Bay 12 Games Forum

It's about 16 tiles wide.  Big sucker.

What I'm going to do is dig an access tunnel from my main floor underground and then stair up to the surface.  I'm going to build a guard tower (three story) with a cat in a pen on the second floor with fortifications as an early warning system.  I will have a drawbridge to seal the door with a lever in the fortress and keep in closed all the time until migrants come in; then I can open it for them.  They appear to not move until they have a path so shouldn't be an issue to crush them so no worries there.  I got my first caravan that came in on my zone so I won't worry about a bridge/road combo until I see they come in from the other side. 

So, I'm on a new embark on a river...and they decide to stop right on top of the frozen river...in early spring.  so it's a scramble to move everything OFF the ice before it thaws and I lose everything. 

I too got on the LNP early and love it.  You don't have to use all the Hack items although Therapist is HUGE (to me) in keeping tabs and making things work.  Without that I don't know what I'd do.   I don't use much of the other stuff but I did finally learn Auto-Labor where I could set workflow constraints to lessen the micromanagement. 

I literally went years, and probably a dozen attempts to start playing this before I sort of got it.  And even now I feel I only truly get about 10% of the game.  It's very detailed.  The tutorials help.  Watch some Let's Play's as well and you can see how they get their setups going to give you some ideas.  I've found two recently that both game me some ideas on how/where to improve that I have recently begun using or will soon.

With the LNP use their current version.  He will update it when it's stable for the new release.  I was watching an LP yesterday that had updated to the new version and the caravan just disappeared from his depot.  Typical to have a few bugs on the new releases.  The LNP will lag behind for sure but you know what is pushed out there is stable.  Just means waiting a little longer for that library or the vampire bard in your tavern.

Build constructed stairs to descend to right above the magma pool, then construct some pathways for your dwarves to build the magma forges on.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Construction

So I can build a floor out over the magma pool?  Cool.  Assuming I have to use magma safe rock to build the flooring?

Whether to link stockpiles or not is a matter of play style.
In your case it sounds you want your mason to realize he should haul stone to the stockpile and then draw from it, but that's not how it works. Hauling stones to stockpiles is a hauling job that's separate from the mason one (hauling a stone to the mason's workshop from either a stockpile or wherever they happen to be is a mason job, however).
If you link the stone stockpile to the mason's workshop it IS out of stone when the stockpile is empty, and the mason takes some other available job (which MIGHT be to haul a stone to the stockpile, but probably something else). If you've got loads of haulers that ensure the stockpile is stocked, linking is great, but if you're short of haulers that can cause production to stall whenever the haulers fail to keep up with demands.
If you don't link the stockpile to the workshop the mason MIGHT get the next stone to process from the stockpile, but he can just as well haul a recently dug stone from across the map. The production rate is lower, but the risk of production stalling is rather small (for stone; wood hauled from outside would stall immediately when you apply a civilian alert to keep your civvies from running out into the goblin siege).

But if I don't link the stockpile, and just use it to have a "close source" of stone shouldn't they still go self-gather stone if haulers are not able to keep pace?  Or should I not set up stockpiles like this until after a migrant wave or two.  And in the early going everyone has to haul (with exception of miner's maybe).  I do disable hauling on my core craftsmen after I get some migrants to replace them. 

So watching You Tube LP's is upsetting me because I can't get my game to mimic theirs..lol.

I have a workshop (say a mason) with a stone stockpile set up around it in a 5x5 room...
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Pretty simple.  I don't change ANYTHING on the stockpile (just like in the YT LPs).  In the videos the workshop dwarf pulls from the stockpile with no problem.  In mine...he acts like he's out of stone when I've got tons of stone...just not moved to the SP yet.  What gives?