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[gunpowdertea]

I use dfhack and like several things about it. I do not use it do creat MAGMA and stuff, but the unit overview list is great, persistent cursors and building material selection (it remembers the last material you used to build a specific construction, say... gold block walls which will then come up as the first selection the next time you build walls. The last two are actually what I missed most when .40 came out. Also great is the (now included in vanilla DF) ability to designate veins for digging! I also like the follow tool better than that of vanilla DF.
Mods: I used to play Fortress Defense, which was pretty cool - except for the flying units getting stuck on the maps. Since flyer routing seems to be still unresolved for DF I am sticking to vanilla.

I stopped spamming cage traps (I use them now only to catch fauna) and completely stopped using weapon traps.

[Naryar]

I don't think dwarf fortress was meant to be played a certain way.

Even if it IS meant to play a certain way that is irrelevant. Play games like you want, else you will not have maximum fun.

[smakemupagus]

DFHack has lots of different utility, not just a cheat engine.  Even if you don't care for any of the interface stuff, for quite a while, DFHack was a convenient source of patches for several very serious bugs before they were fixed in the main game. 

[Skullsploder]

I used to use metalduping, quantum stockpiles, trap corridors of cagespam, and danger rooms. Real powergaming minmax stuff, the only thing I didn't do was cheat in stuff through dfhack (which I still use for bug fixes and UI upgrades). Thing is it became boring. When you're good at DF it gets boring fast unless you set arbitrary rules for yourself. Easy is boring.

[Badger Storm]

For what it's worth, I've never used danger rooms.  I'm still working on getting dwarves fully armored at a reasonable time, and it seems like it would be so easy to forget one pair of greaves and get one axe lord skewered and another three dangerously close to insanity.

[Max™]

Technically speaking, this is an alpha version so it isn't meant to be played a certain way at all is it?

I mean, in so much as we are all testers and determining how it is possible to play if it at all. The feedback and such from this is then considered as toady marches development forwards towards his various goals, tries to fix various broken stuff, and keep track of what the community is doing with his baby.

[ComatosePhoenix]

erm, Aquifers don't usually cover the full area of the map right? I mean, I dig around a lot and everytime I hit an Aquifer I just dig around it and find a way a little bit deeper.

If Aquifers are usually covering a full Z layer, I have been absurdly lucky with my embarks.

[Waparius]

As far as aquifers go I'm waiting on the moving fortress structures (i.e. caissons) or any changes to aquifers and drainage in general before I rule out exploiting my way through - I don't think it counts as cheating if the most "realistic" options (as far as it goes in a fantasy game) aren't implemented.

I've played a couple of Hardcore Realism forts with similar self-imposed challenges - I was a little more liberal about support requirements and lever distances (in stone I followed 2D's 1-in-7 rule) but I required gears near drawbridges (for counterweights), airshafts (I had some rule-of-thumb about distribution and size that I've forgotten) latrines made by putting chairs in a statue garden (those or refuse stockpiles had to be located over any non-cavern underground farms) and 10 times the farm plots than I was actually using.

It was more fun than my stoneless brick swamp-fort.

[Sadrice]

Well, dfhack or whatever you call it sounds like a boring way to play, and savescumming seems terrible.  I don't mind if my fortresses die; with each death I gain one extra ounce of knowledge!

Savescumming can be interesting. I don't use it to save myself from my mistakes, if I killed the fortress, it is dead.  But I like to use it to study how things could go differently.  In a memorable instance, I had a fortress that was going great, but with no defense.  No militia, no bridges on the entrances, no levers to close those, etc.  30-40 goblins came and killed everyone.  I had a backup save from 3 months earlier (I was playing in the school library, with saves emailed to myself, so i already had a backup), which I reloaded, and tried again.  I immediately drafted everyone I could afford, and started intensive training.  Goblins killed them all.  Repeat 5x or so with variations in weapon selection and training.  Same results.  I tried everything, installing traps (not enough time to make enough traps), intensive training of various sorts.  None of it was good enough.  I proved to my satisfaction that there was no way to defeat the goblins in that time span, short of installing some doors and locking them till the goblins leave.  But then I discovered that I was wrong.  By digging an alternate trapped entrance corridor in soil layers with two long zigzag trap corridors ending in upwards hatches, I could manually path invaders back and forth across the same series of hatches, potentially sealing them in specific portions for trap maintenance (unnecessary in this case), using a small number of traps to kill an arbitrarily large number of invaders.

Once I had solved the puzzle I abandoned the fortress, and started over, with more defensive planning integrated from the beginning.  Savescumming just gave me the opportunity to fully explore the challenge I was presented with.

Similarly, sometimes I'm curious about some aspect of game mechanics, usually related to minecart and/or fluidic contraptions.  Those tend to be time consuming to build properly, which prohibits free form experimentation.  For those cases, I have a backup save of an already established fort with dwarves modded for extreme speed, so almost not maintenance is required and designations get completed almost instantly (I know I could mod dwarves to not eat etc to make maintenance truly zero, but that seems like cheating too much.  If you can't keep a fort fed and boozed with speedhacked dwarves, well, that's not something to be proud of).  I like to think of it as being like minecraft's Creative mode, where you can build to your hearts content and try out ideas.  I could do the same experimentation in vanilla dwarf fortress, but it would take many dwarf years and result in a mess of misdesignated passages and flawed designs.  I prefer to implement complex designs in real forts after I kind of figure out how the whole thing is going to work.  Not that I make it a smooth and polished design before construction, there's always bits of abandoned cart track and such things in my forts, but I at least like to get a workable skeleton that I can continue to modify.

[Uggh]

Don't call these things exploits. I just think of them as 'applied physics',  albeit in a world with some very weird natural laws. There is a reason for conducting Science.

Dfhack is different because it's outside of the 'world'. However many features thereof are not changing the dwarven laws of nature but are simply bugfixes of interface improvements (workflow, autobutcher, etc.).

But at the end I agree with what so many here said, if it's fun for you then do it. It's more a toy than a game.

[Badger Storm]

erm, Aquifers don't usually cover the full area of the map right? I mean, I dig around a lot and everytime I hit an Aquifer I just dig around it and find a way a little bit deeper.

If Aquifers are usually covering a full Z layer, I have been absurdly lucky with my embarks.

Some don't, many do.  On the embark screen, if you press F1, F2, etc. you can examine each biome separately if the embark has multiple biomes in it.  Have you been embarking in the mountains a lot?  They usually don't have aquifers.

[Urist Tilaturist]

There are no exploits in DF, just features that Toady did not mean to add. There is a thing called "emergent gameplay", and DF has lots of it. The player should not place artificial restrictions on himself. The only thing I strongly oppose is save scumming, since it contravenes the spirit of a roguelike game, but players can do that too if they want.

[Niddhoger]

There are no exploits in DF, just features that Toady did not mean to add. There is a thing called "emergent gameplay", and DF has lots of it. The player should not place artificial restrictions on himself. The only thing I strongly oppose is save scumming, since it contravenes the spirit of a roguelike game, but players can do that too if they want.

I fail to see how spontaneously generating 200+ steel bars starting from a single pair of leggings and a magma smelter is anything but an exploit.  Part of the "fun" is working within the limitations of your embark.  No easy source of iron? You gotta import it.  No iron and only dwarven caravan (which lacks iron AND flux), then you have to play a trap-master fortress (drowning chambers and pit-traps- no atom smashing and pathing abuse). 

At least things like save-scumming are only "gamey."  They rely on mechanics of this actually being a video game (as there are no saving in life).  However... things like metal duping laugh in the face of realism and actual physics.  Again, how do you just spontaneous generate an entire army's worth of metal from one item!? How is this anything other than an exploit? Aka cheating. 

Its your game and play it how you want to, sure.  There are no competitions for prizes or even leaderboards here that exploits give you an unfair advantage for.  However, if you are going to use the exploit at least own up to it- don't say "LALALALA THERE IS NO EXPLOIT LALALALA EMERGENT GAMING/UNPLANNED FEATURE LALALALA"

[Aslandus]

There are no exploits in DF, just features that Toady did not mean to add. There is a thing called "emergent gameplay", and DF has lots of it. The player should not place artificial restrictions on himself. The only thing I strongly oppose is save scumming, since it contravenes the spirit of a roguelike game, but players can do that too if they want.

I fail to see how spontaneously generating 200+ steel bars starting from a single pair of leggings and a magma smelter is anything but an exploit.  Part of the "fun" is working within the limitations of your embark.  No easy source of iron? You gotta import it.  No iron and only dwarven caravan (which lacks iron AND flux), then you have to play a trap-master fortress (drowning chambers and pit-traps- no atom smashing and pathing abuse). 

At least things like save-scumming are only "gamey."  They rely on mechanics of this actually being a video game (as there are no saving in life).  However... things like metal duping laugh in the face of realism and actual physics.  Again, how do you just spontaneous generate an entire army's worth of metal from one item!? How is this anything other than an exploit? Aka cheating. 

Its your game and play it how you want to, sure.  There are no competitions for prizes or even leaderboards here that exploits give you an unfair advantage for.  However, if you are going to use the exploit at least own up to it- don't say "LALALALA THERE IS NO EXPLOIT LALALALA EMERGENT GAMING/UNPLANNED FEATURE LALALALA"

Still, if you're new to the game, not that good a fortress builder, or just not bold enough to go for "challenge fortress" (I am the last one, and sometimes/often the second as well) it's a bit disheartening to go on the forums and see people calling you a damned cheater for trying to work around limitations of an embark because you didn't use DFhack to check whether you had iron on the embark or not... I understand you like to keep the game realistic, but why do you have to be a jerk about me and others who use some exploits to work with what is known to be a tough game to get into?

[Niddhoger]

Duping metal is a cheat.  I'm sorry if that hurts your feelings, but there is no other way to look at it.  I said you are free to do it if you want, but I was responding to others trying to pass it off as "emergent gaming" and "unplanned features."  They were trying to cheat and not call it a cheat. 

Remember the core principle of Dwarf Fortress: Losing is FUN! Every time you screw up or realize you made a mistake, learn from it! Once you realize that not all embarks have iron, you learn to only embark on places with "shallow/deep METALS (plural).  This is one of the #1 beginner tips along with not settling on aquifers.  You can also check your civ to see what metals it has access to.  I have built several successful forts that have fought off sieges and megabeasts with only something useless like "sphelarite" or no metals at all within my embark.  You either import all your metals from caravans, or use various traps and bone crossbows (or obsidian clubs, only melee non-metal weapon).  Remember, you can freely melt down imported "large iron breastplates" and "bronze cleavers" or even "steel crafts" for bar fractions.  I just make note of any items I melt down for more than 100% efficiency and remove the extra bars. 

Look, this is a difficult game, I won't deny that.  But if you are new and settle on a terrifying glacier with no metal, a (salt water) aquifer, 5 nearby necro towers and a goblin civ, and your own civilzation is both extinct and lacks any metal above copper... are clearly in the wrong place.  You die and learn from it.  Go back to easier areas.  Its like playing any other game where you take a wrong turn out of the gate and wind up in a high-level area.  You don't go "screw this, I'm cheating to survive!" You turn around and head back into the easier areas until you get a better grasp of whats going on.  Once you have the experience and know-how to flourish in the milder zones, you can start adding on challenges (no/scarce metals, goblins, HFS, aquifers, extreme climates, etc). 

If you are new to the game, don't go "I'm cheating to survive!" when you stumble onto an advanced challenge... you do the best you can and take notes.  Losing is FUN kids.