Dwarf Fortress is a simulation game that tasks you with taking care of a colony of dwarves in a savage and untamed land. The worlds that you create are filled with horrible beats and other factions that would like nothing more than to cut your dwarven foray short.
The history of Dwarf Fortress
Brothers Tarn and Zach Adams have developed Dwarf Fortress for almost 20 years. What started as a hobby project for them quickly turned into an indie hit. Thousands of players have praised its intricate systems and insanely complex world-building.
The core gameplay focuses solely on how you instruct your dwarves to build their colony. You have a lot of control over giving orders, setting zones, and giving tasks. Despite all of this, you can’t take direct control of any of your colonists, so planning is an essential part of the game.
Surrounding your colony, you have an intricately simulated world with its own history. The game allows you to choose how long the history of this particular world is, up to thousands of years. The game then generates an over map filled with various types of terrain, wild animals, and other races constantly vying for resources. It will also generate multiple historical landmarks such as wars, natural disasters, etc.
Those races I mentioned can either be friendly such as humans or elves (even though they will quickly declare war if you cut down too many trees), or utterly hostile towards your colony (goblins and kobolds). There is also the threat of evil necromancers that roam the land, looking for an ideal spot to make a Dark Fortress, usually enslaving a goblin army to do their bidding.
But even though it is one of the most compelling simulation games ever created, Dwarf Fortress suffered from a complicated UI and lack of graphics. The entire world was presented to you through ASCII characters, which made it quite difficult for newcomers to understand what exactly was happening on their screen.
Dwarf Fortress Steam version
But after two long years of development, with the help of Kitfox, the Adams brothers have finally released the Steam version of Dwarf Fortress. Finally, the game has a dedicated graphics tileset, allowing you to make better sense of your colony. They have also implemented mouse controls, which were surprisingly inexistent in past versions.
Creating and overseeing a colony has never been easier with the added functionality. The future also looks bright, with a roadmap aiming to add even more content and systems into this incredibly complex game.
The Steam version of Dwarf Fortress is now on PC for $30. You can also enjoy the game on Linux and Steam Deck with the help of Proton. So if you’ve been aware of this game for years but could never get past the difficulty curve, the Steam version is finally here to help you out. So go out there and strike the earth and remember, losing is FUN.
