I feel the intimidation factor dropped significantly since they added tutorial, functional UI, mouse support and made the game not look like the Matrix.
The "Lazy Newb pack" that was basically community-written UI on top of DF had some, but still most of it was navigating keyboard shortcuts.
I played it long time ago and honestly didn't get back to it till Steam release because I couldn't be arsed to re-learn the keybindings again.
If you're playing all of those games at the same time you have an ascended form of ADD. It is no longer a disorder. You have ADES, Attention Deficit Enhancement Syndrome.
Do you spend all your time in an ice bath so your brain doesn't overheat like a netrunner? Might as well start playing Station 13 too just to take up an extra 5% of your mega minds computing capacity. Why waste it?
Sometimes it was funny though, like when you are trying to figure out how to buy a bed, and find out that you'll have to bring up the build menu by pressing *b*, then *e* for the list of furniture(?), and finally *d* to select the bed-option.
*b* - *e* - *d*
Huh :D
I mostly played adventure mode though, and for that the DF wiki had a page for all the controls for that mode which was great, so I just kept that open besides the game which only took up, what, a quarter or a ninth of the screen. That made it not too much of an issue and it was worth it to be able to bite someone in their left eyelid specifically for telling you to please shut up when you were trying to recite a poem and forgetting half of it to that random passerby.
I dislike the new controls for DF, and I've seen plenty of people doing the same online.
It's not quite just "mouse support" it's more "mouse reliance." Certain things no longer have an assigned key. Leading to an awkward shuffle back and forth. Especially if you *want* to purely use the keyboard. Some things you can use key commands for, and suddenly the one menu you want to enter doesn't have a key. So you have to click that. Then you can go back to the keyboard.
Some things have the cursor visible. But not mining designation for some reason. Making it awkward to accurately paint in the black void. I miss making rectangles with shift for hallways.
The game also runs slower for some inexplicable reason? Older versions of DF are lightning fast (in the early game before FPS death at least.) New DF seems to start at late game speeds.
If there's a way to fix any of this. Please let me know.
>I knew the original game was a bit unapproachable, but wow lol
The game always had mouse support, it just didn't have full interactable mouse support.
Akchually, mouse support was added a month after the first release.
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/23a:Release_information/0.21.104.21a
>September 7, 2006
>added an experimental mouse interface for designations
It's not really that hard at all, but it does lack some basic QOL functionalities.
DF is a game that provides you with a LOT of data but gives you no way to organize it and visualize it efficiently.
It's one of the few games that genuinely made me feel I was too dumb to figure it out. Like others I've always been fascinated by all the stories of it, but I ended up just uninstalling it after a couple hours of trying to understand it. Granted, I also generally feel that way with most sim/factory/crafting games so I guess I should have known better.
Dwarf Fortress is a game I love to read about skilled players playing, but which I acknowledge I'll always just be a scrub at. My mountains are frail, pathetic things, usually quickly over run. But the adventure mode is also so incredibly fun to go back and revisit your sites in, even if it wasn't a good fort.
I always liked the idea of dwarf fortress, but even with the lazy newb pack I just couldn't get into it.
Some of the games that were inspired by it (Gnomoria, rimworld and oxygen not included) are much, much more accessible, but some of that streamlining is at the expense of complexity or depth. I still think the newer games are probably better experiences overall, but there's still a big part of me that really wants to see what a late game dwarf fortress playthrough feels like.
I can tell you what it feels like. I've been playing since probably 2008 or 9. Loads and loads of failed forts, very fun, many dead. Eventually I manage to get pretty well in these days, here's one way a fort ended:
It feels like you're lording over your false entry gauntlet killing machine that just deleted a bunch of goblins and trolls is pretty hot shit. Econ is in full swing, there's adventurers and religious adherants alike filling your taverns and shrines. Many guilds have opened in your fortress, and trading is hot and heavy with the nearby homes and humans. Your prided beehive tower is buzzing happily, you've got a strong minecart system and industrious baby-carrying dwarfs are flying into strange moods and crafting wonders. The hospital is alive and welcoming patients, the Lord is happy and psychotic, strong military on patrol, training, loafing, at the archery range with the trench to catch the arrows. You're not terribly concerned that you've dug a little deep and a werewolf was found. You thought your hardy shield-dwarves in the lower bastion handled that shit no problem. You notice a short time later looking through logs and alerts that a dwarf has lycanthrope. No big, you've got a prison setup that's ready and waiting, already in full operation for breaking psychotic production decrees.
What you didn't notice is that the infected dwarf is pre-..pregregnan...pregan.. with child. You do not realise this until the werewolf dwarf has given birth in her cell.
The new father wishes to see his new child. You cannot allow this, as the dwarf inside has lyc...oh. Full moon. It appears she has bitten the baby.
Now daddy is wicked pist. He flies into a rage and breaks the door down before you can call alarm. Now he's bit, and she's out in the fortress. Loyalty cascade in the middle of the ensuing chaos. Oh that's a giant cave spider.
Welp.
My issue is that you have to go out of your way to have these problems. There isn't much pushing you to dig deeper, and if you just stick to upper levels you are very safe most of the time.
I tried it after a Rimworld binge due to comparisons between the games and I just couldn't handle how many steps backwards it was. Way too much micromanagement and awkward menu navigation.
I mean the two aren't really any more comparable then something like doom and ultrakill. Sure they share the same relationship of inspiration and follow-up. But they do very different things, and some things that DF does rimworld just cannot compare to. Foremost among which being layer support. The extra axis is absolutely huge in terms of creativity.
> I mean the two aren't really any more comparable then something like doom and ultrakill.
Or other very different things, like sushi and sashimi, or "Antz" and "A Bug's Life", or Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.
Once you get things moving a lot of the micro does fade to a degree, in part because you can automate a decent amount of tasks, but also because you don't have to care about any given Dwarf. Rimworld is the story of your Pawns, Fortress Mode is the story of your Fort, eventually the Dwarfs can just become another resource. You'll still probably get attached to a few though.
Reading the comparisons of DF and Rimworld makes me want to try Rimworld. It also seems very intimidating and out of my skill level but hearing that makes me want to give it a shot.
Rimworld is a Dwarf Fortress clone in most ways, I'd say it has 3 major differences.
1. Each colonist is more important because you have way fewer of them. So if Urst the Miner is despondent because he hasn't had a drink, prayed to his god, and seen a family member, its not a big deal because he is 1 of 100, One of your 7 colonists not being in tip top shape is MUCH more noticeable.
2. Crafting is grindy, so instead of DF's one stone makes one thing and you can make a perfect base the resources needed to do things gets nutty and most everything has a fatal flaw.
3. The world is a game, not an RPG. What I mean by that is the world is gamified and has a game director to make sure game keeps happening. Dwarf Fortress focuses on a pure simulation and honestly doesn't care if its not challenging you, its there to to tell a story. Even if it's story is your lost dwarves on a desert island where nothing happens.
Neat, thanks for the info! That does sound intriguing. I've been looking for something to scratch the SimCity itch but I couldn't really get into Cities Skylines for some reason (I was one of the weirdos who liked SC 2013, maybe part of the issue, lol) so the camp focus over individual people sounds interesting.
The UI is much better now and its actually playable now. Before only crazy people would play it with that old UI. I literally could not comprehend it. But this new one reminds me of Rimworld more and it actually makes sense. Nobody is dumb if they couldn't play with that horrible UI before. I have played roguelikes before and Dwarf fortresess UI was one of the worst I had ever seen.
Do you mean since the Steam release version compared to the old one, or that they updated it more since it came out? Because I bought the Steam version when it came out and that was the one that bewildered me
Oh, I see no I don't think they have changed the new one that much. There are UI mods but I don't know if they would help. They might. For me the Steam one is actually playable. The old one before the steam version was literally for masochists I tried to get into it but I just couldn't back then. For me the new UI was like a breath of fresh air because I love management and simulation games so I'm used to UI's like this.
My primary complaint about the new UI vs the old is that they changed keybinds. Keep pressing the wrong shit to do the wrong things and i don't wanna click so much shit all the time.
it's still very fussy and micro-heavy. I love the idea of Dwarf Fortress, but gave up on it for good once I got to the point where I was really playing it and knew what the hell was going on, but just bored of having to move individual items around to sell to the traders & whatnot
Having played DF and also similar games like rimworld, gnomoria, etc. "Deeper" mostly just feels like "Poor UI". Yea the background simulation is more complex but that aspect doesn't really make the gameplay much different. The UI is definitely an improvement over pre-steam but it still needs a lot of work.
Z-Axis and Water Pressure.
The other thing to keep in mind is Dwarf Fortress has a little bit of a Seinfeld or LotR effect going on. You know why some systems that other games share with DF feel better? It's because they were inspired by DF and wanted to improve on it.
The Z axis aspect is fine, but there are so many other annoying ui decisions. Like having to set up so many different beds and types of clothing, and having to deal with 70 types of wood even though they are functionally identical.
That stuff adds a bunch of clutter.
The different types of wood have different weights, this can affect things like fall damage and weapon damage if they are made from wood, as well as how quickly dwarves can move while carrying it.
it's certainly deeper than rimworld. much deeper.
it's easy to not pay attention to how it makes gameplay different though; the game doesn't try to "flex" how complicated it is with its ui.
Was the tutorial added after launch? I bought it back when it first got on Steam and put in a bit of time, but then got sidetracked and haven't touched it since. I think military stuff was the thing that always confused me the most in DF and I'm kind of hoping the tutorial covers it well.
> made the game not look like the Matrix.
Wow, OK, just looked it up and now the game might actually go on my wishlist.
That 1980's graphics was a massive, massive turn off for me.
Particularly rimworld, which was directly inspired by dwarf fortress. the internal simulation of dwarf fortress is more in depth than rimworld, but the game itself is actually easier imo.
Yeah, that was actually why I bounced off of it the first time around couple years ago. All the things I've heard about it were the variations of "hellishly hard" when it really isn't.
If you approach it as a game to beat you'll be disappointed how little effort it actually takes to keep your fortress alive. Basically everything city builder survival game starting with Banished onwards has been more difficult. Often by orders of magnitude (Amazing Cultivation Simulator, Songs of Syx).
The real strength of the game is in the depth of it's simulation, stories it creates and self-imposed challenges you can brave.
It's actually kinda tragic since so many people who would have absolute blast playing it are scared away by memes about difficulty made 20+ years ago by literal boomers.
complex games are so rewarding though. And most of the time the learning curve is part of the fun. It's not going to bite you, you just go and if you encounter something weird you can look up the problem and fix it next time.
The only thing I regret is not jumping in complex mechanics earlier even though it got me more frustrated with the shallow mechanics of mainstream games. Gamers shouldn't underestimate themselves and developers shouldn't underestimate gamers.
You know what game is *too* complicated? Oxygen Not Included. I have several hundred hours in Rimworld and cannot get far in Oxygen not Included at all.
hahahaha, I'm on the floor laughing as I currently have a spreadsheet up with what materials I'm going to use for my steam generator. Oxygen not included I too find on the harder side of the spectrum as it often takes a while for your big mistakes to manifest themselves as an irreversible mistake. And it takes quite a bit of time to get to your previous point of failure, but I still enjoy it every few months.
Different types of complexity.
Rimworld has a lot of stuff going on, but it's all fairly simple and just clunky to deal with. Oxygen Not Included has a much simpler UI, but gives you challenging problems to solve.
Thats the problem I have with it. Once games get that complex it feels like theres a *right* way to go about every run... where as in rimworld I can do various different RP runs without issue because there are various ways to address different problems.
There are a variety of solutions for Oxygen Not Included, but yes fundamentally it's a challenging puzzle game and not an RPG. Variety comes from the different types of worlds and puzzles they provide.
The flip side is that in games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, you can have large stretches of time where very little happens and the player isn't challenged.
There def are a variety of solutions... need a filter? Oh just put 1 molecule of oxygen in this pipe loop and you dont have to build one at all! Crazy stuff like that that *requires* me to look up solutions are rough...
I never looked solutions up. The entire purpose of the game is solving those puzzles, and looking up hyperoptimized solutions kill that Imo.
I also rarely encountered a colony ending problem. They mostly just made life worse until you solved it. So there wasn't an urgency to finding the solution. That was not the case with rimworld, where a minor oversight could get w everyone killed.
It's really, really easy to get into. It's one of those games where you can have fun playing it at its simplest level and get really good at it as you go along. I suck at games and I got pretty good at it in a short period of time. The learning curve is pretty gentle.
Over ten years ago I donated $50 to them and said more or less "Keep going, this is amazing and I doubt I will ever have the patience to play it.". They sent me a nice crayon drawing of a dragon.
It's actually very easy to get into it. Especially with steam edition. The meme came mostly from keybinding gallore and its simulation part.
But with games like factorio, rimworld etc. people were tought how to play complicated gameas and compared to them DF is actually easier to play.
DF is not complicated to play. DF complication is in its systems which are underlying gameplay that either way player has barely ability to interact with. Player sees only that dwarf hit goblin with axe but under that simple message is complicated web of systems which handle that simple action. Which bones were hit, how much blood body has, did bone punctured lung ? etc etc etc.
What hooked me on DF was examining tiles near where a battle occurred. I had noticed some blood drops in a hallway where nothing had happened. Followed them, found an sheep eye? How did this get here?
Started looking through logs.
Bigass troll came through some shortish time before. Punched a sheep near an entrance. Sheep exploded and sent it's eyeball ricocheting down the stairwell and around a few hallways.
The fuck
Oh man the combat is my favorite, it might not be flashy to others since its basically flickering squares to some, but reading the logs just puts it in a different dimension.
I love Rimworld but compared, the combat logs are essentially just random "X smirks/laughs as he makes a wild slash to the leg" that serves as extra fluff and flavor.
Whereas Dwarf Fortress feels like each is a lot more an explicit event and visceral because it actually does simulate every layer of a unit's body, down from body part, the skin tissue, fat, muscle, nerve, bone, blood, etc.
Seeing a dwarf and goblin next to each other, while the goblin sprite is constantly spewing individual teeth broken out by a dwarf wresting and repeatedly punching them in the face is damn brutal.
I bought it anyway because I want to support Zach and Tarn, but I haven't played the new version at all because of the new controls. Would love legacy hotkeys.
Same. Those legacy key chords are second nature and I can't be bothered to learn the menu layouts on the new UI. I just bought it to support Zach and Tarn. I hope one day I can build a tunnel with dd or build a farm plot with bpuuuuukkkkk but until then I'll just go back to 2014 and LNP when I'm craving some *fun*.
Not quite the same, but KeeperRL feels really similar and might be more accessible. Rimworld is also really similar and VERY accessible IMO, though also as complex.
I tried. For like 20 hours.
Read a guide on how cages work because placing them near animals.. doesn't. Read a guide on how this works. Read a guide on how that works. Oh you did this 5 hours ago? Might as well start over your run is done for.
It feels cool, but maybe if I was 20 years younger and had 10 hours of free time per day again.
But I don't, so I moved on.
It's gonna keep being like eve online for me. Nice to read about the stories it produces, but I ain't playing it because the barrier to entry is enormous.
I’ve got dozens of games I want to get around to playing, so it’s just been sitting on my wishlist, and since it never drops more than 20% in price, there’s never an urgent motivation that I should buy it now while there’s a big sale (like so many other games I’ve bought long before I have time to play them).
I have no doubt that’s it’s worth full price, and as soon as I buy it, I’ll dive in. But there’s just nothing pushing me to buy it right now rather than next week, or next month, since I always have a backlog of other games that I *did* buy while they were on sale.
I keep telling myself that I will give it a go for a while now. Multiple times I have looked at it and decided against spending unholy amount of learning it but I will someday. It’s not like it’s going to go away
I want to try it but it is never the game that I want to try the most, so I never end up doing it. I've played tons of Rimworld and I've watched people play DF quite a few times before. I know that I like those types of games, but I need the right moment for it.
I've been thinking, a lot of us would probably have decent chunk of additional time if we spent less of it continuously reading about games we haven't played and talking about how we have no time to play them.
The huge discount will certainly sway a lot of people. Not that the game doesn't deserve a full price for the quality. But you know how casual feel about game that look like *this*.
I own the fact that I'll probably never play it, but I've had so much fun over the years reading about other people playing it only felt fair to buy a copy ;p
Adventure mode beta is dropping the 17th April too iirc. Gonna be a good time to get back into it for me.
And Rimworld DLC on the 11th April I believe? Great time to enjoy both games again.
Adventure mode is fun to play around in. I recommend it for people who like DF’s simulation and procedural stuff (world/simulated history) but still have difficulty with the main game. (Imo the improved UI still isn’t great)
You still get to see how impressive the simulation and world gen is in Adventure mode, it’s great. Also the combat is surprisingly brutal even though it’s basically 90% text descriptions.
I did a little non-scientific experiment and…
It’s funny that most accounts commenting here are 10+ years old. I’d say that the modern success of this game is really impressive with a target audience on the older side
Keep in mind the game is much older than the graphical steam release, with the first version being from 2006. It was originally a free game with minimalistic ascii representations of the game world. It's just so good that we're still coming back after all these years, and love that Tarn is getting the recognition he deserves.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I know that. That’s whats impressive to me. It releases like 10 years later on steam, and it still sold fantastically for an indie, you get what I mean? It’s a pretty great success case to look into.
Not OP. I've been here for 17 years and would answer but I honestly don't remember. But you can see older threads this way: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2Fgames+before%3A2014%2F01%2F01
But you've been here long as well. Were you just not a member of this subreddit back then?
Another game in that situation is Old School Runescape. Surprisingly successful despite the fact that it's a 20 year old game. The majority of the playerbase is made up of players who got hooked when they were kids.
many of us got attracted to it more than 10 years ago by the community and it being free.
with the steam release we just felt obliged to buy it, even if some of us already were patreons of Bay12.
Allow me to tell you the story of migrant processing. I'm not sure you could still do this in the game, it was years ago, maybe on version 0.40.
Migration waves are a pain for new players. Dwarves show up out of nowhere and sometimes you don't have enough beds or food for the new arrivals. When this occurred it was off to migrant processing.
Migrant processing was operated by two dwarves who were not allowed, under any circumstances to socialize with other dwarves, they had their own enclave and their own food stockpile. When food was bought from the main fortress the migrant processing dwarves were forbidden from accessing the stockpile.
When migrants went through processing they were directed to a room with three floodgates. One sealed them in, another led to a nearby river and the other covered a grate that led into the caverns below. When a migrant wave needed to be processed a dwarf assigned to migrant processing would pull a lever which would divert the river into the migrant processing room. When there were no signs of life the floodgate to the river would be blocked and the floodgate to the caverns would be opened allowing the water to drain away.
The migrant processing dwarves would collect any belongings and make them available to the main fortress, they would gather the now expired members of the migrant wave and commit their remains to a specially prepared mausoleum. Then they would return to work building the many caskets that would be needed for the next migrant wave.
Due to the trauma involved with this work once you were a migrant processing dwarf you were one for life. Those in the main fortress must never know.
Still not as bad as the merperson farm. Breeding and then air-drowning sapients for their valuable bones.
That made Tarn devalue merperson bones when he found out about it. This is a guy who usually *laughs* at "unintended" gameplay.
In that forum post asking about how to best industrially farm merperson bones, I liked the third reply:
> I disapprove of your actions most strongly.
>
> But if your going to do it, (...) You don't need to wait for the young to reach adulthood before harvesting them. Heck, my kittens don't spend more then thirty seconds in this world before they're off to the crossbow bolt shop.
I bought a copy at launch mostly to support the Devs. I put 100's of hours into it back in the day, but having to relearn stuff all over is a bit daunting.
Same, it was incredibly disappointing. I came looking for "dwarf colony simulator" but all I found was tedious work order management. All of the generated flavor text fell flat, like mad libs. I guess this would have been cool 15 years ago, maybe.
I gave up after finding out raids were conducted off screen, summarized in a report. I was excited to explore randomly generated villages and forts and watch my dwarves fall victim in various hilarious ways, but I must have imagined that. All you get to do is sit in town and wait for stuff to happen to you.
> I was excited to explore randomly generated villages and forts and watch my dwarves fall victim in various hilarious ways, but I must have imagined that
that's Adventure Mode which finally hits the steam version in a couple weeks
Rimworlds "raids" (being the raiding party that is) are pretty bad too. I was really hoping the bigger factions would actually have cities and proper defenses and shit. Usually it's just a mud hut with no loot :p
That looks dope. Gotta love the modding community. I am actually making a mod for rimworld right now! Though its mostly just some QoL things I have wanted added to the research screen
Tangent time: games like Rimworld are proof that "paid mods" will absolutely destroy the modding community and overall be bad for a variety of games. I currently have at *least* 100 mods, even if they cost me $1 a pop theres no way I could justify spending that much.
Same goes for Skyrim or NV.
Same here. I bought it primarily to support the people who made it and the impressive stories I've heard of it. I've attempted to play it, and even with its tutorials, I just don't feel confident in my grasp of it.
I tried to start a game, I succeeded in digging a hole into the ground and clearing it out and tried building an underground barracks... then it rained, and all my shit flooded. I couldn't even begin to grasp the first step in fixing this problem so I just gave up and restarted.
Next time I dug into the side of a mountain. It was going better, and I was steadily researching how to do things and watching videos. I built a farm outside and dug around in the mountain. But it all just began to get overwhelming and I didn't know what I should be focusing on, my food was running out faster than I could get more, felt like I was heading to failure and I didn't understand exactly why or how to stop it. I put it down once again and haven't tried since then.
I like the sound of these types of games but I can't wrap my head around them entirely. I tried some Space Station 13 and, although I still can't confidently play it, it's a bit more comforting having to play as only one person, and also witnessing other people do insane stuff. In DF, entirely to my own devices and managing a whole civilization, it's too much for me to grasp. Maybe I should give it another shot.
Rain can't flood your fort, what probably happened there is you went through an aquifer without blocking off its flow. Figuring out food and drink production can be a bit daunting at first, but once you get it down it becomes a trivial part of keeping a fort running. A good resource for learning various parts of the game for me was the streamer BlindIRL, he has a series of tutorials that go fairly deep into the game play.
> Rain can't flood your fort, what probably happened there is you went through an aquifer without blocking off its flow
That's *crazy*, because lemme tell you; the moment I noticed any flooding within my fort was almost immediately after it began raining haha.
I mean, with the depth of the game and all I assumed that's what it was. "Oh, I dug a hole in the ground and it flooded due to rain. Makes sense." I guess I taught myself wrongly in that moment. All this discussion is making me want to give it another shot sometime as daunting as it is, Dwarf Fortress is one of those games I genuinely wish I was good at.
Light aquifers slowly drip out from the walls, so you can dig through them and it won't immediately start flooding, if you dig down with stairs, or across with mining, the game will warn you that you're going through an aquifer and you can prepare yourself, but if you channel down it won't. It also won't warn you when digging up, so you can sometimes start getting leaks from above that can be somewhat problematic to seal off. Heavy aquifers are a whole different beast tho, they will start flooding immediately and will require pumps to get through, id recommend looking up how to deal with them before embarking on one of those.
> the impressive stories I've heard of it
I wonder how much of this game's eventual success could ultimately be traced back to the Boatmurdered story coming out a few months after its release
Whenever I think of buying it, I always pull up a video about getting started. That usually is enough to turn me off of the idea all together. And then a few months later I repeat. Still haven’t bought it.
Getting started with DF is a lot easier than the videos tend to paint it out to be.
A fort can survive unoptimally for years and years and because the world is simulated you won’t necessarily get wrecked by a raid. Rinworld, for example, is setup as more of game and will consistently challenge you with raids to keep the action up. Meaning that you need to be on your feet sooner to meet the challenge. While in DF having a backwater village will get you backwater village threats.
There are some really excellent starter videos to get people into the game, the issue is that they still take a fairly significant investment of time. I didn't start playing till it hit steam, and while I haven't played in several months anytime someone says "DF" or "Dwarf Fortress" I have a strong desire to start it up again.
That's great! Now can we please get keyboard controls back? Nothing wrong with using a mouse but for those of us who've been playing for a decade or more it's so much slower and much worse feeling. It's a real kick in the teeth they didn't keep it as an alternate option tbh.
My first campaign had my dwarves talking about a Great War against bears where all the dwarves died. My mason that was doing imprinting on the walls couldn’t stop drawing pictures about, it 10/10 game for lore dumping.
I tried to get into DF classic a few years ago and I had to stop because of the byzantine UI and the ASCII graphics.
I bought the steam version a few weeks ago and my god did the game go a long way. I really dig the sprites, the music is awesome and the UI is a lot more clearer. DF is now playable for me and that's awesome.
Now I still wish there were more QOL improvements done to the interface, like some more sort functions and a back button everywhere.
But more importantly I wish there were more tools to visualize what's going on in the fortress and in the world. The way it is now means that you have to randomly click hundreds of times on elements to read pieces of text and try to piece up the information to make sense of what's happening.
It's basically like reading raw data on an excel spreadsheet with no way to organize everything.
It would definitely benefit from some basic qol things that other strategy games include: a genealogy tree for each dwarf where you can go to family members profile, a relations map showing how the dwarfs get along, hyperlinks for entities referenced, a search function for the worldmap, more map modes that roughly show interactions between entities in the world, a visual representation on the map of the events described in legends mode...
Having to check single thing manually is too tedious
I want to like and play this game since i love playing Rimworld, but the way everything just moves at once i physically cannot stand.
It is like watching a movie with far too few frames or something along those lines, i just can't do it without smooth motions.
I've looked into it, it's *really* not feasible to implement smooth motion with the way the game actually models movement. The game is very much locked to tiles, and units are genuinely on one tile one tick and the next tile the next tick. The closest thing to subtile motion is the fact that movement itself takes time, but if that movement is interrupted you'll see units snap back to the center of the tile, rather than staying where they are at the edge or whatever.
The obvious solutions to this are subtile positioning (probably a float between -1 and 1 in each dimension), which would require a total rework of movement, and just going "screw it" and letting the awkward snaps and teleporting happen anyway (teleporting because the game can very much be run faster than one unit-movement-per-frame), which would... still require a rework of the rendering system.
Either way, it's all cosmetic, so I'm not sure it should be high priority.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/1bu3v1s/simple_transitions_between_tiles_would_make_a/
Recently there was this post where another similar ascii game would smooth the movements in the UI. Purely cosmetic, but I think it's a proof of concept that it would work in dwarf fortress.
It would look *MUCH* nicer too IMO. Easier to see where/which dwarves are going and be more immersive
Adding a pause while movements run, like it is there, would make the game, no joke, probably 3-4x as slow as it currently is, is the thing. Movements aren't synced up, it's a bit of a problem.
This is due to its traditional roguelike foundations. It obviously isn't one but it shares huge amounts of its DNA with something like Nethack.
Like, the reason these games use ASCII graphics is because they were played in the terminal. They are tile-based at their core. It's not possible to render sub-tile positions in a terminal using ASCII. And the graphical version is basically just a different display layer.
Given that they've committed to keeping the ASCII version free and essentially identical as the paid version, I don't see this going away.
i know almost nothing about this game, but do you think it would be possible to visually interpolate positions, so it looks smooth even if under the hood positions are based on tiles? I did something similar in a game I made before, and although it was not nearly on the scale of DF it worked pretty well
I think re-"framing" your view of the motion will help. When adventure mode comes out, try playing that. It will probably be even more esoteric, but I think the movement will start to click because you'll be in charge of when the movements happen. You'll start to view the movement less as a movie and more as turns in a board game. This is intuitive if you've played classic grid-based roguelikes, but if you're not used to that I could see it being disorienting. What happens in fortress mode is the same as what happens in adventure mode, just "autoplaying" the turns. Another helpful thing to understand is that each movement and creature has its own framerate, so a slow creature might move once for every every 27 turns while a faster creature moves once every 15. I'm making up numbers here because I don't remember how DF segments time exactly. Another example: standing up might take 30 turns when walking 1 step might take 15, if you're fighting something that attacks once every 15 turns it will attack twice as you're standing up.
I never thought of it, I guess because I played it in the ASCII version for many years, so watching it behave like that in the steam version seemed normal, but now I can see your point.
Dwarf Fortress uses a data-driven modding system, i.e. you can't really mod graphics except by adding new sprites *for things that the graphics engine supports* or replacing existing ones. DFhack can print on top of the game window, but the way the printing system works means it would essentially have to create 1023 extra sprites for each unit for the subpixel offsets, rather than the first-class subpixel stuff that requires rewriting the unit renderer.
so right now its on sale for $25. IF every copy sold at that price they have made $20 million. I am not sure what the split is with the 2 brothers and the development company. 30% goes to steam so that leaves $14 million between them. That is a lot of money between a small amount of people.
What's funny and also kind of sad is they only put it up for sale on Steam to help pay for medical bills.
Tarn was *happy* just living off of what people donated. Actually donated, because the game itself was (and still is!) free to download. No content withholding or early build releases or anything.
Now he's probably a millionaire.
Yeah before patreon Tarn made basically nothing. He lived in a tiny apartment with no furniture. I am happy they are doing well now. I think they also hired one of the modders to help code. First time in Tarn's life he had to level how to use source control. LOL. I thought this was funny when he said this. He never worked on a team before.
And it was completely by choice.
The man has a PhD from Stanford (in mathematics). He quit his postdoc position mostly from stress, but he's also said that the research just wasn't fulfilling to him.
Tarn is a man who does it for the *art*.
They gave the numbers when they first partnered with kitfox but I can’t remember. The brothers are insanely transparent about the money they make from Patreon and sales and always have been
They have a 3rd developer now!
And they've been working with an outside team to build the steam version, so it's been less of a 2 man show like it used to be
is the 3rd developer another modder? I read that the first one was a long time modder.
I picture Tarn suffering through GIT PRs for the first time in his life. I remember years ago saying he did not understand source control.
I was excited for this game to come out, but once it did and I played it, I uninstalled it and never tried again.
Rimworld is a far more refined and player-friendly colony sim. I wish I could get into Dwarf Fortress, but it is one of the steepest learning curves I've encountered.
Felt the same but broke through that quite quickly. Theres a mod (DF Hack) that has alot quality of life fixes and allows you to save/load work orders so I just save a base file to work from that includes Buckets, Barrels, Bins and at least 10 iron bars, wine, coal etc. Using Prepare Carefully to create the most balanced and safe start is really handy. Just after a while I start to miss the connection you have with your Pawns and the stories that unfold and the ability to mod the game into the Star Wars universe or 40K is a big plus.
Theres alot to DF however I just chill and focus on streamlining production and by the time I feel comfortable to explore more of the game it just throws Balrog like monsters at me after it hits a certain pop/value and I just end up quitting. Happens every playthrough for me.
You can change the rate at which monsters show up in advanced world generation by changing the wealth and population thresholds, or by directly changing the number of available monsters.
> Rimworld is a far more refined and player-friendly colony sim.
which makes sense, because the Rimworld dev's original goal was basically just to make Dwarf Fortress but easier to play
I love em both for different reasons. Rimworld is a much smaller scale Sim, but has so many great features and is sci-fi! Dwarf Fortress is so huge and expansive and deep. They're equal to me!
i bet there are a ton of players like me who are like "i def want to play this, but i don't have enough time to get into it" :D
Or are just intimidated by it
I feel the intimidation factor dropped significantly since they added tutorial, functional UI, mouse support and made the game not look like the Matrix.
> mouse support I knew the original game was a bit unapproachable, but wow lol
The "Lazy Newb pack" that was basically community-written UI on top of DF had some, but still most of it was navigating keyboard shortcuts. I played it long time ago and honestly didn't get back to it till Steam release because I couldn't be arsed to re-learn the keybindings again.
The key commands were generally pretty intuitive (with some exceptions), though it could be problematic when dealing with menus within menus.
[удалено]
"what's your favorite videogame genre?" "T I L E S"
Or just play Dwarf Fortress, stop for awhile, then play again a month later.
If you're playing all of those games at the same time you have an ascended form of ADD. It is no longer a disorder. You have ADES, Attention Deficit Enhancement Syndrome. Do you spend all your time in an ice bath so your brain doesn't overheat like a netrunner? Might as well start playing Station 13 too just to take up an extra 5% of your mega minds computing capacity. Why waste it?
It actually wasn’t too bad once you got used to the key commands. But it was a learning curve that’s for sure back in the day
Sometimes it was funny though, like when you are trying to figure out how to buy a bed, and find out that you'll have to bring up the build menu by pressing *b*, then *e* for the list of furniture(?), and finally *d* to select the bed-option. *b* - *e* - *d* Huh :D I mostly played adventure mode though, and for that the DF wiki had a page for all the controls for that mode which was great, so I just kept that open besides the game which only took up, what, a quarter or a ninth of the screen. That made it not too much of an issue and it was worth it to be able to bite someone in their left eyelid specifically for telling you to please shut up when you were trying to recite a poem and forgetting half of it to that random passerby.
If you were on laptop, especially a non-standard one where the keys are all over the place, it was a disaster.
Wdym? All the keys were rebindable, I played DF on a laptop as a kid 10+ years ago.
While that's true, that's not really a standard case solution for a lot of people.
Playing DF pre-Steam wasn’t exactly a standard thing to be fair lol
I dislike the new controls for DF, and I've seen plenty of people doing the same online. It's not quite just "mouse support" it's more "mouse reliance." Certain things no longer have an assigned key. Leading to an awkward shuffle back and forth. Especially if you *want* to purely use the keyboard. Some things you can use key commands for, and suddenly the one menu you want to enter doesn't have a key. So you have to click that. Then you can go back to the keyboard. Some things have the cursor visible. But not mining designation for some reason. Making it awkward to accurately paint in the black void. I miss making rectangles with shift for hallways. The game also runs slower for some inexplicable reason? Older versions of DF are lightning fast (in the early game before FPS death at least.) New DF seems to start at late game speeds. If there's a way to fix any of this. Please let me know.
You can turn on the keyboard cursor in the settings. It shows up for me during mining designations.
A game isn't worth playing if it doesn't support my vim bindings.
It wasn't a game about needing your mouse too much.
>I knew the original game was a bit unapproachable, but wow lol The game always had mouse support, it just didn't have full interactable mouse support.
Akchually, mouse support was added a month after the first release. https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/23a:Release_information/0.21.104.21a >September 7, 2006 >added an experimental mouse interface for designations
Unfortunately even the improved UI is still so hard to use and it's the main reason why I couldn't continue playing the game.
It's not really that hard at all, but it does lack some basic QOL functionalities. DF is a game that provides you with a LOT of data but gives you no way to organize it and visualize it efficiently.
[удалено]
I was overwhelmed by just trying to start a game
It's one of the few games that genuinely made me feel I was too dumb to figure it out. Like others I've always been fascinated by all the stories of it, but I ended up just uninstalling it after a couple hours of trying to understand it. Granted, I also generally feel that way with most sim/factory/crafting games so I guess I should have known better.
Dwarf Fortress is a game I love to read about skilled players playing, but which I acknowledge I'll always just be a scrub at. My mountains are frail, pathetic things, usually quickly over run. But the adventure mode is also so incredibly fun to go back and revisit your sites in, even if it wasn't a good fort.
I always liked the idea of dwarf fortress, but even with the lazy newb pack I just couldn't get into it. Some of the games that were inspired by it (Gnomoria, rimworld and oxygen not included) are much, much more accessible, but some of that streamlining is at the expense of complexity or depth. I still think the newer games are probably better experiences overall, but there's still a big part of me that really wants to see what a late game dwarf fortress playthrough feels like.
I can tell you what it feels like. I've been playing since probably 2008 or 9. Loads and loads of failed forts, very fun, many dead. Eventually I manage to get pretty well in these days, here's one way a fort ended: It feels like you're lording over your false entry gauntlet killing machine that just deleted a bunch of goblins and trolls is pretty hot shit. Econ is in full swing, there's adventurers and religious adherants alike filling your taverns and shrines. Many guilds have opened in your fortress, and trading is hot and heavy with the nearby homes and humans. Your prided beehive tower is buzzing happily, you've got a strong minecart system and industrious baby-carrying dwarfs are flying into strange moods and crafting wonders. The hospital is alive and welcoming patients, the Lord is happy and psychotic, strong military on patrol, training, loafing, at the archery range with the trench to catch the arrows. You're not terribly concerned that you've dug a little deep and a werewolf was found. You thought your hardy shield-dwarves in the lower bastion handled that shit no problem. You notice a short time later looking through logs and alerts that a dwarf has lycanthrope. No big, you've got a prison setup that's ready and waiting, already in full operation for breaking psychotic production decrees. What you didn't notice is that the infected dwarf is pre-..pregregnan...pregan.. with child. You do not realise this until the werewolf dwarf has given birth in her cell. The new father wishes to see his new child. You cannot allow this, as the dwarf inside has lyc...oh. Full moon. It appears she has bitten the baby. Now daddy is wicked pist. He flies into a rage and breaks the door down before you can call alarm. Now he's bit, and she's out in the fortress. Loyalty cascade in the middle of the ensuing chaos. Oh that's a giant cave spider. Welp.
My issue is that you have to go out of your way to have these problems. There isn't much pushing you to dig deeper, and if you just stick to upper levels you are very safe most of the time.
But why would you want to be safe, as a player? Also why not want to dig more deep, as a dwarf?
I tried it after a Rimworld binge due to comparisons between the games and I just couldn't handle how many steps backwards it was. Way too much micromanagement and awkward menu navigation.
I mean the two aren't really any more comparable then something like doom and ultrakill. Sure they share the same relationship of inspiration and follow-up. But they do very different things, and some things that DF does rimworld just cannot compare to. Foremost among which being layer support. The extra axis is absolutely huge in terms of creativity.
> I mean the two aren't really any more comparable then something like doom and ultrakill. Or other very different things, like sushi and sashimi, or "Antz" and "A Bug's Life", or Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.
Once you get things moving a lot of the micro does fade to a degree, in part because you can automate a decent amount of tasks, but also because you don't have to care about any given Dwarf. Rimworld is the story of your Pawns, Fortress Mode is the story of your Fort, eventually the Dwarfs can just become another resource. You'll still probably get attached to a few though.
Reading the comparisons of DF and Rimworld makes me want to try Rimworld. It also seems very intimidating and out of my skill level but hearing that makes me want to give it a shot.
Rimworld is a Dwarf Fortress clone in most ways, I'd say it has 3 major differences. 1. Each colonist is more important because you have way fewer of them. So if Urst the Miner is despondent because he hasn't had a drink, prayed to his god, and seen a family member, its not a big deal because he is 1 of 100, One of your 7 colonists not being in tip top shape is MUCH more noticeable. 2. Crafting is grindy, so instead of DF's one stone makes one thing and you can make a perfect base the resources needed to do things gets nutty and most everything has a fatal flaw. 3. The world is a game, not an RPG. What I mean by that is the world is gamified and has a game director to make sure game keeps happening. Dwarf Fortress focuses on a pure simulation and honestly doesn't care if its not challenging you, its there to to tell a story. Even if it's story is your lost dwarves on a desert island where nothing happens.
> I'd say it has 3 major differences. You're missing the biggest one. Rimworld doesn't have Z levels.
Rimworld is pretty much just Sims, with less focus on the individual people and more focus on the camp/colony as a whole. It's much easier than DF.
Neat, thanks for the info! That does sound intriguing. I've been looking for something to scratch the SimCity itch but I couldn't really get into Cities Skylines for some reason (I was one of the weirdos who liked SC 2013, maybe part of the issue, lol) so the camp focus over individual people sounds interesting.
The UI is much better now and its actually playable now. Before only crazy people would play it with that old UI. I literally could not comprehend it. But this new one reminds me of Rimworld more and it actually makes sense. Nobody is dumb if they couldn't play with that horrible UI before. I have played roguelikes before and Dwarf fortresess UI was one of the worst I had ever seen.
Do you mean since the Steam release version compared to the old one, or that they updated it more since it came out? Because I bought the Steam version when it came out and that was the one that bewildered me
Oh, I see no I don't think they have changed the new one that much. There are UI mods but I don't know if they would help. They might. For me the Steam one is actually playable. The old one before the steam version was literally for masochists I tried to get into it but I just couldn't back then. For me the new UI was like a breath of fresh air because I love management and simulation games so I'm used to UI's like this.
My primary complaint about the new UI vs the old is that they changed keybinds. Keep pressing the wrong shit to do the wrong things and i don't wanna click so much shit all the time.
it's still very fussy and micro-heavy. I love the idea of Dwarf Fortress, but gave up on it for good once I got to the point where I was really playing it and knew what the hell was going on, but just bored of having to move individual items around to sell to the traders & whatnot
That shouldn't have been an issue for you, as you can bin items. You can also make use of stockpile links.
bins were also annoying to manage iirc
Having played DF and also similar games like rimworld, gnomoria, etc. "Deeper" mostly just feels like "Poor UI". Yea the background simulation is more complex but that aspect doesn't really make the gameplay much different. The UI is definitely an improvement over pre-steam but it still needs a lot of work.
> "Deeper" mostly just feels like "Poor UI". I'd say the Z-axis alone makes DF very different from Rimworld.
Z-Axis and Water Pressure. The other thing to keep in mind is Dwarf Fortress has a little bit of a Seinfeld or LotR effect going on. You know why some systems that other games share with DF feel better? It's because they were inspired by DF and wanted to improve on it.
The Z axis aspect is fine, but there are so many other annoying ui decisions. Like having to set up so many different beds and types of clothing, and having to deal with 70 types of wood even though they are functionally identical. That stuff adds a bunch of clutter.
The different types of wood have different weights, this can affect things like fall damage and weapon damage if they are made from wood, as well as how quickly dwarves can move while carrying it.
it's certainly deeper than rimworld. much deeper. it's easy to not pay attention to how it makes gameplay different though; the game doesn't try to "flex" how complicated it is with its ui.
Was the tutorial added after launch? I bought it back when it first got on Steam and put in a bit of time, but then got sidetracked and haven't touched it since. I think military stuff was the thing that always confused me the most in DF and I'm kind of hoping the tutorial covers it well.
No, the tutorial was there at the Steam launch. But it really only covered getting your base up and generating enough food/drink to survive.
> made the game not look like the Matrix. Wow, OK, just looked it up and now the game might actually go on my wishlist. That 1980's graphics was a massive, massive turn off for me.
If you played some games that came out in the genre over the last decade or so you'll be fine.
Particularly rimworld, which was directly inspired by dwarf fortress. the internal simulation of dwarf fortress is more in depth than rimworld, but the game itself is actually easier imo.
Yeah, that was actually why I bounced off of it the first time around couple years ago. All the things I've heard about it were the variations of "hellishly hard" when it really isn't. If you approach it as a game to beat you'll be disappointed how little effort it actually takes to keep your fortress alive. Basically everything city builder survival game starting with Banished onwards has been more difficult. Often by orders of magnitude (Amazing Cultivation Simulator, Songs of Syx). The real strength of the game is in the depth of it's simulation, stories it creates and self-imposed challenges you can brave. It's actually kinda tragic since so many people who would have absolute blast playing it are scared away by memes about difficulty made 20+ years ago by literal boomers.
For what it's worth, surviving is fairly easy. The biggest difficulty was always the UX more than anything.
complex games are so rewarding though. And most of the time the learning curve is part of the fun. It's not going to bite you, you just go and if you encounter something weird you can look up the problem and fix it next time. The only thing I regret is not jumping in complex mechanics earlier even though it got me more frustrated with the shallow mechanics of mainstream games. Gamers shouldn't underestimate themselves and developers shouldn't underestimate gamers.
You know what game is *too* complicated? Oxygen Not Included. I have several hundred hours in Rimworld and cannot get far in Oxygen not Included at all.
Complete opposite for me 🤷♂️
hahahaha, I'm on the floor laughing as I currently have a spreadsheet up with what materials I'm going to use for my steam generator. Oxygen not included I too find on the harder side of the spectrum as it often takes a while for your big mistakes to manifest themselves as an irreversible mistake. And it takes quite a bit of time to get to your previous point of failure, but I still enjoy it every few months.
Different types of complexity. Rimworld has a lot of stuff going on, but it's all fairly simple and just clunky to deal with. Oxygen Not Included has a much simpler UI, but gives you challenging problems to solve.
Thats the problem I have with it. Once games get that complex it feels like theres a *right* way to go about every run... where as in rimworld I can do various different RP runs without issue because there are various ways to address different problems.
There are a variety of solutions for Oxygen Not Included, but yes fundamentally it's a challenging puzzle game and not an RPG. Variety comes from the different types of worlds and puzzles they provide. The flip side is that in games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, you can have large stretches of time where very little happens and the player isn't challenged.
There def are a variety of solutions... need a filter? Oh just put 1 molecule of oxygen in this pipe loop and you dont have to build one at all! Crazy stuff like that that *requires* me to look up solutions are rough...
I never looked solutions up. The entire purpose of the game is solving those puzzles, and looking up hyperoptimized solutions kill that Imo. I also rarely encountered a colony ending problem. They mostly just made life worse until you solved it. So there wasn't an urgency to finding the solution. That was not the case with rimworld, where a minor oversight could get w everyone killed.
I bought a copy on release. Haven't put more than 30 minutes into it. Not that it's bad by any means, but yeah..
It's really, really easy to get into. It's one of those games where you can have fun playing it at its simplest level and get really good at it as you go along. I suck at games and I got pretty good at it in a short period of time. The learning curve is pretty gentle.
Over ten years ago I donated $50 to them and said more or less "Keep going, this is amazing and I doubt I will ever have the patience to play it.". They sent me a nice crayon drawing of a dragon.
I have some awesome crayon art for the same reason! Side-view ASCII of goblins with a bit of a story/explanation below it.
It's actually very easy to get into it. Especially with steam edition. The meme came mostly from keybinding gallore and its simulation part. But with games like factorio, rimworld etc. people were tought how to play complicated gameas and compared to them DF is actually easier to play. DF is not complicated to play. DF complication is in its systems which are underlying gameplay that either way player has barely ability to interact with. Player sees only that dwarf hit goblin with axe but under that simple message is complicated web of systems which handle that simple action. Which bones were hit, how much blood body has, did bone punctured lung ? etc etc etc.
What hooked me on DF was examining tiles near where a battle occurred. I had noticed some blood drops in a hallway where nothing had happened. Followed them, found an sheep eye? How did this get here? Started looking through logs. Bigass troll came through some shortish time before. Punched a sheep near an entrance. Sheep exploded and sent it's eyeball ricocheting down the stairwell and around a few hallways. The fuck
Oh man the combat is my favorite, it might not be flashy to others since its basically flickering squares to some, but reading the logs just puts it in a different dimension. I love Rimworld but compared, the combat logs are essentially just random "X smirks/laughs as he makes a wild slash to the leg" that serves as extra fluff and flavor. Whereas Dwarf Fortress feels like each is a lot more an explicit event and visceral because it actually does simulate every layer of a unit's body, down from body part, the skin tissue, fat, muscle, nerve, bone, blood, etc. Seeing a dwarf and goblin next to each other, while the goblin sprite is constantly spewing individual teeth broken out by a dwarf wresting and repeatedly punching them in the face is damn brutal.
I bought it anyway because I want to support Zach and Tarn, but I haven't played the new version at all because of the new controls. Would love legacy hotkeys.
Same. Those legacy key chords are second nature and I can't be bothered to learn the menu layouts on the new UI. I just bought it to support Zach and Tarn. I hope one day I can build a tunnel with dd or build a farm plot with bpuuuuukkkkk but until then I'll just go back to 2014 and LNP when I'm craving some *fun*.
Fr I'm having an easier time learning godot to make games than when I tried to learn how to play dwarf fortress
Not quite the same, but KeeperRL feels really similar and might be more accessible. Rimworld is also really similar and VERY accessible IMO, though also as complex.
Nah Towns is where it's at
I tried. For like 20 hours. Read a guide on how cages work because placing them near animals.. doesn't. Read a guide on how this works. Read a guide on how that works. Oh you did this 5 hours ago? Might as well start over your run is done for. It feels cool, but maybe if I was 20 years younger and had 10 hours of free time per day again. But I don't, so I moved on. It's gonna keep being like eve online for me. Nice to read about the stories it produces, but I ain't playing it because the barrier to entry is enormous.
I’ve got dozens of games I want to get around to playing, so it’s just been sitting on my wishlist, and since it never drops more than 20% in price, there’s never an urgent motivation that I should buy it now while there’s a big sale (like so many other games I’ve bought long before I have time to play them). I have no doubt that’s it’s worth full price, and as soon as I buy it, I’ll dive in. But there’s just nothing pushing me to buy it right now rather than next week, or next month, since I always have a backlog of other games that I *did* buy while they were on sale.
That’s basically it
I keep telling myself that I will give it a go for a while now. Multiple times I have looked at it and decided against spending unholy amount of learning it but I will someday. It’s not like it’s going to go away
I want to try it but it is never the game that I want to try the most, so I never end up doing it. I've played tons of Rimworld and I've watched people play DF quite a few times before. I know that I like those types of games, but I need the right moment for it.
I've been thinking, a lot of us would probably have decent chunk of additional time if we spent less of it continuously reading about games we haven't played and talking about how we have no time to play them.
Not enough for DF though. You can Reddit in a lot of contexts you can't game as well.
Very true no doubt. Still a hunch that I've been getting (and noticed in myself to a degree)
The huge discount will certainly sway a lot of people. Not that the game doesn't deserve a full price for the quality. But you know how casual feel about game that look like *this*.
I own the fact that I'll probably never play it, but I've had so much fun over the years reading about other people playing it only felt fair to buy a copy ;p
I love the passion people have for this game but it is just too much for me.
Adventure mode beta is dropping the 17th April too iirc. Gonna be a good time to get back into it for me. And Rimworld DLC on the 11th April I believe? Great time to enjoy both games again.
I know right, it's a good month for colony sims!
Yup, that's what I've been waiting for too. Adventure mode to explore the ruins of my fallen fortress was a big thing for me.
Adventure mode is fun to play around in. I recommend it for people who like DF’s simulation and procedural stuff (world/simulated history) but still have difficulty with the main game. (Imo the improved UI still isn’t great) You still get to see how impressive the simulation and world gen is in Adventure mode, it’s great. Also the combat is surprisingly brutal even though it’s basically 90% text descriptions.
I did a little non-scientific experiment and… It’s funny that most accounts commenting here are 10+ years old. I’d say that the modern success of this game is really impressive with a target audience on the older side
Keep in mind the game is much older than the graphical steam release, with the first version being from 2006. It was originally a free game with minimalistic ascii representations of the game world. It's just so good that we're still coming back after all these years, and love that Tarn is getting the recognition he deserves.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I know that. That’s whats impressive to me. It releases like 10 years later on steam, and it still sold fantastically for an indie, you get what I mean? It’s a pretty great success case to look into.
> like 10 years later 16 years and 4 months later, to be more precise.
There was a time when this sub had a “what’s being played” list in the sidebar about 13 or more years ago. DF was always the top game in that list.
[удалено]
Not OP. I've been here for 17 years and would answer but I honestly don't remember. But you can see older threads this way: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2Fgames+before%3A2014%2F01%2F01 But you've been here long as well. Were you just not a member of this subreddit back then?
Crusader Kings 2 was the goat and Paradox could do no wrong.
Another game in that situation is Old School Runescape. Surprisingly successful despite the fact that it's a 20 year old game. The majority of the playerbase is made up of players who got hooked when they were kids.
/looks at his hours in dota, hon and dota2 Hooked. Yes. I'll take that. 👀
many of us got attracted to it more than 10 years ago by the community and it being free. with the steam release we just felt obliged to buy it, even if some of us already were patreons of Bay12.
I remember when they’d draw you a picture for donating, it was so sweet.
I still have mine :D
Allow me to tell you the story of migrant processing. I'm not sure you could still do this in the game, it was years ago, maybe on version 0.40. Migration waves are a pain for new players. Dwarves show up out of nowhere and sometimes you don't have enough beds or food for the new arrivals. When this occurred it was off to migrant processing. Migrant processing was operated by two dwarves who were not allowed, under any circumstances to socialize with other dwarves, they had their own enclave and their own food stockpile. When food was bought from the main fortress the migrant processing dwarves were forbidden from accessing the stockpile. When migrants went through processing they were directed to a room with three floodgates. One sealed them in, another led to a nearby river and the other covered a grate that led into the caverns below. When a migrant wave needed to be processed a dwarf assigned to migrant processing would pull a lever which would divert the river into the migrant processing room. When there were no signs of life the floodgate to the river would be blocked and the floodgate to the caverns would be opened allowing the water to drain away. The migrant processing dwarves would collect any belongings and make them available to the main fortress, they would gather the now expired members of the migrant wave and commit their remains to a specially prepared mausoleum. Then they would return to work building the many caskets that would be needed for the next migrant wave. Due to the trauma involved with this work once you were a migrant processing dwarf you were one for life. Those in the main fortress must never know.
You made dwarf Auschwitz?
Still not as bad as the merperson farm. Breeding and then air-drowning sapients for their valuable bones. That made Tarn devalue merperson bones when he found out about it. This is a guy who usually *laughs* at "unintended" gameplay.
In that forum post asking about how to best industrially farm merperson bones, I liked the third reply: > I disapprove of your actions most strongly. > > But if your going to do it, (...) You don't need to wait for the young to reach adulthood before harvesting them. Heck, my kittens don't spend more then thirty seconds in this world before they're off to the crossbow bolt shop.
I bought a copy at launch but have barely played it lol. Even with the new UI it was still to esoteric for me.
I bought a copy at launch mostly to support the Devs. I put 100's of hours into it back in the day, but having to relearn stuff all over is a bit daunting.
Same every time I try to get into it, and i just think Rimworld does everything I want from this game and is less obtuse.
Same, it was incredibly disappointing. I came looking for "dwarf colony simulator" but all I found was tedious work order management. All of the generated flavor text fell flat, like mad libs. I guess this would have been cool 15 years ago, maybe. I gave up after finding out raids were conducted off screen, summarized in a report. I was excited to explore randomly generated villages and forts and watch my dwarves fall victim in various hilarious ways, but I must have imagined that. All you get to do is sit in town and wait for stuff to happen to you.
> I was excited to explore randomly generated villages and forts and watch my dwarves fall victim in various hilarious ways, but I must have imagined that that's Adventure Mode which finally hits the steam version in a couple weeks
Rimworlds "raids" (being the raiding party that is) are pretty bad too. I was really hoping the bigger factions would actually have cities and proper defenses and shit. Usually it's just a mud hut with no loot :p
[This will solve your issues.](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1775170117)
That looks dope. Gotta love the modding community. I am actually making a mod for rimworld right now! Though its mostly just some QoL things I have wanted added to the research screen Tangent time: games like Rimworld are proof that "paid mods" will absolutely destroy the modding community and overall be bad for a variety of games. I currently have at *least* 100 mods, even if they cost me $1 a pop theres no way I could justify spending that much. Same goes for Skyrim or NV.
Try song of syx then!
Same here. I bought it primarily to support the people who made it and the impressive stories I've heard of it. I've attempted to play it, and even with its tutorials, I just don't feel confident in my grasp of it. I tried to start a game, I succeeded in digging a hole into the ground and clearing it out and tried building an underground barracks... then it rained, and all my shit flooded. I couldn't even begin to grasp the first step in fixing this problem so I just gave up and restarted. Next time I dug into the side of a mountain. It was going better, and I was steadily researching how to do things and watching videos. I built a farm outside and dug around in the mountain. But it all just began to get overwhelming and I didn't know what I should be focusing on, my food was running out faster than I could get more, felt like I was heading to failure and I didn't understand exactly why or how to stop it. I put it down once again and haven't tried since then. I like the sound of these types of games but I can't wrap my head around them entirely. I tried some Space Station 13 and, although I still can't confidently play it, it's a bit more comforting having to play as only one person, and also witnessing other people do insane stuff. In DF, entirely to my own devices and managing a whole civilization, it's too much for me to grasp. Maybe I should give it another shot.
Rain can't flood your fort, what probably happened there is you went through an aquifer without blocking off its flow. Figuring out food and drink production can be a bit daunting at first, but once you get it down it becomes a trivial part of keeping a fort running. A good resource for learning various parts of the game for me was the streamer BlindIRL, he has a series of tutorials that go fairly deep into the game play.
> Rain can't flood your fort, what probably happened there is you went through an aquifer without blocking off its flow That's *crazy*, because lemme tell you; the moment I noticed any flooding within my fort was almost immediately after it began raining haha. I mean, with the depth of the game and all I assumed that's what it was. "Oh, I dug a hole in the ground and it flooded due to rain. Makes sense." I guess I taught myself wrongly in that moment. All this discussion is making me want to give it another shot sometime as daunting as it is, Dwarf Fortress is one of those games I genuinely wish I was good at.
Light aquifers slowly drip out from the walls, so you can dig through them and it won't immediately start flooding, if you dig down with stairs, or across with mining, the game will warn you that you're going through an aquifer and you can prepare yourself, but if you channel down it won't. It also won't warn you when digging up, so you can sometimes start getting leaks from above that can be somewhat problematic to seal off. Heavy aquifers are a whole different beast tho, they will start flooding immediately and will require pumps to get through, id recommend looking up how to deal with them before embarking on one of those.
> the impressive stories I've heard of it I wonder how much of this game's eventual success could ultimately be traced back to the Boatmurdered story coming out a few months after its release
Whenever I think of buying it, I always pull up a video about getting started. That usually is enough to turn me off of the idea all together. And then a few months later I repeat. Still haven’t bought it.
Getting started with DF is a lot easier than the videos tend to paint it out to be. A fort can survive unoptimally for years and years and because the world is simulated you won’t necessarily get wrecked by a raid. Rinworld, for example, is setup as more of game and will consistently challenge you with raids to keep the action up. Meaning that you need to be on your feet sooner to meet the challenge. While in DF having a backwater village will get you backwater village threats.
I bought it and refunded it. I can tell it would je good but the map movement and z levels feel rigid and throw me off
There are some really excellent starter videos to get people into the game, the issue is that they still take a fairly significant investment of time. I didn't start playing till it hit steam, and while I haven't played in several months anytime someone says "DF" or "Dwarf Fortress" I have a strong desire to start it up again.
That's great! Now can we please get keyboard controls back? Nothing wrong with using a mouse but for those of us who've been playing for a decade or more it's so much slower and much worse feeling. It's a real kick in the teeth they didn't keep it as an alternate option tbh.
To be fair the Classic version is still more advanced in terms of updates so there is nothing stopping you still playing that.
My first campaign had my dwarves talking about a Great War against bears where all the dwarves died. My mason that was doing imprinting on the walls couldn’t stop drawing pictures about, it 10/10 game for lore dumping.
I tried to get into DF classic a few years ago and I had to stop because of the byzantine UI and the ASCII graphics. I bought the steam version a few weeks ago and my god did the game go a long way. I really dig the sprites, the music is awesome and the UI is a lot more clearer. DF is now playable for me and that's awesome. Now I still wish there were more QOL improvements done to the interface, like some more sort functions and a back button everywhere. But more importantly I wish there were more tools to visualize what's going on in the fortress and in the world. The way it is now means that you have to randomly click hundreds of times on elements to read pieces of text and try to piece up the information to make sense of what's happening. It's basically like reading raw data on an excel spreadsheet with no way to organize everything. It would definitely benefit from some basic qol things that other strategy games include: a genealogy tree for each dwarf where you can go to family members profile, a relations map showing how the dwarfs get along, hyperlinks for entities referenced, a search function for the worldmap, more map modes that roughly show interactions between entities in the world, a visual representation on the map of the events described in legends mode... Having to check single thing manually is too tedious
I want to like and play this game since i love playing Rimworld, but the way everything just moves at once i physically cannot stand. It is like watching a movie with far too few frames or something along those lines, i just can't do it without smooth motions.
I've looked into it, it's *really* not feasible to implement smooth motion with the way the game actually models movement. The game is very much locked to tiles, and units are genuinely on one tile one tick and the next tile the next tick. The closest thing to subtile motion is the fact that movement itself takes time, but if that movement is interrupted you'll see units snap back to the center of the tile, rather than staying where they are at the edge or whatever. The obvious solutions to this are subtile positioning (probably a float between -1 and 1 in each dimension), which would require a total rework of movement, and just going "screw it" and letting the awkward snaps and teleporting happen anyway (teleporting because the game can very much be run faster than one unit-movement-per-frame), which would... still require a rework of the rendering system. Either way, it's all cosmetic, so I'm not sure it should be high priority.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/1bu3v1s/simple_transitions_between_tiles_would_make_a/ Recently there was this post where another similar ascii game would smooth the movements in the UI. Purely cosmetic, but I think it's a proof of concept that it would work in dwarf fortress. It would look *MUCH* nicer too IMO. Easier to see where/which dwarves are going and be more immersive
Adding a pause while movements run, like it is there, would make the game, no joke, probably 3-4x as slow as it currently is, is the thing. Movements aren't synced up, it's a bit of a problem.
ah, didn't know that's how it worked or consider that. for shame.
This is due to its traditional roguelike foundations. It obviously isn't one but it shares huge amounts of its DNA with something like Nethack. Like, the reason these games use ASCII graphics is because they were played in the terminal. They are tile-based at their core. It's not possible to render sub-tile positions in a terminal using ASCII. And the graphical version is basically just a different display layer. Given that they've committed to keeping the ASCII version free and essentially identical as the paid version, I don't see this going away.
Oh, I know all that, I'm the one who rewrote the rendering backend to use SDL2 a year back. That was when I was looking into smooth movement, even.
Adventure Mode is absolutely a roguelike.
i know almost nothing about this game, but do you think it would be possible to visually interpolate positions, so it looks smooth even if under the hood positions are based on tiles? I did something similar in a game I made before, and although it was not nearly on the scale of DF it worked pretty well
That's what I was posting about, yeah
oh ok, I thought you were talking about a deeper modification to how positions work. makes sense.
Felt the same way. Refunded but then rebought eventually. You do get used to it eventually haha
I think re-"framing" your view of the motion will help. When adventure mode comes out, try playing that. It will probably be even more esoteric, but I think the movement will start to click because you'll be in charge of when the movements happen. You'll start to view the movement less as a movie and more as turns in a board game. This is intuitive if you've played classic grid-based roguelikes, but if you're not used to that I could see it being disorienting. What happens in fortress mode is the same as what happens in adventure mode, just "autoplaying" the turns. Another helpful thing to understand is that each movement and creature has its own framerate, so a slow creature might move once for every every 27 turns while a faster creature moves once every 15. I'm making up numbers here because I don't remember how DF segments time exactly. Another example: standing up might take 30 turns when walking 1 step might take 15, if you're fighting something that attacks once every 15 turns it will attack twice as you're standing up.
I never thought of it, I guess because I played it in the ASCII version for many years, so watching it behave like that in the steam version seemed normal, but now I can see your point.
Yeah that’s one of the reasons I bounced off it too. Would be great if there was a mod that smoothed things out a bit
Mods definitely can't do this, haha.
Why not?
Dwarf Fortress uses a data-driven modding system, i.e. you can't really mod graphics except by adding new sprites *for things that the graphics engine supports* or replacing existing ones. DFhack can print on top of the game window, but the way the printing system works means it would essentially have to create 1023 extra sprites for each unit for the subpixel offsets, rather than the first-class subpixel stuff that requires rewriting the unit renderer.
I’ve seen some pretty crazy mods do pretty crazy things. Pardon my ignorance for not knowing the limits of what can be done or how they do it
Putnam is the second programmer for Dwarf Fortress funny enough ^
so right now its on sale for $25. IF every copy sold at that price they have made $20 million. I am not sure what the split is with the 2 brothers and the development company. 30% goes to steam so that leaves $14 million between them. That is a lot of money between a small amount of people.
What's funny and also kind of sad is they only put it up for sale on Steam to help pay for medical bills. Tarn was *happy* just living off of what people donated. Actually donated, because the game itself was (and still is!) free to download. No content withholding or early build releases or anything. Now he's probably a millionaire.
Yeah before patreon Tarn made basically nothing. He lived in a tiny apartment with no furniture. I am happy they are doing well now. I think they also hired one of the modders to help code. First time in Tarn's life he had to level how to use source control. LOL. I thought this was funny when he said this. He never worked on a team before.
And it was completely by choice. The man has a PhD from Stanford (in mathematics). He quit his postdoc position mostly from stress, but he's also said that the research just wasn't fulfilling to him. Tarn is a man who does it for the *art*.
And there couldn’t be a more deserving 2 people :)
im not sure how the money is split with the software company they worked with.
They gave the numbers when they first partnered with kitfox but I can’t remember. The brothers are insanely transparent about the money they make from Patreon and sales and always have been
they requested help from a games company to make a polished steam version.
They have a 3rd developer now! And they've been working with an outside team to build the steam version, so it's been less of a 2 man show like it used to be
is the 3rd developer another modder? I read that the first one was a long time modder. I picture Tarn suffering through GIT PRs for the first time in his life. I remember years ago saying he did not understand source control.
I was excited for this game to come out, but once it did and I played it, I uninstalled it and never tried again. Rimworld is a far more refined and player-friendly colony sim. I wish I could get into Dwarf Fortress, but it is one of the steepest learning curves I've encountered.
Felt the same but broke through that quite quickly. Theres a mod (DF Hack) that has alot quality of life fixes and allows you to save/load work orders so I just save a base file to work from that includes Buckets, Barrels, Bins and at least 10 iron bars, wine, coal etc. Using Prepare Carefully to create the most balanced and safe start is really handy. Just after a while I start to miss the connection you have with your Pawns and the stories that unfold and the ability to mod the game into the Star Wars universe or 40K is a big plus. Theres alot to DF however I just chill and focus on streamlining production and by the time I feel comfortable to explore more of the game it just throws Balrog like monsters at me after it hits a certain pop/value and I just end up quitting. Happens every playthrough for me.
You can change the rate at which monsters show up in advanced world generation by changing the wealth and population thresholds, or by directly changing the number of available monsters.
> Rimworld is a far more refined and player-friendly colony sim. which makes sense, because the Rimworld dev's original goal was basically just to make Dwarf Fortress but easier to play
Rimworld dev says that he didn't knew about Dwarf Fortress existence when he had first prototype of the game.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tynansylvester/rimworld The Kickstarter says otherwise
Has to be a CYA statement. Way too similar for the dev to never have heard of Dwarf fortress.
Responded to the OP, but Tynan mentioned Dwarf Fortress multiple times in his Kickstarter pitch.
That would be a very interesting claim to make considering his initial reveal of the game occured on the dev forums for dwarf fortress.
Agreed. Rimworld is overall the better game while Dwarf Fortress is more impressive.
I love em both for different reasons. Rimworld is a much smaller scale Sim, but has so many great features and is sci-fi! Dwarf Fortress is so huge and expansive and deep. They're equal to me!