Playing dwarf fortress

I was just playing this.
>weremarmot attacks
>soldiers put it down but one gets infected
>infected soldier transforms, bites bookkeeper before being put down
>build a wall around bookkeeper while he's eating
>around this time, dwarves start turning up dead with their blood drained
>get tired of getting messages when weremarmot transforms, channel an opening above him and send archers to kill him next time he does
>instead of shooting him, archers jump in and hit him with their bows, get murderized
>tantrum spiral begins
>while this is happening, necromancers must be sneaking around because everything in my refuse pile becomes undead
>glorious orgy of violence between tantruming dwarves and undead
>in the end, ~40 of the 60something dwarves are dead
>stop getting messages about the vampire, must've been one of the casualties
Success!

That's not just success, that's !!Success!!

>instead of shooting him, archers jump in and hit him with their bows, get murderized
Well at least I'm 100% sure you were playing Dwarf Fortress.

>>miner manages to cut all ten gobbos down before succumbing to his wounds despite not having a single combat stat
Mining skill was his combat skill.

What game is this, what platform is it on, someone explain to me everything about this game.
I'm going to go Google it while one of you assholes explain.

Dwarf Fortress is a part construction and management simulation, part roguelike, indie video game

dwarffortresswiki.org/
Read the wiki

Learn to love losing legendarily.

You tried to divert a river before you understood the military?

This happened a few months back.

>forgotten beast attacks
>a quadruped made of coral that spits webs
>cavern is sealed off
.>build a corridor of retracting iron spikes
>unseal the caverns
>beast walks into the corridor
>pull_the_lever_urist.gif
>spikes don't work
>forgot to link the spikes to the lever
>beast attacks fortress
>webs all the trained military dwarves
>kicks each one's head into gore while they're trapped in webs
>20 highly skilled military dwarves dead
>beast starts slaughtering helpless civilians
>almost 60 dwarves dead out of a fortress of 80 dwarves
>a lowly unskilled farmer manages to avoid the webs
>farmer kicks the forgotten beast's head off
>a farmer succeeded when all my trained warriors failed
>mfw

Welcome to dwarf fortress, user.

My second fortress I ragequit from after a dwarf went nuts from a fey mod and I couldn't get her some stove. Sher killed the whole militia, and I think died of starvation.

you fookin wot m8?

> Modded DF
>Fortress sieged by Goblins
> Hunter trapped outside, alone
> Hunter recruited in his own squad
> Hunter kills goblins with his crossbow
> Hunter finishes bolts, start beating goblins with his wooden crossbow
> Hunter destroys entire siege by himself, losing an eye and with his guts out
> Hunter survives, a dwarf fall in fell mood, kills Hunter and makes a crossbow out of him.

>implying this isn't the dorf way

That crossbow will slay anything it's aimed at, so seething with rage it is

Dwarf Fortress is a game where you try to herd a misfit bunch of alcoholic dwarves whose happiness depends entirely on whether they're seen a nice chair recently into building a functional, productive fortress. Excitement comes in the form of dwarves not doing what you tell them to, dwarves abandoning pulling a lever that will unleash a wave of magma to kill all of the goblin invaders to go eat some food, dwarves digging too deep and unleashing !!FUN!!, and dwarves throwing tantrums when they haven't see a nice chair recently, which will cause other dwarves to tantrum, thus throwing your entire fortress into chaos and starvation.

It is by far the best game ever made and you will love it.

Tantrum spirals don't happen anymore desu, the eternal bar fight is something I see more often.

i see random shit drop dad from alcohol poisoning before i see barfights that dont end...

That last line made it hilarious to me.

Otherwise, that's a classic example of the crazy badass bullshit that DF can turn up.

Basically everything requires the 'q' key to operate unless it doesn't, but just knowing the 'q' key does a lot of stuff is enough to play. Also just figuring out which menus use arrow keys to scroll and which use - and +

A lot of learning the game is just playing it enough to the point where you have good muscle memory for the commands and just know what sequence of button presses will have a desired outcome.

>no one is good at dwarf fortress
nice (you)

>It's okay user, no one is good at Dwarf Fortress. It's a lot like walking
Son, I have some bad news about degenerative neural diseases.

Hit space, press d then another letter, and hilight stuff.

Then hit escape and space again.

continue for 3 days before succumbing to dehydration.

Reincarnate, grow up, find out about Dwarf Fortress, go on Veeky Forums and ask "is there a cheat sheet for working this game's peice of shit UI?"

Remember; Failure is Fun!

more accurately - understanding that the tab button does this is neccesary to play, understind the d and q command ques and being able to quickly use them due to muscle memory are what you need to have a reasonable level of aptitude in the game, everything else if kinda a matter of wikibinging and trial and error, but those 3 are the core basis.

Also: if you have weregiraffes in your fortress, just rage quit first and save yourself the time as you pretty much won't be able to do anything but will instead no constantly get interrupted by a constant wave of migrants and weregiraffe hulkout murder sprees that in turn will lead to a constant swarm of ghosts stopping any survivors from ever being able to work long enough to deal with the ghosts.

Quality post right here

...

I have also this from 2 years ago, Masterwork DF

>mastershit

>Play Dwarf Fort
>Having fun
>Game lags to shit after a decade or two in game time
>Apply and unapply DFHack
>change and turn off variables for temperature, clothing, decay, weather, population caps, etc
>Change playstyle and focus entirely on clean maps
>Wait for newer versions of dwarf fort
>Play on newer tougher computers
>Embrace Zen Dwarfism of tinyfort tinymap nohistory minimalism
>Years of development come and go
>Still fucking nothing can extend the play time to an in game century
I'd absolutely love to play this game if such a thing were possible.

>have a random yak without a partner that's getting pretty old
>line it up for slaughtering
>nobody does the command for ages
>catsplosion could be imminent
>might as well line a ton of cats for slaughtering before any of the dwarves adopt them as pets
>cat after cat go on the chopping block
>after the cat situation was assessed, at last the butcher goes for the yak
>it dies of starvation right before getting his turn at the butchery
And now I have a yak corpse stinking up the corpse stockpile.

Wait, you can't butcher dead bodies in DF?
That seems weird.

They'll only butcher domestic animals that have been slaughtered by your dwarves.

Super dumb.

That's why you mod in milkable and butcherable cowgirls.

That is not my fetish.

ShindoL, we all know that's you. Stop trying to make Dwarf Fortress more fucked up than it already is.

Getting back in to DF on a 32-bit potato with about 2GB of RAM. Wish me luck and may Armok grant me protection from FPS-death.

I believe user. You can do it.

>Embrace Zen Dwarfism of tinyfort tinymap nohistory minimalism

Brb, making tiny dwarfarium.

How plausible it would be to dig a hole to a mountain, seal it up, then make a system for the original dwarves where they survive in an eternal bubble with a single underground farm producing food and booze? Rest of the commodations are packed tightly, but everything could be carved and decorated to make a lavish and sealed fort. I can see that troubles would arise when babies are born and space starts to run out.

It's definitely possible to make a rather functional vault in the ways you described, but there's always the dwarf-factor which would cause fun to ensue.

Just dig more.

Oh, absolutely. Just wondered how long such construction would hold. I also now remembered that any of the dwarves would go insane for stuff like lack of materials for a fey mood unless you were extremely lucky.

Now I'm thinking of dwarven incest orgies.

>wizards and politics next
Oh god.

When will you be able to lead a dwarf army formed from the elite core of your militia and bolstered by hill dwarf conscripts in a siege against a goblin tower to reclaim your gold pilfered from a caravan you sent to the human heartlands? When will you be able to start a new fort in the newly-conquered tower, building quickly to defend against the inevitable goblin counterattack, led by their demon overlords?

Another 10 years, but it'll be worth the wait

well, there's no reason you couldn't embark with a handful of extras. a stack of silk cloth will last you a while in moods if you don't use it for clothes, and you could take some llamas/alpacas/sheep to provide yarn, leather, bones, meat, and cheese long-term (once you've got cave fungus growing you can keep them all underground)

While animals could provide materials for potentially moody dwarves the dwarves could also adopt them as pets, giving extra negative thoughts when they eventually die.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the reason why farming is the suggested food source for such a project.

>giving extra negative thoughts when they eventually die.
just set them to be "unavailable" as pets (that's the default setting)
>isn't that the reason why farming is the suggested food source for such a project.
highly unlikely. even if you did set them as pet-available for some reason, the bad thought from having a pet die isn't strong enough to kill off your fort unless your dwarves are seriously unhappy already.
I imagine it's because farming is ultra-efficient and really compact, you could probably feed your starting 7 for eternity with a 1x2 farm plot once you have a high-skill farmer

Pets give mood boosts too. Before they die set up enough other nice stuff that the negative thought of death doesn't drive your dwarves to despair. Y'know, like in reality.

It's easy, user. Just let one of your dwarves become a vampire, then seal him up in a little suite all by himself and have him keep your books.

But you have to wait until vampires for that. I was thinking of doing it right after the embark.

These seven dwarves just dissappeared from the world forever.

the vampire thing is just for fun, it's not necessary by any stretch
go for it user, it's totally feasible

bonus round: get some of your starting 7 to marry and reproduce

Well, you can also build a little enclave full of fancy furniture for one dwarf and drop long-lasting food down a shaft into a quantum stockpile. Once he starts getting old, stuff a baby in there to grow into his replacement.
Ultimately vault projects seem to work best with one dwarf who's never had a friend and thus doesn't care if everyone outside dies in agony.

What would a single dwarf need in an isolated fort to last forever?

>dwarf NEET

Will they ever update the UI so it isn't completely retarded, or are they going to continue with the 'Spend a week learning about it yourself' motto?

>You can make the lodging room suited for the particular dwarf by adding furniture made from their favorite materials, and smoothing and engraving everything. Use quantum stockpiling to give them 10+ years of food and drink. Make sure the A.I. is unable to communicate with other dwarves. His/her mood must not be affected by the deaths of the walking meat-bags who tried to befriend him/her.

>Will they ever update the UI so it isn't completely retarded
probably not
there's a thousand things on the to-do list that are considered a higher priority, and it's just one guy doing the coding

No, because then they'll need to remake the UI whenever they include a new big feature that marginally involves it. The "spend a week" motto is entirely unofficial, though.

Also, there's the little problem where there's just one guy who's coding the thing for fun and thus boring stuff gets pushed to the wayside. Like bugfixing, I guess. It's a bit of an issue.

Also, of course, the guy coding it knows fuck-all about UI design - as should probably be obvious from the current UI. And when he mostly (and somewhat understandably) refuses to hand over the coding to other people...

Let's just hope that it'll be fixed by the time 1.0 rolls around next century. And that Toady survives while hooked up to intravenous Mountain Dew or whatever his horrible lifestyle has evolved into by that point.

You can also have them kill things or otherwise witness death until they're completely numb to it. IIRC being a butcher will do it?

Next century is pretty optimistic, didn't he say getting 1.0 could take 20 years for all he knows?

I'm surprised a group of people have never just decided to say 'fuck it' and try to code a decent UI for him.

Oh c'mon. It'd be bar for course if toady didn't artificially devalue the bones of mermaids

I think he's said that he's probably got at least 20 years left of material, yeah. It's his magnum opus - he'll probably keep working on it until he dies, for all I know. (Then again, given his lifestyle that might be sooner rather than later.)

Oh, they have. DFHack is filled with shit like that.

It's just that they don't have access to the actual code of the game and thus don't have quite as much power as they could. Also, it's not official in any respect and sometimes buggy and also needs some work to update it whenever the game gets a new version.

I think this is also one of the reasons Toady has given for not fixing the UI so soon - the fans are kind of doing it for him. Find labors annoying? Use Dwarf Therapist or autolabor. Want to see mutiple Z-levels? Text Will Be Text is literal magic. Want mouse control? There's a cool mouselook script, IIRC, although I forget the name. Want a better manager? The new stuff in the current version was a DFHack script, once, and I think the script is still more powerful in some respects. Want to search in menus? There's a script for that.

Then again, there's also some minor UI improvements now and again. Being able to choose priority for digging is fucking great, for instance, and for all the shit the new military interface gets I still get a kick out of the real-time orders menu.

UI is the absolute final thing to do in a project, or you'll be redoing it with every single fucking revision.

I've seen a lot of people saying it's probably going to take decades to complete, and how he lives a shitty lifestyle. What happens if he dies before the game is done? Will we get the code for it, or will we have to make due with what we've got?

Depends on what happens to the one who gets the code from him when he kicks it. If they are generous, they might just give it out. They might want to continue developing in privacy. Or alternatively, he takes the code to the grave with him. Or in the worst case, the person getting the code puts the game on steam for 30 bucks.

The lifestyle thing is sensationalised, based off that one New York Times interview where he talks about doing meth.

Going opensource would kill DF, the community is too balkanised. There'd be a hundred forks that all kind of sucked. Like SS13, but worse for the lost potential.

It would probably go to his brother. You know, the one who encouraged him, supported him financially at the start and occasionally helps with development.

And the fate of that code would depend on what the brother wanted to do with it.

Obviously, I was just saying it could be much worse.

SOON

Couldn't you have just ordered the workshop deconstructed so he could save himself?

>start a unit of soldiers
>don't have any weapons because I'm too busy building beds and doors
>no armour because I have no leatherworkers
>they all end up as wrestlers
>weresnake attacks
>motherfucker chews through civvies in the entranceway
>soldiers finally arrive
>they have been wrestling in the depths for seasons
>the weresnake starts running
>captain catches up
>throws it so hard is transforms back to a human
>hits the ground and splatters at the edge of the map
>they return to their training in the deep
I miss that fort. I think the captain got bit and then ate everyone else. No one ever reached his level.

You gotta mob cannibalistic dwarves. Solves a lot of problems.

How is adventure mode in Dwarf Fortress?

So I've started dwarf fortress and I'm starting to get a hang of the bare basics (plump helmet farms, item crafting, etc.). I'm using the wiki a lot as well.

Do you guys have any tips for me?

Looking at the old dev logs? 2012 at the latest.

Last time I played it was hella fun. Just don't start off as a dwarf/in a dwarf fortress. Every time I do that, I get lost in the starting area because you're dropped in a random corner of the fortress and everything looks the same and I give up after about an hour of wandering around empty smooth stone hallways with absolutely jack shit in them. That or I fast-traveled, but that drops you off and away, so you still have no NPCs.

Start out as a human; not only will you start in/near a village filled with NPCs and questgivers, but most equipment will work for you (other races may need special gear).

Pretty damn rad. Its different from fortress mode obviously. Make sure you have the controls open on the wiki.

Try to get together a military in case of invasions. Fuck aquifers. Any immigrants with weird skills (beekeeping, milking, shearing etc) In the early years of your fort, make them labourers or farmers. Also, use Dwarf Therapist, the job menu ingame in convoluted and weird, just use Therapist.

Any more storytiems? I booted it up again a couple hours ago and got rekt swiftly. The mist sucks ass, turning my dwarves into husks.

>champion spanks the deity from the drunken master stance

L-lewd

For military, I have one piece of advice: fuck swords. Fuck them so hard.

If you're an adventurer, swords are great because they let you both stab and slash depending on which is more beneficial. AI-controlled dwarves, on the other hand, pick randomly, which in the past has led to hacking apart zombies (leading to a swarm of zombified body parts), stabbing spongemen, and other stupid things. It's better to have a squad of axedwarves and a squad of speardwarves and know when to send out who than to have two squads of sworddwarves.

I usually roll hammerdwarves whenever facing the undead. I feel like it'd make it easier to clean up when you have to get rid of the bodies, before they rise again. Speaking of, what are my options with that? I usually channel a hole, dump corpes and put a floor over it. They can arise if they want, but they're staying in the hole.

yeah, evil biomes are pretty brutal if you're not ready for them

pick-wielding dwarves are fucking amazing, largely for this reason (I don't think you can slap an opponent with the blade of a pick or bash them with the pommel or whatever other shit that doesn't actually do anything in DF dwarves come up with when using normal weapons)

Basically its one of the most complex video games ever developed and the scenarios that happen in it are beyond crazy.

That's supposed to be fixed in the latest version.

>is there a cheat sheet for working with this game's piece of shit UI?

Dwarf Therapist will be the best piece of software you will ever use.

Pick wielding, besides the concept of assault miners being awesome, is really convenient because fighting with picks uses the mining skill and legendary miners are usually your first legend skill dwarves exempting those made by fey moods.

Speaking of assault miners, I think toady mentioned gunpowder being a thing he was considering making dwarves able to do. Not guns, but cased powder regardless.

Even with no guns the possibilities are endless. Blasting charges being hurled at tightly packed goblin formations, firelances and fire arrow arrays, fireworks shows for dwarf entertainment, massive powder storage rooms for another way to bring your fortress to an apocalyptic climax.

>First fort ever. Let's strike the earth!
>Quickly harvest all trees, start building everything out of wood.
>Dig down, huh, why's this hole filled with water?
>Everywhere I dig, water.
>Learn about aquifiers. Uh oh. The entire map is covered with one a few layers down, preventing access to any stone, and I already wasted what little wood there was. To make things worse, new trees only grow in one tiny corner of the map; turns out I embarked on a desert.
>Survive through hunting and meager farms. Military is armed in leather&bone, they fend off the occasional goblin snatcher.
>Purchase building materials from the caravans to pierce and wall off the aquifier through a convoluted series of pumps and heavy micromanagement. Years pass before I gather enough, and the dwarves settle into their rustic lives.
>As the expedition leader is walling off the last portion of the aquifier, both pump operators go on break. He drowns before I get the situation sorted out.
>Mass depression strikes the fortress, turns out he knew everybody. The expedition leader's wife descends into madness and drowns herself. The rest of the dwarves eventually recover, unhappiness balanced out by the sheer masterwork quality of the cook's food. Little did I know this was only a shadow of things to come.

>Dwarf Fortress years ago
>First REAL fort
>Everything running smoothly
>Snatcher!
>Steals kid, stabs dog
>Escapes
>Both belonged to militia commander
>Who then proceeds to go berserk and murder the rest of the militia
>Murders everyone in the fort
>Gets to doctor's office
>He is patching up snake attack victim
>Militia captain murders patient
>Dies Immediately
>What
>Check report
>Doctor PUNCHED HER HEAD ACROSS THE ROOM
>Cleans up his dead friends
>Sits down and drinks
>Not sad or nothing.
>My face

Dorf Fort is weird

>Finally pierce the aquifier! The leader and wife's bodies are recovered and for the first time my dwarves have access to stone. Build everything out of stone. Chairs, tables, doors, pots, coffins, everything. A celebration starts fortress-wide. Disband dining room to put a stop to said celebration. Now is the time for work!
>The dwarves meager holdings expand dramatically in a few month's time. This does not go unnoticed.
>A minotaur arrives first, eager to take the fortress's newly earned weath for its own. It is unarmed and falls swiftly. But while the soldiers are returning home they are ambushed by a squad of goblins and slain. The remaining military deals with the goblins but the damage is done.
>The entire fortress goes into shock. Citizens throw tantrums everywhere, breaking chairs, doors and other dwarves. The fortress guard mete out lethal beatings for criminals left and right as there are no holding cells. Old bedrooms are converted into cells, but the citizens within them starve or go insane, leading to more deaths and more tantrums.