Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
This tutorial will walk you through the best tools and the first in game year or so:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5-Ab4ta4zm9benUlfb5_vJXNTChfBll2
I'm really looking forward to the military menu being somewhat comprehensible finally.
And while there's a steep initial learning curve, it levels out a lot once you ascend the first cliff. You go fairly quickly from being overwhelmed and desperately trying to survive to having a functioning fort that most of the time takes care of itself with little intervention, and can start thinking of fun things to do with your now copious spare time.
There's still going to be a steep learning curve but a lot less of it will be wrangling the UI and the in-game documentation is going to be a lot better. Ironically, this game hasn't really had much in the way of tooltips and in-context explanation, despite being one of the few games that really needs it.
I would recommend giving yourself small goals for learning the game, and to accept repeated failure. So for example, these could be a series of failed forts:
1) You dig out tunnels and rooms, get a couple farms set up, get a storage room set up, get a working kitchen and dining hall, get the basic workshops, get a trade depot, build bedrooms for dwarves as they come, learn how to assign jobs to your dwarves, set up your offices for your head dwarf.
2) Create static defenses and burrows, learn how to assign dwarves to a burrow and how to change alarm levels when an attacking force arrives, build some drawbridges attached to levers that can be used for fort protection. Use cage traps as part of the defenses, learn how to clear caged enemies and reset the cage traps.
3) Build a training room and your first training squad, learn the training menu so you know when your dwarves are training/resting/working. Start with just melee dwarves, try to get up to at least 2 different squads training with different schedules. Learn how to assign patrol routes and how to command dwarves around when an invasion shows up.
4) Set up a functioning hospital. Yes, that's it for this one, good luck.
etc. and etc.
You don't have to use my list, it's just an example of a better way to approach this game, give yourself little things to learn and just keep building on what you learned. By the time you get to your mini missions 8+, all the stuff you've learned and hopefully keep doing every time will have become second nature to you (and you'll even get better and better at those things).
For me personally, the kinds of missions I've started giving myself are now things like this:
- Build near a dark tower and get defenses in place that can handle the growing number of zombie invasions (failed twice so far on this task)
- Build in a start area that doesn't have ideal amounts of resources to force effective trading for survival
- Use defenses that don't include dozens to hundreds of cage traps, but instead relies on very well trained dwarves to survive.
I built a underground fortress but created a secondary, garden of Eden type fortress suspended in the tree canopy 5 z-levels up and banished one of the children there. I even built pump stacks to pump water up 5 z-levels to make sure her statue garden had waterfalls in it. She had several rare pets. She was granted everything *except* interaction with other dorfs (sic). After 2-3 seasons alone in her tree castle, her "Thoughts" screen actually showed that she was "sick of all this greenery" I laughed so hard, it was amazing.
I was grooming her to become a "God Scribe"; An all-knowing, holy empress who could directly communicate the will and words of the gods onto paper (I even set up a paper industry).
She ended up going insane and I learned that dorfs can, not only climb trees but also fall from trees. She fell 5 z-levels down. I had a fancy casket built, we buried her, and we all decided it would be best to just forget about the whole thing.
Oh and than we were raided by a necromancer and her army. She has been stealing all the manuscripts in the region for some strange reason.
We are greatly outnumbered but Legends Mode tells me there are 3 vampires in the world, one of those has not yet been hunted down and killed. We have chosen our best dorf to seek out this vampire, get infected to himself become a vampire, and using Adventure mode, I shall seek out this necromancer and kill her once and forever (and get all my books back :/
Yea DF ascii is probably the best game I have ever played....and its free lol...weird how best things in life tend to be free..
Might have been in the past. But today there are extra tools, good tutorials and really good graphic packs (tilesets).
Just download the "Starter Pack":
https://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=7622
It includes DFHack (which is some kind of a mod) and also comes with very helpful/enriching utilities like "Dwarf Therapist" and Soundsense.
It also has a lot of tilesets in it.
I can highly recommend this tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGB6RkFB7ZmNbSUujzXbgNjJi_-WHTTTD
Also in the beginning make sure to have the Wiki open:
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/
It's not as intuitive/easy as something like Anno.
But it's totally worth it.
Just don't try to make everything perfect on the first run.
Also don't try to understand and do everything on the first run.
It's normal to fail in this game and can be fun to start over.
You will learn with time. Focus on the basics first.
Dwarf Fortress makes you feel like you're playing in a living world which is why most people who learn how to play the game becomes greatly devoted to the game.
Worth playing the original? Let me put it this way: I have played a lot of the games out there (really a LOT of games) and dwarf fortress is the ONLY one i allways come back to. You have seen the screenshots of the game, the graphics are literally crap. At the start of the game you feel like an absolute imbecile, So dumb that you have to look for tutorials in youtube to learn how to dig a tunnel. Dont get frustrated, its a hard beggining. But if you endured with patience that excruciating beggining suddenly the pixel frik graphics turn alive, you find yourself thinking at lunch ways to build a really nice fortress with ways to create clever traps (or just arming your dwarves to the teeth and launch them at hordes of invaders), or thinking how you are going to decorate the gods churches your dwarves are so fond of, or you focus in building a tabern so people from all around the land can come and have a drink of your dwarven wine and stay in a finely decorated room and listen to some fine poetry and singing provided from your dwarvies which will bring all kinds of ppl, mercenaries, travellers passing by, and unwelcomed ones who present themself in disguise (im looking at you friking vampires). And if you get bored you just focus on something else. Expanding your fortress, clearing out deep caverns found while digging for ores, most of which are crawling with dark creatures.
There are so MUCH things you can do in this game that you allways find something fun to focus on
My problem when i play dwarf fortress is that once i start i cant stop for days
I was more entretained trying to figure out how to drain water from below than trying to figure out why my dwarves keept losing all their blood all the time...
But I agree about the guilds and temples ... it can be a bit overwhelming.
That said, guilds and temples are really handy. Temples drain away a lot of stress, and I build guildhalls early and open them to everyone, because they do demonstrations giving useless dwarves useful skills they can have strange moods with. If you throw in a toy stockpile, even kids will learn!
Vampires do suck, though.
I usually have an Engraver from the beginning, who starts working early with smoothing and switches to engraving as soon as he's legendary.
Your whole Fort will look super shiny, when he's done.
It all depends on what type of gamer you are, what genres interest you. If you love management, base building games like Rimworld, Oxygen not included or similiar. Then you'll probably get the motivation to learn the game. It takes a few days to learn and you'll need to follow guides on what programs to install etc.
But if you're new to the genre, I would recommend learning something easier like Rimworld first. Then learn free version of DF or wait for the premium version. Which might release pretty soon or far into the future, no one knows.