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I have been playing dwarf fortress for about 7-8 years. If anybody has any questions feel free to ask me. I think the difficulty of learning the game is overst

I have been playing dwarf fortress for about 7-8 years. If anybody has any questions feel free to ask me. I think the difficulty of learning the game is overstated: if you follow a tutorial, use a graphics pack, and use dwarf therapist (dwarf therapist is a must, most experienced players also use this because it's just a better UI) I think you can get the hang of the game in a few hours of play time. Probably the biggest barrier to learning the game is the UX but if you're a programmer that will be much easier to learn. I recommend https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_guide https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_gu... and https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Dwarf_fortress_mode https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Dwarf_fortres... as guides, and I recommend downloading the "Lazy Newb Pack" version compatible with your operating system, as it makes switching graphics and managing utilities/settings very easy.

tetris11 6y ago
I found that you get used to the ascii after a while. Now I dont even see the code, just blonde, brunette, redhead, quantum stockpile...
- opportune 6y ago
  Yeah, once you get accustomed to the tilesets for a bit it becomes trivial to switch to ascii. But I think it's nice to learn using the tileset because it's usually pretty clear what something is.
  - csunbird 6y ago
    I think the joke went flying over your head. Edit: It is a Matrix reference, where Neo asks Tank if he can understand what is going on by just looking at the green characters whizzing in the screen. He answers "You get used to it after a while. ... For example, I see blondes, brunettes, redheads ... " Edit 2: I guess I remembered it wrong, it was Cypher!
    - opportune 6y ago
      I figured it was a half-joke half-serious comment so I responded to the serious part
    - Alekhine 6y ago
      Small nitpick, it was Cipher, not Tank.
      - cyberfart 6y ago
        Smaller nitpick, it was Cypher.
    - numlock86 6y ago
      Weirdly enough, they make that same joke in the video within the first few minutes.
    - Moru 6y ago
      Except for anyone playing Hack or Dwarf Fortress or any other ascii based game it's not a joke, it's reality.
kagbor 6y ago
So I have to install 2 third-party tools and follow 2+ third-party tutorials/guides for a few hours before I can potentially start enjoying the game. Doesn't sound overstated at all...
- yvdriess 6y ago
  You can just play the base game as is. The Lazy Newb Pack is simply a launcher where you can checkbox the third party graphics and tool options.
- opportune 6y ago
  It's only a few hours. That's how long it takes to learn many games.
- distances 6y ago
  There are lots of games with some learning curve. When starting with Crusader Kings II, I spent more time reading the game wiki than actually playing the game.
  - bregma 6y ago
    Not to mention doing a detailed study of the geography and history of medieval feudal Europe, including just what the heck agnatic-cognatic gavelkind succession is and that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Some days I prefer a sickly in-bred imbecile devil-worshipping king, and some days I just want to deal with short sturdy creatures fond of drink and industry.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Amen. It's deep, and the UI is complex. And then there is the regular updates/DLC thing, which often adds whole new, poorly explained features. Still a lot of fun though. Breath Status: Held for CKIII
  - slothtrop 6y ago
    I still don't understand CKII. Believe I had tried noob island last, it seemed comprised of waiting for things then being uncertain whether I'm skipping time too much or too little. I must have invaded a vassal as per tutorial 2-3 times and failing.
yvdriess 6y ago
I was surprised how fast the (frequently inconsistent) keyboard commands just get into your fingers, where you don't think about it anymore. Similarly for the graphics, and that applies to games in general. You really stop noticing the graphics around ~30mins into a session, because you're running this asynchronous simulation in your head that only needs minimal information to update. That might be a reason why we remember games we played a long time ago being a lot prettier or detailed.
- intended 6y ago
  Dwarf fortress are an example I used to bring up in some discussions on UI UX. You are just far more productive with a keyboard, especially once the commands are in muscle memory.
  - ruste 6y ago
    I think it's a really important consideration of design that gets forgotten about in the name of "useability" and "discoverability". With a little practice a consistent keyboard interface is very fast. _Nobody_ is fast with a mouse.
cletus 6y ago
A few years ago i tried to get into this. Like I really tried. I too installed and used Dwarf Therapist. here's where I struggled: I still wouldn't have the hang of managing the dwarves I had and then a new crop would come along. Even with all these tools it quickly descended into me not having any idea who was doing what or why. Or why they weren't doing the things I was asking them to do. A lot of the things seemed way too roundabout to me too. Like I'd have chickens (or were they ducks? I forget) and I was attempting to breed them. But the whole process of making egg-laying boxes or nests or whatever was tedious and then you had to lock the door to stop the dwarves coming in and taking the eggs. Likewise, i found the process of feeding the dwarves hard to manage largely because I couldn't easily figure out if there was any food, whether that was because no one was making any or that it was simply all getting eaten. Was it an issue of not having room to stockpile food? Or was the dwarf who could make food doing something else (possibly because he was the only person who could do that or he just happened to be the one who'd picked up the pick for some reason)? So I never got to that point where I felt like I had a good grasp of my colony as a coherent unit and could then engage in flights of fancy. I think the last time I tried I then got a monster invading and I hadn't figured out military yet. That was a whole new system to learn and I just lacked the motivation so stopped and never went back.
- opportune 6y ago
  You can cap the migrant waves by setting a max dwarf limit in the LNP configurations. The first two migrant waves are (or were) hard-coded so if you set the limit very low you would potentially go over it. But if you set the limit to like 60, you wouldn't get repeated huge wages. To make sure they're doing what you want them to do, have them "specialize" into professions. Leave a large bulk of low-skill labor for hauling, and try to keep the number of idle dwarves low (it shows up in the corner and you can inspect with 'u' from the main menu). Yeah, the initial set up process for industries like eggs take a bit of getting used to. I actually usually have my craftsdwarf start building nest boxes as soon as I've mined out enough stone. You can also selectively 'forbid' individual clutches of eggs rather than locking the door by selecting them with q and going to the nestbox (or t, I forget) and hitting f after scrolling down to the eggs. For food, it sounds like your issue was not knowing the UI. If you have a bookeeper (set with 'n'->bookeeper, change granularity with 's') with an office they will automatically keep track of your food, which you can check with z->kitchen or z->stocks. You should use a stockpile for food because it prevents food from rotting and keeps it in convenient locations. You can make one with p->f although when just starting a fortress you might instead want to create a general stockpile with p->t(select most things except refuse and stone)->c. Regarding the food production, it's good to limit dwarves in essential industries/positions to have all labors except their particular specialty disabled, including all hauling, and then manage tasks so that those dwarves are not left idle.
shultays 6y ago
Learning the gameplay is reading a related wikipage, which is acceptable. The hard/annoying part is learning UX. It really shouldn't be that complicated. Talking to people in adventure mode, managing jobs (as you said, dwarf therapist is practically a must since the base interface is just horrible), managing armies, hospitals... everything is a chore and you need a tutorial for everything. And every UX in game is different. To dig for example. You have to create a designation for it. But how do you know that unless you watched a video/read a tutorial? On top of that if something is wrong, the game gives you very little clue. Do you have a dwarf with digging task? Is he available? Does he have pick? Can he pathfind? The game gives you no answer other than not initiating the digging (edit actually my bad, i think it gives you some logs for some cases.). Stuff like that is a hard barrier for most players and they won't be able to continue unless they are really committed.
- astrobe_ 6y ago
  > Stuff like that is a hard barrier for most players and they won't be able to continue unless they are really committed. Free software has a price too, in terms of efforts the user has to spend on dealing with issues and shortcomings. Pay. Or do not pay. But there is no bargain.
- rashkov 6y ago
  There’s a nice example of someone coming up with a good UX for this game, in the form of an iOS app that lets you play against a remote instance of DF called DF Remote (http://mifki.com/df/ http://mifki.com/df/). I learned about it here on HN and I’ve found it to be a really impressive example of what the UX could be like. It’s not a 100% complete UI — but what’s there is pretty consistent and intuitive.
throwaway4666 6y ago
DF is much more forgiving and easier than it used to be. Follow the wiki, setup DFHack for a lot of bugfixes and UI improvements and you're pretty much set. You don't even need Therapist anymore when you have the in-game labor manager. Yeah there's a bit of fiddling involved but I can't possibly believe this can be a problem for Hacker News readers.
Supermancho 6y ago
I appreciate his effort (having played for decades), but that aside...the difficulty is knowing what's wrong and why something is happening. The horrid military UI is inherent to the game. Bugs that are left for months (if not years) like the inability for seiges to enter your site (hiding just offscreen, slowly killing your CPU) or the current persistent bad memories, often makes aspects of the game unplayable WITHOUT the complexity and issues with mods that are necessary. Yes you can play the game in ASCII or with chopsticks or blindfolded with someone barking at what you need to do, but complexity and difficulty is not commensurate with fun or depth. DF is not the only game to fall into this trap. DF has depth outside of the UI/setup/bugs, but onboarding is what Tarn is addressing (partly) in the Steam release. Good. I think the difficulty of learning the game is on point.

tetris11 6y ago

I found that you get used to the ascii after a while. Now I dont even see the code, just blonde, brunette, redhead, quantum stockpile...

opportune 6y ago
Yeah, once you get accustomed to the tilesets for a bit it becomes trivial to switch to ascii. But I think it's nice to learn using the tileset because it's usually pretty clear what something is.
- csunbird 6y ago
  I think the joke went flying over your head. Edit: It is a Matrix reference, where Neo asks Tank if he can understand what is going on by just looking at the green characters whizzing in the screen. He answers "You get used to it after a while. ... For example, I see blondes, brunettes, redheads ... " Edit 2: I guess I remembered it wrong, it was Cypher!
  - opportune 6y ago
    I figured it was a half-joke half-serious comment so I responded to the serious part
  - Alekhine 6y ago
    Small nitpick, it was Cipher, not Tank.
    - cyberfart 6y ago
      Smaller nitpick, it was Cypher.
  - numlock86 6y ago
    Weirdly enough, they make that same joke in the video within the first few minutes.
  - Moru 6y ago
    Except for anyone playing Hack or Dwarf Fortress or any other ascii based game it's not a joke, it's reality.

kagbor 6y ago

So I have to install 2 third-party tools and follow 2+ third-party tutorials/guides for a few hours before I can potentially start enjoying the game. Doesn't sound overstated at all...

yvdriess 6y ago
You can just play the base game as is. The Lazy Newb Pack is simply a launcher where you can checkbox the third party graphics and tool options.
opportune 6y ago
It's only a few hours. That's how long it takes to learn many games.
distances 6y ago
There are lots of games with some learning curve. When starting with Crusader Kings II, I spent more time reading the game wiki than actually playing the game.
- bregma 6y ago
  Not to mention doing a detailed study of the geography and history of medieval feudal Europe, including just what the heck agnatic-cognatic gavelkind succession is and that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Some days I prefer a sickly in-bred imbecile devil-worshipping king, and some days I just want to deal with short sturdy creatures fond of drink and industry.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Amen. It's deep, and the UI is complex. And then there is the regular updates/DLC thing, which often adds whole new, poorly explained features. Still a lot of fun though. Breath Status: Held for CKIII
- slothtrop 6y ago
  I still don't understand CKII. Believe I had tried noob island last, it seemed comprised of waiting for things then being uncertain whether I'm skipping time too much or too little. I must have invaded a vassal as per tutorial 2-3 times and failing.

yvdriess 6y ago

I was surprised how fast the (frequently inconsistent) keyboard commands just get into your fingers, where you don't think about it anymore. Similarly for the graphics, and that applies to games in general. You really stop noticing the graphics around ~30mins into a session, because you're running this asynchronous simulation in your head that only needs minimal information to update. That might be a reason why we remember games we played a long time ago being a lot prettier or detailed.

intended 6y ago
Dwarf fortress are an example I used to bring up in some discussions on UI UX. You are just far more productive with a keyboard, especially once the commands are in muscle memory.
- ruste 6y ago
  I think it's a really important consideration of design that gets forgotten about in the name of "useability" and "discoverability". With a little practice a consistent keyboard interface is very fast. _Nobody_ is fast with a mouse.

cletus 6y ago

A few years ago i tried to get into this. Like I really tried. I too installed and used Dwarf Therapist. here's where I struggled: I still wouldn't have the hang of managing the dwarves I had and then a new crop would come along. Even with all these tools it quickly descended into me not having any idea who was doing what or why. Or why they weren't doing the things I was asking them to do. A lot of the things seemed way too roundabout to me too. Like I'd have chickens (or were they ducks? I forget) and I was attempting to breed them. But the whole process of making egg-laying boxes or nests or whatever was tedious and then you had to lock the door to stop the dwarves coming in and taking the eggs. Likewise, i found the process of feeding the dwarves hard to manage largely because I couldn't easily figure out if there was any food, whether that was because no one was making any or that it was simply all getting eaten. Was it an issue of not having room to stockpile food? Or was the dwarf who could make food doing something else (possibly because he was the only person who could do that or he just happened to be the one who'd picked up the pick for some reason)? So I never got to that point where I felt like I had a good grasp of my colony as a coherent unit and could then engage in flights of fancy. I think the last time I tried I then got a monster invading and I hadn't figured out military yet. That was a whole new system to learn and I just lacked the motivation so stopped and never went back.

opportune 6y ago
You can cap the migrant waves by setting a max dwarf limit in the LNP configurations. The first two migrant waves are (or were) hard-coded so if you set the limit very low you would potentially go over it. But if you set the limit to like 60, you wouldn't get repeated huge wages. To make sure they're doing what you want them to do, have them "specialize" into professions. Leave a large bulk of low-skill labor for hauling, and try to keep the number of idle dwarves low (it shows up in the corner and you can inspect with 'u' from the main menu). Yeah, the initial set up process for industries like eggs take a bit of getting used to. I actually usually have my craftsdwarf start building nest boxes as soon as I've mined out enough stone. You can also selectively 'forbid' individual clutches of eggs rather than locking the door by selecting them with q and going to the nestbox (or t, I forget) and hitting f after scrolling down to the eggs. For food, it sounds like your issue was not knowing the UI. If you have a bookeeper (set with 'n'->bookeeper, change granularity with 's') with an office they will automatically keep track of your food, which you can check with z->kitchen or z->stocks. You should use a stockpile for food because it prevents food from rotting and keeps it in convenient locations. You can make one with p->f although when just starting a fortress you might instead want to create a general stockpile with p->t(select most things except refuse and stone)->c. Regarding the food production, it's good to limit dwarves in essential industries/positions to have all labors except their particular specialty disabled, including all hauling, and then manage tasks so that those dwarves are not left idle.

shultays 6y ago

Learning the gameplay is reading a related wikipage, which is acceptable. The hard/annoying part is learning UX. It really shouldn't be that complicated. Talking to people in adventure mode, managing jobs (as you said, dwarf therapist is practically a must since the base interface is just horrible), managing armies, hospitals... everything is a chore and you need a tutorial for everything. And every UX in game is different. To dig for example. You have to create a designation for it. But how do you know that unless you watched a video/read a tutorial? On top of that if something is wrong, the game gives you very little clue. Do you have a dwarf with digging task? Is he available? Does he have pick? Can he pathfind? The game gives you no answer other than not initiating the digging (edit actually my bad, i think it gives you some logs for some cases.). Stuff like that is a hard barrier for most players and they won't be able to continue unless they are really committed.

astrobe_ 6y ago
> Stuff like that is a hard barrier for most players and they won't be able to continue unless they are really committed. Free software has a price too, in terms of efforts the user has to spend on dealing with issues and shortcomings. Pay. Or do not pay. But there is no bargain.
rashkov 6y ago
There’s a nice example of someone coming up with a good UX for this game, in the form of an iOS app that lets you play against a remote instance of DF called DF Remote (http://mifki.com/df/ http://mifki.com/df/). I learned about it here on HN and I’ve found it to be a really impressive example of what the UX could be like. It’s not a 100% complete UI — but what’s there is pretty consistent and intuitive.

throwaway4666 6y ago

DF is much more forgiving and easier than it used to be. Follow the wiki, setup DFHack for a lot of bugfixes and UI improvements and you're pretty much set. You don't even need Therapist anymore when you have the in-game labor manager. Yeah there's a bit of fiddling involved but I can't possibly believe this can be a problem for Hacker News readers.

Supermancho 6y ago

I appreciate his effort (having played for decades), but that aside...the difficulty is knowing what's wrong and why something is happening. The horrid military UI is inherent to the game. Bugs that are left for months (if not years) like the inability for seiges to enter your site (hiding just offscreen, slowly killing your CPU) or the current persistent bad memories, often makes aspects of the game unplayable WITHOUT the complexity and issues with mods that are necessary. Yes you can play the game in ASCII or with chopsticks or blindfolded with someone barking at what you need to do, but complexity and difficulty is not commensurate with fun or depth. DF is not the only game to fall into this trap. DF has depth outside of the UI/setup/bugs, but onboarding is what Tarn is addressing (partly) in the Steam release. Good. I think the difficulty of learning the game is on point.