At least he’s pretty based for someone in the niche of nerdy ass games. He said BLM during the 2020 protests and during the Palestinian protests in ‘21 he said Free Palestine, that US was backing an apartheid, and gave a bunch of resources to donate to Palestinians. Good guy and you should purchase his game because it’s pretty cool.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html
Even if he wasn't politically on my side, I'd have bought it day one because it's genuine art. Two brothers devoting their entire lives to one project, almost 20 years so far with no end in sight, that's always been free and completely moddable. They pretty much singlehandedly created a genre while making the most detailed simulation in any game. Dwarf Fortress is the gold standard of passion projects and indie development.
That article says he was living off of like $30-$50k a year in 2011 but his Patreon alone is bringing in over $10k per month. Fuck I'm so happy for them!
https://www.patreon.com/bay12games
Edit from the FAQ
Why is Dwarf Fortress on Steam and itch.io now?
Dwarf Fortress is going premium because we want more people to encounter the game, grow the community, and some of the creator’s close family members have developed serious health issues within the past 6 months, and money to support them is tight. As it's a sensitive and difficult matter, please respect Tarn and Zach's privacy about this, but keep some well wishes in your hearts for them.❤️
American "healthcare" system robbing them :guts-rage:
Absolutely, as someone interested in gamedev myself Tarn is a very real hero of mine.
Also, the aristocrats in the game are parasites who basically add nothing of value to the dwarven settlements but just make unreasonable demands and punish people for failing to meet them.
I remember making elaborate death traps that would kill and hide the aristocrats bodies.
No, you literally had to lol. They'd activate the capitalist economy and ruin your fucking fortress, dwarves would become homeless because they suddenly couldn't afford their homes, they'd drag money around and waste hours counting it. It was basically earthbound 3 :pigmask-off:
Jobs paid different wages, one of the most important but boring is hauling stuff from a depot to a workstation or picking up trash. It was the least paid.
Food and drink also cost money that they now suddenly couldn't afford.
Nobles would randomly change prices of goods by like 500% because they really like green stuff.
Nobles would (and still in DF) get pissed off if any normal dwarf had a better room or better quality items than they do - including dwarves who have become so proficient at something like Smithing or Painting or whatever that they've become legendary amongst dwarves.
I've played a lot of Rimworld but was leery about how impenetrable DF looks.
It's really not impenetrable. The interface is jank but it's not hard to use. It's so weird and unintuitive specifically because it's optimized to be easy / quick to use by people who already know what they're doing. So once you get over the initial hump it's not hard to play at all.
Either way, the Steam version is out now and it's supposed to have a more intuitive interface. Haven't tried it yet, but it might be a good time to get into it.
The fact that a "free market" simulator just got the longest lived creatures to game and rig it until no one else could meaningfully participate :chefs-kiss:
Oh yeah, or smash them under a drawbridge, or other fun things.
You can make them an enormous dining hall and flood it. Or make their entire bedroom be supported by a single pillar that falls at the push of a lever. Or just make them cross a hallway with a minecart full of spears that's heading straight down at full speed. "Stupid dorf machines" as I think the community calls them are bounded only by your creativity.
Also if you need any more convincing to buy this game. At the moment of speaking the game sits at 98% positive reviews with 2943 reviews.
He also made liberal crime squad which is a hilarious Symbionese Liberation Army simulator where you kidnap and brainwash conservatives and get in shootouts with the cops and CIA. It's good fun!
https://www.bay12games.com/lcs/
I wish LCS became a full game. It's the better version of Freedom Fighters.
I've always wanted to play but never had the time to learn! Any tips you could pass over?
Man it's been a while. I sunk quite a few hours into LCS. There was a fan-update with Toady's blessing as well, I don't remember if I played that.
Some tips:
- The controls are easier than you might think at first, just press the buttons
- Losing is fun, you will die while trying to crawl away from a Conservative hotel manager with a surprise pistol
- Recruiting Hippies and letting them sell art and music is an extremely easy way to get some income, just don't do crimes from where they stay (also guitars + high Heart are decent weapons)
- Your organization is a pyramid scheme: level up, recruit people, level them up, let them recruit people. You can get some extra people in with brainwashing and seduction. For the sake of micromanagement, keep it slim.
- In combat, always get the first strike in
- Have somebody check the news, the most important job in the liberal commune
- There are no police raids while the police station is shut down!
- Going to prison for like 30 years or so (or just playing that long) will give you some fun easter eggs
- Do not alienate the masses
Getting put on trial 100 years into the game and the judges have laser gavels.
I always like to get a sleeper agent in the police force as soon as possible. A sleeper agent will give you advance warning of raids and can steal weapons for you and stuff so their very useful. Using and leveling disguises can allow you to infiltrate some incredibly sensitive places and it's pretty easy to get uniforms.
finally if gun laws are max conservative you can legally install an anti aircraft gun at your hideout to shoot down the national guard's bombers. It's like 4x more expensive otherwise
I never got into Dwarf Fortress, but LCS is a real gem too.
In addition to his support for Palestine and BLM, someone on the forums tried to get him to condemn the Russian invasion and he basically said that it's not as black and white as previous issues and he doesn't think he would be able to bring much attention anyway, given its mainstream penetration. Obviously a thoughtful guy. I want to try to get him to read Marx for the economic update.
the economic update
I like that his original economic simulation was deep enough that it fucked the game up for completely Marxist reasons (over time Dwarves wouldn't get paid enough to afford their own apartments, among a host of other problems) and he cut it out of the game because it wasn't fun, making the Dwarves some kind of centrally planned AnCom society with a nobility.
I wonder how much of that is him projecting our current, market-based system backwards. Land entering the market with economic rents, thus forcing workers to depend on the market for survival and reproduction, is the basis of Capitalism.
I also want to note that while dwarf fortress is extremely violent and callous at times (with a lot of horrific things that emerged out of quirks of the code, like dwarves carrying their babies into battle and cats.) It lacks a lot of the particular gross edginess of rimworld with slavery and cannibalism etc. You'll still end up using floodgates to clean the killing floor of goblin gibbets and dwarves will go berserk and slaughter everyone or something will get in and massacre the whole fortress until there's a lone child wandering aimlessly over the corpses of their parents, but the community has had less of the crowd that gets off on building a torture palace.
but the community has had less of the crowd that gets off on building a torture palace.
You're underestimating how large the 4chan and something awful contingents of the fanbase were/are, and its overlap with other inaccessibly archaic games like HellMOO.
I have basically zero firsthand knowledge of the game but aren't the elves cannibals?
that rang a bell, so I looked it up. Elves are apparently vegetarian with the exception that they sometimes devour foes they defeat in combat.
Elves have kind of an orange and blue morality, AFAIK. They'll declare war on you if you try to sell them something made of wood.
While DF is not my cup of tea (tried to get into it like three times and bounced away, maybe someday I'll learn to enjoy it) it is my go to example for how the "photorealistic graphics arms race" is holding games back.
The fact that that I could generate an entire world with absurd level of detail in a couple of minutes and explore it in my shitty laptop blew my mind the first time I saw it and it still blows my mind.
In contrast the Rimworld guy (Tynan) is a sketchy guy who coded romantic attraction that young women will always be attracted to old men (and vice versa) and when called out by an outlet that have been supporting his game since alpha he frames them as SJWs out to cancel him and sic his fanbase at the site.
Oh, the "Blood and Dust" difficulty was actually called Blood and Soil upon update and was quietly changed when people pointed it out. probably nothing right?
fuck tynan but i still love rimworld. and despite his sketch i'm glad he made such a moddable game.
in the end it basically became the People's Colony Management sim since it's basically entirely driven by the mod community. my mood changes between sci/fi and fantasy and rimworld fills that power armor/laser cannon need. plus it has one of the best spaceship design/salvage/combat games as a freaking mod.. even Cosmoteer hasn't even developed all the stuff in SOS2 yet.
BUUUUT.... i'm grabbing a copy of steam dwarf fortress immediately though and plan on melting my brain. and unlike rimworld DF is truly a passion project built as though it was developed in a socialist game dev system. he's held out so long without more then donations/mutual aid and I have no problem kicking tarn some sweet sweet $$$ for product
and i fucking love mining AND I SHALL DIG GREEDILY AND DEEP
I just wished I never bought the game and just kept pirating it
Are we finally spilling tea on Tynan? I have always found him to be a little, sus?
Also the Factorio dev went on a similar cancel culture screed when someone pointed out a video he was linking to was made by a piece of shit. I can't remember any of the context, but I do remember walking away from it convinced he was a chud.
based on the peak player count, I'd estimate Tarn and Zach made well over $600k just in sales of Dwarf Fortress today, minus the 30% that steam takes off the top. that's not even counting the itch.io sales. I'm so glad that the passion project has finally paid off for the two of them, they deserve every penny and more, imo.
I would but 30 bucks is a pretty steep asking price for a game I may or may not like
:meow-tableflip:
Nah its uncritical support to the Russian piracy scene. Literally the most based pirates in the world.
Eh, just pirate it and then decide later.
If something's DRM free, I'll buy it if I play for more than a few hours.
Eh, just pirate it
i mean the original version has been free for years. the steam version only adds a graphical user interface for people who don't want to play in what is essentially a terminal
You can always try the ascii with tilesets and utilities. there's a super easy to set up bundle called the lazy newb pack that you literally just have to install and run. It can do a lot if you tinker with it, too, but it works out of the box. The interface is byzantine there's no way around it, the result of decades of adding new features. But you get the hang of it eventually and most of it ends up being pretty quick eventually. Learning the gameplay, will always be a challenge, but that's absolutely the fun of the game, the interface too.
It's so fucking satisfying when you build your first pump stack to get freshwater into your cistern so you can build an underground well, or when you successfully set up a militia squad, or even basic metallurgy.
You'll need the wiki and to search specific problems, but the wiki is very well-maintained and not a fandom one.
And then . . . the caverns await.
If you're interested in it, and can get past the UI, the original version is still free, the steam version is just a lot more user friendly. You can install a tileset to the original, which isn't quite to the level of the new graphics, but more usable than exclusively ASCII characters lol
Edit: Actually, yeah, just pirating it to try it out is also a great option
Is it worth it to buy the steam version over the lazy newb pack? 30 bucks is steep for me and I always tried to get into dwarf fortress but the learning curve was a bit steep for me. I love reading the stories that people wright about there fortress. I always want to get into these crazy open ended games but struggle to figure them out.
There are a lot of good beginner tutorials if you want to watch and see how it works. Kruggsmash is a really good youtuber who does roleplaythroughs with illustrations. I've never seen someone who clicked with the game so well and it might pique your interest to see some of the depth one can get from it.
I played DF for years with the LNP, it's probably the best way to get into DF sans steam, especially with the tilesets you get in the LNP. Plus the LNP comes with dwarf therapist, DFhack, other utilities I'm forgetting, and classic is getting all the same updates as the steam/itch version. I'd say absolutely go for it. YouTube is chock full of helpful tutorials, as well.
Remember, your first forts WILL DIE. Often to stupid mistakes or things you didn't know could happen. but that's the fun in it all :pika-pickaxe:
haha, I remember the old tagline for dwarf therapist: "it makes dwarf fortress playable, it's that good!"
its not wrong lmao playing DF with and without therapist is night and day
It kind of depends, if you don’t mind the older UI, lack of tutorial, and keyboard controls you should try it with Lazy Newb Pack, but if the lack of those things are what’s keeping you from enjoying the game then probably should cop it on steam if it goes on sale.
I’ve been playing DF on and off for about 4 years now and I still learn new stuff all the time lol. Imo the best way to learn is by making a series of concerted bursts of effort over a protracted period of time, that way knowledge builds up over time. Definitely don’t expect to learn everything right off the bat.
Start off by just surviving for several seasons, with only basic industries going -> retire fort, make new one -> survive for a year while exploring new industries -> retire fort… -> survive for several years while exploring new industries and defending against sieges , work your way down to caverns -> retire fort…-> explore caverns and make it to lava levels -> retire fort…-> try playing in new biome, etc
I feel like I remember reading somewhere that they quit MIT because they didn't want to get stuck writing code to power the Epstein Engine
