A few weeks back I grew obsessed with Dwarf Fortress. I blame one of my workplace proximity associates, because he started talking about the Villain Update when we were at lunch. Thoughtless bastard.
After a few weeks of watching YouTube Let’s Plays (mostly by Kruggsmash) and re-reading diaries (mostly Glazedcoast and Onionbog) I decided it was time to actually play the game. Last time I tried it didn’t go so well. Dwarf Fortress’s interface is famous for two things: being extremely difficult to get on with, and being functional and logical once you’ve become accustomed to its many idiosyncrasies. It is an interface that flies in the face of contemporary ideas about user experience. The game also uses pseudo-ASCII art so, like, who cares?
After generating a new world and searching for the recommended newbie embark site – soil or clay, shallow and deep metals, serene or calm surroundings, some woodland or trees, and most importantly no bloody aquifer – I embarked with the default loadout. Strike the earth!
The first thing one should do when beginning a game of Dwarf Fortress is check out your immediate surroundings. My dwarfs were clustered on a hilly plateau, apparently many z-levels above sea level. The hill towered upwards still further to their west, which is great as it gives me some soft soil or rock to dig into for an initial entrance. To the east of my dwarfs lay a fast-flowing river, perfect for fresh water.
Elsewhere there were plenty of trees dotted about, and the grass looked like normal grass rather than, say, eyeballs on stalks. All good. The list of creatures in the area was slightly more concerning: seven hippos and an alligator. The hippos worried me as these animals can easily kill humans if they are disturbed, and I figure that they could pulp an idiot dwarf without breaking their stride. The alligator, listed as an ambush predator, worried me less. It was sat in the river nearby, but so long as no one went near it I should be fine.
Another thing it’s recommended that new players do with the default embark loadout is disable everything to do with fishing or hunting while you get your initial rooms dug out. This prevents dwarfs wandering about and, say, aggroing ambush predators in the nearby river. It’s a good tip, so I disabled everything that was recommended. I also made my fish cleaner work as a miner, as the fish cleaner is generally considered the most useless worker in the default loadout, and two miners makes mining faster.
Next I designated a 3 block wide corridor with a sharp turn in it – wide enough for a trade caravan, long enough to give me some room to assemble defences – leading to a 5×5 trade area, a 3×3 area for use as a stairwell, and a 12×12 stockpile. Once that is dug out I’ll move on to a dormitory or rooms, farms, and space for various workshops and stills. Baby steps, though. Finally, I designated a bunch of trees to be chopped down. There are as yet no elves to tell us off for this.
With everything designated, it was time to unpause the game and let my dwarfs get to it!
It all went rather well, until about three seconds had passed and my fisherdwarf walked right up to the river and was attacked by the alligator. For fuck’s sake, man. Didn’t I– oh. No. No, I didn’t disable his fishing labour.
Like I said, the interface is pretty complicated. But this screw-up was on me.
I decided to react by assembling a military squad, aka. a crack team of loyal dregs. I allocated a couple of dwarfs – everyone except my miners and woodcutter was standing about uselessly anyway – to a squad and ordered them to kill the alligator. After unpausing, they enthusiastically attacked the creature. Unarmed.
It turns out that a dwarf is entirely willing to punch an alligator repeatedly, and indeed is capable of bruising every single part of its body and even knocking it unconscious. Unfortunately, it is also rather difficult to kill an alligator this way. And even an unconscious alligator will interrupt the task of any dwarf who came anywhere near it. Did I mention the stupid bloody reptile had hauled itself onto the land and was currently sprawled in a pool of blood right next to my wagon?
At this point my “military” have been punching the alligator for what must be several in-game weeks, and it’s no closer to being dead. There are thirty pages of combat logs, each line stating that the alligator has a new bruise. I dread to visualise this. But my biggest concern is that whilst unarmed dwarfs can’t kill a creature like this, they will not stop trying. If they keep at it for long enough, they can actually die of dehydration. Whilst punching a freshwater reptile. Next to a river.
Smells like Dwarf Fortress!
Next time: how to defeat an unconscious alligator, I try not to fuck up channelling, and possibly some screenshots of our mountain hovel.
