I actually really enjoy the way RimWorld's gameplay is simpler and more focused. Feels more like a game you actually get to play and less like a simulation you feel compelled to tweak every few hundred ticks.

Obviously, you're not going to get "infinite hours of gameplay" out of it the way you can with DF, but it can be a fun ride for hundreds of hours.

RimWorld has a giant and engaged modding community. I know many people with multiple thousands of hours in the game.

There's also a very active subreddit at r/RimWorld

The other thing going for Rimworld is Steam Workshop integration and a very robust modding community.

You want Warhammer 40K in Rimworld? Got it.

You want Lovecraftian horrors in Rimworld? Got it.

You want different types of cats, or barbed wire, or typewriters? Got it.

>It just doesn't have the depth

Literally. There's no z-levels, which really kills it for me in a post-apocalyptic sim where you can't dig a defensive moat or put riflemen in towers.

Same. I haven’t played DF nearly as many hours as Rimworld, but I can still grok that DF contains far more surprises and emergent gameplay. That said, Rimworld has proven to me how useful a pleasant GUI can be. Even though the gameplay loops are ultimately very predictable I’m always surprised at how I can get sucked into a session with it’s relaxing rythyms.

I played DF many years ago when the modding scene was a lot younger and found it’s complexity to be too intimidating. I eventually quit playing after a few weeks because of it.

I’ve been playing the hell out of RimWorld over the past few weeks. It really is a great entry to the kind of game DF is. The creator did a really good job of designing mechanisms to hold your hand in the beginning. The warnings on the right hand side of the screen were a godsend for me picking up RimWorld to make sure that my housekeeping was in enough shape to keep exploring without having an entire colony wipe for some ridiculous reason. It’s made me ready to try to tackle DF again after successfully running colonies in RimWorld.

I suspect someone can mod DF to give the same kind of gentler entry experience (if they haven’t already).

"The Lazy Newb Pack" has always been a must for me, and for me made it finally playable and enjoyable. One you get the hang of the "Dwarf Therapist" component, the game suddenly becomes much more approachable.

That is a really good point. Rimworld has a predictable and fairly simple loop, but it's a good one, and the UI lets you easily and fully manage everything and react to situations appropriately.