Dwarf Fortress
Dwarf Fortress is a construction and management simulation and roguelike indie video game created by Bay 12 Games. Available as freeware and in development since 2002, its first alpha version was released in 2006 and received attention for being a two-member project surviving solely on donations.
Originally displayed using ASCII graphics, the game is set in a detailed, procedurally generated fantasy world with randomized creatures, NPCs, and history. Players can control a colony of dwarves in a fortress or explore the world as a player character. Its mechanics have been lauded for their depth and complexity.
Prior to Dwarf Fortress, Tarn Adams was working on a project called Slaves to Armok: God of Blood which was a role-playing game. By 2004, Adams decided to shift from the original Armok to Dwarf Fortress after the former became difficult to maintain. Adams calls it his life's work and said in 2011 that version 1.0 will not be ready for at least another 20 years, and even after that he would continue to work on it. A paid edition with graphical tiles and a new soundtrack was published by Kitfox Games and released to Steam and Itch.io in 2022.
Critics praised its complex and emergent gameplay but had mixed reactions to its difficulty and learning curve. The game influenced Minecraft, RimWorld, and others, and was selected among other games to be featured in the Museum of Modern Art to show the history of video gaming in 2012. The game has a cult following and an active online community. As there are no win conditions, every fortress, no matter how successful, will eventually fall; this has prompted the community motto: "Losing is Fun!"
Gameplay
Overview and game modes
Dwarf Fortress has three primary game modes which take place in worlds created by the player, where most of the elements are randomly generated.- Fortress mode, a construction and management simulation of a colony of dwarves. There are no objectives, with the player being free to decide how to go about managing the colony and making them interact with the environment, thus making it an open-ended and sandbox-style game. Since there is no way to win, it only ends when the entire colony is defeated by the various possible threats, or the player decides to abandon or retire the fortress.
- Adventure mode, a turn-based, open-ended roguelike where the player starts off as an adventurer.
- Legends mode, in which players can view maps, histories of each civilization and any figure who has lived or died in the generated world. Any notable achievement made by the player in any of the two game modes is recorded and is viewable in Legends mode.
- An object testing arena is present, where players can simulate battles between selected units in various conditions. It is also used for testing mods.
☺, a cat is a dark gray c, a dog is a brown d, and a giant spider is a light gray S. The tile-based graphics use code page 437 characters as tiles, giving it the appearance of a text-based game. The paid edition replaces the characters with pixel art sprites and includes an option to switch between the new and old visuals in the settings menu.World generation
The first step in Dwarf Fortress is generating a playable world; only one game can be played per world at a time. The player can adjust certain parameters governing size, savagery, mineral occurrences and the length of history. The map shows symbols representing roads, hills, towns and cities of the various civilizations, and it changes as the generation progresses.The process involves procedurally generated basic elements like elevation, rainfall, mineral distribution, drainage and temperature. For example, a high-rainfall and low-drainage area would make a swamp. Areas are thus categorized into biomes, which also have two variables: savagery and alignment. They have their own specific type of plant and animal populations. The next phase is erosion—which the drainage simulates. Rivers are created by tracing their paths from the mountains to their ends which are usually oceans, though some form lakes. The salinity field defines oceans, mangroves or alluvial plains. Names are generated for the biomes and rivers. The names depend on the area's good/evil variable and though in English, they are originally in one of the four in-game languages of dwarves, elves, humans and goblins; these are the four main races in any generated world.
After a few minutes the world is populated and its history develops for the number of in-game years selected in the history parameter. Civilizations, races and religions spread and wars occur, with the "population" and "deaths" counters increasing. The ticker stops at the designated "years" value, at which point the world can be saved for use in any game mode. Should the player choose to retire a fortress or adventure mode character, or should they be defeated, this world will persist and will become available for further games.
Fortress mode
Basics
When Fortress mode is selected, the player is given the option to choose the embark location in the world. The player can consider the environment, elevations, biome, soil types and mineral concentrations which can pose significant challenges to the development or survival of the fortress. Customizing the colony's supplies, domestic animals and skills are available, but each dwarf's mental and physical attributes are randomly generated. The game describes in detail each dwarf's physical appearance, like hair and facial features. The mental abilities, individual preferences and desires are also randomly generated. Each dwarf's relationships with others and the deities they worship can be viewed.The player embarks with the expedition team, and does not have direct control over them. In order to construct and operate the fortress, the player has to designate specific tasks to be performed and the dwarves will go about it. They can be assigned any labors, but their work still depends on their relative skill with it, which can increase as they perform said task. Some task categories are stone-working, woodworking, metalworking, farming, and crafting; there are further combat-related skills. They are categorized further, such as leatherworking, butchery, clothesmaking, gem cutting, glassmaking, and pottery. Activities take place in workshops which need to be constructed; for example, stills for brewing alcohol. The metal industry has a very important role because it produces weapons and armor for the military, trap components for defense, and high-value furniture and decorations.
Functional mechanics
The player initially can see a top-down view of the surface-level of the fortress site; each layer of a z-axis level can be viewed when the player changes it. An entire underground level would be seen as its entire section of terrain while a mountain at the surface level would have only its section visible with the remaining surface landscape. Thus, for digging, the player can designate, for every z-level starting from the surface, staircases to be carved, and, at the final designated level, end the staircase by having it dug into a room.The geology in Dwarf Fortress is fairly accurate. Rocks like olivine and gabbro can be dug up. The topmost layer usually consists of sand, clay or plain soil—this can be used for underground farming. Deeper levels will be layers of rock; minerals appear in layers or clusters around the right depth. Gems like tourmalines appear in rare clusters. Water is simulated like falling sand; every tile can contain up to seven levels of it. A tile having one level of water is the lowest, while a tile with seven is full. There is a system for simulating temperature and heat. Fires can spread and burn dwarves and furniture. There are four basic seasons in an in-game year: spring, summer, autumn and winter.
Mineral ores can be mined just like normal stone and the raw ore can be smelted to produce their corresponding metal bars. Different ores or metal bars can be alloyed together for higher quality materials. For steel production, flux stones are used to make pig iron bars and smelt it with regular iron and coke. Specific metal items can be melted back to their respective bars. Without steel, the alloy bronze or regular iron are the next best suitable metals to use. Bronze requires two ores or bars of tin and copper. The metal adamantine, found deep below, is extremely light but very strong, making it excellent for sharp weapons and armor. Raw adamantine can be extracted into strands and can further be either woven in cloth or smelted into wafers.
Fortress management and growth
Underground farming has customized crops like "plump helmet" mushrooms, which can be brewed to make dwarven wine. As the fortress prospers, migrants come in larger numbers from the mountainhome and will need further accommodation. Trading caravans, which can be from the various neighboring civilizations including the home civilization, visit the fortress on a yearly basis and are useful for getting supplies not available in the player's fortress area. The role of bookkeeper, manager and broker can be assigned to any dwarf during early game. The bookkeeper maintains records of every item present in the fort, the manager auto-assigns jobs and the broker deals with trading caravans. The production of crafts from any material are useful for trading. The caravans come from civilizations of elves and humans but depending on the embark region and history, they may be absent or sometimes even hostile.Dwarves need to be provided with food and drink. A dwarf will get negative thoughts for drinking plain water and even for drinking the same type of alcohol, making it necessary to grow different crops for producing different drinks. Things like not having a separate bedroom can upset a dwarf. They may make friends and sometimes marry; females give birth. Dwarves can get upset by sustaining injuries, having poor clothing, losing their pets, friends or relatives; interacting with or seeing their corpses can aggravate this. A frustrated dwarf may break furniture or attack others. Continuous stress will cause them to throw tantrums and eventually go insane, whether going berserk and attacking their comrades in a homicidal rage, becoming suicidally depressed and jumping off a cliff, or simply going "stark raving mad" and stumbling around randomly until their untimely death. Their quality of life can be improved by giving them luxurious personal bedrooms and a well-decorated dining room, medical care, and providing them with a variety of drinks and well-cooked meals. A chain reaction where a single dwarf's unhappiness causes the entire fortress's population to start throwing tantrums can begin when one dwarf throws a tantrum, attacks and kills another one with many friends, which drastically affects the happiness of many more.
As the fortress expands and develops, new noble positions become available. While regular dwarves will be happy with simple rooms provided to them, dwarves appointed or elected to noble positions will need more luxurious accommodation. Nobles will even make demands and mandates, getting negative thoughts if they are not fulfilled. A justice system is present to punish criminals, such as dwarves who injure or kill another dwarf or destroy furniture. Occasionally, a vampire dwarf, with a false background history, may arrive with a migrant wave and start killing and feeding on the other citizens without being noticed.
Inspired dwarves will occasionally get into a "Strange Mood". They will take over a workshop and go searching for the required materials to begin construction of an artifact. If they cannot find the materials, the dwarf will wait at the workshop, demanding it until it is available. After a few in-game weeks, the work results in a legendary artifact, an item so masterfully crafted that it is usually worth more than a beginning fortress' total wealth put together. These artifacts will be added to the world's records and its exact description can be viewed. Through this entire period of being in a strange mood, a dwarf will not eat, drink or sleep and will eventually go insane if they are unable to complete the artifact due to any reason.