Dwarf Fortress

Wyrmrest Accord
1

Dwarf Fortress released on steam recently, a new version with graphics and mouse controls

https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

I played it in the past, but this new version has escalated into a bit of an obsession now that I don’t have to struggle with moving a cursor around with the arrow keys and stuff like that. According to steam I have almost 80 hrs played after buying it less than two weeks ago so I might need to uninstall it for a while for my own health.

For the uninitiated, it is basically a colony-management game which goes out of its way to simulate a ridiculous amount of things, from generating world history to the politics of trying to sell wood to elves to just how far that goblin ear your dwarf just cut off flies through the sky before hitting the ground. So for fantasy nerds who enjoy reading computer generated mythologies and things like that its about the best thing ever. It has been in development for almost 20 years, and for most of that lifespan it was free and had only ascii graphics.

Are any of you playing it? Tell me your tales. How many bards are currently freeloading in your tavern? How many necromancer minions have visited your fortress to recite poetry? How many dwarves have you drowned through ill-conceived hydraulic engineering projects?

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There is no topping Boatmurdered.

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Kobold* Fortress. It’s better. Friend apparently got a kobold with a spear that accelerated with no upper speed limit and would end up hyper-speed launching themselves at hostiles. It was great.

4

I would love to try Dwarf Fortress and I remember trying it years ago but the learning curve seems to take a little more attention span than I can muster. I felt like I was trying to read The Matrix when trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

5

Kill the elves

6

Wish I was smart enough to play dorf fort

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I’ve constantly forgotten to turn off queued up things, since it’s endless, and then oops- Over 200 cups and doors.

I haven’t been able to play it as much as I want to have anything really crazy happen, though, so the most I’ve seen is like… I set my dwarves go to forage and they got stuck on the other side of the thin, walkable river, and died of dehydration. Not sure what part of the task caused that hang up.

8

I thought this post was gonna be about Dun Bladar. Different Dwarf Fortress :frowning:

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9

I’m a huge fan of colony games. I have like 200 hours on RimWorld and another 100 hours spread out over other various others. I’ve thought about playing Dwarf Fortress, especially since mountain bases in RimWorld are my favorites, but I’ve got enough new games to play right now that I’m going to wait for some videos on it from my preferred YouTuber to come out so I can learn by watching them.

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It is quite a bit more accessible now that it isn’t an arcane wall of ascii glyphs, though the mechanics are still the same of course.

Anyway, here are some tales of the forts I’ve made in the new release (note that Dwarf Fortress provides names in both dwarven and english, hence the double names for everything):

Regnitig, “Glovebitten”

My first fortress, it was nestled on a remote forested island. If you settle an island you don’t usually get besieged by neighboring civilizations (though it can be boring because you won’t get interesting visitors either). It prospered for two years and grew to a population of almost 80 dwarves, at which point a bronze colossus showed up (basically a giant golem thing?) and killed every last dwarf. I consider this a lucky death, because colossi are very rare and some of the most powerful enemies in the game!

Zevutshedim, Dreadshadow

Next time I settled on a volcano. I also figured out you can customize the name of your fort, hence the edgelord name for a scary volcano base. Volcanos are very cool for easy access to lava, which you can use for accidentally melting your dwarves interesting engineering projects like magma moats and magma-powered forges. I did successfully build a lava moat with retractable drawbridge with only one dwarf fatality! The poor fellow decided to go collect some ore from the bottom of the pit I carved out for the lava to flow into right as I breached the magma flow… oops.

Things were pretty secure for a while thanks to the lava-based defenses, but we did have a little… infestation. A werepig snuck into the fort and infected many dwarves with the werepig curse, causing much of the fort to turn into crazed pig monsters. Luckily (I guess??) my mayor was a necromancer, which meant he could reanimate the slain dwarves as intelligent undead. Unfortunately, undead can still be werepigs, so after the dust settled I had 3 remaining citizens, all of whom were undead werebeasts. But the fort had been wealthy, so huge numbers of new colonists showed up to repopulate. Ultimately I directed the undead werepigs to stand on the bridge over my lava moat and I had the new arrivals drop them into the lava to avoid spreading the infection any further.

Things were okay for a while, until I had yet another werebeast attack–werellamas this time–that ended things for good. Oh well. I’m just happy I did some volcano engineering without totally flooding my base with lava.

Kivishebal, Lancerreveres

My most successful fort so far, it became wealthy enough that the king of my dwarven civilization moved in–not always a good thing, since nobles are sort of useless and demand lavish bedrooms and stuff like that. Also, the king was a necromancer. He had a weird habit of reanimating random things he found lying around, including the corpse of a forgotten beast we killed earlier, which wound up destroying the fortress. Next time necromancer royalty arrives I’m dropping them off the lava bridge

Migurazin, “Oceanwatch”

My current fort, built on the coast, hence the name (yes I forgot to customize the name of my previous one, hence the mouthful “lancerreveres”

Not a volcano, but the first cavern I dug into had a big lava lake–again, great for industry and defense! I built a really fancy tavern in this one which attracted huge numbers of “entertainers”–i.e. elf and goblin and human weirdos who want to hang out in dwarf taverns and refuse to do most work. I attracted so many elf tavern-goers that they started, um, breeding in the tavern–there are multiple newborn elves in the fort now, and I even had to build a shrine to the elf gods to cheer them up. Elves born in the fort count as full citizens (unlike their freeloading parents), so I’ll have the interesting experience of raising elf babies from their youth to enjoy mining and mushroom farming and all that dwarfy stuff.

The elf god shrines are funny, incidentally, because the elves worship “forces” rather than gods. I tried to make statues of their “god” to decorate it, but couldn’t since a “force” can’t be represented in stone. But my well meaning and literal-minded dwarves could not be deterred by such metaphysical nonsense, so I just had them make statues of random elves to decorate the elf shrine. Surely it makes the elves feel at home, right?

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11

I’ve snagged Dwarf Fortress, but if I’m going to be honest it hasn’t grabbed me as much as I thought it would. I’m still going to dedicate some time to it, but honestly I think Rimworld scratches this particular itch better for me personally.

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I did want to pick up the new rimworld expansion too but I thought that would be sort of a ridiculous serving of colony simulators to play both at once :sweat_smile:

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named my latest fortress Lowtax

decided to fiddle with the symbol creation system for the first time in a while
“It is an image of a human and a meat. The human is in a fetal position. The human is weeping. The human is holding the meat.”

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i got besieged by a large undead army

I pulled up the drawbridge and locked everything up, and while they milled around outside I devised a cunning plan to destroy them–I created a vast web of tunnels filled with traps that I’d open up to the outside, tricking them into thinking they’d found a way past my drawbridge.

Beyond the usual spike traps and rockfall traps I was particularly proud of a section of tunnel in the center, which I could close off with mechanical gates on either end and fill with lava.

If they got past all of that, I had it lead to a long hallway with ballistae at the end to blast em

I spent a few seasons building all this, with the zombies hanging around topside for the whole time. Finally, I was ready to draw them in, and I sent a miner to open the tunnel to the outside world.

just as I sent the miner, the undead gave up and broke the siege, leaving without any fighting

I was so offended

Anyway I meet friendly undead too. I got my very own Sylvanas: an undead elf woman who I put in charge of the military

https://i.imgur.com/Vi9fZky.png

She is cooler than Sylvanas for several reasons:

  • Her last name is “Dimpleglistens”, truly an appropriate name for an undead warlord

  • Absolutely riddled with scars

  • has memorized lots of poetry which she entertains the fort by reciting in her downtime: Sylvanas, by comparison, just knows that one moody elf song

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hello after several years, I wish to talk about dwarf fortress some more. this is cursed alt-character paladin miko leveled during the MoP event because I’m not allowed to double post on my true self.

There’s something about the winter months that make me play this game, I always put like a jillion hours into it in january and february.

My new fort, Kelmelbil or Metaltome is sort of quiet compared to some of my others.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/36693745244826398/2190B4A7AA3B8EE3502B11069A81E54D726882AC/

There aren’t any huge goblin countries or necromancer towers nearby attacking me every year, I don’t really get anything except wilderness bands of 30-50 feral hogs which just walk into my cage traps and provide pork for the fort.

We’re not the wealthiest fort, because I wanted to build a library-focused fort. Here’s the library:

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/36693745244826354/6FE4DE92CB3B18E0774C52456C94AEB50F5E05D4/

It turns out academia is one of the least profitable dwarven industries, as my scholars are still sort of dummies after years of practice producing low-quality manuscripts of dwarven science which don’t really sell for anything. Plus a paper industry is sort of complicated. But at least it provides for a unique, peaceful thing to build a fort around.

So my main project is just making sure this little girl grows up happy and healthy.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/36693745244826137/89F02195231F9CA916FB5797BCD3D9BBCAEA416D/

Why? Because she’s sort of unique: she’s an elf who was born underground in a dwarf fortress! Which means she acts sort of like a dwarf. In her “values” the game reports that she values industry and craftsmanship, rather than the typical elven values of nature.

Elves/goblins/humans can always join forts, but they’re all wandering bards, scholars, or monster hunters. So it is rare for married couples to form. But some of the bards who moved into my tavern were married, and they had a kid underground.

I dunno I just think she’s neat. The dwarven caravans tell me the mountainhome wishes to elevate my site to a barony, but I’m holding off until my elf-dwarf reaches age 18 and can be nominated to ascend to the rank of baroness. She’s only 4, so it’ll be a while, but managing the library is sort of boring so I’m going to dote on this random elf instead.

Overall the sleepy library fort makes me pay a lot of attention to individuals, I doubt I really would have noticed an elf kid in my 200+ population forts under constant undead attack (because the kids usually just died from playing outdoors during zombie horde invasions)

Dwarf Fortress also had an update recently which added adventure mode out of beta, which lets you play the game as an RPG-roguelike rather than a colony sim, where you control an adventurer rather than a gang of dwarves.

It is pretty cool to explore old, fallen fortresses and confront the things which caused them to fall. My most memorable adventure was killing a web-spitting forgotten beast thing which killed a fort of 100-odd dwarves.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/36692794482788602/7E5E0F0A16E1065DA93968921C974B04DBCCB1C0/

Web-spitters are usually extremely dangerous but as an adventurer I could play as a spider-person, who was immune to webs! She still got mortally wounded by non-web methods during her battle with the forgotten beast, but not before killing the thing.

I did try to re-settle the site after spiderwoman killed the beast, but it was so haunted by the ghosts of dwarves that I had to give up on the endeavor. Ghostly dwarves can be put to rest by carving memorials for them, but my guys were too scared to adequately memorialize the dozens of ghosts. Still, at least the forgotten beast got its due!

I went back to fortress mode after running out of interesting sites to explore in adventure mode, because they really do play off each other–exploring randomly generated sites as an adventurer isn’t as interesting as exploring an old lost fortress, so I need to get more forts killed before I play as an adventurer more. But hopefully not the residence of my elf kid

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I think my months are November-December lmao. My job is very busy this time of year and I worked 10-12 hour days and weekends for those two months and what got me threw it was Dwarf Fortress. I set up my guys to do their dwarf chores inbetween executing queries or something lmao.

I recently added a mod that adds different types of dogs to the game. They function the same as normal dog units but now I can have corgis!!

DWARF DOGS FOR DWARF FORT

Also horrifically you can eat them and make their hides into leather. So when I embarked I choose a number of leather goods made out of corgi leather because I’m an awful person but it’s funny. My fortress is named THE SCREAMING DOG.

Also I built it on a volcano and something caught fire and a humongous wave of fire killed all my corgis but it caused the game to lag out and crash therefore I DID NOT SAVE SCUM but I basically got to revert back to a save before the fire death wall. It was really some pompeii apocalyptic destruction and I still not sure what triggered it. I hadn’t unloaded my wagon so when it hit my wagon, the whole game just blew up lmao

Oh and the dog mod adds chihuahuas so I always train them to be war dogs because it’s funny to have WAR CHIHUAHUAS and then watch them take down a titan. I like to imagine they barked at them to death.

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Ok I actually did not succeed at raising my dwarf-elf to adulthood and making her a baroness. Not because she died, but because the fort was just too peaceful and boring to maintain for a couple decades. She was seven when I left her, and still healthy, so I’ll unretire the fort in a few years to see if she’s still OK.

To shake things up I made a dwarf swordswoman in adventure mode and brought her to a necromancer’s tower with the intent of learning the secrets of life and death, something I hadn’t really experimented much with yet in adventure mode. Necromancer towers usually contain a tablet which, if you read it, will give you power to raise the dead (as either a mindless zombie or an intelligent creature with free will). I happened to know where to find a tower because I made a dwarf fishing village near one not too long ago which got overrun with zombies…

Anyway long story short my adventurer successfully found the necro-tablet and learned how to make zombies. I gleefully ran through the wilds finding corpses to raise into a little army.

https://i.imgur.com/PfoBqwI.jpeg

The tough part, it turns out, it collecting bodies which are complete enough to be useful. The sprites don’t show it, but most of those zombies are missing arms, legs, or are just disembodied heads…

The easiest way to kill enemies is to strike their neck and decapitate them, but that leaves you with just a bodiless head to re-animate (as far as I can tell most animals cannot be reanimated without a head, though hands and feet sometimes can). That leaves you with a worthless re-animated dingo head minion who can bite but otherwise is not very effective.

I experiment a bit with attacking enemies at their chest or legs to bleed them out rather than decapitate, but it is rather time consuming to do with 10 dingo heads flailing around on the ground. Ah well, at least I made some abominations.

Reanimated heads aside, early in my necromancer travels I came upon the corpse of one of my previous adventurers, an elf warrior named Emali, in a dungeon. I decided to raise her as an intelligent undead to see what would happen.

Initial results were a little disappointing, she came back to life but seemed to be incapable of speech, and wouldn’t respond to my necromancer. So I ditched her in the dungeon and went off in search of more animal heads to re-animate.

I eventually got bored of the necromancer life and retired the character, and when I went to start a new character, I wondered… can I play as the re-animated intelligent undead lady?

Sure enough, I could, with the “play as existing character” option! As I took control over her I found she had wandered from the dungeon where she was reanimated, was stark naked, covered in her own blood, and had a bruised brain (maybe that was why she seemed incapable of speech earlier?)

I brought her to a nearby dungeon which I knew was cleared out from my necromancer’s travels and equipped her with some clothes from the dead goblins there. I also found a steel scourge, one of the more fearsome weapons in the game. From there I went around as some sort of vengeful frankenstein monster scourging goblins and megabeasts to death in the wilds.

Here she is.

https://i.imgur.com/b65Adhw.png

I’m sort of scared of her because being an intelligent undead means she has super strength, doesn’t feel pain, and can kill almost anything. The fact that she uses a scourge makes her even scarier, as they’re one of the most heart-stoppingly gory weapons in the game. Rather than a merciful decapitation like you’d get with a sword or an axe, fighting with a scourge means you quickly rip your enemy’s armor to tatters and then pulp their flesh, which generally incapacitates enemies quickly but leaves them alive and in pain for a long time… eesh.

Adventurers can re-appear as migrants, visitors or attackers in fortress mode, so now I’m wondering if I’ll be getting a visit from this monstrous character in the future. Hopefully a friendly visit?

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Have you considered digging until you uncover the horrible secrets that lay hidden deep within the earth? Surely nothing could go wrong if you just keep digging??!

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My partner is playing Dwarf Fortress on hardmode and by that I mean, they are running it on a Linux instance with a graphics overlay. They asked me I could help them with something and I said, I have no idea what the heck you are playing lol.

It’s isometric pixel and honestly, it’s pretty dang cute. It kinda looks like FF Tactics + Maple Story but with absolutely impossible controls to figure out. The dogs and cat sprites are extremely cute.

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