gui/control-panel

The DFHack control panel allows you to quickly see and change what DFHack tools are enabled, which tools will run when you start a new fort, which UI overlays are enabled, and how global DFHack configuration options are set. It also provides convenient links to relevant help pages and GUI configuration frontends (where available). The control panel has several sections that you can access by clicking on the tabs at the top of the window. Each tab has a search filter so you can quickly find the tools and options that you’re looking for.

The tabs can also be navigated with the keyboard, with the CtrlT and CtrlY hotkeys. These are the default hotkeys for navigating DFHack tab bars.

The “Automation”, “Bug Fixes”, and “Gameplay” tabs

These three tabs provide access to the three main subcategories of DFHack tools. In general, you’ll probably want to start with only the “Bugfix” tools enabled. As you become more comfortable with vanilla systems, and some of them start to become less fun and more toilsome, you can enable more of the “Automation” tools to manage them for you. Finally, you can examine the tools on the “Gameplay” tab and enable whatever you think sounds like fun :).

Under each of these tabs, there are two subtabs: “Enabled” and “Autostart”. The subtabs can be navigated with the keyboard, using the CtrlN and CtrlM hotkeys.

The “Enabled” subtab

The “Enabled” tab allows you to toggle which tools are enabled right now. You can select the tool in the list to see a short description at the bottom. Hit Enter, double click on the tool name, or click on the toggle on the far left to enable or disable that tool.

Note that before a fort is loaded, there will be very few tools listed here. Come back when a fort is loaded to see much more.

Once tools are enabled, they will save their state with your fort and automatically re-enable themselves when you load that same fort again.

You can hit CtrlH or click on the help icon to show the help page for the selected tool in gui/launcher. You can also use this as shortcut to run custom commandline commands to configure that tool manually. If the tool has an associated GUI config screen, a gear icon will also appear next to the help icon. Hit CtrlG, click on the gear icon, or Shift-double click the tool name to launch the relevant configuration interface.

The “Autostart” subtab

This subtab is organized similarly to the “Enabled” subtab, but instead of tools you can enable now, it shows the tools that you can configure DFHack to auto-enable or auto-run when you start the game or a new fort. You’ll recognize many tools from the “Enabled” subtab here, but there are also useful one-time commands that you might want to run at the start of a fort, like ban-cooking all or (if you have “mortal mode” disabled in the “Preferences” tab) god-mode tools like light-aquifers-only.

The “UI Overlays” tab

DFHack overlays add information and additional functionality to the vanilla DF screens. For example, the popular DFHack Building Planner is an overlay named buildingplan.planner that appears when you are building something.

The “Overlays” tab allows you to easily see which overlays are enabled, gives you a short description of what each one does, lets you toggle them on and off, and gives you links for the related help text (which is normally added at the bottom of the help page for the tool that provides the overlay). If you want to reposition any of the overlay widgets, hit CtrlG or click on the the hotkey hint to launch gui/overlay.

The “Preferences” tab

The “Preferences” tab allows you to change DFHack’s internal settings and defaults, like whether DFHack’s “mortal mode” is enabled – hiding the god-mode tools from the UI, whether DFHack tools pause the game when they come up, or how long you can take between clicks and still have it count as a double-click. Click on the gear icon or hit Enter to toggle or edit the selected preference.

Usage

gui/control-panel