*shiver*

Yeah, graphical tileset makes dwarves into... little dwarves, and a miner with a pick. Not that much of a big deal imo, but it makes the tiles square and that's all I care about.

Uh. 50% chance I just ran into more "fun" than I can handle.
I'm gonna use every war dog I have and all of my military. If I don't post within the hour, I have succombed to the "fun".

I could never really get into this game or figure out exactly what to do.

http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-utter-newby-tutorial-for-dwarf-fortress-part-1-wtf/
Believe me, it helps.

Ah, thanks HK. Much appreciated.


....I was half-way through when Wine crashed.

Why were you using wine? O_O there's a version for windows, osx and linux, what crazy OS are you running?

LinWinOX. What, you don't have it??

I'm using the version provided in the help link HK posted, the graphics mod thingy used doesn't work in Linux. Or so it says. No worries though, it works fine in Wine and I'm OK with it.

Fair enough.
Learning to play with ascii gets your more comfortable with the game, but if you prefer the graphics and you're starting out, that's fine. Wine crashing would drive me up the wall though

OK, I'm officially hooked.

Rejoice brethren, for tonight we have added another warlock to the coven!

Okay, the same guy killed another sasquatch with bare hands...

Scary...

Epicfail, my blacksmith guy went nuts on my original fortress and killed 3/4 of my dwarves, so I started anew. He claimed the metalshop thingy for his own right after I built it, then started to demand Iron bars, which are only made via his workshop-.- and I used my only anvil to make the smithy he was residing in...man why do I only get lame things in my forts?

I guess I'm a little bit late putting in my two cents about our graphics debate, but I must say that learning on the original tileset is much easier than using graphical ones. What I do recommend, though, is changing the color scheme to the "High contrast earth tones" one on the Wiki. I currently use a slightly modified square ASCII tileset with some graphics for characters that are only used once IE: Ramps up/down, beds, walls, and so on. stairs have their own thing too, but the up/down stair is just an X because if you use bins you end up with oceans of pretend stairways and it gets confusing.

SUMMARY: use only minor graphical changes because ASCII makes the game more readable despite it looking more retro (not sure if that's a pro or a con)

I really want to sleep but I really want to keep playing this.

Oh the folly of many a nerd.

Graphics tilesets consist of more than just the 256 ascii characters, but afaik only work on creatures (feel free to correct me, I've never used it and dont plan to, I grew up on rougelikes so I'm pretty used to ascii shenanegans) based on their tokens.

http://drop.io/6x6bmpdrop is a tileset I've made.
screenshot:

colours used in that shot and by me found here

replaces @ with the little demon head you see in the middle of the screen is the biggest change. some accented characters are indistinguishable from each other, but it makes little difference to gameplay. I play at 2:1 res (because I love 2x2 pixels), but 1:1 can be good on lores screens.
are the main changes you'll want, extra vertical height is nice in a square tileset.