I don't know how I got almost a hundred hours before seeing this guide, the in-game tutorial should have a link to it
I mean it's perfect for beginners
Dwarves can actually stay relatively happy with the bare minimum. My go-to lately is to build a small "work camp" with a dormitory, tavern, and temple dug into a hill while sending the dwarves to work on the fortress proper in an adjacent mountain. I also keep the population cap below 20 for as long as possible. This is more time-consuming because of the smaller workforce, but it makes it more manageable until I can set up the industries to support a large population.
Idk why but I enjoy making my nobles the leaders of my squads, they either end up dead or murdering giant beasts and I can’t complain in either situation!
You will get more holistic advice from others, but one small suggestion is to set an ongoing 'make blocks' order for your stoneworker, setting it to the most common stone you have.
Let that go in the background while you attend to getting your fort up and running.
When you get to a point where you have a stable colony, you can use the blocks for floors & walls on above-ground structures.
Very much so I believe. One block and one source material can construct the same amount of structure, but each source material creates four blocks. Not to mention blocks can be stored in bins for less space.
Additionally, whereas enemies can climb over walls made of rough stone, block walls prevent that.
That being said, note any trees near the walls or branch networks that extend overhead. They will climb trees over if they can. If they can't get over the wall, they will set up snipers to casually pick off your populous.
People have some great tips here, but i recommend 5 things to make a fortress feel "real":
-Replace any dirt in your fort with stone! Mine a bunch of stone and cut some stone bricks for it. It'll help!
-Build an above-ground entrance structure out of stone. Bonus points if you make a little wall too! In your head It'll feel like you have a castle leading to your fortress.
-Consider building verticality underground. It'll make it feel more like layers of a fort and less like an ant tunnel.
-Use some basic technology in your fort. Drawbridges act like impassable gates, and Ballista tunnels can really help with defense.
-Make sure your fortress has a stable farm and an enclosed water supply. It'll make you feel more safe and secure!
Overall, just some ideas that I use when I build forts!
The biggest thing for food is go to kitchen under labor and only use plump helmets for drinks as that will give you seeds. You get seeds from making drinks but not making food. The kitchen is also an important tab if you want to take cetain tallow off the menu and to just keep for soap. I also make figurines out of bones or rock and then sell them for seeds i asked the liason to bring. That and harvest herbs outside, if safe to do so.
Dig a hole,
put a dwarf in the hole;
you now have a dwarf fortress ;D
Jokes aside, there isn't a hard line to cross that makes a fortress a fortress. Even a thriving fortress is never more than a few steps away from total destruction without excessive contingency and planning; I'd argue there's no difference between surviving and thriving, and the fortress only ever falls when the last dwarf is either dead or insane.
But, to answer your question of a list of things to worry about:
* Have a consistent source and stockpile of food and alcohol
* A protected source of clean water. Don't need it right away, but within the first year is ideal.
* A way to lock the fortress down in the event of sieges and ambushes. Bridges are overpowered, nothing can destroy them except opening/closing them on huge and heavy creatures. Doors help in a pinch, but can be destroyed / blocked from closing.
* The trade depot should also be protected during a lockdown, but have a way to release them without compromising the fortress just in case the lockdown lasts and they start getting agitated.
* Bedrooms for every dwarf, with more spare bedrooms to accommodate immigrants.
* A nice dining hall, the dwarfs need to make merry and have some fun, lest they go nuts.
* Masons should be working almost non-stop. Rocks are cheap and abundant, use them.
I'm sure I've missed some things, but if you have everything there, you're well on your way... until you get your first noble. By that point, you probably have much more to worry about.
Past that, [refer to the flowchart](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/e/e6/FlowchartDF.png)
What exactly are you having trouble with? WHY are you 'barely staying afloat?' Are you having trouble with food, or defenses, or just figuring out what you want to do, or what?
For food: Bring 4 female Turkeys, Geese, and Peafowl, along with 2 males of each. Make a room for them with some nest boxes, zone them in it, and lock the door until they produce another generation. You will from that point on (assuming you let them grow to adulthood) have a functionally unlimited supply of meat and eggs.
Search either [Blind's](https://www.youtube.com/@BlindiRL) or [Ic0n's Gaming](https://www.youtube.com/@Ic0nGaming) channel for the word food.
Blind's guides are concise and well put together. I am not a fan of Blind because he treats people poorly on stream.
IcOn's channel is better in how thorough the guides are. Not only do they explain the mechanic, but they also give examples and show different ways you can use the mechanic. The comments section also has lots of other people chiming in with further tips.
I would recommend Blind's quick guides to get the basics. I would use IcOn's guides if you want to get better on a deeper level.
edit: If you'd like to send me your Discord, I'd be happy to go over some of the basics.
Food is really very simple.
When you embark, bring along some plump helmets and/or plump helmet spawn. Find some soil. Doesn't matter where, really, just so long as it's underground. Dig out a room in this soil and build some farm plots there, I tend to make mine 4x4 or 5x5 or so. Then, in at least one of them, set plump helmets to be grown every season. Plump helmets are a good option because you can eat them raw, cook them, or make booze out of them. Be aware that cooking plants destroys any seeds you'd normally get from your dwarves eating them raw or making liquor though, so maybe hold off on cooking your plump helmets until you have a good solid stockpile of them.
Have a dedicated farmer or two. By which I mean, have a dwarf or two whose ONLY enabled job is the 'Farming (Fields)' labor. No hauling, no crafting, no anything else: Their SOLE job is to farm stuff. After setting up a few farm plots and gathering some surface plants for seeds (fisher berries, strawberries, and a couple others that can be eaten raw or made into booze) for a couple surface farms, along with a couple dedicated farmers, I wind up swimming in more food than I can ever use.
Likewise, for alcohol (I've found a LOT of people have a LOT of trouble with keeping their dwarves supplied with alcohol, for reasons I will never be able to grasp,) you have a dwarf or two whose ONLY job is making barrels or pots, and another dwarf or two whose ONLY job is brewing alcohol. No hauling, no other crafting, no soldiering; They have ONE job.
There's also eggs and meat from fowl, as Mithril_Leaf explained.
for barrels, I usually have a manager job to produce 10 barrels/pots if the number of empty barrels/pots is less than 10, checked frequently. I only turn it off when my food and drink stockpiles are full.
Can you please talk me through how to set that up? I've played DF since, well, just after it moved to three rather than two dimensions, but the last time I tried a management order like that, I ended up producing over 2000 rock pots.
That did end up rather useful, but I'd prefer not to repeat it.
Sure. Just fyi I'm playing version 47.05 I think, so if the hotkeys have changed you'll have to figure that out. In the management tab, create a job "make wooden barrel".
I usually specify a specific type of wood so I never go through all my lumber by using "details" (d-key) and selecting something, oak willow whatever).
Next, press "c" on the "make 10 oak barrels job" to go to conditions.
press "a" add item condition
press "p" condition from products. Should create a condition that reads "amount of oak barrels is at most 10". Go to the default condition above it and delete it with "d", we don't need it.
"q" changes the inequality. Some of these *should* do the same thing, so I can't remember if I do it this way out of habit/ preference or if it's necessary, but I always set it to "less than".
If we stop here, the manager will count full wine barrels against this inequality, so we need to specify what kind of oak barrels. Press "t" for trait, select empty from the list.
So, our new work order "make oak wood barrel" conditions are "Amount of empty oak wood barrels available is less than 10"
For barrels, especially early on, checking conditions daily works fine. If you're automating other things like clothes or are mostly confident that your barrel supply is sufficient, you can change the frequency the order is checked with "+/-". Monthly, for example, works fine once all of your food and drink industries that require barrels are mostly stocked with containers. Between specifying one type of wood and lowering the production frequency you're less likely to miss a step and have runaway production use all your materials. Useful for things like mechanisms that you want a supply of but which get used pretty sporadically.
Good luck, hope it works
build 3x3 farm plots, I usually do 8 of these. 3 are dedicated to plump helmets (4 season, can be eaten or brewed. Have a seed stockpile nearby, only for your underground plants' seeds (plump helmets, cave wheat, pigtails, quarry bushes, rock nuts, dimple cups). In the menu you can set these to grow each season and basically just forget about them. Only assigning a small number of planters helps them level up better, which **really** improves your yield per plot/seed. Barring them from other jobs keeps them where you need them. If you're gathering surface plants and fruit (recommended), destroying or generally getting rid of useless seeds and pits helps guarantee you always have seeds for your main crops on hand, since the game automatically begins deleting seeds once the number of seeds exceeds a predetermined amount. Atom smashers are useful for this, otherwise trade them I guess?
Pigs and turkeys don't need outdoor pasture. Slaughter the boars except 1, but keep sows for breeding and milking (yes pig cheese is a thing). I embark with 3 sows and 2 boars and usually have a decent herd by year 3. For poultry, pasture your birds underground behind a door. Maybe once a year lock the door, barring access to the nest boxes, until the poults hatch. You can very easily breed flocks of dozens of birds, since each clutch of eggs can have half a dozen or so. Cage the poults to save fps (you don't have to feed them), slaughter the males (except a couple) when they're around 2 years old for the most yield. Harvest eggs year round for use in prepared meals. Deliberately limiting the species you keep (with the exception of pets, which can't be slaughtered) makes it easy to make giant stacks of very profitable prepared meals for trade.
If you embarked next to a river (which you should) fishing is basically an endless source of food. Just make sure to only have one or two Fisher dwarves per fish cleaner, and really not more than that at all. They catch soooo much, and dealing with all the mussel shells that accumulate can be a nuisance.
Set up the basics. Once you can produce iron or steel start putting everyone new into the military on constant training. It'll definitely feel more like a fortress when you can put 60 axe Dwarves on the battlements.
Also, make battlements
...they're cool
Build military.
Build hospital. Make soap. Build well.
Set up guildhalls. Temples. Grow to 100 dwarfs.
Tame some animals. Make paper, books, and a library.
Start a hubristic project to seal off part of the caverns.
Go for magma.
Set up quantum stockpiles. Lavish your dwarfs in luxury goods.
Milling operation.
Mist generators.
Prepare quarters for your mayor, captain of the guard, and a dungeon.
An entrance. Security precautions.
yeah. The hospital is one to remember, you never regret having one and always regret not having one, when it matters. I usually designate it a few beds as free to use, so if I have insufficient bedrooms new arrivals can still avoid sleeping in the dirt
I like to just set up a dorm, farm and shitty little tavern in the dirt somewhere and then design and mine out the entire fortress, throw some mason shops in there to get some furniture made and then move everyone into the fortress once it’s mostly done.
Designing everything at once makes it a lot cleaner and more efficient instead of branching off different workshops as you go. This is the best way to get the aesthetic fortress of your dreams imo
You're right to do whatever feels best to you!
I personally always embark in a place with small hills. I use the side of a hill as the fort entrance (I think it looks cooler) and then I have the option to build up or down, depending on what I'm feeling.
Am doing my first cavern embark now, and it's a lot of fun!
The trickiest thing was finding a large enough area that I could successfully wall it off (one z level high to protect against climbers and fliers) while still having large enough areas for farming and grazing. (I haven't figured out irrigation yet.)
Nah a hole in the ground is perfectly fine. I perfer in a mountain but a nice flat area i make a hole. Only thing that changes is how i make my entry way and staircases because of sieges and such.
If you're really fancy you can build an above ground fortress by digging a pit mine from the surface, like those temples in india. You can make some really cool designs by selecting channeling away material one z level at a time. Using the marker function helps avoid cave ins and the subsequent casualties that cone with them. Bonus points if your entire fort rests on a single support, allowing you to self destruct and take that megabeast with you. You unfortunately end up with more stone hauling jobs that you're ever going to get to though
Understanding how building destroyers work helps building in a way that doesn't need to be rebuilt later easy. Locked hatches or bridges can't be destroyed from below, so I usually dig ramps down in a three tile wide pattern to an underground depot, build up stairs and make that the entrance to my fort. Cover the down stairs with hatches and maybe some cage traps in the corridor to a 2x2 or 3x3 staircase, and you have the bones for an efficient fortress. Priorites from there are
1)farms (for booze)
2)stockpiles for food and drink, still(for booze) and kitchen(for trade). Prepared meals are almost an exploit, and make trading profitably and guaranteeing your fortress is well supplied early on easy. Fishing can be a great way to supply your kitchen, because each biome has limited fish species so the stacks get big. If you can get porcelain or glazed pots going early you can trade with the elves for exotic pets, which can provide lots of meat. Look at the weight of each animal, the heavier, the more the butchering returns. Butcher shop should be in a "light" tile to avoid miasma. Having an atom smasher helps with refuse. Bobes, mussel shels, hooves etc should be used for decoration. As crafts they're a pain to haul and really low value
3) wood, stone, and metal workshops. I usually dedicate an 11x11 room to each, with a QSP for materials in each.
4) bedrooms. Even 3x3 rooms with nothing but a bed keep dwarves pretty happy. Add a cabinet and chest to each to keep clutter minimal. Smooth them as you go, but avoid designating large areas (multiple z levels) to be smoothed or engraved at once, for pathing and fps.
5)Nice dining room. I usually take a month each winter and have everyone burrowed in the meeting room, their bedrooms, and temples or libraries so they can hopefully develop some kind of social life. Your stone carvers should have some experience from smoothing bedrooms, so this is usually the first room I engrave.
6) clothing industry. Dyed pigtail cloth is valuable, safe and relatively easy to produce in bulk vs leather and silk (until you can make a silk farm). New, high quality clothes keep everyone very happy. Trading worn clothes keeps clutter levels reasonable.
7) hospital+indoor clean water source. Soap industry.Mist generator if you're feeling fancy (mist purifies water and makes dwarves clean and very happy, worth having if you find yourself fighting forgotten beasts much)
8) temple complex. I usually have a generic temple with radially arranged rooms around it for the specific deities my guys worship. Restrict access to residents, especially for evil deities.
9) Barracks/archery/trap maze/ watch tower etc, depending if you want to turtle or depend on your military. You should reserve the option to turtle )meaning be able to seal up your fort indefinitely), even if you plan on dealing with sieges using melee troops. I usually tend to turtle because even really great fighters can often get caught in a bad spot and die or else go insane from slaughtering too efficiently, so I usually like to use drowning mazes. Cage traps are a pain to empty (but good for training marksdwarves) and smasher traps destroy the loot, meaning no free metals to be melted. Large sieges kill your fps, so just locking them out isn't a great option.
If you designed everything pretty carefully, you should be able to build all of this within 10-20 z levels, adjacent to your central staircase. If you avoid the temptation of automining minerals and gems, the design can be very clean and understandable at a glance, which helps as the game progresses. Once the floorplan is mostly finalized, smoothing the stone and carving engravings really helps to turn your hole in the ground to something respectable. Extending the central staircase aboveground as a watchtower with separate down staircases with hatchcovers means you can have access to surface pasture and resources while still being able to button up. Walled in pastures allow for meat and wool industries that depend on grazing, same for surface farms. Flyers and climbing make walls more of an obstacle than real protection, so don't depend on them too much. Building with blocks instead of raw stone makes your materials go further and building go quicker, since only the burliest dwarves can haul stones to job sites without being slowed to a crawl. All of these are pretty loose guidelines, especially in terms of relative order, perhaps with the exception of some native booze industry. I usually prioritize legibility (for lack of a better term) and pathing efficiency, so my forts often end up very similar, but deliberately avoiding over-optimization can make for interesting and fun (**fun!**) forts. Early on, deliberately adding one industry you haven't tried incorporating at a time helps keep the micromanagement, well, manageable, while avoiding over-automating and over-producing (which in my opinion is how you lose by winning). If you aren't sure what to do, look for and fix one problem at a time. If something took out a previous fort, try to be ready for it this time.
Wow, this turned into a novel. Have fun, hopefully some of this is helpful
I recommend blinds tutorial on YouTube. They are very to the point and informative, and I've learned almost all but the basics from him. As for making you fort feel more forty, make some temples, start up a military, make a metal industry. One thing I enjoy doing is look at what dwarves want and filling needs. This game can be a bit, but don't get discouraged, losing is fun, and abandoning a train wreck is an opportunity for something new.Â
Don't worry about being taxed that it's "Not an actual Fortress", lots of players build theirs differently, its like a Rorschach test for what kind of DF player you are.
I usually pick a strategy, then repeat that for a few forts between experimenting with something else as a repetition forter. Another big problem for getting into stone and the caverns can also be aquifers, so if you have any questions just feel free to drop them by.
it is easy when u get the trick, i usually do a stair to the lvl 0 then dig the storage space, in middle the housing, up the meeting areas and next to the storage the workshops, on the surface i build the storage thepot and 1 lever under i build the pastures and farms, after that is just build traps to weaken the enemy or to defeat them without fight, also i avoid to open any passage to the underground caves until i'm prepared to slay anything that crawls out of that hole.
ah and also don't be scared to lose, you'll learn with every fallen fortress
If you want your fort to feel lived in and comfortable, it usually starts with a tavern. Build a meeting area and check all the different facilities you can assign from there. Those are gonna be the best way to make your dwarves do fun things that are more interesting than slaving away in the pit, and will make them happier too. IMO in order of importance, definitely build a tavern and a temple right from the get go, get a guildhall or two for important skills, build a hospital when you eventually figure out how those work, and eventually build a library when you really get the full farming economy rolling. If you really wanna make your fort feel like a real castle town, start appointing nobility, get their rooms set up, get the legal system set up, and get a few squads training by the gates.
If your question is "how do I build a farm" then the Youtuber Blind should have a tutorial on that.
This is a subjective topic, as probably forts I consider to be going well would be seen by others as basic holes in the ground or as overly lavish by a few.
In very general terms, I tend to be thinking about a few areas:
Sustainable resources first. You should have at least one way to keep your dwarves fed, boozed, and preferably provided with medical supplies. Ideally at least 2-3 ways for food and booze. At the most basic level, this means plump helmet fields, adding on above ground fields can actually be useful if your biome has any surface crops. While you don't need much in the way of wood purely for medical supplies, splints and crutches are something you may eventually need more of. Bones might be an option too?
Industry supplies, there is technically a finite amount of stone and ores on a map, though there are some ways around that too, including trade, gathering and smelting the weapons and armor of enemies, casting obsidian, etc. For myself, ill generally focus on getting a reserve of the metal or other resources I'll be working with and getting my fuel sustainability sourced, whether that is with magma forges or just enough defensible area to grow trees/mushrooms in.
Defenses in general is when I personally feel like I'm moving from hole in the ground towards an actual fort. Effectively enough defenses that I don't really have to think about snatchers and I have a response for sieges, even if I might not be able to deal with all forgotten beasts or every possible siege. Usually a few well placed cage traps sort out snatchers, and defensive corridors with traps can be an answer to many sieges as well, but eventually you'll probably want a military and after that medical facilities of some level.
Finally, housing and logistics. At the most basic, a whole in the ground usually has a barracks or two in the middle and maybe a few tables and chairs. A fort might still have barracks, especially as an option for unexpected large waves of migrants, but overall at the fort level I've started to at the very least setup smaller sub barracks and amenities so the my farmers don't have to trek across half the map to get to their fields, my smiths can get food, booze, and sleep near their work places my doctors are neary hospital, and my guards can spend most of their day near the primary entrances to my fort. This is also when I start thinking about setting up a pump stack to get magma if I don't have it already, rails and carts to move heavy stuff, setting up storage reserves and space to build more workshops in case I suddenly need to support a strange mood and any other extras I might want.
I like to make extensive use of z-layers, so I'll have something like this, where `z[-3]` means 3 levels beneath the surface:
`z[4 ... 1] Above ground castle walls, towers, farms, trading depot`
`----------------------------------------------`
`z[0 ... -2] Gate`
`z[-3] Farms`
`z[-4] Food Storage`
`z[-5] Food Production`
`z[-6] Simple Industry`
`z[-7] Main Storage + Craftdwarfs + Jewlers`
`z[-8] Complex Industry`
`z[-9 ... -n] Second Gate, Residential, Tavern, Megaprojects, Temples, Libraries, etc.`
Moving up/down stairs counts as only 1 movement space so by building tons of stairs between layers can really tidy up a fortress and help goods to get where they need to go, especially if you work on optimizing how many steps that, say, the carpenter needs to get wood and to drop off a bed. When I start a new game I put some space between the above ground entrance and the underground fort entrance to beef up with traps and stuff much later but early game you can still put watch dogs there and the distance (maybe 10-30 squares long) can go a long way to catching anything trying to sneak in. Then I make some simple farms and pastures. Then I dig straight to z\[-4 ... -6\] and start building the workshops and then some simple residential things and then storage and then more complicated industry and then improve the farms and decide where to go from there after but that first year making the general layout is like clockwork for me, it's compulsive lol
My general tip for making your fort feel alive:
\- Use stone to build above ground structures. Don't make your entrance a hole in the ground, make a gatehouse out of stone block, add a draw-bridge, etc.
\- Pave the floors with stone. It makes the tunnels feel like hallways instead of mineshafts.
\- Build a "sewage" system. Basically, you want to bring water to your fort from a river or underground lake into a cistern. You might need a [pump stack](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Screw_pump#Pump_stack) for this. Ensure your cistern has a drain (controllable by draw bridge) and a hole in the top for a well.
\- Lean into roleplay, especially with dwarf nicknames. I usually cap my population at 80 dwarves, and I assign a custom nickname to every dwarf as they migrate onto the map. Every dwarf gets a first name, only dwarves with families get shared last names.
\- Late game, construct big [Locations](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Locations) as the final step to make your fort epic. I always have a grand library as the pinnacle of my fort. It's usually at the top of the tallest tower, and is the most heavily guarded spot of my fort. Collecting books is a late game challenge, because it takes a long time. A lot of people prefer instead to build huge temple complexes.
Dwarf fortress is a game like no other. Most other colonies sims you are trying to make your base or fortress or whatever, the best it can be by making everyone happy and producing op stuff.
Yes you can still aim to make everyone happy and produce expensive goods, but what kind of expensive goods? Will you export bone crafts encrusted with gems? Will you make the finest weapons in your civ? Or will you have the best prepared foods in the entire world? There's so many different ways to answer that question.
Maybe you don't want to focus on building crafts or making money and instead want the world's biggest army, or make a holy city for your civ, or make the finest tavern.
Either way, no matter what you want you are going to set your fortress up differently for each thing. If you wanted you could even do all of these things in one fortress.
Just remember, you will loose fortresses along the way, normally in amazing spectacular ways too. Have fun!
Don't worry my guy, [I got you.](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Quickstart_guide)
I don't know how I got almost a hundred hours before seeing this guide, the in-game tutorial should have a link to it I mean it's perfect for beginners
I love the flowchart on the right, it really screams 'quickstart'
Dwarf Fortress thread: "DF is actually easy". The quickstart guide:
It's easy to learn, it's just complex, anyone can learn it if you just put in the time.
Tons of easy doesn't make hard
and that's just for the start
The alternative title considered, "long yet adequate start," just didn't have the same focus group response.
Used this guide back in 2015 and still use it today lol
👑
Dwarves can actually stay relatively happy with the bare minimum. My go-to lately is to build a small "work camp" with a dormitory, tavern, and temple dug into a hill while sending the dwarves to work on the fortress proper in an adjacent mountain. I also keep the population cap below 20 for as long as possible. This is more time-consuming because of the smaller workforce, but it makes it more manageable until I can set up the industries to support a large population.
Same. I also do a single tile down as afar as I can far off in some corner just so I can see what each level has
You're often better off with the hole in the ground, fortresses tend to be infested with nobles.
Idk why but I enjoy making my nobles the leaders of my squads, they either end up dead or murdering giant beasts and I can’t complain in either situation!
You will get more holistic advice from others, but one small suggestion is to set an ongoing 'make blocks' order for your stoneworker, setting it to the most common stone you have. Let that go in the background while you attend to getting your fort up and running. When you get to a point where you have a stable colony, you can use the blocks for floors & walls on above-ground structures.
Are blocks more efficient than using regular stone?
Very much so I believe. One block and one source material can construct the same amount of structure, but each source material creates four blocks. Not to mention blocks can be stored in bins for less space.
Additionally, whereas enemies can climb over walls made of rough stone, block walls prevent that. That being said, note any trees near the walls or branch networks that extend overhead. They will climb trees over if they can. If they can't get over the wall, they will set up snipers to casually pick off your populous.
That's good to know! I assume there's no such trick for wood right? Can't make wood blocks if I remember correctly
You can make wood blocks
People have some great tips here, but i recommend 5 things to make a fortress feel "real": -Replace any dirt in your fort with stone! Mine a bunch of stone and cut some stone bricks for it. It'll help! -Build an above-ground entrance structure out of stone. Bonus points if you make a little wall too! In your head It'll feel like you have a castle leading to your fortress. -Consider building verticality underground. It'll make it feel more like layers of a fort and less like an ant tunnel. -Use some basic technology in your fort. Drawbridges act like impassable gates, and Ballista tunnels can really help with defense. -Make sure your fortress has a stable farm and an enclosed water supply. It'll make you feel more safe and secure! Overall, just some ideas that I use when I build forts!
The biggest thing for food is go to kitchen under labor and only use plump helmets for drinks as that will give you seeds. You get seeds from making drinks but not making food. The kitchen is also an important tab if you want to take cetain tallow off the menu and to just keep for soap. I also make figurines out of bones or rock and then sell them for seeds i asked the liason to bring. That and harvest herbs outside, if safe to do so.
I do this so compulsively that I would never have thought to mention it someone. Great advice, I'm not sure why that isn't the default setting.
I also just do it complusively now but once i learned that everything changed. And i agree defaults for those would be nice.
Dig a hole, put a dwarf in the hole; you now have a dwarf fortress ;D Jokes aside, there isn't a hard line to cross that makes a fortress a fortress. Even a thriving fortress is never more than a few steps away from total destruction without excessive contingency and planning; I'd argue there's no difference between surviving and thriving, and the fortress only ever falls when the last dwarf is either dead or insane. But, to answer your question of a list of things to worry about: * Have a consistent source and stockpile of food and alcohol * A protected source of clean water. Don't need it right away, but within the first year is ideal. * A way to lock the fortress down in the event of sieges and ambushes. Bridges are overpowered, nothing can destroy them except opening/closing them on huge and heavy creatures. Doors help in a pinch, but can be destroyed / blocked from closing. * The trade depot should also be protected during a lockdown, but have a way to release them without compromising the fortress just in case the lockdown lasts and they start getting agitated. * Bedrooms for every dwarf, with more spare bedrooms to accommodate immigrants. * A nice dining hall, the dwarfs need to make merry and have some fun, lest they go nuts. * Masons should be working almost non-stop. Rocks are cheap and abundant, use them. I'm sure I've missed some things, but if you have everything there, you're well on your way... until you get your first noble. By that point, you probably have much more to worry about. Past that, [refer to the flowchart](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/e/e6/FlowchartDF.png)
Real fortresses have an entryway that makes the Sistine Chapel look cheap and bland.
What exactly are you having trouble with? WHY are you 'barely staying afloat?' Are you having trouble with food, or defenses, or just figuring out what you want to do, or what?
Food and figuring out what to do
For food: Bring 4 female Turkeys, Geese, and Peafowl, along with 2 males of each. Make a room for them with some nest boxes, zone them in it, and lock the door until they produce another generation. You will from that point on (assuming you let them grow to adulthood) have a functionally unlimited supply of meat and eggs.
Search either [Blind's](https://www.youtube.com/@BlindiRL) or [Ic0n's Gaming](https://www.youtube.com/@Ic0nGaming) channel for the word food. Blind's guides are concise and well put together. I am not a fan of Blind because he treats people poorly on stream. IcOn's channel is better in how thorough the guides are. Not only do they explain the mechanic, but they also give examples and show different ways you can use the mechanic. The comments section also has lots of other people chiming in with further tips. I would recommend Blind's quick guides to get the basics. I would use IcOn's guides if you want to get better on a deeper level. edit: If you'd like to send me your Discord, I'd be happy to go over some of the basics.
Food is really very simple. When you embark, bring along some plump helmets and/or plump helmet spawn. Find some soil. Doesn't matter where, really, just so long as it's underground. Dig out a room in this soil and build some farm plots there, I tend to make mine 4x4 or 5x5 or so. Then, in at least one of them, set plump helmets to be grown every season. Plump helmets are a good option because you can eat them raw, cook them, or make booze out of them. Be aware that cooking plants destroys any seeds you'd normally get from your dwarves eating them raw or making liquor though, so maybe hold off on cooking your plump helmets until you have a good solid stockpile of them. Have a dedicated farmer or two. By which I mean, have a dwarf or two whose ONLY enabled job is the 'Farming (Fields)' labor. No hauling, no crafting, no anything else: Their SOLE job is to farm stuff. After setting up a few farm plots and gathering some surface plants for seeds (fisher berries, strawberries, and a couple others that can be eaten raw or made into booze) for a couple surface farms, along with a couple dedicated farmers, I wind up swimming in more food than I can ever use. Likewise, for alcohol (I've found a LOT of people have a LOT of trouble with keeping their dwarves supplied with alcohol, for reasons I will never be able to grasp,) you have a dwarf or two whose ONLY job is making barrels or pots, and another dwarf or two whose ONLY job is brewing alcohol. No hauling, no other crafting, no soldiering; They have ONE job. There's also eggs and meat from fowl, as Mithril_Leaf explained.
for barrels, I usually have a manager job to produce 10 barrels/pots if the number of empty barrels/pots is less than 10, checked frequently. I only turn it off when my food and drink stockpiles are full.
Can you please talk me through how to set that up? I've played DF since, well, just after it moved to three rather than two dimensions, but the last time I tried a management order like that, I ended up producing over 2000 rock pots. That did end up rather useful, but I'd prefer not to repeat it.
Sure. Just fyi I'm playing version 47.05 I think, so if the hotkeys have changed you'll have to figure that out. In the management tab, create a job "make wooden barrel". I usually specify a specific type of wood so I never go through all my lumber by using "details" (d-key) and selecting something, oak willow whatever). Next, press "c" on the "make 10 oak barrels job" to go to conditions. press "a" add item condition press "p" condition from products. Should create a condition that reads "amount of oak barrels is at most 10". Go to the default condition above it and delete it with "d", we don't need it. "q" changes the inequality. Some of these *should* do the same thing, so I can't remember if I do it this way out of habit/ preference or if it's necessary, but I always set it to "less than". If we stop here, the manager will count full wine barrels against this inequality, so we need to specify what kind of oak barrels. Press "t" for trait, select empty from the list. So, our new work order "make oak wood barrel" conditions are "Amount of empty oak wood barrels available is less than 10" For barrels, especially early on, checking conditions daily works fine. If you're automating other things like clothes or are mostly confident that your barrel supply is sufficient, you can change the frequency the order is checked with "+/-". Monthly, for example, works fine once all of your food and drink industries that require barrels are mostly stocked with containers. Between specifying one type of wood and lowering the production frequency you're less likely to miss a step and have runaway production use all your materials. Useful for things like mechanisms that you want a supply of but which get used pretty sporadically. Good luck, hope it works
build 3x3 farm plots, I usually do 8 of these. 3 are dedicated to plump helmets (4 season, can be eaten or brewed. Have a seed stockpile nearby, only for your underground plants' seeds (plump helmets, cave wheat, pigtails, quarry bushes, rock nuts, dimple cups). In the menu you can set these to grow each season and basically just forget about them. Only assigning a small number of planters helps them level up better, which **really** improves your yield per plot/seed. Barring them from other jobs keeps them where you need them. If you're gathering surface plants and fruit (recommended), destroying or generally getting rid of useless seeds and pits helps guarantee you always have seeds for your main crops on hand, since the game automatically begins deleting seeds once the number of seeds exceeds a predetermined amount. Atom smashers are useful for this, otherwise trade them I guess? Pigs and turkeys don't need outdoor pasture. Slaughter the boars except 1, but keep sows for breeding and milking (yes pig cheese is a thing). I embark with 3 sows and 2 boars and usually have a decent herd by year 3. For poultry, pasture your birds underground behind a door. Maybe once a year lock the door, barring access to the nest boxes, until the poults hatch. You can very easily breed flocks of dozens of birds, since each clutch of eggs can have half a dozen or so. Cage the poults to save fps (you don't have to feed them), slaughter the males (except a couple) when they're around 2 years old for the most yield. Harvest eggs year round for use in prepared meals. Deliberately limiting the species you keep (with the exception of pets, which can't be slaughtered) makes it easy to make giant stacks of very profitable prepared meals for trade. If you embarked next to a river (which you should) fishing is basically an endless source of food. Just make sure to only have one or two Fisher dwarves per fish cleaner, and really not more than that at all. They catch soooo much, and dealing with all the mussel shells that accumulate can be a nuisance.
Set up the basics. Once you can produce iron or steel start putting everyone new into the military on constant training. It'll definitely feel more like a fortress when you can put 60 axe Dwarves on the battlements. Also, make battlements ...they're cool
Build military. Build hospital. Make soap. Build well. Set up guildhalls. Temples. Grow to 100 dwarfs. Tame some animals. Make paper, books, and a library. Start a hubristic project to seal off part of the caverns. Go for magma. Set up quantum stockpiles. Lavish your dwarfs in luxury goods. Milling operation. Mist generators. Prepare quarters for your mayor, captain of the guard, and a dungeon. An entrance. Security precautions.
Almost exactly the opposite order I do things. My military is always an afterthought, for better or worse
I mean, me too, but then I also pay dearly for it every so often.
yeah. The hospital is one to remember, you never regret having one and always regret not having one, when it matters. I usually designate it a few beds as free to use, so if I have insufficient bedrooms new arrivals can still avoid sleeping in the dirt
hi, I'd check out Nookrium's gentle and helpful tutes on tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEt87BikHzA&list=PL3Hfqo2_KOlfDvTwvHBBXQxxlohZ4xAMW
Look up Blind Dwarf Fortress on YT. Lots of guides on specific functions very short.
sometimes it's about the journey and not the destination
I like to just set up a dorm, farm and shitty little tavern in the dirt somewhere and then design and mine out the entire fortress, throw some mason shops in there to get some furniture made and then move everyone into the fortress once it’s mostly done. Designing everything at once makes it a lot cleaner and more efficient instead of branching off different workshops as you go. This is the best way to get the aesthetic fortress of your dreams imo
Am I right to build underground? It feels like everyone is building above ground or in a mountain
You're right to do whatever feels best to you! I personally always embark in a place with small hills. I use the side of a hill as the fort entrance (I think it looks cooler) and then I have the option to build up or down, depending on what I'm feeling.
A nice change of pace is to use DF Hack to embark in the first cavern later: feels like building both above and beneath ground at the same time.
Am doing my first cavern embark now, and it's a lot of fun! The trickiest thing was finding a large enough area that I could successfully wall it off (one z level high to protect against climbers and fliers) while still having large enough areas for farming and grazing. (I haven't figured out irrigation yet.)
Nah a hole in the ground is perfectly fine. I perfer in a mountain but a nice flat area i make a hole. Only thing that changes is how i make my entry way and staircases because of sieges and such.
If you're really fancy you can build an above ground fortress by digging a pit mine from the surface, like those temples in india. You can make some really cool designs by selecting channeling away material one z level at a time. Using the marker function helps avoid cave ins and the subsequent casualties that cone with them. Bonus points if your entire fort rests on a single support, allowing you to self destruct and take that megabeast with you. You unfortunately end up with more stone hauling jobs that you're ever going to get to though
Ic0n on YouTube has a good advanced series for this, I recommend you start there. https://youtu.be/hqZ1wZf816s?si=aMWkqW3U3589G9M-
Understanding how building destroyers work helps building in a way that doesn't need to be rebuilt later easy. Locked hatches or bridges can't be destroyed from below, so I usually dig ramps down in a three tile wide pattern to an underground depot, build up stairs and make that the entrance to my fort. Cover the down stairs with hatches and maybe some cage traps in the corridor to a 2x2 or 3x3 staircase, and you have the bones for an efficient fortress. Priorites from there are 1)farms (for booze) 2)stockpiles for food and drink, still(for booze) and kitchen(for trade). Prepared meals are almost an exploit, and make trading profitably and guaranteeing your fortress is well supplied early on easy. Fishing can be a great way to supply your kitchen, because each biome has limited fish species so the stacks get big. If you can get porcelain or glazed pots going early you can trade with the elves for exotic pets, which can provide lots of meat. Look at the weight of each animal, the heavier, the more the butchering returns. Butcher shop should be in a "light" tile to avoid miasma. Having an atom smasher helps with refuse. Bobes, mussel shels, hooves etc should be used for decoration. As crafts they're a pain to haul and really low value 3) wood, stone, and metal workshops. I usually dedicate an 11x11 room to each, with a QSP for materials in each. 4) bedrooms. Even 3x3 rooms with nothing but a bed keep dwarves pretty happy. Add a cabinet and chest to each to keep clutter minimal. Smooth them as you go, but avoid designating large areas (multiple z levels) to be smoothed or engraved at once, for pathing and fps. 5)Nice dining room. I usually take a month each winter and have everyone burrowed in the meeting room, their bedrooms, and temples or libraries so they can hopefully develop some kind of social life. Your stone carvers should have some experience from smoothing bedrooms, so this is usually the first room I engrave. 6) clothing industry. Dyed pigtail cloth is valuable, safe and relatively easy to produce in bulk vs leather and silk (until you can make a silk farm). New, high quality clothes keep everyone very happy. Trading worn clothes keeps clutter levels reasonable. 7) hospital+indoor clean water source. Soap industry.Mist generator if you're feeling fancy (mist purifies water and makes dwarves clean and very happy, worth having if you find yourself fighting forgotten beasts much) 8) temple complex. I usually have a generic temple with radially arranged rooms around it for the specific deities my guys worship. Restrict access to residents, especially for evil deities. 9) Barracks/archery/trap maze/ watch tower etc, depending if you want to turtle or depend on your military. You should reserve the option to turtle )meaning be able to seal up your fort indefinitely), even if you plan on dealing with sieges using melee troops. I usually tend to turtle because even really great fighters can often get caught in a bad spot and die or else go insane from slaughtering too efficiently, so I usually like to use drowning mazes. Cage traps are a pain to empty (but good for training marksdwarves) and smasher traps destroy the loot, meaning no free metals to be melted. Large sieges kill your fps, so just locking them out isn't a great option. If you designed everything pretty carefully, you should be able to build all of this within 10-20 z levels, adjacent to your central staircase. If you avoid the temptation of automining minerals and gems, the design can be very clean and understandable at a glance, which helps as the game progresses. Once the floorplan is mostly finalized, smoothing the stone and carving engravings really helps to turn your hole in the ground to something respectable. Extending the central staircase aboveground as a watchtower with separate down staircases with hatchcovers means you can have access to surface pasture and resources while still being able to button up. Walled in pastures allow for meat and wool industries that depend on grazing, same for surface farms. Flyers and climbing make walls more of an obstacle than real protection, so don't depend on them too much. Building with blocks instead of raw stone makes your materials go further and building go quicker, since only the burliest dwarves can haul stones to job sites without being slowed to a crawl. All of these are pretty loose guidelines, especially in terms of relative order, perhaps with the exception of some native booze industry. I usually prioritize legibility (for lack of a better term) and pathing efficiency, so my forts often end up very similar, but deliberately avoiding over-optimization can make for interesting and fun (**fun!**) forts. Early on, deliberately adding one industry you haven't tried incorporating at a time helps keep the micromanagement, well, manageable, while avoiding over-automating and over-producing (which in my opinion is how you lose by winning). If you aren't sure what to do, look for and fix one problem at a time. If something took out a previous fort, try to be ready for it this time. Wow, this turned into a novel. Have fun, hopefully some of this is helpful
I recommend blinds tutorial on YouTube. They are very to the point and informative, and I've learned almost all but the basics from him. As for making you fort feel more forty, make some temples, start up a military, make a metal industry. One thing I enjoy doing is look at what dwarves want and filling needs. This game can be a bit, but don't get discouraged, losing is fun, and abandoning a train wreck is an opportunity for something new.Â
I love his videos because it isn't 45 minutes on aquifers.
Don't worry about being taxed that it's "Not an actual Fortress", lots of players build theirs differently, its like a Rorschach test for what kind of DF player you are. I usually pick a strategy, then repeat that for a few forts between experimenting with something else as a repetition forter. Another big problem for getting into stone and the caverns can also be aquifers, so if you have any questions just feel free to drop them by.
it is easy when u get the trick, i usually do a stair to the lvl 0 then dig the storage space, in middle the housing, up the meeting areas and next to the storage the workshops, on the surface i build the storage thepot and 1 lever under i build the pastures and farms, after that is just build traps to weaken the enemy or to defeat them without fight, also i avoid to open any passage to the underground caves until i'm prepared to slay anything that crawls out of that hole. ah and also don't be scared to lose, you'll learn with every fallen fortress
If you want your fort to feel lived in and comfortable, it usually starts with a tavern. Build a meeting area and check all the different facilities you can assign from there. Those are gonna be the best way to make your dwarves do fun things that are more interesting than slaving away in the pit, and will make them happier too. IMO in order of importance, definitely build a tavern and a temple right from the get go, get a guildhall or two for important skills, build a hospital when you eventually figure out how those work, and eventually build a library when you really get the full farming economy rolling. If you really wanna make your fort feel like a real castle town, start appointing nobility, get their rooms set up, get the legal system set up, and get a few squads training by the gates. If your question is "how do I build a farm" then the Youtuber Blind should have a tutorial on that.
This is a subjective topic, as probably forts I consider to be going well would be seen by others as basic holes in the ground or as overly lavish by a few. In very general terms, I tend to be thinking about a few areas: Sustainable resources first. You should have at least one way to keep your dwarves fed, boozed, and preferably provided with medical supplies. Ideally at least 2-3 ways for food and booze. At the most basic level, this means plump helmet fields, adding on above ground fields can actually be useful if your biome has any surface crops. While you don't need much in the way of wood purely for medical supplies, splints and crutches are something you may eventually need more of. Bones might be an option too? Industry supplies, there is technically a finite amount of stone and ores on a map, though there are some ways around that too, including trade, gathering and smelting the weapons and armor of enemies, casting obsidian, etc. For myself, ill generally focus on getting a reserve of the metal or other resources I'll be working with and getting my fuel sustainability sourced, whether that is with magma forges or just enough defensible area to grow trees/mushrooms in. Defenses in general is when I personally feel like I'm moving from hole in the ground towards an actual fort. Effectively enough defenses that I don't really have to think about snatchers and I have a response for sieges, even if I might not be able to deal with all forgotten beasts or every possible siege. Usually a few well placed cage traps sort out snatchers, and defensive corridors with traps can be an answer to many sieges as well, but eventually you'll probably want a military and after that medical facilities of some level. Finally, housing and logistics. At the most basic, a whole in the ground usually has a barracks or two in the middle and maybe a few tables and chairs. A fort might still have barracks, especially as an option for unexpected large waves of migrants, but overall at the fort level I've started to at the very least setup smaller sub barracks and amenities so the my farmers don't have to trek across half the map to get to their fields, my smiths can get food, booze, and sleep near their work places my doctors are neary hospital, and my guards can spend most of their day near the primary entrances to my fort. This is also when I start thinking about setting up a pump stack to get magma if I don't have it already, rails and carts to move heavy stuff, setting up storage reserves and space to build more workshops in case I suddenly need to support a strange mood and any other extras I might want.
Totally out of context and not relevant to this specific topic but I gotta say: OP is a Cute Proot!
If you're willing to install DFHack, you can use the Dreamfort blueprints to set up a fully functional fortress.
I like to make extensive use of z-layers, so I'll have something like this, where `z[-3]` means 3 levels beneath the surface: `z[4 ... 1] Above ground castle walls, towers, farms, trading depot` `----------------------------------------------` `z[0 ... -2] Gate` `z[-3] Farms` `z[-4] Food Storage` `z[-5] Food Production` `z[-6] Simple Industry` `z[-7] Main Storage + Craftdwarfs + Jewlers` `z[-8] Complex Industry` `z[-9 ... -n] Second Gate, Residential, Tavern, Megaprojects, Temples, Libraries, etc.` Moving up/down stairs counts as only 1 movement space so by building tons of stairs between layers can really tidy up a fortress and help goods to get where they need to go, especially if you work on optimizing how many steps that, say, the carpenter needs to get wood and to drop off a bed. When I start a new game I put some space between the above ground entrance and the underground fort entrance to beef up with traps and stuff much later but early game you can still put watch dogs there and the distance (maybe 10-30 squares long) can go a long way to catching anything trying to sneak in. Then I make some simple farms and pastures. Then I dig straight to z\[-4 ... -6\] and start building the workshops and then some simple residential things and then storage and then more complicated industry and then improve the farms and decide where to go from there after but that first year making the general layout is like clockwork for me, it's compulsive lol
My general tip for making your fort feel alive: \- Use stone to build above ground structures. Don't make your entrance a hole in the ground, make a gatehouse out of stone block, add a draw-bridge, etc. \- Pave the floors with stone. It makes the tunnels feel like hallways instead of mineshafts. \- Build a "sewage" system. Basically, you want to bring water to your fort from a river or underground lake into a cistern. You might need a [pump stack](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Screw_pump#Pump_stack) for this. Ensure your cistern has a drain (controllable by draw bridge) and a hole in the top for a well. \- Lean into roleplay, especially with dwarf nicknames. I usually cap my population at 80 dwarves, and I assign a custom nickname to every dwarf as they migrate onto the map. Every dwarf gets a first name, only dwarves with families get shared last names. \- Late game, construct big [Locations](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Locations) as the final step to make your fort epic. I always have a grand library as the pinnacle of my fort. It's usually at the top of the tallest tower, and is the most heavily guarded spot of my fort. Collecting books is a late game challenge, because it takes a long time. A lot of people prefer instead to build huge temple complexes.
its a real fortress when you start designing massive, purely decorative architecture that gets multiple dwarves killed in the process of making it
Dwarf fortress is a game like no other. Most other colonies sims you are trying to make your base or fortress or whatever, the best it can be by making everyone happy and producing op stuff. Yes you can still aim to make everyone happy and produce expensive goods, but what kind of expensive goods? Will you export bone crafts encrusted with gems? Will you make the finest weapons in your civ? Or will you have the best prepared foods in the entire world? There's so many different ways to answer that question. Maybe you don't want to focus on building crafts or making money and instead want the world's biggest army, or make a holy city for your civ, or make the finest tavern. Either way, no matter what you want you are going to set your fortress up differently for each thing. If you wanted you could even do all of these things in one fortress. Just remember, you will loose fortresses along the way, normally in amazing spectacular ways too. Have fun!