Awesome! I just love these succession stories!

Lads - Sadly I don't have enough time in these days, so I cannot participate in this succession game now. I will have more freetime in ~2 weeks, so if we gonna start a new one later on, I will play as well. Until then I just read this topic. Good luck & Have fun in this game.

I'm not an amazing writer, so don't expect much.

WARNING: LOTS OF IMAGES, 20 of them!

Journal of Bill Door, Grim Reaper, Page 1:

The queen sent us here on the first expedition to the western sea, in hope of meeting the merpeople, so that we may harvest their bones for profit, or, if that is unsuccessful, to form the first Dwarven settlement on this sea.

Journal of Bill Door, Grim Reaper, Page 2:

We have arrived.  It is rather cold here, and the snows cover everything.  We will Strike the Earth!  And chop down enough trees to begin making our beds and workshops.  Sir Puffypants will see if this ocean yields any fish, and maybe merpeople.

Journal of Bill Door, Grim Reaper, Page 3:

Buzzards!  Buzzards everywhere!  We seem to have disturbed a nest of them.  The dogs don’t like ‘em, though, so they shouldn’t bug us too much.

Boy, dead buzzards everywhere, the dogs seem to enjoy ripping their wings off!

And jellyfish!  Hopefully this means we will have something to eat.

Journal of Bill Door, Grim Reaper, Page 4:

No more buzzards!  We had to build a butchery to deal with all the corpses, and Orvidos took a disturbing pleasure chopping the things up and tanning their hides.

We shall have to make use of the horses we spotted.

Journal of Bill Door, Grim Reaper, Page 5:

We are starting to get low on food, the jellyfish were not able to be fished, and there are no other fish, so we have built an irrigation system, and it has set off without a hitch.

Journal of Bill Door, Grim Reaper, Page 6:

Great, some migrants just arrived. All that means to us is more mouths to feed.

Journal of Bill Door, Grim Reaper, Page 7:

We are lower on food than I thought, we shall have to start gathering plants, hopefully we can survive until the harvest.

Journal of Bill Door, Grim Reaper, Page 8:

Orvidos is going kinda crazy again, he keeps insisting we let him hunt groundhogs to remedy our food problem, so I set him up with an axe and told him to go for it.  I will never forget what the military shorthand reduced his name to: “rvds".

He’s calling himself the Grizzly Boats, he must be off his rocker.

Journal of Bill Door, Grim Reaper, Page 9:

He’s gone absolutely loony, ignoring the fact that I gave him an axe, and decided to strangle the groundhogs; lukily for him they don’t stand a chance, they can’t even penetrate his clothes!

Part 2 in next post!

Alot happens in a year hey? I still need practice.. back to the training camp

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I also assigned a bookeeper, broker, and manager, and they do have offices.

Edit: Wow, look at all the fixes Toady has in store for .07!

Sorry, I already claimed him when mine died, I should go edit that post, and I'm done so the next person will have to name you one.

Well, stonesense is a visualiser, it attaches to the Dwarf Fortress process and dispays the 3d isometric view, but you can't play through it.  But there are tilesets, which are easier to understand than the ASCII.  Someone linked to Mayday's gfx set earlier in the thread, you can check that out.  It is pretty hard to figure out what things are with the ASCII when starting out though, I have to agree.

Just use the ASCII long enough and your brain actually starts interpretting the objects as making sense and sometimes even looking like the real objects.

Take the 3x3 grid of characters for the still: once you understand that ~ is some sort of liquid and the division sign is a barrel, it makes perfect sense. It looks like a barrel with a tap coming out from it with liquid flowing from said tap. Obviously a still! It grows on you. When you are just starting out, don't think of it as a game, but rather as a challenge.

Well, I know you get used ot the ASCII eventually, I started with it.   But some people just need tilesets.  I'd rather have them playing with a tileset than not playing at all.

Oh, and I don't have an ASCII still in any of my screenies, just the stonesense one.

Edit: Red X of doom!  You have this as your url:https://forums.elementalgame.com/383779/page/2/%22http://img8.imageshack.us/f/52363393.jpg/

You should have this: http://img8.imageshack.us/f/52363393.jpg/

Sure, but someone else (Whoever's next), has to change it ingame.

That's true, both of them. What you guys should understand though is back in my day ASCII was a programming language, one of the first I ever used back in school. When I see ASCII, I see Code. I can understand using it to represent pictures. We see them done all over the place on the web. Example:

............................................______ __
....................................,.-‘"...................``~.,
.............................,.-"..................................."-.,
.........................,/...............................................":,
.....................,?........................... ...........................\,
.................../.................................................. .........,}
................./.................................................. ....,:`^`..}
.............../.................................................. .,:"........./
..............?.....__............................ .............:`.........../
............./__.(....."~-,_..............................,:`........../
.........../(_...."~,_........"~,_....................,:`..... ..._/
..........{.._$;_......"=,_......."-,_.......,.-~-,},.~";/....}
...........((.....*~_......."=-._......";,,./`..../"............../
...,,,___.\`~,......"~.,....................`..... }............../
............(....`=-,,.......`........................(......;_,,-"
............/.`~,......`-...............................\....../\
.............\`~.*-,.....................................|,./.....\,__
,,_..........}.>-._\...................................|........... ...`=~-,
.....`=~-,_\_......`\,.................................\
...................`=~-,,.\,...............................\
................................`:,,.............. .............`\..............__
.....................................`=-,...................,%`>--==``
........................................_\........ ..._,-%.......`\
...................................,<`.._|_,-&``................`\

So it's not entirely possible that I can't see a picture when looking at ASCII, but, after all those years of looking at it as a language, I just can't use it for gaming. My eyes and brain get confused and try to kick each other's asses. It's almost like a strange form of insanity.

Now THAT I can live with. Perhaps I'll have to look into this after-all. Good looking out there, Myles.

So where do I go to get a recent copy of DF and this tile-set pack? I need something to occupy my brain until Beta 2 hits so I don't go even farther down the rabbit hole.

Right here Raven.

Since you're just starting a new game, all you have to do is move the contents into a new folder and start the .exe, though you're pretty smart and shouldn't have any issues starting the game, just figuring out what to do after that. LOL. I had a hell of a time just figuring out how to dig a tunnel the fist time I played.

And as I'd advise to any new player:

Read the Wiki!

Seriously, you'll never get anywhere if you don't.