After a long night of playing Dwarf Fortress, I had a concerned look on my face when I finally went to bed. My wife asked what was wrong. “I think I actually want to keep playing this,” I said. I felt a nagging concern for many weeknights to come.

Available tomorrow on Steam and itch.io, the new version of Dwarf Fortress updates the legendary (and legendarily arcane) colony-building roguelike with new pixel-art graphics, music, some (default) keyboard shortcuts, and a beginners’ tutorial. The commercial release aims to do two things: make the game somewhat more accessible and provide Tarn and Zach Adams, the brothers who maintained the game as a free download for 20 years, some financial security.

I know it has succeeded at its first job, and I suspect it will hit the second mark, too. I approached the game as a head-first review expedition into likely frustrating territory. Now I find myself distracted from writing about it because I keep thinking about my goblin defense and whether the fisherdwarf might be better assigned to gem crafting.

Getting hooked

Nearly 10 years ago, Ars’ Casey Johnston spent 10 hours trying to burrow into Dwarf Fortress and came out more confused than before. The ASCII-based “graphics” played a significant role in her confusion, but so did the lack of any real onboarding, or even simple explanations or help menus about how things worked. Even after begrudgingly turning to a beginners’ wiki, Johnston found nothing but frustration:

Where’s the command to build a table? Which workshop is the mason’s? How do I figure that out? Should I just build another mason’s workshop because that may be faster than trying to find the right menu to identify the mason’s workshop?

In a few hours’ time—and similarly avoiding the wiki guide until I’d tried going it alone for my first couple of runs—I got further into Dwarf Fortress’ systems than Johnston did with her 10-hour ordeal, and I likely enjoyed it a good deal more. Using the new tutorial modes’ initial placement suggestions and following its section-by-section cues, my first run taught me how to dig down, start a stockpile, assign some simple jobs, build a workshop, and—harkening back to Johnston’s final frustrations—craft and place beds, bins, and tables, made with “non-economic stone.”

That’s about where the guidance ends, though. The new menus are certainly a lot easier to navigate than the traditional all-text, shortcut-heavy interface (though you can keep using multi-key combinations to craft and assign orders if you like). And the graphics certainly make it a lot easier to notice and address problems. Now, when an angry Giant Badger Boar kills your dogs and maims the one dwarf you have gathering plants outside, the threat actually looks like a badger, not a symbol you’d accidentally type if you held down the Alt key. If you build a barrel, you get something that resembles a barrel, which is no small thing when you’re just getting started in this arcane world.

The newly added music also helps soften the experience for newcomers. It’s intermittent, unobtrusive, and quite lovely and evocative. It seems designed to stave off the eeriness of too much silent strategizing without overstaying its welcome. I can appreciate a game that graphically evokes the 16-bit era without the audio-cue exhaustion common to the JRPGs and simulations of the time.

However gentler the aesthetics and guidance for a newcomer, all the game’s brutally tough and interlocking systems are intact in this update. These systems crunch together in weird and wild ways, fed by the landscape, your recent and long-ago actions, and random numbers behind the scenes.

My first run ended in starvation and rock-bottom morale (“hissy fits” in common wiki language) because farming, butchering, and other procurements aren’t covered in the tutorial. I shut down my second run early after picking a sandy area with an aquifer as a starting zone, thinking it would make glasswork and irrigation easier and being quickly disappointed with this strategy. I was proud on my third run to have started brewing and dispensing drinks (essential to dwarves’ contentment), but I dug too close to a nearby river, and I abandoned that soggy fort as yet another lesson learned.

But I’ll be back. For me, the commercial release of Dwarf Fortress succeeded at transforming the game from a grim, time-killing in-joke for diehards into a viable, if not graceful, challenge. I will start again, I will keep the badgers and floods at bay, and next time, I might have the privilege of failing to a magma monster, an outbreak of disease, or even a miscarriage of dwarf justice.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1901876

The version of Dwarf Fortress that looks and sounds more like a game than a DOS-era driver glitch will be unearthed on December 6, the creators and its publisher announced Tuesday.

There’s a trailer, a $30 price, and, should things go as planned, versions for Steam and Itch.io arriving that day. Buying these editions gets you a version with graphics, music, an improved UI and keyboard shortcuts, and—perhaps most importantly—a tutorial. It also supports the brothers who have worked on the game for more than 16 years, offering it for free and subsisting on donations. That free version of the game, ASCII graphics and all, will remain available.

You can see the difference in looks in the release trailer:

Or, for those not keen on moving-picture embeds, here are a couple of screenshots showing near-identical scenes from the trailer:

While the trailer is focused on the Steam release, Dwarf Fortress will also be sold through Itch.io, where creators typically receive a greater portion of proceeds. That’s important for Zach and Tarn Adams, the two creators and coders who have seen the project through, and both dealt with family health concerns in recent years, including a cancer scare for Zach in the late 2010s.

What’s the game actually like? Former Ars writer Casey Johnston spent 10 hours searching for that answer. Here’s a snippet from her report:

I’m already in this thing, eight or so hours deep, so it’s time to solve a problem. Googling the “non-economic stone” error takes me to the wiki. This error can happen “when a dwarf walls himself into a corner and is unable to leave to get more rocks. Be careful where you build your Mason’s workshop, as some parts of it obstruct movement.” Otherwise, there may just be too many kinds of economic rock around (stone reserved for a special purpose) or a stockpile might block the loose stones that might be used for making things. I should be able to mine more and generate more loose stones, but I try mining around. Not a single thing changes.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1894474

Dwarf Fortress, the fantasy mining simulation with the motto “losing is fun,” is softening its learning curve just the tiniest bit. In its upcoming (but not yet dated) Steam release, a new tutorial will explain what you can do and how things work—if not, exactly, how to survive.

Co-creator Zach Adams showed off some images from an optional tutorial in an update on the game’s Steam Store page. Even with the upgraded pixel art and improved control scheme of the Steam release, the team thought the newcomer experience “still needs something.” So they built a tutorial that walks a player through camera controls, mining, stockpiling, woodcutting, and, at a basic level, survival.

What’s more, the developers are testing it on Annie, Zach Adams’ wife. After a failed attempt with an earlier version, the latest tutorial took Annie far enough to where she could “tunnel under a bog and drown her fortress.” Presumably, that is good.

“Our aim is to make this level of play achievable by anyone,” Zach Adams wrote on the Steam page. “We want the world to be able to lose this game and have fun doing it.”

A complex game offering a tutorial wouldn’t normally be news. But Dwarf Fortress‘ dense, often impenetrable interlocking mechanics are a large part of the game’s mystique. Former Ars editor Casey Johnston documented 10 hours with the ASCII-based Dwarf Fortress in 2013, starting out with a drive to “avoid using external guides or hints and hold off using internal explanations unless I felt lost.” The results were epic, in the historical sense; things happen suddenly, and there was death.

To wit:

Gray X’s start streaming in from one wall of the fortress and settle into the clump of icons that were already displayed on the screen. They blink aggressively. One turns into an R, maybe. The rest disappear. I receive no alerts. I have no idea what just happened.

During that journey nearly a decade ago, Johnston noted that an upfront tutorial was far from the only thing Dwarf Fortress could use to make the experience more inviting for, well, just about anybody:

What Dwarf Fortress really lacks, aside from a built-in tutorial that at least gets you started, is the ability to learn from tinkering. I would never have figured out the first step—digging a mine—on my own, let alone the dozens of following steps that apparently are crucial to building an effective, or even rudimentary, fortress. And I’m still not done. And I’m still hitting major roadblocks.

Dwarf Fortress, coded entirely by brothers Zach and Tarn Adams, has subsisted on donations, Patreon memberships, and other goodwill gestures since it began development in 2003. The game’s Steam (and Itch.io) release will introduce a graphical tileset, improved keyboard shortcuts and UI, and, most notably, a price, anticipated to be $20. The money will mostly go toward ensuring the brothers have health care and can sustain themselves through more development. A cancer scare for Zach in the late 2010s pushed the move forward.

The game will continue to be available as a free download, with an optional donation, at Bay 12’s site. There’s no date yet set for commercial release.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1890123