I love Rimworld and play it a lot. I frequently see posts and articles comparing the two. I got Dwarf Fortress, watched tutorials, printed out flow charts, and really gave it a try for several hours.
But I didn’t get into Dwarf Fortress :( some of the mechanics are weird. Many things are not intuitive or don’t make sense. Like seeds that are needed for growing mushrooms are defaulted to be used in cooking and the setting to turn that off is difficult to find.
I finally realized an analogy today. Rimworld is like The Sims while Dwarf Fortress is like Sim City. Rimworld you directly control people and micromanage a colony. Dwarf Fortress is Sim City - you zone things and say generally what you want to happen, but don’t control your meeples directly.
Thoughts on the comparison? Any other folks like Rimworld but not Dwarf Fortress?
Appreciate that dwarf fortress is an 18 year old game. They first released it in 2006 and even then the interface was clunky and never a priority. It is a dwarf simulation engine first and an interactive game second.
RimWorld owes its existence to Dwarf Fortress the way Halo owes its existence to Doom, or World of Warcraft owes its existence to RuneScape. Dwarf Fortress is the precursor for all games like RimWorld. So comparing their interfaces will always set Dwarf Fortress up to lose, just like if you compared the controls in Halo against the original Doom. I think you have to approach Dwarf Fortress more like playing a piece of gaming history, and a look into the world of a very interesting human, Tarn Adams, rather than a modern game competing against modern titles.
Huh, I didn’t know that history. But that makes some more sense. It’s always difficult going “backwards” in a game. Like if you play the latest in a series, the first is more “meh”. Respect where due - I appreciate that DF paved the way.
DF, even after the stream release, doesn’t have the polish that rimworld does. I don’t think either creator would argue that.
I like them both, but I was also there for the math breakdown. For the scamps lost under the bread fiasco. For the butterfly door. DF is easier to like if you’ve played it for a decade or more.
DF definitely didn’t feel as intuitive. A game like that needs a Weenie Hut Jr tutorial to introduce you since a lot of the mechanisms don’t make overt connections (to me at least). I remember some elves came to trade and I offered them a bunch of stuff but they got pissed off and rejected it. Some googling later let me figure out they don’t like wooden things :[ but I didn’t know that going in and it would have helped to know
If you still want to get into DF, I’d heavily recommend googling up quickstart guides, either the text ones on the wiki, or some on youtube, ans following them pretty exactly for a while until you get the hang of the basics enough to start experimenting. It’s how I got myself into DF, and I’ve used that method successfully with other games that are so complex that they are intimidating like Stellaris.
Edit: Aaaaand I didn’t realize I was necroing a 3 month old post xD