Bay 12 Games Forum

Back when I was starting out, I actually enjoyed the challenge of figuring out how to do things and build a fort that survives past the point initial food reserves perish. I really liked reading stuff on the wiki and trying new things, getting more efficient forts working, putting together interesting constructions like minecart systems, obsidian farms or elaborate traps. The only complaint I have about all that is it takes too much time to get anything substantial done, if micromanagement could be reduced it would help a lot. I also hated interruptions like liaisons or caravans showing up that would distract me from what I was doing at the time.

But that was back when I was relatively new to the game. Fast forward a few years, up to somewhere like 2016 since I haven't really played in a while, there were two major things that irked me as a more experienced player.

First, performance. I'd really like to be able to play on bigger embarks, there would be plenty of awesome things to do in a 16x16 embark with a 1000 dorfs, unfortunately the single-threaded nature of the game prohibits that. It also irks me how people pop up whenever that is mentioned claiming concurrency is super-near-impossible-hard or whatever. It really isn't, not 90% of the time anyways, with proper design and threading libraries it's only challenging if you're doing seriously advanced stuff, otherwise the reason it's hard is because you're doing it wrong. It would definitely require some serious design changes and would translate to a lot of work, but the sheer numbers required for larger embarks dictate the need for parallel processing.

Second thing is that once the initial learning curve has been defeated, the game becomes too easy, unless the player becomes careless or wants to mess it up on purpose. There's reanimating biomes, of course, but that essentially translates to more micromanagement and taking even longer to get anything done. Food production is too easy, wealth for trading is easy too once you know what to build, army training is mostly automatic and once setup will produce unstoppable killing machines in a few game years. Sieges can be defeated by traps or turtling. While this is fun for building megaprojects, it also means there's no real need for  fancy setups in fortress mode, a tiny, perfectly mundane fort can easily be happy, rich, and self sufficient, with little effort it will withstand any siege and beat the circus. Once I realized the game is 90% self-indulgence it bothered me even more than the performance limited population and build area.

Try increasing graphics card memory in BIOS settings, it's usually easy to find, maybe this guide can help.

Consider using a Virtualbox VM, if you're lucky you might even be able to use the HDD image from the dead laptop.

With all the wealth of procedurally generated content and simulations that make it all work together in meaningful ways, do you foresee various aspects of Dwarf Fortress becoming interesting enough to be a (mini-)game in itself?

Examples:
For the economic aspect, a fantasy trading game where the player can go from town to town, buy cheap and sell high, buy wagons or ships to move more stuff, eventually create a trading empire that has to deal with world politics rather than bandits.

For the combat aspect, a martial arts game where the player can learn various moves and techniques, fight other warriors who might use different schools, seek out masters to learn new ways to fight.

Similarly for all sort of magic/art/cooking/crafting, do you foresee these becoming interesting enough at some point that a player might simply spend hours exploring the possibilities? Wandering the game world following leads and rumors to find new masters or schools to learn from or challenge, perhaps even have deities teach them some seriously awesome stuff.

Fast CPU, fast RAM, a motherboard that will let you overclock both.

You want an Intel CPU, i5 is the sweet spot, i7 might be better due to larger l3 cache, best would be the type that runs on a lga2011 socket. Either way you want clock speed and a CPU version that you can overclock. For DF you can disable hyper-threading and all but two CPU cores, which may let you overclock it more.

Aside from that, GPU isn't important, SSD reportedly helps also for just DF you don't need more than 8GB RAM.

Keep in mind you'll be getting diminishing returns in respect to the amount of money you spend and effort you put into overclocking. You still won't be able to run a 16x16 embarks or hugely cluttered forts with lots of dwarves and moving water/magma.

How would dwarves react to Kerbals?
How would dwarves react to The Sims?
How would dwarves react to Trolling Saruman?

One time I successfully used minecarts for hauling involved a large obsidian farming operation, deep underground and a very long way from where my workshops were. IIRC it took a lot of setting up, even with macros it took hours to get the carts rolling. It worked ok.

Same fort, I tried using minecarts after finding a massive iron ore vein, it wasn't worth the effort. By the time the route was carved and setup, dwarves had already hauled most of the ore up to the stockpile level and there wasn't much left to dig out. OTOH I didn't try very hard that time - had an excess of idle haulers. Had I organized the effort to maximize the use of minecarts, that would've saved me many dwarf-work-hours.

Another setup that worked was a quick route moving metal bars from the smelter level to the master smith level, dumping them in a nice quantum stockpile near the magma forges. Minecarts can fit a lot of metal bars, so that was a very efficient way of keeping the forges supplied and more importantly, preventing the smelters from overflowing.

Do surroundings or mason's thoughts have any effect on the statues produced? If for example the workshop (loaded with a quantum stockpile of rock) was in a locked down area full of cats, would the dwarf start producing statues of cats? Or cats, cheese and booze, since there has to be a food stockpile in there too.