Hi!

Alongside the dwarves and the interface work, there are lots of other bits Meph and Mike have completed recently. Here's another little eclectic fort to show some examples.



I placed a stone bridge in front of the entrance of my fort. The rails on the left and right don't block traffic, but rather distinguish the draw direction -- this bridge draws up to the north. Bridges can also be set to retract rather than getting a cardinal direction, in which case they are displayed without rails.

You can also see a stone door here above the bridge, a wheelbarrow in the stone stockpile, and dwarves down in the lower left with different features/clothing than the last set.



Here I've connected a lever up to the bridge and drawn it up, and you can see it blocking the entrance. I placed some supports in the hallway to the lever for no reason other than to display them. These used to prevent cave-ins, and still do when you otherwise disconnect the fort in 3D by digging totally around them, but mostly they are decorations now.

You can see some stone tables I've lined up in preparation for a dining room to the right - we're messing around with variations here. By the time we're done, you should have some control if you don't want a mish-mash of leg types in a room. The tabletop images will depend on quality (crafted DF items have six quality levels, plus artifacts.)

I set up a wood burner and a glass furnace, and dug out some ramps to get at the sand you can see at the very bottom.



This let me make glass furniture (the wood burner gives us charcoal from felled trees, and we use that and sand collected in bags to make glass.) I set up some glass tables, and a wood table for comparison.

If you look closely, you can see some rain droplets on the wooden table. It was made in a carpenter's workshop outside and was rained upon. Those will soon dry off and disappear. Also, I didn't make the full glass industry pipeline incorporating lye/potash, so these tables are actually green glass instead of clear glass. Those two materials aren't currently distinguished by the tiles.

Here I've taken one of the stone tables and decorated it with some phyllite and lignite cabochons - bands of one and a general encrusting of the other.



These decorations show up on the core furniture types now, along with quality, material, and any spattering of blood, vomit, water, and/or mud.

I forgot I left the debug accelerated invasions option on and everybody died after this when 17 goblins showed up despite it only being the first Spring. We've drawn and implemented a lot of corpse pictures over the last few weeks, but not the dwarves, sadly, so we'll have to wait for a future disaster for an image, ha ha.

- Tarn

Hello again!

As we continue the work adding graphics to replace all of the text characters, the work on menu updates continues as well. Most recently, I updated the process for setting up stockpiles. Like the activity zones from before, stockpiles used to be placed by keyboard presses and couldn't be redrawn. Now we can paint stockpiles with the mouse, using rectangles or free painting, as with zones, and also resize them freely.



Dwarves use stockpiles to get items out from the mines, workshops and the trade depot and into more useful locations. Most typically, you'll want to set a type for the stockpile to tell the dwarves what kind of things you want to store there. In this example, I've created an armor stockpile.



The extra commands there allow you to rename the stockpile, repaint the stockpile, get rid of it entirely, or set up how its links work. Links tell a stockpile where to get its supplies and how to send them down the line. You don't have to set links up at all, but as your fort grows, you might find you want to do so to improve the flow of resources and products.



Stockpiles can be set to accept items from absolutely anywhere, or only from designated donor stockpiles and workshops. A stockpile can also designate which workshops and stockpiles it'd like to give its items to in turn. Here I've set the armor stockpile to accept armor from the nearby metalsmith's forge. Of course, in practice, the items from that forge would go to that pile anyway, since it is so close.

You aren't limited to the basic categories listed. Stockpiles accept a lot of customization:



This pile has been set to accept only bronze armor, for example. Not just that, but it'll only accept bronze armor which can be worn by dwarves. If the armor with the X at the top is turned on, it would also accept bronze armor for humans, which might show up in an invasion. This allows you to separate out junk, for example, so you can melt it down more easily. Note also that you can rule objects in and out by type, by quality, and so on. The text filter is new for the Steam version - the old lists weren't even alphabetized, ha ha.

Veteran players will notice a few missing options - the ability to reserve bins and barrels, for example, and a way to copy custom settings. These are all in the works.

- Tarn

Hey!

This time around, we'll take a look at where we are with representing dwarves graphical on the screen. Keep in mind these are still WIP, but we decided it was at a showable stage.

Back in ASCII land, dwarves were little smiley faces, with fewer pixels than the average emoji. Now, here's a fisherdwarf:



A neatly combed beard, some styled hair back there, and the blue clothing of a fisherdwarf. This is in the basic profession=clothing display mode. You can still see the actual clothing the dwarves are wearing, but it is recolored based on their job, so you can easily spot them. This one has gloves and a dress; each dwarven civilization generated by the game chooses different preferred clothing types as well as hair styles (on top of a ton of other information.) Typically, they'll have a variety of options, and you order them up to be made in the workshops once you have a leather, silk, wool, or plant-based fabric industry going.

This stoneworker for instance, has stuck with the same basic fashion plan clothing-wise, in stoneworker-white, but has shaved her head.



There are of course other ways to display dwarves, and other preferences that can vary even with the same player based on what they are doing. At the bare minimum, you'll also be able to see the items in their actual colors. This makes the fort look more drab, especially before you start up your dye industry or trade, but sometimes you don't want to see the profession colors when looking at your dwarves dance in the tavern. Also generally expect a lot of this to be updated as we see other screenshots in the future. These are the most important graphics in the game, in some ways, and they'll receive a lot of iterations.

There's also the question of the military dwarves. Here are variously dressed dwarves I set up in the arena mode, where you can outfit anybody and then watch them fight (or take control of one of the creatures yourself.)

We have some fully geared-up dwarves, in bronze, with and without helmets at the top.



Their beard-style is similar because dwarves and everybody else in arena mode don't have a civilization and so just kind of let it all grow wild, ha ha. At the bottom, we have a hooded cloak and face veil with iron mail, and on the lower right, a mask and headscarf combo with a tunic, skirt and a steel-tipped spear.

Although we haven't focused on the following mode *at all* yet, we can also check out the new dwarves in adventure mode.



I went ahead and made a dwarven character to play in this (very odd) RPG. Historically in this particular world, a bunch of dwarves have emigrated over to the nearby human villages, so I decided to start there, because I wanted the humans' iron meat cleaver for my look, ha ha. So I'm the one with a meat cleaver in the image, as you might expect. I have a leather vest, and leather trousers and boots.

Ah, and that's my pet black bear Bolli on the left. And another dwarf lives here in this starting dirt-floored cabin, also a head-shaver, but her dress is dyed that color (her purple gloves are another story - still a work in progress!) On the right is a human. I mean, what humans look like now, before they also receive this treatment!

- Tarn

Hello!

Victoria here from Kitfox Games. Dropping in to let you know that we just uploaded an Autumn Dev Update that shows all the things Tarn and the team have been working on -- with gameplay! This includes items we've previously discussed before like the new menus and zones, but now you can see it in action.



This video update is in lieu of the usual text update you'd normally get on Thursday. But things will continue like normal after this. :)

Also if you missed it, Tarn was on Rock Paper Shotgun to play Dwarf Fortress with Nate Crowley, the author of the run longing series The Basement of Curiousity. You can see that here.

That's all from me! Hope you enjoy the update.

- Victoria

Hello!

This time in Main Screen News, we have activity zones. These are places where dwarves perform tasks or socialize without requiring construction materials like workshop do.



Dwarves need buckets of water for a variety of reasons, they can also fish, gather fruit from trees with stepladders, dump unwanted items, fill a pit, pond or moat with various beings, keep animals in a pasture, grab sand or clay for further use, fix each other up in the hospital, train animals, or just hang out.

The process begins by painting a zone:



This currently works by placing rectangles or free painting with the mouse. The Classic version also has a wall-sensitive paint we'll pick up later. This zone has been designated as a meeting area, where dwarves will come and chat. Importantly, the meeting area can be given a specific function with the assign location button (one of five icons that still have Tarn-placeholder-art in this image, the rest done by Meph.)

Here I've pressed the assign location button, and we have four choices.



The space below gets filled with locations as you create them. You can have as many locations as you want, and the same location can be attached to multiple zones to create larger multi-purpose complexes under the same umbrella.



I've selected the temple option and scrolled down through the deity list to the organized religions.

These are currently listed in chronological order, which is why we see a native dwarven religion for this world, the Creed of Sport, above a deity selection, Utag Loafivory. Utag Loafivory is a human god of trade, wealth, and hospitality that made their way to the dwarves several decades prior, through a few different organized religions, and two of our dwarves are members of the Utag religion "The True Stick-Fellowship." I'll pick this one for our new temple.



Annnnd the game leaned heavily into the hospitality aspect - "The Sanctum of Lunch." Very good. There's a new Tarn icon there to go into location details, where you'll be able to rename the location if it comes up with something unfavorable, as well as setting priests and other attached occupations.

Unlike placed buildings, zones can overlap. (I recorded the gif at 10FPS in GifCam, so it's a bit choppier than the game itself.)



This doesn't come up all the time, but if you do decide to overlap zones, you can now switch between them in a few different ways with the mouse, as seen above.

We also have the ability to repaint zones, if you'd like to expand a given zone without creating it again from scratch, or even move it somewhere entirely different.



The boxed text is from a tooltip, which is also a DF novelty! There are many tooltips available here, and we'll continue adding them as we go.



Zones can be suspended temporarily or removed permanently. Zones are currently visible only from the zone mode, as in Classic DF, so they won't clutter up the display otherwise.

- Tarn


Hiya!

PAX Online is coming up, and that means Tarn will be on some panels... and they're completely online and free!



This is our entire schedule in terms of PAX panels, but there are two that will involve Tarn in particular:

• Sept 12, 4:15pm EST - Meet Tarn Adams
  
• Sept 15, 6pm EST - Procedural Generation

EDIT (Sept 12): Updated times to say EST, which originally said PST. Sorry!

All information on where to watch, description, and who else is involved in the links provided. Here's a thread of links for the other panels we're involved in too. Hope to see you at a few of them. :)

Cheers,

Victoria

Hi again!

The work on the main screen continues. This time, we'll show a preliminary version of the minimap. In Classic DF, we try to give the player some notion of their surroundings with a text image:



For a given elevation slice of a hillside, you get some sky, some terrain, and some solid rock. As you move up and down, the minimap gives you a basic picture of what's going on. But of course now, we have the power of pixels to improve this:



You can see here a pixel-perfect representation of the tiles of a fort, including a large room and some little rooms that I carved out at this elevation. These are colors I picked myself, so we'll likely see some improvements here. But along with the ramp images and the multi-level display, this should help you visualize how your fort looks. Here it is in action, complete with trees going up into the sky area as the camera repositions:



We also have the date and some additional information here which used to be hidden away in a different screen. We haven't finalized the main screen layout, so this is more subject to change than usual.

Next, we have guts, courtesy of Meph. We haven't been showing a lot of dwarves to this point, since they are still in progress, so the following image is of our placeholder dwarves... our placeholder dwarves after having been subjected to the disembowelment debug function.



Note the directionality -- as the dwarves walk about, the earthworm-like viscera drag around behind them. This normally involves a bit more blood, but we're still working on it.

- Tarn

Hello again!

This time, we have an example of the new interface to show you. First, let's look at the old version of the embark screen:



Dwarf Fortress of course has been a text game up to this point, but even in that limited framework there are some elements lacking here! There's no indication for instance that both of these lists scroll or how to do it. The bottom options are a random jumble.

When you press the key to buy a new item, it takes you to a whole new screen:



This one does have scrolling instructions but still no indication of how many pages there are. The mouse doesn't work anywhere.

Here is where we are in the version we are working on:



This screen is mainly mouse-driven. The scrolling and purchase options are more clear, and we've cleaned up the options on the bottom as well.

You can continue to narrow your selections with a text filter as below:



The animals have been moved to a third tab:



Meph drew the border and Mike drew the buttons, bars and the rest, and also gave me various layout advice. Mike also has a widescreen monitor, which has helped correct issues there - this screen currently uses a customizable working area ~2000 pixels wide, centered, while the main screen uses the full width of the display for the more graphical play area.

This screen also sizes down fairly well, to a point. The menu widths compact and finally the border is removed (except for the tabs at the top), so the game is playable at smaller resolutions and window sizes.

We haven't yet finalized the order of the listed items (which are still somewhat random, as opposed to, say, sortable alphabetically or by point value.)

We're continuing to work on the main screen to get it up to this new standard. It'll be exciting to share that when it is ready!

- Tarn


If you sign up for the newsletters, you'll be able to see the full size versions of the images! (And they'll be delivered to your inbox.) You can sign up here and view the web version of the newsletter here.

- Victoria

Hi!

The base creature pictures have been completed! As you can tell from some of the previous posts, that's a lot of animals, ha ha, as well as various fantasy critters. This also frees up Mike to do a pass on my ghastly programmer-art screens, which we should be able to show next time, while Meph continues work on items and buildings, as well as some additional work with derived creature types, like baby animals and zombies.

Here is one of the fantasy creatures, a mischievous gremlin.



Mischief here can be quite serious mischievous; gremlins like to jump on pressure plates, free animals from cages, and pull levers. Since pressure plates and levers are often linked up to important floodgates or drawbridges, they can be troublesome indeed.

Gremlins are good at sneaking, but a war dog placed at an entrance or strategic intersection is an option (you can always take them off the ropes if you want them to have a vacation from work with all their dwarf friends.)



Placing dwarf guards on patrol routes or having mechanically important areas behind some general bustle is also feasible, though gremlins wait in hiding for opportunities and can often slip through during breaks in hallway traffic. It's important not to leave a lever that can destroy your entire fortress too close to the deep cavern entrances, ha ha. If you are feeling ambitious, you can set up false levers near the caves to lure gremlins, and link them to traps that collapse or flood the lever room.

- Tarn

P.S.

Episode 24 of Dwarf Talk is here. The volume levels are a bit better this time, and the other host returned, so the original lineup is all back together, talking about the interface and playing with the myth generator.

Hello again!

Giant creatures are a staple of generic fantasy worlds, and since Dwarf Fortress strives to generate worlds which are almost as generic as possible, we have giant versions of most real-world animals in the game. You can tack giant in front of almost anything. Sometimes, this can be trouble - the pandas in our game are just called 'pandas', but a more proper name for the real-world creature is 'giant panda', so that's why we have 'gigantic pandas' for the giant version instead. The same thing happened with the 'giant tortoise.'

The rule in Dwarf Fortress is that a giant creature should be at least as large as a black bear, even if it's a giant version of a small insect. As the real-world creatures approach black bear size, and then beyond, we apply a curve, so that the largest ones are only roughly twice as large in every dimension as their counterpart. Giant whales are very, very large, but they are just eight times as massive as a normal whale, rather than the kind of scaling you see when you go from a spider to a giant spider.

Here are some giant underground creatures:



The giant cave spider has been one of the more notorious DF creatures for many years. The paralyzing venom is quite serious, webs are nasty, it can spring from ambush, and it can also just bite dwarf-sized creatures into pieces. It is an enlarged version of the cave spider, which has a stunning venom (which is merely extremely annoying.) Giant rats are classic beings, of course. We also have large rats since it felt like there needed to be extra size gradations for ratdom.

I feel most bad about the poor giant moles that blunder into fortresses. The art doesn't make me feel better about it! Cave swallows are surprisingly colorful birds.

And here are some more modest creatures, a sample of small-but-not-too-small mammals:



As you can imagine, once we got up to a certain level of animal coverage in the game, it was important for us to get the two iconic monotremes in the game, and fortunately the community pulled through when they selected a few hundred animals to be added to the game back in 2009.

The platypus has poisonous spurs, as in real life, which can cause painful swelling. Perhaps your fortress would benefit by allowing a platypus person adventurer to become a resident monster slayer?

- Tarn

Hi!

Creatures and items, creatures and items. Here are lots of different seeds. You can grow all sorts of different real world and fantasy plants. Our dwarves like to farm a variety of mushrooms underground, but you can try aboveground plants if you like.



I put them on a glass block floor, since I accidentally put an ice floor in the last news posting when I said it was glass, ha ha. I then spread some of the new treasure items around everywhere, in each of the currency materials. You can also make coins and treasures out of non-currency metals and materials.

There were a few other treasures to lay out, but I took the screenshot early, as a lizard started eating my seeds (the guilty party still sits happily in the stockpile.) Normally you can protect seeds from vermin by using bags and barrels, and also by having some trusty cats around to hunt them and bring the remains to their dwarves.

Mike in the meantime has drawn many animals over the last several days, among them the remaining birds. Can you name them all?



I've also been experimenting with the mouse and clickable buttons and other fancy widgets. Animals next to the animal buttons, items next to the item buttons, rather than text text text. DF has had a little patchy mouse support in the past, but we're going to improve that situation for Steam. Hopefully I'll have some to show soon! Artists have to do a pass on my programmer art first, he he he.

-Tarn


After a 6 year hiatus, the DF Talk podcast has restarted! Join Rainseeker, Capntastic and the Toady One (Tarn!) as they talk about Dwarf Fortress and answer questions from the forum.

You can listen to it here, but fair warning... the volume levels are wonky. (In the words of Tarn, they "suck". Heh.) I figured it was still worth sharing though - think of this as the test run of better and more volume-controlled episodes to come! ;)

- Victoria