Bay 12 Games Forum

One of the nice things about using uncompressed saves is that I can keep them under version control, and thus have a branching history of my fortress. This is inconvenient, though, because I have to either manually run git commit -a every time I save, or else set up some cron job or whatever to do it for me, potentially causing lossage if I save a lot in a short period of time.

Could there be a dfhack script to run git commit -a for me whenever I save?

When first learning the game, it's necessary to read each menu item and think about it--even if most of the time what you think is "I don't know what that means, I'll go back to it later".

This is a fact that's not likely to change, as arranging a scenario where a given option is *not* needed would require laborious manual map design or new world generators. Those are only sensible options if the game is feature-complete.

Nonetheless there's a simple way to make the process of learning the interface much easier, and it doesn't even require an overhaul of the in-game help system. Every single menu in the game should be navigable with the +, -, and Enter keys on the number pad.

The most obvious benefit is the cognitive savings of not having to look up a key mapping in order to select a given option. This may not sound like much to the sort of person who's already proficient in Dwarf Fortress, but it's significant.

Another benefit is that if you get the player scrolling thru menus early on, you have them already in a pattern of behavior that requires them to consider the meaning of the option that the menu cursor is on, as they move it about.

Right now it's pretty easy to read a menu too quickly and not notice that there's a difference between "stockpiles" and "stocks," for instance, and proceed to play the game wholly ignorant of the stocks screen. If the player doesn't want to look up shortcuts, and "lazily" goes through the menu by scrolling it, that kind of mistake is less likely to happen, because it's no longer practical for them to skim the menu.

The sort of person who actually wants to memorize the shortcuts should still have them, of course. But, just because I'm interested in a complex game like Dwarf Fortress, doesn't mean I want to memorize a bunch of arbitrary shortcut keys. I'm mainly interested in the game world. Perhaps I have a much better memory for rules than for keys.

Incidentally, this feature would make it feasible to play the game with a gamepad. I tried to do this once, and just about mapped the top-level menu and view scrolling inputs, but I couldn't get the control scheme to cover the various modes in the designate menu for instance.

These new Follow Item hotkeys are pretty cool. I assigned one to some adamantine thread that was sitting around in a craftsdwarf workshop waiting to get hauled.

I saw the TSK label show up and started following. Waited a while, and I thought I saw someone take it out--at any rate the camera moved to the left a few tiles.

And stayed there.

Which would make sense because my adamantine thread stockpile is like right there. But I saw no thread.

I inspected every tile of the stockpile with [K]. Nothin'. OK, there's also raw adamantine in that pile, but not what I'm looking for.

I can still press F1 to get back to where the adamantine thread was, in that stockpile. It ain't there.

It's showing up in my stocks screen. It must be SOMEWHERE.

I don't think it would be fun to have realistically simulated bodily wastes. However, I do want to build some elaborate plumbing for my fortress, beyond wells. So filth should be handled in an abstracted sort of way, like-a so:

Toilets are built in much the same way as wells. They won't work if they're not over water. Before going to sleep, your dwarf will try to use the nearest toilet; if it's easier to go outside the fortress, he'll do that instead. If he succeeds in reaching either toilet or outdoors in time, nothing happens, but if he goes to sleep before pooing, there's a 50/50 chance that he will start generating miasma. Just miasma, there's no actual waste item.

The plumbing needs to drain somewhere in order to work. For this, I think it would work best if the water tile under the toilet were marked "dirty" after use, and if there's already a dirty water tile under the toilet (or well!), it will not function.

Would this still be too repulsive?