Welp. I also just started in this new version, but there are already some changes I have noticed:
- Wild vegetables(at least, I have seen some spinach growing on the surface, although I haven't done anything with it yet) and more variation in plant life on the surface, including many new types of flowers,
- Vastly more detailed trees that have flowers on them in the spring and fruits in the summer, I haven't progressed beyond summer yet but they probably lose leaves in the autumn and only have twigs and branches in the winter,
- You can now control what nobles dwarves can pull levers, allowing you to have a "Control Guy" who is the only dwarf in the fort allowed to pull levers, and trap him in have him occupy a "control room" which is a centralized lever hole with a bed, and a food and a booze stockpile,
- You can also control who is allowed to destroy buildings, making it easier to dedicate dwarves to a single thing,
- You can restrict dwarves in burrows to only use the workshops in that burrow, which likely fixes Planepacked, but it is an optional thing which is disabled by default,
- There are also two new hauling labors which are "Water hauling" and "Trade good hauling",
- There is a new skill; namely Climber, and cats now naturally have that legendary,
- The neck is also always displayed in a dwarf's body summary screen... thing... which says "Wnd" which I have no idea what it means,
- The Thoughts and Preferences screen has been reworked a bit,
- A dwarf can now have someone as "Friendly terms" which for me seems to be in the middle of "Friend" and "Long-term aqcuaintance", and some dwarves seem to make friends at different speeds than others which is very likely a new trait,
- Another new trait seems to control how likely a dwarf is to go party,
- It seems that dwarves can be gay too. Maybe there's even a trait in dwarves controlling wether they support gays or not XD
And many other things that I'm sure are in there but haven't noticed yet, or forgot.
So many small things, but as far as I've gone yet the trees are the only large change. Pun intended.