Standing orders is a tab you will find in the labor menu. It contains a lot of VERY useful options to toggle on for your dwarves, such as automation of certain workshops, whether or not your dwarves should haul or ignore certain things in the world, how to behave during sieges, and what tasks children perform. Most of the stuff is self explanatory and you may set at your own convenience, but I recommend two things:

• In automated workshops, turn off automatic web collection. If you've ever noticed that the second you breach a cavern your dwarves start running around in there before its safe, this is likely why.
  
• Under sieges and forbidding you will see an 'Other Dead' option. Setting it to forbid other non-hunted dead will make it so your dwarves only collect friendly corpses, or corpses of the animals you hunt. This is a good way to prevent your dwarves from rounding up every dead body a monster slayer leaves behind in your cavern. You can now simply hit i and then f to re-allow corpses that you want hauled (such as those generating miasma in a bad spot).

Getting your stockpiles and workshops to work well together can be a real pain. In my first few fortresses my stockpile ballooned to a massive size and was constantly filling to the brim. My dwarves would have to run across the entire thing to get one item all the way at the back, and it was horrible. So here are some things I figured out to help make life easier.

• Multiple z-level workshops. You can put stairs in your main stockpile and have your workshops above or below that. Your dwarves should now have to travel less to pick up and deposit goods. You will have to edit your stockpiles and erase the square where you want your stairs, otherwise your won't be able to mine the stairs out in the first place.
  
• Set up multiple stockpiles so that your dwarves can have a direct line from your workshops. Having a general stockpile is good, but having smaller, custom stockpiles for workshops can make things way easier. I do this with my smiting industry and carpentry, as you can see with my wood stockpile.
  
• Use storage items like bins, barrels, and bags. I didn't know this starting out, but you can store a lot of different items in bins. Barrels and bags are useful too (you need them for brewing and making dye of course) but bins can hold weapons, armor, crafts, gems, metal bars, and so on. Do you see my stockpile full of crates next to my smith? I have over 300 coke and over 100 metal bars in there, all condensed into a very small stockpile now. Additionally, when it comes time to trade, you can simply have your dwarves move an entire bin of goods to a depot, which condenses many hauling tasks down to one!

Thanks to DF Hack (which can be conveniently found on Steam) civilian alerts are back and you can easily order non-military dwarves into safe burrows! So a bunch of this section is out of date now and I removed it, but I still have a tip for the biggest threats new players face:

• Some enemies, like wereanimals can destroy doors, so watch out as this will not stop them at all. In this case you will want to use a drawbridge. When a drawbridge is raised, it becomes a wall in the game logic (which building destroyers won't be able to destroy). This is an effective way of dealing with wereanimals in particular, as once the full moon passes, they will transform back into their normal state and no longer be a threat, meaning you can easily wait it out. You can also get rid of forgotten beasts this way, as if they have no path into your fort (drawbridge the entrance to the caverns for example) they will eventually just wander off map!

There are a few things in the game that are completely busted, completely helpful, and which many players use without really considering it cheating (though its entirely up to you how you limit yourself in this game, nobody is gona peer over your shoulder and judge!):

• Atom Smashers
  
• Quantum Stockpiling
  
• Impulse Ramps

Atom Smashers are a very simple concept. Drawbridges, when moving from being raised to lowered, will completely destroy anything that is underneath them. It will obliterate any object, even a dwarf, and leave literally behind zero evidence of its existence. This is useful for disposing of trash to control lag, just be careful to not have any dwarves in the way of it falling (maybe put it behind a door that you lock prior to operating the bridge).

Quantum Stockpiling comes in two forms, first: you can create a single tile dump zone, and dwarves will be able to infinitely pile any items marked for garbage into that spot (you can then atom smash it if you like!). In the image below, you can see I keep one of these piles by my refuse so as it fills, I can easily quantum stockpile remains and make room for more.



The other way to quantum stockpile doesn't make use of garbage dumps (which can be tedious if you want to use items in there and constantly have to unlock them for use). Instead, we will use a minecart and a cart stop, easily obtainable at the game start.



Here I have two wood stockpiles. The single tile one in the top right is my quantum pile. It is important that you disable this stockpile from giving or receiving from anywhere else. Then you set up a track stop and a mine cart to tip goods into that stockpile (be sure both are aiming the right way). Configure the cart to take specific goods you want in the pile and from a second, larger stockpile that can give/receive from anywhere. If done correctly, your dwarves will move items like wood or stone into the large stockpile, then put it in the cart and kick it into quantum pile and you're done!

Impulse Ramps are ramps used to accelerate carts at ridiculous speeds without having to use powered rollers. These are much faster than rollers, and if you use them, do not put rollers down on your route elsewhere, as rollers will reduce the cart's speed down rather than add to it if it is traveling faster than the roller's max speed. These are a little weird to explain, (there are some great videos on youtube if you need a better demonstration) but the basic premise is that you carve/construct a track to go up a z -level via a ramp and curve onto the next layer, then place a wall there. When a cart is kicked and lands on this, it will accelerate. Keep in mind that these carts are deadly so be careful about having your dwarves walking around the tracks or they will get smashed up and probably killed.

Water is a complicated beast, and it is beyond the scope of this guide to explain it all, so I recommend this video here by Twisted Logic Gaming (he has loads of really useful tutorials on this game as well) which explains how to purify water, how to understand water pressure, and how to safely channel it into your base without allowing enemies in: My only piece of advice is to make your wells more than 1 z-level deep. Water will create mud on the bottom of your well and this will dirty the water, but the z-level above that will remain clean and this will keep your dwarves nice and healthy.