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[Quietust]

Also, lead has a low material value, and is not used for any alloy reactions.

Ahem, lay pewter.

[That guy]

Holding shift while moving the cursor to cut the number of keystrokes by 90%.

I've been playing for four months and I didn't know that. 

In 2010 you can embark with a bunch of sandbags for 1 point each, and large, serrated discs are absurdly valuable now, and if you embark with a proficient glassmaker... I think no quality glass discs trade for $500 each.

[Ricky]

another embark help, instead of buying picks and 2 axes and selling the anvil, buy 4 copper bars, 1 bar of coke, and 4 bitinimous coal and the anvil and make your tools on-the-spot

[SmileyMan]

Also, lead has a low material value, and is not used for any alloy reactions.

Ahem, lay pewter.

Technically, yes, but lay pewter is completely pointless, since it's worth less than trifle pewter, and less useful than bronze, both of which you can make from the same ores, minus the lead.

[goge]

(edited to add)
Also, lead has a low material value, and is not used for any alloy reactions.  It's therefore the ideal material to make your bins and barrels from if you are low on wood.  Luckily, lead poisoning isn't in the game (yet)!

lead is heavy, really heavy.  I remember bins made of stone taking forever to move around and take to the trade depot but that was many versions backs,  has this changed?

Noob Tip:
Stonefall Traps can me made without wood or metal and are quick and easy enough to produce that you can fill the entire entrance of your fort with them.  Good 'till you get your steel serraded disks spinning up or have no wood for cage traps.

[TomiTapio]

Booze barrels vanish (or are ceremonially smashed) when they become empty.
Use job manager, j-m-q brew 25, j-m-q- wooden barrel 30. Other barrels go to food and seed storage.

You must have bags to hold plant seeds, otherwise one seed takes up a 2.5m x 2.5m floor square in the food stockpile.

Make one of every stockpile! Make one of every workshop!

[Ricky]

if you hate stockpile use dump designations on all your resources and put a dump zone in the middle of your workshops

thats what i do

[jester]

stonefall traps suck now.  Cage traps are still awsome. 
  If I embark on a location with shrubs, I take a proficient herbalist/cook/brewer, gets you plenty of food early and once the farms are up and staffed with migrants, becomes full time cook.  Having your star brewers off to plant half the time can kill a fort.

  It can be quite easy to wall off large sections of the caverns with alot of free masons, wood, mud, shubs with no risk once its done.

  Empty barrel stockpile near the stills is gold too.   You will never use half the metal you dig up, so turn it all into barrels, bins and other stuff once you have magma.

  Starting with your back to a hill and then removing all the ramps is the quickest way to build a wall.

  My starting loadout always has a half decent stonecrafter, who starts churning out stuff after the first week pretty much non stop so I can buy whatever I want from the caravan.
  I also take a proficient weapon/armor smith (quality is what it is all about).  After embark this dwarf gets animal training so he will have a pack of bodyguards for early on, if things arent too rough outside he also gets woodcutting for the stat boosts and the extra protection of the axe.
 
  Getting a dorm and dining room up early will stop almost all your happiness issues.
 
  Walling off the outside world and pinging at your enemies through fortifications in hills is a slow but unbeatable defense.

  Small amounts of stuff will grow on underground soils once the caverns are breached, mining out massive chunks of soil in the top few layers can give you a nice tree farm.  Also good for training miners.

 

[Psieye]

Noob Tip:
Stonefall Traps can me made without wood or metal and are quick and easy enough to produce that you can fill the entire entrance of your fort with them.  Good 'till you get your steel serraded disks spinning up or have no wood for cage traps.

Depends. They count as blunt damage, which prior to .08 or so, REALLY SUCKED. Uncertain with the current combat balance and we know Toady isn't finished yet.


More tips:
Aquifers can be removed in the raws. They can be fun and practical, but they can also be a pain.

Worldgen can guarantee you thinner or thicker worlds depending on what you want. You can even cut down the number of caverns.

You can just wall/floor off any cavern you breach. There really is no reason why you can't just go down to the magma within the first season of embark.

Know which jobs need high skill to make better quality products and which just use skill to measure speed. The latter can be done en masse by interchangeable drones.

[TheSummoner]

I tend to bring only enough food and booze to last me until I can set up a farm... which doesn't take long.  For "easy to skill up" skills such as mining, woodcutting, and planting, I only give the dwarves 1 point each.  I use most of my points on iron ore and flux stone to get an early start on steel production.

[Hokan]

Here's a tip.
Magma.

[gtmattz]

Booze barrels vanish (or are ceremonially smashed) when they become empty.

Show me some proof of this, because I am pretty sure I have never had this happen to me, and it is not something that should be happening if it is, and as such should be bug reported.

[ledgekindred]

Enough stonefall traps do the job.  At least in 31_10 it only takes a half dozen or so whacks to severely injure a goblin and send him running.  Or at least trying to run, chances are after the first two or three he will have taken enough damage that he will keep passing out.  If you're lucky, he will stumble through more untriggered ones on the way out.  In 31_10 I've turned away at least three ambushes by nothing but rocks dropping on them, killing enough by suffocation or bleeding out, and causing the rest to run away.   Plus they are absurdly easy to get a ton of them set up right away and will help your mechanic train.  I usually bring a dwarf with mechanic/mason for this and masonry work.

Don't bother with getting a military up quickly, it's still pretty buggy and filling your entryway with 100 traps, even if they are stonefall traps, will be more effective until you get steel weapons and armor and have your dwarves training for at least a couple seasons.

D-B-D

Mass-dumping designation.

This.  Put garbage dump on single-tiles all over the place to minimize the distance your dwarves have to walk to dump stuff.  Put dump zones next to the storage areas and put workshops next to the dump zone and periodically reclaim all the stone that gets put in it (D-B-c I think) and your dwarves will have a handy supply of stone.

It wasn't immediately obvious to me at first, but rocks in your storage zone take up tiles so other stuff can't be put there.  Once you dig out a storage area you need to clear the rocks out before you can use all the space.

- use the work order manager. Don't waste time by searching your workshops and then selecting stuff manually by scrolling around.

Also this.  It took me forever to realize the utility of the work order manager.  Get your manager/bookkeeper an office ASAP and use this for everything.  The other advantage of the job manager is that jobs will stay in the queue until you have supplies/trained dwarves to fulfill them. 

Gather outside plants, set up a couple outside farm plots, grow the stuff you collect.  If you have sand and find rope reed, grow some of those and process them into thread, have a weaver/clothier make it into cloth and then make bags out of them.  Getting a bag industry up quick makes getting a glassmaking industry up faster.  And glassmaking lets you make glass weapon trap components which are good vendor bait and also fill weapon traps. 

Grow anything that can be brewed and get a brewer up and running.  Booze is the most important item at keeping your fortress running efficiently - if you run out of booze work will slow to a halt, including your brewer, which makes it that much slower at making more booze.

Don't let your chef cook booze.  Go into the stocks menu z-kitchen, and disable cooking on booze.  When your fort is first starting your chef can cook all your booze before you realize it and your dwarves will get pissed off and stop working.  You have to keep going into the kitchen menu and turning off when your brewer makes new types of booze - cooking is enabled by default apparently.

Make sure your ranger has Ambushing as his top ranked skill on embark.  If so, he will get free leather armor and a crossbow.  Make sure he also has bolts to work with.  Although ammo is still buggy even in the latest version it's a lot better about hunters picking up ammo to hunt.  A steady incoming supply of meat keeps your cook busy making a wider variety of fancy meals which as mentioned before sell for a lot.  They also make your dwarves happy when they eat a fine meal.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Also, lead has a low material value, and is not used for any alloy reactions.

I wish to point out lay pewter.

[smjjames]

Booze barrels vanish (or are ceremonially smashed) when they become empty.

Show me some proof of this, because I am pretty sure I have never had this happen to me, and it is not something that should be happening if it is, and as such should be bug reported.

I think he is joking around.

If you're embarking on a desert or sparsely wooded biome, its a good idea to bring lots of wood.

What I do before manufacturing alot of barrels at the start, is to create some beds and construct them in your fort somewhere, that way your starting 7 will at least have someplace to sleep.

You can change the number of embark points alloted to you in the advanced worldgen options.

Since you can't farm on dry soil for now (stupid bug!), bring along a rock block and a corkscrew (the pipe will have to be made on site) to muddy whatever dug out area you plan to use for farming. Be careful not to flood it entirely with 2/7 or more of water or you're going to have to bail that area out somehow. Thats if you're planning on embarking along a river or near a lake. Alternatively, if you know there will be murky pools, just empty that out into a space for farming.