The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress – Part 14: “Embarking… to your doom!”

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The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress – Part 14: “Embarking… to your doom!”

June 2, 2009 at 10:20 am | In Fantasy, Tutorial | 20 Comments
Tags: Dwarf Fortress

DFtitle14 A while ago I promised a final tutorial (although I’m always open for to pleading for more) on how to use the custom embark feature of Dwarf Fortress. This is a handy part of the game as it lets you customize exactly what sort of dwarfs you take with you and allows you to set their supplies to your exact specifications. Read on for more information!

Embarking the custom way

So you’ve chosen your perfect location, as per the previous tutorial, and now you’re ready to embark. What you want to be doing now is selecting “Prepare for your journey carefully” from the embark menu. You will now be presented with your list of dwarfs and the skills they can access.

Have a fiddle with your controls. The left-right arrows move between the list on the left (dwarfs) and the list on the right (dwarf skills). Select your first dwarf, then arrow over to the skill list and scroll through it. Currently this dwarf has no skills assigned. Find “Mining”, hit “alt+down arrow” and keep hitting it until the dwarf is set as a “Proficient Miner”. Do the same for “Mason”.

You have now made your dwarf a pretty good mason and a miner! Note, there’s a zero next to his name? This means he can’t accept any more skills. Most of the time you’re going to be giving each dwarf a couple of skills, but one or two dwarfs might be given some outlier skills (leadership skills, for example) to ensure you have a broker from the get-go. There are many strategies when it comes to skill selection, we’ll cover some samples later.

Meanwhile, get back to a dwarf using the arrow key. You’ll see at the bottom the “c” menu for “Customize” and “v” for “View”. Hit “v” and have a read about your dwarf’s personality. I usually look for the most ‘friendliest’ and mark them in my head for any possible leadership skills.

Head back to the list (“space-bar”) and then hit “c”. Here you can modify a dwarf’s nickname and profession name. This is handy if you want to make a note of how you’ve skilled each dwarf, or just for your own amusement, of course! Once you’re done there, hitting “Shift+F” or “Shift+G” takes you to a group and fortress menu list. Fiddle around here and come up with a creative name if you want!

When you’re done, (you may have to hit F9 to head back out of the menu), hit “tab” to go to the item list. Many items will be on your list already, on the left, with animal options on the right.

As in the last menu, use the arrows to move left and right and the up down arrows to move through the list. Head across to the animal list and hit “alt+down arrow” a couple of times to add 2 dogs to your party. Go down, add a couple of cats as well. No, make that three of each, then you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting one of each sex. That’s handy for reproduction, so my mum tells me!

“Alt+up arrow” reduces the number of items. Reduce the number of battle axes to one. I usually don’t bother taking two steel battle axes as one skilled woodsman with a single battleaxe is quite enough and getting rid of one will free up some points you can use for other things. As for the rest of the items, that depends on your strategy. For now, hit “n” for “New”. You’ll be taken to a huge menu of purchasable items.

Lets add some turtles to the list of stuff we’re going to take. Meat/Fish is already selected, so scroll across to the right using the right-arrow and scroll down to “Turtle”. Hit enter, you will now be taken back to the main goods menu and you’ll see turtles added to your list. Hit “alt+down arrow” until you’ve got 20 turtles. Note, the points available to you will go down as you do this – your available points are in the bottom right corner and the point cost of each item is listed next to the item.

Lets add some Dwarven Wine the other method. Hit “n” for new, then start typing “wine”. Pretty soon you’ll be left with only one option, Dwarven Wine. You’ll note that the “Drinks” part of the menu is highlighted, you’ll need to use the arrow key to scroll across Dwarven Wine, then hit “enter”.

You can now increase and decrease the number in the usual fashion. Lots and lots of drink is a good idea!

Embark Strategies

You now know enough to navigate around the somewhat confusing menus. But what you don’t have is an strategy for what to buy when you’re embarking. Thankfully, there are some really good ideas presented on the Dwarf Fortress Wiki Starting Builds guide and of course, more ideas over on the Dwarf Fortress forums. I suggest going and reading the starting builds guide, there are some fun ideas there – for example, taking no axes, a little wood and then forging your own axes on site (saves you points for other items!).

Take all the advice there and then think about the location you’re embarking to. If it seems likely to be a frozen waste, you may chose to modify the builds presented as many are tailored for fairly ideal locations. That being said, there are some interesting ideas for builds centered around extreme fortresses too!

When you’ve spent all your points and modified everything you want, hit “e” for “Embark” and enjoy your new fortress!

20 Comments »

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You mentioned on twitter that you’d be putting all the guides together in a PDF. I would really appreciate such a file. I’m trying to get a local group together for a succession game, but they’re all DF newbs to greater or lesser extents. A handy little PDF I could shoot out to them would be totally awesome.

Comment by Brandon Greenstreet — June 2, 2009 #

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- PDF available here. Enjoy!
  http://www.scribd.com/doc/16071872/The-Complete-and-Utter-Newby-Tutorials?autodown=pdf
  
  Comment by Mysterion — June 14, 2009 #
Any chance we could have one on machinery? It’s one of the more confusing aspects of DF and the wiki doesn’t explain it particularly well.

Comment by Zenshu — June 3, 2009 #

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- I second that.
  
  I must admit I was a little disappointed after reading the magma article because it didn’t include anything on pumps and such (though I did still learn from it). Maybe expand it to include a pumped magma-fall, or an obsidian manufacturing facility, or both!
  
  Comment by Scott — June 4, 2009 #
Thanks a lot for the guides, the game wouldn’t be playable without them, or rather they are much more playable with them.
Just a heads up, 13 isn’t currently linked to 14.

Comment by Michael — June 4, 2009 #

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- No prolem, they were great fun to write!
  
  Comment by TinyPirate — June 5, 2009 #
Agreed on a pump/machinery article! These have all helped my game immensely and made the game all the more enjoyable!

Comment by Ryan — September 11, 2009 #

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Hi!

I hope that everything is going allright with the baby

I just wanted to say that I will be printing this pdf on school on the first chance I have Thanks for it!

p.s. I am an experienced player of DF, hoping to use this to get new insights AND put some friends to play, as far as a manual for DF, this seems to get pretty close!

Comment by Angellus — October 1, 2009 #

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tough you made a good guide , you should mention where should we embark , and what to do if we embarked on a site without moutains

-Grammar Nazi

Comment by Grammar Nazi — December 11, 2009 #

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oh yea , and during the course of the tutoral(for fun only) , i did squash alath so that he will stop mandating glass

Comment by Grammar Nazi — December 15, 2009 #

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i have looked at this game before and disliked it. But now thanks to this guide i have finaly found a good base building game that i will recommend to my friends.

Comment by Animal King — January 8, 2010 #

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First of all: Best tutorial i ever saw. THanks!

(i saw all 14 of them )

Comment by Thomas — January 27, 2010 #

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thanks i just started playing a few days ago when i saw someone else playing. This tutorial is AWESOME!. I was looking at the wiki and stuff and i wondered if you could do some more tutorials. For example can you do like tutorials on Magma Pumping, how to make a waterfall, how to bypass aquifiers and like to use them for waterfalls and as a powersource. Could you basically make more tutorials to expand upon the wiki. It has lots of information, but very little explanation

Comment by dfortbeginner — January 31, 2010 #

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thanks this tutorial set is awesome. It basically teaches everything which is great.

I was wondering if you could make more tutorials on some topics.
Example:
Magma Flows
Obsidian
Aquifiers
Waterfalls
Waterwheels and how to make power from them
Also could you make power from Magma
What is power used for? how is it stored?
If you couuld make magma go in like a waterfountain

How do you make those death chambers and stuff?
How do you take captives and like through them off buildings and stuff?
Can you transport the captives using military dwarfs??? how do you do all of that complicated stuff?

Comment by dfortbeginner — January 31, 2010 #

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I’m thinking of doing a tutorial on pumps, windmills and obsidian farming. We’ll see!

Comment by TinyPirate — June 5, 2009 #

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I must say that such tutorials would be most appreciated.

Comment by Met — June 7, 2009 #

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I would love o see a tutorial on pumps, windmills, etc as well. Please! The wiki is sadly lacking in this area :/ I am currently trying to get a screwpump set up to lift the lava one level & no matter what I do it is simply not working. I have had to channel to get the lava pool the right size but because i channeled I can’t place the screwpump. Bah!!

Comment by Morague — September 24, 2009 #

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OK, I will deliver one! But not right now – the wife is due to have a baby any day now!

Comment by TinyPirate — September 25, 2009 #

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congrats. thanks for the tutorial. i would never have even played this game if not for you. i kind of messed up on the first fortress( flooded an entire level) but just started a new one and im plannin on making a huge above ground city with a safe room in the mountains.

Comment by zakk — January 8, 2010 #

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Awesome! I was planning an inverted glass pyramid once. Maybe next time

Comment by TinyPirate — January 8, 2010 #

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