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[Marc Remillard]

Fairly addictive while you climb the learning cliff, but things I find really annoying, in no order:

* Collapsing ceilings and the ground underneath, open to the daylight, remains dark and indoors. For creating pastures etc
* Incessant spam when Alerting dwarves to hide in their burrows; its a given they won't be able to do much
* " " and unable to store owned item, for unknown reasons, maybe bedrooms too small
* Fey/possessed moods - the description of what they're after is often odd/wrong i.e. stone blocks is sometimes smelted bars?, other times, not sure, seem to have everything but they still remain stuck
* Litter.
* Naming of workshop tasks i.e. farmer's workshop... seems just random. If the only thing a task does is process a plant to a thread, call it 'Make a thread' or something. 'Process to a vial' etc many things on those lines, completely non-obvious when starting out and really requires a wiki check to see what they actually do.
* Barrel management. Pain. Brewing should be able to take an item of wood, and the brewable item. For something so fundamental, having to have the carpenter spam barrels, followed by brewing, gets to be annoying.
* Lack of balance/point:
  * Why embark on a place with an aquifer? Its just a pain. I can't see how that'd be enjoyable unless you plan on a mountain fortress/volcano, in which case its ignored a bit. Manageable at times, but can't really see what it adds.
  * Creating a large world, and being bound to one (4x4, 5x5 etc) spot, what is the point in that? Might as well spam create small worlds (in fortress mode) until you get the one you want. Fortress mode would be nice to move outside of the area you initially create.
* Truetype support. The interface is hideous, not going to sugar coat that one. Initially using the 'original' mode, with the double spaced font... pretty much unreadable - think it even lacked punctuation from memory. Moving to the Newb Pack/Phoebus and TTF, looks a lot better, but countless issues of the text disappearing. I think we're well past 80x24 terminals by now.
* UX. Random keys that work one way in one menu, one way in another. Arrows versus +/-. Really annoying.
* Items that remain impossible to d>b>d (dispose of). Seems to happen from deconstructed things among others. Tried tricks of un-disposing/forbidding/claiming and re-marking as dump items, to no avail. No biggy I guess but just frustrating, adds to the 'incomplete' feel.
* Stone management. My prime hall with yellow, blue, red, and white tables kills the interior decorator inside of me. It'd be nice to nominate what you want to build things from, or, similar to the economic stones, disable certain stones.
* Phoebus. The tileset made it usable for me, there's a few little ASCII artefacts left (corpses etc) that'd be nice to kill off. Otherwise I'll dig out the old Wyse terminal and go all or nothing :p
* Select all - if you've made a bulk load of items for the merchants, you get RSI having to hit down-arrow and enter.

Guess that's scraping the surface a bit. In general seems hellishly buggy, but I guess that's an alpha. All said been an incredibly fun game to check out. Just a bit more discipline, unit/functional tests, balance etc would go a long way.

Cheers.

[MagmaMcFry]

Welcome, new forumite. Have Fun.

* Collapsing ceilings and the ground underneath, open to the daylight, remains dark and indoors. For creating pastures etc
* Incessant spam when Alerting dwarves to hide in their burrows; its a given they won't be able to do much
* " " and unable to store owned item, for unknown reasons, maybe bedrooms too small
* Fey/possessed moods - the description of what they're after is often odd/wrong i.e. stone blocks is sometimes smelted bars?, other times, not sure, seem to have everything but they still remain stuck
* Items that remain impossible to d>b>d (dispose of). Seems to happen from deconstructed things among others. Tried tricks of un-disposing/forbidding/claiming and re-marking as dump items, to no avail. No biggy I guess but just frustrating, adds to the 'incomplete' feel.

Bugs. Will be fixed in about 20 years. Have patience.

* Barrel management. Pain. Brewing should be able to take an item of wood, and the brewable item. For something so fundamental, having to have the carpenter spam barrels, followed by brewing, gets to be annoying.

Erm... Deal with it. Brewers can't make barrels.

  * Why embark on a place with an aquifer? Its just a pain. I can't see how that'd be enjoyable unless you plan on a mountain fortress/volcano, in which case its ignored a bit. Manageable at times, but can't really see what it adds.
  * Creating a large world, and being bound to one (4x4, 5x5 etc) spot, what is the point in that? Might as well spam create small worlds (in fortress mode) until you get the one you want. Fortress mode would be nice to move outside of the area you initially create.

Soon (measured in years) you will be able to send dwarves around your world in military and trade missions. In the meantime, try adventure mode.

* Truetype support. The interface is hideous, not going to sugar coat that one. Initially using the 'original' mode, with the double spaced font... pretty much unreadable - think it even lacked punctuation from memory. Moving to the Newb Pack/Phoebus and TTF, looks a lot better, but countless issues of the text disappearing. I think we're well past 80x24 terminals by now.

Try the original ANSI tileset. Some graphics packs have unreadable punctuation because grass uses the same tile image as punctuation and the pack creators preferred nice grass over nice text. Truetype support was made to have nice graphics and readable text at the same time. If none of the options can please your eyes and if pleasing your eyes is important to gameplay, play something else.

* UX. Random keys that work one way in one menu, one way in another. Arrows versus +/-. Really annoying.

Option 1: Change the key settings under "Key Bindings" in the escape menu.
Option 2: Just get used to them.

Just a bit more discipline, unit/functional tests, balance etc would go a long way.

Be patient, man. Bugs will get fixed eventually. You've probably noticed that this game is not being written for profit, but because someone (Toady One) sat down and said: "I'm going to write a great game." This game will be great.

In the meantime, enjoy the bugs.

[dragginmaster]

Welcome aboard.

Preaching to the choir.

[ObiWorm]

* Stone management. My prime hall with yellow, blue, red, and white tables kills the interior decorator inside of me. It'd be nice to nominate what you want to build things from, or, similar to the economic stones, disable certain stones.

Well, you can forbid all the stones you don't want to use in the stocks menu. I made a dinning room with a huge amount of tables, thrones and statues of marble that way. You can also put a stockpile of the stone you want to use next to the mason workshop. But yeah, it would be useful to be able to just nominate what stone do you want to use.

[NobodyPro]

Just a little something for ya: The next release is a bugfix release and will fix a couple of outstanding bugs from the dawn of time. Toady'll get to everything if given enough time.

[Naryar]

the barrel for drinks problem is hardly one cause now you can transform stones into stone pots.

[Marc Remillard]

the barrel for drinks problem is hardly one cause now you can transform stones into stone pots.

I guess on that note, I just don't find it a fun mechanic to have to chase barrels/pots versus booze. Maybe just me. Its possible I import too much food I guess, and not free up existing barrels, but it seems like a never-ending 'spam barrel create' to me.

[Marc Remillard]

* Stone management. My prime hall with yellow, blue, red, and white tables kills the interior decorator inside of me. It'd be nice to nominate what you want to build things from, or, similar to the economic stones, disable certain stones.

Well, you can forbid all the stones you don't want to use in the stocks menu. I made a dinning room with a huge amount of tables, thrones and statues of marble that way. You can also put a stockpile of the stone you want to use next to the mason workshop. But yeah, it would be useful to be able to just nominate what stone do you want to use.

Are you sure on that? There's the viable stones (flux etc) you can enable/disable, in 34.05 I'm not sure you can turn off the 'crud' stones. I am probably wrong, but I thought I'd checked.

[MagmaMcFry]

Press tab in the stones menu.

[Marc Remillard]

Just a little something for ya: The next release is a bugfix release and will fix a couple of outstanding bugs from the dawn of time. Toady'll get to everything if given enough time.

Hehe. Developer's have a love for moving onto new things, bug fixing and regressions tend to not get much love. Its a bold statement, though.

[Myiagros]

the barrel for drinks problem is hardly one cause now you can transform stones into stone pots.

I guess on that note, I just don't find it a fun mechanic to have to chase barrels/pots versus booze. Maybe just me. Its possible I import too much food I guess, and not free up existing barrels, but it seems like a never-ending 'spam barrel create' to me.

You can always create a custom stockpile that only holds drinks and then reserve X number of barrels for it. If you tell your stockpile that you want a minimum of 50 barrels then any extras will begin to be stored there and basically held for drinks.

[Marc Remillard]

Press tab in the stones menu.

Ah. You're quite right, that's saved me a hell of a lot of d>b>d'ing.

[TheLinguist]

Just so you know, I'm sure that most players agree that a significant contributor to the learning cliff is the horrible UI and documentation (and I'm not referring to the ASCII, that just adds roguelike charm). If you're familiar with the Yosemite decimal system, I think it would be fair to say that the various UI and playability problems turn what should've been a 5.10a difficulty cliff (doable with a fair bit of practice and determination, or for someone experienced with climbing things) into a 5.12d or so (haha, yeah, come back after a few years of training).

So, yeah, we know that the UI could use work. Toady's busy elsewhere, sad to say. And even sadder, there's only one of him, and he's limited to 24 hour days.

[Marc Remillard]

the barrel for drinks problem is hardly one cause now you can transform stones into stone pots.

I guess on that note, I just don't find it a fun mechanic to have to chase barrels/pots versus booze. Maybe just me. Its possible I import too much food I guess, and not free up existing barrels, but it seems like a never-ending 'spam barrel create' to me.

You can always create a custom stockpile that only holds drinks and then reserve X number of barrels for it. If you tell your stockpile that you want a minimum of 50 barrels then any extras will begin to be stored there and basically held for drinks.

I have separate stockpiles yeah. I don't know, I guess it just feels like a constant booze war to me, a little too much so... maybe the peanuts just drink too much, to the point where I'll buy out the merchant of grog, and then continually spam 'brew' at the still. I reckon the rate of consumption could do with a bit of tweaking down.

[MagmaMcFry]

Just a little something for ya: The next release is a bugfix release and will fix a couple of outstanding bugs from the dawn of time. Toady'll get to everything if given enough time.

Hehe. Developer's have a love for moving onto new things, bug fixing and regressions tend to not get much love. Its a bold statement, though.

Erm... Toady said so himself. Also, here is Toady's development log. The clothes bugs he's mentioned today are at least four years old.

I think it would be fair to say that the various UI and playability problems turn what should've been a 5.10a difficulty cliff (doable with a fair bit of practice and determination, or for someone experienced with climbing things) into a 5.12d or so (haha, yeah, come back after a few years of training).

Erm... wut? What are the UI and playability problems you're talking about?