Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress
is a single-player fantasy game. You can control a dwarven outpost or a party of adventurers in a randomly generated, persistent world. It is renowned for its highly customizable, complex in-depth game play.
The game is played mostly with mouse and the version of the game installed by the package is displayed in a terminal-like window with images of ASCII characters (
screenshots
). There is also a graphical version available on
Steam
or
itch.io
.
Installation
Install
the
dwarffortress
package.
Alternatively, the
AUR
has
packages
of old versions that bundle or add graphics tilesets and/or utilities.
Other bundles, starter packs, tilesets, and mods can be found at the
Dwarf Fortress File Depot
.
See also the
Installation
page on the
Dwarf Fortress
wiki.
Configuration Files
When first run,
Dwarf Fortress
that was installed via Pacman creates a folder in the user's home tree, at
~/.local/share/dwarffortress/
, to store configuration files, save files, etc.
Some of the directories in
~/.local/share/dwarffortress/
are
symlinks
to directories in
/opt/dwarffortress/
, so changes in
/opt/dwarffortress/
- either directly or through the link - will affect games for all users.
To make changes to
Dwarf Fortress
files that only affect one user, either delete the links and copy the linked directories from
/opt/dwarffortress/
to
~/.local/share/dwarffortress/
, or manually install a copy of
Dwarf Fortress
to a directory in the user's home directory and make the changes - and run the game from - there (see
Manual or multiple installations
on the
Dwarf Fortress
wiki).
Tools
This article or section is out of date.
Reason:
The information in this section has not been updated for the current version which brought many changes. (Discuss in
Talk:Dwarf Fortress
)
DFHack
DFHack
is a
Dwarf Fortress
memory access utility, with many useful scripts and plugins.
There are multiple
dfhack packages
available in the
AUR
.
To start
Dwarf Fortress
with DFHack, execute
dfhack
instead of
dwarffortress
, or create a custom
desktop entry
.
Similarly to the
Dwarf Fortress
packages, the
DFHack
packages add files and symlinks to
~/.dwarffortress/
, including
dfhack-config/
which contains files that can be edited to configure
DFHack
.
Manipulator
Manipulator
is an in-game alternative to Dwarf Therapist with much of the same functionality, but does not require extra permissions. This plugin is enabled by default in the DFHack, accessible from the units screen.
quickfort
Quickfort
is a DFHack plugin that helps you build fortresses from "blueprint" .CSV, .XLS, and .XLSX files.
StoneSense
StoneSense
is an isometric
Dwarf Fortress
visualizer, as a
plugin
included with DFHack.
Dwarf Therapist
Dwarf Therapist
(
dwarftherapist
AUR
or
dwarftherapist-git
AUR
) is a utility to tune dwarvish behavior (makes micro-management a lot easier). For it to work on current kernels you will need to disable a kernel security feature, since it directly accesses and modifies the memory of a running
Dwarf Fortress
instance. This setting is called
kernel.yama.ptrace_scope
and is active by default.
Permission to use
ptrace
can be given to the
dwarftherapist
executable with:
# setcap cap_sys_ptrace=eip /usr/bin/dwarftherapist
Note
The permissions will reset after an update to Dwarf Therapist. Consider using
pacman hooks
to automatically configure the permissions after an update.
Warning
You
should not
disable
ptrace_scope
globally in
/etc/sysctl.d/
by default, or using
sysctl
, since it is an
important security feature
in the kernel!
SoundSense
SoundSense
(
soundsense
AUR
) adds various sound effects and music by monitoring the gamelog.txt (which for v50+ versions of
Dwarf Fortress
does not currently contain the information SoundSense needs).