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[KiBoy]

Die of tantrum spiral.



Losing is FUN!

[Loci]

Dig a moat. Mining soil is much faster than wall-building, and it trains your miners too.

Breach the caverns. There shouldn't be anything really scary early in the game, and knowing where the caverns are can help you plan your fortress (and determine if a site is even suitable).

[itisnotlogical]

Bring a weapon and make one dwarf a full-time guard. Traps take time to set up, and most petty nuisances (i.e. Kobolds) are trap-avoid anyway. Nothing sucks more than making an artifact and having it immediately stolen.

[Arx]

Dig a moat. Mining soil is much faster than wall-building, and it trains your miners too.

On a related note, I like to channel a quadrilateral out of the nearest mountain side and remove the ramps to make a nice square/rectangular courtyard in front of the entrance to my fort. It's easy to wall off the shorter distance, it trains up your miners, and it allows farm plots for above-ground plants and statue gardens or whatever to avoid cave adaption. If you make it big enough you can fit animals inside, too.

[EvilBob22]

Nominate a broker (typically the one dwarf you assigned a point of Appraiser to).  Nominate a chief medic if you gave someone medical skills.  Nominate a bookkeeper and a manager (often the same dwarf) and give them a 3x3 office with a door, a table, and a chair once you've dug far enough down to make offices.  Set the bookkeeper to medium, which takes like half a second to achieve.  (Highest bookkeeping takes forever.)

You don't need a table, and in fact, you don't really need a door either.  My bookkeepers usually start with just a chair stuck in the middle of a hallway as their office.  (And I start with Highest bookkeeping, if he is stuck on "update stockpile records" when the caravan comes, then I temporarily lower it.)

[greycat]

You don't need a table, and in fact, you don't really need a door either.  My bookkeepers usually start with just a chair stuck in the middle of a hallway as their office.

Yeah, I get that.  But I really have a thing about giving my dwarves all the happy thoughts I can, especially when it only takes one stone table to do it.  When you assign the Bookkeeper the office, all of a sudden he's got a chair to sit in and eat.  This means he won't get a happy thought for eating in the legendary dining room like all the other dwarves do.  In fact he'll get a negative thought for eating without a table.  So, I give him a table next to his chair to avoid that one bad thought.

[Urist McShire]

First thing to do? THIS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzGbxpy3nP0

[hjd_uk]

My usual order of business is :

1) Find decent starting position - main entrance location with room to expand, taking advantage of any water / features.
2) Dig down to rock layer 3-tiles wide, using ramps (for caravans) - i personally like having the trading depot inside the defenses.
3) Wood stockpile & Chop down some trees for some beds, bins and barrels (if you are scarse on wood, ignore bins for now and make rock pots instead of barrels).
4) dig out some areas for a stockpile or two and some workshop space. build a carpenters, mechanics and masons workshops, maybe a craftdwarf's shop to start knocking out rock-crafts & pots.
5) get everything underground -> make a big 'everything' stockpile (don't want refuse/corpses ofc) and unbuild wagon.
6) start making workshops, make some mechanisms and build a raising drawbridge to protect entrance. The protecting wall can be little enough to surround the 3x1 entrance if need be.

Once you have a safe area, you can progress at your own pace really.

[MeMyselfAndI]

My usual start:

• If there aren't any major baddies on the map, designate the entire map to be detreed
• Figure out where I will want my main entrance to be. Generally involves somewhere with as close to a cliff face as I can find, with flat ground for a ways in front
• Dig a two-wide hallway into it, with plans to expand to a 3-wide later
• Dig a 12x12 room, preferably about half in rock and half in soil
• Get a mason's workshop, a mechanic's workshop, a crafter's workshop, a woodcutter's workshop, a brewer's workshop, a kitchen, and a small farm (plump helmets) set up
• Start my mechanic making mechanisms nonstop (among other things, it's what I use for early trading)
• Make a drawbridge to close off the entrance in case of !!FUN!!, along with the lever to trigger it and the mechanics
• Build a quantum stockpile out of materials I've brought along, and set it to accept everything useful
• Wait for everything to be brought inside
• Make a couple doors, beds, tables, chairs

[Kumquat]

• Cut wood, gather plants
• Dig initial entrance (usually 3x3 stairwell straight down)
• Food stockpile
• Build mason & carpenter
• Make some blocks of brought stone
• Build butcher, tanner, still, craftsdwarf, kitchen out of blocks
• Butcher wagon pullers
• Adjust kitchen settings, disable cooking of tallow & booze & plants
• Queue table, chair, nest boxes, beds
• Dig some underground space for rudimentary living quarters, office, dining space, farming
• Repeat build barrels & bins & beds (carpenter), tables & chairs & doors (mason)
• Boozify all gathered plants
• Build farm plots
• Cook all meat and eggs into meals
• Get all the valuable stuff indoors (ignore rocks and logs, nothing will steal those)
• Settle in
• Dig for magma
• Have Fun

I generally don't worry about trading or defenses until start of autumn when I make some dwarfs crank out rock crafts, and wooden trap components if in a rush. I find cliffs and slopes more trouble than they are worth, goblins like to spook dwarfs from uphill even if they can't get in.

Evil areas are of course very different, the first things to do there usually sum up to GET UNDERGROUND QUICK!

[Tawa]

My usual start:
1. Destroy wagon
2. Cut trees, mine into ground/hill
3. Live in hill
4. Set up wkshps and foodstuff
5. Blossom

My first start:
1. Fail to mine hill
2. Try to live in fail-hill
3. Ragequit at booze shortage

[Manivald]

Step 1: Make sure that your fortress only has ONE exit with a drawbridge (farms outside the safe zone). Then when goblins arrive, seal the exit and let the shortage of booze run its course.
Step 2: Return with more dwarves.