I have learned to enjoy the game, but I enjoy it despite the abismal UX. I know other people can interiorize it, and that's cool, but it is not my case. To be

I have learned to enjoy the game, but I enjoy it despite the abismal UX. I know other people can interiorize it, and that's cool, but it is not my case. To be precise: I don't mind having keyboard shortcuts for lots of things. I think that's good UX. But all options should be mouse-clickable too. I find the separation between Designations, Piles and Burrows (or whatever they are called) very confusing. In my mind they should be the same kind of "thing" in the UI (a "zone"). Farms are their own "kind of zone", with a custom UX which looks like the one used for building walls (which is just bad imho, just let us click on the two corners please). That brings us to my biggest grip: lack of consistency across different windows. The initial overmap has a set of keys. The initial "prepare your journey carefully" has a different set of keys for moving around the menus. Then the zone designation window has yet another set of keys to navigate through the menu. The fortress task manager (where you queue new tasks) has another. When a merchant caravan asks you what items they should bring next year, that also comes with a custom UI which is not used anywhere else (and also has its custom set of keys). The steps required to set tasks on each dwarf are so contorted that there is a dedicated tool (Dwarf Therapist) just for that. And over all this, there is the military management window, which I have never been able to master (I just rely on traps and atom smashers to deal with baddies, mostly because of this, and the fact that ranged attacks have been broken for a while). I wish Dwarf Therapist could handle that one as well. This lack of consistency combined with the lack of mouse support means that in order to play this game one needs to learn and interiorize a bunch of keystrokes /for each single window in the game/. I understand that for others this is not a huge deal, but this really puts me off. I don't have the mental agility I used to have when I was younger and makes the game a struggle for me. But the stories produced are great. On that note, if you just want to see Dwarf Fortress stories and don't want to have to deal with all the UX issues I just mentioned, I recommend the Kruggsmash channel. He really takes this game to another level: https://www.youtube.com/user/kruggsmash https://www.youtube.com/user/kruggsmash