A vile force of darkness has arrived! Let's Play Dwarf Fortress!

CONTENTS:

CHAPTER ONE: In which a world is born, and history is made.

CHAPTER TWO: In which the wide plains are broken by dwarven pickaxe.

CHAPTER THREE: In which we harness the earth and its blood.


PRELUDE:



The sun sets every day on Thadar Thran, the Planet of Dawn. It never made me uneasy until tonight. Tonight, the sun hides itself behind thick plumes of smoke as it falls; light through the pyroclastic ash, like an orange gauze, wraps about mountain and valley alike. The air is warm and humid, and the gray ash smears black on my skin. I close my eyes to wipe my face again, and remind myself just how much those priests will pay me -- if I succeed in acquiting them of their heresies.
They have charged me to clear the name of their god Islas Parchedflares, lord of volcanos, smithies, and fire.



I am from the country of Behel Ladgi. To the far north lies the Empire of Hopper, perhaps the most powerful nation in our world. For the past two years, they have waged a bitter war with the dwarves that live in the lands between our nation and theirs. Our king, a wise and shrewd man, has sent word that we would join the Empire against these dwarves. That was barely a year ago, and the world has heard almost nothing of the dwarves since.



There has been great controversy over this conflict -- on one hand, the dwarves are a strange people, and we've had precious little contact with them. For all we know, they could be capturing human children and eating them.



On the other hand, the evidence against them is only circumstantial. "The Innocent Torches" they are called, "Etomlitast" in their own language. The priests of Parchflames have been quick to claim this coincidence as fate, quick to claim these dwarves as martyrs, and quicker still to attract the persecution of those afraid of the Empire's strength. Though the craftswork of the dwarves is legend among our people, baubles and architectural oddities cannot stand against the strength of spear and steed. Despite the jeering mobs, the disdain of the aristocracy, the disgust of other cults, the priests have stayed firm.



And perhaps they are right. For their sake, I hope they are. I don't know why else they would pay me so much to search the dwarven ruins for any sign of "fated" innocence. The Barbarian of Love is the largest gemstone in all the world, cut only two years ago and yet, possibly the greatest treasure in the hands of men. It is here that dwarven hands carried it from the earth, and here that dwarven hands inscribed it with a profound beauty, and it is here that dwarven blood spilled on soil and stone.

Deep in the Marshes of Stalking, a vent of magma rises through the putrid soil, belching its ash into the sky and into my eyes. Wicked looking trees hang their leaves over pools of fetid filth. Horrible abominations prowl in the shadows of this valley -- dogs with beaks instead of faces, enormous slugs with the arms and mouths of men, red-eyed swarms of demon rats. Our merchants have avoided this land for generations, fearing that the marsh itself would swallow them whole. And yet upon a small plateau, next to a noxious smoking pit in the earth, a squat, impossibly sturdy tower stands.



The parting words of the priesthood of Parchflames echo in my ears. "When men walk the earth, the signs of their comings and goings are hidden by nature. Some pride themselves on this invisibility, but it is the dwarves who will be remembered through the ages, for they leave deep footprints." This is the dwarven fortress Keshenuzar, named for a dwarven prince who died in his infancy eighty years ago, eaten by a dragon who would later be worshiped as a god. But it is better known in our language as "Flamegrotto."



I unsling my sword and slide myself down the shallow slopes, and I am greeted by the unmistakenable smell of death. Rotted nearly to the bones is a horse, long stalks of grass already growing between its ribs. Broken toys and torn clothes are strewn about, and several arrows project at strange angles from the ground. A wide tunnel proceeds into the hillside here, in the direction of the tower. I have been in this swamp too long to hesitate outside, and though I note the arrows are clearly of goblin design, I light a torch and stride into the winding tunnel.



Midway into the passage I find myself walking on smooth tile, passing a room with its doors still hanging ajar. Though it is comfortable to be out of the cloying swamp air, the smell of death is still stuck in my nostrils. As I push through a door directly ahead, I find the reason why. This room is a dining hall, full of shattered glass tables and dead dwarven bodies, slumped over their stools. Their bodies are far better preserved than the horse outside. Everything has been picked over, probably by grave-thieving kobolds and their ilk. The walls are covered in stains and mildew where they aren't crumbling, and small bones are scattered on every surface. I search everywhere, as well as I can, but find nothing of value.



The body of a soldier -- the copper helm still on the skull, spear still stuck through the ribcage -- blocks open the door to what looks like a barracks. Further inside is a room full of strange gears, pipes, and screws; I only hope it is not some kind of torture chamber, for it is across the hallway from what looks like a prison. The walls are lined with chains, and there's a bucket with something in it. I backpedal out of the room and lock the door before I find out what it is.



I walk down the wide, spiraling staircase to another level of the labryinth. My boots feel cold, and I realize I have stopped sweating. These stone halls are more still and more silent than any place I have known in my life. The halls twist around in spirals, honeycombed with bedchambers and offices. I find a room with an enormous cage next to a bed, and signs of significant struggle. I wonder, for a moment, if any jewel is worth finding out what happened here. There have been no books or scrolls, no proof of battle but in the instruments.



Down the eastern corridor, past the dining room I find a large warehouse, filled with metal bars and stone blocks. The smell is acrid. Doors hang half open to craftshops full of scarred anvils and melted cisterns. Here is where the great glory of the dwarves once stood, where they used the blood of the earth itself to forge art from ore.



It could not have been more than two seasons since the Empire came, but the heat of lava left unchecked has come and passed. Stone laid in thick folds covers the stockroom floor like a blanket.



A ramp leads up and out of the layer of stone, and climbing it reveals a cavernous, sandy room. In a corner, large purple mushrooms still seem to be growing healthily in rows -- this was an underground farm, once. Now, it houses a vast pile of junk. Perhaps this is the warren of those vicious-looking rats. Still nothing seems to bear any testament worthy enough to bring the priests.



But now, past a millstone with a broken axle rising from its center, I ascend another wide staircase leading upwards, excited. This is the tower. Three stories it risesabove the plateau, arrow-slits in its walls, its glass roof open to the sky. The windmill turns no longer, but still rises from the floor below. Gears and axles reach all the way from up here, and I could not guess how far they go down. No human kingdom ever made something like this. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a soldier, waging war on this place.

They would have come from the north-west, probably finding their way along the river. They would look up to see this half-completed tower, see the smoke pouring from the immense crater now below me. Their corpses have since sunk into the murk, but did their spirits sink as deep?



For my own morale is flagging, here. This is a ruin, with no meaning. No proof of craven dwarves or scheming empires. I will have no proof for these priests, no riches for my long journey. Back downstairs, I find more rooms with barrels, stacks of tanned leather, nothing but the trash that even the scavengers refused to pick up. I pace the hallways, becoming anxious and claustrophobic, but unwilling to leave until I find something. I round a corner, stepping over broken skeletons, and --



The green, ghostly faces of the dwarves looking right at me are so startling that I gasp loudly. The sound of my own voice snaps me back into focus and I realize that these are statues made of glass. I wonder, for a fleeting moment, if this room had been left unsacked by thieves, but then I see coffins lining the walls and the desecrated bones beneath my feet. And then I notice the engravings, covering the floor and all the walls.



There are thousands of pictures carved into these walls. I cannot read the runes, but it is clear that this is what I was looking for this whole time. The stories of dwarves are written on but one page, and it is the earth.



Even the stories from before the dwarves ever came to this place are here. I study the pictures for so long I nearly forget myself. I begin to piece together the battle, about how the military was slaughtered by the first wave of invading humans, how the workers began to carry in the bodies of the slain before the second wave hit.



There were significant differences in this dwarven version of the stories I heard at home about this battle. The empire had made it sound like a great army of dwarves clashed with them, and the sounds of their battle rang from the mountains. These carvings do not make it seem as so.



A lone child was recovering her father's belongings when a host of human soldiers marched upon the fortress. They drew their weapons and rushed at her. Is this what the priests told me was fate? I cannot tell if these carvings are of history or myth. What happened next is that a single dwarf emerged from the fortress to protect the child. Almost a dozen men were killed in his first onslaught. The rest fled, but the dwarf was mortally wounded. The child helped carry him back into the fortress, and tombs were carved out to honor the dead.

I step back from the walls, somewhat dizzy with the concentration of my study.

The carvings end here, and it is not hard to figure out what happened next. With so many dead, the fortress fell into disrepair, and was defenseless with the death of their hero. I walk back and forth through the masoleum several times, looking at the pictures, but I cannot find anything. There was no record of any beginning to this struggle. The dwarves didn't seem to know why the humans attacked at all. Perhaps it wasn't really their fault. Perhaps a
record of these carvings would be good enough for the priests of Parchflames.
It will have to be, because I have decided to be far from this swamp when the sun rises.

As I emerge from the tunnel back into the thick night air, I wonder briefly if anyone will discover who killed that human diplomat and started this war, but I am distracted by flickering lights near the tower. Another traveler? Or something else? I ready my shield and sword. A streak of flame jets past me, and a small, glowing figure rushes through the weeds.



It leaps, and tries to bite me -- I block its strike and drop it to the ground. The glow fades, revealing a small, skinny body with cruel features and ruddy skin. The blood rushes to my head, and I realize too late that the dwarves must have built this tower to protect them from something other than humans. More flickering lights appear from the pit, and still too late do I realize that no-one else ever will discover the truth behind this war.



Though the sun rises every day on Thadar Thran, I will not see it happen again.



COMING SOON: Let's Play Dwarf Fortress!

Damn, that's a hell of a prologue. Really looking forward to this one.

Can you go through a tutorial on how to play the game? I've tried a few times and have always gotten completely lost.

- Eddie

Oh man, I've been waiting for this. Good luck!

Have you tried captnduck's video tutorial? I can't vouch for it personally as I learned to play the game before it was made, but it seems to have helped a lot of people. It's for the previous version of the game, but that's probably the one you'll want to learn on anyway, since the new one has a bunch of confusing features that don't quite work yet.

That's the idea. Think of the above as the theatrical introduction to a documentary feature film. Like March of the Penguins but with beards.

As somebody who has never played Dwarf Fortress I find this introduction completely inscrutable.

Humans and dwarves fought. The humans won. Then fire imps killed the remaining dwarves. After a while a guy showed up. The fire imps killed him too.

I find that I need to keep the wiki open when I play DF. There are some things that I've gotten into my head over time, but you always run into something new. New things that you don't understand can cause Fun.

Technical question, which version is being played? 40d, .31 (AKA DF2010), some sort of mod?

It's one of the graphical compilations but can't remember which one. It was one of my favorites though.

Being hit with a ball of flames suuucks.

After all that burning, it should have said well done.

maybe with the help of this LP I'll finally be able to play DF. I've tried multiple times but just find it all too overwhelming.

Looking forward to this! One hell of an intro. Though I didn't know you could play DF as just a lone character.

Welcome to Let's Play: Dwarf Fortress!

So, the introduction sounds like the junk your DM keeps inside a three-ring binder, and you've looked at screenshots that mean next to nothing to you. Somebody delved too deep, somebody died horribly in a fire, words like "andesite" and "tourmaline" got thrown around, and somebody apparently named their country after the late Dennis Hopper.


All I see is miner, mason, carpenter...
thx to whoever made that originally

Understandably, you're confused. These days, the game gets a lot of press and people fervently post stories about crap that happened to them while they play it. It kind of flies wide, without any context and usually packed to the gills with inaccessible information. Bear with me here, we're going to do this from the ground down (like a good dwarf should).

So, in order to do a Let's Play, let's get a little history out of the way first.

If you google for "Slaves to Armok: God of Blood," you find a hideous, red-text-on-black-background site dating from late 2000 through 2006. Here, you could find a strange and buggy 3D fighting/RPG game, developed by a Stanford student known as Tarn Adams. As far as I know, you can still download it. Armok was to feature an immense, randomly-generated world with a wide variety of things in it, that could all interact together in complex ways. Flesh would contain multiple layers, of skin and bone and gristle; everything from the ground, to trees, to buildings would be made out of a different material, not just textured as such. A lot was supposed to happen.

As the stories go, Tarn discovered that adding gameplay features to a 3D engine was difficult and backwards. Considering the ambitious aims for his game, this is no big surprise. Tarn instead decided to step back and work with a more modest engine, something simple yet flexible, like one would find in a roguelike. By 2006, work had ceased on this first project, and a new game was ready to be released to the world.

Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress came out in 2006, and has gone through vast changes over the last few years. Initially the game took place only on a single z-plane, with the players tunnelling rightwards into a mountain with a river, a chasm, and a lava river -- in that order. In 2008 the game was updated to version 0.28.181.40d. This version vastly expanded on what could happen in the game, particularly by adding the z-dimension, now creating mountains and chasms and cliffs, opening up the world for players to build upwards and downwards, though preserving some of the linear gameplay progression -- elements of the game develop as your fort does, with some events occuring based on how long you've been playing or how many dwarves live in your fort.

Alongside Fortress mode, Tarn implemented two other features: one would allow you to wander about the entire world as an adventurer, visiting different towns and exploring the wild; the other was a tool with which you could review all the people, places, and events of the world. Though you could not actively have a fort running and an adventurer wandering on the same file at the same time, what you do as a player would have a lasting effect on the world as a whole. With 40d, the game really opened up, and players started making enormous monuments, castles, and even crazier junk.

Just this spring, the game updated to version 0.31, currently at 0.31.08 as of this writing but it will invariably change several times during this LP. I'm still playing 40d, as the new version has changes as significant as the original switch from 2d, and also because bugs are still getting ironed out. We'll get to it, in the course of this LP, but for now we'll stick with what I know. Maybe we'll do a community fort in 0.31, I don't know.

I'm playing an un-modded version of the game, with a slightly customized tileset. I downloaded the Mayday pack, but I'm using someone else's dwarves, and I edited a few graphical tiles back to ASCII characters. I would stick to just ASCII but honestly, being able to tell apart miners, metalsmiths, and furnace operators without using the look command is too helpful to stay "pure."

Anyways! The only way I can explain anything further is simply to generate a world. Here we go!



When you hit the worldgen button, the game runs up several fractal maps and layers them on top of one another, setting the initial elevation, temperature, and rainfall on your world. According to generation parameters, it throws out maps that don't quite jive until it is ready to run rivers and drainage maps, figures out where the oceans should be, and erodes mountains and cliffs a bit. At this point, the game determines various biomes based on all the environmental factors. Areas with low drainage, warm temperatures, and high rainfall become swamps. All water freezes completely in the coldest of areas, creating glaciers and stopping rivers. Ponds and small lakes can dry up in incredibly hot areas. Seasons bring rain, snow, and icemelt.



Above, we find a small region on the map. Most of it is hot and dry -- the brown shapes on the north represent rocky badlands, which are mildly hilly and somewhat wild. No plants grow there, and neither do they grow in the south-east, where you can see a sandy desert. There are patches of forest to the north-west, where it is slightly more moist but no less hot, and hills to the southwest. A river, darker blue, is fed by smaller brooks from the higher elevations in the light blue. The little chunks at the end are either lakes or where the rivers originate from. (The X is just the cursor, whenever you see it).



Next, levels of savagery and evil are determined, and together with the biome, influence what kind of creatures can show up in a given area. A place can be calm, neutral, or savage and similarly good, neutral, or evil. Thus you end up with areas that are calm but evil, resulting in a "sinister" location, or savage yet good, resulting in "joyous wilds." In the picture above, we have a mirthful (neutral-good) tundra to the northwest and a haunted ocean to the northeast (neutral-evil). The tundra certainly features fluffy wamblers, and possibly unicorns. In the ocean, you would probably find sea monsters. Most areas are neutral, and have familiar animals such as goats or bears, but these are naturally affected by varying savagery levels. Good and evil areas are immediately apparent, because they show up in bright colors when good, and in murky colors when evil.



At this point, it gets complicated. The game lays down several populations: dwarves, humans, elves, goblins, kobolds, and giant monsters like titans and hydras. They begin to construct towns, fortresses, forest retreats, and roads; the materials they use are based on the biomes that they originate in. Above you can see several human towns of different sizes, with roads (looking like white or brown rivers) running between. The game then starts running these civilizations and beasts for a number of years, creating a history of how all the entities in the world interact. This we can view through the game's legend mode, once you accept a generated world.

It labels periods of history based on what the largest world powers are: while megabeasts run rampant it is the Age of Myth, when they begin to die out it is the Age of Legends. Typically worldgen is set to develop until the Age of Heros, but I always like to have a lot of nasty things about so I cut it off midway through the Age of Legends. You could actually run the game until the Age of Twilight when civilizations begin to crumble, or even the Age of Emptiness when all civilized creatures in your world are dead, but I've never done that personally. Curiously enough, they'll name an age after a particular megabeast if it is the most notable figure in the world. In any case, while scrolling through events in legend mode, you can select them to view more information.



Here we see a war between goblins and humans. All the different civilizations have different values, and on top of that rulers with different personalities. Wars are almost always a given, but you can assume two different socities trade if they aren't at war. There will be many more aspects to diplomacy and thus world generation in later versions of the game, but it can already become very interesting. Goblins steal children, for example, which can lead to very diverse dark fortresses. Elves can forge strong trade agreements with some societies, but they eat the dead of other sentient races -- humans and dwarves will go to war if they ever see elves doing that in person.



The cities and fortresses that the civilizations make can be taken over by one another, or even destroyed. Battles and duels are tracked down to the last injury to even the most trivial historical figure in your world's history. In the above picture, you can see an elven retreat to the southeast (the crown) and a goblin fortress to the southwest (a cabinet, also the letter F). At the center is the site of the battle and the former location of the elven town Hoodmountain.



Every figure is tracked, as well as all their allies, enemies, and kills. Reading through all the lists of events and figures can be mind-numbing, and most players don't do it.



However, I think this is where you find the detail that can really make the game interesting. When your dwarves decorate goods for trade, or engrave the walls of your fort, they draw on the history of your game's world. Almost every part of the introduction derievs from the legends file of Thadar Thran. Of course, the fort I made and the adventurer I ran ended up in the legends file after either perished, but it ties together.



This is most of the Eternal Domain Ruspzuza as it looks in year 150. In the north, there are several small dwarven civilizations living in an enormous mountain range, bordered by the pink kobolds and yellow elves to the east. There are two huge human civilizations, one on the far northeast corner of the map along an ocean and one just south of center. Goblins were involved in every single war of history, with the humans and elves -- for the most part, dwarves kept to trade. Two hydras and a dragon attracted small cults from human and dwarven populations.



In the far southwestern corner of the map, past the humans and kobolds, I found us a suitable embark location. It is rather flat, but that's okay -- three biomes intersect here, yielding a wide variety of minerals, and there's a magma vent somewhere beneath the soil. It's not too hot, not too evil, and we're not inaccessible to traders.



Our dwarves will come from The Washed Shield. There have been two royal lines, the second accounting for almost their entire history. Their kings and queens have worshipped mostly Gigin, a dwarven god of the stars, which is unusual. Typically dwarves worship things of the earth. I'm curious to see where this will go.



There are too many options for a first-time player to ever understand when embarking out to start a new fortress. Rather than dropping all of them on you right now, I will choose them and explain them as they come up in-game. However! This LP can't be all me. Think of yourselves as the bearded government back home, sending messages with trade caravans to the pioneers. I will play out the first two seasons, and of course I will keep the fort running at all cost, but I will assume your input will arrive in the fort every autumn. In your honor, the dwarves name this fort Amashok Enog Zasgim.



Speechtime, the Frog of Toasts. That's a proper dwarven name if I ever heard one.

BONUS ROUND: Can you figure out what parts of the introduction were derived directly from the game, and what parts I came with myself?

Coming Soon: Home is where the cart broke down!

Aw yiss, this is my JAM. Really looking forward to it. You probably know what you're doing, but I would suggest that you try for a more active defense than passive. 31.08's military seems... less buggy than before, and tales of deeds of heroic dwarves is more interesting than watching goblins turned into minced meat by traps (though that has its own certain charm).

Oh my god my head hurts. You haven't even started and I'm overwhelmed.

Well, to put it simply, you pick a dwarven civilization, you pick the stuff you want to bring with you, you pick the place you want to go. The game actually has a very workable starter build (think of it being like getting your stuff ready to leave in Oregon Trail), and as long as you embark for a site that has the necessities of living (i.e. wood, water, not too many monsters outside that want to kill you) you should be ready to start.

You must have invented the human-dwarf war if every worldgen war was with elves.

Also, I'm curious: how did the first king die?

The first queen, as it turns out, was killed by a female titan named Tozux Grizzlylistened, the Watchfulness of Genius, who had twenty-six kills racked up before eating it in year 100. The second queen was an adventurer, who had a minotaur to her name.

The war never progressed past two raids on Flamegrotto, and it was something that occurred because I lapsed and let some fire imps eat a diplomat, but it really did happen. Wars during worldgen do happen all the time -- elves hate it when people cut down trees, demons go out and flush out entire dwarven civilizations, and everybody breaks trade agreements sometimes.

If you guys need me to clear up anything or take more, or less screenshots, please let me know. I'm trying to figure out the clearest way to present this game possible, but it's... well, it's Dwarf Fortress.

More screenshots are good, especially if you break down what's going on in them.

I'd suggest explaining pictures as you go once you embark. Don't worry too much about explaining the intro, people will get it after a while. I have one question though, why didn't you flood the magma on the surface with water? That's always my first priority if I start up next to a magma pipe.

I laughed for a good five minutes at this.

This is how I learned. Also, lots of fun and experimenting

YES

I don't want this Let's Play to be a pean to why I've never played Dwarf Fortress, because it's honestly a fascinating and weird game and I wish I could get into it. But it's just too obtuse and complex, even for me.

I just had a thought- every so often, not every screenshot but maybe for some important ones, you might want to take a snapshot with Stonesense to give people an idea of how things look from a 2.5d perspective. I think one of the most difficult tasks in understanding the interface is getting how it works in a 3D plane (it's sort of like looking at individual strata), and Stone Sense does a good job of depicting that, especially since it can depict more than one layer at once if the space is open.

Example:

Woah. That's really nifty.

There's also one that generates a 3D version of the fortress that you can swoop around through and stuff. The visualization tools for DF are almost as crazy as the game itself.

Those goats in your pic look... questionable.

Just wait till you meet demons!

&

I will be very surprised if we every have to deal with imaging demons. Unless you're planning some ridiculously complex tunnels to lure them out into a big huge pit and then dump a river on them, which of course requires chaining a puppy on an island.

Unfortunately, there's no HFS in this LP, as I really wanted to show off a lot of game concepts, and all the adamantine is in boring or aquifer-ridden locations. I think I'm going to touch on what the embark location viewer can show you about a region before you get there, and I'll answer any sorts of questions.

I never flooded that vent back in Flamegrotto largely because working on anything outside was crazy. The beak dogs were really the worst -- they'd show up and fan out, and my dwarves would go nuts trying to run away while they waited for the military to show up. Arms everywhere. It was awful. The fire imp actually used to set the upper plateau area on fire seasonally, while they were busy killing diplomats.