The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress (2011)
nytimes.com
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Many times you could have won quickly if only the units obeyed. But they didn't ;)
Also the art was entirely redone in the generic cartoony style of every other mobile RTS. I suppose it's more approachable than the original's 2000-era pixeliness, but it didn't seem like an improvement to me.
It's still better than 99% of all mobile games, but that's not saying much. The original is on Steam for $10 including the expansion and various bugfixes; I played it through again last year and I think it still holds up wonderfully. http://store.steampowered.com/app/25990/
The saddest part was encountering enemy units who had magic reflection.
You could do things like pick up imps to make them prioritize a task, or slap them to make the work faster (took a slice of health out of them though).
I seem to recall now that one of the ways you could torture a captured agent was by having him being squeezed by moving bookshelves or something...
It seems like there are some interesting game mechanics possible (as you suggest) that could also benefit from the recent GPU enhancements for neural nets.
The AI was flawed, the serfs, once the population got to around 100 or so, would starve to death frequently as they couldnt figure out how to get to the inn to get food and drink...
It was especially fun and funny when playing against a friend in the same room, you've built your village to the point where youre able to raise an army to smite your foe - but the AI goes bonkers, the serfs start to die off and your economy is ruined to the point that even two soldiers can show up and raze your entire town...
Ill never forget the laughter we had at one's serf's death knell "HNUUGGGHHHH" as they die, and the giddy feeling you had if you could take them out with just a few soldiers.
Check out Banished.
The mods didn't really do anything for me either, I felt like they just increased complexity and unbalance without really adding challenge or fun.
I haven't ever actually played dwarf fortress, but from what I've read, the inherent unpredictability of the world, your dwarves, and other creatures seems like nothing that any other game can even dream of.
Never trust your neighbors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populous_II:_Trials_of_the_Oly...
It was especially interesting because in order to train the creature what behavior was or wasn't desired you had to catch them in the act doing that thing. Since the creature was an independent actor who you could only influence, you had to rely on the randomness of the AI to do certain things so you could teach them what was good and what was bad. E.g. you can't teach it eating villagers is bad unless you catch them in the act and smack them around. Such a shame they almost completely did away with that teaching-through-doing part of creature-training in favor of simplifying down the creatures behaviors to basically sliders like "good vs bad" and "friendly vs aggressive" in BW2. Still waiting on a proper spiritual successor to BW1... what a brilliant game.
Similarly to DF, you just allocate tiles to be excavated, and can paint allocations on rooms, but never issue direct orders to minions. (Though you can possess them and take a first-person perspective, which is an interesting twist).
The attempt to manage a dungeon and direct all your minions at a certain goal, compined with the idea to automate your defence (through traps and alarms) somehow evoked a similar joy to programming for me. It's especally ironic on how many misbehaviors of the creature agents I tried by locking (ha!) doors in front of them.
Also, the general game style (aesthetics, soundtrack and the narrator) remains unmatched to this day.
That's also the point.
Dwarf fortress is actually a good study on community structuring via challenge based gating. Before the many tutorials, if you could hack df or aurora, you were a particular type of gamer, and the challenge itself was the fun.
I really wish people could know themselves through the game the way I got to.
I'm not playing that much these days but I still frequent bay12 other games section, it's the best source for opinionated discussions about games
£23 for a game actively developed, with great replayability, tons of mods, a passionate fan base and community? Holy shit, that's a bargain.
I think GP is also potentially balking at the $300 DLC pack (what could be worth $300 from a game that isn't finished?)
Or maybe they typo'd the amounts...
> This DLC gives you the right to enter a name and character backstory into the game, with skills, appearance, and special work requirements. In addition, your character will appear as the leader of another faction!
and follows with a note that says it does not affect game play, only gives you the right to add your desired content to the game.
$30 for a game that already has more content than many AAA games I've played, is still actively developed, is in many ways more advanced than most AAA games (in terms of the simulation and emergent gameplay). If it were abandoned RIGHT NOW, nobody would ever notice that it wasn't "completed".
I've personally got more value out of playing it than I get from most $60 games and I haven't even played the last two updates yet (which were HUGE).
The expensive packs are expensive because they let you add custom stuff to the game (e.g. Characters named after you) and not meant for the average player.
Take a game with a lot of free updates, such as Terraria. Consider the game the day it was released. What if it had been labeled 'Early Access' and incomplete because it doesn't have all the features that were given in post-release updates? That wouldn't make it worth any less on the day it was released.
a) How far through the QC process the game is
b) Whether the game is going to change dramatically in the next 6 months
c) Whether the game is about to be a cancelled project.
d) Whether there are features/portions of the game that will just _not_ work with <insert OS version/hardware/network configuration/...>
Basically, Early Access is too big a tent to be meaningful, except to take as a caution of "you might be paying for vapor."
$555 of DLC for an early access game?
Like DF and Rimworld, PA has that 'imperative' style, where your prison staff are given instructions, but may have problems carrying them out. Also, with the real-life setting, it might help stimulate some thinking about the nature of the penal system and the prison-industrial complex, while, at the end of it, still being a fun game.
"I decided to play a game of DwarfFortress in an evil biome. Only I didn't realize the weather was also evil. Within 30 minutes all of my Dwarves were dead from an acid rainfall, cause of death: drowning in their own puss."
I think the map was even "deformable" in that if you ordered a tank to move somewhere it could break down walls and such to get there, walls that soldiers could have used as cover while moving around etc.
Note though that the graphics was top down 2D, so it was "cheap" to replace a standing wall tile with a broken one.
There was nothing like setting up a textbook ambush, and then having your inexperienced gunner on an MG42 panic and run off when you gave the order to fire...
It's getting hard to run on current machines, though, with its hard-coded screen sizes and a scroll speed that's unusably fast.
The tanks definitely felt underwhelming sometimes, but overwhelming other times. It depended a lot on the environment, the type of tank, and the enemy units, which seems pretty realistic. It was interesting and terrifying how invulnerable some of the better German tanks could be.
The total war series is a better example, but the games range in quality
It made you careful in where you place things. Placing an airport far from home? Good luck building that!
Would you have to first build a road out there with public transit service stops, and then bootstrap an increasingly-large set of airport hotels for the work crew to stay at, before attempting the airport itself? If so, that sounds like my kind of game.
To make large buildings in distant places you would build roads, then work crew related buildings, then whatever you wanted, including the needed housing for the new city area you ended creating in the process.
Another interesting game is knights and merchants, armies are under your direct control but require supplies, that need to be physically carted off to them, so you needed to either use hit and run tactics, or build infrastructure near the frontlines. Also traffic in that game can literally kill you, as your badly designed city becomes so inefficient that people die of starvation.
Or check out Widelands, a free Settlers-like game.
DF is nearly endless in terms of new content and events; once you figure out a pattern for setting up your fortress and finally feel like you're winning, something new comes along that you didn't expect. Once that feeling of "anything could happen" is lost in a game, it's tough to continue.
Factorio is a good example of this. It satisfies the desire for challenge and survival like DF, but the challenge drops off drastically once you have a good setup.
It's tough to match the content of Dwarf Fortress for a game that hasn't been around for 15 years though.
Sounds like current config management software
Another great game was Banished, i tried when it just came out, It is still updated by developers?
For example, in Kingdom, you get more minions buy throwing gold to beggars. There are spawn points on either side of the map. Your fortress is symmetric and you can also pay for tools like bow/arrows or hammers. There's a tool collection point on either side of the centre. One rule you figure out in Kingdom is that minions pick up the first available tool they come across. That means that if you want archers, but you have a hammer waiting pickup (and your new recruits come from the wrong side of the map), you're going to get an engineer.
Watchtowers are automatically restaffed by your soldiers. Watchtowers cannot be destroyed. If you overextend and build towers too far away from your castle, then you'll enter a vicious circle where your new archers will immediately go to man the towers and die when the hoarde arrives. As the towers are always there, and you can't mark them for demolition, it's possible to get into a situation where you can't resupply faster than your men run to their deaths.
I've recently started playing Rim World, which is essentially a Dwarf Fortress light. I'm enjoying it way more than I enjoyed Dwarf Fortress despite being a less complex (relatively speaking) game because it offers a FAR superior interface and presents it's mechanics in a friendlier way.
I find the DF UI, while minimal, to be great. Everything can be done on keyboard shortcuts... its more challenging initially, really easy as soon as it clicks... then the idea of doing it all with a mouse seems crazy
IIRC (foggy memory, several years since I last played) there are several ways to move through lists, depending on which list you are. Military was a chaos. People recommend an external application for better review of your dwarves, as the main interface is clunky.
It's a great game, but the UI could be much better.
* Not to say I dislike RimWorld, in fact it is my favour dwarflike.
RimWorld is great, but it just feels so much more sparse than DF - you only have a handful of folks. Graphics are nice (and the Prison Architect style is nice as well) and the way to assign orders is much needed (identical to a DF community add-on), but when it comes to Building Your Thang, it's just not a bustling community working against the odds.
It's interesting that so many things are based off what DF lacks (basic graphics, ui-friendliness) but don't implement the heart of DF (complexity), which is admittedly hard and was built up in DF over the course of years.
Dwarf Fortress is an amazing game with an incredible engine, but its UI is notoriously terrible, and IMHO deservedly so. But then, I've never managed to last very long, so perhaps there's something wrong with me.
That said, the great thing about the UI is that once you've learned it you can discard it. If you know the commands you need, you can hide the 'commands' area to give you more information on the current gamestate.
FWIW, DF is absolutely fantastic at doing what it's designed to do. It's primarily a story generator not a game, which is partly why interactivity is almost an afterthought
Do you use Dwarf Therapist?
You search for it, and the main page for Dwarf Fortress is on a "bay12games" domain rather than its own. No one knows "Bay12Games", and it's been 10+ years since Dwarf Fortress was first released. The guy running this should get over it, and admit that the only reason he's got some sort of fame is because of a single game. He should focus on that, not "Bay 12 Games". That company doesn't even have its own Wiki page.
Then the page itself. Looks like it's made in the early 2000's and hasn't been updated since. I just, I don't even know where to start with this one.
Then the actual download for the game: "df_43_05_win.zip". No installer, no MSI, nothing. I opened it just now, and couldn't find any sort of "Instructions" file or manual, either. Not to mention that all the "nicely packaged" versions of Dwarf Fortress exist in random forum threads.
AFAIK, that's all he's doing right now.
Also, Liberal Crime Squad is entertaining too and I know there's a few communities around it.
Really? You can find some of us here. Length > 0. http://www.bay12games.com/champions.html
> The guy running this should get over it, and admit that the only reason he's got some sort of fame is because of a single game.
And if you don't mind me being so blunt, what is your reason? I don't know of zo1.
> Then the page itself. Looks like it's made in the early 2000's and hasn't been updated since. I just, I don't even know where to start with this one.
Some of us remember the internet back when it looked like this. Some of us miss the internet when it looked like this. For this reason, many of us like the website to look _just like this_.
> Then the actual download for the game: "df_43_05_win.zip". No installer, no MSI, nothing. I opened it just now, and couldn't find any sort of "Instructions" file or manual, either. Not to mention that all the "nicely packaged" versions of Dwarf Fortress exist in random forum threads.
Now, I'm going to do something rare and separate from the usual jovial friendliness associated with the community to give make a very stark statement: if you can't figure out how to run the game, you probably shouldn't play it.
Now, returning to a more friendly disposition, I think you need to chill out a bit, stop picking everything apart so much, and start enjoying things for what they are.
I was a tad bit to harsh for polite conversation; but I have no idea why the creator couldn't let a community helper just fix things up a bit. Give it some love, so to speak, like it seems he does to the game itself.
>"Really? You can find some of us here. Length > 0. http://www.bay12games.com/champions.html*"
Sure, length of the amount of "champions" is approx 2100. Bay12Games is still a pretty unknown game company. But everyone knows Dwarf Fortress, so my point still stands. In case you glossed over it: It was a bit of hyperbole.
>"Now, I'm going to do something rare and separate from the usual jovial friendliness associated with the community to give make a very stark statement: if you can't figure out how to run the game, you probably shouldn't play it.*"
It's not that it's difficult to get into, it's that the whole presentation of the game and how it is presented to the user are completely unpalatable. Even before the user gets to see the game UI on his own machine.
Am I saying that your community needs to cater to me, make the game easier, etc? No.
I'm not trying to pick it apart, just adding my point about what sort of disservice the surrounding presentation of this game is doing to it.
Could all these things be done better? Absolutely. However, he has found a way to prioritise the things that are required to make him successful. I look at that priority list and think it's insane, but you will note that I don't receive my salary from kind hearted people who appreciate my quirky way of doing things. I get paid to do as I'm told.
It's pretty easy to think "I could do it better". WRT to DF, there are so many places you can criticise, that it's not funny. But, TBH, I don't think I could do it better, no matter how crazy I think his way of doing things is.
I play, know the bindings etc, but the UI has enormous problems with consistency.
The older interface like the jewlery encrusting and labor assignent work in a completely different way than the less old interfaces like military management and hospitals, which are yet again inconsistem with the latest interfaces like libraries and taverns
Some room get built on the room menu, oter in the zone menu, both can have either modern or old menus to manage assignment and roles and while the whole thing is workable is far from being great, good, easy or even likeable.
I frankly don't blame the guy for wanting to keep it closed source.
I agree Dwarf Fortress is quite hard to learn and the UI plays a large part of that as it's completely keyboard based and requires a lot of upfront effort to learn, but once you do you become much faster than you would otherwise (much like text editors).
People often complain about Dwarf Fortress's graphics in the same vain and breath as the UI, but I think these are parts of the charm and instead of being weaknesses they are leveraged as strengths.
For instance, the lack of fidelity of the game allows any new character to be added in 2 seconds, yet Rimworld needs a considerable amount of time and effort developing each texture. To an extent I think the 'horrible' user experience cannot be divorced from Dwarf Fortress. Losing is fun, after all.
I think what you consider a 'horrible' user experience cannot be divorced from what we know as Dwarf Fortress today. Losing is fun after all. I love Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, but they occupy different spaces within a similar genre in my mind.
Name me anything that is perfect without flaws and still useful? Water is great to drink yet it gets you wet and drowns you if you breath it. Fire is lovely and warm and cooks our food but burns and melts our flesh if we play in it. Lids keep felt tip pens wet, and choke our children. Fish are pretty and taste nice but occasionally swallow fisherdwarves. The internet is great and connects us but causes divide by mixing people who were better separated. Light is fantastic, but I can't sleep if I can see any. Tea is just perfect, but it mAkEs Me ShaKe toO mUcH aNd ThaT caN be a ProbleM.
> Water is great to drink yet it gets you wet and drowns you if you breath it.
If we're going to carry this analogy to Dwarf Fortress, if water was DF, it would be great to drink unless you happened to drink it from an aqueduct that carried it more than 20 miles. It would also make you spontaneously explode if your cat also drank from the same container, and you would be able to demand that your landlord replace your front door with one made of water and would go berserk when he didn't comply.
Not fucking remembering how to engrave gemstones because the key combination is unlike anything else, or how to put down a butcher table, or how to to set up a training rotation for my military? That's just shitty design.
That's the point of it, and I think it attracts all sorts of interesting comments and exploration, like the massive study on the impacts of various types of arrows and bolts on subjects.
This is from Feb 2016, are the updates you're talking about more recent?
Get past your dislike of the UI and you'll discover a game so rich it will outlast any other.
Ideally the game should be easy to learn the basics, but hard to master. The UI hinders this significantly.
And you play using a nice physical goban, the UX is really hard to beat.
I honestly kinda stopped playing after military gui is changed. The new system is unplayable. New conversation system is also very frustrating in adventure mode.
I just wish the game will be open source at some point and the things will be improved.
What I'm still waiting for is the game that comes after Dwarf Fortress, the game which is appropriately engineered for performance and is thereby able to be even more ambitious. We've seen a ton of less ambitious DF clones, but nothing on the other end so far.
It's not so much that it's keyboard controlled (that's great for the reasons you mention) or that it's hard (that's ultimately part of its charm). It's that the interface is inconsistent with itself. A great example (from when I last spent any comsiderable time with it) is that different menus use different controls and mechanisms for selecting a menu item. Some have you type a single character, while others have you scroll through them with varying pairs of keys for no obvious reason. It's a natural result of organic growth and IMO outweighed by a great game, but the cognitive load of using the interface definitely isn't its charm for me.
Then you need to create a task with a specific type of gem to encrust, again the task will delete if that gem type is unavailable.
Finally the encruster will select an item in your fortress at random to encrust with that type of gem.
So if you want to cut semiprecious stones, queue a task for cut gemstone, worth ¤1 to ¤5. It would also be nice if you could specify the type of cut, since the game engine already randomly produces cabochons and baguettes and cushions and such.
The encrusting randomness can be controlled by locking the jeweler in a room with only one encrustable item, but I shouldn't have to. If I want a masterwork silver hammer encrusted with small jade cabochons, I want to be able to specify that.
Also, building multi-part instruments is just insane.
This is only true for tiny developers. If you have dedicated artists then you aren't gated in this way as you work in parallel.
At this point we are conflating too many topics to really talk clearly. Simplest response would be "you should plan to spend years developing if you want to and if you do you need a budget and a way to fill that budget". See early release games as one example, expansions are an older one.
For instance, the lack of fidelity of the game allows any new character to be added in 2 seconds
I get this and actually completely agree. I loved MUD's back in the day because they could be so much more complex and detailed because they didn't have to worry about graphics and whatnot. Rimworld and such also can do a lot more than fancy 3D games for the exact same reasons, so there's definitely a spectrum.
But having said that, I still find the DF UX to be almost unapproachable. It could be low fidelity for the reasons you mention without being quite so hard to learn and internalise, but I get the impression that its just not a priority for the dev at all. Oh well, its their choice, but I feel a bit sad that I'm missing out on an otherwise amazing game.
I am the same way. If I wanted to struggle with difficult tasks, I would work. I realize this puts me more in the "casual gamer" category.
Is there a VI interface?
I mean I came at the game from a long history of playing Roguelikes, so the ASCII graphics weren't an immediate turnoff, but figuring out how to do anything is just plain daunting.
Also, there is a big difference between most Roguelikes and DF on the graphics front. In Rogue you start in a small room with just yourself and maybe a treasure or a monster. New monster icons are introduced slowly so you can learn them at a reasonable pace. In Dwarf Fortress you are apparently expected to learn dozens of symbols right from the start in addition to figuring out what keybinds do what and trying to figure out what you are supposed to be doing or if the fact that there are dozens of different kinds of rocks is important yet or not.
If there was ever a game crying out for a hand holding tutorial it is Dwarf Fortress.
I've found that this particular game has found its niche because of what it is.
The point of the creator is this: the game isnt even past pre-alpha. Lots of things will change, which a UI will only bog down.
So for example rimworld is still currently 2d. (will possibly change), but that a big change
DF plans to change the full world gen and design in the next arc - its a reasonable view.
Here is a quick animated gif with a few examples of interactions:
http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2014/1...
Edit: I still have to stop myself from re-downloading dwarf fortress about once per week because there is so much left to explore. I just barely scratched the surface of power stations and automated rail systems. You could spend thousands of hours just designing traps to kill goblins. The fun is in the complexity. Perhaps you just did not get deep enough into the game. Now I have to talk myself out of downloading DF again. The sheer maniacal glee of knocking a dozen goblins off a narrow path (use a rail car attached to a pressure plate) into a pit and filling it with lava after spending hours setting it up just can't be described.
The default tiles are ugly - unnecessarily ugly - and the keyboard controls don't seem great. (Like a sibling to this comment says, consistency has a lot to do with it, and not having to move your hands far around the keyboard is nice.) Then again, I admit I haven't spent that much time with it.
So I do find the interface offputting, but it's not because I want a flashy, dumbed-down one. And it's a bit frustrating whenever I see criticism of the Dwarf Fortress interface dismissed in those terms.
But the game pales in comparison to the beauty and replayability of Dwarf Fortress. I've been playing DF for 5 years and I still feel like a novice. Toss in modding and the game goes even further.
I understand your point of view, but I'm sad that amazing and well-designed games like Nethack and Dwarf Fortress don't get a fair shake because they're fixed width tile games. DF is a simulation game of stunning proportions.
TLDR: DF is a great game that shaped my childhood and motivated me to become a programmer.
This is a sentiment that crops up again and again. In particular as long time users of a terminal ui (not necessarily CLI but using ASCII/ANSI to draw the interface, and keyboard for input) when they transition to a GUI replacement.
The thing about keyboards is that they are designed to be used without looking. Special keys have special shapes to make them stand out. Every key is in a fixed location. And certain ones are marked but a bump or similar to make them easy to find by touch and thus use as navigational aides.
Yes, mouse and touch screens make it easier and faster to localize and develop a UI. But we humans are quite capable of doing repetitive tasks with our hands without looking.
I think that in RTS and MMORPG circles there is a certain degree of disdain for "clickers". People that operate the game mostly via mouse. This because it is slower and thus limits how quickly they can react to in-game events.
Completely off-topic, but there are two keyboard changes over time that absolutely drive me bonkers.
First, caps lock replacing control on the left, but that's not what prompted this post, but I'm still grumpy at Sun and Apple for surrendering to the idiot PC world on that.
Second, moving the bumps from "d" and "k" to "f" and "h". Pretty sure Apple also had that right originally.
When the bumps are supposed on the 2nd finger, you always feel them, even if your fingers are offset by 1. Feeling the bump on the wrong finger is great feedback to fix your hand position.
When the bumps are now in the 1st finger, if your fingers are offset by 1 you don't feel it at all, and it's much harder to notice the absence of something than it is to notice the presence of the bump on the wrong finger.
Bad designers, bad bad.
edit:
As for the caps lock location, i think you can thank typewriters for that.
As best i recall, they did caps lock by having a mechanical locking lever/key attached to the left side shift key arm. Thus to do caps lock you pushed down the shift key and then locked it in place with that key. Once done you popped the key loose with a press and moved on.
That locking key is pretty much in the same location as the caps lock key is today.
I learned on an Apple and I wonder now if having the bump on the second key has led to a few problems. I find there is a tendency for me to rotate my hand so that the fingers are no longer on the home row. One of the nice things about changing is that when I'm trying to code on the bus or train, avoiding rotating my hands keeps my elbows in and makes it possible for me to work (yes, I like working on the train :-P).
Not entirely sure what the best answer is for this.
I used to play Bard's Tale when a kid and I had memorizedthe keyboard movements from town to various dungeons on the map, and would navigate the map without even looking as it was muscle-memory for where things were... I always loved that.
Archcrystal - 320 years in a fortress (w/spoilers read 37592 times)
I'm a sucker for a good DF story... :P
I dl'd it and started it up. I'm now wondering what I'm looking at. Not being a gamer, I don't have the visual vocabulary or expectations, so I'm glad there's a wiki; the in-game manual doesn't fully work. EDIT: My reading comprehension is not fully functional, the manual works.
> “Water’s not doing it for me these days,” he said. “I know it’s bad, but the sugar goes right into programming the game. If I don’t drink soda now, I get a headache and can’t do any work.”
I feel bad that he's sacrificing his health for our pleasure.
> He’d enrolled at the University of Washington, ... Tarn moved into a string of “dingy one-bedrooms” with “bad moisture problems” — in one, he discovered a shelf fungus growing behind his couch.
I probably lived in one of those when I was at UW. It was a "World's Fair" apartment building, garden level, the only window facing north and looking up an outside stairwell into the alley. Google maps shows me that much of all that has been scraped and replaced.
Other games I have played of a similar vein: Rimworld (great), Prison Architect (great), Banished (great, needs mods to add more content), Planetbase (EA, good, light on content after 2~ hours).
Others I found were: Stonehearth, Gnomoria, Town, Kingdoms and Castles (not out yet), Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2 (kinda) / War for the Overworld (fan remake of DK, essentially).
Not the way I would do my work, but when you are your own boss you get to do whatever you want ;-)
I understand the keyboard only controls, but man, seeing what is going on is a challenge. Yeah all the PC power is used for the emulation of the world and stuff, but how much power does it take to do 2d sprites these days?
Oh well, here I go losing again!
However, the abstraction of the dwarven universe from the universe in which it is being simulated is hardly complete.
By suspending the game and keeping it in storage for several days, for instance, you are placing the dwarves at greater and greater risk that some external-universe course of events will prevent their universe from ever resuming. Furthermore, as the cycles of time which can occur in the universe ultimately face a limit with respect to the rate of the processor and the cycles of time available in the external universe, so in a very real sense you are causing a sort of existential damage to their universe.
This, in fact, raises the question of ethics with respect to the resources devoted to the simulation. Is it ethical to run dwarf fortress on a consumer-grade general purpose computing device? Should not the dwarven reality be given the strongest underpinnings we can provide it, with equivalent respect given between an internal universe subjective & sentient existence an external universe subjective & sentient existence? In fact, given our moral debt as the creators of the dwarven universe, do we not actually owe them more than we owe each other?
Of course, it's only a corollary that they now spend too much time playing Factorio. Their productivity was liable to go to shit anyway; I simply gave a purpose to it haha
But they vary in terms of their approach this complexity: some seem to always want to add more, seeing more complicatedness as always better, and end up feeling like they contain everything but the kitchen sink - complexity for complexity's sake. (Nethack, I'm looking at you.) Others add it only where it's justified by producing interesting gameplay decisions. (Brogue and Sil are rigorous about stripping out unneeded complexity and getting the maximum amount of subtlety and nuance from a stripped-back set of mechanics. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is more complex, but seems aware of the trade-offs around complexity, and is known for removing features as often as it adds them.)
Which of these camps does Dwarf Fortress fall into? There's a lot of complexity, features and mechanics there. Is it all justified, in terms of adding interest to gameplay? Or is just for complexity's sake?
I stopped paying attention to DF development around the time Toady One started focusing in depth on history and cultural generation - apparently nowadays, you can have temples, bards, all sorts of stuff that seems like it only impacts the Adventurer Mode, and will have some impact on Dwarf preferences, history, etc.
None of this strikes me as anything I need to know about when playing the Fortress mode of the game, and seems like just something that Toady enjoys working on.
But for all I know, there's someone out there who's going to love all of this stuff, and it's going to make gameplay much better for them.
System-driven space colony simulation, with a particular emphasis on maintaining breathable air.
Seems only logical...
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Bloodline:Boatmurdere...
For instance in one game a dragon attacked my fort. NBD. Everyone got inside and I was planning to catch it in a cage trap. Then use it as a decoration.
However there was a group of Human traders at my Trade Depot. They decided to run over and fight the dragon. Now the dragon is running around breathing fire. Which started a forest fire. Which destroyed my wooden bridges and doors.
Completely unscripted fun, just a result of the game simulation.
Also the game manages to make you hate goblins and elves through your interactions with them.
In evil regions eyeballs grow out of the ground, blinking at passing dwarves. However cattle will happily graze on them.
If you "delve too greedily and too deep" you'll unleash horrors of the underworld.
There's just a lot of neat stuff there.
The fortress didn't last too long after that. I tried my best to clean things up, making a nice new dining hall and brewery, but the remaining dwarves took it pretty hard - one of them ended up losing his mind while drunk and slaughtered most of the rest in the great dining hall, the rest died of disease because nobody wanted to clean up the mess. I was so proud of my towering (and first!) fortress, and I lost it all because of one stupid mistake, but it's definitely the most fun I've ever had losing a game.
Also, I see Dwarf Fortress as the natural progression of programming games. As programmers, we always look to abstract away busywork. DF takes away the busywork of dungeon-building and hands it off to little applets.
Basically it became popular by word of mouth. I think the popularity of Minecraft led more people to hear about it, since Minecraft was said to be influenced by it. But as far as I know, it's always been a slow build, never went viral or became an overnight success.
Uh. The US... sorry, but if you spend like $1600 before food that is not "low expenses". If you can get below $1300 WITH food then I'd say that's low. Some people have to live with much less than $1000/month altogether.
Gnomoria and Rim World might be simpler games to learn. However not as deep or complex.
In more development terms, to me, "incredibly hard" is embedded assembly programming (im probably not even using the right term for this) ...
The level of hard i would put DF at is "learning VIM"... which I think is apt, because 1) its a steep but rather short learning curve to get around, 2) over a while you naturally get better at navigating/commanding/etc and 3) there are plugins and "distributions" just like vim, to make it easier for a beginner, etc.
Now that I write this out, im thinking VIM is the perfect analog for DF :)
[NOTE] I'm a DF n00b. I have less than 5 hours playing. I'd say it took me about 30 minutes to "get it" though, and now I'm actually playing what I would consider "normally"
=)
Any number of DF players who are also UI designers (hey, there have gotta be a lot of 'em) could propose a dozen minor interface changes that would make DF feel more consistent, and easier to learn without even changing any of the mechanics of the game. You couldn't say that about vim. (Or, if you could, I'd love to hear your interface change proposals for vim!)
I'm a ten year veteran, and have helped many other "hardcore" gamers to get into it, but none of them have stuck with it, citing difficulty. It's a shame, as it has more to give than any other game.
The only thing I am saying is that the usability is complex with respect to what I am used to, in games.
It reminds me of using flight simulators. Many instruments and controls that you need to learn and understand.
I suppose there could be an argument for taking adventurer mode and making it more like a MUD but I'm not really an AM person.
here's a bug related to turtle pond going extinct :
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=2780
"Since turtles were my only source of shells, which are ever so important for moods, I am keenly feeling their absence after a few years. I went ahead and modded my world so that hoofs and horns can be used also for shells, (which is actually very cool btw, its awesome to have an artifact decorated with Elk Bird horn.)
However, my ponds were filled with turtles early on, and I accumulated many shells that unfortunately rotted away. It seems like fish populations are regenerating, but turtles are not among those, and since I found that odd I decided to report it."
"Pond turtles lay eggs, which might contribute why they will only breed in off site statistics if that's any relevance.
DF structures used for dfhack only implies that eggs that are hatched go into certain classes, and entity ID is one of them for intelligent species (crow men eggs layed and hatched on site belong to you etc., underground egg laying races have been in constant decline since they were added because of this until recently)
Egg layers have always had a hard time repopulating due to dependency on a object to breed which limited and stagnated them in world gen (made easier by spontaneous population regeneration in world-gen recently). I cannot recollect if its possible to offer pet pond turtles nestboxes to use by pitting or pasturing enough of them in a contained area as a alternative or even if they have additional orientation/marriage barriers to overcome we are not aware of.
All gendered vermin breed (or apparently breed, they have the prequesite animal tags but its uncertain whether they become pregnant whilst in the game world before leaving for the site population tally and being replaced with a new generated creature in their momentary existances, or even if they do become pregnant at all with child/adult born states) hermaphrodital or non-gender typical vermin are usually accounted for by being virtually innumerable to compensate for no breeding on site. Technically if the female pond turtle could get off the map by dissapearing and being replaced whilst pregnant it could spawn additional turtles slowly.
Fish are very visible with ASCII symbols and can be seen in murky ponds and rivers for periods of time if a example is needed, if they are close together they are in the capacity to breed and keep the numbers up. Drop a sizable amount of caught vermin fish into a empty pool and it should sustain the fish in theory as they repopulate with compatible mates in that area.
Similar designs have been used with isolated cave spider rooms with wild vermin which appear to be self sustainable and harvested with burrowed animal trappers & web collectors. "