Happy New Year!

The holidays have passed, though we've moved on to not exactly calm and workerly times. But we're mostly back to the game and can show you our in-progress Look command.

We haven't had an artist pass on this dwarf view yet, but it's starting to come together! The old text version of Dwarf Fortress made it unnecessarily difficult to find information about dwarves and other game objects. Not only was the data hidden behind many (many) keypresses as you might expect, but it was also scattered through many different windows and screens. We're trying to bring it all together here. We might end up with more icons and less text as we go.

The tabs and overview boxes are still in flux but the screenshot here is where we are so far in-game. Between physical attributes, mental attributes, personality facets, and beliefs, the game picks the strongest or most unique six and displays them in the overview. You'll still be able to get at the full set of data within the tabs; the intent of these boxes is to answer simple questions and provide the best flavor and context. The same is true for items, skills, positions and the rest. The full data and options can be found in tabs, with a short summary at the top level.

We'll also be adding some of the missing options like camera follow and custom naming to the uppermost box.

The game can still run unpaused when this popup is displayed, so you can see e.g. the current job and thought list update in real-time. It's also pretty common to have multiple dwarves/creatures in a single tile, especially with pets tearing about and babies being held. Instead of the cumbersome 'Next' command, which is how we used to deal with this before, we have little tabs that pop up on the right side. If there are too many critters in a tile for right-side tabs to work (which doesn't happen often, but industrious players sometimes drop all of whomever in a narrow pit), clicking gives a scrollable list. The tabs also include items and buildings and engravings, with similar solutions for high object counts.

As a bonus, we have an image to put a cap on last month's winter video update, where I showed a small hallway that Zach had carved out for the coffins, but we didn't have the artwork added in at that time. Now we have the wooden caskets! And, um, the hallway got quite a bit longer... the open ones are unoccupied. Can't say the same for the closed ones.

Talk to you again in 2 weeks!

- Tarn