Bay 12 Games Forum

There is a nice little stairs tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjWO27aa0I

For instance, the alder boots are elvenware. Unless you acquired them from a caravan, they are still caravan items.

First: Press d two times, just to make sure that mining is choosed.
Second: You need either a cliff side on your current z-level or you have to go up or down one level to find one (with < or >). You can only dig into the mountain if you start on a cliff tile and dig into the black inside the mountain.

If you happen to be on a plain or just want to start where you are, you must first channel out a part (d-h), then move down one level and designate the digging area from where the ramps are. But be careful not to remove the adjacent wall, otherwise the ramps will become impassable.
You can also designate a down stair in the ground, to use it you must designate also an up stair or further up/down stairs from the same spot below.

The stocks screen lists everything on the map. That may be things you have made, stuff that your starting dwarves and migrants brought, possessions of the caravans and their personnel, and things that are in the caverns (if you have found any).

The color code is helpful:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Stocks#Color_Code

Also, you can zoom to any specific item.

Maybe it is a general misunderstanding of all the screens.

During world generation you will usually only see a part of the world in the window (depending on world size and system settings).

In the pre-embark screen, the left window is a tiny part of the middle window (position marked by x) and the middle window is a part of the right window (again marked by x). With the arrow keys you can move your current region view following the position of the x in the other two windows.

The highlighted area in the left window is a representation of the actual place where the game will take place. This area can be moved as mentioned above with the umkh keys and also changed in size with UMKH.

After you have chosen your site and chosen your dwarves and equipment, you will find yourself in the final map, where the game takes place.

Each tile in the left window of the pre-embark screen represents 48x48 tiles in the main game screen.

Maybe you changed it by mistake to accept only from links?
This can happen quite easily if you q a stockpile an press a ...

There are lists of commands, but knowing how to dig or how to build something would not be enough to play the game. It is necessary to understand some of the basic game mechanisms to know what you are actually doing and why.

There is the wiki article about the fortress mode: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Dwarf_fortress_mode
It contains lots of useful and needed information to understand the interface and the goals of the game. Also there is the flowchart which gives some hints what to do at all after embarking.

All informations there are quite basic without many spoilers. If you are stuck you will always find a link that leads into the depths of the wiki to more detailed articles.

Even with this guide you know still nothing about embarking and how to do it halfway properly. So you most certainly should have a look at the embark article.

Alternatively you could start with the quickstart guide, which has a more praticle approach to let new players start the game:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Quickstart_guide

Even if you read all oft that, there is still much to discover in dwarf fortress. The game has such an incredible level of detail that it will take a long time to reach the bottom line. Until then, there will certainly be a new version with new features, Toady is working fast.