Trick #1: Forge-your-own bismuth bronze
- Don't bring ANY metal tools except an anvil.
- Bring N tin, N bismuth, and 2N copper bars. You're going to be making a lot of bismuth bronze in a hurry. Those all cost 10 each, while one bar of bronze costs 25. Four assorted bars + 1 fuel = four bismuth bronze, what a steal! When you factor in fuel, below, each bismuth bronze bar costs a little less than 11 embark points.
- Bring a ton of wood. You'll use it as your sole fuel source early on and you want to start burning it ASAP. A cost of 3 and a little time gives you charcoal, much cheaper than the 10 that fuel normally costs.
- Burn five logs, and you have 4 bismuth bronze and the fuel to make your initial 2 picks + 2 axes for the low low price of 55 dwarfbucks in total. Pretty good considering that a single pick is normally, like...44 embark points. If you brought a proficient weaponsmith, they are probably *tools*, which makes a massive difference if your workers get jumped by anything.
- I can usually spare enough points to make, oh, 28 bars. Two picks for miners, two axes for woodcutters, and eight bars each for a squad of three military dwarves: That's a pretty damn good start! Right from the very beginning, they each get a *quality* weapon, shield, breastplate, and greaves. You can cover the rest with leather if you want.
Personally, I prefer just making all my dwarves (except my miners) woodcutters and giving them wooden training axes (made from the wood of the dismantled caravan and from chopped-down trees, so completely free). Five starting dwarves plus any migrants in the first few waves will make VERY quick work of any tree-felling that needs doing, and (even if you bring wood along) at a MUCH cheaper cost than making metal axes, regardless of what metal that is. Later on those training axes can be replaced by metal axes so my dwarves have something semi-useful to protect themselves with if they get caught by a goblin ambush or something, but initially the wood axe will do so why waste the metal? Would be a different story if embarking in an evil biome where survival is an issue from the very start, but for areas that aren't immediately filled with things that want to kill you (where you'd have the time to forge weapons and armour), I don't see much point in wasting embark points on metal for woodcutters' axes.
Trick #3: Leather and wood goods
- Seriously guys. Bring that wood. The less time you spend chopping it down, the more time you spend building your early fortress. Also, you'll be wishing you brought more wood when your wilderness gets mostly depleted and you have to station your military outside to cover your woodcutters from goblin attacks.
Which brings us onto this...by the time you've cleared the forest and goblins start coming, you should have had enough time to dig out a little underground forest which would be goblin-free, thus no need to station military outside to cover suicidal woodcutters because they can chop down trees from the safety of within the depths of their own fortress.
Trick #2: Cheap booze
I think I heard that dwarves prefer homemade booze, too.
Nope. Alcohol doesn't have quality modifiers (that's another common misconception because dwarves have a thought about how they 'had a fine drink lately' or whatever the wording is) and they don't care where it came from. Each dwarf has a preference for one type of booze, and drinking this will give the dwarf a happy thought. If a booze they don't have a preference for is the only thing they've got, they won't get a happy thought from drinking it (even if it's made by a legendary brewer) and then after having it a certain number of times in a row (I forget exactly, but it's around five times) they start getting an unhappy thought about having to drink the same old booze.
The plump helmet trick will inevitably result in you having dwarves who are a bit grumpy about drinking wine unless you bring along some barrels of ale/beer/rum or get a farm set up very quickly to churn out stuff for those different drinks, but since they'll also be getting minor negative thoughts from other things anyway, like a lack of tables/chairs and possibly having to sleep on the ground, this isn't a major concern.
I don't get it, you still can't see prices if broker is not appraiser, and while single bargain is enough to fix that, I haven't seen high level traders in a while. Grower, appraiser and some military skills are the only ones I always take at the embark.
Novice appraisal is all you need to see the prices and any dwarf will get that when they initiate trading at the depot once the first caravan comes along. You don't need a high appraisal level for any reason, and do you have much need to see item value before the first caravan arrives? It may be nice to have but it's not really essential.
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Topic: Stupid embark tricks (Read 21871 times)