Whiskerwood
Establish a home for your industrious mice under the oppressive paw of your cat overlords in this city builder featuring complex simulations, intricate production chains, and the age-old rivalry between cat and mouse.
Sync your Steam wishlist to find the lowest game prices instantly. No login required, just paste your Steam profile URL!
⚡ Try Wishlist Radar!
Sync your Steam wishlist to find the lowest game prices instantly. No login required!
⚡ Try Wishlist Radar!
Close
Dwarf Fortress on Steam
Quick menu
Build a fortress and try to help your dwarves survive against a deeply generated world. Keep your dwarves happy, grow their community and beware of digging too deeply. The deepest, most intricate simulation of a world that's ever been created.
Dwarf Fortress is a dwarves, colony sim and base building game
developed by Bay 12 Games
and published by Kitfox Games.
Released on December 06th 2022 is available on Windows, Linux, Steam Deck and Steam Machine.
It has received 29,327 reviews of which 27,567 were positive and 1,760 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.2 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 30.49€ on Steam, but you can find it for 20.73€ on K4G.
The Steam community has classified Dwarf Fortress into these genres:
Dwarves
Colony Sim
Base Building
Simulation
Strategy
City Builder
Sandbox
Management
Building
Survival
Roguelike
Open World
Procedural Generation
Resource Management
Fantasy
Crafting
Economy
Moddable
Difficult
Exploration
Here is the detailed breakdown of supported languages for Dwarf Fortress:
| UI | Subtitle | Audio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| English |
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Dwarf Fortress through various videos and screenshots.
Load More
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
Steam Price & Best Deals
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
I've told this story a few times over the years.... If anyone ever asks why I love this game as much as I do, why I've play this game with unintelligible ASCII glyphs for over 19 years. This is from around 2010. I have forgotten many details, but the tragic story of this Dwarf still lives with me. One time, one of my fort's Founders, the main legendary militia Dwarf, got in a fight with a Forgotten Beast with necrotic blood. She won.... But the fort lost. A single spatter of the Beast's blood landed on her pinky, which slowly rotted. It was small enough that the constant miasma only affected her. Her mood slowly deteriorated, both from the pain and the stink of rot following her everywhere. She and her spouse became pregnant, but this did little to improve the situation. One day a few months later, while complaining to the Mayor (for the umpteenth time) about her unending troubles, she threw a chair at him and was quickly arrested. She gave birth in the prison, a quickly thrown-together dungeon in the deepest corner of the fort (she was their first citizen prisoner), but instead of staying with her like normal Dwarven babies, her daughter immediately ran off and began wandering the halls. After two years chained up, with nothing but occasional food and drink to keep her alive, she completely lost her mind.... The Hammerdwarf released her, but she stayed in her cell, seething with unending rage. When her daughter finally visited, she attacked. Leaving the strangled corpse behind, she began stalking the halls, killing every living thing she came across. No one was safe. After all, she was the best fighter the fort had seen, and none came close. Close friends, acquaintances, coworkers. Everyone fell before her. Eventually, I got lucky.... She chased an unlucky Dwarf down a narrow, unused hallway, and a Mason quickly built a wall behind her. She got her last kill before slowly starving to death, alone in the dark. Needless to say, the mood of the survivors declined quickly, and the fort was unable to make a rebound. Months later, it collapsed. The save is long gone, but the memory remains.
Dwarf Fortress has been out for 20 years. For three quarters of those twenty years, I have been playing Dwarf Fortress. Not consistently, sometimes going years on without playing it, but I've been there. I have a lot of opinions from thousands of hours of gameplay, and I've bought the game four times now, thrice sending money directly to Bay 12 as a donation. I'm proudly on the wall of champions, and I don't regret that purchase. Here's the TL;DR. Dwarf Fortress is a massive game with a glacial development speed, questionable design choices, and it is not for everyone at such a core level that you might not even understand if it is for you or not after hundreds of hours of gameplay. It's more of a personal belief than a real true or false statement. But it is for me, or maybe it was, and I just haven't realized I've moved on from it yet. Alright, so here's the thing. Dwarf Fortress has changed massively in these last twenty years, and I can't deny it, but I also can't say that I agree with every single change made. I can't say that I agree with some older changes, and also some newer changes. Things like removing keyboard controls, or focusing on graphics over enhancing the gameplay as things continue to be worked on. I can't agree with how difficult modding has become with the changes to visuals. I don't even know if I agree with the new music, but I'll say that I am just being curmudgeonly on that regard, and resistant to change. Some of the artwork that's come out of the game is just downright atrocious, and I understand that it's just some artist's style, but there really should be some revisions done on a few of the animals and animal people. Some really got hit badly by the ugly stick. I understand that art is a major reason why development has slowed to an utter crawl even compared to before, but just throwing up the first pass and calling it done is a disservice to the game. Thankfully, mods exist, so it's a lesser issue. (EDIT: They may have done more passes on these recently. Take this with a grain of salt, but it's all opinion anyway.) I don't know if I agree with the decision to go with Kitfox as a publisher. I have a distrust for them due to some of their past actions when handling certain games, as well as for their stance on "fantastical racism", which is a very overburdened term for light-hearted ribbing of elves and goblins. It's kind of rich when dealing with a game that has its characters genetically predisposed to disliking other civilizations straight out of the womb. I'm not sure if it's an attempt to beat down grognards like myself to open the community up for new blood, or if it's just overzealous moderation, but it's a bit much. And no, this isn't about gay dwarves and livestock. People up in arms over that need to get real, at worst it's annoying to deal with a gay cow, but gay meat is still as edible as straight meat, just butcher the thing and get a new one on the next caravan. Further to that, Kitfox has seemed to be going down the road of tie-in media and bombastic advertising. I feel like they're trying to make Tarn into a character, or a caricature of himself, rather than having him just be a down-to-earth guy like his postings on the forums would suggest. When I saw the phrase "Tarn Time" show up on my feed, I just about flipped my lid at the pure marketing vomitus. "It's called Future of the Fortress you apes! What are you doing?!" I screamed. And when I saw the magic the gathering tie-in set, I sincerely considered slamming my face through my desk. But maybe I'm just old. The 20s have been a decade of new publishing houses making deals left and right, and the corporations of old are still trying to hold onto power. I wouldn't be surprised if I saw a netflix series on Dwarf Fortress, but I might be shocked if I saw Dwarf Fortress vs Skibidi Toilet toys at Wal-Mart. Please do not let this happen. So, that's the more nebulous part of my rant done. Here's some actual information on the game. The most important thing to remember is this. Dwarf Fortress is not difficult. It's complex, but not difficult. Rimworld is more difficult, whereas Dwarf Fortress is more random and layered. The worst enemy you will face in Dwarf Fortress is yourself, because you'll get bored or tired, and either kill your own fort or retire it. You need to be okay with that, the constant cycle of start-build-refine-repeat, and learn to enjoy the differences each fort will have, rather than the challenge of the game itself. As the wise men say, "Losing is Fun". You'll have your best moments in the end of your days, and the rest is just building up to that point. As for development, it's what I would call very consistently glacial. Tarn said recently that there will be no more "Big Waits" between updates. That's sort of true, but I would also argue that there never really were if we count bugfixes and minor additions. You will have to wait on the order of years between major updates, but you have to know that Tarn (and Zach, at times) and all of their contractors are working and refining and working some more, and that every update is worth the wait. Dwarf Fortress, in all of my memory, has never released an update half-baked. They're always beyond quality. Like I said, you will play this game in cycles if you love it. It'll call you back with its siren song just like it did to me. You'll hear a story, or read a combat log, or see a legends dump, or get a screenshot of a megastructure, and you'll get the itch. And that's all it takes. For me, the 20 year anniversary provided that itch. I had to let the game run for half an hour so I could write this review, or else I'd be stuck playing for hours, or days. But in general, even if this game isn't for you, you'll get hours and hours out of it. Just in one big, long streak, and then you'll be done with it. It's like a diner, either you go for lunch once and have a good meal, or you get hooked and become a regular. Look at all the negative reviews, and you'll see most of them have 100+ hours. Some 1000+. Even the people who hate it can't help but keep going a bit more. At the end of the day, that's why I've bought it four times. That's why I'm over a hundred dollars in the hole on this one game, and eighty of those dollars were spent when it was free. And I'd do it again in a heartbeat. You might think I've complained so much that I have to give it a negative review. But I don't, and I won't. I complain so much because I've played this game to death and into unlife. It's a core component of my life, cracks and wrinkles and tears and all. Happy birthday, Dwarf Fortress. Thanks for all the memories, and here's to another twenty years.
I hate when someone recommends something by saying, "You just got to play 100 hours THEN it's fun." Despite Dwarf Fortress's seemingly infinite complexity, I'm glad to report this is not one of those games. I became interested in Dwarf Fortress years ago. After hearing legendary stories like Boat Murdered, a train wreck of a fortress that's well preserved on the internet, but I never picked it up. It seemed too hard & the text based graphics were difficult to decipher. After the steam release with ACTUAL graphics, I decided to give it a try. Even though I had no idea what I was doing, I got my own Dwarf Fortress story out of it. Starting my first fort, I turned on the very helpful tutorial that taught me the basics of mining, workstations, and everything I needed to make a "functioning" fortress. Going into my first winter I felt pretty good. The river running through my land froze as the season started, and the HUD said I had about 700 drinks along with enough food stockpiled to survive the harsh season. I thought to myself, "maybe this game isn't as hard as people make it out to seem." Then, it started to happen. The first warning signs were all my pastored animals started to die of dehydration. I should've been more worried, but I just figured that since the river froze, the animals didn't have access to water. Soon after that, alerts starting popping up saying Dwarves were going "missing". I was confused. Where were they going? It seemed completely out of my control though, so we pushed forward. Even through multiple dwarves disappearing into thin air. One alert changed everything "Bonobus Stortwasher, stone worker, died from dehydration." I paused the game. My drinks have gone down to 500 since the start of winter, but that should still be enough for someone to stay hydrated!! What is going on? I googled "dwarf fortress my Dwarves have drinks but are dying to dehydration." Sometimes the most valuable lessons are most difficult to learn. It turns out the "drinks" tab isn't for water. It's for alcohol. Freaking ALCOHOL. Alcohol is crucial to a dwarves mood, and is vital to a fort's survival. This is why it's tracked next to food. Dwarves were going missing due to an alcohol driven delirium fueled by a lack of water causing them to wander into the cold tundra to search for water. These dwarves were never seen again. The remaining dwarves slowly dropped one by one. Falling to dehydration. I actually tell real life people that story, exaggerating some details of course. I like to tell people that even the animals were drinking alcohol and wandering into the tundra. For certain groups of nerdy people, like people who play D&D, it's a good conversation. Even with 0 skill, almost no knowledge of how to play the game, I now have my own plane crash to share with others. Dwarf Fortress is controlled by an intricate web of systems that interact with each other. A lot of time, incompetence creates the most interesting stories to share. The best part is, this dehydrated fort's history, art, and artifacts are all saved to the world. In future forts these artifacts can be found in trade. The stories of specific dwarves can be referenced in art works. It's beautiful how failures can add layers of lore to an already randomly generated world history. Dwarf Fortress can be an intimidating game, especially with it's online reputation. I highly recommend giving it a try regardless. Learn as you go. PLEASE don't try to learn everything at once. After that forts failure, I learned about ponds and how to store water for winter. My next fort didn't fail from a lack of water, which led to a different plane crash & another lesson to learn. It's complexity only enhances the game for both new and experienced players a like. Give it a shot.
My favorite review of this game reads "Going from playing Rimworld to playing Dwarf Fortress is like going from reading about Cthulhu to meeting him in person." It is not a difficult game. Its reputation as brutally unforgiving is unearned. It's not action-packed. And it's not a masterwork of storytelling. What it is is a maze. A fascinating ancient crumbling labyrinth, still in use! Still added to. Strange old janky mechanics, strange new janky mechanics, weird side mechanics, deeply intricate mechanics with no impact on gameplay. Your dwarves have elaborate personalities and you have to pick what their socks are made of. So, settle in. Turn down the population cap and make a lil outpost to learn the ropes. Design the best fort! Then the worst one. A thousand hours later you will still be finding weird new details. Cthulhu is really into procgen poetic forms.
Similar games
View all
Summa Expeditionis
Summa Expeditionis is a colony sim and base building game set in ancient Roman Empire. Follow the career of a Roman soldier from Legionnaire to Centurion. Build and manage your camp, recruit more soldiers and face the barbarians for the glory of Rome.
Settlements Rising
Settlements Rising is a medieval city building and colony management game. It offers a lively colony experience with simulated villagers, dozens of professions and resources, natural disasters, and raids, while providing full control over the colony through trade, production chains and datas.
Academia : School Simulator
Design, build, and manage a high school with terrific teachers and fantastic facilities or simply let your students poop in the bushes? Academia : School Simulator is a management/tycoon game where you get to decide!
Blacksmith Master
Manage your own medieval smithy in Blacksmith Master and supervise the entire process from mining ores and gems to designing and selling finished products. Forge everything from weapons and armor to tools and cooking utensils to fund your craft and become the Blacksmith Master.
Ground of Aces The World War II Airbase Builder
Take command of a remote military air base during World War II. Build your own airfield, manage iconic aircraft and oversee your crew’s well-being. Prepare them against air raids and send your pilots on dangerous missions. Survive and help your nation win the war!
Corsair Cove
Build a sprawling pirate haven, raise a fleet to explore the high seas, and take on the Crown to keep the Age of Piracy alive! From ale to flintlock pistols, and from scallywags to swashbucklers, you’ll need to manage complex production chains and govern a rowdy crew to reign supreme over the seas!
Manor Lords
Manor Lords is a medieval strategy game featuring in-depth city building, large-scale tactical battles, and complex economic and social simulations. Rule your lands as a medieval lord – the seasons pass, the weather changes, and cities rise and fall.
Craft The World
Craft The World is a unique sandbox strategy game, the mix of Dungeon Keeper, Terraria and Dwarf Fortress. Explore a random generated world populated by dangerous creatures, build a dwarf fortress, gather resources, and craft all the items, weapons, and armor you need.
Noble Legacy
Noble Legacy is a medieval colony sim where every villager has a purpose and every decision carries weight. Build a thriving settlement, recruit & manage your people, master a deep economy, and defend your realm as you forge a legacy worthy of the crown. What kind of ruler will you be?
Surviving the Aftermath
Survive and thrive in a post-apocalyptic future — resources are scarce, but opportunity calls! Build the ultimate disaster proof colony, protect your colonists, and restore civilization to a devastated world.
Frequently Asked Questions
Dwarf Fortress is currently priced at 30.49€ on Steam.
No, Dwarf Fortress is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 30.49€ on Steam.
Yes, Dwarf Fortress received 27,567 positive votes out of a total of 29,327 achieving an impressive rating of 9.20.
😍
Dwarf Fortress was developed by Bay 12 Games and published by Kitfox Games.
Yes, Dwarf Fortress is playable and fully supported on Windows.
No, Dwarf Fortress is not playable on MacOS.
Yes, Dwarf Fortress is playable and fully supported on Linux.
Yes, Dwarf Fortress is playable on Steam Deck, though it might require a few minor tweaks. Make sure to check the Steam store page and community feedback on ProtonDB for exact compatibility details.
Yes, Dwarf Fortress is playable on Steam Machine, though it might require a few minor tweaks. Make sure to check the Steam store page and community feedback on ProtonDB for exact compatibility details.
No, Dwarf Fortress does not support VR.
Dwarf Fortress is a single-player game.
Yes, there are 2 DLCs available for Dwarf Fortress. Explore additional content available for Dwarf Fortress on Steam.
Yes, Dwarf Fortress is fully integrated with Steam Workshop. Visit Steam Workshop.
No, Dwarf Fortress does not support Steam Remote Play.
Yes, 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 | 26 September 2026 17:30 UTC |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 16 October 2026 16:15 UTC |
| Steam price | 27 October 2026 04:10 UTC |
| Steam reviews | 18 October 2026 09:51 UTC |
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
30.49€
Visit Store
🔥 Deal
-33%
30.49€
20.73€
Buy Now
-30%
30.49€
21.56€
Visit Store
-26%
30.49€
22.79€
Visit Store
-23%
30.49€
23.73€
Visit Store
Game modes
Features
Online players
729
Developer
Bay 12 Games
Publisher
Kitfox Games
Release
06 Dec 2022
Platforms
Clicking and buying through these links helps us earn a commission to maintain our services.