Anyone good at Dwarf Fortress?

[Soulipsist]

If you want the full DF experience, you have to go full-on dwarf. Some tips:

- Maximize happy thoughts. This means engravings, cooked food, booze, all of it
- Always start elaborate superprojects, never have a plain old base and you'll remember them all
- Trade a ridiculous sum of goods for booze, and store it in the most secure place (behind a guillotine of traps preferably)
- Put carvings on all of your walls for no reason (Some of them are hilarious!)
- Don't worry about your military 'till later - Just make your entrance a murderous death trap
- Water and lava make for hilarious (and cheap) ways to dispatch enemies if you have the machines set up to make drowning rooms
^-You can also drain the room thereafter and reuse the trap infinitely if you set it up right (Potential fun here, esp. with lava)
- Never let a noble with demands live longer than two hours in your fortress. You know what to do
- Burrows are very good for getting dwarves to go where they wouldn't otherwise
^-Burrows can also be used to put a dwarf in one spot during a siege and make him your 'lever-puller'
^-You can organize groups of traps by attaching them to levers in individual 'control rooms'
- If it breathes, capture and sell it to traders that come visit
- Turtling is and will always be the best tactic in Dwarf Fortress
- A very good tactic is to embark without an anvil and instead purchase a super stock of consumables to last you until you have a stable economy (You should be able to purchase one in the first year, if not just deal without)
- You can embark with metal bars
- Limitations are only defined by difficulty (Embarking and succeeding in a terrifying forest is possible, just potentially short-lived)
- If you can think it, it's possible (Gladiatorial rings, surface villages, ice castles, militarized cave ogres...)

Ethics notwithstanding, of course.

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