What I found more fun was that not only is the game considered ‘42% done’, that’s also how he versions the game (maybe obvious to most, but for those that don’t know that the current version of the game is 42.xx).
I haven’t read the interview but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The game is simulationist enough that you can go on simply forever, just adding detail and variations. So I don’t see how reaching completion is anything but arbitrary.
Adams remarked in the interview that he has a checklist of about 2,600 elements of reality he considers narratively interesting, and the percentage counts against that list.
Sidebar: I am in no way surprised that the Toady One has such a list. The sort of person who embarks on a project like Dwarf Fortress is not the sort who believes in fuzziness.
@Eric_Majkut and @JonRowe, you guys posted about Dwarf Fortress in the Rim World thread, and now you’ve gone and cost me most of my free time over the last week.
Oh, well good! :) I was afraid all my preaching hadn’t reached anyone over there. They’re all lost! Hopeless! They can’t see the true light!
Hahaha! I haven’t played in a few years, I might have to take another crack at a Fortress.
I’ve been contemplating starting a new fort again recently too, but SS13 Colonial Marines and Project Zomboid have been holding my attention lately. I’m all for stories/screenshots/etc of your new creations though! :)
I’m in the same boat—I haven’t done anything major since the old 40d days, so there’s a lot of new stuff to contend with.
Sure! First off, the rather messy front entrance:
I usually try to be fancier, but there’s been a lot of pressure on this fort since the beginning, and this is a purely functional setup. Also, we just defeated a siege (at great cost), so there’s more trash around than usual.The walled-in square in front of the door is a tower with barracks and fortifications on the upper floors. Off to the right, there are two smaller towers past the edge of the walled-in pasture. The trapped entrance tunnel is a new addition.
The tavern, with silver furniture and plenty of room for guests. The mushroom man left of the leftmost tables is a long-term resident, a traveling mercenary spearman. Given that his equipment is pretty weak, and he takes armor of size ‘small’, I haven’t put him into service yet. Now that my military is reduced in size by ten dwarves, though, I may have a metalsmith special-build him some iron gear and draft him into one of my melee squads.
Note also the expanding burial area. Besides the military deaths fighting off the most recent siege—I wasn’t able to button up the fortress like I usually do, because I was in the middle of a big outdoors construction—I’ve lost a few miners to getting trapped and starving, and a few of the outdoorsy types to monsters and goblin attacks. I still have a solid core of five dwarves with legendary combat skills, though, and hopefully they’ll be able to train the rest up quickly.
And now for my dwarfiest of constructions to date, the perpetual motion aquifer reactor. Off screen to the south and one z-level down, four screw pumps pull water from the aquifer. That water turns 88 water wheels before draining back into the aquifer, for a total net power production of about 7,200. That’s more than enough to run the waterfalls which will eventually feed through the tavern and bathhouse, but probably not quite sufficient for the pump stack which will bring magma up from the depths. (Work in progress.)
I am truly impressed people can make sense out of the noise that is your first image. It reminds me of when I open machine code in Notepad - just with colors.
He should post it in pure ASCII for added fun :)
Wait, the vanilla game display is worse than that? LOL
Well, “worse” in that a non-DF player will have no idea what’s going on. No different than any roguelike in ASCII (Cogmind excepted - that game is BEAUTIFUL ascii). For many though, once you learn it, you can ‘see’ it fine and ASCII can be quite a bit more clear just because text is clear. Lots of graphical tilesets tend to be quite small, and thus hard to use on a 1080 resolution (you can zoom of course, but that makes it blurry).
Here’s a picture with the default ASCII tileset.
Though I guess that doesn’t really apply to Jeff. We know he can dig. He made a frop bog! :D
Haha lol. Yea I’m a digger!
Maybe Jeff is a dwarf and so objects to such a simplistic representation of his species.
IT’S OFFENSIVE! STOP IT, ERIC!
I apologize Jeff. I never should have assumed your species.
I’m doubly cheating, even: not only am I not using the default ASCII display, I’m also using a DFHack feature (DFHack is a memory-editing plugin host for Dwarf Fortress) which uses separate tilesets for text and graphics. If I wasn’t, I’d have an oddball mix: upward and downward stairs would be the little stair tile graphics, but up/down stairs in the same tile would be an X, and in text, commas and periods would be dirt tiles.
It’s hard to get into, no mistake, but it’s deeply rewarding. I’m currently engaged in digging through an aquifer, draining the parts I’m digging through and damming off by using the enormous amount of surplus power my reactor is generating.
My last fortress was my first attempt that was fairly successful and managed to survive for quite a while and gain a population well over 100, I believe. Once I made it over that hump it was very rewarding. I should really consider giving it a go again.
I always used the Lazy Newb Pack with Dwarf Therapist and it made it much more manageable for me. I am not sure if they are both still supported, though, or whether they are updated to work with the latest version. If they are, or something similar is available, I should give it another go sometime soon.
I think the funny part about playing that game is that it is a lot like the Matrix. You know the moment when Neo sees the whole world in ASCII?
After you play DF for a few hours, you suddenly get that clarity, and the little ascii symbols start to make sense, and you have no trouble determining things.
Lazy Newb Pack now has a beta release for x64. However, it is beta because Dwarf Therapist is not included - it hasn’t been updated yet for x64, and the main dev is MIA so it may never be. HOWEVER, don’t let that deter you. Autolabor, Manipulator and labor manager are things that exist. So the same/similar functionality is all there, but just maybe not as ‘pretty’.