My New Favorite Game: Dwarf Fortress

These last few weeks, I've just been going through college, getting work done, working out, and chatting a hell of a lot more with friends. A big constant in this however is going back to play Dwarf Fortress over any other game, and this is what I'm gonna be writing about just because I've been obsessing over this game for what seems like more than a month now.

I had always had a small interest in Dwarf Fortress after hearing here and there about the game's crazy real mechanics. Hearing about cats dying after getting booze on their paws and getting drunk bathing themselves stuck in my mind because of how logical and real that problem felt. It couldn't have been hardcoded into the game, it was too ludicrous of a thing to even imagine, but the work of the many different systems that comprised the game manifested it into reality and that, to me, was interesting. I never dared touch the game up until Fredrick Knudsen's Boatmurdered video because of the learning curve. It was then that I realized how accessible the game actually was since it seemed a lot of the players in that succession game were also learning things every day and doing just fine at that moment even if problems were already manifesting. Losing is fun!

This blogpost ended up being way longer than I thought it'd be so I'm gonna separate it into parts for ease in reading from here on out btw.

Getting Into The Game

I first downloaded and played the game for free from the Bay 12 website without any graphics, mostly because I just didn't know how to add tilesets but also because I'm new to the colony simulator genre and didn't know whether I'd like the game enough to pay for the Steam version. When I added Spacefox to the free version, it just colored the ASCII graphics in a way that I could read them better, so I went about playing the game like this for the first week.

It is really hard to understate how much the Dwarf Fortress Youtuber community comes in clutch when you're first starting out. I used Nookrium's Tutorial video series to get started on my first base. Now despite having some very different graphics to the ASCII art I was using to play, everything in Nookrium's game (everyone's game in fact) is structured in the exact same way as mine. All the menus are the same and all the stuff happening in the game happens with graphics as it does without them. So that being said, learning from someone with visuals of what I'm supposed to be looking at made it very easy to figure out the basics, and made for what I think is a cooler introduction to the game.

I've built three bases so far with one still going at the time of this writing, so I want to go over some of my experiences with them starting with the first.

My First Fortress (Assisted Newbie Run)

I took some pictures for a Discord Serv I'm in and all they could talk about was the ASCII. Trust me, it was a pain, but you learn quick if you put effort into doing so.

I can't recall exactly how well my first fortress did seeing that it was less of a legitimate fortress and more of a testing grounds as I learned to play the game. Water is still a pretty tricky mechanic to work with for me even a month into the game, so when I first started, my fortress was made up of a bunch of gatherers who were constantly running out of booze and having to search farther and farther for the fermentable plants they should have been able to grow (you need mud to start farming plots and mud needs to be made with water). Animals and the trading system were also pretty rough to learn about, so eventually, my dwarves killed all the lifestock and I was left with a bunch of cats and no idea how to get more yaks. I wasn't really sure about whether it was a good idea to start killing the cats at this point for food seeing that I knew dwarves liked keeping pets but didn't know how to tell which animals were pets and which weren't. Eventually the cats also depleted as a meat resource though, so I was stuck with no meat and no fish since when I plotted my base, I didn't consider whether having bodies of water was important or not. The good thing about this point in time was that I wasn't paying attention to the moods of the dwarves, so I wouldn't have to worry about what the dwarves thought about how I was running things yet.

Automation is a pretty big part of the game due to the fact that in fortress mode, you can't control any specific dwarf and, instead, just assign everyone tasks indirectly to do at their own discretion. I don't think anyone in my first fortress was really all that upset about all the cats becoming food, so everyone did everything pretty fast. Nookrium taught about work orders and nobles, so I tried my best to get work orders working so I wouldn't have to leave dwarves toiling infinitely at stations until their supplies ran out. Somewhere along my bingewatch however, assigning a manager to place work orders went in one ear and out the other, so work orders weren't a thing in my first fortress. If I remember correctly, I managed to get a bookkeeper since something in the game told me I'd have imprecise values for everything until I got one. THAT I did get through my mind, but for whatever reason, getting work orders to work wasn't a priority for me until the next fortress.

So speaking of this next fortress, a week or two had gone by since I started playing the game and after seeing the game on discount for 20% off, I finally bought the Steam release and had splendid little graphics. After playing the game in just ASCII and watching Nookrium as he flawlessly and intuitively knew what he was looking at, playing the game with graphics felt like my first time playing Team Fortress 2. At that point, I had only played shovel ware games on the Nintendo Wii, so seeing the funny heavy man from the silly YouTube videos suddenly move and speak as intended was this ethereal experience that had me and my brother stuck to that game for a very VERY long time. Anyways, buying graphics had me feeling refreshed and so I started a new fortress.

My Second Fortress (Fucking Parrots)

If anyone just wants to buy the Steam version to support the two brothers that make it,
it also comes with the ASCII art.

My second fortress was built into a mountain and had some small puddles, plentiful mineral deposits, and a big kea problem (this is a kea in real life btw, I imagine this is what they were doing to my dwarves) I didn't develop my military until near the end of my fortress' life, so throughout the entirety of my second fortress, I'd keep getting notifications about Keas striking and interrupting my dwarves as they were busy doing things outside. I'd constantly see dead tree frogs since it seems Keas love killing them and leaving their carcasses on the ground for my baby dwarves to see, but I also saw many dead keas as they received payback from what I believe were either the cats or the dogs in the fortress. How they managed to catch these birds before they flew off is beyond me.

Another picture I found of what these kea look like after they finish bothering my dwarves.
Source: The Wild Focus Project

Oh yeah, and about dogs and cats: they have a giant population problem. When you begin your fortress with your typical 7 dwarves, their livestock, and a wagon, you also start with a few dogs and cats. Dogs help hunt, can be trained into attack dogs, and can be pets that make your dwarves happy. Cats can be pets and also hunt, but they only hunt small rodents in stockholds and stuff like that to keep your food safe. Now both of these animals are good to have around, but they also have an insane libido and give birth to litters of puppies and kittens that eventually flood your fortress unless you start gelding them. Apparently they cause massive FPS problems as they multiply, but my problem with them personally is that when I'm looking at my fortress and trying to make sure my dwarves are busy, they're each traveling across the screen at the speed of light and to me, that's extremely distracting so eventually, they all had to go. Through guilt, I ended up killing a bunch of their offspring and started gelding all the male dogs, but for whatever reason, females kept birthing and the problem would just cycle through over and over. I still struggle with this in my current (and third) base but the thing about it there is that they make for an easy way to get bones and leather once you get over it emotionally and ethically. No one said managing a fortress was easy. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.

After some development.

Setting this moral debacle aside, I mentioned before that it wasn't until my second fortress that I ended up figuring out work orders and started increasing the automation of my workforce. Trying to figure out how to condition and order the making of goods in proportion to what your supplies are is a pretty tedious trial-and-error thing to do, but I find it extremely rewarding when even if for a moment, an entire industry within the fortress is entirely automated. For me, this ended up being the soap industry since my hospital needed some and I was keen to figure out how every system in the game worked. With work orders, you can get your wood furnace to make lots of ash in batches. Then you can get your ashery to check whenever you have enough bars of ash to begin making lye. Then once you make lye, you can get your soap making workshop to start making soap with tallow. The only problem with the setup was how much tallow I needed and how late I was to realize that the kitchen also uses tallow when making fine meals (my second base was also notable for running out of animals to butcher constantly) which left me with none, but when it worked, it worked marvelously.

Trading was still a hard thing for me to wrap my head around, and I was constantly faced with cages full of animals I could be using to make wool, milk, meat, and etc. I didn't understand how democracy worked and eventually when I did, I just didn't have the resources or automation know-how to create what traders wanted. There was always something more dire to me that had me scrambling to address it such as the moods of children (which were always ridiculously low), making sure the hospital had supplies for those suffering kea-related injuries, and even housing once I realized that having one big dormitory for my dwarves to sleep in wasn't ideal for their mental wellbeing. Even when I did have stuff to sell, I had to trade it for meat and plants since I had neither livestock or the ability to manipulate water well enough to make farm plots.

In the end, the abandonment of that fortress came as a result of two things. My base had gotten fairly big, but because nothing of value had been invested into, I had gone years and years without new migrants. Every season, I was hopeful I'd get some, but I never did, and so my population capped off somewhere around 30 to 40 dwarves. I can't remember how many exactly, I just know it wasn't very many.

The other reason was my military's response to a family of bear men passing through the area.

Bear men in question (for more information, just search up "bear men" and Google with take you to the
Dwarf Fortress wiki automatically! :)
Source: Dwarf Fortress Wiki

I mentioned previously that I failed to develop any sort of military until right before I abandoned my fortress. When I began to enlist some dwarves, I started off with archers since Nookrium had started teaching about the military in his videos by making archers and supplying them crossbows, quivers, bolts, and leather armor. I set them up in a small room with archery targets on one end and a small chest on the other. Using leather armor, wooden crossbows, and bolts, they went through a staggered training schedule in order to get them experienced. Or at least I thought that's what I had done until days later, I realized they were off-duty all the time and learned that I had to select staggered training in their routine manually in their menu. A few days after that, a family of two or three bear men passed eerily close to the entrance of my mountain base and didn't really do much other than gander at the small civilization I was cultivating. They didn't attack the geese I had out there, and they didn't attack any of the children playing around, but the thought of these things getting any closer to my base frightened me knowing bears were nothing to mess with in real life. Not only that, but these were bear men and women. They were giant killing machines, but were also sentient.

So of course I sent my archers over to the bears expecting them to make quick work out of them from a distance. I sent the order to attack, and they did so with great haste. They ran out, saw the bears, and got as close as possible to them, literally tile to tile, to shoot at them. They managed to kill one bear man with their puny twig bolts before the other bear men tore all my dwarves apart and just walked off the screen as if nothing happened. I had never encountered a hostile mob so directly as the bear men, and seeing my small population number get even smaller drained the hope out of me, so I abandoned the fort out of shame for such a shitty military action. Not to say it wasn't funny though, I did this after sitting there chuckling at how cooked I really was.

My Third Fortress (A Blossoming Flower)

I started my third and current fortress not long after and let me just say it's been going great so far, but my lack of knowledge while the designing the thing at first has started to come back to haunt me.

The main level of my fortress as it was when I wrote this.

My second fortress had me not only struggling to make mud with water, but also finding aquifers underground to get water from. All of my dwarf's water came from the small pools of it on the surface, and once winter came, my villagers had to rely on booze to keep hydrated (which I often just didn't have). So this time, I found a plot of land that had many sources of water underground. After some digging and learning how to channel water, I had a well set up and operational in my first year at the fort. This was a pretty cool advancement, and the fact I located the base near a moving river let my fishermen catch so many fish that I had over a thousand food items around my first or second year. The only thing that wasn't cool and that I eventually found out the hard way (like everything in this game) was that having so many aquifers meant having lots and lots of damp stone for my dwarves to cancel their mining operations from.

They have some valid reasons to stop mining as well. They run the chance of flooding the base, and risk killing themselves if the water is too deep and they can't escape (this I also found out the hard way, I saw at least one of my dwarves drown mining downward and saw three adults and a baby drown in the river just recently). Because of all the aquifers, mining for minerals is a pain in the butt and nearly impossible to do in many parts of the plot. When I started my base, I had just enough room to comfortably fit everything in there with room for many 3x3 rooms for the dwarves to sleep in, but once I had to expand the amount of bedrooms I had, I ran into problems with damp stone leaking into my base and making ugly muddy puddles in places that were supposed to look clean. Its incredibly annoying to say the least.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, it seems the 3rd time's the charm since all the aquifers also allowed me to very cautiously make a bunch of mud to put farm plots in. Finally, one of my fortresses had the ability to grow crops, and after figuring out I needed potash to fertilize the soil, I started a new supply chain to automate making potash before getting all my dwarves to work on planting plump helmets year-round. It was around a pretty great time too since by that point, I started reaching dwarf population sizes in the 90s and was desperate to get something done about my frequent booze shortages. Before I got my dwarves planting mushrooms, I was politicking and buying a giant portion of my booze and plant rations from traders every autumn.

They're clumsy at planting these things, but they got the spirit.

Very early into my third fortress, I had begun to take pictures of the results of my politicking with my fellow dwarves, and realized I now had both the automation know-how and resources to make the items they needed for the winter. I set up a system where every season, the dwarves would make a certain number of the item the traders needed and stored them for safekeeping. By automating the creation of these desired goods, I eventually found it really easy to buy everything I needed to buy and much more. I bought more booze for the fortress, I bought new animals to introduce to my pen, I bought plenty of plump helms up until I could start growing them, and this time, I made a conscious effort to buy armors and melee weapons from the traders.

Drowning in booze (and this isn't my only stockholds getting taken over by pots and barrels of it or food.)

Oh yes, the military is thriving at my third fortress. It's thriving so well that when a family of bear men walked up to the fortress and actually started attacking some of my villagers, I deployed my large squadron of spearmen and mace men and just watched as they littered the ground with terrified bear folk. I honestly feel sadistic for watching as my dwarves chased one of them at the speed of light until it cleaved their neck in and then walked off a jolly good fellow. This third fortress also had an unwelcome visitor in the form of a three-headed dragon that immediately flew into the base through holes left by tree roots, and again, my military overpowered the evil doer with no casualties. After that, I ended up fixing all the holes in the ground, and setting up some wooden reinforcements along with an iron door to lock now that I know how to do so. My army may not be the biggest or armed with the strongest weapons there is, but they've made due more than I could have imagined when I started it.

Some very basic defenses I should absolutely be strengthening but aren't at the moment. Also, ignore all the dead animals, my dwarves are already doing just that and not putting them in the garbage.

A funny thing about the army, however, is that everyone really wants to join it. In my third base, things have gotten so stable that I've begun to really pay attention to my dwarf's needs. Some needs are pretty easy to meet with all the resources I have such as having good meals (I make lavish meals exclusively now), and making crafts/being creative (I assign a labor regimens with crafts and engraving enabled). I started making an effort to buy instruments to entertain my dwarves, and started buying them jewelry and crowns to feel extravagant in (although none of them have been picking them up which is really pissing me off after making an effort to buy lots of jewelry). Another thing the dwarves really want though is to fight and learn martial arts. I have so many dwarves at this point that I've been adding a big portion to them to my army, but their staggered training routine has come at the cost of neglecting orderlies and occasionally taking long periods of time to go do some things. I've been debating on restructuring the army in a way that I'll have all my spear and mace lords in one permanent squadron to train consistently while recruits do staggered training with both melee weapons and crossbows, but a big portion of my time has been going to making sure guilds and religions are being taken care of so I may not get to it.

Having a fortress grow to around 100 dwarves has many guilds and religions asking for expensive temples and halls. Just yesterday, I had one of my petition quest abandoned before being replaced with another one. I debated just switching the meeting places around and giving the existing temple to a farmer's guild so that I wouldn't lose another petition quest, but seeing all the dwarves praying at the three iron altars I had put down really wore at my heart.

Having this man toil away at engraving all this sterling silver flooring is pissing him off, but they literally wanted to be creative so this should have been a win-win.

Fey moods are another thing I began to encounter. When I got my first strange-feeling dwarf, I literally squealed and rushed to get them what they needed. I even took a screenshot after my dwarf finished her project. I was so happy to see such an iconic happening in my game. Since then, I've had plenty of dwarves in fey moods and even saw one grow possessed (which was honestly terrifying because werecreatures are a thing of nightmares). It was only recently that one of my dwarves, a creature caregiver who took over the craftsdwarf's workshop, failed to get all the stuff he needed and became melancholy. It was not a great feeling seeing him slowly walking around trying to find some way to hill himself. Not just because it was sad to see, but also because I had spent quite a long time trying to get him all the materials he needed. I remember his requests clearly: rough gems, cut gems, bars of metal, bones, and stone blocks. I remember getting everything together for him and even buying metal bars and cut gems from the traders who came at a pretty bad time for it. For whatever reason however, the dwarf would not move. He just kept making demands, but because he never went to the stockholds to get what he needed, he doomed himself and ended up dying of starvation in our bedroom hall. A real shame honestly even if it angered me to see.

Such a small popup stirred a lot of emotions in me.

I'm caught up to the current happenings at my fort, and honestly, I'm starting to grow a little bored of the thing despite having so many things to do. The Foggy Guild in my fortress wants a farmer's guild and I need to make sure its valued at 10k. My mayor and baron wants a better everything and he's honestly just really annoying, but now that I know that he's supposed to be the voice of the people in that everyone cries to him, I might have to oblige his requests. Like I said, I'm thinking of restructuring my military to let more recruits in. Like I said, lots to do in the fortress, but seeing that none of these objectives really line up in a convenient way, it's been a struggle to get things moving for each. I don't anticipate this fortress being abandoned soon just because it has become ridiculously successful, but boy do I have my work cut out for me.

So Uhhh....

That being said, thank you for reading about my latest obsession. I'm hoping all these beginner impressions of this wacky little game encourage someone to try getting into it (or were at least as fun to read about as they were to write about). One thing I really want to try doing is writing about a fortress from beginning to end in a storytelling kind of way. Along with watching Fredrick Knudsen's Boatmurdered video, I started watching Blind's Dwarf Fortress movies as well and find this style of intricate long-term storytelling to be really great. It really brings forth the humanity in the procedurally generated storytelling this game is has to offer, and makes the worlds they speak of feel real and incredible in scope. Also, videos like these have also exposed me to more of the complex mechanics of dwarf fortress and if you're stuck trying to do anything, I recommend watching these to find something new to play around with.

Anyways, back to sourcing more minerals in all this damp stone (fml omfg).

P.S. The parrot in the kea video is actually a kakapo which I should've known because kakapos can't fly, whereas from Dwarf Fortress experience, keas absolutely can... so uhh... moi barhd :p
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