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[The Anus of Discontent]

Hey everyone! Your favorite bunny-throwing, metal monstrosity slaying, dwarf here... I was getting back into DF again, and remarking that even though I've played it SO MUCH (started in 07-08), there are still so many things I don't know about and still end up searching online for. So I just wanted to ask: How hard was it for you guys to get into this game? Did it take multiple attempts? And, if so, what kept you coming back for more?

For me, it took a LOT longer than I thought. I was filled with jealousy when my friends would tell me about their antics in adventure mode, and I was always enthralled by the stories on the forums, but actually playing the game was a much different experience... ASCII didn't look like anything to me but a jumble of shapes. I had never played a game that only used the keyboard, and the lack of animations was jarring, but it was the depth of what you could do and the pages and pages of randomly generated lore that you could explore that kept me pressing on.
 
It wasn't until after I had gotten a graphics pack (Phoebus' is still my favorite) that I started really enjoying myself. Something about actually having a graphical representation of what I was seeing just really made the transition much easier. I tested the waters of Fortress Mode, and I would stumble upon some fortress breaking architectural flaw or flood the entire place with water/magma/goblins/clowns and be so mad that I would quit for a year... Then I'd eventually come back and play adventure mode, training up a great adventurer who would bring the world to the brink of the Age of Emptiness before dying to some crazy random titan and stop for a while longer... Every time I come back I learn a little more, and I'm always happy with my experience, even if it ends in the excruciatingly slow and painful deaths of everyone in my party... I've been playing off and on for many years and sometimes I still feel like a noob. I've played SO MUCH adventure mode, but hardly ever had a fortress for more than an in-game decade. It was a struggle recently just getting a military set up and figuring out how to train my marksdwarves...

Something that has always kept me coming back has been throwing skill in adventure mode, and the hilarious mental images that reading the combat can create... Basically make a macro to throw sand at the ground and leave for a few hours, come back and you've got legendary throwing skill and a pretty fair set of trained up attributes. Throw a rock at a goblin and cave their head in! Giant punches your tooth out? Throw it at him so hard that it ends up lodged in his lung! Trying to wrestle storks and they're trying to fly away? Snipe them out of the air with whatever is handy! Someone tell you that "That was inevitable."? Throw sand in their face so hard that their head explodes in gore! Bandits firing arrows at you? Throw the arrows back at them, make them wish they never gave you that ammunition! Bronze Colossus chasing you down the side of a mountain, about to rip you to pieces? Throw a bunny so hard that it goes clean through several solid feet of bronze... and emerges untouched on the other side... severing the Colossi's head and sending it sailing off in an arc... OH THE MENTAL IMAGES! Even fortress mode can have this every once in a while. I just had an axedwarf fight a giant opossum where his first attack on the thing was a pommel strike... He hit it in the paw and the part exploded in gore... It passed out from the pain immediately, and his next strikes smashed its skull into its brain... I don't know why that looks so funny in my mind. Maybe this game has just broken me...

So what keeps you beating your head against this game? Or are you some kind of savant that can do everything perfectly in DF, but you can't tie your own shoes or something?

[Greiger]

I keep coming back because I see things in other games and figure. "I bet I can build that in DF" Then I usually just end up making a functional fortress and recreating whatever structure ends up taking too much time and effort.

Adventure mode is also fun even when I can't think of any reason to make a fortress it's still fun to do some shinanigans in adventure mode.  I most recently came back to playing actively after seeing a thread about dwarven martial arts.  I somehow managed to make a relatively successful unarmed adventurer mugger before getting stabbed in the throat while mugging a carpenter.

Then I made a fortress in hopes of finding his legend engraved in the walls.

[NullForceOmega]

In a lot of ways it only took one fortress for me to figure out the necessities, mind you, it was my eleventh fortress.  I embarked on an island with a volcano, not realizing that it would rob me of goblin invasions and almost every other kind of FUN.  Thankfully I got to fight megabeasts, forgotten beasts, and titans, I had a fully functional all-legendary military with numerous living gods on their kill lists.  I survived eighteen years, three massive tantrum spirals, and a full-bore loyalty cascade before I retired that fortress.  After that setting up the basics of a fort became trivial, tho' survival still wasn't guaranteed, evil biomes, undead sieges, syndromes, bad planning have all taken their toll on my works.  Adventuring was sadly a much easier puzzle, I've only ever lost adventurers to bad luck or stupidity, every time was a blast tho'.

[Anathe]

I'm still learning. I know next to nothing. Granted, I can make due without having to use the wiki to reference something constantly, only needing it for complex mechanics or anything. That took me about a solid ~2 months of playing.

At this point, all optimizing the way I play.