Well against my better judgement (as I have a hard time with complex games) I bought it and played for hours. I like this much better than Rimworld. The idea of building a big grand thing is way more interesting to me than the micro managing a small collection of people. I have zero idea what I’m doing, but before I stopped I was up to like 18 dwarfs and only 1 dude died.
I was always so jealous over the years about people playing this game, but the interface and such I just couldn’t do it. Now I’m going to spend all my free time either playing or reading about how to play. The things I need to figure out is the hunting and farming. I just couldn’t get any crops going, but I’m sure I was just missing something obvious.
No crashes or performance issues for me. As I never played the original game anything that is missing from the free version isn’t really going to bother me.
It looks like it was the best selling game on Steam last week; hopefully Toady is able to hire some people and fix up the bugs / speed along the process
Kitfox responded to my email today (within 8 hours), saying they just pushed another hotfix today, and that they are focusing on getting the crashing issues fixed asap.
Fix did not work, but I found a solution in the steam discussions that appears to have worked.
So, in your save folder, there are like a billion 0 kb files, and one file that says world.sav
If you delete all of those other files (make a backup first for sure) and then start that save up, the game auto-creates all of those files again. I believe they are probably broken interactions from previous versions with the updates going out, and it appears that whatever was going on that caused my crashes is fixed after clearing that out. Maybe over time, the save file is getting corrupted in some way and then it just crashes.
I am sure this is something they can fix, as you can manually “clean up” your save file and not lose any progress, at least as it seems.
“People miss the old health interface,” Adams said, referring to the Dwarf Fortress menu that comprised seven entire columns of statuses for individual dwarves. “We’d need to draw 100 more icons. We’ll just have to get that done, I guess. There were so many icons: Do you have sutures, do you have an overlapping fracture, are your intestines inside or outside your body? Sensory nerve damage, motor nerve damage, impaired ability to stand… and then the different levels of bleeding, arterial bleeds and whether or not your lungs are functioning properly. It just adds up.”
Now six days later, Dwarf Fortress has sold around 300,000 copies, developer Tarn Adams said in an interview with PC Gamer.
Based on some extremely basic math, 300,000 copies of Dwarf Fortress sold equals $9 million in sales. Subtract Valve’s 30% cut and you have $6 million to be split between the Adams brothers and Kitfox and new contributors, like the artists and composer who worked on the Steam release. Regional pricing makes that figure fuzzier, of course, and the Adams’ didn’t talk about their publishing split. But with Dwarf Fortress still among Steam’s top sellers, the two must have millions coming their way.
“It’s just a ton of money, but it’s also for 20 years,” Tarn Adams said. “So when you divide that by 20, you’re kind of back down into normal tech salary range. Which is still pretty high, obviously.”
“We found a foolproof way of saving our money, which was to not sell anything for 20 years and then drop it all,” Zach deadpanned.
Yeah, I think my crashes are related to manual saves not working.
If you name a manual save the same as a previous one, it doesn’t properly over-write the last save, and then there are items and interactions saved to a different version of your save that crash the game… I think.
Anyway, the foolproof way of fixing issues if you are crashing like I was, is to manually open the save folder and delete all files that are not world.sav The game will auto-generate the required files on your re-load of the save.
Probably will be an easy thing to fix too, as they can probably fix the save system to not cause this problems.
They should probably close their Patreon before some up-and-coming games journalist talks about how they’re still bilking forgetful people while living like fat cats. Gotta watch out for the outrage industry!
One feature missing, that has not caused me trouble yet, is that you can’t make doors impassible by animals, which was a feature of the original game. Situations where a cat or dog could run through a door you had closed on purpose to stop enemies from coming through, or if you want to keep animals out of certain areas.
