Dwarf Fortress - Despite the multiple let's sperg threads, we never had a general

[Foxxo]

It is WILD how kitfox obtaining Dwarf Fortress killed it. No one gives a CRUD about it anymore; it's as though the massive initial burst in popularity and exposure exploded its heart. I hope they're not overworking Tarn.

On another note, Adventure Mode character portraits were a mistake: not because of the default pigmentation and facial structure, you goofs, but because everyone except the kobolds and (ironically) the skeletons has a pair of beady dead-eyes.

 

[Foxxo]

Actually, this one looks pretty good.

 

[Seedling]

It is WILD how kitfox obtaining Dwarf Fortress killed it. No one gives a CRUD about it anymore; it's as though the massive initial burst in popularity and exposure exploded its heart. I hope they're not overworking Tarn.

On another note, Adventure Mode character portraits were a mistake: not because of the default pigmentation and facial structure, you goofs, but because everyone except the kobolds and (ironically) the skeletons has a pair of beady dead-eyes.
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I dislike the idea of portraits because the ASCII allowed you to imagine what they would look like, and of course if you wanted to potray that you could draw them and even make a series out of it like many do.
But giving them official portaits just kills that, you can still do your own version of course but you'll get waves of retards crying that your dwarfs look nothing like the portraits

 

[Book Thief]

It is WILD how kitfox obtaining Dwarf Fortress killed it. No one gives a CRUD about it anymore; it's as though the massive initial burst in popularity and exposure exploded its heart.

Player count has sunk to about 1.3K players regularly since its release. No surprise, since I imagine a lot of people who never played this before were flavor-of-the-month tourists who refused to stomach the game back when it "looked like shit" and had an "unintuitive user interface." Surprise, removing either of those things would not fix any underlying issues with the game at its core, such as the overwhelming complexity of the mechanics and the poor performance when playing a fortress for long periods of time.

I reckon a lot of newbs got filtered by the game itself and left when they couldn't cobble together anything more complex than a hole in the ground, leaving them wondering what the fuck made this game so special in the first place:

On another note, Adventure Mode character portraits were a mistake

I'm with @Seedling on this. I'm an ASCII player at heart, so seeing my player character drawn in pixel art instead of having to rely on my imagination just kills it for me. No pixel art can capture how badass a wolf-man in dwarven plate mail, an azure cloak, and forgotten beast bone earrings as he beats down trolls with a morning star looks compared to what's inside my head.

 

[Seedling]

I'm with @Seedling on this. I'm an ASCII player at heart, so seeing my player character drawn in pixel art instead of having to rely on my imagination just kills it for me. No pixel art can capture how badass a wolf-man in dwarven plate mail, an azure cloak, and forgotten beast bone earrings as he beats down trolls with a morning star looks compared to what's inside my head.

You raised another point i hadn't considered, the ridiculous detail of the accesories the characters can wear and how they can loose them would also need to be potrayed, which honestly seems like too much fucking work for kitfox, so that's another letdown

 

[Orange Rhymer]

You raised another point i hadn't considered, the ridiculous detail of the accesories the characters can wear and how they can loose them would also need to be potrayed, which honestly seems like too much fucking work for kitfox, so that's another letdown

Ironic. Wokes trying to make everyone special by accentuating unimportant details, end up fucking up a game by ignoring details.

 

[Coelacanth]

Anything other than ASCII/retro texture pack is soulless. There is nothing cooler than being able to envisage the world in your mind when you do a fresh embark and figure out in your head what you want to do with the landscape.

I imagine what's eventually going to happen is that DF will split into two different communities just like Minecraft did - you had the bloated normal game and then you had people playing Betacraft/Better than Adventure, which used one of the best versions of Beta Minecraft as a comfy base and branched out into a small but dedicated following. THere will most likely be those who'll keep playing Steam DF (like Kruggsmash... yes I am still very salty he wimped out and switched to Steam) and those who will stick to 0. 47. 05 and eventually make mods for it that take the game in the direction it would've gone if Tarn had stuck to ASCII.

 

[analrapist]

Anything other than ASCII/retro texture pack is soulless. There is nothing cooler than being able to envisage the world in your mind when you do a fresh embark and figure out in your head what you want to do with the landscape.

I'll admit that I got filtered by ASCII and the new Premium graphicspack is worth the cost of admission to me. I see why it's so popular but as a programmer it is such a bizarre relic of a piece of software. Truly one of the strangest workings of man or dwarf. Up there with TempleOS really. Kind of the atheist counterpart.

 

[Rent Tin]

They alienated a lot of previous long-time fans by fucking with previous keybinds that actually worked in favor of a half-ass UI that wasn't ready for release.

 

[Pat Fried Rice]

They alienated a lot of previous long-time fans by fucking with previous keybinds that actually worked in favor of a half-ass UI that wasn't ready for release.

Definitely. I haven’t really touched the Steam version, because with the “updates”
they made, it feels like they actually downgraded some of the features of the game.

 

[AnOminous]

I have honestly not played it at all since the Kitfox faggots basically ruined it. Thanks, troons.

 

[Book Thief]

I've just been sticking with older versions whenever I feel like playing. I like being able to actually play the game and not have it take fifteen hours because I'm hamstrung by the mouse interface. Steam tells me that I haven't touched their version of the game since April of last year.

Also, from what I recall, the Workshop integration is shit. In Classic, if you want to install a tileset, you just dump the files in the save folder, tweak a config file, and boom, you're done. But in the Steam version, if you want to, for example, make the smooth designations more transparent, then too bad, you have to generate an entire new fucking world. It's fucking stupid.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

I’m happy for tarn and bro but if they had just packaged up the normal free version on Steam for $20 as early access I bet they’d’ve made damn near a similar amount.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

"unintuitive user interface." Surprise, removing either of those things would not fix any underlying issues with the game at its core,

If anything, I find the GUI on Steam to be more cumbersome than the old hotkey-heavy classic UI. Granted, it may just be because I had years of experience with the latter, but it's almost depressing how I struggle to get basic things sorted when starting a fort on Steam, but then immediately know how to get things rolling when I go back to ASCII. The Steam UI sucks, just in a whole different way.

 

[Cats]

I like the capybaramen and pond turtle men. I would definitely welcome these creatures into my village if one ever came to visit as there is no way they wouldn't be peaceful. I guess I'd probably do the same in Dwarf Fortress if I actually played it

 

[Moths]

I do agree that the focus on graphics is a bit much id be happy with an advanced tileset like mephs being integrated.

Also confirmed salty they fucked with keybinds I had already fucking memorized

 

[elrond hubbard]

Old keybinds actually made sense and were often a character in the name of what you were trying to build, which meant you could normally get to what you were looking for by trying the more common letters in 3 or 4 tries

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

I have honestly not played it at all since the Kitfox faggots basically ruined it. Thanks, troons.

This is a classic example of pandering to someone not willing to pay for the product. Except instead of troons/twitter activists it's the "can it run crysis" graphics crowd.
It would like be if DCS suddenly started adding in a simplified control scheme to make it more warthunder like.

 

[Foxxo]

I do agree that the focus on graphics is a bit much id be happy with an advanced tileset like mephs being integrated.

Also confirmed salty they fucked with keybinds I had already fucking memorized

Meph was copystruck. Some of the sprites the guy was using (and getting Patreon funding for) were taken from other people's projects... and other games, I imagine. I had to go pretty deep to find a copy.

I hope someone mods the coming updates into .47.05, but I'm not sure about the changes to embark points (YOU HAVE TOO MANY NOW BECAUSE SKILLS ARE PRICED DIFFERENTLY), iron being more common, migrants being a lot less common (and often single moms with nine kids, because only your settlement is a commie utopia apparently), subterranean obsidian slabs with angels and treasures, and the Subterranean Animal People sieges that now happen if you bust open the caverns regardless of whether or not subterranean animal people towns are present.

Regarding that last thing, I get that kitfox wanted Tarn to put some sort of early-midgame challenge to forts that wouldn't be trivial (like ambushes ever since goblin ambushes were shut off) or just straight-up game-ending (like goblin sieges), but infinite hordes of subterranean animal people with no chance of calming down makes no sense.

 

[Moths]

Meph was copystruck. Some of the sprites the guy was using (and getting Patreon funding for) were taken from other people's projects... and other games, I imagine. I had to go pretty deep to find a copy.

I hope someone mods the coming updates into .47.05, but I'm not sure about the changes to embark points (YOU HAVE TOO MANY NOW BECAUSE SKILLS ARE PRICED DIFFERENTLY), iron being more common, migrants being a lot less common (and often single moms with nine kids, because only your settlement is a commie utopia apparently), subterranean obsidian slabs with angels and treasures, and the Subterranean Animal People sieges that now happen if you bust open the caverns regardless of whether or not subterranean animal people towns are present.

Regarding that last thing, I get that kitfox wanted Tarn to put some sort of early-midgame challenge to forts that wouldn't be trivial (like ambushes ever since goblin ambushes were shut off) or just straight-up game-ending (like goblin sieges), but infinite hordes of subterranean animal people with no chance of calming down makes no sense.

Yeah that just sounds like more pointless goblinite since the grounds made of hematite these days.

Feels like back when tarn would add shit it had a purpose like a werenigger approaching your fortress would fuck it over if you didnt have a drawbridge or a way to isolate your entrance in prep for sieges.

And underground raids just sounds like FB spawns but way more trivial. In the last save I remember playing it felt like my cavern layer was constantly under siege by FBs so does this compete with that event in the encounter table? Im not sure how events are handled in DFs system.

It may have been more interesting if they had something like an underground scout that manages to observe your entrance for a season takes note of how many unique dwarves it sees and adjust raid strengtth based on what it sees. That way it may encourage players to set up patrol routes to clear scouts thereby engaging in that system.

Id thought they also wouldve designed something to hook into the intrigue system by now such as undercover scouts coming to your fortress to assess fortress strength for sieges or where your valuable stuff is so raiders beeline to that room and bugger off instead of being hellbent on genociding your fortress.