I won't blame anyone for reading all that and saying, "Nah, I'm all right." I understand. But for that kind of wonderful sicko who might be feeling a glimmer of wild joy, let me say it plain. Beneath its layered strata of arcane menus and mechanics, Dwarf Fortress is a rare treasure. You just need to be willing to dig.

Legends in the making

But that's just half the magic. It's a convincing act, but Dwarf Fortress is only masquerading as a colony sim. As well as the logistics and managerial decision-making, Dwarf Fortress is a wonder of procedural worldbuilding. It's a storytelling toolbox calling itself a game.

Each dwarf has their own unique set of physical characteristics, down to the plaiting of their beards and the appearance of their earlobes. They have their own personality traits, preferences, goals, mannerisms. So do their pets, their livestock, the goblin invader trying to stick a spear in their ribs. Every object has its own generated features, every engraving its own randomized image.


Dwarf Fortress drapes every piece of gameplay in procedural simulation dozens of layers deep. And it begins from your first moment of play: it builds you a world. When you click the "Create a New World" button, it would be impressive enough to watch the sculpting of a unique geography, new continental landmasses seeded with simulated biomes and water tables. Dwarf Fortress starts writing history.

Decades pass in seconds, your new world entering its first age as demigods walk the earth. Mortal civilizations sprout, their settlements uncoiling roadways as they flourish, shrinking as they fall to ruin. Throughout this, Dwarf Fortress is simulating thousands of events, mapping relationships between historical figures and legendary artifacts, charting migrations and death tolls.

When I send out a fresh caravan of dwarves, it's not in a vacuum. It's the latest chapter of a continuing history. Behind what's on-screen, my dwarves are connected to a sprawling, historic thought web. It's referenced when they engrave murals of past events, in the poems they learn and recite—each complete with its own rules of form and meter.

The absurd depth of this simulation gives Dwarf Fortress a frankly unreasonable amount of detail. It barely affects mechanical gameplay in any real way. But it doesn't need to. That ludicrous, near-pathological intricacy is what's kept me fascinated for over a decade.

Thanks to that volume of detail, I can believe so much more easily that there's a world happening off-screen—that what I'm seeing is a small piece of something alive. Every scrap of procedural flavor text is potential space for forming an attachment, transforming the shuffling pixels on-screen into stories worth sharing. You'll see the result when any two Dwarf Fortress players meet: stories are the basic unit of exchange.

Fine quality


Thanks to the modernization of Dwarf Fortress's Steam release, we'll hopefully see a new generation of players swapping fortress stories. Overall, it's a success. But Dwarf Fortress doesn't enter its new era without some stumbling.

For me, something was lost in the UI translation. Once you were acclimatized, the classic version's keyboard-driven interface followed a reliable logic, keeping the visual playspace cleanly delineated from menu information.

The new interface feels scattered in comparison. More things are clickable and accessible, but without any real logic regarding where they're placed. Even after a few dozen hours with it, the level of visual noise can get overwhelming, especially in a busier fortress. All told, I found it a price well worth paying, though—I can’t imagine I'd go back.

Jumping to Steam has also meant the temporary loss of Dwarf Fortress's roguelike Adventure mode, though it's due to return in the future. Where the Steam release leaves me with my strongest reservations, though, is one of its most crucial additions: its tutorial.

It's the first attempt at a Dwarf Fortress introductory experience, guiding you through the most basic necessities of getting a fortress started. A brief but serviceable primer for the controls, it does have in-game help menus offering additional direction. But while no Dwarf Fortress tutorial could ever hope to be comprehensive, I can't help but feel its explanations are a little too vague, its warnings a little too sparse.

You could easily go from the tutorial to starting a new fortress only to watch as giant mantises devour your dwarves because you weren't warned about untamed wilds. The tutorial takes for granted that you'll be hitting up guides on the Dwarf Fortress wiki(opens in new tab) once it's finished. And you should; the wiki is every player's constant and faithful companion. The tutorial could at least point in its direction, to get you acquainted early.

As ever, Dwarf Fortress is a game you have to meet more than halfway. It requires a voluntary buy-in: a willingness to teach yourself its rules, to take the abstract details of its generated worldbuilding and craft your own mythology. But now, the first steps in exploring its depths are a little easier to take. If you're willing, it's an experience you won't match anywhere else. I'm in for another 13 years, at least.