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[Shonai_Dweller]

Worth noting concerning the pop cap feature: you can currently expel dwarves from your fortress on a whim, so that should be the ideal technique for now.
Is it possible to have dwarves homestead a hillocks for now, or is claiming or embarking near a hillocks all that can be done presently? I believe there was also a feature to send dwarves "out to pasture" at a hillocks, anf to bring them back too.

Existing hillocks will link themselves to you economically once you build up some wealth. In addition your civilization will found hillocks near your site in the same way. You can send dorfs there and call them back with a messenger. They tend to be just s stressed as when you first sent them...
Or you can send them to some place you've conquered, or just send them into the wilderness.

Then there are weird cases when the local Dark Pits or bandit camp "link themselves to you economically" which is representative of black market activities and other such not yet implemented goings on.

Nice! Getting these features added to the tutorial would definitely be a good idea, as managing populations has always been something you couldn't really do besides "keep up with the influx".
Being able to reduce migrant waves by sending them back definitely has some significant gameplay implications with respect to that, and probably should be one of those things that just about any player should add to their repertoire. I know the population issues have gotten to the point where players would sometimes construct in-site deathcamps for unwanted professions.
The FPS implications are pretty clear as well.
That said, being able to control population attraction in-universe, by making your fortress politically more difficult to join (being able to force migrants to use the petition process, being able to expel visitors (can we do that yet?), and so forth) would definitely be helpful as well, as managing who gets in by expelling one-by-one could get to be too much as well.

The only way to get rid of visitors that are already present is to kill them or wait until they leave (it is possible to use DFHack to get them to "head for the forest"). You can obviously change the visitor settings to reduce the number over time (apart from the monster waves of artifact seeking groups that can exceed the visitor cap with a single huge group. This was reduced in an earlier release, but still happened in 0.44.12 [I had a group of something like 63 with a visitor cap of 50, and a handful of current visitors]).

Also a single bug is making immigrant control through expelling difficult right now. You can't expel someone right now if their spouse or child is living elsewhere (that's an awful lot of dorfs these days). Not intended behaviour (meant to just check if babies are being carried into battle off-site somewhere).
https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=10848
(Ha, just noticed, in the current version, the bug doesn't occur if a male dwarf's off-site children were born out of wedlock. female dwarves still get the same bug).

[cyrohound]

I love this game and am glad you guys are trying to expand the playerbase. I've been a player for a long time, but I remember being a newbie. I think the big things that would really help out the newbies are as follows:

• Make things like werebeast and megabeast attack qualifications available as options in the normal world gen, and default them to "beginner". The advanced players change a ton of options in world gen from the defaults anyway, so this should just be an option next to savagery or large creatures in the options. For a new player, werebeasts and mega beasts are a problem not because they exist, but because a player has to either learn several in game systems to combat them. They either need to learn about using invincible drawbridges as gates, or learn SEVERAL systems, including forging, getting fuel, managing equipment, drafting a military, and activating said military into attacking something. For a newbie already struggling trying to learn how to feed, make basic crafting stations, house, and make booze for the dwarves, that's a tall order.
• Make fey, mysterious, etc. moody dwarf mechanics clearer for new players. Veterans of DF already know what all the moods mean, asking for "shining bars of metal" just confuses new players. The fact that dwarves can ask for generic cloth and then still go insane because they specifically wanted silk instead of the hundreds of pig tail cloth lying around is also confusing to new players. I think there should also be an option for players to save a valuable dwarf that enters a mood, and has no hope of that artifact being completed due to lack of certain materials on the map.
• Make things like stress and tantrum spirals have noticable symptoms long before they happen, and make ways for the player to consciously alleviate these without individually going to each dwarf to do it. Maybe you can throw wild parties for all your dwarves once in awhile, or create site based Dwarven holidays every year where no one works and certain events happen. Maybe there's a dwarven fishing, sculpting, or arena style brawling contest where the winner gets a masterwork stone ring or whatever. Maybe there are fun games and the winner gets a masterwork dwarven roast for winning.This is especially true for dwarves where the causes of their stress cannot be remedied because, for example, their family does not live with them and they live on a boring volcanic island where nothing ever attacks and the two existing military squads have literally NEVER had a serious engagement. Which happened because the player (me), totally forgot that seiges don't happen on islands and most evil beings worth worrying about cannot swim across the ocean. So suck it up UristMcStressed, because your life will be boring compared to the idiots getting sieged on the mainland, and you had best get over it now.
• Make a tutorial for each absolutely necessary system, and yes that 100% should include the military. It doesn't have to be super in detail, the player should be able to learn things by themselves. However, part of the reason newbies have trouble is that basic but necessary systems for making a stable fort are difficult to grasp. Again, making a working military is a prime example of this. I watched several videos before I even had a basic grasp of how the military worked.
• Maybe later on after the basic stuff is taken care of, the game is out, etc. allow doctors or priests to treat some of the conditions that can ravage a fort.We live in a world with Necromancy and gods where a legitimate strategy for taking on any threat in this universe is to close the gate and ignore the threat until it goes away. Why are things like werebeast infections, the conditions and poisons that some mega beasts throw around, and other random environmental or evil weather conditions incurable?

[Shonai_Dweller]

I love this game and am glad you guys are trying to expand the playerbase. I've been a player for a long time, but I remember being a newbie. I think the big things that would really help out the newbies are as follows:

• Make things like werebeast and megabeast attack qualifications available as options in the normal world gen, and default them to "beginner". The advanced players change a ton of options in world gen from the defaults anyway, so this should just be an option next to savagery or large creatures in the options. For a new player, werebeasts and mega beasts are a problem not because they exist, but because a player has to either learn several in game systems to combat them. They either need to learn about using invincible drawbridges as gates, or learn SEVERAL systems, including forging, getting fuel, managing equipment, drafting a military, and activating said military into attacking something. For a newbie already struggling trying to learn how to feed, make basic crafting stations, house, and make booze for the dwarves, that's a tall order.
• Make fey, mysterious, etc. moody dwarf mechanics clearer for new players. Veterans of DF already know what all the moods mean, asking for "shining bars of metal" just confuses new players. The fact that dwarves can ask for generic cloth and then still go insane because they specifically wanted silk instead of the hundreds of pig tail cloth lying around is also confusing to new players. I think there should also be an option for players to save a valuable dwarf that enters a mood, and has no hope of that artifact being completed due to lack of certain materials on the map.
• Make things like stress and tantrum spirals have noticable symptoms long before they happen, and make ways for the player to consciously alleviate these without individually going to each dwarf to do it. Maybe you can throw wild parties for all your dwarves once in awhile, or create site based Dwarven holidays every year where no one works and certain events happen. Maybe there's a dwarven fishing, sculpting, or arena style brawling contest where the winner gets a masterwork stone ring or whatever. Maybe there are fun games and the winner gets a masterwork dwarven roast for winning.This is especially true for dwarves where the causes of their stress cannot be remedied because, for example, their family does not live with them and they live on a boring volcanic island where nothing ever attacks and the two existing military squads have literally NEVER had a serious engagement. Which happened because the player (me), totally forgot that seiges don't happen on islands and most evil beings worth worrying about cannot swim across the ocean. So suck it up UristMcStressed, because your life will be boring compared to the idiots getting sieged on the mainland, and you had best get over it now.
• Make a tutorial for each absolutely necessary system, and yes that 100% should include the military. It doesn't have to be super in detail, the player should be able to learn things by themselves. However, part of the reason newbies have trouble is that basic but necessary systems for making a stable fort are difficult to grasp. Again, making a working military is a prime example of this. I watched several videos before I even had a basic grasp of how the military worked.
• Maybe later on after the basic stuff is taken care of, the game is out, etc. allow doctors or priests to treat some of the conditions that can ravage a fort.We live in a world with Necromancy and gods where a legitimate strategy for taking on any threat in this universe is to close the gate and ignore the threat until it goes away. Why are things like werebeast infections, the conditions and poisons that some mega beasts throw around, and other random environmental or evil weather conditions incurable?

1) A list filled with hundreds of options before a new player ever gets to play is one of the most off-putting things you can do. I quit Dwarf Fortress first time I tried it because the LNP did exactly that.
Next time I tried vanilla. "Create New Wordl" - What could be more simple than that?

2) Please don't dumb down the game, no. It's called challenge. Consult a wiki if you don't understand or don't want to think about puzzles in a puzzle mini game.

3 and 4 sure, but basically that's how the system is supposed to actually works. Run a decent fortress and dwarves will find enough to keep them unstressed. Needs more work though, as you say, you end up checking individual dwarves, at least for the needs system (not that needs lead to tantrums so it's not really that important).

[takatana]

Tutorials are a bad idea, son.

Not only do you need to take the time to make them now, you also have keep them up to date with every subsequent release. That means the amount of dev time spent on these tutorials compounds over time. So your hypothetical v80 or v100 gets pushed back more and more the earlier tutorials are added.

And anyway, the more fundamental problem is the UI, of course. And what the tutorial would look like depends 100% on the state of the UI. Since the brothers are already planning on overhauling the UI, it seems to me to be a waste to develop tutorials for a UI that's going to go away anyway.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Tutorials are a bad idea, son.

Not only do you need to take the time to make them now, you also have keep them up to date with every subsequent release. That means the amount of dev time spent on these tutorials compounds over time. So your hypothetical v80 or v100 gets pushed back more and more the earlier tutorials are added.

And anyway, the more fundamental problem is the UI, of course. And what the tutorial would look like depends 100% on the state of the UI. Since the brothers are already planning on overhauling the UI, it seems to me to be a waste to develop tutorials for a UI that's going to go away anyway.

You...know it was Toady who first raised the idea of a tutorial for the Steam release, right?
https://www.pcgamer.com/tutorials-and-mouse-support-could-make-dwarf-fortress-on-steam-vastly-easier-to-play/

It's a development arc specifically focused on improving the looks and accessibility of the game. Why on earth do you think they can't do both UI and tutorial?

[Erendir]

This is not quite a gameplay complaint (rather UI).

Another very frustrating thing is, my dwarf (or animal) is blinking with some symbol or another. So, something important must be wrong with him, especially if it's a red "!". I would really expect to see "what the hell is going on" immediately in "v"-view, or at most in status ("v"-"z"). Instead the reason for blinking can be found anywhere. TIL v-w shows "Stressed", but not v-z-h (despite both labeled "wounds"). I guess it is the reason for blinking red "!" -- it would be nice to know for sure without looking wiki up though. I looked in the "?"-help, couldn't find it.

[Quarque]

The fact that

- Cooking plants is enabled by default
- There is no warning that cooking destroys seeds
- The kitchen menu is hidden away under Status

together introduces a nasty noob trap. Everyone is going to run out of food without understanding the reason, until they have done research on the wiki.

[darkhog]

What would be a good way to address the above is to make cooking plants produce seeds (a lore reason could be given that the seeds makes the resulting meal taste bad or whatever so dwarves are just deseeding plants before cooking). That would make it more intuitive as other stuff related to plants (eating them directly, producing alcohol from it) also produces seeds.

[JesterHell696]

On the issue of large migrant waves I thought for a while that potential migrants should be beholden to the petition system, the player/overseer should be able to evaluate migrant groups and migrant groups themselves should be more coherent with themselves, by which I mean families travelling and moving together rather then single family dwarf moving to a fort with no family and then being sad that they have no family in the fort, or families petitioning to migrate to the fort as a family, no taking that legendary weaponsmith but not her 5 kids and fisher dwarf husband.

[Shonai_Dweller]

On the issue of large migrant waves I thought for a while that potential migrants should be beholden to the petition system, the player/overseer should be able to evaluate migrant groups and migrant groups themselves should be more coherent with themselves, by which I mean families travelling and moving together rather then single family dwarf moving to a fort with no family and then being sad that they have no family in the fort, or families petitioning to migrate to the fort as a family, no taking that legendary weaponsmith but not her 5 kids and fisher dwarf husband.

Immediate family do travel together. And in case the migrant wave isn't big enough, they show up in later waves. The only times they don't is when they're busy being kidnapped or in noble positions elsewhere. (And maybe mercenaries, but that's fairly new). And you have to banish them all in one group if one of them becomes troublesome.

[iceball3]

On the issue of large migrant waves I thought for a while that potential migrants should be beholden to the petition system, the player/overseer should be able to evaluate migrant groups and migrant groups themselves should be more coherent with themselves, by which I mean families travelling and moving together rather then single family dwarf moving to a fort with no family and then being sad that they have no family in the fort, or families petitioning to migrate to the fort as a family, no taking that legendary weaponsmith but not her 5 kids and fisher dwarf husband.

Immediate family do travel together. And in case the migrant wave isn't big enough, they show up in later waves. The only times they don't is when they're busy being kidnapped or in noble positions elsewhere. (And maybe mercenaries, but that's fairly new). And you have to banish them all in one group if one of them becomes troublesome.

The question of it would be beholding them to the petition system specifically, so you can turn them away all together without having to concern yourself with later members reuniting their way in on an existing migratory acceptation decision.

[Stadfradt]

I've been playing maybe about three months now. Assuming I understand this thread correctly, here are a few things that I'd like to see addressed:

1. Change the up/down navigation from -/+ to -/=. It's a huge PITA for me.

2. Pick one menu-navigation key set and stick with it; e.g., telling the outpost liaison what I want only needs one set of navigation keys.

3. Add a "do this job now or I will strip you of your clothes and send you to fight a forgotten beast naked" option for ALL tasks. It's effectiveness can drop with use, or some such, to make it more realistic.

4. Allow the player, through the manager screen, to prioritize jobs to whatever level of minutiae seems appropriate. If I put in a non-standing order for rock pots, I want its priority level to be higher than almost any other job; sometimes I want hauling to be a priority, sometimes not, and a real manager would be able to make that happen -- with more or less effectiveness depending, &c.

5. Make the manager more useful. Think about this for a sec.: I'm effectively the Lord High Expeditionary Master leading my plebs to build a new colony. I set out the bedrooms, make production decisions, design the fortress, hire & fire, etc. A good manager would keep me apprised of the state of my dwarves along with options that might help. "Boss, Urist McFleabag is pretty depressed. He likes ducks, free one up for adoption, or put him in the kitchen because he likes cooking," or "Boss, you need keep an eye on our seed stocks. You need get your quern a-workin'." I'm off-the-charts ADD even when I'm medicated, and even when my eyes aren't watering from trying to read the individual description screen, I can't remember the first "becomes distracted" by the time I'm on the third. Also, redesign that screen to be more readable.

6. Put descriptions in the Designate (d) menu. I can't remember which trees are alder or oak and which are fruit. Culling my trees is absolute murder for me. Same for pretty much everything else.

7. I'm terrible with faces: I can't tell one miner from the other. Having the v-menu put names on the screen would be a big help.

8. Force Kruggsmash to make an instruction video on burrows. I can schedule my military, even pick out their ammo for them, but I'll be stuffed if I could figure out how to use burrows.

9. Cherry is salmon pink, not brown. Ash is very light brown, almost an off white. Oak is either reddish-brown or grayish-dark white in N. American species. Garapa is mustard colored. Ipe is greasy green. Walnut is chocolate brown. Alder is light brown. Cedar is whiteish or reddish, depending on the species. Adding a wood color palate, for lack of a better term, would be very pleasing to the eye.

That's all I can think of off-hand.  ^_^

[Putnam]

-/+ expects you to have a keypad, which, yeah, is kinda a PITA.

The manager is... extremely useful, what you're suggesting is more of an advisor, which, yes, would be extremely helpful and I'm all for it.

v-menu does put names on the screen. They're right above all the options.

Color palates are basically planned for the steam release. Right now, you've just gotta make due with the 16 colors available.

[darkhog]

Well, you can edit keybindings yourself (and I in fact did) and you can also set alternative keys for the same action (because keybinding system in DF is flexible) so it could be done by default that it has BOTH -/+ and -/= for up/down nav.

[Stadfradt]

-/+ expects you to have a keypad, which, yeah, is kinda a PITA.

LOL. I'm left-handed. I rarely ever use or even look at the keypad. Never even occurred to me.

The manager is... extremely useful, what you're suggesting is more of an advisor, which, yes, would be extremely helpful and I'm all for it.

The first thing I produce is a chair for the manager. Most important dwarf in the game. But, yeah, some sort of proxy for the sort of communication that goes on in a small operation.

v-menu does put names on the screen. They're right above all the options.

I'm guessing that I should have said "map" rather than "screen"...? It's the ADD again, I literally cannot remember which dwarf I was just looking at when navigate to another dwarf. It's probably one of the reasons why I find a ten-dwarf fort to be the ideal size -- if I could just get it to work. I'm sure there's plenty of downsides to names on the map, but it'd be a boon to people like me.