40d:Challenges

Part of this article was originally taken from the DF forums thread "Goal-Based Dwarf Fortress".

The general goal of Fortress Mode is to survive, acquire wealth, defend your stronghold, and become the capital of your civilization. However, many players find that fighting off repeated sieges and keeping their people alive just isn't enough anymore. They begin to experiment with different sets of objectives, themes, and restrictions in search of more difficulty and fun. These are some goals to attempt or use as inspiration.

Difficult Builds

A sub-optimal embark profile can make the first few years more difficult than they might otherwise be. After a few years, however, immigration, trading, and development of new industries will likely bring your fort up to usual standards. For best results, combine with a restriction.

Diplomacy

• Six dwarves with only social skills
• One skilled dwarf

Six courtiers of the king's court made some ill-advised remarks within earshot of the king, and as a result have been ordered to go found an outpost. They've hired you to make sure they survive. The six nobles only have social skills and refuse to do any work that is beneath them.

Hunting Party

• One marksman/ambusher
• Two camp servants (e.g. one cook/brewer/herbalist, one butcher/tanner/leatherworker/woodcutter)
• Four clients, all dabbling in marksman/ambusher but with primarily civilian skills.

No anvil, lots of hunting dogs ... and a haunted wood. (In a terrifying wood, you may find all the trees & plants are dead, severely reducing long-term prospects.)

Stranded Scout Squad

The only items you can bring weapons, ammo, and armor (no picks). The only skills you can hand out are military. The only animals you can bring are war dogs. See how it goes.

Bandit Camp

• At least 3 marksdwarves.
• Ideally, settle on a hillside, along a canyon or a valley.

Attack and loot every sentient creatures who enter your territory : Goblins & kobolds, but also merchants, diplomats, and even migrants. You can't tell your guys to directly attack allies, but you can build traps linked to a lever (eg. a big pit under the road, with a linked pillar under the pit "roof".) and pull them to kill groups.

Restrictions

Several of the game's features are rightly considered broken. Creating self-imposed limitations on what you can and cannot do may alleviate this.

ASPCA

• No animals

Don't bring any pets. Furthermore, due to the possibility of animals being caught in them, don't build any traps, either. If immigrants bring pets, get rid of them somehow. (Whether "them" refers to the pets or the owners is up to the discretion of local mayors.)

City-States

• No skills
• 7 or multiple of 7 of everything you bring

At the start your dwarves split everything equally and move to 7 different locales that are not interconnected. They have to mine their own rooms, plant their own crops, use their own craft piles. This will probably require a bit of cross-fertilization until you get doors and can lock everyone in, but after that it is every dwarf for him/herself!

Dieting Dwarves

Fishing village

Give your dwarves only the fishing skill and other fishing related skills (like bonecrafting.) Try to survive off a fish only diet. Flood the river and build houses above it so the dwarves can fish through their floors. There will be an extra challenge if the river freezes in the winter.

Carnivore

• No plants or seeds

Only eat strays, pets, and animals you trap and hunt. No farming or plant gathering. Keep all your pets in cages and care for them as little as possible. Eat your dwarves' pets first for an extra challenge. If this upsets your dwarves, ridicule or ignore them. (If you are particularly heartless, you could cage those dwarves as well because anyone that empathizes with animals doesn't deserve any rights either.)

Vegan

In essence, construct an Elven Forest: The Hippy Challenge.

IOGT/AA

• No alcohol

Quite possibly, this is the cruelest challenge that your dwarves can be given. Don't ever brew any alcohol. Build wells instead and watch your now teetotaller dwarves work slower and slower by the season.

Hippy challenge

Peace, man. Don't harm any plants except those you plant yourself. Don't cut down any trees, and don't trade for logs with the filthy humans or dwarves who do. You can trade for plants with the elves, they understand your environmental code. Don't burn any coal, do you know what that does to the environment, man? Never cause any creature's death, so no military, and no lethal traps. You can use cage traps, and either tame the creatures you catch, or release them back into the wild, far from your fort.

For an extra challenge try this in an area with a cave.

Hermit

• No skills
• One pick and no other supplies

A well known and popular challenge. Kill off 6 starting dwarves and any immigrants as they arrive, and try to make a living for the last dwarf. Turn away merchants. If they don't leave, kill them.

Variants

• Keep your starting seven, but no immigrants.
• Selectively admit dwarves based on name, profession, etc.
• Embark with an anvil as well.

Nay, no ponderous stone doors or shining silver arcades, not while I live!

The new king has decided rocks and metals can no longer be used in construction. He'll be overthrown shortly, but in the meantime construct your fortress without them.

Variants

• Make everything that you can out of wood. That means nothing underground, though you may excavate to make areas above-ground. Bonus points for bringing no wood at the start and/or going to a treeless area.
• Construct an above-ground fortress made entirely out of glass. Bonus points for not using magma or using clear and crystal glass exclusively.
• Build with soap. Soap is in the form of bars, and so can be used as a building material just like any other type of bar. Show those elven traders just how much you despise their philosophies by building your trading outpost out of stuff derived from dead trees and dead animals. Too many cats? Build with cat tallow soap.
• Choose one type of rock, one type of metal, one type of gem, and one type of wood. Your whole fortress must be made from these items. You may further narrow it down to bones, skin, and other from one animal, one type of glass, etc. If any artifacts are made using a forbidden item, chuck into lava, a river, or a chasm (you may need to throw the dwarf who made it in as well, since he will throw a tantrum).

Luddite

• No mechanics or mechanisms
• No machines

Traps and moving bridges are forbidden, water moved for farming must be accomplished by hand.

Master Of One

• All starting dwarves can have one skill and one skill only
• No changes are allowed on any dwarf's labor screen
• All immigrants must stay with the profession(s) they arrive with
• All peasants must be activated into the military

Alternatively,

• All starting dwarves can have one skill and one skill only
• No changes are allowed on any dwarf's labor screen, except that hauling may be disabled. You may not enable hauling.
• All immigrants must stay with the profession(s) they arrive with, and only military that immigrates recruited may be military.

The Mad Butcher

_{(this requires a tiny amount of editing to the raws)}

• Edit Dwarf Fortress\Raw\object\Creature_Domestic.txt. Remove the tag [BUTCHERABLE_NONSTANDARD] from cats and dogs.
• Start with a normal build except:
  • One dwarf should be a dedicated butcher/tanner.
  • Buy minimal food.
  • Bring as many puppies or kittens as possible.
• Drop all your puppies or kittens into cages or into animal pits as soon as possible.
• Dig a shaft 10 or more Z-levels deep, mark the top an animal pit.
• At the bottom of the shaft set up a butcher shop, a tanner shop, a bedroom, and some food and leather stockpiles.
• Set it all up so that the mad butcher cannot escape.
• As you need food, begin selecting animals to be dropped into your deep pit, next to the butcher.
• To retrieve the food and leather without releasing the butcher, either have him dump it down another hole or use an airlock system.
• See how long a single butcher, butchering splattered kittens, can keep your fortress fed! Cooking and farming are cheating... raw meat for everyone!

No death

Try to play the game for as long as possible without losing any dwarf (so no death, but also no failed mood, no kidnapping, no beating to death, etc.) A simple challenge, yet harder than what it seems to be.

Some players consider this to be the opposite of the intent of Dwarf Fortress. So naturally, it must be done.

Megaprojects

Instead of deliberately inhibiting yourself, create a wonder of the dwarven world that would make the Mountainhomes proud. Be sure to upload it to the http://mkv25.net/dfma/ Dwarf Fortress Map Archive when it's finished.

Temple

Designing a temple to Armok. Aesthetics count - the god will be very angry if there are no stained-glass windows and domed ceilings carved with frescoes. To gain more favor, make regular sacrifices and keep the fountains and rivers red with blood.

The great brewery

Disaster has struck the kingdom. A strangely glowing ‼peasant‼ visited the greatest brewery of the empire, and as a result the whole thing exploded. No time for weeping — create its successor, a fort dedicated to alcohol production, and get the alcohol supplies flowing! Try to make the widest variety possible, and give or trade it to the dwarven caravan each year.

Castle

Build a castle, greater than anything built by human, elf or dwarf. This is highly time consuming if you want it to be a good castle. There must be floor indoors, and no underground constructions except for mining operations and cellars. For an even greater challenge, build a gigantic tower in the middle, where the nobles stay.

Wealth

The kingdom's coffers need lining, so hop to! Found a fort and start accumulating wealth as fast as possible. Attain as high a fortress value as possible, and make most of your wealth into coins for the vault. Try to beat your record for one year, two years, or five years.

Biodome

All material, seeds, food, tools, and dwarves must be in the fortress within one year. Then, seal up the entrance. Any new immigrants... well, they might be in trouble. Survive for as long as possible!

No chasms/underground rivers/magma vents allowed.

Underwater fortress

Encase your entire fortress in water! Your fortress should be watersealed: surrounded by water against all walls and the top of the fortress.

• Bonus: Build all water-touching walls/roof in clear glass!
• Bonus: Use magma instead of water!
• Bonus: Build it in the ocean or a non-freezing lake
• Bonus: Build large glass domes that encase the fortress. A dome 20 tiles wide should be 20 z-levels tall. Which may be hard to cover in water.
• Mod: Make your dwarves amphibious and include airlocks between the wet fortress and the dry.

Mountain audit/core sample

Start in a mountainous area and strip mine everything down, down, down to ground level. Stockpile everything, and calculate the mountain's composition. For kicks, try not excavating one tile on each z-level. You'll be left with one enormous core sample.

Santa Claus

Get ten thousand toys built and offered to caravans yearly. Optionally, build ten thousand toys, fetch them in adventure mode and deliver them to every single city of the world.

Graveyard Master

Ever dwarf deserves a decent resting place:

• Build a tomb for ever dwarf that dies, the more dwarves you manage to bury the better.
• Tombs must be rooms with exactly 5x5 of size and 1 of height, with only one entrance tile that must be closed by a door.
• Tombs must have all its surfaces engraved.
• Tomb must contain at least 4 statues.
• Once complete, the door must be locked and the tomb must not be ever entered again.

How high can you go?

Construction, construction, construction! Just how big a tower can you build? Out of glass maybe, clear glass? Steel? Pump water to the top? Make your tower a pinnacle of achievement and stun humans, elves and goblins alike - for they know nothing of construction and engineering like dwarves do!

Computing

Can your dwarves build the Antikythera mechanism? Can you program the fortress to play tic-tac-toe? More details at computing.

Doomsday Clock

Build a water or mechanical clock whose final state triggers the support which holds your fortress up or a megabeast out. See how much wealth you can achieve before the clock runs out.

• Bonus: Create something that resets itself, as well as purging the map, so that you can reuse the same fortress over and over.
• Super-Bonus: Create something that involves pressure plates and a small kitten, when the pressure plates are hit in the right order, your map ends. Toss the kitten in and hope for the best.

World Domination

Pretend you are an evil mastermind. Now come up with some device or machine to render the world (or at least your portion of the map) totally unliveable, aside from, of course, your hidden lair.

Suggestions:

• Flood the map with water/magma (may require building walls around the edge of the map)
• Build an "Earthquake Machine" (the entire map is supported by a single support, which is connected to a lever)
• Build an extensive holding cell network for "scientific purposes". Fill it with megabeasts and elephants in secret. Have a lever that lets everything free to feed on the general population.

Casting

Who needs to construct giant statues?! We need ours made from natural walls, however, we want it above ground level as well. For casting your goal is to create some giant structure out of natural obsidian walls through the use of an extremely elaborate scaffold of lava and water pools and screw pumps. When you are finished, just deconstruct the scaffolding and smooth/engrave the statue as you go. Just imagine the bridge over that chasm, now complete with two giant dwarf statues on either side to strike fear into all who enter and to show them the power of your fortress.

The Monolith

As the inevitability of a fortress-wide mental breakdown looms over every single fortress why not have something that alludes to that precipice of insanity. Like the book and feature film, 2001: A Space Odyssey you must have a Monolith. This has to be made from obsidian and have a completely smooth surface (You cannot build it from blocks) You can have it be any size as long as it is outside, at least 2 tiles thick to ensure there are no pillar tiles, and has about the same ratio of width to height as it does in the movie (1:4:9) to make it as close to the real thing as possible. It would be preferable to make it large so that it seems to be dominating the landscape and your dwarves' psyche. The bigger the better.

• If the rock obsidian strata isn't deep enough in parts to make a monolith feasible consider casting a monolith with a large rectangular block in the exact same dimensional criteria as above.

Ceremonial Sacrifices

Build an amazingly complex or spectacular killing device. A shaft that extends across the entire Z-plane is a good start. A constantly shifting maze of atomsmasher drawbridges is another. For the minimalist, a very confined space where you will drop a dwarf wrestler along with the gobbos once in a while. Perhaps a waterslide that carries your prisoner all the way down into a chasm? Whatever your idea, build it and dedicate your fort to the construction, maintenance and improvement of your device.

Do not kill any of your invaders. Capture them using cage traps, and them set them off in your device. Keep a record of the number of victims you drop into it.

Space Ship

Create a giant space ship fit for space travel. It should be able to hold about 100 dwarves for at least 2 years.

BONUS: Use exploding booze as ignitable fuel.

BONUS: Make a removable ramp for boarding.

BONUS: Make the water for the 2 years be on the ship using removable pumps.

BONUS+: Make it totally self sufficient. (Make an internal system which pumps the water supply through a room every few years to muddy the floor. Plant seeds in the mud that's now on the floor. Manage your consumption to maintain self sufficiency.)

BONUS+: Make it all out of steel.

FUN: Let it be held by a single support, ignite the booze, remove the support an let it "fly".

EVEN BETTER: Drop it down a chasm.

Aqueducts

For some reason, a noble was harmlessly pulling a lever when suddenly, magma flooded the river and exploded the booze! The king requires your band of seven to build a great aqueduct to bring water to the capital. Start with supports, and build up your aqueduct until it is 10 z-levels high!

BONUS: Start over a human town, build a wall around it, pump water through the aqueduct and into it!

Dwarf like an Egyptian

• Build a pyramid of epic proportion.

Build a legendary dwarven pyramid, with a corridor running to a central tomb for your favourite noble. Perhaps build it entirely out of glass? Or try to make the top twist in a bit of a swirl. Alternatively, make your entire fortress inside a pyramid, which stretches below the ground.

Skull collector

What proves the might of a civilization better than a hall full of skulls?

• Try to collect as many skulls as you can during your fortress life, and put then in a special skulls-only storage. The more skulls the better.

BONUS: Cover all the skulls in blood, and make the stockpile also a throne room.

SUPERBONUS: Also fill the throneroom with kittens.

Moria

Build a huge hall - at least 3 z-levels high. Leave few pillars symmetrically placed in the hall (don't build them, carve them out). Smooth and possibly engrave everything (not only the lowest z-level!). Then build thin bridge (not the bridge building, just a thin piece of rock to walk on) above magma - support it with bauxite supports connected to a lever (bauxite mechanisms needed in support). Destroy stone holding it at the both ends and replace it with floor hatches (so when you pull the lever it all goes down). After that build a bridge above the chasm. When it's all done seal your dwarves deep inside in safe place and get invaded by goblins. At the same time dig out HFS. Lead the HFS across the both bridges and then collapse the second one when one of the champions clashes with it (it doesn't matter that the champion has killed the HFS with one hit).

Crematory Fortress

• Requires a magma pipe and bauxite.

Build a temple structure above a magma pipe and engrave every available surface. The temple should be as opulent as possible. In the temple, build a retracting bridge over a hole in the floor, and designate a coffin stockpile on it. Whenever a dwarf dies, build a bauxite or other magma-proof coffin for him, place it on the bridge, and retract it, committing his body to the fiery blood of the mountain.

Note: At the time of writing, the editor isn't sure if coffins falling off the bottom of the map count as being 'lost.' If they do, channel out a magma pool and put the temple above that to avoid tantrums.

Swiss Precision

Build a working clock. The clock should accurately track DF days, months, and years.

Bonus Points:

• If the clock has a mechanical effect in the fortress proper to announce new days
• If the clock creates seasonally appropriate effects at the change of months and/or seasons.
• If the clock is used to aid in the operation of the fortress in addition to its role as a clock (automatically controls farmland irrigation at particular times, automatically opens the blast doors floodgates in time for merchants, etc...).
• If the clock governs the schedule of a working rail station (which is always on time). (Definitions of 'working' and 'rail station' are subject to player imagination).

But don't worry about the bonus points, a precision time device should be hard enough.

The cube

Play a fort as usual, but emphasize catching goblins in cages to support and fill this construction: Construct a series of rooms in a symmetrical fashion, all connected to eachother with appropriate doors. Of course, enough rooms to make a maze-like structure, and if you feel like it, an exit that is hard to reach. Fill a bunch of the rooms with traps and pressureplates. Then fill one room with 4-6 goblins (preferably in cages, opened by an outside lever), release them and watch them randomly walk around the rooms dying to traps and whatnots.

• Bonus: Do multiple story maze (3d-maze)
• Bonus: Use pressureplates to open/close the exit randomly; otherwise, all the goblins will just follow the shortest route to the exit.

Land battleship

Turn your moutain into a huge battlestation, complete with crew quarters, decks, command centre, cantina, and a large collection of deadly weapons : Batteries of marksdwarves, ballista cannons, catapults, but also lava projector or remote explosive devices (ie, cave-ins in a part of the map triggered by a lever). Dig and mine the mountain so it end looking like a real battleship, with nothing but a plain around (so you could build it from nothing on a plain, or destroy a mountain, choice is yours). The battleship has to be autonomous, and dwarves shouldn't wander outside it.

• Bonus: The weaponry cover every tile of the map (ie, everything who enter the map, from every side, can be shot)
• Bonus: Build several other ships, maybe dedicated to a special production ? (food, ammo etc.)
• Bonus: Each crew member has a civil and military formation, and when the enemy arrive, almost every economic activity is stopped and all hands to quarters !
• Mega Bonus: After building your Ship(s), flood the surrounding countryside.

Themed fortress

The middle ground between restrictions and megaprojects. A theme gives your fort a sense of purpose, while usually being less time-consuming than a megaproject. Additionally, many themes can be combined together.

Fort Geneva

• Build only nonlethal (cage) traps
• Sentient creatures (Goblins, etc.) are to be considered prisoners of war and treated humanely
• Suggested provisions for prisoners: a bed, a personal cell, a commons area, aboveground exercise yard, and the clothes the creature was wearing when captured
• Inspiration: Geneva Conventions

Immigration and customs enforcement

• One miner/mason/architect
• One woodcutter/carpenter/architect
• Five military dwarves

No anvil, lots of food, in a canyon - spend the first year building fortifications to interdict traffic. Immigrants can build a town around you, but your original dwarves remain dedicated to their mission.

Luxury Hotel

Build a hotel with large luxurious rooms

• Starting 7 dwarfs will be the only dwarfs that can work.
• All immigrants will be treated like nobles and will have all labors turned off.
• Provide places to throw parties.
• BONUS: Make a large fountain or waterfall centerpiece.
• BONUS: Keep the hotel up to code with health and safety.
  • If any of the customers die or get kidnapped you must abandon the hotel.
• MEGA BONUS: Make the entire hotel out of ice.

Segregation

Make two separate, working, independent fortresses. All the men go in one, all the women in the other. Married dwarves are excluded from both.

No singles

As soon as you get a married couple with an immigration wave, kill all single dwarves. Continue to do so with all immigration waves. Try to lose no children.

Live up to your name

Go with the random name chosen by the game for your fortress and group. Make a handicap/play style based on your group's name, and a personal goal based on your fortress name. For example, if your group is The Iron Fist, your military must consist only of wrestlers in iron armor. If your fortress is Prisonportals, you must capture and jail as many goblins/creatures as possible, and all doors in the prison must be made of glass.

Equaland

Equaland: where we are all Equal, besides the Almighty Leader. Each dwarf must have their own bedroom, dining room, etc. Make a large tower in the center of your perfect land and put "The Leader" in it. Then make some kind of mechanism to kill the dwarves inside their dwelling, complete with levers so that The Leader can choose who dies next. If dwarves have one too many friends kill them, if they eat too much food kill them, etc.

This. Is. SPARTAAAA!

At least 50% of your dwarves should be military 100% of the time, and train in spears, shield use and wrestling. All other dwarves are "helots" and shouldn't be given any skills; they can be pressed into the military during times of war, but given no equipment or at most a bare minimum of inferior weapons. Do not use crossbows or traps. Kill maimed dwarves.

Refuse trade with caravans, instead attacking them if possible. Whenever a messenger appears promptly enter aggressive negotiations and then throw them down the well screaming "THIS IS SPAARRTAAAAA..." at your monitor. Forbid the use of gold and silver, etc., the making of crafts, and the smoothing of walls or any other task that makes your fortress "beautiful".

Don't create chainmail or plate armour. Brew only wine.

Note that the above suggestions are modelled on the popular movie 300, which was historically inaccurate. For a more "realistic dwarven Sparta", try reading the wiki article on the real Sparta

Commune

All your dwarves have all labors enabled. Dwarves sleep only in barracks, and no dwarf, including administrators, can be assigned any personal rooms. If the nobles find this upsetting, don't hesitate to make the corridors run red with the blood of the bourgeoisie. Obviously, don't mint any coins either. (Dwarves can take turns with wood cutting and mining, since they can't have both enabled simultaneously.)

Government in Exile

All dwarves are either nobles or in the military. The only useful dwarves you'll have will be your broker, manager, mayor, bookkeeper, and dungeon master. If you can survive until the sheriff arrives, transfer your entire military into the fortress guard. With a little luck, and a lot of exported roasts, you too can rule without proletarian interference.

Stay Awhile, and Listen

Create a world with a lot of large caves and make it possible to see them on the embark map. Build a Fortress near a large cave with a lot of big angry monsters in it (hopefully not too close) and loot lying around that becomes a frontier town for adventurers seeking to clear out the nearby 'dungeon'.

Train up dwarves to become parties of heroes who will descend into the dungeon for fame and fortune (or more likely severed limbs and death). Parties should only be about four or less. You can defend your fortress but luring monsters out into your siege engines is cheating. Give yourself points for large monsters killed and treasure claimed.

Variants

• Only solo adventurers are allowed to enter the dungeon.
  
• Only use 'Thieves' to steal loot and create traps inside the dungeon.

Noblesse requiro

Build your fortress to please the sick, twisted, evil nobles needs. Build a execution chamber for your rowdy dwarves and build a torture chamber for your dungeon master, using your imagination! Use this to punish pathetic dwarves who dare rebel. Build palaces for your nobles and pamper them in every way. Pour most of your resources into a beautiful place for nobles to live whilst letting your dwarves sleep in tiny, pathetic rooms. The only exception is your mayor, who rises from the rank of the disgusting peons. He must live in squalor as well, preferably next to noble rooms to so the nobles can taunt him. score yourself according to how happy your nobles are, and your worth.

Humanlike Fortress

Pretend you're a filthy above-ground dwelling humie.

• Build a town wall.
  • Only hovels and farms outside the town walls.
• House your dwarves in small town homes
  • 5-10 dwarves per house (they had pretty big families back in the day)
  • Upstairs bedrooms, small dining room, maybe a single level basement.
• House your workshops according to profession, not convenience.
• Build warehouses for stockpiles, and set guards outside them.
• Create a keep, with its own wall, barracks, treasury, etc.
  • House your nobles within the keep.
• Create a market square.
• Create a main street from the town wall to the market square and/or keep. Well-paved blocks, statues and decorative shubbery are a must.
• No underground connections between different areas.
• For obtaining stone, metal, etc. a mine may be built, but must have separate entrance from other buildings. It can be outside the fortress, but must not connect to the interior, or vice versa.
• BONUS: Make a fountain at least 3 Z squares high in the center of the keep, with a +statue+(or better) on top of it.
• BONUS: The fortress is built around a human town.
• BONUS: Town has an awesome inn operating in same building as the brewery. REGULAR parties there, or it isn't good enough!
• BONUS: All booze is kept within a town inn.
• BONUS: An above ground farm complete with crops and cows,mules,horses,etc.
• BONUS+: Modify the raws and actually use humans to make the fort.

Sitting on trees

Build up your fortress on the top of giant trees (that you have to construct from wood at first). Don´t build anything underground. Show that snobbish elves that dwarves are better in EVERYTHING - even in sitting on trees.

• BONUS: Build your tree-city at a place with low (or even no) vegetation.