Thoughts on the New Dwarf Fortress

December 11, 2022

In which I share my thoughts and complaints on the new 0.5x version of Dwarf Fortress, with an extra addendum helping new players get started with the game.

Written on a 2015 Macbook Pro (running Linux), naturally while listening to the new Dwarf Fortress Soundtrack. (IDK I've seen a lot of phlogs do this and I want to be cool and hip).

Dwarf Fortress (now the retronymically named classic version) is certainly one of my most-played games. I realized I've never really donated much to Bay 12 Games despite them up until now living off of donations, so I bought the Steam version the instant it was released.

I'm actually mixed on calling it the Steam/Itch Version because it seems more just like the traditional major updates. Until 0.40 there was a major release overhauling a lot of functionality every two years or so until 2014; so this new version really just feels like one of those major overhaul releases but with a lot more stuff built up since it's been… wow actually eight years since the last non-point update. As such I'm gonna be calling the new version 0.5x (presumably the version number will be 0.50 once the free version of it is released) and the old version 0.4x.

The core of the game is very clearly the same as 0.4x, with most of the changes being in the UI and how you interact with the game. Although some bugs and many annoyances have been fixed, but that's typical of most DF updates.

Postive Changes I've Noticed

I much as I want to say I don't care about graphics and I just judge the gameplay, playing with the new graphics set has legitimately increased my enjoyment of the game. There were some good community-made tilesets and graphics sets for the classic version, but they're a PITA to use because you have to fiddle with the raws in the game data to set them up. Plus community graphics sets (custom tiles for every entity instead of tilesets that replace the code page 437 character sheet) were either very incomplete or not an aesthetic I personally like; while the new official graphics set fits the atmosphere of the game perfectly and I really like the aesthetic.

The new menus seem a lot more sensibly designed, although I've had trouble finding some stuff that used to be placed under a sensible submenu but now is somewhere else instead.

Instead of building a construction and then having to click on that construction to designate an area (like a dining room, barracks, or bedroom), you can just designate all areas directly from the zones menu.

The 31x31 size limit for stockpiles and many zones was removed, very nice for inevitably large stockpiles like stone. You also can paint arbitrary shapes for zones and stockpiles instead of being limited to a single rectangle or the zone borders hugging the walls of a room.

It seems like workshops no longer have impassible tiles. Or, if they still have impassible tiles, you can't tell which ones they are which is not a good change :/

You don't need a completely clear three-wide path to a trade depot anymore. Even dwarven traders don't have large wagons and seem to be 1x1; and traders can pass over traps and any obstacles that normal resident dwarves could pass over. Although they still go insane if you block them from exiting your fortress when they want to leave ;)

Issues I've Noticed

At close zoom levels the graphics are bicubically(?) interpolated instead of nearest-neighbor interpolated like you should use for pixel art. Very minor because you don't often use close zoom scales, but it's annoying to go from crisp-looking graphics to blurry mess when zooming in too far.

I can't figure out how to set up civilian alerts. I created a burrow for it like before, but the only method I could find to make it work for civilians is to manually assign all non-military citizens to it.

Pitting creatures both individually and en masse is still very broken just like in 0.4x, I anecdotally had about a 90% failure rate for my current fortress before I gave up on pitting.

The buttons on the livestock menu for butchering or adding as pets are partially underneath the menu's scrollbar—on the Steam Deck's screen resolution at least.

The global health status page seems to be missing; I can find each individual person's health but not a summary of the fortress' overall health. (I've had a hospital, doctors, and a chief medical dwarf for several seasons).

Hospitals and a few other zones are now defined as modifiers to meeting areas, seemingly with very high preference over other gathering areas; and you can't turn off it being a meeting area, designating it as a hospital simply adds hospital features on top. My hospital is constantly congested with people despite my fortress also having a tavern & a normal meeting area, and people sleep in the hospital beds despite having hundreds of unoccupied bedrooms & a large very high-value dormatory to boot. It remains to be seen whether the incessant crowd hampers the hospital's operation, I've only had one injured dwarf so far.

Addendum: Getting Started With Playing Dwarf Fortress

If you've ever been interested in getting started with DF, with the new release now is definitely the perfect time! Everybody says it's super difficult, but with a good getting started guide and a willingness to figure out the intricacies of things it's really not that hard. What makes it difficult is the lack of resources for learning built into the game itself, and unfortunately the new built-in tutorial doesn't feel to me like it'd help that much.

Luckily, the community has written a very good quickstart guide to get started with DF:

Quickstart Guide on the Dwarf Fortress Wiki

Note that it hasn't yet been updated to 0.5x, however the majority of the differences are in the keybinds, and the occasional menu that's been moved to somewhere else in the interface. The new 0.5x menu system should be easy enough to navigate where you can find most menus the quickstart guide mentions (noting the bugs listed in the issues section above).

Other than the guide above and my supplements to it below, I just recommend looking up anything you may be curious about on the wiki:

The Dwarf Fortress Wiki

Finally, when playing remember that losing is fun! Don't feel bad about losing on your first few (or few hundred) fortresses, hopefully you had fun while playing and learned something so your next fortress will last even longer and be even better!

Personal Supplements on Top of the Quickstart Guide

The quickstart guide is great for getting a self-sustaining fortress, which I consider a starting point. Afterwards you have a lot of time and leeway to experiment with fun things without having to worry much about managing basic aspects of the fortress.

When generating a world, set mineral occurance to Frequent instead of Everywhere. Believe me, frequent minerals will be still be more ore and gems than you could ever need. Everywhere minerals has so many that in several embarks I've had literally zero flux stones (very important for metal production) despite having the embark site having a flux stone layer, because the entire flux stone layer was all ore instead of the plain flux stone. That's as bad as not having enough ore!

Very recent versions of DF (even the free 0.4x version) now have a distinction between light and heavy aquifers. You should absolutely not embark at a heavy aquifer because they're very annoying, however light aquifers are mostly managable if you can't find another suitable embark site. I'd still avoid them when possible though.

Garbage dumping is impossibly useful, definitely set one up like the guide recommends.

Once I have a manager and bookkeeper, I almost exclusively use work orders to produce stuff and no longer deal with manually clicking on workshops to build things. Very convenient to quickly queue something up and set a quantity. The only thing I use workshops directly for is for repeating tasks, like my jewler's workshop is set to cut gems on infinite repeat, and the same with one of my metal furnaces turning lignite or bituminous coal into coke.

A trap hallway and drawbridge at the entrance to your fortress as mentioned at the top of Beyond a Minimal Fortress is unreasonably effective at stopping almost any invader. If you have a long-ish trap hallway and a guard animal set up, you often won't need to worry about calling your miliary to action at all for many small attacks.

Smoothing and engraving areas,—particularly dining rooms, meeting halls, and dormitories—is a easy way to boost the happiness of your dwarves.

The end of the guide has a number of good links on what to do afterwards. I'd highly recommend getting a textile industry going (build farm plots growing pig tails as many seasons as possible to have enough thread & cloth) because dwarves get very upset if they're wearing worn clothes or especially if their clothes are too old to wear and they have to go naked.

I also recommend setting up a graveyard with a bunch of coffins and 1x1 tomb zones placed over each coffin, because dwarves also get very upset if dead bodies sit in refuse stockpiles instead of being properly buried.

Finally, I highly recommend building a well inside your fortress, with drawbridges to seal the dug channel to the river off in case of an invasion. Until you get a strong military going, sealing off every single part of entire fortress from the outside world is the best thing to do in case of attack!