Dwarf Fortress
The deepest, most intricate simulation of a world that's ever been created. The legendary Dwarf Fortress is now on Steam. Build a fortress and try to help your dwarves survive against a deeply generated world.
Dwarf Fortress is a colony sim, dwarf and strategy game
developed by Bay 12 Games
and published by Kitfox Games.
Released on December 06th 2022 is available in English on Windows and Linux.
It has received 27,536 reviews of which 26,179 were positive and 1,357 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.3 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 28.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Dwarf Fortress into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: XP SP3 or later
- Processor: Dual Core CPU - 2.4GHz+
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1GB of VRAM: Intel HD 3000 GPU / AMD HD 5450 / Nvidia 9400 GT
- Storage: 500 MB available space
- Additional Notes: Requires 64 bit processor and operating system
Linux
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Context: I first played Dwarf Fortress in 2016, and have been playing intermittently since, often checking in for major updates. The short answer: I recommend Dwarf Fortress Steam Edition (with caveats!) Let's start with the cons: - Those expecting a 'smooth and bug free' game play experience will be disappointed: DF continues to do a poor job explaining itself, especially when it comes to more esoteric elements of the game. Take decorating furniture or items for example: unless one searches online and happens on the right answer, it's almost impossible to get your dwarves to decorate what you want. They will instead opt to decorate every [-Worthless Wooden Barrel-] on the map with diamonds. (The answer, if you were wondering, is to link a furniture or item stockpile containing what you want improved, along with a stockpile of your preferred decorating material, to the workshop). Can you 'play' the game from birth to death of a fortress without hard-locking bugs? Absolutely, great work here. Can you do so without your dwarves being idiotic due to bugs? Not so much. - On this note, playing Dwarf Fortress Steam Edition (which I'll refer to as DFSE because I'm lazy) without something called DFHack is a poor experience. DFSE is the leaky ceiling, and DFHack is the set of mandatory tar patches. This shouldn't be necessary. - A major pain point for me is the continued frustration with military uniforms, equipment and orders. Want your crossbow dwarves to stand in your fortified turret? Direct them there, and one of them might stand in that spot while the others uselessly spill out into the closed hallway behind. Want your dwarves to form a line? Most of them might, while a few may wait patiently under your -Atom Smashing Bridge- to die, twenty tiles away. Equipping your dwarves is essentially black magic; I can see many new players growing too frustrated with the degree of inconsistency military dwarves equip themselves, not knowing, for example, that woodcutters, miners and hunters have secret invisible civilian uniforms that conflict with whatever you assign, or that armor and weapon stands make it harder for militiary dwarves to equip themselves. This type of issue has persisted in vanilla DF for years, and DFSE has inherited and compounded these problems. Please developers, this desperately needs addressed, or else thousands of new potential players will reach a quitting point of frustration and never play DF again . - Put your hotkeys for bottom bar commands on the images for the commands , or at the least add an option for this and enable it by default. C'mon guys, don't make new players mouse over things for every single input. Yes, you can fix this with a mod and a bit of file manipulation, but you shouldn't need to mod-in basic tenants of UX design. - Finally, labor management is better than vanilla DF but still has a ways to go, especially when it comes to understanding and analyzing who would do well at a certain job (apart from skill levels). Dwarf Therapist remains a largely essential third-party application for those who want to feel like they know what they're doing. And now for the pros - Dwarf Fortress, DFSE or not, is the most richly detailed, intimately simulated and imagination-triggering game I've ever played. DFSE retains this quality. You may have heard of the incredible stories that come out of this game. They're quite real. Give DF a bit of your suspension of disbelief and it'll reward you beyond your imagination. (My current fort, for example, is full of punk goth dwarves who worship 'The Future', a deity of death, reincarnation and suffering, and who collectively decided an image of the Grim Reaper would be the icon of their civilization). - The pixel art is a great fit for DFSE, and really helps you connect with what's happening inside your game. It's still working within the limitation of the tile-based graphics, but the boundaries of that limitation have been pushed beyond apparent limits with a lot of time, love and craft. Same goes for the music engine. - In a world where $30 microtransactions for a funny robo suit re-color exist, DFSE is amazing bang for your buck. Vanilla DF (for free) was amazing value, and adding the reasonably low price tag doesn't change this that much. - The improvements to work orders management make semi-automating the less 'interesting' aspects of larger forts much easier and really improves face-on-game contact. - Incredible replay potential and variety at your fingertips. Make your world the way you find most interesting then suffer the consequences - err, I mean, pursue settling a fortress bounded in nature by little more than your ingenuity and design. A fortress which will totally survive. Promise. - Dwarf Fortress has a heart. It's a labor of love, it's artwork, it's enshrined at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and it's made from a place of real passion. You will never worry that some empty, souless [Dust Husk Zombie] will force Bay12 to add in micro-transactions, 'surprise mechanics' or measures designed to take advantage of 'marketing research', or otherwise pull DFSE from the gaming community because it didn't make enough money. [Edited for typos and a bit better clarity]
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Greatest game ever. I've followed its development since 2009. Literally helped me quit opiates. I'm so glad there's an official version now, I'd donated many times over the years but it's nice to have a polished product to show to friends and family. If you're on the fence and love games like Rimworld and Prison Architect, BUY IT
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My first squadron was returning from raiding Jaundicefondled after kidnapping ten beak dogs when the largest invasion force I'd ever seen (85 mounted, metal-wielding goblins, a couple messed up cave creatures and a troll) decided to march on my fortress and demand a parley. I stalled long enough for my other squadrons to make it from the depths to their defensive stations at the entrance and told my citizens to go hide in their burrow. It was my sixth year and my militia was the strongest it had ever been. Our steel industry was finally yielding full sets of armour and weapons. My commander's name was even Tulon Diamondbowel. All the odds were in our favour. I've never parleyed with goblins before, and if I ought to, I'll know it by the time I start my next fortress. On denying their request the gobbos marched towards the fortress, so I ordered my forces to meet them in the middle, away from the entrance that my fisherdwarves and woodhaulers were still running to. What I didn't realise was that the beak dogs we'd kidnapped were so slow that they'd be caught in the middle of the two armies. For a moment, I forgot that we truly live in the best of all possible worlds. It turns out that captured creatures are treated by invading forces as your livestock the instant they arrive at your fortress after a raid. In that moment, Abbeyace Ace Ace the Ace-Ace of Aces had unwittingly gained ten of the strongest warriors they'd ever have. Ten beaked abominations the size of gorillas ran at the invasion force, killing thirty of them and scattering the rest, making it easier to pick them off, all before my commander could even enter a martial trance. There are now ten electrum statues of these cursed creatures in my legendary dining hall and too many bodies on the surface for me to even bother cleaning up. This is a great game. Just don't assign your pasture on the surface or you'll end up with a generation of traumatised farm animals. I now have at least two dogs who have lost the ability to stand and still manage to presumably roll around my fortress. Also don't give your fortress a wackily long name or certain prompts won't display it properly. I've forgotten what I called my site government and haven't found a text box big enough to tell me yet, either.
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My first fortress was infiltrated by a vampire, and out of anger I chose to wall him into a large temple I never ended up using. I figured an eternity of his screams of anguish from inside my walls would make up for my best engraver being drained completely. He immediately became depressed because he was trapped in a dark room with no furniture, and it was going great until he won majority vote and became our mayor. Flash forward a year in-game and he has an entire floor to himself, is a Legendary Engraver because he has nothing else to do but polish and decorate the floor of his sprawling mausoleum. He's still the mayor, and now has his own personal temple, office, combat training area and master bedroom- even though he hasn't slept in 75 years. He leads our people well from his subterranean prison, and he'll probably stay mayor since everyone else thinks he'll get tossed down a hole upon election. Every few migrant waves sees our least valuable member of society being gifted to our great leader so he doesn't become so weak that he can't move. This was maybe 45 minutes of in-game time.
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I was around 7 hours into my first fortress. I had more or less figured out how to avoid running out of food and drink, so everything was more or less going smoothly. So thought the game apparently, who figured everything was going too smoothly for its liking and decided to bring a new friend to my fortress. This new friend was a big quadruped monster made out of amber and who also spat some kind of acid on everything in its path. Now, you might be thinking "Well, just send a few soldiers, they'll take care of it surely," and that would be a very sound and reasonable idea, were it not for the fact that there was absolutely no military of any kind in my entire fortress. You see, dear reader, up to that point I had not encountered anything remotely similar to an enemy (with the exception of goblins trying to steal logs from time to time), so I didn't really want to spend resources and time into training a squad or two. I had to come up with some kind of solution of sorts to this predicament. That beast was out there and it would eventually reach my dwarves, I had to do something... And so did I. I closed the doors. I know, I know. It doesn't seem like the most effective solution, but I didn't have many other options at the ready and the vast majority of my dwarves were already inside, so it was good enough. Back to the beast, it started moving towards the few dwarves that were left outside, each one of them far away from the others. It killed the first one without even breaking a sweat and then went for the second one, who did put up more of a fight, dodging about five blows before finally getting grabbed by one leg and thrown against a rock, dying instantly. The third and final one couldn't do anything, much like the first one. The beast was now on its way to my humble fortress. I was, of course, trying to come up with a plan in case it got in, because I certainly didn't think the doors would hold up for long, but as it got closer and closer, the beast decided to turn left, towards my animals, to slaughter them all. They tried to fight back too, but in the end the beast won with just a few scratches. Fortunately, the monster had moved far away from my fortress while it was chasing one of my animals. This was good, as I had ordered my dwarves to start making weapons and armor so that we could fight back and this would buy us some precious time. In the meantime, I noticed an old man coming from the southwest to visit us. Unfortunately for him, the beast happened to have recently killed one of my animals in that place and was still hanging around. When the old man saw the beast he immediately fled away as fast as he possibly could. The beast either didn't see him or didn't care enough about him because it didn't chase him. A few moments later, while I was still watching our dear monster, I saw a zombie approaching the beast from the west. Contrary to what I was absolutely sure was going to happen, this new creature found some way to not only fight and hurt the beast, but to even kill it. Now, I was confused. Where did this zombie come from? Why did it fight the beast? After digging for a bit, I found out that the zombie was none other than that dwarf who was able to somewhat keep up with the beast when it first appeared. But why was he a zombie? Well, that was the old man's doing. He was a necromancer. Apparently he stumbled upon the dwarf's dead body and decided to resurrect it. And so, my fortress was freed after this necromancer visitor had come, by sheer luck, to rescue it from that beast. He was, unbeknownst to him most surely, a hero. Everything went back to normal, except for five dwarves who had now to start training to become soldiers. The necromancer had decided to stay in my fortress as a guest. I hoped he would eventually want to become part of my fortress as a citizen. Or that's what I wanted until, a few months later, my captain of the guard found he was also a spy, to which she responded by beating him almost to death and chaining him up for a few years.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 23 January 2025 08:35 |
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| SteamSpy data | 22 January 2025 02:24 |
| Steam price | 23 January 2025 12:49 |
| Steam reviews | 21 January 2025 07:57 |
