Puking cats and legless dwarf runners: what Dwarf Fortress is and what it can do

What is Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is a real-time strategy game with indirect control. According to Noyle, it differs from other similar games by a developed mechanism of random generation, which creates a wide variety of creatures and entire races. The main feature is that a whole world with history, nature, civilizations is randomly generated for each game. The player starts a session by establishing a colony.

Oleg Chumakov said that Dwarf Fortress is a very cool colony survival simulator that looks like Vim (text editor). It might scare some people off, but the advanced simulation makes the game feel like a programmer’s dream.

We create a whole world, then we prepare an expedition of seven dwarves, after that we find ourselves in some place and begin to build a fortress. We have a small map of the whole world, we can dig deeper and unearth rooms, build workshops. Then we build farms, get food for the residents. We do not control the dwarves, we only give them tasks. If they want, they will go to do it. However, they have their own needs.
Noyle
Dwarf Fortress veteran

As the guests noted, in Dwarf Fortress, the session ends when the colony dies. At the same time, you cannot win, but you can lose in a thousand ways.

Dwarf Fortress was developed by brothers Tarn and Zach Adams. The game appeared in early 2000 when Tarn Adams was studying programming and doing an indie project. The first game he made was Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. There is a joke from the developers that Dwarf Fortress is actually Slaves to Armok: God of Blood II.

According to Noyle, the first game was “Fierce Game” – a 3D project with all the mistakes of a rookie developer. After that, Adams released small indie games, and eventually came to Dwarf Fortress – and jokingly named it after his first game. In doing so, in Dwarf Fortress, he incorporated many of the ideas that he used earlier.

Slaves to Armok: God of Blood

The game became popular primarily because of word of mouth – Dwarf Fortress is free, and users simply recommend it to each other. Because of this, it remains popular even now, 17 after its release.
What Noyle does

The guest said that he “likes to suffer” in games and to understand complex mechanics.

Noyle wrote several big and small stories, and then left Dwarf Fortress for a while because he tried everything. He returned only when new patches were released – about once every two to three years. He last returned to Dwarf Fortress in 2017, and continues to play it. Now he continues to upload old stories to Pikabu and runs his own YouTube channel.

Dwarf Fortress stories

According to Kuzmin, the lack of an attractive graphical interface allows people’s fantasies to play out. The result is a book-like effect: unique images appear in your head. Dwarf Fortress is a book that you write yourself, and due to this, affection arises.

Chumakov said that Dwarf Fortress attracted him primarily with stories that occur due to bugs. Noyle added that there are a lot of mechanics in the game, and they often conflict with each other. It turns out not at all what the developers planned. For example, the very first monstrous creatures that killed everyone and everything were ordinary river carps. They did not go out on land, but pulled everyone into the water and there they bite to death.