Lesson Eight - Workflow Orders (Reducing Micro Management)

Lesson Eight - Workflow Orders (Reducing Micro Management)

One of the things that new players are likely to tire from having to do is constantly go back to your workshops to add work orders. While early in the game it's quite easy to keep track of what you need you will quickly grow to a level when you wish someone else could do it for you. 

So that's how the game is actually meant to work. 

While in-game you can actually promote yourself a Manager Dwarf. He will keep a list of all the things you want created and make sure that your workshops work to fill your work orders. 

This is a built in feature of the game... so this is quickly how you do this. 

Press 'n' then 'down' until Manager is highlighted.
Press 'enter' and select a dwarf. Ideally use one with some skills. 
You will need to make an office. Do this by making a small room with a desk, chair and chest (container) in it. 
Once the room has completed click your mouse on the chair. 
Press 'r' to create a study. 
Press 'enter' to set the size of the room. 
Press 'a' to assign the room and assign it to your manager. 

Now at any time from the main menu you can press 'j' then 'm' to access the work order screen. 
Here you press 'q' to create a new work order. 
Now start typing keywords for what you want to do. 
For example type: 'brew' and click enter on 'Brew Drink'. Enter 1-30 for the quantity. 
You manager will now ensure 30 drinks are brewed. 

Now for most people this is an awesome system. But it gets tiring eventually having to keep on top of your work orders so a new system has been added in with DFHack using a tool called Workflow. 

Mod: Workflow
This amazing little tool allows you to setup repeat work orders. You set the min and max levels for the item you want create and basically click go. The dwarves will then simple keep working to make sure you always have the minimum amount of the product you require. 

 For example: Please ensure I always have min 50 beers and max 100 beers in stock. 

This is game changing and is going to make it ALOT easier for new people to get into the game!

The first thing you want to do is ensure the mod is running. With Dwarf Fortress running go to your DFHack window and type: 'workflow enable'. It should return with 'The plugin is enabled'. 

Now back in game click on a workshop to display the following menu:

Press'a' to open the 'Add new task' menu. 
Select the object you would like to setup a work order for. I have selected 'Construct Bed'. 

Once the work order is in the workshops job list press 'r' to set the order to 'repeat'.
Ordinarily this will task a dwarf with making the object as long as their are materials to do so. 

This is where we activate the Workflow tool. 

With a work request highlighted press 'alt-w'. 
Press R (shift-r) to set the range (min-max).
Press A (shift-a) to add the work order to the Workflow Order List. 

A pop up menu will open asking you to specify the details of your request such as what materials to make the object out of. 

You dwarves will now ensure there are always a minimum amount of the items you set-up as long as it is possible for them to do so. i.e. you need to make sure you keep your stocks up of the key materials such as wood, rock, etc.

You will notice a new red 's' appear on many of the work orders you set up. This signifies that the job has been suspended likely due to the min order being filled at that time. 

You do not need a Manager Dwarf for this to function although personally I think you should. It would be nice if they could have added this functionality to the manager so that the game still have a small challenge to setting this up. 

Another feature of this mod is the Advanced Inventory window. This displays all of the items in your fortress and displays various information about those items. 

You can access this window by:

Press 'z' to access the stores window. 
Press 'right' until the Stocks is highlighted and press 'enter'. 
Press 'e' to enter 'Enhanced View'.
You can then press 's' and type keywords to search for items (I have searched for piglet in the screenshot above). 
With items highlighted you can use the key combinations to set orders for dump, forbid or mark for trade. 

Lesson Seven - Mouse Support

Lesson Seven - Mouse Support

Mouse support is one of those features that most new players to Dwarf Fortress quickly wish they had. So long gone are the days no keyboard only controls that for most of us Dwarf Fortress just feels clunky without our handy mouse. 

Well firstly I believe the mouse Isn't really required for this game. I used to wish for it but over time I have come to the conclusion that the keyboard is a lot quicker. 

However... mouse support is improving thanks to Falconne who has been modding up a storm for the Dwarf Fortress community!

The first thing you need to do is ensure the mod is turned on. 

With your Dwarf Fortress game running open up the DFHack Console Menu and type the following:

mousequery edge enable <press enter>
mousequery live enable <press enter>
mousequery track enable <press enter>

Now get back into the game and lets check out the improvements. 

Screen Scrolling - You can now use your mouse to scroll around the map. Simply move the mouse cursor to one of the screen edges and watch the screen move. ad

Mouse Over Information - You can now mouse over any tile in the game to see what is currently on that tile! In the screen shot below you can see I'm holding my mouse over a cabinet in one of my Noble's bedrooms. That tile is a smooth stone floor tile. On that tile is an Ashen Cabinet and in that cabinet is a number of clothes!

You can use this to mouse over all kinds of cool things which will make learning the game a whole lot easier!

Click Support - A mouse without the ability to click on things is not mouse at all! And therefore you can now click on various objects within the game!

Try clicking on the following:

A Workshop - clicking on any workshop brings up the workshop profile menu. This is where you can add or remove job orders. You still need to use the keyboard to make orders. 

A Dwarf - clicking on any Dwarf open up a window showing their current activity and all of their skills.  

An Animal - clicking on an animal brings up the info on that animal. This is great for quickly selecting animals to be slaughtered by clicking on them and pressing 's'. 

Digging / Designating - Yes you can now designate an area to dig out a lot more efficiently with this mouse support. This feature already existed in the original game but it was clunky and most people preferred to use the keyboard. 

To designate an area to dig simply press 'd' to access the Designations menu. From here you should be an option menu at the bottom. Make sure it says 'Enabled'. You can press 'm' to change between Enabled and Disabled. 

Your now ready to start designating!

Press 'd' again to ensure the 'Mine' option is highlighted. Click in one corner of the area you would like to dig out. 

Now click in the opposing corner making a square or rectangle. Note that the area highlighted in orange is now designated for digging. 

You can do this with any of the designation options. In order to activate any of the options below you simply need to press the associated key before using your mouse to designate the required area. 

Mine (d) - dig out an area
Channel (h) - dig out a channel area for water / lava to flow (digs out the tile one Z level down also)
Remove Up Stairs / Ramps (z) - as it says. 
Upward Stairway (u) - create stairs that only go up 1 Z level.  
Downward Stairway (j) - create stairs that only go down 1 Z level. 
Up / Down Stairway (i) - create stairs that bot both up and down a Z level (use these to connect to the top of an upward stair way and below a downward stairway).
Chop Down Trees (t) - highlight a square, all trees within the square will get ordered to be chopped down. 
Gather Plants (p) - highlight a square, all shrubs within the square will be picked for fruit and seeds. 
Smooth Stone (s) - highlight a square, all stone within the square will be smoothened. This is how you start getting your fortress to look awesome. 
Engrave Stone (e) - highlight a square, all stone within the square will be engraved with pictures of the events of your fortress. I love this feature, the drawings (represented by text) can be quite hilarious. 
Carve Fortifications (a) - Highlight a length of stone to carve out fortifications allowing projectiles to be fired through!
Carve Track (T) -  Select a length of floor to carve out mine-cart tracks!
Remove Designation (x) - This ones important. If you make a mistake while designating press 'x' then highlight the area you want to click. Double clicking on incorrect tiles also works. 
Remove Construction (n) - Similar to above except used to remove construction like walls. 

There you go, mouse support has come a long way! Hopefully a few people will find the learning curve less daunting now!

Lesson Six - Dwarf Therapist

Lesson Six - Dwarf Therapist

One of the first applications you want to learn about is most defiantly Dwarf Therapist!

This handy little application hooks into your game and will list your dwarves showing their allocated tasks. You can use this app to look up quite a bit of info about your game but this is going to be focussed on its core ability which is managing your dwarves.

• The first thing to do is ensure you have your Dwarf Fortress game running and a copy of Dwarf Therapist open. 
• In Dwarf Therapist click the 'Connect to DF' button. 
• This will load up a list of your dwarves. 
• using the table you can see which skills are assigned to each of your dwarves. 
• A purple box indicates the dwarf is assigned to complete the listed task. 
• Dwarves that are not assigned to a task will not complete that task. 
• The white spots indicate the skill level in a specific task. The bigger the white spot the better the skill level!

• The goal here is to manage your Dwarves and ensure all of the required tasks are allocated to workers!
• To change an allocate simply click on a box related to the dwarf / task. The box will change colour to purple. 
• Make as many changes as you like. 
• To Commit the changes press the Commit button. 

• In the example above I assigned the Dwarf Imush Matulbomrek to complete the following tasks:
• Small Animal Disection
• Trapping
• Hunting
• Animal Care
• Animal Training

Dwarf management is quite easy in the early days when you have a very small population. Later in the game you can have alot more dwarves and as such this program really shines to help assist with the micro management of your troops!

A really handy feature in the ability to group the dwarves by their current jobs. This allows you to easily identify who is doing what in your fortress. Or more importantly who is doing nothing. 

• To do this use the drop down menu next to the Group By option. 
• Select Current Job
• Your dwarves will now be grouped by Job!
• If you have alot of dwarves in the No Job category consider allocating some more tasks to those dwarves to ensure you have maximum productivity!

Another cool feature with this tool is the tool tip that displays when you hold your mouse over one of the dwarves. This really helps you to get to know your dwarves better! 

You can also browse through the various other tabs to check out all sorts of information. 

For example the military tab displays all of the military skills for your dwarves. 

You can do all of these actions in-game however you will quickly realise its much easier to use Dwarf Therapist. 

Lesson Five - You Have Begun!

Lesson Five - You Have Begun!

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress, the actual game! You begin with a small chapter on your humble beginnings. I actually suggest you read through this as a large portion of Dwarf Fortress's beauty is hidden in the text!

Next you are presented with the game screen!

So your finally in-game. Now as I promised in my first post I'm not going to teach you how to play the game. There are plenty of tutorials online for you to watch read in order to take the next step. 

I suggest you start with the tutorials by FogeyGaming. The following link will lead straight from where we just left off. 

Fogey Gaming Tutorial

There are plenty of fantastic free resources and most people will be happy with those. I do however recommend the following book. It's $15.99 for the EBook but in my opinion it was completely worth the buy. It steps through many aspects of the game in complete detail and to this day I use it as a reference guide when playing

Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress

So now it's time to start learning about the various utilities that are available to make playing this game easier!

• Dwarf Therapist
• DFHack

Lesson Four - Preparing For The Journey

Lesson Four - Preparing For The Journey

By now you have created a new map and located a suitable site to embark on your epic journey. The next step is to pick the skills and items that you wish to start with. 

• You will now be at the screen that allows you to prepare for your journey!

•  Select the LAZY NEWB PACK option and press ENTER. 
• NOTE: This screen is basically allowing you to select from some pre determined embark options (what skills your swarves have, what items you will start with and what animals you take with you). You can set this all up manually in the following screens but this is much easier. 
• Sometimes you will receive an error stating that certain items could not be created at your new embark site and therefore you cannot start with those items. Its usually a good idea to check the list and make sure it doesn't list your picks. You don't want to start without picks!
• You can see here there's now willow where I have embarked so any items made out of willow are not available. If you were unable to start with a pick you should go back and select a new site. 
• Press 'ESC' to confirm and move to the next screen if you get one of these errors. 

• This next screen shows you the Dwarves you are taking with you and their relevant skills. 
• The list in the Red square is your dwarves. You can press the UP and DOWN arrow keys to move between the individual dwarves. 
• The list in the Orange square is the skills selected for the highlighted dwarf. These will be pre selected using the pre determined options that you selected above. 
• All options selected here use up points as a form of currency. Each embark is limited to a pre determined number of points. The points are highlighted in Purple. 

• From this screen press Tab to access the items menu. 
• This screen displays all of the items and animals that you are embarking with. 
• The LEFT menu is what ITEMS you have selected to embark with. 
• The RIGHT menu is what ANIMALS you have selected to embark with. 

• LEFT and RIGHT arrow moves from left menu to right menu. 
• UP and DOWN arrows move up and down each menu.
• + increases your selection by 1. 
• - decreases your selection by 1.
• n is used to open the new item menu. This allows you to select an items to add to the right hand list. 
• This is where you want to make a few modifications. I always take the following:
• Dogs (1x Male and 1x Female) - Can be trained as pets, war dogs and hunting dogs.
• Cats (1x Male and 1x Female) - Will kill vermin from your fortress and help keeps the dwarves happy. 
• Chickens (1x Hen and 1x Rooster) - Unlimited supply of eggs!
• Picks - take at least 2! These are required to dig!
• Battle Axe - take at least 1! There are required to chop down trees!
• Anvil - this is required for later in the game but its handy to have from embark. You use these to make metal objects such as weapons and armour. 
• Seeds - Plump Helmets can be eaten and brewed!
• Alcohol - Dwarves are alcoholic!
• Food - Enough to stop you starving!
• Note: Your pre embark selection will usually have already picked up everything you need except some animals.

• You are now ready to Embark! Press 'e' to begin! 

Lesson Three - Starting A Game

Lesson Three - Starting A Game

Actually starting a game in Dwarf Fortress is enough to scare alot of people away before they even get to experience any game-play. With that in mind this page intends to walk you quickly through a no nonsense setup of a new game. 

You should now have a copy of Dwarf Fortress open. 

• Click 'Design New World With Advanced Parameters'. 
• Press 'ESC' to continue. 
• Press the 'Down' key until the option for LAZY NEWB WORLD is highlighted. 
• Press 'ENTER' to continue. 

• Wait for the world to be created. 
• Take note of the name of the new map in the top left of the window. 
• Press 'ENTER' to accept the new map.

• Note: The map is randomly generated. You will always get different results. The LAZY NEWB WORLD option is designed to create a small map with minimal problems. 
• You will now be back at the main menu. 
• Press Start Playing!
• Press ENTER on the map that you created above. If this is your first game there should only be one option. 
• Press ENTER on the option for Dwarf Fortress.
• You are now at the screen to select a site to embark your journey on.
• You can press the ARROW keys to move the flashing cursor around the Region / World map.
• You should be able to easily identify:
• Trees
• Grassland
• Shrubs
• Mountains

• The goal here is to identify a location that has all of the resources you require. Move the flashing cursor around and notice the information on the right side of the screen changing. It is telling you the details of each site. 

• The information on the right of the screen can help you identify a suitable location. You should be aiming for a site that meets the following requirements:
• Temperature: Temperate
• Trees: As many as possible
• Other Vegetation: As thick as possible
• Surroundings: Calm
• And the site should have all of the following:
• Clay
• Soil
• Shallow Metal
• Deep Metal
• Flux Stone
• You should avoid at all costs a site that has:
• An aquifer
• A site that is coloured purple... trust me your not ready for this yet!
• Note: There is no exact science to this. Just find a site as close to the requirements as you can. 
• Once you have picked a suitable location take a look at the Local map in the top left of the screen. You will note a small 3x3 area that is highlighted. This is the game area. 

• If you have a powerful computer you can increase the size of the game area. To do this use the following hot keys. You will see the highlighted area increase in size. 
• Shift u - Increase Y Axis size
• Shift m - Decrease Y Axis size
• Shift k - Increase X Axis size
• Shift h - Decrease X Axis size

NOTE: This game can be very taxing on your PC. It looks simple but its processing more data than any game you have likely played to date... so don't go overboard on the size of the play area as the game may not run smoothly. 

• You can now position the playing area on the Local map using the hotkeys below. 
• u - Increase Y Axis 
• m - Decrease Y Axis size
• k - Increase X Axis size
• h - Decrease X Axis size
• NOTE: Try and position your game area over a river.

• Once you are satisfied with your location press 'e' to Embark! 
• NOTE: If you increased the size of the game area you ill need to confirm that you wish to continue.
• Click HERE to move onto preparing for your epic journey!

Lesson Two - How to Get the Game!

Lesson Two - How to Get the Game!

There are many different versions of the game out there. They are all free. However, if you are new to Dwarf Fortress you should go straight to one of the Lazy Newb Packs. 

The Lazy Newb Pack is a collection of graphic packs, utilities and modifications that are designed to make the game easier to play. 

The version I have been using recently is a repackage created by PeridexistErrant. This pack has everything you need to get started with Dwarf Fortress. 

DETAILS AND DOWNLOAD LINK

So the first thing you want to do is follow the link above and download the game to your PC. It will come zipped up so you need to extract the file to a folder on your PC. You can then run the Lazy Newb Pack.exe to get started. 

Note: If you don't know how to do the steps above then you should not be playing Dwarf Fortress. Learn how to use your PC first. 

When it loads you will be presented with a small application offering a host of options. 

On the standard options tab ensure the following options are selected. 

Invaders = NO (This stops invasions, good until you get the feel for the game). 
Liquid Depth = YES (Water that is 7 deep is very deep!)
Aquifers = NO (You should learn about these before you turn this back on)

On the Graphics tab select the Spacefox pack and clik Install Graphics. 

On the Utilities tab ensure Dwarf Therapist and Sound Sense are ticked.

You are now prepared to begin your Journey in Dwarf Fortress...

Click Play Dwarf Fortress

Quite a few windows will now open so don't be alarmed. 

Dwarf Therapist - this is an application that hooks into the game and allows you to easily change the jobs assigned to each dwarf. Ignore this window for now. It wont do anything until your actually in a game. 

DFHack - this is quite simply a command prompt. This allows you to make all sorts of cool modifications to the game but we will get into that later. Ignore this for now. 

Sound Sense - This cool little app adds sound effects to your games. These sounds help you identify all sorts of crazy things and I consider it to be a must have. This app requires a bit of setup however. 

1. Turn the volume up using the slider at the top of the window.
2. Start a pack update which will download the required audio files. 
1. Click the Pack Update TAB. 
2. Click Start Automatic Update
3. You can watch the progress at the bottom of the window
4. Restart the app when prompted from the Utilities TAB in the Lazy Newb Pack Launcher. 

Dwarf Fortress - This is the game. 

Lesson One - Intro To Dwarf Fortress

Lesson One - Intro To Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is one of those games that many people have heard about but few have ever played. For most of us it's a game you've heard about through game sites and forum boards. It comes across as deeply intriguing the first time you hear about it however a quick Google can often destroy peoples interest in the game.

This is largely due to the fact that the default game looks like this...

The raw look of nothing but ASCII characters is enough to turn any adventure seeking dwarf back to graphical games. 

While a large portion of the community are happy to play with the default UI there have been a number of improvements over the years that have made this game much more accessible. 

For example. The addition of a Graphics Pack allows you to quickly upgrade the graphics to a much easier to understand version of the game as per below. In this example I'm using the Spacefox pack. 

With the addition of a program called Dwarf Hack (DFHack) and the built in addon Stone Sense you can even get the game looking like this! Note that this view is really only good for watching the game on a second monitor and you don't actually play through this view... but it's still a cool view! 

I am going to try and list instructions for not how to play Dwarf Fortress but how to utilise the various tools and aids that are now available in order to help get new people into the game. 

So firstly... What is Dwarf Fortress

Really Dwarf Fortress is the love child of every God Game you ever played. The DF Wiki has the following description.

Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress (usually shortened to Dwarf Fortress) is a part roguelike, part city-building freeware video game set in a procedurally generated high fantasy universe in which the player takes control of a group of dwarves and attempts to construct a successful and wealthy subterranean fortress in a mountain. Along the way the player must face off with the dangers of their environment, invaders and sieges, vampires and other night creatures, and the occasional rampant mega-beast, all while keeping their dwarves happy and their fortress alive. A second game mode, adventurer mode, places the player in the shoes of an adventurer as they wander the world and do battle with various creatures.

Think Dungeon Keeper meets Minecraft.


Interested? Well the first thing you need to do is grab a free copy of the game!

Click HERE to Proceed.
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