Dwarf Fortress

Every conversation about Dwarf Fortress eventually gets stuck on the same two facts: it's the most detailed simulation PC gaming has ever produced, and for nineteen years you needed to already know that before you could stand to look at it. Kitfox Games' commercial Steam release, out since December 2022, exists to answer one question and one question only — did adding a mouse, some menus and a tileset actually fix that second problem, or did it just repaint it? Four years and dozens of patches later, with Adventure Mode long since finished and the game still shipping monthly updates, that's the question worth answering properly instead of repeating the legend everyone already knows.

What Kitfox actually shipped

The commercial release is built and maintained by Bay 12 Games — creators Tarn and Zach Adams, who have run Dwarf Fortress as a free, continuously developed project since 2002 — with Kitfox Games handling publishing, production and the parts of the game Bay 12 had never had the resources to build alone. What Kitfox added is concrete and worth listing plainly, because the marketing shorthand ("now with graphics!") undersells it: a real interface with clickable menus and tooltips replacing keyboard-only terminal commands, mouse support throughout, an official pixel-art tileset commissioned from longtime community artist Jacob "Ironhand" Bowman with Carolyn Jong and Neoriceisgood, a two-volume orchestral soundtrack, in-game tutorials that walk a new player through founding a first fort, and Steam Workshop integration for sharing tilesets, mods and saved worlds. None of that touches the simulation underneath. Bay 12's own store description puts it about as honestly as a publisher ever does: "This is still good old Dwarf Fortress, but with graphics support and music provided. A few bells and whistles won't change its essence." That's an accurate description, and it's the whole story of what you're paying for.

The interface got a face. The depth stayed the same size

The tutorials genuinely work for what they cover: placing a wagon, digging a first set of rooms, keeping dwarves fed and watered through the first season. That's a real accomplishment — the old text-command interface used to lose players before they'd even managed that much, and it doesn't anymore. But the tutorials stop well short of the actual game. Dwarf Fortress's menu count didn't shrink when it got prettier; work orders, stockpile categories, labor assignments, military squad management, nobility demands and trade agreements are all still there, now navigable with a cursor instead of a keyboard shortcut but no less numerous or interdependent. A new player who finishes the tutorial has learned how to start a fortress. They haven't learned why their legendary weaver just started a fight in the dining hall, why a stockpile that looked full is somehow blocking an entire production chain, or how to read the difference between a dwarf who's merely unhappy and one about to have a psychotic break. Those are the systems that actually make Dwarf Fortress worth playing, and the game still expects you to find most of them the hard way, exactly as it always has. The honest verdict on the interface question: the barrier that used to keep people out entirely is down. The barrier that separates "playing" from "understanding what's happening" is still standing, just repainted.

The simulation is still the actual product

None of that would matter if the thing underneath weren't worth the climb, and it is. Every dwarf in a fortress is an individually simulated person with a personality built from dozens of value weightings, a set of skills that improve with use, a body made of distinct parts that can each be individually wounded, frozen, severed or infected, and a private history of relationships, grudges and preferences that accumulates the entire time you're playing. A dwarf who loses a close friend to a goblin raid doesn't just lose a happiness stat — they might start drinking heavily, refuse to work near the site of the death, or eventually snap into a berserk rage that the game never scripted and you never triggered. Nobody wrote that story. The simulation produced it as a side effect of running its own rules honestly, and that's the entire reason Dwarf Fortress still gets discussed in a way most games never will: the anecdotes players share aren't quest outcomes, they're emergent consequences nobody designed on purpose.

That same honesty runs through the physical world. Over two hundred rock and mineral types appear in geologically correct layers rather than being scattered randomly, which means an aquifer breach, a magma flow reaching the wrong stockpile, or a river you diverted for irrigation are all genuine engineering failures traceable to a decision you made, not a scripted hazard the designers placed to test you. Temperature and fluid dynamics run as real simulated systems rather than abstracted numbers — water freezes, ice melts, magma sets things on fire that are actually flammable, and none of it is faked for convenience. Behind all of it sits a procedurally generated world with centuries of simulated history: civilizations rise, fight wars, collapse and get succeeded by others, all before you ever place a wagon, which means the site you embark on already has a legend attached to it whether you asked for one or not. Oxygen Not Included earns real credit for running actual gas and heat physics instead of faking them, and it's a fair comparison — but Dwarf Fortress applies that same commitment to honesty across geology, individual psychology and centuries of world history simultaneously, which is a genuinely different order of ambition.

Adventure Mode finally caught up

For most of this game's commercial life, Adventure Mode was the asterisk — a genuinely interesting roguelike RPG mode that let you take direct control of a single generated character and walk into the same world your fortresses had been shaping, but one that existed in a rougher, keyboard-only state left over from the pre-Steam era. That changed on 23 January 2025, when the rebuilt Adventure Mode left beta and shipped in full, complete with the same mouse-driven menus, tileset graphics and tutorial support the base game got in 2022. It's a legitimately different way to experience the simulation: instead of managing dozens of dwarves from above, you're one person in a generated world who can travel to the ruins of a fortress that failed years earlier, fight the exact historical figures your civilization's wars produced, and watch your own actions get folded into the world's ongoing history the same way an NPC's would be. Bay 12 itself described Adventure Mode as "squared away" once it shipped and has spent 2025 and 2026 pushing patches at the base simulation instead — sieges in November 2025, diplomacy and messenger systems in May 2026, a hundred new prehistoric creatures in June 2026. This is not a game coasting on its reputation. It's still being actively built, on a roughly monthly cadence, four years after the commercial launch.

The free version standing right next door

Here's the detail that most reviews of premium games never have to grapple with: Bay 12 keeps a fully playable, forever-free version of this exact game available directly from its own site, and updates it on the same schedule as the paid release. Dwarf Fortress Classic ships without the official tileset, the licensed soundtrack, Steam Workshop integration, achievements and cloud saves — but it's running the same simulation, the same content patches, the same Adventure Mode. That's an unusually direct value question for a NZ$46.49 purchase: you're not paying for more game, you're paying for a specific presentation of the same game, plus the convenience of Steam's library and Workshop. For a player who's certain they want the tileset and the ease of mouse-driven menus out of the box, that's a fair trade. For a player who's still deciding whether they want to spend fifteen hours learning what a stockpile filter does, there's no reason to pay before finding out — download the classic build, decide if this is actually for you, and buy the polished version afterward if the presentation is worth it once you know you're staying.

FPS death is still real, and it isn't cosmetic

The most consistent complaint in the game's own Steam reviews isn't the interface anymore — it's performance, and it's worth taking seriously rather than waving off as a known quirk. Dwarf Fortress runs its simulation largely on a single CPU thread, and every additional dwarf, animal, historical figure and stored item adds ongoing pathfinding and job-assignment cost that doesn't parallelize away. Players consistently report the same pattern regardless of hardware: a fortress that ran smoothly at twenty or thirty dwarves starts visibly stuttering by eighty or a hundred, and a genuinely large, long-running fortress with a full population and years of accumulated history can grind down to a handful of frames per second on strong modern machines. This is the community's well-known "FPS death," and it isn't a bug so much as a structural consequence of how literally the simulation is run — the same honesty that makes individual dwarves and geology feel real is what makes the engine expensive to keep running as a fortress grows. There's no graphics setting that fixes it, because it isn't a rendering problem. It's a real cost of the game's central achievement, and any player planning a genuinely sprawling, long-term fortress should know going in that the late game is where the engine visibly shows its age.

Value, and what you're actually funding

Judged purely as a transaction, this is about as clean as premium PC pricing gets: one payment, no in-game store, no energy system, no battle pass, and the only DLC on offer is two optional soundtrack albums that add nothing to the game itself. NZ$46.49 sits comfortably in line with genre peers like RimWorld's NZ$46.99 base price, and unlike RimWorld's five-expansion ladder, there's no additional paid content roadmap here to budget for later — what you buy today is the whole commercial product, forever, with free patches on top. The money funds a two-person creative team that has now been building this single project for over two decades, largely without the option to walk away and start something more commercially sensible. That's a genuinely admirable story. It is also, per the brief this review holds itself to, not a reason to grade the game more gently than its actual execution earns — and on execution alone, weighed against performance that visibly buckles in the exact late-game scenario the whole design is built to reward, and an interface that's approachable rather than actually simple, this doesn't reach the very top of the scale.

Players drawn to a system that keeps generating its own consequences long after the tutorial stops holding their hand will find a smaller-scale cousin of that instinct in Wanderer's own persistent world.

Verdict

8.5 out of 10. Nothing else on PC simulates a world this literally — individually modelled people with their own psychology, geology and fluid dynamics that actually run rather than get faked, and centuries of generated history sitting behind every fortress before you've dug a single tunnel. That's not complexity for its own sake; it's the engine that produces stories no scripted game could write, and it's the reason this project still matters twenty years in.

The 2022 rework earns real credit for finally giving that simulation an interface that doesn't actively repel new players at the door — the mouse, the menus and the tutorials are a genuine, measurable improvement over the terminal-only era. But the climb past that door is still the steepest in this library, the wiki is still close to mandatory, and FPS death remains a real structural limit on exactly the ambitious, long-running fortresses the game is built to reward. Buy it if the tileset and convenience are worth NZ$46.49 to you specifically. If you're only curious whether this legendary game is finally for you, the free classic build will answer that question just as honestly, for nothing.

Pricing, platform and release details checked 1 August 2026.