Okay, thank you.
So far it's been a week in-game and we've got a storehouse for wood, another for food, and a partially built one for stone. Though the stone one's going to be overly large for its stocks for a long time to come.
This is good.
That one fell in Summer due to dehydration. Cue the next one involving a fortified watering hole and a couple of wells put up quickly enough to be ready before the drinks were out of stock. Now we've got a woodland fort just waiting for roofs and beds.
So what difficulty does everyone play on? I do 1,1 with increasing difficulty, but so far I've never made it past year one before restarting, so I keep getting the trio popping up. And they're not that hard to kill. A Monitor Lizard killed them the first time, and I only lost two gnomes this last one.
I like to run with default monster strength/frequency/etc, but bump metal up to shallow and abundant.
So far I'm having fun with an underground fortress. Though I have to say, games of this genre really need to incorporate a tracking system that allows civilians to see that monsters are busy being mobbed by soldiers, and it's safe to pass a little closer to the beasts to move about their day.
I've had three monsters in my great hall so far, and all the civies get paralyzed with fear and I'm afraid it's going to dehydrate some of them to death. I'm currently working on torches to fix the situation, but I don't know how soon that'll happen.
Default keybind for those actions:
"Shrink" walls: F
Rotate map: , and . (comma and period)
Show darkness: Unbound by default (very useful, highlights dark zones where mobs can spawn in red).
All of these are in the game options: Esc -> Options -> Controls