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[Cobbler89]

Before I attempt to justify yet another suggestion for making Dwarf Fortress more playable, I want to thank Toady One for making it in the first place. Let's face it: we all love Dwarf Fortress as it stands, because... well, I won't get into the !!list!!, or we'll be here all night, but let's just say there is a !!list!!. That said, on to suggestion...


There are a lot of discussions out here about overhauling the user interface to make Dwarf Fortress easier to play. I'm going to come out with what seems to be a rather unpopular and undervoiced opinion and say that for the most part that's unnecessary. The one thing Dwarf Fortress's (fortress mode*) user interface needs requires no major overhaul (from a high-level design standpoint anyway) and would not be broken by later changes to gameplay features -- and therefore theoretically could be added without waiting on anything else. (Furthermore, I haven't seen it suggested -- though it's quite possible I've merely missed it, sorry if I have.) For these reasons I believe it deserves its own thread rather than merely to be added to one of the dozen supposedly complete and unified lists of user interface transmogrifications. Ready?

I think most user interface overhaul ideas address the complexity of Dwarf Fortress's menus. However, the complexity of the menus largely reflects the complex variety of tasks you can perform in Dwarf Fortress; there's not a lot that can be done to reduce it without taking away from gameplay options. (Some of it could probably be better organized, such as having one place to view multiple dwarves' labors like Therapist in-game, but that's another story; indeed, some screens have only gotten more complex when overhauled in the past, such as the military, so we should be careful what we ask for...) More importantly, it's not complexity that's the issue; think of other games you've played that you could at least get the hang of the basics without a manual or guide: the ideal game, without forcing you through a tutorial or holding your hand through the plot (which is the even more annoying opposite extreme), gives you enough pointers in the beginning as to how the controls work and what your options are that you can pick it up while playing it. Dwarf Fortress is hard to learn not so much because the menu is complex as because the menu doesn't explain its own options.

For instance, as a new player a couple years ago, the options "mine" and "channel" didn't tell me the difference between mining and channelling. It took me longer than it should have to figure out why "build->construction" and "designate" seem to have many of the same options and what the difference is between these two versions of them. Selecting "build->chair" told me I need a chair first (which came first, the chicken or... the chicken?), which left me confused as to what building one is if it doesn't make one (and the same issue exists for all furniture). I didn't even realize at first that stairs connect Z-levels straight up and down in the same spot (as opposed to the sort of diagonal traversal they occupy in my real-life house). There are probably more examples, but these are the ones that I recall from my own learning experience.

Now, all of these confusions could be resolved with very brief descriptions of different menus and menu options (these are just example proposals to show how it could help):

main menu, hidden: "(Press tab to show the menu.)"
main menu, shown: "Press the highlighted keys to access menu options."

designation->mine: "Dig out tiles on the current z-level, leaving the floor"
designation->channel: "Dig out the floor and the tile below, connecting them with a ramp"
designation->carve upward ramp: "Dig out the tile and the tile above, connecting them with a ramp"

designation: "Shape natural terrain or act on the environment"
build->construction: "Place materials as artificial terrain"

build: "Place furniture, workshops and other constructions"
build->chair: "Take a chair (created at a workshop) and put it somewhere to be used"

[build->construction/designate]->up stair: "Place/Carve out a stair connecting to matching stair on tile above"
[build->construction/designate]->down stair: "Place/Carve out a stair connecting to matching stair on tile below"
[build->construction/designate]->up-down stair: "Place/Carve out a stair connecting to matching stair on tile above & below"

Of course, we need somewhere to fit even brief descriptions. Well, there's really only one place available in DF's limited screen space. If announcements fit in the bar on the bottom of the screen, menu descriptions will have to fit in the bar on the top. Or vice versa -- I forget whether announcement position can be set in the init options currently, but an init option to swap announcement and menu description positions would probably be nice. (Even those examples might need to be trimmed a little to fit along with fps and idlers, unless they can switch back and forth between first and second halves of the message, but I suppose it'd be best to avoid that.) Don't forget an init option for experienced players to turn the descriptions off so they don't feel like a fairy is hovering in their face advising them, while we're at it.

The important thing to recognise here is that this relatively small addition is all it would take to make it possible to learn the essentials of Dwarf Fortress simply by browsing the menu and maybe experimenting a little. Or more to the point, experimentation would no longer require new players to deduce both the nature of the action and how it plays out, only the latter. Sure, we'd still need the wiki to look up which materials are magma-proof or to discuss complex mechanical strategies. Sure, we'd still post Let's Plays on YouTube just because we can. Sure, we'd still ask other players on the forums for advice on handling aquifers. But I think making the menu self-explanatory would go much farther than larger overhauls toward eliminating the problem where many people simply cannot learn to play Dwarf Fortress without somebody else walking them through it; and all that without any need to wait for the feature set to stabilize or the Year of the User Interface Overhaul to arrive, because all it takes is changing menus and their options from having a name alone to having a name and a description.

*Note: There's a fairly simple reason this suggestion is directed only at fortress mode. The help menu that lists actions and their keys in adventure mode gives actions larger, mostly self-explanatory names. Further sub-options in an action during play such as conversation choices or attack targets likewise either are described or are self-explanatory. In other words, adventure mode's design is already more or less equivalent to this suggestion.


Toady, if you're reading this, thanks again. Indeed, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read and consider this. Let me know if there's anything I didn't communicate well and could make clearer, or if anyone has any ideas how to improve on this notion.

[StagnantSoul]

All it takes it ten minutes of button mashing and observation to figure out the controls and what they do. I started off completely ignorant of what everything does, spent one day trying to play, and mastered the controls. Let's keep everything the way it is, or DF's huge, famous learning curve will disappear.

[Leatra]

All it takes it ten minutes of button mashing and observation to figure out the controls and what they do. I started off completely ignorant of what everything does, spent one day trying to play, and mastered the controls. Let's keep everything the way it is, or DF's huge, famous learning curve will disappear.

Aye, I remember those days when I was just trying to learn how to grow crops or how to dig through an aquifer. It was fun. I got frustrated from time to time but felt awesome when I learned how to do it. I was examining everything and learning how to tell icons apart from each other, since DF was my first roguelike, it wasn't easy. But it was fun.

I know what you mean by the learning curve disappearing but is it bad for a game to become easier to learn? If I say "no" now I'll contradict myself. But still, a few explanations here and there should help newbies out a lot. So, I agree with the OP. No big overhaul necessary, but pretty much everything needs some explanation.

[GavJ]

This is nice and all, but I don't think it really fixes the main problem, which has less to do with understanding the categories and more to do with them being organized crazily such that I still can't remember where track stops are in the menus after years of using them...

So yeah, this AND overhauling the menus, perhaps.

[Bumber]

The info's mostly all there in the manual.

[Ribs]

I think there could be a mouse hovering thing: when you hover your cursor over one of the menu's options, a text box would appear next to the cursor briefly explaining what it does.

[Cobbler89]

The mouse hovering box crossed my mind, but since the game doesn't have tooltips like that and if I remember correct from the last time I tried you couldn't click on the menu items to select them (although I have to admit I haven't tried in years, mostly I remember that when I first started I couldn't find any use for the mouse) it seemed like it wouldn't fit as well; maybe I'm wrong about that though. [EtA:] On the other hand, long-term if/when DF becomes pretty much playable by mouse/touch a tooltip style might be a nice alternative way to display the descriptions; just because I'm thinking about the here and now doesn't mean that long-term considerations of what can be done with a menu description system wouldn't be helpful/viable. (For that matter, even having a top-bar description as suggested in the original post it might be helpful to display it if a menu item is hovered over with the mouse, since using the keys to select an option takes you to that option.)

[Ribs]

The mouse hovering box crossed my mind, but since the game doesn't have tooltips like that and if I remember correct from the last time I tried you couldn't click on the menu items to select them (although I have to admit I haven't tried in years, mostly I remember that when I first started I couldn't find any use for the mouse) it seemed like it wouldn't fit as well; maybe I'm wrong about that though. [EtA:] On the other hand, long-term if/when DF becomes pretty much playable by mouse/touch a tooltip style might be a nice alternative way to display the descriptions; just because I'm thinking about the here and now doesn't mean that long-term considerations of what can be done with a menu description system wouldn't be helpful/viable. (For that matter, even having a top-bar description as suggested in the original post it might be helpful to display it if a menu item is hovered over with the mouse, since using the keys to select an option takes you to that option.)

Mouse hovering boxes could become an integral part of the interface, if used correctly. Imagine if you could hover the mouse over a stone or a rough stone wall and a box would appear explaining what it and some giving some information about it. Something like:

Hematite: ore of iron (100%)

Not only it saves you time from going "k" to look at what kind of stone it is, it also saves new players time from going "k" + "enter" to see what it does. Small thing like that could even make people depend a little less on the wiki. You could do that with all kind of terrain/items, too. That way you could make the mouse useful for everyone without making it really essencial or even necessary to play the game.

Honestly, I like having the game being mostly keybord driven but the mouse could have more practical uses.

[Bumber]

The mousequery plug-in does something like that.

However, a bar just doesn't seem suitable for longer descriptions that you'll only need to see once or twice. Even at an enlarged resolution, longer announcements are often cut short in the announcements bar. What would probably work better for learning about the menus is a context sensitive '?' help screen that takes you to the relevant help section.

[Cobbler89]

What would probably work better for learning about the menus is a context sensitive '?' help screen that takes you to the relevant help section.

Hmm, that's an interesting thought.

Browsing around in that menu a bit... there's a lot of info in here that I could've learned from if I'd found it when I first played (although some of those specific things like "mining vs. channelling" could be made more explicit). I think I was partly unsure where in all the subsections of "?" to look, and partly not sure how to relate a lot of the descriptive text to the menus/commands in-game.

Maybe have super-brief descriptions in the bar so you don't have to wade into the ? screen unless you want more info, duplicate them in the more detailed help menus that are already in there so as to associate the more detailed text with the relevant menus and commands, add little clarifications on any of the potentially confusable things that aren't already clarified in the help screen text, and then have the "?" key take you to the current menu's section (and say in the generic ? screen that in-game it will give you context-sensitive help instead of the general guidebook) with separate keys to go up a level vs. to exit the screen immediately...?

[Putnam]

All it takes it ten minutes of button mashing and observation to figure out the controls and what they do. I started off completely ignorant of what everything does, spent one day trying to play, and mastered the controls. Let's keep everything the way it is, or DF's huge, famous learning curve will disappear.

Why do we want to get rid of that? I see no reason for that. The game's incredible complexity and actual deepness are what it's famous for. Making it easier for new players to actually play is a good thing.

[StagnantSoul]

I would hate there being a tutorial. That's probably just me, but I honestly hate when a game tries to show you how to play.

[GavJ]

I would hate there being a tutorial. That's probably just me, but I honestly hate when a game tries to show you how to play.

"Hit Esc to end this tutorial!" Problem solved.

[StagnantSoul]

I've never seen a game with that option. A fully optional tutorial, like how Age of Empires does it, is fine, because I'll never do it. But those first start ups, the beginning of each game, scroll over this to get a small explanation and directory? I hate those.

[Putnam]

So instead, you have to go out of your way to get detailed tutorials from the wiki.