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[Dunamisdeos]

The thing is, the vanilla game works fine... IF you are prepared to just set one or two dwarves to one labor and leave them to blindly make their particular product on repeat forever.

If you ever want to, for any reason, have dwarves with more than one major labor enabled, try NOT having insane stockpiles of either 0 or 10,000 of every item because there is no way to manage production through any setting other than "keep making doors until your hands fall off" or "do nothing", take stock of how many of any given labor you have present or maybe rebalance labor, or just plain see how personality impacts behavior by seeing the actual numeric value, you'll find it nearly impossible without using third-party tools.

Basically, yes, you don't need Therapist if you don't have any interest in what's going on inside your fort or having even the vaguest control over it.  If you are that sort of person, I have to ask why you're even bothering to play DF, since if you're not interested in what's going on, why are you playing?

I use the in-game manager for most of that. Makes it easy for me to, say, designate a forts worth of new clothing.

[NW_Kohaku]

The thing is, the vanilla game works fine... IF you are prepared to just set one or two dwarves to one labor and leave them to blindly make their particular product on repeat forever.

If you ever want to, for any reason, have dwarves with more than one major labor enabled, try NOT having insane stockpiles of either 0 or 10,000 of every item because there is no way to manage production through any setting other than "keep making doors until your hands fall off" or "do nothing", take stock of how many of any given labor you have present or maybe rebalance labor, or just plain see how personality impacts behavior by seeing the actual numeric value, you'll find it nearly impossible without using third-party tools.

Basically, yes, you don't need Therapist if you don't have any interest in what's going on inside your fort or having even the vaguest control over it.  If you are that sort of person, I have to ask why you're even bothering to play DF, since if you're not interested in what's going on, why are you playing?

I use the in-game manager for most of that. Makes it easy for me to, say, designate a forts worth of new clothing.

Unless there's been a vast change in the in-game manager, which is basically just trying to copy Therapist, but having to spread the same data over a larger number of screens, then all that does is help with the "how many dwarves have labor X enabled" question.

[Shonai_Dweller]

The thing is, the vanilla game works fine... IF you are prepared to just set one or two dwarves to one labor and leave them to blindly make their particular product on repeat forever.

If you ever want to, for any reason, have dwarves with more than one major labor enabled, try NOT having insane stockpiles of either 0 or 10,000 of every item because there is no way to manage production through any setting other than "keep making doors until your hands fall off" or "do nothing", take stock of how many of any given labor you have present or maybe rebalance labor, or just plain see how personality impacts behavior by seeing the actual numeric value, you'll find it nearly impossible without using third-party tools.

Basically, yes, you don't need Therapist if you don't have any interest in what's going on inside your fort or having even the vaguest control over it.  If you are that sort of person, I have to ask why you're even bothering to play DF, since if you're not interested in what's going on, why are you playing?

I use the in-game manager for most of that. Makes it easy for me to, say, designate a forts worth of new clothing.

Unless there's been a vast change in the in-game manager, which is basically just trying to copy Therapist, but having to spread the same data over a larger number of screens, then all that does is help with the "how many dwarves have labor X enabled" question.

I think you're thinking of something else.
Manager says (on one single screen):
 'make 30 plump helmet roasts', 'make 20 wooden doors', 'make 5 rock doors'.
It saves you having to order dwarves to 'make doors until their hands drop off'.

-- Also manager is currently being updated to be even more useful (and hopefully allow exclusion of certain workshops as has been suggested many times). Although since some people don't seem to know the manager exists...

[King Kitteh]

*Dwarfager

Silly SpongeBob

[Deathworks]

Dear NW_Kohaku,

The thing is, the vanilla game works fine... IF you are prepared to just set one or two dwarves to one labor and leave them to blindly make their particular product on repeat forever.

If you ever want to, for any reason, have dwarves with more than one major labor enabled, try NOT having insane stockpiles of either 0 or 10,000 of every item because there is no way to manage production through any setting other than "keep making doors until your hands fall off" or "do nothing", take stock of how many of any given labor you have present or maybe rebalance labor, or just plain see how personality impacts behavior by seeing the actual numeric value, you'll find it nearly impossible without using third-party tools.

Basically, yes, you don't need Therapist if you don't have any interest in what's going on inside your fort or having even the vaguest control over it.  If you are that sort of person, I have to ask why you're even bothering to play DF, since if you're not interested in what's going on, why are you playing?

Personally, I am a bit disturbed by your seeming dismissal of people who do not use third-party tools when playing DF, especially since I belong to those people.

First of all, I want to address something that strikes me as an interesting aspect. You point out that the tools are needed see the impact of personality traits on behaviour in numeric values. For me, those numeric values are not as interesting as actually noticing that a dwarf tends to do things they like or avoids doing those they dislike. This adds to the immersion for me, and frankly, if I viewed it as a bonus of +x (okay, I don't know anything about the numbers behind the behaviour), a lot of the magic would go away. And I don't mind if I mistakenly overinterpret the behaviour of the dwarves. I think there are quite a few people besides myself who like to imagine that there are some motivations, some quarrels or whatnot behind some of the more obscure incidents, regardless of whether those are based on rules or randomness.

Secondly, I like to play with no-immigration or low-immigration fortresses with sieges turned off in worlds without werebeasts and necromancers settling in relatively peaceful temperate biomes without aquifers, for I want to have my dwarves build their fortress slowly and peacefully, trading with elves, humans and dwarves alike. I like to design the fortress, trying out things that make sense to me even if they are not super-efficient and watching how the dwarves behave. And then we get to crafts and art. I really love to have my dwarves create art because I want to be surprised by them. What will they design? What events from ancient or recent history will they depict in their engravings, thus making me aware of them? With taverns and libraries, there are even more original things I can come across, things I have not designed, and which are thus surprising, sometimes amusing, sometimes odd. There are dozens of tales that develop, and hundreds of historical events to discover. And at the same time, there is also the joy of succeeded in improving the lives of the dwarves, seeing them prosper, founding families and so on.

And all of those things can be enjoyed with DF as it comes out of the box, so to speak. So there is no need for me to use third-party tools.

I think those many joys are reason enough for "bothering to play DF".

Yours,
Deathworks

[Dunamisdeos]

So uh, yeah, I was really referring to the concept of using the job manager to order specific amounts of things and keep track of where they are in the process.

It is totally cool to use therapist, iffin' you prefer. But I do prefer the "organic" approach (for lack of a better term) with the random art and stuff. I also like using the in-game verbal descriptions instead of the raw numbers of things for immersion's sake.

I don't think NW_Kohaku was trying to be offensive, maybe he just really like therapist and numbers and precision ._.

That's cool too.

[Aatch]

I use DT because I find managing the labours in-game frustrating. That's about it really. I tend to minmax the starting 7 dwarves, and if I get a bunch of mostly-useless migrants, I might pick the "best" option for some role I need, but other than that I'll just assign labours as/when I need them. I also use it to make sure I'm assigning a labour to somebody that isn't doing anything important.

I am an efficiency nut, but since the personalities don't seem to make a huge impact, I'd rather take the time to carefully plan out efficient fortresses than ensure optimal labour assignment.

At the end of the day, I'd love to not have to use it, but it's useful and I'd probably just get frustrated and not play DF at all if I didn't.

[NW_Kohaku]

I think you're thinking of something else.

And yes, Shonai, I was thinking of something else, there is a new "labor manager" (amusingly, a part of DF Hack) put into the game that was basically Therapist inside the game.  Obviously, that's something entirely different.

Manager is perfectly functional for one-time needs, like needing 7 random things for a noble's demand, or producing 5 new steel spears, but it's less than ideal to work with for things you need on repeat, as it takes babysitting to keep up.  Having the capacity to set manager to maintain specific levels of goods at all times is far more useful.

If the manager is being reworked to finally be more useful, then all the power to it.  I still don't think it would be happening if players hadn't constantly complained about how unusable the interface is, or gone to such extreme lengths as DF Hack creating entire suites of interface tools to show Toady how to do it, though.

Personally, I am a bit disturbed by your seeming dismissal of people who do not use third-party tools when playing DF, especially since I belong to those people.[...]

Considering as this thread seemingly exists so that people can post links to images where they make jokes about anyone using Therapist having to be insane, that seems like a glass house allegation...

In any event, if you use small population forts, good on you, you very likely don't need Therapist or DF Hack to micromanage your dwarves.  I don't personally prefer giant, 200 dwarf fortresses or trying to take on the HFS with in person dwarf armies, but even in a relatively small 50-dwarf fort, there is plenty of reason to simply prefer not having to babysit each dwarf.

Besides that, I find Therapist makes the game easier to simply visualize the personality of a dwarf.  Unlike many players, I prefer nicknames for dwarves that reflect personality or habit, not simple job function (a must for non-Therapist users), and find Therapist is the best way to understand those traits, rather than the overwhelming text blocks of the "details view".

That said, DF Hack allows you to set up scripts with conditional jobs, such that a new batch of alcohol is brewed when fortress levels drop below 40, and stop when fortress alcohol levels go above 100. Compare this to what I observe the typical non-DF Hack user doing, and just digging more stockpile to keep up with runaway production, and then quitting when they wind up with FPS death and complaining about how their severely unoptimized fort has severely unoptimized framerates. I think the DF Hack user is much more safely on the sane side, since we are not exactly the ones trying the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome.

Beyond that, having the capacity to "explore the rules" is very much one of the core reasons why players will play DF.  Maybe you "wonder" at it without looking at the real mechanics, but if someone is going to have any real understanding of how, say, minecarts work, they need concrete, objective measurements.  I'm pretty sure at some point, you've looked on the wiki or watched some YouTube guide that was filled with information someone else explored.  You don't understand minecarts without exhaustively testing them, especially as their mechanics are so wildly counterintuitive.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I'm much more interested in the mechanics of the world itself. There's plenty to explore under the hood without needing to understand the physics of minecarts. That's the nice thing about DF, there's loads to it. Temperature, water pressure and ballista velocity fascinate some people, ethics, population movement, world balance are much more interesting to others.

I don't think I'd have learned to play the game in depth without therapist/manipulator, but now that I know how everyone thinks, and what degree of control I can comfortably play with, I find myself not needing it.

And, yes, you were thinking of Manipulator. Very handy dfhack labour manager that you can use without leaving the game. I like that.

Toady specifically said spreadsheet dwarf control is not the way he wants the game to be eventually, so not sure if he really learned much there. Stock control and other useful tools have been in the dev notes for years - and, sure, the whole point of having a suggestion forum is so he can see what issues people feel strongly about.

[NW_Kohaku]

Toady specifically said spreadsheet dwarf control is not the way he wants the game to be eventually, so not sure if he really learned much there. Stock control and other useful tools have been in the dev notes for years - and, sure, the whole point of having a suggestion forum is so he can see what issues people feel strongly about.

Yes, but the problem is, he's built a game where spreadsheets are the best way to visualize the data. 

I'm also not soon abandoning DF Hack as long as livestock can be "not interested in marrying" and require either DF Hack or extremely micromanagement-heavy manually pasturing each livestock animal and waiting for which goat gives birth to see which males are useless to fortress production. 

[Shonai_Dweller]

Toady specifically said spreadsheet dwarf control is not the way he wants the game to be eventually, so not sure if he really learned much there. Stock control and other useful tools have been in the dev notes for years - and, sure, the whole point of having a suggestion forum is so he can see what issues people feel strongly about.

Yes, but the problem is, he's built a game where spreadsheets are the best way to visualize the data. 

I'm also not soon abandoning DF Hack as long as livestock can be "not interested in marrying" and require either DF Hack or extremely micromanagement-heavy manually pasturing each livestock animal and waiting for which goat gives birth to see which males are useless to fortress production.

Well, no, I don't think anybody suggested giving up dfhack.
Anyway, wasn't that fixed?
42.04: "Made animals less afraid of casual relationships"

[Pvt. Pirate]

...
I really love to have my dwarves create art because I want to be surprised by them. What will they design? What events from ancient or recent history will they depict in their engravings, thus making me aware of them? With taverns and libraries, there are even more original things I can come across, things I have not designed, and which are thus surprising, sometimes amusing, sometimes odd. There are dozens of tales that develop, and hundreds of historical events to discover. And at the same time, there is also the joy of succeeded in improving the lives of the dwarves, seeing them prosper, founding families and so on.
...

after the first, but devastating attack of a weretortoise, in which the monster and one dwarf died, i was shocked how the other dwarves didn't consider burying him and didn't even depict any of the events in their engravings in their meeting hall.
maybe because noone except the dead dwarf saw the monster, but still... they didn't even bury his severed remains.

i love reading those engravings etc.

[Dunamisdeos]

I used Therapist today! I needed to assign someone a dual wielding shield job. I used it for like 10 seconds whilst I found a suitable candidate.

[Deathworks]

Dear NW_Kohaku,

I had the impression that people in this thread were mostly considering third-party tools just as that - tools that you may use if you think they are useful for you. But I admit that I have only skimmed over the middle part of the thread.

In my opinion, as long as you are enjoying yourself while playing DF, you are playing it the right way. There are so many ways to play this game: with therapist, without therapist, with DFHack, without DFHack, with tilesets, with the original pseudo-ASCII, with the original pseudo-ASCII scaled 2:1 (my preference), with dwarves, with kobolds, with ponies, with dragonkin, torturing and mutilating your dwarves, creating a dwarven heaven, setting out as a heroic adventurer fighting evil in the world, setting out as an adventurer to kill innocent people and burn villages, setting out to become a necromancer, a vampire, a husk or all of the above, setting out to become a master poet at the lord's court, breaching all layers of the map with your fortress, build a surface-only fortress, trading with all merchants, killing all merchants, playing with a hermit dwarf, with a no-migration fortress, with somewhat around 50 dwarves, 200 dwarves, hundreds of dwarves, using stock piles, not using stock piles, using mine carts or not using them, playing casually, playing seriously, playing hard-core, and many, many more. In my eyes, no variant is inherently objectively better or worse than the other as long as those using them are having fun in their way.

Beyond that, having the capacity to "explore the rules" is very much one of the core reasons why players will play DF.  Maybe you "wonder" at it without looking at the real mechanics, but if someone is going to have any real understanding of how, say, minecarts work, they need concrete, objective measurements.  I'm pretty sure at some point, you've looked on the wiki or watched some YouTube guide that was filled with information someone else explored.  You don't understand minecarts without exhaustively testing them, especially as their mechanics are so wildly counterintuitive.

This is why I can't agree with your statement there. Exploring the rules is not a core reason for me to play DF, while your statement makes it sound as if it was for everyone. I don't need to understand minecart mathematics or physics beyond what I can see while playing the game in order to use them. I may not be using them most efficiently, but nevertheless, I still can use them, and if I don't care about being the most efficient, then I think it is fine as is.

Let me re-iterate: In my eyes, it is just as legitimate to enjoy DF using third-party tools as is enjoying it without such third-party tools. Neither way of enjoying it is wrong in my opinion, so I don't condone dismissing either.

Yours,
Deathworks

[Bumber]

When you pass 200 dwarves things get tough, by the time you get 600+ it becomes vital to use them.
I honestly believe a 600+ (pure vanilla) dwarf fort would be impossible without them !
Don't believe me? Try it and see.

A 600+ dwarf fort is impossible for reasons not relating to DT. Labor management is superfluous past 200 dwarves. The logistics and FPS of such a fort is more painful.