Why Dwarf Fortress isn't like other games

This is review for the recent Steam release for Dwarf Fortress. It is probably the most unique game I've ever played. There is really no other games like it.
#DwarfFortress #DwarfFortressReview #DwarfFortressGameplay #DwarfFortressTips #DwarfFortressGuide

[@Maschine_Elf]

Ive been playing since I was 12. About 2013, and found it very playable. After a few dozen hours those ASCII symbols start to look warm and detailed. There was something comforting, interacting with such an alive feeling world to me, that looked like jumbled code to anybody else peeping over my shoulder.

[@george-stefanleoca1319]

A neat thing i did recently, i had this forgotten beast chad in a cavern layer, the madlad killed like 100+ mobs including other forgotten beasts, it had like a few pages of wounds, i built a statue in the name of the mighty foe, then i killed it, then i had like 150 dwarves collect body parts and skeletons for a few days and clean the whole cavern layer nicely xD

[@deuterium2718]

honestly, the old UI was literally just a list of keybinds, once you know which word & its listed button took you where it was super straight forward, the new more graphical one with symbols representing whole categories of old keybinds has me much more confused (but it is prettier)

[@thakin1109]

I hate the new UI. Hoping they add the old keybinds back

[@erwinthedodo9205]

I like the new ui but that's because I'm stupid. The old ui was definitely pretty neat tho

[@billyray9925]

@@thakin1109 I found the mod that visually adds keybinds to the new interface a godsend.

[@RilfDanielson]

I mean, you are used to the wacky old keybinds so of course you have a better time understanding them. But let me tell you to anyone new to the game but used to games like Rimworld, the knew UI is leagues better.

[@deuterium2718]

ehh, there's merit to that but my main point is the old UI literally just stated on screen what button would take you where and do what, instead of using a handful of graphical symbols to generalize whole categories of functions.

[@spencersullivan4447]

Dwarf fortress is a total chaos engine one of my favorite moments happened in my current fort I had a necromancer arrive with migrants I figured he would be good to put on the combat squad because of the whole “raise undead servants” thing but I then got attacked by a werelizard my dwarfs killed it in seconds but it rose as an undead and was infinitely harder to kill and still infectious. What’s more one of my civilians was bit and killed by the lizard he then came back as a werelizard and tore the necromancers head off before being taken down and somehow leaving three corpses to clean up. This game is frustrating and amazing and hilarious at the same time.

[@admiraltygaming3756]

Haha great story. Thanks for commenting it. That sounds like a gnarly combination of threats, and near impossible to deal with.

[@Azure9577]

One thing i dont like about the new graphics is that all the animations that are missing, like water flowing and waves in the ocean etc

[@stephan4921]

Actually, in a lot of old games the passage of time or the animation speed is tied to frame rate / clock speed. It's by no means a unique DF thing, but todays games usually use some delta time variable and advance the game state according to actual real time passed. If you take old DOS games and run them in dosbox for example, you can speed up the game by increasing the clock speed, which effectively simulates a faster CPU. I think it's just that when Tarn Adams (the main dev of Dwarf Fortress) learned programming in the 90s, a lot of the best practices etc. of today hadn't been established and game development was a lot different back then. It's just a rare game that has been in development for 20+ years and it never got a complete overhaul on how the engine works fundamentally to modernize it.

[@Drakuba]

afaik they overhauled the engine multiple times over the years, and they will overhaul it multiple times in the years to come. I can imagine myth and magic will need some room to breath

[@5peciesunkn0wn]

In the original game, you could move forward time by one tick by pressing the period key. That's unfortunately been removed for some reason, but you can get a similar effect by using macros since the space-bar pauses the game. So you make a macro of 'press space twice very quickly' and assign the 'activate' key as 'period'. This helps *immensely* in combat. Edit: There's also no way to see previously cleared logs so if you clear something, you can't go back and find it again which means no fun combat stories. :c

[@DrunkPopTart4]

I'm pretty sure you can still move time tick by tick, i've done it in my most recent playthrough

[@5peciesunkn0wn]

@@DrunkPopTart4 Oh? I'll have to take a looksie then, wouldn't have been hard to add as an update (I hope lol)

[@stevereddragon4542]

It's been updated to do that it's still the period key.

[@5peciesunkn0wn]

@@stevereddragon4542 oh goodie. :D

[@skyedogg]

I probably have brain damage but the ascii graphics are a lot more appealing to me. The opening section that describes the old version as unplayable is kind of funny but understandable

[@Toxodos]

I think factorio also has this fps/ups thing. Makes sense, because both are games that can get REALLY big and that way they're still playable when they have a lot of lag, they're just slower

[@admiraltygaming3756]

Ah makes sense. That makes two games where I've seen this feature now.

[@Anonymouthful]

Tiletsets exist, do people think the ASCI is the only way to play outside of Steam?

[@Wookiee925]

It was years after the first time I played that I learnt about all the extras like custom tiles and helper programs etc. 😅

[@Cyberwar101]

I learned the game back in 2018 one weekend when my internet was down due to a crazy storm. I had recently moved and it was one of a handfull of games on my computer. I had the in-game help and my own immense stubborness. I went through like five different fortress before i had a remotely successful one. But god it was a good feeling once i finally started understanding it lol

[@admiraltygaming3756]

Thanks for the comment. Yeah. The fun really begins when you know whats going on!

[@pyregazer9210]

Project Zomboid was inspired by Cataclysm DDA, but Catadda probably has a few inspirations from DF.

[@Val-ud9fn]

I'd recommend CDDA but it has a similar level of accessibility

[@pcppbadminton]

I played that for the first time a while ago, for such a simple tile-set it creates an amazingly believable world. I actually felt gross playing it. I'm ambivalent about playing it again because it's such a great experience but it makes me feel so bad trying to survive it.

[@sharkpyro93]

cdda needs something like this release

[@BRoyce69]

8:25 One of the biggest issues with the steam version(0.50+) vs legacy versions (0.47- ascii no mouse) is the change from a log system to the notification system, which is okay, but not without any backup logs.... it ties similar notifications together and makes them delete en masse as a whole, meaning any meaningful text logs, story or time-line of events is reserved for legends mode after, and impossible in an active fortress

[@JCWigriff]

I just subscribed today after finding your Kenshi review and have been going through your videos. Your content is great. I hope you keep at it.

[@admiraltygaming3756]

Ty for subbing and commenting. I'm building up the channel so every sub counts. New vid coming soon. :)

[@Silkaire]

Great review! I went ahead and subscribed.

[@sonkotyk]

Oh, I've seen this game while scrolling through the recommended games on Steam but it didn't caught my eye and the graphics seemed weird. Thanks for the vid, now I want it!

[@admiraltygaming3756]

Thanks for the comment. If you can overcome the graphics and the UI this game is a lot of fun.

[@OversizedPringleToe]

Try to play vanilla! When I started, which I had no information about it prior, it was not that hard to get into the ASCII version.

[@canmex9422]

there is one type of progress, iirc (if wrong, happy to be corrected on that), you can tame and domesticate animals. Depending on the world you create dwarfen civilzations that send out a 'new colony' (in other words start of fortress mode) can choose which animals to take with them (when preparing carefully). You can choose all the animals your dwarfs have domesticated. In other words if in one of your fort you manage to domesticate bears, in subsequent playtrough you can choose to take bears with you. Or at thats what i read in the subreddit and wiki a long time ago, never tried it takes decades in game.

[@philjohnson1744]

Nice vid. I liked the old way and thought that "graphics" would ruin the imagination of the game. I was so happy to be wrong.

[@viktorkolaric4156]

My most recent fortress had 0 deaths so far, i had children grow up to adulthood there. There are many pitfalls, like, never ever ever assign a bartender to your tavern. But once you have a handle on things it works fine.

[@clearsmashdrop5829]

re: Taking a while to learn the game. I played almost every day for 6 weeks before finally figuring out how to make soap on my own. I know I could have looked it up in the wiki but that would have felt like cheating.

[@admiraltygaming3756]

Haha nice. I still have no clue how to make it.

[@Isvoor]

You can set chairs to repeat without the manager by pressing the "recycle arrows"-icon at 5:19

[@BlackburnBigdragon]

For those of us who have been playing Dwarf Fortress for YEARS, the original interface was perfectly playable. And you didn't need to play with those ASCII graphics. You could install tileset packs into it to make the screen look like whatever you wanted. A lot of people, especially those who really weren't familiar with the game just downloaded the vanilla version, looked at it, and didn't go further, or learn about it, when in actuality, they should have downloaded the "Lazy Newb Pack" and started off playing with that instead because it automated a lot of stuff like tilesets and added a lot of other useful programs like legends viewers and custom tweaks that made it easier to learn. And this is DEFINITELY one of those games where you NEED to read the WIKI for, or where you learn by repeated failure. In the modern era of people who only know video games from game consoles or games without manuals, something like Dwarf Fortress would look like a confusing mess to them.

[@sharkpyro93]

as a person who play the game for 10yrs now, i think the people who tought the old UI was perfectly playable is an extreme vocal niche of another niche of players, countless of people wanted to play the game but the old ui and ascii graphics is a steep learning curve, people need to stop talking about the topic as if it wasn't a serious issue, and in my opinion if a game in order to be played properly needs a repack with tools that needed to be in the game in the first place, and that is not in the download section of the official site, i must say that i don't blame people who quit

[@aev6075]

I had extremely prosperous fortress where all kinds of creatures came to visit. One day a werecamel transformed in the middle of my most populated tavern and it became a massacre. For years my fortress was like a weird, fanfic version of the Walking Dead where my last surviving dwarves hid away and fought the werecamels which I tried to isolate when they became sane again. Now there's only one werecamel left and he is locked in the dungeon for some experiments (or more fun). While the same fortress was picking itself up with new migrants, I accidentally flooded half of the fortress when I was trying to get new underground fields watered. Now all my existing fields are essentially swimming pools that can't dry up because they are so deep. Don't know how I solve this one yet...

[@naringrass]

I had not realized how much Rimworld borrows from this game. truly dwarf fortress is the granddaddy of colony sims/story generators

[@george-stefanleoca1319]

I grew to love the classic graphs, well almost, custom templates are a thing.

[@hozic9929]

I love how i got a rat man killing most of the underground and even some beasts... and then he decided to become pacifist

[@LiamPorterFilms]

Best video I’ve seen in my research into whether or not to try this game

[@dhauz___7855]

I've got 769 hours in the game and I just learnt from this video that you can change the frame rate speed.

[@allot5530]

Is it hard getting Internet on the sea captain

[@JAHKABE]

You're gonna go far kid

[@theblackneon5396]

Altough 'Losing is fun' is the mantra of the game, I believe 'Dick around, find out' is the games motto.

[@baronbrummbar8691]

i played DF around 2012 and it was to much for me - i came back just about a month ago and are asstunished what progress the game made - BTW thanks for the alr -+ hint that was something i was searching for

[@dracsfantastic]

Thank you for this review. Just got the game and looking to dig in. Great video!

[@monke-dt1tn]

It just feels strange to watch a game give you so many ways to defend yourself, even knowing how overpowered they are. Like, drawbridges destroy ANY item/entity under them. You can fill the space with hundreds of traps and watch goblins get torn apart. Obviously, you can train your army, but it is less fun.

[@admiraltygaming3756]

Haha yeah. The game just gives you all the tools in the world, and its up to you to create your own balance.

[@monke-dt1tn]

@@admiraltygaming3756 I wish that enemies could use siege weapons (catapults), it would make defending your above-ground part of the fortress much more interesting.

[@ToeAndno]

@@monke-dt1tn The siege update is coming soon, this will make everyone's standard defences useless. It will be the next major update.

[@l.3626]

There is no way it looked like this before, before you explained I thought for a second it was a troll or a glitch, no way people played it that way with these old graphics, old gamers are the true OGs

[@laughingvampire7555]

what you consider to be horrible or a shame others, like the creators, consider to be the main feature

[@cleric7017]

I had no idea this game was modernised, or even on Steam

[@admiraltygaming3756]

Yeah. It recently released, it's a lot more accessible now.

[@arthurbarros5189]

I rarely hype things, and I had to run from any news of this game development, as I would spend the rest of the day hyped and thinking on fortresses designs so much it got into the way of my work.

[@FardtilUshid]

Could this be made voxel? Like The Quest controls

[@ezrawyrd9275]

Not exactly what you're after, I think, but in the OG version of the game (and probably the steam version, I haven't looked) there was a mod that would build a 3d/isometric view of your map and base so that you could get a better sense of the space. I think it was technically possible to play with it open but last I recall it dragged the fps to a screeching halt so it was best used for screenshots.

[@george-stefanleoca1319]

I got back up from a point where i had one unconscious dwarf left alive outta 100+ cuz flying forgotten beast, hole in the mines, no weapons/armor/trained dwarves and WEEEEBS. Got bombarded with waves of migrants, lost the fort a short while later tho in a similar manner or i couldn't get stuff done.

[@snickle1980]

Never knew you could have _Dwarven Weeb Migrants._ This game is insane. 😐 Dwu wu.

[@riverdweller3208]

caves of qud have an old school look

[@markkent8436]

I gotta try the steam version

[@GustavoSilva-ny8jc]

4:20 😂😂😂😂😂 that's AWESOME, it would be better if was a homeless person tho

[@WolverineTheWhite]

Like subbed commented for the YT algo! Side note, just released 2 parts of an animated history story to my fort if your interested!

[@Elmithian]

Oi, lazy newb pack makes you able to use way more easy to the eye graphics. It is one of the core thing most old players recommend new players to use to get into it the game. The ui would still be horrendous though. I had essentially memorised the inputs back when I played regularly. But please don't go into falsehoods for the sake of a dramatic line. There were plenty of graphic layouts available to pick from.

[@gazjaz2010]

it's glorified tamagotchi lol but I do appreciate the dedication of the creators.

[@Toxodos]

you do know you can clear notifications with a simple right click right? I'm just asking because your screen is so full of them. Personally I always check and then delete them right away, unless I want a reminder, e.g. when one of my dwarves has a strange mood and I wanna make sure he has everything he needs

[@admiraltygaming3756]

Haha yeah. Thanks for the comment. I try keep up with deleting them but they are just so many.

[@tangentric]

Just popping in on this, I have over 1000 hours on the steam version and I very strongly advise to not clear out the notifications if you’re interested in DF as a story rather than just a game. Once you clear a notification it’s gone for good, irretrievable, and often being able to go back to older logs is quite important.

[@ujjwalsingh5188]

I sub you : )

[@teepaul911]

The "playable" version gave me so much dizziness/lightheadedness

[@taco2188]

I had that problem with ascii except for adventure mode, all the moving parts really hurt my eyes even with tilesets

[@oscarpalma6352]

ORIGINAL GAME IS STILL FREE AND YOU CAN LITERALLY USE A PRE BUILT LAUNCHER TO GET SPRITES, SOUND, LABOR & NEEDS UI AND MOUSE SUPPORT(NEVER USE IT LMAO(xept to build massive bedroom layer(stay humble)))

[@SleepyGarysGameStream]

👍👍

[@waterisaneurotoxin7788]

There actually is a tech tree, kind of.

[@admiraltygaming3756]

Thanks for the comment. How so?

[@waterisaneurotoxin7788]

@@admiraltygaming3756 There is a knowledge system if I am rembering right were books written and existing in librarys can allow civilizations to do things, although last time I read this was on bay 12 a few days ago so the specifics may be wrong, but that is the general idea.

[@JAPerson34]

@@admiraltygaming3756 Also, to make steel armor, you need to make steel. To make steel, you need pig iron. To make pig iron, you need to make iron. To make iron, you need to mine iron ore. The tech tree is there, but it is not like a visual chart like in most games.There aren't knowledge points you spend on the tree. But there are tasks and items that need to be had to advance the colony.

[@zubinkynto]

@@JAPerson34 Yeah but that's a recipe tree, the real tech tree is the civilization knowledge system

[@leglaburgh1494]

@@zubinkynto That's right, after taming some hawks the game told me "The dwarfs of (my civilization) have now some knowledge about hawk taming", so that's not only an individual knowledge, but for the whole civilization. It's like a tech tree so.

[@wolf7379]

Bloody hell! Do I have to be a computer expert to play this game just to know how to manage the game speed?! The graphic put me off.

[@DarthFiscus]

unfortunately i get motion sickness from the choppy camera movement.Dwarfs moving tile by tile don't bother me but the camera should be smooth.

[@capofantasma97]

I tried it, but it's overwhelmingly confusing. They should take a few lessons in user experience by Rimworld and its mods.

[@johnjackson9767]

Unfortunately, the lesson you're suggesting to take from Rimworld is to dumb it down.

[@capofantasma97]

@@johnjackson9767 RimWorld has a fairly straightforward interface and tools to interact with the world. They're fundamentally different in a lot of things.

[@Azure9577]

​@@capofantasma97rimworld has a clean ui because its less complex The amount of stuff you can do in dwarf fortress makes a actually good ui practically almost impossible And that's without adventure mode! (Fortress mode is colony sim, adventure mode is direct control of single character)

[@capofantasma97]

@@Azure9577 I'm sure it can be worked around and re-elaborated. It's not user friendly at all. Rimworld has cleanly organized tabs, overviews, in Dwarf Fortress it's a mess and it's easy to miss something happening. I'm not so sure if modern Dwarf Fortress graphics are that much easier to read than the legacy colored ascii art, because they're pixel art that lack animations that would give more information (where are they going? What are they doing?) and make the world look very noisy, whereas Rimworld has a clear contrast between the looks and silhouette of items, pawns, buildings, structures and backgrounds (reason why some people still play DF in ascii mode).

[@Azure9577]

@@capofantasma97 i can agree on the lacking animations part, the new graphics lack a lot of animations from the old ASCII style, like water flowing or ocean waves

[@GeoffreyBronson]

I was about to be slightly insulted on DF's behalf when you said that the game was in a "playable" state...then I realised that I've been playing this game for a decade and only feel like I've started to get good recently (a big help to the steam version) so yeah..."playable" fits.

[@kredonystus7768]

You say that you aren't meant to care for individual dwarves but that isn't exactly true. Be a fickle god, pick favourites, breed jelousy. Also there is kinda an endgame and if you aren't sure what it is dig deeper.

[@shodan2002]

Lol I tried to explain the game to my friend he said wow that’s so cool and he gave up after 20 seconds because he didn’t want to read the tutorial and because there’s no walking animation it’s not even that much to read it’s a rather short tutorial I got 100 hours in this game i could have explained it faster for him oh well he’s missing out. It only took me one hour and few questions on the steam forum to learn it. ck2 was harder

[@underafger5417]

M

[@TprocNet]

This game was made in the majority of my lifespan :/ I... TAKE MY MONEY. not my usual kind of game but hell they deserve it

[@TheHyBriD3I6]

8:20you leanred the game wrong. it's oe of thoes games like dark souls where you learn it on the internet

[@SWA81]

They had tilesets before steam that gave a good UI. Jfc bad players lol