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[Telgin]

Some maps are so choked with trees that they legitimately are just in the way.  I keep having to cut them down to make space for above ground constructions in my current fort since I'm building an aboveground castle.

Which is fine, but that interacts kind of badly with elven tree diplomacy and wildlife agitation.  Recent experience makes me more worried about agitation than the elves: based on my observations with DFHack, with the default settings if you cut down more than 5 trees a year you're building up more agitation than it decays and it only gets worse if you're also fishing.  I don't have the game open right now but I remember that the settings page implied you're supposed to lose 2,000 agitation per year by default, but it's only 500 at the end (or maybe first) of the year.  Makes me wonder if it's supposed to apply that much per season and it's broken.

At least in my current fort I've only been accosted by small agitated animals that even my kids can kill, but I'll never forget the unending conga line of agitated giant hamsters, flies, and opossums from the last fort that were very deadly.

[mikekchar]

FWIW, I cut down lots of trees and I've never experienced any agitated wildlife.  But I don't embark in savage areas.  I think the biome adjusts how agitation works.  Maybe try some calmer biomes?  Also, I pretty treat fishing as broken :-)  I don't want one of my dwarfs continuously fishing (who needs that much fish, anyway).  So I've never done that.  In my current fort, I'm trying out hunting and I'm expecting agitated attacks, but so far none have come (I ran out of bolts pretty quickly since I embark with just peasants, to be fair).

[Telgin]

You may be right about the biome impacting it, actually, since I had to cut down a lot more trees in this embark to get to that point.  I previously assumed that the biome only influenced what you got, as part of its normal rotation on the animals that wander onto the map.

[Blue_Dwarf]

Agitated wildlife only exists in savage biomes.

[Goldbeard]

[b... pain points that were extremely frustrating:[/b]

Getting dwarfs to do specific tasks

It sounds like this is worse in Steam than it is in older versions. Not that older versions were exactly direct, but there were routes to brute force a particular task to completion faster than you describe.

Ideally this means there's a route to improving the Steam version. Although I note that some of the current issues are tied up with changes to to the jobs/labor system. My vote would be to restore the old functionality around jobs instead of roles, but there may be a third route I'm not aware of. Also, full disclosure, I'm actually still playing 47.05 in ascii after only a very brief try of Steam, so I'm possibly no longer the target demographic.

Prioritizing construction

Yeah, you really should be able to use the 1-7 priority scale for construction the way you can for designating mining, plant gathering and other tasks. This seems like a straightforward, high return quality-of-life improvement to make to the game.

In the meantime you should be able to get a weak effect by keeping non-urgent other jobs at 5-7, but that still runs up against workshop tasks.

Station and Build orders should disregard enemies

No, and even hell no. As a personal preference it's defensible and coherent, but it's not the universal value you make it out to be.

A midpoint compromise though would be to let a player in Fortress Mode take control of one dwarf at a time. Then you could drive that one around to pull levers, pick up socks, build walls in the face of invasion, etc. Between Fortress and Adventure mode it seems like the tools are all there, but possibly the architecture isn't.

I refused to use Therapist and I had a bad time

Yeah, that'll happen. Therapist is easy to install, intuitive to use, and the gains are all from time/efficiency not from hacks, cheats or edits. And it's been around long enough it might even be at least an allowed-for part of the play experience, if not originally intended.

[mikekchar]

Telling individual dwarfs to do specific things was never part of how DF was intended to work, as far as I know.  It has always been the case that dwarfs were supposed to have some agency and that the "overseer" was only able to organise at a high level.  It's specifically different than other colony management games in that respect.  I think the *real* problem (from that perspective) is that the dwarfs don't have enough agency (i.e., they don't do anything reasonable, most of the time, if not told what to do).  My understanding is that this is where the focus of development activity will go (i.e. making dwarfs smarter about getting things done).

In the same vein, Tarn has specifically said that DT is *not* how he envisions managing dwarfs and that he does *not* want to do it that way.  Far from it being the "originally intended" behavior, it is exactly the opposite of the behavior that he wants.  That's why the new labor management moves *away* from assigning individual jobs.

I understand that this in not the answer than some people want to hear.  Personally, I think things are going in the right direction, but completely respect that other people think the opposite.

[aradar]

One of my pet peeves it's slowly driving me crazy is is the way fire Acts I mean I know I can turn temperature off but that seems like a pretty lame way to fix it I mean rimworld has a perfect solution for fire getting out of control it just puts it out after about 5 seconds I mean I don't know how hard it would be to just throw in an if statement that says if x amount of tiles have fire then just start raining or put them all out.

I just don't feel like there's ever a reason that the entirety of the map should have to light on fire

I mean I'm perfectly fine with large fires and I'm perfectly fine with them destroying large amounts of stuff but I just it's crazy when you got these maps with millions of tiles with tons of z level and all of that can light on fire I mean I'm playing a game right now I went from high 80 fps to low 20s FPS and why because that fire started on the opposite side of the map for whatever reason and half the map was on fire by the time I noticed.

Just feels really immersion breaking and I don't know just feels wrong that I have to change settings to mitigate a fire instead of the fire just going out on its own.

And sometimes fire just doesn't even make sense fire won't jump across the two tile channel but it'll jump across the four or five six tile river that just doesn't make sense, also steam/gases can sometimes light thing on fire lol  I'm fairly sure steam/gases doesn't work like that but it is pretty hilarious

And to be fair in vanilla dwarf fortress you probably will never run into many issues regarding fire there's not many things that actually make fire but when you start modding and doing weird things with temperature it just it gets unwieldy really quickly I'm working on a mod now that extensively uses temperature for a ton of things and fire mitigation is one of my biggest problems

[Putnam]

Steam/gases absolutely work like that and, in fact, are pretty much what fire is?

Large-scale fires aren't a performance killer, it's all the pathing recalculations in question. Rimworld's solution is anti-simulationist, at least so far as you described it, and yeah, the performance issues are bad, but one could just as easily mark large swathes of the map as "definitely inaccessible due to fire" or whatever and get just as good of performance gains as preventing fire in general. Neither's easy, though.

[aradar]

Steam/gases absolutely work like that and, in fact, are pretty much what fire is?

Large-scale fires aren't a performance killer, it's all the pathing recalculations in question. Rimworld's solution is anti-simulationist, at least so far as you described it, and yeah, the performance issues are bad, but one could just as easily mark large swathes of the map as "definitely inaccessible due to fire" or whatever and get just as good of performance gains as preventing fire in general. Neither's easy, though.

Neither is easy that is true ♥️
And what you say about rimworld is also true but sadly I've never seen rimworld crash or freeze because fire started somewhere on the map I've seen it slow down and I seen giant tracks of land get lit on fire and I've seen giant amounts of my stuff get burned up in fires but I've never seen a gigantic performance loss or a crash like dwarf fortress does sometimes 😍fire is primal in df it just goes until nothing is left 🤣
But I mean the steam/ gas is hilarious, steam maybe could catch something on fire because steam requires heat to make it but gas is on the other hand there are inert gases and gases don't spontaneously explode and by definition fire is heat fuel and oxygen

But at the same time you say rimworld is anti-simulation and in the same breath say the way to mitigate fire in dwarf fortress is to completely halt the simulation of the fire through the means that dwarf fortress gives you ♥️♥️😍 why not let the game handle it in a smooth non immersion breaking way, like burn out after  a total % of tiles are destroyed by it.
I mean it happens in nature a big fire can create a giant rain storm and then the rain storm in turn puts the fire out it's weird but it happens. 😍 It's funny but dwarf fortress simulates that fire never runs out of oxygen never runs out of fuel and never runs out of a heat source.😍 Some big fires go out because they're so big they use all of the oxygen in the surrounding area that they just can't support fire anymore this isn't true in dwarf fortress simulation because oxygen is infinite and heat sources infinite once a fire starts 😵😔

I mean if that's a simulation of a real fire I think the world would have been gone eons ago to the very first fire while fire just spreads infinitely and consumes every single thing that it comes into contact with that's an organic I'm pretty sure the Earth would have burn to Ash a long time ago LOL

And fires always been a painful destructive force in this game since it's very inception I remember playing this for the first time on an old 386 Pentium computer back in the day and when a fire started my computer would crash because it would run out of ram trying to run all the fires LOL computers have come a long way now now I see 12 million fires and three FPS until I turn temperature off LOL

Dwarf fortress simulates a lot of things realistically very well but I don't know to me fire just seems like it's being simulated in a very fantasy type way.

Either way I still love the game completely and I love fire too it's just so primal you got to be very careful with it

[Putnam]

Your point is still "it is unrealistic for fires to burn down whole swathes of land", which... no it isn't? It really, really isn't. Entire cities and forests have burned down many times. The fuel's the plants on the ground, the oxygen comes from the air, and yes, inert gases can carry heat. This is something that happens in real life all the time. The game's designers are positioned in the pacific northwest, which has massive wildfires thousands of times as big as any DF embark every single year lately.

[xzaxza]

It's worth mentioning that I'm not playing the game using DFHack or Dwarf Therapist or any other third-party utilities designed to make the game more playable. It's cool that these kinds of tools exist, but fresh players from Steam probably aren't going to want to install additional stuff just to play the game they just bought, and if tools like this exist to solve problems in the base game and have been adopted by the community in widespread fashion, the base game should probably evolve and fix those problems anyway.

Yep, but the fact they exists kinda suggests that nobody is holding their breath waiting for that to happen.

Anyway, did you try DFHack yet? Avoiding a better experience just because seems silly.