it's not pretty, it's nigh impenetrable, it's only fun if you make your own fun, it's never gonna be finished, overall it's a mess, but it's so resolutely its own thing and unlike anything else -- and in particular completely unlike the games that keep coming out that try to sell themselves as dwarf fortress knockoffs -- that i can't not love it.

this may sound weird but i genuinely believe if more people had the time and resources to pursue their personal creative projects, this is what a lot of them would look like -- just setting off on a journey in a completely unexplored direction and making something that no one has ever made before. just as an example of that, it's invaluable to me. world heritage stuff

(Steam Release)

Frankly, I'm a bit of a pessimist, and when I heard DF was making big pushes to be more "accessible" for its Steam release, I assumed we'd be looking at a developer-approved official tileset and... that'd be about it. I heard about the mouse controls but was not particularly hopeful that they would be more useful or clear than the keyboard shortcuts that already existed. I'll admit I was wrong! You'd be forgiven for not realizing that the game under the hood was originally designed as an ASCII-only project where gameplay more closely resembles "inputting missile launch codes" than swirling analog sticks. The official tileset and mouse controls alone are worth full price for anyone who, like me, has been fascinated by DF but been unwilling to spend the time learning how to gather all the info I need.

The game is still relatively hard to parse, but if you've played one of DF's many spiritual successors (or games inspired by those, in turn) then this shouldn't be too tough a task for you. Especially given the tutorial, which is actually quite good at explaining what's going on and how not to fail instantly - probably the biggest hurdle to learning DF before this point. It's still the same game, it still has its legendary level of detail and its quirky gameplay mechanics - if you're not used to games where fluids and creatures can travel diagonally, you better learn - and it's still possible to lose it all to the zaniest bullshit on the planet.

I think it's finally helped me see the appeal of DF firsthand - I'd dabbled with the game over the years but never enough to fully grasp what I was doing, so my forts were small and rapidly became failures, never interesting enough to have me doing a deep-dive on the wiki for optimized bedroom designs. It's easy to hear about things like cats dying due to an error in calculating feline Blood Alcohol Content and become intimidated, but Bay12 have been smart in where/how the level of detail gets increased. Most of it's in the worldbuilding or systems that run in the background, meaning that savvy or passionate players can opt into interacting with these elements without it being required of new players. All this info turns the fortress itself into a character - a canvas marked by each being that passes through it. Losing in every bizarre way possible is its own fun, of course, but there's still something to gain from watching your dwarves build a legacy and a culture all their own.

On this day, my first Fortress collapsed and everyone died. I had no active water source and ran out of food, in a rush I built a kitchen and had a dwarf make meals but alas I was already out of my depth, slowly but surely every dwarf succumbed to the inevitable, their pages containing similar narratives; they were numb to the tragedy of death, yet many of them simply wished they had been able to pray to their deities (I hadn't set up a proper altar).

sux 2 b them lul this train doesn't stop for any mortal dwarven fool, its dorf fort baby ya win some ya lose all of it

Yes, this game has a learning curve reminiscent of the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople, but stick with it and you'll have one of the deepest games ever made, NO HYPERBOLE. Ok, maybe a little, but what other game generates entire world histories as well as civilizations, gods, monsters as well as characters with backstories? What other game lets you watch your dwarven comrades slaughter each other over a stinky bedroom? This game has generated so many stories over my years of playing, it's nuts.

Tarn and Zach have been hard at work on this game since the mid-2000s and it makes me so happy to see more and more people at least try it out as its popularity has grown. With the upcoming steam release I'm especially excited to try that new tileset, it just oozes 16-bit charm.

If you're thinking of getting into this game, I would highly recommend the quickstart guide on the dwarf fortress wiki, as well as watching Kruggsmash's excellent tutorial video on youtube, and also checking out one of Vinesauce Joel's streams of it. Just keep one thing in mind while playing: you DON'T have to know every mechanic to play, you only need the fundamentals - how to make food, alcohol, assign jobs, make stockpiles and defend yourself. Once you have that under your belt you can start experimenting with other stuff. Just beware of the clowns. Strike the earth!

Control a colony of dwarves on the edge of maddness as they try to survive winter, starvation, goblin invasions, and your ineptitude.

The level of simulation going on in this game is intense and overwhelming, which is kind of the point. As you play the game, you build up knowledge of what it takes to help the dwarves survive and thrive, learning from your mistakes and exploring the systems and features of the game.

The UX is terrible and the base graphics are intensely hard to parse, but this is still probably the best colony sim game on the market. Download a graphics pack or wait for buy the updated version on Steam -- you owe it to yourself to play this game, quit in frustration 4 times, and then finally get it and build a massive, multi-level fortress full of drunken, dwarf assholes and the cats who own them.

Dwarf Fortress is awesome.

Has the potential to be the greatest procedurally generated fantasy sandbox game ever created but is also marred by having the worst user experience I've ever seen in a video game. I spent more time and effort learning how to play this goddamn game than I did for my major. And as infinitely complex as the mechanics are, I still don't think it actually has to be this way. Maybe in a decade or two when the game gets anywhere near the realm of being "finished," the developer will finally have time to add quality of life improvements. Not counting on it, personally.

If you don't mind having to learn the game, it's pretty good though.

Más juego de rol que la mayoría de rpgs que existen. Sin el componente social directo del rol de papel y lapiz, la experiencia de jugar Dwarf Fortress es una absorta y solitaria. Pero un componente social indirecto surge inevitablemente. Como generador de historias que es, crea la necesidad natural de contar esas historias. La crudeza de la presentación en ASCII es perfecta para la abstracción literaria de la propuesta. Y de ese impulso a compartir surgen todos esos post en foros, vídeos de youtube, guías y crónicas, como una extensión más de lo que es Dwarf Fortress. Una comunidad altruista empeñada en compartir conocimiento sobre un juego gratuito hecho por dos hermanos a lo largo de su vida. Un creador de mundos, civilizaciones, fortalezas y enanos obsesionados con la cerveza y cavar hasta encontrar la efímera gloria o su inevitable ruina.

Absolute beast of a game. Makes you realize this is what the game industry should look nowadays, complex games that favor player creativity and simulation of real life.
You can't really write a review on everything on it, but believe me when I tell you that once you get pass the UI (which is frankly terrible, but a price you pay to get to the diamond inside this game) you will discover a world so vast, so rich, so alive and full of posibilities. Words fail to describe the absolute liberty you have in this game, and the complete randomness in which your story will shape.
And example from a fortress I ran a couple of months ago: Everything started nice, made my dwellings by excavating on the floor because I couldn't find a mountain that was sturdy enough. Anyway, after a couple of seasons ingame (2-3 years) I indirectly angered the local rhesus macaque monkey population, which resulted in an invassion by close to 50 monkeys to my hold. What followed was a massacre to the monkey population, with dwarves using them as flails when alive, and then as axes when they splintered their bodies, and finally throwable objects once their limbs got removed. After that, two or three seasons later I got invaded AGAIN but this time by gray langurs. Another massacre ensued, with my dwarfs getting enough bone and leather to craft wealth for the traders to buy.
And then I got invaded by a collection of weremonkey men and werecamel men with dresses full of coins as weapons that completely fucked up my hold and bit the few survivors, guaranteeing a breakout of werecamels and weremonkeys in the zone for generations. And at that point I had to restart.

I don't joke when I say thins: You are missing out your favorite game by not playing this.

The highest example of realism in simulation games, for better and for worse. This shows us the possibilities of feeling, analyzing and walking around this byzantine simulation and its outcomes, but simultaneously opens these inner workings up to a higher level of scrutiny than more superficial simulations. While the game shoots loftily high, the particular biases of the authors hinder the game from having an interesting theory of history, or from taking the plant-life and larger ecology simulation as seriously as the combat. A work focusing on the development of social forces over time on the scale of dwarf fortress (with its psychology model, and individuals that can be tracked) would be more interesting than something like the victoria series with its purely mechanical and outsider view (which to be fair, dwarf fortress' tracking of the shift from early feudal to late feudal early mercantile production, expansion and centralization of city states and holdings, etc, is somewhat present but the emphasis on the nihilistic unchangedness of the world is hamfisted in), and focusing on the ecology simulation with respect to dwarven production may be able to lead to a less extractive focused simulation. Similarly to the problem of minecraft, the world outside of the player character or dwarves is dead. Like "crystallized thoughts" the natural world marches onward (or in minecraft's case, doesnt move at all) irrespective of man's (or dwarve's) relation to it. Regardless, while not the only way to bring realism to games, this game has carved out a path to it unmatched by any of its emulators.

Outside of this, the actual text of the game has two competing tendencies, and a conservative dressing. There is an attention to the particularity and texture of the various peoples lives, the depiction of beauty in the scope and detail and interconnectedness of it. At the same time there is a rejection of this holding any meaning, that all that exists is pathetic and will be washed away with the ever present threat of madness and mortal fragility of things, foolish pettiness of people, etc. The interplay between these tendencies can be somewhat compelling (there certainly is a lot of foolish repetition of similar mistakes! though not in aggregate of all mankind as the game implies) and acts as a turning wheel through which the dwarves psychology forms. All well and good, however, the threat of fragility and madness falls into a lazy trope of life and civilization being unavoidably cruel and cyclic, clearly stemming from a resignation of the authors grappling with themselves living in a cruel empire that ultimately serves as a gimmick to the persistence of the world as-is. Cities die and leave their presence like demon corpses in doom, scattered across the map in fleshy heaps granting an illusion of persistent influence. But the actual influence of peoples and civilizations upon each other is limited in simulation impact outside of dictionary-like mind entries, names of poetry, family or city affiliations, feeding into a wiki "lore" diving tendency rather than direct relations impacting the games internal economy which has a primary position of the object of the players available verbs (with the exception of books allowing for skill transfer, which largely take a backseat, and artifacts, which function largely as static wealth numbers). Clearly, this nihilistic tendency weighs upon the possibility of the simulation such that the game can come to the predetermined conclusion of no persisting progress and limited historical influence. In this way, the text limits the game and detracts from the strongest points of its own writing.

Finally, we have the inheritance of tolkien. This is the dressing of the game, common to the fantasy genre, of hardly obscured race science. Even going so far as the inclusion of races that have natural inclinations to violence and theft that limits their capacity for industry. This obviously is cartoonishly racist. Addressed in some mods changing the relations between the goblins and dwarves usually band-aids over this at best. A game which attempts to step over dwarf fortress would clearly have to reject this as a premise from the beginning of development, it is simply offensive and unnecessary even within the games own mechanics (which many of the aforementioned modders have long realized) for war and diplomacy, which is the tolkien fantasy races primary function as having de-facto aggressive villains. With most fantasy games, the setting seems largely to be invoked specifically for this purpose, of having a whole race or caste of people that can be gleefully exterminated (see also, BOTW or Elden Ring). If there is to be any saving of fantasy as a setting, this colonial and essentialist writing and mechanical crutch needs to be left far behind and thoroughly criticized in existing works, as well as likely requiring an extensive reworking of many of the assumptions of fantasy itself.

Wonderfully rich game that always has something new for you. People like to knock the UI, which is fair, but in a lot of ways it really works; full use of the keyboard severely reduces the bottleneck between wanting to do something and getting it done. Yes, lots of things are hidden in arcane menus, but there's not too many of those, and with time you'll have them down to muscle memory and designating a spare stray llama to be neutered in a tenth of a second flat. That said, it can certainly use reworks in some areas, but that's more a matter of keeping things consistent. Many menus have their own idiosyncrasies that raise the learning curve just a bit more than necessary.
Ultimately it's a very impressive and unique project that does things no one else has come close to, but mechanically still needs lots of work for a chance at the mainstream. Still very worth your attention.
GOAT.