New Dwarf Fortress

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
Oh, I found out how to dig a mine.. the third or fourth try. You have to have a hillside to dig into, I don't know why you can't just dig down.

JM

You can:

Designate a spot as "Stairs downward",
then go to the z-Level below and designate the same spot as "stairs upwards" (or "stairs up-/downwards" if you want to dig deeper).
I already make a large central main shaft that has nothing but stairs running up- and downwards to the deepest levels of my mine )

As for getting your dwarves to do anything:
Look at your dwarves in view-mode (which you get with the v-key)
and set their preferences accordingly (you can even get your dwarves to do work they´re not skilled at yet [they will gain skill if the work for a longer time in the job, however {which is why only one of my 7 dwarves gets "Mining" in the beginning, the others learn by doing }] ).
If you don´t do it, the dwarves will do the job which they think is most important (often this is hauling stones ) and not the job which you want them to do
(it is especially recommenden to set all activities of your fortress broker to "No" as soon as the dwarven trading caravan and the liaison arrive in autumn; if you don´t do it, well, the fortress broker thinks, that everything is more important than trading with the caravan and conducting a meeting with the liaison, even throwing refuse into the waste bin )

Oh and for water:
Doors (in a closed state) are your best friend. Also keeps you from flooding your fortress if you somehow uhm underestimated the water pressure when you´re about to dig a canalisation for your well

[Jon Miller]

I tried to do that

JM

[Jon Miller]

I Drowned because the ice melted before I finished my cave so that I Could move my stuff inside.

JM

[Proteus_MST]

Strange, just made a little test by just letting one of my spare miners dig a stairs into sandy ground, from the surface one level down. It worked well.
Are you sure the location where you wanted to dig the entrance was reachable for your dwarves (often there are lots of spots not reachable, for example if your dwarves start on top of a steep cliff).

Dwarves that drowned because ice melted.

That´s makes me curious about the map you chose. Never had a starting location where my dwarves were in any danger of drowning.

[Jon Miller]

I started on the ice

now I am trying to convinve my dwarves to not make things out of platinum (thety already made a mechanism, I can still sell the mechanism if I forbit it right?).

JM

[Jon Miller]

One of my nice dwarves, after I hasked him to learn wood owrking (and he was happy), locked himself in the woodworking room and starved himself to death (Well, he really died of thirst, but still). I tried everything I Could do to get him to swithc..

I have a lot of stuff to tade, but no one will become a mason either. and I need to build my trade depot.

JM

[Proteus_MST]

They made a machanism out of platinum?

That´s unusual,
sounds like you set platinum in the economic stone restrictions window (that can be reached by the z-window) to green.

Yes, I assume you can still sell things made out of this material if you set it to red. The window only determines if you allow your dwarves to abuse the economic stones listed for tasks, for which you normally use ordinary stones. Therefore I have almost all stones listed there on red
(even if you have everything listed there in red, you can still make things out of rock, as long as you have ordinary stones (like gabbro or orthiclase) available, the window contains only ores and economic stones, that normally don´t get used for making rock crafts or other thigns out of rock [and even if these things are redded out, your dwarves will still melt them into metal bars if ordered to do so, so if you just want to use these ores for making metals, you can just keep them in red ])

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
One of my nice dwarves, after I hasked him to learn wood owrking (and he was happy), locked himself in the woodworking room and starved himself to death (Well, he really died of thirst, but still). I tried everything I Could do to get him to swithc..

Did he get into a fey mood?
(in this state they don´t care for anything else except the thought that, "if I build it they will come"

Originally posted by Jon Miller

I have a lot of stuff to tade, but no one will become a mason either. and I need to build my trade depot.

JM

Hm, get one dwarf and disallow everything but mason and architecture, I assume this woill get the job done.

[Skanky Burns]

Originally posted by pg
Sure it's useful, but it's not that hard to look over your own stocks if you have your stockpiles sorted instead of mixed.

Few people would sort stockpiles to the point where different seeds went to different piles, and if you are sorting stones to different piles then you clearly have more than enough dwarven labour-hours to spare to do some bookkeeping and make things much easier to see.

[Skanky Burns]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
The ice just melted and everyone downed.

JM

Losing is fun!

[Jon Miller]

It happened to my party that way trying to reclaim the site also... apparently the ice melts very soon after you get left there.

JM

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
Few people would sort stockpiles to the point where different seeds went to different piles, and if you are sorting stones to different piles then you clearly have more than enough dwarven labour-hours to spare to do some bookkeeping and make things much easier to see.

And of course he must have lots of space for his stockpiles available, to be able to keep his stockpiles free from bins and barrels as he wouldn´t see at the first look what´s in the bins and barrels of his stockpile

[Proteus_MST]

Oops,
looks like (unlike the informations I have read in the wikipedia and the bay12 forum) the economy now starts automatically even if you havent minted a single coin yet.
I think (in my case) it is either the created wealth reaching more than 400k or the exports surpassing 10k (which both held true at the time the tax collector and the hammerer arrived).

Pity, I hoped I could delay the introduction of economy and stay in a communism for some more years

[Jon Miller]

Well, I had a laison go beserk and kill 3 of my dwarves.. but then I got immigrants. I thought he was done speaking with me and was wondering why he hadn't left.

JM

[Skanky Burns]

While caravans are around, I tend to have my mayor and my broker with no jobs selected. That way they actually do the important jobs rather than dumping refuse and such.

I'm expecting the economy to start in my fortress as soon as my next wave of immigration hits. I've minted like 4 different types of coins total so far. I have no idea how much is enough. I do suspect that the rooms I currently have provided for my dwarves are too expensive for their jobs, so I will likely need to create more rooms with less stuff in them.