Bay 12 Games Forum

I tried a peasant embark in 40.03, but forgot about designating burrows, and the plants I kept coming up to weren't edibles, and it just got frustrating because one of my people fell out of a tree and drowned in the pond it landed in.

So you definitely have to be more careful in this release, or your people will get reallllly dumb.

Indeed. That's how I learned the military system, by doing a no-points (Peasantry) embark and fighting off armies of thieving keas with a crossbowman. And got slaughtered by a Kobold ambush.

It was inevitable . . . that that wagon would die to a bolt cutting it in half. For Science!

I've started placing a single point into it on my construction workers so they start the game with it turned on.

Yup.

Restarting is perfectly honorable under the circumstances, though continuing on would be possible if you could isolate that last survivor until immigrants come.

ETA: Vanilla embark points is 1324, just for reference on how much you've bolstered them.

Yeah, without a justice system, the worst a King will do is go mad from various stresses and follow his personality to its insane conclusion. Either Depression which will have him sulking in his room til he dehydrates, Going Stark Raving Mad and stripping and tossing his clothes around before streaking through the halls babbling until his dehydration death, or going Berserk and killing everyone he can reach. Which can be a Fortress killer.

Noise from outdoor jobs like tree cutting tends to travel about seven Z-levels, even through solid rock. So dig down to the bottom surface level, then seven more levels down, and place your bedrooms there. Hopefully you don't strike caverns during the digging, but that did happen on my last fort. Was my first time hitting caverns at all, and it was damn inconvenient. 

After you've marked that out, you might base your Fortress around said measurement. Get the permanent farms set on the bottom soil level, get the food processing centers on the stone level right below it, with the dining hall either on that level or one below. Set your workshops within a level or two of the bedrooms so they're pretty well centralized and easy to reach.

OH! Right, also, my measurements and assumptions are based on my standard fortress design: A single central shaft of a 2x2 staircase running through an 8x8 room on each floor. You can house four workshops and easily create a pair of 3x8 storage halls off of each corner, for the workshops to use.

The bedroom level has a corridor shooting off of each cardinal direction. How many rooms you can have depends on the size of the rooms. My current standard is a 3x3 room with a bed in the far corner, a cabinet across from the door, and a chest on the remaining corner. I  run ten rooms off of each corridor, so each level houses forty families.