Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[anewaname]

Without DT, these are the changes you might make to each migrant as they arrive using the 'v'iew menu.

- Check what skills they have using 'v' 'g' and then 'c' 'm' and/or 'b'
- Check if they are dislike fighting, are nervous, or prone to cracking under pressure, using the 'v' 'z' 'Enter' screen.
- Check if they already have a crossbow, pick, or axe using 'v' 'i'.
- Change labors using 'v' 'p' 'l'.
- Put them in a squad using 'v' 'p'  -/+, and 'Enter'.
- Assign a nickname 'v' 'z' 'y'.

[Senator Jim Death]

Utilities like Dwarf Therapist still work without the LNP. Nothing's stopping the OP from playing a Vanilla DF install and making use of utilities to get past some of the obnoxious elements.

In fact, OP describes wanting to use a tileset. I guess I wonder: why not just use LNP and disable DFHack from inside the launcher to try to reduce crashing?

[Fleeting Frames]

Because there's vanilla way to assign a tileset. Same with labours, there's vanilla way to assign them; opening post didn't even mention DFHack.

Vanilla purism is like this: Never mod in a display case (starter mooding exercise on wiki) or use workflow, but make hundred+ cases or conditional orders when added to vanilla because they're dorfy/intended/fitting vision/part of expected DF experience now and weren't before.

[onarum]

Honestly I see about 0 reasons not to use dfhack at least, you don't have to use the more "cheaty" stuff if you don't want to, everything can be turned on or off in LNP, plus the great majority of things you actually have to actively look up how to use and type in commands.

The quality of life improvements dfhack brings are just too good to not use, they don't change the game not one bit, it just makes so playing it is  waaay less of a chore, but it's still 100% "vanilla"

And I see no reason to not play the way I like. I enjoy playing Dwarf Fortress. I'm not using Dfhack. I'm actually playing it right now, and, shocking revelation, am not sitting here in frustration shouting at my PC wondering when Toady is going to improve my quality of life.

I might get frustrated if I were used to playing with a specific Dfhack feature, sure, but (despite what some on some forums, not necessarily here) it's not necessary just to play the game.

I have a copy of Dfhack ready for exporting extra data from Legends, and perhaps for a quick cleanup. I don't play fortresses for more than 9 or 10 years though so don't have much fps death to worry about.

At some point my modded world will require more than raw editing can offer me, at which point Dfhack will surely come to the rescue. It'a a great util, yes, it's not an essential util that somehow saves DF from being a buggy, crashy mess that Toady's accidentally created as some on some forums would have you believe.

So you prefer to spend 5 minutes going through a list trying to find what you're looking for instead of just filtering it in about 10 seconds? ok, you do you I guess...

[George_Chickens]

Except it doesn't take any where near that long unless you learned the game using tools as a crutch. There are tens of ways to do it, and I honestly find nicknames and getting dwarfs classified as they come in the gates far more effective than Dwarf Therapist, as with or without it I'm ultimately going to have to do the same thing and DT just adds another step.

DFhack is another can of worms, but the principle remains mostly the same. What can be done with them, for the most part at least, can be done better by learning the quirks of the game and actually managing your fort rather than having it scattered everywhere.

[Fleeting Frames]

I think he's referring to lists like in stockpiles menu, where you might want to only enable giant animals or the like (creatures like nightwing, goblins, domestic pets, etc. prevent just picking every third creature akin to what you can do with fat/tallow). Though yeah, it does take that long if you haven't memorized the raw order and how many repetitions to use through doing it dozen+ times before (or don't have a saved macro). Five minutes is probably on the low side with about 666 creatures to scroll through and enable/disable near third as needed.

I don't think he's talking about DT, as assigning 30 spring dwarves jobs and nicknames in 5 minutes with v-p-l - that's exactly 10 seconds per dwarf; only way you're doing it that fast or quicker is with a rubber-stamping macro that doesn't take dwarf personality, attributes, skills, relationships, etc. into account. Why even bother nicknaming them then?

[onarum]

Yeah I'm talking about the filtering Dfhack adds to pretty much everything, I mean, i simply cannot play without it anymore.

And no, nothing I do to "learn the quirks" or whatever will make the ability to filter giant lists of things for the one thing I want any less essential.

But again, you want to NOT use that just so you can feel a bit more hardcore or something, that's your prerogative.

[George_Chickens]

It's nothing at all about "being more hardcore". I guess some people just suck at managing the game

[Pvt. Pirate]

playing without DT for the most part anyway. vanilla? no!
I need dfhack - i've come acustomed to mephs tileset, TWBT and the lieks and wouldn't want to play without it again.
i need to see what's going on instantly - without deciphering letters. - although i can mostly decipher screens of vanilla users too.

i mostly use nebulatrons embark profile - varying it on the items only, adding 1-2 extra picks when in mountains or an extra axe in the jungle, sometimes in trade of the anvil, hoping to survive until the caravan will bring one
i haven't actually played without the autolabour dfhack plugin since i found it, so no DT - also because it didn't work for me in the current LinuxLNP.

[sketchesofpayne]

I'm eleven years into a 200 dwarf fort.  I've spent over sixty hours the last few weeks playing it.  I started off by reading each and every migrants' thoughts and preferences, making notes, sorting out family relations, etc.  After the first sixty I stopped because it was just taking too long.  I had a migrant wave of thirty dwarves once and it took me more than two hours to go through them all.

I've found Dwarf Therapist really useful lately.  I want to add another scribe to the library.  Dwarf Therapist > Other Skills > Sort by Writing Skill.  Bam!  The five dwarves out of 200 that have any writing ability are at the top.  I have three military squads but I want to form a fourth one.  Dwarf Therapist > Military > Sort by Armor User, Strength, Discipline, etc.  A big one lately is sorting by happiness.  It is quite helpful to know which dwarves need some TLC to keep them from going over the edge.  If they haven't seen friends or family I unassign all their hauling labors with a single click, which usually takes care of that.  Some dwarves don't know when to take a break.

When the caravan arrives sort the dwarves by number of skill levels assigned.  The ones without a lot of responsibilities get assigned trade goods hauling so my craftsdwarves can keep going with whatever they're working on.  I can assign all the hunters to hunting labors for a month and then quickly unassign them so they won't sleep outside all the time, then I can reassign them the next month.

I can see at a glance whether a member of the military has all their needed equipment.  If not, I can mouse over them and see what they're missing.

With DFHack's enhanced stocks interface I can sort/search for tunics and filter out owned/dump/forbidden/etc so I can see how many fresh, unclaimed tunics there are and if I need to queue up more of them to be made.  Same thing for gloves, socks, trousers, cloaks, hoods, and so on.  I have 200 dwarves to clothe and I don't want to massively over-produce clothing.  I can also easily go through and mark poor-quality armor for melting.  The animal stocks aren't normally sortable.  I have many, many animals.  It is nice to be able to hit search and type in 'badg' and see a list of just the trained badgers I have so I can see how many there are total without having to count them.  Also sorting animals by currently pastured or currently caged is very helpful.

When a dwarf leaves a half-eaten meal in the dining hall and it starts to rot I can use 'cleanowned' to get rid of it.  Otherwise it is quite difficult to make the dwarves dispose of it.  It is also very nice to have the 'deathcause' hack.  I had an engraver found dead in the middle of the fort.  No idea what happened to him.  Highlighted him in the missing/dead unit list and used 'deathcause' and it turned out he died of old age.  Whew, no reason to panic.

Dwarf was in a fey mood for a long time and they want gems.  We have gems.  We have loads of gems.  Used 'showmood' it says they want uncut gems.  Oh, now I get it.  I guess I was overzealous with my jewelers.  So I sent to miners out to go dig up some fresh gems.

When building a long paved road I had to scroll through pages of materials to find shale blocks every single time I laid a new section.  When building walls and floors, if I just used shale blocks to make a wall and then lay down another section, DFHack puts shale blocks at the top of the list.  Very helpful when I've been building a structure that has used over two thousand shale blocks.

Now for years I've played vanilla Dwarf Fortress.  I would assign jobs to migrants as they came in, but if I needed to do any major reassignments it would take a while, or I would just assign random dwarves to the tasks and say "they'll train up the skill eventually."  To keep things manageable I'd stick to fifty dwarves.  With the additional tools it becomes possible to efficiently manage 200 dwarves in a sane amount of time.

[Pvt. Pirate]

those are the things i need for playing - also in vanilla ther eis no "mousequery edge" and i need the mouse to look around and build - otherwise i'd go MAD.

[Flying Dice]

The main difference, as others have said, is that once you're playing with more than ~50 dorfs, you generally start to give up on micromanaging labor and just let things flow for the most part.

If you're not used to playing ASCII roguelikes you'll need time to adjust, but honestly I think that sans the prejudice of "OMG but it's just a bunch of letters" ASCII is actually more clear than most tilesets when it comes to stuff like distinguishing living creatures from the environment and spotting items strewn about tunnels/the surface.

It's really the utilities you'll miss out on, and you can easily add dfhack and Therapist for yourself. Most mods make the game more complex and difficult to play, not less.

[therahedwig]

Joining in on 'vanilla df isn't harder to play'.

I started doing it because I just wanted to play with a new version when it was out, and realised I had no issue just setting labours as I fancied. If you wanna use dfhack and the like, that's up to you, but try not to be scared of vanilla, there's nothing to be scared about.

Nowadays, I use the text rendering mode which on OSX and Linux allows DF to show up as actual text in the terminal, and being able to select text and copy it to a text editor or to a text-to-speech software is very convenient for me who has dylexia.