Play-along Dwarf Fortress tutorials - complete!

Games
61

Nice, thanks.

A bit later in the tutorial it calls for me to remove my old food stockpile - but when I use q to select the stockpile, it won’t let me remove it. Any idea what’s going on here?

Edit: NM I figured it out. This UI is hilariously inconsistent! Forget the heavy keyboard reliance, that’s no big deal. It’s the total lack of consistency that makes it such a nightmare!

62

You can already do all of that in a good 1-3 seconds.

Want to see his health? v-w, takes me less than a second

  • Which I can do in a 1/2 second with hover.

Want to see whats in a construction? t

  • I have to move my cursor over to it first, which takes 1/5th of a second with a mouse.

Want to see whats queued up in a workshop? q

  • Again, quicker to select it with a mouse.

Want to queue an item? a-item shortcut for example a-a, a-b, a-G

  • Assuming you’ve memorized the 100 different items to construct. Much faster to context click than scroll through 50 items looking for the one I want.

Want to queue up lots of an item? a-a-r

  • Shift-click 10 times is faster than those keys 10 times.

Scrolling around for me takes almost no time as well - shift+directional arrow

  • I’m pretty damn sure I can move a mouse to any board location way faster than you can key scroll to it. And I even suck as fast mouse-move FPS twitch games.

GUI features I’d like to see that an ascii interface sucks at:

  • select a dwarf and it draws a nice semi-tranparent line to what the hell he’s actually going to go do.
  • I’d like to see the dwarf’s graphical icons change when they’re in a dangerous mood, or off trying to create some artistic piece of brilliance, etc.
  • I’d like the list of log messages in a small side window where I can double click on each message to take me to the incident location (why did FooBar give up on his job?).
  • I’d like to hover over a shop and see highlighted those items in the queue that I’m missing materials for (no ash = nice little “ash” sybmol in red outline next to it).
  • I’d like a nice visual indication when I select a lever what the hell it’s connected to.

Yes, you can get things done with keyboard commands. I’m not arguing that. Hell, decades of computer use before good GUIs can argue that. GUIs are just simply much better for various activities. I’d easily play $100 for DF with a good GUI.

63

I want to be able to drag out areas to dig with the mouse.

Lists should be sortable by all sorts of things, and selectable in chunks with shift-click and control-click.

Tooltips would also help a huge amount.

Awesome tutorial, Calistas, thanks! Maybe a little slow on defense, though. I kind of had a bit of a massacre.

64

Yeah, army work could have come sooner but I got distracted!

65

Part 13 posted!

World Building Badness

66

Oh dear god I really gotta get Photoshop on this computer and make you a new banner.

67

"A good sized area, a water source in the corner (you need water), magma, sand, flux stone, lots of wood, prefect! "

68

Gah! Will fix today. Ta. And you don’t like kittens???

69

Awake my sleeping dwarf!

Oh Calistas, please help me. Do you prefer to play with the Mayday Graphics edition (DFG) and it is running the latest version? Am I missing something about it in that I don’t seem to be able to customize an Embark! loadout… I can add skills to my 7 dwarfs, rename them if I want, etc. but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to select equipment, food (barrels), seeds (bags) and so forth.

I haven’t played DF in some time; it ran like a dog on my old PC. Saw the Quakebells thread and this one and thought I’d give it a go.

Thanks!

70

From the screen where you select your dwarfs skills it should be tab to get to the item menu. It should have the commands for each screen listed at the bottom.

71

You haven’t fixed your crappy banner. They need to be more adorable, pronto.

This might be what makes me consider playing the game :P Looks good, and the feedback you’ve received thus far only re-enforces the perspective.

72

Thanks, yes I need to write an embark tutorial, after I finish my Barbary States Empire Total War AAR. And yeah, the banner sucks. Have had no better offers :(.

73

Random DF Questions

Noise?

Do I need to be worried about how close my dining hall, sleeping areas, etc are to my workshops or entrance or whatnot?

Legend?

For the embark maps? I’ve figured out what a magma pipe looks like by trial and error but is there a legend either in game or out for the other stuff. For what its worth I’m using Mayday don’t know if that changes the embark map graphics or not.

74

Part 14 and the tutorials as a big PDF added to the OP :)

75

I have to sign up to something to download the PDF?? Any chance you/someone can host it somewhere where I don’t have to do that?

Sorry if I’m being a pain, and I’ll sign up with a junk email address if I need to.

76

Scribd, yeah hmm will see if I can host it on my blog itself :)

And yes I can :)

77

Great! Thank you, I’ve saved it to PC now. I’ve been through it a few times now, but it’s nice to keep as a reference.

Also, 100 pages?!

78

Yeah, hard to believe! That is a lot of words!

79

So noticing all the changes that are being put in on the code development page. Is there any way to play with any of these or are we stuck with d11 for an unknown time.

I’d love to play the beta-alpha or whatever you would call it.

80

Nope. At the pace he’s been going though I have hope we’ll see the new version by the end of the summer.