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I read everything about this game I can get my hands on. I don’t fully understand why I find dwarf fortress so intriguing. It’s such a pure passion project… tha
by reidjs 5y ago
I read everything about this game I can get my hands on. I don’t fully understand why I find dwarf fortress so intriguing. It’s such a pure passion project… that actually made it.
- dexwiz 5y agoIt's the programming equivalent to the people who turn their houses into model train worlds. People dabble in it, or make a few toys of their own, but its rare to commit so hard.
- petercooper 5y agoDo you actually play it? I'm a bit the same about reading about it, yet I have never once played it for myself!
- reidjs 5y agoI tried playing it like a decade or two ago. Couldn’t get past the ridiculous learning curve.
- tastyfreeze 5y agoIts worth the effort and likely easier now than before. The myriad ways that a fortress can die amazes me. Its easy to get a fort that can survive invaders but ultimately your fortress will die. The number of times I have been nonplused by a new fortress failure is amazing. Those crazy dwarves keep finding new ways to destroy themselves.
- tstrimple 5y agoThis image is a reasonable estimation of the learning curve. https://i.stack.imgur.com/iECXl.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/iECXl.jpg
- LeegleechN 5y agoThey're working on a Steam release with a more accessible interface, including mouse support. I suggest trying it again when that comes out.
- opinion-is-bad 5y agoIs there any timeline for the stream release? The release date on the store page just says, “Time is subjective.”
- andi999 5y agoI just saw that O'Reilly published a book to help with that: https://www.amazon.de/Getting-Started-Dwarf-Fortress-complex/dp/1449314945 https://www.amazon.de/Getting-Started-Dwarf-Fortress-complex...
- Arrath 5y agoHah, this is like EVE Online for me. I love reading about the espionage and cloak and dagger and pure insanity, but other than a brief toe-dip...oh no I will not play it. DF lives in my blood, however.
- eigenvalue 5y agoTotally agree on reading about EVE Online. This is a real classic if you haven’t seen it before, and actually contains a lot of very important notions for identifying Ponzi schemes: http://web.archive.org/web/20091026234156/http://geocities.com/currintrading/ http://web.archive.org/web/20091026234156/http://geocities.c...
- willis936 5y ago"I put the isk in risk!"
- chupasaurus 5y agoThe ultimate "Safety off" button is Undock.
- setr 5y agoUse this date instead — the epilogue link fails in 2009. http://web.archive.org/web/20080408110250/http://www.geocities.com/currintrading/ http://web.archive.org/web/20080408110250/http://www.geociti...
- danuker 5y agoThank you. I spent an hour reading this, and am probably better off financially in the real world because of it. There are lots of scams out there.
- prepend 5y agoI love reading about it, but have played for maybe 30 minutes. The game doesn’t intrigue me, but the building of it does. Same for Minecraft and similar. Figuring out the software and the cool way it came into existence is the problem to solve, actually playing it is (perhaps incorrectly) predictable details and so boring.
- minsc__and__boo 5y agoI've put in probably over a thousand hours on it, and have played it over the years as new releases come out. I've gotten to the point where I usually hit FPS death (too large a fortress that it overloads the CPU) even on the harder starts and with dfhack to help. The draw for me was the steep learning curve that rewards you with logical complexity when you finally understand it. The lore that your fortress generates, as well as the random stories, is just icing on the cake. It's definitely not for everyone though since the UI requires additional programs like DF Therapist and DF Hack to be manageable still.
- outworlder 5y agoFor me, the reason I have stopped playing is that I have issues managing migrants. There are just too many dwarves to care for. Even DF Therapist doesn't (or didn't?) really help micromanaging jobs. It becomes tedious quickly. I remember seeing something about auto-allocating jobs, but it didn't work for me.
- praptak 5y agoMost hardcore players set limits on the number of dwarves. This helps both with the micromanagement and with FPS.
- curtainsforus 5y agoThat's why many players had methods for 'taking care of' migrants
- AndyMcConachie 5y agoIf DF is too daunting try RimWorld. It's based mostly on DF, but has graphics and is considerably more approachable. It's also heavily modded and with mods can get just as complicated as DF can.
- milgrim 5y agoI am the same. I also started to play a few times, but not knowing the mechanics and not having enough time/motivation to learn them in detail is frustrating. But there’s a nice alternative: https://youtube.com/c/kruggsmash https://youtube.com/c/kruggsmash Watching someone else play Dwarf Fortress can be surprisingly entertaining. Just start one of his series from the start.
- setr 5y agoGames are interactive simulations, by nature. DF is an honest attempt at simulating things thoroughly. Therefore, DF is an honest attempt at making a thorough game. Very few games can make such a claim
- b0rsuk 5y agoYour reply is somewhat self-contradictory. If games are interactive simulations by nature, why is DF so unusual? There is a trend to call many modern games "immersive sims" and somehow they don't produce such stories. In my opinion game developers have mostly stopped trying to simulate things. The focus is on clothes, rigid crafting systems, skill trees, storyline, cutscenes, vehicles, item collection. It's sandboxes, not simulations. Does Witcher 3 have emergence? Does GTA? Compare that to Bullfrog, a game company which made simulations almost exclusively. In the 90's "simulation" was a game genre.
- setr 5y ago> If games are interactive simulations by nature, why is DF so unusual? It’s an honest attempt at making a thorough simulation. Most games attempt only shallow rules and simulations — nearly everything that happens in Witcher 3 is encoded precisely, with few knock-on effects (because there’s nothing underneath the immediate effect + visualization — what’s modeled is precisely what you see); leading to the lack of emergent behavior. You’re dealing with a fairly rudimentary and static system. GTA is more flexible, but ultimately nothing follows any particular logic that doesn’t revolve around the player. More notably, in both games, if the player doesn’t exist, the world can no longer reasonably operate. Simulation is inherent to game design, but very few games actively work towards it, as you’ve seen. The simulation games of the 90’s were in the right vein — they faltered for practical reasons. As a result, they often make for thorough simulations that are dishonest — the internal logic of the simulation is violated for reasons of hardware limitations, UX simplicity, fun, etc. Tornados happen because it’s fun. DF is honest in the sense that it is only compromised by Tarn’s inability to implement something (and practical impact — it’s not worth trying to model atoms when fluid dynamics will suffice). I don’t mean that DF produces a “realistic” simulation (as a climate scientist might) but that he produces a uncompromisingly logically consistent one (as a fiction author might)
- totetsu 5y agoI used to love falling asleep to the DFTalk podcast..