Dwarf Fortress

I think it's more the fact that I need direction in games. Sure, I love sandboxes, but once the story and missions are over I lose interest fast.

Beat the cliff, join succession fortresses. You have control for a year, during which your job is to fight enemies, keep your citizens safe, and continue making trade goods for the caravans. The game will give you the story by giving you enemies to face and caravans to deal with. As well as character pages where you can see the morale of your people and what they need to be happy.

Think of DF as a story generator as that is what Toady has explicitly said that is his goal.

For more concrete starting directions, here are my starting goals:

1. create a dormitory for the original 7 to sleep while the basics are being set up
2. make a farm
3. establish a defensible perimeter
4. make a legendary dining room
5. dig

I need, like, actual in-game goals, though. I don't really have the motivational skills to get me to do goals I set myself. Probably the reason I gave up with Minecraft..

Just do what those of us who know we're nowhere near good enough to try megaprojects yet do: measure how far you go before the inevitable happens. And by 'inevitable' I mean 'so that's why they say 'Losing Is Fun;' at least I'll have a head start when I reclaim this fort.'

Ehh...That was a given, honestly.

Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

those are in game goals. If you don't have beds, your dwarves will congregate outside and get killed by wildlife or enemies. if you don't have farms, your dwarves will starve to death. If you don't have a defensible perimiter, your dwarves will die and your shit will get stolen. If you don't have a dining room, your dwarves will go insane from having a terrible place to eat.

A legendary dining room is the first luxury, and it's what allows you to do whatever you want without worrying too much about a tantrum spiral.

And if that's not enough, that's what Succession Forts are for. You can read the efforts of your comrades and follow the goals they outline. It's pretty common for the person handing you the fort to also hand you a list of things that need done to run the place well, and I'm sure if you ask for such a list, you'll get one when it's your turn.

Gave it another go like I said, and I've been getting more into it. Sure, I'm still more or less in the setup phase where I'm carving out a basic place to start up the actual fortress, but it's starting to get there.

I like making a treasure hoard of gems and precious metals.

Also: Colosseums for the Forgotten Beasts.

I once had a three-horned fireball spitting dung beetle.

I fed an elf to it.

Slowly but surely making things habitable for Dwarves so they don't have to sleep on the piles of rock they've been hauling all day. Set up a few workshops, got some brews done, working on a decent farm.

Speaking of, anyone know how to make a subterranean farm, to grow Plump Helmets and such?

You need either drain a pound onto a patch of ground to create mud or designate the farming space as a pond and order the dwarves to try and fill it. They will splash water on it and create mud. Draining existing ponds into carved farm areas works much better. Just remember to wall up the hole with stone or metal blocks.

Dig out clay layers or get a bucket brigade going to water rock. I don't know how to do the bucket brigade, so see if you can find some clay near the main fortress.

Hit b, then p, and you can place the farm plots.

And I've never hit the caverns, even on the rare occasions I've actively looked. I might have to use Hack to find them manually.

I usually try to set aside a room in the upper layers of dirt for farming purposes. With an adjoining kitchen.

False alarm. I failed to notice that the soil walls that somewhat-lined my stockpiles were, in fact, made out of soil. Dug out a niche for farming.

Make sure to use the tears of Elves over fallen trees as a fertilizer.

Ran into another problem; All of the Dwarves are complaining about sleeping on the ground/grass even though I designated a dormitory with the right number of beds. I've only ever seen two of the seven sleep in beds at the same time, though.

They're probably still annoyed from having to sleep on the floor/grass once. It should pass in time.

^^^^^^^^i currently have a web spinning forgotten beast trapped in a pit behind fortifications. I drop a goblin in front of it every now and then so it shoots webs all over the room for my silk weavers.

I think I ended up feeding it a total of 15 goblins to lure it into the right pit.

I was posting in a Bay12 thread about playing as other races, and I realized you'd only need a minimum of extra modding above humans to make Elves playable: Mod in site nobles, like with humans, then add mechanics, woodcutting, and carpentry.

Right there you get the minimum for a surface embark. You can use the trees for walls, roofing, and beds, then trade for raw stones to obtain the minimal stone you'd need for defensive works. Three rocks will get you a working drawbridge. Although I don't know whether you can request raw stone. You'd definitely need to bring back the diplomats.

Ah, mods.

I think I have a mod installed that adds in a dragon race.

And ADAMANTINE MILITARY CLAWS.

So, when I build a wall are they supposed to be pillars? Or is there another step I need to do to actually turn it into a wall?

Use umjk to alter the length and width of the wall segment your placing. Place em in a row until your desired length is reached

I meant I only placed down one wall so I could have a door, but it's a pillar instead.

Is that supposed to happen?

Yeah. If you connect another wall to it, it will stretch out