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[TyRante]

Hello I am a fairly new player to DF. I started a fortress, it's been roughly a year since we embarked. I've gotten to a certain point where I can now grow and sustain my own food, have a dining hall, having loads of bedrooms, and finally having a good basic place for workshops and stockpiles. I know there's plenty of more for me to do, but I am not entirely what to tackle next. Especially when a lot of more of my dwarves are becoming idle from my lack of direction.

[Afghani84]

The next thing to dive into should be defence and military since you will get visitors at some point

[Baffler]

Idle dwarves can also be put to work in new civilian industries. Clothing is just as important as food and booze, even if the problems that come from ignoring it come later. Mass smoothing projects are also a good way to give idlers a job.

[anewaname]

Secure your fort entrance.
- Get a "frontgate" bridge built (it does not need to be over a moat, but it should be a raising bridge, not a retracting bridge). Get a lever built and linked to that bridge (so you can close the bridge when there is a crisis). Make sure other entrances to your fortress have doors or bridges.
- Get 4 or 6 dwarves in a squad and training (wood shields and wood practice weapons will work at first). Have them train near the frontgate and put some dogs near them. (when lone kobold and goblin thieves are spotted, these guys will run them down, and when goblin raiders show up, these guys will win or lose, but will give you time to pull the lever and close the gate to protect your civilians).

Produce some weapons and armor for your militia
- get a wood furnace, a smelter, and a forge built, and start smelting any ore that can be used to make weapons and armor.
- get a couple of hunters (wood or bone bolts) and let them hunt (make sure you have butcher and tanner workshops). The bones from their kills can be used to make more bone bolts and the leather can be used for leather armor. And importantly, hunters gain skill with their crossbows over time.

[Dunamisdeos]

After you secure your entrance I recommend a hospital setup.

[callisto8413]

Hospitals need fresh water so you may wish to start planning out how to get water into your Fortress without letting in enemy/were-lizards/so on.  Water projects can be dangerous, so be careful. 

Also think about -

Statue Gardens
Art Projects
Burial Chambers For The Cool Dwarfs.
A Library
A Tavern
Temple Complex
Outside Defenses
A Jail
Cells To Isolate Weres and/or Vampires

Don't rush it.  Think about taking a year for each of those.  More then a couple of years for the water/well system. 

[jimjulius]

Soon you will need proper armor and weapons for your military (and obviously you will need a trained military to use them). Now would be a good time to make a room for training, make a squad of ten dwarves, learn how to schedule training and activate/order the squad. Also you will need to learn how to smelt metals and forge items from metal - which means making fuel from wood. Does your site have suitable metal ores to make copper, bronze, iron, silver or steel weapons? Better trade for those metals if you don't, which mean either high-value or high bulk craft items to sell.

[Jako98145]

Get to the magma!  Keep digging until you see that invaluable red liquid, channel into it, build smith workshops over the magma spaces, and forge to your heart's content.  Also, build up a competent squad to deal with any pesky magma crabs that try to immolate your poor miners and smiths.  Oh, and don't dig too far into any adamantine, or else...well, it won't be pretty.

Or use trees for coal to make metal.  Not my approach, since I prefer to use them solely for construction, but your dwarfs won't have to travel to the depths to forge, at least 

[steel jackal]

be wary of the caverns if you go looking for magma, your dwarves might try and collect spider silk from it automatically and get in trouble with the cavern creatures, or worse, a forgotten beast

i recommend blocking off the caverns and digging down somewhere else until you get though it, that way you dont have to have a security detail around the entrance to them.

military wise, if you have goblins, humans, elves, or necromancers you should plan for war accordingly, while humans and elves wont attack unless you piss them off, goblins and necromancers will attack at any time once you reach requirements

goblins bring leather and copper equipment as well as monsters, elves bring wooden weapons and armor, humans bring various weapons grade materials, necromancers bring armored zombies, ive personally seen copper and bismuth bronze armor but i dont know what else they can wear.

when fighting goblins and elves axes do great, humans armor means that you will need at least steel if you use crossbows (though i personally advise against crossbows due to several issues with them) and spears can pierce their armor, mixed squads of hammer and spear work good. necromancers/zombies should never be fought with swords, axes, spears or other such weapons, maces are the best because a pulped corpse is one that will stay dead, silver maces are awesome. silver can come from tetrahedrite or galena.


as for industry, if you have fire clay you can make stoneware goods which are quite valuable and can be made infinitely, sand allows for glass which can also be made infinitely but isnt as valuable, it is however magma safe.
any other kind of clay can make earthenware, not as valuable as stoneware and also needs to be glazed to be able to hold liquids. they can be glazed with ash or cassiterite. (an ore of tin) if you glaze your ceramics with cassiterite it makes them very valuable, but the glaze is non-renewable. ash glaze is renewable but not as valuable. theres not much use for tin aside from making somebody with a preference for it happy, so using it for glazing is usually a good investment if your looking to produce wealth.

i would also recommend you start up a textile industry, clothing wears out over time and dwarves dont like being naked, plus putting on nice clothes makes them happy. you can use pig tail plants to make clothing.
first have them processed at a farmers workshop, this makes pig tail thread and pig tail seeds, then the thread gets woven into cloth at a loom, and then the cloth into clothing at a clothers workshop.
dwarves will wear whatever you give them, so it dosnt matter if you make dresses or cloaks, at the moment they dont care (though it would be neat if in the future dwarves got a bad thought about being embarrassed for guys being forced to wear a dress XD)


jails and the justice system are a bad idea, your most important dwarves could be arrested or beaten to death for failure to make the 30 adamantine war hammers, or 9001 slade beds that your idiot noble mandates (the 2nd was an exaggeration, but i think somebody had the first one happen)

temples are great, they give massive happiness boosts to non-agnostic dwarves, even just a room with nothing in it will allow them to get a good thought for worshiping, even more good thoughts from the nice stuff you put in it.

danger rooms are also a good idea, but dont go overboard on the wooden training spears, i tried 10 spears per weapon trap before but that resulted in some unlucky blows that took a few lives, one poor guy lost a lot of his teeth, and his left ear. if you stick to 1 or 2 spears per trap you will be fine, the dodging training can massively boost survivability.

another thing, do you have an appraiser and record keeper? they are the two most useful nobles, if you dont, then make an office out of a room with a table and a chair and assign somebody to be both, also turn off all their other labors. record keeping is a full time job and a very useful one at that, it lets you see EXACTLY whats in your fort and how much of it.

theres also a wiki, if you havent been there yet i recommend you take a look at it. also i commend you because it took me 3 months irl just to figure out how to make booze, and that was WITH the wikis help



also, since nobody seems to have given you a proper welcome, allow me

welcome to the bay 12 dwarf fortress forums, please leave your sanity at the door and throw your morals down that bottomless pit in hell.
whether you need to know how to properly torture an elf, or want tips on how to mentally and physically scar your dwarven babies by throwing them into a dark hole with war dogs attacking them for the next 10 years with nothing to eat or drink but what shrooms and booze was thrown in the pit with them when they were born so that one day you can turn them into a vampire wearwolf soldier who will be sent to the circus to fight the onslaught of clowns who are pouring out of the candy buttplug of happy funtime surprises and probably get their face melted off

[Ironfang]

I suggest that you get solidified defenses. I am a fan of making a corridor of death and suffering out of silver war hammers and short swords. I don't know the exact reason, but a tight corridor with around 60 of those weapons tears apart sidges in a very amusing way. Nothing like watching an ettin  get its legs crippled and then slowly chopped apart.

But as a question, how much do you have built above ground. Because if you have a lot of surface stuff, I would suggest setting up walls and gates. If you're a proper dwarf and underground, that good old hall of traps.

Also, get an industry going. Maybe bone carving, goblet making, whatever. You want to gain wealth and riches. That will lead to goblins bringing offerings to your glory.

[Nilbert]

Good suggestions.  One that is a must though I think before any of the larger projects is a garbage crunching dump.  Build a small room with a bridge in it (not retracting) and only one door that can be locked.  Note, room can be small and I put it near my kitchens/brewery/butcher shop section as that area creates the most waste.  Once the bridge is built, hook it up to a lever outside the room, and raise the bridge.  Put a dump underneath it; it will accumulate all the stuff that you designate.  Every few years, lock the door and drop the bridge.  Destroys all the worthless stuff that can drag down your FPS. I usually do a clothing a seed purge prior to pulling the lever every few years...

[Fleeting Frames]

Well, have a drawbridge or hatch + thief catcher on only entrance to the fort (or some other more complicated defence/offence system)? Whatever you want, then. I recommend picking one thing you think is cool and understanding it alongside doing it.

This will give you happy thoughts every time you load up the fortress and see it, for starters, and that's reason enough alone.

[FakerFangirl]

Get a fancy room ready for when a noble comes. Automate most of your work orders. Build a well. Make sure every squad can train properly, preferably near a chokepoint where enemies will attack.

[NJW2000]

Megaproject?

Overdesigned Necropolis?

[Ironfang]

Do you have a tavern?