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[Footkerchief]

And I'm told I'm NOT supposed to alt-tab-delete out of the game, because it can cause issues with corruption?  Ick.  Not being able to exit without saving or abandoning is a huge turnoff.

That turned out to be obsolete information.  It should be perfectly safe to kill DF with Task Manager as long as you don't do it while your game is being saved:

The current folder is meant to prevent these kinds of errors.  Your main saves are never touched except at the moment it says it is synchronizing the folders when you are done, at which point it copies all the current stuff back into the main folder.  If you shut off during that point, you'll corrupt your game.  I'm not sure of the source of these latest corruptions, but in the newer versions, quitting out of the game during play using the OS should be fine.

[MagicGuigz]

Long time no see!

Of all the annoying things in the game, the thing that bugs me the most is known bug 41 (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_bugs.html#Bug41), which is the one that causes caged animals to escape when brought to the caravan (exactly always in my case).  It completely breaks the spell for me every time I have goblin prisoners. It should be the one most important bug to fix imo, because it's the only one that is actually very noticeable (and a nuisance to gameplay) (except the cat thing, but that is fixable with a simple edit).

I really, really hope that bug is fixed very soon because building arenas is tedious and target practice gets old fast.

[ShadowDragon8685]

The real, true killers for me...

1: It's so BLOODY HARD to get all the things you need in one area that you can literally generate several worlds just trying to find a zone with your Hidden Fun Stuff, a nice old magma pipe, a river/subterranian river (dear Armok, hope you're not looking for both,) Flux and Bauxite (or a civilization which can bring these to you) for making steel and working with magma, respectively.

I wish there was a way to force Dwarf Fortress to put certain elements in a map if they're not already present - bottomless pits, chasms, magma pipes, underground rivers, etcetera.

The other thing that annoys me is how hard it is to start up. This is probably my fault since I insist on starting with seven Superdwarves and the Mountainhome's yearly production run of excess food/drink, arms/armor, construction materials, bauxite and steel, so I'll give you a pass on that.

[Neonivek]

to get all the things you need in one area

You mean all the things you WANT in one area.

River + Mountain Side + Trees is all you really need (even less depending on your skill) and the game generates several of those everytime.

I am starting to think the community actually makes the game less fun for others by building some features such as magma up to a "Must have" basis.

[Craftling]

I deserted ! for a while because of the fortress layout. The exterior was always different but the inside was pretty much the same. Also when I built the most awesomebrilliantgoddamnedawesome fort ever I ran out of things to do. Not sure what fixed this but DF is back and for some reason better than ever.

[Kohou]

I haven't read all 38 pages, and I'm sorry for that, but I fear that if I read them all, I'll forget what I want to say by then.

For myself, I actually find the ASCII graphics far MORE pleasing.  I really dislike most of the graphic sets.  (Mayday's is good, but he has that weird O in his, so I refuse to use it.)  I grew up on ASCII games, though, (and still play a lot of rogue-likes) so maybe that's part of it.

Personally, my biggest issue with getting started was how dense the UI is.  More specifically, things like...  "Why can't + and - work on all screens?  or PgUp and PgDwn, or Spacebar/F9."  It took me two tries to even figure out how to scroll most menus.

Next is that a lot of the things are hard to read, and/or naturally intuit, at least for me.  Why do I need an Ashery?  How do I make clear glass?  How on earth do I make a well?  (Not to mention that, esp. on the glass menu, a lot of the words are cut off, unless you tab the menu wider, something I always used to forget you could do.)
(At the time, I didn't have an internet connection, so the wiki was out.)


Thirdly, for me, is the lack of any real...  characteristics to the dwarfs.  I know they all have personality screens, and you can listen to their thoughts.  But with 100, or even 20 or so, that gets unwieldy.  I tend to play the game much more like an RTS than a lot of people seem to, simply because I just started to view it as "4 miners, 2 stonecutters, a glassblower and 7 hammerers.  Send hammerers to attack, retreat my cutters, send miners to build X, Require more Vespene Gas".
*Having some in game representation of various things about dwarves, even just one sentence when you page over them "Aleph Mineypants, likes fish."  Then next time it'll pull something else from their bio, so "Aleph Mineypants, worships Armok", etc.*  (This would be BIG, at least for me.)

And most of all...  90% of the cool stuff you hear about is really rare and/or really hard.  I rarely get to do any megaprojects.  I've never seen nor heard about a mega-beast.  And so forth.  In my mind, that was the biggest turn-off at the beginning.  I was hearing stories about carp attacks, and huge goblin sieges, and building giant glass pyramids.   Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how to build a well, spending 2 hours of reading to figure out how to grow more plump helmets, and getting killed by a single raid of three kobolds.

And lastly... Dwarves are too stupid.  This is the one that still majorly turns me off.  I tell them to go inside...  10 dwarves go running around the countryside, until a goblin siege shoots them down mid-frolic.

That being said, I love the game.  It's deep, and appeals to most of the things I've always wanted to find in a game.  I find adventure mode really boring compared to most rogue-likes, but Fortress mode is like Crack Concentrate for me, so whatever.

[cibbuano]

I don't have a problem with the interface or the keys... though I see how new users would be more likely to stick around if they were improved.

I think the only 'problem' I have is that there's a lot of information in DF, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to see it. I mean, once my fortress goes over 50 dwarves, they stop seeming like individuals, and the new migrants get ignored by me.

Perhaps there's no easy way to fix it, but I'd love to see a page with chronology for every dwarf. You could browse and see their accomplishments - better yet, it could tell you how they died! Finding mysterious corpses is a little frustrating!

[The Orange Mage]

My biggest turnoff is the insanity of resource/barrel/bin management once your fort starts getting bigger. It slowly starts taking up more and more time so that I'm getting less done and the in-game time passes much more slowly.

[eerr]

When I first downloaded the game, I found playing impossible.
My first 5 or so forts died of complete inability to follow how the game plays.

This game was so hard to play, I had to stop playing, remember I liked the idea, and return several month later.

edit: most of my friends would find this unacceptable from a videogame.

[Fourth Triad]

When I first downloaded the game, I found playing impossible.
My first 5 or so forts died of complete inability to follow how the game plays.

This game was so hard to play, I had to stop playing, remember I liked the idea, and return several month later.

edit: most of my friends would find this unacceptable from a videogame.

I totally agree with this and this as well:

Personally, my biggest issue with getting started was how dense the UI is.  More specifically, things like...  "Why can't + and - work on all screens?  or PgUp and PgDwn, or Spacebar/F9."

Thirdly, for me, is the lack of any real...  characteristics to the dwarfs.  I know they all have personality screens, and you can listen to their thoughts.  But with 100, or even 20 or so, that gets unwieldy.  I tend to play the game much more like an RTS than a lot of people seem to, simply because I just started to view it as "4 miners, 2 stonecutters, a glassblower and 7 hammerers.  Send hammerers to attack, retreat my cutters, send miners to build X, Require more Vespene Gas".
*Having some in game representation of various things about dwarves, even just one sentence when you page over them "Aleph Mineypants, likes fish."  Then next time it'll pull something else from their bio, so "Aleph Mineypants, worships Armok", etc.*  (This would be BIG, at least for me.)

And most of all...  90% of the cool stuff you hear about is really rare and/or really hard.  I rarely get to do any megaprojects.  I've never seen nor heard about a mega-beast.  And so forth.  In my mind, that was the biggest turn-off at the beginning.  I was hearing stories about carp attacks, and huge goblin sieges, and building giant glass pyramids.   Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how to build a well, spending 2 hours of reading to figure out how to grow more plump helmets, and getting killed by a single raid of three kobolds.

[alway]

When I first downloaded the game, I found playing impossible.
My first 5 or so forts died of complete inability to follow how the game plays.

This game was so hard to play, I had to stop playing, remember I liked the idea, and return several month later.

edit: most of my friends would find this unacceptable from a videogame.

I totally agree with this and this as well:

Personally, my biggest issue with getting started was how dense the UI is.  More specifically, things like...  "Why can't + and - work on all screens?  or PgUp and PgDwn, or Spacebar/F9."

Thirdly, for me, is the lack of any real...  characteristics to the dwarfs.  I know they all have personality screens, and you can listen to their thoughts.  But with 100, or even 20 or so, that gets unwieldy.  I tend to play the game much more like an RTS than a lot of people seem to, simply because I just started to view it as "4 miners, 2 stonecutters, a glassblower and 7 hammerers.  Send hammerers to attack, retreat my cutters, send miners to build X, Require more Vespene Gas".
*Having some in game representation of various things about dwarves, even just one sentence when you page over them "Aleph Mineypants, likes fish."  Then next time it'll pull something else from their bio, so "Aleph Mineypants, worships Armok", etc.*  (This would be BIG, at least for me.)

And most of all...  90% of the cool stuff you hear about is really rare and/or really hard.  I rarely get to do any megaprojects.  I've never seen nor heard about a mega-beast.  And so forth.  In my mind, that was the biggest turn-off at the beginning.  I was hearing stories about carp attacks, and huge goblin sieges, and building giant glass pyramids.   Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how to build a well, spending 2 hours of reading to figure out how to grow more plump helmets, and getting killed by a single raid of three kobolds.

I personally learned most of the game and how to play it very quickly. Then again, I scored high enough on the PSAT to qualify for NMS semifinalist...
The second part though, I must totally agree with. "I tend to play the game much more like an RTS than a lot of people seem to, simply because I just started to view it as "4 miners, 2 stonecutters, a glassblower and 7 hammerers." though is a bit off for me. After about 20, I don't even keep track of how many of each I have! That last part about megabeasts/megaprojects I must also agree with. The way they are talked about on the forums, you would think there is a dragon invasion ever 2 months, everyone has 15 cast obsidian statues of themselves AND a few magma cannons to boot. The problem is, there is almost more theory crafting than actual playing. Heck, just last night I got an awesome idea for a mega-magma cannon (50 or so pumps pumping magma into a single tube for HUGE squirts of magma) but I probably will never get around to actually building it.

[Leafsnail]

A few things, but I'll try to stay specific:
+,-,/,* vs up, down, pg up, pg down.  It should be the same for every menu.  F9 vs spacebar is also annoying.

Items have different designations.  Cages, for instance, are sometimes c and sometimes j.  Blocks are sometimes b and sometimes o.

Workshops, constructions, traps and furnaces are each in one menu, but everything else is in a massive clump that makes it difficult to find the thing you want.

q, t, k, v.  q and t should be fused, as should k and v.

Dwarf information is a bit all over the place.  For instance, I can zoom to a dwarf from the m screen, but not from the n screen.  I can see a dwarves items from his inventory, but I need to go to the item to dump it.  Dwarven labours are in a very long list.  I can assign a dwarf's weapon and armour from the dwarf, but for a champion I need to use the m screen.  The manager screen is useful but causes endless cancellations.

[AtomicPaperclip]

I remember when I first started playing I killed a kobold in my fort

I scrolled over it with k and saw "giant cave spider silk chi"

My friend had introduced me to dwarf heaven for my first fort and warned me about the infamous GCS, so seeing this I thought it was children.

So yeah, I had completely walled in a kobolds underwear and checked on it every few minutes to make sure it was still there for a couple hours before I discovered the tab key.

[Thendash]

A few things, but I'll try to stay specific:
+,-,/,* vs up, down, pg up, pg down.  It should be the same for every menu.  F9 vs spacebar is also annoying.

Items have different designations.  Cages, for instance, are sometimes c and sometimes j.  Blocks are sometimes b and sometimes o.

Workshops, constructions, traps and furnaces are each in one menu, but everything else is in a massive clump that makes it difficult to find the thing you want.

q, t, k, v.  q and t should be fused, as should k and v.

Dwarf information is a bit all over the place.  For instance, I can zoom to a dwarf from the m screen, but not from the n screen.  I can see a dwarves items from his inventory, but I need to go to the item to dump it.  Dwarven labours are in a very long list.  I can assign a dwarf's weapon and armour from the dwarf, but for a champion I need to use the m screen.  The manager screen is useful but causes endless cancellations.

This is exactly what I think as well.

[Footkerchief]

Dwarven labours are in a very long list.  I can assign a dwarf's weapon and armour from the dwarf, but for a champion I need to use the m screen.

As an aside, the labors thing will be improved in the next version:

[...] there are currently 7 new labor settings, 5 unit types, and 6 skills.  I've grouped the entire vpl list into 15 sections to make it easier to mess with (I'm aware of further changes people want there, but I can't do it all now). [...]

Military equipment assignment should be improved as well -- a good portion of the Squads section of the List is dedicated to that kind of thing.

Good, concise objections overall though.