There aren’t many simulators as well known as Dwarf Fortress as it was the inspiration for games like Minecraft and indirectly others like Fortnite so it’s clear the simulator had an impact on its setting. At first glance, it looks like a survival game like any other. They cut down trees, grow food, and over time build a large community. You have the opportunity to dive into very deep market experiences. Almost everything is simulated, be it what your gnomes did yesterday, the history of the territory or their love life. Making things is often a link in a production chain where goods are transformed into another type of goods that can later be used. Accidents, incidents or other extraordinary things can happen and this creates the feeling that not everything is under your control. When you play Dwarf Fortress, you quickly realize that control is a fantasy.
Dwarf Fortress begins with a group of dwarves on the surface of a patch of land; You have some animals, resources and minions hoping for a bright future. The history of this universe is written and the territory before your eyes is your new home: green hills, lush forests and open fields will be important for your strength. There will not be as much hope when you realize you have to dig too deep for treasure and there will be monsters entering your stronghold from a deep pit and it ends something like the Moria sequence in The Lord of the Rings. Or if you accidentally drill a hole in an underground lake and everyone in the fortress drowns. It’s true that there are signs, supports, and other things to help you predict these things, but you can’t always know for sure. My second attempt at building a volcanic fortress basically ended as you would imagine: quick, sinister death and burning minions. Not to mention the number of threats that can come from the surface or from within when politicians disagree.
So how do you build an imposing fortress that can withstand it all? With time, patience, experiments, instructions and with many losses. From the start, no one is an expert on all of this, it’s an extremely peculiar adventure in which you’ll have to contend with everything a living creature might need in such a fantasy setting. It’s tricky and unrelentingly challenging at times, but if you’re able to survive, you’ll be rewarded beautifully. There are no goals, no pay screens or anything like you might be used to. You play as long as you want to play and there are more game modes than the classic one where you have to build a fortress. You can start Adventure and Legends modes; In the first, you embark on a journey through the world you created, somewhat like the first Lord of the Rings, and you and a group of adventurers can travel the world and learn more about it and go on quests. Legends mode is more of a mode where you can read about everything that happened and is happening in the world. It’s not so much a game itself, but it gives you the opportunity to read all this information, the story and the creation of the world.
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The creation of the world is literally done by you, but also indirectly created by everything that happens in the world. Starting one from scratch creates about two hundred years of history for the world, meaning it wasn’t created by magic when you started, but things happened and shaped it. Later, when you take the reins, it will update over time. Something big can herald new eras, and fun little footnotes can appear between your characters and the computer controls. It is a storyline that is created, shaped, and developed throughout the game rather than being presented directly. When you play adventure or fortress mode, many things are hidden and to find out more you need to explore the world, such as, you will never know the history of the people unless you meet them in the world. Things like weather, seasons, and biomes also reflect what food, animals, or other things you have access to – for example, there are over 50 trees that bear fruit. Likewise, your dwarves will have preferences when it comes to food and drink, but over time you’ll come to know what they need.
When you’ve built a mighty stronghold and feel like you’ve done almost everything and are safe now, rest assured that the fall is not far behind. Your minions may not be very happy and may rebel, or a giant monster eats everything on the surface, or one of your dwarves accidentally opens a leak and several levels of your fortress are submerged under water. . You can certainly build bombs and find a solution to plug the leak, but damage may already be done. Water comes in different forms; I tried to take advantage of a frozen lake in winter, but spring came, the ice turned to water and well… that was a lesson for next time. He hadn’t had time to build enough buildings to handle liquid water. My gnomes managed to crawl off the floors, which were now submerged, except for a couple who felt compelled to try and salvage some gems. My solution to this was to block off the lower floors and build passages behind them. Of course he could have tried to build bombs and save the lower regions, but unfortunately he didn’t have access to many of these buildings at the time. The game often alternates between confronting the crisis and finding solutions to keep building, which for me is one of its strengths: there’s always a plot that unfolds, and your reaction to things determines how it goes on .
To appreciate Dwarf Fortress you probably have to like the developing plots and works like Rimworld and Anno. My biggest gripe is that while there is a training mode, it requires a lot of exploration from non-players. On the other hand, one could argue that it opens the doors to the possibility of self-testing. Congratulations to Bay 12 Games for presenting; I played when it only existed visually in the form of Ascii, a computer language made up of symbols, and it wasn’t easy to understand what you saw initially. The studio felt they were unable to create the art when the game was released in 2006, which the Steam version fixed by hiring an artist to do it. All symbols have been replaced with figures, trees, mushrooms, rocks, stones and many more. It seems like a run of the mill between, but while nothing out of the ordinary, this update is like night and day for what it was. And while the graphics still aren’t quite able to show exactly everything that’s going on behind the scenes (it’s being worked on according to Bay 12 Games), it hasn’t lost any of the depth it’s always had. You don’t learn that overnight.
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Musically and audiovisually, there is music and sound, but it’s nothing that adds extra to the experience, it’s almost better to create your own playlist of your own. On the other hand, folk music is always nice there, but it’s not like there’s a lot of it. Currently, one of the problems is that warning messages and other relevant information are not visible or audible, there is a small box that has to be clicked on one side of the screen, which means that there are things that the player is not always clear , and that worked a little better in the original version. I have mixed feelings about the controls as I prefer the new version thanks to the better mouse support, but I find a lot of menus within menus and it takes a lot of clicks to do simple things. This is an issue that was present in older strategy games, but Dwarf Fortress certainly falls into that category.
The interface is better than it used to be, but there’s clearly room for improvement, for example you don’t have to click as often to get things. A little more information would have been desirable in tooltips and when hovering over objects. It’s one thing to explore the game on your own, but quite another when the game gives you the right information right away. There’s a lot of things like chairs, beds, embroideries, costumes, uniforms, farms, warehouses and the like that are pretty easy to understand but then you have to build buildings on top of others or need specific things and I would have liked a screen to appear in that one , which easily recognizes where in the supply chain a resource or item is needed, since work of this complexity requires this type of tool.
Despite these small criticisms, it is still an immersive experience, because without a winner you can progress, build new fortresses or experience exciting stories. When everything is a multi-step process, it also creates a commitment on my part to get things done. An example of this is the process of making better clothes for my dwarves. Getting clothes is quite a process: you need animals, wool, farms, buildings, and people to collect and transport the materials. In different buildings you get new resources, which in turn you can give to the creator of the clothes; there you decide, among other things, about the size, type, material and color of the clothing. Speaking of colors, these are much more visible now that there are graphics in the project. You used to be able to make uniforms in specific colors, but you had to imagine what they would look like. Part of me appreciated the ascii version for this reason as it became more of an interactive book of sorts, but the steam version is much clearer and easier to play. All of the variations in furniture, trees, terrain, weather, and ways to customize your stronghold are visible in a way that wasn’t there before.
Dwarf Fortress is a masterpiece that has been in development by two brothers for 20 years and is not fully developed yet. What I’ve tried is an expansive and almost unnecessarily deep simulation of building cities in a world full of magic, mead, angry dwarves, heroes and monsters. With Dwarf Fortress, even losing is fun; It tries to simulate all aspects of life, and most of the time it succeeds perfectly. Despite being an (officially) improved user interface, it can be a bit unwieldy in terms of the number of menus. The user interface and signage of important game information could also be slightly improved. In general, there is no other experience on the market that goes as deep. You either love it or hate it, and I’m one of the small group of people who love this sim. Small problems don’t prevent it from being one of the many masterpieces of the world of video games.
