So, I’ve been messing around with Dwarf Fortress for a while now. Its full name is actually Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter 2: Dwarf Fortress but I figure the game, with the kind of graphics it has, or lack thereof, doesn’t need any more strikes against it. The game has been available as an alpha-state, free download since August last year, but the ASCII graphics intimidated me too much to try it. However, I’ve been hearing plenty of good things about it, and since Bay 12 Games recently added a Z-level to it and other players have made it easier on the eyes with modded tilesets, I finally plucked up my courage to give it a whirl.

People instinctively try to describe a new and unknown game by comparing its qualities with more familiar ones. In the case of Dwarf Fortress, the description that I’ve seen the most often is that it’s a mix of The Sims and Dungeon Keeper. This is true enough, but it ignores the city builder and logistics management aspect of the game, so I’d throw Settlers in there as well. You control a group of seven dwarves who set off to establish an outpost of dwarven civilization in wild and potentially hostile territory.

The territory in question in part of a unique world which the game can generate. The game is fairly sophisticated in this regard, being capable of generating a geologically plausible world with many different possible terrain and weather types and then aging the world by simulating various events across a period of a thousand years before the game begins. This means that the world you play in isn’t a fresh and pristine world. Instead the world is littered with the remnants of past civilizations, rich with a history of wars and migration and populated not only by dwarves, but also humans, elves, goblins, zombies and even more fantastical creatures.

The problem of course is that this game has no graphics to speak of and all of the above are rendered as squiggly ASCII characters. Technically the game isn’t ASCII but instead implements an ASCII tileset on an OpenGL engine. This means that the tilesets can be modded and customized as you can see from my screenshot above. This makes it a little easier on the eyes but there’s no denying that for people used to 3D graphics with a high polygon count, this is one ugly game with old-fashioned midi music. This sparsity in presentation is matched by a rather tedious keyboard-only interface which takes quite a bit of practice to get used to.

One reason for this is that the developer Tarn Adams has deliberately decided to forgo frills for richness of game mechanics, and really there’s a lot that you can do in Dwarf Fortress. As in The Sims, each of your dwarves has a distinct personality, skill set and inventory. At the beginning of the game, you are given some resources to allocate, which may be in the form of skills for your starting dwarves or rations (including alcohol which is a must if your dwarves are to work at full efficiency), equipment and even livestock. You then set off to some promising location of your choice to build your fortress.

Your new fortress always starts at the spring of a new year and your seven starting dwarves have their work cut out for them before winter arrives. You have to direct them to dig into the earth or a good-sized mountain to begin tunneling out your fortress, with an eye towards optimizing the layout for defensibility. Your dwarves will need rooms to sleep in, which entails carving beds out of wood, which entails building carpentry workshops and chopping trees. Rooms need doors too, which can be either carved out of stone or wood at the appropriate workshop. Floors and walls can be smoothed and then engraved by dwarves with the appropriate skills so that they look ornate and impressive. Then you’d need dining rooms, storage spaces, more workshops to make things to export to the traders who come visiting every so often, and a farming room to have a more reliable food supply than fishing or foraging for shrubs.

Farming is particularly involved as the starting seeds that dwarves start out with can only be cultivated indoors. Most cavern floors however will be rock which is unsuitable for farming so you’ll need to irrigate it. There are a number of ways to accomplish this including having your dwarves painstakingly carry water one bucket at a time from a water source to the farm plots, but the most efficient way is to divert a stream from a nearby river, damming the stream in a reservoir room with floodgates and then releasing the water from the reservoir room to the farming plots by controlling the opening and closing of the appropriate floodgate as needed. This should serve to give you a good idea of the complexity to expect in Dwarf Fortress.

Once you manage to get a decent fortress running and steady supply of items with which you’ll trade for things that aren’t found naturally in the immediate area, word of the success of your fortress will spread to the outside world and dwarven immigrants will start to show up at your doorstep. In no time at all, your merry band of seven dwarves will become a thriving community and you’ll need to appoint dwarves to posts like sheriff, bookkeeper and manager to help manage them. Eventually, if your fortress grows big enough, you’ll have nobles arrives who’ll have outrageous demands about the quality of their living spaces.

As the word fortress implies, there’s combat as well. Unless you start out in a particularly unfriendly area, the first couple of years for your fortress should be relatively safe, except for run-ins with occasional kobold thieves who are easily dealt with using cage traps or some guard dogs. Later, however, you can expect attacks from bands of goblins, magma men (if your fortress happens to be built over an area with lava), nasty things that crawl out of your well in the dead of night, or even monsters of legendary might, like a dragon or a titan, though I haven’t played enough to get them. To deal with them, you’ll need to designate a corps of dwarven soldiers, equip them appropriately and drill them so that they do more damage to the enemy than to themselves. A wide variety of equipment is available, which you must either import through traders or forge yourself. A well-designed fortress with cleverly placed traps, gates and siege engines help make your defenses more sturdy. You can even, for example, carve slits into the walls of your fortress to create killing zones where your marksdwarves can shoot at invaders without being attacked in melee.

Eventually, however, even the greatest and most powerful fortress must succumb to the travails of time and die away (or else become so big and complex that it bogs down even the most powerful computers). But fear not, for your deeds will be recorded in the history of the land and you can switch to adventurer mode to send a party to explore the ruins of your former fortress and perhaps try to reclaim it.

As you can see, Dwarf Fortress is a hugely ambitious game that is unfortunately hard to get into due to its graphics and interface. I hear that the developers are working on a new, more graphically pleasing build. When that gets released, I’ll be the first in line to give it another whirl.