Dwarf Fortress Adventures, I

Dwarf Fortress is a freeware game by Bay 12 Games. I kept hearing about it from various sources and was really curious to try it because each time, the stories I heard were amazing. The only things that kept me from trying it were that A) the learning curve is apparently extremely steep and B) I don't need another thing to suck up what little free time I have left.

So naturally, I tried it. You can find it here.

They are not wrong about the learning curve. My very, very first experience with Dwarf Fortress was basically just staring at the interface and occasionally pressing keys to see what would happen. It wasn't until my second game that things started happening, but at that point I'd read several wiki pages explaining the basics.

Here's a recap of that second game:

Our wagon came to a halt by a river and my seven dwarf settlers were ready for adventure.

"Okay, Craelin," I said to Craelin, a female dwarf who was occasionally immodest and handled stress poorly, "unload the wagon."

She didn't so much unload it as smash it apart, leaving its contents laying in the grass where swarms of flies and stray horses could get at it.

"Um, right. Okay. Thod," I said, turning my attention now to Thod, a dwarf who disliked immodesty and needed alcohol to get through a working day, "go to the riverside and, uh... smooth some stones?" (I had to limit their actions to what I could get them to do. It didn't need to make sense, shut up.)

Thod happily obliged, lauching himself at the nearby stones and smoothing them vigorously. Meanwhile, I still had six idle dwarves just waiting around. After fighting with the interface some more, I figured out how to get them to start cutting wood. "Great! Craelin, you other guys, start chopping down all those trees. Take the lumber and make a stockpile right over there."

The industrious little dwarves happily set themselves to it, chopping down trees, making piles of lumber and smiling all the while. Yes, I thought, these dwarves have a good future ahead of them.

Then I happened to notice an awful lot of blood running downstream from where I had sent Thod.

System message: Thod has drowned.

Goddamn it.