Dwarf Fortress: The dwarvening

[bhodi]

Episode One: Landfall
Episode Two: Elves are real bastards
Episode Three: An Ambush! Curse them! (part 1)
Episode Three: An Ambush! Curse them! (part 2)
Episode Four: Progeny and Projects (part 1)
Episode Four: Progeny and Projects (part 2)
Episode Five: Operation Waterfail

Welcome to my Dwarf Fortress Blog/Tutorial/Fortress/Mess! Let's get it started. Episodes are going to be by season-ish milestones/goals and I'll try and explain the features and thoughts and future planning as I build my fortress. This first episode doesn't have as many screenshots as I'd like, I need to get into the habit of spamming the screenshot key. I'll try and explain best I can and do better later.

Episode Goals:
Found the settlement
Carve a basic fort
Build basic workshops - Woodworker, Stonemason, Still, Kitchen
Build basic stockpiles - Stone, Wood, Food, Furniture, Crafted items
Build 2 5x5 farms
Build at least 7 bedrooms and a dining room
Build refuse pile

This looks like a good spot! I searched for flux stone, no aquifier, magma pipe, moderate weather, in a 4x4 area. I got dumped in the middle of the woods, as you see:

Supposedly there's a magma tube SOMEWHERE on premises. We'll have to find it later. For now...

This is my initial settlement:

Dwarves:
Carpenter/Leader (leader = appraiser/negotiator/novice judge of intent) He's also my records keeper which skills up fast so I don't give him it.
Farmer/Brewer (part 1 of my 2-man food team, these two are really all you need to survive until you get about 150 dwarves)
Farmer/Cook (part 2 of my 2-man food team)
Woodcutter/Gatherer (This is the only guy who ever goes outside. Outside is dangerous. That's why I don't hunt, and that's why agriculture was invented.)
Miner/Mechanic/Building Designer (5 pts into miner, 3 into mechanic 2 into building designer)
Mason/Stonecrafter (when he's not carving doors/tables/thrones, he's making rock instruments for sale on the first year)
Weaponsmith/Armorsmith (He's my metalbasher)

Items:
1 Iron Anvil
2 serpentine (stone, to make metalforge and wood furnace)
1 Iron bar (axe for woodcutter)
4 copper bars (4 copper picks for masons)
51 plump helmet spawn
50 rock nuts
50 cave wheat seeds
25 pig tail seeds
25 sweet pod seeds
11 dwarven ale
11 dwarven rum
11 dwarven wine
11 dwarven beer
6 horse leather
21 turtle
1 plump helmet
23 tower cap logs
1 of each of every meat that costs 2 each

And we're off! We get dumped in a watery forest, trees and planets everywhere. There is a slightly sloping hill to the east which looks like a good spot for the initial entry. First things first, though:


Cut down those trees! Gather those plants! Build a wood furnace and a metalsmith's forge. Queue up some charcoal and crank out the 4 copper picks and 1 iron axe so that we can get to digging and chopping.

Make some temporary stockpiles nearby- you want a wood stockpile, a food stockpile, and a furniture stockpile. This is just to unload your wagon so people don't stand around idle. Break down your wagon (q, then x) for some more wood.

Now, you'll want to start carving out your fortress in earnest. The most critical things are stockpiles, workshops, and a place to sleep. You have only a little bit of time before your first sleep cycle, so first priority are the beds for your soon to be sleepy dwarves.

Notice that I'm carving in non-rock for the first few levels. This is good and bad. Good in that it carves very fast, bad in that it doesn't contribute wealth or happiness and can't be smoothed. Fortunately, neither farms, workshops, or stockpiles care what kind of walls you've got. Into the earth!


I carved in that little hollow above going north into a 9x9 up/down stair (not shown). This is the next level down. It has the water pockets from the ponds so it's really not suitable for construction. This level will be perfect for farms, as farms can only be built on non-rock. This picture was taken a little bit after, so I've already got the farms built. They are two 5x5 plots. Notice they aren't connected directly to the entrance; you'll see what they're connected to as we progress, one more level down:


The right 9x9 connects to the outside, the left continues downwards. The lower right 2x2 staircase connects upwards into the farm area and downwards into the food workshops. This is done for fortress defense; I only want one entrance to the outside and later that entire corridor will be trapped to prevent things from getting inside. This picture was also taken a bit after, so ignore the beds in the hallway - I'll get to that. Notice I've already got some stockpiles, I'll get to that as well. Ignore those for now. Continuing down...


This is the workshop level. I've labeled the buildings to make things clearer for you. One thing you have to be aware of is what part of the workshops can be walked through and which are impassable. You can see the impassible squares of a workshop as marked by the dark green Xs during the placement stage. For example, you can see that the kitchen has 3 impassible squares in the upper right. If you've got an enclosed room with one entrance, and you place the workshop with an impassible square against the door, you will get an error when it comes time to build the room.

Notice the stairs going up and down. Now, take a look back up at the previous levels - The lower right quadrant is my food quadrant, and it's connected to the food stockpile. Upper right's stockpile is wood, upper left is stone, lower left are finished goods and furniture. Going up or down stairs counts as one movement, so you can see that the stockpiles are only about 5 squares away from their respective workshops. This closeness becomes paramount as your fortress grows and you'll want to abuse the z-axis as much as possible to accomplish this.

So, I built the 4 critical shops along with 2 5x5 farm plots. I started plump helmets in one and quarry bushes in the other. I cranked out 7 beds, a table and a chair, and, lacking a better place to put them, stuck them in the hallway. Just in time, too - you can see a few of the dwarves sleeping above.

You'll also need an indoor refuse pile to collect bones and skulls in. You'll eventually want an outdoor refuse pile as well which is connected to the indoor one as well, but I'll explain how to do this and why you want to in the next episode. For now, an indoor refuse pile where your dwarves will put bones after eating your delicious turtles is fine. It will have a door, because miasma will eminate from rotting garbage and will make dwarves unhappy. We don't want unhappy dwarves. I built mine here, and with these settings (excluding everything except specifically bones) (of all corpse types and all body part types)



With that complete, it's time to create individual bedrooms and a real dining room for our dwarves. Each dwarf requires their own bedroom (couples will share a room, however), and bigger rooms make dwarves happier, but frankly they'll be happy enough to get three square and eat it in a nice dining room. Only the nobles really *demand* better accommodations, so your average dwaves get your standard tiny room containing one bed (and later, one chest to store their stuff in). When smoothed and engraved, this room is plenty nice for your average dwarf.

Because of the large amount of space living quarters take, along with the dwarves penchant for hanging out in their rooms, it's important to design them properly for high traffic and high density. There are a lot of ways you can go about this, but I prefer living pods. These take advantage of the fact that dwaves, like a certain member of the church, can actually move diagonally. Living pods have an enormous density due to this and the fact that like all good DF constructions, they cheerfully abuse the z-level. I create two pods to start - one for 2x2 rooms (bedrooms) and one for 3x3 rooms (noble bedrooms, noble dining rooms/studies).

Another thing you have to be aware of is noise. Noise makes dwarves complain and sleep poorly. It goes through walls, doors, and z-levels, emanating from workshops and mining. Workshops are what we care about, and as such all rooms need to be at least 5 squares (including z-levels) from any workshop. Because I built my workshops around that central stair, we have to move a few levels down. I carved the stair down 4 additional levels before branching out to create the living pods:


I moved all the beds into the rooms, put doors on the rooms, and then created a bedroom (q->r) for each. When the dwarves get tired, they will automatically claim an empty bedroom. I moved the table/chair from the hallway into a "real" dining room and added a few more. I also declared it a dining room by highlighting a table (q->r). I then also carved out one level below:


As you see, the 4 up/down staircases connect to the 4 down staircases of the previous level. You can stack these 3 or 4 downwards before the traffic on the stairs begins to get too crowded. That's not for a while, yet.


Ah, nobles. Bunch of picky bastards. Right now, I've only got one, and that's the leader. Look at all those jobs:


Unfortunately, it's in red, which means that he's demanding appropriate accommodations before he'll do the assigned job. He basically wants a private dining room. Later, he'll also want a private study as he'll be the sheriff, too. I give him two of the 3x3 rooms (I put tables/chairs in there, declare the room, and then assign it to him).


Checking him out, he seems happy now. If he wasn't, "Needs" would be in red.



You can see the error I mentioned earlier about walling in your workshops by accident. That's the error they spit out. You have to fix the problem then if you want to un-suspend construction, go to the shop and (q->x) to try building again.

No migrants?! What! This is a great place to live! You've got beds, food and long, endless hours of drudgery! What more can a dwarf ask for? I'll just need to churn out more rock instruments, I guess. Actually, although migrants CAN arrive every season, generally for the first few years they only arrive in the spring.



Here's where I stand at the end of the first season. Every season, remember to take a look at your summary page to see if you're getting low on food/drink and also remember to re-allocate your farms during the first year. Planting is separated into the seasons (even though you're underground), and you can't always plant every type of seed every season. Next year, it will remember what you chose to plant during the summer but your field will be fallow unless you select it initially.

You also might want to, as I did, edit the init file to autosave and autoarchive per season. That way, if you screw up, you can go back to the previous season to redo. I also have it pause during season rollovers so I can remember to do a once-over, checking food/drink/materials.

[FatuousTwat]

Great stuff... Looking at this, I can see that my base is a clusterfuck of huge rooms with nothing in them all on the first level.

[FatuousTwat]

No animals?

[bhodi]

Just the two dogs which I'll train next episode. There are random animals walking around, and somehow you do come with a tame horse and some other animals which makes up for the other 2

As you see I go pretty vegetarian - it's technically a challenge mode, but I like it better early. Farm plots are a lot more reliable and don't require a lot of infrastructure, whereas for animal food you need, in addition to the required still and kitchen, a butcher and tanner shop as well as a dedicated hunter. Then, you have to deal with stockpiles for the corpses and if that isn't enough there's a time limit on each step of the production as well: the corpse will decay, and once it's been through the butcher's shop the skins will decay unless taken to the tannery. This is just too much manpower required, and with only 7 dwarves, sometimes you're unable to meet the time limit even with one doing nothing but hunting/butcher/tanning - stuff will decay all over the place while the guy is running around after the kill that is all the way across the world. Plus, sometimes this guy will fail to make a kill and get injured or run into a monster and then where are you? Screwed.

While we're on the subject, fishing is the same way. Risky since you're outside, and you tend to fish for a long time before catching anything. Then, you have to go through and queue up "prepare fish" at the fishery which isn't a HUGE deal but again you take an entire dwarf out of commission to do nothing all day but fish.

I'll eventually add both for food variety, but not until my first wave of immigrants.

[Strazos]

Such a shame the interface is so arcane to me, because I would actually play this.

[Threash]

If only there was another thread with handy video tutorials right next to this one :)

[Strazos]

You misunderstood me: I can see what's going on, I just cannot deal with the ASCII and such.

[bhodi]

Yeah, you'll just need to be able to see the matrix. You get used to it after a while.

[Jade Falcon]

With your bedrooms stacked like that do you run into issues later on when the forts get large?

[Lantyssa]

It's probably not enough, but there are graphic packs which improve things a little.

[bhodi]

With your bedrooms stacked like that do you run into issues later on when the forts get large?

Yes and no. As I said, you can really only stack them 4 deep or so before there are too many dwarves running up and down the single staircases. Dwarves that move to move through each other's squares slow down quite a bit so it's best to avoid.

The solution is simply to build more of them branching out from the central 3x3 staircase. There's plenty of room.

[Moaner]

Between this thread and the vid tutorial one I'm back playing DF.  God DAMN this game rocks.  Thanks for all the starter tips F13!

[bhodi]

Episode Two: Elves are real bastards.

Welcome back! In this episode, I complete my year into spring and the first migrant wave. We've got the basics down and our dwarves are going to survive through the winter, so now we can focus on making things a bit more efficient as well as complete our first trades.

Episode Goals:
Construct rudimentary fort defenses
Set up stone dumps and clear up all the stone in the fort
Set up stockpile linking, mini stockpiles and expand my current stockpiles
Trade with neighbors
Complete structures for "Advanced" Farming
Prepare for the first Migrant wave

When we last left our budding fortress, we had gathered enough stocks to survive through the winter, carved out places for our dwarves to sleep, and are ready for some expansion. Being somewhat OCD, I absolutely hate the little piles of stone that is left around during our excavation. Our stonecraft/mason is converting them slowly into doors, chests, and instruments, but it's simply not going fast enough. The easiest way of solving the stone clutter problem is a by creating a garbage dump.

Activity Zones are kind of like stockpiles in reverse. They are places that you designate that you pull resources from (and, in the special case of a garbage dump, a place where you dump stuff). Garbage dumps in particular are special because of their ability to infinitely stack items. Because of the odd way the game works currently, you can actually take all those piles of stone sitting around your fortress and collect them all into a single square. I placed this single 1x1 square garbage dump right next to my mason's shop. You designate them just like mining or stockpiles and when they're designated they show up as "=" like stockpiles but only when you're on the zones menu.



Then, simply use 'k' highlight the boulder you want and hit 'd'. A D will show up next to the rocks on the right, and soon a dwarf will come and haul the ore into your designated dump. Once in the dump, the items within are 'forbidden'; this means they are completely ignored by dwarves and won't be picked up or moved around. However, you can unforbid the rocks so you can use them as raw material again. Simply use 'k', highlight the pile of rocks, scroll up and down with the - and + keys, and hit F to reclaim each rock for later use.

With our fortress clean(er), let's turn to the most rudimentary of base defenses: the cage trap. Cage traps use 1 'mechanism', the mysterious universal device that powers everything from waterwheel axles to triggers to levers and, in this case, to traps. Cage traps also require a cage to place in the trap. Unfortunately, cages cannot be made from stone. Our best material at the moment is wood. A cage trap will trigger when anything walks over the square that you place them on and have a chance to cage that creature.

Mechanisms come from a mechanic's workshop (duh!) so I created one right above my mason's shop, and churned out a bunch of traps. You place the traps through the build menu. They show up as ^ once built. I scattered them around my entrance:




With that done...



My traps finish just in time! A kobold is spotted outside! Also, our first trade caravan! Oh no. We have no trade depot! I quickly build one right at the entrance to my base. Later, this will be inside my base, but for now an exposed one should be fine.

Caravans generally have guards with them. The guards are generally aggressive. This guard, for example, really didn't like the way the deer was looking at him:



My trade depot is one level up, right on that hill (not shown).

I move all my barrels full of instruments to the trade depot:



Then initiate trade:



The trade window is kind of clunky (surprise!) but you can at least highlight the barrels to include everything within. The number on the left is the value, the number on the right is the weight. As you see, I have a problem - Stone instruments are heavy! Fortunately, they hauled those nearly worthless ley pewter bars all the way to our settlement! I assume the caravan driver lost a bet or something. I guess we'll take them... Let's see what I can work out.



The easiest way to see what I traded for is to re-open the move items to depot menu. As you can see, I got some cheese, sugar, leather, and cloth. And 25 steel bolts. Sweet!

With trades out of the way, the trade master asks me what I want. I tell him meat, leather, and seeds, but none of it urgent. The more urgent you put something, the bigger markup it will have when it gets there. He tells me what HE'S looking for:



Swell. I can make some hides and backpacks, and probably some shields as well once I get my metalbashing up and running. The traders leave me and promise to return next year. I turn my eye back to fortress expansion and, in particular, expanding my food supply.

I'll take a moment now to explain the common plants and what you can do with them:

Plump Helmet -> Brewable, Cookable, Eaten Raw
Cave Wheat -> Brewable, can be milled into Flour(1) which is then Cookable
Quarry Bush -> Brewable, can be processed into bush leaves(5) which is then Brewable
Sweet Pod -> Brewable, can be processed into syrup(5) or milled into sugar(1) which are both Cookable
Pig Tail -> processed into thread which can then be woven into bags.
Dimple Cup -> processed into dye, basically a trade good

The numbers in parenthesis are how many of each item you get after processing. Due to the way farming works, the plants that you need to process give more bang for your cooking or brewing buck. When you plant a seed, your grower's skill determines how many 'stacks' of plants, from 1-5 (and a very rare 6 stack) can be harvested once the plants mature. All food 'stacks' are processed or cooked at the same time and considered a single item. Thus, the larger the stack of items are, the more compact they become. a 4 stack of plump helmet would be cooked as a single item along with flour (a simple meal uses 2 ingredients) and give you 8 biscuits. However, a 5 stack of quarry bushes once processed becomes a 25 stack of quarry bush leaves which takes the exact same amount of time to cook as a 5 stack, plus gets multiplied when you use additional ingredients.

While we're on the food subject, when you cook, you'll want to try and create lavish meals. They require 4 different ingredients instead of just 2 for a basic meal. They are higher in point value, so they offer more happiness to dwarves who eat it and more value to your fortress in general. It's not usual late game to create a stack of 75 dwarven wine roasts due to the stacking effect above and combining large stacks of multiple ingredients.

So basically, what all that above is saying, is that we need to build additional buildings to handle the quarry bushes that have been planted and harvested for the past two seasons. Since it's a cooking building and pulls from the food stockpiles (where quarry bushes go), I put it next to my kitchen:

.

And queued a bunch of "Process plants into bags" which is an obfuscated name for creating quarry bush leaves which can then be cooked into food. "Process plants into barrel" is making syrup from sweet pods, which is the other thing that you'll want to do. Note that all this work is for cooking only; the plants listed above can be brewed straight out of the ground.

Unfortunately, we have to make some bags. I throw together a leatherworker a bit south and queue up some more bags with the leather I bought and just traded for. I also make a butcher to try and salvage that poor deer that's sitting outside. I give it a door since generally butcher's shops will often have miasma and you really don't want that spreading all over the place making your dwarves unhappy.


With that complete, I decide to create and link a few stockpiles. Linking allows you to fill one stockpile with the stock of another. The rules of stockpile linking are simple and unfortunately limited at this time. Each stockpile take from an unlimited number of stockpiles, but stockpiles can only feed to a single stockpile. This means that you can't have multiple small stockpiles all drawing from a massive central one, though it will work the other way around. I'm going to use it in three places.

The first is to create a refuse pile outdoors and link it with my indoor one. This is so bodies and bones and such will be placed there and, because it's outdoors, the refuse will vanish every season. We will pull the bones and useful/usable non-rotting materials into our indoor stockpile for later use while the rest will just be left to rot and vanish. The actual doing of this is very simple. Select the stockpile with q, hit t for take, highlight the stockpile you have to take from, hit enter. In this case, we want the inner pile to take from the outer pile.

We create the outer pile and link the inner one:




And you can see they're now linked:



Because I already limited the inner refuse pile to bones shells and skulls, that is all it will draw from the outer pile, leaving the rest to rot.

Next, I create a little stockpile down in the dining room so that the dwarves don't have to walk very far to eat:



And give it the properties of only drink and prepared food since that's what dwarves will eat (notice prepared food is it's own little option down on the bottom - it's highlighted)



Finally, because stockpiles are filled back to front, I create a little mini-wood pile so that my carpenter doesn't have to walk to the back of my expanded, larger stockpile:



Things are looking pretty good, although I noticed that now my woodcutter is stopping chopping every 10 seconds to haul his own lumber back. This will never do. Fortunately, easily fixed:



While I'm thinking about it, I do the same to all my critical dwaves. I'd rather have my miner focusing on mining without hauling his own ore.

While my miner is working on my first long-term construction project (more on this in the next episode!), Suddenly it's springtime! We made it through the winter.



Here's where we stand:



Where are the migrants? Oh well, I'm sure they will be here soon. But what's this?



My bolts were stolen!? What happened? Oh, I didn't have any ammo stockpiles indoors so they were left exposed out at the trade depot! I quickly make a few very small stockpiles for each of the remaining types, in-between the left two staircases:



Oh, and the elves. Lovely. The thing you have to remember/know about the elves is that if you offer them any item that's made of wood or covered in blood (like future weapons taken from attackers), they will just pack up and leave in a huff. They really are whiny bitches that way. As most materials are in wood bins or barrels at this point, you can't select the barrel you have to select each individual item. Not a problem, as long as you know about it. This particular caravan leader was just fucking with me, though. This is why I hate elves:



Not enough profit? Even though the dwarves traded at under 10 profit, I guess I can do a little better...



Oh, fuck you then. I hope you get mauled by bears on your way back to your forest glade or whatever shithole you climbed out of.

On a brighter note, just after the elves pack up in a huff and leave....



Oh deary me. Our rock instruments have gained legendary fame! Dwarves have come from miles around - penniless, empty handed, and hungry - to piggyback on our success.



We have 22 new migrants to deal with. Good thing we created all those rooms! We also added a new noble to our ranks, "Sherrif", which "Carp/Leader" will do, as long as he's given a chest and a coffer in his bedroom. Not a problem.

First thing Next Episode: Assigning names and managing the incoming horde!

[bhodi]

Since we've got a bunch of dwarves, and I'm going to move what they from their nickname ('brew/cook') over to their profession name (after the name), I'm in need of a few volunteers.

Who would like to toil away for no pay and little food, only being allowed to rest once a season, living a sort of horrible half-life in which the only thing that keeps you together is your next drink? You might possibly die gloriously in battle, or starve to death, or go mad from a strange mood, or maybe even drown as the corridor you were inhabiting is suddenly flooded by a mechanical marvel gone awry!

If this sounds like a life you'd be proud to live, just post here with what you'd like to do / your preferred profession or activity and you can be the newest migrant/sacrificial victim to my fair fortress.

Note: Preferred professions do not necessarily have to correspond with current migrant skills. Then again, I might just draft you into the army anyway or assign you to hauling endless rocks because we have no use for a potash maker! Who knows! It could be fun!

[schild]

Can I be schild the Potash maker?

Edit: Did I even understand your post? What the hell is happening in here. Dwarf Fortress scares me.

[Lantyssa]

Oooh!  Oooh!  Lantyssa the Hunter!  Make sure to assign me some hunting dogs!

[FatuousTwat]

Hell yeah.

Can I be the Blacksmith (armoursmith/weaponsmith whatever)?

I think if anyone has writing skillz, they should do a narrative critiquing their glorious leader and their fellow inhabitants?

[Trippy]

Sign me up to be an Engraver.

[schild]

Make the mods peasants.

[Jade Falcon]

Brewer!

[Slayerik]

My brother and a friend of mine are hooked on this game. A little too complicated for me, at the moment, as I'd rather just shoot people in COD. Very cool game though.

I'll be the carpenter! I used to rough frame houses, woot!

[UnSub]

I want to be a good-for-nothing aristocrat who complains about everything but provides nothing of real worth. Make me an ivory tower, stat!

[Slayerik]

Also, if you want to play this game..... make sure you use this Wiki

http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Main_Page

[Fargull]

Sign me up for the Miller slot.  Or if that is taken, anything highly dangerous, perhaps Trap Tester.

[Jade Falcon]

Sign me up for the Miller slot.  Or if that is taken, anything highly dangerous, perhaps Trap Tester.

Trap tester generally falls to my hunters who think taking a nap in my trapped hallway is a good idea.

[Hindenburg]

Sheriff, plz.

[Murgos]

Sign me up, whatever job needs doing. 

[FatuousTwat]

I managed to find a spot with every type of metal except the kinds that can be used to make weapons/armor, and the damn hippies don't sell metal.

[sidereal]

I'm not a big fan of the garbage dump method of stone removal.  I don't like the fact that they're still there slowing my engine down, even if they're not in the way anymore.  Also, digging in there to de-designate something you want back is a nightmare.  I've taken a shine to the catapult method of removal.  Basically, there's a bug/feature where if you fire a stone from a catapult and it lands somewhere on a lower z-level than where it was fired from, it just disappears.  So I start the game with someone with a little Siege Engineer and usually within the first year I have a catapult setup firing rocks all day.  Side benefit of this is that I have ridiculously skillful Siege Operators whenver the base gets attacked.

[Lantyssa]

The other option, if you have magma, is to designate a dump over the magma.

I personally like making huge storerooms of rocks, so it's not a problem for me.

[bhodi]

I actually tend to use a lot of rocks in construction; my garbage dumps don't get ginormous. I've never tried the catapult method, though I did know about it. Maybe I'll try it this time. Sounds like fun.

I took a day off DF but I'll make everyone dwarves tomorrow.

[Strazos]

Ooo, can I be a warrior or thief or spy or something like that?

[Zaljerem]

Ah, this game is really cool. I just donated $50 to the author. Don't let Slayerik fool you; he's been watching over our shoulders as we rock it out in various setups. He claims he won't be playing it; I hope he will, eventually.

I have a special goblin drowning chamber, and a caged dragon; my friend a zoo with crazy undead monsters and even a crippled dwarf ... welcome to the freak show!
I make totems from the skulls of my enemies. I rob elven caravans with impunity and kill their hired human mercenaries.

There is so much to recommend this game. In fact, I'm not sure what I really DON'T like about this game, except perhaps the interface. ASCII doesn't bother me, but a nice graphics mod adds quite a bit in my opinion. And yeah, it's alpha so expect a bug or three.


http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net       .... pretty much everything you need to know, check out "My first fortress".

http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Graphics    - graphic sets

[FatuousTwat]

Ugh... All I have are a bunch of wooden crossbow using dwarves wearing leather armour... I feel like a damn elf.

[bhodi]

Make your crossbows out of bones. Those are way, way cooler. Last call for dwarf names for this round, I'll be starting the next episode in a few hours.