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[Chandrak]

IMO, I don't think the video tutorials were too helpful. I just did alot of trial and error.

Starting Professions: I would highly recommend the following skills. They can be spread out however you wish, really, though I tend to go with grouping like skills together - just makes it easier for me to remember who's supposed to do what.

Mining is a must.
Woodcutting is a must if you have trees.
Masonry is a must, you need someone to build workshops.
Fishing/Animal Trapping/Hunting related skills are good if you are in a place with high savagery (denoted by the 'surroundings')
A Planter is defintely a must as well - I usually make mine have Cooking, Butchering, and Planting.

Carpentry, Stonecrafting, Woodcrafting and Bonecrafting - I personally like to have these. I find its very helpful to build a Craftsdwarf Workshop right off the bat and start making crafts ASAP, so that when Traders come the first Winter, I can sell anything I've made to them for beer or food, depending on what I need. Bonecrafting I'd recommend you wait on, but Stone/Woodcrafting you can start up right away with little work - Bonecrafting, while profitable, requires the setup of hunting/butchering/refuse piles.

[BigJake]

Both temperate and warm will be ok but you might want to go warm just so you don't have to worry a bit about the water freezing over.  To change a dwarf's labor settings, highlight them with (v) and hit (p) then (l).

To set a pond to fill, you have to hit (i) and set an activity zone on the emtpy space above the pit.  Once you've got it set, hit (p) to turn it into a pit then hit (P), _{that's shift-P}, and set it to Pond instead of Pit.  If you have buckets, they should start the bucket brigade.  The default set includes 3 buckets I think.

The jobs you'll need in the beginning are miners, a carpenter, a mason a farmer/brewer and a woodcutter.  Everything else is just gravy, really.

As far as irrigation, though, I've always found it easier to just empty a murky pool into the farm.  Just allow 7 times as many tiles in the farm as there are tiles of water in the pond.  A single 5x5 farm will feed your whole population until you start getting 80+ dwarfs.  Just set the farm to all plump helmets for the first year, then mix it up.  Dimple cups are worthless, everything else can be made into booze or eaten.

As far as items go, bring a couple picks and an axe, at least 45 food and at least 60 booze.  Everything else is pretty much gravy as well.  If you select 45 different kinds of food you'll get 45 seperate barrels, which is very useful in the beginning.  You should also grab a breeding pair of war dogs and a cat or two (there are seperate entries for male and female animals).

[Chandrak]

I'd actually recommend a different means of setting up farms. I've got a pretty simple method thats pretty newbie-friendly.

First, find a pond or murky pool with water in it already. (Dont use Brook/River!). Usually there will be at least one if you got forest/grassland/swamp. Putting one or two spaces between the nearest ground space next to the pond, dig a channel or staircase down one space. Then, move down a z-level to where the channel you dug is, dig a short tunnel, and then a big open square area, at LEAST 3 times in size as the number of water spaces in the pond. Once it's finished, channel (dont dig!) out the spaces you left between the ramp/stairs and the pond, allowing water to fill the cavern you just dug. The water will pour into the cave, eventually becoming 1/7 layers - these will evaporate, leaving behind mud squares. If you find the water level's still a little high, you can widen the area as long as the water isnt higher than 3/7 - your dwarves will be fine then, just keep widening until it all levels out.

As long as you make sure to make the initial cave at least 3x the number of water spaces, you should be fine to widen it if it wasnt big enough.

Once the cavern is drying, you can tunnel from there into your fortress so your dwarves can move underground there. For added security, remove any ramps you had from channeling (d -> z) so baddies cant come down that way. If you're concerned with rain filling up a small pool, you can also wall off the original pool, since all you care about is the underground farm.

Edit: Heh, you beat me to the suggestion of emptying the pool into the farm I added some detailed instructions.

[Chandrak]

On editing specific orders: It depends on what you are trying to do, but I can make a few suggestions.

The first thing to keep in mind is that, barring military units, you cant directly order a dwarf to do something. What you do instead is select a task to be done (Designating mining / woodcutting, placing work orders in workshops, and so on), and any dwarf who has that labor enabled will choose to go off and do that task if he's not doing something else (like Drink, Sleep, Eat or another job).

To enable specific labors, you need to View Unit. This is accomplished one of two ways - first, just use 'v' from the main screen and move the cursor near the dwarf you want to check out. The other method is to use 'u' and bring up the list of all creatures. From there, highlight the one you want and press 'c' for 'zoom to creature' (In the unit screen 'v' does something else).

Once you're viewing the unit, you can press 'g' to see a list of the dwarfs skills, or 'p' followed by 'L' (thats lowercase, capped it so you could see). p -> l brings up the labor menu, where you can then toggle on/off which jobs you want that dwarf to perform.

[BigJake]

Thanks for expanding on all of that.

[Zachski]

Thanks a whole lot, guys.

I'll make another attempt soon.

[Zachski]

So, umm...

Attempting to dig through damp stone ended up with me flooding the B2 level of my fortress with 6/7 water.

The B1 level, where all the dwarves are, is safe, but ironically, I can't seem to get water into my farm.

The first level is only an entrance into the B1 level where basically everything is.

I'm still screwing up, but at least I'm not screwing up due to interface issues this time-- this is normal screw ups.

[BigJake]

Dig under the flooded portion to create a "cistern", then open up a drain between the two.  What's left will be irrigated

[Chandrak]

Disasters are all part of the fun! (A phrase you'll hear regularly around here!). Also part of the fun is figuring out what you did wrong.

What sort of damp stone did you tunnel into? Damp stone always holds back water somehow - by digging such spaces you are guaranteed that water will come through that space.

When it comes to farms, you want to make sure you are flooding using standing surface water. Brooks, Rivers, and Aqueducts (as well as magma pipes) have infinite supplies of liquid, so will just keep running until it fills things up.

If you are digging underground and come across damp stone and you CANT see whats on the other side, never dig into it - its probably an underground lake/river/aquifer. What you want is the pools of water you can see on the surface.


Also: Bigjakes suggestion is a good one

[Zachski]

Actually, I was attempting to dig around it.

Which resulted in water.

Unfortunately, the farm is on B1...

[BigJake]

Actually, I was attempting to dig around it.

Which resulted in water.

Unfortunately, the farm is on B1...

Well, the farm is wherever you want it to be.  Doesn't exactly have to be on B1.  You've got a hundred or more levels below you.  Don't be afraid to dig down.

[bcd1024]

Dig down to B3. Create a sealed space (cistern) close to the flooded area. Seal it with a door or something. Make sure it's big enough to hold the water from B2. Channel a tile on B2 above the cistern and let the water drain.

B2 is now used for farming.

[Zachski]

Dig down to B3. Create a sealed space (cistern) close to the flooded area. Seal it with a door or something. Make sure it's big enough to hold the water from B2. Channel a tile on B2 above the cistern and let the water drain.

B2 is now used for farming.

Right, sounds like a good idea.

Except I can't get to B2.  The water would drown the dwarf that tried to dig a channel there.

[BigJake]

Hmm?  This isn't an aquifer we're talking about, is it?  Otherwise just dig down to the side of the flooded passages; bypass them.

If it is an aquifer, you've got a little project ahead of you to breach it.  It's really just a bit of digging.

[Lytha]

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=66525

If 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.