AlexMax
03-25-2008, 07:12 AM
Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress
I just found out about this game a couple of days ago and I am viciously hooked.
WHAT IS IT?
Dwarf Fortress is actually two games in one:
On one hand, there is Fortress mode, which plays something like Sim City or Dungeon Keeper. You pick a starting location on a map, skills for your starting seven dwarves (through which your commands, such as "dig out a cave", "build a table", "attack that monster", etc. are done), and some supplies. On a superficial level, once you get to your destination, your objective is to build the most badass dwarf fortress possible, but since there are no win conditions, what you do with your fortress is up to you.
On the other hand, there is an Adventure mode. This basically takes after roguelike games such as Nethack or Diablo and allows you to wander around the gameworld and kill shit.
http://xs225.xs.to/xs225/08131/dwarfort932.png (http://xs.to)
And oh yeah, the entire game is in ASCII. You can adjust the tileset and colors, and there are some rudimentary graphics available, along with some neat utilities such as a 3-D fort viewer, but the fact remains that the graphics are a little...sparse. Fortunately, the graphics are very easy to get a handle on, and soon it'll simply make sense to you at a glance.
If you hate words, and you like pretty moving pictures and remixed Legend of Zelda music, you can watch this youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94qFsN247G8) to see someone in the initial stages of fort construction.
So what's so awesome about this game? Well, for one, the gameworld is fiendishly complex. For example, when you want to start playing the game for the first time, you have to wait 5-10 minutes (minimum) for the computer to generate a world for you. It is very thorough, creating realistic mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, swamps, deserts, civilzations, and then takes the game through a thousand or so years of recorded history and creates historical events over the course of said history. It takes a while, but remember how I said you only had to do this once? The reason you do this once is because once the world is created, it is persistent. Perhaps the biggest ramification of this persistance is that If you abandon a fortress, you can visit the ruins of your old fortress in adventure mode. You can even, upon starting a subsequent fortress, attempt to retake your old fortress with a show of military force.
So how about that fortress then? Well, your fortress can be as awesome as you want. You can build it into a side of a mountain (the choice of most true dwarves), but you can also dig an underground fortress directly into dirt, or even build a fortress straight off the ground. Once it's built, you can build storage rooms for your meat and other items, bedrooms for your dwarves, workshops to create weapons, food, furniture, and other items with, underground farms to grow crops (if you dont feel like planting outside). As you dig, you have a good possibility of running into tons of surprises, such as underground aquifers, bottomless chasms, valuable ore and even magma.
The complexity comes in the sheer amount of stuff that is possible with a little creativity. One of the most impressive (and funny) things I've ever seen in the game is someone utilizing a magma vein as a means of defense. If their base was under siege (oh yeah, goblins and other nasties can siege your fortress, did I mention that?), they had a system of levers, channels, and floodgates set up to where all they had to do was order all their men inside the fortress, lock their front door, then throw a switch, and magma would pour out of a hole in the side of the mountain (this game has working fluid dynamics, by the way) and flood the entire outside area, killing everything. Of course, this pissed off the elves that the player had been trading with (oh yeah, you can set up trading posts to trade with outside civilizations), and soon he was drowning entire elven legions in hot hot magma before accidentally leaving a door open and flooding his own fort with hot magma, killing almost everyone inside.
This is a picture of the great fort Boatmurdered at its height. Thumbnailed (obviously) so click for big:
http://xs225.xs.to/xs225/08132/local_map10639186.png.xs.jpg (http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs225&d=08132&f=local_map10639186.png)
You can read the saga of the great fort Boatmurdered here (http://fromearth.net/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/). You might be able to get some idea of how much you can actually do in this game, but note that this was played with an earlier version of Dwarf Fortress, which by contrast had very linear gameplay. There used to be no Z-Axis, so you always started on the side of a mountian, and as you dug right you always ran into an underground river, a bottomless pit, a magma vein, and finally a vein of Adamantine, in that order. Modern versions of Dwarf Fortress are way more randomized and flexible, you can build a fort directly into the ground or like a normal building (if you have the material for it), and you are not guaranteed to find any one particular map feature as you dig (which can be particularly troublesome if you do not start near a source of water, as finding an underground aquifer is not a guarantee).
Oh yeah, losing your fort. You will lose your fort the first couple of times you play, mainly due to ignorance, but the nice thing is that once you get the hang of things, and soon start coming up with cool yet hair-brained building projects to indulge your secret fantasies in, in your quest to create the most kickass fort ever.
I really feel like I'm not stating enough about how in-depth this game is, but I wanted to keep this sorta short. And oh yeah, the game's user interface isn't the most friendly. So if you want to get started, there are one of two options that you can give a shot:
Dwarf Fortress: The Mike Mayday Graphics Edition (http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm): This includes the latest revision of Dwarf Fortress and adds graphics tiles (for the dwarves and monsters) and a custom character set (for everything else).
Dwarf Fortress (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html) itself. Includes the standard character set and no graphics. This is what I use, along with a configuration change that changes water to use numbers to signal how deep it is, Inquisitor Saturn's 12x16 tile set from here (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/List_of_user_character_sets) and the "Natural" color scheme from here (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Color_schemes).
UH, HOW DO I PLAY?
Yep, I wasn't lying when I said the game is complex and that its user interface is not the best.
First things first, make sure and bookmark the Dwarf Fortress Wiki (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Main_Page). If you have questions about ANYTHING in the game, it will have the answer.
Second, out of all the tutorials for learning the game I have personally tried, Your First Fortress (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Your_first_fortress) is by far the best, as it tells you explicitly what to bring and doesn't skimp. (there was a huge spoiler section here, but its gone now because the reason i couldn't plant anything was because my seeds vanished, not because you need ash)
I think I'm kind of going off on a limb with this thread, and I kind of doubt that anyone at AGN will be able to make heads or tails of this game inbetween playing Brawl, but here's hoping.
I just found out about this game a couple of days ago and I am viciously hooked.
WHAT IS IT?
Dwarf Fortress is actually two games in one:
On one hand, there is Fortress mode, which plays something like Sim City or Dungeon Keeper. You pick a starting location on a map, skills for your starting seven dwarves (through which your commands, such as "dig out a cave", "build a table", "attack that monster", etc. are done), and some supplies. On a superficial level, once you get to your destination, your objective is to build the most badass dwarf fortress possible, but since there are no win conditions, what you do with your fortress is up to you.
On the other hand, there is an Adventure mode. This basically takes after roguelike games such as Nethack or Diablo and allows you to wander around the gameworld and kill shit.
http://xs225.xs.to/xs225/08131/dwarfort932.png (http://xs.to)
And oh yeah, the entire game is in ASCII. You can adjust the tileset and colors, and there are some rudimentary graphics available, along with some neat utilities such as a 3-D fort viewer, but the fact remains that the graphics are a little...sparse. Fortunately, the graphics are very easy to get a handle on, and soon it'll simply make sense to you at a glance.
If you hate words, and you like pretty moving pictures and remixed Legend of Zelda music, you can watch this youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94qFsN247G8) to see someone in the initial stages of fort construction.
So what's so awesome about this game? Well, for one, the gameworld is fiendishly complex. For example, when you want to start playing the game for the first time, you have to wait 5-10 minutes (minimum) for the computer to generate a world for you. It is very thorough, creating realistic mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, swamps, deserts, civilzations, and then takes the game through a thousand or so years of recorded history and creates historical events over the course of said history. It takes a while, but remember how I said you only had to do this once? The reason you do this once is because once the world is created, it is persistent. Perhaps the biggest ramification of this persistance is that If you abandon a fortress, you can visit the ruins of your old fortress in adventure mode. You can even, upon starting a subsequent fortress, attempt to retake your old fortress with a show of military force.
So how about that fortress then? Well, your fortress can be as awesome as you want. You can build it into a side of a mountain (the choice of most true dwarves), but you can also dig an underground fortress directly into dirt, or even build a fortress straight off the ground. Once it's built, you can build storage rooms for your meat and other items, bedrooms for your dwarves, workshops to create weapons, food, furniture, and other items with, underground farms to grow crops (if you dont feel like planting outside). As you dig, you have a good possibility of running into tons of surprises, such as underground aquifers, bottomless chasms, valuable ore and even magma.
The complexity comes in the sheer amount of stuff that is possible with a little creativity. One of the most impressive (and funny) things I've ever seen in the game is someone utilizing a magma vein as a means of defense. If their base was under siege (oh yeah, goblins and other nasties can siege your fortress, did I mention that?), they had a system of levers, channels, and floodgates set up to where all they had to do was order all their men inside the fortress, lock their front door, then throw a switch, and magma would pour out of a hole in the side of the mountain (this game has working fluid dynamics, by the way) and flood the entire outside area, killing everything. Of course, this pissed off the elves that the player had been trading with (oh yeah, you can set up trading posts to trade with outside civilizations), and soon he was drowning entire elven legions in hot hot magma before accidentally leaving a door open and flooding his own fort with hot magma, killing almost everyone inside.
This is a picture of the great fort Boatmurdered at its height. Thumbnailed (obviously) so click for big:
http://xs225.xs.to/xs225/08132/local_map10639186.png.xs.jpg (http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs225&d=08132&f=local_map10639186.png)
You can read the saga of the great fort Boatmurdered here (http://fromearth.net/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/). You might be able to get some idea of how much you can actually do in this game, but note that this was played with an earlier version of Dwarf Fortress, which by contrast had very linear gameplay. There used to be no Z-Axis, so you always started on the side of a mountian, and as you dug right you always ran into an underground river, a bottomless pit, a magma vein, and finally a vein of Adamantine, in that order. Modern versions of Dwarf Fortress are way more randomized and flexible, you can build a fort directly into the ground or like a normal building (if you have the material for it), and you are not guaranteed to find any one particular map feature as you dig (which can be particularly troublesome if you do not start near a source of water, as finding an underground aquifer is not a guarantee).
Oh yeah, losing your fort. You will lose your fort the first couple of times you play, mainly due to ignorance, but the nice thing is that once you get the hang of things, and soon start coming up with cool yet hair-brained building projects to indulge your secret fantasies in, in your quest to create the most kickass fort ever.
I really feel like I'm not stating enough about how in-depth this game is, but I wanted to keep this sorta short. And oh yeah, the game's user interface isn't the most friendly. So if you want to get started, there are one of two options that you can give a shot:
Dwarf Fortress: The Mike Mayday Graphics Edition (http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm): This includes the latest revision of Dwarf Fortress and adds graphics tiles (for the dwarves and monsters) and a custom character set (for everything else).
Dwarf Fortress (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html) itself. Includes the standard character set and no graphics. This is what I use, along with a configuration change that changes water to use numbers to signal how deep it is, Inquisitor Saturn's 12x16 tile set from here (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/List_of_user_character_sets) and the "Natural" color scheme from here (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Color_schemes).
UH, HOW DO I PLAY?
Yep, I wasn't lying when I said the game is complex and that its user interface is not the best.
First things first, make sure and bookmark the Dwarf Fortress Wiki (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Main_Page). If you have questions about ANYTHING in the game, it will have the answer.
Second, out of all the tutorials for learning the game I have personally tried, Your First Fortress (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Your_first_fortress) is by far the best, as it tells you explicitly what to bring and doesn't skimp. (there was a huge spoiler section here, but its gone now because the reason i couldn't plant anything was because my seeds vanished, not because you need ash)
I think I'm kind of going off on a limb with this thread, and I kind of doubt that anyone at AGN will be able to make heads or tails of this game inbetween playing Brawl, but here's hoping.