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Make things much easier to understand

Make things look nicer

Don't make a difference to me

Make things harder to understand

Ruin the game

[zchris13]

I can't comprehend mayday.  It is an obfuscating wall of pretty shiny things.

[Martin]

I use a heavily modified mayday set - 16x16.

I used ASCII for quite a while, but got mountain goats and gobbos mixed up one too many times. Mayday is pretty hard to absorb, and I modified some tiles to be clearer at the expense of prettiness.

My main problem with both ASCII and most graphics sets is that the large fields (unsmoothed/smoothed floors, stockpiles, open space, ground cover) clutter things way too much. I keep dialing them back, and other elements as well toward simplicity, leaving the furniture and critters to handle most of the eye-candy.

I found the text to be difficult to read in almost all tilesets, so I swapped in my own which I find much clearer.

[Tcei]

I started out with a tile set, but later went with ascii, once I figured out the basics of the game. Mostly because I got tired of trying to figure out what the figures/diagrams people were making on here were, and because tilesets replacing letters in various screens.

[Zona]

A small question as my power in the Search is weak.
Is there a way to get the grid square well still using the standard ASCII? Every time I take a peek at my forts in 3d I realise just how wonky my spaceing is.

[zchris13]

It's in the Init file.  Go to the wiki, it may take some figuring out.

[Footkerchief]

A small question as my power in the Search is weak.
Is there a way to get the grid square well still using the standard ASCII? Every time I take a peek at my forts in 3d I realise just how wonky my spaceing is.

For the record -- the game comes with a square 16x16 tileset included.  You don't have to download/install one, you just have to edit init.txt to use curses_square_16x16.

[Fault]

I made a tileset which replaces unused tiles with various animal face sprites, so that it's easier to see which creature is which.

Though sometimes I get dwarves with a cat-face or a frogman-face in the middle of their names...

[SimRobert2001]

I use mike mayday. I Just cna't spend the time to get used to ascii.

[gtmattz]

When I first heard of DF I downloaded the vanilla game and tried to learn via some tutorials and gave up when I found myself hopelessly lost and hitting 'k' all the time in order to try and decipher what anything was.  A while later I decided to give it another go and found a tutorial which used the mayday tileset and from that point I was hooked.  I really don't understand the people who say that the default ASCII is clearer than the mayday tileset, when it really is more a matter of the fact that those people learned the game with the ASCII graphics and have everything memorized.  When starting out new, the mayday graphics are a thousand times more comprehensible than pure ASCII.   Recently, after reading multiple comments about how using tilesets 'ruins' the game etc I had to try with the ASCII again, and really I just cannot do it,  things are just too obscure to make any sense to me.

[Efun]

Tilesets mess up the game dimensions for me, the game gets scruched up to the top and i can never get them to work.... probally cuz i have a widescreen monitor, but they look nice, ill give em that. Im too use to the vanilla graphics so ehh.

[Livonya]

My eyes can't take the ASCII for more than an hour or so.

I simply have no choice.

When I first heard of DF I tried to play it, but it seriously hurt my eyes.  So I could never really get into it.

Finally, I discovered a tileset and finally I could actually play.

Some of use simply have no choice.

[Crossroads Inc.]

I don't mind the ASCII based grpahics, but a tileset makes things... nicer, Mostly the graphics remind me of old 8bit graphic games and most of all makes things 'square'

[Shoku]

I've had to do a lot of reading lately so my eyes end up fatigued and with blurry vision and a good set of graphics I can still make out a what a camel is where I might not even realize various animals were on the map if they were the same color letters as what they were walking on.

I used a tileset (font) that made trees look like trees and various common items actually look like a shirt for awhile but threw it out after switching back and forth between caring if my dwarves had levers in their names and if I wanted to remove accents. Also raised bridges looking like trees sucks.

[Malicus]

Maybe I'm odd, but I actually find the ASCII easier to understand.  Then again, I'd played some rougelikes before coming upon DF (and I never used graphics on them, either), so I was used to it, I guess.

[Kate Wissen]

I prefer ascii, but that's merely by preference and what I'm used to. Had I started on graphics I might have been in the other camp. It also gives me that wonderful feeling of nostalgia from the days of low to zero graphics. (Long live Zork and Rogue!)