I'm visiting in-laws for Christmas so instead of playing Dwarf Fortress I've been wanting to write up a list of 🔥HOT🔥STRATS🔥 that I've learned since the Steam release. This will be spoiler-free for major surprises but it may prevent certain aspects of !!FUN!! from taking place.
Embark Location Tips
Some options for picking an embark location can be a little mysterious! Here's some general info I found relevant:
- The list of races with their distance determines if you'll be visited by said race. Elves send caravans in the spring, humans send in the summer, your own dwarf civ sends in autumn, and goblins, uh, don't send caravans
- For steel you must have both Iron and Flux Stone Layer present
- For farming you want soil, sand, or clay. These layers also can make it faster to get started underground because they can be mined out much quicker than stone.
- A lot of things that you typically build with wood can be built with other materials but certain things REQUIRE wood, like beds. If you are embarking someplace with little to no trees be aware of that!
- Aquifers are very common but doesn't necessarily need to be a deal breaker like I was lead to believe.
- Light aquifers are pretty easily dealt with.
- All an aquifer means is a tile that periodically spawns water.
- Light aquifers trickle water very slowly
- If you smooth the walls of the aquifer they will stop. If you want to punch through an aquifer layer, dig stairs down one layer, smooth the walls around the stairs, repeat until you're on a z level that isn't leaky.
- If you want to use magma furnaces right off the bat just make sure a volcano overlaps with your embark area.
- If the area contains saltwater you will get a warning and this means ALL water on the map even from aquifers will be undrinkable. This is scary but overcome-able! Two things:
- Dwarves don't need water if they're un-injured.
- Salt Water drawn from a well is drinkable in this version from my testing. I did not ultimately need to follow the desalination guide on the wiki and indeed it didn't work.
Embark Loadout Tips
What do bring is subjective! But here some useful things I learned.
- A breeding pair of war dogs is a nice line of defense for some of the earliest annoying dangers at the mouth of the fort. They don't need food and will continue to procreate so you can have a doberman squad! Bringing regular dogs is cheaper and you can instantly train them to war dogs.
- Bring a breeding pair of cats to take care of vermin automatically. For cats and dogs you need to pay attention to when new ones are born. From the creatures/livestock menu you can mark for slaughter or geld if you have a butcher's shop. Geld all but 2 males and make puppy stew if the population gets too big!
- You can use nest boxes to collect eggs from birds. You could use chickens but why do that when you can use turkeys! Turkeys lay way more eggs, provide more meat when slaughtered, and even provides a hide for leather!
- Grazing animals require that they are pastured on grass by creating a pasture zone outside and assigning the animals. This includes animals like reindeer, yaks, and cavies, but it doesn't include pigs! Pigs don't need food and will live and procreate quite happily in a hole in the ground. Bring a breeding pair for a tasty source of bacon, hides, and milk!
- The default item loadout has things like crutches, stepladders, and wheelbarrows. You can save a ton of points by just throwing down carpentry and crafting stations and making them yourself. If you're going someplace with low wood, embarking with 25 logs is cheaper than bringing a wheelbarrow!
- Silk is cheaper to bring than cloth, literally half as much. Replace those 5 cloth bags with 10 silk ones!
Getting Going: Settings
Before unpausing there are a few settings I always go for:
- Under Labor->Standing Orders->Other there's a setting for Everybody Harvests. YMMV but this lead to my limited dwarf labor bandwidth getting eaten up by everyone harvesting. I set this to planters only. I set it back to everyone harvests after I get a few migrant waves!
- Under Kitchen, I disable plants from being used in cooking. Plump Helmets, when cooked, provide no seeds, which will delete your farming ambitions. I also disable drinks from being used in meals until I have a reliable drink income.
- Under Labor, I assign two dwarves to be dedicated planters. Getting farm plots going is an early goal.
- The game will assign one dwarf to be a Fisher dwarf which means that dwarf will run off on his own to go fishing. Fishing can be a good source of food at the start but it may be very dangerous to have them traipsing around the wilderness with a super rod. Personally I remove the fishing designation but if you want to use it just be aware of this!
- If you have the aforementioned grazing animals (you may have some randomly that you didn't ask for so check the livestock screen!) Go ahead and make a pasture zone around the wagon and assign them so they don't end up starving to death underground.
Getting Going: Early Goals
- Goal #1 is getting everyone and everything inside and out of the elements. Having soil layers makes some starter rooms easier because they mine out fast and don't drop stone everywhere. I try to get a space for underground farming ready and I dig down to start getting some stone for some future craft projects. You need some basic spaces for throwing down the earliest essentials.
- If you didn't bring logs and have trees or cactuses nearby you can go ahead and queue up some woodcutting. Don't get overzealous here though. Box selecting a giant area of trees might lead to all your dwarves hauling wood through wildlife danger for months.
- First workshops down are carpentry, stoneworker, and craftsdwarf workshop. Build a single wooden chair or rock throne. Place this nearby and create a 1x1 office zone. Open up your Nobles screen and turn your expedition leader into your manager, broker, and your bookkeeper. Assign them to that office and you now have access to work orders!
- The work orders screen lets you order items to be made without interacting with the shops directly and you can also add conditional repeats. It's time to make some stuff:
- 10 beds, you can set these up in a dormitory zone for for the meantime before you get your bedrooms going
- 10 wooden bins, repeat daily if empty bins is less than 10 and logs greater than some reasonable amount. Bins stack a ton of small items into single tiles and you want a steady supply!
- 10 wooden barrels, repeat based on available empty barrels. You need a steady supply for drinks and food soon! If you are in a low wood situation, consider making rock pots instead.
- 10 wheelbarrows. Don't neglect these! Wheelbarrows make hauling stone and furniture much faster so it's good to always have some on hand for when you make some new stockpiles for those things!
- 10 Rock doors. Throw one of these down at the mouth of your fort for a single entry point that can be forbidden to keep everyone inside in case of danger. You're going to be needing a lot of doors for most bedroom designs and they're also handy for refuse stockpiles and birds nest rooms.
- 10 Rock nest boxes. If you brought birds!
- On each workshop you can assign a specific dwarf to be the owner of the shop and this is a good idea to ensure that specific dwarves level up to legendary in their fields. You only have 7 dwarves to start so you want to be careful about not double or triple booking your dwarves this way, just be sure to throw some new migrants from each wave at your workshops to help get their skills going.
- For farming, you can plant your underground dwarf seeds in any soil below ground. It's important to know the difference between all the dwarf seeds! In short, Plump Helmets, Cave Wheat, Pig tails, and sweet pods can all be brewed into booze. Pig tails can be processed into thread which you may want instead. Quarry bushes can be processed to leaves for food and Dimple Cups are only for processing into blue dye.
- ~50 farm plot tiles at max efficiency can supply a large fort so don't go crazy with plots. I do 5 2x5 plots.
- After making the plots, you need to define what to grow for each season so take the time to say up what to grow for each season for each plot or else they be left empty when the season changes.
- Set up a stockpile for seeds near your plots so your farmers don't need to travel. IMPORTANT: Disable barrels in this stockpile. Using barrels will put bags of seeds into them and cause problems when multiple dwarves try to access one barrel.
- If you're cool and brought birds, queue up your nest boxes and make a nice big room with a pasture zone in it and assign your birds in there. You can place your nest boxes in the zone and start generating tons of eggs. If you want to expand your bird population, put some of your nest boxes behind doors and forbid them after a hen goes in there to incubate. Open it back up after the chicks are born!!!
- An early area to set up us a 5x5 or larger Meeting Area and designating it it as a no-specific-deity Temple. Dwarves l o v e the temple and will hang out there above anywhere else.
- As I said before, add a bunch of beds into a dormitory zone to stop your dwarves from sleeping on the ground to start before your start making bedrooms.
- Put some tables and chairs in a dining hall zone, preferably near your food and drink stockpiles. For extra credit add a stockpile for mugs and order some rock mugs from the craftsdwarf.
- Throw down a still and queue up a repeating work order for brewing drinks, a kitchen with repeating order due simple meals, and build a butcher's shop so you can geld the extra male dogs and cats and butcher any unwanted livestock.
- Finally, you can get a decent amount of valuable items ready to sell for the first autumn caravan by plopping down a jeweler workshop next to your craftsdwarf shop.
- Set the jewelry to cut gems on repeat
- Set the jewelry to encrust finished good with cut gems on repeat
- Set your craftsdwarf shop to craft rock "crafts" on repeat. This will randomly create all the different kinds.
- When mining, click the yellow arrow on the right side of the bottom center of the UI to open the advanced mining options. If you change the ALL option to AUTO, mining designations will only affect ore and gems AND they will auto-mine any of the same type they find after they mine. You can use this to rapidly find a ton of gems in the layers below your fort.
- All of this together you'll have a ton of great encrusted crafts to trade to the first caravan for whatever you need. Don't forget to build the 5x5 trade depot with 3-wide surface access before autumn!
More General Strategies
- Specialize your stockpiles! By a wide margin the vast majority of time spent creating goods is spent hauling items from stockpiles. Put non-economic non-ore next to your stone crafters, put ore and flux next to your smelters, have your coal accessible nearby, etc.
- Multi tasking! Don't wait for your miners to finish carving out your dining hall, try to start processes and then move on to queueing up other things at the same time. If you're really maximizing what all dwarves are doing you can have a pretty robust economy by the time your first dwarven caravan shows up in autumn.
- Steel requires smelting iron into bars, then the iron bars + flux + coal into pig iron, then the pig iron + iron + flux + coal into steel. This sounds complicated but it's easy to set up with repeating work orders.
- Iron comes from hematite, limonite, and magnetite, smelt as much as you can find
- Create a stockpile for flux which is chalk, calcite, dolomite, aaaaand limestone and marble?
- Both steps require 1 coal (either charcoal or coke) for carbon regardless of if you are using a magma smelter (a regular smelter will need an additional coal for fuel) If you're on a volcano map you won't have access to Coal or Lignite which both process to 9x fuel. You can embark with bituminous coal for an early start or request them from caravans.
- Each steel job ends up requiring 2 iron bars, 2 flux, and 2 or 4 fuel, to create 2 bars of steel.
- When creating bedrooms en masse, if you have a bed queued into an enclosed space (even with a queued door) you can designate multiple bedrooms at once. Change Paint to Multi in the designation window and box drag all your queued bedrooms. This will auto create an empty unclaimed bedroom for every enclosed room. Much faster than designating one at a time! This works for tombs too but I don't usually fully enclose every coffin.
- If you create a repeating work order for brewing drinks at your still, be conservative! Dwarves drink 5 drinks per season, 20 per year, and each brew provides 5-25 drinks. When your fort is small you can set up a repeating order for 1 brew per day and be good for a while!
- New trees should start appearing about 3 years in.
- Your dwarves will wear through their clothes within the first 5 years, make sure you have a stockpile of new clothes that you've been building from the start instead of suddenly realizing your have none with 200 dwarves to clothe.
- It's really simple to figure out the total amount of potash needed to fertilize all your farm plots each season. Create some work orders to burn logs to ash, and turn an adequate amount of ash to potash every season (click the clock to change the repeat interval to seasonal). Finally on your farm plots mark the "fertilize every season" checkbox.
- Lastly, don't neglect to set up tombs with empty coffins. You can make them automatically assign as needed. Big thing to watch out for here is sometimes the body is unrecoverable. If this happens you need to build a rock slab, have a stone crafters engrave it with the victims name at the stone crafters workshop, and then place the slab anywhere to memorialize the fallen. If you don't, the fallen may get mad.
Been at this for dinner and two movies and can't think of anything else so we'll call it there! I hope this helps new to medium players! Let me know if any of it helped and if there's any favorite tips of your own!



