Dwarf Fortress: Difference between revisions

[[File:dwarfsx0.jpg|link=ASCII Art|frame|You want a dwarf? There's your fucking dwarf. You want some better graphics? '''Fuck you.''' Dwarves can do lots of stuff. Like digging. Can you dig? '''Hell no.''' Play ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]''.]]

 

 

 

It's not there yet (it's technically still in alpha), but it already has about two games worth of content, and an extremely fanatical fan base.

* [[Ancient Tomb]]: The 2012 update added elaborate burial tombs where sentient creatures born and died during world generation will be interred. It makes for excellent [[Dungeon Crawling]] in Adventure mode, and a source for necromancers to summon their armies from in Fortress mode.

* [[Animal Wrongs Group]]: Elves, but for trees (they still tame animals and use them as weapons.) They will be horribly offended when presented with anything made from wood or charcoal. They can't tell steel made with charcoal from steel made with mined coal, so they'll take either; but any glass but green glass needs wood ash to turn into pearlash, and beds and bins must be made of wood, so elves are notoriously unpopular. This is taken to new extremes when a single wooden decoration will turn an otherwise saleable (and "buy out the whole caravan" valuable) steel craft into grounds for packing up and leaving (and probably laying siege later), and you can't readily tell that this is the case unless you examine ''every single trade good you offer'' in minute detail. At least, petrified wood (stone) is okay.

* [[April Fools' Day]]: Version 0.31.01, two years in the making, was released at about 1 AM, PST on [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|April Fools Day]]. The Bay12 site still broke within ''minutes''.

{{quote|Desperate flailing ensued to keep it mostly operational. Oh, the stories I could tell.. - Baughn}}

* [[Artistic License Physics]]:

** Also known as "[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Physics Dwarven Physics]". It's not only possible, but easy, to build a perpetual motion machine, and melting a metal item recovers from 10% <ref>Which at least could be [[Justified Trope|explained]] by poor recycling techniques resulting in much of the material being lost with the slag.</ref> to 150% of its original mass depending on the item. The same stone boulder can be used to make four blocks - each sufficient for one-tile wall - three mugs, or as little as one toy boat, with no waste material in either case. Some of these will probably be fixed eventually.

* [[Ascended Extra]]: No dwarf is inherently more important than any other dwarf. As such, any dwarf that manages to get favored by a player, or even the community, is this.

* [[ASCII Art]]: [[Retraux|The game is actually graphical,]] but uses ASCII characters and a few others as its default tileset.

** One forum thread from the old days of 40d reported [http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=46772.0 something similar happening to a human child kidnapped by Goblins]. At the age of 13, she started a religious war, which apparently ended with her getting killed by a ''seven year old''.

** Experiments in [http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=91093.msg2532118 "Dwarven Day Care"], aka locking a small child in a room full of crowded animals so that the violence of fighting for their life every day would harden them to tragedy and cause them to develop combat skills. It was pronounced a partial success when one experiment resulted in a child taking a permanent change to mental attributes... a.k.a. ''permanent mental scarring''.

* [[Clock Punk]]: Dwarven technology tends toward this. You can build ''Turing-complete computers'' out of Dwarven clockwork.

* [[Comedic Sociopathy]]: One of the things that draws a lot of people towards the game.

* [[Emergency Weapon]]: Annoyingly averted in Fortress mode. Soldiers or hunters equipped with projectile weapons can only use them as blunt instruments, not very effectively; buffing the crossbow's melee damage is many a player's first modding project. Others make their crossbows out of steel and cross-train their marksdwarves extensively as hammerdwarves to compensate.

** Oddly, the current version has certain situations where crossbows are ''more'' damaging than warhammers: bludgeon crossbows have a much greater surface area than warhammer, which makes attacks less likely to damage through armor but more likely to damage a vital when they do.

* [[Epic Fail]]: The best games end like this. The forums generally consider the only "winning condition" to be to fail ''so spectacularly'' as to prompt forum members to declare that you've won the game. Case in point: [[Boatmurdered]]'s inexplicable fiery apocalypse and ensuing tantrum spiral.

* [[Eyes Do Not Belong There]]: Staring eyeball is a kind of grass found only in evil biomes that is ''made out of eyeball''. Cows can still eat it though.

* [[Shown Their Work]]: Regarding geology: the game has ''dozens'' of types of rocks, sorted by the geological formations they're most likely to appear in. This is not to mention the accurate distribution of flora and fauna in those geological formations.

* [[Silly Reason for War]]: The wars in world-gen history can be like this, especially if elves are involved: "The War of Ignition was waged by The Imperial Fells on The Council of Lances. One of the most significant causes of the conflict was a dispute over the treatment of plants." Elves do ''not'' like it when plants are mistreated. And you [[Can't Argue with Elves]].

* [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism]]: Firmly embedded on the cynical end. After all, [[Failure Is the Only Option|losing is fun]].

* [[Sobriquet]]: Sentient beings that starts racking up kills have bestowed upon them a [[Badass]] title such as "The Awe-Inspiring Warrior Ram". Otherwise-unnamed monsters who do the same will eventually pick up a [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast|nickname]] as well.

* [[Super Fun Happy Thing of Doom]]: Random name generator is [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Pretty Much What It Says On The Tin]].

* [[Tech Points]]: Skills and abilities, both civilian and military, are enhanced by using them (and gradually "rust" otherwise).

* [[Teeth Flying]]: Arrows can occasionally target and remove teeth, sending them launching with the bolt. More spectacular blunt mouth trauma can throw the entire set of teeth out at once, spewing them out of the poor creature's mouth in every direction and just generally creating a headache for clean up.

* [[The Tetris Effect]]: Just wait until you start dreaming in ASCII.

** "[http://threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-trade-goods In future, instructions to laborers need to be more specific]".

** Topic: "[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=63417.6135 Note to Urist--In which you express your frustration to your dwarves]"... 444 pages and growing.

* [[Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever]]: Once either population or accumulated wealth is big enough, they will come. They can be killed with a lot of training and some luck... but don't think simple ''doors'' can stop them. {{spoiler|Although cage traps can stop most of them dead}}.

* [[Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny]]: The dwarves have this in spades. In earlier versions, it was much worse, with dwarves instantly abandoning whatever job they were in the middle of the second they got hungry, thirsty or sleepy (which would occasionally spell doom for your fortress if the dwarf who was on his way to pull the lever that raised the drawbridge to seal out the invading goblin hordes suddenly decided he wanted a beer), but now dwarves will complete whatever job they're doing before going off to take care of something like that.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Construction and Management Games]]

[[Category:Roguelike]]

[[Category:Simulation Game]]

[[Category:Space Management Game]]

[[Category:Video Game]]