Dwarf Fortress on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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The deepest, most intricate simulation of a world that's ever been created. The legendary Dwarf Fortress is now on Steam. Build a fortress and try to help your dwarves survive against a deeply generated world.
Dwarf Fortress is a dwarf, colony sim and strategy game
developed by Bay 12 Games
and published by Kitfox Games.
Released on December 06th 2022 is available in English on Windows and Linux.
It has received 28,579 reviews of which 27,134 were positive and 1,445 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.3 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 28.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Dwarf Fortress into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: XP SP3 or later
- Processor: Dual Core CPU - 2.4GHz+
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1GB of VRAM: Intel HD 3000 GPU / AMD HD 5450 / Nvidia 9400 GT
- Storage: 500 MB available space
- Additional Notes: Requires 64 bit processor and operating system
Linux
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
☼«☼TIPS FROM MY EXPERIENCE☼»☼ - The game speed is tied to the Game FPS option (default 50). I learned this after 100+ hours playing at 144 fps. - Creating a Venice style water fortress is a quick way to reduce your fps to about 10. - Children love starving to death after climbing trees. - Rock coffers and glass boxes are the same as wooden chests. - Reloading saves to prevent disasters legitimately makes the game way less fun. ☼«☼STORY TIME☼»☼ - A Giant visited my fortress very early on - Everyone inside and lock the doors - One child and her dog left outside - Child explodes the Giants head with a single punch - Nickname the child "David." David values martial prowess - Plan to make David Captain of the Guard when she grows up - David kills members of the Guard one by one - By the time David is an adult she's killed 10+ members of the guard - Doesn't matter. David is an unstoppable one woman army clad in steel armor - Goblin Parley. No problem, David's got this. Send her outside - New ceiling being constructed collapses and crushes David on her way out. - Backup fighters have no training because David kills everyone with experience - Try to defend anyway - Recruits die immediately - Watch goblins kill all my Dwarfs - I lost my fort to a psychopath and a workplace accident 10/10 This game is overwhelming at first. Give it some time and it gives a whole lot back.
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One of my favourite stories of development is that with every material having calculated density, they couldn't find anything on the mass of a piece of saguaro cacti. Some tenacious Urist set out and did a water displacement density test on it just for Tarns incessant desire for detail. That's the kind of game this is.
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Here is my review well after 2k hours: Pro’s: - It is a deep, fun and immersive game to which there are no comparison. Truly! - The kind of projects you want to start is up to your imagination. Like creating a deep pit with bridges over, and when a siege happens you pull in the bridges and hundreds of enemies fall down into a drowning pit with steel spikes on the bottom… Or you could use magma. Or even fill the pits with captured wild animals, or undeads, or maybe a ancient forgotten beast? - The community is helpful and the devs are doing a good job listening to wants and needs. - It is a game that is still in development, and prob will be for decades to come. - It is a bit of a myth that the game has a steep learningcurve, one could just play it and dig here and there, creating a farmplot etc. But if you want perfection and optimal forts from the start it becomes steep, im still learning after 2.3k hours in the game. - The Adventurer Mode is truly exiting, as it is deadly! I made a huge fort with great riches, twinked up my adventurer that was living in the fort and went out into the world! Only to get ambushed by 15 bandits who had been shadowing me from the start as I was carrying around great wealth. Con’s: - Big parts of both the fort-mode and Adv-mode is still a mess and clunky to the point of breaking the game. - Many bugs and badly working coding takes forever to be fixed. - The in-game languages is a cool concept, but it makes diplomacy, the search for items\artefacts, NPC’s, quest location’s and not to mention the Justice system a real pain. - Infravision\Darkvision is a cool and viable concept, but it makes adventuring with a race without Infravision a disaster. Since all the caves, dark fortresses, Dwarven holds, all the cavern-layers etc etc is dark places you are practically blind and easy pickings just for one goblin with a bow. This removes huge parts of the game and areas where one would want to go and explore. It could be fixed\offset with something as easy as carrying a torch in one hand. - In Adv-mode hardly any skill have been implemented, which makes it feel kinda hollow and cheesy at times. Your companion or pet\mount gets heavily injured, guts falling out and spinal cords cut. But press the Fast Travel-key and move a bit on the world map and they are fiiine. All wounds healed. It would be SO much better and immersive having a couple doctor-skills implemented, like suturing and bone-setting. Lastly I want to say that this is a game I truly love, but has developed into a love\hate relationship. And considering that the dev’s are fiddling around with alternative realities, pocket planes, enemies having siege options like digging down etc, colours on pebbles, magical abilities and items, when the foundation and framework of the whole game is half-glued together, at least certain parts, it kinda bumms me out. Hope they can and will focus more on the things already in the game that “kinda” work, or work not at all instead of adding more content. But again, thank you Devs, and Tarn, for making this game a reality. I still play it, and I will probably continue to do so after another one of my breakup fases with the game. God, it’s like that ex you never manage to get away from... The sex is amazing, but you feel sullied!
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>Finally buy Dwarf Fortress >Start in winter, feeling optimistic >Follow tutorial >Hit ice while digging >Brain blast: "Natural fridge! I’m a genius!" >Keep digging, life is good >Spring arrives >Ice melts >Realise I built my entire fortress under a river >mfw my base turns into Atlantis >Dwarves scrambling, water rising, chaos everywhere >First fortress ends in the Great Dwarven Flood of Year 1
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Context: I first played Dwarf Fortress in 2016, and have been playing intermittently since, often checking in for major updates. The short answer: I recommend Dwarf Fortress Steam Edition (with caveats!) Let's start with the cons: - Those expecting a 'smooth and bug free' game play experience will be disappointed: DF continues to do a poor job explaining itself, especially when it comes to more esoteric elements of the game. Take decorating furniture or items for example: unless one searches online and happens on the right answer, it's almost impossible to get your dwarves to decorate what you want. They will instead opt to decorate every [-Worthless Wooden Barrel-] on the map with diamonds. (The answer, if you were wondering, is to link a furniture or item stockpile containing what you want improved, along with a stockpile of your preferred decorating material, to the workshop). Can you 'play' the game from birth to death of a fortress without hard-locking bugs? Absolutely, great work here. Can you do so without your dwarves being idiotic due to bugs? Not so much. - On this note, playing Dwarf Fortress Steam Edition (which I'll refer to as DFSE because I'm lazy) without something called DFHack is a poor experience. DFSE is the leaky ceiling, and DFHack is the set of mandatory tar patches. This shouldn't be necessary. - A major pain point for me is the continued frustration with military uniforms, equipment and orders. Want your crossbow dwarves to stand in your fortified turret? Direct them there, and one of them might stand in that spot while the others uselessly spill out into the closed hallway behind. Want your dwarves to form a line? Most of them might, while a few may wait patiently under your -Atom Smashing Bridge- to die, twenty tiles away. Equipping your dwarves is essentially black magic; I can see many new players growing too frustrated with the degree of inconsistency military dwarves equip themselves, not knowing, for example, that woodcutters, miners and hunters have secret invisible civilian uniforms that conflict with whatever you assign, or that armor and weapon stands make it harder for militiary dwarves to equip themselves. This type of issue has persisted in vanilla DF for years, and DFSE has inherited and compounded these problems. Please developers, this desperately needs addressed, or else thousands of new potential players will reach a quitting point of frustration and never play DF again . - Put your hotkeys for bottom bar commands on the images for the commands , or at the least add an option for this and enable it by default. C'mon guys, don't make new players mouse over things for every single input. Yes, you can fix this with a mod and a bit of file manipulation, but you shouldn't need to mod-in basic tenants of UX design. - Finally, labor management is better than vanilla DF but still has a ways to go, especially when it comes to understanding and analyzing who would do well at a certain job (apart from skill levels). Dwarf Therapist remains a largely essential third-party application for those who want to feel like they know what they're doing. And now for the pros - Dwarf Fortress, DFSE or not, is the most richly detailed, intimately simulated and imagination-triggering game I've ever played. DFSE retains this quality. You may have heard of the incredible stories that come out of this game. They're quite real. Give DF a bit of your suspension of disbelief and it'll reward you beyond your imagination. (My current fort, for example, is full of punk goth dwarves who worship 'The Future', a deity of death, reincarnation and suffering, and who collectively decided an image of the Grim Reaper would be the icon of their civilization). - The pixel art is a great fit for DFSE, and really helps you connect with what's happening inside your game. It's still working within the limitation of the tile-based graphics, but the boundaries of that limitation have been pushed beyond apparent limits with a lot of time, love and craft. Same goes for the music engine. - In a world where $30 microtransactions for a funny robo suit re-color exist, DFSE is amazing bang for your buck. Vanilla DF (for free) was amazing value, and adding the reasonably low price tag doesn't change this that much. - The improvements to work orders management make semi-automating the less 'interesting' aspects of larger forts much easier and really improves face-on-game contact. - Incredible replay potential and variety at your fingertips. Make your world the way you find most interesting then suffer the consequences - err, I mean, pursue settling a fortress bounded in nature by little more than your ingenuity and design. A fortress which will totally survive. Promise. - Dwarf Fortress has a heart. It's a labor of love, it's artwork, it's enshrined at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and it's made from a place of real passion. You will never worry that some empty, souless [Dust Husk Zombie] will force Bay12 to add in micro-transactions, 'surprise mechanics' or measures designed to take advantage of 'marketing research', or otherwise pull DFSE from the gaming community because it didn't make enough money. [Edited for typos and a bit better clarity]
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Frequently Asked Questions
Dwarf Fortress is currently priced at 28.99€ on Steam.
Dwarf Fortress is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 28.99€ on Steam.
Dwarf Fortress received 27,134 positive votes out of a total of 28,579 achieving an impressive rating of 9.29.
😍
Dwarf Fortress was developed by Bay 12 Games and published by Kitfox Games.
Dwarf Fortress is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Dwarf Fortress is not playable on MacOS.
Dwarf Fortress is playable and fully supported on Linux.
Dwarf Fortress is a single-player game.
There are 2 DLCs available for Dwarf Fortress. Explore additional content available for Dwarf Fortress on Steam.
Dwarf Fortress is fully integrated with Steam Workshop. Visit Steam Workshop.
Dwarf Fortress does not support Steam Remote Play.
Dwarf Fortress is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Dwarf Fortress.
Data sources
The information presented on this page is sourced from reliable APIs to ensure accuracy and relevance. We utilize the Steam API to gather data on game details, including titles, descriptions, prices, and user reviews. This allows us to provide you with the most up-to-date information directly from the Steam platform.
Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 24 July 2025 22:33 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 23 July 2025 16:29 |
| Steam price | 30 July 2025 20:49 |
| Steam reviews | 29 July 2025 16:02 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Dwarf Fortress, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Dwarf Fortress
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Dwarf Fortress concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Dwarf Fortress compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
888
Developer
Bay 12 Games
Publisher
Kitfox Games
Release
06 Dec 2022
Platforms