Hello!

Here's a quick update on some new artwork. There are lots of biomes you can embark on in Dwarf Fortress, and we have some new plants and terrain made by Carolyn to make the drier places come alive.



Here you can see the baby toe succulents and pebble plants in flower (and Neoriceisgood's leopard gecko people). These flowers only show up briefly once during the year.



We also have sandy deserts of various colors! This is a sure place to find material for glass making, though you'll have to work a little harder to put some fire in the glass furnace without trees for charcoal.



Now we'll take a look at some more environmental art, but we'll have to create it by giving these dwarven soldiers some friends to play with.



I've placed five trolls in the room!



Our trolls have cyan blood! There's also a touch of dwarven blood spatter here in red, but all the soldiers survived, along with some helpful citizens that jumped in with the dogs.



Here's a combat report, which you can get to by clicking on an alert over on the left side. We only have one troll corpse picture, even though the headlessness lines up in this case, ha ha.

- Tarn

Hello!


Alexandra here from Kitfox Games! Zach returns this week with a...video update?! Watch as he gives us a tour of his new fort, while showing off the new artwork and menus in action!



Zach one half of a giant that needs to be thrown in the garbage. Following the minecart to the garbage into the underground layers, you will see the giant mushrooms, trees, monsters and flowers.



You can watch the full video on Youtube. We are happy to return to more video updates now that the art is nearing completion. Stay tuned for more soon!

-Alexandra and Bay 12 Games

The mysterious animal people have come to your fortress to seek you out, some for amusement, others... for revenge! They come from the world's wild places in all shapes and sizes. Should you choose to open your taverns to outsiders they will seek you out. They could be coming for entertainment or work. Some might be adventurers seeking danger, others may be poets or scribes.



All of these images show new animal people sprites by Neoriceisgood. There are almost 200 of these new sprites now.





You must remember where they come from. You must always watch yourself around wildlife. Even those recently domesticated are but one step from feral savagery. Respect for nature is the best defense against the animals' wild ways. The environment exists in a state of fragile balance, should the elves be believed. Destroying the animal peoples' habitat makes you their greatest natural enemy. Beware in the savage wilds lest you experience their wrath!

- Zach

Hello!

Carolyn has completed the update of the interface art and icons and has moved on to the next set of updates: vegetation! Here is where we are at so far with aboveground trees:



Flowers! These are apple, peach, and sand pear trees.



And their fruit! Along with some smaller bayberry clusters over on the right that didn't have visible flowers.



In autumn, the leaves begin to turn...



Achieving a rich autumnal glow...



And then ready to fall! We have yet to do the falling leaves animation (it has a very crappy placeholder drawn by me right now ha ha), but we'll be there soon. If you look closely, you'll see a few leaves pointing the wrong way, or branches connecting to nothing - those were my fault and we're fixing them up! Some of it also comes from limitations of the system. But for a tile-based system, where the exact tiles matter (dwarves can only scurry up into the thicker branches when treed by wild beasts), I think this looks great!

Of course, your dwarves don't have to embark in the temperate zone with the four seasons (despite the text at the top!):



In this screenshot alone, we have round limes, guavas, coffee berries, carambolas, kapok fruit, avocados, bitter oranges, cashew apples, pomegranates, papayas, citrons, rambutans, lychees, custard-apples, and durians. There are three images for fruit right now, based on size and recolored. This is a candidate for improvement of course.



And here they are in flower.

-Tarn

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