Dwarf Fortress, Now in 3D … sort of.
by peterb
I’ve made no secret of my love for Bay 12 Games’ Dwarf Fortress. I’ve returned to it this holiday season only to find there’s been a significant change: the game is now 3D.
It’s still a roguelike, mind you. But the environments now encompass a huge number of z-levels, which you can step through with the < and > keys.
I’m of two minds about this development. On the positive side, it brings a lot of freshness and variety to the game, and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, particularly with respect to moving water and magma about. On the other hand, the user interface of Dwarf Fortress was already fairly punishingly bad, and this isn’t helping.
Perhaps a more significant change is that sites are more varied now. In previous versions of the game, every mountain was (essentially) guaranteed to have an underground river, a chasm, and a magma river. Now, you have a lot more flexibility. You can build your settlement on a mountain, or the plains (digging underneath the surface, naturally), or a glacier, or on the shore. It’s entirely possible to choose a site with no magma (or, as I have discovered in my current game, no unfrozen running water. Talk about a challenge).
For added niftiness, someone has created a 3D visualizer for Dwarf Fortress maps.
I’m currently playing it on my Mac via codeweavers’ CrossOver, and it works great. The author of the game, Tarn Adams, is currently trying to get it working under MacOS X natively. I can’t wait.
I keep wishing he’d open up the code, so that the UI could perhaps be fixed. “punishingly bad” merely scratches the surface of the true terror (though in truth, many things are dramatically improved from last time we all were dwarfing around)
My impression, without actually knowing the full story, is that he had a bad experience releasing source code once before (e.g., his code showing up with other people’s names on it, or some such). So I could understand why he’d be gunshy.
Even though I keep coming back to it, I still can’t help thinking that with Dwarf Fortress, the interface IS the game. It’s not too hard to figure out what your dwarves ought to do in order for the fortress to succeed. It is much harder to actually get them to do it. Things as simple as getting your soldiers to wear the plate mail armor that was just produced rather than leather are horribly frustrating. Let’s not even mention actual combat. One day the AI may catch up with the UI problems but 1.0 looks to be far in the future.
On the other hand, I can’t fault Tarn one bit as the game is free and fun to play. I highly recommend naming the dwarves after your friends/enemies.
If the difficulty was to convince the dwarves to do what you want, I’d be happier. But much of the difficulty the difficulty is to remember that to gather up some dwarves to beat up the kobold thief in their midst, you need to hit ‘v’ and note down the names. Then you need to hit ‘m’, find the names in the list, and hit ‘enter’ on them all and then hit ‘a’ and space. Then, you hit ‘x’. Only now have you reached the frustratingly-fun stage of making your boneheads do what you want; the rest was all just bad UI.
I was annoyed at my bonehead wrestler for charging the hydra single-handed (and, very quickly, single-legged and zero-headed). I was equally annoyed at my idiot marksdwarf for running out after 9 goblins and going down in a hail of crossbow bolts (only one of which got him — but through the hip and it lodged in the legbone, which never healed). I was peeved that in pumping out the water from a flooded chamber, I screwed up and flooded the main dining room, sweeping a hungry dwarf under to his death (he ended up beyond the floodgates, so now I’m waiting for winter to collect his body). But losing can indeed be fun.