How complex and merciless is it?

[Windwalker]

How complex and merciless is Dwarf Fortress? I've never played the ASCII version, or any other game like it, really.

Thanks!

[Rhyagelle]

It's not really, especially now with the UI and mouse support.

[Anhmi]

Easier, especially if you pick a peaceful biome/biome with not much happening. Can play at your leisure until you find hidden fun stuff or it finds you.

[Ballon]

Yes.

Sorry, wrong thread.

Wait...

Yes.

[Warzone]

You can turtle up and be a happy dwarf living in a stardew valley sort of world, where nothing bad ever happens.

and then something bad happens and a lot of dwarfs are now dead. Infections can happen- Not zombie plague [those can happen too] but "oof I'm dying 9 days after healing up wrong" type, and the current medicine of dwarves is "Soap [if your lucky] clean water for both drinking and cleaning, replace bandages, hope for the best." more or less...Barring more extreme surgeries and the ilk.

Fun fact, a bad doctor can diagnoze that head infection? Remove the afflicted part...And then wonder why the dwarf died.

[5SD.Elrond Hubbard]

Depends heavily on your goals. My goal is to see how far I can get, so in that sense even the new interactive tutorial is enough to get started. However, it gets pretty complicated quite quickly, much of which is not strictly necessary. I still barely know how the textile industry works and I've been playing on and off for years.

As for merciless, it definitely can be if you don't know how to handle certain situation. The wiki will help a ton, as a lot of things can be avoided (reasonably well) by just knowing what to do in that situation (building with certain materials, mining patterns, building placement, etc.). In that regard, there will almost always be something that gets you, that's part of the FUN of the game. There's always more to know.

That's just my two cents. If you're looking to do crazy stuff right off the bat, the game can definitely be overwhelming, but if you take it one fort at a time and each time explore a mechanic or industry you weren't familiar with before, it gets a lot better IMHO.

[Bloodlance]

its fun, there is fun stuff happening and even if your fort dies you are eager for a new run.

[EmmaKat]

The gameplay loop is rather simple and the complexity comes from how all the different systems interact, making it a difficult game to master, but pretty easy to have fun with as long as you are willing to accept all your dwarfs will die horribly.
The in-game tutorial does a decent job at showing you how navigate the UI, and theres a bunch of ingame hints suggesting what you do, plus there's a huge amount of youtube tutorials.

[Johan 2.0]

Originally posted by HateThyKing:

Easier, especially if you pick a peaceful biome/biome with not much happening. Can play at your leisure until you find hidden fun stuff or it finds you.

Only the most happy and peaceful locations full of mirth and entirely safe unicorns

[AlP]

Originally posted by Glowyrm:

How complex and merciless is Dwarf Fortress?

You can throw a fluffy wambler at a bronze colossus' left pinky, and it will somehow chop the colossus' head off, and the severed part will sail off in an arc.

[The Former]

It's a game that... You can collapse and that's part of the fun. But in terms of just operating day to day, it's not what I'd call unforgiving. The unforgiving part is when you dig into an aquifer and flood your base, or a legendary ogre wanders onto your map looking for blood.

[The Word-Mule]

It's more intuitive for newbies but it's still complex and merciless. Which is part of the fun.

[Guided]

new UI helps a lot.

there a few things that may cause you a bit of hassle at the beginning. the tutorial locks you out of most menus at the start. so you might not be able to undo a dig order at first.

just take your time. loosing is fun :D

the first is always a throwaway

[creamy]

It's reputation is scarier then the actual game is. Most of the difficulty was always figuring out the arcane UI. The new version absolutely fixes most of that. It still takes some learning but once you figure out what everything does it's actually a surprisingly chill experience