Firstly, and most obviously, the game is clearly some sort of work of art. The exact nature of the art is a bit difficult to pin down - certainly isn't an exercise in graphics and the plot is inconsistent between playthroughs - but nevertheless.

The second thing to observe is it appears to be a life's work. A lifetime has not actually passed, but still there is a singleminded dedication here that is unusual.

Thirdly, it is impossible for this sort of art to be a true lifetimes work because computers havn't been powerful enough to do this sort of thing for the full 50 years it takes to dedicate a life to one thing. Furthermore, not enough people have been exposed to computers yet.

If humanity survives to 2121, there are going to be some amazing games. Gamemakers like Tarn, possible multiple generations of gamemakers, polishing these things will have some remarkable outcomes. I am glad to be around now at the birth of computing, but it is all too easy to envy the people who will be young in the 22nd century.

I only play it every couple of years when the desire catches me, yet still patreon to DF. This is what games should be.

Obviously an insane barrier of entry, took me a few goes to 'get it' and even now i barely get it despite playing many varingly 'fun' forts. I watched many youtube lets plays to make different aspects be learnt.

Its a beautiful piece of art for sure.

But yes, it isn't very accessible.

That all said - I would say that DF doesn't fall into a trap very common in modern games: it never lies to you in the UI for simplicity, it is clear about what it's doing and most of the errors are relatively clear to comprehend. Some of these have been accumulated over time (i.e. damp/warm stone warnings) but generally when a feature is added that feature gets consistently signaled in all the UI portions that need it and information is sanely repeated. A good example is lava-safe metals which are pretty clearly highlighted in areas where it might be relevant (i.e. building a floodgate and switch mechanisms).

I've frequently heard talk that cell-shading adds artistic flair or bloom allows better tooling around creating bright scenes - but the immensely obvious and clear style that DF achieves brings precisely what it needs to bring to the table. Ascii graphics make that game clearly legible while still allowing the imagination to roam and beautiful structures to be created - making a multi-z-level dining hall with balconies adding extra floor space around the roaring fire in the middle of the hall with dwarves dancing merrily around it... that is quite possible in DF - it's just not going to look like a triple-A game.

Except the godforsaken jobs interface. But that seems to be a hard problem, because even with Dwarf Therapist I would struggle with the hordes of migrants.

The depth of what can be achieved is what amazes me as an engineer. I can build cisterns to hold water, underground reservoirs, a series of mechanisms to refill the water, and to move it to consumption points, through the use of labelled levers, but be sure to smooth the stone, lest you get dusty water. Have some drain away to create mist in a common area, everyone loves mist. And another floodgate to create a defensive section, should invaders breach the entrance.

This is but one such area that can be brought about through the mechanics of the game, not to mention swimming practise in 1/2 depth water (7 is fully deep) and more.

A truly wonderful game, and I'm honoured to have a crayon drawing from them, to have been like yourself a part of its history. Strike the earth!

This is not a dig on guides, its instead an appreciation for what the game taught me - the idea that losing could be fun.

Before that I would always play in a manner that guaranteed success, re-loading if something went wrong.

With DF it was either something going spectacularly wrong, or utter boredom when I decided to play safe.

I disagree. Losing a game because of undocumented behavior or bugs has never been fun for me.

Sid Meier - "A game is a series of interesting choices."

I think that with a proper tutorial there'd be a much more immediately interesting set of choices. I would say though that Civilization has always had obviously bad choices that aren't clear to new players - most games take this approach where the player is given a lot of obvious choices to feel good about rejecting. The difference is that in most games these choices are rather artificially created and clearly signaled because they're obviously wrong (Sorry - are you sure you wanted to create that Barbarian with 18 WIS and CHA and 3 STR and CON?) - in dwarf fortress it's harder to detect those terrible choices due to having pretty much every option open to you as soon as you start a new game (except a few gated features like Law and Nobility).

That all said - maybe you could make a fortress work where you set up a pottery commune and don't actually set up any agriculture - just try and rely entirely on trade to feed your dwarves.

DF proved it for me. Essentially there’s a meta pattern in human behavior to avoid uncertainty. This robs you of the fun that can be had by embracing chance and risk.

Plus the “bug” I encountered was spawning near a magma vent and a yellow “i” chucking a fire ball at my stockpile.

If DF fulfills it’s goals, I doubt anyone can predict all the interactions.

You also never really lose. It's always possible to reclaim an old fortress -- losing doesn't cause existence failure, it causes a nonfunctional fortress.

If you abandon/retire instead of having everyone die, you may be able to find it in Adventure mode and meet some of your dwarves. Or you can kill the forgotten beast that destroyed it, then retire the adventurer and send in a reclamation party...

I’ll give you an example of a fort that I lost. I had dug down into one of the cavern layers beneath the world and set up shop. I started walling off a good–sized area down there, making it safe from fliers and swimmers. I built walls across a lake that would keep them out but still let in fresh water, and hopefully cave fish. At the edge of the lake next to a courtyard surrounded by stalagmites I built a simple little well house to supply the fortress should the booze ever run out.

Naturally, all this activity attracted attention, and forgotten beasts attacked the fort. I had a rag–tag militia with whatever weapons I happened to have on hand and some armor go out and attack the first one just outside the walls, not far from the well house. They fought hard, and managed to take down the beast with only a few casualties, who were soon carried back to the hospital.

I then directed my butcher to carve up the carcass; this thing was huge and it would likely feed the entire fort for six months or more. He duly dragged the carcass past the well house, across the courtyard, into the stairwell, and up a few levels to the main body of the fortress.

All was going well a few months later when I noticed the blood.

There was blood in the hallways, and blood in the courtyard, and blood in the well house. There were dwarves running around cleaning the blood, but it never seemed to go away for long. You would expect there to be some blood after the fight, and there was. But even dragging the carcass of a huge forgotten beast wouldn’t leave a trail of blood down a hallway; in Dwarf Fortress a dead creature can no longer bleed. Even the meat you get from it doesn’t have blood in it any more. So where was it all coming from?

I inspected some bloody areas, and found that it was dwarf blood. Indeed, Dwarf Fortress keeps track of this because the details matter; for every contaminant that comes from a creature it knows _which_ creature it came from. It wasn’t just dwarf blood, it was blood from specific dwarves! I started looking through my dwarves to find the ones that were bleeding.

All of them had rotten feet.

The skin, fat, and muscle layers of their feet were all rotting. Everywhere they walked they were leaving bloody footprints and smears of blood. They would go to the well house and try to clean themselves. They would try to clean the floors, and get it on themselves again, and on the clean floors. Any dwarf that got that blood on their skin was getting some kind of infection (or “syndrome” as the game calls them) that caused their flesh to rot. Animals and pets had gotten it too. Cats follow their dwarves around, so they were stepping in the same pools of blood and had rotten flesh on their paws.

And that’s when I remembered, the description of the forgotten beast said that it had “poisoned blood”. Forgotten beasts are randomly generated. The game picks a body plan from all the creatures it knows about, randomly changes details such as material, size, and color, adds interesting features, and then sets them loose in the world to harass your fortresses. Poisoned blood is an especially interesting feature because the poison itself is randomized. The game generates a suite of randomized syndromes (on top of the non–randomized syndromes used by various venomous creatures, etc), then uses those syndromes in various nasty ways throughout the game. This syndrome apparently caused flesh to rot. When the forgotten beast bled from its wounds during the fight, it got on the ground and on the armor of the fighters. From there it spread, until it was everywhere.

I might have forgotten that beast’s randomly–generated name, but I’ll never forget the story. Thus I won, even though the fortress was lost.

In fact, the fun doesn’t necessarily stop when you lose a fortress, because you can always start another fortress in the same world. Since it’s the same world, it has the same threats. In particular, it has the same syndromes. There’s a good chance that any fortress in that world would see this kind of threat again, even if that one forgotten beast was dead. Hopefully I would have been able to deal with it better.

Sure, this is a great example of "Losing is Fun".

Here is my example. Note this is 10+ years ago, so some of the details are hazy, and this was my first or second fortress. I carve out an area for an underground farm, then designate the area for Farming. Something about "needing irrigated farmland" first, but the game doesn't tell me how I can issue an irrigation command.

Apparently, after checking the Wiki, the dwarfs won't irrigate squares they stand in. I need to carve out a room above my farm, designate a pond, task dwarfs to fill the pond, then channel water down to my farm. By the time I figured all this out, my dwarfs all starved.

Losing several times because I didn't read the wiki was not fun. I never got the chance to build a fort, where an "interesting story" had a chance to take place. To get to that point, I felt I would have to put some 30+ hours into the game just to learn the basic undocumented steps needed to build a functioning fort. There was too much "work" to get to the potential fun parts.

The steep learning curve, the terribly inconsistent UI, and Toady's lack of desire to do anything to improve these issues, pushed me to spend my fun time elsewhere. I plan on looking at the Steam release to see if anything has changed.

My point is that this is not what people mean when they say that “losing is fun”. They mean that the traditional losing scenarios are not a loss in Dwarf Fortress. This doesn’t mean that the author has spent time smoothing out all of the interactions so that they are obvious or tutorialized the way a AAA game would be.

I was a dwarf, not a normal person ;>

You were supposed to put your farm on _underground_ dirt, like a normal dwarf.

Then I think you will love Darkest Dungeon, FTL, and Into The Breach, and specially Sunless Sea, where you need to die so your next character can inherit something of your choice from the previous character, making each successive run a bit easier.

On the other hand, digital cathedrals are theoretically vulnerable to operating systems changes in a way physical cathedrals don't have to wrestle with as much (I guess maybe changing building code could be the closest analog?)

> On the other hand, digital cathedrals are theoretically vulnerable to operating systems changes in a way physical cathedrals don't have to wrestle with as much (I guess maybe changing building code could be the closest analog?)

Sagrada Familia actually does have analogous problems.

When they started ~130 years ago, there was little in the way of planning regulation. In 2019 they had to go back and file for formal planning permits & licenses, and pay 4.6 million in taxes and fees to do so so that they could continue construction, more than a century after starting: https://www.barcelona.cat/infobarcelona/en/tema/urban-planni...

They also have an ongoing battle because during that 130 years of construction, somebody went and built a city block in the place where the original designs put the front door: https://elpais.com/espana/catalunya/2020-03-05/barcelona-qui... [Spanish]

I showed him the demo 8088MPH, which took seven years to complete. He said, "Okay, that's the software equivalent of La Sagrada Familia".

I too share your optimism, and I feel fortunate to be alive in this period (and who knows, maybe in 2121), however at the same time I feel like Dwarf Fortress is unique in its complexity; I feel like its complexity and attention to detail requires a mind unlike anyone else's, like the singular geniuses of the scientific communities that came out with breakthrough discoveries and incredibly complicated maths.

I find it hard to imagine DF but even deeper. But that might be my lack of imagination. I for one am happy to wait and see and be proven wrong.

This would make a great Ask HN: which computer games of today might be remembered in 100 years? Or: which genres have the best chances for a 100+ year lifespan.

I think I realized just now that we really do live in a time where games as cultural artefacts are stepping into the shoes of books. Wow.

I've never been much of a gamer, but, uh, who knows, maybe my grand-grand-whatever-children of 2100 would also enjoy the first parts of Leisure Suit Larry? [1] It did tackle universal human problems, after all.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry_in_the_Land...

> If humanity survives to 2121, there are going to be some amazing games.

My great grandkids can enjoy that if they survive antibiotic resistant microbes and the water wars.

Its a living world that grows and evolves with you, and shows its technical prowess not through anything as mundane as graphics, but instead through the very beating heart that makes it such an interesting machine. It demonstrates the author's skill, determination, and ongoing mastery of their craft. Dwarf Fortress is a masterpiece, but to call it simply art doesn't do it justice.

Losing is fun.

Some MUDs have this kind of longitudinal development - like the Discworld MUD or LambdaMOO.

And of course the AAA commercial MMORPGs with huge budgets and cattle users that get milked $14.99/month. Though I suspect those are unsustainable in the long run.

Check out nethack if you want to see what a few decades of development can do to a simple game.

That was like 40-50 years ago, along with birth of games, including many innovative ones from that era which have still yet to be remade. We just recently lost one of the last pioneers of this frontier, Sir Clive Sinclair. RIP

These are the ones that always get mentioned, but over the game's whole history there are too many great bugs to name. One infamous one that I recall from the early days had to do with the lethality of carp. You see, Dwarf Fortress features character progression. Your dwarves have not just skills (armorsmith, record keeper, surgeon, conversationalist, cheese maker, etc.), but also basic stats: strength, agility, toughness. The way that you increase your stats is by exercising your skills. And of course every entity in the world is simulated in the same way, because why wouldn't it be? So what made carp so dangerous? Well, every game tick every carp on the map had to make a swim check to stay afloat... and swimming is a skill! So shortly after loading a map for the first time, your carp will have leveled up into legendarily tough, fast, and strong terrors. And because world generation often populates maps with tiny disconnected pools, and then places carp in those pools, the carp AI considered itself perpetually cornered, making them extremely aggressive! Thus the result is that any dwarf walking adjacent to a pool (which they often will of their own accord, to drink or (ironically) fish) will find themselves being bitten by a hulking super-carp and wrestled beneath the surface of the water to drown.

So what do you do against this existential threat? Well, you wait for the first winter, at which point the map freezes over and all the carp asphyxiate. Fun!

To defend the fortress from invading, I had a narrow walkway with spike-filled pits on both sides. The idea was that as the goblins ran over, they would be peppered with arrows, and if they managed to dodge they stood a good chance of falling off in the process. It worked, as far as it went.

The problem was that a very few goblins survived both the fall and the spikes at the bottom, and those goblins became truly nasty.

The thing is, when someone deflects a weapon in that version of DF, they got a small bit of training to their weapon skill, depending on the size and weight of their opponent. Unfortunately, they also got a chance to block the upright spikes at the bottom of my moat. Which were technically "wielded" by the ground itself.

So the few goblins that survived by blocking the upright spike as they fell, instantly became supreme grand masters of their weapon. If they dodged it instead, they likewise became inhumanity good at dodging. The worst was, the moat was constructed so that if they survived, they could run up and try again, and this time they had a very good chance of dodging and blocking, boosting their skill even further.

Thus ended one fort of mine to ninja goblins.

"No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death."

https://comb.io/lthy2e

Bronzemurder - https://dfstories.com/bronzemurder/

Bravemule's Matul Remrit - https://www.bravemule.com/matulremrit

It took me about 6 weeks playing along with the wiki to “git gud” enough to have a mostly stable fort. I used tilesets for eye candy and eventually moved to some of the memory hacking tools like dwarf therapist for a better management UI.

YMMV but if you are thinking “gosh it’s too complicated for me” just be patient with it and don’t be afraid to read the vast amount of documentation around the game.

DF is an extremely rewarding mindf*ck. It’s probably the only game now that I can get so immersed that I blow past my bedtime and spend the next day, fatigued, thinking of what to try in game next.

Can you comment on the experience of reading the wiki and still having fun? Does the wiki have spoilers? Is the game just too complex to spoil with any amount of reading about it?

Even better imo is to play until you get really confused, then use all the internet resources possible to understand wtf is going on.Then repeat.

I tend to avoid things like the lazy been pack or graphics packs. That's up to your taste though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY

I think it makes up the crux of what makes Dwarf Fort great.

You don't need two massive hideously complex systems, when hundreds of smaller ones that all interact are so much more satisfying.

Dwarf Fortress seems to do both though, many large systems with hundreds of smaller interactions that build up to the whole.

I really look forward to seeing where it ends up in a few decades.

Dwarf Fortress is hard to master.

But then I discovered Rimworld, I bought it when it wasn't even on Steam yet so the author e-mailed the download link to you. But I stopped playing when they introduced a bunch of royalty, ESP and religion. Now I'm waiting for the new DF UI in Steam because I wouldn't want to re-learn all the shortcuts.

Anyway, Royalty and Ideology are DLCs, so you can totally play without them.

I sure would like to give it a try!

Here's a post: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=158322.msg701...

Direct link: http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=12202

The depth of this game is truly incredible. I'd imagine if it could exists for a port to nintendo switch

RimWorld randomizes difficulty through the game. So when things go crazy the response tends to be Angst against rngesus.

In dwarf fortress when problems arise the answer is almost always that it could have been prevented and or dealt with in many many ways (some that the developer never considered).

Nobody I know plays the default ones regularly except for Randy, and Randy won't hit you hard enough to break most skilled players.

Where you set some initial conditions and then watch the world evolve without having to take care of it?

There's also the worldgen process which is probably the closest, but doesn't really let you inspect anything while it's happening. The "legends" gamemode lets you explore the history of the world after it's been established, and there's some 3rd party tools to make exploring the maps and timelines a little easier.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/pqp9p2/dwarf... [1] https://github.com/BenLubar/df-ai