How long is Dwarf Fortress? | HowLongToBeat (2024)

FAQs

Does Dwarf Fortress have an end? ›

Since there is no way to win, it only ends when the entire colony is defeated by the various possible threats, or the player decides to abandon or retire the fortress.

Infinity. Dwarf Fortress has no win condition. With a single exception in Archcrystal, your fortress is likely to be wiped out within the first 10–20 years; if you even get that far.

There is no way to win Dwarf Fortress because there is no end screen and no real goal. The apparent goal is to become a mountainhome — a capital — but the game doesn't stop there. That means that every fortress you construct will ultimately collapse.

DF is not necessarily difficult but it's complex and sometimes uses slightly weird logic. Once you get your brain around that though, running a medium size fort is totally doable. After a point, the complexity will ramp up again solely because there's loads of stuff to manage and take care of.

Dwarves are short, stocky humanoid creatures with famously long and prominent beards. Unlike humans, they reach adulthood at age 12, and can live for up to 150-170 years.

And while Dwarf Fortress isn't completely Infinite, it's pretty dang close.

PSA - Dwarves now become adults at 18, not 12 : r/dwarffortress.

The 250 year limit is the default limit. You can change this at the world generation screen (pick year 500 instead) or by going into advanced worldgen. The longer your history, the bigger your world, the bigger your embark, the more heavier and likely crash-prone your game.

With respect to the size of the rooms that players should connect to their hallways, 2x2 squares are perfectly suitable for bedrooms in Dwarf Fortress.

How hard is it to learn Dwarf Fortress? ›

He has learned to love just about every genre of game that exists. Dwarf Fortress might just be the hardest and most complicated game out there. It's got less of a learning curve and more of a learning cliff. You're in charge of everything and there's a never-ending stream of things that need your attention.

The worldmap that's spit out looks like its 256 map tiles across, with each map tile being about 700ish normal tiles (eg 1m or a size of a dwarf or icon or whatever). That being said, the largest maps made are (700*256) = 179Km across.

It is absolutely possible to make a thriving colony, however as there is no way to necessarily 'win' dwarf fortress, you will eventually start new fortresses no matter if your previous one was destroyed by demons or if you just grew bored.

The world size doesn't affect FPS all that much as far as I know (embark size does) but it does affect the time it takes when saving. For those that don't know... Water flowing down multiple levels also makes a huge impact.

It basically only gets hard if you settle on tough biomes like evil, savage or cold or with necromancers but even that can be easily managed once you know how to deal with it. Or if you are unlucky you could have some early random dragon or demon visitor or cave inhabitants you can't deal with in your embark.

Dwarf Fortress is a highly complex colony simulator game that was started as a hobby by a development team of two brothers: Tarn Adams and Zach Adams. The gameplay premise is simple: keep your group of dwarves alive as you expand your underground base, mining deep into the subterranean world.

Angels, and their variants, are the absolute strongest creatures in the game, acting as the "final bosses" of the game if playing in "Adventure Mode".