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[Shonai_Dweller]

Make clothing size easier to know at a glance, for both adventure and fortress mode.
So you don't get confused between a breastplate sized for goblins and a breastplate sized for dwarves.

have a (F)ill function, for soil at the very least, that can allow the filled tile to be set to a 'subterranean' status even if it was exposed to sunlight.

Looking at a breastplate states that clearly. (And goblins and dwarves are the same size). And then in lists, "large" is too big for you (adventurer) or the main race of your civ (fortress), small is too small.

Need to add that to the stocks menu, but other than that, how would you tell "at a glance"?

While Shonai_Dweller is correct on the size issue brought up, the current small/large designations were sufficient before Visitors were added. Now I can't tell if this "Large Troll Fur Loincloth" is human sized, and thus usable by my human citizens, or Troll/Ogre sized, and thus just garbage (animal people sized items are largely irrelevant as far as I've seen, as the chance of getting those as citizens seems to be very low: I've seen less than a dozen visitors). Thus, the size description ought be replaced by race (which gets messy with long named ones, such as two humped camel men). However, that will likely cause some confusion to newbies, as they'd need to learn that goblin and elf size is good enough for dorfs (but they need to learn that anyway). I wouldn't mind of the detailed description of a piece of goblin clothing would mention that it would fit dorfs (e.g. "This is a loincloth made for goblins (usable by dwarves and elves as well)"). If the description modification would be adapted to the current fortress resident races and only mention those it might be kept down to a reasonable level.
It's possible to find the size of an item by looking at the detailed description, but it's very tedious to do that for hundreds of items gathered as a result of a siege cleanup.

While terraforming activities would be nice to have, they're not in the "Save the noobs!" territory.

Yes, that's exactly the issue. So I ask again, how would you make it simple to spot "at a glance" (without a wall of incoherent text)?
It's more likely to look like a noob-scaring mess of text. What is this "Demon of Eros sized Nightmare of Noobhall leather thong" (repeat for every item of clothing...).

Maybe a toggle on the stocks screen to list clothing in size order, handy for the more advanced user who actually needs to sort out clothing for their many non-dwarf citizens, but hidden from wall-of-text hating noobs?

[PatrikLundell]

:
It's more likely to look like a noob-scaring mess of text. What is this "Demon of Eros sized Nightmare of Noobhall leather thong" (repeat for every item of clothing...).

Maybe a toggle on the stocks screen to list clothing in size order, handy for the more advanced user who actually needs to sort out clothing for their many non-dwarf citizens, but hidden from wall-of-text hating noobs?

The stocks screen is fairly useless for that purpose, as you can't actually make useful decisions there (unless it's a metal item that can be melted. [I don't consider dumping to be useful here as there's no ability to filter dump actions into targets, nor any in-game way to know when everything has been dumped]. This makes the dump target basically a static setup, although it could be used for garbage disposal, I consider it too valuable for that). Stockpile settings is an obvious place, and the interface where you select what to haul to the trade depot is another. A possibility when looking at a pile of items might be a display setting that allows you to use the current Small/./Large and fit for mash-named race (using DF's string compression), with a toggle to select a fortress/party member race where possible instead of the actual one to save you from having to look up the sizes of odd races.

[Rekov]

Something that could be useful would be to disambiguate some workshop commands like "Mill plants" into more specific commands like "mill plants to flour", "mill plants to sugar" and "mill plants to dye"

There are probably other similar situations that I'm not immediately thinking of. The bottom line is, "the noobs" should not have to set up stock pile feeds in order to differentiate between different tasks at a workshop.

[PatrikLundell]

Something that could be useful would be to disambiguate some workshop commands like "Mill plants" into more specific commands like "mill plants to flour", "mill plants to sugar" and "mill plants to dye"

There are probably other similar situations that I'm not immediately thinking of. The bottom line is, "the noobs" should not have to set up stock pile feeds in order to differentiate between different tasks at a workshop.

Makes a lot of sense as a UI rework target (as well as the not exactly newbie ability to expand the jobs to specify "d"etails that your dye making job is to target e.g. Sliver Barb).

[Rekov]

Another thing that's slightly tangential to this would be to finish getting all of the plants over to the growths system. This would mostly help modders IMO, not noobs, but even for the noobs it's awkward when you have "brew drink from plant" and "brew drink from fruit", where cranberries are fruits because they're growths, but fisher berries are plants because they're still on the old system.

[PatrikLundell]

Another thing that's slightly tangential to this would be to finish getting all of the plants over to the growths system. This would mostly help modders IMO, not noobs, but even for the noobs it's awkward when you have "brew drink from plant" and "brew drink from fruit", where cranberries are fruits because they're growths, but fisher berries are plants because they're still on the old system.

While it makes logical sense, it's probably too much work for too little gain when competing for Toady's time up until the Premium release. That said, this change can probably be done with RAW changes only, in which case it should be possible for someone else (like e.g. Rekov ) to do the work and post it as a Suggestion. That might increase the chances of it being accepted before the agriculture overhaul due sometime in the fairly distant future. Note that there are significant bugs in the growths system, so any rework will have to work around those.

[Rekov]

I suppose I could take a crack at that, though at a certain point I couldn't just mechanically convert old plants to growth plants. I would have to make creative decisions, like just which growth of a rope reed is processed to plant? The leaves? AFAIK Toady wants to make the creative decisions himself

It would also require new reactions for milling, processing, extracting etc. plant growths instead of just plants, but that's doable.

[PatrikLundell]

This is my attempt to change the RAWs to work around the bugs with non farmable plants (that should be) due to various bugs: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=175374.0.

Note the bugs. You can't use growths that can not be eaten either raw or cooked as they won't be picked, for instance.

Yes, you'd have to make decisions, sometimes sub optimal ones due to the format restrictions/bugs, but stick to a few principles and describe them.

(For flax (which I have a little peripheral knowledge of) I'd extract the thread from the structure part, as that's where the fibers are (but if I was actually going to do the work I'd ought to read up on it). For rope reed, I'd suspect the structural part to be used for thread, but that would definitely have to be looked up. Cotton will likely be a pain due to the bugs/restrictions.

A sneaky thing that could be done with rope reed is to brew a growth and process the structure into thread, removing the frustratingly tricky issue to split dual use crops evenly between usages (as DF doesn't have any useful means to do so), but I'd consider that to be too far into the unnecessary creative territory.

I'd probably stick to the conservative side and change only what logically ought to be changed and that will work nicely after the change, and only consider odd changes when the current implementation is broken (cotton is an example where I suspect it's hard to get a logical change to work, and thus would be left as is).

[boogiemanspud]

This really is a tough one, we were all there once, but anyone hanging out on the forums were the type to get past the struggle so it's a bit hard to judge. I'd say maybe highly emphasize the bay12 forums, maybe even a popup at startup (able to disable it of course) similar to how Streets of Rogue does. Basically you want newbs to know that it's ok to not understand everything and we're willing to help out. Somehow without stepping on toes, make it known that we aren't the cesspool that steam is. Make it easy to report "bugs" even though I'd wager most things aren't actually bugs, just not understanding things. You don't have to understand everything to start playing. You learn as you go. Gaming is basically so oversaturated with choices that it makes people very unlikely to give a toughish game a fair chance.

The one thing I could say, maybe a tutorial, no idea how feasible, but maybe a tutorial scenario with no enemies just to get people used to beginner stuff like farming and learning designate, etc. Some way to include stuff like how stairs work etc. And always emphasize in the tutorial that we're happy to help on the bay12 forums. A lot of this stuff exists, so maybe talk to some of the folks who have made good beginner tutorials and see if they would be willing to make a tutorial map pack or something.

I'd say  whatever you do, don't get discouraged because while steam is almost a necessity to grow and reach a larger audience, they have a very fickle culture that's full of trolls. Depending on finances, it might even be worthwhile to hire a few people to respond to bug reports or other things.

[PatrikLundell]

This really is a tough one, we were all there once, but anyone hanging out on the forums were the type to get past the struggle so it's a bit hard to judge. I'd say maybe highly emphasize the bay12 forums, maybe even a popup at startup (able to disable it of course) similar to how Streets of Rogue does. Basically you want newbs to know that it's ok to not understand everything and we're willing to help out. Somehow without stepping on toes, make it known that we aren't the cesspool that steam is. Make it easy to report "bugs" even though I'd wager most things aren't actually bugs, just not understanding things. You don't have to understand everything to start playing. You learn as you go. Gaming is basically so oversaturated with choices that it makes people very unlikely to give a toughish game a fair chance.

The one thing I could say, maybe a tutorial, no idea how feasible, but maybe a tutorial scenario with no enemies just to get people used to beginner stuff like farming and learning designate, etc. Some way to include stuff like how stairs work etc. And always emphasize in the tutorial that we're happy to help on the bay12 forums. A lot of this stuff exists, so maybe talk to some of the folks who have made good beginner tutorials and see if they would be willing to make a tutorial map pack or something.

I'd say  whatever you do, don't get discouraged because while steam is almost a necessity to grow and reach a larger audience, they have a very fickle culture that's full of trolls. Depending on finances, it might even be worthwhile to hire a few people to respond to bug reports or other things.

An in-game tutorial is planned, but hired help to fix bugs is likely out of the question, as DF is a two man project, with managing the artists probably being rather close to the limit of supervision they can stand. Directing people to the forum is definitely good, but it's usually better to have "bugs" being looked at by the forum rather than being reported directly to be bug tracker, both because it will reduce the amount of duplicate/incorrect report processing on the tracker, but even more because the forum is a much better place to get help with sorting out what the problem actually is, as it is caused by player mistakes most of the time. Unless there's an enormous influx of new players I think the current voluntary forum model will handle newbie questions just fine.

[Pvt. Pirate]

alphabetically sorted lists everywhere which automatically sort, even if there's modded content added.
also filters for lists:
-brewing ingredients
-cooking ingredients
-clothes and armor seperated!
-egglaying creatures
-grazing creatures

and if a list is fullscreen and there's no other layer of scrolling up/down, accept all possible up/down scrolling keys. (material selection in manager screen, symbol selection during embark or when selecting details for a job...)

[Inarius]

I learnt the game with a tutorial.  Something very well done, step by step. Do this. Use these commands to do this. Then do this. When you have finished, you should do this, like this. And then this.
All in all, the game was really easy. Of course my first fortress wasn't very inventive, but i still keep this layout as a model and still play like this for most of my fortresses, so I guess it was a good tutorial.

All of this to say that you can do tutorial. Ingame tutorial on the other hand is long, and a lot of work, and complicated I think.

[bloop_bleep]

Yes, the fortress mode tutorial on the wiki is fairly high quality. It should be a good guide for making other tutorials, including in-game ones.

[Shonai_Dweller]

All of this to say that you can do tutorial. Ingame tutorial on the other hand is long, and a lot of work, and complicated I think.

In-game tutorial is part of the Steam development arc. Toady talks about it in the PC Gamer article about the tutorial and in the recent podcast interview about the Steam development arc.

https://www.pcgamer.com/tutorials-and-mouse-support-could-make-dwarf-fortress-on-steam-vastly-easier-to-play/

https://literate-gamer.zencast.website/episodes/172

[Pvt. Pirate]

alphabetically sorted lists everywhere which automatically sort, even if there's modded content added.
also filters for lists:
-brewing ingredients <-> cooking ingredients
-clothes and armor seperated!
-egglaying creatures <-> and the non-egglayers
-grazing creatures <-> nongrazers
-pet <-> not pet
-trained <-> wild

and if a list is fullscreen and there's no other layer of scrolling up/down, accept all possible up/down scrolling keys. (material selection in manager screen, symbol selection during embark or when selecting details for a job...)

had to correct it. it doesn't help much if you have to assign every creature to one single big zone and then have to assign all grazers to the actual grazing pen afterwards and then pick out all the egglayers to assign to the nestbox zone and then free all the pets from those zones.
it's okay with ~20 animals, but after the third migrationwave, you definitely have too many animals to actually care about sorting them out manually.

so maybe an autoassigning option for the zone system would help too.
just adding all the above as options for a Pen/Pasture zone and all creatures will automatically be assigned accordingly.