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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Do you actually play it? I'm a bit the same about reading about it, yet I have never once played it for myself!

Hah, this is like EVE Online for me. I love reading about the espionage and cloak and dagger and pure insanity, but other than a brief toe-dip...oh no I will not play it.

DF lives in my blood, however.

Totally agree on reading about EVE Online. This is a real classic if you haven’t seen it before, and actually contains a lot of very important notions for identifying Ponzi schemes: http://web.archive.org/web/20091026234156/http://geocities.c...

"I put the isk in risk!"

The ultimate "Safety off" button is Undock.

Use this date instead — the epilogue link fails in 2009.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080408110250/http://www.geociti...

Thank you. I spent an hour reading this, and am probably better off financially in the real world because of it.

There are lots of scams out there.

If DF is too daunting try RimWorld. It's based mostly on DF, but has graphics and is considerably more approachable. It's also heavily modded and with mods can get just as complicated as DF can.

I've put in probably over a thousand hours on it, and have played it over the years as new releases come out. I've gotten to the point where I usually hit FPS death (too large a fortress that it overloads the CPU) even on the harder starts and with dfhack to help.

The draw for me was the steep learning curve that rewards you with logical complexity when you finally understand it. The lore that your fortress generates, as well as the random stories, is just icing on the cake. It's definitely not for everyone though since the UI requires additional programs like DF Therapist and DF Hack to be manageable still.

For me, the reason I have stopped playing is that I have issues managing migrants.

There are just too many dwarves to care for. Even DF Therapist doesn't (or didn't?) really help micromanaging jobs. It becomes tedious quickly.

I remember seeing something about auto-allocating jobs, but it didn't work for me.

Most hardcore players set limits on the number of dwarves. This helps both with the micromanagement and with FPS.

That's why many players had methods for 'taking care of' migrants

I love reading about it, but have played for maybe 30 minutes. The game doesn’t intrigue me, but the building of it does.

Same for Minecraft and similar. Figuring out the software and the cool way it came into existence is the problem to solve, actually playing it is (perhaps incorrectly) predictable details and so boring.

I tried playing it like a decade or two ago. Couldn’t get past the ridiculous learning curve.

Its worth the effort and likely easier now than before. The myriad ways that a fortress can die amazes me. Its easy to get a fort that can survive invaders but ultimately your fortress will die. The number of times I have been nonplused by a new fortress failure is amazing. Those crazy dwarves keep finding new ways to destroy themselves.

This image is a reasonable estimation of the learning curve.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/iECXl.jpg

They're working on a Steam release with a more accessible interface, including mouse support. I suggest trying it again when that comes out.

Is there any timeline for the stream release? The release date on the store page just says, “Time is subjective.”

I just saw that O'Reilly published a book to help with that: https://www.amazon.de/Getting-Started-Dwarf-Fortress-complex...

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