For those of you who recently discovered Dwarf Fortress, a new version is out: version 0.27.169.32a. It’s a major enough revision that the Wiki is being completely revised.
No longer will the mountainside be a long straight line – now it’s a fractal! The world incorporates soil types, aquifers, slopes, biomes, and more (no more mountains made of the same eight types of stone). Instead of “silver” there is now “nickel silver”, “sterling silver”, and “silver.” The starting equipment list is much more varied: four different kinds of picks to equip your first miners with. The point system is more nuanced: skills like “thresher”, “liar”, and “comedian” have been added. Fortress and settlement names can be de-randomized or re-rolled until you find a random name you like. In short, the depth and nuance that made version 0.23.130.23a a hit has been increased by what appears to be an order of magnitude.
Three cheers for Tarn & Zach Adams. Now back to my fortress!
Is there a summary of the major changes over the last few months? I’m curious what’s changed, but I’d rather not slog through the extremely long changelog.
The features I listed above are among the most major changes. The addition of a Z-axis is pretty huge, too. I can’t emphasize how much the layout of the average game has changed. The forum thread titles should give you an idea of what’s going on, too.
Site selection is almost entirely at the user’s discretion – you can scroll over the entire world map looking for a site that matches your exacting specifications, and choose to live near a human or elven city if you really want to. The new map generator will occasionally plop you down near ruins full of zombies, who will shamble about and try to kill you. I can only imagine what the elephants are like now.
I had the bad luck to find a ruin with an elite zombie pikemaster on my first map. He came out, skewered my war dogs, and slaughtered my entire crew. :eek: This, on a map labeled “Calm”. So there are many bugs to be worked out, I hope.
Fair warning: if you can’t handle the (admittedly Byzantine) keyboard-and-menu-based UI, Dwarf Fortress is never going to be for you. Tilesets are available to make the graphics more pleasant, if that’s your gripe.
That said, I’m afraid that with the Wiki for the new version down, only veterans of the old version will be able to pick it up and start playing immediately. Your best bet is to grab the old version and use the old wiki’s quickstart guide along with the recommended starting builds. Work your way through getting to the magma, starting metalsmithing, and minting coins… then see if you can keep the Dwarven Economy running for a season or more.
I sympathize with your plight – “losing is fun” is a pretty terrible motto if you can’t figure out how or why you lost. The key to the old game is realizing that it takes three things to keep a dwarf alive: food, alcohol, and security. It’s relatively simple to provide the first two. The third will keep you busy for the rest of the game. After that it’s just SimCity in a Nethack graphics engine… with surly drunken dwarves.
The new game seems much more open ended: it’s easy to do surface farming, but cave farming now requires even more skill, luck, and patience. It’s easier to show up with good equipment, but harder to plan your fortress layout in advance. I’ve only got about two hours in on the new version and I’m sure there are plenty of additions left to still surprise and/or frustrate me.
I could never figure out what on earth was happening - I had a hard time even FINDING my dwarves, let alone figuring out why they weren’t doing anything I told them to.
The major mechanic for interaction with your dwarfs is the **(u)*nit listing. Hit “u” to view the personnel list (and what everyone’s doing right now). Highlight different dwarfs on the list by scrolling with arrow keys, and use **(c)**hoose dwarf (not sure if that’s the command name, but that’s how I remember it). Hitting “c” will center your view on the dwarf you’ve selected and let you see what he’s doing.
Then **(p)**references and **(l)**abor to get to the jobs list for that dwarf and change what the dwarf is/isn’t allowed to do. All dwarfs start with almost all hauling tasks enabled, but in the very early game, you want your miners to do nothing but dig, eat, and sleep. Learning to forbid them from hauling stuff is… jeez, I guess it’s four menus deep! And pretty much vital to the game.
The old Quickstart guide is remarkably helpful, but it doesn’t really stop to explain why the tasks it’s teaching you are so important to the game. For instance, I was well into my fifth game before I figured out how to manage the **(t)**ake from pile interface.
It’s not a simple game, the initial learning curve is steep, but I think the payoff is worth it – YMMV.
most infuriating interface idiosyncrasy: sometimes you scroll with arrow keys and add goods with +/- … and sometimes you use +/- to scroll and highlight with Enter. There is not usually any clear reason why some menus are one way and others are not.
Candid Gamera, I heartily recommend it. Fair warning, though: many of the guides will advise you to bring turtles along because you can eat their meat and make valuable crafts from their bones and shells. The dwarfs are not a friend to all turtles.
Here’s a link to the last Cafe Society thread about the game. Consider the fact that VCO3 started the thread and it still thrived with two pages of adulation*. With a few snide comments about how hard the game is for newcomers. Which it is. Still. There’s also a thread where several gamers on the boards chipped in to play a “succession” game (passing a save file around from player to player and sharing outlandish stories to explain the bizarre stuff that goes on).
this is not meant to be any judgment of VCO3’s personality: he just tends to start threads that attract lots of negative attention. He likes Dwarf Fortress, so he’s more or less OK by me.
Well, this thread did inspire me to go out and download… the latest versions of Angband. I may check out Dwarf Fortress later on, but for now, I’m dungeon-diving for Morgoth.