Hello everyone.
I am Sugardust, and I come bearing a gift for all you like-minded masochists like myself who actually enjoy the dreaded light-mode for some applications. A Dwarf Fortress color palette which transforms your game from this dark and dingy grimdark fun simulator, to a bright and eye-piercing grim..bright? fun simulator.
Sugardust's Cartographic Color Palette
This color palette is based on a similar bright-mode palette developed by reddit user u/PentagularDark, and posted 2 years ago in the Dwarf Fortress subreddit. The post got some minor attention for it's use of bright colors, as opposed to the majority of color palettes, which are nearly all dark-themed. Many users in the post stated that it was actually good despite being a bright-themed palette, but the background color was a bit bright and some text was hard to read. Many people waited for a possible update by the original maker addressing some of these issues but one never came and the palette was abandoned.
I have been tweaking the palette for my own use for the past while, and thought it would be nice to share it with everyone here, seeing the apparent lack of any good bright-themed color schemes. Some changes I have made have been changing the background to be a more cream/beige color to help with reducing eye-strain and providing readability to brightly-colored fonts on screen. Some colors such as greens, blues, and yellows have also been darkened to again reduce eye-strain and provide some easier readability without needing to squint (most of the time, cyan can still be somewhat hard to read. I have had trouble finding a replacement for it.)
Finally, it should be noted that this color palette has been entirely created using the taffer 9x9 tileset, found here -
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=107924.0. There is a minor problem I believe, for users of the default Dwarf Fortress curses_640x300 tileset however, where tree trunks don't seem to want to display. I have absolutely no idea why this is, and it may just be unrelated to the color palette altogether, as I don't use the default tileset at all. So I recommend using a similar ASCII tileset if you use this palette.
Some screenies:
(Using a slightly older version with a brighter background)
In my opinion, this palette really shines in displaying menus and world screens. Dark-text on a bright background is far easier to read in my opinion, and even brightly-colored font can be read reasonably well (except cyan, but it's almost always a single sentence if at all.) Smoothed walls look to be almost drawn, and brown especially matches well with the background.
One last thing to note is that white-colored items in game just would not work. So things like marble, white sand, rock salt, etc have been changed to a shade of black. It sounds horrid at first, but it's the only drastic change made to the default colors (other than the background of course.) Here is an image depicting a white sand and rock salt wall to demonstrate the change:
This is all I got to present to you all today. I hope you like it and I am of course open to discussion about things that could be changed. Have fun everybody!
The Palette
[BLACK_R:232]
[BLACK_G:225]
[BLACK_B:195]
[BLUE_R:38]
[BLUE_G:139]
[BLUE_B:210]
[GREEN_R:103]
[GREEN_G:140]
[GREEN_B:0]
[CYAN_R:37]
[CYAN_G:140]
[CYAN_B:131]
[RED_R:220]
[RED_G:50]
[RED_B:47]
[MAGENTA_R:211]
[MAGENTA_G:54]
[MAGENTA_B:130]
[BROWN_R:138]
[BROWN_G:105]
[BROWN_B:0]
[LGRAY_R:135]
[LGRAY_G:148]
[LGRAY_B:148]
[DGRAY_R:88]
[DGRAY_G:110]
[DGRAY_B:117]
[LBLUE_R:123]
[LBLUE_G:174]
[LBLUE_B:230]
[LGREEN_R:141]
[LGREEN_G:166]
[LGREEN_B:84]
[LCYAN_R:122]
[LCYAN_G:207]
[LCYAN_B:194]
[LRED_R:247]
[LRED_G:106]
[LRED_B:106]
[LMAGENTA_R:241]
[LMAGENTA_G:134]
[LMAGENTA_B:170]
[YELLOW_R:224]
[YELLOW_G:156]
[YELLOW_B:20]
[WHITE_R:0]
[WHITE_G:43]
[WHITE_B:54]
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Topic: Sugardust's Cartographic Color Palette (Read 5955 times)