The amount of players lately

[mattgravy]

I tend to hermit or join a group but the problem with the latter is that at times I can only put a couple hours a day while everyone else seems to live on the game and end up behind my fellow villagers and since my stats aren't great I stop since I cant really do much part from landscaping. I'll end up dropping the game for a couple months come back as a hermit but after sometime I just log on for chores. I think the issue is that people just get bored or start finding the game to tedious to progress In. The game isn't really advertised I only found the game through dwarf fortress forums years ago.
I do enjoy the game but each world I find myself sticking around less and less maybe because I've never really done the pvp side of it I do not know.
I wonder what would happen if the game ever goes onto steam, would a bunch of kids flood in and shout bloody murdered as they get murdered by animals or pvpers and just quit or would the game find some new life and have new elements brought in to help the flood of new players learn and play.
I feel like the game may go like legacy being seemly abandoned for a couple years and then brought back to life, maybe the devs need people working and developing with them but I highly doubt that will happen.

[Morrighan]

I haven't been playing much the past while now because I find it hard to read the default client. The old -timey script is lovely but I find it very hard to decipher. Normally I circumvent this by using Amber but it crashes every single time I try to run it now. It's very hard to play a game when I can't read it. This may also be a contributing factor to lower numbers, aside from end-game boredom. Making things like glass-making more tedious and involved has not inspired me to play much either.

[shubla]

Making things like glass-making more tedious and involved has not inspired me to play much either.

I think it is great to have more complexity in industry. But devs should also make them give way more yield. Like if you make glass making 10x more complicated, increase the yields 10x, then people don't have to use bots but they can occasionally still enjoy the glass making mechanic and use glass made goods.
Only argument against this is that you would run out of stuff to do(grind), but that is currently not possible. The other argument is maybe that then people won't trade, but they don't trade even now! Trading relatively low value goods that are difficult to transport and make is not too common. For example, no one is going to trade strawdolls because of all the logistics related to trading them. You'd need to transport so many of them to study them 24/7 on your few villagers study. So its just easier to grind them yourself / not study them at all / bot them. Yeah making them is quite easy, but if you want to play the game for like 10 months, you have to make a LOT of strawdolls.

Also if devs read this: Add "barn" ASAP. Basically barn would allow you to store animals in it with some fodder, and then animals would only eat like 5% of what they normally eat, but not give any resources or breed. This way people could have small breaks from the game, or at least animals, without coming back to some crazy animal apocalypse or lack of them.

Maybe consider increasing hunting/domesticated animal material yield by some crazy number, like 5. So there would be less grinding. Or then increase the hunger that food gives by 5x so you'd have to eat less of it etc. The game is just too grindy, player count proves that. Its cool for the first few months after reset but soon the reality kicks in and you realize that you must play the game like 10 hours EVERY DAY only to make curios, food, farm crops and feed animals. And if you want to keep a small break, you will be behind on quality on everything, all your animals are either dead or then there are 100s of them, and of course, in worst case someone has raided you and destroyed everything.

[Nevur]

Public custom clients are ded.
The only remaining faction is harassing players for rl money and taking over bases on the main continent.
Natural population decline.

I completely agree

[mattgravy]

client wise I've been using amber still but using wurtags unofficial update which isn't bad but I still get the odd error and would rather have an official amber update but at this point I think its still better then official

[NeoBasilisk]

I haven't been playing much the past while now because I find it hard to read the default client. The old -timey script is lovely but I find it very hard to decipher. Normally I circumvent this by using Amber but it crashes every single time I try to run it now. It's very hard to play a game when I can't read it. This may also be a contributing factor to lower numbers, aside from end-game boredom. Making things like glass-making more tedious and involved has not inspired me to play much either.

Surely you already know what all the text says and you only need to "recognize" it rather than actually reading it, which should make it easier than if you were a new player?