Bay 12 Games Forum

Some general tips:
Pre-embark:

1. If your embark has vegetation, you can get away with bringing 7 units of booze. You get four self-emptying barrels and a little bit of time to get vegetation and a still set up. The dwarves I assign to Herbalism are generally the ones that start with military skills, as it gives them a profession to come back to if deactivated.
2. Check out each dwarf before assigning skills. The dwarven psyche has gotten a lot more complicated since the days of only material preferences, but giving Weapon/Armoursmithing to the dwarf who likes iron or steel is still a safe bet. Unless they're a total waste of space. Having an Agile Miner is also good, because they're going to be doing a lot of walking between jobs.
3. Somebody should be able to swim Adequately. Sometimes you really want to cut down a cavern tree that's sitting in the water, and there's a pretty good chance that the woodcutter will end up in the drink. Usually my miner gets this skill. They're more likely to fall in water, they have five skill points spare because their only skilled job is to dig, and they can always go pick up an axe if there is a submerged tree that needs cutting.

Post-embark, before unpausing:

1. Order a forge and get your picks and axes wielded. The keas are everywhere.
2. Make a meeting area around the wagon. It's surprising how quickly everything wanders off the moment the wagon is dismantled.
3. Make a food stockpile, no barrels. No fat or tallow if butchering topside. Make the stockpile BIG if you're aggressively gathering plants.
3b. Put a one-tile garbage zone on top of the food stockpile. If the stockpile suddenly fills, order a swathe of it to be dumped. The items will remain in the food stockpile, but only take up one tile.

Post-embark, after unpausing:

1. You don't need to dig space for bedrooms. Put a bed down somewhere convenient, leave it at the default size, and make it available for claiming. Repeat. You can make nicer ones later, when you want, not when you feel you have to.

Every time I've aborted upon seeing the starting seven, it's gone all the way back to the home screen and I've had to select "start playing", go to the site finder, not remember exactly where I had picked,

Remember where you embarked, and set up a macro to take you to the correct Regional tile. You don't need to save it unless you close the game and restart. You'll still need to remember exactly which 4x4 patch of land you embarked on, because the game doesn't always start you in the same place within the Local tile.

How to set up that macro:
Make a note of where your fortress is. You can take a screenshot (make sure it has the X visible! It does flash), or remember its location relative to a distinctive piece of geography. Should you not like the look of the starting seven, abort the game. When you restart, press Ctrl+R. Then navigate directly to the Regional tile you're after, resizing the embark plot if necessary. Press Ctrl+R again. You don't need to (Ctrl+S)ave the macro unless you're closing the game or using another macro during the embark process, because the game will hold the last recorded macro in memory.

If you don't like the look of the starting seven again, abort. When your restart, the cursor will be in the same Regional tile as it was before. Press Ctrl+P and the stored macro will replay, taking you to the correct Local tile and correctly sizing your site.

It's a pretty simple process, but it takes so many words to explain.

As for making stuff topside... the trap is that you might get too invested in your production above.  You build workshops chains (butcher->tanner/craftshop->leatherworker.  You bring thread/shear sheep and get a chain of (farmers)->loom->clothiers'.  You get some stockpiles set up.... and then moving all of that underground becomes a huge drain.

Dig a long staircase down, channel out the topmost down stair, put a food-at-least stockpile at the bottom, and dump it all down the hole. Save the food and drink until last, so that it can all be dumped and reclaimed before anyone gets too thirsty. If you're using DFHack and have specialised stockpiles, copy those stockpiles and paste them somewhere if only to retain the settings.

If I were being organised about the mass dump, I'd have a minecart set to dump down the stairs and I'd gradually empty each stockpile and stop it from accepting new items, thus transferring each industry with a minimum of disruption. But a mass dbd qx px is much simpler, and the Dump Item job has a high priority. So, ehh, down it all goes, and I start fresh at the bottom. Sometimes I forget to go into the stocks screen and exempt powders and liquids from being dumped (just the container please Urist, the contents will follow without your help). That's annoying.

I think if each dwarf was treated as a side character it would be more effective. Say if Bomrek Eribbasan from above, instead having the personality of a wall of text, the same as any dwarf, was put off by merrymaking is pleased by her own appearance and talents, likes lions, and prefers to consume hake and demon rat. This personality is a lot more distinct than before when she was kind of nice, kind of egotistical, kind of determined, kind of cowardly, etc.

Every dwarf is the main character of their own life.

That said, the last part gives me an interesting idea. Perhaps there could be a filter for displaying traits. You could set it to display everything, as it does currently, or show only the strongest deviations from the norm. You know the sliding scales in adventurer mode character gen? Kind of like that. 'Filter ---' to 'Filter < --- >' to 'Filter << --- >>' and maybe to 'Filter <<< --- >>>' if you didn't want it on screen at all.

I just witnessed the death of one of the darkest threads on bay 12. Its humor was perfectly dark, showing the horrible treatment of dwarf kind.

Oh. Which one was that?

They brought me a breeding pair of giant jumping spiders before, and have brought me spiders before as well. They shouldn't need to grab a random silk material, they just need to use the silk sources they have. But I guess that's just not how it is.

Jumping spiders don't make webs.

You don't need a flight of steps on the outside of the tower.

When you come to build the last layer of walls, make one of the tiles a ramp instead. Once you're finished with the roof, remove the ramp and replace it with a wall.

He IS elderly, even for a dwarf. And short-history worlds tend to have a lot more moving around, since everyone keeps forming new settlements so quickly the first few years. So, I only think this guy is suspicious if the world is old enough that he shouldn't still be around.

Dwarves can live long lives in worldgen. He migrated to the fortress in 126 and probably hasn't been there long, so he's one of those dwarves created at the dawn of time as an adult.

As short as possible. Sure, the history is a bit boring, but the saving and loading is much quicker. If I want to stir things up I can roll up an adventurer and lock the fortress behind me before I go.

Sometimes for the first caravan I buy raw materials, process them ASAP, and then exchange them for desired goods / more expensive raw materials. Let's see, what are the easy ones to calculate... (all numbers assume base-quality item, rounded to 2sf)

Gem Cutter: x1.6 value, small chance of x3.3 value. Not much of an earner, but caravans bring lots of rough glass.
Metalcrafter: x6 value. Make goblets, profit. Requires fuel, may require extra hauling time. Nice if the caravan brought platinum, not so nice if they brought lead.
Blacksmith: x2 value. Make buckets. Only worth it if you have a really good smith.
Weaponsmith: x25 value. Serrated discs. So valuable that they're kind of cheaty. Otherwise, battle axes for x6.8 value.
Armoursmith: x5.4 value. Shields.
Leatherworker: x6 value. Waterskins.
Carpenter: x42 value. Spiked balls. Still kind of cheaty, but wood is a low-value material. Wheelbarrows and minecarts are x16 value, and have the advantage of being useful in their own right.
Mechanic: x10 value. ...Mechanisms.
Mason: x8.3 value. Statues. Making statues from valuable ore is quicker than smelting it into bars and forging something, especially if you have a mason's right next to the trade depot and disallow stone and furniture hauling.
Cook: x16 value. Cheese roasts. You can mince up any old rubbish and turn a nice profit though.

Now, the trickier ones.

Weaver: Can be nice if you have a skilled one to hand. Otherwise, plain thread to plain cloth isn't much of a value increase.
Clothier: Pfff... Let's start with a plain piece of cave spider silk cloth, 7db. You can make it into a robe for 33db. If you have a dyed piece of cave spider silk cloth, you can make a robe for 53db, a pair of shoes for 56db, or 1-3 cloth crafts for 40-120db.
If you have a -cave spider silk cloth-, 14db, your robe will be 43db. Dyed, you'll have a 63db robe, a 96db pair of shoes, and 1-3 crafts for 50-150db.
The cheaper the base material, the more the added value of the dye and cloth matter. But cloth items are profitable enough that you don't really need to minmax them.
Dyer: Takes quite a lot of time for the value added, and dye is expensive to buy. Maybe with a Grand Master Dyer.
Gem setter: Nice if you have the time to use the expensive gems the first caravan usually brings. Bolts are the best target, because the stack can be split up for sale.

Turn off all the hauling in the Orders screen, at least until you've bought the essentials. There's nothing more annoying than having dwarves moving items around when they could be working on them instead.
Do you have gems in your embark areas?