[Dwarf Fortress]TW Fort (2024)

So, some of you may recall me making a thread a long ass time ago about a game called Dwarf Fortress. It's a weird, quirky little ASCII game where you pick a spot in the world, buy some equipment and skills, and then set out with seven dwarves to build a badass fortress.

It sounds pretty simple, but there's an insane level of complexity and detail to every part of the game. Before you play for the first time you have to generate a world, which can take as long as five minutes or so even on a modern PC. During world creation it builds all the land masses, places mountains and valleys, creates lakes and then simulates erosion to form rivers and streams, simulates the growth and spread of forests/jungles/deserts/tundras/glaciers/etc, and a bunch more. It also simulates every single person and larger creature that lives in the world, from royalty to peasants to dragons and ogres. It knows that this particular dragon attacked this specific elven town in the year 745, that it killed these three specific elves, it stole these particular items, destroyed these houses, etc. All the people and such have all this history and family lines and the events that have happened to them and it gives the game world a lot of depth and life to it.

Other sh*t includes fluid dynamics for using water and magma to power machinery, create traps, make badass architecture, or whatever you want. Since the last thread that I posted he added z-levels, and there are something like 30-40 levels up and down on each map now. Lots of different machinery like windmills, water wheels, retractable bridges, siege weapons, floodgates, levers that you can hook up do things like retract bridges/trigger traps/open floogates/etc. Trade caravans will come from the various civilizations that are near your fort (assuming there are any) and you can barter for stuff that you need with the various valuable stuff you've created or carved out of the mountain. The world is created with fairly realistic geological rules, and you can find a huge array of different rock types, gems, ores, and lots of other stuff you can use for a million different things. You can use those gems and things to encrust golden statues or platinum thrones or silver doors or whatever else you make out of the various ores that you smelt down.

The damage system is really detailed and every limb and organ is tracked, meaning that fingers can be chopped off, lungs pierced by arrows, livers and hearts cut out by swords, heads cut off, intruders ripped apart into chunks by your war dogs, dwarves splattering on impact after falling over a cliff in combat, goblins impaled on spikes at the bottom of the pit below your draw bridge, and a million other awesomely gory situations. I had a dwarf who was hit in the head by a rock in a cave-in, and his head was permanently damaged. For the rest of his life he wandered around my fort doing his job, but every once in a while he'd fall over unconcious and sleep for a while wherever he was

So yeah, I realize this is just sort of a rambling list of details, but I'm trying to impress upon everyone the depth and detail that's going on here. People tend to just see the ASCII and think "well if there aren't even graphics then it must be a sh*tty game". Personally I really enjoy the ASCII since it lets you use your imagination a lot more, which makes it more fun for me. It doesn't take too long to get used to the ASCII, and once you do you'll start to realize all the ingenious little tricks that are used to convey so much with simple text characters. If you really can't get over it, there are graphical tilesets available at the Dwarf Fortress Wiki, there's a link at the end of this post.

Now that I've gone on for an hour about this game you don't care about, here's what I'm going to do. I'm starting a new fortress and I need volunteers to go along. Basically, one of the dwarves in the game will be named after you, and you'll get to find out what horrible fate you've met as the fort progresses. I'll post some screenshots and stuff to show what's going on every so often. I've seen this done on other forums, and we did it in the last thread here too, and it's funny to see the stupid sh*t that happens I believe the last fort had us running out of food during the first winter, so we slaughtered all the cats and ate them. Around spring time our military was outfitted with cat leather gloves, dog leather boots, etc.

First seven people to volunteer get to be in the initial party. If you're one of the first seven, suggest where you'd like our site to be. Mountains, forests, plains, deserts, glaciers, beaches, jungles, any terrain you can think of is a place we can settle. I recommend a mountain on the edge of a forest as the safest bet, but we can go crazy and settle on a glacier or in a desert or something.

I'll try to keep track of what everyone does in the fort, and I'll post screenshots when interesting sh*t happens. I might even ask for opinions or votes on what to do next if there's a good opportunity for it.

Dwarf Fotress' motto is "losing is fun", and sooner or later our fort is going to meet a terrible, quite possible gory end. With enough mismanagement this should be a hilarious foray into the lives of drunken, hairy little people.

(If you're interested in playing the game yourself, the DF wiki is mandatory reading. Check out the tutorials there. There's information on just about everything in the game, and they have graphical tilesets if you're afraid of the ASCII)

Dwarf Fortress Wiki: Main Page - DwarfFortressWiki

Dwarf Fortress Official Site: Bay 12 Games: Dwarf Fortress
Latest version download: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/df_28_181_39e.zip

Screenshot from a previous fort with some labels to show what is what: http://www.deskbreaker.com/drjonez/images/df/catfort.jpg

DF Map Archive is a site with a bunch of movies/screenshots of cool sh*t people have made in DF: DF Map Archive

Movie of an irrigation system I made. If you've never played you should still get the general idea of what's going on: My First Irrigation System by DrJonez

Movie of a dragon attack. The fire breath is badass. They catch it in a cage trap at the very end: Dragon Attack by Mister Six

Dwarf List:
thejacob
Reaver
Gangrel
whazup911
borlak
Ben Reed
dweeb

Obibun (fisherdwarf)
DeaconBlues (not Donny fa*gen)
Procell
Maverick
Kizzak
Bugspray
z3r0
Merranza

I don't think you guys know what you're wishing for. If we settle on a glacier we're going to have dwarves freezing to death, few trees for wood, no soil to plant food in, to plants to harvest, etc. It's really hard to survive there. So, I'm just going to go ahead and say f*ck the glacier, and move us on to a cool mountain somewhere Maybe I'll find a volcano.

NERD ALERT