Bay 12 Games Forum

My take on it is that DF will improve in depth and content over time, but eventually other open world games will start using procedural content too, because that's really the only option to have a large world for (relatively) cheap. Just look at what one guy can do in a month:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7BIaERfNs0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d2-PtK4F6Y

In the meantime, yeah, I would prefer some of the problems with DF "user friendliness" sorted out and ways to do that have been talked to death on this forum.

> if you want to increase player base, those things should be fixed.
There are a lot of things to be fixed and all of those fixes need time. The Mantis alone has over 2k open issues (some of them duplicates or hard to replicate or unfixable). Toady One prefers to work on new content than to fix bugs and only fixes things for a while after a new release. So the game ends up in a perpetual state of "messy, but kinda works good enough if you know your way around the quirks". I think that over the years, the code has rotten into a state of "making elephant dance is not much fun", which makes fixing bugs even less appealing compared to adding features.

> i have a large pot, with many bags in it, with many seeds in those. how do i get the bags out of the pot and the seeds out of the bag?
I think I've already touch on that. Designate a large stockpile for food. Then {q}ery it, set it to 0 max barrels (there should be help for that on the screen, EeRv something) and set it to only accept seeds, no prepared meals and no other types of food. It will fill up with seeds and bags of seeds. Unlike barrels, having bags with seeds is actually OK and doesn't lead to much cancelation spam. The only way to get rid of the bags I can think of is to not have enough of them in the first place. Oh and set that stockpile with seeds in bags in barrels to not accept seeds, so they will be carried to the new stockpile over time.

I'd like there to be some way of assigning equipment per-dwarf, not to position in a squad. I sometimes have reasons to move people around (especially bad with squad captains) or send them off-duty for a period of time.

More "centre to position / dwarf" in cancellation messages would be useful.

My biggest issues aren't the bugs, it is tedious things like designations, building, stockpiles, trading and so on. falconne's plugins help with some of it and so do tools like Dwarf Therapist and dfhack, but I still find myself doing that stuff for most of the time.

Cooking (in DF) works by taking a number of random ingredients, processing them, mixing them together and processing again. I imagine mincing was the most general thing you can do with food, but it still leads to some funny things like "finely minced beer / floor / seeds". The easy way to implement your suggestion would be to choose a random word from a pool similar to what you've just written, but a proper way would be to have such a list for different categories of food (raw plants, raw meat / fish / organs, flour, drink and so on). If you think mincing is bad, having a "fine roast consisting of minced beer, smoked flour, slow roasting rat weed and boiling cat eye" would be even more ridiculous.

Implementing cooking even somewhat properly, with ingredients and ways to process them that make sense and varying levels of nutrition would be time-consuming, so I'm rather fine with the system we have now. I simply imagine the meals as being an abstracted representation of something else and cooked meals as being served daily and fresh rather than stockpiled for month or years.

I suppose the middle ground would be to have a list of processes that can be applied to each can be applied to sub-categories of food, for example boiling, mincing and frying to plants, frying, smoking and boiling to meat and so on. This would make for more interesting descriptions and wouldn't be that hard to implement or adjust for mods.

After reading through that last comment, I actually prefer things as they are now.

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress, where the difference between a quirk, a bug, an (un?)intended feature and a place-holder for one is fuzzy.

There is pretty much consensus that the user interface would benefit from more work. In fact, there are dfhack plugins that add filers to some menus and other UI improvements.

> especially because there is some bug that makes the equipment display vanish when i scroll through the squad members. the whole squad management should be easier.
If other menus are disappearing, try changing the PRINT_MODE in data/init/init.txt.
If not, then I think you assigned equipment to one position in the squad, but not the others. The easiest way to do this for many soldiers is to create a uniform, assign it to a squad, then customise for each position.

> i play a dwarf fortress. i don't want to go chopping trees. i want to mine coal.
Coal is pretty damn rare. Getting coal, iron and flux in one embark is even rarer.

> spam from seeds not being found altough i have more than enough seeds.
Ah, the joys of the improved hauling system. One work-around is to set up a 40 tile stockpile that accepts no barrels and only takes seeds. You'll get multiple sacks of seeds and it should (mostly) work out.

> it seems the serious FUN comes either from choosing a bad embark location, or from digging too deep.
And from mods. At this point I almost see the game itself as a demo built on top of a modding kit.

> but it would be much more interesting, if the good stones and ores would only exist deeper.
I prefer realistic geology to your proposition.
For bronze you need tin, which is usually pretty deep, but yeah, if you have iron, there is no reason to use anything worse.
Well, I suppose some more expensive gems are only found deep, but that's not important anyway.

> when 3 megabeasts suddenly emerged from the newly found underground cavern i thought it would be too much fun for my fortress to take. 
Depends. Most people consider military training to be relatively easy, but I struggle to keep enough trained and equipped soldiers to repel everything that tries to kill me and often must resolve to digging in or danger rooms. I just don't know what I do wrong. One fix I'd like to see is that to lead a demonstration a soldier would need to be at least competent in that skill.

>  i don't know how common vampires are in general. i had 2 so far.
There are no vampires in the mod I play, but if there were, I think I'd just cheat with DT or dfhack and detect them early. Then they can go ahead and patrol the caverns for me. After I seal them off, of course.

> it is a feedback from a new player with the intention of helping you improve the game, especially concerning matters that might scare of newbies.
A fresh point of view is often valuable. Most of us are vets and we got used to how things work and various work-arounds.

Personally I'm fine with some military training exploits, like Danger Rooms. The method of throwing recruits with wooden weapons at armoured opponents without weapons is dangerous enough and danger rooms murder animals and babies. I find the military hard to train as it is and I don't want restrictions on XP. I once had one of my guys (from a mod, with 300% learning rate for dagger) train to Legendary Knife User and Shield User in one fight and it was funny. Well, less so when he was finally ganked and killed by the rest of enemy squad after they were done with a caravan and I was too cowardly to open the gate and reinforce.

If you want restrictions on XP gain, don't make it lower than 1k per month, excluding strange moods.
EDIT: I mean strange moods as we have them now, bumping crafting skills by around 15k XP.

Giving birth in a hospital isn't normal, because a pregnancy is not a disease. When her time comes, a woman can go to some bushes and return with an infant, or stay at home and send for a midwife. Either way she can go back to working in the field the next day.

That said, I'm not particularly keen on children following their mothers all the time or wandering around and getting in harm's way. An ability to burrow or pasture kids would mostly solve it for me. As for orphans, I've run into that problem and I'd like an aunt or any other woman to adopt the kid instead of watching it die from thirst.

> Dwarf therapist shows that every single pony has a size of 150000 cm^3.
Well, in FoE mod it shows that all ponies have size 70 litres and Lycaeon said they should varry, so I don't know. It may be a thing with multiple caste mods.