5 ms·

“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is pr

“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing. I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more interesting than the actual gameplay. EDIT: To people who are rebutting this by saying “it’s just not for you” - that’s entirely my point. Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.

Catloafdev 16d ago
Yep, the game is difficult to get into, it's not for everyone. The game is great, though. You are in the "I have no idea what's going on" phase.
- Our_Benefactors 16d ago
  It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding. It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design.
  - Dylan16807 15d ago
    If you have a steady food supply and you can hold off a military attack you're playing "the real game". A handful of hours can get you there, and you'll be learning plenty fast.
  - Catloafdev 16d ago
    You're totally allowed to have that opinion. Time is valuable. It does have a tutorial nowadays, but it's still not easy. Not everyone _wants_ to learn Dwarf Fortress, and that's fine - it's not for everyone. But I'm just providing context that, for those of us that have learned, it is a great game.
  - all2 16d ago
    This depends largely on your expectation for what a 'game' should be. Puzzle boxes, for example, have zero on ramp, and yet many many people enjoy them, enjoy the struggle of discovery. Arguably the edges of mathematics and science are inhabited by similar people, living where the rules are ill defined, where there is much to be discovered rather than pre-digested and spoon fed. I have little patience for games that don't spoon feed, so I get where you're coming from. I watched my brother play DF and decided I didn't want to spend my time like that, trying to parse ascii, trying to figure out how all the things interacted. I also don't like puzzle boxes that much. To each their own.
    - VorpalWay 16d ago
      I found exactly the discovery fulfilling in Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld and Minecraft. Once I mastered those (well, maybe it is fairer to say "once I plateaued", there are way more skilled players than me) I found much less interest in them. Sure, I still play occasionally for a bit after a big update drops, but that is pretty much it. Oh and yeah, puzzle focused games (as long as it isn't slide puzzles) are great too. I fondly remember Myst, Monkey Island and other puzzle games like that. Some people like games where you need to grind (idle clicker games seem to be purest/insanest form of that), and that is something I don't get at all. It is just pointless busywork, just like those repetitive achievements ("kill N enemies with X style attacks") or collectables. (Achievements that are on the form "find this hidden thing" or "do this out of the box thing once" I do understand more.) To each their own indeed.
  - deadbunny 16d ago
    Why is it the games job to handhold you?
    - Our_Benefactors 16d ago
      Because it’s not a complete or compelling experience if the systems aren’t naturally exposed and taught over time in a progressive manner. This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years.
      - AnthonBerg 16d ago
        There are notable counterexamples. I find life to be both complete and compelling as experience.
      - Catloafdev 16d ago
        Eh, I definitely can't agree with this one. Some of the most beloved games of all time had effectively no on-ramp of any kind - especially if you're willing to go back 30 years - and none of the fans of those games would say "they are not compelling experiences" because of a learning cliff.
      - StanislavPetrov 16d ago
        >This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years. First, this is completely wrong. There are many good games that have been designed over the last 30 years that didn't assume you were an invalid and needed your hand hand held every step of the way. Second, many of us (including myself) have been playing computer games for ~50 years! In the 80s and 90s the average game was far more difficult than even the most difficult games put out today. It wasn't assumed that everyone, or even most people, were ever going to beat the game. There were games I played for hundreds of hours back then, and enjoyed greatly, that I never finished or even mastered all the complexities of! That didn't make it any less fun. I want to be challenged by a game. If I load up a game and am spoon-fed everything it isn't a game I play for long.
      - deadbunny 16d ago
        Claiming the game of systems and their interactions is not complete or compelling because it doesn't hold you hand is laughable. Not everything has to be made or everyone, in fact I would argue that is exactly the reason games these days are bland and identical. Press "F" to pay respects.
  - zdragnar 16d ago
    Somebody didn't grow up with early console games.
    - RHSeeger 16d ago
      To this day, I never managed to get ET out of that ditch
  - bee_rider 16d ago
    Not every game can be for everyone, and Dwarf Fortress is not a game for people who want onramps. “Shitty game design” is subjective, I guess. Maybe the Steam page is too slick? I can’t imagine somebody going to the old dwarf fortress page and thinking “this is a game I’ll pick up easily!”
  - AnthonBerg 16d ago
    Is it your job to define jobs?
  - StanislavPetrov 16d ago
    >It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding. No, it is a games job to be entertaining for those it was designed to entertain. >It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design. Certainly there are many people who take a longer time to learn and grasp concepts and find challenging tasks something to be avoided, and this game isn't for you! That doesn't mean that every game should be designed so that the lowest commoner denominator can understand and enjoy the game! Some people not only enjoy being challenged by complex games, but seek those out those challenges and that complexity. The game market is flooded with easy to learn and easy to win games designed and made for simpletons, so there's no reason for you to complain about the rare game (these days) that deviates from that.
  - protocolture 16d ago
    >It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding. Its the games job to present their unique style of fun to the market, and let the market sort it out. A game made by 2 blokes has to have a set of priorities, and their priority has always been the simulation. >It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game” I mean, ignore Dwarf Fortress for a minute, this is exactly what Paradox has built its little empire on. I was at 300+ hours of Crusader Kings 2 and had only a sort of intuitive grasp of most of the games systems. And at the time, most of the safer european powers were at risk of just getting rolled off the map by the golden horde mid game, and the work arounds for that were quite insane. I still dont reckon I have the war/conflict systems mastered. Paradox does tutorials, they just suck immensely and you end up on the forums or wikis anyway. Dwarf fortress has managed to create a game with that kind of skill curve with 0.0001% of the resources. >that’s just shitty game design. I feel sorry for you, I get the impression that this hostility is coming from a place where you really wish you could share in these fantastic games but haven't quite got the gumption to stick with them. I get it I really do, I mod Battle Brothers to make it easier, because I love the texture of the game but I haven't been able to master the combat or save scumming required to play at a real difficulty.
  - intended 16d ago
    No. Dwarf fortress challenged what I thought the rules of game design were. It was absurd amounts of fun. I was happy to go through the tutorials or ask questions on bay12. Figuring out how things worked, and then using those skills to explore the world was fun. It was also internally consistent. The game simply isn’t for you.
dnoberon 16d ago
So just because you couldn't get into it means everyone who's enjoying it is a poser? That's some pretty self-centered thinking right there. No one should be judging you if it's not your thing. Those of us that enjoy it readily admit its faults and own the fact it's not a game for everyone.
- whateveracct 16d ago
  some people never developed theory of mind as children sadly
joemi 16d ago
Minecraft was very fun and was selling like hotcakes when it had "no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players". Even nowadays there's no tutorial as far as I know and much of how to play is left to discovery. The achievements tree is a bit of a guide, just by telling you some of the things that are possible, but it sure doesn't tell you how to do anything. I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.
- jjmarr 16d ago
  As soon as I bought Minecraft I opened the Wiki and used that to figure out how to craft stuff. It was the first mainstream Wiki-based game. Now, every game does it that way.
  - serf 16d ago
    >It was the first mainstream Wiki-based game. Now, every game does it that way. the wow wiki was from 04, the minecraft wiki is from 09. ... and wow was very documentation based for people pre-quest-helpers.
    - queuebert 15d ago
      That's impressive. I thought the NetHack wiki would be older, but it dates to 2005, although I suspect there was an earlier version somewhere else.
- Our_Benefactors 16d ago
  Unlike dwarf fortress, minecraft is fun and engaging from minute zero, and exposes its systems to you naturally over time. Terrible comparison.
  - joemi 14d ago
hilariously 16d ago
As someone whose spent ~5k hours playing DF you are right, every person I have ever talked to about it has liked the idea and like 1/50 has gone on to play it for >10 hours.
otikik 16d ago
I am going to boot it up and play today just to spite you lol
pavel_lishin 16d ago
You're not wrong! I used to play it, and for me, I think it scratched the same creative itch that Minecraft does in other folks. Building grand designs, etc. But in Minecraft, I'd have to place it block by block, and the physics... well, they're just absent. DF is like Minecraft, but with Lemmings, and a full physics system. I still remember some of those designs, and I can see them clearly in my mind - not as the game represented them, but as the dwarves would have seen them. A grand underground bridge, with water flowing alongside it, before spiraling down into the main hall - where the wagons would enter the marketplace, and the dwarves would pass through the mist generated by the waterfall (forgotten beast got 'em all.) A giant vertical chain, build out of stone, standing as a monument to the grand fortress that sprawls underneath it (half-completed, as the fortress succumbed to madness.) A fortress built into a volcano, underneath the open sky, with the forges powered by magma, and a small river diversion creating endless obsidian (fucking birds kept swooping down and either eating my dwarves, or knocking them into the volcano, because I couldn't build the roof fast enough.) I keep wanting to go back in, and I should - but I'd literally have to dig out the `cheatsheet.txt` file I had to keep on my desktop while playing, PLUS I'd have to figure out if I still needed the third party app that makes managing dwarven jobs reasonable, because in-game it's a fucking nightmare - and whether that app even exists for OS X, because I think it was a Windows-only thing that would interact with the game by directly reading RAM. It sucks, but it's so good.
- OkayPhysicist 16d ago
  FYI, the newer versions with their mouse-driven interface solve a lot of those issues. Dwarf Therapist (the RAM reading tool you were thinking of) isn't needed any more, because there are much better in-game tools for managing what kinds of work certain dwarves do. The new menu layouts are a lot more discoverable, allowing you to find most things with just a little bit of clicking around (and the descriptions of stuff are a lot better now, so no more googling "what the heck is a quern?"). I miss the old keyboard controls sometimes, but they're gradually adding them back in the form of shortcuts. DFHack is still around, and basically necessary for automating some of the more fiddly resource chains (stuff like, "request 50 trees get cut down out of this patch of forest if our number of logs gets below 200"). I hadn't played in like 10 years when I picked up the Steam release, and I found it pretty easy to get back into.
OkayPhysicist 16d ago
No great game is enjoyed by everyone. Your options when making a work, of any kind, are to either A) make something utterly inoffensive to the point that no one will have strong opinions about it at all or B) make a game that some people will love and others will bounce off of. Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience. If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell. If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.
DarmokTanagra 16d ago
congratulations for stating what the the creators of the game have said many many time. nobody is making you play it, and the people who enjoy playing it don't really care if it you liked it or not.
ux266478 16d ago
I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structure, because these things did have genuinely different behaviors despite being conceptually similar. That's a problem at a deeper layer than the UI/UX. The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.
- db48x 15d ago
  They fixed all that. Go give the free version another try; it has the updated UI but not the new sprites so it feels a lot like playing the older versions of the game but with more polish.
TaLiTr 16d ago
> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here. The majority of people do not play videogames. The majority of those do not play any roguelikes. Citing the majority is completely useless. Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress. There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know. Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once. > I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game. The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours. The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog. That to me is some excellent playtime. Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.
- rmunn 16d ago
  The tutorial is the wiki. I used to play Dwarf Fortress back in the 2008-2009 era, and I kept going back to the wiki when I needed to learn something. It was, and still is, comprehensive, containing not just a "getting started for beginners" tutorial page, but also a list of every building and workflow (from ore to metal to swords and armor, from seeds to plants to food and drink...). In-game tutorials are not the only way to learn about a game; a well-maintained wiki (that isn't on wikia, oops sorry they're called fandom dot com there days — but that's a whole other rant) is also an excellent resource. And certain types of games seem to lend themselves to having well-maintained wikis: Dwarf Fortress's wiki is perhaps the best I've ever seen, narrowly beating Minecraft's also-excellent wiki.
  - fph 16d ago
    For reference, the quickstart guide in the DF wiki is https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Quickstart_guide https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Quickstart_guide . It is quite detailed and well made.
My_Name 16d ago
You may prefer a game like 'Going Medieval' which is a similar concept to Dwarf Fortress but is heavily simplified, almost as though someone played Dwarf Fortress then decided to make a version for their kids.

Catloafdev 16d ago

Yep, the game is difficult to get into, it's not for everyone. The game is great, though. You are in the "I have no idea what's going on" phase.

Our_Benefactors 16d ago
It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding. It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design.
- Dylan16807 15d ago
  If you have a steady food supply and you can hold off a military attack you're playing "the real game". A handful of hours can get you there, and you'll be learning plenty fast.
- Catloafdev 16d ago
  You're totally allowed to have that opinion. Time is valuable. It does have a tutorial nowadays, but it's still not easy. Not everyone _wants_ to learn Dwarf Fortress, and that's fine - it's not for everyone. But I'm just providing context that, for those of us that have learned, it is a great game.
- all2 16d ago
  This depends largely on your expectation for what a 'game' should be. Puzzle boxes, for example, have zero on ramp, and yet many many people enjoy them, enjoy the struggle of discovery. Arguably the edges of mathematics and science are inhabited by similar people, living where the rules are ill defined, where there is much to be discovered rather than pre-digested and spoon fed. I have little patience for games that don't spoon feed, so I get where you're coming from. I watched my brother play DF and decided I didn't want to spend my time like that, trying to parse ascii, trying to figure out how all the things interacted. I also don't like puzzle boxes that much. To each their own.
  - VorpalWay 16d ago
    I found exactly the discovery fulfilling in Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld and Minecraft. Once I mastered those (well, maybe it is fairer to say "once I plateaued", there are way more skilled players than me) I found much less interest in them. Sure, I still play occasionally for a bit after a big update drops, but that is pretty much it. Oh and yeah, puzzle focused games (as long as it isn't slide puzzles) are great too. I fondly remember Myst, Monkey Island and other puzzle games like that. Some people like games where you need to grind (idle clicker games seem to be purest/insanest form of that), and that is something I don't get at all. It is just pointless busywork, just like those repetitive achievements ("kill N enemies with X style attacks") or collectables. (Achievements that are on the form "find this hidden thing" or "do this out of the box thing once" I do understand more.) To each their own indeed.
- deadbunny 16d ago
  Why is it the games job to handhold you?
  - Our_Benefactors 16d ago
    Because it’s not a complete or compelling experience if the systems aren’t naturally exposed and taught over time in a progressive manner. This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years.
    - AnthonBerg 16d ago
      There are notable counterexamples. I find life to be both complete and compelling as experience.
    - Catloafdev 16d ago
      Eh, I definitely can't agree with this one. Some of the most beloved games of all time had effectively no on-ramp of any kind - especially if you're willing to go back 30 years - and none of the fans of those games would say "they are not compelling experiences" because of a learning cliff.
    - StanislavPetrov 16d ago
      >This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years. First, this is completely wrong. There are many good games that have been designed over the last 30 years that didn't assume you were an invalid and needed your hand hand held every step of the way. Second, many of us (including myself) have been playing computer games for ~50 years! In the 80s and 90s the average game was far more difficult than even the most difficult games put out today. It wasn't assumed that everyone, or even most people, were ever going to beat the game. There were games I played for hundreds of hours back then, and enjoyed greatly, that I never finished or even mastered all the complexities of! That didn't make it any less fun. I want to be challenged by a game. If I load up a game and am spoon-fed everything it isn't a game I play for long.
    - deadbunny 16d ago
      Claiming the game of systems and their interactions is not complete or compelling because it doesn't hold you hand is laughable. Not everything has to be made or everyone, in fact I would argue that is exactly the reason games these days are bland and identical. Press "F" to pay respects.
- zdragnar 16d ago
  Somebody didn't grow up with early console games.
  - RHSeeger 16d ago
    To this day, I never managed to get ET out of that ditch
- bee_rider 16d ago
  Not every game can be for everyone, and Dwarf Fortress is not a game for people who want onramps. “Shitty game design” is subjective, I guess. Maybe the Steam page is too slick? I can’t imagine somebody going to the old dwarf fortress page and thinking “this is a game I’ll pick up easily!”
- AnthonBerg 16d ago
  Is it your job to define jobs?
- StanislavPetrov 16d ago
  >It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding. No, it is a games job to be entertaining for those it was designed to entertain. >It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design. Certainly there are many people who take a longer time to learn and grasp concepts and find challenging tasks something to be avoided, and this game isn't for you! That doesn't mean that every game should be designed so that the lowest commoner denominator can understand and enjoy the game! Some people not only enjoy being challenged by complex games, but seek those out those challenges and that complexity. The game market is flooded with easy to learn and easy to win games designed and made for simpletons, so there's no reason for you to complain about the rare game (these days) that deviates from that.
- protocolture 16d ago
  >It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding. Its the games job to present their unique style of fun to the market, and let the market sort it out. A game made by 2 blokes has to have a set of priorities, and their priority has always been the simulation. >It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game” I mean, ignore Dwarf Fortress for a minute, this is exactly what Paradox has built its little empire on. I was at 300+ hours of Crusader Kings 2 and had only a sort of intuitive grasp of most of the games systems. And at the time, most of the safer european powers were at risk of just getting rolled off the map by the golden horde mid game, and the work arounds for that were quite insane. I still dont reckon I have the war/conflict systems mastered. Paradox does tutorials, they just suck immensely and you end up on the forums or wikis anyway. Dwarf fortress has managed to create a game with that kind of skill curve with 0.0001% of the resources. >that’s just shitty game design. I feel sorry for you, I get the impression that this hostility is coming from a place where you really wish you could share in these fantastic games but haven't quite got the gumption to stick with them. I get it I really do, I mod Battle Brothers to make it easier, because I love the texture of the game but I haven't been able to master the combat or save scumming required to play at a real difficulty.
- intended 16d ago
  No. Dwarf fortress challenged what I thought the rules of game design were. It was absurd amounts of fun. I was happy to go through the tutorials or ask questions on bay12. Figuring out how things worked, and then using those skills to explore the world was fun. It was also internally consistent. The game simply isn’t for you.

dnoberon 16d ago

So just because you couldn't get into it means everyone who's enjoying it is a poser? That's some pretty self-centered thinking right there. No one should be judging you if it's not your thing. Those of us that enjoy it readily admit its faults and own the fact it's not a game for everyone.

whateveracct 16d ago
some people never developed theory of mind as children sadly

joemi 16d ago

Minecraft was very fun and was selling like hotcakes when it had "no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players". Even nowadays there's no tutorial as far as I know and much of how to play is left to discovery. The achievements tree is a bit of a guide, just by telling you some of the things that are possible, but it sure doesn't tell you how to do anything. I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.

jjmarr 16d ago
As soon as I bought Minecraft I opened the Wiki and used that to figure out how to craft stuff. It was the first mainstream Wiki-based game. Now, every game does it that way.
- serf 16d ago
  >It was the first mainstream Wiki-based game. Now, every game does it that way. the wow wiki was from 04, the minecraft wiki is from 09. ... and wow was very documentation based for people pre-quest-helpers.
  - queuebert 15d ago
    That's impressive. I thought the NetHack wiki would be older, but it dates to 2005, although I suspect there was an earlier version somewhere else.
Our_Benefactors 16d ago
Unlike dwarf fortress, minecraft is fun and engaging from minute zero, and exposes its systems to you naturally over time. Terrible comparison.
- joemi 14d ago

hilariously 16d ago

As someone whose spent ~5k hours playing DF you are right, every person I have ever talked to about it has liked the idea and like 1/50 has gone on to play it for >10 hours.

otikik 16d ago

I am going to boot it up and play today just to spite you lol

pavel_lishin 16d ago

You're not wrong! I used to play it, and for me, I think it scratched the same creative itch that Minecraft does in other folks. Building grand designs, etc. But in Minecraft, I'd have to place it block by block, and the physics... well, they're just absent. DF is like Minecraft, but with Lemmings, and a full physics system. I still remember some of those designs, and I can see them clearly in my mind - not as the game represented them, but as the dwarves would have seen them. A grand underground bridge, with water flowing alongside it, before spiraling down into the main hall - where the wagons would enter the marketplace, and the dwarves would pass through the mist generated by the waterfall (forgotten beast got 'em all.) A giant vertical chain, build out of stone, standing as a monument to the grand fortress that sprawls underneath it (half-completed, as the fortress succumbed to madness.) A fortress built into a volcano, underneath the open sky, with the forges powered by magma, and a small river diversion creating endless obsidian (fucking birds kept swooping down and either eating my dwarves, or knocking them into the volcano, because I couldn't build the roof fast enough.) I keep wanting to go back in, and I should - but I'd literally have to dig out the `cheatsheet.txt` file I had to keep on my desktop while playing, PLUS I'd have to figure out if I still needed the third party app that makes managing dwarven jobs reasonable, because in-game it's a fucking nightmare - and whether that app even exists for OS X, because I think it was a Windows-only thing that would interact with the game by directly reading RAM. It sucks, but it's so good.

OkayPhysicist 16d ago
FYI, the newer versions with their mouse-driven interface solve a lot of those issues. Dwarf Therapist (the RAM reading tool you were thinking of) isn't needed any more, because there are much better in-game tools for managing what kinds of work certain dwarves do. The new menu layouts are a lot more discoverable, allowing you to find most things with just a little bit of clicking around (and the descriptions of stuff are a lot better now, so no more googling "what the heck is a quern?"). I miss the old keyboard controls sometimes, but they're gradually adding them back in the form of shortcuts. DFHack is still around, and basically necessary for automating some of the more fiddly resource chains (stuff like, "request 50 trees get cut down out of this patch of forest if our number of logs gets below 200"). I hadn't played in like 10 years when I picked up the Steam release, and I found it pretty easy to get back into.

OkayPhysicist 16d ago

No great game is enjoyed by everyone. Your options when making a work, of any kind, are to either A) make something utterly inoffensive to the point that no one will have strong opinions about it at all or B) make a game that some people will love and others will bounce off of. Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience. If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell. If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.

DarmokTanagra 16d ago

congratulations for stating what the the creators of the game have said many many time. nobody is making you play it, and the people who enjoy playing it don't really care if it you liked it or not.

ux266478 16d ago

I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structure, because these things did have genuinely different behaviors despite being conceptually similar. That's a problem at a deeper layer than the UI/UX. The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.

db48x 15d ago
They fixed all that. Go give the free version another try; it has the updated UI but not the new sprites so it feels a lot like playing the older versions of the game but with more polish.

TaLiTr 16d ago

> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here. The majority of people do not play videogames. The majority of those do not play any roguelikes. Citing the majority is completely useless. Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress. There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know. Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once. > I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game. The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours. The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog. That to me is some excellent playtime. Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.

rmunn 16d ago
The tutorial is the wiki. I used to play Dwarf Fortress back in the 2008-2009 era, and I kept going back to the wiki when I needed to learn something. It was, and still is, comprehensive, containing not just a "getting started for beginners" tutorial page, but also a list of every building and workflow (from ore to metal to swords and armor, from seeds to plants to food and drink...). In-game tutorials are not the only way to learn about a game; a well-maintained wiki (that isn't on wikia, oops sorry they're called fandom dot com there days — but that's a whole other rant) is also an excellent resource. And certain types of games seem to lend themselves to having well-maintained wikis: Dwarf Fortress's wiki is perhaps the best I've ever seen, narrowly beating Minecraft's also-excellent wiki.
- fph 16d ago
  For reference, the quickstart guide in the DF wiki is https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Quickstart_guide https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Quickstart_guide . It is quite detailed and well made.

My_Name 16d ago

You may prefer a game like 'Going Medieval' which is a similar concept to Dwarf Fortress but is heavily simplified, almost as though someone played Dwarf Fortress then decided to make a version for their kids.