Once you embrace the fun in failure, Dwarf Fortress is a game that will reward your patience with knowledge, and perseverance with success. There is so much to learn before you can consider yourself a master, but each new trick will bring you closer to becoming a true dwarf wrangler. Surviving past your first dozen hours with the game will open up a whole world of complexity in its simulation.
Cat population control and atom smashers are just a few concepts that might have sounded totally alien to you as a new player. Once you learn the ropes, mastering new tricks will take your fortress from average to amazing.
7 Sound Is Three Dimensional
Dwarf Fortress is more relatable than you might realize. Have you ever been in a situation where you’re trying to sleep, and a noisy neighbor, sibling or roommate just has to be obnoxiously loud? It’s the same for dwarves. If you do construction work next to, or a floor above bedrooms, then the sound of clanking metal actually bleeds into their rooms.
This also applies to things like wood cutting, and nothing disturbs sleep more than giant pieces of timber slamming into the ground. To avoid this, build your bedrooms, barracks and hospitals eight levels or more below ground. Noise moves across all axis levels, and radiates from the center of whatever causes the noise. Building your sleeping areas far away from loud sources of noise will allow your dwarves to sleep in peace.
6 Atom Smashers
Dwarven Atom Smashers are waste removal tools that absolutely obliterate almost anything in the smashing zone. It sounds rather high-tech, but in reality, it's simply an exploitation of drawbridge mechanics. All you need to do is build a drawbridge that lowers onto a single tile of ground. Raise the drawbridge, place your undesirable items, or enemies in the tile, and then lower the bridge. Poof, whatever was in the smashing zone has now been effectively taken out of existence.
Atom smashers are a great way to free up space in your fortress, and designating a dumping zone under the bridge is an important part of the process. There are only a few large creatures that the atom smasher can’t handle, such as a bronze colossus or elephants.
5 Don't Fear Magma
As you might expect, magma can be incredibly dangerous if utilized irresponsibly, and the fear of immolation might discourage you from attempting to harness its raw power. However, if used safely, magma can be an infinite source of industrial fuel and obsidian. Magma can be channeled to power furnaces, kilns and forges. It is an inexhaustible resource, and will eliminate the necessity of coal. If you combine it with the flow of water, you can create obsidian farms that will infinitely generate the useful mineral.
Using magma has the added bonus of getting you into the good graces of the elves, who absolutely hate the harvesting of trees for things like coal. At the very least, magma is also a convenient albeit dangerous source of garbage disposal.
4 Cat Control
Newer players may not be aware, but cats can become a serious problem for your fortress. They tend to reproduce exponentially, and if left unchecked, will result in a "catsplosion." This event refers to a cat population that has grown so large that it actually affects the processing performance of your game. Thankfully, a simple precaution can be taken to avoid this catastrophe.
Gelding is a labor job that can be taken by dwarves to prevent male cats from breeding. If done in a timely manner, it can effectively stop the overpopulation problem before it begins. Just remember that lower skilled gelders can be injured by the felines in question when performing their job. Cats have sharp claws after all.
3 Economic Investment
Dwarf Fortress has an interesting barter based economy, and merchants will frequently visit your fortress to trade goods. If you have an abundance of wealth, there is an interesting tactic worth trying. Consistently overpaying for items will actually encourage merchants to increase the quality and amount of their wares. Humans will start hauling extra cart loads of items, and elves will start bringing large trainable animals.
Injecting the economy with extra coins actually has a tangible effect on what goods you can trade for. It requires a bit of an investment, but your patience is eventually rewarded.
2 The Power Of Eggs
Creating the infrastructure for crop farming can be time-consuming, and sometimes grander things like goblin hunting takes precedence. Fortunately, there is an often overlooked staple food that will come to your rescue: eggs. Eggs from fowl, like turkeys and chickens, are a great source of nutrition for dwarf settlers trying to get their footing. They also take very little effort to maintain.
It doesn’t take long before your feathered friends start laying dozens of yummy eggs, so you only need a few of them to feed your entire group of starting dwarves. Starting out with a rooster or turkey gobbler makes things even easier, as they can fertilize the eggs to bring about another generation of chicks.
1 Z-Plane Architecture
Factoring in the Z-plane is crucial for maximizing efficiency, and lets dwarves spend more time being productive instead of doing cardio. Understandably, Dwarf Fortresses top down perspective makes it natural to only think in the X and Y plane. As such, your first few runs may feature sprawling fortresses that stretch in many directions, but a better method is to use multiple floors to speed everything up.
For example, production chains can be optimized by stacking each step of production vertically. Groups of bedrooms can also be stacked in blocks to cut down on unnecessary walking. Additionally, if you’re feeling creative, many interesting trap setups are only made possible through the use of z-levels.