DF part 3: Preparation

Ugh. I'll fix this momentarily.



Choose 'Start Playing'.



Then 'Dwarf Fortress'.



Then freak out at the mishmash of ASCII characters.

Now calm down. Just keep an eye on the stuff on the right third of the screen... we're looking for a starting location with the following properties:

Temperature: Not freezing or scorching
Trees: Preferrrably woodland or greater
Other Vegetation: Sparse or greater
Surroundings: Not haunted

We also want at least one green-colored layer, and no rows of blue ~~~~'s. A river or brook is also nice.



I find a likely site after a few minutes of searching. Press E to embark.



And I always choose to prepare for the journey carefully.



More options! I set ability points like so:

10 miner (for all your digging needs)
10 wood cutter (for all your wood cutting needs)
6 carpenter/6 mason
6 carpenter/6 mason (for making all the junk you need)
6 grower/6 herbalist
6 grower/6 herbalist (for planting all the food you need)
7 stone crafter (for making a bunch of touristy crap to sell to people)

Then press TAB to bring up the second part...



Even more stuff!

1 copper pick (If you've only got one miner, you don't need more than one)
1 steel battle axe (Ditto for wood cutter)
1 iron anvil (Many strategies have you not take an anvil along, and instead buy one from a trading caravan when it comes around. Since it's worth 1000 loadout points, you could instead take along a full year's supply of food instead. I just take it because I end up needing to burn points anyway.)
70 plump helmet spawn
5 sweet pod seeds
41 pig tail seeds
5 rock nuts
5 dimple cut spawn
5 cave wheat seeds (Lots of pig tail and plump helmet seeds, since that's what I'm gonna be planing, and five of everything else because, while I might not plant them, it's nice to have them in case I do want to.)
31 of each of the four starting alchohols (As I mentioned in Game du Jour, sober dwarves work at half speed, and need access to water. Both problems are solved by always having extra beer on hand.)
77 turtle (Food. Also, eating turtle produces shells and bones, which can be used for several things.)
4 dogs (Dogs are useful for companionship, protection until you get your military up, and an emergency food source.)
2 cats (Cats hunt down vermin and such. Also emergency food.)

And that's that. Next: Strike the Earth!

DF part 2: World Generation

After loading up the game, you're presented with three options:




Create a new world. The second option is for advanced users, and the third option is for really advanced users.


This is good advice.


World generation is like ten times faster than it was a few months ago.

Well, that's about it. Next: Preparation

DF part 1: Setting up

Dwarf Fortress isn't necessarily hard, it just has a learning curve that's more akin to a cliff than a slope. It doesn't help that 70% of that cliff is simply trying to figure out how the game works, either. So to try and smooth things out a bit, here's a documented playthrough of (how I play) the game.

This post is just listing the init.txt settings, and can probably be skipped by most people.

Disclaimer: This is using version 40c. Your play experience may change depending on your version.

Step one: Download the game.
Step two: Extract the game from the zip file.
Step three: Open the game folder, then data then init, then open init.txt.

The game's just fine straight out of the box, but there's a few options I like to change. Thankfully, the init file is well-documented.

My changes:

[SOUND:OFF]
[INTRO:OFF] After playing the game a few dozen times, I just prefer to load up a music player instead and skip the intro.
[WINDOWEDX:800]
[WINDOWEDY:600]
[FONT:curses_800x600.bmp] I like the 800x600 tileset better than the 600x300 one. It's just personal preference.
[AUTOSAVE:SEASONAL] Dwarf Fortress, after all this time, is still in alpha stage (which means there's no guarantee that there aren't any game-crashing bugs). I don't know why this isn't set to at least YEARLY as default.
[PAUSE_ON_LOAD:YES] The game starts paused when you load it up. Useful if you're easily distracted.
[VARIED_GROUND_TILES:NO] This is the one setting I'm changing just for this playthrough. I normally like the mix of punctuation marks that represent the terrain, but it might make for confusing screenshots.
[ENGRAVINGS_START_OBSCURED:YES] See above, but I usually change this one anyway.
[SHOW_FLOW_AMOUNTS:YES] Lets you see how much water remains in a pool at a glance, instead of having to inspect it manually.

And that's it. Feel free to mess around with the init for your own games, this is just how I set things up.

Next: World Creation