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!

(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.

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

-The power and futility of images
-The unreconcilable friction between self expression, documentation, and occupation
-The urgency and necessity of cultural perseverance and joy, even as bloody torrents surge through broken dams
-The act of bearing witness to the places and people whose glittering specificity will be dashed and diluted by apocryphal, self-absolving media narratives scrawled by the servants of those who erased them
-The film reel collectibles are TOO SMALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!