the occasional post

After a lifetime trapped within the big beautiful walls of the Apple ecosystem, I’ve finally started playing Dwarf Fortress.

I’d been curious about it for a while. I added it to my Steam wishlist as soon as it came to that platform, hoping one day it would be available for macOS. I did not expect, two years later, to need a cheap Windows computer to run some unrelated programs.

Those programs ended up not running at all on my brand new Windows 11 HP laptop. Turns out it’s actually too new. Turns out I was right to get a MacBook after college and an iMac for grad school and a Mac Mini for the house in which I’m raising my children. None of those computers have ever been too new to run a program off a disc, but I guess with a Windows computer, that sort of thing can happen sometimes.

And so we get this website, and yet another Morrowind character (Argonian this time), and at long last, Dwarf Fortress — the most complicated game I can’t stop thinking about.

At first I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. The dwarves were all miserable. The game allows the player to see their thoughts, and all of them were annoyed about drinking from their hands. You have to direct them to make their own cups? Did they spend years drinking dirty river water without cups?

So they made cups, but they stayed depressed. This time they were all occasionally thinking about a friend’s decay. It took me a few hours to discover the corpse of their friend, in the path between the fortress entrance and the river that served as a water supply. They had all been walking past the decomposing body every time they needed a drink, since I hadn’t learned about brewing mushroom alcohol or building barrels yet. Or coffins for that matter.

I watched 45 minutes of a four-hour tutorial on YouTube, which eventually helped me come to understand corpse disposal and beverage storage, along with bedrooms and meeting halls and jobs and squads (kind of). That’s when my dwarves started digging, as deep as possible.

Far below the surface, the dwarves discovered a cave system. They explored, successfully avoiding deadly water and lava. There were giant moles down there. Gremlins, too. And mysterious creatures called draltha, which quickly climbed to the habitat levels of the fortress and started breeding. One went wild and had to be killed. The rest ended up outside.

I don’t know why the dogs multiplied the way they did, or why they all hung out in and around the meeting hall, or why there was often a stinky gas around some of them. Maybe next time.

About 10 hours into the save file, a beast came out of the caves and set 51 dwarves on fire. The two survivors abandoned the fortress. Maybe they’ll show up after I start a new one.

Was this fun? Did I enjoy building this sweaty drunken ant colony, or was I compelled by the nature of the game to keep clicking? Does it matter? I’m not sure. I plan to spend a little more time in Morrowind and Steins;Gate (thanks to the Steam Summer Sale) before starting a second fortress. Maybe I’ll finish watching that four-hour tutorial first.