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Dwarf Fortress:About
Dwarf Fortress is an ASCII game which includes both a roguelike adventure mode and a city management mode similar to Dungeon Keeper. It has a very steep learning curve, partly due to its ASCII graphics, but also due to the fact thatit is one of the most complex games ever released. Dwarf Fortress is completely free. Before you play, you must generate a world to play in, which persists until you create a new one. World generation can be time consuming, even on modern computers, but be patient. It's worth it.
Dwarf Fortress has three major game modes and a fourth non-game mode:
- Dwarf Fortress: In this mode you manage a number of dwarves whose task is to create a fortress.
- Reclaim fortress: Once you have created and abandoned/lost a fortress, you can take a band of military dwarves to reclaim it from the monsters that inhabit it.
- Adventure: In this mode you explore the world in a fashion similar to Rogue, Nethack, or Angband. In adventure mode you can uncover details about your world's legends.
- Legends: In the fourth mode you can read more about the legends of your world, provided you've discovered them through adventuring.
An important part of Dwarven Fortress is that it creates a randomly generated, persistent world for you to play in. (The world is only "on" when you are actually playing in it.) However, when you die in either the adventure or fortress modes, your next game will be in the same world, albeit a few days later. You can visit your old fortress, or get revenge on the monster that killed your adventurer. If your fortress or your adventurer had done anything of particular note, there's a chance that the game will generate a legend for them, which you can read about in the Legends section, provided you've discovered enough information about the legend.
The first alpha version was released on the 8th of August 2006 after nearly 4 years of development (it was started in October of 2002). If you are interested in the history of the development of the game you can look at the development log.