Dwarf Fortress > DF Dwarf Mode Discussion
New to DF
Thor2axe:
How can I convince my friend to play? He is just overwhelmed by the shear scope.
(And/or share your first time experiences and thoughts.)
Bromor Neckbeard:
Well, start him off slow. Let him use one of your abandoned fortress worlds to adventure in. Walk him through adventure mode and let him see the inside of your fortress. Once he's built a godly adventurer and genocided the entire world, he'll think, "Thor2axe's fort is okay, but I could really build a better one." Then you've got him hooked, hopefully.
I first heard about this game through reading a succession game on a forum for a different game. At the time, the graphics packs weren't as popular as they are now. So when I downloaded it, I really couldn't get past the ASCII graphics. I tried for a little bit to learn it, but just couldn't get into it. About six months later, I saw another succession game on another different forum, and it interested me to investigate. I read some of the most famous succession games such as Tale of a Sensible Dwarf, Nist Akath, Boatmurdered, and One Dwarf Against the World. After that, I knew I'd have to force myself to struggle up the Cliff of Learning. Once I got a couple of z-levels above the ground, I never looked back. Thanks to the helpful and patient people on this forum answering my noobish questions, I'm now a Competent Dwarf Fortress player and I'm working on Skilled.
Some of my most FUN experiences include:
Back before I knew precisely how water worked, I decided that I would do what everybody else was doing, and put a waterfall in my dining hall. However, I figured that if the water drained through grates into a pool twice as deep as the dining hall, it would evaporate fast enough that I wouldn't have to make anywhere for it to go. Now, my dining hall was lower than the rest of my fort, and it was necessary to go through it to get from the outside to the living quarters so that my dwarves would constantly pass through it and get good thoughts from seeing all the masterwork engravings and furniture and stuff. I imagine that some of those "good thoughts" went along the lines of, "my bedroom seems a tad on the damp side", "how does Bromor expect us to breathe water?", and "whoever designed this fortress is a goddamn moron, glub glub glub".
Back before we could construct more than one square at a time, I decided to build a badass elevated walkway over my courtyard. But, rather than laboriously construct it block by block, I decided to dig the ground out underneath it, and then channel around where I wanted my courtyard to be, so that I could collapse the ground down into the new courtyard, and what was left would be the elevated walkway. I didn't realize that cave-ins would punch through a single z-level of rock. After the dust cleared, most of my dwarves were dead and my fortress resembled an anthill that somebody had taken a scoop out of with a shovel.
inaluct:
At first, I was like "Fuck this shit," and I went to play Crawl. After about a week of DF sitting on my desktop, I got bored and decided to give it a serious try. That's how I learned to play it.
Wolfius:
Let him look through the wiki, maybe read a story or two, then embark in a nice safe area to get a grip of the basic mechanics - soil farming, brewing, mining, and basic static defences.
ToonyMan:
I knew how to play the first time I loaded it up.
EDIT:
If they can't get DF into their skull, they never will.
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