Dwarf Fortress

[Silfir]

I know I'm kind of late in jumping on the bandwagon, but holy crap is it an awesome bandwagon!

When I first discovered Dwarf Fortress (available at bay12games.com) months ago I knew that there was an awesome game somewhere, but didn't have the patience to learn it. It was not until I read through the story of Boatmurdered that I finally managed to stick with it.

I have now reached the point in the learning curve where the godly amounts of fun and sadly lost (NOT wasted) time is starting. What I find hard is sticking with the game after the first immigrant wave, generally because my first fortresses were apparently quite popular amongst soap makers. Now I'm currently stuck because I have a secretive mood weaver hungering for leather and cloth, and I can't find the cloth I've bought from the elves - apparently one of the kobold fuckers stole it. I would not like to lose my only freshly acquired weaver, but how can I make cloth in a few months' time? I think I have cloth plants ready, but planting them and making the cloth out of them (provided I can figure out how) is time-consuming, especially since the only skill needed for that procedure I have is the grower, and if I need a thresher or even weaver I have to use dabblers. Do you see chances or do I have to write the guy off?

[Tnx]

Ehh just let him die lol, alot of ppl restart their fortresses like crazy, since your newer I think you should just mess around first with your fortress. I don't know how picky you are but I've found that I've restarted a bunch of times because of LOCATION. Early on in the game, I had a REALLY REALLY nice site that I was playing on but deleted the save file because I messed up on a tiny little building project. That site was perfect for my tastes and I've never really found a site like that since :\

The problem with letting people die or killing em off in this game is if they have lots of friends, their friends will throw tantrums and stuff. What I do is I let my first seven dwarves be friends with each other, but then the rest I try to keep em busy so that they aren't standing idle in the dining room (when that happens, their relationships go up)

Can I see your fortress if possible? I like looking at other people's designs.

[Dorten]

I like looking at other people's designs.

You may already know, but: http://mkv25.net/dfma/

Alot of maps there.

And for the weaver - to heck with him! But if you want to keep him alive, even with dabblers it woldn't take long to process ONE plant into cloth. Just make sure, that said dabblers won't distract on hauling and whatever.

[Tnx]

Yeah, my favorite city on there so far is this one.. I just think it looks awesome.

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-2912-seabr...etownoffortune

[Kato]

The premise looked really good behind Dwarf Fortress...but this is one of the few games that I think an ASCII environment damages the game more than it should. It's almost too much to me...hard to make sense of it all. Especially when everyone is changing around their tilesets for the game. I know that there is....limited graphics (lol), but this game could benefit from a true tileset with graphics.

Yes...I KNOW what this game does...I KNOW how deep this game is...and I also KNOW how long it can take just to GENERATE A WORLD. All because of how far in depth this game is. Very impressive...but making a tileset and actually using some graphics wouldn't change very much of that information and it's processing. Very impressive that one man did this. But I still can't take the time to get in to it for some reason.

[Silfir]

Generating the world now seems to be a matter of three minutes (I was really surprised, because the first version I tried took a lot more than that). The real time-consuming part is constantly regenerating the world so you finally get a location with magma, different biomes including one with sand and one with a sedimentary layer, with woodlands, but without an aquifer, and still small enough that your framerate doesn't get raped...

In fact I've found that once you do get over the control learning curve, getting a decent fortress going is easy, if you have any wood and stone available.

My current fortress (playing on my laptop, framerate is pretty bad at times since the CPU sometimes slows down because of overheating) is now at 73 population; I've got a Dungeon Master and a Hoardmaster (>200000 dwarfbucks of wealth), and a Mayor and a Captain of the Guard obviously. Four legendary dwarves - my two starting miners, my starting mason, and a child bone carver. Sadly, even though there were igneous extrusive stones listed in the embark screen, I haven't found magma and my lowest explored layer seems to contain exclusively contain gneiss and dolomite. Still, I've found a vein of bitominous coal, so I'll get by for a while.

EDIT: In my opinion, any tileset would look wonky for this game. Finding out what looks like what is similar to learning the controls - intimidating, but not actually all that bad.

EDIT2: I don't have screenshots or the game available right now.

I'm actually pretty proud of this design, mostly because it is my first to make effective use of z-levels. Basically, I've got the entrance surrounded by a half-circle channel, with the ramps removed so the only way to my fortress is across a bridge, with military areas (barracks, archery range, stockpiles of armor, weapons and ammo with a craftsdwarf's workshop for more ammo, and some floodgates blocking water channeled from the river, which I can release to drown invaders that make it across my bridge. I also have floodgates I can open to fill my channel with water, but unfortunately it doesn't quite work as planned - the water dries out before it fills the channel with decent amounts of water, so I just stick with the channels for now.

The second level of my fortress consists solely of soil underground, and is thus the place where my food stockpiles and underground farming are located. Works rather well. Also, I've got sand here, which is awesome.

The third level contains my "working area", where all my other workshops with respective stockpiles are located. I've mined out some sort of grid, with 10x10 squares mostly, and I've done some mining, and found my bituminous coal.

The fourth level is for my dwarves. I've got individual bedrooms for each and every one of my 73 dwarves, complete with cabinets, beds and sometimes, coffers, as well as the luxuriously furnished rooms of my Dungeon Master, Mayor and Captain of the Guard, and a rather large dining area. Currently contemplating setting up a sculpture garden, as my legendary mason churns out statues faster than I can reasonably place them. Also, in the northwest part dedicated to exploratory mining I've found and mined out a large limonite vein, right next to generous amounts of bauxite (shame I don't have magma).

Fifth, sixth and I think seventh level are all dedicated to exploratory mining at the moment. Apart from magnetite and some more kinds of stones, nothing remarkable.

[Tnx]

@Kato, yeah I can't stand ASCII as well, I use mayday's tileset which is pretty easy to figure out at a glance. It's real pleasing to the eye too. You should check that out..
http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm

@Silfir, what version are you playing? There's a feature to see the sites like magma and stuff on the tiles if you enable it (unless of course you didn't want to see it for the surprise). I also had a child legendary bone carver in one of my forts, when he became an adult he made bone bolts 24/7 and I started getting cheap and using those as ammo (they're also good for practice!)

[Silfir]

That's precisely what I'm planning to do with my legendary bone carver child too! Bone bolts forevar. And a couple of masterpiece skull totems to sell.

Yeah, I know there are tools and init options, but that's taking the fun out of exploring a bit, isn't it? Next time I'm going for an obsidian layer, I think I've got better chances with those. Plus obsidian rocks.

Also, I can't for the life of me imagine why you would want to ruin this wonderful game with shitty non-ASCII graphics...