Windstirred: A Dwarf Fortress AAR and Tutorial

[Thoth]

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).

If your embark location has soil/clay then you don't need to screw around with mud farms. Mined out sand and clay leaves behind farmable floors (and it's quick to dig out which helps to level your miners fast).

The downside to clay/sand is that you don't get any stone from it, but you can easily have some small farms up by the end of the first Spring if you embark with two miners and either two picks or an anvil and a couple of bars of copper and a firesafe stone.

I've found that multiple micro farms (1x3) seem to be a lot more efficient than mega farms. They're fast to build, fast to plant and fast to harvest.

[antisocialmunky]

You can do that too but cave farm is more dwarfy.

[antisocialmunky]

Ch.4 - Events of Year 251 Part 2 - Migrants, Magma

In late summer/early autumn, the first wave of migrants arrived. It was surprisingly small, only 8 dwarves since I usually get a single massive wave of 20 dwarves near winter:

Butch - Butcher
Woody - Carpenter
Wade - Fisherdwarf
Angles - Fisherdwarf
Kitchner - Cook
Martha - Homemaker?
ShootKittens - Hunter/Marksdwarf
Soap - SoapMaker/Marksdwarf

Also around this time I started digging out the workshop level. I also started
on my metal working facilities:



We really need some tools to defend ourselves because I have a feeling that bad things will start to happen. Above you can see a bunch of interconnected 8x8 workshop areas as well as raw material storage sections located below for stone, wood, gems, cloth/leather/bone in that order. Some of the workshops have even been installed. At this point, I have a few workshops outside making crafts, mechanisms, cages, furniture while we wait since most of the dwarves have nothing to do otherwise.

Making Magma Forges

Forges especially magma forges are required to set up an effective military. You can go with civilians with crossbows but you're much better off with some real melee and range troops especially because if you get besieged. Often marksdwarves are not enough by themselves to lift a siege and you'll need to mop up some stragglers.

Regular forges and furnaces can be fueled by charcoal from a woodburner but its difficult to get the same volume of production as magma powered forges and furnaces.

If you look closely at the large alcove being excavated at the top of the picture, you'll notice some ▼ which are ramps down. This is how you make magma forges in general. I have on volcano-less maps, just channeled directly into rocks above magma sources but it seems like stuff (fun stuff :neenernee) comes out of them more often than if you just channel side ways. I mean you can use grates / parts of the workshop to cover your channeled hole as well but I generally like to place my forges where my dwarves don't have to go a long way to access so its good to know how to set them up like this.

Basically, you dig down a z-layer like so by channeling some holes and then you mine all the way next to the magma source:



You then channel holes into these tunnels from above. You'll need to remove any ramps under these holes or the magma forge will not act correctly. This means you need another ramp down to the tunnel so your dwarves can get out. Just floor over this tile later after you puncture the wall separating stuff from the magma.

Tutorial Point - Don't place the forge in such a way that the center tile which the dwarf has to stand on to operate it is over the magma hole.

Tutorial Point - Likewise, don't forget you can't remove ramps form above so if you flood before ramps are removed, you're going to have to try again.

Tutorial Point - Also Magma doesn't obey pressure like water most of the time so don't worry about flooding your fort unless you're using a pump to suck magma up.

You should end up with something like this:



You'll also want to set up stockpiles near your forges like this:
1 Economic (only if you are making steel since steel requires lime + iron) and 1 Ore only. Disable regular stone. You don't want your dwarves to run all over the map for ore.

Also, don't forget to set up a wood furnaces somewhere for charcoal if oyu need steel. Despite having a magma forge, you need charcoal for carbon or something. I like putting the wood furnace in my meeting room because dwarves like huddling around wood furnaces.

[Amelia]

I always dig out tons of coal and ligmite in order to make more charcoal... I've never actually went all the way down for Magma yet. Tales of caverns and magma beasts scares me =)

[antisocialmunky]

I never find coal on my maps. Where is it usually...

Also, who wants a dwarf named after them. We're going to start going through plenty of them given the casualty rate for year 1...

[Bobchillingworth]

I'll be a dwarf! I've lurked a few DF games at the Bay12 forums, after reading the awesomely hilariously awesome LPs originally posted at Something Awful, but I've never even tried to get into the game myself. I just can't get past the cluttered, confounding interface, and I doubt my CPU could handle it anyway.

[Ug the Barbarian]

Go on - I'll volunteer to die is some bizarre manner

[Brian Shanahan]

Why not, I'll probably survive until near the end, where Uberfish will kill me trying to revive me.

[Thermos]

Strange, my magma forges work without removing the ramps under them?

I never find coal on my maps. Where is it usually...

Also, who wants a dwarf named after them. We're going to start going through plenty of them given the casualty rate for year 1...

Coal is only present in sedimentary layers (layers types may be identified by the stones you encounter), and not very common at that. Volcanoes are always igneous extrusive, so yeah, I don't think we'll have coal on this map

Another thing to keep in mind is that sedimentary layers usually equals aquifers.

Oh, and I'll be a dwarf please!

[spellman]

Hm, I've never survived to get magma running. Partially because my last run I still didn't know how to make a decent army nor traps.

Luckily this guide helped alot:
http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/0...art-1-wtf/

EDIT: and you can name a dwarf after me