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Comment by AndyKelley | Hacker News Reader

I'm really looking forward to the steam version. When I tried the game back in college (admittedly this was 12 years ago), my conclusion was that the beauty and complexity of the simulation engine was effectively inaccessible from the user interface. Not the fact that it was text based, but that it was limited in its ability to expose the state of the system, and provide an interface to perform the mutations of the state that are an intended part of the game experience. Presumably, these are the main bits of polish that are going into the steam version.

P.S. I say this as an [enthusiastic Nethack player](https://alt.org/nethack/player-stats.php?player=superjoe) :-)

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To get the full benefit of Dwarf Fortress I found it was necessary to use 3rd party tools. One of the big ones is dwarf therapist [1]. This tool makes it far easier to toggle job preferences for all your dwarves according to their abilities. It presents a big table of your roster and lets you see all their skill levels and job assignments at a glance. It also has convenient features for grouping dwarves based on criteria such as migration wave which lets you tackle the mustering in one shot whenever migrants show up.

[1] https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist

therapist seems like an important one, iirc they showed a similar interface in a steam version demo. Without it, jobs and aptitudes of all different dwarfs are all over the place and woe to you if you forget the key combo because by the time you figure it out you probably forgot the friggn guys name

This is a third party mod. You shouldn't need a third party mod to get the main gameplay experience.

Note that Dwarf Fortress is not open source.

What form of "shouldn't" are you using here?

"Shouldn't" as in: the developers of dwarf fortress should be ashamed?

Or "shouldn't" as in: the guy who uses mods is not purist enough?

Or something else?

Since dwarf fortress is free as in beer, I wouldn't complain too much.

I've played dwarf fortress a bit about a decade or so ago, and had fun. But I didn't stick with it. For me, the main benefit was in all the other games, like RimWorld, that dwarf fortress inspired.

"shouldn't" as in the game is obviously lacking an important component, if the essential game experience requires a mod made by a different party than the actual game developer.

It's not officially endorsed by the creator of the game. It's not mentioned on the download page or the "links" page.

The game is clearly missing something - a gap is being filled by Dwarf Therapist, and it would be a better game, accessible to more people, if the game just had a better UX built-in.

I'm not saying something whacky. The dev team has the exact same opinion as me and that's why they're putting a bunch of effort into the UX for the steam version.

Thanks for explaining. That seems reasonable.

> You shouldn't need a third party mod to get the main gameplay experience.

Why? As long as everyone is aware of the mod, what is the practical difference?

Note that dwarf fortress is free as in beer

Also, isn't everything in Therapist already available via ingame menus, just less conveniently?

Yes, aside from a few problems (like exposing a character’s real identity, when the game only wants to show the player their assumed identity). Also, Dwarf Therapist can make some complex deductions from the available data that aren’t shown in the game, such as showing which dwarves would be good for particular jobs by considering their stats, traits, skills, and preferences.

Just.. get good.

This was the tool that finally made DF playable for me, with it I was able to get into the game enough to enjoy myself and realize what everyone was going on about :)

They should have called it "Dwarf Shrink"!

What state are you looking to access/mutate? To me, a large part of the fun from the DF experience came from only being able to twiddle the high level knobs and watch the shenanigans emerge.

I also got the impression that low level interventions may not be usefully realizable in the codebase.

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