Find a layer of stone of a colour you like and pick this for your living area. *Expand your fortress spine to 2x2 staircase tiles horizontally by 10-20 vertically. *When this square is excavated, build a mason's workshop, a carpenter's workshop, a fishery and a craftsdwarf's workshop in your hobbit hole, choosing stone as a building material (don't worry that the craftsdwarf's workshop won't be built yet). *In the first layer that is stone, designate to excavate a 5x5 square to one side of your staircase (as opposed to around it, or you will have problems later): this is your first quarry, and later on will be a barracks. Build a down staircase, and then a vertical column of 10 or so one-square up/down staircases. When the farm plot is built, designate it to permanently grow plump helmets in every season. Next to it, build a 3x3 farm plot (it's a building). This will keep your dwarves busy for a while, and will mean that your fisherdwarf isn't leaving fish lying around to rot. Create in one corner a 5x5 food stockpile. *Advance time until your hobbit hole is excavated. *Create, outside, a refuse stockpile and a wood stockpile. Turn off hauling labour on your miner dwarves.

Mark a large (10x10 at least) square area around this staircase to be excavated: in times to come this will be a stockpile but for now it is your hobbit hole. Find an area with soil rather than rock, not too far from your river. Later on this will be demolished and paved over, but right now the priority is to get a hobbit-hole going. *My first fortress entrance is a down staircase. SITING THE FORTRESS AND SURVIVING YOUR FIRST FEW DAYS * STRIKE THE EARTH! Embark on your journey. Then move the starting area around until it actually contains the river. You can get by without any of the things I want, but either of the things I *don't* want will kill you dead unless you know what you're doing.

I'm looking for at least one soil layer (preferably sand), a river, flux stone and metal, trees, no aquifer and a biome that is not evil. * Picking a site: I use the search function.

You want one anvil, two picks, one axe (trees are cut down with battle axes), one bucket, one crutch, 2 thread, 2 cloth, 1 male cat, 1 female cat, 10 of each alcohol, 20 plump helmet (it's a plant, and is worth its cost), 5 of each seed that isn't plump helmet spawn, 1 of each type of fish, and then use up the last of your points by buying 1 each of as many types of meat as possible. * Picking equipment: All equipment should be the cheapest possible. One is a fish cleaner, jeweler, architect and mechanic. Two dabblers (low skill levels) as follows: One is a grower, brewer and cook.

Five specialists (high skill levels) as follows: Two are miners and nothing else. * Picking dwarves: Sell one of your axes so you can afford skills for your dwarves. The one thing I change from the default controls is that I rebind numpad '*' to move up a Z-level and numpad '/' to move down one. Not including the user interface controls, the only way to learn those is to tool around doing things (the mysterious UI incantation 'umkh', by the way, means that those four keys are used to control a cursor somewhere on the screen). It's all organised around a central staircase and most journeys your dwarves take will be relatively short. The concept is that the fortress is horizontally compact and each layer will eventually be specialised for one particular thing. So I'll describe the first hour or so of a fortress kind-of by the numbers, just to give you an idea of what I do.

Dwarf fortress trading right column