Dwarf Fortress News

Hello there!

When you're starting out in Dwarf Fortress, there's a lot to learn, and we're working now on various forms of tutorialization and instruction to help out new players.

First off, when you are placing your fort, you'll have an option to have the game pick a spot in the world you've made where it can do a more traditional tutorial:



This is the camera controls tutorial. It's important to lead with this since the elevation slices can be a little confusing if you haven't played a game with them before. Once you can operate the camera, we expand out into mining, woodcutting, stockpiles, and workshops.



Another way we can teach people is to have popups on any menu that might be confusing. These are all works in progress, but in the image above you can see the general idea.



Finally, tooltips, tooltips everywhere. We have 350 so far, and we'll keep on adding them until everything makes sense!

This isn't all we have planned. You may have noticed the help button at the top of the screen. Here we'll have more information, and we're thinking about ways to guide players toward goals and things they might have missed in a more interactive fashion as well.

- Tarn

This is the anatomy of a bug that wasn't, and an opportunity to show you how detailed and precise Dwarf Fortress is to the extreme. It is the story of a golden crossbow called Katdiriteb. The weapon was the first unique treasure created in my fortress of Riverdeath, a settlement named after the drowning trap I was using to test pressure plates. The tale of intrigue was decades in the making, revealed by interrogating the surviving conspirators and cheating by looking up the principals in Legends mode.

It all began years ago in 26, when a dwarf named Dakost Busttrust became Captain of the Guard in the nearby capital of Caveclouts. Almost immediately afterward an underworld of necromancers lurking in a nearby tower began to try and turn him to a life of evil. It was his respect of the law, the same quality that made him a good law dwarf, that saved him from temptation. Alas, all things must pass into the night.

It was vanity and his own obsession with mortality that caused Dakost to give up the honest life. In his declining years he went to explain his problem to the necromancer Ineth Kekimmosus. That was the day, in the year 90, Daskost became a villain and his moral flaws became the defining part of his personality.

The dwarven civilization, of which Caveclouts was part, had been at war with the goblins of Hatredmourns for many years when Dakost met Mistem Taderith in 59, three decades before Dakost turned. There, their friendship was forged as they stormed the wicked fort where the goblin warlord had his arm bitten off by one of their war alligators. Mistem was a violent and greedy dwarf, so when the villain Daskot came to her years later she accepted his bribe and in 92 became his professional thief.

In the year 102 Mistem came to the fortress of Riverdeath, disguised as the scholar Id Knifescribes, an expert in agriculture. She had heard of the golden crossbow and immediately went to search for an accomplice. She finds the gullible dwarf Rovod Gemsitthob and turns him with flattery, but he is struck down in a freak giant attack in which he kills the giant that killed him.

It was winter of the next year when Mistem, now Id Knifescribes, tries again. This time she threatens the cowardly dwarf gelder Nish Guildvaults into stealing the crossbow for her. She heads back to Caveclouts after arranging to meet Nish for the crossbow in the spring.

(TL/DR) You can skip the background. It's just for those of you who I know will get a kick out of Legends mode.



The handoff. This is where the story collides with my fortress, four years after the default start date of the spring of the year 100. It's standard for villains to find a quiet place for the thief to hand them the stolen treasure. In this case they chose the library. That wasn't smart as the pair were seen by seven people.



It just happens that there are only two ways out of Riverdeath, and after I close the main gate, that leaves the twisting, and twisted, drowning chamber. You can see the thief running for the exit in the south right after the dwarves throw the lever and trap her inside.



Here we see the dwarf calling herself Id Knifescribes, with the artifact golden crossbow Katdiriteb strapped to her body. You can see she is disguised as a scholar interested in farming. I have already interrogated the thief that gave it to her. All that's left is to arrest her, get back the stolen treasure, and question her to get to the bottom of this conspiracy.

This next part is where the game got too clever for it's own good. When we watched Id Knifescribes reach the closed gate at the end of the drowning chamber, she looked confused for a little bit, then turned around and walked about a dozen tiles and just disappeared. I thought to myself, is she like the kobold thieves and became invisible? Did we program the artifact thieves to just path through walls if they get stuck? If so, I had just found a really insidious bug!



No. The truth was far more embarrassing. You can see here, one level above the drowning chamber. There is the closed gate. There is the trapped hatch to the death hallway. Circled in red, you can see down through a hole into the wood paneling below. When I was pulling up trees to build my wooden fort, the roots left a hole in the ground through which Knifescribes escaped. We have since erased this bug from our to-do list.

- Zach

Hello!

We're continuing to work through the last fortress management menus. Here I'll go through an example of the job details menu.



Depending on the kind of job, you can set further details about it. Clothing can be sized for creatures other than dwarves, decorations can be specified, and many items can be made using particular materials. This rock statue job can have the stone specified and you can even set the image the artisan depicts.



I'll pick marble here from the list of materials. Materials that are available are listed on the top, but you can also set the job to use materials you're planning to have available later.



I want a statue of a platypus thinking about stuff, and I can set that up here. You don't need to fully specify the image. If you want the artist to make an image of their choice concerning a historical figure or site, you can do that too. You can also tell them to recreate the symbol of your civilization or group, or go with the default and let them do whatever they want.



We name the image using the dwarven language. There's only one grammatical form currently, but it's enough for us to specify a variety of names.



Finally we can pick a spot for the statue and admire it!

- Tarn

Hey folks!

Tanya here, while Alexandra is on vacation. Meanwhile, Tarn and Zach are heads-down integrating interface into their various menus, because... drumroll please... we have an artist working on making new icons and interface elements! In fact, she's a new artist, so please welcome Carolyn Jong, a Dwarf Fortress player and pixel artist, as well as Guido (perhaps better-known among some sprite artists as Neorice). Carolyn, Jacob, and Guido will all work together to get the game fully art-ified.

Speaking of which, Guido drew a few new strangers we can show you. Asked about them, Zach says "Deep under the ground, and in the farthest wilds, there are strange people. Like feral beasts they spend most of their time thinking about food and romance, ignoring the irrelevant, such as your dwarves. For they are not ordinary people... they are animal people. It's best to keep your distance and let them be, for one day they may come to you looking for adventure!"

So, feast your eyes on some top-tier animals and the animal-people they correspond to:



Tarn particularly likes the snowy owl person, and called them, "a good chonky floof". We can all agree.

What animal-people are you looking forward to most? Any favorites from your playing in Classic? Tomorrow, I'll try to prioritize showing a preview of at least the first few answers in the comments in a reply, assuming those exist somewhere in the sprite sheet I have...!

OK going back to work,
Tanya (Captain of Kitfox Games)

P.S.
If you're subscribed to the Dwarf Fortress newsletter, you might have seen this post some hours earlier in your email inbox.. though I suppose it also didn't properly explain who Guido is, and the image would have been less... polished, let's say. You win some, you lose some.

Tarn and Zach will be live on Twitch with us tomorrow at 2pm Eastern to celebrate Kitfox's 9th birthday. We will be talking all things Dwarf Fortress from game design, the newest updates and maybe we will even see Scamps!

Single-player or co-op, horror or cute, romantic or funny, roguelike or mystery -- we have something for everyone! Starting from this very moment, the whole Kitfox catalogue is on sale to celebrate the company's founding, a whole nine years ago.

We'll also be streaming schedule with our developers and special community guests, from today and going all week! Our plan is to stream most days at 2pm Eastern time, either here on Steam or on Twitch, with this schedule:




So come with all your questions and pick up a few cool indies for your library!

-Alexandra + Tanya