Dwarf Fortress
Original thread by Thorny made on Facepunch forums (http://www.facepunch.com), asked for his permission to re-make it here so here it is




Dwarf Fortress is a rogue-like game that focuses on the establishment and long-term maintaining of a dwarven settlement. Everything is rendered in ASCII, although there are "tilesets" and "charsets" that render everything differently.



Dwarf Fortress started development in 2001, and no public release was made until 2006.

Originally the game was simply 2D (meaning, there were no z levels. You could not go up or down). There was no variety in the maps. On the left, there is a grassland, and on the right side, there is a mountain, further in a cave river, chasm, magma and then adamantine/the Pits.

Then, the 3D version was released, with the major addition of Z levels, and mechanics. This expanded gameplay tremendously, but made underground rivers, magma, and creatures etc unique to their landscape. To clarify, this is not in a 3D view, but adds 3D features. Whereas in the 2D version you could go left and right, x and y axis, the 3D version adds up/down, the z-axis. Once more, THIS IS FROM THE SAME VIEW AS THE 2D VERSION, TOP-DOWN.

Released on April Fools Day 2010, DF 2010, the latest big update, was an overhaul to a huge chunk of the game, that took over a year to do! For example, Combat has been changed, materials and items reworked, Dwarven Healthcare introduced, Burrows created and the Underground overhauled, to name a few! Take a look in the new version subsection of the Features section for a more detailed changelog of what's been added/changed!

The latest version is here: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html

Screenshots can be found here:

http://bay12games.com/dwarves/screens.html





Dwarf Fortress has three major game modes, a fourth non-game mode, and a sandbox arena mode.

1. Dwarf Fortress Mode: In this mode you manage a number of dwarves whose task is to create a fortress.
2. Reclaim Fortress: Once you have created and abandoned/lost a fortress, you can take a band of military dwarves to fight the monsters that now inhabit it. If you succeed, the fortress is yours to play in once more, just like the standard dwarf fortress mode.
3. Adventure Mode: In this mode you explore the world in a fashion similar to Rogue, Nethack, or Angband, completing quests and killing monsters. In adventure mode you can uncover details about your world's legends.
4. Legends: In the fourth mode you can read more about the legends of your world, provided you've discovered them through adventuring.
5. Arena Mode: This mode was released with the latest large-release of the game, and allows you to spawn any creatures you want in an enclosed arena, assign them teams and armour/weaponry, and fight them to the death! This mode is perfect for testing out modded creatures, as well as simply having some sandbox fun!

1. The world is randomly generated with distinct civilizations spanning over 1000 years of history, dozens of towns, hundreds of caves and regions with various wildlife.
2. The world persists as long as you like, over many games, recording historical events and tracking changes.
3. Command your dwarves as they search for wealth in the mountain.
4. Craft treasures and furniture from many materials and improve these objects with precious metals, jewels and more.
5. Defend yourself against attacks from hostile civilizations, the wilderness and the depths.
6. Support the nobility as they make demands of your populace.
7. Keep your dwarves happy and read their thoughts as they work and relax.
8. Z coordinate allows you to dig out fortresses with multiple levels. Build towers or conquer the depths.
9. Build floodgates to divert water for farming or to drown your adversaries.
10. Surgery, sutures, splints, crutches and more: care for your wounded dwarves instead of leaving them to fend for themselves.
11. Much much more...
12. Play an adventurer and explore, quest for glory or seek vengeance.
13. Meet adversaries from previous games.
14. Recruit people in towns to come with you on your journey.
15. Explore without cumbersome plot restrictions.
16. Seamlessly wander the world -- 197376 x 197376 squares total -- or travel more rapidly on the region map.
17. Accept quests from the town and civilization leaders.
18. Retire and meet your old characters. Bring them along on an adventure with a new character or reactivate them and play directly.
19. Z coordinate allows you to move seamlessly between dungeon levels and scale structures fighting adversaries above and below.
20. The combat model uses skills, body parts, individual tissues, material properties, wrestling, charging and dodging between squares, bleeding, pain, nausea, various poison effects and much more.
21. A dynamic weather model tracks wind, humidity and air masses to create fronts, clouds, rain storms and blizzards.
22. Over two hundred rock and mineral types are incorporated into the world, placed in their proper geological environments.
23. Add new creatures, weapons, plants, metals and other objects via modifiable text files.
24. Extended ASCII character set rendered in 16 colors (including black) as well as 8 background colors (including black).

The changelog of the newest version can be found here. It is too massive to be posted. http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AT8EQ ... l=en&pli=1



Due the the very easy editing of the raws, (simple text files that make up a lot of the game) many mods have been created that can range from full conversions of races, creatures and items to a simple additional stone type.




http://www.archive.org/details/Dwarf_Fortress_Video_Tutorials - 40 video tutorials on almost everything you'll need to know to play!

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/40d:I ... e_tutorial - Indecisive's Illustrated Dwarf Fortress Tutorial

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/40d:Y ... t_fortress - Your First Fortress

http://df.magmawiki.com/ - The most useful site related to Dwarf Fortress - Go here for anything and everything.

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/ - The Official Forums

http://bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html - Check it every now and again for latest developments.

http://fromearth.net/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered The awesome tale of Boatmurdered - a must read.

http://df.zweistein.cz/ What is Dwarf Fortress? A good site that links you to some stories and knowledge.


Tilesets and Character Sets

Though many of us are used to, and like to play with, the default ASCII graphics, you may be more comfortable using a tileset or character set, which renders everything in the game as pictures, instead of ASCII characters, perhaps making things easier for the newer player. These can be found from the DF wiki.

So what can you do in DF?

Stuff that you can make in DF includes all kinds of constructions and megaprojects, like pyramids, skyscrapers, Moria-like underground kingdoms and even gigantic working computers ( http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/15/co ... -mach.html ). You still need to take care of the basics though, like bedrooms, booze and food, and the dangers that lurk above and below the ground will make sustaining your fort hard. But remember the official DF motto: losing is fun.

And a small story found from the forums to get you to try the game. A player encountered a randomly generated forgotten beast.. with surprising consequences:

"It was a giant pterosaur. I sent my greatest warrior to kill it, which he did in one strike. I thought everything was fine, but later I found out that in the brief scuffle he was covered in some sort of infectious goo. The only symptom was their eyes bursting. It spread all over the place and got on almost everyone. In the end, I did get to experience the new burrows system. I ended up with 3/4 of my dwarves separated into the "Blind" burrow, while the remaining quarter were in the uppermost section of the fort. My fort went from a happy game of construction and building to some sort of horror movie nightmare. I didn't even know this was possible."

I am stickying this thread.

Fantastic content for a fantastic game.

Best thing I have played in years.

This game seems really hard to get in to. How's the learning curve?

My thread put to good use, GJ Orky <3

- Thorny

Remco32 wrote:

This game seems really hard to get in to. How's the learning curve?

It is quite difficult at start, but once you learn the basics like farming, booze production and such, you can have a fort sustained quite easily, from which point you can then start to do all kinds of sandboxy stuff. Like build a pyramid, towers, walls, a castle, or dig deeper to explore the cavern systems and minerals, make a drowning chamber or whatever. Check the tutorials in the OP and you'll be good to go.

Beacon wrote:

My thread put to good use, GJ Orky <3

- Thorny

thanks :>

Edit: double posted by accident. I'm too used to automerge.

Also updated some OP links to ones that actually work.

If you're like me and you aren't HARDCORE enough to deal with the ASCII graphics for whatever reason, Stonesense provides you with a colorful 2.5D isometric view of the game. It still doesn't help with the rather steep learning curve, though! D;

Learning curve is absolutely massive, but once you learn to manage the interfaces, the game provides depth that no other game can even manage.

I had a fortress where I sent a burrow of 15 dwarves down into the first layer of caverns in order to cut down some of the giant mushroom trees growing there for wood, since they lived in a mountainous biome.

Needless to say, shit happened and the tunnel down to the caverns was no longer accessible. On top of that, goblins had stormed the fort above it and all the other dwarves had been mercilessly slaughtered. The dwarves living in the ramshack burrow in an incredibly hostile cavern with only a squad of 5 rookie troops to protect them had to hold out for three whole seasons until the next caravan came and cleared out the fortress.

I ended up constructing a mini-fortress palisade using most of the trees in the cavern, my military dwarves becoming hardened soldiers from fighting off wave after wave of troglodytes and giant toads, until the squad leader had his spine broken in a skirmish, and with no doctor to treat his wounds, he died only a season after the palisade had started.

After that, I just stopped doing expeditions and held out in my little palisade for as long as I could, using the now leaderless military dwarves to escort people whenever they needed a drink, and the herbalist whenever he ventured outside the palisade to get some shrubs for the dwarves to eat.

Then a swarm of giant bats filled the cavern and they all died.

Horribly.

That is the beauty of Dwarf Fortress. You die in the best ways possible.

Wait, what.

You can't just sticky threads in here because you like the game.

Personally I find it pretty boring, even with tilesets.
It's just the same old sim shit, with stoned AI.

neo@lex wrote:

Personally I find it pretty boring, even with tilesets.
It's just the same old sim shit, with stoned AI.

It's much more than that once you really learn to play and get into the game. And the dwarven AI, while efficient, is legendary amongst DF players for doing dumb shit like going to drink from the booze stockpile while on fire, causing the booze to blow up and send the fortress into a spiral of madness and fiery destruction. But that's part of the fun.

On another note, in an old fort of mine:

In one of my old aboveground megacities, not one but TWO babies suicided by jumping from the top floor of a 12 Z-level high skyscraper (highest of the three skyscrapers I had constructed) and splattered all over my prison's roof. I only found the first baby's remains after the second one died, before that time it was a mystery how the "Baby has collided with an object" death message happened. I constructed a ramp that lead to the roof and the dwarves took the remains (first baby was already rotted to the bones but second was a fresh corpse) into their tombs from the prison roof.

They suicided because their parents got killed in a siege.

Laughed really hard when it happened. The fort in question: http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-3024-tradedaubed

The fort I made after that fort, which is better in my opinion. Bigger and richer: http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-5322-lightblockade

Some battle videos:

http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-991-champio ... georcforce
http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1240-generi ... eorcsvideo
http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1266-squads ... completely

An example of the above mentioned genious dwarven AI: http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1013-theidiotsuicider

Ivalset wrote:

Wait, what.

You can't just sticky threads in here because you like the game.

I can't deny these allegations.

You gotta admit though, that is a pretty sweet OP. I want to encourage that kinda content, you know?

Wow, this thread sure died. First post in 10 days.

Anyways, good news everybody! The next version, .04, will likely be released tomorrow. It will also be the first version to be OpenGL, so expect easily resizable windows and much, much better perfomance along with several awesome bugfixes (acid rain, bugged healthcare and never-rotting vermin+corpses fixed along with several others).

I tried this game out for a bit and even watched some of the youtube vids to help me out, but i really just gave up because of the menu system was so hard to interpret. it is a extremely deep game with way more then i can imagine , yet dauntingly hard to navigate and understand . when or if they decide to make the game more user friendly I'll check it out again when it updates a few times.

.04 OpenGL version is out

That "tomorrow if lucky" turned out to be a week, but whatever it's out now, and damn it's good.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=57492.0

Edit: There seems to be a nasty bug with window resizing, it turns into a black screen for many people quite often when resized.

My current fort. Above ground, so there's houses and roads and stuff that I constructed. Hospital, restaurant, apartment buildings, noble mansions, workshop huts and offices and stuff necessary for a fort to run. Surrounded by a two-tile thick rock wall.

Orkel wrote:

My current fort. Above ground, so there's houses and roads and stuff that I constructed. Hospital, restaurant, apartment buildings, noble mansions, workshop huts and offices and stuff necessary for a fort to run. Surrounded by a two-tile thick rock wall.

Amazing.

Pokebis wrote:

Amazing.

Thanks :)

My military commander is quite badass aswell. Charging an entire bowgoblin squad, batting arrows out of the air, blocking the arrows with his shield and dodging them, and then destroying everyone when he got close enough using his steel short sword.

Went straight for the squad leader, a hammerman.