I just dove in after reading Boatmurdered, way back when the old 2D version was out. I didn't use a lot of what was available - for instance, I never found out about traps, and I don't think I ever made booze - but somehow that very first fort prospered through unicorn attacks, and mass starvation, and the single-tile wide hallways absolutely crammed with hundreds of cows, and the psychotic sheriff who had so many more dwarf kills than any of the wildlife, all the way until I struck eerie glowing pit and discovered that, while the bovine hordes were quite capable of stomping frogs and tentacle clowns to death, they were unfortunately still quite flammable.
Sadly, the file began to corrupt through several adventurer visits and reclaim attempts, and I stopped playing for a while. When I came back, 40d had been released, and I started learning it all over. That began with an attempt to colonize a goblin tower, (just seeing what that weird symbol on the map was) and continued with what I called a 'hobbit fort' - I'd embarked near a river, ignoring the 'stone may be hard to come by' warning, ("How hard could it really be?" I asked) and discovered aquifers for the first time. So there I was, dug into a completely soil fort, with all my pickaxes destroyed by being encased in ice after winter demonstrated that puddles could be deadly, and too stubborn to abandon. That fort didn't die - the computer did instead. And then I lost internet access for... quite a while.
Eventually, I managed to snag a copy of the latest version of 40d that was out at the time, and relearned everything on my savage badlands fort that introduced me to sieges, and yet was somehow still wildly successful. I discovered the wiki after a while during that fort, and that's when I started messing with pressure plates and pumps and levers and such.
And then the 2010 version came out, and I keep ignoring old forts to gen new worlds as updates arrive because I can't stand the thought that my eventual adventurer will never encounter eyeball grass or honey badgers or whatever. Because of this, I still haven't learned how to do things like work the military in this version - I haven't needed to, since I tend to build in silly locations where the goblins are too smart to go, and the caverns have been weird for me, with unnavigable terrain preventing any monsters from approaching me.
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Topic: How did you learn to play DF (Read 3310 times)