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[lavenders2]

I have been playing with the Mayday texture pack for a while now and decided to put my face into the real world of roguelikes. However, my 14 year old brain can't seem to comprehend "D" being dwarf and every over sodding animal to walk the face of Armok's land. So I'm curious as to how everyone else learnt how to read ASCII graphics quickly. Any tips? Cause it's taking me forever!

[Ieb]

Most things go by the letter their name starts with. Goblins with g, cats with c and so on.
And even then, using 'v'iew or 'k' to look(or whatever the key was again, forgot) a lot and checking out whatever is bugging you will sooner or later make you able to associate all the squiggly lines and letters you see to what they are.

"Oh look a bunch of goblins are marching through the pine forest right in the direction my magma outlet is currently pumping out hot molten stone at. Well, there goes the !!neighbourhood!!."

[Tharwen]

Dwarves aren't 'D'.

If you see a D you'd better run very quickly.

[Girlinhat]

For me, it was playing Mayday, then Phoebus because Mayday was slow to update but Phoebus was quick on the draw.  I just kept at the game for a while, and figured out what things do what and how things happen.  Then when I swapped to ASCII, it was easier because I already knew "macaque like to rush in and get themselves caged, so these little m's must be damned monkeys."  Through similar association, I'm able to roughly approximate what everything is simply by knowing how things already work.  The odd parts, like telling a dog from a duck, I either don't care (another worthless pet) or view it to check.  After a while you find out that ducks are green and dogs aren't.

So for me, acclimating the game in graphics, and using that experience to get a grasp on ASCII.

[Xen0n]

Loo'k'ing is your friend.  You can also keep this page open in your browser to swap to mid-game.

[Melissia]

Kinda already used to it from MUD games, buuuuut I used the phoebus pack for this game, so...

[Kirbypowered]

I pretty much already knew how it worked before I started playing thanks to Boatmurdered.It's almost like second nature now, I guess. I am always terrified that at some point I'll loo'k' at a cat and it'll turn out to be that crundle I decided to tame...

[Doomchild-]

i've always used graphic packs (mayday at first, now ironhand) but i dont have any problems figuring out ASCII screenshots. a lot of community game threads post their screenshots in ASCII, so you could learn a lot just by reading those (not just about ASCII).

[Ethnar]

Even thou I spent hours and hours on ADOM before (and was displeased with roguelikes with some graphics), when I started playing dwarf fortress the urge to have it all more "literal" was huge. I learned about tilesets, before I even started real fortress, just by reading init files, search the wiki for some clues and DLed my first tileset. Some time after I installed first graphic pack (creatures) and I don't feel like i'm going to drop this anytime soon.

I tried to switch to ASCII once, but I just couldn't find a reason to stick with it. The major problem for me is that in ASCII, stuff is just dots, lines and the like, everything close to one another, hardly distinguishable. There's too much going on on the screen for me to bother if what I see is a trumpet, empty stockpile, block or or bars of metal.

Currently playing with a tileset that is frankensteined (over 3 years) from multiple tilesets and the graphic pack I don't remember who's the author of. And having fun.

[Girlinhat]

That's one thing that tends to make ASCII DF difficult.  Other roguelikes may have, say, a dungeon.  That's well and good, walls, floor, monsters, a chest or two...  DF has, EVERYTHING!  Bars and blocks and socks and crundles and cats and shields and more socks and one goblin somewhere in with all of that but you can't quite be too sure because the goblin snuck into your goat pasture.  There's simply a lot of stuff, and it's very hard to compact that into a single character sheet.

[khearn]

Well, I started with rogue, back in the day. Then hack, then larn, then moria, then nethack, then angband, and a few other roguelikes tossed in along the way. So DF in ASCII was not a problem. If my 49 year old brain can handle it, your 14 year old brain ought to be able to.

[ZeroSumHappiness]

First, I would suggest getting a very clear and square tileset without too much variation from the default.  I use Gekz 11x11 at the moment.  Then, use the magnifier in-game to bump it to about 1.5x or 2x size while you're getting used to it.

Also, get a color scheme that's not hard on your eyes and has decent variation.  I use Lee's.

Also, turn on water fluid levels ([SHOW_FLOW_AMOUNTS:YES] in d_init.txt) and turn off the varied ground setting ([VARIED_GROUND_TILES:NO] in d_init.txt).  This makes everything look a little cleaner and less busy.

As you get used to reading which stairs are up-stairs and which are down-stairs and how you know you've got a crap-ton of barrels and pots or where your bedrooms are lower the magnification until you're back at the default.

[Tevish Szat]

I'd frankly just play with it for a while.  There are no real tricks needed to learn to read ASCII, especially not the "High ASCII" (CP347) graphics, with both foreground and background colors, used by Dwarf Fortress as opposed to the standard ASCII used by, say, Nethack (which I play with the standard tileset: no confusing one h for another).

You may or may not lose an early fort due to misplay, but by the time you do, the ASCII will create as much a picture for you as the graphic packs.  I've never used a graphics pack, but from looking at graphics pack screenshots, the ASCII is actually a lot... cleaner.  even with Varied Ground Tiles and no flow amounts.  When reading succession forts, I get more information at a glance from ASCII shots, especially about which dwarf is which. ☺ and ☺ look more immediately distinct for me than most ways a tileset differentiates "mechanic" from "mason" for instance.  You may think this is natural, as I've used only the ASCII and not any of the common graphics packs, but the goal of a graphics pack is to make the screen more readable than ASCII at all times.  I don't... I don't particularly know if its possible, frankly, especially now that procedurally generated creatures like FBs and Titans are just going to make graphics packs throw up their hands and display ? or the normal tile rather than trying to figure out how to render every possible gigantic blob composed of slade with wings of stretched skin, one-eyed mandible-bearing therapod with pink feathers, and monarch butterfly twisted into humanoid form on the fly.

[King DZA]

Well you can use my method, and simply force it on yourself. When i first started, i was very interesting in what ever wandering letter was, mainly to discover whether or not it was going to slaughter my smiley faces and raze my little hole in the mountainside.

Of course, adapting to it may have been easier for me, since i never used any other kind of graphics first, so i had never recognized them as anything else beforehand.

Either way, it just takes a little time to get used to. Soon all those scribbles and letters will turn into wondrous rolling mountains, sparkling rivers, and blood covered, rotting corpses.
Not to mention, you can act like an arrogant asshole because you know how the read the game the way it's "supposed to look".

[elf-fondling human]

I tend to switch back and forth between tilesets, then use the default ASCII when new versions are released. My biggest problem is when I (re)realize that the original ASCII tiles aren't perfect squares, and my OCD goes crazy when I try to designate a square room and it doesn't look right.