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Comment by wheats | Hacker News Reader

>streamline most/all of the features in DF

What features did they streamline? I thought they just replaced the ASCII graphics with sprites and changed some hotkeys?

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The labor system is the biggest thing that got refined.

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.

Is that different from simply making all labors enabled by default in old dwarf fortress?

>the game intelligently assigns work based on dwarf skill and pathing distance

sounds like mostly what happened before.

That's a good question! I am not too familiar with how job assignment worked under the hood in classic DF so I can't really answer. I'm mostly going off of a devlog and a followup reddit post from one of the Kitfox folks.

I don’t think the old system cared about either proficiency or proximity, it just picked whomever was available. Besides, there was no way for the player to "make all labora enabled by default" in the previous versions, or even "enable/disable one particular labor for all", because you could only toggle labors for a single dwarf at a time.

I'm quite certain that proximity has been accounted for for many years. Obviously availability was a prerequisite.

> I'm quite certain that proximity has been accounted for for many years.

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.

While vampires and other undead members of your society can be problematic, a setup where you can trap them in a lever room is highly convenient. They don't have any feelings and will have near 100% availability to pull a lever.

Proximity, yes. But unlike before if you do decide to let everyone do everything now you’ll still end up biasing toward a set of dwarves that consistently gain proficiency instead of a freewheeling rotation of everyone doing everything and nobody getting good at anything.

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.

Usually, I have to worry more about miners hauling the rock they just mined to a stockpile.

There's a massive difference between Steam DF and the previous DF that I played (granted, that was probably in 2019).

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.

I don't know the classic version all too well (because I never got into it despite multiple attempts), but the Steam release is generally much more approachable (so far I have put over 50 hrs into it and love it).

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.

Sounds I need to stay well away from this game for now haha, I bounced off Factorio several times over the last few years and got wildly addicted to it a couple months ago. I imagine a similar fate could be in store with DF if I let myself peek in.

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.

I feel that for sure. Both the risk-of-wild-addiction part and the kills-my-other-efforts part. There are whole classes of games I don't dare play because they feel like being productive/creative but have shorter/better reward feedback loops than the things I'd rather be doing.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I'm now writing short post each day, and think it is better spent time then playing Factorio for two hours, like my friend does.

I haven't played the Steam version, but it's my understanding the menus aren't keyboard-based anymore. That alone is a massive undertaking, Dwarf Fortress has an insane number of submenus for them to figure out good GUI places for them all.

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.

All the menus are still keyboard navagable, if you have that muscle memory already. I think that's a great touch

This isn't true, as far as I know. Some menus are, but hotkeys have been changed quite a bit. Quite a few menus seem mouse only.

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.

Agree there's definitely some quirks with building and making things not via work orders. Even for queuing up a couple of copper greaves at a metalworker's shop (because my king is obsessed with demanding their creation and banning their export), I opt for work orders rather than going through and selecting armor -> copper -> greaves twice.

Or when 20 something dwarves plummet into lave in a tragic mining accident and you need to engrave all the slabs? awful. On the whole, the UI stuff is a significant improvement, though.

Yes, there are some definite losses in the move to a mouse based interface. I'm glad I had enough of a break from my last ASCII DF play, so my muscle memory isn't driving me insane. Some of the hotkeys are a little rough (requiring a big stretch across the keyboard or two hands on the kb but I'm using a mouse now..) and I hope they get another pass.

YUP. Critical functions (doors?!) should all be on the left side of the keyboard if you're going to make me use the mouse.

Wonder if the publishers use DVORAK or something.

Whoever settled on B-P-R for doors is some form of sadist.

The real move is to get in the habit of forbidding your fancy stuff by default, and then using "closest material" and "keep building after placement" for all furniture.

You csn select bed and select placing multiple ones now, so no need to spam hotkeys.

Place, yes. But queuing them up for crafting in a workshop is a chore of clicks before you have an office set up for making work orders.

Nested menus in workshops get even worse. God forbid having to click and scroll Steel -> Weapon -> Battleaxe too many times.

Yeah i only use work orders now, only look at workshops to see what they make if I didn't already know.

Are you certain? I've played the classic version for ten years and the Steam release has completely different hotkeys, and is missing keyboard control for some tasks entirely.

Yes, they also implemented a tutorial, which I think is new, and reordered and reorganised the menus iirc. (This is from memory so I could of course be wrong).

One example of "something was a pain in the ass but no longer is" streamling is that you can dig a stairway across levels and it will put a down stair on the top level and up/down stairs on the middle levels and a up stair on the bottom level.

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

Is it true that you can't manually choose what kind of stairs to place anymore if you want to? I read a Steam review that claimed that your stair example is true, but it doesn't always work perfectly and there's no way to manually specify what kind of stairs you want. Honestly kept me from buying the game for now.

Why was that the thing that kept you off? I have not played in a while, is it that impactful?

Well, it is fairly impactful in that if the automatic stair generation puts a down stair where an up/down stair should have been, there is no way to completely fix it. You can build the correct stairs, but it will never be carved out of natural rock since that rock has been removed. Call me crazy, but that's a distinction that matters to me in what is effectively a procedural story generator.

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.

There are stairs that only go up or down?...

Yes. Lets see if I can make an ASCII rendition that renders correctly. `-` is level floor, `v` is a down stair, `x` is an up/down stair and `^` is an up stair. The simplest possible stair connection between layers is a down stair above with an up stair below:

    ---v---
    ---^---

To make a very tall staircase, you can either stack pairs of stairs next to each other (this approach actually has some gameplay benefits, but isn't usually necessary):

    ---v-----
    ---^v----
    ----^v---
    -----^---

Or, you can use up/down stairs, which are a single block that acts as both an up and a down stair:

    ---v---
    ---x---
    ---x---
    ---^---

In the ASCII game, you had to place all of these manually, so you were in full control. In the new Steam game, it's my understanding that you just select the top and bottom layers for your staircase and it automatically builds the "right" stair types for you. The problem I have seen reported is that sometimes it will erroneously designate something like this:

    ---v---
    ---v---
    ---x---
    ---^---

This staircase does not allow dwarves to transit from layer 2 up to layer 1, and permanently removes material, meaning it's not possible to completely fix the mistake.

Ah I see, that makes sense to build stairs in a shape of, huh, stairs. Thanks for that explanation :)

You can always construct stairs, so it's not permanent. The stairs really are a lot less complicated now, IMO

Call me crazy if you want, but a mistake that leads to having to add a constructed tile to what should have been a purely carved room is borderline grounds for abandoning a fort in my book.

Well, it was equally possible to make mistakes with the old system...

Haven't seen that bug happen so far. Wonder if it's just a case where someone had already mined out one of the tiles that should have been an up/down, so all the game could do is put a down stair. That said, I only really use stairs for exploration or project tunnels, and it's all ramps in my fortress proper.

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.

Relative to a particular floor, there are stairs that go up to the floor above and there are stairs that go down to the floor below.

Oh that wasnt clear to me, that makes sense, thank you!

As far as I can tell: yes. The top z-layer of designated stairs will always become pure down, the bottom layer pure up.

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.

Cursor-based interfaces was probably a big one. They also have things like minimaps, dwarf sprites that reflect equipment gender and profession. It's more than just a tileset. I think they also made a new jobs template system.

That is a non charitable but fairly accurate way of phrasing it. I would say more accurate would be to say the user interface was completely rethought and much more approachable.

I couldn't play the game before, now it is a joy.

On the other hand, for DF veterans "just replaced the ASCII graphics with sprites and changed some hotkeys" would have been the most charitable thing they could have done. I haven't played the Steam version yet, but my reading of reviews gives me the strong impression that they've changed so much that I will have to approach it as an entirely new game.

1)Labour, as a sibling said. You no longer need dwarf therapist to play the game without losing your marbles

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.

As minor as it is, having a settings screen you can tweak ingame instead of a .txt config file in the install folder you have to twiddle with and then relaunch the game is a real nice change.

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