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[redoubtable troutbot]

I haven't tried the new version yet, but if it's as fast as I've been reading it is, it sounds awesome. Slowdown in the later stages of the game is pretty much the only real issue I've had with the game.

[Duckmeister]

Waiting til Mike Mayday updates his graphic pack for .40d9...

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[Valter]

I play without any tilesets. It's like the Matrix. Other people see only a swirling mass of ASCII, but I can pierce through the confusion.

[Duckmeister]

I play without any tilesets. It's like the Matrix. Other people see only a swirling mass of ASCII, but I can pierce through the confusion.

Piercing through the confusion is no problem for me, but I just love his tileset, and I also really, really, don't like having a big E for elephants.

[William Broom]

So, I just missed my first ever trading caravan because I didn't build a trade depot.

...am I screwed?

[Inane]

Not unless you need ores or food or something that you can't get on your own.

[Hideous]

Atleast you're better off than me. I think I accidentally gave them half of my booze.

[Valter]

So, I just missed my first ever trading caravan because I didn't build a trade depot.

...am I screwed?

No. You hardly ever need things from the depot. Usually the only essential thing is leather and pig tail cloth, which is usually harder to get by yourself (at least, from what I've played).

I've found that once I have a few farms up and running, and my fortress is generally in order, the only thing I have trouble finding is bags. I'm always running short on bags. So trade for leather and cloth, and get some clothesmaking/leatherworking shops up.

[Hideous]

Actually, I need an anvil right now. I didn't bring one, because that meants 1000 monies used up.

[battlerager]

Actually, I need an anvil right now. I didn't bring one, because that meants 1000 monies used up.

Too bad. 

[Valter]

You don't need an anvil! Just make wrestlers and crossbowmen. And I don't think there's anything besides weapons and armor that you require metals to make. Just use stone or wood.

Also, try starting by a volcano or other deposit of obsidian. You can make obsidian short swords with them, which are gratuitously powerful.

[battlerager]

Yeah, I love Obsidian 

[Hideous]

Valter: I needed an anvil because my metalcrafter entered a fey mood. and a caravan happened to come by, so I got myself one. The result?



Amazing. Thank god I found a vein of platinum.

[Valter]

Well, moods are different, of course. I can't account for all circumstances, it's just general advice!

You're much nicer than me, at any rate. I woulda just locked him in his room and let him starve to death.

[Inane]

NEVERMIND I SUCK COCKS

[Hideous]

All my dwarves went moody because of the recent tragic deaths of 'Derek' and 'BRONDON' (both whom were females), some dude went insane and people threw tantrums so I had my basement levels flooded and abandoned the fortress. Now I managed to start a new fortress in what seems to be a human settlement.

[Μarkham]

You need to show those humans who's boss around there.  Undermine their buildings until they give in to your demands.

[Valter]

Ooh! The human settlements usually have shrines to their gods. Build a platform over the shrine's pool, and attach it to a lever like a trap door so that you can drown any foolish priests who walk over it.

[redoubtable troutbot]

Well, my idyllic riverside village is not doing so well. I was ambushed by goblins while building a platform over the river so I could safely shoot that damn sturgeon.

It's still down there, surrounded by various dwarf and dog chunks. Really, both arms and legs? Was that necessary? At least it's in pain.

edit: God. One of my original seven dwarves just threw a tantrum and tore down the bridge while standing on it taking three puppies, a kitten and a horse foal with him to his watery grave.  At the same time, my cook went berserk and started slaughtering people's pets before being wrestled to death by my remaining peasants.

My legendary woodcutter is now so miserable she's throwing tantrums while she's unconscious. I've taken her axe away but I still don't think any number of peasants and puppies i can throw at her can stop her inevitable killing spree. Maybe if I lock the door to her room before she heals...

[Sam]

You guys, Dwarf Fortress!

I played this a lot and adored it.  Being a boring analytical type, I wonder WHY I love it so.  Some themes that have come up for me:

Creative
Somehow playing this game filled me with a desire to make great things.  Digging out a large dining hall is a good gameplay decision as your lowly dwarves will all eat there, be impressed by the statues, and become ecstatically happy.  Digging out the 4 z-levels above it to carve a vast vaulted roof?  No gameplay advantage at all, and you've just wasted a load of space in the middle of your fort.  But still, I spent hours doing it, and erecting wooden platforms to get my engravers up to it.  It's not like the finished thing looks nice - you can only see one "layer" of it at a time, and it's rendered in ASCII characters.  Somehow DF produced a very strong creative urge in me.  I've never met another game that did that.

Vast
Brilliantly vast.  Procedurally generated landscapes are often good fun, but DF just goes that little bit further.  It's a game about digging a mine/fort for some dwarves to live in, so you'd think it would just generate a nice mountain shape and be done with it.  But it makes seas, oceans, rivers, volcanoes, swamps, glaciers, everything.  Want to try living inside a glacier?  You can try it!  Trading parties will often freeze to death trying to reach you, and you'll need some magma to melt drinking water.  It seems to me to be the perfect form of emergent gameplay.  Everyone likes to talk about emergent this and procedural that, but DF seems to just do it.  You can spend a lot of happy obsessive time generating maps and looking for that perfect place for your next fort.

Set up the rules for how the world works, make a world, and see what happens:  Animals are set to die if exposed to low temperatures, so a trading caravan sent to your icy fortress isn't going to make it.  But there's not just a simple "if ice, then no caravans spawn" check, it'll spawn the caravan and you can watch the wretched mules try to drag it to your gate and collapse in the snow.  Then you can send out your dwarves to salvage whatever goods they were carrying, and maybe some almost-fresh mule meat.

Story
We've already seen it in this thread.  People love to write the story of their fort.  Again, DF just seems to generate positive creative feelings in people.  What's more, there's a huge history system built right into the game.  I spent a happy couple of hours once looking up the history of the area surrounding my favourite fort.  I found a wonderful little story about a dwarf girl who aged 8 killed a troll (I think) that'd previously killed off the rest of her town.  She'd been living alone in the town for a few months since the troll's previous visits.  She went on to lead a local group of elves into countless bloody victories - quite a few against other dwarves.  As with the physical world, all this history is procedurally generated too.  Sometimes you'll appear in a world with no elves because they were all slaughtered, and the world generator even has to check that there's any dwarven civilizations left alive for you to join.

Abandon your fort and it continues to exist as a ruin.  The former population will go wandering, looking for somewhere to live.  Their stories that you were so closely involved in will now continue without you, but following the trajectory you gave them.  That one master wrestler you trained to fight off kobolds might go on to lead armies and change the shape of the world.


So, why isn't Toady god-king of the world?  Because it's almost unplayable.

Of course it is playable, and fantastic.  But it's a lot of work to get to the level of knowledge needed to even begin to understand what's happening in the game.

ASCII characters instead of "real" graphics is the obvious starting point.  I think it's actually not that much of a hurdle to understanding the game, but it's ugly to most eyes.  Most people who see a DF screenshot will not be inspired to pick up and play the game, and certainly not inspired to read 10,000 words on how to start a new game.  I think it does work as a useful early filtering system so people at least know to expect something insane from the start.

The interface is pretty bad.  It's not terrible as there's on-screen cues as to what button you should press to get into the myriad of menus.  But it was obviously constructed on an ad hoc basis, with seemingly similar tasks having quite different ways to accomplish them:  Setting an area of rock to be dug out, setting an area to be used as a metal store, and setting an area to be used as a farm plot.  Three fundamentally similar tasks, but with totally different and incompatible ways for the player to perform them.  The mouse works on some parts, but not on others.  Buttons have their meanings completely change as you move through menus.

There's virtually no in-game help.  The wiki is amazing, but that's thanks entirely to the work of insane fans.  How do you place a water wheel so that it'll actually work?  What on earth is a "strange mood"?  Why are the elves so angry at me?  How do I feed my dwarves?  What are they so angry?  Is that flying zombie whale flying?

I love dwarf fortress.  I think part of why I love it is because it's a bad game.  It ignores all those nice modern ideas of seamless in-game tutorials, and "what you don't show the player, the player doesn't see."  It's just a vast wonderful game that has quite obviously been made because Toady wanted to play it, and he's letting us look over his shoulder.