So...at the risk of suffering even more ridicule for playing DF (;) ) I figured I'd make a thread for it. I'm currently playing it and still learning the ropes, but it's crazy addictive. The biggest 'problem' is getting the hang of the interface and learning the game. And let me tell you...the scope is amazing. Basically you build up an entire (mini)society with its own economy and militia, social system, production, trade with the outside world etc etc.

As this is only my second real try after my first fortress ended in a pretty quick death by dehydration of my early settlers (:roll:), I'm still messing a lot of things up and struggling to keep tabs on everything, but it's pretty incredible to see how a well-functioning fortress looks. I currently have about a 100 dwarves which isn't making things easier...I'm always praying I don't get any migrants taking up space. But I suppose I could set those up with 'unfortunate accidents' when it gets that far.

I've got elven, human and dwarven trade caravans coming once a year, which mostly provide me with more varied food (my farm production is pretty one-dimensional), wood (the elves get pissed if you cut more than an X amount of wood each year yourself) and metal. My entire early economy basically revolves around stone crafts. I have some amazing stonecraft who can pump out a lot of cool shit in a short time, and I got craploads of stone lying around anyway.

I'm not gonna talk about EVERYTHING I've done so far but beating the earliest challenge - flooding an underground cave with mud so I could use it for farming - made me pretty proud given that I knew shit all of the game. I had a river running along and (mostly) over my fortress, so I created a system with 2 floodgates that allowed and still allows me to flood the cave at will. Really cool. I used part of the same irrigation system to make a moat in front of my main entrance, with a remote controlled drawbridge in case I get sieged or have intruders (like a herd of killer elephants).

My food stockpiles have been bulging ever since, so the fortress won't go hungry too soon. Drinks are a little harder (dwarves strongly prefer alcohol, they work slow and get unhappy if they have to drink water) but I'm currently well-stocked. My biggest problem is a lack of metal industry. I didn't have an anvil for a long time which is needed to start a forge, so I had to wait for a trade caravan to bring one to start...but even then I didn't really get the hang of it. Think I'm getting it now, finally. And I just struck a huge vein of native gold which should help immensely. Other painful point is the lack of guard/militia. It's not that I can't make one, it's that it's complicated how to assign barracks, equipment and train them. I'll get it eventually, for now I have a virtual explosion of war dogs (about 30) that I plan to use as a defense if necessary, together with the moat+drawbridge and a system that allows me to seal off my main fortress entry remotely AND flood it.

Since my population has expanded a lot since the starting year and my upper levels were a bit "on the fly" designs, I embarked on a grand plan to give everyone of the current population their own room. So about a hundred rooms, a hundred beds and all hand-mined. In addition to this I connected them to a grand dining hall that I decorated with fine craftsmanship. Once all is done, it will be a dwarven utopia. I'm gonna make a ghetto with common sleeping rooms for migrants on the level above.

I also have a mayor and a few 'noble' positions now that my fortress is growing. I recently assigned a bookkeeper, manager and chief medical dwarf. Most of these guys need offices to work from too, so I started making a noble district one level under the general quarters. The mayor even needs a bedroom, an office AND a dining room to himself. And a few items of furniture too. And the bastard wants classy shit - I needed to engrave the walls with my masons to make it good enough for him.

The mayor also issued a mandate, that items be made from black bronze. They're like orders and he'll get pissed if they don't get fulfilled (which will impact your society)..and he's serious about them. He ordered my mason to be jailed for 50 days after I failed to fulfill a previous -masonry related- request. I didn't jail him though, since I don't have a prison yet.

Oh and I also created two levels with workshops and huge stockpiles a few levels away from the living quarters (they get annnoyed by the workshops noise if they are too close). Basically it's halls and halls of workshops...masons, brewers, craftsmen, tanners, metalsmiths, looms, clothiers, kitchens, siege workshops, kennels, carpenters, bowyers, dyers, pretty much anything really.

So...I don't know if these rambings interest anyone but I'm having a great time playing. I think Derf or Satis would actually like this game, but I realise the denseness and low graphical quality may be a turn off. But now I know a few good tilesets and know some of the base mechanics I can help you out. It's gonna require a lot of learning, but I think you guys are like me and like to learn new things, even if it's 'just' a game. I may post screens with some explanations.

Well i barely have the time to play a 'real' game anyway, so i end up playing lots of flash games on kongregate. Might as well give this one a try if you write down a noobfriendly tutorial on the tilesets and stuff.

I'd be happy to help out, but I don't think DF is a good choice if you're strapped for time though

I'm not gonna write a tutorial either since a) there are already a few very good ones around and b) that would be a full-time job.

And well, let's just say my fortress took a sharp turn for the worst last night.

I had just finished perfecting my workshop district and stockpiles, as well as my dwarven general quarters (manually assigning 80 rooms - that part was less agreeable but I was going for a utopia dammit!!) when an Elven caravan came in, with whom I traded for lots of wood, a few cool caged animals I was planning to use for my sick plans (a grizzly bear, an orangutan and a jaguar). More importantly, they had shitloads of wood, which I needed to make coal to start my smelting industry for good. Armors and weapons for everyone!!

And yeah, well...then a Hydra popped up outside my fortress. They're pretty vicious motherfuckers, since they have 7 heads and only one of them is the "right" one. You can still bleed them to death by severing others, but that takes a while and that's not time you can afford when it's raping dwarves. They're also big and destroy doors and buildings. So first thing I did was pull up my drawbridge to set in motion my drowning trap...I let the canal fill up with water and opened up my drawbridge to lure it in.

Meanwhile I let loose my tame grizzly, black bear and 15 war dogs near a cage near the entrance, hoping they could stop or at least injure the fucker if he got through. I also roused up an almost defenseless militia, but I had (luckily) traded some earlier caravans for bronze armor and weapons so at least 3-4 guys could get armed. While all this was happening the Hydra apparently tore apart one of my hunters who was still outside in the wilds. I saw a severed arm, leg and leather armor strawn all over the woods.

I also checked the internet and found that...hydras may be incredible bastards, they can also be caught quite readily in a cage trap (since they are not exceptionally smart). So I start to frantically make a line of three cage traps he's GOTTA set off if he comes in. I immediately order the drawbirdge closed again. But then...oh god..before my mechanic could install the cage traps and before someone pulled the level for the drawbridge, it came in. Panicked, I order the floodgates to be opened, but it's useless, the hydra has blown through the doors and hatchcovers and flies a level below, killing war dogs left and right and whacking out the bears in a matter of seconds.

The good news is that there was nothing of worth a level below - I had already relocated the workshops, stockpiles and living quarters to the deeper levels. The only things still there were empty rooms and a so-so dining room, as well as the dormitory for the most recent migrants (who didn't have/deserve their own rooms yet). But there WERE a lot of dwarves there...and it starts killing. One after the other dies, splattering the walls in blood and the floors with torn limbs. Dwarves go insane with fear and/or go berserk, killing each other and randomly punching and stabbing people around them.

The militia hurries to the scene and the first 2 members are killed almost instantly...the other 2, a great dodger and a marksdwarf seem to have more luck as the dodger keeps the beast busy whle the marksdwarf fires arrows from accross the hallway. Soon enough the hydra decides it has enough of the marksdwarf and flies over and whacks him too, however.

What happened next isn't clear. In a flurry of blood and limbs, the Hydra somehow bites it. I checked the battle reports but couldn't find who or what did it in...I did notice that my militia leader, the dodger, was still alive after the fight. And died in a staircase from severe blood loss a few mlinutes later.

So I check the population count and overall the damage wasn't unbearably high - around 15-20 of my dwarves from a population of 140 bit it. BUT some of these dwarves had friends and lovers whose happiness now obviously drops to rock bottom, the more since their fucking limbs are pasted all accross my second floor, like pieces of meat in a giant spaghetti sauce.

I immediately order the bodies to be dumped in a garbage pit - ok so I had no coffins ready for a proper burial, but jeez, there was nothing left to bury - to avoid anyone having to look at them any longer AND to prevent them from rotting and filling my halls with miasma which fucks up things even worse. This goes relatively well, if it weren't for some assholes throwing tantrums, going berserk and in some cases stark raving mad. They interrupt the working dwarves by punching/injuring/killing them, or by being generally freaky, which makes them pissed and then more likely to crack etc etc.

After a while things seem to calm down, except for one berserk metalsmith who keeps hitting my legendary clothier who is eventually killed, causing his friends to go in a rage and so forth. What looked like a general return to calm is now a dwindling spiral of violence and lawlessness endangering the entire fortress. About 20 dwarves are still 'ecstatic' and some 40-50 are happy to content, so not all is lost YET, but I can't risk having them affected by these troublemakers.

Not sure how to fight it....I might try to round up a new captain of the guard and have a patrol pick up troublemakers and the tie them to the leashes that were previously used for the dogs. Or I may try and wall in the sane/insane dwarves, or just try to make everyone calm down by locking them in place until they die or come to their sense.

This game is pretty fucking awesome.

I contained it. It took me blood, sweat, tears, a few hours and a sort of forced genocide but I did it. I broke the spiral of violence and misery...but at what cost?

I quickly realised that having the captain of the guard go around and dishing out beatings/arresting dwarves wasn't going to work as well as I'd hoped, with about 30 dwarves (out of a 110) being ready to crack at any moment or already having cracked and rampaging the fortress, destroying shit and punching/murdering/going crazy/rolling up and dying. The fact that I only had about 10 makeshift restraints made out of fucking weed rope fpr a prison instead of proper cages and chains didn't make me too optimistic either.

Luckily, my fortress had a lot of rooms and doors. So...I manually started assigning burrows, ie areas that particular dwarves are allowed to hang out in. I started grouping together the most miserable of the miserable in a large room. They may be crazy or depressed, but the dwarves usually still have moments of clarity in which they actually follow orders...so they slowly poured into the room and hung around thinking 'what up?'. As soon as I had around 10 in the first room, I fucking boarded up the door. They slowly went crazy, berserk or just died from hunger, thirst or misery, but at least they fucking stayed away from the sane dwarves who were willing to function properly. So after a while I had a room splattered with blood and littered with bodies, and some dwarves jabbering to themsleves in corners unti death came. Meanwhile my other dwarves didn't suffer their wrath nor got unhappy from seeing their bodies everywhere. An additional bonus is that the morale-wrecking cloud of stench and rot that comes from fresh bodies, 'miasma', doesn't pass doors. So they all just rotted all over each other.

This worked so well that I started doing it for other, smaller control groups as well. 6 here, 5 there, and if I saw a group of 2-3 miserable dwarfs in a single room by accident (like a dormitory) I locked that shit up. There were some...sacrifices though. My captain of the guard and 2 soldiers went batshit insane WHILE IN FULL BATTLE DRESS but luckily they were all in the great hall when it happened, so I sealed off all entrances...but 1-2 sane guys were sealed in as well. Ended up with the captain of the guard killing cats, destroying tables and chairs and stabbing people before croaking from thirst. Good riddance fuck-o.

Things were taking a turn for the better, and a human caravan showed up. But while they were there some asshole dwarf trashed my drawbridge, and I was too busy crisis-managing to put a new one up. SO there was no exist from the fortress and the humans couldn't leave. You guessed it...they got pissed, and angry, and starting attacking shit. One of them went down in the living quarters with a berserked pet camel and started harassing dwarves and killing war dogs. He eventually bit it, but it took ages. That's when I saw that the rest of the caravan traders and guards were mostly packed in 2 rooms at my ground level. So I locked them in as well. As we speak my former barracks has bodies of a human trader, a camel and a human guard talking gibberish in them, and my stone stockpiles has 2-3 human bodies and 3 guards looking for an exit. I hope they die soon.

The numbers:

Before Hydra attack: 130-140 dwarves, happy as hell
Immediately after Hydra attack: 115 dwarves, about 30 with mental issues
Aftermath: more and more dwarves going insane/violent over trauma
Nett result after ethnic cleansings: 49 dwarves still alive, all relatively happy. Production is back on. I lost a lot of legendary craftsmen and workers though.

Bizarrely, as I rebuilt the bridge and cleaned most of the halls from bodies and blood and started booze production again, an envoy of the dwarven kingdom informed that I had been elevated to the status of colony and instead of a mayor I was to propose a candidate for the baroncy. So now I have a baron...and plenty of space.

lol, crackhead. If that game had graphics that didn't blow....

lol yeah, i finally tasked myself to google for a video of this game to see what the fuck Ox was banging on about.

Conclusion: Ox, you should lay off the crack.

I must admit, he's got a hell of an imagination.

"Yea, there were legs here, arms there, blood all over the walls..."

translated into the real world

"there's a _ here, a L over there, a # symbol was reddish to look like blood..."

haha, you fuckers. I do have a pretty vivid imagination, but I wasn't making all shit up. The game gives you a crapload of information, often to the point where it's overkill. For example every dwarf, creature or animal has a detailed personal description. This covers physical aspects (strong, weak, slow to heal, missing limbs, tall, short, colour hair, eyes, and so forth), mental aspects (procrastinator, prone to depression, sociable, quick to anger, loner, etc.) and likes and dislikes (what animals do they like, which materials, and so forth).

Some of these are merely aesthetic like eye colour, but others like physical strength, mental aspects and likes and dislikes very much affect every interaction of the dwarf with the world. A strong dwarf will obviously make for a better fighter than a weak one, and you don't want to rile a dwarf who is quick to anger too much or he may throw a tantrum or go berserk, which is bad news. Etc. etc. The most outspoken effect is usually in mayors and nobles, who will make demands from time to time which are often influenced by their personal likes. A mayor who likes gold will often ask you to produce golden items, and if he loves bucklers he may prohibit their export for a while. And since he's the mayor his social qualities + influence over the people are important so it's good to keep him happy. That is why you're often better off arranging "unforunate accidents" for mayors with very extravagant or expensive tastes, before you piss them off and they start wreaking havoc on your legendary craftsmen for not producing ridiculous item X in time.

Here's an example of a (rather hilarious) personal description.



Similarly, every battle has a minutiously detailed report of what is going on, what body parts have been struck and how bad the damage seems to be. This also means that after a particularly savage battle (like with that hydra, who likes to rip off limbs ) you'll see read about body parts on the scene, as well as blood spatterings (you can see them too to some extent with the tilesets).

Example of battle report



Also, every dwarf has a ridiculously detailed anatomy and can suffer from anything ranging from bruised skulls to collapsed lungs, broken bones, etc etc. Which can of course be healed by well-trained dwarves with the diagnosis, suturer, nonesetter etc skills.

You can make the game better to look at with a tileset replacing most of the ASCII, which is what I do. It doesn't look half as arcane with that, in the sense that wooden logs look like wooden fucking logs and not a brown comma or whatever. I'm using Mayday Mike and it looks something like this



I'm sure you can make out barrels, dwarves, doors, beds, tables and stools and a few armored dwarves. A world of difference. Don't think I could have gotten into the game if I had to do it in ASCII tbh.

It also has realistic water physics, which may seem hard for a 2D game but it works pretty well really. Nothing like seeing your floodgate system work when flooding (subterranean) fields or a room full of enemies.

And you can build the most insane and elaborate traps, it's awesome. A quote I struck somewhere when looking for the screens above:



I'd continue to tell some stories about my recent experiences in DF but I'm not sure anyone cares or reads them. So I'll give you the skinny for now: the original fortress, Onslaughtspears (randomized name ) was sieged by a bunch of humans not long after my last report. They probably came because of that human caravan that I starved to death semi-accidentally after the brdige was destroyed and they couldn't return home. I saw them in time and pulled up the bridge, and they didn't seem to make any attempts to get in. And since I had ample supplies and was more than self-sufficient, I could technically speaking just sit it out. But I decided it would have been better trying to kill a few of them...silly me. My lousily trained army and the paltry few traps I put up were raped by 2-3 humans who got in after I put down the drawbridge. No biggie I thought, because I had my failsafe up at the end of the main entrance: two tame giant lions I had bought from an Elven caravan a little before. Surely two 7-foot tall lions could take on a few spear-carrying humans with ease? Well...they couldn't. The humans started killing everyone and I abandonded the fortress halfway their killing spree after sending in unarmed dwarf after unarmed dwarf and seeing them get killed.

I may still reclaim it somewhere in the future with a new expedition, as it was a nice location, but for now I think I'll leave it be. I started a new fortress in a less hospitable place and was doing really well, until some ****** goblins decided to pull a trick on me. There was a goblin child snatcher (yes, they steal children) and some thieves near the entrance of my fort so I send my pretty bad-ass militia commander in. He kill 2 of them, and then, BANG, 4-5 armored goblins appear. Ambush! Tricky fuckers. They killed my commander with crossbow fire, then stormed in my fortress. My half-finished traps killed a few but the rest seem to have free reign now. Then I went to bed. May be a quick end to the fortress though!

So the 'new' fortress was a bust (goblins ftl) and I reclaimed the old one. Basically this means you arrive at the fortress as it was left, with that note that a) there will be bodies, items, furniture and so forth scattered all over the fortress/outside it, as it would from being looted, b) any designations (stockpiles, hospitals, meeting areas, bedrooms, dormitories etc) have been lifted and perhaps worst of all c) any hostile forces will still be present. This can mean a gigantic monster, an enemy army or a nbunch of batshit insane dwarves depending on the outcome of the previous fortress.

In this case it was the invading force of humans, who had scattered all over the outside area and inside my fortess as well. A hard nut to crack for a starting expedition of 7 badly equipped dwarves, but for some reason the vast majority of the 11 human warriors (clad in bronze) hanging around was 'friendly', meaning they hung around in more or less the same spot without actually attacking. Huh. Not that I minded...it gave me the chance to very slowly start clearing out the fortress and repairing the defenses.

Strangely, the humans were still hostile against the yearly trade caravan from the Dwarven kingdom and would kilit before it even got to me. So I was a bit strapped for some materials at first. Still, the fortress grew rapidly and without too many problems or military invasions. I also trained up a crack squad of 5 dwarves in a danger room. A danger room is simply a small room designated as a training room, with the entire floor covered in spike traps. These spikes are wooden training spears instead of real metal weapons, of course, since I don't want my dudes to die a horribly spikey death. Then you link all the traps to one lever and put it in a place where a lot of dwarves pass, and put it on eternal 'repeat'. Every time a dwarf is near and has the time he'll pull it continiously, making spears pop in and out all the time and creating a sort of amazing ninja training room. The downside is that it usually kills any cat or dog or other small animal (or even babies) caught in it...so better lock the door for your pets or not draft any mothers.

Before too long I assembled the team and had it attack every human soldier hanging around. 4 out of 5 didn't take a single scratch, but the 5th somehow ran got it real bad: one of her legs and one of her arms destroyed and her guts cut open. I took her to the hospital where her wounds were cleaned and she was sutured up (in several places), but she couldn't stand, crawl, had nerve damage and was in extreme pain. So barring a miracle she wasn't going to make it, and since my medical staff was pretty shit back then (I had no one who could properly set bones or make casts for example) she succumbed to infection. Had a coffin manufactured for her and a graveyard cut out - least I could do for someone who fell bravely in battle.

After that things have been pretty much going uneventfully. There was a named titan who came walking into my base, but just as scrambled the militia to take it on the human carvan guards (they were there protecting the trader) engaged it and killed it in almost one blow. Warhammer to the head. So false alarm. Funniest part was when I saw my butcher drag his corpse really slowly from the refuse pile to his butcher's shop. A few minutes later I was several hundreds of pounds of meat richer, hahaha. Yeaaaah boooy.

Other noteworthy happenings: I made a zoo with animals I can't train into war animals (yet). Also made a prison, expanded the hospital with a well and an improvised watering hole, and started the creation of a safe room that will allow me to sustain a handful of "chosen" dwarves in the event of a FUBARing fortress. I'll post screens tonight.

First off, screenshot of the dwarven militia member that got seriously fucked up that I mentioned in my previous post.



Yeah...chances were slim she was gonna survive that.

The fortress itself then..the ground floor



1) The drawbridge. You can see the water moat under it.
2) A stockpile of many different stone sorts. As you can imagine you shit stone as you dig more and deeper, so I'm not exactly short on it. To the far right up and down outside the fortress you'll see more stone piles. The white square thing below the stone stockpile is the Trade Depot which welcomes traders as they arrive (I forgot to number it)
3) The small room with the two blue-ish guys in is the danger room, a collection of spear traps that they use to dodge and block, speeding up their training. The bigger room below is part barracks, part wood stockpile (cause I'd rather not leave it outside for peeps to steal).
4) Underground farms. You'll recognize some paddo's ('plump helmets'). There are many floodgates and levers in the environment, which are used for controlled flooding for irrigation (and as a trap in case of the long waterway that goes around to my moat).
5) the hatch covers of the main stairways below
6) The river. My main and only source of water so far.

The second floor, the initial living quarters, now more or less abandoned



1) is the bottom of the moat under ym drawbridge, which as you can see caused a little accident and two rooms to flood upon construction. I told my dwarves not to open the doors and built a wall in the hallway to be sure.
2) Some stockpiles. Weapons and armor I think (since the militia trains so close)
3) another stockpile, mostly buckets and wooden shit
4) the old dining room. You can probably makle out a row of tables and some backless chairs
5) the old dormitory, a collection of beds. There are seperate rooms to the right, used to belong to my first 7 settlers.

The hallway of death. Used to be where my first workshops were located, now functions as a dangerous and narrow hallway full of shit that will get you killed real fast.



1) 2 rooms with cages full of trained war animals. They're linked up to a lever below so I can release them all without coming anywhere near the actual hallway. As you can see in the top right information screen the first cage is filled with a war leopard, jaguar and cheetah as well as a giant war tiger, giant war cheetah and giant war jaguar. The other cages has 7 war dogs, a war gorilla and a war grizzly. Yeah...it's not gonna be pretty.
2) The green things are cage traps. While the war animals are extremely useful against humanoids, they tend to get swapped aside pretty quickly by most larger beings (titans and big monsters etc). Humanoids are pretty smart and tend to avoid getting trapped in a cage, but those big beasts are fucking stupid so they do walk into them and then can serve as pets for my zoo.
3) a stockpile of empty cages
4) a loaded ballista aimed into the narrow hallway. Another behind it and two more up top to provide crossfire. And yes, ballista arrows hit everything in their path so potential for massive destruction against groups here!

I want to build much more sick traps here, this is just the start.

The workshops: a few levels down are the workshops. Basically what it says, my main production hub. Not gonna name them all, just a few.



1) a stone stockpile for the mason workshops below (2). Since I specialise in masonry and rock crafts because of my abundant stone I figured it'd be good to have a stockpile near so they don't always have to run back and forth.
2) the aforementioned mason's workshops
3) Same principle: a stockpile with ores and coal provide a fluid back and forth between my smelter and blacksmith (just below, smelter to the right and blacksmith hs a little anvil)
4) another essential part of the fortress: the stills.
5) a garbage dump. Several doors to prevent miasma (ie rot) from spreading

The stockpiles: right below the workshops (for easy access to resources and for easy storage of finished goods and food).



1) wood (as you can probably tell)
2) furniture storage
3) metal ores that can be smelted. Mostly stocking gold right now.
4) A lot of barrels, the food stockpile
5) bins of cloth and silk
6) bins with finished metal bars (smelted by smelter from ore, now ready for blacksmith use)
7) gems in bins
8) bins with finished goods: crafts, clothes, etc
9) leather hide stockpile. Tanned by the tanner from animals killed by my butcher, usable by the leatherworker nowto make leather products


The living quarters, many levels beneath the workshops (because of noise pollution)

Upper part


Most of it is just rooms with beds and chests as you can see.

1 )the Great Hall. One large space with a shitload of tables and chairs, and the floors and walls are first smoothed and then engraved (with some masterpieces). My dwarves feel a-ok in that place.

Lower part



1) is the jail. It has 2 cages and 2 chains to lock dwarves in/to in case they break the law. They are also made out of solid gold. I have so much gold that I figured it'd be a waste to use another metal I may have more need of later on. Besides, gives the prisoners something nice to look at while they're there.
2) the hospital. It has beds + tables for surgery. Figured it'd be good to keep it close to the living quarters and jail
3) is a well I created with some creative tunneling from the river. Near the hospital cause doctors need water to have patients drink/clean their wounds while they're there.

Lastly, the nobles district, zoo and safe room (under construction)



1) the three rooms above the '1' are the living room, dining room and office of the mayor. He needs nice and spacey rooms.
2) the beginnings of the safe room. In case of emergency I want to pull back a few essential dwarves and wall them in. There is already a food stockpile, a still and I'm working on an underground farm. Self-sustainable is the idea.
3) the manager's office
4) the bookeepers' office
5) the captain of the guard's quarters, dining room and office
6) the zoo, which right now is little more than a collection of exotic animals people can stare at. I want to make it better over time.


So there you go The grand tour!

Did anyone even read/see the screens? Just wondering.

yea, but I may have fallen asleep a few times.

I hate you.

I have to admit i didn't make it to the lowest level