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[slothen]

I mean, do whatever is fun for you, but since you asked, I'm not sure I get the point. If you want to build big elaborate structures without actually going through any of the important constraints of dwarf fortress, isn't that basically what minecraft is for? Not only is it way easier and less confusing, but you can view your stuff in 3D afterward!

DF is a simulator of dwarves bumbling around getting into trouble and disrupting your plans and dying horribly, and you're essentially just skipping past everything that is DF in order to achieve a different game that already exists and does a better job of what you seem to want to do.

I think this is getting into arbitrary value judgements about the relative worth of one kind of gameplay over another.  There are dozens of reasons why one would prefer to do this kind of thing in dwarf fortress rather than minecraft.  Science being a big one of them.  And you can always turn off fastdwarf once you've done what you want and you'll still be playing dwarf fortress.

Also, its only cheating if you show your work to the community and misrepresent the effort that went into it or the methods used.  And then its still more 'lying' than cheating.  Of course for community games and community challenges, having rules (and thus introducing the possibility of cheating) is an essential part of the fun.

[dwarf_reform]

On a laggy setup, or a fort facing fps death, you can regain some playability through fastdwarf.. Of course, I'm hopelessly addicted to fastdwarf now, and feel like smashing my skull open watching dwarves saunter around at their vanilla speed.. I also use autodump to stockpile huge amounts of stone and wood so dwarves aren't busy hauling (and pathing to) it all for the next year..

If DF had a couple of game-speed modes, similar to what the Sims has, and assuming that amping up the speed wouldn't triple the lag, then I'd just use that.. I don't use fastdwarf because it makes them fire crossbows like semi-automatics, or slash away at enemies like berserkers, or do ten times the work for the same amount of food and drink.. I basically set up safe 'creative mode' worlds by turning off evil zones and demons/night creatures/bogeymen/megabeasts/titans (I do leave werebeasts and vamps, though..), remove all the caves, cap the world to a single playable civ and then I'll run the world for 9999 years.. Occasionally you'll get a world with no necro tower but 10+ necromancers all living in the fort :| But they still count as a living civ so you won't get an early king-dwarf dropped on you..

Its effective against that general.. melancholy?.. that DF players occasionally suffer when confronted with setting up and fine-tuning a whole new fort, for me, especially with the understanding that you could pull the lever a second too late and lose a young fort to a single zombie..

On it being 'cheating' or 'undwarfly', when these kind of options are widely available (as with Minecraft) I always assume that there's at least a chance that a megaproject was aided by non-vanilla means, though I do respect people who achieve their goals through vanilla play.. I always say so when I use fastdwarf or other exploits (like setting up my magma industry by creating it with 'liquids' command), and always believe community members when they say they've done something in vanilla-only.. Not to mention that any seasoned vanilla player knows what can and can't be accomplished in a given time period with legendary miners..

I embarked with all seven dwarves with 5pts in mining and steel picks and channeled a massive entrance all the way down to the first cavern layer (started with a 80x80 square and channeled out the area inside it each time so it'd slope all the way down, and when I finally reached the cavern the hole was around 20x20..), and completed it in a little more than a year.. Normal dwarves would have suffered to half-complete the first gigantic designation in a year, much less the layers and layers after it :>

[Max™]

Yeah, I think that's part of the fun of using it, just doing normal stuff faster is boring. I dug out everything but the engraved living areas and waterfalls from four layers of a 2x2 embark, it was all smoothed, and it looked awesome as hell with multilevel 3 turned on so I could look down from the top layer and watch the dorfs roaming into the meeting area/happythoughts room, see them head down and wander through the hallways I deroofed for this purpose, watch the baron roam around in his room due to it having a four story roof, and so forth.

Naturally it was more fun to watch them run around at normal speed so I'd turn it back down and play like that after I got the entire embark dug out besides the living areas. I am proud of it because it looks cool and turned out better than I initially planned (there were a lot of limonite veins in the top layer which ruined the symmetry around the chambers I dug for the waterfall feeds, so I started removing the whole thing, and just kept moving down level by level until I had the whole room upramped and cleared) but I don't go around claiming I did it in vanilla with no tweaks or hacks or anything.

[taptap]

It is a single player game, play it as you like. But if you are bored at start because you do the same thing, the same layout every time, changing your opening may help more than going through it faster. My current embark (pop cap 7) is seedless/plantless in evil biome, so I had to punch through the aquifer and start gathering cavern plants as quickly as possible for booze and seeds. As I am already at the cavern by that point I decided to build the whole fortress there.