Dwarf Fortress Builds

Eventually, you set out with your dwarves. You'll jump right into play with a wagon sitting there on the ground, and your seven dwarves milling about aimlessly.

Typically, you drill into the side of a wall, start hollowing out bedrooms, dining halls, workshops and such. Sometimes you have to drill straight downwards because you're on flat ground. On rare occasions, you'll be forced to build upwards because of wet ground, but the concept is much the same.

But I'm not really going to cover the gameplay much here, more the procedural stuff.

Depending on where you settled down, you might get goblins or other monsters wandering your map on a random regular basis. They're not such a problem, before long your fortress will attract attention not from enemies, but from other dwarves. Depending on how much you send off as trade with the caravans that pass by, the game will start to calculate migrants to show up at your doorstep. You can't say no, you can't send them away again, you just get more dwarves. They each have a random selection of starting skills, typically a few conversation peices to let them interact and one or two related skills of note.

They might not be useful skills, like sope-makers who are trained in something that's not actually implemented yet, but they will have skills, and they'll start work if there's anything to do. Otherwise, it'd be better to assign them to the army.

The army is nessicarry, because once you get about eighty migrants, you run quickly into other things taking notice of you. You'll fall under attack from some of the neighboring groups, often goblins, elves and humans but perhaps even giants, dragons, or zombies. They surround your fortress and simply wait for an opening to attack.

Seiges add an important and interesting aspect to the gameplay, because they forcve you to think of a lot more than just profit when building a fortress. Doors, traps, defendability. They're not too simple, either. Depnding on the type of enemy you're fighting they might come with archers, or be able to smash down doors, or if you're lucky they'll be too heavy for your drawbridge. Once the seiges start, then they keep on showing up regularly until you've been wiped off the map. Sounds fun, huh?

There's another aspect of the game outside of gameplay worth mentioning, dwarven economy. Once you hit a hundred dwarves, dwarven nobles will start showing up, and dwarves will stop acting as an anarchic community and more like a proper city. They'll need to be paid, they'll want to buy things, they'll have mandated items to make/not make and so on. It adds a whole new dynamic to the game when you stop mining new rooms and your miners suddenly can't afford to pay for their rooms and are forced to sleep on the floor.