![]() At first this feels ridiculously unfair, but there's a magical thing that starts to happen the longer you play - you begin to stumble upon old bases, little caches of early game treasure (maybe just as simple as some tools or a few pieces of food). The idea was that you would spawn randomly within a fairly large radius of the world spawn.īTW made a lot of changes to the early game of Minecraft to make survival significantly more difficult, so you would wind up respawning often. I used to play a Minecraft mod called Better Than Wolves, which had a mechanic called Hardcore Spawn. The artists always seem to have perfect knowledge of their subjects. There's also a sort-of-exploit related to this, where if there's a stranger in your fortress whom you suspect of having a nefarious background, you can commission artwork of them and sometimes it will reveal malicious traits about them if you examine it. I had a some statues made of her, and most of them came out depicting the heroic deed in different levels of detail (so of course the best one was put up in that dining hall). In one of the last times I played, some invader had broken through my defenses and killed a couple of highly respected dwarves (one of whom was a skilled fighter), but finally came face to face with a young girl dwarf who confronted him in one of the dining halls and, though she lost a leg, managed to kill him (eventually recovering to grow up to be a skilled craftsdwarf). from the current game world, but you can commission pieces about specific dwarves and the artisans will commemorate battles or other milestone events that involved them. My favorite thing about the engravings (and statues and similar art) is that not only is it based on real dwarves, gods, etc. but low detail art has a way of really spurring the imagination on! And I hope this didn't come off as ranty or judgemental - each person enjoys games in different ways. I hope to see the non-ASCII version work as a gateway drug to get more people into the imagination of what they're building. ![]() If you use words or abstract symbols then each player will fill in the details themselves, usually in their head but sometimes in artwork (see Kruggsmash as an approachable example here) which can be extremely fulfilling. that's awesome.ĭwarf fortress is the first thing since MUDing that's really scratched the imagination itch in quite that way and, as someone who has worked in game development themselves, I think it's something that is only possible if you keep to the lowest tech. in the end it's just a box you need to floor scroll to see on the screen but the carved pillars in the middle of the room - the enclaves for dwarves to, in hushed voices, discuss just how beautiful gold is - and the grand skylight in the middle of the ceiling casting a rainbow of different colored light on the ground below. I've built a glorious six floor tavern (slowly) with engravings on every surface - even those not reachable by pathing, why? because I had an image of a tavern floor full of rowdy miners with opera boxes circling the room above them for dwarves of a more refined taste. The information given to the player is extremely dense and easy to parse once you've adjusted and you're giving your brain a chance to try and play inside your own head. I think it does something a lot of modern games miss out on - it encourages imagination first. If you can stomach the adjustment period for ASCII I'd really recommend it. It is truly a labor of love by two brothers who have chosen to make it their life's work. It's a big learning curve but I love the game so much, and knowing the story of it's creation over time makes me love it even more. If you do want to give it a go, make sure you find an "Intro to DF" type video and follow it. I adore DF and am one of those folks who enjoys playing, not just watching videos on youtube. So here is a talk that tries to explain DF to an audience, and does talk a little about the simulation. There was also a recent article about Dwarf Fortress published to the Stack Overflow blogĮdit: There's really a decent amount of stuff out there, they've been making the game for almost 20 years now. Here's a video telling a very famous story about tracking down a bug that involved alcoholic cats One of the creators (Tarn, specifically) does interviews fairly often, talking about the game and progress.
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