Hacker Remix

Dwarf Fortress – Boatmurdered Part #1 – Intro (2006)

147 points by Tomte 4 days ago | 49 comments

kibwen 4 days ago

(The submission should have a [2006] in the title)

As silly as it sounds to say, the importance of Boatmurdered can't be understated. Boatmurdered was an internet sensation and put Dwarf Fortress on the map; the depth and complexity of the simulation was mind-blowing to read about for the era (and it's still more-or-less unmatched in many ways). Without that there'd be no Infiniminer (and later, no Rimworld, no Factorio), and without that there'd be no Minecraft.

beng-nl 4 days ago

Nitpick, but I think you mean “can’t be overstated” - no matter how important you state the thing to be, it’s not overstated, because the thing is just that important. Hence, can’t be overstated.

kibwen 4 days ago

Listen, my capacity for malapropisms can't be understated.

sshine 4 days ago

Maybe he meant "mustn't be understated", so "can't" as in "mustn't".

Not to argue about idioms, what you say is right.

rrssh 4 days ago

Then it sounds authoritarian, "we'll have a beef if I hear you understated boutmurdered"

Fuzzwah 4 days ago

Similar to "I could care less".

suprjami 4 days ago

This saying really grinds my gears.

How did "couldn't" become "could"?

It inverts the whole meaning of the statement.

ywvcbk 3 days ago

If you’re talking about something wouldn’t that always mean that you in fact ‘could’ care less?

Saying that you ‘couldn’t care less about X’ doesn’t seem logical at all because you of course could, ‘could care less’ is of course not particularly informative unless you’re expressing intention or a desire to care less about something.

wtetzner 3 days ago

> Saying that you ‘couldn’t care less about X’ doesn’t seem logical at all because you of course could

I think the whole point is that it means you don't care at all, and therefore it's not possible to care less.

ywvcbk 3 days ago

But you are thinking and talking about that specific thing? Which means that you could care less.

The moment you say “couldn’t care less” you’re already technically incorrect because you obviously could..

krustyburger 3 days ago

The best kind of incorrect!

Supermancho 4 days ago

> How did "couldn't" become "could"

Sarcasm and Laziness are at least 2 reasons people might modify it. The second carries it through time.

hinkley 4 days ago

I tried to get into dwarf fortress, but always went back to Rimworld occasionally and mostly Oxygen Not Included.

ultimafan 2 days ago

I had a blast with Rimworld. Still play it occasionally for the "Dwarf Fortress but sci-fi" urge it fulfills. But in the long run when trying to do a huge generational colony I can't stand how "gamey" it feels. Maybe there's some mod or something to fix it, I'm not sure. But the raids/diseases/bad events feel like they're more targeted for lack of a better way to put it, like the game is intentionally tailoring them to your situation vs just simulating a world where those things tend to happen. DF's "events" feel more natural over the long run.

shepherdjerred 4 days ago

I love the setting of Rimworld but cannot get past how dumb the pawns are. As in, it requires so much human micromanagement to make sure they occasionally clean, haul, and tend to the guy who is 1h away from dying rather than the one who has an scratch

KyleBerezin 3 days ago

I have the opposite problem. I want to play Rimworld, and it IS fun, but I always want more. Rimworld feels too basic and I find myself craving the complexity of DF instead. Ultimately I decide not to dive back into DF and I end up enjoying neither. Oxygen Not Include is great though.

hinkley 3 days ago

Rimworld makes war crimes a little too easy. And as the other person said, the AI is bad. Though personally I think it’s bad in all three. Self preservation and the lack of it requires a lot of reloading from save points.

29athrowaway 4 days ago

Gnomoria is also another one.

Prison Architect came before Rimworld and was somewhat of an inspiration for that game too.

refulgentis 4 days ago

TL;DR: Is it possible that it seems to you that Dwarf Fortress was the first game with procedural generation?

Full comment:

Factorio wouldn't exist with Dwarf Fortress?

If this is a claim that Dwarf Fortress paved the way for deep(er) simulation games, enabling Factorio, I don't think that's accurate.

I was ~18 in 2006 and a huge fan of simulation games when I was growing up. There were plenty with depth that approximated Factorio.

I've never heard of Infiniminer or Rimworld.

5 minute review of Infiniminer shows its a very different game and has a specific triad of inspirations named by the creator, all of which predate Dwarf Fortress. (Team Fortress, Infinifrag, and Motherload)

Rimworld is nearly a decade after Dwarf Fortress, so its impossible for me to claim it wouldn't exist without it, and I believe vice versa.

kozziollek 4 days ago

Notch (the original creator of Minecraft) mentioned he got inspired by DF:

> Infiniminer is the main inspiration for the blocky design and the terrain deforming. Dwarf Fortress is the main inspiration for the survival game mode, and this is where I want to take the majority of the gameplay.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120126163153/http://notch.tumb...

Kovarex (creator of Factorio) mentions Minecraft mod(s):

> I always loved minecraft mods like industrial craft, but limitations of minecraft were my motivation to create something on my own.

https://forum.industrial-craft.net/thread/8845-factorio/

and not getting job at Mojang:

> I had this great idea to apply for a job at Mojang as working on Minecraft might be very inspiring. I didn't get any reply, and later on, I decided to try to make something on my own.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170324040836/https://www.minec...

refulgentis 4 days ago

My curiosity/claim is neither "There are 0 games inspired by Dwarf Fortress" nor "Minecraft was not inspired by Dwarf Fortress" :)

Rather, 2 of the 3 specific games named, none of which are Minecraft, seem directly contradicted. I'm curious about the larger idea OP was getting at.

ekidd 4 days ago

> Factorio wouldn't exist with Dwarf Fortress?

According to Factorio's developers, they were heavily inspired by Minecraft factory mods like IndustrialCraft. Minecraft is commonly said to have been inspired by Infiniminer.

I'm not aware of Infinimer being inspired by Dwarf Fortress.

RimWorld is basically "Dwarf Fortress on an alien planet", although the simulation doesn't go as ridiculously deep. RimWorld has in turn inspired a bunch of attempts to do "RimWorld on a spaceship," but none of so far have achieved the status of being a "classic".

simonw 4 days ago

Minecraft was inspired by both Infiniminer and Dwarf Fortress.

Philpax 4 days ago

No, their claim is that specific lineage of inspirations led to the games we enjoy today. It is very unlikely that the games would exist in the same form without the innovations and discoveries made along the way.

itsoktocry 4 days ago

>There were plenty with depth that approximated Factorio.

Curious if you could name a handful.

refulgentis 4 days ago

SimCity, Age of Empires, Sim$X (they really need to rerelease SimAnt), Roller Coaster Tycoon were my gotos, off the top of my head. Railroad Tycoon is probably the best obvious simile but also wasn't my favorite. Too much management :)

vintermann 4 days ago

These are management games, not factory games.

Crafting games are games where a lot of the gameplay is combining items in particular ways to get new items.

Factory games are crafting games where you build raw logic, wires, conveyor belts etc. for automating crafting. Some are pure factory games where automation is the only way to craft anything, others reveal their debt to modded Minecraft by having a player person who does the first crafting by hand.

There were arguably factory games evolving alongside Minecraft, in particular Zach Barth's programming/automation puzzle games. But you'd be hard pressed to find a factory game before modded Minecraft.

The first game anyone built a working computer in was Dwarf Fortress, although through unintended game mechanisms. I believe this was what inspired Notch to add redstone to Minecraft, the first intended game mechanism for Factory-style gameplay.

refulgentis 3 days ago

[flagged]

arwalk 4 days ago

I don't know if that's appropriate, but that's an opportunity for me to boost this little tool I made : https://github.com/Arwalk/lparchive2epub

This tool builds an epub file from a let's play from lparchive.

Installation is through pip, it requires python >= 3.12.

Boatmurdered has been built with it for the occasion on https://github.com/Arwalk/lparchive2epub/blob/master/prebuil... (click on raw to get it) , but i wouldn't advise on downloading stuff from the internet without prior verifications, of course.

I'd love to have some feedback on it and its output, considering i've been the only one using it so far, afaik.

yreg 4 days ago

For sure it's appropriate!

lubujackson 4 days ago

My favorite Dwarf Fortress playthrough description and did a good job of explaining how the game actually works and how different people approach the game. I believe someone made a comic or animation or something based on this specific playthrough.

Reminds me a lot of sofrware engineering projects where someone works on this pet project for a long time then someone else comes in and completely ignores it or has no idea how to use it because there's no documentation...

sundarurfriend 4 days ago

> Reminds me a lot of sofrware engineering projects where someone works on this pet project for a long time then someone else comes in and completely ignores it or has no idea how to use it because there's no documentation...

I didn't understand how this connects to the first paragraph at first, but I think you're saying this playthrough is an analog to someone making such documentation, thus saving DF from such a fate?

The general point is certainly true, there's a lot of projects out there that never see as much use as they could, where someone has put a lot of effort into the work, but never managed to present it in an accessible way - where you can't even tell what problem it's solving, even if you're dealing with that problem at that very moment.

No documentation is one obvious way this happens, but there's also lots of projects where there's a good amount of documentation but only at the wrong abstraction level. It's easy to get lost in the implementation and document only the minutiae, but taking the small step to imagine your past self, go back to the big picture, and write just a few paragraphs from that perspective, can make a project so much more usable for others. (It's also ok to just create something for yourself and put it out there in a "take it or leave it" way if you're not charging for it, this is more about the projects that do want more people to use them, but just never manage to present themselves in the right way.)

tehbeard 4 days ago

No.

It's because it's a succession play (series of users, each plays one in game year before handing it to the next.)

So the various mechanisms set up for drawbridges, flood control etc by player 2-3.... aren't labeled / clear to player 7...

sundarurfriend 4 days ago

That makes sense, thanks.

icen 4 days ago

> I didn't understand how this connects to the first paragraph at first, but I think you're saying this playthrough is an analog to someone making such documentation, thus saving DF from such a fate?

(Not OP) Possibly, but one of the repeated themes in Boatmurdered is a number of fortress defenses (some with considerable collateral damage) attached to a variety of scattered and unmarked levers.

Does pulling this lever lower the drawbridge, irrigate the fields, or douse the world in cleansing magma? Only one way to tell!

recursivecaveat 4 days ago

It looks like the animation had to be abandoned in favor of real life commitments unfortunately: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=60750.0

This artist made a short series for another LP that are really charming: https://youtube.com/@starguarded

29athrowaway 4 days ago

Dwarf Fortress is a single player game. But if you take a saved game and pass it around you can take off from where others left off.

Boatmurdered is a Dwarf Fortress game session done by different people in this way, which is a good intro to the game for those who haven't played it.