Having dabbled in dwarf fortress over the years, I think they did a really nice job on the steam release. It must have been a daunting project to streamline most/all of the features in DF.
Congrats to the team on their success!
Congrats to the team on their success!
What features did they streamline? I thought they just replaced the ASCII graphics with sprites and changed some hotkeys?
Instead of painstakingly assigning jobs to dwarves in a very fine grained process through the labor menu for each individual, dwarves are assigned to jobs.
That is, the vast majority of jobs are by default assigned to all dwarves, and the game intelligently assigns work based on dwarf skill and pathing distance. You are free to tweak labor settings from there, for instance by assigning a forge to be the exclusive workplace of a legendary weaponsmith and only making weapons at that forge, or specializing miners to only mine so that they won't find themselves cleaning fish when idle between mining gigs. You can also create custom work profiles more akin to the old setup, enabling or disabling specific tasks and then assign that profile to specific dwarves if you want to get so detailed. However I find the new system works very well.
>the game intelligently assigns work based on dwarf skill and pathing distance
sounds like mostly what happened before.
It is a new paradigm to play through, and the immediate reaction a lot of old time players had was negative on this, but the idea was that instead of having to micromanage every labor for every dwarf, you can just let most things be open to anyone and it won’t be super wasteful.
There are a number of changes like that which are geared toward making something less tedious, even if some people don’t like the the change on principle.
I do think there is a lot of work to be done on the new DF but they’re out the gate running. Really need to implement a system to stop dwarfs from trapping themselves, which admittedly was never part of the base game but DFhack did a lot of QOL stuff that they should really incorporate into this new version.
Except for when you desperately need someone to pull that lever to raise the drawbridge to head off a horde of feral elves, and it assigns the job to a staggeringly-sober one-legged basketweaver who's having a party in a copse of trees halfway across the map.
It's a totally new UI between the two versions: it's much friendlier to a broad population while still retaining the same game mechanics.
[edit] I'll also add my favorite change: performance. Before the steam version I always ended up abandoning my fort because the framerate just became unbearable. In the steam version I have yet to encounter these issues.
It has a simple tutorial, the interface is fully mouse driven, there's sound effects and music, and the tile graphics really do a great job to visualise what's going on in the game.
I've got a decent run on a side project right now, and I've noticed that (no surprise) when I get into a new game, all of a sudden all of my "healthy" hobbies like guitar, weightlifting, and coding go out the window.
Definitely planning to take a run at Dwarf Fortress eventually though.
Everything used to just be in a central massive "press a single letter for this specific submenu" sub-screen on the right third of the screen, with multiple submenus to navigate to what you're trying to do.
I can't ABABABABABAB to add a bunch of beds to a carpenter anymore, DD doesn't mine.
The hotkey path for placing doors in the steam version is bananas. Still a great game! Hoping there's a mod or a patch that lets me use the classic keys with the new interface eventually though.
Wonder if the publishers use DVORAK or something.
Nested menus in workshops get even worse. God forbid having to click and scroll Steel -> Weapon -> Battleaxe too many times.
In the "the feature is less complex" in the steam version (note most of these are still in the simulation, just missing from the GUI so inaccessible to the player), some examples are:
- Health and body part level damage - Reading historical logs - Ammo - Idlers counter
But I think you can get around that by designating one more z-level than you need, and then removing that. Blueprint mode or designation priorities might also work.
Tell you what, I am going to try now, will post my results shortly.
Edit: Yes this works. After finishing the designation, it will change to the corresponding stair type. By doing one more z-level, you move the "down/up only" layer there, and can remove it. The designations in the level below will not change as a result.
For anyone wondering: Yes, this is still an improvement over the old way of doing it.
More generally, it speaks to a level of sloppiness that tells me I'm better off waiting a couple of years. I've played a lot of buggy DF builds over the years. It's just part of the experience, but I don't have as much free times as I used to so I'd rather wait than play through the bugs these days.
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I did notice that it seems like dwarves won't/can't dig straight up with stairs, they need another path up. Not sure if that's new or pre-existing limitation, as I haven't played classic in over a decade.
I couldn't play the game before, now it is a joy.
2)Automining veins is now part of the base game rather than a dfhack thing
3)The military UI is still confusing and counterintuitive but it's a billion times better than before. I've actually managed to effectively train, equip and station troops and deploy them in combat without having to check the wiki. There's no way I could do that in classic and I've played a fair amount of DF
4)Things like the minecart UX and the thing which specifies how bridges open etc are way less confusing than before. Small, but there are thousands of UX improvements like that.
5)Rather than sometimes it's hjkl and sometimes wasd and sometimes arrow keys and sometimes numpad and sometimes you can select a box and sometimes you select the first tile and then the last tile to get a rectangle and sometimes you select the first tile and then use hjkl (or sometimes wasd) to grow your rectangle to the size you want, now you click the first tile, then the last tile. For everything. Building bridges, specifying zones, specifying burrows, building stockpiles etc, they all work the same. (Ironically there is a keyboard cursor if you want that but it is buggy for me at the moment.)
6)The system for worldgen and embark is also a lot better. For example you don't have the 3 weird confusing maps any more, you just have a big map and if you zoom in you get another map where you can pick exactly where you want to embark and the size.
7)Notifications. They all appear on the side in cronological order with an appropriate icon, you can hover to get the basics or click to see more or interact. Right-clicking dismisses them.
I could go on but you get the idea. There are lots of examples like this. It's still DF, but at least playing it isn't some Kafka-esque bullshit nightmare.