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« on: December 08, 2022, 06:24:41 am »
These are the things lacking in the Steam release that I have come across that are essential for a smooth and fun Dwarf Fortress experience.
- No capability to review past announcements. Obviously players will want to review announcements of things happening in case they missed something, or when they're currently busy and they want to look later.
- Similarly, no capability to review past combat logs. Obviously players will want to review these in the future, they are fun and can allow you to view how a dwarf died. Solution for both of these could be to have a dedicated tab somewhere that lists them. You know, a "log" menu with different tabs for reports, announcements, combat, ect.
- No capability to mass-designate materials for construction. Currently if you build a 10x10 floor, and you want to select materials yourself (because colour and aesthetics matter), you have to manually click 100 times on the desired material. Not good. Solution is to allow shift+click or ctrl+click on the desired materials to select all possible.
- Deconstruction labour is linked to the mining work detail. I understand the rationale: miners are the ones removing walls through digging, so they can also remove constructed walls. However you don't always want to have every dwarf assigned to mining. Mining skill influences strange moods, for one, and woodcutting and mining are mutually exclusive due to equipment incompatibility. Even if deconstruction happens very quickly now, in general I just don't want to wait till my miners are finished digging, to then go all the way to the surface to then deconstruct the floor/wall. Solution is to have deconstruction not be linked to mining, but to wall/floor construction.
EDIT:
- When clicking on "Add new task" on a workshop, the search bar is not automatically focused. You have to manually click on the search bar box with the mouse, then start typing. This is clunky, but this is also a consequence of the overall forced mouse support. In general, moving your hand from mouse to keyboard (to type) and back again is very tedious.
- No Single-step functionality. Thus, no capability to view high intensity combat situations as they unfold. Works in tandem with the lack of combat logs to make combat very opaque.
There are other things I could say but those are not essential to the gameplay as I regard these things to be. If you have encountered something else essential then please post it. I will add though that I did kind of expect the mouse support to be optional. I mean, why wouldn't Dwarf Fortress support full keyboard control. The functionality for that was already in there.
Best of luck to the brothers, may the stars shine brightly upon them.
