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[agatharchides]

I use it, mostly for FPS stuff and to find out what metals I have with prospector. I like to play long-term forts so I am always fighting FPS decline and ever since 31.19 I've taken to abandoning forts that lack good metals, so prospecting saves me time.

And no, I don't feel guilty about it. In the thread devoted to explaining with tools you use and why, not explaining why would defeat the purpose of posting. It isn't brought about by a guilty conscience.

[Mickey Blue]

I clearly didn't mean people explaining why they used it suggests a guilty conscience, rather that attempting to explain why somehow using a program that gives your dwarves absurd speed or allows you to see all the minerals and where they are is somehow not cheating. 

[Splint]

I clearly didn't mean people explaining why they used it suggests a guilty conscience, rather that attempting to explain why somehow using a program that gives your dwarves absurd speed or allows you to see all the minerals and where they are is somehow not cheating.

I believe that's a matter of opinion too.

If you're really hurting for metal and can't find it but you know damn well it's there....

The absurd speed thing I'm gonna say is flat out cheating unless that's just how you roll.
I considered using it to get my walls up faster, and after just switch it on or off when trading needed to be done.

Decided against it. reveal though I wholeheartedly embrace so I can kit out my troopers good and proper with metal.

[Naros]

My opinion is that DFhack is pure awesome!

[Cobbler89]

There's one bug I know was in 31.25 that only dfhack helped you with -- buckets that would get a mix of water and something else (lye, usually) in them and become both unusable -- and unemptyable, hence unable to be made usable again... dfhack had a fix for that. Pretty much the only place I would want to use it because 1) while hacking, it's not cheating so much as fixing a bug and 2) I couldn't do it without dfhack (all the other legit uses, I'll just take the time to do myself).

That said, I don't think you're a cheater if you use it just to work around some of the weirder quircks of the game or something. If you used it, on the other hand, to do the RTS equivalent of powerlevelling except violating the game mechanics rather than exploiting them, that's cheating. If you do it to automate something that you could do yourself (which I guess it technically more like powerlevelling), it may be the cheap way to play the game without being cheating.

That's a concept I think a lot of people lack -- it doesn't have to be either bigtime cheating or perfectly standard, it can be stuff in between. Cheap shortcuts and third-party bugfixes are just a couple examples. Then there's mods -- taking one game and making it into something else. That simply defies the framework in which "cheating" exists: if you redesign the rules in any way to suit some whole remake, that's different from breaking the rules in the original game. Of course, if you're playing a mod you're not really playing Dwarf Fortress strictly speaking -- but that's exactly why it's not cheating, because you can't cheat at a game you're not playing.

On another wild note, I've heard of a couple handy utilities that utilize dfhack. Example: if I'm not mistaken dfhack is required for Dwarf Therapist, which (generally) doesn't do anything you can't do in game, but puts all your data and options in one place for ease. Another example: various 3d visualizers have, historically, connected through dfhack. (However, I believe the most up-to-date one, Overseer, is about to get a remake that will use the map data in the save folder or maybe some sort of export. I _think_ that implies it won't rely on dfhack.

If the elves here were like Tolkien's I'd say I'm one of them -- "Do not go to elves for counsel, for they will answer 'Yes' and 'No.'" However, we all know elves are a mysterious hybrid of hippie businessmen who want you to only buy trees from their inexplicably friendly log-producing corporations, which seems like a misapplication of the notion if you ask me.

[Clover Magic]

I use fastdwarf as standard as my computer is a POS who gets 50 FPS on a flat embark on a GOOD day.  Usually it's plummeted below 30 by the end of the year, and just goes down from there.  People may say "tough it out", but there's only so much toughing it out at 2 FPS.  I've seen grass grow faster than the dwarves move at that speed, and it's what I usually get by year 3.

Autodump, vdig, and prospect are exploity, but I use them anyways since they save me time.  I have better things to do with my time than dig 4 tiles -> designate 4 tiles -> repeat ad infinitum, and prospect saves me from "my only metal is nickel" dilemma.  And at the above-mentioned 2 FPS, manual dumping just isn't happening, sorry.  I also use drybuckets to make sure my industries that use buckets keep running.

I don't really bother with any of its other functions.  Do they make the game easier and not "legit"?  Probably.  Do I care?  Not really.  I play to have fun, and dfhack helps me have that fun without abandoning all forts at year 2.     If that makes me a "cheater", so be it.

[Splint]

I use fastdwarf as standard as my computer is a POS who gets 50 FPS on a flat embark on a GOOD day.  Usually it's plummeted below 30 by the end of the year, and just goes down from there.  People may say "tough it out", but there's only so much toughing it out at 2 FPS.  I've seen grass grow faster than the dwarves move at that speed, and it's what I usually get by year 3.

Autodump, vdig, and prospect are exploity, but I use them anyways since they save me time.  I have better things to do with my time than dig 4 tiles -> designate 4 tiles -> repeat ad infinitum, and prospect saves me from "my only metal is nickel" dilemma.  And at the above-mentioned 2 FPS, manual dumping just isn't happening, sorry.  I also use drybuckets to make sure my industries that use buckets keep running.

I don't really bother with any of its other functions.  Do they make the game easier and not "legit"?  Probably.  Do I care?  Not really.  I play to have fun, and dfhack helps me have that fun without abandoning all forts at year 2.     If that makes me a "cheater", so be it.

High five man. I support thee.

[kefkakrazy]

Playing a succession game at the moment, and running it via LNP.

The entrance is composed of a bunch of scaffolds that have launcher-bridges on them, and a couple of melee goblins had wound up on a blind column. They were stuck there, absolutely no danger at all, but dwarves couldn't do anything outside because the goblins kept spooking them.

Marksdwarves? This game is an absolute cluster%*$& at the moment, getting marksdwarves out there took long enough, then they wouldn't attack, not getting a clear shot for some reason.

So I used dfhack to spawn a tile of magma on the little jagged edge of pillar the goblins were standing on.


I don't consider this cheating. When I'm playing a game notorious for bugs, like this, or an Elder Scrolls game, or the like, I don't have any qualms about using any console commands or the like in order to break the standoff between "the game as it should be playing" and "the bug that is keeping me from enjoying the game."

[Archereon]

DFHack is good for !!SCIENCE experiments. Once it gets updated, I'm gonna use it to give a dwarven adventurer godly stats and candy arms and armor so he can lay siege to a necromancers tower ans steal his secrets over life and death. Then he's going to retire, and I'm gonna see if he migrates to the fortress.

[Tarran]

Of course DFhack is cheating for the most part. Without a doubt most (though not all) tools are cheating as they break the 'rules' of the game. But as with many cheating tools, there's plenty of reasons for using the tools. A large number of those reasons don't have to result in benefit to the player, or just deal with a minor nuisance or bug, and thus could be considered "Not Cheating", but in all technicality it is cheating.

That said, it usually does not matter that DFhack is cheating, because DF is a single player game. In succession forts, cheating may be called into question, but for the most part it does not matter. And even in multiplayer games, as mentioned above there are plenty of reasons to cheat not resulting in benefit to the player.

Examples to prove my point:

Get stuck in a clump of rocks in an FPS or RPG, use a console command to get you out: You're fixing a bug, but it's still cheating because you used the console command. And that's okay.

In an RTS, spawn 100 more enemies: You're not gaining anything, in fact you're making it harder, but it's still cheating because you used a cheating command/tool. And that's okay.

In Dwarf Fortress, you spawn magma on your dwarves: You're killing yourself, but since you made it appear out of nowhere, it's still cheating because you used a tool that breaks the rules of the game. And that's okay.

Tl;dr: 95% of DFhack is cheating no matter your intentions since it does things that aren't in the original game. And since DFhack is a singleplayer game, and since there are plenty of ways that you don't actually help yourself or fix a bug, it does not matter.

[orius]

On another wild note, I've heard of a couple handy utilities that utilize dfhack. Example: if I'm not mistaken dfhack is required for Dwarf Therapist, which (generally) doesn't do anything you can't do in game, but puts all your data and options in one place for ease. Another example: various 3d visualizers have, historically, connected through dfhack.

It's not.  The two programs are seperate.  DFHack does run Stonesense, but that's of course a different case.

Anyway, like I said before, I generally use it to speed up micromanagement or to fix bugs.  I don't use it to make the game easier, because I'm comfortable with the vanilla difficulty.  Most of the cheats I use are emergency cheats to fix a mistake made in the learning process.

[The Merchant Of Menace]

DFHack is good for !!SCIENCE experiments. Once it gets updated, I'm gonna use it to give a dwarven adventurer godly stats and candy arms and armor so he can lay siege to a necromancers tower ans steal his secrets over life and death. Then he's going to retire, and I'm gonna see if he migrates to the fortress.

You can do that with copper armour and weapons and regular stats.