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[hans otterson]

Hey there, I'm on my first fortress, following Capt. Duck's tutorials (thanks, man!), and I have a question:

I just had my first thief. The game pauses, takes me 5 levels higher than where my fortress is, and I don't see a thief. I'm completely disoriented. I zoom back in to fortress-level, don't see any thieves there, either. Am I missing something?

And why does the game zoom out automatically? I can't see anything least of all my fortress. I think the ASCII is confusing me a bit. All that black is mountain rock, right, so that's why my fortress is obscured from a high level view? Thanks for helping a newbie.

[MonkeyHead]

The game will zoom to where the thief is upon a unit (dwarf, animal, whatever) first seeing it. Use the v-key and see if you can spot it on the screen it jumps to. If you still cant, go into the units screen (u), scroll to kobold thief (grunklanges, or somthing similar usually), then hit c to center on it.  havent used the ascii output in a while, but i think a kobold should be "k"... consider using a graphical set - it helped me learn the game. lots of people like mayday's set, but i use a modified version of rantingrodents with 40d, and proteus with 0.31.

As to the layer visibiliy: the game displays anything on one layer at a time... imagine it as displaying a slice or cut thorugh the terrain. if your fortress is below the cut, you see what is above it... moving up or down a layer shows only what is on the layer. try going to the very top, and moving down one layer at a time - you should get mountin peaks first, before valleys and the interior of hills, then valley floors and rivers, and finally moving underground

[hans otterson]

imagine it as displaying a slice or cut thorugh the terrain.

Ah! THAT makes sense. Thanks--weird to wrap your head around, but once you approach the game on its own terms it makes sense. And the thief advice was helpful, too.

[Bronzebeard]

ASCII can be hard to cope with, especially for newcomers. Did you try a tileset yet? If you do, I recommend Mayday's (his latest version can be found here): http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php

It'd make things loads simpler to understand.

[hans otterson]

I keep browsing the tilesets, but for some reason I want to conquer the ASCII. I like the look of it, but it is kind of a pain to have to pause the game and look around to check what every little new ASCII character that I don't recognize is.

Maybe I'll go with Anikki's.

[Psieye]

There is not too much ASCII to learn if you accept the general patterns. I hardly remember every single ore, gem, stone and tree ASCII but I don't need to as I know what group of ASCII characters represent each of those types. As for creatures, you don't have to face a large variety all at once (unless you just traded with the elves for exotic pets) and again, I don't remember all the obscure ones, just the important ones (dog, cat, uh... cows?).