Hello! And welcome to my tutorial for the game Dwarf Fortress. Now, I'm going to go ahead and assume you haven't played the game before, and so our goal today is to get you started playing what is considered by many to be the most complex video game ever created. But, don't let that scare you. I'm actually going to show you that it's not that bad. In fact, I should also mention that Dwarf Fortress isn't technically a game either. It's more a fantasy world simulator. So keep that in mind as we go through this. The goal isn't to win, like a game. The goal is to have an experience. That being said, I'm probably going to continue calling it a game, out of force of habit. You know how it is. Now I plan for this to be a rather basic tutorial. And so today we are actually going to be trying to cram all this information into a single half-hour episode. And you know what? We have a lot to learn today. And so we should get straight to it, shouldn't we? Now then, starting at the very beginning we have to install the game. So, we just have to go over to bay12games.com/dwarves Which will bring us to the Dwarf Fortress website. And we can head over here and download whatever one we want. I'll be downloading the Windows version. And once that's all set we can go down here Show in folder. And we are going to extract this. Easy enough, right? Now, this is just the way I typically go about doing it. If you like to install things differently go straight ahead. Now, I'm going to throw this thing right out here on the desktop. And we are going to call it something clever, like "DF". There we go. Now we are going to open that file, Go down to Dwarf Fortress, and we're going to open it. Alright and you see the game opens up. There is a nice little intro here. But the window is far too small. And so we're going to have to adjust that a bit Plus, I'm gonna show you how to install a basic tile set. We're gonna be using my own today, because I always have people ask me how to install that thing. So yeah, I'm just gonna show you how to do that. We're just gonna quit out of the game for now. There we go. Now then, we're going to come over here. Go to "data" And we'll go to "art". There are all the current tile sets that come with the game. And we're gonna throw in this file right here. Just a bit-map file, called "Kruggsmash". This is my tile set. And we're going to put a link to it down in the description below this video. And so you can snag it there. Now that the file's in there, we have to tell the game to use it. So we're going to go back. Down to "init". And once again "init", this text file. We're just gonna change a couple of things here. I'm going to turn the sound off. Just because I'm recording the game here. And we're not going to want this windowed, either. And now, let's see here, we're gonna go down to... Full screen, I'm gonna keep these both as 0. Because then the game will resize the window to my screen. But then down here, we're gonna change this "curses" to "kruggsmash.bmp" Couple other things I'd like to do here. I'm going to change BLACK_SPACE to "NO". In TRUETYPE I'm going to change to "NO" And... yeah, that's gonna be about it. So we're going to save, and close this. One other thing I'd like to do, is to go to "colors" here. And I'm going to change the colors that are found in the game, to my own color values, which can be found in the description as well. There we go, just like that. Real easy. Now we're going to save. Close that. And now I think we can start the game. Let's see. Ah, yes, there we go. Skip the intro. And now we're ready to start playing Dwarf Fortress! So we now have a set of wooden double-doors going into the fortress. Pretty neat, right? Now we'll unpause the game and see what happens. Here you can see that all the dwarves are heading over to the Carpenter Workshop and grabbing furniture And then they'll run inside and put it wherever we have it placed. There we go! You could say our little fortress is coming right along, isn't it? However, I'm going to pause the game here Because the dwarves aren't going to use these rooms unless I tell them to use these rooms. And to do that we can hit 'q' just like we do with the farm plot or the workshop
I 100% understand everyone who cannot get into this game. There's no graphics to speak of, the UI is.. well, there is one. You have to learn it, like you learn any language. There's absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. The complexity is beyond reasonable, and it throws you right into the middle of it with no tutorial whatsoever. Some people even give up before they reach the main mode and I fully get that. How are you even supposed to know what kind of world you should generate? And don't even think about playing the game without having the wiki open 24/7.
And even if you get into the game, you'll have to be damn good to get very far. I'm not very good. I've never seen a dragon or a hellbeast. Evil regions scare me.
But if you get past that, eventually, you are practically guaranteed one of the most amazing experiences of emergent gameplay you've ever had.
This game isn't scripted. Nothing is. And yet virtually everyone has a wonderful story to tell about how his fortress was destroyed and how everyone in it died a horrible, painful death.
One of my favorites was that one time I settled my fortress near a necromancer's hideout. It was a new patch, and until then, the surroundings past your "map" didn't really matter, and I figured settling near an evil area without being actually in it would keep me safe. Oh boy.
Usually, after a few in-game months, your fortress gets attacked by a bunch of incompetent kobolds. This is mostly to ensure you have at least some military early on to deal with those pesky things. So when the screen flashed with "SIEGE", I didn't think much of it. Must be the kobolds arriving.
Only why are they not looking like kobolds? Why are they undead? And why on earth are they coming from the north, the south, the east and the west simultaneously? And why is there a Necromancer in the list of creatures on the map? Uh. Better get my military ready.
Turns out, instead of the expected 4-8 kobods, close to 50 undead came from all directions, outnumbering my 30 or so dwarves. Not good. One of my dwarves was hunting outside and went to attack an undead.
Turns out, undead don't care about arrows sticking through their bodies. They just kept on marching on. In close combat, my marksman dwarf used a knife to cut off the hand of a zombie. The hand proceeded attacked my dwarf and strangle him.
He was overpowered not long after. He died. And then he stood up again, turned around and meandered towards my fortress along with the other undead.
My small military died within seconds of attacking the enemy forces. They turned, and now the undead had armed and armored dwarves on their side.
I closed off my fortress, panicking. At least they couldn't get inside, right? Just keep the doors closed and locked. Granted, we would just all starve, but hey.. it's a start.
That's when the dwarves began to rise from their graves from within my fortress, slowly climbing their way up the stairs to the main hall.
Also, various body parts in the butcher's shop began to come to life, attacking everything in sight.
The entire fortress was in full on panic mode in no time. Dwarves fighting for their lives, fleeing into small corners or right into the hands of the undead outside, or just sinking down into a fetal position, shivering and crying quietly to themselves.
My entire fortress turned into a fortress of the undead in record time. The last surviving member of my dwarves was a recently born dwarf kid, naked, covered in the blood of their (now undead) parents, and crawling around in the halls, hungry, crying and very, very unhappy.
I closed the game before the zombies got to him.
Dwarf fortress is a game Iβve always wanted to get into but never could! Iβll be sure to check out the video after work
Kruggsmash is great, I've been watching his content since he started. It is obvious he enjoys what he is doing and puts a lot of effort in to each episode, it is a joy to watch.
Hopefully this will inspire some more people to play Dwarf Fortress, it really is a fantastic experience. I'm not entirely sure I'd call it a game.
I REALLY do want to try and work my way into understanding this, especially given the stories surrounding it (primarily the fortress of Boatmurdered). It seems like one of those games that I'd straight up have to block off time to understand. In the meantime, Rimworld provides a much more user-friendly UI, though it doesn't have some of the features that Dwarf Fortress does (like Z-levels, for example).
Also to keep an eye out for is the Seed MMO, supposed to be like both games, but on an MMO basis. Don't know how it'll pan out, but the potential is there!
If you're looking for a game like this with a less scary/terrible interface and with graphics, check out RIMWORLD.
I've absolutely fallen in love with it recently. Same style gameplay but it's easily learnable and very fun to play.
This is a game that I always think about getting into but know that I'm going to uninstall it in like an hour, I would probably have more fun reading about what people do in it than I would playing it.
i still remember when my fisherdwarf went out to do his job and vanished. WHen my hunter found his body,he was attacked by undead crabs and my fortress was destroyed by a necromancer.
This video oddly adorable. I wish all complex games (video and board) were explained by a crayon drawn dwarf.
My first fortress caught on fire. The whole thing. Dwarf immolated himself while drunk and tried to hug everyone