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[roughedge]

The Plant Minecart Technique

Turn off barrels on your main plant stockpile 5x5 or larger
Use a minecart Track Stop dumping on a 1x1 plant stockpile, set a route that feed from the main pile, if done correclty every plant will be dumped/stored on the 1x1 plant stockpile for infinite storage.
Never use a plant stockpile with barrels, unless its set with take from links only and it feeds from the main gathering pile.

Other Stupid Plans:

Forest Camp: Embark on a Forest biome with 7 training axe, cut a large wood area at start then build a 7x7 wood camp in center with 4 tables and 10 bed. Choose up to 10 dwarves to be part of the surface guild for adventurous dwarves and assign them a 1x1 bed. Bonus point for a fortified roof and a team of shooters on top. Build the warehouse in a large cave beneath for cheap and fast storage of gathered surface plant and animals. Dont connect it to the rest of the fortress. Try to burrow them to surface only. Try hiring 20 hunters.

Executionners: Choose a few dwarves, give them full iron kits and good rooms and dining. If a soldiers seems unhappy for long, fire him off for unlawful behaviors. Favor stress resistance over strength, killing berzerking peasants is hard for the heart not the arms.

[Sadrice]

Mixing rooms and workshops means dudes get woken up and get bad thoughts.

According to the wiki workshops no longer make noise.  It blew my mind when I read that last week, I've been providing a buffer zone between shops and bedrooms in my forts for years.  Currently, the things to be concerned about are mining and woodcutting, at 8 tiles each.  Thus, make your bedrooms at least 9 z deep, and 9 z from the nearest forested cavern, and avoid digging ore veins nearby.  Engraving has 4 tiles of noise, and removing constructions has 8, but there's no real way to avoid that, so don't worry.

EDIT: "removing fortifications" changed to "removing constructions"

[WanderingKid]

I find it interesting that no one has commented on the one thing that's paramount during your first two seasons if you expect to be able to handle your first wave or two well.

Pause.  Pause often.  Pause well.  Pause when you think.  Pause when you plan.  Pause Constantly.

Because otherwise you're just burning daylight.

The advice above is all relatively good.  To break it down to basics though: You need food and booze.  A dorm with a few beds will keep upwards of 30-40 dwarves happy.  You need security from attack.  After that the world's your oyster... until the web shooting green glass harpy wanders in from you unsecured cavern. 

Ravash the nearby surface for lumber and easily grabbed plants while your initial dig happens with a few stockpiles near the stairway to get them moved close.  Get your brewer, cook, and farmer(s) settled in quickly once the dig is proceeding.  Dig in small chunks, so you can make sure a room is dug before the next is started.  Most easily done by simply not designating the doorway between a planned room and your main hallway(s).  Break out the stone pots next for booze storage.  From there, you should be able to expand with little concerns.

[Reelya]

Mixing rooms and workshops means dudes get woken up and get bad thoughts.

According to the wiki workshops no longer make noise.  It blew my mind when I read that last week, I've been providing a buffer zone between shops and bedrooms in my forts for years.  Currently, the things to be concerned about are mining and woodcutting, at 8 tiles each.  Thus, make your bedrooms at least 9 z deep, and 9 z from the nearest forested cavern, and avoid digging ore veins nearby.  Engraving has 4 tiles of noise, and removing fortifications has 8, but there's no real way to avoid that, so don't worry.

Yeah I wasn't sure but I whack my farmer's beds in a little room right next to the farm, and cross-connected to some of the workshops on the floor below and I never saw them woken up by noise.

Digging and construction work, etc. are what make noise. A mature working fortress is nice and quiet.

[94dima94]

I'll try to care less about bedrooms and start big food production earlier, this will probably help a lot.

Also:

The ultimate aim in my forts is to (as far as possible) seal each dorf into a small area which contains only their workspace, the required stockpiles and their quarters. Farmers only see & interact with other Farmers. Weavers only see weavers & dyers. Each area, if possible, should be linked to the next part of the fort by cart tracks alone, with physical access ways blocked by doors, gates or (best of all) walls.

You can do a very neat system with food where each area of the fortress is provided with food once a year by a set of minecarts that are triggered by the winter freeze.

1) It's awesome;
2) It's weird that when I asked for some simple advice, the answer is a climate-controlled automatic minecart network delivering resources to many small self-sufficient fortresses. Well, I guess this is what as simple as it gets in Dwarf Fortress. 

[Reelya]

I Think the airlock thing is overkill personally. And you need power for all the tracks then, which is NOT trivial.

My version, every area directly connects to each other, no airlocks, no minecarts.

You just graph the places where e.g. a farmer needs to go, and put all those places next to each other. That's it.

Then make a "farmers" burrow that covers those areas and all farmers are members of that burrow. That means they never wander off, never make friends with non-farmers and never randomly wander outside to get eaten by wildlife or killed by goblins for retrieving a sock.

Some of the farmers output stockpiles are used by other industries, e.g. the cloth industry. So you make a "Clothesmakers" burrow which overlaps the relevant parts of the farmers burrow, but includes it's own dormitory, cafeteria and workshops, plus other output stockpiles for finished clothes. Only use minecarts for quantum stockpiles, not shipping good around, at least for now.

So, you end up with a patchwork fortress, but every trip is minimized for distance, stockpiles are optimized so one dwarf delivers to them, another takes from them, wandering dwarves are minimized too, so dwarves on break don't wander halfway around the fort, thus losing time when they get off break.

I have airlocks and stuff but between more major parts of the fort, e.g. you definitely do not want a direct stairway all the way to the caverns. That's asking for trouble in more ways than one (i.e. a single crundle at the bottom of the stairs 30 levels down, and dwarves won't cross the stairs to get to other rooms. real frustrating).

[GavJ]

Mixing rooms and workshops means dudes get woken up and get bad thoughts.

According to the wiki workshops no longer make noise.  It blew my mind when I read that last week, I've been providing a buffer zone between shops and bedrooms in my forts for years.  Currently, the things to be concerned about are mining and woodcutting, at 8 tiles each.  Thus, make your bedrooms at least 9 z deep, and 9 z from the nearest forested cavern, and avoid digging ore veins nearby.  Engraving has 4 tiles of noise, and removing constructions has 8, but there's no real way to avoid that, so don't worry.

EDIT: "removing fortifications" changed to "removing constructions"

Well that seems kind of silly. But good to know.

[tussock]

Personally, I find the easiest way to get started while doing other things (inviting the clowns to meet the first dwarven caravan is always fun, especially on a map with a shallow multi-level aquifer. Busy, busy, busy, but it's a small cost to keep out the riff-raff).

Where was I? Right, getting started is making a basic hospital, and setting up everyone as marksdorfs, all in case of early trouble. One butchered yak and some fishing gets everyone crossbows, bolts, and a helmet (maybe even leggings and gauntlets). Try to keep any cow if you get one for a while. The hospital gets a nice 7x7 room with 7 beds and 7 tables, which also have chairs so people can eat there, for now. It's also the dormitory, and your barracks, so dorfs do some dodge training rather than making friends, and they get a bed for their first sleep. Everything else is workshops and stockpiles.

Your 3x13 corridors are stockpiles. Your connecting rooms are workshops that use those piles and a couple 3x5 farms that will feed half the planet, remember after they plant the helmets you can switch the field to something else and they'll plant that in any remaining space, and so on. If you have stone immediately, that's awesome, get making the thousands of blocks you'll need, if not you cut down every tree on the map (or do that anyway, for bins).

Don't build a refuse stockpile for a while, try to use everything instead, it's a good habit. By the time the dorf caravan arrives you should be well safe on food, booze, building materials, and well into whatever megaproject looks fun on your particular map. Flat surfaces are good for covering in magma-pits, for instance, especially if you've modded body components so they all burn. Mountains with high cisterns (and what mountain doesn't end up with a high cistern) make wonderful deluges to greet the sieges with.


No, I'm not that good, but I have a lot of FUN trying, and the hospital/barracks/dormatory/office with minimal hauling distances for everything solves a lot of early problems.

[mross]

unless you're embarking on a glacier, desert, mountain or ocean, or an evil region, food shouldn't be a problem. every embark has hundreds of free plants sitting out in the open, waiting to be gathered.

so far the most important basic rule i've found while playing is to use barrels only for booze, and to disallow them everywhere else (disallow bins too). besides the retarded hauling mechanics, there's just no reason to. dwarf labor is expendable and abundant, and vermin don't eat food quickly enough for containers to matter.

[doublestrafe]

so far the most important basic rule i've found while playing is to use barrels only for booze, and to disallow them everywhere else (disallow bins too). besides the retarded hauling mechanics, there's just no reason to. dwarf labor is expendable and abundant, and vermin don't eat food quickly enough for containers to matter.

I used to think like this, but I found that dwarves are immeasurably happier if you have someone cranking out infinite green glass or fire clay pots. There is no way to control flies except for pots/barrels, and since everyone hates flies and some dwarves double-hate them, and everyone needs to eat, flies all by themselves become a massive happiness drain.

[sal880612m]

I had a dwarf who liked flies for their ability to annoy. Made him a farmer/cook/brewer.

[kingubu]

Lots of good stuff here.

I don't think I've seen reseal the caverns after you crack them until you're ready to deal with the incoming fun.

Makes the game so much easier.

[doublestrafe]

I had a dwarf who liked flies for their ability to annoy. Made him a farmer/cook/brewer.

I'm fascinated. Did he get good and bad thoughts simultaneously from them, or double good?

[Shoku]

Since this hasn't been said too directly:

Your ideal early fort is something you dug out hastily in dirt layers. Maybe not -hastily- but rather quick just to get things set in motion. After you've got lots of dwarves trained up and some idlers sitting around THEN you can start digging out the legendary planned fort only shortly above the first cavern, or even between the 2nd and 3rd so you don't have to move magma very far, if you've planned out some good way to handle a trading depot down there without the caverns being all too open to the rest of the world.

Or in other words your nice looking fort is a mini-mega project. You can put up with poor defense and ugly little rooms all crammed in next to each other at first (along with things like a dining/dorm/hospital,) but later on when you're looking for more work to have your dwarves do you can mine out individual rooms for these things and promote your dwarves to the luxury of 3x1 rooms that contain a dresser and some variant of a box (or 4x1 for the restraints.)

-

As for legendaries dyin, you should only really freak out about protecting your metalsmith and your carpenter. The rest train to legendary easily, on basically limitless resources, so not having a million masterwork rock crafts to feed the next caravan is no biggie.
Though, if the dwarf spent very long legendary you probably have way more than you can actually cram into the depot in any given season in the first place...

-

So self sufficiency -> cool looking fort with high value and happiness boosts -> more/better/weirder sufficiency. At that point you basically just need to come up with ways to keep them busy, which is mostly military with a few builder type tasks mixed in.

[sal880612m]

I had a dwarf who liked flies for their ability to annoy. Made him a farmer/cook/brewer.

I'm fascinated. Did he get good and bad thoughts simultaneously from them, or double good?

I was trying to find the right set up for something I wanted to do and I ended up deleting the save before I got too far into it. Seemed to me like he just didn't gad bad thoughts about them. Other dwarves got annoyed by flies but despite being in the thick of it he received neither positive nor negative.

I just imagine them flying around him and he swats at them then watches them fly off towards another dwarf and getting a perverse enjoyment out of watching that dwarf get annoyed. Basically he was a bit of a jerk.