DWARF FORTRESS (a free, alpha release game)

[signal]

I recently found this crazy game called Dwarf Fortress. First of all it's an ASCII game so be forewarned. However, if one can get past the graphical shortcomings, one will find a very complex and detailed creation. The object is to build a dwarf fortress and get the little bastards to be productive and survive. It takes a little while to learn it, but once you do it can be addictive. The wiki is a must-read in order to learn the game mechanics. It is fun and the two shortcomings that I see are the ASCII graphics and micro-management (however, for some micro-management is fun).

The game is in alpha; however it is playable. Updates appear regularly and according to the website the game has been in development since 2002.

Developer's Website: Bay12Games

Download Link: Dwarf Fortress

Wiki: Useful Wiki Information

Screen shots: Screenshot link



Synopsis (from dev's website):
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Welcome to Dwarf Fortress. Prepare to guide your stout charges to fortune in a world fraught with many perils. You'll begin by creating your world and watching an animation of the region's history. Once this process is completed, you can prepare a group of dwarves and send them out to seek wealth deep in the mountains. As you dig deeper and more dwarves take up residence in your outpost, your doings will attract attention, both wanted and unwanted. Deal with challenges as they arise, and you might one day find that your fortress has grown to become the capital of the kingdom.

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Since the ASCII characters are confusing (for me, at least) I used this complete download which is an 'object tileset'... a little easier on the eyes.

Enjoy!

[bogey1]

The Dubious Quality blog turned me on to this game. It's an incredibly good sim (ala the Tycoon games, Sim-Earth/city/etc), held back by an incredibly long learning curve in part due to a difficult to use GUI.

I gave up on it after a couple times of starving in the winter. It was really cool, but the GUI frustration overwhelmed me. I wanted to click-drag to define stockpile regions. I wanted to right click on a dwarf to bring up menus, etc, etc.

Give this game a proper interface and it's the best sim I've ever seen.

[signal]

[ QUOTE ]

I gave up on it after a couple times of starving in the winter. It was really cool, but the GUI frustration overwhelmed me. I wanted to click-drag to define stockpile regions. I wanted to right click on a dwarf to bring up menus, etc, etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

I definitely see your point. In fact there were many times that I went to use the mouse only to find that there was no mouse cursor, only arrow keys work.... According to the developer, the ASCII graphics and unintuitive GUI are in place he can better use his time to refine and add to game play.

The source code is not released to the public, but if it were the ASCII and GUI issues would most likely be addressed by other programmers.

By the way, I am in my second game. I am nearly through the winter so maybe I have a chance.

[Bostaevski]

i played the hell out of this game. Surviving first winter is cake if you make your first priority to get an indoor farm up and running ASAP. Send one miner east into the mountain until he hits the river. Then mine out something like an 11x6 room, install necessary floodgates (i never do nile-style farming) and start planting. You don't need bedrooms, dining rooms, or anything.

With the current version of DF, you can designate custom stockpiles. So make sure your food stockpiles do not allow seeds. next to the farms, put small stockpiles that ONLY allow seeds.

There is definitely a steep learning curve to this game.

Eventually i got to where I was consistently building up a fortress with 200 dwarves. Full economy going and would have the goblin sieges coming once or even twice a year. At this point I found the game would become almost unplayable because every goblin that gets killed drops all his crappy armor and weapons and your dwarves will queue up all those "hauling jobs". After a bloody siege and 30 or so dead goblins it could literally take a couple years before the mess was cleaned up. The way around this for me was to build about 70 cage traps at the entrance to my fortress (My fortresses all have a main hallway that is 6 tiles wide and runs from the cliff face to the magma river with bridges over the cave raver and chasm). The gobs would get trapped in the cages. Then a dwarf will come haul the cage to an animal stockpile while your mechanic dwarves go to replace the traps with empty cages. Once all the caged gobs/trolls are in an animal stockpile, I would assign them all to a single cage. The dungeon master noble (if you have him) will transfer them to the single cage. Now I have this cage stuffed with like 25 goblins and 10 trolls. If you have the bookkeeper noble, you can go to the stocks menu and tell the dwarves to "chasm" that cage. A dwarf will come pick up the cage and haul it to the chasm, then throw it in. No mess, no crap to pick up, no blood to wash off the walls... hehehe

Also it's nice to eventually divert some magma to the chasm and fill it with magma. It will piss off the rat men and troglodytes that live down there. They'll come crawling out and attack you but eventually it will kill off everything in the chasm.

[Bostaevski]

A good starting build for your 7 dwarves
2x Maxed out (proficient?) miners
1x Carpenter/Woodcutter
1x Mason/Novice Building Designer
1x Mechanic/Novice Stone Crafter
2x Proficient Growers

Bring with you 2x puppies, about 30 plump helmet spawn, 1 battle axe (you don't need 2). Also about 5 of all the other types of seeds. Finally bring 1 or 2 each of the 4 different alcohols (you get free barrels that way).

When game starts give your growers the "gather plants" job and designate a huge area to gather plants outside.

use 'q' or 't' or whatever on the wagons and deconstruct them for free wood. Build a refuse stockpile outside, a wood stockpile, and a food stockpile. Do not build a stone stockpile since it is a huge waste of time to have dwarves hauling rocks around.

Send one of the miners on a straight shot single tile wide tunnel east till he hits the cave river. Once he is into the mountain a ways, set the other one to widen the tunnel. I make mine 6x wide and it just continues east that way. Don't bother with other rooms, just build the mason workshops and such right there in that 6x wide tunnel. You can build bedrooms/dining room/prison/etc on the other side of the cave river. In fact I build all my industry in the main tunnel until i'm across the CHASM and then build the industry area between the chasm and magma river.

While the miner is heading east, get a mason workshop and build 2 rock floodgates and a couple rock blocks. A mechanic workshop should start by building 5 mechanisms. You might also build the carpenter workshop and start on some buckets for a well.

Once the miner hits the river, get your floodgates built. See the DF wiki on how to properly build your floodgates and set up a farm. Hook them to a lever to flood the room, then unflood it and start a farm plot. You should be planting seeds by late spring.

[bogey1]

No, I got it, I really did. I was in position to survive winters and got lazy. I played more than twice actually, but quit several times as a learned.

I never got to the point of nobles or being attacked. I was already going insane managing 30-45 dwarves all doing stupid things and not what I wanted. I really wanted to be able to bring up a screen with all dwarves and sort based on jobs so I could see how many I have doing job X, then be able to click on it and zoom to that dwarf. Or see who was unhappy and be able to click or get hover text on why.

I found 2 huge problems:
1) It's hard to know what's wrong with anyone or why things aren't happening (WTF isn't it smelting steel?)
2) Even if you know, it's a pain to sort through and find how to address it and assign the tasks.

The idea of managing 70 or 100 or 200 dwarves wasn't appealing at all, so I stopped.

Like I said though, given a really good intuitive interface and ways to surface lots of info, this would be an absolutely mind bogglingly incredible game.