The Official Dwarf Fortress Thread

[DarkDXZ]

Slaves to Armok: God of Blood
Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress

Yes, it had to be made eventually...

Dwarf Fortress (also known as Slaves to Armok: God of Blood - Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress) is easily one of the most complex, robust, least hardware-demanding games ever made. Also, the hardest one to learn I ever recall....

What is Dwarf Fortress, essentially?
It is a mix of a strategy, simulator and roguelike game, with two (or three) game modes - a titular Dwarf Fortress mode, a less-likely-to-be-talked-about Adventure(r) mode, and also an indirect game mode, Legends.

In DF, you are given seven dwarves, with various abilities and labors (that you can customize pretty much), with basic equipment, you have to settle in one of (many) areas of your randomly generated world - it has its own history, civilization, wildlife and legends.

Once you settle (or embark, as referred to in-game) in a chosen location, you start to make your own dwarven fortress - here comes the"Strike the earth!", chopping down trees, making farms and many, many more aspects - from making stockpiles to maintaining water pumps to trading with other civilizations to making sure that your dwarves have enough food, ALCOHOL, and are happy - and there are many factors that can affect that - let it be noise made by workshops when one tries to sleep, purple, stenchy gases made by rotting flesh (miasma) to one's relatives not being buried or memorized - yes, your dwarves are not just mindless machines that do everything for you - they have to eat, sleep, they can have relatives that can "go past to the dawn of the time" - every single dwarf in your fortress has his very own, deep history.

This game's amount of content is so big that even after playing the game for a pretty long time you will always discover something new - let it be a new mineral, never-seen-before beast or a mysterious sickness causing vomiting and coughing blood...


The best part about that? The game is totally free to play. No fu**ing around with PayPal or other strange ways of transferring money - just go to the website (the title at the top of the post), download it and enjoy!
BUT, the creator(s) of the game highly appreciate donations, so go ahead and show your support for the land of "Slaves to Armok: God of Blood - Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress"...

[Kaedechan]

Won't play it until an actual GUI is implemented. My power level isn't high enough to comprehend little symbols.

[themightycomrade]

LOL, first time I played fortress mode, I embarked on a beach being total noob, and then a zombie whale annihilated my village (I kinda just jumped in, so don't blame me).
Other then that I have once succeeded to get all of my limbs dismembered on adventurer mode, so I became a legendary biter, which was actually pretty fun, because I could bite off limbs from most of my enemies.
Other then that, I never really understood what the hell can or should you do in this game, so i'll be happy if anybody could point me to a good guide.

[tunaspirit]

I usually get stuck after the part I build some workshops, a farm, various stockpiles, a dormitory, a meeting hall and a trading post.
Then I have my animals starve to death because I don't know how to feed them.
And those fucking staircases man.

[mikuli]

...least hardware-demanding games ever made.

lolwut.

If your processor is over 6 years old, you may as well forget about running forts two cats. Even though the GPU requirements are rather low, due to the ASCII representation of the world, the CPU power you need for this game is crazy high compared to what it looks. I mean topping pretty much any given major game release from last year. DF eats Skyrim's CPU usage for breakfast and asks for seconds, if you run a decently sized fort. Also, it will only use a single core, so your octacores will be wasted on this one. like all other AMD products ever anywhere

I could only run <20 dwarf forts playably with my 7 year old top-of-the-line CPU with every little optimization tweak I could find. We're talking about a 3.2 Ghz hyperthreading Pentium IV byte cruncher here.

[Fluttershy]

Won't play it until an actual GUI is implemented. My power level isn't high enough to comprehend little symbols.

Download the lazy newb pack, contains a bunch of useful stuff including multiple graphics packs that make the game a little more understandable (or just download the graphics pack by itself, but i highly reccomend that one thing that makes assigning tasks to dwarves easier).


Havent played this game in awhile, dont feel like starting a new one until the next update. All i remember is my last econemy thrived off of the cat trade. slaughtered thousands of the little things for food and bones. Best decision ever.

[DarkDXZ]

...least hardware-demanding games ever made.

lolwut.

If your processor is over 6 years old, you may as well forget about running forts two cats. Even though the GPU requirements are rather low, due to the ASCII representation of the world, the CPU power you need for this game is crazy high compared to what it looks. I mean topping pretty much any given major game release from last year. DF eats Skyrim's CPU usage for breakfast and asks for seconds, if you run a decently sized fort. Also, it will only use a single core, so your octacores will be wasted on this one. like all other AMD products ever anywhere

I could only run <20 dwarf forts playably with my 7 year old top-of-the-line CPU with every little optimization tweak I could find. We're talking about a 3.2 Ghz hyperthreading Pentium IV byte cruncher here.

Yeah...Funny since my PC is single-ocre, if I recall...
Anyways, surely there are more resource-swallowing games than Dwarf Fortress, in some parts...

Still, it is a good game, but I admit - it's learning curve is bloody [...].
Hopefully you can change graphics to your liking (with LNP), so the game is a little easier to understand.
So far all the videos I saw about it were made using a "texture" pack...It's hard to play it on vanilla.

[mikuli]

Well, just try running 300+ dwarves in a mountainous region with a start area of 6x6 or so and you'll see what I'm talking about. A 200 dwarf fort with too narrow hallways will completely clog up a Core 2 Duo-level CPU. The problem can be eased with using 3-10 square wide hallways in high-traffic areas. I tend to design my forts in a city-like fashion, with the workshops and living quarters surrounded by hallways. Sort of like city blocks.

The problem with the game is, that the movement speed of your dwarves is completely dependent on the internal frame rate the game can run at, depending on your CPU's speed - the graphics output FPS is capped at 50 by default (IIRC), and the doesnt really fluctuate all that much, since like said, it is not very graphics intensive. I personally consider the game quite unplayable at internal speeds of under 100 ticks per second, since building pretty much anything bigger will take quite a long while. You can set the frame rate display visible from the configuration files.

For a 6x6 starting area with very high cliffs and a stream running nearby, my i5-2500k can keep the tickrate up at 230 FPS. This is with 7 dwarves who are not doing anything but milling around next to the wagon. If i had the quite usual catsplosion happening with a couple of hundred dwarves, all trying to utilize the routefinding algorithm, I'd consider myself lucky to see even +20 fps - and with that, everything takes forever to happen.

Of course, when the game isn't really doing anything (when paused), the FPS will be soaring at around 550,000, with the G-FPS at 50.

[mman789]

First off, if your having trouble learning the game, I suggest the Lazy Newb Pack which includes the latest build of the game, adds actual graphics, and some other useful tools. I also suggest these tutorials.

Second, this is a very fun game. I've only gotten a bit into the game though since by the time I start setting up rooms for my dwarves and moving them out of a dorm, I run out of food and they all starve :D. This is one of my favorite kind of games, the kind you have to master.

[Yourself]

Dwarf fortress is really fun once you learn how to run it. I'll probably wait until the upcoming update to start a new fortress though.

Edit: My next fortress will probably be created out of an obsidian cast.

[SueSakamoto]

No amount of lazy noob packets are going to help me comprehend this game anymore than I do now

[DarkDXZ]

Well, if you would look at it that way, it isn't really high-end compared to features in it.
I don't say it's a lag-less game, in no way, but if it was done by EA or any other (rogue! they supported SOPA!) big company, they probably made it far more challenging for any PC than it is now.

Damnit, I had SO GOOD place to embark, but when preparing I've thrown out steel anvil (since I'd prefer to have an iron one), and I couldn't find it in the "shop".
Since then, I totally lost that site, FUU!

(damn, it's REALLY hard to find a good site with no aquifer...)

[tunaspirit]

"Some migrants have arrived."
*camera moves to migrants*
Me: okay now lets go back to my fortress
*moves around the borders of the screen
Me: duck WHERE IS MY FORTRESS
DfHack: die

[Doctor]

[Kanye]

YEAH. YES. OKAY. YES.

My last fortress ended with one of my master carpenters (from the original troupe) going bat-shit and murdering one of my make-shift militia during my first goblin siege which I was by no means ready for. I haven't played it much recently because I've been distracted by other things, but I plan on revisiting it and building a thriving fortress as soon as the new update rolls out.