Dwarf Fortress News

Greetings all!

Yes, it's that time again, the quarterly Dwarf Fortress video update from Tarn brought to you by me, Fiona! Hello, I'm the new Community Manager for Kitfox Games and I'm excited to work with Tarn to bring you all the future DF news! I've highlighted most of the main points in this newsletter but feel free to watch the video in its entirety over on the Kitfox Youtube channel.

For now, let us begin.

The trade-depot graphics are placeholders however, you can see the wagons pulling up, along with some humans (ugh) and their bodyguards. Hope they have some decent things to trade and are not here just to waste our time (look, there's lots of digging to be done).



I'm hoping they won't judge us on our murderous cats. Or with any luck maybe they'll be intimidated. Look at all those carcasses sheesh. who's going to clean this up? Speaking of intimidation, there's a whole room full of coffins, which are currently being depicted by, placeholder images, you can't see it but trust us, that's one grim room.



Hovering over anything on the map will now show a tool-tip popup, giving you more information about what it is you're looking at. This replaces the look command in the classic version.

It's true, there are indeed two horses at that trade depot.



We've been hoarding this information but now we're ready to release our stash. Stockpiles! You can see here the miner has been busy digging us another room in which we can click into the stockpile interface and drag a little rectangle to designate our new storage room.

In order to designate this room for particular items to store we head into the custom set, which we can deselect everything, type in "mech" which will isolate "mechanisms". Clicking that then tells our dwarves to only store that item in the stockpile.



Last of our updates this month is a peek into the building interface. Here we can see the items that can be built in the building menu. Once clicked and the blueprint placed, we'll be able to select what construction materials to use, based on what's currently in our stockpile.



On the left our architect is having a good look at these blueprints, you can see the railings on the bridge showing that it's travelling east to west but as it is a blueprint it will not block anyone from walking through it. And on the right, it's complete, safe even for cats to travel on!



There are lots more graphics that have been added, little items like wheelbarrows, stepladders but sadly, no mussel shells yet.

Thank you for supporting Dwarf Fortress this year. It means a lot to Tarn, Zach and everyone at Kitfox Games. Kitfox Games Discord.

We'll be back for the next update on the 14th of January but for now, we leave you with Scamps who, as usual, is enjoying sitting in his box.



Happy Holidays!

See you next year,
Fiona, on behalf of Tarn, Zach, and the Kitfox team

Hello again!

Sometimes during testing, I have to press the accelerated invasion button to test things. Coming in from the left side of the screen, we have some new friends:



Normally, you don't have to worry overmuch about human invasions if you don't get greedy with the trade caravan or send raiding parties out to harass your neighbors. But when it comes to blows, they bring armor, and sometimes war elephants.



Here my human adventurer leading their one-humped camel, which can be used to carry heavy equipment or for riding. I was expecting to find some more humans in this village, but I found this heavily-armored dwarf out patrolling the streets instead, carrying with a human pole weapon. They were part of a historical migration wave that adopted human ways, however cumbersome those might be in this case!



These are some additional equipped humans and dwarves for comparison - the human set is a work in progress, and the dwarf set is also undergoing a few touch-ups, but this is the basic amount of differentiation we are going with. There'd realistically be a bit more height difference, but the relative thinness and small-headedness of the humans captures it well enough.



Here are some more in the default cyan peasant clothing. These all have the arena hair style (that is, long and uncombed.)

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Finally, let's take a look at some giant critters! When embarking in the more dangerous wild areas of a Dwarf Fortress world, almost any of the ~200 real-world wilderness creatures can either take on a giant or humanoid form. This includes all of the critters that are normally too small to have combat calculations, like the slug and cardinal and hamster seen here. Though the pictures can be quite cute, the giant critters come in at a minimum of grizzly-bear-sized, so exercise caution when trying to make friends!

- Tarn

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