Post Mortem

Dwarf Fortress is very much a Nethack derivative. In Nethack, you die over and over until eventually you learn the ropes. Then you die a bunch more because the game is so stacked against you. There's a feeling of accomplishment that accompanies beating such horrendous odds, using a user interface so bad it probably doesn't deserve to be called a user interface. There's a part of me that enjoys that. Many games these days (Mario Galaxy, Portal, BioShock) are designed with instant and consistent gratification in mind. They hold your hand, teach you everything you need to know, and make failure almost impossible. This also makes a feeling of real accomplishment from playing them almost impossible. Of course, if I'm gonna work that hard on a game, I'd rather be developing it, but I can definitely respect the very old school challenge Dwarf Fortress offers.

The End

Kadol Athelarzes, leader of the fortress, was the first to go, killed by thirst. Immediately followed by the engraver, the herbalist, and many others.


One of the herbalists starts throwing a tantrum. Will it be violent? Ooh, let's hope.


Nope. He just refuses to work, hangs out in the meeting area for a bit (while another herbalist dies of thirst), then goes right back to work. Brilliant.

And finally, we have the final thoughts of the last dwarf to die. I think they speak for themselves.

Desperate Times; Desperate Measures

Supplies are low. Immigrants need to eat. What else could go wrong?


Well, something in the storeroom could go rotten, releasing a giant purple cloud of illness. I'm not even at the point where I care if someone gets sick and dies. Really I'm more morbidly curious than anything else. Who'll go first? Will it be illness, starvation, or a surprise snow leopard attack on our foragers? (Obviously, I'm rooting for the snow leopards. You have died of dysentery wasn't much fun in Oregon Trail, and it won't be much fun here.)


The lake is frozen. No more fishing or drinking this year.


The first dog is slaughtered.


One of the miners is so hungry she tries hunting down a wolf with her pickaxe.


And takes it down without any injury to herself. Nice one!

Gonna Hurt!

This is what my stocks looked like after the traders packed up. Like everything else in this game, the trading interface was so arcane the whole process went by without any obvious opportunity to buy anything at all. We're boned. Hopefully our deaths will be entertaining and quick so I can start playing Dark Cloud 2 for a somewhat similar but hopefully more rewarding experience.


A couple of our brave band try to gather enough plant life to keep us going.


And of course, no tragedy would be complete without a pile of unskilled immigrants to make our already impossibly low food supply even more laughable.


Now instead of 7 dwarves trying to get by on almost nothing, we've got 15. I think the thing that will really get us is the no drink. Once the lake freezes over, it's gonna get nasty.

Food Food Food (Everything is Food)

As you can see if you zoom in on this status screen, things are going okay, but not great. Our food stores are dwindling in mid summer, when they should be growing. I blame the dwarves love of masonry. Seriously, thought, I better teach someone to hunt and start killing some native wildlife.


And it's done. The red squiggly's are where a fox lost its life, pummeled (or possibly bashed with a mining pick) to death by our expedition's lead miner.


Apparently complacent because of the easy win over nature, the dwarves take a victory nap.


Not so good. I hunted everything there was to hunt and our food stocks aren't any better off. Well, we have some raw turtles. If we can cook them over the winter (when we need to be indoors all the time anyway), maybe we'll survive. Yeah. And maybe I'm a Chinese jet pilot. As you can see, we have a very nice dining room, and are excavating a very large storage area. I mostly want the storage just to be able to get all the stones out of the living quarters. Also, I'm turning some of the stone into doors and most into statues for trade. I'm really hoping a trade caravan comes through before winter, because that's probably our only hope.

Food Food Food

Everyone finally got hungry and headed back to the wagon, which had a couple barrels of ale on it. Good enough for now, but I really should be cooking those turtles. I've heard their shells can be used to make crafts we can use for trade.


Now if I could just figure out how to turn one of these rooms into a crafting room.


Of course, first everyone needs a nap.


But eventually everything picks up. I finally hit up the Dwarf Fortress Wiki to learn how to make rooms. The build menu had more pages than I thought. I blame the dwarves.


With some rooms created, things are going much better. I have our cook cleaning turtles. I have beds made (which is good as sleepy time comes again quickly). And I have chairs in the queue (which is what everyone's been complaining about not having).

Work Work Work

Yay! The fisher dwarf caught a turtle for eating! Now I just have to build a kitchen. :P


But my first room will be storage. Hopefully having some will get my lazy dwarves working. Once we have some storage, I'm not sure if we'll need a kitchen or a woodworking area next. I'll try for the kitchen, as I'm assuming eating is more essential. That'll mean digging a refuse chute as well. And it might be good to build tables. Feh. Building an outpost from scratch is a pain.


Yay! The dwarves are grabbing stuff for the stockpiles. Uncut gem stones, turtles, and logs are all being piled up.


Hmm. The rooms are coming along just fine. And I designated one a meeting room, so my dwarves would stop hanging around the wagon in the middle of nowhere. There are still issues, though. I supposedly have two pickaxes, but I can't seem to train anyone new on mining. My cook doesn't seem to know how (or have the right equipment) to cook the turtles, so they're going rotten. And I can't seem to get any beds underway, either.

Meet The Party

Okay so it's hard to read, but basically what it boils down to is this:

We've got a fisher and fish cleaner, so if we can find some water (I think I see some nearby, but the cursor says open land, so maybe it's just bluegrass?), we can hopefully start putting food together. Also, we should probably put a farm together, to grow grain. You know, for booze. And finally, we need to carve out some living quarters.

I start time again and the fisher dwarf teleports to some water so far away that I can't figure out where she is in relation to the rest of the group. I designate a bunch of the mountain for mining, figuring my miner will start carving it up, but the miner still shows "No Job" on the unit list. Hmm.



Well, apparently telling my miner to dig out some more specific minerals has gotten the work moving. Maybe the other stone was too hard.



I've also put the woodcutter to work, thinking that putting a farm next to a body of water might be a good idea. I've also designated some of the stone areas my miner has cut out for smoothing, to get my stone worker dwarf to join the party. I guess I'll have to build buildings for everyone before they'll bother to actually move to the new settlement location. And traders, IIRC, like to trade where the wagon is, so we may have to build a long tunnel out to the wagon. Stupid humans and elves. But the main priority right now is still getting everyone to work. As fast as the miner can make me some rooms, I want to get storage and workshops going so everyone has something to do. Then we'll worry about living quarters.

And So It Begins

In following the Dwarf Fortress thread on the Penny Arcade boards, I decided it would be the perfect way to procrastinate instead of looking for my next job or learning ACS scripting to make class based co-op DooM levels.

And so, I cast my destiny to the winds. I let the fractal world generator free to create a multitude of worlds. The game warned me it could take a long time as the random process could generate a plethora of rejects. Only six rejects were generated, meaning I would be playing on the seventh world, a good omen, and while I may not be superstitious, I know dwarves certainly can be. From what I'd read on the thread, dwarves are drunken cowards with a great appreciation for craftsmanship. They could also be quite mad, a fact not unrelated to their penchant for creating. Apparently, sometimes a dwarf may be inspired, the idea for a fantastic work of art suddenly overtaking their entire being. If the materials for said work cannot be secured fast enough, they go mad. And of course there are the standard monsters, cave ins, and accidental tapping of magma veins to contend with. But no matter. I am fortune's to guide. I let the game automatically generate my party of dwarves and pick my starting location. Here's what it looked like.



I'm a bit concerned about those purple bits. I think bad things may live in them. I'll try to make fortifying an early priority, but the first priority must be to survive, and I'll need to do a lot of work to secure food and shelter to survive the winter.

Oh, and my new settlement is called Windape. Considering my love for all things simian, another good omen.