I am roughly aware that it is a very complex simulation that exists under an ASCII art and menu presentation, but it's not clear at all to me how gameplay actually works. Does the game more or less "play" itself and allow you to nudge things in different directions to observe the outcome, or are you responsible for micro-managing all of your dwarves' lives?
The idea is that you do specify where dwarves will build items (like beds, tables, workstations) and you also specify zones (stockpile food here, grow mushrooms here) and provide orders (chop all trees in this area). But _then_ you tell the dwarves what kind jobs you want them to do. You tell the cook dwarf that they're allowed to cook, haul, and maybe they're allowed to farm too. The cooking stove will have a job order that says: "make X meals" or "make meals until you have X many" You tell the mining dwarf that he's allowed to mine and haul iron ore only. You tell the construction dwarf to build stuff. And then the dwarves manage their own days. They "work" 10ish hours a day based off of what tasks are available, and they eat/drink/hangout the rest of the time. You never actually have to micro manage them, you just set up rough guidelines.
Fortress is a base management sim, you don't directly control anything, you issue orders and then drwarves take those orders and do them in their own time.
Adventure mode is a rougelike with in a deep world.
So there is the option for the ant farmer as well.