Was he just a dabbling mechanic?
Yeah he probably was. It was one of the first things he ever tried to mechanic, other than the mechanisms.
I don’t get the appeal of Dwarf Fortress. Don’t get me wrong, it looks like it might be a fun game, but figuring out what to do is harder than the game itself.
You have to experiment to discover even the littlest things. WTF is a ‘plump helmet’? Why would I want one? Oh its food I guess. Why not just call it something that’s obviously food? Why the stupid name? Why won’t any of dwarves build the workshop I designated? Oh, they need a skill. So which of the 8000 skills do they need for this? Oh, one I didnt give at the beginning, I’m out of luck. Wait this guy has that skill, so why is he just standing there? If I designate this 2x2 area as stockpile, why does it only mark 3 of them? And how big a stockpile do I need? How much does one square hold? Can I make a stockpile of food right where my dogs and horses are wandering around, or should it be in a room off to the side? I see a vein of turquoise, should I just dig it, or do I need another action to get the turquoise? How much food do I need? How much food is ‘1 gazelle meat’, how much booze is ‘1 dwarven wine’? etc etc The questions stacked up much faster than the answers.
It takes hours and hours of staring at the screen watching your dwarven miners randomly digging out whatever block they feel like at the moment before you realize that you’ve forgotten something little, or didn’t bring something you need, or don’t actually know you’re supposed to do something important. It’s like UNIX dwarves and all the MAN pages say ‘Good luck, have fun’. They just stand there blinking at you until you hit the exact right combination of keys to make them do the thing that they’ve been standing in front of the entire time. And the interface somehow managed to be so small and so cluttered all at the same time, that you have no idea what’s in half the squares unless you specifically go look at it.
The thing I don’t like is that the game itself does nothing to help you play it. The help files are a joke. In most other amazingly complex games I play, theres some kind of tutorial, or introduction, or something explaining things to you. With this game, it just chucks you in the deep end and stares at you while you flail about trying to figure out how to do pretty much anything. I don’t mind reading directions or anything, but I shouldn’t have to scour the net looking for walkthroughs just to learn how to play. The game is so complex you don’t even know what you can do at the beginning, much less what you should be doing.
I’ve tried playing several times, and quit in abject frustration each time. I feel oddly drawn to it, thinking things like ‘Well maybe it would work if I tried this…’, but then I remember the frustration from trying to do the tiniest little thing and failing miserably, and then trying to find the exact key strokes necessary by pouring over tutorials that just say ‘You should have your dwarves bamblox the fweebleweenie and do it quickly’ or whatever. They will often tell you that you have to do X, but not the steps necessary to do X. And since the interface is quite arcane, figuring this out on your own is quit frustrating.
It looks interesting, and I will keep an eye on it, but I think I’ll leave it alone until it becomes a tad bit more user friendly.
Remember, it is still an alpha product done by two guys. If you are interested in learning I would suggest browsing through a good bit of the Wiki on it. Make a list of your questions and figure it out. I had most of the game figured out before I even started by doing it this way. And remember, “Losing is fun!”
What is this, some sort of elaborate hoax? All I can do is generate worlds or go back to the title screen! And the help screen is the least helpful screen I’ve ever seen. It won’t let me get help on any other subjects except how to use the help screen.
To those of you having some problems figuring the game out, check out this link to the Dubious Quality blog.
Click the archives link for September 2006, and flip through the posts. There is a 5 part tutorial that is pretty in-depth and should get you going through the first year or two.
(THe posts are all in reverse order. I found the easiest way of sifting through all the posts was to search for the word “Dwarf” starting at the bottom)
Losing isn’t fun.
Losing means I sit there with the screen saying
Dwarves idling: 7
While the letter H moves over periods and commas.
I tell my dwarves to build a building, and it just sits there as “construction suspended” while my dwarves idle.
All my dawrves have two highlighted options: mining and health care, and I can’t even select “health care”.
One got promoted to “peasant”? What the hell does this mean? What was he before?
++
This gets irritating after a bit.
Remember those two people scrabbling in the mire in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, smart-alecking King Arthur? Might those be sub-peasants?
Might I also add. . .I couldn’t figure out how to close the game down.
I did "save game’.
Then I had two reasonable options
-
Go to title screen. This brought me not to the title screen which actually had the option “quit” but rather to a screen that just listed the name of my land.
-
Abort this fortress. This indicated that if I chose it, it would remove the game I had just saved.
I ended up having to bring up windows task manager and shutting it down through that. Then, I was asked if I wanted to send a bug report to Windows.
All in all, not the slickest software I’ve ever seen.
The first time you start the game, it has to generate the entire game world, which takes a pretty long time. About twenty minutes, or so, but it only has to do it once. After that, all the fortresses you create are located in the same world, and you can go back and revisit your failed attempts.
You don’t select them. The reason they are highlighted is because they are already selected. Highlight some other tasks if you wan them to perform them. Also, you are likely only looking at the first page of the work options, they have all kinds of other things highlighted at first, including the hauling jobs.
Odd, every time I save I have the option of quitting. It won’t, however, let you quit without saving immediately prior
This game is fun and reading through boatmurder I’ve been laughing maniacally, but I’ve struggled to control my own game (couldn’t seem to figure out how to make anything). Until I figured out that +/- controls a lot of menus and the build order menu is longer than one page, I couldn’t figure out why the program would only let me build so few things and then finally I figured it out and reading the wiki built my first workshop. Of course then I had a huge cave in collapsing most of my storage and smashing my workshop. This may take a few colossal failures before I figure things out. But it is fun.
I want to like this, but have decided to say “forget it” and try nethack again. I remember being able to get much more involved in that. This game is a complete noodle-scratcher.
But regarding your problem quitting - I dunno. I saved my game, and was taken directly to the title screen, with the options “continue playing.” “create new world,” and “quit.”
Corrupted file maybe?
Joe
Okay, I now have a…wall. How do I get these guys to dig?
Fucking confusing, isn’t it?
The answer is, you go to the Dwarf Fortress Wiki, stare at it while clicking on various pages for 75 minutes, then having an “Oh! I get it!” moment, followed by 75 more minutes of brow-furrowed staring at the DF Wiki wondering about how to chop a fucking tree.
Joe
Just found a rather excellent website where users can upload their maps in compressed form for others to check out (it’s a flash plugin, all done in-browser). In particular, check out the utterly ridiculous Copperblazes…
Watch out for stampeding elephant skeletons.
so I read the boatmurder thing and laughed my ass off.
then I played all paranoid about rampaging elephants and never saw one…wich is good because I coulnt even figure out how to mine.
then I figured out how to mine and dug and dug and dug…but couldnt figure out how to store or stockpile or build or JESUS H BALLS back to wiki…
then I realised part of the problem was simply that even the wiki pages often just assume you know how to do something without giving details on the exact how to…
I think that as much fun as it is diggin holes in a wall I will have to give this a pass until it gets some 4 bit graphics and a bit more intuitive on the play.
looks like a lot of fun though.