Hello again!

Over the last few weeks, part of what we've been doing involves trade in the fortress, both making it look better and adding some new practical pieces as well.



Here we have some full wagons on the bottom of the screen bringing much-needed supplies to the player, through a bamboo forest. There's also a yak with some bags packed on it that is part of the caravan as well, and a few bodyguards. On the wagons and animals, there's not a lot of graphical real estate to work with, so the images reflect the amount of stuff being carried (there are four levels), rather than specific items.



Once we get to the newly redesigned depot, though, the situation changes, and we can show specific trade goods on the tables. The tables at the top are for the visiting merchants, and they also get the northern stool. The bottom tables show the goods the fortress is willing to trade (which are selected by the player), and the fortress broker sits on the southern stool.

In the image above, the left side is before the wagons arrived, and on the right side, the wagons have unloaded (you can see the wagons resting at the very top.) I've also brought the, um, goods I had on hand in my little test fortress, ha ha. It is a bin of wooden crafts and some turtles we caught. I'm sure the thriving capital of the dwarves will love my little turtles.



Just for fun, here's an image of the depot in the old version. I've circled it in green in case you have trouble picking it out! The separate tables and the ability to tell who is trading which item are new to the graphical version.



We're still working through the trade screens. Here you can see what we have for bringing items to the depot so far. It's a little easier to select groups of items now, as well as bins containing various objects, but we're also going to allow direct selection at stockpiles and from the items themselves, so you won't have to handle everything from the depot, which could be very cumbersome to say the least.



A little of this applies to adventure mode as well! Here I've packed some items on my trusty donkey, and that is visible now as I lead the critter through the village.

- Tarn

Hello!

Levers in Dwarf Fortress can be hooked up to all sorts of buildings and machines, such as doors, floodgates, gear assemblies, cages, spikes, and bridges. In the old game, this was a reasonably painful process, where mechanisms had to be manually selected, lists scrolled through, and afterward it was very difficult to figure out which lever was linked to which building without just pulling it and seeing what horrible things happened.

This has been changed now! In the video, you can see what we currently have:



When you click "link lever", two appropriate mechanisms are chosen by default. You decide what to link the lever to by clicking on it, and once you've hooked it up, both the lever and the linked building have a list of links with a recenter option. So hopefully there will be fewer unnecessary tragedies.

Patrick has also drawn up some new barrels, with their contents, so that you can get some information about your food stocks at a glance.



Here we have some dwarven wine and rum, as well as meat, fish, plump helmets and seed bags.


- Tarn

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