NailBunny [she/her]

I like computers and all the dumb bullshit that makes them work. I’m also a big fan of horror literature, especially of the cosmic variety, and always appreciate recommendations! hexbear-trans

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • I absolutely love classic roguelikes. I didn’t love ADOM despite playing it a fair amount, but I do love DCSS, Caves of Qud, Cogmind, Cataclysm, and quite a few more, albeit to a lesser degree. I love games that demand you learn their systems inside and out to even have a chance at winning. I love the sense of stakes that roguelikes create and the experiences that emerge from the fear of losing everything. I also generally tend to be quite critical of heavy RNG elements in roguelikes and I fucking hate deckbuilder games in general, but I like having to measure and mitigate the risk of unexpected and unfavorable situations on the fly and come up with impromptu solutions to interesting problems. Loss is expected, and while you can learn from loss, sometimes you’re left feeling like the cards just weren’t in your favour, and I think that’s something that a lot of people who play these kinds of games just come to accept. A lot of people see it as senseless masochism, but in my experience with the games I’ve listed above, losing can genuinely be fun. There is a sense of loss, but these games to me are also in part story generators. I’ve had many experiences in all of them that I remember very fondly, and a lot of those stories end with loss.

    My particular fixation with them might be because of autism though. I have well over a thousand hours in several (probably multiple thousand in Cata) and tend to come back to them for comfort, so I probably just really like bad games






  • I think Dwarf Fortress’s Steam release, for all its issues, has made it a lot more accessible to a casual audience, especially in the wake of the great success of games like Rimworld. That said, it’s still quite an undertaking to pick up and learn. Cataclysm has definitely always been a hard sell to others, though. Usually, their interest wanes as soon as they look up a screenshot. On the rare occasions that I’ve convinced someone to boot it up, they’ve just walked into the sight range of a mi-go or something and immediately died and lost interest. There’s so much to talk about when it comes to both of them, but no one to talk about them with :(


  • Deadly Premonition. It has a cast of very charming and surprisingly well written characters alongside a fascinating mindfuck of a story that is very much unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. Heavily inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and the closest I’ve seen another piece of media come to recapturing its dreamy, surreal vibes. Has a cult following despite being an absolutely shit game by all reasonable metrics. The combat is atrocious, it’s unfathomably buggy, you’re forced to drive between locations in a janky ass car, and the driving is like pulling teeth. It’s really quite an unpleasant game to play for many reasons, and that’s if you even get the game to run; the PC port is basically unplayable and requires a fuckton of fiddling on newer systems. Despite all that, it’s an experience I remember very fondly. Just don’t know if I’ll be booting it up for another run in the next decade.



  • As others here have suggested, if you go with the Steam edition you’ll get a pretty new UI with mouse support and official tileset pre-installed among a variety of other QoL improvements (and some regressions that are being worked out, but nothing that will affect you having a good time.)

    If you don’t go with the Steam edition, I’d highly recommend getting started with the Lazy Newb Pack as it provides a nice launcher that allows you to change some internal settings and select from a handful of tilesets

    First of all, Flinch already linked it, but I’ll doubly recommend having the wiki open while you play. It’s an invaluable resource, and anything you don’t understand will be explained in detail there.

    For your first fortress, I would personally try to settle somewhere without aquifers (although light aquifers are newer and pretty manageable), or you may get frustrated trying to deal with them while learning.

    When you get settled in, have some workshops, bedrooms, etc., try checking out the basics of the nobles system, particularly managers and bookkeepers, early on. Having a manager will allow you to set up automatic tasks that are refreshed on certain conditions (i.e., Build 10 more beds IF number of beds in storage is less than 2.) Learning this early on will save you a lot of time and annoyance resubmitting tasks one-by-one for jobs that you would much rather have automated.

    I could ramble about DF and little tips for hours, but honestly blind is the best thing to be when starting. Just be patient, use the wiki, and have fun!

    spoiler

    Oh, and if you dig really, really deep, you might find some delicious candy, or even a group of funny clowns, if you’re lucky.