Bridging the gap between WTF and Dwarf Fortress

Well. Here it comes. The Olympian task of trying to explain Dwarf Fortress. Really there are huge amounts of areas of the game that I've yet to completely understand, but here's what I briefly do know. A word of warning, to anyone who only looks for aesthetics and fancy music, this will NOT be something that you're gonna find exciting. But really, your missing out on some fantastic gameplay. Such as:

• Building your own fortress in literally any way you want. How many levels, assigning rooms to specific jobs (such as bedroom, even a room for litter), assigning each specific dwarf a job, crafting Hundreds of different items and tools from the mass of materials to be found.


• A randomly generated world each time a new game is started, including history of each faction, each new founded settlement, and even the stories of people of importance. I'm talking endless. This section can literally be endless.


• Go down to the tiniest of detail in each of your dwarves; their likes & dislikes, what kind of a character they are, and of the utmost importance: a description of their appearance more detailed than I would of thought manageable.

I can go on forever but I'd like to point out the insane amount of detail. We're talking on a Charles Dickens level here. Its nothing I've ever seen in a game before, and its new every time. Here's a list of all things currently craftable and materials. (I wouldn't recommend checking it out just yet until you finish the article).

The one problem with this game is however the sheer complexity of running it. Obviously in a game where you can go down the the tiniest detail the question of 'how are we going to fit this in, don't have enough keys for half of it!' is posed and this is where most people lose interest. For example, let me show you screenshot of the 'world' as it is in 'Dwarf Mode' (the main mode of the game), bearing in mind that the game runs on 'slices', which are different sections of height, e.g. at one 'slice' you will see the bottom of a tree or soil, move up some 'slices' and you will see the top of the tree (this is using a different tile set however. I will give link's to all things seen later.) I'll give a few pointers to things hopefully making some sense in the madness. I'd rather link to a image host because the screenshot probably wouldn't fit on the blog well enough for you to read so here's the link:

Help me see the fun D:

I will give this time to sink in for some people before updating this post with more explanation of the complex controls, how to actually play and more about the multiple game modes.

Links to some things that may help so far however if you are interested:

A guide to getting started (The best guide I have found, and believe me there are loads.)

Mayday's Tileset

Dwarf Fortress

One more thing. At the moment this game is completely and utterly free.

Free.

Okay, so I'm back to build on this and talk more in detail about the controls and several programs to help make it manageably and understandable. First of all, a lot of keys will have two different actions, requiring to hold down 'alt' to activate the secondary one. In general, to the game is really hard to keep up with learning to manage all these controls. For example, to move up and down slices you'll need to press [alt + <>], if you havent found this out your gonna be stuck on one level. Pretty tough, agreed? Also realising your ideas can be grotesquely hard, as the graphics cannot do a 'grand fortress' any justice. Not to mention managing the state of your dwarves, their roles and individual jobs, and how they are coping. Three programs I would like to reccomend to tackle this problem are; Stonesense, QuickFort & Dwarf Therapist:

• Stonesense - This program realises the current area you are viewing in an isometric but massively graphically superior view. You can't run the game through this, only view, but it is essential for two reasons: 1, It shows mutliple slices without having to move up or down them and 2, it gives a much better idea of how you are going to build your fort. (The link isn't just an image, if you look the download is on a Google Project page.)
• QuickFort - This program is complex to explain but it works along the lines of allowing you to use and create blueprints in Dwarf fortress for room's (e.g. bedroom) without having to go through the process step by step by step. Best thing about this in my opinion is that the blueprints can even be created in none other than the fable Microsoft Excel!
• Dwarf Therapist - This tool is beautiful. Beautiful. It's job is to present all information on your dwarves in a much more presentable way, and also allows you to control and assign jobs from within the program. One major hassle is keeping tabs on everything about your dwarves, this program maintains all of this for you. A must-have. (this project is looking for a new maintainer to anyone who understands games!)

Hoping that these helped a little bit more, I will add some video tutorials soon if I get feedback on this, anyone wants them then let me know in the comments.

Peace,

Andy