Chapter 0: This Is What Stuff Looks Like.In which ocular apparatus is engagedWill 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
< (as you would type it, so use the shift key). 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-lookThat'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:
- 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:
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 ConclusionAll 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
Author
Topic: Tabarkel: A play-along tutorial for a complete newcomer (Read 13841 times)