Dwarf Fortress 0.40.01 | Hacker News Reader

Dwarf Fortress 0.40.01

bay12games.com

278 pointsAudiophilip61 comments

DF has a reputation for being impenetrable. Like it requires weeks or months of work or study to get anything out of it. Not true! You can start from scratch and have a crazy little adventure in minutes. Really.

Dwarf Fortress: The Detailed Roguelike That’s Easy To Play

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/04/16/dwarf-fortress-th...

>Dwarf Fortress is famous for producing anecdotes by the minute. The two-man, twelve-year, donation-funded indie project weaves together procedurally generated geography, civilizations and histories to create a rich fantasy world. It simulates its characters – standard fare like dwarves, elves, goblins, etc. – down to the most minute detail, and when all its systems combine, the results are often hilarious, occasionally tragic, and always surprising.

>It’s also blissfully easy to play. The game is free to download and easy to install, the UI comes with a detailed and handy help system, and there’s a community wiki full of guides – not that you’ll need them. I started from scratch last night and was having fun immediately.

>This whole experience has taken around twenty minutes, and while it’s a shame Akan Seasonveiled didn’t get to see more of her homeland, the experience encapsulated much of what I love about Dwarf Fortress. I discovered a town, talked to people and formed a posse. I went on a dynamically generated fantasy adventure and slayed a grim beast. I discovered a camp of travellers out in the wilds, had a tense and hard-fought combat encounter, and finally met my own grisly end. It was exciting! It was just a tiny taste of this world, but I’m itching to go explore more.

I actually enjoy simply generating worlds and looking through the history afterwords... even easier.

On the other hand, "rogue" part of dwarf fortress is much easier than "dwarf fortress" part.

But the dwarf fortress part is amazing. My number 1 game.

The fortress mode tutorial on the DF wiki allows you to build a self-sustaining fortress.

The Lazy Noob Pack is also of great help. One will probably have to wait for it to be updated for the newer version of DF, but one can begin with the previous version of DF and update when it's available.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Quickstart_guide

The ASCII interface is already a huge stumbling block for anyone not used to it. For anyone that is used to roguelikes, then Adventure mode is 'Just Another Roguelike'. Dwarf mode, where you have to build a home, has a huge number of pitfalls.

Try figuring out the military system on the first read-through, for example (or even without a read-through!). It's flexible and makes sense... after you've come to grips with it... and there are a lot of moving parts and tweaks for any kind of military deployment. DF in 'Dwarf mode' is one of the poster-children for games with steep learning curves.

Aye, Fortress mode takes quite a lot of time on the wiki/forums to get used to. I've played quite a few roguelikes and it was more akin to learning vim (complete with all the single letter commands...)

But once you master it, you're draining the oceans, trapping whales in lead cages, and rocketing them down the steep slope to hell on minecarts as a kinetic demon-slaying weapon of choice. Or something like that :)

The thing I love about DF is knowing enough to see the creativity in other people's solutions to problems. I know enough to get a stable, defensible fort, but nothing too creative (I still can't work out how to disarm a caged goblin - so I generally have an ever-increasing number of cages...). But the glorious creativity in what so many people do with the DF 'framework' can be truly beautiful at times.

Mass dump the tile the cage is on, then undump the cage itself is what I've always done. EDIT: and claim them. I haven't played for a while, I'm getting forgetful.

And yes, people can be very creative. Farming various rare creatures (possibly via draining oceans), creating orbital magma cannons that can target any part of the world, conquering hell, creating mechanical calculators that operate on magma where an "overflow" error results in a literal overflow of magma...

You don't see that in many games. But there aren't many Turing complete games out there, either. I think Minecraft & Starbound are the only big ones, though I'm not sure if Terraria is or isn't.

> creating orbital magma cannons that can target any part of the world

Mind giving the gist on how that's done?

Isn't Little Big Planet Turing complete?

Create a floor filled with hatches on a very high z level that covers your embark. Link all hatches to levers in a control room of doom somewhere. Pump magma up from the magma sea. Laugh manically when you flood the surface with magma :) (and destroy your FPS...)

Not sure about LBP as I haven't played it. I was hoping wikipedia would have a list of Turing-complete games but I can't find one.

Not a wikipedia page, but LBP is included in this list of accidentally Turing-complete things.

http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complet...

Magic the Gathering? You made my day. Of course, even rocks can be Turing-complete :) http://xkcd.com/505/

Rocks don't have their own rules on how to "execute." Calling the rocks Turing-complete is like pointing to a Turing machine's tape and saying it's the tape that's Turing-complete :-P

Good point, well made.

Thanks guys - looks like it was the claiming that I'd overlooked. Another fun thing about DF's complexity - so many layers. Dump, forbid/claim, dig, deconstruct, stockpile, zone, burrow, traffic cost...

Terraria isn't TC.

However, SpaceChem apparently is, but I am not sure that counts.

Actually, Terraria is. Before the update that added multiple colors of wire it was possible to create a very, very slow clocked NAND gate. Now it's possible to create a much faster NAND gate, and from there all the other logic.

First, claim all the items (d-b-f), then dump them (d-b-d). Don't forget to switch off dumping the cages themselves (k-d on each cage). A whole slew of dwarf haulers should spring into action to strip your caged goblins naked. Then toss them in a pit and use them as live training for your militia.

For me the problem is not the fact that the interface is ASCII, but the fact that is inconsistent. Each menu has its own little quirks to navigate it. Moving the focus from one part of a menu to the other takes different keypresses on each screen.

I was never able to decipher the military config screen. I rely on traps and animals (once I managed to have tigers!) to repel the first small invasions. Then I have Fun.

That's all part of the Fun[1].

[1] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.34:Losing

For the most part, the quirks are consistent, though.

I mean, it's not intuitively consistent, but basically there are navigation controls with or without having a selection cursor on the main screen (which is usually where the difference is, since navigation and some of the selection keys overlap).

If you look through the keybindings, there are "move selector / cursor" options and then secondary options for all of those, and that's more or less what they map to.

>I started from scratch last night and was having fun immediately.

"Fun" in dwarf fortress usually refers to losing violently.

Capitalization of "fun" makes all the difference when reading stories about it.

This game is like what the Sims should have been all along. If you think building a dream home, getting slapped by a neighbor for an ill-timed kiss, and drowning your characters in their own swimming pool were interesting, imagine how you would feel if you could make your house a 100-story skyscraper built from obsidian and glass, with subbasements that pierce three separate underworlds before breaching Hell, witness a tantrum that ends in broken bones, severed limbs, and execution by hammering, and kill your characters by sending them on a rollercoaster ride that ends with their minecart smashing into a mountainside and falling into a volcano.

All of EA can produce a game where the tiny people pee their pants instead of using their own toilet. Two guys at Bay12 can produce a game where tiny people can have both arms snipped off by a monster with crab claws and still kill it by choking it out with their legs and then biting its head off.

The Sims let you train your stats with mirrors and home gyms and bookshelves. DF lets you train stats by stabbing people with lever-operated spear traps, dropping live puppies onto their heads, forcing them to drown for short intervals, and making them wrestle with naked goblins.

And all it costs is a voluntary donation to support a grand total of two people.

Little known fact: it's only due to DF that you can find the solid density for Saguaro wood online.

It's ~430 kg/m^3 dry and this was determined empirically by players.

EDIT: Fixed units.

kg/m^3, actually. Even gold is only 19.3 g/cm^3 :-D

Ah, yeah. Saguaro wood probably floats, and the cutoff for that is below 1 g/cm

There is at least one wood that does not float: ironwood.

It's only thanks to DF that I know things like this.

“Ironwood” is a name used for a whole bunch of different unrelated tree species.

I believe lignum vitae is just about the densest commercially available wood. Definitely sinks.

The nice thing about the DF raws is that they now list the actual species used as a basis. A lot of research went on some time ago to add correct, sourced information to the raws. There are probably still a few wonky things, as some of the properties in there make more sense for metals than things like wood, but the players care about even strange details like that.

Oops, you're right. Most sources list g/cm^3, but you're correct that the raws use kg/m^3 (and 430 kg/m^3 is the proper figure).

Can you elaborate? I didn't get what are you pointing at.

Some fans decided to try and get accurate densities for as many materials as possible so that their in-game simulations reflect their actual properties.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=80022.0

The other reply linked to the forum thread, but just to elaborate, fans of the game obtained a box of Saguaro wood, then proceeded to measure the solid density and reported their findings.

That said, what actually prompted the raws to get updated was this: http://imgur.com/EPtgt

And the jokes on that page will only make sense if you play DF.

One more bit of background that may help you make sense of this. In DF, material properties, among other things, are defined in the "raws" (text files that contain assorted figures, like solid density).

You can see an example of what they look like here, on the DF wiki - http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.34:Saguaro/raw

---

Density was determined experimentally. Contact Uristocrat for a sample if you want to verify this yourself. A 6g (+/- 0.1g) piece of dry Saguaro wood had a volume of approximately 14 cm^3 (+/- 1 cm^3) [SOLID_DENSITY:430]

My favorite explanation of DF:

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/4/40/FunComic.png

For those who don't know what Dwarf Fortress is, and want to read about the marvelous story behind Dwarf Fortress and its creators: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of....

Sorry but I just hit a Page Not Found.

Is there a typo in the hyperlink?

If a cursory googling is any indication, it's probably the following link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of...

Some additional googling turned up this follow-on story about how the Times made the ascii art in the original article.

http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/the-fine-art-of...

Another enjoyable read by the folks at Ars Technica:Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/02/dwarf-fortress-ten-hou...

And if you want an idea of the type of 'generated stories' it can tell, you might be interested in http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/ - a "Let's Play" told by successive rulers of a fortress. (The story proper begins in Update 2 of Thread 1)

Warning, you may spend the rest of the day reading it...

Another warning: You'll never look at an elephant the same way again after reading this. I used to think they were intelligent, noble creatures. Now I know the truth.

I always find amazing what one can accomplish when the scope is reduced enough. I don't think Dwarf Fortress would have a fraction of its features if it had sprites, non-tiled graphics, multiple visible layers, sound effects or a sane UI.

By taking those sacrifices we now have a game to behold.

I'm excited to try the new features.

I don't think "limited scope" is a phrase that accurately describes Dwarf Fortress at all.

It has an extremely limited scope in particular carefully chosen ways, enabling an incredibly expansive scope in other much more important ways.

I really doubt the graphics would have much of an impact; after all (IIRC) they haven't really been updated in forever, meaning most of those 12 years were spent on the programming.

Graphics would have an impact on development - not having graphics makes it trivial to add large quantities new content, things, creatures, etc.

Even simple sprite graphics would require to be created/modified/maintained at every modification, thus increasing the barrier/cost of such changes and causing less changes/experiments to be done.

Currently, the author publishes the changes, and fan spritepack maintainers do all the work of maintaining those sprites and their relation to the raw datafiles - it's a lot of continuous work; if Toady would have to do all of it himself then it wouldn't scale.

Urist McProgrammer has created Dwarf Fortress 0.40, a luminous C++ program.

All the code is of the highest quality. It is studded with ASCII character cabochons and menaces with spikes of attention to detail. It is engraved with an image of Toadyone surrounded by dwarves. The dwarves are battling an invasion of new bugs.

A friend of mine put it best - "The work of a lunatic, but possibly the best game of our generation."

I completely agree, if I had to choose one computer game to survive some kind of natural disaster I would choose this one.

Instead of "our generation", I would say "spectrum" generation (people born from early 70's to early 80's). I wish I had this work of art when I had the time to play computer games.

As a metaphor I would compare this game to high-cuisine and a 3D intensive game to fast-food.

Absolutely can't wait to go home and try out the latest version of DF, which has been two years in the making if I'm correct.

Apparently the entire dwarf motivation system has been redone, so almost every aspect of the game will be changed. I am looking forward to all of the bugs, especially the ones relating to trying to wash difficult to reach areas with globs of sentient-fat soap.

I highly encourage anyone who likes extreme detail and gaming to check out DF. DF is probably one of the most creative and most fantastic games ever made, and certainly one of my top five games of all time. The learning curve is easy enough to climb if you watch a series of youtube tutorials and have a mentor to ask questions to. Once you've got the basics down and can build a fort without flooding it or having a tantrum spiral due to not enough rum, then the Fun really begins. The minute to minute can also be very entertaining. I laughed really hard when one of my elite militia captains went into a martial trance while fighting off an invasion of goblins and promptly gave birth to a boy while still swinging her axe.

If you don't see yourself playing this game, consider following the dev blog. It's rare for someone to devote themselves to a lifelong project, and Tarn has been going strong for a decade now. The updates are fun, especially his narrative descriptions of glitches in the world.

"They cannot yet realize their dreams of taking over the world."

Sums it up I think.

Wow, I totally didn't expect to see this headline. This version has been in the works for years and the updates have been infrequent as of late.

I remember waiting for the very first version of Dwarf Fortress. I think it wasn't even known as Dwarf Fortress back then, just "the dwarf game". Bay 12 Games was virtually unknown, with several quirky games to its name, and a dozen or so fans on the forum. There was a thread where screenshots and videos of the upcoming game were posted. The full scope of the game wasn't revealed back then: the fact that adventure mode even existed was a total surprise, and so was the fact that it's a sequel to Slaves to Armok. The first announcement was posted on Usenet. Good times.

>the updates have been infrequent as of late.

If you're referring to updates on the state of development, this is resoundingly untrue.

Toady makes multiple entries every week, commenting on things happening, bugs found, and havoc discovered. He's done this consistently since I started following DF, around 6 years ago.

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Edit: I should also point out that the brothers are also active on the bay12 forums, conducting monthly Q&A sessions about DF's future, as well as posting monthly donation numbers. There is a DF podcast on which they appear frequently to boot. I mention all of this only to stress that despite DF's odd, irregular development cycle, the Adams brothers are among the most communicative and forthright of dev teams out there.

Edit edit: The above takes into consideration that the devs' communications, updates, changelogs, etc., are just as unorthodox, non-standard and charming as DF itself, and often make for as much entertainment.

Dwarf fortress is one of many games that I enjoy following but can't really play... I just like that OTHER people play it. I've grown up on games just like any other form of entertainment (movies, tv etc) and it's great that I can still get some feeling of keeping up on things by watching 5 minute videos or reading summaries of some other much better player's creative output instead of having to invest 50 hours that I don't have...

Guess it's time to update talesfromthefortress.com to include the new version number.

It remembers me of the beautiful ADOM (ancient domain of mistery)...i think they got a lot of inspiration from it

If you like ADOM, you should note that it got crowdfunded a while back to create a sequel. I believe they even released some public "betas" recently. (figured I'd mention it in case you hadn't heard :)

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