Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

DF is a fantastic game, and one worth taking some time to explore if you have a weekend to burn when friends and family are out of town, or you're just feeling like being a shut in. It is an excellent example of a "forever project" and one that has gained some quite a fanbase, but as you get deeper in, you will be frustrated by some things.

The game is designed by 2 brothers, and coded completely by one of them. This has led to a game with immense scope, and tons of features, but with most of them lacking polish. Its also led to performance problems, as adding new features is vastly more important than optimizing existing ones. The game is single threaded, outside of some of the gui, and processors aren't really getting any faster. Eventually you'll get frustrated and kill your fortress due to FPS slowdown. This could happen from your fort growing to a large number of dwarfs, or you playing too much with things that flow (lava, water), etc.

There have been quite a few offers by fans of the game to help with the code, but Toady One is adamant about keeping the source closed and being the only developer.

So play, enjoy, and be impressed with what one guy and a lot of Mountain Dew can accomplish, but be aware that you're playing in what is essentially someones (amazing) lifetime art project.

PS: Dwarf Therapist and DfHack make the game much more playable and get around a lot of the interface quirks. If you're going to get started playing I'd recommend them.

I'm not sure that DF's learning curve is really comparable to vi. Maybe TECO. Almost everybody's first fort dies because they didn't set plant orders or ran out of booze or something similar. Next, forts die because you got enough wealth to spawn an ambush and you are totally unprepared. There's a litany of failure conditions that can shut you down hard and once they've begun it is very difficult to impossible to reverse; tantrum spirals are the most obvious but for example you might find out that you needed to plant food some time ago, or that aquifers are full of Fun and Exciting and cause interesting problems for your nascent fort. I mean as a veteran I'm pretty good at avoiding these and getting into the late game but I can't even remember what they all are.

It reminds me in some ways of the old HGTTG text game, where if you didn't take exactly the right steps at the start of the game you would be irreversibly fucked two hours later with no warning. Except I think that was due to malicious intent, and DF's complexity is some combination of developer indifference / incompetence (Toady is quite good but obviously UI design is not something he's really enthralled by) and Stockholm syndrome on the part of the player base. Some folks won't play without Dwarf Therapist, I absolutely require dfhack's workflow plugin to not go insane, etc. This is not really a good situation, but there's just one of Toady and the community is startlingly loyal, probably helped by the sheer addictive quality of the game once you get going; he can be excused, to some degree, a focus on new, novel things before the total UI revamp needed.

> Ulric McDwarf has torn his brain > Ulric McDwarf has broken his spleen

Ah, Dwarf Fortress. How I love you. Wait, no, the other one. Hate. Definitely hate.

In the recent threads on armor and armor piercing on the Bay12forums, the game calculates and checks for fracture stress and impact stress when crossbow bolts impact armor.

So for example the game will test to see if the impact_yield, and further research in the threads below reach conclusions such as :

" the IY (impact_yield) deflection mechanism is related to armor density, armor thickness, bolt size, bolt impact yield, bolt contact area, and the difference between mail and plate at larger contact areas."

Armor density takes from armor material - Iron/Steel/, as does impact_yield.

Here is the thread where the initial !!Science!! on whether bolt weight made an impact on their lethality - [Dwarven Research: The Effect of Bolt Weight on Crossbow Performance](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=115683.0)

The results were converted on reddit into a LaTeX PDF, which is excellent reading - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2891221/DF%20study.pdf

This led to the follow up: A Comparison Study on the Effectiveness of Bolts vs Armors

LaTeX - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2891221/DF%20study%202.pdf

Thread - http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=116151.0

The underlying algorithm for impact_yield deflection on page 11 was:

" Algorithm: 1. The projectile is hitting the creature on a body part protected by a piece of rigid armor (i.e. bolt hits steel breastplate). 2. Multiply the armor's LAYER_SIZE by the projectile's CONTACT_AREA, and round the result down to the nearest 100. The exception is that you round up to 100 instead of rounding down to zero if the result was less than 100 (i.e. 20x2=40 -> 100). 3. IMPACT_YIELD = (800/157) * ARMOR_SOLID_DENSITY * (step #2 result) / PROJECTILE_SIZE "

And thats to test if a bolt deflects on impact with armor. Penetration causing severing of tissue, blunt damage causing bruising are also possible depending on the Armor vs Bolt combination.

And this is a minor sub part of the game which most people don't see.

This is very beta/alpha an should be treated as such.

The dev is focused on depth of gameplay before all else.