Oh, well metal seems to be the imposible for me, so a jail is an issue. I'll set up a sheriff and manager's office though, those those morons stop complaining all day.

You can make cages out of wood too
Obviously they're not as good as metal ones, but they'll keep your sheriff happy.

Also, when building the jail try to keep the cages away from each other. I've heard that if there are inmates next to each other in cages it makes it a lot easier for them to escape. And Kobold Thieves are escape artists who may let every other prisoner out.

The wiki said that only metal cages can be made into jails. I even tried it with wooden ones, and nothing happened. it just said "Assign animals"

Hmm, how interesting. No matter, just raid/trade with the next caravan for some metal ones.
Also, I was happy to have received a tamed Giant Desert Scorpion from an elven caravan once. Well worth the possible siege later. It enjoys feeding on kobold thieves.

That's amazing, I want a scorpion now

I intend to get 3 vampires locked in a room pulling trap levers non-stop, and trapped zombies to be uncaged when goblins show up.

No, jails can only be made with metal cages.
Also, try to be a little more space-efficient by packing all of your rooms together tightly.
This provides one great advantage: your dwarves will spend less time walking from one place to another or hauling things to the garbage zone.

Also, it's a good idea to build the entrance to your (underground) fortress in the middle of the map. This drastically reduces the time your dwarves will need to e.g. cut wood and drag it to the fort or collect ores.


http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/2333/fortu.png
Edit: here is a picture of the industrial level of my fort. Above this z-level I have a massive storage room for raw products such as wood, ores, stone etc.
The 'ring' of squares you see is where I will put all of my industrial workshops. Around them will be a storage room for the finished product.

As you can see, it's always a good idea to store up on barrels and coffins. They can come in handy in emergencies.

Hello I got a story for you
This story came from the mouth of a dwarf called 'Le doctor'

'It was a simple day as always we were gathering gold nuggets in an underground cavern,we had small attacks from strange kinda humanoid being but our local guards managed to take care of them.
We continued with the gathering I was new so I didn't had any big relations with anyone.I have met some good guys there who die...
It was hot morning when me and the other dwarfs gathered on the cavern to get some gold nuggets.We heard a loud howl and somebody screaming I was stocked the item away and runned back to see what it was it was a Giant Crocodile!
All my dwarfs runned away and all the squad dwarfs have died we were only 8 left out of 14,6 died in a day thats insane the crocodile killed everything in its path animals dwarfs there was no hope.Our Commander told us to run and lock our selfs to our rooms.(set room as burrows)The doors were locked we heard screaming I heard 'me gusta'(the miner)getting angry throwing a tantrum.After some time we got out and we searched for survivors around the fortress none have survived only us who were in the burrows.Four of us left we dont know what the future is planing for us.We can only wait to see.'

Im going to continue with the fortress
and continue with the 4 dwarfs also because Im going to expect some migrants soon

Also what happended to the crocodile...
I was quite lucky because.
A dwarf named 'No Megusta'(my second miner) got chased by the crocodile and entered a room I call 'slaughter room' I put there any animal I want to butcher(via pen pasture) in right after the butcher room and it has a door in it the dwarf runned in it the crocodile followed the dwarf stoped kill by the crocodile and I locked him in.The dwarfs havent found 'No megusta'yet but Im not ready to kill that crocodile I will have to w8

Guys. I just got the weirdest thing ever.
I have an unlimited map.
Seriously.

When I go to the border, it looks like this:



And I can do this:



Then I can go on and it looks like this:



Is this normal?

@Arglax wtf?this is awesome O.o
EDIT: Did you edit anything in D_init.txt?
well maybe when you restart dwarf fortress it will be removed but its cool and pretty useful

That's something I haven't seen before.