That's a bit of a dramatic exaggeration for theatrical effect. The ASCII art definitely does not take 100 hours to understand.

If you use a beginner's guide, you can get the basics in a couple hours - after that, you start having fun but of course it takes a very long time to learn and understand all of the subtleties of the game (but that's true of any good strategy game).

O'reilly has published a book about the game, I highly recommend it. You can start really grokking the game within an afternoon.

The basics, yes. But you are gauging the wrong complexity here.

Dwarf Fortress has no concept of 'hit points', for instance. A character (monster, undead or whatever) can die for several reasons. For instance, they hemorrhage to death, or a vital organ is hit. The can be crippled for life. All 32 teeth in a dwarf are modeled, and they can all be individually damaged/lost.

It has complex social interactions. One reddit thread was asking why one of his engravers was engraving pictures of rats over and over in a room. He got asked to check if said dwarf had a grudge against whoever owned that room. Sure enough, he did - the owner was a noble that happened to be afraid of rats.

There's a legal system, dwarfs can commit homicide and you need to try to track down the perpretator and bring to justice, assuming there are no witnesses.

Heck, even the world generation is way more advanced than anything I've ever seen.

Hah, I think you are gauging the wrong complexity :)

Sure, all these things lead to an incredibly deep universe, but you're meant to discover them as you're playing the game. In a way, the metagame (posting on reddit, reading wikis, etc) is just as important as the actual game (which is also true for Minecraft, when it comes to sharing your creations, learning red stone, etc). But knowing these things is certainly not required to start playing the game or to get in the "swing of things".

The fact still remains that someone can turn on Minecraft, mine a few blocks, and "get" the game, especially if they've played with LEGOs. Dwarf Fortress not so much.

Think of the children.

I would imagine a good example of this is when my ten-year old decided to try Minecraft, I only had to show her the basics before she was off and running on her own. She's now up there with mods and console commands with no input from me. She then taught her five-year old sister to play without my involvement at all.

I can't imagine the two of them playing Dwarf Fortress.

You'd be surprised. I've worked a lot with kids, and I've seen pre-teens get into Dwarf Fortress very independently. It's not necessarily true that all kids will have the interest/attention for it, but it's still not that crazy. People routinely underestimate kids.

I happily admit that at its core, Dwarf Fortress is ANYTHING BUT simple. And yes, I've played the hell out of it for years and years.

However, the concept of Dwarf Fortress is extremely simple- you're a band of dwarves, you start out with limited supplies, here's this open world for you to go live in, now try not to die. Minecraft is the same way in that regard- here's this world you've been plopped down in, it's theoretically infinitely big, try not to die.

In Minecraft, "not dying" is very simple. Make a well-lit underground wheat farm and you can survive forever. If you have never heard of minecraft you can get to this point in less than an hour of gameplay.

That "minimum viable strategy" is a baseline from which you can ramp up difficulty at your own pace.

Sounds like that player had a lot of FUN.

But in all seriousness, getting to a point where the game is playable takes 2 or 3 failed games at worst (assuming you do some reading). The game just continues to offer complexity you can explore.

Ha ha reading the article it seems the author intentionally didn't do any reading of anything other than the info included with the game. I can see that without reading a noob guide or checking out the DF wiki at the very least a player would have absolutely zero idea about what the heck is going on.

Yeah. It didn't take me that long to get the hang of Dwarf Fortress. The hardest part is figuring out that you can't control any of the dwarves directly in Fortress mode, so anything you want done involves changing the work orders for the whole fortress.

The closest you can get to individual control is by putting one dwarf in a military squad, and even then there are limits.

It's almost like a perverse version of the Sims, where if one of your sims has a full bladder, rather than directing it to use the toilet, you have to queue "urinate" and "flush" jobs on the toilet itself, and a "wash hands" job on the sink. Then you have to mark the toilet such that it can only be used by that one sim. Otherwise, the sim with the largest and emptiest bladder rushes in, does the assigned jobs in seconds, and rushes out again, foiling your plan. And then you have to suspend the "wash hands" job until after the "flush" job is done, because the sink is closer to the door, and the sim would otherwise do that one first. Then you forgot that you didn't mark the "urinator" and "flusher" jobs as active on the sim, so you do that, and wait. You have to wait, because before emptying that full bladder, the sim now wants to "take a break" and guzzle a keg of mushroom wine and a pot of kitten livers.

Ok, maybe a little hyperbole is warranted.

Yeah 120 ties is probably about right then. I can't imagine learning all of that by trial and error. They probably settled in some terrible places too, which makes everything harder.

For anyone interested in Dwarf Fortress, here are the chronicles of Boatmurdered, a legendary Something Awful thread:

http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/Introductio...

Highly entertaining read and somewhat of an internet classic.

I'd say it takes maybe 8 hours max to start understanding the interface and art. With regard to learning the mechanics that can be hugely accelerated if you know how to save scum. Basically you move your save files out of the default save folder regularly and then if something happens that you don't like you can restore a previous snapshot of your fortress.

This is good for newbies because it allows you to try out different ways to avoid or recover from various things like tantrum spirals, invasions, etc before the fortress is completely ruined and the game ends. Rather than taking 120 different games to master the mechanics you can master the mechanics over 120 save and restore iterations on the same game, so you don't have to waste time rebuilding from scratch.

It's also fun to try to never let a single dwarf die (from anything other than old age) or get a significant injury, and never let a single strange mood go unsatisfied.

I would say eight hours is a figure you've derived in hindsight. I have walked at least a handful of people through playing DF (without DFHack or other mods), and eight hours playtime is not sufficient for learning some of the things necessary for survival (e.g. a military), even sticking with the same save and therefore having a kind of prescience about invasions and such.

I guess I'm always the type to read the wiki so I quickly learned the "exploit" way to train up an impressive fighting force: build mechanisms and set up a room full of poor quality light wood spikes linked to a lever that is being continuously pulled by another dwarf, then station your squad of unlucky soldiers inside that room with the door locked (keeping a careful eye on them to remove anyone with excessive bruising so they don't pass out and get slowly poked to death). Eventually your dwarves get ninja level dodging skills.

At that point they are pretty much invincible because they can't be hit by enemies and can just punch the goblins to death while dodging every attack. (I once had a dwarf trained in this manner kill a forgotten beast inside one of the underground cave levels with a silk sock taken from the corpse of a less skilled worker dwarf who had been slaughtered by the beast). It took forever but he survived.

But anyway, speed of learning aside there is practically endless variation in techniques to take advantage of in Dwarf Fortress, and if you choose you can discover them all yourself through slow experience, or you can read up in the wiki to get a jumpstart, but either way you end up having a lot of FUN.

Agree with that. Hell knows that I have spent more than eight hours in that game and still haven't been able to defeat a goblin invasion through a decently trained military. There are other ways though, I usually go the overly-complicated-lava-filled-valley-trap route.