Trivia / Dwarf Fortress

• Ascended Fanfic: Simon Swerwer, who composed music for the SoundSense soundtrack mod for the original game, also lent his talents to the official soundtrack of the Steam version. The Game Over theme, "Koganusan", was originally from the mod.
• Doing It for the Art: Tarn "Toady One" Adams has described it as being his "life's work", reportedly turned down six- or seven-figure deals to license just the name because he doesn't want it to be associated with anything but his life-long creation, and the idea of working for the next twenty years to release v1.0 doesn't bother him. Downplayed with the Steam release, as he sort of realized with his brother's deteriorating health that he needs to start making a more substantial income from his project.
• Dummied Out: Female dwarves don't have beards by default, but this can be changed with a minor edit to the dwarf creature raw file. There's even a note left inside the file that explicitly says what to do if you want to enable them.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: The development of the game started in 2002. It had its first commercial release in 2022, and even then remains in early access.
• Meme Acknowledgement: "Koganusan," one of the tracks on the soundtrack for the Steam release, is the dwarven name of the infamous fortress of Boatmurdered.
• Newbie Boom: The 0.50 version, released on Steam, saw an immense boom in new players due to the inclusion of an official tileset and the much-waited revamping of the game's notoriously clunky UI. With the game now more accessible than ever for new players, Dwarf Fortress would become one of the most purchased new games on Steam at the time of its release.
• No Budget: Prior to the Steam release, the studio's annual operating budget was about US$35,000; for a game that's coded by one guy and which started out as a pure hobby project, that's pretty high. For a game that's won a large stack of awards, spawned at least three or four imitators from much larger and better-resourced studios, been the subject of a feature article in the New York Times, and now appears as part of an exhibit in New York's Museum of Modern Art, it's astonishingly low.
• Throw It In!: When Toady One was testing out the code for adventurer mode necromancers, he discovered he could raise a butchered animal's skin as a separate unit. He kept it because "it makes about as much sense as a walking skeleton."