Bay 12 Games Forum

When I first read about DF (I think it was in some roguelike's forum), I thought that it couldn't be for real. A full randomly generated world with simulated weather, civilizations, the complete history of relationships between those civilizations, and all that. I just couldn't believe it, so I had to check it out.

The first time I tried it I was blown away by the amount of things you could do, but I had no clue how to do any of it. I somehow managed to designate some rooms to be dug but soon gave up because of the huge wall of a learning curve. It took me maybe 5-6 months to try it again when I stumbled upon the wiki and then I started to learn how to do things. Now I've been playing for a few months on and off and manage to keep a relatively succesfull fort going if I don't try anything too ambitious. It's still a bit hard because of my lack of organizing skills.

I first erroneously read the subject as "A cave spider the entire world" and thought "Oh no! Not another one of those 'I accidentally the whole bottle'-inspired threads!"

Cave Spider: "I accidentally the entire world!"
Urist McHelpdesk: "Excuse me?"
Cave Spider: "You know, I was happily spinning webs in my cave and got this funny feeling. Then I accidentally the whole world! Can you help?"
Urist McHelpdesk: "Uhh... you seem to be missing a word in that sentence? You accidentally did what?"
Cave Spider: "I don't see what part you don't understand? I just accidentally the whole world".

This would continue on forever but Urist McHelpdesk happens to be a dwarf so he pulls a lever and then - accidentally the whole magma!

Some elf-slaying action...

I just had my first DF themed dream. It was awesome.

The dream was all about managing the army. In the dream version of DF you could enter a first person 3d view and control any dwarf individually in that 3d mode. So I played a bit with each of my military dwarves to more easily train their skills. There was a really intuitive way to control the fighting, I wish I remembered how it worked. It was probably something like a mix between Mount & Blade and Lugaru. I fought some goblins (which looked like they do in Oblivion) and quickly made some of my dwarves legendary in their weapon skills (as I could directly control their actions, it was easier to train).

What about your DF dreams?

But a leveled work order, is like "UNDER 2000 DRINKS, MAKE DRINKS", so if your food storage goes under 2000 drinks, you will make more drinks. Once over 2000 drinks, your workers stop.

One problem with that is this: Brewer makes drinks until there's 2000 drinks -> someone takes one -> theres 1999 drinks which is less than 2000 so -> brewer makes 1 drink and stops making them 'cause it's back to 2000 again -> someone takes one -> etc. so basically it would cause a "make one - take one"-loop which would just waste time.

Lately I have been playing Civilization II and Fallout 3. Otherwise I don't play much anything nowadays, I have too much other stuff to do and websites to surf through.

DF seems to need a lot of optimizing before something like that should become a high priority to accomplish. I'm no expert on programming but you'd think a game that looks like this - as complicated and freeform by content as it is - should be at least a little bit faster on modern machines? Besides, I remember reading Toady himself saying something like that.

Open source might speed the project up a lot or create many side projects with better graphics (wishful thinking) 

I personally don't mind the graphics as they are now, though. There are some excellent character- and tilesets out there, after all.

Environment window as big as possible and commands small. The minimap seems to be of very little use.