It's pretty damn zen. With the newest version, you can even turn off outside problems and just focus on cultivating your weird megaprojects. My last fort was near a volcano with a cavern near by, except that cave turned out to be a problem so I installed a set of iron bars to just nip that problem in the bud.

Were I to keep playing that fort, I could later decide to breach the depths of the earth via that cave, or instead bypass the cave and dig straight though the earth. It's a lot similar to the reason I play SimCity or that one gardening game on the 3DS Streetpass app when that still was a thing; it allows me to cultivate a little thing without much worry.

Even when troubles did occur, they were rather easily repaired; as were the dwarves. Though I felt a slight clench, they're tougher than they lead on, and even my hunter who lost his foot in an attack was able to become a legendary crutch walker.

There's something about letting them live long enough to become legendary in their own right which serves as a moment of pride; that you helped cultivate them personally into such stratum of status.

Dwarf Fortress is an excellent storymaking game because unlike games influenced by it, it's rather organic in how it all occurs; there's no narrator AI deciding to make your life more interesting, but simply many gears, sprockets, and cogs all working together to make the entire world interesting. And legends aside, you can take great steps to influence that worldly machine. Become a library where the finest discoveries are made and pump out billions of books. (Okay, not really billions, but you get the idea.)

Plus, Zach & Tarn appear to be standout people, so I have no problems supporting their glorious work that has remained popular for over 20 years, unlike Factorio, Rimworld, and Caves of Qud, who have all turned out to have rather problematic developers and/or opinions.

And that's just for Fortress Mode.

There's two other modes to look into.

The Adventure Mode is a personal favorite of mine. Dropping into a world that's yours to carve a path into, yet being of only the importance the world can allow you; for all they know you're just some outsider who showed up one day, got a spear on your back, and wandered off into the wilderness. And it's just you and the world. Want to build a house? Cool, get to it. Explore the underground? I wouldn't suggest that but you can get lost in the caverns. Quest for the nobility to become one yourself? Yeah.

Just wander the lands and see the sights? Yep. There's no overarching objectives except what you make of it.

And of course the ultimate chronicle, the Legends Mode. See why dwarven society went extinct in the year 300, see the aftermath of the fire you sparked in adventure mode in the midst of an Elfin treehouse, see the depths of wealth that made your outpost into the Mountainhome and each conquest you've made. But that's simply not all; there's even in depth maps which can show a variety of things including the territorial history of the various claimants, the spread of religions, the establishment of necromantic orders, and so much more.

I had tried half a dozen different graphical overhauls when I tried it and they all were still lousy -- since it was still based on "layered 3d". Think: The Sims "stories" button, but instead of just having ground, +1, +2 you had dozens of "floors". It was unmanageable.

I LOVE games with a lot of zero-player "just watch how it develops based on how I set things up" times. But DF is one I just could not break in to.

Unmanageable how? A simple 3x3 stairwell, install a manager's office, and you've got workorders to take care most of the clicking. Plus, as others have mentioned, Version 50 has a shiny new interface! An actual menu with clickable buttons!

I never played it myself but the stories I hear and read were always wild. I imagine that's part of the fun in a weird, simulated fantasy world.

No, I haven't played it. The presentation and performance is so poor I don't think I could play it extensively. I realize I don't "get it" and was just curious what the hook was because it's not obvious to me.

It is quite literally in a museum of art. And by a, I mean <span class="bold">the</span> Museum of Modern Art.

What complicates this is that DF does indeed have a steep learning curve. So you can't just download it and say ''Oh, I will play it for some minutes and see what this game is about.''

You will need to learn a tutorial just to get started. ;(

By now several people have written what's their appeal to the game is. (A few more wouldn't hurt; mine post could be a tad more detailed, but it is what it is.)

To condense all into one though - Have you ever played any ''do what you want'' game?
Like: Kenshi, Dragons Dogma, Mount & Blade, The Sims... just to name a few...

There are no levels or greater goals (Yes I understand that DD has a greater goal).
Trying to explain the intricacies of the game mechanics is difficult though. There are physics Water flows downhill, don't build under a river! :D/-< There are relationships between the dwarves and their pets. There are relationships between travelling merchants. Trying to explain everything the game offers would be difficult.

Good news, the game has an inbuilt interactive tutorial to get you started.

Cool. So that means that:

* Halfway decent graphics
* Usable menu/interface with clickable buttons
* Something to assist the steep learning curve

are all covered!

All of those, however, won't still help EverNightX to see where the fun in this game is. ;(

I heard all the good things about the game, actually cool stories. One friend told me how one of his dwafves went nuts when his cat died in an accident, another friend told me how he sent sanwiches with goblin meat to the goblin king and was raided after a few days by goblin hordes. On paper the game seemed quite interesting, so I wishlisted the game on Steam long before its release.

Most of the time I check YouTube Let's play videos before trying something new for myself, and I'm not sure I would ever play it. Maybe some other time, but for now I just can't find the game *suitable* for me. I loved to watch videos for Rimworld words, maybe it's a bad analogy to the Dwarf Fortress but it's the closest one I have, but I can't endure more than 10 minutes of watching DF videos. It's almost like looking at some routine work.

I also couldn't force myself into playing Minecraft and Terraria games but *everyone* were so hyped for those.

Help me to understand the goodness in DF game maybe?

Because it's different and unique? It's the polar opposite of today's AAA games --> fuck graphics and focus on depth and gameplay.

I played it a bit a few years back but I quit - it's too fricking addictive and I have a life to live ...

The appeal, like in many managerial or colony sims is to thrive and shape your business/base to fit your vision. Designing the fortress it's similar to building a house in the sims, playing with legos or creating your settlement in Age of Empires. There are functional and decorative elements you can consider, and there is a satisfaction in mastering such things, or getting a complicated plan in motion that ultimately bears fruit.

Setting up the logistics can also be interesting for many, and so is just being "successful", expanding your fort and its population, setting up an army, successfully repel invasions and so on.

The game simulates a lot of mechanics, and they interact with each other in interesting ways, so there is also a sandbox element to it. Setting up a trap by digging a passage for invaders, and a way to lock them in and drown them is pretty interesting and also practical in-game, and you can do many such things.

Some people also find interest in the stories the game builds thanks to its sandbox nature, and the way it simulates thoughts and feelings for the various characters. Reading the log and finding out that a dwarf hated another for decades before killing it, or how your axedwarf has become incredibly enraged and defeated a dragon/ogre/whatever after it killed his dog can be fun for some.

There are more mechanics as well, so it offers a lot of variety.

It's not a perfect game, however: it's incomplete, there are lots of exploits, difficulty is very uneven, the UI is bad (although the recent Steam version improves a great deal over the basic version), mechanics are unexplained or poorly explained and so on, but it does remain brilliant in various ways, due to how intricate the amount of control players have and how many moving parts there are to it, allowing for an incredible number of interactions and creative ways to handle the situations that arise from this.

TotalBiscuit had defined you play games for fun. But also there are games that are no fun at all, but you'd play because they are Compelling in some say.

Maybe it's for the challenge, rush, the rush, tranquility, learning experience, or any other thing. Or just to get through it as fast as possible (speedrun), the story, or to see how badly you can break it from modifiers you apply in game.

Maybe they like dwarves?

/sarcasm

indeed, we love d0rfs.