DWARF FORTRESS!

Fellow members of the Swarm: Beware!

If I actually start playing this game I'm bound to end up writing a dozen 3000+ word posts on it. Don't let me do it fam! Don't let me get sucked into the Blackhole of DF.

Dwarf Fortress is an old game initially launched in 2006

I had never heard about until a buddy of mine from the Amazon sort center I used to work at tried to tell me about it a few times. He told me it was one of the most (or the most) complicated games of all time. I was a bit skeptical about some of the claims made but the more I look into it the crazier this game appears to be. It is perhaps the most complicated single-player fantasy simulator ever.

To give an example of how insane the simulator is:

A few years back I read a story that claimed that cats in Dwarf Fortress were dying and it was unclear why. It was then discovered that these cats were walking through the tavern (alcohol is a staple necessity for dwarves), getting alcohol on them, and then dying of alcohol poisoning when they cleaned themselves later. I still don't know if this is real or a completely bullshit story.

CHAOS THEORY

But again: the more I learn about this game the more it seems like it could actually be real. The simulator is THAT GOOD. The simulator is so good that random events are constantly colliding and the outcomes are totally unpredictable even to the creators of the game. That's exactly what a good simulator should do, but rarely do we actually see a simulator that can accomplish such chaos theory to such great effect. It's extremely impressive.

If you heard about the game years ago, why didn't you play it?

Well first of all I was probably addicted to some other game at the time so I didn't have the bandwidth to start playing the most complicated game of all time. Also the free version of the game looks like this:

HMMMM YEP

The free version of the game is full-on ascii frontend, which is incredibly jarring and very hard to read unless you've already been playing the game for like 20+ hours and know what you're looking at. It's obvious the brothers who created this are backend developers focused on the simulation rather than what it looks like. Back when I first heard about Dwarf Fortress it was always planned to relaunch the game with official skins (there were already unofficial modded skins at the time but I didn't want to mess around with that) on Steam.

I waited and waited and waited.

I waited years. Every six months or so I'd check back in to see if the new version of the game was available. Many times the launch date got pushed back. I checked again yesterday and saw that it had been launched last December, so I bit the bullet and paid the $30 + tax for it. Pretty pricy for a game you can play for free, but I'd like to support the developers of a passion project that's been in the works for almost two decades now and was mostly funded through donations of diehard loyalists. Also the ascii version looks like a hot mess, even if it is cool in a hardcore gamer type way.

The game doesn't seem to have a rating, but there are some pretty adult themes in the game. Apparently sometimes if your Dwarves get depressed or crazy enough they can harm themselves or others. In one game I saw a report of a dwarf that became "secretive and reclusive" and ended up blowing up the entire fortress. Game over bro, game over. Probably flooded the entire thing with lava or something.

So I own the game on Steam right now, but I haven't even downloaded it yet. I think I might wait to play it with my 9-year-old nephew who I've personally seen watch youtube videos about the geopolitics of Iraq and other middle-eastern countries. They call him "the walking atlas". I joke that one day he'll teach me how to code. Kid doesn't forget anything. I can probably get him to watch a dozen videos on the game before we even start playing.

Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

This is an article I read last night about someone who documented their first experience trying to play the game for 10 hours with no instruction. Just trying to figure it out on their own. It almost reads like something I would write: and her experience was an abysmal disaster; as is to be expected. Here's the top rated comment from that article:

So basically the entire concept of even attempting to play this game without getting help from outside the game is completely untenable. If you're truly curious as to how insane it is to even attempt such a thing go ahead and read the article, lol. I actually did install the free version like a year ago and booted it up and started a new game, and once I saw how crazy it was (simply choosing a starting location is ridiculous) I just quit instantly and figured I'd keep waiting for the updated skins and frontend from Steam.

She picked a terrible location in the badlands (desert)

Although even when you mess up it still takes a while to die.
Defeats seem to be slow and painful in this game.

According to the wiki, I did indeed do a terrible job of picking a fortress site earlier. A good site has a number of features, including no aquifer, abundant trees, warm temperatures, shallow metals, clay, and soil, and most of the other land features you might guess are needed to foster life. It turns out there’s a tool to search for the right combination of landscape features, but this mainly transforms the window into a swath of blinking red x’s that is painful to look at and not at all easy to process. I start a new game but after searching for 15 minutes, I can’t find a square that fits all the requirements. One of the only absolute requirements of the guide is “no aquifer,” so of course nearly every tile is an aquifer. Finally, after endless searching, I find a tile with metals, soil, trees, and a warm climate that’s near a stream but not an aquifer. I dig in.

WTF is an AQUIFER?

WHAT? Yeah that feeling when you realize you don't know a god damn thing about the world around you. This game is INSANELY REALISTIC. If it was possible to adapt a game like this to crypto, so many libertarian/anarchists would play it. You actually learn real things.

Of course if you were building a mountain fortress you absolutely would not want to dig into an aquifer and flood the entire thing with water. My guess is that this can actually happen quite easily in Dwarf Fortress. Maybe I'll put that theory to the test one day.

For example this particular player was having trouble doing a basic thing (building a chair with stone). Apparently it was some kind of collision that blocked her mason dwarf into the room she built for him and he could not escape. It took her hours to figure it out even with help from the internets. More and more it feels like this game has the complexity of learning a completely new programming language. Same vibes for sure.

It's important to point out that in this game you can not control your Dwarves directly. You simply give instructions about what you'd like to happen and hope that the work will get done. You can assign jobs and build things, but who will end up building the thing and when it will actually get done often depends on variables of the simulation that are completely out of the player's control.

According to the in-game guide, dwarves get their orders from the buildings I construct in the fortress. And yes, they will die if not cared for. Memories of failed Oregon Trail missions come rushing back.

You'll notice here this is not ascii

I believe this is an unofficial skin mod that makes the map a little bit easier to read. Many of you will be floored to learn that this game is actually a 3-dimensional simulation just like Minecraft. How is that even possible when you can only look at 2 dimensions at a time? Easy! You just scroll up and down and can look at one height level at a time. LOL.

So if you look at the above picture if you look at a higher elevation that black mountain will start to disappear and you can see what's located higher up the slopes. Again I haven't actually played the game but simply learning how it works from a distance boggles the mind.

Unlike other games that will hold your hand and give you access to very few options in the early game (which you'll research/unlock later) Dwarf Fortress throws you into the deepend instantly with every single type of job and building unlocked. So if you want to know what you should be doing in the early game: you simply have to look it up.

Again, trying to figure this game out on your own is a fool's errand and will end in tears. It's like trying to teach yourself Calculus by inventing Calculus yourself. WIKI pages and youtube videos will be my friend for sure once I start playing. I used to have it in my head that I'd try to do it the hard way but clearly that's just asking for instant burnout. I could probably spend 5 hours simply researching the game without even playing and it would save me more time than actually playing the game. It's a hardcore gamer's dream.

Here is what the game looks like now on Steam.

Obviously this is just about as basic as it gets, and is still somehow a 1000% upgrade compared to what it was before. At least I won't have to decode what ascii character means what and everything will be a bit more obvious.

Conclusion

Dwarf Fortress is one of the most insane simulations of all time. Despite the learning curve and overwhelming complexity of it: it has some of the highest reviews of any game. Quite impressive considering how convoluted the UX can be. It must all be worth it in the end because the cultish fanbase of this game can't seem to get enough.

I feel like this is a game I will eventually need to play for a couple of reasons. First of all it's one of the most hardcore games out there so just gamer bragging rights, but also I'm fascinated by the in-game economics and how everything flows together. I'm always looking to gain more experience when it comes to digital economies and how they might be applied to crypto.

Like I said before, once I do actually start playing this game, I may end up writing an absurd 30000+ word series on it. I'm quite certain it wouldn't be hard to achieve if I truly got sucked into something like this. Hopefully I can keep the conversation focused and on-track as to how we could leverage something like this for ourselves and crypto at large, but I doubt it.