I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they essentially scrapped the old. In favor of a mouse-driven design, they dropped the old, keyboard-driven UI.
Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how much they were receiving. Tens of thousands of $ a month, mind you. For monthly contributions at that level for many, many years I would expect at least a nod - instead they straight-up told everyone they'd abandon keyboard users, a decision later recanted.
That said, Dwarf Fortress holds a special place in my heart. Only regret I have is that I didn't track how many hours I put in. In excess of 10k, I'm sure.
I was under the impression that the classic keyboard-only version was kept up to date with the Steam version? They're both on patch 53.16[1][2] which was released simultaneously on 8/5, so it doesn't look to me like keyboard-only is forgotten or left behind unless I'm missing something.
Sadly no – the current 'classic' is just the Steam game without the steam features AIUI – i.e. still the mouse-oriented UI. 0.47.05 is the last keyboard version AFAIK.
Ah I see, I misunderstood. I just tried the latest classic version and it was all mouse. I agree then that it's disappointing as someone who has played both versions
I understand why they did it - medical emergencies and all. Have to pay the bill somehow. But yea, 0.47.05's still my go-to. Just can't vibe with the new UI/keybinds.
Old controls were on their roadmap for a long time, but the benefit from their perspective shrinks as time goes on. I doubt we'll see it at this point.
They complain there are few Mac players on Steam. Well, I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't run on the desktop OS [1] i use most, duh.
[1] My Linux boxes are headless. And the windows boxes I have to RDP into them. That may work for a game with a beginning and and end via Steam streaming or something, but not for a forever game you just keep around.
While individual game developers choose whether to support macOS, the broader phenomenon of developers dropping macOS support is Apple's fault. They either have no interest in being a serious gaming platform, or else they've made catastrophic missteps in their quest to stay relevant for gamers.
I don’t think it has anything to do with their gaming specific capabilities, just their general philosophy matches poorly with the games industry.
Apple insist on having their own apis and they don’t maintain compatibility for older software for very long, these 2 facts explain things fine on their own. Game devs don’t want a major support burden, they’re happy to patch here and there but constant dropping of apis or even architectures is a lot to handle. The bigger impact is that macOS ends up with a lot less old games that still run, if you need a critical mass of games to become a gaming platform, that constant bleed of legacy games will always slow macOS down.
As for gaming specific features, Metal is a perfectly fine api whose only real problem is that it’s different from the other platforms. Maybe not the best, but certainly not terrible. They also have a really nice capability floor, it’s practical to make a modern game work on any Mac from the last X years (maybe the neo complicates that a bit).
There’s probably a few gaming specific capabilities they could improve on, mouse input especially, but that’s never been the real issue.
Optimization and bug hunting makes supporting multiple graphics api's a pain. I really don't understand Apple's stubborn refusal to make vulkan drivers. Between Apple and the better performance on SteamDeck, I can see PC game developers seriously considering Vulkan over directx.
I was a quarterly(-ish) contributor for years. There was no way for me to justify buying anything when they announced dropping keyboard support, when I've spent years developing muscle-memory to their (admittedly insane) control scheme.
Also - I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that running DF through a terminal is (was...) possible if you're not using a graphical tileset (perhaps even with... ha)?
The sad thing is that current Macs are perfect machines for DF. The recommendation was always to get as fast a single threaded machine as possible with the biggest cache. Even the least expensive Macs are monsters in those regards. The game is more multi-threaded than before but still is dominated by single threaded performance.
What benefit does a native build have over proton? I used to care more about it on Linux, until I realized that "native build" probably means "doesn't work." I can only imagine this being much worse on a niche gaming target which there are extremely few users making (and voting for) bug reports.
Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense.
Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).
macOS is also just a proper PITA through and through. I'm annoyed that I can't play it on my m4 but I also understand that supporting macOS has always been a nuisance.
If I were making games I wouldn't support it either. Apple does just about everything to not support backwards compat.
Is it really that bad? I haven't played since the GUI update but was thinking about getting into it again because I still have years of muscle memory from it. But if I am forced to use the mouse im not sure I even want to bother. There is absolutely no way I could play the game at the same speed I use to if I have to resort to mouse-only features.
What you are asking for is completely unreasonable. There’s no way that one programmer can maintain two completely separate UIs. Keep in mind that they could not simply “add graphics” to the existing interface, they had to write a completely new one that was not based around fixed–size character cells.
Wasn't the graphical interface 95% outsourced to others? And originally the graphic version was suppose to be layered on top and leave the underlying version of the game barely touched from the player's side. It was even touted as an excuse at the time to fix some of the keyboard shortcuts that were inconsistent among different submenus, and certainly not to eliminate or supersede keyboard interfaces.
It makes me sad to think about. I would love to get into the new UI, but the immersion just won't come back. My muscle memory, hands firmly on the keyboard, is too persistent, and playing with the new UI feels like stumbling around and misclicking.
You dont want to know your hours. Perhaps my greatest shame is the number of hours i have spent on factorio. I was afk for much of that (letting the factory run) but ... i would not want other people to see the number.
I wish nothing but success to Tarn and Zach, it’s great that releasing on Steam and adding a friendlier UI helped the game reach new audiences. It’s the proverbial time black hole.
In a documentary about them putting Dwarf Fortress on Steam Tarn talked about how he had to split the $7 million first payment from Steam with his brother and it turned out the easiest way was to just use the bank app.
I’ve never received $7M but a few times I’ve handled large sums (when buying a house and previous startup exit) and it felt so weird to be how completely normal it was. Like just… oh yeah go ahead and write a cheque for six figures. Or do an e-transfer into your chequing account for six figures. It felt like… no there has to be a whole special world for large sums, no?
I'm sure there is special handling for large sums... but six figures isn't it. Businesses routinely write checks for half a million dollars, two million dollars... it's perfectly normal to see such amounts within the banking world. There might be some extra scrutiny on the back end that you don't see, but since it's well within the realm of normal operations that the bank sees happen every day, it's nothing special.
Now, eight or nine figures, that's probably going to pass the threshold for special attention. As in, you might be required to go to the bank in person with photo ID in order to authorize the transaction, that sort of thing. But under 10 million U.S. dollars? Many businesses will handle those amounts monthly, and the bank is used to seeing them.
I had the muscle memory for the full keyboard control on pre-steam releases and the loss of some complete keyboard controls and things just changing made it so I never really got into the Steam release, which was pretty disappointing. I get it though.
I'm in a similar, but less extreme boat. The new interface has its perks, especially in terms of discoverability, but for tasks that need to be done repeatedly (request 10 beds be made before you have a manager, for example), you really miss the ability to rock some chords.
It took me some time to remap the muscle memory but it felt so worth it. The Steam version is not just a new AI, it introduced a lot of gameplay changes which really improved the underlying systems a lot.
The version available for free on their website is the same exact program as the one you purchase on Steam. It simply includes a different set of graphics for the UI. These graphics are designed to look as if they are made up of text characters, but in reality they are still just sprites. The sprites that come with the version you buy from Steam are designed to look like a normal but stylized gui.
“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more interesting than the actual gameplay.
EDIT: To people who are rebutting this by saying “it’s just not for you” - that’s entirely my point. Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
Minecraft was very fun and was selling like hotcakes when it had "no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players". Even nowadays there's no tutorial as far as I know and much of how to play is left to discovery. The achievements tree is a bit of a guide, just by telling you some of the things that are possible, but it sure doesn't tell you how to do anything.
I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.
How would you suggest someone make a good tutorial for DF that doesn't leave the player exhausted by the time they start a new game?
That's my core complaint w/ strategy games. By the time I'm done with the tutorial i have to do other things only to forget everything I learned the next time I get to sit down with it.
At best "hints" or a glossary/help menu is the best way imo.
Yeah, I think this actually supports the idea that Dwarf Fortress is needlessly bad at onboarding players. Every time I try to get into it, I end up confused by why people enjoy it and unable to figure out how to play it. Whereas with Minecraft, exploring how to play it was actually fun, with Dwarf Fortress, it felt frustrating and unnecessarily obscure.
That's because the UX/UI is utterly awful. It's cargo cult: the game. (And BTW my complaints have nothing to do with the controls. The actual UX is just... not thought out at all).
Minecraft's early game is relatively boring. Empty busywork like punching trees, village raids and strip mining are vestigial gameplay loops that neither Mojang nor Microsoft had the confidence to fix.
I'd agree that they're a bad comparison though. Despite Notch's inspiration from DF, Minecraft has worse bosses, biomes, trading, mining, diplomacy, cooking, innkeeping and NPCs.
I had a good number of hours in Minecraft Classic's browser version, mostly in online servers though. Solo wasn't much fun.
Modern Minecraft is still not much of an appeal to me without mods. I'm happy to see more block games like Vintage Story push the medium forward while Microsoft... wraps up post-production on A Minecraft Movie: Squared, I guess?
It also has effectively zero physics. I still remember being annoyed at how water worked in Minecraft when playing with my kid, and the fact that trees don't collapse if you cut 'em down.
You may prefer a game like 'Going Medieval' which is a similar concept to Dwarf Fortress but is heavily simplified, almost as though someone played Dwarf Fortress then decided to make a version for their kids.
> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
The majority of people do not play videogames.
The majority of those do not play any roguelikes.
Citing the majority is completely useless.
Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress.
There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know.
Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once.
> I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun.
On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game.
The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours.
The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog.
That to me is some excellent playtime.
Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.
The tutorial is the wiki. I used to play Dwarf Fortress back in the 2008-2009 era, and I kept going back to the wiki when I needed to learn something. It was, and still is, comprehensive, containing not just a "getting started for beginners" tutorial page, but also a list of every building and workflow (from ore to metal to swords and armor, from seeds to plants to food and drink...). In-game tutorials are not the only way to learn about a game; a well-maintained wiki (that isn't on wikia, oops sorry they're called fandom dot com there days — but that's a whole other rant) is also an excellent resource. And certain types of games seem to lend themselves to having well-maintained wikis: Dwarf Fortress's wiki is perhaps the best I've ever seen, narrowly beating Minecraft's also-excellent wiki.
It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding. It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design.
This depends largely on your expectation for what a 'game' should be.
Puzzle boxes, for example, have zero on ramp, and yet many many people enjoy them, enjoy the struggle of discovery.
Arguably the edges of mathematics and science are inhabited by similar people, living where the rules are ill defined, where there is much to be discovered rather than pre-digested and spoon fed.
I have little patience for games that don't spoon feed, so I get where you're coming from. I watched my brother play DF and decided I didn't want to spend my time like that, trying to parse ascii, trying to figure out how all the things interacted.
I found exactly the discovery fulfilling in Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld and Minecraft. Once I mastered those (well, maybe it is fairer to say "once I plateaued", there are way more skilled players than me) I found much less interest in them. Sure, I still play occasionally for a bit after a big update drops, but that is pretty much it. Oh and yeah, puzzle focused games (as long as it isn't slide puzzles) are great too. I fondly remember Myst, Monkey Island and other puzzle games like that.
Some people like games where you need to grind (idle clicker games seem to be purest/insanest form of that), and that is something I don't get at all. It is just pointless busywork, just like those repetitive achievements ("kill N enemies with X style attacks") or collectables. (Achievements that are on the form "find this hidden thing" or "do this out of the box thing once" I do understand more.)
>It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding.
No, it is a games job to be entertaining for those it was designed to entertain.
>It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design.
Certainly there are many people who take a longer time to learn and grasp concepts and find challenging tasks something to be avoided, and this game isn't for you! That doesn't mean that every game should be designed so that the lowest commoner denominator can understand and enjoy the game! Some people not only enjoy being challenged by complex games, but seek those out those challenges and that complexity. The game market is flooded with easy to learn and easy to win games designed and made for simpletons, so there's no reason for you to complain about the rare game (these days) that deviates from that.
>It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding.
Its the games job to present their unique style of fun to the market, and let the market sort it out. A game made by 2 blokes has to have a set of priorities, and their priority has always been the simulation.
>It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”
I mean, ignore Dwarf Fortress for a minute, this is exactly what Paradox has built its little empire on. I was at 300+ hours of Crusader Kings 2 and had only a sort of intuitive grasp of most of the games systems. And at the time, most of the safer european powers were at risk of just getting rolled off the map by the golden horde mid game, and the work arounds for that were quite insane. I still dont reckon I have the war/conflict systems mastered. Paradox does tutorials, they just suck immensely and you end up on the forums or wikis anyway.
Dwarf fortress has managed to create a game with that kind of skill curve with 0.0001% of the resources.
>that’s just shitty game design.
I feel sorry for you, I get the impression that this hostility is coming from a place where you really wish you could share in these fantastic games but haven't quite got the gumption to stick with them. I get it I really do, I mod Battle Brothers to make it easier, because I love the texture of the game but I haven't been able to master the combat or save scumming required to play at a real difficulty.
Because it’s not a complete or compelling experience if the systems aren’t naturally exposed and taught over time in a progressive manner. This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years.
There are plenty of good or even great games that dont give a shit about "good game design". And developing in the direction of "good game design" is sort of like Carcinization, AAA games have been tending towards a single unified structure. Its great for mass media but its terrible for art.
I learned Dwarf Fort through a mate of mine. We both played separately, and we would have phone calls discussing how we were able to achieve x or y outcome. Eventually we determined an ideal set of bootstraps to achieve a plateau of semi functional Dwarf society.
And then they dropped the dwarf economy update, and everything went to shit and we got to relearn how to pick ourselves up all over again.
Then Bees, then Taverns and Travellers. Then Danger Rooms started causing more serious wounds.
You are welcome to limit yourself to AAA games and yellow paint but thats you deciding to artificially limit what experiences you participate in. It doesnt cast a single shadow on people tooling around and experiencing the art of games.
Eh, I definitely can't agree with this one. Some of the most beloved games of all time had effectively no on-ramp of any kind - especially if you're willing to go back 30 years - and none of the fans of those games would say "they are not compelling experiences" because of a learning cliff.
>This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years.
First, this is completely wrong. There are many good games that have been designed over the last 30 years that didn't assume you were an invalid and needed your hand hand held every step of the way.
Second, many of us (including myself) have been playing computer games for ~50 years! In the 80s and 90s the average game was far more difficult than even the most difficult games put out today. It wasn't assumed that everyone, or even most people, were ever going to beat the game. There were games I played for hundreds of hours back then, and enjoyed greatly, that I never finished or even mastered all the complexities of! That didn't make it any less fun. I want to be challenged by a game. If I load up a game and am spoon-fed everything it isn't a game I play for long.
Religiously subscribing to every "cornerstone of great game design" is how you end up with the plain oatmeal of videogames. Inoffensive, bland, and easily forgotten.
I, for one, hate games spoonfeeding me. Most games are unlikely to be a player's first videogame. I don't need every damn mechanic tutorialized. Present me with my toolbox, and let me get to it.
No great game is enjoyed by everyone. Your options when making a work, of any kind, are to either A) make something utterly inoffensive to the point that no one will have strong opinions about it at all or B) make a game that some people will love and others will bounce off of.
Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience.
If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell.
If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.
I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structure, because these things did have genuinely different behaviors despite being conceptually similar. That's a problem at a deeper layer than the UI/UX.
The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.
As someone whose spent ~5k hours playing DF you are right, every person I have ever talked to about it has liked the idea and like 1/50 has gone on to play it for >10 hours.
I used to play it, and for me, I think it scratched the same creative itch that Minecraft does in other folks. Building grand designs, etc. But in Minecraft, I'd have to place it block by block, and the physics... well, they're just absent. DF is like Minecraft, but with Lemmings, and a full physics system.
I still remember some of those designs, and I can see them clearly in my mind - not as the game represented them, but as the dwarves would have seen them. A grand underground bridge, with water flowing alongside it, before spiraling down into the main hall - where the wagons would enter the marketplace, and the dwarves would pass through the mist generated by the waterfall (forgotten beast got 'em all.) A giant vertical chain, build out of stone, standing as a monument to the grand fortress that sprawls underneath it (half-completed, as the fortress succumbed to madness.) A fortress built into a volcano, underneath the open sky, with the forges powered by magma, and a small river diversion creating endless obsidian (fucking birds kept swooping down and either eating my dwarves, or knocking them into the volcano, because I couldn't build the roof fast enough.)
I keep wanting to go back in, and I should - but I'd literally have to dig out the `cheatsheet.txt` file I had to keep on my desktop while playing, PLUS I'd have to figure out if I still needed the third party app that makes managing dwarven jobs reasonable, because in-game it's a fucking nightmare - and whether that app even exists for OS X, because I think it was a Windows-only thing that would interact with the game by directly reading RAM.
FYI, the newer versions with their mouse-driven interface solve a lot of those issues. Dwarf Therapist (the RAM reading tool you were thinking of) isn't needed any more, because there are much better in-game tools for managing what kinds of work certain dwarves do. The new menu layouts are a lot more discoverable, allowing you to find most things with just a little bit of clicking around (and the descriptions of stuff are a lot better now, so no more googling "what the heck is a quern?"). I miss the old keyboard controls sometimes, but they're gradually adding them back in the form of shortcuts. DFHack is still around, and basically necessary for automating some of the more fiddly resource chains (stuff like, "request 50 trees get cut down out of this patch of forest if our number of logs gets below 200").
I hadn't played in like 10 years when I picked up the Steam release, and I found it pretty easy to get back into.
The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail. It's the opposite of the approach taken by AI games that want to generalise based on simple prompts.
I would pose that's a matter of holding it wrong. Like, integrating generative AI as a prompt to an API endpoint exposed to the user is one of the worst, most naive and bland ways to use it as a game subsystem that I can think of.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with trying to use generative AI as a subsystem for a game, problems which exist at a conceptual level. But all the games I've seen that integrate AI as a subsystem don't even come remotely close to hitting that ceiling. I think it's ultimately up to the fact that an interesting usage of generative AI requires a level of technical competency and theory that's well beyond that of the layman. The people making games that utilize AI generally seem to lack the chops to make a good game or do interesting things with AI. The people with the chops and manhours to make a good game with AI:
- Don't want the backlash of having a generative model in their game, because no matter the context that's a lot of very bad press for something that's very difficult and time consuming to implement.
- See the immediate problems and difficulty that arise from a decently integrated concept and execution, and even without the bad press, understand that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That it's always going to be an immensely stupid gimmick in the end, one that's trying way too hard.
That won't stop us from having 10,000 pieces of shovelware getting churned out that have the worst, most uninspired integrations imaginable mind you. We clearly already have those. For those that could do something better with the tech, there's too many good reasons to not touch it.
> The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail.
I don't know, it's basically Minecraft with Lemmings. You control a lot, but at the end, the AI comparison might be somewhat apt - you tell the dwarves what to do, and they mostly do it. When they're not struck by a strange mood, or when they're not too depressed to work, or when they're not being eaten by a Forgotten Beast (beware its deadly dust!)
It's been a while since I last played DF and I'm surprised to see that both this article and the video are a bit light on details, IIRC they used to showcase upcoming updates a lot more.
Digging a bit more it looks like the magic system will be built around deities, spheres of influence [1], and workshops/professions centered around magic leading to procedurally generated spells. I'm really excited to see how it'll turn out.
They have a history of at least trying to be transparent, especially in their Future of the Fortress posts[0]. Emphasize on trying to, as they're not exactly great at sticking to plans, though that certainly improved with the Kitfox partnership.
I’ve been tinkering with a game engine where magic is made of first principles for a very long time. Cannot wait to see the gameplay and mechanics here!
Only working on the magic system itself, unfortunately making the game around the mechanics is not something I enjoy, so I have been implementing different approaches with some minimal debugging UI. Did not reach the need for an actual game engine
Does any other game have true procedural generated magic systems like DF talks about? I have always been curious how and if they'll pull it off and if it will just end up being all pretty much the same
What ive generally heard is that this is more of a refactor and base functionality improvement, rather than building out all the actual magic systems to start with.
2-10 updates in the future will have much more fleshed out magic
this game will be updated until the creators die, its a passion project and is a genre defining masterpiece if you are into procedurally generated narrative driven world sims.
Historically, they did a big update every year or two. Since the Steam release, they've sped up significantly, with medium sized updates every 2-3 months.
I remember finding this game back in the summer before 8th grade. right after the z-axis was added. talk about a spirtual wakening. I remember printing off the wiki and reading it in my science class. This game is probably the main reason I became an engineer honestly.
Try the game again, the performance has improved significantly. One major problem that was affecting most players were the line–of–sight calculations. Every person and animal in the game has an opinion of every other, and can get mood changes simply from seeing people (or animals) that they like or dislike. And that opinion is both based on the history of interactions between them as well as other factors like consanguinity. So every time someone moves the game has to check who they can see, and for every person (or animal) that they can see it has to check to see if they are related, and if so to what degree. Guests, invaders, monsters, zombies, ghosts, sneaks, villains, etc all have their effects.
The fundamental O(n²) behavior remains, but caching has greatly improved performance for typical forts. They also improved cache locality and refined the exact set of conditions that affect mood. They also parallelized this specific part of the code, though I believe you have to enable that in the options.
You can also improve performance by making changes to your fort. Primary amongst these is simply to reduce the number of people and animals on the map. Don’t keep 50 sheep and 100 cats and 100 dogs and so on. Cut those numbers severely. In the mean time use cages. Caged animals in small rooms behind closed doors don’t see very many people in any given frame, so the cost goes down. Plus you can sell the cages with the animals in them, which is nicer than simply butchering all of your puppies and kittens. Kick out some of the guests too. If you have public taverns, libraries, and/or temples with guests in them then either close them down or make them smaller. Focus on quality over quantity. (Actually for taverns and I guess temples I still recommend having a large room with a big square area with a nice floor and no furniture so that everyone can dance. If you haven’t seem them dance then you have been missing out!)
You can also consider changing the layout of your fortress. I don’t recommend going too far down this road, but even small changes can have large effects. Long corridors full of people are the most expensive, so try breaking line of sight using doors or corners. Put things on different floors instead of along a single long corridor. Naturally some players experimented with zig–zag corridors so that nobody can see more than a tile or two in any direction, which works, but of course that results in completely alien fortresses that feel terrible to the player.
They can make a simulation of magic based on the fabric of a procedural universe work, but even they failed to make a simulation of economics work. Fantasy magic makes more sense than modern economic theory.
I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they essentially scrapped the old. In favor of a mouse-driven design, they dropped the old, keyboard-driven UI.
Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how much they were receiving. Tens of thousands of $ a month, mind you. For monthly contributions at that level for many, many years I would expect at least a nod - instead they straight-up told everyone they'd abandon keyboard users, a decision later recanted.
That said, Dwarf Fortress holds a special place in my heart. Only regret I have is that I didn't track how many hours I put in. In excess of 10k, I'm sure.
I was under the impression that the classic keyboard-only version was kept up to date with the Steam version? They're both on patch 53.16[1][2] which was released simultaneously on 8/5, so it doesn't look to me like keyboard-only is forgotten or left behind unless I'm missing something.
[1] https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
Sadly no – the current 'classic' is just the Steam game without the steam features AIUI – i.e. still the mouse-oriented UI. 0.47.05 is the last keyboard version AFAIK.
Ah I see, I misunderstood. I just tried the latest classic version and it was all mouse. I agree then that it's disappointing as someone who has played both versions
They chose to have social security over a keyboard only interface for a game they continue to publish for free.
I understand why they did it - medical emergencies and all. Have to pay the bill somehow. But yea, 0.47.05's still my go-to. Just can't vibe with the new UI/keybinds.
Old controls were on their roadmap for a long time, but the benefit from their perspective shrinks as time goes on. I doubt we'll see it at this point.
They also dropped the Mac version.
They complain there are few Mac players on Steam. Well, I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't run on the desktop OS [1] i use most, duh.
[1] My Linux boxes are headless. And the windows boxes I have to RDP into them. That may work for a game with a beginning and and end via Steam streaming or something, but not for a forever game you just keep around.
While individual game developers choose whether to support macOS, the broader phenomenon of developers dropping macOS support is Apple's fault. They either have no interest in being a serious gaming platform, or else they've made catastrophic missteps in their quest to stay relevant for gamers.
I don’t think it has anything to do with their gaming specific capabilities, just their general philosophy matches poorly with the games industry.
Apple insist on having their own apis and they don’t maintain compatibility for older software for very long, these 2 facts explain things fine on their own. Game devs don’t want a major support burden, they’re happy to patch here and there but constant dropping of apis or even architectures is a lot to handle. The bigger impact is that macOS ends up with a lot less old games that still run, if you need a critical mass of games to become a gaming platform, that constant bleed of legacy games will always slow macOS down.
As for gaming specific features, Metal is a perfectly fine api whose only real problem is that it’s different from the other platforms. Maybe not the best, but certainly not terrible. They also have a really nice capability floor, it’s practical to make a modern game work on any Mac from the last X years (maybe the neo complicates that a bit).
There’s probably a few gaming specific capabilities they could improve on, mouse input especially, but that’s never been the real issue.
Optimization and bug hunting makes supporting multiple graphics api's a pain. I really don't understand Apple's stubborn refusal to make vulkan drivers. Between Apple and the better performance on SteamDeck, I can see PC game developers seriously considering Vulkan over directx.
> Game devs don’t want a major support burden
What fraction of game studios still even exist 10 years after releasing a game?
I was a quarterly(-ish) contributor for years. There was no way for me to justify buying anything when they announced dropping keyboard support, when I've spent years developing muscle-memory to their (admittedly insane) control scheme.
Also - I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that running DF through a terminal is (was...) possible if you're not using a graphical tileset (perhaps even with... ha)?
The sad thing is that current Macs are perfect machines for DF. The recommendation was always to get as fast a single threaded machine as possible with the biggest cache. Even the least expensive Macs are monsters in those regards. The game is more multi-threaded than before but still is dominated by single threaded performance.
You might be interested in running games from your headless boxes with this: https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine
Mac gaming is a pain in the **. It's Apple's fault. It's fine they can't justify the maintenance.
The game runs fine in Proton, including with dfhack. You can probably get it working on your Mac with a tiny bit of Crossover/Wine/GPTK tweaking.
That's missing the point. There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't.
Can't be too mad about it though, it was free back then too.
What benefit does a native build have over proton? I used to care more about it on Linux, until I realized that "native build" probably means "doesn't work." I can only imagine this being much worse on a niche gaming target which there are extremely few users making (and voting for) bug reports.
Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense.
Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).
You should try speaking to the Apple manager.
macOS has changed a lot more than Windows or Linux did in the last decade. It's hardly Tarn's fault, here.
macOS is also just a proper PITA through and through. I'm annoyed that I can't play it on my m4 but I also understand that supporting macOS has always been a nuisance.
If I were making games I wouldn't support it either. Apple does just about everything to not support backwards compat.
FWIW DF and DFHack work flawlessly through Crossover on macOS on my M2 and my M5
Is it really that bad? I haven't played since the GUI update but was thinking about getting into it again because I still have years of muscle memory from it. But if I am forced to use the mouse im not sure I even want to bother. There is absolutely no way I could play the game at the same speed I use to if I have to resort to mouse-only features.
What you are asking for is completely unreasonable. There’s no way that one programmer can maintain two completely separate UIs. Keep in mind that they could not simply “add graphics” to the existing interface, they had to write a completely new one that was not based around fixed–size character cells.
Wasn't the graphical interface 95% outsourced to others? And originally the graphic version was suppose to be layered on top and leave the underlying version of the game barely touched from the player's side. It was even touted as an excuse at the time to fix some of the keyboard shortcuts that were inconsistent among different submenus, and certainly not to eliminate or supersede keyboard interfaces.
It makes me sad to think about. I would love to get into the new UI, but the immersion just won't come back. My muscle memory, hands firmly on the keyboard, is too persistent, and playing with the new UI feels like stumbling around and misclicking.
I know what you mean, but I have been playing since 2008? and the last few updates have been pretty great.
Yeah my biggest issue has been that none of my muscle memory transfers over and it adds another hurdle to ever getting back into the game.
You dont want to know your hours. Perhaps my greatest shame is the number of hours i have spent on factorio. I was afk for much of that (letting the factory run) but ... i would not want other people to see the number.
The new updates got me back into dwarf fortress. I'm sure there are more players now then ever before.
I don’t understand. I don’t know what “added the G to their UI” means.
Also sounds like they added back the keyboard support so there’s literally no issue?
> In excess of 10k, I'm sure.
Sure sounds like you got your moneys worth.
Ui+g=gui. As in since they added graphics
I wish nothing but success to Tarn and Zach, it’s great that releasing on Steam and adding a friendlier UI helped the game reach new audiences. It’s the proverbial time black hole.
Weirdly the ASCII art was what drew me in the most. Once accustomed to it, feels like The Matrix where they're reading the world.
as someone who grew up playing ascii games I was pretty excited about the graphical update.
there is a novelty to ascii, but its a barrier to entry and major eye strain.
In a documentary about them putting Dwarf Fortress on Steam Tarn talked about how he had to split the $7 million first payment from Steam with his brother and it turned out the easiest way was to just use the bank app.
The noclip documentary series for any other readers who might be interested
1. The Origins of Dwarf Fortress: https://youtu.be/MxV24so-dw8
2. How Dwarf Fortress Evolved over 16 Years of Development: https://youtu.be/PiNeDarPzeI
3. How Dwarf Fortress Coming to Steam Changed Everything: https://youtu.be/TX65XCk2-6U anecdote about the money starts @ 18:40
4. Life After the Success of Dwarf Fortress: https://youtu.be/I5zgBXp4e8A
You are thinking of the NoClip documentary! It is fantastic and well worth your time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwLSgaYPKA0&list=PL-THgg8Qnv...
NoClip does a great job. I also recommend their Prey/Arcane documentary.
I’ve never received $7M but a few times I’ve handled large sums (when buying a house and previous startup exit) and it felt so weird to be how completely normal it was. Like just… oh yeah go ahead and write a cheque for six figures. Or do an e-transfer into your chequing account for six figures. It felt like… no there has to be a whole special world for large sums, no?
I'm sure there is special handling for large sums... but six figures isn't it. Businesses routinely write checks for half a million dollars, two million dollars... it's perfectly normal to see such amounts within the banking world. There might be some extra scrutiny on the back end that you don't see, but since it's well within the realm of normal operations that the bank sees happen every day, it's nothing special.
Now, eight or nine figures, that's probably going to pass the threshold for special attention. As in, you might be required to go to the bank in person with photo ID in order to authorize the transaction, that sort of thing. But under 10 million U.S. dollars? Many businesses will handle those amounts monthly, and the bank is used to seeing them.
What is it like when billionaires sell like $10 billion worth of shares? Do you need a special bank account to hold that much?
I had the muscle memory for the full keyboard control on pre-steam releases and the loss of some complete keyboard controls and things just changing made it so I never really got into the Steam release, which was pretty disappointing. I get it though.
I'm in a similar, but less extreme boat. The new interface has its perks, especially in terms of discoverability, but for tasks that need to be done repeatedly (request 10 beds be made before you have a manager, for example), you really miss the ability to rock some chords.
It took me some time to remap the muscle memory but it felt so worth it. The Steam version is not just a new AI, it introduced a lot of gameplay changes which really improved the underlying systems a lot.
Does the non-steam version not receive the same gameplay updates? I had been under the impression that the only difference was the UI.
The version available for free on their website is the same exact program as the one you purchase on Steam. It simply includes a different set of graphics for the UI. These graphics are designed to look as if they are made up of text characters, but in reality they are still just sprites. The sprites that come with the version you buy from Steam are designed to look like a normal but stylized gui.
The non-steam version also had its controls significantly changed
steam release is a major improvement beyond just the graphical updates.
if you are a fan of the original I would encourage you to give it another shot.
“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more interesting than the actual gameplay.
EDIT: To people who are rebutting this by saying “it’s just not for you” - that’s entirely my point. Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
Minecraft was very fun and was selling like hotcakes when it had "no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players". Even nowadays there's no tutorial as far as I know and much of how to play is left to discovery. The achievements tree is a bit of a guide, just by telling you some of the things that are possible, but it sure doesn't tell you how to do anything.
I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.
As soon as I bought Minecraft I opened the Wiki and used that to figure out how to craft stuff.
It was the first mainstream Wiki-based game. Now, every game does it that way.
You cannot be serious! That comparison is a joke. There's worlds between the complexity of Minecraft and DF.
How would you suggest someone make a good tutorial for DF that doesn't leave the player exhausted by the time they start a new game?
That's my core complaint w/ strategy games. By the time I'm done with the tutorial i have to do other things only to forget everything I learned the next time I get to sit down with it.
At best "hints" or a glossary/help menu is the best way imo.
Why you ask me that?
Unlike dwarf fortress, minecraft is fun and engaging from minute zero, and exposes its systems to you naturally over time. Terrible comparison.
Yeah, I think this actually supports the idea that Dwarf Fortress is needlessly bad at onboarding players. Every time I try to get into it, I end up confused by why people enjoy it and unable to figure out how to play it. Whereas with Minecraft, exploring how to play it was actually fun, with Dwarf Fortress, it felt frustrating and unnecessarily obscure.
That's because the UX/UI is utterly awful. It's cargo cult: the game. (And BTW my complaints have nothing to do with the controls. The actual UX is just... not thought out at all).
Minecraft's early game is relatively boring. Empty busywork like punching trees, village raids and strip mining are vestigial gameplay loops that neither Mojang nor Microsoft had the confidence to fix.
I'd agree that they're a bad comparison though. Despite Notch's inspiration from DF, Minecraft has worse bosses, biomes, trading, mining, diplomacy, cooking, innkeeping and NPCs.
Back in my day, villages weren't even in the game. My highschool classmates and I still found something compelling about it.
I had a good number of hours in Minecraft Classic's browser version, mostly in online servers though. Solo wasn't much fun.
Modern Minecraft is still not much of an appeal to me without mods. I'm happy to see more block games like Vintage Story push the medium forward while Microsoft... wraps up post-production on A Minecraft Movie: Squared, I guess?
It depends what you mean by "early game." The first night cycle happens within minutes of starting and it's very interesting.
It also has effectively zero physics. I still remember being annoyed at how water worked in Minecraft when playing with my kid, and the fact that trees don't collapse if you cut 'em down.
(Yes, yes, mods exist.)
So just because you couldn't get into it means everyone who's enjoying it is a poser? That's some pretty self-centered thinking right there.
No one should be judging you if it's not your thing. Those of us that enjoy it readily admit its faults and own the fact it's not a game for everyone.
some people never developed theory of mind as children sadly
You may prefer a game like 'Going Medieval' which is a similar concept to Dwarf Fortress but is heavily simplified, almost as though someone played Dwarf Fortress then decided to make a version for their kids.
> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
The majority of people do not play videogames. The majority of those do not play any roguelikes. Citing the majority is completely useless.
Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress. There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know. Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once.
> I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun.
On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game. The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours. The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog. That to me is some excellent playtime. Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.
The tutorial is the wiki. I used to play Dwarf Fortress back in the 2008-2009 era, and I kept going back to the wiki when I needed to learn something. It was, and still is, comprehensive, containing not just a "getting started for beginners" tutorial page, but also a list of every building and workflow (from ore to metal to swords and armor, from seeds to plants to food and drink...). In-game tutorials are not the only way to learn about a game; a well-maintained wiki (that isn't on wikia, oops sorry they're called fandom dot com there days — but that's a whole other rant) is also an excellent resource. And certain types of games seem to lend themselves to having well-maintained wikis: Dwarf Fortress's wiki is perhaps the best I've ever seen, narrowly beating Minecraft's also-excellent wiki.
Yep, the game is difficult to get into, it's not for everyone.
The game is great, though. You are in the "I have no idea what's going on" phase.
It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding. It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design.
This depends largely on your expectation for what a 'game' should be.
Puzzle boxes, for example, have zero on ramp, and yet many many people enjoy them, enjoy the struggle of discovery.
Arguably the edges of mathematics and science are inhabited by similar people, living where the rules are ill defined, where there is much to be discovered rather than pre-digested and spoon fed.
I have little patience for games that don't spoon feed, so I get where you're coming from. I watched my brother play DF and decided I didn't want to spend my time like that, trying to parse ascii, trying to figure out how all the things interacted.
I also don't like puzzle boxes that much.
To each their own.
I found exactly the discovery fulfilling in Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld and Minecraft. Once I mastered those (well, maybe it is fairer to say "once I plateaued", there are way more skilled players than me) I found much less interest in them. Sure, I still play occasionally for a bit after a big update drops, but that is pretty much it. Oh and yeah, puzzle focused games (as long as it isn't slide puzzles) are great too. I fondly remember Myst, Monkey Island and other puzzle games like that.
Some people like games where you need to grind (idle clicker games seem to be purest/insanest form of that), and that is something I don't get at all. It is just pointless busywork, just like those repetitive achievements ("kill N enemies with X style attacks") or collectables. (Achievements that are on the form "find this hidden thing" or "do this out of the box thing once" I do understand more.)
To each their own indeed.
You're totally allowed to have that opinion. Time is valuable. It does have a tutorial nowadays, but it's still not easy.
Not everyone _wants_ to learn Dwarf Fortress, and that's fine - it's not for everyone.
But I'm just providing context that, for those of us that have learned, it is a great game.
No.
Dwarf fortress challenged what I thought the rules of game design were.
It was absurd amounts of fun. I was happy to go through the tutorials or ask questions on bay12.
Figuring out how things worked, and then using those skills to explore the world was fun. It was also internally consistent.
The game simply isn’t for you.
Not every game can be for everyone, and Dwarf Fortress is not a game for people who want onramps. “Shitty game design” is subjective, I guess.
Maybe the Steam page is too slick? I can’t imagine somebody going to the old dwarf fortress page and thinking “this is a game I’ll pick up easily!”
Somebody didn't grow up with early console games.
Is it your job to define jobs?
>It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding.
No, it is a games job to be entertaining for those it was designed to entertain.
>It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design.
Certainly there are many people who take a longer time to learn and grasp concepts and find challenging tasks something to be avoided, and this game isn't for you! That doesn't mean that every game should be designed so that the lowest commoner denominator can understand and enjoy the game! Some people not only enjoy being challenged by complex games, but seek those out those challenges and that complexity. The game market is flooded with easy to learn and easy to win games designed and made for simpletons, so there's no reason for you to complain about the rare game (these days) that deviates from that.
>It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding.
Its the games job to present their unique style of fun to the market, and let the market sort it out. A game made by 2 blokes has to have a set of priorities, and their priority has always been the simulation.
>It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”
I mean, ignore Dwarf Fortress for a minute, this is exactly what Paradox has built its little empire on. I was at 300+ hours of Crusader Kings 2 and had only a sort of intuitive grasp of most of the games systems. And at the time, most of the safer european powers were at risk of just getting rolled off the map by the golden horde mid game, and the work arounds for that were quite insane. I still dont reckon I have the war/conflict systems mastered. Paradox does tutorials, they just suck immensely and you end up on the forums or wikis anyway.
Dwarf fortress has managed to create a game with that kind of skill curve with 0.0001% of the resources.
>that’s just shitty game design.
I feel sorry for you, I get the impression that this hostility is coming from a place where you really wish you could share in these fantastic games but haven't quite got the gumption to stick with them. I get it I really do, I mod Battle Brothers to make it easier, because I love the texture of the game but I haven't been able to master the combat or save scumming required to play at a real difficulty.
Why is it the games job to handhold you?
Why is it a game's job to be fun?
DF is extremely fun.
And in the same way, it's a game's job to make sure their players have fun, one of which is to have a good onboarding experience.
Because it’s not a complete or compelling experience if the systems aren’t naturally exposed and taught over time in a progressive manner. This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years.
There are notable counterexamples. I find life to be both complete and compelling as experience.
>good game design
There are plenty of good or even great games that dont give a shit about "good game design". And developing in the direction of "good game design" is sort of like Carcinization, AAA games have been tending towards a single unified structure. Its great for mass media but its terrible for art.
I learned Dwarf Fort through a mate of mine. We both played separately, and we would have phone calls discussing how we were able to achieve x or y outcome. Eventually we determined an ideal set of bootstraps to achieve a plateau of semi functional Dwarf society.
And then they dropped the dwarf economy update, and everything went to shit and we got to relearn how to pick ourselves up all over again.
Then Bees, then Taverns and Travellers. Then Danger Rooms started causing more serious wounds.
You are welcome to limit yourself to AAA games and yellow paint but thats you deciding to artificially limit what experiences you participate in. It doesnt cast a single shadow on people tooling around and experiencing the art of games.
Eh, I definitely can't agree with this one. Some of the most beloved games of all time had effectively no on-ramp of any kind - especially if you're willing to go back 30 years - and none of the fans of those games would say "they are not compelling experiences" because of a learning cliff.
>This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years.
First, this is completely wrong. There are many good games that have been designed over the last 30 years that didn't assume you were an invalid and needed your hand hand held every step of the way.
Second, many of us (including myself) have been playing computer games for ~50 years! In the 80s and 90s the average game was far more difficult than even the most difficult games put out today. It wasn't assumed that everyone, or even most people, were ever going to beat the game. There were games I played for hundreds of hours back then, and enjoyed greatly, that I never finished or even mastered all the complexities of! That didn't make it any less fun. I want to be challenged by a game. If I load up a game and am spoon-fed everything it isn't a game I play for long.
Religiously subscribing to every "cornerstone of great game design" is how you end up with the plain oatmeal of videogames. Inoffensive, bland, and easily forgotten.
I, for one, hate games spoonfeeding me. Most games are unlikely to be a player's first videogame. I don't need every damn mechanic tutorialized. Present me with my toolbox, and let me get to it.
Skill issue.
Claiming the game of systems and their interactions is not complete or compelling because it doesn't hold you hand is laughable.
Not everything has to be made or everyone, in fact I would argue that is exactly the reason games these days are bland and identical.
Press "F" to pay respects.
No great game is enjoyed by everyone. Your options when making a work, of any kind, are to either A) make something utterly inoffensive to the point that no one will have strong opinions about it at all or B) make a game that some people will love and others will bounce off of.
Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience.
If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell.
If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.
I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structure, because these things did have genuinely different behaviors despite being conceptually similar. That's a problem at a deeper layer than the UI/UX.
The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.
As someone whose spent ~5k hours playing DF you are right, every person I have ever talked to about it has liked the idea and like 1/50 has gone on to play it for >10 hours.
congratulations for stating what the the creators of the game have said many many time.
nobody is making you play it, and the people who enjoy playing it don't really care if it you liked it or not.
You're not wrong!
I used to play it, and for me, I think it scratched the same creative itch that Minecraft does in other folks. Building grand designs, etc. But in Minecraft, I'd have to place it block by block, and the physics... well, they're just absent. DF is like Minecraft, but with Lemmings, and a full physics system.
I still remember some of those designs, and I can see them clearly in my mind - not as the game represented them, but as the dwarves would have seen them. A grand underground bridge, with water flowing alongside it, before spiraling down into the main hall - where the wagons would enter the marketplace, and the dwarves would pass through the mist generated by the waterfall (forgotten beast got 'em all.) A giant vertical chain, build out of stone, standing as a monument to the grand fortress that sprawls underneath it (half-completed, as the fortress succumbed to madness.) A fortress built into a volcano, underneath the open sky, with the forges powered by magma, and a small river diversion creating endless obsidian (fucking birds kept swooping down and either eating my dwarves, or knocking them into the volcano, because I couldn't build the roof fast enough.)
I keep wanting to go back in, and I should - but I'd literally have to dig out the `cheatsheet.txt` file I had to keep on my desktop while playing, PLUS I'd have to figure out if I still needed the third party app that makes managing dwarven jobs reasonable, because in-game it's a fucking nightmare - and whether that app even exists for OS X, because I think it was a Windows-only thing that would interact with the game by directly reading RAM.
It sucks, but it's so good.
FYI, the newer versions with their mouse-driven interface solve a lot of those issues. Dwarf Therapist (the RAM reading tool you were thinking of) isn't needed any more, because there are much better in-game tools for managing what kinds of work certain dwarves do. The new menu layouts are a lot more discoverable, allowing you to find most things with just a little bit of clicking around (and the descriptions of stuff are a lot better now, so no more googling "what the heck is a quern?"). I miss the old keyboard controls sometimes, but they're gradually adding them back in the form of shortcuts. DFHack is still around, and basically necessary for automating some of the more fiddly resource chains (stuff like, "request 50 trees get cut down out of this patch of forest if our number of logs gets below 200").
I hadn't played in like 10 years when I picked up the Steam release, and I found it pretty easy to get back into.
I am going to boot it up and play today just to spite you lol
Makes me think how would an AI interface to a game like dwarf fortress play out. Where you tell it what you want like some sort of dwarven ruler.
The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail. It's the opposite of the approach taken by AI games that want to generalise based on simple prompts.
I would pose that's a matter of holding it wrong. Like, integrating generative AI as a prompt to an API endpoint exposed to the user is one of the worst, most naive and bland ways to use it as a game subsystem that I can think of.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with trying to use generative AI as a subsystem for a game, problems which exist at a conceptual level. But all the games I've seen that integrate AI as a subsystem don't even come remotely close to hitting that ceiling. I think it's ultimately up to the fact that an interesting usage of generative AI requires a level of technical competency and theory that's well beyond that of the layman. The people making games that utilize AI generally seem to lack the chops to make a good game or do interesting things with AI. The people with the chops and manhours to make a good game with AI:
- Don't want the backlash of having a generative model in their game, because no matter the context that's a lot of very bad press for something that's very difficult and time consuming to implement.
- See the immediate problems and difficulty that arise from a decently integrated concept and execution, and even without the bad press, understand that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That it's always going to be an immensely stupid gimmick in the end, one that's trying way too hard.
That won't stop us from having 10,000 pieces of shovelware getting churned out that have the worst, most uninspired integrations imaginable mind you. We clearly already have those. For those that could do something better with the tech, there's too many good reasons to not touch it.
> The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail.
I don't know, it's basically Minecraft with Lemmings. You control a lot, but at the end, the AI comparison might be somewhat apt - you tell the dwarves what to do, and they mostly do it. When they're not struck by a strange mood, or when they're not too depressed to work, or when they're not being eaten by a Forgotten Beast (beware its deadly dust!)
I take your point, but those are also all things you can control and manage, albeit indirectly.
to each their own, but that is the least interesting part of DF for me.
I like the narrative element and enjoy delegating random shit and seeing what happens.
been messing around with this idea in godot for a few months, if you are really interested i can send you an alpha build once its in a playable state.
This thread really inspired me to never release anything for free for decades.
You have to look to the people for whom those decades brought joy, and realize how grandly that outnumbers complaints...
and if you find yourself blessed enough to be in that position does the road, then "reading HN" is a problem that solves itself ;)
It's been a while since I last played DF and I'm surprised to see that both this article and the video are a bit light on details, IIRC they used to showcase upcoming updates a lot more.
Digging a bit more it looks like the magic system will be built around deities, spheres of influence [1], and workshops/professions centered around magic leading to procedurally generated spells. I'm really excited to see how it'll turn out.
[1] https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Sphere
This seems more like a teaser trailer. I presume more information is forthcoming.
They have a history of at least trying to be transparent, especially in their Future of the Fortress posts[0]. Emphasize on trying to, as they're not exactly great at sticking to plans, though that certainly improved with the Kitfox partnership.
[0]: https://bay12games.com/dwarves/
I always thought dwarf fortress would be a great simulation backbone for some kind of LLM driven story telling system.
Something that keeps the world consistent while the user experiences a generated adventure
I’ve been tinkering with a game engine where magic is made of first principles for a very long time. Cannot wait to see the gameplay and mechanics here!
i've been doing something similar and decided to stick with godot.
have you found yourself constrained with engine boilerplate or do you feel like you are making good progress on the magic system?
Only working on the magic system itself, unfortunately making the game around the mechanics is not something I enjoy, so I have been implementing different approaches with some minimal debugging UI. Did not reach the need for an actual game engine
The idea of procedurally generated magic systems sounds insane. My fortress will be a glorious magical mess.
Does any other game have true procedural generated magic systems like DF talks about? I have always been curious how and if they'll pull it off and if it will just end up being all pretty much the same
yes, there are several games exploring this idea on steam.
Could you name a few of the best ones?
Noita is the first that comes to mind.
Some others that I have in my library are magicraft, fictorum, and spell chain.
I'm messing around with these ideas myself, reminds me of the old days of crafting broken spells in morrowind.
What ive generally heard is that this is more of a refactor and base functionality improvement, rather than building out all the actual magic systems to start with.
2-10 updates in the future will have much more fleshed out magic
OPs post made me curious about jumping in, how often do they release updates? If I'm going to wait for this and the next one.
this game will be updated until the creators die, its a passion project and is a genre defining masterpiece if you are into procedurally generated narrative driven world sims.
Historically, they did a big update every year or two. Since the Steam release, they've sped up significantly, with medium sized updates every 2-3 months.
As if my fortress wasn't chaotic enough. Guess I'll be learning a whole new system to exploit.
The only game I've I've supported where I ended up buying licenses for friends and family. Lot of respect for them and their game.
My dwarves are already drowning in complexity; this update will ensure total legendary chaos. My weekend plans just evaporated.
I remember finding this game back in the summer before 8th grade. right after the z-axis was added. talk about a spirtual wakening. I remember printing off the wiki and reading it in my science class. This game is probably the main reason I became an engineer honestly.
It's so exciting, I've heard about them doing magic for a decade, and now it is actually approaching.
same, I'm going to break the hell out of this update
I was passionate about this game (gui version), until my fps dropped to 1 (unplayable) and I found no fix.
Try the game again, the performance has improved significantly. One major problem that was affecting most players were the line–of–sight calculations. Every person and animal in the game has an opinion of every other, and can get mood changes simply from seeing people (or animals) that they like or dislike. And that opinion is both based on the history of interactions between them as well as other factors like consanguinity. So every time someone moves the game has to check who they can see, and for every person (or animal) that they can see it has to check to see if they are related, and if so to what degree. Guests, invaders, monsters, zombies, ghosts, sneaks, villains, etc all have their effects.
The fundamental O(n²) behavior remains, but caching has greatly improved performance for typical forts. They also improved cache locality and refined the exact set of conditions that affect mood. They also parallelized this specific part of the code, though I believe you have to enable that in the options.
You can also improve performance by making changes to your fort. Primary amongst these is simply to reduce the number of people and animals on the map. Don’t keep 50 sheep and 100 cats and 100 dogs and so on. Cut those numbers severely. In the mean time use cages. Caged animals in small rooms behind closed doors don’t see very many people in any given frame, so the cost goes down. Plus you can sell the cages with the animals in them, which is nicer than simply butchering all of your puppies and kittens. Kick out some of the guests too. If you have public taverns, libraries, and/or temples with guests in them then either close them down or make them smaller. Focus on quality over quantity. (Actually for taverns and I guess temples I still recommend having a large room with a big square area with a nice floor and no furniture so that everyone can dance. If you haven’t seem them dance then you have been missing out!)
You can also consider changing the layout of your fortress. I don’t recommend going too far down this road, but even small changes can have large effects. Long corridors full of people are the most expensive, so try breaking line of sight using doors or corners. Put things on different floors instead of along a single long corridor. Naturally some players experimented with zig–zag corridors so that nobody can see more than a tile or two in any direction, which works, but of course that results in completely alien fortresses that feel terrible to the player.
They can make a simulation of magic based on the fabric of a procedural universe work, but even they failed to make a simulation of economics work. Fantasy magic makes more sense than modern economic theory.