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[tastypaste]

Before playing it I had read all kinds of epic horror stories about things that can go wrong in Dwarf Fortress so I went with tutorials before I jumped right in. I followed the Wiki first fortress and the cptnduck videos on Youtube.

Neither of those prevented me from making horrible designs and abandoning a dozen early fortresses due to inexperience and lack of planning. And even after learning the basics I'm still constantly discovering new features and functions. I didn't even know about the manager or setting the accuracy of the hoardmaster until I read the facepalm thread from beginning to end this week. I also thought aluminum was a worthless metal so I never even bothered to smelt it before. And I had no idea how to interpret the location finder until just recently. I'm absolutely certain there are still a lot more things I still don't know about this game even though I've been playing daily for months.

And there are even more complicated features coming in DF 2010. I can't wait.

[PhilbertFlange]

I thought that you give the order to build something (bed, statue, whatever) and a dwarf with the appropriate labour just walks over there with the building material and builds it on the spot.

I had the same thought when I started to play. Took me a few tries to figure out you needed to build something before you built something. 

Learning how to flood your first farm before the outdoor river froze was fun, as was learning to not position your dwarves right near the cave river when you breach it (ditto for the magma river).

[Judas Maccabeus]

I also had hideous amounts of difficulty with the z-level system.  As well as the fact that my first several forts starved because I couldn't figure out how to grow food.  I kept trying to grow plump helmets outside, actually.

[varkarrus]

I misunderstood the idea of stairs, and dragged out a long hallway of stairs,thinking it was all one long staircase going down.

My first fortress ended after the first year from tantrum spiral.

Other then that, I learned quickly.

[tastypaste]

I misunderstood the idea of stairs, and dragged out a long hallway of stairs,thinking it was all one long staircase going down.

I make all my hallways out of stairs. They act like 3D hallways and make the paths between any two z-levels much shorter. I have 3 space wide halls of stairs from top to bottom. My dwarfs can move to any point in the fortress in a fraction of the time.

The only downside is that enemies in the fortress have the same advantages.

[gumball135]

I read the Wiki for about 3 days before I even started up the game, and then I played along with the Wiki 'first fort' tutorial. Although, it still took me about 5 forts before I began to understand what was going on

[filiusenox]

I didnt realize there was a wiki.I spent half a year playing without z-levels.or how to make beds, or booze, or grow food.

[Craftling]

I could actually understand the game when I first played it, I thought it was just like the settlers.

[Jack_Bread]

After getting hang of some parts of DF(designating and building things), I actually tried. I cut down some trees and built a small hovel. Then I made a carpenter's workshop and made a few beds. Then I attempted to build the beds inside the hovel. But there was no roof on it because I hadn't discovered z-levels. I was thinking "But it is inside! There's walls and floors, what else did it need!?" I then read the help file and began complaining about how it doesn't explain anything.

Like all games I found confusing, I stopped playing then picked it up ~a month later.

[Nite/m4re]

I spent a lot time wondering how to make buildings. Then I realized they are dwarves and I was supposed to DIG.

[Caesar]

I embarked on a mountain and immediately found out how to dig.

It was, though, almost everything I understood back then.
I decided that it'd be fun to dig an entire layer off the mountain. (One of the topmost, near the layer the dwarfs dug out.)

My miner was killed and I was left with the rest without a clue as how to play the game. -- Then I found the Wiki.

[nenjin]

I built walls and other defineable constructions one stone at a time for my first two fortresses before I actually read the screen and realized I could shape them.

[Kayla]

I first started DF right after the very first 2D version came out. A friend of mine had found it, and was telling me about all of these epic things. The one thing that stood out was that you could mine. Bringing me back to my fond memories of Minerva.

So I downloaded it, opened it up, created a world. Didn't know squat, went into fortress mode. Failed.

Read the manual, worthless. So I stopped playing for a day or so, and let it sink in. I opened DF again, another world, another fortress. This time I paused it. And went through every single menu. I saw how to open a menu was by pressing the highlighted key. Within a few tries, I got a pretty decent fortress going, and it imploded somehow. Lack of food. Went to the forums, found out how to channel and make farms.

I was one of the first players of DF, before there was a wiki, and before there were huge amounts of people. I taught myself how to play, and enjoyed it. Downloaded every release, messed with the init.

Then right before 3D came out, the wiki was released and updated. Went there and learned a great deal. I've been with DF every since I first started, even if I didn't sign up to the forums for years afterwards.

Statistics: Donated many times. Never edited or updated a wiki page. Longest fortress was four years before I got bored with it and starved everyone slowly. Craziest fortress death was a fey mood, dwarf couldn't get the materials he needed. Tried building him in, and he went batshit insane. Killed many many of my dwarves, and the rest started going insane. Then goblins attacked.

Yeah.

- Kayla

[gumball135]

Like all games I found confusing, I stopped playing then picked it up ~a month later.

Now that I think about it, it was the exact same with me, except that I only started it up again because I read a few of the community forts

[Dwarfu]

The first time I tried Dwarf Fortress was early in the 2d days...

and I sighed heavily...

disgusted with myself for having spent so much money on marketed big budget graphics-pumped but no meat games...

It was the last coherent thought I had...

I don't think I even blink anymore...