Fairly addictive while you climb the learning cliff, but things I find really annoying, in no order:
1. Collapsing ceilings and the ground underneath, open to the daylight, remains dark and indoors. For creating pastures etc
2. Incessant spam when Alerting dwarves to hide in their burrows; its a given they won't be able to do much
3. " " and unable to store owned item, for unknown reasons, maybe bedrooms too small
4. 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
5. Litter.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Lack of balance/point:
a. 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.
b. 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.
9. 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.
10. UX. Random keys that work one way in one menu, one way in another. Arrows versus +/-. Really annoying.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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
14. 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.
1. The ceiling doesn't collapse if you pay proper attention to trees overhead, and don't channel over a region which has already been dug out. My frustration has always been that areas opened up by channeling remain light forever, even after building solid rock ceiling over them. They also take on the weather aspects of outdoors even though they are now indoors. Oh well.
2. Yes.
3. For same reason as 2. They can't get to something they want to store in their rooms. They do claim items outdoors if those are not forbidden, and inherit items from relatives who may have died.
4. They sometimes want more than one type of something, eg two kinds of bones.
5. Yes.
6. The generalized naming leaves room for modders, and for future use by Tarn Adams.
7. Why would a brewer know how to make barrels, and do it at the still? Use the City Manager to queue manufacture of barrels, or better yet, put stone pots in a repeating loop for the stonecrafter.
8. These things are a matter of individual taste. Some people like the challenge of embarking on an aquifer. Some people like a large world to choose from. Neither thing are you forced to do. Isn't it nice that others can?
9. I enjoy the ASCII display myself, but then again I grew up with keypunch cards. There are lots of other display sets available, and even a 3D display called Stonesense.
10. Yes.
11. Claimed items cannot be moved. Children are notorious for claiming clothing which they cannot store because they have no room of their own. When military drop their civilian clothing to don a uniform they also tend to leave it lying.
12. Yes.
13. Rehash of 9.
14. Yes.
DFHack/Stonesense and DFTherapist are very useful tools for this game. Users have created a lot of mods and tools over the years which change and sometimes enhance the game for those who don't enjoy it "out of the box".
Tarn Adams has a vision for Dwarf Fortress that will probably take decades to finish. Every time he adds a new aspect, he has to rewrite older parts where they meet the new parts. Then he has to debug everything. He tries his best to leave us with a working game in between releases of the new aspects. He does the programming largely alone, although he seems now to have acquired help with the SDL interface. He doesn't acquire a team to help him with the game itself because he considers this his personal project, which it is. He quit a fulltime, paying, job to do this with his life. He lives on our contributions. He is happy living and working that way. We are happy with him, and content with the results. This is a very loyal community.
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Topic: New Player Feedback (Read 4347 times)