The Story of Oilfurnace

September 6, 2010 5:46 PM

A second illustrated tale of Dwarf Fortress has appeared, the saga of Oilfurnace.

The original, the illustrated story of Bronzemurder was posted here.

Just a few of the other Dwarf Fortress posts on Metafilter: most recent version, building a computer in-game, first DF post

posted by JHarris (65 comments total)

Digging continues, creating a floating "plug" of earth that is supported only by a wooden arm.

I wish I was good enough at Dwarf Fortress to figure out how the hell you do something like this.
posted by Jimbob at 5:56 PM on September 6, 2010

This is so awesome. For some reason I really enjoy videogame-based fiction.
posted by griphus at 5:57 PM on September 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

There's casual gaming, there's hardcore gaming. And then there's Dwarf Fortress.

(Also, don't forget the awesome story of The Hamlet of Tyranny relayed here a few months ago. These and other epic DF tales can be found on fansite dfstories.com.)
posted by Rhaomi at 6:02 PM on September 6, 2010 [4 favorites]

If I could "I know kung fu" anything, I'd do it with Dorfort. I want to want to play that game, but it's just way, way too much of an investment for any sane human being.
posted by cthuljew at 6:15 PM on September 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

So, the dwarves dug too greedily and too deep again? Bloody hell.
posted by Doktor Zed at 6:24 PM on September 6, 2010

Boatmurdered is my all time favorite Dwarf Fortress tale. I see it in the tags, but no link? Don't worry, I fix.
posted by wires at 6:24 PM on September 6, 2010

Digging continues, creating a floating "plug" of earth that is supported only by a wooden arm.

I wish I was good enough at Dwarf Fortress to figure out how the hell you do something like this.

Oh, I could do it. I'd just accidentally crush my legendary miner in the process, sending the whole fort into a tantrum spiral. Oh, and then the plug would be too narrow to build a staircase and I'd find this out after the water would flood in and ruin everything.

Excellent use of the "catsplosion" tag, BTW.
posted by gamera at 6:28 PM on September 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

My teen son has been playing Minecraft lately. He says it's like a lite version of DF, but with 3D graphics.

random: He also plays a sort of improvised RPG with his friends. During the last session his party was saved from angry villagers by a machine gun-wielding Laura Ingalls Wilder with an artificial leg.
posted by mecran01 at 6:45 PM on September 6, 2010 [7 favorites]

minecraft has absorbed the past week of my life :(
posted by empath at 7:06 PM on September 6, 2010

Ditto, minecraft has been 'blowing up' lately since several youtube VG stars have started casting it (and bloopers too). I hear the minecraft developer has been invited to chat with Valve...
posted by anthill at 7:21 PM on September 6, 2010

I don't know anything about Dwarf Fortress, and I don't have time to learn, but these are awesome.
posted by showmethecalvino at 7:29 PM on September 6, 2010

Yeah, Minecraft guy sold 4,000 copies yesterday. He's a lone developer. I wish it could somehow meld with DF.
posted by mecran01 at 7:34 PM on September 6, 2010

Does Armok ever show up?
posted by XMLicious at 7:47 PM on September 6, 2010

I wish it could somehow meld with DF.

Someone is on it.
posted by D_I at 7:53 PM on September 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

Dwarf Fortress is one of those things that ten years from now we're all gonna claim we were really into back when it was good, isn't it?
posted by BitterOldPunk at 8:23 PM on September 6, 2010 [9 favorites]

I came to this thread to post about Minecraft. It's got the same sandbox mining storytelling joy as Dwarf Fortress. No automata, so less stories about the crazy dwarf who gets obsessed with his bat leather cloak. But great UI and easy to get in to immersion. It's pretty great.
posted by Nelson at 8:23 PM on September 6, 2010

Dorf fortress sucked up all of my free time when I only had one job and school; now I have three jobs and school and I'll be damned if I'm going to get sucked back into that morass of drowning elves and tantrumming nobles and =pig tail sock=s, especially after I planned out an epic fortress (Butteredcircles, founded by the Toasts of Burning) and never got beyond the detailed graph-paper plans because I embarked on top of a GCS.

Well, okay. Maybe just one mini-fort, on Saturdays.

And Sundays.


What the hell, maybe my lunch breaks, too.



And... well, sleep isn't really all that important, is it?
posted by subbes at 8:29 PM on September 6, 2010

100 million and a brandname director is all you now need for a blockbuster film... oh and add gratuitous love story somewhere in there.
posted by edgeways at 8:29 PM on September 6, 2010

Dwarf Fortress is one of those things that ten years from now we're all gonna claim we were really into back when it was good, isn't it?

No, we'll be arguing why the 3D holographic rendering in 0.63.55 was highly superior to 0.63.54 and how the miners are totally nerfed now.
posted by griphus at 8:30 PM on September 6, 2010 [3 favorites]

Dwarf Fortress resides on the short list of games that I love hearing stories from, but can't really fathom the time it would take to get into them enough to create my own stories. Games like EVE Online, (now basically dead) Ultima Online, and Minecraft.

Great stories though.
posted by graventy at 8:57 PM on September 6, 2010

graventy, try Minecraft -- it's very accessible. In fact, as far as I remember, there are no words in the game whatsoever, once you get past the menu screen. It's compulsively addictive almost from the minute you boot it up and you can play in small chunks here and there and still make big progress.
posted by empath at 9:10 PM on September 6, 2010

Ooh lovely. I wish that furnaces did output smoke, requiring chimneys.

Dwarf Fortress really ain't that difficult to learn.
posted by fleacircus at 9:50 PM on September 6, 2010

For some reason I really enjoy videogame-based fiction.

Is it fiction if all of this happened in DF?

Incredibly good game, I gave it up, way too addictive.
posted by CitoyenK at 10:18 PM on September 6, 2010

fuck. they finally got around to releasing a linux port of the new version. I'm fucked.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:39 PM on September 6, 2010

So who's up for a MeFi succession game?
posted by fleacircus at 12:20 AM on September 7, 2010

Digging continues, creating a floating "plug" of earth that is supported only by a wooden arm.

I wish I was good enough at Dwarf Fortress to figure out how the hell you do something like this.

It's a neat trick he's used, exploiting the fact that you can support a chunk of rock however big by just one rock pylon, or a wooden post, or a single staircase, no matter where it's located. Digging out the bottom like he did is a bit more tricky and could take two or three attempts to do it right, but it looks like he dug out the area under the aquifer-punch, with (maybe) a staircase a few squares away so that it wouldn't support the rock.
posted by daniel_charms at 12:44 AM on September 7, 2010

100 million and a brandname director is all you now need for a blockbuster film... oh and add gratuitous love story somewhere in there.

Love stories happen all the time in DF, so it wouldn't even have to be a gratuitous one. Dwarf moves into Oilfurnace -> dwarf attends a party -> dwarf falls in love -> dwarf gets married and has children -> dwarf loses his/her spouse in a "mining accident" and throws a tantrum, attacking everyone in sight, until the fortress guard take him/her down. The only problem with a love story in a DF movie would be dealing with the tantrum spiral it will inevitably cause.
posted by daniel_charms at 1:00 AM on September 7, 2010

Am I missing something or does the main link now re-direct to the author's etsy page?
posted by atrazine at 1:21 AM on September 7, 2010

Never mind. Company firewall blocks flickr.
posted by atrazine at 1:22 AM on September 7, 2010

100 million and a brandname director is all you now need for a blockbuster film... oh and add gratuitous love story somewhere in there.

The story of the love of a DWARF for the ROCK.
posted by ersatz at 4:07 AM on September 7, 2010 [4 favorites]

For those of you who understand Dwarf Fortress but haven't played Minecraft, and want to be horribly addicted to it:

In Minecraft, you do the Hermit challenge, first-person.

There are no discrete invasion events; enemies spawn in the dark, and some of them try to hug you and explode. There are huge, expansive natural cave systems to explore. Here's an example surface / cave map pair from a game where I got lost underground, and 'surfaced' at the bottom of an ocean a good distance from my base.

You will die horribly, unexpectedly, and often. It's Fun to be the legendary miner drowned in an ocean of magma.
posted by tylermoody at 8:40 AM on September 7, 2010

JHarris, you suck. Every time I hear about Dwarf Fortress I end up spending an hour or so reading about it online. It has definitely surpassed EVE Online as the top "game I'll never play but enjoy reading about others playing." You know where my night went last night? That's right, reading about dorfs. Well, there was reading about dorfs and then there was ...

mecran01, you suck as well, just for being the first person in this particular thread to bring up Minecraft. I finally gave in and started looking at it and then played some online, and had to drag myself away from it to go to bed (with chores undone) and went to sleep thinking about it and it's all I've been able to think about this morning. This is obviously completely your fault.

I want this day to be over so I can go home and (do those chores first!) play Minecraft and end up breaking down and buying it because really I want the Alpha version with crafting and stuff and survival mode. I have yet to see any reason I would want multiplayer.

Anyway the point is that none of this is in any way my fault, the blame rests completely on everyone else.
posted by komara at 9:06 AM on September 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

I love these Dwarf Fortress comics...They're entertaining enough to make me want to play it again, but then I recall my wife hates it when I stop showering and never want to leave the computer.

I'll have to check out Minecraft, though - it might be a bit more accessible to my current available free-time.


mecran01 - I hope my sons grow up to be as cool as yours when they're teenagers. :-)
posted by JibberJabber at 9:09 AM on September 7, 2010

Okay, I just gave in and bought and downloaded Minecraft.

5 hours ago.

If the Minecraft guy and the Dwarf Fortress guys were to get together, "Gaming" would be considered a solved class of problem.
posted by Jimbob at 9:39 AM on September 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

I have yet to see any reason I would want multiplayer.

Man, I can't WAIT for survival multiplayer. Working economies! Specialization!

I want a big capital city with a pyramid of gold with a diamond throne that 6 people worked on collecting, etc.
posted by empath at 11:16 AM on September 7, 2010

empath, I have so much less faith in humanity than you. All I can think of is griefers.
posted by komara at 11:21 AM on September 7, 2010

Oh, you can run your own server and keep it private.
posted by empath at 11:45 AM on September 7, 2010

For those of you who don't feel like learning Dwarf Fortress: Just do what I do for my RPG kicks. Crash a DND club, and shout that you have an excellent campaign you want to DM. Don't worry if you don't!

After you get a party assembled around you, announce this:

You have all turned 10 years old today. You have all arrived at the local Pokemon laboratory to get your first Pokemon from me, Professor Oak.

You are bound to have an excellent time if you and the regulars are young enough nerds to enjoy Pokemon. You shouldn't even need a script or math! Having it be an ad-hoc campaign opens the door to human-Pokemon hybrids, Pokemutants, new types, unheard of Gym leaders, and so on. If you're like me, you'll limit it to the original 151 Pokemon, though!
posted by mccarty.tim at 12:00 PM on September 7, 2010

If someone did that to me I think I would stab them in the face with a pencil.
posted by Justinian at 3:42 PM on September 7, 2010 [4 favorites]

Mechanical or wooden? Sometimes you can get a better bang for your buck if you aim the wooden kind for the heart. On the other hand, mechanical pencils tend to be reusable.
posted by kaibutsu at 4:54 PM on September 7, 2010

The only way I can imagine that being fun is by limiting myself to 151-proof grain alcohol.
posted by Evilspork at 7:40 PM on September 7, 2010

Arrrgh why did he have to put so little thought into the interface... I don't mind it being ascii but he started this in 2002, by which point text-only interfaces had long since become waaaay better developed than this. I'm enjoying the game but the constant mode-changing and lack of (easily usable) context menus is such a needless impediment.
posted by XMLicious at 8:19 PM on September 7, 2010

Arrrgh why did he have to put so little thought into the interface...

The sacred koan of Dwarf Fortress: Oh, you'll get used to it...

The developer tends to focus on working on what he's interested in, not on making cosmetic improvements for the weak. Hence, a ridiculous amount of time spent developing AI, realistic wounds (including modeling of blood vessels and organs), fluid dynamics for water and lava, crazy procedural generation of the landscape etc., and no time spent making it easier to use.
posted by Jimbob at 8:27 PM on September 7, 2010

The developer tends to focus on working on what he's interested in, not on making cosmetic improvements for the weak. Hence, a ridiculous amount of time spent developing AI, realistic wounds (including modeling of blood vessels and organs), fluid dynamics for water and lava, crazy procedural generation of the landscape etc., and no time spent making it easier to use.

There's a bit more to it than that. There is the matter that UI and graphics take up such a large proportion of the effort of game development, of course. But more than that, there is the need for Tarn Adams to keep himself interested in the game.

He's worked on this game almost exclusively for several years now, and manages to support himself entirely through donations. That is not an easy trick. I don't think I am such a bad programmer, and I've been known to have the occasional all-consuming project to work on, but to develop something with both the scope and detail of Dwarf Fortress is almost beyond my comprehension. It is a big design, bigger than almost anything else, maybe even bigger than Nethack in just the sheer amount of stuff crammed into it.

Most games aren't anywhere near that big, and when they are the play usually becomes an incomprehensible mess, mostly because the wealth of detail becomes unwieldy for the developers to think about. This hasn't happened with Dwarf Fortress, it seems like Tarn really does keep it all in his head at once, and that implies an almost shocking devotion to the game. I suspect that this devotion can only continue so long as he enjoys working on the game.

The kind of mind that would find working on a computer game enjoyable is unlikely to find cobbling together a UI or graphics enjoyable.
posted by JHarris at 9:31 PM on September 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

I feel like some big company (maxis?) should just offer him a shitload of money to fork the code so they add some graphics and a decent ui to it.
posted by empath at 10:31 PM on September 7, 2010

More likely, he could wedge an interface in to split off client code, then let the community toil on a better client for free. DF has an awfully active community for a closed-source game.

Some tools have already been written that work by hacking DF as it sits in memory (!). Like, stonesense (screenshot) and Dwarf Therapist.
posted by fleacircus at 11:40 PM on September 7, 2010

Jimbob: The sacred koan of Dwarf Fortress: Oh, you'll get used to it...

I do not think that is true. I'm sure it depends on the person but I'm finding myself spending much of my time stalled, trying to remember which button to press on this particular screen or having forgotten exactly what I was doing during the five or six screens it took to get where I currently am, even though after a few hours I'm fairly familiar with it.

JHarris: There is the matter that UI and graphics take up such a large proportion of the effort of game development, of course.

But he's not simply refraining from spending a large proportion of his time on the UI, he's leaving lots of low-hanging fruit that are not giant projects to implement. He's not even bothering to make sure the same key does the same thing on different screens; you can't always back out by hitting Escape, for example, or select things or move to the next step of a process by hitting Enter. And it's not that these keys do something different in those cases, they just don't do anything on random pages for no apparent reason.

Nethack, for example, appears to be much more consistent to me with its consistency of key assignments. I don't get stuck and space out anywhere near as frequently as I am with df.

I think it's a great game and I appreciate the amazing amount of work he's put into it, it's just that if he spent a little time cleaning up the interface, or just modularized it into something like a separate tab-delimited file that someone else could clean up along the lines of what fleacircus is suggesting, I would be able to enjoy it substantially more.

But also a'course it's only at version 0.31.12. Forty years from now when he has his 1.0 release it'll undoubtedly be absolutely stunning. {:) <--- Dwarf smiley wearing a pickelhaube
posted by XMLicious at 1:24 AM on September 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

empath: I gave in and bought Minecraft and the concept of 'last night' as I regularly know it did not exist. All I can recall is some frightened digging and eventual deployment of my beautiful start to civilization. And loneliness. And snow.

Afterward: dreams about Minecraft, including a gigantic underground furnace shaped like a spider-god into which I threw all my cobblestone.

Let me know when multiplayer Survival happens, in case I miss it. I'm sure one of us will run the MetaFilter Minecraft Survival Server and we will have a gigantic golden Cortex in the front lawn.
posted by komara at 7:43 AM on September 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

He updates almost every friday, so look out for that.
posted by empath at 8:08 AM on September 8, 2010

we will have a gigantic golden Cortex in the front lawn

Isn't it more likely that it'll crash on your couch? Ba-dum-dum!
posted by JHarris at 1:55 PM on September 8, 2010

I'm sure it depends on the person but I'm finding myself spending much of my time stalled, trying to remember which button to press on this particular screen or having forgotten exactly what I was doing during the five or six screens it took to get where I currently am, even though after a few hours I'm fairly familiar with it.

The keystrokes are always listed at the bottom of the screen... It's common for people not even to look at the list of possible keys, and then discover something months later that would have saved them lots of time. Like, that you can place multiple walls at once, or that you can select all the material for a bridge/road/wall with shift-enter instead of stone by stone.

I won't say that DF doesn't have a comically bad UI. I am totally the kind of person who will bitch about these minor annoyances, but I guess it's a combination of (1) getting over it, (2) the game beyond the UI is so worth it, (3) it's just some dude's game after all, and (4) it's free, you know. Remove any of those and I revert to a spoiled lazy corporate-teat-sucking whiner.
posted by fleacircus at 2:11 PM on September 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Those are all good and appropriate attitudes to have; what I'm saying is in response to "getting used to it" and "getting over it" - these aren't simply cosmetic issues. Usability of interfaces, which is a big part of UX / user experience, is a sophisticated and scientifically-studied field at this point and there are laboratories where you could objectively show that DF's UI prevents people from fully playing the game, some I'm sure even after extensive experience with it.

It's still a great game, it's just a shame that there's such a major roadblock to good UX in such a great game. (Not as in "Tarn should be ashamed of it", a shame as in unfortunate.) But it's definitely enough of a masterpieces that the better parts shine through.

Also, I'm saying this as a software engineer, not a gamer. I'm not really a gamer at heart and I'm scroogey so I generally only play free games or open source games and make donations to the ones I like best. So as far as games, at least, I'm mostly sucking the indie non-mainstream teat.
posted by XMLicious at 2:54 PM on September 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Those are all good and appropriate attitudes to have; what I'm saying is in response to "getting used to it" and "getting over it" - these aren't simply cosmetic issues. Usability of interfaces, which is a big part of UX / user experience, is a sophisticated and scientifically-studied field at this point and there are laboratories where you could objectively show that DF's UI prevents people from fully playing the game, some I'm sure even after extensive experience with it.

That is actually part of the problem. Tarn Adams doesn't have access to a laboratory studying user experiences, or a quality assurance department, or a legion of paid testers. He's one guy. An incredibly focused and brilliant guy, but still, he doesn't have a whole lot of capital to work with.

If you demand those things from all the software you use, then you'll only ever use the software produced by companies who can pay for it, and mostly the companies that can pay for it care a lot more about appeasing the brain-dead mainstream than producing quirky-wonderful games about dwarves getting eaten by elephants.
posted by JHarris at 3:10 PM on September 8, 2010

Tarn Adams doesn't have access to a laboratory studying user experiences, or a quality assurance department, or a legion of paid testers.

If you'll read my response to you above I talked about some really, really simple things he could do to drastically cut down the percentage of the time people spend messing around with the UI. Getting the same keys to do the same thing across multiple screens is NOT some sort of bleeding-edge monumental project that only wealthy megacorporations could accomplish. You really don't need to portray every slight criticism of DF's UI as if it's some myopic demand that Tarn Adams turn lay pewter into gold or fund an army of a thousand programmers.

The reason I mentioned UI laboratories wasn't because I think Tarn Adams needs to use one, but in response to you guys repeatedly implying that UI issues will be resolved by everyone will just getting used to the interface - that is demonstrably and objectively not true and could be proven in a laboratory, UX analysis and human-computer interaction are a major field of computer science, not some kind of mumbo-jumbo thing that only web designers talk about. We'll all put up with the interface because it's a great game but as I keep reiterating all I'm saying is that it's a shame for such substantial obstacles to exist, many easily dealt with, that may impair many many peoples' enjoyment such a great game.

Also - he may be just one guy but he's one guy who in one particular month this year received more than sixteen thousand dollars in donations to work on this game. (Yeah, that's right: in one month, and that's only the highest-revenue month so far this year.)
posted by XMLicious at 6:05 PM on September 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Let me know when multiplayer Survival happens, in case I miss it. I'm sure one of us will run the MetaFilter Minecraft Survival Server and we will have a gigantic golden Cortex in the front lawn.

As I said above, I too bought Minecraft as a result of this post, but I constantly get confused about the various "modes".

What's "Survival"? Is that just the normal single player mode, where there are zombies and things? The multiplayer mode doesn't have that yet? The game doesn't actually have a "Survival" option, so I'm assuming that's just what people are calling it. And there's Classic, InDev, InInf and Alpha... all the videos I see on YouTube where people are building Mario, and models of the Earth, what are they played in, Classic, or Multiplayer Alpha? It's very hard to penetrate...the website, as far as I've seen, doesn't even offer many useful instructions, like that pressing F5 will get you into 3rd person view.

I'm just having fun in singleplayer mode making a seaside resort with a fleet of boats, and a pretty garden. Considering starting a fabric empire.

Sure as hell beats Second Life.
posted by Jimbob at 8:04 PM on September 8, 2010

More likely, he could wedge an interface in to split off client code, then let the community toil on a better client for free. DF has an awfully active community for a closed-source game.

Well I was going to yell "he should go open source!"...then I realized that (a) open source software famously attracts geeky programmers, not people who are willing to work on UI or other stuff, hence brilliant things like LaTeX, Apache and R and Postgres that don't have interfaces, but things like KDE and Gimp and any Linux video editor or music software that suck ass, and (b) that would totally, totally mess up the game and deprive him of income. Your suggestion may be the best idea... have a core game, developed by Adams that handles all the AI and physics and characters and stuff, and separate clients that connect with an API, that can handle input, and offer some real graphics.
posted by Jimbob at 8:18 PM on September 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

ack. I just played the free online version of Minecraft and it looks awesome but I am about to puke from motion sickness. I may have to stick to Dwarf Fortress after all.
posted by beandip at 8:50 PM on September 8, 2010

it's a shame for such substantial obstacles to exist, many easily dealt with, that may impair many many peoples' enjoyment such a great game ... he may be just one guy but he's one guy who in one particular month this year received more than sixteen thousand dollars in donations to work on this game

So you're saying he'd better adopt your usability guidelines or he'll be stuck at $16k/month? :)

Okay okay, I know what you're saying. But the fact is that many many people DO get over it and get on with actually playing a game anyway. Experienced players want UI stuff fixed too, but it's not penny-ante stuff like inconsistency in a couple menu screens. I want the dwarf inspector screen to show skills sorted by level. I want a full-screen dialog where I can select a skill and get a ranked list of dwarves by that skill, and be able to activate/deactivate the job skill from that same screen. I want to be able to put dwarves into the military from the inspection screen, like in the previous version. I want to be able to easily tell what a lever is linked to.

Personally I think the quirky weird interface fits a quirky weird game, and people who throw an exception at something so surface and early are probably just going to error out on the next weird game difficult they run into. Dwarf Fortress is an ASCII game about dwarves mining and building and drowning and dying. It's philosophy is: "Losing is Fun!" What part of DF is in any way conventional wisdom on how to make a popular, lucrative game?
posted by fleacircus at 9:17 PM on September 8, 2010

In fact, Tarn Adams' 16K month is a far outlier. Most months he gets in the 2-4K range.

Sure it'd be nice if it had a better interface. But really, for the kind of person who generally enjoys Dwarf Fortress, a super-consistent interface. (And in fact, the interface isn't that bad. At least the game does tell you what all the keys do in every instance.)
posted by JHarris at 1:06 AM on September 9, 2010

In fact, Tarn Adams' 16K month is a far outlier. Most months he gets in the 2-4K range.

I paid my ten euro for Minecraft. Then I had a look at Wikipedia, and it claimed that as of the start of September, he's had 100,000 paid memberships. A million euro for a game made of blocks, that's still in alpha. I'm extremely happy for him.
posted by Jimbob at 1:50 AM on September 9, 2010

Damn it to hell, JHarris, you sucked me back in. I had work I needed to do this week.

I had resisted the new version until now...
posted by valkyryn at 7:45 AM on September 9, 2010

Jimbob: I think this Minecraft wiki page on Alpha helps. Alpha single-player is Survival mode. Alpha multi-player will reportedly be Survival or PvP or other things, but it's still in development and buggy. Right now I'm still having enough fun working on a world by myself that I don't wish to try anything multi-player. Eventually? Maybe - but only with some sort of trusted team with a good leader, etc. I'm not just going to show up on some PvP server and fight for my life. I'd rather have a leader and a goal and put my best skills (whatever they may be) to use.

Oh my god. What if ... what if Dwarf Fortress is multiplayer Minecraft? You tell your dorfs to dig and they do it for a while and then wander off ... because they're real people?
posted by komara at 11:28 AM on September 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

Minecraft folks: alert: MetaTalk thread about Minecraft servers wherein cortex discovers the game and geeks out.
posted by komara at 11:59 AM on September 9, 2010

It was just occurring to me today: I wonder if DF's absolutely horrendous interface is completely intentional. The rest of the game is so incredible with such attention to detail, and the interface is, well, the complete opposite. I was thinking that it might be that he's planning a really awesome interface and does not want people to become accustomed to any sort of stop-gap interface he threw together while he was working on the other aspects of the game; so that when he comes out with the "real" interface, people will regard it as a vast improvement no matter what it's like.
posted by XMLicious at 9:17 AM on September 11, 2010

There is a "presentation arc" listed among the near-term arcs. Wikipedia even claims that it's currently in development.
posted by fleacircus at 9:59 AM on September 11, 2010