When we last left off, our expedition had just arrived in the small valley where we will finally build our fortress. At this point, a lot of people will likely go "OH GOD ALL THESE SYMBOLS WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN AAAAAAAAAAAAH", so allow me to explain a bit. All the .,'´ symbols you see is (relatively) flat ground, with the green bits being grass, and the grey bits being pebbles or small rocks. The green "s are bushes (can be gathered for plants, but otherwise same as flat ground). The green clubs and spades symbols in the upper right are trees. The dark-blue double tildes near the center is a stagnant pool of water, the flowing light-blue/white ones is a small brook that's shallow enough to walk over. The rounded square things with beards in the center of the screen are our dwarves, standing around the wagon containing all our supplies.
Usually, this all becomes straight-forward once you play it long enough, and I'm going to keep the amount of explanations of what symbols represent what low in the future. When playing yourself, if you are ever confused as to what a tile/symbol means, press 'k' to bring up the Look command, and simply hover the cursor over the thing in question.
With that brief explanation out of the way, I look for a nearby rock outcropping where we can dig into the mountainside. I settle for this position, as it is both very near our wagon (it is just off the screen to the upper left in this picture), the brook, and easily accessible magnetite (the dark-grey tildes near the bottom of the screen), magnetite being an ore of iron that tends to come in very large deposits.
Note that finding a cliff to dig into is completely optional. Dwarf Fortress is actually fully three-dimensional, and there are many levels both above and below this one. An equally valid option to digging into a mountain from the side is simply to dig down into the earth where you start, and work from there.
Case in point, here's how the area looks one z-level above the previous picture. The large quantities of up/down arrows you see in these pictures are ramps, which can be used to walk onto walls and onto the z-level above it. (Or walk from a top of a wall onto a ramp and the z-level below.) You can think of it as Minecraft (indeed, Dwarf Fortress was one of the games that inspired minecraft in the first place), if everyone was one block tall, and you could only see one layer of blocks at a time.
(Here is an image of the entirety of the ground level, for those interested.)
Anyway, I designate an area for our miners to dig out. Here you see what is going to turn into a long corridor ending in a small central area, with large area for workshops in the north, and bedrooms to the south. (The large room is for me, because I
deserve something grander than the rest of you plebeians need more space to fit an office so I can do all of my administrative work.
Similarly, I designate a lot of trees for ThatGuy and Raveman to cut down, using the same method.
Our miners begin to work...
And so do TG and Rave.
Hangon, where did DarkPaladin run off to?
Less than ten seconds after I unpause the game for the first time I remember that I gave DarkPaladin hunting skills during preparation, so naturally the first thing he did was to waste half of our precious bolts by turning a nearby goat into a pin-cushion. While this is technically what hunters are supposed to do, that wasn't really what I had planned. I turn off hunting from his labor window so he'll leave the native fauna alone in the future, unless I tell him otherwise.
Speaking of which, labors. While every Dwarf depends on his skills to do jobs, they only affect how WELL they do it. You can individually turn on/turn off different jobs, such as you've seen me do here with DarkPaladin. A dwarf doesn't need any relevant skill in order to do a particular job; He's just going to be worse at it than someone who has the relevant skill. (You can hand any dwarf a pick and tell him to go mine, and he will do so, and he will even improve his mining skill from doing so, but he's not going to be mining just as well as a Grand Master Miner or the like).
Eventually, managing the indiviudal labor settings of a hundred dwarves is likely to frustrate even the most patient DF player. In this case, I highly,
highly reccommend that you use
Dwarf Therapist, a third-party tool that allows you to easily manage and keep track of labor settings in your fortress(es).
Moving on, I place down a mason's workshop near the entrance of our fort so we can produce doors for our bedrooms. Since our resident mason (ThatGuy) is busy, I enable masonry for myself since I'm not doing anything of use at the moment anyway.
I also place down a carpenter's shop (to the right) so we can make beds (currently manned by Rave) and a butcher's shop (to the left) where DarkPaladin is preparing the goat he murdered for consumption.
Mmmmm. Delicious prepared mountain goat intestines.
Our two miners are about two-thirds finished with the initial layout when they decide to fuck off and have a drink. It's going to delay things slightly, but not enough to really matter, plus we brought plenty of booze anyway.
(Oh, and ignore the part about DFHack near the bottom of the screen. It runs at the same time as the main program and I didn't bother turning it off. I'm not actually using it.)
Meanwhile, the rest of the expedition goes to place down the beds and doors we made earlier.
Sooner or later, everything is dug out, so I move onto the next phase.
Now that we have a basic place to sleep, our next concern is food, since the supplies we brought aren't going to last forever. The first source of food for every fortress is likely going to be a Plump Helment farm, Plump Helmets being mushrooms that grow in subterraenean environments in all conditions and seasons, and can be either eaten raw, cooked into a meal, or brewed into wine. All in all it's a very versatile plant. The problem, though, is that it needs to be grown underground, in soil, as opposed to the solid rock cavern floor that makes up most of our fortress as it currently stands. Therefore, I tell our dwarves to dig south, where there is plenty of silt that can be used for this purpose. (You can also see room for expansion to the south, but we won't be using that for now.)
I claim this room for myself. The other bedrooms lie unclaimed for now, so whenever a dwarf that isn't me gets tired they're just going to grab the first bed they see and sleep there.
Eventually, I've done so much masonry work that I actually become a mason as far as the game is concerned, coupled with turning to white, the color assigned to masons and engravers. (My title is still "expedition leader", not "mason", as you can see in this image, since I never stopped being the expedition leader and that title supersedes the profession one.)
Since this area is all dug out, I put down some workshops here and dismantle the ones outside.
Whilst digging out this area, I discover that the shale rock extends further than I anticipated, meaning less overall farming area. This isn't really a huge issue though, the left room still has a good amount of soil (you can see the planned area of the plump helmet farm here) and I can just extend further down once I need more fields.
Around this point, everyone starts getting tired and heads off to sleep. Lazy bastards.
(Yes I am aware that I'm on this picture.)
Since I now have a chair and a table (which you could see in the south end of my room in the previous picture) I start claiming all the administrative titles of the fort. I'm still not going to be doing much in that department at the moment, but might as well.
I find TG and Rave lounging about with nothing better to do so I set up a wood stockpile so they have something to do. Stockpiles are simply areas that have been designated for storage, and dwarves will always attempt to put loose items into stockpiles where they belong. It's more efficient than leaving them all over the place. (with the one exception of stone; there is almost always going to be more stone than you have storage area to store the stone in, so don't even bother. Just leave it where it lands, someone will eventually turn it into a door or a cabinet.)
Since I, yet again, don't have anything better to do, I start to smoothen the rock walls that surround our bedrooms in an effort to make it look nice. Since I'm going to be doing this alone this is going to take ages. Oh well.
Rui and DarkPaladin are full at work planting the plump helmet
seeds spawn we brought. Out of curiosity, I decide to have a look at DarkPaladin's profile in order to see if he's doing alright.
Uh.
Well, turns out that Rui and DarkPaladin managed to fall in love with each other. I guess that's a fairly reasonable turn of events since they've been working together non-stop since the fortress began.
Whatever, I decide to stop caring about what goes on in my minions' love-lifes and focus on more important matters. I designate a storage area for all the food, and make plans to create a dining room just below the living quarters. Without a dining room, people will just eat straight out of the barrel in the food stockpile. Which is kind of uncivilized. (Also, they get happy thoughts from eating in dining rooms, which is always good. Dwarves can cope with the brutal loss of their loved ones perfectly well, as long as they eat in a
really, really fancy dining room.)
Whoops. At this point I realized that since I turned off DarkPaladin's hunting labor, he decided to discard his crossbow. He didn't need it anymore, after all. This is not really what I wanted to do, since I wanted him to carry around the crossbow
without having him waste his ammo murdering the countryside.
I therefore make DarkPaladin the militia commander of Walkedtomb, and captain of its first company, the Rapidity of Busts. He's still going to be working normally, but in a pinch, he can be told to go defend the fortress with nothing but a copper crossbow and raw, dwarven grit. (I'm likely going to add TG and Rave here in the future, since they have axes, and numbers are generally a good thing to have.)
At this point, I remember that I'm supposed to dwarf Ceridran, so he gets the blacksmith miner dwarf we've had around. I'm still waiting for someone more suitable for swordkirby. You might notice that Ceridran's not doing thing at the moment.
That's because her previous task was already finished. The dining room area (upper left) and the kitchen area (lower right) are both now dug out, so they're lazing about without nothing to do. This will not do.
(Also, notice that it is now summer. More on that in a bit.)
I designate a group of storage rooms on the level right below the current one, since we still have a lot of things we want to move in from the outside (and are going to need a place to keep the fuckton of crap we're about to produce). The Xs in the middle are stairs, and can be used to either go up a level, or go down one (if there are stairs on the level you're trying to move to as well. There are also just up versions (<) and down versions (>) of stairs as well, but up/down stairs are the most common.
ThatGuy decides to take a break. Lousy good-for-nothing slackers...
Time to fill the dining room with actual tables to eat from.
Oh for Armok's sake, not you too!
Fine, if everyone's going to slack off, then I'm going to do it as well. I've been smoothing all of the living quarters with nothing but my own bare hands. I'm the only one who really deserves a break, here. Everyone else can go the fuck back to work.
Ah, migrants. In the beginning they're a blessing, as more hands are always useful. You will come to later curse their arrival, for you realize that you just got another bunch of suicidal midgets who you got to micromanage, and feed. At some point, some people just tend to slap all migrants into a squad and send them at the hazard that's currently threatening the fortress.
Right now, though, we're not going to say no to a few more laborers. Cilob, in particular, is highly skilled in carpenting (I forget which level, but it's in the upper echelons), and has a plethora of other useful skills. Sigun is not nearly as great, but he is apparently a Competent Speardwarf with some rudimentary fighting experience, so he's likely to go into the military once we get to that point. Aban isn't all that impressive, his highest skill being a simple Furnace Operator, which doesn't really need much skill to begin with. He has basic farming skills though, and will most likely be joining Rui and DarkPaladin in harvesting plump helmets.
Lastly, we have Érith, a four-year old brat who isn't going to contribute much. Dwarf Children can't normally have any labor settings changed, but they will help out with rudimentary thing such as hauling and construction.
Cilob and Sigun immediately decide to go fishing, where-upon I tell them to fuck off and do something useful.
We're in summer now, meaning one step closer to autumn and the dwarven caravan. Since we don't have anything of significance to trade, I construct a craftsdwarf's workshop and tell people to go make useless knick-knacks to throw at the merchants.
I go tell Ceridran and the other miner to stop mining the storage areas (they're already halfway done) in favor for more bedrooms. These right here are more bedrooms than we actually have people, but it never hurts to have spare rooms for when migrants arrive.
Since I'm done with detailing the walls in the living quarters, I go ahead and do something that's actually part of my job, namely taking stocks. There is a status screen where you can see your stocks of various objects, but the accuracy of the numbers depend on the "precision level" (as seen above) you've set for the bookkeeper and how much work he's done to keep the stocks up to date. (This only needs to be done once, until the position changes hands, so this will have to be done again once I die.)
Now that we are producing crafts to trade, we just need a place to actually trade with caravans. We need the construction of a trade depot, which I'm designating here. The Trade Depot is where merchants will head when they arrive to the fortress, and we can haul items here to trade off for more useful items once they arrive.
Naturally, such an imporant building needs to be finished by yours truly.
Marvellous.
Show Posts
