Dwarf Fortress Succession Game - Year 1, Update 2

[Ceridran]

I'l be dwarfed, as I don't think I'd be doing a very good job in actually playing the game.

.. I have the right idea of what being dwarfed is despite it being explained, right? That tends to be how I am.

[Swordkirby]

Build a nice building with a trade depot  in it, It will hide the eventual horror of the fortress (and make a nice adventure mode dungeon entrance to boot!).

[Myroc]

(click to show/hide)

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.

[Swordkirby]

Nobody noticed that the world was in the fifth age of myth??? Also, since it's taking too long for me to get dwarfed, just shorten it to average in size and quick to anger.

[Myroc]

(click to show/hide)

http://i.imgur.com/iDV0V23.png


Taking a brief look in our status screen, I notice a critical emergency: We're running out of booze! Fortunately, we have plenty of plump helmets available from our farming endeavours, so I tell Rui to turn some of it into lovely dwarven wine. Dwarves do not actually need alcohol to survive, and can survive perfectly well on just water (preferably fresh). However, the longer dwarves go without alcohol, the slower they become, and fortresses can slowly grind to a halt if one chooses to ignore the lack of drink.

An important thing to know: Just because dwarves prefer alcohol to water doesn't mean you can ignore the latter. Injured dwarves that are resting will not drink alcohol, and have to be given water. Having access to fresh water is important for any fortress, regardless if you can keep alcohol levels stable or not.

(Also, should you mod the game and play as a race that isn't alcohol-dependent, you can subsist on fresh water alone without any troubles at all, although good drinks can still give your citizens happy thoughts.)



With that problem resolved, I designate a room to be used as a hospital. We have yet to see any actual combat (save one perforated goat) since we settled, but one should always strive to be prepared. Should any of our dwarves suffer injuries, it is better to have the facilities available already instead of quickly having to create something makeshift. Non-fatal wounds can quickly turn into fatal infections if not treated in time, and we preferably want to keep that to a minimum.



I also construct a mechanics workshop, which we'll need later on.



We just passed into autumn. Right now we're mostly waiting for the caravan to arrive, so with no critical tasks that need to be dealt with I tell people to go pretty up parts of the fortress.



Fun fact: Trees actually slowly turn yellow and red during autumn. During the winter, the leaves even fall off and render the trees bare.



All of the items we previously stored in the wagon have been carried inside the fortress proper, so I dismantle it since it doesn't do anything useful anymore.



More migrants arrive, and the first one immediately goes to Swordkirby, due to being a mostly perfect fit to his requests (competent with swords and is quick to anger). In addition to being a decent fighter, he is also a very good smith, and he'll likely be manning the fortress when he's not busy defending the fortress.



He also has, interestingly enough, very very good social skills. I am sure this is completely irrelevant and will not matter at all in the future.



Overview of the current population. We're reaching the point where it is hard to keep track of everyone, and from this point on I start to use Dwarf Therapist in order to manage everyone's jobs.




So I activate Stone Detailing on pretty much everyone and tell people to go make the fortress look good. At this point, you'll see Masonry and Engraving enabled on more or less everyone who isn't a miner, as they are tasks that are going to be done en masse a lot of the time, and relegating them to just a handful of dwarves would cause them to take ages.



Two of the migrants takes a page out of DarkPaladin's book and proceed to murder the surrounding countryside, since they're hunters in addition to their normal jobs and brought crossbows. I tell them to stop and throw them in the militia squad along with DarkPaladin.



Case in point, a task that would take a single dwarf months was done in a day or two by virtue of teamwork. It makes sense for engraving, but it may not be apparent for Masonry. I'll get onto that shortly.



I define a zone for the hospital so the dwarves know where to take the wounded. Zones can be used to define areas for various things, from hospitals, to pastures to store animals in, to garbage dumps to dump refuse. They differ from stockpiles in that they aren't used to explicitly store things (though dwarves may put things in them for purposes related to the zone in question). I've actually already used this tool before, in order to designate a meeting area just outside of the fortress, so dwarves will tend to go where when idled, but I didn't show it earlier.



Finally, after lots of waiting, the trade caravan arrives, late in autumn, as does a liaison from the mountainhomes.



All the crafts and knick-knacks we've been making for the past few months are hauled to the depot, in order to be exchanged with things that are actually useful.




Before we get to that, though, I meet with the outpost liaison. Every time the dwarven caravan arrives, the liaison will accompany it and seek out the current leader (currently the expedition leader, ergo me) in order to discuss trade contracts. What this means is that we get to request items from the mountainhomes, which the caravan will try to bring next year. In turn, they notify us of goods they need in the mountainhomes, and will be more valuable if we sell them to the caravan next year.




We don't really need anything in particular here, but I place orders for a few things. First thing being booze, because we can never, ever have enough booze. Second is a bunch of different stone types: Marble, Limestone, Chalk, Calcite, Lignite, and Bituminous Coal. You might wonder what these rocks have in common. The first four stone types are so called flux materials a vital component in making steel, and something we lack at the current moment. We can still make normal iron, which is fine, but steel is generally superior in every way and the more you can get your hands on, the better.

The last two, Lignite and Bituminous Coal, can be used to make coke, which is used to fuel forges and smelters. We can also make charcoal for this purpose, and most of our smithing work will be fueled by charcoal, but this consumes a lot of wood, and ordering these stones can ease the fuel requirements ever so sligthly.

Note that requesting items makes them more expensive. Usually, this just means you need to throw more crafts at them.



Meanwhile, the wagons move into the depot and start unloading their goods.




This is the export agreement. You aren't outright required to supply these, it's just an opportunity to save some dwarfbucks. I tend to ignore them completely, but they're there.



And with that, the liaison takes his leave, and I go to do the actual trading.



Or at least, I would, if I wasn't busy being incredibly lazy. Goddamnit, me.



A few minutes later (after disabling every labor that stopped me from actually going to the fucking trade depot) I actually get down to business. This is the bartering screen, the merchants' goods are on the left, while our goods (that are in the depot) are on the right. You select what goods you are willing to trade on the right, what goods you want on the left, and try to make a reasonable deal. Note that this isn't a store, you don't just take an item worth 100* and offer 100* worth of goods in return. The merchants want to make a profit, and how good a deal you can make depends largely on the negotiation skill of the fortress trader.



First things first, we make sure to grab two anvils, since we lack any and are incapable of making them. (Guess what you need to make an anvil? You need a forge which requires, you guessed it, an anvil. The Dwarf Fortress community has gotten plenty of mileage out of this joke.)



Food and drink are also very good things to have. Even if you aren't running low, it's always good to have extra in cases of emergency. Not shown is my purchase of a cloth bin and a leather bin, or the handful of weapons and armor I bought in order to start out or military. (Mostly bronze, which is inferior to the iron equipment we can make, but it's better than nothing. There's also a pick or two in there, so we can assign a few more miners, though I forgot to actually do that.)



Winter arrives, and the merchants take their leave shortly after I finish trading, mostly because it took me ages before I stopped being distracted by hauling tasks.



We bought a lot of cheese in the transaction, so I tell Rui to go make some fancy meals out of the the food we have. Kitchens can be used to combine 2-4 pieces of food into meals, such as biscuits, roasts, etc. Dwarves will use pretty much anything edible (or drinkable!) in cooking, but you can tell what to use and what to ignore in the "kitchen" tab on the status screen. Useful if you don't want your cooks to consume all of your drink when making biscuits.



The entrance to our fortress is basically just a hole in the wall covered with doors. Time to change that. Digging out underground rooms is not the only way to build a fortress, your dwarves are perfectly capable of building things on the surface. In fact, if you could skip living underground altogether and build a normal surface town instead, though it is noticeably more difficult, and requires a lot of construction materials. You can see the outline of the courtyard that I intend to build, not finished because I ran out of shale blocks. (You can build walls with raw stone without having to turn it into blocks, but one piece of raw stone can be turned into several blocks and just because you have metric fucktons of the stuff is no reason to be inefficient.)



Moments later, the walls are completed. This is where having a lot of dwarves with masonry enabled comes in handy too, because otherwise this would take forever. You can also notice that I've removed the ramps that were inside the courtyard, because otherwise people could just walk onto the hill above and down into the courtyard, which renders the walls kind of pointless.




This is how the area ends up looking. You can see here that I'm building floors on the level above. I had the intention to build fortifications on top of the walls I placed earlier (which are solid, but can be fired through with crossbows), and the floors are simply there as a means for dwarves to walk on. There is also supposed to be a wall to the east, blocking the courtyard off from the rest of the hill, so enemies can't just approach from above and fire on people in the courtyard. I didn't actually manage to finish this before the year ended, sadly, but hopefully future overseers will be able to see to that.



It's time to get our metalworking industry up and running. Since we now have anvils, I place down a pair of forges, where we can shape metal into various implements.



This is followed by a pair of smelters, which we can use to turn the vast amounts of magnetite we have lying around into iron.



Lastly, two wood furnaces to provide the former the above workshops with charcoal.



Eventually, as the fortress grows, managing your workshops can become tiring, since you can only queue up to ten tasks in a workshop at once, and doing so in several workshops can take a lot of time. Fortunately, there is a way around that. The manager screen (accessed from the unit screen by pressing 'm') can be used to dictate large amounts of workshop activities at once. Need 30 iron helmets? No problem! Just go into this screen, make a new order, select "make iron helm" and input 30 as the required amount, and the fortress manager (e.g, me, again) will automatically delegate the tasks to the relevant workshops.



Last architectural update before the year is finished. These rooms are intended to be a barracks and training room for our future military. The rooms to the left are supposed to have fortifications carved into the walls facing into the courtyard, so archers can stand in here and fire into the courtyard should enemies ever make their way inside.



But, eventually, winter gives way to spring, marking the arrival of a new year, where I must leave behind my duties as overseer. I will, of course, remain in the fortress, focusing on the many lesser administrative tasks it requires: Record keeping, job management, trading, and more. But the fortress itself shall now be guided by another hand.

And that's the first year! The save will be passed onto King Dumb shortly. You can see the fortress as it currently stands here.

[Rui]

tfw when you accidentally post in another thread without realizing until after you post it

Eep. I'm going to have to drop out since school starts again on Monday, and I have to prepare for stuff like ACT/SAT, getting back into school mode and not laze around, etc etc.

Good luck on the fortress!

[Myroc]

Noted.

In related news, I've noticed that we aren't exactly drowning in people signing up for the sucession list/dwarfing. In the case of the latter, I highly recommend everyone who reads this thread to sign up for dwarfing if they haven't already. Things become much more tragic hilarious Fun if a well-known community member receives an involuntary quadruple amputation than when the same happens to some unnamed shmuck. The fortress needs you: Apply today!

In the case of overseers, it's more understandable, since this game is not exactly everyone's cup of tea. I'm just posting to let everyone know that, in case we should ever run out of overseers (which seems fairly likely, at this point), I am going to assume leadership for years where no leaders are available. In addition, if you wish to sign up for a second year, feel free, although people that haven't played a year before, or have played less years than you, will receive priority, even if they sign up after you do.

[Swordkirby]

Noted.

In related news, I've noticed that we aren't exactly drowning in people signing up for the sucession list/dwarfing. In the case of the latter, I highly recommend everyone who reads this thread to sign up for dwarfing if they haven't already. Things become much more tragic hilarious Fun if a well-known community member receives an involuntary quadruple amputation than when the same happens to some unnamed shmuck. The fortress needs you: Apply today!

In the case of overseers, it's more understandable, since this game is not exactly everyone's cup of tea. I'm just posting to let everyone know that, in case we should ever run out of overseers (which seems fairly likely, at this point), I am going to assume leadership for years where no leaders are available. In addition, if you wish to sign up for a second year, feel free, although people that haven't played a year before, or have played less years than you, will receive priority, even if they sign up after you do.

Pft... Easiness, who gives a shit about easiness? I don't, if it ends tragically then I laugh.

[Magnet Dood]

I've been reading this and must say it's pretty funny. Dwarf me if you ever get the chance (but you'd have to name me Dwarf Dood- tradition, ya know?)

[Myroc]

Pft... Easiness, who gives a shit about easiness? I don't, if it ends tragically then I laugh.

I didn't say anything about easiness. It is merely something to ensure the game continues should we experience a lack of volunteers.

I've been reading this and must say it's pretty funny. Dwarf me if you ever get the chance (but you'd have to name me Dwarf Dood- tradition, ya know?)

Sure, added to the list. An equally viable alternative would have been "Magnet Dorf".

[Gumballtoid]

You can throw me in there as Zwergballtoid if you're running low on dwarves to dwarf.

[Swordkirby]

I don't do very much economy... I make militia and kill elves and release whatever HFS I can find.

[Thunderono]

Hey so this is an interesting read

May as well get dwarfed.  "Thunderono" would be preferable.

[Swordkirby]

OT but in adventurer mode I found out how fun it is to throw things via wrestling and how vampires are awesome in adventurer.

[Swordkirby]

*Waits growing impatient*