Gird your nerdly loins: Dwarf Fortress

[Crispy]

I'm ill and off work for the day so I have been learning Dwarf Fortress. Everything you've read about this game is true. The depth, the complexity, the brain-fuckingly insane interface. I've spent about 4x as much time looking stuff up on dwarffortresswiki as I have actually playing the game. I've got a graphics pack installed so it doesn't look entirely like the matrix.

So I'm nearly a year into my first fortress, which the game named Tubesportals. It's home to my 7 settlers and 7 immigrants. I've managed to run out of brewable food items, so my Dwarves are going without booze. This means they're having to run outside to drink from the stream. Although some dwarves are complaining about not having booze, they are made happy by the smooth walls and floor of the main hall, and the fact that they each have a private bedroom. I also appear to have fucked up the farming somehow and have run out of seeds. This means my dwarves are living off fish, which is ok, but it means lots of dwarves outside the fort all the time, catching fish. It makes me nervous.

I've found plenty of iron ore and common gems, so I've been forging and crafting loads of crummy things to trade with. Now I just pray the traders turn up with seeds and booze before my dwarves go mad from sobriety.

It's a great game, I can tell, but my god does it need a better UI. It's entirely keyboard driven and only slightly consistent. I'm getting faster with it, as is the way with all keyboard UIs, but it's completely undiscoverable. I have double figure browser tabs open at all times.

Anyone else "play" this game?

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

I'm ill and off work for the day so I have been learning Dwarf Fortress. Everything you've read about this game is true. The depth, the complexity, the brain-fuckingly insane interface. I've spent about 4x as much time looking stuff up on dwarffortresswiki as I have actually playing the game. I've got a graphics pack installed so it doesn't look entirely like the matrix.

So I'm nearly a year into my first fortress, which the game named Tubesportals. It's home to my 7 settlers and 7 immigrants. I've managed to run out of brewable food items, so my Dwarves are going without booze. This means they're having to run outside to drink from the stream. Although some dwarves are complaining about not having booze, they are made happy by the smooth walls and floor of the main hall, and the fact that they each have a private bedroom. I also appear to have fucked up the farming somehow and have run out of seeds. This means my dwarves are living off fish, which is ok, but it means lots of dwarves outside the fort all the time, catching fish. It makes me nervous.

I've found plenty of iron ore and common gems, so I've been forging and crafting loads of crummy things to trade with. Now I just pray the traders turn up with seeds and booze before my dwarves go mad from sobriety.

It's a great game, I can tell, but my god does it need a better UI. It's entirely keyboard driven and only slightly consistent. I'm getting faster with it, as is the way with all keyboard UIs, but it's completely undiscoverable. I have double figure browser tabs open at all times.

This is why I never play computer games, ever.

If I started nobody would ever see me in public again.

 

[Citizen66]

Looks mental.

Did Paradox copy the idea for a Game of Dwarves?

 

[JimW]

...
Anyone else "play" this game?

I'd seen posts about it on the net and always meant to give it a whirl, then when I was home at Christmas turns out my nephew is really into Minecraft so I mentioned this Dwarf game I'd heard of and tried to set it up to show him. Loved the concept but never got as far as you, as I was still reading all the bloody wiki articles to work out what to do. My nephew was kind about it all

 

[Crispy]

I had an invasion of buzzards, but my traps got two of them and a hastily assembled militia finished off the last one. First blood goes to Otha the fisherdwarf!

Citizen66 - Kinda. From what I can tell, GoD is more of a traditional management game, with a bunch of closed systems that you need to master. DF is completely open-ended. There are no victory conditions and no "correct" way to play. If GoD (and Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park etc.) are like building an intricate pyramid, DF is like balancing a hundred pencils on their points.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Graphics pack is cheating

As long as you started in a safe area, it doesn't really make a lot of difference if your dwarves are outside to begin with - they need to be to chop wood and fish and hunt anyway. You don't get raided until the settlement reaches a certain size, though you may get goblin snatchers and kobold thieves, who are generally quite wimpy at that level and normal dwarves will beat them up without you really doing anything (as long as they detect them).

 

[JimW]

Graphics pack is cheating

First thing I did was find that pre-set-up 'Lazy Newb Pack' for the slightly enhanced graphics. Maybe that was where I went wrong.

 

[tommers]

I tried it but the interface deterred me. It was too much like hard work.

 

[Crispy]

Holy shit. I was pootling along with 18 dwarves, getting nice and comfy. The new wave of immigrants have turned up and there's 38 of the fuckers. Jesus christ. Time for some emergency barracks and mass digging. I'd better make some more picks.

EDIT: And now some goblins have shown up. Apparently. Dwarves are being distracted by them, but pressing z to zoom to the scene of the crime shows... no goblins.

I have mustered my military dwarves to the entrance and rushed the civilians indoors. Let's see if I can fight them off...

 

[Crispy]

And now I've hit Caverns. My god they're huge. I am walling myself back in for now.

 

[TruXta]

Are you still ill?

 

[Crispy]

Oh dear. I think it's all gone wrong. I sent my militia after a crocodile, which was much stronger than I thought. It wiped out my soldiers, and now the rest of the fortress is getting sad because of their dead spouses/friends. My best mechanic has gone insane: Berserk.

 

[Crispy]

Are you still ill?

I've pretty much recovered from my cold, but I think I'm coming down with a case of Dwarf Fortress Addiction

 

[TruXta]

I've pretty much recovered from my cold, but I think I'm coming down with a case of Dwarf Fortress Addiction

Hence my question. I've heard dire stories about this horribly disfiguring disease maskerading as a game.

 

[Crispy]

Oh dear. I think it's all gone wrong. I sent my militia after a crocodile, which was much stronger than I thought. It wiped out my soldiers, and now the rest of the fortress is getting sad because of their dead spouses/friends. My best mechanic has gone insane: Berserk.

Well, it's ok, the rest of my dwarves killed him as soon as he killed my best miner
It is not a happy fortress. However, over time, I hope to pick things back up again. I plan to pump and divert some water from the nearby stream to make a decorative waterfall on one side of the main room. Dwarves like waterfalls.

 

[JimW]

Holy shit. I was pootling along with 18 dwarves, getting nice and comfy. The new wave of immigrants have turned up and there's 38 of the fuckers.....

Should have installed the Dwarf-KIP mod

 

[Crispy]

I started again, having learned from my newbie mistakes. Fortress #2 is going much better, although I didn't bring an anvil with me, pissed off the dwarven caravan in year 1 and they haven't come back in year 2

So, whilst I have excellent wood and stone industries, I am completely metalless.

Also, a Forgotten Beast has awoken in the caverns. "Kutsob Sposnungom Usbu Asno" A towering quadruped composed of moss opal. It has large mandibles and a gaunt appearance. Beware it poisonous vapours!

There is a 1-wall gap which I MUST block before it finds it. Fingers crossed. If it can't swim, then I have more time...

 

[FridgeMagnet]

I built a whole system to channel stagnant water down from rainwater pools on the surface to an underground chamber, where it gets purified via a screw pump and fed into an expandable series of reservoir cells that supply a well above them.

What I would really like to do is have the initial pump and the floodgates between the cells open and close automatically depending on water pressure, using pressure plates. So once water depth in the intake pool gets to a certain point, the purifying pump starts to put the water into reservoir A. Once reservoir A gets to a certain depth the floodgate to B opens and water is shared between them; once the total depth in A/B gets too low, the floodgate closes and a pump starts to move the water from B to A. At the moment I have to open floodgates and activate pumps manually.

 

[Crispy]

Fortress #2 died in its 3rd year, from an invasion of goblins riding giant blue cave worms, supported by trolls that turned up just as I'd opened a temporary gap in my defensive wall. A shame. I'd just struck magma.

Fortress #3 is being built into a tall cliff. I intend to build balconeys and things. I was rather careless, however, and got my expedition leader caught up in a cave-in while lowering a small hill, which broke his right forearm. He's comfortably sleeping away in the hospital, but I have no thread to suture his wound, which needs to happen before my hastily-assigned doctor can set the bone. There's no fiber plants so I'm having to wait for the first caravan. So I'm one miner short, and there's always someone wasting their time getting water. But I'm going to stick it through. Losing is fun etc.

EDIT: Great. I finally get him fixed up and then he falls down a hole and breaks his legs. Another 6 months in bed for him, how wonderful.

 

[JimW]

Just seen a link to this, an isometric viewer for your fortress: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Utility:Stonesense

 

[Crispy]

My creaky old laptop gets bogged down enough just by DF on its own!

Today, fortress #3 fended off a fell Bush Titan without taking any casualties. I think it was stuck in its own webs. I have a huge pack of dogs Penned outside my front gate that reliably rips thiefs to shreds. I have struck Raw Adamantine and have been very carefully mining the safe bits. I have built a hideously complicated pump chain to get a waterfall down one side of my meeting hall and am having to build 16 windmills to power it. Those dwarves had better fucking like it.

A child has crafted a legendary mountain goat bone earring. An engraver has imortalised it on the wall.

No iron ore at all so far

EDIT: It really is just me and Fridge isn't it?

 

[Crispy]

So I finally cracked and bought a gaming PC. To play Dwarf fucking Fortress at a decent frame rate.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

"Oh hai I am a Marksdwarf - I've been allocated to a squad for the use of the most utterly devastating weapon dwarves can make, the crossbow. It punches through any armour and two or three bolts will kill or cripple any goblin, and a dozen or so will easily kill a forgotten beast or equivalent."

"Hey tell you what, why don't I not do any weapons training even though you set the squad to Active/Training. But let's pretend that I'm trying to. Oh you unset the Active/Training flag? Right, now is the time to do some archery practice!"

"Hey wow you set us all to active because we're being invaded. Dude. That's great. Okay, let's wait for a while. No, you know what, I can't be arsed doing anything."

"Hey wow you now told us to kill some targets. You know what? Even though I've been designated as a Marksdwarf and it says it on my fucking title and I'm carrying a crossbow and I've had about half an hour to equip myself with some of the fucking three million iron bolts in the stockpile right next to me, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to run at these goblins - on my own, not waiting for anyone else - and try to hit them with my crossbow."

fuck dwarves

 

[Crispy]

In my current fortress, my marks dwarves are confined to the first floor, where they sleep, eat, "train" and have access to a 20-wide battlement of fortifications so they can rain doom on any invaders outside. They're still useless most of the time.

I don't think there's such a thing as a DF "fan". We're "enthusiasts".

 

[tommers]

Do you get used to the interface? Or are you still looking at a wiki every few minutes?

I liked it but couldn't see any rhyme or reason to how you did things so I gave up.

 

[Crispy]

Do you get used to the interface? Or are you still looking at a wiki every few minutes?

I liked it but couldn't see any rhyme or reason to how you did things so I gave up.

I'm used to it now. Clattering around the keys to designate rooms and constructions. The more common stuff is muscle memory. I still have to stop and pause to find which key to press for uncommon buildings, and I wish so badly that you could type a dwarf's name to select it from a list instead of scrolling through 200 of the things. But I'm over the hump.

 

[Crispy]

My pack of stray dogs just took down a Swamp Titan all on their own
Ok, so its body was made of water....

 

[el-ahrairah]

still off sick?

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

This game sounds amazing, terrifying and utterly bewildering in roughly equal measure.

 

[stuff_it]

still off sick?

Gardening leave at this rate.