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Being a Nethack fan who has also lost countless hours managing civilizations, space fleets, cities, insect colonies, zombie apocalypse survivors' camps, I have three words to say:

Must... not... play...

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Dwarf Fortress sounds to me like nethack in its difficulty but unlike nethack in its endlessness. You can play all you want, but there will be no end!

a fusion between nethack and minecraft (and the sims) is a good description I feel.

Dwarf Fortress is, in many ways, the anti-nethack.

In Nethack, you can parse the source code to figure out nearly any situation, that is, it's a closed, nearly solvable system. (See http://sporkhack.com/design_concept.html for some commentary on nethack being 'solved'.)

Dwarf Fortress, on the other hand, is totally emergent. Toady logs in and plays to check if his coding worked well, that is he goes looking for the situations he is referring to in his code and observes them.

I love them both, but I'm enjoying dwarf fortress more right now.

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