Dwarf Fortress on Steam
The world would be poorer without Dwarf Fortress and the various things people do with it. I always figured it was a worthwhile tradeoff if the game's lone developer chose to spend his limited time on the simulation rather than the user experience. But now there's an official version of it that doesn't look and feel like a dozen roguelikes slammed together. I'm excited to see people getting into it, some after years of trying, now that doing so isn't a part-time job.
My review of the "Steam version" (also buyable elsewhere) is, it's Dwarf Fortress, and anyone with the time and patience should play it. It more or less feels like it always has, vibe-wise, just with the massive quality of life improvement of everything being easier to read/parse in general. I also like the new tiles and music--there's some very cool stuff happening with sprites attempting to reflect creature descriptions.
With that said, I have some gripes. Nothing that should make you avoid it, but annoying if you're like me and have the convoluted muscle memory of someone who's been striking the earth for a decade or more.
- Maybe I'm missing something, but there doesn't seem to be a way of viewing a list of all your combat logs or announcements. It's easy to miss things and evidently impossible to find them later.
- You can't copy and paste jobs queued in workshops. If you want to make ten beds, you have to navigate the menu ten times (or assign a manager and use work orders, but this tends not to be a top priority during the first year of a new fort).
- The system for assigning tasks to dwarves isn't bad if you like to assign groups of dwarves to groups of tasks, which I typically don't. Up-front it feels like a massive pain if you're used to Dwarf Therapist or DFHack and want to assign labors individually to optimize experience gain for your crafters. I also sort of wish they'd cribbed the Therapist thing of sorting your dwarves by migrant wave.
- WASD map movement works fine with an interface made for clicking, but I guess the path of least resistance for implementing it was to change 95% of the keyboard shortcuts? Best to just accept that you're going to continue trying to dump objects the wrong way for however long it takes you to unlearn d-b-d, given that rebinding all the keys would probably make things more awkward.
As for my first fort in this version: half the dwarves accidentally became necromancers, I think by reading a book a visitor brought to the fort's library. This sounds more fun than it is, considering that the bodies they animate are pretty likely to attack them, and the infinite death/reanimation loop that happens in every fight means that fighting any more than about two enemies crashes the game. So I had to retire that fort, but I'm hoping they add adventure mode sooner rather than later, since it's now a horrible RPG dungeon full of cavern-dwelling necromancers and bloodthirsty livestock skeletons with like 50 kills each, and I really would like to smash my way through it and retrieve the fort's most prized artifact, a wool loincloth.