Played Dwarf Fortress Steam version for several hours today. It's a lot more playable than it used to be for sure, but it's still so very, very janky and kind of boring. The game is still severely lacking ways to get information to the player in convenient ways. There doesn't seem to be a screen where I can look at an overview of the highest skills each of my dwarves posess so I can easily decide on how to assign jobs. Instead you need to go to the list of dwarves and click on each one to go to their personal overview, this closes the main list, then you need to close that dwarf and re-open the citizen list and click the next in line. Repeat 10-200 times. One of my dwarves went 'stark raving mad' after going into a strange mood for a while, and I got a notification of this. Clicking on the focus camera button simply took me to an empty area, I guess it was the location that my dwarf was the moment the notification popped up, but since moved on. The game is filled with little annoyances like this, where it's still inconvenient to access the information that you want to. It's better than it used to be, but it's still nowhere near what you would expect for a game released in 2022.
The game is still kind of boring also. I purposefully chose a haunted mountain right next to a goblin fortress, because I was hoping the game would have some interesting conflict. I also set enemy and economy difficulty to hard. Despite that I still haven't had a goblin invasion after almost a year, and I haven't even set up my military yet. I spent 3 seasons getting around to setting up a farm because I had no soil and was figuring out how to make a well from an aquifier and make mud out of water, despite that my dwarves are still alive and mostly happy despite running out of alcohol several times (like 5 of them are max happy even though the fort sucks and nobody has any luxury goods), and I still was a fair way away from staving just with the default starting goods and slaughtering a couple animals that migrants brought that couldn't graze on the dead haunted grass anyway. I still don't know what people see in the game, really, there's a ton of detail if you look for it, but it's all just noise. Yes each dwarf has a massive character sheet of personality traits, dreams, and memories, but it doesn't really matter. They are all functionally identical and do the work that I tell them to (most of them are just standing around jobless because so many migrants come, and I'm not good enough at the game to have all the work set up correctly). I haven't even looked at the dwarves beyond looking at the skills part of their overview because it just doesn't matter. I just really can't care about them because there's so many and the game moves so fast it's hard to keep track of anything on a micro level. I don't know, the game just isn't for me and I don't think any amount of updates will change that.
Kind of feeling like going back to Rimworld now, a much better designed game, that that will actually punish you if you play badly and consequently actually feels like there's a point to making an efficient colony.