Dwarf Fortress has the well-earned title of being one of the most torturous games to learn. There is a lot going on, even after we changed all the ridiculous keyboard commands and replaced the Matrix-like interface with some understandable, and awesome, pixel art. It still needs something. Something to ease the need to head straight to a wiki just to understand what's going on. The answer is the tutorial of course.





To make the tutorial all it can be, we found the ultimate play tester: my wife Annie. There are a lot of base-building games out there now, enough to make Dwarf Fortress easier to get into. She doesn't play any of them. The closest she gets to DF is Overcooked 2. After one failed attempt with the original, the latest version of the tutorial allowed her to get good enough at the game to tunnel under a bog and drown her fortress.









Our aim is to make this level of play achievable by anyone. We want the world to be able to lose this game and have fun doing it.

- Zach

P.S.
A note from Kitfox, our publisher: Very soon, Alexandra will be starting a streaming video series on learning this new version of Dwarf Fortress! Follow along and get ready to stock up on knowledge at our Twitch or YouTube channels.

Hello!

We're continuing along with the art. The last bit we need to update is the buildings. Jacob has put together some amazing workshops. Their color reflects the material they are made from. Here are twelve different workshops made from three different woods:



These workshops were built in a volcano, sadly. Watch the destructive power of lava here:



- Tarn

Hello!

My brother Tarn and I recently returned from PAX West, an entire 30 minute ferry ride across the Puget Sound in Seattle. There we met with the Kitfox community manager, Alexandra, who introduced us to the crowd waiting to see the first ever live demonstration of the new Steam version of Dwarf Fortress! The link to the show can be found here (https://youtu.be/uE-FCtGdwMI), where you can listen and watch as we take a ponderous tour through the new controls and give away the Easter eggs - spoilers!



I would like to thank Alexandra and the many fans who showed up in person to visit with us. Extensive Influencer BlindIRL also came out to meet us. His many Fortresses online are an inspiration, including one that aims to span a thousand years! He and the many other streamers have kept our project afloat for almost 20 years and it soon will be accessible to all.

- Zach


Hi everyone!

It's Alexandra, just wanted to thank everyone who talked to us at PAX and everyone online who watched online. We did not have a booth this year so it might have been hard to find us but hopefully we will be back with one for next con! Now that the game is in a more showable state, we can start making more video updates and hopefully working a lot more with any Dwarf Fortress content creators so stay tuned!



-Alexandra

Hey there!

It's Alexandra from Kitfox Games with some very exciting news about the new Dwarf Fortress soundtrack. Watch the announcement video from Tarn and Zach on Youtube:



Dwarf Fortress Steam edition will have a 15 track soundtrack by Dabu and Simon Swerwer including tracks in the Dwarvish language! You might be familiar with Simon from his work on the SoundSense utility for the original Dwarf Fortress. We are so excited to be able to work with both Dabu and Simon to bring you this new soundtrack that will be available on Steam, Spotify, Bandcamp and more!




Tarn, Zach and I will be at PAX West in Seattle, Washington hosting a demo for Dwarf Fortress Steam edition. It will be taking place this Friday September 2nd at 4:00pm Pacific Time from the Horse Theatre.

This will be the first time you'll be able to see the game in action on stage! If you'll be at PAX West you won't want to miss this! If you can't make it to PAX, the panel will also be streamed live on https://www.twitch.tv/pax3 with a VOD available shortly after.

Looking forward to meeting some of you soon!

- Alexandra + Bay 12 Games

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