Bay 12 Games Forum

Adamantine is very resistant to heat. Extruding thread-sized wire before smelting allows the heat to penetrate a given volume of metal through a greater surface area; otherwise, it simply won't melt. (That's how I think about it, anyway.)

Dear Edzul Cattenshigós:

Welcome to Shedber!

Many opportunities await in our glorious burrows and activity zones for a dwarf with survival instincts as sharp as you have proven yours without a doubt to be.

We all mourn the loss of your compatriots, but I know you mourn them most of all, having traveled months together across hostile lands to arrive at our magnificent mudstone doors. Surviving the rigors of migration was commendable of them, even if it was only to fall within a catapult's shot of the gate to a giant, winged, fire-breathing slug who chose that moment to attack the fort. No-one ever said that dwarves get by on their good luck. Their suffering has earned them all a memorial chamber in the catacombs, whether their death was in the maw of the beast or in the brush fires that charred the landscape in its wake.

I know you are modest, but your daring dash right past the ravening, soot-blackened creature, through the very front gate it was throwing itself against, was truly the stuff of legend. Clearly your penchant for thrill-seeking served you very well, as most other dwarves would choose to run away from any monster even if it took them further from safety.

When common sense prevails in such an epic display, it deserves a party! Meet us at shale table for a hen egg roast feast you will not soon forget, my clean-shaven friend!

Sincerely,
Imush Kûbukethab, mayor and cook

It should be possible to get yourself on the way to building a strong fortress with well-planned, basics-only documentation and tutorials explaining the principles and philosophy of gameplay (and making users aware of problematic bugs), of the kind found in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, such a tutorial does not exist. The in-game documentation is insufficient (though of course you should read it anyway), and the tutorials pinned at the top of the forum spoil some significant content and are not generally concerned with letting viewers figure things out for themselves to whatever extent it may be possible. I have some ideas about how it should be done, but any tutorial I would make would be obsolete due to my having played Fortress Mode only in versions prior to version 0.34 which came out in February.

If you are concerned about spoilers and using your noggin to the max, I would recommend against reading the forums and wiki except when absolutely necessary. Instead, if you have a question about how something works, ask here, and explain that you only want the gentle basics. Many things are intuitive and can be picked up through use, but many other things are fiddly enough in the details that figuring out how they work purely by experimentation would be painful. Mining, foraging, and stockpiling are examples of the former; stairs, ramps, schedules, and archery practice are examples of the latter, which many people here will be able to help with.

Finally, to start you off, two pieces of information would have helped me greatly when I was just starting. For one, the game world is three-dimensional, and perhaps the two most important keys are < and > (SHIFT plus , and .), because they show you different heights and depths of the world, respectively. For another, you should investigate the "workshops" and "furnaces" sub-menus of the [b]uilding menu sooner rather than later; the structures listed there will open the way to building most of the rest of the items on that menu.

Finally,

Loaded up my expedition members with useful skills like Leader and Fish Dissector.

Tried my damnedest to figure out how to equip the plump helmets from the embarkation wagon.

Stored corpses of dead dwarves in the kitchen.

Walled off the mouth of my entrance canyon for über security, not realizing attackers could just walk over the hills on either side.

Filled my reservoir from a well drawing from the same reservoir.

Sent a single novice marksdwarf to kill a titan. I can't remember whether he managed to fire off a shot or not.

I had limbs cut off dwarves in combat. I assumed those would be buried in a regular coffin that would eventually contain the whole dwarf when they die, but the parts aren't getting buried in available installed coffins. How do you bury body parts?

*steals a seed bag*

I should confess that I do perform mass-dumping of excess stone, and I wouldn't hesitate to fish it back out of the dump if I thought I needed it. But I don't situate the dump in a way that's intended to be convenient for storage, and I tend to have legitimate stone stockpiles peppered throughout the industry area of the fort.

I'm not saying the current stone stockpile implementation is ideal or anything. Just that I prefer to play the game more or less as intended by the author.