Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress

"All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead..."

Source // Wikipedia

Do you like Rogue but want more? NetHack not enough for you? Do you want all the empty, black spaces on your terminal screen to be full - absolutely crammed full - of characters you didn't even know were in the ASCII standard? And do you then want that fantasy world to be staggeringly huge, span a good few hundred years of simulated history, and be incomprehensible, nonsensical, yet insanely detailed, all at the same time?

Then you might - might, mind - be looking for Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, or Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress, or better yet, Dwarf Fortress, the game that is almost literally like no other.

There are games you dread to start up, games you fear setting eyes upon, and then there is Dwarf Fortress, as impenetrable to new players as a good fortress should be. This post is going to be something, alright, but I know for sure it won't be useful.

Fun Times

Dwarf Fortress is a labour of love like no other. Initially released in 2006, I'm playing version 0.47.04, which was the latest available version, completely free to play, as of August 2020. It's still not a complete game. It may never be a complete game. News of it coming to Steam with overhauled graphics was a shock, but that, too, is a version not yet available.

This game is an entirely different beast to all other games, and I'm doing the stupidest thing I can do with it: go in blind.

Before starting a game of Dwarf Fortress, you need a world to play in, and with several options concerning size, history, and amount of stuff kicking around, the game will simulate your world up until the point you decide to start your game in it.

Here, I told it to develop a medium world with a bit of history, 250 years of it. As the ages go by, I'm able to see that thousands upon thousands of events have happened, though what they are, who knows. They happened, and they've made this world unique.

Frustrations

They're also happening so often that Dwarf Fortress stops responding for a brief second basically every year that it simulates. Thankfully, I can butt in and decide to dive into whatever awaits. I assume the green bits of the map are land, the blue water. X marks the spot? We got this.

Oh lordy, no we don't got this. We've not really started playing yet. Here's the screen where you choose where your bunch of dwarves are going to settle down and start building a fortress. If the name didn't give it away, and the screenshots aren't helping, Dwarf Fortress is, in this game mode, a base-building management simulator kinda game. You've got a bunch of dwarves, each incredibly detailed, and a base that needs to be built to ensure their safety and survival.

Think of it like Rogue meets Minecraft meets Microsoft Flight Simulator, built by a Linux developer with an insane amount of passion for the seemingly inane. We'll get to that.

The world and region views mean nothing to me. The local view at least looks like I could understand it a little. There is a river and there are some woods. I can work that out. Everything else is a mess of ASCII text, yet to seasoned Dwarf Fortress players, it's a blank canvas of immense possibilities.

With absolutely no idea of whether this is a good place for a fortress, I forge ahead with the game.

And here we are. Dwarf Fortress base camp. The map on the right shows you where we are. I know what the yellow X means, but everything else is unknown. In the middle are all the things we can do to get our dwarves moving. They'll be doing things on their own, so good management and organisation of tasks are essential.

As you can imagine, I'm up shit creek without a paddle here. I can see some dwarves. Some of them are on jobs, others free to be put to work. Somewhere I see a cat. I think it's the 'c'. I don't know how to interact with the cat, nor, importantly, my dwarves...

I need a bed to make a bed. Well, that makes sense, I guess. Do I have a bed, by any chance?

Wow. Not even the inventory knows how much inventory we have. Geez. Dwarf Fortress isn't messing around. I'm just gonna...

Quitting out of Dwarf Fortress mode, I switch into Adventurer mode, where I can explore this world I've created first hand. I won't be micromanaging a band of dwarves, but directly controlling the increasingly detailed life of Osplek Pobeiño, dwarf and peasant. You don't have to be a dwarf, by the way, but come on - it's in the title.

The character creation screens are mindbogglingly detailed. Stats contain strength and agility, but also focus, creativity, empathy and much more besides. The list of skills to distribute points into spans multiple pages, and jobs that surely no longer exist in our own world.

It doesn't take a genius to know that I've still no idea what's going on in this mode, either, but the randomised character bio is cutting deep.

With my last two 'equipment and pet points', I purchase a bunny so that I have at least some comfort on my adventure. If it runs away, I'll be distraught, and for reasons we'll get to, I wouldn't put it past Dwarf Fortress to do such a thing.

Though it took me a while to work out which character I was - the @, I eventually found out - Dwarf Fortress suddenly felt a little more familiar. Only a little, mind. Instead of the clear descriptions of events in Rogue, Dwarf Fortress just has you work it out for yourself. People - at least, I assume they're people - talk if you get close, but I've no context to their communication. Am I asking questions? Am I overhearing them?

Not wanting to spend any length of time indoors, I emerge into the wider world of wherever it is I started, I forget, and marvel at the detail on display. Your field of vision gradually expands the map. Walking around corners introduces hundreds more characters for you to translate, from rocks and trees to buildings, animals, and who knows what else. Knowing what you're looking at will make for a better game, but walking in one direction and trying to get a sense of what it all is makes for quite the experience too.

Making my way across fields, I assume, I was going in whatever direction caught my eye. When a river sprang into view, I decided to follow it downstream. Towns are built on rivers, right? Just follow it and I'll find something of interest.

Moving around, I found someone of interest. A monk, so I'm told. A concave-nose bridge human monk. I guess I'll just have to try to imagine that while I'm interacting with him. Though, my interaction seems to be him remarking at my weapon. I know I've got a sword of some kind. Do I have it equipped? Am I just mindless swinging it around when I'm walking? What are the controls for Dwarf Fortress anyway?

That doesn't tell me anything. Is that all I can do? Run around and get in fights? What can I even fight? For as massive as this place is, I haven't seen a single thing moving other than me and this monk. I thought Oblivion was big and empty. This is bigger and emptier.

Pretty sure this is a bridge and a road, though, and all roads lead to Rome or the regional equivalent, so I might as well pick a direction and find something to do.

Am I invisible, or do these people just have nothing interesting to talk about? I guess, being generated on the fly, that scripting them is going to be a challenge, but surely they can do better than that.

Disappointed in the lack of interaction, I head back into the wilderness for a closer look at the river.

Exactly as planned.

Final Word

My time with Dwarf Fortress was brief and tedious. I admire the scope, but not the difficulty curve. It is a game for a very, very, very particular group of players, but for that group, it is insane.

A bug was submitted to the very active community that cats were mysteriously dropping dead in puddles of their own vomit. Not just a few cats, an alarming number of them. They were dying of alcohol poisoning, which is weird considering that they're programmed to not seek out beer and wine as drinks. They're cats. Cats don't drink beer.

How would a cat die from ingesting too much alcohol? What else has been programmed into Dwarf Fortress, you start to wonder. Cats lick themselves clean, mhmm, like cats do. Beer spills onto the floor into puddles, yeah, obviously. Cats walk everywhere, thinking they own the place, of course, nothing out of the ordinary there... Wait a minute. Were the cats walking through puddles of beer and then licking themselves clean? In a game about dwarves building a fortress in a fantasy world? Whaaaaat?

Remember all those attributes regarding creativity and empathy and whatnot? The dwarves in this game aren't just dwarves. They're living dwarves. They have hopes and fears. They suffer emotional trauma. They can, under the right circumstances, be driven to suicide, say, for example, when they lose a child through a miscarriage. Whaaaaaaaaat?

I'm learning most of what Dwarf Fortress is through players who are dedicated enough to see past all the ASCII text in ways I just can't breakthrough. I'm following the stories of dwarves who will do their best but inevitably die and leave a mess for you to frantically try to deal with, hoping events haven't upset the mental wellbeing of the surviving dwarves.

Like Minecraft, you can create elaborate fortresses to live like kings, defending yourselves from the perils of the outside world through weaponry or devious traps, though unlike Minecraft, most of the cool action happens in your head, as you try to translate what a given character is before it causes you any trouble.

There are guides to get into Dwarf Fortress, but I can't see myself being able to finish reading a guide, let alone making use of it. Dwarf Fortress is insane. It's overwhelming. It's unreal in its efforts to make ASCII text act in a more realistic manner than seemingly any 3D RPG you could think of. The mechanics going on behind the scenes put entire other games to shame.

But it all counts for nothing much if you can't get into it, and beyond videos and stories by others, I can't see myself getting into it. Maybe the adventure mode again, if I knew how it worked in detail - a lot of detail - but to be honest, probably not.

I'm comfortable in knowing that Dwarf Fortress is too much for me, but fully encourage you to see if it's too much for you as well. It's certainly setting its own path through video gaming history.

Fun Facts

The specific character set Dwarf Fortress uses comes from the IBM PC, known as 'Code page 437', among a few others.

Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress, developed by Bay 12 Games, first released in 2006.

Version played: 0.47.04, PC, 2020.