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Hey all. I downloaded dwarf fortress, opened it... and closed it. The interface is far too confusing. After reading a tutorial or two, I vaguely know how it works. I was just wondering how many people here actually know how to play it and how long it took them to learn?

i do. i knew the game for about 2 years before actually getting into it. i learned how to play it when i was down with the flu and had nothing better to do lol. you really have to devote a day to figuring out how everything works. the game is a lot harder to learn than it could be because of the bad interface of course. but i think it's worth it. DF is probably one of my most played games ever.

p.s. it REALLY helps if youve played traditional ascii roguelikes and some of the more complex management sims like the settlers, anno or tropico before.

Think the guy making it will ever make a better GUI, or is it one of the "features"?

Just out of curiosity, does anyone else think it would be a cool idea to make a community developed version of Dwarf fortress without the annoying GUI? Like, a version with the same amount of functionality, but easier to learn. Someone makes a framework, then it is basically a collection of hundreds of mods? Sound cool, or am I missing some big thing that would make the entire idea moot?

According to the retarded fanbase it's a "feature", but it really makes doing even the most mundane of tasks a total pain.


To answer the OPs question I know how to play, and it took awhile.  But even once you do its still a pain in the ass. :(

It's like you have this really amazing game similar to dungeon keeper, but I have to play it with no mouse

and broken fingers

it's a bit like linux, if linux was very good underneath, but I can't tell about that

Hey, Linux is great! (When it doesn't break.)  :P

Not everything is meant for everyone and that's fine.

I think you'll be faster enjoying dwarf fortress by just getting over the gui-thing. (then waiting for a non-existing community to clone a huge complex beastly indie-game ) speaking of clones, there is Gnomoria wich has a more noob friendly GUI (basically it's dwarf fortress lite with floating nested windows), which is quite horrible and fiddley. Just get over it like a man, do some old-school programming on the command line and you'll get it. And you'll be faster then any mouse gui.. ;)

I know.... I just am so frustrated at the unintuitiveness of it all. DF has at least 3 different types of menus. Each time I open one, I have to look at the bottom just to navigate...  >:( But it's so good!

Good interface is very low on the list of priorities, because there's a large enough fanbase that doesn't care about the interface and keeps giving him money regardless, and it would probably take a while to make an actually good interface.

But yeah, I know how to play. I choose not to these days because DF is a massive timesink. Play it with the wiki open underneath and refer to it often.

yeah it could be a bit better, just try to memorize the keys, you'll be very fast in the end.
 

also the game IS an alpha and is getting a constant stream of new features so he would probably end up having to completely redesign the interface several times over.

i wouldn't recommend any of the "clones" because they're all either bad or unreleased but i CAN recommend just checking out the management genre in general.

Not unique idea.

DF visualizer:
http://code.google.com/p/stonesense/

Straight up DF clone with nice graphics:
http://gnomoria.com/

Also yeah, the default controls for DF is bad. The community develops a lot of tools to get around every kind of control, including tiled graphics if you don't like the UTF8.

And the problem with actually someone building a full GUI mod for DF is that it changes too fast. Otherwise the developers themselves would build a GUI for it.

merged posts from fight thread pollution into this thread. no need to have the same discussion in 2 different threads.

>nooby interface
>get over it
>not everything meant for everyone

what

We're not even talking about learning the game, or the game being too difficult guys, we're talking about it not even remotely having an interface suitable for what you need to do to play.

Unfortunately it probably won't be fixed until its done because the game changes too fast, and since it will never be done the way Toady is going, it will never have a proper interface.  :(

People tend to forget that.

It´s a massive and very complicated game. I think it would benefit from a better GUI too, but it would still take alot of time to learn how to play. The retarded fanbase consists of people who have spent enough time with the game to reaize the wonders, horrors and humor it gives back. And keep giving back even after hundreds of gameplay hours in a way that I realy never felt in any other game do. But no its not the most noob freindly game out there and probably never will be because it is a very big game, even at this stage.

Yeah, I don't actually play DF anymore, but I get along with the community very well, because of the same taste in games. I was probably one of the first people to sign up to their forums, back in the Slaves to Armok 1 days.

Took me about a week to understand DF, and I was used to complex ASCII type games.

It's actually a very mainstream game, IMO. Minecraft was built off a similar style. DF goes into far more depth (no pun intended).


Toady One puts it under serious consideration, even mentioned that he plans to make it full 3D in the future (even though nobody asked for a 3D game). It's in its current form because it's the fastest way to develop it. When he 'feels like it', he'll probably branch out a graphical version for kicks.

Full 3D?  Holy balls.

Time to check back with DF in year 2020.

iirc he thinks delving into graphics and mouse interfaces too early is what killed the first armok and he doesn't want to repeat the mistake.

it's actually a smart decision, development wise. the roguelike i'm making right now has a mouse interface, but i didn't implement that either until i had all the core mechanics down. ofc Df has about 100x the scope of my game so it'll take forever until toady is that at that stage.

also i guess the reason he's been able to keep going for so long is that he prioritizes things that are fun to make for him.

i mean the interface itself is awful, no question about it. i'm just saying.

I know everything about Dwarf Fortress's inside baseball and I won't tell anyone anything except for cryptic snide remarks.

I played a bunch around the time before and after it made the jump to a 3d world.

I make one fort every year, but I used to play a lot more back in HS because it could run on my netbook and it was more interesting than 2/3 of my classes.

I love the changes to adventure mode, that always appealed to me more. It's still pretty... rough, but the combat is a bit more fun now with targeting and things like necromancers and vampires.

In what other game can you impale an enemy with the corpse of another enemy?

the game is never not going to be in alpha, so the interface will probably always be shitty.

I already said that.

The scope of Toady's game is so big and taken so long already, I wouldn't be surprised if it was fueled purely by massive amounts of PCP and RedBull.

Or if he was secretly a game making AI; like SkyNet only with rougelikes instead of sending death robots to the past.  8)

huh, it's allready 3d though right, coming from a 2d world.. have you got a link or something on that ?


as for the question of the post, yeah I do sort of, atleast enough to build a little empire and have fun until bored. just watch some youtube on it and/or install the lazy newb pack , it might be just for you!

yeah but I can't do complex stuff like irrigation and those insane lava traps you find on youtube, I can generally get a nice lil fortress going and then suddenly tigers or elves appear and they all die :<

As in polygons. Lol, it's a needle in the haystack, under the yearly 200 page development discussion threads and the massive feature list they had a while back. But the original Slaves to Armok was also polygons.

It's not on the "any time soon" list, though. They had a "presentation arc" at one point which was supposed to be a graphical overhaul, but it seems to have been buried too.

A somewhat old thread on this from DF's designer/project manager:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=34311.0

Dev list here:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html

It used to be more insane, but they've wrapped up the combat mechanics last year and greatly improved the adventurer mode over this year. Looks like next year's focus is procedural story generation.

There's a book with 240 pages about how to get started with Dwarf Fortress http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920022565.do

That shit is cray.

I think some people miss the point, the simulation itsself's insane depth is the draw, you feel like you can do anything, once you know how to do it, baseline survival is pretty simple, there are basic moves that work for any playthrough, and if you get good enough at that, you will want to try new interesting things like: Obsidian towers, Giant Ebony trees with Cages full of captured goblins on their branches, Golden fighting platforms with lava underneath them, for fighting training in your ornate dining room, a network of towers connected underground to repel raiders, a rapture like 3 story tower sunk into a lake, giant waterworks designed to flood and drown raiders, with an out spout to a local river, using a grate to collect their resources, lava heated water that doesn't freeze in the winter. Those are things I've done.

That all sounds cool and all, but minecraft does the same through an acessible interface. It takes so much effort to do something in DF at first, that feels like you can't do nothing at all. But as some people pointed out, it's on alpha, so let's wait.

You can't make nearly as many interesting situations in Minecraft, due to the solo nature of the gameplay. Also, the interface in Minecraft is pretty convoluted as well. You are also missing the entire AI social aspect that is a big part of what makes Dwarf Fortresses interesting.

What? There is a health bar, a food bar, an inventory bar and a mysterious green bar that you will quickly discover is an experience bar.
Whereas in DF there are like a quarter million keys you gotta press and now you've told a dwarf to cook a bun. You win!

I think there's a misunderstood here, you see, it's not that DF is bad or something, it's just that its interface walls up the game instead of opening up. The game has pretty much a language of its own.

So do some of us. And... ?? :lol:

FTR, I could probably figure it out, but don't need any more timesinkers than I already have on my plate now.


Genuinely curious though... which do you think would be harder to learn:

Being good at programming?

OR

Being good at Dwarf Fortress?

That's why the game has a community and a wiki

If you go into a game like DF and try to figure it out yourself, yeah you deserve to be stumped. You're trying to approach some dude's really complex life work and you have so much freedom and no idea what to do and it's paralyzing.

So you go to the community, you get help, you read the wiki, and you play it. Part of the game is sharing how to play with other people. It's not hardwired into the game, so I wouldn't call it a feature, but the community is as much a part of playing DFort as the code that constitutes the game is.

There really isn't that much you need to know to get started in dwarf fortress. Mining and getting food, both are pretty easy, there are multiple ways to get food, you can learn in steps and the internet will help


Actually, cooking a bun is probably EASIER as a player in Dwarf Fortress then in Minecraft. You just need to open up your manager window and create an order for a bun to be cooked, and eventually it will, if you have the required items in your stockpiles.

naah, I believe programmer ought to pick it up easier then others, to get 'good' at it it helps if you

• like to research by googling, or rtfm in general
• are capable of using a keyboard
• are willing to remember some keystrokes

so, yeah no OR but yes AND !

and what Castle said.

@baconman: programming. Programming takes logic and an active brain, while Dwarf Fortress only takes lots of time to learn.