Over 13 years playing Dwarf Fortress, I've seen my share of legends. I've witnessed one-armed dwarven generals strangle dragons as old as time. I've watched in horror as an artisan emerged from months trapped in the caves below my fortress halls, clinging to life just long enough to craft one last work: a puzzlebox of obsidian and bone. Now, I get to see Dwarf Fortress arrive on Steam, the colony sim's emergent storytelling more approachable than it's ever been—but only just.

The ever-evolving life's work of brother developers Tarn and Zach Adams, Dwarf Fortress is entering a new age, shedding its text-based graphics for proper pixels and the basic modernity of native mouse support. Still inscrutable, still magnificent, Dwarf Fortress remains an incomparable treasure trove of procedural mythmaking for those willing to delve its depths.

Striking the earth

At its most basic level, Dwarf Fortress is a settlement sim. With a small group of dwarves, you embark from the Mountainhomes to stake your claim on a plot of distant wilderness. It's up to you to establish a fortress capable of lasting the ages, from the ground up—or down, in the typical dwarven fashion. Winter is only months away. Start digging.

At first, Dwarf Fortress can be deceptively simple. Clunky to control, maybe, but when you're marking out tunnels to mine and trees to chop it seems easy enough. Within minutes you're three menus deep, trying to parse labor details and work duties, assign administrative positions, designate burrows, organize stockpiles of food, gems, finished goods, and precious cave wheat ale.

Meanwhile, your livestock are brawling because you put them in too small a pasture, your lone huntsdwarf is being chased home in a panic after antagonizing a giant capybara with their last crossbow bolt, and your best farmer's in a depressive spiral over your dining hall's lack of chairs. And that's all before your first goblin siege.


Leaving that delicate balancing act of fortress management aside, the Steam release's most obvious changes are visual. Until now, Dwarf Fortress has been an ASCII-based enterprise, requiring mods for any imagery more engaging than a letter "D" facing you in martial combat.

Dwarf Fortress now boasts its own lovely tile-based graphics. They're charming enough to look at, your dwarves' physical features realized in sprites. The visual overhaul joins an expanded soundtrack, which moves between the gruff warmth of dwarven work songs, plaintive acoustic plucking, and haunting atmospherics. It nails the vibe—sometimes whimsical, sometimes punishing, often doomed.

In terms of playability, the biggest changes involve the interface and controls. Limited before to keyboard input, Dwarf Fortress now has native mouse support. Clicking to designate/interact with/inspect things is a much-needed and welcome change, but the new UI struggles to accommodate every aspect of this bottomless game.

Hard-won wealth

Dwarf Fortress's daunting reputation is not unearned. In building and managing your new mountainhome, the game does very little work for you. It's just you, a bunch of menus, and whatever ragged scrap of self-preservation instinct your dwarves can muster.

You're responsible for every component of your fledgling dwarven society, and there are a hell of a lot of components. Every inch of every room and hallway is one you told your dwarves to dig. If they grow a crop, you told them where to plant the seed. And if they're lost to any one of Dwarf Fortress's countless dangers—whether it's goblin hordes, were-gazelles, or an accidental cave-in—it's because you failed to protect them.

And you will fail. A lot! That's expected. Dwarf Fortress's guiding ethos, as the game itself tells you, is that losing is fun. It has no victory condition. There's no winning. In the end, every fortress you make is doomed, whether you're forced to abandon it or choose to.

Instead, your victories are measured in lessons learned and knowledge deployed. However long your fortress lasts, all its achievements are yours, built by hand and wrested with effort from atop a vertical learning curve.

Lasting success in Dwarf Fortress means navigating production lines, military defense, civic planning—so many avenues of potential toil that, after 13 years of play, there are entire fields of Dwarven industry I haven't touched. There's real pride that comes with internalizing a new piece of Dwarf Fortress logic, like mastering some eldritch spell. Imagine how powerful I'll be when I'm proficient in Dwarven hydraulics.