This game has been around for many years now, but has always been in pre-release state. In fact, it’s so old that that it was the primary inspiration for Minecraft. What is Dwarf Fortress?
You generate a world.
The world can age, in the beginning there are a lot of giant beasts and wild creatures, but over time certain creatures begin to form something like civilizations, many of the titanic beasts are hunted down, and civilizations begin to crawl across the world.
You can start a fortress at any point during the history. But unlike Minecraft you don’t control one character directly, and unlike an RTS you don’t control many characters indirectly, but rather it’s more like Sims. You create projects, but unlike Sims stuff doesn’t automatically build, your dwarves have to do it.
Speaking of Sims, it’s sims on steroids. There are a TON of personality traits and experience meters for various tasks. They have set jobs, each one will have multiple jobs, but specialization is best, so the more dwarves you have, the more specialized they can become in their tasks, the smoother things will run…
…but the more dwarves you have, the more chances there are for social crumbling. A vampire might appear in your dwarves, and if you have hundreds, you might know there’s a vampire, but not who it is, and before long you might have multiple vampires. Find it and slay it! Or, cage it and use it as an elite battle unit.
If your fortress falls, or you want to retire from it, you can leave and start another. If you retire a fortress, you can come back later, although if time has passed, your fortress might have grown or shrunk since you last saw it. In a new fortress, Dwarves from your old Fort might decide to settle in the new one, they might move to your civilizations capital and become high nobility (or something).
If you choose, you can retire a fortress, let time run forward, and then return to the game at a later point in history.
Also, there are physics, weather, and the whole shabang.
I’ve been playing this one on and off for over a decade. While some people prefer the vast continents, I like to take control of a smaller pocket world. Although, I might try for something a little larger this time around.
The game is fairly crazy with its variety. But, the graphics are like something out of PC games from 1992-1993… an update from the old ~1976 graphics.
You generate a world.
The world can age, in the beginning there are a lot of giant beasts and wild creatures, but over time certain creatures begin to form something like civilizations, many of the titanic beasts are hunted down, and civilizations begin to crawl across the world.
You can start a fortress at any point during the history. But unlike Minecraft you don’t control one character directly, and unlike an RTS you don’t control many characters indirectly, but rather it’s more like Sims. You create projects, but unlike Sims stuff doesn’t automatically build, your dwarves have to do it.
Speaking of Sims, it’s sims on steroids. There are a TON of personality traits and experience meters for various tasks. They have set jobs, each one will have multiple jobs, but specialization is best, so the more dwarves you have, the more specialized they can become in their tasks, the smoother things will run…
…but the more dwarves you have, the more chances there are for social crumbling. A vampire might appear in your dwarves, and if you have hundreds, you might know there’s a vampire, but not who it is, and before long you might have multiple vampires. Find it and slay it! Or, cage it and use it as an elite battle unit.
If your fortress falls, or you want to retire from it, you can leave and start another. If you retire a fortress, you can come back later, although if time has passed, your fortress might have grown or shrunk since you last saw it. In a new fortress, Dwarves from your old Fort might decide to settle in the new one, they might move to your civilizations capital and become high nobility (or something).
If you choose, you can retire a fortress, let time run forward, and then return to the game at a later point in history.
Also, there are physics, weather, and the whole shabang.
I’ve been playing this one on and off for over a decade. While some people prefer the vast continents, I like to take control of a smaller pocket world. Although, I might try for something a little larger this time around.
The game is fairly crazy with its variety. But, the graphics are like something out of PC games from 1992-1993… an update from the old ~1976 graphics.
