[jdhn]

Congrats to them! Very rare to see people who follow their dreams no matter what their field become millionaires.

On a side note, I feel like I should like Dwarf Fortress, but every time I look at it, it seems completely daunting.

[vermilingua]

It might sound condescending, but the daunting is part of the !fun!

I strongly recommend just digging in, and it's never been easier than right now. The DF Wiki is one of the most comprehensive video-game wikis that exist due to a very passionate, very tight-knit community; and has excellent guides on how to play your first game.

I'd recommend playing one fort while strictly following a guide so that you can learn the interface and concepts, then try another fort totally on your own to experience the chaos in full.

[flanbiscuit]

The new release adds graphics (instead of the ascii art styled graphics) so maybe that might be less daunting.

I say this only from observation, having never played the game. I saw a headline recently about the graphics update and you can see it in the videos on the Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

[intrepidhero]

The graphics package removed my big complaint: that trying to figure out what each particular character stood for in which context was not fun.

The complexity is daunting, but also a big part of the fun. Since I started playing the new version I find myself constantly sniped by trying to re-design the UI in my mind.

[_carbyau_]

Yeah. I like the idea of this game. But I'd love the idea if I could romp around in it with a friend or 15. But multiplayer is hard baked in from the start. This game will never happen.

So someone else will copy what they've done and add multiplayer and get that bag.

[OkayPhysicist]

Dwarf Fortress is basically uncopyable. Lots of games have tried: RimWorld is a good example. But they end up feeling like shallow imitations, because Dwarf Fortress has been continuously upgraded for 16 years. It's the game that every first year game dev dreams of making, with incredibly deep simulation and a myriad of mechanics to play with, before they realize that it would take decades to build.

The Toady One is just the madman who actually did it.

[zajio1am]

While Dwarf Fortress is incredibly deep simulation, it is also filled with bugs and UI misdesigns, that makes playing it much more frustrating than playing e.g. Rimworld. Also, the simulation is very uneven, some parts are very deep, some very shallow and some completely broken.

[bpye]

I never successfully got into Dwarf Fortress before because the ASCII interface was just too hard to learn. I have had some fun with the new release.

I do agree though, whilst it’s made the game, for me, playable, there are lots of smaller annoyances that really add up once you’re a few hours into a fort. The UI is inconsistent in many areas. Sometimes you can view dwarf details, sometimes you can’t. Sometimes right click closes one level, sometimes it’s all of them, then for the squad menu you dismiss by the squad button/hot key again… Search is useful but not available everywhere.

I hope some of these annoyances will get resolved, but certainly it’s not a perfectly polished game either. It is still fun - yes - but I can’t help but be a little sad because it could absolutely be better.

[PeterisP]

The UI revamp in the current Steam version fixes most of the UI misdesigns.

[smegsicle]

there are a lot of ('fun' in community parlance) rough edges, but just getting food and drink down isn't too difficult and unlocks about as much of the rest of the game as you want

that is, figuring out or looking up-

- how to get a small farm plot going ('plump helmet' is the staple food)

- how to brew drinks at a still (set it to repeat- brew-able plants will be used indiscriminately, generally plumphelmets, and seeds will be left behind for planting)

from there, you'll start to see messages about (cancelling the brew job due to) needing more barrels/rock pots, which aren't difficult, neither are beds and mugs, which you'll see dwarfs complaining about

oh and you'll obviously want to set up stockpiles, which will keep your workshops from getting all cluttered...

anyway, the new game-start options make it easy to turn off attackers, which should ease fortress-management enough to figure out any other features you want to work on:

-centralized job management with a 'manager' and an office, which will also let you schedule jobs to occur as needs arise

-getting charcoal and ores for forging is of course a big one

hopefully the new interface makes it even easier to see what is going wrong, things that you can get a head-start on the next time you start a fortress

[Y_Y]

Strike the earth!