Whoa…

And here I thought April was going to be productive :[

Site keeps timing out for me, I guess there must be a wee bit of traffic going on.

Not sure why, but I was expecting Darkfall 2010.

If this is a joke, it’s very cruel. And evidently many people are falling for it; the site must be getting hammered with requests because it keeps timing out for me.

I think the April Fool’s joke is that this looks so much like a joke people think it is one, but it isn’t!

Just google for the Dwarf Fortress Wiki, there are several download mirrors right on its frontpage.

From the release notes:

“Release notes for 0.31.01 (April 1, 2010):

It has been a long journey, and it is ongoing. This release has all of the new stuff we’ve been talking about for more than a year, but it is quite buggy. I also still need to do the merge with the OpenGL/Mac/Linux stuff as I mentioned in the dev log. We have a new bug tracker at http://www.bay1games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/ which we are going to try out. Expect it to be populated over the next few days with hundreds of issues. All the same, the testers seemed to be able to enjoy themselves, so please try everything out and have fun!”

Grats to Toady for completing it actually, this has been an epic project just to reach this stage.

So I start on a riverless map to discover that you can no longer farm dirt underground, so I start up a complex mechinism of pond filled reseviours, my first test goes poorly, and I have to redesign the four I had already dug out. Then I discover I can my farming done somewhere else… Yes it is a new release, and there quite a lot of changes, most of them don’t have a huge impact on gameplay. I’ll list a few.
Creatures…. well open up the raws and you will see a lot has changed.. They now grow over time, becoming bigger and bigger, they’ve got different descriptions and other stuff. There’s also a lot more of them, and more creatures can be tamed. Also civilizations can have different domestic breeds… like war polarbears, or pack giant olms.

There’s now a bunch of forgotten creatures in the legends, they’re all bizzare things like a blind panther twisted into human form. Also the new titans are extremely interesting, they’re rather reminiscent of shadow of the colossus. For example I have titan of the desert that is a giant green tarantula that breaths fire. And I have sea titan that’s a giant flying worm made of salt.

Did I also mention that there’s now an underdark style cave system? There’s that too. And it’s inhabitants.

Military stuff has been smoothed over, you’ve now got practice weapons and stuff so no more hacking each other’s arms off sparring. You can also set uniforms and have a greater degree of control over what your troops use, you can also set schedules and rotations of squads.

There’s smaller changes too, most all the issues with the previous version of DF have been fixed, and a bunch of new features have been added bringing in new issues… like how I got three peasants you are all good at swimming but nothing else. they’re obviously survivors migrating to other fortresses.

Go to
http://brage.info/~svein/df_31_01.zip.torrent

For the torrent, that’s the quickest way to get it.

Site is back up, and looks like it got a facelift!

“Dwarf Fortress + Minecraft”
That would make the best game ever.
And it would need only 2 guys to make it !

I love the picture, it’s how I’ve been explaining roguelikes to my friends who don’t understand how to read them…

“You see asperands, lowercase d’s, foward slashes…all I see anymore is heroes, wolves, and swords.”

“You see asperands, lowercase d’s, foward slashes…all I see anymore is heroes, wolves, and swords.”

Best roguelike quote ever!

A Elephant!!, Get in the car.

My bad. I should have googled ‘asperand’ before figuratively opening my mouth. Putting that aside. . . Woo! Dwarf Fortress!

The caverns were introduced, as I remember. I found those to be quite a large feature.