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[C4lv1n]

So yeah... I've had this game for a week now and have been playing it in every bit of my spare time, but I am getting nowhere. I have been reading the wiki (I usually have it open while playing) but it's kinda confusing, so I was wondering if people could awnser specific questions that I have... I'll even number them fo you 

1. How do I make the play area bigger, it seems like I'm only ever playing a small part of the huge game world I generated.
2. How do I get metal, ANY metal?
3. And then how do I smelt it? The smelter says I need fuel, where do I get that? (Besides magma)
4. I have never seen a season change (I usaully die quick...) how long does it take? Is there a calendar?
5. How do I get more dwarves? I've only ever had the starting 7.
6. I usaully dig a 2 square wide doorway and put wooden doors in the spaces, dig a short hallway (10 squares long?), and have all my stuff off that. Is that a good/decent defense?
7. When should I start to worry about having water?
8. How do you embak with more stuff (While picking choose carefully) , I only ever get the option to add/remove amounts of what the game gives me, and add animals, besides setting skills.
9.Ok, last question, I promise, what are the apsolutley ecential skills you should embark with?

Excuse my bad spelling, and sorry if this is a bit much, but I figured if I put all my questions here I wouldn`t need to ask any more questions for a while.

                                                         Urist McNoob, signing off.

[Sukasa]

1.  You can't, you can only play small areas of the world at a time in Fortress mode.  The best you can do is use a larger embark area.

2. You'll find veins of it in rock as you mine, mine this to get ore.

3. Use a wood furnace to make charcoal.  This and magma are the two fuel sources.

4. Depends on your frame rate - there are three dwarven months to a season, use [z] to get the status screen, which'll have the date and time of season.  The announcements line at the bottom of the screen will say when the season changes

5. They'll come to your fort as time passes

6. Not really, have a look at the DF Map Archive for a few defensive setups.  Generally you'll want to use a few traps, but a proper military is your best defense.

7. Right away - you never know when you'll need it.

8. When in the items section of the embark menu, hit [n].

9. Mining, Growing, Carpentry, Masonry.  Other skills you can just assemble on site.  Always bring a pick, unless you want to really challenge yourself.

[Liokaizer]

So yeah... I've had this game for a week now and have been playing it in every bit of my spare time, but I am getting nowhere. I have been reading the wiki (I usually have it open while playing) but it's kinda confusing, so I was wondering if people could awnser specific questions that I have... I'll even number them fo you 

1. How do I make the play area bigger, it seems like I'm only ever playing a small part of the huge game world I generated.
2. How do I get metal, ANY metal?
3. And then how do I smelt it? The smelter says I need fuel, where do I get that? (Besides magma)
4. I have never seen a season change (I usaully die quick...) how long does it take? Is there a calendar?
5. How do I get more dwarves? I've only ever had the starting 7.
6. I usaully dig a 2 square wide doorway and put wooden doors in the spaces, dig a short hallway (10 squares long?), and have all my stuff off that. Is that a good/decent defense?
7. When should I start to worry about having water?
8. How do you embak with more stuff (While picking choose carefully) , I only ever get the option to add/remove amounts of what the game gives me, and add animals, besides setting skills.
9.Ok, last question, I promise, what are the apsolutley ecential skills you should embark with?

Excuse my bad spelling, and sorry if this is a bit much, but I figured if I put all my questions here I wouldn`t need to ask any more questions for a while.

                                                         Urist McNoob, signing off.

Alright, to answer your questions.
1. You can make the play area bigger while you are choosing a where your fortress will be. These will be the buttons that say 'resize local area' in the lower left hand corner on the embark screen.

2. Metal is obtained a few ways. I do not recall if you can embark with any metal bars or not. The easiest way to get metal is to simply run into ore while mining. Another way is to get metal bars from caravans. Another way is to melt metal items left from corpses of dwarves, kobolds, goblins, etc.

3. The alternative to magma with smelting is charcoal, which is made with a wood furnace, which converts wood into charcoal.

4. There is a calender and seasons do change. I am not too keen on how long in real time a season lasts.

5. Every so often, you will get a wave of immigrants, usually at least once a year.

6. In peaceful territory, that might work in the beginning. You might want to trap the hallway just beyond the doors and draft a dwarf or two to guard the hallway just in case. As your fort gets bigger and you attract more attention, you should invest in better defense such as a larger army, more traps, placing your important assests deeper into the fort, ballistas, etc.

7. You need to worry about water under two circumstances. First, if you run out of alcohol, also if any of your dwarves are injured. Healthy dwarves can survive indefinitely on alchohol and food. If you run out of booze, they'll need water as an alternative. Also, injured dwarves need water to heal. I recommend making a well in every fort you build.

8. When you choose to prepare carefully, you get a default set of items and a points pool. One of the ways to ensure that you can start with more is to give up one of the less important items to get points to get more necessities such as food or booze. The best things to give up are one of your steel battle axes and your anvil, since those are 2 of the most expensive items the game defaults you with. This will free up a lot of points to put into your dwarves and more items.

9. I would say the most essential skills to start with are Mining, Growing, Carpentry and Masonry. Mining helps you carve your fortress into the mountain or ground. Growing ensures that you have someone at the start that can get a farm up and running efficiently. Carpentry is necessary since beds can only be made of wood. Masonry is good to put the plethora of stone you will likely have to good use, by making furniture out of them.

[Skid]

1. shift + "h", "m", "k", or "u" will resize your starting area.  And yes, you only play on on a tiny section of the world make, the computer hasn't yet been invented that could run the whole thing.

2 and 3. Dig. There'll be ore down there somewhere, probably. You'll need a smelter and some coal to process it into bars. Coal comes in ore form or can be created by burning wood at a wood furnace.

4. Be patient, it take quite a while.  However you might not notice any change if you're in a temperate or hot climate. If the Dwarven Caravan shows up you'll know that it is fall. You do have trading depot, right?

5. They'll probably show up uninvited in fall with the Dwarven Caravan, if you've got enough wealth. It might take until spring otherwise.

6. You'll want to put some stone fall traps in that hallway.  Task a dwarf to mechanics and build a mechanic workshop, have them build a few mechanisms. You can then build traps in the hallway.

7. When dwarves get injured, or if you have no booze. Won't be a problem until mid summer and they should just go drink out of the local ponds or rivers, if you have any. You should start a brewing industry early anyway, as it makes dwarves happy and keeps them from running around outdoors looking for drinks.

8. "n" allows you to select a new item from the list of everything available, I believe.

9. You can start a viable fortress with no skills, however you will normally want mining, masonry, mechanics, farming, brewing, woodcutting, carpentry, and a touch of architecture. Any other skills are pretty much dependant on what direction you want to go with your fort.

[Cal]

First C4lv1n, welcome to DF. I'm sure someone else will be able to answer these questions better than I but here goes.

1. When you gen the world, there are 3 'maps' side by side, local, regional and world, within the local area is a darkened area, that's the size of your embark, you can make that larger or smaller with U, and M for up and down, H and K for left and right. The larger your area, the more stuff DF has to figure out so it's going to end up running a bit slower. I recommend making the largest possible embark at least once just to see it though, 16x16 I think it is.

2. While mining, you'll come across ores. You'll also get alerts for them (and other stone which is just annoying like Alunite or Mica) Saying 'You've struck hematite' for example. Hematite, Limonite, Native Platinum, Galena etc. are metal ores. When you mine through them they'll leave a stone behind, the odds of getting a stone go up as your miners get more skilled, once they are legendary miners, it will *always* leave a stone behind.

3.This will tie into your second question obviously. To get fuel there are a couple of ways but the easiest and best way to do it your first time is to build a wood furnace (b > e) it's the top one in that menu, the specific key for that escapes me right now. Once you've built that, you can make one charcoal from one wood log. Once you've got a smelter (not magma obviously) then you can smelt one of your ore stones, let's just say it's hematite. It will consume the one charcoal and the one hematite ore and you'll get one iron bar. To make things out of metal (not including constructions, I'm talking weapons, armor, bins, barrels) you'll need multiple bars (usually) and you'll need more fuel to make the item as well. The massive amounts of fuel are one reason magma smelters are so much easier.

4. There's probably a specific number of game 'steps' it takes for seasons to change but I don't know off the top of my head, you can check the date in the upper right area of the screen you can pull up with 'z' it'll say early, mid or late(season) with a date and month as well. I don't know the month order but there is a list on the wiki. http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Main_Page

5. More dwarves come from migrants. I've never had migrants before at least one year in game, 2 seasons after the first caravan which comes in the fall. They'll usually be useless and never have skills you want or need at the time though.

6. Personally, I use 3-wide hallways and then have large open (underground of course) rooms to designate stockpiles of all my stuff. After you've played a bit you can concern yourself more about where to put stockpiles but when you're just learning, it doesn't matter too much.

7. Water is important at 2 times. First, if you run out of booze. Your dwarves will start drinking water, but they're not going to like it. Second, if you have injured dwarves. Injured dwarves only drink water and you have to have a bucket available for someone to go and fill and bring to them, either from a local water source or, if you can manage it, a well in your fortress.

8. I'd have to be looking at the embark screen to know for sure but I think 'n' lets you add something new to the screen. Regardless, it says which keys do what, I'm pretty sure it's labeled new item or add item nearer to the bottom of the screen.

9. Unless of course you're trying to do a challenge with only certain skills or something (of which there are some good ideas on the wiki as well http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Challenge#Pre-Embark_Build_Ideas) you're going to want a miner, a wood cutter, at least one dwarf with some millitary skills and someone with a couple points in trading so you don't get fleeced by the caravans and traders. I like to have someone with a point or two in brewing, one with some in growing and one with some in threshing and milling. However, I use both the dig deeper and civilization forge mods merged together which gives a lot more options for milling/threshing so that may not be the best bet.

Ask more questions, I've just started posting a few months ago and everyone on here is damn helpful.

[C4lv1n]

Thanks guys.

[Ubiq]

So yeah... I've had this game for a week now and have been playing it in every bit of my spare time, but I am getting nowhere. I have been reading the wiki (I usually have it open while playing) but it's kinda confusing, so I was wondering if people could awnser specific questions that I have... I'll even number them fo you 

1. How do I make the play area bigger, it seems like I'm only ever playing a small part of the huge game world I generated.

You can resize the embark area on the world map by pushing U, H, K, and M. 6x6 is the default though and embark areas larger than 36 total tiles tend to run more slowly.

2. How do I get metal, ANY metal?

You can embark with some metal bars or ores while any ore on site will have to be mined out. Generally speaking, it's a better idea to buy the ore than the smelted bars as it's a lot cheaper. Tetrahedrite is a good bargain as you can directly smelt billon from it and billon is a fairly high value metal compared to the cost of the stone you're smelting it from.

Mining the stuff is a bit trickier as you'll just have to dig around and look for it. If you're embarking on a mountain or an area with cliffs, look around the screen and seen if you seen any oddly colored stone on the edge of the mountain. If so, use 'k' to identify it.

3. And then how do I smelt it? The smelter says I need fuel, where do I get that? (Besides magma)

You can bring lignite and bituminous coal along when you embark. The former gives you two coke for each while coal gives you three, but you'll burn one element of fuel for each reaction. Since they're the same cost on the embark screen, always go with bituminous coal as that's twice as efficient.

You'll need a piece of charcoal to start the process. You can purchase charcoal on the embark screen (cost 10) or make it at a wood furnace by using a log. After you have the charcoal, you can go to the smelter and make coke from coal or lignite. After you smelt the coke, you can use it to smelt ore, make glass, or run a forge.

All that's provided that you don't use magma as it doesn't require fuel to run any of those workshops.

4. I have never seen a season change (I usaully die quick...) how long does it take? Is there a calendar?

How fast the seasons move depends on how fast your computer is. You can check the calender by pushing z.

5. How do I get more dwarves? I've only ever had the starting 7.

Trading and driving up the value of the fort. Nobles will come when certain requirements are met.

6. I usaully dig a 2 square wide doorway and put wooden doors in the spaces, dig a short hallway (10 squares long?), and have all my stuff off that. Is that a good/decent defense?

It's a start as it'll keep out wild animals. One good idea is to stake a dog somewhere near your entrance to keep out thieves and put traps as well. Stonefall traps are a good choice for beginners as they just require a mechanism and a stone, which you'll have plenty of soon enough.

After more dwarves start showing up, you'll probably want to switch to halls that are three to five squares wide.

7. When should I start to worry about having water?

Never if you have plenty of booze and can keep your dwarves from getting injured as that's the only time you need water in the current version. On the other hand, a moat with a bridge across it can make a fairly handy defense while water sources are always useful when it comes to finding fish and certain plants. It's usually best to embark near a brook if you can.

8. How do you embak with more stuff (While picking choose carefully) , I only ever get the option to add/remove amounts of what the game gives me, and add animals, besides setting skills.

Hit 'n' on the screen where it lists animals and starting equipment. You might want to dump at least one of the axes to get more points to play with. One axe will pay for a hundred tower cap logs, which is more than you're going to need for the forseeable future anyway unless you're planning on building a wooden city. Most people dump the anvil as well as it's fairly easy to get one when the caravan shows up and a thousand points can buy a lot of handy materials.

9.Ok, last question, I promise, what are the apsolutley ecential skills you should embark with?

Barring you having a particular project in mind, I'd say Mechanic is the first one you should worry about.

Mechanisms are not only a fairly effective trade good, but they're necessary for setting up traps. A no-level Mechanic takes a very long time to do even a simple task and they take quite a while to level up as well.

It's usually a good idea to have at least a couple levels in Miner since you don't want to wait a long time before you can begin moving underground. Not to mention the fact that a skillless Miner will tend to destroy minerals and gems rather than carving them out for you.

Furnace Operator isn't a bad choice either as that'll speed up any glass/metalworking industry by allowing you to smelt ores and produce coke more quickly.

Since you're a beginner, I'd recommend Stonecrafter as making Rock Mugs at a Craftdwarf shop is a good way to produce a lot of trade goods in a hurry. Cooking is another good way to produce a handful of very expensive trade goods, but you have to watch that all of your booze isn't used while cooking. You can use the Kitchen option under the stockpile page (press z to bring it up) to limit what items can be cooked or brewed.

It's usually a good idea to have a Mason or Carpenter with a point in Building Designer so that they can build a Trade Depot. If your fort is going to be mostly carved out of stone, Engraver is worth a skill level or two since smoothing stone is a fairly easy way to raise wealth and attract more immigrants.

For the most part, your starting dwarfs will level up fairly quickly so it's not really all that important what skills they take unless you have a particular project in mind when you start.

It's also a good idea to pick a dwarf with fairly simple tastes in stone/metal and give him/her a level or two in Appraiser/Judge of Intent. That dwarf will almost always wind up being your first Mayor and having them like stuff that is easy to get will make your life easier when they start making mandates.

[ronnyfire]

There is an awesome series of dwarf fortress videos on youtube that i found incredibly helpful.
http://www.youtube.com/user/captnduck?blend=1&ob=4&rclk=cti#p/a/5A3D7682BDD48FC2/0/koZUS2h-Yzc

kinda a long series, but definitely worth looking at

[Particleman]

Regarding 9: You don't really NEED to buy any of the skills when you first start since you can train any skill up from nothing. Should you buy skills? Yes, unless you're doing some kind of challenge. Probably the single most useful one would be Growing, with Brewing right behind that. Dwarves who have good food and booze will put up with more than dwarves with crappy rations.

Mining is nice when you start out, but not neccesary. Mining does three things: increases the speed at which miners dig, and the higher the level, the more likely it is that a stone will be produced when mining through a rock square. It also affects how well dwarves wield picks in combat.

Masonry... is... okay. It's an easy skill to train, just have your mason make blocks on repeat, then use the blocks for building stuff. If you somehow find your slef short of rocks (which I doubt has ever happened to any player, ever), you can conserve them by building walls, deconstructing them, then building them again. I normally have my masons building walls or something instead of churning out tables or whatever, so my experience may be abnormal.

Woodcutting, like mining, is nice, but not essential. All woodcutting affects is how fast your dwares actually cut trees. If you embark on a site with a lot of trees, a dwarf can easily go from no skill to legendary in a year or so.

Stonecrafting is nice to have, I find. Makes trading for stuff easier early on. Again, that's just me, though.

My typical embark profile is something like:
2 miners
1 miner/judge of intent/appraiser (my trader)
1 axedwarf/wrestler (who also handles woodcutting- he trains woodcutting from nothing)
1 planter
1 planter/brewer (Usually he later becomes a dedicated brewer and gains the custom profession of Brewmaster)
1 stonecrafter

[IronyOwl]

I tend to prefer trading for metal to actually finding it. Finding it is nice, of course, but it's unreliable and only gives you one sort per vein (usually). Trading can only be done in relatively small amounts, but its inexhaustible and can get you any kind of metal you need.

For starting skills, nothing is absolutely mandatory, but there's two general paths to take.

The first are skills that make the game easier early on. If you keep dying, that might help. These skills tend to be mining (get started faster), growing (steady food/booze faster), stonecrafting (get valuable trade goods faster), and potentially woodcutting (quicker wood). Not much else is terribly important early on, unless you're in a hostile area where military dwarves are useful.

The second is for skills you'll eventually want but have a hard time getting. Blacksmithing, armorsmithing, and weaponsmithing are the main ones here, with armorsmithing being particularly useful for stopping your dwarves from dying horribly. Gem cutting and gem setting fall into this category unless you have sand for glassmaking, but they have no use beyond making things even more valuable.

[Rotten]

Along with Captnduck's tutorials, I found TinyPirate's tutorial here extermely useful. It comes already embarked in a great location witha  play along tutorial. Magma and minerals included. At the least you can see what skills he embarked with and model your profile off those. Most players have their own ideas on what skills to get and which ones to ignore, but here's what I think. Most skills need to overlap- I normally stick my 'stone' 'wood' 'food' and 'metal' skills together, for example my miners will have miner, mason, mechanic and architect, woodcutter will have woodcutting and carpentry etc.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

2-3 miners. Stone is incredibly useful at the beginning, and the faster you're holed up in the mountain the better.

1-2 masons. For furniture.

1-2 mechanics. Traps.

1 Architect. Bridges, other stuff.

Stonecrafter. For trading.

Woodcutter. Fast wood for beds.

Carpentry. Finely designed beds are helpful.

Furnace Operating. I always get immigrant smiths later on, and I don't use a furnace much at the beginning anyways. However he melts goblinite FAST.

Planter. Inexperienced farmers waste seeds, and at embark they are valuable.

Brewer. Nice booze.

Cook. Keeps dwarves happy.

Appraiser. He is my bookkeeper, so I know what I have. Remember to build an office somewhere!

I distribute them like this.

Miner, Mason, Mechanic, Stonecrafter.

Miner, Architect, Stonecrafter.

Woodcutter, Carpenter, Architect.

Furnace Operator.

Planter, Brewer, Cook.

Appraiser (he's broker and bookeeper)

Peasant or a soldier, if on a tough map.

[SinisterMinisterX]

Hi Calvin (and Forum) - I've finally decided to de-lurk after a few months of learning DF, and reading this forum during that time. Here's my answers, based on my recent learning experience...

1. Don't make your playing area larger now; you've got plenty to deal with already, and a larger embark area will slow down your game sooner. When you're ready, it's the UMKH keys when choosing an embark site (capital letters matter here, since umkh moves the embark site instead of resizing it).

2. Find ore and smelt it (see below for that). Or build a smelter and melt metal items. You can buy metal from caravans, or loot it from slain enemies. Press 'k', put the cursor over the slain baddie, and you'll see all his equipment listed on the right. Press 'f' to un-forbid the items in {curly braces}, and +/- to move up and down that list. (There are other ways, too - the z-stocks menu and the designations menu.) Looting the bad guys is your major source of early metal, unless you go hell-bent for a metal industry from the very start.

3. Build a smelter from the furnaces menu ('b' then 'e', IIRC). Also build a wood furnace. Assign a dwarf to wood burning, and add that task to the wood furnace. This gives you charcoal, which is the fuel you need to smelt. If you find lignite or bituminous coal, add the smelter task to make fuel from those (you'll only need to burn one wood to get the process started if you have the fuel ores). Remember to put a dwarf on furnace operating, or the smelter will be inactive. Once you have fuel, query the smelter and add tasks to smelt ores or melt items.

A general tip: download and use Dwarf Therapist. It makes it simple to put dwarves on or off labors.

4. On my computer, running at 100 FPS, the first few seasons take about a half hour of real time each. But if you're new, it may be longer until you learn the game. In the init.txt file, you can set the game to pause on season change. Watch the announcements for "summer has arrived".

5. Trade away as much as you can to the dwarven caravan - this value will attract migrants. And build some architectural value. This means defined rooms underground like a meeting hall, or constructions like walls and floors. If you go for constructions from the very beginning, you can get migrants in your first summer or autumn (at least, I have) but most often the first migrant wave is your second spring. Your starting 7 will usually have to handle the first year on their own.

6. Sorry, that's not a defense at all. Build traps to protect yourself in the early going, then train a military. You can build stonefall traps from nothing but the stone your miners produce, but I like to buy some cheap copper serrated discs on embark for this purpose (mainly because they'll trigger multiple times without needing to be reset).

7. Worry about water as soon as your fort is stable enough. Waiting until you're under attack is no good. Read about digging wells on the wiki. At a minimum, have your carpenter make some buckets and designate a water source zone. Also have some beds for the injured to rest in. But it isn't a critical concern right away. It will take a game-year or so for goblin ambushes to show up anyway.

8. On the items part of the embark process, press 'n' for new item, and you'll get menus to select more items.

9. One dwarf should have appraiser / judge of intent / negotiator for trading. A proficient grower is essential. A proficient stonecrafter is needed to get something to trade off to the first dwaven caravan for more food. At least one dwarf should have some military skill - I like axedwarf, since I take an axe with me anyway. Set that dwarf to woodcutting, and designate at least one tree to be cut down so he picks up the axe. Then don't turn off woodcutter, so he'll carry the axe with him. And don't make him a miner - he'll drop the axe in order to use a pick. Axe and pick are mutually exclusive.

All the other skills you can train up if you have to, but here's what I usually do (all these skill are proficient i.e. 5 points into each)
2 miners
2 masons
1 carpenter/axedwarf (will train up on woodcutting, as described above)
1 grower/cook - eventually, I'll make a migrant into a grower and let this dwarf cook.
1 stonecrafter with the trader skills. He's either making goods or selling them.

Forget taking an anvil, and this leaves gobs and gobs of points for items.

Most important: read this forum frequently. I've learned more here than from the wiki, to be honest. The wiki is great, but limited. And watch capnduck's video tutorials if you can find the time. Those helped me quite a bit.

[Kidiri]

1. The biggest fortress you can make is a 768 by 768 game map tile map. If that made any sense. To clarify: when you embark, you see three maps. From right to left it's the world map, region map and local map. It says so above each part. Basically, each map is a bit zoomed in and more detailed piece of the map to the right of it. The one that's the most important is the one on the left. You can resize the game map (the map where you'll be actually building your fortress) with the UMKH keys and move it with umkh. The biggest embark site you can have, is the full 16 by 16 tiles on the local map, which corresponds to one region tile. And seeing one local tile equals 48 tiles on your embark site (where you build and all that jazz), the biggest site is 48*16 or 768 by 768 tiles. Now, mind you that this is really large, and a 5 by 5 map should be big enough.

2. You either trade with a caravan for bars of metal (or metal items, such as cages, unusable armour, toys...). These are only offered to you by human and dwarven caravans, though. The other way is to dig for [ur=http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Orel]ores[/url]. Then smelt them to bars of metal.

3. You need coke, charcoal or magma to fuel your smelters, glass furnaces, kilns and forges. The most readily available of those three is most likely charcoal. Chop down trees, build a wood furnace, assign some dwarf to the wood burning labour, and add one or multiple "Make charcoal" jobs. The dwarf who you just assigned to wood burning duty will then burn the wood into charcoal, making it readily available for your smelters, glass furnaces, kilns and forges. The second type of fuel, is coke. This is obtained from lignite or bituminous coal, both types of rock. They need to be refined at a smelter, and thus also need a piece of fuel to be smelted, however lignite produces two pieces of coke and bituminous coal three. So you'll always have a net gain of minimum one piece of coal. And then there's also magma, but you specified no magma, so I'll not delve into that.

4. Seasons change, it takes 3 months of 28 days (in-game, obviously) for one season to pass. The days also have an exact length, but I'm not entirely sure how long it takes. There is a calendar available in the stocks menu, which can be opened with the z key. However, if you've never seen a season change, you do indeed die quickly. May I ask why?

5. When autumn comes, you'll get a dwarven caravan. If you wish to trade with them, build a trading depot, and read the wiki article on trading. Seriously, do it. It's not so easy to trade. Now, when you've traded (or just when the traders have been to your fortress, I can't quite remember) they go back home and tell tales of the magnificent wealth of your fortress. The next spring, you'll then normally get immigrants.

6. For goblins, it's a basic defence, but only if your tactic is to turtle up. This could get annoying with ambushes, seeing they spring at your dwarves out of nowhere. So you should prepare for some losses due to ambushes, or chain up a pair of war dogs out front.

7. As soon as possible, however it really becomes important when you've got a wounded dwarf.

8. Try hitting n. Most of the pre-embark commands are listed at the bottom of the screen. Pay some more attention to it.

9. Theoretically, none (seeing there are people who go for a no-points embark, which means you spend no points. Neither to skills or items). However, it's always very handy to have at least one miner ready. The same goes for a brewer and a planter. They provide you with booze and food. Note that you'll need to have some sort of soil available for farms to be built. Preferably subterranean, where you can grow plump helmets. This is the best crop: they are edible raw, can be brewed and are able to be farmed in all seasons. Masons can provide with readily available doors, cabinets, coffers, weapon racks, armour stands, statues, coffins... Pretty much anything you can imagine. A carpenter is also nice to have around. In the beginning, he'll make beds, bins, barrels, buckets and all other items you can't make out of stone. Those are the most important ones. They provide, in order, happy thoughts, less hauling jobs in the long run, something to put your booze in and a means to transport water to the ill. Other handy skills are bonecarving and stonecrafting. If you embark with fish (basically any type of meat without 'meat' at the end), and more specifically turtles (which I highly recommend, more later) you'll get some bones after your dwarves have eaten it. Those bones can then be carved in to an assortment of things, ranging from crowns, amulets and idols all the way to boots, helmets and armour. The stones you mine out can also be made into crafts.
The way I (nearly always) divide labours is like this:

• proficient miner/expedition leader (social skills: novice appraiser, novice judge of intent and then three other novice social skills)
• proficient miner/proficient mechanic
• proficient woodcutter/proficient carpenter (but seeing SinisterMinister's idea of proficient axedwarf, it seems a good idea: this is the dwarf which will be the most outside and will have to deal with meanies)
• proficient mason/proficient building designer
• proficient brewer/proficient cook
• proficient farmer/proficient plant gatherer
• proficient bonecarver/proficient stonecrefter

As for items/animals, I take two war dogs, two chains, one cage, one axe, two picks (or one, if I only have one miner), and the rest of the points I divide evenly between food and booze. With an equal amount of each booze. The rest I spend on plump helmet spawn. As for food, I take one of each 2-point type of meat/fish and the rest (of food-points) in turtles, they provide bones and shells. Both can be used for crafts, but I advise against using the shells for crafts: it's a common way to loose a dwarf when he's in a mood and demands shells. This can obviously be altered to allow wood if I'm in a (nearly) woodless area.

Also, this should belong in the Gameplay Questions subforum, where you can find two very handy tutorials, which already have been linked to before.

[Qloos]

Geez guys, were answering questions, not writing a book.

[Lord_Shadow]

Geez guys, were answering questions, not writing a book.

Well most of these topic are highly disputed and based purely on play style.