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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

The Z-level stuff is so ingrained into me as a default (I started playing just before it was added) that it's amazing to think that some of the most famous DF stories are from before it was added.

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What is the z-level stuff? Haven't you always been able to move through layers up/down?

Nope, that was added in Dwarf Fortress in 2008 (and it was a huge change at the time).

Sometimes I miss the predictable and ensured progression as you tunneled into the mountain and got farther from natural light.

Underground river -> Chasms -> Magma -> Bad Things(tm)

I almost prefer it, I think! It felt much more like a proper story game with a challenge rather than the modern result of "The Sims, but dwarves". A single Z-level may be too austere today, so perhaps a modern iteration could use the same layout but with three or four Z-levels. I wonder if there's a way to replicate that today with some map editing...

The real trouble I had with the old versions was the inability to build walls. As I recall, once you dug something out it was dug forever.

It used to be you could be almost completely safe if you just stayed in the upper z-levels and didn't dig too deep, but with the caverns update you now can find various types of fun imported directly to your back door.

Sometimes you have the fun, sometimes the fun has you.

When you generate your world you can change the amount of layers per layer zone.

I don't know the minimum off hand but it is probably around 6 normal stone or cave levels, minus the levels used for open sky space and magma sea which I don't know the minimum for. Trees are multilevel now and I don't know that they will grow on a single layer.

So what was it like before the Z-level stuff? Only the surface and one level below that?

https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Bloodline:Boatmu...

From what I've seen, it was fully 2-D: the "surface" was to the left, then you hit the mountain face, and the further to the right you went, the deeper you were, until eventually you breached the proverbial Hidden Fun Stuff.

No, the surface was at one side of the map, and you kept tunneling through to the side

Pre-Z DF was basically a side-scroller. Surface was map-left, there was a cliff face, and the further map-right you went was 'deeper'

The left was outside, the mountain face was basically a vertical line, and all the things we associate with "deeper" were found further and further to the right of that line. Some ways in you'd find an underground river (which floods when you first find it), then a chasm (enemies spawn from here), then a magma river, [spoilers for ancient versions of DF start now] eerie glowing pits, and finally adamantine. Finding adamantine made the king show up and demand you mine more and more adamantine, but the more you mined the more likely you were to have your fortress suddenly end in a cutscene.

All these fixed elements gave the game a specific progression of increasing rewards and challenges, and a guaranteed story arc for the whole fortress.

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