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Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

The author's problems all have solutions:

You need to dig stairs to be able to go up and down levels. You need to dig an "up stair", and then a "down stair" below it. Or you can dig "up/down stairs" which combine both functions into the same square.

The lack of stone is probably due to embarking in an area that has clay, soil, or sand layers on top. If you tunnel down a few levels, you should find stone.

If you have an axe (which is one of the default starting items if you didn't customize them), you can (D)esignate (T)reecutting areas to chop down trees and build things out of wood (assuming you're in an area that features trees).

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The author's problems all have solutions

Well, no, those are symptoms, not problems. The problem, as explained by the author, is the sheer improbability of discovering how to play Dwarf Fortress by trial and error. (I say that as a big fan of the game... I've put in a few dozen hours over the years, which I feel is just barely enough to put me at the high end of "beginner").

Is that a problem?

Chess is inscrutable via trial and error too.

Not sure I agree... give me the most basic computer chess program and 15 minutes, and I'll have (most of) the rules figured out. And that's assuming no tutorials or hints such as highlighting legal moves.

Getting good at it is a different matter entirely, but figuring out how to play is relatively simple.

Some of the weird-but-essential moves such as castling and en passant will not be apparent to you even after hours of playing like that.

I definitely wouldn’t call castling and en passant “essential”. I just now played a game of chess against the computer on the lowest difficulty, and won easily without using either of those moves. And during the game, the computer itself castled, which might have helped me to learn the move if I hadn’t known it.

My partner's dad was evil: he taught "simple" versions of games, leaving out complicated rules like castling, when she & her sister were small, and then never explained the full rules later.

Thus, when she played me at uni, she was furious that I was "cheating," until I showed her the full rules (the internet is brilliant) and she realised that it was her dad being crazy.

In summary; it is essential to know castling exists, because otherwise as soon as you play another human, they will beat you with it.

Castling is incredible essential. You might go 50 games before you see any need for En Passant, but castling is crucial in any real play.

But Chess is a game that you're already familiar with - unless you're going to be changing the absolute foundation of the game with these altered rules, your familiarity with the original game is what allows you to come up with an altered set of rules.

Compare that to Dwarf Fortress, short of 'Sim City' (which is a dubious comparison at best), there is nothing out there that remotely comes close to the myriad of gameplay concepts that have been shoved into this single, mildly coherent package.

I'd say that Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius come pretty close to DF's style of gameplay. But yeah, DF still has far more above what those offer.

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