Dwarf Fortress

[Celestial Goblin]

Every forum now has a thread about this game. The reason to own a PC. Art.
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Have you played it yet? Share your experiences, questions and woes.

I'm off to demand two platinum chains in my bedroom.

[Cherri Tart]

what is it, CG?  i've never heard of it before :)

[Celestial Goblin]

It's a text-based strategy-roleplaying game. It has graphics made of letters in different colours. For example:
The grey, grey-white and grey-brown squares are walls. The dots between them are corridors. The four green 'heads' are four crossbow dwarves. The yellow one is a carpenter(or maybe it's a lumberjack or a bowyer?). The brown crossed '0' are their beds. The grey circle is a well. The '$' symbol is a pile of platinum coins.
It takes a few days of playing to get used to...:)


In Dwarf Fortress, you lead a bunch of dwarves to dig into a mountain and build an underground fortress there. The game is ultra-detailed, so that you can control up to 100 dwarves and still see what clothes a dwarf is wearing, what does he/she eat and many other details. It's a bit like 'The Sims', but you actually get to build traps, train armies, fight monsters, make complicated hydraulical systems to irrigate farms and many other things.

The thing that this game is really closest too would be the game 'Settlers', but it's way more detailed and has much more possible things to do. It's also terrible violent, with a realistic damage system that allows to sever limbs, choke people and throw their own body parts at them.

[Cherri Tart]

:)  thanks - looks way to complicated for my tastes, tho

[Vekseid]

The game now has a Z-axis, it's insane >_>

Trying to play on more than a quarter of the available map area kills the cpu.

[Jefepato]

I started playing briefly, but didn't put in enough time to get used to it.

I was just thinking earlier that I should get started, after reading part of the Boatmurdered story.

[ulthakptah]

Wow last post was in 2007. Not a lot of love for this game huh? Personally I love it, though I only started playing it this year so I have no idea how the game was at the time this thread was started.

Anyway I was just playing and thought I would check to see if anyone on this forum played as well. Currently I started in a tundra with no land. I was pretty sure all of my dwarfs were going to starve or go insane. No dirt, no farms, no sources of water, and the only animals were albatrosses. I felt the only way to survive would be to dig through the ice and snow, then keep tunneling down till I found a cavern. I found a cavern, so I got access to water, mushrooms, and wood stuffs. However there are dangerous creatures in caverns and now my dwarfs had to fight off troglodytes to establish a small base of operations there. The base is up and running and I have a few under ground farms started, but my dwarfs are really upset will the lack of luxury they have at the moment, so that's my main goal right now. As for my fortresses defenses I have cage traps and one draw bridge. Nothing fancy yet, but I expect great things from my dwarfs.

[Sel Nar]

Threadnomicus Necromantus!

Honestly, if you want a rather good idea of how Dwarf Fortress tends to go down over the years, check out these links.

http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/ WELCOME TO FUCKING BOATMURDERED! This succession game (each player played for a year, then handed it off to the next) was the benchmark for Dwarf Fort Insanity, before DF gained its Z axis. Murderous Pachyderms, Fire, Project 'FUCK THE WORLD', and fanart make the game a joy to read, even if the images look like ASCII on the tail end of a bar crawl used your monitor as its 'depositorium'. Boatmurdered lasted 66 in-game years.

http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Headshoots/ Headshoots; another Something Awful monstrosity, it grew and created a life of its own; namely one of the Let's Players, a member by the name of Vox Nihili, Took inspiration from the batshit insanity of Headshoots and Created two Gods locked in eternal conflict for its Direct Successor, Syrupleaf.

http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Syrupleaf/ Syrupleaf is, by far, the most involved, most depressing, and most terrifying DF game to date, in part due to the mod that added the 'Spawn of Holistic'; Horrific undead with hook-like claws, a mouth large enough to bite a human in half, mostly made of its gaping ribcage and jaw, and a heart made of raw magma. Needless to say, the Syrupleaf Military (around 60% of the fortress on a good day) ended up tough enough to Punt HORSES out from underneath frost giants and call it 'all in a day's work'.

[Vekseid]

I get into playing occasionally, though it's been awhile. Always tend to run my system into the ground >_>

[Strangler]

I love the game in principle, but I'm not going back to it until ToadyOne comes up with a more intuitive interface. Even allowing for it's high complexity DF is a nightmare to navigate.