For 23 years, developer Tarn Adams has been working alongside his brother Zach on the complex strategy simulation Dwarf Fortress
, which has also been available on Steam since 2022. Dwarf Fortress is considered one of the most complex video games ever. There is one thing in it that Adams is still afraid of after all these years: aquifers. He struggles with them and is terrified of accidentally drowning all his dwarves, he explains.
What is that thing in Dwarf Fortress? In Dwarf Fortress, you build a complex fortress above and below ground, populated by dwarves. You dig deeper into a mountain, discovering new layers of rock, along with demons and monsters. In doing so, you shape a complex civilization with roles and professions.
However, the most terrifying thing one can encounter in Dwarf Fortress are not ancient creatures boring up through the earth that kill and eat all dwarves, but “aquifers.”
Many a dwarf fortress has been destroyed by a wrong pickaxe blow, as hitting such an aquifer flooded the fortress, causing all dwarves to drown.
Developer says he is so afraid of them
This is what the developer says: In a conversation with PC Gamer, developer Tarn Adams states:
I am so afraid of the heavy aquifers. The light ones are fine, but the heavy ones do such crazy things.
He says that when he invented the feature back then, he didn’t even know if any player would ever be able to deal with this source of danger:
That was one of those things where I thought: I’ll just let the players figure it out themselves. I didn’t know if it was possible or not. But after 45 minutes, they figured it out and had methods to deal with it, and since then I’ve been afraid to change too much.
Adams says that players have found creative ways to handle the unpredictable water flows:
- They would divert magma into the water flows to harden the water into obsidian.
- Or they would build special drains to mitigate the situation.
Developer says: feature is only for “sickos”
This is how Tarn Adams views the feature: But he himself considers such methods to be too high: these heavy aquifers are only for “sick masochists” in the game; he calls them “sickos.”
He is perfectly fine with the light aquifers. He just builds some walls around them, and that’s it.
In fact, he only implemented heavy aquifers in case players needed a strong water source for their above-ground fortress. Underground, he viewed the sources as “hard blocks,” or places where there simply isn’t a way to proceed.
But the hardcore players of Dwarf Fortress did not accept such obstacles. They found a way to deal with the aquifers that he never anticipated.
This is how he sees the situation: The developer says:
A part of the problem is that we are just not good at video games. Zach and I are terrible. I mean, I’m terrible at every game I play. So I can’t really engage with high-level strategies until I see how someone else implements them.
Developer Tarn Adams has apparently come to terms long ago that Dwarf Fortress is no longer his game, but the players’ game. And this has served him very well: For 20 years, two brothers have been working on a fantastically deep game – coming to Steam now because they actually need money
