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Comment by mlindner | Hacker News Reader

I've tried Rimworld a couple times and it always came off as just bland, flat, and uninteresting compared to Dwarf Fortress. Once you played it a bit you could see "through" the game and into the random number generation beneath it. Also I didn't like the sci-fi aspect personally as I like fantasy more.

Perhaps it's gotten better in the few intervening years since I last tried it.

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RimWorld has tons of interesting features, it's a game I really want to love. But their much-hyped "story generator" is really just a very basic random event system, without even much variety to pad it out. The only "AI" thing it does is take into account the status of your colony (wealth, etc).

It's frustrating because it's the system which really drives the whole game, and it's so simple, and so arbitrary. Without Dwarf Fortress' depth of simulation, it needs some stronger glue to tie the game together.

Yes you did a much better job of describing my feelings on the game. The systems are very simple and show it leaves nothing more than randomness and an almost complete lack of emergent behavior that happens in Dwarf Fortress.

I love fantasy too! Do you know if any games that are like RimWorld but fantasy? I saw Amazing Cultivation Simulation but you need a master's degree to play that, at least that's how it felt to me...

> like RimWorld but fantasy?

Dwarf Fortress ;)

The problem is/was the learning curve. And of course the UI. I really hope the Steam version is done well and not just one of those graphics packs that you can install on Dwarf Fortress.

It's a proper UI and it includes in game tutorials and help pages to explain the basics of the game as well as making the game much prettier than any existing tilesets IMO.

DF is also not as 'hard' as most people think, if you start your fort in an easy location you can quickly build a self sufficient colony inside a hill or underground and make it inaccessible to most threats once you understand the basics of production in the game. And with the UI upgrades managing your dwarfs' moods is a lot easier too.

The only thing that has been preventing me from being an annoying df evangelist for years has been the horrible UI :D

I want the opposite. I like the complexity of Dwarf Fortress, but the fantasy element makes it not as immersive as Rimworld for me.

There are DF overhaul mods that make it scifi. I think the big one is called The Long Night or something like that. DF has steam workshop integration so you might see it there soon

Clanfolk, though it's more medieval than fantasy.

You need Rimworld with mods. To see what's possible see for example "The Wizards of the Black Death" playthrough by Rhadamant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIkNXqlIIas

And here is the list of mods for Rimworld which creates this world:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=27809...

Rhadamant shows a ton of different Rimworld scenarios in his Youtube channel, and does marathon Twitch streams of the game as well. Many of them heavily modded to do all sorts of fantasy and sci-fi scenarios. You can get many ideas for your own scenarios from them.

To bring it back slightly on-topic, I strongly suspect that while Dwarf Fortress influenced Rimworld, Rimworld had some influence on the Steam version of DF in terms of the graphical user interface.

I've actually played with mods and Zetrith's multiplayer mod is a must! No honestly, stop what you're doing and go check it out. Especially if you have at least one friend! I manage to even make it work with many many mods.

It's been a couple of years since I last played using this mod, so it's probably even better now. The only down side at the time was that it would desync sometimes, so you'd have to wait a bit a resync, but it's still so worth it because the experience is just so amazing! I would probably pay the price of the game again just to have an official version of multiplayer.

This is co-op multiplayer, at least how I played it.

Highly recommended to anyone who likes RimWorld and has at least one friend!

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