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“Dwarf Fortress” is a game that has earned a reputation for being difficult. It’s not that the features themselves are all that difficult to understand though; it’s more a question of the peculiar design of the game. For many players, this is what makes the game fun, and once you navigate the complicated menus, there’s a whole world to discover.
Here are some tips so you too can hit the dirt like a pro.
The 1.0 release of “Dwarf Fortress” features a new in-game tutorial that is essential for any new player. You’ll get your first fort up and running and even pick a newbie-friendly site for your first fort. There are some specific things that it doesn’t show you that I think are very important for new players, but if you’ve never played “Dwarf Fortress” this is where you should learn how to make zones and reserves, cut down trees. , and get your kitchen and distillery up and running before your dwarves start throwing a tantrum.
Right after you’ve selected to start a new game in a particular world you’ve generated, the option to play through the tutorial should appear. If you don’t like your tutorial fortress, you can always start a new save in the same world.
Stick with the default world build when starting
The first thing you do in “Dwarf Fortress” is to spawn a new world. There are plenty of great options to choose from on the world generation screen, but if you’re new to the game, it’s best to keep things simple and stick to the default settings. While it’s fun to generate a longer world history, going from 250 years to 500 years, it can sometimes make your game more complicated. The first two worlds I spawned were 500 years old, and I ended up with no dwarves migrating into my stronghold because we were the only dwarven civilization left.
Do not ship near an aquifer
After choosing a world, you must choose the site where you are going to build your fortress. There are a couple of things to keep in mind that can make your stronghold more difficult than normal to play. First of all, new players should not embark on or start a fortress anywhere that has a heavy underground aquifer. Dwarves don’t swim and don’t go into water, so if your fortress floods, it’s game over. Light aquifers are fine, but you will have to watch out for spaces that fill with water. I’ve been playing this game for almost a decade and I still don’t know how to deal with aquifers. Instead, it is better to embark next to a river.
Remember to check your biome
The sites also have levels of “badness” and “wildness”, which affect the flora and fauna in the surrounding area. “Evil” means how haunted or overall gross the flora and environment will be, and “savagery” means how dangerous the animals are. These two features add up in a site’s biome. If, for example, a particular site has “benign” for its savagery value but “evil” for its evil value, the biome will be called “Sinister” and don’t be surprised if your game has the aesthetic of a horror movie. . : The animals may not be as threatening, but the general environment will be hostile to your dwarves. Some evil biomes have fun features like raining acid or reanimate anything that dies as a zombie, so it’s important to pay attention to this.
Your best bet is to settle in a place with a “Calm”, “Wild” or “Joy” biome, and avoid “Haunted”, “Dark” or “Scary” biomes. You might be okay with an “Untamed Wilds” biome, which is neutral in its evil but has great savagery, but there will be particularly nasty wildlife like giant eagles.
Pick some admins
The tutorial stops right before the part that I think is most important: choosing dwarves to be your manager, accountant, and broker. Your accountant keeps track of everything in your fortress and how much it’s worth, and your broker is the dwarf who goes to your trade depot to trade with other civs.
The most important in gameplay terms is your manager, who can approve work orders, which you can access by pressing O on your keyboard. From the work order screen, you can create batch orders instead of having to go to each shop and queue for each stone bed or craft individually.
You can designate these positions from your peerage screen, but the manager and accountant will need an office. Just dig out a two-by-two room for each dwarf, classify it as an office, stick a table and chair in there, and then in the zoning menu, click on the icon of a dwarf to assign it to someone. Now you can order your dwarves to make 100 stone crafts, and you probably should, because you’ll want to trade something.
Pay attention to who you are negotiating with
Elves do not accept wood products, and in fact, they will be so angry that you even offered them to pack up their products and leave. They won’t accept anything made of bone or shell either, but do live animal trade.
Humans have their own quirks as traders, although they are not as hostile. They only sell “large” size clothing and armor, which won’t suit your dwarves, but is useful if you have humans or elves in your fort.
Trading with other dwarves doesn’t come with any warnings, but trading with your own civilization sometimes comes with Mountainhome requests. If you tell them what items you’ll need next season, they’ll provide them at the next caravan at an inflated price. On the other hand, each season, Mountainhome tells you what items you want, and they’ll pay a pretty penny for them next year.
You can trade anything, but things your dwarves do are preferable. Making stone crafts to start with is a good idea because there will be a lot of stones lying around. If you create a gem cutter workshop, they can encrust these finished products with gems, increasing their value.
Once you get your metal industry up and running after a few years, metal items like weapons and armor will often be the most valuable items to trade. Not every industry will produce a lucrative good for trade, but don’t let that discourage you from trying anything and everything. The porcelain statues, made of kiln-fired kaolinite, cost 230 gold each, and I only found out about it because I had so much kaolinite in my fortress that I was trying to get rid of.
An army is essential to your strength. If you are at war with the surrounding civilizations, they will occasionally place your fortress under siege. While it’s quite possible to expect a siege, once you’ve got over 100 dwarves, it’s also a good idea to gather some of those unskilled workers into a squad and give them some battle experience. The best thing to do is put non-essential workers, so no lumberjacks, miners, hunters, and definitely not your manager, accountant, or broker, in a squad, turn them into a barracks, and then give the squad the training instruction. I also prefer to set them up on staggered training, which means they go one season and one season off. Non-stop training is on by default, but not being able to pray or socialize will affect the mood of these dwarves. If they get so stressed that they start killing people, it’s going to be a bloodbath.
If you find “Dwarf Fortress” too complicated to play, but still think it sounds great, gamers have found a way to let non-players have the fun: by talking about their own strengths non-stop.
Probably the most famous game is Boatmurdered, which was a succession game played on the Something Awful forums. A succession game is one in which the save file is given to other players after a certain period of time. These players wrote each entry in character as the “new mayor” of the fortress, belittling the latter for his poor leadership. If you really don’t know what “Dwarf Fortress” is about, reading this is a good place to start. (Think elephants drowning in a sea of magma. This game really came in handy.)
One of my favorite forum games is also Glazedcoast, which takes place in the most cursed biome possible. It rains a stinking mud; everything that dies comes back to life as a zombie; when the dwarves first embark, they all vomit immediately. Reading about how this player deals with all the things this biome throws at him is hilarious. It’s pretty much the only good case I’ve seen for playing in an evil biome.
YouTuber Kruggsmash has a series of videos about various strong creatives. He also illustrates these videos with hand-drawn and colored images, which do a lot to bring the fortresses to life. In his narration, he takes great pains to impersonate each dwarf and follow the plots of each character. A really good Kruggsmash video always feels like a TV show about a dwarven fortress.
Kruggsmash is also quite ambitious in his projects, with each of his series having a little gimmick. In one, he was running a vampire fortress. In another, he tried to build on the ocean. These stories push me to try more complicated builds in my own games.
Don’t worry about “winning”
It’s not so much that you win “Dwarf Fortress” as that you don’t lose. There is an endgame and what some players might consider bosses, but it’s best to learn about that on your own. There are consequences for digging too greedily and too deep, but that’s where the fun really begins. If you have a good army and balance your economies, you’ll probably be fine!
In general, try not to think of this game as a project to be finished, but as a story waiting to be told. You win when something happens that is so funny or interesting or just weird that you have to tell a real person about it. Then they can try “Dwarf Fortress” and win too.
Gita Jackson is a cultural critic living in New York. She has signatures at GQ, Vulture, Motherboard, and Kotaku. They are currently working on a book.
Source: news.google.com