Wow, world generation seems a lot faster. Saving is faster too.
Really love the graphics and music. I hate the mouse and hotkeys, but I'll get used to them.
There's no "seems" about it, world gen and saving are both at least 3-4x faster than the classic counterpart. Readjusting to the new hotkeys will take a bit, but they're honestly more logical now and having the mouse to select areas saves sooooo much time.
I'm even getting over my instinctive revulsion of graphics. They aren't just prettier, they're actually helpfully informative. Being able to see what's a few Z levels down in open space is real nice, and now there are sub-menus that can do super-helpful things like letting you reliably pick the orientation of pumps.
This version took a game that was unplayable for me and my ADD/ADHD brain (what’s that? and what’s that over there?!) and made it not just playable, but enjoyable.
I'm even getting over my instinctive revulsion of graphics. They aren't just prettier, they're actually helpfully informative. Being able to see what's a few Z levels down in open space is real nice, and now there are sub-menus that can do super-helpful things like letting you reliably pick the orientation of pumps.
Some things aren't as good yet.
You can't see raindrops outdoors when it's raining (apparently planned). You can no longer tell when a dwarf is on the ground, his square used to be highlighted in brown to show he'd been knocked down or was in the middle of a scuffle. It's also hard to tell what a dwarf is carrying, in my experience...I like to play a little zoomed out and any extra information I might be able to see is lost in the tiny sprites. I watched a dwarf walking really slowly and wondered why until I realized they were installing a door. I wish the sprite still just flashed to show their current work object in the full tile. Also I preferred the bright pink to show dumped items and bright green to show items that could be reclaimed, rather than the tiny little lock icon.
EDIT: Might need this mod to fix smoothing designations which cover up everything going on in the tile.
But a lot of it is really cool when you notice the details, like how statues in a stockpile are covered with a sheet like they're not ready to be unveiled yet. Or how you can visually tell the direction a bridge raises from.
I couldn't properly play or stream this evening, so I said screw it and generated a world that is 10,000 years old.
It has 4.76 million historical events. I cannot wait to see if this thing is even playable.
Edit: ...the world generated was named "The Ageless Dimension". Game of the fucking year.
Anyone playing on higher resolutions having scaling issues, be sure to go in and manually set your maximum interface width to your resolution width. That should let you properly scale everything and not hide any UI elements without the text getting absolutely tiny.
You might have to do some adjusting of your grid size - I found 200 and 75 feel good for me at 4k.
Having not touched DF in years, I started a world. Then quickly started another one as I had no stone. Slowly relearning some of the pieces and definitely need to start memorizing hotkeys as even an hour was tiring out my mouse finger. It looks great and the sound work is also good.
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21stCenturyCall me Pixel, or Pix for short![They/Them]Registered Userregular
How are the promised tutorials in the Steam Version?
I decided to see what is like to embark with the default team just to see what it's like. The expedition leader is useless! She's just an organizer and I don't usually start needing a manager until my second year. So I switched on mining for her, and she grabbed a pickaxe and then she... Went to gather plants. Huh.
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
How are the promised tutorials in the Steam Version?
They get you dug into the ground with a stockpile, a carpenter shop and a craft workshop, with an awareness of controls and how to place furniture and rooms
There are a lot of contextual help pop-ups to complement the tutorial bits, too
It also makes sure you embark in an area that isn't going to immediately fuck you sideways with zombie elephants
How are the promised tutorials in the Steam Version?
The explicit tutorial tells you how to do some basic stuff, such as digging, chopping down trees, building and using workshops.
Beyond that, most of the complicated UI screens have a pop up that explains what they're for and there's a help menu that has additional info on a number of topics.
Every button in the UI has a tooltip, but it appears in the corner of the screen and not at the mouse cursor, which is easy to miss at first.
I would say the tutorial introduces you to enough different base mechanics and menus that, when it ends and is like "okay there's way more shit that we didn't show you or tell you about, click around to investigate and remember losing is fun!" You feel like you know how to go about doing that. It's that style of introduction.
Edit: the game now also has tooltips something like Stellaris does, where a window pops up to tell you about the menu you've just clicked on, and will continue to do that until it tells you to stop.
The tutorial is fine for some of the basics, you will probably want to look up a more in-depth one to learn slightly more advanced gameplay concepts like farming or defense or addressing dwarf needs still though. Expect your forts to die a lot.
There are also mini in game guides for things like farming that aren't directly introduced in the interactive tutorial. You kind of need to know what you want to do in order for those to be useful, but they are useful.
I feel bad that I was so tired when I got home from work that I just ate dinner and went to bed without even launching the game. I at least accepted my friend's gift of it and installed it, but that's all. Definitely gonna play it tonight tho
Or not, I was still super tired today when I woke up at 3:50 to go to the gym before work. We'll see how this day plays out.
Give me stories of your dorfs suffering to sustain meeeeee
I feel bad that I was so tired when I got home from work that I just ate dinner and went to bed without even launching the game. I at least accepted my friend's gift of it and installed it, but that's all. Definitely gonna play it tonight tho
Or not, I was still super tired today when I woke up at 3:50 to go to the gym before work. We'll see how this day plays out.
Give me stories of your dorfs suffering to sustain meeeeee
Streamer I follow had an embark where he seasonally got attacked by 3 to 4 giant birds. Able to handle it. Then one of his dwarves made a masterwork ruby and instantly an army of giant birds descended on the fort killing everyone.
I stayed up...way too late playing this last night, and got a fort most of the way through its third year. Things are going decently well overall, but I've definitely faced some challenges with the new interfaces:
- The haphazardly-renamed stone-related jobs were deeply confusing at the start. Masonry is Architecture (I think?), Stone Carving is Masonry, and Stone Cutting is smoothing and block-crafting, which were split off from their original categories. I do understand the rationale of separating skilled from unskilled labor now that I've decoded it, but I wish all the names had been, like, anything else.
- The default way labors in general are handled makes sense for a brand new player, but is a poor match for how I play the game. I generally hyper-specialize my dwarves, and needing to manually define labors before I could even set them was really tedious (and I assume it needs to be redone every embark), plus the fact that custom labors are given arbitrarily roman numerals instead of definable icons makes it hard to keep track of who's doing what. Anecdotally, it also felt like dwarves with lots of labors enabled are worse at prioritizing than they used to be. Immediately after embarking I forged two picks and an axe and it was done by three different dwarves, none of whom were the skilled weaponsmith I brought.
- Almost no alerts pause the game, including ones like migrants arriving, strange moods, or snatchers, when I really really want them to. I thought this would be configurable, but I couldn't find a menu for it. I'm very, very bad at noticing anything that doesn't involve the flashing red ALERT button, so half of the time when I got migrants they had mixed with the general population before I could check who they were.
- Since staircases now need to be a single multi-level designation, it appears to be impossible to create them in situations where they would need to be partially dug and partially constructed. You cannot construct an up staircase in the middle of a room and then use it has a platform to dig a down staircase into the ceiling, which made digging out storage attics above my workshops harder than it needed to be. I'd appreciate an optional "advanced" tab on staircase creation that lets you do it the old way.
I haven't touched the military menu yet, but that's next on the list now that I've finally gotten some big migrant waves.
I decided to see what is like to embark with the default team just to see what it's like. The expedition leader is useless! She's just an organizer and I don't usually start needing a manager until my second year. So I switched on mining for her, and she grabbed a pickaxe and then she... Went to gather plants. Huh.
Oho! So I see now. Many tasks are set for everyone by default at the beginning of the game--harvesting we already knew about, but now plant gathering is set to everyone as well. Also, most jobs are not actually listed in the labor menu, you have to designate them later if you want to restrict dwarfs. Any job that isn't listed in the labor menu has everyone do it. This is a handy way to get a job done in an early fortress where you don't have any specialists yet. So for example I built a glass kiln and I noticed everyone was building glassworks automatically. So you have to go to the labor menu and designate glassworking as a specific labor to restrict it to certain people. Otherwise everyone does it. This is handy because I just need some green glass blocks ASAP to block up an aquifer (and make it like those famous liminal space pictures of 70s era swimming pools. lol)
I like this new labor system!
edit: @Wyvern yes, it seems like to fix your weaponsmithing problem you need to define it as a custom labor and then designate your weaponsmith as the only one allowed to do it. Otherwise everyone dabbles in it.
DisruptedCapitalist on
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
What?! This is almost as bad as when Hammerers became optional.! I love running the risk that my legendary stonecrafter might get his head bashed in because the mayor needs 3 floodgates RIGHT NOW.
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
- Almost no alerts pause the game, including ones like migrants arriving, strange moods, or snatchers, when I really really want them to. I thought this would be configurable, but I couldn't find a menu for it. I'm very, very bad at noticing anything that doesn't involve the flashing red ALERT button, so half of the time when I got migrants they had mixed with the general population before I could check who they were.
I saw a post elsewhere about editing one of the game files to make alerts pause the game and move the camera. So it's possible to change, but not straightforward.
I'm proud of myself for remembering that when you trade with the elves, and all your trade goods are stored in wooden bins, to not sell them the bin as well
[Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
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21stCenturyCall me Pixel, or Pix for short![They/Them]Registered Userregular
I'm proud of myself for remembering that when you trade with the elves, and all your trade goods are stored in wooden bins, to not sell them the bin as well
yes, it seems like to fix your weaponsmithing problem you need to define it as a custom labor and then designate your weaponsmith as the only one allowed to do it. Otherwise everyone dabbles in it.
Yeah, I figured it out pretty quickly after noticing the issue. It's just that, anecdotally, I feel like in classic there was at least a gentle push towards assigning jobs to the most skilled dwarf as long as they weren't actively busy, but in the new version there's nothing whatsoever discouraging your stone carver from making beds while your carpenter plants seeds and your planter makes tables. I ended up having to lock like 5 out of 7 dwarves to do assigned labor only on day one anyway, and it's way more time-consuming to set it up for the same result.
Switch: SW-2431-2728-9604 || 3DS: 0817-4948-1650
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SummaryJudgmentGrab the hottest iron you can find, stride in the Tower’s front doorRegistered Userregular
edited December 2022
I just completed the tutorial but I'm wondering - should I begin a new game on a non-tutorial map?
The wagon started in like a forest and they told me to dig down, but I felt weird digging into the middle of a field so I dug down at the base of the mountain to the south, which felt kind of far away but, again, digging into the field felt weird:
Is there a way to move the broken wagon (or salvage it), or do you eventually just haul all the supplies out of it and it just sits?
Is there a way to move workshops once built, or salvage them and recover some of the building materials?
SummaryJudgment on
Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.
- Almost no alerts pause the game, including ones like migrants arriving, strange moods, or snatchers, when I really really want them to. I thought this would be configurable, but I couldn't find a menu for it. I'm very, very bad at noticing anything that doesn't involve the flashing red ALERT button, so half of the time when I got migrants they had mixed with the general population before I could check who they were.
I saw a post elsewhere about editing one of the game files to make alerts pause the game and move the camera. So it's possible to change, but not straightforward.
Turns out when you have a bunch of yaks just following your dwarves into their meeting room, the solution is not to butcher them all and leave their meat out.
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Fleebhas all of the fleeb juiceRegistered Userregular
edited December 2022
Super cool.... estimates are that the guys have done very well on this release
And they may have underestimated their fan base by a little
Couldn't be happier. Talk about a labor of love. I've been playing since before Z levels were added, and now I see my son and his friends talking about it
- Almost no alerts pause the game, including ones like migrants arriving, strange moods, or snatchers, when I really really want them to. I thought this would be configurable, but I couldn't find a menu for it. I'm very, very bad at noticing anything that doesn't involve the flashing red ALERT button, so half of the time when I got migrants they had mixed with the general population before I could check who they were.
I saw a post elsewhere about editing one of the game files to make alerts pause the game and move the camera. So it's possible to change, but not straightforward.
Ooh, that Dwarf Fortress/data/init/announcements.txt file looks very promising. I'll experiment with that next time I play.
Here's a version I did up if you want to save some time. I may have it alerting and centering on some stuff that I kinda wish it had before but didn't (like a linkage being suspended, which tend to be, ya know, important) or just alerting/pausing on things likesomeone growing up so you can assign them labors/military. But it's a decent starting point I think.
One of my cats killed a magpie and the corpse actually looks like a magpie corpse. You're a fricken mad genius Mike.
Edit: on second thought that might just be the standard magpie sprite, but since it's wings are out and it sitting in the refuse pile it sure as hell looks like a magpie corpse.
also, back to brass tacks: one drawback of the new labor system is that I have to assign migrants to specific jobs when they show up. I had a legendary stonecrafter show up and he wasn't assigned to any stonecrafting!
But anyway, my swimming pool is ready and actually, this is cool: the aquifer is so slow I can actually leave one tile open to the aquifer and enough water keeps pouring in to keep the water level full at all times. Nice reliable source of fresh water!
DisruptedCapitalist on
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
Posts
There's no "seems" about it, world gen and saving are both at least 3-4x faster than the classic counterpart. Readjusting to the new hotkeys will take a bit, but they're honestly more logical now and having the mouse to select areas saves sooooo much time.
I'm even getting over my instinctive revulsion of graphics. They aren't just prettier, they're actually helpfully informative. Being able to see what's a few Z levels down in open space is real nice, and now there are sub-menus that can do super-helpful things like letting you reliably pick the orientation of pumps.
Some things aren't as good yet.
You can't see raindrops outdoors when it's raining (apparently planned). You can no longer tell when a dwarf is on the ground, his square used to be highlighted in brown to show he'd been knocked down or was in the middle of a scuffle. It's also hard to tell what a dwarf is carrying, in my experience...I like to play a little zoomed out and any extra information I might be able to see is lost in the tiny sprites. I watched a dwarf walking really slowly and wondered why until I realized they were installing a door. I wish the sprite still just flashed to show their current work object in the full tile. Also I preferred the bright pink to show dumped items and bright green to show items that could be reclaimed, rather than the tiny little lock icon.
EDIT: Might need this mod to fix smoothing designations which cover up everything going on in the tile.
But a lot of it is really cool when you notice the details, like how statues in a stockpile are covered with a sheet like they're not ready to be unveiled yet. Or how you can visually tell the direction a bridge raises from.
Definitely don't have time for that, but this is DF, so I am happy for him and sorry that happened.
It has 4.76 million historical events. I cannot wait to see if this thing is even playable.
Edit: ...the world generated was named "The Ageless Dimension". Game of the fucking year.
Double Edit: Now with image!
Just a reminder that dwarven cheese is made from dwarven milk...
That is technically correct (but dwarven milk is made by milking purring maggots. Which is actually... worse?).
You might have to do some adjusting of your grid size - I found 200 and 75 feel good for me at 4k.
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
They get you dug into the ground with a stockpile, a carpenter shop and a craft workshop, with an awareness of controls and how to place furniture and rooms
There are a lot of contextual help pop-ups to complement the tutorial bits, too
It also makes sure you embark in an area that isn't going to immediately fuck you sideways with zombie elephants
The explicit tutorial tells you how to do some basic stuff, such as digging, chopping down trees, building and using workshops.
Beyond that, most of the complicated UI screens have a pop up that explains what they're for and there's a help menu that has additional info on a number of topics.
Every button in the UI has a tooltip, but it appears in the corner of the screen and not at the mouse cursor, which is easy to miss at first.
guess the tutorials don't check for evil biomes
Edit: the game now also has tooltips something like Stellaris does, where a window pops up to tell you about the menu you've just clicked on, and will continue to do that until it tells you to stop.
Or not, I was still super tired today when I woke up at 3:50 to go to the gym before work. We'll see how this day plays out.
Give me stories of your dorfs suffering to sustain meeeeee
dooo it
Streamer I follow had an embark where he seasonally got attacked by 3 to 4 giant birds. Able to handle it. Then one of his dwarves made a masterwork ruby and instantly an army of giant birds descended on the fort killing everyone.
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
- The haphazardly-renamed stone-related jobs were deeply confusing at the start. Masonry is Architecture (I think?), Stone Carving is Masonry, and Stone Cutting is smoothing and block-crafting, which were split off from their original categories. I do understand the rationale of separating skilled from unskilled labor now that I've decoded it, but I wish all the names had been, like, anything else.
- The default way labors in general are handled makes sense for a brand new player, but is a poor match for how I play the game. I generally hyper-specialize my dwarves, and needing to manually define labors before I could even set them was really tedious (and I assume it needs to be redone every embark), plus the fact that custom labors are given arbitrarily roman numerals instead of definable icons makes it hard to keep track of who's doing what. Anecdotally, it also felt like dwarves with lots of labors enabled are worse at prioritizing than they used to be. Immediately after embarking I forged two picks and an axe and it was done by three different dwarves, none of whom were the skilled weaponsmith I brought.
- Almost no alerts pause the game, including ones like migrants arriving, strange moods, or snatchers, when I really really want them to. I thought this would be configurable, but I couldn't find a menu for it. I'm very, very bad at noticing anything that doesn't involve the flashing red ALERT button, so half of the time when I got migrants they had mixed with the general population before I could check who they were.
- Since staircases now need to be a single multi-level designation, it appears to be impossible to create them in situations where they would need to be partially dug and partially constructed. You cannot construct an up staircase in the middle of a room and then use it has a platform to dig a down staircase into the ceiling, which made digging out storage attics above my workshops harder than it needed to be. I'd appreciate an optional "advanced" tab on staircase creation that lets you do it the old way.
I haven't touched the military menu yet, but that's next on the list now that I've finally gotten some big migrant waves.
Oho! So I see now. Many tasks are set for everyone by default at the beginning of the game--harvesting we already knew about, but now plant gathering is set to everyone as well. Also, most jobs are not actually listed in the labor menu, you have to designate them later if you want to restrict dwarfs. Any job that isn't listed in the labor menu has everyone do it. This is a handy way to get a job done in an early fortress where you don't have any specialists yet. So for example I built a glass kiln and I noticed everyone was building glassworks automatically. So you have to go to the labor menu and designate glassworking as a specific labor to restrict it to certain people. Otherwise everyone does it. This is handy because I just need some green glass blocks ASAP to block up an aquifer (and make it like those famous liminal space pictures of 70s era swimming pools. lol)
I like this new labor system!
edit: @Wyvern yes, it seems like to fix your weaponsmithing problem you need to define it as a custom labor and then designate your weaponsmith as the only one allowed to do it. Otherwise everyone dabbles in it.
What?! This is almost as bad as when Hammerers became optional.! I love running the risk that my legendary stonecrafter might get his head bashed in because the mayor needs 3 floodgates RIGHT NOW.
I saw a post elsewhere about editing one of the game files to make alerts pause the game and move the camera. So it's possible to change, but not straightforward.
I haven't tried it, but there's a mod on Steam Workshop that adds sounds to alerts.
Are elves consummate carnivores?
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
The wagon started in like a forest and they told me to dig down, but I felt weird digging into the middle of a field so I dug down at the base of the mountain to the south, which felt kind of far away but, again, digging into the field felt weird:
Is there a way to move the broken wagon (or salvage it), or do you eventually just haul all the supplies out of it and it just sits?
Is there a way to move workshops once built, or salvage them and recover some of the building materials?
And they may have underestimated their fan base by a little
Couldn't be happier. Talk about a labor of love. I've been playing since before Z levels were added, and now I see my son and his friends talking about it
Here's a version I did up if you want to save some time. I may have it alerting and centering on some stuff that I kinda wish it had before but didn't (like a linkage being suspended, which tend to be, ya know, important) or just alerting/pausing on things likesomeone growing up so you can assign them labors/military. But it's a decent starting point I think.
Mike WTF @Mayday
One of my cats killed a magpie and the corpse actually looks like a magpie corpse. You're a fricken mad genius Mike.
Edit: on second thought that might just be the standard magpie sprite, but since it's wings are out and it sitting in the refuse pile it sure as hell looks like a magpie corpse.
also, back to brass tacks: one drawback of the new labor system is that I have to assign migrants to specific jobs when they show up. I had a legendary stonecrafter show up and he wasn't assigned to any stonecrafting!
But anyway, my swimming pool is ready and actually, this is cool: the aquifer is so slow I can actually leave one tile open to the aquifer and enough water keeps pouring in to keep the water level full at all times. Nice reliable source of fresh water!