Dwarf Fortress - Hive Tutorial ep 03 - Work Orders

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Hello gamers!

I'm back with another actual play/tutorial episode for you. Yesterday, we completed our goal of getting our Beds and Booze situation sorted out. It's always important to have a half-decent place for our dwarves to rest their heads, and a social spot for them to drink.

Today, we're going to look at improving the efficiency of our time as players, by setting up some Work Orders.

Work Orders are a series of build tasks that you can assign to be completed as single-time actions, daily events, weekly events, or even more rare than that. These will help automate a lot of tasks for you, such as ensuring you always have 30+ Barrels of Booze (on the wall).

To set up Work Orders, we need to start by adding a new dwarf to our nobility/administration team, and that is the Manager. For a Manager to do their job, they require at least a basic office. At this stage, that means they need a box with a table and a chair in it. As we get deeper into the game, your administators/nobility are going to make larger and larger demands... but for now, a simple room with a table fits the current requirements. With that built, they're able to sign off on new work orders, and your fortress is going to end up managing a lot of day-to-day production by itself.

Some things I highly recommend you create Work Orders for (in no particular order) are:

• Barrels
• Bins
• Brewing Drinks (from Fruit AND from Plants - so two work orders for that one)
• Beds
• Doors
• Blocks (stone at the stonecrafter, and wood at the woodcrafter)
• Chests or Coffers

By building these as Work Orders, it'll ensure that you always have some on hand for when you need them. You can set conditions up within your Work Order to ensure that you're not oversupplying too. By setting conditions such as "If Number of Empty Bins is Less Than 10" you can ensure that as soon as you've only got 9 empty bins left, your dwarves will jump into action to add to the supply.

I honestly cannot overstate how important Work Orders are for your Fortress. If you plan to survive for any length of time at all, you're going to need to get a Manager and start setting up this automation within the first year.

The next thing we tackle in this episode is our very first Trade!

Like with Work Orders, we need a new Administrator/Noble to actually be able to make trades, and so we have to assign our second chosen administrator: the Broker.

Brokers are the folks who make deals with travelling merchant caravans and sell your items at your Trade Depot.

With these two tasks out of the way, it's time to take stock of our goods, and hunker in for a long cold winter, which will hopefully pass fairly uneventfully.

As always, thanks for watching and Happy Gaming!

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