Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is a construction and management simulation and roguelike video game developed by Bay 12 Games, in which players guide a group of dwarves to carve a settlement out of a procedurally generated fantasy world.¹³¹⁴ Its full title is Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress.²³ Created by the brothers Tarn and Zach Adams, the game has been in continuous development since it began as a hobby in 2002, with its first alpha released for free in 2006.¹⁴³ It is widely described as “the most complex video game ever made”.¹⁰

The game is built around distinct modes of play.² In Fortress mode, the game’s core, players lay out instructions for a colony of dwarves who mine resources, build bedrooms, dining halls, taverns, libraries, and temples, and defend themselves against sieges and fantasy beasts.¹⁴² A player begins by embarking seven dwarves onto a single chosen site, then descends through horizontal layers of the map to dig out living quarters, produce food and alcohol, and establish workshops.¹⁴²⁰ The game imposes no fixed goal; the only object is to see how long a fortress can survive.¹⁴ Adventure mode plays like a traditional roguelike, with the player controlling a single character exploring the world, filled with medieval weapons and monsters.²⁵ Legends mode is a non-interactive browser for the elaborate, procedurally generated history of a world, listing every character, artifact, war, and civilization it has produced.²⁵ The three modes interact: a settlement that falls in Fortress mode can later be explored as an adventurer, and its events recorded in that world’s legends.²

The player does not control any individual dwarf directly but issues instructions that the dwarves carry out around their own needs, which include eating, sleeping, and a ubiquitous dependency on alcohol.¹⁴¹³ Each dwarf has thoughts, memories, favorite things, personal skills, relationships, and physical traits that shape their behavior.¹⁸ Dwarves name weapons they grow fond of, write their own poems, and hold memories that affect their mood.² Alongside the dwarves, the game procedurally generates hundreds of animals and monsters, poetry, musical forms, instruments, and dances, and models a dynamic weather system tracking wind, humidity, and air masses to produce fronts, storms, and blizzards.¹⁶ The combat model tracks individual body parts rather than hit points, along with skills, material properties, aimed attacks, wrestling, pain, nausea, and poison effects.²¹⁶ Tarn Adams has noted the model’s granularity, once describing a test in which a fighter was disemboweled and a third combatant severed his exposed guts.⁴

World generation

The feature Tarn Adams has called “probably the most striking” and unique aspect of the game is its world generation, which he believes no game before 2006 had attempted in the same way — not merely making maps but making a history.⁸ Each new world is generated using real geologic and meteorological equations: erosion shapes the landscape over time, mountains create rain shadows, distance from the equator affects temperature, and over two hundred rock and mineral types appear in their proper geological environments.¹⁰¹⁶ The generation process is computationally intensive enough to consume much of a modern computer’s processing power.¹⁰ The game then places fantasy races according to farmland and forests, simulates agriculture and craft production week by week, and traces the rise and fall of civilizations, their roads, tunnels, wars, and mythologies before the player begins.⁸¹⁰ Players can set parameters such as the size of the world, its degree of savagery or evil, and the length of simulated history — commonly anywhere from 50 to 550 years — before the game seeds the terrain and populates it.⁵¹⁴ Adams has emphasized that little of this is truly random; he and his brother sought to make a game that surprised them.⁸ The fidelity of the underlying data has occasionally required fan intervention: when the brothers could not find the wood density of saguaro cactus online, a fan ordered cactus wood, measured its density by liquid displacement, and relayed the result into the game.¹⁰

Graphics and interface

For most of its life the entire game was rendered in ASCII characters drawn from IBM code page 437, in 16 colors — a dwarf appearing as a smiling face, an armor stand as a musical note.²⁸ Adams has said he sampled the character images from a decades-old version of MS-DOS, choosing the abstract interface in part to speed development.²⁸ The notoriously difficult, keyboard-driven interface has long been the game’s chief barrier to entry, an obstacle Adams acknowledged was full of menus whose keys he sometimes “chose at random”.²⁸ Adams has conceded that the interface is “one of the things we’re not doing well,” noting that ambiguous text symbols can make it hard to tell, for example, a goat from a goblin.⁸ Community modders bridged some of this gap: the Stonesense utility, which first launched in 2009, rendered the game in a 3-D isometric view by building atop DFHack, a community library that reads the game’s memory.³ A large fan community grew up around the game, including a detailed wiki, starter packs, and tools such as the Legends Viewer, which turns a world’s generated history into a searchable hyperlinked database.⁵²

On December 6, 2022, after roughly 20 years of development, Bay 12 Games released a commercial “Premium” version on Steam and itch.io, published by Kitfox Games, adding pixel-art graphics, a soundtrack, mouse support, and in-game tutorials.¹⁴¹⁶ The new tileset was developed with community artists including Michał “Mayday” Madej, while the soundtrack featured tracks by Dabu, Simon Swerwer, and Águeda Macias, some in an invented Dwarvish language.¹⁶² The free ASCII-based version, marketed as Dwarf Fortress Classic, remains available on the Bay 12 website.¹⁶¹ The Premium version cost $29.99 as of 2026 and had drawn very positive reviews, with 94% of its 23,858 Steam reviews positive as of July 2026.¹⁶¹⁷ Development continued after the Steam release; version 53.15 was released on June 25, 2026, and Bay 12 estimates the game is only about 44% complete.¹³¹⁶ Adventure mode, absent at the Steam launch, was added later.¹⁴¹⁵

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The game has always been supported by donations from fans rather than sales, a model that sustained the two-person Bay 12 Games for years; the brothers’ decision to sell on Steam was driven in part by health-insurance costs after Zach Adams had a cancer scare.⁴² In 2012, Dwarf Fortress became one of the first video games acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.¹⁶² The game’s tenth anniversary in 2016 was marked by Dwarf Moot, a community celebration held at the Mox Boarding House in Bellevue, at which Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering and an early fan of the game, delivered the introduction.¹⁰

Lineage and influence

Tarn Adams has resisted placing the game in an external lineage, saying he does not see it “as a continuation of a lineage, aside from our own horrible string of fantasy games”.⁸ The brothers learned to code from their father and made about 400 games in BASIC? before Dwarf Fortress, drawing on tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons and Cyberpunk 2020, and on 1980s roguelikes including Hack, Rogue, Larn, and Ragnarok.²⁴ They began the earliest ancestor of the game as a fantasy project when they were roughly 12 and 14 years old.²⁴ The wider roguelike tradition descends from Rogue, which itself drew its bestiary and inventory from the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset.⁶⁹

Critics and developers widely credit Dwarf Fortress with founding the colony-simulation genre and inspiring a generation of games.¹⁸¹⁰ It is repeatedly cited as a direct inspiration for Minecraft — which, according to WIRED, might not exist without it — and for RimWorld? and Prison Architect.²¹⁶²² Reviewers and players also name it as an influence on Factorio and many other titles.¹⁵¹⁸ Tarn Adams has remarked, without malice, that the game’s influence has created “more millionaires than I can count”.¹⁰ The game world has itself become a vehicle for storytelling, generating widely shared player anecdotes that circulate under the community’s motto that “losing is fun”.²¹⁴