Can someone explain the basics of Dwarf Fortress?
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Complete and Utter Noob's Guide to Dwarf Fortress, which funnily enough has the initials of **** (immaturity at its finest)
But even after using this, I still couldn't get into Dwarf Fortress, since the graphics were so... intolerably bad. Haters gonna....
But even after using this, I still couldn't get into Dwarf Fortress, since the graphics were so... intolerably bad. Haters gonna....
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Since you got two great guides, I'll go into some smaller details.
When choosing your first place, MAKE SURE THERE IS NO AQUIFER!!!! I cannot stress this enough!
Traps are your first defense and you best defense. Except against forgotten beasts. then you're screwed.
Make sure you heavily fortify your pathways into caverns and the like. The last thing you want is an infestation of giant cave swallows.
Make your dining room EPIC by smoothing and engraving all the stone. This is also a good way to put Idlers to use. (To ingrave, press 'D'esignate and then 'S'mooth stone. After it is all smoothed, Designate them to be 'E'ngraved.)(This will raise the thoughts of your dwarves DRAMATICALLY, even ones who's spouse/pet/mother/child/whatever died.)
farming is the best source of food. Plump helmets are arguably the most diverse, as they can be eaten raw, cooked, OR made into dwarven wine. Pig tails are a close second, as they can double as clothes.
never sign mothers up in the military. They will shamelessly carry their babies into battle. Babies have rightfully earned the nickname of 'Dwarven Body Armour'.
Download the Lazy Noob pack. Not only is it chock full of useful tools and changeable options, (No raiders, anyone?)But it has some well crafted tile sets.
and, last but not least, CONTROL THE CAT POPULATION. Many a fort has fallen from a catsplosion, in which the cat population gets so extremely high that your entire fortress is centered around the damn things (butcher them before they indoctrinate {or 'get adopted by'} a dwarf)
If you have any other questions, feel free to ask or check out the Dwarf Fortress Wiki (Magmawiki, I believe.)
Since you got two great guides, I'll go into some smaller details.
When choosing your first place, MAKE SURE THERE IS NO AQUIFER!!!! I cannot stress this enough!
Traps are your first defense and you best defense. Except against forgotten beasts. then you're screwed.
Make sure you heavily fortify your pathways into caverns and the like. The last thing you want is an infestation of giant cave swallows.
Make your dining room EPIC by smoothing and engraving all the stone. This is also a good way to put Idlers to use. (To ingrave, press 'D'esignate and then 'S'mooth stone. After it is all smoothed, Designate them to be 'E'ngraved.)(This will raise the thoughts of your dwarves DRAMATICALLY, even ones who's spouse/pet/mother/child/whatever died.)
farming is the best source of food. Plump helmets are arguably the most diverse, as they can be eaten raw, cooked, OR made into dwarven wine. Pig tails are a close second, as they can double as clothes.
never sign mothers up in the military. They will shamelessly carry their babies into battle. Babies have rightfully earned the nickname of 'Dwarven Body Armour'.
Download the Lazy Noob pack. Not only is it chock full of useful tools and changeable options, (No raiders, anyone?)But it has some well crafted tile sets.
and, last but not least, CONTROL THE CAT POPULATION. Many a fort has fallen from a catsplosion, in which the cat population gets so extremely high that your entire fortress is centered around the damn things (butcher them before they indoctrinate {or 'get adopted by'} a dwarf)
If you have any other questions, feel free to ask or check out the Dwarf Fortress Wiki (Magmawiki, I believe.)
Um, you can sing the diggy hole song while you play it? It's this the one they say inspired Minecraft?
Firstly, keep the following precept in mind:
All of your dwarves are going to die horrible, miserable deaths.
The fun part is seeing how much they can suffer before that.
All of your dwarves are going to die horrible, miserable deaths.
The fun part is seeing how much they can suffer before that.
Same reply I got when I didn't like oblivion, if a game really isn't any fun without mods, then something is horribly wrong.Demitri Kamoraz said:
I do like the idea behind dwarf fortress, though I was put off by the far too complicated controls and eye-bleeding visuals. When I originally tried the game I had no idea it could be modded or that any mods existed.
A quick Google showed some map renderers, but I didn't think they were real time?
Can you provide some links to some good mods please?
I'm in the mood for building a mishappen and ill conceived outpost.
I don't blame you on oblivion, saying as you have to mod the game by adding in additional content. I just use tilesets and edit the raws to make new creatures, make dwarves have altered anatomies, etc., etc. Oh, and things that make the game easier to play. (Dwarven Therapist and the like.)thePyro_13 said:Same reply I got when I didn't like oblivion, if a game really isn't any fun without mods, then something is horribly wrong.Demitri Kamoraz said:
I do like the idea behind dwarf fortress, though I was put off by the far too complicated controls and eye-bleeding visuals. When I originally tried the game I had no idea it could be modded or that any mods existed.
A quick Google showed some map renderers, but I didn't think they were real time?
Can you provide some links to some good mods please?
I'm in the mood for building a mishappen and ill conceived outpost.
As such, I STRONGLY SUGGEST the lazy n00b pack. (without the 0's for o's.)
And if you really want to understand Dwarf Fortress better, spend some quality time with Adveture Mode and Legacy. the former will show you just how freaking complicated combat mechanics are (and the best way to kill enemies, such as the Patented Kamoraz Method of using socks as projectiles) and the latter shows you how much lore is generated just for one playthrough, for your own little world.
No, you name the NOBLES after people you hate. Then, you literally hate them, both from the name and in-game!xXxJessicaxXx said:
"I demand you make me slade earings and diamond windows so I can look out of my office for a view of JACK SHIT and stop exporting stone goods, your main industry down here!"
"...Hey, can you go pull that lever? What? No! Of course it doesn't collapse the floor and send you spiraling into a creeping eye filled pit, where you will slowly be beaten to death over the course of a year!"
The game is very much about trial and error. Don't be afraid of trying stuff out. If you don't want to waste time restarting a new fortress, don't be afraid to save scrub (make multiple copies of your save game files). I'm massively guilty of that one.
Just on the level of getting a fortress which is reasonably self sufficient though.
1. Embark.
Never choose a site with an aquifier unless you want a massive challenge.
Calm and Serene regions will make for a nice relaxed game.
Joyous Wilds and Savage regions will make for a slightly more exciting game. Wildlife is not quite as deadly as it used to be, but you may still find the occasional dwarf gets nommed by a hippo.
Terrifying regions can live up to their name.
Some skills are more useful to embark with than others. Mining is essential (and make sure you bring some mining picks!) Having a dwarf with growing, brewing and/or cooking can help you get food production up and running quickly. Treecutting, woodwork and masonry are useful. Stonecrafting is very useful, I'll explain why later.
2. Food and drink production.
There are whole range of ways to get food, but the real issue is getting drink. Dwarves are alcoholics, they drink a lot more than they eat, and if they run out of alcohol they get surly and suffer a massive drop in efficiency. Don't try and survive on water unless you're going for a challenge game.
To make food and drink you need to grow crops.
Crops come in two varieties, underground and above ground. To farm, you need either soil or stone which has been splashed with water. The latter is complicated, the former is very simply as almost every map will have a soil layer. Dig out a room and put a field in it. If you accidentally dig into stone, your farmers won't be able to plant seeds there. A starting fortress does not need a very big farm, it's very easy to overproduce on food and fill your fortress with stinky rotten vegetables. Press Q, move the cursor over the field and select crops to grow in spring, summer, autumn and winter. Leaving the field fallow has no advantages, unlike in real life, but it does help you control overproduction.
Plump helmets (an underground mushroom crop) are the staple of the dwarven diet because they're so flexible. Hungry dwarves will eat them raw. If you build a still you can turn them into dwarven wine, and if you build a kitchen you can cook them into prepared meals which are more efficient at feeding dwarves than just eating raw mushrooms.
Incidentally, if you realize you forgot to take a certain skill and can't wait for the right immigrants to come along. Press V, move the cursor over a dwarf. Press P to bring up the preferences menu and L to bring up the labour menu. You can now choose exactly what tasks that dwarf will do, regardless of whether he or she is skilled in them or not. This way, you can eventually train useless peasants into productive members of society.
Once you've built a field and chosen what you want to farm, dwarves with the 'growing' skill should automatically start planting the right crops assuming you packed seeds. All you need to do now is designate a food stockpile by pressing P and then F and dragging out an area, and your dwarves should automatically store the crops there in any loose containers. Again, by pressing Q you can customize stockpiles, which you don't need to do now but is very useful later on.
3. Trading.
Early on, your fortress will not be very self sufficient. For this reason, trading is very useful. Various caravans will arrive, with the most useful being the dwarven caravan from your home civilization.
This is why I always bring a max level stonecrafter. As your miners mine, you'll notice they leave tons and tons of stone lying around cluttering the place up. If you build a craftsdwarf's workshop, tell it to make rock crafts and press R to make the action repeat, your stonecrafter happily carve away making all kinds of tacky crap like rock crowns and figurines which you can sell for far more than the basic stone its made of.
Another good thing to make are large pots. Again, these are made out of rock, which you'll never run out of. Food production requires a lot of containers, which means either pots or barrels. Building a decent supply will help keep your stockpiles looking tidy, will avoid rotting food and will ensure you can always produce booze.
To trade with the caravans, you need a trade depot and a broker. For the broker, press N to bring up the noble screen and pick whichever dwarf has the best social skills (or any random dwarf if none do) to be the broker. To use the trade depot, press Q and move the cursor over it. The rest should be self-explanatory.
Umm.. yeah.. there's a lot more to cover, but if you set up farming, buy all the useful stuff you can and if nothing goes horribly wrong you should make it through your first winter. Beyond starvation, the biggest cause of early fortress death is unhappiness, which is based on a huge number of variables. Most are common sense though, if you build your dwarves nice bedrooms and put pretty statues and furniture around you'll find they're much more emotionally stable than if you just let them sleep in the mud, for example.
Just remember, even once you've mastered the basics of keeping everyone alive and happy, it's highly likely your first goblin siege will steamroll you. Dwarf fortress does not have a learning curve, it has a learning cliff with tiny little ledges which crumble as soon as you try to stop for a rest.
But eventually, you'll watch a bunch of goblins and trolls being eviscerated by bridges full of traps suspended over a lava pit and you will think back on all the fortresses you lost and smile.
Just on the level of getting a fortress which is reasonably self sufficient though.
1. Embark.
Never choose a site with an aquifier unless you want a massive challenge.
Calm and Serene regions will make for a nice relaxed game.
Joyous Wilds and Savage regions will make for a slightly more exciting game. Wildlife is not quite as deadly as it used to be, but you may still find the occasional dwarf gets nommed by a hippo.
Terrifying regions can live up to their name.
Some skills are more useful to embark with than others. Mining is essential (and make sure you bring some mining picks!) Having a dwarf with growing, brewing and/or cooking can help you get food production up and running quickly. Treecutting, woodwork and masonry are useful. Stonecrafting is very useful, I'll explain why later.
2. Food and drink production.
There are whole range of ways to get food, but the real issue is getting drink. Dwarves are alcoholics, they drink a lot more than they eat, and if they run out of alcohol they get surly and suffer a massive drop in efficiency. Don't try and survive on water unless you're going for a challenge game.
To make food and drink you need to grow crops.
Crops come in two varieties, underground and above ground. To farm, you need either soil or stone which has been splashed with water. The latter is complicated, the former is very simply as almost every map will have a soil layer. Dig out a room and put a field in it. If you accidentally dig into stone, your farmers won't be able to plant seeds there. A starting fortress does not need a very big farm, it's very easy to overproduce on food and fill your fortress with stinky rotten vegetables. Press Q, move the cursor over the field and select crops to grow in spring, summer, autumn and winter. Leaving the field fallow has no advantages, unlike in real life, but it does help you control overproduction.
Plump helmets (an underground mushroom crop) are the staple of the dwarven diet because they're so flexible. Hungry dwarves will eat them raw. If you build a still you can turn them into dwarven wine, and if you build a kitchen you can cook them into prepared meals which are more efficient at feeding dwarves than just eating raw mushrooms.
Incidentally, if you realize you forgot to take a certain skill and can't wait for the right immigrants to come along. Press V, move the cursor over a dwarf. Press P to bring up the preferences menu and L to bring up the labour menu. You can now choose exactly what tasks that dwarf will do, regardless of whether he or she is skilled in them or not. This way, you can eventually train useless peasants into productive members of society.
Once you've built a field and chosen what you want to farm, dwarves with the 'growing' skill should automatically start planting the right crops assuming you packed seeds. All you need to do now is designate a food stockpile by pressing P and then F and dragging out an area, and your dwarves should automatically store the crops there in any loose containers. Again, by pressing Q you can customize stockpiles, which you don't need to do now but is very useful later on.
3. Trading.
Early on, your fortress will not be very self sufficient. For this reason, trading is very useful. Various caravans will arrive, with the most useful being the dwarven caravan from your home civilization.
This is why I always bring a max level stonecrafter. As your miners mine, you'll notice they leave tons and tons of stone lying around cluttering the place up. If you build a craftsdwarf's workshop, tell it to make rock crafts and press R to make the action repeat, your stonecrafter happily carve away making all kinds of tacky crap like rock crowns and figurines which you can sell for far more than the basic stone its made of.
Another good thing to make are large pots. Again, these are made out of rock, which you'll never run out of. Food production requires a lot of containers, which means either pots or barrels. Building a decent supply will help keep your stockpiles looking tidy, will avoid rotting food and will ensure you can always produce booze.
To trade with the caravans, you need a trade depot and a broker. For the broker, press N to bring up the noble screen and pick whichever dwarf has the best social skills (or any random dwarf if none do) to be the broker. To use the trade depot, press Q and move the cursor over it. The rest should be self-explanatory.
Umm.. yeah.. there's a lot more to cover, but if you set up farming, buy all the useful stuff you can and if nothing goes horribly wrong you should make it through your first winter. Beyond starvation, the biggest cause of early fortress death is unhappiness, which is based on a huge number of variables. Most are common sense though, if you build your dwarves nice bedrooms and put pretty statues and furniture around you'll find they're much more emotionally stable than if you just let them sleep in the mud, for example.
Just remember, even once you've mastered the basics of keeping everyone alive and happy, it's highly likely your first goblin siege will steamroll you. Dwarf fortress does not have a learning curve, it has a learning cliff with tiny little ledges which crumble as soon as you try to stop for a rest.
But eventually, you'll watch a bunch of goblins and trolls being eviscerated by bridges full of traps suspended over a lava pit and you will think back on all the fortresses you lost and smile.
Also, once you've got the hang of how workshops and farming works, try quarry bushes. They require several stages of preparation and the infrastructure to make or buy bags, but you can feed a big fortress by growing one season of quarry bushes a year on a single field.Demitri Kamoraz said:
Also, the nuts can be either eaten in a pinch or milled and pressed to make oil (used to make soap, which is actually useful now).
I've never had encounters with quarry bushes truthfully. I know they can be foraged, but I always stick to underground crops. call me a caveophile.evilthecat said:
The cruelty of 'Indie' games.Baneat said:
Notch calls himself indie as he rakes in millions while the actual indie games make nothing and actually update once in a blue moon.
No, calling yourself indie when you independently developed your game is correct. The worst part is his legion of adoring fans who believe he can do no wrong. 45M euros and less content than community modders? Blasphemy! he's *busy*! How dare you call him lazy for having a game that runs at 30fps on a 5870+Quad Core, for Reasons!Demitri Kamoraz said:
I'm not saying much about your point, but he has a whole crew now. a company. he whored himself out to ecksbawcks. he whored himself out to that one cell phone company. he has enough money to clone himself a goddamn dinosaur, quoting Jonathan Carter. and I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic in the last sentence, but he constantly breaks his own game with every update. And, due to the new agreement that all modders had to... agree to, he can freely steal all their content and claim it as his own. (Pistons in the upcoming update.)Baneat said:
Don't get me wrong, I like Minecraft. it's just not to be considered indie any more. call me a hipster.
(and you're right about the fans.)
Quarry bushes are underground. They grow from rock nuts.Demitri Kamoraz said:
The real reason to grow them is that every leaf counts as an ingredient for cooking, and each bush produces several leaves (as well as a nut). It's not quite as silly as cooking with alcohol used to be, but I've definitely found it more efficient than most other crops for food production.
I don't think anyone could accuse Toady of laziness. The development log seems to be on fire at the moment.Baneat said: