The other main problem, in my opinion, is that most people prettying up the graphics tend to use 16*16 tiles, because that's what most creature tiles require. The list of user character sets is here: What counts as good depends on your tastes, and what you're willing to put up with. But there's no easy way of telling what tradeoffs the artist decided to make when they were designing the thing, what's going to show up in the wrong place, short of trying it for a while ingame. Now, if you're making a character set, you can work around all of these issues, by being vague in shaping things, or lots of artists just draw a chair or a fish anyway. So even the letterforms neet to be designed to suit with their other roles, there's not really a lot you can do to alter the font. On top of this, text characters are used as graphics tiles: the 'pillars' at the end of polished walls are upper-case O's. there's a list of what tiles are used for what on the wiki at: even the 'chairs' aren't chairs half the time. and, of course, 'goblin fortress' is the same as 'cupboard' all the refuse tiles are the same, so 'bone' and 'hunk of flesh' are the same tile the 'uncut gem' tile is also the 'turtle' tile Here are some examples: (there's heaps of them, though) Problem is, lots of the characters get used for more than one object. The main issue with dwarf fortress graphics is that most of the stuff in the game is drawn from one image, the character set. On a clean white character set, the recolouring should work fine. I'm guessing the character set you were using had too much grey, which would dampen your colours a bit. I've messed with making dwarfort graphics, and that's not normal, the stone colour thing. This carries over to stones and ore found in the ground often, and to lose stone in your fortress. A jet door in ascii shows as black, a chalk one as white. Tilesets make for nice screenshots, but I don't use them because you lose some of the information conveyed in ASCII.

Favorite dwarf fortress tileset