Other than the infamous irrigate-to-farm-underground bug, I’ve yet to run into any real bugs, so far. There are some balance issues with combat, so I hear, but I’ve always been more into building than combat anyways, so I’ve just kept my dwarves nicely walled off. And Dwarf Therapist for 3.03 is more complete than it was for 40d#, last time I played, so I’m having a jolly old time. Just need to get the hang of milking now…
Dwarf fortress is begging to be ported over to something like the ‘Theme Hospital’ engine. I’d pay good money for that.
You can hack your own compatibility into .3 by adding a blank “v0.31.03.ini” file in etc/Windows, and “0x4bc3c470 = v0.31.03” under #windows in etc/“game_data.ini”
I’ve been using it, seems to work just fine so far.
I tended to focus on the combat aspect of this game, as making it to sieges was a great challenge in the 40d versions… Combat seems to be pretty glitchy so far - I’m not sure whether sieges are still working.
Maybe it’s time to try some mega-projects. I’ve been thinking about building a 100-level or so screw pump system to power ground-level magma furnaces…
Odd, I’ve always focused on the building because, even without traps, I’ve never had any siege be more than trivially difficult (I tend to field 25% of my dwarves in the military (troops, fort guard, and royal guard combined), granted, just because otherwise they’d just be haulers anyway since my pop growth almost always outstrips my ability to economically use my dwarves.) But when a legendary dwarf trained first in wrestler and armor user and then as a hammerdwarf can single-handedly annihilate 15-20 goblins with only minor wounds…
I finally got a good fortress going, but it collapsed because of the military bugs. I had several guys I couldn’t get to stop training under any circumstances. eventually they went insane with thirst, the killed someone, then died. The the dead guys friends went insane with grief and attacked people and got killed by the guards, and it became a never ending cycle of people going crazy until my fortress was shit.
I hope they fix the training bug, and make some sort of military management tool like therapist.
God, I love DF.
That sounds like a whole lot of fun.
My population growth never outstrips my economic workforce needs. I have a very simple technique. Any new immigrants who arrive without useful skills are immediately drafted into the military and sent to stand guard in the trash compactor. (Wouldn’t want anyone sneaking in and stealing our garbage.) Unfortunately, it seems that my dorfs just love to play with all the levers in the control room… 
Of course, I plan on expanding my operations so that incoming immigrants will have more choices than just being smashed into oblivion. In the future they will be able to choose between assignments to the magma room, the freezing room, the drowning room, or the 100 z-level mine shaft. 
I started over, and had a hunter who worked well.
He become legendary, and fell in love with his crossbow, and it became an artifact with 20. Now he renames the damn thing every 30 seconds, I had to change the init settings to stop the nameing of a weapon from causing a pause and taking focus. :smack:
I don’t understand how people can not use all their dwarves.
Hauling garbage the goblins leave behind is a never ending job for me (and my fortress’s main wealth generator, sadly). I only have 40 dwarves due to FPS issues and probably 30 or so are constantly hauling but the goblins just keep coming and dying faster then I can clean up after them.
Even if I ever did manage to get caught up on that, there’s about a thousand gems that need to go into stockpiles and about oh, 10,000 - 12,000 or so ore (and equal that number of useless stones) down in the mines that needs to be hauled back up and eventually I’m going to have to do SOMETHING with the 500+ goblin skeletons (and at least that many severed goblin limbs) laying about everywhere.
… hauling really should have a skill, considering it’s all most of my dwarves ever get to do 
Well, perhaps it’s because I’m such a micromanager early on in my fortress’s life span, but I usually find that immigrants come in much more quickly than I feel like managing. I’ll be designing a nice set of rooms for my first seven dorfs, when along come seven or eight more. So far so good: I could use a little more labor to start dumping all the excess stone, after all! But then I’ve no sooner finished carving out a larger living space than a wave of twenty or twenty-five new immigrants shows up, more than doubling my population and straining my food and drink resources to the limit.
Sure, I could put some of those new mouths to work producing food and booze for the rest of them. . . but that would require that I stop working on the much more important task of designing a cool-looking fortress for a while to set up additional farms and workshops. So, into the crusher room they go!
Hell, even just something with mouse control and tooltip menus. That’d be worth $40-50 to me, easily.
No kidding. I want to absolutely fall in love with this game, and I’ve tried several times, but I just can’t stand the graphics and terrible user interface. I just can’t tell what’s going on.
Where the holy hell is the listing of commands for this thing? It sounds intriguing, but right now I’m stuck at the start. I GUESS that I’m supposed to assign abilities and buy stuff, but how do I do it?
I recommend starting by following this guide for your first game. It’s a little outdated, but it will take you through all the basics of building & balancing a fortress, and at least from personal experience, by the time I got to brewing/farming/irrigation, I had most of the (horrible) interface down.
Something similar to the TK ports of the Angband variants would be perfect.
The file that the guide references is corrupted, or at least that’s the message that I keep getting. And I can’t figure out how to guide my dwarves into certain skills at the start, nor can I figure out how to purchase goods to start with.
There are four steps to creating a fortress from scratch:
Creating a world.
Choosing an embark location.
Preparing to embark.
Playing the game.
After you’ve chosen where you’re going to embark, there’s a screen that says something like:
STANDARD
Prepare carefully for your trip
Pick the second one, and you’ll be taken to a screen where you can select your starting equipment and skills. Equipment and animals are on one screen, skills are on the other, and you switch with TAB.
Does that help?
To further elaborate on preparing to embark:
To begin with, when choosing a location for your first fortress, it’s a good idea to find a spot that will be as beginner-friendly as possible. That means you want to avoid any biomes whose Surroundings are indicated as “sinister,” “haunted,” “terrifying,” “untamed wilds,” or even probably “joyous wilds.” Look for normal wilderness, or better still a place listed as “calm” or “serene.” Also try to find a place without temperature extremes, and with a reasonable number of trees. Also, no aquifers. Aquifers can make mining hell, and are indicated by a row of blue squigglies next to one or more of the geological layers listed in the region properties on the right.
If you want to be able to take things really easy, you might even consider setting up shop on a little island out in the ocean. The benefit is that you will have no goblin civilizations as neighbors, so you won’t have to worry about being invaded and slaughtered. The downside is that you won’t be able to trade with humans or elves, since of all the civilizations, it seems that dwarves are the only ones who know how to build boats. :smack:
In the preparation screens, you use your arrow keys to scroll through the various lists and highlight different dwarves, skills, items and so on (NOTE: you can also use PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN in all these lists to move through them more quickly); and you use your numpad + and - keys to increase or decrease the quantity of some highlighted thing.
So, on the dwarves screen, you select a particular dwarf in the list on the left, then press RIGHT to move over to the skills list. You then scroll through the skills, pressing + on each one you want to increase. The cost for each increase is displayed on the right side; each time you increase a skill, the cost to increase it again will go up by one point.
Choosing starting skills can be something of a complex art, but if you made sure to select a hospitable embark region, it’s neither too difficult nor terribly important. I usually start with a couple of miners, a woodcutter/carpenter, a mason/building designer, a stonecrafter/mechanic, a grower/herbalist/brewer, plus a “leader” dwarf, who should have some skills in brokering, appraisal, judge of intent, and record-keeping. These skills are useful for trading when caravans arrive (so you can see the value of the goods you’re bartering, and angle for better deals) and so you can assess the value of things in your fort and maintain accurate records of all your possessions.
(Pressing “z” in-game allows you to review fortress wealth and stockpile records; how precise these counts will be depends on how much your record keeper has been working. It’s the difference between “Uh, I dunno, we have maybe a thousand stone? Don’t bother me when I’m drinking!” and “We have exactly nine hundred and eighty-six units of stone: 422 granite, 181 andesite, 150 rhyolite, 98 orthoclase, 54 microcline, 48 bituminous coal, 32 bauxite, and one chunk of schist; and if you like I can show you where each and every one of those stones is right now, even the one that Urist Shovelslapped was carrying when he slipped and fell into that pit of tigers.”)
You don’t have to assign all ten available skill increases for every dwarf, either; most skills (especially mining) will quickly be improved on their own just by experience. So, to recap, here’s my super-generic starting build (all skills I just raise to “adequate”, except where specially labeled):
[ul]
[li] Dwarf 1: Miner[/li][li] Dwarf 2: Miner[/li][li] Dwarf 3: Wood Cutter, Skilled Carpenter[/li][li] Dwarf 4: Skilled Mason, Building Designer[/li][li] Dwarf 5: Grower, Herbalist, Brewer[/li][li] Dwarf 6: Skilled Stone Crafter, Mechanic[/li][li] Dwarf 7: Judge of Intent, Appraiser, Record Keeper[/li][/ul]
Now, items! Pressing TAB gets you over to the items screen. The list you see immediately on the left contains the items that are “yours” already. You can scroll through this list with UP and DOWN, and pressing the numpad + and - keys will increase or decrease the amount of the highlighted item (which will either subtract or add back to your available points). Note that if there is only one of an item (it won’t have a bracketed number, like [2] after it), and you press “-”, that item will be removed from the list.
Pressing “n” brings you to a list of all available items, so you can select a new one to add to your inventory.
I would actually recommend removing several of the default items from the list, to free up more points for booze. Specifically, I’d ditch one of the battle axes, the pig tail thread, the pig tail fiber cloth, a couple of the pig tail fiber bags, the splints and crutches, and possibly the anvil. These things are all useful, of course, but I find that I rarely make use of them before one or two trade caravans have arrived, at which point I could easily acquire them. And if you need those splints and crutches within the first couple of seasons, your fort is in serious trouble. 
Then I’d spend the surplus points mainly on booze and meat. You’ll probably start getting immigrants before too long, so it helps to have a bit of a surplus in the food department, especially since as a beginner you may take a while to get your own food and drink production up to capacity.
Of course, even with all this preparation, your first fortress (or two, or three) is quite likely to fail. So the best advice is to try to take things as they come, realize that the learning curve is brutal, and keep in mind the official Dwarf Fortress motto: Losing is fun!
AHA! I was using the + and - keys on my keyboard, not the numpad. THAT’S what I’ve been doing wrong! Thanks.
I learned to type on a typewriter, not a keyboard, and even though I took a 10 key by touch class, I still tend to not use the numpad. All right, I have something to keep me busy tomorrow.
Dwarf Fortress uses the numpad a lot (well, really just four keys on the numpad, I suppose). In fact, one of the minor challenges faced by new players is learning just which buttons can be used for scrolling in which contexts. The general rule of thumb is that completely separate screens use the arrow keys to scroll (and PGUP/PGDN for page scrolling), whereas things in the “sidebar” in the main game interface use numpad + and -, with numpad * and / used for scrolling a page at a time.
There are exceptions, though. For example, when speaking to your trade liaison to request the delivery of certain goods in the next caravan, you get a full screen menu, but you have to use + and - to scroll through the major item types: up and down scrolls through specific items, and left and right change the shipment priority on a given item.