Price: You're Soul Free!
Website: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Dwarf Fortress is one of my favorite games of all time. If you enjoy deep mechanics and feel the urge to try something unorthodox then give this game a download (it's free) and, if you can figure out the controls, you'll be in for a wild ride.
Dwarf Fortress is not for everyone... I think it's actually only for a very few. If you can become even mildly proficient at Dwarf Fortress then you will have joined an elite fellowship in the upper echelons of PC gaming geekdom. The game is brutally difficult, it only has ASCII based graphics, the UI is like hard coding a computer language, and the game itself has lots of bugs. Why would I recommend this game and why is it one of my all time favorites? Two words. "Mechanics" and "Details" Oh sweet mercy the mechanics and detail of this game are the deepest, widest, and most amazing in the world for any video game ever.
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| A small snipped of a world map. This is a stunning view of the antarctic polar cap moving into tundra, serene cold plains, coniferous forests, deciduous forests, hills, mountains, freshwater swampland, and treacherous oceans. You can also see a desert in the west and just north of the desert is The Hammering Star (dwarven nation). |
When you start Dwarf Fortress for the first time you will need to create a world to play in. For other games this takes only a few seconds, for Dwarf Fortress it can take minutes and will put your computer's processor through its paces. Each world created involves creating every individual character and every monster in that world and a simulation is run for a period of 50 - 5000 years wherein these individuals and monsters live life and every event changes the characters and is recorded. By the time you get to enter the world it already has a unique history filled with kingdoms, cities, towns, villages, families, and individuals who have worked together, fought each other, loved, quarreled, developed likes and dislikes, fortunes and fears, works of art and powerful artifacts.
You can play in three different modes. Fortress mode puts in charge of an expedition of dwarves where you pick a location in the world, travel there, and build a home. Adventurer mode allows you to create a single character to go throughout the world in a rogue-like RPG adventure. Legends mode allows you to view the various locations and history of the world.
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| Embarking on an expedition in The Universe of Enchanting to The Velvety Hill in The Jade Horn-Land, a warm savanna with fertile soil, clay for making earthenware, and rich in metals but an aquifer will make mining very difficult. The settlement will be on a stream named The Dear Wanderer surrounded by wilderness. If you press tab then you will be able to see who your neighbors are, a break down of the elevation, and the presence of other biomes that may not be readily apparent. |
You are going to lose this game a lot, but as everyone in the DF community says "losing is fun!" My first half a dozen fortresses came to wonderfully terrible ends, getting butchered by goblins, minotaurs, zombies, or dying of starvation.
Once you establish a self sufficient outpost and your dwarves are safely underground you can start focusing on digging deeper, constructing individual rooms for your dwarves, and start up one or several of the many manufacturing chains to create necessities and items for trade. As your wealth grows migrants (and enemies) will be drawn to your outpost and you will have to figure out what to do with them. Migrants may have useful skills that can greatly benefit your industry (jewel crafting, farming, weapon smithing, glass making, etc.) or they may have useless skills (cheese making, milking, glazing) in which case I volunteer them to join the militia. Enemies should either be locked out of the fortress, captured, or killed.
Everything in Dwarf Fortress, every dwarf, every monster, every barrel, tree, rock, weapon, plump helmet has a dizzying amount of stats associated with it and can be used for any number of things. The options are so many, the scope so large, and the mechanics so deep and the fact that you are playing in 3 dimensions on a 2 dimensional map is so confusing at first that everyone playing will get lost in what to do, and provided you know what to do you will probably also get lost in how to do it because there are just so many options available. Thankfully caring Dwarf Fortress super geeks have put together what is called "The Lazy Newb Pack" which adds better graphics, extra Dwarf Fortress apps, and quick start builds to make playing the game easier and the DF Wiki which you will act as your textbook for how the varying characters, constructs, systems, and goods all fit together.
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| A basic self-sufficient outpost mined into the side of a hill. Farms for food. Breweries for drink. Beds for sleeping. Craftworks and plenty of good stone for trade. Masons and carpenters for constructing furniture and walls. Traps at the door to dissuade invaders and thieves. A trade depot. All of this brought to you by the Phoebus tileset graphics pack. |
There is something very satisfying about making the pieces fit together and watching your little dwarves go about their lives. Planting seeds, harvesting crops, milling them, brewing them, preparing lavish plump helmet roast garnished with lettuce leaves chopped prepared reindeer liver, and finely diced river berries, having a lucky dwarf grab that meal, make her way to the legendary dining hall, and gain all manner of happy thoughts for eating a majestic meal in a legendary dining hall while chatting to her friends and admiring the fine craftdwarfship of the tables and chairs.
Turning layers of solid rock into an intricate community of dwarves who go about their lives is fun in the sense that building and watching an ant colony is fun, but dwarves aren't ants, their proud, stalwart, greedy, and ambitious. It isn't enough to just cut out a deep home in the roots of the mountains so that they can eat and sleep and admire the furniture. Dwarves take pride in their crafts and love to display their wealth! Take those fine tables and chairs and inlay them with silver and cerulean gemstone. Cover the walls with carvings that display the proud history of your race and your home. Create works of power and beauty. Dig deep, find the valuable ores and gems, pave your home in gold and gems, and brain any goblin hoard or monster who thinks they can take what you've laboured to make.
They will be coming, the hoards of greedy monsters who will storm your home, murder your dwarves, and try to claim your riches for their own. You must prepare for them. Build walls with strategic drawbridges, setup safe zones for your dwarves to stay in when they are under attack, assign a militia, cover them in armour and weapons, set falling rock traps, pitfall traps, cave-in traps, weapon traps, cage traps, drowning traps, lava traps, angry bear traps, ballistic traps, crushing traps... the list of what you can prepare with goes on... Or you can skip the traps and let your militia go toe to toe with the invaders. The fight mechanics, like everything else in Dwarf Fortress, are incredibly deep and complicated and it is well worth reviewing the combat logs for a full description of what happened because what you see in real time happens so fast it's hard to decipher what all the flying pixels and red means.
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| A grisly combat log between the player and a bandit leader in Adventure Mode. Fortress mode combat logs look like this but with more combatants. |
In my first fortresses combat did not work in my favor for a variety of reasons. I hadn't figured out how to properly assign a militia and my drawbridges were set to retract instead of raising to block off a passageway. My poor dwarves got butchered in the first four years. I've come a long way since then and in my most advanced fortress goblin sieges and random monsters are a valuable source of income. Monsters can be captured, tamed, and used as 'pets', some can even be trained for war. Goblins, even when out numbering me 5 to 1, get torn to shreds by a well trained steel clad militia... it's like a wrecking ball hitting a house of cards. Their shoddy weapons and armor can be smelted down and used to create useful and valuable things. Just for the fun of it I smelted down the weapons and armor of my goblin siegers into pikes, made a deep deep pit, put the pikes at the bottom of the deep deep pit, then dropped the goblin prisoners into the deep deep pit onto the pikes they had so graciously provided the materials used to smelt them with. That's what you get when you start an unprovoked war on the dwarves! Future prisoners will get to compete in a death arena against all the beasties my dwarves have captured (or purchased from exotic caravans) and if they manage to survive, may attempt to run "The Gauntlet of Grisly Death" in a bid to reach the surface while their captured leaders are forced to watch from their display cages in the trophy room.
The more wealth and the larger your fortress the more enemies will try to tear it down, eventually attracting Titans, Forgotten Beasts, and other things deeper, darker, more sinister, and more powerful than anything else you have encountered...
But hey, "Losing is Fun!" and long before you reach the end game you have lots of other things to keep you occupied like "where am I going to put all these new migrants?" "why has one of my dwarves stolen the craft workshop and constantly repeating cryptic words?" "what is an artifact and why do I want them?" "why is all the rum gone?" "how do I build a well?" "if I seize all of the Elvish goods will they attack me?" "why would I want Elvish goods?" "I must control the river." "who needs a watch dog when you can have watch bears!" "why do the animals keep dying?" "how do I create a grazing area and how do I assign animals to it?" "get back here you blasted Kobold!" "is there a vampire in my fortress?" "how do I get rid of these annoying nobles?" "Where did that blasted Pigtail Fiber Mitten get to?" "what do you mean I can't make goblin bone crafts?" "What is the proper ratio of farmers to brewers in a community of my size?" "Hey a huge underground cave!" "Lava!?" "Magma smelters!" "Smelt all the things!" "Dwarfy McDwarftington likes granite, sapphires, and cows... what is the best way to fill his room with all of these things to make him a very happy dwarf?" "Why are my dwarves wandering around naked?"
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| A simple flowchart for the beginner DF player. |
Once you overcome the learning curve you can have a lot of fun with Dwarf Fortress, and depending on your personality type overcoming the learning curve may be part of the fun! It's definitely not for everyone though, and that's just fine. The game industry is full of corporations that put out games with 'broad appeal' to sell the most copies possible to make lots of money. Dwarf Fortress is a refreshing labour of love created by two brothers who have a vision of something great and unique. What caught me off guard when I was learning how to play was how much personality came through the mechanics and how vivid the non-graphics can be. The review is getting long but please allow me to share a story or two more.
I was looking at the surface layer and noticed a small letter 'c' and a green dot moving about. Unsure what this was I paused the game, pressed 'k' which is the command for 'look' and hovered over the c. It was a cat (male). I hovered over the green dot. It was a firefly. The cat was chasing the firefly in the meadow. I thought that was pretty cool and wondered at what point the programmers decided to write that particular algorithm for cats chasing fireflies. Then I marveled at how the cat managed to get out of the fort in the first place because all the doors were securely locked and had been for some time. Further investigation revealed that cats are not adopted by dwarfs (which is odd considering that dwarfs can adopt pets) but rather dwarfs could be adopted by cats. Oh my. But here's the thing that really impressed me, while I saw the minimalist graphics of a 'c' and a green dot moving about through the 'O's (tree trunks) and other pixels representing various plant types I could see the cat and the firefly in my mind's eye, the chase somehow vivid in vibrant colors, an orange cat in a sunny meadow full of green grass and daisies waving in the wind, a bright spot amidst the cool shadows of the thick pine trees all around. Now, obviously my mind created this image but I wasn't expecting it to and somehow, for me at least, the minimalist graphics can become more impressive and immersive than high budge AAA graphics engines. When talking to other DF players I found that some of them have had similar experiences.
My other story involves an evil 'g' (goblin) thief who jumped one of my overland farmers and then took off towards the edge of the map. The militia were training nearby and I ordered them to attack before the nasty little rodent got away. Normally dwarfs and goblins move at the same speed but one iron-clad master hammerer ran past all the other dwarfs, caught up to the goblin and pixels flew everywhere with lots of smashing and squelching noises, more than one would think are required to kill an unarmored goblin with a war-hammer. I checked the combat log and it turns out that the goblin had attacked the farmer with a silver dagger, lacerating his right hand. The dwarf who managed to catch up the the goblin was the farmer's brother (interesting) who struck the goblin on his right hand over and over and over again with his silver war-hammer, first cracking the bones, then breaking the bones, then shattering the bones, until the hand was destroyed (bits and pieces flying to adjacent tiles) before landing a killing blow to the head. Was the brother inspired by rage to exact this sort of grisly vengeance or was this all just chance? I don't know. But wow, the amazing things that can happen when you have mechanics as deep as Dwarf Fortress.Now there's one more thing about Dwarf Fortress you need to know. It's not finished yet. It will probably never be finished ever. It's a continually growing and evolving project with updates and new versions coming out every few months adding new features, fixing bugs, and creating whole new bugs. Considering that this game is already more complex and has more features than most finished games this really works to its advantage. There is also a vibrant modding community so you can dive into fan-generated content (which is actually really good) should you ever find 'vanilla Dwarf Fortress' to easy.
If you are the least bit intrigued then download the Lazy Newb Pack (it's free) and check out my Dwarf Fortress tutorial.
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