Dwarf Fortress has a lot going on beneath the surface – that’s true of the game conceptually, since it’s always been about watching scores of complex systems interacting beneath an ASCII-based graphics design. It’s also true of how Dwarf Fortress is built, however. You can dig through many, many layers beneath the surface in the sandbox game, as this new Dwarf Fortress gameplay video illustrates.
Zach Adams, one of the two brothers who designed Dwarf Fortress, has uploaded a video that shows a garbage disposal system he’s built in the latest version of Dwarf Fortress. Dwarves in the fortress take their trash to a designated room, where it’s placed in a minecart and then pushed along a rail track to a disposal area, where it’s dumped into a pit of liquid-hot magma.
This seems straightforward enough, but as the video shows, there’s a lot of distance between the trash room and the place where it’s ultimately incinerated. The track winds its way down through dozens of layers, each one populated by its own ecosystem of plants, animals, and potentially dangerous monsters who’d love nothing more than to get into a compound full of tasty dwarves.
For anyone unfamiliar with Dwarf Fortress, each time the video scene shifts, the dwarf pushing the minecart is moving down to the floor below. Each segment of track shown emerges from a tunnel leading up, and ends in a tunnel leading down.
The video is also a nice showcase of Dwarf Fortress’ new art assets. The various levels Adams’ trash minecart passes through have giant mushrooms and neon grass filling their corridors and chambers. Waterways flow through the caves, and endemic life flitters about, lighting the caves with bioluminescence.
Bay 12 Games and Kitfox, which is publishing the Steam version of Dwarf Fortress, say that there should be more video updates coming along soon, “now that the art is nearing completion.” That’s good news for anyone eager to get digging in the new edition of Dwarf Fortress.