oh no, I might be ready for another year of Dwarf Fortress.
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
+4
HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Yeah, the new UI was made for mouse. Looks like it has hotkeys, if you prefer the old ways.
Fuck no I don't, fuck hotkeys.
You're never gonna make it to the big leagues of competitive Dwarf Fortress with that attitude!
In all honesty, hotkeys are great shortcuts. The old maze of letters in DF wasn't a good situation, but even if it had been designed with a "normal" gaming UI to begin with, everyone would've been using the full keyboard anyway. I mean, I would rather press space to pause and unpause than move a mouse pointer over to a pause button and click it.
I will definitely be using hotkeys when I play it on the Steam Deck.
The devs being a couple of seconds behind on the stream didn't help
It did confirm how much I remember about a game I haven't played in a decade, though, as I was thinking stuff like, "no, the building options are over there!"
I watched the stream for a little bit and the hot keys to do stuff started popping into my head which is wild because its probably been 10 years since I played.
I do not conciously recall any hot keys, but the tendons in my hands seemed to be twitching along with purpose.
The devs being a couple of seconds behind on the stream didn't help
It did confirm how much I remember about a game I haven't played in a decade, though, as I was thinking stuff like, "no, the building options are over there!"
I watched the stream for a little bit and the hot keys to do stuff started popping into my head which is wild because its probably been 10 years since I played.
Seeing the tooltip show "m" to dig gave me a weird miniature panic attack. It's "d"esignation>"d"ig! It's always been dd! I haven't played in years and somehow it's still in there so strongly. Zones for bedrooms instead of qr was weird too.
Watching the preview has made me crave playing Dwarf Fortress like crazy. I might have to download it this week to get the edge off while I wait for the Steam release. I don't think I ever played the current version with taverns and temples and stuff.
So, anyone interested in doing a community rotation fort after the Steam version hits?
Possibly/potentially with some sort of mega-structure build or other weird but not "fuck you" hard goal to achieve?
I'm interested (we talked about this earlier) but with the caveats that 1) I will be out of the country for a couple of weeks in the beginning of December, 2) spending time at my in-laws at the end of December (in the same state at least) and 3) I probably haven't played in 8 years so I'll probably bungle everything into a tantrum/death spiral. But other than that I'm totally in!
I'm a little disappointed with the beginner friendly vids or whatever they want to call them. No slight against the people doing them, they're enthusiastic and friendly and want the game to be a success and I want it to be too. They're also a small company without a lot of resources.
But they don't really end up being tutorials because there's a lot of muddled clicking around looking for how to do something. A tutorial should present instructions confidently and cleanly. In the first one Tarn tries to give instructions but the delay means the player ends up in the wrong menu and has to back out. In the second one BlindIRL isn't familiar with the new interface so often says "we should do this but I don't know where it's located now" so again there's hunting around and head-scratching and things are a bit meandering. Fundamentals are still missing...constant pausing is critical, especially for a new player (not fun for a video, I know). Serendipitous stealing everything from the caravan has led to them not needing to worry about food yet so they still haven't made a farm.
If these aren't intended to be tutorials and just examples of what it's like as a brand new player, it nails that experience but I don't know if what is shown ends up being a selling point.
If they're mostly intended to show off the new graphics, UI and sound then that's fine. I just don't want people to watch these thinking they'll be a good starting point.
As a streamer Blind is absolutely great, but I really question the wisdom of getting him to do a video like that, when on stream he's been pretty vocal about not wanting or liking the graphics or mouse interface.
Well...that was a new loss I've never experience before.
Was going for a trap heavy defense with basically no militia, and had a steel clad Monster Slayer get drunk and start a fight in the tavern. The ensuing brawl wiped out over 120 dwarves and basically cratered my fortress.
Yes, I've come to the conclusion with my last fortress werebeast situation is to build any tavern with an entire wall of floodgates and a large reservoir in the z levels above.
Now if only I can set up a pressure plate that triggers on the full moon....
DisruptedCapitalist on
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
Now if only I can set up a pressure plate that triggers on the full moon....
I love the idea of a group of engineers struggling to figure out how to automate this and one guy with a humanities (dwarfities?) degree telling them “just hire someone to throw a lever.”
I couldn't handle the wait for the new release and started playing the current Dwarf Fortress version.
Everything was going okay for a while, until a giant cave toad got into my main stairwell and ripped out the throat of my only armorsmith because I apparently forgot how doors worked.
Soon afterwards a fresh migrant marked as a presser went on an impromptu hunting expedition and ran afoul of a giant cave spider. Unwilling to leave a helpless dwarf to her doom, I sent my fledgling military to assist, all of whom were promptly webbed, grabbed by the head, and swung around like ragdolls until their necks snapped.
The really weird part is that, while my military was en route, Iton the presser effortlessly punched four of the spider's limbs into gore and wandered off completely unharmed. Between the four mangled legs and one lucky spear wound to the abdomen, the spider limped off the map and completely ignored all the unarmed dwarves who rushed in to reclaim the bodies and equipment.
I really need to relearn how to handle the caverns properly.
The easy method is walling them off, but that's too easy for some. The other method tends to involve the sort of fun you just had, endlessly.
Part of the concern is climbing monsters that can even clamber along the ceiling and ignore any lesser defenses. Has to be a floor-to-ceiling wall. Doors can be destroyed by building destroyers unless you happen to get a strange mood artifact door which cannot be destroyed, and will lead to a conga line of monsters constantly attempting and failing, giving you ample opportunity to attack them from arrowslits or drop things on their heads.
I rebuilt my militia under the leadership of Iton Spiderbane. Unfortunately, before I really had time to recover, an undead siege showed up.
Like an idiot, I went over two and a half years without installing a floodgate or drawbridge, and I made the brilliant choice to hold off until winter to finally do it since the dwarven caravan was about to arrive. I tried to wall off the depot before the zombies limped their way over, but a slightly speedier-than-average elf zombie scared off the workers before they could finish.
In a panic, I ordered my new, barely-trained militia to clog the passageway while I ordered another wall built a little further in. The gambit succeeded, but the entire militia died to their faces getting kicked off in the process. At least there's no necromancer, so I have a chance of living long enough to bury them.
Lessons learned:
- Build a proper gate in the first winter.
- Doors do not block wild animals unless you mark them pet-impassible, which is an FPS killer and not really an option.
- Doors marked "Forbidden" DO block wildlife and hostiles from getting through unless they're building destroyers. This would have saved my second military if I had known.
- Be more aggressive about cage-trapping chokepoints in the caverns. Maybe terraform them a bit to create more chokepoints. I did a little bit of this but I should have done it sooner and on a bigger scale.
- It's probably worthwhile to add some mazelike defenses between your fortress and the surface/caverns. There aren't really THAT many important labors that send your dwarves outside. Building destroyers can't destroy constructed floors or walls, so temporary shortcuts in the first year or two that get plugged up later are fine.
Mayday confirmed for me that covering up areas that no one can see will now "unreveal" them, making them dark again. So for example if you have a vein of lapis lazuli running through your bedrooms, you could carve it out and construct walls in its place and it won't look awkward.
So after the fall of my last fort, I started up a new one last night. Another nice waterfall embark, with the plan of doing a dry run for one of the community fort ideas I had. Wagon spawned right next to the waterfall, surely a sign that Armok was favoring my start location - even the dwarves wanted to take in the sights right away!
So I go, plan out the basics of the fort, lay everything out. Finish up my designations, unpaused and let the miners get to work.
Within 3 seconds, 4 of the 7 starting dwarves were dead at the bottom of the waterfall. Something terrified them, and they threw themselves right off the cliff. Only the woodcutter and miners survived because they had tasks assigned and had pathed away in the first few ticks.
Mayday confirmed for me that covering up areas that no one can see will now "unreveal" them, making them dark again. So for example if you have a vein of lapis lazuli running through your bedrooms, you could carve it out and construct walls in its place and it won't look awkward.
To elaborate, the walls that get hidden need to be surrounded by other walls. If you build a 3x3 wall with an empty segment inside, that empty segment will be visible. But you can definitely just wall in the whole space left behind a vein and it will be dark.
I think Penny Arcade forums were one of the first epicenters of Dwarf Fortress, alongside Something Awful and of course the Bay12 forums. There are early references at Bay12 about what's been said "over at PA" like everyone was aware of the places to talk about DF online.
Unfortunately it looks like PA's archives only go back to threads created at the start of 2007. In the earliest DF thread I can find here, there's a link in the OP to the current SA thread "since the old PA DF megathread fell off the forums."
Unless the dates got screwed up, it looks like we went through two 60 page threads in just May 2007. As noted by Captain K, it was possibly the most active thread on the forum at the time.
I rebuilt my militia under the leadership of Iton Spiderbane. Unfortunately, before I really had time to recover, an undead siege showed up.
Like an idiot, I went over two and a half years without installing a floodgate or drawbridge, and I made the brilliant choice to hold off until winter to finally do it since the dwarven caravan was about to arrive. I tried to wall off the depot before the zombies limped their way over, but a slightly speedier-than-average elf zombie scared off the workers before they could finish.
In a panic, I ordered my new, barely-trained militia to clog the passageway while I ordered another wall built a little further in. The gambit succeeded, but the entire militia died to their faces getting kicked off in the process. At least there's no necromancer, so I have a chance of living long enough to bury them.
Lessons learned:
- Build a proper gate in the first winter.
- Doors do not block wild animals unless you mark them pet-impassible, which is an FPS killer and not really an option.
- Doors marked "Forbidden" DO block wildlife and hostiles from getting through unless they're building destroyers. This would have saved my second military if I had known.
- Be more aggressive about cage-trapping chokepoints in the caverns. Maybe terraform them a bit to create more chokepoints. I did a little bit of this but I should have done it sooner and on a bigger scale.
- It's probably worthwhile to add some mazelike defenses between your fortress and the surface/caverns. There aren't really THAT many important labors that send your dwarves outside. Building destroyers can't destroy constructed floors or walls, so temporary shortcuts in the first year or two that get plugged up later are fine.
Wait. Is this why my FPS is so garbage in my current fort?
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Posts
Yeah, the new UI was made for mouse. Looks like it has hotkeys, if you prefer the old ways.
Fuck no I don't, fuck hotkeys.
This is how you break an engineer’s heart.
You're never gonna make it to the big leagues of competitive Dwarf Fortress with that attitude!
🎶 Mmm, man, dig that crazy click
Who likes shortcuts?
We like shortcuts 🎶
In all honesty, hotkeys are great shortcuts. The old maze of letters in DF wasn't a good situation, but even if it had been designed with a "normal" gaming UI to begin with, everyone would've been using the full keyboard anyway. I mean, I would rather press space to pause and unpause than move a mouse pointer over to a pause button and click it.
I will definitely be using hotkeys when I play it on the Steam Deck.
I do not conciously recall any hot keys, but the tendons in my hands seemed to be twitching along with purpose.
Watching the preview has made me crave playing Dwarf Fortress like crazy. I might have to download it this week to get the edge off while I wait for the Steam release. I don't think I ever played the current version with taverns and temples and stuff.
I thought it was to [k]now what you were looking at?
It's for [k], I gotta actually check what the hell is going on here.
Possibly/potentially with some sort of mega-structure build or other weird but not "fuck you" hard goal to achieve?
I'm interested (we talked about this earlier) but with the caveats that 1) I will be out of the country for a couple of weeks in the beginning of December, 2) spending time at my in-laws at the end of December (in the same state at least) and 3) I probably haven't played in 8 years so I'll probably bungle everything into a tantrum/death spiral. But other than that I'm totally in!
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1655533303
And here's beginner tutorial vid #2:
But they don't really end up being tutorials because there's a lot of muddled clicking around looking for how to do something. A tutorial should present instructions confidently and cleanly. In the first one Tarn tries to give instructions but the delay means the player ends up in the wrong menu and has to back out. In the second one BlindIRL isn't familiar with the new interface so often says "we should do this but I don't know where it's located now" so again there's hunting around and head-scratching and things are a bit meandering. Fundamentals are still missing...constant pausing is critical, especially for a new player (not fun for a video, I know). Serendipitous stealing everything from the caravan has led to them not needing to worry about food yet so they still haven't made a farm.
If these aren't intended to be tutorials and just examples of what it's like as a brand new player, it nails that experience but I don't know if what is shown ends up being a selling point.
If they're mostly intended to show off the new graphics, UI and sound then that's fine. I just don't want people to watch these thinking they'll be a good starting point.
But like I said, I don't agree with that either. Beginners will be hopelessly lost watching these.
Was going for a trap heavy defense with basically no militia, and had a steel clad Monster Slayer get drunk and start a fight in the tavern. The ensuing brawl wiped out over 120 dwarves and basically cratered my fortress.
The main takeaway I got from that stream is that if you build a tavern, you attract air guitarists
/Draws up plan for floodable tavern
Now if only I can set up a pressure plate that triggers on the full moon....
I love the idea of a group of engineers struggling to figure out how to automate this and one guy with a humanities (dwarfities?) degree telling them “just hire someone to throw a lever.”
Everything was going okay for a while, until a giant cave toad got into my main stairwell and ripped out the throat of my only armorsmith because I apparently forgot how doors worked.
Soon afterwards a fresh migrant marked as a presser went on an impromptu hunting expedition and ran afoul of a giant cave spider. Unwilling to leave a helpless dwarf to her doom, I sent my fledgling military to assist, all of whom were promptly webbed, grabbed by the head, and swung around like ragdolls until their necks snapped.
The really weird part is that, while my military was en route, Iton the presser effortlessly punched four of the spider's limbs into gore and wandered off completely unharmed. Between the four mangled legs and one lucky spear wound to the abdomen, the spider limped off the map and completely ignored all the unarmed dwarves who rushed in to reclaim the bodies and equipment.
I really need to relearn how to handle the caverns properly.
Part of the concern is climbing monsters that can even clamber along the ceiling and ignore any lesser defenses. Has to be a floor-to-ceiling wall. Doors can be destroyed by building destroyers unless you happen to get a strange mood artifact door which cannot be destroyed, and will lead to a conga line of monsters constantly attempting and failing, giving you ample opportunity to attack them from arrowslits or drop things on their heads.
Like an idiot, I went over two and a half years without installing a floodgate or drawbridge, and I made the brilliant choice to hold off until winter to finally do it since the dwarven caravan was about to arrive. I tried to wall off the depot before the zombies limped their way over, but a slightly speedier-than-average elf zombie scared off the workers before they could finish.
In a panic, I ordered my new, barely-trained militia to clog the passageway while I ordered another wall built a little further in. The gambit succeeded, but the entire militia died to their faces getting kicked off in the process. At least there's no necromancer, so I have a chance of living long enough to bury them.
Lessons learned:
- Build a proper gate in the first winter.
- Doors do not block wild animals unless you mark them pet-impassible, which is an FPS killer and not really an option.
- Doors marked "Forbidden" DO block wildlife and hostiles from getting through unless they're building destroyers. This would have saved my second military if I had known.
- Be more aggressive about cage-trapping chokepoints in the caverns. Maybe terraform them a bit to create more chokepoints. I did a little bit of this but I should have done it sooner and on a bigger scale.
- It's probably worthwhile to add some mazelike defenses between your fortress and the surface/caverns. There aren't really THAT many important labors that send your dwarves outside. Building destroyers can't destroy constructed floors or walls, so temporary shortcuts in the first year or two that get plugged up later are fine.
Clinodev @'d you a few days ago in the Kitfox Discord server. I was like "hey I've seen that guy around, wait he hasn't been here for like a year."
yes he made the unfortunate mistake of finding my twitch stream and how I run my forts. Scarred him for life I tell you.
So I go, plan out the basics of the fort, lay everything out. Finish up my designations, unpaused and let the miners get to work.
Within 3 seconds, 4 of the 7 starting dwarves were dead at the bottom of the waterfall. Something terrified them, and they threw themselves right off the cliff. Only the woodcutter and miners survived because they had tasks assigned and had pathed away in the first few ticks.
To elaborate, the walls that get hidden need to be surrounded by other walls. If you build a 3x3 wall with an empty segment inside, that empty segment will be visible. But you can definitely just wall in the whole space left behind a vein and it will be dark.
I think Penny Arcade forums were one of the first epicenters of Dwarf Fortress, alongside Something Awful and of course the Bay12 forums. There are early references at Bay12 about what's been said "over at PA" like everyone was aware of the places to talk about DF online.
Unfortunately it looks like PA's archives only go back to threads created at the start of 2007. In the earliest DF thread I can find here, there's a link in the OP to the current SA thread "since the old PA DF megathread fell off the forums."
Unless the dates got screwed up, it looks like we went through two 60 page threads in just May 2007. As noted by Captain K, it was possibly the most active thread on the forum at the time.
(first thread lost forever)
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/21581/dwarf-cancels-sleep-playing-dwarf-fortress-nsf56k/p1
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/22572/dwarf-fortress-a-section-of-the-thread-has-collapsed-nsf56k/p1
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/23989/dwarf-fortress-toady-one-withdraws-from-society-nsf56k/p1
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/38984/dwarf-fortress-new-ver-released-now-in-3-ascii-dimensions-nsf56k/p1
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/41106/dwarf-fortress-fishing-interrupted-by-carp/p1
(seventh thread lost forever)
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/58103/dwarf-fortress-the-goblin-slams-into-an-obstacle-and-blows-apart/p1
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/72813/dwarf-fortress-when-you-wake-up-in-the-morning-consider-torture/p1
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/85511/dwarf-fortress-knowing-no-mercy-toady-one-destroyed-our-lives/p1
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/89547/dwarf-fortress-be-sure-to-quot-neuter-quot-your-cats-at-the-butchers-shop/p1
(gap from May 2009 to April 2010)
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/117872/dwarf-fortress-is-that-a-legendary-sock/p1
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/133553/dwarf-fortress-0-31-25-probably-got-flying-cars-powered-by-plump-helmets-and-beards/p1
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/153867/dwarf-fortress-with-amazing-hd-graphics/p1 (this thread!)
Wait. Is this why my FPS is so garbage in my current fort?
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain