Miners not mining designated area

if this is your first fortress, I would suggest finding an area that matches the following conditions:

• Evil: Medium
• Tempeature: Medium
• Flux Stone: Yes
• Aquifers: No
• River: Yes

This should lead to a biome that satisfies the following conditions:

• Temerature: Temperate (green) or Warm (yellow)
• Trees: Sparse (white), Woodland (green) or Heavily Forested (dark green)
• Other Vegitation: Moderate (white) or Thick (green)

Ensure there is at least one white ground layer in the overview, and there are no layers which have blue squigly lines (aquifer indicator) behind them, and the name of the river of brook is given. (a brook is preferred and stay away from the sea)

Also, if there are Goblins around, check if they're not at war (Tab)

whle these settings aren't a source of much fun, they're perfect for learning the first steps in dwarf fortress (the only fun thing you can basically do, is flooding your fortress)

The dreaded "Urist McDirty cancels clean self:Area inaccessible." message-spam stems from dwarfs trying to clean themselves with soap, typically by trying to clean a missing part of his body.

After realizing the error of their way, they put the soap back on the stockpile, walk away, and go on with their activities, which, incidentally, is clean self, resulting in a message-spam generating loop.

This is a known bug related to soap and the only solutions for now are not to create soap or temporarily forbidding all soap bars through the stock menu, so the culprits in question will wash themselves at a well or pool, without trying to use soap, or increasing the soap stock levels in the hospital, moving all the soap over there which disallows it to be used for general cleaning.