I a fair bit of time playing Dwarf Fortress a year or two ago. Once I grasped that I wasn't supposed to directly tell the dwarves what to do, I started picking

I a fair bit of time playing Dwarf Fortress a year or two ago. Once I grasped that I wasn't supposed to directly tell the dwarves what to do, I started picking up the mechanics much more quickly. The depth of the simulation is amazing, but it's not particularly legible unless you spend a lot of time manually poring over descriptive text in menus. DFHack and its various plug-ins[1] (especially labormanager) and Dwarf Therapist greatly ease the management process and can help avoid confusion when your dwarves just won't do what you want. It's still a lot of fun to play around with for a while. I would love to see what could be done with a larger development team working on it, but I suppose it would be hard to keep the concept focused. [1] https://docs.dfhack.org/en/0.47.05-r2/docs/Plugins.html https://docs.dfhack.org/en/0.47.05-r2/docs/Plugins.html