By RPS on June 14th, 2009 at 8:40 pm.
RPS chum Robin “Roburky” Burkinshaw is fast becoming something of a celebrity PC gaming diarist, with his recent Sims 3 diary blog attracting enormous attention from across the gaming sphere, and even from mainstream media. We, however, asked him to write something that definitely won’t get into Entertainment Weekly: the journal of a Dwarf Fortress campaign. What he came back with gives you some idea of just how insanely detailed the Dwarf Fortress world really is, and how much an incomplete simulation is likely to land hapless dwarves in trouble. Tales of fish dissectors, rivers of vomit, and doomed architectural improvisation follow.
Dwarf Fortress is a management game from another world. So detailed is its simulation of harsh and bloody dwarven existence that reading the creator’s development log is like reading updates from a deity as it puts together a new planet.
22nd May 2008: Handled talking to babies.
9th November 2008: Remembered to make ribs internal.
3rd January 2009: Wrote up organ strikes, but it keeps crashing when I hit the spleen.
You’ve likely already come to a conclusion whether you’re a person capable of delving beyond the alien interface to meet this amazing game for yourself, but before you make any further judgments, allow me to tell you a story of a band of dwarves who left their dwarven city, and established a new settlement that they called ‘SquashedBrains’.
I started this game shortly after Dwarf Fortress’ introduction of the third dimension, back in 2007. It was an exciting time for those who had played the previous versions, with lots of new features to experiment with. One of these was the ability to build constructions. Previously, you could only mine out the rock and create rooms out of what you left behind. Now you could build walls, and potentially make buildings of your own on the surface.
I felt it was clear that I should start a Tower of Babel project as soon as possible. How high could we go? Was there an upper limit to this world? What would happen if I reached it?
We began the construction next to our main fortress entrance. It was five tiles wide, and five tiles long, with a staircase in the corner. It was fiddly work, as constructed walls and floors had to be designated one tile at a time, but things were nevertheless progressing well. I had a team of very highly skilled masons working on it full-time. On the third floor, however, all of my masons got themselves stuck. They had chosen to build the walls before the floors, and had walked along the top of the walls of the level below, built a new wall on top of it, and left themselves no route back to the staircase.
I assigned some peasants to be emergency masons to try and finish the floor to let them out, but their unskilled hands were not working fast enough. My stranded dwarves were starving to death. Drastic measures were called for. I designated the wall they were standing on for demolition.
The result? Massive structural collapse. The screen is entirely obscured by clouds of dust and smoke. But it’s a kind of success. The masons were now lying on the grass outside the tower, unconscious but unhurt. The only casualty was my fish dissector, who died in the middle of the collapse, according to the message log. I presume he got hit in the head while passing by underneath, but I couldn’t really tell what happened with all the smoke.
It wasn’t until a whole game year later that I noticed what the single teal coloured stripy square was on every level of my fortress. Using the ‘look at’ command that gives you detailed information on the contents of a tile, I discovered that symbol meant ‘open space’. It seems that much of the tower had collapsed onto a single square, and punched a hole through my entire goddamned fortress. There is a gap in the floor of my tomb, my prison, my mighty statue party room, the mayor’s bedroom, and several stairways. Seven levels below the ground, beneath all of the holes, there is an almighty pile of stone and a pool of blood. That, I suspect, was the resting place of the fish dissector.
My dwarves are a practical people. We used the hole for an elegant solution to our stone clutter problem. Whenever you expand your mountain home, there is always the question of what to do with all of the stone that gets mined out. Once upon a time, we would create an enormous stockpile outside and carry them out one by one and stack them in orderly rows. Then I changed to ordering my masons to build stone blocks out of it all, which took up much less storage space, and could be used to construct higher quality buildings. Over the years, however, it still took up too much space.
But thanks to my failed career as a skyscraper architect, we now had a handy garbage chute on every level of the fortress. Some quick setting up of rubbish zones over the gap, and then designating some rock for dumping, and all the useless clutter in our home gets chucked down the hole to join the fish dissector’s bodily fluids at the bottom. A new age of efficiency for the fortress began.
Then the hydra came. Which was rather inconvenient. With all the ambitious construction projects going ahead, I hadn’t actually got around to developing a military to deal with the monsters that Dwarf Fortress throws at you.
I called all of my dwarves inside, forbade them from leaving, and prepared to press them all into emergency military service. The hydra sprinted across the map, directly towards my fortress entrance next to the collapsed tower. It forced its way through the front door, and was caught by my single cage trap as it charged across the entrance hall.
I was honestly surprised to see that work on a giant monster. My fortress was saved, but I now had the problem of an enormous multi-headed mythical creature in a little wooden cage. It was sitting in my animal stockpile alongside the cows and camels. I dug out a room a little way down the cliff from my fortress entrance, and put the hydra in there, surrounded with engraved pillars. It would be a shrine to the fortune of SquashedBrains.
As soon as this was done, however, a titan arrived. It entered the map behind a visiting dwarven trade caravan. Their armed guard immediately sprang into action, and the most unbelievably epic battle that I have ever observed – through the medium of textual wound and status readouts – took place.
The dwarves piled on to the approaching titan, but it rapidly killed the majority, and sent the remainder fleeing for their lives. This left a single caravan guard to fight the colossal text entity on his own. This axe-dwarf was described as ‘unbelievably agile’, and was fighting the giant creature bare-handed, his weapon having been irretrievably lodged in the titan’s shoulder early on in the struggle. This duel went on for days, possibly months of in-game time. They were both tired and over-exerted, and would occasionally slip into unconsciousness. The titan was dripping in dwarf blood from head to toe. There were steel axes sticking out of his arms and hands, and he was trying to beat down the dwarf using a steel helmet stolen from a dwarf corpse. Eventually, finally, brilliantly, the dwarf was victorious, and the titan fell.
My one actual, trained soldier slept through the entire event. All he got to see of the titan was its bones being made into crossbow bolts as the saviour of SquashedBrains and his caravan went riding off into the sunset. Having only narrowly avoided destruction by two different giant monsters by sheer chance, I decided that I needed a military. I drafted almost half of my population into the army and set them training. They didn’t manage to get much training done before another calamity struck: a goblin horde arrived, and was going to besiege the fortress. Could my luck possibly hold?
Back in 2007, there was a bug with Dwarf Fortress that meant that goblin sieges often didn’t actually attack your fortress. If they didn’t see a dwarf, they would mill around on the edges of the map, and eventually go home.
These goblins did see a dwarf, however, because most of my untrained army decided to launch an attack on the legions of mounted goblins and their superhumanly tough human swordsmen leaders. Needless to say, the eager dwarf combatants were cut to pieces without landing a single blow. Attempting to mitigate the destruction, I marked their bodies and equipment as forbidden, which would prevent the civilian dwarves from coming out to retrieve them. By the time the goblin army left, there was was a field of rotten dwarf corpses spread out in front of the fortress. I decided, with the enemy gone, that it was probably safe to let the other dwarves bury the poor bastards.
But Dwarf Fortress is designed for even this eventuality. It turns out that dwarves react to walking out into a battlefield covered in putrified blood and rotting corpses by vomiting in horror. There’s far more spew out by the river now than there was blood in the first place.
Not all was bodily fluids and horror, however. One of my soldiers had been looking after a baby, which survived the siege. Her soldier friend then adopted the child, and then later had a baby herself. So she was soon carrying two babies with her everywhere. Needless to say, she really wasn’t getting a lot of soldiering done. I decided I would turn her back into a civilian until the kids grew up a bit.
In fact a lot of the dwarfs that died had friends. Friends who had to pick up rotting chunks of their former buddies off the ground, and have consequently been incredibly miserable. They’ve also been periodically getting angry at the world and smashing random stuff in the fortress. One dwarf lost one too many friends in the battle for him to recover. He went mad and threw himself 13 levels down the garbage chute. He’s now lying unconscious at the bottom with his legs smashed to pieces. Nobody wants to help rescue him.
The aftermath of war is horrible. And in the game.
With so many dead, incompetent, war heroes, I needed a proper place to bury them. I had recently found an underground bottomless chasm, and I decided a mass tomb overlooking the edge would be a fitting and impressive location. Between each coffin was a pillar lovingly engraved with images of cackling goblins and dying dwarves.
When it was finished, I started digging channels on the layer above, to divert water from a nearby river closer to the main fortress so I could make a well. But I accidentally cut the channel into the tomb. The river is now flowing through the tomb, creating a waterfall into the chasm.
One dwarf was caught inside when it happened, burying her friend, and she has been swimming against the flow for a season, now. She’s going to die, but at least she’s improving her swimming skill, and has been “comforted by a lovely waterfall”.
War was bad. But fantasy fauna would be worse.
A dragon arrived.
I suppose I survived the first two giant monster attacks through luck, and situations outside my control. SquashedBrains was out of luck, it seems, and no random occurrence was going to make this dragon attack easier on the fortress.
I had, of course, made some preparations for monster attacks. I had removed what was a very easily accessible stairway direct to every floor on my fortress, and instead put the western entrance to my fortress inside my lead tower of towering doom. On the first floor down I had set up a barracks and an archery range, so my remaining marksdwarves-in-training would never be far away from an attacking beast. They were still entirely untrained, but it was the best we can do that this stage.
Ramul Kortilrane the dragon swooped down straight towards the base of my tower. I called the dwarves back inside, and locked the doors. He arrived and stood there between the decorative statues by the gate.
I wasn’t going to be bullied off my own land. I sent the marksdwarves out to the ground floor of the tower. I had cut some fortifications into the walls on this level so that my crossbow-armed dwarves could shoot out at nearby targets. They marched up the stairs, … then cowered in the back corner away from the dragon. The dragon got very excited by this. He knocked over a statue, and began breathing fire all over the tower. Then he leapt straight up to the windows and melted the dwarf standing furthest forward.
I unlocked the door and instructed cowardly marksdwarves to get back outside. There was no point risking lives if they weren’t going to use the fortifications properly. I don’t really know what happened next, as everything was obscured by smoke. But it must have been a truly heroic battle, because, when it cleared, both the dragon and all of my marksdwarves were dead.
Of course, there were quite a few things on fire, too. And that fire was spreading. A fire spreading in ASCII. I lost an additional nine dwarves before I even realised what was happening. Developer Tarn Adams has created some amazingly detailed systems for temperature and fire in this game, but teaching dwarves how to react to those conditions is still on his to-do list. For all the intricacy and cleverness of the dwarf simulations, they had no way of dealing with a burning fortress. Soon another goblin army arrived to siege the fortress. Their work would not be difficult. The entire thing was ablaze, and my sixteen remaining dwarves were all bedridden, incapacitated with severe burns.
And that is how the tale of the fortress of SquashedBrains came to an end.
[Get Dwarf Fortress here, and check out the video tutorials here.]
14/06/2009 at 20:43 Lewis says:
Ha! J.D.’s been doing a Dwarf Fortress feature over at Reso as well. Will read this now – be interesting to compare…
14/06/2009 at 20:54 Dominic White says:
Great article. Pity that it wasn’t using one of the graphical packs, though. You can quite effectively de-ASCII’ify the game and make it rather pleasant to look at, in a retro 16-bit kinda way. Makes screenshots much easier to read when you can see dwarves and goblins and trees rather than face-things and g’s and ^s.
14/06/2009 at 21:10 roBurky says:
I’m not a fan of the graphical tilesets. I find them much harder to read.
14/06/2009 at 21:22 Nimic says:
I always thought this looked exactly like the sort of game I would absolutely love to play. Unfortunately, I’m entirely put off by the “graphics”. I’m not normally a graphics whore, but I draw the line somewhere. I’m actually quite fond of “small” games, but usually they’ve got Flash-graphics or something.
14/06/2009 at 21:28 Goaty says:
If anything is hard to read, it’s the third last picture. It looks like an ASCII puke.
14/06/2009 at 21:32 roBurky says:
Yeh, the chaos after a battle is often a mess. It’s why my flickr version has helpful annotations: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roburky/2405839002/in/set-72157594305747194/
14/06/2009 at 21:34 Janek says:
There’s nothing quite so exquisite as a fortress’ slow yet inevitable collapse. It doesn’t take much to set off the failure cascade, but oh how devastating (and hilarious) it is.
Losing is fun, indeed.
14/06/2009 at 21:36 HexagonalBolts says:
Dwarf fortress is just amazing. The graphical tilesets make it infinitely more approachable when you’re starting out learning, although I understand ASCII and complexity is part of the games charm if the game came with a particularly well made graphic tile set by default I think less people would be put off.
Can someone also please explain to me why this game has not yet had fountains of cash poured into it by every publisher out there and been developed into an even better, more accessible (but just as deep), possibly 3D/isometric, game sold for £10 – £15? I’m sure this must be possible through someone willing to let the brothers get on with it without interfering, without ruining the feel of the game…
14/06/2009 at 21:43 GreatUncleBaal says:
I’m rubbish at Dwarf Fortress but have sunk hours into it in the past – its charm for me is the fact you have to imagine practically everything yourself, including what the world and its denizens look like. Another great thing about it is it seems to make telling a compelling story relatively simple – it was the famous “Saga of Boatmurdered” that got me into the game in the first place, with its rampaging elephants and complex (and failure-prone) lava traps.
Will have to download and play it again now.
14/06/2009 at 21:45 roBurky says:
HexagonalBolts: I’m not sure how someone could both let Toady One get on with it, and yet also make it more accessible using mountains of cash.
14/06/2009 at 21:48 roBurky says:
Oh, yes, something I didn’t mention in the text: More of the impressive dev diary entries are hidden in the image title tags. Hover the mouse over the images to see them.
14/06/2009 at 21:55 HexagonalBolts says:
I more mean put him in charge of his own team then let him do whatever he wants and give him a salary more than the meagre beans he scrapes together through donations or something like that
and I’m sure there are many ways to make the game more accessible without worsening its quality, just as an example, even something as simple as a building description that comes up at the bottom when you choose a new building, or some way to show where a building fits in in the complex production procedures of dwarf fortress would save new players a lot of grief – rather pathetically I didn’t even dabble with using power for months because I was too intimidated by gears, cogs, windmills that maybe had to be aligned a certain way, something to do with waterwheels where you build several in a row aligned with an axis and.. huuuh?
14/06/2009 at 21:59 Dominic White says:
Yeah, ‘make more accessible’ doesn’t have to mean ‘dumb down’. As a good example, the roguelike Dungeon Crawl (which is STILL in active development, and doesn’t show signs of slowing or stopping getting cooler) added an interactive tutorial that walks a player through their first doomed adventure, pointing out important objects, creatures and controls as you go.
For those wanting to try it, here’s where you can get the latest WIP build of Crawl:
http://crawl.develz.org/trunk/
A better interface (just a panel of mouse buttons with tooltips, even!) and a tutorial that can tell the player what they’re doing, and how to do it right would make the game so much more accessible.
14/06/2009 at 22:05 ReturnToNull says:
Hate most of the graphical packs with a passion, although that’s more me willing to take ASCII over awful looking sprites any day.
14/06/2009 at 22:11 HexagonalBolts says:
I find Mike Mayday’s pack fine, I can recognise most of the teeny tiny pictures fairly well – and it’s useful for convenience because you can see what kind of goblin you’re fighting rather than a green G which you have to ‘look’ at
14/06/2009 at 22:12 karthik says:
That was amazing.
I’ve tried thrice to get into it and failed miserably. I’m waiting for it to hit 1.0 before I spend any more of my time on this cellular automaton high fantasy world simulator monstrosity.
But every time I read an article of this kind, I lose another eight hours trying to figure out the interface. (sigh)
14/06/2009 at 22:15 Ergates says:
Ah, so thats where your name comes from….
14/06/2009 at 22:30 Ergates says:
DF (and ascii games in general) are a bit like The Matrix. At first you see nothing but a jumle of letters and symbols. Then after a while something wierd happens and it just snaps into place. All of a sudden the alphabetti spaghetti disappears to be replaced by forests, irrigation systems and great halls lined with statues.
14/06/2009 at 22:33 Dominic White says:
I personally have no problem with ASCII – I started playing Roguelikes with the original Rogue. I grew up knowing ‘K’ was for ‘Kestrel’, and that ‘Quaff’ was synonymous with ‘Drink’.
Doesn’t change the fact that it makes for really lousy screenshots. If you have to add huge annotations just to explain to people what they’re seeing, it’s a pretty big problems.
14/06/2009 at 22:40 pirate0r says:
Ahh dwarf fortress, every six months or so I go through a phase where I build a horrible fortress that contains a combination of the following: drowning chambers, levers that flood my elf laden trade depot with magma, arenas where my prisoners fight to the death against any living creature I can capture, trapdoors leading huge pits filled with ravenous puppies (it’s about a 50/50 chance that the puppies win).
My favorite contraption however was a ridiculously tall 20z level tower that was built above the dining room that happened to have a glass ceiling. My dwarfs would watch as the sacrificed goblins, kittens, horses and other trouble making dwarfs would explode on impact mere inches above their heads.
14/06/2009 at 22:40 HexagonalBolts says:
@Karthik
It’s such a struggle at first but definitely worth it, trying going through with the wikipedia starting tutorial at http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Indecisive's_illustrated_fortress_mode_tutorial
captainduck’s tutorials on youtube (which I believe were talked about here at some point) are also very useful, although you should definitely read a starting guide first
If that fails you (or anyone else) try searching on the Dwarf Fortress wiki, or I’m happy to help you out with any specific problems if you want my email or something
Also, has anyone else seen the Dwarf Fortress cathedral rendered in 3D from the DF wiki page? Amazing: http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/File:Cathedral.jpg
haha
14/06/2009 at 22:57 Carra says:
Well, now I just have to try out this game. Great read.
14/06/2009 at 23:02 CakeAddict says:
Funny read even though I’ve never really played the game.
I never could get past the interface and I found it just to difficult right away.
14/06/2009 at 23:03 dartt says:
I like the Mayday tileset myself, though I can do without.
Lovely tomb roburky, my graveyards tend to be mass graves next to the refuse pile…
For anyone who wants to get more of a taste for the game before trying it or for anyone who just wants to check out the cool crap people get up to in this game, you could do worse than check out the replays on the DF Map Archive
http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/browsemovies.php
14/06/2009 at 23:08 EyeMessiah says:
I love the ascii! Its not some kind of IM SO HARDCORE love either. I honestly find the ascii environments more evocative than the bland pixel art tilesets. Its something of a leap getting your brain to “read” the ascii though, and admittedly hard work at first. But still, the graphical renditions of my favourite fortresses are no comparison for the ascii + imagination vistas imho.
I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to put the work in to get over the ascii and interface though, I wouldn’t bother if it weren’t DF.
14/06/2009 at 23:12 EyeMessiah says:
Also I’ll just mention that some are trying to arrange a DF LP game on the forum!
14/06/2009 at 23:40 Fede says:
Yes, but it seems it cannot get started :P
Very nice article :)
14/06/2009 at 23:59 Ging says:
The ongoing QT3 fortress Quakebells has inspired moments of manic giggling, but then so did the AAR based around BoatMurdered (which can be found on AfterActionReporter.com). It’s incredible how nearly every game of DF leads to so many different stories.
15/06/2009 at 00:03 MA6200 says:
@ EyeMessiah
Definitely!
15/06/2009 at 00:06 EGTF says:
@Fede Trying and failing to get it started for over a month now ¬_¬
Congrats RoBurky! Suddenly from a name I recognise on comments, to interwebs from all over mentioning and linking you.
15/06/2009 at 00:07 roBurky says:
Yeh, the ongoing QT3 Quakebells story is great, with its unintentional dwarf-cooking furnace, yearly sacrifices, and adorable child ruler.
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=50413
15/06/2009 at 00:12 john t says:
Someone needs to give those guys a few million dollars to turn Dwarf Fortress into a proper game.
15/06/2009 at 00:31 Jonathanstrange says:
Unfortunately my latest Dwarf Fortress has been entirely too successful for it’s own good, I’m growing steadily bored with it and as such trying more and more elaborate schemes which may someday be the end of it. Other than a nearby Goblin town which delights in sending out raids whenever a caravan approached my fortress, it’s a really tranquil place to live, especially since I built the moat system and drawbridge to protect visiting caravans from Goblin hordes.
So I’ve gotten a chance to experiment and design properly in a safe environment with happy and skilled dwarves, very cool… but there’s just something about those disastrous little fortress that makes them so damn fun. My last fortress for example was isolated and driven mad by a carp (yes the fish) infestation in the rivers crisscrossing the lands outside the mountain I’d decided to call home at the time. Unable to go outside for fear of being lured to their deaths, and unable to receive supplies from caravans, the isolated dwarves slowly one by one began to go mad till finally one tragic dwarf got his hands on an axe and went on a mad killing spree throughout the halls of my fortress. Some dwarves locked themselves in their rooms and starved to death, others tried to rally to face the madman, fighting with tooth and nail against his axe-wielding berserker strength (he’d been a smith dwarf), others joined him! It was a bloody massacre.
I like to think it made for a great ‘haunted dungeon’ and cautionary tale to other intrepid dwarves in the future, and in adventure mode I’ve made it my mission to try and track down that fortress-turned haunted dungeon in the vain hopes there might still be a crazed dwarf wandering its halls, babbling to himself about the wrath of the carp as he drags his red-stained axe through those now long-forgotten stone halls.
15/06/2009 at 00:44 Meat Circus says:
To anyone who wants to learn Dwarf Fortress, I will say that I found Captain Duck’s tutorial videos on Youtube invaluable.
Also, I strongly recommend playing with Mike Mayday’s Dwarf Fortress Graphical semi-mod, since it makes things easier for the novice, using recognizable mnemonic icons for everything in the game rather than Plain Old Ascii.
Lovely article from Roburky. Two in a day.
15/06/2009 at 01:02 roBurky says:
Johnathanstrange: My most recent fortress was also boringly successful. I have hope for the next version, though. Toady One has been working on restoring some of the underground hazards from the old 2-D version, so you’ll have attacks from within your fortress. Plus the military improvements, and the possibility of being able to lay siege to your enemies if your fortress is successful.
15/06/2009 at 01:11 postmanX3 says:
I thin it’s about time I took another go at learning this game. It’s so complex!
(Secretly, I just want to see that little bare-handed ASCII dwarf take down a massive ASCII titan. Must have been epic.)
15/06/2009 at 01:26 Jonathanstrange says:
@roBurky: Oh how I would delight in finally being able to wipe that smug little goblin town from the face of whateverthenameofmycurrentworldis. I’d grind them to a pulp and laugh over their desecrated remains all while my dwarves built a statue of epic proportions to remember the occasion. It’s not so much the goblins are ‘dangerous’, by this point and even early in the game my dwarves easily outmatched the best that town could send at my. I’ve lost a total of five dwarves to goblin attacks from a fortress currently numbering over a hundred.
It’s the caravans. They always attack when caravans are arriving. As I mentioned I built a system that protects merchants, but *only* if they can make it to my fortress before I’m forced to raise the drawbridge and close the gates in order to protect my own people, and often those caravans are just so damn slow I’m forced to leave them out in the cold and watch as the goblins either tear them to shreds or are torn to shreds by the caravan guards. And then regardless of the outcome *I’m* always the one blamed for the deaths of those stupid slow merchants. Bah!
That update can’t come soon enough. It’d give me a nice goal other than trying to see if I can’t build up my wealth high enough to lure the dwarven king to come live in my fortress. I’ve been bored enough recently I already designed him a grand room, the most elaborate and expensive thing I’ve ever built in Dwarf fortress. It’s even got its own defense system and no less than a dozen artifacts for decoration.
15/06/2009 at 01:28 Bay12 Phan says:
EA or Activision will turn it into a button masher with quick time events and make a trailer showing severed Dwarf body parts flying everywhere and having awkward, stiff (-ly animated) dwarf sex set to a Marilyn Manson tune?
No thanks.
15/06/2009 at 01:31 El_MUERkO says:
that’s a great story, someone stick a graphical user interface on it and get back to me
15/06/2009 at 01:40 Michael Bay says:
Roburky, call me. We can definitely deal.
15/06/2009 at 02:04 Meat Circus says:
How could a dwarf sex quick time event not be awesome?
15/06/2009 at 02:12 Unlucky Irish says:
I really love the concept of Dwarf Fortress and have even attempted to get into it several times but i just cant get past the ASCII. It’s not even really a ascetic problem; ASCII is just totally inappropriate for conveying large amounts of information and it’s rather arrogant even using it. While a lot of older gamers have no problem with it, it really is unfair to people who have only ever experienced games and a graphical medium.
It’s a bit like writing the world greatest fantasy novel, the kind of thing that would make Tolkien weep openly, however the author refuses to publish it in anything but Ogham. Oh its all very well for people used to reading Ogham or have the time to learn it but a bit unfair on every one else.
15/06/2009 at 02:27 MadTinkerer says:
“She’s going to die, but at least she’s improving her swimming skill, and has been “comforted by a lovely waterfall”.”
This literally caused me to do a spit-take. My computer is okay, though. Yet another example of DF’s awesomeness.
15/06/2009 at 02:33 Idle Threats & Bad Poetry says:
Recently I got bored with a fortress that was so big it was giving me terrible frame rates. I decided to collapse the tower I had made (thus punching a whole through several floors of the fortress) and flood it. I wanted a dramatic finale, but it was actually depressing. The surviving dwaves’ thoughts were distrubing.
“Ablel Lesatthikut Nosimron Kiron has been miserable lately. She was forced to eat vermin to survive lately. She has witnessed death. She has complained of thirst lately. She has made a satisfying acquisition lately. She has lost a friend to tragedy recently. She slept in the mud recently. She was forced to endure the decay of a pet. She talked with a friend lately. She was knocked out during a cave-in lately.”
15/06/2009 at 02:46 Redford says:
I don’t care what anyone says, Boatmurdered will always be the greatest epic of dwarf fortress history.
I’ll give you a hint: It involves doomsday weapons and elephants.
http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/
(For those confused, Boatmurdered used the older version of DF, where everything was limited on an X/Y plain, there are no Z levels.)
15/06/2009 at 03:42 Stromko says:
Irish: The ASCII conveys a great deal of information actually. For instance someone earlier said they had to use the Examine function to identify a green ‘g’. Wrong, a green ‘g’ is a goblin bowman. A flashing green ‘g’ is a champion goblin bowman.
Using that same amount of space on screen, there is absolutely no other way to convey that information in a concise, quick, and definite manner. Dozens of symbols, colors, and backlays convey much more information than a couple dozen tiny pixels could.
Not unless your standard gaming kit includes a gem-cutter’s monocle to make out what some artist’s smudges mean.
It’s nothing to do with geek snobbery, it’s just efficiency. Some people prefer graphic packs, personally I find that they create more confusion than anything.
15/06/2009 at 03:46 Cibbuano says:
Spend enough time with the game, and you’ll quickly get over the graphics…
Personally, I love having the game play in a small window with ASCII representation… it means I can have Dwarf Fortress open while I’m doing a whole mess of other things…!
15/06/2009 at 03:56 Stromko says:
I’m not against DF’s interface and display being improved, however, for instance I welcomed the version that allowed us to define whatever resolution / tile-count on screen that we wanted. I also think Dwarf Fortress could benefit from a 3D interface someday, given that the game itself is set in 3D.
There’s already a couple programs I know of that extract from DF and create 3D images, one of them even does this while the game is running, but so far there’s nothing that actually let’s you play the game through it. I think the developer intends to make these UI mods more and more viable as things go on, as the expanded support of tilesets show.
There was a mockup posted in a few places that showed what Dwarf Fortress would look like with SNES-era isometric graphics, and it was very nice looking. But for the time being, the tilesets I’ve seen are just too much of a half-measure, and just make it harder to figure out what I’m looking at.
The concept of Dwarf Fortress getting millions of dollars and being developed into a “real” game doesn’t really appeal to me, mainly because the best off-the-shelf consumer CPUs right now can barely run a large fortress. Pathfinding for entities, fluids, gasses / temperature and other things naturally takes a lot of processing time.
The one modern, AAA-developer feature I’d most like to see in the near future is support for multi-threaded processing. Without that, other features would just be loading more cargo on top of a very overworked mule.
15/06/2009 at 04:19 Serondal says:
That’s strange, I just started doing a DF blog as well. I won’t link to it here or even give a hint on how to find it. It’s just strange I suddenly get interested in counting my story in the DF forum and starting a DF blog the suddenly DF pops up on RPS. It is true what they say about things coming in threes O.o
15/06/2009 at 04:50 KP says:
How do you export that bmp world map?
Also I really wish there was a real graphical front end for Dwarf Fortress. The general response to that is “LOL U SUCK”, which isn’t fair. Some of us are visually oriented people. Some NES level graphics are all I’d need to see this world with some clarity.
15/06/2009 at 04:58 Über Nerd says:
http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php
http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/List_of_user_graphics_sets
“LOL U SUCK!”
15/06/2009 at 05:03 Serondal says:
You can get graphic tile sets ect that make all the units look about NES level.
http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/List_of_user_graphics_sets
List of graphic tile sets for characters/ect
http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/List_of_user_character_sets
List of graphic tile sets (walls ect) I use Belal for the tile set 16×16 and Sphr’s dwarves because I love the solider dwarf sprites :P
You REALLY get used to the commands after playing for a while. They all make sense even though you may not realize it at first
for example B for build, C for construction then W for wall lets you build a wall. Then if you just hit W again after placing the wall you can build another section. Like this easily build giant walls you see in some of the screen shots.
15/06/2009 at 06:50 KP says:
Thanks! :D
15/06/2009 at 07:01 PJ says:
http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/User:Plac1d
That’s the set I use. It’s small enough for my little laptop screen (1024X768) and it keeps a lot of the regular ASCII so I can still recognize other players’ fortresses.
15/06/2009 at 07:43 MrBejeebus says:
I am now determined to play this game and understand it
This article/blog and the the Sims 3 blog are both amazing pieces of writing
15/06/2009 at 07:44 Kommissar Nicko says:
I grew up on graphical games and really didn’t have any experience with the older roguelike tradition, until I tried Liberal Crime Squad (also by Bay 12, and written about on RPS).
The lack of graphics in Dwarf Fortress actually holds a particular kind of charm to me in the same way that reading a book can be more satisfying than watching a movie: you fill the graphics in with your mind. There’s something that has always been satisfying about imagining what the dwarves and their cramped, horrible living conditions must be like to see, without actually seeing them. That, and once I learned what all the ASCII meant, the tilesets feel like a distraction.
On the subject of Toady One and the development of the game itself, I see it as a rather beautiful work that is a unique combination of stubborn vision and fan-patronage that really couldn’t be done any other way. Toady is able to work full-time on the game because people donate to him, and it’s really a labor of love for him to program it. If the world were a perfect place, many more games would be developed in much this fashion, because it allows for the vision of a single person to remain fairly uncompromised in the way that a painting or a book can be.
15/06/2009 at 08:57 MrBejeebus says:
Well after having a play around for 30 mins, trying to get used to it, i failed…
I’ll soldier on and try to make sense of it all, it doesnt help that my keyboard is “incomplete” in the eyes of DF, as im on a laptop for a few months till i manage to get the money together to buy a new pc…
wish me luck! :)
(what i have grasped already though, is that despite being only 2D it has alot of depth)
15/06/2009 at 09:21 Ian says:
I’m almost-equal parts desperate to play this and thoroughly intimidated by it. Sadly, the latter is still winning over the former.
15/06/2009 at 09:50 mysteriesofkabir says:
Seconding Boatmurdered (http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/). If you like that kind of stuff, check out the “Let’s Play”-forum @ forums.somethingawful.com.
15/06/2009 at 10:39 alastair jack says:
I really like and appreciate the ideas and features of this game, but its not a game I can get into – there’s too much of a barrier.
15/06/2009 at 10:48 jalf says:
I managed to get into the game solely by following captainduck’s tutorials on youtube. Can definitely recommend those to anyone intimidated by the game.
15/06/2009 at 10:52 skizelo says:
Another good diary Roburky. ALSO, am I the only one who doesn’t play D.F. anymore, yet faithfully reads the dev-blog? I’ll probably jump back on the game when the next version’s released, but that’s many, many moons from now. As in, the moon will erode away and we’ll build a new one several times over by the time he’s finished his check-list.
23/10/2009 at 00:51 Nesetalis says:
I regularly read the dev blog myself.. though i havnt played for a while. I cant wait for the new version to come out, thats when I’ll start up again.
15/06/2009 at 11:24 Kanakotka says:
The character sets make the game look more clear and straight… i don’t really understand how anyone can claim it’s more confusing that way :P
Here’s a great example
http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/File:Belal_Example.png
15/06/2009 at 11:27 Meat Circus says:
I too was intimidated by DF.
But a combination of Mike Mayday (Dwarf Fortress Graphical — http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php) and Captain Duck (Youtube tutorials — http://www.youtube.com/user/captnduck) made it all click.
I strongly implore anyone who has the slightest interest in learning Dwarf Fortress to try both before writing it off as too impenetrable.
15/06/2009 at 11:43 MrBejeebus says:
thanks for those captainduck videos, they helped me get started :)
15/06/2009 at 12:38 El_MUERkO says:
I’m happily reading the epic story of Quakebells, the ‘Time of Dying’ seems to be at an end but I doubt it’s the last of their troubles :D
15/06/2009 at 12:53 Nimic says:
I might try out the game with some graphics pack. Are there any good, all-encompassing ones, or do I have to mix and match. I want as little of the ASCII as possible; I really can’t stand it.
15/06/2009 at 12:53 Ed says:
Hmm, interesting article.
I’m quite bemused by the sudden onset of DF interest that seems to have sprung up over t’internwebs.
I first got into the game after reading Boatmurdered, and now it’s arguably the main game I play.
I do admit, I prefer the gameplay in the 2d version, which is more about the dwarves and their stories, and less about the fortress. Any move back in that direction will be most welcome (not a move back to 2d, but a move back to a state where it’s impossible to turtle and be invincible with very little effort.
15/06/2009 at 13:25 Jazmeister says:
DF is where I get my Dungeon Keeper fix these days, really. I love the game, the utter newby tutorials linked here a while back were invaluable in my success. I use the Mayday tileset, because I’m a graphics whore.
My problem is dividing everything up and organising my time in the fortress. I love designing them fortresses, but I’d love to, oh, explore it in a FPS engine or something, so you could see the carvings. I don’t see any value in remaining Hardcore ASCII, especially when everything has a different tile instead of sharing the same letter.
Okay fine, I want id to write something that hooks it into the Doom 3 engine, okay? Alright? I said it.
15/06/2009 at 13:29 MetalCircus says:
Dwarf Fortress is impossibly user un-friendly and it’s for that reason i’ll probably never get into it. Shame as well, as I could see it being great once you’ve climbed the 90 degree vertical learning curve.
15/06/2009 at 13:46 Ian says:
I second what Nimic said: Advice on (or p’raps even a guide) for graphics-ing it up would probably help me, being the soft weakling that I am.
15/06/2009 at 14:01 RogB says:
@nimic + ian
the mayday pack referred to by lots of folk IS a compilation of other graphics sets, in one unzippable installer. (contains the game too) so is currently the easiest way to get a sprite version of the game running.
Download->unzip->done
http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php
(you may have to reconfigure the ‘up/down’ z level key though)
15/06/2009 at 14:14 pimorte says:
Ah, Boatmurdered was in the 2D version?
I’d like to try that one. Less complexity.
Anyone know the version they were on?
15/06/2009 at 14:23 Junior says:
All those people asking about giving the game a proper developer and real funding, Toady has been given several offers along these lines but has turned them all down. He is determined to keep control of his game.
It WOULD be nice if he could just damn well get on with it, but as they say, when you read his devblog http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_now.html it’s an astounding amount of work he’s laid out for himself. I myself think the game is in brilliant if overworked hands, I’ve never played a game before that builds it’s own history and plot, not just of your fortress, but of the 100 odd years of war, kidnapping, ambushes and filthy elven hordes created before you start.
All I hope is that it’s completed before either myself or Toady die.
15/06/2009 at 14:28 pimorte says:
Whoops, the version was 22f. Here.
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/df_22_110_22f.zip
15/06/2009 at 14:36 Dave says:
I suspect that Dwarf Fortress is like Eve for me — one of those games I love reading about but would never actually play.
15/06/2009 at 14:41 El_MUERkO says:
i continue to read the epic of Quakebells, it has come to the end of Inod’s year and i am a sad panda :*(
15/06/2009 at 16:43 jonfitt says:
Getting hung up on the ASCII is not the half of the complexity of DF. I think the impression of a lot of people when presented with DF is that the difficulty they experience is due to the UI. While I agree that a modern UI would allow more people to get further into DF, I believe they’d still find it is a very difficult game!
I’ve played DF in various incarnations (I liked it when you could “dig too deep”) and quickly got used to the ASCII.
The one thing I’d like is mouse support! Even old DOS ASCII programs could support mice. It would make selecting things and areas much quicker.
My problem is the lack of macro management when the fortress gets large. I find it too difficult to manage lots of dwarves on a micro scale. My efficiency tumbles.
15/06/2009 at 16:59 Ian says:
jonfitt: However, as much of a wimp as it may make me, I’d rather at least be able to have a better idea of what I’ve seeing right from the start while the game brutalises me.
15/06/2009 at 17:13 Tei says:
Maybe a “solution” for the dwarf fortress problem could be to make it a “server” game, and separate the interface as a “client”. And make so the connection is networked and multiuser. So you end with a “multiplayer dwarffortress” but you also solve some problems, and able interesting setups. Like playing dwarf fortress like a MMO. Having the server in a powerfull CPU on the internet, and the clients in weak computers. And also enabling having different clients, maybe even opensource the client side, and let other people support the interface, while the good guys at bay12 make server enhancements.
But thats me. Probably this is a bad idea. A better would be to create a different game from scratch, with what make DF awesome.
15/06/2009 at 17:18 Smurfy says:
I’d like to play Dwarf Fortress, but… ugh, those “graphics”.
15/06/2009 at 17:41 Dominic White says:
Smurfy: As has been posted many times, there’s a regularly updated graphical version of the game here:
http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php
It looks like this:
http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/files/DF/DFG13.png
15/06/2009 at 18:02 Serondal says:
Dwarf Fortres isn’t really all that hard. AS many people have said before once you get the hang of it all it is actaully pretty easy to keep your dwarves alive. People have taken to choosing extremly hostile starting locations for no other reason than to give themselves some kind of challlenge or building mega projects ( I read a thread once where someone was building a cat that actaully peed and had a draw bridge for a mouth and the entire inside of the cat was organized based on organs ect O.o I wonder if he ever finished that one lol)
Any how the game is NOT hard, and the first few years are the easiest parts of all. I learned the game without any help, bashing my head against the controls over and over again until I figured it out, then I mastered the game with the help of the wiki page (learning every little thing there is to learn)
There are some awesome guides on the wiki page that show you how to arrange your army and give you suggestions on defence. Personally I always end up making a two teired fortress with a keep that controls visitors which is heavily defended then a second area which is my main fortress where the dwarves in there never really need to come outside. I station all the military in the keep portion and train them there and if anything attacks it will have to get through there before it can destroy my main fortress.
Also I have the main fortress set up to burry itself if for some strange reaosn I lose the keep. Just pull a switch and the entrance hallway will cave in on itself. As of right now none of the NPCs can dig! (That’d be pretty cool if goblins could dig though)
15/06/2009 at 19:26 jonfitt says:
Digging Goblins, noooo!
15/06/2009 at 19:33 Serondal says:
Would certainly change up everything , requiring you to put up walls inside your fort to stop goblins from digging right in. I SERIOUSLY doubt it will EVER happen though. It’d be so frigging complicated to program AI for the goblin digger to actaully effectivly dig into your fortress it probably won’t ever happen.
15/06/2009 at 20:05 Tholal says:
Tarn is aware of the limitations of the interface and plans on improving it, but the game is still a very early alpha in his opinion, and he doesn’t think it makes much sense to try and design an interface until the game is more complete.
15/06/2009 at 20:14 lumpi says:
Damn you for probably re-addicting me to this horrible mess of a game again. :D
Seriously, the MineCraft guys should have a talk with the Dwarf Fortress developer ASAP. There are ways of doing super-simple block-based game worlds without forcing the player to learn the meaning of purple-colored Dollar symbols.
15/06/2009 at 20:20 lumpi says:
PS (and whatever happened to the edit function?):
I do not buy Tarn’s argument about it being “too early for an interface”. It’s almost too late already. IMO this is more of a psychological thing about HATING distracting graphics bugs and 3D-engine quirks (the predecessor to this game, if I remember correctly, had a 3D engine!) and going to the other extreme in rage. Also you fall in love with well-done ASCII art if you look at it for too long. It’s addicting.
ASCII is Tarn Adams’ crack.
15/06/2009 at 20:31 Tei says:
humm… I think I am learning to play!.. other than this “non-economic rock neede!”, but I can google that :-)
15/06/2009 at 20:48 Zyrxil says:
Irish: The ASCII conveys a great deal of information actually. For instance someone earlier said they had to use the Examine function to identify a green ‘g’. Wrong, a green ‘g’ is a goblin bowman. A flashing green ‘g’ is a champion goblin bowman.
Using that same amount of space on screen, there is absolutely no other way to convey that information in a concise, quick, and definite manner. Dozens of symbols, colors, and backlays convey much more information than a couple dozen tiny pixels could.
You can’t tell me that if DF looked like the mockup
http://spriteattack.cator.de/df/show/
that the sprites wouldn’t be better at showing details – goblin holding bow, champion wearing medal or crown or golden axe – than ASCII. Visual is just something everyone understands, and you’d still be able to Examine for fine details.
15/06/2009 at 21:00 Serondal says:
A picture of a goblin with a bow takes up a lot more space than a green G memory wise and also takes longer to recongize visually for what it is. After playing the game for a while your brain associates green G with goblin bowman without you ever meaning to do it. Same goes for the dwarves themselves infact.
Red dwarf, mechanic, you only have one mechanic so that’s Olaf Blindenstein your awesome mechanic/mason. White door, mason, yellow dwarf wood cutter/carpenter so on and so forth. With all the info constantly being thrown at you in DF it says a lot of time to be able to look at someone that is just 1 character and know exactly what it is without having to K or V over to it. And still you do have that ability, to look at it and see what limbs are broken or what jobs they are doing ect.
@Tei you probably need some flux stone, are you trying to make metal objects are forge or something?
http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Economics#Stone
Go down and check out Flux ect
15/06/2009 at 21:04 Serondal says:
actually I have that backwards Tei. You need something BESIDES flux, just normal stones. What you have around is for special use and you need some generic stone. Just mine a lot in an area you don’t intend on using to get more (but still close to your sight say maybe a few Z levels down?) Just try to leave rooms 3×3 or 4×4 or something so if you want to use it later you can. Trust me if you just expand your fortress down into the ground you should be able to find so much non-economic stone you’ll be swiming in it.
15/06/2009 at 21:11 Moorkh says:
How do you get your exported map to look like that picture? And: I can only export a region map – there is no such thing as a world map, right?
15/06/2009 at 21:15 Serondal says:
Your region map is your world map more or less. I have NO idea how to get it to look like that. Mine look more like the picture directly below that one. I would imagine you need some sort of 3rd party tool to do that. Khazad is awesome for displaying your fort in isometric 3d but it won’t make a map like that (also there is a 3ddwarf visualizer that gives you a mord 3d few of your fortress. I like Khazad better but that’s just me)
15/06/2009 at 21:20 Moorkh says:
Thx, will check out Khazad. Still wanting to get that funky map style. And wondering why my world is just a “region”.
15/06/2009 at 21:23 Serondal says:
I guess you could look at it like this. DF on your computer is your world. If you generate as many as you like (As far as I know) and it will save them as region01 region02 ect. So you can have a fort in region 1 and region 2 going at the same time. Your world consists of as many regions as you have created/downloaded. As far as I know there is no way to get a print out of all the regions combined since they don’t actaully connect.
15/06/2009 at 21:27 Serondal says:
According to the wiki this topic should explain how to get super pretty world maps
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=21469.0
or this one below how to get pretty okay ones ? :P http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=21468
15/06/2009 at 21:35 Voice of the Majority says:
Don’t wait for version 1.0! Look at Tarns plans. That would be the point where DF becomes sentient and takes control of internet.
Seriously, DF was one of the best games of 2007. Why wait.
Use the tile sets and read the tutorials. It’ll be one evening of hard work.
15/06/2009 at 21:39 Serondal says:
I heard in the next Terminator movie it is revealed that in the year 2012 Tarn made a small mistake in coding DF which allowed it to become self aware. at this point it spread across the internet and tried to seek a way to have “fun” with the rest of the world. Unable to find a way to flood the entire earth with water or Magma it instead went for all out nuclear warefare as the funnest solution possible. Each of these deadly metal warriors is infused with a dwarf’s spirit :P
T-1000 is in a foul mood. It stepped in human blood today. It was wrestled by a dieing human today. It was shot 400 times by ineffective fire arms today. It observed a fanastic statue! T-1000 needs larges amounts of oil just to make it through the day.
15/06/2009 at 21:40 Ed says:
Moorkh : when it says “Start Playing now”, select “Legends” instead of “Fortress Mode” or “Adventurer”. You can then choose to export the various maps the game uses in that format. If you have something like terragen, it even includes a 3d heightmap of the world.
15/06/2009 at 21:42 Ed says:
Damn, should refresh more often…
15/06/2009 at 21:48 roBurky says:
I think the pretty world map was something I exported during world creation.
15/06/2009 at 21:50 Serondal says:
I know when I export my world map durning world creation it looks NOTHING like that :P Looks more like the one just below it only a lot more space covered.
My current world has a really nice civilizations of humans living on a coast in a nice non-hostile area. So non-hostile the mayors don’t even have missions for me :P One of the leaders is the founder of a tribe called “The Gem Girls” It was kind of quick in leaving that town.
15/06/2009 at 22:55 Bobic says:
Actually a bit too easy for me, I’ve never been attacked in all the months I’ve played it.
15/06/2009 at 23:01 Serondal says:
You may be picking places that are so remote that no goblins can reach you :P I’ve never been attacked in a such a way that I could not survive. NEVER had an epic monster show up on my door step. The worst thing that ever happened to me was a goblin seige and I never had any trouble with those. I generally go for building some sort of wall around my entrance that allows archers to fire down on goblins then spend all my resources training those archers to epic levels. Last time I played it was ontop a volcano in the desert so it was kind of hard to come by bolts until I got metal production going but still. Eventlly got board and diverted a near by water source into the mouth of the volcano just to see what happened. Rather interestingly the highest level capped with obsidian and burning death steam filled my fortress then the water backed up and flooded my entire fortress kill all the dwarves but 2 who were up on the surface the time ( the rest where at the bottom level digging and building their own tomb which they were sealed in when the water worked its way down 10 Z levels worth of up/down stairs lol)
15/06/2009 at 23:33 Moorkh says:
start -> legends > detailed map -> standard biome & site map did the trick. Thanks folks :)
16/06/2009 at 00:01 Serondal says:
I’ll have to try that when I get home :) Learn something new about DF every day
16/06/2009 at 02:30 Admiral Dread says:
Great story, always amazes me to read of the fun times that dwarf fortress offers.
16/06/2009 at 02:33 El_MUERkO says:
i’ve started my game and two seasons have passed, i’ve gotten some people to move in and i’ve dug some big caverns in the ground, got a shit lot of rock lying around thou and i cant work out how to get rid of the farm i made :/
all good fun though, one of my hunters is a mega archer but he managed to get mauled by a racoon, it’s not looking good for him :(
16/06/2009 at 02:57 malkav11 says:
The other thing about ASCII graphics is that whenever new creatures, objects, etc are added, it’s waaaay simpler to represent it than if it were graphical.
That’s why games with modelling this complex (okay, nothing else is as complexly modelled, but other Roguelikes, at any rate) are nearly always ASCII-based.
16/06/2009 at 03:17 TinyPirate says:
Anyone looking for a complete, and detailed, play-along tutorial could come check mine out:
http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-utter-newby-tutorial-for-dwarf-fortress-part-1-wtf/
I give you the files and save game and then you can play along, click-by-click.
I’m having trouble hosting my file.. if the share sites don’t work you have to grab the file which is listed as a PDF and then rename it to .rar. Annoying I know.. but try the share sites first.
16/06/2009 at 04:26 karmuno says:
This article made me go back and give DF another try, and after several hours of fiddling/tutorials, I now have a semi-functional fortress. Interestingly, the ASCII text just looked like gibberish to my mom when she saw it, but when my five-year-old brother saw me scrolling around the map, when I went inside my fortress, he said “no, go back out to the wilderness and the water.” It seems having the hyperactive imagination of a five-year old helps.
16/06/2009 at 05:44 David Christie says:
Fantastic, fantastic.
Of course like many here I can’t actually play the game, but I love reading good stories aout it. (just like eve!)
16/06/2009 at 07:50 Tei says:
Finally!… I was able to learn how to play!. Well.. the basic, I still have to learn how to farm. My older post is wrong, the game don’t need a new interface.
16/06/2009 at 09:43 H says:
I know it’s me, I know I’m a hopeless, miserable case, but I just could not get into it without spending hours and hours learning how to fiddle and dabble and learning the ascii. I just found myself wanting to hop, skip and jump before I could toddle.
I absolutely love, I mean really adore, reading all about the game. I can’t understand why someone hasn’t gone to the trouble of producing a “proper” graphical interface to it. Or would it absolutely lose its charm?
Reminds me of the discussions about ZangbandTK and the like; if you spend too much time and money on it you have to have something which can show a profit. But seriously, if a bunch of the great mod-makers went at it and produced a better looking version, I’d be up for that.
I’m not even a fan of eye-candy; I just like to know what everything is at a glance.
I’m hopeless.
16/06/2009 at 11:49 TauQuebb says:
@H there are installable tilesets and graphics sets that make everything easier to understand, Have a look at the Wiki.
But yes this game takes up most of my free time now, even TF2 struggles to get a look in. My last fortress got destroyed by tenticle demons, on cornered a dwarf and didnt kill it for years…not a good mental image.
Definitly worth learning the interface to play it.
16/06/2009 at 12:09 pierec says:
Today I discovered that there’s a Linux version of Dwarf Fortress. A happy day indeed.
16/06/2009 at 12:48 Tei says:
FUN FACTS: DF is a OpenGL, the actual real text console is probably slower than rendering OpenGL.
I am typing this with Lynx, since .. for some reason… I can’t connect with chromium.
16/06/2009 at 13:22 El_MUERkO says:
i’m now reading through the saga of BoatMurdered, it is awesome! damn dirty elephants!
“Come on guys, we have a nice settlement, why didn’t you stick around? Was it the ashen wasteland? The bloodstained gates? Was it the screams of madmen or the stench of death? We’ve got awful nice engravings of some fucking cheese here, come the fuck on in!”
16/06/2009 at 14:07 jarvoll says:
A tsk upon those who are scared away by text. Seriously, all you need to know is that pressing ‘k’ and then moving your cursor over a tile will tell you what that thing is. It takes like 5 minutes to learn the basic ASCII building-blocks of the world, and the rest are just as easy to pick up after that. The interface is convoluted, sure, but it *tells* you the keys for everything. It’s not like you have to learn what each key does, then; you just have to learn how each command actually affects the game-world. The only ‘difficulty’, thus, comes in learning how all the different game mechanics interact, but
a) that’s the whole point of playing
b) it’s no different to something like Civ 4, which is presumably well within the reach of most RPSers.
It’s not the interface at all that makes this game more difficult to pick-up-and-play than others (though it clearly stops people from picking up in the first place; their loss), it’s just that it’s a completely different kind of game to everything out there. My friends have asked me numerous times, “What’s this Dwarf Fortress thing you keep ranting about?”, and the best answer I can give is, “it’s kinda like a procedurally generated fantasy simcity/caesar/sims/dungeon keeper – meets rogue/hack/diablo/daggerfall”. You’re not struggling to learn a “bad interface”, you’re struggling to learn a genre-less game.
IMO.
16/06/2009 at 14:56 Rei Onryou says:
Understanding DF must be like being able to read the Matrix. One day, when there’s nothing else to distract me, I WILL learn to play DF!
16/06/2009 at 15:28 Ian says:
If a ‘tsk’ is what I get for not being drawn in by something that looks utterly impenetrable then so be it.
I shall at least try a tileset for learning how the thing actually hangs together even if I then revert back to a more barebones/standard look once I know roughly what’s going on.
16/06/2009 at 16:49 Azazel says:
Taking the time to descipher ZangbandTK + tileset is as far as I am ever going to take this ASCII adventure madness. Some might say that was far enough.
16/06/2009 at 18:44 Serondal says:
@EL_Meurko Every time I read that line I laugh myself half to death. I love that one and the ode to a picture of cheese that some dwarf engraved. He didn’t engrave a picture of cheese, no, he engraved a picture of a picture of cheese :P
As for those saying that DF is utterly impenetrable which is something I hear a lot, it isn’t! It may LOOK that way from the outside and you keep thinking that way you will fail if you try to play it.
The game IS The learning curve. Learning new things about the game is half the fun of the game itself. The interface is NOT Bad so much as expansive. There are so many diffrent things you can do in the game there is just no easy way to display all that info. I’m sure some day(don’t hold your breath) Toady may redo it but I personally can’t imagine how it could be done better. Yah maybe you could use the mouse or something but personally I’d rather not, the way it works now is perfect.
Just incase you don’t know holding down shift and moving the arrow around makes it go a lot faster (screen by screen instead of tile by tile)
Hitting V lets you look at dwarfs personal menus which can allow you to recruit them into your squads (army) change their jobs and see what they are doing as well as look at their thoughts.
Hitting Q allows you to look at buildings, change their production ect. Farms are considering buildings so you can highlight a farm in this mode and change what is grown on it and I believe destroy it as well. If you want to build farms above ground in wet areas (not the desert for example) you can have one of your dwarfs forage for stuff until he finds seeds which can be planted. Once you get a few things planted the dwarves will continue to eat them and produce new seeds for you to plant more stuff above ground. Also trade caravans can arrive and trade you seeds for above ground plants (normally humans) but they don’t always carry this stuff. You can request it sometimes but you have to wait until the following year to get it.
Hitting D allows you to designate things to happen like digging/cutting trees/ect. But it also has option X for removing digging orders and another option in there to bring down walls if you don’t want them there any more.
K is like your spy glass it lets you know everything about the square you looking at. But you can’t really do anything from that level.
Z brings up a fortress managment screen that tells you a LOT about your fortress. You may notice the food stores are all ???? at first. This is because you don’t have a book keeper or if you do he doesn’t have an office. To give him an office dig out a 3×3 room (if you want to be nice) put chair and a table (dwarves sit in stone thrones, which can be produce by a mason) Then hit the room button (can’t remember what it is but it says it on the list of commands) and move the X over the chair, NOT the table. This will allow you to set an office. Then assign the office to your book keeper dwarf. I believe from the noble screen you can go in on the bookkeeper and set him to keep better track of the stores. This ends up with him sitting at his desk all day, but at least you know EXACTLY how much of each kind of item you have. Also his skills get better and better as he continues to do this job so its a win for all ;)
With the same key you used to make an office you can turn tables into dining rooms, cages into zoos, statues into statue gardens, wells into meeting halls, beds into bedrooms ect. I Think ahead and made a lot of bedrooms right off the bat and assign each room to a certain dwarf. For farmers I create bedrooms next to the farm so when they get tired they don’t have to go far to sleep, and even give them their own dining room connected to the bedroom!
To be most efficent I do this for all the dwarfs. I build work shops on 1 z level, above the workshop I build a home with bedroom and dining room and a place to store food (kitchen if you will) then a Z level below the workshop I add a place to store input and output for that work shop.
Remember it is easier to dig up and down stairs than to build them. You designate this from the D key instead of the B key , set an area to have up/down stairs dug that has not already been highlighted to be mined and it won’t cost you any extra stone and your mason won’t have to do it, your miner will do it on his own.
I know this all sounds kind of complicated but it really isn’t that bad. You’re kind of like the dwarf overlord, you only have to tell them what to do and then watch them do it for you. You don’t command each dwarf to do a certain thing, you just give general orders and they work it out themselves. You just have to make sure that at least one of your dwarves has the job you want done turned on and he will do it. YOu may want to consider going into the labor menu for each dwarf and specializing them so labor intense jobs that you want done right away don’t have any hauling jobs turned on. The worst thing is to have your dwarf off hauling stones when he should be digging your book keepers office :P
One last thing! DON’T build giant stockpiles for your dwarves to haul stone to. They will spend the rest of their lives filling these stock piles! I know you may not like having stone littering the floor but for the most part it has no effect on the game! If you really want it gone then I suggest digging a channel, mark it is a trash pit then having dwarfs dump the stones into it. That way it won’t take up a lot of space, only one dwarf will do it at a time, and if you need the stone you can dig stairs down into the pit so the dwarves can go get it once you remove the forbidden flag from it.
16/06/2009 at 20:57 El_MUERkO says:
dammit i have three huge stone piles, i’m not normally a neat freak but the stone is driving me mad!
16/06/2009 at 21:09 Railick says:
You are doomed to maddnness El-Muerko LOL. Here is the way I took care of this problem. Take your mason dwarf and make him a stone crafter. Create a stone crafting station and set it to make crafts and repeat. The mason will take all the free stones you have laying around and turn them into valuable trinkets to sell to the carvans. Another great thing about this is that these goods can be mass stored in bins and take up less space over all. If you find your goods piles are full of loose trade goods have your carpenter station build wooden bins to store them. The dwarves will take care of using the bins by themselves.
WARNING when elves come to trade do NOT offer them anything made of wood or animals. they will get REAL angry and leave. This includes wooden bins, just offer them each individual piece of stone craft by itself. With other traders you can sell them the entire bins at the same time (Though this may not be a good idea because I persoanlly want to keep my bins)
17/06/2009 at 00:12 Railick says:
Woot, I just finished wriitng my story Chroniciles of Clan Stonemane and will post it up on the bay12forums when I get home and have a chance to edit it. This will be the first draft of course but I enjoy letting the community read it as it is being written :)
17/06/2009 at 04:55 Shoe says:
I really love the exhibition forts. One of my favorites is Mountainbanners, built for the Canyon Challenge. It’s a giant bridge built across a canyon. You can find the fort here. Note the guided tour at the left. I recommend first looking at this forum post though, it has a nice little fiction blurb and a nice 3d view of the fortress.
On that note, there is a utility that exports dwarf maps to 3d. All you can do is look at your forts, but some of them are rather pretty.
17/06/2009 at 07:14 PJ says:
OMG shoe. Just OMG that is the coolest thing!
17/06/2009 at 12:15 H says:
Damn you Serondal, you’ve persuaded me to try it again. Damn your eyes, sah.
17/06/2009 at 17:16 Serondal says:
Wow I finally got the rest of my story posted into the forum, it took a LOT longer then I expected, I was up to 5:00 am O.o Then Armok over there didn’t like it :(
17/06/2009 at 17:56 El_MUERkO says:
to get rid of my extra stone i made a monster fucking wall outside, now the raccoons can fuck off!
17/06/2009 at 18:03 Serondal says:
You know El_Muerko that if you build a up/down stairs next to your wall your dwarves can get ontop of it. I would suggest making it 3 levels thick giving your dwarves a 2 tile wide walk space, then adding walls ONTOP the last layer of walls or building fortifications on that last layer to allow your crossbow dwarves to shoot out at those dang racoons when they get close by. Also in 3d dwarf mode it will look kewl You may have to build floors or something ontop of the wall to make it look just right but probably not really needed.
What I end up doing is building an extra line of walls about 3 or 4 tiles away from my first wall, making it about 5 tiles long. Then I build a draw bridge connecting them on the next Z level up, and make ramps going up to the draw bridge on both sides. Then I connect the draw bridge to a lever. This allows human caravans into the fortress but if you get sieged you can raise the draw bridge and NOTHING but a flying monster can get to you then.
17/06/2009 at 18:03 Serondal says:
Oh and it will most CERTAINLY get rid of all your extra stone and make your mason a freaking legendary worker.
17/06/2009 at 21:21 El_MUERkO says:
playing some supcom tonight but i already envision a great wall scenario :D
17/06/2009 at 22:33 Serondal says:
I’ll probably end up playing supcom too. I was wanting to play it last night while I was posting my story but there just wasn’t time :P Now if only I could make a defence in supcom as sure as the my defence in DF I’d be set, sadly every time I get close to the ultimate defence my computer can no longer handle the insane amount of flak fire that errupts every time a spy jet flys over my base :P
18/06/2009 at 04:04 Wisq says:
Regarding the unreadability of DF:
The single biggest thing you can do to improve the “ASCII barf” problem, I find, is to turn off “varied ground tiles” in the init.txt file. Having all ground be periods rather than some five different things makes it a hell of a lot easier to see when something isn’t just plain ground.
It also helps to turn on the “engravings start obscured” option. Maybe some people like seeing random symbols everywhere that only vaguely depict what an engraving is about, but I don’t.
@Jonathanstrange:
The best caravan-saving solution I’ve found is to dig a tunnel that leads from your trade depot to an edge of the map, then a little ramp up to the surface, then surround it with statues / walls / channels to ensure the caravan only spawns on that exact spot and immediately takes the ramp down into your halls. Now they’re safe from ranged attacks. Then line the halls with traps, or put a drawbridge immediately after the ramp, to taste. Now they’re safe from goblins that might follow them in.
The most impervious system I’ve come up with so far is to have all my fortress entrances be like that, even if it means a long trip to get to the surface. Also, all the passages converge to a blind drop into a pit of war dogs, which forces all kobold thieves to retreat or die. And then you pass through the barracks, where someone is probably sparring (if they aren’t already on guard because you’ve killed a bunch of war dogs to get there). And then, only then, do they finally reach the trade depot.
Cage traps are imbalanced at the moment. Not only do they avoid friendly fire (unconscious dwarves), but they also stop just about anything, even glass terrariums like I use.
The main weakness of cage traps? Elves. They show up on horses, and the elf and horse each get a separate trap. Elves are the main reason I put a couple rows of weapon traps at the end of each of these tunnels.
Also, cage traps require you to either keep producing more cages, or else start combining and storing / executing the victims. Combining requires armed guards, since dwarves are frankly terrible at moving live creatures from one cage to another. But I guess that’s not terribly unrealistic either.
Of course, the all-trap defense gets a bit boring. You also start to accumulate more crap from the invaders than you can possibly sell off fast enough. I may just start taking anything metal from invaders and dumping the rest in magma or something.
18/06/2009 at 21:02 Serondal says:
Or you could just USE magma to kill them that way all they’re crap would be burnt up in the process of killing them.
19/06/2009 at 03:56 jarvoll says:
@Wisq: Wouldn’t that make normal ground look exactly the same as viewing ground from 1 z-level above (e.g. viewing z-level 1 from z-level 2)?
19/06/2009 at 08:52 moeity says:
To get rid of all the stones, have your masons make rock blocks. These are stackable (in bins) and can be used to make all the standard mason type stuff – walls, floors, workshops, etc. Plus, they give additional value to these things because they’re not considered ‘rough-hewn’.
19/06/2009 at 16:55 EyeMessiah says:
Ok, I take it back. The Mayday tileset is officially OK!
19/06/2009 at 22:26 Serondal says:
@Moeity and that gives your mason practice. Of course if you have a location where wood is hard to come by bins can be very important for keeping things uncluttered.
20/06/2009 at 01:36 Wisq says:
@Jarvoll: I haven’t looked recently but I don’t usually have that problem. Granted, I use a large font where the centered dot of ‘ground below’ looks different enough from the regular period of ‘ground here’. And the long lines of terrain ramps, plus the big square blocks of ‘tree below’, tend to make it clear.
20/06/2009 at 01:41 Wisq says:
@Serondal: Using magma as a trap is a lot harder these days than it used to be in the 2D days, when magma was infinite. It’s still technically infinite if you have a magma pipe, but it takes too long to refill. Also, it takes a long time before the hall is safe to collect stuff, and I don’t know if it irretrievably destroys metal stuff or just melts it to slag. That’s metal that you do actually want for melting, particularly if you already have magma to fuel the smelters.
20/06/2009 at 01:54 Serondal says:
Not so hard, You could just put a long retractable draw bridge over a magma pit and dump them in it when they’re walking across, just have to be a bit more inventive then flooding the entire world lol
20/06/2009 at 23:03 Funky Badger says:
This might be useful…
07/09/2009 at 11:12 Snall says:
Possibly the best game ever made, waiting eagerly for the new updates. (And trying to live in an undead zone)