I love Rimworld and play it a lot. I frequently see posts and articles comparing the two. I got Dwarf Fortress, watched tutorials, printed out flow charts, and really gave it a try for several hours.
But I didn’t get into Dwarf Fortress :( some of the mechanics are weird. Many things are not intuitive or don’t make sense. Like seeds that are needed for growing mushrooms are defaulted to be used in cooking and the setting to turn that off is difficult to find.
I finally realized an analogy today. Rimworld is like The Sims while Dwarf Fortress is like Sim City. Rimworld you directly control people and micromanage a colony. Dwarf Fortress is Sim City - you zone things and say generally what you want to happen, but don’t control your meeples directly.
Thoughts on the comparison? Any other folks like Rimworld but not Dwarf Fortress?
I was playing DF before RimWorld so it had clicked before RimWorld even existed. Then the Steam version came out and I had to relearn everything because it didn’t have the keyboard commands anymore and they rearranged the menus. lol
My RimWorld is modded up to be closer to DF, too. The only one that’s kinda wonky is the layers mod that makes it “3D” like DF is. It is as close to “sci Fi DF” as I can make without making my own game (which I also am working on).
I may be looking at it from owly playing on the Steam Deck too, like never having a keyboard and mouse made a lot of it difficult and gave me a sore thumb lol.
I wanted to play vanilla to understand the mechanics before modding, so I could appreciate the quality-of-life improvements. I definitely have a bunch I play with in Rimworld.