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[blah_1123]

Reading these forums, I notice not many people play DF the way I do, so I was just wondering.

Am I the only one that uses no mods, including tilesets?
Am I the only one who doesn't use burrows?
Am I the only one who struggles to find caverns? I've managed to reach the magma see before without finding a cavern and I've only found one cavern in all the time I've played DF.
Am I the only one who doesn't use strange and intricate stair systems and just has a simple layout fitting everything on 3 or 4 floors all connected through 1 system of stairs and corridors, I know that last one isn't very well explained.

Just curious, as everyone else seems to have all this, I mainly don't use burrows because I don't understand them.

[TKGP]

I think many people use tilesets because that's how they were introduced to the game (LNP in particular). More experienced players seem to start messing around with mods after they've started to get bored with the vanilla mechanics. Myself though, I've been playing for a fair while and still use the default graphics and raws.

[oven_baked]

I don't use tilesets, I find it so much clearer without. No mods other than DFhack and Therapist because they make managing things easier. (I have only used the clean and cleanowned functions of DFhack).
I use burrows because It means that my dwarfs don't all run out to collect socks during sieges.
I hit caverns often, but manage to miss the magma sea and find SMR before magma...
I just have simple stairs as well, never understood the gigantic stairs.

Burrows are useful, you set an area and you set some dwarfs and those dwarfs stay inside that area.
I've got all of my fort that's behind my main defence in a burrow called "Enemies at the gates" and i've got an emergency room one for if my defences fail called "Enemies inside!", I just set [Civ] to them when appropriate and it all works fine.

[blah_1123]

I just remembered, after fiddling around with burrows for half an hour I did once use them, and it was to set up a civilian alert...

[Urist McSpike]

I use tilesets, probably because I started with the LNP.  I also make use of DFHack & Therapist (couldn't imagine playing without Therapist at all).  As for DFHack, I make extensive use of the clean command, and usually prospect & reveal at the start of a new embark, to see what I'll have to play with, and to avoid aquifers.

As for my fort design, I tend to be a bit more compact, like you do.  I'll turn a starting area into my walled-in pasture/farm area, and connect it down to my "real" fort.  Then I'll add an outside entryway, with depot access & trap-filled "guest" access.  But inside the fort, I tend to go with a grand staircase connecting everything, a 3 level grand dining/meeting/throne room, with apartments on each level.  I also like to make one access point to that area, so I can put a mister in, so every dwarf going to the meeting hall or their rooms goes under it.  Workshops are on their own level, usually everything on the same level, with an entire storage area above & below them.

But other than goblinite harvesting, magma pumps, water reservoirs, power plants & that kind of thing, everything is fairly close.

Burrows... I usually tend to have only a couple - one covering the entire domain (inside, farms, pastures, mining areas), to keep dwarves from roaming outside.  (I also always turn off fishing & hunting.)  The second is my "safety" zone, covering most of the inside areas of the fort, a slight downsizing of the previous zone, which is used when invaders come.  I've tried to do specialty burrows - one for the farmers, one for the crafters, one for the military, and one for nobles... but I tend to give up on that pretty fast.

I also hardly ever use the caverns, other than breaching them for spores and then walling them off.  Best is if I breach into open air, so I have less concern over critters coming out.  And I have never yet dug into the circus.

I honestly get bored with forts after about 15 years - once they're established pretty well, with everything dug out, smoothed, engraved, and food/drink supplies going steady.  I find I enjoy the initial challenge of getting it all set up more.

[Azated]

I started out with the pheobus tileset, but tried the ASCII after a few months. I've stuck with it since.

I usually only have one burrow that I activate to order my civvies inside before they get torn to shreds. In my opinion, they're a little too problematic to be of any more use unless you specifically design your fortress for efficiency.

I never have problems reaching the caverns. It's actually really annoying, because I often have to move my 3x3 central staircase a few tiles until I get past them.

[Loud Whispers]

Am I the only one that uses no mods, including tilesets?

No

Am I the only one who doesn't use burrows?

Why not?

Am I the only one who struggles to find caverns? I've managed to reach the magma see before without finding a cavern and I've only found one cavern in all the time I've played DF.

I've dug a massive 200x200 hole down to layer 28 I think, and still no caverns :|

Am I the only one who doesn't use strange and intricate stair systems and just has a simple layout fitting everything on 3 or 4 floors all connected through 1 system of stairs and corridors, I know that last one isn't very well explained.

I don't know what you mean, but all industries except bees, war and mining take place on one z lvl in my fort

[wuphonsreach]

DwarfTherapist - pretty much a must, until Toady implements something similar in-game.  It's the fastest way to see "did that new migration wave bring me more fisherdwarves" or "who has the Cooking labor turned on".

DFHack - I try to stay away from parts of it, but:

* copystock - the most useful command ever when setting up your industries
* prospect all - useful pre-embark to say "do I really want to settle here if I'm dead set on an XYZ industry?"
* stonesense - useful for getting the lay of the land

And I've always used a graphical tileset.  I've tried ASCII and it just doesn't click for me (even though I play Angband in ASCII).

[Joben]

I don't use ASCII much, it literally hurts my eyes. For mods I'm only using a few small tweaks I wrote myself. I might try some more after another fort or two though.

In my current fort there are three layers of caverns, it takes planning to sink a shaft that misses them.

I'm still too new to have settled on a general fortress design. My current fort is far too sprawling and random though. The next one will be more vertical and compact.

I have two general burrows, but they're just for civilian alerts. One that gives them the run of the whole place, including the above ground fortifications and farms. And antoher that keeps them under ground in the best defended areas.

[Loud Whispers]

DwarfTherapist - pretty much a must, until Toady implements something similar in-game.  It's the fastest way to see "did that new migration wave bring me more fisherdwarves" or "who has the Cooking labor turned on".

Or just sort out your migrants when they arrive?

[misko27]

No mods and tilesets here, pure DF. Except when FPS starts to suffer, then I use DFhack to get rid of garbage.

Fort design with me is vertical, and categorised into sections for easier late additions.

Burrows are for sieges and vamps.

[Drazinononda]

I use a 16x16 tileset so that my rooms actually look like the dimensions that they are (e.g. a 5y by 10x room doesn't look 6.7y by 8.9x, make sense?) and the walls look better. I don't consider that a mod since it only changes the appearance of the game, not the function. I use dfhack to do things that otherwise would be very annoying (dig veins, for example) but don't cheat with it much.

I put one burrow within my defenses that keeps my children and useful Legendaries from becoming the goblin snatcher/ambusher welcoming party, and occasionally will set one up in my hospital so that my Chief Medical Dwarf can actually be bothered to stop Attending Party long enough to do his job.

I've missed the caverns once on purpose (using dfhack) and once on accident. Other than that, I always hit at least one. Are your embark options messed up somehow, maybe?

I don't know what you mean by "strange and intricate stairs" but I usually have one main stair system supplemented by a couple extra minor ones, like the extant set between the residence hall levels. Generally having only one stairway leads to problems of one sort or another, but it can be done decently well and it's a lot less of a pain (in my opinion) to figure out how to do one stairway well than to figure out how to do multiple ones excellently.

[Mishrak]

I particularly appreciate the tilesets (Ironhand especially) and Dwarf Therapist.  I'm still fairly new, so I kinda enjoy not using mods to find out what i'm going to embark on, but it has been frustrating to not have iron when I want it.

I've never tried playing it in ASCII, but the tileset is just dramatically easier for me to see and interpret, despite a history of playing text based games.

[TopHat]

I've never used mods/tilesets (inc. therapist).
I generally only use 1 or two staircases.
I easily find caverns. (though some people don't)
I rarely use burrows (for defense and planepacked artifact experiments (find out history of world))
So the answer to your questions is:
1. No
2. No
3. No
4. No

[PaleBlueHammer]

I CAN play with vanilla ASCII, but I prefer a tileset.  If tilesets went away completely I would probably lose interest.

Dwarf Therapist... I learned DF a little bit before DT was a popular option, so I went through the hassle of maintaining labors manually in game.  Then I used DT and I will never go back, a couple of hundred dwarfs in your fort is just way, way too much micromanagement when you want to play with labors.

Caverns: I adjusted my world_gen to provide three open, flat caverns instead of a mish-mash of mazes.  So it's rare that I miss one as I'm digging down.  Even with the modification, my caverns get all sorts of features and weirdness.

Burrows:  we hates them, precious.  It's a HUGE pain for me to map out my burrows and then go through each one in-game and add individual dwarfs.  The civ alert system is fine, but I make do with a simple drawbridge and a lever.  Compounding that, dwarfs just don't react very quickly when assigned a burrow IMO.  They don't work well for moving vamps around, and new migrants will often just ignore a burrow completely and miss their spike trap room welcome and reception area.