At least he’s pretty based for someone in the niche of nerdy ass games. He said BLM during the 2020 protests and during the Palestinian protests in ‘21 he said Free Palestine, that US was backing an apartheid, and gave a bunch of resources to donate to Palestinians. Good guy and you should purchase his game because it’s pretty cool.
You can always try the ascii with tilesets and utilities. there’s a super easy to set up bundle called the lazy newb pack that you literally just have to install and run. It can do a lot if you tinker with it, too, but it works out of the box. The interface is byzantine there’s no way around it, the result of decades of adding new features. But you get the hang of it eventually and most of it ends up being pretty quick eventually. Learning the gameplay, will always be a challenge, but that’s absolutely the fun of the game, the interface too.
It’s so fucking satisfying when you build your first pump stack to get freshwater into your cistern so you can build an underground well, or when you successfully set up a militia squad, or even basic metallurgy.
You’ll need the wiki and to search specific problems, but the wiki is very well-maintained and not a fandom one.
And then . . . the caverns await.
