The Campaign Builder's Guild

Normally I'd never trouble you with a thread about a game on the CBG, but Dwarf Fortress is the CBG-est computer game that exists.  It's also free!

Dwarf Fortress is an amazingly complex simulator of life in a dwarven colony.  The program generates an entire world from a random seed, with continents, extensive terrain and vegetation, thousands of historical figures, stories, caves, ruins, monsters - it can take half an hour to generate a large world map.

But it's worth it, because once you make your world you can live it.  In Dwarf Fortress mode, you start off with 7 dwarves and a small amount of resources, with which you must carve your fortress right out of the mountain.  The game is extremely open-ended; carve out any cave structure you want through layer after layer of complex geology, and hope your dwarves can survive the first winter and build a lasting society in the years that follow.

Each dwarf has its own personality and preferences; unhappy dwarves will tantrum, destroying furniture and getting into fistfights.  They like different foods, make friends, fall in love, have kids, and go into mad trances and create unique artifacts (or go into a murderous rage if their efforts are foiled).  You assign them to tasks and they build up experience; they can be carpenters, miners, jewelers, soldiers, masons, engineers, soapmakers, brewers, rangers, or just laughable peasants that haul around garbage (there are many more professions).

Trade with elves, dwarves, and men.  Fight off goblin sieges with your Rube Goldberg-like creation of traps stuffed with spikes, enormous corkscrews, and serrated disks, or just fill a moat full of lava, or stuff the fortress entrance with ballistae and champion axedwarves.  Mine for gems and precious metals.  Build elaborate systems of machinery powered by waterwheels and windmills.  Build a citadel with hundreds of dwarves, with nobility ruling over the plebs (and maybe even the Dwarven King himself).

The motto of DF is "losing is fun," and trust me, you will lose.  Your dwarves will starve, or go berserk from thirst, or be devoured by zombie elk, or roasted by a dragon, or dig too deep and unleash a horde of Demons, or get slaughtered by a goblin army, or get drowned by a flood of water or lava caused by over-zealous mining.  You might lose quite a bit - but it's all in good fun, and eventually you'll build a lasting and secure outpost that will resist all assailants.

DF is not for everyone.  It has a steep learning curve, ASCII graphics, and a keyboard-based interface that takes some getting used to.  If you can get over these things it's great fun and endlessly replayable.

Links:

You can find the game

here.*If you want somewhat better graphics, download an alternate version of the game here.*Most questions on the game can be answered at this convenient wiki here.*Regional prospector is a valuable utility that lets you see if there are certain resources (magma, chasms, adamantine, underground rivers) where you settle.  Without it, such resources are basically random.[/list]

Enjoy!

well I will give it a try, it does indeed look like fun

I'll give a little advice, because I hate to see people get discouraged and give up on this excellent game.

Always remember to check the wiki. I know many, many things about this game, and whenever I play it, I still always play in windowed mode with the wiki open in another window. It will cure much of your frustration.

Know your various ways to look at things. You can [v]iew the attributes and skills of creatures, loo[k] at the contents of a square, check the [q]ueue of tasks for a workship or the clu[t]ter that fills it. You can press tab to move the map and menu around the screen, or hide them. The menu isn't necessary, but it's a nice reminder of the keyboard commands.

The landscape is represented as a top-down view of a three-dimensional area, and you view one flat slice of it at a time. You can press < to view the next higher slice of land (or "z-level", as the wiki calls them), or press > to view the lower one, deeper within the earth. Black area is area you haven't mined next to yet (and thus, can't see); blue/teal area is usually sky, and will look different if you go down a few z-levels and see what's at the bottom.

If you're playing on a laptop without a number pad like I am, you'll need to remap the secondary scroll keys (they default to numpad + and -.) I stuck mine on [ and ]. You can use the cryptically-named "export to text" function on the key remapping screen to make these changes permanent.

Don't be sad if your first few fortresses fail hilariously. Mine certainly did.*



*The fates of some of LC's [spoiler=fortresses]
Hammerseasons - everyone starved to death.

Gearcloisters - a bowmaker went insane when his masterpiece crossbow was stolen by kobolds, and in his madness he slaughtered all my other dwarves, then threw himself into the river.

Helmedgleam - tragic mining accident killed a few of my dwarves, and sealed the rest in a part of the fortress that happened to have no mining picks, food, or (most importantly) booze.

Blazespears - I built a perpetual-motion-machine and accidentally used it to flood the entire world.

Swordbodice - overrun by goblins.

Tinshears - surprisingly successful, until a king moved in and started making demands I couldn't manage to meet, and having craftsdwarves punished by beatings with a hammer. Ouch.[/spoiler].

I saw the best dwarves of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical....

[blockquote=LC]I saw the best dwarves of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical....

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------[/blockquote]
This may be the best advertisement to play a game ever...any game that can have insane dwarven craftsmen is OK in my book.

As long as they don't bite people in the butt...

Quote from: NomadicAs long as they don't bite people in the butt...

They do that too.

I've run a few fortresses, and most were mildly unsuccessful. My first fort crashed my computer during a save, cause it was using too much system resources.
My second fort couldn't make iron weapons cause I flooded the magnetite stock pile with magma. Then a goblin siege started and my wooden X-bow bolts weren't killing them fast enough.
I'm not sure what happened to my third fort.
In my forth fort, I had caught five imps. My fort was annihilated when I tried to move the imps from their five tin/nickel/copper cages into one masterwork glass cage. The animal stockpile was in the same room as the well room, and the imps were loosed during a party. I wish I had caught that on film or something...

My most recent failure is chronicled here. Rather embarrassing.

I have a poll going to decide for me which fort chalenge I should try next. It looks like I'll be taking a coastal fort and create a glass palace beneath the waves, unless some more votes for the canyon of doom come in.

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As fun as this game is, don't doubt that I'll be any less productive. PkMn Same, Botsa SD, and 54 Swords are still very high priorities.

Quote from: Luminous CrayonI saw the best dwarves of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical....

...naked.  Don't forget naked!

Let's see, special ways in which my fortresses have been destroyed...

- All dwarves killed by goblins save one miner, who subsequently threw himself into a bottomless chasm out of despair
- All dwarves killed by a single zombie tuna (!)
- Accidentally broke into aquifer, flooding bedrooms, all dwarves sealed by water in their bedrooms until they starved

edit:

QuoteBlazespears - I built a perpetual-motion-machine and accidentally used it to flood the entire world.

Yeah, "accidental."  Sure. ;)

That is brilliant, I am going to start a game just so I can try to flood the world with my mechanisms

Quote from: NomadicThat is brilliant, I am going to start a game just so I can try to flood the world with my mechanisms

It's harder to do than in previous versions but is possible as long as you have sourced water (a brook, river, or underground river).  An aquifer would probably work too.  Alternately you can flood the world with lava if you have a source, though that will take a lot longer.

It's a lot easier to flood your fortress.  That has happened to me many, many times.  Lava is best for that because it leaves rock in its wake, entombing your hapless dwarves in obsidian forever.

I blame this thread for a day of staring at ascii and a mind-numbing headache.

Gosh darn it. I had everything unpacked and started digging my fortress out... and then I realized it was completely loam and sand. Good for farming, however I didn't find a single stone the whole time.

Quote from: RaelifinI blame this thread for a day of staring at ascii and a mind-numbing headache.

If you can't stand the ASCII, I highly recommend the alternate download I posted in the OP.  The graphics, while not astounding, seem astounding if you're used to the ASCII version.

Quote from: NomadicGosh darn it. I had everything unpacked and started digging my fortress out... and then I realized it was completely loam and sand. Good for farming, however I didn't find a single stone the whole time.

Who needs stone, make everything out of glass!

You can make stone mechanisms and doors out of glass?! o_o

Quote from: NomadicYou can make stone mechanisms and doors out of glass?! o_o

Well, not mechanisms, but you can make glass doors (they're called portals).  You can make glass versions of almost every placeable item except for beds (must be wood) and mechanisms (must be stone).  If you have access to magma and build a magma glass furnace, you can make green glass just from a bag of sand (no fuel required) and glass becomes essentially a limitless and renewable resource.  Don't make clear glass unless you have a ton of wood and spare dwarves to turn it into pearlash.

Quote from: NomadicGosh darn it. I had everything unpacked and started digging my fortress out... and then I realized it was completely loam and sand. Good for farming, however I didn't find a single stone the whole time.

Dig deeper into the ground. When you have any type of soil or sand, it's usually just one or two layers deep, with stone underneath. Dig under the soil to find the stone below. Lots of people like to put farms and stockpiles in the soil levels (since there isn't any resulting stone from digging to clutter the stockpiles.)

Some biomes have aquifers, which are essentially levels of water between the soil levels and the stone levels. If you have an aquifer, you'll have to find a way to bypass it to get to the stone beneath, so it can be very hard to get any stone on aquifer maps. Aquifers are handy sources of water, but I think they're generally more trouble than they're worth.