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[strider_ani]

Hey all, I've been playing DF for about 1 week and I'm already addicted. I haven't even stopped playing for that week and can't get enough of it. Anyways, I'd like to tell the take of how I was introduced to DF and how my few first fortresses went, and how much fun I've had.
If anyone wants to post their first experiences, or fort/sm go ahead!

Anyways, the way I heard about DF was at Uni, a guy had it on his laptop. He and his friend were in deep conversation about how they were going to plan this thing out. I walked up to them and asked, "What game is this?" Immediately I was set upon by the two Dwarf fanatics as they scrambled to explain to me every single situation, nuance, death trap, working and generally everything to know about it - All at once. The game game could track damage to eyelids for god sakes!
Fascinated by their enthusiasm, I delved deeper into the discussion, asking questions about things that interested me which went something along the lines of: "You can burn things with lava?!" - "Yeah, I'm building a lava waterfall!" - "OMG really?!" - "This one time, I built a fortress, and my dwarf went berserk and pulled all the levers which flooded my fortress!"
There was something bothering me though as I could not make any relation to what they were saying  and the DF game I was seeing on the laptop. Eventually I uttered the well known noobs saying "wtf?" to which they just laughed.
Another thing I was worried about was if the laptop was going to blow up. The guy was generating a new world and it was taking FOR EVER. (about an hour) To bad I had an Accounting lecture, I decided not to go - this was way to fascinating and a bjillion times more interesting than accounting. Anyways, while the map was loading, I was continually bombarded with situations and things the other two had done/been in.
Once it finally loaded I was introduced for the first time to the Embark screen. This was especially confusing (As I didn't get the one square = the X to the right, or why the colorful square in the left box kept moving around maniacally when he pressed in a direction.), and I proceeded to say "Seriously WTF?"
Onto the Prepare Carefully Screen!
More confusion and intense discussion between the two friends as they decided what skills and items to bring.
Then he embarked. Wow. I didn't know WHAT the hell I was supposed to be looking at. WTF are all those arrows? "They are slopes to the next z level" - "What? This is top down isn't it? I don't get it..."
Anyways, as the two began to plan how they were going to tunnel into the side of a mountain. (In a highly complicated fashion I might add, now that I understand what was going on) So, with the designations set, my new friend unpaused the game and watched as his miners start digging. All of a sudden a see a big cloud errupt on the screen - like an explosion. "What the hell happened there?" Oh no! The poor dwarf had channeled around a section to make it unsupported (Or something, I can't remember what I was seeing when I didn't know wtf I was looking at.), The resulting smoke and blown the dorf of the side of a mountain.
The two laughed manically at this while I looked on in horror as the screen showed the dwarfs status being: Extreme Pain, Broken Left Lower Arm(Red), Broken Left wrist, Broken Broken left Upper Arm, Broken Right lower arm, Broken left hand, broken left upper arm, broken right leg, broken left leg, Damaged (Yellow) lower torso and ?(Blue) Pancreas. "Wtf? It shows the damage to the pancreas?"
The guy quickly designates an area as hospital but the other points out nothing will really happen if there isn't a bed and so he abandons.
"What, whats it?" I say, dissapointed. "Yeah, the first 7 dwarfs are critical and losing one of them is not good when you first start." he explains.
Anyways, the helping friend then tells me if I want to play it just search Dwarf Fortress on google and you should be able to download it, It's only 40Mbs or something.
He also tells me too "DO THE TUTORIAL"

Ok, so as soon as I get home, I jump on the net and search for this DF, I find the wiki, the website and the forums! Yay! The wiki, I disregard, The tutorial will tell me all I need to know. So I download the tut with DF packaged with it and start to play through my first fort...

((I'll right more later. This is taking time away from precious DF playing))

[Ghavrel]

The wiki, I disregard, The tutorial will tell me all I need to know.

Heh. Aheh. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA


Welcome to the rest of your life, by the way.

[Eric Blank]

Rest of your life indeed.
I haven't played any other game in a week. I've been on DF for months, and STILL haven't run out of insane Ideas of how to torture these insane, verminous little men.

I personally learned of DF from a friend online who was laughing at how she'd gotten her entire militia wiped out by a camel. She then went on about some other stuff and I decided it sounded entertaining, and when I found out it was free I was ecstatic. The lava thing caught on for me too.
I spent the next week nagging her, a couple other people, and browsing the wiki to learn how to play. My first fortress (read: wagon crash site on elven retreat) starved to death because I didn't know how to set up a farm After that I eventually learned how to make some damn cool stuff, and be slaughtered 1 to 1 in every battle with goblins because I used floodgates instead of drawbridges and spearmen (wrestlers) instead of fortified positions, archers, and traps. The floodgates always break when there's anything on their tile, and i never remembered to clean them, so I'd always have to position troops around the entryway. 

You should get a copy of version 40d16 and play with it too, but not 40d or below since they seemed to cause compression errors, the new release is horrendously bugged at the moment, but playable. Worldgen is slow this time around, 50 years in 20 minutes.

[Thiickshake]

Nooooo! the wiki is your bible, your saving grace i cant not explain to you the amout of times that wiki has saved my fortress.

[strider_ani]

Yup, I realize this now. Thank Amok for the wiki.

[Jake]

I found it via someone's signature in the Abandonia forums, browsed the wiki and the DF forums for a bit, and thought it looked interesting but kind of complicated. Then I stumbled across the saga of Boatmurdered, which is now my standard DF promoting tool.
I downloaded .40c the same day and discovered I needed to buy a new PC to get it to run satisfactorily. My first fort is referenced in my signature; If my dwarves can't walk over a well then it has to act like a wall, right? I'd thought naively.
My early experience with a magma pipe cost me both picks, and I've had a phobia for the stuff ever since. My first tantrum spiral brought home the fact that I get emotionally attached to and feel responsible for the well-being of all my dwarves, even the stupid ones.

[Lytha]

I was told about it by a friend some years ago, maybe in 2007 or 2008. I tried it, and couldn't figure out how anything worked or what to build out of that huge amount of possible workshops. I vaguely recall that I must have at least embarked three times in total: The first time the dwarves ended up on a mountain and I couldn't figure out how to move up and down the z-levels or how to dig stairs. Another time, it was a forest with a magma pipe - the obsidian cap was in plain sight. And one glacier.

So I gave up, and my friend occasionally told me tales about his fortresses in the mean time.

Then he dug out the newbie guide by TinyPirate ( http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-utter-newby-tutorial-for-dwarf-fortress-part-1-wtf/ ). He had to explain to me that it wasn't ALT+arrow but Numpad +-*/, and that it's the ;: keys for the z-levels, not the <> key, and that farm plots (and bridges) have a mentally screwed up way to be constructed with the umhk keys before selecting where they shall be.

Well, and here I am.

[LordBucket]

If anyone wants to post their first experiences

I first heard Dwarf Fortress casually mentioned on the ToME forums. Nothing was really said, no fancy description, no tales of kittens or magma, just a "yeah, I play Dwarf Fortress, it's pretty cool." And that was about it. So I decided to go take a look.

I've been playing roguelikes since I was about 14, so visually it wasn't a problem, but I remember being annoyed at the variety of characters used for ground. The ground looked like a splattering of mushrooms and rubble to me more than smooth cave floor. And...the interface. Worst interface of any game I've ever played. Ever. By a lot. Yet, here I am years later still playing the game.

Still though, I remember thinking "yeah, ok...maybe I play this game, by who the hell else would be crazy enough to deal with this?!!?"

first fort

This was back in 2D, so my first half dozen forts were probably about typical. Starve to death before the first winter, starve to death during the first winter, starve to death after the first winter, pretty routine stuff. I somehow managed to avoid most of the more exciting deaths...flooding the world, everyone in the fortress catching on fire, that sort of thing.

Ahh, fun times.

And of course, while carp were not the terror back then that they have since become, 2D did have it own terrors.

[Pickled Tink]

First heard of Dwarf Fortress on the TV Tropes. Often with takes of horrific death and carnage. It sounded fun so I gave it a whirl and downloaded 40d.

My first forts:

I couldn't figure out how to do anything and my dwarves all died.

I got annoyed, checked the wiki, learned the basics, went back to the game, did better, built a fortress ran out of food, they all died.

I started another fortress, I did better, I got up to 130 dwarves, I had a thriving metalworking industry. I discovered clownite, and accidentally let out the clowns. My dwarves were mostly slaughtered, I had 30 or so left afterwards, but all the enemies were dead. The I was introduced to the full power of the tantrum spiral. My dwarves all died.

I decided I had done pretty well, and decided to start another fort, so I built another fort on the edge of a mountain. I decided to dig the defensive pit that worked with the previous fort holding off sieges, and hit clowns while doing so. Predictably my dwarves all died. Again. But it was hilarious.

The next fort had an aquifer I tried to breach using the magma method. I punctured the pipe while cleaning away stuff and trapped my dwarves in a small room at the bottom. They might have lived had a magma man not killed the only dwarf with a pick before he could get away from the magma. It was hilarious watching these five totally doomed dwarves.

The next fort stayed up! It held out for ages as fire imps periodically burned down the forest around it until I cleaned them out. A real accomplishment on my part then. After that I got inventive, and now my deathtraps are needlessly complicated and deadly (Also, senselessly cruel and violent).

I haven't lost many forts since then. There was an awesome fort loss that happened because I forgot to seal up every water escape route as I was diverting an underground river (pressurised by three waterfalls) to a cistern. Washing all my stockpiles and half my dwarves out the front door of the fortress was funny as hell, especially since a quarter of my stockpiles were caged goblins, and three Titans. The other half of my dwarves were below the stockpiles. Trapped in a watery tomb. That fort was entirely salvageable.

Good fun

[Marconius]

I originally found out about DF from a webcomic. Decided to look it up and give it a shot; this was back in 40d.

I'm not really an avid player, but I do give it a whirl once in a while, since it's a lot of fun. I barely recall my first fortresses, but I know a lot of them ended up being flooded... water is my greatest enemy, really.

One location I embarked had an open top magma pipe. Imps sometimes hurled fireballs at my dwarves when they foolishly walked nearby, resulting in the entire map being burned down... I started building moats then!