Aquifers are one of those things that, in general, I have not had to think about much as a gamer.  Whether this is a shortcoming of game design or a personal failing, I am not entirely sure.  What I have learned about them recently, though, is that unless you know what you’re doing, you don’t want to fuck with them.

I was introduced to Dwarf Fortress a little over a month ago, and in the weeks that followed, I have sunk an awful lot of time into the consideration of aquifers, irrigation control, and the proper gutting and boning of fish.

For those of you unfamiliar, Dwarf Fortress, by Bay 12 Games, is a free game in which you take control of a brave party of dwarf settlers, set out into the wilderness to carve a new home from the very earth itself.  As you will soon see, that simple explanation belies the incredibly complexity of this game.

One of the first things you notice about Dwarf Fortress upon starting is that it appears to have been propelled forward in time from somewhere in the early 90’s.  Consisting entirely of text menus and ASCII graphics, the game looks like an old-school BBS game that was allowed to self-replicate, growing stronger and more advanced with each successive generation.  Again, here is a case where a simple exterior hides what lurks beneath.

Once you make your way through the game’s extensive world-building options and choose a suitable location (one of the most important choices you will make in the game), your bold party of dwarfs arrive, unpack their wagon, and promptly drink themselves into a stupor.  Dwarfs are fun like that.

After that, however, the region is your oyster.  With your starting crew of dwarfs, you must quickly get to building your dwarven dream home however you like. Your starting workers will have limited skills, but unless you tried to set things up yourself (and did it poorly), you should have enough talent to start digging out a dwelling and give your dwarfs beds to sleep in, tables to eat at, and food to eat.

Once you have the basics in place, and your fortress starts attracting immigrants with new and varied skills, that’s when the real adventure starts.  There are a huge number of options available to the player to occupy their citizen’s time, and for me to even start to describe them would be a fruitless venture.  As a short example, your Animal Trainer could take one of your stray dogs (if any have been tagging along with you) and train him into a hunting dog.  That hunting dog can tag along with your Hunter, and together they could bag a nice juicy mountain goat.  After dragging the corpse back to the fortress, a skilled Butcher dwarf could prepare the corpse, resulting in several servings of meat, a pile of bones, some fat, and some random gristle.  The meat, of course, would go off to food storage, but the bones could be taken down the stairs to the Craftsdwarf’s workshop, where he could fashion some various folk crafts out of them, which could then be traded away to the next foreign trade caravan that comes through for some much-needed silk thread.  See, easy?

I know it sounds complicated, and, truth be told, it is. The game is incredibly daunting to sit down and try to play the first time you encounter it.  Fortunately, there are plenty of guides out there on how to get your first fort up and running, and the Dwarf Fortress Wiki can tell you pretty much what everything does.  After a little trial and error, you’ll be building devious defense systems to fend off the goblins, and etching historical records into the walls of your legendary dining hall.

The question that struck me somewhere around midnight one evening, as I was plotting out the best way to make sure my Metalworker was well supplied with ore, was “why am I playing this?”  Dwarf Fortress is hardly a game in the traditional sense; you don’t get any points, there are no levels to conquer, no princesses to save, and you certainly never “win.” It is, if you have to put a label on it, more or a simulation than anything else.

For me, I think it comes down to this: I like making efficient systems.  I know that sounds like the most boring reason in the world for playing a game, but it’s more interesting than you might think.  The first simulator I can recall playing was Railroad Tycoon, back in the DOS days.  In Railroad Tycoon, you play as a young Rail Squire looking to someday become a Rail Baron.  You do this by buying trains, building rails, and connecting towns and industries across various historical maps.

I first fell into RT because it was like building a little model railroad, but without all the fuss of trying to get those little pins that connected the tracks together.  The difference was, I didn’t have to stop building my real model railroad when my stock holders got angry with me (well, only once, but that’s a different story).  That little problem made me realize I should probably build a railroad that wasn’t just fun to design, but also accomplished something.  Soon I found myself figuring out the best ways to avoid steep grades, save money on bridge construction, and connect the most valuable resources to places they would make the most profit.

This was the attitude I carried into things like SimCity - which was like building a little model city that actually functioned – and Transport Tycoon - which was like building a little model series of highways and rail lines and boat… you get the point.  Watching all of the pieces come together to create a growing system gave me a real thrill, and the more time I spent playing, the more I began to focus on deciphering the rules that governed the model, and figuring out how to work with them to create the optimal system.

While cracking the code, as it were, is fun, the real fun comes in dealing with the disruptions to the model.  Automobile crashes in Transport Tycoon, economic downturns in Railroad Tycoon, or errant Microwave Lasers from space in SimCity 2000; those are the things that keep you on your toes, that test your ability to keep your system running.

Fortunately, Dwarf Fortress loves to test you in spades, and that’s what keeps me coming back.  The game pitches so many variables at you, from the initial climate of your starting area to the makeup of the soil itself, that you always have to be ready to adjust your plans.  There is no rote pattern you can always pick up and run with and reach success (at least, not that I’ve found yet).

In my latest game, for example, I felt awful proud of my initial set up; I had a woodcutter doubling as a hunter to maximize his “outside” time, as well as to bring in a steady supply of meat.  This worked all well and good until he took an unfortunate bite from a wolf and ended up bleeding to death on the side of a mountain.  This wouldn’t have been a complete disaster, except for the fact that a Rhesus Macaque swept in a stole his axe from his corpse (they like to steal things).  This was, as you might have guessed, my only axe.  No axe meant no tree-felling which meant my carpenter couldn’t produce barrels which meant my brewer couldn’t produce booze.  An no booze?  That is a recipe for dwarf disaster.

I did eventually recover after trading with a passing caravan for an axe, but not before undertaking a very large-scale aqueduct project to get water into the fortress so my citizens didn’t die of thirst.  It was not something I was planning to do, but that’s where the fun comes in.

So, if you’re like me, and you love the challenge in building a system, making it as efficient as you can, and then watching in descend into chaos beyond your control, and then fixing it, go ahead and give Dwarf Fortress a try.  Be prepared for a steep learning curve (some starter guides can help a lot), and you might want to grab a tileset to make the graphics a little easier to understand.  The game is free, is still undergoing constant development, and has a very dedicated community; what do you have to lose?