Dear
NW_Kohaku,
I had the impression that people in this thread were mostly considering third-party tools just as that - tools that you may use if you think they are useful for you. But I admit that I have only skimmed over the middle part of the thread.
In my opinion, as long as you are enjoying yourself while playing DF, you are playing it the right way. There are so many ways to play this game: with therapist, without therapist, with DFHack, without DFHack, with tilesets, with the original pseudo-ASCII, with the original pseudo-ASCII scaled 2:1 (my preference), with dwarves, with kobolds, with ponies, with dragonkin, torturing and mutilating your dwarves, creating a dwarven heaven, setting out as a heroic adventurer fighting evil in the world, setting out as an adventurer to kill innocent people and burn villages, setting out to become a necromancer, a vampire, a husk or all of the above, setting out to become a master poet at the lord's court, breaching all layers of the map with your fortress, build a surface-only fortress, trading with all merchants, killing all merchants, playing with a hermit dwarf, with a no-migration fortress, with somewhat around 50 dwarves, 200 dwarves, hundreds of dwarves, using stock piles, not using stock piles, using mine carts or not using them, playing casually, playing seriously, playing hard-core, and many, many more. In my eyes, no variant is inherently objectively better or worse than the other as long as those using them are having fun in their way.
Beyond that, having the capacity to "explore the rules" is very much one of the core reasons why players will play DF. Maybe you "wonder" at it without looking at the real mechanics, but if someone is going to have any real understanding of how, say, minecarts work, they need concrete, objective measurements. I'm pretty sure at some point, you've looked on the wiki or watched some YouTube guide that was filled with information someone else explored. You don't understand minecarts without exhaustively testing them, especially as their mechanics are so wildly counterintuitive.
This is why I can't agree with your statement there. Exploring the rules is not a core reason for me to play DF, while your statement makes it sound as if it was for everyone. I don't need to understand minecart mathematics or physics beyond what I can see while playing the game in order to use them. I may not be using them most efficiently, but nevertheless, I still can use them, and if I don't care about being the most efficient, then I think it is fine as is.
Let me re-iterate: In my eyes, it is just as legitimate to enjoy DF using third-party tools as is enjoying it without such third-party tools. Neither way of enjoying it is wrong in my opinion, so I don't condone dismissing either.
Yours,
Deathworks
