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Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress (usually shortened to Dwarf Fortress) is a part roguelike, part city-building freeware video game set in a procedurally-generated high fantasy universe in which the player takes control of a group of dwarves and attempts to construct a successful and wealthy mountainhome. Along the way the player must face off with the dangers of their environment, invaders and sieges, vampires and other night creatures, and the occasional rampant megabeast, all while keeping their dwarves happy and their fortress alive. A second game mode, adventurer mode, places the player in the shoes of an adventurer as they wander the world and do battle with various creatures.
Dwarf Fortress is modeled on a complex physics engine and is presented in ASCII graphics. Every world is generated completely from scratch, and historical events and figures are documented and recorded as game lore, including any and all sentient characters. The game is programmed solely by Tarn Adams, with input from his brother Zach Adams. Work began in 2002, the first alpha was released in August 2006, and development is ongoing. Tarn Adams has declared it his life's work, expecting 20 years before it is complete; development is supported solely through donations, and contributors receive either short stories or crayon drawings as thank yous from the developers.
The game has accumulated much praise for its rich content and deep gameplay, and holds a small but devoted fanbase. On the other hand, reviewers have pointed out its extremely steep learning curve, which makes picking up the game especially challenging, and mastering it even more so. As there is no way to expressly win the game, every fortress, no matter how successful, is bound to be destroyed somehow; this has prompted the trademark phrase of the community: "Losing is fun."
World generation
Every game in Dwarf Fortress starts with the generation of a new world; only one game at a time can be ongoing per world. The exact qualities of a world are random, but can be influenced quite heavily with input from the player, who determines the map size, natural savagery, mineral occurrence, et cetera. The world generator first uses a fractal algorithm to create a randomized elevation map. This is then further elaborated upon by a temperature map, rainfall map, drainage value, vegetation value, and salinity. Each tract of land is then differentiated into a biome based upon a combination of these values. Tracts of land are then sorted into evil, neutral, or good regions, as well as benign, wild, or savage ones. Mountains are then worn away with temporary rivers, followed by permanent ones flowing from high points to low ones. Local animal and plant populations are established, followed closely by sentient ones.
At this point world creation ends, and the historical ticker begins, as sentient creatures form settlements, live and prosper, reproduce, do battle, and spread across the land, claiming lands, building roads, and generally making the world increasingly hospitable. The ticker stops at a designated value, at which point the map can be saved and its information offloaded for use in a game. Should your game end or fortress fall, this world persists on, and after saving changes will become available for further games.
Fortress mode
Dwarves inside their fortress, built into a mountainside.
A game of Fortress Mode paused.
The primary game mode in Dwarf Fortress is the titular fortress mode, in which the player finds a site on the map, takes control of a group of seven dwarves, chooses their basic skills and supplies, and then embarks to start their fortress. Typical supplies include seeds for farming, axes for woodcutting, picks for mining, utilities like bags and basic medical supplies, barrels of food and alcoholic drink and an anvil. The local environment of an embark site has an important effect on its success; fortresses in evil regions will have to deal with especially strong, extremely aggressive undead creatures harassing them from the very beginning, while maps with aquifers will force players to contest with difficulties acquiring stone and space until they can either outmaneuver the aquifers or overpower them. Natural resources like wood, ore, and stone are important to fortress life, as are geographic features like cliffs, gorges, waterfalls, ponds, lakes, beaches, oceans, and especially rivers.. Since the game world can always be regenerated and easier environments created, embarking in more difficult environments is typically done for the challenge, as creating a thriving fortress on an evil glacier is vastly more difficult than on a brookside woodland.
The most important buildings in Dwarf Fortress are workshops, each of which are purposed to certain tasks. For instance, fisheries prepare captured fish, carpenters' workshops make wood furniture, and jewelers' workshops turn mined out roughs into valuable cut gems. Dwarves are assigned jobs based on what labors they have enabled, and the higher their skill in a job, the more quickly they will perform them, and the higher quality the product will be. Thus, purposing dwarves to tasks according to their skill base is an important consideration. The dwarves themselves have their own personalities, physical and mental attributes, character traits, and likes and dislikes, all of which affect their productivity and course of action. In addition, dwarves can occasionally enter strange moods, seizing workshops and demanding certain resources; if they are supplied these resources they will produce an object of impeccable craftsmanship and value, a "legendary artifact", and will often instantly become of legendary skill in a trade. If the player fails to provide them the necessary materials, the dwarf will go insane, and will either attempt suicide, run around the fortress naked and babbling, or, more dangerously, go berserk and actively attack other dwarves.
A major feature in the game is trading caravans, one for each of the major sentient races that the player is at peace with (typically dwarves, humans, and elves), which arrive once a year in designated seasons loaded down with goods. The player may trade goods created in their fortress in return for the supplies and goods carried by the caravans; these traders are an important feature of the game, and often carry goods that the fortress does not have access to at all, or supplement what it already has. Because these caravans often arrive alongside enemy attacks, their appearance requires military alertness; if too many caravans are lost to enemy attacks, their civilization will declare war against the player and send their own attackers, sometimes at the same time as an ongoing siege.
Once the basic stockpiles, farms, bedrooms, and dining halls of the fortress are dug out, and as the player digs deeper into the earth and uncovers the local geology, mineral resources and ores become important. For instance, kaolinite can be used as the basis of a high-value pottery industry, magnetite can be smelted into iron or further processed into steel and used to forge weapons, and gold can be forged into extremely valuable gold crafts and trinkets to be sold to the traders. Individual workshops and dwarves can bind together with infrastructure and local resources to produce necessary and vital goods as parts of industries. As the number of dwarves expands with migrant waves and the birth of children, players must accommodate their increasing number of residents by digging out bedrooms, designating jails, expanding food production, dining, and food preparation facilities, and put them all to work at various tasks, be it making clothes, forging steel weapons or gold crafts, tending the farms, or building a vibrant meat industry.
As the game develops, two major concerns emerge: keeping the dwarves alive, and keeping them happy. Goblin sieges can start harassing fortresses once they reach 80 population, and will spell doom to an unprepared player. In addition to sieges, stealthy ambushes and the possibility of the appearance of massive megabeasts (both from above and below) create another threat. The appearance or absence of foes is based on the amount of wealth generated by the fortress; the more net worth the fortress has produced, the more attractive it is to attack (and, on the flip side, the more attractive it is to more immigrants). This threat can be met with a dwarven military, (sometimes quite elaborate) traps, or a combination of both. Keeping dwarves happy can be achieved by keeping them out of harm's way and by providing them with pets, good living conditions, high-quality prepared meals and drinks, replacement clothing, and good public facilities.
Eventually the player may dig all the way to the bottom of the map and encounter magma, as well as adamantine, an incredibly strong, light, and sharp-edged material that can be used to create the best weapons and armor in the game. Digging too deep, however, will cause the player to breach hell, unleashing a likely game-ending swarm of demons into the fortress. As the game has no predefined ending or final challenge, breaking into hell and defeating the demon swarm is seen as the greatest challenge of all. Similarly, as there is no predefined end to the game, every fortress will eventually meet its demise. New fortresses are frequently lost to poor resource management (which leads to dwarves dying of thirst or starvation), enemy attacks, or mining accidents which can lead to deadly cave-ins or flooding. Older and more highly developed fortresses are less vulnerable to these problems, but the loss of even a few dwarves can still lead to a so-called "tantrum spiral," where dwarves who have become critically unhappy due to the loss of friends or family throw tantrums, injuring or even killing other dwarves and leading to more unhappiness and tantrums - ultimately the fortress can descend into uncontrolled riots and fall apart from the inside.
