However, after reading the O Reilly dwarf fortress book and the PeridexisErrant's DF Walkthrough, I have no idea why the DF wiki back then started off with up/down stairs. It made way more sense for any tutorials to start off with immediately excavating rooms instead of directing the player to dig down. There's enough to do without having a brand new player figure out that dwarf fortress is a 3D game that you navigate/manage via 2D z-level cross sections.
So after the traumatizing experience, I abandoned dwarf fortress for almost a decade. Since that time, I switched from slinging code on a Microsoft tech stack to Linux, where I grew far more comfortable with a command line interface. I downloaded angband and began to get comfortable and even love ASCII interfaces. But it still seemed too daunting to play. This year though, I decide it was now or never. Especially because my wife was pregnant and if I didn't at least figure out the basics before the kid popped out, it'd probably be another decade before I overcame the dread of overcoming the learning curve.
So while on a vacation to Spain, I purchased the O Reilly Dwarf Fortress guide ebook and read it on the flight there and back. Upon my return, I felt like I had a solid enough grasp of the starting mechanics and began. I followed the book as close as possible, supplementing it with PeridexisErrant's excellent walkthrough guide. This time around, I downloaded lazy newb pack. The name made it sound like it was optional, however, the online guides made it clear that this was mandatory. I soon learned why.
I found a nice safe area with low savagery, lots of trees, a river, a warm climate, and a nearby hill with which I could start mining out my starting area. Pretty soon I had a dormitory setup, a trade depot, and some basic workshops, a still for booze, a pasture, and some farm plots. For my first playthrough, I didn't use any tileset, and stuck with ASCII so I could revel in all its glory, beauty, and badassery.
A years into the game I had a few dozen migrants. I had expanded below to a second floor housing a tavern, noble quarters, sleeping areas for the common rabble, a kitchen area, temple, library, and bar. The third floor contained stockpiles and metalsmithing workshops. The fourth floor contained what would be the new noble quarters, that contained fancier and bigger rooms.
During this time one of my dwarves entered into a strange mood. But he needed yarn, and I didn't have any! Apparently this needed wool sheared from one of three animal types. An alpaca was an acceptable source of wool, but I only had only just rangled a baby alpaca into my pasture. So my dwarf went mad and left the fortress, gibbering in the wilderness before dying of starvation and dehydration. Sadly, a few months later, his wife had given birth to a baby.
This was one of those emergent moments that Dwarf Fortress was renowned for. It made me feel sad. And then it got worse. A werecoyote appeared and immediately attacked a nearby hunter. He slashed and clawed at the hunter, tearing open a gaping wound in the hunter's leg. By pure luck or desperation, my hunter landed a critical hit headshot on the werecoyote. He was brutally crippled and maimed and could no longer walk. I quickly forgot about him as I hastily began reading the tutorial section on building a military so I would be more prepared in the future.
I suddenly remembered my hunter and began looking up how to construct a hospital to treat his wounds. I began carving out a hospital section on the ground floor. And then he turned feral.
He bit two citizens before being dispatched. At this point after googling frantically I realized that werecoyotes infected dwarves if their bite managed to pierce flesh. CRAP. I had two infected. One was a miner, and the other was a broker. I quickly googled various ways to kill dwarves. I decided I would wall in the miner, who was crippled and unable to move. I did so but then due to how dwarves construct stuff, I realized I had walled him in with another one of my dwarves. This one was a dwarf who had built my first artifact ever in the fortress. I didn't have the heart to sacrifice him, and ordered the walls torn down.
Later, this infected dwarf slept in his bedroom with his wife. Again, I had a chance to wall him in forever, but didn't have the heart to sacrifice his wife as well. As I would soon find out, such idealistic decisions would cost my fortress dearly.
Meanwhile the broker was happily frollicking around my fortress and I did not have any answers.
Frantically, I tried to build an "atom smasher". A drawbridge will smash anything beneath it once lowered. Using this mechanic, a death chamber can be built by having a dwarf pull a switch conveniently placed next to the drawbridge on repeat, and then designating only that dwarf to be able to pull the switch. But I struggled ordering my infected dwarves to go and pull the switch. They wanted to get drunk instead (Apparently, utilizing burrows or assigning the dwarf to a squad and using move command is the right way to do it). Before I knew it, it was a full moon again. The miner that I did not wish to wall in with his wife became feral and immediately tore into a baby, ripping it to shreds, bashing it against the floor over and over. The miner was finally taken down, but not before inflicting terrible, terrible damage.
Meanwhile the broker went on a rampage as well. She too targeted a baby, Erush's baby, the widow who had already lost her husband. Erush, a ranger rushed to help, but was helpless as the broker tore into the baby, who cried out for "mama" before its skull was crushed. Erush fought valiantly, but was taken down by the broker's superior grappling skills and then maimed to death. As I read the combat logs (hitting r in the logs) and the list of combat (by hitting a for announcements) i felt sick to my stomach. Multiple dead babies, children, and civilians, and many more infected. Worse, the broker had lived through the carnage and even commented about how awful the carnage was.
I tried and failed again to get the infected under the atom smasher. But before I knew it the full moon came and a horrific nightmare scene unfolded as feral children began tearing into adults. At this point there were too many infected and dead to keep track of. Corpses were strewn about the fortress and dragged to corpse stockpiles outside by dazed and traumatized dwarves. One more full moon cycle and I only had three dwarves left alive, all infected. At this point I toyed with the idea of having a werecoyote only fortress, but decided the logistics of making sure dwarves got infected but not killed was too much trouble. I abandoned the fort in disgust.
There are few times in video games where it was able to elicit such an emotional and visceral response from me. I was sick to the stomach as I read the combat logs of the baby crying out for mom as the werecoyote killed it, the mother being unable to defend her newbown infant. In fact, the few times I had such a strong reaction were during scripted cutscenes in game, never before in a game where everything was procedurally generated.
I understand now firsthand the appeal of the game, but I'm a long way from mastering it. At first, I was pissed off about losing and didn't consider it fun (the game's motto is "Losing is fun"). But then I realized that you can reclaim an abandoned fort and basically resume where you left off (stockpiles are gone and items are strewn about everywhere, but no big deal). Now this was fun! Not wanting to lose my work, I reembarked back to Deepnumber of Weeds. The three surviving infected dwarven werecoyotes were gone! I quickly cleared out all the scattered items, piled up the corpses, and began excavating a vast underground tomb to commemorate the original citizens.
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