Some Neighbors may be Towers, whose inhabitants are necromancers and the undead. A Neighbor is any Civilisation of a dominant race that would reasonably know about your new settlement and have diplomatic relations with the Civilisation you represent, which is selectable in the Your Civilisation tab. You will notice that there are several informative screens besides the default screen showing various properties of the area, including your Neighbors. While searching your map for a good site, hit the Tab key to change the display. Just be aware that it is one more thing you will have to deal with, and choose your climate accordingly. This can be anything from a minor inconvenience to a major pain, depending on circumstances. In temperate or colder climates, above ground water will freeze during the colder months. Speaking of water, take a look at the Climate. It isn't a necessity, as there are other sources of water on most maps, but only oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, brooks, aquifers and some cavern layers contain unlimited quantities of the stuff and of these, rivers and brooks are by far the easiest to deal with. Having a brook or river on your site will make things much easier. You could dig down to the first cavern level and chop down giant mushrooms for wood, but even the uppermost cavern level often contains far more Fun than a newbie can handle. Also you need to be able to make charcoal, which requires wood. Dwarves like to sleep in beds, and beds are only made from wood. It is also possible to have areas that have no aquifers at all, which may be preferable for those who don't want to manage fluids in and around their fortress.Īlso, you will want to avoid sites that have no trees.
Light aquifers flood much more slowly, however, which makes it much easier to breach them and get through to the useful stones and ores beneath.Īquifers of any type will need to be walled off to prevent flooding, which can be accomplished by either building or smoothing walls around damp stone. This may limit the amount of stone and vertical depth you have to work with in the early game until you have a method of draining them.
Heavy and varied aquifers may be extremely difficult to dig into as they constantly emit lots of water that can make mining difficult and potentially interrupt or even drown dwarves. This makes things a challenge because it's harder to figure out what you're going to get for metals.
Making effective use of the Z-axis will make your fortress vastly more efficient, since dwarves have to walk shorter distances to do their tasks, and it will also make your fortress vastly more fun, since building small protrusions off a central stairwell puts significantly less stress on the pathfinding algorithm and therefore your framerate will be higher.īoatmurdered looks the way it does in part because there was no Z-axis at the time and in part because it was a succession game with several startlingly inept and several pretty good players.What sort of stone you have on your map is important, but you only know if you have soil, clay, a metal (ore), more than one metal, an aquifer, or flux stone. When building my forts, I try to limit sprawl as much as possible. Note that archers at the top of the cliff can still shoot down, so you'll want to wall off the sky. Consequently, you can either build your entrance on top of one of those, or you can make an unclimbable cliff from scratch. The only place you can find unclimbable cliffs in the current version is around chasms, bottomless pits, and open-air magma.