Publishing on my dead blog that I have not written in for years. Will we make more videos? Will we make at least ten for season 1? Will anyone watch and subscribe?
Nobody knows. But I must try.
In this episode we do a relatively uneventful playthrough of dwarf fortress where I help DJLaoD on his base. Note I am not that much more knowledgeable about dwarf fortress, having only just started recently. Nothing too exciting happens, except for our exciting back and forth banter.
I been wanting to play dwarf fortress for years, after having read so much about it. Ten years ago I downloaded it, created a world, tried to follow along with the tutorial on DF wiki. There was a section on how to dig a stairway down into the earth, and a wall of text describing how up/down stairs worked. I couldn't figure it out and promptly gave up for another decade. In retrospect the up/down stairs is not that complicated.
However, after reading the O Reilly dwarf fortress book and the PeridexisErrant's DF Walkthrough, I have no idea why the DF wiki back then started off with up/down stairs. It made way more sense for any tutorials to start off with immediately excavating rooms instead of directing the player to dig down. There's enough to do without having a brand new player figure out that dwarf fortress is a 3D game that you navigate/manage via 2D z-level cross sections.
So after the traumatizing experience, I abandoned dwarf fortress for almost a decade. Since that time, I switched from slinging code on a Microsoft tech stack to Linux, where I grew far more comfortable with a command line interface. I downloaded angband and began to get comfortable and even love ASCII interfaces. But it still seemed too daunting to play. This year though, I decide it was now or never. Especially because my wife was pregnant and if I didn't at least figure out the basics before the kid popped out, it'd probably be another decade before I overcame the dread of overcoming the learning curve.
So while on a vacation to Spain, I purchased the O Reilly Dwarf Fortress guide ebook and read it on the flight there and back. Upon my return, I felt like I had a solid enough grasp of the starting mechanics and began. I followed the book as close as possible, supplementing it with PeridexisErrant's excellent walkthrough guide. This time around, I downloaded lazy newb pack. The name made it sound like it was optional, however, the online guides made it clear that this was mandatory. I soon learned why.
I found a nice safe area with low savagery, lots of trees, a river, a warm climate, and a nearby hill with which I could start mining out my starting area. Pretty soon I had a dormitory setup, a trade depot, and some basic workshops, a still for booze, a pasture, and some farm plots. For my first playthrough, I didn't use any tileset, and stuck with ASCII so I could revel in all its glory, beauty, and badassery.
A years into the game I had a few dozen migrants. I had expanded below to a second floor housing a tavern, noble quarters, sleeping areas for the common rabble, a kitchen area, temple, library, and bar. The third floor contained stockpiles and metalsmithing workshops. The fourth floor contained what would be the new noble quarters, that contained fancier and bigger rooms.
During this time one of my dwarves entered into a strange mood. But he needed yarn, and I didn't have any! Apparently this needed wool sheared from one of three animal types. An alpaca was an acceptable source of wool, but I only had only just rangled a baby alpaca into my pasture. So my dwarf went mad and left the fortress, gibbering in the wilderness before dying of starvation and dehydration. Sadly, a few months later, his wife had given birth to a baby.
This was one of those emergent moments that Dwarf Fortress was renowned for. It made me feel sad. And then it got worse. A werecoyote appeared and immediately attacked a nearby hunter. He slashed and clawed at the hunter, tearing open a gaping wound in the hunter's leg. By pure luck or desperation, my hunter landed a critical hit headshot on the werecoyote. He was brutally crippled and maimed and could no longer walk. I quickly forgot about him as I hastily began reading the tutorial section on building a military so I would be more prepared in the future.
I suddenly remembered my hunter and began looking up how to construct a hospital to treat his wounds. I began carving out a hospital section on the ground floor. And then he turned feral.
He bit two citizens before being dispatched. At this point after googling frantically I realized that werecoyotes infected dwarves if their bite managed to pierce flesh. CRAP. I had two infected. One was a miner, and the other was a broker. I quickly googled various ways to kill dwarves. I decided I would wall in the miner, who was crippled and unable to move. I did so but then due to how dwarves construct stuff, I realized I had walled him in with another one of my dwarves. This one was a dwarf who had built my first artifact ever in the fortress. I didn't have the heart to sacrifice him, and ordered the walls torn down.
Later, this infected dwarf slept in his bedroom with his wife. Again, I had a chance to wall him in forever, but didn't have the heart to sacrifice his wife as well. As I would soon find out, such idealistic decisions would cost my fortress dearly.
Meanwhile the broker was happily frollicking around my fortress and I did not have any answers.
Frantically, I tried to build an "atom smasher". A drawbridge will smash anything beneath it once lowered. Using this mechanic, a death chamber can be built by having a dwarf pull a switch conveniently placed next to the drawbridge on repeat, and then designating only that dwarf to be able to pull the switch. But I struggled ordering my infected dwarves to go and pull the switch. They wanted to get drunk instead (Apparently, utilizing burrows or assigning the dwarf to a squad and using move command is the right way to do it). Before I knew it, it was a full moon again. The miner that I did not wish to wall in with his wife became feral and immediately tore into a baby, ripping it to shreds, bashing it against the floor over and over. The miner was finally taken down, but not before inflicting terrible, terrible damage.
Meanwhile the broker went on a rampage as well. She too targeted a baby, Erush's baby, the widow who had already lost her husband. Erush, a ranger rushed to help, but was helpless as the broker tore into the baby, who cried out for "mama" before its skull was crushed. Erush fought valiantly, but was taken down by the broker's superior grappling skills and then maimed to death. As I read the combat logs (hitting r in the logs) and the list of combat (by hitting a for announcements) i felt sick to my stomach. Multiple dead babies, children, and civilians, and many more infected. Worse, the broker had lived through the carnage and even commented about how awful the carnage was.
I tried and failed again to get the infected under the atom smasher. But before I knew it the full moon came and a horrific nightmare scene unfolded as feral children began tearing into adults. At this point there were too many infected and dead to keep track of. Corpses were strewn about the fortress and dragged to corpse stockpiles outside by dazed and traumatized dwarves. One more full moon cycle and I only had three dwarves left alive, all infected. At this point I toyed with the idea of having a werecoyote only fortress, but decided the logistics of making sure dwarves got infected but not killed was too much trouble. I abandoned the fort in disgust.
There are few times in video games where it was able to elicit such an emotional and visceral response from me. I was sick to the stomach as I read the combat logs of the baby crying out for mom as the werecoyote killed it, the mother being unable to defend her newbown infant. In fact, the few times I had such a strong reaction were during scripted cutscenes in game, never before in a game where everything was procedurally generated.
I understand now firsthand the appeal of the game, but I'm a long way from mastering it. At first, I was pissed off about losing and didn't consider it fun (the game's motto is "Losing is fun"). But then I realized that you can reclaim an abandoned fort and basically resume where you left off (stockpiles are gone and items are strewn about everywhere, but no big deal). Now this was fun! Not wanting to lose my work, I reembarked back to Deepnumber of Weeds. The three surviving infected dwarven werecoyotes were gone! I quickly cleared out all the scattered items, piled up the corpses, and began excavating a vast underground tomb to commemorate the original citizens.
My new dwarves were traumatized by all the gore and limbs and body parts scattered everywhere, but they set about grimly to their task. Ghosts of the fallen dwarves haunted them, horrifying many, but my new settlers were resilient. Pretty soon it became a bustling metropolis again of over a hundred dwarves. Still, I look out to the horizon and await the return of any werecoyotes. This time I will be ready. Or maybe not. Probably not. I think the atom smasher is working now.
I first read Shadow Innsmouth by HP Lovecraft as a kid in high school. It was an intense and riveting tale of horror, and I finished it in one setting. Since then, I've been a huge fan of HP Lovecraft. He's one of my favorite authors of all time, and I'm not just talking about horror either. His enduring and legendary legacy, the Cthulhu mythos, has far reaching tentacles that spread across all the nethermost regions between time and space, making its unnameable, unspeakable, and horrific presence known in all sorts of pop culture settings. So when I saw the computer game, Call of Cthulhu, at the store, I bought it immediately on impulse. It was published by Bethesda, a company that makes numerous homages to Lovecraft in its games, so I figured it'd be a good purchase.
I was not disappointed. Words cannot describe how ecstatic I was when part way through the game, I realized I was reliving the motel escape sequence described in his short story, Shadow over Innsmouth. I was frantically trying to lock doors and bar them with furniture, all in order to buy time for my escape. Playing through the game, it was obvious that the developers knew their material quite well.
EDIT: This post was made years ago, and abandoned because I was trying to come up with the words to describe what an epic homage this game was. A decade later, I learned to lower expectations and just type whatever :)
Imagine waking up in the middle of the night in your crappy hotel. You are in a backwater town with weird degenerate looking humans that have pale fishlike skin and big bulbous eyes. You get dirty stares and it is made clear you are not welcome. You spend the night in the motel and wake up to hear someone trying to open the door to your room. Panicked, you silently walk over to make sure you aren't hearing things. Realizing there are multiple people outside, you slap the deadbolt on and then slide a book case over to block the entrance. Now your mystery assailants know you are up, and begin pounding down the door. You escape out the side doors, and you can hear them trying those doors as well. You slam some furniture onto the front door of the connecting side room as well. But you realize now that all the rooms are connected via side door, and they are all being broken down. Frantically you see your only hope of escape - out the window. Quickly you make it onto the windowsill and frantically try to find a way down.
This is the heartpounding scene in the short story, Shadow over Innsmouth, and the game version of this delivered. Also in this game are mother hydra, shoggoths, dagon (or one of his spawn), and other Cthulhu mythos monsters.
The best part of this horror game is that it sticks with the feel of a Lovecraft novel. Lovecraft was all about the hopelessness of humanity in an uncaring and insane universe. The bleak atmosphere is captured perfectly, and the frailty of the human mind unequipped to deal with these horrors is modeled via an insanity mechanic. Vision blurs, movement becomes like the slurred speech of a drunkard, and become insane enough and you commit suicide. This is all canon.
The only complaint I had is that I was not able to beat the game, it seemed glitched. There is a final escape sequence but not enough time to complete it. After googling I confirmed that it was buggy, and no patch was released, at least a decade ago. I guess this is a good excuse to replay the game.
