Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates • Hacker News Board

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#91

Post by scratcheee » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 10:04 PM UTC

rkido wrote: post #54

nottorp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also dropped the Mac version. They complain there are few Mac players on Steam. Well, I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't run on the desktop OS [1] i use most, duh. [1] My Linux boxes are headless. And the windows boxes I have to RDP into them. That may work for a game with a beginning and and end via Steam streaming or something, but not for a forever game you just keep around.

While individual game developers choose whether to support macOS, the broader phenomenon of developers dropping macOS support is Apple's fault. They either have no interest in being a serious gaming platform, or else they've made catastrophic missteps in their quest to stay relevant for gamers.

I don’t think it has anything to do with their gaming specific capabilities, just their general philosophy matches poorly with the games industry.

Apple insist on having their own apis and they don’t maintain compatibility for older software for very long, these 2 facts explain things fine on their own. Game devs don’t want a major support burden, they’re happy to patch here and there but constant dropping of apis or even architectures is a lot to handle. The bigger impact is that macOS ends up with a lot less old games that still run, if you need a critical mass of games to become a gaming platform, that constant bleed of legacy games will always slow macOS down.

As for gaming specific features, Metal is a perfectly fine api whose only real problem is that it’s different from the other platforms. Maybe not the best, but certainly not terrible. They also have a really nice capability floor, it’s practical to make a modern game work on any Mac from the last X years (maybe the neo complicates that a bit).

There’s probably a few gaming specific capabilities they could improve on, mouse input especially, but that’s never been the real issue.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#92

Post by zamalek » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

hamdingers wrote: post #55

bigyabai wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game runs fine in Proton, including with dfhack. You can probably get it working on your Mac with a tiny bit of Crossover/Wine/GPTK tweaking.

That's missing the point. There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't. Can't be too mad about it though, it was free back then too.

What benefit does a native build have over proton? I used to care more about it on Linux, until I realized that "native build" probably means "doesn't work." I can only imagine this being much worse on a niche gaming target which there are extremely few users making (and voting for) bug reports.

Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense.

Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#93

Post by ux266478 » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 10:12 PM UTC

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #10

Mobius01 wrote: post #3

I wish nothing but success to Tarn and Zach, it’s great that releasing on Steam and adding a friendlier UI helped the game reach new audiences. It’s the proverbial time black hole.

“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing. I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more intere…

I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structure, because these things did have genuinely different behaviors despite being conceptually similar. That's a problem at a deeper layer than the UI/UX.

The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#94

Post by Planktonne » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 10:23 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #44

Planktonne wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail. It's the opposite of the approach taken by AI games that want to generalise based on simple prompts.

> The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail. I don't know, it's basically Minecraft with Lemmings. You control a lot, but at the end, the AI comparison might be somewhat apt - you tell the dwarves what to do, and they mostly do it. When they're not struck by a strange mood, or when they're not too depressed to work, or when they're not being eaten by a Forgotten Beast (beware its deadly dust!)

I take your point, but those are also all things you can control and manage, albeit indirectly.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#95

Post by threedliams » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 10:39 PM UTC

flurb wrote: post #38

I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they essentially scrapped the old. In favor of a mouse-driven design, they dropped the old, keyboard-driven UI. Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how…

I was under the impression that the classic keyboard-only version was kept up to date with the Steam version? They're both on patch 53.16[1][2] which was released simultaneously on 8/5, so it doesn't look to me like keyboard-only is forgotten or left behind unless I'm missing something.

[1] https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#96

Post by poulpy123 » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 10:45 PM UTC

flurb wrote: post #38

I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they essentially scrapped the old. In favor of a mouse-driven design, they dropped the old, keyboard-driven UI. Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how…

They chose to have social security over a keyboard only interface for a game they continue to publish for free.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#97

Post by satvikpendem » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

deadbunny wrote: post #48

satvikpendem wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a game's job to be fun?

DF is extremely fun.

And in the same way, it's a game's job to make sure their players have fun, one of which is to have a good onboarding experience.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#98

Post by TaLiTr » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 10:59 PM UTC

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #10

Mobius01 wrote: post #3

I wish nothing but success to Tarn and Zach, it’s great that releasing on Steam and adding a friendlier UI helped the game reach new audiences. It’s the proverbial time black hole.

“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing. I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more intere…

> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.

The majority of people do not play videogames. The majority of those do not play any roguelikes. Citing the majority is completely useless.

Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress. There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know. Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once.

> I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun.

On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game. The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours. The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog. That to me is some excellent playtime. Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#99

Post by TaLiTr » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #29

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike dwarf fortress, minecraft is fun and engaging from minute zero, and exposes its systems to you naturally over time. Terrible comparison.

Minecraft's early game is relatively boring. Empty busywork like punching trees, village raids and strip mining are vestigial gameplay loops that neither Mojang nor Microsoft had the confidence to fix. I'd agree that they're a bad comparison though. Despite Notch's inspiration from DF, Minecraft has worse bosses, biomes, trading, mining, diplomacy, cooking, innkeeping and NPCs.

Back in my day, villages weren't even in the game. My highschool classmates and I still found something compelling about it.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#100

Post by KylerAce » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 11:09 PM UTC

forrestthewoods wrote: post #87

flurb wrote: post #38

I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they essentially scrapped the old. In favor of a mouse-driven design, they dropped the old, keyboard-driven UI. Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how…

I don’t understand. I don’t know what “added the G to their UI” means. Also sounds like they added back the keyboard support so there’s literally no issue? > In excess of 10k, I'm sure. Sure sounds like you got your moneys worth.

Ui+g=gui. As in since they added graphics