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Environments are populated with animals based on habitat ecology, and all the varying wood-producing plants in the game feature accurate material densities. Erosion will shape the landscape as the clock wears on, mountains will create rain shadows, distance from the equator affects temperatures-even soil drainage is taken into account. The enormous scale of this creation might appear random, but Tarn’s program uses real geologic and meteorological equations to generate these biomes. More lies under the crust, each tiny biome’s individual square unit hiding layers and layers of varying types of ore and minerals, subterranean aquifers, and pools of magma. ASCII symbols flash and mutate as continents spring up before you-boreal forests, tropical jungles, mountains, parched deserts, volcanoes, islands, oceans, and tundras, each with its own corresponding character. Dwarf Fortress may look as if it was made in the mid-’80s, but the process of generating this world can eat up half of a modern computer’s CPU power. This world is utterly unique to your game alone. When Dwarf Fortress begins, after a brief, goofy intro, you witness the creation of an entirely new world.
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There’s a weird dichotomy there.” How, as Stephens wonders, could a game so influential and groundbreaking, downloaded by millions, remain so obscure?Ī quick click on the brothers’ website, which looks like it’s from 1997, is all it takes to download Dwarf Fortress, playable on Windows, Mac, or Linux. As far as arts and culture go, they’re doing something very unique and valuable and receiving very little recognition for it outside of the online community and game industry. “These guys deserve so much more attention than they get,” Stephens says emphatically, “especially from the community around them, the local Seattle community. Dwarf Moot is one of the rare video-game events sponsored by King County’s cultural services agency 4Culture-a hopeful sign for Stephens, given that the event’s other objective is to turn locals onto a game that he says has gone criminally unheard-of. Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering and an early fan of the game, will deliver the introduction. The game is still only in version 0.43.īut on June 11, in honor of that anniversary, Kinnon Stephens, a video-game developer and DF player since 2007, is organizing Dwarf Moot, a big blowout at the Mox Boarding House in Bellevue, to properly pay tribute to the Adams brothers’ achievement. Among its many documented imitators is Minecraft, which, behind Tetris, is the second highest-selling game of all time.Īpproaching the 10th anniversary of Dwarf Fortress’ release, the brothers say they haven’t had any weepy, reflective moments yet-after all, there are millions of things left to work on. It would be more of a shock if at least one person hadn’t seen God after staring into the byzantine depths of what’s widely accepted as “the most complex video game ever made.”Īcross the video-game industry, developers have analyzed, dissected, and studied Dwarf Fortress as if it were a holy text, its resulting influence creating “more millionaires than I can count,” Tarn says without a hint of malice. That someone derived spiritual enlightenment from Dwarf Fortress actually isn’t entirely surprising. “We get lots of weird e-mails,” Zach, 40, says with a shrug. In the guy’s message, he said he started feeling that sort of reincarnation-cycle type of thing, you know? I think they phrased it something like, ‘Life is dust.’” “Everything dies in the game, eventually. “There’s not, like, just a starting and end point and ‘Yay! You’ve saved the thing!’ and it’s over,” Tarn, 38, tells me while sitting in his messy Silverdale apartment flooded with hundreds of loose papers, scores of academic textbooks, cat toys, and disassembled board games.
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According to the stranger, the game’s unique mechanics helped illuminate the truthfulness of one of Buddhism’s core tenets: Life is suffering, because life is impermanent. The man wrote that Dwarf Fortress, the computer game the brothers developed together, had caused him to convert to Buddhism. In 2009, Tarn and Zach Adams received an e-mail from a stranger.