Dwarf Fortress Game

Dwarf Fortress is a legendary computer game with a devoted cult following. Despite never selling a single copy it has survived through years of voluntary donations.

Its interweaving pieces of code create battles, rumors, and wealth which attracts invaders, goblins, and trading caravans. The Steam version of the game includes a tutorial to guide new players through the basic tasks of setting up their first workshop.

Gameplay

Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that has broken into the Internet consciousness. It simulates civilizations, wars, legendary artifacts, and dwarven personalities in an absurdly detailed world, all from an ASCII interface.

Each creature, from dwarves to squirrels to aardvark men, comes with its suite of modeled data on limbs, organs, bodily fluids, and more. They die not when they run out of hit points, but when they can no longer function.

Developer Bay 12 Games has been showing off lots of little details of this ur-colony management game, but until now we haven’t had a big-picture view of how all those detail bits will fit together in moment-to-moment gameplay. This new video shows a few things like the revamped UI and a nice typing filter for work orders.

Structures

Dwarf Fortress features a wide variety of structures, including buildings, bridges, obelisks, and dungeons. Some structures require a large investment of time, while others can be built in just a few hours. Some are difficult to construct and only a few dwarves can do so at once (like the pyramid), while others only take up one or two rooms of a dungeon (like a temple).

Build a maze-like tomb for your favorite dwarves, with many different traps in each room. Or construct a huge dwarven pyramid, fill it with treasure and obelisks, then cover the top in glass and rewire it so that every dwarf who dies gets a new coffin each time.

Crafting

Besides mining, brewing, and farming, dwarves can craft stonecrafting, bonecarving, weaving, leatherworking, and pottery. Metalcrafting requires smelting, which is done in a workshop (b) with a furnace. Metal ore gets left behind when dwarves dig through certain types of rock.

Dwarves can also request temples and guild halls if there are enough believers or laboring dwarves in the fort. Once a temple petition is satisfied, a priest can offer inspiring sermons and comfort stressed-out dwarves.

A complex construction/management/roguelike simulation that has been around for over a decade, Dwarf Fortress offers wild emergent stories and plenty of ways to fail. This Steam release, published by Kitfox Games, features a full graphical overhaul and soundtrack. The game’s text input issues have been resolved, which should make it more accessible to new players.

Economy

Dwarf Fortress has a very different economic system from most modern business or military strategy games. There’s no competition between dwarves, no market for goods or services, no currency, and no explicit economic hierarchy. Instead, the fortress is governed by a complex set of customs and conventions that limit dwarves to specific roles within the economy.

In the present version, this is largely a matter of establishing strict social conventions early on that define who can do what work, and limiting each dwarf to a small number of these economic activities. The result resembles a form of feudalism.

The fortress’s manager, broker, mayor, and other notables expect correspondingly grand living quarters and dedicated dining rooms, for example. The value of a room can be seen by pressing q and selecting it – this is based on the cost of furniture, smoothing, and decoration.

Dwarves

The dwarves, formerly just smiling text symbols, now have faces, bodies, personalities, and simulated emotions. You can direct them to dig, for example, but they may decide instead to read a book, build a statue of a giant frog, or run away from a goblin horde chasing their dirty socks. Battles often look like a mess of blinking sprites slamming into each other, but studying the details of what happens before, during, and after is fascinating (and sometimes hysterical).

Dwarf Fortress also features a separate mode that lets you play as an adventurer in a procedurally generated roguelike world. Explore thriving capitals, villages, and bandit camps, or delve into labyrinths and catacombs. Learn how to make a range of exotic goods, including honey, wax, pottery, windmills, waterwheels, and papermaking, while exploring and questing for glory.