Getting started with Dwarf Fortress can be a bit daunting. After you generate your world, you are faced with the tasks of deciding where to plant your plucky little pack of seven dwarfs. So I'll start with a few brief notes:

- A single world can be used for dozens and dozens of games.
- Bigger worlds just give you more potential sites to pick from.
- Think of it as sending out successive expeditions when the first one fails.
- "Failure is fun" in DF, expect a high attrition rate early on.
- You will abandon a few dozen expedition sites before you figure it out.
- Later on, you an try to reclaim lost expedition sites.

So here's what the world looks like:


See also: hi-res version (4112x4112) - seed file

(My assumption is that you already have a world generated.)

Some key things to know about the May Green tileset:

- Purple areas are "evil", haunted with nastier mobs.
- Avoid purple if you're just learning.
- Yellow is desert, which means a lack of water.
- White/Grey is mountains.
- Light blue is ice, dark blue is ocean.

Things to look for in an initial site:

- Not isolated on a tiny island.
- Hopefully not in a purple (evil) area.
- You'll want some trees and bushes.
- You'll want nearby water.
- Flat land may be boring, but is easier to grasp early on.
- You do need to pay attention to stone types.
- Aquifers can be difficult for new players to deal with.
- You will probably want to stick to less wild locations.

First steps:

To start off, you are going to be spending a lot of time panning around the world with the arrow keys and looking at various locations. Things you should be looking for are "Temperate" or "Warm" climates with moderate to high amounts of trees and at least some vegetation. The surroundings should be Calm or Wilderness (if you're just getting started).



Next, hit the [Tab] key a few times and look at the Neighbors. These are listed in descending order by distance from the current location. Since goblins are always at war, you may want to pan around until you get them ranked at the bottom.



Once you have a general location that catches your eye, take a look at the relative elevation to see where the high/low points are. Flat areas are to be preferred initially as it's easier to play without having to move up and down all the time with [Shift-<] and [Shift->].



Also look at the cliff indicators (by hitting [Tab]).



Here's a comparison of the 4x4 plot that I decided to pick out. The northwest corner is rather hilly and with somewhat steep cliffs, but the rest of the area is basically flat, or with small hills. The only issue with this plot is that there is no nearby river, so water may be an issue down the road.



You can choose to change the site of the initial embarkation plot, going with anything from a 2x2 up to much larger sizes of 4x4 or 6x6. However, the bigger the plot, the slower your game will run. On modern machines, a 4x4 plot is probably reasonable. On older machines, you might want to bump down to a 3x4 or 3x3 plot.

I'm also choosing to settle on the boundary between two different biomes (Mountains and Temperate Forest).





It's important to think of this phase as imperfect knowledge. You're not going to know the exact lay of the land until you actually arrive at the site and start setting up your fortress. At best, you're just trying to find a site that has wood, water, food, some earth and rock to dig in, and hopefully not lying in a flood plain.

So what did we end up with after arriving? Well, here's the initial view after you press [Tab] a few times to change the screen layout. You can see our party of dwarfs clustered around the 3x3 wagon in the lower-right quadrant. The upward pointing arrows indicate upward slopes, and downward pointing arrows indicate downward slopes.





However, if you use your mouse-wheel, you can rescale things and zoom out a bit.





Now we're starting to get a real feel for the terrain around us. There is a really big hill (almost a mountain) in the northwest corner of our area, with 3 smaller hills to our west. While the big mountain is tempting, due to being on the edge of the map we might find it constraining to actually make use of it.

Our dwarf party is current at Z-level 149. That mountain up in the north doesn't top out until Z-level 153. We still might make use of it later. But for now, let's go up/down a few Z-levels and watch what happens to the map (using the [Shift-<] and [Shift->] keys (comma/period). The first image is Z-level 148 and the last one is Z-level 154.













Notes:

- #148 is actually below the surface of this broad plains where we've started out. This makes the murky pools of water really stand out.

- #149 is the surface level.

- #150 is above the surface of the plain. The bright green dots are the tops of individual trees while the tiny grey/green dots indicate empty air.

- #151 shows that there are trees on the top of the southwest hill. It also shows that none of the 3 smaller hills are higher then Z-axis 149.

- The 3 hills are all 1-unit tall (enclosed areas on Z-level 149). They're mostly barren rock on top (see #150), but the southwestern hill has a larger patch of vegetation and trees on top of it.

- Since the hills are all 1-unit tall, we'll be mostly burrowing downward from our initial hallway instead of going both up and down.

Ultimately I ended up abandoning this site for a variety of reasons. The key one being that I didn't really dig deep enough at the start and building above ground fortifications was a bit beyond me at this point. Plus I didn't like the flatness of the terrain.