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[MobRules]

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.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sure, the straight-up creationists consider it heresy that IDers feel the need to explain things in scientific terms, and the science-knoweldgeable consider it psuedo science at best, but there are still plenty of intelleigent design types that consider it self-evident common-sense :p) It's different episthemologies (the philosophy of how one determines what is "true"). Scientists study empirical truth, creationists define truth in terms of biblical literalism -- and intelligent design folks seem to miss the point of both, and mash them up into a single philosophy that does't work in either paradigm. And throw terms like "irreproducable complexity", "macroevolution", and "microevolution" around a lot.)

[Bumber]

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)

But only one of them holds seeds/etc.

[BigD145]

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)

But only one of them holds seeds/etc.

"I have barrels so why can't I gather sand with them? Seeds fit in bags and barrels and sand fits in bags but not barrels?"

DF has quite a few specifics like that. We can go into stockpiles and how to grapple in adventure mode and how to navigate legends mode. All in all, there's a lot of specific things that you might expect to work one way or five different ways, but don't. To be adept you have to learn all the ways to do all the things.

[Pvt. Pirate]

i haven't even looked into adventure or legends mode.
and without a tutorial video on youtube, i wouldn't have tried it out.
to a new player it is a game with a steep learning curve and with no plateau in sight.
after some time of playing, you get a hand on some of the principles and yet when assigning stockpile infos, i am thrilled as how different they are from the trading and the Z-Stocks screen.
without mousequery, TWBT and phoebus, this game would've landed in the bookmark-folder of "games with potential but way too stupid at current development status".

[Niddhoger]

It really is that "sandbox" paralysis more than the UI.  The UI doesn't really "hide" anything so much as presents too much of the wrong stuff at once.  It also hides some of the most important figures of all, input/output charts.  You consumed 100 units of food and 500 units of drink last year while only producing 50 and 400, respectively!  This workshop produced 15 pairs of socks last quarter.  This loom only processed 5 silk webs while the other processed 30 bits of yarn. 

But back to the paralysis... you really don't have any "preset" layouts to use.  The player is given so much freedom in designating chains of production, distribution, and foot-traffic its not even funny.  Look at the Settlers series... the last one I layed you only had room for so many building which could only have (at most) a few additions built at pre-determined intervals.  The path's between areas were already determined, and you could only build some hauler huts at the borders to help grease the wheels.  So even though there were complex chains of production, it was still pretty much all laid out for you.  In DF... you can construct the environment as you will on top of decided how close to place which workshops and how much storage space for exactly what materials with exactly this many haulers each.  The "oh shit, how do I do this RIGHT" thought can easily cripple you- especially with all this misinformation and "advice" spouted by people that onlyi assume they are correct- as NW_Kohaku mentioned, many people fall into the trap of those huge 20x20 stockpiles where the items are placed first in the upper left corner... forcing so much wasteful movement (feeder stockpiles, QSP, or just realize how much is enough and scale down).  Where do I put the dining room? How big does it need to be? Am I leaving enough hallway space? My dwarves seem confued by all these stairs/ramps connecting my floors.  Where do I put this workshop? How do I keep it productive when I don't have room for a full stockpile nearby? Etc, etc, etc. 

And besides the lack of handholding, there are no breadcrumbs to follow and no clear goals to achieve.  Sure, you can hit 200 dwarves and/or become the mountainhome- but that doesn't really "win" the game.  Once a person scales the "how to not die" cliff and can stomach the freedom to set up your own systems, they are often left with the "well shit, what now?" syndrome.  What really helped me here is realizing that DF is a fantasy world simulator.  I can construct my own scenarios across multiple forts- or in general you have to bring your own extra fun into the game.  My civilization is on the brink of collapse due to goblin aggression, we are the last bastion of the Moldy Socks! Desperate to survive, we flee the goblin-contested lands to less resource-rich (no metal) lands to rebuild some population.  Then, we begin aggressively returning into the old homeland to bleed to goblins dry.  Get the fortress set up! We need defensible positions! Walkways on the walls! Ballista aimed at chokepoints! THIS IS SPARTA! RAAAWWWRRR!!!  Give yurself restrictions, set goals, force yourself to experiment with new industries, or specifically up the challenge by doing a one pick embark in an evil biome!

PS, what do you mean by central staircase layouts are bad? ~10 floors with related industries grouped up within and across floors (textile processing above the farms/pastures and kitchen/dining room below said farms, for example) are inefficient layouts? Is it that stairs are more taxing on pathfinding than ramps, or that we need to decentralize the fort more with multiple dining rooms and dormitorie near where dorfs actually work?

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

PS, what do you mean by central staircase layouts are bad? ~10 floors with related industries grouped up within and across floors (textile processing above the farms/pastures and kitchen/dining room below said farms, for example) are inefficient layouts? Is it that stairs are more taxing on pathfinding than ramps, or that we need to decentralize the fort more with multiple dining rooms and dormitories near where dorfs actually work?

Both. They are both problems with the centralized fortress.

HOWEVER, I assert that a newb should use a centralized fortress design. You have to be good with designations to make a spiral ramp, and you have to be very knowledgeable about industry to perfect the placement. One stairway in the middle of everything is good for a newb, and honestly the fortress won't last long enough for FPS death or cluttered hallways or long production lines to become an issue. Just making sure you put all farm-related things near the surface works for the production issues, anyway, it's just that a decentralized fortress done badly is worse than a good centralized one.

[Niddhoger]

PS, what do you mean by central staircase layouts are bad? ~10 floors with related industries grouped up within and across floors (textile processing above the farms/pastures and kitchen/dining room below said farms, for example) are inefficient layouts? Is it that stairs are more taxing on pathfinding than ramps, or that we need to decentralize the fort more with multiple dining rooms and dormitories near where dorfs actually work?

Both. They are both problems with the centralized fortress.

HOWEVER, I assert that a newb should use a centralized fortress design. You have to be good with designations to make a spiral ramp, and you have to be very knowledgeable about industry to perfect the placement. One stairway in the middle of everything is good for a newb, and honestly the fortress won't last long enough for FPS death or cluttered hallways or long production lines to become an issue. Just making sure you put all farm-related things near the surface works for the production issues, anyway, it's just that a decentralized fortress done badly is worse than a good centralized one.

I don't really decentralize other than make a few small temples/dining rooms/booze stockpiles tucked here and there.  I have one at the bottom of my fort for miners and those guarding/utilizing the caverns.  I may have another in the level between the stoneworks and forges, too, as those tend to be busy areas.  My farms/wood processing tend to be close enough to the main tavern not to worry about it, but sometimes I build another by the entrance when I ramp up barracks and sleeping quarters up top.  I suppose that is somewhat decentralized, but I still keep a main staircase that drops about 10 levels, only branching off with side tunnels to pierce the caverns (capped by barracks, ofc). 

I still keep around 25 FPS like this at 200 population.  I've heard about the ramps>stairs for FPS/pathing, but I've always been leery of the extra space and steps it requires to build a proper system or ramps (spiral ramps are either one tile wide or huge).  Decentralized farms are messy, though.  You need extra farmers and tight burrow controls- so I might leave those and some barracks (plus housing/dining for them) in the core of the fort.  Then start branching off complexes from them across broader areas and a few floors- adding a temple/tavern/living quarters for each major area.  Ican try it out next patch release.

^design paralysis overload for the newb if even veteran players have to struggle with advanced layouts. If I don't break these up evenly enough, it won't be worth it.  I can also try adding in minecarts to speed up moving large volumes of goods around the fortress too (they hold -so- much more than wheelbarrows ever could)... say between floors to move large amounts of food/booze to the various taverns... or large amount of furniture from where they are made to where they are needed... or large amounts of crafted goods from the magma glass kiln/craft shop/bonecarver/magma forge/clothier/whatever to the trade depot. There is just so much freedom to design systems and how they are connected in this game... especially fitting those around your freeform traps (drowning chambers, pitfalls, lead loaded minecart repeaters, garbage shotguns, ballista galleries... whatever).

[NW_Kohaku]

PS, what do you mean by central staircase layouts are bad? ~10 floors with related industries grouped up within and across floors (textile processing above the farms/pastures and kitchen/dining room below said farms, for example) are inefficient layouts? Is it that stairs are more taxing on pathfinding than ramps, or that we need to decentralize the fort more with multiple dining rooms and dormitorie near where dorfs actually work?

The problem is that your typical central staircase design is a 3x1 or 3x3 up/down stair in the middle, with some ungodly huge stockpile in one direction, and a straight hallway in orthogonal directions in three others.  The hallway is extended solely upon that one straight line to the central staircase.  Every other workshop added, therefore, is placed another four tiles to the side of the next one (because people like putting walls between workshops). Players using these designs also tend to just set industries to repeat forever, and when they have too many crafts for their stockpiles, respond by simply expanding stockpiles further rather than finding sane ways to throttle production, until traffic becomes so inefficient (because every dwarf trips over one another in this one massive central stairway all traffic, even horizontal traffic, must go through) that it finally slows down production enough to dent their overproduction.  Then they quit the game because they killed their FPS for some odd reason!

Compare this to a decentralized design where each industry has a material-specific (I.E. wood, stone, metal, gems, glass, etc.) input stockpile floor, a material-specific output stockpile floor, and a stairwell leading downwards to vertically-stacked clusters of workshops. Vertically stacked workshops do not require each successive pair of workshops to be placed four tiles further along the hallway, it requires they be placed one tile further down along the stairway. Because you can place 4 workshops off of a diagonal of a stairwell, for every four workshops, a worker need walk only one additional tile.

Further, industry decentralized by material allows you to place living quarters (and dining hall/tavern) in the center, with a "spider web" or "wagon wheel" design on each floor to allow workers to have direct access between their housing and workshops, with movement for food or materials being vertical, and transition between work and break horizontal along completely separate walkways than a single central stairwell, leading to not only less crowded hallways, but a greater set of redundant hallways in the event one needs to "quarantine" a section of fortress due to syndromes or tantrumers.

That said, my fortress layouts have become slightly more complicated than that since the introduction of minecarts, and my subsequent desire to stack certain industries vertically upon one another.  (For example, my sand is up high, but I can more easily keep my magma glass kilns down low, so I set up carts that carry sand bags down and empty bags back up using impulse elevators.  Likewise, I want a guided minecart track through my major quarries to mitigate stone hauling, which means I have corkscrew ramps in several areas the rest of my fortress needs to be built around.)

[Niddhoger]

yeah, if I made a more lateral fort I'd definitely want to use a minecart track for stone.  I'd also likely do the same for furniture, since they can only ever be carried one at a time.

And although I typically make those central forts, I avoid most all of those issues.  Ginormous stockpiles are only ever made (generally just for stone and wood) with smaller feeder stockpiles closer to the workshops.  I also prefer to forgo stockpiles entirely and just use a workshop as one- if it gets cluttered its a natural throttle.  Farmers workshop->loom->dyers->clothier is the most natural choice for this, but I'll also pair up smelters-forges with only ever an ore/coke stockpile on one side of/below the smelters.  I often (but not always) layer stockpile/worshop floors, and when I do I'll make a honeycomb of stairs connecting the floors.  I often have just 4-6 workshops a floor, as why keep branching out when I can just go up/down a level, and who needs 20 workshops going full blast- you just cramp FPS and it creates more work processing all the junk.  And again, I'll also build secondary and tertiary dining rooms, like for the soldiers, miners, and whoever near the caverns.  Oi, and if I leave the craft shop, jewelers, and glass forge (sadly I can't neatly layer these without building a dirt fort or a tower) on repeat its because I'm dumping them on the caravan 1-3 times a year.  If I get too far ahead, I'll shut them down.  With all the imported cloth/food and bits of leather, I don't have much for my farms to do. 

How many floors do you usually wind up with in a decentralized layout? I'm hesitant to push them too far in any direction, and how big you make your rooms would also be a concern (dormitories and 1x1 beds without walls easier to fit around your industry).  It sounds like Toady is close to making the next release, so I'll experiment with broader, decentralized forts after that.

[Gatleos]

Just gonna leave this here...

I just lost brain cells

[NW_Kohaku]

How many floors do you usually wind up with in a decentralized layout? I'm hesitant to push them too far in any direction, and how big you make your rooms would also be a concern (dormitories and 1x1 beds without walls easier to fit around your industry).  It sounds like Toady is close to making the next release, so I'll experiment with broader, decentralized forts after that.

Since I can plug 4 workshops around a single stairwell, I can make arbitrarily many stairwells, and I tend to use the maximum populations to throttle immigration to waves of a relatively manageable 10 at a time (changing init settings to increment up 10 every year), I generally get by needing one floor of workshops unless I go on long enough to need maybe 2 floors at most.  Keep in mind, I don't need to have only one staircase, either.  For my smelters, which I keep on one floor just because channeling magma into multiple floors is more hassle than it's worth, I use multiple stairwells up to different floors.  My glass furnaces are just built around the point where minecarts drop sandbags and accepts sandbags back before being given the push to go back up. This is on the same floor as, but fed around a different stockpile (actually on the floor above) the metal smelters.

That said, workshops are not always on the same floors, spread out evenly.  My latest stone hub, for example, had a boulder depot for collecting stones and a mason that cut boulders to blocks, then shoved them into a minecart that pushed it down a floor into the actual quantum stockpile of blocks, around which the main masonry workshops (and stone craftsdwarf workshop) were arrayed.  I then shoved output from that into a minecart that took a one-tile trip to another hole to a finished goods quantum stockpile. Even six workshops were too many.  By contrast, the food production was up one Z below the surface in the soil in the center, directly above the dining hall with the food stockpiles on the floor between.  The dining hall had 7 stairwells upwards for access to the food and booze stockpiles, and those stairwells also went downwards to access the residences.  The standard dwarf's room was 4 to 6 tiles, arranged in roughly hexagonal pods of six.  I assign larger rooms to married dwarves who share the room (and give them an extra bed, besides).

Spoiler: image (click to show/hide)

I was challenging myself to use only ramps, not stairwells for my "main" fortress, (the up/down stair you can see is for an aquifer-to-cavern "chicken run", and not part of the "real" fortress) incidentally.  I was experimenting with the style to accommodate that, and chose at least 4 rather than 3 mid-game, so pardon the asymmetry.

In that fortress, the connections are through the corners of the quite large dining hall, and at the bottom of the residential stack, although it's worth again noting my fortress is also decentralized by height.  Using ramps, the deeper industries are also slightly further either North or East than higher-up industries. (You can see two of the ramps on the Northeast and Northwest edges, although no workshops are on that particular floor.)

My smelters, for example, were lower-down, because I wanted to keep the magma channels I flooded away from most of the other industries.  This included a sandbag dropper I mentioned previously that had to go through an aquifer, which was a bit of an engineering feat in itself.  Wood and cloth were similarly tossed down a hole to reach a mid-level crafting zone, although I merely required a hole for those, not a returning minecart to carry empty bags back up.

[Ezekhiel2517]

Well might it be because DF is the most difficult game ever to learn? I had to print and take a few nights to read two or three times the Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial by TinyPirate just to learn the basics! And that was years ago, then each time I started playing again, with several month in between I just had to read it again and investigate forums and wikis to learn new more advanced concepts.

This time I might be on my 15th fortress or so, and just now I´ve learned how to make spiral ramps, I´ve fiddled some with console commands, started using the "record" commands feature, and so many new things and every time I´m learning more. But there is so much I haven´t even tried yet, like pumping water or magma through pipes, or many many other stuff. So I could say that I´m just about in the middle of that learning curve, even some years after I started playing!

[milo christiansen]

You know, I found DF to be really easy to learn. But then again, I did have TinyPirate's book up on the other monitor...

[Aquillion]

Just gonna leave this here...

I just lost brain cells

They're technically correct (the best kind of correct!)

In technical usage, a "steep" learning curve originally referred to one in which you gain knowledge quickly (hence, forming a steep graph.)  However, popular usage tends to use it the opposite way, likely due to the mental association of "steep" with eg. a steep, hard-to-climb cliff.

I think the main takeaway is the fact that that thread went to fifteen pages, which shows the really weird relationship a lot of Dwarf Fortress players have with the game's difficulty, like there's this pride in it being SUPAH HARD.  Honestly, though, when you get down to it...  it's not difficult once you know how to play.  I mean, if you know all the rules and the interface, you can easily make a fortress that is practically invulnerable, without requiring any particular skills beyond knowing those basic rules and controls.  There's a lot of rules and controls to memorize, which makes the game seem intimidating (and when you don't know all the rules, it tends to seem like things can fall apart for no clear reason), but I don't really think of it as a difficult game to play, just a hard one to get into.

I think the other issue is the "losing is fun" catchphrase.  What it really means is that Dwarf Fortress is designed to make it fun to lose; that is to say, when everything falls apart, it tends to do it in a memorable way.  But it's not hard game in the sense that eg. Dark Souls or Flappy Bird is hard.

[Pvt. Pirate]

exactly.
once i actually got to control my militia squad, it was super easy to defend my fortress. - before that, i feared even a kea could be the ruin of my dorfs.