It’s interesting going way back to the beginning of this thread and seeing all the different posters who have just disappeared. I wonder what happened to them all. It seems strange that someone would have 10k posts and then just disappear off the face of the earth.
I am also new but I just watched this beginner video and it explains all those things and more. “Only” 45 minutes long. He gets to the basics right away, so you don’t even need to watch it all to get your answers.
God talk about the End of Days - DF sold on Steam for $30
Cats and dogs living together
The Great Schism took many, I’m sure! But yeah, it’s anyways interesting seeing a really old thread get bumped and look back at all the familiar names from before! Online communities are strange in that people can just vanish and it often takes some time to realize!
That’s a great explanation. I’ve never played DF, but I never imaged it to be like an RTS. Is it a lot like Rimworld in Fortress mode where you manage a lot of people?
Legend Mode is in the game, but I don’t think Legend Viewer is.
I opened a generated world in Legend Mode today and it doesn’t have any of the map-style or statistical information up front and doesn’t have the clickable links.
So you can’t, say, sort all historical figures in the worldgen by kills and then click on their battle list and then click on a battle to see those details, etc.
This is a shame, as one of my favourite things to do is generate a very long history world and then use Legend Viewer to read through it like a history book.
I’m going to feed the Steam version save to the most recent version of Legend Viewer and see if it’ll open.
It’s a lot like Rimworld in regular Dwarf Fortress mode, yes…that’s the main mode, the one we all played for 30 years…I never played adventure mode myself.
Looks like in less than a year too. Very impressive!
Pick a manager (nobles/admin screen), zone an office with a chair and assign it to them, then use the work orders screen (orders created here are global) or the tab in your workshops (these orders are local to the structure). The default is to make 10 of something once.
Look at the canceled job notifications later to see what you’re short on or missing production for. You can set multiple conditions to trigger the orders, which helps cut down on notification spam, and also sets a repeating schedule. The suggested conditions may give you hints about required inputs and equipment.
Ha, by random happenstance I ran across him streaming new-DF:
Thanks, I found that video much much better than the beginner friendly streams on the devs channel.
Thanks.
Ok, how do I get my kitchen to stop cooking up the plump helmets and their seeds? It just ruined a whole fort because I now suddenly have no seeds to resow anything because they cooked them all. I have a work order set up to make easy meals, but can’t see any button to restrict what can be used either in the work order screen or the kitchen screen.
Advice I see online and in the wiki is for the old DF with a completely different interface.
Ok I figured it out from a post buried in the steam forum. Bring up the labor menu and you’ll see a ‘kitchen’ tab that lets you restrict plump helmets from being used to make food. This is so important for new forts, as cooking them doesn’t give back any seeds so you can no longer farm them after one harvest.
Normally I would have a go at the designers for making such an important thing not be in the tutorials, but the game is known to be pretty inaccessible so I guess it is as described.
Some things I figured in playing on and off today.
Build bins and barrels at the carpenter’s workshop asap or you’ll need impossibly huge stockpiles.
Appoint a manager asap. Queuing up tasks at workstations is for suckers. The manager needs an office, but unlike Rimworld or Going Medevial there don’t appear to be any room requirements. You just zone something as an office and they have a “meager office”.
Once you have a manager you can struggle with the horrible UI of the work orders screen which I assume is really the key to everything. Here’s where you set the “if I have less than one empty bin build five more bins” order. You create a work order, choose what for from a giant inaccessible list by typing “bin” in the search blank. A line is added to make 10 bins. If you want to make more or less than 10 bins at a time you click the +/- button over on the right (not in the middle). Then you click the icon with the comparison symbols. Here the UI has a saving grace in that it has useful suggestions for rules so you don’t have to go through another giant search list. So you select “has less than 10 bins” and use the +/- to scale that up or down if you want.
I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m going, but I queued up a bunch of work orders to make sure I always have some things on hand.
The next guy you want to appoint and give a crappy hole in the rock to call an office to is a bookkeeper so you can get actual numbers for your stockpiles.
That’s most of what I’ve figured out. My fortress so far. It’s all just one level.
snickers in pre-steam DF
No doubt, thus why I have waited so patiently.
One other random tip from a noob, a long starting history generates some fun text but takes up good starting positions.
Though after history the entry I got posted before someone needs to create a mod where you can play as the race of honey badger people. I am highly interested in their society.
I’ve hit some OSHA fun. I try to keep the architecture of my fort and anything nearby reasonably safe since all my dwarves in the past have been pretty cluelessly careless.
I noticed earlier that I had a possibly-dangerous spot at the edge of my map. A river comes down from the mountains at a high level and falls over a long waterfall into a deep gorge while to the side it cascades lightly into giant foamy sprays over the mountainside. It then flows down the gorge to eventually reach the valley floor where my fort entrance is located.
The issue is that the edge is too steep to cross the river upstream of the waterfall except right at the fall’s edge and the gorge is too deep to cross until well downstream. I figured my dwarves have no reason to go up there, so it could wait for a bridge or something when I was better set up.
After a few migrant waves entered elsewhere and I had ignored the waterfall, one wave finally entered over that mountainside. They and their animals proceeded to cross the top of the falls and fell 13 Z-levels to the bottom of the gorge into deep water, leaving them all injured and drowning. I attempted to tunnel stairs down to the bottom of the gorge to attempt to save them, but by the time my miners got through only a single donkey had lived, though it later died of its wounds.
I didn’t want to risk my dwarves gathering corpses from beneath the falls and so restricted the area. Next time I thought about it, two of the migrants were now running around the other side of the river a ways away as zombies. (I think it might have something to do with a necromancer who had arrived in the prior migrant wave.)
I decided the undead could stay on their hillside for now and focused on my own defenses and on some bridges around the top of the falls and some walls to block passage right at the edge. With that dealt with, I then ignored the problem again.
A human caravan was leaving the fort when I got the alert that the zombies were fighting and dying. Their warriors seemed to have it under control, so I left it alone.
Then just as the survivors were about to zone out, the caravan’s elephant died of its wounds and rose from its grave to murder the remaining merchant as he fled over one of my new safety bridges. I lucked out though and it seemed to leave the map on its own while I mustered defenses.
Now I just need to deal with the ghosts rising from their watery grave to haunt the fort. Need to re-prioritize the coffins and burial detail before anything actually gets bad (well, for the rest of us). I hope the next human caravan doesn’t steer clear of our site or attack us.
Not necessarily!
Your purchase comes with a Steam key
Best of both worlds!
i had no idea about the itch release. that will allow me to play it in the mac without too many file transfers shenanigans too. thanks to both of you.