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[Bumber]

10m x 10m x 10m would be 1000000000 cm^3, not 100000. 10m is 1000 cm, 1000^3 cm^3 is 1 billion cm^3

I forgot that 1m³ != 100cm³.

[Enemy post]

It's a minor issue, but it might be good to automatically disable the "percentage beasts dead for stoppage" tag on the smallest world sizes in advanced worldgen. It makes it impossible to generate a world older than 30 years with those settings unless you know the problem and disable it.

[Seabream]

Hi, I'd definitely call myself a noob since I have probably less than 10-15 hours in this game. First of all, just wanted to thank you and Toady for making this amazing game and providing to everyone for free. It's definitely unlike anything else I've played and I can tell it's special. 

I find that I really want to get deep into the game and sink my teeth into it but there always a couple of things that frustrate me into giving up. This doesn't have anything to do with the difficulty in terms of the challenges the game throws at you, such as early werebeasts, since I just consider that part of the learning process of the game. At any rate, I have a lot of patience with difficult and "unfair" scenarios since my favorite genre of game is roguelikes, and I consider grappling with and losing to such challenges to be part of the fun of the game.

However, it's always the more technical issues that make it difficult for me to keep playing, such as bugs. The biggest one for me are the marksman issues; to this day I still have no idea how to make them pick up the right arrows and train. The military overall is kind of incomprehensible to me and that's usually where I give up... I don't really understand how to make archers work or how to parse the military UI.

Overall, it can feel that it's hard to do basic tasks in a way that feels as if you're fighting against the game interface and controls. I notice that quite a few people in this thread are getting pretty passionate about this topic, and I think that's because they care about the game and want it to reach its full potential. Dwarf Fortress has the potential to easily be the greatest video game ever created, but it can feel held back by technical aspects like bugs, UI, controls, and some counter-intuitive/inscrutable mechanics. Obviously it's your creation, your baby, and you guys can and should develop it as you like, but I really think that the game would benefit from putting a temporary hold on new content and instead going through the existing base game and polishing everything.

Thanks again for creating this incredibly deep game.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Archers really need a tutorial. They really do actually Just Work if you get them right. Watching my guys right now pewpew at the archery targets with wooden training bolts before skipping off to learn about dodging. Just earlier they were in an enclosed space shooting bad guys with steel bolts through their fortifications. Beautiful.  And all automated, no micromanagement at all except to switch them to siege alert when needed.

I mean, sure they don't know any tactics themselves besides "charge and club with crossbow". But that's more of a missing feature than a bug.

[PatrikLundell]

Archers really need a tutorial. They really do actually Just Work if you get them right. Watching my guys right now pewpew at the archery targets with wooden training bolts before skipping off to learn about dodging. Just earlier they were in an enclosed space shooting bad guys with steel bolts through their fortifications. Beautiful.  And all automated, no micromanagement at all except to switch them to siege alert when needed.

I mean, sure they don't know any tactics themselves besides "charge and club with crossbow". But that's more of a missing feature than a bug.

I believe you when you say you can get marksdwarves to work reliably under the conditions you've prepared for. However, the amount of work required to cover all loopholes the morons can slip through to fail to work are just far too many, un- (or counter-)intuitive for it to succeed with a reasonable consistency unless you've polished your setup to a spotless shine, which is very far from where newbies are.
The single change that would probably make the most change would be to somehow prevent X-bow dorfs from suicidal charges, but I don't know how much work that would take (adding a general squad tactical option of "hold your ground" that would be enabled on pure X-bow squads by default [or all missile troops individually] would help a lot in that respect [and would be useful for melee troops as well, although you'd inevitably get bug reports of "my militia just stands there while the gobbos kill them with missiles", and "the gobbos attack one of my militia members, but the others just look and don't help"], but again, that would require development time.
A good set of instructions on how to set things up with spoiler type expansions containing explanations of why would probably help a lot for those who found and bothered to use those instructions.

[Shonai_Dweller]

It's a minor issue, but it might be good to automatically disable the "percentage beasts dead for stoppage" tag on the smallest world sizes in advanced worldgen. It makes it impossible to generate a world older than 30 years with those settings unless you know the problem and disable it.

Advanced worldgen doesn't need noob guards. That's why it's advanced worldgen. Instructions and warnings perhaps, but not automated safety nets. They couldn't possibly take into account every possible mod tweak that an advanced user might make before running advanced worldgen.

[wierd]

A more detailed explanation of what the knobs DO from the Toad might be useful all the same though.

For example, what the X-Y variances actually DO.  We can surmise some of what they do by playing with them, but unless you are skilled with IDA PRO, and want to take the game apart, getting the skinny on what it actually does is concealed by the degree of factors making it impossible to fully isolate impact.


Much of the knobs in there are like that.  They can have fun effects, but it's kinda like pulling levers blindly.

[Shonai_Dweller]

A more detailed explanation of what the knobs DO from the Toad might be useful all the same though.

For example, what the X-Y variances actually DO.  We can surmise some of what they do by playing with them, but unless you are skilled with IDA PRO, and want to take the game apart, getting the skinny on what it actually does is concealed by the degree of factors making it impossible to fully isolate impact.


Much of the knobs in there are like that.  They can have fun effects, but it's kinda like pulling levers blindly.

Yes, instructions. Copy the clear guide from the wiki into an in-game help. That would be good for most everything in the game.

[Apollofunghi]

Hi. I've bounced off Dwarf Fortress every couple of years, starting back on one of the 2D versions, and never getting more than a couple of years into a fortress before quitting. Here's some of the problems I've had with it;

On first time generating a world I was left confused about what a world rejection is and whether I should care about it (I think that version had unusually high numbers of rejections even with default settings, but even in the current release it still reads a bit like an error message)
While trying all the buttons on the Prepare For The Journey screen, I managed to embark with no skills or items. Maybe there's a Y/N confirmation before doing that these days?

I think my biggest problems though, the ones that detract from my ambitions to build an awesome fortress filled with interesting characters, are;

• Oversize migration waves that can double your population, or more. That might be a fun mid game challenge, or thematically appropriate depending on the state of your world, but it seems to be just default behaviour every time. It feels like I can't get started on any proper construction because I'm constantly playing catchup with housing and infrastructure for new arrivals, and it's hard to gain familiarity or sympathy with your dwarfs when they're provided in such numbers so cheaply. Plus, it exacerbates the second problem which is..
• The amount of faff needed to get anything done. What do we need to do, for example, to build a bedroom? We need to mark the space to be mined out; wait for a miner to show up and mine the space out; construct a bed and a door, and depending on how the timescales line up, possibly wait for that to complete; build the bed and door; wait for the items to be hauled and the building work to complete; and finally select the bed and designate the space as a bedroom. That's four interface actions, three wait periods, and lots of individual keypresses to do essentially one thing. Multiply by the number of rooms, add in every other task you need to do, and the game honestly starts to feel more like a chore

at least the devlog keeps me sufficiently entertained to keep coming back and trying again. Maybe next time hey?

[voliol]

@Apollofunghi 2. Seems like a very difficult problem to solve, as you don’t want to lose any complexity, nor any realism by making the dwarves ”magically” set up bedrooms all at once without the different steps being involved. Well, considering it is tedious for the player to set up each bedroom manually, even if it is just the right amount of work for the dwarves, having some workaround would be handy. I can imagine two solutions to this:
1. An auto-dig/build system. This of course is very tricky, and the player should probably need to restrict their dwarves somewhat, lest they wreak havoc by digging up all of the mountain for bedrooms, with no room left for your megaprojects.
2. Allow us to ”build” furniture that hasn’t been made yet/where they can’t be built yet. This would enable macros that fully dig and deck out rooms, instead of having macros for the digging and then having to manually set the furniture up. Building materials being searchable would also help for making better building-macros, as right now you have to worry about putting your artifact bed in some random dwarf’s bedroom.

Granted, neither of these solutions are that noob-friendly...

[PatrikLundell]

@Apollofunghi: If you approach bedroom construction as:
- Designate a bedroom to be dug out
- Wait for that to be finished, and then designate the construction of one bed and the construction of one door (which isn't needed, technically: dorfs have no concept of privacy).
- Wait for the bed and door to be constructed and then place it.
for every single dorf, yes.

You can, however, streamline the process a bit by:
- Order the digging out of a number of bedrooms (my standard structure means 20 per batch, but that's for low pop fortresses).
- Order the construction of as many beds and doors through the manager, or, as I do, have bedroom items constructed on repeat in the workshops (I want to eventually give everyone masterworks, but beds are placed as they're constructed and replaced later, with other furniture placed only when masterworks are available. The junk is disposed of via the garbage collector system [a.k.a. caravans]).
- Once in a while engage in bedroom construction/upgrade activities, i.e. place all the beds available in bedrooms (and, in your case, doors as well) designate bedrooms from all the beds installed since the last time. In my case I also designate masterworks furniture for installation (the crap bed is placed in one location and the final masterworks one in the center, allowing for a graceful replacement), removal of the old bed and designation of a new bedroom from the new bed when the masterworks bed has been installed. It's not necessary technically, but I typically allocate the new bedroom to the same dorf that just lost the bedroom.

While blueprint blocks would indeed be convenient (assuming you could specify/customize them to a "necessary" level of detail when it comes to item qualities, materials, rotation, and, possibly upgrade paths and priority orders), it's a lot of work to implement those and fix their bugs, and I don't think there' development time for that in the near-mid term.
Having the dorfs dig everywhere to make bedrooms would turn fortresses into the same kind of mess game generated fortresses are, and would interfere with essential infrastructure (no, there's no room for a well/cistern or the tunnels to carry water to it, because rooms block all avenues; no, you can't make a garbage/corpse disposal hole, because you don't have enough contiguous Z levels available, unless you want to make it an extra long haul away from everything else; Oops! Dorfs breached a cavern [or aquifer] with their room digging, etc.).

[Pillbo]

I think there's potential solutions to what @Apollofunghi pointed out without losing complexity or options. Some kind of system where you can designate multiple things at the same time, to be done in a specific order instead of waiting for something to finish them come back, then wait, then come back.

Why not the ability to: designate a space to mine, then designate 'smooth stone' on top of that to be done after (similar to the 1-7 priority designations). At that point you know the shape of the room so it's a matter of the player waiting or making orders that wait, if there was a Planning Mode type feature you could mark a place for a Bed, cabinet, chest and door; that furniture placement could just be auto-suspended and occasionally checked by the system until the furniture is available and the space open to put it. I don't think this would sacrifice any of the player's freedom or ability, but it would remove a lot of jumping back and forth to see if you can do part 2-∞ of a basic project.

The only problem I could foresee is when you dig into a cavern or something, but at that point it just seems like standard DF FUN situation which would just make it interesting.

This could be made even more friendly if the game asked if you wanted to queue an order on the managers screen when you place furniture you don't have. I think it should ask "You don't have any beds, would you like to order some? Press [Y] or [N]" then auto-open that mangers screen to the construct bed option and allow any custom settings/count be applied before jumping back out. That is, as long as the in game tutorial already showed the player how to assign a manger/workshops and make them work properly.

[Iduno]

Oversize migration waves that can double your population, or more. That might be a fun mid game challenge, or thematically appropriate depending on the state of your world, but it seems to be just default behaviour every time. It feels like I can't get started on any proper construction because I'm constantly playing catchup with housing and infrastructure for new arrivals, and it's hard to gain familiarity or sympathy with your dwarfs when they're provided in such numbers so cheaply.

I've been playing since z-levels were new, and I agree that this is a major problem. Migrant waves should be limited to a percentage (maybe 50 percent?) of your current population. Especially now that ghosts happen and dwarves mind when their friends are dropped into the magma because you don't have space or resources for them.

2. Allow us to ”build” furniture that hasn’t been made yet/where they can’t be built yet. This would enable macros that fully dig and deck out rooms, instead of having macros for the digging and then having to manually set the furniture up. Building materials being searchable would also help for making better building-macros, as right now you have to worry about putting your artifact bed in some random dwarf’s bedroom.

Even without the macros, this is a good idea. Prevent us from building a room having the miner show up a season later, then not remember what the room is even supposed to be a season after it's dug and you finally notice.

Doors aren't for privacy, they're for keeping room designations in one area and not overlapping. And occasionally locking up a dwarf who goes insane.

[Apollofunghi]

@voliol Yeah, there's a scale from 'micromanage everything at the finest possible detail' to 'automate everything until the player isn't needed', and there's no objectively best place on it for DF. It's just currently a little to micromanage-y for my preferences. I'd agree that any auto-build or -dig feature should allow the player to override the CPUs choices

@PatrikLundell that's pretty much how I do it, and yeah, batch designating does make it a bit more bearable. Even so, it's still enough to become an issue for me (which is possibly a me problem rather than a DF problem).
As for not placing doors, that just seems uncivilised

@Pillbo yes to all. There's material there for a good suggestions forum thread, if it doesn't already exist

@Iduno 40-50% seems right to me, with any larger waves accompanied by an explanation about why they're here. I expect this will get some attention with the fortress scenarios release

[PatrikLundell]

I'm fully in favor of restricting migrant waves to cut out the enormous waves. However, a mechanical application of percentage causes issues at both ends of the scale:
- 50% for the first few waves can be too little, in particular for dead civs that would be guaranteed to get a max pop of 15 (at most 3 in the first wave and 5 in the second and last wave with a 50% limit). Too small a number here leads to a slow start with each dorf having to wear many hats to cover all job types needed.
- 50% of a 200 pop fortress is probably too much for most people to consider reasonable.
Thus, if mechanical limits were to be applied, I'd rather have something like:
- The limit is the MAXIMUM number allowed for a wave. Any number less than or equal to this, including 0, can happen for various reasons (just a clarification, as it isn't a change from the current situation when the pop cap is used to provide a limit).
- A is the lower bound for the limit
- B is the upper bound for the limit
- C is X% of the fortress' current population.
- The limit is A if C < A
- The limit is B if C > B
- The limit is C if C is in between A and B
- A, B, and X would all be parameters that could be tuned by the player. The default setting might be A = 10, X = 30, B = 30.
With these values A would be the limit up to a pop of 33, X taking over to gradually allow for larger waves up to a pop of 100, where B takes over.
(I'd set A and B to 10, which matches how I currently change the pop cap to restrict waves).
Starting Scenarios may well include ones that either ignore these restrictions or default them to values deemed appropriate to the scenario, but as far as I currently can see (which admittedly isn't very far) it's quite possible this control mechanism could be retained with Starting Scenarios.
In some distant future you could very well have "events" that disrupts the expected behavior, such a the fall of a nearby settlement leading to a spontaneous influx of refugees.

Doors: Role playing is a very valid reason for doing things that aren't necessary technically.