Dwarf Fortress (originally named Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress) is a video game that combines building and managing a world with elements of a roguelike game. It was created by Bay 12 Games and has been in development since 2002. The first version, called an alpha, was released in 2006. At that time, the game was made by only two people who relied on donations from players to continue working on it.

The game was first shown using simple text-based graphics called ASCII art. It takes place in a fantasy world that is created randomly by the computer. This world includes unique creatures, characters, and stories. Players can either build and manage a fortress with a group of dwarves or explore the world as a single character. The game is known for having many detailed and complex rules.

Before creating Dwarf Fortress, the game’s designer, Tarn Adams, worked on a different project called Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, which was a role-playing game. By 2004, Adams decided to switch to Dwarf Fortress because the original project became too hard to manage. He considers Dwarf Fortress his most important work. In 2011, he said the game would not reach a complete version 1.0 for at least 20 more years. A special version with improved graphics and music was released in 2022 by Kitfox Games and made available on Steam and Itch.io.

Reviewers have praised the game for its deep and creative gameplay, but some found it challenging to learn. It has inspired other games, such as Minecraft and RimWorld. In 2012, the game was included in the Museum of Modern Art to highlight the history of video games. The game has a loyal fanbase and a large online community. Because the game does not have a way to win, every fortress will eventually fail, no matter how successful it seems. This idea led to a popular saying among fans: "Losing is Fun!"

Gameplay

Dwarf Fortress has three main game modes set in worlds created by the player. These worlds are mostly made up of elements that appear randomly.

• Fortress mode is a game where players build and manage a group of dwarves. There are no set goals, and players decide how to manage the colony and how the dwarves interact with their environment. This makes it an open-ended game. The game ends when all the dwarves are defeated by dangers in the world or when the player chooses to stop playing.
• Adventure mode is a turn-based game similar to a roguelike. Players start as an adventurer and explore the world.
• Legends mode lets players view maps, histories of civilizations, and information about important people in the game world. Achievements from the other game modes are saved and can be seen in Legends mode.
• There is also a testing area where players can simulate battles between units under different conditions. This area is also used to test game modifications.

The game world is shown using letters, numbers, symbols, and 16 different colors. For example, a dwarf is shown with the symbol ☺, a cat is a dark gray "c," a dog is a brown "d," and a giant spider is a light gray "S." The game uses special text characters called code page 437 for its graphics, which makes it look like a text-based game. The paid version replaces these characters with pixel art images and allows players to switch between the old and new visuals in the settings.

The first step in the game is to create a world. Only one game can be played in each world at a time. Players can change settings like the world’s size, how dangerous it is, where minerals are found, and how long the history of the world will be. The map shows symbols for roads, hills, towns, and cities, and it changes as the world is created.

The world is built using randomly generated elements like elevation, rainfall, mineral locations, drainage, and temperature. For example, areas with high rainfall and poor drainage become swamps. These areas are grouped into biomes, which have two traits: savagery (how dangerous they are) and alignment (good or evil). Each biome has specific plants and animals. Next, the game simulates erosion, which creates rivers flowing from mountains to oceans or lakes. The salt levels in the world determine if areas are oceans, mangroves, or plains. Names for biomes and rivers are generated based on their alignment and are originally in one of four languages: dwarven, elven, human, or goblin.

After a few minutes, the world is filled with life, and its history develops for the number of years chosen by the player. Civilizations, religions, and wars appear, and counters for population and deaths increase. The game stops at the chosen number of years, and the world can be saved for later use. If a player quits or loses a game, the world remains and can be used again.

When starting Fortress mode, players choose where to begin in the world. They can look at the environment, elevation, soil types, and mineral locations, which can affect the fortress’s survival. Players can set up supplies, animals, and skills for the colony, but each dwarf’s physical and mental traits are randomly generated. The game gives details about each dwarf’s appearance, like hair and face, and their mental abilities, preferences, and relationships with others and gods.

Players begin with an expedition team of seven dwarves, their animals, and supplies. They do not control the team directly. To build the fortress, players assign tasks to dwarves, who complete them based on their skills, which can improve over time. Tasks include stone working, wood working, metal working, farming, and crafting. Some tasks are further divided, like leatherworking, butchery, and pottery. Workshops, such as stills for making alcohol, must be built to complete tasks. The metal industry is important because it makes weapons, armor, and furniture.

The game shows a top-down view of the fortress’s surface. Players can view different levels of the fortress by changing the z-axis. For example, an underground level shows its entire area, while a mountain at the surface only shows part of it. To dig, players can create staircases from the surface down to a chosen level.

The game’s geology is realistic. Rocks like olivine and gabbro can be mined. The top layer is usually sand, clay, or soil, which can be used for farming underground. Deeper layers have rock and minerals found in certain areas. Gems like tourmaline appear in rare clusters. Water is simulated like falling sand, with each tile holding up to seven levels of water. A tile with one level of water is nearly empty, while a tile with seven is full. The game also simulates temperature and heat. Fires can spread and harm dwarves and furniture. There are four seasons in each year: spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

Minerals can be mined like regular stone. Raw ore can be smelted to make metal bars. Different ores or bars can be combined to create better materials. For steel, pig iron bars are made using flux stones, then smelted with iron and coke (or charcoal). Some metal items can be melted back into bars. Without steel, bronze or iron are the next best choices. Bronze needs tin and copper. A rare metal called adamantine is found deep underground. It is very strong and light, making it good for weapons and armor. Raw adamantine can be made into strands for cloth or smelted into wafers.

Underground farming includes special crops like "plump helmet" mushrooms, which can be brewed into dwarven wine. As the fortress grows, more migrants from the home civilization arrive and need more space. Trading caravans from nearby civilizations, including the home one, visit the fortress yearly to trade supplies. Players can assign roles like bookkeeper (tracks items), manager (assigns jobs), or broker (handles trading) to dwarves early in the game. Crafts made from any material are useful for trading. Caravans come from elf and human civilizations, depending on the game’s settings.

History

One of Tarn and Zach Adams' early projects was a text-based adventure game called dragslay, created using the BASIC programming language and inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. This was their first fantasy-themed project. In high school, Tarn Adams taught himself the C programming language and continued developing dragslay. Later, this game influenced the development of Dwarf Fortress. Adams explained that he grew up surrounded by fantasy and science fiction, which became part of his personal background.

Before entering graduate school in mathematics, Adams began working on a project called Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. The name came from a character in dragslay originally named for a variable "arm_ok," which tracked the number of limbs a player had. This new project was a two-dimensional isometric fantasy role-playing game where players fought goblins.

Adams paused work on Armok to focus on smaller projects, one of which was Mutant Miner. This game was inspired by Miner VGA and involved digging underground, collecting resources, fighting monsters, and carrying radioactive "goo" to grow extra limbs. Adams found it limiting to have only one miner and faced performance issues because the game was turn-based.

Adams started working on Dwarf Fortress in October 2002, expecting it to take two months. He paused development to finish Armok. He described the early version as similar to the 1982 arcade game Dig Dug. The Adams brothers later formed Bay 12 Games, launching their website and sharing their games online. As Dwarf Fortress developed, Armok became harder to maintain due to its outdated code and 3D graphics. By 2004, Adams shifted his focus to Dwarf Fortress, which he described as a simulation game featuring dwarves. He kept a surprise feature called "Adventurer mode" and gained more fans after announcing the change.

He added a PayPal donation button after a fan requested it, and later introduced a subscription system. Over five months, they earned about $300, covering the website’s hosting costs. He named the game Slaves to Armok, God of Blood II: Dwarf Fortress, calling it a sequel to Armok because it continued working toward similar goals.

Adams focused on Dwarf Fortress full-time during his first year of a math post-doctorate at Texas A&M in 2006. The university offered him $50,000 to stay for another year. He agreed and said, "I woke up the morning after I gave notice and realized I could actually make this work." He initially planned to use $15,000 in savings and find a job if the game did not generate enough income. The first alpha version was released on August 8, 2006. Donations reached $800–$1,000 in the following months, growing steadily until the project became financially stable.

Adams said Dwarf Fortress uses a mix of C and C++ programming languages, with a free version of Microsoft Visual Studio as the development tool. He avoided 3D graphics because they slowed development and caused technical challenges. He preferred text-based graphics, inspired by roguelike games, and avoided using graphical tilesets. Story elements in the game originated from Armok and were influenced by books like The Twelve Caesars and writings about Assyrian kings.

Games like Hack, Starflight, and the Ultima series inspired Adams. Hack influenced the random level generation and character persistence in Dwarf Fortress. The Ultima series inspired the game’s world generation. The body part and wound system was inspired by the 1990 game Cyberpunk 2020. Adams focused on individual elements rather than entire systems for better control over outcomes. He used fractals and midpoint displacement to create natural-looking landscapes and developed an algorithm to simulate rain shadows near mountain deserts.

The personalities of units in the game were based on the NEO PI-R test, though Adams admitted he knew little about it. The feature of carps eating dwarves was unexpected, as carps were designed to be carnivorous. A challenge was implementing the A* search algorithm for pathfinding, which could strain a computer’s resources. Adams composed the game’s music, inspired by flamenco.

A z-axis was added in 2007 to allow for more complex structures and underground digging. This change required handling details like fluid mechanics and cave-ins. Vampiric and lycanthropic infections were added in 2012.

Adams relies on PayPal donations, saying he is content because people enjoy his work. He noted that donations increase during updates but remain stable otherwise. He refused a job offer from a major game developer and a $300,000 deal to license the Dwarf Fortress name, preferring independence. He said, "Barely in the black one month, a little in the red another month. … It's a risk I'm willing to take, and really I couldn't have it any other way."

He did not spend money on advertising and was happy when bloggers and reviewers wrote about the game. In 2015, Bay 12 Games created a Patreon account to support development. In March 2019, the Adams brothers announced a paid version of Dwarf Fortress through Steam and Itch.io, published by Kitfox Games. This version included new graphics and music but did not affect the free version. They made the change due to family needs and declining Patreon income.

Reception

The game gained attention because of its emergent gameplay, text-based graphics, many details, difficult interface, and challenging difficulty. Many reviewers said the game was hard to learn. It has been compared to other simulation games such as SimCity and The Sims, Dungeon Keeper, and roguelike games like NetHack. However, reviewers praised Adams' independence and attention to detail. Gamasutra said, "There have been few indie gaming success stories as big as Dwarf Fortress." Wired magazine, after one of its updates, described it as an "obtuse, wildly ambitious work-in-progress [that] mashes the brutal dungeon crawling of roguelikes with the detail-oriented creativity of city-building sims."

Dwarf Fortress was praised for its depth and complexity. Jonah Weiner from The New York Times stated, "Many simulation games offer players a bag of building blocks, but few dangle a bag as deep, or blocks as small and intricately interlocking, as Dwarf Fortress." PC Gamer's Steve Hogarty commented, "Dwarf Fortress's reluctance to expend even a joule of energy in prettying itself results in astonishing hidden complexity." Regarding the open-ended nature and emergent gameplay, Rock Paper Shotgun's Graham Smith found that with its procedurally generated world and characters simulated "down to the most minute detail," the game's results are "often hilarious, occasionally tragic, and always surprising." Mike Rose from Gamasutra said, "… to an outsider looking in on this game so many years into development, with such a wide scope of features and potential play styles, it's fair to say that getting into Dwarf Fortress is perhaps one of the most daunting tasks the video game industry as a whole can provide."

The lack of graphics, poor interface, and controls were seen as the reasons for the game's difficulty. However, the reviewers also noted that most of these aspects played a role in gameplay and that the text-based graphics force players to use their own imagination, making it more engaging. Weiner wrote, "[the game] may not look real, but once you're hooked, it feels vast, enveloping, alive. A micro-manager's dream, the game gleefully blurs the distinction between painstaking labor and creative thrill." Quintin Smith from Rock, Paper, Shotgun said, "The interface has a tough job to do, bless it, but getting it to do what you want is like teaching a beetle to cook." Ars Technica's Casey Johnston highlighted the difficulty in performing basic actions and felt that tinkering or experimenting ended up being unproductive; she compared it to "trying to build a skyscraper by banging two rocks together." She pointed out the lack of an in-game tutorial and said how players can learn by themselves in other games, which are also open-ended or have intuitive mechanics, but in Dwarf Fortress, there is no autonomy "even after hours" of gameplay.

The editors of Computer Games Magazine presented Dwarf Fortress with their 2006 "Best Free Game" award.

In 2016, Dwarf Fortress was ranked as #1 in "The 50 best free PC games" list by PC Gamer. In February 2019, PC Gamer listed Dwarf Fortress as one of the best open world games.

In 2015, Rock Paper Shotgun ranked Dwarf Fortress 7th on its The 50 Best Free Games On PC list. In 2020, Rock Paper Shotgun rated Dwarf Fortress the third best management game on the PC.

In 2023, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences awarded Dwarf Fortress with "Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year" at the 26th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards.

Dwarf Fortress currently has "universal acclaim" on Metacritic, with a score of 93 out of a 100, from 12 reviews. The Steam release sold 160,000 copies within 24 hours of release, and 300,000 copies within its first week. By the end of 2022, they had generated over half a million sales, and over 600,000 copies had been sold by March 2023. Within its first year, Dwarf Fortress sold a total of over 800,000 copies. As of April 2025, Dwarf Fortress has surpassed 1 million copies sold on Steam.

Community

Dwarf Fortress has many fans, and it is well-known among players. The game is very challenging, and most of the player's fortresses eventually fail. This led to a popular phrase: "Losing is fun!" The phrase was first used as a joke in the game's manual. It was meant to help players feel more comfortable with the idea of permanent loss. Another phrase, "strike the earth," is used in marketing and community materials. Tarn and Zach Adams, the game's creators, answer questions from players on their official podcast called "Dwarf Fortress Talk." People who donate money receive personalized crayon drawings or short stories from Tarn Adams. Their names are listed on an online "Champions' List." In addition to cash, Adams has received donations of goods or services, such as volunteers who help manage the game's bug tracking system.

Players and fans often create stories about their experiences in the game. These include diaries, videos, comics, and audio recordings that describe their successes or failures. They also test the game, share it with others, and support it through donations. They offer suggestions, help new players, and share information in the Bay 12 Games forums. They maintain the game's wiki, and there are also fan-run podcasts and meetups. In 2006, a story called "Boatmurdered" became popular. Fans passed a single fortress between players, each taking turns to save it before sending it to the next person. The story was shared online and helped increase the game's popularity. Tutorials about the game are available on YouTube, including a 15-part series and a 12-part written guide called "The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress." In 2012, a book titled Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress: Learn to Play the Most Complex Video Game Ever Made was published by O'Reilly Media. It was written by Peter Tyson and includes a foreword from Adams.

Adams said the community has helped him transition from a hobbyist to a full-time developer. He noted that players sending him stories or events from the game is very rewarding, as it aligns with the game's goal of encouraging players to create narratives. Adams admitted that some achievements by the community surprised him. He said the most impressive feat was when a player built a computer that could perform complex tasks, powered by dwarves.

Tools and modifications, such as "Dwarf Therapist," help players manage game settings. "Stonesense," based on the "DFHack" library, allows players to view the game in 3D. The "DF to Minecraft" tool lets players convert their Dwarf Fortress maps into Minecraft structures. Adams acknowledged the community's support and praised third-party developers who create tools for the game, even though it is closed-source.

On June 11, 2016, an event called Dwarfmoot was held in Bellevue, Washington, to celebrate the game's 10th anniversary. It was organized by Kinnon Stephens, a video game developer. Tarn and Zach Adams attended, and Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, provided a pre-recorded introduction.

Legacy

The game influenced Minecraft, which reviewers considered an easier-to-use version of Dwarf Fortress. Adams says he is thankful for the Minecraft developers mentioning Dwarf Fortress because that attracted more players to his game.

RimWorld developer Tynan Sylvester said Dwarf Fortress "amazed me because of the stories people created from it. I read generated tales like Boatmurdered and Gemclod and was fascinated by how the player and game could work together to create a story that worked well. I wanted to take this idea even further and make it easier for players to use, without making the same mistakes that, in my view, have made Dwarf Fortress harder to enjoy."

When Dwarf Fortress was released on Steam, many independent game developers praised it and said it influenced their own games, including the developers of Terraria, Caves of Qud, Prison Architect, and Project Zomboid. References to Dwarf Fortress appear in World of Warcraft.

In March 2012, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City displayed Dwarf Fortress along with other games chosen to show the history of video games. As new updates are released, the Museum of Modern Art automatically downloads them and saves them on their servers. Curator of the exhibition, Paola Antonelli, said she was amazed by the mix of "beautiful design" and "very complex" features in the game. In July 2014, the game won a poll by Turtle Beach as the community's most "Beautiful Game." Fans nominated games by sharing videos, images, or text, and a list was created by the community that also included The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Far Cry 3, and The Last of Us. Justin Ma, one of the developers of FTL: Faster Than Light, said about its use of ASCII graphics, "Part of the reason Dwarf Fortress can include many game features not found in other games is because complex ideas are shown in simple visual forms."

Game designer Craig Ellsworth praised Dwarf Fortress for having a long-lasting popularity. According to Ellsworth, no other game in its category will replace it: "There is no more advanced version of Dwarf Fortress that is also more exciting, and there can't be, by definition." He predicted that the game's popularity "will reach its highest point" when it is finally completed.

The game has been studied in several academic papers that look at different areas, including artificial intelligence, computer game environments, and teaching methods in computer games.