Print

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

[Scynix]

Hey everyone..
 I haven't played DF in a long, long time, well before the current "DF2010".
I tried googling for guides for starting out with DF2010, but all I can find is the old guides.
I love this game and would really like to get back to failing miserably, but for the life of me I cannot remember what skills to take when starting the game. I don't need a step by step guide or anything, I remember the basics, but the new systems confuse me. Someone told me to take 5 points in mining, but the values start at 5? I think that's point cost, but I don't know, I'm just really confused at this point. 

Can someone point me to a bare-bones recommended build? Something I can explore the basics of the game again with, without having to start over because I forgot to bring xxx or yyy ?

Thanks in advance.

[Psychobones]

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Starting_build

The wiki knows all.

[thijser]

Well you can start a fort with almost everything but a pick anvil and axe are strongly adviced. A planter is usefull and so is a large amout of alcohol and food at embark. If you embark somewhere dangerous you may consider bringing allong a strong soldier with weapons and armor and if you embark somewhere without trees you should consider taking some wood with you.

[melomel]

Love the wiki, know the wiki, embrace the wiki.

That said, it doesn't cover everything.

Things I keep in mind, in absolutely no order of importance:  Nobody brings camels or muskoxen for trade.  You can use wooden training axes to cut down trees.  The new military is worlds away from the old one.  Skill in doctoring really, really, really matters if you want to keep your combatants alive.  So does armor.  The caverns are dangerous, really dangerous.  Bringing bags of sand is cheaper than bringing empty bags.  A lot more stuff is magma-safe now.

Immigrants suck a whole lot less.  Yeah, you still get the deluge of cheesemakers and butchers, but you also get moochers with high ranks in armoring/weaponsmithing/etc.  I've had legendary cooks and mechanics pop up.

Bedrooms are bugged; dwarves will claim them, but they never sleep in the right ones.  Make dormitories and a spiffy dining room instead.

If you survive long enough, you'll get besieged by troll clerks.

[Scynix]

Thanks a lot guys, I really appreciate it.

I was actually using the wiki, but the section about sample starting builds didn't make any sense.
For example: LumberjackHerbalist   Woodcutting-4,Herbalism-4, Axedwarf, Armor, Carpentry <-- This isn't a possible build if its telling me to put 4 increases into woodcutting and herbalism. I tried the other three and could only do two, as the dwarfs 10 points get allocated before I can get the third (duh).

I feel like I'm missing something x_X

[AngleWyrm]

It was a mistake on the wiki -- I've edited out the armor point so that the dwarf has ten skills.

Also, I've been having a good time with a farmer-miner build:
Grower-5, Brewer-5
Grower-5, Cook-5
Miner-5, Stonecrafter-5
Miner-5, Negotiator-3, Appraiser-1, Bookkeeper-1
Miner-5, Diagnostician-5
Carpenter-5, Woodcutter-5
Leader-5, Organizer-5

[JAFANZ]

It was a mistake on the wiki -- I've edited out the armor point so that the dwarf has ten skills.

Actually, if you look at the Embark_profile.txt excerpt for 'BillyBob & the Rock Nuts', the error was in specifying Herbalism 4, when the author actually went with Herbalism 3

From the wiki page:
   [SKILL:3:WOODCUTTING:4]
   [SKILL:3:CARPENTRY:1]
   [SKILL:3:HERBALISM:3]
   [SKILL:3:AXE:1]
   [SKILL:3:ARMOR:1]

[AngleWyrm]

Aha. Well correction corrected.

[JAFANZ]

Aha. Well correction corrected.

Thank you, I've never bothered learning how to edit wikis, nor am I real big on creating accounts for them.

[Xenos]

here are my starting dwarfs

5brew/5cook
appraise/record/whatever manager uses
5herb/5farm

the rest of my points go on equipment (I like lots of sand bags, seeds, and animals [i modded elephants as embarkable ] also, use wooden training axes as has been said.)  If I feel adventurous, I leave the picks and bring 1 coke, 3 bit coal, 9 copper nuggets and a few stone blocks.  Add glacier volcano for maximum Fun.

[Scynix]

Nevermind. I totally forgot the game gives you a ton of items (occupying a LOT of points) before you do anything. Oi.

[melomel]

I recommend dumping most of the items it assigns you on embark.

Take the splints--it gives you zero-quality splints, and most folks embark with the carp skill.  Even if you don't--still cheaper to make them yourself with an untrained dorf, even if you have to bring the wood yourself, too.  Pigtail cloth is also at least twice the cost of cave spider silk, and you only really need cloth/thread in the early embark if you're expecting injuries before the caravans arrive.

If you want to embrace your inner munchkin:  Barrels can hold stacks of 10 meat, and 15 booze.  Parts from the same animal get shipped together:  your cow meat, cow eyes, cow tripe and brain and intestines and etc. will come in a single barrel, unless you bring 11 cow parts, in which case you'll get one barrel with 10 steaks/suspicious organ meats in it, and one barrel with only 1 cow part in it... or you could bring one part from every single cheap animal available and embark with tons of soon-to-be-emptied barrels.  1 monarch butterfly brain?  It comes in its own barrel.  Add your mules and cats and dogs and cows and dromedaries and bactrians and never mind why dwarves decided that fly brains were hearty fare, you get a barrel!

Also, points in mining are overrated if you have a lot of dirt to play in.  Even unskilled dwarves can plow through soil like buttah, and you don't have to worry about losing flux/gems/ores due to their lack of skill.

[JAFANZ]

I agree with Melomel, don't use the "Play now" or "Prepare Carefully" as both waste too many of the points assigned to equipment.

I believe Liquids at embark are 5/barrel not 15, so 16-20 of one booze = 4 barrels.

Sand & Seeds come in bags, I think it's 10/bag.

1 Iron Anvil, 2 Copper Picks, & 2 Training Axes ~= 222pts or DIY 7ea of Bronze Picks & Axes for ~=224pts (1 Coke, 7ea Bit. Coal/Cassiterite/Copper Ore, 3 Fire-/Magma-safe stones, 1 Iron Anvil) [NB: 1 Iron Anvil, 2ea Copper Picks & Axes ~= 324pts]

Rock Nuts are edible, & cost half as much per unit as the cheapest Fish/Meat.

Cave Spider Silk Rope costs 10pts/ea, I'm pretty sure the default Pig-tail is 20pts/ea.

If you have reason to believe your embark site is likely to have a decent volume of harvestable surface plants, taking a Proficient Herbalist, a Proficient Brewer, & cutting back on your Booze supplies may be worthwhile (start brewing early).

Courting a Cat-/Dog-splosion is a theoretically a fairly cheap way of getting Meat & Leather industries going early (low value, high output).

Note: taking 1 each of a the 2pt/unit Meats/Brains (I recommend starting with Brains if you go this route, there'll be more types) gets you a lot of free Barrels, at the cost of taking a long time to transfer from your Wagon to your 1st covered Food Stockpile (AIUI Outdoor Food Stockpiles still rot, if slower, Indoor don't).

Note2: Food & Drink Consumption are approx 14 & 28 (respectively) per season, 16 & 31 respectively will net 2 "free" barrels, & should cover any excess requirement.

[Shoku]

The caves are typically not any more dangerous than a lot of the overworld biomes I was embarking to in 40d. The only lie in that are the forgotten beasts that can show up and generally behave like titans. They don't wait until you have 80 dwarves but you do get a pause and warning message about them. They're very random though so you may dispatch them like so many hoary marmots or lost 40 dwarves trying to kill them and find out that most of the fort suddenly has beard-rot.

So basically figure out how burrows work so you can set up a quarantine and prepare for some fun.

-

I go with 5:mining/1 of each conversation skill, 5:mining/5:armorsmithing, 5:carpentry/5:architect, 5:grower/5:cook, 5:herbalist/5:brewer, 5:mechanic/5:glass, and a Doctor. The doctor is the only one not aimed at doing something before I've even finished digging out the first few rooms.

-

Although you can save points by shifting equipment down into raw materials I don't really bother because you can now choose the number of embark points when you generate worlds.

-

The critical thing to mention for military now would be schedules. You can tell a squad what you want it doing every month of the year and they'll go do it with pretty severe devotion- like to the point that they're exhausted. This is because each task comes with a designation for the minimum number that need to be doing it and that defaults to 10. This is pretty handy because now you can be sure somebody is always standing watch at a particular doorway but you should tweak the number down to a couple less than the # of dwarves in the squad.

This makes training pretty simple though as you can make squads of 3 with 2 required and they'll basically train constantly without waiting around for people to show up. Squads of 10 waste lots of time waiting for people to show up for demonstrations and such so smaller is better. There's much less injury from training but if you want to be super-duper-ultra sure you can have them use training weapons. Those are practically broom handles with padding.

And on a related note units treat traps a lot like regular attacks now so goblins that make it through a long hallway of huge glass weapons (which are weaker now) will be much better armor users and such.

[Ubiq]

These days I usually take at least some Lye to make soap out of early on anymore as that seems to be one of the few ways to guarantee that a relatively minor injury doesn't kill your dwarf with infection.

Other than that, I would recommend Medical Skills since they're not easily raised without using a mod that includes a custom workship designed for just that. It's best to put them on a dwarf that isn't prone to procastination or any of the other bad labor traits.

I'd also recommend turning off skill rust, but that's a whole other story entirely.