Analysis | Want to get into ‘Dwarf Fortress?’ Here are some tips to start. (2024)

Here are a few tips so you too can strike the earth like a pro.

“Dwarf Fortress’s” 1.0 release features a new in-game tutorial that’s essential for any new player. It will get your first fort up and running, and even choose a newbie-friendly site for your first fortress for you. There are some specific things it doesn’t show you that I believe are very important for new players, but if you’ve never played “Dwarf Fortress,” this is where you should learn about how to make zones and stockpiles, cut down trees, and get your kitchen and distillery up and running before your dwarves start having a tantrum.

Right after you’ve selected to start a new game in a particular world you’ve generated, the option for playing through the tutorial should pop up. If you’re not into your tutorial fortress, you can always start a new save in the same world.

The very first thing you do in “Dwarf Fortress” is generate a new world. There are a lot of cool options to choose from in the world generation screen, but if you’re new to the game it’s preferable to keep things simple and stick to the default settings. While it’s fun to generate a longer world history, going up from 250 years to 500 years, sometimes it can make your gameplay more complicated. The first two worlds I generated had 500 years of history, and I ended up not getting any dwarves migrating to my fortress because we were the only dwarven civilization left.

After you pick a world, you have to choose the site where you’re going to build your fortress. There are a couple things to look out for that can make your fortress harder than normal to play in. Firstly, new players should not embark, or start a fortress, on any site that has a heavy underground aquifer. Dwarves don’t swim and won’t go in water, so if your fortress is flooded, that’s pretty much game over. Light aquifers are okay, but you’ll have to be vigilant about spaces filling up with water. I have been playing this game for nearly a decade and still don’t know how to deal with aquifers. You’re better off embarking next to a river, instead.

Sites also have “evil” and “savagery” levels, which affect what the flora and fauna are like in the surrounding area. “Evil” means the level of hauntedness or overall grossness that the flora and environment will have, and “savagery” means how dangerous the animals are. These two characteristics add up into a site’s biome. If, for example, a particular site has “benign” for its savagery value but “evil” for its evilness value, the biome will be called “Sinister,” and don’t be surprised if your game has the aesthetic of a horror movie: The animals may not be all that threatening, but the general environment will be hostile to your dwarves. Some evil biomes have fun features like raining acid or reanimating everything that dies as a zombie, so it’s important to pay attention to this.

Your best bet is settling in a place with a “Calm,” “Wilderness” or “Mirthful” biome, and avoiding “Haunted,” “Sinister” or “Terrifying” biomes. You may be okay with an “Untamed Wilds” biome, which is neutral in its evilness but has high savagery, but there will be some particularly nasty fauna like giant eagles.

The tutorial stops right before the part I think is most important: choosing dwarves to be your manager, bookkeeper and broker. Your bookkeeper keeps a count of everything in your fortress and how much it’s worth, and your broker is the dwarf who goes to your trade depot to trade with other civilizations.

The most important in terms of gameplay is your manager, who can approve work orders, which you can access by pressing O on your keyboard. From the work order screen you can create batch orders instead of having to go to each workshop and queue up each bed or stone craft individually.

You can appoint these positions from your nobles screen, but the manager and bookkeeper will need an office. Just dig out a two by two room for each dwarf, zone it as an office, stick a table and chair in there, and then in the zoning menu click the icon of a dwarf to assign it to someone. Now you can command your dwarves to make 100 stone crafts — and you probably should, because you’ll want something to trade with.

Elves won’t take wooden goods, and in fact they will be so mad that you even offered them that they’ll pack up their wares and leave. They also won’t take anything that’s made of bone or shell, but they do trade live animals.

Humans have their own quirks as traders, though they aren’t as hostile. They just only sell “large” size clothing and armor, which won’t fit your dwarves but is handy to have around if you have any humans or elves in your fort.

Trading with other dwarves does not come with any caveats, but trading to your own civilization sometimes comes with requests from the Mountainhome. If you tell them what goods you’ll need next season, they’ll provide them in the next caravan at an inflated price. On the flip side, each season the Mountainhome tells you what items they want, and they’ll pay a pretty penny for them the next year.

You can trade anything, but the things your dwarves make are preferable. Making stone crafts to start is a good idea because there will be a lot of stones lying around. If you make a gem cutter’s workshop, they can encrust these finished goods with gems, raising their value.

Once you get your metal industry up and running after a few years, metal goods like weapons and armor will often be the most valuable things to trade. Not every industry will yield a lucrative good to trade, but don’t let that discourage you from trying every and anything. Porcelain statues, made of kaolinite fired in a kiln, go for 230 gold each, and I only learned that because I had so much kaolinite in my fortress I was trying to get rid of.

A military is essential for your fortress. If you’re at war with surrounding civilizations, they will occasionally put your fortress under siege. While it’s very possible to just wait out a siege, once you have over 100 dwarves it’s also just a good idea to get some of those unspecialized workers in a squad and give them some battle experience. The best thing to do is to put workers with nonessential labors — so no woodcutters, miners, hunters, and definitely not your manager, bookkeeper or broker — into a squad, make them a barracks, and then give the squad the instruction to train. I also prefer to set them on staggered training, meaning they go one season on and one season off. Nonstop training is on by default, but not being able to pray or socialize will do a number on these dwarves' moods. If they get so stressed out that they start killing people, it’ll be a bloodbath.

If you’re finding “Dwarf Fortress” too complicated to play but still think it sounds cool, players have found a way to let non-players in on the fun: by talking about their own fortresses nonstop.

Probably the most famous play through is Boatmurdered, which was a succession game played on the Something Awful forums. A succession game is one where the save file is handed off to other players after a certain amount of time. These players wrote each entry in-character as the “new mayor” of the fortress, disparaging the last one for their bad leadership. If you don’t really know what “Dwarf Fortress” is all about, reading this through is a good place to start. (Think elephants drowning in a sea of magma. This playthrough really went places.)

One of my personal favorite forum games is also Glazedcoast, which takes place in about the most cursed biome possible. It rains a malodorous ooze; everything that dies comes back to life as a zombie; when the dwarves first embark they all immediately vomit. Reading about how this player deals with all the stuff this biome throws at them is hilarious. It’s pretty much the only good case I’ve seen for playing in an evil biome.

The YouTuber Kruggsmash has a few series of videos about various creative forts. He also illustrates these videos with hand-drawn and -colored images, which do a lot to bring the fortresses to life. In his storytelling, he takes a lot of care to personify each dwarf and keep track of the storylines of each character. A very good Kruggsmash video always feels like a slice-of-life television show about a dwarven fortress.

Kruggsmash is also quite ambitious in his projects, and each of his series has a little bit of a gimmick. In one, he ran an all vampire fortress. In another, he tried to build out over the ocean. These stories push me to try more complicated constructions in my own games.

You don’t so much win “Dwarf Fortress” as you don’t lose. There is an end game and what some players might consider bosses, but it’s best to learn about that on your own. There are consequences for digging too greedily and too deep, but that’s where the fun really begins. If you’ve got a good army and balanced your economies, you’ll probably be fine!

In general, try not to think about this game as a project to be finished, but as a story that’s just waiting to be told. You win when something that’s so funny or interesting or just plain weird happens that you have to tell a real life person about it. Then they can try out “Dwarf Fortress” and win at it too.

Gita Jackson is a cultural critic living in New York. They have bylines in GQ, Vulture, Motherboard and Kotaku. They are currently working on a book.