
How Two Seattle-Area Brothers Made Dwarf Fortress - robinhoodexe
http://www.seattleweekly.com/arts/enormous-dwarf-2610456/
======
Natsu
> The brothers find most of their data online, but it is only because of Dwarf
> Fortress that you can find the density of saguaro cactus wood on the
> Internet. When Tarn and Zach couldn’t find the number, a fan ordered cactus
> wood from a dealer, empirically determined the density using liquid
> displacement tests, and relayed back the results, which ended up in the
> game.

I suspect this author reads HN :) If anyone was curious, the thread where
Saguaro wood's solid density was determined can be found here:

[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=80022.0](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=80022.0)

> NEW: The guesstimate of 300 kg/m^3 for Saguaro density in the V2 raws was
> probably wrong. I have a 6g piece of Saguaro wood with a volume of
> approximately 14 cm^3, which indicates that the density of Saguaro wood is
> approximately 430 kg/m^3. This number appears very reasonable when compared
> to all the other densities I have researched. I have more ~1 ft pieces of
> Saguaro rib wood than I know what to do with right now and I'm more than
> willing to ship them to people willing to do further research on the matter,
> or those who wish to duplicate my experiments.

In fact, there are two approximately 1" saguaro wood cubes sitting on my desk
directly in front of me at this very moment.

------
epaga
Dwarf Fortress is a truly unique game and really worth putting in the effort
to learn simply due to the stories it generates as you play - and it is
amazing how the stories emerge from the ASCII symbols.

Here's an example of a story that happened to me.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/1mb0cw/the_s...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/1mb0cw/the_sad_story_of_m%C3%B4som/)
Note: this story is in NO way embellished by me. Everything described there
was actually fully simulated within the game.

~~~
brobinson
I think the story of "Boatmurdered" is my favorite. A friend described it as
"pee-your-pants funny".

[http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-
Boatmurdered/](http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/)

~~~
Natsu
Roomcarnage has a rather compelling story as well -

[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=139393.0](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=139393.0)

------
faide
I find the UI of Dwarf Fortress completely impenetrable, but am fascinated by
the level of depth and granularity in the systems underlying the game.

If anyone is interested in the game, I recommend grabbing the Lazy Newb
Pack[0] which comes with a few utilities that will make your experience
slightly less infuriating.

[0] [http://lazynewbpack.com/](http://lazynewbpack.com/)

~~~
trentmb
Much like Eve, I prefer to read about others exploits than try and have my
own.

~~~
mfoy_
Funny thing about Eve is that once you start playing it you realize it's...
actually pretty "normal".

It's like the Australian Outback, you hear so many terrifying stories that you
just assume every single thing in that place wants to kill you, but plenty of
things live there.

Just like in Eve, your life in space will be pretty standard fare 99% of the
time, even moving out to nullsec can be actually quite a... dare I say,
mundane affair.

But it's that 1%... oh man, that 1%. The feuds, the rivalries, the deception,
the betrayal.

It's almost like CCP are playing a cosmic version of Dwarf Fortress and the
capsuleers are their dwarves.

~~~
phillc73
What terrifying stories have you heard about the Australian Outback?

Having lived a large proportion of my life in what would be described as rural
Australia, if not quite the Outback, I can't really think of anything that is
actively trying to kill people.

People die because they were unlucky (trod on a poisonous snake perhaps) or
they were stupid (traveling somewhere without adequate water and/or informing
others of their whereabouts).

Snakes aren't actually trying to kill you, nor spiders, nor dingoes (unless
you're a really small baby maybe), nor feral camels, nor kangaroos, nor the
emus. The only think I can think of that maybe actively wants to kill you are
the crocs, because they're top predator and have to eat. Also the vast
majority of human deaths from croc attacks are also down to stupidity
(swimming at night in a known crocodile area, for example). Even so, the crocs
are in the north and I wouldn't necessarily call that the Outback either.

Anyway, genuinely curious about the terrifying stories and all the things
trying to kill humans.

~~~
spacehome
> I can't really think of anything that is actively trying to kill people.

[... proceeds to list a bunch of animals that kill people ...]

~~~
phillc73
The point was that none of these animals actually want to kill people, which
was stated in the parent post.

------
phil248
I'm a dedicated gamer who has found countless hours of enjoyment from games
like Minecraft and Crusader Kings 2. But in my attempts to play Dwarf
Fortress, I felt like I was being trolled. Like the entire thing was some 'in'
joke and by spending hours attempting to figure out the UI, I was the butt of
said joke. I find time to play games like CK2 despite the poor UI and serious
time commitments, but I'm a grown man with a job and I don't have time to play
a game with what is quite possibly the worst UI in gaming history.

~~~
flashman
I have tried the game multiple times but have not had the patience to stick
with it.

I am glad that it exists, though. I want to live in the kind of world where
two brothers are happy to devote the majority of their life to a project like
this.

Maybe it's the same impulse that drove the Voynich manuscript's creation.

~~~
Derpdiherp
Although they're out of date now, captain duck's tutorials on youtube
demystify the entire thing a great deal. And most of the core concepts haven't
changed much since he made the tutorials.

Believe it or not once you "get" the interface it's really not all that bad.
There's one or two incredibly annoying intracacies - but get the lazy newb
pack with dwarf therapist and you'll be in for an easier time.

------
mundo
If this piques your interest and you have a few hours to kill, you might enjoy
reading the Roomcarnage saga:
[http://imgur.com/a/xhQHE/layout/horizontal#0](http://imgur.com/a/xhQHE/layout/horizontal#0)

Briefly, it's a very experienced DF player trying to conquer a frozen volcano
who has written up his exploits in narrative form. Fun read and will give you
a good idea of what DF is allabout.

~~~
ajacksified
Or, much earlier in Dwarf Fortress's history is possibly the most famous DF
story, the epic saga of Boatmurdered: [http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-
Boatmurdered/Introductio...](http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-
Boatmurdered/Introduction/)

------
cryptoz
I guess this is the article that makes me realize I'm out of touch. I was
super excited to see what kind of small castle they built, how they did it
with just two people, and I also had lots of legal questions about building
castles. Oh well, this looks neat too!

Edit: was expecting something like this, for those of you now interested in
home-castle-building-stories:
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2280764/Farmer-
told-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2280764/Farmer-told-MUST-
pull-castle-built-secretly-haystacks-loses-year-planning-row.html)

~~~
honua
This is what I thought it'd be, too, only I mis-read fortress as forest and
thought about a really cool park-like area with tiny trees.

------
exratione
So: Dwarf Fortress in a forest with an aquifer down in the soil.

It takes a year to build a wooden hall large enough for most of the workshops,
on one side of the river, while on the other side digging out a collapse to
drop soil into the acquifer. A lovely wooden bridge and wooden tile road is
the meeting area to keep the dwarves happy while they have no stone.

The dwarf with the only pickaxe falls into the watery pit under the collapse
and drowns. I have to wait half a year to trade for another while the dwarves
live on fish and berries in their hall. They are haunted by the ghost of the
miner, as there is no stone for for a engraved slab in the graveyard. Cherry
blossoms litter the ground, and blow into the half-finished excavation.

A crafter is possessed and wants stone, the one thing we don't have. What
little the drwarves traded for had to go to other uses. A great pile of wooden
crafts is building up. Just as well there are no elven neighbors. The crafter
becomes melancholy, and wanders about the fisherdwarves, watching them.
Sometimes he stands in the middle of the river.

After trading a new pick, the next miner knocks out the remaining support, and
the collapse happens. But, alas, the aquifer is two levels thick! Only one
level is smushed dry with the collapsed soil. We trade for rock, build a new
structure in the now open watery pit. Two dwarves fall in that season during
the construction, adding more drowned victims and wailing ghosts.

The construction of stone walls in the pit is knocked down at the cost of yet
another dwarf - yet it isn't enough to breach the aquifer. Woe. The pit is now
littered with rock and bodies and materials.

There is only one other thing to do; build a stack of wooden pumps, stairs,
landings down into the pit, and an aquaduct to the river. Pump it dry and send
in dwarfs to build walls and lock away the water.

All of this and still not at the point of the exercise - to raise a great
hollow tower of stone over the river and a deep pit of stairs beneath, and
tear down the hall of wood for charcoal. So it continues.

------
robohamburger
Some other interesting articles form the past:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-
of...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-
fortress.html?_r=0)

[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131954/interview_the_m...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131954/interview_the_making_of_dwarf_.php)

I have played quite a bit of the game and it is amazing despite its insane and
sometimes frustrating UI.

------
Jordrok
Dwarf Fortress is truly an inspiring project, not only because of how
amazingly fun and engrossing the game is if you can get into it (granted, it's
not for everyone), but also because of the sheer amount of dedication and love
that is put into it by Tarn and Zach Adams.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
Along with the community. They donate $60k per year which is incredibly
impressive given its size.

~~~
patio11
I'm torn between "That's better than the $30k it was the last time we
discussed this years ago, which was itself better than $0" and "If one
produces something as staggeringly joy-bringing as Dwarf Fortress, one can
fairly easily avoid being a starving artist by applying single-digit hours of
worksmanlike execution on monetization."

~~~
lloyd-christmas
This has been their performance:

    
    
      2015:     $60603.43
      2014:     $66765.31
      2013:     $48999.11
      2012:     $57854.88
      2011:     $42294.19
      2010:     $54501.15
      2009:     $32516.44
      2008:     $32318.46
      2007:     $19052.28
    

That's pretty damn good for such a cult game. I'm not sure there's really any
better way to monetize it than rely on donations.

~~~
patio11
I'm going to give a very boring answer with regards to monetization strategy:
they should sell licenses to Dwarf Fortress, or Dwarf Fortress Supporter
Edition, which is distinguished from DF Vanilla by saying that it's the
supporter edition and maybe some cosmetic change somewhere.

I would price it at $19, where it would be towards the top-end of indie games
on Steam; by the standards of people _who enjoy Dwarf Fortress_ , Dwarf
Fortress ROFLstomps the depth and quality of any other $19 entertainment
option.

I would then immediately solicit inclusion in a Humble Bundle, in the
expectation that Humble Bundle would leap at the chance. One could envision a
rougelike or Df-alike bundle; I anticipate that Humble Bundle would give DF
top billing in whatever deal was negotiated. I would model that Humble Bundle
as doing > $800k in sales, of which DF's take would be > ~$80k. Throw in "and
we'll use Humble as our exclusive e-commerce provider for 12 months" since I
think it is fairly clear that the authors don't want to be in the e-commerce
business; that gives Humble ~10% of their gross revenue for next year.

Stage 3 of the master plan: get the game onto Steam. This might require $X,000
worth of production-ready art and video assets to satisfy Steam's
requirements; $X,000 will not be a material amount of money to Dwarf Fortress,
LLC.

The above unsolicited opinions are coming from a place of love for small
software businesses generally and Dwarf Fortress in particular. Strike the
earth.

~~~
saucetenuto
I think this analysis assumes that Dwarf Fortress has reached only a small
fraction of its total addressable market (that is, the space of players who
can enjoy DF without large improvements to new player onboarding). Any fixed-
price offering risks cannibalizing Patreon subscriptions, whose expected LTV
is probably _much greater_ than $19.

Their chosen tradeoff makes more sense if you think of it as "subscriptions
versus one-offs" instead of "sales versus donations".

~~~
ovi256
Even given that I stopped playing and probably will never find the time to
touch DF again (unless singularity) I would still buy that Supporter Edition.

And thanks patio11 for that plan, sounds fascinating, as always.

~~~
saucetenuto
I guess I saw his proposal as more about customer acquisition; those of us who
already know and love the game can send Tarn $19 any time we want, right here:
[http://www.bay12games.com/support.html](http://www.bay12games.com/support.html)

------
curiousgal
I always play Dwarf Fortress when I am waiting in the airport and there's
always someone near me who thinks I'm "computer hacking".

~~~
VonGuard
Whoa, how do you play without a numeric keypad. I can't even begin to play
without it due to muscle memory...

~~~
curiousgal
My laptop has a numeric keypad actually (Dell inspiron 15). And yes I can't
imagine playing without it.

~~~
viewer5
I bought a USB numpad for my T60 laptop so I could play.

------
qznc
(inspired by the other Elite thread)

Is there something like a Dwarf Fortress in Space? I know about FTL, but there
you have too much control over the crew.

Like FTL but with Dwarf Fortress like gameplay. "And then my ship got invaded
by alien mind slugs and everybody want insane" or "The mourning captain shut
himself up in the bridge and shortly afterwards we flew into a sun" or "We
transported a herd of alien-cows which resulted in a stempede through the
canteen".

~~~
talmand
Sometimes I really wish the FTL crew did have some semblance of intelligence.
It's so easy to miss a small detail that leads to the death of a crew member
simply because they can't be bothered to go through a door to save themselves.

I currently think of the game as a ship AI simulator. You, the player, are the
AI of the ship. The crew members, upon boarding the ship, are injected with
some form of mind-control tech that provides total obedience. Therefore, the
crew have no free will. They will do whatever you command, even if it'll lead
to their deaths.

A bonus to support the theory is the mind-control module you can get installed
on your ship. This module takes control over an enemy crew member by hacking
into that ship's mind-control tech.

------
overcast
I had no idea that this game is essentially their life's work. Playing that
looks like the equivalent of reading raw Matrix code.

~~~
Filligree
I don't see code, anymore. I just see dwarves, goblins... cats...

But really, the graphics aren't that bad. No worse than any other roguelike.

~~~
writeslowly
I was actually pretty impressed by Dwarf Fortress's use of the extended ASCII
set (or whatever the technical name is). Most of the non-creature symbols were
easy enough to guess based on appearances.

~~~
kd0amg
And for animals, it's mostly the first letter of the animal's name, colored
like the animal, and upper- or lower-case based on the animal's size.

------
alyandon
I've had so many hours of entertainment playing Dwarf Fortress I usually
donate $10-$20 every major release. Well worth it if you can get past the UI.

------
Olscore
If you like Dwarf Fortress, you might like a game called: Factorio

~~~
kiba
I played both. They're nothing alike at all.

~~~
Bognar
They're nothing alike, but I find they scratch a very similar itch.

------
chrisdbaldwin
Tarn's dissertation "Flat Chains in Banach Spaces" is truly awesome, if you
have enough domain knowledge to understand what it's talking about. I love
those guys.

~~~
Impl0x
I enjoy math, but I'm nowhere near experienced enough to follow that paper.
There wouldn't happen to be an annotated version or some kind of summary of
it, would there? I've always wanted to know what it was about.

~~~
chrisdbaldwin
He tries to explain it at the end of this interview:
[http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_8_transcript.html](http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_8_transcript.html)

------
cpeterso
Given the game's huge following, they should pledge to open source the code
before they die so the saga can continue. :) If they don't make money from
direct sales, why not open source the game now?

~~~
vessenes
A copy of their source code is supposedly on file with the Library of
Congress, but I can't find proof of this as I search right now.

~~~
astrange
This is the usual practice for registering copyrights, but I don't think you
need to send the whole source.

~~~
vessenes
The first 25 pages of dwarf fortress code is probably really interesting
actually;

VIOLENCE_COEFFICIENT = 2.4

CIVILIZATION_HEGEMONIZATION_TENDENCY = 1.8232

------
res0nat0r
Anyone read The O'Reilly book about this and can comment on it? I've been
wanting to try this game but really don't want to spend the overhead time just
digging through learning on my own.

[http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Dwarf-Fortress-
complex...](http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Dwarf-Fortress-
complex/dp/1449314945)

------
khalilravanna
Truly awe-inspiring and inspirational work. Over a decade spent working on
that one game. A bit over two years ago I started working on my own similar
type of game (a Dwarf-Fortress-like or DF-like if you will) and it's given me
so much appreciation for the insanity that is game development. The sheer
amount of time it takes to build out a system with so much depth is
incredible. I've probably been working an average of 8-10 hours a week for 2
years and I have but a fraction of the functionality. Dwarf Fortress stands as
a bastion of inspiration I can look to any time I feel like quitting.

------
bespoke_engnr
Just spent a bit of time working around some problems to get Dwarf Fortress
and the Lazy Newb Pack installed on Ubuntu 16.04.

It's a bit more complicated than running it on Windows _, but still works just
fine:[https://tutorialinux.com/install-dwarf-fortress-
ubuntu-16-04...](https://tutorialinux.com/install-dwarf-fortress-
ubuntu-16-04/)

Enjoy!

_If I had a nickel for every time I've said that...

------
owk247
Man I really like playing DF I just can't get myself installing X(quartz) for
it on OSX so right now I am lacking a machine to run it on.

~~~
Filligree
It should be possible to run without X. Set print-mode to text, it's supposed
to work in a terminal.

I'm not sure if that code works on OS X, but if it doesn't, you can still run
it on a server. The interface won't be perfect, though, and you'll need to
remap some keybindings.

------
andrepd
The article repeatedly stresses how "influential" DF was, and it bothers me a
bit. Dwarf Fortress is one of the greatest achievements in video game history
because of its unparalleled complexity, but it's pretty much a niche game. It
wasn't, I think, very influential at all. There are many adjectives we can use
to describe this work. Monumental springs to mind. But not influential.

~~~
cma
It influenced Minecraft.

~~~
andrepd
Did it? How so? It has almost no mechanics in common apart from procedural
terrain generation.

