Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Adventure Mode Discussion => Topic started by: ral on March 26, 2011, 06:09:50 pm
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After being a little frustrated with getting started in adventure mode, I decided to try to update the wiki page (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Adventure_mode_quick_start) with some information that I would have liked to know when I first trying to get started. (I also tried to organize it a little.)
Unfortunately, since I'm a little new to this adventure mode stuff, I'm a little unsure of the factual solidity of some information I added, especially regarding attribute allocation.
So this is a request to correct any errors I might have made, as well as a request to add any additional tips that noobs might find helpful.
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Early survival is easy, even as a peasant.
Agility is god, but a few points in social awareness is never bad, and it is much harder to raise social awareness in game. skillwise, a few points in observation and swimming will save your life.
First, go to a fortress and grab a soldier. After that, go find a groundhog, or other small critter and wrestle with it. At least have a shield before trying this (You can also just take a soldier, and let something kill him, so you can steal armor. Just lay there, take hits, and build up your shield, armor, and fighting skills, as well as your attributes.
After that, you fight boogeymen, using them to train your weapon skills. Attack, move back, and attack again. Make sure you fight them one on one or you will die.
Once that is done, you can kill just about anything.
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I can understand swimming but what good are observation and social awareness?
Fighting bogeymen one on one sounds pretty difficult unless maybe you have a really high agility so you can outrun them.
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After critter wrestling, you could easily have superhuman agility.
Observation affects the rate you get ambushed. If you have low skill in it, you can very well get killed in your sleep if your not in a secure location.
Social awareness directly affects the number of followers you can have.
I fight boogeymen all the time. They don't bother me too much, and I have more then enough defensive skills, and usually full armor, before trying to attack them.
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When you say wrestle with badgers, are you talking about actual wrestling (like A, Enter) or bare-handed attacks? I made a macro to continually "A, Enter" grapple with a small animal and got Fighter and Wrestling up to master or legendary which was good but I didn't get any defensive skill doing that.
I also made a macro to sharpen rocks and throw them and got Knapper, Thrower, and Archer up to legendary along with superhuman kinesthetic and very high spacial sense (though the hit rate and damage of a Legendary +4 thrower still seems rather lame.)
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Hmm, so the social skills actually do something ? I thought they were dump stats.
I know Musicality/Creativity/Empathy are dump stats though.
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Yeah, just grapple with a small critter, then sit on the ground and just take hits. A small critter will not deal you any real damage if you have even just copper armor and a shield.
EDIT: You can pass turns by pressing period.
Also, how do you set up a macro.
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Hmm, so the social skills actually do something ? I thought they were dump stats.
I never bother raising it from average, a few extra bods don't make a lot of difference.
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Also, how do you set up a macro.
Do whatever repetitive thing you want to do enough times to figure out what exact sequence of keys you keep repeating, then hit ctrl+r. Enter the sequence of commands and hit ctrl+r again. To replay the keystrokes you have recorded hit ctrl+p.
This seems to work pretty well for repeatedly grappling and releasing a creature, and for sharpening and throwing rocks.
Anyway, I fancied up and expanded the quick start article on the wiki a bit:
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Adventure_mode_quick_start
I didn't add the powerleveling techniques though because those might be a bit advanced for someone just starting to mess with adventure mode.
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Very nice, though with above average social awareness, your starting companion limit is three, not two. Fixed.
A few more survival tips.
When approaching a bandit camp, your best option is to (S)neak into the camp, and try to loot it before crap hits the fan. You might even find decent armor that way, and it helps to avoid the bowman [Always a pain]
In addition, if you wish, instead of using fast travel, you can sneak around to the next target, to raise your ambusher skill.
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Thanks. I added your suggestions at the bottom under tips and I also went through the whole tutorial myself to make sure it "works".
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http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Attributes#Skills_By_Soul_Attribute (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Attributes#Skills_By_Soul_Attribute)
IIRC those come directly from a post by the toad himself. Most of those don't apply to adventure mode, but some of the more relevant ones:
FOCUS: archer, observer, ambusher
WILLPOWER: "resists exertion/pain effects"
SPATIAL SENSE: "combat skills"
KINESTHETIC SENSE: "Most skills involving any movement at all (lots of them)"
And of course more will start to be used as more adventurer skills get added (soonest is maybe some merchant-related stuff further down the current dev list, unless Toady surprises us), but those are the ones I see right now.
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This explains why my characters suck.
P.S. How do you save characters for later play? I can't do an entire epic in one session.
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There's an option to save on the Esc menu. I think it's the second one down? Not sure.
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FOCUS: archer, observer, ambusher
WILLPOWER: "resists exertion/pain effects"
SPATIAL SENSE: "combat skills"
KINESTHETIC SENSE: "Most skills involving any movement at all (lots of them)"
I did read about these, but I didn't include them in the suggested starting stats because these can all be raised relatively easily by doing stuff like sharpening and throwing rocks over and over. In any case they didn't seem as important as stuff like maxing out toughness and agility for maximizing survivability for those who aren't sure what they're doing yet.... I this point I don't know for sure if it's more important for defense to, say, max out toughness or if it's better to subtract a point from that and increase spacial sense or something.
Basically what I was trying to do was come up with the right allocation of stats/skills to come up with the hardest to kill character right off the bat, to facilitate getting through the tutorial, which isn't necessarily the best thing for longer term play. For example, I'm not sure I'd put any points into social awareness in a normal game since I'm not sure the extra companion slot(s) matter that much in the long run, but the extra companion in the beginning helps keep the noob alive enough to get through the tutorial.
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Why not go for a ☼adventure mode quick start☼?
Seriously though, this is very helpful. You might want to mention that knapping and swimming raise a bunch of attributes, though.
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Well, I think it would qualify for ☼Masterwork☼ status except that the [[]] links need to be replaced with {{l|links}} (even though I'm not sure why).
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Dwarf_Fortress_Wiki:Quality#Masterwork
It also needs multiple editors so maybe someone else could fix and verify that all of the masterwork criteria have been met, then promote it? Adding some screenshots might be good too but I'm personally too lazy for that.
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This wiki article needs some major overhauling. I started updating it from various computers but it needs a lot more, perhaps a section for the poet playstyle? and merchants/thieves when that stuff comes in etc.
Also, the fact that you can get proper beast kill quests from a lord/bandit leader if you are subordinate.
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strength helps you hold 10 shields at a time without slowing down. so have strength.
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And what's with all the "hearthperson" stuff? What's the difference between a follower and a hearthperson?
I found the wiki to be lacking in a lot of information on adventure mode.
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First, go to a fortress and grab a soldier. After that, go find a groundhog, or other small critter and wrestle with it. At least have a shield before trying this (You can also just take a soldier, and let something kill him, so you can steal armor. Just lay there, take hits, and build up your shield, armor, and fighting skills, as well as your attributes.
Please don't put anything like this in the wiki, just save it for this board, where the advice is unavoidable. Don't recommend any activity so tedious that it sours players against the notion of starting a new character. It isn't even necessary if creating a demigod.
strength helps you hold 10 shields at a time without slowing down. so have strength.
Strength is good, but it can be overrated, as it was in the article. Strength comes with mass, which reduces speed. If you raise Strength over Agility, you're not only lacking Agility (because it is, as RTiger noted, God), you're also degrading the potential of your Agility.
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Uzu, you might want to recheck the date on that first post.
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Funny how the topic is still relevant after all these years. And what I replied to RTiger amd pikachu17 still applies.
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And what's with all the "hearthperson" stuff? What's the difference between a follower and a hearthperson?
I found the wiki to be lacking in a lot of information on adventure mode.
A hearthperson is a soldier who works for a government or group, eg for a lord, as a defender, eg a guard/sdoldier.
A lieutenant currently is a person who is subordinate to a bandit leader.
A follower is a person who is just following you due to an agreement, eg an agreement to travel with you for glory and death, or to guide you somewhere, or to perform with you. Though you could debate that a follower who is following for entertainment purposes is a subordinate.
Its like the difference between subordinate and an equal partnership.
And yeah the wiki needs more adventurer mode.
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A performer is sort of a free agent, same as in fortress mode. You can enlist them , but they can choose to leave if they aren't getting the opportunity to perform. If you switch modes with dfhack, your character and all adventuring companions will become equal soldiers, but the performers can't be assigned any tasks. If there's a tavern zone, performing there will be one of the tasks they take on their own.
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oh and you can easily get access to fort mode if you roll up a background where you start at the fort site than somewhere else.
saves you the trouble of having to wow folks on military skills, or what uzu said about performers, or retiring them there and finding out you need to wait for about a year for the adventurer to build the courage to move in completely.
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This explains why my characters suck.
P.S. How do you save characters for later play? I can't do an entire epic in one session.
you're charecters survive a whole session?
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Escape - save game.
Choose "continue game" or similar when you want to play again. Choose the right world if you've generated multiple.
Why the hell isn't that information on the wiki?
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Because it's too obvious? Look how old that post he revived is; if the guy didn't figure out in the last ~5 years, he's probably quit the game. Unless he's so obsessed with it that he can never turn it off.
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Time travel is strange.
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Because it's too obvious? Look how old that post he revived is; if the guy didn't figure out in the last ~5 years, he's probably quit the game. Unless he's so obsessed with it that he can never turn it off.
Saw your update to the page Uzu, awesome job.
I Just updated the "quests" page myself and I adding the new crafting abilities to the "detailed adventurer mode reference guide" page.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Adventurer_mode
(^^ still outdated a bit)
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quest
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Saw your update to the page Uzu, awesome job.
Ah, thank you. I just finished ~10 mins ago. I only overhauled the Character Creation section, replaced unsubstantiated imperatives with better elaborated suggestions. I expect some players to have differences with my suggestions, and encourage the feedback.
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Saw your update to the page Uzu, awesome job.
Ah, thank you. I just finished ~10 mins ago. I only overhauled the Character Creation section, replaced unsubstantiated imperatives with better elaborated suggestions. I expect some players to have differences with my suggestions, and encourage the feedback.
Looks very good. One suggestion: I'd remove the mention of grind in fighter/archer.
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Saw your update to the page Uzu, awesome job.
Ah, thank you. I just finished ~10 mins ago. I only overhauled the Character Creation section, replaced unsubstantiated imperatives with better elaborated suggestions. I expect some players to have differences with my suggestions, and encourage the feedback.
Looks very good. One suggestion: I'd remove the mention of grind in fighter/archer.
I only re-wrote one section, Character Creation. I didn't mention Archer at all in it because it can be safely developed without any starting skill. But if I did edit more, that's something I'd remove.
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Terribly sorry. Ignore what I had said. I clicked on the wrong link, http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Adventurer_mode as opposed to the one you did edit: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Adventure_mode_quick_start#Character_Creation.
So yes, very well compiled, Uzu. It's a good source of information, and in all earnestness, the prose is splendid.
EDIT: The suggestion about fighter is very interesting. That works best for a more sandbox build-your-own-game learning style. Most people may find it easier to benefit from a more linear style at the beginning. Your suggestion though, I believe is better long-term as the linear style will have a player doing less and thinking less.
Also, I hope that (if time allows) you overhaul the entire quick start article.
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Generalization works well in the immediate term, too. For example, you start in a fortress with axe skill expecting a good one, but the only one you can find is copper while the miner is holding a steel pick. You can't start with skill in mining, but with Talented Fighter you can put it to good use right away. Or if you start in a meadhall hoping to get a good sword, and you find a mediocre one along with an excellent silver whip.
In either case you aren't bound to a preselected weapon, so it's easier to make the pragmatic selection of taking the best available. Fighter skill gives you the ability to use it effectively from the start, so weapon skill will increase quickly.
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Generalization works well in the immediate term, too. For example, you start in a fortress with axe skill expecting a good one, but the only one you can find is copper while the miner is holding a steel pick. You can't start with skill in mining, but with Talented Fighter you can put it to good use right away. Or if you start in a meadhall hoping to get a good sword, and you find a mediocre one along with an excellent silver whip.
In either case you aren't bound to a preselected weapon, so it's easier to make the pragmatic selection of taking the best available. Fighter skill gives you the ability to use it effectively from the start, so weapon skill will increase quickly.
Except doesn't a character usually start with a fairly decent version of whatever specific weapon with which they are skilled?
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Even if you started with a decent weapon, and didn't find something better where you started, then Talented Fighter would serve you just as well as Proficient in your preferred weapon skill. Better yet, it contributes to Wrestling.
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Even if you started with a decent weapon, and didn't find something better where you started, then Talented Fighter would serve you just as well as Proficient in your preferred weapon skill. Better yet, it contributes to Wrestling.
Oh sure -- I do think Fighter is extremely valuable. I just meant that one might want to add points to a specific weapon skill solely because they might start with that weapon.
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Even if you started with a decent weapon, and didn't find something better where you started, then Talented Fighter would serve you just as well as Proficient in your preferred weapon skill. Better yet, it contributes to Wrestling.
Oh sure -- I do think Fighter is extremely valuable. I just meant that one might want to add points to a specific weapon skill solely because they might start with that weapon.
The likelihood that you'll start somewhere that doesn't have a decent weapon is pretty slim. The likelihood that you'll start somewhere that doesn't have a better than decent weapon is a little less slim. You can't know what the best weapon available will be, so you'd be picking one blindly and marrying it from the start.
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weapon skills level slowly. fighting and wrestling level extremely fast. I usually put a few points in fighter just in case I need to fight a goblin before finding a punchingbag.
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Attack skills other than wrestling level to scale with damage output. High Fighter helps with initial damage output, but what helps even more is effectively using the best quality weapon you can find. That weapon skill will increase much quicker.
I always start with Novice in Fighter, Wrestler, all unarmed attack skills, Dodge/Shield/Armor and Observation, then put the rest in non-combat skills. I wouldn't recommend that for anyone's first character, though. Unless someone has already made up their mind they want to focus on the non-combat and social activities, then I would recommend those combat skills at a minimum.
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I can understand swimming but what good are observation and social awareness?
Fighting bogeymen one on one sounds pretty difficult unless maybe you have a really high agility so you can outrun them.
Observation allows you to see exactly what attack the enemy is using, and social awareness and empathy both increase your follower count.
As for fightan boogymen, just charge at them every attack you get. You're much bigger than them, and will knock them over 90% of the time.
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I can understand swimming but what good are observation and social awareness?
Fighting bogeymen one on one sounds pretty difficult unless maybe you have a really high agility so you can outrun them.
Observation allows you to see exactly what attack the enemy is using, and social awareness and empathy both increase your follower count.
As for fightan boogymen, just charge at them every attack you get. You're much bigger than them, and will knock them over 90% of the time.
The comment you were replying to was from way back in 2011
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I'm going to update the rumors section of:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quest
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It's kind of interesting to see what happens to articles on the wiki after this much time!