
Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video] - doener
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY
======
opportune
I have been playing dwarf fortress for about 7-8 years. If anybody has any
questions feel free to ask me.

I think the difficulty of learning the game is overstated: if you follow a
tutorial, use a graphics pack, and use dwarf therapist (dwarf therapist is a
must, most experienced players also use this because it's just a better UI) I
think you can get the hang of the game in a few hours of play time. Probably
the biggest barrier to learning the game is the UX but if you're a programmer
that will be much easier to learn. I recommend
[https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_gu...](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_guide)
and
[https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Dwarf_fortres...](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Dwarf_fortress_mode)
as guides, and I recommend downloading the "Lazy Newb Pack" version compatible
with your operating system, as it makes switching graphics and managing
utilities/settings very easy.

~~~
cletus
A few years ago i tried to get into this. Like I really tried. I too installed
and used Dwarf Therapist.

here's where I struggled: I still wouldn't have the hang of managing the
dwarves I had and then a new crop would come along. Even with all these tools
it quickly descended into me not having any idea who was doing what or why. Or
why they weren't doing the things I was asking them to do.

A lot of the things seemed way too roundabout to me too. Like I'd have
chickens (or were they ducks? I forget) and I was attempting to breed them.
But the whole process of making egg-laying boxes or nests or whatever was
tedious and then you had to lock the door to stop the dwarves coming in and
taking the eggs.

Likewise, i found the process of feeding the dwarves hard to manage largely
because I couldn't easily figure out if there was any food, whether that was
because no one was making any or that it was simply all getting eaten. Was it
an issue of not having room to stockpile food? Or was the dwarf who could make
food doing something else (possibly because he was the only person who could
do that or he just happened to be the one who'd picked up the pick for some
reason)?

So I never got to that point where I felt like I had a good grasp of my colony
as a coherent unit and could then engage in flights of fancy.

I think the last time I tried I then got a monster invading and I hadn't
figured out military yet. That was a whole new system to learn and I just
lacked the motivation so stopped and never went back.

~~~
intended
There’s a very deep lesson in Dwarf Forts motto of loosing is fun.

I’ve struggled to embrace it because my habit is defensive safe playing. In
other words “succeeding”- beating your enemies without suffering a loss or
misfortune and never having to deal with jank.

My second fort blew up to a yellow “i” which I had no clue was a fire imp (2d
DF era volcano embark.)

But I got lucky and found the ascii explosion of ascii booze barrels
fascinating.

Embracing that pain makes all the stories of DF interesting. This does include
just letting things blow up because you didn’t get the interface and just
enjoying the situation you are in.

To a large extent, the new tutorials and helpful community have eroded that
ideal, the long learning curve have you a crucial part of the DF experience -
loosing is fun.

I have never been able to fully capture the point or explain how fundamental
it is to appreciating the game and how it changes your enjoyment of things.

------
pkilgore
As you might imagine after watching, and if you haven't read it before, the
Dwarf Fortress change log[1] is a thing of absolute beauty.

> \- 0009195: [Dwarf Mode -- Pets] Cats dying for no reason - alcohol
> poisoning? - resolved.

[1]
[https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/changelog_page.p...](https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/changelog_page.php)

~~~
KMnO4
For anyone doubting the complexity of Dwarf Fortress, the dying cats bug
provides a fantastic glimpse.

> Cats have a self-cleaning interaction that contains the
> [IE_SYNDROME_TAG:SYN_INGESTED] tag [...] They might be walking through
> spilled alcohol, licking it off their fur and ingesting the drunkenness
> syndrome. Toady also said alcohol effects are related to body size, so it
> theoretically wouldn't take much to do them in.

> Haven't made a tavern yet myself, but does alcohol routinely end up on the
> floor?

So Dwarf Fortress simulates 1) spilling alcohol, creating puddles on the
floor, 2) cats walking through puddles getting dirty with the puddle’s
contents, 3) dirty cats having the desire to clean themselves, 4) self-
cleaning leads to the substance being ingested, 5) ingestion of alcohol
intoxicates the cats as a function of their body size

~~~
Scarblac
Of course for the longest time, carp were the most dangerous animal in the
game, they would drag you into the river and kill you if you were standing on
the bank. The reason? Swimming trains strength. Fish swim all the time. Their
strength went through the roof.

And of course, for the longest time a main way to defend fortresses (armies
were broken) was to have an entrance corridor, with another corridor filled
with molten lava underneath it. This would cause the upper corridor to become
warm. Not really hot, but warm. And there was a bug with the melting point of
fat being set too low, so your enemies entering your fortress through the main
entrance _would die from having all the fats in their organs melted off them_.
Path finding didn't know about warm rooms.

------
eindiran
I attempted to play DF in high school many years ago, booted it up and was
immediately overwhelmed. I ended up uninstalling it and forgetting about the
game for a long time. Recently I remembered the game and gave it another shot,
and have been having a lot of fun [0]. Having the noob pack available to try
out some titlesets made it a lot more approachable as well. And there have
been a lot of quality of life improvements for new players; I think the Steam
release will add a lot more in this direction as well.

There is also a large community of content creators who play the game and post
the stories of their fortresses. This can be an interesting place to jump in.
I enjoy Kruggsmash's videos [1] and if you haven't heard it yet, a classic DF
story is Boatmurdered, from the Something Awful forums. I recently listened to
this reading of the story: [2]

[0]
[https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=Fun](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=Fun)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/kruggsmash](https://www.youtube.com/user/kruggsmash)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZF59Dkk73g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZF59Dkk73g)

~~~
dmonitor
I can see it being very fun for a certain kind of person, but I don’t think
most people will get a ton of pleasure from just making your base bigger
without any end goal

~~~
austhrow743
I'm an "aiming to win in a fixed round" type gamer myself but I think lack of
an end goal is less of an issue for more players than you think. Minecraft is
huge. Animal Valley is currently all the rage. The Sims was once upon a time
the shit. Farmville once (still?) dominated facebook.

People love base or society building for the sake of base and society
building.

If anything, playing to win/end is the minority in gaming.

~~~
andrewzah
> Animal Valley

Do you mean Animal Crossing? Stardew Valley drew inspiration from Animal
Crossing and Harvest Moon.

~~~
genocidicbunny
Sounds like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley wires got crossed.

~~~
austhrow743
Yep. Was meaning to reference Animal Crossing specifically here.

------
snide
Nice to see NoClip getting some love on HN. I'm an unabashed Danny O'Dwyer fan
and I think this community would enjoy all of NoClip's work if this is your
first taste. His docs cover quite a few behind the scenes stories that I feel
all us startup / programmer folks can relate to. His work captures the heart
of what it means to be a creator. My dream is that one day he makes a doc
about the community around Vim. It'll never happen, but a boy can dream.

Some of my favs

The untold story of Astroneer's development
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfUjl4owxTQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfUjl4owxTQ)

Doom: To hell and back
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS6SBnccxMA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS6SBnccxMA)

~~~
dgritsko
NoClip is fantastic; I also really enjoyed the Rocket League[1] and Half-
Life[2] documentaries. Danny just seems like a genuinely nice guy who just
loves to tell the stories behind these games, it's awesome to see the success
he's had with NoClip.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om0j9SLBDPQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om0j9SLBDPQ)

[2]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQLEW1c-69c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQLEW1c-69c)

~~~
pdrummond
The NoClip Spelunky[1] documentary is also particularly good.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv434Xyybqc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv434Xyybqc)

------
Trasmatta
I would love to be able to read the Dwarf Fortress source someday. I know Tarn
considers Dwarf Fortress to be his life's work, so it would be amazing if he
decided to release the source someday -- even if that's 10, 20, 30 years from
now.

~~~
pengaru
He wrote Liberal Crime Squad [0] which is GPL.

If LCS is any indication, the code in DF will be a horrible mess.

[0]
[https://sourceforge.net/projects/lcsgame/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/lcsgame/)

~~~
p1necone
The fact that the game has been seeing continuous development of relatively
complex new features for this long means the code can't be _too_ horrible.
Perhaps very idiosyncratic and particular to Tarns personal preferences, but
certainly not unmaintainable (this is just an assumption though).

~~~
bregma
I have maintained a fork of LCS. The code is unspeakably horrible. It's like
its been run through an obfuscator. It requires a hardened, dedicated
developer who has developed life-long immunity to code cooties to hack it.

~~~
larzang
He did start out as an academic/scientific programmer, so yeah.

------
paloaltokid
They are adding graphics to the game! And it will be on Steam. It's exciting
to see where they are taking it.

~~~
simaldeff
That's great but I wish the creator'd do something about death by FPS. Which
is arguably how I end up all the time. I like to build big complex fortresses
with a lot of industry and a lot of mining. And oftentimes I end up with a lot
of animals to produce meat, leather and bones (had a very promising Draltha
industry at one point). It's quite disheartening to put time in a fortress and
"die" by FPS just because you are doing good. Will still buy the Steam version
(been supporting them for a while now).

~~~
grawprog
Being able to explore goblin spires and human cities in adventure mode would
be nice too. It's sad when you have to avoid exploring the biggest city in
your world mode because taking a step takes two minutes or more. It sucks all
the more because exploring things in cities in adventure mode has given some
of the best roleplaying adventures i've had in a game. It just take so damn
long to do anything.

Can't think of any other game i've played where the leader NPCs of a city were
vampires who'd taken over the city a few hundred years ago and were at war
with a church started by a human who found jewelry created by a dwarf who'd
ran away after murdering a child and crafting their bones into jewelry in a
fell mood that was found by a random human in the city who started a cult
around it, who then took up a personal vengeance with the vampire overlords
and were undergoing covert operations against them that i disrupted when I
killed the fuck out of everyone, gathered the child bone jewelry and read
about that shit in legends. All procedurally generated and created on the fly
through the simulation of all those respective NPC's lives.

~~~
chongli
Caves of Qud [1] is a fantastic roguelike with procedurally generated
backstory, quests, towns, etc.

If you like the classic Fallout games (1 & 2) and you enjoy roguelikes with a
lot of weird stuff, I think you’d get a kick out of CoQ. The game has
incredible atmosphere that gives you this feeling like you’re exploring a
real, living, breathing world. There’s a lot of depth to the gameplay as well,
with deep character building and a complex crafting system.

I really want to get back to playing it but I’m in school right now and have a
ton of work to do!

[1] [http://www.cavesofqud.com/](http://www.cavesofqud.com/)

~~~
kibwen
I just learned about Caves of Qud by this great talk by its developer that
goes over examples of its procedural history generation:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClGAApZYIvI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClGAApZYIvI)

Apparently it's slated to leave early access in Q4 2020, so I'm holding off on
buying it for the moment, but I'm very eager to play it.

~~~
programd
And here is the paper [1] about how they procedurally generate the histories
in Caves of Qud. Very interesting both from a storytelling theoretical point
of view, and from a practical programming point of view (state machines and
replacement grammers)

[1]
[http://www.freeholdgames.com/papers/Generation_of_Mythic_Bio...](http://www.freeholdgames.com/papers/Generation_of_Mythic_Biographies_in_CavesofQud.pdf)

Makes you wonder what you could do applying something like the GPT-3 AI text
model to this kind of problem (history generation).

------
dopu
DF is wondrous not just because of what it is (I think it's one of the
greatest living examples of the artistic potential of computers as a medium),
but also because of how it came about. In a society which does about nil to
allow for this kind of deep creative work to flourish (I mean, was Toady
basically living on ramen for most of the 2000s?), the Adams brothers set out
and did it anyway. And we're getting to see it happen in real time!

------
hyperion2010
After watching this I went to go check in on my last fort that I played which
was about two years ago. Turns out the countless hours I spent herding dorfs
in college have left me with an instinctive memory of the key bindings over a
decade later. DF has such incredible depth and nearly infinite replayability.
It struck me today that despite all that time playing I have never actually
made it to a fort that was able to produce adamantine weapons, and you know
what? Loosing really IS fun! DF is one of those works of art that truly
elevates our sense of the possible. Now, if only we could convince Toady to
work on multithreading ....

~~~
tetris11
Or just opening the graphics interface ever so slightly. Those menus do not
need to be so convoluted as they are, and plenty of fans would jump in to do a
UI overhaul if allowed.

~~~
Asuchug4
DFhack already modifies many parts of GUI. Changes in trade window or
construction building(floors/walls) are so convenient I refuse to play new DF
release until dfhack is able to support it.

------
INTPenis
I love DF. I played it for so many years that I knew all the bindings I needed
by heart. It was insane.

But I left it alone many years ago, like 6 years ago at least.

And after that I feel like you can get the same joy from simpler games, and
prettier games, like Rimworld and Oxygen not included.

Sure they'll never be as complex and deep as DF but they're much simpler to
get into after not having played and they don't have a steep learning curve.

To this day I'm on the lookout for DF-like games on Steam. And I'm still
waiting for DF to come out on Steam to give it another shot.

~~~
hinkley
I tried to get into DF by watching some of the better play through videos. It
was fun but in the end it just inspired me to pick up Oxygen Not Included
again.

------
29athrowaway
Some casual alternatives to Dwarf Fortress include Gnomoria or Rimworld. They
do not have the same level of depth, but they're enjoyable.

~~~
ducaale
There is also Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead[1] which is open source

[1] [https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-
DDA](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA)

~~~
X6S1x6Okd1st
I love CDDA, but it is not really that similar to DF. It's a very punishing
rougelike with a huge amount of depth, but it's an RPG style game, not a
strat/base management game, and it doesn't create a procedural story with Rich
depth, it was some fun depth, but that's coded in by the developers.

HN crowd might be impressed by the scale of the contributors though. Last I
checked it has over 1.1k contributors. Just cloning the repo takes a while.

------
jcrites
Dwarf Fortress sessions have been fun, but Oxygen Not Included provides a lot
of the same type of satisfaction (unfortunately with no combat aspect, but
much more complicated designing and building of systems) with great graphics
and great UX. It's 40% off on Steam right now:

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/457140/Oxygen_Not_Include...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/457140/Oxygen_Not_Included/)

The simulation is highly detailed, but in a different way than DF: liquids,
gases, creatures in the environment, and networks of machines that you build
to produce food and oxygen, recycle various elements, manage germs, and
generally keep your base alive. ONI is made by Klei Entertainment, an
experienced team, which is primarily known for the game series called Don't
Starve. It was in early access for a while and launched in July 2019. They've
been adding more content periodically for free since then.

I've enjoyed games of DF, but I'd find it hard to come back to after having
played games like Oxygen Not Included, Prison Architect, Rimworld, Frostpunk,
Banished, and so on. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with for
the Steam release, though, and maybe be willing to give it another try.

Factorio is absolutely amazing, but that's an entirely different kind of game.

------
otikik
I have learned to enjoy the game, but I enjoy it _despite_ the abismal UX. I
know other people can interiorize it, and that's cool, but it is not my case.

To be precise: I don't mind having keyboard shortcuts for lots of things. I
think that's good UX. But all options should be mouse-clickable too.

I find the separation between Designations, Piles and Burrows (or whatever
they are called) very confusing. In my mind they should be the same kind of
"thing" in the UI (a "zone"). Farms are their own "kind of zone", with a
custom UX which looks like the one used for building walls (which is just bad
imho, just let us click on the two corners please).

That brings us to my biggest grip: lack of consistency across different
windows. The initial overmap has a set of keys. The initial "prepare your
journey carefully" has a different set of keys for moving around the menus.
Then the zone designation window has _yet another_ set of keys to navigate
through the menu. The fortress task manager (where you queue new tasks) has
another. When a merchant caravan asks you what items they should bring next
year, that also comes with a custom UI which is not used anywhere else (and
also has its custom set of keys). The steps required to set tasks on each
dwarf are so contorted that there is a dedicated tool (Dwarf Therapist) just
for that.

And over all this, there is the military management window, which I have never
been able to master (I just rely on traps and atom smashers to deal with
baddies, mostly because of this, and the fact that ranged attacks have been
broken for a while). I wish Dwarf Therapist could handle that one as well.

This lack of consistency combined with the lack of mouse support means that in
order to play this game one needs to learn and interiorize a bunch of
keystrokes /for each single window in the game/. I understand that for others
this is not a huge deal, but this really puts me off. I don't have the mental
agility I used to have when I was younger and makes the game a struggle for
me.

But the stories produced are great.

On that note, if you just want to see Dwarf Fortress stories and don't want to
have to deal with all the UX issues I just mentioned, I recommend the
Kruggsmash channel. He really takes this game to another level:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/kruggsmash](https://www.youtube.com/user/kruggsmash)

------
totetsu
I wish they hadn't stopped the DF TALK podcasts. Listening to Tarn talking in
crazy detail about the 10 year plan for some new feature was one of the
sweetest ways to fall asleep.

------
ckemere
I've been thinking for a while that the creator of Dwarf Fortress should win.
Macarthur award. If any nominators read the HN comments, please consider!

------
zajio1am
I played DF for a while and seems to me that its main usability problem is not
text graphics, but general bad UI design. It can be used as a cautionary
example of why action-object (instead of object-action) approach and many-
modes lead to bad usability.

~~~
hu3
Interesting. So it's better to have a character interact with the object and
then br presented with action options?

I've been trying to learn game design.

------
nix23
DF and Aurora are the two 'games' i sunk the most time in by a far margin,
what two pieces of great software!!!

~~~
speps
Have you heard about Brogue[1]?

[1]
[https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/](https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/)

~~~
polytely
Brogue is so much fun, it hits the sweet spot for me between depth and
accessibility

