&quot;Well&quot;, it&#x27;s not a complaint about direction, it&#x27;s more that the ability to create interesting stories hasn&#x27;t expanded a lot in a long time. Early on in my time with DF, I really enjoyed the exploration, mastering the subsystems involved and developing cool stories out of both my successes and mistakes--but then the mistakes stopped happening because the game <i>ended</i> and it became a time sink rather than a growing and evolving challenge. I have built most of the stupid dwarf tricks (I have an embarrassingly large attempt at a CPU lying around somewhere) because of the lack of breadth to the stories that can be told, but eventually, I very much hit the end of the interesting and challenging things and reached the point of &quot;this would take a dozen hours to do and wouldn&#x27;t be <i>fun</i>.&quot; It&#x27;s not much fun if you can&#x27;t fail, and the mastery ceiling of DF is much lower than most people think it is; the self-imposed challenges are artificial ones, and while mechanically they can be interesting, I do not find them fulfilling when I know how it&#x27;s all supposed to work.<p>(Minecraft would have this problem if not for the <i>tremendous</i> mod support, Forge, etc. that enables you to make what you want of it. Crash Landing is still one of my favorite things in games--not because of the use of HQM, but rather just the profoundly different environment and options for exploring the same rules in a very different milieu.)