Dwarf fortress us really not that complex, its the same gameplay as banished or rimworld. The old UI is complex. The new one is fine. If you want a complex city builder, play songs of syx.
"Draw a place to dig and a Dwarf will dig." Welllll.... Most of the time. Sometimes they're sleeping, sometimes they're eating and sometimes they're accusing a goose of murder.
As someone who's only tried the text version of dwarf fortress (and gave up fairly early because everything was a pain to navigate and see), that last thing made me wheeze
With most games a simple graphical style is usually an artistic choice, but I'd like to think that Drawf Fortress uses such simple graphics because it literally couldn't function on any device otherwise
Ah yes,The game where a dwarven barkeeper that lost a finger keeps dropping beer jugs therefor making the cats become alcoholic and either die or vomit all around the place. Its a beauty to behold
The cats have become dirty due to the beer Cats lick beer off Cats become drunk Cats vomit Cats become dirty Cat licks off beer vomit Cat becomes drunk Cat vomits....
Nothing affected me more in this game than when I saw that my broker was not getting to the trading post in a timely manner, so I went looking for her and found a few different things. First, I had accidentally broken the main staircase upwards, so anyone going to the ground level had to use the back entrance, which went a looooong way out of the way. Second, this was first broker in a while that did not immediately get disheartened and go drinking instead of doing her duty. And third, my broker had apparently been a victim of a recent olm person invasion and had suffered nerve damage making her a paraplegic. I found her 90% of the way to the trading post, having crawled all the way through the back entrance (which I later calculated to be a journey of 9 in-game days for her), dutifully making her way to the trading post. I immediately relieved her of duty, got her to the infirmary, made her own room out of solid gold, and gave her her own personal crafting station. She is doing much better no, and has learned how to walk with a crutch (somehow). Just the absolutely staggering level of detail in this game within every single aspect of it has blown me away.
Oh WOOOOOW, and no one have commented on that, both of you are a LEGEND 👏👏👏👏👏. Mad respect. Probably the first time i truly wanted to meet a character in real life, she's goated.
My favorite part about Dwarf Fortress is that it's a colony manager that doesn't care whether you're playing or not. Shit will happen to fortresses all over the world. And it will happen to yours. What's beautiful about this game: The fact that everything you said after 7:00 is completely unique to your playthrough
You mean about the curses? If your dwarves don't pray to their deity for a long time there is a chance they might get cursed to turn into either vampire or a werebest.
Another awesome thing is that when you abandon a fortress to ruin, it’s story and inhabitants still exist in the world of you want to play in that world again, meaning that you can even stumble across the ruins of your old fortress
This was actually the original premise of the game: you were supposed to go as an adventurer and explore an abandoned fort to find its secrets and the reason it fell. Then the developer decided that it would be fun to also get to make that fort and things spiraled from there.
Probably my fourth attempt at a fortress, I embarked upon an Untamed Wilderness. While I was chopping wood and fishing, a flock of Giant Cardinals swooped down and murdered six of my Dwarves almost immediately. Couldn't help but laugh.
One of my more successful forts in Dwarf Fortress for Steam was constantly harassed by all types of birds. From giant ravens to cardinals that took turns picking out my dwarven children who went too far.
On one of my embarks the tree that my only woodcutter was chopping down fell on him and killed him. In another of my fortresses every time a dwarf would try to drop something in the garbage dump hole, they’d be attacked by bones and wool and skulls. I eventually figured out why: my surgeon was a necromancer, and his child daughter was always playing in the refuse stockpile next to the garbage dump zone, and so she had been reanimating everything in the garbage dump. This game provides a constant supply of you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up emergent behaviors and that’s why people love it.
The same happened to me on my very first fortress because the tutorial dropped me into a wild biome. Giant Wrens killed ALL of my dwarves except a last one which they let to slowly bleed out with only one limb left. I had to abandon the fortress because waiting for the last one to die took too long.
ive never heard of this game until now but i gotta say that tavern waterfall seems to have claimed more lives than actual enemies 10/10 thoroughly convinced to play
Dwarf Fortress, is what you get when you have a bunch of Backend developers, designing the most complex game, but not having any idea on how to make any of the graphics or the UI/UX.
I once had one of my peasant dwarves go full sicko mode after having a mental breakdown and decided to attack a child. The fight immediately escalated as one of my hunting dogs attacked the peasant, the fight was actually pretty even. In the chaos the peasant accidentally kicked a chicken, the chicken joined the fight and immediately blinded them. The hunting dog and chicken working together signaled the end of the peasant, who got torn to literal shreds, all because they punched a fucking child. 10/10 I will never stop playing this game.
@@hi28 Yep. Accurate modelled dog tbh. My old bull terrier the only time she ever attacked a human was when she saw some father hit his kid, and she went terminator on him. Thankfully he recognized that though innapropriate, jazmine was just trying to protect the kid from what she thought was an attacker and went full momma dog mode, so declined to report the attack. Pretty much straight away booked that dog into obedience classes and she never bit someone again, but in her mind, she was just defending a child. My cat on the other hand will attack anything with a face, including me if I'm more than 30 seconds late to feed her lol
@@OnADock I believe dwarves prefer to have bodies put in tombs, but the tablet memorials are also available if you lose the body through melting or having their atoms smashed. A skeleton waterfall is probably preferable to a ghost waterfall.
I only ever heard of DF in 2023, but it’s immediately become my favorite game ever. Most complex game is correct. My favorite moment in my short time playing was a dragon attack on my fortress. The dragon immediately attacked my stables, melting all my animals before he tried to attack my fort directly. I sent my army out to try to intercept, but I guess I messed up because only a single spear dwarf carrying her child went out to meet him. My speardwarf deftly hurdled a fire blast intended for a camel and stabbed the dragon in the liver, and while the dragon was vomiting uncontrollably my speardwarf stabbed it in the head, killing it instantly. She saved countless souls that day. In honor of her heroic deeds, she became captain of the guard and I made platinum and golden statues commemorating the day.
If your fortress gets large enough and wealthy enough to become a barony and have a Baron in the nobles menu, you will also be able to assign someone as the fortress’ Champion. The Champion role doesn’t mean much in the current game version - they’ll just lead combat demonstrations like a militia captain will - but I always use the role as a nice reward for any heroic dwarves. Your speardwarf definitely counts. You said you made some statutes of her, but you can also give her a really nice bedroom, build her a really nice tomb, etc. and you can assign her to wear or use legendary artifacts as a symbol of her Champion status. (On the nobles page that’s what all the crown buttons are for.)
@@Oiljackeryes other dwarfs will feel inspired or joyful, they may even write songs or carve pictures that may spread throughout the world. I’m not sure specifically if they get inspired to do something heroic, but they will definitely talk about the event
Fun fact, personalities are so developed in this game, making what's called a "puppy fountain" which entails a hole on the a pit of spikes over a room with pregnant dogs, so when they gave birth and the space became to crowded they fall to the spike pit, that way desensitizing the draeves to death, since they see it every day down at the puppy fountain on their way to work
@@cccbbbccc5910 Welcome to Dwarf Fortress, next episode we talk about the mermaid bone farms, which were so fucked up that the devs cut back the sale price of mermaid bone.
Armok was named after one of their previous games having a variable called 'arm_ok' (which checked for whether or not a creature had functional arms). According to the devs, Armok is the sole constant entity among the procedurally generated worlds of Dwarf Fortress; whenever a world becomes too calm, too stale for its liking, it smashes it upon its anvil to reforge into a new, more interesting world filled with strife. In other words, Armok is the player.
Just remember to add water AFTER your done. Seriously though, sounds like that would be a badass bar. Underground with a waterfall running through it just cuz. Just don’t mention the ghosts
slaves to armok: god of slaves chapter 1 was a game they had tried working on previously but did not get very far with. they wanted to use some of this new 3d technology you talked about but found it to be cumbersome to do some of the crazy weird things they wanted. for example, there were be a fully procedural 3d world and characters generated with many limbs, heads, and basically any other feature they thought of. however, i believe the effort required to do the 3d work was a bit overwhelming which led to them switching to ascii graphics. lots of screenshots still exist out there on their own website if you're curious.
I actually found out about slaves to Armok while writing this video, but I ended up cutting any actual explanation of the title since it didn’t really add anything in a video about Dwarf Fortress. It is cool to look at that piece of development history though!
dwarf fortress, but 3d doesn't sound like a realistic task even in 2023. Maybe we'll get something like that in the next 20-30 years, but the best we have right now is probably minecraft
Since the steam release people have been getting into DF again, but I gotta say the legends of Dwarf Fortress over the years are crazy. - Cats would die from alcohol poisoning because their paws soaked up too much dwarven beer and they'd get instant liver failure when they tried to clean themselves. - People used to build mermaid bone farms that were so cruel (yet profitable) that the devs had to actually address it as a problem. - Because the game generates thousands of years of history for every seed, we have the legendary Elf King of the Dwarves: an elf child who's parents were eaten by monsters is adopted by dwarven conquerers and eventually becomes their King who rides an Undead Wyvern and has armor of obsidian and a cloak of solid gold - Multiple players devoted their time and effort into seeing who could make the biggest statues out of butter - There are multiple instances of dwarves toddlers beating to death creatures such as monkeys, cave crocodiles and captains of the guard - A group of players created a save with the worst possible starting point and swapped it between them. They ended up with a dwarven cult that worships cheese, a lava trap that would "kill the entire fucking world" and an entrance under constant attack by zombie elephants, seemingly immortal goblins and miasma
I almost included the cat story in this video. I laugh every time I read that one and it's such a great example of how all the systems in this game interact.
One of my lecturers when I studied PC maintenance in 2009 would sometimes spend half the class talking about the catastrophes of his fortresses (and also talk about EVE online) and I've been hooked on both games ever since.
@@OnADock Yeah, that is totally fair, they're one of the strangest animals I know of! There's actually a lot of folklore about them being baby dragons, which is super interesting, especially because they look the part
I tend to cage animals in DF too once their population grows to big and then sell that to the elves for other animals, which... well, you can guess where this leads to. But once in a time, the elves then arrive with a breeding pair of... say... tamed tigers. Or something that could be war trained....
Since I started programming at 13 I've always wanted to make an advanced ai game like this. Where you are just a player in the world, but truly do not hold the control. The fact this game did just about everything I could think of plus. I might have to pick up this game or go start coding myself! Thanks for posting this video!
A sentence that will only make sense to DF veterans: "I needed just one more tile worth of cotton candy to finish my axedwarf squad's armor, but I opened the clown car and wasn't prepared for the circus"
You know it's so funny I played Df in ASCII And I'd get going but eventually I'd get stuck trying to get the miasma out of my fortress. Well I play the steam version for two weeks and find now all you need to do is take a one by two bridge make it slam against a wall and then throw stuff on it and then it gets deleted it's that easy what a great game
I actually lost two dwarfs Based on my inclination to put the trash compacter in a pit. So pro tip do not do this. You can literally just put your trash compactor on the surface (or anywhere) and it's fine
Dangerous cave dwellers that live near the valuable minerals is a crazy double entendre I picked up on that I don't know if that's what you meant but it was hard as fuck
@@tymera The trick is to put a trash storage on the surface (must be in open air to work), designate a trash dumping zone inside that trash storage, and then order your dwarves to dump your threadbare clothes and other junk in there. It will rot away relatively quickly, and because it is a dumpsite, not just a storage, there is no limit to how many items can fit in there.
So uh... the Let's Play of Boatmurdered is what introduced me to this game Also, the thumbnail of "This is a Cat" had me screaming... as cats have been the biggest causes of game breaking glitches in the history Dwarf Fortress. Sometimes just exploding, sometimes dying on mass due to alcholism--sometimes various other things involving leather goods Being concerned about Elephants is a meme... Cats are the _REAL_ threat of this game xD
I remember my first real attempt. I'd started getting pretty competent with the game, had some farms going, all my dwarves were happy and making fun artifacts, had some peahens and a peacock hanging around, made some nice steel, and ate an elephant. But all went awry when I found a bunch of elk birds running around in my mine. What is an Elk Bird? Good question, they didnt really do anything, but the 30 odd little cave gremlims that followed them up the mineshaft certainly caused me a great deal of fun. Evidently I had walled off the caves incorrectly, must've missed a corner. Oh well, that's that. Might as well check out that sick looking volcano on the other side of the map, steel be damned.
im awful at these types of games and this unironically sounds incredibly fun except i know i would suck at it and play it for like only an hour before giving up for ever
I have yet to play it, but DF is less about being good and more about enjoying losing hilariously. Yeah there are people who know how to make seemingly indestructible fortresses, but that isn't what it is about at all! A lot of it is telling your story.
Yeah, I feel just the same, I really find the idea of complex rich stories and the world building present on DF incredibly interesting, but as with many other games alike, I struggle with the slow gameplay and all the managment they require to fully explore their potential.
For some reason, I talked to an acquaintance of mine about this masterpiece prior to the steam release. I apparently painted myself as some for of master of the game, as he invited me onto his stream where he did a blind playtest of the game. In front of many people in the audience I watched in horror as his entire fortress was slaughtered by a roving band of elephants within an hour of starting. At least I got to show him how to look up said elephants in Legends Mode!
@@sweetdangerzack nothing wrong with taking inspiration. they're a little egregious about it in earlier videos but they're starting to shine in their newer stuff
@@templeofdelusion It isn't. The old control scheme is dead, but the ASCII version of the game is still very much free from their website, with the latest updates and new control scheme.
Well, now I have the perfect video to explain my addiction to my friends. Also, a forgotten tidbit information that got left out is that it can be a buggy mess, especially the military.
I remember getting into Dwarf Fortress back in 2018. I took one look at the interface (as you did) and got so confused by everything that I quit before I began. Now that it has this graphical remastering, I will try and play the game. I really can't wait!
The thumbnail had me thinking this was NetHack. For those of you who don't know (which I assume is all of you), NetHack is a descendant of Hack, which is a descendant of Rogue. The rogue. Anyways it's a really cool roguelike (duh) and carries a similar complexity as Dwarf Fortress (I also cannot play NetHack without the wiki open) with a totally different gameplay, but the same tileset. Luckily you can install graphics there too. It's open source and thus 100% free for everyone to enjoy. If you ever feel like you have too much free time and want to try out a real roguelike classic but don't actually want to play rogue, this game might be worth your attention.
I actually played Nethack in-browser a few months before I played Dwarf Fortress because I was bored and trawling links on TVTropes or something. The experience I had actually sold me on ASCII games. At first I didn't know what I was doing, but I did find a cool anti-magic cloak. I also knew how to kick down doors. So, I kick down a door that happens to be a shopkeeper's space. The debris from the door goes flying inwards and the keeper is furious and tries to kill me. However, I'm wearing an anti-magic cloak! All his magic bounces off and hits him instead! So I mamage to kill him first and now I'm left in a room filled with free stuff! Excited, I start checking out all the items and trying on all the better armor. I equip a cool magic wand that shoots lightning or something. But then, a kobold enters the room! So I shoot him with my magic wand! Unfortunately, the kobold had picked up my discarded anti-magic cloak off the shop floor (because I unequipped it earlier to try out the different clothes) and the magic bounced back on me! I immediately exploded and died! I must've laughed for a good five or so minutes because of that.
Other great "real roguelikes" include: -Brogue, it's free! And also weirdly pretty for an ASCII game. It's relatively simple but IMO it's a really smart take on the genre. -Cogmind is seriously the most underrated roguelike. It's *shockingly* in-depth, especially whem you realize it's got a whole branching storyline with quite a lot of lore attached. You play as a sentient robot in a mining facility. There's BattleTech-ish customization, weirdly deep combat and a cool focus on simulating the way enemies communicate with each other & stealth. - Pixel Dungeon. There's quite a few different forks of it. It was designed for mobile, but it actually does a great job of making the genre playable on a touchscreen and doesn't have the problems most mobile games have. - Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is pretty much a "zombie survival" roguelike, although zombies are the least of your worries. This is the kind of game that simulates every major component of the car you found on the side of the road and lets you perform surgery on yourself to get robo-legs. Project Zomboid was directly inspired by Cataclysm but still fails to reach it's level of depth. - Tales of Maj'Eyal is an interesting one because instead of items it's focused hard on having an MMO style hotbar. It's really a fusion between traditional roguelike and something more like Diablo. - Rift Wizard is kind of a more modern, minimalist take on ToME - Caves of Qud is a Morrowind-inspired game that also takes a queue from Dwarf Fortress in that it also has randomly-generated history (although nowhere near as deep). It's sort of a YT darling for being pretty and... weird. Very weird.
I played so much Nethack way back when it was still a new game. "c" (lowercase) was a cat and "C" (uppercase) a centuar. That was a truly awesome game, it didn't need graphics. In fact I think the "tile sets" that came later actually made it worse.
Dwarf Fortress requires you to invest your time, mind, and imagination into the game. a pretty small portion of the gamer population are willing to do that. most see a video like this and think "man that sounds cool", they get it play it for 2 or 3 hours and declare it boring and move onto something else.
I began playing once.. 6 years back.. couldn't handle the controls despite having played ASCII-based dungeon explorers and similar games. Moved on to Rimworld and loved it.. Began using Linux as my only OS, made my own vast arsenal of commands in Linux and Vim. Became quite confident about this game and started again. Nope. Will try again in a few days
@@certainsomeone186 yeah I played DF long ago, when Rimworld came out i got into that. when i heard DF got a make over and had graphics more akin to Rimworld i decided to jump back into it. The world needs more games like DF and Rimworld. Not everyone likes games with insane levels of complexity, but it's a niche that is horribly underdeveloped.
i remember when i played this game, one of my dwarfs was a little girl, who became an orphan after her parent died infront of her eyes, that made her become a sociopath and she started killing and torturing cats. when she grew up she wanted to go back into sociaty and started being a normals person, but then her husbend was killed and she became a serial killer. this game is wild
Technically, the waterfalls in the tavern is actually the key stone to keeping the whole fortress together. Probably stopped countless bar brawls. At least until it didn't.
I haven't played the Steam-version but a few years ago I was playing the original version and in adventure mode I was a Pokemon trainer, meaning I beat up small animals and threw them around to attack enemies. I remember going through a cave and wondering why I was moving so slowly and when I checked my character he was holding a bison corpse in each hand. I didn't even remember picking those up!
Next update: if a dwarf is too unhappy, they will begin to get angry, and will leave the fortress, after being away for long enough, they will find a dark wizard who will teach them the forbidden arts of magic, where they will learn "true manifestation", upon learning this spell, the dwarf will manifest in the real world and strangle you to death for not satisfying their needs
I learned about this game from my programming / Linux friends around 2010. (plus or minus a few years) Interestingly enough until very recently, They were really the only people who really ever talked about this game.
I first had heard about Dwarf Fortress many years ago, it was one of those games that was famously brutal. I watched someone stream it and thought it looked cool, so I donated and played it. I could not understand anything. It just got its remake on Steam with proper graphics, and I am stuck trying to figure out how to make stairs. Worth. Every. Cent.
there is an even more complex game which name i unfortunately forgot. It has majorly text and almost no graphics. It's a strategy game about building a interstellar empire. the amount of things you can do and especially the ones you can do wrong there seems to be unlimited. e.g. you start in an era before you can do interplanetary journey. In order to do that you need to research a certain type of engine. However you need to allocate your resources accordingly and set your scientists to work on various other projects in order to get them to this level. scientists could not be productive becuase your policy is bad and there are not enough resources and finances diverted to them (yeah you ahve to take care of every other aspect of the global society aswell). Meteors can come crashing so you need defenses. Other galactical aliens can visit you and are building the same empires as you do parallel to you. complex trading, global cataclysms, revolts, jumps in scientific breakthroughs etc etc etc. the game seemed insane and just to get started you need like hundreds if not a good thousand of hours spent there tweaking around. Edit#1: the game is called Aurora 4x
The steam release really brings me great joy that people can easily access this amazing game and make their own unique and amazing storys to share with others a really great feeling seeing how far the game has come fueled by nothing but passion of 2 lads to make what they like not what will be popular and quick money but a thing if pure passion that shows itself at every corner of the game
I finally managed to get a decent fort going. First 5 floors are dedicated to a military installation. I have a 5 layer moat surrounding it, bridge, etc. I realize the militia commander is missing. Body is in the moat. Weird. I built it 3 years ago. Figure they fell in, but next year it's a kid, then another dwarf, I didn't recognize. That's when the game stopped working.
Fortress mode is only half the game of Dwarf Fortress, the other being Adventure Mode (unavailable on steam release for now, but is still playable) and let me tell you, if you think Skyrim is incredibly in-depth, and find it fun, you will quickly become addicted with Adventure Mode. Imagine Skyrim but in a world that you can randomly generate, the world is filled with insane amounts of lore, and the environment around you continues to change due to the relationships between different factions in the world. All relationships with every single NPC are dynamically forming, creating loads of drama in the world for you to uncover. That inn keeper that you always love to stop and talk to on your adventures? On his off days he could be off murdering people, or he could be banging someone's wife. Maybe one day you go there and he isn't there. Why? Because he randomly decided he was going to join up with a bandit group and dedicated his life to crime. Literally anything can happen, and it's incredible. A dragon could attack a city, and as long as you're in render distance, any foliage, wood structures, people, or animals, will burn to ash. No game can compete with a truly living breathing world, especially not RimWorld.
The oldschool version was even more detailed than the steam version We will (most likely) get it eventually but for now the steam version is missing a couple of features
really? Thats crazy. Like what? I remember playing a solo adventure mode back in the day, where I ussually turned into a vampire. is that kind of stuff in the steam version?
@@eduardofreitas8336 In the old version, there was exact metric measurements for metal densities and melting points for metals so you'd know even with modded stuff, what could resist dragonfire and lava before boiling you alive or what would be more brittle to use for your squad as armor or weapon. There were even exact weight measurements as well.
There is a record of a game that was run by several players back when the game looked decidedly Ancient Egyptian, that showcased the detail in every dwarf, as well as the tag line that I always associate with the gam4, "Losing is fun." Look up the saga of Boatmurdered when you have some time.
i once had an unnamed beast come up from the depths and start mauling everyone. i had a miner who took on said beast wearing rubbish clothes armed only with a pickaxe. he won. i made him general of my armies, and forced them to use pickaxes in his honor. 10/10 game
apparently there once was a bug in the game, where cats kept dying because they were picking up beer from the tavern floors and got alcohol poisoning from a wrong transfer parameter when licking their paws. truly one of the games of all time. huge respect to the brothers. a real inspiration.
that's what legends mode is for though I guess it's not a summery as it is the entire history of the world and every named entity, named item, every event and all the settlements
One time I had a dwarf get inspired to make something and he did something like this. He laid out on a tapestry on a bench the ENTIRE FUKING HISTORY PAST PRESENT AND ALL FUTURE things in my world down to details like how many socks we had who died where they died when they died how may stocks I had details and dates of it all. Craziest thing that ever happened to me
It should be mentioned that we actually do know what slaves to armok part 1 is. Tarn covered it in one of his talks he did a while back. It was a game that him and his brother came up with in high school, a 3D overhead fighting game where any of your limbs could serve any other limbs purpose. It wasn't called slaves to armok part 1. It was just called slaves to armok.
DF is definitely one of my favorites, and only became more so as I dove into the files and added some new animals and tweaked some of the internal tags, made my own workshop, etc. I highly recommend using a graphic overlay and making sure you can load your dwarves into Dearf Therapist, managing large populations is much easier that way. Also soundsense for some awesome sounds.
I love the way each z layer has a small floor tile, I’m on my first play through, and I knew I had to be careful of collapsing while trying to make a vaulted ceiling, but I got ahead of the carving job and started removing stairs below a dwarf, and holy crap it was scary and hysterical to catch a small collapse and watch the dwarves freak out lol. Thankfully nobody was lost, but what a scare for making one room a little taller lol.
As a fan of dwarfen hydro engineering myself, I would like you to learn the secret art of flood-dooring and tunnel-grateing. Being able to turn off the water will do wonders for the health of your miners, and wall grates keep most of the annoying animals out. Not all,though. And.... if you really need not to close the water inflow, you can place traps in those tunnels before flooding them.
I was so proud of myself when I constructed my first pressure controlled, self-refilling water reservoir. Then some time later of course I had the wrong level pulled, and channeled the whole river into my fort. (Since then I DECONSTRUCT that damn lever after the automatism is in place)
Quick hint about burying dudes whos body you cant retrieve. Just build a pile of slabs and then have someone engrave a memorial to that dwarf on them, then place the memorial. It has the same effect, it stops ghosts.
My recollection of this game was failing a lot to get anything established at all (i.e. they all died before creating anything significant), then once getting all the way to the point where I was seriously trying to construct a table. I successfully got a number of other things built, but I don't think I succeeded at the table before my dwarves all died off. It looks like there's a prettier UI than the one I used, now.
I love how this game generates stories, even before you start playing and adds more epic stories to the world as you are playing. For example how one of my hunter dwarfs killed a world dragon when he got caught out with his practice bow, which got disarmed right away after wich the dwarf succesfully dodged a flame breath attack and then punched the dragons teeth out his mouth. After the battle, he got into a 'mood' in which he used one of the dragons teeth to make a legendary amulet which depicted the fight with the dragon and was adorned with... dragonteeth. And I like how the community talks about the games 'fun' moments (translation, epic fortress death). Even if you master the game, you'll die eventually. If the forgotten beasts don't kill you, the diseases they carry will
I remember playing Dwarf Fortress a few years after release. I was just a small child then but I was actually a tad interested in the game, also looking forward to buying the steam release soon
It is incredibly complex and impressive but at the same time Dwarf Fortress is very easy difficulty wise once you learn the mechanics. All you need is a bridge to make your fortress invulnerable to outside threats and food/drink/happiness is never an issue if you know what you're doing. Top tier game/simulation though, I have over 500 hours on the steam version alone. Making bedrooms will become the bane of your dwarfish existence.
I remember trying this game out when i was little because it was so artsy fartsy to me. I couldnt believe it ended up being this popular years later but good for it, its really cool.
Homie is running waterfalls through his fort for fun, meanwhile I can't even get my dwarves to throw out shells that the fishermen get to the point where they are literally preventing other dwarves from doing their jobs because it's clogging up the hallways 🙄
you will figure it out something, 1 sell them, preferably make crafts out of them then sell 2 make a stockpile for them on top of lava, 3 or under a bridge while closed then open the bridge and smash them to atoms
Actually insane you didn't mention legends mode. My fortress had a dope sword called "The Barricaded Teacher" but it was stolen by a visitor at one point. I occasionally go into legends mode to see where the damn thing has ended up. Even found a quest about searching for it in adventure mode.
can I be in your video Devon?
congrats bro
Yoooo that's class
ummmmmm
ummmm
ummmm (chain
I saw the title and thought “whatever it is, can’t be as complex as Dwarf Fortress” and then the video was about Dwarf Fortress lol
I have never played this game, only learned about it through a UA-cam Gamer, but it was my immediate guess as to which game they were speaking about.
Not even Dwarf Fortress is as complex as Dwarf Fortress
I saw a dwarf and went “it gotta be dwarf fortress”
I tought of Amazing cultivation simulator at first, to be honest.
Dwarf fortress us really not that complex, its the same gameplay as banished or rimworld.
The old UI is complex.
The new one is fine.
If you want a complex city builder, play songs of syx.
"Draw a place to dig and a Dwarf will dig."
Welllll.... Most of the time. Sometimes they're sleeping, sometimes they're eating and sometimes they're accusing a goose of murder.
As someone who's only tried the text version of dwarf fortress (and gave up fairly early because everything was a pain to navigate and see), that last thing made me wheeze
@@zitronenwasser There were really good texture packs back then for df. Made the game SO much easier to look at
That actually summarizes the game pretty well
Craft the world in a nutshell?
sounds on brand for dwarfs lol
With most games a simple graphical style is usually an artistic choice, but I'd like to think that Drawf Fortress uses such simple graphics because it literally couldn't function on any device otherwise
No way could Dwarf Fortress have animations. Instant CPU death.
20230414170612_1
I really like games with simple graphics because you know the developers' focus was almost entirely on the gameplay.
Looking forward to year 2050 when we will have computers fast enough to run Dwarf fortress with animations
Shit, it can barely run on the current hardware lol
"Fixed cats coming into a bar, drinking and then exploding" will always be the funniest fix i ever will see
"I think I made the carp too hardcore..."
@@WackoMcGoose they swam so hard that they kill fisherdwarves
@@ScirioBirdLover "A cat walks into a bar..."
"fixed aerial births"
A fun bug was when geese laid leaden chairs...
Ah yes,The game where a dwarven barkeeper that lost a finger keeps dropping beer jugs therefor making the cats become alcoholic and either die or vomit all around the place. Its a beauty to behold
The cats have become dirty due to the beer
Cats lick beer off
Cats become drunk
Cats vomit
Cats become dirty
Cat licks off beer vomit
Cat becomes drunk
Cat vomits....
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah
I’m getting this game now
@@no_social_skill1369 family guy moment
Nothing affected me more in this game than when I saw that my broker was not getting to the trading post in a timely manner, so I went looking for her and found a few different things. First, I had accidentally broken the main staircase upwards, so anyone going to the ground level had to use the back entrance, which went a looooong way out of the way. Second, this was first broker in a while that did not immediately get disheartened and go drinking instead of doing her duty. And third, my broker had apparently been a victim of a recent olm person invasion and had suffered nerve damage making her a paraplegic. I found her 90% of the way to the trading post, having crawled all the way through the back entrance (which I later calculated to be a journey of 9 in-game days for her), dutifully making her way to the trading post. I immediately relieved her of duty, got her to the infirmary, made her own room out of solid gold, and gave her her own personal crafting station. She is doing much better no, and has learned how to walk with a crutch (somehow).
Just the absolutely staggering level of detail in this game within every single aspect of it has blown me away.
Oh WOOOOOW, and no one have commented on that, both of you are a LEGEND 👏👏👏👏👏. Mad respect. Probably the first time i truly wanted to meet a character in real life, she's goated.
On a MISSION.
That's WILD I should check this game out. I like old graphics but I maxed out at Risk and Shining Force when it comes to strategy games lol
My favorite part about Dwarf Fortress is that it's a colony manager that doesn't care whether you're playing or not. Shit will happen to fortresses all over the world. And it will happen to yours. What's beautiful about this game: The fact that everything you said after 7:00 is completely unique to your playthrough
You mean about the curses? If your dwarves don't pray to their deity for a long time there is a chance they might get cursed to turn into either vampire or a werebest.
Another awesome thing is that when you abandon a fortress to ruin, it’s story and inhabitants still exist in the world of you want to play in that world again, meaning that you can even stumble across the ruins of your old fortress
This concept is legitimately horrifying
This was actually the original premise of the game: you were supposed to go as an adventurer and explore an abandoned fort to find its secrets and the reason it fell. Then the developer decided that it would be fun to also get to make that fort and things spiraled from there.
@@thereinforcementshavearrive What is horrifying about that?
@@jasoninthehood9726 well one story I read had their fort fall to demons
If you find the ruins there’d likely still be a crap ton of demons
Probably my fourth attempt at a fortress, I embarked upon an Untamed Wilderness. While I was chopping wood and fishing, a flock of Giant Cardinals swooped down and murdered six of my Dwarves almost immediately. Couldn't help but laugh.
You gotta get underground ASAP and then stockpile everything from the wagon into the hole you dug.
One of my more successful forts in Dwarf Fortress for Steam was constantly harassed by all types of birds. From giant ravens to cardinals that took turns picking out my dwarven children who went too far.
@@MrPervSan Burrow commands will let you stick the children in safe places. Keeping them off the surface is pretty simple.
On one of my embarks the tree that my only woodcutter was chopping down fell on him and killed him.
In another of my fortresses every time a dwarf would try to drop something in the garbage dump hole, they’d be attacked by bones and wool and skulls. I eventually figured out why: my surgeon was a necromancer, and his child daughter was always playing in the refuse stockpile next to the garbage dump zone, and so she had been reanimating everything in the garbage dump.
This game provides a constant supply of you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up emergent behaviors and that’s why people love it.
The same happened to me on my very first fortress because the tutorial dropped me into a wild biome. Giant Wrens killed ALL of my dwarves except a last one which they let to slowly bleed out with only one limb left. I had to abandon the fortress because waiting for the last one to die took too long.
When I try to explain this game's complexity to people, I tell them my struggles trying to make soap for the first time
I have over 200 hours on the steam version and the total amount of soap I have made is two bars.
screw the soap honestly, i prefer breeding cats till my computer dies :p
Do you keep dropping it or something?
@@Purfait you'd have to make one TO drop first
@@ThePhantom4516 what if it was almost done and they dropped it
ive never heard of this game until now but i gotta say that tavern waterfall seems to have claimed more lives than actual enemies
10/10 thoroughly convinced to play
It’s rimworld on crack
Veteran of the Classic version, I can confirm that the deadliest thing in your fortress is the Fortress.
Until you find the Clown College at least.
Gotta look up the town of “boatmurdered” really great dwarf fortress collaboration. You won’t be sorry
If you don't know of the clowns, do not look it up! Just make your fort and dig deeply and greedily!
Dwarf Fortress, is what you get when you have a bunch of Backend developers, designing the most complex game, but not having any idea on how to make any of the graphics or the UI/UX.
if the game had good graphics it would not be the same
Or perhaps the simulation eats so much processing power that there's not enough leftover to draw much more than text or sprite graphics.
@@lavatrexlike the steam edition?
@@joemck85 That's why we have video cards nowadays.
@@exapsy and they were all inspired by VIM
I once had one of my peasant dwarves go full sicko mode after having a mental breakdown and decided to attack a child. The fight immediately escalated as one of my hunting dogs attacked the peasant, the fight was actually pretty even. In the chaos the peasant accidentally kicked a chicken, the chicken joined the fight and immediately blinded them. The hunting dog and chicken working together signaled the end of the peasant, who got torn to literal shreds, all because they punched a fucking child. 10/10 I will never stop playing this game.
i mean.. they punched a child
based asf dog
@@hi28 Yep. Accurate modelled dog tbh. My old bull terrier the only time she ever attacked a human was when she saw some father hit his kid, and she went terminator on him. Thankfully he recognized that though innapropriate, jazmine was just trying to protect the kid from what she thought was an attacker and went full momma dog mode, so declined to report the attack. Pretty much straight away booked that dog into obedience classes and she never bit someone again, but in her mind, she was just defending a child. My cat on the other hand will attack anything with a face, including me if I'm more than 30 seconds late to feed her lol
If they ended up making peace and the dog became the guide for the guy it would truly be peak writing
Why punch, hot water IS much better
You can put ghostly dwarves to rest by making a stone tablet, chiselling a memorial text on it, and placing it anywhere on the map.
I honestly thought you needed the body. I’ll have to try that. Thank you!
@@OnADock I believe dwarves prefer to have bodies put in tombs, but the tablet memorials are also available if you lose the body through melting or having their atoms smashed. A skeleton waterfall is probably preferable to a ghost waterfall.
I only ever heard of DF in 2023, but it’s immediately become my favorite game ever. Most complex game is correct.
My favorite moment in my short time playing was a dragon attack on my fortress. The dragon immediately attacked my stables, melting all my animals before he tried to attack my fort directly. I sent my army out to try to intercept, but I guess I messed up because only a single spear dwarf carrying her child went out to meet him. My speardwarf deftly hurdled a fire blast intended for a camel and stabbed the dragon in the liver, and while the dragon was vomiting uncontrollably my speardwarf stabbed it in the head, killing it instantly. She saved countless souls that day.
In honor of her heroic deeds, she became captain of the guard and I made platinum and golden statues commemorating the day.
If your fortress gets large enough and wealthy enough to become a barony and have a Baron in the nobles menu, you will also be able to assign someone as the fortress’ Champion. The Champion role doesn’t mean much in the current game version - they’ll just lead combat demonstrations like a militia captain will - but I always use the role as a nice reward for any heroic dwarves. Your speardwarf definitely counts. You said you made some statutes of her, but you can also give her a really nice bedroom, build her a really nice tomb, etc. and you can assign her to wear or use legendary artifacts as a symbol of her Champion status. (On the nobles page that’s what all the crown buttons are for.)
@@jordanbradford7729 so doing this will boost morale and all dwarfs will want to do something heroic too? Is that how this game works?
@@Oiljackeryes other dwarfs will feel inspired or joyful, they may even write songs or carve pictures that may spread throughout the world. I’m not sure specifically if they get inspired to do something heroic, but they will definitely talk about the event
@@NBH-xh3nq damn that's amazing
df=dangerously funny
Fun fact, personalities are so developed in this game, making what's called a "puppy fountain" which entails a hole on the a pit of spikes over a room with pregnant dogs, so when they gave birth and the space became to crowded they fall to the spike pit, that way desensitizing the draeves to death, since they see it every day down at the puppy fountain on their way to work
This fact isn't fun at all. :(
WHAT THE HAHAHAHAAHAHA
@@cccbbbccc5910 Welcome to Dwarf Fortress, next episode we talk about the mermaid bone farms, which were so fucked up that the devs cut back the sale price of mermaid bone.
Ah sweet. Man made horrors beyond my comprehension
@@ildar.ishalin.chelovek well I can comprehend these man made horrors perfectly fine so idk maybe you have a skill issue or smth
Armok was named after one of their previous games having a variable called 'arm_ok' (which checked for whether or not a creature had functional arms). According to the devs, Armok is the sole constant entity among the procedurally generated worlds of Dwarf Fortress; whenever a world becomes too calm, too stale for its liking, it smashes it upon its anvil to reforge into a new, more interesting world filled with strife.
In other words, Armok is the player.
Dwarf Fortress players look at numbers and letters all day being like
"Yea, theres a real world happening here"
"I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead..."
If there's one thing to take away from this video it's that tavern waterfalls are awesome and everyone should build them
Just remember to add water AFTER your done.
Seriously though, sounds like that would be a badass bar.
Underground with a waterfall running through it just cuz.
Just don’t mention the ghosts
slaves to armok: god of slaves chapter 1 was a game they had tried working on previously but did not get very far with. they wanted to use some of this new 3d technology you talked about but found it to be cumbersome to do some of the crazy weird things they wanted. for example, there were be a fully procedural 3d world and characters generated with many limbs, heads, and basically any other feature they thought of. however, i believe the effort required to do the 3d work was a bit overwhelming which led to them switching to ascii graphics. lots of screenshots still exist out there on their own website if you're curious.
I actually found out about slaves to Armok while writing this video, but I ended up cutting any actual explanation of the title since it didn’t really add anything in a video about Dwarf Fortress. It is cool to look at that piece of development history though!
dwarf fortress, but 3d doesn't sound like a realistic task even in 2023. Maybe we'll get something like that in the next 20-30 years, but the best we have right now is probably minecraft
@@RADZIO895 with a fuck-ton of mods
Since the steam release people have been getting into DF again, but I gotta say the legends of Dwarf Fortress over the years are crazy.
- Cats would die from alcohol poisoning because their paws soaked up too much dwarven beer and they'd get instant liver failure when they tried to clean themselves.
- People used to build mermaid bone farms that were so cruel (yet profitable) that the devs had to actually address it as a problem.
- Because the game generates thousands of years of history for every seed, we have the legendary Elf King of the Dwarves: an elf child who's parents were eaten by monsters is adopted by dwarven conquerers and eventually becomes their King who rides an Undead Wyvern and has armor of obsidian and a cloak of solid gold
- Multiple players devoted their time and effort into seeing who could make the biggest statues out of butter
- There are multiple instances of dwarves toddlers beating to death creatures such as monkeys, cave crocodiles and captains of the guard
- A group of players created a save with the worst possible starting point and swapped it between them. They ended up with a dwarven cult that worships cheese, a lava trap that would "kill the entire fucking world" and an entrance under constant attack by zombie elephants, seemingly immortal goblins and miasma
I almost included the cat story in this video. I laugh every time I read that one and it's such a great example of how all the systems in this game interact.
Is that Boatmurdered?
@@ardensetiawan353Yes, that last one is Boatmurdered.
How about that fortress entrance that could not close because a butterfly was stuck in it? XD
@@Mewseeker That is also Boatmurdered.
One of my lecturers when I studied PC maintenance in 2009 would sometimes spend half the class talking about the catastrophes of his fortresses (and also talk about EVE online) and I've been hooked on both games ever since.
Fun fact: Those 'cave worms' are designed after a real animal! It's a kind of blind cave salamander called an Olm
I had no idea an Olm was a real animal. lol.
@@OnADock Yeah, that is totally fair, they're one of the strangest animals I know of! There's actually a lot of folklore about them being baby dragons, which is super interesting, especially because they look the part
the hell thats an axolotl
@@OnADock there's an olm in oldschool runescape too xd
actually you could cage the cats instead to butcher them, they couldn't go anywhere even reproduce if they are inside the cage
Just geld them.
Or as a preventative measure you can just geld them.
so a horny jail?
I tend to cage animals in DF too once their population grows to big and then sell that to the elves for other animals, which... well, you can guess where this leads to. But once in a time, the elves then arrive with a breeding pair of... say... tamed tigers. Or something that could be war trained....
Since I started programming at 13 I've always wanted to make an advanced ai game like this. Where you are just a player in the world, but truly do not hold the control. The fact this game did just about everything I could think of plus. I might have to pick up this game or go start coding myself! Thanks for posting this video!
You should learn to code I believe in you
Should check out Kenshi, it's similar in that regard
@@GruntKF can it work on a potato PC? That game's been in my head for some time
@@Dhruvvrma9224 ah not sure, it is a bit demanding since its 3d. could always "borrow" it and see how it runs on your machine lol
@@GruntKF ok , thanks bro
A sentence that will only make sense to DF veterans: "I needed just one more tile worth of cotton candy to finish my axedwarf squad's armor, but I opened the clown car and wasn't prepared for the circus"
ah... hidden secret fun.... did you hear about the player that colonized the circus somehow?
Losing a Fortress isn't a failure, it's inevitable. It's the most consistent part of them game.
Losing is FUN.
is there no way to prepare your forces or something?
You know it's so funny I played Df in ASCII And I'd get going but eventually I'd get stuck trying to get the miasma out of my fortress. Well I play the steam version for two weeks and find now all you need to do is take a one by two bridge make it slam against a wall and then throw stuff on it and then it gets deleted it's that easy what a great game
I actually lost two dwarfs Based on my inclination to put the trash compacter in a pit. So pro tip do not do this. You can literally just put your trash compactor on the surface (or anywhere) and it's fine
Dangerous cave dwellers that live near the valuable minerals is a crazy double entendre I picked up on that I don't know if that's what you meant but it was hard as fuck
Also works for getting rid of Mayors.
@@tymera The trick is to put a trash storage on the surface (must be in open air to work), designate a trash dumping zone inside that trash storage, and then order your dwarves to dump your threadbare clothes and other junk in there. It will rot away relatively quickly, and because it is a dumpsite, not just a storage, there is no limit to how many items can fit in there.
Oh! I've heard of this thing! The "atom smasher", right?
So uh... the Let's Play of Boatmurdered is what introduced me to this game
Also, the thumbnail of "This is a Cat" had me screaming... as cats have been the biggest causes of game breaking glitches in the history Dwarf Fortress. Sometimes just exploding, sometimes dying on mass due to alcholism--sometimes various other things involving leather goods
Being concerned about Elephants is a meme... Cats are the _REAL_ threat of this game xD
I remember my first real attempt. I'd started getting pretty competent with the game, had some farms going, all my dwarves were happy and making fun artifacts, had some peahens and a peacock hanging around, made some nice steel, and ate an elephant. But all went awry when I found a bunch of elk birds running around in my mine. What is an Elk Bird? Good question, they didnt really do anything, but the 30 odd little cave gremlims that followed them up the mineshaft certainly caused me a great deal of fun. Evidently I had walled off the caves incorrectly, must've missed a corner. Oh well, that's that. Might as well check out that sick looking volcano on the other side of the map, steel be damned.
im awful at these types of games and this unironically sounds incredibly fun except i know i would suck at it and play it for like only an hour before giving up for ever
I have yet to play it, but DF is less about being good and more about enjoying losing hilariously.
Yeah there are people who know how to make seemingly indestructible fortresses, but that isn't what it is about at all! A lot of it is telling your story.
Yeah, I feel just the same, I really find the idea of complex rich stories and the world building present on DF incredibly interesting, but as with many other games alike, I struggle with the slow gameplay and all the managment they require to fully explore their potential.
I started playing the game learning from Quill18 videos - still the best tutorials for DF that you can find on UA-cam
The first rule of Dwarf Fortress: Losing is fun!
Yep that's what I did lol
For some reason, I talked to an acquaintance of mine about this masterpiece prior to the steam release. I apparently painted myself as some for of master of the game, as he invited me onto his stream where he did a blind playtest of the game. In front of many people in the audience I watched in horror as his entire fortress was slaughtered by a roving band of elephants within an hour of starting. At least I got to show him how to look up said elephants in Legends Mode!
VO sounds like a chill version of Videogamedunkey. The inflections, pauses, etc.
@@BrianPotterProductions too much so, honestly. Needs a new shtick.
He's very obviously imitating dunkey, probably in hopes of achieving the same level of popularity.
@@sweetdangerzack nothing wrong with taking inspiration. they're a little egregious about it in earlier videos but they're starting to shine in their newer stuff
I think it's important to mention that the non-steam version, for all those years and continuing, is entirely free.
who cares when it's abandonware
@@templeofdelusion It isn't. The old control scheme is dead, but the ASCII version of the game is still very much free from their website, with the latest updates and new control scheme.
Thanks for making the vid. Glad to see how much more attention the games been getting. Been my favorite for years
Well, now I have the perfect video to explain my addiction to my friends.
Also, a forgotten tidbit information that got left out is that it can be a buggy mess, especially the military.
Plz guys, let's recommend this game to Let's Game It Out. I'm dying to see how josh would turn these dwarves fortresses into a living hell!
I remember getting into Dwarf Fortress back in 2018. I took one look at the interface (as you did) and got so confused by everything that I quit before I began. Now that it has this graphical remastering, I will try and play the game. I really can't wait!
The thumbnail had me thinking this was NetHack. For those of you who don't know (which I assume is all of you), NetHack is a descendant of Hack, which is a descendant of Rogue. The rogue.
Anyways it's a really cool roguelike (duh) and carries a similar complexity as Dwarf Fortress (I also cannot play NetHack without the wiki open) with a totally different gameplay, but the same tileset.
Luckily you can install graphics there too.
It's open source and thus 100% free for everyone to enjoy. If you ever feel like you have too much free time and want to try out a real roguelike classic but don't actually want to play rogue, this game might be worth your attention.
I actually played Nethack in-browser a few months before I played Dwarf Fortress because I was bored and trawling links on TVTropes or something. The experience I had actually sold me on ASCII games.
At first I didn't know what I was doing, but I did find a cool anti-magic cloak. I also knew how to kick down doors. So, I kick down a door that happens to be a shopkeeper's space. The debris from the door goes flying inwards and the keeper is furious and tries to kill me. However, I'm wearing an anti-magic cloak! All his magic bounces off and hits him instead! So I mamage to kill him first and now I'm left in a room filled with free stuff!
Excited, I start checking out all the items and trying on all the better armor. I equip a cool magic wand that shoots lightning or something. But then, a kobold enters the room! So I shoot him with my magic wand! Unfortunately, the kobold had picked up my discarded anti-magic cloak off the shop floor (because I unequipped it earlier to try out the different clothes) and the magic bounced back on me! I immediately exploded and died! I must've laughed for a good five or so minutes because of that.
@@conspiracypanda1200 lmao nice
Other great "real roguelikes" include:
-Brogue, it's free! And also weirdly pretty for an ASCII game. It's relatively simple but IMO it's a really smart take on the genre.
-Cogmind is seriously the most underrated roguelike. It's *shockingly* in-depth, especially whem you realize it's got a whole branching storyline with quite a lot of lore attached. You play as a sentient robot in a mining facility. There's BattleTech-ish customization, weirdly deep combat and a cool focus on simulating the way enemies communicate with each other & stealth.
- Pixel Dungeon. There's quite a few different forks of it. It was designed for mobile, but it actually does a great job of making the genre playable on a touchscreen and doesn't have the problems most mobile games have.
- Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is pretty much a "zombie survival" roguelike, although zombies are the least of your worries. This is the kind of game that simulates every major component of the car you found on the side of the road and lets you perform surgery on yourself to get robo-legs. Project Zomboid was directly inspired by Cataclysm but still fails to reach it's level of depth.
- Tales of Maj'Eyal is an interesting one because instead of items it's focused hard on having an MMO style hotbar. It's really a fusion between traditional roguelike and something more like Diablo.
- Rift Wizard is kind of a more modern, minimalist take on ToME
- Caves of Qud is a Morrowind-inspired game that also takes a queue from Dwarf Fortress in that it also has randomly-generated history (although nowhere near as deep). It's sort of a YT darling for being pretty and... weird. Very weird.
I played so much Nethack way back when it was still a new game. "c" (lowercase) was a cat and "C" (uppercase) a centuar. That was a truly awesome game, it didn't need graphics. In fact I think the "tile sets" that came later actually made it worse.
Dwarf Fortress requires you to invest your time, mind, and imagination into the game. a pretty small portion of the gamer population are willing to do that. most see a video like this and think "man that sounds cool", they get it play it for 2 or 3 hours and declare it boring and move onto something else.
I began playing once.. 6 years back.. couldn't handle the controls despite having played ASCII-based dungeon explorers and similar games. Moved on to Rimworld and loved it.. Began using Linux as my only OS, made my own vast arsenal of commands in Linux and Vim. Became quite confident about this game and started again.
Nope. Will try again in a few days
@@certainsomeone186 yeah I played DF long ago, when Rimworld came out i got into that. when i heard DF got a make over and had graphics more akin to Rimworld i decided to jump back into it. The world needs more games like DF and Rimworld. Not everyone likes games with insane levels of complexity, but it's a niche that is horribly underdeveloped.
i remember when i played this game, one of my dwarfs was a little girl, who became an orphan after her parent died infront of her eyes, that made her become a sociopath and she started killing and torturing cats. when she grew up she wanted to go back into sociaty and started being a normals person, but then her husbend was killed and she became a serial killer. this game is wild
As it sounds now, all should be safe as long as you don't build waterfalls in your taverns
Technically, the waterfalls in the tavern is actually the key stone to keeping the whole fortress together. Probably stopped countless bar brawls. At least until it didn't.
It can be built in a way that's perfectly safe, but it was open from the topside. Easily avoildable mistake.
I haven't played the Steam-version but a few years ago I was playing the original version and in adventure mode I was a Pokemon trainer, meaning I beat up small animals and threw them around to attack enemies. I remember going through a cave and wondering why I was moving so slowly and when I checked my character he was holding a bison corpse in each hand. I didn't even remember picking those up!
adjusted value of bees
Always glad to see DF getting love. I've been playing since 2007.
Even after like 2000 failed tries at not sucking at this game I won't get tired of the intro, it's just so good
imagine if DF could have a fully detailed 3d animation of everything in the complexity of the game, it would take like a team of 10,000 animators
Next update: if a dwarf is too unhappy, they will begin to get angry, and will leave the fortress, after being away for long enough, they will find a dark wizard who will teach them the forbidden arts of magic, where they will learn "true manifestation", upon learning this spell, the dwarf will manifest in the real world and strangle you to death for not satisfying their needs
Something like that is planned, not the revenge part though.
I zoned out at some point in the video and when I started paying attention again he was talking about how the dwarves could have depression...
I learned about this game from my programming / Linux friends around 2010. (plus or minus a few years) Interestingly enough until very recently, They were really the only people who really ever talked about this game.
I first had heard about Dwarf Fortress many years ago, it was one of those games that was famously brutal. I watched someone stream it and thought it looked cool, so I donated and played it. I could not understand anything. It just got its remake on Steam with proper graphics, and I am stuck trying to figure out how to make stairs. Worth. Every. Cent.
Wtf ? Only 187 likes for a video that good ?
Anyway, i didn't know game with that level of complexity existed so early.
People make a lot of weird assumptions about needing "new tech" to do cool stuff.
@@colbyboucher6391 More like "I didn't think game could be that complex without having old computer lagging as hell"
@@cpp3221 Oh, it did, quickly. Honestly DF still starts to lag out past 150-200-ish dwarves.
I'm kind of proud that I was playing DF since before it had Z-levels, only a year or so since it had come out.
That one quick shot of Dig Dug just gave me so many flash backs I'm pretty sure I got whiplash. I can't believe I've forgotten.
That tavern waterfall was certainly more expensive than you could have ever foreseen.
there is an even more complex game which name i unfortunately forgot. It has majorly text and almost no graphics. It's a strategy game about building a interstellar empire. the amount of things you can do and especially the ones you can do wrong there seems to be unlimited. e.g. you start in an era before you can do interplanetary journey. In order to do that you need to research a certain type of engine. However you need to allocate your resources accordingly and set your scientists to work on various other projects in order to get them to this level. scientists could not be productive becuase your policy is bad and there are not enough resources and finances diverted to them (yeah you ahve to take care of every other aspect of the global society aswell). Meteors can come crashing so you need defenses. Other galactical aliens can visit you and are building the same empires as you do parallel to you. complex trading, global cataclysms, revolts, jumps in scientific breakthroughs etc etc etc. the game seemed insane and just to get started you need like hundreds if not a good thousand of hours spent there tweaking around.
Edit#1: the game is called Aurora 4x
The steam release really brings me great joy that people can easily access this amazing game and make their own unique and amazing storys to share with others a really great feeling seeing how far the game has come fueled by nothing but passion of 2 lads to make what they like not what will be popular and quick money but a thing if pure passion that shows itself at every corner of the game
I finally managed to get a decent fort going. First 5 floors are dedicated to a military installation. I have a 5 layer moat surrounding it, bridge, etc.
I realize the militia commander is missing. Body is in the moat. Weird. I built it 3 years ago. Figure they fell in, but next year it's a kid, then another dwarf, I didn't recognize. That's when the game stopped working.
Fortress mode is only half the game of Dwarf Fortress, the other being Adventure Mode (unavailable on steam release for now, but is still playable) and let me tell you, if you think Skyrim is incredibly in-depth, and find it fun, you will quickly become addicted with Adventure Mode. Imagine Skyrim but in a world that you can randomly generate, the world is filled with insane amounts of lore, and the environment around you continues to change due to the relationships between different factions in the world. All relationships with every single NPC are dynamically forming, creating loads of drama in the world for you to uncover.
That inn keeper that you always love to stop and talk to on your adventures? On his off days he could be off murdering people, or he could be banging someone's wife. Maybe one day you go there and he isn't there. Why? Because he randomly decided he was going to join up with a bandit group and dedicated his life to crime. Literally anything can happen, and it's incredible. A dragon could attack a city, and as long as you're in render distance, any foliage, wood structures, people, or animals, will burn to ash. No game can compete with a truly living breathing world, especially not RimWorld.
My math professor went to Stanford with Tarn Adams, and has nothing but nice things to say about him! Super cool guy, and made an awesome game
3:56 “and while this may sound like a real-time strategy game,-“ it isn’t, because you play the game while it’s paused.
imo, the most complex ever game is C (or indeed any turing complete programming language) itself. Literally comprises every possible game.
The programming language itself is not really that complex, only if you start making complex things, it gets complex
@@christophhofer303 I guess I should say that it is complex in that it's the ultimate sandbox.
The oldschool version was even more detailed than the steam version
We will (most likely) get it eventually but for now the steam version is missing a couple of features
really? Thats crazy. Like what? I remember playing a solo adventure mode back in the day, where I ussually turned into a vampire. is that kind of stuff in the steam version?
@@eduardofreitas8336 the steam version didn't release with adventure mode and at the moment adventure mode is in beta with regular updates
@@eduardofreitas8336 In the old version, there was exact metric measurements for metal densities and melting points for metals so you'd know even with modded stuff, what could resist dragonfire and lava before boiling you alive or what would be more brittle to use for your squad as armor or weapon. There were even exact weight measurements as well.
When you said "that's dig-dug" I felt @videogamedunkey possess you for a moment and I was contractually obligated to subscribe.
Dunkey is my favorite creator to steal delivery cues from. Huge influence on me tbh.
@@OnADock we can tell
keep up the hard work and you’ll start to develop your own style i’m sure
There is a record of a game that was run by several players back when the game looked decidedly Ancient Egyptian, that showcased the detail in every dwarf, as well as the tag line that I always associate with the gam4, "Losing is fun."
Look up the saga of Boatmurdered when you have some time.
This guy is whispering the whole video
@@saul-goodman He's trying to be videogamedunkey.
i once had an unnamed beast come up from the depths and start mauling everyone.
i had a miner who took on said beast wearing rubbish clothes armed only with a pickaxe.
he won.
i made him general of my armies, and forced them to use pickaxes in his honor.
10/10 game
apparently there once was a bug in the game, where cats kept dying because they were picking up beer from the tavern floors and got alcohol poisoning from a wrong transfer parameter when licking their paws.
truly one of the games of all time.
huge respect to the brothers. a real inspiration.
Wow. It tracks every tooth, finger, and minute detail. Thats pretty insane.
suddenly i wonder if game logs can be fed into some ai and generate awesome summaries about the world you created
I'm fairly sure the game has this as a built in feature
that's what legends mode is for
though I guess it's not a summery as it is the entire history of the world and every named entity, named item, every event and all the settlements
One time I had a dwarf get inspired to make something and he did something like this. He laid out on a tapestry on a bench the ENTIRE FUKING HISTORY PAST PRESENT AND ALL FUTURE things in my world down to details like how many socks we had who died where they died when they died how may stocks I had details and dates of it all. Craziest thing that ever happened to me
@@lif3thesniper brooo that's crazy
@@lif3thesniper It was a bug, the same that created Planestacked, maybe the most famous artifact of this kind. Sadly fixed by now.
“She got ptsd from being caught out in the rain once”
Totally caught me off guard, I laughed out loud and woke my dog up.
It should be mentioned that we actually do know what slaves to armok part 1 is. Tarn covered it in one of his talks he did a while back. It was a game that him and his brother came up with in high school, a 3D overhead fighting game where any of your limbs could serve any other limbs purpose. It wasn't called slaves to armok part 1. It was just called slaves to armok.
DF is definitely one of my favorites, and only became more so as I dove into the files and added some new animals and tweaked some of the internal tags, made my own workshop, etc. I highly recommend using a graphic overlay and making sure you can load your dwarves into Dearf Therapist, managing large populations is much easier that way. Also soundsense for some awesome sounds.
I fucking love Dwarf Fortress.
I did some work on one of the pack versions of the free online version of dwarf forfortress. Still remember the drunken dead cats issues.
I love the way each z layer has a small floor tile, I’m on my first play through, and I knew I had to be careful of collapsing while trying to make a vaulted ceiling, but I got ahead of the carving job and started removing stairs below a dwarf, and holy crap it was scary and hysterical to catch a small collapse and watch the dwarves freak out lol.
Thankfully nobody was lost, but what a scare for making one room a little taller lol.
I'm pretty sure if i downloaded this my computer would blow up and destroy the continent I'm living on......
I found the stories about DF much more interesting than playing the game myself. Thanks for the video!
As a fan of dwarfen hydro engineering myself, I would like you to learn the secret art of flood-dooring and tunnel-grateing.
Being able to turn off the water will do wonders for the health of your miners, and wall grates keep most of the annoying animals out. Not all,though. And.... if you really need not to close the water inflow, you can place traps in those tunnels before flooding them.
I was so proud of myself when I constructed my first pressure controlled, self-refilling water reservoir. Then some time later of course I had the wrong level pulled, and channeled the whole river into my fort. (Since then I DECONSTRUCT that damn lever after the automatism is in place)
Video starts at 1:40 .
I'm glad Tynan took inspiration from this but made Rimworld much more accessible. And even that is a game too complex for many people.
Quick hint about burying dudes whos body you cant retrieve. Just build a pile of slabs and then have someone engrave a memorial to that dwarf on them, then place the memorial. It has the same effect, it stops ghosts.
My recollection of this game was failing a lot to get anything established at all (i.e. they all died before creating anything significant), then once getting all the way to the point where I was seriously trying to construct a table. I successfully got a number of other things built, but I don't think I succeeded at the table before my dwarves all died off.
It looks like there's a prettier UI than the one I used, now.
this game was released a week before i was born, whoah
I love how this game generates stories, even before you start playing and adds more epic stories to the world as you are playing.
For example how one of my hunter dwarfs killed a world dragon when he got caught out with his practice bow, which got disarmed right away after wich the dwarf succesfully dodged a flame breath attack and then punched the dragons teeth out his mouth. After the battle, he got into a 'mood' in which he used one of the dragons teeth to make a legendary amulet which depicted the fight with the dragon and was adorned with... dragonteeth.
And I like how the community talks about the games 'fun' moments (translation, epic fortress death). Even if you master the game, you'll die eventually. If the forgotten beasts don't kill you, the diseases they carry will
I remember playing Dwarf Fortress a few years after release. I was just a small child then but I was actually a tad interested in the game, also looking forward to buying the steam release soon
another dunkey clone for the books let’s go
I’ve come perilously close to actually trying to play DF dozens of times over the last two decades. Is my favorite game I’ve never played
ONE fortress later....
My game started to slow down, I had no idea why...
just after a dwarf moved in with 100 pet cats ....
It is incredibly complex and impressive but at the same time Dwarf Fortress is very easy difficulty wise once you learn the mechanics. All you need is a bridge to make your fortress invulnerable to outside threats and food/drink/happiness is never an issue if you know what you're doing. Top tier game/simulation though, I have over 500 hours on the steam version alone. Making bedrooms will become the bane of your dwarfish existence.
I remember trying this game out when i was little because it was so artsy fartsy to me. I couldnt believe it ended up being this popular years later but good for it, its really cool.
5:16
"He felt restless dwelling upon being able to rest"
Dude, same. smh...
Excellent video, interesting, to the point, no wasted words. Kept me engaged throughout the duration.
The humor and pacing in this video is fucking immaculate. Best UA-cam recommendation in a hot minute, keep doing your thing man!
I have so many fond memories from 2002. It was the start of a golden age for gaming.
Homie is running waterfalls through his fort for fun, meanwhile I can't even get my dwarves to throw out shells that the fishermen get to the point where they are literally preventing other dwarves from doing their jobs because it's clogging up the hallways 🙄
you will figure it out something, 1 sell them, preferably make crafts out of them then sell 2 make a stockpile for them on top of lava, 3 or under a bridge while closed then open the bridge and smash them to atoms
one thing not covered out of the many, is that even if your fortress falls, it's story is permenant in the world created
Actually insane you didn't mention legends mode. My fortress had a dope sword called "The Barricaded Teacher" but it was stolen by a visitor at one point. I occasionally go into legends mode to see where the damn thing has ended up. Even found a quest about searching for it in adventure mode.
as a software developer, cant imagine how many bugs this game have
@@tonyhart2744 Between 1000 to 5000, it is not clear due to players reporting already known bugs.