Dwarf Fortress 03: Ringstaff, Spring 125

In which we follow the outpost Ringstaff.

Spring 125
While Vucar and Unib, our miners, go to work, we designate a small area around the local brook as a water source and fishing area.We also build a carpenter’s workshop and a masonry, to get some beds, doors and tables as well as blocks. Blocks are cut from stones and give a higher building value when used for construction. And as we have a hunter hunting, we also build a kitchen, a butchery and a tannery to get the kills processed before they go bad.
Workshops are exclusively build by the corresponding craftsmen. If a workshop doesn’t get build, we simply lack the neccessary professional.
Below the cursor (the yellow x): the butcher’s shop. Above that the mason’s shop, on the right of that the carpenter’s shop. Below the butcher are the tanner and the kitchen, left of the kitchen the craftsdwarf’s shop. Play this game long enough and you know it. Yes, that’s probably a bad sign. Worse is dreaming in bird’s eye ASCII. Been there, done that.

Also: Dôbar, our hunter, is already out of ammunition. He will get
the bone crafter-job, so can he make his own bone bolts…
We make some doors, a table and a chair and some stone blocks. We also make a load of beds. Our miners continue digging, and in the meantime we take a look at our nobles.
Our expedition leader, Bembul Regdesis, gets some additional workload: manager, broker, bookkeeper, and chief medical dwarf. The bookkeeper needs an office to work. Neccessary rooms for nobles are indicated by a red [REQUIRE] on the overview, not depicted above.
Room qualities are a function of room size, decorations and the amount of smoothed surfaces, all of which we will encounter later.
We place a table and a chair behind a door in the appendix behind the planned dormitory and create an office from the chair.
The office gets assigned to Bembul, who gets to work on the books.
Up next we place some beds in the room in front of the newly build office and create a dormitory – a shared bedroom for civillian use, as opposed to barracks.
We also commission a trade depot:
And finally, we place a stockpile for everything that is not logs or stones.
Before our miners finished the stockpile room, they got thirsty, went back to the wagon and started digging out the square part next to the entrance – it was the closest designation when they started looking for a new job. Afterwards they wanted to dig their way towards the stairs, which we could prevent by using a priority designation.
As soon as the stockpile is placed, we dismantle the cart and start bringing our stuff inside.
We define an area for plant gathering. I hope that we can supplement the diet of the dwarves a bit. We also designate new areas for mining.
Why? To find subterran soil to start farming.
While our miners go to work, Urist, our mason and mechanic, start building the bridges over the holes in the main entrance. These will be connected to levers to force attackers through the twisty passage. Which will be trapped.
(There’s a “finished” bridge in the second screenshot because planned bridges blink.)The first attempt to find soil went wrong – nothing but stone. But one z-level higher up we’re finally lucky and start to designate farm plots.
Building -> Farm Plot (b -> p), and Meng, our planter, starts working. We set the crops for every season in the building-menu, and now we probable wont starve. I usually use one field per crop and let it be planted in every season possible – when it isn’t, the field lies fallow.We also designate a room for our food-stockpile.And now summer has arrived. We’ll continue there in a week.