Usually I start by mapping out the caverns, which throws up enough stone to build a very small wall to keep buzzards and things out and dwarves in. Then I dig down, making the main corridor wide enough for 5x5 buildings, and figure out what to do from there.
Farming is dealt with by above-ground crops, since I embark on sand. That means plants, even if very few.
Dwarves share a dorm until I've figured out what I want to do with the design. Since I like to keep my head down to avoid attacks there aren't too many unhappy thoughts to worry about, and if I can't think of anything for dwarves to do there's always military training.
The wiki page on the military contains perhaps a little too much information. It's better to turn invaders off and press the buttons yourself to see what they do. To do that you need a squad.
[m ], [c ], pick 'no uniform', highlight the first name in the 'candidates' column, press enter a bunch of times. This squad won't be any good for fighting, but you can still give them orders to be carried out in the safety of the fortress.
To actually give them orders you need to go outside the military screen. The military screen might be where you assign patrols and burrow defence orders, but until you specify where the patrol routes and burrows are the 'give order' part of the schedule screen will remain blank and incomprehensible.
But never mind about that, that's advanced stuff if you don't already know how to use burrows and notes. The [s ]quads menu accessible from the main screen is where you find the basic 'go here' and 'kill that' commands. Selecting it does not pause the game like other menus do, which takes some getting used to. This overlaps with the military screen a little in that you can view squad schedules and toggle their active / inactive status.
The default here is to select the whole squad when you press a, b, c, etc., but this can be toggled to individuals by [p ]. If you give a kill order, it will not be cancelled upon completion (it's unclear whether or not this is indended behaviour), and if you order anything in the caravan to be killed then you should either have a backup handy or be willing to live with the results.
Miners, woodcutters, and hunters are bugged because their civilian jobs require them to hold or wear stuff, and the game can't handle a military uniform and a civilian 'uniform' on the same dwarf. You can reduce this buggy behaviour to a minor annoyance by not allowing squads to carry food and by disabling the three mentioned civilian labours unless they're needed. Your miners and woodcutters will still take off all their armour to dig or to fell trees, but they won't claim food and leave it lying around to rot.
Some other notes: Military training as the game 'intends' is painfully slow at first. Skilled fighters teach unskilled ones, but since green dwarves have crappy fighting skills, are crappy teachers and crappy students, and often have crappy mental stats, they're just... crap. Armouring them and sealing them in a room with repeating spikes made from wooden training spears is a quick way of leveling them (and requires no modding), but is generally considered an exploit even if it's sometimes necessary.
...Well, so much for that being a short post.
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Topic: How to get back into Dwarf Fortress? (Read 1867 times)