Bay 12 Games Forum

When I was 8, my grandfather got a batch of floppy disks in that included something called "Hack". It was horrible to install (the week long struggle we had sorting out ANSI vs. NANSI is burned into my skull), but inevitably I was left alone in a gorgeous ascii world where mail daemons flitted about and I always starved to death or died drinking the wrong potion. I continued playing off and on through nethack until it's development stalled and eventually moved to DCSS, which seems like the proper successor to the franchise that started back in rogue.

So today, after 29 years of playing this game series, I finally won. My minotaur slung the Orb over his back, booked like Jehu, flicked off the demon hoards on his trail, and ascended. I could have done this decades ago if I wanted to, just hunkered down, screamed, "You and me, f'er!" and nailed the thing down, but I suppose that would have missed the point. Like DF, the story you follow has meaning because it can go anywhere and end so quickly. Pull the wrong switch, dig the wrong square, hold down the right arrow key to try and get through a section, BAM, it's all over. But it is an unfolding story pregnant with near infinite variation. The complexity, harshness, and finality have been the draws that make games like the Rogue-like continuum and DF worth the playing.

I only hope that I can get 3 decades of enjoyment, head-smacking/keyboard crushing frustration, and fulfillment out of DF as I have out of Rogue-likes. I'm off to have a Zottish drink.

Before the Dwarf walked upon the land, there was the Lungfish.
Before the Crow took to the sky, there was the Lungfish.
Before the Carp defiled the waters with the blood of the unworthy, there was the Lungfish.
Before the Marmot mounted the heights, there was the Lungfish.
Bow before your Lord! For when the dark recesses of the Deep are cleared and the peak of the Admantine Spire is reached, you will find there the one, the indivisible, the true divinity upon it's throne of leathery mucous, breathing air, and on that day YOU SHALL TREMBLE!!! Amen.

Go Team Lungfish!

The thread title totally sounds like it would be some type of awesome limerick.

How can we not?

The raven and the carp did fight
along the riverbank one night
with such thunder and blood
their flesh did cake the mud
as the badgers fled away in fright.

Failure. I had only a couple of casualties, just a couple, during a successfully beaten back siege. So a few dwarves are uppity about their loss, big deal, I've seen worse. Only this time one downer dwarf leads to another and within a month it's full blown tantrum spiral time. Wee! After jailing failed to dissuade the others, after the public executions, after the berserk slaughter and the incident with the collapsing bridge into the river, I had enough. I designated a burrow across a river from my fort (the one with the functioning bridge), sent everyone except the military over, and decided to try a couple of rounds of "alert over, QUICK PULL THE LEVER!" to thin the herd, as if they needed more misery via the atom smasher.
Well, no need to worry about my half-baked schemes, a bonkers dwarf nuked the bridge before I could turn off the alert and just in time for a dwarf to go thermonuclear in the burrow which contained 60 cranky dwarves in a 3x6 area. Fun! I freed them from the burrow and let nature take its course. The first bonko-dwarf was fun, but the Architect! Wow, when he went nutso it was epic. Half of that festering sliver of hell across the river was his doing, I suppose all those years of building roads left some unresolved tension. Finally, a babbling miner drove a pick into his skull and put him out of his misery.
When all was said and done, there were 6 starving dwarves left across the way and 8 in the fort. Looking over the river massacre survivors, I see one who's not red exclamationed, with a baby to boot. The heck? Reviewing her state. I find out that she is ecstatic, even though her husband and all her friends were killed, even though shes witnessed enough rampant massacre to scramble everyone else's bean, even though she's lived off of vermin for a month, this mama is absolutely peachy. Kind of like the earth virgin in The Begotten, wandering the wasteland with her horror-spasming baby trailing behind her. I tell her to grab a pick and dig her way back to safety. She's obviously a keeper and the future of the fortress, if there is any.

I embarked on a shallow metals 3x3 and struck a massive run of limonite 5z levels deep. With flux and the magma sea at 45z, I'm set. Exploratory shafts and mining assessments are definitely required in order to get a handle on what kind of fort you're sitting on; I appreciate the realism. The density of mineral wealth on embarks in prior versions was highly unrealistic. For those who prefer that, though, it might do to request a mineral density control in world gen.

What is a formal wedding celebration among dwarves?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

another party

I've had a number of betrothals, but never once have they had a formal celebration. I've always assumed it was due to the lack of a facility or enough booze or the right kind of animal glob, but it does beg CapnUrist's question: Has anyone ever seen a Dwarven Marriage celebration? Do they exist at all or are they an unimplemented feature? And for the sake of all that is Dwarven, how much booze must one of those benders consume? Cat skin lamp shades and dragonfly gut garters, wee-hah!

... I have begun driving around looking for a source of limestone or dolomite that I can mine without notice as I refuse to pay for what I can strip out of the earth with my bare hands and a steel pick.

I also now consider lungfish to be playful, spritely creatures and yearn to have one of them wiggling about in my yard, or on my roof, or up a cliff face. They do seem to get everywhere.

Donation is in the mail, I hope for herds of Capybara roaming the swaying grass riverbanks, swimming about playfully until a Leopard (or a dwarf, because these things are the rodent equivalent of fish fries on the webbed foot (so much so that the Catholic Church qualifies them as fish in regards to Friday red meat prohibitions (weird))) lunges into their midst and stains the river with their blood. Dwarf fortress, like Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, but with more obsidian. And dwarfs.