For those of you who don't actually know what Dwarf Fortress is by now, Dwarf Fortress is a unique little gem that boasts depth and creativity. It's kind of like a city building game with a focus on the actual people doing the building. Now I know that might not sound very appealing to everyone, but creating your own little fortress is, down to every little wall piece, window, door and decorations. You get to manage your crazy little sods as they go about digging their way into the mountain for ores, rocks and shelter, and that's not always easy. Think Mincraft. Think the Sims. Think MAGMA.
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| The mighty stone entrance.The visual style takes some getting used to. |
Dwarf Fortress has been in development since 2002, with its alpha release in mid 2006, and since then has undergone a tremendous amount of updates, changes, overhauls and not to mention the incredible amount of player created mods and utilities for it. It's insane, given the game is practically developed by one guy, Zach Adams, also known as ToadyOne, and his brother Tarn Adams. My complete and utter respect for those guys.
Oh I'm sorry, are all my words positive? Am I using all complimentary language? Do I sound bias to you? That's because it's amazing. Go fucking play it. Right now. I'll wait. It's absolutely free, which is amazing considering that's all the creator does for a living, living off mere donations. Does that sound like it'd be hard? Wait 'til you see the game, then.
Upon starting up the game, you will almost immediately realise that almost everything is randomised. I really do mean, almost everything. You generate the world, that's all randomised. You start with 7 dwarves. Their appearances and features are all randomised. You get a few migrant dwarves each season depending on how good or bad the fortress is doing. RANDOMISED. Forgotten beasts, titans made of god-knows-what attack your fortress from both above and underground. Guess what they are? You guessed it. Randomised. I, no joke, got a vomit forgotten beast once. Personally, I absolutely love the randomisation. It makes for so many different outcomes, such a unique experience. It's great talking with other players, seeing what kind of craziness they've got up to. And my favourite was a hill titan comprised completely of salt that a dwarf killed by biting it to death. That titan delicious, guy? Bet it'd go good with some dog steaks. Hey, don't you judge me! I do what I need to survive.
And you really will need to do just that. The game's motto is "Losing is Fun!" and in a way, it's both thrilling and utterly depressing when your hard work goes swirling down the drain. So many things can happen to put a fortress in danger;
You may be suddenly attacked by goblins who want nothing more than to loot your fortress and see your dwarves all dead and dismembered.
You might suddenly encounter the pits of Dwarven depression as one dwarf's cat dies and he proceeds to destroy his friend's bed, and then his friend gets angry and punches a stranger, and that stranger gets so upset that he refuses to consume any food or drink for months and then dies in the dining room. Now EVERYONE has watched a dwarf die by slowly killing himself. Behold the infamous tantrum spiral. More horrifying than 100 goblin elites.
YOU might make a mistake. Remember that flood gate that lets the water/magma in from the river/volcano that you were using to make a little pond/EPIC MAGMA PIT, but you were distracted by a puppy running around or a goblin attack and forgot to close it. Well.... At least I hope that yout dwarves learn to swim soon.
Getting back on track. Do you like crafting? Of course you do. Dwarf Fortress has crafting. I like crafting, you like crafting, so everybody craft! Dwarf Fortress has over 20 workshops you can build, each with their own list of craftable items. You've got your carpenter's workshop where you make wooden stuff like beds and wooden storage bins (which oh-sweet-Jesus you'll need a lot of), and your masonry where you build doors and stone bricks and floodgates and the like. Then you get stuff like butchers and metalcrafters and so on, until you have a pretty large amount of items sitting around your fortress.
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| Stockpiles, with so much stuff. Special guest Prison, up the top right. |
There's more features than I can mention in one little review, and there's even some spoilers for new and inexperienced players. The longer you play it, the more you realise you're not just looking at ASCII graphics anymore. You're watching actual little dwarves run around and build an actual little fortress, each little guy with his own little back story and specific likes and dislikes which is all spelled out rather nicely in the Thoughts and Preferences window.
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| Dem feelings. |
The game has other features like the Adventurer and Legends mode. Legends mode is basically a viewer of every major living creature such as dwarves or megabeasts. It also lists major outpost or city, Adventurer mode sees you control your own little character of one of the three playable races, Elves, Dwarves, or Humans, and travel around your generated world. The generated world itself is almost infinitely larger than your tiny little fortress embark from Fortress mode, so it's nice to walk around and see how alive the world is. And with every update, it's getting even livelier. You can use your own adventurer to visit your lost fortresses, full of traps and fat loots, and maybe even full of whatever made you lose it in the first place. I wonder if the dragon still hangs out there? You better go check it.
In February, Toady updated Dwarf Fortress with the long awaited undead update, an update that included large amounts of content including new sieges, a new undead system, largely improved evil areas on the world map and huge cities with castles, quests, shops and a whole lot of sewer systems. The evil system brought in was probably my favourite, with the introductions of vampire dwarves occasionally arriving at your fortress, and the new system where, if something dies or is killed in an evil region, it gets back up, regardless of damage. That means specific body parts lopped off will come back to life, along with the main corpse.
As this is a review, albeit a very biased and fanboy-driven one, I do have to point out the game's flaws. (I know! It'll be hard on me too!) The game has so many operations occurring, with every dwarf having thoughts and actions, that it actually gets gradually slower as your population rises, or as the goblins gift you their equipment and body parts and you don't dispose of them (The only way is to burn the excess junk in magma, and not everyone has easy access to that right away). Inevitably, if your fortress lives past its first initial and most difficult years, it will sadly result in a disappointing FPS death. The game is also quite buggy, but nothing game breaking. There was once, and possibly still is, a bug where a dwarf wouldn't quite understand what to do with soap, resulting in him or her trying to shove it in their mouth when washing. Way to go dwarfy.
I am insanely in love with this game. So many stories can come out of even one session of Dwarf Fortress, more than any other game I've seen or played. In order to convey my point, I will now share with you one of my favourite stories about my Dwarves and their hardships. Remember, everyone has a completely different and unique experience, as almost everything in the game in randomised.
Keep in mind, this is a very long story. If you've had your Dwarf Fortress fill with my review, you should probably turn back now, as I'm about to gush my very heart and soul out. If you haven't had enough, it gives insight into a specific story one dwarf can have, as well as the level of detail the game offers you.
Alright, so. I once had a Dwarf named Bomrek. Bomrek was a woman axedwarf, drafted into the military prematurely in the first year of the fortress as soon as she arrived on the scene. Barely had time to unpack her things. Bomrek was reasonably strong, so I put her under the command of an older, more masculine Dwarf in the fort's main militia team of around 4 dwarves including her. Equipped with leather armour and copper weaponry, Bomrek and the others held back frequent werewolf attacks, wild animals and stray kobold thieves for around a year.
And then it happened: A sudden goblin invasion was in progress. Arriving with some trolls and a squad of swordsgoblins, they approached my tiny little fort, which had no countermeasures to stop such a thing. it all came down to the militia, a horrible idea when it comes to Dwarf Fortress. Sending up the squad, the militia commander headed the attack with Bomrek on his heels.
Clashing into the enemy, the militia commander was almost immediately stunned by one of the trolls, which allowed a goblin to come in and finish him. Seeing the commander in trouble, Bomrek rushed in and cut down the goblins, quite a few of them, racking up more than 5 kills in the process (after 5 kills a dwarf earns a special title, which again, is completely randomised). The commander was rushed to the hospital, which at the time was their very own barracks. Having sustained serious wounds during the battle, the commander was incapacitated and unfit for command. He had lost his foot in the skirmish. I always say, if they survive the first real encounter with minimal wounds, they can survive almost anything. The commander had no such luck.
For her achievements in battle, Bomrek was given command of the squadron, and the first iron weapons were produced and gifted to her, and soon after, her squadmates. Bomrek continued to happily serve the military for several years, holding back minor ambushes, building her skills, and continuing to save her comrades admirably in battle. After many, many battles, Bomrek had a kill list of 40-60 goblins, quite impressive for a single Dwarf. For this, I pimped out her room with statues, a table and a chair. You'll never guess what the statues depicted. Mhm, they were all statues of Bomrek.
I could send Bomrek's squad out and they would clean up the goblins swiftly. And then the miners did it. They broke through the magma sea deep underground and found adamant veins, and quickly began producing the very first and only full set of adamant armour. Think of this as a dwarven Power Suit, almost unbreakable and impenetrable. In commemoration of this, thinking she was ready for the task, I waited for a goblin invasion and sent her out. Only her.
She clashed into them straight on. I have never, EVER seen this happen in the history of all of my Dwarf Fortress games without using the danger room strategy (you cheaters). She sustained no damage, blocked every arrow or just straight up took them for shits and giggles, started slashing goblins limb from limb, chasing them, grabbing them, they just couldn't get away. Every craftsman started to produce statues of her, floor and wall carvings all depicted her successes and immense number of kills. She had over 200 kills by this stage, which is amazing considering the fortress was only 7 years in.
Bomrek was given an office, her own person dining room, each all decorated and filled with treasures, and her own, very large, incredibly flashy golden tomb, which contained all of the legendary artifacts my dwarves had created. Honestly, when one dwarf can take on 80 goblins at once, I really had no expectation she was going to fill it any time soon.
Unfortunately, given the diminishing FPS to unbearable levels, I had to give up on that fortress. It was a great disappointment, as Bomrek is my single favourite dwarf to date. Well, other than that guy with no legs that managed to carry around a keg of beer ALL THE TIME, as well as two crutches.
If you would like to play Dwarf Fortress (and you actually stuck around this long), you can find it at Today's website here:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Personally, I play with a version called LazyNewbPack, which comes with a Graphical User Interface where you can change many in game features without fapping about in text files. There's also some built in graphical sets which you can play with and find which ones you like. There's absolutely essential utilities in there as well. You can find that here:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59026.0
Remember, it's a free game and only 50MB. You have absolutely no reason not to try it.
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