Dwarf Fortress News

Hello again!

Giant creatures are a staple of generic fantasy worlds, and since Dwarf Fortress strives to generate worlds which are almost as generic as possible, we have giant versions of most real-world animals in the game. You can tack giant in front of almost anything. Sometimes, this can be trouble - the pandas in our game are just called 'pandas', but a more proper name for the real-world creature is 'giant panda', so that's why we have 'gigantic pandas' for the giant version instead. The same thing happened with the 'giant tortoise.'

The rule in Dwarf Fortress is that a giant creature should be at least as large as a black bear, even if it's a giant version of a small insect. As the real-world creatures approach black bear size, and then beyond, we apply a curve, so that the largest ones are only roughly twice as large in every dimension as their counterpart. Giant whales are very, very large, but they are just eight times as massive as a normal whale, rather than the kind of scaling you see when you go from a spider to a giant spider.

Here are some giant underground creatures:



The giant cave spider has been one of the more notorious DF creatures for many years. The paralyzing venom is quite serious, webs are nasty, it can spring from ambush, and it can also just bite dwarf-sized creatures into pieces. It is an enlarged version of the cave spider, which has a stunning venom (which is merely extremely annoying.) Giant rats are classic beings, of course. We also have large rats since it felt like there needed to be extra size gradations for ratdom.

I feel most bad about the poor giant moles that blunder into fortresses. The art doesn't make me feel better about it! Cave swallows are surprisingly colorful birds.

And here are some more modest creatures, a sample of small-but-not-too-small mammals:



As you can imagine, once we got up to a certain level of animal coverage in the game, it was important for us to get the two iconic monotremes in the game, and fortunately the community pulled through when they selected a few hundred animals to be added to the game back in 2009.

The platypus has poisonous spurs, as in real life, which can cause painful swelling. Perhaps your fortress would benefit by allowing a platypus person adventurer to become a resident monster slayer?

- Tarn

Hi!

Creatures and items, creatures and items. Here are lots of different seeds. You can grow all sorts of different real world and fantasy plants. Our dwarves like to farm a variety of mushrooms underground, but you can try aboveground plants if you like.



I put them on a glass block floor, since I accidentally put an ice floor in the last news posting when I said it was glass, ha ha. I then spread some of the new treasure items around everywhere, in each of the currency materials. You can also make coins and treasures out of non-currency metals and materials.

There were a few other treasures to lay out, but I took the screenshot early, as a lizard started eating my seeds (the guilty party still sits happily in the stockpile.) Normally you can protect seeds from vermin by using bags and barrels, and also by having some trusty cats around to hunt them and bring the remains to their dwarves.

Mike in the meantime has drawn many animals over the last several days, among them the remaining birds. Can you name them all?



I've also been experimenting with the mouse and clickable buttons and other fancy widgets. Animals next to the animal buttons, items next to the item buttons, rather than text text text. DF has had a little patchy mouse support in the past, but we're going to improve that situation for Steam. Hopefully I'll have some to show soon! Artists have to do a pass on my programmer art first, he he he.

-Tarn

[h3]Kitfox Note[/h3]

After a 6 year hiatus, the DF Talk podcast has restarted! Join Rainseeker, Capntastic and the Toady One (Tarn!) as they talk about Dwarf Fortress and answer questions from the forum.

You can listen to it here, but fair warning... the volume levels are wonky. (In the words of Tarn, they "suck". Heh.) I figured it was still worth sharing though - think of this as the test run of better and more volume-controlled episodes to come! ;)

- Victoria

Hello!

Workerly progress on items and other art the last few week. It's an eclectic mix, as in the first image here:



Glass block floors, wooden floors, and dwarves, of course, like metal floors. Some of their favorite weapons are here as well, and shields, and trap components. You can use an enormous corkscrew to make a screwpump to move liquids around the fortress, but you can also place one in a weapon trap.

And why not add a giant axeblade, a serrated disc and various spikes? Hmm... dwarves have to clean them when they are jammed up with goblin bits, that's one reason, but a resilient dwarf can handle that job just fine.

Here are swords made of various materials being shown off by the proud Debug Creature that arranged them on the arena floor.



And more weapons and tools, along with a few reasons why you might want your dwarves to keep weapons around. These critters can all be found underground.



On the left we have a naked mole dog and a molemarian. The naked mole dog is like the real world naked molerat, but it is bigger, hence dog. The molemarian... is like a centaur, but instead of placing a human upper torso on a horse body, you place a moledoggy human upper torso on a naked mole dog, and then replace the head with a mole dog head... so it's just a lot of naked mole dog with some grabby arms.

Up top, the voracious cave crawler and the magma man. Occasionally, legendary generals will make a journey to the depths during world generation and tame voracious cave crawlers for use in war. Magma men, on the other hand, are just not safe to have around at all.

On the right, longer critters! A giant earthworm and a giant olm. You'll find that Dwarf Fortress has a lot of giant creatures...

- Tarn

--

[h3]Kitfox's Note[/h3]

The Debug Creature's face is such a mood.



- Victoria

Heya!

A bit of a mini-interruption from the regular updates you've been getting from Tarn (don't worry, they're still happening), but as part of the Guerrilla Collective showcase on June 13, we revealed a first look at the work-in-progress gameplay of the Dwarf Fortress Steam Version!

[h3]Watch here:[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Note: Gameplay UI is in progress, and is not indicative of the final look.


The gameplay video includes:

• Developer commentary from co-creator, Tarn Adams
  
• Real time footage of a world map being generated and a first embark
  
• New graphics including workshops, bodies of water, dwarves, and trees
  

Hope you enjoy. We're excited! :)

Cheers,
Victoria

Hey.

The main project we've been focusing on recently is the depiction of bodies of water. In Dwarf Fortress, that can mean a lot of things: still pools, rocky brooks, wide rivers, oceans, lakes, underground lakes, city sewers, and channel and cistern and noble-drowning facilities you produce in your own fortresses.

This is the current status of the rocky brooks.



We're using sixteen frames of animation, which is a first for DF, ha ha, and we might touch this up with some flow direction indications and variants. Dwarves can walk across these, so it's important that they don't look very deep.

This is a deeper, more opaque pool of water that the dwarves prefer not to drink from, but which can have turtles and moghoppers for the dwarves to catch, to add to their food variety and allow for shell crafts. Or to keep as pets. Or for your zoo terrariums and aquariums.



Here are the larger workshops - the kennels and the siege workshop. Many animals can be brought from a wild to a semi-domesticated to a tame state.

This is not entirely safe! But it is good to have mostly friendly critters running about the fortress.



Here are some minecart tracks! Build them with wood, stone or metal, or carve grooves into cavern floors or glaciers.



With the availability of wheelbarrows, it's not always practical to produce a lot of infrastructure just to cart off stone, but you can always use them to do routine hauls of finished goods, or let your dwarves take a fun ride. Take a ride yourself in adventure mode. Or fill a cart with rocks and crash it against an obstacle as an improvised boulder shotgun. Or use serrated discs. People always find a way to turn DF features into weapons!

- Tarn