f13.net

Toady has blessed us with the new version of DF! This includes a z-axis for fortress building, complete 3D fluid dynamics, randomly generated cliff facings, revamped noble handling, and a host of other features that should rekindle the ASCII dwarf-loving flame. The game is still technically in alpha and the new release is likely to contain some bugs, but the last version was wonderfully fun enough to keep me amused for hours on end without a hitch.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it's the most complex, detailed simulation environment I've ever had the pleasure of playing. You start out as a humble caravan of dwarves with limited supplies and skills and must build your fortress from scratch by digging into the cliff face. From there, you must venture into farming, logging, stoneworking, cooking, and a host of other tasks to maintain both the livelihood and morale of your sometimes finicky dwarven population. The learning curve can be steep, especially with the small amount of information available on the wiki due to the new release, but the time investment will reveal a very well engineered and complex game that provides near infinite options for progression. It's certainly not for everyone (graphics whores be warned!) but it's definitely on my list of all-time favorites.

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

I love open-ended ASCII games.  I'm still a ZZT/Megazeux whore at heart.

Between this and Nethack/Rogue, are there any other really awesome, open-ended ASCII games I'm missing?

Also, as awesome as text mode is... has anyone done a graphical port of Dwarf Fortress, as was done with Nethack?

wow. This is really, really complicated. I think the learning curve (more like a wall) is too steep for me to climb. Also, ascii graphics... bleah. They just add to it.

Ah fuck. This is the last thing I need, I don't have time to finish all the games I have. And now a new and improved DF hits. Fuck.

Well, yay. And fuck.  :awesome_for_real:

Nethack/Rogue isn't open-ended, but you are missing ADOM if those two are your thing.

Can someone here put together an article to get the most pleasing non-ascii gui out of Dwarf Fortress, I have interest in playing the game, but I want at least Tiny Warz level detail to this shit. Basically, I have no interest in learning a language. Which is exactly what any ascii based game requires. If I wanted to do as much, I would learn Japanese. As such, I am extending this:

If someone puts together a guide, a short one with basic information, setting up, and playing at the most basic level along with links to the most appealing tileset/gui for the game, as well as information on the modes, I will frontpage it and blue name you. And if it goes above and beyond that, I will give you a horrible custom title. Basically, Google searches gave me bupkiss probably due to the player base. And the official wiki is under construction and the archived wiki is a big fuckyfuck mess.

As it stands, at least SOME site needs a reasonable start guide for this game because the official site is just utter crap.

The official site links to the Wiki and if you can't play after reading 2 pages of the Wiki, you're a fucking moron of the highest order that plays far too many fucking console games.

Or Something.

Downloading now...

Irony :  So Much Has Changed !!!

Irony 2 :  The Wiki Has Been Raped.

 :|

So, what you're saying is, I was right.

No shit.

Because of some fundamental changes in the data files for new version it will take some time for the new tilesets and objects to be integrated. I plan to mess around with it tonight to see how close I can get to my original configuration in the last version. I had all of the dwarves and creatures as graphics and much softer fonts that looked nice in a 1280 wide screen.

With all of the changes made to the game it's likely that any of the tips from the last version will do more harm than good. There's a text file in the \data  directory somewhere that is used to contorl all of the keymappings, but all the important ones needed to play the game were listed in the left-hand pane.

Edit: found the old wiki archive: http://archive.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Main_Page

In the previous version, you could pretty easily set it up to use a graphical tileset - non-animated 2D tile graphics in the vein of Avernum. At that point it was pretty easy to tell what stuff was - the obtuse part is still the Interface of a Thousand Keys.

That said, the new version looks to have some awesome features (3D digging! :D) and I look forward to trying it out at some point.

Sounds like we have enough people here to fix up a tileset and do a writeup.

For right now, I just downloaded this: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XPRO3NJ0

Its a copy of the game with Easy Pack already installed.  Just download and start playing.  Doesn't add a whole lot, but it does give little graphics to the dwarfs and other creaters, which is most important to me (since its hard to figure out what is what in the normal game).


And holy fuck, they changed so much, I have no idea what to do now.  Does the underground river/chasm/magma thing still exist?  What direction do I dig?  I see platinum veins exposed on the fricken cliff face.  WHAT DO I DO!  AHHH!

Your not guaranteed to have river/magma now like you used too but if you have a water table on the map you choose you can drill down until you hit water then pump it up to where its needed.Also if you get no magma you can trade for wood and I think coal now so you can fuel your forges with crafted good trades.

A good, graphical "beginner's explanation" of how Dwarf Fortress works can be found here (http://fromearth.net/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/intro.html).

This game may be my new drug of choice.

Keep in mind that you can now dig downwards, as well. I haven't had a lot of time to mess with it, but I understand that you build a down staircase, go down a level (shift + <) and then build a corresponding up staircase to connect it.. you can then build a sweet subterranean fortress and expand along any axis your heart desires.

I will admit this game could gain significantly from some semblance of a manual to lay out the basics, especially with the major changes in this release. However, with the amount of work Toady puts into this game I'd worry it would take away from the amazingly coherent development pace he maintains. Many a mere mortal would have created a spaghetti mess of unmaintainable code at this level of complexity.

Well, you know, that's the whole point of the new features.

No more fixed layout, so you can't say where an underground river will be. It is suggested to pay more attention to the location you pick for the fortress. Then it's pure freedom. The game is actually more unforgiving now than before. It's easier to survive because there are more possibilities (if you farm on clay or sand you don't need irrigation). Hunting seems more reliable as well.

Dig wherever you want. Not just to a cliff face, but also up or down. The world is cheese.

I'm not upset about all the new features.  It's just that they changed the game so fricken much that its like I have to relearn it again.  Already running into walls were I dont know how to make things (they added all sorts of new items and workshops).  Or making farm plots its tells me I dont have any seed to plant in that type (anybody know whats up with that?).  Anyways, just alot more to deal with, and the new Z-axis thing makes it really mind blowing in trying to figure out how to set up the fort.

So, did they get rid of the whole, find adamantium, then game is going to end not to long after with a "you dug to deep message" followed by it erasing your saved games?  I never really liked that....

The not right seed sounds like you made a farm plot in a place labelled outside light which means it needs outdoor plants like strawberry seeds prickle berries etc,if it's labelled indoors darkness then you'll need old favorites of plump helmets and pigtails etc.

I haven't seen any posts yet on anyone getting an end message so unknown what happens.I keep trying out new things or dieing so have been abandoning a lot still.

Ah, that would explain it.  With a lack of underground river, I was just trying to drain ponds and build in the mud that was left (out doors).  I didn't realize the usual plants I grew didn't grow in sunlight....

This is the least intuitive UI ever.   :oh_i_see:

There *might* be a fun game somewhere in there.  It'll take some more digging to be sure.

There is, a seriously fun and frustrating game. But yeah, it's a little rough interface wise heh.

Toady's reasoning behind the UI sucking is "It's still in alpha and undergoing heavy development, so there's no point in spending time polishing the UI when I might need to scrap half of it and rework it in a week's time"

Sort of understandable as the 'development team' is pretty much (mostly) him & a couple of friends/relatives, but annoying until the Matrix-Vision (tm) kicks in: "I don't even see the ASCII. All I see is miner, mason, axedwarf"


This game is also surprisingly good for getting stories & story concepts - playing through the game has quite a strong 'emergent narrative' (for lack of a better word) for such a sandboxy game. For example, once I get mills, gears, axles & pumps figured out, I'm going to find a desert region with an aquifier and turn it into grassland. Because I (theoretically) can.

Now, picture that in a story or an RPG: leagues and leagues of trackless, barren desert and then the nameless hero sees hundred foot high sandstone walls, intricately carved with murals. And behind those walls? A verdant garden with crystal clear running water, all powered by the scores of windmills on towers. And in the middle of the fields...a dwarven city, spun out of glass made from the sands of the desert itself. Inside the city are human and elven trade caravans halfway through crossing the desert. Lurking outside, in shallow burrows in the dunes, are goblin raiders lightly clad in +pig tail cloth burnouses+ How :awesome_for_real: is that? It's practically a campaign setting ready to go.

I've not known you to be 'right' about anything yet.  I live in constant hope.

Spent all day playing this yesterday (Yeah, All Day.  Christ, it's a fucking Marvel).  I have abandoned 3 fortresses in my attempts to get it right.

The game has changed, hugely, but the basic idea remains the same.  The addition of the Z Axis, THE JOYOUS Z AXIS, has made everything new again and requires you to radically rethink your game.  Farming, for example, one of the basic things you have to get right, has changed beyond recognition.  In some respects it's easier (you can farm outside and in certain substances inside without water) but those purists who want to actually set aside Subterranean farms are finding inventive ways to do so.  One guy on SA was making waterwheels levels below lakes and using pumps to pump the refill the lake once it drained.  Crazy, crazy shit.

There's a host of other changes as well (anvils from the start, caravans being different, other factions being more important) and it's going to take a good long while to get it sorted.

One thing that really baffles me, though, is why a game of this complexity and replayability has not been snapped up for a modernisation.  I suspect it's got something to do with the fact that you couldn't play it on a fuckstick joypad.  It's  a shame really, as I see it as what Dungeon Keeper SHOULD HAVE BEEN ALL ALONG.

Back to 'The Forbidden Fortress of Fucknuts'.  See you all in a week.

:)

Yep, gather plants outside, then brew them to get seeds.

See my thread (http://www.bay12games.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=001177) at the game's forum to have the problem of soil solved.

There are some false myths about the game's learning curve.

The first is that you don't need to memorize anything. This is a major difference from other ASCII games. All you can do is accessible through menu. So you just need to experiment to get most of the stuff.

The second is that once you've learned the ropes, the rest comes with experimentation as well. Once you can set one workshop you can also figure out the remaining ones. The hard parts are about starting to play with pumps, water and military aspect. But those only come later.

So the game is much more accessible than how it appears. You just need to go through the first couple of hours.

Tell that to the colony I just started that fucking died of thirst.

All of them.

Fucking Ice.

I was writing a short guide for fun, but now I'm tired. So it's just the introduction. What is left isn't too much, I just planned to explain the commands and some basic stuff, the rest is for the player to figure out (and part of the fun). You'd have to deal with my english.

--
Dwarf Fortress quickstart guide

This is a guide designed to be as quick and effective as possible.

Dwarf Fortress is a sandbox game simulating a randomly generated world in every detail, from geography to populations and myths. It offers four modes of play, but the one explained will be the first. You will lead an expedition of dwarfs and build their fortress along the years, starting from setting farms and bedrooms, up to the military aspect to deal with sieges of epic proportions. In short it's a city-building kind of game blended with The Sims and Dungeon Keeper. There's a bit of everything, but in the beginning you'll just try to make your dwarfs survive the first winter while you start to dig your wannabe Ironforge.

Yes, it's an ASCII game, but it's more easily playable than how it appears.
1- You don't need to memorize commands as everything is accessible through onscreen menus.
2- The ASCII is a graphical representation. It just needs time to get used, and then it will be as readable as any graphical game.

To begin with you "Create New World" from the start menu. No world will be the same as it's all generated, so your world, and then fortress, will be like that little snowflake. Something unique and unrepeatable. That's part of the charm. The creation is automatic, so you just press "Enter" and then either stare or go browse the wiki while you wait. It will take some minutes, depending on your hardware processing power. Once it's done you'll see a line at the bottom of the screen asking you to press "Enter" to continue or "p" to export an ASCII map (it will be in the main folder). If you want the map of your full world do it now because you may not be able to get it later.

There's a new feature to transform that ASCII map into something more graphical. I mention this because if you don't extract it now, you won't be able to do it later. So if you want to see your generated world as a weirdly colored fractal you select "Start Playing" from the start menu and then "Legends". Then press (d) for a detailed map, and make sure you have some space on the HD because it can take about 50Mb alone.

Then go back and select "Dwarf Fortress" so that the journey can begin. Next you have to select where in the world your settlement will arise (or be carved). It's an important choice because the difficulty of the survival will depend greatly on the location. You'll see three graphical window working like three zoom levels. The rightmost is a very abstact representation of the whole world. With arrow keys you move around (if you have the detailed .bmp map created before you should be able to easily recognize the location on the "region" window), with "Tab" you cycle through various information screens. To pick a location I'd suggest the source of a stream. Three resources will be useful: water, trees and a mountain face to dig. The mountain less so, as now you can just dig downward. So you can ideally build an underground fortress in a plain. Try to pick a temperate climate so that the winter won't be terrible, a decent amount of trees and vegetation, and calm surroundings if you don't want to suffer a painful death, like stomped by phantom elephant. With function keys (when displayed in the bottom right) you can cycle through biomes. The small box you see in the "Local" window will become your explorable area. You can read on screen the keys to press to move and expand that box. The bigger it is, the bigger will be the area where you'll manage your dwarves. So go around searching a good location with the necessary resources (trees and water, mostly), and then (e)mbark.

You can now start the game with a default expedition, or organizing things yourself. I suggest the latter so that you have a better idea of what you'll have available. So press "Space". With "Tab" you cycle between two modes: dawrfs and inventory. In the dwarf screen the up/down keys will cycle through the seven dwarfs, while left/right keys move to the other column (that will scroll). Here you can basically buy skills. You can't have everything as you only have 200 points to "spend" on both skills and inventory (lower right). It's also a not ultimate choice as every dwarf can learn any job at any time, he just won't be skilled at it. A good idea can be about having a miner/mason/engraver/mechanic, a carpenter/woodcutter/building designer, a marksman/trapper, two fisherman/grower/cooker/brewer/herbalist/butcher (you decide how to split). This leaves you with two remaining dwarfs. You decide how to spread more those jobs. You'll learn how to make optimal builds and I think it should stay outside the scope of a guide, as it's a freeform choice. Every player has its own preferred build. As I said it's less important than you think as you can tweak jobs anytime while playing. So once you have some basic professions, you are set.

That's a good start; I figured some of that stuff out myself.

Any added inventory to take? What's useful?

I've found Dwarves will sit idle unless you 'designate' stuff. One of the first things I did was to build a large 'custom stockpile' for them to offload the wagon's crap in. I don't see the point for separate stockpiles (maybe a separate one for garbage?) , so I did custom stockpile, then make sure everything was allowed in the stockpile, and then made it something like a 4x10 area. That got my idle dwarves busy!

I tunneled into the mountain a bit with mine, mining out largish rooms, I tried to get them to smooth it, but they didn't do anything so I'm guessing I'm missing some components. I tried building a door and buildings, but it was just red saying no door, I guess I didn't have the materials. I guess I couldn't harvest tress since I was in grassland, and I couldn't seem to figure out how to make a farm or anything. Gathering plants seemed to do nothing as well. I had a stream and I built a trench thing, but when I dug it ran into clay and stopped (I had to route around it). That didn't seem very useful.

I'm kind of lost at this point :)

Once the fortress grows large the main activity will be hauling stuff. So you'll want to organize things, like body pile being near to the butcher, food to the kitchen, booze to the brewery and so on. It just lets you control and organize. It gets also painfully hard to track stuff if everything is clumped together.

Too large rooms without pillars will crumble, just a warning...


If a job isn't getting done, you probably need to activate a corresponding job.

(b)uilding menu only works after you fabricated a door. So first you need a carpenter shop, where you fabricate the door. The when you'll build the door you'll just pick where to put it. To fabricate both carpenter's workshop and door you just need logs.


This may be a problem. Designating a large area in wilderness doesn't highlight any tree? In grassland there should be at lease *some* trees.

Once eaten raw or brewed they produce seeds that you can then plant.

Maybe you have a problem designating stuff? You need to press enter on one location, move the cursor far away, then enter again. It should highlight all there is inbetween.

When you get more experienced this will change to your liking but for a someone starting out two picks,one axe, plump helmet spawn,and all the food and booze you can carry.If you want to see everything you can choose from hit 'n' on the inventory screen.It's a big list.If you want something specific off the list just start typing the name and the list will pick the closest match to what you entered.


Sounds like none of your dwarves have engraveing turned on.To see what jobs they have [v]eiw the dwarf then [p]reference then [l]abour then just scroll through the list to activate deactivate jobs.


As mentioned you need to make the door first before you install it,this goes with pretty much anything else you can place as well.Since you haven't found wood yet I'd recomend making a mason shop and making stone doors as you should have tons of stone lying around at this point.


 
Depending where you started you could either be on zone with no trees and gatherable plants or you could have started too high up the mountain.From where your dwarves are hit shift +> to lower the elevation and see if there are any trees or plants below you.Trees look like clubs and spades or backwards candy canes and gatherable plants looks like ".

Are you totally screwed if you don't get trees?  I choose a 'heavily forested' area but all I see is grassland.  Blah. 

Still trying to work out how exactly to start farming since they only let you choose inside seeds to start with.  It may be a rough winter.  :oh_i_see:

Also I have no freakin' idea on how to get a forge started.  Or any kind of metal work, really.

Pick bushes, then brew plants (z -> kitchen to toggle brewery). It will produce seeds.

But setting a farm indoor shouldn't be very hard.

I think you start by default with an anvil, so you just build the workshop and you have the forge.

You need metal, of course. And either you mine it, or you try for the tradesmen to bring it to you.

Just have to dig down until you hit soil/clay/loam/silt then you can farm away.If you chose heavily forested and your not seeing trees scroll down a few levels,shift +>, and check the lower elevations for them.If you still don't find trees you can always request wood from the dwarven liason when the traders come in the fall.

Part two:

--
The other screen is the inventory. On the left you see what you already have in the inventory (by default). I wouldn't change much. I use to bring two dogs and cats, but I forgot their use (maybe they help keeping the dwarfs happy). If you're lucky and get one of either sex, you'll soon start to see kittens. To add other items to your inventory press (n)ew. I'd try to get a crossbow and some bolts, but your dwarf ranger should be able to go hunting with an axe or even bare hands (wrestling skill). Anyway, it's up to you to experiment. The bigger risk is to have your ranger killed if there are some mean animals in the wilderness, so spend a few more points on his skill and make sure you have the corresponding weapon in your inventory for him to use. Once you think to be ready, press (e)mbark (and wait the loading).

After an introductory screen you should see a tripartite window. Press "space" to pause the game (you should see "PAUSED" in the upper left). On the left you have the top down view with your smiling dwarfs in the middle, along with their wagon. The middle is the default menu, and on the right the map of the whole area, with a cursor marking your current location. With "Tab" you juggle those screens, so press it a few times to figure out what you have available. Arrow keys move the local view around, this is what you'll use to pan the screen. If you lose your dwarfs press F1 to center on screen again.

This new version introduces the z-axis so you have multiple planes to explore. It's important you get used to their representation, so that you don't get confused. To move one level toward the sky press "shift+<", to move down toward the ground "shift+>". What you need to know is that when you see small dots it means that you are looking at the representation of a lower level. If instead the gap between two planes is more than one level you see "sky".

I'll give you an example:

(http://www.cesspit.net/misc/start.gif)

On the bottom left you can see a zone of grass with my smiling dwarfs and their wagon. All around, in the other zone, you see green dots and small blocks of green. The line separating these two zones is an arrow pointing down. As I said the small dots represent a lower level. So this means that if you go down one level you should be able to visualize that other part.

Let's go *down*, one level. By pressing "Shift+>":

(http://www.cesspit.net/misc/start2.gif)

Here we are. The previous zone with the dwarfs is now in black with some gray dots and "%". It represent underground terrain. We went down one level, so it makes sense that we are looking at the ground below where the dwarfs were, while on the rest of the screen we now see green characters, representing grass and trees (clubs and spades).

This means that the dwarfs were located in a upper level, like a small plateau. Till you see those arrows following the border, it means that the slope is walkable. So your dwarfs can move smoothly between these two levels without building ramps or stairways (in fact you can see a bluish smiling face in the middle of the second image, it's my fisherman already on his way for that small pond to his left). You'll also notice that the level where the dwarfs were, has only green/gray dots, so no trees. It means that if we want to cut down some trees our woodworker will have to move to that lower zone where there are plenty of trees.

Try experimenting a bit, moving up and down and trying to get familiar with the way the game visualizes things.

So now you should be able to pan the view around (arrow keys), go up down z-levels (shift+<, shift+>),  zoom back to origin (F1), and how to pause/unpause (Space). These are all the commands you need to memorize, the rest will be shown on the default menu. Now we'll see how to figure out what those weird ASCII characters represent. With (k) you look around (as you see in the menu). Pressing that key will activate an "X" yellow cursor. You move it around with arrow keys. Whatever will be under the cursor will be listed on the right panel. If one square has more than one object stacked, you'll see it listed one under the other. This is the quickest way to figure out what's what. For example see the first image, under the white smiley face there's a gray "H". If you move the cursor over it, you'll see on the right panel that the "H" letter represents a "tamed stray horse", with grass under it (obviously).

To exit EVERY screen, you press "space". Keep it in mind. It's also the key pausing/unpausing the game, so pay attention.

The other important command after (k) to look what's under the cursor is (v)iew units. Pressing "v" you also activate a similar yellow cursor, with the difference that it won't show what's under it, but the infos about the nearest unit. Usually everything that is "alive". So pets, dwarfs, wild animals, monsters and so on. It's not important to understand all the infos for now.

Now let's present some basic concepts. In this game you don't drive the dwarfs around. They are kind of autonomous and you don't have to (you cannot) micromanage them. This makes sense because now you have seven dwarfs to manage, but as you access later phases in the game you can have huge fortresses with hundreds of dwarfs moving like ants. What you CAN do is set a list of jobs. The dwarfs will then complete these jobs depending on their own priority and skills. When you'll dig your fortress you'll tell them exactly where to dig, where to position doors and so on. They eat, sleep, drink, organize parties, make babies and rest all on their own. As long there are enough resources. If there's booze, they drink booze, if there's not booze, they drink water, and if they don't have water, they die of thirst if you don't have a river or a well near them. So your duty is to keep them happy and healthy. They'll need beds to sleep, tables and chairs to eat. And obviously they need food and drinks.

There are two screens that let you track what the hell is going on. The first is (j)ob. You press (j) and you'll see a list of dwarfs with what their are currently doing. Plus a list of jobs in the queue, waiting for a free or proficient dwarf, if you already set them. With the arrow keys you move through the list and with (c) you zoom to that dwarf. This helps to not lose your dwarfs around the place. You don't know where the fisherman went? then you go in the (j)ob menu, select it and (c) zoom to it to see where he is. As always you exit this screen by pressing "space".

The other screen is (u)nit. You press (u) and get a list of all your dwarfs (first) and then everything that is alive in the whole zone. There will be probably animals listed as well. So, as above, you can locate them by selecting one and then zoom to it by pressing (c). This screen also list your dwarfs current action. So you can see at a glance what they are all doing. If some of them have no job, are sleeping, eating or resting.

Summary: (k) and (v) to look around. (j) and (u) to have a list of jobs.

Now, in order for your dwarfs to be able to do anything, you need to activate their jobs. For example if you want to cut trees, you need a dwarf with the "wood cutting" skill enabled. If you picked your skills correctly before embarking, you should have already a dwarf who can cut trees, already enabled. To be sure (and learn how to activate/disable jobs) let's look into it. Press (u) for a list of units. You should see listed at least a dwarf on yellow. select it (arrow keys), then zoom (c). Now, in the right panel, you can toggle between four detailed screens that can be switched with the corresponding key. (g)en, (i)nv, (p)ref, (w)nd. Try to toggle between them. The first is general infos, like name, sex, job, skills. Then you have the inventory, preferences and health status (with locations). Go in the (p)ref tab, then press (l)labor. Here's the list of possible jobs. If some of the jobs active in this screen correspond to one task in the job queue, then the dwarf will take the job and complete it.

Before you start doing anything you need to understand one UI quirk. In some cases you move through lists with arrow keys, in some cases you need to use (-) and (+) on the keypad, with (/) and (*) to scroll a full page.

In this case of the labor list, if you use arrow keys you'll move the local cursor, not the jobs. So you may end up selecting a different dwarf. Instead to browse the job list you use (+) and (-). With (enter) to enable/disable them. If you want to *force* a dwarf to do one job only and make sure he doesn't waste time doing something else, you can disable all other jobs. In this case, if the dwarf isn't sleeping, eating, drinking, resting, dying or participating to a meeting or party (being all spontaneous action you can't normally interrupt), he should go complete the job. Once you are used to this system you already have full control over your dwarfs. There isn't much more to learn. You know how to set up your dwarfs, what is left is learn how to set up the jobs themselves.

Good writeup, Hrose


I've dug down about 6 levels and the rock seems to get getting tougher. 

I'll let you know when the liquid hot magma floods my fort.

Edit:  I just had the bright idea that maybe you meant up instead of down, I'll try that after I piss off this caravan that's here. 

Edit the second:  I manage not to piss off the trader, all my guys move the few trade goods I have to the depot, and then my designated broker gets his foot torn off by a skeletal goat on the other side of the map and can't walk back to make the trade.  Hmm. 

I've always dug down and found some sand/clay but I guess it could be anywhere.Usually I just look for underground pools and see what soil is around them and go from there.Worst case scenario find an underground pool get a farm ready beside it and breach the pool and run :)

For game exploration purposes, the most important menu is b, the build menu.

The second most important menu is b -> w, the workshop menu.

Your basic map shouldn't be in a glacier. Try to navigate to a place with trees and mountains. You shouldn't hit an aquifer your first time either (there's a blue wavy line on the screen describing the types of ground if there is one.) This means that if you dig deep enough you get stone. And you seem to get stone a lot more these days.

The designate menu, d, is useful for a couple of things. Most important among them -

- hit d again and select some solid rock or loam walls. Dwarves who can mine and have picks will start digging it out.
- hit t and select a stretch of wilderness. Dwarves with wood cutting and an axe will make with the chopping, producing one log from one tree.
- hit p and select a stretch of wilderness. Dwarves with plant gathering (herbalists) will run around scooping up bits from the bushes.
- the stairway keys are a bit odd. You can build a down stairway all the time, but you can only designate an up stairway or up/down stairway in a solid wall.
- enabling dwarven movement along the Z axis requires ramps or stairs on Z-adjacent squares.

You can quickly designate with the mouse - left-click designates the square under the mouse, right-click positions the cursor on the square. Enter starts the designate area, and enter finishes the designation as well. So right-click enter right-click enter on the corners of an area is fast and simple.

Anyway, there are two important things you can do with rocks. The mason's workshop b -> w -> m can turn them into rock blocks, which are slightly lighter and make smooth structures, and into all manner of rock furniture - doors, floodgates, coffins, thrones (rock chairs), coffers (rock chests), cabinets, et cetera. The mechanic's workshop b -> w -> t can turn them into mechanisms, which are used to remotely control all manner of fortress features. If you need some trade goods, one option is a craftsdwarf's workshop b -> w -> r making stone crafts, mugs, instruments, and toys.

If you're building on limestone or a similar white stone you may find your dwarves refusing to make things out of the rock - go to stones under the z menu, and deselect the stone if it appears in the list of "economic stones". These stones fulfill the "flux" reaction in making pig iron and steel, so in the old DF people saved them.

Stone can make any type of furniture your dwarven heart desires except for three important ones - beds, where dwarves sleep; barrels, which hold consumable items; and bins, which hold everything else. Wood is a good option for this.

A carpenter's workshop b -> w -> c will turn wood into various furniture items, but those three are the most important, since rock is generally so freely available.

If you want your nobles to work (the n menu shows who's assigned; you can freely change this) you need to build a chair, then look at the chair in the q menu, and choose r to make it an office. Assign the office to a noble and he'll get to work. Even starting out you'll have a manager, a broker, a bookkeeper, and a leader. The manager and bookkeeper need offices to queue up global jobs (press m on the job or unit screens) and count things, respectively. Settings on the bookkeeper will make him more precise, though be warned this takes a long time.

Making things out of metal is the ultimate dwarven pursuit, so here's how you do it.

First, you need some ore. Go digging around until you find something with the "pounds" symbol in a wall that comes out as an asterisk. That's metal ore.

Next, you need some fuel. You have two options - dig coal out of the wall, or cut down a tree and make it into charcoal. Wood furnaces are built with b -> e -> w, and need a stone block. Queueing up a job in the furnace you can turn one log into a bar of charcoal or ash. Ash has other uses in glassmaking and fertilizing farms, but charcoal is the fuel.

Next, you need a smelter, which you also build from the furnaces menu, b -> e. It needs a stone block. When it's built you can use it to smelt your ore into bars.

Finally, you need a forge, which is built from the workshop menu, b- > w. It's called a "metalsmith's forge" and needs a stone block and an anvil.

Now, you can make things at the forge!

Except the forge and smelter both consume 1 unit of fuel for every job, and that's one square of coal or one tree.

If you can find some magma, you can build magma versions of the smelter and forge which don't need fuel, working instead off geothermal energy. But unless your region has a red squiggle in it, indicating an exposed magma pipe, you've got a lot of digging before you can find some.

WTB modern interface and graphics, plz.

Seriously, I want to love this game more than my wife. However, I'm fighting the interface and ASCII graphics to get to the love. And that was BEFORE it added a third dimension.

Speaking of the interface... I installed this at home and fired it up in fullscreen.  The Dwarves/Professions list was a bit off since apparently some of the icons (beardy type) are either black or missing.  I installed it on my laptop here at work today, picked windowed mode and the icons are all visible, furthermore they are the non-beardy type.  I don't know if it is important to have beardy icons, but it seems important to be able to see the icons, so... I should play windowed only?

EDIT:  It occured to me that those icons might just be dark purple and on my monitor at home (which needs replacing) they just were invisible.  I also cannot read "f13 brand green sarcasm text" on my home monitor.  So nevermind that.  What I want is a list of what icon means what.  Like ⌂, what does that mean?  I'm very interested in not borking my starting location.

Is there any reason NOT to make the initial placement grid as large as possible?

If your computer can handle the cycles make it as big as you like,but the bigger the area the more things your system has to track and bogs down the cpu cycles.the starting size is actually pretty huge when you take into consideration 16 levels up and down on average.

This (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Tilesets) was the best I could find with a quick search.Scroll down a bit and there is a decent list of what each symbol means.

Pretty hard to bork your start location worse case they all die horribly you laugh and start over :)

Edit:New version up as of Nov 1 with some fixs.

That list is confusing.  The symbol you're wondering about, Yego, is a small mountain/foothill, sometimes made of rock and sometimes made of dirt or sand.  The terrain material types (on the same page that lists forest/tree level/calm-haunted) will tell you exactly what type.  I also think it's just a color issue on your computer - the dwarf symbols are different on the fullscreen/windowed modes, and some are quite dark.  I have a somewhat similar problem differentiating stone doors from the hallways since they're almost exactly the same color with a similar symbol.

I've figured out a trick about choosing a starting location: elevation matters when it comes to trees.  If you have the 'heavily forested' message but have a starting area of all fairly high elevation, you're never going to see a single tree, even if you scroll down to the lowest surface level. 

A few of my problems:  I HAVE SO MUCH STONE.  Seriously.  I have a pile of stone outside my fort that is at least half as big as my entire carved out fortress.  I can't trade it away, because the stupid caravan is already overloaded by 750 pounds when he shows up, so I have to buy the heaviest things I can if I want to trade anything at all.

This game has a learning curve of like 6-12 hours.   :uhrr:  So it becomes a test of learning to play before you burn out from frustration.

Ok, how the fuck to I build wells?  It keeps telling me I need "open space" even though I've got it set in a really open space.  It already took me longer to get the parts to build the well than I thought (since they added in that you also need chain and mechanisms on top of the blocks and bucket of the past), and now all the god damn water sources are frozen over.  I really need to dig this thing before all my dwarves die of thrist.

I haven't figured out how to get a fresh water source inside my fortress either - the official forums talk about channels and wells but I'm still working on getting my forge working (can't seem to find enough metal), so building the well parts is tough. 

But I did build a still, and the dwarves will use plump helmets to make dwarven wine, and since plump helmets grow inside anyway it works for winter.  Probably won't work long term though. 

*Also important: You can designate any dwarf to do just about any job, even if they don't have training, by hitting v and then p near/on the dwarf. 

Well, in the past, all you had to do was have a block, a bucket, and then just tell your dwarfs to build a well at any given spot inside the fort.  And bingo, you had an infinate water source that didn't freeze (they also cause random .  I guess I should have figured with the z-axis comming into play, the wells wouldn't work like normal anymore though.

Looks like its time to wade through the official forums.  I really need to learn how all these new pumping, pipes, wind/water power mechanics work.

Yeah, don't worry about my monitor at home, it's old and the issue is mostly because I'm using a DVI->VGA converter and it's really dim.  I do find it incredibly ironic that Dwarf Fortress is the game that causes me to seriously consider buying a new one.

So, comedy time, I guess.  I got a great starting area, so no worries there.  I answered most of my own questions via experimentation just today.  I noticed right off that the river I settled next to is actually three levels below my wagon, and I mean it's a cliff to a river with no shoreline.  Should be fun to try digging down there and make a shore of some sort, but then I have ponds nearby and I'm cut off from creatures, such as a nasty minotaur.  I hope minotarus can't swim.

Also when I was customizing the party I decided, for some reason, to trade off both battleaxes and use the points on food and whatnot.  I guess I'm going to have to work on making a stone axe, or no wood for me.  I hope I can make things out of claystone.  Or not, if they all die I will get the new version.  :awesome_for_real:

Only one of these dwarves wants to mine.  Fuckers.

Not sure how to make a well now,there was a crash bug with them so I was avoiding them for the time being.

If you can make it until the caravans start showing up you should be able to trade for wood or have your carpenter deconstruct the wagons they usually drop 3 wood each should be enough to make an axe.

You pretty much don't need water anyway unless you don't get a still up and running dwarves always prefer booze over water.Only time I think they actually want water is when they have to bring some to an injured one stuck in bed.

Edit:The newest version is compatible with the saves from the last version.

If you've only got one miner, change the preference of another dwarf (v, then p), and hightlight mining.

In my latest game, I've got a caravan guard that won't stop following one of my dwarves around.  Odd.
Also, it looked like I had baaaarely enough food and drink to get through the winter - and now 7 more dwarves just showed up. 

And again, I have huge fields of stone stockpiles outside my fortress.  Rarrg.

There needs to be a water source on the level below the well.

In my last fort (http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-834-paintflies) in the last version I usually turned a lot of my stone into blocks (at the mason's workshop) to use in building (workshops, bridges, roads, furniture, etc..) since blocks can be put into bins in lots of 10, saving a lot of space. Of course, that means you need to build a lot of bins, which uses wood. Also, if you build a mason's workshop near the stone you want to remove the dwarf will use the stone nearby first, giving you some control over what gets cleared. Finally, there's always the option of using stone stockpiles to make stylish designs via stockpile placement.

Is it a caravan guard or the liason? I had the liason follow my broker around for ages until he finally stayed put long enough to talk to him and make the trade arrangements for the following year.In the [N]oble screen you can designate nobles now from your dwarves or administrators like the broker.

One way a lot of folks have been getting rid of stone is to make a one tile dump then designate all the rock in an area to be sent to the dump and they pile it all on that one square.unfortunately you have to mark each stone individually to be dumped so not bad for single rooms but takes forever for a large area.

Very nice job on that fort.I never seem to get away from straight hallways long corridors.

Yeah, the well isn't so useful right now. If you have water below you can just dig down. So much simpler.

If you still have problems finding drinks you should just try to pick bushes and then brew drinks from plants. Dwarfs drink booze, not water.

My stinking dwarves aren't hauling stone into the stockpile.  I have two and both are set to hold stone, one also set to hold blocks, but they just leave the rocks laying all over the place.  They move food around just fine.  I might not care except I'm suspicious that I can't use the stone unless it's in the stockpile?

The wiki needs help.

That could be a couple of things.

Hit Orders (o), and see if gather minerals is on. 
Check to see that the stockpile is actually the right kind of stockpile.
But the mason or whoever will go grab the closest stone when he needs one, stockpile or not.

I got pretty lucky in my latest starting location: trees right outside the entrance, and a half rock/half clay fortress that means I don't need to make mud to farm.

I'm done writing part 3 of this guide but I formatted it in a way that messed with bbcode, is there a way to disable it?

Well, I'll be damned if that wasn't it.

Does it involve getting the friggin Millstone powered by a windmill?  Because if so that would be awesome.   I can't get that damn thing to work regardless of what I've tried (axels, gears, moving the millstone around).

Was pretty easy for me.  First, build the windmill directly over the room you are going to be milling in.  Once done, build a gear assembly directly underneath the middle tile of the windmill.  Then just build a millstone on any side of the gear assembly which touches it.  Should work from there.  You may want to do it in that order, since I thought I read somewhere that building the gear assembly before the windmill makes it not work....

Also make sure after you build the windmill that it is actually active.  I tried building windmills at this one location once, but none of them would work.  I guess certain areas don't have any damned wind.

If you cant build the windmill directly over the spot to mill, you can try to chain it along using the various verticle and horizontal axles, along with gear assembly's, to get it to the spot.  I've never really tried this though, since I always managed to finagle it so I had the windmill right above.  Just remember that you always must first start the chain in the spot directly below the middle of the windmill.  You can't start out on the same level as it (though I hear you can build a platform outside and build the windmill on top of that if the ground below it is not usable for what ever reason.

Aahhaha @#$E#!$#21 room above . . . oh god damn this z-axis.

I was trying to build the millstone next to it on the x or y axis.  Never even thought about digging below it. 

you can use a [ code ] block... I need more help! :D

My dwarves don't seem to plant seeds!

Is there any way to automate some of this stuff, beyond doing 'repeat' on things like the still? It's becoming hard to keep track of everything I need to do.

Should be able to que up 30 tasks at a  time in the manager tab

I don't mean queueing stuff, I mean just have them do it as needed without queueing :) I mean, how many 'meals' should I queue up in the kitchen? Is that food going to waste? Who knows!

How do you get stuff to mill? Seeds for grain and such? How big does my farm need to be?

Also, my dwarves keep drowning. I'm not sure why. It always seems to happen offscreen. Maybe they are trying to fish with their bare hands? I generally build near a stream, so I can fish and also for the waterwheel which I want to build someday.

I can't really seem to get my dwarves to hunt; Is the best strategy to build a 'workshop' and queue it from there? Like, a fisher's shop to tell them to fish, and a butcher's shop to tell them to bring live animals?

I'm still experimenting with layouts, but I generally just dig downwards. I was thinking of separating by levels, have the 'tier 1' buildings on the first floor with the stockpile and the 'tier 2' stuff like gemcrafting and kilns on the floor below. I tend to pre-dig stairs down a few flights anyway... Is there any reason to have a 'doublewide' staircase/corridors? If not, I should probably stop making them I guess.

What a about ramps over stairs? I haven't actually lived to winter yet, but I don't know how that's going to affect my stuff. I'm not sure livestock can go down stairs.

Here's what I seem to do from start:

Find a place straddling a stream, Joyous Wilds if possible (I found one spot and I keep reusing it basically. I assume blue text = really good), with thick/heavily forrested, temperature temperate or warm with only one 'soft' type rock (peat/clay loam, etc.) until you get to useful rock (siltstone/shale/granite). No aquifer, not too steep in elevation
(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/df11194114395.JPG)
Make a temporary big custom storepile for people to offload outside
Designate a large area around your wagon / fortress entrance as gather plants and gather trees
Digging out rooms for Farms, mason's shop, butcher, fisher, woodworker, cook, with small storepiles nearby
Build those workshops, allocate storepiles, remove those storepiles' materials from the main custom one outside They will automatically move materials once you create a specific stockpile and then consider the custom one an 'overflow' -- this is perfect!
Queue up the tasks in the workshops (specifically hunt, fish, make some stuff(?), plant(??)
Start digging a few levels down look for some ore and some workable rock to craft stuff into (anything but loam/sand)
Build a still, mechanic's workshop, ??
Make some bins, a millstone(?) a few beds (?)
??


That's about as far as I've gotten.

I can't speak for the newest version since I haven't messed with it. (Playing HL2, since I finally gave up on ignoring Steam)  However, my dwarves used to drown when they were trying to gather shit across the river and there was no bridge, OR they were getting a drink from the lake because I was out of alcohol/ didn't have a well.  (I always felt their deaths due to drinking from a lake were just weeding the idiots out of my fort.. there's always more dwarves than you want/ can manage in the spring!)

As long as the meals are being stored and not left out to rot there's no harm in making extra. In fact, meals serve a few functions: they save space by consolidating multiple food items into one dish, they contain multiple ingredients increasing the likelihood that the dwarves will eat something they like, and they leave no waste behind (bones, shells) once they are eaten saving the need for cleanup. Often I would set up a task at workshop and hit 'r' to make it repeat endlessly until my stockpiles were large enough to satisfy me.


This depends on the skill of the farmer working the field. An expert farmer will yield more food per square planted, so less room is needed. In addition, it was also beneficial to make smaller plots (3x3 - 5x5) in the last version becuase when seasons change the crop needs to be completely harvested before a new type of plant can be planted on the plot. That may have changed, though.


This often occured when the water would swell in the spring killing dwarves that were fishing, drinking or were caught on the bridge. However, with the new z-axis and flows I don't think bridges are as much of a danger anymore.


Any dwarves or animals that have to walk 'on top' of eachother get slowed down significantly, so it's a good idea to leave plenty of room for them to walk around each other, especially as your population of animals and dwarves gets bigger. Otherwise, you'll start to get bottlenecks at key locations.

Still having trouble with hunting/capturing live animals/butching.

Could someone walk me through that process? I seem to build cages but when I try and 'capture live animal' from the butcher's workshop menu it cancels it. :/ My hunter/trapper is all idle...

Also, do I have to deal with making sure my hunter has a weapon equipped? Will the hunter automatically take it from stores? How's that work?

I hvae a racoon stealing food supplies from me :/ This is how I feel when I play this game:  :uhrr:

Still can't brew -- I have empty wooden barrels but it says it needs them and cancels.. grr. I don't get it!

Regarding farming:  I usually assign two dwarves just as planters.  In the job preference list, it's called Planting (fields) or something similar.  Make sure that is turned on, and more importantly, make sure all the endless hauling jobs are turned OFF so they only plant. 

I like to have my forts in rock, so I have a never ending group of dwarves dragging stones out of my fortress, but it's important to note that Stone Hauling seems to override most other commands.  So if your mason/planter/brewer has stone/wood/item whatever hauling turned on, he's going to do that instead of his main job.  And ALL dwarves start with it on, so you have to manually turn it off.  (Or hit 'o' for orders, then tell them to stop gathering minerals or whatever - I do this when I have a few quick jobs that need to be done quickly, like brewing when I'm low on drinks).

Hunting:  The Ambush skill seems to be the important one for hunting.  If you promote a dwarf's weapon skill beyond Novice when preparing to embark, he'll automatically get whatever weapon you give him.  So if you want a dwarf with a crossbow, promote marksdwarf (but remember he's going to run out of bolts quickly, and you probably won't be able to make them for a year or two).  Since you start off with two battle axes, I tend to make my hunter a novice axedwarf, which tears through most of the critters in the first year or two - but if you're starting off with sandy soil or in a non-mountain area, I'm not really sure you need a hunter to start with, as it's really easy to farm.

It's a bad idea to make your hunter a butcher as well, because he'll just drag the body to the butcher store, and then go off hunting again while the body rots.  I like making a peasent immigrant or even one of the starting guys a brewer/butcher/tanner - the odd jobs that don't take up much time, and otherwise he just hauls stuff.

To change weapons, hit 'v' near the dwarf, then 's' for soldiering - that will bring up a list of weapon options for you to choose from.  Of course, if you don't have the necessary weapon, it doesn't do anything.  And I don't really know how the trapping stuff works.

Anyone know how to order a soldier to kill a specific enemy?  I've had these troglodytes harassing my workers as they run across the map to get the belongings of a dead hunter.  But whenever I send the soldier near, the trogs just run a little bit away. 

We need a DF subforum.  :awesome_for_real:

Are the empty barrels in a stockpile and unaccounted for?

errr... how do I designate a barracks?  :uhrr:

Just a heads up, they added Aluminium in now.  They are being historically accurate with it, and its worth as much as platinum.  So if you see any, don't immediately think its worthless and not bother to smelt and make things with it.  ;)

I'm somewhat annoyed they added in all the shit ton of different alloys.  I mean, its cool for historical purposes and what not, but theres absolutely no god damn use to making shit like Billion, Rose Gold, pewter, etc.  If you've found silver, gold, or platinum, its just better to just make a bunch of pure metal crafts with it (with the exception of electrum, which actually works good for coinage now that theres alot of different ores you can combine with gold to make it).  All of the non-precious alloys for making weapons/armor/tools they added in are all worst than normal Iron, which is not hard at all to get.  There just isn't any real point to them that I can see.

Build an armor or weapon stand and hit 'r' to make a room out of it.

Yeah. So, I need cloth, badly -- I can't seem to mill anything, since it needs a bag, and I can't seem to find thread anywhere -- Supposedly, I should be able to grow them with pig tails, but the thread never seems to end up available; my loom sits idle. I'm not sure how to remedy that. I traded for some spider silk, but I must have screwed something up since it's not listed as available even though it said the trade went through.

I have way way more stone than i know what to do with. Next time, I'm building all my workshops on loam so I don't have to lug them around. According to the wiki, the dwarves don't care what workshop rooms look like, so I don't have to worry about the fact I can't smooth the floor.

I don't know why I trained one guy in anything more than carpentry, and another in cooking -- it seems like I need to have one full time dwarf making barrels for crap and another cooking meals/brewing. The barrel guy can barely keep up, I apparently use them for everything. I also have a permanent fisher and a more or less permanent miner. I don't think I needed to spread the skills out as much as HRose said, unless I'm missing something here. I never did figure out hunting/trapping, but my guys aren't starving since I brought about 50 seeds, farmed, and I made it through the winter so <shrug>.

I can't find any iron; getting to the 'next step' requires some metal for me to forge, and I simply don't have any. I reallllly need bags, too. Maybe I'll make some glassware. I made each of my dwarves a 3x5 room, but it's still considered 'meager' for some reason. I stuck a bed in there and a stone cabinet and each room has a stone door. I'm not sure what else would make them happy.

Where do you build the roads to your trade depot? Anywhere on the edge?

In the loom there should be an option to weave thread from plant fiber.

For hunting your guys aren't killing anything? or they're not processing the kills? If it's not hunting at all not sure I always just have them run off like little suicidal nuts shooting the first thing they see.If they're not processing it do you have a refuse pile?They need to haul the kill to the refuse pile where a dwarf with the butchering skill will grab it and haul it too the butcher shop.It could be the distance they are dragging the corpse it could be rotting before it gets to the fort.I don't usually hunt though since my hunters tend to have a habit of leading herds of elephants back into my forts.

Barrel management is one of those things that take some getting used too same with bins.Make sure you adjust all those stockpiles your making,they auto set themselves to use the max amount of barrels/bins respectively which in most cases is not needed.If you use [q] on a stockpile you can adjust the amount of barrels or bins it will use.I pretty well only let barrels be used in my booze stockpiles as that lets me see at a glance how much raw food i have and what types are are there instead of looking in barrels or the kitchen menu.

The stone issue everyones having at the moment I've been using the dump to clear out stockpile areas.Designate a one tile dump near the stock pile and set all the stone in the stockpile area as to be dumped.A pain but works until it gets fixed.

For the moment you don't need roads for the trade depot the humans will drag there wagons too you.If you have a ton of trees tho you might want to cut a path through them as they try to find a three tile wide path to your trade depot.

For most of your dwarves you only want them having meager quarters if you start the economy.Most of your dwarves wont have high paying jobs so if you have them all having top quality quarters they'll get evicted and sleep in the barracks.If you want to though just details the floors and walls and double details under things like doors and beds,cabinets.That should bring the quality up pretty fast.You can double detail the whole room I just don't like the way it looks.If you do double detail make sure to examine the second detailing it;s usually pretty good especially if you've had a lot of deaths.

I don't hunt at all; It never seemed to work out for me and I can grow all the food I need from farms. I do use the barrels on everything, I had just have one guy make barrels and one guy make simple meals which are stored in them -- I figured I needed a lot of food for the winter anyway.

I try to use the loom but it says there is never any plant fiber avaliable. Is there an additional refinement step beyond picking the plants that I'm unaware of?

I did forget a step sorry about that you have to process the pigtails or rope reed at a farmers workshop then it will be thread your loom can use.

As for storing food in barrels it doesn't really help any to waste barrels on food it won't rot if you just have it sitting in your stockpile without them and they don't hold all that much more then the one stockpile tile does anyway.But if you have lots of wood anyway guess it doesn't hurt.

Well, it's not so much the wood as the time -- I have an entire dwarf dedicated to it.

I think that was a problem with the farmer's workshop -- It seems to want to store them in bags, and I don't ever have any... because I can't make them....

There should be three options I think on the farmers workshop,process plants-this does the pigtails and rope reeds,process plants to bags-this does the quarry bushes to leaves that you can cook,and process to barrel-this does sweet pods to dwarven syrup that you can cook.

This game is horribly, horribly addicting.

Someone wrote a pretty good guide on the wiki:
http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Your_first_fortress

I've suggested separating it out and will definitely be adding to the wiki with my own knowledge. I'm now on fortress #4! #3 was destroyed by CPU cycles once I got about 40 dwarves in.. I'm making my landing area '3x3' now.

My latest fortress is pretty damn cool.  I found a red sand area with no aquifier - thus, my sand dwarves of doom are born! 

The only things I have on the surface are the trade depot, stairs leading down, and two sets of stone walls encircling the first two items as well as a small lake that dried up the first summer (the second, inner set of walls encloses the stairs).  I've got a farm and stone storage set up two levels down, which is still sand, and below that I have everything else, which is all rock.  I originally planned on churning out glass goods for trade, but there's specks of aluminum all over, which sell for insane amounts even when crafted with low skill levels. 

The downside is that there's a bug that makes the dwarven trade liason unable to leave if he goes underground, and then down stairs.  So the first dwarven caravan came, we traded, the liason set up a deal, but he never left.  Eventually he went insane, took off all his clothes, and then wandered around the halls naked until he died of thirst.  I left his corpse there to rot as an example to the other dwarves: going insane is bad.

So I don't think the dwarven caravan will be coming back, which is a pain because I need wood.  There is a little on the surface, but it won't last me more than a few more years. 

Oh yeah, I just discovered bins.  Bins are wonderful.  Too bad I don't have enough wood anyway...

Make metal bins :)

Metal needs charcoal.  Charcoal needs wood  :-P

The dwarven caravan came back, sans liason.  Oh well, they brought like 20 logs. 

Making metal/glass just isn't barable unless I can set up magma smelters/forges/kilns.  You burn through an insane amount of wood trying to power your industry, and I'm already spending a shit ton of wood on making beds, barrels, and bins.  I can't make a fort anymore unless its near a volcano, so I know I'm have access to magma. 

I kind of want to try the desert strategy, and build myself a city of glass, but there is going to have to be some magma nearby....

I had a no-aquifier sand area with a magma chasm right in the middle.  So if you don't mind digging down 15 levels, you can do it. 

Of course, the people are saying on the official forums that they're finding all kinds of interesting things when you dig that deep.  Like chained up humans and elves, and the nasty things that chained them up.  :-o

In unrelated news, I forgot to brew anything for my dwarves to drink, and due to the fact that ALL my barrels were in use, I was unable to brew anything more for a while.  In the ensuing chaos, my population went from 42 to 7 from dehydration and madness, and I'm worried about the sanity of my remaining dwarves.

What a game.

Thats awesome about the chained up people in chambers.  I always wanted them to put in more things to discover in the depth of the earth.  This whole game is about channeling Moria, heh.  Problem is, with my current fortress, I've dug down as far as I can go, and am making swiss cheese out of the bottom level trying to discover adamantium, cool things, or fiery demonic death, but not a thing so far.  This is all at the base of a giant volcano filled with magma men and fire snakes no less.  I really hope they didn't make the cool stuff really rare, like finding underground magma chambers are right now.  Is there a certain environment I need to build near now to find that I wonder (probably in terrifying level woods, heh)?  I would like to find some damn adamantium.

My current fortress is pretty bad ass.  As I mentioned, its based alongside a volcano.  I actually started on a cliff several levels above the opening of the vent, and all my facilities are based in the area between the volcano vent level and the top of the cliff.  I even built a legendary level dinning hall with glass windows that look out directly over the top of the lava vent from several levels above it.  The level just under the top is all loam, so I can do all my farming there as well as carving out giant rooms for storage.  On the top, all I have is a stairway going down with a small castle thing I built (its really awesome they added in the ability to make outside rooms now) on top of it for protection, and a trading depot.  On the underground levels along side the volcano, I built several rooms for magma forges/smelters (currently running 6 smelters and 4 forges, and a couple of kilns).  Had to make sure I installed steel grates under the wall were I built the channel from the main volcano vent to my forge rooms so all the nasty shit living in the volcano cant get it.

Whats really cool though is the topography.  On the level with with actual opening to the volcano, is kind of a broad plain that extends out till it hits a deeply cut canyon.  Several sheer levels below that runs a raging river.  There are even tall pillars of stone in the middle of the canyon left from where the river cut in between them.  I built bridges out to these, and from there to the other side of the canyon, so I can access all the stuff over there if need be (or if a caravan happens to come in from that direction).  I'm just really impressed at how well the world generation makes realistic topography.  So anyways, I built a stairway down to the river level also in case dwarfs need water or to fish.  From there, I also built a couple of water wheels, and made an incredibly elaborate mechanical system of axles and gears that traverses several cliffs and digs deep into the mountain, providing my fortress with unlimited power.  I tried building windmills, but apparently there is no god damn wind here (the area I'm in is scorching, so I dont know if that has something to do with it.  On the bright side, the river never freezes up, though there is nothing but dried of pond beds with no actual water, heh).

No volcano so far, I just started a-fresh and am still trying to make it to mid-game where you actually DO glassmaking... but check out my total abuse of the Z-azis. You guys might want to do something similar. The millstone's going beneath the sill, and all dwarves' quarters will be farther back into the mountain (notice all the loam walls). The empty plot just south is for another two farming plots, when I need them.

This was taking during the first sleep cycle; I play at 800x600 now so you have to remind yourself that everything is stretched vertically when trying to pace out distance:
(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/fort11194221292.JPG)(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/fort21194221311.JPG)

Thats kinda funny the stone stockpile is the only one with no stone in it :)

I just restarted a new one myself this one is shaping up nicely no magma yet but a 19 level drop chasm on the side of it and at the bottom of it I found Ironman  :-o so not sure if he's going to come smack my dwarves around.

I keep forgetting about the Z axis until I have all these stockpiles already set up.

I've been pretty impressed with the topography as well.Pretty cool setting up your fort in valleys with natural fortifications to stomp goblins.

More screenies, I need to know how later fortresses look!

How do you take screenshots?  My layouts are completely different.

Give him alcohol, its his biggest weakness!

But seriously, what exactly is this Ironman you found?

I wish I could find a chasm underground :(  I haven't found anything so far.  Just a ton of gold and silver!  How boring.

If you press your Print Screen button (or F13, if you will), you will have saved a shot of your screen to the clipboard.  Just paste that into some image editor, like Paint.NET in my case.

I don't have a good fortress to take a picture of at this time.  My band of dwarves that had no axe, I abandoned them when the caravan showed up and I realized I had a couple miles of trees blocking the caravan from my depot.  I started over and tried to use the same spot, but I couldn't embark in the same square.  I tried reclaiming, but that crashed the game, so I hunted around for a new place.  It's mostly white sand, with shale and platinum three levels down.  I think it's platinum, can't be sure since that's my "work laptop" fortress.   :awesome_for_real:

The group on this rig, they embarked right smack in the center of a human town.  So far the humans don't seem concerned about my clear-cutting operations.

I've got it creating my first world now.  I have a feeling I won't last long at a game this complex and this primitive in presentation.  My only other experience in this sort of ultra-low-fi gaming was ZangbandTK, and that at least had sprites and a GUI.

EDIT:  Got to selecting a fortress site and fled screaming.  I don't do ascii graphics.

It took me a bit to get over the first impressions of the graphics but once the matrix vision kicked in I don't even see it as ascii any more.

Here's the early winter of latest fort (http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-1309-hammershot-17-region1) It's just beginning so not much going on just started the one level down to start setting up mason shops other industry stuff.I think I'm going to try to set up a windmill farm a couple level above this as my mountain plateaus above this just have to experiment with piping the power from it down to a mill.If you scroll it all the way to the left you can see where the chasm pops through my level and gives me the finger  :lol:

It doesn't say much but here's Ironman (http://members.shaw.ca/talonuo/ironman.bmp)

Also looking for him I found a second Ironman on another level with a bunch of trogs that seem to have a joy in slaughtering mountain goats that wander by.

Yep. I also have matrix vision. You get it after playing it for 12 hours straight. I'm way past the graphics, now.

Your fortress is really really spread out; do you need 5-wide hallways? I'm trying to minimize distance moved in mine. All one level? You must not be used to the Z-axis. Your dwarves must spend all their time walking, walking, walking... Also, you don't need to create support beams. Cave-ins aren't implemented correctly/hardly at all.

Try creating one large (2x2 or bigger) up/down staircase and as you need more stuff, just go down a level. For example, on my previous fort, the 2nd level is all storage, the 3rd level is living quarters and offices, and the 4th level is my forge/smelter/jewler. Since they are all near the main staircase, however, it's simply 2 steps 'up' to the 2nd level storehouse for the stone to smelt and about 5 steps over to the storepile. Almost nothing in my fort is more than 20 steps away from anything else, except for the dwarf rooms which are spread out.

I piped my windmil to a millstone fine, although it was only one level for me.

Ya I'm still of the cave in mindset so it's automatic for me to leave supports.Same with hallways I like wide open spaces so my dwarves don't trample each other especially when the population gets up around 200.It's kind of a pain at the moment having them have to walk all over but later on when I get my population up I tend to specialize a bit more so it isn't so bad.Your fort gave me some ideas for having bedrooms above workspaces,just not sure if I could have the right dwarves in the right rooms when the economy starts up.

I just started the upper floor bedrooms and one floor down for smelting and construction going to move pretty much all construction down one floor but I still need to buy an anvil since I couldnt afford the 3000* steel one they brought with the first caravan :(

In the far top left corner a brook runs through so I think I'm going to try to divert that up the mountain for a moat and waterfall.

You can't really see it well but theres a four wide down stairwell by my kitchens  that leads to the mason  and mechanic shops as well as future smelters/forges.Going to take some doing to set that area up as it's loaded with flint and iron ore so stockpiles are taking some time.

My setup is a bit more like Jade's, I'll post it later.  If I have any complaints about my sand dwarves, it's that the map is just too easy.  I've seen one giant scorpion wander by, and other than that the only thing my hunter could hunt was a pack of camels that were breeding with the one I brought (I put an end to that.  What the hell do you do with camels, anyway?).  I might start my next map on Terrifying on a glacier or something.  :awesome_for_real:

And WUA, it really is worth sticking with it until the vision kicks in. 

My dwarves still do way, way too much walking. I definitely need to do something about isolating my dwarves with a small stockpile, their bedroom, and their craft area. Then, locking them in. My dwarves are spending way too much time going to and from their rooms. On my next design, I'm pretty sure I'm going to extend the small staircases down more; I'm going to keep level 1 as a crafting area, level 2 as 'storage', level 3 as a 'living level', but I'm going to start doing the stockpile manipulations -- I'm going to play around with that, and keep small stockpiles of raw materials next to the crafters and then link them with a larger pile somewhere else. Maybe that will cut down on some walking as well.

My master craftdwarves are far, far too valuable to waste time having them walk around. I need one creating nothing but barrels, one creating nothing but bins, one cooking, one brewing, and god damn do I ever have too much stone to even lug around. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way around it. I may start with a craftdwarf and sequester him in, making 'stone craft goods' just to get rid of all the fucking stone. I didn't do that last time, I just built endless doors and cabinets. When I carve out custom quarters, It's even too much to haul around to a gigantic stock pile -- I just need it gone. I wish there was a 'pulverize stone' option. I may just do-away with custom quarters and just barracks them... I haven't decided. It's frustrating, though.

I got sieged, unfortunately, so that's the end of #4. Damn it, it was calm wilds! Time to design #5.

I think I'm going to have a 'crafting quarters' area and manually assign the correct dwarves. I've taken to giving my dwarves nicknames of their desired job so that I know I've manually edited their labor tasks, taken off hauling and assigned them only to that specific task. The ones I really care about are my masons (make doors, cabinets) and woodcrafters (make more barrels, plz) and my planter/gatherer, and my brewer/cook. By time the first vagrants arrive, I can separate out and have one do brewing full time, one do cooking full time.

I'll probably do the 3 tier'd level crafting 'zone' and have them all identical, so that I can just add more as needed. I need to do something about the food so they don't wander too far for that either. Also, noise is a problem. I hope it doesn't go down 2 z-levels so as long as I have the materials storage buffer between the workshops and the rooms. Apparently, sound goes through both walls and doors, and workshops cause noise within 4 tiles.

I haven't tried it yet but in the old version I used to make dining rooms near each industry zone, the kitchens would pump food into two cooked food storage spots which would feed into the storage spot dining room I put near my forges and a third dining room I'd have near my front gates/military barracks.I'm assuming it will still work that way with this version but haven't had a chance to test it yet.

Goblin sieges come no matter what zone your in unless at the start you have no contact to any race.Once your net worth reaches a certain point they attack.

That's a good idea; I never built dining rooms, whoops! I thought the dwarves just walked into the food area and stuck their head in a barrel.

Does it work for drinks as well? They seem to be thirsty a lot more than hungry. At any rate, you will be able to use the stockpile flow data to move from one stockpile to another; You should be able to create a small maybe 3x1 stockpile in the dining room for them to eat at. Bah, You basically need to plan out your complete fortress from scratch :) I need to find a fortress build tool! This is going to be tough to plan for heavy expansion.

It looks like I have a lot to learn about stockpile management. They recommend creating an outdoor refuse pile (since it gets magically emptied every season) and another smaller one indoors that is set only for bones. I need to pair down my general 'food' stockpiles as well.

I'll also make sure to set the 'reserved barrels/bins' to 5 so that there are always 5 avaliable for brewing. I'm constantly running out of them, and this should really help with that.

I'm not sure what the hell you do about wood. I guess trade for it, late game? I'm going to be in trouble needing sand as well. Hopefully you can trade for all that... It's going to be tough when I need one whole wood to make charcoal to smelt crap, as well as an endless supply of barrels and bins.

What's the minimum size of a custom crafter dwarf's abode? I was making 3x6 but that may be too large.

3x6 is huge.  I give my dwarves 2x2 with a bed and a cabinet or something, and that makes them estatic.  The official forum people seem to like 1x3 or 1x3 for efficiency.    The nobles get bigger rooms, of course, and that's pretty much the only place I do the second level of engraving. 

1x3 or what for efficiency? What's the noble size? I'm looking around on the forums now, but all I've found is this gem (http://www.bay12games.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=11&t=000904)... on how to completely flood the world.

They need to code faster!

Edit: Someone added a ton of stuff to the wiki, including rooms (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Rooms).

Other ways of getting rid of so much goddamned stone (http://www.bay12games.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=7&t=001557). Next time, my 'miner's not going to be proficient.. that way when he excavates, he gets hardly any stone from it. Yeah, it's slower. Oh well.

From the wiki: 

 :oh_i_see:

Room size all depends really.If your not going to activate the economy you can make anything you like and let your dwarves live in luxury but if you start the economy then all those big rooms will cost a fortune in rent and only your nobles and legendary skilled dwarves will be able to afford them forcing all the rest to get evicted.I usually run some 1x2 for the haulers,2x2 for most general craft dwarves and fishers 2x3 for legendaries then just build noble rooms to fit what they require as needed.

Yup I keep a drink and food stockpile by each dining room it's a bit weird at first as it first gets filled up but once they're going saves a lot of time having dwarves run to your main dining room.

If you examine your dwarves you can go into there thoughts, without a dining room they complain about a lack of chairs.Also since they spend a lot of time eating,cleaning,or grabbing seeds from a dining room if you make one big legendary one it gives them lots of happy thoughts as they go about their chores within it.

Stockpile management can really make life easier once you get the hang of it.Almost all my stockpiles I try to specialize just to make things a bit more efficient.The one downside to pulling from one stockpile to another is that it only works for one at a time,so you can't have the two far food stockpiles pulling from one central one it has to be from two central ones.

Trying to plan it all at first is usually where I forget to do something or mess something up design wise.It's taking me a bit more time with this version and the odd shapes of the rock face to get it all sorta planned out ahead of time but once I get a bit more used to this Z axis should start working out better for me.

Can't wait for armies to be implemented raising a dwarf army outfitted with adamantium armour and weapons marching on the elven towns will be awesome :)

Haven't herd of zombie whales  but have read some horror stories about undead carp and other sea creatures causing chaos.

There's a theory on the official boards suggesting that the new swimming skill is to blame for the mass of carp related deaths.  Stat increases come from skill increases, and since swimming creatures are always improving their skills, they get real tough real fast. 

I've lost count at the number of dwarves those carp have dragged to their deaths.

So I've put the sand dwarves on hold for now, since it wasn't really going anywhere.  Easy = boring, and I like playing the first 5 or so years the most, before it gets bogged down in micromanagement.

I start again, trying for a 'harder' map, in a sinister area.  Naturally I end up in a valley with a brook, the thicket trees and plants I've seen, and lots of platinum exposed on the cliff walls.  There's a chasm in the corner with lots of beasties in it (wtf are cave swallowmen?), but they don't have any way of getting out.   And there's a nice clay area for inside farming. 

Maybe I should try a glacier.  :uhrr:

Edit:  Restarted.  I'm in a 'terrifying' haunted wood full of dead trees and skeletal groundhogs. 

Tried Adventure mode for the first time today, and after finding this page:
http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Adventure_Mode_quick_reference (http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Adventure_Mode_quick_reference)

... I could actually do stuff.  It's a lot of fun - combat is very detailed, and filling creatures' body parts with arrows is good times.  In my last game, my elven bowman had shot an Ettin through both of its heads while it pounded on some human drunks I had recuited as cannon fodder.  Eventually it fell unconscious and bled to death. 

The basic premise is that you get quests from towns (human towns are all I've been able to find so far), get a quest from the mayor, and then go off and kill stuff, sell the loot, get experience, etc. 

Shift T brings up the travel map (travelling heals all non-missing body parts - my bowman was looking pretty hardcore after it got an eye ripped out by an Ironman)
hitting > (shift period for me) puts you down in the area you chose on the travel map.
Shift Q brings up the quest log, and then you can hit z to find out where the creature or cave entrace is - much better than spending 20 minutes wandering aimlessly around a map. 

Pretty sure that last time I looked at it you could also go raid your abandoned fortresses in adventure mode.

godDAMN is it a pain to find a merchant that sells arrows or bolts.

I don't know, but I think there is something buggy about trading for bolts/arrows.  Several times now, I have been trying to buy a caravan out, offering a fuck ton of gold/platinum crafts, but it wouldn't go.  I keep giving up random things I want, to no avail, until I magically unchecked all the bolts/arrows and suddenly he trades me everything I want without haggle.  That has happened several times now, and I'm starting to not think its not coincidence that knocking off the arrows just happened to be putting me under the price threshold for trade each time.

Yup but I heard it's bugged at the moment and crashes.What you do is reclaim fortress and you take 7 dwarves but instead of all farming and masonry you give them combat skills.They start at the fort you abandoned and you have to go in and reclaim rooms and what not and kill off all the baddies that get placed within.Once you clear it all out of monsters and reclaim all the rooms it goes back into fort mode and you start getting immigrants and caravans again.

Arrows and bolts were always hard to get in adventure mode,you could never buy them always had to get them off undead archers I think it was.Now that you all mentioned it my last dwarf caravan got all messed up and I had tried to buy bolts from them never would let me trade then they got pissed off and left.

I need a fortress designer program.. I'm trying to lay it all out but all I can do is highlight for digging and try and remember what is what... Also, that 3d view he made in the screenshots area is pretty sweet.

Has anyone else tried custom tilesets yet?

What I *really* want is it to be about twice as big as it is on the y axis. I've stopped stretching it so that x and y are square, but now it's soooo short it's driving me crazy.

I chatted with Toady in IRC once about the 3d viewer and he said that it was just something he played around with briefly and had no intention of releasing. The folks at the DF Map Archive (http://mkv25.net/dfma/index.php) are working on a multilevel viewer that compresses files based on the tiles, so it wouldn't be infeasible to write an app that could read the tile images at that fixed size and compose them into some semblance of a 3D view. Something like the 3D maps from Metroid Prime would be pure love.


I've installed both a custom tileset and a new set of graphics without any issues. http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Graphics_sets provides one complete graphics set called DR. (my personal favorite) You can install it by doing the following:

1. Convert and save the first image on the page as dwarves.bmp
2. download the graphics_example.txt files from the section directly below the image entitles 'Quick fix for DR'
3. go to the Raw directory and in the subdirectories (I forget the dir names exactly) replace both the dwarves.bmp and graphics_example.txt files

As for the tilesets, they can be replaced by doing the following:

1. Choose a tileset from http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Tilesets
2. place it in the /data/art directory
3. open the /init/init.txt files
4. change the tileset entry for your resolution setting to the new file name

As far as I know, curses is the most popular tileset, but some of the others are pretty stylish.

Meh, only creatures are supported? I'll pass. I've got matrixvision already anyway. What would really be useful is rooms and shops and storepiles and such.

I'm bumping this, because I'm STILL playing. New versions are released all the time.

Toady is interviewed for a lengthy Gamasutra article (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3549/interview_the_making_of_dwarf_.php).

I do want to share the tale of Boatmurdered (http://fromearth.net/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/), one of the funniest let's play! threads on SA I have ever read. It's the one referenced in the article.

Yay, beady-eyed undead elephants. Thanks for that link.

That thread got me to try the game -- and I agree. Fucking elephants.

He's also just released a mac version of the game.

Elephants I can deal with but the new kobold ambushs can get hectic when they stealth up close before a hapless woodcutter or hunter reveals them.

My best solution to this so far is to chain up animals all over the wilderness as an early warning device.Besides you can only have so many kitten hide gloves :)

I figure I'll post it here, since I didn't see the thread earlier, but I was wondering if anyone was interested in getting a F13 Let'sPlay going with DF. We have some pretty comical captioners here, so I think it would be a good read for everyone else who isn't playing DF.

Takers?

I tried playing Dwarf Fortress ONCE.

I blacked out 6 minutes in and woke up in Mexico.

I'm never ever doing it again.

Kidneys intact?  :awesome_for_real:

That's right, Venture Brothers kicks your ass.

I recently paypaled them 20 Dollars for the very idea of the game. But actually playing it? I don't know if I'm strong enough for that.

The whole point about playing it is so we can have an engaging storyline; if we just have the best fortress ever and everything is peachy keen, no one will give a rat's ass. However, if everyone is slain with a mis-route of magma, that's compelling.

 :uhrr:

If I did this, I would not be able to tell you what I did, or how I did it and I can't promise anything other than trauma and tragedy.

Trauma and tragedy are usually the best parts of the game.I'm the first to admit tho that it does take some perseverance before it hooks you and you can get past the ascii.

Can I just write a funny story about at-signs and skip over the baldness-inducing UI?

I'd actually play this once the UI makes it out of the 1980's.

This game needs a tutorial, really fucking bad.  The guy can make good, deep systems, but accessibility is right in the shitter.

I really have no idea what the fuck is going on. It's awesome.  :drill:

I could barely play it in 2D. No way I'm trying ASCII hell in three-D.

I must agree that adding 3D made a very difficult interface just about impossible to enjoy. It's an interesting change but it was just too overwhelming for me to manage even with the downloadable icon upgrades. The viewable window was pretty small compared to the size of the map before, but now it represents even less of the total landmass.

Give this game a real graphics interface and it would be pretty godly.

This is the best game ever.

... If you play long to 'see the code', Neo-style.

Seriously, stick with it, it gets amazing.  And there ARE tutorials on the dwarf fortress wiki (make sure you're reading the new one, not the old one designed for the 2D game).

It looks really cool.  I just really, really don't want to memorize a couple hundred unintuitive letters and icons, plus command trees, before it becomes playable.  See, life experience up until now has trained my brain to identify basic structures like "water", "bridge", "elephant", etc.  I'm quite fond of what I've learned, and rely on it a fair bit (even elephants!).  I'm not all that inclined to relearn it all.

Toadys mentioned a few times he hasn't spent a lot of time on the UI and a tutorial because with the nature of it's development ,the 3D being the latest and the army build he's doing next, that he would spend too much time to redo the tutorial and the UI every major build but it is something that has plans to work on down the road.

Until then tho I'm content to watch goblins throw themselves on my traps o doom and spray there body parts across the z axis :)

Downloading a tile set helps alot.  Been playing with this one lately, and I really like it:

http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm

(http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/files/DF/DFG3.jpg)

The pack is the game with everything installed, so no configuring.  However, for my system, it was giving me and error where it wouldn't let me play in full screen mode, and the text was fucked up.  To fix this, I had to go to the ini file and change the blackspace (I think its called blackspace) option to Yes, and to fix the text problem, I had to replace both instances of "square_16x16.bmp" with "lite.bmp" in the .ini file.


It is a really fun game, but the jump to 3d was a bit to.....expansive.  There less game to it now.  Before there was the basic frame work of you digging deeper and deeper into the mountain, finding the river, chasm, magma, then demons, with better rewards and risks along the way (you open yourself up to more and more attacks from river/chasm/magma/demons).  It was still sandbox but had structure and the excitement of finding new things when you dug back.

Now....I litterally strip mined the entire interior of a mountain, from top to the most bottom level, and found nothing (other than ore and stone).  No rivers, magma, demons...... it kind of makes the game more boring.  Its also alot easier now with the 3D.  Food is way the hell easier to come by now with the changes to farming, and requires a lot less inventiveness compared to the underground river farming of yore.

I still enjoy the game, but he needs to figure out a way to add the game aspect back into the game, and not so much sandbox.  Not much to do in the current game other than build a pretty fort and look at it.

That tileset is pretty sweet.

That tileset gives me a Dragon Warrior vibe.

Apparently you just need to pick a spot that has those features. http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Location

I kinda figured you could do the adventure mode if the fortress got boring.  I have not tried that yet, but with that tileset I just might.

If you just want to play around, go to the wiki and use a pregenerated seed. I highly recommend this, especially so you can try out all the game has to offer.

Here's the one I'm using. This works for the current version, and is perfect because it's all in a 4x4 area.
seed 3550403832, size SMALLER. magma, adamantine, sand, trees, brook, flux in a compact area:
(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/35504038321204662692.png)

I recently read that mist, which is created from falling water, gives dwarves happy thoughts, so I'm creating a new fortress to test it out.

As most of my designs are centered around a 9 block square up/down staircase, I'm going to put a hole in it and have the water run all the way down. Hopefully it will work, the last time I tried something similar, I used a cascading waterfall and ended up flooding my entire fortress by accident. Dwarves last a surprisingly long time underwater before they drown.

I also need to experiment with something like this... this is the coolest thing, ever:

Awesome.  My current fortress is built around a volcano as well, and I have a nifty room with a hole carved in the floor I designated as the dumping area.  So my dwarfs can throw shit down to get ride of it permanently, and dont have to worry about the nasty fire monsters that hang around the pools edge.

Maybe you can help me with something.  I'm trying to figure out how you work cages and capturing.  So, I assume I set up cage traps.  Something/anything steps on it, then its in a cage.  How do I move it and the cage to somewhere else?  Like, if I want to tame the animal for instance.  Or like in what you showed there, how would I move the bronze colossus to the arena.  For that matter, how would I throw captured goblins down into the hole? 

Can't seem to figure out how to control this stuff yet.

I want to capture monsters and set them loose on things damnit...

If you want to move the cage to a set location like to make a zoo or something just [b>uild the cage at what ever location you want then one of the haulers will stroll along and grab it and install it.To tame animals you need the dungeon master noble and a kennel then when you cage something tamable just set the order at the kennel to tame large animal and the DM will just run and haul it to the kennel for training.

One note about cage traps they only work on non native things to the map like goblins and dragons etc that come from off the screens edge,anything that is already on the map when you spawn is considered native and wont set off the trap like say giant cave spiders.

Ah cool.  However, I'm still not sure how to move cages with animals/goblins in them to various locations.  I've caught some in cages, and my workers seem to naturally just walk over and grab them, then store then in the appropriate stockpile (with the occupant still inside), but I cant seem to figure out how to tell them to put the cage with its occupant at a certain location.  And I really don't have a clue how somebody managed to get his dwarfs to throw goblins down into a pit like in the volcano pic Bhodi showed.

Cages show up under the build menu, you just 'build' a cage wherever you want, and you select the one with the goblin in it (x to expand the list so you can select the appropriate one.) To throw cages down a pit, designate the edge of the pit a garbage dump, restrict it to only cages, and then select your victim's cage and hit k->d to designate it to be dumped. You could also place it on top of a trap door and attach the door to a switch, and then manually activate the switch.

BEHOLD! My glorious invention!
(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/df11204703118.bmp)

So far so good...
(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/df21204703155.bmp)

A little splash, no big deal..
(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/df31204703178.bmp)


OH GOD, OH GOD, NOOOOOOOOOOO

(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/df41204703207.bmp)



I realize now why it didn't work. I completely forgot to close the floodgate to make it a closed circuit. Whoops!

I've tried to get into DF on a couple of occasions.  The independent coder in me REALLY admires what Toady has done but I just haven't been able to fall in love with it as a player.

However, I love reading about other peoples mishaps and misfortunes with their little dwarven slaves compatriots and so if anyone has any decent AAR type threads it would be cool if you posted them.

That's what we're looking for. The one I have started so far is Dieinn the Barfire.

 :drill:

So did I hear that a version of this with graphics was in the works?  Maybe an interface?  Because when I tried it, I found it utterly inscrutable.

Planned yes,in the works,don't think so.I think the plan was to look at it after the war arc but I'm not 100% on that.

What exactly is this war/army arc I keep seeing him say he is working on?  What exactly does it all entail?

I dled that tile set and for some reason it wont let me move up or down, all i could do was build a down staircase then i was basically stuck.  I havent played in about a year but i used to have this shit down pat, this is frustrating.

The gyst of it is that currently you can raise an army sort of but all you can use it for is to protect from goblin sieges or mayby human/elf ones if you piss them off,with the new system you will be able to build up your fort to a barony/mountainhome then build an army and lay siege to other civs like those filthy elves.I believe once your main city is established you'll also be able to make little outpost like places for early warning if asomeones coming for you.There's also some things to make managing your military a lot easier.

From the dev log;
"# ARMY ARC: You should be able to control patrols and then armies in dwarf mode. The adventurer should be able to both go with and command armies. In dwarf mode, you should have the option to control your individual patrol members as you would in adventure mode. This comes back to adventure mode in terms of being able to control each member in a party of adventurers you make yourself. You could lead one and the others follow (as it is currently) or control them all, particularly during tense situations where you don't want to count on the AI. Entities should war with each other from bandit and monster raids to full fledged wars. Upset entities could patrol near their sites, leading to new wilderness encounters etc."

You can get a basic idea of all the planned arcs here (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_v1.html)

 

I believe he remapped the keys for level up and level down to "keypad /" and "keypad *".

I'm reading it right now and it's fucking gold.  StarkRavingMad is a genius.  The decoration of the dining room made me spit out my coffee : *spoiler alert I guess* "Engraved on the wall is a superiorly designed image of an elephant by "Toret Doge"  Regunid. The elephant is in a fetal position."

WTF. :awesome_for_real: This has to be made up.  Especially since the first player is named TouretteDog.

you can add nicnames to your dwarves in game.Comes in handy in keeping track of who was who and who gets the tombs :)

LOL

(http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/2262/screenhunter57vm9.jpg) (http://imageshack.us)

Yes, so hurry up, download DF, and start playing so you can get the hang of it. I really want to start a thread like that one.

 :grin:

shift > to move down a z-level, shift < to move up a z-level.  Mark a down stair on the top z-level and an up stair on the bottom at the same location. Also, don't build up stairs, build up/down stairs instead; you never know when you may need to extend the staircase down an additional z-level.

Actually, since he downloaded the tileset, up/down is now / and * on the keypad.  They remapped it for that tileset for what ever reason, thus his problems.

Goddamn dwarf fortress. I stayed up four hours too late last night thanks to downloading the latest version and kicking around with the 3D stuff. It seems to make good organization of your fort easier.

Does anyone have any good illustrated examples of magma industry setups? My current half-assed (and not yet activated) setup is supposed to take magma from the surface of a volcano vent, channel it to a walled-off pool near the entrance to my fort (for later expansion into a lava moat), then pull magma off that pool via another channel, taking about five levels down to a bunch of channels cut next to rooms where the industrial buildings will go.

I'm half-fearing that liquid pressure will cause the underground magma sections to overflow and flood my entire fort with viscous burning.

Call it a learning experience, and hire more dwarfs.

You know, we need an Evil Dwarf Fortress variant if this guy ever gets done and gets a good graphic setup going.

Heh. I want to channel my magma to the elf populations and wipe them out.  :drill:

Yeah, nothing stopping you from being evil now.  Theres actually an option to just seize the property of caravans that stop to trade with you, though this obviously hurts future trade and can lead to armies being sent against you. 

Or you can just burn them all to death (or drown them) as cmlancas suggests.  You can play evil dwarf fortress all you want right now ;)

Oh, and thanks for the tips earlier Bhodi.  The reason the build list wasn't comming up with cages with objects in them was that I needed to hit the expand button (x).  So now I see how to move them.  I actually just caught a whole raiding party of goblins (but not before the assholes killed my only clothmaker/weaver), and I'm trying to think of fun ways to dispose of them.  I was just going to chuck them into the pit overhanging the volcano, but I don't want to waste the cages.  I guess I could also use the armor and weapons they carry....hmmm.....

Thunderdome: Two men, err, well one dwarf and one goblin enter, and one man, err, dwarf or goblin leaves!

I've been playing for a while and I'm still not sure how to move goblins in cages.  Every time I try, the goblins end up being set free.

On a similar note, does anyone know how to remove units from the (u)nits screen?  all these dead goblins and camels and dwarf babies... err... they really clog up the screen when I want to find a living unit quickly.  I see the r: remove creature option, but doesn't do anything.

And if you're looking for a 'boatmurdered'-esque story, then Nist Akath is pretty good.  And also very very long, I'm only about halfway through.
http://www.bay12games.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=11&t=001057&p= (http://www.bay12games.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=11&t=001057&p=)

Currently playing a desert map (for the FPS boost) in an Untamed Wilds region... and I think I've seen one jaguar and one giant desert scorpion so far.  Everything else is lame-ass camels.  I've even got an 'extra creatures' mod loaded in, and nothing.  Bah.  I may try an evil jungle or something after this.  My plans for breeding an army of War Giant Jaguars must be fulfilled!

Play in a Terrifying area.  From the get go your being attacked my skeletal squirrels and fox's.  And then the bad things come.

Hmm. My map has a cave system filled with ratmen and a giant.

I think I know where my test magma line is going.

Is there a comparable game if I want to evaluate my chance at mastering the interface?  Is it more painfull than a MUD?

Much.  I don't think there's anything that's come out in the last 10 years that's comparable.  Maybe some of the old flight simulators that used every one of your 103 keys for something ridiculous.  Or about 2 and a half times as inscrutable as a roguelike, like angband or ADOM.

Once a cage trap captures a goblin, a dwarf should come and take the cage (containing goblin) to an animal stockpile. Once it's been moved to the stockpile (not while it's still in transit) you can then issue a 'build -> cage' order, use 'x' to expand the cage selection so you can actually see what's in the cage and pick the golbin cage.

I'm not sure if there's a way to transfer a goblin from one cage to another but this method allows you to place the goblin cage wherever you want, say for instance your arena where you can then have the goblin torn apart by war dogs for the amusement of all...

Perfect, thanks.  They should make some nice fodder for my War Ogres in the pits  :awesome_for_real:

I tried a new Terrifying map with a creature mod added in - Zombie Rhinoceroses can mess a dwarf up.  Had to restart after a failed waterfall-in-the-dining-room turned my fort into a dwarf aquarium. 

You can transfer creatures by telling them to place one cage on another, I believe; You can somehow herd all animals into a single cage.

You can definitely transfer tame animals into the same cage, but if you try to move an untamed creature from one cage to another then it frees the animal. I've not tried this with goblins but I'd assume the same happens, so best to keep them in the cage they're trapped in IMO.

My text is fine, but I can't get it to run fullscreen. Weird.

Hard lesson learned. Magma rises to the level it's originally drained from. Tapping the surface of a volcano and trying to form a magma reservoir several levels below the tap? Bad idea.

Other hard lesson learned. Dwarves do not like the burning.

The hard lessons are usually the most hilarious to watch for those of us who aren't learning it.  :grin:

The fort I had running when the change to lava went in had a similar effect to me.I patched up and went about my business when lava poured over the ledge above my entrance and trade depot.After the initial WTF!!!!! moment it turned out the "dormant" volcano I had thought was a cozy place to occupy had over flowed and carnage was had for all.On the bright side the elvish caravan was trading at the time so it wasn't a total loss.

n00b question:

I'm having trouble with thirst during the winter (killed two of my mans).  My dwarves will drink from the river most of the year, but they freeze during the winter.  I can't see any underground rivers or anything, and I can't find any way to thaw the surface river water or anything (it's literally just outside the back door, so I didn't think this would be a problem).  Wells, as far as I can tell, need to be built over some source of unlimited underground water or they'll dry up, and I haven't found any underground water at all (limited or otherwise).  Is there something I'm missing, or did I pick a bad starting place or something?

Ah fuck now I'm back playing DF. I stopped because my dreams became ASCII/Matrixvision DF escapades. But they released an OS X version. I *had* to try it. 14 hrs later.

It is easier though, depending on your starting point. More complex, but less frantic. I suspect that's my starting plot though...

Booze. It doesnt freeze, makes your dwarves much happier than plain water, and if you distill plump helmets you even get the seeds back. (Possibly other seeds as well)

Also you can build a long underground tunnel leading water away from the river to a reservoir. Of course there is a slight chance that the miner breaking through the riverbed will drown. He got out fine for me, but YMMV.

Letting dwarves survive on water alone is cruel and indwarven punishment,the only time you might need water is if someone gets bedridden but usually they're gonna die anyway so not too bad as mentioned just get a good booze stockpile up and running of pretty much any growable product and your good.

As for the mining aqua run o doom just mine until your one tile from breaking through then pop up one z axis and channel out the square from above,then you can just build a floor over the hole or a hatch cover and you safely have your fluid redirect.Works good on magma as well and keeps the beards from getting singed.

Also, while magma will not rise above the level it's originally drained from - you can tunnel into the side of a caldera and it won't rise above your tunnel entrance - water WILL. Water WILL rise and fill to the level of the highest part of the attached water. That means, if you tap the underside of a brook and pretend it's a cistern, everything below the top of that brook will end up flooded if precautions aren't taken.

As for your magma plan, just tap directly into the side of the caldera at one level below your forges/smelters. If you look on the previous page, you can see the tunnel I built (and then I made channels above it in the room) - that tunnel goes directly into the side of the caldera.

Yeah, that's what I eventually figured out, but not before losing a fairly substantial amount of the base to The Burning. Also, the intended "outdoor reservoir + lava moat" is still overflowing and slowly covering the entire map with lava. Oops.

I've also tapped the caldera a few more times, directing a few "pipes" of magma into a cave filled with ratmen and giants. Soon the cave will be nice and warm. :awesome_for_real:

OK, I'm trying it right now.  Anyone can tell me what's the point of the world map?  You see history being generated when you create it but doesn't look like it have any effect. 

Yeah, you can pretty much ignore it at this point.

Now prepare to be confused and cursing at the graphics for a few hours.   :uhrr:

I'm using the graphic edition, it's doing a good job. My problem right now is finding a decent spot.  I followed a walkthrough up to the point I realised I had no magma.  I'm too stubborn to use a easy spot seed.  I'm up to 5 generated world right now.  All the volcano are either on an aquifer or there's no tree.

I'd skip trying to find magma for the first few times you play... maybe aim to live through the first winter instead  :grin:

Instead of just looking for a volcano if you look over the mountains and watch for obsidian in the list of main rock types that will let you know theres a good chance of a hidden lava vent or caldera on the map.I've found that gives a bit more chances for having a good wooded spot.

Just use a pregenerated seed already. This was on the previous page but I am posting it again, here.
If you want to just play around and don't want to waste time looking for the perfect spot with everything you'd need, use this world size, seed and place here. I've modified the picture for even easier enjoyment.

This has sand, magma, brook, flux, iron, adamantine, trees, doesn't freeze, temperate climate, wind @ 20, plenty of wildlife, and farmable soil. This allows for easy steel making (flux stone with with magma forges/smelters), glass making, engineering marvels with wind/water/magma, lots of food, and decently hilly without overdoing it, and it's small enough (4x4) that when you get to 200 dwarves your computer doesn't slow to a crawl.
                   BUILD HERE FOR EASYMODE
(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/35504038321205028990.png)

But I want to be a special snowflake!

Anyway, I'm slowly getting trough the interface. I just learned that you have to quit trough saving and not abandon the fortress (even if you saved before)...

I also highly recommend editing the ini file to enable seasonal saves. It makes the game a lot more fun since you can just reload a game if you tend to screw up. Remember to revert to an old save, copy the data from that directory into the one you were playing, as if you just select it, you won't be able to go back to it a second time.

It's possible to get through an aquifer if you have enough wood for pumps. Some sort of power source (windmill, watermill) will make things go smoother. I suppose I wouldn't recommend it though if you're just getting started but it does make a challenging engineering project once you've played through a few fortresses :)

Okay, another n00b question:

I've been building a tower over my main entrance, using my excess stone, but there are some rather unsafe looking holes in the construction, I think because I mucked up some of the build orders (some stuff is blocking some other stuff, built some floors where I shouldn't have, etc.).  Is there some way to demolish or undo these things?  "Dig" doesn't seem to work, and I can't find any other way to get rid of constructed architecture once it's already built.

Also, how can I get my millitary to not suck?  Like, quickly?  Very quickly, if at all possible?  My dwarves all run off to fight and get slaughtered; I read you can get them to spar by taking them off duty, but they kept crippling each other, and then when the goblins attacked, my squad of one-armed bleeding axedwarves were cut down by crossbow fire before they could limp their way to the enemy.  I'm running out of dwarves, and the fucking goblins keep coming... it's getting kind of worrying (on the plus side, I have a massive surplus of not really used weapons and slightly more used armor).

there is a 'remove construction' option in the (d)esignate window. I believe it is c but I'd have to check. when you select it, all your built items flash C and you can just select it.

As for how to not get your military to suck, you were doing the right thing, but you probably want to select them to be 'unarmed' or, if they have weapons equipped, you definitely want them to be wearing very good armor or they will be maiming each other on a regular basis.

To get your army to not suck, you probably want to pull people who have been detailing floors or digging for a while -- this increases their strength and endurance far faster than if they are just sitting around the barracks. Once they have a good baseline, set them to sparing.

Also, you shouldn't need to go to the enemy... let the enemy come to you! Cage traps and fortifications!

To remove built things press (d)esignations then (n) to remove constructions.

The military thing can get tricky to manage especially if you want the more deadly equipped squads like spears,axes,swords etc.As you've seen the trouble is they hack each other to bits because the higher trained dwarves spar with the newb ones and mangle each other.

What I do is first equip all military with shields asap then have them train only in wrestleing until they get a few levels in both.Both shield skill and wrestleing will help them dodge and or block weapon attacks later.Once I'm happy with there skill level I'll start switching them over to hammer or mace dwarves not as powerful as the edged weapons but they rarely do permanent damage to the other dwarves.This won't guarentee no friendly injuries you'll still get the odd crushed throat but for the most part they stay pretty healthy and a legendary hammer dwarf can do a lot of damage to goblin hordes.The main force I use for military is marksdwarves I tend to run about a 70/30 60/40 ratio depending what wildlife I have on the map.These also get the wrestle/shield training as they tend to run after things and smash them with there crossbow when they run out of ammo.Also get them into metal armour asap as that reduces sparring damage also.

Not really a fast solution but it does the job if you start early enough.

Edit:Just re read they're getting mowed down by crossbow goblins,even healthy they will get mowed down by bow wielding goblins.Archery is very over powered at the moment if you see bow wielding enemies don't try to engage them Go to (o)rders and order all dwarves stay indoors and let them run across your traps outside the entrance a few sets of serrated wheel traps will make mince meat of em and shower the entrance with goblin bits quite effectively >:).

If you're industrious and have a magma source (and bauxite or adamantine), you could set up a magma reservoir system that can controllably flood the areas outside your base with deadly burning. Water also works in a pinch, for most enemies.

Equip hunters with crossbows and assign some hunting dogs to them.  They make a good force against enemies early in the game when they're not out looking for dinner.

Nerf cage traps!

I had a nice fortress of 100 or so happy dwarves, chugging along in an area accesible only to goblins and dwarves.  I started getting regular goblin ambushes in my second year (the first ambush was crossbows, but thankfully they wasted most of their bolts on the dwarven caravans... so much for trading that year).  After a few more years I'm getting multiple ambushes every single season - thankfully my military of markdwarves and speardwarves is fairly well trained and mostly equipped with iron weapons and platemail (built from the melted 'narrow' goblin gear), so I typically only lose the odd fishing dwarf that I don't really care about. 

...then a Bronze Colossus shows up. 

I figure, what the hell, my military is fairly mighty, why not give it a go?  So I order my 30-odd dwarves out to meet the Colossus on the way to my fort.  All my speardwarves and markdwarves charge out (barring the small number who are sleeping) along with a few of the non-lazy guards (macedwarves, most with spinal injuries or brain injuries... my crippled military guys usually become guards unless I want some arena fodder) and before long the battle is on. 

It's not pretty.  The Colossus has both his eyes taken out early on, but that doesn't even slow him down.  Dwarves are getting tossed a third of the way across the screen, splattering into trees or each other. The marksdwarves run out of bolts in short order (probably should have kept an ammo depo near the surface) and charge to uselessly whack the Colossus with their crossbows before being swatted.  The speardwarves... well, they mean well, but spears are PIERCING weapons, meant to take out internal organs, and while this works fantastic against goblins and other living things, Colossi don't have any internal organs.  Problematic. 

The Cripple Brigade (fortress guards), even though they're relatively small in number, do ok with their maces, but they only get lucky hits every so often, and the Colossus heals too fast and none of the hits are mangling or breaking limbs.  Eventually they get chased down and crushed just like everyone else.

The battle rages on long enough that all the military dwarves who were sleeping were able to run out and have their turn, but since they're trying to take on the (by now fully named and titled) colossus in ones and twos, they don't really have a chance. 

My military has been wiped out, and the colossus is making is way through the doors of my surface enclosure.  He walks through my first row of serrated-blade weapon traps without a scratch.  Bah.  I'm mentally preparing to activate every last dwarf in my fortress into a wreslter and send them all at him.  The he hits my second row of traps... and bam.  A birch(!) cage trap, designed to catch Goblin snatchers for my arena (which really deserves it's own post) catches the colossus as soon as he steps on it. 

Laaaaame.  I wanted to see my fortress go down in flames, either by the hand of the colossus or through the tantrums thrown by the survivors. (Amazingly, three members of my military did survive, a single marksdwarf, a speardwarf, and a guard that, as far I can tell never even went outside to fight.  The first two were lucky enough to get dragged inside while the Colossus was chasing a guard on the other side of the screen.  None of them seemed too upset with the fact that every single friend they had just got killed.  Oh well.)

So yeah.  Nerf cage traps.   :-P

If you really want to see the havoc it can cause, you can always release it...

Make an airlock system for the arena and feed the colossus goblins you catch :)

Be careful about the airlock idea. The only "safe" way to do something like that is to drop them in from above. A colossus will break down doors.

Necro:

Check out this tileset: http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/~mayday/files/dwarf_show.png

Love the isometric

I'll play it if that ever comes out and works.

Sadly, as far as I can tell, that was just a graphical mock up to show what it could possibly look like with graphics, and there isn't any actual work underway to make that picture a reality.

I'm also sad to see the last update released for DF was last september :(

Catsplosion would destroy my computer running that.

If it makes you feel any better, the game isn't dead.  He's been solidly working on it since last fall.  Check his dev logs if you're really curious.  I checked on it a few weeks ago, and the next version was originally supposed to launch this month, but got pushed back for some reason or another.  The next version is a pretty large overhaul of the backend and military, far as I remember.

Ah, good to hear.  As long as he's still working on it, I actually don't mind the long breaks.  I actually prefer it, because usually the next release after a huge break is a game completely different from what came out before (see the update where he just suddenly made the world 3D  :awesome_for_real:).

Totally irrelevant unless there is an overhaul of the interface.  I don't mean the graphics.

The game is almost complete, just missing a decent interface.  I wonder why no publisher picked it up.  All the game need is 6 moth a decent team and it would turn into a blockbuster.

Because relatively few people will look at it until it does away with an ASCII interface. And he's not moved past an ASCII interface because he wants to concentrate on mechanics. Sort of an chicken-and-egg issue. Compound this with the fact that sim-type games are pretty small niche, and he's got a devoted enough following as is, so he's got no real reason to want to sell it -- he doesn't seem to be out for the money.

Yeah, if the game had a Dungeon Keeper-esque interface and graphics to go with the mechanics, it would kick great amounts of ass.  Sim games are niche, yeah, so I wouldn't say that it would be a blockbuster, but it would definitely get a solid following.  I'd certainly buy it.

The thing that I just fundamentally don't understand is why he insists on the tiny, tiny tiles.  It's only a "text" UI because he's using pc/ascii characters as placeholders and there's already the ability to add tilesets.  If he allowed for 2x/3x sized tiles, it'd give the third party tile making folks a way to provide much nicer art.  If he wanted to go the extra mile, adding an isometric display mode would allow the tile makers to really go to town.

He's got enough of a following that I bet it wouldn't be that hard to get some nicer art from the community if he just put a little bit of effort into things on the engine side.  Likewise, taking a pass on the "UI" (the crazy key selections for menu navigation, etc) would do wonders for the game.

Hell, take a page from blizzard's book.  Lua is fucking trivial to embed in stuff.  If he took a week or two, dropped lua 5.x in, reimplemented the basic UI in lua -- having the core app call up into lua to draw things, get input, etc, he'd be set for having third parties go nuts on the interface without having to release any source code.   Alternatively (and less work), split the UI draw/input code into a separate little library, publish headers for dwarffortressui.dll, and let people replace it.

None of this is rocket science!

You guys always make me laugh.  So funny to watch you witter on without actually getting it.

This is his hobby.  He really doesn't give a fuck what you think and, further, he's got no intention of selling it, since it's his baby.

Why don't you all come round to my house.  You can all have a pint and a snort and then tear in to how I've arranged my garage.

 :awesome_for_real:

I imagine he'd be afraid of any loss of control in regards to direction of the game.  And yah, he's probably doing well enough (for his standards) with whatever pays the bills to avoid ransoming off his baby.

I'd love to see some sort of FFVI quality tileset with a rudimentary mouse driven UI, but I'll settle for playing the upcoming improvements to the game he'll let me have for free.  Hell, I'd pay for them. 

I've been itching to radicalthon another go at a fortress, but I'd rather wait for the next update.  Not like I'm overloaded with available gaming time.

Christ, this. Everyone has completely missed the point on why this game is like it is, why he and his brother are how they are and what the future of this game is. Appreciate it for what it is... or don't. The Adams brothers are probably okay with it either way.

A lot of them (myself included) are just frustrated at seeing a game we would LIKE to enjoy, buried deep within an obscure interface and ASCII "graphics".

Get a graphical tileset. I use one because as much as I love DF I need little people to look at. It doesn't detract in any way.

Once you get used to it, you don't even see the matrix anymore.  You just see a cat, another cat, an orc kidnapping a baby, a dwarf getting mauled by a carp...

But yah, Dystopian Rhetoric tileset ftw. Still no donkey graphic though, but I suppose you could always poach that from another set if you were so inclined.

Edit: hey, I think there is a donkey graphic, somehow I was missing some of the graphics.  :xNope, no donkey. Hmm.

I've been actually thinking about implementing the thing in 3D. I think the grid he uses for the actual fortress is pretty small, 150x150x150 or something if I counted my ASCII correctly.

The presentation in 3D is just a bit more tricky. I think something like the building mode in Sims 2/3 might work. You select a floor (z) that you work with and then cull away all the walls that face away from the camera on that floor. You render none of the floors above the selected z and a few (some fancy trick to figure out when to stop drawing) floors below it with walls facing both ways. I guess the camera would be restricted to looking down, but you could otherwise rotate it freely. I think that could work.

I'm waiting for the Metaplace conversion.

 :uhrr:

Oooo. Anno: Dwarf Fortress. There's a winning idea right there.

My biggest problem with this game is that there seems to be no middle ground. It's either really easy, or "Oh shit is that a group of titans? I just fucking started!"

Maybe a way to change the difficulty mid-game would make it more approachable, but I don't think the author really cares about that.

No, sometimes you just get fucked.

The motto of the game is "losing is fun", your "oh shit titans" moment is exactly the reason to play.

From what I understand the difficulty curve is changing with the update that changes how the military works, assuming he ever gets it released.  Sieges might actually become dangerous instead of something you can just pull up the drawbridge and ignore.

It really isn't fun for me to take 30 minutes generating a map, finding a good spot on it, picking what I want to bring and then naming everything, only to be wiped out in 5 minutes.

Why do you hate freedom?

Then you're not in the target market.


(Actually, you shouldn't have to pick what you want each time.  You can save a template that you have no reason to deviate from.  And you shouldn't name anything until you're done scouting for Titans)

Also don't make a new map every time.

Guys, I hear there's this game and I'm going to play it the exact opposite of how it's supposed to be played why isn't it fun?

If you do not like:

- Limitless sandbox
- No concrete game goals
- No narrative
- Incredibly opaque controls
- Shitty "graphics"
- The possibility of your game ending any second

then this is not a game for you. Do not pretend it is. If you play it and these irritate you then you've learned a lesson; that lesson should not be "fuck, why isn't this fun?" but rather that this is not a game for you. Insisting that it might be for you if it changed just a teensy bit is like playing TF2 hoping it turns into a RTS.

I stated what I disliked about the game. I love everything else.

I agree entirely and have done so in this thread.

However, both you and I have to realise that some people can still enjoy the game while WISHING that the list above was more suited to them.  Hell, I could do with better controls and graphics myself.

 :grin:

Yeah that tileset picture on the last page had me salivating until someone said it wasn't real.

That's why I spliced a font pack and a graphics pack together to at least give the game a decent visual appearance.  The only problem with it is a few dwarves end up with levers in their name.

As far as dwarfs go, that's pretty cool.

I don't mind any of the above list, other than the controls.  Those are some fucked up controls, and this from someone who's played nethack extensively.

I feel a strong urge to agree with you completely.  I don't give a flying shit about the graphics, but the controls are sadistic.

Anyone remember how to do the stack-every-stone-in-the-fortress-on-one-square trick?


Edit: Ah, just found it, you have to designate a dump zone, rather than a stockpile(under quantum stockpiles (http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Exploit)).

Yah, using a dump for stone is a near necessity. Otherwise you end up with your stockpiles cluttered with stone instead of what you want stored there.

I build huge stone store rooms in the dirt layers.  Means I don't have to junk and unjunk everything by hand.

d - b - d = area select dump (so you don't have to do every piece by hand), and d - b - c = turn off forbid for an area (so you don't have to go through the pile and unforbid everything).

I prefer to create catapults and let dwarves train on them all day.  There's a bug/feature where if the fired stone lands on a z-level below the catapult, it disappears.  So you work through all of your stone and get a bunch of expert siege operators to boot.

Disposing of waste by catapulting it off the side of the mountain?   :drill:

My fortress is in a tantrum spiral, and my sheriff is the lead instigator. I think he has a sentence of over 400 days in prison.

Mine's just too quiet.  I'm searching desperately for the glowing pit.

Ok, I'm having some kind of retarded problem where my dwarves aren't using Bauxite at all. I have all other stones forbidden, it's easy to access and not in the process of being moved/dumped, but the masons/mechanics (trying to set up a magma smelter/forge) wont do a thing with it. AGH!

Don't know why they're not using the Bauxite but it isn't required for the smelter and forge only things submerged in lava need to be made with it or any other heat resistant material,like say you wanted to make a flood gate to control a lava flow then the mechanisms and the door would need to be fire proof.

Yeah, I want to make a grate in order to keep fire imps and other things out... I'll just have to use a steel grate and not have a mechanism attached.

I ran into the same thing and it was because Bauxite was flagged as an 'economic stone', stones your dwarfs won't use because they can be traded with the caravan.

From the wiki:

Oh damn, I think I just remembered what the deal is. I somehow changed bauxite into a non economic stone (I had a good reason at the time, I just can't remember what it is now). Off to find out how to turn that off (or back on).


Edit: or maybe I had the stone mod on? oh god

Edit2: nope, i don't have that installed... bah.

Just curious,have you ever actually had a fire imp pop out of a lava trench?Mayby it's cause I always seem to have to route the lava a ways to get it where I want my forges but in all my forts never seen one pop out.

I did the first time I made one... First time to see a booze storage explosion as well, haha. I remembered that plain iron can withstand lava, so I just made an iron grate, put it in place in the tunnel, attached a mechanism to it, opened the grate, dug out the last few spots then closed the grate when everyone was out of the tunnel. Worked out ok. I just need a damn well now.


Edit: Oh, another odd thing about the bauxite... They will use it to build workshops and wall and the like out of, but nothing else. BAH.

Hehe ya booze explosions are pretty cool in a  sadistic sort of way.Been meaning too see if I can trap an imp and set up a booze pile trap for goblins.Might be tricky keeping the dwarves away from drinking the ammo on me tho.

You can always set the stockpile, wait for it to be delivered, then remove the stockpile and forbid the barrels.

Anyone have any guidance here?

I've gotten to the point of building a trading post with the help of a tutorial I found. Once I've made it that far, what's the next step? Keep mining, keep producing things to trade and look forward to the next caravan?

In relation to the trading depot, yeah, that is pretty much it. After a while, you wont even need to make crafts or instruments or any of that crap, because goblins and the like drop narrow/small/large clothing that your dwarves can't wear. I just melt down all the metal junk and sell the cloth.

If you are talking about in general, well, there really isn't any goal... Just mess around and build stuff you think is useful/interesting. I just got done building an underground greenhouse, dug trenches a couple of z-levels into the ground, then built green glass block floors on the top. Just before that I made a tower (only 2 stories) above the entrance to my fort that only has access from underground, only 4 xbowdwarves have held off a ton of goblins at once.

Does the game detect the greenhouse and give direct sunlight to the plants?

Yep... When you dig a channel into the ground, the bottom will say outside, light. If you build a an opaque floor (rock, block, wood or metal) over the hole, it will say inside, dark. If you use something clear (green, clear or crystal glass) it will say inside, light. The whole point is for your dwarves to be able to grow things that require light, without being exposed to the surface. I've heard of people putting glass over their central staircase so their dwarves don't get light sensitive, I was thinking about doing that perhaps (sick of seeing the entire entrance of my fort being covered with vomit).

I wonder if it would work with a metal grate or bars... Might be an idea for a fort without sand or magma... Is obsidian opaque in the game? In real life you can see through it if you polish it.

Just seize all the next trade delegations items, or build your depot out of wood to piss the elves off.

Unless something changed since the last time I played it, that's not actually true.  There's some functionality that never got fixed.  Once an area gets exposed to light, it's always flagged as being such, even if you build an opaque floor above it.  So for a greenhouse, it doesn't matter if you use glass for the floor or not.    That said, I still use glass personally, since it'll get fixed one of these days.

Grates or bars work too, but enemies can shoot through it and throw things at your hapless farmers. I never tried using metal or wood for my greehouse roof. I guess I just want to pretend that particular bug is fixed!

I made a giant trench a few z-axis levels down, then walled it off upstairs.  That way my farmer dwarves could have outside harvests without any threat.

It must have changed, because I tested out putting a tile of rock floor instead of glass and it said dark.
Edit: Ah, I guess I was wrong. Just rechecked it, and it said light... Must have been looking at the wrong tile.


I'm not sure they can shoot through it... I tried making murder holes in an entrance tower once, and the dwarves wouldn't shoot down through them.

That's the second most annoying thing about bauxite. The most annoying thing is that you can't smelt it to aluminium.  :angryfist: Seriously, just make it 'magma smelter only' or something.

Well, at least my fortress has nice blood red walls now.

Someone decided to make a isometric visualiser for DF: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxUYIZsu664
Also, development of the the next version stumbles onward.

Getting there....

Oh. My. Gawd!  :ye_gods:

I can visualize it just fine.  Not the problem.

I would have used marches, rather than stumbles. The man makes regular updates, frequently meeting his predetermined milestones.

I would have used drills

 :drill:

Even better.

I would have said shambles on.  The last released update was over a year ago.   :oh_i_see:

Maybe a steady crawl?

Through a tunnel?

A steady crawl by a narcoleptic dwarf.

If that comes with any sort of non-retarded interface, I will totally play it.

(http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/5728/matrixy.jpg)

New update should be very very close. Sadly no backward compatibility. For those who don't know, the guys behind dwarf fortress put up a podcast every month where Tarn talks about what his plans are for the game and they answer questions from the forums.

They can be grabbed here. (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/df_talk.html)

The list of new features/changes/wacky stuff is here (http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=30026.0) as well.  Lots of new stuff.

I read back over  Boatmurdered (http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/) a couple days ago to get psyched up for the new version.  I suggest you all do the same.

If you've finished Boatmurdered you should check out Headshoots (http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Headshoots/) and it's successor fort, Syrupleaf (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3194790&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1).  It is also on it's way to being archived, it's finished (in an orgy of death, as befits it) just being cleaned up.

Toady: busily working at modelling beard damage, proper non-shit UI and mouse support can wait.

This is critical to a dwarven society! How else would we know what happens when a beard suffocates a giant eagle!?

Finally made it through a full year, and am deeply regretting how utterly one-man neckbearded developer this game feels, because otherwise I might enjoy it immensely.  Oh hey, look: a status screen with tabs for "kitchen" and "stone", and the kitchen tab handily allows me to select what tasks (cook / brew) I want each material to be used for.  I'll just cruise over to the "stone" tab and disallow using the valuable and rare magma-proof stones for standard crafting and construc... WHAT THE FUCK?

As many have said:

This game will be awesome, when the UI is not a Lovecraftian horror that drives men insane, and when it has a little something people like to call "graphics".

For the love of god, grab Visual Studio 2008 and build a zillion crap-ass C# GUI/Menu systems and have one of your zillion fans through together a graphics engine. PLEASE.

That's the thing: he won't open source anything, because he's happily living off donations and doesn't want that threatened.  I was looking through the dev notes for any indication that he was going to do something intelligent next build: like make every map have water and magma tucked away in the lower layers of rock.  Or make a world builder that takes input from the player and builds the play area first, locks it down, then finishes the surrounding world, so I don't have to go through several worlds to find the exact combination of lava pipe, flux stone, no aquifer, no berserk wildlife that would make the newbie experience not such a fist to the nuts.

EDIT: And holy fuck, is his community ever frightening.  "We need commonly used tools like picks and axes to have durability!"

I don't care about any of that as much as I care to see the same keys used consistently throughout the UI.  Having to pay attention to which keys scroll the particular screen you are on is, as far as I can tell, Toady just being a dick.

That falls under the category of UI.  I could easily live with the current (modded) tiles if he would fucking add another / extended tileset dedicated so text didn't have fucking picks and shirts in it.

It's not for you.  <insert PA cartoon>

You know you love DF when item durability is mildly exciting.  DF is all about how the game can potentially fuck you over.  Past a certain level of competency, you don't want predictability, stability, or safety; you want a pissed off rock monster to turn your hunter into paste (that you can then weaponize or feed back to your dwarves).

I wouldn't complain about a better finder (or perhaps I just never learned to use it properly).  Choosing from a list of prospective sites would be nice.

The UI could improve, but you get accustomed to the matrix.

This is pretty much my stance on it.  Love the game, shame about the controls.

Every time someone necros this thread i get all excited thinking a new version is out, but its always just more bitching about the UI.

DF makes Dominions 3 (http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Illwinter/DOM3/DOM3_page.html) look pristinely stunning in appearance.

Hey, Threash, the UI Still Sucks.

 :why_so_serious:

That is what happens to me in all the other threads around here.  It is hardly ever anything exciting, usually people wondering if they should now buy the game since it is on sale on Steam, or an argument over particulars of whichever nerdy IP it involves, or a gentlemanly discussion of DRM.

:yahoo:

From reading the rss feed of his dev status, this first release may be a little rough.  Still, very psyched.  I promise I won't bump this again until there's something out.  :grin:

I however will bump this just to make Yegolov feel the fires of pain over anticipation.

That, and, you know, I actually want the release to come out.  I just wish it wasn't when I'm completely buried in games.

Well played.

Bugfix: Dwarves were incorrectly dual-wielding their flaming offspring as melee weapons.  They now correctly use a two-handed stance, and throw the child as a projectile if it happens to be on fire.  Stone transportation and storage had to be delayed to implement this critical feature.

This game is too fun to be this horrible.

Confirming once more that this is the game of the year every year.

Sometimes I think the F13 community (especially WUA) is made of horribly broken individuals.

Then I read something like this. (http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=m34lj0f1esk67dh7aof1pquti6&topic=51660.msg1122502#msg1122502)

Once you've learned to read the matrix, stuff like that sounds completely normal.

And, I bet Toady's going to be a dick and release something totally fake tomorrow.

Bump for Yego.

Oh hay guise, new Dwarf Fortress is out today! (http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=51948)

Toady says it be riddled with bugs (that mainly have to do with the new squads and hospital things) that will be squashed in the days to come, but it (should be) in a playable state at the moment. Site at the moment seems to be overflowing as my browser can't connect. Humm.

I'll probably wait a few days for him to merge it with the 40# stuff.

What is going on?  Why release if you are still in the middle of a merge?

My right eye just twitched.

No more ez-mode farming.  EEEEEEEEEEEP.  I got it to work after somehow botching it so that world generation would cause a constant crash.

I probably will just feel out the new systems until he releases a more final version.

Oh great this and a new mount and blade,why couldn't this all come out 2 months ago when I was stuck at home with torn ligaments

Has April 1st become the official indie game release date target?

Needs debugging, lots of runtime errors at the title screen, to the point where I questioned whether it would work at all.

EDIT: Some other minor errors, like pathing being broken completely. :uhrr:

I never played this game.  It looks fun.

You may want to check something on your end. Really not being flippant here because I generally hate hate hate that response but everything as far as runtime errors and pathing are working fine. I could see runtime errors maybe being a version to system problem but pathing issues would probably be showing up for most folks and it's not.

Farming needing irrigation is supposedly a bug.

Was there REALLY a new version? I thought it was an April Fools joke.  :ye_gods: Ach I want more time to check this out....

Dude, read the Bay12 forum, there's a new nine twenty-four page bug list.

Huh. That's really weird because I don't have any consistent pathing issues nor does anyone I know. I have had more than one irritating crash and the site finder locks my entire system.

I'm assuming he broke the hell out of things with this burrow concept and the extended underworld.  I'll try more new maps and see if it's a localized thing.

EDIT: Next map I tried I couldn't get a woodcutter to chop any trees.

I didn't have any problem chopping trees anytime I embarked. Only real bug I had was some of my digging designations weren't registering if the area wasn't already accessible.  Could just be that I was fucking something up.  Don't know.

It's probably best to wait until the merge.  Apparently most the support for the graphic sets is in that. However, guybrush tileset alone would be sufficient if you don't mind your animals being letters and your dwarves all being the same.

Working Mayday hack on the front page of the wiki. Only thing it's missing is some creature support and engravings.

Is this worth getting at this point (versus continuing to play the old version)?  I can't find a list of what all was changed or added, and the talk of bugs has me hesitating about diving back in to re-learn whatever I can't do anymore.

...And I got it working with a clean install, no tilesets, graphics off.  Are graphics hooked into pathing in some fucked up way?

If your still having fun with the old version, keep playing the old version until Toady releases a bugfix for the major problems people are having.

If your tired of the old version, try the new version while looking up bugs and try to avoid them.

Changes in the new version can be found here (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Release_Information)

Fuck mountain gnomes.  Little bastards can eat shit and die.

Next time I embark with some military.  Or a fucking wagonload of war dogs.

It's definitely worth it to try the new version. Completely different game. One post said it best: prior DF was about building up, this DF is about going down. It plays very differently.

It plays a lot like the old 2D version in that it's back to "Everything ticking over nicely....ohfuck" rather than just "Okay, year two. Now what megaproject shall I make this time?"

Also, from the bug list on the wiki:
:rock_hard:

(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_J8UnEYzH2p8/ShKmrb5X_cI/AAAAAAAAAAc/OVzmRfqSOsA/s400/Matrix+Fortress.jpg)

Kind of glad I won't have time for this until mid May or so.  By then it may be playable  :awesome_for_real:

Trying to give this a go again... it's not very laptop keyboard friendly....

augh... I can't even page up/down through the help topics... and there's a keybinding thing but it doesn't work.

I am reminded why my last attempt at playing this didn't last long.

Help topics? There's help topics?  :awesome_for_real:

Wiki for everything.  A lot of info is being updated for this release, however.   Laptop keyboard.  (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/40d:Laptop_keyboard)

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/40d:Key_bindings

The "laptop bindings" subtopic here that suggests using [ ] - + for these number pad menu nav things seems sane.

Fighting with his UI really makes me consider building my own crazy simulated world game. 

For what it's worth, I play on both my laptop and desktop.  I don't remember what I did in the past, but a slight tweak made the laptop keybinds a bit more bearable.  Of course, I'm not letting this version touch my laptop (it's "not mine") until it's a bit more stable.

This, I have to say, is a thing of sublime and perfect beauty.

I'm stealing this!

Fake edit: Little too small, but whatever.

Cut the text, it will be better.

Hmm... I've seen it somewhere without the text, I'll have to find it.

Edit: Ah, page 8 of this thread :P

Played a fort where my purpose was to explore new features, got destroyed by a forgotten beast, a lavender three eyed serpent with a shell that shot frozen slime dust.

The underground is a whole bag of fun.

Also I don't know if this is just me, but it seems a lot harder to kill anything in this version.

So, my first tantrum spiral is going on right now, but I had to take a break to show you guys this!

One of my dwarves let loose a "roaring laughter, fell and terrible!"(fell mood), murdered another dwarf and MADE A MASK FROM HIS FACE!
(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/99701/Sinfullulled.png)

Two more dumb questions:

- Is there a way to run this above 80x25?  If so, what's the trick?  [EDIT figured it out. mucked with my init.txt... still amazes me that he uses opengl for a roguelike...]

- Is there a getting started guide that is at all up to date for the latest crazy version?  I really have no idea at all how to setup everything before getting started.  If I went with the defaults would I have any hope of survival?

The Dwarf Fortress Wiki (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Main_Page) is slowly updating. If this is your first time playing, I would suggest using .40d instead. This release is realllly buggy still.

It absolutely amazes me how he will put in the most intricate subtle shit like this (which really is what makes the game amazingly fun, to be fair), yet ignores dealing with major interface issues and bugs.

It doesn't really surprise me -- UI/UX is a huge pain and a lot of people prefer hacking on what they perceive to be the far more interesting side of things (simulation, gameplay logic, whatever).   It's unfortunate, since it really doesn't seem like it'd be that hard for somebody who did care about it to massively improve the UI, if only they could.

I'm guessing that there is no easy way for Toady to abstract out the game logic from the graphics and UI at this point.

If he spent a while refactoring that into a nice layered model he could probably spend all his time playing with neat little mechanics things and let the community build the UI and display models.

But you know, that's software engineering, which he seems to think is conceptually a bad idea.

I'm still reeling at the concept of having to spend days merging things together.  IMO that would be an indication of poor planning and/or tool usage even with a large team where it takes more effort to avoid debacles like that.  And he's a one man team.  WTF.

Look at his game.  His mind is peculiar.  I'm not surprised he's messing up some basics.

http://magmawiki.com/index.php/Gnomeblight

The Dwarven Computer - A programmable computer built in Dwarf Fortress (http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-8269)

That's pretty fucking awesome.  I want to see some animations of it performing a calculation.

The only thing that could make it more awesome would be having it do something actually useful in the game that you can't do with the existing mechanisms.

Newest version is pretty stable. Military is still a little fucked, fighting is tough, fishing is useless but it's stable. I actually had a pretty nice fort going until a siege wiped me out. Reclaim is useless, too. :(

Awesome. I've been waiting for a "pretty much fixed" version. I've been playing two versions ago lately. I'm happy to help with beta versions as long as they're mostly playable.

Click for amazing. (http://www.nzfortress.co.nz/forum/showthread.php?t=20768)

 :awesome_for_real:

That is awesome. 

Short but so awesome.  A more detailed description of the fighting would have made it cooler.

From the sounds of it, there wasn't much fighting, just the giant iguana running around and one shotting everybody in the fort.  No real need.\

But yes, that was awesome.

Information is Beautiful.

Has Toady fixed superheated rain melting the fat off of dwarfs resulting in massive hemorrhaging yet?

Should be a feature.

Sounds like its working as intended.  What do you think super heated rain should do when striking somebody?

You two fell in the sarcasm or I've just fell into yours.

You're in the sarcasmphisbaena.

No, actually, it's serious.  There is a bug where superheated rain falls from the sky and melts dwarves.

Played a couple games (just the first couple seasons a time or two to get a feel for things).  I'm starting to wrap my head around the controls and the "physics" of DF as it were (and managed to flood one fortress impressively in a misguided attempt at irrigation).

One thing eludes me: how the hell do I deal with the crazy amount of leftover rock I have?

for example: http://frotz.net/misc/fresh-start.png

look at all that goddamn rock I'm stockpiling outside. 

Toady has been busy fixing Hydras so that they can be decapitated multiple times, being able to manage the three thousand metric tonnes of rock you dig up will have to wait.

Also serious.

The way I get rid of it is to designate a one tile garbage dump, and then go around and designate all the stone to be disposed of.  Dwarves will come around and haul it all to the garbage dump, which allows you to stack infinite amounts of shit in one space.  More specifically, once I have a lava channel dug into my fort for the magma forges, I'll leave an area open and designate it as the garbage dump so my dwarves throw all the stone into the lava, which melts it.  I figure destroying all those extra objects should hopefully help keep up the game performance some.

Cute.  Can I do that indoors?  If I don't have a handy magma channel, will I ever be able to remove the stone later for long term disposal?

Nice tileset Quinton.

Tiles are from here: http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php 

I find the game a *lot* more comprehensible this way.  Which is funny, since I find nethack utterly unplayable in non-ascii mode.

Found the tileset via this tutorial: http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-utter-newby-tutorial-for-dwarf-fortress-part-1-wtf/

Yeah, you can do it indoors, in fact, you have to change one of the options in order to dump things from outside (o-r-o?).

I don't think there is any real need to get rid of the stone, AFAIK it doesn't slow anything down when it's all in the same stack. If I'm wrong, just set a few dwarves to make stone crafts on repeat and sell it all to the caravans.

Also, d-b-d allows you to designate large areas of things to dump.

There are two historical ways.

The first is to make rock instruments out of them, trading them to whoever passes by. This is good in the early game and is always my primary trade good.
The second is to fling them into oblivion with catapults.

The interim way of dealing with it is to make a 1x1 garbage dump, only allow rocks, and periodically go and unforbid everything in the zone. Sadly, it DOES slow things eventually, even if it's all in one stack. Also, until the first and maybe second migrant wave arrives, you won't really have time to haul all the stone you carve out - you can leave it in the corridor.

Depending on the rock, it might not melt in the magma.

ABUSE THE Z-LEVEL! Make your storehouses on one level above or below your workshops. Re-read my DF radicalthon and get some ideas from it.

You can also pave your floors with your left over stone.  Typically I tend to employ just about all of the solutions, but I haven't tried the magma dump.  I'll have to try that once I give this a go again (waiting for his merge to finish and a couple more bug fix patches).

I never dump stone since it takes too much effort.  I just make sprawling warehouses and craft everything I can out of it.  Chests, tables, chairs, statues, trade goods, etc.  Since I like playing near lava, a good deal of it is obsidian, which has the bonus of making my forts very wealthy and my dwarves very happy.

The current build seems to work reasonably well. I didn't encounter anything game breaking.

Things that didn't work for me:
Archery training: Only melee works.
Sparring: The military skills up perfectly fine with only individual training and you get none of the training accidents involved with sparring so it's not that bad.
Diagnosticians: None of them show any interest in actually diagnosing the wounded in the hospital. All seriously wounded dwarfs die.
Kiln & occasionally soapmaker: keep insisting there are no materials to start production although the stocks say otherwise.
Enemies: On one of my tries I got zero enemy activity. The only thing that spawned were those big monsters you get when you reach over 100 population. Those legendary beasts swiftly stumbled into a wooden cage trap... The only way to get into combat was to explore some of the caves you find below a certain z-level. While the fights are entertaining the caves themselves don't seem to provide much added resources.

I tried out the in-progress sdl linux port of 40d (supposedly this work will be merged into the new version once both are more stable) on my thinkpad tonight and it rocks:

http://frotz.net/misc/df-starting1.png
http://frotz.net/misc/df-starting2.png

I'm also getting the hang of moving water and magma around and basic operations.  Goddamn this game is evil...

Love that Mayday graphics mod. An earlier version let me mouse-wheel scroll in and out, and also resize the screen. The latest version does not. Any ideas what gives anyhows?

Something to do with Toady being a horrible OpenGL programmer. Wait for the 40d merge.

Here is my current fort (40d, with Dig Deeper):


The bottom floor of my defensive tower. There are 2 more floors above with fortifications on all sides. The double line to the north of the tower is a row of fortifications and a floor for soldiers to stand on. Right to the north of that is the (dry) moat... Maybe I should put spike traps in the bottom... To the south of the tower are the skylights leading into the stairwells, which doesn't work yet because I didn't know that light doesn't penetrate stairs. Everything green is green glass.

This is the courtyard+depot. There is a drawbridge (currently up) between the walls. I will probably at some point tear the bridge down and rebuild it only 1 tile wide. When I first built it, the depot was in the 5x5 room inside the fort (which is now a barracks). To the west of the barracks, there is an archery range, and to the west of that is a well. The archery range is closed off with a floodgate when the bridge is down, so nothing can run into my stockrooms from so close to the entrance.

The stockrooms. I've set it up so enemies have to run through the workshops one floor down before they can enter. NW=Wood, NE=Misc, SE=Bars, SW=Food. To the south is the refuse pile and a couple of craftdwarf workshops for totems/bolts. South of that are the farms which are currently laying fallow, as I have around 4k food and drink. The green area is the greenhouse, the roof has been channeled out and replaced with green glass. That is where I usually have the above ground type crops, but I've let grass grow there for now, because it's pretty :P.

Here are the workshops. NW=Carpentry/wood furnaces for charcoal, NE=Misc, SE=Magma Forges/Smelters/Glass Foundries, SW=Kitchens/Abattoir/Tannery/Farmers Workshops/Still/Gym (pumps hooked up to nothing). The walls are set the way they are around the food stocks/food handling area because Miasma can't travel diagonally.

Near the bottom of the fort are the bedrooms:

The Nobles Rooms:

And the Tomb/Prison:

Nice.

Bump:

http://www.goblincamp.com/

 :drill:

Oh dear christ.   I dread every time this thread is updated.    Oh well.   Time to lose a few days.

Probably not, unless I'm missing something.  Game's not exactly finished.  All you can do is harvest wood/berries, build farms, three kinds of workshop, walls, doors, and beds.  Once you've got that built (about five minutes) there's nothing really to do.  Your orcs/goblins just kind of mill around and keep things stocked.

It's a promising start (the interface is waaaay better than that of DF), but it's not much of a game yet.

You need to dig deeper.

Sadly, the one thing I really want are multi-cell'd graphics, if only for the workshops. They're simply a jumbled mess that really needs to be cleaned up.

The Dwarf Fortress forums reeeeeaaaaaalllyyyy don't like people talking about Goblin Camp, for some reason.

I suspect reason has nothing to do with it.

They really just need to find an artist or two and go fully tiled.  I mean the engine is an opengl tile engine - they're just using bitmaps of ascii characters as the default tiles.

I hear schild likes pixel art.

Speaking of amusing Dwarf Fortress bugs, there's this (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61507.0) little recent gem.

From what I gather with my very limited DF knowledge after reading the thread, the world generator bugged out and created a spire of adamantite so large that it actually reaches the highest Z-level and then loops back around to the lowest Z-level and goes back up through itself again. Multiple times.

It's an object that occupies the space it's already occupying.

It's a well known fact that reality is recursive. And so is space. All the DF guy needs to do is move from three dimensional space into the 11-D space of string theory.

Allow your dwarves to mine in all 11 dimensions, until they accidentally tunnel into this reality and kill us all. While weilding their own flaming offspring.

DF 31.11 released. Lots of fixes, all the showstopper bugs have been resolved and this is the first version in my opinion that's worth playing since the merge and military change.

Sadly, dwarf therapist does not work with this version (yet). Mike Mayday (http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php) has not updated his graphical DF yet. Hopefully soon.

Too bad, I went through the list looking for this fix. It's no gamestopper but it can get annoying.

This is pretty much what I'm waiting for.

Hmm, I think my tileset is a bit messed up.  I'm guessing guybrush hasn't been updated for DF2010.  I'm getting a lot of weird icons for ores and most of my trees are letters.

edit: I'll try the mayday one included..  the changes are interesting so far.  A bit more time consuming to get started with farming.

My wife and I made a modified Mayday tileset to better suit our likes. Last we updated it was back in 40d9.
Waiting for some of the nastier bugs in the latest release to get sorted before we get back into playing again.

I like it.

Mike Mayday updated DF to 31.12 (http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/~mayday/upload/dfg_31_12_b_win.zip)!

OK, I found a new love. Forget having to deal with updates, memory offsets, custom packs, all that BS.

Presenting, The Lazy Newb Pack (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59026.0)!

This is what it contains:

This is what it looks like:

I've never used quickfort but holy crap. That's awesome. You create CSVs for digging out and it overlays them onto DF. You can even place beds, drawers and such, too! I'm gonna totally try it.

Now it's starting to speak a language I can understand.

This is what happens when accountants take over Dungeons and Dragons.

I had a look around and this seems to be the most recent Dwarf Fortress thread. So, arise!

I have decided to give the game a go. I am wondering if there are any veteran players still having a go and if so do they have tips regarding needed/recommended add-ons and tilesets for the current version of the game?

I've a deep love for this game, though I haven't been playing it much lately.

I use Mayday's pack (http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php) ... and  Dwarf Therapist (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=66525.msg1582174#msg1582174) ... what bhodi linked looks interesting though.

I recommend the Lazy Pack.  It will trim the neckbeard back some with minimal fuss.

Mike Mayday/Phoebus graphic pack(your choice), and Dwarf Therapist is all you really need.

The rest is pretty much fluff.

Yes, but the goal is that he not be pissed by the time he designates his first tunnel, which is a forgone conclusion, because he still as worldgen and finding a suitable site.

Didn't see anything to help finding a site, and worldgen is easy as hell now.

Therefore he should break his fingers to make it challenging, amirite?

Seriously, it's exquisitely suited for newbies.  Decompress -> Go (through all the bullshit you normally go through in DF to get to the fun).

What does this even mean?

With the phoebus/mayday packs, all you do is download it, unzip it, and hit the .exe. It's not like you have to install the graphics yourself like you did a couple years ago.

And generating a world takes 4 keystrokes.

Does the newb pack also come with a fort already built and self sufficient? That is the only way I can see it being easier than what I've just described.

All the important init options are accessible through a GUI, a batch file exists for swapping graphics sets, and a prefabricated low difficulty world exists.

Ah, that I didn't know. I only change like 2 things in the init (show fps and some other little thing like no autosaving).

I actually have had a problem with the difficulty being too low in the last few versions. I never get sieged, even when I provoke it.

Wow. That makes DF look almost palatable.

Oh, and I'm (http://www.avatarist.com/avatars/Cartoons/Pokemon/Slowpoke.gif), I know...

I am enjoying this. So far I have go some of the basics down and building farms and the like. My problems are getting a metal working industry going, having a military that works, and the detail with that stuff. I have trouble keeping up with changes and often have half or more of the population (currently about 50) idle. Just made my first artifact!

I keep wanting to abandon my current fortress and restart with better design and knowledge, but in the spirit of the game I am going to try and start some wars and so worth instead.

One thing that bugs me is that the more 3rd party utilities that come out, with nice interfaces, the less excuse for the Main App being 'Like that' there is.

Stonesense alone makes me wonder why the hell we can't see that in game.

4 dorfs died of thirst, so I built a well with a flooding room underneath, all powered by levers and stairs and shit.

They had a party when I put in the well (no, seriously, when did they start doing that ?) and 4 of them passed out during it.  At this point I flicked the switch to fill the well and, well, it overflowed a little and jetted into the room, soaking the party with level 4 water, pulling the sleeping dorfs into the room below (7 water) and drowning them.

This game is still awesome.

So, the score is 4 dead of thirst and 4 dead of, well, the opposite...

Parties are at least as old as 40d.

I thought dwarves only drank water if they were injured? Did you run out of alcohol or something?

I ha way too much food (1000 plus for 30 dwarves) so I stopped farming and put the stockpile for alcohol. Now I have more manageable food, but 900 seeds.

Military training is super slow...

If some could give this game a good user interface, with mouse, it would be truly great. Unfortunatly I feel like I'm fighting the menus to do stuff a bit often.

It only gets worse.  Personally, I consider the late game fort management stuff to be an unplayable mess, because there is only the barest of automation.

I actually took to capping my fortresses at around fifty dwarves, few enough that I could still personally manage each one wiping his ass.  More than that and I ended up having hordes of unemployed stinking up the place and drinking my beer.

I rarely made it long enough to get 50 dwarves before starting a new game, but I always had the intentions of building secondary and tertiary fortresses to split up the population if I did.

I did try to get back into this fairly recently, but I've lost the memory of all of the keystrokes and it was a struggle just to build buildings. I got bored, and then went to play minecraft.

I played Dwarf Fortress for a while...
Eventually I realized, I had every helper utility installed, was using every cheat, my dwarves stats were all maxed out and were practically Gods... and even then, I was barely surviving. I still would miss some tiny detail that would lead to total catastrophe. At that point I decided that while I was impressed with the game... it is obviously one of the most detailed games ever created, it was just too god damned difficult to be fun.

Heh, just give me a graphics pack and I'm good to go. The matrix, as unintuitive as it is, becomes second nature by the time you've got your apartments dug out.

If anything, the builds from his latest major update were too damn easy just because you never got attacked.  It gets boring when shit doesn't go wrong because someone went crazy after their husband was murdered by goblins. 

I don't think I can play now, because I just don't have the time.  Mainly because I don't work from home anymore.  :awesome_for_real: Plus, I'm not quite ready to have this new PC build playing DF yet.  Although, I bet it'd handle catsplosions much better.

Anyone know if he's addressed all of the major bugs introduced since the big update? It seems like, from his updates, that he wandered off to work on the adventure part that no one gives a shit about.

125 dwarves all starving to death.  Um.  I did something wrong somewhere...

May I suggest food?

Or possibly chewy rocks?

The game is fun because the dwarves' behavior is unpredictable which leads to unpredictable situations. It's about spending your entire life building the perfect railway system only to watch two trains collide into each other carrying nuclear armaments that starts a chain reaction that destroys the world. It's Dominos meets the Sims.

I can't develop Matrix-vision. I keep wanting to love this game.

Yeah.  I've analysed what happened and I suspect I ran out of food.

I think we brewed it.  I think we eat the seeds that would have made us self-sufficient.  I think we had no fishermen assigned.  I think my plant gatherers suck.

Basically, I think you shouldn't brew Plump Helmets.  Ever.

I can't really get the self sufficiency thing.

Also, I don't understand the military.  At all.

I haven't been attacked by anything yet. I don't know if I have the game settings changed to be easier or anything.

Playing this has just made me want to get the latest version of Ceaser or something. I find the UI and inconsistencies a bit too annoying for the game to be completely fun.

You were relying on plant gathering and fishing for a 125 dwarf fortress?  Fine for some variety, not nearly so good as a staple.  Farms are incredibly efficient with decently skilled labour, you could have a massive surplus of food with a ~100 square farming area and four to eight dwarves working it.  Just 1) turn off seeds in the kitchen menu so that you don't cook them all, 2) don't let your breweries autorun unless you have them very carefully balanced with your kitchens and farms, and 3) make sure you have enough idle hands to pick the plump helmets (or quarry bushes or wheat or whatever) before they wither on the vine.  Setting those 4-8 farmers to do nothing but farm while turning off "all dwarves harvest" generally takes care of #3 while simultaneously making those farmers skill up like mad.

As for the new style military, I'd need to write a novel.  Ugh.  Just build ten million traps and don't worry about arming your dorfs.

I don't know why I'm reading this thread, I haven't done anything in DF for a month.

See, this is the shit that always gets me.  Toady is busily growing another inch of adventure mode neckbeard, but a simple manager/assign task bot to maintain minimum/maximum settings for stockpiled items?  Maybe a system to make templates for designation/construction (rather than an external macro program)?  Fucking forget it.

Yeah. He won't do any quality of gameplay improvements until he runs out of money and is forced into it by needing a larger player pool to draw from. Which is why I won't give him a cent.

I've always loved the concept, and have given it a shot or two, but the micro management gets to me every time.  And it's one thing to have a game that's actively hostile to the player, but when even the interface tries to kill you, I dunno if I can hack that.

Did a search, and Dwarf Fortress seems to have fallen off the radar again here (except for a stupid slapfight with Minecraft).  There a new version (31.xx), and there's a graphical skin (http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php) that doesn't require fiddling with ten thousand different filenames and obscure init entries to use, just download and go.

When I say "graphical skin", it's not going to be mistaken for a AAA game anytime soon (except from 1990).  But it's not all multi-color ASCII that requires "matrix vision" to understand.  Walls look like walls, floors like floors, etc.

(http://lh3.ggpht.com/_x25P9A-Pxj0/TRcScqGlFkI/AAAAAAAAAXE/ghnySUOQOsM/s800/DFG13.png)

Been having some fun with it over christmas, my wife accused me of playing a "Sims-style girl game" until I started chortling over the first Elven raiding party that got caught in my "infinite racetrack" meatgrinder (pressure plates controlling doors so the way "in" or "out" is always "through 10 tiles of steel buzz-saws and giant axe blades") and how the head and left foot of the quickest of them actually managed to bounce into my fortress proper.  I love the giant saws and axe blades because even if they manage to back out before they're hopeless screwed, they usually lose a limb or two and die of blood loss before they reach the edge of the map.  On the other hand, the body parts have a bad habit of bouncing onto my pressure plates and messing up the anti-pathing attributes of the racetrack, so there are sometimes escapees or loners who make it into the fortress.

After I turned the screen to show her where one of those had dragged himself 30 tiles with no legs before the wardogs got to him (leaving a trail of blood from the Osterized organ soup that was all that was left of the rest of his raiding party), she stopped twitting me about "girl games".  Or asking any questions at all, actually....

If you couldn't get into DF because you couldn't get past the ASCII, it might be a good time to try again.  I haven't had this much simple *fun* with a single-player sandbox in forever (since original Populous, I think).

--Dave

Seriously? Its just lower down this page?

I am filled with shame.  Also rum and alcoholic cultured milk.  Thought that thread in the search was dead.

--Dave

Check the tiles with chairs.  I found all my seeds under the chairs when I made the mistakes of putting them in.  Noticed it because all the farmers were standing around and there were no growing plants.  Apparently a dwarf drops the seeds when they eat the plant raw, and seeds on chair tiles get ignored the same way clothes in bedrooms do.

Now my dwarves eat standing up and bitch about the lack of chairs.

--Dave

I may have to dust off the old DF and play a few more rounds.

The DFG mod is the thing that made it playable for me -- it's still full of crazy UI quirks, but a simple to install tileset that provided a reasonable way to visualize things made all the difference (I'm sorry, but 16 different color smiley-face characters to represent different professions of dwarfs is just not enough for me).

- Q

No, DO brew your plants. Your cooks will cook your booze and it's a net gain in food at the end of the chain.

Just don't set the brewing task to repeat.   Sure, it's something you have to check up on, but a good recorder keeper makes it easy.  I think it will convert 10 plants -> 10 booze every time you brew.

I tend to set one type of booze as no cook and one type of plant as no brew. You can do that via the cooking menu.

I too am trying this now. Gave it a go last night, after watching all the "legendary" vidoe tutorials by Capt. Duck and four hours later realizing they dont apply to the current version.
So should I do the Bentgirder DF2010 tutorial or has it also been superseded?

This looks pretty cool: http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php

Any help or suggestions welcome!

Learning all the key strokes as Bhodi recently posted about is killing me. So many buttons to bush just to break apart our now useless wagon and get some logs out of it.

Edit: Someone mentioned they werent getting sieged anymore, it might be because in the LazyNewb pack you have to click on and activate sieges. It comes auto-deactivated.

I didn't activate sieges (or change anything at all) in the LazyNewb pack I downloaded two days ago and got sieged anyway when I had around 100 inhabitants. Most of the besiegers ran into cage traps and will be the new stars of my arena of death.

My plump helmets kept rotting in the fields. Not sure why I had brew going 24/7 I would think they would be grabbing them to brew with or eat them.

Set up a butchery. All the prepared parts rotted. Not sure why that happened either.

I had an ass load of what looked to be empty barrels, boxes, bins etc sitting around on varying levels, so I would have thought they would have stored stuff in those to keep fresher longer?

Any ideas?

Do you have a food storage area set up to except those items?

Yes but I think I might have broken the food storage areas. I had one big one in the beginning. Then I remembered the advice to have one seeds, one alcohol and one edible food. So I made three smaller ones and supposedly used the "x" key to deactivate the old big one, but they never did move the old stuff to the new areas. And after a while seemed to stop using the new areas altogether, after only filling a few squares with new stuff.

You may have deactivated the entire area, including your newly-assigned storage -- assuming you did things in the order you describe, the 'x'-ing would just clear all designations from the selected area, including the new ones you had set up.

Stuff only rots in the fields when there is no storage available for food. Either there is no storage with food enabled or it's full.

Did you guys know you can convert DF maps to Minecraft?

And have one of those assploding dudes knock me and my patiently crafted diamond outfit into a pool of magma for the umpteenth time? Nah, I'll just keep puppeteering my ascii dwarfs towards their inevitable doom, thank you very much.

Oh hai new Dwarf Fortress. I started playing the new version, loving the changes, but it took me until winter to realize farming was changed on a fundamental level, and now all the water is frozen and I cannot grow crops. I hope I got enough alcohol to last one more season!

Okay will check that out tonight after we get home from the movies. I would have thought the "x" button would have only cancelled out the stock piles I was clicking on in the same manner, laying out the initial stockpiles work....especially since the new ones are indicating they are still there due to the graphics in the hexes. But who knows.

Follow up question, have any of you guys tried the newest Lazy Newb pack and if so how do you get Mayday's graphics pack to work? I have started the game using the DFInit_Utitity included in the newb pack and clicked the button for Mayday graphics pack, DOS screen opens and says its installing it, hit the Play DF button from within the utility and it starts the game.....but no Mayday graphics pack. Of course right now Im playing an old game/world using the included Bentgirder tutorial, so maybe its unable to convert prior worlds?

I apologize in advance for all the annoyingly stupid newb questions!

OH DEAR LORD IT HAS MULTIPLE SAVES PER SEASON! I lost maybe an hour backing up to Autumn but hot damn, I got me some farms now.


I believe that is it; they're not compatible. There may be a patch that allows some compatibility somewhere. Maybe? I think I read something about that on their forums. But your best bet may be to start over.

Can you summarize major changes in the new version for the lazy?

Granted, I haven't played in over a year, so not sure how many updates there have been since then, so maybe I'm way behind.

The two biggest changes I've experienced are:

Military: You can select a dwarf, tell him to (k)ill, then select the target, and that dwarf will kill the target. :awesome_for_real:

Farming: You have to irrigate subterrenean crops now.  :uhrr:

A few new things to make, like soap; also dwarves will automatically tan hides when they are available. I dunno if that was an option before, but if it was, it's now set to default. And more options for Doc-dwarves, like splints and crutches.

That would be very annoying for some of the staples.  I always had a walled-in outdoor area, so at least some of my crops would do okay, but yuck.

How does that work?  Previously, I'd just dig a room out of mud (or slosh some water over a stone floor for a minute to make it muddy) and farm that.  Do you actually seriously have to set up pumps and drains and so on for all your farms now?  That sounds like a monstrous amount of work.

The easiest way is to dig out a room for your crops, then dig out a room above it. Then make the top room a "pond", so the dwarves dump water into it. That water falls on the dirt in the bottom room, making it mud. Then you get to build a farm plot on it. Fortunately you only have to do this once. I read somewhere that for some reason, you can't just drop water on the ground. I can't remember why.

You're supposed to be able to build farms on soil, if the soil is at least two levels deep. But that's bugged, so everybody has to make pumps and drains or lots of buckets for now.

Drain a murky pool into a room sized so that it will be roughly 1/7 depth water, let it evaporate, then wall off the breach in the pool.  Stop making shit complicated for yourself, it's bad enough as-is. :grin:

The usual large room and floodgates worked for me.  Only actually ever flooded it once.

Digging to a murky pool to flood my mushroom patch (and later building a walled garden for Strawberries) works just fine for me.  What nearly got me killed once was starting in a Hot region, and watching all the pools evaporate before I got my well set up.  I eventually gave up on that one because it didn't have any coal, and I busted open a cavern full of zombies trying to find Magma.

The only useful ways I've found for using the military is either to have them training near the entrance and ordering them to (k)ill invaders/beasts directly, or giving them orders via the Scheduling menu to "patrol" a route with two points near the enemy.  And until they reach Competent, they don't accomplish much without a huge numbers advantage (although steel plate will keep them alive).

Hallways full of 10-blade Giant Steel Axe and Steel Serrated Disc traps are quite effective, though.  I had a major Elven siege hit me (I told the ambassador to fuck off when he told me to stop cutting down trees), and out of 40+ elves, War Grizzlies, plus assorted mounts, only one elf made it past the meatgrinder.  He was apparently an Elite squad leader, and even with no arms he managed to kick a bunch of wardogs to death before the militia put enough bolts in him to knock him out.  Or the blood loss from the lack of arms, I'm not sure the crossbows even fazed him.  That tree-hugger was Legendary in five different combat skills, if he'd had even one arm left I probably would have been starting a new fortress.

For the rest though, it was a major slaughter.  Elf and grizzly parts were bouncing all *over* the place, over the walls and three tiles away.  Right now I've got a bunch of Siege Operators training by chucking rocks at a wall, after they get up to a decent skill I'll station them on a Ballista sighted down that hallway, and that should lock down the surface entrance for good (Ballista bolts apparently kill *anything*).

--Dave

EDIT: BTW, apparently it's unusual to have as much steel as I did, as quickly as I did.  There was nothing unusual about my site, it had 4 levels worth of sedimentary with no particularly great amount of Bituminous Coal.  Rather, I just did what seemed to be an obvious optimization: a two-level "factory floor", with (p)iles defined on the open lower floor to hold nothing but 20 or so each of raw coal and the metal ores (everything else is locked out of the piles), and a larger storage space for coke, iron and pig iron, and another for steel.  The upper floor is 8x8 rooms with 2x2 stairways to the lower floor in the center of each and 4 workshops around those, the walls weren't strictly needed (and have 4 tile wide doorways), it was just a way to help give visual cues to keep things organized.

Unskilled haulers keep the raw material piles full, and thereby keep my furnace operators from wasting a lot of time running all over the place chasing ore and coal.  Intermediate material stockpiles likewise aren't far from the furnace operators and metalsmiths.  The big catch-all pile for everything *but* raw materials is a few Z levels higher, so they have to go a *little* further with final output products, but not enough to slow things down much.  I've got about 11 smelters going (4 producing nothing but coke, two smelting iron ores, two producing pig iron, and two making steel, with one left over that either smelts precious metals or makes up for shortfalls in production of something in the steel chain).  These all feed into 4 forges, which can outrun the steel production (especially when producing those trap components), but the (j)(m) manager queue keeps me from having to babysit them.

Before I had a lot of Legendary miners I had to carefully chase the coal seams to keep the furnaces fed as well as set 4 wood furnaces to cranking out charcoal (hence my war with the elves), but not anymore (8 miners can chew through sedimentary rock so fast I've strip-mined the entirety of those layers, and they're all Legendary now).  I'll run out of bituminous coal soon, but I'll either add more smelters and start in on the lignite, or I'll make the dive for magma.

Anyway, by the time the goblins started showing up I had enough traps to chew them up, and by the time they got *really* serious I had overkill.

I never find magma anymore.

I still think he needs to hire someone else to reign him in and make a *game*. 

There is magma on (virtually) every location now.  You just have to dig deep enough.

I agree on the "game" bit.  I wish we could have the option to play with all of the improvements over the past three years, but in the 2d format that felt much more like a game.  Sure, one wouldn't have quite as grand an array of options for megaprojects, but damnit, I miss the engines of Satan that were the 2d elephants.

Except the magma is always fifty z-levels down.

Dude really needs to stop fucking around and implement a worldgen option that generates a site you specify rather than constructs a world and makes you find something that sort of works.

There are tools for that, both tweaking worldgen and outright over-riding it to build your sites to order.  I have come to really hate starting a fortress and finding out that it doesn't have any coal to speak of.

--Dave

Are you talking about Perfectworld DF?

Because I haven't actually discovered a way to get it to build the exact combination of shit I want with great consistency.

I think you can specify the number of z-levels on a map in the init/raws files somewhere.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine you can effectively bring the lava up pretty close. 

It's buggy.  "Oops, cavern level is above ground level" buggy.

Dwarf Fortress 0.31.19 out now! (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html)

Dwarf Fortress 0.31.22 (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html) is out now, the second most likely last bugfix for awhile. If you were holding off for most bugs to be squashed, this is probably the best time to start up a fortress!

Also:
# made dwarves get crutches properly
# allowed dwarves that can't stand even with a crutch to move around instead of never moving again

Hopefully this fixes the issue where dwarfs just never get out of bed ever even if they're fine o.O

Finally fixed the health issues that have been in since he released the hospital update how many months ago?

This is why I quit playing.

Dwarf Fortress gets a six-page article in the New York Times.

/mindblown

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1

 :drill:

I found that article really interesting.

I thought the facepalm was due to a bumped dwarf fortress thread that did not have a link to a newly jebuspatched version of the game.

The article confirms basically everything suspected about Toady.

You mean:
(http://www.mamapop.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/McPoyle1-525x393.jpg)

What a bizarre article for the New York Times to publish.

Seemingly worse.  He is the beard.

That article made me want to play, until I thought more about the ASCII graphics.  I just don't want to learn how to see all that correctly - I'd rather wait until it gets some sort of useful interface for lazy people like me.

It isn't even the graphics for me, it is the actual keystrokes involved in doing anything. I can play ASCII roguelikes fine, but trying to do a city builder type game with object placement etc. with a roguelike-style interface is what breaks me.

The tilesets help a lot.  The per-character information density is way higher than something like nethack (which I actually have trouble playing in tiled mode because I can't recognize anything...) and it benefits a lot from a tileset.

I wish the developer was a little less anti-UI -- take stock DF plus that slick isometric viewer mod and clean up the UI a bit (somewhat saner default key bindings and maybe a bit of drag-n-drop selection) and you'd have a helluva game.

It's still be this ultra-neckbeardy-insane-simulation-game-of-doom, but the interface would feel a bit less like shards of broken glass in your hands ^^

The Lazy Newb Pack makes getting a good-looking tiled version nice and easy.  But the rest of the UI is just an abomination, you're forced to fuck around with the save system via task manager if you ever want to try anything risky, you soon find yourself in micromanagement hell building and furnishing every fucking room and constantly queuing more jobs for every conceivable profession because there is no free will or economy, and absolutely everything worth trying out in the game is ball-bustingly long and tedious to accomplish because you start with a ridiculously small number of dwarves and the rate at which a fortress grows is just pants-on-head retarded.

My wife has been playing the crap out of the latest builds. Alot of nice features have been added from the last time we played this.

She just ran into a forgotten beast in the caverns, a huge blob made of water, with wings, that shoots webs. The image of wtf this thing must look like has had me in giggling fits for awhile now.

Damn, that's like first edition monster manual weird. :)

I love my wife, she was giggling alot at her computer, went to see what was so funny, she had been working on a drawing.

(http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg98/scaled.php?server=98&filename=scarybeast.jpg&res=medium)

Yeah, this.  Tilesets can't fix the underlying UI, sadly.   :heartbreak:

Dwarf Fortress 34.01 & 2 have been released.  To give some perspective, the last release before this one was on March 28, 2011, nearly eleven months ago.

The changelog is pretty big.  A glimpse:
Vampires and vampirism
Werewolves and lycanthropy
Undead and undead hordes
Evil mists and rain
Revamped justice system
Lots of new animals and animal abilities
Necromancers / beginning of magic
...and a lot more.

You can download the new version: here (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=101464.0).
Or, the new Lazy Newb Pack can be found: here (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59026.0).

It's been so long since I've played DF that the urge is once again stirring within me. I fear a few days of UI torture sessions may be in order to suppress this desire.

Please tell me the new features use an entirely different set of control keys to work with.

(http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=dlattach;attach=5808;type=avatar)

I don't suppose there will ever be a version of this game that doesn't have a fuckstupid UI?  I could see myself losing many years of productivity to this, but damn, that control scheme is awful.

I'm convinced it's a point of pride for the misanthropic developer.

I don't think it'll ever happen.  Not unless Tarn dies.  

However, I suspect he doesn't comment his own code for fear of someone messing with his life's work.

I'd like notch to base minecraft 2 on DF.

Game's been in development for a decade. If it were going to happen, it would have happened by now.

I'm hoping Prison Architect (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX_DnZ_uMQg) turns out really well and IV's next project after that is a straight up DF clone.

I would need an IV drip to survive if introversion did a straight up DF clone, and made the UI not suck.

Paradox Interactive is making a what looks to be a DF knock off as well.  http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/a-game-of-dwarves (http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/a-game-of-dwarves).

There is also Towns (http://www.townsgame.com/), an indy project in (playable, purchasable) Alpha and in currently on its last day in the Indie Royale (http://www.indieroyale.com/) Alpha bundle. I just bought it and spent an unexpected number of hours in just-a-little-more gameplay last night. Survived three sieges, two self-inflicted famines, and outfitted my Townies in spiderite pants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_d2dEbsOE

And don't forget Goblin Camp (http://www.goblincamp.com). I want graphics, though.

That looks great. I hope it is.

The Lazy Newb pack remaps a lot of keys to be more consistent. Unfortunately, by the time I got around to trying it, I was already used to the inconsistency, so had to go through and change things back to "Sometimes F10 closes, sometimes Space closes, sometimes Esc closes" etc.

Anyway. I must try this. I would love to see lycanthropy run rampant.

I got a bad case of the Weregecko today. They attack like megabeasts, only I had one attack in the first year with a ten dwarf fort. Good thing it was distracted eating all those bunnies instead of attacking proper, then changed back into a goblin and ran offscreen.

Also: Embarking next to an ocean called "The Unholy Sea" is a bad idea. The undead crab pincers create Fun.

You probably don't get delicious crab meat either.

Here is a new bit of alpha footage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnmYsy9q4BY) of A Game of Dwarves  from the Yogscast.

Obviously it's a complete ripoff.
Of A Game Of Thrones.

Hrm. Still not exactly a fan of the graphics style, but I've seen worse.

 :awesome_for_real:

I'm really looking forward to Game of Dwarves. I love these kinds of sim games, but DF is just so  :argh:

I tried putzing around with this today.  I just don't have the patience for this kind of shit anymore, it seems.  I think I would have loved it 10 years ago. 

Every time this post gets bumped I get a small flutter of hope in my heart that Toady is finally overhauling the interface.  :heartbreak:

Today wasn't the day.

I found what seems to be the first legitimate play at remaking DF with a graphical interface in mind; Gnomoria (http://gnomoria.com/). It's still in Alpha (isn't everything these days?) and it's one programmer + one artist but they are cranking out updates at a decent pace (1-2 weeks per patch) and the fundamentals are there. It's currently selling as pre-order/early access for $7.99.

I've read that the interface is slightly awkward, but even the Bay 12 forum junkies have generally nice things to say about it. I grabbed the demo and expect to fall into a gaming trance until 4am tonight.

I wish Gnomoria would do more with the graphical interface.  The selection interface is clunky and the nested menus are awkward.  Will be watching to see where it goes...

(http://www.f13.net/images/necropost.gif)

Rather than make a new thread for Gnomoria I thought I'd bump this one to say I'm playing it and it's highly addictive.  It's still officially prerelease but I haven't hit any terrible bugs; it feels a lot more solid and complete than either Prison Architect or Stonehearth did the last time I played them (might not be a fair current assessment).

For the most part I've been avoiding tutorials and trying to figure the game out through discovery.  This approach has led to a few spectacular failures (like the time I triggered a zombie apocalypse by digging too deep) but the UI is good enough that you can mostly figure out what the fuck you're doing by hunting through menus and experimenting.

It's not QUITE as feature-rich as DF (based on the descriptions I've read of DF anyway) but I've put a fair bit of time into it and not hit the "is that it?" point yet, so I'd say for those who have been looking for a graphical DF this is the one to check out.

Yeah, I really had a good time with Gnomoria.  The one disappointing aspect of it to me is that the dev has a definite final plan involved (as opposed to Dwarf Fortress which just keeps getting bigger and bigger) and as far as I can see, that final plan doesn't have some features I want.  Mostly the ability for Gnomes to have children, since without it, it means your only way to get more Gnomes is by immigration, and the only way for that to happen is for your city's net worth to increase, which makes things a bit one dimensional for me.

Looking at the wiki, it looks like a lot has changed.  I guess they added a bone needle, which relieves much of the massive annoyance I had setting up a millitary early game, since you used to have to make them out of metal.  I should probably reinstall and give it a spin to see what's new.

I'm not sure bone is any kinder of a gating factor than metal for the early game.  You need to either have a functioning military or a thriving yak herd, and it takes a while to set either of those up.

Although now that I've finally got a good economy humming along, I have more bones than I know what to do with.  And milk.  I've started trading it all for metal just to get rid of it.  Because THAT'S HOW YOU GET MANTS.

I purchased Gnomoria on a steam sale a long time ago and never installed.  Will have to give it a go!

Anybody know how Game of Dwarves turned out?

Or any of the other DF type games mentioned in this thread for that matter.

Of all the Dwarf Fortress clones I've played, Gnomoria is the most stable and feature complete I've seen (though maybe there have been updates since I've stopped, I haven't touched most of these in months).

Allegedly, Game of Dwarves is pretty terrible.  I haven't played it, but it sounds less like Dwarf Fortress and more like Dungeon Keeper, except with way more handholding/railroading.  Devs aparently went out of business (or abandoned the game) so I'd advise staying away.

The other titles I know about are mostly incomplete or abandoned.  

Spacebase DF-9 is Doublefine's "Dwarf Fortress in spaaaace" attempt.  It's not awful, but at the moment it's pretty content starved.  The first half hour or so is pretty fun, setting up a space station and getting air and other basic necessities up is pretty interesting.  But once you've got ten or so rooms built, there's nothing else to do, no endgame to aspire to, no real threat to your colony.  Game's buggy as hell, too, and Doublefine's spread out over like a million Early Access games, so updates are slow.

Towns, as far as I know, is buggy and crappy and basically a complete trainwreck, though it's been a while since I played it. (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-09-the-fall-of-towns)  I think it was patched last month, so it's only mostly dead.

Dwarfcorp (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=168755959) might be worth keeping an eye on, but it's still in alpha.  Same goes for Craft the World (http://store.steampowered.com/app/248390/) and Maia.
 (http://store.steampowered.com/app/252250/)

Stonehearth is a long way away from anything, really, but the initial bits of gameplay are very promising IMO.

I checked out Alpha4 last night and you can now customize buildings, etc.  Yeah they've got a long way to go, but they're doing it in style.  Their UI refresh made their already nice looking UI a bit cleaner.

Gnomoria definitely seems the most graphical DF of these various games.  I just wish they would fix their picking UI -- the wireframe box thing just never lines up with the map in a way that I can parse visually.  Seems like they've added a bunch of stuff since I poked at it last. 

DF-9 which has really nice clean menu UI also has issues with the UI for room layout being pretty awkward, and while they've added more stuff, is pretty shallow content-wise.

Clockwork Empires just dropped into Early Access and it certainly looks like it has potential, but wow it is super super rough UI-wise right now.

Timber and Stone seems to be moving forward at a pretty slow rate.  1.5.2 supposedly has an overhaul of pathing/ai that prevents units from getting stuck.

A Game of Dwarves sucked. It was a really, really bad game. Very shallow, buggy and both hand-holdy and difficult (not in a good way, but because of horrible design; if you chose the wrong way to dig, even on the starting level, you would basically Game Over).

I'm actually thinking about doing a Gnomoria radicalthon in the general vein of the DF radicalthons since those have historically been popular.  Good idea?  Dumb idea?

I vote yes, especially if you include a little bit of how-to-actually-get-started advice.

Please do.  I tried to play Gnomoria and it bit my shin.

NEW RELEASE IS OUT TIME TO PARTY (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/)

0.42.02 stuff:
       
    Ability to designate taverns, temples and libraries in the fortress
    Taverns and libraries also exist in adventure mode and world generation
    Tavern keepers can serve drinks in both modes, goblets can be used by dwarves to drink (in taverns or otherwise)
    Performances include stories, poetry, music and dance (you can view activity descriptions from the unit/job list)
    Art forms are randomly generated for each civilization
    Instruments are now all generated, instruments can be used in both modes
    Most instruments are constructed from multiple pieces using different materials
    Personalities and values lead to needs which can be met by various actions in both modes
    The fort has visitors, residency petitions and eventual citizenship, including non-dwarves
    Tavern visitors include mercenaries, monster slayers, bandits, diplomats and performers
    Can set details for clothing/armor jobs to make them for other races that can equip items
    Monster slayers can petition your fortress to go down and fight monsters once you discover the underground
    Performance troupes are active in world generation and into play, visiting the fort, can be formed in adventure mode
    New knowledge system divided into nine branches (though it has very few practical effects so far)
    Fortress scholars can advance knowledge, form master-apprentice relationships and write down their findings
    Fortress scribes can copy works in your library
    Scholars can visit your fortress libraries, bringing knowledge from around the world
    Devoted historical figures can visit your fortress temples
    Three forms of writing material: papyrus sheets, paper sheets and parchment sheets
    Papyrus sheets are made directly from the plant at the farmer's workshop
    Paper is made from pressed slurries (start at the quern/mill, then go to a screw press)
    Parchment is made from hide and milk of lime at the tanner's (bake quicklime at a kiln, then make milk of lime at an ashery)
    Sheets are used to make quires or with rollers to make scrolls -- these are then used for writing
    Quires can be bound into codices with bindings after they contain writing
    Dwarves read books in the library (they don't need to be scholars)
    Values can be passed in writing (both modes) and through adventure mode arguments (uses some conversation skills)
    Animal people are playable as adventurers, arrive as fort visitors and sometimes live in towns in (playable) populations
    Children play with toys now, and they can also play make believe, in both modes
    Personality can be customized/randomized in adventure mode, appearance can be randomized as well
    Temples can be defiled in both modes, dwarf temples can be assigned to particular gods
    Adventurer can rent rooms in inns
    Adventurers can compose new poems, music and dances
    Adventurers can write material down on empty quires or scrolls
    Alcohol causes inebriation, erratic behavior, unconsciousness, death
    Festivals occur in world generation, though we haven't gotten them out of there yet
    Dwarves will wear trinkets again

Major bug fixes

    Fixed some army pathing issues
    Goblins have mounts again
    Fixed long-standing flow bug with unit occupancy
    Stopped some issues with brawls escalating to non-lethal

Other bug fixes/tweaks

    Looking at reaction screen for redded-out reactions in workshop will indicate missing reagents now
    Fixed inversion problem with half of the child/parent conversation thoughts
    Lots of historical figures that weren't around from the beginning didn't have deities when they were supposed to
    Allowed site finder to look for 1x1 sites
    Human civilizations now have randomized values
    Added ability to set invasion wave cap size

Biggest changes is taverns, allowing multi-race forts. When I have time I'll be trying a new radicalthon (although that could start anytime between tomorrow and infinity days) and hopefully start an f13 "world" so we can pass the save around and visit old fortresses past in adventure mode.

 :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods:

Toady really is a crazy fuck.  It's eventually going to take a supercomputer to run this ascii game.

Does make me want to fire it up for the first time in years.  Did he ever put the economy back into it, or is it still on hold?

Still on hold, I don't think it's on the horizon either. I forget what he has planned for the next few releases, but on his current schedule it'll be another year for a major content release.

That's to bad, seems like it would tie in very well with the new stuff.  I really enjoyed minting coins of different metals and watching them flood around the fortress.  Also, dwarves unable to pay their rent and thrown out to the street to be hobo dwarves.   :awesome_for_real:

Re: toady is a crazy fuck:

Stopped cats from dying of alcohol poisoning after walking over damp tavern floors and cleaning themselves (reduced effect)

That's a result of every creature having a cubic measurement for how much blood they contain, all the different liquors having differing potency, and being able to determine a blood alcohol level. Completely unintentional, but cats would walk through spilled booze, lick their feet to clean them, and skyrocket their BAC and die.

Seriously.  I loved the concept but it was difficult as hell to get started and the few times I managed to do something remotely interesting seemed to be more luck rather than figuring out exactly a way to not suck.

Jesus Wept.

The problem I had with the last release was that you essentially had to get lucky in order to ever encounter any goblins or invaders.  It wasn't a guarantee that they would eventually show up like in previous versions so I just chose to play the older releases since it was all very dull.  I'm not sure if that's been changed.  I love Dwarf Fortress, but Toady seems to consistently choose simulation at the expense of fun and I think that in a lot of ways the releases prior to the introduction of the z-axis were actually the most fun.

For varying values of fun.

They fixed the goblin invading stuff this release (and they're back riding beak dogs).

One you get started the Fun never stops!

Totally agree.  Last few times I fired up Dwarf Fortress, it was with the last version before Z-axis introduction.

I mean, what it's become since is fascinating and fun, but the game changed from sandbox game to a sandbox simulation.  For all the cool things there are about building your own personalized fort and everything....it not hard, and it's more along the lines of building shit to play with like mine craft (again, nothing wrong with that).  In the end, I enjoyed the structured flow of the original dwarf fortress.  Carve out an initial cave and try not to starve through the first winter.  Find the river and create and underground flood/farm system, while not dying to floods or river monsters.  Move further on to find better ore, and the chasm, and the fight the monsters it brings.  Move further in for the best ore and the magma river, giving you access to high end smelting, traps, and even worst monsters to fight off.  Move beyond that to find adamantium while risking cracking the pits and unleashing hell on your fortress.

With Z-axis, I can pretty much start mining platinum and high end shit from minute one.  The game is only really a challenge if you are actively trying to fuck with yourself.  I prefer games that try to fuck with me, and I respond to it.  I've really drifted away from the game more and more because of that.

But again, that's not to say what it is now is bad.  This game is literally what would happen if a programmer was "struck by a strange mood", gathered materials, ran to his workstation, and didn't stop coding for a decade.  C++ code of the highest quality, encrusted with Limonite and cat bone, decorated with cave lobster shell and alpaca leather, and menaced with spikes of pure cocaine.

It's amazing to behold and play.  Because Toady is a crazy fuck.

Yeah, well, I find the game super hard and I've only played the z-axis version.

The few times I've attempted have been post-z-axis, and it's always felt like I was fighting the UI more than anything else.

Okay, what the hell is this z-axis change y'all are talking about?  Hasn't there always been a z-axis?

Very early versions had only one level, part of which was on the surface. You went 'deeper' by tunneling further into the direction away from the surface.

--Dave

The z-axis was introduced in 2008 or so.  Before that elephants were the engines of Satan, the game had a beginning, middle and end (if you chose to follow it...you didn't have to) and people routinely flooded the world with both water and magma by poor floodgate usage...and awesome floodgate usage.  It was a simpler world.

It feels a little funny to describe it as a "very early version", since I played that version for years before he introduced the Z-axis.  :p

But I guess with how long the game has been in development, it counts as 'early' now.  Still enjoyed that simpler world better.  Would be awesome to see a version of the game where a lot of the shit he's developed since was added in to the 2D version.

River, chasm, fun stuff.  I did like that version better now that i think about it.

No way, I'm not that old, I can't have been playing Dwarf Fortress off and on for more than 7 years.  :ye_gods:

The classic Boatmurdered happened in the time before the Z axis. I have to admit when I heard about the Z axis I lost interest in playing it. It was just adding complexity for no purpose imo, along with vastly increasing the amount of "safe" real estate for you to play with. And now that you can chose where on the world you want to dig rather than "By order of the king you are chartered this mountain on the Border of the Lands of Nergash the insane and the Beardshaver Elves!! Enjoy!" it made things rather easy again.

As people say the worst thing to happen to DF is the guy who made it. People wanded to make crasy doomed fortresses rather than indulging in a world simulation as far as I could see.

I'm confused why everyone is getting nostalgia goggles over the 2D DF. The beginning, middle and end, the game fucking with you, the better materials and harder monsters the deeper you go, the inevitably doomed fortress, it's all still in there. I think I really do now need to fire up a new radicalthon just to show people.

...how?  I just dig down into the ground, make a perfect compact fortress with well placed stairways so no dwarf has to travel far at all to get to anything important, and I guess see if I can withstand what ever invades from outside (which isn't hard).  Maybe get really lucky if I have one neat feature like a magma river or chasm.  You almost never get all 3, let alone even one.  And even then, you can have your dwarves dig straight to the bottom level of the mountain the second you load the game.  Getting from the front of the mountain to the back in the original is a bit of an adventure.  There is very little sense of exploration.

You have to start yourself on a haunted glacier to get a challenge.  And it certainly can be hilarious, but hard to also generate a plot of land with anything interesting to explore under the ground.

DO IT!  :awesome_for_real:

I'm with you on this one.

I had no idea there was a z-axis hate group until now!

I only learned on the z-axis version.  

If you want it to be hard, just make it hard. It's really easy to just set up in an evil area and watch all of your hard work go up in smoke when one of guys making a wall gets bitten by a zombie gerbil.  I'm not sure if goblins invade more (last version I played on, they really didn't), but even when they did, it wasn't difficult to make yourself basically unconquerable if you're not set up for some baked in difficulty.

I'm sure most of instinctively set up in a warm wooded area with a river, low chaos/evil, abundant ore, and no aquifer.  Once you've got beyond the interface and the organizational aspects that sort of set up isn't going to breed trouble.  Well, until your engineered underwater lake and canal system floods the entire fortress because you didn't quit think about putting a floodgate up before you dug that hole with the pumps still going full bore.  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, I can't make shit work in paradise so fuck you guys.

I make it "hard" by refusing to ever put a real military together (the UI for that is past my breaking point) or do any metallurgy (I always have more important stuff to do than figure out that production pipeline). I defend my fortresses with elaborate series of traps, then lose when I fail to arm them in time because my dumbass dwarves won't get inside and like fuck am I going to let my Master Engraver die now, get in you imbecile, okay now pull the lever pull it pull it faster oh no two goblins came in with him and they're going to cut down 30 of my fat, soft dwarves before being punched into unconsciousness, which will invariably include anyone with any medical training, and then the tantrum spiral ensues...

+1

I've never managed to have my shit together by the first winter and/or first enemy attack.

Well just like any game, you set the difficulty to how you want it. If you want an easy game embark in a nice area, if you want a harder game embark in a hard area. The underground always has cavern layers (I think two by default), if you dig to the magma from game start they're going to cause you trouble (especially if you breach a forgotten beast, animal-people camp or the magma sea has magma crabs spitting lava at my dwarves like the last radicalthon causing Samwise to dodge into the magma -.-'). If you want more chance to embark in a really full location, you can up the percentages in the world gen screen.

I'm waiting for the next patch to drop before I start a new game, hopefully it'll be very soon <3. Haunted Glacier, hmmmmmmmmmm!

Did they change it so that the caverns and magma were always in now?  Very often I'd start fortresses and never find any sort of magma or underground river (I haven't really played in a few years).  Or at least couldn't find a decent plot to start on that the map told me contained any.  Anyways, in the original you could also choose to start on the side of a mountain located in a haunted tundra.  Nothing changed there.  It's about what happens after you dig into the mountain that changed for easier (and less interesting, imo).

But again, it's not just the hardness thing.  It's that I liked the flow of the game.  You had to work towards getting further and further into the mountain, to uncover stuff.  There was a beginning, middle, and end.  The current way is too free form for my taste, and doesn't feel like a game anymore.  I was presented with a challenge to conquer, and I worked on doing it.  It took years and years of work before I got a tunnel to the back end of the map.  There is no goal to work towards now, just dick around until you eventually die or get board.  The bottom level isn't really different from any other level.  I understand it's totally a personal preference, not bagging on you guys for liking the Z-axis more.  It's just an aspect of the game I miss.

Z-axis did make fortress management waaaaaay easier though.  Travel times, base layout on limited space, access to resources, all mattered before.  Now you can just stack everything on top of each other, and the base runs super efficiently.

It might be easier if you could make fucking stairs that fucking dwarves would fucking use.  Maybe that is just me.  The guy who isn't in love with crab meat.