Instead of just changing, text-based lists, there are cascading menus with helpful icons. This graphical redesign extends to the menus as well. But the new graphics - new tilesets provided by Mayday and Ironhand - are a welcome addition. Sure, some of the appeal of Dwarf Fortress has been the… let’s call it quirky nature of the ASCII graphics. Graphics, obviouslyĪside from the addition of a tutorial, the biggest change to Dwarf Fortress is visual - in that there are visuals now. Beyond that, the help menu has been reorganized into something much more accessible and helpful. There’s a tutorial now! Image: Bay 12 Games/Kitfox Games via PolygonĮven if you close it, you can reactivate and interact with the tutorial at any time from the help menu.

The new tutorial walks you through the first few steps of your first fortress and helps you learn the mechanics. This is why Dwarf Fortress’ learning curve is called a learning cliff. For nearly 20 years now, players were dumped into the game with no explanation and left to sort through the game’s legendary complexity on their own (or with a lot of help from the official wiki). The addition of a tutorial to Dwarf Fortress is a big deal. There’s a tutorial and the help is more helpful

Below, we’ll give you the 11 biggest changes we noticed after putting a quarantined-with-COVID amount of hours into the original version and about 40 hours into the Steam release. For experienced players, it might take some time to adjust. With Dwarf Fortress’ Steam release, a few big things are different.

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