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[Valdus92]

So when your dorfs break the earth(!) what is the first things on your checklist, tasks to check off and get moving...

I just have difficulty sometimes figuring out which comes first or even which comes next!

[steel jackal]

#1: plump helmet farm
#2: carpenters workshop
#3: barrels
#4: still
#5: booze
#6: bedrooms
#7: beds
#8: wood furnace
#9: smelter
#10: forge
#11: metal
#12: weapons (warhammer if you have silver, battleaxes otherwise)
#13: armor
#14: militia
#15: defensive walls
from there, expand industry as resources are available, good ones to look in to are glass, textile (that is, clothing and fabric), crafts, and furniture
i also recommend building a temple, a dining hall, and a hospital

[SeymoreGlass]

• First things first... PAUSE!
• Tweak labors (I usually embark with two miners and five peasants)
• Plan out main entrance, farming, meeting hall, and bedrooms
• Dig out main entrance and farming
• Put ALL of my supplies in the farming area to protect from sky demons keas and thieving horrors rhesus macaques
• Dig out meeting hall and first bedrooms
• Setup temporary production in meeting hall (mason, carpenter, mechanic, kitchen, still)
• Create drawbridge and pit at entrance (to completely seal off the fort if needed)
• Furnish bedrooms (just bed and door for now)
• Dig out dedicated storage
• Move stockpiles from farm to storage
• Build farms
• Dig out dedicated production
• Move production from meeting hall to permanent location
• Furnish meeting hall (tables, chairs, statues)

From there, I look for someone to make into a Record Keeper, then I start equipping a small squad (4-6 dwarves, crossbows and leather).

After I have all of that, I consider my early game to be done.

[Dadamh]

Dig down a couple floors.

If I have soil on at least -2 level, then dig farms there.
Otherwise dig a stockpile, zoned for everything but stone, except a corner that is just stone.
Put workshops under stockpile, with stairs down.
Dig farms if I didn't already, water the stone with a lazy floodgate/channel rig.
Plant everything
Make a bunch of stonecrafts because they're cheap and I have stone already
Build Depot in the meantime.

There, fort set up.  It's kind of dull and I want to get out of the routine, but what do you want?  It works.

[Dunamisdeos]

1: Decide on entrance location.
2: Unload wagon.
3: Basic workshops above ground. Skip in dangerous embark.
4: Dig down to main floor.
5: Move everything in, move workshops inside. Build Trading post. Begin stone goods from craftsdwarf shop. Designate bookkeeper/broker.
6: Dig farming areas. Begin planting.
7: Seal entrance with raising bridge.
7: Dig food storage and workshops as well as dining hall.
8: Dig dormitory.
9: Dig dedicated Industry (Masonry, Carpenter, Forges, etc).
10: Dig water system, designate hospital.
11: Military training set up.
12: Fort is now self-sustaining. Begin stupid dwarf project.

[GhostDwemer]

For "safe" areas, the list is like this:

1: Set mining labor on miners (rarely take miners, digging dirt trains them up fast)
2: Pasture animals
3: designate trees to cut
4: dig entrance hall with u-bend for unbreakable safety hatches
5: dig general purpose storage area
6: begin unloading wagon and storing wood
7: dig farm area, build farms and farmers workshop, plant crops
8: dig initial workshop area for carpenter, mason, mechanic and crafts workshops
9: begin bed and barrel production, plus hatches for the u-bend and a table and chairs for the book keeper
10: dig kitchen area, build kitchen, still, butcher, tanner, and fishery. set up book keeper office in a corner of the main storage area.
11: butcher draft animals and cook up initial food supply
12: dig central staircase down, at least to first cavern level. If necessary, dig exploratory tunnels out to find caverns
13: begin door, chest, and cabinet production for bedrooms, mechanism production for traps, and two flood gates
14: with caverns located, dig out bedrooms at least 10 z-levels below surface.
15: continue digging down to find the rest of the caverns and the magma
16 with magma and all caverns located, decide where to put the "center" of the fort.
17: dig out well room, cistern, hospital, permanent book keeping office, permanent "locals" dining room and food/drink storage area.
18: begin exploratory mining for weapons grade metals, decide on strategy for weapon and armor production, build initial fired smelter and forge near metals
19: begin initial trap component and armor/weapon production using copper or iron.
20: dig permanent smelting/forge area, either at the top for wood/coal fired production, near the middle plus a pump stack and water reactor if total z-levels to magma sea is between 30 and 50, or at the bottom if z-levels to magma sea are less than 30 or more than 50.

For dangerous areas, focus shifts to initial safety and defense. For wild areas, I may choose to dig out an animal proof trench or erect a wooden stockade first. For evil areas I may focus on getting everyone inside and the wagon unloaded before doing anything else. For either, I will probably focus on finding metals and getting initial smithing set up before finding the caverns or building the bedrooms. Maybe set up a dorm in a corner of the initial storage area instead.

[Baffler]

I don't do things in any particular order, but I do have ideas on what milestones I should have reached by certain points.

By Year One:
- Build a couple dormitories, a dining room, and a stockpile in the first stone layer. This will house the dwarves while the rest of the fortress is being excavated, and be converted for military use afterward.
- Establish a food source. Whether it's fishing, farming, herbalism, hunting, or some combination of those doesn't matter so long as it'll keep everyone fed and boozed up.
- Get at least two major industrial activities going. This is usually pottery or timberwork, for difficulty reasons I don't like using stone for furniture except where it would make sense IRL like slabs, constructions, and statues.

By Year Two:
- Have at minimum a tavern and temple set up, and ideally a library, each with at least one person in each role.
- Have at least 60 dwarves.
- Diversify food stocks to include meat, fish, fruits, and plant products other than plump helmets; and serve dwarves prepared meals whenever possible. Import if necessary.
- Give every dwarf their own room.
- Stockpiles and workshop space set aside for every primary industry.
- Workshop orders in place to keep the food, booze, and medical supplies topped off.

By Year Five:
- Have at least a fortress guard squad, and fill up all appointed noble positions.
- Have high-value public areas of every type, with multiple locations where applicable to reduce congestion.
- Stockpiles and workshop space set aside for every primary industry, and for every trade a dwarf in the fortress has skill in (except beekeeping because it's still messed up as far as I know.)
- Have some kind of fortification and/or town on the surface, both for defense and to house elves and humans who may live in the fortress. How much effort goes into this and how focused on defense it is depends heavily on the population of non-dwarves.
- Have some form of public water system, with a large enough reservoir to sustain 200 people for at least a year (which isn't as big as it sounds.)

After that, assuming I'm still interested in the fortress, I usually just do whatever.

[sculleywr]

My checklist is as follows:

1. Mine out a beginning area for underground farms and basic industries, including crafts, which make use of all the excess stone to provide trade fodder that gets literally anything I want from the caravans. By the end of the first year, I'll have clear cut enough wood for my beginning industries to have charcoal and wood for beds and bolts for my hunters.
2. By the end of the second year, I'll have my metal industry fully operating, churning out copper and iron weapons and armor to train my smiths while I stockpile flux stone if I have a layer. If there's no flux on my map, I'll demand tons of every flux stone from the dwarven caravan.
3. By the end of the third year, my craft industry is bolstered by my now fully operating jewelry industry, and now I have built my first tavern and library for the meeting of needs.

I never have a problem with the booze or food industries because I go overpowered on it. To save FPS, I'll sometimes clear out the excess foodstuffs in one of my trading sessions.

[Valdus92]

Baffler, where do you see the year. In fact there are quite a few numbers on my screen that I have no idea what they are for. Like the ones in the lower right hand screen or across from the name in the saved game list.

[steel jackal]

Baffler, where do you see the year. In fact there are quite a few numbers on my screen that I have no idea what they are for. Like the ones in the lower right hand screen or across from the name in the saved game list.

press z, look in the upper right corner, you will see the date, month, year, and season.
note that the year is the current year of the world, not how many years your fort has existed.
for example it shows in my current fort to be the 13th of slate, 252, mid-spring. i embarked in the year 250, so its my forts 3rd year (its been over 2 full years since embark)

[wierd]

I tend to try my best to gen worlds with features that were more common in really old versions, like "magma tubes".

The game currently tries everything it can to make volcanoes have cones of some kind, but I like flat surface access to magma with water nearby.

As such, I spend lots of time in world gen rejection hell after giving the game very difficult settings to work with.

Namely, I make X-Y variance 1/3 of the default value, set oceans to zero, set the max number of volcanoes, turn erosion way up to 10000 cycles, and set min peaks at 1.

It takes a long time for the world gen spinner to kick out a viable world with that kind of fiddling, but it reliably gives me some flat magma tube embark sites.

Ideally, I want sand, a water source, heavy woodland and lush vegetation along with my flat embark. With access to surface magma, penetrating an aquifer is effortless, so those are non-issues.

The usual first step us creation of a food stockpile, setting huge gathering zones, and getting green glass pots going.

Then it is fortress planning, and military setup.

By then, I usually have a surface textile crop gathered from the wild, and I start up the cloth industry.

I find that in these kinds if embarks, wild food gathering is sufficient to sustain food and booze supplies without farming, allowing my farmers to focus on textile production.

Metal industry is started as soon as ore is found.

I only cut enough wood to make the fortress footprint, then use green glass block to make walls and roads.

[steel jackal]

I tend to try my best to gen worlds with features that were more common in really old versions, like "magma tubes".

The game currently tries everything it can to make volcanoes have cones of some kind, but I like flat surface access to magma with water nearby.

As such, I spend lots of time in world gen rejection hell after giving the game very difficult settings to work with.

Namely, I make X-Y variance 1/3 of the default value, set oceans to zero, set the max number of volcanoes, turn erosion way up to 10000 cycles, and set min peaks at 1.

It takes a long time for the world gen spinner to kick out a viable world with that kind of fiddling, but it reliably gives me some flat magma tube embark sites.

Ideally, I want sand, a water source, heavy woodland and lush vegetation along with my flat embark. With access to surface magma, penetrating an aquifer is effortless, so those are non-issues.

The usual first step us creation of a food stockpile, setting huge gathering zones, and getting green glass pots going.

Then it is fortress planning, and military setup.

By then, I usually have a surface textile crop gathered from the wild, and I start up the cloth industry.

I find that in these kinds if embarks, wild food gathering is sufficient to sustain food and booze supplies without farming, allowing my farmers to focus on textile production.

Metal industry is started as soon as ore is found.

I only cut enough wood to make the fortress footprint, then use green glass block to make walls and roads.

mind sharing the world save? that sounds like something i would be interested in playing on

[wierd]

Sure. I will gen up a world for you later.

Do you have any other desired creatures? Like super evil, deadly rain, absurd numbers if megabeasts, etc?

I will have to push a world save, rather than a world gen template, because my settings tend to reject 50,000 times or more.  The game has a very hard time of it.

[steel jackal]

Sure. I will gen up a world for you later.

Do you have any other desired creatures? Like super evil, deadly rain, absurd numbers if megabeasts, etc?

I will have to push a world save, rather than a world gen template, because my settings tend to reject 50,000 times or more.  The game has a very hard time of it.

i prefer large numbers of megabeasts, and some goblins, thats about it

[wierd]

Doable.  Do you want towers?