Dwarf Fortress: how big have you got?

[Crossroads Inc.]

So for the most part, we all know that our Dwarfs are doomed to die horrible horrible Deaths. But every so often a plucky group will survive that first year and go on to form a proud and bustling Fortress. My Question for those out there is just how big a fortress have you been able to produce, and also... What exactly do you do with so many little Dwarfs? I'm currently up to a fortress population of 80 and I keep running out of things to tell them to do. Always make Crafts? Weapons? Just keep digging forever an ever?

So many of my games never got this far Im curious what some of you out there do with populations of 80+

[Duckie]

I've passed a hundred a couple times, but it rapidly grows to ennui. Lack of significant end-game goals outside of megastructures is something being worked on with the army arc currently, and by currently I mean a while in the future- at least another few months, if not the rest of the year until it starts.

Goblin Sappers and other siege improvements, world map army, tougher megabeasts (coming this update!) etc. would make the game last a lot longer.

It's one of the reasons why I just can't work up interest in the game despite loving it, although the really the updates are rather awesome in piquing my interest- the latest experiment is swapping out blood with boiling gaseous gold and watching what happens to dwarves.

An earlier experiment saw Toady spawn an enraged dwarf and hit him with a warhammer over and over- he gibbed the dwarf's limb when hit each time, and finally realized he had miswritten the connective tissue. Then he did it again and it happened again.

The reason? A bug had caused everything to be made out of dwarf skin. Everything. Lungs. Hearts. Bones. Warhammers. The ground. Everything was a giant flab of X-shaped dwarf-skin.

[also, the default temperature for a generic item is about as much as the core of the sun- that way, if a bug happens and a particular material isn't loading its temperature info right, Toady realizes it right away when everything made out of that material instantly explodes into thermonuclear fury (eg Bronze in one particular update).]

Dwarf Fortress: It has the best bugs.

[Alan Bolte]

So here I was going to post a response, but it looks like MRDOD covered everything perfectly.

[Zablorg]

By the way, the next update is expected to come out around April or March. Toady has been working so hard just to ensure that we can have our dwarves feel pain and die slow horrible deaths in a more realistic fashion.

Bless him.

[Crossroads Inc.]

IAn earlier experiment saw Toady spawn an enraged dwarf and hit him with a warhammer over and over- he gibbed the dwarf's limb when hit each time, and finally realized he had miswritten the connective tissue. Then he did it again and it happened again.

The reason? A bug had caused everything to be made out of dwarf skin. Everything. Lungs. Hearts. Bones. Warhammers. The ground. Everything was a giant flab of X-shaped dwarf-skin.

Ok that actually gave me a "LoL" moment when I read that, Im sorry but the thought of a world where everything is a flat slab of Skin made me cackle.

That Said, currently ive been creating a lot of new worlds, it seems the most fun for me is in starting a new fortress, once the population gets to be about 80+ its gets more and more of a hassle :/

[Alferd Packer]

I was always afraid of nobles, so in reality, I never progressed to getting the enconomy going. I still had somewhere around 50 dwarves, I'd guess, and I dug all the way back to the magma river. I spent many hours attempting to get a magma moat for my entrance, but I could never get the drawbridge to work properly over the channels I dug.

[open_sketchbook]

I play without economies (or reasonable limits on the number of dwarfs), and the largest I've gotten is 326 dwarfs. The key is to isolate groups of dwarfs into relatively small, self-sustaining forts, so that a spiral of depression cannot kill them all in one run.

[Vendetta]

I was always afraid of nobles,

Nobles were about the same as farms. Once you could do indoor irrigation, you were sorted

[open_sketchbook]

I lock all my nobles in a central tower, drop food down chutes to feed them, and let them go crazy. As long as you make sure the hammerer is trapped as well, it's great fun.

[Crossroads Inc.]

so I'm curious, why is everyone bent on slaughtering nobles?

[Tanasinn]

so I'm curious, why is everyone bent on slaughtering nobles?

They contribute nothing while making outrageous demands on the common dwarf. Occasionally, they go mad and murder the citizenry.


Just like real life.

[Zablorg]

Ok, I've got an idea. Put yourself on a mountain with a chasm. Then watch in tears as you spend the next ten years fighting a futile and barbaric war against the merciless Giant Bats.

[PeZook]

Feh. You mean nobody here can get a stable fortress going in five minutes?

Just how incompetent are you people?

I spend 90% of my games thinking up elaborate traps and defences of my fort, but my computer is too slow and I always get bored before actually having the opportunity to test them.

[Duckie]

Feh. You mean nobody here can get a stable fortress going in five minutes?

Just how incompetent are you people?

I spend 90% of my games thinking up elaborate traps and defences of my fort, but my computer is too slow and I always get bored before actually having the opportunity to test them.

Have you checked the most recent versions? Toady had two people from his forums help him overhaul the graphics code, which was the most significant slowdown for older, slower computers besides pathfinding (more dwarves, items, and creatures and bigger area = slower) and flows (liquid flow, also temperature = slow if not disabled).

Some people are getting double their usual FPS, although it is a bit buggy. The latest version is 40d8, but because it's highly tentative you have to go to the development page to get it (as it's not stable enough to get a full release). The upgraded FPS speed will also be in the latest verison.

However, the new version is kind of finicky- the options in init.txt definitely matter as far as GP_FPS and FPS_Cap and Partial_Print and so forth. I haven't yet figured out exactly what one needs to do to get optimal returns from it, mostly because I'm just waiting for the new version instead of playing.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Ok so late last night I tried something wild and crazy... I decided, for sheer challenge, to start a new fortress in a zone that occupied a Goblin fortress. Just to see what the hell happens.

Well I found a spot on the large map with one of those "3x3" city/fortress things and zoned it into an area. Set out immedaitly with my dwarfs and loaded the map. When it loaded, I quickly scanned the map and found, indeed, three large, Immense fortress, They were square in shape, 5 layers in size and built out of unminable walls. one thing... NO GOBLINS to be found.

As such I now have a massive ready built fortress whit only a single well guarded entrance to put all my goods, rooms and anything else I want into...

Anyone else ever discovered this?

[Alan Bolte]

Yeah, I've had that happen. It's not consistent, though. I once played a game where I started my dwarves with mostly military skills and war dogs, and stormed a goblin fortress. I spent the next few years avoiding the other two fortresses and selling bloodstained clothing, until one of my idiot dwarves wandered into goblin territory and was wounded. The resulting rescue mission killed the remaining goblins. I also had half a dozen war dogs loitering on my roof at all times, because like an idiot I had assigned them to a dwarf that proceeded to get himself killed.

[PeZook]

Empty fortresses seem to be a result of world-generation wars. Some world have entire populations killed off by civs that never occupy sites.

One thing I'd love to try is set out with just two married dwarves, build them a little log cabin in the mountains and try to defend it from goblins

Can you do that?

P.S.

Last game, I built an entire overground Roman fort out of stone in order to get rid of those giant stone supplies. It was tedious, but quite awesome once finished

[open_sketchbook]

My longest running fort is partially built like that. Well, sorta; I mined an entire mountain flush with the ground, built a fort atop it, dug a moat to the bottom Z-level, and built down into the resulting cube. I run at least an hour of that game daily, and it's been going since October. It's got a stable population of about 225, which is carefully regulated (translation : Death Pits for the nobles) and I haven't had a tantrum in weeks. The goblins show up like clockwork, die hilariously in huge quantities, and go down the elaborate chutes lining the fortress walls to decompose so I can take their armour and bones. In theory, this fort could likely sustain something like 500 dwarves, but it's hard to know without doing and I'm really nervous about it.

And it has a 12 z-level tall obsidian tower with a glass observatory. One entire floor is being dug as an elaborate library of engravings, slowly being excavated and engraved to track the fort's history. I have two waterfalls, and have routed the natural river into a (suspended) canal complete with a system to trap fish. I have a vault that, if the fortress falls, can be sealed to protect the goods within for reclaiming. Said vault is under an internal, artificial pond. My storehouses occupy several floors and I've had everything my craftdorfs could possibly need. I have a small cathedral, complete with dome steeple. My latest project is a new gateway made out of gold. I have a mechanism that, if ever needed, could flood the world in magma without harming myself (in theory).

I think I may play too much Dwarf Fortress.

(BTW, there is no secret to building such a fort, trust me. I almost abandoned this one when one of my miners got killed by swarm of pike. Then I decided "fuck it, I'll see how far I get" with my remaining miner... and hit a good quantity of gems, which sent the value of my fort skyrocketing. My one piece of advise is have some way of isolating workshops remotely, to cut off tantrum spirals at the start; if a dwarf claims a workshop, lock him in just in case.)

[Glimmervoid]

Any chance of pics? I'm having a hard time imaging your fort.
Incidentally my forts never get very big. My farms always end up collapsing after awhile and every one starves.

[open_sketchbook]

I wish there was a good way to do that, but I'd have to take quite a few pictures, thanks to all the z-levels (and I can't quite get a full floor into one window). I'll try to get it in 3d Dwarf, but the interior wouldn't be shown, and there is a big update to it with support for different materials, so I would want to wait for that. And it would basically be a cube with a tower and some stuff sticking out the top on the outside anyway.

For an idea, the fort has 7 underground floors (plus the vault level, where I keep spare valuable metals), each separated by a z-level or more of original rock (to prevent cave-ins from destroying multiple floors). The fort is built in sections, with each section relatively isolated from one another by purpose. For example, all magma-related functions happen in half of the lowest floor (keep magma low, so it can't flood the fort if something goes wrong). Everything the workers need is placed on that floor or brought to that floor automatically. At ground level is an enclosed courtyard, with the trade depot and lots of pretty things. Above that is three other levels, though they are directly on top of one other because cave-ins will go through constructed walls anyway. The higher floors contain all my military functions, barracks, and workshops for weapons, as well as fort areas and levers for traps. The tower is 6x6 and rises pretty much as high as I can go, and the top floor are 8x8 and contain the room and garden for the only noble I kept, the philosopher. The only problem the fort has is getting food to the philosopher, but it's so cool I have to keep it.

[Crossroads Inc.]

So I finally passed the big 100 on population and Ive started to learn a few things.

Firstly, at this point all new comers go straight into the Army. As far as I can tell theres simply no point having an active workforce over around 60 or so. everyone else, unless they have some legendary skill, goes into military. Which brings up another important point, those brave dwarfs who I started the game with are at this point pumping out legendary items on a semi routine basis, as long as you keep them alive they can fund any need your Fortress has.

Just recently I had one of my elder Miner/Metalworks get possessed and pumpped out an Iron+bone+gem+leather anvil worth in excess of 100,000 coins. He almost didn't do it all on account that I had to frantically scourge the map looking for rough gems. Oh no, the bins of gems that Ive been buying for use weren't up to par, he needed an UNCUT gem... Snobby bastard... As a result Ive simply stopped cutting gems all together. If I ever really want I can buy cut gems at this point, the fact that it seems most Dwarfs that go into a strange mood always demand uncut gems is bothersome.

The other thing starting to get on my nerves is that ironically, Wood is also starting to become a rare commodity. Between constantly being burned for charcoal or being used to make beds, bins, chests and fo Course barrels...endless barrels... Its always being cut faster then it grows.

On another note my first "siege" recently happened.. I am a bit amused as it was simply 10 unarmed goblins and 4 ax goblins... the "siege" ended in a flurry of crossbow fire and the charging of two of my elder Miners ((who I quick-conscripted as a goblin was upon them)) Undoubtly they will grow in size.

[Duckie]

I know dwarf fortress is a niche game even on SDN, but I'd like to think that even a non-player can appreciate the fey insanity under which the creator, Tarn Adams ("ToadyOne") labours. In case you miss something or are just lazy, this post collects everything we know about the latest version:

DAILY DORF: Dwarf Fortress Updates.
Dec 2008:

Version 40dn: A forumgoer discovered that Toady's half-decade old rendering code for the graphics engine was completely overwrought and could be simplified. Toady gave the community an example program, called "Battle Champs"- a crappy strategy game with almost no production value made in about 9 hours, whose purpose was to display a million units running in a straight line at eachother for battles. The purpose? The source code of battle champs' graphics was the same as DF, so that Toady could get help with something without opensourcing or taking on a new dev. The revised Battle Champs by Baughn, with better rendering code, ran 10 times faster. When integrated into DF, slow computers now run DF 2x faster, while fast computers are unchanged. Versions are very tentative, so can only be found in Dwarf Fortress->Development->Dev_Now due to bugs, but version 40d9 seems to have sorted through most of the bugs.

As part of the dn releases, Dwarf Fortress now has a native Mac, Linux (curtosy of forum member Bernard) and Windows version.

Toady spent a long time revising the materials work of the game and adding attributes such as eye colour, beard colour, and links such as Beard Colour Grays Over Time to dwarves. This made a bunch of people annoyed as it was a long way from gameplay improvements, and was a very slow period. However, actual engineering numbers such as Young's Modulus are now used in determining the effectiveness of a weapon for attacks, as a preface to the new wounds system.

Further, as a preface to Antmen getting a better treatment, he added Castes. Now races have different 'generic forms', such as Male, Female; or Worker, Queen. Units are born as one caste and stay put, as far as I know. The caste system is rather complex and confusing, a lot of forum questions didn't resolve what we know about it, but think of it as a way to make different genders or types of a race- you could, say, mod in Elemental Men, and have Fire Men, Water Men, Earth Men, and Air Men all in the same fortress, and you can apply tags- like Fire Men might be Immune to Fire and have red eyes, while Air Men might be faster and taller, and it doesn't affect other castes.

Wounds: Units are now modeled as a system of layers- for instance, your muscle layer is below your skin layer, and your skeletal layer is below that. Further, there are joints, such as a knee cap (he mentioned connective tissue), and operators like "Skull <Surrounds> Brain".

Each section can be individually damaged, so your hand can be sliced down to the bone. Variable thickness layers, allowing for fatty or thick skinned opponents, is on the list, but unsure if implemented yet. Body parts can explicitly be bigger, so that people's hands and hearts are about the same size but their torsoes are bigger. Each section has its own info- Lungs are the respiratory tissue and will enable breathing for creatures who don't have [NOBREATHE] tag. Damaging a lung thus disrupts respiration, but damaging a foot wouldn't. Further, each tissue has a level of bleeding and a level of pain associated with damaging it- bone doesn't bleed, brain tissue has no nerves, etc. You can make things out of non-organic materials- Iron Men, Magma Men, etc. are canon. Iron Men are going to have literal iron skin, which is going to make it difficult to kill them in the new version, especially with non-bludgeoning weapons. It is implied in the dev logs that if all connective tissue is severed (for instance, hitting someone in the kneecap), a limb is lopped off. Theoretically if you slice through all layers of a body part, it would be bisected (for practical purposes, obliterated leaving behind a corpse part and a stub on the enemy), but there is no confirmation of that.

Different castes have different body parts- female dwarves explicitly do not have beards, but there is a commented out line in the new raw files of the game that you simply have to remove the comments to add it in. (about 2 seconds of modding).

Wounds are no longer additive- the old system was that each body part had 15 HP, and that weapons delt a certain amount of damage based on your stats and the weapon. If you hit for 10 damage, the wound was 'bruised' and at 5HP. Hitting again would bring it to a 10HP 'minor wound' state. So you could theoretically inflict terrible injuries on a dragon stabbing it a hundred with a dagger as long as it did 1 damage.

Overall, this looks to add a new realism to wounds, so that you can stab the dragon as many times as you want and it will only cause painful but nonfatal scratches unless you get very lucky. There is a random chance of a wound falling on an old wound, so that if you hack open someone's belly you could slip a dirk in there (called shots are not in, but it's a later item presumably, so it will be random chance). Fighting large or tough monsters, especially megabeasts, iron men, and magma men and so forth, will become much harder unless balanced.

January 2009:

More Wounds stuff:
Bruises and cosmetic info are stored for wounds, although whether it'll be visible in game or waiting for implementation is unknown.
"Simple Healing and Scars" has been added, which means that dwarves should probably mend healable (not bone or brain) tissue over time if it's wounded, leaving scar info in the game (visible in the game as played? probably)
Temperature: Individual layers can now boil or slough off, so your skin can be burned off by heat- A person with iron skin might, when immersed in magma, come out unscathed save that their eyes was burned off.
Creatures with fixed temperature or state of matter, such as magma men, are damaged by deviation from their fixed temperature- for instance, a magma man on a glacier takes freezing damage, and a magma man even in normal weather takes freezing damage (possibly). A sentient liquid would die when frozen or boiled, for now, as a state change still is instant death (probable).

Genetics: Toady has recently taken a break from wounds for 2 days to add genetic information to appearance variables. For instance, colour is handled using dominant-recessive genetics, and (non-colour?) appearance can be handled using that or a simple 'average out (and then apply random factor?)'. You can now breed dogs (or dwarves) towards certain body features like large noses or smallness or red colouration, but only what is allowed in the raws can happen (for instance, dwarves can't slowly develop a new organ, and dogs can't become purple if the raws don't allow purple as a coat colour). Microevolution is implemented! Breeding is currently unregulated- you'll have to cull undesirables, which this is Dwarf Fortress so the evil of that is completely ignorable. Toady wants to implement unhappiness for breeding regulation for sentients, and make eugenics programs noticable by the targeted dwarves and reacted against (flee, rebellion, etc). He considers this might be in bad taste or used incorrectly (awesomely?) by players, but figures it's dwarf fortress and compared to kitten slaughtering and child maiming, eugenics and genocide is pretty much par.

Wounds again: Wounds now, when healed, stop hurting (so much?). That means that the old problem of a dwarf having a missing arm or missing eye causing him to pass out from pain every 10 minutes and be a cripple for life is now over.

Materials again: Finally, yesterday, Toady added discrete material tracking of a sort- liquid and gaseous blood, snow, slime, vomit, etc. all have invisible quantity meters. When it reaches a threshhold, it becomes a puddle, pool, etc. This is basically the same as before, but now if, say, the snow melts, it can become a certain amount of water, or if the blood is made of gold, the molten gold that flows out could become a thin gold plating on the floor or chunks of gold that can be melted down. He theorizes whether this will be used for snow/mud depth or even item tracking (10 gold bars in a pile, use 3 to make a goblet, 7 remain, as opposed to the current system of 1 Giant Gold Pile, inseparable, produces 3 goblets or 1 throne, etc.), but notes that it's a problem for later versions.

That's the Daily Dorf Backlog for this version.

Current Release Date Estimate:
Mathematical Model:
Optimistic (Exponential): Late February 2009
Middle (average of 2): Mid-Late April 2009
Pessimistic (Slowest Linear): September 2009

Toady's estimate: April-May 2009.

Planned Features for next version beyond this:
Finishing Wounds
Creating descriptions for new traits
New venom/poison system using new materials, so that poisons actually physically exist and can puddle and stuff- Toady wants, eventually (maybe not this version) contact, inhalable (checks vs current breathing status), and injectable poisons, with different effects. Ingestable poisons would require either a flag to be set on the item that is poisoned and go off later, or to completely revise how edible items work to include digestion. Finally, Dwarves coating weapons with poison has been mentioned, and Toady indicates he doesn't feel this is very Dwarfly but that he'd work on it eventually- perhaps not this version, again.
Health Care fixes
Map features- probably increasing the amount of cool stuff found underground (Underground Diversity is the biggest request on the DF Forum 'eternal voting')
Minor World Gen stuff
Military reform
Bugfixing and other randomness such as skills/attributes.

Potentially:
Smelter reform, so that things inside items (seeds in a bag, booze in a barrel) can be used in reactions. Liquid resultants like 'add spice to rum to make spiced rum' are currently going to be inoperable since they'd appear magically in thin air and splash on the floor, and programming dwarves to go get containers for resultants is off the list for this version. However, examples like 'combine seeds + magic powder = magic beans' or something is totally possible, just as 'tin + silver = pewter' is now.

Item damage- items have a sharpness rating for weapons, which could degrade over time. It would require, probably, a fix item labour, so Toady is unsure if he wants to complicate DF with it right now.

All in all? This looks to be awesome.

[open_sketchbook]

I have a prediction. As computers increase in strength, Dwarf Fortress will exponentially increase in complexity. Eventually, as humanity learns to manipulate dimensions outside our own, somebody will run an infinite world-gen of Dwarf Fortress on a computer powered by a self-replicating pocket dimension. This event will become known as the Big Bang.

[The Yosemite Bear]

no, our reality will be invaded by canabalistic, cat hating dwarves, who will have decided we are responsible for all the bad things in their lives....

[Vendetta]

I firmly believe that when the age of cybernetics finally dawns, all copies of Dwarf Fortress will be live updated via direct connection to Toady One's brain.