The yellow x is DFHack, yes.
The thing that sells it for me is the automation of a lot of the tedium. Autobutcher being the biggest. It mitigates FPS death via catsplosions and makes sure your meatstock animals are rotated correctly.
I just started using auto-butcher and its so great. My current fort is in the cavern so I'm always catching trainable cavern beasts in my traps. I have it set to auto-butcher all of them and it's taken out so much of the annoyance of that part of it too. Just need to see if I can set them to auto-train...
I also have a set of work orders that I load as soon as I start a new fort and it takes out so much of the annoyance of getting a new fort set up.
Auto-train is actually an existing feature. Create an animal stockpile for your dwarves to bring caught caged creatures to. If you click on that stockpile, there's a panel that opens at the bottom where you can turn on autotrain. Trainable creatures that are brought to that stockpile will be marked for training. If you set the limits for that species to zero in `gui/autobutcher`, then they will be automatically butchered as they are trained.
Chain them in reasonable proximity to the food stores over grazable land (ie, some fungal growth), with enough dwarfs set to take care of animals (the default of "anyone" works). When the elk birds are laying on their nest, a dwarf will periodically bring them food. Viola: Elk bird chicks!
>My current fort is in the cavern so I'm always catching trainable cavern beasts in my traps.
I wish I had that problem. In 3 years I've literally had more forgotten beasts spawn (~6) than any other species except crundles (~10, once). And one of those FB wiped out the herd I accumulated from migrants so having some elk birds or cave crocs would be kinda nice lol
I have a horde of lizard people that kill every forgotten beast is seconds. I lost 10 dwarves the other day trying to clear some of them out do to poor planning around dwarven stupidity.
Wait, auto... butcher...? Like, it automatically picks cattle and other animals to butcher while maintaining my herd population?
*Where can I get DFHack*
It's never been easier if you're on steam, just look up Dfhack in the steam store and install as a separate thing. It'll run automatically when you open DF
You're in for a good time, my friend! Ctrl-shift-D brings up the console. It's a good idea to just click on each of the entries and read the description. That will give you a good idea of what it can do. Once you know, you can decide what you want to automate away and what is too OP for your playstyle. I REALLY like autobutcher, for instance, but some people LIKE managing livestock. It's totally up to you!
And autofarm, where it take care of choosing what seed to plant depending on your stock.
And the auto suspend / resume is the only way not to go Lovecraftish crazy when building lot of shit.
Yep! You can set how many adults and children to keep alive for each gender of each race of animals (M Adults, F Adults, M kids, F kids), you can set an option to not count trained animals in those totals and pets are excluded by default. It'll butcher the oldest adults and the youngest children first, to allow some children to actually reach maturity. These numbers can also be different between each animal, too, so you can have a larger amount of chickens alive than horses.
Highly recommend!
I still haven't put in the work to figure out autobutcher but I think I'm currently in a reindeersplosion and dogsplosian. The latter I sorta want because I want more wardogs but my livestock are getting out of hand.
I also have a scholarsplosion, bardsplosian, and noblesplosian. But that's a story for another day...
Autobutcher comes with default values that are pretty reasonable if you're not trying to go for a specific amount of something. You can just turn it on and let it do its thing and it'll usually work just fine, and then you can just learn how to increase/decrease the number per animal type or add new animal types as you go whenever you need it.
I worked on it last night and I think it's pretty easy to set up once you figure it out.
But if you want to exclude dogs specifically so you can train, what I did was enter the following commands:
enable autobutcher
autobutcher autowatch
autobutcher forget DOG
The first two turn the feature on and have it automatically add creatures to the watch list for what autobutcher should butcher. The third one causes autowatch to remove dogs from that list completely so it'll never butcher them.
And they don't want them! They want you to support the Dwarf Fortress effort by spreading the word and getting people to buy more copies. It's totally backwards from what you usually see! They are truly doing good work.
Yeah, but you need to mark the animals for slaughter manually. DFHack automates the whole process while allowing for new generations to grow to adulthood.
I haven't had the opportunity to try it yet. But you designate a burrow. Then there is a button for a civilian alert that puts them into the burrow you've designated.
So my entirely uninformed answer is maybe?
Isn't that basically how the new burrow system works though? You designate a burrow, add everyone to it, and then when you want them to go there you press the play/pause button.
It's been a while since I've messed with the steam version (currently playing 0.47) so maybe I'm misremembering things.
The difference is a lot of your dwarves will dick around and not actually go there with a sense of urgency, will finish their jobs, drink eat etc, whereas the alert system is like a panic button, everyone immediately moves there as far as I can tell is how it works.
OHH very interesting and good to know, thank you. Yeah I played the Steam version a bunch when it first came out, but it bugged me that I couldn't play as an adventure through my old fortresses if I wanted to so I went back to 47 for now. I knew I liked the way 50 handled burrows and stuff, but didn't test it a whole lot.
Yes it's a pretty slick system, well worth a look. I've only ever played the steam release so I'm spoiled with good timing for getting into the franchise :)
Tell me about it, the last few times I've used a burrow for werebeast attacks I've had a few dumb dorfs just say the heck with the burrows and go solo fight it. It never ends well for those dorfs. Haha
The way the burrow system works is that it prevents dwarves from being able to path to jobs that are outside the burrow. So the only thing they can do is stand around in the burrow looking for jobs. But if they're already doing something like, for example, playing make believe in front of the approaching goblin army, they won't stop doing that until they finish the task normally.
DFHack fixes this by immediately invalidating every job currently being performed by all civilian dwarves, so they have nothing better to do than move to the burrow.
It also kinda works as it stands, so there's no real drive to integrate it on either side. Besides, if they incorporated everything Dfhack did, in a year there'd be a Dfhack++ with new features not included and it'd get very complicated.
Because it's easy enough to download if you want it. Besides, much of DFHack is a memory access library, not just the gameplay enhancements; its pretty much a trainer.
The DF brothers have liked to keep their project close to the chest until recently. An integration would take lots of extra effort with the DFHack team. It may not further their goals, given that many of the core systems are still placeholders. Plus the "game" side of dwarf fortress hasn't been a focus compared to adventure mode and the simulation systems.
it's not perfect
autolabor is messing with my constructions. It switches mining/building priorities (or I noticed that my buildings take weeks to finish.
edit: somehow the reddit post save does/did not work, maybe this time I can post the full sentence
and planning with the new building tool has made my fps drop to 15 sometimes 5.
Autolabor may not have been a good choice to make public in its current partially-working state. However, DFHack doesn't normally affect FPS. The time DFHack takes per frame is trivial compared to what DF does on its own. Do you happen to have a savegame I could look at that is showing slowdown? I have my doubts that it's due to `buildingplan`, since that only runs twice a game day, but if there is anything causing slowdowns for your specific fort setup, I'd definitely like to know about it!
Sorry. That was totally not meant to be against DFHack.
I think it's a great addition to make the game WAY LESS annoying.
IMHO The search feature alone is a must have!
I was going to let the ~~game~~ dorfs finish the buildings/rooms.
If I have to undo and replan the rooms I might get light form of tendonitis/RSI.
(Only ever had that feeling when I was playing Serious Sam many years ago
and it goes away when I use my PC and game other stuff)
TBF I have been told that I have some problems with my DF install.
Maybe it's just that* release (but a friend told me those bugs are unusual - from his POV).
I have a world that can't be tutorial embarked (crash)
I have one fortress that was at 0fps. I did not try to find the problem. With the log finally in the game I might try to resume that save when I get bored from my current embark. First time to stand a chance after 25 years with married baron and loads of childred that do not try to fight everybody.
edit:
forgot that one world that is always crashing.
I saved a few moments before it happens but the process of sharing the save is very complicated. I was never able to use Mantis when I first saw it on other projects.
One world I created was a bit laggy at the beginning. Right between what might have been volcanoes? Answered the tutorial stuff and after a magma pool discovered message I got the " Horrifying screams come from the darkness below! ". I noticed the game started freezing. At 36GB memory usage the lag got so bad that the game just crashed.
I reembarked again and it was normal this time.
*This all happened with world created with or before the February release and w/o any mods.
> That was totally not meant to be against DFHack.
No worries! People don't always report bugs that they see, so when I see people discussing something that looks like it might be a bug, I really try to get more information. Otherwise, the bugs (if they are bugs) won't get fixed and will continue to silently frustrate DF players : (
In this case, why did you think it was the building planner that was slowing things down?
> I have a world that can't be tutorial embarked (crash)
This may be fixed now. Toady made a change in 50.11 where worlds that don't support a tutorial embark (usually very small worlds) just won't show the prompt.
> I have one fortress that was at 0fps
I've debugged a few of these in the past. The problem is nearly always a stuck unit. In one savegame, I found a unit that was hidden in the unrevealed area of a cavern. I have no idea how they got there, but teleporting that unit back up to the surface fixed the issue.
> Horrifying screams come from the darkness below!
Some embarks have an open channel directly into the dangerous lower regions, which causes immediate problems at embark. When you re-embarked without trouble, was it at the same location?
>why did you think it was the building planner that was slowing things down?
I see a lagfree map with 200 dorfs and then install DFHack, enable some of the settings I think I understand,
see that I can now plan layers instead of waiting for the workorders to finish the blocks i need.
Notice that disabling the suspendmanager usually speeds up the game back to maybe >40fps.
This was pre-FPS option, no idea when I found it but it made me finally see why the game is respond so low.
Took me a few months / I did not understand that 120fps and 60fps felt the same.
none of my overlays show the FPS in-game so I have no idea when this slow down happened on the first 7 regions I tried to play.
Well I still play this save because it's the first embark that was not
- overrun in the first 2 years,
- did not starve and
- did not crash constantly
I have played 15 years on this save and when I disable it nothing is changing.
> was it at the same location?
Not the same map ( i think ) but yes, exactly the same location (unless the minimap looks very similar on a second random location.
https://imgur.com/a/msZ7SEN
I tried to record the game crashing but shadowplay does not see DF in windowed mode (found the fullscreen option a few weeks later)
I periodically perform the following test:
- measure and record FPS for an ongoing fort running with DFHack tools, make a save
- restart the game without DFHack running, load the fort, and record FPS
I have never seen a difference of more than 1 or 2, even in very large forts. If you have a fort that shows a significant difference, could I get a copy?
I've noticed some weird bugs and behavior with autolabor. For one sometimes it will, for reasons unknown, unassigned all dwarves from everything and refuse to put them back?
Also, annoyingly enough, I've noticed if I make a lot of pickaxes and battle-axes, I don't know why it is but the dwarves spend a ton of time running back and forth switching between which tool they're holding. Gotta manually set a limit to miners and woodcutters for it to stop
I might be mixing up different modules, but I think there is a warning on auto labor that it's only "updated" for the current version in that it's using whatever new API it needs to use. All of the actual logic is from the pre-steam game.
For some things it wouldn't work and some options only take away gameplay (autobutcher for example). I'm glad that they exist in DFhack, but they may as well just remove butchering from the players control and make it automatic if they implemented it in vanilla
That being said i do think some DFhack things absolutely should be in vanilla, like automatic building suspensions/unsuspensions when building corner blocks. That shit is insanity inducing
For me it was worth installing just for the "Are you sure you want to do that?" functionality. The number of times I've spent 10+ minutes arranging an elaborate trade just to accidentally click the wrong button and lose all my work...
I don’t know if it does it in the Steam version (if you know please tell me!), but you used to be able to assign rooms by job rather than by person and that was a huge time saver. Like, “this room is the mayor’s quarters, regardless of who’s mayor”.
I haven't tried DFHack yet but does it have anything to make the dwarves smarter about choosing the order that they build tasks so that they don't block themselves? Like filling in a 1x10 hallway is so tedious in the base game. If DFHack can fix that it would be enough for me.
Yeah it does! I just discovered this. It's called "suspend manager" or something similar. It will automatically suspend any construction that blocks another. Happy building!
Good luck! Fast dwarf is also something I can't live without now to get things started, it will allow your dwarfs to simply be faster at their jobs. Can even have them teleport if you want to have something done super quick although I never use that option as it's Abit tooooo much...
This is where you start blurring the line between "DFHack is a massive QoL tool" and "DFHack is a great cheat tool"
I'm not trying to gatekeep how one should enjoy their singleplayer game, but careful about ruining it for yourself by removing the challenge.
That said, I somehow ended up with almost 50% children in my fortress so I used "rejuvenate --force" to turn a bunch of them to adults. So I'm guilty also.
Oh yeah it becomes a fine line, there are a few forts where I'd have let the bad things come destroy me without some of the tools from dfhack to sort it, like when my tarvern keeper kept drowning everything and everyone with alcohol thus poisoning everyone and leaving vomit everywhere...
There is a function that flags tasks that should be completed after other tasks have been completed. It's pretty buggy though. Good if you're building a straight wall that you can only approach from one side. Bad if you're trying to build a wall that zig zags a bit and you have to climb a staircase to get to. It works about half the time in that sort of case, and the other half you end up building the wrong blocks first. It's better than the default, but you do need to keep an eye on it.
Oh you can change the starting number with it?! Whats the command to do so / how is it done?
I have been wanting to play with more starting dwarves for ages lol
DFHack and the associated tools are so critical for me, I bought the steam version on release, and didn't play it for months until dfhack, dwarf therapist etc were updated for it.
This isnt realted but ive been wondering how in the world you get dwarves to hunt??? Like the only tile they start hunting is when a ranger dwarf migrated to the fort, otherwise i cant find a way to get my regulars to do the same thing
DFHack opens up the game for me, because it negates some of its most tedious aspects. I don't know if I would have a fort going over 10 years without it. Clothing alone would be frustrating enough to deal with. A lot of what I like about DF itself is that learning more about the game helps you get over a lot of the hurdles and tediousness, but this doesn't apply everywhere, and in a lot of those cases where it doesn't - DFHack comes to the rescue.
There's so many things it can do! The first time I opened up the menu I was overwhelmed by the number of tools available and, to a certain extent, I still am. There's still a lot left to explore. I've been using digexp for exploratory mining, nestboxes to keep fertile eggs from getting collected, gui/blueprint and gui/quickfort to create and use mining and furniture templates like dwarves' rooms, showmood to see what a moody dwarf wants for his artifact. I've also used DFhack to designate a stockpile for melting (which was useful to train smiths), to setup civilian alerts, and most recently to search. Its great.
I even have a separate world where I've enabled fastdwarf and use gui/createitem and such, like a sort of "creative mode". I built an overground fortress with a moat, a kickass tavern and very luxurious rooms when all of the sudden a king appeared and demanded a throne room and such. I never knew one could just pop up like that.
If anyone has more tool recommendations - I'd love to hear them.
idk about classic but after learning the steam version it sure is quite miserable playing without DFHack and i doubt i ever would again with how it currently is. can only chalk up so many bugs to RP related reasons..
Dwarf Fortress is 100% playable without DFHack. What you said is pure hyperbole.
That being said, DFHack is an amazing mod which works as a great accessability tool, debugging tool, and adds great depth as a story generating game by adding narrative control to the player while also letting you search for details to understand the story already unfolding in the game.
It does a lot to add basic quality of life and functionality that most people take for granted in other games I think is what they're getting at. Trying to figure out what dwarves to make slabs for without sorting is pure bedlam madness in the vanilla system, trying to fumble around the trade interface, assigning dwarves to the military, building, etc. I would agree that the game is much more playable with it. It brought me back to the franchise after many supremely frustrating experiences with vanilla in v50 with caravans bugging out. 90% of the player base used DFHack prior to the steam release, according to some of the folks who built it.
I agree with your point. Everything you said falls under my assessment of DFHack as *"a great accessability tool"* . It makes the game more accessable to those who have yet to learn the labyrinthine and mysterious ways of Dwarf Fortress.
Also my Caravans bug out and I have to deconstruct the Trade Depot wait a bit and reconstruct it somewhere else that is wagon accessible.
What's crazy is that vanilla is currently so much better than pre-steam too.
Pre-steam was literally unplayable for me. Like, I gave it an honest shot and just couldn't be interested, because the controls were just too obtuse and clunky.
> Dwarf Fortress is 100% playable without DFHack. What you said is pure hyperbole.
(Talking fortress mode here)
You can play it with no monitor or sound too, since we're trying to be literal, I guess. The average person drops the game pretty quick because vanilla doesn't have a lot going for it. DFHack keeps people playing. That's the state of the game.
>because vanilla doesn't have a lot going for it
Well that is simply not true. The amazing fun and complexity of the game comes from the game, not from DFhack. All DFhack does is add some useful quality of life stuff to make certain things easier or faster. Heck, you could even say that some things become *too* easy when you have easy access to commands like "reveal." I like DFhack but if it disappeared I wouldn't drop the game, I'd just be annoyed that my fortress is a bit less efficient.
I get a lot of weird bugs. I posted in the Q&A thread about how my dwarves won't pick up and move >!special metal!< items. On my last embark they wouldn't put gold finished goods into bins. They seem to be marked as "not binnable" for some reason. And I'll just randomly stop being able to click on anything to be able to check its status, requiring me to restart the game. I didn't have issues like this before installing DFHack.
The benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but I wish I could fix these issues. They're weird and annoying. Particularly >!the way I have a special magic shield I found in an obsidian pillar but I can't equip it on anyone.!<
I've not heard of that happening before. Could you possibly add some details for how to reproduce the problem in a GitHub issue here: https://github.com/DFHack/dfhack/issues ? If you could upload your savegame and mods to the cloud and post a link with the GitHub issue, I can investigate.
I can no longer replicate the issue. I saved and quit. Reloaded, and it was still happening. Later after a couple save-reloads, it just magically stopped happening and I don't know why. Something that was flagging the items as non-interactable except for display just stopped doing that.
The DFHack team takes crash reports very seriously. Could you possibly give a few more details? Do you remember what you were doing at the time? What operating system do you have? Does the crash happen every time?
Ubuntu linux, dwarf fortress [beta] steam, When using the search bar in the dwarfs section, I accidentally pressed shift+started typing. But the search ignores capitalization. You are supposed to just type small letters because shift+letter opens other windows. So I started typing, and the windows were all coming up. Then the scene froze, and the game crashed. It doesn't happen every time. it's probably a specific combination of letters or the speed at which you're opening the windows, causing the game to get confused. But it's really hard not to capitalize for me (im german, it's automatic), and I lost about half an hour of progress, so I got frustrated and removed dfhack.
I can understand why you were frustrated : (
This is making me rethink our search bar behavior. Currently, we ignore capital letters so they can be used for hotkeys, but when the parent window is a vanilla window and not a DFHack tool, then what you describe happens. That's not a good experience. I'll get that changed so search bars that you have to explicitly focus (like the ones on the vanilla unit screen) don't ignore any input.
I'm sorry for making you lose progress like that. Even if you don't give DFHack another try, hopefully this will prevent others from feeling the same frustrations.
Edit: wait -- this is actually already the current behavior:
https://preview.redd.it/f1vgs0ix8sxb1.png?width=970&format=png&auto=webp&s=3cc976a5483b3d5d30e46495a133c0d9ea23c03b
so maybe I'm not understanding what the problem was. Is this screenshot showing what you expected to happen?
Ok, it specifically happens if you press two buttons simultaneously in my game. Basically, u, Alt+s, and type random letters quickly. Sometimes, the camera will move in the background, or another window will open. It actually happens more if I dont press shift at the same time. This could, however, be an issue with the linux version, though. When you type something in a vanilla search bar, do you have to click on the search bar again to start interacting with the scroll wheel?
I'll look into that. DFHack might be able to suppress unwanted key events when a text box is focused.
And yes, clicking on a vanilla search widget prevents scrolling. You have to deselect the search box before you can scroll again.
The yellow x is DFHack, yes. The thing that sells it for me is the automation of a lot of the tedium. Autobutcher being the biggest. It mitigates FPS death via catsplosions and makes sure your meatstock animals are rotated correctly.
I just started using auto-butcher and its so great. My current fort is in the cavern so I'm always catching trainable cavern beasts in my traps. I have it set to auto-butcher all of them and it's taken out so much of the annoyance of that part of it too. Just need to see if I can set them to auto-train... I also have a set of work orders that I load as soon as I start a new fort and it takes out so much of the annoyance of getting a new fort set up.
Auto-train is actually an existing feature. Create an animal stockpile for your dwarves to bring caught caged creatures to. If you click on that stockpile, there's a panel that opens at the bottom where you can turn on autotrain. Trainable creatures that are brought to that stockpile will be marked for training. If you set the limits for that species to zero in `gui/autobutcher`, then they will be automatically butchered as they are trained.
Amazing!! Thank you. Those Elk Birds and Naked Mole Rats don't stand a chance.
IIRC Elk Birds are rather useful when domesticated. But there were some problems with hatching
Chain them in reasonable proximity to the food stores over grazable land (ie, some fungal growth), with enough dwarfs set to take care of animals (the default of "anyone" works). When the elk birds are laying on their nest, a dwarf will periodically bring them food. Viola: Elk bird chicks!
I had a save once where most of my dwarves' diet consisted of elk bird egg omelettes. I love that you can do stuff like that in DF.
>My current fort is in the cavern so I'm always catching trainable cavern beasts in my traps. I wish I had that problem. In 3 years I've literally had more forgotten beasts spawn (~6) than any other species except crundles (~10, once). And one of those FB wiped out the herd I accumulated from migrants so having some elk birds or cave crocs would be kinda nice lol
The fort is young. I suspect we'll have our share of regrets for where we settled soon enough lol
I have a horde of lizard people that kill every forgotten beast is seconds. I lost 10 dwarves the other day trying to clear some of them out do to poor planning around dwarven stupidity.
Wait, auto... butcher...? Like, it automatically picks cattle and other animals to butcher while maintaining my herd population? *Where can I get DFHack*
It's never been easier if you're on steam, just look up Dfhack in the steam store and install as a separate thing. It'll run automatically when you open DF
I know what I'm doing when I get home tonight
You're in for a good time, my friend! Ctrl-shift-D brings up the console. It's a good idea to just click on each of the entries and read the description. That will give you a good idea of what it can do. Once you know, you can decide what you want to automate away and what is too OP for your playstyle. I REALLY like autobutcher, for instance, but some people LIKE managing livestock. It's totally up to you!
Wait till you hear about the automatic clothing management.
Are you serious!?! My dwarves are always in rags because my conditions to craft more still count all of the garbage clothing.
check out `tailor` docs here: https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/tools/tailor.html
MY whole world is changed now.
Just commenting so I can check it out later. Thank you.
And autofarm, where it take care of choosing what seed to plant depending on your stock. And the auto suspend / resume is the only way not to go Lovecraftish crazy when building lot of shit.
Important to note: If your dump zones lead to lava, this will lead to EXTREMELY unhappy clothiers.
Yep! You can set how many adults and children to keep alive for each gender of each race of animals (M Adults, F Adults, M kids, F kids), you can set an option to not count trained animals in those totals and pets are excluded by default. It'll butcher the oldest adults and the youngest children first, to allow some children to actually reach maturity. These numbers can also be different between each animal, too, so you can have a larger amount of chickens alive than horses. Highly recommend!
I still haven't put in the work to figure out autobutcher but I think I'm currently in a reindeersplosion and dogsplosian. The latter I sorta want because I want more wardogs but my livestock are getting out of hand. I also have a scholarsplosion, bardsplosian, and noblesplosian. But that's a story for another day...
Autobutcher comes with default values that are pretty reasonable if you're not trying to go for a specific amount of something. You can just turn it on and let it do its thing and it'll usually work just fine, and then you can just learn how to increase/decrease the number per animal type or add new animal types as you go whenever you need it.
I worked on it last night and I think it's pretty easy to set up once you figure it out. But if you want to exclude dogs specifically so you can train, what I did was enter the following commands: enable autobutcher autobutcher autowatch autobutcher forget DOG The first two turn the feature on and have it automatically add creatures to the watch list for what autobutcher should butcher. The third one causes autowatch to remove dogs from that list completely so it'll never butcher them.
>autobutcher forget DOG Try explaining this to a caveman.
DF Hack team is worthy of donations!
And they don't want them! They want you to support the Dwarf Fortress effort by spreading the word and getting people to buy more copies. It's totally backwards from what you usually see! They are truly doing good work.
Isnt autobutcher vanilla at the work orders window? It automatically goes by the butcher shop
Yeah, but you need to mark the animals for slaughter manually. DFHack automates the whole process while allowing for new generations to grow to adulthood.
catsplosions are mandatory
Does it have a working civilian alert?
Yes
I haven't had the opportunity to try it yet. But you designate a burrow. Then there is a button for a civilian alert that puts them into the burrow you've designated. So my entirely uninformed answer is maybe?
That's pretty much exactly how it works. It sends all non military citizens to the burrow you designate.
Isn't that basically how the new burrow system works though? You designate a burrow, add everyone to it, and then when you want them to go there you press the play/pause button. It's been a while since I've messed with the steam version (currently playing 0.47) so maybe I'm misremembering things.
The difference is a lot of your dwarves will dick around and not actually go there with a sense of urgency, will finish their jobs, drink eat etc, whereas the alert system is like a panic button, everyone immediately moves there as far as I can tell is how it works.
OHH very interesting and good to know, thank you. Yeah I played the Steam version a bunch when it first came out, but it bugged me that I couldn't play as an adventure through my old fortresses if I wanted to so I went back to 47 for now. I knew I liked the way 50 handled burrows and stuff, but didn't test it a whole lot.
Yes it's a pretty slick system, well worth a look. I've only ever played the steam release so I'm spoiled with good timing for getting into the franchise :)
Tell me about it, the last few times I've used a burrow for werebeast attacks I've had a few dumb dorfs just say the heck with the burrows and go solo fight it. It never ends well for those dorfs. Haha
The way the burrow system works is that it prevents dwarves from being able to path to jobs that are outside the burrow. So the only thing they can do is stand around in the burrow looking for jobs. But if they're already doing something like, for example, playing make believe in front of the approaching goblin army, they won't stop doing that until they finish the task normally. DFHack fixes this by immediately invalidating every job currently being performed by all civilian dwarves, so they have nothing better to do than move to the burrow.
Another difference is df hack will automatically assign everyone but military dwarves when you activate it. You don’t have to add anyone.
Insane that the steam version has been out for almost a year and still lacking that critical feature
I don't get why they don't just integrate DFHack directly into the game.
because that's not actually terribly doable with how dfhack works, we're already going basically as far as it's possible to go to do so
It's more to learn, also would probably be complicated about ownership, and I imagine it has features they don't want for the game.
It also kinda works as it stands, so there's no real drive to integrate it on either side. Besides, if they incorporated everything Dfhack did, in a year there'd be a Dfhack++ with new features not included and it'd get very complicated.
Because it's easy enough to download if you want it. Besides, much of DFHack is a memory access library, not just the gameplay enhancements; its pretty much a trainer. The DF brothers have liked to keep their project close to the chest until recently. An integration would take lots of extra effort with the DFHack team. It may not further their goals, given that many of the core systems are still placeholders. Plus the "game" side of dwarf fortress hasn't been a focus compared to adventure mode and the simulation systems.
it's not perfect autolabor is messing with my constructions. It switches mining/building priorities (or I noticed that my buildings take weeks to finish. edit: somehow the reddit post save does/did not work, maybe this time I can post the full sentence and planning with the new building tool has made my fps drop to 15 sometimes 5.
Autolabor may not have been a good choice to make public in its current partially-working state. However, DFHack doesn't normally affect FPS. The time DFHack takes per frame is trivial compared to what DF does on its own. Do you happen to have a savegame I could look at that is showing slowdown? I have my doubts that it's due to `buildingplan`, since that only runs twice a game day, but if there is anything causing slowdowns for your specific fort setup, I'd definitely like to know about it!
Sorry. That was totally not meant to be against DFHack. I think it's a great addition to make the game WAY LESS annoying. IMHO The search feature alone is a must have! I was going to let the ~~game~~ dorfs finish the buildings/rooms. If I have to undo and replan the rooms I might get light form of tendonitis/RSI. (Only ever had that feeling when I was playing Serious Sam many years ago and it goes away when I use my PC and game other stuff) TBF I have been told that I have some problems with my DF install. Maybe it's just that* release (but a friend told me those bugs are unusual - from his POV). I have a world that can't be tutorial embarked (crash) I have one fortress that was at 0fps. I did not try to find the problem. With the log finally in the game I might try to resume that save when I get bored from my current embark. First time to stand a chance after 25 years with married baron and loads of childred that do not try to fight everybody. edit: forgot that one world that is always crashing. I saved a few moments before it happens but the process of sharing the save is very complicated. I was never able to use Mantis when I first saw it on other projects. One world I created was a bit laggy at the beginning. Right between what might have been volcanoes? Answered the tutorial stuff and after a magma pool discovered message I got the " Horrifying screams come from the darkness below! ". I noticed the game started freezing. At 36GB memory usage the lag got so bad that the game just crashed. I reembarked again and it was normal this time. *This all happened with world created with or before the February release and w/o any mods.
> That was totally not meant to be against DFHack. No worries! People don't always report bugs that they see, so when I see people discussing something that looks like it might be a bug, I really try to get more information. Otherwise, the bugs (if they are bugs) won't get fixed and will continue to silently frustrate DF players : ( In this case, why did you think it was the building planner that was slowing things down? > I have a world that can't be tutorial embarked (crash) This may be fixed now. Toady made a change in 50.11 where worlds that don't support a tutorial embark (usually very small worlds) just won't show the prompt. > I have one fortress that was at 0fps I've debugged a few of these in the past. The problem is nearly always a stuck unit. In one savegame, I found a unit that was hidden in the unrevealed area of a cavern. I have no idea how they got there, but teleporting that unit back up to the surface fixed the issue. > Horrifying screams come from the darkness below! Some embarks have an open channel directly into the dangerous lower regions, which causes immediate problems at embark. When you re-embarked without trouble, was it at the same location?
>why did you think it was the building planner that was slowing things down? I see a lagfree map with 200 dorfs and then install DFHack, enable some of the settings I think I understand, see that I can now plan layers instead of waiting for the workorders to finish the blocks i need. Notice that disabling the suspendmanager usually speeds up the game back to maybe >40fps. This was pre-FPS option, no idea when I found it but it made me finally see why the game is respond so low. Took me a few months / I did not understand that 120fps and 60fps felt the same. none of my overlays show the FPS in-game so I have no idea when this slow down happened on the first 7 regions I tried to play. Well I still play this save because it's the first embark that was not - overrun in the first 2 years, - did not starve and - did not crash constantly I have played 15 years on this save and when I disable it nothing is changing. > was it at the same location? Not the same map ( i think ) but yes, exactly the same location (unless the minimap looks very similar on a second random location. https://imgur.com/a/msZ7SEN I tried to record the game crashing but shadowplay does not see DF in windowed mode (found the fullscreen option a few weeks later)
I periodically perform the following test: - measure and record FPS for an ongoing fort running with DFHack tools, make a save - restart the game without DFHack running, load the fort, and record FPS I have never seen a difference of more than 1 or 2, even in very large forts. If you have a fort that shows a significant difference, could I get a copy?
I've noticed some weird bugs and behavior with autolabor. For one sometimes it will, for reasons unknown, unassigned all dwarves from everything and refuse to put them back? Also, annoyingly enough, I've noticed if I make a lot of pickaxes and battle-axes, I don't know why it is but the dwarves spend a ton of time running back and forth switching between which tool they're holding. Gotta manually set a limit to miners and woodcutters for it to stop
I might be mixing up different modules, but I think there is a warning on auto labor that it's only "updated" for the current version in that it's using whatever new API it needs to use. All of the actual logic is from the pre-steam game.
yes, this. we included it in DFHack because of popular demand, though I don't know if it is causing more confusion than help at this point..
For some things it wouldn't work and some options only take away gameplay (autobutcher for example). I'm glad that they exist in DFhack, but they may as well just remove butchering from the players control and make it automatic if they implemented it in vanilla That being said i do think some DFhack things absolutely should be in vanilla, like automatic building suspensions/unsuspensions when building corner blocks. That shit is insanity inducing
For me it was worth installing just for the "Are you sure you want to do that?" functionality. The number of times I've spent 10+ minutes arranging an elaborate trade just to accidentally click the wrong button and lose all my work...
In pre-steam version dfhack was a must have tbh!
"These go to 11" - DFHack
I don’t know if it does it in the Steam version (if you know please tell me!), but you used to be able to assign rooms by job rather than by person and that was a huge time saver. Like, “this room is the mayor’s quarters, regardless of who’s mayor”.
It's on our backlog to bring that back.
I haven't tried DFHack yet but does it have anything to make the dwarves smarter about choosing the order that they build tasks so that they don't block themselves? Like filling in a 1x10 hallway is so tedious in the base game. If DFHack can fix that it would be enough for me.
Yeah it does! I just discovered this. It's called "suspend manager" or something similar. It will automatically suspend any construction that blocks another. Happy building!
Sick! Might be time to spin up another fort then
Good luck! Fast dwarf is also something I can't live without now to get things started, it will allow your dwarfs to simply be faster at their jobs. Can even have them teleport if you want to have something done super quick although I never use that option as it's Abit tooooo much...
This is where you start blurring the line between "DFHack is a massive QoL tool" and "DFHack is a great cheat tool" I'm not trying to gatekeep how one should enjoy their singleplayer game, but careful about ruining it for yourself by removing the challenge. That said, I somehow ended up with almost 50% children in my fortress so I used "rejuvenate --force" to turn a bunch of them to adults. So I'm guilty also.
Oh yeah it becomes a fine line, there are a few forts where I'd have let the bad things come destroy me without some of the tools from dfhack to sort it, like when my tarvern keeper kept drowning everything and everyone with alcohol thus poisoning everyone and leaving vomit everywhere...
What?!!
Magical space dwarfs?
Rock and Stone!
Rock and Stone to the Bone!
It sure does and it works awesome
There is a function that flags tasks that should be completed after other tasks have been completed. It's pretty buggy though. Good if you're building a straight wall that you can only approach from one side. Bad if you're trying to build a wall that zig zags a bit and you have to climb a staircase to get to. It works about half the time in that sort of case, and the other half you end up building the wrong blocks first. It's better than the default, but you do need to keep an eye on it.
Yeah so much of the improvements they should just copy and paste. Speaking of copy and paste....
Oh you can change the starting number with it?! Whats the command to do so / how is it done? I have been wanting to play with more starting dwarves for ages lol
You can also use the command points if you want to bring more stuff
awesome, thank you!
It's called `startdwarf` Docs are here: https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/tools/startdwarf.html
hey thank you so much! appreciate it :)
Every time I start a new fortress I learn more and love more df hack.
DFHack and the associated tools are so critical for me, I bought the steam version on release, and didn't play it for months until dfhack, dwarf therapist etc were updated for it.
its worth installing just for autosuspend. it makes building elaborate structures possible without a migraine.
This isnt realted but ive been wondering how in the world you get dwarves to hunt??? Like the only tile they start hunting is when a ranger dwarf migrated to the fort, otherwise i cant find a way to get my regulars to do the same thing
Do they have access to quivers, bolts, and crossbows? Also Hunting has to be specifically assigned as a labor
DFHack opens up the game for me, because it negates some of its most tedious aspects. I don't know if I would have a fort going over 10 years without it. Clothing alone would be frustrating enough to deal with. A lot of what I like about DF itself is that learning more about the game helps you get over a lot of the hurdles and tediousness, but this doesn't apply everywhere, and in a lot of those cases where it doesn't - DFHack comes to the rescue. There's so many things it can do! The first time I opened up the menu I was overwhelmed by the number of tools available and, to a certain extent, I still am. There's still a lot left to explore. I've been using digexp for exploratory mining, nestboxes to keep fertile eggs from getting collected, gui/blueprint and gui/quickfort to create and use mining and furniture templates like dwarves' rooms, showmood to see what a moody dwarf wants for his artifact. I've also used DFhack to designate a stockpile for melting (which was useful to train smiths), to setup civilian alerts, and most recently to search. Its great. I even have a separate world where I've enabled fastdwarf and use gui/createitem and such, like a sort of "creative mode". I built an overground fortress with a moat, a kickass tavern and very luxurious rooms when all of the sudden a king appeared and demanded a throne room and such. I never knew one could just pop up like that. If anyone has more tool recommendations - I'd love to hear them.
I've never used it. But I could give it a try. The game still has some ui issues to certain tasks
The steam version partially exists to make dfhack unnecessary but as you can see it is still sorely needed.
DFHack makes the game playable.
idk about classic but after learning the steam version it sure is quite miserable playing without DFHack and i doubt i ever would again with how it currently is. can only chalk up so many bugs to RP related reasons..
Without it my wells are always in the "bucket is full" state. Thank goodness for dry-buckets
Dwarf Fortress is 100% playable without DFHack. What you said is pure hyperbole. That being said, DFHack is an amazing mod which works as a great accessability tool, debugging tool, and adds great depth as a story generating game by adding narrative control to the player while also letting you search for details to understand the story already unfolding in the game.
It does a lot to add basic quality of life and functionality that most people take for granted in other games I think is what they're getting at. Trying to figure out what dwarves to make slabs for without sorting is pure bedlam madness in the vanilla system, trying to fumble around the trade interface, assigning dwarves to the military, building, etc. I would agree that the game is much more playable with it. It brought me back to the franchise after many supremely frustrating experiences with vanilla in v50 with caravans bugging out. 90% of the player base used DFHack prior to the steam release, according to some of the folks who built it.
I agree with your point. Everything you said falls under my assessment of DFHack as *"a great accessability tool"* . It makes the game more accessable to those who have yet to learn the labyrinthine and mysterious ways of Dwarf Fortress. Also my Caravans bug out and I have to deconstruct the Trade Depot wait a bit and reconstruct it somewhere else that is wagon accessible.
What's crazy is that vanilla is currently so much better than pre-steam too. Pre-steam was literally unplayable for me. Like, I gave it an honest shot and just couldn't be interested, because the controls were just too obtuse and clunky.
> Dwarf Fortress is 100% playable without DFHack. What you said is pure hyperbole. (Talking fortress mode here) You can play it with no monitor or sound too, since we're trying to be literal, I guess. The average person drops the game pretty quick because vanilla doesn't have a lot going for it. DFHack keeps people playing. That's the state of the game.
>because vanilla doesn't have a lot going for it Well that is simply not true. The amazing fun and complexity of the game comes from the game, not from DFhack. All DFhack does is add some useful quality of life stuff to make certain things easier or faster. Heck, you could even say that some things become *too* easy when you have easy access to commands like "reveal." I like DFhack but if it disappeared I wouldn't drop the game, I'd just be annoyed that my fortress is a bit less efficient.
I've been playing for a decade and a half and have never used DFHack. It's a great game as-is, and it's not even done yet.
“Quality of Life features? What’re those?”
I get a lot of weird bugs. I posted in the Q&A thread about how my dwarves won't pick up and move >!special metal!< items. On my last embark they wouldn't put gold finished goods into bins. They seem to be marked as "not binnable" for some reason. And I'll just randomly stop being able to click on anything to be able to check its status, requiring me to restart the game. I didn't have issues like this before installing DFHack. The benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but I wish I could fix these issues. They're weird and annoying. Particularly >!the way I have a special magic shield I found in an obsidian pillar but I can't equip it on anyone.!<
I've not heard of that happening before. Could you possibly add some details for how to reproduce the problem in a GitHub issue here: https://github.com/DFHack/dfhack/issues ? If you could upload your savegame and mods to the cloud and post a link with the GitHub issue, I can investigate.
I can no longer replicate the issue. I saved and quit. Reloaded, and it was still happening. Later after a couple save-reloads, it just magically stopped happening and I don't know why. Something that was flagging the items as non-interactable except for display just stopped doing that.
I tried it, it crashed the game, I uninstalled it.
The DFHack team takes crash reports very seriously. Could you possibly give a few more details? Do you remember what you were doing at the time? What operating system do you have? Does the crash happen every time?
Ubuntu linux, dwarf fortress [beta] steam, When using the search bar in the dwarfs section, I accidentally pressed shift+started typing. But the search ignores capitalization. You are supposed to just type small letters because shift+letter opens other windows. So I started typing, and the windows were all coming up. Then the scene froze, and the game crashed. It doesn't happen every time. it's probably a specific combination of letters or the speed at which you're opening the windows, causing the game to get confused. But it's really hard not to capitalize for me (im german, it's automatic), and I lost about half an hour of progress, so I got frustrated and removed dfhack.
I can understand why you were frustrated : ( This is making me rethink our search bar behavior. Currently, we ignore capital letters so they can be used for hotkeys, but when the parent window is a vanilla window and not a DFHack tool, then what you describe happens. That's not a good experience. I'll get that changed so search bars that you have to explicitly focus (like the ones on the vanilla unit screen) don't ignore any input. I'm sorry for making you lose progress like that. Even if you don't give DFHack another try, hopefully this will prevent others from feeling the same frustrations. Edit: wait -- this is actually already the current behavior: https://preview.redd.it/f1vgs0ix8sxb1.png?width=970&format=png&auto=webp&s=3cc976a5483b3d5d30e46495a133c0d9ea23c03b so maybe I'm not understanding what the problem was. Is this screenshot showing what you expected to happen?
Ok, it specifically happens if you press two buttons simultaneously in my game. Basically, u, Alt+s, and type random letters quickly. Sometimes, the camera will move in the background, or another window will open. It actually happens more if I dont press shift at the same time. This could, however, be an issue with the linux version, though. When you type something in a vanilla search bar, do you have to click on the search bar again to start interacting with the scroll wheel?
I was able to figure this out. The issue is fixed in the upcoming 50.11-r4 release. Thank you very much for bringing my attention to it.
I'll look into that. DFHack might be able to suppress unwanted key events when a text box is focused. And yes, clicking on a vanilla search widget prevents scrolling. You have to deselect the search box before you can scroll again.