Except it is in 3d, you can just only see 1 slice at a time making it that much harder.

I also wanna say that the Steam version packages a full tutorial which will get you off the ground and also cleaned up a lot of the old game logic that was inconsistent and confusing (like how some rooms were “rooms” and others were “zones” and still others were “places”), and now I’d say that getting a base up and running is pretty intuitive since most things work just about the way you’d expect them to and it’s only “hard” if you intentionally make it that way by embarking on a dangerous biome or doing a challenge run.

You’ll still die a lot though, 'cuz that’s the fun part.

As someone who loves it, It’s less a game and more a story generator. Until the company was hired to do the nicer graphics and interface for the Steam version it was a math PhD and his brother programming it as a work-in-progress complete fantasy world simulator. It still is but now it’s prettier. It feels very comfortable to call it the most complex game on Steam. Rimworld and Minecraft among others took direct inspiration from it, he’s been working on it awhile.

Famous patch notes include fixing cats dying from alcohol poisoning because they walked through a puddle of beer before cleaning themselves, egg yolk and egg white having different fluid densities, and nerfing mer-people farming because that’s just disturbing.

So if you’ve played Rimworld it’ll feel familiar. Much more complex but part of that complexity is because you can traverse the Z axis, and make multi-level fortresses. I don’t think Tarn has ever recoded to allow multi thread processing, so everything runs on a single CPU core (my info may be out of date). If that’s still the case At any rate, the end of every fortress (that doesn’t succumb to a mood spiral or a were-beast or an elf invasion or the circus or forgetting to pack an anvil or vampires or a cavern collapse) is fps death. Usually from cats. But remember, losing is fun!