Spring RTS Engine

dont forget animals.

Id suggest ditching one of the axes and getting an extra pickaxe. You dont need much wood but 3 miners will let you set up a fortress very fast. This gives you enough cash to spend on fully training your dwarves in skills.

I usually dont change the standart items cause they are fine, but if you change you should make sure to bring at least one anvil (else you will have to buy one to make metal stuff)

If you dont plan on running a large or early metal economy (IE no magma), this is fine. If you arent in an area with a sedimentary layers (which has the most and best kinds of ores) then a metal economy is going to be only so good, anyway.

This is why an Igneous Extrusive biome (magma) and a Sedimentary biome (Iron), with a flux (Steel) of some kind, next to eachother, is the holy grail.

You can pretty easily buy an anvil once you start churning out crafts, and 1k points goes a long way (not that there is all that much else you'd want to buy).

As for skills, you should make sure to give at least one of your dwarves some administrative skills as those cannot be gained otherwise.

Lies, just assign a dwarf to the task and he will gain the skill. Social/Admin skills train VERY fast. Set a dwarf to dedicated perfect stockpile updating and he'll hit legendary pretty quickly. Having a bit of appraising helps with merchants, but you can still gain the skill just by trading a few times.

In fact, letting your dwarves party and socialize is a great way to train their stats, as there are a heap of skills to train and they all give stat bonuses. My bookkeeper/mayor/sherrif is usually my beefiest dwarf.

I've been poking around the wiki and found some nifty tips.. first is to bring 1 of each 2 cost meat and the same for each 2 cost drink as you get free barrels from it... second is to skip the axes and picks and just bring all you need to build them (metal bars, anvil, stone, charcoal), that frees up enough points to make a huge difference on skill buying and forces you to get a functional furnace set up right away... personally i prefer at least 1 pick... third is to bring turtle meat because you get shells and bones from it unlike most other meat which makes for good early crafts etc.

No, you bring turtles, not turtle meat. Both are possible if I remember correctly.

Saktoth wrote:

As for skills, you should make sure to give at least one of your dwarves some administrative skills as those cannot be gained otherwise.

Lies, just assign a dwarf to the task and he will gain the skill. Social/Admin skills train VERY fast. Set a dwarf to dedicated perfect stockpile updating and he'll hit legendary pretty quickly. Having a bit of appraising helps with merchants, but you can still gain the skill just by trading a few times.

In fact, letting your dwarves party and socialize is a great way to train their stats, as there are a heap of skills to train and they all give stat bonuses. My bookkeeper/mayor/sherrif is usually my beefiest dwarf.

Ops, right :) I guess I was distracted and used the wrong words. I wanted to mean that those skills cant be gained just by toggling then on the dwarf skill list like the others.

I suppose that dwarves partying is good for their moral, but the problem is that then dwarves party a large part of your workforce gets pretty much paralized :) And it also seens than then dwarves are happy they party A LOT... there were times where my fortress was always having a party, wich was quite anyoing since I wanted stuff to be getting done.

ahh fuck i cant damnit play df again

second is to skip the axes and picks and just bring all you need to build them (metal bars, anvil, stone, charcoal), that frees up enough points to make a huge difference on skill buying and forces you to get a functional furnace set up right away

Or skip the anvil and bring the cheapest picks and axe, as then you have a decent weapon immediately, gain the 1000 points from the anvil (as the axe + picks only go over 1000 if you get nothing but steel) which allows yo to bring a load of wood for metalworking later on, and just wait for the first caravan which is guaranteed to bring multiple anvils which you can buy with worthless rocks carved into cheap trinkets. By the time you get the anvil, you will have found a worthwhile amount of ore.

El Idiot wrote:

second is to skip the axes and picks and just bring all you need to build them (metal bars, anvil, stone, charcoal), that frees up enough points to make a huge difference on skill buying and forces you to get a functional furnace set up right away

Or skip the anvil and bring the cheapest picks and axe, as then you have a decent weapon immediately, gain the 1000 points from the anvil (as the axe + picks only go over 1000 if you get nothing but steel) which allows yo to bring a load of wood for metalworking later on, and just wait for the first caravan which is guaranteed to bring multiple anvils which you can buy with worthless rocks carved into cheap trinkets. By the time you get the anvil, you will have found a worthwhile amount of ore.

Troofs.

Anvils are super cheap, you can really drop the starting one to free up mad cash. I usually bring it anyway since I usually end up with so many points I don't know what else to spend them on.

Def. max out all your starting dwarves skills though.

Lol a tip to those wondering about good dwarf fortress design.

Make a highway. A large hallway that connects to all your major 'buildings'. Dont have narrow 1 way tunnels to connect to things. Make your 'buildings' adjacent to eachother and mine out entrances that match through your entire fortress so in turn you make smaller 'highways'.

I was wondering if anyone here farms more than plump helmets.

Im trying to go quarrey bushes and sweetpods for more diversity in roasts and alcohol.

Also a good idea is that when your fortress gets big enough that you can abandon your soil layer and go into the stone layers, its advisable that you mine upwards again to get to the original soil layer but makesure its completely sepreate from your original soil fortress. This way you have a secure place to farm that isn't at all attached to your now useless and defending soil fortress.

I dont get the point of abandoing the soil layers to rebuild in the stone layers... whats it for? :)

By the way, we are so used to games with building direction limitations that its easy to forget that in this one we can build in full 3D, wich is quite usefull for quick movement structures :)

manored wrote:I dont get the point of abandoing the soil layers to rebuild in the stone layers... whats it for? :)

By the way, we are so used to games with building direction limitations that its easy to forget that in this one we can build in full 3D, wich is quite usefull for quick movement structures :)

I personally do it for added security and for role-playing. I mean what kind of dwarf lives in an ugly soil fortress. And building in more Y levels can be easier for your dwarves to get to things if you build important structures and stock piles below or over them.

Why build anything (except maybe farms) in soil anyway, why not just dig straight down to the rock to begin with?

Only reason I can think is because rock is a lot harder and thus takes a lot longer to dig out than soil.

You can actually cave-in soil down to lower layers and make your fortress as deep as you like, or just dump a little bit of water down there to get some mud which is probably easier. Make sure to make a grate over the entrance to the muddy area otherwise your dwarves will track mud all over your fortress- grates stop mud (I guess dwarves wipe their feet).

I never make anything but plump helmets, the food production is broke IMO, it was way more fun when you needed to irrigate regularly. I can feed the whole fortress on a 5x5 square or so. There is even fertilizer, you just do not need it!

Mud doesn't spread anymore, Saktoth. That was removed a few versions ago.

Saktoth wrote: I never make anything but plump helmets, the food production is broke IMO, it was way more fun when you needed to irrigate regularly. I can feed the whole fortress on a 5x5 square or so. There is even fertilizer, you just do not need it!

Yeah, I also find sort of lame how you need very little to keep your dwarves super-happy... there is little to none incentive to making your fortress better than the basic.

manored wrote:

Saktoth wrote: I never make anything but plump helmets, the food production is broke IMO, it was way more fun when you needed to irrigate regularly. I can feed the whole fortress on a 5x5 square or so. There is even fertilizer, you just do not need it!

Yeah, I also find sort of lame how you need very little to keep your dwarves super-happy... there is little to none incentive to making your fortress better than the basic.

Keep things 'simple' for now. Dwarves complain about the lack of diversity in alcohol but that just means they complain, but they still work as fast as they usually do and they still are ecstatic. But yeah I think it'd be nice if things required more complexity like diets. But if you guys want something super complex, try making dwarven 'computers'. Very complicated theoritcal traffic controllers and such. If you think about it in the way of electronics and computing, it may not be complicated as making a robot with touch sensitive neuro-shit. But damn its complex!

In the most recent version, dwarves have started to complain if they eat the same shit day after day. Of course, this is only a very minor penalty right now.

Erom wrote:In the most recent version, dwarves have started to complain if they eat the same shit day after day. Of course, this is only a very minor penalty right now.

Lokum: By Armok, Im getting quite tired of these servings of dwarven wine an- OH MY GODS IS THAT A MASTER PLATNIUM STAT- OH MY GODS LOOK AT THOSE ENGRAV- OH MY GODS THAT TABLE IS MADE OF- OH MY GODS ELEPHANTS IN CAAAGEES- ect