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[GaxkangtheUnbound]

A decorated Dining Room may be the only thing between Temper Tantrums and you.
Also, having a Well can help if you lack booze for some reason.
Prepared Meals do not rot as fast.

[meto30]

copper is abundant enough and replenishable enough that it can be safely used for barrels without fear of running out of it.

It is said there are four primary ores of iron. Those are hematite, magnetite, limonite, and goblinite. Goblinite is easy to get, once your defences are up and running. Have multiple smelters melting leftover metal things after a particularly lucrative large siege.

it is true that wood is a semi-replenishable good class B, that is, it does regenerate but does so at a painfully slow pace. As long as you're absolutely certain you won't run out of wood anytime soon, try to limit the amount of wood you consume. That also means that metalworking industries shouldn't go full-scale without magma. It is a difficult choice to make, I know.

[Astramancer]

When setting up your food stockpile use multiple stockpiles and only allow barrels on one for your booze stockpile, then have the other with barrels disabled for everything else.  This keeps all of your barrels free for booze storage, which is very important.

Even better, on the 'p' menu where you're choosing which stockpiles to place... hit * (on the numpad) a few times.  This will increase the number of 'reserve barrels' you have.  This means they're reserved for any task that specifically uses barrels, such as brewing alcohol.  They will not be used for general food storage.  This way, unless you're totally out of barrels because you were using all but your 5 reserved barrels and then build 5 asheries/dyer workshops, you'll have some barrels for emergency booze production.  Without having to remember to tweak every single food/seed stockpile.

Goblinite is the fan term for "those damn goblins left 500 pieces of useless narrow iron armor wrapped around their stinking corpses, so I'm going to melt it down for the iron"

The easiest way to irrigate for your first farm:  Dig a big room next to a murky pool (the room is underground, of course, and should be at least 6 times the area of the pool, if you don't want your hallway to get muddy).  Once the room is dug, merely mine away one wall tile that's separating your room from the murky pool.  In a minute or so, everything will be under 1/7 water, and you can start building those farms.  Just go ahead and build a wall (b-C-w) in the gap.  Building destroyers won't be able to touch it (and unless you're in a hot area, it should be underwater soon anyway).

d-b-d.  Learn it, use it, love it.  This is how you designate lots of stuff for dumping all at once.  There's something called the 'quantum stockpile' that you'll hear people talking about.  Designate a garbage dump (it's a zone -- 'i') that's just 1 tile big.  Everything marked for dumping will (eventually) end up there.  By everything, I mean everything.  There's no limit to the number of objects that can be stored there.  You can out mass black holes if you want. 

Speaking of quantum stockpiles...  if you want to permanently remove stuff from the game (say, those 20,000 loose stones I mentioned earlier), then you can build a drawbridge (b-g), hook it to a lever, raise the drawbridge, place a garbage zone under the drawbridge, store rocks (or elves, or whatever) under said drawbridge by dumping them.  Low the drawbridge.  Everything under it was just smashed out of existence.  This is referred to as the dwarven atom-smasher.

Speaking of Elves...  They bring lots of really neat toys (read: Giant Lions, Tigermen, and other assorted awesome animals), but only if they don't like you.  You see, cloth is far more profitable from a weight-to-value ratio, so if you keep giving them good profits, they'll just bring acre after acre of useless cloth.  To solve this problem, don't pay for anything.  Just mark what you want and seize it.  They'll keep bringing the nice animals, and a minimum of cloth.  Sure, eventually they'll get ticked enough to siege you (maybe), but you'll have at least a decade of favorable (to you) trade relations first.  Similarly, don't give in to their unfair demands that you stop harvesting bed charcoal wood.

Speaking of trade caravans...  If you need to equip an army in the near future and don't have a decent supply of steel yet, wait until the dwarven traders get there, trade for the steel weapons and armor.  If it's not enough, then 'v' the dwarven guards and mark their gear for dumping.  Assuming you have enough free labor, your dwarves will come and steal the armor right off those guards.  This does, however, get charged against you when they run their balance sheets back home, so unless you want them annoyed with you, don't do this too often, or grossly overcompensate them in regular trading.  Also, if you want more steel, and they just aren't bringing enough bars/ore (you are ordering steel, iron, and pig iron bars, right?), then buy out all the steel and iron toys they have and melt them down.  It's not much, but every little bit helps.

Lastly: Dwarf Therapist.  I don't think I could play the game without it.  If offers a much needed streamlined interface for managing your dwarven labors.

[Shoku]

Here's a tip less for playing the game but more for forums in general: ask specific questions. Obviously today there were a lot of people eager to recommend things but my first impulse after reading this was to think that you were too lazy to actually play the game and actually ask for help understanding what you were encountering. This equates to a waste of time in the part of my head where I am an expert on some subject but with internet forums I don't let that dominate my behavior.

I am trying to say this in a fairly positive way. I'm obviously a bit pissy about some other things right now but you are going to run into people that aren't in the best of moods on forums, especially specific forums about a subject with a lot of depth. You could ask what are some interesting things to try first or maybe say that you had the basics down but wanted some advice on places to look that most people pass over.

So here's a tip: all of the farming jobs except tanning don't get special moods and don't have very big benefits for being good at them. They are however things you want somebody to run over and work on pretty quick when they become available. To this end I suggest turning all of those on on any migrant that you don't have working on something else. This is very tedious to do entirely in the game engine so download dwarf therapist to make it just take some quick clicking.
Also if you're working with metals at all you can have all of these dwarves work your smelters (furnace operating).

If they don't have any skill other than the ones I mentioned if they get a mood they will just make some craft and probably become a legendary stonecrafter. This gets kind of lame after awhile but the good news is that you can easily control what moods these farm/furnace dwarves get. If they have ANY experience doing something else they will have a mood for that. If they make just one rock block at the mason shop? Artifact furniture. Just one shoe at the clothier shop? Artifact clothing.

Another tip: When you get around to using the military just put three dwarves in a squad. Then you can set the minimum for their task to 2 and you'll have 2 of them sparring almost all of the time while one takes care of drinking and eating and so forth, or hauls junk around if they really have no biological needs. If you actually put 10 in a squad they waste a lot of time waiting for everyone to show up and then it's probably just for a demonstration by someone not really good at their skill.

[melomel]

But won't that mean all your food will rot? Plus your food stockpiles will be far less efficient?

Not if they're big enough, which brings us to another tip:  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PAY ATTENTION TO THE BARREL AND BIN SETTINGS ON YOUR STOCKPILES.

If you're starting out and only using giant vanilla stockpiles for everything the game counts as food (fat, tallow, dyes, seeds, milk, prepared meals, booze...  everything) you'll be fine.  If you start trying to refine your stockpiles, it can waste months of hauling effort as, oh, say, dwarves dutifully haul your seeds not to your new seed stockpile, but to that one barrel in your old stockpile that isn't supposed to have seeds in it, but there's an old barrels with seeds in them, so EVERY HAULER IN THE FORT drags seeds halfway across the fort to the barrel with the seeds in it that isn't supposed to be there instead of just moving the damn barrel and meanwhile nothing else gets moved.  There are init settings to deal with this that I have not mastered yet, also.

I've gotten to the point where I only permit barrels in (1) booze stockpiles, and (2) other stockpiles when they run out of un-barrelled room.  (I like soil layers, clearing stone rooms, and big stockpiles...  ymmv, but booze SPs should have maxed barrels, and prepared food SPs, few to none.)

Bins, OTOH, are your friends.  Your bestest, bestest friends.

A secure water source is vital.  Floodgates can be destroyed by some enemies; raised drawbridges can't--I think.  Some enemies can fly.  Capping your population at 19 isn't a bad idea if you're just learning the basics.  Aboveground crops won't grow on rock, even if you build the plot and make it aboveground after.  In some areas, water freezes in winter and thaws in spring--this can lead to tragedy, because the thawing process is instant and dwarves will gladly path across frozen ponds (use d -> o -> r to prevent them from drowning when the ice turns into watery doom).

Here's a tip less for playing the game but more for forums in general: ask specific questions. Obviously today there were a lot of people eager to recommend things but my first impulse after reading this was to think that you were too lazy to actually play the game and actually ask for help understanding what you were encountering. This equates to a waste of time in the part of my head where I am an expert on some subject but with internet forums I don't let that dominate my behavior.

Well...  I gotta respectfully disagree, there.  While a "just give me tips that help" post can be annoyingly open-ended, this isn't exactly a game you pick up by "just playing".  See the face-palm thread, and the avalanche of posts by people suddenly realizing that you can use the stocks menu to forbid all items of a type, or use the d -> b menu to mass dump/melt/forbid items.  Or that you can use u/m/k/h to change the size of a construction instead of having to build a floor piece by piece.

The wiki is a good starting-off point, but with the epic complexity of DF, it is nowhere near complete.  (I only just figured out that the reason elk birds and unicorns and giant moles and crap were getting loose in my fort was because of a bug that sets caged wild animals loose if you try to trade them--and that bug wasn't in the articles for wild animal training/cage traps/trading when I read the wiki.)


To the OP--It's not a bad idea to state exactly what you want to know about DF/do with your fort, though.  I'd suggest some walkthroughs, but I'm not sure if there are any for 2010 yet.

[gtmattz]

stuff

But won't that mean all your food will rot? Plus your food stockpiles will be far less efficient?

Food in stockpiles does not rot, ever, period, even outdoors. As long as your food items are on a food stockpile they are good forever. The only thing barrels gives you is some protection from vermin.

[The Grackle]

Spend like an hour exploring every menu and sub-menu.  When first playing, I missed a LOT of useful tools, like for mass-dumping stones, auto-forbidding items that dead creatures drop, the job manager, and so on.  Just wiki "menu" and start reading.     

[Xenos]

stuff

But won't that mean all your food will rot? Plus your food stockpiles will be far less efficient?

Food in stockpiles does not rot, ever, period, even outdoors. As long as your food items are on a food stockpile they are good forever. The only thing barrels gives you is some protection from vermin.

I have had meat rot in stockpiles I believe (it happened today in a fort started in 31.12 and today taken to 31.16)

[cog disso]

Make sure to play plenty of DF immediately before bed.

Trust me.

[Earthquake Damage]

I have had meat rot in stockpiles I believe (it happened today in a fort started in 31.12 and today taken to 31.16)

Disclaimer:  The following may or may not be true. 

FYI:  Stockpiled food never degrades fast enough to matter, so long as you consistently produce more food.  So the following can mostly be ignored.

AFAIK meat never rots in a stockpile.  It does, however, suffer damage.  I think extreme temperatures (e.g. stockpiles outside on a glacier) cause such damage, but the most common cause is vermin IIRC.

Vermin slowly damage your food over time.  Somewhere along the way I picked up the notion that some foodstuffs are vermin-free (e.g. extracts like syrup, and presumably any prepared meals made entirely of said extracts), but don't quote me on that.

You can protect yourself from vermin by storing food in barrels (metal offers better protection than wood, but neither is perfect).  Another option is dealing with the vermin directly, either with cats (bad idea if you don't want the game to slow to a crawl over time) or setting someone to trap vermin repeatedly (bonus:  caged vermin can be eaten if your food stores run low).  Trapping vermin requires empty animal traps, the correct workshop (kennel?), and someone with the animal trapping labor enabled.  You'll want to build a cage somewhere and periodically assign trapped vermin to it so you can reuse your traps.

[Vehudur]

I usually embark with 5 male cats.

Once I accidently got 5 female cats.  Then the first migrant wave had two male cats.

Fill in the blanks.  You know exactly how that went.

[Raufgar]

I cannot stress the importance of micromanaging when you mass designate channeling/digging/removing/etc something that is supporting something (i.e. the roof of your entire fortress, the floor Urist McStupidMiner is standing on, a floodgate holding back magma, etc.)

In fact, I suggest that you do NOT do any mass designation of removing of anything (except when dumping stuff). Case to point: Designating floor tiles to be removed from an entire room/level. Urist McAutomatons will happily remove the tiles closest to the walls (which act as a place to hold up the floor), leaving the middle to crash through several z levels, killing or maiming whatever is beneath them (or on them, like Urist McStupidMiner). Since the game can't really tell which ones were designated last (Dwarf Fortress runs on a last in, first out (LIFO) order processing, keep that in mind), they will just do whatever they please. Had to reload my fort thrice due to this Fun.

That being said, your fortress itself can truly be held up on a single support if you wish (for lots of Fun)

Also, I suggest making your own weapons/tools when you embark, they give you more leeway (i.e. Embark Points or EP) to customize your starting build. This usually means you get more options when looking for the right dwarf/tool for the job, as well as a longer timeframe to put everything into place before your dwarfs start bitchin' (I'm Thirsty, I'm Hungry, Help I'm being attacked by a Zombie Elephant)

[ghosteh]

Cage traps are the most useful traps as they ensure instant incapacitation, including certain Fun things;

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Bronze Colossus, Dragon, Hydra

Don't dig too deep or too greedily; War Dogs are lifesavers; adventure mode sucks and, contrary to popular belief, Bronze is better then iron.

[Raufgar]

Cage traps are the most useful traps as they ensure instant incapacitation, including certain Fun things;

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Bronze Colossus, Dragon, Hydra

Don't dig too deep or too greedily; War Dogs are lifesavers; adventure mode sucks and, contrary to popular belief, Bronze is better then iron.

Cotton Candy > Steel > Bismuth Bronze > Bronze > Iron > Copper

[nuker w]

Your worst enemy is on the inside. The menace will not kill your dwarves... But your FPS. KILL ALL THOSE DAMN CAT'S.