Dwarf Fortress: Your E-mail
Additional information (and a correction) from Blake Senn:I've been playing this for a few days now and it's quite possibly the most impressive game I've ever played. The detail in the world is staggering - just today I found out that spider webs (which exist to provide silk thread to be woven into cloth) actually catch butterflies and dragonflies and the spiders come to eat them. In my opinion, the decision to start with ASCII graphics was brilliant. It lets him concentrate on pure gameplay and not worry about any kind of art or graphics unless he wants to - and it can still do some pretty amazing things. Check out the waterfall, especially when the river's flooding.
Anyway, I noticed a couple things in your "preparing for the journey" walkthrough that I wanted to point out. One, you mentioned that there are 5 skill levels for the dwarves; that's only partially true. There's 5 that you can buy at the start, but as dwarves work in that category they can go past Proficient, to Professional, Adept, Expert, Master, High Master, Grand Master, and Legendary. Lemme tell you, a Legendary Miner basically walks through solid stone.
Another thing I noticed is that you said "Now we need to add some food. If you don't gather enough food before winter comes, these supplies might be the difference in surviving and starving to death. We have four food options: plump helmet spawn, pig tail seeds, fox meat, and plump helmets. We add a bit of everything until skill points reach zero." You actually have a LOT more options than that. When you're on the screen that lists your current supplies, hit N. This brings up a looooooong searchable list of additional supplies - including about 30 more types of meat and 3 more plants with accompanying seeds. Generally speaking, turtle is the best food to buy at the start - it's cheap at 2 points per, and supplies both bone and shells for crafting later. You also probably want to add at least a few sweet pod seeds, because once you get a kitchen or two and a farmer's workshop running, they're very efficient at making food. 1 Sweet Pod yields 5 Dwarven Syrup when Processed into a Barrel at a farmer's workshop, and that syrup can be used in any cooking at a 1 syrup to 1 resulting food ratio; that makes a field of sweet pods worth 5 times as much as a field of plump helmets once you have the infrastructure set up for them.
I thought that food list looked strangely short--it wasn't, I just wasn't navigating through the list properly. He's also correct about the skill levels--I actually had a Miner advance into those higher levels in a previous game but had forgotten.
It's going to be a challenge to write in detail about this game, but the details are so incredibly dense that I'm going to miss things and make errors as I go. I'll do the best I can, though, and you guys will fill in the gaps.
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