Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

A few years ago i tried to get into this. Like I really tried. I too installed and used Dwarf Therapist.

here's where I struggled: I still wouldn't have the hang of managing the dwarves I had and then a new crop would come along. Even with all these tools it quickly descended into me not having any idea who was doing what or why. Or why they weren't doing the things I was asking them to do.

A lot of the things seemed way too roundabout to me too. Like I'd have chickens (or were they ducks? I forget) and I was attempting to breed them. But the whole process of making egg-laying boxes or nests or whatever was tedious and then you had to lock the door to stop the dwarves coming in and taking the eggs.

Likewise, i found the process of feeding the dwarves hard to manage largely because I couldn't easily figure out if there was any food, whether that was because no one was making any or that it was simply all getting eaten. Was it an issue of not having room to stockpile food? Or was the dwarf who could make food doing something else (possibly because he was the only person who could do that or he just happened to be the one who'd picked up the pick for some reason)?

So I never got to that point where I felt like I had a good grasp of my colony as a coherent unit and could then engage in flights of fancy.

I think the last time I tried I then got a monster invading and I hadn't figured out military yet. That was a whole new system to learn and I just lacked the motivation so stopped and never went back.

You have two grids. Clear grid 2. Go over grid 1, calculate the new state for the current cell, write it to the second grid. At the end of a step you swap the grids.

Just slap on a good old "#pragma omp parallel for" with OpenMP (a nice guide is here [0]).

[0] https://bisqwit.iki.fi/story/howto/openmp/

I also found this pdf if you are interested. http://www.shodor.org/media/content/petascale/materials/UPMo...

DFhack already modifies many parts of GUI. Changes in trade window or construction building(floors/walls) are so convenient I refuse to play new DF release until dfhack is able to support it.

You can cap the migrant waves by setting a max dwarf limit in the LNP configurations. The first two migrant waves are (or were) hard-coded so if you set the limit very low you would potentially go over it. But if you set the limit to like 60, you wouldn't get repeated huge wages.

To make sure they're doing what you want them to do, have them "specialize" into professions. Leave a large bulk of low-skill labor for hauling, and try to keep the number of idle dwarves low (it shows up in the corner and you can inspect with 'u' from the main menu).

Yeah, the initial set up process for industries like eggs take a bit of getting used to. I actually usually have my craftsdwarf start building nest boxes as soon as I've mined out enough stone. You can also selectively 'forbid' individual clutches of eggs rather than locking the door by selecting them with q and going to the nestbox (or t, I forget) and hitting f after scrolling down to the eggs.

For food, it sounds like your issue was not knowing the UI. If you have a bookeeper (set with 'n'->bookeeper, change granularity with 's') with an office they will automatically keep track of your food, which you can check with z->kitchen or z->stocks. You should use a stockpile for food because it prevents food from rotting and keeps it in convenient locations. You can make one with p->f although when just starting a fortress you might instead want to create a general stockpile with p->t(select most things except refuse and stone)->c. Regarding the food production, it's good to limit dwarves in essential industries/positions to have all labors except their particular specialty disabled, including all hauling, and then manage tasks so that those dwarves are not left idle.

Learning the gameplay is reading a related wikipage, which is acceptable. The hard/annoying part is learning UX. It really shouldn't be that complicated. Talking to people in adventure mode, managing jobs (as you said, dwarf therapist is practically a must since the base interface is just horrible), managing armies, hospitals... everything is a chore and you need a tutorial for everything. And every UX in game is different.

To dig for example. You have to create a designation for it. But how do you know that unless you watched a video/read a tutorial? On top of that if something is wrong, the game gives you very little clue. Do you have a dwarf with digging task? Is he available? Does he have pick? Can he pathfind? The game gives you no answer other than not initiating the digging (edit actually my bad, i think it gives you some logs for some cases.). Stuff like that is a hard barrier for most players and they won't be able to continue unless they are really committed.