Which means I can't get booze going.
And inexplicably, all of my dwarves just stopped working. Argh! This interface is a little confusing...
Okay, when creating a world, what are the settings you use? What items should I bring? How should I spread out my initial professions? Do I aim for temperate, or warm?
Erm.
I create pocket islands. They come with plenty of salt water and aquifers, so you should make a pocket region instead. Creating these tiny worlds is really fast, this is why I create them instead of the huge worlds.
The only parameters that I would change if I were you, are the minimum numbers for the volcanoes. Volcanoes are awesome, so up it to 20 for a pocket region or so.
Next: finding a suitable site.
Find the mountains on your pocket region. Find their edge that connects to the nearby forest. Look through these squares until you find the brook that probably is somewhere along this line; if you can't find a brook, look through all available squares of your pocket region until you find a river. Follow that river until you find a suitable spot for your embark.
You are really new, so you can really just embark anywhere though, until you get the farming down.
Next: farming.
Farming is really the only thing that you need to hurry to get doing. I will assume that you found a suitable spot with trees, shrubs, some river or brook and some murky pools.
The shrubs mean that you can do and should do some aboveground farming straight away, before messing around with irrigation projects for your plump helmet farms.
While you send your miners to cut some holes into the ground and your lumberjack to cut down some trees, enable the plant gathering labor on all of the idlers.
I would recommend that you download Dwarf Therapist for this, because it can get quite tedious with the game's interface.
Dwarf Therapist thread:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=66525If you don't want to use the Therapist, you need to find the idle dwarf, then (p)reference - (l)abour - scrollscrollscroll Plant Gathering.
Anyway, collect some prickle berries and rat weeds and put them into food stockpiles (just a hint: disable barrels for this plant stockpile. Let them put the booze into a different stockpile. q-s enables you to change the settings of your stockpiles.)
Build a small farming plot (2x2 tiles is sufficient for now, really) in the open, on some soily squares. Tell this farming plot to farm prickle berries or whatever you got.
Build a still.
Now, I am going to assume that you started out with some booze, so it's not really necessary to get a booze production ready so quickly, but booze and access to some food is really the one vital thing in your fortress. You don't want to ever have the dwarves in the desperate vermin-hunting mode; and as long as there's booze, you don't need a water source anyway unless anybody got hurt and is in the hospital.
Once this is set up, feel free to do your digging and subterranean farming experiments.