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[coldstone]

id like any and all tips i can get to make the fastest running fort i can, thanks.

[Makrond]

Well, if you already know a bit about game mechanics, embark somewhere with a layer of obsidian, and maybe near a volcano or magma pipe/vent.

Obsidian is awesome because you can make swords out of it. Just make sure you have trees.

Magma means you don't need fuel. Be careful, though; with magma comes fire imps and magma men.

Adamantine, IMO, is overrated. It's nice to have, but if you're not careful, your fortress gets rapinated.

Other than that, dig out a giant room, preferably in dirt or something that doesn't leave stone behind. In this, place your food, furniture, finished goods and wood stockpiles. Also place a meeting hall in this room (press 'i', move the cursor to the top corner, press enter, move the cursor to the opposite corner, press enter, press 'm'.) Dig out more rooms on this level and build workshops in them. Especially: still, kitchen, mason's workshop, carpenter's workshop. Next, dig out another room, place a farm in it ('b'uild->farm 'p'lot). Press 'q' near the farm plot, press 'a', highlight 'plump helmet', press enter. Press 'b', highlight 'plump helmet', press enter. Press 'c', 'plump helmet'. Do the same for 'd'.

Brew Plump Helmets like crazy. Dwarven Wine = good. Cooked wine biscuits = good.

Basically, just build workshops and furnaces until you run out of room, then dig out more rooms. Do some exploratory mining and try to find stone, but more importantly try to find metal ores (magnetite and hematite are the most important. Metal ores are usually marked by a % when not mined, and the ores themselves are marked by *s).

And then you can always cheat.

[Kagus]

I believe you mean the pound sign: £

[Makrond]

Yes.

I use a tileset,so I can't remember what all the original things looked like. 

[MaxVance]

Embark on a goblin fortress, immediately draft all of your starters, and send them to take down the goblin bowmaster. Indeed, that will be a very fast fortress.

[FlamingCow]

Embark on a goblin fortress, immediately draft all of your starters, and send them to take down the goblin bowmaster. Indeed, that will be a very fast fortress.

This is about as good as "MONKEY IS ANIMAL, FISH IS NOT MONKEY, FISH IS NOT ANIMAL" Kind of true, but not, so to speak, helpful.

[muwahahaha]

Off Topic:

"MONKEY IS ANIMAL, FISH IS NOT MONKEY, FISH IS NOT ANIMAL"

Cows eat grass, cows produce milk. Therefore milk is grass.

On topic:
You may already know this, but just in case I'll go over it:

At the start screen, get rid of your anvil and bring along lots of food, booze, seeds and logs, I normally end up with 60/60/60 of Dwarven rum/beer/wine, about 140ish plump helmet spawn and around the same of plump helmets, and 100 logs.

This way you wont need to worry about cutting down trees for beds early on and you can set your carpenter to make a handful of beds right away and then a few buckets (for wells/health care/ponds) and barrels (for booze)

Also. I have to disagree with Makrond on Adamantine, I normally only choose somewhere that has it, but if you know you have it, dont dig right down to it and start pumping out stuff because you'll soon be overrun with gobbos. I normally have about 40 dwarves before I even start making strands of the stuff, but patience pays off due to the great 500/500% block/damage. Just be sure not to have your recruits sparring with *Adamantine Spear* or you will soon depopulate the fort.

[Makrond]

500/500% block/damage.

Wait, whoa, what?!

I thought it was only 200%

No wonder adamantine is so awesome...

I change my stance on the issue. Adamantine is god!

[muwahahaha]

From the raws:

[MATGLOSS_METAL:ADAMANTINE]
[NAME:adamantine][ADJ:adamantine][COLOR:3:3:1]
[VALUE:300]
[SPEC_HEAT:7500]
[MELTING_POINT:25000]
[BOILING_POINT:50000]
[WEAPON][WEAPON_RANGED][AMMO][DIGGER][ARMOR][ANVIL][ANY_USE]
[WAFERS]
[DAMAGE_PERC:500]
[BLOCK_PERC:500]
[SOLID_DENSITY:200]
[DEEP]

That also means that a masterpiece weapon/armour gets a 1000% block/damage due to the extra 2x multiplier, can make for some fun when you have a legendary armourer

[ShadeJS]

-Find magma (forges and obsidian), trees, and running water in as small an area as possible
-Hawk your anvil (Your won't need it until you can buy it.)
-Buy a pile of booze (100+), a pile of cheap meat, and plump helmet spawn.
-Turtle meat is your friend. Shells (art) and bones (training bolts)
-Buy rope if you want a well early.
-If you want, a spare pick (and maybe axe), are handy just in case 'stuff happens.
-Always build with tomorrow in mind.
-Mechanisms and / or obsidian crafts are your best friend when you start.
-Underground agriculture and wells should be high on the TODO.
-All fluid going into your fort should pass through a 'filter'.
-Don't spar near wells and stay away from rivers.
-Obey good Motte and Bailey ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey ) for the surface of your fort.
-Wield crossbowdwarves and ware bowmen.
-Be wary of nobles with fancy tastes, and guard nobles with modest tastes.

VICTORY! (Barring any number of other calamities.)

[Klendt]

I'm seeing a whole lot of people suggesting he ditch the anvil.
Isn't this a thread about getting a fort up FAST?
Sure, the thing takes up an assload of points, but leaving yourself entirely without weapons production under the assumption that the dwarven caravan WILL have it is pretty suicidal, in my experiences. I have in fact had three forts now where they never got around to dragging one up until the third year, and by then I had been repelling undesirables entirely through traps and bone-clad wrestlers.
  I always found it better to ditch the things you absolutely don't need/never end up using, such as the second axe (few builds call for two woodcutters) or the fifteen plump helmets (that's what the spawn are for). Hell, even all the booze is a bit excessive. If you just get a lot of seeds and be ambitious with your farming (with two dedicated planters and one brewer, mind you), ya can manage with barely an eighth the suggested amount.

But hey. Whatever.
Maybe that's just the waves picked up by my tinfoil hat speaking.

[Quift]

I'm seeing a whole lot of people suggesting he ditch the anvil.
Isn't this a thread about getting a fort up FAST?
Sure, the thing takes up an assload of points, but leaving yourself entirely without weapons production under the assumption that the dwarven caravan WILL have it is pretty suicidal, in my experiences. I have in fact had three forts now where they never got around to dragging one up until the third year, and by then I had been repelling undesirables entirely through traps and bone-clad wrestlers.
  I always found it better to ditch the things you absolutely don't need/never end up using, such as the second axe (few builds call for two woodcutters) or the fifteen plump helmets (that's what the spawn are for). Hell, even all the booze is a bit excessive. If you just get a lot of seeds and be ambitious with your farming (with two dedicated planters and one brewer, mind you), ya can manage with barely an eighth the suggested amount.

But hey. Whatever.
Maybe that's just the waves picked up by my tinfoil hat speaking.

While I do agree with most of your post, I think that the anvil is completyl unneccessary. You can get a good enough keep up with high walls, towers, moat and a drawbridge up in almost a year with 1-2 masons. Churning out some crossbows and bone bolts is a rather quick defence (albeit not really adequate.)

I would actually reccomend brining the anvil, a decent smith, and tons of copper and little charcoal.

That way you start metal production immidiatly, churning out basic armour for 3-4 dwarves from the first immigration, copper bolts, additional axes, picks and whatnot.

So it goes:
Miner
Woodworker
Mason
Mason/soldier/hunter depending on location
Smith
Farmer
Brewer

1 pick
1 axe
Anvil
50-60 copper bars
10-15 charcoal
20 Booze
20 plump helmets
10 plump helmet seeds
10 Turtle
2 dogs

Something like this should enable you to step up defences, farming, smithing and brewing before autmumn. With the autumn immigration you should have an armed defence force, a keep, booze, etc first year. You would also have a good base to expand in any desired direction.

[Solmyr]

Question: Is there actually any reason not to spend all your starting points on skills and items?

[sorbius]

No, spend all your points. 

If I start on a map with magma I will keep my starting anvil because I don't have to go through the BS of fuel production, if I don't have magma I'll ditch it because I won't have the dwarf-power to spare to make fuel until after the immigrants come.

[Mephansteras]

Um...all the posts so far are assuming that he wants to get a fort up and running as fast as possible.

What if he wants to know how to run a fort that gets good FPS?

Guess I'll throw out a few tips for both.

First, for FPS:
1) Build a cage for all non-working animals. (Excluding a few cats who's job is to run around and eat rats and whatnot). Later on animals make for a giant mess and eat up FPS like crazy. Stuck in a cage, they don't slow things down much. Due to the quantum nature of DF cages, you can have any number of animals in one cage without any problems.

2) Build large hallways to avoid congestion. 3 tiles wide is decent for main walkthroughs, 2 for side passages. Only areas that need good defense or are very rarely visited should be 1 tile wide. Large is better, depending on your layout.

3) Most other FPS related issues really have to do with z-levels, liquids, and population. The wiki should have some good info on those.

Now, for getting a fort up and running quickly, here's my build:

1 dedicated miner
1 miner/mason/stoneworker
1 woodcutter/carpenter
1 farmer/brewer/cook
1 fisherdwarf (replace with herbalist/farmer/marksdwarf/whatever as appropriate for the map)
1 smith (skills in all areas, although you could probably ditch blacksmithing)
1 Trader/admin

I keep the anvil, ditching both axes.
With those extra points, I take:
2 dogs, 1 cat
10 extra turtle
a few of each seed. You don't need more then 4-5 of each
a rope for a well
2 silk thread, to be turned into cloth later and saved for moods
1 charcoal to kickstart my forge
10 tetrahedrite ore.
  4  of these will be smelted for copper and maybe a silver. Make an axe or two, a crossbow, and some bolts out of the copper.
  6 will be turned into Billon. These are worth as much as 1 silver and 1 copper bar, but you only get silver 1/5th of the time, I think. It may be a bug, but you effectively get free wealth by doing this. These all get turned into crafts.
1 platinum ore. Turned into crafts. You can get as much as 2-3k at the first caravan with this, if you're lucky. At worst, you get 400. I usually get 1200-2000.
30 bituminous coal
30 tower-caps

Extra points are spent on skills. If I have some left over after my critical skills are filled, I may grab extra booze, coal, or tetrahedrite.

Once I embark, I set my miner to ONLY mine. No other tasks.
I then designate my initial entryway and a dumping area inside which eventually becomes my trade depot area. I put a food stockpile there at first, so get all the food inside quickly.

 The woodcutter, trader, and farmer are all given plant gathering and set to gathering some plants. Fisher, too, if the map starts frozen. The trader is made a jack-of-all trades.

The miners keep clearing out all required rooms, starting with my workshop area, then the farms, and so on. My smith starts doing nothing by smelting and smithing ASAP. Once the farm is in, the farmer is moved over to only doing food related tasks. As soon as stockpiles are in place and everything has been moved, I start worrying about things like making beds, training the dogs, etc.

The 30 towercaps let me make 7 bed, 3 buckets, 10 barrels, and 10 bins. Everything I need for the first year, wood-wise. Which is how I get by without an axe until the smith gets around to making it.

Usually by the time the caravan shows up, I've got good food stores, thousands worth in crafts to trade, and a fort with a dining hall, bedrooms, and a well. I usually have an entrance that is protected by a drawbridge ready as well. Playing with modded enemies who can siege the first winter teaches you to move fast!

I always make sure I have my well ready before the water freezes, just in case.

So far, this basic pattern has worked well for every fort I've had. Barring the ones where some enemy runs in and kills me before the migrants show up, of course.