This is a review of fortress mode. I have not yet played adventure mode, but will do so when it's out of beta.

I was really torn on whether or not to leave a positive review, but decided in the end that what I am reviewing is the base game, and not Dwarf Fortress with DFHack.

Dwarf Fortress with DFHack is an incredible game. It's one of my all time favourites and one of my most played. I keep coming back to it, year after year. I've spent a lot of time playing similar games like Rimworld and Oxygen Not Included, both of which I love, but it's only Dwarf Fortress that I still play. There really is nothing like it. An entire world is being simulated in the background and it creates emergent stories better than any other game I have played. You really feel a part of the world.

Another amazing part of the game is engineering. I love designing big projects. Whether it's a complex waterfall system to keep your dwarfs happy, a powered minecart track that goes through water to teach swimming, or an arena where your dwarfs can watch forgotten beasts battle to the death, you really get a sense of achievement when you see your design in action.

The problem is that without DFHack, you will never get to experience these parts of the game. You will get bogged down with micromanaging your fort, and / or run into game breaking fps issues and bugs. DFHack allows you to automate most of the annoying stuff, allowing you to focus on the fun parts. You can automate farming, butchery and clothesmaking. You can fix the agitation mechanic. You can fix broken caravans. You can ban cooking of certain ingredients. You can run custom scripts to fix things like the acquire object need, and set the script to run automatically each day / week / month. You can clean the map of contaminants to fix frame rate issues. You can delete bugged creatures (breeding magma crabs!) to fix fps issues.

It's a shame that a community developed add-on is required to enjoy the game, but the developer has no interest in going back to fix old issues. Some of these issues have been in the game for over a decade. New features are great, but fix the existing ones first.

So in conclusion, Dwarf Fortress on it's own is pretty bad. Dwarf Fortress with DFHack is one of the best gaming experiences you can have.

Must have put in 2,000 hours of the pre-steam version, flooded my city, had a dragon once, dug to deep, so many memories of this game that I knew I had to pick it up on steam even if I never play it just to say thanks for the fond memories.

It's like crack, but less healthy.

I've played 1011 hours, what do you think?

I appreciate the effort and scale of the game. I think it is a really cool project and I would give it another chance in the future... BUT idk how you work on a game for over 20 years and allow it to be such a buggy mess. There are hundreds maybe even thousands of documented bugs that have been around for years and you have to navigate threads to fix the game while you are playing it. And that is what you spend half of your playtime doing, doing silly workarounds for bugs that the developer has been aware of for a long time, but doesn't fix because... Why? They would rather add more new features than make the existing game playable? I'll give it another shot in 20 years when the game probably still isn't finished.

Alright, listen to me you knife eared piece of ♥♥♥♥! If you go any further with your piss stained pubic hair you call a wig, I'm gonna wreck your ♥♥♥♥ so hard you won't even be able to walk with your limp ♥♥♥♥! I'm gonna shove my foot so far up your shaven perfect little ass that your breath is gonna smell like shoe polish, then I'm gonna take that little red anal bead on your belt, and push it in your face! I'm gonna flagellate you with my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ beard! I'm gonna build you a pair of runic mechanical balls, and use surgical precision to sew them to your groin where your manhood ought to be just so that I can kick them with my iron ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ feet, you ♥♥♥♥!

I'm giving this a recommendation because I love this game and believe that when a few issues are resolved, it may be the best game ever made.

Fortress mode only offers me a few gripes. Like sometimes the way things are done isn't the most intuitive and you might find yourself looking up information on basic things such as how to get you dwarves not to die of dehydration even though you have plenty of water and booze. Then there are things that honestly just add to the charm of DF like dwarves going to build a wall to block the flow of water somewhere only to build it from the wrong side and drown.

Adventure mode, my favorite way to play, needs major work however. You wouldn't think it, but this mode is *FAR* more prone to crashing than fortress. A crash is worse than death, since at least when you die, it adds to the lore of the world and you can still go read about your character's exploits in legends mode. A crash simply erases your last X amount of time played. Extremely frustrating. And unlike fortress mode, there's no auto-save feature. This is triple damning since even manual saves are sub-optimal because they split your timeline. The world after the save doesn't share the same timeline as when you save and quit game.

AM has a few other "I'm never playing this game again!" issues that *aren't* easily chalked up to needing to learn the game. Like when you think you're turning in a quest only to have the person who "gave" you the quest say "You killed so-and-so, the terrible evil thing. I was inevitable." or "You got the awesome stolen treasure we wanted back. I don't really care one way or another." I say these aren't a matter of learning the game because of just how egregiously unintuitive they are. The slaying of creatures bothering a settlement is something you simply have to go shouting in taverns and places to spread word of your deeds. Once word gets around, it improves your chances of being made a hearthperson and get actual quests from your lady/lord.

The game is good. No, it's great. It's worth the price for fortress mode alone, adventure mode is a bonus and not one that's for everyone. If you're getting this for adventure mode, you're better off to get the original game for free with the Lazy Newb pack. No mouse support and the UI is even more frustrating than the Steam version, but it's more fleshed out and more stable.

Y

outdated. would love a remaster though

Rimworld is better.