After Action Reporter

I’ve written a book – Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress, available at O’Reilly and Amazon! It covers the current version and takes you from knowing nothing to being a confident Dwarf Fortress player!

You’ve come a long way, padawan, but don’t worry, I won’t let any stupid angsty teenager come and strike you down because he’s in a tizzy having lost his mum! No, nothing of the sort! Baby Dwarf Fortress managers like yourself will prosper and grow strong like a seedling, going on to bear nice dwarven fruit. And not the Class-C sort of fruit that gets picked and sold on the streets, no, nice, rare, delicious fruit! Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, tutorial 9, Nobles and other layabouts. Get on with it!

Queer Eye for the Straight Dwarf

Decorating your massive housing project should be complete now. Here’s how mine looks. Every room has a bed and a door and the noble rooms (they will need four rooms each, as a rule) are kitted out with assorted stuff to keep any nobles who visit happy. Lets cover off the details.

Nobles (from the “n” menu) generally want a bedroom (assigned from a bed), a dining room (assigned from a table), an office (assigned from a chair) and often a tomb as well (assigned from a coffin). For simplicty’s sake, set up each room in its own contained area and then throw in some decorations to keep the noble happy, like armor stands, weapon stands, containers, statues, cabinets, cages (with their favourite animal in them), that sort of thing. Usually nobles want at least two of most of those items so produce a ton and get placing!

What is all this about nobles I hear you ask? Well, once your fortress gets to a certain size, those purple slacker dwarfs will come to live in your fortress. They usually don’t do much (other than haul stuff) but they do make demands. Their biggest demand is for rooms, which need to be of a certain quality. Quality can be increased through smoothing and engraving the walls of the room as well as adding more furniture, especially high quality furniture.

The other thing nobles do is make mandates.  Mandates are demands by the noble for things to be done, like the production of certain goods, or a ban on the export of certain goods. It pays to try and meet the demands of your nobles or they may go crazy and cause all kinds of problems.

Lets have a look at nobles. Go ahead and hit “n”. This is your noble list, right now it should be very short, but in time it will grow. Chances are it looks like this (click for big):

With a newby fortress only one dwarf is set as expedition leader. As the fortress grows more noble ranks will appear in this list and more positions will be filled. Lets look at the current expedition leader. Hit “enter” and you’ll see info about the current leader. Our dwarf owns 14 objects (mostly clothes and stuff), has “meagre quarters”. Lets assign Eshtan Urdimfash a full set of noble rooms, just for kicks. He’s not demanding any, but we’ll do it for practice. If he were demanding more rooms you would see them in red on the left. If he had a room, but not a good enough room, it would show what he’s currently got and what he’s actually demanding.

Once you’ve assigned the bedroom, office, dining room and tomb, if you go back to the noble list and view our chap you will now see his holdings have changed (clicky biggy):

Next job for you is to assign a book keeper. Usually, if you embark with at least one dwarf with the “appraiser” skill (good idea, by the way), this job would already be filled. But for now it’s vacant. This skill is what makes our stock count accurate (more on that later). Fortunately for us we can chose a dwarf to do the job. They might not be doing a good job at first (having no skill), but they will learn, and they provide a useful function, accurate stocktaking!

So, in the nobles screen use the arrow keys to scroll down to “Bookkeeper” and hit “enter”. Find Eshtan and hit enter, assigning him to this job. The bookkeeper requires an office to work, just as well we just assigned him one, right?

Next, with Bookkeeper still highlighted hit “s” for “settings” (the only noble role you can assign settings for). The screen you’ll see now dictates how much time your dwarf will spend counting. Use the arrow to scroll to “Highest” and hit enter. Eshtan will now work very hard to get all our stock counts accurate!

There you go, a quick overview of nobles. As you play the game more you will have to deal with nobles a lot, but don’t worry, the Dwarf Fortress Wiki should provide you with heaps of tips and advice should you get confused.

Accounting is fun! Really!

We’ve mentioned stocks, but not discussed the stock screen yet, so lets get to it now. Hit “z” and you’ll see this screen:

Lets go over what you’re seeing here:

• Across the top are sub menu options. You can scroll through them using the arrow keys (left and right) and then hit enter to learn more.
• There’s a description of your wealth on the left. We don’t know yet as we need a noble with skillz.
• There are food store stats, but those question marks indicate we really aren’t that sure how much food or drink we’ve got. The bookkeeper should turn these figures accurate fairly soon.
• Then we have population information. Not too interesting I find.

With “Animals” selected, hit enter. You can see all the animals in the fortress on the following screen. This is also the screen you can set animals to be butchered on mass. If you set a few to be butchered a dwarf with “small animal dissection” and “butchery” skills enabled will run off and start grabbing those animals and chopping them up in the Butchery. You won’t need to set anything at that workshop, the butcher tasks gets added automatically.

Butchering animals is a great way to get a lot of food, bones and skin (for tanning into leather) but be careful! If you assign a big list of animals to be slaughtered by the time the butcher gets to the last one the animals may have become someone’s pet. This results in the butcher walking up to the animal, as it follows its master around, dragging it off and turning it into steak. This is somewhat disturbing to the dwarf whose pet you’ve just killed! So, don’t tag too many animals at once. Also, make sure you leave at least one breeding pair (male and female symbols to the right of the pet’s name), or you won’t get any more baby animals popping out, will you?

Now go back to the stocks menu and hit “Kitchen”. This is where you see a list of what your dwarfs will consider using to cook meals in the kitchen when ordered (dwarfs like cooked meals). Remembering that cooking destroys plant seeds, here are some guidelines for you:

• Cooking meat (ie, “cook” is blue) is fine.
• Don’t cook spawn or seeds (“cook” is red”) unless you have way, way too many.
• All plants can be brewed as brewing returns seeds.
• Turn off cook for “Plump Helmet”, you don’t want to cook them out of stock, right?
• Cooking booze is great as you end up magically creating more food than you started with. Trust me on this (or look it up on the wiki).

Good work! Now back out of that menu and chose stone. In the stone menu you see (in red) all the stones your dwarfs are forbidden to build with/use and in green, all the ones they are allowed to use. Scroll through with the arrows and hit enter over every stone that does not have a use description appear on the right. The only exception may be bauxite due to its special magma-proof qualities.

The reason you are doing this is so that the dwarfs have much more choice in the stone they will use to make doors, walls, etc etc. This stops them running half way across the map to get some boring stone when a perfectly useful stone (that just happens to be yellow) is sitting next to them, but ignored.

Backing out to “z” the final menu is “stocks”. This is a master list of all items in your fortress and is a good way to see exactly how much of certain items you’ve got . Until your bookkeeper gets working you won’t get any detail, but trust me, you’ll see heaps, in time.

You can use this menu to manage the items in your fortress more easily. For example, you might find, after a goblin raid, that you’ve got a ton of their crappy weapons lying around, what to do with them? Well, you could add them to weapons traps, or you could find them in the stocks menu and hit “m” for “melt” when they are selected and then any smelter with the “melt metal object” task on will have a dwarf grab the item and then melt it back to a metal bar.

You can also use this menu to “forbid” items. If you have a bunch of low-quality junk you don’t want your dwarfs to use, hit “f” for “Forbid” with the item highlighted and you’ll find they will ignore it. This is handy when setting weapons and armor up for your military as you can prevent them from picking up wooden swords and thus push them to pick up your non-forbidden steel swords!

The last menu “Justice” doesn’t come in to play until we have more nobles who will start wanting to throw dwarfs into jail if they ignore their mandates. Worry about that latter!

Homework time!

You’ve got a tricky job to do now, ok, not so tricky really. I want you to dig exploratory tunnels in EVERY DIRECTION from your living room and the below levels. Try and cover much of the map with your grid of tunnels. We’re looking for three things: 1. Ore, 2. Gems, 3. Magma. You may want to assign another dwarf or two to mining duty, and to make a few more picks as well (at the metalsmith’s forge, under “weapons”). We’ll see what this map is like when we return in Tutorial 10!

The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress – Part 10: “Soldiers and your army”