Dwarf Fortress, the most inscrutable game of two decades, gets a tutorial

Expand / Part of the tutorial that will give new Dwarf Fortress players some tips, if they are not complete understand, when the game is available on Steam at any given time. Bay 12 Games / Steam

Dwarf Fortress, the fantasy mining sim with the motto "losing is fun", smooths out its learning curve a bit. In its next (but not yet dated) Steam release, a new tutorial will explain what you can do and how things work, if not exactly how to survive.

Co-creator Zach Adams showed off some footage of an optional tutorial in an update on the game's Steam store page. he team thought the newcomer experience "still needed something". So they created a tutorial that walks the player through camera controls, mining, storage, woodcutting, and, at a basic level, survival.

In addition, the developers are testing it on Annie, the wife of Zach Adams. After a failed attempt with an earlier version, the latest tutorial took Annie far enough that she could "tunnel under a bog and drown her fortress". Presumably, that's fine.

The optional tutorial prompt that appears at start Dwarf Fortress' Steam Edition. A mineral-rich region of this world could be yours.

"Our goal is to make this level of play accessible to everyone," Zach Adams wrote on the Steam page. "We want the world to be able to lose this game and have fun doing it."

A complex game with a tutorial wouldn't normally be new. But the dense and often impenetrable mechanics of Dwarf Fortress are a big part of the game's mystique. Former Ars editor Casey Johnston documented 10 Hours with the Dwarf ASCII-based Fortress in 2013, starting with "avoid using external guides or hints and expect to use internal explanations unless I feel lost". The results were epic, in a historical sense; things happen suddenly, and there was death.

To know:

Grey Xs start streaming in from a fortress wall and settle into the cluster of icons already displayed on screen. They flash aggressively. One turns into R, maybe. The rest disappears. I don't receive any alerts. I have no idea what just happened.

During this trip nearly a decade ago, Johnston noted that an initial tutorial was far from the only thing Dwarf Fortress could use to make the experience more attractive to, well, just about anyone :

What Dwarf Fortress really lacks, other than a built-in tutorial that at least gets you started, is the ability to learn by tinkering. I would never have figured out the first step - digging a mine - on my own, let alone the dozens of subsequent steps that are seemingly crucial to building an effective, if not rudimentary, fortress. And I still haven't finished. And I still encounter major obstacles.

A child than the player might never have even noticed that he was created and born bleeding to death, several hours into a game of Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress,coded entirely by brothers Zach and Tarn Adams, has survived on donations, Patreon memberships, and other goodwill gestures since the beginning of its development in 2003. The Steam game (and Itch.io) will introduce a graphical tile game, improved hotkeys and user interface, and, most notably, a price tag, expected to be $20. The money will mainly be used to ensure that the brothers have health care...