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[Tibbz2]

Hey Guys...

Im still struggling away at trying to get past making stockpiles in my fort   So i was wondering...

What order do you things in on your new embarks, and where ect?

For me it is basically...

Make entrance
Set up some rooms for mining
Set stockpiles
Fail in some way.

x50.

[i2amroy]

My general method is to dig down to the stone and then make my Entrance/Barracks area. I then dig back up to the soil on the other side and dig out a large room that I designate as a custom stockpile that holds almost everything except stone. Then while my other 4 dwarves (I tend to start with 3 miners, two with the skill and then I give my mining-unskilled trader a pick) unload the wagon I go and dig the farm plots out. Following that I dig out  start to dig out a workshop area where I immediately set up my stonecrafter to make stone crafts on repeat and set up a carpenter's shop to get some bins. If I'm fast enough, I have enough stone crafts by the time the traders come to buy anything that I'm lacking and supplement my food and booze supplies. After that it is a matter of digging out bedrooms and finishing off the workshop/stockpiles area, as well as setting up some kind of fortress defense.

[Nameless Archon]

For me it is basically...
Make entrance
Set up some rooms for mining
Set stockpiles
Fail in some way.
x50.

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress.

Im still struggling away at trying to get past making stockpiles in my fort   So i was wondering...

What order do you things in on your new embarks, and where ect?

I bring enough food and drink to get my original seven (and a few migrants) through until late autumn or winter. (Depending on migrant counts.)

1. Find a spot to site the fort.
2. Designate early areas to be mined out and then walled in later.
3. Don't haul anything in the first two seasons unless you have to - let the dogs watch the wagon for monkeys while your dwarves enjoy 0% unemployment and Get 'Er Done.
4. Get axes and wood clearing started first. You'll need wood for fuel, beds, bins, etc.
5. Get dorm space mined out and beds built. Dig a temporary stockpile to hold future production, but no one is hauling here yet.
6. Start wooden bin/bed production (in the underground space).
7. Build stonecrafter's and mason's shops, start building rock pots for food storage and stone items (tables, chairs, doors, coffers for hospital). (Again, underground)
7.5. Mechanics build drawbridge and channel for rudimentary wall-off defense.
8. Dig out P-trap for water access without requring dwarves to visit the surface.
9. Dig out magma for magma forges. (8 and 9 usually not done before 10 happens)
10. Migrants arive around here.
11. Designate all migrants as dedicated haulers, let them haul to stockpile spaces.
12. Start farms. Plump helmets first, haulers assigned to pick plants for surface plants.
13. Excavate and cover the 'surface farm' areas. Begin surface plant farming.
14. Excavate barracks space, and permanant workshop space.
15. excavate permanant stockpile space (temp stocks filling up by now).
16. Excavate living quarters, begin giving dwarves bedrooms.

...or some variant of this pattern. I suppose I'd have to do a video of an embark tutorial explaining why I do various things in order for any of it to make much sense.

[khearn]

The last few forts I've done, I've been trying to have well organized forts, and that requires spreading things out a bit, which takes more digging, which I don't have time for when my miners are still learning. So now I set up a temporary fort with the minimum to get me through the first year. In my current fort, the temporary fort had:

- Refuse stockpile outside
- Log stockpile outside
- Pastures for animals that need them. These initial pastures are outside and vulnerable. They get moved inside when I have time to dig out enough space, have hit the caverns to pollinate them, and stuff has grown. But I get the outside ones set up quickly to keep animals from starving.
- A couple of tiny pastures just outside the door for dogs to spot thieves.
The above is all done before unpausing at the start.
- Entry with a couple of wooden doors for "security". Wouldn't stop a siege, but if I'm still living there when I get a siege, I've screwed up already.
- Meeting room/dormitory with 3 or 4 beds. Quick to set up and keeps the dwarves from getting too upset.
- Farm plot, 3x3, set to make plump helmets all year 'round.
- General purpose stockpile, initially 6x6, but expanded to 10x10. Takes most everything except stone, logs, animals, refuse & corpses.
- Carpenter shop to build doors and beds. Also makes some spiked wood balls later of for early trading.
- Butcher to handle output from hunter, plus I usually kill the animals that came with the wagon fairly soon. If I started with a fisherdwarf, I'd set up a fishery workshop in addition.
- Kitchen and Still
- Mechanic shop to make traps.
- Craftsdwarves shop for various tasks, especially cranking out a bunch of mugs for that first caravan.
- Trade Depot

I had all of that set up by the end of Spring. I did a lot of pausing whenever I saw someone idle and made sure to find something to keep everyone busy all the time.

Then I had the miners dig downward as far as they could go. usually I hit the top of a cavern and have to go sideways a bit, but this time the just grazed the bottom level of two of the caverns (so I built walls to close them off) and then straight down to semi-molten rock. A bit of probing around found the top of the magma sea and I set up a magma glass furnace for cranking out pumps/trap parts. I still haven't found the third cavern, but I have found the bottom of a magma pipe going up to it.

Oh yeah, this embark is at a site with no metal ores at all. That's why I'm going for glass so early. All of my metals will come from caravans and goblinite. It makes for an interesting game.

At that point I had everything I needed to survive. They were just stuck wherever they would fit in a little hill that my wagon started next to. In the past I've often just expanded from that sort of start, but it ends up with an ugly, disorganized fort with things by the entrance that really should be deeper down, and an entrance that is set up for quick digging, not real security.

So then I took some time and figured out where I wanted things to be in the permanent layout and started digging rooms for them. As I built stuff that was already in the temporary fort, I removed them from the old locations. Now the temporary fort is just a bunch of empty rooms and the original stockpile. As I've created new stockpiles, I've edited the original one to no longer take those items. So anything that ends up in the original is something that I still need to create a stockpile for.

I am about to wall off the original entrance, since I've now get a new entrance with a nice dodge trap/pit that just finished dealing with my first shipment of goblinite. Who-hoo! Now most of my soldiers have some sort of armor. Some are still wearing wooden junk I bought fro the first elf caravan, but that will go away as I acquire more metal.

BTW, please try to come up with more descriptive subjects for new threads. "How do you..." could be about anything. Something like "First things to do after embark?" would be much better. if all the threads had subjects like "How do you..."  or "Help me!!!" or the like, the forums would be pretty hard to read.

   Keith

[Tibbz2]

Woah some very nice things here!

However most people ive seen tend to be able to set up a decent fort within their first 5 forts, but ive made over 50 and i still cant get more than a year in!

[khearn]

Woah some very nice things here!

However most people ive seen tend to be able to set up a decent fort within their first 5 forts, but ive made over 50 and i still cant get more than a year in!

So what tends to go wrong? If we don't know how they fail, we can't give much advice on how to avoid it.

[i2amroy]

Just make sure that you get those farm plots, craftsdwarf workshop, and bedroom/dining room set up and you should be able to at least survive until the first goblin ambush short of something terrible happening (Giant Skeletal Badger attack anyone? ).

Also yeah, if you give us some examples of what seems to go wrong then we could probably give some more explicit advice on how to keep your forts alive.

[Tibbz2]

Woah some very nice things here!

However most people ive seen tend to be able to set up a decent fort within their first 5 forts, but ive made over 50 and i still cant get more than a year in!

So what tends to go wrong? If we don't know how they fail, we can't give much advice on how to avoid it.

To be honest I don't really know myself...

It's just general little things like dwarves not hauling stuff and it messes things up, then then end up becoming unhappy, starving, running into giant badgers etc.

Edit: Also, I can't usually find enough/decent ores or any flux etc to set up my metal industry. (yes the embark always has flux, metals etc.)

[i2amroy]

A handful of farm plots in the soil layers should solve most food/drink problems (I tend to start with four 5x5 plots myself, and then expand them) and can actually overwhelm your dwarves with too much food. Combine that with a large dining room that has been smoothed and engraved and most of your dwarves should be ecstatic almost constantly.

On the note of the metal industry, I tend to resort to just buying everything metal from caravans/requesting metal objects and pulling on the resources of goblinite. Combined with a magma smelter that is set to repeat "melt object" and I find that I generally have enough metal to accomplish whatever I want to do. Of course I also tend to just keep my small military armed with iron armor until fairly late on, since the goblinite armor that shows up already fits my dwarves anyways.

[Tibbz2]

Ah right, thanks!

I think the main thing i struggle with is the layout of my fort. I can't design a decent and efficient fort to save my life...

[proxn_punkd]

A handful of farm plots in the soil layers should solve most food/drink problems (I tend to start with four 5x5 plots myself, and then expand them) and can actually overwhelm your dwarves with too much food.

I tend to start with ten 1x5 plots instead, half in a surface enclosure for surface plants and half in an underground chamber for 'shrooms. The farmer(s) and the herbalist(s) start gaining experience while there aren't a whole lot of dwarves to feed/booze, so by the time migrants start flooding the place the farmers are skilled enough to keep them all liquored, and then they'll get so good I have to start leaving fields fallow for a season or two for lack of larder space.

Food supplies are also usually supplemented when migrants start bringing livestock faster than I can slaughter and animals/creatures/FBs/mounted ambushes start showing up.

In conclusion, four 5x5 fields and later expansions seems like massive, massive overkill.

[i2amroy]

I usually have such a large amount of farming space for a handful of reasons
1) I usually start with untrained farmers, maybe 1 of my starting dwarves will be a grower, and other farmers are usually unskilled. This leads to rather inefficient plot space usage
2) I mass produce/trade stone crafts, leading to a ton of migrants fairly quickly. I've been known to hit 120 dwarves by like the end of year 3.
3) I also tend to run huge forts sometimes having as many as 250 dwarves, so they consume a lot of food/alcohol.
4) I don't really butcher creatures. After getting really annoyed at grazer creatures fighting due to my enormous pastures being too small apparently I just butcher any grazers immediately and let any grazer pets starve. As a result my meat/fish industries don't produce that much unless I manage to get my hands on a pair of bears.

It is overkill , but not quite as massive due to my reasons and I personally would rather overkill in the early stages then accidentally starve when my fort's population triples in the course of 2 years before I can plant more food.

If you aren't quite as dwarf population heavy as me though you could definitely get away smaller plots.

[Tibbz2]

Well I don't think i will ever have a problem of feeding that many, as my FPS becomes unplayable after 50 dwarves...

[Fredd]

When you are just learning the game turn off invasions, and set a low pop cap. At the beginning just worry about a outpost that can support a small population with food/booze/storage space/farms and a basic defense.
 Whats fun is to open a paint program, and design the main forts design beforehand. Quickfort is a good tool for digging designations which uses your level designs from the imaging program.
this should be after you have the outpost built/dug. In most circumstances a good defense is just a locked door or hatch early on blockng a narrow tunnel to your outpost's interior

[Nameless Archon]

You mention control issues centered around labors (like hauling). Are you using Dwarf Therapist? If not, WHY NOT?