I've attached an image of my fort, it's housing around 100 dwarves and I'm just getting into mass-producing steel so I can properly equip my soldiers with steel armour and weapons.
Top Dwarf Fortress tips for beginners include:
- Think of a set plan for how your fortress will be designed, I went for a grid of 12x6 rooms (though remember that a 7x7 area will cave in if it's unsupported). A good approach for workshops is to have a room with a workshop in the centre, an input stockpile on one side of it, and an output stockpile on the other side. Another method I've seen, but not tried, is 5x5 rooms with a workshop in the centre and stockpiles all around. Experiment!
- Make wide corridors. Two dwarves cannot walk past each other in a corridor one tile wide, one will lie down while the other walks over him. This takes quite a lot of time and will slow down movement around your fortress. The minimum you really want a corridor is 2 tiles wide. You'll want your main, central artery to be 5-6 tiles wide (7 tiles wide will cave-in, of course). You don't have to immediately make it this wide, I started with a central corridor 2 tiles wide (as I had two miners) and built long corriodrs leading off it to my early room, so I had space to widen it later.
- Get farming up and running fast. It's quite simple to make a farm, you need a channel leading off a river, controlled by floodgates linked to a lever, into a sealed chamber (sealing meaning with a locked door as the only entrance). Flood then unflood the room with water to make the room muddy. You can now build farm plots in your room, farmers will need to come in and plant seeds in it. You'll need to flood the room again every spring, as the room will unmuddy during the winter and you won't be able ot grow anything. Plump helmets are perfectly fine as a crop, they've served me well for the entire game so far. They're the only crop my dwarves eat, and the only booze they drink is brewed from it.
- Make a really good dining room. Dwarves are made happy when they use high quality rooms, and they'll extract just as much happiness from eating in a good dining room as they will from sleeping in a good bedroom. Since they need individual bedrooms but all share one dining room, it's much easier to make thme happy through a good dining room than good bedrooms. Gold and platinum statues work really well for this, though I was lucky enough to get a legendary engravers, so his artwork all over the room makes it as good as it can be without needing this.
I've attached an image of my fort, it's housing around 100 dwarves and I'm just getting into mass-producing steel so I can properly equip my soldiers with steel armour and weapons. Oh, and I'm really sorry about breaking the frame on this page into tiny pieces.
Top Dwarf Fortress tips for beginners include:
- Think of a set plan for how your fortress will be designed, I went for a grid of 12x6 rooms (though remember that a 7x7 area will cave in if it's unsupported). A good approach for workshops is to have a room with a workshop in the centre, an input stockpile on one side of it, and an output stockpile on the other side. Another method I've seen, but not tried, is 5x5 rooms with a workshop in the centre and stockpiles all around. Experiment!
- Make wide corridors. Two dwarves cannot walk past each other in a corridor one tile wide, one will lie down while the other walks over him. This takes quite a lot of time and will slow down movement around your fortress. The minimum you really want a corridor is 2 tiles wide. You'll want your main, central artery to be 5-6 tiles wide (7 tiles wide will cave-in, of course). You don't have to immediately make it this wide, I started with a central corridor 2 tiles wide (as I had two miners) and built long corriodrs leading off it to my early room, so I had space to widen it later.
- Get farming up and running fast. It's quite simple to make a farm, you need a channel leading off a river, controlled by floodgates linked to a lever, into a sealed chamber (sealing meaning with a locked door as the only entrance). Flood then unflood the room with water to make the room muddy. You can now build farm plots in your room, farmers will need to come in and plant seeds in it. You'll need to flood the room again every spring, as the room will unmuddy during the winter and you won't be able ot grow anything. Plump helmets are perfectly fine as a crop, they've served me well for the entire game so far. They're the only crop my dwarves eat, and the only booze they drink is brewed from it.
- Make a really good dining room. Dwarves are made happy when they use high quality rooms, and they'll extract just as much happiness from eating in a good dining room as they will from sleeping in a good bedroom. Since they need individual bedrooms but all share one dining room, it's much easier to make thme happy through a good dining room than good bedrooms. Gold and platinum statues work really well for this, though I was lucky enough to get a legendary engravers, so his artwork all over the room makes it as good as it can be without needing this.