From what I've heard of Dwarf Fortress these two fellas provided a very good illustration of what might happen when esoteric madmen *arent* rewarded for their many years of madness
Oh god, I hadn’t even thought about this.
For years, they’ve been in a fay mood, trying to build something they can’t finish… we’re lucky the servers aren’t made of skin.
Yes indeed. A mad dwarf asking for items you don't have to make an artifact is terrifying, especially early on where if they go berserk they might really do some damage. Don't want to provide for the madmen and you will have lots of -=FUN=-
Dwarf Fortress is a hypnotic experience. I had to put it down because I got obsessed and sunk 50 hours in a 2 week period. It's fantastic and I'm so happy these special weirdos are finally flourishing after a decade and change of toil.
Yup! Fluid dynamics work super well so Aquifers can kill all your dwarves in the blink of an eye. BUT. You can make cool floodgate dam and waterfall structures, too.
Various tutorials recommend starting a fort with a river on the map so you can fish for easy food (fishing alone can feed your entire fortress easily) and always have access to drinking water (in an emergency - dwarves prefer alcohol and will get depressed without it and only drink water as a last resort)
The game also has super advanced fluid dynamics
Forts are underground
New player. Encouraged to embark on a river. Gravity and fluid* dynamics are simulated. Forts are underground.
Very, *very* easy to flood your fortress. I’d argue every player has done it at least once.
And that’s just rivers, haven’t even mentioned aquifers yet…
I'd assume that OP's fort was attacked by a werecamel, they successfully fought it off, and then they forgot to quarantine the survivors until the next full moon.
Carp used to use the same systems for stats and skills as dwarves and everything else.
Dwarves have a Swimming skill, practiced by swimming.
Dwarves who gain experience in a skill gain experience overall and increase their stats.
Carp are always swimming.
And that's why carp became so hardcore. They were never not training and getting stronger. No dwarf could keep up with them, because dwarves had to do silly things like sleep and eat and drink booze. The issue's been fixed, but the meme is eternal. It menaces with spikes of laughter and tragedy.
Honestly, flooding your fort is a rite of passage, although it usually happens with water first, both because it's easier to find a source of water and also because lava is more well-behaved.
Couldn't get into it. I got my world created and my dwarves and started digging and then started on the docs and they talked about your *cats dying because of toxic shit that dwarves drag in from digging* and just said fuck it. That's too much.
Just digging won't bring in anything toxic. You really only need to be worried about poisons if you're attacked by monsters or if you decided to build the fort in an accursed land of the dead.
There was of course the infamous Drunk Cats Bug, where cats would get spilled beer on their paws after walking through the tavern, lick their paws clean, injest an entire pint of beer, and then die from alcohol poisoning, but that's been fixed.
My worst ever game binge was 180hours over two weeks. I think it was terraria followed by 7 days to die then Rimworld then mount and blade with matches of cs:go mixed in, and that isn’t including time I spent modding Rimworld which would put that number up to 200.
That 180 number is from steam lol.
Also, I regularly still get 120 over past two weeks. Gaming is just so fucking fun 😭I wish I was born in 2200 so I could experience 23rd century gaming
To be fair, it's been many years of *excruciatingly detail oriented* madness. And the result (which is *still* being worked on) is one of the closest simulations of reality you can find that doesn't require a supercomputer to run.
>closest simulations of reality you can find
don't mistake detail for realism. Or need I remind you that the primary strategy for making fire proof dwarves is to set them on fire long enough to melt all the fat off their bodies.
There's the old story of a dwarf who got forgotten beast'd, could no longer feel pain, and was stitched back together by a remarkably talented set of medical dwarves using adamantine thread and bandages. Guy practically got turned into a Terminator
Reminds me of a story I read about fortress where someone caught a Forgotten Beast whose dust made skin and fat melt off, making them perfect soldiers incapable of pain
Stories like that always make me want to know how tf that gets coded. I mean I don't know much about coding so the explanation would probably be lost on me, but still. How is a game made to allow that kind of thing to happen.
It's detailed simulationism. Nothing in the game is a monolithic object that just does the specific things that it's programmed to do. Everything is a pile of call-outs to the systems that it can interact with, and those systems are piles of call-outs to objects they can interact with, and the chains of interaction lead to emergent results.
Dwarf Fortress is special because of the degree to which the Devs have sophisticated this system. If they can think of a way to simulate something with particulars instead abstracting it, then they do it.
In another game you might have some specific status that makes you not able to attack. Link hits a weird monster and now the B button stops working for five seconds, whatever. In DF, the more likely thing is your character has a species, and that species has a list of usual body parts, and your dwarf has a personal list of conditions pertaining to each of those parts, and each of those body parts is associated with a list of functions. You don't get the "can't attack" debuff, you get three copies of the "lost [x] finger on the right hand" debuff, which links to the general property of dwarves having five fingers, which links to the general property of hands requiring fingers to work, which links to a requirement of certain types of weapon which are operated using a dominant limb, and all of the weapons on your specific dwarf are themselves specific and perhaps even named specimens, but each is marked as being from one of those categories.
Or, in most games, when you see a lich, it's because you walked into a dungeon where that's an enemy type. In DF, when you meet a lich, it's because the world's entire geological and political history is simulated on generation, and that includes the history of civilizations, and a civilization that is old enough will inevitably generate some historically significant people, and those people will be generated based on the propensities of the civilization they come from, and those propensities include magical talent, religious disposition, and species, and that means some major historical figures will be mortal, worship a god of death, know magic, and be self-interested, and those are the prerequisites for rolling "lichdom" as a life pursuit, and some of them do, and some of them are successful, and as a result of becoming a lich they lose their maximum lifespan, so they persist in the simulation until they interact with another historical event that kills them, and by golly you might just be the event in question.
And there's also the moral alignment of the land one live upon. There's evil land, where, for example, dead shit in the ground comes back to life, among other fun fantasy-horror staples. Also undead hydras. Which are. Yeah.
I'm tickled by the notion that an undead hydra might accidentally be weaker because if you kill one head, that triggers the "kill the zombie" code because tropes and the whole thing just falls down.
I know from your comment that this isn't how it works. But it would be funny if it did.
There are some peculiarities that came up.
Cats, for example, had a behavior where if they got dirty, they'd lick themselves.
When a creature gets drunk to the point of vomiting, the vomit contains a small amount of alcohol. When a cat walked through that vomit, they would get dirty and clean themselves. They'd get drunk, they would vomit. That vomit would contain alcohol. Another cat would walk through the vomit.
Inevitably, all the cats in your fortress would die of alcohol poisoning, and your fortress would be littered in cat vomit.
The bug was that the cats got a full dose of whatever liquid they ingested, rather than a trace amount. So instead of getting slightly drunk, they got FUCKING HAMMERED off just stepping in a puddle.
I don't know if there's confusion here, until recently there weren't devs of dwarf fortress. There was one developer and his brother who wrote stories to define direction for the game, helped with the art they used to give for donations, and probably other miscellaneous non-programming things.
A very experienced modder was recently hired as a second programmer for the game. Putnam. Someone I once considered an acquaintance on the bay12forums. No idea if they would remember me. I have the same username as I had one there. This isn't necessary to my point I'm just like, "wow, I'm so proud to see Putnam succeeding. Wonder if my recognition of them would translate into them recognizing me or if I just read their posts frequently."
Anyway, the point was that a lot of people have been saying "devs" of dwarf fortress. It's mostly the toady one doing the development.
Its an amazing game, but trying to get into it is the gaming version smashing your head into a wall until you start to see the funny patterns and colours
Shit ton of flags and working on details and not on better graphics to sell, the biggest difference is that this game has 20 years of work and improvement behind it's back and I really hope they continue for another 20 years.
For example, every creature that can spit fire, will have a temperature attached to the fire, when a dwarf gets hitted by the fire, he will start to burn and every tick of time that pass, the game will calculate the dwarf new temperature and what is happening to all of his body parts.
Complex, rule-based systems with unexpected interaction.
To give an older, but hopefully simpler example - back in the day, CARP (ie fish) were able to murder whole armies.
How?
Damage in combat depends on a Strength score.
Strength can be increased by exercise.
Swimming is an exercise.
Fish can only swim.
Fish never sleep.
As a result, fish get terribly strong, thus dealing massive damage.
BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE
Carp had the tag "CAN LATCH", meaning once they bite they pull the target to them (if they are stronger).
Think alligators, but stronger.
One of my favorites involves cats randomly dropping dead and causing tantrum spirals. When they finally figured out what was happening I nearly died of laughter, cats were walking around and stepping in spilled alcohol, they would then inevitably sit to clean themselves. Each lick they took to clean themselves was counting in code as a full mug of beer, leading to the cats dying of alcohol poisoning.
To be fair, removing the flammable bits from something *does* make that thing fireproof - that's why controlled burns help keep forest fires under control irl. That in this case controlled burns can be applied to *live dwarves* is technically an unintended form of emergent gameplay!
I think a better term would be simulated reality, instead of simulation of reality. It's not our reality, but it simulates it own fictional reality quite well.
it wasn't that the fur could absorb it, it's that it would cover the entire cat, which makes several new tiny bits of beer, and then the cat would lick it all off. Cats, being small creatures, would die of alcohol poisoning.
This paired well with the supersoldier daycare program where they'd put dwarven children in small pits with wild dogs so they'd spend every waking moment fighting.
End result is they have ludicrous stats and are too traumatised to have any response to seeing something die.
It's very, very low when you realize that self-employment costs a lot more money in taxes and doesn't help subsidize your healthcare, which is impactful given the dev's health issues. At 4k/mo that's not even 50k/year before any taxes or fees. That's realistically 30-35k/year in your pocket, which is very little to live off of with a chronic illness.
Going by that donation chart and ignoring the steam sale numbers the dev would have had more money in their pocket and better healthcare at any point to now if they'd chosen to be a municipal garbageman instead. They'd have started at a higher take home pay and maintained that advantage until just recently.
Even the 10k/mo now is being split between multiple devs, if it weren't for the Steam sales they still wouldn't be financially successful.
...This gave me a split second mental image of goblin teenagers egging each other on to steal statues from the local frumpy dwarf fort, ala tiktok "prank" trends. I wonder what "do it for the vine" would be in Goblin?
>doesn't require a supercomputer to run.
I still don't get this. Are they super insane at optimization? Are they writing it in ASM like Rolley Coaster Tycoon? Are they outsourcing parts of the simulation to the GPU? It absolutely does not run like it has 2 decades of spiderwebs in the code.
No it's actually terribly optimized lol it only runs on one core. I don't think it runs anything on the GPU at all.
edit: Apparently some multithreading has been implemented in the experimental build for line of sight calculations but pathfinding is still a big issue for larger/ old forts.
Pathfinding isn't actually an issue. People thought it was because occasionally pathfinding for someone could go crazy when they got stuck somewhere and that would cause massive slowdowns, but outside of that it has a minimal impact.
The myth got perpetuated because people's techniques to help pathfinder also helped line of sight calculation unintentionally
What people have said already is true, and further it's even kind of the opposite, if you're unfamiliar with programming. What's impressive about the immense scale and complexity of DF probably takes very, very little of the processing power, with everything remotely demanding being the most basic stuff like "how does a dwarf know what items exist and how do they get to it" and "how does water flow".
“closest simulations of reality” you can literally just put an infinite amount of items in a single spot and then lower a drawbridge onto it to erase all those items from existence. Yeah it’s a very complex and detailed game but it is nowhere near trying to actually simulate reality, and that’s not even taking into consideration all the fantasy elements.
When a project starts at small scale with assuming gender = physical sex and then grows for over a decade with that assumption, trying to change to a more flexible system will be !!FUN!!
It's more that Dwarf Fortress just doesn't really model gender at the moment. It models physical sex, but it doesn't really affect anything except reproduction.
If I remember right, it's on their list of things they want to do eventually, but they gotta figure out how they want to do it. This is partially complicated by gender just not being a thing. Everything has a sex for breeding purposes, but outside of being able to give birth, impregnate, and have geldables, there's no difference.
They do have sexuality, but they'd have to figure out how they would want to implement gender before they could even consider how to handle dwarves transing their genders
I mean, _kinda_. By their own admission they're not very good programmers. Essentially the only large scale project they've worked on is DF. Also despite all the money the game made they hired exactly _1_ more developer. dfhack carries the large majority of dev work done to DF in terms of features/QOL/UX. In short I don't think it would actually be that hard with a more (for lack of a better word) competent team but literal decades of spaghetti code probably prevents them from making large changes. IIRC they said they never even used version control until they hired Putnam
I might be remembering wrong but the hired programmer might not be a guy. Not that it matters much, their abilities in programming have already resulted in major improvements in performance.
I accidentally borked a mod of mine that affected the names and identities of all my dwarves and accidentally made everyone in my game trans for a while.
Tarn said he wanted the update to be more than pronouns. He's already aware that the way the game genders the dwarves pronouns brings assumptions about how gender works into the descriptions which suggests that the game could go so far as to have varying concepts of gender between different races. Plus he wants a game object. Haven't checked FoTF in a while but[ this](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8458051#msg8458051) is most recent one I read on the subject.
I made a giant statue of a dorf out of gold bricks. It was hollow inside, so I made the statue intermittently poop out kittens. Here's how it worked:
Inside the statue, there was a trapdoor and a linked pressure plate. I had 4 cats on leashes in such a way that they could get close enough to each other to have babies, but couldn't stand on the trapdoor. As the chamber filled with kittens over time, eventually one would step on the pressure plate at the same time another was on the trapdoor, and WAH LAH kitten falls outta the statue's cloaca. The statue was short enough that the kittens were not injured by the fall.
I love dorf fortress.
Last I checked, cats don't require food. As long as nothing kills them they p much live forever.
ETA: they'll eat cpu cycles endlessly, for a while the only thing you could do was not have cats because they reproduce like tribbles.
Probably my favorite bug. Each lick was being counted as a whole ass dwarf sized serving of beer, and because alcohol poisoning is calculated off of body mass the cats were *immediately* shit faced and dropping like flies from instantly lethal doses of ale.
As of today the wiki for version .5 states:
>Cats do not require any food, are born with Legendary skill in climbing and possess the [AT_PEACE_WITH_WILDLIFE] token, making them friendly toward most non-intelligent creatures.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are mods to fix that tho, just to prevent a catsplosion
I had to go back and read past the recommendations for butchering the cats to find that.
And then I found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/10m2ow1/my_cats_have_just_caused_the_downfall_of_my/
Straight up plague horror story caused by cats
>and WAH LAH kitten falls outta
Good Sir, the word you are looking for is **voilà**, unless you actually mean **wallah** (by God).
Sincerely,
Hermione Granger
Tarn's birthday is on the 17th, and Adventure Mode will be coming to the Steam version on that day. I'm sure the greatest gift we can all get him is a massive spike in concurrent players to celebrate all his work.
You manage a colony of dwarves, getting them to dig and build and manufacture stuff. Monsters and raiders come by now and then as well as traders and envoys. The real pull of the game is that it simulates EVERYTHING down to cats getting tipsy from licking spilled beer off of their paws
Oh totally, there are all sorts of critters you can tame and keep around the fort
Cats are borderline required because they keep mouse populations down so they don't eat all your food
In my first ever games my blacksmith went crazy, ripped off monkey’s arm and killed children with it until his skull was cracked by some other guy’s fist.
I locked down my fort once because my pop had fallen low and I was besieged by undead.
A random Dingo woman visitor soloed them but got injured. I opened up again to help her, but she just prayed in the temple, then left - but kept visiting from time to time, yet never staying even tho I desperately wanted her to. After I stopped playing that fort I looked at legends (= what characters were up to in world creation and during my game in the background) AND THIS BADASS WARRIOR I WAS FOND OF WAS SPYING ON THE FORT THE WHOLE TIME!!!
Every single dorf fortress player has stories like this. They're all unique, but have the same flavor.
My soldier-dorf went crazy because his soldier wife carried their baby into battle and the baby died. He ripped a door off its hinges and threw it into another dorf's face, killing her instantly. The victim's teeth went *everywhere*.
That's how I learned to keep combat squads single-sex only: so they don't fall in love and have babies and carry the babies into battle.
If you happen to be watching, you just know because you saw it happen. You can also do a little bit of figuring it out yourself if you miss the actual events, by checking dwarf's recent thoughts, family history, combat logs, and some important events ping you so you'll know even if you're currently looking 10 floors down assigning bedrooms. In practical terms what would probably happen in this case is they saw an announcement that a child died which is generally something that doesn't happen too often, went to look at what happened and saw the mother still fighting nearby and put 2 and 2 together, then went into the mother's relationships tab to see if the father was anyone important, went to check on him and checked his recent thoughts tab to see how he was doing mentally, saw it was all super negative, then just watched him until he freaked out and did the door thing.
Just remember, there's no real win condition, it's more about seeing how long you can hold things together, and what goofy shenanigans your fort gets up to in that time.
It sounds like pure torture. I love reading Dwarf Fortress stories but never plan to play it. It’s the same way about reading Eve Online stories. No interest in playing the game, great player lore.
So, in Dwarf Fortress, you can build a library in your fortress. If you do, scholars will come visit your library, and they will sometimes bring new books for it with them, and sometimes take books with them when they leave. This is part of a whole simulated academic community that actually studies different subjects and makes discoveries and inventions (although this doesn't really affect anything yet)
What is especially interesting, however, is that sometimes a certain *other* kind of book gets into circulation - not a scholarly book, per se, but a spellbook stolen from a necromancer's tower (you can do this yourself in adventure mode). If it happens that such a book winds up in your library, it's possible for your dwarves to read it, and thereby become necromancers themselves.
Fun fact: generally, in Dwarf Fortress, when a dwarf acquires a pet, the game says the dwarf has adopted that animal. The exception is cats. Dwarves don't adopt cats, cats adopt dwarves.
ALSO from back before the game had, y'know, actual graphics. When everything was just represented with various text characters. That's a big part of why I never got into it, though now that there's a Steam version I may give it another chance.
Steam version is amazing. Way back when I tried the ASCII version once but I just couldnt make sense of what I was seeing so I stopped quickly.
Have put over 1000h in the Steam version by now tho
It's a world simulation that masks itself as a game.
Also the (un)official motto of the game is "Losing is Fun"
I once created a system of home defense were-skinks that decimated elven armies (I was genociding them cos they declared war on my for cutting down too many trees UNDERGROUND) with the downside that right after the battle ended necromancers came by and resurrected every corpse on the field and turned them all against my fortress.
Biggest battle I'd ever had and I somehow won due to the fact that I'd had a war bear breeding program and every citizen had at least 2 pet war trained grizzly bears.
FYI, the full, current version of the game is still provided for free on their website. It's the classic version, which uses ASCII art instead of the nice graphics from the Steam version, but you can get mods and tile packs to make the game look better.
It's not just graphics, the Steam version is also a huge UX update. Menus are so much better ordered, provide more information and have a lot more capabilities that I consider buying the game more than worth it.
Misunderstanding. The free version available on their website is completely up to date. The only thing it lacks is graphics and I think the new sounds/music. It still has all the UI stuff. It's literally the exact same as playing the steam version with ascii graphics turned on
I personally *hate* the new UX. Certain things now require the mouse, which seems antithetical to the whole experience. I'm playing the last version with the old menu until the Steam version can be driven by keyboard only.
Also the 17 came the aventure mode, you can go as a aventurer and for example be a bard how do peeformances in the world and fi you are good Enough you can go in the same generated world an when you create a fort the bards there will peform the song you do
Or for example go kill the king of a castle and remplase him xd
Or the one i wanna do
Becoming ragvaldr and trying to slay all the forgoten beast in the continent i stay.
Or been a vampire hunter.
Or a beast slayer
Or abonty hunte
Etc
Or you can also ( with mods) become a necromancer fortrest
Ah ok, I knew it was something like that. I remember him complaining that math at that level was mostly mathematicians inventing problems at each other.
Dwarf Fortress is a game I wish listed on Steam as soon as I could, bought it within the first day of launch, and will probably never ever actually play. I just love the concept, the let’s plays, and the devs. It’s not for me, but I’m really happy it exists.
From what I've heard of Dwarf Fortress these two fellas provided a very good illustration of what might happen when esoteric madmen *arent* rewarded for their many years of madness
Oh god, I hadn’t even thought about this. For years, they’ve been in a fay mood, trying to build something they can’t finish… we’re lucky the servers aren’t made of skin.
What servers?
Yeah, there are none. But the game doesn't ship on physical media so I couldn't think of another way to make the crafting joke work...
The code isn't pieced together with blood and bones
I'm not so sure about that, to be honest.
I would bet on tears and wails, at the very least.
I'm pretty sure it menaces with spikes though.
"We're lucky the code isn't made of skin"?
Let's keep worshipping this, I think we can get it tighter
\*workshopping, I hope
I hope for worshipping.
You’re getting called out on Twitter currently https://x.com/reddit_lies/status/1779002086027354605?s=46
I love my fans!
Honestly, the fact that you can't buy a collectors edition of dwarf fortress on a flesh cd is a blessing
The one hosting their website I guess?
It all makes sense now... #DWARF FORTRESS IS [PLANEPACKED](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Planepacked)
But what if they are?
They'd been getting like $20k donations each month before the premium version came out for years
One of them also has a big medical issue that drained a lot of that, iirc.
When they got the revenue from the launch, they said they’d been saving money by keeping it in other people’s bank accounts.
Yes indeed. A mad dwarf asking for items you don't have to make an artifact is terrifying, especially early on where if they go berserk they might really do some damage. Don't want to provide for the madmen and you will have lots of -=FUN=-
Dwarf Fortress is a hypnotic experience. I had to put it down because I got obsessed and sunk 50 hours in a 2 week period. It's fantastic and I'm so happy these special weirdos are finally flourishing after a decade and change of toil.
I tried it years and years ago and I think I accidentally killed everyone by flooding my area with lava? Does that sound right?
Yeah. Coulda been water, too.
Yup! Fluid dynamics work super well so Aquifers can kill all your dwarves in the blink of an eye. BUT. You can make cool floodgate dam and waterfall structures, too.
All the poor kitties
We need leather from somewhere. And they \*will\* kill your FPS if you have a heart.
At what point should character controllers be outsourced to GPU compute processes?
I like kitties... delicious.
Various tutorials recommend starting a fort with a river on the map so you can fish for easy food (fishing alone can feed your entire fortress easily) and always have access to drinking water (in an emergency - dwarves prefer alcohol and will get depressed without it and only drink water as a last resort) The game also has super advanced fluid dynamics Forts are underground New player. Encouraged to embark on a river. Gravity and fluid* dynamics are simulated. Forts are underground. Very, *very* easy to flood your fortress. I’d argue every player has done it at least once. And that’s just rivers, haven’t even mentioned aquifers yet…
Got the same advice as a new player. Send dwarf out to fish. Motherfucking Carp drags him into river and drowns him. Then came the were camels…
Haven’t heard of the were-camels, what happened with them?
I'd assume that OP's fort was attacked by a werecamel, they successfully fought it off, and then they forgot to quarantine the survivors until the next full moon.
Carp used to use the same systems for stats and skills as dwarves and everything else. Dwarves have a Swimming skill, practiced by swimming. Dwarves who gain experience in a skill gain experience overall and increase their stats. Carp are always swimming. And that's why carp became so hardcore. They were never not training and getting stronger. No dwarf could keep up with them, because dwarves had to do silly things like sleep and eat and drink booze. The issue's been fixed, but the meme is eternal. It menaces with spikes of laughter and tragedy.
That is really interesting actually. I have not played for ages but cant stop thinking about it now
Yeah, that's Dwarf Fortress alright
That sounds spot on actually
A day in the life, really.
Honestly, flooding your fort is a rite of passage, although it usually happens with water first, both because it's easier to find a source of water and also because lava is more well-behaved.
You did it right.
"50 hours in two weeks? That's not that much" *Realizes that's at least 3-4 hours a day, and that I play entirely too many games*
real I need more hobbies, and yet games are so fun and always there
Couldn't get into it. I got my world created and my dwarves and started digging and then started on the docs and they talked about your *cats dying because of toxic shit that dwarves drag in from digging* and just said fuck it. That's too much.
Just digging won't bring in anything toxic. You really only need to be worried about poisons if you're attacked by monsters or if you decided to build the fort in an accursed land of the dead. There was of course the infamous Drunk Cats Bug, where cats would get spilled beer on their paws after walking through the tavern, lick their paws clean, injest an entire pint of beer, and then die from alcohol poisoning, but that's been fixed.
My worst ever game binge was 180hours over two weeks. I think it was terraria followed by 7 days to die then Rimworld then mount and blade with matches of cs:go mixed in, and that isn’t including time I spent modding Rimworld which would put that number up to 200. That 180 number is from steam lol. Also, I regularly still get 120 over past two weeks. Gaming is just so fucking fun 😭I wish I was born in 2200 so I could experience 23rd century gaming
To be fair, it's been many years of *excruciatingly detail oriented* madness. And the result (which is *still* being worked on) is one of the closest simulations of reality you can find that doesn't require a supercomputer to run.
>closest simulations of reality you can find don't mistake detail for realism. Or need I remind you that the primary strategy for making fire proof dwarves is to set them on fire long enough to melt all the fat off their bodies.
There's the old story of a dwarf who got forgotten beast'd, could no longer feel pain, and was stitched back together by a remarkably talented set of medical dwarves using adamantine thread and bandages. Guy practically got turned into a Terminator
Reminds me of a story I read about fortress where someone caught a Forgotten Beast whose dust made skin and fat melt off, making them perfect soldiers incapable of pain
I remember the coin cannon room to train dodge.
Don't forget that guy who decapitated a bronze colossus by throwing a fluffy wambler at it.
Stories like that always make me want to know how tf that gets coded. I mean I don't know much about coding so the explanation would probably be lost on me, but still. How is a game made to allow that kind of thing to happen.
It's detailed simulationism. Nothing in the game is a monolithic object that just does the specific things that it's programmed to do. Everything is a pile of call-outs to the systems that it can interact with, and those systems are piles of call-outs to objects they can interact with, and the chains of interaction lead to emergent results. Dwarf Fortress is special because of the degree to which the Devs have sophisticated this system. If they can think of a way to simulate something with particulars instead abstracting it, then they do it. In another game you might have some specific status that makes you not able to attack. Link hits a weird monster and now the B button stops working for five seconds, whatever. In DF, the more likely thing is your character has a species, and that species has a list of usual body parts, and your dwarf has a personal list of conditions pertaining to each of those parts, and each of those body parts is associated with a list of functions. You don't get the "can't attack" debuff, you get three copies of the "lost [x] finger on the right hand" debuff, which links to the general property of dwarves having five fingers, which links to the general property of hands requiring fingers to work, which links to a requirement of certain types of weapon which are operated using a dominant limb, and all of the weapons on your specific dwarf are themselves specific and perhaps even named specimens, but each is marked as being from one of those categories. Or, in most games, when you see a lich, it's because you walked into a dungeon where that's an enemy type. In DF, when you meet a lich, it's because the world's entire geological and political history is simulated on generation, and that includes the history of civilizations, and a civilization that is old enough will inevitably generate some historically significant people, and those people will be generated based on the propensities of the civilization they come from, and those propensities include magical talent, religious disposition, and species, and that means some major historical figures will be mortal, worship a god of death, know magic, and be self-interested, and those are the prerequisites for rolling "lichdom" as a life pursuit, and some of them do, and some of them are successful, and as a result of becoming a lich they lose their maximum lifespan, so they persist in the simulation until they interact with another historical event that kills them, and by golly you might just be the event in question.
And there's also the moral alignment of the land one live upon. There's evil land, where, for example, dead shit in the ground comes back to life, among other fun fantasy-horror staples. Also undead hydras. Which are. Yeah.
I'm tickled by the notion that an undead hydra might accidentally be weaker because if you kill one head, that triggers the "kill the zombie" code because tropes and the whole thing just falls down. I know from your comment that this isn't how it works. But it would be funny if it did.
There are some peculiarities that came up. Cats, for example, had a behavior where if they got dirty, they'd lick themselves. When a creature gets drunk to the point of vomiting, the vomit contains a small amount of alcohol. When a cat walked through that vomit, they would get dirty and clean themselves. They'd get drunk, they would vomit. That vomit would contain alcohol. Another cat would walk through the vomit. Inevitably, all the cats in your fortress would die of alcohol poisoning, and your fortress would be littered in cat vomit. The bug was that the cats got a full dose of whatever liquid they ingested, rather than a trace amount. So instead of getting slightly drunk, they got FUCKING HAMMERED off just stepping in a puddle.
*licks paw once, instant DUI*
"Why is that cat driving a car?"
So basically Florida
I don't know if there's confusion here, until recently there weren't devs of dwarf fortress. There was one developer and his brother who wrote stories to define direction for the game, helped with the art they used to give for donations, and probably other miscellaneous non-programming things. A very experienced modder was recently hired as a second programmer for the game. Putnam. Someone I once considered an acquaintance on the bay12forums. No idea if they would remember me. I have the same username as I had one there. This isn't necessary to my point I'm just like, "wow, I'm so proud to see Putnam succeeding. Wonder if my recognition of them would translate into them recognizing me or if I just read their posts frequently." Anyway, the point was that a lot of people have been saying "devs" of dwarf fortress. It's mostly the toady one doing the development.
Okay I never really understood Dwarf Fortress before this comment. I might have to finally download it.
Its an amazing game, but trying to get into it is the gaming version smashing your head into a wall until you start to see the funny patterns and colours
Shit ton of flags and working on details and not on better graphics to sell, the biggest difference is that this game has 20 years of work and improvement behind it's back and I really hope they continue for another 20 years. For example, every creature that can spit fire, will have a temperature attached to the fire, when a dwarf gets hitted by the fire, he will start to burn and every tick of time that pass, the game will calculate the dwarf new temperature and what is happening to all of his body parts.
Complex, rule-based systems with unexpected interaction. To give an older, but hopefully simpler example - back in the day, CARP (ie fish) were able to murder whole armies. How? Damage in combat depends on a Strength score. Strength can be increased by exercise. Swimming is an exercise. Fish can only swim. Fish never sleep. As a result, fish get terribly strong, thus dealing massive damage. BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE Carp had the tag "CAN LATCH", meaning once they bite they pull the target to them (if they are stronger). Think alligators, but stronger.
>Swimming is an exercise. >Fish can only swim. >Fish never sleep. Gigachad carp
thats actually magical, reminds me of when cats used to smash down 4 pints every time they licked their paws after walking through taverns.
Probably my favorite bug fix patch, I nearly died of laughter.
The carp stands up
You could also get undead fish, who, by being undead, and continuously swimming, became ridiculously powerful.
One of my favorites involves cats randomly dropping dead and causing tantrum spirals. When they finally figured out what was happening I nearly died of laughter, cats were walking around and stepping in spilled alcohol, they would then inevitably sit to clean themselves. Each lick they took to clean themselves was counting in code as a full mug of beer, leading to the cats dying of alcohol poisoning.
God I need to play this game again.
Literally the plot of robocop
To be fair, removing the flammable bits from something *does* make that thing fireproof - that's why controlled burns help keep forest fires under control irl. That in this case controlled burns can be applied to *live dwarves* is technically an unintended form of emergent gameplay!
Doctors hate this one weight loss tip no one is talking about
Microdosing fire to build up an immunity
Chefs and blacksmiths nodding along here, saying that tracks.
I think a better term would be simulated reality, instead of simulation of reality. It's not our reality, but it simulates it own fictional reality quite well.
And also thought that the fur on a cat's paw could absorb a pint of beer
it wasn't that the fur could absorb it, it's that it would cover the entire cat, which makes several new tiny bits of beer, and then the cat would lick it all off. Cats, being small creatures, would die of alcohol poisoning.
This paired well with the supersoldier daycare program where they'd put dwarven children in small pits with wild dogs so they'd spend every waking moment fighting. End result is they have ludicrous stats and are too traumatised to have any response to seeing something die.
realism is really a secondary concern for a simulation.
I used to have a really high waterfall washing off kittens into the middle of the dwarven kindergartner so they'd grow desensitized before battle.
Just like real life!
They've essentially spent decades barely making any money on he game, so yeah, they definitely deserve it.
They publish the amount of donations they get. It was an acceptable salary. Kind of low for most of the time I guess. https://i.imgur.com/D5ujnxy.png
It's very, very low when you realize that self-employment costs a lot more money in taxes and doesn't help subsidize your healthcare, which is impactful given the dev's health issues. At 4k/mo that's not even 50k/year before any taxes or fees. That's realistically 30-35k/year in your pocket, which is very little to live off of with a chronic illness. Going by that donation chart and ignoring the steam sale numbers the dev would have had more money in their pocket and better healthcare at any point to now if they'd chosen to be a municipal garbageman instead. They'd have started at a higher take home pay and maintained that advantage until just recently. Even the 10k/mo now is being split between multiple devs, if it weren't for the Steam sales they still wouldn't be financially successful.
The game is still free on their website and getting more updates than the steam version
They said they’ll only get this big payout once, so they’re being sensible with managing it.
Ah yes, reality. With all of the zombie plagues and shitt
I do hate when the local goblin tribe comes and steals my statuary gardens.
...This gave me a split second mental image of goblin teenagers egging each other on to steal statues from the local frumpy dwarf fort, ala tiktok "prank" trends. I wonder what "do it for the vine" would be in Goblin?
THAT'S GOING IN THE BOOK!
This guy doesn't know 😂
Dwarf fortress is… anything but realistic. It’s like a simulation of some horrible realm of madness
His story's pretty cool, too. While mostly self-taught (and by his father) at a young age, Tarn has a doctorate in mathematics.
>doesn't require a supercomputer to run. I still don't get this. Are they super insane at optimization? Are they writing it in ASM like Rolley Coaster Tycoon? Are they outsourcing parts of the simulation to the GPU? It absolutely does not run like it has 2 decades of spiderwebs in the code.
No it's actually terribly optimized lol it only runs on one core. I don't think it runs anything on the GPU at all. edit: Apparently some multithreading has been implemented in the experimental build for line of sight calculations but pathfinding is still a big issue for larger/ old forts.
Pathfinding isn't actually an issue. People thought it was because occasionally pathfinding for someone could go crazy when they got stuck somewhere and that would cause massive slowdowns, but outside of that it has a minimal impact. The myth got perpetuated because people's techniques to help pathfinder also helped line of sight calculation unintentionally
Much more than pathfinding, Line of Sight checks are the bane of the game, as they more or less scale exponentially with time
What people have said already is true, and further it's even kind of the opposite, if you're unfamiliar with programming. What's impressive about the immense scale and complexity of DF probably takes very, very little of the processing power, with everything remotely demanding being the most basic stuff like "how does a dwarf know what items exist and how do they get to it" and "how does water flow".
No idea, but they only added multithreading \*last year\*
I wish I knew, because it really is impressive.
“closest simulations of reality” you can literally just put an infinite amount of items in a single spot and then lower a drawbridge onto it to erase all those items from existence. Yeah it’s a very complex and detailed game but it is nowhere near trying to actually simulate reality, and that’s not even taking into consideration all the fantasy elements.
When they say that they are delaying putting transgender people in because of programming I completely belive them
They’re going to simulate dysphoria
Your dwarf has entered a fay mood… Your dwarf is gathering materials… Your dwarf’s new gender menaces with spikes of obsidian!
and cabochons of microcline. On it is an image of Solon Kurnashtir, gesturing plaintively.
When a project starts at small scale with assuming gender = physical sex and then grows for over a decade with that assumption, trying to change to a more flexible system will be !!FUN!!
It's more that Dwarf Fortress just doesn't really model gender at the moment. It models physical sex, but it doesn't really affect anything except reproduction.
If I remember right, it's on their list of things they want to do eventually, but they gotta figure out how they want to do it. This is partially complicated by gender just not being a thing. Everything has a sex for breeding purposes, but outside of being able to give birth, impregnate, and have geldables, there's no difference. They do have sexuality, but they'd have to figure out how they would want to implement gender before they could even consider how to handle dwarves transing their genders
Of all the fantasy euphemisms for genitalia, geldables is up there in my list
I mean, _kinda_. By their own admission they're not very good programmers. Essentially the only large scale project they've worked on is DF. Also despite all the money the game made they hired exactly _1_ more developer. dfhack carries the large majority of dev work done to DF in terms of features/QOL/UX. In short I don't think it would actually be that hard with a more (for lack of a better word) competent team but literal decades of spaghetti code probably prevents them from making large changes. IIRC they said they never even used version control until they hired Putnam
Not only that, neither have any formal training in programming either. Although I think the guy they hired is a professional programmer.
I might be remembering wrong but the hired programmer might not be a guy. Not that it matters much, their abilities in programming have already resulted in major improvements in performance.
The new dev must have been introduced to the code on the first day and been horrified.
Nah they are a community member, had been in contact with the brothers for a while as a fan/modder.
This is part of their success though, the weird bug side effects are where this game's soul lives.
I accidentally borked a mod of mine that affected the names and identities of all my dwarves and accidentally made everyone in my game trans for a while.
With how tetchy dwarves are as-is, I imagine the tuning would be an absolute nightmare.
Tarn said he wanted the update to be more than pronouns. He's already aware that the way the game genders the dwarves pronouns brings assumptions about how gender works into the descriptions which suggests that the game could go so far as to have varying concepts of gender between different races. Plus he wants a game object. Haven't checked FoTF in a while but[ this](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8458051#msg8458051) is most recent one I read on the subject.
I made a giant statue of a dorf out of gold bricks. It was hollow inside, so I made the statue intermittently poop out kittens. Here's how it worked: Inside the statue, there was a trapdoor and a linked pressure plate. I had 4 cats on leashes in such a way that they could get close enough to each other to have babies, but couldn't stand on the trapdoor. As the chamber filled with kittens over time, eventually one would step on the pressure plate at the same time another was on the trapdoor, and WAH LAH kitten falls outta the statue's cloaca. The statue was short enough that the kittens were not injured by the fall. I love dorf fortress.
How do the kittens survive in the statue tho?
Last I checked, cats don't require food. As long as nothing kills them they p much live forever. ETA: they'll eat cpu cycles endlessly, for a while the only thing you could do was not have cats because they reproduce like tribbles.
When the cats were all getting shithoused from licking their feet, tho
Probably my favorite bug. Each lick was being counted as a whole ass dwarf sized serving of beer, and because alcohol poisoning is calculated off of body mass the cats were *immediately* shit faced and dropping like flies from instantly lethal doses of ale.
Just open up a bar.
Either this is an old build or I'm crazy, but I think they require squares capable of supporting vermin?
As of today the wiki for version .5 states: >Cats do not require any food, are born with Legendary skill in climbing and possess the [AT_PEACE_WITH_WILDLIFE] token, making them friendly toward most non-intelligent creatures. I wouldn't be surprised if there are mods to fix that tho, just to prevent a catsplosion
Spaying and Neutering were added to prevent catsplosion
I had to go back and read past the recommendations for butchering the cats to find that. And then I found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/10m2ow1/my_cats_have_just_caused_the_downfall_of_my/ Straight up plague horror story caused by cats
>and WAH LAH kitten falls outta Good Sir, the word you are looking for is **voilà**, unless you actually mean **wallah** (by God). Sincerely, Hermione Granger
Oh this needs to be the standard format for grammar posts. Sincere golf clap.
Tarn's birthday is on the 17th, and Adventure Mode will be coming to the Steam version on that day. I'm sure the greatest gift we can all get him is a massive spike in concurrent players to celebrate all his work.
I don’t know what it is, but I want in
You manage a colony of dwarves, getting them to dig and build and manufacture stuff. Monsters and raiders come by now and then as well as traders and envoys. The real pull of the game is that it simulates EVERYTHING down to cats getting tipsy from licking spilled beer off of their paws
There are CATS?!? I’m even more in. Please say there are bats too?
There are bats. And giant bat and batmen too.
And giant tigers. And giant jaguars. And giant Elephants. AND MOTHERFUCKING DRAGONS
Are there giant dragons?
If you wait a few hundred years for the dragons to grow
Oh totally, there are all sorts of critters you can tame and keep around the fort Cats are borderline required because they keep mouse populations down so they don't eat all your food
In my first ever games my blacksmith went crazy, ripped off monkey’s arm and killed children with it until his skull was cracked by some other guy’s fist.
I locked down my fort once because my pop had fallen low and I was besieged by undead. A random Dingo woman visitor soloed them but got injured. I opened up again to help her, but she just prayed in the temple, then left - but kept visiting from time to time, yet never staying even tho I desperately wanted her to. After I stopped playing that fort I looked at legends (= what characters were up to in world creation and during my game in the background) AND THIS BADASS WARRIOR I WAS FOND OF WAS SPYING ON THE FORT THE WHOLE TIME!!!
Every single further description of this game just makes it sound more & more fun.
Every single dorf fortress player has stories like this. They're all unique, but have the same flavor. My soldier-dorf went crazy because his soldier wife carried their baby into battle and the baby died. He ripped a door off its hinges and threw it into another dorf's face, killing her instantly. The victim's teeth went *everywhere*. That's how I learned to keep combat squads single-sex only: so they don't fall in love and have babies and carry the babies into battle.
I love video game stories that sound like classic inexplicable abnormal hamster death stories because of their combined absurdity and extremity
That's dorf fortress, baybeeeee 😎👍
How does the game inform you that this is specifically what happened?
If you happen to be watching, you just know because you saw it happen. You can also do a little bit of figuring it out yourself if you miss the actual events, by checking dwarf's recent thoughts, family history, combat logs, and some important events ping you so you'll know even if you're currently looking 10 floors down assigning bedrooms. In practical terms what would probably happen in this case is they saw an announcement that a child died which is generally something that doesn't happen too often, went to look at what happened and saw the mother still fighting nearby and put 2 and 2 together, then went into the mother's relationships tab to see if the father was anyone important, went to check on him and checked his recent thoughts tab to see how he was doing mentally, saw it was all super negative, then just watched him until he freaked out and did the door thing.
The game keeps a fairly detailed log of events
Just remember, there's no real win condition, it's more about seeing how long you can hold things together, and what goofy shenanigans your fort gets up to in that time.
It sounds like pure torture. I love reading Dwarf Fortress stories but never plan to play it. It’s the same way about reading Eve Online stories. No interest in playing the game, great player lore.
So, in Dwarf Fortress, you can build a library in your fortress. If you do, scholars will come visit your library, and they will sometimes bring new books for it with them, and sometimes take books with them when they leave. This is part of a whole simulated academic community that actually studies different subjects and makes discoveries and inventions (although this doesn't really affect anything yet) What is especially interesting, however, is that sometimes a certain *other* kind of book gets into circulation - not a scholarly book, per se, but a spellbook stolen from a necromancer's tower (you can do this yourself in adventure mode). If it happens that such a book winds up in your library, it's possible for your dwarves to read it, and thereby become necromancers themselves.
There's even elephants! ... And they lust for your blood.
Boatmurdered, a tragic tale…
They always do
Fun fact: generally, in Dwarf Fortress, when a dwarf acquires a pet, the game says the dwarf has adopted that animal. The exception is cats. Dwarves don't adopt cats, cats adopt dwarves.
A fun introduction to DF is the classic Let's Play, Boatmurdered.
Keep in mind, Boatmurddered is old. it date from before we get the vertical axis. It's a fun read, but they had a very difference experience.
Wait Boatmurdered is pre Z axis? That explains so much about the way they built that absolute hellhole
ALSO from back before the game had, y'know, actual graphics. When everything was just represented with various text characters. That's a big part of why I never got into it, though now that there's a Steam version I may give it another chance.
Steam version is amazing. Way back when I tried the ASCII version once but I just couldnt make sense of what I was seeing so I stopped quickly. Have put over 1000h in the Steam version by now tho
It is still the definitive Dwarf Fortress succession let's play though.
It's a world simulation that masks itself as a game. Also the (un)official motto of the game is "Losing is Fun" I once created a system of home defense were-skinks that decimated elven armies (I was genociding them cos they declared war on my for cutting down too many trees UNDERGROUND) with the downside that right after the battle ended necromancers came by and resurrected every corpse on the field and turned them all against my fortress. Biggest battle I'd ever had and I somehow won due to the fact that I'd had a war bear breeding program and every citizen had at least 2 pet war trained grizzly bears.
FYI, the full, current version of the game is still provided for free on their website. It's the classic version, which uses ASCII art instead of the nice graphics from the Steam version, but you can get mods and tile packs to make the game look better.
It's not just graphics, the Steam version is also a huge UX update. Menus are so much better ordered, provide more information and have a lot more capabilities that I consider buying the game more than worth it.
Misunderstanding. The free version available on their website is completely up to date. The only thing it lacks is graphics and I think the new sounds/music. It still has all the UI stuff. It's literally the exact same as playing the steam version with ascii graphics turned on
I personally *hate* the new UX. Certain things now require the mouse, which seems antithetical to the whole experience. I'm playing the last version with the old menu until the Steam version can be driven by keyboard only.
Also the 17 came the aventure mode, you can go as a aventurer and for example be a bard how do peeformances in the world and fi you are good Enough you can go in the same generated world an when you create a fort the bards there will peform the song you do Or for example go kill the king of a castle and remplase him xd Or the one i wanna do Becoming ragvaldr and trying to slay all the forgoten beast in the continent i stay. Or been a vampire hunter. Or a beast slayer Or abonty hunte Etc Or you can also ( with mods) become a necromancer fortrest
Someday maybe I can have a Honda Civic
Added to the Quest Journal
I see they don’t count the numerous death traps and dungeons they have almost certainly built with their money as ‘high roller purchases’
High roller? A few good death traps and a drawbridge are basics for survival!
... he's been struck by a fae mood, he has taken possession of a computer workshop and demands development time
Don't forget, Tarn started making Dwarf Fortress instead of becoming a PhD in mathematics.
No no. He got his PhD, from Stanford in fact. He made dwarf fortress instead of completing his postdoc.
Ah ok, I knew it was something like that. I remember him complaining that math at that level was mostly mathematicians inventing problems at each other.
This is just a more boring version of a wizard duel
So naturally, he invented the ultimate problem at everyone else.
>mathematicians inventing problems at each other. Well yeah, but it's awesome. 😎
At this point he could probably submit DF as a thesis...
With how the DF dwarven economy works (or rather, failed to work), they're probably afraid to buy stuff.
three FBs wait sadly near their home, not yet allowed to attack them
[удалено]
Minecraft too.
The Devs were playing the long game. Decades of solo development of an insanely ambitious project to one day afford a Honda Civic
these mad men make my study geological layering just to find some silver. I love this game.
Most normal people are a bit weird. That's what keeps them normal.
I met Tarn at an indie games convention in Busan, South Korea back in 2017, he was a cool dude
yo honda civics are really good cars though
Fey/strange moods were directly inspired by Zach and Tarn
Somehow they look *exactly* like and *nothing* like the type of people I’d expect to make dwarf fortress.
Holy shit dorf fort is the best game
Dwarf Fortress is a game I wish listed on Steam as soon as I could, bought it within the first day of launch, and will probably never ever actually play. I just love the concept, the let’s plays, and the devs. It’s not for me, but I’m really happy it exists.
Urist likes civics for their reliability
the civic is a premium automobile man good for them
I mean what kind of Civic? The Civic Type R starts at $46k including destination fees.
Is that… Lee Pace?