Dwarf Fortress: Losing is Fun!

The Game Room
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It’s time to play Dwarf Fortress!

What is Dwarf Fortress? From the Developer’s website:

  • Dwarf Fortress is a single-player fantasy game. You can control a dwarven outpost or an adventurer in a randomly generated, persistent world.

Although Dwarf Fortress is still in a work in progress, many features have already been implemented.

* The world is randomly generated with distinct civilizations spanning over 1000 years of history, dozens of towns, hundreds of caves and regions with various wildlife.
* The world persists as long as you like, over many games, recording historical events and tracking changes.
* Command your dwarves as they search for wealth in the mountain.
      o Craft treasures and furniture from many materials and improve these objects with precious metals, jewels and more.
      o Defend yourself against attacks from hostile civilizations, the wilderness and the depths.
      o Support the nobility as they make demands of your populace.
      o Keep your dwarves happy and read their thoughts as they work and relax.
      o Z coordinate allows you to dig out fortresses with multiple levels. Build towers or conquer the depths.
      o Build floodgates to divert water for farming or to drown your adversaries.
      o Much much more...*

…and it’s free!

My take on Dwarf Fortress? It’s a deliciously complex sandbox game, a sort-of hybrid of The Sims, SimCity and Dungeon Keeper.

I’ve spent very literally hundreds of hours constructing massive fortresses populated by hundreds of dwarves. It’s a blast, and even more fun when (inevitably) the civilization starts to fall apart and dwarves go insane with anger, hunger, thirst or grief and begin murdering each other.

The graphics are ASCII-like - I hear your collective groans already! - but really once you’ve played for a while it’s just like the scene in the Matrix where Cypher says “I don’t even see the code anymore…all I see is blond…brunette…redhead” Oddly, since I have fond memories of earlier Roguelikes I find the graphics evoke a nice nostalgia. There’s also a beautifully haunting acoustic guitar soundtrack!

I’ll be entirely honest - the learning curve is BRUTAL. If you try it, do not expect to understand what’s going on for 5-10 hours at least. The Dwarf Fortress Wiki has a very nice guide for starting your first fortress; I also highly recommend the Dwarf Fortress Map Archive, which is a site where players of the game upload fortresses that they have built so that you can see how players lay out their bases.

So why “Losing is Fun”? A wonderful quote from the wiki: Dwarf Fortress doesn’t have a “win” condition: It just has a long series of “lose” conditions.

When you first start playing, everything is confusing. How do I order miners to begin digging? How do I get my butcher to turn that deer corpse into edible meat? How do I get my brewery pumping out beer? And why are those elephants pacing around the outskirts of my outpost so ominously?

…and inevitably, winter comes, your dwarves begin to starve and then to kill each other. The fortress falls. But every time you start anew you’ve learned more and the game becomes more and more rewarding!

On the humor side, I strongly suggest reading the epic chronicles of Boatmurdered. Here’s the link in text form; there gets to be some NSFW language.

fromearth.net/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered

Boatmurdered is the name of a particular fortress played as a “succession game” - here, a group of forumers (I believe it was on the SA forums) started a fortress. Each participant would play Boatmurdered for exactly one year of game time, then the next participant in line picks up. The chronicles of Boatmurdered get to be fairly hilarious; It’s a long read but I’d suggest the absolute best parts are the introduction and then the chronicles of participant StarkRavingMad, which begin on “Update 11”.

Keep in mind that Boatmurdered was played on an older version of DF; the newer ones allow for terrain and construction on the z-axis as well so you can carve out 3-dimensional fortresses.

Anyways, this game isn’t easy to learn but it’s free and I can’t recommend it enough! Give it a try!

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I think we’ve done this before with so-so results. It was lots of fun, before the demons.

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My only problem with the game is that i’m at the point where I know how to setup my initial fortress too well - and end up getting the maximum of immigrants the first wave through. So I have my happy fortress of 7 dwarves, and then whoops, i’ve got 30-odd dwarves traipsing about the place demanding booze all of a sudden. If there was an option to request the amount of immigrants from a maximum still set by your output, i’d be ecstatic.

Edit: Oh, and you’re right, Boatmurderd was by SA. The link is to their LP archive.

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blast, did a cursory search but didn’t find the Dope DF thread.

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I’d like to be able to regulate immigration myself, but I’ve found that the best way to deal with this problem is to stop playing reasonably, and start having fun by experimenting with “creative” architecture. Chances are, if dwarves still want to live in your fortress, you aren’t being creative enough. :smiley:

(alternatively, I seem to remember there being a few neat Challenge builds around. Haunted or Cold/Scorching terrains are always fun, and I seem to recall someone building right on top of a goblin town, promptly burrowing underground, collapsing their entrance, and remaining relatively undetected until their subterranean army was big enough to burst into the goblin town square and massacre the whole population.)

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Ok, I’ve managed to navigate my way through numerous problems using the Dawrf wiki, but now I’m stuck on something.

I have a buttload of lignite. I have a smelter. According to the wiki, I should be able to burn the lignite in the smelter to make coke, which the metalworker can use in his forge.

However, whenever I try to set an action for the smelter, it tells me “Need refined fuel”. So what’s my next step here?

Many thanks in advance.

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Your problem is that the smelter itself needs fuel in order to make your lignite into coke. What you need is a Wood Furnace, and someone on it making charcoal from your wood.

You may wonder why you should bother making coke at all, instead of just using your charcoal as fuel in your smelter. The answer is that while you use 2 one “piece” of fuel (the charcoal) to make the coke, the action will produce 2 units of coke. So effectively you’re gaining 1 fuel from the process.

It’s only if you have a magma smelter that you can dump your lignite in without a fuel source itself, so it’s more efficient. But not having one isn’t really a huge annoyance (and generally maps with magma have bigger disadvantages anyway. Like horrible burning death).

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They have disadvantages now. One of my biggest (and only) complaints about the improvements made in recent versions of DF was the way in which they nerfed Steam damage. Back in the day, you could work out these insanely complex plumbing systems that brought water and magma to the surface through different passages, mixed them, and funneled the resulting steam into the main chamber where it’d kill off the invading army.

Alright, so workplace accidents usually killed a number of dwarves before things got to that stage, but we’ve already bemoaned the lack of an immigration controller, so I like to see this as a “solution”. :smiley:

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Thanks for the info. I’ll give it a try when I get home tonight. There will probably be more questions later.

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Read most of the Boatmurdered saga. Compelling, and sad (and more than a little bewildering) how it all went to hell so quickly.

I’ll go through the Wiki when I have the time. For now, just out of curiosity, I want to know if it’s actually possible to completely avoid all the losing conditions. Of course, this being a Sim-style game, there’s no real way to “win”, but is it at least possible to keep things going indefinitely, or at least for a very long time? Looking at Boatmurdered again, it looks like too many people (particularly the one who started work on a colossal resource-devouring monument for gods know what reason) let their petty desires get in the way, had lousy problem-solving skills, or simply never understood what needed to be done. How the hell did the place just run out of alcohol, for example?

Yes, I understand that it’s a game and creatively screwing up can be pretty fun. What I’d like to know is if you don’t want to screw things up, if you prefer a boring, tepid existence to not existing, if you can. Or is the game designed to bring things to a crushing end no matter how good you are?

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I think the game definitely lets you continue indefinitely, it’s just a matter of how creative you want to get. If you just dig out a series of bedrooms, a large farm, a brewery, a kitchen, and the services needed to keep the brewery functioning, you’ll be fine. Eventually you’ll want security, either in the form of a military or a complex series of traps, but I don’t think there’s any dynamic element that would push you to go beyond those rudiments.

Really, the biggest challenge for me has always been the clunky interface and terrible Dwarf Management Algorithms (hauling, I"m looking at you): immigration will eventually saddle you with around 200 dwarves, and it can be a pain in the ass to make sure everyone is doing what they need to be.

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One more probably simple question: how do I give people possessions? I’ve got a storeroom now filled with stonecraft masterpieces, and no use for them except trade.

And what makes the difference between a meager bedroom and a non-meager one?

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You don’t, at least for now. Trade is their main use, and you don’t want Dwarves mucking around with all your valuable goods in their pocket.

However, there may come a point later when you have built up your fortress a bit in which an event causes the Dwarven economy to start. At that point, you’ll need to start minting coins and so on, but you get to build shops from which dwarves will buy stuff.

What’s in it - beds, containers, stands, etc - the quality of the stuff that’s in it, and smoothing/engraving. It’s worth it to smooth/engrave (from the designate menu, the one you mine from) noble’s rooms, since often you’ll get a free upgrade like that. But you have to smooth before engraving.