Dwarf Fortress

The Most Beautiful Disaster Simulator Ever Made

Dwarf Fortress is what happens when two math-obsessed brothers spend 20 years building a fantasy world simulator that tracks the individual fingernails of 200 dwarves while also simulating erosion patterns and tavern gossip. Bay 12 Games—specifically Tarn and Zach Adams—have been developing this beast since 2006, offering it as freeware for nearly two decades before the Steam release in December 2022 added pixel art graphics and charged $30 for the privilege of understanding what you're looking at.

The Gameplay Loop: Spreadsheets in Hell

The core loop is deceptively simple: embark with seven dwarves, dig into a mountain, build a fortress, attract migrants, and watch everything spiral into catastrophic failure. You don't control dwarves directly—you designate tasks like "mine this hallway" or "brew 50 barrels of dwarven wine" and hope your citizens have the right labor enabled and aren't currently having a mental breakdown because they saw a dead rat.

The actual feel is like playing SimCity through six layers of abstraction while also managing a Sims household where everyone has clinical depression. The z-level system means you're constantly flipping through underground layers, carving out dining halls on level -5 while your bedrooms are on -12 and you forgot to build a staircase connecting them. The moment you think you've got a handle on food production, you realize you forgot to make alcohol, and dwarves would rather die of thirst than drink water like some kind of elf.

The Moment of Truth: When the Circus Comes to Town

There's a specific experience every Dwarf Fortress player goes through: You've built a thriving fortress. You have 120 dwarves. Your legendary dining hall is engraved with images of cheese. Then you dig too deep, breach a hollow adamantine vein, and unleash what the community calls "the circus"—a horde of procedurally generated demons from the underworld. Within 20 minutes, your entire civilization is burning corpses stacked three high while a forgotten beast made of steam and hatred melts your military captain's lungs.

This isn't a scripted event. This is Tuesday. The game generates unique monsters—one playthrough might have a "towering eyeless blob composed of salt" that causes nausea, while another spawns a bronze colossus that punches through your fortress walls. You don't reload saves in Dwarf Fortress. You watch the avalanche of failure, learn what killed you, and embark again.

Visuals, Audio & Atmosphere: From Hieroglyphics to Actual Art

The Steam version's pixel art is a massive quality-of-life improvement over the original ASCII graphics, where a "dwarf" was a white smiley face and "magma" was a red tilde. The new sprites have charm—dwarves wobble around with beards and pickaxes, and you can actually tell the difference between a cat and a war dog without consulting the wiki.

The soundtrack is somber and ambient, fitting for a game about inevitability. The UI sounds are minimal—mostly the clunk of menus and the ambient noise of picks striking stone. The atmosphere is oppressive in the best way. You're always underground, always one flood or goblin siege away from disaster.

The Narrative/Context: Emergent Stories Written in Blood

There's no written story. The narrative emerges from procedural generation and emergent gameplay. Your bookkeeper might be a vampire who's been draining citizens for three years. A dwarf might enter a "Strange Mood," lock themselves in a workshop, and demand two units of tanned giant cave spider silk to craft a legendary obsidian door worth 50,000 gold. If they don't get the materials, they'll go insane and start punching people.

The Legends mode lets you read the entire generated history of your world—wars between civilizations, the births and deaths of megabeasts, which elf killed which goblin in 342 AD. It's absurdly detailed and mostly unnecessary, but it's there because Tarn Adams is a madman who simulates erosion for fun.

Performance, Hardware & Polish

PC: The Steam version runs fine on modern hardware, though fps death—when too many cats and calculations bog down the simulation—is still a thing in mega-fortresses. Expect slowdown once you hit 150+ dwarves and have 300 job orders queued.

Steam Deck: Officially verified, surprisingly playable. The interface is still mouse-centric, so you're using trackpads, but the game pauses when you're not issuing orders, so it works.

Monetization: None. You pay $30 once. No DLC, no battle pass, no cosmetics. The Classic ASCII version is still free on the Bay 12 website if you're a masochist who hates their eyeballs.

Polish: The UI is better than it was—which is like saying a broken leg is better than a severed leg. You'll still spend 30 minutes figuring out how to assign a dwarf to a squad or why your hospital doesn't have soap. The tutorial helps, but this is a game that requires reading the wiki while playing.

The Verdict

Dwarf Fortress is not a game you "beat." It's a game you survive until you don't, then laugh at the absurdity of how you died. It's the most ambitious simulation ever made, packed with enough depth to drown in, and it respects your intelligence by refusing to hold your hand. The Steam release makes it accessible without dumbing it down, which is a minor miracle.

This is a game for people who get excited about emergent systems, who want to build something beautiful knowing it will collapse, and who find joy in complexity for its own sake. It's not for everyone. But for the right player, it's transcendent.

InGameRiot Score & Advice

Score: 9/10

Buy Advice: Must Play (if you have patience) / Game Pass equivalent (it's not on there, but wait for a sale if you're unsure)

The Bottom Line: Dwarf Fortress is a masterpiece of systems-driven design wrapped in a UI designed by someone who thinks suffering builds character—and they're right.