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[Erofire]

I didn't notice it having any score, milestones, or anything to keep track of how well you're doing. I need at least that... a scoring system that tells me I'm doing better than 30 minutes ago or worse. A rating, a grade, achievements, challenges... SOMETHING.

Dwarf Fortress offers lots of ways to keep score, most of them are subtle though. Here are three simple ways:

• Limit yourself to an open fortress and set the population limit to 999 or something high. See how many dwarves you can get until you are overrun by seiges. Press U and your score is the number of dwarves
• Let your score be the value of your fort. Again, this is too easy with a closed fort.
• Adventurer mode might be the best for you. See how many kills you can rank up and how high your fame can go before you are fatally shot in the neck by a copper bolt

[Rattleme]

As Dwarf Fortress is a high fantasy world generator in which you control drunk depressed midgets there is no goal, no achievements (outside of the community awwing) and no game over screen. That's right you can never lose or win in Dwarf Fortress. Even if your fortress crumbles the world will still exist to make a new fortress in. In any roguelike (in this case a "Fortresslike" a subgenre of the Roguelike) there is no winning or losing condition. You can always try again and again and again and again. If you win or lose it makes the game less playable, since you already won you have no reason to play again. DF is only limited by your creativity. If you can possibly conceive it then you can build it.

[Shoruke]

Most of the awesome moments in B12 are from megaprojects, dwarven science, or self-imposed challenges.

For instance, I had rather a lot of fun making myself a magma-killsat and nuking things with it. When that got boring I set the overworld on fire, made a new embark, and tried to make it faster.

Minecarts are good sources of fun. I've been tossing around an idea to make a Flaming Stuff Launcher. Think flamethrower but with flammable rocks instead of gas.

Avoiding death by the Hidden Fun Stuff is easy; just don't go there. Colonizing spoiler-land and setting up a functioning Dwarven community there is much, much harder, and much more interesting.

[riffraffselbow]

Dwarf Fortress really isn't a game, at least by the mostly arbitrary definition of the word I choose to use when discussing games. Rather, it falls under the category of "toy".

I don't mean to make any kind of value judgement with these words. I just see a game as having some definable goal, and an arc of progress to that goal. Tic-Tac-Toe is a game. There's a goal, and you can see the number of possible moves decreasing and the result approaching. "Tag" is generally played as a toy, though scoring can be added to make it a game. Grand Theft Auto blends elements of Toy and Game, part of what (IMO) has made it so sucessful; you can play the game, then seamlessly transition into the "toy" whenever the campaign bores you.

[Pinstar]

I'm still a newbie myself, so am still enjoying the game in the "figure stuff out" fasion.

Once I can make a fortress safe in a reliable manner, I see myself refining my builds.

Setting up industries to be both self-sustaining and bottleneck-free is a major goal.

Creating a "Utopia Fortress" where my goal is to maximize happiness of all as much as possible across as large a population as possible is an appealing goal for me.

On the mega-projects front, I see wanting to create a "Tower of Babel" type deal... a fort that has a very specific footprint, like 10X10, but extends all the way down to the magma sea, and is built upwards as many Z levels as it goes down, with something useful or interesting on every floor.

Lastly, and this will likely be the hardest, trying a no-deaths run. Seeing if I can make my fort in such a way that my very first death will be from old age rather than any other cause.

[WanderingKid]

On the mega-projects front, I see wanting to create a "Tower of Babel" type deal... a fort that has a very specific footprint, like 10X10, but extends all the way down to the magma sea, and is built upwards as many Z levels as it goes down, with something useful or interesting on every floor.

I wish you well on most of those, but this...

... your FPS is going to die, screaming in pain, tears pouring out of its very soul.

[Snaake]

On the mega-projects front, I see wanting to create a "Tower of Babel" type deal... a fort that has a very specific footprint, like 10X10, but extends all the way down to the magma sea, and is built upwards as many Z levels as it goes down, with something useful or interesting on every floor.

I wish you well on most of those, but this...

... your FPS is going to die, screaming in pain, tears pouring out of its very soul.

Erm, how so? 10x10 isn't that much open space per level, and people have built way larger cities/megafortresses on the surface with blocks. Anyway, It probably won't be possible to build as high up as down, on most embarks, AFAIK the vanilla sky has a ceiling at some point. Or I wouldn't remember seeing a dfhack script/utility/thingamabob to automatically raise said ceiling as you reach it, which does then allow for infinite skyscrapers, if that's your thing.

[WanderingKid]

Erm, how so? 10x10 isn't that much open space per level, and people have built way larger cities/megafortresses on the surface with blocks. Anyway, It probably won't be possible to build as high up as down, on most embarks, AFAIK the vanilla sky has a ceiling at some point. Or I wouldn't remember seeing a dfhack script/utility/thingamabob to automatically raise said ceiling as you reach it, which does then allow for infinite skyscrapers, if that's your thing.

OOOOhhh, sorry.  I was thinking you meant a 10 x 10 EMBARK.  My bad.

There's a DFHack option you can use for inifinte sky, yes, so you can twin yourself up and down.

[Arucard]

Succession or community forts tend to have a set of rules or role-play style objectives, you may have more fun joining/starting one of those. We started one on another forum and it became an unwritten rule that each ruler would make an obsidian tower tomb before his year was up, in addition to whatever other projects they had in mind. The random stories that come from these forts are absolutely priceless, and one of my favorite things about this game. There's so much detail waiting to be found if you just look for it.

It sounds like you just need some structure to give you a goal, if you can't come up with something yourself (due to lack of creativity or lack of knowledge about the game) this is a pretty fun way to do so. However, it is possible this just isn't the game for you, and that would be unfortunate, but there's a lot to love here and hope you find a way to enjoy it.