Dwarf Fortress

[MahrinSkel]

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.

[Ironwood]

I never find magma anymore.

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

[Ruvaldt]

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.

[Sheepherder]

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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

[Sheepherder]

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.

[Raging Turtle]

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. 

[Sheepherder]

It's buggy.  "Oops, cavern level is above ground level" buggy.

[Pagz]

Dwarf Fortress 0.31.19 out now!

[Pagz]

Dwarf Fortress 0.31.22 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

[FatuousTwat]

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.

[Stormwaltz]

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

[Malakili]

But the game’s profile is slowly growing on Tarn’s own terms. This week, the Museum of Modern Art will include Dwarf Fortress in a major design exhibition called “Talk to Me,” which Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, describes as being about the “communication between people and objects.”

 

[Mrbloodworth]

[lamaros]

I found that article really interesting.

[Bann]

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.

[Ingmar]

The article confirms basically everything suspected about Toady.

[Yegolev]

The article confirms basically everything suspected about Toady.

You mean:

[Raging Turtle]

What a bizarre article for the New York Times to publish.

[Sheepherder]

You mean:

Seemingly worse.  He is the beard.

[Xanthippe]

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.

[Ingmar]

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.

[Quinton]

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 ^^

[Sheepherder]

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.

[Vaiti]

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.

[Morat20]

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. :)

[Vaiti]

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.

[Samwise]

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.

Yeah, this.  Tilesets can't fix the underlying UI, sadly.   

[Ruvaldt]

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.
Or, the new Lazy Newb Pack can be found: here.

[Tairnyn]

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.

[Yegolev]

Please tell me the new features use an entirely different set of control keys to work with.

[Rasix]

Please tell me the new features use an entirely different set of control keys to work with.

[Rishathra]

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.

[Yegolev]

I'm convinced it's a point of pride for the misanthropic developer.

[Rasix]

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 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.