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[Umi]

Which ones do you always run?  Which ones do you sometimes run?  Are there any that you never run?

My important ones are:

Meat industry as a whole (Raising animals, butchering them, eating them, tanning them, etc.)
Farming industry (Growing, harvesting, eating, boozing, etc.)
Wood/stone industry (Woodcutting, mining, masonry/carpentry, etc.)
Bolt making (Part of the Meat industry, but it has other sources of bones as well)
Engraving (Why not?  Two dwarfs going around making everything pretty and valuable.  Sounds good to me.  ^_^)

Sometimes industries:
Jewelery (Not much use for them personally.  They are good for trading, but too heavy and luxury foods sell for more)
Obsidian farming (Start it when I need.  Not a very high priority though)
Hunting (I use it early game, but rarely later on)

Never:
Fishing (Too dangerous and not enough turn out for it...  :\ )


I'm sure I'm missing some, but those are the ones that popped to mind first.

What do you think are the most important industries?

[bombcar]

Beer.

And then stone, followed by farming, and furnaces.

[Scope]

Stone/wood.

Trading goods.

Metal.

Food.

[RPB]

I run as many as possible.

Farming/brewing is obviously the most important industry, but it's such a simple process I hardly even count it. Everything else is more or less a luxury, but I consider metalworking the most important due to how important good armor is.

Beyond that, I would say textiles are probably my favorite industry. The only resources it needs is farming space and seeds, both very easy to get and are almost-infinitely repeatably (after a certain point the seed cap will limit production, though). You can concentrate your textile industry into a small area, it provides productive employment and training for a lot of otherwise idle dwarves, is fairly high efficiency in its output of wealth, and its output requires very little bin space so you need minimal storage room (and you can compact it even further if you use up cloth by decorating the cloth goods you already have, although this is not as efficient as cloth crafts or shoes.)

A glass industry has many of the same advantages, but large-scale glass production requires magma and sand which limits your site options considerably. It's also generally less efficient, producing less value and taking up more space than textiles (if you have wood to burn, clear glass may be slightly more efficient but you probably have better things to use wood on). On the plus side though glass is versatile and is excellent for producing semi-luxury furniture.

[Sinergistic]

Never:

Fishing/Hunting (Waste of dwarf power + cause of injuries and deaths)
Extracts (Waste of time + dwarf power. I've yet to do this, even for the novelty)
Woodworking (Mods have overshadowed this industry for me.)

Sometimes:

+Butchering Industry. (Only for the bones to turn into arrows, I get my food from other sources/rarely do anything with leather.)
+Breeding rare animals. (The elves bring me nice things now and again. I generally don't raise these to slaughter)
+Dying cloth/thread. (I'd do this a lot more, but the whole industry sucks. Not enough control over what is dyed/used)
=Engraving. (In select places, I try and avoid mass engraving things. I do like to engrave things I won't get access to again easily, like magma channels)
=Stone working. (Nice for the early doors and things, I try and move to glass asap.)
-Gem setting/gem cutting. (Eh, I use to do this when I was starting to place, but now I only really bother if I wanna do something special for a dwarf.)

All the time:

Farming. (Major for me. All food, booze and dyes come from this. I only stop when the stockpiles get full.)
Metal working. (Turning bars of metal into, normally, corkscrews, blocks and pipes as well as floodgates and doors)
Mechanics. (Gears are the single most useful thing in any fort, I try and train up two legendary mechanics over time if I can.)
Glass working. (Huge industry for me, since I've modded in green glass barrels and bins and beds. It's replaced the wood working industry for me. Includes kiln and ashery)
Cloth Industry. (Farming produces the pig tails which get turned into bags, for the glass industry, and ropes, for breeding animals and, when dyed, decorating)

I think I've missed a couple.

[Torak]

Metal and Farming. I almost never use jewelry or bother to decorate objects, or to trade. I'm primarily a war-ready fortress guy, none of that high brow stuff.

[ThtblovesDF]

Beds, beds, beds, beds

[Duke 2.0]

Masonry +++

 Once you do a human castle with only things humans would make, you appreciate that dwarves can make stone floodgates, doors, cabinets, chairs and tables.

[Chromie]

Cooking -- when I have wealth to burn I tend to buy out the cheeses and high value meats from traders, and sell em back in masterpiece roasts. I cook seeds mainly to free up the bags full of em I buy... I won't be disappointed when booze cooking and seed cooking go away. I farm plump helmets until I have a comfortable booze stockpile, then I only farm one plot cave wheat in the summer and fall to maintain supply.

Stone Crafting -- I hate it, and I keep meaning to start a stonecraft free fort, but... its ability to generate piles and piles wealth from mass produced knickknacks is pretty convenient.

After that, I'd say the butchery/tanning/leatherworking --  you can supply the cycle with hunters, or by sending the military against the unicorns once in a while. I was lucky enough to get a legendary leatherworker in my last fort, and I imported scads of the good stuff. I'd like to think the guy was like a high class designer of the dwarf world, cos all he did till the end of his days was produce masterfully crafted shoes for the rest of his days.

A big part of my wealth production is importing, usually leather or cloth, because I don't like the bins of stonecrap sitting around.

As for the military, I tend to rely more on dogpiles of wrestlers, so if I get a legendary armorer it's just a bit of good luck.

[Bromor Neckbeard]

My most important industry is the agricultural/brewing industry.  It's sacrilege to run a fortress without a source of alcohol.  However, I usually have just one dedicated brewer and two farmer/gatherers to supply him, so while it's vital to the health of the fortress, it's my smallest industry as well.

Metal is my second most important industry, and by far my biggest.  For one thing, I can take all the crappy iron stuff the goblins bring me and turn it into weapons and armor for my soldiers or masterwork furniture for my nobles.  I have four magma forges and four magma smelters in any fort I build.  In my current fortress, I have one of the smelters going nearly nonstop, and I have six dedicated Furnaciers who are combination wood burners, furnace operators, glassmakers, and potash makers.  Although I feel that buying out an entire caravan with a couple of stacks of high-quality meals is exploity, I feel differently about buying out that same caravan with a couple of complete suits of masterwork steel plate armor.  I generally buy any metal item the caravans have, and then D-F-M over the entire trade depot to melt every last item.  Then I go into the stocks menu and de-melt the bars that I just bought.

My third most important industry is bonecarving.  My single legendary bonecrafter cleans up all the biological waste that gets created by goblin ambushes, and provides me a steady supply of bone-decorated totems for extra cash (not that I ever need any) and bone bolts for my marksdwarves to practice with.

I dabble in jewelry, ranching, leatherworking, tailoring, and carpentry, but those are just something I fool around with when everything else is running smoothly and I don't need my attention focused anywhere in particular.

[Zink]

Farming/brewing is big.  I use it for all my homegrown food needs.
I never use the meat industry.  I dunno if it's just me, but I've never yet embarked on a map with animals to hunt, and I hate having dwarves outside my defenses anyway.
Fishing is a tough call.  It's slow and basically asking for ambush deaths, but you need shells for moods :/
I never do leather/clothing, either.  Too finicky.
Instead... stonecrafting ftw.  It's trivial to get a legendary crafter with a mood or just by having them crank it out months at a time.  You basically get infinite trade goods for free.
Masonry is important- for furniture and things.  My bedroom design requires 5x1 with a bed, chest, cabinet, statue, and armor stand- with a good mason that's a free Grand Bedroom with engraving.
Ah yes, engraving.  Again, free wealth, costing only time (and opportunity cost, obv).  Smooth all the bedrooms.  By then the first migrants arrive- smooth their rooms too, and by then you have enough skill to engrave.
Metal is kinda too specific.  I mean, I'd never really make anything but armor, weapons, or trap components anyway, and in that case it's kind of a waste not to use steel.  So it takes a lot of support especially without magma.

[Hyndis]

Food and booze, obviously.

But thats pretty much an automatic thing. Once you set it up during the first year you can ignore it forever and it'll keep your dwarves well fed and drunk.


Aside from that, metalworking. The metalworkers in my forts are pseudo-nobles. They perform no tasks at all besides metalworking, they have their own private, customized rooms, and they produce some of the most valuable and useful items in the entire fortress.


Textiles is also extremely useful, particularly if you embark in an area with spiders. Silk provides an unlimited supply of raw materials, and you can produce silk crafts, decorate them with more silk, and buy out entire caravans with a single bin of this stuff. I also like to decorate pretty much everything in the entire fortress. If you don't have any silk, then you can use plant fiber, but this is less valuable and takes more labor, so thats more of a stopgap than a primary industry.

[Org]

I fish. Those carp are below me. Never attacked.

I only sometimes hunt, only if there are no wolves.

[(name here)]

Farming/booze, of course.

Boltmaking and metal working are both up there.

Engraving, too.
Stonecrafting early and i generally try to keep slightly up with the bed demand.
Masonry pretty much stops after i make the legendary dining room that lets my dwarves ignore the fact that everyone who they know died from crossbow fire.

I've never really bothered with much else, though i dabble on occasion.

[Heron TSG]

1) food/booze production

2) playing with magma (forges, glass, etc)

3) megaproject industry. (In my current fort, buttloads of miners and eighty beds full of people with cave-in wounds because they can't channel out a simple lake without hurting themselves.)