Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

I tried to get into DF a few years ago but found it... overwhelming. Even after buying a book.

I certainly welcome efforts to make DF more accessible in this way. One thing I'm unsure of with the Steam roadmap is this: will this still require third party software to realistically play?

I forget the name of it but there was software you'd run that would directly peek and poke into DF memory to set the tasks and preferences of your dwarves and it was the only way to manage a lot of dwarves. Will this still be the case?

View on HN

If you're looking for a less overwhelming yet still complete colony management sim, Rimworld has gained a lot of (frankly well-deserved) traction recently. You won't be doing as much micromanagement as you would in DF, but the gameplay is slimmed down such that you can realistically learn it over the course of a playthrough while still having fun.

I still prefer the denser sim titles like SS13 and DF, but I'll almost always reach for Rimworld if I want some no-fuss fun. Just be careful around the modding rabbit hole...

It is a true tragedy that SS13 will never have the enormous following it deserves. I often struggle to convey how engaging an experience it is, even with an absurdly obtuse interface. Dwarf Fortress is a lot of fun too, but nothing can surpass the emergent, anarchic glory of SS13.

If I can sway you in this comment, please. Treat yourself to two full playthroughs with the wiki open in another tab. You may just be hooked.

This video is what got me into SS13! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ__73b7FUE

SS13 is hampered by the awful BYOND software it was made for. It lags bad on high population servers. Unfortunately numerous from-scratch rewrite attempts have stalled out so we're stuck with it

That's not true. There is a new open source rewrite in very active development. https://spacestation14.io/ It's still missing quite a bit from SS13, however, it is fully playable right now, and the US test server is fairly full most night of the week.

BYOND? is that a specific tool or some weird "bring your own ??? ????" acronym?

It's a specific game engine tool: Build Your Own Net Dream[0]

0:http://www.byond.com/?

It's sort of a joint game engine/launcher? It's like something dug up in an archeological dig, but struggling through is worth it.

I have hundreds of hours in Rimworld. I love the game description on its own website because it’s exactly what they say it is.

However I’m sad that there are so many cool things to manage in your colony except… water. There is no notion of hygiene or thirst and this always break the immersion at some point for me.

But I love that the game is designed to make you feel like each colonists are unique people that you can’t afford to let die, because it will be hard to recover and it will anyway change your colony forever.

> There is no notion of hygiene or thirst and this always break the immersion at some point for me.

Then Dubs Hygiene mod is for you :)

Oh nice, thank you ! Looks like someone is going to loose another hundred of hours.

If haven't already, you'll lose yourself in so many mods for RimWorld :)

Was modding support built in to rimworld or something people tacked on afterwards like minecraft?

It was built from the start and people tacked on even more :)

There's anything from quality of life improvements to complete game overhauls (like full magic systems, factorio-style factories etc.) to new content to new scenarios to... :)

There was basic support from the beginning, but what really caused the community to flourish were modding frameworks. Hugslib (and then later Harmony) kicked off a truly insane modding arms-race, with everything from combat overhauls, expanded vanilla features, new races, new AI storytellers, new factions, new menus... there's simply too much to describe in one sitting.

Dwarf Therapist.

I actually quite like that paradigm of requiring mods and other tools to play. Dwarf fortress is not a game it's a kind of sometimes fun job.

The name is so appropriate.

There were several of those, but DwarfTherapist is probably what you’re thinking of. It’s basically required to run a fortress at scale.

You can do it quite easily without Therapist by typing "enable autolabor" into your dfhack console window. All job assignments basically get turned on for every dwarf.

I never really tried DF, only read some tutorials about it. I have high expectations for this port, but at the same time, I'm worried that the learning curve will still make this game unpleasant to play because it takes too much time.

Factorio is also an excellent game, but I don't play the mods for the same reason I would not play DF. Too much things, and often the game design is a bit hairy for no good reason that would make some sense.

There are a lot of stuff to do on DF but you don't have to do them all. You need food, you need booze and learning how to make those two is necessary but rest is optional really. You can pick a safe starting location or wall yourself in and even ignore military (at least up to a point I think)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com