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If it is not to your flavor, you can also try Rimworld, which still has a steep learning curve, but more polish. Iirc Tynan kind of sucks but I actually quite enjoy rimworld and the code is basically fully open so the modding scene is super green.
Still though it's original inspiration is Dwarf Fortress. and DF is basically made by two big brain guys from MIT that decided they wanted to have fun making the game instead of making weapon systems for general dynamics or whatever it is most of their grads end up doing in the Wage Cage. So they could certainly use your support. If you're on the fence, I say go for it.
you eventually get used to the crazy controls and interface. but you might just want to skip directly to rimworld. it's like df but more understandable.
When you learn the commands its a lot of fun but there is a learning curve also i feel like getting terrorized by werebeasts and vampires is part of the fun so dont worry about all that just learn the mechanics and try to survive
it is a bit complicated i tried it for a while and then got rimworld and have just enjoyed quite a bit
theres some mods out there that turn all the stuff into sprites and gives it a ui
i got bored of it when i realized i could atomize everything with bridges and i couldnt help but solve all problems with it
yeah it can be nice. i preferred rimworld imo, theres less cheese strats
i mean sure, but thats more fun than just building bridges everywhere lol
You don't have to do that.
A fortress where every migrant is immediately handed a weapon and has a 10% chance of surviving the first season is way more interesting than a well-run fortress.
If your favorite dwarf isn't sent outside to chop wood or help farm, how is he going to get killed by the very first shot fired by an ambush party and later immortalized valiantly defending the fortress in a masterwork sword?
True, it is pretty fun to watch a big raid walk into range and just melt under mass fire
Yes, it does, though it isn't immedate. Get the Lazy Noob pack - comes with a bunch of tilesets as well Dwarf Therapist, which is an indispensable tool for tracking/reassigning duties. You start to get a feel for the sort of problems your fort can have and strategies to deal with it, and the more you play the more some of your design becomes standardized - housing, workshops, etc. That said, I spend about 15-30 minutes at the beginning of the game planning my entrance, moat, towers, interior defenses and interior waterways.
While I also really like Rimworld, it doesn't scratch the same itch for me. Rimworld is wayyy more user friendly and great for emergent storytelling, but I don't feel like there's nearly as much room for creativity in fortress design. In DF, I can literally pump magma to the surface to melt enemies. Nothing really like that in Rimworld.
This entire article is great, but here: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Trap_design#Magma_and_fire_traps
"Consider a hallway filled with lignite floor grates, which can be built directly on the floor and do not impede the passage of enemies. Pouring magma on any one of these grates will set it alight, and the fire will spread to all connected grates. The end result is a lot of constant smoke and a hallway that kills anything that passes through it. Consider restricting access to your dwarves or building this in a pit with a retractable bridge over top: the mere fact that a location is on fire will not stop them from walking through it. On the plus side, goblins are just as stupid."
It's very interesting but it's also annoying. Often slow, a pain in the ass to control and to learn. Yeah you can learn it but still there's a lot of bullshit that will fuck you up. Still, failing is part of the fun.
Personally, I had way more fun with Rimwolrd. It's a similar game-feel with basebuilding, making plans, fighting againts the elements and defending your base. It's also all emergent gameplay - obviously theres less scenarios than in DF but still a lot. Most importantly it is way more accessible. It has no z plane though.
EDIT: Oxygen not included is also similar.
I like it, been playing off and on for years. You get used to it, especially as the command-menu trees start to enter muscle memory. As others have said, Lazy Newb Pack and reading the wiki help for getting started.
I think he's still tweaking the stress system, at the moment, which means your dorfs will slowly but inevitably go insane and start murdering each other. DON'T GET CAUGHT IN THE RAIN!
It adds a stressed thought. Some dorfs are more resilient, but others will continue to dwell on it, growing angrier over time until they just lose it. It's kinda unavoidable, right now, unless you really go out of your way to keep dorfs indoors (or embark in a desert).
FYI, the easy way to deal with stressed out dorfs in the current version is to use DFHack, and specifically the brainwash command. It comes with the lazy newb pack and is pretty easy to use.
yah the completely unbalanced stress system is probably the single most challenging thing in the current df meta. it basically puts a soft cap on fortress lifespan, unless you do the micromanaging of exiling or "disappearing" dwarfs with personality traits that give them susceptibility to trauma. IIRC the reason it's become such a problem is that toady added the ability for dwarfs to have an emotional reaction to the act of remembering. So in addition to "urist was unhappy after getting caught in the rain" you also have "urist was furious after remembering getting caught in the rain two years ago", meaning the emotional consequences of one traumatic event quickly compounds as the dwarf remembers it. certain personality traits can also affect this, some dwarves are more prone to dwelling on the past or holding grudges. the effect is even worse for soldiers or dwarves tasked with cleaning up after battle- PTSD is very effective at bringing down fortresses.
it's definitely going to be patched in one of the upcoming bugfix releases, but its also an amazing reminder of what makes DF special, no other game has the depth of simulation that makes these bugs possible.
To add to that, my understanding is that bad memories don't go away unless they're overwritten by something of strictly greater magnitude. That's why the rain thing early on can last for a long time. The dorf may be encountering plenty of small, happy moments, but it's never enough to dislodge that damned raindrop.
Does repeatedly traumatizing them with the deaths of their pets and friends so they feel nothing at all immunize them to the effects of stress? Last I played I saw a lot of messages to the effect of "she felt nothing at all after seeing the corpse of her child"
I think that's one possible outcome. Extreme events and long-term trauma can change their personalities, making them more or less affected by different stressors. So yeah, if they don't go into a rage, first.
if you're willing to devote a lot of time to reading the wiki while you figure things out, sure. the interface is horrible but eventually manageable. i spend a lot of time paused to figure things out and plan stuff, so if that's not appealing it may not be a good game for you. even though i know the interface well it's still annoying to interact with and a huge time suck just to figure out what is going on. and that's even with tilesets and some of the really good helper programs like dwarf therapist and dfhack.
that said, there's nothing else out there like DF and i have lost countless hours to it. lots of people recommend rimworld as an alternative. it may be a fun game but nothing else has the level of deep simulation and emergent storytelling possibility that DF has. the trade-off is that you have to put in a lot of work to figure out what is going on and draw coherent stories out from the mess of information overload the game gives you.
there is a paid steam release coming sometime soon (maybe within a year, but who knows) that will have massive UI improvements. the single DF dev has a bigger team helping him with that release, doing tilesets, UI design, testing etc. I'm actually taking a break from DF until that is released.
if you do decide to try DF now, I would highly, highly recommend the lazy newb pack . it's not just for lazy people and i would never play df without it. it bundles a lot of the third party addons into a handy interface that allows you to turn helper programs on/off, switch tilesets, set certain options etc.
np! one other thing is that if you like your games to have clear goals and win conditions, DF is probably not gonna be satisfying. DF's creators are very devoted to creating a pure sandbox, so there are aspects of the game's design that really have no regard to balance or making "wins" possible or even meaningful. another poster alluded to the fact that there are a lot of cheese strats in DF. this is strictly true, but i would argue if you're playing DF to win like you would a game of Starcraft or whatever, the game is not really designed for you.
i find satisfaction by building elaborate machines or architecture, playing out RP scenarios, designing fortresses for specific, impractical purposes (one of my favorites I've seen is a fortress that was designed to export a balanced, diverse diet for the entire population of the fortresses' civilization) or simply watching for the stories that emerge during the course of constructing the basic necessities of survival. there's certainly a lot of "losing" (invaders, tantrums, engineering mishaps, disease and starvation) but no real winning with any of these ways to play. I like it but definitely a lot of people bounce off the game because of that.
I've always found DF to be much more interesting as a peculiar spectacle than as a game that I play myself. When trying to play on my own it invariably seems to devolve into a diseased chore that makes me yank hair out because it seems to have a bottomless well of arcane mysteries that I can't divine the ancient secrets out of.
definitely try it - every now and then I stumble across something wild and fascinating that I've seen someone else do in DF that makes me feel like playing it again too. I can just never seem to reproduce anything nearly as cool myself XD
