1. Getting Started — PeridexisErrant's DF Walkthrough (2024)

1.1. Set Up¶

Download the walkthrough pack here.

This tutorial uses a pre-configured install of DF, with the samesave and all the extras you need - but no more. If that’s notgoing to work for you, see the guide to Setting up your install.

After downloading the pack, you need to unzip the folder onto your harddrive (but not in Program Files). Then create a shortcut on yourdesktop leading to the launcher or directly to Dwarf Fortress.exe.

1.2. Run the Game¶

Now we’re ready to get going! Click on your new shortcut, hit “Play” ifyou’re using the launcher, and you should get the screen below.

So, you’ve got the game running and enjoyed the exciting ASCII intromovie. Well done! I can tell you’ll go far! Next step is to hitEnter on Continue Playing, which should behighlighted. You’ll then be presented with this screen.

This is the save game list, which gets cluttered very quickly asseasonal saves build up. But for now all you have to do is use thedown-arrow key (not the number pad arrow key) to selectregion1-post-embark. Hit Enter and the game will load.

1.3. First Look¶

Once the game loads you will be presented with this screen. Althoughit’s confusing on first glance, don’t panic! It will all be made clearshortly. First thing though, hit Space to pause the game.Esc backs out of any menu you’re currently in.

Lets talk about what you can see. First up, the screen is divided intothree sections: The left shows the local view. The center shows theaction menu, the right shows the area map. To make things a lot neaterhit Tab, which cycles through various menu arrangements. Stopwhen your view matches the one below.

Now we’re really cooking with gas! Soon you’ll be melting foes withmagma-falls, and drowning goblins in artfully engineered traps! Butbefore then, lets look around. Use the arrow keys to navigate aroundthe local area. You’ll notice the we’ve got a decent amount of space towork with.

While you examine your surroundings you should be able to spot treetrunks and the grassy areas easy enough, same with (frozen) ponds andthe stream and bushes. Other tiles won’t make much sense, these tend tobe the slightly-arcane zones like open air spaces (pale blue tiles, ortiles with dots) and the earth (brown tiles) and slope or ramp tiles (upwardtriangles). The screenshot below should help point those features out.

Key to understanding DF’s local view is getting your head around thefact that DF is a 3D game displayed on a 2D map. To display a varietyof heights the world is sliced into dozens of Z-levels. Each Z-level isnumbered.

If you look on the bottom right of the window you’ll see we’recurrently at level 108. To move between levels you need to hit <to go up, and > to go down. If you go up a level the map willlook like image below. Try it yourself now.

You’ll see that what was black dirt is now grass and trees. It’s likewe’ve gone up a floor in a lift and we’re no longer looking at a slope,now we’re looking across a grassy plain. Below us is open space andtree tops. Make sense? Now, try going back down to 108 and then down to107, a level below “ground” level.

Your view should look something like this. We’re underground now withmostly dirt around and earth between the pool, the tree roots, and therest of the ground. You may have noticed the pool doesn’t appear tohave changed much, but don’t be confused. The difference is that onthis lower level we’re on the same level as the body of the poolitself, at the level above, we’re actually above the pool a littlelooking at the top of it.

Continue having a look around. When you’re done, return to Z-level 108and find the wagon with our dwarves. The helpful graphic below explainswhat you’re looking at.

1.4. Lets get digging!¶

So now what do we do? In Dwarf Fortress we’re usually trying to get abustling community of dozens of dwarves up and running, while fendingoff goblins, the whims of nobles and assorted other evils. To do thiswe need to build ourselves a mighty fortress! Preferably underground.So lets find a cliff face to dig into and get this show on the road!

If you go west (left) from where our dwarves are (using the arrow keys)you’ll see a nice cliff face. Lets dig an entrance into this spot andplan to eventually dig down way underground where it’s safe and cosy.First up, get the map centered around about where we want to dig (shownon the screenshot below). Once you’re ready:

• Hit the d key. You’ll see the menu on the right changes and inthe local view a yellow X has appeared. The menu on theright should show the Mine option highlighted. If itdoesn’t, hit d again, to select it.
• Move the cursor to the edge of the cliff, like this:

• Now hit enter and move your cursor down with the arrow keys. You’llsee that you’ve dropped a flashing “anchor”. This is going to mark outwhat your dwarves will dig. Move it across 20 and up 3 and hitenter, your screen should look like this:

The browned out area shows where your miners are going to come alongand dig. But they won’t act until you back out of theDesignations menu as the game is paused. Hit Esc andyou should see the game unpause and the menu reset to its master list.Oh, when you have the d menu up you can actually click on themap with your mouse and select areas to mine. Some people prefer toselect areas this way.

With the game unpaused you should notice two dwarves race to the cliffface and start digging. With our entrance under way we should alsothink about laying out some rooms for our dwarves to live in, who wantsto spend time out under that hot yellow disk when lovely rock and earthbeckon!

Right now we’re not worried about making our fortress perfect andcreating the strongest entrance, we’re simply trying to scratch out aspace to live! To that end we’ll need three or four rooms off this mainentrance.

See if you can match the layout below by marking out areas to dig, asyou’ve learnt. If you make a mistake you can hit x from theDesignations (d) menu and you’ll note that the menuon the right has Remove Designation highlighted. Now whenyou hit enter and select an area, any area set for digging will becleared of that designation. Anyway, enough detail, on with the roombuilding!

Look at the little dwarves go! Aren’t they industrious! They’re quicklydigging away and leaving a lot of dirt floor behind them. Good lads!Lets leave them to their work while we sort out some other importantjobs.

1.5. Chopping trees, setting up piles¶

Dirt and rocks are handy, but so is wood to make nice dwarven beds, andwe’re short on it right now. To get wood, we need to chop down sometrees. And we do that by designating an area of trees to be chopped.Lets get cracking and clear the trees in front of the entrance.

Designating trees to chop is like designating rocks to be dug, so letsdecimate the local environment!

• Move the map around so you’re looking out front of your fortress.
• Hit d. Hopefully this time you’ll notice the game hasautomatically got Chop Down Trees selected, if it doesn’t,hit t and it will be highlighted.
• Move the cursor to the upper left, hit Enter, and movethe cursor to the bottom right, hit Enter again. Any treesin that area will now be set to be cut, as indicated by them all beingmarked brown.

Although you’ve done well neither man nor dwarf can live on wood anddirt alone! Luckily for us there are plenty of bushes out there loadedwith ripe berries. Lets set some of them to be picked:

• Hit d again and then p. One the right GatherPlants is now selected.
• Designate about the same area as we did with the wood cutting.
• All the bushes will be highlighted now, and when you unpause youshould see a plant harvesting dwarf join the woodcutter.

Your view now should look something like this, note the brown‘highlights’ and fallen logs:

Now lets sit back and watch the dwarves work for a minute! It won’ttake long before our miners have cleared out our temporary livingquarters and our woodcutter and plant gatherer have begun their work.Once the interior space is clear we have lots of work to do, so letsbreak it down into useful chunks.

1.6. Our First Farm¶

Farming is how you will make most of your food in Dwarf Fortress, andit’s important to get farming quite quickly. If food runs out yourdwarves will starve and your game will end prematurely, and we don’twant that, right? dwarves usually farm underground and handily, we havea space all prepared. So follow along, and lets get some tastymushrooms growing for our stumpys to chow down on!

• Find the bottom right room.
• Hit b for the Building menu and then p forFarm Plot.
• Move the cursor to your farm area.
• The screen instructions tell you how you can increase the size, weneed a good 6 by 6 plot, so hit u and k a few times untilyou’ve got a big green grid, like the one below.
• Move the grid around with the arrow keys until it’s in about the sameposition as the one in the screenshot. If you get the size wrong,h and m will reduce the plot.

• Hit Enter and the green area marker will change to a flashingbrown field marker. When stuff flashes it indicates that dwarves are ontheir way to come build the construction, in this case, a field. Andlookee-here! A farmer has come to build our field for us!

He will take a short while to build your field. When you see the dwarfrun off, you know he’s done. Now it’s time to set the field to growdelicious plump helmets all year round.

• Hit the q key. This is the key for Set BuildingTasks and Preferences. Again you’ll notice a cursor on the localscreen and if it’s anywhere near the field, the field will be flashing.You can move that cursor around with your arrow keys, this is usefullater on when you need to select different workshops and buildings.
• You’ll note that on the right the menu now shows you specific taskdetails associated with that field, like so:

• What we want to do is set Plump helmets as the food to beplanted every season. You can see on the top right of the menu we havethe various plants we could try and grow and in the middle area we havethe different seasons. Right now Dimple cups are selected(but not highlighted, note) and the season is set onSpring, as it’s Spring currently. We need to change thesesettings.
• Now comes an important skill! Menu scrolling! Using = (notthe down-arrow), scroll down through the list to Plumphelmets and hit enter. You should now see Plump helmetshighlighted. By the way, -/= is the way to scroll inmenus; DF usually uses - and +, but having to use the shift key getsannoying.
• Good work! But right now we’ve only set the spring planting. It’stime to set the planting for Summer, Winter and Autumn too. To do this,with the field task menu up, hit b for Summer and then scroll toPlump helmets and hit enter again. Hit c for Autumn,set Plump helmets and then d for Winter, repeatingyour selection. You may have noticed that what you can plant changeswith the seasons, but don’t worry about that for now.
• Hit Esc to back out of the menu and resume the game. Yourdwarves will quickly begin planting in your new field, well done!

Now we’ve got a field down hopefully none of your dwarves will starve,go crazy and resort to eating rats, or each other. Pretty soon you’llhave a few seeds in the ground and your farm will begin to look a bitlike this:

Oh, by now you may have noticed the announcements along the bottom ofthe screen. This is generally because the game wants to let you knowthat something important has happened. You can hit space to let thegame resume, or hit a to see the alert if you miss it at thebottom of the screen). Hitting Esc will take you back out of thealerts menu and resume the game.

1.7. Stockpiles¶

While you can just leave all of your dwarves’ stuff strewn around thecountryside, it’s much more efficient to have it all inside near whereit’s needed. You may have noticed your farmer dwarves running in andout of the fortress to grab the seeds that they need (when they flashbetween their icon and a little red dot (the seed icon) you know theyare carrying seeds).

This is where stockpiles come in. They make everything more organised.A stockpile for all our food and seeds right next door to the farmwould probably be pretty handy, right? We don’t want the dwarvesrunning across the map to get a bite to eat or a seed to plant, so letsmake a food stockpile inside!

• Find the room opposite the farm.
• Hit the p key (for “piles” of course), a cursor will appear.
• Hit f to select Food, we want to make a foodstockpile, after all.
• Move the cursor to the bottom right of the room, hit enter, move itto the top center and hit enter again. You have now set that space as afood stockpile, well done!
• Hit w to make a Wood stockpile, and place it onthe other side of the room.
• After a few seconds your spare dwarves will start moving food inside,you’ll see barrels and bags being hauled and pretty soon the stockpilewill look something like this:

You don’t have much room inside the fortress yet, so no more piles fornow. In time you’re going to want to put stockpiles everywhere to helpmanage your production and resource gathering. For now, well done,you’ve got food production up and running, you’ve set up a stockpile,you’ve set wood to be chopped and plants to be gathered and you knowhow to do some basic digging! You’ve come far!

Before reading Chapter 2, how about setting some more plants to be gatheredand more wood to be chopped. Then, head to the next installmentand we’ll learn all about workshops, bedrooms, dinning rooms and stairs! Itwill be ever so exciting, I promise!