v0.31 Talk:Quickstart guide

• Is this seriously what we want to say here? Wouldn't 'coming soon' be better? --StrongAxe 13:04, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
  • Much better, thanks. --StrongAxe 12:00, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

there are so many differences between the current and last to make last edition totally unusable (farming is a MAJOR one) it needs to be rewritten entirely.

• Can dwarves die of old age?

• • (collective wiki roaring laughter)

• Does the CODE check if dwarves are too old to live?

• • (collective comments about how almost every block of code contributes to it)

• Does the CODE check if dwarves are able to die from the numerical value of their age going over a certain number?

• • (collective comments requesting savefiles with really old dwarves, which are NOT proven to exist... yet)

• If I mod the game to have one of my dwarves 10000000000 years old, will he die as a result?

• • Yeah, that one needs to go in the FAQ under 'humor' and 'is it coded to be a signed or an unsigned integer?' which can only be found out by testing it.

We need a complete-guide thingy. Perhaps we can get the developper to anwser 3 questions per 1000$ donation level reached or something.

I'm taking a stab at writing this. GhostDwemer 15:53, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Rough draft mostly finished. I will write a bit about setting up a cistern and well, and a hospital zone. And a little more about actually using the military. And then maybe a 'where do I go from here?' section. I also need to double check everything, as I wrote this from memory while sitting in the server room at work, baby-sitting a tach, per HIPPA requirements that non-employees can't be in there without a chaperon. Maybe I'll put up some screenshots to illustrate things. I would appreciate any feedback anyone has, I'm sure I've forgotten something. I'd like this to be a general guide that introduces players to the kinds of decisions they will have o make later on, rather than walk-through for a a pre-made site, but it should end up with players having a functional fort. GhostDwemer 23:56, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

"Quick"-start guide

I'd like to protest some complaints about the guide. Seasoned dwarf fortress players should not need this guide, referring particularly to the opening paragraph. Perhaps a different page showing what changes to expect if they had played an old version (especially farms). A new player would read these and become confused by their meaning (Speaking from personal experience, trying to introduce a friend to the game with this guide). I would also like to question why this guide is considered a "quickstart" guide. It is very long, not quick by any standard, and indeed is more of a tutorial than a guide (Reading the paragraph "And So It Begins"). I decided this guide is not intended for a new player, I then found the Bentgirder tutorial, and have used that instead. All in all this guide is rather mediocre, in dire need of revision and simplification. And per wiki standards, should be professional and informative, rather than personal and informal (It shouldn't sound like someone is holding your hand and telling you what to do).--RadGH 07:43, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

i am a beginner trying to pick this game up. this tutorial has helped somewhat, but by the time i got to starting the actual game--the point at which i have 7 dwarves and a wagon--the "guide" falls apart. it constantly tells the reader to do things without telling them how. i can't, for the life of me, figure out who this article is written for, but i have to look elsewhere to find out how to play this game, and i'm already about to quit out of frustration. not from how a roguelike is supposed to frustrate you, with constant death, but by the sheer amount of information you need to know to even start DF and the lack of a cohesive way to learn that information. 68.68.32.168 09:12, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

WOW, lot's of info to cover; it is so much for a beginner. Like the last edit, I have no idea how to do many of the things you say. Select a refuge spot? Change refuse option? Let me say thank you for the guide .. it is helpful but, if the goal was to write it for a DF newb, it started out strong and then left me in the dark. I will try agian to understand how to play this game but damn, I am not sure what I am looking at or doing.

I started out about a week ago and tried to use this guide and had a similar experience to the previous person. "First off, look over your dwarves' assigned labors." Huh? How? I still haven't figured out a reasonable way to do this from within the game, but I did find Dwarf Therapist which makes this fairly easy. Looking at both this and Bentgirder, I was able to figure out how to do most things. Some things are very clearly explained in this guide, and many currently aren't. Obviously, this is a work in progress. Now that I've figured out how to do most of the things that aren't well described, I'm going to start going back to the parts that had me scratching my head and update them so the next newbie that comes along will (hopefully) be less confused. And if he (or she) finds things that aren't clear, hopefully he'll come back later and clarify them. A lot of effort has already gone into this guide, and I'll show my appreciation by putting some of my own effort into it as well. --Khearn 19:56, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

This tutorial sort of sucks, and I consider it actively harmful to people who actually want to learn how to play DF because they like myself learned about it from Minecraft. I had to use http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/1667 to understand the basics of what was going on after I set up my build and deployed using the first part of the tutorial, as after you press 'e' and start, its pretty much rambling and worthless, talks about things it has not explained as if they are easy (they are not), and does not give you any usefully data in a true tutorial format. You guys should merge that link with this so people can actually want to play the game instead of freaking out and raging due to the artificially inflated learning curve this tutorial creates. Yes, I'm trying to be nice but this is as constructive as I get at 6am after fighting DF for 8 hours just to learn the basics of playing, after being up for 24 hours before that. No wonder this game is free, I honestly ave a hard time thinking somebody would want to pay for it given how un-user friendly it is. The learning curve for this is even higher than Eve Online, and I didn't think that was possible.

The tutorial is helpful, to an extent. However, I can't follow the reasoning why it tells the player to dig nine levels down before excavating a living area, largely because no actual reason is given. This takes a ton and a half of extra time, all while my dwarves starve and go cold turkey and my storage areas fill up with lizard corpses that mysteriously fail to be carted off to the refuse pile.

I'm still hanging in there, but the lack of oversight is a serious flaw. As a tutorial it starts out well enough, but aside from the section on dumping, it gives the player little ability to understand or control what's happening. --Eleas (unregistered) 00:19, 12 May 2011 (GMT +1:00)

First, keep in mind that this particular thread predates major changes to the guide so any more threads with feedback should probably be started somewhere below to avoid confusion. Anyway, the original reasoning behind the "build living quarters on level -7" is that dwarves can be awakened by noise from activities on upper levels, but I'm not sure if this is any longer the case in the current version. It shouldn't actually take any longer to build a single stairwell 7 levels down than it does to dig a tunnel 7 tiles long. How long is it taking and how are you going about it? Also, aside from dumping there isn't much of any way to directly control dwarves. You pretty much just specify things for them to do, build, put things, etc, and they take on jobs and perform them as hardcoded priorities allow.... Perhaps I should add something about that.... --Ral 00:08, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Firstly, with the caveat that I'm a rank newbie, the problem is not merely that we dig down eight levels. The problem is that we excavate an entire extra level before doing that, and that we have to divide our attention between the surface layers and the sleeping quarters. We're not told why it has to be this way. We do not know whether there might be caves full of fire and brimstone and burrowing Balrogs in the layers between. We're not given any sort of timeframe to work with either, so we have no way of knowing if we're making good time. While we're trying to figure out this, our limited control over labors is tested by the distance to the planting fields, and we don't realize why the plump helmets rot unattended. The tutorial tries to be helpful, but (particularly after a while) falls into the trap of assuming that the reader will understand by inferring the relationships.

So as constructive criticism, I would say the tutorial was informative and useful until Strike the Earth. At that point, we're told stuff without the requisite context. Why is a long, narrow corridor easy to defend? How does one defend at all? What does a jeweler have to do with getting basic amenities into position (food, drink, rest)? What's the real purpose of the administrator? Et cetera. The fact that the tutorial is billed as the most up to date on the wiki (the DF build icon) meant I trusted it to be so, and that could have been one reason for the disconnect. --Eleas (unregistered) 00:22, 13 May 2011 (GMT +1:00).

Currently it is the most up-to-date. It's true that at some point I kind of start glossing over things a bit, but I was trying to keep it from getting too long and it's about 10 times longer than it was before I started working on it. (You would have found the original one totally worthless, most likely.) Part of the reason that it's not more detailed is that it's supposed to be "quick" and cover more material in less detail than a normal tutorial. You might want to check out Template:L which covers less material but covers it in more detail I think. I did actually update some stuff in the quickstart quite to address the fortress design stuff, but the game is so complex that there's no way to explain everything that might happen as you might be able to in SimCity. --Ral 22:41, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Major Updates

This article seemed to be stagnating so I made some major improvements to the guide. It still doesn't tell you exactly how to do everything step-by-step, but there's a better reference guide for looking things up now. I did improve the level of detail somewhat, and linked to Bentgirder for people looking for something more specific. Also linked to Dwarf Therapist in about 3 places. --Ral 08:46, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Kitchen / Still Stockpiles

I think the area dealing with the stockpiles in the kitchen and still could use some work. There is no entry for "Large Pots" under the furniture section for instance. Also, what is considered prepared food versus non-prepared? I started going through all the meats excluding everything starting with "Prepared..." and almost lost my mind. Overall I've found the guide useful and feel like I'm getting a practical grasp of the game now that I'm on my third time going through it. Vitriolum 01:48, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

The stockpiles screen is confusing. "Prepared food" are not actually the things that start with "Prepared" like "Prepared whatever meat". It took me forever to notice the u: Prepared Food thing in the lower right corner. (Keep on the lookout for other toggles that appear in this part of the screen when you select other things like Animals, for instance.) "Prepared Food" should probably be called "Cooked Meals" or something since that's what it actually is. This configuration is complex enough that it's worth elaborating on so I updated that section and the first section on stockpiles. Let me know what you think. --Ral 03:36, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Excellent. Yes that clears it up for me! I suppose it does make sense to keep that stuff in a separate article. Maybe we should spell out the benefits of the advanced stockpiling, though, with the link. I'll add that later tonight. Also, I'm now set to be emailed when watched pages update so it won't take me 3 days to learn that something's been added here! Vitriolum 20:32, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Feel free to add whatever you want especially since it's in its own page now and doesn't contribute to the complexity of the main guide. I do seem to remember in my first fort that I really didn't want to mess with custom stockpiles too much and would rather just focus on other things. (Like I knew I could create a seeds-only stockpile but I just didn't want to bother with it yet). So I tried to remove everything about custom stockpiles, but the general-purpose custom stockpile seemed pretty important so I left that one in. I at least simplified the general purpose one so that people only have to mess with enabling/disabling top level categories of things and not worry about digging around finding rock pots and such. I should probably read back over and see if there is anything else I can simplify. Like perfectly optimal stockpiles there are probably some other things that a fort could operate without that might be removed or simplified.... --Ral 21:43, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Military and stockpiles

I moved the military stuff to DF2010:Military quickstart to try to shorten the article a bit, and I simplified the stockpile stuff and moved the more advanced stockpile tweaking to its own subpage. I wish I could shorten the guide more but it seems very hard to do so because there's just a lot of stuff that you have to do to get a minimal fortress working. Though the guide isn't short it is relatively quick compared to trying to learn by trial and error using the rest of the docs on the wiki..... --Ral 19:37, 9 May 2011 (UTC)