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[revara]

Exactly what the title says, share your stories or reasons of why you keep playing Dwarf Fortress.

Personally, I'm totally lost, a complete wreck as far as DF is concerned, I don't like to think that I'm bad, but I'll admit to never having seen a siege, because, well, I can't keep playing, I keep losing interest, and I'd love to hear some tricks you may have found in your many, many hours of playing this wondrous game.

Although I have never seen my first siege, I have managed all to many hours with this wonderful dwarf simulator, and I have played it for years on and off.

I come back because it is wonderful complexity, without being too demanding in moment-to-moment interactions and it allows me to communicate with other people through text freely, as I play the game. That, and it makes you feel sort of special when you know the bindings and can designate a not-too-shabby fortress, and see it bloom to the point where you(I) lose control and start getting way too many idlers!

[Loud Whispers]

The relationship between a player and Dwarf Fortress shares much in common with addiction, stockholm syndrome and zealotry.

OBEY ASCII

[Skribbblie]

I am kept playing by the stories and legends I witness coming to life. And by the really really cruel and stupid experiments I perform.

There is nothing quite like watching all of the dwarves you named after your friends slowly die from misfortune and poor choices. It's very entertaining. It's like drama television, with fewer tears and romance, and more sudden blood and gore.

Quite fun.

Now, I'm not generally a sadistic person.

But this game just really, really summons out my deeply experimental sadistic tendencies. There's nothing very fun about running around and murdering everyone for the sake of murdering everyone. But do something stupid that will probably end with a lot of people getting killed. Like leaving a ton of dead and unburied bodies in the dining hall for three years, and enforce punishments for tantrums solely by beatings. To test the emotional limits of your dwarves. Coincidentally, only three dwarves in that fortress went insane, which wholly surprised me.

I mostly enjoy striking a balance between peace and chaos. Between order and fun. It is satisfying to watch your farmers diligently harvest massive quantities of pig tails and process them while your weavers make vast amounts of cloth, and it is thrilling to watch those same farmers and weavers desperately make a wall while a forgotten beast makes mincemeat finely-minced dwarf meat of your weaponless desperate distraction militia.

And there is so much to do! I've been playing for years now, and I still haven't done so many things! I haven't made a magma pump stack, or a magma piston... And I haven't even touched minecarts.

There is so much more fun to be had.

[Robsoie]

Some stuff to keep going at DF :

- making a Megaproject , often require invaders turned off (though if you play with DF2014 there's nearly never any invasion, unlike past versions)

- creating a surface town with individual houses for families, much more challenging that it sounds due to wilderness dangers (assuming you didn't embark in an ultra peaceful location)

- NOT walling your fortress (invaders AI being too limited to know how to invade a walled fort or dig) but developping a military to actually fight heroic wars (recommended playing 34.11 or lower, due to how rare and small invaders are in DF2014) and have legends about your last stands trying to protect the dwarves.

- trying to make some interesting traps system, trying to weaponise the environment or simply some stupid dwarf trick

- embark in challenging or at least atmospheric or interesting (a good reason to go back even to 40d) areas , as often the embark zone will make a fun or a boring game.

- try a mod that make things more interesting for your own taste in case the default setup is not that good for you

- just have fun

[StagnantSoul]

For me... I really don't know what keeps me playing. I just love DF, even if I hate it too. I hate how the game takes forever to get successfully going, I hate how I am constantly bugged by werebeasts, I hate how few sieges we get nowadays, I hate how my dwarves are too stupid to go to their jobs... I really hate that.













But I love so much about DF. I love how there's no hp system, you have a semi-realistic body you have to chop away at to kill. I love going into adventure mode and pitting myself against the impossible odds that is survival. I love how awkward and quirky it was in 34.11, with things such as a dwarf injuring himself when trying to wash his kidney. I love seeing my army go to work, sending heads and feet flying in every direction as they cut down the enemy. I love watching a battle one on one between a massive statue and my champion. I love seeing into the profiles of every dwarf, and understanding just why they act the way they do. Really, with most games, I become bored after a few weeks or months. But not Dwarf Fortress, I've been playing for about two years now, and I'm still enjoying myself and have yet to experience everything.

[NW_Kohaku]

Mostly, I view Dwarf Fortress as a game of discovery.  Not of discovery of what's in the game, but in how the game, itself, works. Understanding how far it can be pushed, how it breaks down, how you can trick it, etc.  It's an exploration into the game, itself.  To that end, I often make fortresses just to experiment with new features, or try out new mods. 

Beyond that, I stay for the chance to argue with people on the forums.  You get to learn so much neater things from arguments on these forums than most forums, and I get to discuss everything from history to geology to physics.

[Jigowah]

I'm in it for the stories, fun and watching this incredible simulation in action.

I have so many wonderful memories:

Watching my first mountainhome get obliterated by the circus.
My vampire blood well that infected the whole fortress.
My experiments with werebadger soldiers.
Watching a dragon burn the entire surface to cinders, and then seeing him move on to annihilate my booze stockpile and the hapless dwarves I had burrowed there having their blood boil and explode.
My criminal vs goblin fist fighting arena, and the battles that would last for months and result in incredible amounts of blood and teeth sprayed everywhere.

There is nothing like Dwarf Fortress anywhere in the world.

[Lockem Shoto]

There are so many stories and fortresses that I can make. The abundance of things that I can do is what keeps me coming back. It's like ... it's like good art form in a movie. I can keep coming back to Dwarf Fortress every couple of months, and the pleasure I gain from the game never diminishes. It's so beautiful to me.

[ImagoDeo]

I keep playing, though not consistently, because this game is deeper than anything else I've ever encountered in terms of the variations it can have. I love reading stories of the exploits of others, and I love building grand forts with the most precision and greatest efficiency of space. (I'm zeroing in on a really really good style - it actually depends on having an aquifer to pierce, believe it or not). I love starting with nothing but a pick for the sake of a clean beginning without all those silly trappings you can spend points on.

I love trying to do all of the above in a haunted glacier with yetis (and worse) breathing down my dwarves' necks while they frantically dig for the caverns and try to establish some sort of functional fort in the creepy depths while giant cave spiders snatch them one by one.

I don't go really in depth on knowing my dwarves, but the story of the fort is very interesting to me and I love to push things to extremes - crocsplosions, massive pump stacks, trapping forgotten beasts, surviving with only twenty dwarves...

[CyberianK]

One thing I love most about this game is that I can play it alongside doing other things.

So after work I sometimes start it and leave it running on one screen only checking notifications and occasionally modifying small things. Or just leave it in pause mode and occasionally design stuff. Meanwhile I can watch some videos and browse on my other two screens but still enjoy what my dorfs are doing. I can't do that with some of the other games I play like War Thunder or shooters where you always have to focus.
Sure when something bad fun happens I have to focus to but then you can just hit pause and wait till you are ready. Same reason I like 4x games for relaxing times because I am old and slow. No not really but its just different times I like to play different games I have no problem playing fast competetive games on weekends or when I am ready for them but not after a hard days work.

[revara]

I am happy to see so many replies, and perhaps I can find it a bit inspiring, to start my own new fort, one where I might finally make it to a point of some good old fashioned fun. I'll definitely give it a shot on my laptop over the weekend, and perhaps I'll try to take some of the small stories here to heart, attempt to see what I can live out, what stories I can create with Dwarf Fortress.

Thank you for participating so far, and I'll try to strike the earth with more inspired zeal than ever!

[mobucks]

The drama is what keeps my older forts going.

I have a 20 cell jail. Right now it is full because of a trade restriction on shields that came after I sold them all to a human caravan.

I prefer to train my military only 2 months a year, so that they all aren't legendary in a year. Deaths happen, and new recruits are brought in to fill the ranks.

I had the fortune of embarking while at war with goblins. 7 years in and my dead-missing unit list says 247 goblins and 49 trolls have come to die at my fort. 4 gobbos and 2 trolls are permanent prisoners. Sieges keep getting bigger and bigger, but I havn't had a new seige in a year or two and if they stop completely I may start a new fort.

Regular sieges keep things interesting over the long term. It sucks that they are hard to come by in this version.

Ignoring mandates specifically to get use out of the justice system is more entertaining than fulfilling mandates. The added bonus is the ability to just walk away and let the game run.

[Robsoie]

Regular sieges keep things interesting over the long term. It sucks that they are hard to come by in this version.

The good thing is that 34.11 is still fun even without the "world activation", so going back to it isn't making you miss much when it comes to fortress mode, actually i have more fun with it now.

[nimbus25]

DF is a very weird, quirky, and complicated game, and I love it for it.

While I do dislike how hard it is to get things going, how stupid dwarves are, and how tedious the game can be, it's worth it for seeing all the silly and dwarfy things you can produce. While I am not the most experienced player ever (never touched the Justice system or Minecarts, and am just now making a magma pump), it's really fun seeing this fortress slowly grow into a city, tense when a fortress almost falls to something, satisfying when it recovers, and thrilling when having to deal with Forgotten Beasts. This forum is also a really cool place to browse, seeing all the amazing things people can pull off, and all the stories people tell of their fort.

[herocrafter]

That new fortress smell.  Learning Climbing the learning cliff (Wiki, Google seem to be always open).  The stories,  love reading everyone trials- successful or not are very motivating (reading those at work when possible not only passes the time quickly but really gets me siked).  I have that attitude that after a game crash after an epic run without a save that next time I'll do it better.  In short I guess it's still challenging to me.