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[Antmf]

Hello all am fairly new played a while ago but really getting into this great game..I do have a question I want to try vanilla firstly because I see a lot of people love it and secondly I would lobe to try it. But my concern is giving jobs out without using dwarf therapist. Is it really difficult without using DT? Also I have a monitor that supports 1920x1080 and I want to use curse but dont know what the tileset graphic font and tilest font should be for my resolution. What do you guys play at?

Also I love Kruggsmash's tileset but dont know how I would install it to use it withnin lazy noob pack. Anyone have ideas? Thanks...

[Shonai_Dweller]

Hi,

In my experience, dropping Therapist (or Dfhack's Manipulator which I was mainly using) seems harder at first, until I stopped trying to play the game as if I had Therapist. You don't need minute control of every single dorfs labours. It's different, involves embracing a certain amount of chaos but is still a great fun game. There is no "spending hours adjusting each dorfs labours" as many assume, because you don't have to. If its the micromanagement and min-maxing that you primarily enjoy, it might not be the game for you because that's all a lot easier with a spreadsheet util.

Tilesets come in various sizes. It's not being "not vanilla" to use a larger ascii-like one if the 16x16 included with the game is too small for you to see without it being painful. Depends on your monitor, on my laptop it's just not possible for me to play the smaller tilesets comfortably.

I use 20x20 Taffer tileset, but Taffer actually plays at the same resolution as me (and you) and insists that it's far too large to play. So it's an eye thing, or a laptop thing. Not sure.

[Antmf]

So you play Vanilla and how do you set jobs? Do you do the vanilla thing and just target each dwarf and set jobs that way? And when you first make a fort what jobs do you assign to each of your 7 dwarfs?
Also when you get migration waves how do you handle that? I don't like or want to min max or micro manage everything?

[Shonai_Dweller]

The more immigrants you get, the less you need to worry about available skills as migrants bring them. I set up my starting 7 with everything I think I'll need at first (carpenter, mason, woodcutter, 2 miners, doctor, broker). Save the embark profile to speed up setup later.

In labour setting, I don't need to manage every dorf's labours. I usually find a lack of stone smothers at first, so first couple of migrant waves get that set. Any metal workers I usually turn on the whole set of skills if they don't have them all, then hunting on the rangers.

By the time I get round to complex stuff like library management, there's usually enough dorfs with the required skills available.

And of course, I use the manager extensively for automating fortress job management (again, it works differently from other tools like Dfhack provides, that doesn't make it broken, just requires playing in a different way).

[Antmf]

awesome. ok my first seven dwarfs i have 2 miners 1 carpnter/woodcutter and bower, then i have 1 woodcrafter 1 mason 1 stonecraft and 1 farmer/plant gatherer/brewer. Because thhe woodcrafter can't make stone crafts in craft dwarfs worshop right? So I have to create two one for stone crafting and one for wood crafting?

[vassock]

I was getting crashes with LNP, so I stopped using it completely. Not worth it to have a game ruined/lost because LNP caused problems. I assume it was LNP since DF has otherwise been quite stable in the past.

[Antmf]

Me too the game is crashing grant it not all the time but enough atvembark to make me rage lol. So now I am playing vanilla or atleast trying to. Lol. I’m just a little confused on starting jobs with my first 7 dwarfs.

[Telgin]

My general process for handling migrants' labors is to assign them immediately when the migrants arrive, and nickname the dwarf or give them a custom profession title to signify that they've processed.  Yes, that does mean I go and check their skills one-by-one and then assign appropriate labors, but you only have to do it once per dwarf.  I try to strike a balance between what the dwarf is good at vs. what I need, but don't sweat it too much if my needs are covered.

What Shonai_Dweller said is very true though.  You really don't have to worry about being on top of every single dwarf's labors once you've got a few dozen.  I just try to get 2-3 dwarves per job, more for important industries, and let them go.  If some end up working suboptimally, that's fine with me.

For the starting seven, I usually go with something like this:

1 militia dwarf with a bronze weapon and helmet, maybe a breastplate if I really splurge.  I put 3 points in the relevant weapon skill, then spread the remaining points out over dodge, armor user, teaching and leadership.  The last two supposedly help with training new squads, but I'm not sure how true that is or how much it matters.  Don't bother with fighter since it trains up fast on its own.

1 medical dwarf with 3-4 points in diagnosis and 1-2 points in plant gathering.  Enable all medical labors once you embark.

1 wood cutter, no skills since they get that fast when cutting trees.

1 miner, no skills since they get it fast and easily.

1 cook, 1-2 points in brewing sometimes, sometimes with nothing since they're fast and easy to train up.  I enable cooking and brewing on this dwarf until I get migrants to help with the load.

1 dwarf with maybe 3 levels of carpentry and masonry, who serves both roles.  I usually enable carpentry, masonry, woodcrafting and stonecrafting on this dwarf until I get migrants to help out.

1 farmer with 5 levels or so in growing.  Enable all farming labors once you embark.

[Fleeting Frames]

Personally, I was quite annoyed with missing numerous small tweaks (cursor position, stable movement, staying still on scrolling, search - i.e. constant annoying reminders of being slowed down) when I played vanilla 43.05 (due the time it took to update back then).

For migrant labour assignments, you can use macros as custom profiles and assign them jobs as they come. It's not as good, but it shall make do. Lack of DT more strongly prevents changing your mind later and stuff like momentarily disabling construction removal on all but one dwarf, then reenabling it on all when that is done, or getting a dynamic quick overview of what your dwarves are wearing and more importantly not wearing.

For unchanging stuff like preferences you can just build your own spreadsheet, it's more drudgery but at least it is only done once.

Vanilla, graphics font does nothing if you don't have graphics on, otherwise it is used in lieu of normal font everywhere. If you want larger sheets while keeping nearly the same look, there's vectorized curses.

@vassock/Antmf:

At embark crashes have recently all been due TWBT. Try disabling TWBT (only some tilesets need it, but it's on by default in LNP I think), either entirely or for during embark (embarking with small screens have also been reported to work). The wonderful and useful plugin is in constant development and dealing with core parts of game - I think majority of the crashes I've read about while playing have been linked to it.

[onarum]

Honestly I see about 0 reasons not to use dfhack at least, you don't have to use the more "cheaty" stuff if you don't want to, everything can be turned on or off in LNP, plus the great majority of things you actually have to actively look up how to use and type in commands.

The quality of life improvements dfhack brings are just too good to not use, they don't change the game not one bit, it just makes so playing it is  waaay less of a chore, but it's still 100% "vanilla"

[Shonai_Dweller]

Honestly I see about 0 reasons not to use dfhack at least, you don't have to use the more "cheaty" stuff if you don't want to, everything can be turned on or off in LNP, plus the great majority of things you actually have to actively look up how to use and type in commands.

The quality of life improvements dfhack brings are just too good to not use, they don't change the game not one bit, it just makes so playing it is  waaay less of a chore, but it's still 100% "vanilla"

And I see no reason to not play the way I like. I enjoy playing Dwarf Fortress. I'm not using Dfhack. I'm actually playing it right now, and, shocking revelation, am not sitting here in frustration shouting at my PC wondering when Toady is going to improve my quality of life.

I might get frustrated if I were used to playing with a specific Dfhack feature, sure, but (despite what some on some forums, not necessarily here) it's not necessary just to play the game.

I have a copy of Dfhack ready for exporting extra data from Legends, and perhaps for a quick cleanup. I don't play fortresses for more than 9 or 10 years though so don't have much fps death to worry about.

At some point my modded world will require more than raw editing can offer me, at which point Dfhack will surely come to the rescue. It'a a great util, yes, it's not an essential util that somehow saves DF from being a buggy, crashy mess that Toady's accidentally created as some on some forums would have you believe.

[Fleeting Frames]

Buggy, maybe, but crashy? I've never seen a suggestion that vanilla is not the most stable option.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Buggy, maybe, but crashy? I've never seen a suggestion that vanilla is not the most stable option.

Yes. Vanilla pretty much never crashes for me.
I'm talking about more casual forums, where when DF is mentioned words like 'buggy' and 'unstable' are thrown around and bring up an image for the non-player of Dfhack being the only thing that makes the game work.

[George_Chickens]

I can't say it becomes any harder, but it may become easier as you learn to manage the game without tools and get a greater understanding of how it really works.

All of these utilities, if you are a new player, are more of a harmful crutch which make you never able to learn to walk properly. You won't know how to set up tilesets and DFhack, you won't know how to manage aquifers as you can just turn them off, you won't know how to manage dwarfs well without DT and you will always be reliant on the releases of tools, not on the release of DF.

LNP is probably better as something for returning players than full blown newbs, if you ask me. That being said, there should be no problem with continuing to use Dwarf Therapist and a tileset, as it will not affect the stability of the game. DFhack may, however, so it is best to avoid it for now.

[Fatace]

Honestly, it feels better to start off with vanilla first while using wiki to learn, once you have the hang of things, switch to LNP afterwards, DFhack is useful incase of bugs or just performance tweaks, ect. You don't need to use the Cheaty part of it. The only part of it I've used in a cheat way was /die to kill the game and not save if something stupid happened lol. But other than DFhack, using Texture Packs or Dwarf Therapist can be helpful, though Dwarf Therapist is something I have not used yet, I honestly prefer just to assign jobs on my own the moment they show up to my fort lol.