On this day, my first Fortress collapsed and everyone died. I had no active water source and ran out of food, in a rush I built a kitchen and had a dwarf make meals but alas I was already out of my depth, slowly but surely every dwarf succumbed to the inevitable, their pages containing similar narratives; they were numb to the tragedy of death, yet many of them simply wished they had been able to pray to their deities (I hadn't set up a proper altar).

sux 2 b them lul this train doesn't stop for any mortal dwarven fool, its dorf fort baby ya win some ya lose all of it

look, the new steam release still has some rough edges. you're still going to need to have the (excellent! well-run!) wiki page open a lot. there are still bugs, and things that might be bugs or might be misunderstandings, and lots of you fighting the interface.

but it's worth it. worth it for holding your breath to see if you accidentally flooded your fort when you forgot water flowed diagonally, and dug too deep. worth it for barely squeezing through a winter as animals help themselves to your weapons stockpile while you try to brew enough alcohol to stave off a fort-wide temper tantrum until you realize you forgot to clear out a rotting corpse and oops, all miasma! worth it for when a vampire or a dragon or a necromancer shows up and you realize you are just going to not survive this one, and Losing Is Fun.

And you know what? the community is really sweet about it. because we've all been there. sometimes it's just out of our hands. if you want to opt out, you can absolutely roll a map of even-tempered wildlife by a gently babbling brook (and sigh as your mayor gets his eyes pecked out by a wild parrot anyway). Or you can tempt fate and and wage total warfare as nobles sling demands at you and you dump them into lava pools.

i'm not going to pretend to be objective about this. I've been playing this game for over ten years. it means a lot to me, and i immediately sunk in to a new round. it's not the easiest thing to learn, but it's influence is wide and deep. it surprises me still. what else can you say in praise of a game?

Más juego de rol que la mayoría de rpgs que existen. Sin el componente social directo del rol de papel y lapiz, la experiencia de jugar Dwarf Fortress es una absorta y solitaria. Pero un componente social indirecto surge inevitablemente. Como generador de historias que es, crea la necesidad natural de contar esas historias. La crudeza de la presentación en ASCII es perfecta para la abstracción literaria de la propuesta. Y de ese impulso a compartir surgen todos esos post en foros, vídeos de youtube, guías y crónicas, como una extensión más de lo que es Dwarf Fortress. Una comunidad altruista empeñada en compartir conocimiento sobre un juego gratuito hecho por dos hermanos a lo largo de su vida. Un creador de mundos, civilizaciones, fortalezas y enanos obsesionados con la cerveza y cavar hasta encontrar la efímera gloria o su inevitable ruina.

(Steam Release)

Frankly, I'm a bit of a pessimist, and when I heard DF was making big pushes to be more "accessible" for its Steam release, I assumed we'd be looking at a developer-approved official tileset and... that'd be about it. I heard about the mouse controls but was not particularly hopeful that they would be more useful or clear than the keyboard shortcuts that already existed. I'll admit I was wrong! You'd be forgiven for not realizing that the game under the hood was originally designed as an ASCII-only project where gameplay more closely resembles "inputting missile launch codes" than swirling analog sticks. The official tileset and mouse controls alone are worth full price for anyone who, like me, has been fascinated by DF but been unwilling to spend the time learning how to gather all the info I need.

The game is still relatively hard to parse, but if you've played one of DF's many spiritual successors (or games inspired by those, in turn) then this shouldn't be too tough a task for you. Especially given the tutorial, which is actually quite good at explaining what's going on and how not to fail instantly - probably the biggest hurdle to learning DF before this point. It's still the same game, it still has its legendary level of detail and its quirky gameplay mechanics - if you're not used to games where fluids and creatures can travel diagonally, you better learn - and it's still possible to lose it all to the zaniest bullshit on the planet.

I think it's finally helped me see the appeal of DF firsthand - I'd dabbled with the game over the years but never enough to fully grasp what I was doing, so my forts were small and rapidly became failures, never interesting enough to have me doing a deep-dive on the wiki for optimized bedroom designs. It's easy to hear about things like cats dying due to an error in calculating feline Blood Alcohol Content and become intimidated, but Bay12 have been smart in where/how the level of detail gets increased. Most of it's in the worldbuilding or systems that run in the background, meaning that savvy or passionate players can opt into interacting with these elements without it being required of new players. All this info turns the fortress itself into a character - a canvas marked by each being that passes through it. Losing in every bizarre way possible is its own fun, of course, but there's still something to gain from watching your dwarves build a legacy and a culture all their own.