ASCII rivers wore down mountains rain shadows and elevation shaped the formation of lakes hundreds of years of history were logged, sketching tens of thousands of historical figures and events: wars, the foundation of cities, the creation of notable artifacts. Another config file detailed how to build bodies out of component parts, from organs on up: īefore playing this game, you had to first give it time to create the world. A file called item_armor.txt laid out the material, weight, and size of protective gear files called language_DWARF.txt, language_ELF.txt and so on indexed massive vocabulary lists for fantasy tongues. Within the raw/objects folder, for instance, a file creature_amphibians.txt defined an entity: ĭozens of other creature files defined worms, cats and dogs, oysters and whales, and less earthly creatures like mermaids and centaurs. Those who poked into these folders found an astonishing catalog of human-readable data which implied a simulation operating at extraordinary depth. The first clue might have come from the readme, which amidst typical legalese noted “You may NOT modify any files, except”-and here was maybe a bit of a wink-“the files in these folders:” "raw/objects" Little upon the game’s first release suggested the 5.1 megabyte download from an unknown developer would prove anything special. It’s still unfinished: even so, it’s become one of the most infamous and beloved text games ever made. Within months it would become wildly popular among a certain kind of gamer obsessed with detail and emergent play, and the brothers have kept working on it ever since. Designing together, but with coding handled by the math-ier brother, Tarn, the two would work on Dwarf Fortress for four years before releasing an alpha build in 2006. Since the original had collapsed under the strain of trying to realize a detailed simulated fantasy world in 3D graphics, the brothers decided their new game would use only text. In their mid-twenties they started a sequel to an earlier and overly ambitious project, Slaves to Armok: God of Blood -the deity’s name inspired by a variable arm_ok counting unspoiled limbs. But on the side they kept making games for fun. In brief: two talented brothers, making games together since they were kids, had grown up with the thought perhaps of becoming academics, one in math and the other in history. The story of the game’s creators has been told before. The default tileset for Dwarf Fortress, possibly adapted from the 1981 IBM Monochrome Display Adapter font. It’s “visually terrible,” Slate once wrote, “insanely difficult, and beautifully weird.” What makes the game so memorable is the incredible depth of its simulation and the deliciously vivid stories it inspires using nothing but words and a simple palette of symbols. Zasit was a procedurally generated character in Dwarf Fortress, which the New Yorker once described as “ SimCity ’s evil twin.” In the game, you shepherd a colony of dwarves through the building and expansion of a remote outpost in a dangerous, fantastical land. Though rendered on my screen with just a single ASCII character, Zasit Bomreksezuk had depths I would never see. And I knew her pages of biography, extensive as they were, showed only a portion of her simulated character: selections of interesting or unusual facts, not the whole dossier. I knew, more anecdotally, that she tended to finish tasks quickly and reliably that I could count on her to get a job done. I knew that, like many of us, she detested purring maggots. Yet I knew she had very long hair arranged in double braids and an angular chin that she was strong, but slow to heal and quick to tire that she liked fine pewter, colors in a dark olive shade, and drinking apricot wine that she had an amazing memory and an iron will but little patience. She existed for only a handful of days on my laptop’s hard drive before perishing near the end of a frigid winter. It was just the first of nine paragraphs describing Zasit Bomreksezuk, a Stonecrafter in my dwarven fortress of Zedotkol. She sometimes feels sad at being separated from loved ones. ![]() She felt pleasure having an intellectual discussion with a lover. She felt satisfied remembering getting into an argument. She was exasperated when caught in the rain. ![]() She was content after eating a fine dish. She felt love remembering talking with a lover. “She feels euphoric due to inebriation,” the bio began: Within the last season, she felt fondness talking with an acquaintance.
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