Comment by KVFinn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KVFinn | Hacker News Reader

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DF has a reputation for being impenetrable. Like it requires weeks or months of work or study to get anything out of it. Not true! You can start from scratch and have a crazy little adventure in minutes. Really.

Dwarf Fortress: The Detailed Roguelike That’s Easy To Play

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/04/16/dwarf-fortress-th...

>Dwarf Fortress is famous for producing anecdotes by the minute. The two-man, twelve-year, donation-funded indie project weaves together procedurally generated geography, civilizations and histories to create a rich fantasy world. It simulates its characters – standard fare like dwarves, elves, goblins, etc. – down to the most minute detail, and when all its systems combine, the results are often hilarious, occasionally tragic, and always surprising.

>It’s also blissfully easy to play. The game is free to download and easy to install, the UI comes with a detailed and handy help system, and there’s a community wiki full of guides – not that you’ll need them. I started from scratch last night and was having fun immediately.

>This whole experience has taken around twenty minutes, and while it’s a shame Akan Seasonveiled didn’t get to see more of her homeland, the experience encapsulated much of what I love about Dwarf Fortress. I discovered a town, talked to people and formed a posse. I went on a dynamically generated fantasy adventure and slayed a grim beast. I discovered a camp of travellers out in the wilds, had a tense and hard-fought combat encounter, and finally met my own grisly end. It was exciting! It was just a tiny taste of this world, but I’m itching to go explore more.

I actually enjoy simply generating worlds and looking through the history afterwords... even easier.

The ASCII interface is already a huge stumbling block for anyone not used to it. For anyone that is used to roguelikes, then Adventure mode is 'Just Another Roguelike'. Dwarf mode, where you have to build a home, has a huge number of pitfalls.

Try figuring out the military system on the first read-through, for example (or even without a read-through!). It's flexible and makes sense... after you've come to grips with it... and there are a lot of moving parts and tweaks for any kind of military deployment. DF in 'Dwarf mode' is one of the poster-children for games with steep learning curves.

For me the problem is not the fact that the interface is ASCII, but the fact that is inconsistent. Each menu has its own little quirks to navigate it. Moving the focus from one part of a menu to the other takes different keypresses on each screen.

I was never able to decipher the military config screen. I rely on traps and animals (once I managed to have tigers!) to repel the first small invasions. Then I have Fun.

For the most part, the quirks are consistent, though.

I mean, it's not intuitively consistent, but basically there are navigation controls with or without having a selection cursor on the main screen (which is usually where the difference is, since navigation and some of the selection keys overlap).

If you look through the keybindings, there are "move selector / cursor" options and then secondary options for all of those, and that's more or less what they map to.

That's all part of the Fun[1].

[1] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.34:Losing

Aye, Fortress mode takes quite a lot of time on the wiki/forums to get used to. I've played quite a few roguelikes and it was more akin to learning vim (complete with all the single letter commands...)

But once you master it, you're draining the oceans, trapping whales in lead cages, and rocketing them down the steep slope to hell on minecarts as a kinetic demon-slaying weapon of choice. Or something like that :)

The thing I love about DF is knowing enough to see the creativity in other people's solutions to problems. I know enough to get a stable, defensible fort, but nothing too creative (I still can't work out how to disarm a caged goblin - so I generally have an ever-increasing number of cages...). But the glorious creativity in what so many people do with the DF 'framework' can be truly beautiful at times.

First, claim all the items (d-b-f), then dump them (d-b-d). Don't forget to switch off dumping the cages themselves (k-d on each cage). A whole slew of dwarf haulers should spring into action to strip your caged goblins naked. Then toss them in a pit and use them as live training for your militia.

Mass dump the tile the cage is on, then undump the cage itself is what I've always done. EDIT: and claim them. I haven't played for a while, I'm getting forgetful.

And yes, people can be very creative. Farming various rare creatures (possibly via draining oceans), creating orbital magma cannons that can target any part of the world, conquering hell, creating mechanical calculators that operate on magma where an "overflow" error results in a literal overflow of magma...

You don't see that in many games. But there aren't many Turing complete games out there, either. I think Minecraft & Starbound are the only big ones, though I'm not sure if Terraria is or isn't.

> creating orbital magma cannons that can target any part of the world

Mind giving the gist on how that's done?

Isn't Little Big Planet Turing complete?

Create a floor filled with hatches on a very high z level that covers your embark. Link all hatches to levers in a control room of doom somewhere. Pump magma up from the magma sea. Laugh manically when you flood the surface with magma :) (and destroy your FPS...)

Not sure about LBP as I haven't played it. I was hoping wikipedia would have a list of Turing-complete games but I can't find one.

Not a wikipedia page, but LBP is included in this list of accidentally Turing-complete things.

http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complet...

Magic the Gathering? You made my day. Of course, even rocks can be Turing-complete :) http://xkcd.com/505/

Rocks don't have their own rules on how to "execute." Calling the rocks Turing-complete is like pointing to a Turing machine's tape and saying it's the tape that's Turing-complete :-P

Good point, well made.

Thanks guys - looks like it was the claiming that I'd overlooked. Another fun thing about DF's complexity - so many layers. Dump, forbid/claim, dig, deconstruct, stockpile, zone, burrow, traffic cost...

Terraria isn't TC.

However, SpaceChem apparently is, but I am not sure that counts.

Actually, Terraria is. Before the update that added multiple colors of wire it was possible to create a very, very slow clocked NAND gate. Now it's possible to create a much faster NAND gate, and from there all the other logic.

On the other hand, "rogue" part of dwarf fortress is much easier than "dwarf fortress" part.

The fortress mode tutorial on the DF wiki allows you to build a self-sustaining fortress.

The Lazy Noob Pack is also of great help. One will probably have to wait for it to be updated for the newer version of DF, but one can begin with the previous version of DF and update when it's available.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Quickstart_guide

But the dwarf fortress part is amazing. My number 1 game.

>I started from scratch last night and was having fun immediately.

"Fun" in dwarf fortress usually refers to losing violently.

Capitalization of "fun" makes all the difference when reading stories about it.

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