


There are plenty of other little mods and improvements made by dedicated players. Kitfox Games (maker of the lovely Shrouded Isle) is helping out with art and music and a few other things. There are “tile packs” available in a variety of sizes and styles that any player can apply to the game to make it easier to follow in fact, the creators of two popular tilesets, Meph and Mike Mayday, were tapped to help make the “official” one, which by the way looks nice. Not that you couldn’t get graphics in other ways - gamers aren’t that masochistic. Here are a few screenshots compared with the old ASCII graphics: Of all the changes Dwarf Fortress has undergone, this is likely the most surprising. So when developers Tarn and Zach Adams announced on their Patreon account that they were planning on ditching the ASCII for actual sprites in a paid premium version of the game to be made available on Steam and indie marketplace itch.io. But you get a feel for it after a few years. You know in The Matrix where they show how the world is made up of a bunch of essentially text characters? It’s basically that, except way more confusing. In the decade and a half this game has been in active, continuous development, perhaps the only thing that hasn’t changed about the game is that it is a maze for the eyes, a mess of alphanumerics and ASCII-based art approximating barrels, dwarves, goblins, and dozens of kinds of stone. It may be hard for anyone who isn’t already familiar with the game and community to understand how momentous this is. But the developers, in a huge shift to the status quo, have announced that the game will not only soon have a paid version on Steam - it’ll have… graphics. The unbelievably rich and complex and legendarily user-unfriendly title has been a free staple of awe and frustration for years. Among the growing field of indie games, one truly stands alone: Dwarf Fortress.
