Dwarf Fortress

[LK]

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.

[Morat20]

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

[Ironwood]

May I suggest food?

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[Muffled]

May I suggest food?

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.

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.

[Sheepherder]

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.

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.

[bhodi]

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.

[Bzalthek]

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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 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.



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

[lamaros]

Seriously? Its just lower down this page?

[MahrinSkel]

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

--Dave

[MahrinSkel]

May I suggest food?

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.

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

[Quinton]

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 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.

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

[Modern Angel]

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.

[Rasix]

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.

[Modern Angel]

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.

[Sand]

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 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.

[lac]

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.

[Sand]

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?

[Jade Falcon]

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?

[Sand]

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.

[Ice Cream Emperor]

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.

[lac]

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.

[Mrbloodworth]

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

[lac]

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.

[Slyfeind]

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!

[Sand]

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!

[Slyfeind]

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!

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.

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 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.

[Teleku]

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!

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.

[Slyfeind]

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.

Farming: You have to irrigate subterrenean crops now. 

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.

[Lantyssa]

Farming: You have to irrigate subterrenean crops now. 

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.

[Kail]

Farming: You have to irrigate subterrenean crops now.

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.

[Slyfeind]

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.

[Sheepherder]

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.

[Ironwood]

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