Jo's Dwarf Fortress Beginner's Beginner Tips

Personally, I like [Dwarf Fortress] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
- Aklyon, Dwarf Fortress forums

It's like if Tolkien taught your Geology 101 class, but you were drunk and playing the Sims during the lecture. Then you had a dream that got them all confused.
- nbonaparte, Dwarf Fortress forums

So you want to learn how to play Dwarf Fortress, eh?

Oh you're in for a treat.

And by treat I mean torture.

Some people I've spoken to have shown an interest in learning this colossal leviathan of a game, and anyone who plays knows how daunting that task can be. I've decided then to help my fellow man (or anything you may identify with) by providing a small beginner's guide and some tips to get you started!

Get the Lazy Newb Pack

So what's the Lazy Newb Pack? Well the Dwarf Fortress game you get out-of-the-box is somewhat excruciatingly difficult to learn, and there are some things in the base game that even the community thinks are too hard to use to actually be useful or fun; the vanilla military management is a prime example of obfuscation and complicated...ness... The Lazy Newb Pack (LNP) is a self-contained package of many different mods and utilities that greatly help with the installation of the game. I myself download it whenever a new version comes out (I don't want to deal with re-installing the correct version of every third-party utility I use). You don't have to use all features and utilities, in fact I would recommend against it, but the basics are there.

EDIT: The Lazy Newb Pack is no longer maintained with the most recent versions of Dwarf Fortress... I would recommend looking on the wiki for the most recent equivalent. They're mostly built on the same backends, and I've tested them as of v0.44.12 and they work pretty well.

Speaking of utilities...

Get familiarised with Dwarf Therapist

Dwarf Therapist is a utility (comes with the LNP, don't download your own version) that allows you to view all your dwarves in a simple spreadsheet-like environment, and allows you to assign their jobs, save job profiles, etc. It's a must-have (since assigning jobs in the base game is a pain in the rear posterior ass) for anyone playing the game!

Accept defeat, and remember that Losing is Fun!

This part is probably the most important part of this post, and is where a lot of people struggle with Dwarf Fortress; I think that has to do with the expectations people have about Dwarf Fortress, and about their own skill progression. Sooner or later, you WILL lose a fortress to famine or dehydration. Sooner or later, you WILL lose a fortress to a siege that was too big to handle. Sooner or later, you WILL lose a fortress to the murderous clowns you unleashed from the circus by mining through cotton candy (it makes sense in context, just trust me on this one).

And sooner or later you WILL create a fortress in a safe land where nothing happens, and where you can overcome every obstacle the game throws at you.

And you WILL find it boring.

Dwarf Fortress is a game about struggles, about learning from your mistakes and overcoming them. It's about getting a little better every time, and becoming bolder as a result. It's about embarking on progressively harsher landscapes, and struggling to survive. And eventually, you build a fortress that works, and you retire it to build another one in harsher lands.

The unofficial tagline of the game is "Losing is Fun!" because the struggle makes the game, here, and trying to keep a fortress together when it all inevitably goes wrong is where the fun is. If that's not for you, if you don't like struggling and losing repeatedly as you slowly become better, then this game is not for you, and that's okay. Like I say repeatedly, DF is not for everyone.

If, however, all those things I mentioned above don't discourage you, and in fact seems enjoyable, then in DF you will find a deep and engaging game that will occupy your darkest hours in the night. You will find a vibrant community which will:

[...] routinely talk about kitten slaughter, the best methods to immolate creatures without destroying their stuff, or how to produce 'children' with personality problems beyond the dream of psychoanalysts but no one is going to insult your mother.
- hiroshi42, Dwarf Fortress forums

Find a (good) tutorial

Finally, I would suggest finding a lengthy tutorial. If you were expecting to find one here, well, I ain't gonna do that. Entire books have been written about how to play Dwarf Fortress (friends and colleagues: I carry my copy almost everywhere if you want to peruse it). I am always happy to provide information and help to anyone who needs it, but I simply do not have the time right now to write a whole tutorial.

Before looking for a tutorial online, you will have to remember that Dwarf Fortress is mainly a game about learning how to do stuff yourself, and as such most tutorials will teach just the basic controls and very basic fortress management strategies (such as digging, farming, military training, etc cetera), and that's okay.

With that in mind, I strongly suggest people take a look at The Complete and Utterly Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress. It's how I started, and I think it's pretty great. It deals with an older version of Dwarf Fortress, which you can download directly from the site, but most of what it teaches is still relevant and required to know in the modern DF (which you'll get as part of the LNP, right?). It's a great starting point, and will teach you all the basics you'll need to get started!

So, in conclusion...

So that's it! I'll probably add on to this post as time goes by whenever I can think of something else that might help beginners. Let me know if you have any questions, I'll be happy to address them. Happy learning!