@@Koboldbard I'm gonna assume your name is a reference to ASCII, which makes your comment even better. Have another like Also Quill18 is currently teaching me how to play this game. Highly recommended
Just starting the video and I have to say if you don't die here then i'm starting a petition to continue the series till you do. It's just that FUN you see.
It’s weird the Steam version seems to not throw much at you. In several fortresses where I make sure I have hostile Goblin neighbours iv only been attacked by 1 small group of undead.
@@kye4216 Check your difficulty settings. Steam version has those, and I'm sure the devs decided to make them gentler by default. Not a bad idea, given they're expanding their player base.
What the barrel contains is the words before the word "Barrel", the material that the barrel is made out of gets moved to the parenthesis after. So the "dwarven syrup Barrel" contains dwarven syrup. Also the single tip I'll give, build bins from wood at a carpenter's workshop so that your stockpiles have containers to put things into.
If you don't use bins then you get a lot of tiles with just a single item on them but if you place bins in a stockpile then your dwarves will put similar items in the same bin. You can then tell your dwarves to move the bin, So instead of trying to carry a thousabd crowns one at a time you can just carry 10 bins of a hundred crowns.
Also make as many blocks (especially rock blocks) as you can cause they are more efficient (some video said that 1 boulder = 4 blocks) and can be binned, stone stockpiles seems to explode in size
Any floor that gets wet becomes farmable due to mud, so you can have dwarves with buckets wet an area, or use levers and floodgates if you're feeling bolder; just watch out for water pressure. Bins and wheelbarrows are your friends.
The problem with levers and floodgates is you need some way of getting the water _out_ again afterwards. Some players even build whole plumbing networks in their fortresses for delivering water or removing waste whenever needed. (A particularly clever application is making decontamination showers that continuously spray water over everyone passing through, with drainage grates in the floor to stop it flooding, so as to prevent your dorfs from tracking poisonous substances into the fortress from outside.)
@@edman1357 It absolutely is. Of all the videos MATN has released, this one came out at a time where people would watch it. It was, might I say, of a certain quality.
1:15 Tutorial: "You should dig down. Even if there's hillside to work with, you want to seek wealth beneath the surface." Jon: "Anyway, let's start by digging sideways into this mountain."
Digging into the side of a hill isn't a bad idea when you're not learning, though. More of an aesthetic choice, but it also makes it easier to find soil to grow crops with on many maps. You can always dig deeper later once the basic fortress is functioning.
That's what a lot of players do though. It makes it a lot easier to create safety, find good amounts of soil, and keep an eye on everything going on on the same level with the wagon until you get everything set up inside.
Good work so far! Not being sarcastic, you've got a pattern down and can work from there. What you're going to want to do is build a chair, park it in a small room with a door, and go into the Nobles screen to assign a broker, a book keeper, and a manager. I generally make them all three the same person, but you do you. The broker should be someone with the appraiser skill, so they can give you an actual account of what you're worth. The book keeper will give you a solid handle on what you own. The manager is a powerhouse for production. You can use them to set up quota-based production in order to automate your fort's basic needs and free you up to explore the bigger picture.
When your fortress is still small your admins don't actually need an office. (Basically the fortress is small enough they can just remember everything by themselves.) Eventually they'll need a chair and table to work at and then ask for extra furniture like cabinets. Eventually they'll get fussy and start demanding things like fancy furniture and decor but by the time your fortress gets that big meeting those demands should be quite easy.
@@dandersonanza 100% sincere, yup. I can understand your reaction. The game is just that freakin' deep. I cannot understate the strength of a manager in cutting out massive chunks of micromanagement. Without them, any order put on repeat will completely cancel if it runs out of any ingredients. With a manager you can effectively set up an equation so the job simply suspends itself until whatever conditions you have set are valid again. Without a book keeper, you'll only ever have an estimate of what you have on hand, which can make the manager less reliable. Without a broker with some level of appraiser skill, you won't have a handle on how much your goods are worth, so it'll generally be a guessing game.
@@o-mangaming5042 The one small downside of a manager is that they have to validate the task each day before a dwarf can work on them. Usually it's not an issue but sometimes you might need something made immediately for a strange mood or need something like a mechanism and drawbridge made before a horde of megabeast storm your fortress.
@@MrGhosta5 But they only need to validate work orders, right? In the cases you're talking about, I should be able to just set a one-and-done task and prioritize it.
This is going to be simultaneously hilarious and highly painful to watch. Godspeed my Dwarven friends. You did not deserve the cruelty that is Jon as overlord.
When Jon said, a minute in, that he wanted to dig into water to get water in his Dwarf Hold, I just knew this was going to be an entertaining mess of confusion and Fun.
@@drworm73 It both did, and didn't. On the one hand, he realized that connecting the path directly to the water was a BAD IDEA and to make a bridge to it. On the other hand, he hasn't realized that the water is still on the same layer, and is just filling a cave, not making a lake.
@@Chessrook44 I assume he needs to dig out the layer above his cave for where he wants the lake to be, but not the whole system or he's back to square one. I've never played DF, this just seems like common sense.
I knew this was coming inevitably. I honestly think it's a game that is right up your alley, being a ridiculously complicated game about managing a community.
The only thing I know about Dwarf Fortress is that it's an excellent story generator. I feel that if Jon got to grips with the game, he'd have a ton of fun commenting on viewer submitted saves.
Glad to see you're finally giving DF a good run. You've only got to remember one thing when playing dwarf fortress: losing is FUN. It'd be a shame to do the follow ups on livestream only, though. Lots of us normal viewers don't like watching live streams (live or afterwords) for a variety of reasons.
The problem is that long tedious games like this are kind of difficult for series given how much editing needs to go into them to make things interesting. This one 40 minute video was from about 6 hours of gameplay as Jon said in a comment earlier. A livestream can work better because of the community interactions and whatnot. Same reason why Elden Ring and Pokemon tend to be livestreams.
This series needs to continue. I learned this game existed earlier today and I’ve been watching RUclips videos about it. Turns out I might have timed it perfectly with a new MATN series
Being a Dwarf Fortress Players since back in the ASCII Graphics Time, i always thought Dwarf Fortress would be a Game Jon would absolutely love. Now with the 2.0 Graphic Update and lack of ASCII i hope Jon finds it playable enough to either play it a lot in private by himself or maybe even stream it. It's a perfect Example of a Game that is so creative, complex and fun that Graphics take a Backseat. A lot of Game Devs nowadays focus too much on having their Game in the "next gen Graphic Technology" that the actual Gameplay, Creativity and Complexity takes a Backseat. In the End, a Game with insanely realistic Graphics, Effects etc. using the newest Technology but focus under 50% on Creativity, Uniqueness, Complexity etc. will never be as good and creative as a Game that has outdated or even ancient Graphics but the Devs put over 50% of the Work into making it unique, creative and complex. Good Example of a Trend from recent Years: PS1-Style and even older-style Horror Games being more popular and perceived as scarier than all the AAA modern Horror Games. Usually these Games are put out by one Guy doing it for fun while studying or working. a full Horror Game using Graphics from between 1985-1999 managing to be much more immersive and scarier than a Game using the newest realistic Graphics from 2016-2022. It's fascinating and i hope AAA Devs start to accept one day that Graphics and newest Technology shouldn't be more important than the Game being unique and fulfilling it's Genres Pinpoints of what it should have. You got Games like "Bloodwash", "Murder House" and even Atari-style "FAITH Trilogy" that came out in recent Years get much better Responses by Live Streamers and Viewers of the Game being scary than high Graphics Horror Games like "Resident Evil 8" "Callisto Protocol", "The Medium" etc. that end up being a tiny bit "horror" compared to the low budget one-person-dev old-graphics Games
@@andrewgreenwood9068 Exactly. Having "old" or "outdated" graphics isn't a bad thing regarding if a Videogame is amazing/fun. So it's bad to see some AAA Dev Companies focusing way too much on Graphics and Graphics Options than on the Game itself
@@andrewgreenwood9068 Another Game i noticed getting way better Response and Popularity in recent Years among big Streamers are the "Gothic" Games (Gothic 1-3). It's a German Open World RPG from 2000 onwards. So before Morrowind etc. and according to "The Witcher" Devs their main Inspiration of creating Games of The Witcher Book Series. Being German and having grown up with Gothic 1-3 but also played all the big worldwide open world RPGs like Elder Scrolls etc. i think the Reason you see big Streamers call "Gothic" the "best open world RPG they ever played" because even being 20+ years old. It has no Quest Markers, it has no hand-holding, it has no "über friendly NPCs". And Actions actually have massive Consequences. Trust the wrong NPC? You gonna be stabbed in the back and when you're on the ground, the NPC will laugh and steal your whole inventory and if you want it back, you gotta try to kill them or beat them up (or savescum). Nowadays open world RPGs have "Pseudo-Consequences for Actions". yeah your Dialogue Decision makes the NPC react bad or good, but in the end it won't matter much. While in Gothic where you start as a New Prisoner with nothing in a magically-sealed "Dome" over a beautiful Landscape, you literally feel like you're worth nothing, can't trust anyone, can die easily no matter what area of the Map and lose your stuff etc. People miss Consequences in oldschool open world RPGs and other Genres. So no Games like "Gothic" (one of the few Games we Germans created that is actually good) have a Revival. Especially since the Devs didnt have the Money to market it outside of Europe. Def recommend Gothic by Piranha Bytes if you enjoy Daggerfall or in general old open World RPGs with actual Consequences
It's because so many folk, particularly the "Duh peeseat iz musterd rice" crowd pushed and pushed and pushed for so long on their crap talking about needing to have ultra-realistic-9999p-UHD-widescreen-I want to see every dust particle from 10 kilometres away-whateverthefrick, and the AAA devs rubbed them off on that, and now so many expensive games are all bloom and bluster on the graphics, and absolute bugger all on any gameplay or creativity. The grave has been dug by those whom now lie in it.
Pretty graphics and visuals sell. You can't pump out deep complex games every single year but you can apply a fresh coat of paint and resell (functionally) the same game over and over and over again. It doesnt help that some people, like my nephews, wont even give classic games a chance because they're "ugly" for not being photo realistic or super hirez. Make sure to expose kids to classics while they're young to build that appreciation!
If Rimworld was a steep learning curve then dwarf fortress is a 5km sheer cliff face with an even sheerer 10km cliff face on top. Dwarf Fortress has been in development by a single person for 20 years. Dwarf Fortress is currently in version 50. The freeware version will continue to receive updates along side the steam release.
This was amazing! You made the right choice of doing a walkthrough instead of learning the game and then making a video about it, this feels more natural and enjoyable :) 33:00 I also didn't knew that butter packets had amazing feature!
Well. As a first fort it was not that bad. But I guess doing the tutorial would be a big help finding out the basics. I suggest Nookorium and Twisted Logic Gaming for tutorials. Escpecially about nobles and managers that will make your life much easier. Also forbid the kitchen to cook plump helmets. Those mushrooms are the backbone of a dwarven society. Eating it raw or brewing it gives back seeds to plant them again. Cooking will destroy the seeds
I have never played DF, myself, but I played C:DDA (Cataclysm:Dark Days Ahead) for at least a thousand hours. Still do. It is fascinating. It is a massive time sink. I have two and a half pages of hand written notes on just the key bindings alone readily available. It is a seemingly endless series of rabbit holes. I might be an addict.
I’ve been rewatching this video over n over just to support both one of my favorite games and favorite youtubers… And I CANNOT stress this enough Jon, A BROKER IS ONE OF THE EASIEST NOBLES TO GET/MAINTAIN… PLEASE just select a broker as soon as you load the map and (assuming they don’t die) you literally never have to worry about them again 😭
I've been waiting so long for this one Jon. Do you think there's series potential? I can't really get to the livestreams due to work but I'd love to see more of this on the channel.
"I wont tell you what i want or need because you'll charge me more!" You are paying for them to purchase and bring it to you specifically >< if you dont tell them they wont bring stuff you actually want or need :P
Oh, I am excited to see you try this! I've played on and off for ... wow, must be over a decade. It's an amazing game, I'd love to see you do a series. Congrats on both making it through a couple years without everyone starving, going thirsty, or accidentally flooding the whole base. I fully expected the pond to flood you, but you got that right. I really need to check out the new UI.
My favorite videos are always the weird labors of love. One offs, short challenge runs. I know your series' are a big mainstay, but the single videos feel more manageable than lots of episodes when I have a lot going on. Weird games that you're just like, "this looked cool" are always my favorite. That's how I found Megaquarium, from your channel.
Honestly, this was a really good start for a first time player without looking things up. Good logic led to decisions that, while not the best, would at least lead to some sort of solution to the current issue at hand.
Welcome Dwarf, your first fortress survived two years, you're doing SO MUCH BETTER THAN I DID. I want to see you play more, this is such a great game, and you've started seeing some of the stories already, and it just gets better. And remember, "Losing is !!FUN!!"
One of the thing with dwarf fortress is unless you have breached to lower levels you will not have any edible cave fungus etc in to caves for the animal so you have to pasture them on grass with a pasture zone else they are so stupid they won't eat.
One small "mistake" / think to improve on. You never want your staircases to be far from each other outside of defensive purposes. Now When 1 Dwarf moves from Floor 1 to 3 , instead of moving only 3 tiles, he needs to move 12 or something (instead of down, down, down. They move, Down, 9 tiels to next stairway, then down, down) because they are further apart .... That might not matter now, But you will expand Deeper and then it will be noticable the more often you do it. Managing Traveltime is basically the most important part of building an effective fortress. Enjoy :)
21:37 Oh dear, that's not going to end well... 22:41 Ok, so no flooding, but let's just hope that no goblins decide to attack as there's now two ways in.
I also kind of took issue with the game not telling me about animal feeding (You have to set an animal range zone and also checkbox every animal in that zone or they refuse to eat and starve)
If you decide to do a follow up to this video then you need to dig a farming area, with a tunnel blocked by a floodgate that goes to a source of water. And you might want to tap that water source with the tunnel only reaching a square diagonal to a water filled block, that will let water through but not pressurized and thus slower and more controllable and less likely to flood your fort. This kind of hydro engineering is crucial to the game but impossible to just find out on your own.
Love seeing you bring this game to your mass-market audience of RPG lovers Jon. itll be news to some and a few of those will love it to no end, and building the dorf fort community is always admirable. as far as not knowing how to play and the 'way too complicated to play bit' thats a misconception based on the combination of story/generative depth leading to mechanical depth, on top of the old issues with ascii and control obsucfation; the games not innately hard to do well in, it just has mechanics that require knowledge of them to work properly. so to be fair the in game tutorial covers about like, what used to be about an hour or two of youtube tutorials on the old system, and the mouse support and modified controls immediately save 30-60m if your not an avid nethack player familiar with the hotkey menuing.
Bookkeeper - Checks your stocks so you know how much stuff you got Manager - Activates work orders you create, which distributes the jobs to workshops for dwarves to do, this saves you a lot of time to get stuff made and you can even customize the conditions to repeat these work orders, like make 10 drinks when brewable plants are at least 10, empty barrels at least 10, and when drink stocks are less than 100 (so you don't over produce drinks and use up all the barrels) Both of these positions can be filled by the same dwarf with a tiny office. I do not know why the game's tool tip says soil deeper underground is richer, its basically all the same in practical terms. You can build farm plots over sand, clay, loam, and mud floors it all works the same. You can create mud over stone floor by having water on the square, it'll dry and become mud. Making a pond zone can let your dwarves carry buckets of water to splash water on the stone. The reason for making underground farms is that most of the starting plant seeds we get are all underground type plants. If you want above ground seeds you gotta gather them (can use a gather zone to automatically gather) then process the plants in a way that yields seeds. WARNING: Cooking a raw plant will not give a seed back. So you want to disable the type of plants you want to process for seeds from being cooked. Plump Helmets for example, can be eaten raw giving a seed back, cooking loses the seed, brewing gives a seed (chance for extra seed based on brewer skill). You can actually cook with the brewed drinks, as long as you are getting one ingredient that's considered solid the rest can be drink, and drinks get you seeds back which means more farm. The meal tiers work like this, first ingredient must be a solid, then the rest can be solid or non-solid. So a lavish meal that needs 4 ingredients can be something like 1 fish 3 drink. This makes 4 edible stacks of food. So it can be a way to turn drink into food, other uses involve making high value non-solid ingredients like flour (cave wheat) or sugar (sweet pod) so you can make very high value meals for trading. Making easy meals is great for training a cook, yields faster exp rate. Starved animals cannot be butchered.
As someone who hasn't played dwarf fortress in a very long time I'm surprised by how much I remember and that you can't hear me yelling at the screen 🤣. Though very impressed with how much you were able to do without an outside guide of some kind, I know the steam version has the tutorial but still not using a wiki is still impressive. I'm gonna have to get the steam version one of these days and see if I can get lost in the game again. That would be nice.
Since you're playing Dwarf Fortress, I'd like to recommend another game that's somewhat comparable to it: Dominions. It's the work of a similarly tiny dev team (two people), also goes for the minimum-graphics-maximum-mechanical-depth kind of priorities DF has going on, and it does have spreadsheets in certain bits. I feel like both games have a similar narrative tone as well, though that's it for their similarities. It's a turn-based grand strategy game rather than a colony-builder. The premise is that, in a fantasy setting where many gods are capable of existing, one has reigned absolutely supreme for ages... and he's suddenly vanished, so a bunch of his former rivals are breaking free of their prisons while entirely fresh pretenders to divinity are also coming out of the woodwork. The UI takes some getting used to, but you do get to name and design your own pretender god, and it's pretty easy to mod if you consult the modding manual (easily found online). Someone even made a mod that adapts the dwarves of Dwarf Fortress into the game.
I love your videos! I am so glad you didn't try to blind play the non-Steam version, but this was still painful to watch. I would love to see you make this a series (after you read the getting started page of the wiki). Painful but fun, LMAO.
Jon going in blind is a blessing and a curse! to be fair the "tutorial" isnt that great, but thats my opinion on it since started playing DF almost 15 years ago
This is purely because there is no win condition, so you just play until you either fail to keep the fort going, or you wipe the save and begin again out of boredom.
"Right up to the point where the giant emus come back and murder me" Me, having seen a friend's starting settlers get killed by wild camels and having fallen victim to the hyper-violent carp: yeah, they'll probably try that at some point.
My first fort in the current version lost most of its livestock and several people to agitated muskoxen. And then the giant flying squirrels came. I remembered why I shouldn't embark in Untamed Wilds.
A game you may enjoy is called Hammerting. It is once again dwarves, but a side on view base builder dungeon exploration thing (kind of like Oxygen Not Included) but you also have to make goods for trading with a nearby kingdom and villages and whatnot
“presumably they’re going to want water” was when i knew this fortress was doomed
Jon wouldn't want anything but a Doom Fortress.
I've never played this game or watched much about it, but I know that aquifers can definitely cause issues with flooding.
I had an immediate premonition of flooding.
I love that flooding did happen, there was a big flashing alert on screen, and he just didn't mention it
The only thing I know is when the dwarves don't have booze to drink they all go insane
"The dwarves are going to want water" ~hovers over aquifer~
I'm 5 minutes in and I'm certain there will be FUN to be had in this video
Not to mention ale is more their speed. Dwarves need booze to get through the day.
Yeah, but need plump helmets for booze, and water to soak then recede to make mud to farm underground
because you undrstood the water management in this game (and how it's not the thing meant by "drink") on your first try...
I am genuinely impressed how quickly you picked the game up Jon! Really goes to show the improvements that have been made to the interface
In my anti-defence, this is 6 hours of playtime...
@@ManyATrueNerd It used to be six hours in, you might be figuring out how to build a kitchen
@@Koboldbard then you are doing it wrong, i found that out in less than 15minutes and that was 13+years ago
Yup. Now I really want Jon to get familiar with the game and then I want to see his reaction to the original UI.
@@Koboldbard I'm gonna assume your name is a reference to ASCII, which makes your comment even better. Have another like
Also Quill18 is currently teaching me how to play this game. Highly recommended
"Oh! I suspect the miasma might be the rotten stray donkey corpse that we're storing next to our food"
That is an all-timer good line.
Just starting the video and I have to say if you don't die here then i'm starting a petition to continue the series till you do.
It's just that FUN you see.
It’s weird the Steam version seems to not throw much at you.
In several fortresses where I make sure I have hostile Goblin neighbours iv only been attacked by 1 small group of undead.
Jon isn't going to live long enough to get to the FUN part of the game.
@@kye4216 Check your difficulty settings. Steam version has those, and I'm sure the devs decided to make them gentler by default. Not a bad idea, given they're expanding their player base.
@@kye4216 Well, given that they're simulating diplomacy etc, etc, etc who knows what's going on in the world...
What the barrel contains is the words before the word "Barrel", the material that the barrel is made out of gets moved to the parenthesis after. So the "dwarven syrup Barrel" contains dwarven syrup.
Also the single tip I'll give, build bins from wood at a carpenter's workshop so that your stockpiles have containers to put things into.
and automate it with a bookkeeper/manager, you always needs barrels and bins
If you don't use bins then you get a lot of tiles with just a single item on them but if you place bins in a stockpile then your dwarves will put similar items in the same bin. You can then tell your dwarves to move the bin, So instead of trying to carry a thousabd crowns one at a time you can just carry 10 bins of a hundred crowns.
Also make as many blocks (especially rock blocks) as you can cause they are more efficient (some video said that 1 boulder = 4 blocks) and can be binned, stone stockpiles seems to explode in size
Any floor that gets wet becomes farmable due to mud, so you can have dwarves with buckets wet an area, or use levers and floodgates if you're feeling bolder; just watch out for water pressure.
Bins and wheelbarrows are your friends.
The problem with levers and floodgates is you need some way of getting the water _out_ again afterwards. Some players even build whole plumbing networks in their fortresses for delivering water or removing waste whenever needed. (A particularly clever application is making decontamination showers that continuously spray water over everyone passing through, with drainage grates in the floor to stop it flooding, so as to prevent your dorfs from tracking poisonous substances into the fortress from outside.)
my favorite moment was when jon said "It's Dwarfin' Time" and fortressed all over the screen
Same. This is a video that was uploaded to RUclips.
@@edman1357 It absolutely is. Of all the videos MATN has released, this one came out at a time where people would watch it. It was, might I say, of a certain quality.
1:15 Tutorial: "You should dig down. Even if there's hillside to work with, you want to seek wealth beneath the surface."
Jon: "Anyway, let's start by digging sideways into this mountain."
The only wealth needed is that of Crowns.
This looks like my first fortress, it did not end well & lasted about two years
Digging into the side of a hill isn't a bad idea when you're not learning, though. More of an aesthetic choice, but it also makes it easier to find soil to grow crops with on many maps. You can always dig deeper later once the basic fortress is functioning.
@@ActuallyAcce That's literally true if you're Scandinavian. Their countries' currency literally translates to crowns.
That's what a lot of players do though. It makes it a lot easier to create safety, find good amounts of soil, and keep an eye on everything going on on the same level with the wagon until you get everything set up inside.
As a long time player of DF I find this video absolutely fascinating. Seeing you struggle with zero help is incredibly interesting
Good work so far! Not being sarcastic, you've got a pattern down and can work from there.
What you're going to want to do is build a chair, park it in a small room with a door, and go into the Nobles screen to assign a broker, a book keeper, and a manager. I generally make them all three the same person, but you do you. The broker should be someone with the appraiser skill, so they can give you an actual account of what you're worth. The book keeper will give you a solid handle on what you own. The manager is a powerhouse for production. You can use them to set up quota-based production in order to automate your fort's basic needs and free you up to explore the bigger picture.
When your fortress is still small your admins don't actually need an office. (Basically the fortress is small enough they can just remember everything by themselves.) Eventually they'll need a chair and table to work at and then ask for extra furniture like cabinets. Eventually they'll get fussy and start demanding things like fancy furniture and decor but by the time your fortress gets that big meeting those demands should be quite easy.
Holy moly. I'm assuming this is sincere advice, but it genuinely reads as trolling to someone like me who is unfamiliar with the game.
@@dandersonanza 100% sincere, yup. I can understand your reaction. The game is just that freakin' deep.
I cannot understate the strength of a manager in cutting out massive chunks of micromanagement. Without them, any order put on repeat will completely cancel if it runs out of any ingredients. With a manager you can effectively set up an equation so the job simply suspends itself until whatever conditions you have set are valid again.
Without a book keeper, you'll only ever have an estimate of what you have on hand, which can make the manager less reliable.
Without a broker with some level of appraiser skill, you won't have a handle on how much your goods are worth, so it'll generally be a guessing game.
@@o-mangaming5042 The one small downside of a manager is that they have to validate the task each day before a dwarf can work on them. Usually it's not an issue but sometimes you might need something made immediately for a strange mood or need something like a mechanism and drawbridge made before a horde of megabeast storm your fortress.
@@MrGhosta5 But they only need to validate work orders, right? In the cases you're talking about, I should be able to just set a one-and-done task and prioritize it.
This is going to be simultaneously hilarious and highly painful to watch. Godspeed my Dwarven friends. You did not deserve the cruelty that is Jon as overlord.
Unbelievably they actually *survived*.
Mainly due to him *kind* of figuring out trade...
When Jon said, a minute in, that he wanted to dig into water to get water in his Dwarf Hold, I just knew this was going to be an entertaining mess of confusion and Fun.
yes its a mess, and im getting annoyed by it hahaha
!!fun!!
Seems to have worked, though. I have never played the game and know nothing about it, however.
@@drworm73 It both did, and didn't. On the one hand, he realized that connecting the path directly to the water was a BAD IDEA and to make a bridge to it.
On the other hand, he hasn't realized that the water is still on the same layer, and is just filling a cave, not making a lake.
@@Chessrook44 I assume he needs to dig out the layer above his cave for where he wants the lake to be, but not the whole system or he's back to square one. I've never played DF, this just seems like common sense.
the plaintive "Are there supposed to be so many Yak's in my meeting room" kind of says it all :D :D
I knew this was coming inevitably. I honestly think it's a game that is right up your alley, being a ridiculously complicated game about managing a community.
I would love a series of this
Jon doing a series that is not a Bethesda game? yea rarely...very rarely
I would not mind if this became a series, or even series of seasons where you do different things kind of like with Stellaris.
The only thing I know about Dwarf Fortress is that it's an excellent story generator. I feel that if Jon got to grips with the game, he'd have a ton of fun commenting on viewer submitted saves.
Glad to see you're finally giving DF a good run. You've only got to remember one thing when playing dwarf fortress: losing is FUN.
It'd be a shame to do the follow ups on livestream only, though. Lots of us normal viewers don't like watching live streams (live or afterwords) for a variety of reasons.
The problem is that long tedious games like this are kind of difficult for series given how much editing needs to go into them to make things interesting. This one 40 minute video was from about 6 hours of gameplay as Jon said in a comment earlier. A livestream can work better because of the community interactions and whatnot.
Same reason why Elden Ring and Pokemon tend to be livestreams.
@@tournesol99 True, but you could also point to the examples of Stellaris, and other Paradox games, which tend to be done as a series of videos.
Not that I'm complaining but I really expected this would be a 3 hour video from Jon - Dwarf Fortress is made for him!
This 33 minute video is edited down from 6 hours (according to Jon). I'm guessing most of the edited out stuff was near the beginning.
This series needs to continue. I learned this game existed earlier today and I’ve been watching RUclips videos about it. Turns out I might have timed it perfectly with a new MATN series
Finally, after all these years, the video I've been waiting for.
Being a Dwarf Fortress Players since back in the ASCII Graphics Time, i always thought Dwarf Fortress would be a Game Jon would absolutely love.
Now with the 2.0 Graphic Update and lack of ASCII i hope Jon finds it playable enough to either play it a lot in private by himself or maybe even stream it.
It's a perfect Example of a Game that is so creative, complex and fun that Graphics take a Backseat.
A lot of Game Devs nowadays focus too much on having their Game in the "next gen Graphic Technology" that the actual Gameplay, Creativity and Complexity takes a Backseat.
In the End, a Game with insanely realistic Graphics, Effects etc. using the newest Technology but focus under 50% on Creativity, Uniqueness, Complexity etc. will never be as good and creative as a Game that has outdated or even ancient Graphics but the Devs put over 50% of the Work into making it unique, creative and complex.
Good Example of a Trend from recent Years:
PS1-Style and even older-style Horror Games being more popular and perceived as scarier than all the AAA modern Horror Games.
Usually these Games are put out by one Guy doing it for fun while studying or working. a full Horror Game using Graphics from between 1985-1999 managing to be much more immersive and scarier than a Game using the newest realistic Graphics from 2016-2022.
It's fascinating and i hope AAA Devs start to accept one day that Graphics and newest Technology shouldn't be more important than the Game being unique and fulfilling it's Genres Pinpoints of what it should have.
You got Games like "Bloodwash", "Murder House" and even Atari-style "FAITH Trilogy" that came out in recent Years get much better Responses by Live Streamers and Viewers of the Game being scary than high Graphics Horror Games like "Resident Evil 8" "Callisto Protocol", "The Medium" etc. that end up being a tiny bit "horror" compared to the low budget one-person-dev old-graphics Games
I recently started Daggerfall and that game is terrifying. Old graphics are definitely no barrier to a game being scary.
@@andrewgreenwood9068
Exactly. Having "old" or "outdated" graphics isn't a bad thing regarding if a Videogame is amazing/fun.
So it's bad to see some AAA Dev Companies focusing way too much on Graphics and Graphics Options than on the Game itself
@@andrewgreenwood9068
Another Game i noticed getting way better Response and Popularity in recent Years among big Streamers are the "Gothic" Games (Gothic 1-3). It's a German Open World RPG from 2000 onwards.
So before Morrowind etc. and according to "The Witcher" Devs their main Inspiration of creating Games of The Witcher Book Series.
Being German and having grown up with Gothic 1-3 but also played all the big worldwide open world RPGs like Elder Scrolls etc. i think the Reason you see big Streamers call "Gothic" the "best open world RPG they ever played" because even being 20+ years old. It has no Quest Markers, it has no hand-holding, it has no "über friendly NPCs". And Actions actually have massive Consequences. Trust the wrong NPC? You gonna be stabbed in the back and when you're on the ground, the NPC will laugh and steal your whole inventory and if you want it back, you gotta try to kill them or beat them up (or savescum).
Nowadays open world RPGs have "Pseudo-Consequences for Actions". yeah your Dialogue Decision makes the NPC react bad or good, but in the end it won't matter much. While in Gothic where you start as a New Prisoner with nothing in a magically-sealed "Dome" over a beautiful Landscape, you literally feel like you're worth nothing, can't trust anyone, can die easily no matter what area of the Map and lose your stuff etc.
People miss Consequences in oldschool open world RPGs and other Genres. So no Games like "Gothic" (one of the few Games we Germans created that is actually good) have a Revival. Especially since the Devs didnt have the Money to market it outside of Europe.
Def recommend Gothic by Piranha Bytes if you enjoy Daggerfall or in general old open World RPGs with actual Consequences
It's because so many folk, particularly the "Duh peeseat iz musterd rice" crowd pushed and pushed and pushed for so long on their crap talking about needing to have ultra-realistic-9999p-UHD-widescreen-I want to see every dust particle from 10 kilometres away-whateverthefrick, and the AAA devs rubbed them off on that, and now so many expensive games are all bloom and bluster on the graphics, and absolute bugger all on any gameplay or creativity.
The grave has been dug by those whom now lie in it.
Pretty graphics and visuals sell. You can't pump out deep complex games every single year but you can apply a fresh coat of paint and resell (functionally) the same game over and over and over again. It doesnt help that some people, like my nephews, wont even give classic games a chance because they're "ugly" for not being photo realistic or super hirez. Make sure to expose kids to classics while they're young to build that appreciation!
If Rimworld was a steep learning curve then dwarf fortress is a 5km sheer cliff face with an even sheerer 10km cliff face on top. Dwarf Fortress has been in development by a single person for 20 years. Dwarf Fortress is currently in version 50. The freeware version will continue to receive updates along side the steam release.
“I’m a little bit concerned we might not have a sustainable society.” Me too, Jon, me too. 😢
This was amazing!
You made the right choice of doing a walkthrough instead of learning the game and then making a video about it, this feels more natural and enjoyable :)
33:00 I also didn't knew that butter packets had amazing feature!
I loved the moment where Jon just dwarfed all over his subscribers
It's certainly one of the "Jon Dwarf Fortress" moments
Well. As a first fort it was not that bad. But I guess doing the tutorial would be a big help finding out the basics. I suggest Nookorium and Twisted Logic Gaming for tutorials. Escpecially about nobles and managers that will make your life much easier. Also forbid the kitchen to cook plump helmets. Those mushrooms are the backbone of a dwarven society. Eating it raw or brewing it gives back seeds to plant them again. Cooking will destroy the seeds
I have never played DF, myself, but I played C:DDA (Cataclysm:Dark Days Ahead) for at least a thousand hours. Still do. It is fascinating. It is a massive time sink. I have two and a half pages of hand written notes on just the key bindings alone readily available.
It is a seemingly endless series of rabbit holes. I might be an addict.
I’ve been rewatching this video over n over just to support both one of my favorite games and favorite youtubers… And I CANNOT stress this enough Jon,
A BROKER IS ONE OF THE EASIEST NOBLES TO GET/MAINTAIN… PLEASE just select a broker as soon as you load the map and (assuming they don’t die) you literally never have to worry about them again 😭
we need a kruggsmash type illustration of that dwarf wearing the fancy dress and 2 crowns.
I've been waiting so long for this one Jon.
Do you think there's series potential? I can't really get to the livestreams due to work but I'd love to see more of this on the channel.
I've been watching other peoples' livestreams on VOD.
"I wont tell you what i want or need because you'll charge me more!"
You are paying for them to purchase and bring it to you specifically >< if you dont tell them they wont bring stuff you actually want or need :P
And then you have a dwarf go mad and kill everyone because he couldn't find any yarn.
Game: "Milk Barrel"
Jon: "I have no idea what's in this. I just have to guess."
I’ve heard of this game so much but have literally never seen anything about it. This will be fun
Oh, I am excited to see you try this! I've played on and off for ... wow, must be over a decade. It's an amazing game, I'd love to see you do a series.
Congrats on both making it through a couple years without everyone starving, going thirsty, or accidentally flooding the whole base. I fully expected the pond to flood you, but you got that right.
I really need to check out the new UI.
My favorite videos are always the weird labors of love. One offs, short challenge runs. I know your series' are a big mainstay, but the single videos feel more manageable than lots of episodes when I have a lot going on. Weird games that you're just like, "this looked cool" are always my favorite. That's how I found Megaquarium, from your channel.
Honestly, this was a really good start for a first time player without looking things up.
Good logic led to decisions that, while not the best, would at least lead to some sort of solution to the current issue at hand.
I'm so glad you're doing this!! Looking forward to this since the steam relaease dropped
I'm amazed that Jon actually survived. Every new creator I watched who played for the first time ended up dying. Well done!
Jon is going to start the second Emu war isn't he? Oh God, the Australians clearly are former Brits.
Been a while since Jon has uploaded a video that's made me say "uh oh" upon seeing it in my notifications
Welcome Dwarf, your first fortress survived two years, you're doing SO MUCH BETTER THAN I DID.
I want to see you play more, this is such a great game, and you've started seeing some of the stories already, and it just gets better. And remember, "Losing is !!FUN!!"
6:14
Your lifestock is starving to death.
Perhaps give them a pasture zone?
8:49
There we go. 😀
22:00 Ok, he is hooked. All is well in the world.
One of the thing with dwarf fortress is unless you have breached to lower levels you will not have any edible cave fungus etc in to caves for the animal so you have to pasture them on grass with a pasture zone else they are so stupid they won't eat.
One small "mistake" / think to improve on. You never want your staircases to be far from each other outside of defensive purposes. Now When 1 Dwarf moves from Floor 1 to 3 , instead of moving only 3 tiles, he needs to move 12 or something (instead of down, down, down. They move, Down, 9 tiels to next stairway, then down, down) because they are further apart .... That might not matter now, But you will expand Deeper and then it will be noticable the more often you do it. Managing Traveltime is basically the most important part of building an effective fortress. Enjoy :)
21:37
Oh dear, that's not going to end well...
22:41
Ok, so no flooding, but let's just hope that no goblins decide to attack as there's now two ways in.
21:20 King Kai: NO! NO! NO! NO!
Tien Shinhan: I'm not even going to ask.
I also kind of took issue with the game not telling me about animal feeding (You have to set an animal range zone and also checkbox every animal in that zone or they refuse to eat and starve)
If you decide to do a follow up to this video then you need to dig a farming area, with a tunnel blocked by a floodgate that goes to a source of water. And you might want to tap that water source with the tunnel only reaching a square diagonal to a water filled block, that will let water through but not pressurized and thus slower and more controllable and less likely to flood your fort. This kind of hydro engineering is crucial to the game but impossible to just find out on your own.
I forgot the whole reason for the water, flood the farm area slightly and let the water dry to get muddy farmable floors
Love seeing you bring this game to your mass-market audience of RPG lovers Jon. itll be news to some and a few of those will love it to no end, and building the dorf fort community is always admirable.
as far as not knowing how to play and the 'way too complicated to play bit' thats a misconception based on the combination of story/generative depth leading to mechanical depth, on top of the old issues with ascii and control obsucfation; the games not innately hard to do well in, it just has mechanics that require knowledge of them to work properly. so to be fair the in game tutorial covers about like, what used to be about an hour or two of youtube tutorials on the old system, and the mouse support and modified controls immediately save 30-60m if your not an avid nethack player familiar with the hotkey menuing.
Jon, if you haven't seen/heard it yet, you have to check out the legendary Boatmurdered saga.
All thinks considered. Can we at least give Jon the props for doing as well as he did on his first go?
I can not WAIT to see this return as a livestream
Want more. Need more. Tried playing a couple years ago, and don't think I got half this good in twice as long.
Going an entire video without having involuntary fun break out is pretty solid Dwarf Fortress execution.
Aquifers usually result in a quick rush of FUN especially for new players.
looking forward to seeing more of DF by you, watching you making sense of it is really entertaining
OMG my eyes do not hurt watching this game! Dwarf fortress is back baby!
TBH I was expecting this to go full Boatmurdered in this one video. Congrats on not perishing instantly
This, or at least the way you're playing and presenting this, reminds me a lot of the Rimworld miniseries. Yes, more please.
Rule number one in such games:
"too much" becomes "too little" very quickly
(ben kenobi voice) --> "use the water MATN, make the floors muddy." 👻🤣"OOoooOOOOOOOoooo~~~ Jedi noises"
13:18 Turtles are reptiles and only can be friends, Jon not food.
I'd love to see more of this .
I'd love a series from this
I knew it was going to hurt and now 25 minutes into the video Jon has apparently decided to declare war on the Emus.
Oh, this is going to be fun
John: *Sees Emu*
John: These guys may be good candidates for being eaten
Buddy let me tell you about a little something called the Emu Wars
“Who’s the miserable person?”
“Claire.”
That feels like an attack.
Bookkeeper - Checks your stocks so you know how much stuff you got
Manager - Activates work orders you create, which distributes the jobs to workshops for dwarves to do, this saves you a lot of time to get stuff made and you can even customize the conditions to repeat these work orders, like make 10 drinks when brewable plants are at least 10, empty barrels at least 10, and when drink stocks are less than 100 (so you don't over produce drinks and use up all the barrels)
Both of these positions can be filled by the same dwarf with a tiny office.
I do not know why the game's tool tip says soil deeper underground is richer, its basically all the same in practical terms. You can build farm plots over sand, clay, loam, and mud floors it all works the same. You can create mud over stone floor by having water on the square, it'll dry and become mud. Making a pond zone can let your dwarves carry buckets of water to splash water on the stone.
The reason for making underground farms is that most of the starting plant seeds we get are all underground type plants. If you want above ground seeds you gotta gather them (can use a gather zone to automatically gather) then process the plants in a way that yields seeds.
WARNING: Cooking a raw plant will not give a seed back. So you want to disable the type of plants you want to process for seeds from being cooked. Plump Helmets for example, can be eaten raw giving a seed back, cooking loses the seed, brewing gives a seed (chance for extra seed based on brewer skill).
You can actually cook with the brewed drinks, as long as you are getting one ingredient that's considered solid the rest can be drink, and drinks get you seeds back which means more farm.
The meal tiers work like this, first ingredient must be a solid, then the rest can be solid or non-solid. So a lavish meal that needs 4 ingredients can be something like 1 fish 3 drink. This makes 4 edible stacks of food. So it can be a way to turn drink into food, other uses involve making high value non-solid ingredients like flour (cave wheat) or sugar (sweet pod) so you can make very high value meals for trading.
Making easy meals is great for training a cook, yields faster exp rate.
Starved animals cannot be butchered.
as a veteran of DF... this wave of people playing it fresh without any guides is Interesting. have !!FUN!!
I know Jon mentioned possibly bringing this back as a Livestream, I really hope he does because I'd love to see him play this more.
As someone who hasn't played dwarf fortress in a very long time I'm surprised by how much I remember and that you can't hear me yelling at the screen 🤣. Though very impressed with how much you were able to do without an outside guide of some kind, I know the steam version has the tutorial but still not using a wiki is still impressive. I'm gonna have to get the steam version one of these days and see if I can get lost in the game again. That would be nice.
I know that title is a Morbius thing, but I now need a mod where the Dwarfs can become Power Rangers.
Since you're playing Dwarf Fortress, I'd like to recommend another game that's somewhat comparable to it: Dominions. It's the work of a similarly tiny dev team (two people), also goes for the minimum-graphics-maximum-mechanical-depth kind of priorities DF has going on, and it does have spreadsheets in certain bits. I feel like both games have a similar narrative tone as well, though that's it for their similarities.
It's a turn-based grand strategy game rather than a colony-builder. The premise is that, in a fantasy setting where many gods are capable of existing, one has reigned absolutely supreme for ages... and he's suddenly vanished, so a bunch of his former rivals are breaking free of their prisons while entirely fresh pretenders to divinity are also coming out of the woodwork. The UI takes some getting used to, but you do get to name and design your own pretender god, and it's pretty easy to mod if you consult the modding manual (easily found online). Someone even made a mod that adapts the dwarves of Dwarf Fortress into the game.
Wow, I haven't seem this game in ages, its gorgeous!
I love your profile pic and username. ☺
I LOVE this game. I've been playing it for well over 10 years, and loving the steam release.
FINALLY - also going in blind is perfectly valid! Its all FUN.
Okay, I'm at the point where Jon's considering hunting emus for food and I'm pretty sure the Australians would have some wise advice against that.
"Digging a hole"
_......distant drumming intensifying...._
Jon adopts the perfect DF attitude: I care not, I shall lose and have fun
Mighty Dwarfing Time
I love your videos! I am so glad you didn't try to blind play the non-Steam version, but this was still painful to watch. I would love to see you make this a series (after you read the getting started page of the wiki). Painful but fun, LMAO.
And people say it's grandson Rimworld explains itself not enough...
Jon going in blind is a blessing and a curse!
to be fair the "tutorial" isnt that great, but thats my opinion on it since started playing DF almost 15 years ago
A lot of people seem to miss the last page of the tutorial, which mentions the help button, where there's a lot more tutorial.
Oh my, I wanted to buy the game so much! :) Now, thanks to Jon, I will know whether or not it is worth it! :)
The classic and still updated version is free
Watching this after watching the start of the Perun Gaming playthrough is a *very* different vibe
"What's a miasma?"
They'll take your degree back if you aren't up to speed on one of the causes of the Athenian Plague, you know. ;)
I think that meeting hall turned into a meating hall. Maybe later it'll become a meading hall.
The only thing I know about Dwarf Fortress is that nobody makes it out alive
This is purely because there is no win condition, so you just play until you either fail to keep the fort going, or you wipe the save and begin again out of boredom.
"Right up to the point where the giant emus come back and murder me"
Me, having seen a friend's starting settlers get killed by wild camels and having fallen victim to the hyper-violent carp: yeah, they'll probably try that at some point.
My first fort in the current version lost most of its livestock and several people to agitated muskoxen. And then the giant flying squirrels came.
I remembered why I shouldn't embark in Untamed Wilds.
Somebody should probably tell Jon that he can just assign a broker whenever he wants.
especially when he keeps looking at that clerk xD
Pasture, Jon. Make a pasture area for your animals. No? OK.
As an Australian, I'm looking forward to Jon fighting his own Great Emu War.
The funniest part, which will go over most peoples heads, is that you start with 7 Dwarves.
Remember the number 1 rule of Dwarf Fortress Jon
It's fun to lose
Can we make Dwarf Fortress a staple series on the channel like Stellaris is? I wanna see Jon do this game just as random livestream options.
A game you may enjoy is called Hammerting. It is once again dwarves, but a side on view base builder dungeon exploration thing (kind of like Oxygen Not Included) but you also have to make goods for trading with a nearby kingdom and villages and whatnot
Please continue this series