Dwarf Fortress News

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

These are new pictures of the wooden weapons grown by the elves. The haughty protectors of the forest would never harm plant nor beast without cause, but beware! Should your dwarves fell too many precious trees, the elves would have a bone to pick with you... and they never waste the flesh of the prey they kill!



Here we have the new picture Jacob drew of a tombstone.

It's a memorial slab to Kel Balancedclasps, located in a storage room adjacent the drowning chamber where she died (bin palettes also by Jacob.) Would you like to know more about Kel? Would you like to know how crazy Dwarf Fortress actually is? I did a little research in Legends Mode and this is what I found:

The dwarf Kel Balancedclaps began her career as a scout in the army based out of the fortress Letterrough. During half a dozen assaults on the Dark Fortress she and the dwarf fighter Zasit Showerall became lovers. They were soon parted as Kel had to flee to the Hills of Uniting, where she became a spy. Her life of intrigue didn't last long as she was fooled by the goblin Ngoso and was forced to flee again and ended up in my fortress, the fortress of Ragsprays.

It was at that time that Kel redeemed herself, creating the artifact crown "Spiritcrushes," only to be murdered by the dwarf Minkot Browngild in a drunken brawl. Minkot had been convicted (by me) a dozen times for fighting in the tavern and had served half a year in the dungeon. Shortly after being released, Minkot happened to run into Kel who had just forged the wonderous crown.

It was at the half-completed drowning chamber where she died, a place meant only to kill goblin invaders. Minkot happened to attack her, probably the first dwarf he saw, and she dodged the swing, falling off the bridge into the water. I didn't notice for the longest time, and she returned to the fortress as an angry ghost. All I could do was place the tombstone where she died and put her spirit to rest.

- Zach

Hello!

We've been working through the remaining tabs on the dwarf character sheets. One of our objectives is to surface some information that has been difficult to find.





These are the relationships and personality traits of Kikrost the planter. She has several very strong friendships, and you can see in the personality tab that the romance she started with Geshud a few years ago has made her a more joyful person.



(These item images aren't yet updated.) Notice here that poor Zon has three sutures. We can get some more information about the procedure over on the health tab.



Here's Zon's full medical history, and if we want to know how the injury came about we can zip over to check the combat logs.



This baron has been reading in the library!



If we want to know more about the culture, we can also access a wealth of details from the knowledge tab.



When dwarves experience circumstances, there's a chance for the emotion/thought to be saved as a memory. This can cause lesser but recurring emotions and can also change their personalities (as with Kikrust above.) Previously, the player had to cobble together a dwarf's memories from their seasonal thoughts and personality changes, and most memories were not visible most of the time. Now we have this simple chronology.

- Tarn

Hello!

Jacob has been working hard on graphics, and we have some new capabilities there as well. He's prepared palettes for all of the material colors. Some community members (Lexi, Jenifer, and Rose) did a lot of work in particular on wood colors back around 2017, and the ASCII version only ever showed them as one brown color, ha ha, but now you can see all sorts of wood colors. Here are some bedrooms with new furniture images for stone cabinets, wooden chests (the planned ones use the old image), stone doors, and stone hatches:



And here's a happy colorful tomb with new wooden casket images, using specialized wood color palettes (so a 'red' wood object and a 'red' stone or metal object use different color sets.)



The pictures here use a pretty random mix to show the palette variety, but you can select the material while you're building or placing furniture if you'd like to arrange items according to color.

I've been updating the remaining menus as we work through the first step of the roadmap we posted last time. I've finished the justice menu (aside from interrogation reports), the petition system, and I'm about halfway through diplomacy. The dwarven justice system covers crimes from bar fights to vampiric bloodsucking, and punishment can be anything from a few days in jail to a reforging by the hammerer. The petition system is used by people that want to become residents of your fortress who are not from your selected dwarven culture, and also by religions and craft guilds who want recognition and spaces devoted to their groups.

- Tarn