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[Jigowah]

I've been playing for 1-2 years now.  I only recently discovered that you can designate things in the x,y AND z-axis.  For some reason I thought you could only designate areas in the x/y plane, and this made activities like digging a 50z staircase, level by level, such a grind that I would make macros on my keyboard to do it faster.  I just hope this helps someone else.  Am I the last person to figure this out!?

Better late than never I suppose...

[Richard Von Veger]

Heh, I know that feel.I am playing DF for some 6-7 months now and I learned that 2-3 months ago.I suppose that you learn the more and more you play DF...

[TerryDactyl]

For all intents and purposes, that is a relatively new feature, so no need to feel foolish.

[Jigowah]

Mostly I'm just glad to know now . It makes so many little things better. Burrows are about 100x more useful!

[NW_Kohaku]

Fun fact: When starting a new embark, you can try starting the game by finding all the caverns by just hitting "down stair", digging a random spot, going down one z, switching to "up/down stair", hitting enter, then holding down the down z button until you hit the bottom of the world, and hit enter again. 

When you hit the caverns, just move horizontally to get through a column in the caverns, remove and channel the old stairs, and replace the old space with a grate (or a wall if you hit it sideways) and then when you dig down a bit, dig back to your original designation and keep going. 

This can also be useful if you tap a river wrong and flood your fort: Having grates off a stairwell that drain into the caverns means that instead of flooding your fort, you're simply drowning the caverns. (Sorry about that troglodytes!)

[Insert_Gnome_Here]

Yep that is basically how all my games start.

[Numeroid]

Not as bad as when I first started. I didn't know you could change the size of farm plots and I designated each tile by hand. I felt like the biggest fool when I finally actually read the interface.

[Putnam]

For all intents and purposes, that is a relatively new feature, so no need to feel foolish.

3 years old, yeah

[Loud Whispers]

Almost as bad as not knowing that you can mass designate items with (d) (b), I manually dumped hundreds of boulders before figuring that out...

[Niddhoger]

Realizing I could forbid/dump items from the stocks screen was a HUGE help.  Hell... just learning to work my way around the stocks screen really helps orient you better than just watching your dorfs scramble from stockpile to workshop and back, especially once your fort starts to mature.  This is especially of help when a weaponsmith enters a strange mood and I flip to the stocks screen to forbid all the junk metals. Zinc spear? ewwwwwww

[Immortal-D]

OP, don't fret.  I've been playing the game several years now, and still discover new things.  Often times I'll take a break and completely forget about a particular mechanic.  For example, my latest Fortress has a sand castle on the surface.  Everything was going fine, albeit extremely slowly.  4 years later, I realized that my Dwarves have been using raw boulders, because I never ordered any blocks

[KtosoX]

Almost as bad as not knowing that you can mass designate items with (d) (b), I manually dumped hundreds of boulders before figuring that out...

I remember the hassle which was manual item forbidding and dumping and so forth quite vividly. Those were terrible dark days.

[Alfrodo]

hmmm..

I can't think of anything obvious I recently discovered. But when I just started (2-3 years ago. back before minecarts and wheelbarrows.) I didn't know what a barrow did.  So I defined one and put all my dwarves in it.

They all died of starvation and thirst as I was saying "THE RIVER IS RIGHT THERE DAMMIT"

It did take me like 3 months of play before I realized Hey! I can smooth walls!

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, if we're talking about realizations, apparently, vermin no longer produce miasma when they rot.  It's been this way for years, as I've been told.  So I was making elaborate corpse-disposing atom-smasher dumping pits for nothing, I guess.  (Oh well, at least I can dispose of the nervous tissue and other junk items, now...)

[Putnam]

Elaborate atom-smasher dumping pits are never for nothing.