I just posted a bit about the included utilities
on Reddit, and I thought I might as well repost it here. It's a response to
this list.Alright, a big post about utilities... they generally fall into one of two categories: they're either tools which run alongside DF and help you play in some way, or companion programs which you might fire up separately to (eg) look at the legends exports. For this post I'll ignore stuff like Falconne's UI plugins for dfhack - which work automatically - and just stick to the programs that show in the LNP utilities list. Note that there is a list of all of these - with links - at
the start of this thread.
Companion programs:
* Chromafort: turns images into Quickfort blueprints. Buggy, but occasionally very useful.
* DF Story Maker: Parses the gamelog, and creates a new file which can have specific types of announcements filtered out. Useful if you want to write up a story about your fort, but can't dig through the job cancellations and mineral strikes.
* PerfectWorld DF: advanced world generation on steroids. You can paint terrain, biomes, place stuff; it's insanely powerful but if you don't know what you're doing it may not work. Outputs a world gen template which you then use in DF, extreme worlds may be rejected.
* Fortress Overseer: the only truly 3D visualiser for DF. While playing, use the dfhack command "mapexport filename" to export 'filename.dfmap'; this can then be opened in Overseer which will render a mesh from it. You can fly around, or (iirc) export the mesh to use somewhere else - I've only ever looked at stuff.
Here's some examples.* Legends Viewer: what legends mode would like to be when it grows up. You import legends exports (which can be processed in certain ways), and then get a searchable, filterable, hyperlinked, mapped, graphed wiki-style display of lots of information. This can uncover some incredible stuff, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
*
__Process Legends Exports: is not actually listed here (it's a batch file), but bears mentioning. It takes the various files you can export from legends mode, compresses the bitmaps to .png images, fixes an issue with the legends for legends viewer (if you've had a fort, it may crash the viewer otherwise), creates a compressed folder for Legends Viewer, and moves everything to a 'region#' folder in User Generated Content. You can either double-click on the batch file (in the DF folder) or with the LNP type "processlegends" in dfhack to call it.
* Isoworld: an isometric world map viewer. You export the detailed maps from legends mode, and then open them from this - there are a number of different modes for various maps, a pictographic mode that maps finding waterfalls very easy, and it can also link to dfhack to load a *very* detailed view of the loaded area. This is most useful in adventure mode. The super-detailed images are also saved, so you can see them later without DF open.
pics 2,3,4 are all from IsoworldThen there are tools to use while playing.
* Dwarf Therapist: the most powerful labor and all-round dwarf manager there is. Instead of more info (see [here]() for that), alternatives: dfhack adds a grid view for labor assignment (u,l) to the units list, or magic the whole issue away with `autolabor 1`. Neither of these can give you information like DT does.
* DFMon: a tool for real-time announcement filtering, which includes an overlay for the ticker at the bottom of the screen. Requires some fiddling to get set up, and if you just want to be rid of job cancellation announcements you can turn those off from the (o)rders menu with 'x'. DFMon has amazingly powerful filters though and is *very* customisable.
* dfterm3: multiplayer. Several people can share a common fort over an internet connection; only the host needs to have dfterm (the rest need a newish browser, probably Chrome or Firefox).
See this discussion from a few days ago for details.
* Soundsense: adds contextually appropriate sounds to the game. It parses the gamelog, and adds a bunch of other logging through dfhack, in order to eg. play combat sounds when someone's fighting, seasonal music, etc. Very very customisable, but I've never bothered. This is notable as it actually works best to start it with the game - while it does work if started later, it won't play season music until a season changes (which may be a long time) unless it's running when the map is loaded.
* Quickfort: a designation tool. You can lay out designs to designate, build, query, or place stockpiles in excel - or anything else that can work with .csv files - and then this will handle the designations for you. Capable of anything from a faster staircase to
the Mines of Moria. This is an
excellent tutorial for Quickfort.
And that's it, for this post...
Author
Topic: PeridexisErrant's DF Starter Pack (Read 4188632 times)