I love these forums. In every other gameforum, you'd be shouted at when asking a basic question. <3
The difference is that other games are intuitive enough to where you're not required to ask basic questions.
This. In all honesty, it took me three embarks to figure out z-levels, a few more to figure out farming, and then a good 5 or so to get the metal industry down. It's like being thrown in a nuclear reactor that is on fire and about to explode while being sieged by an army of bear riding gorillas being rode by goblins wearing steel armor, and being expected to save the nuclear reactor. Plus, all the instructions are in Chinese. People are here to help, because they went through the same struggles. In a few weeks or months you'll be face-palming when you think that you never knew these things. We've all done it
I can beat that it took me 9 months of 1 fort every other day to figure out the bloody stairs!!
I didn't find the stairs hard to figure out. Just the incredible architecture used that makes them only accessible one way. I like to think they just place arbitrary traffic laws about going up/down certain ones so it doesn't give me headaches.
For me it was the bloody up/down stairs. You want to hear an embarrassing story? Well one time when I was still pretty new, I decided to dig deep! I would dig a 3x3 room, channel a square out to get a ramp down to the next level, build an up stair down there, then a down stair on the level above it. I did this for every level. The micromanagement...The stupidity. It took hours just to find the first cavern which being the newb I was, mistook for the hfs. I thought I was a god among dwarves for breaching the first cavern and surviving.