Windstirred: A Dwarf Fortress AAR and Tutorial

[antisocialmunky]

WINDSTIRRED: A Dwarf Fortress AAR and Tutorial

The Story So Far:

Adil Litastzon's wrath was provoked when the dwarves refused a agreement to trade crafts made from mud and goblin feces, as is their custom, for tasty dwarven ale by killing his envoy on sight. Now he has conquered all the great dwarven civilizations and finds himself quite bored as the goblin king of the dwarves. He must now find something to amuse himself with...

"There must be something I can do with these dwarves..." He muttered to himself on his cold throne. Just then his usually drunken queen consort Tulon Unibosust leans over in a moment of sobriety saying, "I tire of the dwarves always bragging of their hardiness. Let us give them a challenge to see how long they last where even goblins do not go..."

Thus in the 251st year of the Age of Legend, 7 Dwarves are dispatched by Adil Litastzon the Goblin King of Dwarves from the Kubuk Anid the capitol of The Lance of Sport Kingdom to establish a claim in the haunted Realms of the North, where no goblin dare go.

Will they succeed, will they fail? Who know buts it'll be fun to watch.

Their names are:

Expedition Leader - BookDwarf
Farmer, Engineer, and Cook - Cheth
Miner and Mason - Minson
Woodcutter and Bodyguard - MostlyDrunk
Miner and Craftsman - Ross
Jeweler and Carpenter - Woodshine
Doctor - Dr. McLuvin

Lets play some DWARF FORTRESS!

[antisocialmunky]

Ch. 1 - Picking a Site: Of Evil Volcanoes and Flux Stones

First things first: just incase you thought I was kidding about The Goblin King of Dwarves:


Tutorial Point - If this screen ('c' button) says 'no important leaders' then you're better off abandon/reclaiming a fort with another civ. You won't get migrants after the first year so you'll have to slow grow your fort... which is ultra tedius. Just find a civ that works. Also you'll get bonus supplies form the previous embarks. :D

That's dwarf fortress for you. Pretty interesting but not as good as Cacame Awemedinade the Elven King of Dwarves. Actually, its not that uncommon that a civ gets wiped out or conquered by another race.

Now onto business, this is the site I chose from the 100th or so world I rolled that day (and I spent some time rolling a playable volcano):


Its a 5x5 embark which is slightly larger than the 4x4 standard and slightly slower. Its not that big of a deal though 6x6 was unplayable for me. Maybe its something with the map

Note the 'Terrifying.' The surrounding is kinda like that DnD chart of alignment (Neutral Good, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil... etc). Usually you'll get wilds (some dangerous critters) or untamed wilds(slightly more interesting dangerous critters like elephants and badger swarms). I haven't embarked anywhere good because it seems quite sissy elvish to do so so I made 1/2 my map freaking evil and crawling with probably undead elephants and undead badger swarms. Maybe there'll be undead carp that crawl on land and chase you around or those undead shurbs that the wiki claims exist.

...

Tutorial Point - Don't do this for your first game of DF.

Surrounding data can be found here: http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Surroundings

As you can see there are 3 more 'biomes' or distinct map areas. They contain flux stone (basically sources of lime to be used in steel production IIRC) like limestone. There's also a brook and of course the volcano. You don't need brooks or volcanos but brooks make water and utilizing water power much easier. Likewise volcanos makes it much simpler to deal with magma as in you don't have to pump or glitch magma to the surface and risk game ending fun.

Also one of the other biomes are also evil. *

Tutorial Point - You'll want something that says 'ore' usually both shallow and deep. You'll want soil if you are farming or have pastured animals. You'll want a brook for easy water and power (wind power sucks) and flux stone if you ever want to make large quantities of good weapons and armor.

So I set up and embarked with my team. Hopefully I wouldn't instantly die. This happens not that so unoften so yeah... There are ways to deal with it though:



Immediately the FPS dropped to about 80 due to something. I checked with the dfprospector tool and found a preponderance of slade. That means the lag is being caused by probably an underground demon civ... Oh joy. I guess we know why this place is so fricking evil... The FPS returned to 100 quickly so apparently they weren't unleashed onto the surface world... which is good because the last time that happened, one demonic flying spawned with the ability to breath Sarin nerve gas. *ahem*

Anyway, I spawned on a high ridge. I searched for a suitable location and found a promising site hopefully away from that yellow:



Why this site? Well...

1) I like digging on a gentler slope. It is just more visually pleasing and easy to deal with. You can't see above but there is a very gentle slope so I can build fortifications and silly dwarven apocalyptic security systems just incase any friends of our goblin overlords show up... and they will show up. Its fun for target practice on elves as well.
2) Its a nice patch of green so the undead usually don't wander to close.
3) There are a lot of trees.
4) There's a pond for water and down thee hill 5 z levels down is the brook (can't see)
5) 2z tiles above are iron and gold ore :D

You gotta love maps that give you visible ore right off the bat.

You can see from above I already made stock piles so I can localize all my embark supplies. I also gave MostlyDrunk a task to kill all those trees so we can get some beds and charcoal going. You need charcoal for steel... and you will need steel or creative use of bridges for this sort of fort.

Tutorial Point - Don't forget to designate a pasture and assign your animals in it. Don't forget to make a meeting place either. In dangerous embarks, its useful to designate a nearby water source so your dwarves don't path find themselves up to a snoozing grizzy bear.

Check back for the next chapter.

* is officially the GIR smile BTW Someone needs to recolor it.

[antisocialmunky]

Ch. 2 - Jobs, Entrance Design, and General Strategy

Jobs

The second order of business after I picked a spot was assigning all my jobs:


*The names are different because I renamed DrunkenMaster -> MostlyDrunk and Redeal -> BookDwarf because I didn't like the names. Dr. McLuvin I did like.

Tutorial Point - Be sure your dwarves for the manager/bookkeeper positions aren't too busy with other important stuff.

Tutorial Point - Be sure to set your bookkeeper to the 2nd to lowest setting. Take the bottom and and he'll count your enormous piles of rocks which you really don't care about. Take the ones above that if you don't want as accurate counts.


The most important jobs to assign are bookkeeper, manager, and broker. Bookkeeper populates the z screen with your full inventory. Manager allows you to make work orders when to go 'u' -> 'm'. You can also see the 'require', 'demand', and 'mandate' options. Require is for assigning rooms and items to noble dwarves. Demands for showing if your nobles want something in their rooms. Mandate is used to check what unreasonable demands your nobles want. They are just work orders. Hope you can fulfill them or a random dwarf with the job that produces items will likely get beaten to death if you have no jail.

Tutorial Point - Don't forget to stock your jail with food or that legendary craftsdwarf that got thrown in there will starve or die of thirst if your dwarves are busy. More on that later.

Entrance Design
Entrance design is a pretty tricky thing. There are simple designs and more elaborate ones like one-way herding systems, double entrances with a short entrance and a long winding entrance when the short one is sealed. There are even crazy magma traps and medieval style castle defenses. I for one like the standard cage trapped hallway to start off and then build more specialized and interesting systems later. Cages traps are pretty reliable and also get you captives that your military and practice on. Its also safe versus most uninvited guests.

Code:

----------------------
XXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXX
----------------------

- is wall
X is trap

Simple, just a hallway full of traps. However this system can be easily circumvented by thieves and masses upon masses of goblins (from a siege I've have 100+ from very powerful civilizations). Thus its useful to plan for when your system gets completely overwhelmed. Thus I usually make what I call a blast door. This is basically a raiseable bridge with a pit next to the fulcrum for which creatures cannot get up. This is therefore resistant against any building destroy even against flying building destroyers (they seem to have a hard time destroying things while flying...

So here is the finished trap and blast door entrance way:


In the bottom left you can see a dormitory and meeting hall. In the top left, you can see a cemetery. You can't be too prepared. If you look carefully under the dog by the barrels, you'll see a switch that controls the bridge. The bridge is the octagonal thing near the green bear trap icons which represent the cage traps. The down arrow is for the parapet in front of the bridge. Its usually a good idea to have an exit from it because dwarves are quite dumb.

Atleast they won't get caught in the cages unless they are wounded and try to hobble home.

Tutorial Point - Put your levels away from dangerous area as the level pullers run AWAY from danger. Meeting halls are good even if they are temporary like the above.

Here is the bridge up:


What's that message at the bottom? Well I'll introduce you to the fauna later. In fact with this setup, the standard goblin ambushes will be taken care of by the natives. 5 points to whoever can guess what happens next...

General Strategy
My dwarves dig slow and my farm will take a while to set up. Therefore I'm going to have to trade with the first dwarven caravan for food. That's not too bad. The default amount of food will last a year, not so much the drink but lack of drink will only make dwarves less production. So the first order of business is to make my craftdwarf produce a metric buttload of crafts to sell for food and other useful items. If all else fails you can 'gather plants' for food (shrubs and berries).

I'll try to not lose too many dwarves as well because it can get dangerous quite quickly. The main goal is to be self-sustaining within the second year and to start carving out bedrooms and real facilities for the dwarves. That is if I don't die of course.

After I get it self-sustaining I'm going to really get the iron mining and a steel clad military led by MostlyDrunk going. Then I guess I'll try and abuse the landscape for fun. Maybe I'll start a war with the elves and see how long their siege and last the hordes of undead that appear on these maps. The sky is the limit

[antisocialmunky]

BTW. If you want the dwarves to be named after you. Say so.

[Brackard]

Even without being immortalized as a dwarf, this is really, really cool. First thought when I saw you mentioning it in the diplomacy thread was "Hell Yeah!"

Dwarf Brackard signing up for duty! Maybe I'll last longer as a dwarf than I did as an X-COM....

[antisocialmunky]

Ch. 3 - Events of Year 251 Part 1 - Building a Farm

When I started writing this AAR. I wasn't sure how I was going to do it because I wanted to do it as a tutorial too atleast for some things. My original thought was "It would be cool if I wrote it like one of those DF stories" and then I decided against that after I finished writing the OP because that would take TOO MUCH TIME™. So I guess I'll mainly report on my projects and how the dwarves were doing and whether or not one of them does something interesting. I'll make tutorial sections first and then eventually do a little summary of what's going on at the end of the first year.:neenernee

Building a Farm

This is one of the first things you should do. It should be fully up and running by the 2nd year at the latest. You can get buy by trading with caravans until you start to get too many dwarves to sustain via that route and gathering plants.

You can build farms above ground and underground. Its not a huge deal which one you start out on. You get better alcohol options for the above ground ones. Whip vines that make whip-wine will make your dwarves happy so will having lots of different types of booze and munchies as well.

Because the outdoor world is so inhospitable and I mostly have cave plant seeds/spawns I decided to do a cave farm.

Cave farming is a little more difficult because you have to flood a region underground with water to coat underground rock with mud. This can lead to all sorts of fun like flooding your whole fort. I mean, its not nearly as bad as wells for flooding potential (wells are usually put near your meeting areas so its a flood on one of your habitation floors).

So how do you build a underground mud-farm? First you must pick a location near a body of water. This body of water has to be decent sized. Ponds are also much easier and faster to set up compared to a river which requires flood control systems. Unfortunately I did not have a convenient pond I could drain. I had one on my fortress lawn if you remember:



But I wanted to use that for other things and didn't want to deal with things trying to enter the fortress from that direction just in case. Thus I dug 5 Z layers down and dug next to the river.

This is my general method for setting up a farm like this:


"When Ready to Flood" is when you've installed a lever(not shown) to operate the flood gate so you can stop said flood.

It took a season to finally install the lever because the dwarves were busy with some other things like carve out some beds (successful), make enough crafts to trade for food (successful), and trying not to die to the local fauna (mostly successful). So then I lowered the flood gate after connecting it to the lever and broke the dam.

NOTE: You can mine next to the river but I prefer to use smooth/carve. Its a preference thing.

Tutorial Point - Doors stop water (and magma if you have magma safe doors) if you want something to restrict flooding, build some doors like above. I didn't want to cover everything with mud so I just stopped it there.

When I was ready, I poked a hole:



You let the water cover relatively evenly 1 deep. So don't over fill or else you need to figure out how to drain it

The final result is a nice little (safe) farm:



My farm area is actually completely oversized. When I fill that area full of farm plots, it will probably be able to feed over 200 dwarves. To the right you can see the beginnings of a well.

Next Time: Magma Forges and death.

[Krill]

This is perhaps dumb, but where did you get those graphics from?

[antisocialmunky]

Phoebus graphics pack. Just download the Lazy Newb Pack.

[Amelia]

Erm... for some reason i just can't get used to those graphics, i prefer happy faces and acsii.

[antisocialmunky]

☻