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[sunshaker]

I figure there are cheats, exploits and everything else.

Cheats:
Most but not all Third Party programs (specifically the ones that allow you to alter things in the game).
Reactions that give free stuff, reactions that might as well give free stuff (turn 1 stone into 10 logs).
Altering the Raws to boost the abilities of your dwarves or nerf the abilities of your opponents or get you free stuff (or in a round about way get you stuff for cheap, like giving cows [MODVALUE:100] and purchasing an entire caravan with a Cow skull totem, 45 cow bone bolts, a tanned cow hide and a meal consisting of cow meat and cow tallow).

Exploits:
Cooking with nothing but Booze (I think booze is a valid cookable item so long as there is stuff other than booze in the meal, accidental pure booze meals are acceptable but boarder line, deliberately cooking with only booze is an exploit).
Selling Prepared meals.
Any use of game mechanics in an unexpected way that has a positive result (infinite water on a frozen map with magma via a freeze thaw cycle, solid ice square > apply heat via magma from level below > solid ice square becomes 7/7 water > drain water to reservoir until generation area is covered in 3/7 or less water > remove heat by draining magma > water Freezes (even 1/7 water becomes a solid ice square) > repeat).

[100killer9]

What's the big deal on deconstructing the depot anyway? It's like seizing, but worse, since the extra stuff you swipe can lead to larger sieges. The caravans register it as theivery.
Honestly, all I see as cheating is modding the game significantly in your favor. I'd allow putting your soil as a sand, and adding the [trAINABLE] tag to creatures. Not lead-to-adamantine reactions.

[The Architect]

What's the big deal on deconstructing the depot anyway? It's like seizing, but worse, since the extra stuff you swipe can lead to larger sieges. The caravans register it as theivery.

That's incorrect. They just measure it as a negative profit, not a theft. And since no members of their civilization die as well, you don't create any negative influence with that civilization. You just get a smaller caravan the following year because the caravan's wealth is based on past earnings.

That is why this cheat is such a big deal. Another major reason is the fact that you can steal from the dwarven caravan, which is not normally possible.

[azazel]

ooh, I have another one. Forbidding items during moods. Where's the sense of achievement/awe/whatever when you know you'll get the best thing possible? Boring, that's what it is.

Ok, so a tin spear with spikes of birch might not be as intimidating as a clownite spear with spikes of clownite, but damn it, it's that dwarf's VISION.

Besides, it's more fun watching them use a tin spear.

[Particleman]

I agree that 'cheating' is pretty much a meaningless term in a sandbox-style single player game.

There are a couple things I won't do, though. I don't cook booze, though that's more about the fact that I usually only have a single brewer (one is plenty if that's ALL he does) and I don't want to have everyone die of dehydration because I accidentally cooked all the drinks. Also there's usually enough other stuff to cook.

I also don't use crossbows. I find that making sure my marksdwarves have a reasonable number of bolts in their quiver and the fact that they do so much damage isn't very entertaining. Shoot a goblin's head clean off his shoulders from twenty yards with a single bolt, causing all the others to flee? Boring.

[bluea]

Plump Helmets.
Relying on just one food/beer.
Beercooking.
Any meal other than 'Lavish'.
Naked Dwarves.
Dwarves in undyed clothing.
Non-local supplies that can be made locally. (Getting silk when there's no spiders is fine, etc.)
Military that aren't fully provisioned with gear (backpack, waterskin, quiver)
Traps as main defense.
Quarters that don't contain bed, table, chair, cabinet, coffer.
Selling goblin silk.
Avoiding the economy.
Avoiding appointing a sheriff.
Ignoring Mandates. (Sane ones. Not a lot to do if you don't have, say, glass.)
Meddling with the Depot/theft.

[Kaelem Gaen]

I've never completely walled in or channeled around my fort, but when you take a look at classic construction of castles and the like a wall around said fortress was one of the main forms of defense,  and lasted for a long time till the enemies started making seige weapons,  I think it's a viable option.  but then again I'm not entirely sure what "completely walling in a fortress" means as I don't use dig deeper.

What I don't consider cheating;
The use of "Motlen Rocks" mod, as it just gives stones their proper melting points, and therefore makes a few of them magma safe outside bauxite.

[Asmodeous]

Since walls cannot be destroyed by any creature, walling yourself in means you're completely safe from almost all hostiles - ambushes, sieges, skeletal carp, they're powerless against you if you build a wall around your fort. For the most part, the same applies to digging a channel around your fort (though archers can still get you with that method so it's not quite as good). Flying creatures can go over the wall or channel and attack you, but there are so few in the game that you might as well say that you're safe from all hostiles.
That's the reason why walling yourself in can be considered cheating; if you're not prepared to be massacred by goblins/orcs/whatever then walls prevent them from getting into your fort in the first place.

Yes, but there's a few downsides, and unless you roof-off the wall you still get fliers coming in.

The very concept of cheating implies Gain with no Downside. Walling yourself in also walls you in from traders, from migrants, etc. It is not so much cheating as it is exchanging one type of challenge for another.

You're effectively making any embark an "island fortress".

However with the upcoming version in theory the addition of "material" to walls should theoretically allow walls to be destroyed. One would hope.

[LoneJedi7]

Depot disassembly while the trade carts are offloading/ready to trade. That's a big no there. All that free crap you can get.

I agree with you there. I've done it only twice.

Once to see what happened  and then my dwarves hid in horror ... expecting retribution. But none came.
Second I ... well I marked all my items and managed to give them away on accident. So I stole everything back... but in the spirit of honesty I dumped most of my ill gotten gains in the garbage.

Y'all do realize that, from an entity standpoint, this is exactly identical to seizing all their stuff, right? Every civ keeps a log of what they send and receive from your fortress. If their taking massive losses, they might start a war.

so if a goblin ambush occurs when the merchants do and the goblins kill all of them and you take the stuff from thier dead bodies, does that count as a loss to them and make them declare war on you? (even though its not your fault)

[Asmodeous]

Depot disassembly while the trade carts are offloading/ready to trade. That's a big no there. All that free crap you can get.

I agree with you there. I've done it only twice.

Once to see what happened  and then my dwarves hid in horror ... expecting retribution. But none came.
Second I ... well I marked all my items and managed to give them away on accident. So I stole everything back... but in the spirit of honesty I dumped most of my ill gotten gains in the garbage.

Y'all do realize that, from an entity standpoint, this is exactly identical to seizing all their stuff, right? Every civ keeps a log of what they send and receive from your fortress. If their taking massive losses, they might start a war.

so if a goblin ambush occurs when the merchants do and the goblins kill all of them and you take the stuff from thier dead bodies, does that count as a loss to them and make them declare war on you? (even though its not your fault)

Yep.

[Lemunde]

What is a fortress without a wall, anyways?   

Here's a few things I consider cheating under any circumstances:
*Using third party programs to altar the gameplay.
*Exploiting the atom smasher.  Getting rid of clutter is one thing but creating an unstoppable draw bridge of doom is another.  I figure this will get fixed in future versions so relying on it now seems a little meaningless.
*Editing the raws yourself for anything other than aesthetics.  Downloading big mods is okay as long as you don't altar the raws afterward.
*Using the site finder.  This is the only built-in feature I feel is excessively cheating because it takes away the fun of finding a site on your own and discovering features after embark.
*Related to the previous cheat, constantly embarking and abandoning or constantly regenning worlds just so you can find that one site that has everything a dwarf could possibly desire...is cheating.
*Dismantling the trade depot to get free stuff.  Regardless of the consequences, this is an exploit, plain and simple.
*Basically exploiting anything that is obviously a bug or an incomplete feature is cheating.

Here's some things that I personally don't do myself, part as a challenge and part because they may be exploits:
*No plump helmets.
*No wrestlers.  I found out how exploitable using them was the last game I played so I'm sticking to armed dwarves from now on.
*No 1x3 bedrooms.  They're too easy to make and they don't look very good.  If my dwarves aren't worth making a 3x3 room for then they can sleep in the barracks.
*No engraving of every engravable tile.  It just looks bad.  Engravings are great in moderation.  Not really a cheat, I guess.

[Starver]

so if a goblin ambush occurs when the merchants do and the goblins kill all of them and you take the stuff from thier dead bodies, does that count as a loss to them and make them declare war on you? (even though its not your fault)

Yep.

If you want, think of it as a covenant with the traders that you shall do your utmost to protect them whilst in your realm.  If you (by some perspectives) stand by and watch them get slaughtered, it's not much different from actively attacking them.  To the source civilisation, you're just as bad.  (And if none of the traders or their entourage make it back home alive, how would they know anyway?  All they'd know is that their caravan was somewhere between the last stop and you when they disappeared.[1])

"But the ambush occured over on the other side of the map, I had no military or militia available to defend them, or get to them in time!" - You're the one that staked out the territory.  If you're not prepared to rule over it and impose your authority, why did you claim such a large territory[2]?

That's an IC way of thinking of it, though I admit "it sucks" could be an apt way of talking about it, also.

As does a wandering hostile creature you're hoping to entrap getting in the way of a caravan and being slaughtered.  And until you can send your own warriors out on active "containment" duty (e.g. wrestling it to the ground, non-fatally), rather than auto-attacking, the best you can hope for is to send a non-ranged warrior over and 'herd' them towards your traps/away from the caravan guards.



[1] One could argue for a sufficiently high "liar" or "pursuasion" skill, in your fortress's given representative, being able to deflect (or correct) such accusations towards the prior/next stopover who was 'actually' (or actually) at fault, when the non-fudged external wanderings of caravans is brought in rather than the current analogue...

[2] Modifiable when the game gives long-term siegers who can actually set up settlement areas that you can only send military units into, or similar, or perhaps in currently-possible circumstances where they're wandering through a settlement that you encamped near to, and have not yet siezed.

[Fedor]

I must say that the claims that "third party programs that alter game data" and "modding the raws" - without qualifications like "that give stuff for free or beef up your dwarves" - constitute cheating puzzle me. 

Dwarf Therapist modifies game data, but (if you avoid doing a small number of rather obvious things like fiddling with the Dungeon Master's labor settings) it doesn't let you do anything that you can't inside the game.  It just lets you do these things much more conveniently.  Programs that let you remove mud, etc. I only consider cheats if used to remove challenges deliberately set up by either the game or the person in charge of that particular fort.  Using them to more completely realize your vision of the fort, in a plausible way, isn't cheating.

Modding the raws would only be cheating if vanilla were the only acceptable game.  It isn't. Toady One made the raws user-editable for a REASON.  Every game version makes the raws capable of modding more stuff.  So enjoy DF the way it was meant to be, and mod as you please!

Same story for the init.txt file.  If you don't want sieges or the economy or temperatures, turn 'em off.  That's not cheating, that's just changing the rules of the game.  Disclose the rules you're playing with and all is well.


For me, an exploit is abusing any misfeature or incompletely coded bit of the game to ruin a legitimate game challenge.  This definition is rather vague in DF, because you get to decide what constitutes a "legitimate game challenge" for the game you're currently playing. 


A cheat is changing the rules in your favor in a way BOTH implausible within the game world AND without due disclosure (or permission, in a multi-player game).  In DF, the game world is a flexible concept and you're invited to pick and choose the rules you want to play with.

One can easily imagine a DF game in which you set yourself a challenge to create a work of art, and mod things so you have unlimited raw materials and perfectly problem-free dwarves so you can realize your vision without playing the parts of the game that aren't relevant to that particular fort.  While in most games, stuff for nothing and dwarves that are never unhappy, sleepy, or hungry would be cheats, in this sort of game they aren't.

[kungasi]

Your a dwarf dammit! The game gives you a challenge and you over come it in the most confusing and resource expending way possible!

lol sigged

and TBH, i dont consider much cheating in DF cause as its been said several times before, given that DF is a single-player sandbox game, cheating really has no meaning, its a single-player sandbox game, the only one it'll affect is the player in question, though all ive done so far is edit the .ini to reveal things in embark and removed cave adaptation (cause i is nub and i dont want my mili-dwarves puking when a siege hits >.>) and thats all ive done so far

[Aspgren]

When the liaison is discussing with my leader. I pause the game, choose "dig" and draw circles with the mouse.

This triggers the liaison to keep talking. and you can get the export/import deals over with in a dwarven second. I don't consider this cheating, since it doesn't make sense that a meeting like that would last for weeks .. MONTHS even. Plus it's just downright annoying to have him pause everything and pester you while you're following some fight.