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[Karadrass_Fr]

Hello.

I discover Dwarf Fortress. This game is super impressive and complex. But I am totally lost, even if I have read quickly a tutorial.

The main problem of this game, it is the total lacking of explanation inside the game. Nothing is explaned about functions of bulding, furnitures etc.

In my humble opinion, make the game more friendly user should be the maximum priority, and not creating new features.

I thing of something which could looks like a video, with macro, which could be activated for each features/bulding.


This kind of features could bring much more new players, and more money to Toady One. The more strategic time to addict and passionante a player is the beginning. The efforts must be done here before everywhere.

But maybe this kind of tutorial feature exist. Help me if you can.

Thank you to have readed me.

[Sirbug]

Refer to this article. Do what it says. By the time I finished it, I knew everything I needed to manage the fort

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Quickstart_guide

I kinda agree that putting such exercises into game itself would be useful, but it has too many interconnected features to just do it.

[weenog]

At this stage of development, any tutorial would be laughably unhelpful at best, and a development crippler at worst.  Consider, every time the game changes significantly, the tutorial must also be changed to reflect that, or else become increasingly inaccurate.  Keeping the tutorial updated could cost Toady a lot of extra time he could be using to advance the game instead.

I don't believe Toady's goal is to get as many players as possible passionately addicted.  He's making something he loves, turning his fantasy into a reality, and he's graciously invited us to explore it while it's still in the embryonic stages.  Dwarf Fortress is not for everyone; it's for Toady, and people who like some of the same things he likes.

I think the opaque user interface reflects the game well. In fact, it can serve as a useful test of character.  If you can get into the game, you're probably the type to stick around.  If you stall at the entry gate, you probably wouldn't enjoy what's behind it, anyway.

The kind of player most likely to appreciate Dwarf Fortress -- the diligent madman who drains the ocean if it leaks into his fortress, engineers a way to dispose of an un-killable titan, hangs a floating fortress from sky hooks, or breaches the forsaken underworld, evicts its denizens and colonizes it -- is the same kind of player who is likely to soldier on through the indecipherable user interface, scale the learning cliff, and ruin fortress after experimental fortress until he groks the game and makes it his own.

The kind of player that needs their hand held, and guidance, the player who wants friendly, simple fun: is he really likely to enjoy it when an enemy titan shows up that has no blood to bleed out, can't be beheaded or bisected because its body is amorphous, has skin harder than the hardest weapons-grade metal he can produce, can swim and breathe underwater, and just getting near it causes dwarfs to rot to death in minutes?  You can kill those brutes, but it isn't easy or intuitive.  You can capture them and use them as guard beasts, too, but it takes a special kind of crazy to do that.  Of course, if you handle them poorly, they can and will destroy everything you love, and you'll get no help but what you provide yourself.

[Karadrass_Fr]

I understand what you have sayed. Thank you for the guide.

Weenog yes but there are intermediates positions beetween the casual fast hedonist player and the supreme geek gamer. I am somewhere beetwen these two categories. Now I don't know yet if I will continue further, but the mystery and complexity stimulate my curiosity.

Anyway if there is not really something which can be added to the game at this stade of developpement, there is nothing more to propose or discuss I think.

[Laurin]

There is also quite a good book, available in paper form and digital: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920022565.do
Written by Peter Tyson, who is famous for his tutorials for the game, published under his nickname TinyPirate. It's easy to read with a humorous touch and some sketches as well. It provides useful basic information in compressed form and takes you through the fist steps to start a fortress.
Further paragraphs cover things like food production, handling of dwarfs, or the military.
Lots of these things are also covered in the older tutorial: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=31928.0 which covers an older version of the game and is a bit outdated, but the basics are still the same.

[Trif]

An official tutorial is planned. See this interview:

We talk about the graphics slowing down development, and it's one of the main reasons why we don't have them. Tutorials are sort of the same way, in that they are an anchor that you need to keep updated. But that's definitely a sacrifice that I'm willing to make, just because I think they would make a big difference just to get people started.