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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Eagerly awaiting the graphical version to finally be available on Steam so that I can buy it and throw some money their way.

I know the regular version has been available for free forever, but the ASCII graphics have always been a turn-off. I'm not opposed to MUD-style graphics in general, Dwarf Fortress is just so dense with stuff that I found I spent most of my time just trying to figure out what was going on.

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If it's encouraging at all - after some hours into the game the ASCII actually starts looking like what they represent, enough that even when you see a new character given its context you can figure out what it's meant to represent without really thinking about it.

It's a bit like the Matrix. At first it's an overwhelming amount of mostly tiny green symbols and after a while things make more sense.

I'm definitely looking forward to this graphical version, though. And hoping that one day the game will even support multiple threads, but that's probably wishful thinking.

IMO trying to decipher those glyphs is near trivial compared to trying to manage what your dwarves are doing in a moderately sized fortress without Dwarf Therapist. In order to play it (which I haven't done in a few years TBH) you either need to be willing to push through some abstruse UI choices or use third-party tools. Those ASCII graphics just serve as a warning of what's to come.

It's not terribly difficult to add a graphical tileset to the free version, and there are a variety to choose from on the bay12games.com forums.

Same, i would have given them money years ago but always had issues with Paypal

They have a Patreon now. I recently started supporting them there.

Why didn’t you install a tileset? Most people don’t play with ASCII nowadays.

Sloth, admittedly. I could probably look up how to do it, but the guys explicitly announced they were going to put the game on Steam and add a proper graphical overlay so that they could start charging for the game (IIRC they announced this decision because a family member has medical bills they need to pay, or something).

So, I'm just waiting for them to fulfill their end of the bargain. Then I will pay.

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