Bay 12 Games Forum

I'll see if I can get a shot of it happening. There's no overlapping. I'm starting to doubt my memory tbh

I agree burrows are more elegant. I've always just been lazy with them and stocks screen is easy

Check this wiki page. We're all basically just cribbing from it anyway. Lately I've been using the DFhack command "autodump destroy" incredibly liberally.

I'll add my biggest considerations, though, in roughly their order of importance:

embark size - I think this trumps just about everything else. More space means more of everything else. I do mostly 1x3s these days.
population - more dwarves with more crap doing more things. It hurts! My pop cap is never above 140 (just enough to become a mountain home). Sometimes I'll tweak "strict pop cap" depending on my ratio of dwarves:babies:outsiders. If you don't care about becoming the capital, I say go much lower. IMO there isn't a lot 140 dwarves can do that 50 can't.
activity on surface - a glacier will be better than a dense forest. I imagine this is less important the smaller your embark, but still relevant.
flowing water on surface - as much as I love a natural waterfall or a lovely brook, I've decided it's not worth the cost.
fort design/pathfinding - use traffic designations and keep the forts relatively simple

If you wanna cheat (just a little) or alter the game:
temp/weather - turning them off can be huge. A glacier with no weather or temp calcs is the best possible fps embark I've found. Obviously it makes the glacier easier to not have those but I've already proven to myself I can survive a vanilla glacier
items - destroy everything you don't need! This can be done without commands (just throw it into a volcano!) but I can't say enough good things about DFhack's "autodump destroy" command. "clean all" also helps and removes gross vomit as a bonus.

Dwarven radar still works as per Werdna's post. I can't say I recall an embark that didn't have access to the caverns in some capacity.

Assuming I didn't remove them in advanced world gen which is sometimes nice for fps.

LNP's list of tilesets should include the default. In the Lazy Mac Pack launcher it's under the graphics tab and labeled "Curses". Can't speak for windows, surely it's similar.

Linked stockpiles help, particularly if there are ongoing jobs queued but I still see my dwarfs hauling from wherever on occasion. 

A workshop linked to a stockpile can only take in materials from that stockpile, full stop. It's pretty easy to demonstrate. Link something to an empty stockpile and queue some jobs. You'll get the same error as if you simply didn't have the relevant material anywhere in your fortress.

It might be helpful to forbid all your unused barrels for a bit. If they end up using pots you'll at least know they have "access" to them.

I tend to have a tomb prepared with a large amount of coffins beforehand. The bigger issue is dealing with dorfs that don't have a body to recover. I often forget or dont notice that in time and get ghosts.

A memorial will still put them to rest, even if they're already a ghost.

OP: Assuming you're talking about citizen corpses, basically churn out coffins and slabs. Everyone else: into the magma they go.