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Chapter 0: This Is What Stuff Looks Like.
In which ocular apparatus is engaged

Will you look at that!

So after following the installation and loading instructions you should be looking at this:



The left section is the main view of the fortress, the middle section is a list of all the menus and options available, and the right is a minimap. Notice how the minimap is pretty uninformative, and the main view is really small? Let's fix that.

Press tab and the minimap will disappear, then press it again and the menu will move to the right. If you keep pressing tab it'll cycle through:

• Neither the minimap or the menu (good for screenshots, the menu appears when it's needed)
• Minimap only (pretty useless)
• Menu and minimap (again, the minimap is useless but this is the default)
• Double-width menu (handy when looking at lists of items with long names)
• Menu only (Probably the best combination of informative and space-saving, we'll use this for pretty much all of the tutorial)

Set it to the last one, and you should be looking at this:



But you know, it's still pretty small compared with our modern monitors. The good thing is, DF is resizeable. Drag out a corner so that the view of the world is around twice as big. This is the size I'll be working at. You can maximize it if you want. If the characters are too small, you can use the mouse wheel for a primitive zoom/font-size change. I'll be zoomed in a bit for clarity.

Once you've got your window and zoom set up the way you like, press F1 to recenter the screen where it was before, and you should be looking at this (more or less):



You can move the view around with the arrow keys, or the numpad (including diagonals) Once you're comfortable with that, F1 will recenter on the wagon.

Wait, what wagon? All I see are a bunch of characters!

Yup, that's DF for you. Don't worry, we'll get used to this quick enough. For now the basics are that smiley faces are dwarves, letters are generally animals, solid squares are cave walls or buildings and the rest is mainly snow-covered ground and trees.

Here's than screenshot again with extras:



1. This is your wagon. It's filled with stuff you've brought with you, including food and drinks for your Dwarves to survive on. We'll learn how to see the stuff inside in a bit.
2. This is a Dwarf! Different colours for different professions. That particular one is Tobul, we'll meet him and his skillset in lesson 4.
3. This is a dog. Remember I mentioned animals are letters? Some animals use the same letter but different colours. Notice how there are brown c's and grey c's? The former are chickens, while the latter are cats. You'll see there's another d for dog as well since we brought a breeding pair, and a couple of other animals all of which we'll get to in due course.
4. These are trees. See how there's 3 different types? This variety is everywhere in DF. 3 types of trees is nothing compared to what you'll find when you start mining different types of rock. The trees are white now, but will turn green once the snow melts.
5. The menu of menus! Each of those options leads to a menu, informational screen, or list, of varying usefulness. Don't try any of them yet, we'll get to the most important one by one over the course of the tutorial, and some can be ignored completely if you want.
6. The height/depth indicator. What you see on your screen is only the surface (literally). You can move the view down a level to see what's under the ground, and the height indicator tells you where you are in that respect. Since you're moving in the z-axis, these levels are known as z-levels. It says 0 now as we are on the surface, but on this particular map it can range from +16 (high in the sky) to -171 (deep underground) The blue and brown portions of the bar represent aboveground and below respectively, and are pretty intuitive once you start moving up and down.
7. Paused. This is good since your Dwarves have nothing to do yet. You can order pretty much everything while the game is paused, and when you unpause your Dwarves will get on with it. Expect to see this a lot, since orders are best made when the game is paused, and unpaused time is generally just for watching it happen.
8. This arbitrary point on the bottom of the screen is where announcements will appear. We'll come back to that once we've actually done something to generate an announcement or two.
9. Idlers is where you see how many of your Dwarves are doing nothing. It's a very handy thing to keep an eye on in a well functioning fortress, but don't worry too much about it for this tutorial.
10. FPS. Frames per second – game frames first, then graphical frames in the brackets. An average dwarf walks one tile in around 10 frames, if they're not carrying anything heavy.
11. The upwards triangles are ramps, which can be used to walk up a z-level.
12. Walls – basically undug stone or soil. There's some ground on top of it, we'll get to that in a second. When you're underground, you'll be digging into this to make rooms and stuff. Soil is usually blank squares of a colour, rock is usually a grey square with a symbol on it.
13. Unseen underground stuff. If you dug into this, you'd be able to see what was there. Here's a hint, in that section it's exactly the same stuff the visible outer walls are made of.
14. This is technically also a wall, but it's a wall of ice. Once the temperature goes up, it'll melt into water and become a pool. We can see through the water whether it's frozen or not.
15. This is a big empty section of ground, covered by snow. Or is it? We just saw that we can have frozen ponds, might this big section be another pond, with the snow sitting on ice? That would explain the lack of trees. Luckily, there are two ways to check this, and these happen to be in the next section of this chapter!
16. This is the mouse cursor. No you see correctly, there is no 16 in the picture above, nor is there a mouse cursor in the picture. There are very few uses for the mouse in DF I'm afraid, it's almost exclusively keyboard.

Wow!

I bet you didn't think there was that much information to be gleaned from one look at the screen. This is the power of DF's interface – once you know what it means, it can convey far more useful information than graphics ever could. Consider a Dwarf you might be looking at. He's coloured red, which means he's a mechanic. He's flashing a lighter colour, which means he has at least one legendary skill. He's also flashing with a small red cross and a blue downwards arrow, which mean he's injured and thirsty respectively. Finally, the background of his square is a light brown colour, which means he's crawling for whatever reason (maybe the injury is to his legs, or he just needed to get past someone in a narrow corridor). And this is just one square; you could be seeing similar information in multiple places on the screen.

Brief interlude: If you need to go do something else at any point during this tutorial (likely given the length), you can press ESC to get the options menu seen here:



There's no Quit option, as the Save Game option includes that functionality. You can't quit without saving, meaning any mistakes are yours for the life of your fortress (however short that may be). Feel free to hit Save Game to quit, then when you want to continue you can load up the same game where you left off.

Now that we're overloaded with info, it's time to look around and see more things!

Don't worry, we'll review all this as we go through the lessons dealing with them. Remember F1 will recenter your view on the wagon, in case you get lost.

First of all, we can move the view around by using the arrow keys or the numpad (including 7913 for diagonals), but this only allows us to see our starting surface area. Fortresses are usually underground (hipsters love 'em), and as we saw, there is a small plateau over to the west, which we currently can't see on top of. We'll need to be able to move the view up or down z-levels (not to be confused with moving North and South).

To move our view up, press <. After you've pressed it once, you'll see this:



You can now see the top of the plateau to the west. Note that the ramp up triangles have changed into ramp down triangles. The rest of the screen is open space, with a colour hint of what lies one level below, as well as occasional rectangles indicating there's a tree below. There's nothing above this except sky.

To move our view down, press >. You'll be back to the start level, so press it again to see what's below that:



Answer: Don't know!

You can see that most of the screen is unexplored, with pools here and there. Remember that open space we suspected might be a frozen pool? Turns out we were right. There's also a frozen river over to the east, but you might need to move your view over to be able to see it.

While there's plenty below this, we won't be able to see any of it yet. Let's head back to the surface (press <) and look at stuff in more detail.

K-look, v-look, t-look, and q-look

That's right, there are four different ways to look at stuff in DF. They all have different uses, and you'll use all of them regularly.

K-look:

Now that you're looking at your wagon and group, press k. You'll see a yellow X appear in the middle of the screen, and the right hand side will change to show what's in the square marked by the X. Arrow keys and Numpad keys will now move the X around the screen. Hold shift to move 10 squares at a time. Take a look around, you can see what's in each square. Most of them are empty squares with just grass and snow, but you'll be able to see what type the trees are, and there will be shrubs and rocks around as well. Take a look at our suspicious open area, and you'll see snow layered on ice. There's also some of that just to the southwest of our wagon, which is concerning – we don't want idling dwarves or animals to fall in when the ice melts. We'll do something about that at the end of this chapter. (luckily the wagon itself isn't on ice, as that would require a frantic race to get the stuff inside moved before the ice melted and it all fell in).

Here's a screenshot of me looking at a cat using k-look:



There's not much information, since one of the other look types is a better way to look at creatures. For now, press enter on the cat and you'll get a description:



That is one brown cat. DF gives all creatures their own generated appearance like this, although they are mainly cosmetic. Dwarves have additional stuff which isn't cosmetic, but we'll get to that in a bit.

ESC out of that and you'll back in k-look. Feel free to look around some more. Once you're finished with k-look, press ESC again and you'll be back at the main view.


V-look:

Here we go, this is the way to see the full information on the creatures in front of you. Press v, and the familiar X will invade your screen once more. This time, it doesn't necessarily show you what's under the X, it just gives info about the nearest creature, whether that be under the X or 10 tiles away. If it's on a different square, the creature being shown will flash with a small green cross.

As an example, here's me looking at a horse:



You can see I'm a fair distance away from it, but it's the nearest creature so that's the one I get info on. However, there's not much more to say about a horse, so let's go look at a Dwarf instead. Three squares East and one South of the horse, is a Dwarf coloured light grey. Move your cursor (another name for the X) to the square North of this Dwarf, and you'll see an additional option on the sidebar: v: Next. This is due to the fact that there is a cat an additional square North, and our cursor is equally distant from each. This also happens if there's multiple creatures on the same tile. Pressing v will cycle through them.

Here's me looking at the dwarf in question – go ahead and do the same:



Meet Zaneg Dolilzulgar, our expedition leader, miner, and star of chapters 1 and 6 as well as a couple of conditional lessons (We'll talk about conditional lessons in interlude 1).
Here we can see Zaneg's name and the translation of it, profession (Expedition Leader), and sex (Female).
We can see she currently has no job to be doing. We'll fix that soon enough.
There's also a list of her skills. We can see her best skill is mining, and she has a bunch of different skills at very low level. c, b, and m will toggle categories of skills - c won't do anything as Zaneg has no combat skills to hide.

Near the bottom, we can see that g for Gen(eral) is lit up, since that's the page we are on. There's additional info in the other pages, so let's go through them. Press i to change to the Inv(entory) section. Like this:



This shows what Zaneg is wearing and carrying. She has on trousers, a dress, a robe and a cloak! Also two hats, and two pairs of gloves, as well as socks and shoes. Well, I guess there is snow on the ground. She also has a pick, which should be handy for her mining. Remember you can use tab to get a wider sidebar, which will help you see the full names of everything.

Moving on, press p for Prf (Profession) and you'll see this:



This isn't so much about information as it is changing settings. This isn't something we need to worry about yet, since we'll be covering it in chapter 4.

Let's move on and look at the w for Wnd (Wound) Screen:



What, no healthbar? Hah, no chance. This is a list of Zaneg's wounds, or in this case lack of wounds. All the body parts listed are shown in white, so that means she's uninjured (I guess that means she's allwhite, eh?). If she had an injury, one or more of these body parts would be coloured depending on the type and severity of the wound. We'll worry about what the colours mean when someone gets injured though.
Wait, DF models damage to all those body parts individually? Well yes, but that's just the basic information. Each of those body parts has skin, fat, muscle, bone, nerves, arteries, tendons, ligaments, joints, and internal organs where appropriate. Additionally, there are more body parts which only appear in the list when they're injured, including said internal organs, facial features, teeth, and individual fingers and toes, including nails.

Anyway, there's one more option in that list: z for St(atus?). This will bring us to a full screen page that looks like this:



Here we can see that Zaneg owns 14 objects (remember all those clothes?). Once she has her own bedroom it'll be listed here, and any other rooms. In lesson 6 we'll learn more about this screen.

The options at the bottom:

By pressing y you can customise Zaneg, giving her a nickname as well as a custom profession name. This can be handy to keep track of who does what, but let's leave it alone for now as I'll be referring to her by her actual name.

r will show you Zaneg's friends, lovers, family members, acquaintances, enemies, and other relations. This has an effect on her mood in both directions – chatting with a friend cheers her up, while the death of said friend will do the opposite. A fortress where everyone is friends can be quite brittle because of this, but that's something to worry about when you have a few crumbled fortresses under your belt.

If Zaneg has killed at least one creature, there'll be an option to view the list of kills on this screen as well.

Enter will give you lots more information on Zaneg. Go ahead and do that now, and you'll see this:



Here's the essence of Zaneg's being. Everything you could possibly need to know about Zaneg herself is here. Her happiness and the reasons for it are the most important, so feel free to ignore the rest. I've spoilered a description of the rest below for anyone who's interested.

She's been quite content lately. This is the measure of her happiness, which is a massively important thing to manage in DF. Quite content is the default (I guess you could call it a happy medium), but happiness can range from ecstatic to miserable. Let it get too low and she'll start throwing tantrums and eventually go insane.

Nothing's happened to affect her mood yet since we've just started, but if you check back later all the contributing factors will be shown here. These factors are referred to as thoughts, and there are tons of them to encounter. Here are a couple of the more common examples:

Positive: Talked with a (friend/family member/pet) lately, admired a fine (object/building) lately, enjoyed a truly decadent drink lately, etc.
Negative: Slept outside lately, complained about the lack of chairs lately, witnessed a friend's death lately, etc.

Here's a description of the other stuff if you're interested:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

• She is apparently a worshipper of Sûbil twice. No, I don't know either.
• Next we see her citizenships, memberships, and positions with regard to the civilisation as a whole and our subgroup of it, followed by her age and date of birth in yellow.
• Then we have her cosmetic description. Remember the brownest cat? This is the equivalent section for a Dwarf.
• The next section is her physical attributes. There are more than are listed here, but they're only listed if they are low or high. Zaneg is physically average in everything, except that she's clumsy and very quick to tire. Probably just as well she has no combat skills, we wouldn't want her as a soldier.
• In light green we have her preferences. Various materials, objects and animals that she likes. These aren't entirely cosmetic – having a pig as a pet would make Zaneg happier than it would make another dwarf, and she would get happy thoughts from drinking sewer brew. If she's making stuff from any of the materials, or making any of the objects, they'll be slightly higher quality more often and she'll get happy thoughts from working with them, although nothing particularly significant. If she sees a brown recluse spider it'll make her pretty unhappy. If she's doing something like engraving the walls or making statues she'll be much more likely to feature the items listed here in her work (even the ones she hates).
• Next is her mental attributes. Honestly, while they affect various skills, attributes are only really of interest to power-gamers. There's a difference, but it's not earth shattering. Skill level has a much bigger impact on a dwarf's ability to do a job, and doing the job will raise the attributes needed anyway. You can play to quite an advanced level without taking them into account at all.
• The same with the next section, which is personality traits. They affect social skills mainly. Zaneg believes that some deception is necessary, which indicates that she is capable of gaining levels in the Lying skill, but that's just another social skill. You can ignore pretty much all of this. The exception is the last line about working outdoors. If a dwarf spends a long time underground, they get cave adaptation to varying degrees. This isn't too bad, but it means that when they do come back to the surface, they get bad thoughts from the sun, and can even spend some time vomiting if it is severe enough.
• The final line is the generic description of a dwarf.

Once we're done here, press ESC to go back the way we came, until we're on the main screen. Note that v-look remembers which tab you were on last time you were using it.

Feel free to check out the other dwarves, if you're so inclined. We'll meet each of them in their own chapter.

The unit screen:
Press u. You'll be taken to a list of all known creatures on the map. The first screen is a list of our intrepid band of dwarves:



Their names and professions are listed, and the colours match up between here and the main screen. You can also see what each of them is doing (nothing). Along the bottom are a few handy options:
v: ViewCre – this will open the info screen on the creature. For Dwarves it'll be the screen with owned objects that we looked at previously, for non-dwarves it'll be their description.
c: Zoom-Cre – This will centre the screen on the creature, with v-look activated. Extremely useful.
b: Zoom-Bld – only works on a dwarf working on or in a building, which we don't have yet. Centres the view on the building with q-look activated. Mildly useful, but we haven't gone over that yet.
m: Manager – opens another screen. We'll discuss that screen in chapter 6, so ignore this option until then.
Manage labors (DFHack) and Search – nothing to see here... seriously, you won't see that option on your own screen, since DFHack isn't included in the file you downloaded. It's a third party program I used to help me set the embark location up, but this guide isn't going to cover the use of it and I would advise you to get some experience before messing around with it. If you see stuff like that which isn't reflected on your own screen, just ignore it.

Press the right arrow key to move to the next tab of the unit screen, and you'll see this:



A list of the animals in the fortress:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

2 horses – they weren't picked by me, you automatically get 2 draft animals which pulled the wagon to the location. This is why they're both female, I would have preferred a breeding pair, although chances are they'll both get pregnant from a pack animal used by a caravan. Can be milked. Need to graze, so we'll set that up at the end of this lesson.
A gander and 2 geese: The geese will lay plenty of eggs, and we can decide whether to cook them or let them hatch so we'll have more geese. Without the gander, the second option wouldn't be possible.
A rooster and 2 hens: Same idea as the geese.
A breeding pair of sheep: can be sheared for wool, and milked. Need to graze like the horses
4 cats, one of them male: all 3 of the females will pop out litters of kittens due to the presence of the male. Cats wander around the map hunting vermin. Unlike most animals, you can't choose to allow them to be adopted as pets. Cats choose their owners when they feel like it, and aren't interested in what you might have to say about it.
A breeding pair of dogs: can be war trained for extra combat utility

Press right again and we'll see other creatures, whether they be invaders, traders, or just wildlife:



Looks like there's only a single moose kicking around somewhere. Press c if you want to find out where he is.
This screen is very useful for assessing danger to your dwarves. Some animals are tough and aggressive, so you'll want to keep an eye out for them.
If you did go look at the moose, you'll need to press ESC to get out of v-look, and then u to get back to the units screen.

Press right one more time for the final tab of the units screen:



I think that speaks for itself, don't you? Press ESC to get back to the main screen.

Q-look:

Next it's time for q-look. Press q. You'll see that in the same way v-look snaps to the nearest creature, q-look snaps to the nearest building, which is our wagon (it doesn't move or anything, so is treated as a building). You'll see the following:



Our wagon is flashing green, but the sidebar is pretty bare. This is because q-look lets you manipulate the functions of a building, and our wagon doesn't have any functions which could be manipulated. It's essentially a big box. We do have the option of deconstructing it, but let's wait until we have somewhere else to store the stuff.

We'll come back to this when we have a better example, so press ESC to get back to the main screen so we can take a look from a different angle.

T-look:

Press t. Similar to q-look, it'll snap to your wagon, but this time the sidebar has a list of stuff showing:



If you haven't already guessed, this is a list of the contents of the wagon.

The 3 (pine) items at the top have a (B) next to them, which means they are the materials the wagon's made of. The rest of the stuff is just stored inside. Let's take a look.

An anvil, some alcohol, some seeds, a barrel full of meat. Is that all? Nope. You see how that first log of pine is highlighted? That means it's currently selected. If you pressed enter on it, you could see some information on it, but pine logs are boring. We want to see the meat barrel (which is made from willow). As we know, the arrow keys move the cursor around the main screen, so they can't also move selections in the sidebar. Instead the sidebar uses +, -, *, and /.

Press + and the highlight will move down a line
Press - and the highlight will move up a line
Press * and the highlight will move down a page
Press / and the highlight will move up a page

Don't worry, you'll be using these controls often, so you'll remember them in no time. For now, use the + key to move down to the meat barrel. We want to see what delicious morsels the dwarves have brought to munch on, so once you've got it highlighted, press Enter to see what's in the barrel:



Mmm, tasty. This screen has the details of the barrel. Its weight is at the top, and would be joined by the value if we had someone who could appraise things. If you press enter on one of the morsels, you'll see the weight of that as well. Item descriptions aren't much use at the moment, and we'll get to forbid and dump later on, so ignore that for now. ESC out of there, until you're looking at the wagon in t-look again.

Use your new controls to look at the stuff in the wagon. Remember there's more than one page.

We have thread, rope and cloth, bags of sand and raw glass, more booze and seeds, some armour, barrels and logs, more meat, fish and plants, and some malachite. Also some milk, but that's frozen at the moment. Plenty of stuff.

Also of note: These controls would have worked when we were looking around using k-look, but there weren't stacks of stuff to look at there so there wasn't much point. They would have also worked when we were looking at Zaneg's inventory full of clothes, but there was only one page there so the wagon was a better example.


No more looking!

Ok, we're 6 and a half thousand words into this, we're almost at the end of chapter 0, and all we've done is look at stuff. We're not leaving this chapter without actually doing something, so let's get to it!

There are a couple of things I've briefly mentioned so far which could be taken care of together. The first being the possibility of the ice suddenly melting and dwarves and animals falling in, and the second being the need for our horses and sheep to graze. Both of these could use a zone.

Press i. You'll see our old friend the yellow X, and a sidebar change which looks a little like this:



Move the cursor to the right of the wagon, about where it is on the above screenshot. We're going to be drawing a rectangle by defining two diagonally opposite corners, and this is our starting point.

Press Enter to start the rectangle. Then hold down shift, and press the right arrow key twice, and then the up arrow key once (if you didn't use shift, it would only move the cursor a square at a time. We want a big zone for this though). You'll see the initial point of the rectangle flashing green like this:



Notice a few things have appeared on the right now. They list how many squares in the selection are useable for each type of zone.
Once your cursor is around where it is in the above screenshot, press Enter again to finish the rectangle, and it'll look like this:



Now we get to select what the zone is for using the letters on the right. While we can choose as many of these functions as we like, we only want one for this zone. Press m to light up meeting zone. A meeting zone is where idle dwarves and stray animals will stand. If there's no such zone, they'll stand around the wagon, which we are worried might result in an ice-related accident.

Note also there's a v: Next option like in v-look. This is because you can layer zones on top of each other if you want.

However, looking at the number of creatures this zone seems a little too big. What a coincidence! This is a perfect opportunity to learn how to remove zones!

If you press x, you'll see the bottom of the sidebar change slightly, since you're in remove mode.



If you wanted to delete the whole zone you could press shift-x, but don't do that since we just want to make it smaller. Instead, put the cursor on the top right corner and press enter to start a rectangle. The hold shift and press left and down once each, then enter again. This should delete a big chunk of the meeting zone.

If you wanted a more complex zone shape, you would need to start with a rectangle and delete bits of it using remove mode; there's no way to add to a zone once it's placed.

Press x to come out of remove mode, and back into place zone mode. We're going to put another zone on the left hand side to give our horses and sheep a place to graze. Put the cursor just off the top left corner of the wagon, press enter, then hold down shift and press left twice and up once. Press Enter to finish, and press n to highlight Pen/Pasture as the type of zone.

You should now be looking at this:



As you can see, there's a new option there: Set Pen/Pasture Information. Press shift-n and we'll see what's needed. The sidebar will change to show this:



It's a list of all your animals. As before, you can select them by highlighting them using the + and – keys, and pressing enter. Do this and select the Ewe, the Ram, and the two Horses which are on the next page.



Once selected, there will be a few indicators. The green cross to the left means they're allocated to this zone. The green symbol on the right shows that it is a zone they're allocated to, whether this one or otherwise. The brackets are grey in the picture because they haven't yet reached their allocated zone – they need to be moved there. Notice that one of the horses was already in this area when we laid down the zone, so its brackets are already white and it doesn't need moved. Don't worry, your dwarves will automatically do the moving.

Zones can be used for multiple purposes, so you might think that we could have just made one that was both a meeting zone and pasture together. The truth is we could do that, but there's a couple of things which make it less than ideal. The size of the pasture means that the far end is a long way away. An idle dwarf will happily walk all the way to the other end of it, then when a job comes along he will walk all the way back, which is inefficient. That's why we cut down the size of the meeting zone. There's also a problem with having many creatures in a pasture, since they tend to trample the grass, which takes a while to grow back. In the end, while we could probably get away with combining the zones like that, it's better not to.

Oh, one last thing. When you leave the zone menu, the zones will disappear from the screen. Don't worry, they're still there, but it would be a hassle to see them all the time so they're hidden mostly. To see them again, all you need to do is press i to open up the menu again. I guess you could call this i-look and make it the 5th way of looking at stuff, but let's not get carried away.

Chapter Conclusion

All right! We've completed chapter 0. We've taken a look at the lay of the land. We know how to look at pretty much everything in the game, and we'll get comfortable with that as time goes by. Don't worry about what's important to keep track of at this point, as each chapter proceeds I'll let you know what information is important for that aspect of the game.

We also know how to use zones to tell creatures where to stand, and have been introduced to the mighty yellow X and its rectangles, which will be a big part of the next lesson and fortress life in general. Zones can be used for other things as well, but placement of them and the pasture menu are the big things to learn.

Chapter 0 End Save

[Nice Save]

Chapter 1: Meet Zaneg, the Miner
In which earth is struck.

Zaneg

You remember Zaneg right? Let's put her to work.

In Dwarf Fortress, you don't order your dwarves around directly. You specify what things need done, and they get on with it in their own time and in an order of their choosing. There are a bunch of different labours in the game, which are basically categories of work that you can activate and deactivate. We won't be changing anyone's labours yet though. At the start of the game, a dwarf is already set to do any labour they have the skill for.

In this case, we're interested in the fact that Zaneg is a competent miner, as we saw when we checked her in v-look. She's already set up to start mining away, but we need to specify where the holes need dug.

Lets dig a staircase straight down to begin with, and make a reasonable sized room to store all the stuff from the wagon in.

For this, we need the designation menu. From the main screen, press d.



This is a list of jobs you can order which aren't tied to a building or zone. The first 6 are stuff that Zaneg can do, and have to do with hacking at rocks with a pick. We'll come back to those in a second.

x for Remove Designation is important to remember, as you're bound to need it at some point.

Chop Down Trees and Gather Plants aren't in Zaneg's remit, but we do have dwarves who can do those jobs, so let's set up orders for each of those jobs to be done in the meantime. If Chop down Trees isn't already selected, press t to select it.

Use the cursor to make a rectangle around your wagon as we did with the zones. Holding shift while moving the cursor moves it 10 squares at a time. The following screenshot is of a 40 wide by 20 tall rectangle, and I estimate there's around 50 trees in there. That should be plenty, we can cancel some of them or add more later.



Now press p to select Gather Plants, and make the same rectangle with that command. This is where we should be:



Right, that's enough distraction. We'll leave that as it is, and see what it looks like after we've put Zaneg to work.

It's a staircase we need, so start by pressing j for a Downward Stairway. Again, we can make rectangles for this, but we only really want it to be one tile. There's 2 ways to do that; either press enter twice without moving the cursor in between or left-click the tile with your mouse. Whichever method you want to use, we need to decide where our staircase should be. There's a pine tree right next to the wagon on the East side, let's dig the staircase on the other side of that. Either click that square, or move the cursor there and press enter twice. You should see the square change into a designation-brown colour with a > symbol on it. That's the symbol for a downward staircase. Here's a zoomed in image of it:



Now we're almost ready to unpause the game. When we do, a few different things will happen. One of our dwarves will start chopping those trees, while another will start gathering plants. Some others will start moving the grazers to the pasture, while anyone without a job and the rest of the animals will wander around, eventually moving to the meeting zone we set up.

We're mainly interested in what Zaneg will be doing though. She'll move to that designated downward staircase, hack at it briefly, then once it's dug she'll wander off as well since she'll have run out of work. As soon as you see her move away from the staircase, pause the game again and we'll admire her work. Be careful, this can happen fairly rapidly.

You'll need to be out of any menus and back on the main screen. Press space to unpause, and then space again to pause again once she's done.

And there it is. Let's join this goose in admiring it:



So let's see what's underneath! (Remember it's > to move down a z-level.)



Well, that's an undug wall made of sand. The thing about downward staircases is they're just the top half of a flight of stairs. To actually get a dwarf to the z-level below, there needs to be a matching upward staircase below it. But we want to go more than one z-level down, so we would need to add another downward staircase on this level.

Introducing the Up/Down Stairway! It's a combination of both the up and down stairways, and we want one on this z-level and the one below.

Press d again, and then press i for Up/Down Stairway. Move the cursor over the revealed wall of sand and press Enter (only once this time). Then, without moving the cursor, press > to go down a z-level to -2, and press Enter again. Move the cursor away, and you'll see that there's a designation with an X on it (like > and < together, see?). If you move back up a z-level to -1, you'll see that designation is there too. As we just discovered, the mighty rectangles we've been drawing can be extended over z-levels to make cuboids of doom! At least where designations are concerned. Zones don't work that way.

Now move down to z-level -3. Directly under the lower of the two Up/Down staircases, make a single tile of upward staircase (u button). If you've done all that right, you should have the revealed sand tile covered with a single X designation, and if you go down a z-level you should see another X designation in the same place, then on the next level you should see a < designation in the same place again.

Leave your view on the upward staircase and unpause for a 10 seconds or so. You should see that staircase start flashing, then change colour, and eventually end up looking like this:



Pause as soon as you see this, and we'll take a look around. First let's look at the bottom of the staircase. Since the upward staircase is dug out, we can see the walls that border it. They're different from the sand walls we saw on the surface, and that's because we've hit rock. If you use k-look, you'll see that this type of rock is called dolomite. Dolomite is really useful, as it is a flux stone which you need to make steel. There will be tons of it on this map though, so we can use it for generic stone purposes as well - we don't need to reserve it for steelmaking.

Both of the levels with up/down stairways have walls made of soil rather than rock. -1 has sand, and -2 has peat (neither are technically soil, but meh). These will come in handy in a few chapters' time, but we want to make our storage room on -3 in the dolomite so we can mine some of it for later use.

Head back to the designate menu (d), and press d again to select Mine. Make a rectangular room to the east side of the staircase, sized 11 x 11 (that's one shift-move by one). Try and make it so the centre of the west side of the room is directly adjacent to the bottom of the stairs as shown below:



Don't worry if it's off by a square or two up or down, as long as the room is touching the stairs. Otherwise, Zaneg won't be able to get to the room to mine it out.

This is going to take a while, so we're not going to sit and watch it all happen. Briefly unpause to make sure one of the squares starts flashing, which indicates that Zaneg is on her way, and then pause again. If none of them started flashing, you might have left a gap between the room and the staircase. Either use x to remove the designation and start again, or just add another couple of tiles to join the room with the stairs.

Feel free to watch her start mining, but we don't need to monitor it too much. We have other things to learn in the meantime.

As we go through the next chapters, Zaneg will work away, as will our plant gatherer and woodcutter. At some point she will finish that big room, after which we need to designate more stuff to keep her busy. When the other two run out of plants and trees, just designate more, but for Zaneg here's a list to go through one at a time:

1. Make a room at least 5x5 in the soil on level -1 or -2. Warning, soil is very fast to mine, so this might not keep her busy for long. -- this is needed for Chapter 3
2. On the opposite side of the stairway from that, make a smaller 3x3 room -- this is needed for Chapter 3



3. On the other side of the stairs from the big storage room, designate a single tile for a door to go in, and a 6x6 room beyond that. -- this is needed for part of Interlude 1
4. Off the 6x6 room, make 2 smaller rooms, one 2x2 and the other 2x3, again separated by a single tile. Here's a screenshot of what my version looks like, but you don't have to copy it exactly: -- this is needed for part of Interlude 1



5. Expand the storage room by 4 tiles at each of the North and South sides -- this is optional for Chapters 5, 6, 7, 9, and further



6. From the bottom left corner of the expanded storeroom, make a 20-tile long, 1-tile wide corridor south with another staircase to the surface at the end of it. -- this is needed for Chapter 7
7. Add another room off the 6x6 room from number 3, make it 4x4 at least -- This is needed for chapter 9
8. Then another room off that 6x6 room, 4x4 should be big enough for this one too. -- This is needed for chapter 10
9. Add 6 tiles to the East side of the storeroom (for the fully expanded height)
10. Into the western wall of the storeroom, dig 2 downwards staircase tiles. Add a 2-tile up/down staircase starting beneath that, and make it go all the way down to z-level -40.
11. On z-level -30, designate a corridor and set of rooms off the staircase, to be used as bedrooms. Make at least 12 to allow for migrants. There's a picture of my layout below as an example, with 2x3 rooms (note that the right hand side has a gap before the designation starts, so can't be dug yet. Once I need more rooms I'll designate the two tiles at the start of the corridor). Feel free to change it to something else, or change the sizes of the rooms. Make the rooms have at least 3 tiles in them, plus one for the door. It's also handy to have a way to expand without destroying rooms, like the spaces to the north and south of the stairs in my example (and the extra tile to the right of the stairs for an expansion to the stairs themselves). However, when we need more rooms we'll be moving to different z-levels first, so it's not hugely important.



11a. to save your sanity, let's create a hotkey to move the view to the newly designated rooms. look at the bedrooms, and press shift-h. You'll see the screen shown below, which indicates that only one of the possible hotkeys is assigned. Remember pressing F1 to move your view back to the wagon? Press F2 (or an F-key of your choice up to , and then press z. You'll see the None in the second column change to Zoom. n would allow you to name the key to help you remember what it was for.



[NOTE TO SELF][FINISH] Add more stuff to dig out

Chapter Conclusion

We're on our way! Digging into the earth, making rooms and stairways, these are the tools you will use to build the majority of your fortress. The tools are simple, but the combinations are infinite and the possibilities are endless. Channelling, ramps, and the rest of the designations will be dealt with in future chapters, but are also simple and useful tools.

Chapter 1 End Save



Chapter 2: Meet Kûbuk, the Carpenter
In which shoddy merchandise is produced, and the lazy are put to work.

Kûbuk

So three of our Dwarves have been put to work, mining, gathering plants, and chopping trees. Who else can we get working? Hit u to go to the unit screen, and you'll see there are a few with no jobs. The first on the list is Kûbuk, who is a Carpenter (If you're wondering, you can type that funny û letter by holding down ALT and typing 0251 into the numpad). Given that we're already chopping down trees, it seems sensible to start with him. Or is Kûbuk a her? Let's find out. Highlight Kûbuk in the units screen and press c to Zoom-Cre. You'll see this:



Meet Kûbuk! She is, in fact, female, and is both our Carpenter and our Brewer. Both are important jobs, with Brewing usually being more directly vital to the health of a fortress. We're going to ignore Brewing for now though, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that we have tons of booze already in the wagon, enough to last us for 1 to 2 years, depending on how many migrants we get. The second reason is that in order to brew drinks, we need barrels to put them in. We have a couple in the wagon, but by the time we get to brewing we'll have more, from two sources. The first, smaller source is our alcohol supply, since each barrel of booze will be empty eventually. The second source of barrels is newly made ones, and for that we need, you guessed it, a Carpenter!

Now a Carpenter like Kûbuk can make furniture, barrels, training weapons, primitive shields, and other goodies, but she can't simply walk up to a log and turn it into something else with the power of her mind. She needs a workshop to take the log to, and, then she can turn it into one of the available items (not that there are tools in the workshop as far as I can tell – I like to think she just fixes the log with her meanest glare and the wood jumps into the desired shape out of fear. The workshop is just a screen so the glare doesn't cause collateral damage).

So it's time to build her a workshop!

Once you've examined Kûbuk to your satisfaction, head back to the main screen and press b (for build). You'll get a bunch of different options in the sidebar, but workshops have their own subcategory so press w to open that. You'll now be seeing the list of workshops available to build:



You can see Carpenter's Workshop about a quarter of the way down. Either use the + and – keys to highlight it and press enter, or just press c to choose it directly. Building workshops in this manner will become second nature to you soon enough; when you want a carpenter's workshop you'll just press b-w-c and be ready for the next step, which is placement. Whichever way you used to select it, you should now be seeing something along the lines of this:



The 3x3 square of the workshop will appear as Xs on the screen, with different colours depending on the availability of the individual tile:

Red means you can't have the workshop on that tile.
Purple means the tile would be fine, but another tile of the workshop is blocked and so you can't build it.
Green means you're good to go.
Darker green or purple means that this particular tile of the workshop will be impassible once it's built. Different workshops have different layouts in this regard, so be careful not to lock yourself into a room (I'm looking at you jeweller's shop!).

Let's move the workshop to somewhere more suitable. To the right of the staircase would be a good place, since there's space and it minimises the distance our dwarves have to travel once our storeroom is ready. Leave a free tile between the workshop and the staircase though, I'll explain why in a bit. Use the arrow keys to move it around (shift-move works for this, but isn't needed in this case) Here's how it should look when you've got it in the right place:



Press Enter to confirm this is where you want it, and the next screen will be this one:



This is where we see the available materials that we can use to build the workshop. There's 20 pine logs in the wagon, and you might also be seeing some other logs from the trees which are being cut down, or some dolomite from the mining of the storeroom downstairs.

There are 3 columns here: The name of the item, the distance from the building site, and the number of items available (the number after the slash). Pick whatever you want for a material – the colour of the workshop will match the material, so if you pick wood it'll be brown like the wagon, if you choose dolomite it'll be white. All the surface trees we have access to in this location are the same colour, while stone and underground trees can be many different colours, based on their type.

Pick your material using the + and – keys, and press Enter to choose it. I'm going with pine myself.

The number before the slash is for more advanced buildings which need more than one item to build. We'll cross that -bridge- when we come to it.

Now you'll find yourself back in the workshop select menu, and the green workshop plan has been replaced by a building site which looks like this:



ESC out of the workshop menu then the build menu, and press q to enter q-look. Move the cursor over the building site to see the sidebar change into this:



This tells you what is being built here, with various details.
The colour of the name matches the colour the building will be when completed.
Waiting for construction will show until all the materials are collected at the building site and work on the actual building has begun. Gathering the materials is usually the more time-consuming part though.
The next line tells us which labour is needed to build it. Here we're fine since the labour to build a carpenter's workshop is always Carpentry, so Kûbuk can build her own damn workshop.
Construction inactive means that no dwarf has the job of building it. As soon as we unpause the game, this will disappear as Kûbuk realises there's work to be done and starts moving. This message will also tell you if the building is suspended.
s: Suspend Construction – this will pause the building job, or resume it if it's already suspended. Dwarves will ignore the building site until it's unsuspended. This is handy if hostile creatures are nearby and you need to wait for them to move on. It can also happen automatically if a dwarf needs to cancel the job for some reason (interupted by the hostile creatures mentioned, animals in the way of the building, path to the site cut off, etc.)
x: Remove Building – deletes the building site. No materials are lost. You can also do this with fully constructed buildings, but we'll cover that when it's time to remove the wagon.

Now ESC out of that, unpause the game, and watch Kûbuk run over to the building material you selected, grab it, and take it to the building site. The site will flash through a few configurations, and then end up constructed and looking like this, after which she'll wander off with nothing to do:



If a red message pops up at the bottom and she wanders off without finishing it, that probably means one of your animals got in the way. Serves us right for building it in our meeting zone, eh?

Spoiler: How to fix it (click to show/hide)

Go into q-look and unsuspend it, and she'll try again. If it keeps failing, cancel it and rebuild from the start, and if that doesn't work, download this savegame from just after I finished building it:
Workshop troubleshooting save

To Work!

Alright, so now we're ready to make some wood goods (for the hood). Press q to go into q-look, and take a look at the newly built carpenter's workshop.



The only two options we can see available (the rest being greyed out) are a: Add new task, and x: Remove Building. Let's just quickly add a couple of tasks so the rest of the options become available, and we'll go through them then. Press a and you'll see the list of stuff which can be made here:



Look through the choices using the +, -, / and * keys. There's 3 pages of stuff. Notice how some of the items can be selected with a hotkey, and others can't and need to be selected manually. Don't worry, all the major stuff has hotkeys. For the moment let's add a chair (c), then press a again and add a table as well (t). Now you should be looking at this:



You can queue up 10 items like this, but lets look at the options first, now that they're available.

a: Add new task – lets us add more to the queue.
c: Cancel Current Task – removes the highlighted task. Feel free to test it out, but add the items back afterwards since we need multiple items in the queue to test:
p: Promote Current Task – moves the selected item up a slot in the queue. Moving it down can be done by promoting the other tasks you want it to be below. Try it out.
r: Repeat – this will add a blue R to the right of the selected task, which means once it's done it'll be added back to the end of the queue (still with the R). This is powerful, but be careful not to use up all of your resources by accident.
s: Suspend – stops the task from being performed, and puts a red S next to it. Other tasks in the queue will still be performed (unless they're suspended too).
You might also see a green A next to a task, which simply denotes that a dwarf is actively working on it. They won't necessarily be in the workshop; they might be hauling the resource to the workshop, or even just walking towards the resource with that intention.
x: Remove Building: Pretty straightforward. We'll get a chance to test this when we remove the wagon.

Keep the chair and table in the queue, and add 7 beds (b) to it as well, one for each dwarf. In the one remaining slot, add a wheelbarrow (no hotkey, press - a few times to get to it).

ESC out of there, and unpause the game. Kûbuk will get to work. She'll run over to the nearest log (probably in the wagon at this point), grab it, and carry it to the workshop, and stand there for a bit while she turns it into a chair (by glaring, remember). She'll do the same for the table, and then the beds one by one. Pause the game every now and again to see how the queue looks, and then when there's at least 4 empty slots for jobs, leave it paused while we continue.

Laziness is Not Tolerated!

You might notice that all the other dwarves are standing around doing nothing while this is going on, which is nice of them. While there's not much they can do to help Kûbuk make the furniture, we can certainly get them to help her haul the logs. While it won't help much yet, once the logs in the wagon run out she'll need to go much further to pick up the ones lying all over the place from the woodcutting, and it can take quite some time.

To help with this, let's make a stockpile for logs near her workshop. Press p to bring up this screen:



Stockpiles are a massively important part of your fortress, and you can have a huge amount of control over them, but for now we just want a place to put logs. We'll discuss more advanced use when our storeroom is finished, and then we'll build on that in multiple future chapters.

We want a wood stockpile, so press w to select that (no + and – keys this time, you need to use the hotkey) and move the cursor over to Kûbuk's workshop. We're going to draw a rectangle, starting one tile North-West of the workshop corner, and ending one tile South-East of the opposite corner. Like this:



Press Enter to complete the rectangle, and you should see:



Notice that the stockpile wasn't placed over the workshop itself, since buildings and stockpiles can't overlap. The stockpile placement will just ignore any invalid tiles inside the rectangle. Building placement isn't so smart, and you would need to remove part of a stockpile if you wanted a building there.

Removing stockpiles is pretty much identical to removing zones, except without the option to delete the whole zone. On the stockpile placement screen, you would press x to activate remove mode, then make with the rectangles to remove parts of any stockpiles. Say for example we wanted a ring-shaped stockpile like the one we just made, but didn't have the building in place. We could make a 5x5 rectangular stockpile, then remove the inner 3x3 rectangle (yes, I'm well aware 5x5 and 3x3 are squares, but the tiles themselves are taller than they are wide, and rectangle's a cooler word).

Anyway, let's ESC out of there and unpause the game. Your idle dwarves should start grabbing logs and moving them to the stockpile. If they don't, or they start grabbing other stuff, then something went wrong.

Spoiler: troubleshooting for that (click to show/hide)

Take a look at the stockpile in q-look, and see what the name of it is. If it's anything other than “Wood Stockpile #1”, then you selected the wrong type of stockpile when you were placing it.
Go ahead and remove the stockpile and start again. Make sure to press w for wood before you start your rectangle (when making the tutorial I forgot to do that myself actually, and ended up with the default animal stockpile)
If needed, here's a save with it working:
Stockpile troubleshooting save

You might notice that Kûbuk, Zaneg, and our unmet plant gatherer and woodcutter move a log or two each as well. That's alright, since even though it'll slow them down a bit, we're not in a huge hurry. Also, once the stockpile is full, Kûbuk will only be taking them one at a time, so only one hauling job will be available at a time. Kûbuk will always be busy performing carpentry on the log she just took when the job appears so will never take it. The other 3 will probably be halfway through a job as well, so the job of hauling the log will usually go to an idler since they're immediately available. More on this later.

Let's make another stockpile nearby, but for refuse this time. This is for stuff like body parts, rotten food, corpses, and the like. At this point, it'll mostly be vermin remains, since your cats have been busy. The thing is, even the above stuff which isn't already rotting will start soon enough, and if it's underground when that happens, it will generate purple clouds of miasma, which give your dwarves some severe bad thoughts when they walk through it. Outside it'll still rot, but no miasma will appear, so that's the best place to put a refuse stockpile. Because of this, refuse that's already outside will just be left to rot away by default, and not moved to any stockpiles.

Press p to go back into the stockpile menu, and press r to select refuse. Lay out a 7-10 tile square stockpile to the north of the wagon. Not that we'll need that much space at this point, but it costs you nothing and means we won't have to worry about its capacity for quite some time. Note, if you don't see the refuse pile in some of the future screenshots, don't panic. I just forgot to add this bit until I was writing chapter 4.

Check on how Kûbuk's getting on with that queue. Once she has 2 or less beds to go, add another 3 tables and 3 chairs. This is a good time to revisit t-look, and you'll see why in a second.

Press t to open t-look, and look at the workshop. You should see something along the lines of this:



Again, we can see a list of the contents of the building. Since there's nowhere to take the furniture at the moment, this includes everything Kûbuk has ever made there. Also, there's a cedar log with TSK next to it, which means it's assigned to a job. In this case it's assigned to Kûbuk's latest carpentry glare-down, but it can also mean that another dwarf is on the way to grab it and move it somewhere else. You'll also see this in k-look for items lying on the ground.

Look at the furniture. What are the symbols around their names? They're quality level symbols. If you selected one of the items with the symbols, pressed enter, and then v for the description, you would see it had a quality-related adjective. Here's a list of them:
No Symbols: Normal. Nothing special.
-Thing-: Well-crafted. Worth twice as much as a normal item.
+Thing+: Finely-crafted. Worth 3x as much as a normal item.
*Thing*: Superior quality. Worth 4x as much as a normal item.
≡Thing≡: Exceptional. Worth 5x as much as a normal item
☼Thing☼: Masterwork. Worth 12x as much as a normal item! You get an announcement when one is made. Makes armour or weapons more effective. If one of these is destroyed or stolen, the creator gets a bad thought.

We'll leave her working away, but as with Zaneg, we want to try and keep her busy. Here's a list for when she's finished the stuff you've given her (might be worth copying Zaneg's list and this one into notepad or something, to save you scrolling around all the time):

3 doors (d)
2 buckets (e)
2 more wheelbarrows
10 barrels (v)
10 bins (n)
2 beds (b)
5 blocks (o)
5 splints
5 crutches
10 beds (b)
20 bins (n)
5 cages (j)

Only do these next ones if you haven't already set up a mason, otherwise make them in the mason and keep making bins and barrels in the carpenter, 3 times as many bins as barrels. Make beds as needed to keep up with bedroom digging.

10 doors (d)
5 caskets (k) (Mason version: coffins)
9 chests (h) (coffers)
9 cabinets (f)
2 armorstands (a)
2 weapon stands (w)
5 tables (t)
5 chairs (c) (thrones)
6 floodgates (l)


[FINISH] Add more

Chapter Conclusion

Learning how to work a workshop is an important step to understanding the game. At a basic level, most of the other workshops are operated in the same way, although each of them have their own quirks to take into consideration. In Interlude 2, we'll go through them all in detail, and explain the differences and what you need to take into consideration for each of them.

While workshops are a key part of playing the game at all, stockpiles are a key part of playing it well. Keeping your skilled dwarves in their workshops instead of running around collecting materials will make them much more productive, and having goods in the right place at the right time can keep a massive fortress running like clockwork. There's more to come on stockpiles in Interlude 1 and chapter 5, then some really advanced stuff in a far off future lesson I've not even planned yet.

Chapter 2 End Save

[Nice Save]

Chapter 1: Meet Zaneg, the Miner
In which earth is struck.

Zaneg

You remember Zaneg right? Let's put her to work.

In Dwarf Fortress, you don't order your dwarves around directly. You specify what things need done, and they get on with it in their own time and in an order of their choosing. There are a bunch of different labours in the game, which are basically categories of work that you can activate and deactivate. We won't be changing anyone's labours yet though. At the start of the game, a dwarf is already set to do any labour they have the skill for.

In this case, we're interested in the fact that Zaneg is a competent miner, as we saw when we checked her in v-look. She's already set up to start mining away, but we need to specify where the holes need dug.

Lets dig a staircase straight down to begin with, and make a reasonable sized room to store all the stuff from the wagon in.

For this, we need the designation menu. From the main screen, press d.



This is a list of jobs you can order which aren't tied to a building or zone. The first 6 are stuff that Zaneg can do, and have to do with hacking at rocks with a pick. We'll come back to those in a second.

x for Remove Designation is important to remember, as you're bound to need it at some point.

Chop Down Trees and Gather Plants aren't in Zaneg's remit, but we do have dwarves who can do those jobs, so let's set up orders for each of those jobs to be done in the meantime. If Chop down Trees isn't already selected, press t to select it.

Use the cursor to make a rectangle around your wagon as we did with the zones. Holding shift while moving the cursor moves it 10 squares at a time. The following screenshot is of a 40 wide by 20 tall rectangle, and I estimate there's around 50 trees in there. That should be plenty, we can cancel some of them or add more later.



Now press p to select Gather Plants, and make the same rectangle with that command. This is where we should be:



Right, that's enough distraction. We'll leave that as it is, and see what it looks like after we've get Zaneg to work.

It's a staircase we need, so start by pressing j for a Downward Stairway. Again, we can make rectangles for this, but we only really want it to be one tile. There's 2 ways to do that; either press enter twice without moving the cursor in between or left-click the tile with your mouse. Whichever method you want to use, we need to decide where our staircase should be. There's a pine tree right next to the wagon on the East side, let's dig the staircase on the other side of that. Either click that square, or move the cursor there and press enter twice. You should see the square change into a designation-brown colour with a > symbol on it. That's the symbol for a downward staircase. Here's a zoomed in image of it:



Now we're almost ready to unpause the game. When we do, a few different things will happen. One of our dwarves will start chopping those trees, while another will start gathering plants. Some others will start moving the grazers to the pasture, while anyone without a job and the rest of the animals will wander around, eventually moving to the meeting zone we set up.

We're mainly interested in what Zaneg will be doing though. She'll move to that designated downward staircase, hack at it briefly, then once it's dug she'll wander off as well since she'll have run out of work. As soon as you see her move away from the staircase, pause the game again and we'll admire her work. Be careful, this can happen fairly rapidly.

You'll need to be out of any menus and back on the main screen. Press space to unpause, and then space again to pause again once she's done.

And there it is. Let's join this goose in admiring it:



So let's see what's underneath! (Remember it's > to move down a z-level.)



Well, that's an undug wall made of sand. The thing about downward staircases is they're just the top half of a flight of stairs. To actually get a dwarf to the z-level below, there needs to be a matching upward staircase below it. But we want to go more than one z-level down, so we would need to add another downward staircase on this level.

Introducing the Up/Down Stairway! It's a combination of both the up and down stairways, and we want one on this z-level and the one below.

Press d again, and then press i for Up/Down Stairway. Move the cursor over the revealed wall of sand and press Enter (only once this time). Then, without moving the cursor, press > to go down a z-level to -2, and press Enter again. Move the cursor away, and you'll see that there's a designation with an X on it (like > and < together, see?). If you move back up a z-level to -1, you'll see that designation is there too. As we just discovered, the mighty rectangles we've been drawing can be extended over z-levels to make cuboids of doom! At least where designations are concerned. Zones don't work that way.

Now move down to z-level -3. Directly under the lower of the two Up/Down staircases, make a single tile of upward staircase (u button). If you've done all that right, you should have the revealed sand tile covered with a single X designation, and if you go down a z-level you should see another X designation in the same place, then on the next level you should see a < designation in the same place again.

Leave your view on the upward staircase and unpause for a 10 seconds or so. You should see that staircase start flashing, then change colour, and eventually end up looking like this:



Pause as soon as you see this, and we'll take a look around. First let's look at the bottom of the staircase. Since the upward staircase is dug out, we can see the walls that border it. They're different from the sand walls we saw on the surface, and that's because we've hit rock. If you use k-look, you'll see that this type of rock is called dolomite. Dolomite is really useful, as it is a flux stone which you need to make steel. There will be tons of it on this map though, so we can use it for generic stone purposes as well - we don't need to reserve it for steelmaking.

Both of the levels with up/down stairways have walls made of soil rather than rock. -1 has sand, and -2 has peat (neither are technically soil, but meh). These will come in handy in a few chapters' time, but we want to make our storage room on -3 in the dolomite so we can mine some of it for later use.

Head back to the designate menu (d), and press d again to select Mine. Make a rectangular room to the east side of the staircase, sized 11 x 11 (that's one shift-move by one). Try and make it so the centre of the west side of the room is directly adjacent to the bottom of the stairs as shown below:



Don't worry if it's off by a square or two up or down, as long as the room is touching the stairs. Otherwise, Zaneg won't be able to get to the room to mine it out.

This is going to take a while, so we're not going to sit and watch it all happen. Briefly unpause to make sure one of the squares starts flashing, which indicates that Zaneg is on her way, and then pause again. If none of them started flashing, you might have left a gap between the room and the staircase. Either use x to remove the designation and start again, or just add another couple of tiles to join the room with the stairs.

Feel free to watch her start mining, but we don't need to monitor it too much. We have other things to learn in the meantime.

As we go through the next chapters, Zaneg will work away, as will our plant gatherer and woodcutter. At some point she will finish that big room, after which we need to designate more stuff to keep her busy. When the other two run out of plants and trees, just designate more, but for Zaneg here's a list to go through one at a time:

1. Make a room at least 5x5 in the soil on level -1 or -2. Warning, soil is very fast to mine, so this might not keep her busy for long. -- this is needed for Chapter 3
2. On the opposite side of the stairway from that, make a smaller 3x3 room -- this is needed for Chapter 3



3. On the other side of the stairs from the big storage room, designate a single tile for a door to go in, and a 6x6 room beyond that. -- this is needed for part of Interlude 1
4. Off the 6x6 room, make 2 smaller rooms, one 2x2 and the other 2x3, again separated by a single tile. Here's a screenshot of what my version looks like, but you don't have to copy it exactly: -- this is needed for part of Interlude 1



5. Expand the storage room by 4 tiles at each of the North and South sides -- this is optional for Chapters 5, 6, 7, 9, and further



6. From the bottom left corner of the expanded storeroom, make a 20-tile long, 1-tile wide corridor south with another staircase to the surface at the end of it. -- this is needed for Chapter 7
7. Add another room off the 6x6 room from number 3, make it 4x4 at least -- This is needed for chapter 9
8. Then another room off that 6x6 room, 4x4 should be big enough for this one too. -- This is needed for chapter 10
9. Add 6 tiles to the East side of the storeroom (for the fully expanded height)
10. Into the western wall of the storeroom, dig 2 downwards staircase tiles. Add a 2-tile up/down staircase starting beneath that, and make it go all the way down to z-level -40.
11. On z-level 30, designate a corridor and set of rooms off the staircase, to be used as bedrooms. Make at least 12 to allow for migrants. There's a picture of my layout below as an example, with 2x3 rooms (note that the right hand side has a gap before the designation starts, so can't be dug yet. Once I need more rooms I'll designate the two tiles at the start of the corridor). Feel free to change it to something else, or change the sizes of the rooms. Make the rooms have at least 3 tiles in them, plus one for the door. It's also handy to have a way to expand without destroying rooms, like the spaces to the north and south of the stairs in my example (and the extra tile to the right of the stairs for an expansion to the stairs themselves). However, when we need more rooms we'll be moving to different z-levels first, so it's not hugely important.



11a. to save your sanity, let's create a hotkey to move the view to the newly designated rooms. look at the bedrooms, and press shift-h. You'll see the screen shown below, which indicates that only one of the possible hotkeys is assigned. Remember pressing F1 to move your view back to the wagon? Press F2 (or an F-key of your choice up to , and then press z. You'll see the None in the second column change to Zoom. n would allow you to name the key to help you remember what it was for.



[FINISH] Add more stuff to dig out

Chapter Conclusion

We're on our way! Digging into the earth, making rooms and stairways, these are the tools you will use to build the majority of your fortress. The tools are simple, but the combinations are infinite and the possibilities are endless. Channelling, ramps, and the rest of the designations will be dealt with in future chapters, but are also simple and useful tools.

Chapter 1 End Save



Chapter 2: Meet Kûbuk, the Carpenter
In which shoddy merchandise is produced, and the lazy are put to work.

Kûbuk

So three of our Dwarves have been put to work, mining, gathering plants, and chopping trees. Who else can we get working? Hit u to go to the unit screen, and you'll see there are a few with no jobs. The first on the list is Kûbuk, who is a Carpenter (If you're wondering, you can type that funny û letter by holding down ALT and typing 0251 into the numpad). Given that we're already chopping down trees, it seems sensible to start with him. Or is Kûbuk a her? Let's find out. Highlight Kûbuk in the units screen and press c to Zoom-Cre. You'll see this:



Meet Kûbuk! She is, in fact, female, and is both our Carpenter and our Brewer. Both are important jobs, with Brewing usually being more directly vital to the health of a fortress. We're going to ignore Brewing for now though, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that we have tons of booze already in the wagon, enough to last us for 1 to 2 years, depending on how many migrants we get. The second reason is that in order to brew drinks, we need barrels to put the booze in. We have a couple in the wagon, but by the time we get to brewing we'll have more, from two sources. The first, smaller source is our booze supply, since each barrel of booze will be empty eventually. The second source of barrels is newly made ones, and for that we need, you guessed it, a Carpenter!

Now a Carpenter like Kûbuk can make furniture, barrels, training weapons, primitive shields, and other goodies, but  she can't simply walk up to a log and turn it into something else with the power of her mind. She needs a workshop to take the log to, and, then she can turn it into one of the available items (not that there are tools in the workshop as far as I can tell – I like to think she just fixes the log with her meanest glare and the wood jumps into the desired shape out of fear. The workshop is just a screen so the glare doesn't cause collateral damage).

So it's time to build her a workshop!

Once you've examined Kûbuk to your satisfaction, head back to the main screen and press b (for build). You'll get a bunch of different options in the sidebar, but workshops have their own subcategory so press w to open that. You'll now be seeing the list of workshops available to build:



You can see Carpenter's Workshop about a quarter of the way down. Either use the + and – keys to highlight it and press enter, or just press c to choose it automatically. Building workshops in this manner will become second nature to you soon enough; when you want a carpenter's workshop you'll just press b-w-c and be ready for the next step, which is placement. Whichever way you used to select it, you should now be seeing something along the lines of this:



The 3x3 square of the workshop will appear as Xs on the screen, with different colours depending on the availability of the individual tile:

Red means you can't have the workshop on that tile.
Purple means the tile would be fine, but another tile of the workshop is blocked and so you can't build it.
Green means you're good to go.
Darker green or purple means that this particular tile of the workshop will be impassible once it's built. Different workshops have different layouts in this regard, so be careful not to lock yourself into a room (I'm looking at you jeweller's shop!).

Let's move the workshop to somewhere more suitable. To the right of the staircase would be a good place, since there's space and it minimises the distance our dwarves have to travel once our storeroom is ready. Leave a free tile between the workshop and the staircase though, I'll explain why in a bit. use the arrow keys to move it around (shift-move works for this, but isn't needed in this case) Here's how it should look when you've got it in the right place:



Press Enter to confirm this is where you want it, and the next screen will be this one:



This is where we see the available materials that we can use to build the workshop. There's 20 pine logs in the wagon, and you might also be seeing some other logs from the trees which are being cut down, or some dolomite from the mining of the storeroom downstairs.

There are 3 columns here: The name of the item, the distance from the building site, and the number of items available (the number after the slash). Pick whatever you want for a material – the colour of the workshop will match the material, so if you pick wood it'll be brown like the wagon, if you choose dolomite it'll be white. All the surface trees we have access to in this location are the same colour, while stone and underground trees can be many different colours, based on their type.

Pick your material using the + and – keys, and press enter to choose it. I'm going with pine myself.

The number before the slash is for more advanced buildings which need more than one item to build. We'll cross that -bridge- when we come to it.

Now you'll find yourself back in the workshop select menu, and the green workshop plan has been replaced by a building site which looks like this:



ESC out of the workshop menu then the build menu, and press q to enter q-look. Move the cursor over the building site to see the sidebar change into this:



This tells you what is being built here, with various details.
The colour of the name matches the colour the building will be when completed.
Waiting for construction will show until all the materials are collected at the building site and work on the actual building has begun. Gathering the materials is usually the more time-consuming part though.
The next line tells us which labour is needed to build it. Here we're fine since the labour to build a carpenter's workshop is always Carpentry, so Kûbuk can build her own damn workshop.
Construction inactive means that no dwarf has the job of building it. As soon as we unpause the game, this will disappear as Kûbuk realises there's work to be done and starts moving. This message will also tell you if the building is suspended.
s: Suspend Construction – this will pause the building job, or resume it if it's already suspended. Dwarves will ignore the building site until it's unsuspended. This is handy if hostile creatures are nearby and you need to wait for them to move on. It can also happen automatically if a dwarf needs to cancel the job for some reason (interupted by the hostile creatures mentioned, animals in the way of the building, path to the site cut off, etc.)
x: Remove Building – deletes the building site. No materials are lost. You can also do this with fully constructed buildings, but we'll cover that when it's time to remove the wagon.

Now ESC out of that, unpause the game, and watch Kûbuk run over to the building material you selected, grab it, and take it to the building site. The site will flash through a few configurations, and then end up constructed and looking like this, after which she'll wander off with nothing to do:



If a red message pops up at the bottom and she wanders off without finishing it, that probably means one of your animals got in the way. Serves us right for building it in our meeting zone, eh?

Spoiler: How to fix it (click to show/hide)

Go into q-look and unsuspend it, and she'll try again. If it keeps failing, cancel it and rebuild from the start, and if that doesn't work, download this savegame from just after I finished building it:
Workshop troubleshooting save

To Work!

Alright, so now we're ready to make some wood goods (for the hood). Press q to go into q-look, and take a look at the newly built carpenter's workshop.



The only two options we can see available (the rest being greyed out) are a: Add new task, and x: Remove Building. Let's just quickly add a couple of tasks so the rest of the options become available, and we'll go through them then. Press a and you'll see the list of stuff which can be made here:



Look through the choices using the +, -, / and * keys. There's 3 pages of stuff. Notice how some of the items can be selected with a hotkey, and others can't and need to be selected manually. Don't worry, all the major stuff has hotkeys. For the moment let's add a chair (c), then press a again and add a table as well (t). Now you should be looking at this:



You can queue up 10 items like this, but lets look at the options first, now that they're available.

a: Add new task – lets us add more to the queue.
c: Cancel Current Task – removes the highlighted task. Feel free to test it out, but add the items back afterwards since we need multiple items in the queue to test:
p: Promote Current Task – moves the selected item up a slot in the queue. Moving it down can be done by promoting the other tasks you want it to be below. Try it out.
r: Repeat – this will add a blue R to the right of the selected task, which means once it's done it'll be added back to the end of the queue (still with the R). This is powerful, but be careful not to use up all of your resources by accident.
s: Suspend – stops the task from being performed, and puts a red S next to it. Other tasks in the queue will still be performed (unless they're suspended too).
You might also see a green A next to a task, which simply denotes that a dwarf is actively working on it. They won't necessarily be in the workshop; they might be hauling the resource to the workshop, or even just walking towards the resource with that intention.
x: Remove Building: Pretty straightforward. We'll get a chance to test this when we remove the wagon.

Keep the chair and table in the queue, and add 7 beds (b) to it as well, one for each dwarf. In the one remaining slot, add a wheelbarrow (no hotkey, hit - a few times to get to it).

ESC out of there, and unpause the game. Kûbuk will get to work. She'll run over to the nearest log (probably in the wagon at this point), grab it, and carry it to the workshop, and stand there for a bit while she turns it into a chair (by glaring, remember). She'll do the same for the table, and then the beds one by one. Pause the game every now and again to see how the queue looks, and then when there's at least 4 empty slots for jobs, leave it paused while we continue.

Laziness is Not Tolerated!

You might notice that all the other dwarves are standing around doing nothing while this is going on, which is nice of them. While there's not much they can do to help Kûbuk make the furniture, we can certainly get them to help her haul the logs. While it won't help much yet, once the logs in the wagon run out she'll need to go much further to pick up the ones lying all over the place from the woodcutting, and it can take quite some time.

To help with this, let's make a stockpile for logs near her workshop. Press p to bring up this screen:



Stockpiles are a massively important part of your fortress, and you can have a huge amount of control over them, but for now we just want a place to put logs. We'll discuss more advanced use when our storeroom is finished, and then we'll build on that in multiple future chapters.

We want a wood stockpile, so press w to select that (no + and – keys this time, you need to use the hotkey) and move the cursor over to Kûbuk's workshop. We're going to draw a rectangle, starting one tile North-West of the workshop corner, and ending one tile South-East of the opposite corner. Like this:



Press Enter to complete the rectangle, and you should see:



Notice that the stockpile wasn't placed over the workshop itself, since buildings and stockpiles can't overlap. The stockpile placement will just ignore any invalid tiles inside the rectangle. Building placement isn't so smart, and you would need to remove part of a stockpile if you wanted a building there.

Removing stockpiles is pretty much identical to removing zones, except without the option to delete the whole zone. On the stockpile placement screen, you would press x to activate remove mode, then make with the rectangles to remove parts of any stockpiles. Say for example we wanted a ring-shaped stockpile like the one we just made, but didn't have the building in place. We could make a 5x5 rectangular stockpile, then remove the inner 3x3 rectangle (yes, I'm well aware 5x5 and 3x3 are squares, but the tiles themselves are taller than they are wide, and rectangle's a cooler word).

Anyway, let's ESC out of there and unpause the game. Your idle dwarves should start grabbing logs and moving them to the stockpile. If they don't, or they start grabbing other stuff, then something went wrong.

Spoiler: troubleshooting for that (click to show/hide)

Take a look at the stockpile in q-look, and see what the name of it is. If it's anything other than “Wood Stockpile #1”, then you selected the wrong type of stockpile when you were placing it.
Go ahead and remove the stockpile and start again. Make sure to press w for wood before you start your rectangle (when making the tutorial I forgot to do that myself actually, and ended up with the default animal stockpile)
If needed, here's a save with it working:
Stockpile troubleshooting save

You might notice that Kûbuk, Zaneg, and our unmet plant gatherer and woodcutter move a log or two each as well. That's alright, since even though it'll slow them down a bit, we're not in a huge hurry. Also, once the stockpile is full, Kûbuk will only be taking them one at a time, so only one hauling job will be available at a time. Kûbuk will always be busy performing carpentry on the log she just took when the job appears so will never take it. The other 3 will probably be halfway through a job as well, so the job of hauling the log will usually go to an idler since they're immediately available. More on this later.

Let's make another stockpile nearby, but for refuse this time. This is for stuff like body parts, rotten food, corpses, and the like. At this point, it'll mostly be vermin remains, since your cats have been busy. The thing is, even the above stuff which isn't already rotting will start soon enough, and if it's underground when that happens, it will generate purple clouds of miasma, which give your dwarves some severe bad thoughts when they walk through it. Outside it'll still rot, but no miasma will appear, so that's the best place to put a refuse stockpile. Because of this, refuse that's already outside will just be left to rot away by default, and not moved to any stockpiles.

Press p to go back into the stockpile menu, and press r to select refuse. Lay out a 7-10 tile square stockpile to the north of the wagon. There's no need for one that size yet, but it costs you nothing and means we won't have to worry about its capacity for quite some time. Note, if you don't see the refuse pile in some of the future screenshots, don't panic. I just forgot to add this bit until I was writing chapter 4.

Check on how Kûbuk's getting on with that queue. Once she has 2 or less beds to go, add another 3 tables and 3 chairs. This is a good time to revisit t-look, and you'll see why in a second.

Press t to open t-look, and look at the workshop. You should see something along the lines of this:



Again, we can see a list of the contents of the building. Since there's nowhere to take the furniture at the moment, this includes everything Kûbuk has ever made there. Also, there's a cedar log with TSK next to it, which means it's assigned to a job. In this case it's assigned to Kûbuk's latest carpentry glare-down, but it can also mean that another dwarf is on the way to grab it and move it somewhere else. You'll also see this in k-look for items lying on the ground.

Look at the furniture. What are the symbols around their names? They're quality level symbols. If you selected one  of the items with the symbols, pressed enter, and then v for the description, you would see it had a quality-related adjective. Here's a list of them:
No Symbols: Normal. Nothing special.
-Thing-: Well-crafted. Worth twice as much as a normal item.
+Thing+: Finely-crafted. Worth 3x as much as a normal item.
*Thing*: Superior quality. Worth 4x as much as a normal item.
≡Thing≡: Exceptional. Worth 5x as much as a normal item
☼Thing☼: Masterwork. Worth 12x as much as a normal item! You get an announcement when one is made. Makes armour or weapons more effective. If one of these is destroyed or stolen, the creator gets a bad thought.

We'll leave her working away, but as with Zaneg, we want to try and keep her busy. Here's a list for when she's finished the stuff you've given her (might be worth copying Zaneg's list and this one into notepad or something, to save you scrolling around all the time):

3 doors (d)
2 buckets (e)
2 more wheelbarrows
10 barrels (v)
10 bins (n)
2 beds (b)
5 blocks (o)
5 splints
5 crutches
10 beds (b) - 5
20 bins (n)
5 cages (j)

Only do these next ones if you haven't already set up a mason, otherwise make them in the mason and keep making bins and barrels in the carpenter, 3 times as many bins as barrels. Make beds as needed to keep up with bedroom digging

10 doors (d) - 9
5 caskets (k) (Mason version: coffins)
9 chests (h) (coffers)
9 cabinets (f)
2 armorstands (a)
2 weapon stands (w)
5 tables (t)
5 chairs (c) (thrones)
6 floodgates (l)


[FINISH] Add more

Chapter Conclusion

Learning how to work a workshop is an important step to understanding the game. At a basic level, most of the other workshops are operated in the same way, although each of them have their own quirks to take into consideration. In Interlude 2, we'll go through them all in detail, and explain the differences and what you need to take into consideration for each of them.

While workshops are a key part of playing the game at all, stockpiles are a key part of playing it well. Keeping your skilled dwarves in their workshops instead of running around collecting materials will make them much more productive, and having goods in the right place at the right time can keep a massive fortress running like clockwork. There's more to come on stockpiles in Interlude 1 and chapter 5, then some really advanced stuff in a far off future lesson I've not even planned yet.

Chapter 2 End Save

[Nice Save]

Chapter 3: Meet Tobul, the Lazy Miner
In which a shirker is made to work in order to allow himself more work.

Let's check who is still without work (hauling logs doesn't count as work). Open the units screen:



Tobul is next. Press c to zoom to her.



She's a Weaponsmith, a Furnace Operator, and a Miner. Wait, what? Miner? What's she doing idling and hauling logs then? There's no shortage of mining, to be done, and Zaneg's probably a bit annoyed at having to do it all herself.



Well, maybe not. But still, we should get Tobul down there to help, if we can figure out what's wrong. Take a look at Tobul's inventory (press i when in v-look):



I think I see what's happening. There's the usual display of flagrant fashion overload, and some of those logs everyone's carrying these days, but no pickaxe. That means there's not one in the wagon either, or Tobul would have grabbed it already. We'll need to make one.

Luckily, Tobul is also a Weaponsmith. What a coincidence! Almost like it was planned. Now we can build her a forge and she can make a pickaxe out of copper bars.

What? No copper bars? Ah well, I'm sure I saw some malachite in the wagon earlier, which is a type of copper ore, and Tobul just so happens to be a Furnace Operator as well. We'll build her a Smelter and she can smelt that malachite into copper, using coal for heat.

Oh no, no coal? Who planned this expedition? We'll need to burn some wood in a Wood Furnace to make charcoal then. Unfortunately Tobul's run out of conveniently relevant skills, and none of our other 6 are Wood Burners either.

However, we need to get some wood burned now, and no-one has the skill. At the start of the game, any labour that a dwarf has skill in is automatically activated, and the rest are left deactivated. Since all the jobs we have assigned so far were ones that a dwarf had some skill in, the dwarves in question just got to it. Hauling isn't a skilled labour, and all dwarves have it activated by default (it's actually broken up into 9 different labours, but I would just treat them all as one unless something urgent is getting neglected).

This doesn't mean no-one can burn wood, however, just that it's not set by default. Any dwarf can learn to do any job, and will get better at it over time (you may have noticed that Tobul has a bunch of social skills at the level “Dabbling”. That means she's used the skill at least once, but hasn't gotten enough experience for Novice level, which is the first real skill level. She got that social skill experience when she was standing around with nothing to do but chat to the other dwarves).

This is Tobul's chapter, so I guess she'll be our brave pioneer into the unknown complexities of setting fire to bits of tree. Assuming you're still looking at her in v-look, press p for Prf (Profession). We skipped over this screen before, but now we're needing to use it so let's take a look:



From the bottom to the top then, since we could use some arbitrary spice in our lives.

The Squad section: Has this always been there? I swear I've never seen it before in my life. There's a dedicated military screen which can do all this stuff, and that's not until lesson 10. Just... pretend it's not there.
e: Work Animals: If you train any animals for war or hunting, you can give them a dwarf to follow around using this. I don't have a lesson planned to cover that at the moment (mainly because I've never tried animal training in it's current incarnation), so if animal training sounds fun to you, then look it up on the wiki
l: Labor: This is what we're here for. In here you'll find the list of all the labours in the game, and be able to activate or deactivate them to fit what you need the dwarf to do. Press l to begin (that's a lower case L for Lima, not an I or a 1):



This needs a bit of explanation. Mining, the first skill shown, is bright white since it's activated. All the other lines aren't single skills, but categories. Woodworking, for example, encompasses Wood Cutting, Carpentry, and Crossbow-making. Tobul doesn't have any of those labours activated, so that category is dark grey. Metalsmithing includes Furnace Operating and Weaponsmithing, which Tobul has activated, and also Armoring, Metalcrafting, and Blacksmithing, which she doesn't have activated. That's why it's medium grey. Wood burning is in Farming/Related, so use + and - to highlight that category and press Enter to go in:



Move down to Wood Burning, press Enter to light it up, and then press ESC to go back to the categories. There's one further thing to do here. Tobul is going to be pretty busy over the next while, so we don't want her wandering off to drag logs around when she could be doing more important stuff. Highlight the Hauling category, which is bright white to show that all of the labours within are activated, and press shift-Enter. This will deactivate that whole category.

It might be a good idea to do that for Kûbuk and Zaneg, too.

So now Tobul is set up to burn wood, smelt ore, and forge weapons on request, but we need places to do all that. From the main screen, press b for build then e for furnaces (obviously. Using f would make no sense, now would it? f is clearly for cabinet).

There're four options in the furnaces, and we're interested in two of them, Wood Furnace and Smelter. Set up building plans for one of each. I'll let you pick the location this time. Don't worry too much about where to put it, since all the buildings on the surface are going to be temporary anyway. Just make sure it's not on top of a frozen pond. The best way to check this is to move the building to your desired spot, then press > to go down a z-level so you can see the ponds in relation to your building. If it's clear, < back up and build it (we don't have any ponds small enough to hide behind a building plan).

Notice that there's no wood available in the materials menu? Wood doesn't qualify as a fire-safe material, which is what we need to build these. Dolomite it is then!

ESC out of the furnaces screen, and press w for workshops and then f for forge. This one is even more important to avoid the frozen pond.

Spoiler: The reasons for not building your forge on the pond (seriously, don't do it) (click to show/hide)

That's because we need an anvil to make the forge, and we only have one. The only way to make another anvil is by using a forge, so if our only anvil ends up in a murky pool, we're in trouble. We'd have to do a lot of messing around to drain it, or wait for Autumn and pay over the odds for one from the caravan, if it brings one at all. Additionally, anything that's in water when it freezes is destroyed.

Hold up:



This is slightly new. A forge needs an anvil to be built, so the first thing you see is a list of all anvils in your fortress (all one of them). Agonise over the choice a bit, then press enter to select it. Now you're looking at another version of the same screen, with our old friend dolomite in attendance. Press Enter there as well. You've built your first multi-item building! Remember how in t-look the wagon was made of 3 logs? Once this is built it'll be made of one dolomite boulder and an iron anvil.

Now, the complexity isn't over I'm afraid. While the forge can be built using any metalworking labour (Tobul's Weaponsmithing will do the trick), the Wood Furnace and Smelter need something a bit more advanced:



Architecture! What this means is that an Architect will have to come along, bring the building materials to the site, and design the building. Then it'll be over to someone with a different labour to actually build the thing.

Now Zaneg's an Architect, but she's pretty busy with her mining and might take a while to get around to it. Since that would leave Tobul standing around anyway (since she doesn't haul any more), why not activate the labour and get her to do it?

As before, it's v-look, p for Prf, and l for labor. Architecture is in Other Jobs. Now that we've got 3 buildings to build, and the labours set up to build them, let's unpause the game and let it happen.

Tobul will build the forge and design the other two, but she doesn't have the skill or labour to build them. That’s Masonry in the case of these two buildings, since they're made of stone. We've not met our Mason yet, he's been gathering plants up until now and will go back to that once the buildings are finished. He'll need a prod though, or he'll just keep gathering plants.

Go into v-look and find Monom the Mason (unless he's done enough plant-gathering to level up his Herbalism skill in which case he'll be Monom the Herbalist and his icon will be yellow rather than white). Use the u for units screen if you like. Go to p for Prf, l for labor, and then into the category Farming/Related and deactivate Plant Gathering. ESC out of there, unpause the game, and let him finish those furnaces.

Once they're finished, pause the game. Go back and reactivate Plant Gathering on Monom, and deactivate Architecture on Tobul.

Let's get to the burning! Head over to your Wood Furnace in q-look and hit a for Add New Task:



Don't get too overwhelmed by the choices. We want to make some charcoal, so press c to add a piece to the queue. Then hit a to add, and c for charcoal again. Repeat until you've filled up the queue with 10 Make Charcoal jobs. Be careful, pressing c on the queue screen cancels the highlighted job, so you could end up going nowhere if you have clumsy fingers.

We only really need 6 pieces right now, but the spares will get used eventually. Run the game until all the pieces are ready (it might take a while since without any skill Tobul is a slow wood burner. Just wait for it, checking on Zaneg and Kûbuk every now and again as well).

Here we go:



We've got enough charcoal to be going on with. So head over to the Smelter in q-look and hit a for Add Task:



Whoa, lots of red! That means we don't have any of those ores available, so there's no point trying to smelt them. Our previous lack of coal would have left that one white option red as well, even though we have malachite.

Look through the menu. You'll see more ores to smelt, and also the options we were talking about for turning bituminous coal and lignite into coke. There're also options for making alloys from different types of metals, or even directly from different types of ore. The option we want is Smelt Malachite Ore, though. Add that to the queue 3 times.

Tobul will grab a malachite ore from the wagon, and a charcoal from the woodburner, take them to the smelter, and make some copper bars out of them. You might notice that she takes much longer to walk back from the wagon with the malachite than it took her to walk there without it. This is because malachite is very heavy. We'll talk about how to get around that when we (properly) meet Monom the Mason, who also works with heavy things.

Once she's finished, there will be 12 copper bars in the smelter, 4 for each ore. Lets turn some of them into a pick, and a couple of axes while we're at it. Go to the Metalsmith's forge in q-look, hit a for Add task, then w for weapon, since that's how the game classifies picks (and axes actually are weapons, that's why we're making them). Welcome to nested workshop menus. Press ESC to go up a level if you need to, but you should be looking at this:



As you can see, there's a few different metals we can make weapons from. I'll be honest, copper is the worst of those. Iron, bronze, and bismuth bronze are better and about even with each other, with iron edging ahead a little. Steel is the best conventional metal. Silver is as good as steel for blunt weapons, worse than copper for edged weapons, and can't be used for armour at all.

We only have copper for now, so select that and then we'll see the available weapons. Let's do the axes first, because once the pick's finished Tobul might go haring off to use it. Press Enter on the battle axe, then a to add another item. See how the menu remembers where you were? Add a second battle axe and then a pick.

Once we unpause the game, Tobul will grab charcoal from the woodburner and copper from the smelter, and make those two axes and the pick. Then, with nothing else to do, she'll grab the pick and go help out Zaneg. The two axes will sit and do nothing for now, since we don't need them until chapter 10.

You can watch her do that if you want, or we can just move on to the next chapter. She'll do it either way.

Chapter Conclusion

Tons of important things learned in this chapter. We're going to start finding plenty of ore as we expand our fortress, and turning it into weapons and armour will increase our chances of survival. Furniture and other stuff can also be made of metal, which can be handy to make valuable stuff to keep your dwarves happy or trade away.

Changing labours is an essential part of any fortress. There are plenty of skills beyond the ones your starting 7 dwarves have, and migrants turn up with random skills which might be useless. Knowing how to change labours will help you ensure there's always someone available to do the needed jobs, and keep your fortress running smoothly. A certain percentage of your dwarves should be primarily haulers, so that your skilled dwarves don't have to go too far from their workshop, but there's no need to worry too much about that until the deluge of useless migrants starts.

If you want to practice changing labours, you might as well deactivate woodburning from Tobul, since we probably won't use it again.

Chapter 3 End Save




Chapter 4: Meet Meng, the Farmer
In which the seeds are planted for a bountiful harvest.

Note: this chapter needs the 5x5 room on the soil level which is at the top of Zaneg's list of things to do after the storeroom. If she's not done with that, then run the game until she is. Now that Tobul is helping her, it should go faster.

Meng

The next dwarf we're going to meet is Meng, the planter. His profession colour is brown. Let's take a look:



He's a tanner and leatherworker too, but we'll cover that in a future lesson. Let's focus on his skill at planting.

A note about terminology: You might have noticed the words planter, growing and farming being used so far in this chapter. This is because they refer to the profession, skill, and labour respectively.

Spoiler: If you get confused, here's a rundown which probably won't help (click to show/hide)

Growing is the name of the skill – when we talk about how good Meng is at all this, we can see that he's a Proficient Grower.
Planter is the name of the profession – it's mainly a cosmetic label based on his best skill, but for some reason the name doesn't match the skill.
Farming (fields) is the name of the labour – farming in fields is something Meng's currently got on his list of stuff to do, which uses the growing skill. The labour is what you activate or deactivate to specify whether he should do this.
To make things just a little more confusing, farming is also the name of the labour category that contains farming (fields) and tanner.
To make things a bit more confusing again, if a dwarf has a few different skills at a similar level within the same category, his profession name would be based on the category itself. If Meng was only a skilled grower, and also a skilled tanner and a skilled miller, his profession name would be Farmer.

Dwarves grow stuff underground mainly. They can grow on the surface too, but we don't have any above-ground seeds yet. We'll get some later when we brew/process/mill the plants our herbalist has been gathering, and we can trade for more with the elves or humans. We're just going to do some underground farming for now.

Let's move to our prepared 5x5 room and take a look. You'll see that the dug out area has a floor made of '.`, signs, as does our storeroom (although the storeroom also has dolomite lying around in it). This is what the ground outside looks like too, by the way, but you can't see it under the snow.

Farm plots are treated as a sort of building by DF, so press b for build, then p for plot. You'll get a green X and the sidebar will show a couple of new options:



Change Height (u and m) and Change Width (k and h)will allow us to make a bigger plot, since a single tile isn't going to do much. Let's press h 4 times and m twice, to make a 5x3 plot. That'll leave us space for a couple of smaller ones. You can move the plan around with the arrow keys like any other building plan, no matter how big it is.



Before you place it, lets try moving it so that one edge overlaps the wall on the left. Notice anything weird?



It didn't go red and purple like our carpenter's workshop did, it just ignored the squares which couldn't be built on. This is because on the surface, there are rocks, trees and pools which a farm can't be placed on, and it would be impossible to find a large space where there were none of those in the way. Instead, it just ignores any invalid tiles, similar to the way our stockpiles do. Unlike a stockpile however, we can't remove just part of it. We would have to remove the whole plot since it is officially a building. Bear in mind that all the squares of a farm plot need to be connected for the plot to be valid, so this wouldn't work:



Anyway, move back so that the plot covers the first 3 rows of our 5x5 room, and press Enter to place it. Then make a 2x2 and a 3x2 plot in the remaining space. Farm plots don't need resources to build, except for time and dwarven work. Unpause the game and Meng will get on with it (you may need to disable hauling on him if he's taking too long). When he's finished, start up q-look and look at the biggest plot:



Let's take a look around this screen, from the bottom to the top:
a/b/c/d: Season – Farm plots are configured separately for each season of the year. Each plant has it's own different list of seasons it can grow during, so this is important. By default the current season is highlighted.
f: Fertilize, FT 0/4, s: Seas Fert (N) – this has to do with spreading potash on the field to make it grow more plants per tile. We don't have any potash, and we're not going to make any. There's better things to use our wood for, and when we want more crops we'll be just as well expanding the size of the farms.
List of crops – shows which crops we can grow. Press Enter on one of them to choose it. Only crops which can be grown during the specified season will be listed.
z: Fallow – highlighted just now because there's no crop selected. You'll want to make sure this isn't highlighted mostly. You can press z to purposefully select it for this season if you want, mainly this would be in preparation for deconstructing the field.

Ok, so none of those crop names mean anything to you, right? No worries, I'll just tell you what to set for now, and explain each crop as we set it.

For the big plot, we want to be growing the legendary Plump Helmets (PH). Plump Helmets will be the backbone of your fortress's food and booze supply. They are the fastest crop to grow, can be grown in every season, can be eaten raw, cooked into meals, or brewed into Dwarven Wine. You could feed and water an entire fortress on Plump Helmets alone, although your dwarves wouldn't be too happy at the lack of variety.

+ on down to Plump Helmets (or press - to wrap around to the bottom), and press Enter. From now on, Meng will plant Plump Helmets in this plot every spring. However, we want him planting them all year round, so press b to select Summer, and select it there, and repeat for Autumn and Winter. Notice how the list of plants changes by season.

That's our main farm sorted, but what about the other ones? Let's go to the 2x3 plot, and set that one up. Our second most important crop is Pig Tails (PT). Pig Tails are the only other crop which grows as fast as Plump Helmets, but are inedible. They can be brewed into Dwarven Ale, but that's not what we're interested in. The main use for Pig Tails is to be processed into thread, which can then be used to weave cloth for clothes and other tailored goods (bags are a good example. You can never have too many bags).

However, Pig Tails can only be grown in Summer and Autumn. We'll need to pick a different crop for Spring and Winter.

Quarry Bushes (QB) will do for Spring. Quarry Bushes aren't edible directly and can't be brewed, but they can be processed into leaves (which you need bags for. You can never have too many bags). The leaves aren't edible as they are, but can be cooked into meals at a kitchen (and are high-value enough to make it worth doing so). Quarry Bush seeds are named Rock Nuts, and can be milled into paste, which can be pressed into edible press cake, extracting oil in the process.

For Winter, we're pretty limited. The only option other than PHs is Dimple Cups (DC), so we might as well go with those. Dimple Cups can't be eaten, cooked or brewed, nor processed into anything edible. They can however be milled into blue dye powder, which can be applied to cloth to change the colour and increase the value (milling into powder needs a bag for the product. You can never have... you get the idea).

In the smallest farm, we'll grow Cave Wheat (CW) in Autumn only. Cave Wheat can be brewed into Dwarven Beer, but isn't directly edible. You can, however, mill it into Dwarven Wheat Flour, which can be cooked.

In the Spring and Summer, we want to grow Sweet Pods (SP), which are similar to Cave Wheat. You can brew it into Dwarven Rum, and while it's not edible directly, it can be milled into Dwarven Sugar (bag), which is cookable. However, Sweet Pods can also be used to extract Dwarven Syrup into a barrel. Dwarven Syrup isn't edible, but can be cooked (slightly less easily as it's a liquid), and you get 5 times as much of it per plant as you do sugar.

In Winter, go for Plump Helmets again. We don't need that many Dimple Cups.

To summarise:
5x3: PH, PH, PH, PH
3x2: QB, PT, PT, DC
2x2: SP, SP, CW, PH

That's a lot of different uses for plants!

Don't worry, most of these crop abilities are optional. You can just brew the sweet pods and cave wheat, leave plump helmets to be eaten, and sit the rest of them in a stockpile until you have the time and inclination to set up production. You don't get the seeds until they're eaten or processed, so there's no need to worry about drowning in them.

Just leave Meng to plant away. You'll see that he plants one tile at a time, and the tile switches to straight rows to show something's growing there. After a while, the tile will change again to the shape of the crop (a purple ♠ for Plump Helmets), and a free Dwarf will come and harvest it. The crop will then stay there until it's dragged off to a stockpile (you can tell it's been harvested because it'll start flashing to show what is below it).

We don't have enough seeds to fill up the whole of the big plot, but we will soon enough. (I think we have 10 seeds each of Plump Helmets and Pig Tails, and 5 of everything else)

You might notice I said that any free Dwarf will come and harvest the crop. This is an option that's on by default, but you can change it if you like. There's a trade-off either way, since harvesting confers a little bit of skill gain, which you would want Meng to get rather than any random Dwarf. However, if the crop isn't harvested in a timely manner, it will wither and become useless.

At the moment, all Meng does is farm, so let's set it so only farmers harvest the crops. Press o from the main screen:



These options are all pretty situational, and most of them you can ignore. We're interested in Dwarves All Harvest. Press h to change it to Only Farmers Harvest, and we're done. I would advise making sure Meng has Hauling switched off if you're going down this route. If you start seeing withered plants, consider switching it back.

You said we want Meng to increase his skill, I assume that's a desirable thing. Can you elaborate on exactly how this helps though?

I certainly can, and this is a very good time for it now that we've seen a few Dwarves in action.

Spoiler: Technical details – “higher is better” will get you by for now (click to show/hide)

The most common impact of skill is on speed of work. Remember Tobul burning wood? It took her forever since she had no skill in Wood Burning. If she had had a high skill level, she would have flown through those tasks in a fraction of the time. Bear in mind that hauling the wood to the furnace would have taken the same amount of time, which is why we want haulers to bring the resources closer instead. Zaneg's mining will be faster with higher skill too, to the point where Tobul will be a fair whack slower since she started with lower skill and has spent less time increasing it. Go watch them for a second or two to see the difference if you like.
Quality of goods is the most important impact, but is less common since not all jobs produce goods which can have quality levels. Tobul's charcoal and copper bars for example are just plain old bars; you don't get well-crafted charcoal or masterwork copper bars. Her weapons can have quality levels, however, in fact go and have a look and I bet at least one of those axes in the forge has quality symbols around them. Kûbuk's carpentry products will have them too. The relationship is simple enough: more skill means higher quality more often. Even if a Dwarf has no skill there's a chance to make a higher quality item. Conversely, even a Dwarf with a skill maxed out at Legendary+5 won't make Masterwork items every time.
Misc effects: There are a few skills which have more unique effects. As Meng's skill with growing increases, there will be a higher average number of crops harvested on each tile he plants (Set at time of planting, so it doesn't matter who harvests it). Herbalists get the same thing with the plants they gather. Military, social and management skills work differently altogether, and we'll get to them later.

Chapter Conclusion

Farming is an important and versatile part of the fortress. It isn't glorious, and won't bring you riches, but without it everything else would be that much more difficult. In theory your Dwarves can eat eggs and meat from butchered animals, collect thread from webs in the caverns, and get enough booze for survival by trading and brewing gathered plants, but farming is much easier and covers them all. Once you've got some experience, a fort without farms is an interesting challenge, but that's not what we're here for.

One last factor to take into account here, which we've touched on previously. If the plants are left lying where they were harvested for too long, or if they haven't been harvested in time, they'll wither and become useless. They won't generate miasma like rotting meat would, but there's not much difference otherwise – they'll be hauled to a refuse stockpile and will eventually disappear. You'll also lose the chance to get seeds from the crop to replant, so be careful not to lose all of it. They won't wither if they're on a food stockpile, so it's just as well the next lesson involves creating one.

Chapter 4 end save

[Nice Save]

Interlude 1: Meet The Functioning Hole In The Ground.
In which the surface is abandoned, and true Dwarven life is embraced.

Since we have no Dwarf to meet for this lesson, it isn't a proper chapter. However, this stuff is essential to know for a functioning fortress, even though it's mostly miscellaneous. We do have three major subjects to cover, however, as well as the small stuff: Proper stockpiles, Dwarven thoughts and needs, and the concept of Rooms.

First let's look at announcements though. You've probably seen a few messages pop up at the bottom of the screen by now, although nothing important should have happened yet (as far as announcements go anyway). You can see a history of the messages by pressing a:



At the top of the screen is the current date, the 4th of Slate. Dwarven months are named after stone, ores and gems mostly, and are 28 days long. New year's day is also the first day of spring, and is on the 1st of Granite. That's also the date we started the fortress. Slate is the second month, so we're a little more than a third of the way through spring at this point. More info on dates

- Looks like 2 snow storms have been and gone (that's why my wagon and workshops went white – they got snowed on). Weather will be announced here, but isn't a big deal. Dwarves which are outside during the rain or snow will get a mild unhappy thought. Snow will make the ground snowy, and rain will slowly refill any depleted ponds and put out fires. If we were in a good or evil region, it might rain other substances, but we're in a boring neutral place.
- Monom became a herbalist, because his herbalism skill has risen while his masonry hasn't.
- You have struck Amethyst! If you followed along exactly, you'll have that too because there's amethyst to the right hand side of the storeroom. Note that there's no announcement for striking dolomite. That's because dolomite is the layer stone; the default stone that all the other veins and clusters are put into. There'll be tons of it down there. Jet is in a large cluster to the south west where we dug out the 3 rooms, but don't get too excited. It's a basic, low value stone, half the value of dolomite and without the ability to be used in steelmaking. We'll be mining out plenty of low value stone through the life of our fortress, so there's no need to go out of our way to get any. If you see this message again and want to know what you've hit, check The Non-Dwarf's Guide to Rock to see what it's good for (if it's a stone, anyway. Gems are all good for the same thing, just with differing values).
- Kûbuk made a masterpiece. Hopefully the first of many.

There are a bunch of other announcements you might see over the course of the game as well. You can zoom to the location of most of the announcements by pressing z, once the announcement is pointed at by the green arrow. This doesn't work for stuff like weather of course, since there's not an appropriate place to zoom to for that, but it could help you see where that amethyst is, for example.

The big serious announcements will pause the game and usually move your view to the location automatically. I've added (no I haven't, but I will) a series of conditional lessons in one of the followup posts, which will cover things like that. Since these events need to be handled as and when they arise, we can't fit them in our normal lesson plan, but they are definitely important to learn. Head down there and have a look at the contents list, so you know when there's more to learn about something that happens.

Some other announcements you might see:

[Dwarf] has given birth to a [boy/girl] – Yay, a glorious bundle of burden on your fortress!. Dwarven children take 12 years you reach adulthood, and will do very little in that time. You still need to keep them fed, boozed up, and happy though.
[Creature] has given birth to a [baby creature] – This is generally a good thing, depending on the type of animal. Animals will join the pasture of their mother if there is one, so it's a good idea to leave a bit of room for this purpose when it comes to grazing animals. Different animals take different amounts of time to grow up, loosely correlating to size.
[Dwarf] cancels [job]:[reason] – You'll see this a lot, and it can happen for a variety of reasons. Most common for workshop tasks is a lack of resources, for building jobs it might be that something's in the way. If a dwarf gets too close to a hostile/wild creature they'll run away, cancelling the job.
[FINISH] Add more

If you see one that isn't listed there or in the conditional chapters, try typing it into the search bar of the Wiki, and you'll probably find it easily enough. Make sure and post it in this thread for me to add to the list, too.

Oh, by the way:



The snow has melted (apologies if this happened a while ago for you, or hasn't happened yet). The ponds are still frozen, but that won't last much longer either. Now we can see what the ground really looks like.

There's a couple of grey ⌐ characters around. If you take a look at them in k-look, you'll see they're withered plants. All this time our herbalist Monom has been picking plants and leaving them lying, and after a while they wither. No need to worry, there are plenty of plants around and Monom would have just been standing around otherwise. He'll at least have improved his herbalism skill a bit.

There are green '.`, symbols around which are grassy ground – our pastured grazing animals have been munching away at the grass in their pasture, and seem to be doing alright. There's the occasional sand tile (yellow ≈) around, where a grazer has eaten a tile of grass recently and it's not grown back yet. The location I selected for this fortress has the highest vegetation rating, so the grass grows back fast. We could probably put 10 or 15 more animals in there before the grass couldn't keep up. Other sand tiles around are where trees have been cut down or shrubs collected, or where dwarves and animals have trampled the grass out of existence. Grass will grow back on these tiles too, if they're left alone for a while.

The white '.`, symbols are bare rock ground (it's white because it's dolomite, other rocks are different colours), while the ∞ symbols are dolomite rocks on the surface. The rocks don't do much, the only thing of note is that they block wagons from being able to pass. You can smooth them away if you need to though.

The dark green curly backwards y things are either shrubs for a herbalist to collect, or saplings that will grow into trees. The “ symbols are shrubs. Both shrubs and saplings can be trampled and killed by dwarves and creatures walking over them.

The light green curly y things and the light green ƒ shapes are bamboo. This essentially works like grass, but for pandas. We don't have any pandas, so just ignore the bamboo.

The yellow circles are bee colonies. They can be farmed, but we're not covering that in the guide.

The grey squares are flies of various types. All dwarves get mildly annoyed if they encounter flies, but each dwarf has a particular type of vermin that they hate, and will get very annoyed if they encounter. Non-fly vermin that a dwarf doesn't hate won't bother them. Vermin is defined as any animal below a certain size, not just pests. Your cats will wander around killing vermin, and leaving their remains lying around. These are shown by purple ² signs. As the remains decay, the symbols will turn white then disappear.

There's other stuff around. If you don't recognise it, k-look at it and you'll see what it is. If you need more info, type the name of it into the Wiki.

Going Underground.

This next bit depends on Zaneg and Tobul's mining a bit. Given that Meng's farm was finished, I'm assuming the storeroom was too. Let's put it to use.

We're going to put 2 stockpiles in there, one for food, and one for pretty much everything else.

Hit p to bring up the stockpile menu, then f to specify food. Fill the first 6 rows with this food stockpile:



For the remaining 5 rows, we don't want to be restricted to just one category. Luckily, there's a way around that. Press c for custom stockpile. Then press t to bring up the list of stuff which we can customise it with.



This screen will let you specify exactly what to store in the stockpile to a stunning level of specificity. Want a stockpile for battleaxes made of steel, but only of masterwork quality? You can do that. For now, we don't want to be specific in any way, since this stockpile is going to be our “everything else” stockpile. When we do make a more specific stockpile, we can always come back and deactivate those goods from this stockpile.

On this screen there's 3 columns, but we can only see one for now. Go down to Furniture/Siege Ammo category and press e to enable it:



It's not hard to see how we specific we could be, but we'll come back to the mechanics of that in a second. For now, enable everything except Food, Refuse, Corpses, Stone, and Wood. Once that's done, press ESC. Custom Stockpile should still be highlighted as the selected option, so go ahead and place one over the remaining 5 rows:



Ok, that's a basic setup, but let's get just a little more fancy and make a stockpile specifically for seeds in that 3x3 room opposite Meng's farm. Start by placing another food stockpile there, then take a look at it in q-look:



There are a few options here which can really seal the deal of your absolute control over where your stuff goes.
s: This takes you back to the screen we were just on, where you can choose which stuff is allowed in the stockpile.
erER: Lets you choose how many barrels are allowed for this stockpile. Food can be stored directly on the stockpile, or inside a barrel which is itself on the stockpile. This saves space in the stockpile. e and r adjust it by 1, while E and R set it to 0 or max. Since this is a food stockpile, it automatically has the max number of barrels selected.
cvCV: The same for bins. Bins are even more effective at saving space, since the stuff that fits in would generally require a whole tile for every single item, while food often stacks.
W: Wheelbarrows are useful, but we'll come back to them in Chapter 5.
a, t, and g: lets you set up rules and destinations for this stockpile's stuff. Say you wanted your mason to only make furniture out of orthoclase boulders, because you like the yellow colour. Set a stockpile to hold only that, and tell it to give to the mason's workshop, and that'll happen. You could make that one small, but have another, bigger one as a reserve, and set it to give to the smaller one. Or you could have multiple smaller single-type piles taking from a larger mixed one. The possibilities enabled by just these three options are endless and incredibly useful, and we'll cover them in more detail in a future chapter.

For now, we have a generic food stockpile, but what we want is a seed stockpile. Before we set that, let's make it so barrels aren't used here (seeds are stored in bags anyway, and there's a couple of minor bugs with stuff in bags inside barrels). Press shift-e to do that, and you should see Max Barrel is now 0.

Now press s and we'll change the settings. Press down to get to the Food category, then right to go into the list of sections. There are a few different controls here.



If you're in the right hand column, Enter will enable/disable a specific item.
f will disable all items in a section, while p will enable all of the items (All Meat for example).
a and b will do the same, but for all the sections in the whole category (All Food).
Some categories have an item or two which doesn't fit in any of the sections, and you can toggle them using u or j. In this case it's prepared food, which you make in a kitchen.

For this stockpile, we only want seeds active. The quickest way to do that is to press b to disable everything, then move down to seeds and press p to enable the section. Like with labours, the sections are white, light grey, and dark grey when all, some or none of the items are activated. If you really want to get fancy you could go in and use Enter to select only the underground seeds (the first 5 in the list, as well as Dimple Cups which are nearer the bottom). We don't have any above-ground seeds though, so it won't actually help immediately.



ESC out to q-look, and go down to the food stockpile we set up there. We want to change the settings on that to exclude seeds, since we have a better place to put them now. So that's s for settings, move down to food, highlight seeds, and then press f to forbid seeds from the pile.

The “everything else” stockpile could use a little tweak as well, while we're at it. Head into the settings for that, and under Furniture/Type disable sand bags (last on the list). We've got a fair few bags of sand in the wagon, and they don't fit in bins, so we don't want them filling up the stockpile. We'll leave them lying around on the surface until we need them.

One last thing. Go back to the main screen, and go to the stockpile placement menu again:



As we established, the food stockpile will use barrels to save space. Dwarves will try and fill every tile with a barrel. However, that would mean none of those barrels would be available for other tasks, notably brewing. If you press * a few times on this screen, you'll notice that the Reserved Barrels counter goes up. Set it to 5, and the dwarves will only add more barrels to stockpiles when there's 6 or more. This gives us some room to work. As our fortress grows and production increases, you'll probably want to increase that number. Keep in mind the spare barrels need to be stored somewhere too. Don't bother reserving bins, since there's no use for them other than stockpiles.

OK! That's us set up with everything we need to empty out the wagon into our storage room! Kûbuk's furniture and Tobul's axes, copper and charcoal will be moved too, and so will any gathered plants which haven't already withered. Bear in mind this will all take some time. If Zaneg and Tobul have finished mining the 3 rooms from number 3 and 4 on their list, then re-enable hauling for Tobul to help. If Kûbuk has finished the 3 doors that are first on her list, do the same. Both will still do their jobs, but will also do some hauling as well.

Bonus objective!

Now that we have a food stockpile, vermin will try and eat our food. It's not a huge worry, since we should be keeping a substantial reserve at all times, but we might as well do something about it. Remember those cats we have wandering around killing vermin? Try pasturing a couple (not all) of them in the storeroom. They'll focus their hunting there, saving our food.

Considerations Must Be Made

Right, next on the list, we'll need to talk about the needs and happiness of your dwarves. Each dwarf needs to eat roughly twice a season, and drink four times. If you have no food, a dwarf can last a little longer by hunting vermin, but that will only make a slight dent and the dwarf will still starve to death in short order. If you have no alcohol, dwarves will drink water instead (if you have any – ours is all frozen at this point), but dwarves are alcohol dependant. The longer they go without alcohol, the slower they get.
They also will need to sleep a few times a season (not sure how often, definitely less often than they drink [FR]). They'll sleep in a bed if there's one available, or on the ground otherwise.

You might see dwarves flashing with downwards arrows to show their status: Brown for hunger, blue for thirst, white for tiredness, and red for unhappiness. Your starting seven will be approximately synchronised at this point, so you might have seen a few of them standing around the wagon flashing blue, barrels in hand.

Your dwarves also get happy or sad depending on the various situations they find themselves in. The fact and manner in which the above needs are fulfilled play a big part in that.
Eating: Eating something a dwarf likes will give them a happy thought. If they aren't able to get food in a reasonable time when they become hungry, or if they have to eat the same thing repeatedly, they will get a bad thought. If there's not a chair and table for them to eat at, they'll get unhappy, but if there is they'll get a happy thought based on the opulence of the dining room (we're getting to that in a while). Prepared meals made in a kitchen can have quality modifiers which enhance the happiness gained.
Drinking: They don't need a table or chair to drink so won't complain about the lack, but also won't get a dining room bonus. They don't like a lack of variety in their drinks either, and have preferences for what they like to drink too. There are far less types of drink than food, so a dwarf is much more likely to have access to their favourite drink.
Sleep: Dwarves that can't find a bed when they need to sleep will sleep on the ground, but won't be happy about it. If there's a bed available to sleep in they'll use it, but unless it's in an actual bedroom they'll be mildly annoyed. If it's their own bedroom they'll get a happy thought based on the opulence of the room. If they're too close to some noisy work they might sleep uneasily or be woken, making them unhappy.

There are plenty of other factors which can cause thoughts for dwarves. Let's take a look at Melbil and Meng, to see how they feel:



Nothing too big has happened either way for these two, so they're still quite content. You can see that Melbil has had a fine drink lately. If you look at the light green section, you can see he likes dwarven beer, which is good since we have plenty of that. He obviously made a beeline for the stuff last time he was thirsty. He was annoyed by flies, which is pretty much inevitable since he's our woodcutter.



Meng was accosted by terrible vermin. If we look in the light green section for him, we can see that he absolutely detests rats, and he's apparently seen one. That's a more severe unhappy thought than Melbil's encounter with flies, but still not enough to knock him down from quite content.

Keeping your dwarves from getting unhappy is important. There are a couple of hundred possible thoughts, and they vary in severity. While the direct penalties for unhappy dwarves are not too harsh in themselves, unhappy dwarves will often throw tantrums, and dwarves who spend too long unhappy will go insane. Tantrums involve knocking down buildings, throwing stuff around, and starting fistfights. That doesn't sound too bad until you consider that dwarven punches can break bones and skulls, and some of the things they throw might be weapons or massive boulders. Also, when a dwarf goes insane, they have a chance of going berserk and attacking anything they see. Any injuries or death as a result will cause more unhappiness, triggering more tantrums, and soon enough half your fortress is dead or insane.

The direct bonuses for dwarves being happier than average aren't earth shattering either, but the real value in happy dwarves is their buffer against unhappy thoughts. When half your army is wiped out by an invasion, a dwarf might have lost several friends, be severely injured, and angry about almost starving to death before someone could bring him food in the hospital. If he was only quite content before, he's probably going to be insane before much longer (if he survives his injuries anyway). If he had been ecstatic beforehand, he might not even be unhappy overall.

Let's take our first steps towards happier dwarves by making some rooms for them. If Tobul and Zaneg haven't finished steps 3 and 4 on their list (the 6x6 room opposite the storeroom and the 2x2 and 3x2 rooms off that), designate them and run the clock until they have.

We need to make some Rooms. Rooms are (usually enclosed) areas set aside for a specific purpose, involving furniture. We're going to make a dormitory for our dwarves to sleep in, a dining room for them to eat in, and an office for Zaneg to use later.

The first thing we need is to build the appropriate furniture. Kûbuk has already built beds, tables chairs and doors, which is what we need for these rooms, but they're not usable until they're placed/built (think IKEA flatpacks). Press b to go to the build menu, and then d for door. Move the X over to one of the entrances to the rooms, and press Enter, and pick one of the doors. Repeat for the other two entrances, then place 7 beds (b) in the 6x6 room, in whichever locations you want. Here's how it should look at this point:



The 2x2 room will be Zaneg's office. In theory all an office needs is a chair, but Zaneg will sometimes eat in there, and complain if there's no table. Press c to build a chair, and press Enter to get to the item selection screen, but let's take a closer look at that before we actually place the chair:



We have 4 chairs, but as we saw previously, furniture and other stuff can have quality levels. Sometimes we want to make sure we're putting in the highest quality furniture we can, while other times we want to avoid placing the good stuff where it would go unappreciated. You can change the material selection list from generic item types to a list of specific items by pressing x:



Here's a list of all the fortress's chairs, with their quality level on show. If you wanted, you could press v to look at an item. Let's build the lowest quality one in the office, and save the nicer ones for the dining room where everyone can appreciate them. Once you have nobles or a big enough dining room for quantity to overwhelm quality, you might want to do it the other way around. Selecting an item for this is the same as it was when it was just types, + and – to highlight and Enter to select. Go ahead and place it, then put the other 3 in the dining room. Do the same with tables (t).

Here's how it looks so far:



Notice that they're all black on light grey? That's because they're building sites, not finished furniture. One of your furniture haulers will carry the actual piece of furniture to the location, move anything in the way, and build the furniture. Once they're built, the furniture will be the colour of the material it's made from (brown in this case). Some of the building sites might be flashing between the symbol and a white oval; that's fine, the oval is just a boulder of dolomite which will be moved out of the way by the builder.

Go ahead and unpause, then pause again once all of these have been built:

At least one of the beds.
At least one of the tables in the dining room.
The chair in Zaneg's office.

Go ahead and look at Zaneg's chair in q-look:



The only option is the one we want: r: Make Throne Room or Study. Press r and then just press Enter on the next screen, and you'll see this:



This is the new q-look screen, now that we've made this chair into a room. If we had done this by accident, we could remove the room label by pressing f. Since this will be Zaneg's office, we should assign it to her. Press a, and you'll see a list of the dwarves in our fortress. Nobles will automatically be at the top, and since Zaneg's our expedition leader, she's first on the list. Select her and press Enter, then take a look at the new information:



Okay, Zaneg has an office! What's that good for? Well, not much yet. When we get our first caravan, she'll use it to meet with the outpost liaison, and we'll be assigning her some work that needs an office later.

Let's do the dormitory next. Move over to the bed and press r to start a bedroom. Let's look at next page now we're making a bigger room:



See the flashing blue bits? That's the area our room is set to cover, and everything in that area will belong to the room. Use + or – to make it bigger or smaller. It always expands out from the piece of furniture you're making the room from, and is blocked by walls and doors, as well as other impassible objects. Press + until the whole room and all the walls around it are highlighted, and then press Enter:



Here we have a few more options. We would be able to assign this room to someone if we wanted, but this is going to be shared. However, unlike other rooms, dwarves will grab any free bedroom for themselves, if they don't have one already. This is handy to save you having to do it yourself, but undesirable for a shared room. To stop this from happening, press d to turn it into a dormitory. Any dwarf who doesn't have their own bedroom will come and sleep here, if there's a free bed. We'll talk about barracks later on.

Create a dining room from a table in the 2x3 room. Again, don't assign it to anyone. The options for this include making it a meeting hall, which has exactly the same function as the meeting zone we placed away back in chapter 0. This room is too small to be a sensible choice for that though, so we'll leave it for now.

That's us set up! When our dwarves get sleepy they'll sleep in the dormitory, and when they get hungry they'll take their food to the dining room, and eat it there (except Zaneg who might use her office if she feels like it).

Interlude 1 End Save



Chapter 5: Meet Monom, the Mason
In which rocks are utilized.

Our storeroom is up and running, and loads of stuff is being put in there. However, you might notice that many of the tiles are being blocked by dolomite boulders. We should really do something about that.

Meet Monom!



Monom is our Mason, but up until now she's been performing her secondary profession, Herbalism (I totally didn't design her with a stoner pun in mind). Herbalism has its uses, but they're mainly to do with scrounging food before you have a farm set up, or getting plants to turn into seeds if you want an overground farm, or just as a place for extra dwarves to be kept busy. Over the life of a fortress Masonry will be much more useful, so let's get her working on that instead.

We need to build her a Mason's Workshop, so press b-w-m to build it. If Tobul and Zaneg haven't finished digging the southern expansion to the storeroom, then put it on the surface temporarily. If they have, then place it touching the stockpile in that space, like this:



Notice that I've left a 5 tile space to the West of it. That's because that Southwest corner is going to be our new entrance, and one of our future workshops will benefit from being close to the entrance.

Pick a material for the building. Monom will build it once we unpause, but we should set her up a stockpile first. Press p and then s to select a stone stockpile, and draw a rectangle which covers a single-tile U-shape around the 3 free sides of the workshop. Once you have done that, take a look in q-look and you should be seeing this:



Not something we haven't seen before, but we're doing something new with it. Remember Tobul smelting her malachite? She took much longer to walk to the smelter with the malachite that she did to walk back, due to the weight. This can be worked around by using wheelbarrows, which eliminate the speed penalty from hauling. You can see that since this is a stone stockpile, it's already set to have a wheelbarrow assigned, but let's up that to 3 (the max). This can be done by pressing w twice. You've probably already got 3 wheelbarrows, since there was one in Kûbuk's initial list of stuff, and another 2 were pretty high up her list of further projects. A dwarf will carry each wheelbarrow to the stockpile, then whenever a stone needs moved to the stockpile they'll grab a wheelbarrow to move it. Note that if a stockpile has any wheelbarrows assigned, then dwarves will not haul to it by hand, only with the wheelbarrow.

We also need to consider what stone our Mason and other stoneworkers should be allowed to use as resources. We mentioned earlier that dolomite can be used in steelmaking, and it's one of the few stones which can. If we didn't have a whole layer of the stuff to use, then we wouldn't want to waste it on regular stoneworks. In fact, once we open up a new layer of rock and start mining some more useless stuff, I would suggest disallowing regular stoneworks entirely on dolomite.

In order to do that, we'll need to introduce the concept of economic and non-economic rock. From the main screen, press z. The page that appears is a pretty handy fortress overview, but we'll come back to it in the next chapter since it'll have more info by the end of that. For now, press right to highlight Stone, and press Enter. Here's what's behind door number one:



This is the stone screen. First of all, press Tab to look at the Other Stone. This is a list of all the types of stone which don't have a special use beyond building materials and resources for stoneworkers. They are all highlighted green, which means they will be allowed for those tasks. There's not much reason to deactivate any of these, except maybe colour control. Feel free to look through the dizzying array of stones, then press Tab to go back to Economic Stone. These are stones which do have other uses besides the basic ones. In the case of dolomite, marble, and a few others, they can be used as the flux component when making steel. Most of the other stones in this list are metal ores, along with a few miscellaneous uses. By default, everything in this list is deactivated, unless there's a whole layer of the stuff (dolomite and marble, in this case). Anything deactivated here will not be used by Masons and other stoneworkers, and won't appear in the list of building materials. The last thing you want is for your masons to make the tables for your dining room out of iron ore, while your weaponsmiths have no resources to work with.

As I said, there's no point changing anything yet, until we have something else to use instead of dolomite, so ESC out of there and let's head back to the stockpile we just laid down. Press s to look at the settings, and move down to the Stone category:



This is no good. Currently, it's set so that anything dug out of the ground will be brought here. Our Mason won't use any metal ores or other deactivated stone, so they would just clog up the stockpile. Deactivate the whole Metal Ores and Clay sections, and all of the Economic section except dolomite (remember that f will deactivate a whole section).

OK, time to put it all into place. Unpause the game, and dwarves should start moving wheelbarrows to the stockpile, then using them to move stone there too. Monom should also build her workshop, so get her started making stuff. Remember how part of Kûbuk's list was only to be done if there was no Mason? Add anything left of that part to Monom's list, and add the following after it:


1 quern (q)
20 coffers (h)
20 cabinets (f)
20 doors (d)
10 statues (u)
5 slabs
10 tables (t)
5 thrones (c)

Make coffers, cabinets, and doors as needed to keep up with bedroom production.

Chapter Conclusion

A Mason will never run out of work to do in a fortress. Making enough coffers, cabinets and doors for your dwarves' bedrooms, tables and chairs for their dining rooms and offices, caskets for their corpses, and other necessities will take up plenty of time, and then there's the extra things like statues to improve the quality of rooms, and floodgates for incredible (-y dangerous) feats of engineering.

While it's easy to think of wood as the infinite resource since trees grow back, the truth is that stone is what you will find most plentiful. Wood requires a specific journey to the surface and work done out where there are wild animals and occasionally enemies. Woodcutters are the most common first casualties. Stone, however, will stack up all over the place as you dig out your living areas and hunt for ore, and you'll soon have more of it than any sane person would want. Therefore, if it's something that can be made from stone, then you'll not often want to make it from wood or metal.

Chapter 5 Endsave

[Nice Save]

Chapter 6 – Zaneg and Kûbuk Revisited
In which drunkenness is enabled and organisation is attempted.

By this point, you're probably getting close to the bottom of Zaneg's mining list and Kûbuk's carpentry list. Lets give them both some additional duties.

Zaneg has her office up and ready to go, but we've not given her any work to do in it. Press n and we'll see about that:



This is the Nobles screen. Nobles are in charge of various miscellaneous functions of your fortress, have various requirements in terms of owned rooms, and some of them can demand the production or outlaw export of certain goods. Noble titles override the usual skill-based profession names.

Spoiler: Here's a quick rundown of the ones you see here: (click to show/hide)

Expedition Leader – Automatically filled by Zaneg on embark because she has the highest (only) social skills, but you can appoint anyone to this position. You need one of these to appoint the other nobles, and angry dwarves will go and shout at them, giving them a happy thought based on the leader's Consoler and Pacifier skills. They will also meet with diplomats and outpost liaisons that come with caravans. No requirements or demands. When you have 50 dwarves, this position is replaced by a Mayor, who performs all the same functions but does have requirements and demands. The Mayor is elected rather than appointed, so will most likely be the dwarf wit the highest social skills.
Militia Commander – No requirements or demands. Does nothing in itself, but needed to appoint Militia Captains who head up your military squads.
Sheriff – Metes out dwarven justice, or at least most of it. Crimes mainly come from behaviour during tantrums, or the demands of nobles not being met. This isn't something to worry about until the fortress is quite advanced. Needs modest rooms, and is replaced by the Captain of the Guard at 50 population who needs slightly better rooms, and can lead a squad. No demands.
Hammerer – Metes out the most extreme form of dwarven justice, hammerings. This is a kind of semi-execution, that a tough or lucky dwarf might be able to survive. No requirements or demands, and can lead a squad.
Manager – Allows profiles for workshops, and manages work orders. Requires an office, no demands.
Chief Medical Dwarf – allows access to the Health screen, and diagnoses injured dwarves. No requirements or demands.
Broker – Allows you to see the value of items if the broker has at least one rank in Appraiser. Also lets you see the value of the fortress itself, with accuracy based on the Appraisal skill of the broker. Usually used to trade with caravans, but you can choose to allow other dwarves to do so if you want. No requirements or demands.
Bookkeeper – Works to count the stuff in your fortress, so you can see it in the stocks screen. You can specify how accurate they should be, which correlates to how much time they spend doing it. Needs an office to work in, no demands.

You'll also see a few other nobles pop up in the future:

Baron/Count/Duke – Once you reach a certain population, fortress wealth, and exported wealth, the outpost liaison will let you pick a dwarf to become a Baron. A Baron takes over the Expedition Leader/Mayor's liaison-meeting duties, and has fairly high room requirements and demands. At higher fortress and export values the Baron will be replaced by a Count, then a Duke, with increasing requirements and demands.
Champion – Appointed by a Baron etc. Will help train your squads. No requirements.
Monarch – Once you've met some pretty hefty, complicated, and varying requirements, the Monarch of your civilisation will arrive. They don't do anything, and have massive requirements and demands. Occasionally they will turn out to be a vampire or another race based on the crazy shenanigans of the world's history.

For now, let's explore this screen. Move down to Bookkeeper, and press r to choose who to place in this position. You'll get a list of your dwarves to pick from – take a look at Zaneg:



You'll see on the right a list of relevant skills owned by the highlighted dwarf. In this case, there's only one relevant skill, Record Keeper, and Zaneg is a Novice at it. That's still better than any of our other dwarves, so press Enter to select Zaneg for this position. In any list of this type, the dwarf with the highest relevant skills will be at the top.

What's this?



The Require tag is highlighted white. Press Enter and we'll see what that's all about:



You can see on the right that Zaneg Needs a Meager Office, due to the positions she holds (Manager and Bookkeeper both require a meager office, but if the same Dwarf has both positions they don't need two offices). Luckily, we already assigned her one, and it's shown on the left under Holdings. If we hadn't given her one, the Require tag would have been red, or if her office hadn't been of a high enough quality, it would have been yellow.

ESC back to the Noble screen, and press s while the bookkeeper position is highlighted:



Here we can choose how precise we want Zaneg to be when counting all the stuff. You can choose how many significant figures you want the amounts rounded to, and the higher the precision the longer it takes. Once the desired level of precision is reached, it only takes a little effort for the Bookkeeper to keep it there, so let's set it to highest precision and forget about it. If you come back and check on this in the future, it'll tell you what level she's reached and the percentage progress to the next level.

None of the other noble positions need settings like that. Zaneg also has the skills for Manager and Broker roles, so set her to fill those positions too. Notice that multiple skills pop up as relevant for the Broker, but the most important one is Appraiser, followed by Judge of Intent. Appraiser is needed to make valuations of items (especially important for trading - what's the price difference between a caged elephant and a large black diamond?), and Judge of Intent is important for seeing how happy a trader is with the deals you've made with him so far, which affects how hard you can bargain.

No-one has the skills for Chief Medical Dwarf, but assign Zaneg to that anyway since it gives us access to some extra information.

OK, we have nobles set up for now. What good does this do us? First, let's see what actions the Manager position lets us take, then we'll take a look at the information revealed by the other positions. ESC out to the main screen and look at any workshop in q-look. You'll see the following:



There's a new option for Workshop Profile. Press shift-p to open it:



This lets you restrict this workshop to certain dwarves, either by selecting one or multiple dwarves as the only allowed user(s), or setting a blanket minimum and maximum skill level for working at the workshop. This allows you plenty of control. For example, if you have tons of walls to build from stone, you might want to enable Masonry on a bunch of unskilled dwarves. Setting the workshop to only allow your proper Mason access will prevent those unskilled dwarves from making low-quality furniture. Using stockpile give-to settings, you could also set up two forges, one being fed by a stockpile full of cheap plentiful metal with a maximum skill restriction, and another being fed rare expensive metal with a minimum skill restriction. This would let your lower skilled metalworkers gain skill using the cheap metal, while the expensive metal is saved for your highly skilled metalworkers to make higher quality goods from.

Mess around with it to get familiar, but before leaving the screen make sure and press 1 to select all, since there's no need to set anything else at this point.

The second benefit of having a Manager is the manager screen. You can get to this in a couple of ways. The first way is through the Units screen, but we've already seen that screen. The second is the jobs screen, which you can reach by pressing j from the main screen:



This is a list of all jobs needing to be done in your fortress, as well as their status. The status will either show the dwarf performing the job if it's in progress, or inactive if not. If a job is suspended for any reason, the status here will tell you. You can also see the building/stockpile that the job is associated with, if any. v will show you some details of the job, including any items involved. c will take you to the worker for the highlighted job in v-look, while b will take you to the workshop/stockpile involved in q-look. r stops the dwarf who is currently doing the job from completing it, while not cancelling the job itself. This causes the dwarf to look for a new job, as if he'd just finished one. This is mainly a troubleshooting tool, as most jobs are quick enough that you might as well let the dwarf finish it. An example of when to use it would be if you had a hungry or thirsty dwarf who was hauling something really heavy a long way - they won't interrupt a job to go eat, so you could do it manually (You really should set that stockpile up to use wheelbarrows though).

The control we want is m for Manager, however. Go ahead and press it:



This screen will allow us to set a list of jobs to be done in order. So if we were kitting out 20 bedrooms, we could add 20 each of beds, coffers, cabinets, and doors to this list and once our Manager had validated the requests they would automatically be added to our workshop queues.

It's a revolution in goods production! Press q for a New Order:



This is a pretty overwhelming list of every possible job you could perform in any workshop or furnace. Don't worry, you don't need to wade through all of it. If you type words or parts of words, you'll filter it down to only jobs with those characters in them. There's only one job with the word BED in it, for example. Typing TAB will filter it down to tables only, since there are no other jobs with the letters T-A-B in a row. ODE will show only jobs for wooden items (WOO also catches the wood opal gem, and petrified wood stone). TAB ODE will show only Construct Wooden Table, since that's the only job which includes both strings of characters. You'll get used to the best parts of words to use, and if in doubt just type whole words. Pick a job to add (the next thing on Kûbuk or Monom's list would be a good choice), and press Enter to select it. You'll then have an opportunity to type in a quantity, with the max being 30 (numbers over that amount will result in a quantity of 30). If you leave it blank it will add the job with a quantity of one. Add a couple more orders to the list for us to play with, so you can see something like this:



The other options on the page will work now. p will move the highlighted order up a line, while t will move it to the top. r will remove an order. One thing you don't see here is the validation symbol. Because we have less than 20 dwarves, our Manager doesn't need to do any work for these orders to be sent to the workshops. Once we get enough migrants to push the population over 20, you'll see a red X to the side of newly added orders. Our Manager will need to work in an office to turn each order into a green tick, and only then will they be sent to the workshops.

You might as well fill this up with whatever you have left of Kûbuk and Monom's lists. Once all the items in a given order have been constructed, you'll get an announcement to let you know.

More Information!

Let's see what information about our fortress has been revealed by our nobles. From the main screen, press z to get to the status screen. We skipped past this earlier, but let's take a look now:



This is a general overview of your fortress. At the top is the name of our fortress and its translation, as well as the date. In the next section are various menus, which we will get to in a second. At the top left of the big part of the screen is the valuation of various parts of your fortress, broken down by type. We're pretty poor at the moment, since we just started. Notice how any of those numbers longer than 3 digits have a ? next to them? That's because Zaneg has only just started her job as a bookkeeper. They'll get more accurate. The created wealth and the exported wealth of your fortress are the main things which affects your dealings with the outside world. A wealthier fortress will attract more migrants, and caravans will bring more goods to trade with the residents. Human caravans won't turn up at all until you reach a certain level of wealth. Higher wealth will also attract more and nastier invaders and thieves (Yay!).

Below that is the food stores list, which is extremely useful for an at-a-glance look at how far from starvation you are. These numbers are only single-significant-figure estimates just now, but as Zaneg works in her capacity as bookkeeper, that'll improve. Meat, Fish, Plant, and Seed are pretty self explanatory. Drink includes alcohol and milk, while Other includes cheese and prepared food, as well as some miscellaneous stuff probably.

To the right is the rundown of how many dwarves you have by profession. It's also useful as a reference for learning the profession colours.

Right, back to those menus. The first on the list is Animals, so press Enter to take a look:



I guess a list of all our animals is exactly what was to be expected. On the left is the name, sex, and tameness of the animal – stray means it's no-one's pet, while pets have proper names.
The line of D's in the middle mean that these are all animals that are domesticated by our civilisation – you won't need to pay much attention to that or the (tame) tags unless you want to try taming captured animals (same with the second tab of this page which lists our civilisation's levels of knowledge of various animals and how to tame them).
On the right is the Owner of any given animal. If you press Enter on one of them, you'll make it available and a dwarf might choose to adopt it as a pet. The cats don't work that way – they adopt dwarves when they feel like it. Pets follow their owners around, and increase their happiness (until they inevitably die and have the opposite effect). This column will also show you which animals are slated to be butchered, which you can toggle by pressing b (you can't butcher pets, you monster. (kill the owner first)).
At the bottom are a few options for training animals, which isn't covered in this guide.

For now, we don't want to make any pets or butcher any animals. Head back and go into the Kitchen menu instead:



This is a list of the various cookable and brewable foods in your fortress. You can use the c and b keys to prevent or allow the cooking or brewing of various plants, meant and fish, alcohol, and other stuff. There are a few reasons to do this, mostly to do with saving the items for other uses.

Let's make a few changes here. Note that only items actually present in your fort will be listed here, so you'll need to come back every now and again to change the settings on any new things (after each caravan is a good time for this).
Disallow cooking from Plump Helmets (because cooking doesn't give you seeds back, unlike other uses, and Plump Helmets are our staple food).
Disallow cooking from the various alcohols to prevent them from running out.
Disallow cooking from any milk since we're better off turning it into cheese. Note: Milk is treated separately from frozen milk of the same animal, so if your milk is still outside and frozen, you'll need to set this again once it melts.
Disallow brewing from Pig Tails and Rope Reeds, since we're better off turning them to thread.
Once you have a Farmer's workshop and a plant processor to work in it, you might want to disallow brewing on Sweet Pods in favour of extracting syrup.
If, at some point in the future, you have empty bags, a quern or millstone, a Miller, and can be bothered milling, disallow brewing from cave wheat, longland grass, and whip vines (single-sentence comma count HISCORE!).
If you are planning to make an outdoor farm, you might consider disallowing cooking from outdoor plants to prevent their seeds from being lost. If not, you might want to activate cooking on the outdoor seeds (be careful not to cook any underground seeds though).
When and if you get any tallow, deactivate cooking on that in favour of making soap with it.

When you're finished head back. We already looked at the stone menu, so go into Stocks:



This is a list of all the stuff in the fortress. Zaneg's precision level will affect the counts here too, but in categories where the precision allows exact numbers you'll also be able to see all items that are included in that category. You can see above that as far as weapons go, we have 2 copper picks and 3 copper battle axes. If you press Tab, you'll see the list of individual items, similar to the expanded building material view we looked at when we were furnishing Zaneg's office.

You can see that next to the counts in some categories, there are red numbers. These represent items which are not available for use, either because they're currently incorporated into a building as a building material, seeds planted in a field, are forbidden, etc.

You can designate and undesignate items to be forbidden, dumped, or melted from this screen. You can also do that when looking at the item in k-look ot t-look, or en-masse using a designation in the Item/Building properties menu (d)-(b).

• Items marked for dumping won't be touched, except to take them to a garbage zone (not to be confused with a refuse stockpile). Once a dwarf gets to the garbage zone with the item, they will throw it down a hole if there is one in the zone, or just leave it lying in the zone otherwise. Either way, the dumped item becomes forbidden.
• Forbidden items are marked so that no dwarf will touch them. They'll just sit where they are until unmarked.
• Only metal items can be marked for melting. They will be taken to a smelter which has the Melt Items job active, and melted down to produce some of the metal they are made of. This produces less metal than it takes to make the given item. If it's not a whole number of bars that's made, the remainder is kept invisibly in the smelter until the next such melting of that metal.

Onwards! Come out of there and go into the Health screen, which is only visible because we assigned a Chief Medical Dwarf:



This is a list of everything wrong with each of your dwarves and animals. Thankfully it's clear for now. Notice the blue bar at the top, which lets you know which set of columns it's currently showing the key for. If you use the arrow keys to move it right and left, the key will change to show you the possible symbols in each column set. The first column set is special – it shows treatments needed rather than the problems themselves. Diagnosis is needed for any of these to be shown (except for Crutch Required, which is pretty self evident when a dwarf can't stand).

The rightmost column-set on the first page has some symbols which are of special note. They will tell you if a dwarf or animal is hungry or starving, or if a dwarf is thirsty or dehydrated. If this is the case for a dwarf and there's no shortages, then that dwarf is probably stuck somewhere without access to food or booze, or they're too injured to go get it. If a grazing animal is hungry, there's probably an issue with the pasture it's allocated to being overcrowded, or it's not in a pasture at all. You can go and look at the dwarf/animal using r to see what's up.

OK! That's plenty of info screen infodump. Let's get out of here and do something else. Kûbuk's been carpenting away (yes I know that isn't a real word), and has probably gotten way ahead of demand by this point. Lets set her up to do some brewing as well.

Build her a still (b-w-l) touching the north side of the food stockpile, with a one-tile gap to the west wall. Place an n shaped, one tile wide food stockpile around it, and set it to only hold barrels, large pots, and brewable plants (Plump Helmets, Cave Wheat, and Sweet Pods will do for now. Refer to the Wiki if you want to know exactly which overground plants are brewable). Now look at the stockpile in q-look, and press t to set up a take rule. Move the cursor over the main food stockpile and press Enter. Now this new stockpile will have plants brought to it from the main stockpile in addition to loose plants, and will be more consistently full of them.

Once the still is built, enable the job Brew Drinks on repeat. Eventually the barrels will run out, at which point you can build more of them in the carpenter's shop.

Chapter Conclusion

Nobles are worth keeping an eye on. The functions and information they bring to your fortress aren't completely essential, but they do make your life easier. Nobles are generally pretty high maintenance though, and in general the less use a Noble is, the more high maintenance they are, and the less choice you get about them being part of your fortress. We'll go through noble requirements, demands, and mandates in more detail in a future chapter.

Brewing is essential to your fort, but not particularly hard to keep on top of as long as you have plants growing and wood or stone for barrels and pots.

Chapter 6 Endsave




Chapter 7: Meet Solon, the Mechanic
In which the nasty is prepared for.

Now we know how to check our fortress wealth. I mentioned that invaders will be attracted when you have high wealth, so should we be worried? Well, not yet, but it never hurts to start preparing as soon as possible.

Meet Solon!



Solon has some military skills, but that's not why we have a chapter dedicated to him. It's his skill as a Mechanic which will help us set up the traps we'll use as our first line of defence.

First we need mechanisms, which Solon will need to make from stone in a mechanic's workshop. Go ahead and build the mechanic's workshop (b-w-t) in that space we left next to the Mason (or somewhere near the bottom left corner of the storeroom anyway). Make another non-economic stone stockpile to fill the rest of the space (you might need to make some extra wheelbarrows for it - remember, you assign wheelbarrows to a stockpile in q-look with the w key. You could also just remove the stockpile around the mason's workshop and add a single larger one around both workshops, if you prefer). Once it's built, take a look in q-look and press a to add task and you'll see this:



There's only 2 options, but the first one, Make Rock Mechanisms, could well become the most used job in your fortress. Traction Benches are used for hospitals and need a table, a mechanism, and a rope/chain, but we don't need any of those at this point. We need plenty of mechanisms though, so press t to add a job to make some (no + or – here), and then press r to set it to repeat, upon which you should see a blue R next to the job:



Now every time Solon finishes that job, it'll be added back, but to the bottom of the queue. That means you could queue a few non-repeating traction benches below it and Solon would make them after the next mechanism is made, then go back to making mechanisms.

Disable Mechanisms from our main stockpile, so they'll be left in the workshop and we can keep track of how many he's made by looking at the workshop in t-look. You can find them under Furniture → types in the stockpile settings screen.

Lets leave Solon to get on with that for a bit, and we'll catch up with him when he's made some mechanisms to use.

Digging in

Take a look at your wagon with t-look and see how far along your dwarves are getting with moving stuff inside. We want to be closing off that staircase in a while in favour of our long corridor, since the corridor will be better for defence. However, that would mean a much longer walk for the dwarves emptying the wagon, so we want to finish that first if at all possible.

To help with that, re-enable hauling on all your dwarves, and suspend the brewing job in the still for now, by pressing s when looking at the job in q-look. Once we have finished the more important stuff we can continue with the brewing (pressing s again will un-suspend it). If Zaneg and Tobul have finished the two 4x4 rooms from number 7 and 8 on their busy list, then hold off on designating anything new for now.

At this point, it would also be useful to move the carpenter's workshop underground, along with its wood stockpile. I would make the new wood stockpile bigger as well – use the whole of the remaining space at the top of the food stockpile, including the extended bit of the room to the east if it's dug out already. Deconstruct the smelter, wood burner, and forge as well. Remember, it's x to deconstruct a building when looking at it in q-look or t-look.

If you've got space for a 4x5 stockpile, make a furniture stockpile and set it to store only sand bags (in the furniture category, types section, forbid all except the last one). That's the only thing which is in the wagon and isn't allowed in one of our main stockpiles.

Now let the game run for a while, checking on the wagon and Solon's mechanism building every now and then. If the hauling doesn't seem to be progressing, you might need to make a few extra bins. Once the wagon is empty, deconstruct it. Once Solon has made at least 4 or 5 mechanisms, we'll move on to the next section (if Solon is ready first, feel free to continue the chapter - we don't absolutely need to deconstruct the wagon quite yet, and I'll let you know when we do).

It's a Trap!

Once we have a few mechanisms, let's get started on some traps. Press b for build, and then shift-t for the trap menu:



There are 3 single-tile self contained traps and also some other stuff which will be covered later.

The three self-contained traps are:

• Stone-Fall Trap -  The most basic trap. Once it's built, a Mechanic will load a stone into it. When an enemy steps on the trap, the stone is dropped on them, causing bruises, broken bones or even caved-in skulls. After use, the Mechanic will need to come back and reload the stone. Note that most creatures will have a chance of dodging the stone. This can even be used against them, since they won't check where they are dodging to, and will happily dodge into any 20 z-level pit that just happens to be lying around. Some (thankfully rare) creatures are so big and tough that the rocks just bounce off.
• Weapon Trap – More advanced. You build up to 10 weapons into the trap, and when a creature steps on the tile, they are attacked by all the weapons. They can dodge these traps as well, but they need to dodge each weapon individually, which is harder the more weapons in a given trap. They don't need to be reloaded, but occasionally jam with a corpse stuck in them and need to be unjammed by a Mechanic (more frequent with some weapon types). You can also put ranged weapons in them, in which case your Mechanic will keep them loaded with ammo for 10 shots with each weapon.
• Cage Trap – Invincible instant-prisoner device. Once built, the Mechanic will load them with a cage. When a creature steps on the tile, they will be instantly trapped in a cage, and your haulers will haul them off to an animal stockpile. Then your Mechanic will need to load another cage. These are pretty overpowered, since there's no way to dodge or resist them, and once a creature is in the cage there is no escape. Many players make a point of not using these, to preserve the challenge.

Note that some creatures are immune to traps altogether, and will happily walk straight through all of the above. They can be fought with your militia, or you can put something elaborate together using the other three items on the page. (My personal favourite is a giant cistern of water with floodgates at the bottom on one side of the path, and a very deep hole on the other. Pull a lever, open the floodgates, and everything on the ledge is washed off it. This takes a lot of effort to set up of course).

Spoiler: The other 3 items in the list for the curious (click to show/hide)

Upright Spear/Spike – Built in the same way as a weapon trap, but the only valid weapons are spears and menacing spikes (a type of trap-only weapon, which your dwarves can't fight with. There are other trap-only weapons for your weapon traps as well). When activated by a link, the spikes raise or lower. Needless to say, anything which is on the tile when they raise is in for a bad day. They are built in the raised position, so you can build them at the bottom of a pit and anything falling onto them will have massively increased damage compared to falling on bare floor. Bear in mind that unlike the self-contained traps, these are indiscriminate and will impale anything on them, including friendly creatures.
Lever – Build using a mechanism. Doesn't do anything on its own, but you can use 2 mechanisms to link it to another building, and then pull the lever to activate any linked buildings. There's no limit to how many buildings can be linked to a single lever. Here's a list of buildings you could link - we'll set up some of them in future chapters:

• Doors, hatches, and floodgates can be opened and closed from a linked lever.
• Bridges can either be retracted (effectively disappearing) or raised (turning into a wall along one edge). You choose which type of bridge and the raise direction when building the bridge. You can use retractable bridges to drop enemies into pits, and raise-able bridges for access control and to catapult enemies around.
• Supports deconstruct, dropping anything which relies on it for structural integrity. This is dangerous and hilarious.
• Cages also deconstruct, releasing the animal(s) inside. This can let you set up an arena, or an overly-complicated feral badger trap.

Pressure Plate – Is linked to buildings like a lever, but instead of a dwarf pulling the lever to activate, you can set it to be activated by various weights and classifications of creatures, or level of liquids. Won't be set off by creatures who avoid the basic traps.

We're going to be sticking to Stone-Fall Traps and Cage Traps for now. We're going to put 5 Cage Traps at the end of the corridor nearest the storeroom, then leave an empty tile, and fill the rest of the corridor with Stone-Fall Traps. We don't have enough mechanisms for that yet, so we'll just build a couple of each.

Press c for cage trap, place it at the storeroom end of the corridor, and press Enter to place it, choosing a mechanism to build it with. Then add a second one in the next tile. At the stairway end of the corridor, place as many Stone-Fall Traps (s) as you have mechanisms left. You should be seeing something like this:



Solon will come along and build them. Once they're build they will be ^ symbols, in green for the cage traps and grey for the stone-fall traps. Once the traps are loaded they will turn light green and white respectively. Solon will do the loading as well.

Run the game for a while, and let him build and load a couple of the traps.

One thing our traps won't protect against is Kobold thieves. They will sneak in and steal stuff without setting off any traps, and you won't even see them do it. Unless, that is, they come within a single tile of one of the dwarves or animals belonging to our fortress. We'll need to set up something to detect them and scare them off.

Leave space for 5 Cage Traps total, then in the next tile build a restraint (b-v). You should have a rope available to build it with since we brought some in the wagon. Unpause and let one of your dwarves build it, then look at it in q-look.

Pressing a will let you pick a creature to tie to the restraint. Pick one of the dogs, since they are the fiercest fighting animals we currently have. Like with a pasture, a dwarf will grab the animal and lead it to the restraint, and tie it up. It won't be able to go more than one tile away from the restraint.

Now any thieves which try to enter our fortress will meet the dog, be detected and then immediately try to run away. Unless they enter via our original staircase, which seems to be a bit of a liability given what we just learned.

We don't have much reason to be going to the surface now, so that initial staircase isn't even that useful. We'd better close it off, once we have our affairs in order up there.

Once the wagon is empty, get it deconstructed. Don't worry if there's still a couple of items in there, they can always get picked up from the ground. Remove the meeting zone, and place a new one in the storeroom (or make the cat pasture a meeting zone as well). Remove the refuse stockpile, and put a new one at the top of the new entrance's stairs.

Once that's all done, it's time to do the actual closing off. Press b for build then shift-c for the Construction menu.



These are various terrain features you can build, similar to the ones you get from digging. They need more time than digging and need resources to build, but they can be built where there's no rock walls available to carve out. In this case we want a single tile of floor, so let's just place it for now and worry about the more advanced details in future when we make something more complicated.

Press f for floor, move the X around until it covers the downward staircase, and press Enter. Select a material you like. Masons build stone floors, Carpenters build wood floors, etc. A worker will come along and build it in due course. A constructed floor is a + sign. It's also possible to smooth cave floors, which will turn them into + signs too. More on that later.

Keep building traps until that corridor is full of them, then let Solon continue making mechanisms for later (there's always a use for more mechanisms, and you're not going to run out of stone any time soon).

Chapter Conclusion

Basic traps are your first line of defence, and are effective against most of the enemies you'll face. They are also the easiest defence to set up, and can prevent your dwarves from being at risk if managed correctly. You'll still need a military for the situations where you need flexibility or to deal with trap avoiding creatures, and there are other things which can help your security such as access control, but we're off to a good start here.

Chapter 7 Endsave

[Nice Save]

Chapter 8 – Meet Melbil, the Stonecrafter
In which useless tat is churned out

If you take a look at the units screen once more, you might notice that there's only one dwarf left that we haven't met.

Meet Melbil:



Melbil, like Solon, has a few military skills, but again we're here for his civilian skills. He's been chopping wood all this time, but we've got plenty wood for now. In any case, we're better off making things from stone if we can swing it, and that's what Melbil can do with his other civilian skill, Stone Crafting.

Find Melbil – the units screen is handy for this – disable hauling on him, and remove Woodcutting from his activated labours (remember, in v-look it's p for the Prf tab, then l for Labour to bring up the list. Woodcutting is in the Woodworking category). If we do run out of logs, we can always reactivate it, or more likely set a migrant to cut trees when we get some (you're most likely well into summer at this point, so a wave of migrants is probably imminent. When they do arrive, look for the relevant conditional chapter). This will let him focus on Stone Crafting.

Wait, isn't that what our Mason does?

Not quite. While both our Mason and Stone Crafter make things from stone, they have a slightly different focus. Masons primarily make furniture and larger items, while Stone Crafters tend to make smaller stuff like tools, as well as various crafts for flogging off to traders.

Firstly, though, we need to make a workshop for all this to happen in. That would be the Craftsdwarf's workshop (b-w-r). Put it near the Mason and Mechanic Workshops, and give it a stone stockpile as well – remember to set the pile to only hold non-economic stone, and set the wheelbarrow count (you could also delete the Mason's pile and replace it with an extended one serving both workshops if you wanted).

The Craftsdwarf's workshop deserves a special mention because unlike most workshops, it's used by multiple professions. Most of the stuff we'll be making from stone could also be made of wood by a Wood Crafter, or bone by a Bone Carver, and it all happens in one workshop. There's also a Metal Crafting profession which makes similar things, but that takes place in a forge. Other uses of the Craftdwarf's workshop include engraving memorial slabs, and extracting metal strands.

However, stone is generally more plentiful than wood, and all our bones are currently holding our creatures together, so Stone Crafting is the most common use for this workshop.

Once we've got it placed and built, let's look at the options available. q-look at the workshop, press a to add a new job, and then choose rock:



The options here are pretty diverse, so let's go through them:

Crafts, mugs, instruments, and toys have no actual function, but they do have a value so are useful for trading.
Rock short swords can only be made from obsidian, and also use a log each. They are the worst weapons you can make, so only use them in an emergency.
Nest boxes are needed for animals to lay eggs in. We'll make some of these later in this chapter.
Jugs are used for a couple of the most obscure industries – they can store honey from beekeeping and oil pressed from rock nuts (the seed for Quarry Bushes).
Pots, sometimes referred to as Large Pots, work almost identically to barrels, but have twice the capacity. We'll be switching over to making them almost exclusively instead of barrels, to save wood and increase the capacity of the stockpiles. You occasionally need a barrel as a building material or to extract syrup from Sweet Pods, and a pot won't do for that. In all other cases, pots are superior.
Hives are used for beekeeping, which isn't covered in this guide since I've never tried it myself.

So what are we going to make here?

Firstly, queue up 8 Nest Boxes, and then in the remaining two slots add a repeat job for Pots, and a repeat job for mugs. We're choosing mugs because from each stone you get three mugs, increasing the value and experience gained. Crafts are made in quantities between one and three, while instruments and toys are only one for one.

But if mugs aren't used for anything, why are we making them? Well, at some point in Autumn we're going to get our first caravan, and they're going to have tons of stuff we want to buy. However, unless we have something to barter with, we won't be able to afford anything. That's what the mugs are for. Being made of stone, they aren't all that valuable, but the resources are plentiful and we can make tons of them relatively quickly. As the fortress expands, you'll probably want to switch to more valuable goods, but we're just starting out here.

Speaking of trading, we might as well get ourselves prepared for our first caravan. When the caravan arrives, they'll need a Trade Depot to unload their goods at. It needs to have a clear 3-tile-wide path to the edge of the map, or the wagons won't be able to get to it, and won't even come onto the map. You can still trade if that's the case, but you'll only be offered the goods on their pack animals, which will be a much smaller selection.

To build the Trade Depot, press b then shift-d. Pick a place as close to your new entrance stairs as possible – it's a bigger, 5x5 building, so you might have to look around for a big enough clear space. Press Enter to select the position, and take a look at the next screen:



In the Item column header, it states (3 Needed). This means we need three items from this particular list to build it out of. It doesn't have to be 3 of the same material, but it can be if you like. If you choose multiple materials, the building will arbitrarily pick one of them to base its colour on, so if you want it a specific colour you should make it out of three the same. Pressing Enter will decrease the (3 Needed) by one, and increase the number before the slash in the Num column, to help you keep track. z will do the opposite, decreasing the selected count of a given material. You can also press shift-Enter to select the material as many times as necessary, and shift-z to deselect everything.

I'm going with Dolomite myself, since the white will stand out against the ground quite well. It's your choice though.

Once you've selected the material, leave it to get built. It needs an Architect to build, like the Wood Burner and Smelter did, but there's no rush here, so just let Zaneg get around to it when she has the time. If you get to Autumn and it's still not built, then we can worry about getting Architecture activated on someone else who's free.

In the meantime, let's get back to those Nest Boxes. Run the game if you need to, until a few of them are built.

Pick one of the 4x4 rooms off the dormitory, and put a door (b-d) on it. Put a door on the other room as well while we're at it. Then build all your Nest boxes (b, shift-n) inside the room, and run the game until they are finished building.

(This is the point in my game that my first migrants arrived. There's a conditional chapter dealing with that – do that as soon as you get your migrants, and don't worry if you notice differences in the screenshots because yours turned up at a different time)

Now, when one of your geese or chickens is ready to lay some eggs, they'll claim one of the nest boxes for their own, and lay the eggs there. At this point, one of two things can happen. If your dwarves have access to the nest box and there's a stockpile with space for eggs (or if they want them for a job in the kitchen), they will come and collect the eggs, taking them to the stockpile. If there's no access, or nowhere to take the eggs, they will be left, and the animal which laid them will sit on them until they hatch (which only happens if there's a male in your fortress, so it could be an indefinite wait).

In practical terms, this means if you want to breed egg-laying animals, you need to take action to stop your dwarves interrupting the process. Breeding chickens or geese is a good idea for a new fortress, since they're cheap to bring, hatch in large groups, and grow up relatively fast. Hatching the first two or three sets of eggs can end up with enough birds to keep your fortress swimming in eggs for years to come. Note that eggs aren't edible in themselves, but can be cooked into a meal at a kitchen. We'll go over that in a future chapter.

Before we can deny access to our Nest Boxes, we should make sure of a few things. First, we should add a Pasture inside the room with the Nest Boxes, and assign all our egg-laying birds to it. If you remember, this is done by pressing i to bring up the Zones menu, then defining a rectangle using the cursor. After that, press n to set it as a pasture, then shift-n to get to the list of animals, where you can navigate with + and -, and choose animals with Enter. In Dwarf Fortress, it’s actually not necessary to have your male and female animals anywhere near each other for them to breed – they just need to be on the same map - so it’s up to you whether to put the rooster or gander into the room with the hens and geese.

We should also make sure all the Nest Boxes and the door are finished building, so unpause the game as necessary until that’s done. Otherwise our Dwarves will be denied access to the room and won’t be able to finish the job.

Once all the Nest Boxes and the door are built, and the hens and geese have been taken to the pasture, take a look at the door in q-look:



There are three options we haven’t seen before here, as well as a status readout at the top which will change accordingly:

l: Forbid Passage – This will prevent anyone from going through the door – Dwarves, animals, and (most) invaders. Note that it’s a lower case L for Lima, not an i or a 1.
o: Keep Tightly Closed – This will prevent passage for animals only, but they can occasionally sneak through with Dwarves so it’s not very secure. It’s often better to use pastures to keep animals in a given place, since animals won’t try to leave those.
s: Set as Internal: Remember when we were defining the dormitory, the edges of the room were blocked by the surrounding walls and doors? Internal doors won’t block the room designation, allowing you to set up multi-area rooms.

For now, press l to forbid passage through the door, locking the henhouse and preventing access. Now the hens and geese can roost and your Dwarves won’t interrupt the hatching process. You’ll get an announcement when chicks or goslings hatch, and after that they will take a year or two to reach adulthood and start laying eggs themselves.

There are a few thing to take into account here:

Hens lay up to 15 eggs at a time, and geese a little over half of that. This can quickly lead to a massive exponential population growth. It’s a good idea to keep it in check by unlocking the door every now and then.

Related to the above is the fact that too many animals in too small a space will start small fights each other. These usually end with nothing more than scratches and bruises, but can occasionally cause bigger injuries. You’ll probably want to get all the goslings and chicks out of the nesting room shortly after they hatch because of this.

Chapter Conclusion

The Craftdwarf’s workshop has more uses than the ones we’ve covered here, and we’ve not even seen the most important ones yet. Engraving slabs is something you’ll need to do every now and again when a Dwarf dies, and we’ll cover that in a conditional chapter based on that morbid inevitability. Crossbow bolts made of wood and bone aren’t as good as metal ones, but use more common resources and are perfect for practicing with (that’ll have its own chapter too, but I’m not sure if it’ll be conditional or not).

Eggs and poultry breeding are just two of the options you have for feeding your fortress, and are reliable enough that you could use them as your sole methods, if you were boring like that. You would still need to farm for plants to brew and for thread so you could make cloth, though. You’d also lose out on a few side benefits of other methods, like the bones, fat, and hides from butchered animals.

The Trade Depot is essential, and you’ll want to have one available at all times. There are things we can’t produce on our own due to lack of resources at this particular location, and trading can get us limited quantities of those things. You’ll also trade with other races who can produce things that Dwarves can’t.

Chapter 8 Endsave

[Nice Save]

(reserved)

[Nice Save]

(reserved)

[Nice Save]

Conditional Chapter 1: Migrants Have Arrived

(In the demonstration game this happened halfway through chapter 8 )



OK, so this will be happening a lot through your fortress-dooming career. Migrants are the main way your fortress will expand in population. Even though dwarves can and will have children, it's a fairly old fortress that will see them become adults, while you'll get migrants almost every season, and the higher your fortress wealth, the more you'll get.

So what is actually going to happen?

The map should have zoomed to the migrants arriving at the edge of the map, and paused the game. You'll be able to see a single dwarf there, flashing with a grey X (as shown by the extremely enlightening screenshot above – it’s more obvious in game). That doesn't mean you're only getting one migrant – every few seconds another one will appear in the same spot until they've all finished arriving, while the previous ones will make a beeline for the nearest meeting zone.

Migrant waves can contain the following:

Adult Dwarves – highly skilled, poorly skilled, or completely unskilled. May be related to each other.
Dwarven children – of various ages, they're arriving with their parents.
Pets – each belonging to one of the dwarves.
Other animals – possibly including non-adult animals.

Spoiler: an actual spoiler (click to show/hide)

Vampires – but you won't know the difference from normal dwarves until you start finding dead bodies.

Spoiler: If your migrants have arrived on the other side of the river (click to show/hide)

 They'll be stuck until you can open a path. There's the option of making a path from floors across the river, but I prefer a tunnel under it myself – you can fill it with cage traps later on and catch wildlife to butcher. Dig a staircase down to z-level -3 on each side of the river, then join the bottom of the two staircases together.

Unpause the game and watch the migrants appear and charge off to your meeting zone, getting a rough count as they go. When no more appear after roughly the same interval, they've all arrived and you can pause the game again to inspect them.

I got 3:

Fikod:



Atír:



Stâkud:



I also got a duckling and a piglet, both male and neither being pets.

Let's take a look at the skills of my new labour force:

Spoiler: Fikod (click to show/hide)

 Has some minor ranged military skills which should come in handy later. As far as work goes, she's apparently best at catching fish, and also has the fish cleaning skill. These complement each other pretty well – the fish she catches aren't usually edible directly, they need to be cleaned at a fishery by – you guessed it – a fish cleaner. Fish dissecting is only useful for extracting a cooking ingredient from one specific species of fish, so we can ignore it. Personally, I would have Fikod's main job be fishing and fish cleaning, but also activate woodcutting and herbalism, so that she can take care of all our outdoorsy-type jobs and be the only dwarf exposed on the surface like that. Another option would be to have her hunt instead of chop wood, since that would increase her marksman skill (mining, woodcutting, and hunting are mutually exclusive since each needs different equipment – pick, axe, or ranged weapon respectively). Hunting is dangerous though since dwarves will take on anything without regard to personal safety, and we don't have any crossbows so they would run off and try to kill the animals with their fists.

Spoiler: Atír (click to show/hide)

 Has minor melee military skills, is a slightly worse fisherman that Fikod, and is a Great Potter. That's a pretty high skill rank, she could make some pretty high-quality pottery goods. Too bad we don't have any clay on this map – maybe we'll trade for some later on. Finally, she has an impressive array of social skills. They're mostly useless in practical terms, but will probably mean she ends up elected mayor quite often. She'd actually make a good Expedition Leader/Mayor, since her Consoler and Pacifier skills are so high. When a dwarf gets unhappy, they'll sometimes go and shout at the leader, venting some frustration and allowing the leader to use those two skills to calm them down, giving a happy thought.

Spoiler: Stâkud (click to show/hide)

 Similar military skills to Atír – they would make good squadmates. Tracker is a useless skill for our purposes – it's only used during the generation of the world. She's a grower too, although not as good as Meng, so I would put her to work on the farms. That would give Meng some spare time for his secondary skills.

Of course, your migrants will be different from mine – you might only have two, or you might have more. The biggest first wave I’ve ever heard of was around 24, but I’d be surprised if anyone following this guide came close to double digits. Remember that the number of migrants you get is influenced by the value of items you’ve created over the life of your fortress, and we’ve been taking it fairly slow.

Take a look through the skills of your new recruits. If any of them have Hunting in their list of skills, make sure and deactivate it – hunters need a bit too much micromanagement for our purposes, or they’ll end up getting themselves killed. If you have any highly skilled carpenters, brewers, or any of the other professions we’ve already learned about, consider putting them to work. Otherwise, set them to hauling for now. In Interlude 2 we’ll go through all the workshops that haven’t been covered so far, which should help you decide what to do with them.

If you’d like to keep things closer to the demonstration game, you could consider downloading the Chapter 8 Endsave when you finish that chapter – you could then play with the same migrants as me. That’s by no means required though, and you shouldn’t have any trouble following along if you don’t.

One thing I would recommend doing just now is to set one of your migrants to be your new Expedition Leader. This is because one of the duties of an Expedition Leader is to meet with your Outpost Liaison once a year, at the same time as the Dwarven caravan arrives to trade (trading will have its own Conditional Chapter). If Zaneg is both the Expedition Leader and the Broker, she’ll have to trade and meet the liaison during the same period of time. This is actually fine 90% of the time since the liaison will wait around, but missing a caravan would be a big deal so it’s best not to risk it. Of course, if one of your migrants has a better Appraiser skill than Zaneg, doing it the other way around would work too.

Remember, to assign a noble you press n to get to the nobles screen, select the role you want to replace, and press r to bring up the list of Dwarves.

In my game I’m setting Atír to be my Expedition Leader, since her skills are well suited for it. I’m also thinking of ways to put her, Fikod, and Stâkud to work around the fortress – not that they wouldn’t be valuable as extra hands to haul to the stockpiles.

However, before we start playing around with the labour menus on individual Dwarves, I’m going to introduce Dwarf Therapist, a third party tool that reads the skills and labours of your Dwarves, lays them out in a grid pattern, and lets you make changes directly from the tool. There are also a bunch of other features that can make life easier for you. It’s not a huge difference when you’ve got a low population fort like ours, but after enough in-game years you might end up with a Dwarf count measured in triple figures, and Therapist can make that manageable.

Here’s the link to the tool’s forum thread – we’re not using the most recent update to Dwarf Fortress, so make sure and get the version for DF 34.11, which is version 22.0 at time of writing:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=122968.0

Here’s what it looks like:



A quick rundown of the basics:

You can see the list of your Dwarves on the left – the Group By dropdown at the top will let you split the list up by various categories, the most useful of which is Current Job.
After this are columns for a few handy miscellaneous status indicators, and then columns for each labour in the game – the boxes will fill up as the Dwarf gets more skilled, and are coloured blue if the labour is activated. There are tooltips packed with information for all the boxes and the Dwarf names themselves, which appear if you hover the mouse over them.
Clicking in any of the labour boxes will activate/deactivate the labour for that Dwarf, but with a red box around it which means it hasn’t been saved yet. Right clicking a box will give you the option to activate/deactivate a whole category of labours.
At the top is the option to Read Dwarves, which will pull current information from the game – if you’ve run the game for a while you’ll be looking at old information until you Read Dwarves. There’s also the Commit button, which will write any unsaved labour changes into the game.

There’s much more you can do with Dwarf Therapist, but I’m not going to go into the details of how to work it, since it’s pretty straightforward and has its own manual. It’s also optional, so if you’d prefer to stick with the same labour changing method we have been using, bash on.

In the end, I left the labours of my migrants as they were, but added woodcutting and plant gathering to Atír and Fikod. Atír and Fikod will fish, chop wood and gather plants, and once I build a Fishery workshop they’ll also clean the fish to make them edible. Stâkud will help Meng in the fields, and all three of my migrants will haul as well. That will keep them busy enough, without making them too essential to join my militia later on.

Here’s a list of other things to consider when you get a wave of migrants:

• Animals: Review all the animals that arrive – if any of them need to graze, assign them to a pasture with grass in it (covered near the end of chapter 0). If they’re not an animal type that you want to keep around, you can butcher them (covered in chapter 10). If they’re egg-laying, you might want to make a few extra nest boxes (covered in chapter 8 ).
• Facilities: More Dwarves need more beds, chairs and tables, etc. It’s always a good idea to have enough spare bedrooms and dining capacity to cover migrant waves, but a dormitory will make a good backup.
• Food and drink: The number of mouths to feed can change drastically when a migrant wave arrives, especially during the first year of a fortress. Keeping an eye on your food stocks and production is sensible all the time, but making the checks every time migrants arrive is a good way to avoid falling behind, and it’s a good idea to divvy out food and booze production jobs first when assigning your new workers.

Chapter Conclusion:

In the end, there’s nothing really ground-breaking to cover with migrant waves – you’re pretty much just doing the same thing with more Dwarves. Planning for and dealing with the increase of population will take up a good chunk of your time though – Interlude 3 is the closest we’ll come to dealing directly with that, but all the chapters have bits and pieces which will help.

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