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[Dirst]

How about as a compromise just an init.txt option turned to permadeath by default? Pure traditional whatever experience for people until they know enough later to look in the init file?

I can just see the init text now...

The following setting affects how saving the game functions.  In the default setting of NORMAL, the game is saved every time you exit a session making it difficult to get a "do over" for a mistake made in game.  Remember, losing is fun!  If this is set to HARDCORE, the game saves OS-specific information with the game data which makes it impossible to copy and restore a saved game.  Finally, if this is set to I_AM_A_SCUMMY_CHEATING_BASTARD then an option appears in the ESC options menu to make an explicit copy of a save with a player-chosen name.
[SAVEMODE:NORMAL]

[scriberman]

I have been playing games (starting with peek-a-boo, perhaps?) for around 40 years, and so have definite opinions on what kind of gaming experience I want.

For any computer game that I really liked, which created save files, I wrote scripts to make backup/restore of those saves easy.  Sometimes, I used them to restore, but most often, not.  Why would I restore in certain cases?  Unwillingness to reinvest the RL time to regain the status? Science? !SCIENCE!? Curiosity for the alternate universe? Safety net against bugs? Safety net against accidental key press? Unwillingness to give up certain cool (i.e., fun) item? Share current world state with friends?  We could create a list of reasons to utilize saves, and a list of reasons not to.  In the end, it will ALWAYS boil down to personal play style preferences (for a single-player mode game).

Now, once you set up some sort of competition between players, then you will likely set up some rules to keep an even playing field; but then, you are not strictly playing the same game, any more, are you? You are now playing something else, something multiplayer, which has its own rules to follow.  Now, you get unquestionable reasons to enforce certain play styles.  Behold, the meta-game.

If you want to join in on the rules of a particular group's version of a meta-game, then GREAT!  Have fun!  If you don't want to play that particular meta-game, then don't; go find another meta-game, or just play your own single-player game as ... well, as a single-player game.  If you are playing by yourself, and for yourself, and not to compare your results in any sort of competitive way, then only you can decide for yourself whether your actions are cheating.


Established Consensus
There is already an established consensus that !SCIENCE! is a legitimate use case for restoring saves.  No other rational is necessary.  No meta-gaming group on these forums can reasonably argue against the pursuit of !SCIENCE!, or its usefulness in the fostering of a vibrant DF community.  From this alone, there is sufficient and compelling reason to seriously consider adding a save/restore functionality to the UI.


Pure
There is no need for one group of meta-gamers to denigrate another.  If any one meta-gamer group has a "pure" foundation from which to preach, it might be the group which makes ZERO changes to the game, playing as-is, without modifying raws (including for any init options), and eschewing any use of dfhack, Dwarf Therapist, tilesets, and any other unofficial add-ons.  Any other meta-game group is just claiming that their particular slippery-slope position choice is more solid than the next (with regards to arguments of "purity").


History
Many examples exist from the forums of the many succession games, many bug reports, and many research projects which benefit richly from the existence of save files, and which would therefore CLEARLY benefit from an official save/restore UI.  Really, if the person reading these words wishes to argue against all of that evidence, then that person is a truly unreasonable person with whom time will not be wasted.


Conclusion
To save/restore or not to save/restore, is a perfectly valid question, which can only be usefully answered by an individual player, or by a group of individual players with an internal consensus.  If, perhaps, you were a player who tried to force your personal save/restore preferences upon everyone else, then you were part of the problem, causing unnecessary conflicts.  But, now, maybe you can begin to realize that choice is really the only long-term solution.  With the existing OFFICIAL option for save/restore, anyone can play either way, and still be playing the "pure" game, as intended, and as provided for in the vanilla game.

p.s.
The only part of this post which I will direct towards an individual:

I find nothing conclusive in the fact that out of the handful of people that posted in this thread (out of thousands of players/forum dwellers), the majority appear to advocate a permadeath style that should never be abolished. One could even argue that the insignificant number of replies this thread got so far, is an indication that the majority of DF players 'couldn't care less' about this, which is not quite the same as considering permadeath as "essential for the pure dwarf fortress experience."

I hate (in a non-mean-spirited, playful kind of way) that you have compelled me to spend the time to write this post; I really wanted to do other things with that time.   But, some of the DF players do care a great deal about this topic, and have decided not to spend the time to write a post.  I do not read silence necessarily as an indication that the person "couldn't care less" (although I must admit to the general rule of, "silence is assent"); sometimes silence is more from apathy, rather than agreement.
  Also, I will readily agree that I believe most players probably don't care much either way.

[GavJ]

wow gavj, im really suprised by how much you seem to underestimate the impact of permadeath has on the game. almost everyone in this thread agrees that its essential for the "pure" dwarf fortress experience, yet you keep talking about it as some small annoying bug you have to put up with. since we clearly feel differently about this i will stop arguing, but im honestly curios, why you think of it in this way. i assume you have tried to play it without savescumming, what made you change? do you enyoy other games with permadeath, ie rougelikes? if so why do you feel different about dwarf fortress?

1) I agree it's "pure" in a historical sense, too. This is pretty uncontroversial. Anything about the game that's been the same for 10 years or whatever is going to be the "pure" option.
2) Pure/historical =/= necessarily most fun, though. If this were true, Toady would never change anything he already had in the game ever, but he does all the time.
3) Pure/historical =/= necessarily something Toady thought was critically important, versus just a quick decision he made one day and hasn't reconsidered much since.
4) In response to your question, I changed because I enjoy playing the entire game, and want to have the variety of all the parts of the game. Permadeath makes me play the early game disproportionately often, and although it is fun, I don't want to play the early game constantly. It gets boring. I want to play it and the mid and the late game all a decent amount.

Reason #2 was that it was really inefficient for me learning the game better. I kept losing and then not learning very much from it, because I had to go build a whole new fort and might not have encountered that situation again for another month. Reloading a save means I can try a problem 4 ways very quickly and figure out the best way and thus get better at the game much more efficiently. Since I enjoy mastering games (and modding games which requires mastery first to do well), this was better for me.

5) In response to the other question, no I hate all games with permadeath, and find them almost universally tedious and annoying for the same reasons as above (playing early game over and over, and difficulty of learning), which is why I quickly looked up how to do it in dwarf fortress as well and then tried it here and realized I liked it better, as expected.

[enizer]

There are a couple of very good points here recently in this thread, that I have savescummed for.
#1, when learning how to play, I used to savescum a lot, because you can only play through the first fights only to die to a tantrum spiral before it becomes VERY tempting to save at the start of said tantrum spiral, and play through again and again untill you find out how to keep the fort alive through that.

And
#2 bugs
This happens in nearly every fort, something eventually messes up.
Some rock decides to be a rebel and refuses to obey the law of gravity like all the other rocks.
In the first month of play 5 of the 7 starting dwarves fall down a waterfall.(everyone not busy digging a hole)
Husk storm in quite literally the very first second of play(yes I had that happen, noone even managed to pick up the pick).

I mean, there are just some things when you need to say to yourself, "ok, this was just nonsense, lets reset that"

[0996395]

I have been playing games (starting with peek-a-boo, perhaps?) for around 40 years, and so have definite opinions on what kind of gaming experience I want.

For any computer game that I really liked, which created save files, I wrote scripts to make backup/restore of those saves easy.  Sometimes, I used them to restore, but most often, not.  Why would I restore in certain cases?  Unwillingness to reinvest the RL time to regain the status? Science? !SCIENCE!? Curiosity for the alternate universe? Safety net against bugs? Safety net against accidental key press? Unwillingness to give up certain cool (i.e., fun) item? Share current world state with friends?  We could create a list of reasons to utilize saves, and a list of reasons not to.  In the end, it will ALWAYS boil down to personal play style preferences (for a single-player mode game).

Now, once you set up some sort of competition between players, then you will likely set up some rules to keep an even playing field; but then, you are not strictly playing the same game, any more, are you? You are now playing something else, something multiplayer, which has its own rules to follow.  Now, you get unquestionable reasons to enforce certain play styles.  Behold, the meta-game.

If you want to join in on the rules of a particular group's version of a meta-game, then GREAT!  Have fun!  If you don't want to play that particular meta-game, then don't; go find another meta-game, or just play your own single-player game as ... well, as a single-player game.  If you are playing by yourself, and for yourself, and not to compare your results in any sort of competitive way, then only you can decide for yourself whether your actions are cheating.


Established Consensus
There is already an established consensus that !SCIENCE! is a legitimate use case for restoring saves.  No other rational is necessary.  No meta-gaming group on these forums can reasonably argue against the pursuit of !SCIENCE!, or its usefulness in the fostering of a vibrant DF community.  From this alone, there is sufficient and compelling reason to seriously consider adding a save/restore functionality to the UI.


Pure
There is no need for one group of meta-gamers to denigrate another.  If any one meta-gamer group has a "pure" foundation from which to preach, it might be the group which makes ZERO changes to the game, playing as-is, without modifying raws (including for any init options), and eschewing any use of dfhack, Dwarf Therapist, tilesets, and any other unofficial add-ons.  Any other meta-game group is just claiming that their particular slippery-slope position choice is more solid than the next (with regards to arguments of "purity").


History
Many examples exist from the forums of the many succession games, many bug reports, and many research projects which benefit richly from the existence of save files, and which would therefore CLEARLY benefit from an official save/restore UI.  Really, if the person reading these words wishes to argue against all of that evidence, then that person is a truly unreasonable person with whom time will not be wasted.


Conclusion
To save/restore or not to save/restore, is a perfectly valid question, which can only be usefully answered by an individual player, or by a group of individual players with an internal consensus.  If, perhaps, you were a player who tried to force your personal save/restore preferences upon everyone else, then you were part of the problem, causing unnecessary conflicts.  But, now, maybe you can begin to realize that choice is really the only long-term solution.  With the existing OFFICIAL option for save/restore, anyone can play either way, and still be playing the "pure" game, as intended, and as provided for in the vanilla game.

p.s.
The only part of this post which I will direct towards an individual:

I find nothing conclusive in the fact that out of the handful of people that posted in this thread (out of thousands of players/forum dwellers), the majority appear to advocate a permadeath style that should never be abolished. One could even argue that the insignificant number of replies this thread got so far, is an indication that the majority of DF players 'couldn't care less' about this, which is not quite the same as considering permadeath as "essential for the pure dwarf fortress experience."

I hate (in a non-mean-spirited, playful kind of way) that you have compelled me to spend the time to write this post; I really wanted to do other things with that time.   But, some of the DF players do care a great deal about this topic, and have decided not to spend the time to write a post.  I do not read silence necessarily as an indication that the person "couldn't care less" (although I must admit to the general rule of, "silence is assent"); sometimes silence is more from apathy, rather than agreement.
  Also, I will readily agree that I believe most players probably don't care much either way.

Excellent. You're the best. That, coupled with the response I quoted earlier, have answered every question I posed at the start of the thread, leaving me completely satisfied. I consider this topic closed. That's not to discourage further replies but merely to say that I no longer need to read any for the knowledge I wanted.

[0996395]

There are a couple of very good points here recently in this thread, that I have savescummed for.
#1, when learning how to play, I used to savescum a lot, because you can only play through the first fights only to die to a tantrum spiral before it becomes VERY tempting to save at the start of said tantrum spiral, and play through again and again untill you find out how to keep the fort alive through that.

And
#2 bugs
This happens in nearly every fort, something eventually messes up.
Some rock decides to be a rebel and refuses to obey the law of gravity like all the other rocks.
In the first month of play 5 of the 7 starting dwarves fall down a waterfall.(everyone not busy digging a hole)
Husk storm in quite literally the very first second of play(yes I had that happen, noone even managed to pick up the pick).

I mean, there are just some things when you need to say to yourself, "ok, this was just nonsense, lets reset that"

Before I posted this topic I didn't realize the savescum's use as a learning tool. And yeah, if you had a really good embark and then got destroyed by uncontrollable circumstances, that's not losing in a "losing is fun way," in my opinion. That's just frustrating. Perfectly good reasons to revert.

[DiacetylMorphine]

I just whant to say i used it a lot at the begining. It just felt obvious to do so to learn the game. I stoped when i felt i was good enouth to enjoy the game as intended by his creator.

[Dyrxaend]

well I dont want to actually get involved in this argument but I just wanted to mention something that occured yesterdae which seems a bit relevant.
So, something went really wrong and I found that the river had just frozen, I had no alcohol, and all my brewers were somehow dead (I dont really know how I got to this point...) and not only that, but multiple people had already died before I noticed and I had no brewable plants. But I managed to survive barely, and got out of it with three people. I mostly recovered and got up to twenty people, and then a goblin siege came. I managed to kill them by using nothing but a single atom smasher inteligently. Then I got a kobold ambush, and despite everything I had just survived I still died anyways. I guess my point is, sometimes it just gets kynda tiresome to fend off threat after threat and survive by a hairsbreadth only to die of some other stupid thing which you dont have any control over.
Oh, and also sometimes I get ambushed by elves before even the first migrant wave. So, things lyke that where you have no control over at all and you really couldnt have done anything to survive, I thynk at least those are legitimate uses of savescum.

[salithus]

Anyone who cares how I spend my time is insane, does not matter whether I savescum or not. Play the game the way you enjoy it, and let others do the same.

[mnjiman]

People liking different things is perfectly ok. Having a game with too many options is not ok. A game is set within a certain amount of boundaries and has certain expectations. I am talking about the game itself where people here seem to be confusing whats good for the game itself and what makes it what it is vs what people like. That isn't how games work at all. Restraints is what makes games games. Sorry that many people don't realize that concept -_-

[0996395]

People liking different things is perfectly ok. Having a game with too many options is not ok. A game is set within a certain amount of boundaries and has certain expectations. I am talking about the game itself where people here seem to be confusing whats good for the game itself and what makes it what it is vs what people like. That isn't how games work at all. Restraints is what makes games games. Sorry that many people don't realize that concept -_-

But why does it matter to you how people play Dwarf Fortress? How does it affect you? Why should you care one miniscule bit what someone else is doing?

[ArKFallen]

On the idea of an option for a savescum option: personally I would prefer such a thing not be added. Making savescumming easier would truthfully make me more likely to do so which, while potentially fun in the short term (yay fort still lives), would make my long term enjoyment plummet. Most of my fun from the game comes from the narrative that takes shape in the fort over time and each savescum breaks my continuity in a weird way (for each save scum victory/awesomeness I also remember the story that took shape pre-savescum and was erased). The extra effort to savescum makes me look twice on whether I really want to do so (during activation task manager slows my computer hard ). If it was in any way an 'official' option/feature I would no longer have that moment of hesitation to reevaluate my choices.
Though I honestly usually don't even have the thought to savescum anymore unless I'm playing with something I have little practical experience with (Resevoirs, oddly I'm quite used to wells and magma despite trying to not breach the caverns) and need to design something. Otherwise I prefer to Reclaim, so this is at least in part a past thing.

The Autosave options in the d_init are good for fort snapshots and savescumming but I've never been tempted to you them because of the extra space it takes (and I get tired of manually deleting saves when done with the fort).

Oh, and also sometimes I get ambushed by elves before even the first migrant wave. So, things lyke that where you have no control over at all and you really couldnt have done anything to survive, I thynk at least those are legitimate uses of savescum.

If you revert in that case isn't the ambush still going to happen? If you get lucky with when you saved I guess you might have time to prepare which is a very good use of one early on.

[mnjiman]

People liking different things is perfectly ok. Having a game with too many options is not ok. A game is set within a certain amount of boundaries and has certain expectations. I am talking about the game itself where people here seem to be confusing whats good for the game itself and what makes it what it is vs what people like. That isn't how games work at all. Restraints is what makes games games. Sorry that many people don't realize that concept -_-

But why does it matter to you how people play Dwarf Fortress? How does it affect you? Why should you care one miniscule bit what someone else is doing?

When people make suggestions that could greatly affect the integrity of a game I enjoy, that is when I care. I can also have my own opinions just like everyone else in this thread.

Why should you care that I care about the integrity of the game? Really your reply is a non statement.

Anyways, I gave my opinion the same as you. Nothing wrong with that.

[GavJ]

But why does it matter to you how people play Dwarf Fortress? How does it affect you? Why should you care one miniscule bit what someone else is doing?

I care because newbies won't always think of hackish things like task manager, even if they know how they want to play the game. I.e. don't care what they choose, but would prefer it to be more intuitive for them to figure out how to choose what they want.

[martinuzz]

When people make suggestions that could greatly affect the integrity of a game I enjoy, that is when I care. I can also have my own opinions just like everyone else in this thread.

So I guess you won't mind an optional init option to optionally make optional savescumming optional? Can't see that breaking any game's integrity. If that would cause anyone to be tempted to savescum, while they would be less inclined to do so without the optionality, the only integrity affected is their own, not the game's, silly