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[bluthru]

Hello.  I can't believe I never heard of Dwarf Fortress or played it before until now!!  Just discovered it this month while searching for games having a lot of detail and a google search turned up a wiki of this game.   After giving up over three times at the start of the year I finally got the gist of it and was able to play and lose but had a lot of fun doing.  Since early this month, I haven't stopped playing it and it definitely has NOT gotten boring at all.  The only game that had me gripped for a long time was Civilization and this game has so much more depth and re-playability after I was able to get used to the UI.  I actually appreciate the ACII as it definitely gives a greater challenge but the starter kit with all the mods helps a great deal. 

Just curious how and when people stumbled on this game as I think it is only going to get better with the future Steam release but it is extremely enjoyable to play now.

[Salmeuk]

grats! You are entering into a meta-verse that has existed for almost 20 years now. I began playing back in 2007.

May I suggest you peruse the Hall of Legends?

Or hop on by to the community games subforum and try taking a turn on one of the succession fortresses.

If anything interesting happens to your fortress, say a massacre at the hands of a were-demon, share it! Make a post in the What's Going On in Your Fort? thread.

Any questions feel free to search or ask. The DF wiki is invaluable, but there is plenty of knowledgeable people hanging around at bay12 who are more than willing to suss out what your problem is.

Whatever you do, don't forget - the game is unfinished, there is no wrong way to play, and . . . losing is fun.

[Urlance Woolsbane]

I first heard about Dwarf Fortress circa 2012, from another student at my high school; it struck me as interesting, but I wasn't impelled to seek it out until late 2014, when I stumbled upon its TVTropes page, and read the various entertaining stories of the game there. Also, I had recently been thinking about how to make a BIONICLE world-simulator game, so I was in the mood for something like DF

[MaxTheFox]

A friend introduced me. At first, I played adventure mode and did random kinda cringy shit but now I like fort mode more.

[voliol]

I had heard the usual rumors about a hard and unapproachable game on reddit, and for some reason decided to try it out. This was 5-6 years ago, some time after the ”world activation” release of 0.40, and I’ve been playing it on and off since then.

[brewer bob]

First heard about it in 2012 from some crappy gaming article (can't remember from where). The attitude of the article kept me from trying out DF for some time. Couldn't really stand the "oh look, I just discovered rogue-likes and am so cool to play this ASCII game, which is super hard to learn and you need to be super smart to play" style of the writing (as if ASCII rogue-likes were some new thing).

Probably around the end of 2013 or early 2014 I finally decided to give a go after reading Boatmurdered, and was delighted to discover that the article I had read about the game was complete bullshit. After that, there's been no turning back and each major update has addicted me even more and more (pretty much don't play any other computer games anymore).

[Mobbstar]

I too had initially been turned away from DF, less-so because of the alleged difficulty but rather because of a reddit snippet about a dude beating a mermaid to death and grabbing its body as a weapon to beat another.  At that point, it seemed like a sociopath fantasy.  Rimworld reinforced that idea.

In early 2020 I somehow found Kruggsmash's stories, which ultimatively convinced me to give it a spin.

[Salmeuk]

I too had initially been turned away from DF, less-so because of the alleged difficulty but rather because of a reddit snippet about a dude beating a mermaid to death and grabbing its body as a weapon to beat another.  At that point, it seemed like a sociopath fantasy.  Rimworld reinforced that idea.

In early 2020 I somehow found Kruggsmash's stories, which ultimatively convinced me to give it a spin.

This is an interesting point, and it's kind of shameful to think others might have also been turned off. DF is simulationist to it's core, and with that comes this predilection towards super-violence. Think of a kid playing with action figures, fighting and smashing them together. For the most part people are engaging with DF in that manner.

And then, you realize just how much LIFE there is to explore in the game. Connections, personalities, heroic adventures, and the towns and cities which we construct.

It is also interesting you bring up Rimworld, since

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

that game was so directly "inspired" by DF it chose to retain the simulation of individual body parts. . and for some reason Tynan decided to hardcode personality traits into a perk-like format, which completely destroys the suspension of disbelief that these pawns are creatures of their own volition, instead reducing them into stat-containers and meat puppets. So that simulationist approach to limbs and organs kind of funnels the game into this body horror simulator. Yes, it's partially tone, but it also leads to really stale gameplay. DF pawns, in their glorious historical detail, continue to grow more interesting and more relatable with every update.

[recon1o6]

Way back in 2008, alas I couldn't stomach the ascii graphics for long and I wasn't able to get much done as a result and didn't have the brain power to install tilesets

rediscovered in 2018 I want to say? on and off since with my favourite forts being

-the time I made a tower out of ice after discovering how to mine it
-smallhands over in community forts is a close second
-third is a personal fort I made inside a waterfall with my personal modded race until my old laptop gave up the ghost

[KtosoX]

Someone made a video about the perfect metropoly in SimCity 3000. Here is the link:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU

And in the comments section someone wrote: "I hope this guy never discovers Dwarf Fortress"

[Plazek]

A couple years before Boatmurdered or so I think.

Back before we had a random map that's for sure.

[callisto8413]

OneFjef got me to notice the game and then I failed at it a lot and then kind of had a few Fortresses last a few years and than lasted twenty years and now I like to try out challenges I create myself or try to make stories with the game.  I like it because it can be hard but once you figure out how to overcome a problem or barrier you truly feel good about how well you did.  Because each player will find their own solutions to the same problem.  Some simple.  Some involving bridges and hot lava.

[Silverwing235]

Not really much to tell, in my case - found adv mode back in 43.05 via the trope page. Just waiting on the Big Wait, like most of the rest of us, for now.

[WonderPsycho]

For me, I first discovered Dwarf Fortress thanks to Joel from Vinesauce, basically I discovered Dwarf Fortress all the way back in 2015-2017, I at first didn't watched Joel's archived streams of him playing Dwarf Fortress cause the title of the game sounded like something generic to me (and this was before i realized Dwarf Fortress was a roguelike cause at that time the only roguelike i knew and is the first roguelike i ever played was Cataclysm:Dark Days Ahead, which i discovered back when i first discovered the open-source multiplayer roleplay game Space Station 13) tho after a while I then decided to watch Joel's archived streams on Dwarf Fortress, wondering what was all the fuss about and that's when I realized Dwarf Fortress is not only a roguelike, but alot more then what I expected it to be, and another thing that got me hooked into it was the persistence in the world you generated and whenever you died you could start a new character or fortress and play in that same generated world again, but I will say the archived stream by Joel that truly got me into Dwarf Fortress was his "Part 15" archived fortress mode stream, with the undead and !!FUN!! that happened in that archived stream, and another youtuber that truly got me into wanting to play Dwarf Fortress for myself was Kruggsmash

also a fun fact: Dwarf Fortress as a roguelike was what got me into ascii graphics in some roguelikes like Dwarf Fortress

[jarathor]

Boatmurdered was definitely my first introduction to Dwarf Fortress. The first time I actually tried playing it, it was still 2D, so it must have been 2007 or so. I bounced off of it then but picked it up again a year or so later, and have been regularly playing ever since. I even did some very embarrassing Let's Plays (do people still call them Let's Plays? I don't think so, right?) circa 2010 that got more attention than I ever expected. I've always wanted to give streaming DF another go, but since then I've been to college, then grad school, and now work as a computational physicist, so I don't really have the time. Besides, the video game video/streaming space is completely different now, and I don't know how much appetite there is for more DF content.

OneFjef got me to notice the game

Now there's a name I haven't come across in a long time! Big dose of nostalgia right there.