Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF General Discussion => Topic started by: Archibald on September 30, 2017, 12:21:20 pm
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This topic comes from the General Discussions.
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Guess I should start from the beginning.
Back when I was very young, there was this game called "Cultures 2: Northland". It was quite complex for a game that has been created in early 2000s. I was so amazed that it blew my mind. I could go as far as to call it the DF of the 2000s. Just to give few examples:
a) Each person (viking) in your settlement is an unit of its own, with the needs like hunger, sleep, talk and faith. Most of them are civilians that can become things like farmers, scouts or extractors (person who gathers goods like stone, wood, clay and mushrooms).
b) A civilian becomes a farmer. After they hit 100% exeprience, you unlock the mill. 100% exp there and you get the bakery and the well, since you need flour and water to make bread. Some 100% exp later you unlcok three buildings: upgraded bakery where you can make cakes (more effective than bread and hunger time is reduced), beehive and brewery where you make mead (which is basically a unit of food you can eat two times).
Few years later, I found Minecraft. After that, terraria.
In short, I started to like these sandbox-type games.
So one day of this year I went to tv tropes and then... WTF? What the hell is Dwarf Fortress? I give the page a read and then I see it...
Boatmurdered.
And from that day, I started playing Dwarf Fortress.
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I also found out about DF through TV Tropes sometime last year, though I only actually decided to give it a try earlier this year and since then I've been unable to stop.
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This topic comes from the General Discussions.
***
Guess I should start from the beginning.
Back when I was very young, there was this game called "Cultures 2: Northland". It was quite complex for a game that has been created in early 2000s. I was so amazed that it blew my mind. I could go as far as to call it the DF of the 2000s. Just to give few examples:
a) Each person (viking) in your settlement is an unit of its own, with the needs like hunger, sleep, talk and faith. Most of them are civilians that can become things like farmers, scouts or extractors (person who gathers goods like stone, wood, clay and mushrooms).
b) A civilian becomes a farmer. After they hit 100% exeprience, you unlock the mill. 100% exp there and you get the bakery and the well, since you need flour and water to make bread. Some 100% exp later you unlcok three buildings: upgraded bakery where you can make cakes (more effective than bread and hunger time is reduced), beehive and brewery where you make mead (which is basically a unit of food you can eat two times).
It looks interesting. Where can I find this game?
So one day of this year I went to tv tropes and then... WTF? What the hell is Dwarf Fortress? I give the page a read and then I see it...
Boatmurdered.
And from that day, I started playing Dwarf Fortress.
I too found about DF on TvTropes when finding about Mermaid farming around 2011 or no later than Summer 2012. I started to play the following Summer, when my courseload became lighter.
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You can find it on Steam for 4.99 (7.99 if you buy it with the expansion "8th wonder of the world").
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Wait... Now I remember... I stumbled upon it when I was like what, 7? It was 2010 (I think) at the time and I couldn't figure out how to stop worldgen. But I remember the rough shape of part of the world.
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A friend of mine showed me it and it looked neat, then he plopped me into the game blind and made me learn it...
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A friend of mine showed me it and it looked neat, then he plopped me into the game blind and made me learn it...
Haha, sounds like my conversion tactic :).
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I first tried df when pc gamer released an article called 10 best free pc games. I actually started playing df a year later when pc gamer released another article called: df now has vampires and necromancers.
I used to visit that webpage a lot.
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A friend of mine showed me it and it looked neat, then he plopped me into the game blind and made me learn it...
Haha, sounds like my conversion tactic :).
I just deluge them with stories of Boatmurdered and necrobacon and the FAILCANNON (possibly my favorite DF contraption ever made) and the Hamlet of Tyranny and dwarven childcare.
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You can find it on Steam for 4.99 (7.99 if you buy it with the expansion "8th wonder of the world").
Couple bucks more at GOG, but I think the DRM-free is worth it. I bought it on sale, though. $4 for game and expansion, or something like that.
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IIRC it was while I was browsing Tv Tropes - I don't remember the exact page but it mentioned some of the shenanigans that occur within DF - that was how I discovered it - what actually got me into playing DF was finding a link to the archive of Boatmurdered.
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Since the beginning my gaming career, I get bored quickly with games, and I have allways been looking for the next bigger kick, games that set the bar as to what is possible. Being utterly frustrated of the performance of my GPU in all those cool sandbox early access games, I went looking for something truely innovative that wouldn't need a monster rig to run. I had seen DF around before but never dug into the topic bceause I was turned off by the ASCII, but that time I stumbled upon DF stories and read till 6am.
I must say DF surpasses my initial requirements by large and I even had the joy to notice that my weird 13" build (i7 47900mq, gtx765m (no own fan), 16gb crucial ballistix ram) is kind of perfekt for this game (wtf took me to invest 100€ more for better ram at the time?)
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A friend started talking about shooting and being mauled to death by camels in chat. I immediately knew i needed to play the game. I was not disappointed.
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See What was your gateway to Dwarf Fortress? (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=137401.msg5128148#msg5128148)
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College dorms. An acquaintance brought it to my attention.
Started playing seriously 6 years later.
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This Xkcd comic (http://"https://xkcd.com/1223/").
I looked up DF about a week later, and downloaded it a week after that. I then spent thirty minutes trying to designate normal ground to be mined and thinking that the mountainside over there was some sort of ocean.
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I learned it in two evenings due to the quckstart guide.
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On the comment section of the BYOND game Dungeon Master, which is a DF based multiplayer game. Someone there said that it was just like DF, and it led me to search for it over Google.
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I was just browsing the internet looking for interesting things, trying to find a game to get interested in. Months go by with me occasionally finding something and then getting bored of it or dissapointed by the over hype. Well, then I ended up on DF because it was on some list (Can't remember exactly what list). So I took a look and tried it out. I got a hell of a lot more than I expected to, with more details than I ever though possible with today's technology. DF is amazing.
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Back when I was very young, there was this game called "Cultures 2: Northland". It was quite complex for a game that has been created in early 2000s. I was so amazed that it blew my mind. I could go as far as to call it the DF of the 2000s. Just to give few examples:
It's Cultures 3: Northland. Downloaded, played a bit.Meh, not even settlers. Conrtols feel clunky, game feels not very great overall, and chains of production(?) don't make any damn sense. When you "hit 100 exp", you not unlock next building, you unlock ability of this single unit to work on it. Say to make bakery, you build a farm and make someone work on it. When he gets enough exp, you build a mill and make this farmer, not someone else, to work on it, because only unit with exp in farming can do this. Even more absurd, when unit must have exp in mining to be a mason, or hunting to be animal farmer.
Discovered dwarf fortress from phrase "Minecraft was inspired by dwarf fortress and bla bla bla". Looked at screenshots while don't looking at game, decided that i'ts something not very interesting for me, and forgot about it for two years. Then i looked at it again, then i maniacally readed trough looked at funny moments thread at russian forum, and... Oh. My. God. Downloaded... Umm... how i can mine here? Spent three hours hugging wiki to get started. :P
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http://www.nerfnow.com/comic/370
http://www.nerfnow.com/comic/371
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Didn't occur to me to say in my previous post, but I feel like it might be worth pointing out that DF has been in development since 2002...so technically it can itself be considered the "DF of the 2000s". :P
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The Streamer "Vargskelethor" got me into this game last year, I kept watching him play so I decided to play it myself. Complicated to learn at first, now I love the game and cant wait for the update :D
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In my case, I first took enough notice of DF to poke at it during the discussion / "controversy" about it getting voted up and eventually winning the Ascii Dreams (http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/) 2007 Roguelike of the Year award. This was late 2007, about the time it also got a surge of publicity after the Z-axis was introduced, so it was probably a case of seeing it in a few places within a short period overcoming my inertia. I didn't get involved with the forum until a bit later, and didn't create an account to post (rather than just lurk) until later yet; the forum says I didn't register until early 2010.
So, I never played in the "flat" / "horizontal" era, but we've now gone 10 years in the "3D" era... hopefully it will not be too much longer before we get other dimensions / realms / etc. and move to "4D" :)
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The Streamer "Vargskelethor" got me into this game last year, I kept watching him play so I decided to play it myself. Complicated to learn at first, now I love the game and cant wait for the update :D
joel also got me interested in Dwarf Fortress
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Another forum I was on started a succession game.
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I was reading a book about Minecraft, when it said that one of the games Minecraft was based on was the free game Dwarf Fortress. I thought "If it is free, why not try it?". And now, here I am.
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Youtuber called Quill18.
Me at first : Wtf is that ugly game... how can he... ? uhhhh!
Few days later : I must... MASTER it...
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I forget the exact order of my hearing about the game, but I started playing dwarf fortress I think with one of the first stable versions that introduced z-levels into the game.
Boatmurdered. And Three Panel Soul's few comics on the game were what got me interested and/or revised my interest in the game.
I usually get into the game for a few months, drop it for a year or two, and come back looking at new things that have been added.
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Screwing around at an after school something, a friend asks me "Hey, have you ever heard of Dwarf Fortress?" I answer no, and then regales me with stories of Boatmurdered, his own torture chambers for the hippies, mermaid breeding programs, ect.
5 minutes later, I'm downloading dwarffortress-0-40-24.zip and failing to understand the basic interface; I thought burrows were how you moved Z-levels.
Fast forward 3 years; at least I can make a semi-competent fortress.
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Oh man, I vaguely remember that I saw mention of it various places before I finally tried it.
The main one I remember though was in the forums for another game (which is both the best of games and worst of games... but that's another topic probably) called Haven and Hearth, and there was a suggestion thread for possible things to be implemented there. I remember at least one of these was beekeeping/hives, and it was mentioned that they'd just recently been implemented in Dwarf Fortress, and I think there were a few other things mentioned with reference to DF as well. That at least introduced me to the idea, and intrigued me a bit, and as I said I believe I then saw DF mentioned one or two other places, enough to make me finally decide "you know, I should probably check this thing out."
The rest, as the say, is history.
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tv tropes, a few months ago I tried, got frustrated with it, deleted, about a month ago I picked it up again and now can't put it down
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I found out about it from Marcus Aurelius LP.
R.I.P to his channel
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An article on RPS about it. I had played some of the sandbox games and enjoyed them (this was 2012), but wasn't really taken with the genre. I found this like a junkie finding heroin for the first time, and have been comfortably addicted ever since. While I will often go play something else for a while, i always seem to come back. Nothing else has the stories that the game generates, with the possible exception of Rimworld (which I also play the hell out of).
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Back in 2006 I used to hang around in the Taleworlds Forum where someone posted an after report of Dwarf Fortress. As I liked ADOM and Nethack I decided to give it a try and so Im here since then.
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This (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVEt6YFgpcM)
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If I recall correctly, I first stumbled across Dwarf Fortess on YouTube and then promptly read most of the wiki in one go. I think I enjoy learning how games work nearly as much as playing them sometimes, and Dwarf Fortress gave me plenty to learn!
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Quill18, 1 F Jeff, and Vinesauce Joel worked all three as a collective force to make me play this game.
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For me it was a cocktail of watching jef major on YouTube, tv tropes and needing more depth after playing cataclysm to death.
6 years later I'm still a novice and I love it
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I think I saw it on tvtropes through some really absurd chain of events/wiki walking taking me from the Yu-Gi-Oh pages to its main page proper, which lead me to playing it briefly in... 2011 or 2012? I think? Got confused about how fort mode worked, eventually quit (albeit after playing an absolutely absurd amount of adventure mode, like at one point spending literal hundreds of hours on it).
Later on in 2014, picked it up after seeing some lps of it, played some more adventure mode, got a bit more of an understanding of fort mode (still was too darn proud to check the wiki on how to play, though :-X ).
This all continues as a cycle of getting slightly better at fort mode after fairly long droughts in playing between absolutely absurd hours spent playing until I ended up where I am now, with a basic understanding of how forts and traps and etc work, enough to at least set up/prep nice things for my Adventurers and stuff, like steel weapons and dwarf adventurer starting points that don't end in the character dying in the depths because they can't find the stairs.
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I saw a physics demonstration of water meeting magma on youtube, thought it seemed really neat and dived right into DF. I thought DF was horrible and didn't understand it, quitting it. Two months later I tried again and... At last I saw the divine magma at the end of the tunnel, the beauty that was Dorf Fortress
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http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=119511.msg3835460#msg3835460
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I first learned of it in 2011 or 2012, from another student at my highschool. Of course, I was fuzzy on the details, and poor health and school don't leave much time for leisure, so it wasn't until shortly before 40.24 released (late December of 2014, I believe) that I stumbled on its TVTropes page and decided to give it a go.
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stumbled on df through spicy memes in some 2010 or 2011. didnt know how the fuck to play it however so i didnt bother with it. then like most people i stumbled on boatmurdered, decided to give df a new go and this time look at some guides on how to play as well as download the newbpack.
been playing for some..3 years now?
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Heard many references to it at game review sites, and saw some pictures at some image boards but I thought it was a shallow gathering simulator without combat. Then a few years ago I saw some meme's of it on funnyjunk and it looked really interesting, especially the learning curve meme made the game look like a challenge to master, and just some comics showing how crazy things could be showed that my original perception that is was a shallow game was wrong.
One of my favorite games for almost 20 years and I still play today is Dungeon Keeper, also love the old Sierra city simulation Games like Ceasar, Zeus and the first three simcity games. DF combines all of them with dungeon keeper and it is amazing. Only thing is lacking is magic, especially have the artifacts be magical instead of just max quality. Though this is coming so I will be patient. My only problem is DF makes every other simulation game boring after a few hours while DF keep you going, at least until FPS death.
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I'm pretty sure through Dudley's Dungeon, a Nethack fancomic. Somebody was talking about Dwarf Fortress there, and I got interested. (I found Nethack through a Wikipedia "how cool are you" joke test, I think.)
I think I spent a little time trying and making a hodgepodge fortress that eventually got boring, stopped for a while, then came back and got involved in the Bay12 Forums, which helped to make DF more interesting for me.
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I'm pretty sure through Dudley's Dungeon, a Nethack fancomic.
((Newt jokes anyone?))
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Personally, I discovered Dwarf Fortress through Dave Fayram and Lyinginbedmon. They did a thing where they tried an evil embark in Masterwork, and it was hilarious.
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I'm pretty sure through Dudley's Dungeon, a Nethack fancomic.
((Newt jokes anyone?))
Remember the time he got polymorphed into a newt?
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I think, when I was doing a research on minecraft...?
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Back in 2014 I was talkng to a work-friend about being bored with the games and also without time to play long-action games.
He said that he knew a game that I could play for like a half-hour a day and would be fine with my time-issue.
Turns out that I spent hours reading and watching tutorials about this game, and untill today I still do not full understand it, but it is fine because it is Dwarf Fortress.
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i don't remember when i first heard of dwarf fortress. it's like...it's always been there. a whisper just at the edge of hearing. like sunlight without the harshness. i reach out and feel it as it moves through everyone and everything. and i can hear the voices of those who have felt it too.
"fuck elves"
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I first read about it in a gaming magazine. I installed it, but could not figure out how to actually play the game. The problem was, I accidentally moved the screen away from the dwarfs and could not see them anymore. :D
A few months later I saw a few more mentions of the game elsewhere, so I gave it another try. This time I also joined the forum and found the Dwarf wiki which helped me to start. I have been following the development of this game for more than a decade now and still find it fascinating.
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Was in 2010 or 2011. I don't remember specifically what I was looking for, but I ended up at Boatmurdered. That was awesome, so I found the game and here we are
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I read about the game in one of those "This is the most complex game you'll ever see!" articles, and decided to check it out...
only, I'm sorry I couldn't find that article again after that to check, because for what I remember, it somehow got everything wrong about the game.
Apparently the article was full of speculation and ideas about what could be in the game, mixed with actual things that were in the game at the time.
Some examples: "you can build a giant tower as long as you are careful about designing proper foundation for it" or "you can even generate power by boiling water into steam and having it power special devices", listed together with stuff like the detailed world generator and the procedurally generated thoughts of every dwarf.
It certainly did its job, as it got me interested, but it was such a weird way to introduce people to this game. Had I not found out about Boatmurdered as one of the first results, I would have probably just given up on the whole thing as "one of those early-access games who promise so much content and only actually have 5% of it".
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Completely chance discovery upon a youtube video showing the collision of water and magma in DF. I thought this looked intriguing enough, certainly pretty in a way I'd never seen in a game before. I loaded it up and began my first Fort and... I gave up, I made very little progress. Two months later I remembered this game and gave it a second shot, and had one of my most treasured Forts ever. It ended in tremendous failure, but of the best kind. With eagerness I saw all of my plans combust as winter set upon me with goblin and giant badger, and I was hooked!
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Was looking for games with randomly generated levels/worlds (as that is a particular interest of mine), and I saw this game come up in the search results. Watched a few Adventurer lets plays (I can't remember when this was), and was hooked... unfortunately I couldn't play the game at the time without frequent crashes. Started playing it a few months afterwards following a PC upgrade, and swiftly discovered that seeking a Giant as your first kill is not a good idea.
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Heard about it because of Minecraft, didn't bother checking it out.
Saw my brother playing it a year later, made a mental note to check it sometime.
About another year after that (near the end of 2012,) I finally got the urge to play it.
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Through an article on the origins of minecraft, started playing after finding out more through tv tropes.
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It was in 2009/10 when i was playing a LOT of DiscworldMUD, and some people were just spamming the talker with DF chat, so I decided to find out what it was all about.
It was a very different game back then! I started on 40d. Carp were the top cause of random dwarf death, aside from the tantrum spiral caused by someone witnessing a fellow dwarf mutilated by a carp, where they would just inflict that mutilation on each other until there's no-one left alive.
I couldn't keep a fort going for more than 3 years without them all slaughtering one another. Those were the good old days.
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TVTropes initially, although I don't remember the article or chain of articles that eventually led me to it. Video Game Cruelty Potential, probably, since I remember reading something about DF players loving to lock up and torture elves in their dungeons.
The vague impression I got about the game was that it was some kind of torture simulator, and figured it was a relatively modern 3D dungeon simulator. I wasn't terribly interested in that.
Later on, I found it again on TVTropes and a link to Boatmurdered. I fell in love after reading that, although the version I started on was much newer (0.31.25).
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I have read about Dwarf Fortress in Russian Wikipedia's article. I knew about the game since 2013, but actually started playing somewhere in the Summer of 2016, when I completed school education.
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i found it in the main page of the minecraft wiki. so i looked around here a while and found the LNP.
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Quill18 was the person that introduced me to the game via one of his playthroughs but I couldn’t get into it, recently Nookrium had his very in-depth 50~ minuet turorial and then a tutorial fortress, after watching all of that together I got into it (about 3 weeks ago) and haven’t looked back since.
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I read somewhere that Minecraft was inspired by Dwarf Fortress a few years ago. I later looked Dwarf Fortress up on TV Tropes, and decided to try it out.
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It seems like there are quite a few people who came here through minecraft
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Boatmurdered, for me.
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Boatmurdered, for me.
read it on MC wiki as i said before, but reading in the wiki, Bronzemurder https://www.timdenee.com/bronzemurder convinced me to try it and a tutorial video used the LNP, so i was hooked
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Seeing this awesome game being compared to Minecrap would have deterred me. But again, when I first heard of it, I was a stupid Minecrap fan.
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I discovered roguelikes when my dad I was 8-10 years old and my dad brought home an old mac from work that they were going to throw away. This would have been somewhere around '91-'93? Can't remember exactly. It had a bunch of games on it that employees had messed with on their lunch breaks and such. One of them was nethack. I poured so many hours into that, along with my 2 younger brothers. This grew into an appreciation for roguelikes that never ended. Played basically every single one that could be found on the internet in the late 90's.
My youngest brother also kept up with them, and found Dwarf Fortress when it was still very young. Like 2007 or so. This was after I'd had a kid, was trying to finish up school, working full time, totally engrossed in Stalker, etc. So I was all "yeah, that sounds awesome... I'll get around to it eventually". That was my response for a couple years. Until I read Boatmurdered at work (I spent a lot of time putzing idly around on the internet at this job). That put my determination to learn and play this game into overdrive. Been hanging around here ever since.
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Seeing this awesome game being compared to Minecrap would have deterred me.
It's not comparison at all. DF is mentioned on MC wiki's main page in a list of games which inspired MC.
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Seeing this awesome game being compared to Minecrap would have deterred me.
It's not comparison at all. DF is mentioned on MC wiki's main page in a list of games which inspired MC.
Also MC has its own charm.
i'd love a MC total conversion mod, adding everything from DF into it. then i'd buy a VR system and dorf around there until i die of thirst.
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I found out from here: https://xkcd.com/1223/
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Someday, I'd like to make a Minecraft Dwarf Fortress mod where Dwarf Fortress has all the Minecraft creatures and crafting recipes and such. Also a tileset that uses Minecraft textures. I'd estimate 9 months to a year of work to make that though, so it would be a lot of work.
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I remember seeing a minecraft dwarf fortress texture pack a long time ago.
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I happened to blunder into the article on 1d4chan. Followed its link to Boatmurdered.
Fairly certain my classmates (had read a large chunk in the latter half of a computer class) though i had gone insane cause I kept getting the giggles after reading it.
Read through to Genmclod, and started playing religiously since just before the 34.01 release.
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I remember seeing a minecraft dwarf fortress texture pack a long time ago.
I also recall a tool that would export DF fort maps into Minecraft.
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I remember seeing a minecraft dwarf fortress texture pack a long time ago.
I also recall a tool that would export DF fort maps into Minecraft.
yes, but it had some unbearable flaws.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=138366.0
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No, there was another one that would export the actual forts.
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No, there was another one that would export the actual forts.
oh, that sounds amazing - but we already had the discussions on how the DF blocks/tiles should be represented in MC and it is rather difficult to make it look nice and be representive at the same time.
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It did look pretty good, actually, but it lost compatibility with any modern DF version, and nobody updated it.
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It did look pretty good, actually, but it lost compatibility with any modern DF version, and nobody updated it.
ah, i guess i know which one you mean.
its main flaw was that it let MC generate villages etc over the existent DF world.
but we're deriving... :D
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No, there was another one that would export the actual forts.
Somebody used it on Towersoared, IIRC.
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It did look pretty good, actually, but it lost compatibility with any modern DF version, and nobody updated it.
ah, i guess i know which one you mean.
its main flaw was that it let MC generate villages etc over the existent DF world.
but we're deriving... :D
That's not the one. You're thinking of the one that would export a df world map.
That said......
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/434122117966200862/435474189185712128/unknown.png)
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/434122117966200862/435477763563061248/unknown.png)
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I don't exactly remember how I discovered Dwarf Fortress, but I have a vague memory of googling for some ASCII rogue-likes that are still being developed (this was around 2012 or something). In the 80's/90's I had played Moria/Angband/ADOM/etc. quite a lot and had some kind of nostalgic urge to play something similar when I stumbled upon DF and immediately thought "this is exactly what I've been looking for my whole life."
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(http://)
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Asylum of the Three Immortals on YouTube.
Coincidentally, I take my project's name from this story.