Dwarf Fortress A humble guide - how to bury your dwarves.

Why Worry About Dead Or Ghastly Dwarves At All

When you gain some experience, your forts will survive longer. In the long run there are other things to worry about than a goblin invasion. One of those is happiness.

Ghosts can not only influence physical objects in your fort, like moving ammunition around, or Armok forbid, pull levers. Ghosts are more likely to ruin your dwarves mood than fill the fort with lava. And since ghosts seem to have a sense of humor, they will most likely push your legendary speardwarf over the edge in stead of your newest fish dissector. This might start a death spiral, and you will be left wondering why there are so many alerts and why the screen is painted with red and things are flying all over the place.

Coffins And Doors

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For burying your typical dead dwarf, let us hypothetically say a crispy mangled corpse of a child from the caverns. I suggest creating workshop orders of wooden coffins and rock coffins. Build something like 20 to get going, and then use your manager to keep the count up.

You might want to check that you ordered coffins and not coffers. Now do the same with doors. You will need doors for both your bedrooms and your tombs, so whatever you think you need, add some more doors.

Stockpiles

You can either place each and every coffin and door manually, or you can place your stockpiles strategically.

Place one stockpile for doors, and one for coffins near where you are burying your dwarves. Only accept wooden, stone, and only accept less quality than Masterwork. Have them take from your bigger furniture stockpiles. These bigger stockpiles should be a bit further away.

This means you can place with "Use closest material" and "Keep building after placement". Why? Because your golden and silver masterwork coffins and doors are elsewhere. Make sure you place coffins and not slabs.

Rooms

Locate an area big enough for tombs, a few stockpiles and a dedicated spot for a workshop with its own small stockpile for slabs.

I suggest building small tombs, for instance two by two. Still keep a two wide corridor for pathing reasons. Place one coffin and one door for each room.

Zones

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This is a bit different than the old versions. Use "Zones(z)->Tomb->Multi". With multi you can paint all the tombs at once.

Macros

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You may want macros when you are doing boring things. Building lots of tombs is boring, at least it is for me.

Hit escape->settings->game and set "Keyboard cursor enabled" to yes.

Shortcuts:

Start/Stop recording macro: CTRL-r.

Save macro: CTRL-s

Load macro: CTRL-l.

Play macro: CTRL-p.

You might want to practise macros somewhere safe and away from your most critical structures.

Slabs

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If you cannot get to a corpse, or it is missing, you will need slabs. Or maybe you ordered 100 coffers and no coffins. Or maybe you did not quite grasp the new way of designating with "multi" for tombs.

You may think you do not need slabs, but you will need slabs. This is important, because they are heavy. If your dwarf finally gets to creating a slab, then moves it somewhere, then go grabs that slab to engrave it, then you forget placing it, the ghost might already have done quite a lot of mental damage to your best hammerdwarf. That might end badly.

A good setup is to have a workshop next to where you want to place your slabs. Have it only accept input from a stockpile with already made slabs. This stockpile gets its slabs from your bigger more general furniture stockpile somewhere. This way you engrave a slab and immediately place it.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2955459735

A humble guide - how to bury your dwarves.