Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress began as something Tarn Adams thought would take two months. He started it in October 2002 as a side project while finishing work on Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, a role-playing game he had been developing with his brother Zach under the Bay 12 Games banner. The side project outlasted Armok, which became progressively harder to maintain as Tarn kept adding features to the new game instead. By 2004 he announced on the Bay 12 website that Dwarf Fortress was now the primary project. His audience at that point numbered a few dozen people.

Tarn was, at the same time, finishing a mathematics doctorate at Stanford, where he had completed a dissertation on flat chains in Banach spaces. He started a post-doctorate at Texas A&M in 2006, lasted less than a year, turned down a $50,000 stipend to stay, and left to work on the game full time. Dwarf Fortress reached its first public alpha release in August 2006. The decision had consequences he could not have anticipated. Within the space of a few years, Dwarf Fortress would be cited as a direct inspiration by Notch during the development of Minecraft, collected by the Museum of Modern Art as part of its permanent games exhibition, and quietly acknowledged by the teams behind RimWorld and Prison Architect as foundational to how they thought about simulation design.

The full title remained Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress for years, a piece of nomenclature that told you a great deal about the game’s relationship with accessibility. Dwarf Fortress was not trying to reach a broad audience. It ran entirely in ASCII, representing a full procedurally generated world, its geology, its civilisations, its weather systems and its centuries of pre-existing history, through letters and symbols on a black background. Each world generated before play began contained multiple civilisations, hundreds of settlements, and up to 250 years of historical events. Wars had been fought, rulers had died, and fortresses had risen and fallen before the player arrived. The game tracked all of it.

In Fortress Mode, players directed a small group of dwarves to establish and expand an underground colony. The simulation modelled individual dwarves at a granular level: personalities, skill sets, emotional states, relationships, and a wound system that tracked injuries by body part rather than through a hit point abstraction. Tarn had deliberately rejected hit points as a design shortcut. Each dwarf could become unhappy for specific reasons, fall into depression, go berserk, or produce strange moods that led them to lock themselves in workshops and construct artefacts of mysterious purpose. A fortress that managed its population’s psychological wellbeing as carefully as its food supply and defensive perimeter tended to last longer than one that did not. Adventure Mode offered a second way to engage with the same world, dropping the player into the map as an individual character to explore, complete quests, and interact with the history the world generation had produced.

The community that formed around Dwarf Fortress developed its own culture of storytelling. Players began writing detailed accounts of notable fortress collapses, cataloguing the specific chain of events that led from a functioning colony to catastrophic failure. The most celebrated of these was Boatmurdered, a 2006 project in which a group of players passed a single fortress save between them, each taking a turn and documenting what happened. The result was a narrative of escalating mismanagement, elephant-related disasters, and a final descent into fire that became one of the most widely read pieces of player-generated content in gaming history.

Bay 12 operated the game on donations throughout this period. Tarn and Zach kept their expenses low and treated the game as self-sustaining as long as income roughly covered outgoings. In 2011, Tarn declined both a job offer from a major developer and a $300,000 licensing deal for the Dwarf Fortress name, calculating that long-term donations would exceed the lump sum and that independence was worth more than either. By 2013 the monthly income averaged around $4,000. The decision to finally release a paid version came in 2022, motivated in part by Zach facing significant medical costs. Bay 12 partnered with Kitfox Games to produce a Steam release featuring pixel art graphics, a redesigned interface, tutorials, and audio. It launched on 6 December 2022, sold 160,000 copies within the first 24 hours, 300,000 in the first week, and surpassed a million total sales by April 2025. The freeware version remained available throughout and continues to receive updates alongside the premium edition, with Tarn still pushing patches in 2026.

The game received a score of 93 on Metacritic following the Steam release. It won the D.I.C.E. Award for Best Strategy and Simulation Game in 2023. None of this altered the fundamental character of the project. Tarn had described Dwarf Fortress as his life’s work and estimated in 2011 that version 1.0 was at least twenty years away. The game is still in development. The current version, as of early 2026, introduced changes to how dwarves seek out and respond to quality food. The patch notes read exactly as they always have.