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Arguably even more intimidating than Dwarf Fortress’s Fortress mode is its Adventurer mode. Allowing you to create a highly customizable character, this is an open-world roguelike experience that is alien to many players. It isn’t intuitive and going through it unprepared will often lead to meandering through miles of wilderness until an inevitable death.
Dwarf Fortress: Beginner’s Guide
Learn how to play Dwarf Fortress with this guide designed to help complete beginners make sense of one of the single most complex games ever made.
This guide is designed to help readers understand some of the basics of character creation and how to actuallyplayin this mode, rather than flounder in confusion while trying to learn the ropes.
Getting Started
you may start diving into Adventurer mode by following these basic steps:
Generate a (Fun) World to Play In
Adventurer mode first requires you to have a world in which to play and that you have retired any fortresses you have running in that world; you don’t need to abandon fortresses to ruin,justretire them, meaning they will run themselves and typically be fine with only slight changes if you revisit them later.
While you’re able to play Adventurer mode in any world, you will want one that is actually interesting. Complex civilizations with many sites will give you more places to visit (including your own retired fortresses, which you can often loot for food, gear, and whatever else you collected in Fortress mode with minimal risk). A world with a long history may help with this, although wars waged in a world can potentially wipe out races and actually reduce some of the options available to you.
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Create a Character
With a world selected, you will then need to create an Adventurer mode character. Like so many other systems in Dwarf Fortress, this creation process has a great deal of depth for those interested. This guide will attempt to explain these choicessimplyand reduce the complexity of getting started, but interested players can dive into these systems far more than is explained here. Important character choices you will make include:
Into the World You Go
With the above options all selected, your character is basically complete. you may customize some other options like your name and background, but this is almost entirely narrative fluff. Once you’ve completely gone through the creation process and spawned at a spot appropriate for your character, you may experience a sense of directionless (although the Chosen destiny will at least have you given some sort of quest to aim you somewhere).
It’s worth going through the tutorial for this mode when prompted, but it’s very basic and mostly just to teach you some important controls. The next section is designed to help a new player actually find things to do, rather than waste away as they run out of food or are attacked by strange beasts who might wander their way.
Surviving and Finding Fun
Like in Fortress mode, your adventurer will need food and drink (assuming your character isn’t an edge case, such as a vampire or experimental monster). Drink isn’t very difficult to get; if you have a waterskin, which you can start with, you can fill it in a river and drink from your waterskin as necessary. Food is more complicated; getting food in the wild is notoriously tricky, with the usual recommendation from the Dwarf Fortress community being to hunt animals and then butcher them (some plants can also be foraged). However, this can be dangerous and/or unreliable, at least at low levels.
It’s better to find a town with a market and just buy food. Even better, many houses (especially large houses or outright fortresses) will contain food that you can steal with almost no risk of discovery (and, for the moral sort, almost no risk of actually impacting the resident of that house). Whatever your methods, aim to get 25+ of something you can eat, and you should almost always have enough that you have time to get more if you need to be away from civilization for a while. Those interested in video game food might also like togo hereto read about the stuff in Palworld orhereto read about the many offerings inGenshin Impact.
With your necessities covered, you’ll want to start setting a long-term goal or two for yourself. Questing is one of the most obvious ways to start generating a sense of purpose, especially if you began as a hearthperson to a noble nearby your spawn location. Talk to individuals around your starting civilization (you can talk to people with k), inquiring about troubles in the area. They will then give you a quest, which you can check on through your quest screen. Use the quest screen to help guide you to the location of the target. At the time of writing, ALL quests are about hunting down targets and killing them. Once complete, you don’t need to return to the quest giver to complete the quest; talk to anyone (or crowds of people) and use the “Bring up specific incident or rumor” option to tell people what you’ve done. This will gain you fame.
7 Most Iconic Side Quests in Video Games
These side quests give off main quest energy.
As you gain fame, you will find it easier to recruit NPCs to your party, which will become essential to defeating harder quest bosses. At this point, your goal should be to build a mighty band of soldiers, get quality gear for yourself, and keep building your fame through questing until people start to suggest you speak to kings, queens, or a civilization’s equivalent. Given enough time, you will eventually be directed to fight deadly foes like dragons and megabeasts. This is the end game; these creatures are very difficult and will be almost impossible to defeat on your own. Only with a strong enough party (potentially dozens strong) and quality combat abilities will you have a decent chance of winning the day. In effect, questing will eventually lead you to tough boss fights (although beatable, with enough skill, unlike the baddies discussedhere).
Of course, questing isn’t the only thing of interest you can do in Adventurer mode. This is especially true because you can bring what you find in your journey to fortresses you’ve retired, drop those items somewhere you can remember, and then access those items later if you unretire the fortress (assuming the dwarves there didn’t move it somewhere else). Some notable things an adventurer may want to attempt to include:
Final Tips
Listing every useful tip and trick about Adventurer mode isn’t possible in this article. However, some notable advice worth internalizing includes:
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