When first learning the game, it's necessary to read each menu item and think about it--even if most of the time what you think is "I don't know what that means, I'll go back to it later".
This is a fact that's not likely to change, as arranging a scenario where a given option is *not* needed would require laborious manual map design or new world generators. Those are only sensible options if the game is feature-complete.
Nonetheless there's a simple way to make the process of learning the interface much easier, and it doesn't even require an overhaul of the in-game help system. Every single menu in the game should be navigable with the +, -, and Enter keys on the number pad.
The most obvious benefit is the cognitive savings of not having to look up a key mapping in order to select a given option. This may not sound like much to the sort of person who's already proficient in Dwarf Fortress, but it's significant.
Another benefit is that if you get the player scrolling thru menus early on, you have them already in a pattern of behavior that requires them to consider the meaning of the option that the menu cursor is on, as they move it about.
Right now it's pretty easy to read a menu too quickly and not notice that there's a difference between "stockpiles" and "stocks," for instance, and proceed to play the game wholly ignorant of the stocks screen. If the player doesn't want to look up shortcuts, and "lazily" goes through the menu by scrolling it, that kind of mistake is less likely to happen, because it's no longer practical for them to skim the menu.
The sort of person who actually wants to memorize the shortcuts should still have them, of course. But, just because I'm interested in a complex game like Dwarf Fortress, doesn't mean I want to memorize a bunch of arbitrary shortcut keys. I'm mainly interested in the game world. Perhaps I have a much better memory for rules than for keys.
Incidentally, this feature would make it feasible to play the game with a gamepad. I tried to do this once, and just about mapped the top-level menu and view scrolling inputs, but I couldn't get the control scheme to cover the various modes in the designate menu for instance.
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Topic: Every Menu Scrollable (Read 959 times)