"You have been struck down." - Dwarf Fortress Adventure stories

[Brackard]

For some reason, this struck a chord, and sure enough, we did have another dwarf fortress thread around here somewhere. After some searching:

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...f+fortress

They did a pretty good job of walking through the basics if I remember correctly. For those who want to know more, this is a solid reference for watching what happens here.

[HidingKneel]

While I'm in no position to demand certain types of posts, in the spirit of the amazing early FFH threads, and considering what seems to be an enormous learning curve, I'd love it if uberfish and m_h could go slow and explain things in detail as they start the game. For example, I'd like to know the significance of the criteria uberfish gave for the settlement location.

+1

I've tried a couple of times to play DF, but I never had any idea what was going on. Sign me up for a dwarf!

[mostly_harmless]

While I'm in no position to demand certain types of posts, in the spirit of the amazing early FFH threads, and considering what seems to be an enormous learning curve, I'd love it if uberfish and m_h could go slow and explain things in detail as they start the game. For example, I'd like to know the significance of the criteria uberfish gave for the settlement location.

Sure, no problem.

Seven foolhardy bold dwarves set out to found Fortress Arakoslan, "Shaftwinds"!

Embarking on a 4x5 to cover two biomes and have flowing water. On top of an aquifer, which I'll try to breach.

You always start with 7 dwarves. Randomly generated names and sexes. They are "new" to the history of the world, so unlike later migrants they do not have a family or history. The 7 dwarves start a Group with a certain name (like "The Pillars of Mining" for example; Uberfish will have to post that). That Group will be a historic entity and responsible for founding the Fortress. That group also has to belong to a existing dwarven civilisation. You can select the civ in the starting (embark) screen. This might seem irrelevant but the chosen civ has for example an impact on the trade goods available. The civ already exists and consists of a number of fortresses and mountain halls.
Here is an example (exported from the trade map).


You can see three dwarven civilisation with the seat of the king, the light blue rectangles. The dark blue rectangles are fortresses and outposts belonging to that civilisation. (the whitish ones are humans, the yellow are elves, the purple ones the goblins) You get an annual trade caravan from your civilisation's capital (in autumn). If there is no steel in your civilisation, then you cannot take steel equipment with you on embark and you cannot trade any steel items from the caravans. (after all where would your civ get steel from).

(Note that the individual fortresses are there on the global map and in history, however the actual detailed site maps are not implemented for dwarves (and elves and goblins) only the human sites are "fleshed out". This will change in the next release. Remember how Uberfish's adventurer ended up seeking a dwarven fortress which the global map said should be there, but there was nothing.)
Here is an example of a dwarven mountain hall (the Omega tile) and a goblin dark fortress (the Pi tile) as they are shown on the global map.


As an adventurer you cannot fast travel through these areas but when looking for structures or an entrance, nothing will be there. Only human settlements have something in this version.

---

The fortress name can be customized, but the randomly generated ones are usually cool. Like Shaftwinds.

Here now the embark screen:


The world map tries to put this into a 16x16 map. Pretty useless. The region map in the middle is slightly more useful. Every tile on the region map contains 16x16 tiles of the local map. Every local map tile then consists of 48x48 actual in-game tiles. So when Uberfish choose a 4x5 area on the local map to embark we have a (4x48) x (5x48) map to play on. That is plenty and will also take its toll on slower machines (pathfinding!) I think the developers said that each in-game tile is roughly 1.5m x 1.5m x 2m. So that gives you a sense of area.
Note that this embark screen is not the one Uberfish used. Just an example.
On region map, you can see a dark grey Omega, indicating a dwarven settlement (sparsely populated = dark grey). To the left of it on the region map two horizontal green bars indicating a human hamlet (small).
Now, on the local map you can see those "#" tiles in the west. This is the site of the human hamlet. Your embark region (4x4 in my case here = highlighted) must not overlap existing sites. You can also see a smaller 3x3 Omega site, which is my tourist trap on the waterfall. Again your new Fortress must not overlap with that.

On the very right you can see information on the terrain your 4x4 embark area includes. Here your 4x4 contains a part of The plains of Vegetation (the little taus and quotation marks). And this comes with shallow clay, very deep soil and aquifer, shallow and deep metals. It is also hot (water evaporates faster) has a decent supply of trees and some shrubs and herbs and wilderness surroundings. Note that the stream mentioned by name there refers to the blue stream in the local map, however we currently do not overlap our 4x4 embark region with that stream so we won't see it in game.
I circled the "F1F2" as this indicates that your 4x4 embark includes more than one biome. You can see the second biome (the three little arches at the top right corner of the 4x4 region)by pressing F2. That will change the info to the right to:

So in-game the top right area will belong to The Hill of Flaying which is not that different from the other biome but also has flux stone (necessary for steel).

You can extract more information about the area (for example elevation, steepness of cliffs) by cycling with the Tab key.
You use this screen to carefully select your starting area.

There is also a find function, where you can search the whole world for a desired spot. You can specify various parameters and can then browse through the found sites matching them.


Note that you are not guaranteed to find what you are looking for and might need to compromise.

Once you find a suitable spot, the next step is to decide what to take with you.

mh

[mostly_harmless]

For some reason, this struck a chord, and sure enough, we did have another dwarf fortress thread around here somewhere. After some searching:

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...f+fortress

They did a pretty good job of walking through the basics if I remember correctly. For those who want to know more, this is a solid reference for watching what happens here.

Yes, that might have been played on an older version, though.
But the all the general principles should apply.

mh

[mostly_harmless]

Taking the following itemst:

Copper Pick, Copper Axe, Anvil
84 alcohol
10 of each seed
15 pork, 15 wild boar, 15 fish
30 plump helmets
2 ropes
a bucket
10 gypsum plaster
11 olivine (To make stone items in case we hit the aquifer immediately)
1 piece of raw green glass (in case someone desperately likes glass and wants to make an artifact)

Explanation on the items.
First of all you have a certain amount of points you can invest in various items (basically everything the home civ has to offer and your 7 dwarven skills.
While DF has no real victory conditions, players set their own goals, like get the king to move into your splendid fortress, defeat hell, build some amazing structure, survive in an evil biome, etc.) Regardless of your ambition you will have to get started and build stuff. For this you can use for example wood should you have trees around. Unlike Minceraft were you start by punching wood, if you forgot to bring an axe with you on you won't fell any trees soon.
Being a dwarf things should really be built from stone, which of course requires at least on pickaxe.
If you forgot to bring a pickaxe as well, you are screwed.
So an axe and a pickaxe should be your minimum requirement for gear. In theory you can get started with just that.
However, you will have more points to spend.
Healthy dwarves need booze to make it through the day. Only if they are out of booze will they resort to drink water from a nearby water source. But they won't like it. If the water source happens to be a stagnant murky pool, they will like it even less!
So you should bring a decent supply of booze with you, that will last you either until the autumn trade caravan arrives, which always seems to have some booze for trade or you have your own still set up, with a sufficient supply of things to distill of course.
The same goes for food. Dwarves need food and food can luckily be supplied by various means, hunting, fishing, farming. Fishing being the easiest, provided you have a river or a pool around.
Of course dwarves that regularly feast on lavish prepared meals are happier than ones that have to eat raw pond turtles throughout the year.
So Uberfish went for booze, food, plant seeds (only the dwarven crop seeds are available upon embark, additional one can be traded for from the humans or gathered and processed from the local shrubs) and plants. Plump helmets is the dwarven Swiss army knife. It can be cooked and distilled and even eaten raw.

2 ropes, not expensive and Uberfish might comment on it. Probably to chain the watch dogs near the entrance? They can be self produced eventually.
1 bucket. Can be easily self produced. But cheap enough.
Gypsum plaster is quite useful for your medical system and I always trade for it when the caravans come, because I have yet to play a fortress where I could find and produce it myself.
Finally the stone and the glass are not strictly necessary. But Uberfish will have more to say on that, especially if he plans to breach the aquifer.
There are probably many hundred different items you can choose from to take with you. The cheapest option is of course to only take the tools and raw materials with you that are essential and leave everything to your managing skills. For example, unless you embark on a region with no trees, I would not bring beds with me.

The following animals: 1 male and 2 females for all except cats which only have 1 female because we don't particularly need a lot of cats.

Dogs
Cats
Chickens
Ducks
Blue Peafowl

Dogs are very useful, as they are for a long time your first and only line of defense. Always bring a breeding pair.
Cats are a nuisance and they can multiply very quickly. Luckily they can be butchered, as long as they are not somebody's pet! In which case fortresses have ground to an halt because of Catsplosion.
The birds give a steady supply of meat and eggs. But I normally like pigs more and sheep. For one pigs don't require grazing grounds and are milkable and supply lots of meat and sheep on top of that supply wool of course. But that's cool. Never played a chicken farm approach before.
Also note that you can always trade animals from the human, elvish and dwarven caravans. From the dwarven caravans you as well demand certain goods, that they will priorities next year, for a hefty increase of price of course.
An elvish caravan once traded me a tame gorilla and lion, which I trained into war beasts. Very nice. Never got lucky with getting a breeding pair of them from the elves though.
Alternatively, you can catch and tame (!) the wildlife on your map. So you can eventually end up with your own domesticated packs of dingos or Giant cave swallows! I like that aspect of the game very much.

But back to the point. Uberfishes equipment looks very decent. Can't comment on the skills he used for the 7 dwarves.

Also one final tip: When playing fortress mode, use the Dwarf Therapist tool for managing labour and keeping track of your dwarves!
To me its the difference between enjoying the DF experience or throwing the game into the corner. Only a few purists play without it, I believe.

mh

[Jkaen]

I agree, therapist and stonesense makes the game playable

[uberfish]

I'll do a bit of a mini walkthrough; the start is slightly unusual because the aquifer at our site was right beneath the surface soil. This means we're just poor relations of elves having to make do with a wood-based economy until we breach it. There will be stone and ore in the layers underneath.

[mostly_harmless]

Please report in detail about your breaching of the aquifer. As for the elves, just don't offer them any wooden stuff. They will not demand to limit your tree cut down numbers in this version.

mh

[uberfish]

Our site was slightly north of here:



We started with the following seven



Ichabod: Miner
Harmless: Weaponsmith, Mechanic
Uberfish: Brewer, Negotiator, Judge of Intent, Appraiser
Pling: Woodcutter
Cyneheard: Carpenter, Armorer
Kylearan: Mason, Architect, Cook
Sunrise: Grower, Animal Trainer

This gives us coverage of most of the basic industries, with a slight emphasis towards wood given our jungle aquifer start.



Our wagon drops us off on a gently sloped hillside, which looks as good a place as any to start. A couple of screens south, and one vertical level down, runs the river.



We start by going to [d]esignate and marking a large area of [t]rees for Pling to chop and telling Ichabod to [d]ig out a temporary home in the hillside. One of the small rooms is going to be a dormitory, and one an underground farm. Because we are digging into soil we don't have to worry about irrigation - DF's implementation of farming is extremely forgiving and requires very little inputs apart from seeds and labour; fertilizer is optional.



This is our temporary home dug out, featuring:

- A 5x5 farm plot in the left back room - [b]uild [p]lot. I assigned it to grow plump helmets all year round for now as the basic high-yield staple crop. This can be changed by using [q] command to interact with buildings.

- A dormitory in the right back room containing beds. the [b]uild menu contains all the furniture options. I [q] one of the beds to define it as a bedroom and dormitory. Dwarves prefer having individual rooms, but this will do for now.

- In the top half of the main room is a large generic stock[p]ile set to take everything but corpses, stone, refuse and wood, so we can move all our stuff inside. Annoyingly, shells although a valuable raw material are classified as "refuse" by the game, so I enable the specific refuse setting for shells and disallow everything else:



Back to the map



- Tables and chairs being set up in the bottom right of the room for a dining table. Again, [b] to build the furniture, [q] to set it up as a dining room and meeting hall. Having at least one meeting place stops dwarves wandering around completely randomly and tells immigrants where they should head to.

- In the bottom left of the room are a still and mason's workshop, built because our mason had nothing better to do in case I needed some stone items. [b]uild [w]orkshops to find these.

- Outside you can see a Wood stockpile and next to it is the carpenter's workshop, which is Cyneheard's domain. When Pling chops down trees she just leaves the logs where they fall. Assigning a stockpile means that dwarves will haul the logs to keep the stockpile full. This increases Cyneheard's efficiency because he can just focus on making stuff in the workshop.

- The large stockpile to the right of that takes corpses and refuse, to prevent dead vermin decaying indoors and stinking up the place.

- To the right of this is the start of a wooden wall I'm building to control the front yard. [b]uild [C]onstruction gets you to the menu for walls, floors, stairs and the like. The interface is case sensitive and that's a capital C. Horrible. I know. For now, I enabled the Carpenter labour on some dwarves like Harmless who don't have much else to do so that they will help build walls, but only Cyneheard is allowed to use the workshop. [q] [P]rofile to restrict who can use it. That's because skilled carpenters can make high quality furniture but any random dwarf can build an equally good wall.

- Finally, at the bottom of the screen is an exploratory stair I dug out, which stops at the aquifer two levels below.

[sunrise089]

There are probably many hundred different items you can choose from to take with you. The cheapest option is of course to only take the tools and raw materials with you that are essential and leave everything to your managing skills. For example, unless you embark on a region with no trees, I would not bring beds with me.

What's the benefit of bringing less?

- In the top half of the main room is a large generic stock[p]ile set to take everything but corpses, stone, refuse and wood, so we can move all our stuff inside.

Where did stone end up being stockpiled?