Dwarf Fortress’ graphical upgrade provides a new way into a wildly wonky game

I was worried when I went to bed after a long night of playing Dwarf Fortress. What was wrong with my wife? I said I would like to keep playing. I was concerned for many nights to come.

The new version of Dwarf Fortress will be available tomorrow on Steam and itch.io. The commercial release aims to make the game more accessible and give some financial security to the Adams brothers, who kept the game free for two decades.

I'm pretty sure it succeeded at its first job and will hit the second mark as well. I was going to review the game as soon as possible. I keep thinking about my defense and whether the fisherdwarf should be 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?

I got further into Dwarf Fortress' systems than she did, and I probably enjoyed it more than she did. My first run taught me how to dig down, start a stockpile, assign some simple jobs, build a workshop, and craft and place beds.

Advertisement

The guidance ends there. You can keep using multi-key combinations to craft and assign orders, but the new menus are much easier to navigate. The graphics are easy to notice and address. When an angry Giant Badger Boar kills your dogs and kills the one dwarf you have outside, the threat actually looks like a badger, not a symbol you'd accidentally type. When you're just getting started in this arcane world, building a barrel is no small thing.

Adding music helps newcomers. It's pleasant and evocative. It seems designed to keep the eerstiness of too much silent strategizing at bay. There is a game that evokes the 16-bit era without the audio-cue exhaustion common to the JRPGs and simulations of the time.

• 
• 
• 
• 

The game's brutally tough and interlocking systems are not altered in this update. The systems crunch together in weird and wild ways because of the landscape, your recent and long-ago actions and random numbers.

Advertisement

Farming, butchering, and other procurements aren't covered in the tutorials, so my first run ended in starvation and rock- bottom morale. I shut down my second run early after picking a sandy area with an underground water source as a starting point, thinking it would make glasswork and irrigation easier. I was proud to start making drinks on my third run, but I dug too close to a river and abandoned the soggy fort.

I will return. The commercial release of Dwarf Fortress turned the game into a viable, if not graceful, challenge for people who have been playing it for a long time. I will start again, I will keep the badgers and floods at bay, and I might have the privilege of failing to a magma monster, an outbreak of disease, or even a case of dwarf justice.