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I agree with the spirit of your post, but Dwarf Fortress and Easy to Start do not fit in the same sentence in my opinion. I mean, the game is legendary for it's

I agree with the spirit of your post, but Dwarf Fortress and Easy to Start do not fit in the same sentence in my opinion. I mean, the game is legendary for it's arcane user interface and the vast number of things that can go wrong even for experts. Dwarf Fortress is something like vim, where usually on the first interaction people don't even know how to start the game, let alone do anything in it. Chess is easy to start, the rules fit on a post it note basically. Dwarf Fortress is difficult to start, and even more difficult to master.

devenvdev 5y ago
When I first started playing DF it took me all day reading the wiki... Next week was spent on trying to survive the first winter... As a 15 years vim user though - vim has a much more gradual but also much higher learning curve, I'm still learning new tricks in vim on a weekly basis.
Agentlien 5y ago
I love Dwarf Fortress and play it quite actively. I've been using Vim as my primary IDE for many years. That said, I wouldn't compare Dwarf Fortress to Vim. Vim is mainly difficult to get into because the model itself is so different from what people are used to and there's inherent complexity. But, quirks aside, it's mostly very consistent and learning a few patterns will get you very far. In Dwarf Fortress you need to fight not only incredible complexity, but also so very much bad UI/UX and inconsistencies between what should have been identical actions. A great example is searching a list of items. This is done with q for query. Or sometimes s for search. And in some cases f for filter. Or even better, the way k, v, t, q, are all just needles variants of "look at thing under cursor". And none of them work for some activity zones such as pastures, then you need i. As much as I love DF I'm very much looking forward to the Steam version, mainly for the UI overhaul, which is so far looking really promising.

devenvdev 5y ago

When I first started playing DF it took me all day reading the wiki... Next week was spent on trying to survive the first winter... As a 15 years vim user though - vim has a much more gradual but also much higher learning curve, I'm still learning new tricks in vim on a weekly basis.

Agentlien 5y ago

I love Dwarf Fortress and play it quite actively. I've been using Vim as my primary IDE for many years. That said, I wouldn't compare Dwarf Fortress to Vim. Vim is mainly difficult to get into because the model itself is so different from what people are used to and there's inherent complexity. But, quirks aside, it's mostly very consistent and learning a few patterns will get you very far. In Dwarf Fortress you need to fight not only incredible complexity, but also so very much bad UI/UX and inconsistencies between what should have been identical actions. A great example is searching a list of items. This is done with q for query. Or sometimes s for search. And in some cases f for filter. Or even better, the way k, v, t, q, are all just needles variants of "look at thing under cursor". And none of them work for some activity zones such as pastures, then you need i. As much as I love DF I'm very much looking forward to the Steam version, mainly for the UI overhaul, which is so far looking really promising.