Ten Hours with Dwarf Fortress

“Dwarf Fortress is one of the most complex computer games in the history of computer games.”

“How complex? In the game’s discussion forum, one player asserts that after 120 failed games, he can finally “get into the swing of things.””

“One of his many fortress death spirals began, as the downfalls of society often do, with an immigrant dwarf who suddenly succumbed to a “secretive mood.” A short time later—kaboom.”

“First devised by its two obsessive creators in 2002, Dwarf Fortress involves taking a band of dwarves and building them into a miniature civilization.”

“In a profile of the game’s co-creators, the New York Times described Dwarf Fortress as “a series of staggeringly elaborate challenges and devastating setbacks.””

“Not only is the game complex, with endless intricacies to the controls and systems, but it’s incredibly archaic-looking, especially for a game released this millennium. Its cast and environments are all rendered in colored characters of ASCII symbols (apostrophes, letters, mathematical symbols).”

“It’s a puzzle constructed in code, a throwback to games like Kroz. Calling it Dwarf Fortress is almost misleading at first—you won’t see anything resembling a traditional dwarf here.”

“While I implicitly understood Dwarf Fortress to be difficult, I couldn’t imagine why it was said to be so hard. It seemed counterintuitive to make a game so obtuse it might actually drive people away unless the developers at Bay 12 Games were the Pai Meis of game design, accepting only the most dedicated/masochistic of players.”

“There are rewards to playing a game like Dwarf Fortress: from reading the forums and articles about the game, it’s clear that once you have a grasp of the mechanics, the wide-open nature of the game gives you flexibility to do more or less whatever you want.”

“Similar to Dungeons and Dragons, once you overcome the technical execution hurdles, the only remaining major limitation is your imagination.”

“I decided to give the game ten hours of my life. I set a goal of doing my legit best to avoid using external guides or hints and to hold off using internal explanations unless I felt lost. I’d experiment and explore, seeing what I could ascertain from the user interface and environment and making as much progress as I could by my wits alone. And I learned one thing well: Dwarf Fortress is not a game that will hold your hand.”

“Disclaimer: Graphical skins and other such add-ons can make the game more palatable, but for the purposes of this piece, I attempted to play it in its original, stripped-down state. There are instructions within the game, and without in the form of wikis and forums, but I wanted to begin at the most basic level, if only to come at the game from a recently trendy (if controversial) design paradigm on discoverability that’s flowed from mobile apps to many new indie games: “if you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it”. This is admittedly extreme, but I wanted to begin at the bottom to let the game be its most challenging, and then work up from there.”

“The problem is the solution is another problem”

“I searched out a game guide online, which told me that my goal is “to extract every last ounce of wealth from the mountain.” Finally, a goal I can latch onto! But then I realize my fortress is not in a mountain at all, but in the badlands, and I wonder how that will affect my wealth extraction and immediately decide the answer is “irreparably.””

“According to the in-game guide, dwarves get their orders from the buildings I construct in the fortress. And yes, they will die if not cared for. Memories of failed Oregon Trail missions come rushing back. A feeling stirs in my gut that may be maternal instinct or may be hunger.”

“I’m beginning to think I’m being too cautious about this. The instructions do say, somewhere, that “losing is fun.” This naturally fills me with dread in anticipation of the moment my screen becomes flooded with a torrent of Wingdings meant to represent invading elves. I’m afraid that my carefully built series of meaningless burrows with dwarves who have nothing to do (because I can’t figure out what to do with them) are all… inevitably… doomed.”

“The decline of this not-quite-a-civilization actually takes a really long time. It occurs to me that even if there were a “commit graceful and unobtrusive suicide” command to speed things up, I wouldn’t know how to use it. Three dwarves have apparently died and the game did not tell me. (A dwarf’s status does not rank as highly as that of a stray water buffalo, evidently.) Dwarves must be the bipedal equivalent of camels, because only now, several months into the game, do they all start to die of thirst. About three hours in and my work here is done—per the game’s only clear instruction, I’ve lost.”

“Digging in”

“I give up and navigate to the Dwarf Fortress Wiki, where I find a quick start guide. The guide lets me know that having no idea what to do is “understandable”—thanks—but creating a sustainable fortress is “not as hard as you might think.””

“A sidebar notes it can be easy to kill off all your dwarves by accident on your first couple of tries. Given that my band of dwarven followers refused to die in a timely fashion, I’m not sure if I’m a natural at this game or so profoundly terrible I can’t even accomplish this simple step.”

“According to the wiki, I did indeed do a terrible job of picking a fortress site earlier. A good site has a number of features, including no aquifer, abundant trees, warm temperatures, shallow metals, clay, and soil, and most of the other land features you might guess are needed to foster life.”

“It turns out there’s a tool to search for the right combination of landscape features, but this mainly transforms the window into a swath of blinking red x’s that is painful to look at and not at all easy to process.”

“I start a new game but after searching for 15 minutes, I can’t find a square that fits all the requirements. One of the only absolute requirements of the guide is “no aquifer,” so of course nearly every tile is an aquifer. Finally, after endless searching, I find a tile with metals, soil, trees, and a warm climate that’s near a stream but not an aquifer. I dig in.”

“This game is a testament to evolution; kudos to whoever even got this far and was able to explain it to others, let alone document their progress in a guide. One puzzle piece down, several thousand to go.”

“I have to make sure dwarves get assigned to certain essential skills, such as wood burning, plant gathering, and metal crafting. I do this by selecting them, going into a skills menu, and toggling their duties on and off. To do that, I have to track them down and select them first. This is my “I told you this game is unnecessarily complex to the point of stubbornness” moment.”

“At this point in the quick start guide, a sidebar helpfully points out there is an external utility called “Dwarf Therapist” to “make the UI for managing dwarves easier.” I wonder whether this utility would help me realize my parents never thought I was good enough or smart enough, and that’s why I’m torturing myself with Dwarf Fortress.”

“I’m failing to grasp the higher order ideas behind how this game works—how to examine things, check on progress, fix problems, or see how everything fits together.”

“The existential woes of the misunderstood”

“The problem with this game, for me, is that obstacles like this arise about every 30 or 40 seconds. I’m constantly scrolling back through the quick start guide to the place where I first did the task. But if every 30 seconds I have to break away from the game to pore through a text, it feels like I’m making no progress. Every time I break away is an opportunity to lose interest—I’m losing interest twice a minute. If I do happen to understand an instruction or a way to accomplish a task, I don’t have a larger picture to fit it into and I almost immediately forget it. Repeat ad nauseum and I’m soon pressing buttons with no rhyme or rhythm.”

“To feel like you’re not getting a game in the beginning is standard, especially when it’s a game of the complex civilization-management type. As I said earlier, I’m not averse to a game where you more or less have to play in windowed mode so you can have a browser open with external resources telling you what to do (see: multiple years of World of Warcraft). But with Dwarf Fortress, I’ve never felt so lost and powerless, still, so many hours into a game.”

“What Dwarf Fortress really lacks, aside from a built-in tutorial that at least gets you started, is the ability to learn from tinkering. I would never have figured out the first step—digging a mine—on my own, let alone the dozens of following steps that apparently are crucial to building an effective, or even rudimentary, fortress. And I’m still not done. And I’m still hitting major roadblocks.”

“I went into Dwarf Fortress knowing the barrier to entry was dizzyingly high, but I consider (or considered) problem-solving, iterative experimentation, and quick learning to be among my personal strengths. In Dwarf Fortress, I feel like I’m trying to build a skyscraper by banging two rocks together.”

“I’d like to think I’m not the problem here. Dwarf Fortress wants to be understood about as much as the average teenager. The more it confuses you, the more accomplished it feels. Perhaps that’s too harsh an assessment. It is possible to tinker, after all. But tinkering is endless instead of productive, and there are so many ways to go wrong.”

“In Dwarf Fortress, the controls are so numerous and dense and the relationships between them so inscrutable that the initial game is really Watch These Dwarves Die, You’re Powerless To Do Anything, Maybe Just Pretend This Is TV and Grab a Bucket Of Popcorn.”

“There are plenty of enjoyable games out there that don’t hold your hand when it comes to learning the ropes. Many games have mechanics that are so intuitive that they don’t even require a tutorial. Even the difficult-to-learn games still have a place in many players’ hearts, because the investment can be rewarding.”

“But Dwarf Fortress isn’t just hard to learn; for me, it’s a fight every step of the way. I’ve been at this for a total of probably eight or nine hours now, between reading and executing commands. I’m no closer to autonomy or agency than when I started, and it seems clear that I’m still many hours away.”

“Fighting back with documentation”