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[PatrikLundell]

Difficulty toggles, sliders, etc. are useful measures, especially of those that make sense can be toggled on for a save (aquifers do not make sense, while the possibility of were attacks does).

In addition to this, trying to sort the functionality into easy/early, normal/middle game, and advanced/obscure features would probably be useful if it can be pulled off. Wind mills, for instance, would end up in the advanced category, even though they CAN be used to just power a single mill. Vermin traps aren't particularly advanced, but they're definitely obscure like the animal training building or whatever it's called that basically doesn't have any use. A mill/quern isn't a particularly advanced building in itself, but it marks a foray into the second level of food processing territory, as well as the seed destruction one, and so I'd place it at the middle level.
Dyeing and encrusting activities would end up in the advanced/obscure tier. Neither activity has any direct function that's important to a fortress (but may well serve role playing purposes, so I by no means suggest they should be removed. Dyeing in particular may find a practical use if dyed clothing is made visible by the graphics [assuming the players can figure out how to get the right items to the right dorfs]).

I wouldn't mind some functionality that allowed you to easily control the usage of multi use crops (how do I split my pig tails 50/50 between brewing and cloth making, not to mention milk->cheese, or syrup/sugar making. The first one is, unfortunately, something that probably need to be addressed early on by newbies, while the latter two would end up in the advanced field (I've never bothered even trying to device some mechanism or even DFHack script to handle those products, but I don't use quarry bush at all either [no bags available early on, and no need for more food later]).

Moving the game from "given away for donations" to "sold in a storefront" comes with some significant expectations that do not attach to a freeware product. I understand that the developer doesn't like long sessions fixing bugs. Neither do I. Unfortunately, if they're not fixed when and where possible then they only metastasize, and I want to see the game succeed, not get panned hard as it rolls out the door. I know not every bug will be a good candidate, but there are some real nasty ones that vets never really question any longer, because that's how long they've been around!

I honestly feel this is a really really important thing to recognise...

Actually... going to agree, much as I don't want to.  Having been involved in many early access Steam releases, the newcomers are often shockingly brutal in their reviews.  DayZ comes to mind, and that was only 5-6 years.

Yes. I was one of those who claimed DF wasn't anywhere near a shape suitable for a commercial game as the Premium plans were launched, and Toady's extended Villains walkabout is cutting the time available to get it into a horrible shape (rather than abysmal) very short. The efforts that ARE planned seem to be aimed more at the makeup of the pig rather than the pig itself (i.e. UI in its various forms, but bugs don't seem to be in there, and will be the stuff that has to be cut when the finish line is reached anyway).
I WANT it to be successful, and hope my misgivings are put to shame.

[SkaiaMechanic]

A tutorial is badly needed. You're dropped into the game with a cluttered menu, no direction, and no idea how to even dig.
This would be seperate from a generated world, but rather a step-by-step process in showing how to get a BASIC fort up and running.

NEEDED INSTRUCTIONS:
-Pre-set suggested embark team/supplies (even outside of the tutorial, people can adjust once they realize what they want)
-Digging (not burrow!)
-Stairs (This alone caused me to give up the first time I played the game. Consider a "stairs" designation that shows an down-stairs when there is no stairs dug/built above it, and up-stairs when there is stairs only above it, and a up/down-stairs if there's stairs above and below. If not, be very clear on how it needs to be done correctly.)
-Woodcutting/Plant Gathering
-Basic Workshops (Carpenter's, Mason's, Kitchen, Brewery, Craftsdwarf's)
-Farm (with Plump Helmets all seasons, as they are used for meals and alcohol)
-Setting "jobs" for each dwarf
-Stockpiles
-Rooms (Bedroom, Dining Room, Office)
-Basic 5 Dwarf Military Squad and show how to attack two goblins.

And then end the tutorial, with the suggestion to experiment! (And a reminder that Losing is Fun!) It was discovery that kept me wanting to learn more, and the announcements that state why a task was cancelled are very helpful in that process. There's a bunch of tutorials out there made by other people, see what the most common "first things to learn" are from them and implement those instructions in-game.

Other notes:

The menu works, but isn't friendly. Combining some of those commands would go a long way.

Minecarts are a mess. I've spent many, many hours trying to set up a good minecart track, but I STILL can't wrap my head completely around it. Why can't my workers push/ride the empty cart to my farm, load it up with veggies, and then push/ride the cart back to my food stockpile? It's odd because Mines and Minecarts should intuitively go hand in hand. Also wheelbarrows are so generally useful for speeding up hauling but nothing really explains that.

I think it will become very important to keep in mind that Dwarf Fortress will not appeal to everyone by its very nature of a simulation-sandbox above all else. It will be a problem no matter how "noob-friendly" you make it. The epic tales draw people into the game, and give people the encouragement to find them...even if they have to Dig a little bit to do so.

[Rumrusher]

Was wondering when toady added retiring forts to DF that the major player base kind of treat it as an another means to end the fort than a set the fort down for a bit to play something different in the same world.

Then realize oh the un-retirement mechanic breaks forts which is weird given how retired sites when visited in adventure mode don't have all their barrels spill out.

[voliol]

First off, I want to talk about this thread, and that there are a lot of quite heated complaints. A few of them a bit too heated perhaps. I just wanted to say that I love this game, even with the blemishes it has. Ha, I am sure we all do, otherwise we wouldn’t care so much about dragging other in, and giving them an as wonderful experience as possible. Well, my opinion is that while the inevitable gamebreakers like the current stress balance aren’t too great, the other ”blemishes” are honestly not too bad. While they are many, they are all small enough to be worked through by the player with some endeavor, or elsewise by the community. If you don’t fix them before that, that is. Due to its brilliance, Dwarf Fortress will pull through despite the hurdles a slightly imperfect first release would cause. So don’t panic.

...I suppose that was a mediocre attempt at de-stress :p. I don’t know whether it was needed.
I’ve seen people here talking about having to use the wiki/forum being bad design. To be honest, I don’t think it is. I don’t think playing Dwarf Fortress without expecting to look anything up will ever be the greatest idea. Dwarf Fortress is simply a too complicated game, and detailed tutorializing would be taxing for you and I believe the player. Thus, after whatever tutorial system is implemented is completed by the player, the pop-up message for doing so should include a link to the wiki, as well as the forum’s easy question thread(s). Dwarf Fortress has a well-functioning wiki and a helpful community. I think this should be seen as one of its strengths, instead of something to distance oneself from.

[green_meklar]

There are of course many things I could say about the UI, but it sounds like that's considered to be under control for the time being. (Not that I really believe that, but still.) I also remember Toady saying something about fixing aquifers, which is great to hear; and I won't repeat anything about the stress mechanics here because I already posted about that in the other thread.

As far as werebeasts go: These are definitely an issue the way they are right now. They're basically a perfect combination of threatening attributes: They're trapavoid, they're building destroyers, they're invisible until they're right on top of you, and even if they're defeated they can still leave your fort infected (and the only way to analyze your dwarves for infection is to search through the combat logs). I'm not sure the 'invisible enemies' (the way kobolds also are) mechanic is a good thing to have in the first place. But even if that remains, it's not logically clear why werebeasts would be trapavoid when regular goblins aren't (cage traps are probably overpowered as it is, I'm just saying the logic of what gets trapped and what doesn't seems pretty thin), and they just seem to be excessively strong in combat. Also, most players are going to assume that silver weapons will be good against werebeasts, but the actual randomized metal weakness is non-obvious and there's no way to ascertain which metal is effective other than by experiment. Additionally, there should be some easier way of quarantining dwarves (for instance, it should be possible to chain up or cage any dwarf, rather than just convicted criminals), and some easier way of keeping track of the phases of the Moon in order to know when the time of transformation has come (although this basically comes back to being a UI issue).

Werebeasts aside, some other thoughts on things that should be improved for noobs:

• Endless combat is a big problem. Right now, if your civilians encounter a hostile wild creature and don't get a chance to run away, they will start beating on it until one of them dies. If the civilians are unarmed and the creature is highly armored (but has weak attacks), this can take a very long time. This results in ridiculous situations where you have half your fort's workforce crowded around an unconscious alligator punching it repeatedly for months on end, falling unconscious when they exhaust themselves in combat only to wake back up and keep wailing on the alligator, with nobody able to deliver a lethal blow through the alligator's hide with just their fists. This is utterly unrealistic and can bring a fort's economy to a grinding halt for no good reason. Civilians should be more willing to break off combat (especially with unconscious creatures) in order to flee to safety or grab a weapon that can actually affect the hostile creature. (Aside from stress, this is the closest thing I can think of to a 'game-breaking' problem. I think I abandoned at least one fort as a result of this.)
• The mechanics of stairs and ramps are rather non-obvious. I've answered multiple questions on the DF subreddit by noobs wondering how to make stairs work. Some sort of ingame guide to stairs and ramps is warranted. Additionally, it would be convenient to have a 'smart stairs' designation, where you can designate a column of stairs and get only downward stairs on the top (if the top is a clear floor), only upward stairs on the bottom, and up/down stairs on all intermediate Z-levels. This would make it more straightforward for a noob to designate his first mining shaft without getting his dwarves stuck in a pit or wondering why no stairs are being dug on the surface.
• The problems with grazing animals are very non-obvious. The average noob is not going to expect their two starting yaks to starve in the midst of plenty just because they haven't been pastured. It makes no sense and it's an unnecessary barrier to understanding and utilizing the livestock industry. Grazers should graze wherever they please, and should only starve if they are not permitted to find groundcover at all (either because the local biome has none, or because they are pastured in a zone that has none, or because you have so many grazers that they have eaten it all). There should also be a UI indicator for whether a particular animal is a grazer or not.
• The irrigation mechanics are very non-obvious. When people think 'irrigation' they think of constantly bringing water to otherwise fertile soil in order to grow crops there, not spilling water once on bare rock in order to grow mushrooms. There are a variety of ways this could be done better. Farming is actually so easy right now (everywhere other than on bare rock floors) that it would be okay to make irrigation a little more complicated as long as it's intuitive. My suggestion would be: Require all farm plots to either have proximity to standing water or receive occasional watering (presumably with buckets, although automated systems with floodgates or minecarts would also be Fun), but allow farm plots to be built on rock floors, and even artificial floors, by conveying dirt, clay or sand there.
• The mechanics of wheelbarrows are non-obvious. The fact that 3 wheelbarrows means more hauling than 1 wheelbarrow but 0 wheelbarrows means more hauling than 3 wheelbarrows is going to fly over a lot of people's heads. There should at least be an ingame guide to this.
• Depletion of wildlife populations seems too severe. For a noob who finds fishing to be a convenient food source and plans his fort that way, running out of fish and realizing this cannot be reversed is a bit of a shock and kinda feels bad. In my view even pond turtles and cave fish should gradually regenerate from zero given a few ingame months, but more importantly, the populations of fish in lakes, streams and oceans that touch the edge of the map should be effectively inexhaustible. The idea of being able to completely deplete all the squid in the ocean just by fishing along the shore is ridiculous and counterintuitive.
• The fishing industry should be less broken. As it is, fisherdwarves will leave giant piles of fish on the shore to rot, and eschew all other jobs, including fish cleaning, as they seek to make the piles higher. Fishing should at least be a lower-priority job, and it would be good to allow the same dwarf to handle both fishing and fish cleaning depending on which looks more urgent.
• Groundcover blocking sand and clay access is kind of non-obvious and unnecessarily annoying. I get it that sand and clay are kind of overpowered as it is, but having them blocked by a bit of floor fungus doesn't make much sense. If your dwarves can clear the groundcover away by making a dirt road there without requiring any tools, they should be able to automatically clear a tile of groundcover within a sand or clay collecting zone in order to get at the sand/clay.
• Cooking all your plants and then running out of booze ingredients is a common pitfall. There should probably be some extra mechanic implemented to prevent this. For instance, instead of toggling 'cook' vs 'no cook' for each plant, there could be a limit so that the plants are only cooked above a certain threshold (e.g. if the limit for sweet pods is 20 then your dwarves only make dwarven rum as long as there are at least 21 sweet pods available). This way, the threshold could be set to some appropriate default value (like 10) at the start of each embark, and most noobs wouldn't have to worry as closely about what to do with their booze ingredients until they learn more about the game. (Similarly, cooking of booze should be disabled by default.)
• Constructions sequences could be improved. Right now, if you try to build a corner of wall at the edge of a cliff, what tends to happen is your dwarves build the two sides of the corner first, then suspend the actual corner piece because they've blocked their own path to that tile. This seems fairly obvious once you see it happen, but it's kind of annoying and silly. It doesn't seem like much of a stretch for the game to detect this and sequence the construction orders correctly. Additionally, dwarves will build constructions off the sides of bridges even when they have no support, causing instant cave-ins. Again, this is just silly and dwarves should have enough common sense not to do it.
• The fact that constructed floors block constructed walls, while natural floors don't, is very counterintuitive and makes construction of aboveground buildings more annoying than it needs to be.
• Fruit-picking dwarves getting stuck in trees is annoying and there should be some better way to handle it. (I don't do a lot of fruit-picking in my games, but last I heard this was still a problem.) Either dwarves should simply climb or jump down from the trees, or some other dwarf should come along with a fresh stepladder to get the stuck dwarf down. Having them sit up there dying of thirst is kind of silly and unrealistic.
• Dwarves not collecting corpses from outside by default is counterintuitive and the menu for finding this option is non-obvious. Usually players want to collect corpses so they can be entombed or disposed of (and at the very least, kept away from their dwarves' innocent eyes), so either this should happen by default or there should be a more straightforward way of recognizing that it needs to be turned on.
• Trees opening up holes in the ground when logged is a non-obvious way to completely compromise your fortress defense. I would suggest either removing this mechanic entirely, or having trees automatically fall when the tile below them is dug out (and preventing any new trees from growing directly above an excavated tile; saplings there would simply die like they do in 1-Z-level-high rooms).
• The inability to designate a bin for trading if it is currently being hauled by a dwarf doing a job is kind of annoying, and rather mystifying if you don't know what's going on when you see it.
• It should probably be harder to accidentally trade wood to elves. Sure, veteran players all like to piss off the elves and start a glorious war against them, but a player trading for the first time is just going to be frustrated when they try to trade the elves 30 perfectly good stone trinkets in a (wooden) bin and get slapped in the face. In particular, the fact that obsidian short swords qualify as wooden items is utterly non-obvious. One way or another, this mechanic can be made more player-friendly.
• 'Recover wounded' should be a much higher-priority task. Seeing a dwarf lying unconscious and bleeding out while the rest of the fort ignores him in order to make cheese faster is not only unrealistic, it also makes the player feel more helpless with regards to caring for injured citizens. Similarly, doctors should probably attempt to care for sick dwarves even without a dedicated hospital zone. Again, this is realistic (how many medieval doctors had purpose-built hospitals to work in vs attending patients at home?) and makes the player feel like something is at least being done to keep their dwarves from dying.

I'm not saying all of these are game-breaking or even close to it. But the compounding effect of so many counterintuitive mechanics can be more off-putting than any one of them is on its own. (When one or two things are counterintuitive, players can focus their attention on those; but when everything is counterintuitive, a player is more likely to just give up.) Wherever there's an easy fix to make something work in a more intuitive way, that should probably be done. Even if this leaves a few problems not attended to, those will come across as more manageable to players. Of course, the more integral a particular mechanic is to gameplay, the more important it is to get into good shape for new players. For instance, a problem with minecarts will usually be much less important than a problem with booze production. Debugging and mechanic-fixing efforts should prioritize the things that every player is going to have to do in their first few forts.

Regarding tutorials: Personally, I don't like tutorials very much, and I don't think Dwarf Fortress is very suited to them. I've seen them done badly many times, and I often see them used as an excuse for not fixing bad gameplay or a bad UI. Having intuitive game mechanics and an accessible UI does way more for a game than having a tutorial. Aside from obvious UI improvements and ingame guides, the one thing I would recommend in place of a tutorial is some sort of 'noob embark finder' that automatically searches the world map for really good beginner embark locations (warm, forested, non-evil, non-savage, away from goblins and necromancers, have water access, etc). Even a 'noob world generator' (makes small worlds with no werebeasts, vampires, necromancers or evil regions, and plenty of islands away from the goblins) might be warranted.

[Alapaga]

I have to say, I love this game, and I watched a lot of people play it, and have played it myself a lot.

I have a few positive things to say about Dwarf Fortress. It is a game that doesn't "show you the way" and I love that aspect of it. There are very little games like that where you don't feel like the game holds your hand while you learn to deal with it's mechanics and inputs, and even fewer that would have such a complex interface. Gamers that gravitate towards Dwarf Fortress and stick with it draw satisfaction from discovering how to do something themselves, despite it not being obvious at all. Of course i'll be watching a tutorial about how to solve an issue if I can't figure it out myself, and I had a lot of joy watching other people play over on youtube and twitch. Some of those people that showed me the ropes of Dwarf Fortress I would consider as friends, and the Dwarf Fortress community is great for this.

In order to appeal to a newbie, a game doesn't necessarily have to be accessible. At this point we will have to just assume that this is still the direction the devs wanna go, and that the community aspect, and eventually the modding community will play a role in bonding the players that chose to play Dwarf Fortress.

How do you save the newbies? Well you don't, they don't need to be saved from this game. The interface could be more intuitive, the menu  more fleshed out, some systems reworked (i'm looking at you millitary system). But Ultimately the choice of a player to "stick" with this game only depends on how much time are they allowing themselves to fail before they succeed. This is a parameter that was very common on older gen games (i'm talking 1980 nintendo and arcade games) because of the limitations of the hardware at the time. Starting over a game because you failed was normal because there were no ways to save the game back then, and that also kept people playing over and over again so as to "complete" the game, with no obvious hints or tips about what went wrong in their last run. Now Dwarf Fortress has the benefit of being an "endless" game, especially fortress mode, and it is a scary proposition. The only measure of how successfull a fort is is how many years did it last, and comparing that with how long the last fort you played lasted. That's also a subjective measure considering the embark would not be exactly the same, and depending on wether both forts are on the same world or not, the previous fort's dwarves could be the new fort's migrants. Hopefully, the player is gonna progress from learning about the game's mechanic as they go, and it would help their forts last.

The issue that new people have with Dwarf Fortress is hinging on that instant gratification that they get from other games, that is very common in newer games that are very popular. Dwarf Fortress have to rely on players having their own goals, and setting new goals as they go. And these two ways to play games appeal to different people. Other games have succeeded in bridging that gap, by having set objectives, timed events, achievements, side missions... all these things can help new players that are missing a goal feel more "involved" in the Dwarf Fortress experience.

I think I drove a few points home, thanks for reading me if you got this far, have a :cookie: on me. Bay12Forums Strike the earth!

[Robsoie]

For a new player i think  an ingame tutorial would be for the best, as you can't expect someone that would be very new to DF (and very likely coming from more modern games and UI ) that will see the menu and interface system to then go spend hours searching a wiki, reading some detailled steps by steps gameplay explanations or watching some long letsplay video to get the hang of it . Most of them will just give up and go play something else.

An ingame tutorial with the player being active during it would certainly be a formidable help for a new player to easily get the hang of the menu system and the gameplay.

the fps is also another important problem .

When a fort is getting low fps , it also mean that everything takes age to be done, dwarves move very slowly, even simple designed works or basic hauling takes a very long time to be completed and all those events that makes the fort alive can then takes an overly very long time to happen (invasion, traders, visitors, etc).
Everything takes so much time to happen that it become a great way to be bored and just quit, new players aren't really going to get hooked when the fps get low.

On a fort with good fps, it is just great to see your dwarves working, there's some sense of urgency that positively build tension while waiting for events to happen, basically you get the "i just want to play one more month to see what's going to happen" , no boredom , just fun

[Zarathustra30]

*More* ability to micromanage, surprisingly. A lot of newbs need fast options to solve a single problem.

• There should be a way to order individual items to be moved, other than dumping.
• ALL jobs should have the ability to be prioritized.
• Citizens should be able to be chained/caged. Some other citizen should still have to collect/free them.
• Raising bridges should be able to be opened/closed by a mechanic without connecting a lever.

These would help resolve a lot of the early problems (and some of the late ones), and, in my opinion, don't violate the Dwarf Fortress "philosophy" of each dwarf doing their own thing.

[Putnam]

Hello as a newb here is what frustrated me, still frustrate me in no particular order:
- sound / music as well, you cannot expect noob to use soundsense.

(this is planned, at least)

A tutorial is badly needed. You're dropped into the game with a cluttered menu, no direction, and no idea how to even dig.

this is already planned--this thread is really about saying what a tutorial needs, I gather, not that it's needed.

Anyway, a tutorial for something like this is... probably difficult. What I, in my ignorant experienced-player opinion think a tutorial should have, is a checklist of everything a successful, long-term fort needs, perhaps in order of priority, but not locked off. Entering any individual part of the checklist takes you to a tutorial on how to do that.

[armads]

Moving the game from "given away for donations" to "sold in a storefront" comes with some significant expectations that do not attach to a freeware product. I understand that the developer doesn't like long sessions fixing bugs. Neither do I. Unfortunately, if they're not fixed when and where possible then they only metastasize, and I want to see the game succeed, not get panned hard as it rolls out the door. I know not every bug will be a good candidate, but there are some real nasty ones that vets never really question any longer, because that's how long they've been around!

I honestly feel this is a really really important thing to recognise...

Actually... going to agree, much as I don't want to.  Having been involved in many early access Steam releases, the newcomers are often shockingly brutal in their reviews.  DayZ comes to mind, and that was only 5-6 years.

As much as I said, many of my own complaints boil down to this. I love df, and have lots of great memories of it, but the bugs absolutely kill a lot of the game, especially because you never know what is a and isn't a bug, meaning you have to search through forums and the wiki and hope that someone has written something about it. While I love new content, I'd much rather the game work as intended first. As the op said, many of the bugs have been around a decade or so, and are way, way overdue to be fixed. I get the argument that 'fixing bugs now will just cause them to be rebroken when we add more stuff' but honestly? more often than not things are just broken worse as time goes on.

My biggest fear with a paid version of df is that people are going to go 'there's an adventure mode and a fort mode, neither work correctly and are riddled with bugs, the ui is a mess, and the game expects you to like this.' and while many of us, myself included, are going to buy it when it's launched, your average person isn't going to put up with things that we the faithful do.

Because at least in the steam universe, there are lots of games made by one person that work as intended. That argument won't work when you put it out for people to buy. Honestly, the worst thing that happened to df imo was adventure mode, because it split work on the game between two modes that don't really work all that well together. Absent adventure mode, most of what happens in fort mode could be simulated without having to actually generate physical infrastructure for it all. Fort mode and adventure mode are really two games, and probably should be two games at this point.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Adventurer was there at day 1. It's actually easier to argue that without Fortress Mode getting in the way with all its technical limitations, DF would be a fantastic game. As it happens, it has both so it is a unique project that will always be "under Construction" and should be honestly sold as such (with graphics, music an improved UI and a tutorial).

Tons of people already enjoy the game and pay for it. No reason others won't.

Also what's "going on sale" is a graphics set and music DF package. The game is still free for those who don't feel like it's worth paying for.

[DG]

...I suppose that was a mediocre attempt at de-stress :p. I don’t know whether it was needed.

I think it was, saved me from doing it. 

=====

I'm probably too far from my noob stage and my playstyle is too OCD to valuably help the aim of this thread, but I can remark on this (mostly because I've been waiting to ptw):

It should probably be harder to accidentally trade wood to elves.

Making things easy to overlook and thus cause problems has been perhaps the main philosophy behind adding "difficulty" to the game from very early on. They want things to go wrong to cause drama and fun. It's a purposeful design decision to make it easy to accidentally sell wood to elves even when you don't want to and are well aware that you shouldn't. You are free to be aware of it and play around it, but the game design still hopes that you will slip up from time to time for plot.

There are many such examples that I think are holdovers from when DF was a much less sophisticated game with the aim of forcing bad things to happen, no matter what you do. The "dug too deep" game over is long gone but the general philosophy behind it is still there. There's not so much force now, instead there's stuff like hoping a noble will change their mandate and a now suddenly illegal trade good leaves the map on a wagon. Or how a dwarf can be attacked in sight and earshot of other citizens but you will only know if you are already zoomed or notice that a new report is available. The game could pause-zoom-announce like it does if a titan appears on a map corner where no-one can see it, but it doesn't because there are parts of the game designed to go wrong from lack of player attention.

DF has over the years very slowly moved away from certain in-game problems. Lack of shells killing moody dwarves in early forts is an example. There was a wiki entry that advised players to mod cows to produce shells when butchered. I think that other such problems have lingered for years because they are the blunt-force plot tools meant to cause drama. Irrational noble demands for stuff that doesn't even exist, can't be made or even imported could have been patched out years ago. I suspect that noble demands were looked at but on balance it was decided more important to keep the mechanism in game to cause problems. Note that even if you can meet the mandates, the game design hopes you miss the message alerting you to them. You don't design something like that, or have dwarves needing family that are offsite, or leave food preferences as they've been for so long etc etc without a certain philosophy of what the game is about.

The many old pitfalls like trading wood to elves were put in for a reason. Maybe the first few times it happens, depending on the player, it can be fun. After you've played for a decade the novelty is gone from such mechanics and it's just something to keep in mind. That's why the Villain Arc is exciting. It should signal the pivot away from the need for any of what I see as artificial-but-purposeful-user-interface induced difficulty. Villainous plots can cause trouble with your elven neighbours rather than you scouring the trade screen but still missing a bronze goblet that was studded with wood.

The game is slowly evolving and I think that the early dev mindset behind such mechanics will inevitably change, too, simply because they won't be required. Maybe some of the stuff Tarn and Zach will need to be reminded of from time to time because they've been baked into the game for so long. It stands to reason, as they don't and most likely can't play like players do.

[Mechanoid]

Having played Dwarf Fortress during the 2D era due to reading the Boatmurdered community game on the Something Awful forums, I've gone through the entire scope of learning how to play the game in 2D and then through the changes to 3D. There really wasn't the amount of community help, wiki space, youtube videos and individual knowledge about the game back then as there is now... But I managed, in part due to prior videogame genre experience and not necessarily because of available tutorials. I may have forgot the specific hang-ups I suffered in my first playthroughs, but ultimately I continued to play Dwarf Fortress because it was something I wanted to play and wanted to learn to play... So, I can safely say that: Someone who has no patience for learning will be a lost cause when introduced to Dwarf Fortress.

Reading through Boatmurdered again: New players will absolutely take choices that will result in "bad" outcomes. These outcomes may become "unfun" after a series of defeats to the point where a player may begin to suspect Dwarf Fortress is nothing more than a simulator for destroying hope and crushing souls. If the player is actually going to learn how to play the game, they have to be held back from making and taking the absolutely suicidal choices of figuring out how the game rules work by trial and error. The best tutorials prevent these kinds of suicidal tendencies from happening.

Tutorials should be:

• Advised to be required for best experience but ultimately optional so the advanced player isn't forced through remedial classes
• Able to load near-instantly so the player doesn't spend an eternity generating a new world to play in
• Replayable, in any order so they can redo any section until they feel competent
• Searchable for specific subjects so they will be able to jump immediately to what they want to know
• Summarized as text instructions so they don't have to actually play through the tutorial to be reminded what's going on
• Able to prevent the player from committing suicide in every way possible. except in the case where they need to die in order to demonstrate being undead ("The tutorial where you die.")
• Exposing how the game works at a fundamental level, for EVERY aspect of the game so that no stone is left unturned and no one bugs Toady with bug reports that an NPC "lied" to them about the location of an artifact (when being lied to is actually a story feature)

The last point is the most important: If the player does not know the fundamental workings of a system, how can they be expected to master it?
How does a dwarf die from starvation; better yet, how does hunger work? How does farming work? How does building construction work? How does skill assignment work? How does menu navigation work? -- How do hotkeys work and why should the player be using the keyboard 9 times out of 10 compared to the mouse? And how do inconsistencies in hotkeys change how the user experience (UX) feels when they press a key they think should work but doesn't?
Each of these questions appear seperated from one another, but anyone who's played Dwarf Fortress long enough knows I've just described an actual flow chart of actions that do happen in the regular gameplay loop, even if the player isn't always aware of it. When a player asks a question "Why are my dwarves starving?" they've actually asked several questions at once. It could be that they've physically blocked their dwarves off from their food with a locked door, or their dwarves are crippled and can't reach it, or their food is forbidden due to dumping, or their food stockpile has rotted because the stockpile wasn't actually storing food because, or they are producing food but not enough, or because, because, because...

• Start with hotkeys and basic concepts behind menu navigation and keep the controls consistent so that they're not switching constantly between 'umhk' or '2468' or '-+/*' or 'hjkl'. Tell the player if the mouse works on those screens!
• Identification of symbols or tileset images so that the player will know at least the appearance of a dwarf, a floor tile and a wall tile.
• Comprehension of game space and dimensions; 2D and 3D spaces being able to allow the player to visualize in their mind's eye what is actually above and below their character
• More symbol ID and more meaningful game menu navigation (inventory) being able to distinguish why that dwarf is blue and why that dwarf is yellow and how to put a box inside a bag and then wield the backpack the box is inside of and equip on a sock from inside the bag
• Building player knowledge and skills outwards from basic concepts so that the player will master adventure mode well enough that they can understand the world when they enter fortress mode, and have some mental fortitude when the nobles are shouting at them to not export leather caps and the sheriff is beating people about it (which should all probably get its own set of tutorials)

If I was personally tasked with creating a Dwarf Fortress tutorial, I would honestly avoid stepping into Fortress Mode until the player was fully familiar with the symbol ID, world space, path finding, and other very essential behaviors before... setting a werebeast upon a starving unarmed fortress of 20.

Lastly:
Test test test test test the tutorials WITH OTHER PEOPLE. Long-time players of Dwarf Fortress will never get you the authentic "noob" experience random people on the street or in a library could offer. (just ask for permission and don't be annoying)

[thompson]

A simple thing you could do would be to ship a default world with the game with a party that has already embarked but hasn't done anything yet. The wagon should be loaded with just about every material and item the player might need (bags, barrels, food, drink, querns, floodgates, tables, weapon racks, doors, seeds, nestboxes, rope, buckets, charcoal, wood, iron, stone, blocks... You get the idea). Essentially, the noob won't need to worry about prerequisite workshops or industries to get anything done and can just dig and build stuff. After a few years once they run out of initial stuff they'll need to start setting up proper supply chains, but by that time they should at least understand the interface and core gameplay.

Also keep the embark threat free.

[voliol]

I agree with Mechanoid on most points, the big exception being trying to redirect the players onto Adventurer mode when they want to play Fortress mode. I do like my share of both, but you really can't force the  player to play one mode over another, and honestly, they are both quite difficult to parse.

I'm going to reintroduce an old philosophy that I have seen too little of in this thread, namely that "losing is !FUN!". And learning through losing is also !FUN!. However, not knowing at all how could even prevent that losing, is not fun. Basically, the biggest problem is not new players losing to starvation, werebeasts and forgotten beasts, it is when new players lose to starvation because they didn't know how to set up a farm, and werebeasts and forgotten beasts because they didn't know how to set up a militia, and use that to attack the beast. Because a werebeast . As long as things are not out of your hands. It is also because Dwarf Fortress is an incomplete game, with a set amount of troubles. Teaching how to deal with all those troubles down to the detail means there is less game, or at least less "early-game". The satisfaction of having managed to deal with something due to learning is also lost, if you are prompted with the solution before encountering the problem.

A good (DF) tutorial should not:

• Teach about "hidden features" in detail. This is of course the HFS, but also the caverns (as they are now, you can't expect most players to dig down to them in their tutorial game), vampires, temple curses, and enemies climbing walls. Of course, these still need to be prompted so the player understands them, and most of them also are, at the moment. As long as the player knows of the tools to counteract them, even if they realize it first post-!FUN!, the player should not quit.

A good (DF) tutorial should:

• Tell that "hidden features" do exist. This way, the player does not feel cheated when they encounter something yet seen (a Werebeast as opposed to the bear of the militia tutorial), as they have been warned.
• Teach the basic controls. This one is obvious, but it cannot be stressed enough that learning to dig, make stockpiles, look at things, make workshops, and build workshops and furniture is all kind of complicated, and no one will get to the !FUN! parts of failing if they fail at these. During the teaching of these, some kind of "safe mode" should be on. You don't want your dwarves to starve before you figure out how to dig into a wall, and need to start all over again. Possibly, this "safe mode" could be gradually turned off, so that dwarves do need to eat after you set up a farm.
• Tell the player why something isn't possible. Why doesn't the miner mine? Because there is no pick? Because no one has the miner labor assigned? Because the miner was crushed by your wood-cutter's logs? I know you've been thinking of implementing a system that would tell the player that, and I think it is a wonderful idea. It really would be helpful post-tutorial as well, but I digress.
• Be optional. Old players won't want to be forced going through a digging tutorial.
• Let the player choose their own pace. This is of course tied to the previous point, but goes further than it. The crime menu and tutorial, or the health care, minecart, or raid tutorial, should be left for the player to "discover" by themself. They are all these parts of the game, that need to be tutorialized for the player to understand, but that aren't 100% essential to get a noob-fort up and running. Because of this, there is no need to force the player into taking these tutorials, before they feel like doing them
• Have a check-list of (un)completed tutorials. A more concrete wish. What I imagine, is first a skippable basic tutorial, that teaches you all you need to uphold a noob-fort (+the militia, because getting attacked by something without one can be really unforgiving), and then releasing the player into free play, with a few tutorials scattered about. After completing the basic tutorial, you should be met with a "Congratulations! You are now free to play however you want!" message and a checklist for more features to learn, and where to find them. Optimally, this check list would be divided into three parts:
  
  • Basic tutorials: These are the ones the player already went through in the basic tutorial mode. They should all be checked off, if the player didn't skip the it. They are here because this way they can be easily "re-played" (though perhaps without a "safe mode" on).
  • Intermediate tutorials: All these things any fort will want sooner or later, but are too lengthy/complex/unessential to be part of the basic tutorial. The metal industry should probably top this part, but others are the healthcare, trading, c-screen, and crime screen
  • Advanced tutorials: Things that a fort perhaps does not really need, but can be useful none-the-less by those who take time to learn them. Minecarts, advanced militia functions (i.e patrolling), water dynamics etc..
• Have some achievements related to it. Trust me, Steam players (and possibly itch.io users, but I don't know much of them) love their achievements. Having an achievement for 1. finishing the basic tutorial, 2. finishing the intermediary tutorials, 3. finishing all tutorials (including the advanced ones), would be a motivating factor for making sure people go through these tutorials, sooner or later.

Oh, and regarding Mechanoids last point, I believe we have to remember that Dwarf Fortress won't appeal to random people in the library (even though the concept of introducing it to them compels me), or even all gamers. The target audience of this thread is all gamers nerdy and patient enough to want to play Dwarf Fortress in the first place, but were turned away by certain aspects of the game. So perhaps the testing group should be people from some gaming subreddit, who willingly sign up as interested in trying it out? With a step of sorting out the already avid players, of course.