Bay 12 Games Forum

In my last fortress I found a shitload of coal and lignite. It was fun digging all of that out and smelting it into coke.

The good thing about artificial caverns is that they aren't infested with wildlife unless you set said wildlife loose yourself. So the bigger you can dig them, the more material you can safely get. Besides, the higher the trees/shrooms can get, the more logs you can get from each job done.

Yeah, that millstone will bring value and happiness to your public space just by being there, so set it up where everyone can admire it. And if you happen to work out the pluming to use it in the dining hall, you can kill two birds with one stone.

Another easy way is to only give the dwarves a single tile wide walkway to stand on. They have a 3-tile radius to play with when it comes to stationing, but if there's nowhere to stand away from a fortification, they'll be right where they need to be at all times. Easy way to do that in a tower room is to carve out the center of the room so it only has a one tile edge to stand on. I don't think ramps count as standing room, so having a few for access to the bottom floor shouldn't be an issue.

I'll accept this as baby steps on the no-cheating front. The vanilla points are in the 1300s range, not multiple thousands. To get the full feel of the game, you should have to be selective about what you bring.

There's also a lot of skills in your set-up. While I can see the use in a dedicated trader/bookkeeper, you don't necessarily need the book-keeping skill as a starter. Even without it, I've managed to set a no-points keeper to highest precision within a season or two. With a grower and so many seeds, you don't really need an herbalist. You could swap that butcher to trapping, if you're looking to feed into the leather industry.  I generally set my carpenter and mason as two separate people so the carpenter can be doing beds while the mason triples up on doors, chests, and cabinets.

The set-up I was given involved 2 miners, a mason, a wood cutter, a carpenter, a grower, and a brewer. With the new version, I'd double up the mason as a mechanic and add in architecture so it can set up defenses early. A grower won't be constantly busy, so you could double the grower as a brewer. You'll be constantly mining for more space/stone, so you might want your miner to be dedicated/hauling for the few down moments it has between rooms.

Sorry for the wall of text, I'm just passing on how I do things in case you can pull ideas. Play however you want.

A lot of them wouldn't understand and you're liable to eventually find someone who thinks we're dangerous or just plain insane and need locked up. 

Artificial caverns for tree farming sounds like a totally dwarven thing to do. Rock on!

You need seven or more tiles of empty space to prevent a successful jump. If a tree branch is big enough for a running start, a jump can clear five or six tiles max. So you need to clear out more space than that. Seven is the safe minimum for preventing jumps.