Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Dutchling]

did you guys all started playing DF before Google was made? Because the moment I discovered i had no idea what the hell was going on I just googled 'Dwarf Fortress tutorial'.

So, the Complete and Utter Newb tutorial is my first memory of DF. I did the tutorial just a few days before .18 was released so it didn't have stuff like caverns, dormitories and the military but i'm still happy enough that I never had to do the so called learning-curve or DF.

[Vercingetorix]

did you guys all started playing DF before Google was made? Because the moment I discovered i had no idea what the hell was going on I just googled 'Dwarf Fortress tutorial'.

I discovered DF pretty much by accident and taught myself how to play using the Wiki as a guide.  Of course, I'm also the type of person who never does tutorials or reads the manual for a game so that's not out of the ordinary for me.

[monk12]

did you guys all started playing DF before Google was made? Because the moment I discovered i had no idea what the hell was going on I just googled 'Dwarf Fortress tutorial'.

I discovered DF pretty much by accident and taught myself how to play using the Wiki as a guide.  Of course, I'm also the type of person who never does tutorials or reads the manual for a game so that's not out of the ordinary for me.

+1

[Tenebrais]

First game I played I didn't understand how the water worked and tunnelled my way into a stagnant pool. Fortunately no dwarves drowned so I just dug a new fortress entrance with the help of a tutorial.

[Jacob/Lee]

I was digging fortresses in the dirt, not realizing that my fortress was always on the brink of absolute anarchy if 1 or 2 dwarves died. Getting smeared by ambushes, too. It turns out triple drawbridge entrances are useful only if you actually know the enemy is there so you can raise them.

[QuakeIV]

"Phooey, all females, how on earth will I get more dwarves?"

[DuckPolice]

I didn't know about water physics and manged to make a lake while making a moat.


FPS death

[Farmerbob]

  Can't remember the version but it was a couple years back.

  Loaded up the game, and couldn't figure out how to dig.  Tried to build a farm on the surface, but my plump helmets wouldn't be planted there.

  Decided it was time to hit the forums in silent mode, because I was obviously failing at something, since I couldn't make my dwarves either dig or grow food.

  That was when I discovered the DF wiki, through links on the forums, and things went much, much better after that.

[TheDarkBolt]

Getting bum-rushed by Boogeymen. 1st play-through in Dwarf Adventure mode and I lasted less than 5 minutes.

[Aquillion]

Oh, man.

I remember coming across Toady's site waaaay back when he was still working on Armok 1, looking over its huge list of intended features, and thinking that it was all insane (in a good way.)

Later on I came back when I got into LCS a lot, and posted on the forums a lot when Toady was working on that.

One day he posted a thread about he was getting back to the dwarf game -- it was something like two years, I think, between posting that thread and actually releasing Dwarf Fortress, but we'd constantly discuss it there.

Oh, and he'd release videos occasionally, so I guess those are my first in-game images of Dwarf Fortress.  I wonder if anyone still has those videos?  I couldn't find them when I searched my computer or the internet, and the DF map archive doesn't seem to have them, either (I'm not sure they'd be compatible with it, but they were the first DF videos ever made.)  Toady drowned one of his miners and a bear starved to death...  also, there was a dragon attack.  And some humans set up camps when attacking, I recall that.

Once it was released, my first few actual forts didn't do well at all -- this was back before anyone knew how to play, before there was a useful wiki or anything, so it was pretty normal for everyone to die in your first winter (also, the 2D versions were harder in general -- no moats, unless you managed to pump magma all the way outside, which was a huge undertaking.  So sieges tended to be rather lethal.  Not to mention unlimited hordes of monsters crawling out of the river, the chasm, your well...)

EDIT:  Haa, going over the old Back To The Dwarf Mode thread turned up some posts that are funny in retrospect...

"this could very well be the game that Toady is remembered best for."

Discussion of improved hauling ideas, before the game was even released.  Some things never change.

Adamantine was originally going to be mithril, but was changed for copyright reasons.  I'd forgotten that.

[Devling]

*Curls into ball*
Oh, god the pain...

[quip]

Found out about the game after the z-axis came out some time in 2010 on wikipediea , on the article on 'emergent gameplay'. Thought 'Hey, this looks cool.'

Started my first fort a couple of weeks later after having lurked on the forums for a bit, read a couple of pages on the wiki and downloading the latest version. My first thoughts were basically: 'Okay, lets star- Woah, okay... Uh... I guess those faces are my dwarves? Uh... How do I get them to do stuff?' *Abandon fort*

I then started my first proper fort in windowed mode with the wiki up all the time till I learned the very basics. Had a lot of fun with that fort: 1-tile hallways, accidentally locking my dwarves in not knowing quite how levers attached to doors worked, having a military of unarmed (unarmed, unarmoured) swords-dorfs (who didn't train), not having a food or booze production industry E.T.C.

Good times.

[Aryn]

The first thing I remember was being in a little valley in the first 3D version, trying to figure out how to dig. I could see some of the stone walls already from looking at captioned screenshots, I just needed to find the dig command. Surely, in a game about mining, there would be a fairly simple way to tell my dwarves to mine into the rock?

After I found it in the thoroughly unintuitive designation menu, my next challenge was to get around "Build Door: Needs Door". The workshops, the things I needed to build these identically named building materials, and some of the only constructions to use raw stone, were at the bottom of the build list, of course.

[Makbeth]

I remember wondering why sturgeons would interrupt my dwarves while they were drinking, and also why the river was turning red.

[Agdune]

Man, I feel oldschool (well, untill I read Aquillion's post). I started way back, probably a few weeks after the first DF release. I was bumming around Relicnews forums as I tend to, and a thread by Nurizeko got me interested. Like dungeon keeper he says? UNDERGROUND FARMING FOR MUSHROOMS HE SAYS? I'M IN!

It took me a couple of months to really figure out how to do... anything whatsoever. My first real memory after that first, failed, 10 minute attempt at playing was when I'd figured out how to get over the underground river (but not yet worked out how to irrigate anything safely - relied instead on just hollowing out a gap besides the river and the food storage room). I was trying to figure out how anyone could do anything with jeweling, as there were always so few gems lying around - You'd never get any dwarf up to legendary! (a problem I still grapple with, actually. Can't rely on moods forever!)

I lost a few forts to starvation due to troubles getting farming working, lost one to a tantrum spiral (the only one I've ever lost to that), then abandoned the rest, eventually. I never, ever reached the adamantine (again, something that I've never actually gotten around to doing - always feel the need to make my army or industry or fortifications *perfect*. Never get to that last step of making it happen.)

It took a few months to work my way up to the elaborate magma-moats, all-encompassing walls and general super-sensible architecture which has always dominated my dwarfy adventures. Unfortunately I never shook the habit and so all my forts are rediculously safe, happy places where nothing bad ever really happens to shake up the status quo. Biggest thing to happen in my last fort was when a mood dwarf went bezerk - only happened twice because after that I'd traded in most supplies they could conceivably need. After that, 40 dwarf years of peace and boring, boring tranquility!