That is what I have been told. I have tried both and I ended up getting a lot of enjoyment out of rimworld while in DF I spent several hours studying the getting started wiki and still didn't really feel like I understood what was going on.

Would be amazing to see all this work that went in to DF exposed to a wider audience with some kind of UI improvements.

Rimworld is nowhere near as deep as dwarf fortress, but it's a game many more people actually manage to play.

They are both interesting.

As someone who has played neither game, can you please explain why?

Rimworld is an accessible game and while it has a certain level of depth compared to other games, especially on the emotional side of your characters, it's shallow compared to DF.

The problem with DF is, it's hardly accessible. This is why so many people hope for the Steam version. It's often more fun to read people stories playing the game compared to playing it yourself.

DF offers you the illusion of a living world, that is writing it's own history.

Dwarfs discovering some kind of creature living on a mountain edge. They gain interest in it. Throwing stuff at it, talking about it, giving this creature a funny name. Later on your mason will carve stories on your walls in your castle and somewhere in the story, maybe, he will write about this creature.

It's these little things that make DF fun.

Dwarf Fortress goes into depth to a truly magnificent, ridiculous degree. (I guess also in the non-ridiculous degree of having a 3D world instead of 2D ;)) It simulates a lot more, and thus more is possible in game and more weird and wonderful chain reactions can happen.

Never thought I'd see a https://xkcd.com/541/ in the wild! I'll take it as a good omen for 2022.

I also do that.

How about "lisp taught me"?

English teachers can hate all they like, but I will not swap the final two punctuation marks!

I implore you to read stories here https://dfstories.com or a LetsPlay on https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/

Rimworld has systems, but they are generally pretty simple. Dwarf Fortress allows some insane interactions between agents that are all organic

Are those stories written by a character in Dwarf Fortress or a dramatization of the emergent behavior? The first story I saw could’ve happened in Rimworld or even Prison Architect, given literary license to dramatize.

Both are driven by systems so they're both effectively simulations, but dwarf fortress is much, much more in depth. It's basically a "real life" simulator but set in a fantasy universe, where you control a colony of dwarves. The interplay between systems is unheard of in any other game*, the closest you get is some roguelikes.

*except maybe space station 13

And similarly to DF it's also getting a more accessible Steam version (Space Station 14 as well as Unitystation) to make it easier to start playing it.

In my play experience SS13 wins out in terms of funny stories and variety, mainly because the speed of development is so much faster (especially on big servers like tg), it being multiplayer and there existing many spin-off forks from the usual space station gameplay.

DF probably still comes out ahead, but SS13 exposes way more systems to the player. If you get a good group there is NO comparison.