Dwarf Fortress

Allow me to introduce you to a computer game called Dwarf Fortress. Imagine a combination of Sim City, The Sims, and Diablo II, and you will have some idea of the flavor of Dwarf Fortress. This is a game that should shame many major game developers who have produced glittering, but ultimately worthless and unoriginal trash. Dwarf Fortress stands out as a game infused with creativity and zero glitter. Its only graphics are text symbols.

So why am I in such a swoon over this game? Because, despite its graphics, Dwarf Fortress is a staggeringly large and complicated game. Its world is generated fractally with a random seed. This process took 15 minutes on my 2004 Dell desktop PC. The world that was created is realistic. Plants grow, animals wander about the landscape, water flows. These are no mean feats of game design and the game play has not even begun yet.

Rather than go into more detail that has been covered more thoroughly elsewhere, I'm going to provide a bevy of links, then provide a diary of my first experience with the game.

Coincidentally, Gamasutra just did an interview with the Dwarf Fortress creator. It can be found here. To give an idea of how complicated the world generator is for this game, the designer explains:

So the idea is to go down to basic elements. The biomes are not the basics, they arise, at least in DF, from several factors: temperature, rainfall, elevation, drainage. First, it uses midpoint displacement to make an elevation map.

It also makes a temperature map (biased by elevation and latitude) and a rainfall map (which it later biases with orographic precipitation, rain shadows, that sort of thing). The drainage map is just another fractal, with values from 0 to 100. So we can now query a square and get rainfall, temp, elevation and drainage data.

This is where the biome comes from. There's an additional vegetation field so it can alter the amount (from logging for example), and there's also a "savagery" and a "good/evil" field. So for instance, if rainfall is >=66/100 and drainage is less than 50, then you have a swamp.

A gushing and totally deserved review of the game can be found here.

A blog about the developer of the game can be found here. Most of my links come from this page.

This is the developer's page dedicated to the game. You can also find links to download it here.

Main page of the wiki.

Movies of gameplay.

Many people take one look at the graphics here and flee in terror. Take hope. This is a full graphics release of the game, though I have not yet tried it out. Additionally, this, provides the ability to "fly" about the world and look around in 3-d (sadly you cannot play in this mode).

The game is daunting. Tutorials seem to help. Here are a few good ones:

• Your first fortress tutorial
• Indecisive's tutorial - this is perhaps the best
• Penny arcade post on dwarf fortress. I think you have to be a forum member to view this.

This Gamasutra article on storytelling in sandbox games is what originally lead me to discover Dwarf Fortress. The article talks about the feeling that things are happening "off stage". That is, the player gets lost in the game as in a good book and feels it is real. The game is suddenly not just a mechanism where numbers are shuffled around or the proper icons are clicked in order to win, but instead the world of the game feels real. This is the opposite of Neo seeing the matrix. Instead he sees walls, doors, people; a world and a story.

Game Diary

Day One

The game begins with a view of the world at three levels of detail. Since I had Indecisive's tutorial pulled up on my computer at the same time, I knew I was looking for a mountain (for defense) with a good source of water (to drink) and a good source of magma (for heating smelter or foundry). Trees would also be nice for acquiring lumber. I soon got tired of looking. I was itching to play. I settled on a spot that looked like it had trees and water and magma not too far away.

Unfortunately I screwed up. The green stuff I was seeing was grass and shrubs and not trees, so I didn't have much lumber. Worst of all, the soil turned out to be all sandy and poorly suited for growing crops. I didn't play long enough for my dwarves to starve, but it seems likely.

Actually, I got ahead of myself. Before I started chopping trees and planting crops, I had to organize my party of dwarves and their supplies. This part of the game has an unmistakable Oregon Trail feel to it. I followed the tutorial closely to get through this part.

Finally I got into the nitty gritty of the game. I set two dwarves to mining right away. I had some trouble until I realized you can't dig down until you place an up stair case directly below a down stair case. I guess that's sort of obvious. I instructed other dwarves to chop wood, plant seeds, and stockpile supplies. I kept worrying that going about these activities willy-nilly was probably not the best idea. I mined as much as possible, only afterwards did I read somewhere that cave-ins are possible. I think the fortress I dug was definitely in danger of that.

I was happy to learn that a click-and-drag maneuver is possible for instructing the dwarves to mine out large areas. This is all done with the keyboard. The mouse is not used at all. I left off just about to build my first building, a carpenter's workshop I recall. My first foray into the game was pretty frustrating, especially after I learned my crops wouldn't grow. Although many people warned that the learning curve is sharp, I'm not sure I have the patience for it.

If this game had some clearer graphics and a tutorial mode that would make it much more appealing to me. Still, I'm blown away by the level of detail. Kudos to the game designers.

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