Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is a single-player fantasy game. You can control a dwarven outpost or a party of adventurers (adventurer mode is not yet available in the current version) 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

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).