Hello!

We've been continuing along with our usability work. That isn't just tutorials, but a few final menus to give some helpful overviews and otherwise provide information. Let's take a look at the new Places tab for an example.



Here's an ordered list of the zones. The most important part is the recenter button - it's easy to lose your garbage dump or dungeon, placed somewhere on the hundred elevation levels and then forgotten until you need it again. The meeting areas all display the tavern/library/temple/etc. they are associated with, and barracks show their squad.



The larger locations, which can be made of several zones placed over multiple elevations if you like, also get their own list. Hospitals display the number of patients if you have any.



Here's the stockpile list. It places stockpiles with custom names at the top of their category (Zach named a few of them here.) Determining how full a stockpile is can be complicated by containers like bins and barrels, but the occupancy number here gives some idea of how close each stockpile is to needing expansion.



Like certain zones, workshops can be easy to misplace, and this alphabetical list lets you pop over to a given workshop without trouble. The assigned master of the workshop is shown below the name, and the list also shows the current task. It prints "+ X tasks" if there are additional tasks set for the shop.



Farm plots aren't as easy to misplace, since there are usually only a few layers where they can logically be set down, but it's nice to have an overview of what's currently growing and ready to harvest.

These are all still subject to change - they're a bit sparse and there's always more information we could display - but things are continuing to come together.

- Tarn

Hello there!

When you're starting out in Dwarf Fortress, there's a lot to learn, and we're working now on various forms of tutorialization and instruction to help out new players.

First off, when you are placing your fort, you'll have an option to have the game pick a spot in the world you've made where it can do a more traditional tutorial:



This is the camera controls tutorial. It's important to lead with this since the elevation slices can be a little confusing if you haven't played a game with them before. Once you can operate the camera, we expand out into mining, woodcutting, stockpiles, and workshops.



Another way we can teach people is to have popups on any menu that might be confusing. These are all works in progress, but in the image above you can see the general idea.



Finally, tooltips, tooltips everywhere. We have 350 so far, and we'll keep on adding them until everything makes sense!

This isn't all we have planned. You may have noticed the help button at the top of the screen. Here we'll have more information, and we're thinking about ways to guide players toward goals and things they might have missed in a more interactive fashion as well.

- Tarn

This is the anatomy of a bug that wasn't, and an opportunity to show you how detailed and precise Dwarf Fortress is to the extreme. It is the story of a golden crossbow called Katdiriteb. The weapon was the first unique treasure created in my fortress of Riverdeath, a settlement named after the drowning trap I was using to test pressure plates. The tale of intrigue was decades in the making, revealed by interrogating the surviving conspirators and cheating by looking up the principals in Legends mode.

It all began years ago in 26, when a dwarf named Dakost Busttrust became Captain of the Guard in the nearby capital of Caveclouts. Almost immediately afterward an underworld of necromancers lurking in a nearby tower began to try and turn him to a life of evil. It was his respect of the law, the same quality that made him a good law dwarf, that saved him from temptation. Alas, all things must pass into the night.

It was vanity and his own obsession with mortality that caused Dakost to give up the honest life. In his declining years he went to explain his problem to the necromancer Ineth Kekimmosus. That was the day, in the year 90, Daskost became a villain and his moral flaws became the defining part of his personality.

The dwarven civilization, of which Caveclouts was part, had been at war with the goblins of Hatredmourns for many years when Dakost met Mistem Taderith in 59, three decades before Dakost turned. There, their friendship was forged as they stormed the wicked fort where the goblin warlord had his arm bitten off by one of their war alligators. Mistem was a violent and greedy dwarf, so when the villain Daskot came to her years later she accepted his bribe and in 92 became his professional thief.

In the year 102 Mistem came to the fortress of Riverdeath, disguised as the scholar Id Knifescribes, an expert in agriculture. She had heard of the golden crossbow and immediately went to search for an accomplice. She finds the gullible dwarf Rovod Gemsitthob and turns him with flattery, but he is struck down in a freak giant attack in which he kills the giant that killed him.

It was winter of the next year when Mistem, now Id Knifescribes, tries again. This time she threatens the cowardly dwarf gelder Nish Guildvaults into stealing the crossbow for her. She heads back to Caveclouts after arranging to meet Nish for the crossbow in the spring.

(TL/DR) You can skip the background. It's just for those of you who I know will get a kick out of Legends mode.



The handoff. This is where the story collides with my fortress, four years after the default start date of the spring of the year 100. It's standard for villains to find a quiet place for the thief to hand them the stolen treasure. In this case they chose the library. That wasn't smart as the pair were seen by seven people.



It just happens that there are only two ways out of Riverdeath, and after I close the main gate, that leaves the twisting, and twisted, drowning chamber. You can see the thief running for the exit in the south right after the dwarves throw the lever and trap her inside.



Here we see the dwarf calling herself Id Knifescribes, with the artifact golden crossbow Katdiriteb strapped to her body. You can see she is disguised as a scholar interested in farming. I have already interrogated the thief that gave it to her. All that's left is to arrest her, get back the stolen treasure, and question her to get to the bottom of this conspiracy.

This next part is where the game got too clever for it's own good. When we watched Id Knifescribes reach the closed gate at the end of the drowning chamber, she looked confused for a little bit, then turned around and walked about a dozen tiles and just disappeared. I thought to myself, is she like the kobold thieves and became invisible? Did we program the artifact thieves to just path through walls if they get stuck? If so, I had just found a really insidious bug!



No. The truth was far more embarrassing. You can see here, one level above the drowning chamber. There is the closed gate. There is the trapped hatch to the death hallway. Circled in red, you can see down through a hole into the wood paneling below. When I was pulling up trees to build my wooden fort, the roots left a hole in the ground through which Knifescribes escaped. We have since erased this bug from our to-do list.

- Zach

Hello!

We're continuing to work through the last fortress management menus. Here I'll go through an example of the job details menu.



Depending on the kind of job, you can set further details about it. Clothing can be sized for creatures other than dwarves, decorations can be specified, and many items can be made using particular materials. This rock statue job can have the stone specified and you can even set the image the artisan depicts.



I'll pick marble here from the list of materials. Materials that are available are listed on the top, but you can also set the job to use materials you're planning to have available later.



I want a statue of a platypus thinking about stuff, and I can set that up here. You don't need to fully specify the image. If you want the artist to make an image of their choice concerning a historical figure or site, you can do that too. You can also tell them to recreate the symbol of your civilization or group, or go with the default and let them do whatever they want.



We name the image using the dwarven language. There's only one grammatical form currently, but it's enough for us to specify a variety of names.



Finally we can pick a spot for the statue and admire it!

- Tarn

Hey folks!

Tanya here, while Alexandra is on vacation. Meanwhile, Tarn and Zach are heads-down integrating interface into their various menus, because... drumroll please... we have an artist working on making new icons and interface elements! In fact, she's a new artist, so please welcome Carolyn Jong, a Dwarf Fortress player and pixel artist, as well as Guido (perhaps better-known among some sprite artists as Neorice). Carolyn, Jacob, and Guido will all work together to get the game fully art-ified.

Speaking of which, Guido drew a few new strangers we can show you. Asked about them, Zach says "Deep under the ground, and in the farthest wilds, there are strange people. Like feral beasts they spend most of their time thinking about food and romance, ignoring the irrelevant, such as your dwarves. For they are not ordinary people... they are animal people. It's best to keep your distance and let them be, for one day they may come to you looking for adventure!"

So, feast your eyes on some top-tier animals and the animal-people they correspond to:



Tarn particularly likes the snowy owl person, and called them, "a good chonky floof". We can all agree.

What animal-people are you looking forward to most? Any favorites from your playing in Classic? Tomorrow, I'll try to prioritize showing a preview of at least the first few answers in the comments in a reply, assuming those exist somewhere in the sprite sheet I have...!

OK going back to work,
Tanya (Captain of Kitfox Games)

P.S.
If you're subscribed to the Dwarf Fortress newsletter, you might have seen this post some hours earlier in your email inbox.. though I suppose it also didn't properly explain who Guido is, and the image would have been less... polished, let's say. You win some, you lose some.

Tarn and Zach will be live on Twitch with us tomorrow at 2pm Eastern to celebrate Kitfox's 9th birthday. We will be talking all things Dwarf Fortress from game design, the newest updates and maybe we will even see Scamps!

Single-player or co-op, horror or cute, romantic or funny, roguelike or mystery -- we have something for everyone! Starting from this very moment, the whole Kitfox catalogue is on sale to celebrate the company's founding, a whole nine years ago.

We'll also be streaming schedule with our developers and special community guests, from today and going all week! Our plan is to stream most days at 2pm Eastern time, either here on Steam or on Twitch, with this schedule:




So come with all your questions and pick up a few cool indies for your library!

-Alexandra + Tanya

These are new pictures of the wooden weapons grown by the elves. The haughty protectors of the forest would never harm plant nor beast without cause, but beware! Should your dwarves fell too many precious trees, the elves would have a bone to pick with you... and they never waste the flesh of the prey they kill!



Here we have the new picture Jacob drew of a tombstone.

It's a memorial slab to Kel Balancedclasps, located in a storage room adjacent the drowning chamber where she died (bin palettes also by Jacob.) Would you like to know more about Kel? Would you like to know how crazy Dwarf Fortress actually is? I did a little research in Legends Mode and this is what I found:

The dwarf Kel Balancedclaps began her career as a scout in the army based out of the fortress Letterrough. During half a dozen assaults on the Dark Fortress she and the dwarf fighter Zasit Showerall became lovers. They were soon parted as Kel had to flee to the Hills of Uniting, where she became a spy. Her life of intrigue didn't last long as she was fooled by the goblin Ngoso and was forced to flee again and ended up in my fortress, the fortress of Ragsprays.

It was at that time that Kel redeemed herself, creating the artifact crown "Spiritcrushes," only to be murdered by the dwarf Minkot Browngild in a drunken brawl. Minkot had been convicted (by me) a dozen times for fighting in the tavern and had served half a year in the dungeon. Shortly after being released, Minkot happened to run into Kel who had just forged the wonderous crown.

It was at the half-completed drowning chamber where she died, a place meant only to kill goblin invaders. Minkot happened to attack her, probably the first dwarf he saw, and she dodged the swing, falling off the bridge into the water. I didn't notice for the longest time, and she returned to the fortress as an angry ghost. All I could do was place the tombstone where she died and put her spirit to rest.

- Zach

Hello!

We've been working through the remaining tabs on the dwarf character sheets. One of our objectives is to surface some information that has been difficult to find.





These are the relationships and personality traits of Kikrost the planter. She has several very strong friendships, and you can see in the personality tab that the romance she started with Geshud a few years ago has made her a more joyful person.



(These item images aren't yet updated.) Notice here that poor Zon has three sutures. We can get some more information about the procedure over on the health tab.



Here's Zon's full medical history, and if we want to know how the injury came about we can zip over to check the combat logs.



This baron has been reading in the library!



If we want to know more about the culture, we can also access a wealth of details from the knowledge tab.



When dwarves experience circumstances, there's a chance for the emotion/thought to be saved as a memory. This can cause lesser but recurring emotions and can also change their personalities (as with Kikrust above.) Previously, the player had to cobble together a dwarf's memories from their seasonal thoughts and personality changes, and most memories were not visible most of the time. Now we have this simple chronology.

- Tarn

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