Greetings all!

Alexandra here with the Spring video dev update showing off all the latest features in Dwarf Fortress with Tarn. This time, we have some new, exciting developments in the Fort including bedrooms, tombs and a visit from an elven caravan! We have have big updates on the building interface and zoning placement.



That's it from me today, see you next update!

-Alexandra

Hey everybody!

This time we have a look at the expansive cavern system that you can find underneath your fortress.



There are all sorts of mushrooms down there, which Patrick has prepared for you. Big ones, little ones, really big ones... in the image above we have tower caps and fungiwood growing in the subterranean water pools, and the floor is entirely covered with smaller fungus. The largest multitile growths can be used for lumber if you manage to reach them and recover the fallen material, and the smaller ones can be used for food, dye, and clothing. These can also be cultivated. Your dwarves can use the water for all sorts of purposes, especially if the surface level lacks a river or brook. (We still have to handle the blue water behind the tree images, and the ramps cut off prematurely sometimes.)



Since the largest mushrooms occupy multiple vertical levels, you see slices of them as you move up and down through the levels of your fortress. In the gif, we start at the mossy floor with a spattering of webs and small vegetation (and a cave ogre) and move up three levels, viewing the caps as they round out at their tops.



You can see three different gem clusters in this image of a lichen floor. The open cavern makes it easier to prospect for ore and other useful minerals, but also leaves you exposed to visits from various creatures if you don't take precautions!

- Tarn

Hi again!

This time I've brought some elves, the third of the major critters you can find in the game, after dwarves and humans.



Brought to you by Mike, they are slighter than humans, as we can see here, and their hair comes in autumn colors, though some have mossy green or silvery white. I have everybody in the same clothing here to focus on the physical features. (Note that some of the beards of the dwarves have been shaved since my creature placer doesn't respect their normal customs.)



These elves grow wooden weapons and armor and don't like to trade any items made from butchered animals or wood they suspect came from felled trees. In the image above, you can see their heavy armor, and a more lightly armored warrior, with some humans in metal equipment for comparison.



And this is the variety of their typical clothing, using profession colors. A few of these professions are atypical for elves, but you can find them in human settlements where they'll often find themselves working in jobs that don't exist in their forest retreats, even those wood-working professions which the elves living among the trees might find offensive. Similarly, fully-acclimated city elves don't appreciate that forest elves eat the people they kill in the ongoing timber skirmishes, so it kind of evens out.

- Tarn

Hello!

Statues are one of the pieces of furniture in Dwarf Fortress. You generally use them to increase the value of a room, or as the center of a room when you designate an area to be a sculpture garden. This is a place for dwarves to hang out and admire the architecture, which generally makes them happy. The statues can depict particular people, historical events, abstract shapes, artifacts, and more. Of course, up to this point, we used the same text symbol for every statue, made the material give it one of a few colors, and left the rest to a sometimes lengthy paragraph description, including whatever engravings or other decorations might be found on the object.



After Patrick drew lots of new images and adapted many additional images to the statue format, we're finally able to begin showing some portion of the details! This is my coati hall, with eight coatis and a coati person. There's also a sunfish enjoying some time in the waves under the moon. The colors of the statue give some indication of their material, various stones I located in the mines. It's a strange room, and I shouldn't be in charge of decorating anything, but my dwarves enjoy the space, because they don't know any better. There's also a visiting human monster hunter there, possibly confused.



The pedestal indicates the quality of the statue, and also reflects all of the decorations (spikes, hanging rings, engravings, etc.) Damage and spatter are also indicated. This statue has been encrusted with oval cabochons and given little menacing spikes.

- Tarn

Hi!

This time in Adventures in Clicking on the Main Screen, we have workshops!  


(Please click-through for a bigger image)

This window has popped up after clicking the mason's workshop. In the old Dwarf Fortress, looking at the items in a workshop and looking at the tasks to be performed at a workshop were two separate commands. Now that information has been combined into one window.  (Like last time, none of the interface art is final here.)

There are various ways to interact with tasks and items which are now accessible through the little buttons. These include setting up repeat tasks, high priority tasks, shuffling the order of the tasks in the list, examining the details of the task in the list, suspending a task, and cancelling a task.

In the bottom list, the distinction between the two pieces of granite is that one of them makes up the physical workshop (the one with the house-shaped building icon), and the one at the end with the 'TASK' icon is the one currently being worked on in the active task. The other icons allow you to do some of the actions also accessible from the lower left menu - forbidding items, dumping items, melting items (not pictured here since none of these are meltable), and hiding items.


(Please click-through for a bigger image)

Here's what you get when you add a new task. The potential task list alphabetized now and has a search filter. I've changed some of the old job names to make the alphabetization work.

All of this can run unpaused (also new).  Missing is the ability to rename the building, the worker profiles, and the ability to destroy the building.  Those'll all be in soon.

I've also redone the old jeweller's workshop screen (the old gem cutting interface was very baroque, to say the least.) It now works like a regular workshop. The same is true of seven other workshops previously inaccessible to our modding infrastructure. They all work like regular workshops now (the loom, the mechanic's workshop, the dyer, etc.)


- Tarn


Hello folks! Just a quick wee message from myself to say, happy (belated) birthday Scamps!🎉 I couldn't resist getting this birthday boy in here this week and, with full blessings from Tarn, I can share a new picture with you of the third Dwarf Fortress developer.


(Please click-through for a surprise image!)

Thanks and speak to you soon!

-Fiona

Happy New Year!

The holidays have passed, though we've moved on to not exactly calm and workerly times. But we're mostly back to the game and can show you our in-progress Look command.



We haven't had an artist pass on this dwarf view yet, but it's starting to come together! The old text version of Dwarf Fortress made it unnecessarily difficult to find information about dwarves and other game objects. Not only was the data hidden behind many (many) keypresses as you might expect, but it was also scattered through many different windows and screens. We're trying to bring it all together here. We might end up with more icons and less text as we go.

The tabs and overview boxes are still in flux but the screenshot here is where we are so far in-game. Between physical attributes, mental attributes, personality facets, and beliefs, the game picks the strongest or most unique six and displays them in the overview. You'll still be able to get at the full set of data within the tabs; the intent of these boxes is to answer simple questions and provide the best flavor and context. The same is true for items, skills, positions and the rest. The full data and options can be found in tabs, with a short summary at the top level.

We'll also be adding some of the missing options like camera follow and custom naming to the uppermost box.

The game can still run unpaused when this popup is displayed, so you can see e.g. the current job and thought list update in real-time. It's also pretty common to have multiple dwarves/creatures in a single tile, especially with pets tearing about and babies being held. Instead of the cumbersome 'Next' command, which is how we used to deal with this before, we have little tabs that pop up on the right side. If there are too many critters in a tile for right-side tabs to work (which doesn't happen often, but industrious players sometimes drop all of whomever in a narrow pit), clicking gives a scrollable list. The tabs also include items and buildings and engravings, with similar solutions for high object counts.

As a bonus, we have an image to put a cap on last month's winter video update, where I showed a small hallway that Zach had carved out for the coffins, but we didn't have the artwork added in at that time. Now we have the wooden caskets! And, um, the hallway got quite a bit longer... the open ones are unoccupied. Can't say the same for the closed ones.



Talk to you again in 2 weeks!

- Tarn

Greetings all!

Yes, it's that time again, the quarterly Dwarf Fortress video update from Tarn brought to you by me, Fiona! Hello, I'm the new Community Manager for Kitfox Games and I'm excited to work with Tarn to bring you all the future DF news! I've highlighted most of the main points in this newsletter but feel free to watch the video in its entirety over on the Kitfox Youtube channel.

For now, let us begin.

The trade-depot graphics are placeholders however, you can see the wagons pulling up, along with some humans (ugh) and their bodyguards. Hope they have some decent things to trade and are not here just to waste our time (look, there's lots of digging to be done).



I'm hoping they won't judge us on our murderous cats. Or with any luck maybe they'll be intimidated. Look at all those carcasses sheesh. who's going to clean this up? Speaking of intimidation, there's a whole room full of coffins, which are currently being depicted by, placeholder images, you can't see it but trust us, that's one grim room.



Hovering over anything on the map will now show a tool-tip popup, giving you more information about what it is you're looking at. This replaces the look command in the classic version.

It's true, there are indeed two horses at that trade depot.



We've been hoarding this information but now we're ready to release our stash. Stockpiles! You can see here the miner has been busy digging us another room in which we can click into the stockpile interface and drag a little rectangle to designate our new storage room.

In order to designate this room for particular items to store we head into the custom set, which we can deselect everything, type in "mech" which will isolate "mechanisms". Clicking that then tells our dwarves to only store that item in the stockpile.




Last of our updates this month is a peek into the building interface. Here we can see the items that can be built in the building menu. Once clicked and the blueprint placed, we'll be able to select what construction materials to use, based on what's currently in our stockpile.



On the left our architect is having a good look at these blueprints, you can see the railings on the bridge showing that it's travelling east to west but as it is a blueprint it will not block anyone from walking through it. And on the right, it's complete, safe even for cats to travel on!



There are lots more graphics that have been added, little items like wheelbarrows, stepladders but sadly, no mussel shells yet.

Thank you for supporting Dwarf Fortress this year. It means a lot to Tarn, Zach and everyone at Kitfox Games. <3 You can catch us and other rad Dwarf Fortress fans over at the Kitfox Games Discord.

We'll be back for the next update on the 14th of January but for now, we leave you with Scamps who, as usual, is enjoying sitting in his box.



Happy Holidays!

See you next year,
Fiona, on behalf of Tarn, Zach, and the Kitfox team

Hello again!

Sometimes during testing, I have to press the accelerated invasion button to test things. Coming in from the left side of the screen, we have some new friends:



Normally, you don't have to worry overmuch about human invasions if you don't get greedy with the trade caravan or send raiding parties out to harass your neighbors. But when it comes to blows, they bring armor, and sometimes war elephants.



Here my human adventurer leading their one-humped camel, which can be used to carry heavy equipment or for riding. I was expecting to find some more humans in this village, but I found this heavily-armored dwarf out patrolling the streets instead, carrying with a human pole weapon. They were part of a historical migration wave that adopted human ways, however cumbersome those might be in this case!



These are some additional equipped humans and dwarves for comparison - the human set is a work in progress, and the dwarf set is also undergoing a few touch-ups, but this is the basic amount of differentiation we are going with. There'd realistically be a bit more height difference, but the relative thinness and small-headedness of the humans captures it well enough.



Here are some more in the default cyan peasant clothing. These all have the arena hair style (that is, long and uncombed.)

-



Finally, let's take a look at some giant critters! When embarking in the more dangerous wild areas of a Dwarf Fortress world, almost any of the ~200 real-world wilderness creatures can either take on a giant or humanoid form. This includes all of the critters that are normally too small to have combat calculations, like the slug and cardinal and hamster seen here. Though the pictures can be quite cute, the giant critters come in at a minimum of grizzly-bear-sized, so exercise caution when trying to make friends!

- Tarn

Hello!

We've been working on the building construction interface, which covers everything from workshops to bridges to farmplots to walls, and are making good progress there. Placing and sizing rectangles with the keyboard sometimes require a lot of keypresses, as you can imagine, and we've got that all up and running with the mouse now, which is much more efficient. We should be able to show that in a bit. In the meantime, let's take a look at wells!

Now, dwarves drink in the game, hard stuff, lotta drinkin'. This is fine for them. They work slower without it. But sometimes water is needed, for bathing or for the hospital, say. If you want to control the water supply, or you want to stay away from giant cave crocodiles, it can be prudent to carve out a cistern and place a well several Z levels above the water itself.

For demonstration purposes, since we haven't finished the graphics for flowing liquids away from natural sources, I set up a well on a wooden platform above a river. Here's the stilts and a block stairway upward:



Two levels up, we have the platform and the well itself:



This well uses a rope. You can also use a chain. A well also requires a bucket, some blocks for the low wall, and a 'mechanism', which is used in Dwarf Fortress for any machinery, included levers and certain workshops.

Once I got the little demo area set up, I cruelly used a debug command to destroy all the booze in the fort and also make all the dwarves thirsty. Here you see them rush up the platform to quench their thirst, and you can see the empty bucket plop down into the river and come up full of water a few times.



There are some other little work areas that, like the well, are smaller than the typical 3x3 workshops. In the following image we have a screwpress and a quern on the right:



The screwpress's construction requires a few mechanisms, made at the mechanic's workshop on the left, and our stonemason used the mason's shop at the center to carve the quern. Flour is ground from grain at the quern - you can see the little handle at the top where the stones are spun against each other. You can also set up a powered system using a millstone and a windmill or watermill, along with some axles and a gear assembly - we should be able to show that when the building interfaces are a little further along.

(I mined out the work space and placed the shops immediately - I was debating whether to haul away or use the hide option to obscure the loose stone for the final image, or otherwise smooth the place over, when I noticed the small visitor on the left and knew it was time to take the screenshot. A wild chinchilla!)

- Tarn

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