Strange Things Are Happening

Last time I started bedrooms for my dwarfs, as well as an office for my leader.  Now I have to add some other necessities: basic workshops and a mess hall, complete with a kitchen and a still for booze!

While I'm doing all this, 7 more dwarfs show up for a grand total of 22 dwarfy citizens.  For some reason half of the migrants are fisherdwarfs, so it looks like we'll be eating a lot of fish...if they ever catch anything, that is.

A bit later, I get this message:

Oh goody, my first strange mood!  Since he's a clothier, and I don't have a clothier's shop yet, I hurriedly construct one; another dwarf has the labor enabled, so I don't have to mess with that.  I learn that he wants some silk cloth...which is unfortunate, since you can only get that in caverns, as far as I know, and I'm nowhere near ready to explore caverns.  Needless to say,

 

...and a short time later:

Well, make that 21 dwarfy citizens.

While this has been going on, I've  been visited by a caravan and a couple of kobold thieves, which I mostly ignore.  I don't have much of anything worth trading at this point, or anything really worth guarding for that matter.  I'll get around to traps and defenses soon enough.

Mining Is a Dwarf's Best Friend

Welcome back to my wonderful blog about dwarfs and special characters!  Now that we found a site, I am going have my dwarfs start building their fortress.  First, I have to find a good entrance location.  In the far southwest corner of my chosen area, there's a little hill that I can burrow into:

I have no idea if this is strategically good or bad, but let's start digging. At this point I mine out some stairs and rooms, get some basic stockpiles set up, and start to grow some food.  The farm turns out to be the biggest challenge of the process, as there is no soil at my entrance.  I can see that there is soil by the river, so I mine a long tunnel east until I reach softer earth and start growing some plump helmets.

I continue to design my fortress, building some basic workshops, when what's this?

 

Oh, how exciting!  More dwarfs to order around!  I end up with eight more dwarfs, for a total of fifteen, more than doubling my slaves citizens!  While their professions are generally not very useful at the moment (e.g. Beekeeper), all of the migrant dwarfs have some combat skills, which should prove helpful later.  (The best part is that I now have an Axedwarf in my piece of the Cheerful Axe civilization.)

Now that I have even more dwarfs, I'd better make some bedrooms for them all, so I dig a few levels farther down.  In the process of mining the rooms, I discover no less than two sources each of microcline and native gold, and a source of kimberlite, rubicelle, and pyrite——all in the space of a 20x20 square of living quarters.  This is what happens in a world with frequent mineral occurrence, I suppose.

And now that my dwarfs have their bedrooms, I think I hear my own bedroom calling my name.  Until next time!

Dwarfs, Embark!

Greetings!  Welcome to my blog.  This page is devoted to a Let's Play of Dwarf Fortress.  For those of you who don't know, Dwarf Fortress is a complex sandbox game that uses ASCII art instead of modern graphics to display objects and landscape.  This may seem odd at first, but the interface allows for all kinds of detail and complexity that otherwise wouldn't be practical or even possible.

My dwarfs' world

Well, let's get started.  First thing's first: generating a world.  All worlds in DF are procedurally generated, with various biomes, named land features, and a full-fledged history.  I'm actually pretty bad at Dwarf Fortress, so I'll be utilizing the quickstart guide on DF's wiki.  The guide suggests a medium world with a short history, very low savagery, and somewhat abundant minerals, so I'll do that.

The world generated for me is shown to the right (you can click on it for a full-sized image).  You can see some deserts to the north, a frozen wasteland on the southern edge, and all kinds of forests, mountains, rivers, and other features in between.

The next step is finding a place to call home.  The game has a neat search function that allows you to pinpoint what you want, so I used that to find a location that looks fairly easy to deal with.  The dwarfs will be starting out in the northeast corner of the map, the Domain of Dawning on the Bulbous Continents.  The Domain is a hot, calm area of the map with lots of trees, a stream, and plenty of metals and other resources for my dwarf party.  And of course, there's a mountain to burrow into.  I choose the Cheerful Axe as my civilization, and set off to conquer the land with my Seven Dwarfs.

See you next time!


(Since I'm fairly new to DF, and to blogging, I would appreciate whatever comments you may have about my game and my posts.  However, please refrain from posting any sort of spoilers to the game that might ruin my Fun.)