Dwarf Fortress News

Hello!

We've been working on the building construction interface, which covers everything from workshops to bridges to farmplots to walls, and are making good progress there. Placing and sizing rectangles with the keyboard sometimes require a lot of keypresses, as you can imagine, and we've got that all up and running with the mouse now, which is much more efficient. We should be able to show that in a bit. In the meantime, let's take a look at wells!

Now, dwarves drink in the game, hard stuff, lotta drinkin'. This is fine for them. They work slower without it. But sometimes water is needed, for bathing or for the hospital, say. If you want to control the water supply, or you want to stay away from giant cave crocodiles, it can be prudent to carve out a cistern and place a well several Z levels above the water itself.

For demonstration purposes, since we haven't finished the graphics for flowing liquids away from natural sources, I set up a well on a wooden platform above a river. Here's the stilts and a block stairway upward:



Two levels up, we have the platform and the well itself:



This well uses a rope. You can also use a chain. A well also requires a bucket, some blocks for the low wall, and a 'mechanism', which is used in Dwarf Fortress for any machinery, included levers and certain workshops.

Once I got the little demo area set up, I cruelly used a debug command to destroy all the booze in the fort and also make all the dwarves thirsty. Here you see them rush up the platform to quench their thirst, and you can see the empty bucket plop down into the river and come up full of water a few times.



There are some other little work areas that, like the well, are smaller than the typical 3x3 workshops. In the following image we have a screwpress and a quern on the right:



The screwpress's construction requires a few mechanisms, made at the mechanic's workshop on the left, and our stonemason used the mason's shop at the center to carve the quern. Flour is ground from grain at the quern - you can see the little handle at the top where the stones are spun against each other. You can also set up a powered system using a millstone and a windmill or watermill, along with some axles and a gear assembly - we should be able to show that when the building interfaces are a little further along.

(I mined out the work space and placed the shops immediately - I was debating whether to haul away or use the hide option to obscure the loose stone for the final image, or otherwise smooth the place over, when I noticed the small visitor on the left and knew it was time to take the screenshot. A wild chinchilla!)

- Tarn

Hi!

Alongside the dwarves and the interface work, there are lots of other bits Meph and Mike have completed recently. Here's another little eclectic fort to show some examples.



I placed a stone bridge in front of the entrance of my fort. The rails on the left and right don't block traffic, but rather distinguish the draw direction -- this bridge draws up to the north. Bridges can also be set to retract rather than getting a cardinal direction, in which case they are displayed without rails.

You can also see a stone door here above the bridge, a wheelbarrow in the stone stockpile, and dwarves down in the lower left with different features/clothing than the last set.



Here I've connected a lever up to the bridge and drawn it up, and you can see it blocking the entrance. I placed some supports in the hallway to the lever for no reason other than to display them. These used to prevent cave-ins, and still do when you otherwise disconnect the fort in 3D by digging totally around them, but mostly they are decorations now.

You can see some stone tables I've lined up in preparation for a dining room to the right - we're messing around with variations here. By the time we're done, you should have some control if you don't want a mish-mash of leg types in a room. The tabletop images will depend on quality (crafted DF items have six quality levels, plus artifacts.)

I set up a wood burner and a glass furnace, and dug out some ramps to get at the sand you can see at the very bottom.



This let me make glass furniture (the wood burner gives us charcoal from felled trees, and we use that and sand collected in bags to make glass.) I set up some glass tables, and a wood table for comparison.

If you look closely, you can see some rain droplets on the wooden table. It was made in a carpenter's workshop outside and was rained upon. Those will soon dry off and disappear. Also, I didn't make the full glass industry pipeline incorporating lye/potash, so these tables are actually green glass instead of clear glass. Those two materials aren't currently distinguished by the tiles.

Here I've taken one of the stone tables and decorated it with some phyllite and lignite cabochons - bands of one and a general encrusting of the other.



These decorations show up on the core furniture types now, along with quality, material, and any spattering of blood, vomit, water, and/or mud.

I forgot I left the debug accelerated invasions option on and everybody died after this when 17 goblins showed up despite it only being the first Spring. We've drawn and implemented a lot of corpse pictures over the last few weeks, but not the dwarves, sadly, so we'll have to wait for a future disaster for an image, ha ha.

- Tarn

Hello again!

As we continue the work adding graphics to replace all of the text characters, the work on menu updates continues as well. Most recently, I updated the process for setting up stockpiles. Like the activity zones from before, stockpiles used to be placed by keyboard presses and couldn't be redrawn. Now we can paint stockpiles with the mouse, using rectangles or free painting, as with zones, and also resize them freely.



Dwarves use stockpiles to get items out from the mines, workshops and the trade depot and into more useful locations. Most typically, you'll want to set a type for the stockpile to tell the dwarves what kind of things you want to store there. In this example, I've created an armor stockpile.



The extra commands there allow you to rename the stockpile, repaint the stockpile, get rid of it entirely, or set up how its links work. Links tell a stockpile where to get its supplies and how to send them down the line. You don't have to set links up at all, but as your fort grows, you might find you want to do so to improve the flow of resources and products.



Stockpiles can be set to accept items from absolutely anywhere, or only from designated donor stockpiles and workshops. A stockpile can also designate which workshops and stockpiles it'd like to give its items to in turn. Here I've set the armor stockpile to accept armor from the nearby metalsmith's forge. Of course, in practice, the items from that forge would go to that pile anyway, since it is so close.

You aren't limited to the basic categories listed. Stockpiles accept a lot of customization:



This pile has been set to accept only bronze armor, for example. Not just that, but it'll only accept bronze armor which can be worn by dwarves. If the armor with the X at the top is turned on, it would also accept bronze armor for humans, which might show up in an invasion. This allows you to separate out junk, for example, so you can melt it down more easily. Note also that you can rule objects in and out by type, by quality, and so on. The text filter is new for the Steam version - the old lists weren't even alphabetized, ha ha.

Veteran players will notice a few missing options - the ability to reserve bins and barrels, for example, and a way to copy custom settings. These are all in the works.

- Tarn

Hey!

This time around, we'll take a look at where we are with representing dwarves graphical on the screen. Keep in mind these are still WIP, but we decided it was at a showable stage.

Back in ASCII land, dwarves were little smiley faces, with fewer pixels than the average emoji. Now, here's a fisherdwarf:



A neatly combed beard, some styled hair back there, and the blue clothing of a fisherdwarf. This is in the basic profession=clothing display mode. You can still see the actual clothing the dwarves are wearing, but it is recolored based on their job, so you can easily spot them. This one has gloves and a dress; each dwarven civilization generated by the game chooses different preferred clothing types as well as hair styles (on top of a ton of other information.) Typically, they'll have a variety of options, and you order them up to be made in the workshops once you have a leather, silk, wool, or plant-based fabric industry going.

This stoneworker for instance, has stuck with the same basic fashion plan clothing-wise, in stoneworker-white, but has shaved her head.



There are of course other ways to display dwarves, and other preferences that can vary even with the same player based on what they are doing. At the bare minimum, you'll also be able to see the items in their actual colors. This makes the fort look more drab, especially before you start up your dye industry or trade, but sometimes you don't want to see the profession colors when looking at your dwarves dance in the tavern. Also generally expect a lot of this to be updated as we see other screenshots in the future. These are the most important graphics in the game, in some ways, and they'll receive a lot of iterations.

There's also the question of the military dwarves. Here are variously dressed dwarves I set up in the arena mode, where you can outfit anybody and then watch them fight (or take control of one of the creatures yourself.)

We have some fully geared-up dwarves, in bronze, with and without helmets at the top.



Their beard-style is similar because dwarves and everybody else in arena mode don't have a civilization and so just kind of let it all grow wild, ha ha. At the bottom, we have a hooded cloak and face veil with iron mail, and on the lower right, a mask and headscarf combo with a tunic, skirt and a steel-tipped spear.

Although we haven't focused on the following mode *at all* yet, we can also check out the new dwarves in adventure mode.



I went ahead and made a dwarven character to play in this (very odd) RPG. Historically in this particular world, a bunch of dwarves have emigrated over to the nearby human villages, so I decided to start there, because I wanted the humans' iron meat cleaver for my look, ha ha. So I'm the one with a meat cleaver in the image, as you might expect. I have a leather vest, and leather trousers and boots.

Ah, and that's my pet black bear Bolli on the left. And another dwarf lives here in this starting dirt-floored cabin, also a head-shaver, but her dress is dyed that color (her purple gloves are another story - still a work in progress!) On the right is a human. I mean, what humans look like now, before they also receive this treatment!

- Tarn

Hello!

Victoria here from Kitfox Games. Dropping in to let you know that we just uploaded an Autumn Dev Update that shows all the things Tarn and the team have been working on -- with gameplay! This includes items we've previously discussed before like the new menus and zones, but now you can see it in action.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This video update is in lieu of the usual text update you'd normally get on Thursday. But things will continue like normal after this. :)

Also if you missed it, Tarn was on Rock Paper Shotgun to play Dwarf Fortress with Nate Crowley, the author of the run longing series The Basement of Curiousity. You can see that here.

That's all from me! Hope you enjoy the update.

- Victoria