Hello!

Jacob has been working hard on graphics, and we have some new capabilities there as well. He's prepared palettes for all of the material colors. Some community members (Lexi, Jenifer, and Rose) did a lot of work in particular on wood colors back around 2017, and the ASCII version only ever showed them as one brown color, ha ha, but now you can see all sorts of wood colors. Here are some bedrooms with new furniture images for stone cabinets, wooden chests (the planned ones use the old image), stone doors, and stone hatches:



And here's a happy colorful tomb with new wooden casket images, using specialized wood color palettes (so a 'red' wood object and a 'red' stone or metal object use different color sets.)



The pictures here use a pretty random mix to show the palette variety, but you can select the material while you're building or placing furniture if you'd like to arrange items according to color.

I've been updating the remaining menus as we work through the first step of the roadmap we posted last time. I've finished the justice menu (aside from interrogation reports), the petition system, and I'm about halfway through diplomacy. The dwarven justice system covers crimes from bar fights to vampiric bloodsucking, and punishment can be anything from a few days in jail to a reforging by the hammerer. The petition system is used by people that want to become residents of your fortress who are not from your selected dwarven culture, and also by religions and craft guilds who want recognition and spaces devoted to their groups.

- Tarn

Hello!

Work has now progressed to the point that we feel like we can share a plan for the next several months of development, all the way up to the release. It has been a long road of course, and I'm sorry it has taken so much time to get to this point, but as it turns out there was an awful lot of stuff to do ha ha. And there's still quite a bit left to go.

We need to maintain some flexibility to react to feedback or emerging circumstances, so the following can't be set in stone. But hopefully it offers something of an idea about what's up. I know there are various levels of patience out there. All we can do is keep at it and try to plan the next steps carefully.

Here's the rough roadmap:

1. Finish the menus that haven't been upgraded yet. These include the graphics and layout for justice, health, diplomacy, and hauling. These aren't small tasks; each will take weeks. I'll also be working with Jacob during this period on the sprites we need to update throughout the project. He submitted the new weapons recently, for instance, and I also got a new batch of music from the composer. It's important to get these things incorporated in a timely fashion so everybody can keep working.

2. As the menus are finished, and the graphics updates are completed, we'll move on to some important interface and usability improvements (tooltips everywhere, Xs to close windows, hotkey support, etc). Some of these can be done fairly quickly, but a few are chunky additions, and there are lots of them to do. After this part is done, the game should be much easier to get into. At the same time, we'll also be continuing to add graphics (flows, the ocean and beach, some more shadows, etc.)

3. All this time, of course, we've been fixing old bugs and making new bugs and fixing them, and here we'll need to focus and spend some quality time with them, so that we have as smooth a launch as possible.

4. We're not sure what level of Steam Workshop will be needed for modding support, and it needs investigation.

5. The old ASCII version has other game modes - Adventure mode, Legends mode, and Arena mode. We've made significant progress on Legends mode, but we haven't done anything with Adventure mode and Arena mode yet. We also have the Classic ASCII mode to support, and we are also working on Mac and Linux builds.

6. There's the matter of Steam achievements and the other various Steam features. We'd like to support whatever people are into here, eventually.

When we finish the first three points, we'll have the playable fort game on Windows. The path ahead is now shorter than the path behind, and looking at the amount of graphics left to produce and the amount of menus to update, it looks like our earliest possible launch date would be in the fall. Many of the things from #5 or #6 will delay the launch significantly, and this leads to some very hard questions indeed! I know most of you want us to launch the game as soon as it is feasible, so we've been thinking about what it might look like to do some of #5 or #6 post-launch.

We'd been hoping to have more of these later items done faster, of course, but a few things happened. Well, 2020 and 2021 happened, ha ha. Also, my original plan for how Classic mode might be implemented has only partially panned out. I made an ASCII friendly interface layer, which'll be a great help, but I underestimated how long it would take to retool all of the smaller clickable buttons into an ASCII-friendly state. A few menus will need to be redone from scratch, and my current thinking is that doing ASCII versions of the menus alone would take a few months. I'd mostly been accounting for keeping and adapting the ASCII glyphs we already had in place, with some alterations to support for example the ability to see multiple Z levels, but the menus have changed so much it's now a much larger project. The hard question then is do we want to delay the initial release to do this? Or launch, and then do the free update after.

Adventure mode is straightforward in its way. I don't expect it'll have many real development gotchas, but it does have dozens of menus, some of them quite complex. So similarly, that'll be months of work to complete. It's an important part of the game and has figured into some of the most well-known DF community stories, but it's also separate enough from Fortress mode that we can conceive of letting people get their hands on fort mode first. Again, delay or launch?

We'll be pondering this and considering feedback. We'll eventually get to everything; it's just a matter of the best order to do things, with a different right answer for different players, frustratingly enough! I'm grateful for how patient people have been in general, especially with everything going on, and thankful for the support we've gotten from the community and Kitfox as we try to get this initial release together.

We'll continue to keep you posted with regular news updates.

-Tarn

Hey!

It's Alexandra again from Kitfox with a bit of dwarfy news. I know I said last time things were going to be a bit slow, but we still have a few things to share. We wanted to show you what a fully generated world looks like and Jacob has created a map legend with all new sprites!



See the full size image: https://imgur.com/a/StnOP0J

This is a medium sized world and we are still working on a few visual details here. You'll notice there are no caves for example, because they end up being very numerous and mess up the look a bit. The rivers are also a little wonky at the moment but they will be fixed. The underworld spire goblin cities should be distinguished - right now they look like the regular goblin forts (in ASCII, these were the difference between dark magenta and the much rarer light magenta symbols).



In our next update, we will be sharing a roadmap of what is left to do and approximate time it will take to finish. These aren't going to be firm, but we want to be as transparent as we can about development.

See you next time!

- Alexandra + Bay 12

P.S.
An earlier version of this post said the sprites had been created by Patrick. I later edited it to reflect the correct artist, Jacob. Sorry about that to both artists!

Hey!

It's Alexandra again from Kitfox with a bit of dwarfy news. I know I said last time things were going to be a bit slow, but we still have a few things to share. We wanted to show you what a fully generated world looks like and Jacob has created a map legend with all new sprites!



See the full size image: https://imgur.com/a/StnOP0J

This is a medium sized world and we are still working on a few visual details here. You'll notice there are no caves for example, because they end up being very numerous and mess up the look a bit. The rivers are also a little wonky at the moment but they will be fixed. The underworld spire goblin cities should be distinguished - right now they look like the regular goblin forts (in ASCII, these were the difference between dark magenta and the much rarer light magenta symbols).



In our next update, we will be sharing a roadmap of what is left to do and approximate time it will take to finish. These aren't going to be firm, but we want to be as transparent as we can about development.

See you next time!

- Alexandra + Bay 12

Hey!

It's Alexandra here from Kitfox. We have just a bit of news this week building off of the major update to Legends Mode. During world generation, a text box will appear displaying the significant events of the area.



The most important of the last 1000 events are added every second. Players will be able to pause and browse the chronicle at their speed so you can dive into the lore of your world before it's even saved! Unlike in Legends mode, the colourful text isn't clickable although this could change in the future.

Work is moving along very well but the news for the next while will be a tad dry and lacking graphics. This means that there might not be an update every two weeks, but rest assured we are moving forward. To make up for it, here are some new pictures of Scamps and Jojo:





-Alexandra + Bay12

Hello!

Back to work in 2022, and something different: Legends Mode! When you start Dwarf Fortress, you generate a world that you can play several games in, and this world's history can be quite involved. Sometimes it's fun for a change of pace to sift through the details. Once you've played a fortress, your fortress's characters and events are also incorporated into the legends.

In the text version of Dwarf Fortress, navigating legends is quite difficult; you can only view one page at a time, and you cannot move directly from one entry to another. To build up any kind of meaningful story or to view even a few different pages of information, you'd pretty much need to be writing things down on paper or in an outside text editor. Now, we enter the Age of the Hyperlink:



Every colorful word, which I'll probably also underline before the end, can be clicked to open up a new page. You can keep as many tabs open as you like.



I wanted to figure out a little bit about the master goblin poet and their spouse and such. It only took a few seconds and I didn't need to take any outside notes, ha ha. So far, so good!

- Tarn

Greetings all!

Yes, it's true! Tarn is back with a new video for an update many of you have been waiting for.

This time around we get to see the new and improved embark screen in all it's glory!




The highlight for old players is that it is not at all like the stunningly crappy embark screen from the ASCII version. This isn't an overstatement at all - the old embark screen is remarkably bad; people have made many remarks in fact.



For new players/future players, the highlight is perhaps that you can embark anywhere in a massive generated world with various meaningful differences, and also the general new shininess, and of course the new artist!

Check out the full video on the Kitfox Youtube channel.

You can catch us and other rad Dwarf Fortress fans over at the Kitfox Games Discord.

Thank you to all the Dwarf Fortress content creators for reaching out so far, it's been lovely meeting all of you and please do continue to reach out if you haven't yet!


See you next time,
Alexandra and Bay 12

Hello!

We are happy to announce Jacob Bowman to the Dwarf Fortress Steam edition team as our new pixel artist. You might be familiar with his work as Ironhand, as he created a rather popular tileset some years ago. We're excited to work with him, and he's already off to a great start making brand new tiles for us.

Here is a look at some of the art (both are works in progress!!) Jacob has made so far on the world map:





Look at those wormy hills and deep water! A world worth generating and spiralling into madness in, surely.

We will have more detailed updates with more images and video coming in the future as Jacob and the team works together, but I'm sure you'll agree that it's best not to rush Tarn and Zach so much that we add more bugs in haste. Thank you for being patient with us while we sort things out.

We are also still interested in talking to content creators (streamers, YouTubers, etc) interested doing more with Dwarf Fortress. If that is you, then let's chat on Discord! (Alexandra #0007)


-Alexandra, Tanya, and Bay 12 Games

Hello!

This week's video is all about setting up patrol routes with the new military screens. The gameplay is from Zach but we also have guest commentary from Dwarf Fortress Youtuber and Twitch streamer, Blind.



This time, we see a fort in need of defending and we must create and equip squads of dwarves to patrol the outside walls. In the military screen, we can designate the type of equipment each dwarf should use, allowing them to seek it out and equip it.



Once we have our squads formed, we can map out the patrol route (as shown below with the dotted lines) and watch as the dwarves follow the path.



For the full video and a list of timestamps, check out the video on Youtube. Thank you to Blind for helping us with this week's update. If you're a Dwarf Fortress content creator (or want to be one), please visit us on the Kitfox Discord and/or say hi to me (Alexandra#0007) and the rest of the urists!

-Alexandra and Bay 12 Games

Hello!

We a special video this week featuring Zach Adams of Bay12 Games showing how to defend your fort from a goblin siege.



This time, Zach has set up a waterfall fort with a pen of exotic large animals. It's a very appealing site for goblins! But as you'll see, in the video, they will face a hallway full of different traps to stop them.



For the full video and a list of timestamps, check out the video on Youtube. Thank you to everyone for the feedback on these last few video updates. Please continue to do so and as always, come visit us on the Kitfox Discord!

-Alexandra and Bay 12 Games