Fishing can be a good source of food at the start but it may be very dangerous to have them traipsing around the wilderness with a super rod. The game will assign one dwarf to be a Fisher dwarf which means that dwarf will run off on his own to go fishing.Getting farm plots going is an early goal. Under Labor, I assign two dwarves to be dedicated planters.I also disable drinks from being used in meals until I have a reliable drink income. Plump Helmets, when cooked, provide no seeds, which will delete your farming ambitions. Under Kitchen, I disable plants from being used in cooking.I set it back to everyone harvests after I get a few migrant waves! YMMV but this lead to my limited dwarf labor bandwidth getting eaten up by everyone harvesting. Under Labor->Standing Orders->Other there's a setting for Everybody Harvests.Replace those 5 cloth bags with 10 silk ones!īefore unpausing there are a few settings I always go for: Silk is cheaper to bring than cloth, literally half as much.If you're going someplace with low wood, embarking with 25 logs is cheaper than bringing a wheelbarrow! You can save a ton of points by just throwing down carpentry and crafting stations and making them yourself. The default item loadout has things like crutches, stepladders, and wheelbarrows.Bring a breeding pair for a tasty source of bacon, hides, and milk! This includes animals like reindeer, yaks, and cavies, but it doesn't include pigs! Pigs don't need food and will live and procreate quite happily in a hole in the ground. Grazing animals require that they are pastured on grass by creating a pasture zone outside and assigning the animals.You could use chickens but why do that when you can use turkeys! Turkeys lay way more eggs, provide more meat when slaughtered, and even provides a hide for leather! You can use nest boxes to collect eggs from birds.Geld all but 2 males and make puppy stew if the population gets too big! From the creatures/livestock menu you can mark for slaughter or geld if you have a butcher's shop. For cats and dogs you need to pay attention to when new ones are born.

Bring a breeding pair of cats to take care of vermin automatically.They don't need food and will continue to procreate so you can have a doberman squad! Bringing regular dogs is cheaper and you can instantly train them to war dogs. A breeding pair of war dogs is a nice line of defense for some of the earliest annoying dangers at the mouth of the fort.What do bring is subjective! But here some useful things I learned. I did not ultimately need to follow the desalination guide on the wiki and indeed it didn't work. Salt Water drawn from a well is drinkable in this version from my testing.Dwarves don't need water if they're un-injured.This is scary but overcome-able! Two things: If the area contains saltwater you will get a warning and this means ALL water on the map even from aquifers will be undrinkable.If you want to use magma furnaces right off the bat just make sure a volcano overlaps with your embark area.If you want to punch through an aquifer layer, dig stairs down one layer, smooth the walls around the stairs, repeat until you're on a z level that isn't leaky. If you smooth the walls of the aquifer they will stop.Light aquifers trickle water very slowly.All an aquifer means is a tile that periodically spawns water.Light aquifers are pretty easily dealt with.

Aquifers are very common but doesn't necessarily need to be a deal breaker like I was lead to believe.

If you are embarking someplace with little to no trees be aware of that!

A lot of things that you typically build with wood can be built with other materials but certain things REQUIRE wood, like beds.

These layers also can make it faster to get started underground because they can be mined out much quicker than stone.

For farming you want soil, sand, or clay.

For steel you must have both Iron and Flux Stone Layer present.

Elves send caravans in the spring, humans send in the summer, your own dwarf civ sends in autumn, and goblins, uh, don't send caravans

The list of races with their distance determines if you'll be visited by said race.

Some options for picking an embark location can be a little mysterious! Here's some general info I found relevant: This will be spoiler-free for major surprises but it may prevent certain aspects of !!FUN!! from taking place. I'm visiting in-laws for Christmas so instead of playing Dwarf Fortress I've been wanting to write up a list of 🔥HOT🔥STRATS🔥 that I've learned since the Steam release.

Dwarf fortress embark strategies