Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
You decide where to settle down, which greatly impacts what can happen and the overall difficulty.
For example, embarking near a necromancer tower means that undeads are going to invade you fairly early, a high savagery biome is home to giant and "-man" variants of normal creatures and are much more dangerous.
Having a river means an easy access to water (even if dwarves prefer to drink brewed alcohol), a forested area means easy access to wood...
Unlike most games in this genre, you have more than a single layer to handle.
It is basically 3D as a set of many 2D layers on top of each others.
The above ground is fairly simple but the underground has many layers of stone as well as 3 caverns (usually relatively dangerous places) as well as magma at the bottom (we play as dwarves, so magma has its uses even if it can be dangerous if handled incorrectly).
The population starts at 7 but you can usually get to 200+ dwarves relatively easily.
This means that most individual dwarves don't matter much, but specializing some dwarves can make their value for your fort shoot up.
For better or worse, the game has a lot of systems and a lot of depth.
It means that learning can be a bit daunting, but also that you can come up with rather absurd setups, like weaponizing minecarts (either as a ramming tool or as a "shotgun" to bombard enemies with many projectiles).
The basic idea is similar to Rimworld, you give "global" orders and the individuals (dwarves in this case) work on things at their own pace.
It is the game that inspired Rimworld, that started as a simplistic clone before branching out to do its own things (like the narrator for example).
People that manage to get into it tend to come back to it every few years (since this game has existed for well over a decade) but it is still a niche game with many flaws and quite a few bugs.
The development is also pretty slow.
It's not as tactically challenging as Rimworld, it's not really a game "about" combat. It's important to have a military if you want to do certain things, but there aren't research trees and technology upgrades apart from basic material qualities (eg: iron is better than copper for swords). You can't really force march anyone anywhere, only ask them to please go. It's a bit more like Oxygen Not Included in that it's about finding a way to balance the needs of your dwarves over time with your personal goals for the fortress, nation, or world. (ONI also being in a direct lineage from Dwarf Fortress.)
And that's part of the whole charme.
Just start it and watch the bearded ants weaseling across your screen, watch them work (if they want to to), watch them drink or sleep or procreate and, more importantly, watch them die.
And just experience the stories along the way, created by the game itself and by your choices.
DF basically is a world simulation on a rage-drunken level which is as hilarious as it's deep.
They dont like humans, goblins, or elfs.
they need beer to survive.
you will get speical amongus characters like a vampire or serial killers, in which you could trap in far off corrner and send all your bad dawrfs too, in exchange you get cool items 5% of the time.
You can war and raid.
Or you can be like everyone else.
Create a minecart lava shot gun system, that instantly kills everything.
Tell me what you love or hate the most about RimWorld and I can tell you what it's like in DF.
Melee combat (since it is medieval setting, so no guns and the crossbows/bows are not that good) has a lot of random elements but highly skilled dwarves with high quality steel equipment can fight off most things pretty well.
You can also use traps (weapons or cages) that are overly potent and trivialize most fights, even if a lot of the most dangerous stuff are immune to traps.
You can also wall yourself in completely and be fine, there is usually no reason to fight off invaders unless you want to (it is a sandbox-type game after all).
Melee combat can still get quite precarious since all blows are simulated quite a bit, and lucky blows can still happen.
Your dwarves (and most enemies) can also get tired and end up as immobile targets to wail on.
Basically, combat can be mostly safe if you want it to be, but also highly dangerous if that is what you pick.
Unpredictability is there to an extent, but without a system like the narrator you are mostly in control over how much unpredictability you want.
Most of it appears in the form of threats though.
Watching your dwarves work is harder for several reasons.
For starters, the game not being on a single 2D plan means that many things are happening where you are not looking.
Without looking into details of what is happening (especially around social interractions), it is very easy to completely miss what they are doing.
If you like to dig into details though, the game has a whole lot of them for you.
Most of the stories about this game are from compiling (and usually picking what you want to use for the story) many of the details and putting them together.
Channels like kruggsmash are all about experienced players manipulating the game to have what they want happen.
It makes for interesting stories, but the average player is unlikely to come across all of those details and even less so making a coherent story out of it.
Like in RimWorld, you don't have direct control of your pawns. You prepare for threats and let the combat play out. There's a massive underground world, so threats can come from down there as well.
You have a lot of control over the difficulty, both in the menus and the way you choose to interact with the world. If you embark in a safe place and don't dig too deep, you're unlikely to face big threats. But dig deep enough, piss off a lot of people or embark in a hostile environment, and you'll find a lot of... fun.
DF has bucketloads of all that and I'd say it's more satisfying than in RimWorld.
Endless.
There's a lot more of this in DF compared to RimWorld. The pawns interact with each other and the environment in obscenely detailed ways.
What I've said is all based on the vanilla game, no mods. I think you'll like Dwarf Fortress.
Rimworld is a LOT simpler and easier to pick up.
Rimworld is prettier.
Rimworld has a deep modding scene that lets you easily adjust almost any detail, or to completely change the game (rimworld of magic, for example)
Rimworld expacs bring different games - biotech and anomaly, for example, whereas DF is largely the same game in different terrain.
Rimworld has a win condition. You don't "win" Dwarf Fortress. You just have fun until the fortress inevitably falls to some insane disaster.
Definitely watch some vids before jumping into this. If you come in thinking "Rimworld, but with drunken dwarves" then you're going to get a shock. Maybe pleasant, maybe not.
One thing I like about DF is that the story in DF is more present and more realistic.
Rimworld throws mostly-unconnected RNG at you and Tynan calls that a story generator. In DF, everything is closer to a simulation and your fortress's outcomes are more directly drawn from its history and actions. The story is more real, less RNG.
Plus, it's drunken dwarves determined to find inventive ways to die despite the player's hopes. What could be more relaxing? :)