Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Lav]

The first time I tried Dwarf Fortress was after thoroughly reading Boatmurdered, Wiki, and a number of tutorials. So I had a more or less decent understanding of what I was doing. But I still didn't understand the little annoying details, like dwarves claiming items for pending tasks, and quickly abandoned my first fortress because my dwarves continuously told me I need an anvil for a forge even though I saw one right there on the ground (and apparently tasked to be put into a furniture stockpile).

[Greiger]

My first play involved everyone dying for some reason after embark.  I don't remember why.  I think it was an animal attack.  I hadn't figured out how to do anything yet.

Second playthrough I managed to dig a little bit into the mountain.  Just started figuring out how to build structures.  I think everyone starved or was constantly hunting vermin.

3rd play managed to last a bit longer til early spring.  I had at least one dwarf with at least 1 level of skill in everything.  Because I still didn't know how to assign labors to a dwarf.  Meaning a job with no dwarf pretty much meant that it would never be done.  Managed to bridge the cave river, before starvation set in this time. 

4th play I actually found out about the labor settings from the forum. And it was good.  The next fortress lasted for a few years.  And made it all the way to the magma before falling to a goblin seige.

[Jualin]

My first time playing dwarf fortress I thought that red sand was magma. I blocked myself off from the red sand I dug out to keep out the fire imps. My realization of the differences between sand and magma were slow in coming.

[Vieto]

My first time playing dwarf fortress I thought that red sand was magma. I blocked myself off from the red sand I dug out to keep out the fire imps. My realization of the differences between sand and magma were slow in coming.

I know what you mean. It didn't help that my first map had a circular cave full of red sand.

[Blue-ninja]

The first time, I DID generate a world, made a name for that world, and embarked onto a random place.

But my first reaction was, "what the hell am I looking at?" Couldn't tell dwarf from a hole in the ground back then aha

[Muz]

I got through my first game quite fine. Took me a while to figure out mining. Except that it took me a while to realize that we were supposed to build fortresses underground, instead of mine out lots of stone and build houses, and I didn't know how to build the roofs on houses. I didn't know that dwarves were alcoholics.

Oh, and I lost half my fortress to carp. I was careful with bears, but the carp did them in.

[alway]

One of my early forts I built had an aquifer layer. I decided to drain it so I could get down further. After awhile with 1fps from filling half the map with water, I figured out aquifers have an infinite supply of water.

[de5me7]

i never got past the embark screen cos im on a laptop and it wouldnt recognise my + and - keys. About a month later after playing some other roguelikes and reading some blogs i came up with the idea of plugging in a usb key board, after that i just followed a first fortress walkthru on th wiki. Still took me ages to work out how to construct a well tho. The idea that i would have to dig a shaft to water supprised me, i was expecting it to be more like age of empires or something. I also couldnt work out why i couldnt plant plump helmets outside. Its an issue of detail really. DF doesnt follow many of the standard RTS laws.

[Rafal99]

Firstly I got surprised by the complexity of things that are done during world generation (running rivers, forming lakes etc...) and noticed that this must be a great game and I want to get deep into it.

Then I embarked using 'Play Now!' (and got 7 unskilled peasants because of this...)
 
When I saw the actual game the first time I thought it is some big scale strategic view, I thought that wagon is a city and faces are armies moving around, heh...
Took me some time to figure (k) view.

When I knew what is what, I tried desingating some wood cutting, plant gathering etc, but nothing was happening. Took me a looong time, and lots of wiki searching (there were noone of that awesome tutorials back then) to figure out that I have to enable labors on my dwarves. So to save me from further micromanagement I enabled all labors on all dwarves... Took me several ingame years to figure out that they are much more efficient if each of them specialize in another jobs...

That fortress actually lasted quite long, about 10 game years (with a little save scumming, but not much). I learned most of the important game elements from it, including advanced mechanics, like pump towers, raising bridges linked to levers etc.

I finally abandoned it due to low FPS, and an ambush wth 3 squads of goblin crossbowmen who slaughtered all my military. It had about 70 population before that (I had 3 years without immigrants during that, bacause the dwarven caravan somewhat got stuck in the depot).
I still have DF 38c with a save from that fort somewhere on my disk.