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[brolol.404]

> barrels reserved should default to 20

But then they'll wonder why their perfectly good barrels aren't being used to store food.

better than dying because they can't make alcohol

(also I wouldnt have to manually set it anymore lol)

[brolol.404]

One more:

> xbows should always be used as a range weapon no matter the wielders skill (not blunt weapons). This should include hunting

[mightymushroom]

Two recent things I've experienced:

I don't understand the rationale for requiring a roof over some furniture while other items you first craft and then B-build are fine outdoors. Maybe it's a general bad idea for dwarves to be outside where it rains, but at the time I believed drawing them into the sunshine to prevent cave adaptation would be desirable. And eventually I may be playing with other races that I expect to tolerate the outdoors a bit better.

And I keep having problems with water "pressure" not flowing downward when the space is open – gravity is a separate, and almost always slower, calculation for fluids. When I have a tunnel, and put a hole in the bottom, then pump water through it, I expect the flow to go mostly downward like any faucet or spigot I've ever seen. It does move slightly down, but not more than a z level without also spreading very widely to the sides. Much panic Fun! can be had without understanding why the player got it wrong. This was after reviewing the wiki like 4 times and that quirk still didn't sink in.

[oldmansutton]

Things I've heard new players say, which makes me think they don't realize they're playing an open-ended sandbox... not really anything you can do about this, it's just sometimes the game attracts the type of player who the game isn't geared towards:

• What am I supposed to do?
• There needs to X in the end game (not realizing there IS NO ENDGAME

Things that sound like they'll be fixed for the Steam release:

• What am I looking at, what do all these symbols mean?
• How do I do X?
• This menu is confusing...

Something I notice a lot, is that the commands to do certain things AREN'T similar across Adventure/Fortress, or even within the various menus in a given mode.  For fortress mode (my preferred game mode), you might be using +/- to scroll items in one menu, and up/down keys in another.  Digging up/down staircases is X from the designation menu, but building them is an I in the build menu.  I've been playing over a decade now, and I have pretty much all the keys memorized (though the +/- vs up/down still throws me), but this can be exasperating for a new player, if not downright prohibitive to play.  Having some sort of strictly followed key convention that is observed across all modes of play would help a lot.

[therahedwig]

My earliest experience with df consisted of smashing the space bar, and then trying the build menu, which gave cryptic 'needs chair or throne' for a chair, at which point I searched for a tutorial, so I agree with George_chickens that something like this would be a huge newbie streamliner: 'needs chair or throne, these can be made at a carpenter's workshop, mason's workshop, or glass forge' and then when someone navigates to workshops 'needs a building material such as logs, rocks or blocks, designate trees to be cut for logs'.

That said, I want to point out a pretty big one: Migrant/Pop Control.

Popcap in DF determines the kind of features(read: invasions) you will see. Back in 40d, you'd get 3-4 migrants per season. Right now, you can easily get 5 to 15 migrants (this is as far as I know caused by maps just being more featurefull, so it's easier to get rich), which this also means you end up with a full fortress within 3 years, and even for seasoned players this can be very overwhelming.

Ideally, for newbies, the pop-cap should be dynamic, and you should go through a dialog with the outpost liason to have the pop-cap go up. If you communicate it with 'beware, the more people live at this fortress, the more enemies it will attract', this should allow newbies to decide for themselves whether they want to up the difficulty with new challenges. Because it might be that a newbie is still busy with figuring out why their meeting hall flooded, or trying to understand why all the dwarves are suddenly naked, and then they end up with a goblin invasion on their doorstep.

For experienced players, ingame pop-cap control would be great as well, but that isn't the point of this thread

[PatrikLundell]

@George_Chickens: Lowering the general invasion threshold to 20 is easy: just set the progression trigger for invasion pop to 1 = 20, rather than the default 3 = 80 [2 = 50] in entity_default.txt file for the races you want to be allowed to invade you. (Semi) megabeasts similarly have triggers in their raws (individual per species). FBs, necros, and weres are outside of player control currently, as far as I know. The available triggers can be changed by changing the copy of the appropriate raw file in the save (not the original the save raws came from) in between sessions (don't change a lot of other raw things in the save without knowing how the game reacts).

Other newbie issues:
- (Mentioned before) Realizing that you need to build a down stair or up/down stair at the target level takes some getting used to. I guess you can consider a stair just up to the level of a 2*2 meter hole in the floor above (i.e. having to reach 1 meter to in some direction to heave yourself up while carrying a boulder) to be rather tricky to deal with, but you'd need to form that kind of mental picture to understand why you need the "extra" level.

- Building from ramps/stairs diagonally: "I can swear I saw the dorfs build both the wall segments to the side of the ramp while standing on it, and I've seen them build diagonally before, so why won't the #*! build the last segment!!!"

- That there is an inexplicable but important difference between carved and built fortifications, and why it matters (hint to those who don't know: there's no protective roof/floor over the built one, so you can't walk on it but critters can get in [and I think X-bow dorfs can climb out to make suicide charges]).

- How drawbridges work, their magic ability to fold many tiles long bridges up to a single Z level high wall (without a roof). Other counter intuitive features are that open retracting drawbridges get smashed when you drop cave-ins through them (though that's hardly a newbie task), that trees grow through them, atom smashing (and when it doesn't work), when bridges are magma/fire safe and not (and that this sometimes is dependent on alignment), etc. A retracting drawbridge is, after all, one of the first defensive measures a player ought to learn how to use.

- That dorfs don't know how to build walls, i.e. that the overseer will have to micro manage the building of walls either through the building of access scaffolding to all parts of the new wall or through building orders issued with the right timing (i.e. such that the previous section is actually going to be built before the next one).

- Building destroyers, and what can and can not be destroyed.

- Stockpile links. That they should keep away from them until they understand them in detail, and then only use them when they have a specific reason to do so. One of the most common reasons for "Why are they producing booze, I've got everything they need in abundance" and similar issues is failed linking (typically no link to barrel stockpiles, in this case).
I don't know how to improve the situation, although I guess trying to issue orders that are made impossible by linked might possibly be indicated to the player.

- Bin/barrel related workshop order/manager cancellation spam. The default recommendation will have to be to avoid bins like the plague until it's fully understood when they're safe to use (or they're revamped so they can actually be used in a reasonable manner even by newbies). The same goes for barrels, but, I think, to a lesser extent.

- Having randomly selected but occasionally important dorfs murdered by the injustice system as scapegoats for the overseer's failure to fulfill nobles (sometimes literally impossible, given the resources available) mandates, as well as the overseer's inability to predict nobles' trade bans before they're issued. I assume the Villains release will have to deal with that kind of problems as it seems a somewhat working justice system will be necessary to protect your fortress from plots, so you won't be able to just make sure not to enable it (and newbies wouldn't be expected to avoid what seems to be an important feature).

Proposal:
Tool for troubleshooting some of the inevitable "why won't my dorfs to X" pathing issues: A path finder where the possible path from a selected location is painted (like the trade depot one) to allow users to find where the path is broken. Can probably be implemented with DFHack, but that won't help vanilla users.

Edit: Therahedwig's point is a good one. Getting a dozen migrants to assign jobs to (and try to make rooms and beds for) gets a bit long in the tooth, while monster waves of 30+ is a real pain (I manually up the pop cap to the current pop + 10 after each wave until I've reached my target level, but that's not something you can expect newbies to do).

[HmH]

Oh, by the way, aquifers. They're a game-breaker unless you have embarked with the know-how and resources to channel through one.
So I think it'd be more than reasonable to make aquifers leak water, like, ten or twelve times slower. Slowly enough that they can be walled off by a carpenter.

[therahedwig]

Oh, by the way, aquifers. They're a game-breaker unless you have embarked with the know-how and resources to channel through one.
So I think it'd be more than reasonable to make aquifers leak water, like, ten or twelve times slower. Slowly enough that they can be walled off by a carpenter.

This is actually sort of implemented in the next release(with optional old-style aquifers too)

Finally this week, I made a change to aquifers. Most of them will now run about 1/500th as slow as they used to, allowing you time to come up with a strategy to wall or channel or pump or whatever you like, while remaining a fairly immediate flooding danger. The old-style near-artesian aquifers are still in the game, but they make up about 5% of the total and are clearly marked on embark and in the site finder, so people can play around with the aquifer-busting methods that have been invented or just have an easy flowing water supply. The new slower aquifers can still be used for wells, but if overused, there is more danger now that they won't fill fast enough, in which case you just need to make an additional well or make the well excavation larger. All old forts loaded into the new version will have the old type of aquifer to avoid breaking existing fluid-mechanical setups, but the old worlds will have the new aquifer distribution for any future embarks.

I understand you must've forgotten, I only remembered it just now

[brolol.404]

Oh, by the way, aquifers. They're a game-breaker unless you have embarked with the know-how and resources to channel through one.
So I think it'd be more than reasonable to make aquifers leak water, like, ten or twelve times slower. Slowly enough that they can be walled off by a carpenter.

I forgot about this since I dont play with aquifers (mine are always molded out). Aquifers are a game ender for a new player and they seem to be way too common.

[PatrikLundell]

I agree current aquifers require the right knowledge to pierce (while it's available on the wiki, it's definitely not a newbie task), but it's one of the things that you can actually disable (and probably should be disabled if DF gets an "Easy" or "Beginner" setting).

With the know-how, the resource requirements are rather modest (a metal axe and trees is sufficient, and there are low point cost embark options for when you don't have trees [and then you don't even need an axe]).

Personally I like them very much because of the safe unlimited amounts of non freezing (and other hassles) water, in particular if I get lucky enough to get a partial aquifer so I don't even have to pierce it.

Obviously, we'll have to wait to see how the new aquifer version changes things.

[scourge728]

ptw

[Rose]

Honestly,  I'd say the absolute biggest thing needed is an ingame tutorial.

When you start, there's no indication at all of what you need to do. Players are forced to seek other sources to learn how to play the game, and that's a design flaw.

[Frango Nicolbidok]

1. Werebeasts. Whenever one enters my fortress, and particularly early on, I can assume that fortress is DONE for. One bite can lead to another and it becomes extremely difficult to isolate or control sometimes. Don't get me wrong, because werebeasts add a lot of fun and fun to the game, but for new users, I think this aspect is frustrating, just as it was to me when they were introduced initially.

2. Unclear first steps. For this, it is a little iffy, because I think it's important to ultimately experiment, but knowing what to do to get food initially (farming) I think is a little unclear unless you look it up right away.

3. Complexity. Just as number 2, it's about learning, but I think people quit from not just the graphics being overwhelming, but also the fact that there are so many things to learn and little time to learn them since much of it needs to be figured out early on (or fun will come quickly). A lot of people who I recommend the game to say that once they can get past the graphics, they have to then understand the mechanics and that part is overwhelming to them.

A good example of this is the fact that you have to make the carpenter workshop, have the wood, then order the job be done (given the right skilled dwarves), then also choose where to place it as a building. None of this is abnormal because it's literally like real life to have the furniture and then choose where it goes, but I think it could be made clearer somehow that you have to make the item and then place the building, in that order. I think it would be more friendly to be able to designate the building at any time, and then you can choose whether you already want it made or make it after you designate it.

I'm blanking on more things, because the rest I have are personal suggestions about my own little things than things for noobs.

[CheeznWhine]

Hey there Zach hope things are going well health wise for you

Werebeasts never really bothered me, i just locked up my fortress when they came.

However, i have some adventure mode complaints if that is alright. I love adventure mode but the issues with it can be very stark at times.

I have played dwarf fortress...

I think these suggestions would go a long way towards making adventure mode more noob friendly.

This was a great start to this thread and really great insights!

[Mort Stroodle]

Marksdwarves are incredibly finicky. Give them any way whatsoever to melee an enemy and half your squad will do that instead of trying to shoot. I once dug a moat, starting building a fortifications wall, and because I wasn't able to roof over the wall before the first siege came, most of my marksdwarves actually climbed *over* the fortifications, falling five stories and breaking their legs in the moat, instead of just standing there shooting. I get that there's many reason why shooting might not be an option, maybe they're out of bolts, maybe there's some other problem, but their response to "Hm, I can't shoot the enemy" should not be to jump to their death in the desperate hope that they might get the chance to bash somebody with a crossbow. Aggressiveness options for squads would be swell, like "stay put and attack anything you can without moving from your station area" or being able to tell the dwarves to retreat and only attack in self-defense. Ideally these should be a rework of the existing military UI rather than something tacked on, we don't need even more stuff added to the military UI.

Military scheduling is a huge mess to control, and honestly doesn't do much anyway. Patrols are downright useless for the vast majority of players because chained up cats will do the job better (unless you're using patrols to make vampires control logic gates in your nightmare computer or something), much of your military will ignore idle time and just train on their own anyway when it's supposed to be destress month, "defend area" schedules are redundant with station orders, it feels like the most complicated parts of the military system could be cut outright without much changing. Or at least, if you do a military tutorial, focus on saying "Station and kill orders are important, here's how to do them, setting your dwarves to train forever is important, here's how to do it", and not confusing new players with all the other superfluous stuff.

When I was first playing I spent a long time trying to figure out how to make my dwarves properly patrol for some months and train for others and be able to set a schedule to defend specific areas for when goblins are attacking, but then I realized that none of that stuff matters and it's far simpler and more effective to just tell your dwarves to train at all times, and to station them where you want them when things need to die.