dwarves that have five ranks in glass and weaponsmith. Armor is less important. It is not difficult to get a dwarf to level up to a suitable rank just making huge stocks of copper shields before you assign them to steel/candy chain shirts, and for the most part, 0 and 5 ranks don't make enough of a quality differense in the initial arming of your soldiers to matter.  What matters is that they are armed at all and what material it is made of, not the quality of gear.
You can give these dwarves another, more directly useful skill like planting, cooking or brewing, but keep them away from competing moodable skills. 

Dwarves 5, 6 and 7
After that, it doesn't matter. Consider making sure all of them have their highest skill in ambusher, for the crossbow loadout. Get a military dwarf with a point in teacher and leader if you want (I like hammerdwarves, and I like taking a silver war hammer along, it is cheap and super effective.)

When you get into the game, you are going to give one of these dwarves woodcutting, and the other two are going to get all of the skills save mining, woodcutting, and hunting.

Finally, any embark points spent on dwarves can be largely better spent on raw materials. Consider this: 35 points to make a woodcutter makes 11.67 logs, placed right in the wagon so they are close by and useable right away. 35 points spent in cook can be 17.5 units of food and also 17 barrels. Same for brewer.

You can spend your precious embark points on marginally useful skills for dwarves, or you can loadup the wagon with a ton of supplies that can get you started on all of those skills immediately on Granite 1, and they actually make useful things in the process to boot.

[GavJ]

I like to have dwarves that have five ranks in glass and weaponsmith. Armor is less important. It is not difficult to get a dwarf to level up to a suitable rank just making huge stocks of copper shields before you assign them to steel/candy chain shirts, and for the most part, 0 and 5 ranks don't make enough of a quality differense in the initial arming of your soldiers to matter. 

I'm not following your logic, here. Both weapons and armor would need a bunch of training junk you won't use to get skills up, then production begins. They are equivalent.

[doublestrafe]

The skill I usually take that I don't see mentioned here is Herbalism. Getting a jump start on year-round "aboveground" farming (channel out a little block and roof it over with bridges) pretty much guarantees a self-sufficient, lock-down-able fortress. I usually find that there's an absurdly low number of rope reeds (and, if applicable, sun berries) on the map, so I crank herbalism to try to prevent failing on them.

I like to have dwarves that have five ranks in glass and weaponsmith. Armor is less important. It is not difficult to get a dwarf to level up to a suitable rank just making huge stocks of copper shields before you assign them to steel/candy chain shirts, and for the most part, 0 and 5 ranks don't make enough of a quality differense in the initial arming of your soldiers to matter. 

I'm not following your logic, here. Both weapons and armor would need a bunch of training junk you won't use to get skills up, then production begins. They are equivalent.

I'd go so far as to say they're not equivalent, but in the other direction. Skilled weaponsmiths are a dime a dozen, because crossbow bolts. Armorsmiths require actual directed junk training, so the higher the starting skill level, the better.

[edgefigaro]

I like to have dwarves that have five ranks in glass and weaponsmith. Armor is less important. It is not difficult to get a dwarf to level up to a suitable rank just making huge stocks of copper shields before you assign them to steel/candy chain shirts, and for the most part, 0 and 5 ranks don't make enough of a quality differense in the initial arming of your soldiers to matter. 

I'm not following your logic, here. Both weapons and armor would need a bunch of training junk you won't use to get skills up, then production begins. They are equivalent.

Yeah, your probably right here. I want a weaponsmith to mood rather than an armorsmith because I want to be able to sneak some high quality candy weapons early. I'll sit on candybars while I level an armorer. I'm impatient when I want a couple lightsabers and lightaxes.

The skill I usually take that I don't see mentioned here is Herbalism. Getting a jump start on year-round "aboveground" farming (channel out a little block and roof it over with bridges) pretty much guarantees a self-sufficient, lock-down-able fortress. I usually find that there's an absurdly low number of rope reeds (and, if applicable, sun berries) on the map, so I crank herbalism to try to prevent failing on them.

This is a good idea.

[Panando]

The skill I usually take that I don't see mentioned here is Herbalism. Getting a jump start on year-round "aboveground" farming (channel out a little block and roof it over with bridges) pretty much guarantees a self-sufficient, lock-down-able fortress. I usually find that there's an absurdly low number of rope reeds (and, if applicable, sun berries) on the map, so I crank herbalism to try to prevent failing on them.

I'm quite a big fan of embarking with herbalism too. A nice aspect of it is you get much bigger stacks, the dabbler will only ever bring in stacks of 1, but a proficient will sometimes bring in stacks of 4. As well as larger barrels of booze (which every dwarf will appreciate) you also get many more seeds for bootstrapping farming. So it's a very good deal, if you're into above-ground plants.

Now with that said, I have to confess that I mod plant growth times to be 4x usual, this makes herbalism relatively better compared with farming - farming is still better overall, but herbalism is far more convenient at times.
I also have to confess, that I don't like plump helmets, pigtails, sweetpods, cave wheat, quarry bushes or especially dimple cups. Sorry, just ain't a big fan of crap which grows underground in the damp and dark. Throw me down the magma chute for heresy but I prefer to grow above ground crops in the sunshine and rain like an elf (but, it must be noted, that there are much nicer offerings above ground, there are no less than 7 edibles: sun berries, strawberries, fisher berries, prickle berries, ratweed, bloated tuber and muck root, two edibles after milling: longland grass and whipvine, quite a lot of brewables: all the previous, plus rope reed and several dyes)

I don't roof over my aboveground farms because I like the extra !FUN! potential of being exposed to the open air (and also some strategically placed cage traps will do a good job of catching birds which try to fly in to nick stuff or eat vermin).

[sal880612m]

I have become a fan of 14 point embarks. A stone and a cat. So no skills.

[Tenderroast]

if you want to change things up a bit, there is a dfhack feature that can change your embark size.

startdwarf x; starting with 10 dwarves, or 20, with no starting skills, and some items can be challenging. More dwarves, they go through food and booze faster.

[edgefigaro]

Also, embark points can be set in advanced worldgen. You can give yourself an order of magnitude more points to loadout with. It gives you some perspective.

[Naros]

Basically you can't go wrong with an embark. 0 skills and just a pick is very doable, and 0 skills and no pick is not too hard once you know what you're doing.
But we of course most of us will want to give ourselves an edge where we can.

I did the following in my last fort:

Mining is in bold because it's a moodable skill, the others get to do some basic weapon smithing so that will be their moodable skill. Because artifact weapons are great!
If you specialise (I.E. only one dwarf assigned to do all Masonry at the workshop), the common skills go up rapidly, so I decided to focus on the harder to train, or less used skills.
With this setup they can exchange combat skills, and hopefully train up some mighty fine guard squads.

[Sadrice]

Lately, I've been planning my embarks around the final role of the dwarf, after I transfer to a proper division of labor with only 1 job per dwarf.  That means I give them one skill that is a nuisance to train or will be wanted early, and I max that, and the rest of their points get used on various basic skills for getting the fortress up and running, like growing and carpentry, that will be disabled on the starting 7 as soon as there is a dedicated dwarf for the job.  I also like to spend a lot of points on mining, because while it's dead easy to train, nothing kills my enthusiasm for the game like waiting forever for designations to be dug.


Thus my usual layout is:


3-4 proficient miners
1-2 proficient engravers
1 proficient weaponsmith
1 proficient armorsmith
0-1 proficient metalsmith


Distributed among the non-miners, I also give a few points in masonry, mechanics, carpentry, growing or herbalism, cooking, brewing and furnace operating (last two are optional).  If I want some extra skills, I might dual skill a miner, but they never get anything done but mining anyways, so I try not to depend on them for non mining purposes.  As for items, I take 3-4 picks, an axe, an anvil, some seeds, not much booze or food, and none of the other stuff it tries to give you.  I spend all the rest of my points on female geese or turkeys (plus one male), because for 6 points you get way more than the cost equivalent 3 meat, even if you never collect eggs.  If I'm on a biome where livestock will be a significant liability, I'll exchange them for wood and extra booze.


I like to start with dedicated moderately skilled weapon and armorsmiths, because while I could pump out copper trader trash to train them, I'm probably going to want decent armaments before then.  I also like to have a skilled metalsmith because I like to build all furniture out of metal as soon as that becomes possible, and I hate going back and rebuilding things because the furniture was unacceptably low quantity.  I don't bother with metalcrafter because that trains very quickly when pumping out zinc, nickel, and lead mugs and crafts.  While engraver is easy to train, it takes forever, and I don't like engraving without high skill workers, and don't like waiting ten years to train some up from scratch.


3-4 miners, likely without other skills might seem wasteful to some, but in the beginning when you are sketching out the grand plans for your fortress, it is incredibly nice to actually see them carried out in a reasonable amount of time.  Of course I always disable hauling on miners, so other fortress work is annoyingly slow until migrants show up, but generally I spend most of the first year designating and supervising miners anyways, so that doesn't really matter to me.

[doublestrafe]

I have become a fan of 14 point embarks. A stone and a cat. So no skills.

I assume the stone is there for the purpose of smashing the cat.

[Dirst]

3-4 proficient miners

I do this in a slightly different manner.  I'll have the 3 or 4 miners (though not maxed out), and give 3rd/4th some other skill that is needed early but not immediately (such as cooking or masonry).  That way I can have them blow through the initial mining designations without hauling or other distractions, then I switch the secondary miners over to something quasi-permanent.  The extra picks are kinda expensive, but since I'm embarking with a zillion free barrels (hello 1 unit of every kind of milk, hello 1 unit of every 2-point meat) I don't really mind.  They end up getting used by early militia dwarves (Dwarf Therapist keeps referring to these migrants as Milkers and Soapmakers and Strand Extractors for some reason).

Speaking of Dwarf Therapist, often I will notice that Dwarves X and Y would really be more effective if they traded all of their responsibilities.  The skills points in a starter pack are handed out by position in the list... is there any way to change the positions of the dwarves?

I was unaware that Ambusher gave you free equipment.  I always just waited for migrants to get hunting going (buying a crossbow and quiver and bolts at embark seemed too expensive).

[Larix]

I was unaware that Ambusher gave you free equipment.

It doesn't. This may have been a feature in older versions, but in .34.11, embark skills don't give you free equipment. You must buy or construct your own crossbows and ammo, or wait for migrants - _migrants_ will get free equipment if they're ambushers (and presumably miners or woodcutters, but those migrate quite rarely).

[greycat]

While engraver is easy to train, it takes forever, and I don't like engraving without high skill workers, and don't like waiting ten years to train some up from scratch.

I think carving minecart tracks might be the fastest way to train engraving; and you can smooth the floor afterward (or go back and forth between track and smooth as many times as you want).  But I haven't done science on this yet.  It's just something I observed while playing with minecarts a bit -- carving track doesn't take very long at all.

[Sadrice]

I had noticed that carving tracks is much faster than smoothing.  I have a feeling that both award the same amount of XP, but I would have to check.  Does anyone know where I could find a chart of the amount of XP awarded by different jobs?  I could just watch an engraver in dwarf therapist, but I want to check some other stuff too, and it would be a pain.