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[Jurph]

I love these threads.

2.  How do you keep all of the dwarves organized?  I got the hang of managing the original 7 pretty well, but then the immigrants came, and suddenly there were 28, some of which had skills I didn't even have buildings for yet, or had no skills, or had redundant skills because apparently only one dwarf can use a particular building at one time.  I wound up not knowing what people were doing, who had the seldom-used skills (like Architecture), and having 10-15 Idlers at any one time.  Help?

As many have mentioned, Dwarf Manager is the way to go.  Look for threads about DM for tips on how to better organize your workforce - for example, assign all peasants every job that has no quality modifiers.  They will gain skills, and the unskilled labor will get done faster.

3.  My butcher shop was constantly creating miasma - is the meat rotting in there?  There was meat successfully being put on the stockpiles, and the only rotting things I noticed were corpses (which were all outside) but I wasn't keeping very good track of how much was being brought in either.

I see that you're taking care to dispose of chunks now.  Are you tanning the hides?

4.  How do you get dwarves to actually stay inside? 

Hermetically-sealed fortresses.  A popular design strategy is to have a wide boulevard for traders and invaders that comes into the bowels of the fort, and then a vertical shaft with stairs that leads to a walled garden on the surface; this area can be used to farm the above-ground crops and harvest wood.  Use traffic designations to discourage dwarves from using the main entrance.

5.  On a related note, how do you defend against the goblins? 

Traps, marksdwarves, and legendary military.  Using the military menus (and learning which commands do and don't work) is lots of fun.

6.  Also, my cage traps did manage to catch some goblins, but then what do I do with them? 

Dump them into a deep pit naked, and then let your marksdwarves use them for target practice.  Squirming screaming targets give more experience.   

7.  I assigned one of my unskilled immigrants to hunt, because I wanted him out of my hair; apparently he got injured and went to rest in the barracks [...] is he maimed for life now?

Yes, but he can still lead a happy and productive life as a member of the Royal Guard or as a socializer.  Disable all labors (so that he doesn't cancel any jobs) and let him wander around.  If you'd like him to be useful, rename his profession to "Medic" and leave Health Care and Burial enabled.  It's unlikely that he'll pass out carrying a bucket to help someone, but as long as someone else also has it enabled, it's also unlikely that his infirmity will keep him from helping out.  If he levels up his social skills enough, he could gain enough attributes to be a fine marksdwarf.  See "Lightning Never Strikes The Same Place Twice". 

[rufio]

I see that you're taking care to dispose of chunks now.  Are you tanning the hides?

Well, I reinstalled to fix whatever I did to the display, so that game was lost.  But yeah, I installed the tannery at the same time as the butcher shop - I was trying to organize it so that the buildings/stockpiles/etc. that are related are actually sort of in the same place.  I like how all the butchering and tanning happens automatically whenever a hunter brings back a kill.

Hermetically-sealed fortresses.  A popular design strategy is to have a wide boulevard for traders and invaders that comes into the bowels of the fort, and then a vertical shaft with stairs that leads to a walled garden on the surface; this area can be used to farm the above-ground crops and harvest wood.

I actually tried that on the fortress I started up today, or something like it anyway.  I was originally thinking about how to get a well that was sort of underground; the level I started my fortress on was directly under the surface for a ways in, and there were a bunch of surface lakes that had the water on the level I was building on (you know what I mean?) and I figured that to make a well I would have to dig up to the surface and establish it there, and if I just put walls around it it wouldn't be bothered by sieges.  And of course, it means fish too, in the absence of actual subterranean water.  I hadn't thought about growing the surface seeds up there, though.

However, the mason that was constructing the wall somehow got stuck mid-construction and died of starvation (I thought he was just fishing in an unauthorized place...) and then some unskilled migrant became possessed and took over the crafts shop, which was the main source of my exports at that point, and started blithering about "rocks....stones" which didn't make any sense since there were stones of all kinds all over the place.  Then I hit something by accident and managed to seal off the stockpile where I was keeping all the crafted stuff, and couldn't figure out how to reverse it, and then a caravan showed up.  It was getting a little too fun for me, but I did learn some things from that fortress before I gave it up.

What does it mean when a dwarf "gets enraged"?  It happened to one of my hunters, and all that happened was the she mauled the hell out of the deer she was hunting and then snapped out of it.  Her thought said she was unhappy, I guess because she was out in the rain, since that was the only other thing that was there.

Yes, but he can still lead a happy and productive life as a member of the Royal Guard or as a socializer.

What is the Royal Guard for?  Is it another useless thing that nobles demand they must have?

If he levels up his social skills enough, he could gain enough attributes to be a fine marksdwarf.  See "Lightning Never Strikes The Same Place Twice".

Heh.  Is there actually any benefit to having a dwarf like that, or is it just for fun?

[Albedo]

(re last question)

It's a "better than nothing" situation. To paraphrase Napoleon...

"A blind cripple can stop a goblin arrow as well as a dwarf."

"Engraged" is a berserk trance a dwarf (or other intelligent creatures) can enter when outnumbered.  It's a good thing, and based on their personality profile.

[Lymojo]

I was originally thinking about how to get a well that was sort of underground; the level I started my fortress on was directly under the surface for a ways in, and there were a bunch of surface lakes that had the water on the level I was building on (you know what I mean?) and I figured that to make a well I would have to dig up to the surface and establish it there,

That's a good way to start, just to kinda get everything in position and figure out what buildings you need to survive and how the dwarves use them. Just plopping a well right on top of one of the lakes works fine.

When you wall off your outdoor-farming/fishing/orchard area on the surface, make sure that you can get to it from inside the fortress. A staircase straight into the earth that connects to your underground tunnel system works fine. Build a hatch cover (built at the masons workshop) on top of it for aesthetics.

Ultimately, when you're a bit more dwarfy, you'll want to have wells inside your fortress, too. You'll want to dig some tunnels and pits in such a way that the water in the lakes flows down and hangs out in a z-level below where YOU want your well to be.

[Albedo]

(Also, dwarfs like flowing water much better than stagnant water from pools. Finding some source of flowing water (there are several possible), and digging a detour to beneath your wells is the best.)

[Shaostoul]

On a side not on everyone suggestions. I've noticed that dwarf manager doesn't assign all possible jobs. I use dwarf foreman and it works great for me.

Your resolution windowed and full screen is really dependent on your monitor size and highest allowed resolution.

I'm free almost all the time, so if you need help ever PM me on here and I could give you my instant messenger (whichever you have works, I have all of em.)

I'd also like to take this time to openly invite anyone else who needs help to feel free to PM me.

[Lymojo]

If you're finding that not all labors can be assigned with Dwarf Manager it's because you're using a version that's out of date. I think we're up to version .71 or something.

[rufio]

Ok, so I turned off invaders for the time being so I can figure out how to make a military that works.   I seem to have figured it out now - I have a squad of wrestlers and two of them are champions now.  I should probably be giving them weapons too, right?

Now I have another problem though, which is that I don't seem to be able to make enough barrels to actually make booze anymore, despite the fact that my carpenter is churning them out non-stop.  I don't know what happens to them exactly - I suppose some idler is busy stuffing them full of seed bags and plump helmets, which don't actually need to be in barrels.  Is there any way to tell them to stop putting food and seeds in barrels?  The alcohol level is getting worryingly low.

[Lymojo]

You should really check out CaptnDuck's video tutorials, dude.

You've diagnosed the problem exactly. The solution is to replace your large, generic "Food" stockpile with smaller, specialized "raw ingredients", "finished meals", "alcohol", and "seed" stockpiles.

Your raw ingredient one should be pretty large, your alcohol a little less so, your seed stockpile should only be about 1 or 2 tiles big, and your finished meals should be as big as it needs to be.

This should pretty much solve your problem, but if you're finding that the dwarves are giving too many barrels to one of your stockpiles, you can fiddle with the "min/max barrel" settings for each stockpile. Just reduce the max number of barrels for the greedy stockpile and the dwarves will eventually reshuffle them.

Pro Tip: Seed stockpile should be near your farms, raw ingredient stockpile should be near your kitchen/butcher/still/farmer's workshop area, your finished meals should be near your dining hall, and your alcohol should be near your workshops. Bonus points for keeping a barrel of each of your skilled dwarves' favorite booze directly adjacent to his/her workshop.

[Jurph]

Pro Tip: Seed stockpile should be near your farms, raw ingredient stockpile should be near your kitchen/butcher/still/farmer's workshop area, your finished meals should be near your dining hall, and your alcohol should be near your workshops. Bonus points for keeping a barrel of each of your skilled dwarves' favorite booze directly adjacent to his/her workshop.

This can go all the way down the rabbit hole.  You can split your raw ingredients across two or more piles: those which cook into valuable meals (flour, cheese, syrup, quarry bush leaves, expensive booze, and valuable meat) and those which don't, or those which can be eaten raw (plump helmets, turtle, etc.) and those which can't, or even have a series of stockpiles that take from each other, each of which allows one fewer ingredient.

Valuable ingredients go to the kitchen that you reserve for your best chef to make lavish meals; cheap ones go to the other kitchens for making rations.  Raw food goes straight to the dining hall for snacking without cooking -- if your cooks run out of food in their pantry areas they'll go get raw edibles for garnish.

Pile management (especially food pile management) is one of the major skills required to run a fort!

[rufio]

Well, most of my food is fish, meat, and plants.  I occasionally get cheese from traders, but that's it, really.  I'm sure once I get more intimately familiar with all the foodstuffs I'll wind up doing it differently.  I do keep the seeds in another stockpile, but the dining room, farms, and associated workshops are all in the same general area anyway.  I didn't know about the barrel limits - thanks.

Anyway, what I wound up doing was turning off my farms for a while, and that fixed it.  Now that there's a large stockpile of booze (1000+) I turned them back on again.

The reason I don't tend to go after step-by-step tutorials is that when you see the tutorial it's just an intellectual memorization process.  This way I get to figure out why things are necessary and remember them better.