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The impenetrable game to end all impenetrable games. The game that randomly generates worlds, monsters, cultures, people, events, dances, books, and more. The game that has inspired a whole subgenre of games and countless tales – involving goblins, lava, elephants, and – of course – dwarves. The game that was banned from /r/nocontext posts for just being cheating. The game the author joked was more about watching it be played than actually playing it.
Dwarf Fortress started out as an effort to completely simulate a fantasy world to support a roguelike game – and the version number is meant to convey how far along they are (currently version 0.47.04 or 47% done). There are three primary ways of playing Dwarf Fortress. The first is as a roguelike: Adventure mode lets you wander a randomly generated world, meeting characters and killing goblins and zombies. The second is Legends mode, which is a way to peer into the history of the randomly generated world and learn the stories of the cultures found there. The last is the one it is most well known for: fortress mode.
Fortress mode lets you embark on a journey with seven dwarves to found a new dwarven colony, withstand the attacks from goblins, zombies, and necromancers, and eventually become a force to be reckoned with in the wider world. Along the way, you must micromanage your dwarves to grow food, provide entertainment and healthcare, create artifacts, and root out which of your dwarves is the vampire. The fate of most all fortresses is ruin, whether from goblin siege, internal strife, or a button press gone wrong. This goes well with the games’ motto: losing is FUN! (“FUN!” being distinguished from “fun” by some).
The two biggest hurdles to starting in on Dwarf Fortress are the interface and the mechanics. Now, while I realize that may sound like the entire game, it is. I have – on several occasions in the past – attempted to learn the game with little success. This time, however, I had four factors in my favor which buoyed me to success… or, well, my entire fortress dying because I didn’t flip a switch – but as mentioned that’s arguably the point of the game anyway. I would highly recommend some combination of these factors to any aspiring Urist.
First, I had gotten used to the game concept while attempting to play Rimworld. Amusingly, I went into this intending to do an impression of Rimworld. But as cool as Rimworld was (and having graphics and other such amenities was nice), I kept feeling like things were missing – especially the third dimension. Admittedly, Dwarf Fortress has had a bit of a head start on Rimworld, but it’s hard to overstate how many systems are in place in Dwarf Fortress.
Next, my keyboard control had improved due to working on headless Linux servers. This obviously isn’t mandatory, but the controls in Dwarf Fortress are a lot more palatable after you’ve used vim and nethack over telnet/ssh.
Third, my interest had been steadily growing for a long time – from reading stories online to a friend who enjoyed playing it. Finding the channel Kruggsmash pushed this interest over the edge – a combination of dwarf fortress and excellent storytelling and artistic skills.
And finally, the PeridexisErrant Starter Pack – colloquially known as the Lazy Newb Pack. I feel no shame in using this. The Lazy Newb Pack is a GUI for internal Dwarf Fortress options packaged with some extremely useful game mods, and it makes maintaining your installation dead simple. There are several features I would highly recommend: a graphics pack to replace the ASCII default – while the ASCII is doable, the graphics pack (like in my screenshot) just makes a variety of things easier to remember (especially since there literally aren’t enough characters to represent everything in ASCII). Soundsense, which not only provides sound effects but also keeps a handy window with a running game log of all events open. DFHack, which enables Multilevel view (making outside areas easier to understand), adds automation tools, a multitude of quality of life improvements from siege engine updates to text will be text, and allows you to automatically assign jobs to your dwarves. That last one is probably the only one you might consider a “cheat” – if so, I’d recommend using DwarfTherapist instead. For now, job management inside Dwarf Fortress just requires far too much input to be enjoyable to me.
Once I started in on my fortress, things actually went pretty well. My first year in-game probably took several real-life hours – but not just because I was familiarizing myself with the interface (although that was part of it). No, instead it was because I kept going down rabbit trails of information on the mechanics: how to do certain things, how I’d like my fortress to look, what requirements there were for various items, etc.. And remarkably enough, once I got used to the rhythm and feel, it started to seem almost intuitive – like learning the cadence of a Dark Souls game.
The main complaint I can think of is also because Factorio spoiled me – it would be nice if ordering the creation of an item would queue up the component parts as well, rather than needing to go to five or six different places to get things ready for anything more complicated than a bed even when you have all the requisite materials and workshops [Edit: Something along these lines is actually in the game – the manager will handle this for you, to a point]. The only other complaint I can think of is that some menus scroll with the arrow keys, some with the number keys, and some with the +/- keys. That one’s a bit weird.
The one rabbit trail I didn’t expect was reading about the dwarves in my fortress – and I think this aspect is the first hint of what makes Dwarf Fortress great. As I attempted to figure out why certain dwarves weren’t happy, I learned about those dwarves’ habits, beliefs, and opinions. I started empathizing with them, and gradually got things to the point that the fort was running smoothly. The dwarves were happy, I’d narrowly averted a food crisis (of my own making), and I had plans for some interesting new excavations.
Then, near the end of my second year, it all fell apart. I had just gotten 20 new migrants and was feeling pretty good when a zombie siege came to my fort. Instead of calling my dwarves back and closing the drawbridge (which is what I had planned on and prepared for), I figured I should get my militia some combat experience. Given that they didn’t even have armor at this point, I can now see how painfully obvious the result was: everyone died (and came back as zombies), and my fortress fell to ruin. Ah well.
While this is very much a first impression, I think I’m now comfortable putting Dwarf Fortress in Tier One. I’ve already started a second fort, and I’m excited to try again. I don’t normally play these sorts of open-ended games – usually, I end up feeling like the time I spend just isn’t worth it and that the “result” is too impermanent to be interesting (e.g. Minecraft). And even though hearing people’s Dwarf Fortress stories excited me, I didn’t really expect to feel the draw of actually playing it (especially after trying Rimworld). But perhaps because every fortress is part of a larger world that you can keep coming back to, I kinda did. Somehow, it does feel like there’s something special here – something that might actually be worth the time.