Dwarf Fortress

[Safe-Keeper]

Anyone else here play Dwarf Fortress? For those who haven't hear of it, it's an incredibly deep game focusing on content and realism rather than graphics. People say the original Silent Hunter is way better than III-5, because even though it lacked good graphics, it was filled to the brim with content. Dwarf Fortress, the work of a single man who's worked on it for seven years thus far, takes this philosophy to the extreme. It uses only square BMP tiles for graphics, and the default tileset is comprised of colour-coded ASCII characters (ya rly). What it delivers, in the place of visuals, is content and, above all, depth.

The game is comprised of three parts -- a realistic world generator that handles such things as politics, erosion and road-building, a Rogue-like RPG mode where you walk around in the world, and the titular Dwarf Fortress Mode, where you pick a site in the world and travel there with a team of seven dwarves and a wagon and build a fortress. You'll mine, "terraform", trade, hunt and fish, fend off goblin sieges, and build "mega-projects" -- huge prestige projects that take skill and time to accomplish, but which look great when finished.

Examples of how deep this game is:

• You need to build living quarters away from workshops, or your dwarves won't be able to sleep well, which will result in unhappiness.
• You can choose freely which jobs individual dwarves can do, and if you feel like micro-managing, you can choose to give dwarves jobs by preferences -- for example, a dwarf that enjoys helping others can become a nurse, a dwarf that loves a good thrill and has a fascination for weapons can be drafted into your army.
• You need to be careful digging and building, as a rudimentary cave-in and collapse system resides in the game and will gleefully punish you for the mistakes you make.
• In Age of Empires II, resources are magically stored in drop-off buildings and new structures are built by hitting the foundation with a hammer for two minutes. In DF, you need to actually define stockpiles, where goods are stored, and workers will then carry goods to where they're needed to build something.
• Refuse and bodies will generate miasma, which in turn will generate unhappy thoughts, if you don't designate a garbage dump outside of your fortress.
• There are no hit points -- various kinds of damage is dealt to body parts, with effects based on the wound and body part.

People interested in the game should at the very least read the famous after-action report, Boatmurdered. It's of an early version, and the screenshots are of the base ASCII graphics set, but it's an hilarious read and will give you a good idea of what the game is like. As will this play-along tutorial. If you want more... try downloading the game itself at the Bay 12 site.