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The full name is:
Slaves to Armok: God of Blood
Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress

Incredibly fun and diverse rogue-like with random levels. Can you live 100 years? Can you live 1 year without a horse catching fire? Will your dwarves keep out goblin invaders? Can you build a huge waterproof walled fortress around a human city, then dig into the aquifer, thereby killing all inhabitants of the nasty human city? Can your city survive off of living on cat and dog meat? You can find out!


Saves settings to: Application dir
Download Size: 5.5 MB (3.3 MB without sound)
Size in use: ~100 MB (it creates its own worlds)
RegShot says:
Modifies one key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\MostRecentApplication\Name: "dwarfort.exe"
Dependencies: DirectX (DirectDraw specifically, see Regshot info)
Notes: Fairly CPU intensive, despite the fact that it's text based. Oh, that reminds me. You can also get graphical tilesets for the game.

Website (and download link): http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Edit: added link

Sort of pleased to see this program's website is still surprisingly active with a new release earlier this year. I've never understood rogue games, but it looks cool.

It's definitely portable, but there's a little bit of a learning curve. This definitely falls into the "desert island" class of tools out there. No Internet required, extremely detailed and complex. The scale and level of detail is astonishing for a freeware, "rogue"-like game. I hope the developer opens up the code at some point, but it's already quite an achievement.

I'd definitely want to pull down the entire wiki on this (or at least the 'Getting Started' article):
http://www.dwarffortresswiki.org

There's several mods and utilities, including the 'Lazy Newb Pack' with tilesets that get away from the text-only format of the main client.

webfork wrote:I've never understood rogue games, but it looks cool.

I've been a fan of another rogue like game (Nethack: http://www.nethack.org/) for years, but never even been close to 'ascendancy' -- in fact never went much further than level 8 or 9... I did take a look before at Dwarf Fortress, but came away believing it would be PhD level rogue playing.

BTW, Darkart Studios has a multiplatform Nethack mod with graphic tilesets and portable on Windows that I've played since it was called Falcon Eye (http://falconseye.sourceforge.net/): Vulture (http://www.darkarts.co.za/vulture; previously mentioned by Lupo73 at viewtopic.php?t=4826).

Was it ever submitted to the collection?

Specular wrote:Was it ever submitted to the collection?

I haven't submitted it so far just because I don't think it would get the votes. It's a very specialized game for a unique player. Their motto is "losing is fun".

From the wiki:

There is no internal end point, single goal, final Easter egg or "You Win!" announcement in Dwarf Fortress. Therefore, eventually, almost every fortress will fall. The only ones that don't tend to be very conservative and very boring—and what fun is that? Therefore, DF = losing ∧ DF = fun ⇒ losing = fun, and that's okay! It's a game philosophy, so embrace it, own it, and have fun with it!

If I'm wrong, someone post so and I'll submit it to the database.

I know a lot of games and programs here on the site have shut down or faded away but not Dwarf Fortress. Good for them.

DWARF FORTRESS CLASSIC is now at v50.07 (February 7, 2023)