Nice Video-Tutorials but I noticed an error, in your fifth video at the very end you typed this:
These rooms ive dug out are pretty big, but still safe. Be careful though if you make rooms to big without any kind of support the cavern could collapse. When designing your fortress do not make rooms which are much bigger than this.
This is a common myth, in the 3D version of the game cave-ins only occur when something is
completely disconnected from the rest of the world. This false rumor comes from the 2D version of the game where cave-ins occurred when you made rooms bigger than 6x6 but this feature was removed with the introduction of the Z-Axis. So theoretically you could make a fortress that looks like this
and not have it collapse.
Also as far as I know
all river fish are dangerous to dwarves, and rivers always have them. If you want water without the risk of your dwarves being pulled under you should embark on a brook next time, which are smaller, can be walked over, and are easy to find (they branch off rivers so you can just look near one of those), but they don't appear on the larger map screens on the embark menu (because otherwise the map would be too cluttered.)
Sorry if you already know this by now or if somebody else said it before me, I just don't like false information being perpetuated.
and yes, this post really is just an excuse to post a funny image.
Edit: Found some more errors in Video #6 and #7
1. Bones (along with skulls and shells) do not cause miasma and are actually very useful (bones are best for making crossbow bolts, skulls can be made into totems and sold to caravans, and shells are absolutely vital for the occasional moody dwarf who may demand them), I always customize my refuse stockpiles so that the bones and such are stored underground (where they will not decay away into nothingness) and all other refuse is deposited outside.
2. If you value efficiency and productivity over (dwarven) friendships and social skills you may want to make a meeting zone (with {i}) instead of designating a meeting hall. Dwarves will throw parties at meeting halls (as well as statue gardens but not meeting zones) where they will stand around and talk to each. Parties
can will prevent otherwise productive dwarves from working so you might want to prevent them from goofing off. On the other hand dwarves will make friends with each other (which will give them happy thoughts) and gain social skills (which will make them gain attributes like any other skill), but this has its own downside as dwarves will be very sad to see their friends die and vagrants who stand around doing nothing but talking to people may gain large attributes from social skills and make them dangerous to anger.
3. An easy way to remember which dwarves have which professions would be to customize their profession titles (in the same place as the name customization) to something like "Farmer/Brewer," and you can also use this to keep track of the skill level of the dwarves by naming them something like "SrFarmer/Brewmaster" or "JrMason/Engraver" or "JrFarmer/Processor."
4. A great idea is to customize food stockpiles to not contain seeds and make a separate seed stockpile next to your farms, this is because dwarves will grab one seed, carry it over to the farm, plant it, and then run all the way over to the food stockpile to grab another seed rather than grabbing a bagful or something. So putting the seeds close to the farms will allow them to plant seeds faster. Since your dwarves are eating plump helmets you may want to make your dining room closer to your seed stockpile so that your dwarves don't have to go very far to clean up all the seed leftovers. Efficiency is very important when your populace gets much bigger.
5. Barrels can be made of metal as well as wood (not that that would be useful outside of an extreme situation such as embarking on a treeless map.) Also you may want to reserve some barrels (which can be done on the stockpile screen) which will cause dwarves to leave a designated number of barrels to only be used for brewing or syrup processing tasks. This is useful because if you're not careful your dwarves may constantly fill all your barrels with food and thus prevent you from brewing any alcohol (which can be fatal on a map without an easily accessible source of water.)
6. In my experience dumping items is ludicrously high on the list of priorities, so much that when I want a large amount of stone dumped my entire fortress will drop what they're doing and go off to dump stones to the point of forgetting vital jobs such as making food, possibly leading to somebody starving. However, this may be because you are using an earlier version where I believe it was very slow indeed. Still, most players will be using the newest version and it would unfortunate if their dwarves became so preoccupied with dumping stones that they forget to grow any food or brew any alcohol.
I'll be watching the rest of your videos later, I hope to point out any errors or inefficiencies so that everyone can avoid common mistakes and make management of their fortresses easier.
) and it's (supposedly) about an intern who used to work at Maxis during the development of spore, and there's another part after it where another person posts something else that's relevant.
