#0006: Intro to Dwarf Fortress (AWWOT archived article)
Below is an article I wrote in 2014 for a defunct online magazine that my friend made. It was a general hobbyists/interest e-magazine for people into gaming, films, and tech. It’s name was “A Wonderful Waste of Time”.
This article is about a game called Dwarf Fortress. Describing this game succinctly is rather difficult so I’ll use the developer’s description of their game.
“Dwarf Fortress is a single-player fantasy game. You can control a dwarven outpost or an adventurer in a randomly generated, persistent world.” ~Bay12games.
A very simple summarisation for a very deep game.
Article:
Starving Dwarfs
Dwarf Fortress, or to give it it’s full title: “Slaves to Armok: God of Blood – Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress”, has three main modes: Dwarf Fortress, Adventurer, and Legends; all of which are affected by the game’s chief mechanic, which is that it can create an entire new randomly generated world on request.
In doing so it doesn’t just create the geography of this new region; the layout of the vast continents, the high reaching mountain ranges, the sprawling deserts, dense jungle, sparse woodland, destitute badlands, and evil tainted realms to name but a few varieties of terrain you can experience; but the game then writes the history of the new region. This can range from the five years after world creation, all the way up to a maximum of 1050 years. This ‘history’ can include the recording of kingdoms which arose then might have fallen, the wanderings of great forgotten beasts, the formations and breakdowns of fraternities; right down to the individual life records of a boot making peasant. It can be as deep as you care to look, and in my opinion, that level of randomly generated lore is quite a feat; more so because the denizens’ histories are consistent and interwoven into each others time lines.
Fortress mode is the main game mode, it usually consists of building a large subterranean dungeon. You don’t have to though, you can stay on the surface if you want; it’s just a good idea to put your dwarfs safely underground, away from the dangers of sunlight. Once/if you have dug out a decent sized place, it’s usually time to turn your mind to industry.
There are numerous things you can do as the player to tailor your experience in fortress mode. Anything from ignoring whole swathes of industry, terrain, resources, to ignoring the pleas of random dwarfs; the last one I did especially in order to maintain sanity. Once my fortress grew to house hundreds of dwarfs (I think around 240 was the most I ever had at any one time), I stopped caring about individuals. Either they’d go insane because I didn’t have the materials for them to craft whatever valuable tat they wanted to, or their spouse or pets die; I didn’t care really. Once they became a problem, it’s time they went into time-out. I created a starvation room to put these troubled individuals into. Then once ready, I unlock the doors and someone hauls their corpses into a stone box coffin, and hey presto problem solved. No one’s unhappy anymore. Just make sure no one important to the bigger picture cares about them. I know it sounds cruel but my forts were built on the principal of efficiency, and inefficiency was paramount to criminality.
I find that I can keep fair relations with most neighbouring races, be it Dwarf, Human, or Elf; as most of them are pretty fair – that said, for goodness sake don’t trade the Elves anything made of wood, it really upsets them. They say killing trees is amoral or something to that effect, then refuse to do business with me. Yet if you look at what they’re selling it’s usually either more cloth than you can shake a tree at, or yes you guess it: a whole plethora of wooden tat. I’m talking eighteen Palm-wood spears here, empty Cidre-wood barrels, or useless musical instruments! Yeah, because that’s what my underground factory society needs, musical instruments.
In Adventurer mode, you play as an adventurer and explore the world. It’s a decent enough RPG experience, but not for me for the most part. I found the experience quite tepid, I mostly just wandered around interacting with little else but animals, which I had to kill. That said, I didn’t probably play enough of it to see what it really had to offer.
Legends mode consists purely for displaying all the worlds history, it’s just a record that you can read if you feel so inclined. What I like about this is it displays how deep the history generation really is, and it can also show you exactly how all of your tampering has affected the world. I found this to be quite interesting because I got to look into the past of all the creatures of note what attacked (and died in my fortress), for example all the forgotten beasts that attack my fort have usually travelled there through other realms and you can see what they did and where. It really is something to know that, that creature that died to my Militia Commander (and current mother of two) by having a palm wood spear (yeah, I bought five!) lodged into its stupid minotaur cranium; had in fact lived a long and good life up until that point; it adds so much character to the game and I enjoy it for one.
For all the positives of this title, it should be noted that this game has a few things that would most likely put a lot of people off of it. The ASCII graphical aesthetic I think would be the most obvious, although there are a fair few graphic mods one can use instead. The real problem I think this game has is it’s user interface. Once you get used to it and learn the hotkeys, it isn’t bad. But the initial plunge, well its a learning curve sharp enough to cut your fingers on.
Dwarf Fortress is a free game, not free-to-play, free. You can pick it up from the developers, “bay12games” website. Although I wouldn’t recommend playing the game as it is, the mods available for this game really do make the game so much more user friendly, especially Dwarf Therapist. The developers manage to fund this game purely via donations. So, if you try it and like me fall in love like with this modern ASCII monstrosity, kicking them a few farthings might not be a bad spend of your hard earned space bucks.
Comments:
Games like DF age like fine wine, they get better with age as either the developer or the community around them continues to add features and refine the experience.
Six years on, I definitely want to write about (and play) this game again. I just hope that I can say more of technical value other than just advertise a game that I enjoyed, like I did above.
