Update two
First Year, Autumn to Early Winter
The first caravan to visit our Fortress approaches... Here it is seen crossing the river. It seems our Trading Depot is not too hard to find or inaccessible for the traders. If it would be, the caravan would miss the Fortress, which wouldn't be good.
Now that we know the caravan is approaching, we can start making arrangements for trading. This is our trade depot; we have to move all items we want to trade to it, and a trader needs to be present to conduct the negotiations.
This is the screen in which you select which goods are to be moved to (or from) the depot. Crafts are usually the no.1 good for trade, as they are not good for anything else. I've selected all crafts that we have made to be moved to the depot. I also tag some wood, barrels and gold nuggets, just to check their value. Those goods will probably be too heavy for the traders.
Gah! Unfortunately the dwarfs think that sleeping and constructing buildings is more important than hauling stuff asap to the depot, before the traders leave...
Another reason why the dwarfs delay hauling items to the depot is this: there are a lot of crops to be harvested from the fields.
I maniacally deselect other labors than item hauling for all dwarfs, so that they get on the job right now! There is also an option to forbid non-farmers to harvest plants from the farms.
After a while, all the items I have tagged are at the trade depot, and even Andhaira strolls leisurely to the depot to trade with the merchants.
The traders have arrived at the depot (that are all these random signs), and Andhaira is on his way to trade with them...
This is the trading screen. On the top you see the trader's reaction.. In this case it is favorable, so we can trade. The left pane shows the goods the traders have brought, and the right one is a list of our goods that we have brought to the depot.
The gold bars and the wood are indeed too heavy for the traders, so I've only tagged the crafts and some barrels with prepared food for trading. In return, I've chosen some cloth and rope.
Unfortunately, the traders have not brought an anvil with them. This is an item we really need, because without it we can do no metalworking at all, which means that we cannot create any weapons and tools. We will need to outfit a militia in the second year - defending a fortress with one axe and three copper picks is not something that I'm dying to do.
Another feature of these trading caravans is that you can order specific items from them. The probability that they will bring the item next year then increases, as does the price. However, to do this our fortress bureaucrat needs an office, to conduct the meeting with the merchant's envoy. Since we haven't built an office, the traders didn't even bother to send an envoy
Anyway, so much for the traders. Let's get on with our other duties.
The sleeping chambers have been carved out. Now we have to place beds in them, and designate them as the personal rooms of each dwarf.
Useless showing-off of the features of DF: you can choose which bed, that is, made from which kind of wood (there are a dozen or so) is placed where, and this influences the quality of the bedchamber
When the bed is installed we can designate bedrooms. The bed needs to be hauled from our storage room by a dwarf with furniture hauling enabled. This can take some time, depending on the other tasks of our dwarfs.
Enhancing the Fortress' defense with another two rows of stone traps. I've also designated some plants in front of the entrance to be gathered. Notice that some of the trees have become yellow, and then red. Slowly winter is coming, and the leaves are falling...
Digging out the gems which are lodged in the outside of the mountain. They occur in several places:
Here....
And here. Some bituminous coal is here as well. If we dig that out we can start making coke from it, and using the coke to smelt the gold we have found.
The traders are leaving! See you next year, dwarven brothers! We will get more traders after winter, but it will be a caravan from a different civilization.
The main dining hall has been carved out, so let's install some tables into it. As with beds, the tables need to be moved here from the storage room.
Defending the food storage room with stone-fall traps and doors. Actually, thieves bypass traps easily when they're not detected, so this is not really an useful defense (traps are more useful with full-scale attacks). But I'm.... *cough*
roleplaying *puke* again.
These are the stockpile records and dwarf status of the Fortress. See those "?"? This means the number is not accurate. These numbers depend on our bookkeeper and his skill, and whether he has an office or not.
This screen shows the precision with which the stockpile stores are presented. As you can see, the bookkeeper does not have an office, which means that the numbers are very imprecise. So let's build him an office...
This will do. Andhaira will need at least a table and a chair in the office. The precision can then be increased by adding cabinets, coffers, statues and by smoothing or engraving the stone of the office.
We don't have any dwarf skilled in gem cutting, so I just enable the labors with Andhaira. He can then go cut the rough gems we have dug out of the mountain wall, since he hasn't anything better to do anyway. The jeweler's workshop hasn't been built yet: this has to be done by a dwarf with gem labors enabled.
At the now-finished jeweler's workshop, I order some of the white chalcedony's we have dug up to be cut.
I've enabled the "hunting" labor for Skyway the Ranger.. And he went on to hunt! Here he goes, accompanied by his trusty dogs.
And here he... WHOAH! He's chasing a
GIANT EAGLE! On foot! With nothing but a copper axe! EPIC! Let's see if he survives... The Eagle seems to be fleeing, even though it has a good chance against our poorly equipped and unarmored dwarf...
WHAT THE! In the middle of the life-threatening chase, the dwarf simply drops on the ground and FALLS ASLEEP! (shown by the "Z" flickering on the dwarf) The Eagle is nowhere to be seen! His trusty dogs stand around him, confused!
OMG!
IMMIGRANTS! They just pour out one after another at the top of the map, here you can see the first one, on his way to our Fortress' entrance...
Let's check out what skills they have... The easiest way to do this is to simply look at their profession in the unit list. The new dwarfs are of course the ones without Codex nicknames (which is the reason to give your starting squad custom names).
New dwarfs are a pain in the ass because we need to enable a lot of labors for many of them, otherwise they will just stand around doing nothing. New dwarfs arrive very specialized; they only have the labor tagged which they are skilled in, and if you don't need a milker, miller or gem setter, they will have nothing to do.
The immigrants just basically enter your fortress and assemble wherever you have designated a "meeting area"; and if you haven't, like me, they will just wander the halls.
Some beds have been installed in the sleeping quarters, and I have designated two more sleeping blocks to be dug out for the newly arrived dwarfs.
What will become the room is shown by the light "X"'s; this area can be enlarged or shrunk. After that, you can assign the room to one of the dwarfs.
The other chambers have been carved out, and I'm assigning bedrooms to the new dwarfs...
Huh? This room has two owners? Hmm, let's check the profile of one of those dwarfs...
Ah! The other dwarf is her husband, and they will be sharing this room together! Nice! Efficient!
Dwarf Fortress shows an radically egalitarian society when it comes to gender. However, when dwarfs get children, it is the female dwarf that suspends her duties to take care of the child. I hope this couple will breed, so I can show you this. It is quite nice
I've dug out a treasury to store gems and gold bars, some cut gems are already stored (I'm having boulderdash-dejavu now).
Protecting the treasury with stone-fall traps...
One of the new dwarfs went hunting, and now he is dragging a bloody mountain goat corpse through the hallways...
Some tables have been installed in the dining room.
NOTE: What I'm doing here is actually wrong. I am used to designate each table for the dwarfs separately, but this will mean that there will be overlapping "dining rooms". This boils down to the tables not being used by any dwarf... I haven't noticed this in my previous Fortresses!
I checked later, after playing, why my dwarfs aren't using the grand dining room on the DF forum (
link):
Toady One the Great said:
If you drag out a dining hall, and then designate it as a "meeting hall" in [q] view, they'll start hanging out there. Any furniture (with a few exceptions like coffins) that is covered by the cyan X's will belong to the dining room. They should still eat at any table with an adjacent chair no matter what the status is, unless you assign the room to a dwarf. Rooms that are assigned to dwarfs are used only by that dwarf, mostly.
So the correct way is to make the dining room an "activity zone" for meeting, and just putting some tables there. Another way is to use one table to designate a dining room, let is overlap the whole area, but not to assign that table to a specific dwarf (which is what I have been doing).
Anyway, this is how you can designate a dining room... Similar to making bedrooms. You can assign the room to a dwarf, but if there is an overlapping room just next to it (like I did in this game...), the table will not be used.
I'm enlarging the raw materials storeroom, to store coal here, which will be used in the smelter, one level below.
The stockpile settings have to be adjusted to only allow coal:
There! The dwarfs will now move the raw coal we have mined out to this pile.
Meanwhile, our Ranger Skyway (who has turned into a Herbalist because of all of this plant gathering I have had him do), is again hunting.. Here you can see his battle with two mountain goats! Skyway is not injured though, so there is little to worry about...
The bloody corpse of the goat is carried back to the fortress by the dwarf, to be butchered... The leaves on the trees are dark red, soon they will fall...
WINTER IS UPON US!
The stats of the fortress at this point:
The fortress at this point at the DF map archive, to be viewed interactively: http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/map-4294-declinebitch
That's some dope shit right there. The sheriff will capture and punish criminals! 
What could be the reason?
