At a Q&A session at PAX East last weekend, a fan took the mic and insisted that Penny Arcade creators Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins try the indie game Dwarf Fortress. The kid couldn't have had better timing, because on Thursday, Bay 12 Games released the first new version of the freeware game in over a year.
Dwarf Fortress, aka Slaves to Armok: God of Blood: Chapter II Dwarf Fortress: Histories of Avarice and Toil, is the creation of brothers Tarn Zach Adams. The obtuse, wildly ambitious work-in-progress mashes the brutal dungeon crawling of roguelikes with the detail-oriented creativity of city-building sims.
As in Nethack, the game's default graphics are simple ASCII text, but those who can't yet see the Matrix can download a wide array of tilesets to make the game easier to immediately grok.
You've got to play Dwarf Fortress to truly understand the madness of its creators – and of its biggest fans. Or just reading some of the bug fixes from prior versions of the game, such as "stopped dwarves from choosing to sleep on top of traps" and "made cats able to carry vermin properly again," can explain a little bit. For a deeper dive into the the scope of the game, check out Dwarf Fortress Talk, the game's official podcast, where the creators answer questions from players.
If you opt to try out this new version of Dwarf Fortress, know in advance that it will be buggy – Bay 12 Games depends on its players to test and document faulty code. The brave early adopters ought to check out captain_duck's Dwarf Fortress video tutorials before they download version 0.31.01 of the game and get started.
Gabe and Tycho, we await tales of your tunnelings.
Image courtesy Bay 12 Games
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