Hi, I’m hoodie hair, and it may not seem
like it if you’ve watched me learn how to build minecart tracks, try to tame animals,
or forget to brew alcohol, but I’ve been playing dwarf fortress for a little over a
decade. What originally got me into dwarf fortress
were the crazy stories people would tell about their games, and it makes me happy to have
done the same thing for some of you with my videos. That being said, there is a type of comment
that I get even more frequently than people telling me about the existence of bins or
that I should be brewing alcohol, and that is people saying something along the lines
of, “Cool story, I wish stuff like this happened in my game”. So today I’m stepping slightly outside of
my typical format and making a guide/list of tips for finding the stories in dwarf fortress
that I hope might be helpful for somebody out there. Tip #1: Name Your Dwarves I had no clue what I was doing for probably
the first 5 years I played dwarf fortress because I never read or watched a tutorial
and would just reference the wiki when I wanted to figure out a specific problem. Despite this I kept coming back for more and
that is primarily because I had a built-in story to get attached to because I would name
my starting dwarves after my friends and they would tell me what they wanted to do in the
fort and I would tell them how they came to an untimely demise. Naming your starting dwarves provides an easy
narrative to follow: how are the people who first came to your fort doing 5, 10, 15 years
down the line. Instead of having to pay attention to the
inner lives of 100 dwarves I would instead focus on the relationships, thoughts, and
feelings of the only 7 that really mattered to me. Because of this their deaths and accomplishments
felt more meaningful to me and that kept me playing the game. Tip #2: Embark with a Plan When I first started playing dwarf fortress
my plan was always to just survive as long as I could and see what my dwarves got up
to along the way. But as I got better it got easier and easier
to survive if that was my only goal. Now when I embark I generally have a plan
in mind. Build a dark fortress, try to make everyone
happy, start a unicorn ranch - all of these were ideas I had going in. Working towards something a little dumb that
actively hurts your chances of survival just a little bit can bring a little bit of chaotic
fun into the mix. I never would have lined the walls of my unicorn
pasture with elf bodies had I not robbed multiple forest retreats of their livestock. Having a plan also invites deviations from
the plan where the game pushes back a little bit and you have to refind your footing - like
when an artifact nazush is driving people mad in the middle of your mountainhome attempt. Stories in dwarf fortress are a conversation
between you and the game and having a plan gives you something to work with - whether
that is the game working with or against you. Tip #3: Be (a little) Reckless Just like all the points on this list this
won’t suit the temperament of every player but for me there is a reason I put levers
next to the bridges they control and provide doors to caverns. I could bury a control room with an immortal
necromancer in it under a mile of rock where it will never be accessed but that provides
less opportunity for chaos - and chaos is almost always what I am looking for in dwarf
fortress. When I got good enough at dwarf fortress that
I wasn’t concerned about my forts surviving anymore I had a brief period of not really
knowing what it was I should be doing and looking back my solution was to take risks. Embark in a haunted biome, roleplay a little
bit, build in a nonoptimal but pleasing way, there are a million ways to just loosen the
reins a little bit and allow the game to do its thing. If I never dug into the caverns I would have
never created a noble killing throne room and if I hid my levers away I would have never
had the moment of seeing my last dwarf save a cat and himself from a yak skeleton just
a few tiles away. Tip #4: Read & Write I have saved the most boring for last. Reading the thoughts of dwarves is a lot more
pleasing on the eyes now than it used to be, and the same goes for legends mode, but doing
a lot of reading is not always as fun as some of the other things you can do in dwarf fortress. Despite this I would say that the reading
is where the depths of dwarf fortress are found. This was a more obvious relationship when
looking at the graphics felt like reading but the internal lives of the dwarves are
perhaps the most fascinating part of the game and they can’t be accessed unless you do
a little reading. On the writing side of this I have found it
way easier to keep track of ongoing stories in my fortress since I started making youtube
videos and had to start taking notes to remember what happened when. My two videos on the goblin dancer Stozu Rushedhates
were uploaded 2 months apart and had 20 years of dwarf fortress history between them. If I hadn’t taken note of her and wrote
about her in August, there would have been no chance that I would have still remembered
her in November, and getting to see her again, one last time before the steam version came
out was one of my favorite moments in my pre-steam dwarf fortress videos. Ultimately there are a ton of ways to create
and find stories in dwarf fortress and if you have some feel free to put them in the
comments. My tips are just things that have helped me
figure out what I want out of dwarf fortress over the years. Hopefully they help some of you. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next
time!
