Dwarf Fortress

[Still Not George]

Curses, I forgot about the modify timeout. And now I think of it, it might be a help to people to see the DF window at exactly the size it will appear.

THE SNG GUIDE TO PLUMP HELMETS AND MAGMA will continue later tonight.

[Still Not George]

SNG'S GUIDE TO DWARF FORTRESS: DAY 2

Right, we're back. Start up Lazy Newb Pack again (It's good to get into the habit of using that rather than just launching DwarfFortress.exe) and click "Play Dwarf Fortress!" again. You can skip the intros by pressing Escape twice. Now select Continue Playing from the main menu. That'll bring up a list with one option, marked "region1."  Press Enter to select that one. Once again there'll be a short pause while the game loads.

Once you're back into the game, you should start out Paused, which if you remember you can tell by the green "PAUSED" indicator in the top-left corner. If you're not Paused, press Space to pause the game. From where we left it, your mining Dwarfs should be happily hacking apart the cliff-face and leaving some irregular globular clusters of stone behind, while your woodcutter will be leaving behind little piles of logs. You can see both on my game here:



So, things aren't going too badly. Before we get further into it, let's go over some tricks to help master the controls for this game.

Firstly, you need to bear in mind that the game models a 3-dimensional world. Dwarfs, buildings, tunnels and so on can and do go up and down as well as north, south, east and west. To go up and down, you press "<" and ">" respectively, including pressing the shift key. Try it now - don't move the view around with the arrow keys to avoid getting lost, just move the view up and down.  You'll notice that when you move up, first you lose sight of anything on this level except for trees, then the Map Screen fills with the light blue that represents screen. Likewise, when you move down, you quickly enter an uneven grey/brown soil representing underground areas. Look over onto the right side of the screen and you should see two numbers. The one at the bottom right is the height from the very bottom of the map that you'e currently at, and the one at the top right indicates how far from the ground you currently are (with negative numbers meaning distance up to the ground). These two should help you keep your bearings.
Because most maps feature a slope (gentle or otherwise), your map will typically feature a band of land at the same height as you started, some higher up, and some lower down. You dwarfs do not need any additional instructions to work on these levels; the height-levels are a help for you, not the dwarfs. So if you make a Stone stockpile just above your new mine entrance, for example, then your dwarfs will happily carry stone up to the stockpile without worrying about it being on a different height-level.

Secondly, if you want to know what any object in the game is, you can press "k" at any time to enter Look Mode. Look Mode provides the Map Screen with a pointer (represented by an X) which when placed over an item, indicates what the item is. Some items may have further information available by pressing Enter; keep an eye on the button prompts at the middle of the center screen for a list of what's possible. To try this out, place the Look Mode pointer over one of the barrels left over from breaking down your cart (there will be plenty). You will get a little list of the items in that square. To move between those items, press "+" and "-" on the numeric keypad (as moving the arrow keys will move the pointer off your square). If one of them provides a prompt to press "Enter" to view, do so, You will get a short description. Most of these screens permit a further description by pressing "v". As an example:



At the moment the descriptions are simplistic, but later when you're producing masterwork artifacts, this screen will provide access to a full description of your possessions.

Thirdly, there is a zooming function, after a fashion. If you turn the scroll-wheel on your mouse upward, you will find that the font size will shrink, and the leftward windows will shrink to allow a larger view of the map. This works for all modes, so it can be used to perform mass designates, large stockpiles, and so on. However, be careful - it's almost impossible to read the prompts when zoomed out, and zooming out too far can often crash the game.

Finally, lets have a look at our dwarfs and their possessions. To get a list of all dwarfs and animals on the map, press the "u" (units) button. You should see something like this:



As you can see from my screen, 4 of my Dwarfs are currently engaged in tasks. Two are digging, one is cutting down trees, and one is shifting wood to the stockpile. All as expected. We can also see that we own a tame donkey, and that there are a fox and two mountain goats on this map. If we had a Hunter, we could hunt it down, but we don't. We have two miners, two farmers, a woodworker, a stoneworker, and an "expedition leader." That last sounds rubbish but trust me, he's useful. Just bear with me and you'll understand why.

Next up, your stuff. Press Escape to leave the Unit list and then press "z" ("status"). This will bring up a list with 4 tabs. Press right once followed by Enter. This will show you a list of the foodstuffs currently available in your Fortress. Here's what my food list looks like:



You will notice that your Plump Helmet, Dwarven Wine and Dwarven Rum all have "Cook" selected, and your Plump Helmets have "Brew" selected. These are all bad options, so press Down until they're highlighted, then press "c" or "b" to turn the relevant option to red (off). You need the booze for your alcoholic workers, and Plump Helmets are a kind of cave mushroom that will fail to release Spawn (seeds) if they are cooked or brewed, unlike most other foodstuffs. We'll need those Plump Helmet Spawn later on when we get to farming, as for most Fortresses Plump Helmets are something of a staple, being qucik and easy to grow all year round.

We're done with that screen, so press Escape and then press right twice on the Status screen to enter the Stocks screen. You'll notice that much of the list of items in this screen is brownish-yellow. This means that your dwarfs don't really have a record of how mych they have - they need a book-keeper to keep track. Your "expedition leader" will be an excellent book-keeper later on, once you've built him an office to work in. Some of the options will give you results - weapons, for example, will return two picks and a battle-axe, all of which are in use by your dwarves. But for the most part your Stocks are either empty or unrecorded.

Enough faffing now, let's get to some real work.

[Still Not George]

Let's build a Carpenter's Workshop to make best use of all this wood we're collecting. Press "b" (Building), then press "w" (the hotkey for "workshops"). Then press "+" on the numeric keypad to navigate to Carpenter's Workshop:



There's a lot of workshops and buildings in this game as you can see from the size of the list, so this will be a good basis to learn how to build them. Press Enter to select Carpenter's Workshop, and you'll get the Building Placement screen:



Move the 3x3 indicator around until it's next to the wood stockpile as shown above. If it's blocked by anything, it will turn red, so you'll be able to tell easily where you can place it. Press Enter to choose a location. Next you'll see a list of possible building materials. Wood from the stockpile tops the list, but that's more valuable than stone, so navigate down to the stone by pressing "+" on the numeric keypad and press Enter. The green highlight will collapse into a little square of disordered symbols, representing a partially-constructed workshop. Press Escape twice to leave the Building menu, then press Space to unpause the game.

Your Woodworker probably isn't building the building just yet. Why not? Because he's busy cutting down trees. Eventually he will get around to it, however. Once he does, you can start giving him orders to produce wooden goods. Remember how to select buildings? It's "q". Press that, then make sure the Carpenter's Workshop is flashing. If it's finished, you will have a highlighted prompt marked "a: Add new task." Go ahead and press a. You will see partway down the list of potential wooden items, "Construct Wooden Bed." Doesn't that sound like a nice thing to build for your dwarfs? Thought so.  Select it, either by navigating to it with the "+" key or by pressing "b". It should look something like this:



But where will the bed go when it's finished? Stockpile time! Press Escape to leave Building Select mode, and make a "Furniture Storage" stockpile by pressing "p" (Stockpile) followed by "u" (furniture storage), then select the area as before.

Unpause the game and watch what happens. By now, your miners will have finished excavating your entrance tunnel, What now? Time to build a larder! Designate ("d", followed by "d" to select mining) a rectangular area inside the hill, just off your corridor Then connect it to your corridor with a single-square space. The results should look something like this:



Let 'em go again, and your miners will excavate that room. When your woodworker gets around to it, he'll also make you a bed, which will be moved to your Furniture Storage stockpile. But 1 bed isn't enough for 7 dwarfs, so you'll need to queue up 6 more. "q" to select the building, then "a" followed by "b" in quick succession 6 times. Your building queue in the Carpenter's Workshop will quickly fill with Construct Wooden Bed requests.

So, now your miners have finished digging out the larder. But the room is all full of stone! You'll find that stone gets in the way of food stockpiles - food has to be placed around it. So, you'll need a Stone Stockpile. You know how to build Stockpiles by now, so make one for stone ("s" in the Stockpile Mode) near to the Furniture Stockpile. Why? Because next we want to build a Mason's Workshop to use up some of that stone. "b" to build, "w" for workshops, then navigate to "Mason's Workshop". Place it near to the Stone and Furniture Stockpiles.



Right, you should now have a nice outdoor workspace and a rapidly clearing larder. Once the stone is all moved, make a Food Stockpile inside it. Now, go to where your cart was located. Open Stockpile Mode ("p"), then press "x" to enter "remove stockpile" mode. Why? Because technically your wagon is a food stockpile by default. So, place the pointers over your wagon as if you were making a stockpile. You can use this method to remove any stockpile you wish, in fact. Once this is done, your dwarfs will begin moving all your food barrels into your Food Stockpile.

So, that's gotten the food indoors where it's less likely to get wet and mouldy. This won't keep the rats and lizards away, but it's a start. Next up we need to make bedrooms to keep these beds in. My preferred method is to make a long corridor stretching away from the rest of the Fortress, and make 3x3 square rooms connected to the long corridor by a single square. Why a single square? Because that square can be filled with a door.

Doing all this room laying out can be a bit difficult to begin with, but if you get it wrong, just press "x" to enter "remove designation" mode, which kind of acts like a rubber. Here's the way I arranged my 8 bedrooms:



Now instruct your Mason's Workshop to make 8 Stone Doors using the same method you used with the Carpenter's Workshop earlier. This should start to use up some of the stone! If your Furniture Storage stockpile gets overly full (which it may - 7 beds + 8 doors quickly adds up, plus some things from the cart will be placed there), then make another nearby. Now unpause the game and let it play for a while, watching the new doors and beds be made and the bedrooms carved from the living rock.

[Still Not George]

How is the digging of the bedrooms going? If they happen to strike gems while digging a room (which they did with mine), then you may need to make a Gem Stockpile. By now this should be easy - "p" followed by "e". If the stone stockpile gets too full, make another. At some point in this process you will likely see your dwarfs get hungry and thirsty - when this happens, they will head to your food stockpile to eat and/or drink. Eventually you should have 8 clear rooms with a 1-square space connecting them to the corridor. You're ready to set up bedrooms!

First things first - beds. Once you have all 7 in your furniture stockpile, press "b" to enter Building Mode, then "b" to set down a bed. Choose a location inside one of your bedrooms, then press Enter. You'll get a list of beds - just pick one. (Later, when your woodworker is a master craftsman, this menu will allow you to pick out specific mastercrafted beds etc.) That sets down a "ghost image" of the bed. Repeat this for 7 of the rooms. Then do the same with the doors - "b" followed by "d" to set down a door. Place one in the entrance to each room. Again, a "ghost image" will be set down. Unpause and wait for the dwarfs to deliver the real ones.



There they all are. Now, at the moment these aren't really bedrooms - just rooms with beds in them. Dwarfs will sleep on these beds, but they feel better if they have a real room of their own. (Yes, dwarfs have feelings. We'll get into that more later.) How do we do that? Well, a bed is treated as a building (that's how you put it down on the map, right?), so as ever, it's "q" to select a building, then select the bed with the cursor keys. After pressing Enter, a menu with only one option will appear: "r: Make Bedroom". Press "r". You'll see a flashing room outline appear as shown below:



Don't worry about sizing the room for now, the door keeps it to the perfect size and shape. Press Enter to accept this area. You'll get a little menu with a bunch of options. The obvious one for us now is "a: Assign Bed". This will bring up a list of your dwarfs. You can move the highlight up and down this list by pressing "+" and "-". Any that already have a bedroom will be in brown, and those without bedrooms will be in green (none will be brown to begin with, but it's a handy reminder).

Finished setting up all the bedrooms? Now press "Escape" to leave this mode and unpause the game. You will likely see some of your dwarves head into their bedrooms, either to sleep or simply to stand around. Dwarfs that aren't busy like to stand around things they own.

So, now our dwarfs have shelter and indoors food and drink. What's that last room for? We're going to build an office in that room, to allow the expedition leader to count the things we have. We'll also begin gathering berries (like a bunch of stinky elves), and get started on brewing, farming and cooking. Finally we're going to have a look around the map for metal ore and start to think about hunting and weapons. But for now, as our dwarfs catch some well-deserved shut-eye, let's save the game and call it a night.

[Treguard of Dunshelm]

Plump Helmets are a kind of cave mushroom that will fail to release Spawn (seeds) if they are cooked or brewed, unlike most other foodstuffs.

Are you sure? I'm pretty sure brewing does release spawn, and the wiki says:

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Plump_helmets: "Both eating a plant raw and brewing it will leave plump helmet spawn behind"
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Brewer: "Brewing plants always produces seeds, so you won't have to worry about being unable to replant your crop next season"

To ensure you don't brew all your food early game, keep an eye on your booze stocks in the 'z' inventory screen and only brew a few drinks at a time to maintain an acceptable level (brewing one plant will produce 5 drinks). Don't let the drinks run out and then try and brew loads in a panic.

Good guide though, nice and clear. Definitely agree with ZG you should crosspost it to bay12 at some point.

[Eis Nein]

Great guide, keep it up, no pressure.

It's considered sacrilege by the initiated, but I do hanker for a better visual representation than the tilesets. Something like the original Dungeon Keeper, with plenty of darkness, but even just a Gauntlet-style 2D would suffice. If only to give the graphics chips something to do while all available cpu cores are being thrashed.

[Still Not George]

Very good point, Treguard. I've no idea where I got the impression Plump Helmets didn't drop spawn on brewing from - maybe a pre-2010 thing? I've been playing on that basis for a long time, hence my massive stocks of prickle berry wine etc. It's a good idea to get into the habit of keeping your PHs on no-brew for a while anyway, I think - I'd rather my dwarfs slow down than die of starvation.

As for crossposting, maybe when its finished.

[Zetetic]

If only to give the graphics chips something to do while all available cpu cores are being thrashed.

Part of the problem with DF's performance is that only one available CPU core is ever likely to be thrashed.

(Unbelievably lazy that I am, I tend to grow outdoor plants for ages rather than anything else, but I realise this is probably because I'm always settling in friendly biomes. I should try Freezing Evil or something, no doubt...)

[Eis Nein]

Shows up my tech knowledge. Inexcusable to be modelling blood spurt trajectories without using entry-level processing.

[Still Not George]

spurt trajectories

Snigger.

[Still Not George]

SNG'S GUIDE TO DWARF FORTRESS: DAY 3

So, at the end of our last section, we'd dug out a series of rooms, shifted out all the stone, moved all the food indoors, built some workshops, cut down some wood, and used it to make beds for each and every one of our dwarfs. Not a bad start, eh?

You may be wondering at this point where the hellish evil that Dwarf Fortress is famous for is hiding. Where is the invading Goblin army? The lava? The zombie elephants? Well, we picked an area with a low Evil and Savagery rating, so we've got somewhere relatively safe to begin with. No undead monsters, no hordes of wild animals. The Goblins and Kobolds will come anyway, but it will be a while before that happens yet. So we need to get all the basics sorted out, not least since we're probably going to get some (SPIT!) migrants (SPIT!) at the end of this season.

So, what do we need? Well, Dwarfs fundamentally need 3 things - shelter, food, and water. We've dealt with shelter. Now we need to provide food and water, and luckily both can be produced by farming, since Dwarfs prefer to take their liquids via alcohol if at all possible. Now, all of the seeds and suchlike we've brought with us are for underground farming (yes, underground farming, they're Dwarfs remember?) so either we'll need to make an underground farm, which will take a while to set up, or we'll need to get some above-ground crops.

How do we do that? Well, remember the map section with the trees from earlier, when we designated them to be cut down?



Do you see all the little fluffy cabbage-looking things? They're shrubs, as a quick look mode ("k") examination will tell you. They can be gathered by designating "gather plants", which is "p" on the designations screen. Set a designation to gather them and they will be highlighted in brown just like the trees were.



If you're using the LAZY NEWB PACK loadout, you should find that your two farmers immediately leap to the task of collecting new plants. However, all this delicious new food and booze is going to need barrels. And what are barrels made from? Wood! So instruct your Carpenter's Workshop to make a bunch of them. They should be ready in plenty of time to store the new stuff. Unpause the game and watch as the delicious fruit rolls in. Soon you'll have prickle berrys, wild strawberrys, longland grass, and more.
Now, what to do with these? Why, turn 'em into booze of course! Designate one of those 3x3 rooms with a connecting door leading off from your food stockpile. Once it's dug and cleared, press "b" to build, then choose "w" for workshops followed by "l" to build a Still. (Dwarves distil everything, including beer and wine.) Use some of that stone you just dug to make it. Now unpause again, and wait for it to be finished. One of your farmers should run over and do it.



Press "q" once again to enter Building Select mode, highlight the Still, then press "a" to Add New Task followed by "b" to "Brew Drink". Repeat this a few times. You might find that you get a message across the bottom of the screen: "<Dwarf name> cancels Brew Drink: Needs Empty Barrel." If that happens, wait until some more barrels are finished, then try it again.

Now, here's the fun part. See how you've cleared a bunch of soil outside your fort? Well, now you can make better use of it. Press "b" to enter building mode, follwed by "p" to select Farm Plot. This mode is a little different to the ones you've used so far - it's a rectangle select mode rather than a area definition. It's an odd distinction, but they behave differently. You will see a green "X", but this is not used to mark corners; instead it marks the current size and shape of the Farm Plot.  You want it bigger than one square, so use "u" and "k" to turn it into a 2x3 rectangle. Now drop that in the grass - if the area is clear soil the "X"s should remain green. Ignore the silly yellow error message about mud, that only applies indoors. Now, press Enter to set down the plot.



For my fort, when I unpaused, I was a bit perturbed when my Dwarfs didn't show up. I eventually found them all in my Food Stockpile drinking themselves silly before running to their bedrooms and falling unconscious, Eventually one of them nipped down and built my new Farm Plot, so it was time to select the crops to put in it. And as you've probably guessed, the button for that is,,, "q"! Highlight the farm plot and you'll get this wonderful Farming Menu:



Yours might be a little different depending on what fruit your Farmers found in those shrubs, but it's very likely they found some Prickle Berries. They may not be the tastiest things, but they grow all year round, so let's set them to do exactly that. Press "+" to select Prickle Berries from the list, then press Enter to confirm the selection. Then note the four seasons arranged at the bottom of the screen. Press "b" to select Summer, then re-select Prickle Berries, then "c" for Autumn and re-select Prickle Berries, then finally likewise for Winter with "d". Your little Farm Plot is now set to grow Prickle Berries all year round. Press Excape to leave this screen, and the game should unpause. As you watch, your Farmers should head over to the Farm Plot and start planting crops:



There we go! We'll be on our way to self-sufficiency in not much time at this rate. Eventually you'll want to build bigger plots once you've more seeds available, but for the moment this little one is using all the Prickle Berry seeds I have. The seeds wll gradually grow until they're ready to harvest, at which point your Dwarfs will harvest them - the process is completely automatic as long as the Dwarfs are free to harvest.

[Still Not George]

Now, time to have a look around the map using the Look "k" function. Remembering that you will at times need to move the view up and down using "<" and ">" in order to see everything, take a bit of a wander around your map to see what's there. To move around faster, hold down Shift while you move. You'll likely see a bunch of small, jagged, colourful bits representing semi-precious stones sticking out of various cliffs. See if you can find the following:

- A river or brook. If you have neither, look for a decent sized pond. A good water source is always handy - you can use it for fishing, for filling ponds (see underground farming, later), for filling moats and underground water reservoirs for wells and complex pumping setups, and at a really big stretch, as a water supply. If the water's flowing, you can also use it to power mechanisms using water wheels.
- What looks like grey-black cogwheels. Placing the Look pointer over them reveals "Rough-hewn Bituminous Coal Wall". This is a coal seam. Lumps of grey-black coal may be Lignite. This is also a coal seam.
- A reddish-pink stone texture may very well be Hematite.  This is an easy iron ore, and is often your very bestest friend, since it can crop up seemingly anywhere.
- A yellowish stone texture may well be Limonite. This is another common iron ore.

You can see Bituminous Coal, Lignite, and Hematite on this screen here:



Some open-cast mining on this wall would therefore not go amiss. You could also try carving out some long passages into your existing tunnel complex to see if you hit these minerals.

Now, while your miners rip open the landscape for delicious ores, instruct your Carpenter's Workshop to build you a Wooden Table and a Wooden Chair. (You can do these with the Mason's Workshop, too, if you wait - Stone Table and Stone Throne.) Once they've been made, stick them in the remaining 3x3 room near the bedrooms using the "b" button (you "build" permanent furniture, see)- put the table down in the middle, and the chair behind it, so it faces the door The Apprentice-style. You can imagine your Expedition Leader is a tiny dwarven Alan Sugar, if you like, only with a much better beard. Now, you can assign it to your expedition leader, by assigning the chair the same way you assign a bed. Now he has an office!

Only he doesn't seem to be doing much. Why would that be? Because he hasn't been officially made your book-keeper yet! Press "n" to enter the Nobles Screen.



For a change, you switch between the selections on this screen using the arrow keys, not +/-. Select Bookkeeper and press Enter. You'll be given a list, similar to the one for assigning beds or furniture, and you should choose your Expedition Leader from that list. For good measure, set him as your Broker too.
But that's still not enough! Put the highlight over Bookkeeper and note that the "s: Settings" tooltip lights up. Press "s" to enter the Noble Settings menu.



Doing the books takes time, and we don't actually have thousands of anything, so select "Low Precision". Now press Escape twice to leave this mode. Once back in the game, you should see your Expedition Leader head to his shiny new office and take possession. Soon he'll begin work on the stock list, so you'll be able to get a good picture of what your fortress has and doesn't have.

Later tonight: Delving Deep Beneath The Earth.

[Still Not George]

Right. Next up, Zones! This is another kind of area setting, much like designations, but this determines long-term behaviour areas. In this case, I'm setting a stretch of my river as my Fortress' official Water Source. For the most part they won't need it for drinking (that's what booze is for) but they will eventually need it to wash things, fill ponds and so on. We'll need a bucket chain for our indoor farm, too, eventually. Setting a zone means opening Zone Mode by pressing "i". Then you select the area you wish to set as a Zone the same "selecting corners" way as designations. The main difference here is that you select the type of zone after you define the area. In addition, you can set a zone to do more than one thing - so if we had a Fisherdwarf, I could set this as a Fishing zone too.



Now, back to my Fortress. The little spit of cliff I'm on lacks in room somewhat. I could move my corridors further back, but that would just make the travel distance to the doorway and the outside world incredibly long. The solution? Time to dig deep into the earth like a true Dwarf!

The best way of doing that is to carve Stairways out of the rock. Go into Designation mode, but instead of choosing "d" to mine, select "j" for a Downward Stairway. That'll start the process, but you need a matching Upward Stairway on the next floor down (or an Up/Down Stairway if you wish).  I've just designated mine here:



Now my Miners will carve their way down to this level. I should put a couple of corridors down here, just to make use of the space. Then perhaps I could even dig down another level?



Remembering to put am Upward Stairway immediately below it, just to be sure. Now to let my miners get to work. Unpause and wait. They're getting more and more skilful, so it won't take them much time.
Now, time to try making an underground farm. To do this, you need an underground chamber covered in mud. How do you get that? Easy. Just get it wet! Firstly, on our new lowest level, we need to build a corridor with a set of stairs going down:



On the image above you can see I've highlighted "Channel". This designation mode sets up an area to be channeled out, which is to say dug out 1 level down from here. The idea is to create a 2-story room. We designate the area right up to where we dug the stairway:



Once the channeling is finished, we see that it wasn't quite perfect; the room is full of stone, of course, and it's surrounded with ramps leading upwards. To remove those ramps, press "d" to designate, then select "Remove Up Ramps/Stairs". Be careful not to designate the removal of those stairs we built earlier. You probably also want to build another stone stockpile if, like me, your stockpiles are full. Once it's all done, look at your new chamber from the upper floor:



Now use the Zones screen and set this open area as a pond. Press "i" for the Zones menu, as before; select the corners of the new chamber's upper floor; press "p" to set this as a Pit/Pond. Look at the bottom of the screen - there's a note that you can press "P" to open a special Pit/Pond Menu. Press "P" as directed. Any tame animals you have will be listed, but you don't want to put any in this one; instead, note the section at the bottom which says "f: Is Pit". It's this you need to change by pressing "f". Now press Escape a couple of times to leave this menu. Unpause the game and watch as your Dwarfs begin carrying buckets of water to the new "pond". If the process is slow, you may need to make more buckets in your Carpenter's Workshop. Another trick is to split the pond up into smaller pond zones, each one of which will have a separate Dwarf attending to it. Eventually they should nicely muddy the whole of the bottom of the "pond", and you will have yourself a nice underground area to farm.

If you want to, you can dig even deeper than this - Dwarf Fortress places most ground surfaces hundreds of levels above the bottom of the map. You may find interesting minerals, gems, and possibly even cave systems, magma, or underground rivers!

While my Pond was being filled, Summer arrived for me; it may or may not do so for you. This should be a warning; you don't have long until the Caravan arrives, so you're going to need to build a new Trade Depot pretty soon, not to mention things to trade in it. Both of those can come tomorrow. For now, time to save the game.

[Still Not George]

I've been busy the last few nights, but I should be able to get back to this later this week.

[All Surrogate]

I can't find stone.  Wherever I embark, either using Find as per your instructions, or trying by myself, I get hills of loam, but no stone nearby.  I suppose there's stone in the lower levels, but I'd rather start with something simple, as I really am a newb.  Any suggestions?

[Still Not George]

Have you tried looking up and down the z-levels using "<" and ">"?

If so and you've still got no stone, then you'll need to build all your stuff out of wood instead. Which you can do, just choose logs instead of stone when it asks you what you want to build things out of.

It's a bit odd that you're only ever getting loam, though, typically most places have a decent amount of bare rock. Try finding an embark site which is roughly 50/50 woodland and mountain, that might help.

[Jack Shaftoe]

Just wanted to say thanks for these guides SNG - really looking to finally getting to grips for this when the sleep cycles of my two children finally allow for more than half an hour's free time...

[hpmons]

Started playing this again over the last couple of days, got just over 50 dwarves now.

The problem is I don't quite know what to do with myself. The area seems fairly calm, only had two enemies appear so far and my rubbish marksdwarves finished them off easily.  Also: is military training supposed to be super slow, or am I doing something wrong?

[Treguard of Dunshelm]

Once you get a few more dwarves and perhaps create some more wealth you should start to see Titans, Forgotten Beasts and Megabeasts appearing. My current map was goblin free for ages, but they've started showing up now. You could try pissing off the elves and humans to provoke a war with them.

Training is slow at the moment, it's not just you. You could set up some danger rooms to train them faster, but that's quite exploity and tends to go too far the other way - you end up with legendary fighters after a couple of months.

[Eis Nein]

An interview with the creators. Who'd have thought Tarn Adams would live in a blacked-out apartment with a pallet of soft drinks and a cat?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html?pagewanted=all