Bay 12 Games Forum

Jobhunting. (Argh) It seems a lot of positions I desire require at least some knowledge of SQL. Since I know nothing about SQL I thought I'd ask here: how do I start with it? I suppose I could just google it, but I trust the advice of people here more than random google results.

Beautiful, so many options. If you literally want the biggest value, df wiki has a list of alloys and how much they differ in price from their components http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Metal

Although with 80 000 tiles of metal ores, why would you care how to use them optimally?

Quote from: blue emu on June 09, 2014, 07:59:34 pm

Depends on where you embark, of course... but a Noob should pick a "Calm" biome rather than "Terrifying" anyway.

Where's the fun in that?

Oh, but terrifying is not fun. Endlessly reanimating corpses of things you killed a million times already,the constant need to destroy corpses before they animate again...

Quote from: ancistrus on June 09, 2014, 07:31:26 pm

If you want to start metal industry asap, to arm your military, then bringing some charcoal with you, or making charcoal early actually makes sense.

Oh, they'll be coming armed.

May I ask now armed?

It is not hard to survive, it is hard to survive without resorting to cheap tactics like walling off the entrance.

I firmly believe that overanalyzing the preembark preparations (which seems to be quite a fad lately) is pointless. I especially dislike advices like you should bring 100 different types of food, so that you get more barrels. If you have trouble with lack of embark points, increase them in the advanced world generation, who cares.
Truly important stuff is picks(better bring two), anvil, food(~50), drinks(~100). Can't think of much else.
Animals... yeah bring some dogs if you want. You can always import animals later, or catch some cool ones with cagetraps.

two military dwarves - ...makes sense if your goal is to defend yourself without using traps, purely with military, right from the start. Otherwise, not so important. Giving them the teacher or armor user skill may be a good choice.

All the rest of dwarves and skills- you are overthinking it. Too many different skills. Being an adequate brewer vs no skill in brewing makes basically no difference. Make dwarves proficient in a few skills, don't invest 1-2 points in a dozen of skills.
stonecrafting/woodcrafting/brewing/wood burning seem useless for your starting 7. Bring a proficient armorer instead.

Your biggest (only) challenges will be defense and providing for the huge number of dwarves you are likely to have by the end of year two.
For defense, don't just rely on soldiers, try to build a simple trap. Is there an infinite source of water on the surface? Then the easiest thing would be a long entrance tunnel that can trap the intruders inside, then pour water in and drown them.

Food and drinks- make a safe reservoir of water early and build a well above it. Food is almost too easy to get. I frequently have so much there is no room in the stockpile, so it rots. That is because migrants bring all sorts of stupid useless animals for me to butcher. Also there is always some stupid animal that decides to enter the fortress and I have to kill it.

To put it simply,
movement between level Z and level Z+1 via stairs is possible if there is a downstair tile at X,Y,Z+1 and an upstair tile at X,Y,Z. The special tile "up/down stairs" simply counts as both upstairs and downstairs tile. Whether the stairs were constructed or carved is irelevant.

Try not to think about stairs as of their real world counterparts, they have little in common.

It seems you didn't check if there are any titans or megabeasts left in the world. Duplicate the save file, abandon fortress, look into legends. Having a young world that is in the age of myth does not guarantee there will be anything left alive. One the other hand, I too had forts that were 5+ years old and without a single megabeast encounter.

my slightly related opinion: do not spend too much time coming up with a "perfect" embark skillset or itemset, its not that important