Dwarf Fortress

[Raging Turtle]

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. 

[bhodi]

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

[Raging Turtle]

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. 

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

[Raging Turtle]

Tried Adventure mode for the first time today, and after finding this page:
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. 

[Murgos]

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

[Raging Turtle]

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

[Teleku]

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.

[Jade Falcon]

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

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.

[bhodi]

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.

[Tairnyn]

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.

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 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.

Has anyone else tried custom tilesets yet?

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.

[bhodi]

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.

[bhodi]

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

Toady is interviewed for a lengthy Gamasutra article.

I do want to share the tale of Boatmurdered, one of the funniest let's play! threads on SA I have ever read. It's the one referenced in the article.

[Tebonas]

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

[Morat20]

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

Toady is interviewed for a lengthy Gamasutra article.

I do want to share the tale of Boatmurdered, one of the funniest let's play! threads on SA I have ever read. It's the one referenced in the article.

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

[Jade Falcon]

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 :)

[cmlancas]

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?

[schild]

I tried playing Dwarf Fortress ONCE.

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

I'm never ever doing it again.

[cmlancas]

Kidneys intact? 

That's right, Venture Brothers kicks your ass.

[Tebonas]

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.

[cmlancas]

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.

 

[schild]

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.

[Jade Falcon]

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.

[Yegolev]

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

[LK]

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.

[cmlancas]

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

[Morat20]

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

[Tairnyn]

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.

[Raging Turtle]

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).

[Roac]

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.

[Jade Falcon]

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 :)

[Teleku]

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



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.

[LK]

That tileset is pretty sweet.

[schild]

That tileset gives me a Dragon Warrior vibe.

[Murgos]

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.  I food is way the hell easier to come by.

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.

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

[Yegolev]

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.