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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I'd definitely play it with that UI.

I often wonder why games almost never have swappable (or even just scriptable) UI-s that could allow player to use shorthands through UI drudgery.

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> Wow. I'd definitely play it with that UI.

You may want to take a look at Gnomoria (http://gnomoria.com), which is basically "DF clone with sensible voxel graphics". For example: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/45067176442464...

It's not a scriptable interface, but it is much saner than DF's, with a limited set of consistent hotkeys/toolbars/panels.

Gnomoria is to Dwarf Fortress as Nano is to Vim. It's much easier to learn to play and fun, but it's about 1/10 the magnitude.

For many popular roguelike games different tilesets are common. Search for "dwarf fortress tileset".

I'd recommend installing the Lazy Newb Pack instead. It has all the tools and tileset you need preconfigured:

http://lazynewbpack.com/

Now that's what I needed to try this game. Last time I tried, I spent hours and hours downloading tools and never ever got to play the actual game!

Also read some introductions. Some tips like "no aquifer" for your first settlement really ease it.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_gui...

DF badly needs that for the key combinations. They're complete nonsense, and in all the time I've spent playing, I've always needed a cheat-sheet for even the things I didn't do all that rarely.

But I'm guessing that's not trivial to implement if you haven't already started doing it that way, and for something like Dwarf Fortress, it would probably be a lot of effort for not a significant amount of result - after all, everyone's already got their cheat sheet...

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