I love dwarf fortress, but there are so many things about it that are just so unprofessional and amatuerish. I feel like the DF community has come a long way since its inception and that we should try holding ourselves to a higher standard, its time we all come into our own as programmers and start adding some polish.
Everybody has something about DF that drives them absolute batshit, its fun to play but it can be a grind.
Heres a list of crap that I would take a hammer to, in no particular order:
1) Being able to designate things for trade in the stocks menu
2) Being able to search through the stocks menu without having to hit tab
3) Including the basic workshop functions in the raws instead of hardcoding them so that they can be removed easily for custom mods
4) I always get shit for this, but... standardized materials. For the love of god, I'm sick to death of organizing my socks! Wood is wood is wood! Unless its supposed to be worth more or has some sort of special property, whats the point of having 100 different types of wool, leather, wood, meat, bones, ect.? At the very least streamline it to poultry, beef, pork, jerky (Carnivores are stringy and lean and don't make good livestock), fish ect.
5) More than 1 milk and 1 hide per creature for large creatures
6) Integrate Therapist into the UI! NOBODY wants to fuck with the tedious micromanagement of manually changing labors 1 at a time in-game, only noobs and autists do it that way.
7) Alphabetize the damn menus!
Don't make players use a different key for the same action! If you're going to use the arrow keys and page up and page down to scroll, use it on all the menus! Don't make me use the damn number pad like I'm learning how to use a keyboard...
9) Speaking of which, hotkeys are sort of garbage to begin with. DF should use mouse controls and icon interfaces, only using hotkeys to supplement the controls.
10) Artifacts are frustratingly useless, despite being one of the better role playing aspects of the fortress. The player is Armok, right? So shouldn't he have some say in what kind of artifacts his dwarves create? After all, isn't HE inspiring their vision with divine inspiration? Wouldn't it be kind of cool to have at least some limited control over what kind of artifact you're dwarves produce?
11) Archery Practice has been broken since v34.xx. When am I going to be able to train my archers? When am I going to be able to mix my training ammo with my combat ammo and have it work as intended?
12) Why do we keep adding new content instead of patching up broken features and bugs? Bins, Bags and Barrels are still super broken.
13) I think there should be a way to assign a squad to a burrow from the squads screen
14) Most of the new plants and trees are bloat. A basic selection of fruits and vegetables is fine, you don't need 5 types of wheat. I miss when we only had the core plants and crops and everything had sort of a dwarfy name, even if rope reeds were basically just hemp.
15) I hate the library system. None of the knowledges actually do anything or contribute anything to the game. Making paper is unnecessarily complicated and the text gets cut off when you make a book out of written pages. Its added another complication to an already complicated game that doesn't really do anything.
16) Temples, likewise, are just another addition to the already lengthy list of dwarven needs. Both libraries and temples are neat ideas, in theory, but neither is really implemented all that well.
17) I think there should be some way to integrate meeting halls and taverns. I'm not sure if dwarves get a happy thought from eating in a tavern the same way they do with a meeting hall, but I dislike having to designate both a meeting area and a meeting hall in the same area.
18) If kennels are no longer going to be used would it be too much to ask to remove them from the menu?
19) I feel like seige engines are just set peices. They hardly work at all.
Well, shit. I guess I just had to get that out of my system. More to come if I think of it.
*ringring feels better after yelling at a noble*