Dwarf Fortress you sick temptress, you!

Mr Bismarck wrote:

DF is one of the subjects where the subreddit is actually not a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Their sidebar on the right has a "how to get started" section with links to stater packs that come with add ons and tilesets and various sources for how to get going.

It's older now, but if you're someone who likes to read tutorials rather than watch them, then I really like this book.

Hey thanks! That should work perfectly.

Until the new itch.io version comes out, I'd recommend that you grab a starter pack to handle the mods and so forth. You won't need anything that isn't in that until you're much, much more familiar with the game.

I'm not up to date on tutorials because it's been to long since I started and a lot of stuff has changed. Anyone else have good recommendations?

Quoted in literally the post above yours Gremlin.

DasTactic also has a p good series of tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Dwarf Fortress wiki

PeridexisErrant's "walkthrough" and tutorials - from the guy who maintains the best (IMO) starter pack/installer.

And always remember! Losing is !!Fun!!

Anyone who plays RimWorld, that won't be a problem. Everyone loses eventually lol.

Oh, this is good news. And it has graphics instead of letters!

Robear wrote:

Anyone who plays RimWorld, that won't be a problem. Everyone loses eventually lol.

Maybe I changed between last playing DF and playing RW, but RW was so much easier.

boogle wrote:
Robear wrote:

Anyone who plays RimWorld, that won't be a problem. Everyone loses eventually lol.

Maybe I changed between last playing DF and playing RW, but RW was so much easier.

I've actually been eyeballing RM for awhile now. A guy I used to work with always had great stories from his time with it and it sounds great.

Rim World is really good, but the feeling it left me with most is "I should play Dwarf Fortress."

Sundown wrote:

Never touched it, but had a friend who was way into it for years. I'm probably in once the proper interface is in, so I can finally see for myself.

Well, Tarn has said that he doesn't plan to try to fix the UI until Dwarf Fortress is done. At other times, he has said that he doesn't expect Dwarf Fortress to ever be finished.

Ergo, I don't think we'll ever see an improved UI, at least not by bay12games. Maybe someone can mod something in, but considering how much work and troubleshooting it takes to just do dfhack (which adds some UI stuff, but is far from a total overhaul), I suspect that's unlikely to happen.

Never played. Always been curious. Will probably pick it up when it comes to Steam.

DF has the best bug reports.
IMAGE(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/252370797337772050/557400636296265759/unknown.png)

The story about drunk cats is great.

Malor wrote:

Ergo, I don't think we'll ever see an improved UI, at least not by bay12games. Maybe someone can mod something in, but considering how much work and troubleshooting it takes to just do dfhack (which adds some UI stuff, but is far from a total overhaul), I suspect that's unlikely to happen.

I'm guessing that they'll have to do some UI work for the graphical version, but we'll see.

I suspect that the graphical version is mostly just a bit of polish on a tile pack and making it the default.

Yonder is probably right. The 'UI' code is too deeply embedded in the game for a 3rd party to fix so we'll never get a fix for the inconsistent menu navigation, for example, unless they decide it's better to do that than implement modeling the way a vampire's flesh burns, layer by layer, in sunlight.

aka... it'll never happen

Motherboard: 'Dwarf Fortress' Is Abandoning Its Text-Based Graphics, but Not Its Soul: Developer Bay 12’s transition from ASCII to 2D art is about more than selling copies—it’s about improving the game and opening it up to a wider audience.

But the 2D facelift isn’t just about changing the art style, it’s about opening the game up to more people, making it accessible, and fixing legacy issues.

“All of the accessibility questions for Dwarf Fortress are on the table,” Adams said. “We’re going to look at the interface and the menu structure and common problems that new players have that make them bounce off the game.”

One of the big issues Adams is hoping to tackle is topography. Dwarf Fortress allows players to build a fortress with multiple levels and that’s hard to navigate in ASCII. In its current form, players move between layers of the game individually and have to keep track of the whole fortress in their mind. It’s like leafing through pages of a book. With some clever shading techniques, it’s easier to create a multi-leveled fortress in a 2D space.

“Before, when I had 16 colors, I couldn't do that,” Adams said. “If the lower level is a darker green, well, there's only one darker green available, and it might clash with some of the darker green stuff that's above. And then you can't tell what's up and what's down. It's just confusing.”

But Bay 12 Games isn’t abandoning the ASCII version of Dwarf Fortress. It plans to keep updating the game with more unicode pages (an enhanced superset of ASCII) and design tweaks and every copy sold on Steam and Itch.io will come with the ASCII version. “Everyone everywhere can experience [Dwarf Fortress] the the way they want to experience it.”

Yeah, so those accessibility improvements are "on the table" after as many people as possible buy the tilepack.

Well, to be fair, he's never before indicated interest in fixing the UI, so maybe something might actually happen.

What killed it for me was the bug with not being able to bury or memorialize certain ghost which meant no matter how well your fortress worked it would Always end up in a ghost fuelled tantrum spiral that you couldn’t do anything about.

The issue is the agency, if I Could do something about it it would still probably end in a ghost fuelled tantrum spiral, but at least then I could point to it and say ‘yup, that was my fault. Losing is fun’

I had an interesting start over the last couple of days. I had a good small fortress going with maybe 25 dwarves and good progress on a project to divert a river into waterfalls through my entrance hall. Pretty standard first couple of years stuff. I'd skimped on military and defense though, which was not fun when the weregecko came. The dwarves took it down pretty quickly, but there were some bites... then a month later, more bites, a bloodbath, and one survivor, a nine-year-old happily playing make-believe in my food stockpile.

Luckily a couple of months later I got a migrant wave and they were able to clean up and start work again, but they are a messed-up bunch of dwarves now. Viewing their thoughts shows acres of "was traumatized by seeing the body of X" text. After a massive coffin-and-slab building project I think I've got the ghosts under control.

DFhack's auto-labor plugins were a great help here- a bit cheaty for now, but since I have nine dwarves doing *everything* it saves me a lot of management that I'd just have to undo later on.

An option to turn off ghosts would be the thing that would get me straight back into playing this Soooo hard.

0.47 has arrived and bugfix patches are coming in.

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

And a lazynewbpack release candidate is in progress.

http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?...

At this point I think I'm just contributing to the patreon until the steam release for really no worthwhile reason.

For anyone curious how the Steam/itch version is coming along and want to see some interface update previews, check out this playlist.

Coming December 6th.

Norfair wrote:

Coming December 6th.

This makes me happy, no news on release price yet, I´m guessing it will follow a RimWorld-like pricing strategy, 30$ forever and ever, but for this guys I can take the plunge.

Yay, finally!

Sure, I've played DF off and on over the years, but I've been stoked for this updated Steam release since they first announced & explained their goal for it. I've had it wishlisted since then, and frankly I don't care what they price it at, I'll be in on day one, they've more than earned it.