Once your world has been generated and you enter the Dwarf Fortress mode, always specify that you would like to carefully manage your goods. The default quickstart setup does give you a bit more useful equipment, but it gives you very little food: you will run out before Winter even starts.
The easiest way to survive your first winter is to bring lots of meat along for the ride. Plump helmets are more economical than meat because they not only give you something to eat but also leave a seed afterwards, which can be used to plant more plump helmets once you find a river. However, they don't give you as much food. I always spend between 100 and 120 points on food and supplies only, usually going for about 50/50 meat and fruit. The rest goes to giving my Seven Dwarves one or two skills each.
(You can also try bringing no extra food by spending 100 points on a new pick instead. This allows you to get to farming faster because your miners will be working faster. However, this is only recommended once you've gotten the farm-building down-pat.)
As soon as the game starts:
1) Press the [spacebar] to pause the game.
2) Stop any hunters from going hunting, if you have any. This is done by going to the nits, zoom-[c]reature on your Hunter, hitting [p]refs, selecting their [l]abour, then disengaging their "Hunt" task by using the Link controls to select the Hunt task and press Enter to turn it grey. (At this point, you are probably unarmed and a hunter will almost certainly be killed by any wildlife you hunt. This will probably change in later versions.)
3) Designate a Wood [p]ile on the map.
4) [d]esignate a Mine task consisting of a single or double line into the rock face for about 5/10 tiles.
5) Designate a large Mining [p]ile (at least 30-40 tiles) on the map near where you've placed your entrance. I like to place it right on top of the entrance to start the game, as it produces a nifty-looking "mole tunnel" effect, but if you do this you'll have to move it later in order to make way for roads and such.
6) Designate a Refuse [p]ile off to the north or south of your entrance. This need only be tiny -- no bigger than eight or ten tiles of area. Also designate a Graveyard [p]ile near your Refuse [p]ile: this doesn't need to be any bigger than a couple tiles at the moment, since you shouldn't be expecting your dwarves to die at all. It's actually there for the corpses of any other people who wander onto your map and get killed by creatures: you'll need to build caskets and coffins before you can use it for your dwarves, and you should probably be burying them in a tomb indoors anyway.
7) Unpause the game with the [spacebar].
As soon as two blocks of stone have been extracted from the rock face, press the [spacebar] again to pause the game.
uild a Carpenter's Workshop and a Mason's Workshop out of those blocks of stone. Assign the task of building beds and chairs to the Carpenter, and assign the task of building tables and doors to the Mason. Both should be on repeat orders.
9) Designate a Furniture [p]ile outside your fortress. It should be a decent size -- at least 10-15 tiles of area. It doesn't have to be close to your entrance because it's only going to be temporary until you've gotten your people into the mine.
10) Unpause the game with the [spacebar] and begin playing.From now on, it's mostly up to your whims. However, like the first Dwarf Fortress demo movie does, it's a good idea to build a small, poorly-appointed sleeping area and dining area as soon as possible.
I recommend making large furniture piles. If you're anything like me, you're building beds, tables, and chairs on Repeat orders so you'll be able to provide bedrooms for new immigrants. Your miners won't be able to keep up to the need for bedrooms in the first year, so don't worry about actually building those bedrooms: your goal is not to make your dwarves feel like royalty but to get your colony self-sustaining.
Carefully manage your mining by alternating between expanding your living area and digging deeper into the mountain by about 20 tiles at a time. Your mason should also build stone doors and you'll need to have at least one spare door (and preferably several) in your furniture pile. You should run into the underground river soon. Immediately build a stone door a little bit inside the tunnel along the bank of the river. Use [q] to specify that this door should always be shut tightly. You may also want to lock it if you have other management to do before you get to cutting out farmland.
When you're ready to start building farms, start a little inside of the riverside door and start digging parallel to the river. Build a new door immediately at the intersection between your new tunnel and the old tunnel that found the river -- specify that it should be closed tightly, but don't lock it. If the river floods before you've managed to get your farms cut out, your dwarves will have to get out of there in a hurry.
Now begin cutting out your farms. You can go for either natural floodplains, where you dig your farms directly against the river, or manual floodplains, where you dig rooms a little inside of the river and then dig tiny channels up to the river and block both ends off with floodgates. I recommend starting one manual floodplain before you start your natural floodplains, as the flooding of the river isn't extremely predictable (although it will always flood every spring). A manual floodplain will allow you to get your cropland all watered and ready to go.
To figure out how to build an irrigated floodplain, just follow the instructions given in the manual under the Farming subsection of the Your First Outpost section.
After this, it's mostly as life takes you.
The big important note is that you shouldn't get too attached to this particular section of your mountainside: this area is only going to be sustaining you for the first couple of years. You'll be using communal sleeping areas until you can actually afford to build individual sleeping areas. Once you feel as though you're ready to build individual rooms, I recommend digging an entirely new mine entrance a ways to the north or south of your current entrance, where you'll be able to start carving your mountainside anew as you see fit. I usually have three entrances going by the middle of the second year: one entrance consists of the communal area that I started the game with, another entrance consists of a new carefully-designed living-and-work area which has been designed to be defendable and have unique architecture, and the final entrance consists of a dedicated mine tunnel where my dwarves go after ore. Don't bridge the river until you're ready to expand across it: it's always wiser to use the space you have available before you try to make new space.
Eventually your mine will have its central living area deep within the mountain, well past the river, but in the beginning you should live fairly close to the surface in order to have good access to wood.
[ August 11, 2006: Message edited by: JT ]
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Topic: Spoiler: My tips (Read 659 times)