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Dwarf Fortress a deep management simulation/roguelike with text based graphics. To grossly oversimplify - think Dungeon Keeper done in the style of NetHack. The learning curve is considered somewhat steep but there is an active and usually helpful/friendly following.
Get hype!
For the impatient: Starter Pack ETA is ~6-8 hours from now, obviously without DFHack or Therapist. I'll update this comment with a link to the less-stable pack when it's uploaded ;-)
Looks like I was too pessimistic about the release date - I was guessing December (well, recently - I started at March 2017!).
Don't forget to check out the development page - it's got a great list of upcoming features.
I'm actually really really really excited that Toady is planning a whole series of smaller releases. I love the big overhauls, but smaller cycles with bugfixes make the existing game so much smoother to play :-)
Contribute to the wiki! Without you, you early adopter you, new players would be lost in a twisty maze of features, all alike.
[mod hat on] If you have questions, please use the questions thread.
/braindump over, looking forward to playing later this evening.
Considering how faithfully Adams has stuck with his development roadmap and how many items on that list are still white goals he hasn't begun work on yet, I'll be astonished if we see 1.0.0 drop in the next ten years. There aren't really other games like this.
oh christ...
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Just look at the website and you'll already feel overwhelmed I'm sure. (It's a download for the computer)
Go in dry and don't come back until you're flat and shiny in the front parts.
Continuing a long tradition of humorous bug fix updates!
>For instance, a human trading company called the Present Hall was wildly successful trading various leathers and bones for crafting, and eventually had enough clout to open a branch warehouse inside a dwarf fortress for the first time. Can't resist that draltha leather. This turned out to be a strategic error, as two short years later, a forgotten beast obliterated the fortress, the warehouse, and killed everyone inside. So, what's the correct response? Close the destroyed branch? No, no, you stimulate the (non-existent) economy by hiring local. Forgotten beast, you're the new (ruined) warehouse administrator, congratulations!
I couldn't resist.
Play Dwarf Fortress. The UI takes some getting used to, but holy hell is it the most intricate, fucked up game you can play.
Use the resources available to you and have as much patience as possible. If you ever understand it, it will be the most !!fun!! you have had in a game.
It's doesn't so much have a learning curve as a learning cliff, but I've yet to find another game anything like it. I've heard it described as a "combination of Dungeon Keeper and the Sims, if all your minions were manic-depressive alcoholics".
Dwarf Fortress is free. The Steam version will have an official tileset, new music, and Steam Workshop integration, but if you're willing to play with ASCII graphics (or use a modded tileset), then you can download the game from the developer's website.
I haven't played Rimworld, but it may be the better option if a) ASCII graphics are a dealbreaker, b) a steep learning curve and hardcore gameplay are dealbreakers, or c) you like the sci-fi colony theme better than high fantasy.
Unfortunately, they only raise corpses when they're in combat situations. Or perhaps fortunately, since the raised corpses are immediately hostile and try to kill the necromancers.
I think I'll report that as a bug.
Edit: Bug reported!
It's pretty much the original 'colony survival' game (think Rimworld or Banished). You have a little group of dwarves and your goal is to stop them dying from starvation/invasion/infighting/wild badger attacks. It's notorious for two reasons:
- The incredibly basic UI and fairly poor controls.
- The huge amount of simulated detail. Your individual dwarves have preferences and fears and neuroses and entire procedurally generated lives outside the little window of time you see them in. In combat it's possible to cut off individual fingers or teeth, or blind or paralyse or cripple characters to varying degrees. The game simulates fluid movement and pressure, fire propagation, the spread of poisonous contaminants throughout a map. The histories of civilisations of hundreds of thousands of NPCs are generated, including economics, diplomacy and conflicts spanning hundreds of years and the propagation of new ideas throughout a nation.
It's pretty great. Because of those two things, it has a bit of a reputation for being unfriendly to newcomers, which is true, but not as bad as some people make out. Once you work out the basic controls it's simply a matter of learning one new mechanic at a time and learning through failure until you have a fort that can survive a few years.
I'm a bit of a fanboy. Can you tell?
>Hi all! The Starter Pack has updated to 40_05 r1! As usual, you can get it here.
>DF 40_05 included a record-breaking 78 separate bugs resolved, more than any release since 0.31.01! You can see the full list here. It's now stable enough that the legacy starter pack is in full archival mode, and I recommend the new version to all players old and new.
>This was already a decent pack update before the new DF version, so I'll just let you read the changelogs (seriously, look at the link above).
>Changelog for Starter Pack 40_05 r1:
>* updated DF2014 embark profiles (default set)
>* updated Dwarf Therapist to 23.2
>* updated Legends Viewer to 1.13.18; some version number catch-up is involved
>* added Legends Exports Processor 4.0; a script to compress (by 95%+) legends exports and move them to the UGC folder
>* updated the launcher; it now won't launch DF again if it's already running
>* updated Dwarf Fortress to 40_05; biggest bugfixing update ever!
>* re-installed keybindings, phoebus graphics, embark profiles
>* updated Ironhand graphics for 40_05
>* updated Phoebus graphics for 40_05
>* updated Dwarf Therapist to 23.3 for 40_05
It's like one of those weird traditions you get in little villages. I suspect an enormous amount of alcohol is involved.
Buzzkill edit: should probably drop a savefile on the bug tracker because I'm certain they're not meant to do that.
Dwarf fortress - the amount of work put into this game is insane. Yes the UI is not so friendly but you can take some time to read the wiki and you will get used to it eventually, a little effort and you will be rewarded with one of the most interesting and brutal experiences of strategy/dwarf management. Also it's free.
Half life 2 - Very fast paced action from start to end. Still stands out as one of the best of all time. Movement is very fluid if you practice it, can make the game seem so smooth. Also City 17 is how I imagine a futuristic 1984 would be, minus the thought police. Almost everyone already has it but if you don't I really recommend it.
Morrowind - Yes Skyrim is one of the most popular games of all times, has tonnes of mods to add hours and hours of playtime and looks insane but before Skyrim even existed I played morrowind for hundreds of hours, running home after school to load it up. I've never felt more immersed in a world before. There is currently an overhaul mod in the works, it is playable but not entirely finished yet, sadly the game does not hold up too well with graphics and movement like it did when it was released. The magic system in the game is nuts as well.
> Take for another example Dwarf Fortress
You're thinking Spacebase DF-9. Dwarf Fortress, its inspiration, is an extremely ambitious base-building, world-exploring, dwarf-managing, procedurally-generated RPG with a passionate fanbase that's been in development for 13 years.
So that reminds me of a thing, but it's only tangentially related.
Are you familiar with Dwarf Fortress? It's full of Fun. If you're not familiar, it's essentially The Mines of Moria, the RTS/sim game. Think dwarves carving into a mountain and potentially digging too deep, and you're there. The game is complex as fuck and weird things can happen.
I played a game that was doing fairly well one time. Then someone died. Then another person died. Soon my ~100 dwarves were reduced to ~8. Of the 8, one had gone insane because of all of his loved ones dying apparently brutal deaths. Plus, as it turns out, all of his loved ones were just lying outside, not being buried properly.
Finally I found what was happening: a piece of metal somehow got superheated. It was permanently superhot. It was lying outside, so a dwarf went to pick it up. The dwarf died, because it was super hot. Another dwarf went to pick it up and died. Other dwarves tried to pick up the corpses and died. And repeat until there are 8 dwarves left.
By then it was too late. The remaining 8 died. All that remained was the children.
These dwarf children had witnessed the fall of their entire town. Most of these people literally burned alive. They were left to fend for themselves, eating their slowly dwindling supplies, until finally one of them aged enough to be able to care for the others.
Dwarf Fortress is weird.
Here's the to do list. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html
Basically the version number is based off of this to do list. When 100% of this list is done we will be on version 1.0. Right now the game is just over 40% done.
> The long-term goal is to create a fantasy world simulator in which it is possible to take part in a rich history, occupying a variety of roles through the course of several games.
-- found here.
For one, you're completely missing adventure mode, and neither of those games come even close to the depth DF already has, much less what it aspires to.
It really is a world simulation, the playing modes are secondary. Once more stuff is in place it'd be possible to build a politics sim on top of it, for example, managing whole civilisations.
Seriously, Toady, seriously?
I mean, I don't know about you, but I wasn't expecting the new towns to be THIS good.
For people who, like me, dont play in ASCII: the inner blue ring circling the city is not a river. that's a microcline wall, complete with towers. Toady posted the 4 or 5 upper layers too. In those, you can see how the wall "climbs" over the elevations.
We were actually going to get games in taverns when they came in, and were teased with interactive games (player against dwarves,) but Toady got distracted.
> It's so clear that you are buying into something that is far from finished.. every single time
And yet I've had an enormous amount of fun with Project Zomboid, Minecraft, Rimworld, Prison Architect, ArmA 3, Don't Starve, FTL, Wayward Terran Frontier etc. Sure, there have been disappointments, but I'm finding the ratio similar to that of officially released titles.
Hell, the game I've spent the most money on is likely to remain "far from finished" for a few decades yet. And I'll do my best to make sure that actually happens, which is actually the point most of the time, not getting a playable product immediately.
> peeked my interest
Piqued, damnit. Usually it's "peaked my interest", at least that makes some kind of sense :P
From the development page:
>Villainous plots
>* Work existing mechanics into conspiracy chains
> * Bandit groups raid and pillage the hill dwarves and extort from the fortress
> * Steal/demand artifacts
> * Thieves stealing items
> * Assassination of position-holding dwarves and meddling adventurers
>* Prisoner interrogations (both modes)
>* Receiving tips and rumors (both modes)
>* Sending out dwarven agents/investigators
>* Improve fort/adv rumor displays to highlight known plot elements
I want to suggest Dwarf Fortress. The sheer amount of time I must have spent playing this game is scary to think about.
You build and manage a fortress for your dwarves, their children and their pets in a procedurally generated world with thousands of years of history (including people, monsters, events, deaths e.t.c.). As your fortress grows in size and wealth, word spreads and more dwarves migrate to join you, goblins and other nasties will also want a piece of your fortress too so you better be ready to defend it.
The game has a steep learning curve but a rewarding one, imagine grabbing the bogey man by his teeth and kicking his head clean off, well you can do this in game.
Possibly my favorite ever bug was "fat dwarves eating cause lag". The game was recalculating how well insulated dwarves were based on their fat, which was capped at a maximum. Every time a fat dwarf ate, it would hit the cap, causing a recalculation (which happened at set fat intervals, one of which was the maximum), but then immediately decrease (because fat is constantly being burned), causing a second recalculation a frame later.
10% of CPU utilization was being taken up by calculating exactly how well insulated a dwarf was. I have never seen that actually be a factor during play, but sure enough, it's being calculated quietly in the background
Anyone else having trouble generating a world? Mine is freezing when 'Placing civilisations...'
Edit: Problem has now been resolved and will be fixed in 0.42.02 http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9125
From the development page:
Improved sieges >• Coming up with a plan to overcome pathing obstacles to reach fortress innards
>>• Ability to dig (optionally, default on)
>>• Ability to build bridges/ramps
>>• Ability to use grappling hooks/ladders/climb
- Nethack (seriously)
- FreeCiv (a bit redundant now with Civ V on Linux but still somewhat interesting in its own right)
- Dwarf Fortress (free as in beer)
- Battle for Wesnoth
- HedgeWars (Worms clone)
- 0 A.D. (not personally a fan but many seem to like it)
- OpenMW (not entirely free since you need the Morrowind data files in order to play but an amazing project based on an amazing game)
All but Dwarf Fortress should be in your repos.
Not fixed yet, but seeing this in the bug tracker made me laugh: <em>Flying creatures stop flying, fall to the ground, and explode</em>
> While on an embark containing flying creatures, I find that they sometimes spontaneously stop flying, plummeting to the ground and dying. In at least one of these instances, there were no other creatures on the screen, so it was not a result of combat or anything similar.
> When this happens, I sometimes get job cancellations from nearby dwarves on the surface that say "Urist McDwarf has cancelled job X: Horrified"
> I would be too, Urist.
Imagine a game where you play the part of an overseer for an fortress built by dwarves. They do the work, in their own time, but you assign the orders. You tell them to grow their food, process it, and then cook it. You tell them where to dig, how wide to make the hall and how tall, and to build the furniture. Or perhaps you wish to build an above ground castle block by block? All whilst fighting against the cursed goblins who wish only to murder and kidnap the dwarves.
How do people play this game? Cruelly. They use abuse of the dwarves to toughen them up against violence, making children fall stories to dead the souls of the adults. They find ways to enslave the forces of hell and exploit every facet of nature. What do you do when you embark on a map with mermaids? Capture and set up a breeding program to harvest and butcher them for meat and crafts? Why? because mermaid bones are worth thousands of dwarfbucks each. Does it matter that mermaids are sentient beings? Nah. Or whales? Find out once and for all if it is possible to spear a whale with a ballista. (yes). Need a tough military? Lock dwarves in a room of weapon traps and shout "Dodge!" whilst locking the door. Or you can take every child and throw into a pit full of fighting dogs along with super swaggy food and furniture to keep his mood up. Let him fight for his life for 12 years until he is an adult and can be let out to join the military.
Yeah, not everybody can stand the interface. I grew up playing ASCII roguelikes, so I have it easy, but not everyone's so lucky.
I do recommend you follow the dev blog, though, I find it incredibly fascinating from a game design perspective.
The development isn't really slow for a two man team. Development is slow because it's a huge and extremely intricate game that he (Tarn Adams) has said he'll work on for at least 20/30 years. Tarn Adams also likes to release updates only when he has finished large sections of the gameplay/simulation (usually only once or twice a year).
He's currently working on taverns for example. If you have one in your fortress for example random visitors will visit, rent a room, buy drinks, create parties, have fights and tell stories. You can even visit the taverns in adventure mode, rent rooms, buy drink or pick up on rumors or quests.
He's also working on NPC's being able to tell lies and a "blueprint mode" in adventure mode. The blueprint mode lets you build your own bases, villages and so on. Fans are already talking about creating necromancer cities filled with the undead.
Here's the development overview, it's pretty huge: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html
Full text of this devlog (2014-04-15):
>I did the things I wanted to do with intruder detection. Moving on to the vampire/god tweak I mentioned on the 19th, I ran into a new world gen crash, but it reproduces so hopefully that'll be cleaned up soon.
And it refers to this entry:
>In terms of these finalizations I've been doing, there are six left:
>* Doing a test run with a dwarven adventurer from depot to depot through a tunnel, >* the liaison commenting on the world situation in dwarf mode, >* that information screen I mentioned in the FotF thread not too long ago, >* the plant list, >* some checks with guards/intruder, and >* some sort of nod to vampires/gods ruling civilizations (since it gets stranger and stranger for them to be there without any comment at all).
>Then we'll have a steaming pile of game that needs to be debugged and otherwise made playable.
Of these, we only have one left - which "should be cleaned up soon" - and some bugfixing.
Prepare yourselves. DF2014 is coming!
(I estimate one to three weeks)
Even after 27 years and the current huge popularity of FPS games, there are still point-and-click and ASCII-art games being made out there. You'll be fine. Don't be a dick.
>Super fast response: The starter pack has been updated to Dwarf Fortress version 0.40.01!
>As always, you can download it here. (For those who want more tools and less bugs, the stable/legacy 34.11 version remains available here)
>I won't go into the the wonderful details of what's new in DF 0.40.01 - for that you should check out the release page, and remember to consider donating - but here's the starter pack changelog:
>* 12x8 or 16x16 ASCII graphics options in the launcher
>* changed settings to starter pack defaults, good for new players
>* Quick fixes to legends exports processor to update version references (might be broken, but speed is more important than perfection!)
>* Added symlinks batch script
>* no keybindings, a quick compare shows huge changes so I'll have to do more detailed analysis and updating later
>Happy bughunting!
That was very confusing since Toady has already posted another log just two hours after this post was made.
This link should take you directly to the correct log.
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html#2014-01-05
A complete list of bugfixes can be found on the changelog page of the bugtracker. (There's also a bot that announces these in #dfhack (and now #dwarffortress) on irc.freenode.net, for those interested in live updates). There are currently ~~59~~ ~~60~~ ~~62~~ ~~65~~ ~~71~~ 72 fixes in the next version, which is the most ever in a single release since before 0.31.01 (possibly the most ever).
Yeah, there seems to be a bug that leads a civ to go to war with itself. I thought at first it would just be a glitch in entity relations with the irritating side effect of stopping the dwarven caravan, but it looks like my civ really means business; I wonder now if they'll collapse entirely and destroy all their sites or if the civil war will end with only half the civ dead. We'll see!
I can understand the "flee in horror" reaction to the screenshots. I've played text-based games and enjoyed them, and this kind of management/4x/worldbuilding gameplay is right up my alley, but the 8-bit colors and the console graphics seem a bit too much even for me.
Still, I keep hearing about this game in geek circles, and it seems like it wouldn't mind my laptop being a potato, so I'm probably gonna give it a shot anyway.
'fucking epic' doesn't even begin to describe Dwarf Fortress.
My last fort was wiped out by Zombie Were-wombats.
I'll just leave these here:
What you'll need:
-Dwarf Fortress Get it here
-Fantasy Map Maker Get it here
-Photoshop
Launch dwarf fortress, enjoy the little intro, and then select "Create New World." Hit ESC to continue, and once you're at a new screen, hit the left arrow to select a small world size (The Map Maker works with small worlds by default, but the image I linked is from a large map, an option you can set later in Photoshop and described in the info.txt), now hit 'y' to create the world.
Sit back, because an entire world is being created, mountains raised, rivers and lakes created, and erosion occurs as the game runs through the first years of history in this world. Once it's done, accept the map, and then go to "Start Playing" and select Legends. From here, you should use the info file in the Map Maker folder to tell you what to do, by pressing d and exporting/renaming the detailed maps it needs.
If you follow the rest of the Map Maker info file, it should work! Enjoy your awesome looking fantasy maps. Dwarf Fortress is also an awesome game, and definitely worth your time.
> I went with a command system that transfers your intention into the mount's head
Guessing we might see the end of invading mounted crocs drowning their riders then? Not sure if that's even a thing any more.
Once in a blue moon, there comes an old dwarven Patriarch to a tavern, getting a mug of finest dwarvish ale. His attire is of old generation, ancient even, it attracts all the younger dwarfs as to who he is. Why has he come here?
With a cough, the old Patriarch beckons all, and he regale with sometimes humour, sometimes sombre.
Thus the tales of updates and roadmap echoes the room.
With his mere utterance, many a world been reshaped and changed, dwarfs live and dies.
> Here's a house. You can see the upper floor in the z-window on the right. The carpenter's workshop is outside, where I made a couple of doors, a table, a chest, a cabinet, a chair and a bed. You can now place items in unheld container buildings/items, and you can also put them on tables (where they become displayed as in dwarf mode, like my copper dagger in the image).
its happening
>It's like the bad old days of the tantrum spiral all over again.
Man, so many tears were shed ~July 2014, when players discovered that dwarves had suddenly became virtually immune to madness. Anyway, 0.44.10 morale buggy as heck confirmed. I think most people expected a quick fix release, but it looks like he got distracted and it will come with outlaying sites.
Yep, happiness is just very, very poorly balanced at the moment.
I'm holding out some hope that Toady will look into the issue before the next release.
If you want random internal fun however, drunken brawls/disagreements are pretty much the only go-to nowadays, as grom alluded to. They often end in fairly visceral fist fights that can erupt into fully fledged loyalty cascades. Not the same, but it's something.
There is a first time for everything. Here is a quick introduction:
Explanation: http://i.imgur.com/qv1orJF.png
The story that got me into the game:
http://dfstories.com/the-hamlet-of-tyranny/
The subreddit:
/r/dwarffortress
and the actual website:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Please upload a save to:
http://dffd.bay12games.com/index.php
and then post a link to this bug report:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=10878
This has happened to a non-trivial number of redditors (including myself) and I want it to be taken seriously. The more examples we can get, the easier it will be to track down the cause and get it fixed.
Devlog, 2014-03-30:
>The list of new plants has more or less settled. We don't have certain things implied by the lists, like coffee or tea drinks, or tapioca, and so on, but there'll be some stuff anyway as everything slowly gets more interesting.
Whoa there - we're talking about an icon for a game whose advertised graphics consist of:
>Extended ASCII character set rendered in 16 colors (including black) as well as 8 background colors (including black).
What you'll need:
-Dwarf Fortress Get it here
-Fantasy Map Maker Get it here
-Photoshop
Launch dwarf fortress, enjoy the little intro, and then select "Create New World." Hit ESC to continue, and once you're at a new screen, hit the left arrow to select a small world size (The Map Maker works with small worlds by default, but the image I linked is from a large map, an option you can set later in Photoshop and described in the info.txt), now hit 'y' to create the world.
Sit back, because an entire world is being created, mountains raised, rivers and lakes created, and erosion occurs as the game runs through the first years of history in this world. Once it's done, accept the map, and then go to "Start Playing" and select Legends. From here, you should use the info file in the Map Maker folder to tell you what to do, by pressing d and exporting/renaming the detailed maps it needs.
If you follow the rest of the Map Maker info file, it should work! Enjoy your awesome looking fantasy maps. Dwarf Fortress is also an awesome game, and definitely worth your time.
Here's another one I did, this time with a smaller world, great for creating an island or a basic mainland for your adventure.
Also, a smaller world equals faster map generation. This island took no time at all, while my original took about 20 minutes to generate all the specialized maps for it.
hehe, you could try Dwarf Fortress.... Losing completely and utterly is part of the Fun! Lazy Newb Pack to help ease into the game a little bit
Be prepared for the UI to truly horrify you. Not only the visuals, but the input system as well. It was too much for me, which I was very upset about because it sounds like such a cool system to operate with -- and because I'm not one to shy away from complexity (EU4 is one of my favorites, for instance).
I'd highly recommend a visual improvement mod at the very least.
Few bugs going on here I believe.
First off, any sort of force-based damage is absolutely, totally broken. So this is damage like getting jabbed with a spear, where the spear itself doesn't pierce the armor, but the force of the spear's impact shatters bone and all that. Likely the same buggy logic is used for 'shaking around' attacks.
Secondly, the whole combat until passing out is the result of a fix to this issue never actually working. If two armored opponents are duking it out, and one becomes incapacitated by whatever means, the other opponent is supposed to remove their helmet armor and devlier a killing blow. But, if the other combatant doesn't have a free grasp (which is almost always the case, since nearly all soldiers have a weapon AND shield) - they'll just keep uselessly wailing on the downed enemy.
And, then there's the pretty big issue with war animals. Long story short, they won't use their really lethal attacks due to bugs
So yeah - it's all bugged up.
Polar bears have [MEANDERER], which causes their men to move slowly unless hauling something or fighting.
So, obviously not mining or the like. Maybe herbalist, glazer or hauler? He's bigger, so he can haul heavy stuff faster.
OTOH, they don't need alcohol unless they see lot of people dying so they can become a vampire. Record keeper/manager/lever puller would make a fine position as well.
I've never heard that specifically, but I don't doubt it for an instant. Plenty more complicated things than that are accounted for.
EDIT: Here's a relevant bug report. I read through some of it; it does appear they are concluding it's because of the water changing the rate of heat transfer.
You may want to consider listening to some Dwarf Fortress Talk.
A lot of questions you are asking here are already answered in these 'podcasts'. The more informed you are, the better questions and discussions you will come up with. I would suggest playing the game if you havent already.
If you are the "Society of Physics Student" then I would suggest asking some physic questions as well. Understanding the mechanics in the game, why ToadyOne picked one route for his ingame physics vs others.
Cage all non-grazing, non-hunting, and non-war animals due to bug 797
- Thanks to /u/clinodev
If you are building constructed walls or floors, then use the DFHack command "cleanconst" from time to time. DF will store the blocks/logs/bars in the wall, when it doesn't need to. This command deletes those references, and you will get FPS gains from not having your dwarves consider the wall/floor contents when searching for materials to build with, or what needs to go in a stockpile (also important). Deconstructing the walls/floors later will still return the building materials you used, so there is no downside to this utility.
Legendary military members will practice their skills EXTREMELY frequently. Give them a break, and rotate them out in favor of other dwarves, or add unskilled dwarves to the unit from time to time. As unskilled units will slow down their training frequency while they try and train someone up with lower endurance.
If you don't have enough doors, you can still designate areas for not pathing through with d-o-r to set an area as restricted. This won't stop enemies, but will prevent pet and dwarf pathing through there.
Complex passages will cause pathing FPS issues, try to stick to passages that don't branch multiple times.
Map clutter from item and blood spatter can slow things down, run the DFHack "clean all" from time to time.
Viewing areas with multiple Z levels dropping away causes FPS loss from the viewer itself.
Stockpiles should be right next to the shops they service.
Run "cleanowned x" and "cleanowned scattered" periodically in the DFHack console, as Dwarves are messy, and will just discard clothes where ever they feel like. Also note if you are above 64,000 items, as that will cause a significant FPS drop.
Enjoying Rimworld right now. I describe it as Dwarf Fortress, Prison Architect, and Firefly put together. It's got the same survival aspects of Banished, but there's a much more personal connection to the colonists. You won't be getting populations of hundreds. I'm stoked to have just 6 people alive and walking around.
Instead of managing buildings you're managing room construction. There's still a need for efficiency, but Rimworld is more intimate than Banished.
Start playing this and never look back.
Prosperity has some of those elements, but expands very quickly. This classic meets the bill without being too demanding.
I am glad for mentioning the stories' reverse-engineering. The analyses are probably not known to many DF fans (or are they?), but they are really really interesting and offer bigger picture of the game's development direction.
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_story.html
It's also cool that they gave Zach some space, I think he was completely missed in another article I read.
Yup, Toady's current priority is the four mini-arcs at the top of the dev page (Job Priorities, Inns and Taverns, Non-Player Artifacts, Fortress Starting Scenarios). Each of these is going to get probably several releases (main release followed by a few bug-fixes), probably with a few extra little low-effort suggestions (like gelding, which only took Toady a day or so to add in) added along the way.
I've mostly been holding my tongue but I unfortunately agree. It seems highly improbable the goal will be met. Hell, at this point it seems iffy they'll break $100k.
What I don't understand is why they aren't using KS as a platform to talk about the game more. Most successful KS update like crazy, usually multiple times a day! At this point it feels like they made a list of hopeful features and a slick video then expected to hit $360k without anything else. That's not how KS works. You guys need to communicate with us and the more the better.
This is one of the first successes in crowd funding -
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Look at all the updates they do even many years later. They aren't big updates always but usually every day they post something. A lot of their updates are detailed and in depth too. They aren't always bug fixes or features but often thoughts behind changes. If you're asking us to fund a project and take a risk on it the least you can do is communicate extensively with us. Do more updates or make a podcast with the devs, etc just do something.
Full text, reformatted as list:
>The bug processing continued today.
>* Using an observation from ag, I think I've put an end to those construction suspensions that came from the builder standing on the construction spot -- any that were ongoing in old saves will still be there, but it shouldn't make new ones.
>* Saplings (and other trees) were growing way too fast, and that is fixed now.
>* Dwarves shouldn't raid caravans for hospital supplies anymore.
>* The bug where placing your crutch in your bag caused you to have a phantom crutch should be fixed (and there were circumstances that caused that to happen in fort mode as well, and it happened with casts, splints and bandages as well).
>* Sparring events shouldn't be reported as combat events now, although that's a more difficult problem now that combat moves are smeared out over time, so we'll keep an eye on it.
>* Sadly, ghosts will no longer be able to realize dreams after they are dead. Theoretically, it would be fine if certain kinds of ghosts did it, but the overall code was problematic, so we'll have to revisit that later.
>* Tools made from adamantine wafers use the proper number now (Quietust).
>* I used proper yield etc. values for obsidian (UristDaVinci).
>* Fixed up some density mistakes...
>* proper agreement viewing button...
>* lots of typos...
And for a full list of resolved issues, you can see the changelog for the coming version here. At time of writing, there were 72, which I believe is more than any other release since 31.01 and possibly earlier.
It looks like 0.40.05 might be less buggy than 0.34.11!
Please notice that Dwarf Fortress isn't even close to being finished. Here's a list of all the crazy stuff Toady wants to add. Scroll down to the "Power Goals" section.
Toady wants all this stuff to happen to your character and NPCs without any kind of scripting(depending on personalities and actions of thousands of characters) in the Adventure Mode in which you don't control a fortress, but one adventurer.
I mean just look at this:
>PowerGoal102, SAVE MY DOG, (Future): A sniveling wretch left you for dead, but you weren't dead and after many hardships you return to his town a mighty and imposing warrior. He recognizes you immediately and rather than facing agonizing drawn-out justice at your hand, he ingests a poison, calling out "who will look after my dog?" before he dies. You look after it.
While I can't comment on the racial traits of Dwarfs, the dev page has a whole section on Lighting outlining future plans for its implementation:
Lighting
- Proper environmental lighting
- Construction and use of torches
- Candles/lamps/lanterns
tl;dr - torches aren't implemented yet, so you don't have to worry about them :-)
I can confirm it works on OSX Lion, you just need to make a really simple change to the launch script (Credit goes to Flickering - Original Source : http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=4103)
The standard DF script has:
export DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=${PWD}/libs export DYLD_FALLBACK_FRAMEWORK_PATH=${PWD}/libs
Which puts the libraries DF ships with right at the end of the search path. If I change those to:
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=${PWD}/libs export DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH=${PWD}/libs
I'd try to compare it to Dwarf Fortress. They may have a few more people working on it, but the sheer scope of the project as well as all the resources that need to be made to support the scope of the project by this limited team of individuals (working out of turkey iirc) means this shit is gonna take a long time.
Dwarf Fortress is on 0.44.12. They have a development roadmap that shows what features they want to implement. Just scroll through that and take note of how much of it is still white. They're gone add it if they can. It's gonna be a lifelong project. Now imagine that Warbands had a roadmap like that. Then consider the increased amount of work required to create a true 3d game, engine, and assets. Even if warbands only had a quarter as many features, it's roughly as much work. With a limited development team (they're not exactly a AAA studio), it'll take years. It has taken years. I expect it to take several more. Seeing as how they're getting ready to put out betas, we'll finally be able to see that it is worth it.
This can apparently happen in some cases when cutting down trees or during forest fires.
Yeah, it's still being updated. He generally does large updates followed by several bug patches every couple of years.
The dev goals for fortress mode in this update can be found here. And yeah, that includes huge goblin armies craving your marble floodgate and then sending a troop of elite soldiers to get it back, slaughtering gobbos in their way.
Yeah Prison Architect is pretty great. Though it's less about economic management than building and managing the prison itself.
All my favorites have already been mentioned by other people in this post except one. Dwarf Fortress' Fortress mode is technically a Tycoon style game, and it's one of the most detailed simulations of medieval life I've seen, combined with the fantasy of managing a dwarven fortress.
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
It's pretty hard to learn but the simulation is so advanced it's almost more fun when things go wrong than when they go right, so I recommend trying to just play it your first time, and see what crazy stuff happens when you don't know what you're doing.
I've had quite a few experiences fighting fire titans/FBs, and this won't work either sadly. His troops will simply not recognize the critter, because it's so hot. See here. The pathing AI just isn't equipped for this sort of stuff.
Definitely adventure mode. I'm psyched to see the new sites and to explore the new combat system, insurrections, sneaking, climbing and visit hill and deep dwarves. I'll probably mess around with that at least until Phoebus updates the tileset and then start trying to break things in fortress mode between refreshing the weekly questions thread.
Edit:
Oh wow, that would be like a DF version of Miegakure. Wouldn't animals and liquids spawning in other planes be a problem if there weren't any naturally-occurring marquees between the planes though? I'm imagining embarking on a serene tundra that turns out to be four planes kata of a terrifying ocean. You strike the earth, and suddenly an oceanful of water filled with skeletal whales and marlin creeping fog thralls falls out of the neighbouring planes onto the wagon...
(aside: Toady and Threetoe have actually discussed the possibility of different planes, but not in the four-dimensional sense: see the Analysis section of Cado's Magical Journey.)
Because Toady is literally insane and won't release a new version until there's a bajillion new features ready to go at once. Just look at this. Mummies, necromancers, werewolves..
>First I gave squids the brains I had forgotten... squid men don't have skulls, so when I set them on each other there were a greater number of deadly kicks to the head before they all drowned in the air.
Oh, Toady.
Hey there! While feature suggestion posts are welcome here, (they often lead to interesting discussion,) you should be aware that the developers basically don't use reddit. Bug reports and feature suggestions are best shared on the official forum.
As an /r/dwarffortress mod, I strongly encourage everyone who plays to make an account on the official forum and the bugtracker, because that is where your ideas and feedback have the most impact on the game. Very often only a tiny number of consistent posters on the official forum end up influencing major game decisions, sometimes to the detriment of anyone who hasn't played since 2010 and read all the forum posts since then.
Any genre you can pull off as ASCII art. Check out Dwarf Fortress, for example.
If you don't want to get that minimal but want to have at least a bit of visuals, then I recommend a city builder with a very deep simulation underneath. Buildings are very easy to model/draw in a passable quality, and if you want pedestrians and cars, you are basically forced to make them extremely low-poly.
The wiki agrees with you, Toady agrees with you, and that's what I've always seen, but there are people who swear it occasionally happens, (and not just this person.) I suspect they're false reports involving diagonal movement, block/rough walls, or jumping, but I try to give the "better safe than sorry" advice.
Someone should pit wild GCS in 3 deep smoothed pits for science, I guess.
I won't say I find every bug funny, but some I do. Here's an example from Dwarf Fortress, in which cats were dying due to alcohol poisoning.
Next major push is Non-player Artifacts.
This will probably involve more world activation and adventure mode improvements again, though there's always spillover to fortress mode too - for example, adventure sites have made it much easier to allow forts straddling world-tile borders.
This bug is back? In early 0.40.x and 0.34.11 (and earlier versions, I think, but I started playing a week or so after 0.34.11 was released), there is a bug where you'll kill someone and they'll respawn after sleep or fast travel. It is useful to exploit, but it gets kinda stupid seeing 35 corpses of the same exact creature in the same spot. Please go here and add a note that it still exists in this version.
It may not look like much, but it's great once you get into it.
Now, that being said, "eugenics" to dwarves tends to end up meaning either dropping newborns down a long pit into your dinning room to get rid of the useless bastards in a way that benefits your fort in the long run through desensitizing them to violence, or you can go a more extreme route and when the newborns become complete freeloading, booze-drinking, farm-wasting toddlers, lock them in a tiny room full of dogs, and throw food and booze down to them every once in a while until they grow old or die from being bitten to death.
You want to craft your own master race your own way? Dwarf Fortress is for you.
<strong>Infinitely small undead creature parts.</strong> Completely terrifying to dwarves, and also completely unkillable - so your fortress just stops completely, every action anywhere near an undead tuft of hair or a little flap of skin is canceled repeatedly.
It looks like there's a bug report from 2012 about it. You could update the report if you wished. I'm sure a savefile would be helpful in tracking it down.
*spelling
Just going by what the tracker said
Like you said, animals don't really have a set sexual orientation like people do. Besides, all animals in DF breed via spores, so their preference doesn't even matter that much anyway :P
From yesterday's devlog:
>Animal training should work now -- residual combat data was screwing that up.
So you'll just have to be patient.
>but the next release shouldn't be too far off
PS: Please consider posting future questions of this kind in the weekly questions thread.
A forever-WIP fantasy world generator
Fortress mode is like a city builder sim at the micro level (having to maintain the food and thoughts of individuel dwarves). There is no real goal here. Once you learn how to play the basics, just surviving is easy. Most of the challenge here is self imposed, since many of the mechanics are very easy to abuse.
Adventure mode is like an open world rouge-like, similar to ADOM. The difference is that each world is procedurally generated, and the world (in theory at least) goes on while you play, with great beasts roaming the earth and armies marching on cities while you wrestle hippos or whatever.
Legends mode is more or less a text dump of the all the world's history. Most of the world's interesting people, civilizations, sites, events and historical maps can be found here.
For a more general overview, I'd read the features page and the dev page on the main site.
Anyone looking for an alternative may want to try out Dwar Fortress or Gnomoria.
Dwarf Fortress is the inspiration for Towns, Gnomoria, and several other games, and is possibly one of the best games ever. It goes into an insane level of detail that absolutely astounding, allows for tons of freedom, and is still only in an Early Alpha. However, the complicated menus, ASCII Art style, unforgiving difficulty, and near-suicidal learning curve can make it hard to get into. Also, it comes at the low, low price of free.
Gnomoria, on the other hand, is much closer to Towns. It's essentially Dwarf Fortress with better graphics and a less complex UI. However, it doesn't have as much to offer as Dwarf Fortress. Still there's plenty to do and it's still being updated.
Overall, both games are great and I love them both. You choose.
Adventure Mode was ignored for a long time, the latest work has been focused on that but DF-mode is not anywhere near done!
Here's a development "roadmap" of sorts: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html
There's lots of adventure mode stuff, but there's lots of Fortress stuff too. I feel like there was a better page that I had seen before, but I couldn't find it.
I don't think so, or at least not for that. It counts against you if you seize goods, but not if you deconstruct the depot, for instance. Even when you're trying to anger traders by bold faced theft, it takes <em>a lot</em> of it before they respond.
I'm almost certain the "punishment" for any unintentional theft is always the same, worse trade, as described by Toady in the famous bug report reply.
Do you have another source?
I'm getting sick of hearing about jira. It is a fucking issue tracking system. Wheee, Port has a way to keep track of issues. They can even rank priority. News flash, everyone does this.
Agreed 100% the guy on the camera is not the one taking notes and entering tickets. Where I work the one presenting the design review is not the one keeping notes. They are focused on the presentation and the questions asked real time.
You should check out <em>RimWorld</em> if you haven't already. It's not turn-based, but neither is FTL, so I think it fits. You have a party, build a base from an overhead perspective, protect it from raiders, etc. Many people have compared it to Dwarf Fortress (which is one of the most in-depth roguelikes/lites ever made), but it's much easier to learn.
Oh, and FYI, you might have more luck cross-posting this in /r/roguelites; traditional roguelikes are turn-based dungeon crawl games with (usually) a single player-character, and many times also ascii/text-based 'graphics'... Much harder to learn, for someone who only likes FTL (which is not a roguelike by traditional definition, though it does have many roguelike elements).
I disagree on that part - The world itself has been dramatically fleshed out since the 2d days. The interaction abilities and world itself has changed. But forget these, these are all superficial issues.
Underlying it all is the difference in modes. Fort mod has a different time scale, and adventure mode has very different time scales. You can't seamlessly transition from one mode to another, without fully unloading the fort.
Even then its been only recent that we can fully explore running fortresses (iirc you would have to let them fall to ruin before they could be dungeon delved). Getting to here has required the persistent world features to be introduced through the caravan arc.
Site populations, lair designations, site claiming and historical population management don't seamlessly interact. You can't (for example) just select a dwarf in your fort and up and run as an adventurer, while your fort carries on its merry way.
Similarly, the bug I described above ( Mantis link), prevents things like population transfers because the world recalculates once you go to bed (so caged animals escape).
In short, the existence of the modes itself is the chasm. Its a necessary gap at this stage of dev, and a lot of work needs to be done to let these two... gears mesh.
Do they resurface in Legends if you let some time pass or are they completely gone? You could retire the fortress and do a collection run with an adventurer if it's the former.
Also, it's in the bug tracker so it might be fixed, eventually.
Reminder: you can always see the list of bugs fixed in the next release on this page.
I just can't believe how fast this cycle is moving - it took far longer for 0.40 to become stable, let alone accumulate fixes for so many bugs. At this rate, I expect to replace my current stable starter pack with 42.03 + DFHack in just a week or two!
Look at this page and concentrate on the blue (complete) and pink (partial) items. The "Inns, Taverns, and Temples" section is the one most loaded with new features.
This sounds very similar to the (I assume fixed) caravan cloth theft bug in a previous version of DF.
I have noticed the odd dwarf going to my own trading depots to eat and then return to the fort, but as I exclusively trade food I assumed they were just grabbing our own stocks. Maybe they do not recognize food as having an 'owner' and when they're hungry they grab what they will.
> The last major thing I need to do in adventure mode is ...
At this point, many of us are probably starting to guess release dates. Start by checking the status of the development page! There are three main areas left:
- Games, including player participation in games
- Recipes and quality levels for drinks (years in the making, heh)
- Setting tavern prices and activities in fortress mode
There's also a substantial number of items coloured 'partly done'. My guess is July if those are left for the post-release cycle, or August-September if not - about the same timing for the finish state, just a question of how Toady decides to release on the way. And since many past releases had stuff left partly done... I'm excited!
Yep, it's a major balance issue.
Tragically, the only real remedy is to either plead with Toady to look at the issue following the next release or ask a DFhack guru to write a script to diminish or outright remove these needless thoughts.
Dwarf Fortress, full stop.
1000+ years of virtual history, then you dive down and either wander the world as any number of heroes, or you can build a, um, dwarf fortress.
Different starting conditions can do anything from making a single island amidst a planet-spanning sea, home to hundreds of bloodthirsty monsters and one naked barbarian warrior, to a world dead of all life (I recall one person on the forums did this with an adventurer who just hunted every animal extinct and killed every civilized creature, which was a little easier since it was a small world), to an epic war story between a once continent-spanning dwarven empire and the goblins that advance every day to wipe them out.
One of my fondest memories was when I played an adventurer, learned the secrets of life and death from a necromantic tome, lost my hand in a fight, and then RE-ANIMATED MY OWN HAND to fight alongside me.
"Prior to DF 0.40.24 building a construction on a tree would cause the tree to vanish. In the current version it now causes a game crash." bug 8719