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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Some casual alternatives to Dwarf Fortress include Gnomoria or Rimworld. They do not have the same level of depth, but they're enjoyable.

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+1 for Rimworld. I've sunk hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into that game. It doesn't have the same depth as Dwarf Fortress, but still has a lot of depth and a ton of Fun. Especially with Randy Random and his random event generator

Another +1 for Rimworld. I picked it up after a particularly long stretch of playing DF, and it has managed to both satisfy that DF itch while providing plenty of its own unique Fun.

DF is certainly deeper, but Rimworld is much more approachable to the average player. I would argue that Rimworld is also significantly more moddable than DF is. While with DF you can change the raws, Rimworld allows modifying some of the base game code, so you can do way more with Rimworld mods.

I got the expansion. It is mostly for people that do the quests. I am not too much into the quests, caravans and such.

I actually haven't gotten that yet. With how much there already is to do, I haven't found the itch to expand the base game just yet.

There is also Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead[1] which is open source

[1] https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA

I love CDDA, but it is not really that similar to DF. It's a very punishing rougelike with a huge amount of depth, but it's an RPG style game, not a strat/base management game, and it doesn't create a procedural story with Rich depth, it was some fun depth, but that's coded in by the developers.

HN crowd might be impressed by the scale of the contributors though. Last I checked it has over 1.1k contributors. Just cloning the repo takes a while.

Did not know about this one, I'll check it out.

Should also checkout Kenshi, on the surface very different, but in practice I think it can scratch a similar itch.

I liked Kenshi, but it was a bit too shallow and rather janky. I am looking forward to Kenshi 2.

Haha yeah, I consider Kenshi to be the jankiest game that I consider worth playing.

For me, that title was recently taken over by My Summer Car.

In Rimworld, the most entertaining mode is the one where you start with only one wounded colonist with no gear and no food.

You have to build a shelter, craft some rudimentary weapons, hunt, and then survive your first raid.

gnomoria is different insofar as the gnomes don't have personality. this makes it more of a "pure" sandbox simulation game rather than a story generator (which is probably the biggest part of DF/rimworlds appeal).

Gnomoria

Edited, thanks.

CDDA is gradually evolving into more of a Dwarf Fortress than a Roguelike as time goes on.

Could you elaborate?

Digging, destruction, building, crafting, all are becoming as much the focus as slaying zomboids

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