History VideoGame / DwarfFortress

** When asking a child his profession: ''"You look like a mighty warrior."'' ''"I'm four!"''

** You can assign specific uniforms to your dwarf soldiers, and if there is not exactly what you have assigned, they will grab the next best thing. Now let's say you're holed up because of a full-on siege but one of your soldiers dies for the above reason. He has better equipment than one of your other military dwarves, who will now try to head to his corpse because there's a ''really nice'' pair of boots out there. Then ''he'' dies and another dwarf thinks, "You know, his crossbow was better than mine..."

* BloodyHilarious: The combat reports. Sometimes they are [[RuleOfCool so absurdly over the top]] and full of ShockingMoments you can't help but have a good laughs.

** The player community can fall into this at times. [[AffablyEvil They're typically rather civil, at least as far as internet communities go]], but they frequently consider VideoGameCrueltyPotential to be both amusing, and a mandatory requirement for enjoying oneself; whether they are to keep a friendly group of Kobolds alive and... relatively safe, or if the little buggers are to be used as meatshields, is considered something that needs to be seriously debated. Meanwhile, tossing dwarf children into pits filled with angry dogs and gleefully massacring kittens to use their bones as building materials for giant doomsday devices with which to slaughter your enemies, dwarven nobility, or both, is considered sufficiently standard behaviour that ''not'' participating in it (or something roughly equivalent) at some point, will have you be regarded as an alarming aberration, and render you liable to recieve accusations of being a disguised elf from other players.

* DivinePunishment: Characters can find themselves cursed with vampirism or lycanthropy for disturbing graves, toppling idols or abusing oracles.

** Some of the _______-Men are just downright creepy, made even weirder by their nondescript ASCII chips. Slug-Men, for instance, ''have no bones'', and have inedible flesh. Luckily, they don't seem to be very enthused about defending their space, and sort of just slither around the overworld area aimlessly. Rat-Men, on the other hand, seem to exclusively live on the edge of volcanoes.

* GuideDangIt: The original game has no instructions or tutorial. Learning to play at all, and learning to build a sustainable fort even in friendly environments, all but requires one to find online guides. Accidentally destroying your fortress or killing your adventurer in the most stupid of ways might as well be a coming of age story, whether it be flooding your fortress with pumped lava or water, building a fortress on a plain that floods when it's high tide, or accidentally jumping off a mountain. Later lessened in severity in the Steam release, which included some in-game tutorials, though it by no means scratches the surface in the more complex mechanics.

* AIGeneratedEconomy: Showing us the pitfalls of giving the AI control over sectors of the economy is the cut [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Dwarven_economy eponymous feature]]: when some conditions were fulfilled, all dwarves were awarded private accounts to spend on food and other items they could buy from shops--except for nobles and [[AsskickingEqualsAuthority legendary dwarves]], who could take whatever without spending anything. Dwarves were able to buy shops and sell items in it for their own benefit. This led to bizarre things like children of nobles/legendary dwarves being ''poorer'' than average, and dwarves spending all their time counting their coins.

* GuideDangIt: The original game has no instructions or tutorial. Learning to play at all, and learning to build a sustainable fort even in friendly environments, all but requires one to find online guides. Accidentally destroying your fortress or killing your adventurer in the most stupid of ways might as well be a coming of age story, whether it be flooding your fortress with pumped lava or water, building a fortress on a plain that floods when it's high tide, or accidentally jumping off a mountain. Later lessened in severity in the Steam release, which included some in-game tutorials.

* GuideDangIt: The original game has no instructions or tutorial. Learning to play at all, and learning to build a sustainable fort even in friendly environments, all but requires one to find online guides. Accidentally destroying your fortress or killing your adventurer in the most stupid of ways might as well be a coming of age story, whether it be flooding your fortress with pumped lava or water, building a fortress on a plain that floods when it's high tide, or accidentally jumping off a mountain.

** The Steam version of the game added tutorials, much to the relief of incoming new players.

** "Fun" is generally used to refer to things going pear-shaped, like your Legendary+5 Swordmaster losing their mind and going [[UnstoppableRage berserk]], your miners accidentally breaching a magma pipe and flooding the fort with molten rock, or [[spoiler:[[DugTooDeep accidentally digging into the core of an adamantine vein, unleashing TheLegionsOfHell into your unprepared fortress]].

* GuideDangIt: The game has no instructions or tutorial. Learning to play at all, and learning to build a sustainable fort even in friendly environments, all but requires one to find online guides. Accidentally destroying your fortress or killing your adventurer in the most stupid of ways might as well be a coming of age story, whether it be flooding your fortress with pumped lava or water, building a fortress on a plain that floods when it's high tide, or accidentally jumping off a mountain.

** Even before reaching Hell, when digging in the very lower levels of the world you can occasionally unearth a single demon that was sealed inside an air pocket inside the layers of rock. Said demon will usually wipe out your miners and make a beeline straight for your fortress.

* DugTooDeep: Dig deep enough and you will eventually reach Hell, instantly triggering an invasion of demons. More insidiously, all veins of adamantine (the best metal in the game) lead to Hell, making mining it a very risky prospect.

On March 13th 2019, Tarn announced that ''Dwarf Fortress'' was coming to UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} and itch.io with a new tileset and enhanced graphics support and audio. He said that he would continue updating the free ASCII version on the Bay 12 web page as ''Dwarf Fortress Classic''. The non-free version was released on December 6th, 2022.

* GuideDangIt: The game has no instructions or tutorial. Learning to play at all, and learning to build a sustainable fort even in friendly environments, all but requires one to find online guides.
** Accidentally destroying your fortress or killing your adventurer in the most stupid of ways might as well be a coming of age story, whether it be flooding your fortress with pumped lava or water, building a fortress on a plain that floods when it's high tide, or accidentally jumping off a mountain.
* HandicappedBadass: [[SubsystemDamage Thanks to]] [[ChunkySalsaRule the combat system,]] anyone can become this, including yourself in Adventure mode and your dwarves in Fortress mode. All you need is a crutch and enough time to grind crutch-walking, and you are back up fighting against the best of them. If they can get [[ImprobableWeaponUser a properly heavy metal crutch]], all the better.
** The character doesn't even need a crutch, they can just crawl around and slay [[AttackOfTheFiftyFootWhatever megabeasts]] without breaking a sweat, although they move pretty slowly. Some [=NPCs=] will even move as fast as the PC can, in Adventure mode... despite missing their legs.

* DifficultButAwesome: It could be argued that the ''entire game'' is this trope, what with the [[http://www.vayapotra.es/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/2rmqi6o.gif steep learning curve]] but the awesome things that can happen. [[http://i.imgur.com/SLIGtiY.png This]] outlines the ''bare essentials'' needed for a self-sustaining fort. Note that it does not mention that getting a muddy cave often requires mechanisms and floodgates or an early expedition into the cave layers, which could as well be a source of quick [[UnusualEuphemism Fun]]. [[http://i.imgur.com/glPVP.jpg Here]] is a similar diagram for getting your military operational.

[[caption-width-right:350:Losing is Fun!]]

->''"Losing is Fun."''
-->-- '''Official motto'''

%% Please do not change or remove either without starting a new thread.
%% The profanity will be left alone, as it does sum up DF and its metagame quite well.

[[caption-width-right:350:You want a dwarf? There's your fucking dwarf. You want some better graphics? [[UpdatedRerelease Get the Steam version.]] Don't want to? Then '''fuck you.''' Dwarves can do lots of stuff. Like digging. Can you dig? '''Hell no.''' Play ''Dwarf Fortress''.]]

%% Image and caption kept as is per Image Pickin' thread: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1335005460045720100

[[quoteright:204:[[ASCIIArt https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/dwarf_fortress.png]]]]
[[caption-width-right:204:You want a dwarf? There's your fucking dwarf. You want some better graphics? [[UpdatedRerelease Get the Steam version.]] Don't want to? Then '''fuck you.''' Dwarves can do lots of stuff. Like digging. Can you dig? '''Hell no.''' Play ''Dwarf Fortress''.]]

--> Kol Tölunimush has been ecstatic lately. He killed somebody by accident while sparring recently. [[AxCrazy He took joy in slaughter lately.]] [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone He has lost a lover to tragedy lately.]] He has witnessed death. He had a satisfying sparring session recently.

On March 13th 2019, Tarn announced that ''Dwarf Fortress'' is coming to UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} and itch.io with a new tileset and enhanced graphics support and audio. He said that he will continue updating the free ASCII version on the Bay 12 web page as ''Dwarf Fortress Classic''. The non-free version was released on December 6th, 2022.

** The 31.17 update made the overworld of ''Dwarf Fortress'' much nastier, with bogeymen ready to tear apart anyone foolish enough to sleep outside and [[AllTrollsAreDifferent Night Trolls]] infecting humans with TheCorruption. Worse, [[DueToTheDead unburied dwarves]] [[spoiler:now might come back as ghosts.]] They may [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=70423.0 throw parties]] for the rest of your dwarves, or [[KillEmAll attempt to kill everyone]] in the fort, depending on what their mood was when they died.
** The .34.01 release gives us such wonderful additions as necromancers and their undead armies, werecreatures and zombies that can turn your dwarves into dwarrowwolves/zombies, evil clouds and rains that can have the same syndromes as forgotten beasts and evil lands that transform the living into [[KillEmAll Life-despising]] Husks.

* KillEmAll: [[ForegoneConclusion The inevitable end]] to any given fortress.

* ChildrenAreAWaste: Children eat your meals and drink your booze for 12 years without doing or learning anything useful. Birth rates don't come close to matching a successful fort's immigration rate or basically ''any'' fort's death rate, so children won't really give many long-term benefits even if you're patient and successful enough to have the same fortress span multiple generations. Even worse if you're unlucky enough to get a wave of migrants that consists almost entirely of children and your fort has suddenly become an orphanage.

* AscendedMeme: One of the official songs in the non-free release is called 'Koganusan', Dwarven language for "{{LetsPlay/Boatmurdered}}"