Hi. I'm new to Dwarf Fortress.
I jumped in a couple of weeks ago, opting to skip the in-game tutorial and simply ask my friends questions if I hit any snags because we often hang out in voicechat together. I figured a combination of game experience from titles like Minecraft, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, etc would probably prep me with most of the basics I needed to play the game and overall that seemed to be a good foundation from which to understand Dwarf Fortress at a topdown level.
I binged the game for 2 or 3 weeks straight to the detriment of everything else and wanted to share how that went with the devteam. I hope this forum is the right place to do that.
The gameplay experience:My first two or three maps were short-lived, not because of any particular danger or tragedy, but because I was learning the controls with my friends backseating my gameplay, and I wanted to check out my options for different types of embark sites. I dug some holes, planted a handful of crops, abandoned some forts, and had several chances to laugh at the world generator's constant feed of goblins striking down dragons. After that, I started up a new world to see how far I could get.
Fort 01My first actual attempt at a fort landed in a desert biome.
A river bisected the map, and I opted to tunnel along the inside of the gorge that the waterfall had carved out to secure the entrance to my fort. For the entirety of this playthrough I missed out on caravan wagons - I figured it was simply a bug that I was getting a notification about caravans bypassing my site because they were still showing up with camels anyway.
Despite the biome being desert, highwood trees were abundant on the map (and spiraled out of control when left unattended, converting my sandy retreat into a flowery, grassy, shaded wood). I was able to negotiate with the elves without much issue and fended off my first few waves of goblin invasions with ease, but took a ton of damage from my first encounter with a lycanthrope. A visitor in my tavern transformed into a weregilamonster and harmed a significant subset of my population- I was not aware that this would be an issue until the next full moon, when seven more of them sprouted in various corridors of the fort and caused sweeping casualties on all floors.
Several lunar cycles later, they were cleaned up, but at heavy cost- as the mood of my dwarves declined, infighting and tavern brawls coupled with loyalty cascades from recruited visiting poets and entertainers left most of my remaining population perpetually hospitalized, and the fort eventually succumbed to llamas- not because they were hostile, but because my handful of still-standing dwarves couldn't butcher them fast enough.
The fort slowed to an unplayable crawl under the weight of my sheltered pasturing area, and as a last-ditch effort, I released a captured bronze colossus within the halls of my base in the hopes that it would do some population control for me- but it proceeded to equip itself with a hemp sock and accomplish absolutely nothing until eventually some of my visitors killed it in the library. At some point the single remaining noble became a weremouse so I sealed him in a room and was surprised that he refused to starve or dehydrate. Next fort.
The second attempt embarked at the edge of the mountains in a savage biome.
Reading through the wiki, I saw that there was a chance to encounter chinchillas and chinchilla men in such biomes- I did not see a single chinchilla the entire playthrough. I did, however, manage to recruit a cougar woman early on, and the fort's resident catgirl was assigned lever duty in the hopes that it would keep her out of trouble.
Like the previous desert fort, the map featured a defensible waterfall gorge, which I immediately overengineered with bridges, ballista emplacements, and a long kill hallway. During the fort's run, this hallway only saw enemies a handful of times, and the ballistas were usually completely useless because their operators managed to not be able to shoot in a straight line. Unlike the desert fort, this map was completely devoid of trees, which would end up being the lynchpin that drove the base to ruin later on.
Despite doing a much better job this time of managing my dwarves' happiness, I still had constant issues with tavern fights exploding out of control (tavern keeper bug, apparently), and opted to disable visitors being welcome in the base after these hallway skirmishes claimed the lives of both the fancy catgirl and the entire royal entourage- twice. I found myself in a situation where visiting nobles from different sites were starting fights with each other- I was on peaceful terms with neighboring civilizations, but they had ongoing fights with each other which would culminate in violence in my library and guild halls.
I broke into the underground cavern layer and was eager to explore it, but my modestly-armed-and-armored military was evenly matched with the spear-and-shield-wielding tribe of lizard men below. The lizard men would hang out at the water's edge and force my dwarves into combat in the water where they were often ganged up on in fights that were five-or-more on one, leading to a lot of combat losses and forcing me to lock the doors on the lower levels.
Not having wood from trees meant that I was trying to upgrade my equipment using charcoal from fungiwood logs from the caves, and each trip out to gather wood was beset with attrition kills from spear-wielding lizards. I attempted to carve out fortifications in the rock faces to combat them using marksdwarves instead, but ran into a heartbreaking bug involving my rangers standing still and dehydrating to death when joining an existing combat with any lizard that happened to stare at them.
Having succeeded in creating several large, slow-agonizing-death liability zones for myself, but not in removing hostile invaders, I started looking into other solutions to deal with the lizards, and ended up mining out a cluster of gems on purpose to release a demon trapped within- this was an extremely successful maneuver, but at some point the demon's pathing got screwed up and it just sat in the center of the map doing nothing, and I ended up sealing it inside my failed first attempt at a magma pump stack. With many of the lizards cleared, I had some time to harvest some fungiwood and get steel production and several magma forges online- the forge was built onsite at the magma after having to seal the demon in the intended magma-pumping route, and the long hauling times for dwarves to get down to the forges were an ongoing problem for the rest of the run.
During this time I was periodically harassed by forgotten beasts but all of them died quickly and accomplished nothing. Whether this was simply favorable RNG or not I am not sure, but at no point did any forgotten beast claim more than one or two kills- usually just wandering civilians out chopping wood or gathering webs. Attacks from lizards were ongoing and often resulted in much more damage, and with the fortified archer holes being totally useless, I attempted to drain the underground lakes instead so I could get a fair fight on dry land with my spear-wielding opponents.
This process was slow and I took lots of hits in the process, but several of the lakes got drained and I won in places where I could force engagements in shallow water. Near the edges of the map, draining the infinite water was not an option, so I pumped magma through the ceiling to drop onto those areas from above, which did an underwhelmingly small amount of damage due to the magma not burning through the fungus caps- very disappointing. Eventually I had steel production online, but the fort was now running so slow from the hundreds of invisible/ambusher lizard men populating the caverns that it just wasn't fun to play anymore. I retired the fort after filing some bug reports about various stuff I'd run into and started up a new one.
The third fort embarked next to the ocean.
This beach area was completely flat - the entire upper surface was a single z-level with two river deltas approaching the coastline. Opting to simply dig a hole in the ground where my wagon was, I went for a much simpler hallway design for the entrance to the base and lined it with two rows of cage traps. I was determined to not have problems with dwarven moods this time around, so from the outset I designed the base for constant misting. The 2x2 central stairway that acted as the spine for all other levels of the fort had grates in the adjacent corners which allowed river water to pour in from above, creating a perpetually-misted conduit which suppressed negative emotional outbursts from the population. This area was extremely mineral-rich, and the presence of trees on the surface coupled with abundant ores meant that steel production came online very quickly.
The ocean was sheltered from most of the conflicts on the main continent, and only a very sparse scattering of goblin forces ever showed up- all of which were easily dealt with. A necromancer tower near my location gave me some trouble the first time they attacked, because my steel armor was ready, but my weapons were not. One zombie in particular had a steel chainmail vest worn, and after my dwarves removed the zombie's arms, legs, and head, the flopping torso still managed to kill five dwarves because my army was armed with copper weapons and simply couldn't damage the body.
After over a week of kicking the corpse, it was finally no longer a threat, and as soon as steel weapons were manufactured, the offending necro-tower became one of my first successful missions, where their population of <10 necromancers was overwhelmed by around 30 fully-equipped and mostly-trained dwarves just a couple of years into the fort's run. With that out of the way, having established a safe place for myself where tantrums weren't going to cause infighting, I proceeded to raid everything else nearby on the map, rapidly acquiring as many artifacts as I could while continuing to expand the waterworks of the base below, drawing water from both rivers to feed misting systems in the barracks, guild halls, tavern, kitchens, and other areas. I noticed the misting system was replicating puddles of banana beer all over the base that won't go away. Weird.
Around this time, my population saw an explosion of puppies, all of which became war dogs. There were roughly 2.5 war dogs per dwarf, and meticulous assignment meant that they were mostly-evenly distributed among the population. This trend would continue for the duration of the fort- war dogs continue to provide the most immediate, tangible value of any asset in the game and have become a non-negotiable part of my playstyle. I'm glad the war dogs kept breeding, because the dwarven migrants stopped arriving- I don't know why. We get a yearly goblin diplomat instead now.
At some point my dwarves brought home a scroll that could turn dwarves into necromancers, but this ended up being more of a liability than an upgrade, so I used burrows to quarantine the remaining necromancer dwarves in their own wing of the fort, where I managed to reanimate a kobold corpse, which was not worth the effort- I thought it would be friendly (it was not). Speaking of kobolds, there were three of them- every spring during the rain they would visit to try to steal things, and when they'd get caught, they'd drop what they were holding. Something about this process created items that my dwarves were not able to pick up and haul back to the base, so there are lines of cabinets and anvils leading from my fort's main entrance toward the edges of the map where the kobolds have been approaching from. At this point I've simply accepted that cabinets are part of the terrain here since the dwarves won't put them back inside.
Not wanting to deal with the nonsense in the first cave layer after the previous playthrough, I tunneled past it immediately to see what the lower layers had to offer, and was sort of disappointed to find that the second cave layer had a lot of mud but was otherwise completely empty. Didn't spend much time looking around, kept digging until the next layer. Discovered crundles. I think they're cute and they haven't harassed me at all yet. I managed to dig deep enough to find gem-encrusted walls and strike my first adamantine vein.
By the time I'd made it to this point, the hours of backseating voicechat gaming had prettymuch spoiled all of the endgame aspects for me, so I knew that I had to be careful and micromanage my digging here or I'd be wiped out. At this point I have gotten into the habit of save-scumming because of the capricious nature of the game's RNG, so it has been a process of digging out one or two tiles at a time and reloading if dwarves do stupid stuff that gets them killed.
Not really sure what to do with the handful of raw adamantine that I've collected- I know how to use it, I just don't see much point in allocating it to anything at the moment. The fort's performance is slowing down. Immigrants won't arrive anymore and my population isn't large enough for the king to show up. I've removed all the trees from the surface and converted all of the grass to dirt roads in order to manage exponential tree spread above, but I think the lower cavern layers need to be managed, too, and I'm not sure if I can do that with my current setup, so I find myself in a weird stalemate- I figured I'd take a break from binging dorf fort to post here.
All three forts exported cut gems, the third fort also exported iron bars to supplement the gems if necessary. Most of the time, cut gems were more than enough to cover all of the imported goods in the entire caravan, whether I needed the items or not- I found myself deciding which items to keep based on the volume of hauling jobs that would be necessary to move things from the depot to stockpiles instead.
Having had a chance to give the game what I think is an honest try, I've got a bunch of feedback about it.
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.
It is also worth noting that I am choosing to avoid exploits while playing unless it is absolutely necessary, which means I am not abusing things like quantum stockpiles.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to mention most of this stuff, but it's probably worth mentioning all of it again anyway- I'm hoping that my "fresh blood" perspective will help highlight which things need to be prioritized to continue improving the game. It looks like a lot of people have adapted weird meta-playstyles to work around long-standing issues and in a sense have become numb or desensitized to some of the more important problems that take away from the experience.
In no particular order, here are some pain points that were extremely frustrating:
Dwarves leave random items in doorwaysThis shoudn't happen. If it does happen, removing the item from the doorway should be a high priority task, even if it's just scooting the item one tile away. Any dwarf going through any door that is item-blocked should automatically do this, the same way they retake doors used by invaders. Several of my doors have been stuck open for years because the game won't let me prioritize a hauling job. Cancellation of all other tasks + placing a burrow over a door with a dedicated stockpile designated to haul a single item is both obnoxious and ineffective.
Most of the time, dwarves don't build stuff even if I constantly cancel and restart the job. It's frustrating and clunky to have to cancel every other task in the entire fort to guarantee that something gets done. A task that is stale should steadily increase in priority until it is accomplished instead of being buried in the foreverqueue.
The presence of cage traps on the map drastically affects all other dwarf tasks. Their behavior is radically different (and much more efficient) without cage traps. I have not been able to nail down the exact problem, but it has something to do with re-arming, and once it starts happening, tasks get lost. This behavioral weirdness causes construction to not get done, ponds to not get filled with water, and garbage dumping to never happen. Cage traps are an indispensable part of the fort's defensive arsenal and they are currently breaking everything else - this should be a high prio focus of attention and fixes
Who designed this? You're fired.
Being able to choose combat targets across multiple Z levels would be nice. It works for unlocking items- why doesn't it work for combat? For burrows? Why can't I add to the existing selection instead of having to reselect everything I want dwarves to fight?
The way these conditions are set up puts you at a resource equilibrium to produce steel bars but doesn't actually produce any steel unless you change the settings, because they're all set to "greater than" instead of "at least"
Coming from Starcraft, if I tell a unit to go somewhere, I expect it to go exactly where I told it to go, regardless of whether or not they are in combat or doing anything else. Tactical retreat mid-fight can be extremely important. The station command is almost completely worthless because of how inaccurate it is, and dwarves often ignore it entirely. When dwarves do respond to the station command, they will not respond to further station commands until they finish their current path. This is an anti-feature, and it's so badly implemented that it feels malicious.
This was supposed to be a cool upgrade. All I got was more hostile zombies.
I have all of the item restrictions as strict as I can get them because if anything isn't set to forbidden-by-default my dwarves will waste weeks (if not months) of time trying to prepare for a raid by walking to the edge of the map, picking up a single bolt, realizing they're hungry, walking all the way back, sleeping, needing to refill the waterskin, etc etc etc - there needs to be some kind of "combat ready" supply stockpile for dwarves to select items from so they're not doing stuff like this. I thought this is what the armor stands and items being stored in the barracks was designed to prevent, but apparently all of that stuff is useless or something. Factorio has good systems for this with their logistics bot networks, and implemented a bunch of other similar features to DF at scale - maybe take some leaves from their book.
This is a combination of the station order's clunkiness and the item forbidding paradigm's shortsightedness, taken to the worst of both extremes
I don't want to wait a year for the lever to get built.
The game needs some kind of sorting or visibility option for disabled dwarves to make it easy to see which ones are fit or unfit for military service. Legless dwarves taking a year to crawl to the map edge to start a raid is not ok. Similar problems for wounded war dogs- why can't I unassign them if they're wounded?
This is slightly more understandable for things like catapults or trebuchets, but doesn't make any sense for a ballista. Fix it.
Take the search option for engraving memorial slabs, filter it for current living population, and put it in all of the interfaces where you select anyone for anything, please. Also, not being able to see who has dogs assigned already when assigning dogs sucks.
Fisherdwarves and other hunter/gatherer roles should have options to automatically stop doing that role if you already have a large amount of stockpiled fish, meat, plants, etc. to bring them into parity with work order automation.
Every single left third toe does not deserve its own unique tile in a stockpile, especially considering how many useless items are generated by teeth getting knocked out and limbs being strewn around. This is ridiculous and wasteful.
There's a myriad of examples, but the best one I can think of is tavern fights causing massive downtime for your whole population, just to leave them all infected and slowly dying, effectively wasting your time because RNG decided to. These constant and egregious overreaching negatives forced me into habitual save-scumming just to keep playing, which sucks. More on that later.
There isn't an intuitive way to tell the whole fort "put your discarded laundry here", which is a pretty big deal considering the amount of downtime every dwarf spends chasing new clothing when it becomes available. See disrespecting player time above.
The inability to retrieve corpses or items from bodies of water is an enormous oversight. Let us put these lazy fisherdwarves to use please
"Broker requested at depot" should not be a suggestion. Stop what you're doing, go to the depot, and stay there until you are dismissed. If a ballista operator can hang out at their ballista until they starve to death, you can hang out at the depot until I say otherwise.
A lever queued to be pulled should be an immediate move-through task in the same way removing an item blocking a door should be a move-through task. A dwarf within 4-ish tiles of a lever marked as needing to be pulled should just pause what theyr'e doing and pull the lever, instead of locking the lever and reserving it to be pulled by some dwarf 80 z-levels away who's currently unconscious.
Seriously what the hell. Just redo this entire system or something. This is stupid.
I should be able to turn this off. Nothing on the entire map is more important than immediately building the things I am telling dwarves to build. By default they should not be able to suspend construction of anything, and if they do choose to suspend something, it should automatically reinsert into the task list if it was not manually paused- at an increased priority to make sure it gets finished. They should also do these tasks regardless of nearby threats - I'd rather take responsibility for sending a dwarf to their death to build a wall while under attack than have the wall never get built. This is basic gameplay functionality and should supercede any stupid dwarven personality quirks.
Why is there a notification for someone figuring out animal migration patterns
Why is lye in the default food stockpile?
Why is ballista ammo in the furniture category?
Why is the refuse category using the same icon as the garbage dump zone if they aren't the same thing?
Why is fuel in the bars category?
Why aren't the types of flux stone clearly marked as such in the stockpile interface?
What is non-economic stone?
They sit there while their fellow dwarves are dragged into the water by enemies and won't go help. Having to pull a drawbridge out from underneath the feet of my army to train them to swim is ridiculous. Fix this nonsense.
Some items just burn forever I guess- this is pretty stupid. I should be able to mark items for having water dumped on them, in the same way I can mark them as trash for pickup.
Some kind of specific, meaningful message about what they won't accept from you in addition to the existing flavor text would be nice. Trial-and-error for a once-a-year trading opportunity is shitty- I shouldn't have to dig through arbitrary item metadata to figure out what I did wrong.
Everything involving cages, levers, dumping, pitting, creature-in-zone designations, dungeons, dungeon occupants, and managing the inventories of prisoners in cages is a complete clusterfuck. Redo all of this.
My biggest complaint about Dwarf Fortress is that the terrible performance of the game forces you into an immersion-breaking metagame playstyle.
Instead of playing the game in the spirit of the game, the hoops that you have to jump through as a player to try to keep the game's framerate serviceable put more pressure on you (with a more vicious and unforgiving learning curve) than any of the actual gameplay.
Having to constantly geld or slaughter animals for the sake of performance sucks. Separating male and female animals into different pastures requires constant upkeep and makes animals like war dogs useless. Either reduce the rate at which animals breed or allow us to set caps in the game settings so that we're not symbolically murdering innocent creatures just to keep the game running. If the engine can't handle that many creatures, give us a means by which to put them in stasis where they're not dying in their cages.
Having to reduce your own population on purpose for the sake of performance sucks, and it's made much worse by the population requirements to hit the different levels necessary for progression on your way toward the endgame. The king won't show up unless you have a high population, but having a high population ruins the game. At the very least, change the numbers around so that you're not telling the player to build up so many dwarves that the game stalls out.
Having to design defensively around the idea that large numbers of enemies moving in formation will cause all of your combat options to become unresponsive sucks. These layers of redundant traps aren't tactical- they're a crutch because the game won't allow you to actually play when things get interesting. Factorio handles hundreds of enemies moving in formation with dynamic pathfinding at the same time while simulating millions of factory interactions simultaneously- DF has trouble with like, 50 of anything moving at all. That's silly.
Overall, Dwarf Fortress does a lot of stuff right, but the game's shitty performance makes it feel like a tech demo for terrain generation with a bunch of other half-functional features stacked on top.
"That's cool, but the game doesn't run" summarizes prettymuch everything I've experienced so far- while the game is performant, it's enjoyable and a lot of the bugs and quirks are easy to forgive, but as soon as performance degradation sets in, all of these stupid problems compound on top of each other to culminate in an experience that ultimately makes me feel like it was engineered to punish me for trying to play.
I am of the opinion that all available development resources should be focused on fixing performance problems and nothing else until the game can handle the features it already has at a normal framerate up to and through the endgame phase - prioritizing adventure mode at this time seems like the wrong direction.
The OST is great though. That's probably the only part of this game that's flawless.
Author
Topic: Dwarf Fortress 50.11 - New player, 320 hours, first impressions (Read 5966 times)