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!
I’ve written a book – Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress, coming to O’Reilly soon! It covers the current version and takes you from knowing nothing to being a confident Dwarf Fortress player!
So you’re busy enjoying the latest build of Dwarf Fortress, marvelling at the complex health system and the confusing military system when a thought strikes you, “I’ve just built all this great stuff for my Hospital, but how will I get my medical dwarfs some doctoring experience?”. Indeed, this is quite a conundrum! If you don’t train your medical staff perhaps they will screw up when some really important doctoring needs to be done.
But don’t fear, dear reader, we have a solution! Controlled dwarf torturing: it’s not really torture, it’s just dropping them a few levels on to rocks and then using them to practice medical techniques on. They love it really – it’s all for the good of the fortress, after all!… 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!
The best of the dwarf-management packages, Dwarf Therapist, has been freshly updated for the latest version of Dwarf Fortress! Go get!
There’s nothing people like more than the story of the catastrophic demise of a dwarf fortress. Mostly these are written out in long but entertaining forum posts, but the story of Bronzemurder is different from all the rest – it’s done in the style of a graphic novel, or perhaps an infographic. Go and check out the fantastic story of Bronzemurder on the DF Wiki. You won’t regret it!
What’s geekier than Dwarf Fortress? Answer, building your own home-made mechanical computer. What’s even geekier than either of these hobbies? Combining them, of course! And that’s what Jong over on the Dwarf Fortress forum has done. He’s built a mechanical computer in Dwarf Fortress. You can check out his theorycrafting or go right to the description of construction and testing, or just have a look at the sweet pictures on the DF Map Archive.
I think I agree with a forum commenter: “Holy crap, someone just won Dwarf Fortress!”
One of the best things about Dwarf Fortress is the way it lets people tell stories. Fortresses rise and fall on a mis-placed lever, a dwarf accidentally dropping a baby into a well can lead to massive civil works and then emo-death spirals see manic dwarfs bashing each other to death and making fine leather skirts out of each other’s skin.
The good news is that despite the bugs in the just-released version the potential for telling stories is now even greater than before. Take the case of the dwarf whose head was ripped off by a skeletal goat, or the adventure-mode player who stabbed an NPC guard to death with the crossbow bolt that was lodged in the player’s chest.
I can’t wait to play this some more!
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