Dwarf Fortress

[biosc1]

Somebody has to start it.

Dwarf Fortress...live then die. Cycle of life.

Everything you need to start in one nice 7zip file (http://www.esnips.com/doc/3318c1fd-10e2-4749-af2c-5a5201e8c064/df_28_181_40d). Tileset included, world pre-generated, standard embark load-out saved...just load it up, execute df.exe, choose start new adventure, choose standard embark, then press 'e' to embark and you'll be on your way.

Newest version v0.28.181.40d, 5.5 MB, posted September 6, 2008 (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/df_28_181_40d.zip)


The website: http://www.bay12games.com

The forum: http://www.bay12games.com/forum

The wiki: http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Main_Page

The starting point: http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Your_first_fortress


Some graphics/game packs to make it easier on your eyes:

Website: http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.htm
File containing everything you need: updated Aug. 26/08 (http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/~mayday/upload/DFG13.zip)
Suggested tileset: http://www.threepanelsoul.com/temp_host/ian_16x16.bmp


Now sit back and await a Titan to come in and destroy those hippy elves that were sharing the same map as you :)

http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/7268/dfze1.jpg

[danielOut]

Sometime soon I'm going to need to whip up another "complete graphic package" like I did back on that other site.

Dwarves + Fortresses = wins

[biosc1]

Sometime soon I'm going to need to whip up another "complete graphic package" like I did back on that other site.

Dwarves + Fortresses = wins

Yah, that would be a great help for folks. I might try as well, but my world generation skills are lacking in the regard to actually make a really great world to adventure in.

A pack that people can just unzip and play, that has understandable graphics is sure to pull more people into this great open world game :)

[SilentScreams]

Is it wrong that I'm actually waiting until I get my quad-core rig back before I play DF again?
I've never known ASCII to put so much strain on a CPU.

[biosc1]

Is it wrong that I'm actually waiting until I get my quad-core rig back before I play DF again?
I've never known ASCII to put so much strain on a CPU.

Actually, the trick is to restrict the process to just one core. This way, you can do other things while you have this run in the background.

[danielOut]

DF doesn't take advantage of multi-cores. Set it to one core, and only it to that core. This should help performance.

And it actually uses DirectDraw rendering, so even the graphics are (somewhat) a strain.

[JediSanf]

CoG really ought to do a link game in the vein of Boatmurdered!

Also, biosc1, link Ian's (3PS, Machall) tileset. It's pretty descent.
http://www.threepanelsoul.com/temp_host/ian_16x16.bmp

[biosc1]

Added a 7zip file of the latest version, with a pre-genned world with lots of nasty and nice stuff, with tilesets installed, to give people who haven't tried this game out an easy way to, well, try it :)

Couldn't find any nice places to share files from, so I created an account at the following link. There is only one file to download, so there shouldn't be any confusion.

http://www.esnips.com/web/bblusStuff

Just unzip and execute DF.exe

http://www.esnips.com/doc/3318c1fd-10e2-4749-af2c-5a5201e8c064/df_28_181_40d

[Evewalker]

Well, there goes another month of my life. Did you have to remind me about this? :)

[biosc1]

Of course...lots of new things going on in the Dwarf Fortress world (minus an annoying bug involving cats complaining of being unable to bring stuff to the refuse).

The next Dwarf Fortress update looks to be a doozy, involving the Military Arc he's been working on, where you can start going to war with other civs.

[BrassGecko]

The next Dwarf Fortress update looks to be a doozy, involving the Military Arc he's been working on, where you can start going to war with other civs.

I'm excited just for more squad control. The current options aren't bad, but more detailed ones? Excellent.

[RandoM51]

Tips for good FPS in DF:

1. Running water and flowing lava are both bad. These are hard to give up because of the extra avenues of development they offer but worst case scenario pick a map without either to preserve framerate.

2. You can choose your disembark area size, which chooses the overall size of the map. In a similar vein, you can choose the size of the world when generating from seed. Making both of these smaller will improve performance, and in standard mode reducing them really has no negative effect on the game experience itself.

3. Elevation can cause performance issues. Build on the plains = better performance than on the side of a mountain. Once again you're probably sacrificing stuff for this performance(lava and adamantite).

4. Pets. Nothing kills FPS more than the dreaded Catsplosion. If you wish to keep animals, keep them caged so they do not become pets and so that you can harvest them at will. Harvesting pets tends to piss off your dwarven populace. Harvesting unnamed animals from your cage farm does not and yields you valuable meat, hides, bone, fat, etc. Similarly, controlling your populace can help as well. Beware new immigrants who bring pets, pets you cannot cage nor kill without consequence. Perhaps those immigrants should not get a place in your Fortress?

[Jeffool]

CoG really ought to do a link game in the vein of Boatmurdered!I hereby propose the establishment of Colony-G!

As much as I'd like to help, I barely have any idea of how this game works on any level in which I'd venture to leave a colony for someone else... Luckily, I recently got a better computer, so I'm DLing it now and will tool around with it more this weekend, so, I got that going for me.

Anyone else want to start it?

[biosc1]

Tips for good FPS in DF:

2. You can choose your disembark area size, which chooses the overall size of the map. In a similar vein, you can choose the size of the world when generating from seed. Making both of these smaller will improve performance, and in standard mode reducing them really has no negative effect on the game experience itself.



Dang, you're right, I forgot about that while generating that world I put in that 7zip file I posted...it is a large world...but isn't everyone playing on a Magic PC? :p

[Arphahat]

I suggested a Bloodline (Boatmurdered style) game on the other Dwarf Fortress thread on a forum elsewhere and would love to participate. I'd prefer not to be first since I'd be interested in seeing how others start.

[biosc1]

I suggested a Bloodline (Boatmurdered style) game on the other Dwarf Fortress thread on a forum elsewhere and would love to participate. I'd prefer not to be first since I'd be interested in seeing how others start.

Yah, I'm looking into it...I tried one mod and it didn't seem so "dangerous", so I think I'll have to keep looking or try and mod it myself. Shouldn't be too hard, right?

[Lance Uppercut]

What the hell is this, and why does that screenshot hurt my eyes?

[Alkanos]

I played a lot of this for a while, before kind of getting burned out on it. I really wish that he would fix the bows/crossbows though, they're practically chainguns as they are now!

[biosc1]

What the hell is this, and why does that screenshot hurt my eyes?

Because you're a graphics whore? :p

Don't make me get up on my soapbox and preach to you the power of this game, it's like sims on steroids, sim city without the cars, Company of Heroes without the guns, etc...etc...

[Lance Uppercut]

No seriously, what is it? I don't quite understand the premise of this game.

[Arphahat]

No seriously, what is it? I don't quite understand the premise of this game.

This site has a ton of useful information about this game. Instead of me trying to explain it and doing a poor job of it, I suggest you read about it here:

http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Dwarf_Fortress:About

[biosc1]

No seriously, what is it? I don't quite understand the premise of this game.

Well, you start with 7 dwarves who arrive by wagon to a location on a map of your choosing. The maps are usually a few screens wide by high with multiple "levels/heights".

You disembark and are left to your own devices, you can have multiple professions per dwarf, from being a miner to a fisher...they are all autonomous with you giving some commands such as build here, dig here, etc...You make workshops for them and you can tell them to make goods from crafts to mechanisms (for traps/levers) to weapons and armour. You can trade with caravans that come through, create an army to defend against the inevitable goblin attacks (or pissed off hippy elves that get angry when you cut down too many trees).

Basically, it's sort of a dwarven economy...they elect a mayor, you can assign a sheriff, you can grow large enough to become the "Mountainhome" of the dwarves, where a king/queen will take up residence. Every few seasons, more dwarves come and join you depending on how well you are doing, etc...

If you like city management/city development type games, you'll like this one because you'll have fun created defenses against bad creatures (like the Titan in the above screen shot). A lot of this game is open world, all about you trying to create goals and challenge yourself...like one game where I'm making a huge pump network to move water around a moat system for my castle.

[RandoM51]

No seriously, what is it? I don't quite understand the premise of this game.

Just a more complex take on Guns and Butter, in a fantasy setting.

[Jeffool]

Here's an idea... Instead of passing a colony from one person to the next, why don't we all take the same world, and the same section of map (shrunk to whatever size people need for their PCs. Then we could compare at each season. Anyone up for that?

[Hemalin]

Here's an idea... Instead of passing a colony from one person to the next, why don't we all take the same world, and the same section of map (shrunk to whatever size people need for their PCs. Then we could compare at each season. Anyone up for that?
That's an interesting idea. I could see how horribly inefficient I actually make my fortresses. Something to remember though is that moving water and the number of z-levels also play a large part in CPU strain.

[Arphahat]

Here's an idea... Instead of passing a colony from one person to the next, why don't we all take the same world, and the same section of map (shrunk to whatever size people need for their PCs. Then we could compare at each season. Anyone up for that?

OK, I wouldn't mind doing something like this. Let's determine some parameters and I'll whip up a world for us to play in. Actually, if we all agree on the parameters, we could just manually pick a seed and all have the same world to start. I'm always partial to 8675309 because it is long enough to be a real seed, but easy enough to remember.

Anyone with low end computers can determine the size of the world we play on.

Oh, and for taking pictures during the game, let me recommend a free app I wrote ages ago for doing such a thing: ScreenShotAssistant (https://sourceforge.net/projects/screenassist/). It takes care of a lot of things for you, like saving the image and naming it accordingly. It requires .Net libraries.

[Jeffool]

Well, I personally vote for everyone using the same plot of land as well; I'd like to see what other players do with the exact same area. (And just let individual users scale down their world as they see fit, though maybe someone should take a large screencap of it so they'll know where to settle within that area.)

[Arphahat]

Well, I personally vote for everyone using the same plot of land as well; I'd like to see what other players do with the exact same area. (And just let individual users scale down their world as they see fit, though maybe someone should take a large screencap of it so they'll know where to settle within that area.)

I don't think that there is a way to scale and still use the same game once we start one. How about I just start a game, pick a 4x4 area with a magma pool, pick the starting professions and equipment of the starting dwarfs and then save and post here?

If anyone has input about what they want to bring or what the profession distribution should be, please let me know and I will accommodate the requests as much as possible.

[danielOut]

i think the same starting profs/equip takes a lot of the originality out of a fort; the way you embark might be (and probably is) totally different from they way I settle.

I am all for picking the same location, but allowing each person to embark uniquely.

[biosc1]

i think the same starting profs/equip takes a lot of the originality out of a fort; the way you embark might be (and probably is) totally different from they way I settle.

I am all for picking the same location, but allowing each person to embark uniquely.

Unless we decide on starting equipment and no skills added. So we all start with inexperienced dwarves and set equipment list...say, 2 picks, 1 axe, 1 anvil, two war dogs and a cat, etc...

[Arphahat]

I think that there are multiple levels at which we could compare and we just need to settle on how specific.

For example, picking a seed and all of us playing in the somewhere in that world is as generic as we can get while still trying to compare. All of us using the same save file that someone generates after they pick the site location and equipment and skills is as specific a comparison as we could get. The question becomes where do we want to draw the line?

Personally, I'd be in favor of just using one of the suggested starting builds at the wiki site, having someone pick the location and provide the save file.

[RandoM51]

We could start from the same seed, and if we wanted one of us could pick a disembark area on the map and post a couple screenshots so we could all start in exactly the same spot.

I definitely don't want to start with the same dwarves/skills/gear as I use a highly customized set at this point. :)

As far as disembark areas go, I would recommend a small one(for performance reasons), small but that contains every cool thing you can have. You'd want:

magma
iron ore
economy ore(to make steel from the iron ore)
adamantite
underground pool(so you can grow towercaps)
rift/cave system(so you can collect cave spider silk)
renewable source of water(running out of water sucks)

These are the things I always look for when choosing a starting location.

After that we could just compare our settlements once a year and post maps on the df map archive.

I've got plenty of time on my hands, I could set this up if we decide on this method.

[Hotcod]

i still want to play this but i know i'll download it, try and find a title set i like... download that... start it up... get pissed off with the obtuse controls and lack of GUI and leave it sitting there unplayed.

[danielOut]

you can find a 3x3 or 3x4 with most of that stuff; more so using custom map gen parameters. also, having an underground river instead of underground pool solves both the tower cap and water source issues; plus the added challenge of figuring out how to access it without water monsters filling your fort. :)

as far as starting goes, i never take an anvil. ever.

[Jackel]

While I haven't played in a while, if you get this going I would definitely join in. Sounds like a lot of fun.

[biosc1]

as far as starting goes, i never take an anvil. ever.

Agreed...cost and weight are too much of an issue for me.

Of course, ironically, I do now have a Duke Consort that demands that I build 3 anvils pretty much constantly...my own personal hell.

[RandoM51]

There is a pre-built word available for download that has a 3x3 embark area with just about everything cool:

http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=582 The Everseeing Land

Inside the archive is a png file that shows you where the 3x3 embark spot is, it is near the center of the map if you're having trouble locating it.

Seems like a quick way for us to start this if you guys are up for it. Maybe we should start a thread just for this project?

[Arphahat]

We could start from the same seed, and if we wanted one of us could pick a disembark area on the map and post a couple screenshots so we could all start in exactly the same spot.

I definitely don't want to start with the same dwarves/skills/gear as I use a highly customized set at this point. :)

As far as disembark areas go, I would recommend a small one(for performance reasons), small but that contains every cool thing you can have. You'd want:

magma
iron ore
economy ore(to make steel from the iron ore)
adamantite
underground pool(so you can grow towercaps)
rift/cave system(so you can collect cave spider silk)
renewable source of water(running out of water sucks)

These are the things I always look for when choosing a starting location.

After that we could just compare our settlements once a year and post maps on the df map archive.

I've got plenty of time on my hands, I could set this up if we decide on this method.

I'm game for this. Unless someone objects, I say go ahead and generate this for us.

edit: Didn't see your other post. Yeah, let's just use that. Do you want to get another thread going, Random?

[Hemalin]

We could start from the same seed, and if we wanted one of us could pick a disembark area on the map and post a couple screenshots so we could all start in exactly the same spot.

I definitely don't want to start with the same dwarves/skills/gear as I use a highly customized set at this point. :)
That sounds pretty good and something we could all probably agree on.

As far as disembark areas go, I would recommend a small one(for performance reasons), small but that contains every cool thing you can have. You'd want:

magma
iron ore
economy ore(to make steel from the iron ore)
adamantite
underground pool(so you can grow towercaps)
rift/cave system(so you can collect cave spider silk)
renewable source of water(running out of water sucks)

These are the things I always look for when choosing a starting location.

After that we could just compare our settlements once a year and post maps on the df map archive.

I've got plenty of time on my hands, I could set this up if we decide on this method.
I'd also prefer sand but it's usually not a deal breaker.

What are people's thoughts on Skeletal Giant Eagles? I'd prefer an area with enough wildlife to make it interesting but without having to worry about Zombie Elephants every moment of your short Dwarven life.

[danielOut]

sand rocks; i heart sand.

[01010s]

I really, really want to get into this game but I just can't, I can play ASCII games but this just has too much going on for me to follow. It's a shame cause I find the premise fantastic.

[biosc1]

I really, really want to get into this game but I just can't, I can play ASCII games but this just has too much going on for me to follow. It's a shame cause I find the premise fantastic.

I agree, ASCII is just too much going on for me, but with the right tileset, it makes it much easier on the eyes and much easier to understand what is going on...and remember, you can pause at anytime to issue orders, un-pause to watch them play out.

[agentgray]

I have nothing but love for my 2007 PC GOTY.

Love.

With this being the gaming glut of '08, I'm going to have to pass. The timing is just off--and this game will eat my time.

[BrassGecko]

From today's Recent Developments (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_now.html).

"However, I can't promise I won't stop at venom and disease for a while when I get back to wounds. We've been on a research kick in those directions in our planning for some reason recently."


Looovely. :eek:
I can see the next development.. you have to get your wagon TO the site first. You have to control how fast you go, how many rations everyone gets, how to cross the rivers, maybe hunt for food.. and Dwarf1 has Cholera.

[biosc1]

From today's Recent Developments (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_now.html).

"However, I can't promise I won't stop at venom and disease for a while when I get back to wounds. We've been on a research kick in those directions in our planning for some reason recently."


Looovely. :eek:
I can see the next development.. you have to get your wagon TO the site first. You have to control how fast you go, how many rations everyone gets, how to cross the rivers, maybe hunt for food.. and Dwarf1 has Cholera.

Dang, now I have another RSS feed subscription ;)

I swear one of my guys went insane after a battle with a giant cave spider. I literally thought he was poisoned. Time to make more marksdwarves to keep out of reach of the nasties...and quivers...lots of quivers.