Bay 12 Games Forum

The last few forts I've done, I've been trying to have well organized forts, and that requires spreading things out a bit, which takes more digging, which I don't have time for when my miners are still learning. So now I set up a temporary fort with the minimum to get me through the first year. In my current fort, the temporary fort had:

- Refuse stockpile outside
- Log stockpile outside
- Pastures for animals that need them. These initial pastures are outside and vulnerable. They get moved inside when I have time to dig out enough space, have hit the caverns to pollinate them, and stuff has grown. But I get the outside ones set up quickly to keep animals from starving.
- A couple of tiny pastures just outside the door for dogs to spot thieves.
The above is all done before unpausing at the start.
- Entry with a couple of wooden doors for "security". Wouldn't stop a siege, but if I'm still living there when I get a siege, I've screwed up already.
- Meeting room/dormitory with 3 or 4 beds. Quick to set up and keeps the dwarves from getting too upset.
- Farm plot, 3x3, set to make plump helmets all year 'round.
- General purpose stockpile, initially 6x6, but expanded to 10x10. Takes most everything except stone, logs, animals, refuse & corpses.
- Carpenter shop to build doors and beds. Also makes some spiked wood balls later of for early trading.
- Butcher to handle output from hunter, plus I usually kill the animals that came with the wagon fairly soon. If I started with a fisherdwarf, I'd set up a fishery workshop in addition.
- Kitchen and Still
- Mechanic shop to make traps.
- Craftsdwarves shop for various tasks, especially cranking out a bunch of mugs for that first caravan.
- Trade Depot

I had all of that set up by the end of Spring. I did a lot of pausing whenever I saw someone idle and made sure to find something to keep everyone busy all the time.

Then I had the miners dig downward as far as they could go. usually I hit the top of a cavern and have to go sideways a bit, but this time the just grazed the bottom level of two of the caverns (so I built walls to close them off) and then straight down to semi-molten rock. A bit of probing around found the top of the magma sea and I set up a magma glass furnace for cranking out pumps/trap parts. I still haven't found the third cavern, but I have found the bottom of a magma pipe going up to it.

Oh yeah, this embark is at a site with no metal ores at all. That's why I'm going for glass so early. All of my metals will come from caravans and goblinite. It makes for an interesting game.

At that point I had everything I needed to survive. They were just stuck wherever they would fit in a little hill that my wagon started next to. In the past I've often just expanded from that sort of start, but it ends up with an ugly, disorganized fort with things by the entrance that really should be deeper down, and an entrance that is set up for quick digging, not real security.

So then I took some time and figured out where I wanted things to be in the permanent layout and started digging rooms for them. As I built stuff that was already in the temporary fort, I removed them from the old locations. Now the temporary fort is just a bunch of empty rooms and the original stockpile. As I've created new stockpiles, I've edited the original one to no longer take those items. So anything that ends up in the original is something that I still need to create a stockpile for.

I am about to wall off the original entrance, since I've now get a new entrance with a nice dodge trap/pit that just finished dealing with my first shipment of goblinite. Who-hoo! Now most of my soldiers have some sort of armor. Some are still wearing wooden junk I bought fro the first elf caravan, but that will go away as I acquire more metal.

BTW, please try to come up with more descriptive subjects for new threads. "How do you..." could be about anything. Something like "First things to do after embark?" would be much better. if all the threads had subjects like "How do you..."  or "Help me!!!" or the like, the forums would be pretty hard to read.

   Keith

Oh, don't mind Quietust. He's the resident grumpymunchkin.

Yes, but he's a veteran grumpymunchkin, who's been playing much longer than most of us and usually knows what he's talking about.

What's the rush to get him to the depot if there's still stuff to be carried there? He might as well carry something on his way.

By default uniforms are set to "partial match". You can change them to exact match like Mister Always said. With partial match, if you don't have enough iron bits, they will use lesser stuff, even down to cloth in some cases.I've seen troops wearing silk trousers when my uniform said metal leggings. I always just set mine to "metal" and it takes the most valuable things, which usually works. This can be a minor problem if you have a ≡«☼Copper Breastplate☼»≡ and your dwarf wears it instead of a +Steel Breastplate+. But that's pretty unusual.

During Army Arc, I would expect that danger rooms gets severely nerfed.

They'll be made with Nerf(tm) spears?

Diorite's not magma safe. See http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Magma_safe

In my current fort, I set up two 3x4 stockpiles just above the masons/mechanics. On only accepts the magma safe stones listed on that page, one only accepts the non safe ones. Neither accepts ores nor flux. Not too far away I have a couple of bigger stockpiles of each type, with the small stockpiles set to take from the big ones. I just have to do a d-b-f to forbid the small stockpile for the stone I don't want and d-b-c to claim the other, and I can be sure to get the type of items I want. When my legendary mason starts cranking out doors he only has to step up the stairs to get the next stone, so he works very quickly. By the time he has gone through the 12 stones that are close at hand, a dozen haulers are in action bringing more from the staging stockpile, so he doesn't run out (unless all the haulers are busy bringing stuff to/from the depot or hauling in goblinite from the latest siege). And then another dozen make the trip down to the depths to being up more to there. And the only time I need to remember which stones are magma safe is when I build something and have to select which door/floodgate/mechanism to use.

I use garbage zones for clearing out newly dug rooms, but I don't see much need for them as stockpiles. When you dig a room that has some orthoclase (magma safe), some granite (not magma safe), and some native gold, it's a pain to try to send each to a different garbage zone. I send them all to the same nearby zone, and then reclaim them all later. When one of my staging stockpiles needs more of a certain type of stone, the haulers will do the sorting for me.

Then again, I don't usually care at all about colors. That would make things a little more complicated. But not all that much, just a few more stockpiles, one per color.

What I find amusing about Zasit: "He is not a risk-taker"

I've got a stack of quarry bush leave roasts in my current fort that is worth ~29K. I could buy everything I want from any elf caravan, and most human ones with it. But I just keep it in reserve because I've got so much goblinite crap to get rid of. I really do need to set up a magma garbage disposal system.