Bay 12 Games Forum

Hi all, I have a slow-going fort where I dwarfed DF redditor's user names in, as my thanks to the community for their help and entertainment/FUN. I only have three in-game years in this fort, but it takes a lot of organisation to tell each dwarfed redditor's stories and Reddit isn't the best place to share ongoing fort story, so I took a redditor's advice to migrate the stories here. That being said, I'm open to dwarfing you lovely forum people too, since I still have plenty unnamed.

I'm a casual player who likes to play the fort my own way, so I'm just here to open my dwarves up for naming, and I'll report back how the named dwarves are going in my sessions. You can make suggestion on what you want your dwarf to achieve, and I'll try my best to cope, but no promises.

Some info about my fort, including Masterwork exclusives for those not familiar with the mod:

First Reddit post with the first dwarfing wave
Year 128 - Second Wave

I'll keep updating this top post with future fort updates.

Hi all,

I am a 21st century lazy newb, who grew up with Age of Empire 2, Diablo 2, eventually today's MMORPGS, and just started trying out DF with the lazy newb pack. I'm not an ASCII graphic fan when it comes to games, I use the graphic packs just so I can look at a more graphical interface, I'm slow on the hotkeys and have to look at the menu all the time, I am utterly confused with things in the game and have to constantly rely on the wiki, I worried about the difficulty and I am one of those who wish there is a point n click interface.

All that being said, I'm still hooked with the game anyway because of one thing: losing isn't as easy as people make it out to be. I went ahead with my very first dwarf fortress under the first few paragraphs of guidance from the wiki's quick start guide, choosing a calm biome and all that, then I only planted a few farms beside digging a huge area out of the mountain. One in-game year has passed now and I'm surprised to see that every dwarves are still at least content and no real threat has been going on. I even purposely commanded a miner to dig through a damp stone to let a lake flood in, but instead of flooding the cave it just irrigated the floor and made it farm-able. I have no active still to make more beer, the only food source is my plume helmet farm that is now gigantic because of the unintended irrigation, but I am still not in any immediate danger and I have a lot of time to try all the buildings and most of the functions.

It's going to be a very messy fortress and I already feel like purposely killing it off so that I can use the new knowledge to build a better one, but in regards to the difficulty of dwarf fortress, it's actually not easy to die that soon and you have plenty of time to figure out what's going on. Later on, sure there may be more threats, but quoting someone on another forum thread, you can really just wall yourself in and play peacefully forever. Threats only come when you go out there to seek it, and if I do go out there to risk things that's just because I am willing (like me trying to flood my cave purposely).

I hope this give some insight to old and new potential players alike out there, what DF feels like to a 21st century lazy newb. Thanks for the game Tarn!

I'm still going to stick to the lazy newb pack though >.> (Thanks to all the creators of the tools and graphics included in the pack, and the pack compilation itself)