Minecraft's early game is relatively boring. Empty busywork like punching trees, village raids and strip mining are vestigial gameplay loops that neither Mojang nor Microsoft had the confidence to fix.

I'd agree that they're a bad comparison though. Despite Notch's inspiration from DF, Minecraft has worse bosses, biomes, trading, mining, diplomacy, cooking, innkeeping and NPCs.

Back in my day, villages weren't even in the game. My highschool classmates and I still found something compelling about it.

I had a good number of hours in Minecraft Classic's browser version, mostly in online servers though. Solo wasn't much fun.

Modern Minecraft is still not much of an appeal to me without mods. I'm happy to see more block games like Vintage Story push the medium forward while Microsoft... wraps up post-production on A Minecraft Movie: Squared, I guess?

It depends what you mean by "early game." The first night cycle happens within minutes of starting and it's very interesting.

It also has effectively zero physics. I still remember being annoyed at how water worked in Minecraft when playing with my kid, and the fact that trees don't collapse if you cut 'em down.

(Yes, yes, mods exist.)

Yeah, I think this actually supports the idea that Dwarf Fortress is needlessly bad at onboarding players. Every time I try to get into it, I end up confused by why people enjoy it and unable to figure out how to play it. Whereas with Minecraft, exploring how to play it was actually fun, with Dwarf Fortress, it felt frustrating and unnecessarily obscure.

That's because the UX/UI is utterly awful. It's cargo cult: the game. (And BTW my complaints have nothing to do with the controls. The actual UX is just... not thought out at all).

> minecraft is fun and engaging

It depends, for me it is boring and has pretty dim graphics. I wanted to love it, but it is not fun. It looks like a Sims game, it lacks what e.g. factorio has, that "spark".

DF sounds like it might have that "spark", but I'm afraid to touch it.

Even though I'm a big fan of the game and have been playing it for over a decade now, "fun and engaging from minute zero" is not how I'd describe it. I've seen a number of people (both kids and adults) become frustrated with it almost immediately, and that's with someone experienced nearby to answer questions and let them know what they can do. Without such guidance, they'd definitely have quit and never played it again.