Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Romegypt]

This is my first post on the forums, but I have been trolling them for a while (Looking at posts on them). I have played dwarf fortress almost a year, and am psyched for this update. I do wish dwarf therapist existed for this version, but I can get along fine without it.

I thought I'd post about my first time playing. IT was rather confusing.
My brother was reading notch's twitter (Both of us play minecraft, but he is more devoted to it than I, though now we almost exclusively do the mod TFC. I'm 16 btw)
I love dwarf fortress. As  I said, my brother was reading notch's twitter, and read that dwarf fortress had been a big inspiration for notch. He decided to try it.

Upon playing it, he decided it was not for him. I tried it and loved it, but because of the ASCII I couldn't find out what was going on as easily. So I abandoned the world, and looked for some way to change the graphics.

Thus I was lead the perridexiserrants, amazing LNP. I used it exclusively (until the update, then I bothered to learn ASCII and it wasn't so hard anymore). I started my first "Official" fort, and loaded it up.

I had deigned not to prepare carefully, and so ended up with the standard miner/farmer/fisher/so-on setup. The first thing I thought was food. I had looked up; no external wikis or guides. I trolled through the build menu, hit workshops, found the fishery, and tried to build it. I had no building materials? cool!

After wondering why I couldn't build it, I went to designations. I needed to chop trees I saw. I realized how things were designated, and dug a 5x5 tunnel roughly 20 tiles deep into the hill. Excited, I also chopped tons of trees, and subsequently gathered a good many plants.

I decided to build a road from my fishery to my entrance. I then built a carpenters workshop and pumped out a few barrels/beds. That's were I stopped. One of my guys managed to drown himself, and as I looked for him, one dwarf went crazy needing beer. I'd thought I was doing good, as I had had a surplus of food. I had also figured out the stockpiles (how to set basic ones, not change settings) and had finally learned the staircases. Then they died.

Everyone died of thirst before a tantrum spiral, and to this day I STILL haven't had a tantrum spiral. waiting for one though, with quite some apprehension.

I did end up looking and wikis and guides quite a lot after that, until I learned the basics. Vanguard of Valor's Youtube guide series was EXTREMELY helpful, way better than anyone else's (Sorry quill18/sippycup/whoever else I'm forgetting!). In fact, I wish he would continue past episode 35, he was just about to test a fighting chamber.


So how did I do my first time? How did you guys do? post your first times now!

[Codyo]

My first time? There wasn't much of one, my experience has mostly been testing things on dozens of embarks and trying to figure out how to make farms work for the longest time. Then I was told I could use clay\peat for free muddy soil. I have mainly used only the mayday texture pack when I was getting better at the game, found the DF therapist awhile after and it was OK.

I think my first semi-successful fortress was after I got a food industry going and managed to keep everyone happy for awhile. I breached some caverns and eventually had 3 forgotten beasts attacking at once. I failed boarding up some entrances so the beasts crawled up the stairwells into my fort, at the time I had about 60 dwarves.

I decided to put them all in the military (I am slow with a metal industry so they were only wrestlers). It ended up being a blood bath in my meeting hall and the forgotten beasts were killed and I only had a few survivors. All but one ended up tantruming to death. The last one had a willpower made of steel. So she was left to clean up the corpses and make the place look liveable again. She went through the corpses of her friends and family and didn't bat an eye. I eventually had other migrants come in, but as soon as they saw the carnage and all the miasma, they lost their minds. So again and again after migrant waves she became the only one, only to die due to some dangerous savage animal or maybe it was thirst. That fortress was v28

[Grahar]

As far as I can tell, you did fine.
My first fortress went down due to acute aquifer breaching from below. My second fortress was conquered by goblins, because I ordered all the civilians in one small emergency burrow, but the lever to the drawbridge was outside that burrow.
My third fortress finally succeeded to survive a few year, but when I finished the self-powered pump stack, DF2012 came out and I started a new world.
My fourth fortress was on an island and died of boredom. My fifth fortress died an FPS death with additional damage done by the hauling update, which set free hundreds of pieces of clothing instantly. I abandoned this one.
My sixth fortress failed to breach an aquifer and was swarmed with zombie mussel shells. I then proceeded to reclaim my fifth fortress, only to have severe setbacks by two forgotten beasts, where the second one reduced my fortress from 90 inhabitants to 15 (only to be scratched in halves by a dog). Since it was a twenty-year old fortress (with a break of three years), a lot of dead creatures had accumulated, so I would not get more than four immigrants each season. That's where I abandoned this fortress again.
After that, I built some smaller forts and tried out the adventurer mode.
Now the new version is up, and I plan to build a huge fortress as soon as there is an update without savegame corruption.
So basically, I am still a beginner.

[Broseph Stalin]

Not bad, death by dehydration is the usual way the first fort falls. Ironically most new players lack the skills necessary to make any of the more dramatic fuckups.

The first time I played I reinstalled the game twice because I looked at the screen and thought it was corrupted. Then I tried designating and it just seemed so strange and alien that I couldn't get into it. A year later I re-read boatmurdered and spent three days reading the wiki, watching video guides, and exploring third party resources. I downloaded LNP and built a dirt hole to live in in the middle of a swamp. Everyone died of thirst. My next fort I consider my REAL first fort. I dug out a small living area and a small stockpile and a small dining room and started a small economy based on textiles. I tried to work with clay but my woodcutters were constantly harassed by capybara men. I built over a hundred cage traps and sent out militia dwarves with the woodcutters old axes. I built a mass pit to execute the capybara men I'd caught and dedicated all my resources to fighting them. Eventually the fort flooded due to a well mishap and I was forced to abandon. The utter insanity of a group of dwarves fighting capybara people was so delightful that it's kept me hooked all these years.

[AernJardos]

Came across Dwarf Fortress a few years ago. Thought it sounded fun, and since I used to play MUDs like Achaea the ASCII format didn't bother me at all. I remember being very confused at the site selection screen, I thought I was actually taking the dwarves on a wagon trip ala Oregon Trail, as I didn't realise it was just a quick selection kind of thing. So I carefully charted my course and moved one square at a time through the terrain, around mountain ranges, over rivers, etc. I thought the screen on the side talking about the various minerals was some sort of daily dwarf prospector report. Eventually, I found a spot and settled down. Dug into the hill (after trying to dig for like 30 minutes), but kept everything on the first floor. Managed to do fairly well, until I decided I really wanted a water source inside, in case I was attacked. Dug a channel to the river. Cue entire fortress flood in less than 3 minutes. Everyone drowned.

[HawaiianJon]

Ah, first time playing...
Well my first time, I hadn't a clue what to do, so I tried the vague tutorial, got nothing.
I didn't know of the wiki page so I had no hint what anything did, so I did everything by trial and error.

I didn't even know how stairs or even how to go up and down levels.

I started on the side of a mountain, as I didn't know how to specifically place a fort.
I went with the auto play now function.
After about 2 hours on pause and looking in the various menus, I dug into the mountain and just dug out giant areas.
I set up a Mason workshop and looked inside to see what I could make the dwarves craft.
I made chairs and tables.
Then around that point, my dwarves were blinking all different colors, and I was freaking out, I didn't even know they needed food or drinks (I didn't check the z menu OF ALL THE MENUS TO NOT CHECK)
and then they all died.

Then I looked up Dwarf Fortress, so a wiki page... face planted into my desk and then studied it as I went along.

But yeah, my first time, I got them all killed within the first year.