The Making Of Dwarf Fortress

[Guest]

fireman? sprinkler system?... what?!

 

[zahratustra]

LOL my thoughts exactly!

 

[Guest]

I am now playing the best fortress I've ever had. The game is going incredibly well and I can't believe how much fun I'm having. I'm building all kinds of things and trying various stuff out just for fun, currently I'm planning on having a waterfall in my magnificent dining hall and finishing my water flooding trap system and I'm building a fancy entrance outside to my fortress

This game is so much fun that it's almost sick.

 

[Prime Junta]

Whew, I managed that sprinkler system. Tough job -- first I had to pump water up six floors (powered by a water wheel on a channel from a cave river, looping back into the chasm into which the cave river flows), have that cascade as an indoor waterfall through my meeting hall, fill a well, and fill my sprinkler cisterns, with a switch letting the overflow go into the drain. Then another switch to trip the sprinkler.

I still want to add an emergency lockdown switch that'll lock down the entire foundry floor, so in case something nasty gets in, they'll be trapped. -- I rigged the sprinkler so that it'll fill the foundry to a depth of 4/7, which means my dwarves won't drown, but (I hope) the imps, fire men, and magma men will die in the water.

Trouble is, there isn't much to smelt in this mountain -- I've only seen copper, silver, and tin, and not much of that either. So no plate mail factory here either.

(Fire men are evil beasties that creep up magma pipes; they breathe fire which toasts dwarves dead.)

 

[Guest]

Haha! Stonefall traps rule I had a group of goblins trying to storm my fort.
I opened up all the gates and let them come cause I wanted to see how my traps would perform.. It did not take long for them to decide to take a fast retreat I was dissapointed actually by their lack of determination and battle spirits, I would've liked to watch them suffer and die.
Now I have a goblin on my map that moves a tile, passes out from pain, moves a tile, passes out from pain....and so on... It's hilarious!

Apparently a stonefall trap crushed it's right leg

 

[dteowner]

@Zakhary: don't use that stuff, use this stuff -- it's essentially that stuff all nicely preconfigured and packaged so that you don't have to start out by messing with the config files.

What to know/do? Sure:

(1) Expect about 3-6 hours (play time) of utter confusion until you start to get the hang of it. IOW, the initial learning curve is s-t-e-e-p, but boy is it worth it. Patience is the order of the day.

(2) Start out with the tutorials in the DF wiki, in particular this one and this one.

(3) Don't worry about raising armies, fighting wars, or magma. That's for later. (At that point you can also ditch the starting outfit in the tutorial, which leaves out the anvil in order to have more basic survival stuff.)

Alright, PJ, what's the scoop? Are you using the graphics pack you linked, or do real men do ASCII? I'm about ready to take the DF plunge, so I want to jump in properly.

 

[Guest]

PJ is using the graphics pak (at least in the screenshots he has made).
Many people like that. It's available here:
http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm
I don't like it tho. IIRC It even phucks up some of the ingame text because it tries to replace too many things with graphic icons. That's not acceptable. And I really dislike the way dwarves look here.

There's also another easy to use graphics enabled option here:
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=62
This is what I would recommend to DF newbies.
Just unpack and start playing. It looks fairly nice & clear too.

However, others like to choose a graphics set (Graphics sets are a type of tileset for use with Graphics Mode, which allows the game to display different tiles for creatures) from the list available here:
http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Graphics_sets
I like to use the "Dystopian Qantas" graphic set because they are colorful and nice
and clear. All the dwarf professions are clearly distinguishable.

I wouldn't recommend going pure ASCII. But if you really dont want to have
any graphic tiles at all, at least take a look here:
http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/List_of_user_character_sets#16.C3.9716_tilesets
to make things a bit smoother for a bigger screen/window.

But these are all things of lesser importance
Once you've got the game running you absolutely need the
http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Your_first_fortress
-guide. I learnt to play with that. Just follow that guide for a couple of hours and you'll be playing DF just like that!

Good luck and welcome... You'll never be the same again
If you need any help with playing/installing/configuring DF just post here, I'll try to help ya.

EDIT: Also.. for those graphic paks mentioned above you should have a desktop resolution of 1280 or more. If you've got less than that, like 1024x768, and can't go higher, this might be the best option:
http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Graphics_sets#Sphr_.2B_Markavian

 

[V7]

Haha! Stonefall traps rule

Three words: Large Serrated Disk

(weapon traps automatically reset as well, unlike stonefall traps)

Edit: you'll need extra dwarves to carry the bits, they're messy.

 

[dteowner]

Thanks, Zakhary. Will give it a go.

 

[Guest]

Three words: Large Serrated Disk

(weapon traps automatically reset as well, unlike stonefall traps)

Edit: you'll need extra dwarves to carry the bits, they're messy.

Hmm... I'll have to look into that. I admit I haven't really fudged around with all the various trap types, my smiths have always been too busy with other things. With stonefall traps I can just slap them around pretty much whenever I feel like it without manufacturing anything special (I always seem to have dozens of stone mechanisms lying around )
....
Messy, you say?

 

[V7]

Weapon traps still need a stone mechanism but after that you can put in up to ten weapons - you can use whatever you have laying about (those copper daggers from the Kobold theives, practice weapons left over from training your smiths or bowers, I'll often have a carpenter train by working on spiked balls if I've got plenty of wood...) the serrated disk is just the shiny, slicing, dicing cream of the crop. All the weapons will attack at once so the dammage can be huge.

 

[Guest]

dte? report back! You still alive and well? How about your dwarves?

 

[Prime Junta]

Yup, I use the pimped-out version. I agree with most of what Z said, but I switched to it after I got bored of reconfiguring the damn thing after every update. (They come fast and furious usually -- the current one has been around much longer than normal.)

 

[Guest]

My dwarves are throwing up in disgust when they come outside and see the sun!
Awesome!

 

[Prime Junta]

My dwarves are throwing up in disgust when they come outside and see the sun!
Awesome!

No kidding? How did that happen?

 

[VPeric]

Well, I've tried out the game... and I'm not that impressed. First, there's no handy in-game help (something like a tooltip), so I have to have the wiki open in the background always (how else am I to figure out what I need to build something and where can I make it?) - still, I've mostly managed to overcome this and the interface (which I consider a success ).

The main trouble is that stuff isn't clear at all. For example, I've got no idea what's in my storages and how much of it is there - the icons are equally cryptic and even the "look around" stuff doesn't do too much. Furthermore, I've no idea how much stuff is still at my wagon site, and why it's still there. Also, building up on the first issue, I've got no idea how to place traps and the like - by the way you talk, that's an important aspect of gameplay, but I've got no idea how to do something like that. In the same vain, manipulating water (haven't yet seen magma) is similarily cryptic - I'm not even sure how to build a well. Yes, I've read that guide, but it mentions just the basics - "build xyz, set storage xyz, plant seeds... you're on your own now". Now I'm trying to build bedrooms for each of my dwarves, but I don't know what they want (other than a bed, obviously).

Oh, and another big thing: no idea how to handle all the stone lying around. I had trouble with it the first time round, so in this game I figured I'd build all the main things in a section of soil - unfortunately, those walls can't be engraved (and I figure they'd want that ), so I dug down to rock to make the bedrooms - unfortunately, now I've got tons of stone lying around preventing me from further building. I've already made a huge stone stockpile, but there's still bunches and bunches of stone. I wish there was a way to move the stone from the bedrooms to another area (setting them to "dump" doesn't work) - and preferably without making a storage area, because I don't know how to remove a storage area afterwards.

In the end, it's an interesting enough game (evidenced by me being so eager to explain what I'm doing), but some of this stuff will keep me from playing it, and I'll just go back to Emperor: RotMK (at least there I know what's in my storages!).

BTW, it might be my computer, but saving a world/exiting a game takes so much time... other than that, I've had no troubles, even though my comp is below the reqs, CPU-wise.

 

[Guest]

No kidding? How did that happen?

Are you really asking or are you just making fun of me ? I can't tell.
I went unerground right from the start for three years. When I came back out
to build the entrance I wanted.... vomit!!!!

 

[Guest]

Well, I've tried out the game... and I'm not that impressed. First, there's no handy in-game help (something like a tooltip), so I have to have the wiki open in the background always (how else am I to figure out what I need to build something and where can I make it?) - still, I've mostly managed to overcome this and the interface (which I consider a success ).

Yeah, the game certainly isn't for everyone.

Few notes tho:

- The wiki is a must. I like to have it open in a browser below the game window,
that way I can play the game at the same time I'm reading the wiki, which is in a way even better than some kind of in-game help that would always get in the way of the game itself.

- I don't care what's in my storage and where exactly. You dont need to either. Use the z key, there you can see pretty much everything you need to know. also, you can go to the properties of a specific stockpile area and specify what is to be stored there. You can be very specific if you like.

- don't try to take it all in at once. first just have the basics up and running and play around with things, don't take it too seriously, you're gonna die eventually anyway. losing is fun. traps, for example, is something i didn't start worrying about untill I was far deeper in the game. I'm still learning the game and I'm still doing foolish things - that's part of the fun. There's no winning or playing it in a right way.

- to get rid of stone designate a dumping area by pressing the i -key and designate and area and then enable it to be a "garbage dump" or something like that. then the dump key works. don't do stone stockpiling. its a waste of time. I always like to begin digging in an area with only soil, makes things much easier. Start worrying about digging deeper and building up defences later.

 

[dteowner]

dte? report back! You still alive and well? How about your dwarves?

HEck, I spent an hour just tooling around the map. The wiki does a crappy job of explaining site selection. I figure that I need to be in the mountains since we're talking dwarves and excavations, but I also need trees and vegetation, which don't grow in mountains. Then, it would seem that I've got two choices for the entrance--either a mine shaft down in the middle of a forest or a proper mine entrance into the side of a mountain. The former means caravan problems and the later entails a rather specific location. I think I might be making it overly difficult.

 

[Guest]

Dont worry about the site too much, the caravan has always come to me no matter how inaccessible site i have chosen. You dont need mountains. Just, as a beginner, try to have running water, warm/temperate climate and some wood.

I like to start digging the soil from a heavily forested area straight down.