[Elysium]Dwarf Fortress

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Dear Mr. Sands,

It has come to my attention that you have some interest in giving Dwarf Fortress another try. I realize that this may seem like a momentous undertaking, but there really is an amazing game hidden beneath all the ASCII. I too was very skeptical when I played the game for the first time ages ago, and much like yourself I found it cryptic and frustrating enough that I stopped playing for a long time. I decided to give it another shot months later, and somehow managed to get over the hump that seems to push so many people away. Once you've played enough to know what the ASCII means without having to stop and check (it takes less time than you probably think), the game takes on a whole different personality. A touch of imagination combined with what's happening on your screen, and the game starts to tell a story that's different for every fortress you make.

To me, that little story is what makes it such a great game. There's no amazing gameplay in mining out a bunch of gold nuggets and having them made into golden thrones for my dining hall, but it IS pretty awesome to imagine the scene in your head, your dwarves all chowing down atop some golden, jewel encrusted furniture. The detailed wound system is another example of this. In most games, your characters fight and you know that you lost 10 hitpoints but won the fight. In Dwarf Fortress, you can see that your dwarf lost his left thumb and suffered a broken leg in the last battle. Not only that, but you'll watch your bearded little buddy struggling to make it through his day with his new injuries. It adds a whole different level of attachment to what are really just little ASCII smiley faces darting around your monitor.

But, I digress. I'm not here to sell you on the game. I'm here to offer my assistance in broadening your horizons. I'm not the biggest DF dork around (I don't think I've played at all in the past few months), but I've done my part in walking hordes of people from other forums through the basics of the game. I really believe most gamers would be as amazed at DF as I am if they could just get past the ASCII and the interface, but many aren't willing to try. It's truly not as difficult a process as you might believe, and the game contains lots of helpful little tools to guide you along your way. You'll be pausing to check what that little ~ means every 5 seconds for a while, but before you know it you'll be reading a screenshot of Dwarf Fortress like the guys in the Matrix decipher that green crap that scrolls down their screens.

I assume you're going to have piles of questions when you first start the game. Really, the best way to get newbies started on DF is to let them play while attempting to answer the inevitable avalanche of questions they'll have. Just remember the official Dwarf Fortress motto: Losing is fun! You're going to see your dwarves starve to death, go mad, get dismembered, fall off of cliffs, drown in lava, and die in plenty of other horrible ways before you master the game. Judging by your generally sadistic nature, I don't think this is going to be a problem.

So, in order to facilitate your new venture into Dwarf Fortress, I offer to answer any and all DF questions you may have. Post them in the thread, IM me on Steam, email me, whatever. There's an excellent DF wiki out there somewhere, but even it can't answer every question you're going to have. It's your destiny to be united with your Brothers in Bearddom, and I'd hate for a few simple questions to stand in your way.

Nerdily yours,

DrJonez.

PS: Has anyone been following the recent development updates? His latest project has been adding realistically simulated tissue layers to every living creature in the game. Holy crap.

hurrah! Also yeah guys a genius, go give him some money! You get stories and crayon drawings!

The #1 problem everyone will have is translating ASCII graphics. I know that a big green D is a dragon and a grey d standing among green periods is a deer on grass. But for most people they will have to spend at least an hour before they start to see the matrix. Make the effort! Once you have it you won't lose it in a hurry. Its like learning foreign sign language. The second hurdle is to be able to visualize ASCII in a 3d space. The game is divided into levels and its possible to build an upside down pyramid shaped fortress instead of a hole in the ground.

The third hurdle is learning to survive your first winter. If you can't do that then you rarely have a chance to exercise the advanced skills. But do count yourself lucky, you guys have it about 500% easier than we did way back in 2d dwarf fortress.

And be aware that the game includes a lot of crazy stuff. Most are technically bugs but they will blow your mind. I once had a giant eagle fly over my fortress and pop out a baby giant eagle in midair. (eggs have yet to be implemented). This baby plummeted 12 levels to the ground and EXPLODED right beside one of my miners who was splattered in gore. This gave him an unhappy thought because he witnessed death recently. But get this, it gave him a HAPPY thought because he HATES GiANT EAGLES!

Toady is king!

I keep oscillating as to whether to install this. I recall trying it once way back in the day, but couldn't even penetrate the most basic parts of it. How much micro-management is required to play? Is it something I could goof off with while half-listening to a lecture?

Edit: Elysium, I'll make you a deal. If you give this a shot, I'll do it too. Between us, our howls of anguish will surely provide amusement for the masses.

The original GWJ thread is here:
http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/2...

With the graphics packs available, "decoding" the ASCII graphics is no longer a monumental obstacle.

Last I played, the real challenge was finding a location that didn't just plain suck. As the game transitioned step-by-step from the 2D interface to the more fleshed-out 3D world, it implemented some features before others. Gone was the cookie-cutter maps where they were all the same and had every aspect available to you. Instead you had to search for locations with the features you wanted and when I was playing there was no good way to search. I think he's made some progress since then, but again I was running 0.27.176.38c from February when I was building Isengard.

When your first start playing Dwarf Fortress, it's useful to keep it windowed with the wiki handy. While the interface is badly organized, it's usable enough once you get the basic keyboard commands down.

Apparently, there's a linux version in the works now as well.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

The original GWJ thread is here:
http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/2...

With the graphics packs available, "decoding" the ASCII graphics is no longer a monumental obstacle.

Last I played, the real challenge was finding a location that didn't just plain suck. As the game transitioned step-by-step from the 2D interface to the more fleshed-out 3D world, it implemented some features before others. Gone was the cookie-cutter maps where they were all the same and had every aspect available to you. Instead you had to search for locations with the features you wanted and when I was playing there was no good way to search. I think he's made some progress since then, but again I was running 0.27.176.38c from February when I was building Isengard.

Finding a good location is one of the more frustrating parts about the "3D" version. The ability to search has improved, although it's unlikely a region containing exactly what you want exists in a given world. You can also grab a pregenerated world from here.

Coldstream wrote:

I keep oscillating as to whether to install this. I recall trying it once way back in the day, but couldn't even penetrate the most basic parts of it. How much micro-management is required to play? Is it something I could goof off with while half-listening to a lecture?

Edit: Elysium, I'll make you a deal. If you give this a shot, I'll do it too. Between us, our howls of anguish will surely provide amusement for the masses.

There's a lot of micromanagement at the beginning, with less required as your dwarf colony expands. As someone who has played Dwarf Fortress in class, it's definitely possible once you finally "get" the game, but the real fun of the game is in the details. Once your master engraver immortalizes the Great Carp Attack of 1158, you'll understand.

Don't bother. Basically the game is being developed by a crazy person whose goal is some sort of bizarre dwarf ant farm instead of an actual game. So we get things like stupidly detailed geology simulation, individually modeled teeth on every critter and hair growth, but not useful tools for selecting an embark site that would be fun to play on, UI improvements or even the ability to clean up the endless swarm of socks that result from sparring wrestlers*.

*Yes. Sparring wrestlers routinely knock each other out of their socks. Each sock can occupy it's own tile, so a swarm of 20 or so wrestlers can easily fill their little dojo with wall-to-wall socks. You cannot get rid of these, though they might burn away in a catastrophic fortress fire.

Thats nothing compared to how stupid dwarves on fire can become. Let me give you an example.

Lets say a dragon shows up and immolates one of your dwarves with fire breath. That dwarf dies and all of his flaming possessions drop in a pile. Every single idle dwarf will come running to greedily loot his flaming clothing. This will then set them on fire as well. I have seen a dwarf go to bed on fire, set the bed on fire. Die in bed and then the bed is used by another dwarf who then gets set on fire.

OH! And once you guys learn enough DF to read ASCII screens go and read Boatmurdered!

JoeBedurndurn wrote:

Don't bother. Basically the game is being developed by a crazy person whose goal is some sort of bizarre dwarf ant farm instead of an actual game. So we get things like stupidly detailed geology simulation, individually modeled teeth on every critter and hair growth, but not useful tools for selecting an embark site that would be fun to play on, UI improvements or even the ability to clean up the endless swarm of socks that result from sparring wrestlers*.

*Yes. Sparring wrestlers routinely knock each other out of their socks. Each sock can occupy it's own tile, so a swarm of 20 or so wrestlers can easily fill their little dojo with wall-to-wall socks. You cannot get rid of these, though they might burn away in a catastrophic fortress fire.

See, this is a common reaction. That Toady is just single mindedly focusing on his own thing while completely disregarding the fans. It's not true, well, mostly If you look at the DF website, he has literally HUNDREDS of features that are yet to be implemented in the game. It doesn't make sense to implement something that's just going to need to be re-written again later once some other piece of the puzzle is put in. The interface is a good example. It's not the best, it's not the worst, and it works fine once you've gotten used to it. The reason there haven't been improvements is because there are still major sections of the game that are on the way, and why should he waste the time to re-design the interface once now, and then again later? Do you see what I mean?

Right now, finding a good site can be somewhat of a task. However, I've yet to find a site that's truly completely unlivable. Just because you don't have mountains made of gold and forests made of platinum, you can still survive. Part of the challenge is working with what you've got. One of the big changes coming up is the ability to raise squads/armies and send them out into the world to explore/conquer/etc. It might seem like a real pain not to always get a good site now, but once the ability to travel away from your fort is implemented it'll no longer be a problem to send some scouts out to find supplies. Make sense?

If anyone else has questions about the game, I'll be happy to answer them Like I said, I'm not some DF super expert or anything, but I have played a lot here and there over the past year. Also: http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/i...

Glad to see I'm not the only DF fan around here

Very compelling. While Birth of America 2 is currently my horizon game for January, Dwarf Fortress is certainly in the mix for February. I'll make my decisions the middle of the month.

Elysium wrote:

Very compelling. While Birth of America 2 is currently my horizon game for January, Dwarf Fortress is certainly in the mix for February. I'll make my decisions the middle of the month.

If you want to see compelling, check out: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/de...

Read the bit at the middle of the page explaining what the different categories are (like Core Components and Bloats), and then take a look through some of those lists. The Power Goals are especially awesome. It's sort of a peek through the keyhole at what Toady has in store for us all sooner or later. Some of the ideas and goals he's set for the game are really insane, and as much as I think he'll never pull it off he always manages to amaze his fan base.

No, I'm not a Toady fanboy or something. I just feel the guy is a great thinker.

Tamren wrote:

OH! And once you guys learn enough DF to read ASCII screens go and read Boatmurdered! :D

Boatmurdered was singlehandedly responsible for amusing me so much that I finally decided to learn how to play the game. I never had tried it since it went all crazy-ass 3d though. The 2d game was hard enough to understand!

There are plenty of other stories out now that also take advantage of 3d levels. [i]If you want my favorite you should go read the story if Nist Akath.

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/inde...

Nist Akath is a community fortress. People on the forum sponsor/adopt dwarves in someone else's game. This tends to result in horror/hilarity whenever anything happens to someones dwarf avatar within the game. The more skilled the person telling the story the more spin he will put on relatively mundane events. Its an art really.

(oh and be warned, Nist Akath is currently a healthy 168 pages long at this point)

Boatmurdered was so freakin' awesome, haha. The best part was the player who played his year in the fort as the guy from Quantum Leap. Oh man, I couldn't breathe because I was laughing so hard at that part. Great stuff.

These awesome video tutorials (over 2 hours) http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=...
and this graphics pack http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm
made me try Dwarf Fortress again yesterday, maybe this time I'll have an idea what I'm actually doing in this game

wahwah wrote:

These awesome video tutorials (over 2 hours) http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=...
and this graphics pack http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm
made me try Dwarf Fortress again yesterday, maybe this time I'll have an idea what I'm actually doing in this game

Oh wow, that graphics pack IS gorgeous (not that the ASCII got in my way after I got used to it :)), and I will have to watch those tutorials. If they get me over the 3d hump I might be able to get back into DF!

Tamren wrote:

There are plenty of other stories out now that also take advantage of 3d levels. If you want my favorite you should go read the story if Nist Akath.

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/inde...

Thanks! I plan to check that out!

JoeBedurndurn wrote:

Don't bother. Basically the game is being developed by a crazy person whose goal is some sort of bizarre dwarf ant farm instead of an actual game. So we get things like stupidly detailed geology simulation, individually modeled teeth on every critter and hair growth, but not useful tools for selecting an embark site that would be fun to play on, UI improvements or even the ability to clean up the endless swarm of socks that result from sparring wrestlers*.

*Yes. Sparring wrestlers routinely knock each other out of their socks. Each sock can occupy it's own tile, so a swarm of 20 or so wrestlers can easily fill their little dojo with wall-to-wall socks. You cannot get rid of these, though they might burn away in a catastrophic fortress fire.

It is kind of a dwarf ant farm, true, in that it's one of the most purely sandbox-style games I've ever played. That doesn't make it not a game though. And a couple of things people need to keep in mind when looking at the game: 1) It's a freely available labor of love, and 2) since it's a hobby game, there is no QA department; rather, we the players are the QA department. So yes, bugs spring up. All the time.

It used to be that the goal of the game was to build a fortress strong enough to withstand the demon onslaught. With the move to 3D, that endgame was crippled since not every map is going to have them. On the other hand, the sandbox aspect was significantly enhanced. So the key to playing now is to establish your own set of goals, such as building a kick-ass structure of some sort.

This thread has inspired me to give this another shot. I've tried once before and wasn't able to get over the hump. I'm hoping the video tutorials will help with that somewhat. I may try that graphics pack, but there is something appealing to learning the game in the original ASCII...

I'm glad to see I've inspired so many of you to give DF another shot!

Important things to remember:

1. YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE A LOT. But that's ok, because losing is fun!

2. Make sure you visit the wiki regularly, especially to run through the "my first winter" tutorials and such: http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/i...

3. Also, setting up your config file so the game is running at the correct size/resolution is very important for your enjoyment of the game. It's silly to play it full screen, so make it windowed for easier switching to the wiki. Not only are there a bunch of display options in the config file, but there's also settings for turning on/off many features, setting a population cap so your fort isn't overpopulated in a hurry, turning the music on/off, tweaking some various display options, etc. The first thing I do when there's a new release of DF is thoroughly pick through my config file to make sure it's all setup properly. The display setting stuff can be a bit of a pain in the ass to get the tileset displaying correctly with the resolution you're using, but the wiki has some info: http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/i...

(Here's a screenshot of the grid size/resolution that I use on my 1680x1050 LCD: http://www.deskbreaker.com/drjonez/i... )

4. Post in this thread if you're unable to find help on your issue anywhere else, and I'll do my best to answer your questions

Enjoy

A new feature which was added a while ago made the UI difficulties at least 50% better. By default DF only displays a certain amount of tiles as its game screen. This "default" can be seen in places like the story of boatmurdered. Now however you can go in and set a custom tile resolution. I changed mine to be square for example. However this feature is hard to use if you have a custom tileset and other parts of the interface such as the menus don't work as well.

Before you boot up the game for the first time have a look through the config file which contains most of the game options. Most people will have to change the settings within to get DF running properly. The Wiki should be a great help to that end or you can ask questions here.

So I guess this means everyone gave up already?

DrJonez wrote:

So I guess this means everyone gave up already? :(

No, I'm steeling myself to give it a try here shortly. But first, les amusements avec les femmes.

DrJonez wrote:

So I guess this means everyone gave up already? :(

How so?

I tend to juggle several games at once, and it'll be a bit before I get to learn enough on the current DF build before I can start a game in earnest. I've already got Sacred 2, FFT on the PSP, Persona 3 FES, LotRO, and WoW on my plate at the moment.

I messed with it just a bit last night, with the help of those video tutorials. I think the first part that sort of paralyzes me is selecting a good starting place. I'm sure half the fun is just trying things and seeing what works and what doesn't, but I get bit overwhelmed by all the different things to take into account when selecting a location. Reading some of the tutorials has helped a bit, but maybe it's just a trial and error thing...

Sheazy wrote:

I messed with it just a bit last night, with the help of those video tutorials. I think the first part that sort of paralyzes me is selecting a good starting place. I'm sure half the fun is just trying things and seeing what works and what doesn't, but I get bit overwhelmed by all the different things to take into account when selecting a location. Reading some of the tutorials has helped a bit, but maybe it's just a trial and error thing...

DF is definitely a trial and error thing Just pick a place that sounds interesting to you. As a new player I'd suggest you pick mountainous areas as your first sites, mostly because tunneling into a mountain to create a home is one of the easiest ways to do it. Later on you can try digging down into the soil or building forts and castles in the woods, but mountains are a nice easy way to begin I'd also suggest avoiding any places that have an aquifer, as they're quite a challenge to overcome for newbies.

Differing maps are going to have different resources too, but you won't know what to look for until later. A lot of the ores/gems/etc that you'll find have to do with real geology. The wiki is good at helping with this. When you're considering an area to settle in, you're shown what rock layers make up the surface levels and just below, and that will hint at what you can expect to find beneath the ground there. Some maps you'll have platinum and gold coming out of your ears. Other maps you'll have a hard time making steel because you don't have the flux required. Some maps have magma, some don't. One area will have you mowing down enough trees to piss off the elves, and other areas will have you frantically trying to cultivate a handful of trees just to make a few beds for your dwarves. Once you've played a while you'll understand what you need, you'll have some hints as to what's in the area, and you'll know how to make do without certain things and capitalize upon others. Worst case scenario, you can just trade tons of whatever you have to the various trade caravans and request for them to bring you whatever it is you're lacking when they come back the next year.

But yeah, you're going to fail a lot at first It's ok, we all did! It's part of the fun

DrJonez wrote:

But yeah, you're going to fail a lot at first It's ok, we all did! It's part of the fun :P

If you say this enough, does it become true?

Coldstream wrote:
DrJonez wrote:

But yeah, you're going to fail a lot at first It's ok, we all did! It's part of the fun :P

If you say this enough, does it become true? :D

Yes.

I dunno, I've always found it fun. It's true that it can be a bit disheartening at times, especially on a fort you were really enjoying, but you go into every single game of DF knowing that it's going to end with you losing one way or another. I mean, there aren't really any victory conditions unless you set your own. So the game either goes on indefinitely, or you lose

It's fun in a way though, as I said. Watching dwarves going nuts and wrecking everything, trying to eat each other, fighting, burning stuff, etc. It's interesting to watch how one thing can snowball into the demise of an entire fortress and all who lived within.

Snowballing is right. Man you guys have no idea what things were like in the older versions. Permafloods, Adamantine demons of death, uncontrollable magma due to melted floodgates. I once triggered the infinite pressure bug and flooded my entire fortress 5 levels high with magma... at which point the pump melted.

Nowadays when dwarves get angry the other dwarves can calm them down. Usually anyway. Before there was a switch and the only settings on it were "blissfully happy" and "apesh*t factor 10". It didn't take much to flip dwarves between those extremes.

Tamren wrote:

Snowballing is right. Man you guys have no idea what things were like in the older versions. Permafloods, Adamantine demons of death, uncontrollable magma due to melted floodgates. I once triggered the infinite pressure bug and flooded my entire fortress 5 levels high with magma... at which point the pump melted.

Nowadays when dwarves get angry the other dwarves can calm them down. Usually anyway. Before there was a switch and the only settings on it were "blissfully happy" and "apesh*t factor 10". It didn't take much to flip dwarves between those extremes.

Hehe, funny to think those were the "good old days" of DF, but then again there's nothing like having a dwarf go nuts, punch holes through your irrigation system and flood the world. Good times.

I think the best part of the good old days was the first time that the caravan drove through that horde of capital E's milling around your road, switching them from "benign" to "marauding" with the first attack. God, the horror.

Oh, for those playing along, there's a couple neat 3D visualizers available to play around with. One captures a snapshot of the map and lets you fly around while the other actually attempts to update and render in real time. Both have issues, and aren't meant in any way to replace the current game interface, but they're fun to play with.

Snapshot via 3Dwarf:
IMAGE(http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a288/LupusUmbrus/3dwarf.jpg)

Live view via Lifevis:
IMAGE(http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a288/LupusUmbrus/lifevis.jpg)

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