Suggestions on Jobs and on Notifications

[Akasen]

So I've been playing this game for, at this moment, about 51 hours so far and I must say I really do love this game. I once played this game for maybe nine or twelve hours once and only got three hours of sleep before work.

While it doesn't have quite the same depth as Dwarf Fortress as Fortress Mode at this moment, it has had me returning game after game after game trying to get good at this game using swaths of outdated information from youtube and a hilariously uncared for Wiki.

My writing here is not to suggest any sort of additions to the game, but rather changes to certain aspects of the game.

 

TASK ABSTRACTION

My main frustration, and what brought me to write a draft for this before, is an issue regarding how tasks, or errands, are abstracted in-game.

Simple example: To build something, a Dupe needs to have the Build task enabled. What if the item needs to be deconstructed? The average reader would be forgiven if they thought that the answer was also Build before reading this. The actual answer is DIG. I repeat, if you want Dupes to DECONSTRUCT something, the task governing this is DIG. If you have Dig unchecked on a Dupe, they will not deconstruct an item.

You may well be thinking “Well, why would you have any Dupe not set to Dig anyways?”, and there’s any number of reasons I can give, but that’s irrelevant.

I have a similar issue with Repair, which was a major focus for this section in my previous draft before. The original issue I had is that since Repair isn’t exactly listed as a skill, I had to make a guess as to what did Repair. Nothing exactly says what it could be, so I was stuck for a while thinking it was Operate. At this point, I don’t know what it is, so it leaves me to going into my tasks and making everyone do EVERY task when things break and then setting them back to whatever they were before.

What I suggest then is to simply have every little task that a Dupe can do be an individual task that can be selected and deselected from the Task Menu, but also being under an umbrella of boxes relating to major jobs.

Also certain jobs need to be reworked, removed, or merged with another job. Like the General Engineer doesn’t really seem useful at all.

For a good idea of what I’m suggesting, here’s the menu for Dwarf Therapist for Dwarf Fortress

One final suggestion on this topic, and this is very important, but I feel it’s important to have a menu to see what every Dupe is currently doing. It helps to get a sense of what’s going on at this very moment, what the Dupes are doing more often than not, and so forth.

 

SOUND FEEDBACK

Very brief, I think there needs to be more sound notifications for different alerts. Brief and simple, but I feel the game doesn’t do the best job in conveying a lot of messages and alerts, save for low oxygen.

I think at some point, this should be investigated and experimented upon. The simplest addition I would suggest is for the game to have a menu that lists all previous alerts and notifications.

Also allow me to rid myself of the darn TIPS. They create an unnecessary clutter at the start of so many colonies.

CONCLUSION

And that wraps things up that I can think of at this moment of writing. I feel like there’s more issues I had before, but I’ve probably become far too accustomed to this game to remember what they were.

I hope what I am saying comes across properly and that they provide helpful feedback.