Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm downloading the save. Is there a naming convention with the save file? At the moment it is WeatheredCastle-559, would my upload be 560?

Considering its recent development, I'm not convinced Notch knows what Minecraft is supposed to be, or why people actually like it. That being said, I think of it and DF as fairly distinct products that don't really overlap a whole lot in terms of features or design.

Admittedly I only played Minecraft for about 10 minutes before my fiance couldn't continue on with his client repeatedly crashing. My impression with the purpose of Minecraft is that it is a game that Notch desired to play, and since there are not many similar games, he decided to make his own. I called it a virtual lego game as a light hearted metaphor of what I think it is, but yeah, there seems to be no clear vision for Minecraft other than it being the game that "he has always wanted to play but it didn't exist", whereas DF actually has a clear vision that hasn't been strayed away for so long. Today DF is still a world simulator, where new stories and fictional histories continue to get generated via people playing the game.

Even if Minecraft is trying to do what DF does, it is still a different vision - Minecraft is a virtual lego game, DF is a fantasy world simulator.

As a programmer myself, I can understand Toady's decision of going solo. Everyone's ambition is unique no matter how similar they may be with a project. Once there are more than one person working on a project together, the unique ambitions from each individual of the team are normalised into something common that they all share, but then the uniqueness of their individual ambition is sacrificed just so they can work together. Conflicts happen when team members arrogantly hold onto their ambition that the rest of the team don't agree with, which wouldn't happen in a solo project - you can do as your heart desires and you get to create something that's truly unique to your own, you're just on your own without any help to speed up the development.

Hi Deon and Tomi,

Been having a blast with this mod. Thank you so much for the massively added fun (and "fun").

I only just started playing DF and I couldn't play with ASCII tileset, but the lack of supported tileset for 3.25i made me adopt to the ASCII. Now not only I don't mind the ASCII anymore, it loads much faster on my laptop.

Stonecutter's workshop is my favourite since stone resource is so damn infinite. It's nice to be able to put them to better use. (stone pick!!! \o/)

2. You start a Project: Fuck The World in real life

I enjoyed learning new lessons actually by trying stupid things just to see what happens, and it was a massive mayhem to watch the fortress fall. I was more referring to the crash that causes me to lost all the progress and thus it never happened.

But yes, it's easy to take things smooth early on, and the "fun" comes later. I had a possessed child that hasn't grown up in time, so he went berserk and the military had to take him down. It wasn't an "ending fun" thing but a noteworthy moment nonetheless.

This fortress was also somehow bringing up bunch of "surface dwarves" whose traits did say that they prefer working on the surface. I didn't get to start with any underground farming seeds and the caravan never carried any (can't find it as an option in liaison either), so I had to farm above ground, and so the fortress was either above ground or some parts are just one z-level below the surface.

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)