dwarf-fortress game sourced
Dwarf Fortress
A colony sim in which the player directs a fortress of autonomous dwarves inside a procedurally generated world whose history, geology, fluids, bodies, and minds are all simulated.
parts
30 mechanics, as Dwarf Fortress does themcore · 8
Designation orders
The player designates digging, chopping, construction, and workshop jobs; dwarves with the matching labor enabled pick them up, and a manager can queue work orders automatically.
Fluid and gas simulation
Water and magma flow tile by tile with up to seven depth levels per tile, so breaching a river, cavern lake, or magma source floods connected tunnels.
History chronicle
Legends mode lists historical figures, sites, artifacts, and civilizations with a historical map; fortress deeds and retired adventurers are added, and the archive exports to XML.
Injury body model
Body parts are layered tissues (skin, fat, muscle, bone, nerves) damaged individually in combat; injuries can be permanent and are treated in a hospital with traction benches, casts, sutures, and splints.
Mood and breakdowns
Emotions add to or subtract from a hidden stress value (-1,000,000 to +1,000,000) with effects from +10,000, +25,000, and +50,000; stressed dwarves throw tantrums, fall into depression, or wander obliviously, prolonged stress leads to insanity, and one breakdown can spread unhappiness.
Simulated history generation
World generation builds elevation, rainfall, drainage, temperature, and vegetation layers, then simulates civilizations, sites, and historical figures for a player-chosen number of years before the fortress is embarked.
Stress accumulation
Emotions from events add to or subtract from a hidden stress value (-1,000,000 to +1,000,000) scaled by facets such as stress vulnerability and bravery; above +10,000, +25,000, and +50,000 dwarves risk tantrums, depression, obliviousness, and insanity, and long-term memories keep adding stress.
Vertical layers
Z-levels, added in 2007, let the fortress descend level by level through soil and stone to caverns, the magma sea, and the underworld, connected by stairs and ramps.
supporting · 22
Adaptive threat scaling
Wealthier and more populous fortresses attract sieges and megabeasts.
Agent skills
Work quality and speed rise with skill gained through practice in each labor.
Building placement
Crime and policing
A justice system punishes assault, murder, and vandalism.
Crop cultivation
Underground farming on soil layers; plump helmet mushrooms are brewed into wine.
Fire spread
Fires spread and burn dwarves and furniture.
Hauling jobs
Dwarves carry goods to player-defined stockpiles.
Heat transfer
Tiles, materials, and creatures carry temperatures.
Immigration by attractiveness
Migrant waves from the mountainhome grow as the fortress develops.
Memories and thoughts
Emotions become short-term memories; strong or revisited ones are promoted to long-term memories that keep adding stress.
Modding API
Raw text files define creatures, materials, and reactions; DFHack adds Lua and C++ scripting.
Needs decay
Food, drink, and sleep, plus personal needs such as socializing or praying met at taverns, temples, and libraries.
Pause and speed control
Personality traits
Facets such as bravery, stress vulnerability, and anxiety scale how stress builds and dissipates.
Production chains
Ore is smelted to bars and alloyed; steel needs flux to make pig iron plus coke or charcoal, and magma can replace fuel.
Raid defense
Ambushes, sieges, megabeasts, and forgotten beasts are met with squads, fortifications, and traps triggered by levers or pressure plates.
Relationship values
Friends, family, and pets; their deaths are major stressors.
Room recognition
Furniture defines bedrooms, dining halls, and offices; nobles demand rooms of rising value.
Storage and buffers
Trade routes
Yearly caravans from neighboring civilizations are handled by a broker; caravans can be absent or hostile depending on history.
Unit commands
Military squads in uniforms train at barracks and can be ordered to attack.
Utility action selection
core loop
embark and dig -> designate jobs, stockpiles, and workshops -> dwarves self-assign labors and craft -> needs, emotions, and stress accumulate -> migrants, caravans, sieges, and beasts arrive -> fortress thrives or collapses into the world's legends
design notes
Tarn Adams's stated principles are to break a system into parts, avoid overplanning, and base each model on a real-world analog; he describes the game as a story generator. The fortress is embarked inside a world whose geology and history were already simulated, and the fortress's own events flow back into that history through Legends, so a collapse becomes a record that a later adventurer can visit. Strange moods let an inspired dwarf seize a workshop to make a named artifact and go insane if materials are missing, which turns the production system into a story source. The game was free and donation-funded from 2006; a paid Steam edition with sprite graphics followed in December 2022, still short of a 1.0 version.
appears in
the paper, 5 sections · 9 chapters · 6 episodesWhy deep systems are hard to read
on screen at 0:00 cold open, 1:40 two scores, 4:44 mechanics that own nothing, 5:51 choosing a point
The five ceilings
on screen at 3:35 ticks per second, 3:47 what a player can follow, 5:31 minds made of formulas