- Bug reports are always like
this in Dwarf Fortress It's like,
I have a problem in my tavern.
There's a bunch of dead cats
in there and I don't know why.
[DANNY LAUGHING]
And so they send me 
a save or whatever,
what we ended up discovering
was that the cats--
So I had just added this new feature 
in the taverns where
there's actual service at the bar, right? 
So the tavern keeper will 
get a mug, fill it at the barrel,
bring it over to the table,
hand it to a dwarf, and the
dwarf will drink. But I mean, oftentimes
the dwarves were like
called out to go do a job, right?
And so they'll take their mug,
just pitch it on the floor,
'cause they don't care about 
cleanliness. 'Cause I'd have
to teach them how to be clean, right? 
So they pitch it on the floor.
And of course that spills the
contents onto the floor, right?
So now you got like alcohol 
all over the floor of the bar.
That's fine, right? That's how 
bars are sometimes.
But the cats would walk in there and
because of this other thing we added to
make like lava more realistic or whatever
the alcohol would actually get on
their little feet, right?
So the cats have this alcohol now 
soaked in on their little feet,
and because of this other, you know--
 So there was this whole
other thing that I added back when 
stuff was getting like, when you'd
get like blood splattered
on you during a fight or something,
we had this problem where it would
be like there's blood
on your eyes or whatever, 
and there's blood.
And so when people would go to like
clean with soap, it was really weird.
'Cause they'd be like soaping their eyeballs 
or whatever. And we're like, okay,
so we just need to make
eyelids work, right, so that--
So we go to the eyelid
body part, and we're like,
the eyelid just cleans like the eye.
And at this time, of course,
because of how the thing
works, modularly like,
well we can make cats clean themselves 
'cause it's so cute, right? Like,
oh, they're just licking their paws
and so forth and it's charming, right?
And so we had these cats now 
that are in the bar with the
alcohol soaked in their feet. 
And now they're licking them.
They're like licking their paws. 
And of course, because we had
just finished like ingested 
poisons not too long ago--
DANNY: Yes, of course.
- They're now getting drunk, right?
And this is the bug. The actual bug
is just, there was a numeric problem.
'Cause I didn't expect this at all.
And so they were like drinking a whole
mug every time they would lick their hand,
like an actual mug for a poor cat,
 and the other calculations were all
fine. So that just wasn't good for them.
Their blood alcohol content shoots
up to who knows what, and they didn't
make it, you know? And we had like the
seven or eight, we just go on Wikipedia
and have like the seven or eight
different symptoms of alcohol poisoning.
And they eventually get to respiratory
failure, and the cats respiratorily failed
and keeled over in the bar, and 
that was the bug report.  And...
DANNY: Like the punchline of the story is
all these cats were getting drunk.
But like on the way there, you made a
system for cats to have fucking eyelids.
- Yeah. Yeah. Oh, everybody's got eyelids. 
Yeah. I mean, everybody who has them,
We actually had to go through the creature
 list and be like, who has eyelids, who doesn't.
We're not that careful with that 
because we have like 500...
[MUSIC PLAYING]
DANNY: Dwarf Fortress is one of the
most interesting games ever made.
But the reason we've been sitting on
this interview for so long is that our
usual trick of using gameplay B-roll to
explain what the developer is talking
about doesn't really work here. 
You see, Dwarf Fortress looks like this.
To the average viewer, the action that's 
taking place here is incomprehensible.
In fact, it's only after playing hours of the
game and watching dozens of YouTube
tutorials that I can decipher
half of what's going on here.
- I don't even see the code. 
All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
DANNY: But the ASCII graphics are part of the
reason Dwarf Fortress is so interesting.
You see, a lot of modern games
are burdened by their fidelity.
If, say, Madden wanted to add a feature
where dogs could play football,
they'd have to model the dogs, and texture
the dogs, and change a bunch of AI and
animations, and add lots of barks. For
Dwarf Fortress, features like this are
modular. Tarn and his brother, Zach,
just add it and then choose how it
interacts with the rest of the system.
And that's what they've been doing for
about 17 years now, and such they've
created this complex, bizarre
interconnected simulation,
which is capable of producing some
of the wildest emergent gameplay and
narrative in all the video games. I played
 Dwarf Fortress here and there,
but I mostly watch YouTube videos. 
In fact, to help illustrate
some of how this game works, we've 
gotten permission to use some
footage from my favorite Dwarf 
Fortress storyteller, Kruggsmash.
We have a link in the
description to his channel,
which you should absolutely check out and
subscribe to. But like any good story,
we have to go back to the start. So
how did Dwarf Fortress come to be?
- Yeah, so my name is Tarn Adams and
I'm the co-founder of Bay 12 games.
And I'm making a game called Dwarf
Fortress with my brother Zach.
The website's been up
for 18 and a half years.
Been working on Dwarf Fortress for
16 of those, the first two on and off,
but steady for about 14. We'd
always been working on a kind
of fantasy role playing simulation
type game. Even when I was like, 
you know, very, very young.
I remember in elementary school
we had a game called Drag Slay.
So we hadn't really seen a kind
of RPG fantasy type game that
really indulged in the same things that
like Civilization was doing or whatever,
where you can make a whole map or
whatever. There was the rogue like games,
which of course we were 
heavily into where they
make their own dungeons 
and so forth. But we were,
we just wanted to make the whole
world. Why not make the whole world?
So I created the Bay 12 website.
I like started giving away the game we
were working on at the time for free.
And at that time it was like the fifth
iteration of this Dray Slay game was
called Slaves to Armok: God of Blood,
this really terrible 3D game 
where we had changed
our philosophy\ at that 
point to like, oh,
let's build from the bottom
up. So we were like, okay,
now we're constructing this 3D
model of this person who can like walk on
one hand or one foot if you set 
the stance variables that way.
DANNY: Wow.
- It's got these really terrible animations, 
like terrible.  Don't wow too much here.
And uh, but it had like tissues and so forth.
There were spells that would like strip
the skin off of people or teleport
people's noses over. And the
little models would move and stuff.
It was like a fun little playground,
not much of a game at all.
And it took us years to get that far,
'cause we didn't know what we were doing.
But that was the game we
were working on at the time.
And so we had this other
kind of side of games,
that we were doing.
'Cause that's just, you know,
it's a slog where you're adding features
very slowly. And so I'm like, okay,
side project, three days, side
project, three days. And this is 
where things like WW1
 Medic, which is
one of our games that's gotten
like a small amount of press.
There's Liberal Crime Squad,
which is another game. That's
an ASCII game, right?
Text graphics or whatever.
There are several of them. And that's
what Dwarf Fortress was going to be.
Dwarf Fortress was like, you know, 
a few years in. We're like,
I wanted to make a game kinda
like Dig Dug or something.
It was, actually there's this game
called VGA Minor, VGA Minor,
which is it's got like 
this cross section you'd
go down in an elevator, and you dig 
and you get like just your minerals,
and you bring them back. And this is 
from like the 90s or something.
There's a little bit of flooding, if I recollect. 
You're supposed to put dynamite under
the outhouse to get your wedding ring 
out of there or something like that,
which is the plot of the game, I guess. 
I vaguely remember. And so we were like,
okay, let's make a game called Mutant Miner.
You go down and dig just like that
except you find like Teenage Mutant
Ninja turtles, munition canisters,
and you grow extra arms
so you can mine faster.
And now you have progression, right?
Or whatever, this is a game now.
So we're like, we're going to need
to make it real time, right?
It's gotta be real time in order
to deal with this,
these multiple things. So now you've got
multiple little people running around,
digging and so forth, and
this is still a side project.
And then we had like this, okay,
we're going to make it about dwarves.
You dig. Dwarves always screw
up and dig too deep. They die.
They leave behind their 
little workshops and things.
And we were going to like generate
diaries and things like that.
And then you'd bring an adventurer
in to go and find out, you know,
as many little things as they could
about the game you had just played.
And so the Dwarf mode 
makes your maximum score
and then the adventure you send, 
it gets the realized portion
of the maximum score. Tight little
almost arcade game, right?
We were really excited about
this idea. So we scoped it out two months.
And, well, you see now that's gone.
It just started like,
because it was a fantasy game.
That was probably our mistake.
It started to siphon the
features from the main one, right?
Because it's ASCII graphics,
so it's so much faster
to put stuff in there
than I suppose like this 3D thing
we were working on and yeah,
so just every,
every little idea that we 
had for the other game
that we hadn't gotten to in five years, 
just slot it right into Dwarf Fortress.
Yeah. So Dwarf Fortress
is a colony management game.
I mean, it's kind of hard to explain to
a theoretical person that's like,
do they know what Sim City is?
Do they know what Tropico is?
Do they know what these other kind of
games that are vaguely like it are, right?
But you basically have a group of
dwarves, and they mine in the mountain.
You don't control any specific dwarf,
but you just kind of order their
 general activities and
just make the best of things
as trouble comes your way,
make sure that you have enough alcohol
to drink and make sure that you're farming
mushrooms and making little
golden goblets and so forth.
But when it comes to like, 
what makes the game more unique 
is that it actually takes place
in a persistent world that the game
will cook up for you each time.
So you can run a world generation,
which has sort of this historical
procedure that runs out, you know,
some hundreds of years
of history in a world map
that's been cooked up just for you.
And then you can play as many fortresses
as you want. And the old ones will
impact the new ones and so forth.
You might have a dwarf from your old
fortress come and migrate to your new
fortress, and you'll recognize them.
It'll be the same dwarves, you know,
whether or not they're missing
their pinky finger is intact.
You can also play a single player RPG.
So you can visit your retired fortresses,
talk to your old dwarves. I mean, it's
not, it's not that great, right?
We don't have like a
script writer like writing like
this whole story of your dorms or
whatever, but they'll talk to you about,
you know, what they've been doing
and so forth. And over the years,
it's become incredibly complicated
and so forth. And that,
that feeds into this whole
notion that's at the center of the
game, which is emergent narrative, right?
It's the idea that you can be 
playing a game without a story,
but a story will still
arise as you follow the
different threads and pieces of
information that are presented to you.
'Cause your own mind
is a story-building engine.
And we can help that by, 
you know, in our
game design processes to
encourage that kind of thing to happen.
So it's really sort of a collaboration
with the player
to produce a bunch of stories. 
And you can just look up
"Dwarf Fortress stories" as a Google search,
 and you'll see what we mean.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
KRUGGMASH: Well, hello, 
you bearded bastards.
Welcome back once again to
Odlestifon, the Scorchfountain.
And as you could see, we have
ourselves a little guest,
a guest by the name of Kenam
Sport Torches, the perfect growth,
or should I say the corpse
of Kenam Sport Torches,
the hydra, a giant dragon like
monster with seven biting heads,
an interesting foe to be sure, showed
up just moments ago and is now just
kind of wondering around the fortress.
It caught sight of some capybara out
here and it's just chasing them around the
hillside, and that's absolutely fine. But
we can't go outside for the time being.
I have reason to believe this creature
will be kind of dangerous. I mean,
I guess that's probably pretty
obvious. On the best of days,
the hyrda is a powerful foe,
but this one's undead,
which makes it a lot more dangerous.
Oftentimes the easiest way to kill
a foe is by destroying their head,
but this one has a seven of them.
However, if this was a living hydra,
we could potentially
do enough damage to it
to exhaust it or possibly make it
collapse in pain and then eventually
bleed out. But none of those are going
to be factors in combating this foe.
So I'm not too sure what our plan is.
If the thing would just
come to the fortress,
that might make things a little
bit more straightforward, but no,
it seems to be perfectly fine just 
wandering around out here. Well,
that's fine. Wander our way, you
bastard. And in the meantime,
we can address our bustling
fortress. Ah, Scorchfountain,
what a fine place for a 
dwarf to call home.
DANNY: You seem to have built this just
like this, it's like an emergence
like house of cards, like just 
so much data in this system.
- Well, it's not, a house of cards is 
such a scary way to say it though.
DANNY: It implies it's all gonna fall apart. 
May not be very flattering.
- Well, it's not untrue 
with, you know...
'Cause I mean that was a bug report we
were talking about there
and there are issues all the time,
 but yeah, no, I mean, it,
is a very intricate machine and it
can have, yeah. I mean, it's
interconnections everywhere.
It'd be more like if the house of cards
had little strings connecting all of the
cards too, and you know, that makes it
more stable in a sense because they,
the strings hold it together.
But also if you pull the wrong
string too hard or something,
you're going to go, and 
then we go oftentimes.
Recently we allowed humans to 
move into your fortress, and
they can petition for residency 
based on various criteria.
And you kind of decide 
o let them join or not.
But then the problem is like
none of the clothes fit them.
And so you have to like explicitly say,
I want to make some human clothing,
clothing for human sized people. As
you can imagine, that's fiddly, right?
That's really fiddly.
And just another burden that the
 Dwarf Fortress player has to assume,
which is a problem, right? I mean,
we really like to help people,
but at the same time,
we're adding more stuff. And then we're
not helping people by doing so, and so
forth. But it's  more about just
 general modularity, I think.
For instance, with villains now
we have this piece of their mind,
that's called their intrigue perspective,
and it holds the different plots
they have, the different actors 
in the plots and so forth.
And that's in their own mind 
as opposed to being a--
Another way to do it would have been
to make a global object outside of the
minds of people and just have
more of an objective scheme.
And even if we're not doing much with it,
now the fact that two different people
can have two different ideas about what's
going on is really important when
you start thinking about,
you know, partial information or
deceiving people, that kind of thing.
Lies are traditionally
very hard to do in
simulations because you have to
track so much extra data about like,
who knows what and who believes what,
but if it's something like a plot,
there's not that many 
plotters, right?
So you can keep the memory
usage down and so forth.
DANNY: Do modern games 
bore the shit out of you?
- Well, I mean, it's like I
still listen to music, you know?
I have a, I mean, I do, I play
a lot of PS4 games and stuff.
And I don't, I just don't play them for
like the same reason that I play them.
Like if I want to go hunt
metal dinosaurs or whatever,
and go hunt metal dinosaurs and not 
worry about whether or not like their paint
is chipped properly and that kind of
thing, right? I don't care. Yeah.
People are allowed to have all
kinds of varied interests and stuff.
So it's cool.
KRUGGSMASH: Alrighty. Now then 
anyways, our fortress.
Here you can see that little 
entryway, pretty much all set up.
We have a trade depot here,
as well as a couple of protective
bridges that can be raised to protect the
entryways. The roof up top
is almost all completed.
And then down in the actual fortress,
you can see that the meeting.
hall is all carved out,
although we don't have any tables
or chairs in place quite yet.
That's because we've been working on the
bedrooms of which we have 20, and each
has his own bed, cabinet, coffer, and
statue. There are two levels of them.
And then over here to the right,
you can see some looms and farmer
workshops, storage for plants, underneath
we have some stills and kitchens.
And then way up top
in this clay layer here,
you can see the farm plots
and storage for seeds as well.
So we're looking pretty good. We have
had a couple of migrant waves at this point,
so we're up to 13 dwarves.
So we're going to have to start making
some more bedrooms before long, I'm sure.
TARN: Yeah. I mean, it's hard to even
define what the community is, right?
If someone watches Dwarf
Fortress videos and stuff,
contributes on like the Patreon,
because I have lots of people
contributing that do not play.
They just love the stories
and stuff. And that's
like they're part
of the community, right? I mean,
I joke sometimes that the people that
watch videos and listen to people's
stories and so forth are
the players and the people who are
actually playing are more like the QA
department, right?
'Cause they have to deal 
with so much crap.
DANNY: Can you give us some examples of like,
how are ways that like, you know,
fortresses tend to just collapse?
TARN: So yeah, you can, I mean, a
very common way that fortresses
collapse is flooding. Yeah. 
That section of the fortress needs to
be sealed off as quickly as possible.
And occasionally there's a few dwarves
that are just kind of stuck in there and
you build the memorials to them so that
their ghosts don't haunt the fortress.
DANNY: Of course.
-And then they're fine. You don't
need to reclaim their bodies.
It helps if you can find and bury
them, but sometimes it's not possible.
There are sieges and
like monsters coming from
outside, dragons and so forth.
And then from below the ground or the
procedurally generated forgotten beasts.
Those are not necessarily common ways
fortresses fall. If you're
an experienced player,
you have a lot of tricks up your sleeve.
If you're not, then sometimes you,
yeah, that's it. You know, oh,
I wasn't expecting the giant like
hippopotamus to come
and destroy my fortress.
Magma down below, demons 
down below, starvation
can kick in if you aren't watching out.
 And also the, in different versions,
there's a different amount of effect of
a thing called a tantrum spiral where
something goes horribly wrong
for a small number of dwarves,
but they're all related to each
other. They're all friends.
The people that know them
get disturbed by that.
And then if you don't like give
them enough, you know, nice
masterpiece dining rooms and feed
them the right type of food or whatever,
the grumpiness will outweigh
the happiness. And then if they start
throwing fits and causing trouble,
that'll piss off more people.
And then the whole thing,
just kind of spirals out of
control. We're having a
issue with no unhappy dwarves at all.
And it turned out it's because when
they, when we added emotions to the game,
we added like 120 different
emotions to the game.
And one of them was the euphoria
you feel after you've been drinking.
And we had a flag that was wrong
on that. So after your first drink,
you would be euphoric for the
rest of your life.
DANNY: Oh my god.
- And so they never had trouble again.
And so I fixed that and then suddenly
we're back down in the, you know,
everyone's pissed off again.
And we've been, we
recently introduced the kind of short
and long term memory system to do like
character arcs so that you
would like, remember the
strongest things that have
happened to you over like a year,
and then it would save them
to your long term memories.
And that also causes a personality
change when it does it
so that we kind of get like actual
character arcs for the dwarves.
But there's been some
issues with that too,
'cause they have this kind of thing where
they remember the longterm memory like
cyclically when they're
doing nothing. I mean,
it'll occasionally pop into their mind.
And if someone's had a crappy life that
sometimes overwhelms them, and they
just remember these things. And they
just do it more and more. So it sets them
on these arcs, right?
And then people just aren't as resilient
as regular people most of the time.
I mean, these dwarves are not
as resilient as they should be.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
DANNY: Tarn and Zach have 
been making this game for a
diehard community of players 
for almost two decades.
But perhaps the craziest thing about
all of this is that the Dwarf Fortress is
free. After a few years
of people badgering them,
they eventually put a donation button
on their website and started getting
support from their community.
And in more recent years they've
developed a pretty healthy Patreon.
But the reason for creating a commercial
steam version complete with actual sprites
isn't just about making a quick buck. For
Tarn and his brother it's a lot more personal.
- Yeah. So the...
We had been giving away the
game free for a very long time.
And, just recently--
I mean my brother has always
had a, you know, he's on a 
medication that's expensive.
That's the kind of, yeah, typical 
US problem or whatever.
And that's been, you know, for 
more than a decade or whatever.
And then we just recently had
like a kind of cancer scare thing
that ended up costing, you know,
a bit of money and so forth.
And we looked at my health insurance
plan and were like, you know,
if that had been me instead of my brother
that time then I'd have been
wiped out, I mean that's just,
my plan is different from his or whatever.
And just the little numbers and percentages 
don't add up favorably or whatever,
that kind of crap. So
we were just like, okay,
it's time to,
you know, enter our forties a
little more responsibly. But
at the same time we
wanted to keep, you know,
try and stay as close to what
we were doing as we always had.
So there's always going to be a free
version. Features will always be updated
and in line with the Steam version. The
Steam version has a graphics and sound.
There's no specific date for the Steam
release where we're hoping to get it
together in X number of months.
And if X is longer than 12 than
a year and months or whatever,
it's game development,
DANNY: You probably get asked
this question all the time, but are you,
do you ever get sick of working on it,
or is it just always entertaining?
- No. I mean, like I said,
I was working on Drag Slay when I was 10
years old and that's 30 years. I mean,
I didn't even know what else I'd do.
Because the way the game is,
there's always something new
to work on, right? I mean,
I was reading like Chinese 
law codes from 1500 years ago
for the law update that's coming 
like four years down the line or
five years down the line or something. And 
you know, if I want to read about that,
I can do that. If I want to read books 
about like occult magic systems for
the magic release I can read about that.
You can always find a way to put anything
you're interested into a video game
just by making it into a video game when
you read about it or whatever. So it's,
it's like if, I would have to 
be bored of everything.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
