Most of the defaults in 0.43 of Dwarf Fortress are fine, but there are some settings under the “Orders” menu that I change for every fortress.

All of these shortcut keys are under the “Orders” menu (o)

(m) Change to “No Mix”. Ensures that food is not mixed inside of barrels, which makes it easier to stockpile the right thing in the right place.

(h) Change to “Only Farmers Harvest”. Only farmers will harvest plants from the farm plots. Has no effect on yield as that is determined at the point when the seeds are planted.

(F)-(i) Change to “Forbid death items”. Keeps your dwarves from running out and claiming socks off of the fallen.

(F)-(o) Change to “Forbid other dead”. Keeps your dwarves from running out in the middle of a siege to drag corpses to the refuse pile.

(r)-(o) Gather refuse from outside. If you keep your refuse piles on the surface, near the butcher shop, you’ll want this on. Otherwise you should probably leave this off. Note that DF2014 (40.13 or earlier) has a bug with regards to inside/outside and garbage dumps. So you will need to turn on (r)-(o) and (r)-(o)-(v) to make sure things get hauled to the refuse pile.

(r)-(o)-(v) Gather vermin too, only needed if you have your dwarves gathering refuse from the outside.

(Note: Quantum stockpiles using minecarts work very well for keeping your refuse pile from having a huge footprint. Which also lets you keep it inside, near the entrance of your fort. Just keep a series of doors between the main travel path and the refuse pile to lock in the miasma.)

(z)-(d) Only zone drinking.

(z)-(f) Only zone fishing.

(W)-(l) No auto-looming of thread.

(W)-(w) No auto-collection of webs.