df. the nightmare game. the peak tier pc game. why?
1) the interface sucks ass
this is the default interface. monospace text. now the thing is.. IT'S NOT A TEXT CONSOLE! these are 16x16 bitmaps, and you can actually swap in a graphics package really, really easily
there, isn't that pretty??
why don't they just release it with that? because
the programmers think this looks great2) IT'S NOT A GAME!it's an interactive story generator. That's why a big part of the game is Descriptions. There's a whole third mode of the game, that nobody ever talks about, just for reading all the stories your dwarves write.
(this is a bug but it's also a typical dwarf description)
dwarves have desires, fears, memories. If they make art, they will record experiences and things they have seen.
Classic repository of "epic"
df stories 3) you have to be a troubleshooter to play itthis is THE GAME of weird bugs. because there isn't a win condition, fail condition (you only lose when all your dwarves are dead). That's one thing that sets this apart from it's clone, Rimworld: you can win Rimworld (launch a spaceship).
So why does one of your dwarves complain about thirst, when there's a fresh water well RIGHT THERE that EVERYONE ELSE is using?
- maybe you accidentally restricted him from going in that area
- maybe he's been crippled somehow and can't walk over to the well
- maybe the well is encrusted with Rubies but he's terrified of Rubies
- maybe you never fucking figure it out and he just dies of thirst
I once had a dwarf somehow wield thirteen (13) battleaxes simultaneously, and wear five (5) steel armors. He was a tank. He took down dragons and legendary beasts single handedly. But then he couldn't put an axe down to bandage a wound or something and he fucking died RIP.
The game has very little tutorial. When you get to midgame, you have to fuck around a little to understand certain mechanics. Like if you're trying to make a Waterwheel, what do you need? Nothing in the game tells you. Granted this has been normalized with Minecraft forcing you to go to a wiki, but this can be very, very frustrating.
4) IT's not open source, and very difficult to mod. The two brothers that made this.. guard their source jealously. So, it's not really moddable. You can add new creatures, items, tools, but you can't change game mechanisms.
For two years every animal born inside your fort was the size of a gerbil (the game calculates the size of everything, even though everything takes up Exactly One Block) and nobody figured it out until someone ram-scoped (or whatever, i'm not a hacker) the thing to figure this out.
THIS SHIT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME
There's a couple add-on tools to making managing dwarfs easier.. without them you need a memory of iron or very good notes to keep your dwarves from idk, accidentally napping during a gobling invasion.
goddamn look they made a Patreon for DF, right, and people *finallY*
have a way to give back.. and it's only $60k a year?? Jesus, that's shit wages! And the one guy quit his job 11 years ago!??? And there's no Patron rewards? Christ! How are these men not starved to death?
Epilogue) Anyway it's a horrifying yet wonderful beast of a game. Here's some wetfishers who play it:
<@copt> I do off and on
<Weazzy> yeah i never got more than an hour or two into it
<Weazzy> i'll give it another go one of these days