The text version isn’t just still free. It’s free and getting active updates. It actually got a significant number of updates and bug fixes that came along with the Steam version being released. These dudes are legends.
Wow, really? Might give it another whirl then, it was still a bit rough cut when I played it back in the Boatmurdered era.
The steam release came with a lot of cleanup. It’s a bit less than it was right before but it’s more accessible. Still quite difficult to learn the ins and outs, I think it took something like 30 forts before I had royalty move in. But the game is all about learning through failure, it’s just difficult to find where that failure is most times, lots of pausing and reading to track down which dwarves are having issues with what.
It took me longer than I like to admit to realize that reading a lot was key to knowing what would keep the dwarves happy.