The ramblings of a madman

Well seeing as I don’t have a job for the moment I’ve been trying my hand at what is called one of the hardest games ever made. Dwarf Fortress. I’m not gonna say I’m pro at it because I’m not by any stretch of the word because lets face it this IS dwarf fortress were talking about. Basically I couldn’t play the vanilla version of it, mainly because I dont wish to learn how to decode the Matrix and help Neo fight. ASCII can seriously go eat a damn dick, I get it it’s the only way you can show shit without my laptop dying. (BTW I am totally running it off of my external hard drive so I can take it anywhere.)

This is how it generally looks:

"I can't even see the Matrix anymore."

No please….just no. Look what I can tell you is I can see the roads, the dwarves the grass and the water. Besides that I’m just as lost as you are on this. So I downloaded a handy pack called: LazyNewbPack it comes with some new tilesets one being Ironhand and while it’s not great you can definitely see things and understand them, well more basic of things. I actually do see into the Matrix on this one and I can pretty much tell whats going on, since it is what I’ve learned off of.

only taken to show the difference I promise.

Oh god. So yea there you go. Dwarf Fortress is at it’s heart a story telling machine, sure you pretty much rule over you’re dwarves and lose in the most horrendous ways possible, but that’s just part of the story. Remember: Losing is fun! I will admit for awhile I was getting furious at my butcher dwarf who wouldn’t kill cats and dogs, even though I would tell him to find a live animal and designate them for slaughter. It was important to keep a dwarf from going insane, which ended up happening because my butcher wouldn’t do his damn job! Oh well I figured all that out now and am very slowly working on the fine points of the game.

Honestly I think when this fort eventually runs into some unforeseen horror which will more than likely slaughter my dwarves to the last (I still don’t know how to raise an army.) that my next fort will be even better, of that I have no doubt.  I have the knowledge now of what to take at the start and what is just plain silly. There is still alot of stuff that I just haven’t figured out yet unfortunetly, and I’m learning that very slowly. but for now I have a thriving fort and I’m having fun trying out different things and just learning how to do shit.

It is suffering though, generally I find myself consumed by it and then its four in the morning. But mah dwarves! It really is fun though, and I know I’ve been beating around the bush about what kind of game it is but thats hard to say…it’s a city builder with RPG elements…but pretty much every thing else is up to you the player. You make the world how you want, your dwarves are strong and if your will is as well, do it AND STRIKE THE EARTH!