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[Untelligent]

It really depends on the player. Some people figure everything out in 2 days, some people take months just to learn how to use the military screen.

[Brandedahall]

It really depends on the player. Some people figure everything out in 2 days, some people take months just to learn how to use the military screen.

Good point, i figured out everything in about a day. IMHO It's seriously not hard to learn, it just takes patience. A thing people have seemed to lose.

[Phantom of The Library]

I started playing during the 40d era, it took me almost a week to figure out that > and < were move up and down the z-levels. 

I went through at least four forts before one survived past the first year. 

My final one before that one everyone was killed by Rhesus Macaques after a few months, via "we gonna dodge into the pool of water!" which I had made my settlement around.

However I had no rogue-like background and looked up no tutorials or information other than basic controls occasionally.

Overall with no help, it took me a week or two to learn the game with no help.


But I still haven't figured out the new military screen.

[Ghills]

DF isn't really that complicated or hard to learn - it is more complicated than most games out now, though so there's more too learn.  Also, the interface is inconsistent, so people have to actually remember all this information.  Most people just aren't interested enough to waste brain space on all the DF controls when practically every other game shares conventions that they're already familiar with.

[melkorp]

Captain Duck's 40d video tutorials were what really unlocked the game for me; I don't think I would've made it without them.  Been playing since 2008 and I'm still learning: just found out how to set maximum number of barrels/bins in a custom stockpile.

[OMGTANGERINES]

I've been going since 40d and I still don't know how to use pumps. I also just figured out how to change orders away from "Train 10 minimum." It's difficult to pick up because if you don't happen to hit b-w by accident, you're kinda screwed.

[Anathema]

When people say it's hard to learn DF, they're comparing it to other modern games, and in that sense it most definitely is. If you say "it's not hard, just look things up on the wiki," or "it's not hard, once you learn the interface" or any other qualification, really you're proving just how hard the game is to learn - because most games nowadays you don't need to look things up on a wiki or spend a day struggling with a keyboard interface, you point and click and you've "learned" the game in about 30 seconds.

Now, I'm a programmer, and I wouldn't call learning DF "hard" in the sense that learning to program with/debug pointers and addressing in C when you're coming from a Java background is hard. And I do remember the days when learning to play a game could reasonably be on that same level of difficulty - you used to actually have to read the manual (crazy, huh), rather than just loading up the game and maybe playing a brief tutorial.

But compare DF to "learning" how to play a modern game, say, Skyrim - or to take an example closer to home, Minecraft. The learning curve hardly exists in these games, it's more of a gentle slope that you can barely tell is going uphill, and compared to that DF certainly has a learning cliff, not a curve.

[orius]

I haven't found the game particularly difficult, but I've also followed some video tutorials, made extensive use of the wiki, and this is the sort of game that appeals to me in the first place.  It's not really outright hard, more like complex, with a lot of things to learn, a good deal of which is optional.  It also helped that I built strong defenses early and keep my fortresses well fortified.

[Mr Frog]

I think that the problem isn't necessarily that DF is difficult to understand; the interface is reasonably well-organized except for some directional input woes (and, of course, the military screen, though I think that much of its bad reputation is a legacy of 31.01, where it was so buggy that you honestly couldn't tell which problems were your fault and which were the game's) and most tasks are fairly simple to carry out.

The problem is that DF is ridiculously hard to figure out for yourself because there's nothing else quite like it. When you get the latest Zelda, Elder Scrolls, Dragon Quest, or cheap CoD knockoff, you already have a pretty good idea of what you're supposed to do and how you can do it, based on previous experiences with games of that type. With DF, however, you have absolutely no starting point; instead of just skimming the instructions to see what's different, a new DF player has to completely learn a new way of playing a game entirely from scratch.

This is helped not at all by the fact that there really is a lot to do in DF, and that quite a bit of it urgently needs doing. You NEED to learn RIGHT AWAY how to get food, booze, shelter, defenses, and so on or else your fortress won't make it past the year; this, I think, is where the fabled "learning cliff" originates -- it's not a particularly high cliff, but it must be climbed immediately with all haste and the slightest misstep leaves you back at square one.

The sheer scale of DF can also be a little hard for a newbie to grasp (and holy wow, that statement seems condescending). It's easy to mistakenly assume that you've already learned everything important about the game, only to be bit in the ass by some important detail that you weren't aware of and honestly had little reason to expect ("What? Adamantine warhammers are actually a terrible idea? Crap." "What? This game simulates hydrostatic water pressure? Crap!" "What? This game models realistic melting points for each material and just being made of stone/metal doesn't mean a floodgate will hold up in high temperatures? CRAP.").

EDIT: Fixed errant commas.

[Phantom of The Library]

Yeah, I spent about 15 minutes browsing the wiki and was set to play, I think the learning cliff must have been on vacation that day or something.

The graphics didn't bother me at all, but I'm big into roguelikes, so that's somewhat expected.

It's hard when you've only the wiki, a fuzzy understanding of roguelikes, and the echoes of a migraine, lemme tell you.

You may have been set to play in fifteen minutes, but I bet we all spent hours on forts that crashed and burned our first few tries until we finally got the gist of everything. Oh, happy memories. I found a chasm on my first fort- you can bet that "open space" confused the crap out of me.

I actually had cotton candy on surface level on my second fort. 
Me:
"What's this blue stuff?  And why did I get a message for discovering it.  Maybe it does this every time I discover a new metal.  Ah, well guess I'll have my novice miner dig it out."

That one died because said miner mined himself into a pit while I was messing around with channels. 

Taking my only pick with him. 

And I had only dug out about five tiles of underground space.

[Biopass]

DF isn't all that hard. I almost think that at times the community exaggerates its difficulty to sound more hardcore.

I actually found DF back just before the release of 40d, when I was looking for a new roguelike. It took me a while to pick up, and the controls/ASCII were pretty tough (although now I can't use tilesets, I just look at it and ask "wtf is this? What stone is that? What on earth is that dwarf's profession? Why is there a stool on my ballista?"), but I had the basics down in a few days. Of course, years later, I'm still learning about interesting new things, although I don't play nearly as much.

I think DF is much easier for those of us that think of games in terms of realism. I was the kid who would complain about how in Age of Empires 3 (the first modern AAA title I ever played), settlers would chop at a tree and gather wood, but the tree wouldn't fall down until it had 0 wood. I also hated that the anti-artillery artillery dealt almost no damage to infantry (you're getting hit by a cannonball, you shouldn't still be alive), and was pissed that there was no ammunition and subsequently no supply lines I had to manage. And that nobody ever needed to eat. I think you see where I'm going. DF lets people like me apply real-life logic to gaming, and personally, I love it.

My friends that play "normal" modern games (WoW, LoL, etc) do not understand this in the least. "This is 2012, why isn't it in 3d?" "Seriously, why don't they just give all the dwarves hitpoints?" etc.

[darklord92]

granted the steep learning curve has helped the community a bit. there are reasons i dont go on mcs form anymore( minecraft is awesome check out the converter to turn df worlds to mc it's even mroe fun ). As for learning df, i admit i was a bit slow. but after you get past the initial controls, and most importantly designate is your friend i was on a roll from there, it took me nearly a year of off and on playt before i decided to experiment in the other industries in the game besides stone and wood working. slowly moving onto metal than steel. I eventually got the glass industry working and explored making my next fort almost entirely around green glass and a magma glass furnace. from there i'm planing to explore the clothing industry and maybe later more plant processing. it goes in steps you don't need to learn the entire game, and i think that is why people see df having a steep learning curve. There is so much to see and do it becomes overwhelming not to mention the continuous threat of FUN.

[Cruxador]

It's not really that hard to learn, but you do have to learn it. That makes it way harder than most games on the market.

[Prologue]

I got frustrated the first time playing DF. The more frustrated a person gets, the less likely they will learn. My first few embarks were so...bad. First embark, I didn't bring ANY items or assigning skills. Then a few minutes searching what I did wrong, I embarked again. Then I can't seem to get a farm plot (had to irrigate soil first) that wasted another few minutes.

I just got tired of embarking then failing, then embarking and failing at another thing so I just spent half a day reading a guide. Some of it didn't stick since I was frustrated at this point.

This game differs from a lot of games since it doesn't hold our hands in the beginning. We don't see any 'Hold X to jump.' or a list of dangers or tutorials. It basically throws you in a pit, surrounded by unknown dangers, with a stick and telling you to survive. You can do it, but you'll fail getting there.

[The Axiom]

learning cliff, not a curve.

And I swear there was a loop-the-loop on my way up that thing too.

Also in case anyone has not seen this before. IT F*#&ING rocks...

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