The Official Dwarf Fortress Thread

[Horatius]

Was the bug ever solved with liquids contaminating everything and slowing the game down to a crawl? I'll be honest, that was the latest reason I quit. I hated getting a fortress good and running just to have a slug monster show up and turn half of the world into slime just because of how liquid contamination spread, dropping my FPS from 150 to significantly less than 1.

I don't think my FPS ever dropped because of things like that and I doubt it has been fixed since he seems to basically just have worked on the enhanced town generation, adventure mode improvements and all this (imo unnecessary) night creature stuff that turns an evil biome into a truly unplayable terrain now (everything that died stands up every 5 seconds as a zombie which is getting worse the more body parts get chopped off - then also this super annoying blood rain all the time and disease clouds moving along the map that can potentially kill your whole fortress). Now he seems to be finally back on fixing really annoying bugs and actually improving the original game. For example has the clothing issue been solved recently. No more claimed pieces of clothing littering your whole fortress with magma being the only way to ever get rid of them. With the minecart improvement also coming up in the next version things are really looking up.

Uh.. on the matter of the FPS draining liquid problems... you may want to check out the very popular mod DF Hack. It has several useful functions to alter the game experience. One of it is to clean the whole map of unwanted fluids with a simple command.

[MagicManICT]

The most recent "main" version, 0.34.xx, has fixed many of the old major slowdowns, though I do see issues when you have a lot of water fluid movement. It took me 200+ dwarves and 10k+ items before my current fortress slowed to a crawl. Otherwise, I've been able to maintain a respectable processing rate.

As far as tutorials: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=31928.0
and http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=28477.0 -- video based tutorials

Disclaimer: I haven't checked either of these out, so I won't make a claim on their quality or usefulness. They do get a good bit of praise on the Bay 12 forums, though.

[shotgunn902]

essentials for DF are the phoebus tile set and dwarf therapist.

life savers.

[TeckXKnight]

essentials for DF are the phoebus tile set and dwarf therapist.

life savers.

Phoebus is superior to Mayday?

[MagicManICT]

I'll second Dwarf Therapist (or as the guy's wife calls it... Dwarf the Rapist--see video tutorial on youtube).

I personally don't use tile sets. While some look nice, for the most part they're just not complete enough or varied enough to really make a difference.

I think one of the newbie packs (in one of the tutorial posts I listed) uses the Mayday tile set. I know I see it mentioned most on the forums.

[Horatius]

essentials for DF are the phoebus tile set and dwarf therapist.

life savers.

Phoebus is superior to Mayday?

There isn't a superior tile set. The three big ones are Mayday (probably the most common one due to his constant updates and being around for a long time now), Ironhand and Phoebius. My own preference is Ironhand's tile set. It's simply the most detailed one and looks the best in my opinion. It can be a bit tough on the eyes though since it is quite dark and ores cannot be so easily distinguished from rock and soil layers as in some other tile sets. Less pure functionality for better looks I guess.

[ValerieHallaway]

I tried it, but honestly I felt like I was trying to decipher hieroglyphs from a lost ancient civilization. Just couldn't do it. I very much like my pretty moving pictures, even if DF sounds and likely is awesome.

[shotgunn902]

I tried it, but honestly I felt like I was trying to decipher hieroglyphs from a lost ancient civilization. Just couldn't do it. I very much like my pretty moving pictures, even if DF sounds and likely is awesome.

look up captainduck's tutorial videos.

thyre life savers.

[WatsonX]

I tried it, but honestly I felt like I was trying to decipher hieroglyphs from a lost ancient civilization. Just couldn't do it. I very much like my pretty moving pictures, even if DF sounds and likely is awesome.

Get the Lazy Newb Pack, it has some texture packs and other helpful things. http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59026.0

Also, captainduck's tutorial vids are really good.

[Jacob_Lee]

'Bout time we had a DF thread on the first page.

Anyway, I learned how to play using the wiki's tutorials during 40d. A year+ before DF2010. I played using Mayday's tileset, back when it was good *COUGH*. About a year ago I switched to ASCII, and I must say I like the ASCII a lot more. After you learn how to play a game like Dwarf Fortress in ASCII, most other Roguelike games become really easy to look at.

The whole minecarts + hauling improvements thing will be ultra badass.