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[Tacomagic]

So, I've been playing around with a new challenge.  It may not actually be much fun due to the way migrants are weighted, so I'm still working with the specifics to try to make it as playable as possible.

Anyway, this challenge was born out of a different challenge I messed with in 34.11 called the random embark (embark was completely randomized and skills locked; however, this challenge was barely playable).  The Skill Lock challenge works as follows:

Embark:

Dwarves:
Each of the seven dwarves is assigned 1 skill at level 5.  You'll need to pick carefully (see the rules below).

Items:
2 Picks
1 Anvil
100 booze
100 food
10 Stone
10 Wood

(Note: The items aren't really that critically important to this challenge, so change these as you want.  You'll have points left over, so spending those on some animals might be a worthwhile.  If you really want a challenge, combine with the single-pick embark.)

Rules:

• Dwarves may only ever be assigned a labor that they have at least 1 level in, with the exception of military and nobles.
• Military and Nobles may be assigned at will without restriction.
• All unskilled labor may be used without restriction (this includes things like hauling and feeding/watering)
• Once a dwarf becomes a Master (Level 13) in a skill, (s)he may take on a single apprentice; this apprentice must be assigned the master's labor and have all other labor unassigned (not including hauling or dwarf care).  Once a dwarf is marked as an apprentice, that dwarf must remain an apprentice under that master until they reach level 8 (Adept) in the labor.  At this point they become a journeyman in the skill and leaves the apprenticeship, which frees it up for the master to take on a new apprentice.  The only other way out of an apprenticeship is death.  A dwarf MAY undertake as many apprenticeships as you want, however, they may only take part in a single apprenticeship at a time and they must complete the active apprenticeship before taking another.
• Even if a dwarf is master in multiple skills, they may only have 1 apprentice at a time.
• You must toggle the {h} order to "Only farmers Harvest".  This makes it so that grower skill is not trained through gathering.
• Children, upon reaching adulthood, may be assigned 1 labor of choice.
• Any labor that is given through a strange mood is treated like a normal legendary skill regardless to if the dwarf originally had that labor assigned.  The dwarf can be assigned the labor and take on an apprentice like any other legendary laborer.
• A request for a single labor of choice may be made to the liaison each year with the following restrictions:
  
  • Your fortress must pay a tribute to mountainhome.  The tribute starts at 1,000☼ and doubles each time you make the request.  So first time is 1,000☼, second is 2,000☼, third is 4,000☼, fourth is 8,000☼, and so on.
  • You pay this tribute by offering the associated worth of exports to the caravan. In a situation where you cannot do it as an offering, make a trade for a single, worthless item (such as a clay figurine).
  • Both the Liason and all the caravan's wagons and pack animals must make it off the map.  Guards do not have to survive.  If any wagons, pack animals, or the liaison die on the way off the map, the request is canceled.
  • The next migrant wave is checked for the labor requested (note: there must be at least 1 migrant otherwise you'll need to wait for the next migration opportunity).  If the labor is there, then the transaction is considered complete.  If not, the labor is assigned to whatever migrant you want and then the transaction is complete.

And that's pretty much it.  The primary idea is to bottleneck your labor so that you have to think around a lack of a certain kind of labor.  For instance, in my last attempt I never ended up getting a mechanic so I had to try to make it without being able to raise bridges, make traps, or do any of the other nice things that mechanisms can do for you.  Another attempt left me without a cook OR a brewer, so I had to concentrate on making great bedrooms and meeting halls to keep everyone distracted from their plump-helmet and water diets.

Issues/Challenges:
There are a number of issues and challenges I'm trying to balance.  Some of these are more intended than others.

The first is that it slows down the fort a LOT since you're leaving available labor largely up to chance.  Not a lot you can do about this without changing the core tenant that you're restricting labor on purpose.

Second, there are a lot of really core labors that are rare in migrant waves.  Among those are wood burners, architects, and wood cutters.  Carpenters and Masons also seem relatively rare in the more recent builds.  On the other hand, you'll have a glut of fisherdwarves, milkers, and cheese makers.  This I balanced slightly with the master/apprentice mechanic and with being able to assign a labor of choice to children who become adults.  There is a rule I'm messing with that might balance this out a bit more.  See optional rule 1 below.

Third, idleness will be a constant battle.  With so many useless labors coming up all the time, you'll be hard-pressed to find something to do with all the dwarves.  The only realistic solutions are: to just let them idle (bad idea), enact solitary confinement for idlers/useless dwarves, draft all the chaff into the military, or subject migrant waves without any useful labor to unfortunate accidents.  Take your pick, really.  I found that immediately drafting useless newcomers into cavern exploration teams was a great way to make them vanish find something for them to do.

Four, the lack of some labors can make certain conditions nearly impossible to deal with.  That's why the first 7 are allowed choice labors.  In earlier variants, the labors for the starting 7 were randomized, which could make things nearly unplayable.  Along with this, I beefed up the food and alcohol on embark because it's very likely that you may have to spend a few migrant waves waiting for a grower/cook/brewer/gatherer.  This builds in a buffer so you can afford to wait a little longer.

Optional Rules:
These are some of the optional rules I've been tinkering with.  Some of these may become core rules depending on how much balancing needs doing.

• The benefit of legends: Any dwarf that achieves Legendary +5 (Level 20, 29,000 XP) may be assigned an untrained labor of choice.  This simulates a kind of multiclassing.  This can be done each time a dwarf reaches legendary +5 in a skill.  Military, physical, and social skills are not counted for this.
• Legendary Hobby: As an alternate to the above, instead of a labor of choice, the labor is selected and assigned randomly.
• Legendary preference:  Same  as "benefit of legends" but the labor selected must be related to their preferences.  If a dwarf likes doors, they get a labor that makes doors.  They like weapons-grade metal, they become a weapon or armorsmith.  They like being outdoors, they can be a ranger.  Etc. [(Credit to Pink Photon for this variation)
• Diagnose what you can treat:  Any dwarf that has any of the healing skills can be given the diagnostician labor as a freebie.  Conceptually, if you can treat something, you probably know how to make a diagnosis related to that treatment.  Granted, any dwarf with diagnosis can diagnose any injury or ailment, however, without the skill to heal it, diagnosis doesn't actually provide anything of actual utility. (Credit to Pink Photon for this rule)
• Sacrifice to Armok:  You may make a blood sacrifice of any 2 peasants.  In return, you can assign 1 labor untrained to any remaining peasant.  Now you're thinking with Gods of Blood.
• Draft Dodger:  For every full squad of soldiers, you may assign 1 untrained labor to any dwarf.  Squads that support a labor like this MUST remain at full compliment in perpetuity.  If the draft dodger dies, a new one may be chosen in it's place or the squad may be disbanded.
• Retired Soldier:  Any soldier that reaches legendary +5 status in their weapon may be retired from the army and be assigned a labor of choice.  This unit may NEVER be placed back into the military.
• Random Embark Location:  This actually works for just about any game, but I find it synergizes particularly well with challenge runs.  Pick your embark location at random by pumping the map size into Random.org's integer generator.  You probably want to re-roll if the spot isn't FUN! enough.  Getting a calm embark in the middle of the forest without any neighbors on the first roll is always kind of a let-down.

That's pretty much it.  Still a work in progress, but the basic rules do produce a challenging, if somewhat frustrating, game (mostly in dealing with all the idlers).  I find that there definitely are certain skills that do better on the first 7 than others.  Particularly rare skills and skills for building stuff right away need to be balanced against each other in order to supply both short-term and long-term fortress needs.  I will say that an architect is almost mandatory for the first 7; especially if you're like me and prefer aquifer embarks.

EDIT:  Added the liaison request to the core rules.  Thanks to Pinky Photon for the initial suggestion.

[Mimodo]

I'll keep a note of this for when my fortress inevitably crumbles to ashes. What kind of skillset would you suggest embarking with? Obviously you'll want a miner in the embark crew

[Tacomagic]

Depends on where you embark.  A good generalized set is:
Miner, Carpenter, Wood Cutter, Wood Burner, Architect, Mason, Mechanic.

That gives you everything you need to cover the basics, but it does crutch a lot on getting metalworkers in migrant waves.  It also provides a framework for getting clay or glass going rather quickly if you have the materials and the labor shows up.  You could feasibly drop the mechanic for glass maker if you're feeling lucky about sand, otherwise a potter could get clay industry off the ground.  The wood burner is pretty key because you'll almost never see one in a migrant wave.

If you're in an area with no trees and an aquifer, I'd use this one but swap out the cutter and burner for an armor and weapon smith. You'll have to hope that the wood and stone you brought is enough to pierce.

If you're embarking in an area without trees and no aquifer, then I'd use this setup:

Miner, Mason, Architect, Mechanic, Smelter, Armorsmither, Weaponsmith.

If you're going evil biome, then... may Armok help you.  I'd probably go with that second set and start digging for metal as soon as possible so everyone could be armed and start individual training in their free-time.  The nice thing about an evil biome is that it'll be pretty easy to get rid of migrants that you don't need.

The issue with both those is they have no ready way to produce food.  You're pretty much at the mercy of the RNG.  Luckily, farmers and gatherers are pretty common.  And, if push comes to shove, you could draft a slew of dorfs into the military and send them after wildlife for some extra meat.

In either case, keep a close eye on that miner.  As soon that dorf hits Master you'll want to apprentice somebody as a second miner and get them digging straight away.

[Tacomagic]

Played this challenge again tonight, this time I picked a less hostile biome for balance checking (last time I did a glacier, which was a bad idea for a challenge still in beta).

This time picked a spot with all the good stuff.  Clay, Aquifer, Shallow and Deep Metals, and Flux.  Trees are plentiful and lots of plants.

First year was pretty good this time.

Spring:

The first season was very productive.  Pierced the aquifer just before summer, already had one legendary miner who took on the architect as her apprentice.  I've kept the carpenter working full tilt so that he'll be able to take on an apprentice as soon as possible.  Churned out lots of wheelbarrows, shields, and training axes for trade.  Created an emergency lock-down bridge

Summer:
Most of summer spent training up my miner by digging out the bedrooms and workshop areas and churning out bedroom stuff.  Breached into the cavern to get the fungus growing then walled it off for now.  I also realized that I forgot to build a wood burner before apprenticing my architect.  Important for the next try is to make sure that the wood furnace is constructed before apprenticing the architect (or apprentice somebody else).  Disappointing migration of only 3 dwarves showed up.  There was a brewer, a smelter, and a glass maker.  Nobody that could produce food like I'd hoped.  Luckily, with only 10 mouths to feed, there's enough food reserves and an aquifer to make it until the caravan, and enough shields, training axes, and wheelbarrows to clean out any food, booze, and other sundries they have.

Fall:
Asshole kobolds ambushed my waterbuffalo and killed my cow.  So much for a meat industry based on her.  Without a butcher, that corpse is just a waste of meat.   Meanwhile, the first office was finished so I assigned the glassmaker as the expedition leader, manager, broker, and bookkeeper.  Since there's no sand here, that's about as much use as I'm likely to get out of him.  The bedrooms got finished up, so I started making a large underground field to move the remaining waterbuffalo inside away from the kobolds.  Shortly after starting the new field, the apprentice miner became a journeyman, allowing me to build the wood furnace.  After that was done, I started charcoal on repeat to get the wood burner training up.

When the Caravan arrived, a migrant wave with a farmer, 2 plant gatherers, another brewer, and a cook was right on its heels.  Just what Armok ordered.  After the migrants naturalized, I gathered a few of the random mooks from around the fort and started a small squad with the training weapons and wood shields.  I also traded away all the crap my carpenter has been making to the caravan for a mess of food, booze, cloth, and metal items for melting.

Just as fall came to a close, my carpenter hit master status and took on one of the two plant gatherers as an apprentice.  With the coal being made, the drain on available wood increased substantially.  I cut down a few dozen more trees and started building cage traps to gather some local wildlife.

Winter: 

As the fort began to take shape, I forbade the master carpenter from the carpentry shop and put him to work on creating some rudimentary above-grown palisades.  Just a rough framework to provide a long, enclosed entry and a sniping point for the archers I'll eventually have.  Once my mason is trained up, I'll enlarge this with a large bulwark encompassing a contained field for above-ground farming and plant gathering.  But that's for the future.  For the winter the mason is being utilized to make coffers, doors, tables, chairs, statues, and other sundries for the bedrooms, dining rooms, and offices.  Hopefully he'll hit master by mid-spring so I can assign an apprentice from the massive migrant wave.

As winter comes to a close, the fort is doing fantastic, better than any other try at this challenge.  There's 300 units of food, with more on the way as the farmer, gatherer, and fisherdwarf do their jobs.  There's 200 units of drink, also with more on the way from the two brewers.  Wood stocks are plentiful and I've begun to drag down excess wood to a quantum dump to keep some of the idlers from getting too chatty.  There's a squad of 5 dwarves warming up in the new barracks with training gear, and the cage traps are set across the river to collect any wildlife that tries to make a crossing.

There are still many key labor deficiencies, primarily in that there are no metal workers, no leather workers or tanners, no gem cutters, no crafters of any kind, no bowyer, and no clothes makers, but at least the ones for survival are filled.  Hopes for metalworking lie with the massive spring migration.  Without one there, things could get interesting trying to outfit the military.

Next year's goal is to finish up enough bedrooms to contain 60 dwarves and make an airlock to the caverns so I can start sending in expedition teams to find some choke points for exploitation.  My mason(s) will be busy preparing some slabs.  Just in case that doesn't go very well.

[Tacomagic]

With 40.13 I started a new fort, this time in a desert without trees.

I used these skills:

Miner, Mason, Architect, Mechanic, Smelter, Carpenter, Glassmaker.

Working out pretty good.  I rushed the magma sea so I could start pumping out glass products using the bounty of the desert.  Took me longer than I had planned due to a deeper than expected aquifer, but once I pierced I got lucky and drilled all the way down to semi-molten on my first try.  Just moved my way back up level by level until I found the top of the sea.  Set myself up with a magma forge and glass furnace, made a couple of stockpiles to hold the raw materials and set my fort to work doing the long hauling to keep them from idling (been more of a problem this fort because of the lack of resources).

I noticed almost right away that I'm seriously short of bags and ways to make bags, which has strangled the speed at which I can make glass.  Still, it's working out, just slowly using the 3 empty bags I have.

Hopefully the elves or humans show up with bags or I get some textile labor in the next migration.

Unfortunately, it looks like the majority of my native ore are gold and zinc.  Woo.  Good for exports and decor, bad for the military.

[Finndibaenn]

I've been giving this a try for a few days now. (150+ dwarves now)

Not too difficult with a reasonable embark, even though i'm still missing some key professions : no weaver/clothier/leatherworker, which is going to prove an issue once the clothes wear out.
I've indulged myself a pump operator though

[Tacomagic]

I've been giving this a try for a few days now. (150+ dwarves now)

Not too difficult with a reasonable embark, even though i'm still missing some key professions : no weaver/clothier/leatherworker, which is going to prove an issue once the clothes wear out.
I've indulged myself a pump operator though

Yeah, I almost never get pump operators either.  I've learned to exist without them for the most part.  With an architect and a carpenter, you can actually do pretty well even without a mechanic.  The trick is to use screw-pumps in place of the gear assemblies. 

However, gear linkages make life a lot easier.

[Finndibaenn]

Yeah, I almost never get pump operators either.  I've learned to exist without them for the most part.  With an architect and a carpenter, you can actually do pretty well even without a mechanic.  The trick is to use screw-pumps in place of the gear assemblies. 

There's something I don't get here : how do you use screw pumps without operators ?

[Tacomagic]

Yeah, I almost never get pump operators either.  I've learned to exist without them for the most part.  With an architect and a carpenter, you can actually do pretty well even without a mechanic.  The trick is to use screw-pumps in place of the gear assemblies. 

There's something I don't get here : how do you use screw pumps without operators ?

If you hook a screw pump up to a power-source, it'll work without any operator.  So, you can use either windmills or waterwheels to power screw pumps.

[Pink Photon]

How does dwarven health care work? You need a diagnoser and then anywhere from one to four other labors, depending on the injury. Wounded dwarves just live in the hospital until you manage to swing that?

[Tacomagic]

How does dwarven health care work? You need a diagnoser and then anywhere from one to four other labors, depending on the injury. Wounded dwarves just live in the hospital until you manage to swing that?

Well, that is the question isn't it?  That's all part of the challenge.  You may have to survive without an appreciable health system, or utilize one or more of the starting seven if health care is perceived to be a concern (such as in a terrifying embark).

So far as I play it, mortality rate for injuries tends to be kinda high in my forts as I ignore health care unless I get lucky with migration.  Disabled dwarves, provided they aren't friends with everyone, tend to vanish into the night in a way reminiscent of Captain Oates.

Doctors in migrant waves aren't super-rare, so you're likely to get a couple, but it's not something I'd necessarily count on as a certainty.  If you're lucky enough to get a few older children in migrant waves, you could raise them into doctors with their coming of age labor assignment.

[Pink Photon]

You may have to survive without an appreciable health system, or utilize one or more of the starting seven if health care is perceived to be a concern (such as in a terrifying embark).

To treat any injury you need diagnosis, so you'd need a minimum of two, and that would only let you treat one kind of injury. And while doctor migrants aren't that rare, there's no guarantee that they'll have diagnosis. (In my current fort I've had 3 doctor migrants out of ~120. Each had 2 medical skills, but only one of them had diagnosis.)

I would suggest that turning on one of the 4 treatment skills allows you to turn on diagnosis as well. This lets you use doctor migrants, even if they don't have the diagnosis skill, and you can start treating injuries with just one freebie rather than having to wait for two. Conceptually it makes a lot of sense, since if you've been trained to treat a certain type of injury, you probably know what it looks like.

[Sutremaine]

Not too difficult with a reasonable embark, even though i'm still missing some key professions : no weaver/clothier/leatherworker, which is going to prove an issue once the clothes wear out.

You can take them off goblins. You could also put every adult in an inactive squad and take the goblin's body armour, which doesn't rot. This armour can be supplemented by your own stuff.

If you're using the optional rules you could train up a stonecrafter or whatever to L+5 and have them take up leatherworking. >.>

[Tacomagic]

You may have to survive without an appreciable health system, or utilize one or more of the starting seven if health care is perceived to be a concern (such as in a terrifying embark).

To treat any injury you need diagnosis, so you'd need a minimum of two, and that would only let you treat one kind of injury. And while doctor migrants aren't that rare, there's no guarantee that they'll have diagnosis. (In my current fort I've had 3 doctor migrants out of ~120. Each had 2 medical skills, but only one of them had diagnosis.)

I would suggest that turning on one of the 4 treatment skills allows you to turn on diagnosis as well. This lets you use doctor migrants, even if they don't have the diagnosis skill, and you can start treating injuries with just one freebie rather than having to wait for two. Conceptually it makes a lot of sense, since if you've been trained to treat a certain type of injury, you probably know what it looks like.

I'll roll with that.  Diagnosis when you have a primary care skill does make good conceptual sense (for pretty much everything except rare disease, but this is Dwarf Fortress, not House MD).  It's a little wonky for DF in that a diagnostician will still diagnose things that they cannot treat themselves, but without anyone to actually treat the wounds, being able to diagnose them is of no real utility anyway.

I'll add it to the optional rules.

Not too difficult with a reasonable embark, even though i'm still missing some key professions : no weaver/clothier/leatherworker, which is going to prove an issue once the clothes wear out.

You can take them off goblins. You could also put every adult in an inactive squad and take the goblin's body armour, which doesn't rot. This armour can be supplemented by your own stuff.

If you're using the optional rules you could train up a stonecrafter or whatever to L+5 and have them take up leatherworking. >.>

Also, I've found that the skills required to get leatherworking off the ground are much more common than clothes-making (weaving seems to be really rare for whatever reason).  My last two forts have been very leather-centric.  It helps that you can use your military to hunt down critters, so you don't actually need a hunter.  Plus, axedwarves have the nice benefit of lopping off limbs which can yield more skin.  A group of well-trained axe-dwarves stationed in the caverns can really rack up the leather.  Just have to make sure you've got a butcher and tanner close to where they're stationed.

With the optional rule it's very, very easy to abuse miners and potters to earn extra skills.  I'm considering a revision to that rule to make it a little harder to abuse.

[Sutremaine]

You could make it so that the new skill has to use the same base material, or the material next to it in the production chain. So a stonecrafter could move to masonry, and a tanner could take up either butchery or leatherworking.

Mechanics could be a tricky one, as it can take both rough stone and metal bars as a base material.