You don't happen to have an earlier save to share so that we can build alongside you this episode do you? Or is there a seed or anything like that in DF? Thanks for the help, this will really help me get started!
I decided I wanted a well near my hospital, so I rerouted a surface river down 10z. I underestimated water. I flooded down half of my fortress, but two brave heroes, Edem and Catten were able to dig out a drain. Unfortunately, in order to complete the drain they had to mine into the flooded area and were overcome by the torrent. I lost several more in recovering their bodies. They all now share an honored memorial tomb so no one forgets their brave sacrifice.
@@crowhaveninc.2103 Agreed. TIL light aquifers don't absorb water... After I channeled a river through my tavern and down into said aquifer. I had a floodgate in place for maintenance and the like. By the time I realized my fort was flooding... It was too late. On the plus side, they were sooo happy before they drowned!
"Beds are only made of wood" tell that to the dwarvern child that had a strange mood in my fortress and made a platinum and armadillo bone bed worth around 10k
You are the reason that I'm actually able to understand and enjoy this absolute gem of a game! Thank you so much for all your work and helping newbies like me
7:40 I laughed for a good while when you gave this explanation about treefelling as it reminded me of my first ever contact with the Steam version of DF. I am a veteran player, had a *big* DF phase that eventually mellowed out for a few years. Seeing the game again pop up in Steam fueled my desire to play again. And so I did. Being a bit rusty and having a brand new UI I figured I might aswell just play the tutorial and see how it was made. Generate a small world, and I get the "play now?" tutorial prompt. "huh, no carefully prepared embark... I guess the tutorial will choose a sensible starting location and wagon. Let's see how it goes". So i clicked it. The game set me up for a tutorial partly on an evil biome right off the bat. Instant _fun_ as they say. So there I was, trying to relearn the game before anything worse came to happen. First thing first, chop some wood from the untainted part of the map aaaand... a dwarf has died crushed under a tree. Not a minute into the tutorial. And before I had finished laughing it reanimated and killed the rest of the crew. I can only imagine if this happened to a new player, what a legendary first contact it would be with the good old mantra that *losing is fun*
This happened to me however my dwarves died to yaks they were trying to hunt. It was my very first fortress and I laughed extremely hard seeing that they came back and killed everyone else
Following your tutorials, I have run into a hilarious problem: the starting fortress is so nice that I am flooded with guests, migrants, etc. to the point that nobody does anything because fortress government can't keep up with everyone and they all just hang out in the tavern, brawling and leaving the corpses to stink up the dancefloor. Nobody seems to care enough to move them or stop socializing; they just get into worse and worse moods.
After literal years of reading the wild stories about the game but never having the mental fortitude to play it, I picked up this version and it's amazing beyond every description I've heard. My first death: a cat climbed up a tree, couldn't get down so it started making so much noise the carpenter tried to kill it. It failed to kill it with a crossbow so it tried to climb up with a ladder. Once up there it also got stuck because a monkey stole the ladder. They started to starve, so they decided to eat the cat, raw. It became bloodthirsty, jumped down the tree, broke both legs then and attacked a child, which killed it with a pinecone, and grew up to become the mayor.
At about 36:00 you may want to ensure that you have a 3 tile wide path to the trade depot so that your visiting traders can bring wagons. Otherwise they will only appear with what they can carry because the wagon can't make it to the depot.
his next video showing the trade, the coming trader seemed to be able to unload his item in his trade depot despite it is not on the surface (must be entered from stair), I thought this will fail the trade???
I much enjoy these videos, but they could really benefit from having selectable chapters on the specific topics you address. So you can get to them quickly. With the amount of information in Dwarf Fortress, you'll want to re-watch a lot of specific things a few times before you've fully absorbed them. To do that, you have to know what information is in which video, and where exactly.
My favorite thing was my first attempt on steam edition, my wood cutter lived a total of 3 mins before he cut down a tree that was next to a small pond. He decided that instead of being on the safe side of it (where the land is) he would try to wade into the water to get a good angle (I was trying to chop it not even for the wood, it was just in the way of my irrigation system and I wanted it to look nice) He cuts the tree, the ground gives out, causing him to sink in and drown. I only noticed when it said he’d been missing for weeks. I completely ignored the surface collapse because it had been happening all over way to the north of me so I figured it was just the area next to the river.
A friend of mine really got into this game and wanted me and other friends to also get into because he plans on making a Succesion game like Boatmurdered with us. It's the first time I'm playing a game with such complexity and it's hard to get into as a newcomer. I can honestly see how I can really enjoy this game, but it would take a lot for me to be able to actually enjoy it without feeling stressed. This video series will really help me ease into it and enjoy the game as a whole. Thank you for this.
As someone who voted for you to continue the old fort . . . . after you had decided to make the new one technically, but, wanted to say, this is a fantastic tutorial and a great start for a new series. Always looking forward to more, whatever you do; finally being able to play this game has been a treat, everything you've done has only made it better.
You should really use the button next to the minimap with an arrow pointing at an x to set the f key hotkeys to zip your view around the fort to preset locations, allows you to set a location and press the corresponding f key to instantly move there, instead of just f1 to take you to the wagon. You can quickly move up or down floors without needing to scroll up and down.
What you might want to do, for those of us who want to play along exactly, you might want to provide your seed so we can get the same map as you. Just a thought, loving these tutorials man.
This series is a lifesaver. Your ability to clearly and simply explain how to navigate this game has helped me get my footing more than anything else I've found so far. Thanks!
This is so helpful. Giving context for why you are doing something in a play through is so clarifying. Only been playing this since the Steam version so a total noob, but you've really helped me get started! Keep up the good work!
Love your's videos! Something very interesting would be if we could pass some saved games files of our fourtress and you could give us opinions about them, i have a couple of fortresses that have staigneted and don't know why exactly that happend, besides would be amazing and hilarious to see some begginer fortress of people with the eyes of a experienced player!! Pd: sorry for my bad english, greetings from argentina!
Thanks for the video! Didn't know about the ability to specify the amount of mugs in the meeting room. Well, that, and the 7000+ other things in DF I still have no idea about.
Is it typical to just have stone strewn about your base? I see it on a lot of the new steam tutorials and it drives me crazy. Just wondering if people make huge stockpiles of stone, or maybe process it in some way rather then have it taking up space all about your base
You can turn it into blocks to help get rid of it, since blocks can be stored in a bin it's much more compact (until you get into making quantum stockpiles, at least). And blocks are great for making walls and buildings from. Though you do need to be a bit careful as some things can only be made with stones, not blocks.
Just an FYI, I found that dwarves will smooth floors under beds, just not some other stuff like pedestals and statues. I only bring this up because in the other video you specified beds couldn't be smoothed under. Thanks for the videos man. o7
You channel and videos are fantastically detailed and informative, as well as very impressively thought out. Thank you for all the effort you put into this.
Thank you. I never heard of Dwarf Fortress before the Steam launch, nor did I ever hear about a RU-vidr/Twitch named Blind. I love your easy to follow guides and you really make this game more manageable to play. Thank you for providing me (up until now) with 20h of fun Dwarfen gameplay and the hours of content about them.
My lady bought me this game for christmas, and i immediately searched up tutorials for how to play. Your videos were the first i saw, so i hopped in a bath and put it on. Fantastic and informative content. I will most likely be watching all of this series. One question i do have, because it for whatever reason super irks me - How do you remove those piles of stone and gems all over the place? Its making my ocd go nuts lol
You could use the feature to find embark locations to show it to people and show how can anyone look easilly for a spot that have the attributes you seek, like Aquifers.
I don't know how they are useful. I found some, but they are sort of limited source of water. Some are even drained or they are able to fill 10 floors of stairs, but when i want to use diagonal digging trick to make a well, it sometimes contains 1/7 of water.
@@pavelperina7629 From what I understand, the aquifer will slowly generate water, so even though it's only showing you a 1/7 water, if you get several aquifer tiles feeding into a reservoir, you will be able to accumulate infinite water, it's just fairly slow unless you were to have a lot of aquifer tiles feeding it. If water is only 1/7 it will evaporate though, so it may be evaporating faster than it can accumulate, so you have to reach the tipping point to start gathering water.
Started playing DF a couple weeks ago and have been very slowly learning. I already learned SO many things from just this first video in the series. I can't wait to watch the rest and get rolling. Loving all of this. Thanks so much for all the time and effort!
Excellent work as usual. My first experience was back around 2011 for a week or so before life kept me from continuing to play. So these have helped dust off a lot of memories and skills
Is there a benefit to putting the boundaries of a zone a square past the walls? Noticed that there's a few times where you added squares in the empty spaces between mined out zones
Hello just started playing dwarf fortress, and out all I guide videos I saw this one of the most comprehensive beginner guide. I actually feel confident playing the game thank you!
Splendid tutorial! I've lost 2 dwarves while chopping trees, b/c somehow *within* the trunk there was a hidden floor of soil... depending on agility I think, sometimes the dwarves get away when it collapses - then I get a message telling me they're fighting a dust cloud... sometimes they drop unconcious and recover, and then there were those I lost... I haven't been able to figure out how to spot the danger beforehand, though. Looking very forward to learning more about aquifers!
I’m now about 50 hours in and still picked up a few good tidbits here. Putting the trading post underground never even crossed my mind, for instance. Or turning off visitors at that first tavern to quash them. Also I’m still building too much like a human, straight lines everywhere (other than temples and tombs), I really need to think more like a dwarf, it’s so much more aesthetically pleasing. Finally, I’ve had garbage luck with maps. It’d be terrific to get a waterfall. This map is great. Good video, good process, good format.
I've made like 6 different worlds striking Earth and getting lost and messing things up. Enjoying your work. Thank you. 20 years of development. I'm stoked.
A solid foundation for newcomers and that's coming from one! I did manage to figure out a good chunk of this on my own, but didn't think to dabble in the nobles menu let alone build a throne. I'm particularly happy I figured out farms, managers, brokers and bookkeepers since they're clearly core features. Maybe now I'll survive more than two years and get a start on my military! Seriously, cheers for this my man.
I wish you had included a world seed. Trying to set something up as similar as possible so I can follow along and have everyhting I need but damn does world generation not want to play nice!
I'm excited to watch through this new tutorial. Understandably, the first time around some things were left out such as getting all productions ready in preparations for Strange Moods. But all of your content has been extremely useful for me to get started with this game. Can't wait to see where this fort goes. When it does inevitably go to shit, I would love to see that as well!
Love building with Jet and Chalk for that black & white look ;). Also, had a whole layer once with rock salt and microcline (pastel pink and cyan) my fort was sooo beautiful!
I love these kind of tutorials and explained videos with jump cuts in them. As some one who never played the game I want to get a feel for it, how the early mid and late game is like. Hope you continue this series
Finding a good embark point is a nightmare. Even when using the find an embark feature. (It needs a trees option for one thing) I find a great one, says it has soil, dig around for 2 hours and never find ANY soil. I start from a new point, a huge amount of soil. I dig around for 2 hours and don't find a single stone. I start from another point, good mix of stone and soil, and dig down 3 layers. After trying to dig to the 4th layer for 2 hours, discover the 4th layer is ALL water.
I'd say that this tutorial is way too fast for a basic "first look tutorial." Remember that you're talking to people who have no idea how anything work at all. Making a quick remark such as "look it up in the wiki" would be an example of how not to be helpful. "Which wiki? What is a wiki? Wait, what did the person say? It went by so quick!" Some other questions I got is: -Does it have to be named soil to be used as a crop? What do you mean "cave farming?" 1/5 of what? Are you spoiling caves to people? -Is there a time limit in the game? Is that why you explain everything so quickly? -Why explain in the video that you started over? Wouldn't that be better as a community message, or explained in the description below the video? -What do you mean by "remove the entire layer?" -What do you mean by "a threat?" Will I be attacked soon or something? -What is "Aquifer?" What is "smoothed walls?" -etc, there's a lot more, really. To me, this tutorial seems a lot more of an intermediate tutorial than beginner tutorial, i.e. not a "Your First Fortress" situation. Still, thanks for the tutorial. :)
I wish I met with this game earlier but hey I find your channel and thanks a lot for the video I'll watch all of the guides and advice you to all my friends LONG LIVE THE DWARFS
Recently got into the game, been using the mussel shells my fisherdwarf has been collecting to flood the market with 10-30 value jewelry (think I still have about 500-something shells not being used in spite of that), so I’ve got a massive amount of cheap items to sell when it’s trading season, and I’m saving the gems for when I start regularly getting masterwork-grade stuff
I've transitioned away from using wood for barrels and primarily use jet if it's available. For reference, stone pots weight one-third as much as a barrel would if it were made of stone. Being the lightest non-economic stone at 1320kg/m3, cut by two-thirds it becomes 440kg/m3. Considering that *most* woods weigh in around 600kg/m3, on average jet pots are considerably lighter. In fact, jet pots are even lighter than ceramic pots; and there are only 5 barrel types that are lighter than the jet pot... feather tree, papaya, candlenut, kapok, and willow. Even assuming you had an abundance of those materials, it makes more sense to me to save those for bins, which cannot be made from stone at all. Also, if you're curious, you can look at a raw lump of stone or log to check its weight and get an idea how they compare. I just made a test pot, then compared its empty weight against the weight of most of my empty barrels.
I have tried to play DF over the last week, and watching this video has inspired me. I have so much to learn, but I honestly want to get to your level of expertise. Looks incredibly fun.
With your video I don't feel so lost anymore. My second playthrough Idk what happened but I lost half my dwarves, my entire livestock and cart instantly after unpausing. I don't understand if they spawned on top of a river or if they were washed away... but it was something with water lol. I'm about to start my 20+ playthrough and I hope I can survive longer this time.
Your video should come with a warning: "Caution!!! If you start playing this game and it sucks you in? It will haunt you till you play it again... Day after day after day after day... You've been warned!" I bought the steam version... Man. I had no idea just how deep and addictive this game is.
Well after doing a nice little test run I am happy to announce that I think I have a basic grasp of this game. Granted, there are still many things I haven't had the chance to do due to the nature of my spawn region. For one, dehydration has been the biggest killer of my dwarves, making up about 90% of my deaths, the other 10% are a mix of dwarves dying to the yearly necromancer siege due to a necromancer tower to my north west and one really huge tavern brawl that killed three dogs, two puppies, a peacock, 4 dwarves, and 2 kids. all of that which occured because one of my dwarves became possesed and because everyone was so shitfaced they decided they were going to beat the shit out of everything in sight. I also dont, or havent found my aquifer and I dont have a river which is why the sieges have killed so many dwarves without actually having to directly kill them themselves. They actually were nice one time and now I have about ~50 Demon wolves which are friendly to my dwarves and kill literally anything that is hostile to the fortress unless its undead, and they keep breading and making more, but I also dont want to deal with making them angry so I am basically kinda stuck with them until I get access to some magma and pump it up to the surface to burn them away. Also, due to how much my dwarves have been staying inside they have been amazingly productive and I went from expedition force to duchy in about 4 years and I am on my way to become the Mountainhome if I can just not be under siege in Autumn.
Me, who couldn't manage to play 'original' dwarf fortress even with a kind of texture adjustment for dos viewing, played gnomoria for years as a substitute, and now getting so many people who are showing Dwarf Fortress and learning some of how it runs.... one word/noise. Squeeeeee~
Quick question, is there a problem with having your fort be closer to the surface if you got stone anyway? I just got the game and I like building near the surface a lot more than just going straight down is there a particular reason for always going down multiple levels right from the start?
I decided to watch this AFTER playing a bit, and boy howdy did I make so many, SO. MANY mistakes already, from single line hallways, to not too deep(albeit I guess Im in some stone?) and more, jayyysus.... probably would be better if I restarted lol.
39 hours of playtime and two other tutorials in, and at only 11 minutes into your video I've already learned some game-changing things...namely, stairways being able to be plotted down multiple levels in one click, and channeling resulting in no crushed dwarves lol
Hi, I am a beginner Dwarf Fortress player. I miss some information in this video. What for are you doing all of this? :) I mean I imagine that you are mining gems for trading, but what is trading for later in the game? It might sound like a stupid question, as I imagine that you potentially get something in exchange or you simply getting money to buy some goods that aren't available so fast in the game or you can't get them on your own, but still it would be nice to get some context on trading. I started playing the tutorial and I wouldn't have an idea that I would need a broker or a different governor to have a correct number of supplies (again useful info, but how besides trials and errors someone would know that? That's some thought regarding the game itself). Also, it's quite useful to know that dwarfs prefer stone walls instead of mud walls. If you think more about that I would imagine that everyone would prefer stone walls, but it's not something relevant at the beginning of the game. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's wonderful that the creator thought about such important detail that other games simply ignore. I would also appreciate more information on what I should be looking for when locating my fortress. The best would be in my opinion if you could explain what problems you expect to happen, so I know that your actions will solve those problems in the future. Also, you say that you cut the trees and elves are going to be annoyed, could you tell us more about a potential problem that can appear due to such a situation? Thanks
I wished you would have explained parts of the UI more. Really don't understand the layers so it's confusing watching you give orders and understand what's happening.
My first ever fortress, one of my main stonemaker died after being haunted. Soon after than, a small king of a hamster with red eyes appears and starts killing dwarf in the forest... but soon after, some dwarfs and visitors starts to transform into this hamster sh*t of a monster inside my fort and start killing the others.. from a population of 100, only 10 survives... is this normal ? How can you prevent this ? i am so afraid to have that again, only to see my fortress destroys after hours of work... PS : your videos is the reason i've start to play, but i need to learn so much things.. thanks !
I'm very new to DF, and have 2 successful forts, one that I retired after 3 and a half years once it started being a bit too unwieldy and my current fortress that's about 4 years old. I had no idea you could make doors and barrel equivalents out of stone. maybe now I won't be constantly hemorrhaging wood reserves trying to make charcoal, doors, beds, bins, and barrels all out of wood.
Do we have the Standing Orders menu, or has that been taken out? I always forbid web gathering, spent bolts and enemy equipment by default using this menu...
He said dig til -10, I did, needless to say I hit 3 caverns and then these small creatures came and wiped all 7 of my dwarves out. Loosing is fun.... PepeHands
Excellent video. just got the game and still working on initial fortress. I got migrants and in no time one of them punched my fisherman in the beany. wtf? Now I got baby dwarves all playing peak a boo in a refuse pit. Visiting traders get pissed off when I try to pawn off dead hamsters and an equitable trade deal.
Hey I know this is probably a noob question but is "blind" just a moniker or do you have a serious visual impairment? I do and I was one of the people who asked a question you used for an interview with Tarn and I have had a longstanding respect for your channel.
Oh. Is baron some sort of accomplishment? I’m still so new to the game I got a baron and baroness and was like psh get this notification out of my face so I can keep building graves for all my fallen dorfs
As this seems to be intended to be a beginner tutorial, why did you not explain what an aquifer is and what's important/dangerous about it? Also, I noticed that you make things out of rock instead of wood whenever possible. Is there a specific reason to do so other than aesthetics / lore?
I have no idea how to even start playing DF, I don’t even own the game yet…. I have no idea what is going on on in the video …. Yet I m watching , mesmerized by the complexity
I started playing 3 days Ago, and I have a 3 years old fortress which still have things on the wagon haha. I guess It's because I'm putting too many orders to the dwarves
About the mugs in coffers thing near the end of the video. It seems mugs inside of coffers are held for staff to serve drinks in. A secondary stockpile nearby of just finished goods mugs of the material you want stored there can fix this and have dwarves serving themselves.
Um. Was the trading depot changed? I don't see any wagon access options. Is a 3-wide path no longer needed? I've been trading for a few years and it feels very different than in classic.
