Toady has released a new version of Dwarf Fortress! This one includes some pretty impressive features, including grazing animals, sheering wool (and goblins will sheer trolls!), bees and harvesting their honey and wax, making ceramics and glazing them and who knows what else.
The full feature list makes a good read, and you can go grab the client right now! This looks like quite an interesting update. Well done, Toady!
There’s a really great write-up on just why Dwarf Fortress is interesting over on The Quixotic Engineer. I recommend a read if you’re new to Dwarf Fortress or wondering what all the fuss is about. Matthew covers the interesting elements of the game beautifully and there are some useful links there as well!
Jeux Video has posted a French translation of my Complete and Utter Newby Tutorials for Dwarf Fortress. At least, I think he has! I don’t speak French, so what do I know?
One of the challenges of getting into Dwarf Fortress is that there are a lot of great mods, tools and additions that the new player won’t know about or could find daunting to install. To help people get over the hump LucasUP on the Dwarf Fortress forums has put together the Lazy Newb Pack. There is some great stuff in there; tools and utilities I hadn’t heard of, so I suggest you go have a look! Now might finally be the time to get into the new, 2010 version!
Kevin Snow has written, and George Kavallines has illustrated (SomethingAwful forum regulars?) a fantastic Dwarf Fortress AAR on the go over at Bravemule. The AAR is filled with fine art and great story telling as well as 3D representations of the map using Stonesense. It is well worth a read, especially as it’s written in a very Dwarf Fortressy style. Me, I love the Cat Missing picture a couple of pages in. So cute! And terrifying.
Remember Bronzemurder, the illustrated Dwarf Fortress story? Well, Tim Denee has been at it again and has produced the story of Oilfurance, never a tale of greater woe has been told before. Woe and laughter. It’s great, go enjoy!
Reader Dirk Flinthart has sent in a Dwarf Fortress after action report in the form of a short letter to the King of the Dwarfs wherein the fate of Fortress Alebaldness is recounted. It’s a good laugh, have a read!
Read more…
I was starting a new fortress the other night and it struck me that sometimes the hardest part of playing Dwarf Fortress is deciding where to dig that very first tunnel. There is so much potential locked into the average Dwarf Fortress map but every tap of the miner’s pick reduces your options. I almost feel a degree of analysis paralysis contemplating the options when I look at a fresh map. Do you? How do you go about starting what will end up as hours of real-time effort? There’s nothing worse than being several hours into a construction and realizing you’ve made some major mistake that makes routing magma to where you want it impossible, or that your dream of a waterfall based defensive network is now going to be horribly complex to build, or that your fortress is just plain ugly! And if you make that crucial mistake then how will you ever be able to build a truly amazing fortress?
Since I always have grand schemes in mind when it comes to designing a fortress I am almost tempted to not let my dwarfs live anywhere but on the surface until my first major constructions are complete; until the entrance tunnels are dug, the initial workshop spaces are complete, the farm system laid out and the storage bunkers prepared. I can’t help but feel I’m spoiling my mountain if I dig some quick spaces early. Yes, my poor dwarfs will, in future, survive in rough wooden huts under the horridly bright sky and among the squishy green stuff. And sure, there will be upset dwarfs moaning about the sun and filth, but damn it, my inverted obsidian pyramid isn’t going to look pretty mixed up with random diggings, channels and culverts, is it?!
Every month or so Toady, coder of Dwarf Fortress, releases numbers on the donations fans have made to support the project. Yesterday the stats for April were released and Toady revealed that fans had donated an impressive sixteen thousand dollars! Release months are always great months for Toady’s bank balance (he survives solely on these donations) but April has to be one for the record books! Well done Toady (on releasing the latest version) and good work fans for keeping Toady going. And, if you haven’t already, why not go donate? For interest, here’s a graph showing the month-by-month donations to Bay12.
A friend pointed me to a list of the MIT Comparative Media Studies theses for 2009 and the wondrous sight of a thesis on storytelling in Dwarf Fortress by Joshua Diaz. Josh’s paper, is an interesting read and if you love Dwarf Fortress you should have a look. It’s long, 225 pages, but great to look through. With a focus on how Dwarf Fortress creates “tellable moments” there are a lot of neat excerpts from AARs old and new. Dwarf Fortress: It’s practically art!
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