Dwarf Fortress Basics

How-To create a functional, basic draft of a Fort that will allow your dwarves to live relatively happily while having their basic needs met autonomously. This is by no means an efficient, well-oiled machine but it will help you get the basics down.

What is DF?

It's a... sort of... colony sandbox simulator? You're going to build some kind of home for some dwarves. They will need food and drink, but that's about it. Dwarves might get upset sleeping on the ground, but the only things you need to keep your dwarves alive are food and drink.

Create Your World

Importance of variations in World Generation

(most important ones underlined, as far as dwarf survival is concerned)

World map size:
Not a huge deal. Larger worlds will have more varied sites for making forts. Smaller worlds might get cramped and living far from other races can be beneficial.

History Length:
Not a huge deal. How long creatures and civilizations have been keeping on keeping on.

Number of Civilizations:
I'd keep at Medium or lower unless you want neighbors.

Maximum number of sites:
Not a huge deal. How many distinct, named locations appear on the map. Keep it lower for a more untamed wilderness and world.

Number of beasts:
I'd keep at Medium or lower as too many means more frequent visits by giant monsters focused on destroying your fort. This is a sort of direct difficulty setting.

Natural savagery:
Savagery determines just how wild the wild can get. Higher savagery makes things like necromancers, vampires, were-monsters, and giant creatures prevalent. The lowest savagery makes your world a perfect Eden where only normal-sized rabbits and wolves live.

Mineral occurence:
This determines how many minerals there are, density, and complexity. Setting Everywhere will ensure there aren't barren wasteland areas. You need metal to make stuff.

When in doubt, just use the default options for the original intended player experience.
Personally I use Large worlds, 250 years of History, Medium civilizations/sites/beasts/savagery with minerals Frequent.

Find Embark Location

Using the "find embark location" button you can search for specific features in the world like rivers, metal, etc.
The only completely necessary ones include a source of freshwater like rivers, flux stone to create steel later on, a metal to make weapons/armor out of like iron, and a metal to make expensive things out of like gold/platinum/silver/aluminum. Aquifers make digging kind of difficult for new players so I would set that to "No". Setting it to "N/A" means that you don't have a preference either way, so "No" will ensure they aren't in the desired location.

Example:

Navigating this map thingy to find your desired location:

After you press "Begin" and it stops searching the world, use the

• MIDDLE MOUSE WHEEL click and drag to pull yourself around the map
  
• RIGHT CLICK to exit the search parameters and zoom out of the map
  
• LEFT CLICK to zoom in
  
• HOVER MOUSE over a tile to see what can be found there

Try to avoid hostile neighbors!!!

Friendly neighbors are great but hostile neighbors will actively raid you. Elves are friendly but literally consider cutting trees to be murder, so they may impose restrictions on you if you don't want to war them like capped tree fells.

Prepare for the journey carefully (or not!)

You are allotted a preset number of points to spend on dwarf skills, animals, bags/clothes, literally everything besides the number of dwarves you start with. Don't even worry about preparing your first run unless you're following a strict guide. Just go with the "Play now! Start immediately with default skills, equipment, and animals" as skills are easy to acquire and it gives you all the basics.

Disable Cooking with your Drinking materials

Click the hammer on the bottom-left bar to open up the Labors tab.
Select subtab "Kitchen" ---> subsubtab "Vegetables, fruit, and leaves"

Click the little

to turn it from green to red and disable cooking with plump helmets. You will use these mushrooms to brew alcohol. Cooking items raw won't return seeds to plant more with, yet brewing will produce new seeds. This makes it harder to run out of brewable mushrooms in the future.

Time to start digging!

Hopefully there is a nearby slope to start digging into! If so go right ahead but assuming you're in a completely flat area, dig a staircase downwards into the ground.

Dig out some large areas which we'll use as stockpiles for the time being.
Create a Meeting Area in the center of your Fort or somewhere you'd like your dwarves to hang out.





Having hallways/corridors that are multiple tiles wide allows for more foot traffic and less cramped dwarves.


I like to start a new, single floor for most types of crafting. Later on you can build specialized areas for crafting but in first few years it's nice to enjoy the simplicity.

Start by carving out large wings from the stairway, each wing supporting crafts that require different resources, one for gems, one for economic stone and ore/metal crafting, one for wood and bone/pearl/horn/etc crafts, and build additional large rooms off these wings for more stockpile space.



You can set each stockpile to allow only its area's specially tailored materials, like setting the Stonecrafting area to only allow non-economic stone whereas the Metalcrafting area will have economic stone + metal ores. Take it a step further and designate only furniture/finished goods made from the respective area's material.

Work Orders (hotkey: o)

Finished goods including doors, jugs, beds, thrones, goblets, etc can be manually created one-by-one but Work Orders allow you to automate your dwarves. You will need to assign a dwarf to the Noble/Administrator role Manager for Work Orders to take effect.



Assign Work Orders for beds, chairs/thrones, doors, fine meals, drink from plant + fruit, and stone blocks. Assuming you have material, your dwarves will continue making these items forever until their stocks reach your desired levels.

I order a minimum of available 15 beds, 15 doors, 15 chairs/thrones, 15 empty barrels/bins to keep a steady supply. When you make 15 new bedrooms you will use up the supply and the dwarves will automatically replenish your stocks.




For food, I make a Work Order to Prepare 10 fine meals as long as we have less than 400 meals. Once we have enough basic food, another Work Order comes into effect to Prepare lavish meals as long as we have equal to or more than 400 meals but less than 1200 meals so we don't waste our stocks of raw food.



With a solid collection of work orders like the list below, your dwarves should create more as you use them.

Farming + Animal Husbandry

Farming is wicked easy. Build a few 5x5 farm plots, set one to always grow Plump Helmets year round with which to brew drink, and set the other to producing other crops. Above ground plots will allow you to grow fruit/oats/vegetables where underground plots offer... underground crops! Later on, we will create an underground river which will allow us to move mud onto stone and make vastly more efficient farms.

Animal Grazing Pastures

Animals will roam the entire fort including your crafting areas, bedrooms, eating areas, they really don't care where they are and grazing animals will accidentally starve themselves if they aren't wandering over grass.

Pastures allow us to assign a specific area we'd like our animals and livestock to stick to. Fences aren't necessary to create a pasture, but fences may keep out predators. Flying predators can swoop in and attack your livestock, so a longer-term solution is required to prevent unsolicited loss-of-life.

Creating an Underground Pasture on soil using Cavern fungus

To easily keep animals fed underground where there is no grass to graze upon, we need to expose our fort to the fungal spores of the deep caverns underground. The spores will take hold all over your fort the second you unearth a cavern, despite the great distance between the caverns and your fort's loamy soil.

To begin, dig a 1x1 or 2x2 staircase far, far from your fort's entrance. Dig the staircase about 40 tiles straight down until you hit a cavern. As soon as you unearth the cavern, build a floor over the staircase to prevent underground monsters from spilling upwards onto the surface. Now, fungus will slowly spread all over all soil tiles within your fort.










Create a pasture in a very large room filled with soil and your livestock will now be safe from the wild and elements! Fungus will grow over time and eventually fill up the entire dirt area.

Animal Taming + Training

Animal Taming is kind of funny and I generally try to avoid the practice. Animals will breed automatically if a male + female cross paths on the same tile, so large pastures reduce the chances for a pregnancy and small pastures increase the chance.

Wild aggressive animals you catch will never be fully tame. You can reduce their aggressiveness only temporarily, before they eventually revert back to their untamed selves. The trick is to breed them when fully tame, to produce tame children who will never revert back to their wild variant.

To fully ignore this whole system, just trade with the elves who often sell caged animals. Every animal the elves have for sale are fully, permanently tame. You can get any kind of animal as well from these elves, including giant rhinoceros, coyotes, jackals, giant elephants, orangutans, tigers.

What animals might you want?

It's all personal preference but some animals are objectively more valuable than others.

Milkable:
Alpaca, Cow, Donkey, Goat, Horse, Llama, Camels, Pig, Reindeer, Sheep, Water buffalo, Yak

Can be sheared:
Alpaca, Llama, Sheep,

Trainable:
Dog, Dragon, Roc, Elephant, Cheetah, Eagle, Jaguar, Leopard, Lion, Tiger, Panda, Gorilla, Grizzly Bear, Mandrill, Polar Bear, Giant Bat, Giant Cave Swallow, Jabberer (Tarn Adams dreams of creating a dwarven society that lives in harmony with Jabberers)

Lays eggs:
Birds, Snakes, Echidna, Lizards

War/Hunting Animals

Many animals may be trained for war and hunting. War animals deal more ☼lethal☼ attacks and hunting animals are X..x..stealthier..x..X..

I exclusively train war animals and pasture them outside the entrances of my forts. If kobold thieves try to sneak in to steal our valuables, they must first make it past the coyotes and war dogs.




If you find yourself lucky enough to get a hold of a war tiger or some other savagely ferocious trainable creature, consider assigning them to your Mayor or Duke as a personal bodyguard that also makes them very happy.

Building Wells and a Fortress-Serving Water Supply

Dwarves are going to get sick of using the river for water very quickly. Immediately, actually. If you really want to avoid building a nice big underground water supply, consider building a well ASAP on the surface.

Creating an underground waterway

Start by digging a 3x3 stairway from the surface near a river, straight down until you are beneath your current plans for your fort. Dig all the way to the side of the map. You'll notice that you can't dig the wall out on the edge of the map.









You CAN smooth the stone on the edge and with smoothed stone, you can build fortifications into the stone. These "fortifications" aren't what you might think! They're slits in the wall that your archers can shoot out of but more importantly, these slits allow gas and water to travel through them. Your river can now safely flow out the side of the map as opposed to flooding your Fort and killing all your dwarves.


I like to channel deeper pits where your wells will be for extra water storage if you decide to close access to the river later on.


Once the plans are finished and your dwarves have dug the entire trench, made fortifications, and dug pits for your wells, dig a single tile out between your trench and the river to start the process.





Now your dwarves will have access to water from their most active locations including their bedrooms, major crafting area, and temple locations. Other important locations that may require a water source include hospitals and dining halls.

Farming Underground

At some point it would be wise to dig large areas out for farming. By utilizing levers attached to floodgates, you can spread water over stone, then close the floodgate to prevent any more water from coming in. The water will dry up, leaving mud which you can use for farming.

Farm plots created this way are ~75% more efficient overall than soil near the surface. I can't find the statistic online that describes the official ruling but I did find vague proof in-game that states...

Underground Farming using your Dwarf-made Water Supply

To create an underground farm plot on stone tiles, we must push water across the stone. After the water passes and evaporates, it will leave behind mud. It does not matter if the water supply ever came into contact with soil. The mud *magically* appears behind water from any source upon evaporation.

Farming underground on these created mud tiles is superior and vastly more efficient than farming above-ground or on soil found just beneath the surface. I can't find any statistics regarding just how much more efficient it is besides a screenshot found above stating above-ground soil is "poor soil (cavern is best)".

Taken straight from the Dwarf Fortress wiki page on Farming[dwarffortresswiki.org]:
"Underground farming is not restricted to soil layers and caverns; underground floor of any material – rough stone, smoothed stone, ore, gem – can support subterranean farm plots once there is a layer of mud covering it. See irrigation for tips on getting the right amount of water to the farm plots."


Materials needed:

• ~3-5 floodgates (stone/metal/wood/glass)
  
• ~10-15 mechanisms to create levers and connect to floodgates (stone/ore)
  
• 1 grate to construct a wall/floor grate to prevent intruders coming through the water supply
  
• patience and a backup save prior to connecting your farm project to the water supply in case of botched attempts

Sometimes it can be difficult to make dwarves do what you want. Sure, they'll mine and cut wood, but it's totally possible that none of your dwarves are looking forward to operating levers or helping you fine-tune their livelihood and they'd rather be praying to their gods or making babies. It can take some time and luck to flesh out your project, and this is one reason I like to avoid making a tavern/temples for a while.

Farming Underground, Getting Started

We'll assume you have not yet built an underground water supply since I'm lowkey writing this section weeks later on a new embark *cough* *cough*

We need to dig a 2x2 or 3x3 staircase two or more tiles away from your water source. Dig these staircases straight down relatively far, at least past your current Fortress bottom.





Dig from below the water source to under your Fort, then to the edge of the map. You'll notice that you can't actually mine the tiles on the edge of the map. You can, however, smooth them and engrave fortifications which are essentially slits in the wall. These slits allow gas and liquid to pass through, but not solid material or creatures. Allowing the river to flow through these fortifications prevents the likelihood of flooding our Fortress.

Water pressure is very real in Dwarf Fortress. Moving water from up above will force the water to at least the z-level the water came from. There are ways to slow water down, like by mining diagonally-only, but I'm lazy and the wall fortifications work great.





Our next step is to dig rooms around the sides of the river. We will connect each room to the river with a floodgate separating the doorways. The left side of my Fort will be used for farming and the right side has a deep water pit that I will use for long-term well usage. Another small room will hold all levers assigned to the floodgates, or in other words, a sort of maintenance/river operating room.

It's important to keep floodgate levers in the maintenance room as far disconnected from the waterways as you can to prevent flooding! In my setup, IF the fortifications built beyond my farm don't to handle the water supply, water could potentially build and push up the nearby staircases. My maintenance room is accessed by a separately connected stairway and I could easily pull a lever, close a floodgate, and stop the entire flow.

[Rangerklypf [CG]]

@Thirstymuppet incoming numbered list

Pasturing Animals Underground Using Cave Fungus:
1. Expose Fortress to "Caverns" layer by digging staircase down until reaching the naturally generating caverns layer, of which I believe there are three, which are like 40-120 layers under the surface.
2. After you get the message that pauses your game and says something like "you unearthed a cavern" then your fortress is officially exposed to this fungus. You do not need to actually continuously keep this connection to the caverns open to allow fungus to spread across your map. The fungus *magically* starts growing fortress-wide wherever there is exposed dirt/loamy soil underground, and this fungus is effectively underground grass. You never have to re-open access to the Caverns to re-acquire the fungus growth. It's permanently unlocked even if the Caverns staircase is only open for 1 second lol

[Rangerklypf [CG]]

@Thirstymuppet

3. Seal the passage to the caverns immediately after exposing your fortress to the caverns. If you build/dig this passage outside the fortress proper, then I would just immediately close it and try to forget you ever dug it out, as it's no longer necessary. The caverns extend throughout the entire world so monsters freely appear and disappear from your map as they travel the world. If you leave it open, a horde of trolls or giant cave spiders could discover your stairway to the surface and quickly escape, killing any dwarves you might have out cutting trees, hunting, or trading on the surface.
4. Build large underground area near the surface to assign animals to graze on the fungus that will grow. I like to build farming workshops and assign daily shearing/milking/cheese-making jobs to them and if you're really into making stockpiles, make a nearby stockpile for the related byproducts.

[Rangerklypf [CG]]

@Thirstymuppet Ah yes, exposing our fortress to the fungal spores to allow us to pasture animals underground so they can eat the fungus which will grow on soil tiles underground. I explained the process or concept a little more in the paragraph previous to the one you quoted, but I'll elaborate in a nice lil numbered list.

Essentially you dig the hole to caverns, then seal it up immediately. By the specific wording "build a floor over the staircase" I mean literally "go to the very top of the staircase and construct floor over the top of the staircase." They'll use the nearby stone from the initial digging of the staircases and it should only take a few seconds to complete if your miners are allowed to build things.

[Thirstymuppet]

Great guide. I'm fairly fresh so bear with me. I'm just wondering what you meant by "As soon as you unearth the cavern, build a floor over the staircase to prevent underground monsters from spilling upwards onto the surface."

Do you mean to dig out a big ass room just below the surface that will somehow trap monsters that climb the staircase? Why wouldn't they climb out onto the surface? Or does the big ass room go just above the cavern and again, why wouldn't the monsters climb up the rest of the stairs.

Finally, what advantage have I gained from accessing this cavern. It must need to be linked to my fortress for the spores to spread but I'm not sure how.

Thanks.

[Randi Rabbit]

I don't understand how to set the Lavish meals to >=400 UPM but <1200

[Rangerklypf [CG]]

@[ZQ]Mishek Don't worry about it! I appreciate all questions :) That's a common mistake. It doesn't make much sense but it is a legitimate game mechanic, that you can mine every tile on the map except for a one-tile wall that prevents you from leaving the map. Once you reach the edge of the map and there is a stone tile you cannot mine, you smooth and carve fortifications into it. *maGiCaLLy* the water flows through the fortifications and disappears off-screen, even though realistically there would be a solid wall right on the other side.

[[ZQ]Mieliś]

@Rangerklypf [CG]
I tried again and figured out that I had to build fortifications in the UNDUG squares right next to map's edge.
I misunderstood the part of the guide that describes this, sorry.

[Rangerklypf [CG]]

@[ZQ]Mishek My first guess is that the water pressure coming inside your base is too high. I would create more fortifications to allow more water to travel through at once and relieve some pressure.

There is an advanced method to slow down the flow of water too, near the source. Instead of building one straight tunnel, dig diagonal paths like a checkerboard to drastically slow down the flow of water.

Check out this video I just found on YouTube. Starting around 7:55 he explains how to reduce water pressure by pushing water through a diagonal space.

[[ZQ]Mieliś]

I built fortifications on the edge of the map for the underground river, but my fortress (floors above the underground river) gets flooded anyway... what am I doing wrong?

[Poxlox]

Awesome, thx