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[Urist McVoyager]

Noise from outdoor jobs like tree cutting tends to travel about seven Z-levels, even through solid rock. So dig down to the bottom surface level, then seven more levels down, and place your bedrooms there. Hopefully you don't strike caverns during the digging, but that did happen on my last fort. Was my first time hitting caverns at all, and it was damn inconvenient. 

After you've marked that out, you might base your Fortress around said measurement. Get the permanent farms set on the bottom soil level, get the food processing centers on the stone level right below it, with the dining hall either on that level or one below. Set your workshops within a level or two of the bedrooms so they're pretty well centralized and easy to reach.

OH! Right, also, my measurements and assumptions are based on my standard fortress design: A single central shaft of a 2x2 staircase running through an 8x8 room on each floor. You can house four workshops and easily create a pair of 3x8 storage halls off of each corner, for the workshops to use.

The bedroom level has a corridor shooting off of each cardinal direction. How many rooms you can have depends on the size of the rooms. My current standard is a 3x3 room with a bed in the far corner, a cabinet across from the door, and a chest on the remaining corner. I  run ten rooms off of each corridor, so each level houses forty families.

[Darkgamma]

Noise from outdoor jobs like tree cutting tends to travel about seven Z-levels, even through solid rock. So dig down to the bottom surface level, then seven more levels down, and place your bedrooms there. Hopefully you don't strike caverns during the digging, but that did happen on my last fort. Was my first time hitting caverns at all, and it was damn inconvenient. 

After you've marked that out, you might base your Fortress around said measurement. Get the permanent farms set on the bottom soil level, get the food processing centers on the stone level right below it, with the dining hall either on that level or one below. Set your workshops within a level or two of the bedrooms so they're pretty well centralized and easy to reach.

OH! Right, also, my measurements and assumptions are based on my standard fortress design: A single central shaft of a 2x2 staircase running through an 8x8 room on each floor. You can house four workshops and easily create a pair of 3x8 storage halls off of each corner, for the workshops to use.

The bedroom level has a corridor shooting off of each cardinal direction. How many rooms you can have depends on the size of the rooms. My current standard is a 3x3 room with a bed in the far corner, a cabinet across from the door, and a chest on the remaining corner. I  run ten rooms off of each corridor, so each level houses forty families.

Ok this is good to keep in mind now that I'll do a second game.
Basically, another collapse - this time in previously dug-out areas, in the fields - killed the grower, caused the king to go batshit and kill three more and then jump into the river at the west edge of the map. Pesky worthless nobles.

[Urist McVoyager]

Yeah, without a justice system, the worst a King will do is go mad from various stresses and follow his personality to its insane conclusion. Either Depression which will have him sulking in his room til he dehydrates, Going Stark Raving Mad and stripping and tossing his clothes around before streaking through the halls babbling until his dehydration death, or going Berserk and killing everyone he can reach. Which can be a Fortress killer.

[Darkgamma]

Does this count as berserk?

[Urist McVoyager]

Yup.

Restarting is perfectly honorable under the circumstances, though continuing on would be possible if you could isolate that last survivor until immigrants come.

ETA: Vanilla embark points is 1324, just for reference on how much you've bolstered them.

[Melting Sky]

Yay. Growing pains that include random collapses and teleportation through levels <_<
Well, good to know. Ought to avoid digging so shallowly.

Cave ins are perhaps the single most devastating and dangerous force in the game. They can instantly kill any being in the game and they will keep collapsing through multiple floors until they reach a layer of solid stone. So say you collapse a tree on the surface directly over your fortress with 15 floors stacked underneath it. So long as there is a room or passage on each level below the tree it will cause a cave in that continues all the way down to the floor of the deepest level of your fortress killing everything in between.

[WJLIII3]

I'll accept this as baby steps on the no-cheating front. The vanilla points are in the 1300s range, not multiple thousands. To get the full feel of the game, you should have to be selective about what you bring.

There's also a lot of skills in your set-up. While I can see the use in a dedicated trader/bookkeeper, you don't necessarily need the book-keeping skill as a starter. Even without it, I've managed to set a no-points keeper to highest precision within a season or two. With a grower and so many seeds, you don't really need an herbalist. You could swap that butcher to trapping, if you're looking to feed into the leather industry.  I generally set my carpenter and mason as two separate people so the carpenter can be doing beds while the mason triples up on doors, chests, and cabinets.

The set-up I was given involved 2 miners, a mason, a wood cutter, a carpenter, a grower, and a brewer. With the new version, I'd double up the mason as a mechanic and add in architecture so it can set up defenses early. A grower won't be constantly busy, so you could double the grower as a brewer. You'll be constantly mining for more space/stone, so you might want your miner to be dedicated/hauling for the few down moments it has between rooms.

Sorry for the wall of text, I'm just passing on how I do things in case you can pull ideas. Play however you want.

If that's a wall, cave-in is imminent.

[Darkgamma]

Yup.

Restarting is perfectly honorable under the circumstances, though continuing on would be possible if you could isolate that last survivor until immigrants come.

ETA: Vanilla embark points is 1324, just for reference on how much you've bolstered them.

Ah, okay. Modified the embark points to 1324 now. Will probably be better. The earlier embark was also quite loaded: would require lots of hauling tasks to bring the produce indoors. Starting over anyhow, the last survivor had broken legs

Cave ins are perhaps the single most devastating and dangerous force in the game. They can instantly kill any being in the game and they will keep collapsing through multiple floors until they reach a layer of solid stone. So say you collapse a tree on the surface directly over your fortress with 15 floors stacked underneath it. So long as there is a room or passage on each level below the tree it will cause a cave in that continues all the way down to the floor of the deepest level of your fortress killing everything in between.

Okay, that is bugged.

[MaskedMiner]

Honestly, you don't need to modify anything for easy mode. Only thing you need to do is to create pocked world with with minimum amount of civilizations and use the world that doesn't have goblins. Or alternatively, just embark on island without other civilizations. Wildlife in caves can be hard and megabeast can be dangerous, but megabeasts don't start attacking before you have population of 80(I think) and a lot of created wealth so either way you are safe until you have learned to keep your dwarves alive from starvation and thirst and wild life whether cavern or surface.

(I'm not sure about current version since nowadays civilizations can declare war on each other after world gen, but in previous version I had extremely easy time with small world where only humans, dwarfs and elves existed as nobody attacked me and two other races sent caravans once a year)

[quarague]

my starting 7 usually look as follows:
2 miners
1 mason
1 carpenter/woodcutter
1 jeweller+ rock crafter
1 expedition leader
1 grower/ cook/ brewer
I give the 2 miners the maximum proficient skill and disable hauling for around the first half year, and they still don't sit idle,
with the first migrant wave, I get one engraver (actually more a wall smoother, until he gets fairly good at it), separate the grower and cook/brew in 2 dwarfs and similarly separate jeweller and rock crafter
I also tend to bring cats, dogs and chickens (or some other egg laying bird) usually 3 females+1male each, animals are not monogamous are they? ;-)

[martinuzz]

Brought six cats

Yer doomed matey.


I've kinda made this my standard embark group:

-one expedition leader (the dwarf who seems most suitable in it's thoughs and preferences): 5 points in one or two random social skills will ensure getting the expedition leader position.
The other 5 points I usually put in cooking. Expedition leaders make good cooks
- one woodcutter (5) / carpenter (5)
- one miner (3) / engraver (3) / mason (4)
- one miner (3)/ engraver (3)/ stonecrafter (4) (early trade goods if you dislike selling roasts)
- one miner (3)/ engraver (3)/ brewer (4)
- one planter (5) / mechanic (5)
- one dwarf with 10 points spent on fighting, striking, dodging, +weapon of choice

2 female war dogs, 5 male war dogs. Each dwarf is assigned one at start. I try to give the female dogs to miners, so they have less chance of dying to something on the surface.
1 male kitten, one female kitten. Postponing catsplosion until they mature.

The points spent on cooking / brewing are not strictly nescessary, but it's nice to start making semi-decent meals if you want to trade them, and afaik booze does have hidden quality modifiers that influence happy thoughts.

I worked with 2 embark miners for a long time, but after careful consideration, I've found the third miner to really pay off when establishing the fort.
The military dwarf usually gets to do all the oddjobs that aren't covered by others, until migrants arrive that can fill thses jobs. Then he'll be military commander, and form the first squad.

[blue sam3]

So, basically, I've decided to try my hand in actual Dwarf Fortress. So far I've been learning and playing with the game with various cheats enabled: I finally decided this is just wimpmode. Embarked my first actual fort in a calm, cold forest. Brought six cats and six pigs and the following dorfs:

Six cats might be potentially problematic from an FPS standpoint. I'd probably switch most of them for poultry and/or dogs instead.

2 Miner/ 2 Engraver/ 2 Thresher/ 2 Mechanic/ 2 Bowyer

Miner is usually unnecessary (you can train it really fast). Ditto engraver. I probably wouldn't take thresher or bowyer either.

5 Gemcutter/ 2 Mason/ 2 Carpenter/ 1 Architect

Architect is unnecessary.

2 Record Keeper/ 2 Organizer/ 1 Judge of Intent/ 1 Intimidator / 1 Liar/ 1 Negotiator / 1 Persuader/ 1 Appraiser

Don't put levels into record keeper. You can just train it up, and get stat bonuses for free.

2 Woodcutter/ 2 Weaponsmith/ 2 Armorsmith/ 1 Furnace Operator/ 1 Woodburner

I wouldn't bother with any of these, honestly. Woodcutter you can train up, and the others aren't needed early.

5 Herbalist/ 2 Butcher/ 2 Tanner/ 1 Leatherworker

Ditto.

5 Grower
5 Cook/ 5 Brewer

Both fine. Your other dwarves all have very spread out skills though. I'd prefer to give them just one or two specialisations, and fill out the rest with migrants.

Came with some two hundred units of dwarven wine, about four hundred seeds and about ten different types of meat (from various animals). The stocks tentatively say ~300 meat and ~50 fish and twenty logs for absolutely no reason at all. I was still left with about four thousand embark points even after purchasing five silver maces and five steel shortswords. I got about sixty barrels in all. No wheelbarrow, I can make that later on. Well then, let's strike the Earth.

All that's OK, given the crazy amount of embark points you've got.

Six cats? Male and Female?

Three each, and four sows and two boars.

For breeding purposes, one male and many females is more efficient.

Yup.

Restarting is perfectly honorable under the circumstances, though continuing on would be possible if you could isolate that last survivor until immigrants come.

ETA: Vanilla embark points is 1324, just for reference on how much you've bolstered them.

Ah, okay. Modified the embark points to 1324 now. Will probably be better. The earlier embark was also quite loaded: would require lots of hauling tasks to bring the produce indoors. Starting over anyhow, the last survivor had broken legs

Cave ins are perhaps the single most devastating and dangerous force in the game. They can instantly kill any being in the game and they will keep collapsing through multiple floors until they reach a layer of solid stone. So say you collapse a tree on the surface directly over your fortress with 15 floors stacked underneath it. So long as there is a room or passage on each level below the tree it will cause a cave in that continues all the way down to the floor of the deepest level of your fortress killing everything in between.

Okay, that is bugged.

No it isn't. That's exactly as intended. It basically comes down to "what happens if you drop a 2x2x3m cube of rock (weighing something on the order of 30 tonnes, depending on the type of rock), on a thin layer of rock?" Answer: It keeps on going through until it comes to an actual obstacle.

[Edmus]

Pigs are good because they don't need grass, dogs are slightly better IMO because they can be trained as war dogs in a pinch.

[martinuzz]

I do not entirely agree on architect skill being useless.
I used to include it when I was still using 2 miners instead of 3.

a good architect can provide a ton of happy thoughts.

[Urist McVoyager]

I've started placing a single point into it on my construction workers so they start the game with it turned on.