Blog 3: Slaves to Armok, God of Blood Part II: Dwarf Fortress

My wild blog title today refers to the full title of a game more commonly referred to as simply "Dwarf Fortress" by its own cult following. Dwarf Fortress is a procedural fantasy world simulator, with the player's main objective is to manage a colony of dwarfs. This involves managing various intertwining industries from brewing alcohol, to growing, hunting, butchering and cooking food, to mining and smelting ore in order to forge metalwork, armor and weaponry, all these and more, along with all the workers that facilitate these jobs getting done. The depth of the systems that make up the game is often detailed, and even realistic in some ways, many things are simulated in the world constantly, from the thoughts occurring in the simulated minds of NPCs reacting to the world around them, to the actions of interacting civilizations in both peacetime and war. Some have speculated that dwarf fortress is the most complex game that exists, and yet it this project, which has consistently released updates for free for over a decade, has only two developers: brothers Tarn and Zach Adams who accept donations but require no payment to enjoy their games.

The amazing thing that tops it all off, has to be the almost inscrutable user interface design and graphical style I've ever seen, with the world of dwarf fortress being rendered in colored ASCII characters. Due to the UI situation and the controls essentially being nothing but a huge list of keybound commands, you have to really work at it in order to learn and enjoy this game, and with a couple hundred hours logged I've certainly worked at it and enjoyed it.