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[paShadoWn]

There is MUCH more stuff to memorise in EVE, much more complicated stuff to build in Minecraft, and intricacies of Zero-K unit interactions take years to master.
DF? Plop some workshops, dig a moat, watch dorves scurry. With what do you compare it lol?

[NJW2000]

I think it's partly just a joke about the UI, which puts some people off. It might also be about the grand scale of what you can do in DF: build computers, withstand huge sieges, brave undead biomes, create perfectly-optimised utopias, etc, etc. Dunno if there's "more" stuff in minecraft or whatever... there's a pretty extensive set of mods for both, so the games are as "complex" as anyone wants them to be...

But yeah, played on its easiest setting, DF isn't much harder than enything else. Same with most games with easier ways of playing though.
And it used to be a lot harder. 42.00 is a hell of a lot different from 34.0 and below.

Out of interest, do you play DF? You mostly seem interested in talking about other games, but DF is quite amusing just to mess around with, not to "master" or whatever. If not, I'd really recommend just playing for a bit 

[Kirkegaard]

The current state of DF is also very, very forgiving compared to how it use to be. For instance the chances of a total fort meltdown because one dwarf have a old pair of shoes on are very minimal today. They are a lot more robust that they used to be, giving far less tantrums and violence.

Also the UI is horrible, the graphic is kind of non existent and 3rd part software like DFhack/therapist etc. are absolutely needed to play.

[Salmeuk]

The UI is functional (albeit unhelpful), the graphics leave space for your imagination, and 3rd party software like DFhack/therapist etc. are absolutely NOT needed to play.

paShadoWn, if you are into games like EVE I'm not surprised that DF was easy to pick up. It just takes dedication to learn the UI.

Others have talked about how the learning curve is actually just a cliff. If you manage to scale the sheer stone and reach the plateau waiting above, you will find the rest of the game hilariously simple. At that point you either troll the forums endlessly while waiting for the next update, or start writing stories of questionable quality, or some combination of the two.

[NJW2000]

Cliff... wait, I just got the fact that it flattened out. The joke is subtler and truer than I realised.

[NW_Kohaku]

There is MUCH more stuff to memorise in EVE, much more complicated stuff to build in Minecraft, and intricacies of Zero-K unit interactions take years to master.
DF? Plop some workshops, dig a moat, watch dorves scurry. With what do you compare it lol?

The problem is best summed up with this Extra Credits video on depth and complexity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVL4st0blGU

Dwarf Fortress experiences a tremendous amount of mental load because of a UI that requires players to put much of the data in the game in their own heads because the UI will not display it. (Especially since more vertically-built fortresses are more efficient, but the game can only show a single 2d slice of the game at a time, resulting in many players creating massively suboptimal "central staircase" layouts and giant stockpile monstrosities. There is basically no data given out on a sub-tile level without going to a details page or stopping the game to use one of four separate "look" commands. Oh, and if you don't leave notes, you darn well better memorize what those levers do.)

More than that, Dwarf Fortress suffers from a fairly large dose of irreducible complexity.

The end result is that Dwarf Fortress is a game with no tutorial that demands you learn absolutely everything about it before you can get anything done... and when you learn that, you've learned everything, so move along.

I've said it many times, Dwarf Fortress isn't a hard game by any measure; In fact, it's actually really easy, and you can see it from games like Gnomoria which basically amount to a tutorial level for Dwarf Fortress. It's just a game that explains itself very, very badly, and allows you to make a tremendous number of mistakes before giving players zero control when the reckoning comes.  It's a scheme that winds up easy for veterans and off-puttingly punishing for new players.

(Also, you can't honestly say there are more complicated things to build in Minecraft - complexity of what you craft is virtually limitless in either game, truly limited only by number of loadable chunks or fortress size.  People can build fully functional computers in both games, so complexity in either is essentially limited only by the hardware capabilities of the machines running them.)

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

DF isn't like other games. You need a particular mindset to play it and have fun (or ‼FUN‼)

Some possible (not all) playstyles:

1. The ‼MAD SCIENTIST‼

2. The War Chief

3. The Deepdelver

4. The Megaproject Builder / Stupid Dwarf Tricker

5. The Explorer of Obscure Things (beehives, minecarts, and such)

6. More on minecarts: a combo of Explorer and Scientist makes the minecart scientist: exploring arcane codes to determine how to make magic minecart impulse elevators or something!

All of them, of course, can be combined.

Spoiler: irrelevant, but mostly addressed to NW_K (click to show/hide)

Good grief, I have seen that phrase ("irreducible complexity") too much. I've been refuting science-doubters, and they always throw that at me.

[palu]

Just gonna leave this here...

[Col_Jessep]

I think you could make DF much easier to understand for newbies with a couple of changes.
Easy mode for newbies: Clothes do no longer wear out, no material or job ☼quality☼. The manager automatically gives job orders for missing items. (Militia needs 8 more swords, 3 shields and 9 backpacks? Urist, get on it. Same for barrels, buckets, bins...) Militia is set to be active/training by default. Soap can be bought from traders.

Seeds need to be managed better by default in an extra stockpile. A chest stays a chest and doesn't become a box or a bag sometimes. Rooms are no longer designated by either q-menu or an i-zone. Sensible default uniforms (rag-tag leather/full metal plate) and training schedules. The way archery targets work needs to be overhauled...

It would also be fantastic if we had a garbage burner that can comfortably get rid of stuff like remains, hoof, shells but also low quality furniture, pets and chil... I mean goblins. I meant goblins!

[NW_Kohaku]

I think you could make DF much easier to understand for newbies with a couple of changes.
Easy mode for newbies: Clothes do no longer wear out, no material or job ☼quality☼. The manager automatically gives job orders for missing items. (Militia needs 8 more swords, 3 shields and 9 backpacks? Urist, get on it. Same for barrels, buckets, bins...) Militia is set to be active/training by default. Soap can be bought from traders.

Seeds need to be managed better by default in an extra stockpile. A chest stays a chest and doesn't become a box or a bag sometimes. Rooms are no longer designated by either q-menu or an i-zone. Sensible default uniforms (rag-tag leather/full metal plate) and training schedules. The way archery targets work needs to be overhauled...

It would also be fantastic if we had a garbage burner that can comfortably get rid of stuff like remains, hoof, shells but also low quality furniture, pets and chil... I mean goblins. I meant goblins!

Most of those wouldn't help.

I don't think item quality causes anyone problems, although they are difficult to memorize, just because they aren't really important. (Plus, they have a logical progression - more lines in the marker for quality, the more quality.) 

Clothes wearing out only causes problems about 2-3 years into the game. If they last that long, they're ready for the relatively simple challenge of making a few more crafts.  Same can be said of soap, it's not a top priority.

Manager auto-ordering missing job items?  Why would that only be in a version for newbies, we veterans have been asking for that for ourselves for the length of Dwarf Fortress's existence! It'd certainly make the game easier, but it's more useful the deeper into the game you go, not the other way around.

Stuff about military defaults are also things perfectly reasonable for the base game, not just for new players.

I'm not sure what you mean about seeds.  My seed barrel that accepts seeds being placed right next to the fields never had any problems...

And "garbage burners" are just the effort it takes to set a dump zone over a channel with a drawbridge on a lever.  Yeah, that takes a little more advanced knowledge, but garbage compactors aren't necessary in the first few years, anyway.


If you want to have a newbie-friendly version of DF, what you really should do is just play Gnomoria.

In DF, aside from the problem of the simple visuals being hard to come to grips with, (a full 3d world shown in only an individual 2d slice at a time, even if you're not using ASCII and having to memorize the abstract representation while also memorizing game functions,) is the "Sandbox Paralysis".  DF dumps everything on you all at once, leaving players with little understanding of how to prioritize their time, often leading to them being attacked by wild animals because they didn't move to sheltered areas fast enough, or starving because they didn't recognize food generation was a top priority amidst all the looking for metal ores and setting up smelters. 

Gnomoria has a strict "bootstrapper order". At the start of the game, you have an axe and a pickax, but raw wood and boulders can only make one workshop, a "crude workshop", which is used to make the blocks it takes to make a basic woodworking or stoneworking workshop, which unlocks the things you need to make more advanced workshops as you build each workshop in sequence.  This ensures that sandbox paralysis doesn't happen, as you are restricted to a relatively linear order of things you need to build, at least until you've hit a point where the whole set of workshops opens up. 

This is the barebones way that most games pace their learning curve - they introduce only a few pieces of their game's systems at a time, then introduce more as players have had time to play around with some the previous ones. 

(Oh, and Gnomoria has auto-ordering of intermediary products, too...)

[NW_Kohaku]

Spoiler: irrelevant, but mostly addressed to NW_K (click to show/hide)

Good grief, I have seen that phrase ("irreducible complexity") too much. I've been refuting science-doubters, and they always throw that at me.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I can't imagine why. Wasn't irreducible complexity as a creationist argument tied wholly to the "intelligent design" charade? That whole line of argument was debunked even within the creationist circles over a decade ago.

[Aquillion]

A lot of basic interface stuff is very complex.  In particular, the way job assignments work is unintuitive to new players and frequently trips people up -- it requires a lot of keystrokes to start assigning jobs.

Part of the problem is that (like with a roguelike) you have to know the right key for everything, but unlike a typical roguelike, which command you're looking for often isn't obvious even if you have a list, since many keys lead to large menus that control a wide variety of different things.

But yeah, played on its easiest setting, DF isn't much harder than enything else. Same with most games with easier ways of playing though.
And it used to be a lot harder. 42.00 is a hell of a lot different from 34.0 and below.

Eh.  You've always been able to stabilize your fortress' mood as long as you have a really good dining room.

The 2D versions were harder in some respects (in that you'd have enemies pouring endlessly out of the river, chasm, and wells; and the game would actively pressure you to dig constantly deeper), but a bit simpler to understand overall.

[NW_Kohaku]

2D was significantly "gameyer", and much harder as a game, but it was also much simpler to learn. 

3D made the game far more conceptually difficult for players to handle, since it requires that people understand a 3D world while only being shown a single 2D slice of that world, even as the game, itself, became far easier since you no longer needed to flood your farms annually or expose your fort to creatures from underground rivers or other creature spawn points or the floods. Subsequent updates have made the some of the menus far more confusing (especially the likes of Military, which some players still are dragging their feet on really getting to learn...) while at the same time making control for those who understand the micromanagement far more precise.

Basically, the learning cliff has done nothing but grow taller as time has passed. 

When I learned to play Dwarf Fortress, I did so by reading through the wiki for about 3 days before even trying to start, something I never did for any other game. (I've read wikis before playing complex games before, but it never took me that long to get comfortable with playing.) After that point, I had very little trouble launching my very first fort into a nearly 200-dwarf fortress with a monarch up until I got an eternal siege bug.  The game was easy because I took the time to learn it, first, and past that initial stage of the setup, there is no real challenge. When people lose in DF, it's either because of some extremely bad luck combined with "challenge" conditions that handicap the player, they just don't know the game well enough to make good decisions, or they just quit after dinking around for 10 minutes and say "Screw this, I don't want to play some game with ASCII, anyway."

I've kept that quote in my signature practically since I joined the forums for a reason - the most notable feature to most people is the Learning Cliff, brought about by one of the most user-unfriendly interfaces in all of "gaming", if you can even call Dwarf Fortress a game at all at this point.  (I generally think of it more as a "performance art project"... It's moved steadily away from even attempting to feed traditional gaming needs ever since the move to 3D.)

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

I think you could make DF much easier to understand for newbies with a couple of changes.
Easy mode for newbies: Clothes do no longer wear out, no material or job ☼quality☼. The manager automatically gives job orders for missing items. (Militia needs 8 more swords, 3 shields and 9 backpacks? Urist, get on it. Same for barrels, buckets, bins...) Militia is set to be active/training by default. Soap can be bought from traders.

Seeds need to be managed better by default in an extra stockpile. A chest stays a chest and doesn't become a box or a bag sometimes. Rooms are no longer designated by either q-menu or an i-zone. Sensible default uniforms (rag-tag leather/full metal plate) and training schedules. The way archery targets work needs to be overhauled...

It would also be fantastic if we had a garbage burner that can comfortably get rid of stuff like remains, hoof, shells but also low quality furniture, pets and chil... I mean goblins. I meant goblins!

Clothes wearing out, as others have said, is not that bad - but there's already a DFHack plugin for this!

Automanagerial Stuff: This is something we all want. Also, how do you know we need 8 swords? Maybe I want to save my iron and use copper. Assumptions are bad, they make an ass out of you and me awful cliches.

I never make the military active by default the first year. Too much stuff to do. I turn it on in the autumn or so, maybe summer if I get a big migrant wave. I don't think newbies should have an active militia in the first bit of the game.

Soap from traders is a very simple suggestion, although it would likely be somewhat expensive for newbies.

Seeds are fine - are you saying it should auto-disable seeds in all stockpiles but the seed-exclusive ones? I would like a table of stockpiles or something where you could disable bits of stockpiles or entire stockpiles - but this really isn't that bad. Either plan ahead or have your farmers walk the extra eight steps. They are making small forts, right?

You do not understand chests. Chests and boxes and bags are the same type of item, it's only the material that changes. (and the name based off the material)

You don't need to ever use the q-screen to assign anything the i-screen can do. You don't even technically need the i-screen for rooms. It's just that a bedroom without a bed doesn't make much sense, while a temple with no box works just fine.

Archery targets and military stuff all around need to be worked on, not just for newbies.

Garbage firepits are quantum dumps or atom smashers.

HALF OF THIS CAN BE DONE WITH DFHACK.

[Sanctume]

There is MUCH more stuff to memorise in EVE, much more complicated stuff to build in Minecraft, and intricacies of Zero-K unit interactions take years to master.
DF? Plop some workshops, dig a moat, watch dorves scurry. With what do you compare it lol?

Learning curve is a sense of applying the "learned" basics like WASD for movement, which is a function that can be applied elsewhere in the game in a more consistent, like using WASD to move through a grid of menu selection of sort. 

Furthermore, EvE and Minecraft adopts a sort of standard user interface for a 3d rendered game.  R-mouse drag to look around, clicking to select, r-click for pop menus.  Very little of that UI via mouse is in DF. 

So a newb would probably start using WASD in DF which will not move the cursor because the arrow keys are actually used.  Then apply to some DF function to move and re-size a local embark for example, it is not WASD but uhkm and UHKM.  And oh by the way, you can SHIFT+arrow key to move +10 tiles.

Now apply those "learned" thing in choosing an embark, and build a bridge. using arrow keys to move the cursor, hot key menu to build a bridge (yeah sure a newb can "read" a text menu, but this tediousness affects the perception of "leaning curve").  So back to building that bridge, uhkm to resize the bridge, wasd x? to change the orientation of the bridge.  Sure after a while a newb can "learn" that, but the speed of getting it intuitively is on the steep side, imo.  The learning curve is more akin to the perception of a total noob--how fast will that noob learn it. 

Next is the "matrix" like symbols in the screen.  Ascii, or graphics tiles, they are all representation that requires further investment of the player to either learn more of the detail, or just unpause the game and continue "simulating."  I think that is the biggest difference when DF is compared to EvE of Minecraft in this example.  In those other game, the player controls a ship or a toon.  In DF fort mode, the player do not control that dwarves directly.  Sure a player can pick a squad or individual to move there or attack this, but the dwarf being simulated will not follow a precise action plan compared to those 2 other games. 

I would also add the concept of z-levels in DF is as much of adding to the learning curve.  On top of the general confusion of seeing symbols of the screen, a change in z-level is akin of giving a pagefull of information from 1 button.  It is disorienting to a noob who is not familiar with the z-level concept.  In Minecraft, you jump down a hole, and you pretty much understand you're below ground.  In EvE, you warp somewhere, and understand you're in a different set of coordinate.