First thing to do? Dismember the wagon for 3 units of wood. Then you can use two pieces of wood to make a carpentry and masonry. The last piece of wood goes into making a wooden training axe for your woodcutter. The masonry then makes rock blocks. Bring a couple rocks as well... they'll be your smelters and forges. They don't need to be magma safe, but you might as well if they are available (same price as normal stone). Then, like someone else mentioned, bring copper+tin ores and some coal. The first rock block becomes a wood burner that will make a single unit of charcoal after your woodcutter gets some wood chopped. Alternatively, you can just bring a single unit of coke/charcoal for 10 points to skip this step. Then make a smelter and make a unit of coal before a batch of bronze. Now continue making some more charcoal, but you have enough for your weaponsmith to make a pair of picks. If you brought a military dwarf (settled near a tower/evil biome/just being cautious), you can go ahead and forge a starter set of armor for him. Remember, unskilled armor-users get encumbered. I think you need at least 3 levels in the skill to comfortably use a simple bronze get-up. Never give full metal to an unskilled dorf (use a sparse leather/bone set for fresh meat, or just give them a single mail shirt).
Forging your own tools, even without a weaponsmith, save massive amounts of money. Each pick is 44 points, and that axe is something like 68. 8 bronze bars are worth 12 points total. One stone block to turn into a wood burner/smelter/forge is just 3 points. For 15 points you can save 156. It just costs you some time before you can begin digging... do NOT do this if you have to get below ground asap... like in a glacier or freezing biome.
I prefer to bring two skilled miners. I know, I know, leveling up in dirt is so fast! Just a season of making big open sores and shitty ass dirt tunnels is all you need! After forging my own tools, I don't want to wait even more time before starting my fortress! And no, I don't want to build large rooms in the dirt. I want to dig straight into the stone, and only leave agricultural stuff (farms, underground pastures, related workshops) in the dirt. Everything else gets carved out of stone like Armok intended. I also hate looking at giant empty "rooms" that I leveled up in. You don't get any stone or expose any gems/ore either. About the only useful thing you could do is level up your miners to make an underground tree farm, but that requires at least 4 layers of soil if you don't want to build a roof or flood stone.
NEVER bring food on embark and NEVER waste skill points on cooks and brewers. Want immediate food on embark? Butcher your pack animals. It is seriously the only good thing you can do with them. You'll get ~60 food (120 value!) and some crafting materials (bones/hooves/horns/skull), and a couple pieces of leather. They are just not worth keeping around to get a breeding pair for a number of reasons. The odds of a breeding pair on embark are just too low. Your chances of getting a breeding pair by the first caravan are also low. Even if you get a breeding pair, they take far too long to produce a proper herd. They will always be large grazers. They will never be shearable. I never keep grazers that aren't also shearable. So I can get milk, yarn, meat, leather, AND bones from the animals. Or, just use a non-grazer or egg-layer (as they don't require pastures). Even piercing/resealing the caverns and digging out an underground pasture (or channeling down and roofing over a space) is far more work than just tossing your pigs in a cold stone room or building a couple nest boxes.
Cooking and brewing simply don't need levels. Drinks never have a quality level, and food quality levels do NOT matter for happy thoughts. Its just to abuse their over-the-top trading value. Even then, butcher the pack animals, set up the farms, and have some idle dwarfs strip the countryside bare. Build stepladders and drown in apples. Made use a fisher to gain shells as well, and/or a hunter. Line the area in cage traps and butcher everything. Any way you slice it, you can seriously overproduce food waaaaay too quickly to bother starting with skills. Rendering fat from a ton of turkeys you brought on embark to butcher is another way to jumpstart a new cook's career.
Milk. If you are going to bring food, bring milk. Its an easy no-quality job to churn it into cheese at a farmers' shop. It also comes in its own barrel and is worth half the cost of normal food. Bringing 5 stacks of 10 different milks gets you 10 more barrels and twice the food for the same price.
That being said, it usually is worth it to bring a skilled grower. Dabbling growers can actually fail to plant seeds, and then only get 1 plant back from the successful plantings. Thus, if you want/need to rely on farming early, bring a grower. Otherwise, you can just use herbalism and keep planting the seeds you get for experience, not caring if they germinate or not. HOWEVER, there is a compounding effect of high food stacks. They haul quicker (one stack of 6 instead of 6 stacks of 1), and they brew into barrels more efficiently. That 1 stack of 6 becomes "Dwarven wine pot [30]" instead of needing six separate pots (and brewing jobs!) to make 6 separate "Dwarven wine pot [5]" So starting with either a skilled grower/herbalist will ensure higher stacks of plants that require fewer jobs to process and fewer pots/barrels to brew into. Its an overall time saver. A skilled herbalist in an embark with dense vegetation can bring in well over 100 food in just about two weeks too. Its good stuff.
I only ever bring 7 of each seed at most. I don't like making a giant plot of just plumpies, and 7 is a good number if you ever want to fertilze. Dwarves get pissy if they have to eat/drink the same thing too much, so you want to grow a spread of things. I like 4+ plots of this size to keep up diversity, and a legendary farmer will have you drowning in food even without fertilizer. Turn on "only farmers harvest" at first. You won't need enough farm plots to prevent your farmer from being able to harvest everything, and he'll level up quicker. Thus, you can get to higher yields (increased efficiency) sooner. Once hes legendary you can turn it back on. If you don't want to bother with refining the various advanced crops, just don't bother with quarry bushes and brew all the cave wheat and sweet pods into booze. Plump helmets, butchering yields, eggs, fish, and whatever you buy off the caravans should be good enough food variety.
Just straight up ditch everything below the seeds. NO you do NOT need a pair of ropes and some cloth on embark. You don't need a stepladder either. If the area is so wood poor you can't afford to make a stepladder... you don't have the trees to justify even having a stepladder. Leather is the same price as cheap thread, but doesn't need to be woven into cloth first. You can just make it straight into bags. Or, bring the 30 turkeys/geese at 6 points each. You get ~18 food, some bones, AND a bit of leather for the same price... just have to spend a few seconds butchering and another few seconds tanning the hide. Either way... don't bring cloth. Leather will make great bags, make backpacks, waterskins, and quivers. Cloth can only do the first. You won't need to replace clothing for a few years either, so you have plenty of time to set up more critical industries and infrastructure before needing textiles.
If you absolutely must bring cloth, just bring sheep. You can eventually butcher them for food, but you can also milk them and shear them. Each shearing job gets you 7 units of wool that you have to process into yarn before weaving into cloth. It's only worth 42 dwarf bucks per shearing, but again, you get a continual source of food/leather/bones along with your textiles.
I like to start with a skilled (high str/creative) mason too. I want at least some quality furniture for my early dining room. This gets the good thoughts rolling sooner... but you could just spit out some crappy furniture and then churn out stone blocks. Once leveled, you can start replacing the place-holder stuff.
A skilled weapon/armorsmith is also good at embark. Thus, when you finally get your metal industry up and running, you don't need to spend months training on no-quality weapons. Your military gets at least middling quality asap, and you need significantly fewer jobs until you start spitting out the odd masterwork.
I do like to bring a medical dwarf. I also leave them as my first scholar to keep their skills from getting rusty, then unassign them if someone actually needs treatment. Eventually I can draft more doctors from migrants.
Architecture just doesn't matter. A shoddily constructed forge will never break down. Its just there to generate happy thoughts that you shouldn't need this early. If you want to train a dedicated architect, burrow one inside a locked room of freshly mined stone. Have him design a field of archery targets, but then dismantle them and re-design continuously. It helps to give him a room and some food/drink. Just make sure no one with masonry comes in to finish building them.
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Topic: What are your embarking tips and tricks? (Read 9080 times)