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I don't think that the criticism is that easily dismissible.

It's not so much that it's keyboard controlled (that's great for the reasons you mention) or that it's hard (that's ultimately part of its charm). It's that the interface is inconsistent with itself. A great example (from when I last spent any comsiderable time with it) is that different menus use different controls and mechanisms for selecting a menu item. Some have you type a single character, while others have you scroll through them with varying pairs of keys for no obvious reason. It's a natural result of organic growth and IMO outweighed by a great game, but the cognitive load of using the interface definitely isn't its charm for me.

The criticism is not being dismissed. It is simply an opposing and simultaneous viewpoint.

The jeweller's workshop UI is a weird disaster. You need to specify specific a task to cut a specific type of gem. You can make it repeat, but the task will erase if that gem type is unavailable.

Then you need to create a task with a specific type of gem to encrust, again the task will delete if that gem type is unavailable.

Finally the encruster will select an item in your fortress at random to encrust with that type of gem.

There should really be an option to handle gemstones by value rather than mineral type, which would require (and exercise) the appraisal skill.

So if you want to cut semiprecious stones, queue a task for cut gemstone, worth ¤1 to ¤5. It would also be nice if you could specify the type of cut, since the game engine already randomly produces cabochons and baguettes and cushions and such.

The encrusting randomness can be controlled by locking the jeweler in a room with only one encrustable item, but I shouldn't have to. If I want a masterwork silver hammer encrusted with small jade cabochons, I want to be able to specify that.

Also, building multi-part instruments is just insane.

dfhack has an automatic jeweler script now.

Once you have a manager though, you can set up jobs that are highly configurable and repeatable. Learning the job system really took my DF productivity to the next level.

The problem for me is... I love simulation games (love Rimworld and Prison Architect for example) but the Dwarf Fortress learning curve is too much for me. I've attempted a number of times and learning it just was not fun for me at all. I want to enjoy good simulation games, but I don't have enough free time to force myself to play something that I don't enjoy until the point where I've learned it enough to enjoy it.

For instance, the lack of fidelity of the game allows any new character to be added in 2 seconds

I get this and actually completely agree. I loved MUD's back in the day because they could be so much more complex and detailed because they didn't have to worry about graphics and whatnot. Rimworld and such also can do a lot more than fancy 3D games for the exact same reasons, so there's definitely a spectrum.

But having said that, I still find the DF UX to be almost unapproachable. It could be low fidelity for the reasons you mention without being quite so hard to learn and internalise, but I get the impression that its just not a priority for the dev at all. Oh well, its their choice, but I feel a bit sad that I'm missing out on an otherwise amazing game.

> I want to enjoy good simulation games, but I don't have enough free time to force myself to play something that I don't enjoy until the point where I've learned it enough to enjoy it.

I am the same way. If I wanted to struggle with difficult tasks, I would work. I realize this puts me more in the "casual gamer" category.

You might enjoy Stardew Valley then.

I agree. I've played DF for probably about a decade now, and the UI isn't an issue. I know every keybind so I don't really need to go searching for it. Yes, to begin with, it is a bit of a struggle, but the wiki (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/) is probably the best game wiki out there.

Get past your dislike of the UI and you'll discover a game so rich it will outlast any other.

But thats just the thing. Its hard to get past the UI. You really have to be dedicated to get over the steep learning curve of both the game mechanics and the UI. For new players its often just too much effort for a game.

Ideally the game should be easy to learn the basics, but hard to master. The UI hinders this significantly.

Well, my game recommendation may seem out of place, but if you look for building&fighting strategy game that is very easy to learn and awfully hard to master, try GO (baduk/weiqi/igo).

And you play using a nice physical goban, the UX is really hard to beat.

I've wanted to love Dwarf Fortress, but the fans sometimes come across like Stockholm Syndrome victims when you mention the UI and UX.

I mean I came at the game from a long history of playing Roguelikes, so the ASCII graphics weren't an immediate turnoff, but figuring out how to do anything is just plain daunting.

Also, there is a big difference between most Roguelikes and DF on the graphics front. In Rogue you start in a small room with just yourself and maybe a treasure or a monster. New monster icons are introduced slowly so you can learn them at a reasonable pace. In Dwarf Fortress you are apparently expected to learn dozens of symbols right from the start in addition to figuring out what keybinds do what and trying to figure out what you are supposed to be doing or if the fact that there are dozens of different kinds of rocks is important yet or not.

If there was ever a game crying out for a hand holding tutorial it is Dwarf Fortress.

This is one of the reasons why Youtube video tutorials of DF are hugely popular. I think there are probably even a lot of people who really enjoy watching them for the game play, but don't want to invest the effort in learning how to play for themselves.

People make tools that reads memory of DF to create better GUIs. Compare dwarf therapist to standard gui of DF to assigning jobs, it is just horrible.

I honestly kinda stopped playing after military gui is changed. The new system is unplayable. New conversation system is also very frustrating in adventure mode.

I just wish the game will be open source at some point and the things will be improved.

I want so badly for dwarf fortress to just be an API to the simulator and let the community build the user interface and view layer. That would make my life complete. And also completely unproductive.

That only solves half the problem, though. There's still the issue that it's a single-threaded game which allocates and accesses memory randomly on the heap. So there will always be a limit on how large and complex the game world can be.

What I'm still waiting for is the game that comes after Dwarf Fortress, the game which is appropriately engineered for performance and is thereby able to be even more ambitious. We've seen a ton of less ambitious DF clones, but nothing on the other end so far.

I have to think that anything more ambitious than DF would either take a crazy genius with lots of free time or a large team. Possibly both.

> For instance, the lack of fidelity of the game allows any new character to be added in 2 seconds, yet Rimworld needs a considerable amount of time and effort developing each texture.

This is only true for tiny developers. If you have dedicated artists then you aren't gated in this way as you work in parallel.

If you pay artists, development is expensive. There is pressure to sell and to break even. Is there any game which is developed continuously for years and pays artists?

Certainly there are a number of AAA games that fit that description.

At this point we are conflating too many topics to really talk clearly. Simplest response would be "you should plan to spend years developing if you want to and if you do you need a budget and a way to fill that budget". See early release games as one example, expansions are an older one.

I agree about the UI, but the performance degradation is still a significant issue.

Kill cats before they adopt a dwarf. Clean up old clothes with dfhack, and stop making dams!

The other big one is making sure dwarves don't path to complicated places, or animals don't path at all. Needing to know about how the game is written to make it useable is not great, though.

I think it's part of the package.

Name me anything that is perfect without flaws and still useful? Water is great to drink yet it gets you wet and drowns you if you breath it. Fire is lovely and warm and cooks our food but burns and melts our flesh if we play in it. Lids keep felt tip pens wet, and choke our children. Fish are pretty and taste nice but occasionally swallow fisherdwarves. The internet is great and connects us but causes divide by mixing people who were better separated. Light is fantastic, but I can't sleep if I can see any. Tea is just perfect, but it mAkEs Me ShaKe toO mUcH aNd ThaT caN be a ProbleM.

We're not asking for perfection.

> Water is great to drink yet it gets you wet and drowns you if you breath it.

If we're going to carry this analogy to Dwarf Fortress, if water was DF, it would be great to drink unless you happened to drink it from an aqueduct that carried it more than 20 miles. It would also make you spontaneously explode if your cat also drank from the same container, and you would be able to demand that your landlord replace your front door with one made of water and would go berserk when he didn't comply.

But isn't figuring this out part of the !!FUN!! ?

Here's the thing; I like the !!FUN!! of Dwarf Fortress. I like knowing that some giant with poisonous spikes can come in, kill half my dwarves before succumbing to arrows, and let me carry on as usual... until I realize that cats are tracking poison into the kitchen, which leads to everyone dying. That's !!FUN!!.

Not fucking remembering how to engrave gemstones because the key combination is unlike anything else, or how to put down a butcher table, or how to to set up a training rotation for my military? That's just shitty design.

That's actually a good point - I like that I can figure more about the game by looking how it's made.

That's the point of it, and I think it attracts all sorts of interesting comments and exploration, like the massive study on the impacts of various types of arrows and bolts on subjects.

If you haven't played Dwarf Fortress recently, the performance seems to have improved nontrivially in recent releases. I was out of the game for a couple years and came back to a big jump in perf when I've got a lot of dwarves.

I'm reading a play through story posted elsewhere in this thread[0] and inbetween instalments by the OP there are plenty of comments by people talking about how their ability to play the game is constrained by fps.

This is from Feb 2016, are the updates you're talking about more recent?

[0]http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=156319.0

> I agree Dwarf Fortress is quite hard to learn and the UI plays a large part of that as it's completely keyboard based and requires a lot of upfront effort to learn, but once you do you become much faster than you would otherwise (much like text editors).

Is there a VI interface?

"In the same vein"