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[inanity]

Yes i know, and there is so much stone i cant do ANYTHING! 

Also i know you need to muddy the stone ect, but i was told you cant do farms above ground, but if you can, how?

I've always found it a huge hassle to muddy stone.  Instead, I find soil or clay or sand and build my farms on that. 

Building farms above ground is done the same way as below ground.   I usually have a message saying needs muddied soil, but I think that's a bug - build it  anyway and my dorfs farm it.   You need seeds though,, which you can't get from embark, only from caravans I think, maybe also gathered plants.

[MadocComadrin]

You could turn off hauling on your miner(s) if digging is taking too long.

[KtosoX]

Yes i know, and there is so much stone i cant do ANYTHING! 

Also i know you need to muddy the stone ect, but i was told you cant do farms above ground, but if you can, how?

-gather some plants
-brew them to get seeds
-build a farming plot(above ground)
-???
-PROFIT!

[inanity]

-gather some plants
-brew them to get seeds
-build a farming plot(above ground)
-???
-PROFIT!

Hmm, I just realized that when Optimus Prime is in robot mode, his windshield looks like pecs and radiator looks like abs....  never noticed that before.

[CapnUrist]

To put it shortly, your metal industry can stand to wait until you have all your basic needs tended to. ALL aesthetics can also wait for that. The first things you need to worry about it getting your dwarves in safe lodgings, with more food and alcohol than they need stockpiled, and somewhere to sleep that won't give them bad thoughts. In 31.25, underground farms can be made on dry soil as well as muddied stone.

Hauling stone takes a long time even with a large number of haulers, so sometimes it's easier to just leave it there and hide it. It should not cancel any jobs as long as it's not designated for dumping or forbidden, and there's somewhere it can be put out of the way. The only reason I mass-haul stone is if I want a particular type of stone used by my masons or an area MUST be cleared (such as in sewer systems where a loose stone can block the floodgate that will keep the fortress from being flooded).

[KtosoX]

First, provide food booze, shelter and safety. Once you got those 3 things, you can start any project you want.

Burning and raping the land is recreational. Where business is concerned, though, sustainability is the name of the game.

Remember, that this game has no built in tutorials. Use the wiki, check out youtube or lurk the forum.

[franti]

My method is to immediately get a metalworking system set up, and live off of exports for years until I can pump water from a cavern lake up into a hollowed out area for farms.
And yes, hauling/smoothing is very pretty, and I love it, but it's time consuming.

[Roraborialisforealis]

My advice on metal indusrty is to embark on a riverbed without an aquifer. You are likely to have alluvial deposits which will give you some metal. This should give you the courage to do some higher risk mining, or at least I hope it would.

[franti]

I would recomend embarking on an evil forest, because Glumprongs are awesome, and then moving everything to the magma sea, which is far more efficient than charcoal.

[Kattel]

dwarves wont move something tagged for another reason, IE dumping, stockpiling, owned etc. for above ground plots just designate it on grass and away you go...but you will need to collected above ground seeds like strawberries etc.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

One year is not a long time.  At 100 fps, one year takes about an hour.  If an hour is too long-- you're probably playing the wrong game.

I get my metal industry up in about a year.  Slightly less.  That means digging to the magma and getting a smelter and forge up.  It doesn't mean nonstop production.

At first, my smelters are run by furnace operators that haul their own ore, and at first, there's only one furnace operator.  Stockpiles for ore are an improvement for my metal industry, not something I consider necessary for the metal industry.

I'm not sure what problem you're running into, exactly-- it sounds like you have a metal industry, just not working as fast as you'd like.  Making things as fast as you'd like is about eternal optimization.  You never reach perfect efficiency, you only get closer and closer to it.

Like so much in DF, it's about prioritization.  I don't care about dining rooms and bedrooms until I get my metal industry set up.  For me, the priority is probably food/booze, metal, trade, happiness, in that order.

In my current fortress, I knew that I wanted a defense based around cage traps, which means metal or wood, and I was on a desert (no wood).  I got to the magma after about 6 months.  I still only have a single furnace, a single forge, and a tiny stockpile.  I have enough cages, and my forge is pretty much unattended these days.

[sambojin]

I find my metal industry comes in 3 waves. I almost always bring along 2 copper picks and some stone/wood to get things going.

The first wave of industry is immediate, where the very first thing I do is build a furnace and a metal forge, smelt some bronze and make some weapons. I find that 6-8 worth of bronze ores (3-4 copper, 3-4 tin) on embark is cheap and very fast to make. I usually take a little more bit. coal than I need, because it's cheap and handy to have a little extra coke around in case you find any especially good metals early. Making up an extra 3 picks and 3-5 axes really gets your fort going, giving you option of clear-felling large sections for wood/charcoal or mining out your fortress really quickly. They're also good weapons and boost your fort value very quickly at the start, which tends to give you some pretty big migrations straight off. With 5 miners, 3-5 lumberjacks(or military hunters) and a few extra haulers/farmer/gatherers, all the problems you mentioned disappear after 2-3 boosted migrant waves. For 1 casseterite, 1 copper and 2 bit. coal you get two 300-1000 dwarfbuck weapons/tools for 18 embark points. Very efficient. You can get by with copper if you can't get bronze, everything else is too pricey/slow/crap.

The second wave of industry is decided by the resources at my disposal. If you have coal or lignite it will start soon, if you have especially good metals it will start even sooner. But with the option of at least 3 lumberjacks and 5 miners, there's no real excuse to not start churning out some weapons/armour after the first or second migrant wave. For metal-less maps you can hold off until you trade/steal/kill-for some decent ores/bars/weapons/armour. This can take a while, or be quite difficult if you're getting seiged before you get your weapons/armour made and your military trained. I bet you're glad you bought those bronze ores at embark now, aren't you?

The third is going for the magma sea and going for fuel-less smelting. Sometimes (on volcanoes or treeless/coal-less maps) this wave of industry completely replaces the second one. If you are going to dig that far down you'll probably have access to pretty much any ore on the map including the blue stuff. Set up your furnaces (glass furnaces as well), mine your ore and go wild. Note that steel still needs wood/coal to make pig-iron, so you'll still want a charcoal/coke supply. This is pretty much end game in DF, where you decide whether to train up and invade hell, start a multi-ethnic war, pull the lever of magmatic fun or all three at once.

[Psieye]

Any time I want to build anything where there's a rock, my dorfs WILL cancel it.

Beds, doors, statues, cages, traps. Doesn't matter. If there's a rock, the job WILL be canceled.

This is answered by:

dwarves wont move something tagged for another reason, IE dumping, stockpiling, owned etc.

Only dump stone that needs to be dumped in the earlygame. I mean yes, mass-dumping stone is something I do a lot but only when I have spare labour.


It took me around 6 forts when I was starting DF to get comfortable with a magma powered metal industry in the 40d days. Nowadays I set up a metal industry within 1 season of embark and can forego early farming for alternate sources of food but this shouldn't be attempted by the beginner: dig out your fort in soil and get used to having a functional fort that relies on a wood-powered metal industry so you have some taste of what (short-term) normal sustainability success is like. Then experiment with digging down to the magma (seal off caverns as you find them) and getting your metal industry properly powered.

Further tip: why do you need rooms so early? Dwarves want beds with a roof over them, having walls around those beds with rock floors is an optional luxury that can be granted later. Same with dining rooms - your first dining room can be a disgrace so long as it's functional: 4 wooden table/chair pairs in soil will suffice.

[Melissia]

After a dozen forts, I still haven't managed to get a good metal industry going... my latest fort is the closest though, but even it's mostly trading off gems and crafts and using the metal to arm my first militia.

[saltmummy626]

my first good one was in an evil swamp. its still going strong in fact, but here's what I did. go to your miners and turn off ALL hualing jobs for them. the miners job is to dig, not carry shit. take your mason, turn off hualing for him and start using him to build WALLS. alot of people just use the natural cave walls, but I prefer an artificial fortress with one drawbridge and a backdoor. let all your other dwarves do the hualing work/whatever they feel like doing. set up the workshops to be built too, they will get built eventually. a good idea is to dig out your first cluster of rooms in soft soil where no rocks are left behind, this layer can act like a forward base until the lower levels are carved out and cleared. set trees to be cut, but don't worry about foraging in the first year. you should have started with a fisherman, and for some reason I cannot fathom, they always seem to go fishing instead of anything else. when your first migrants come, ignore them. they will work themselves in where they are needed most. (hualing) if your diligent and make sure that your miners keep working at a fair clip, you'll be set. after that, metal is a snap. oh yeah, get doors on the rooms you keep workshops in ASAP, if a dwarf decides to go off the deep end because he couldn't make his artifact, you'll need to seal him in there.