By Kieron Gillen on January 8th, 2009 at 11:14 am.
Perhaps the most requested feature we half-promised to do on RPS is a beginners walkthrough for Dwarf Fortress. And, clearly, I’m never going to do it because I’m too lazy. Some gentlemen, as I discovered on Qt3 this morning, are not lazy. They are industrious, like dwarfs. For example CptnDuck, who’s done fourteen ten-minute tutorials explaining pretty much everything you need to know about Dwarf Fortress. So, if you’ve been scared before, download the game and get watching. And to help, I’ve embedded all fourteen (count ‘em!) beneath the cut…
If you have trouble reading the text, if you click through, there’s crisp HD videos where you totally can…
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 01 – World Generation & Finding a site
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 02 – Preparing the Journey
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 03 – Understanding the DF world & Naming Dwarfs
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 04 – Mining and making beds
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 05 – Making Bedrooms, farms and stairs
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 06 – Dining rooms and dealing with refuse
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 07 – Brewing, labor options and dumping
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 08 – Bedrooms, crafting, trading
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 09 – Crafting and Hotkeys
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 10 – Migrants, Military and Requests
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 11 – Requests, Training and Specialized Stockpiles
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 12 – Patrols, Bins, Entrance, Walls
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 13 – Trading, Migrants and Defense
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 14 – Moods, crossbows, engraving
Dwarf Fortress Video Tutorial part 15: ODB & Macy Gray – Don’t Go Breaking My Heart
Look, ma! An RPS hints and tips post. It’s like we’re back in the days of Dr Berkman’s surgery at YS.
08/01/2009 at 11:45 Yhancik says:
Just as I was thinking “RPS hasn’t posted about DF in ages”.
Now, I don’t know… 10 x 14 minutes, isn’t it like 2h20 or tutorial?
As much as I like DF and learning, I’m afraid 2h20 of DF tutorial will be a bit too arid (for me). I’d rather spend those 2h20 building a doomed fortress :p
08/01/2009 at 11:52 Babs says:
My god, that’s a ‘Keeping Up Appearances’ joke in the tutorial 8 screenshot.
I love the Dwarf Fortress. Anyone who hasn’t read it already should also check out the BoatMurdered AAR/story, although the game is considerably easier than that these days.
08/01/2009 at 11:57 Trenchspike says:
Mayday graphics package ftw. All those letters give me nightmares.
http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm
08/01/2009 at 12:04 clovus says:
I spent a week or so with this game about 6 months ago. I really liked some aspects. Like when I had a young dwarf go crazy and try to create a masterpiece. He failed and then started wandering the fortress removing bits of clothing everywhere. I’m pretty sure he kept getting dirty too. Anyway, he eventually died of starvation.
Things like that are fun, but it just takes forever to get a fortress going and it seemed like a lot of micromanagement. Then the game crashed in the middle of an interesting battle and I figured I’d just wait (probably forever) for a really stable alpha.
I just wish some company could throw a crew and some money at this guy to make this a finished product with a real GUI. I just don’t have enough time to go on the ride during this developement cycle.
The game is currently very good though and has potential to be great.
08/01/2009 at 12:06 Mark says:
Oh man, this looks like it’ll be what it takes for me to finally get into this game.
08/01/2009 at 12:11 Echo says:
About time you lazy folk posted on DF, been a while since promised :) All the same, I would say the DF wiki might be a better starting point, with some shorter and less bandwidth consuming tutorials.
08/01/2009 at 12:13 Ben Abraham says:
OI dat be cheatin’, sneaking that last vid in there like that!
08/01/2009 at 12:17 James G says:
I need to get back to Dwarf Fortress again soon. I invested a good month or so in it about four months ago, but then broke off to play other things. Great game though, and the continual updates mean that it is constantly creeping forward.
Other than the UI, which is somewhat inconsistent and fairly inaccessible, the biggest flaw is that its too easy to build a stable fortress. This is something which will change eventually, once siege instruments are introduced, but at the moment the best tactic for enjoyment in an established fortress is to set yourself ridiculous engineering projects.
08/01/2009 at 12:17 Ergates says:
I thought I had scratched my DF itch, but seeing those screen shots has made me start thinking about fortress layout again. Dammit!
08/01/2009 at 12:25 The Hammer says:
Ooooh. I might have to give this an actual proper, more than five minute go, now that tutorials (and ones referencing Keeping Up Appearances, at that!) have been thrust in my face!
08/01/2009 at 12:25 Cooper42 says:
This is gonna get me playing it again.
I got sucked into it before, but never got very far. I decided that it was a great game, but doomed to be eternally niche because the UI was just so unbelieveably cumbersome.
But, I always knew there was an amazingly deep game under that. This has inspired me to try and find it…
08/01/2009 at 12:34 gnome says:
Very well. Right after I spent the next few hours watching these lovely tutorials, I’ll try again. And of course spectacularly fail. Again.
08/01/2009 at 12:37 dozer1986 says:
The Matrix should be remade with Dwarf Fortress (ASCII characters) on the screens instead of that daft scrolling green text.
08/01/2009 at 12:41 Meat Circus says:
This is ace! I’ve been waiting for something like this for years.
Thankles.
08/01/2009 at 12:55 eyemessiah says:
This is for big babies!
You have to suffer! Its in the DF eula.
08/01/2009 at 13:07 Calabi says:
I’ve been wanting to play this for a while, I did try and play it for about five minutes but its like learning another language, I cant be bothered, and honestly the graphics look like someones puked up a bunch of letters on the screen. How can E be representative of an elephant? How do they show the difference between an Indian Elephant or an African?
But still with these guides it might be worth another try.
08/01/2009 at 13:09 Pags says:
Bah, in Soviet Russia, Dwarf Fortress learns how to play you.
Actually, in the rest of the world too.
08/01/2009 at 13:15 Tei says:
Thats *exactly* what I need. Thanks RPS!.
I was yesterday pondering the posibility to try again to play Dwarft Fortress. I have tried and failed before. Even tryiing custom graphics. The thing evade me. ( and I used to make ascii art, even ascii art games way before in the c64!).
Now, theres even a Linux build, so I can play this thing on my netbook :-)
08/01/2009 at 13:16 clovus says:
I don’t mind the ASCII graphics so much. One of the tilesets helps a lot with how it looks and interpretting what info is on the screen. What drives me nuts is that the game is entirely controlled by the keyboard. I don’t have a problem with keyboards either; I use the keyboard a lot in Windows. But this game really, really begs to be controlled with a mouse. I’m sure some people will disagree, but choosing dwarfs (especially multiple dwarves) would be a lot easier with a click. It’s like playing Children of the Nile or any RTS with a keyboard. Sorry, but that is full of fail.
Oh, and the battles seem really detailed. I mean, you can get different kinds of blood on each of a dwarf’s fingers. However, figuring out what cool things are happening is really difficult. Blood and parts end up everywhere, but trying to figure out what belongs to who is like being a forensic detective or something. Better graphics and a mouse driven GUI with perhaps tooltips would help with this.
08/01/2009 at 13:26 Senethro says:
The maker needs to open source this project already. There is no reason an ASCII graphics game should be quite so resource hungry. Yes, I’m sure it is more fun to add new features wily-nily but please let someone optimise the old stuff for you!
08/01/2009 at 13:39 BooleanBob says:
This game just galls me so much. It sits there on my hard drive, in the same directory as Liberal Crime Squad and Alpha Man (God knows why I thought I’d ever be so innundated with ASCII games or roguelikes that they’d need a seperate directory), a monument to arcane systems of laws and lore that seem to dwarf (ha!) more trivial fare, like the, um, AD&D ruleset? (Which I did pick up pretty much exclusively from cRPGs. I like to think (rather preeningly) tha gleaning a working understanding of THAC0 without the help of a vastly patient pen-and-paperer puts me in a fairly exclusive group).
So yeah, it sits there, in the dark, whispering to me about how I’m not nerd enough to truly comprehend its unremittent, esoteric majesty.
These may help.
08/01/2009 at 13:51 Feet says:
Good tileset
http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm
08/01/2009 at 14:01 Down Rodeo says:
Babs: WELCOME TO FUCKING BOATMURDERED!
(Link for those that are interested).
08/01/2009 at 14:05 Pod says:
Is the guy singing in that last video:
a) Bill Crosby?
b) Completely drunk?
08/01/2009 at 14:12 Larington says:
I’ll have to add this to my list of things to do during the summer break from uni.
08/01/2009 at 14:18 James G says:
@Senethro
It’s not been made Open Source because Tarn Adams wants to maintain full creative control. He has however opened up some bits of the code, particularly some of the OpenGL stuff, to allow for optimisation by those in the know.
08/01/2009 at 14:29 Kieron Gillen says:
Pod: It’s the ODB!
KG
08/01/2009 at 14:41 Ergates says:
@Calabi
Q: “How do they show the difference between an Indian Elephant or an African?”
A: Colour
08/01/2009 at 14:51 Calabi says:
@Ergates
Well thats it, I’m playing it then.
08/01/2009 at 14:57 Colthor says:
I tried a graphical tileset when I played DF a year or so ago… It just didn’t get the information across as easily as the coloured letters and symbols. Yeah, they can be a bit abstract, but they work really well.
08/01/2009 at 15:21 eyemessiah says:
Believe it or not, if you stick with the ASCII for a while it becomes quite evocative. When I look at graphical tileset screenshots of DF I see kitsch pixelart. When I look at ascii screen shots I see lakes and rivers and cliffs and forests and great caverns.
And millions of cats.
Actually one problem with playing DF in ASCII for long periods of time is that eventually you can’t look at your keyboard without feeling that it needs some serious landscaping and also probably a butcher.
08/01/2009 at 15:30 Heliocentric says:
But seriously. I want a 3d graphical df so hard. I got hinterland just because it shared principles with that kind of game. On losing is fun. I suffer minor panic attacks in a really intense game against another person. Hinterland does similar things because dead is dead. I need more games that let you lose without forcing a retry.
On a similar theme i’ve started playing grid way out of my depth. Its so much more satisfying to win or even just scrape a podium position and win some sponsor money than simply win because the other drivers are set to “retarded”.
What other single player games allow for fun failure?
08/01/2009 at 15:30 jonfitt says:
I last played DF about a year ago and before that a couple of years ago I think (it was still the old dig to river, dig to lava format). Every time I go back I have to relearn everything, so this will help a lot.
I usually end up quitting when it gets to the macro management stage, the interface just makes macro management near impossible. The focus stays on the micromanagement side of things, but suddenly you’ve got 30 dwarves to manage.
Have they fixed/removed the catsplosion?
08/01/2009 at 15:35 jonfitt says:
Oh, and I never tried it, but you heard about the 3D visualiser right?
http://www.tigsource.com/articles/2008/01/27/dwarf-fortress-3d-visualizer
08/01/2009 at 16:47 Nitre says:
Is there supposed to be sound on the videos?
08/01/2009 at 16:56 Pod says:
Yes, there should be a dutch guy talking away. I saw these when they were originally uploaded elsewhere, and either the original author or a new bloke has uploaded them to youtube. So there should be sound….
Just checked and there is no sound :(
The other videos are available at http://www.gamevee.com/user/captainduck/videos but it’s 404ing for me..
08/01/2009 at 17:32 captain_duck says:
Wow, i got linked on a famous site like this, awesome.
I have no idea why people are complaining about sound though. Seems fine on my side. The earlier videos might be a bit soft, maybe thats it?.
On gamevee, i crossposted the videos on gamevee and youtube because gamevee has even better quality, but gamevee seems to have died in the meantime, no idea what happened to the site.
08/01/2009 at 17:37 Larington says:
Cheers Oh Captain my Captain, the games needed something like this for a while, and it means I might actually get to discover what all the fuss is about (Aside from reading about boatmurdered) when my assignments have passed.
The audio of the first one I listened to seemed fine, long as theres not a bunch of background noise in the room.
08/01/2009 at 17:41 Uglycat says:
Reading boatmurdered sold DF to me
08/01/2009 at 18:04 Lightbulb says:
A graphics mod! Shallow but i couldn’t get on with ASCII – might give this a go now…
08/01/2009 at 19:07 Ergates says:
Stop! Stop! What are you doing? This fortress is not ready yet! Where is this dwarf’s beard?
08/01/2009 at 20:17 Junior says:
HELL YEAH!
Dwarf Fortress has to be one of my all time favorites, there’s no other game that lets me feel so free with what I can try to do. And the satisfaction of getting that perfect trap working is unparalleled in games for me, the combat system has also spoiled all rougalikes since. Nothing like beating wolves to death with a dead wolf.
Also, my two cents on assistance; http://pkf.olivepeak.com/dwarfcalc.html
This will help you set your window up they way you like, the Mayday tileset linked above uses 16×16 tiles BTW.
If you’re an obsessive like myself; http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_now.html
And see what bizarre additions are being made.
So, any of the RPS crew play DF, or do you not have space for that kind of timesink?
08/01/2009 at 23:51 Meat Circus says:
captain_duck:
Thanks *so* much for these. I’ve been waiting for a year for somebody to something like this so I could finally see what I was missing with Dwarf Fortress.
Is there any downside to using the Mayday DFG semi-graphical mod rather than stock Dwarf Fortress in your opinion?
09/01/2009 at 01:35 fulis says:
Dwarf Fortress rules
You just need imagination
You can embed HD btw, google it
09/01/2009 at 02:25 wyrmsine says:
Thanks very much for these – I’m still on my first fortress (woo-hoo!), but these will give me a leg up after my beloved Boltpolished’s sudden but inevitable end. My goal is to double the current population of 100 before some random event* kills everybody.
*the last “random event” was the Great Starvation and Madness Plague of the seventh year. Said random event was, near as I can determine, sending a trader to hunt in the absence of a caravan. The repercussions of that decision echoed for 17 years, culminating in the Guard Captain going on a killing frenzy, long after the plague. What an awesome game.
09/01/2009 at 10:28 neofit says:
Add me to the list of those waiting for some kind of at least basic graphics and mouse control. There are too many games to play for me to spend hours trying to learn what a white ‘E’ means, just because some dev never played anything since 1985.
From the features I’ve been reading about, I’d pay full retail price for a version with even Avernum-like graphics. These huge colored ascii symbols just hurt my eyes too much.
09/01/2009 at 11:27 Meat Circus says:
@neofit:
For basic graphics, see upthread. The Mike Mayday DFG mod adds a pretty decent tileset and some other changes so that you don’t have to wonder at raw ASCII all the time.
09/01/2009 at 18:52 user@example.com says:
There is a tiny bit of very basic mouse control, for designating stuff. Makes it easier to designate odd-shaped rooms to be mined, and pick specific trees for felling, if you want to do something like that. Also handy for digging parts of your moat in the shape of a rude word or two.
A better UI is on the to-do list, but right now there are more pressing matters, like the ability to track the length of a dwarf’s beard…
Which isn’t as stupid as it sounds, since it’s apparently a minor part of a fairly major overhaul to some system or other which makes future development much easier and much more consistent. Yay.
I suggest that everyone adds the devlog to their RSS reader of choice. If you don’t, you’re missing out on awesome bugs, such as this one from when Toady One was testing a new materials system, and it had… thermodynamic issues: “Okay, there are dwarves walking around, though it’s next to the wagon with the equipment that immediately explodes into clouds of boiling bronze while the dwarves flash between the dwarf and bar symbol wearing no-material clothes, but there are dwarves walking around.”
10/01/2009 at 01:06 Calistas says:
Enjoyed playing it last year, really feel like picking it up again, but last time I was overwhelmed by the army creation and control job. Mostly I ignored it. But I did make a hella-fortress until it was accidentally flooded and everyone died.
10/01/2009 at 01:57 Jeremy says:
Just to make sure people know, the tutorials don’t just stop at ODB. #15 is Forging, Part I, so presumably there will be more.
10/01/2009 at 07:08 captain_duck says:
Yep i still working on them, part 17 went up today.
12/01/2009 at 12:28 Larington says:
Awesome, thanks Captain_Duck.
12/01/2009 at 17:11 Jeremy says:
Who is the imposter?! This game has been so great to play, and yeah, I used a graphics pack as well, nothing wrong with wanting dwarves and trees to actually be dwarves and trees. Does that make me not hardcore or unable to appreciate the game? Definitely not. This game is really fantastic, it is a very deep and difficult game but it fairly reasonably ramps up the difficulty, not with stages, but just by giving you more and more dwarves. Even after 2 years I could start over and make a much more efficient and well supplied fortress, but I’m just waiting for my first disaster, so far only 2 kobolds have threatened my existence…
13/01/2009 at 19:18 Larington says:
The main issue I’ve had with the game is that migration tends to be in the 20-25 range rather than 10-15. After so much of that, I’ve given up, gone to the init file and reduced max population to 25, I’ll increment by 10 as immigration waves come in later.
14/01/2009 at 22:10 Larington says:
Heh, I’ve just discovered what happens when one of your doggies goes for a run near a magma pool… And theres a fire throwing mob just inside… And the magma pool is next to a forest…
Ooooh dear, and I’d just started to get my first set of workshops up good and proper. Think I’ll reload and move it a bit further from the magma pool.
Oh, and built a great big stone wall all the way around the fecker – Just to be sure.