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Author Topic: *We need your help to save the noobs!*  (Read 96433 times)

Untrustedlife

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #30 on: October 31, 2019, 06:11:14 pm »


7. You knew this was coming, add meals to taverns, right now its impossible to meet the "fine meal" need in adventure mode outside of going to a player fort in adventure mode which is an issue

The worst part about this is that the proposed solution wouldn't actually help because the player is being mislead. It has nothing to do with prepared meals, but instead involves eating a favorite food. IIRC, adventurers don't even have favorites.

I think this definitely proves my point further. lol
« Last Edit: October 31, 2019, 06:26:12 pm by Untrustedlife »
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Untrustedlife

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #31 on: October 31, 2019, 06:13:29 pm »

Hey there Zach hope things are going well health wise for you :)

Werebeasts never really bothered me, i just locked up my fortress when they came.

However, i have some adventure mode complaints if that is alright. I love adventure mode but the issues with it can be very stark at times.

I have played dwarf fortress...

I think these suggestions would go a long way towards making adventure mode more noob friendly.

This was a great start to this thread and really great insights!

Thanks :)
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Witty

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #32 on: October 31, 2019, 06:30:49 pm »

I personally don't think the werebeast issue is as extreme as it looks. Yes, they do arrive early and will almost certainly wipe out an early noob fort - first time players aren't going to gnash their teeth at something like that. It's a neat story that will teach them to make armored dwarves. Hell, most first time players will lose their forts to something far more mundane anyhow. Hopefully that werebeast trigger is brought out into the raws or advanced worldgen, I wouldn't want something like that hardcoded.

A strong benefit I think you guys will have is the natural reputation Dwarf Fortress has. New players, even with the fancy new graphics, are going to immediately go to youtube/reddit/wiki to find out where to get started, what they need, and what they should look our for. I don't think a fully fledged internal tutorial is a realistic expectation, so this existing system will do fine. Even the newest players will understand this just from word of mouth.

That said, there are definitely some things that are just annoying no matter what, most of which has been covered by other posters. For Fortress Mode, I would say that (besides from the stress system issues) the military screen could use a UI overhaul. For example, having the default minimum train number hidden away in the schedule screen, and always at 10 no matter what is not very helpful. It should instead match the number of people in the squad by default.

Setting generic armor settings also can cause major headaches. Lets say I tell the squad to wear iron armor. Why does the green check mark appear even when they aren't actively wearing that specific armor piece? I know its to indicate the possibility of it being equipped, but that's very unintuitive. You also run into what I like to call the 'armor dance', where military dwarves will constantly equip the next best quality piece of armor, even if they actively training or already have an adequate piece of armor on already. I think adding a maximum preferred quality setting could help alleviate this little issue, because right now I avoid it by just manually assigning each individual piece of specific armor. It works, but it's very tedious and certain new players I doubt will tolerate frankly.

I think the real trouble will come from Adventure Mode. Right now, a lot of things just don't really work. I'll get a job to kill a bandit camp for example, and arrive only to find that the bandits aren't there at all, the bandits are all asleep and won't wake up even as I start attacking them one by one, or all the bandits are awake and fine - but aren't hostile and will instantly run away or start crying once I start attacking them. That isn't fun, and wasn't the case in earlier versions of DF. There's also the issue of people recognizing your achievements. If someone tells me to kill some night troll, I'll go out, kill them, bring word back about killing the creature - but it basically does nothing if it isn't specifically a hearthperson quest. Hell, I've had lord say things to the effect of "X Beast has terrorized our people, you must hunt it down. In 250, you killed X".  It's just this weird combination of bad phrasing, bugs and inconsistencies that makes doing even basic things in Adventure Mode just odd. That'll definitely leave new players scratching their heads, wondering what the heck is even happening. 
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Urist_Macnme

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #33 on: October 31, 2019, 06:39:52 pm »

I'm what I would regard an 'intermediate player', been playing for a few years, definately not a newb, but have never had a Fortress go beyond about 8 years before giving up. Either to FPS death or Stress Cascade.

My main problem is "what to do with the corpses"?
I'm not one for exploits - so the idea of using a quantum stockpile or Atom Smasher seems to me like cheating... and I am forever stuck with the problem "what to do with the corpses"?
They take up too much 'refuse stockpile' room given that every tooth, finger, hand, foot etc all need their own individual square in the stock pile; and then there's the insanity it causes.
To me, the idea of throwing all the bodies of my enemies into a giant mass grave seemed like a good idea - until every dwarf that went near it got 100 negative thoughts at once from seeing all the mangled corpses.
And then every subsequent Fortress I created in that world would get migrants who were permanently traumatised from having witnessed this mass grave.
I ended up having to abandon the entire world becuase of that mistake.

On the one hand - I enjoyed it - gave me a great story, and I can empathise how traumatic the scene that I had created for the dwarves was and how it would give me nightmares for the rest of my life too... on the other hand - Fortresses are constantly under seige, and dead bodies are an inevitable consequence of playing for any amount of time.
I just feel a real Dwarfy Dwarf wouldn't be THAT upset about seeing a dead Goblin or two, or 100.
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armads

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #34 on: October 31, 2019, 07:21:09 pm »

I've been playing dwarf fortress on and off for years. I've modded the game, delved deep into all those notepad documents, mostly to try and figure out why things happen or try and improve them. That said, it wasn't until I tried to get someone else into the game recently that I remembered how esoteric most of the game actually is. Complexity isn't innately bad, but a lot of things in dwarf fortress have been piled on top of other things so many times that everything is a mess.

The biggest source of frustration is that literally nothing is clear on its own. Things that should make sense are impossibly complex for no logical reason. Examples of this include: military organization, bin use, gathering discarded items, minecarts, stockpiles, work orders.

The military is a mess. Trying to figure out how to make archers work correctly is like pulling teeth. Trying to figure out just how to make the military function as intended is equally bad. Most of it is because you have to go through menu after menu just to set basic things like schedules and equipment. Ammo is extremely difficult to work with, and it's never clear why your dwarves aren't doing the things you want them to do.

Bins. I have no idea why bins are such a pain, but they are. Mostly because only one task can be used for one bin at a time. Meaning that if you have any sizable amount of material, large amounts of materials are considered unusable or gone because they're being accessed by some other dwarf in some other part of the fort. Oh, you need cloth, because you need multiple clothiers? Sorry, all that cloth is considered gone, because one dwarf at a different clothier's shop has taken up the entire bin. Maybe, your guys can't get new clothes, because someone has decided to stud something in that bin. Maybe you can't get weapons because a miner has decided to drop his pick off. As it stands, you either need massive amounts of land in order to provide for all this stockpile space, or you need to suffer under the bin bug.

Gathering discarded items is awful. Have a major siege? Now you have to go through and manually forbid or allow all the items out there, otherwise your dwarves will either haul nothing or all of them. If you have hundreds of items out there, then you'll be busy for a very, very long time. it's insanity. How is there not a 'forbid/allow all' command when selecting things on the ground?

Minecarts are a mess. Just making them function, or figuring out their function, probably takes a mathmatics degree. They seem to only function if the stars are aligned correctly; I have a better chance of summoning an elder god than I do at making a mine cart serve it's purpose.

Stockpiles are a mess. More accurately, getting dwarves to only take certain things from stockpiles requires so much micromanagement that it becomes a chore. You practically need to double your stockpiles, otherwise dwarves shove everything together into 'finished goods.' Dwarves will decide to continually encrust socks over and over rather than any of your actual trade goods, because they can't decide what to do. Eventually, you're just making stockpiles for every item because you can't keep track of who is grabbing what at what time, and at that point you lose track of where everything is.

Work orders are a pain to deal with, and there are a lot of bugs. For example, sometimes your work orders just don't work at all for seemingly no reason, or go on forever. Tell your dwarves to do something like encrust or stud, and they'll literally never say that they've completed anything.

At this point, I think it's clear that the main problem are all the bugs. Look, I love new content. I do. But I would love nothing more for dwarf fortress, and nothing would make it better, than if instead of adding new content, the huge backlog of bugs was dealt with, and everything was streamlined. Almost nothing makes sense at this point in the UI; the orders tab isn't clear for example and it's not entirely certain what different things do or don't do. Burrows are a mess to deal with, because you have to attach literally everyone into them if you want them to work, which is a pain for a fort with more than one hundred people. Seeds disappear completely without being edited in the raws, which is a problem because if you have a fort growing lots of plants, you'll quickly run out of seeds due to them being disappeared by the game.

Most of my time playing dwarf fortress isn't me going 'man I want to try doing this!' it's me playing until something goes wrong, at which point I have to play detective and search through wikis and raws to try and fix the issues that haven't been fixed in the game. That's what breaks things most for new players, imo. They play the game, hit something like the bins not working, and someone goes 'okay use a quantum stockpile' and upon seeing how difficult that is to do, quickly figure out that it's probably not worth doing.

I can say that, as a veteran player, the thing that stops me from making more forts and going back to the game is just thinking about all the micromanaging and messing around with the stuff I've mentioned. Just trying to make things work as intended is a mess. There's so much STUFF in the game, but so little of it seems to work coherently together. So much needs to be streamlined and cleaned up and put together in a clear and concise way. Because right now, players are as much bugfixers as the actual programmers, with how many workarounds are needed to make the game work in any sort of stable way.

Essentially, the biggest impediment to people playing dwarf fortress is the actual gameplay of dwarf fortress. So much has been built atop unstable foundations and swept under the rug and put off that at this point, new players only see it the way you look at a mess of tangled wires behind a desk. Yeah, you could try to figure out what everything does, but you probably won't. Which is a shame, because there's a lot of great stuff with dwarf fortress. But if the goal is to open it up to new players, then the game needs to clean up all the bugs and streamline the actual gameplay to a point where it makes sense and you don't have to search through wikis and forum posts to make the game work as intended.

Or, to put it another way: if you have to rely almost entirely on third party mods and scripts and applications to make the game at all useable, then much of the game isn't actually useable. If players are relying on dfhack and dwarf therapist to use the game, because the game itself makes such things difficult if not impossible, then that's a problem with the game. Many, many quality of life upgrades need to be done with the game to make it accessible to anyone who isn't interested in a college course amount of work just to play it.
« Last Edit: October 31, 2019, 07:23:33 pm by armads »
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Mort Stroodle

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #35 on: October 31, 2019, 07:36:39 pm »

first time players aren't going to gnash their teeth at something like that.

I disagree. I nearly quit the game when my first fort fell to werebeasts, and I think many players were in the same boat. You spend all this time digging out your fort, only for one of the most dangerous creatures in the game to show up one year in, bite somebody (which you can't always feasibly prevent, werebeasts can show up anywhere on the map and all it takes is one woodcutter to get bit), then if you figure out this person needs to be quarantined you need to either figure out the hospital system or the military system, neither of which are very penetrable to new players. If you try to station a bitten person to lock them up, only for them to stand on the opposite side of a wall because militia dwarves have a very lax approach to actually stationing themselves on the tile you tell them to, you just lost a fort because of the god-awful military UI that no new player could possibly be expected to understand. Werebeasts show up before semi-megabeasts, even though the latter is way less dangerous than the former. That's not a good learning curve.
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Fleeting Frames

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #36 on: October 31, 2019, 07:50:12 pm »

Oh, here's another newbie and even long-term player trap:

People expect engravings to be seen by dwarves, i.e. if their fortress entrance has engravings everyone going out will see them when walking by. It's not obvious without hours of engraving and then hours of reading dwarf personality screen walls of texts and then carefully experimenting with 'R'ooms menu that they don't, but do contribute to room value.

(Especially as most fortress screenshots often have things engraved everywhere, misleading newbies to conclude it's a necessary thing.)

(Brought up by newbies sending their engravers to carve their large corpse pile rooms.)

Witty

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #37 on: October 31, 2019, 07:54:43 pm »

first time players aren't going to gnash their teeth at something like that.

I disagree. I nearly quit the game when my first fort fell to werebeasts, and I think many players were in the same boat. You spend all this time digging out your fort, only for one of the most dangerous creatures in the game to show up one year in, bite somebody (which you can't always feasibly prevent, werebeasts can show up anywhere on the map and all it takes is one woodcutter to get bit), then if you figure out this person needs to be quarantined you need to either figure out the hospital system or the military system, neither of which are very penetrable to new players. If you try to station a bitten person to lock them up, only for them to stand on the opposite side of a wall because militia dwarves have a very lax approach to actually stationing themselves on the tile you tell them to, you just lost a fort because of the god-awful military UI that no new player could possibly be expected to understand. Werebeasts show up before semi-megabeasts, even though the latter is way less dangerous than the former. That's not a good learning curve.

That's fair, but I think that's more a testament to how weak semi-megabeasts are when they should be quite a lot tougher. It's true that werebeasts demand an immediate and intimate knowledge of certain hard to crack systems all at once, and having that occur so early is probably not for the best. I still though maintain that a single failed fort shouldn't cause game-quitting rage. It's a beginner fort, it's going to fail. Hell, werebeasts attack would probably be a good incentive to learn those difficult systems.

Those systems should be streamlined and made more usable for players, but I still maintain that earlyish werebeasts attacks aren't going to have new players running for the hills. If that's enough to make them quit, they'll more likely leave anyway after they see the mountain of bugs workarounds they need to memorize to maintain a proper end-game fort. 

it's insanity. How is there not a 'forbid/allow all' command when selecting things on the ground?

That actually does exist. (d)isgnate-(b):item properties allows to mass forbid/allow for grounded items.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #38 on: October 31, 2019, 08:16:27 pm »

first time players aren't going to gnash their teeth at something like that.

I disagree. I nearly quit the game when my first fort fell to werebeasts, and I think many players were in the same boat. You spend all this time digging out your fort, only for one of the most dangerous creatures in the game to show up one year in, bite somebody (which you can't always feasibly prevent, werebeasts can show up anywhere on the map and all it takes is one woodcutter to get bit), then if you figure out this person needs to be quarantined you need to either figure out the hospital system or the military system, neither of which are very penetrable to new players. If you try to station a bitten person to lock them up, only for them to stand on the opposite side of a wall because militia dwarves have a very lax approach to actually stationing themselves on the tile you tell them to, you just lost a fort because of the god-awful military UI that no new player could possibly be expected to understand. Werebeasts show up before semi-megabeasts, even though the latter is way less dangerous than the former. That's not a good learning curve.
For every newbie who rage quit when they lost their fortress in an entertaining werebeast curse that showed them exactly how Fun Dwarf Fortress can be, there are dozens more threads on forums asking "where are the goblins, I'm so bored, my 79 dwarves have been here for years, made tons of wealth and yet no goblins. F*ck realism I'm off to play a proper game".

Honestly, what do people expect more. A fantasy game with deadly creatures that you have to figure out a way around or a fantasy game in which nothing happens and everything eventually succumbs to fps death because there are too many clothes scattered about.?

Well, whatever, if you must nerf, go ahead, just don't forget to make it an adv worldgen option.
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feelotraveller

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #39 on: October 31, 2019, 08:40:17 pm »

First up, BUGS.  Here's one from the previous release the we've been waiting on a fix for ...months.  Game crashing, unplayable save - basically as bad as it gets. (I'm sure there is a report on the bug tracker, for whatever that is worth.)
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=174949.0
Not saying that 'noob' is lost but some would be in that circumstance.  (Oh yeah, and reclaiming, let us count the ways bugs with that!)

More generally since you were asking after 'design' problems: the massive migrant waves in the second year.  I commonly get 30, or 60, or even 80 migrants per wave to add to what is usually about 20 at that point.  It breaks so many experiential nodes for the game.  No way I am getting to know those dwarfs personally, nor is there much room left for progression beyond the 2nd (or maybe 3rd year).  Basically it overwhelms the player. (And yeah, experienced players work around it one way or another, but that's not the point.  :) )


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DontMineYellowSnow

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #40 on: October 31, 2019, 08:42:00 pm »

first time players aren't going to gnash their teeth at something like that.

I disagree. I nearly quit the game when my first fort fell to werebeasts, and I think many players were in the same boat. You spend all this time digging out your fort, only for one of the most dangerous creatures in the game to show up one year in, bite somebody (which you can't always feasibly prevent, werebeasts can show up anywhere on the map and all it takes is one woodcutter to get bit), then if you figure out this person needs to be quarantined you need to either figure out the hospital system or the military system, neither of which are very penetrable to new players. If you try to station a bitten person to lock them up, only for them to stand on the opposite side of a wall because militia dwarves have a very lax approach to actually stationing themselves on the tile you tell them to, you just lost a fort because of the god-awful military UI that no new player could possibly be expected to understand. Werebeasts show up before semi-megabeasts, even though the latter is way less dangerous than the former. That's not a good learning curve.
For every newbie who rage quit when they lost their fortress in an entertaining werebeast curse that showed them exactly how Fun Dwarf Fortress can be, there are dozens more threads on forums asking "where are the goblins, I'm so bored, my 79 dwarves have been here for years, made tons of wealth and yet no goblins. F*ck realism I'm off to play a proper game".

Honestly, what do people expect more. A fantasy game with deadly creatures that you have to figure out a way around or a fantasy game in which nothing happens and everything eventually succumbs to fps death because there are too many clothes scattered about.?

Well, whatever, if you must nerf, go ahead, just don't forget to make it an adv worldgen option.

To restate from my original post, fairly noob here, I enjoyed the werebeast attacks.  I'm also not above save-scumming in Dwarf Fortress if I have to, though.  Most of the time its due to a bug, glitch, or some other hokery but occasionally I'll get something I just can't take out and reload a save.  I'd rather keep it than lose it.  Putting in some kind of guardrails so only weaker werebeasts attack at first might be pretty difficult for the minimal benefit.  Advanced Worldgen options sounds like a perfect compromise.
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Coactum

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #41 on: October 31, 2019, 10:39:15 pm »

I'm a new player, only just sitting down and taking the time to learn properly in the last month or so. I'm a long term Rimworld player (several thousand hours).

Werebeasts were an issue for me to the point where I turned them off until I got my head around the game more (perfectworld) because its frequency made me worry I would hit a consistent roadblock, become impatient and give up learning. Between the UI (alerts page can be somewhat confusing for me especially) and generally discovering them when they were almost inside, it catches you  by surprise and it quickly feels like you're building spefically for that event if you don't nail it down ths first few times. What I would propose is not so much changing the event or values, but change the probably of it happenig, or maybe add some parallel events that are similar in danger but allow a new player struggling a break between remaking without it being such an obvious landmark. I stress that I realise the importance of preserving difficulty in game as I say this, this is specifically to do with accessibility.

Speaking of ui, understanding corpse/bone/parts crafting and storage is the other that throws me off completely.

Found my new favourite game though , thank you!
« Last Edit: October 31, 2019, 10:42:16 pm by Coactum »
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HmH

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #42 on: October 31, 2019, 11:25:33 pm »

Marksdwarves are incredibly finicky. Give them any way whatsoever to melee an enemy and half your squad will do that instead of trying to shoot. I once dug a moat, starting building a fortifications wall, and because I wasn't able to roof over the wall before the first siege came, most of my marksdwarves actually climbed *over* the fortifications, falling five stories and breaking their legs in the moat, instead of just standing there shooting. I get that there's many reason why shooting might not be an option, maybe they're out of bolts, maybe there's some other problem, but their response to "Hm, I can't shoot the enemy" should not be to jump to their death in the desperate hope that they might get the chance to bash somebody with a crossbow. Aggressiveness options for squads would be swell, like "stay put and attack anything you can without moving from your station area" or being able to tell the dwarves to retreat and only attack in self-defense. Ideally these should be a rework of the existing military UI rather than something tacked on, we don't need even more stuff added to the military UI.
This. Marksdwarf AI is broken right now, in ways that make them unusable for all but those who practice the dark arts of marksdwarf herding.
Fixing marksdwarf retardedness, and military AI in general, will make the game a lot more accessible to beginners and intermediate players.

TheEqualsE

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #43 on: October 31, 2019, 11:39:04 pm »

Things that frustrated me the most when I started playing, in no particular order.

Forgotten beasts with webs or fire would show up too early in a fort's history.  It's be nice if beginners could toggle them off or have a mega beast lite option so they are there but don't shoot webs or fire.

The dwarves have little sense of self preservation.  They set their babies down in water currents to do tasks and then are upset when they get swept away.  They try to climb when they have little skill and get hurt. This is especially a problem with squads in areas by water or tall environments.  Experienced troops might battle a monster successfully in caves only to suffer losses after the fight because they all try to path home at once.  The ones in the back see the ones in front as being in the way and take crazy routes over water or up stalactites and inevitably fall and drown / take falling damage.

The same climbing behavior means they will dig to places they can't get to, stop halfway, climb out, and then never come back because the task requires climbing to get to.  The game doesn't warn you because no job has been cancelled, it's just not ever going to happen.  The only way to start the digging job again is to build a path that can reach the place they left off.  There is no way new players are going to see this coming or know what to do when it happens.

My suggestion for this kind of stuff is have something that detects the condition and then warns the player.  Give them a preference for waiting a second and trying to path again before doing climbing dangerous numbers of levels.  Prefer to dodge in a directions other than into their own moat which will almost certainly kill them.

Floor hatches can cause unexpected and seemingly unexplained injuries.  Sooner or later someone sets down something heavy on top of it and it falls on the next person through, possibly causing them to drop whatever carrying on anyone below this.  In the combat log it will just look like  bunch of people got hurt for no reason or from falling.  This can cause loss of limbs, even death.  That's pretty frustrating.

Speaking of which in the early stages of learning DF a lot of dwarves are gonna get squished or flung into the air unintentionally by draw bridges.  It doesn't help that when they want in they stand directly in front of it.  If a player could paint a "don't stand here waiting for the door zone" that would save a lot of pointless deaths.

My apologies in advance if any of this has been patched out lately, I've only just recently started playing the most recent version.  I hope this helps.
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Proudbucket

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Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« Reply #44 on: October 31, 2019, 11:52:53 pm »

As a new player I think the biggest issue is that one does not know how to interact with the environment, the game is very obscure, overly complicated and inconsistent. This made me abandon fortresses in frustration and think about leaving the game several times. There are several factors contributing to the problem:

1) The command menu is cluttered
Finding too many options is overwhelming. I'd suggest rearranging the menu so that options are divided in categories and hide commands that are rarely used.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

2) Players do not obtain enough information from the game
The command k should give something like:
"Elephant corpse"
"This is the corpse of a paquiderm, an enormous and terrible beast with tough rubbery leather and a couple intimidating tusks."
> The corpse can be stored at a refuse pile (p+r)
> Meat can be extracted at the butcher's shop (b+w+u)
> Bones and Ivory can be used at the craftswarf's shop (b+w+r)
> Leather can be extracted at the tanner's shop (b+w+n)
> If not consumed, the meat will rot producing noxious miasma

Things that veterans give for granted (e.g. one can milk a kangaroo) are not obvious for beginners and the game should give this info.

3) Improve consistency
The game is very inconsistent with the way buildings or areas are made. As an example, to set places where dwarves do some stuff there is a plethora of options:
- Build a 3x3 workshop.
- Build a variable size farm plot with UMHK.
- Designate trees to be cut by selecting two corners.
- Designate a permanent area to gather plants by selecting two corners.
- Set an activity area over a piece of furniture.

How in the hell is one supposed how to ask a dwarf to do one job? There are so many ways that it becomes confusing. The system used by Dwarf fortress follows a logic but it is obscure and confusing to new players. I'd suggest sticking with just one or two methods and be done with it.
« Last Edit: October 31, 2019, 11:58:04 pm by Proudbucket »
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