v0.31:Stonegears/Starting the game

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Running, loading and saving

(((LAUNCHING THE GAME)))

SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER

Dwarf Fortress will start in a window titled "Dwarf Fortress". There are several options to choose from, the current choice highlighted in white, which can be selected with ↑ and ↓. The one you want, Continue Playing, is the one you want, since a pre-existing game has been created for you. Simply press Enter.

SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER

On this screen you get to choose which saved game you want to play. Since there's only one, the only thing you can is hit Enter to load it. Loading the game can take several second or more, depending on the speed of your computer. There will be no progress bar or clock/hourglass animation to indicate progress. When the game is loaded the window will look like this:

SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER

At any time you want to save the game, you can press Esc from the main menu to get the game options screen; if you aren't at the main menu just keep pressing Esc until you are. The game options screen (which can be exited with Esc) looks like:

SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER

Use ↓ to select Save Game, then press Enter. The game will take several seconds to save (again, with no progress indication) then will return to the first screen you saw. You can then use ↑ or Page Down to select Quit and then Enter to exit the game.

Note that if you kill the Dwarf Fortress application without saving then all progress you've made since your last save will be lost. You can use this to your advantage if you want to undo some mistake, like one of your dwarfs dying.

The main screen

Okay, back to the main screen. The game is paused, as indicated by the *PAUSED* in the upper left-hand corner, so you're free to take your time.

SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER

The left third of the screen shows a closeup view of your fortress site, the middle third shows the main menu, indicating which commands can be used by which keys, and the right third shows a zoomed-out map of your fortress site, with an X indicating the part of the map you're looking at in the left third of the screen. You can cycle through hiding or showing the menu and map by repeatedly pressing Tab.

The closeup view on the left shows a grid of tiles; each dwarf or creature in the game takes up one tile (see the notes section for weirdness on tile size). Your fortress site is 96 tiles from north to south and 96 tiles from west to east. This size is unchangeable, since the part of the game where a site's size is chosen has already happened, but don't worry: this is plenty big enough for a first fortress.