Location Taken: Thermopolis, Wyoming
Time Taken: June 2010
Ah, Dwarf Fortress, what would I be without you?
Probably saner, but hey, that’s life!
Dwarf Fortress, if you haven’t heard of it before, is a lovely game where you guide a set of dwarves through carving out a secure and pleasant home from the very first wagonload of seven to whatever horrendous fate awaits these poor souls…
Ok, it’s not the most friendly and peaceful game. There’s a very good reason the motto is “Losing is fun!” Well, lots of reasons. Lots and lots and lots of deadly reasons, from goblin invasions to accidentally flooding your fortress with magma to carp murdering your dwarves to dwarves angry about their friends dying going on murderous rampages that kill friends of other dwarves who then go on rampages…
Those aren’t made up reasons, by the way, those are all ways fortresses I personally have run have met their deaths. You have to be willing to try, again and again, until you figure out what to do.
Oh, have I mentioned, this game has no tutorial? And it’s controlled using almost the entire keyboard as commands (and no real mouse support)? And that it doesn’t have a learning curve as much as a learning cliff-of-doom? And the graphics are made out of ascii symbols so all the screenshots look like this or this? Or that, despite the super-primitive graphics, the game uses so much processing power that even modern computers will slow down to unplayable levels after you get a mere 200 dwarves or so in your fortress?
So why in the world would I play an impenetrable game with awful graphics and an almost guaranteed chance of losing?
Some of it’s the stories. So many strange and peculiar (and all too often horrific) things happen that it’s easy to come out with a compelling story. I downloaded the game after reading through the tale of Boatmurdered, which I do solidly recommend you check out. It’ll give you a great idea of what the game’s like, despite being seven years and many versions of the game old. I haven’t kept track of most of my stories from the game, alas, but I did write one up years ago, from a fairly typical fortress. Perhaps I shall share it tomorrow.
The challenge is another reason I like the game. Once you’ve fought your way to the top of that learning cliff, you find yourself with a long list of options and possibilities and a marvelous canvas to work on. If you’ve played Minecraft, this may seem like a familiar concept, and it’s no coincidence. The creator of Minecraft has outright listed Dwarf Fortress as one of his primary inspirations. But where Minecraft leads you to an open world of interesting tools and battles, Dwarf Fortress throws you into an unforgiving realm with far too many options and monsters that can wipe out hundreds of dwarves single-handedly. Losing is Fun because surviving as long as you can is the goal. Winning? What’s that?
And lastly, there’s the detail. You know how I mentioned that the graphics are ascii, in other words, text and other simple symbols, arranged in ways that make sense once you figure out how to read it? Well, one advantage of all that simplification and reliance on text is that you can have absurd levels of detail. There’s 16 types of alcohol, 31 different types of tree, a whopping 63 professions for your dwarves, and an absurdly long list of creatures to encounter, from swans to ice wolves to black mamba men. And the types of stone! I’ve been only half joking when I’ve claimed you can use a geology textbook as a manual for this game!
So, if you’ve got a great computer, little love for graphics, a gluttony for punishment, and the willingness to delve deep just to see what’s there, well, give the game a whirl! If you can manage to get past that initial rough learning cliff, it’s well worth the effort.
Oh, and there’s a decent modding community, too, if you want to tweak it a bit. They even make graphics sets so the game looks almost legible!
