Everything that you need to do to fully experience DF without doing EVERYTHING.
Feel free to add to this thread:
(I'd prefer it if the checklist goals aren't too hard, but if you have enough of them, I'll just put it into a section of its own.)
Basic Goals: you gotta get them.
-Make it through the first winter
-Reach the Dwarven Economy
-Seiged for the first time
-Ambushed for the first time
-Have at least one champion in your military
-Kill a caravan of elves
-Over Complicate a simple task.
-Survive an Ambush
-Survive a Siege
-Experience emotion towards one of your dwarves
-Reach your fortress in adventure mode
-Kill a semi-megabeast in adventure
-Become the enemy of a civilization
-Find at least one underground feature (both, in dwarf mode, and adventure)
-Experience a tantrum spiral
Advanced:
-Fun with magma
-See every underground feature
-Water structure
-Mega-construction
-make a creature on your map extinct
-build an arena
-build an execution chamber
-Get through 5 Years in fortress mode
-Don't kill Migrants (is this really that hard?)
-Do something that makes you feel absolutely dwarven
-Get through an aquifer
-Fortress on "unsustainable" land
-Learn acsII graphics
-Wage war on all vanilla civs (excluding dwarves)
-Self-destruct a fortress
-kill a noble
-make soap
-get a king (HFS not counting)
-Survive a tantrum spiral (for the sake of percise definition, once you have a berserk dwarf and at least 3 tantrumers. This is open to debate).
Extra-hard:
-Reach 200 dwarves
-Smooth a mountain
-Do a Giga-construction (must span multiple z-levels, and have a large base)
-blot out the sun.
-Get through 10 years in fortress mode
-Defend your fortress Successfully without traps.
Extra-curicular: Overtime fun stuff.
-Play a mod
-Make your own creature
-invent a new weapon
-join a community fort
-Do a bloodline/succession game
-Challange fortress
-Build an Above ground fortress.
-Run a community fortress
-Report a never before seen bug
-donate to Toady
Thats all I can think of right now...