Adventurer Mode Beginner's Guide in Dwarf Fortress

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• Getting started
• Survival and fun
• Final Tips

There is no doubt that Adventurer mode is more daunting than the Fortress mode of Dwarf Fortress. It allows you to create a highly customizable character, an open world Roguelike experience that is unfamiliar to many players. It is not intuitive, and entering the game without preparation often leads you to wander aimlessly in the vast wilderness until you eventually die.

This guide is designed to help readers understand some of the basics of character creation and how to actually play in that mode, rather than struggling with confusion in trying to learn the skills.

Getting started

You can start experiencing Adventurer Mode with the following basic steps:

Generate a (interesting) world

Adventurer mode first requires you to have a game world and you have retired any fortresses you are running; you don't need to give up the fortresses to make it ruins, just retire them, which means they will run on their own, and if you revisit them later, there will usually be only a slight change.

While you can play Adventurer Mode in any world, you want a truly interesting world. A complex civilization with many locations will give you more places to visit (including your own retirement fortress where you can usually plunder food, gear, and anything else you collect in fortress mode with minimal risk). A world with a long history may help, although wars that take place in one world may destroy races and actually reduce some of the options available to you.

By the way, if the graphics of the Dwarf Fortress are discouraging you, then there is no suggestion that will change this. Instead, maybe check out these games for something cooler.

Create a role

After choosing a good world, you need to create an Adventurer Mode character. Like many other systems in the Dwarf Fortress, this creation process has a lot of depth for those interested. This guide will try to explain these options simply and reduce the complexity of the introductory process, but interested players can dig into these systems, not just what is explained here. The important role choices you will make include:

• Race : The race to choose depends on the world you choose. You may very likely have the option to be a dwarf, an elves, or a human, but according to world history, many other races are also possible, and if these civilizations are destroyed, some races (including dwarfs and elves) may be eliminated. Humans are always available.
  • Each race is unique and has its own advantages and disadvantages. The elves are fast and have good combat capabilities. The dwarves can see things in the darkness and enter a powerful martial arts state in battle. Humans are tall, making them too tall to wear the armor of dwarves, elves and goblins, but can use weapons that small races cannot equip and have an advantage in fighting small races.
• Civilization : The civilization you choose will determine your starting position and may limit some of your skill choices. Each of these civilization choices has advantages and disadvantages, but new players should be aware that the outsider option will limit them at the beginning and prevent them from getting the field until they join a civilization.
  • In short, human and dwarf civilizations offer a wide variety of metal weapons and armor. The Elf civilization only provides their weak wooden equipment, but the beasts will not attack members of these civilizations (including non-Elf). Beginners may want to choose human or dwarf start civilization.
• Fate : The character's fate can be considered as choosing a game mode in this game mode.
  • Normal: This fate does not provide additional gaming features. This mode is not recommended unless you have enough experience in "creating your own fun" in this mode.
  • Hero: This fate gives you a compass that guides you to nearby points of interest. You will usually automatically become a "fireside man" which is basically a loyal soldier of the lord or lady associated with your starting position. This allows you to skip some boring grinding because usually you need to gain fame to become a fireside man, and this status allows you to ask your leaders for unlimited tasks.
  • Selected: This fate brings the same benefits as the hero option and offers some extra benefits. Your character will automatically receive a message from the Holy Guardian at the beginning, giving them a sacred mission, which, if followed, will eventually involve restoring a tool and returning it to the priest who is aligned with the Guardian. The community also noted that the Guardians rarely intervene in combat to protect the selected characters, although the specific reasons for this happening are not clear. Among the available fates, the selected one may be the best choice for new players; you can even ignore the sacred missions if you want.
• Difficulty : Difficulty adjusts the power of the characters, not the enemies they may encounter. "Normal" is the choice most people want to choose if they want a challenge; "simple" makes you very powerful (note the huge increase in all points), while "difficulty" makes you quite powerless.
  • Of the total, attribute points may be the biggest impact on gameplay in long-term games. Improving your stats can be difficult, but skills will naturally improve as you use it and getting better gear during your adventure is essentially inevitable.
• Prototype : Prototypes are basically a character's profession, choosing how to assign their attributes and skill points (you can customize the automatic assignment later) to best fit the character. The vast majority of new players will want to choose a prototype that focuses on fighting with melee weapons. Ranged weapons are complex and difficult to master, as they can be very ineffective until they have good skills and proper equipment.
  • Most weapons in Dwarf Fortress have advantages and disadvantages. Swords and axes are good, balanced choices, while maces and hammers work well against powerful undead creatures that may need to be crushed to stop them from resurrecting.
  • After selecting a prototype, you can customize your attributes and skills and reduce the number of points automatically allocated to use them for other aspects. Remember that the prototype is designed relatively balanced; be careful if you want to minimize/maximize. Some skills may seem useless , but they are not; a zero swimming point may mean you will drown soon, and a zero reading point means you are ignorant.
• Equipment : Characters can use their equipment points to customize their equipment, which are at least partially used for equipment (such as a kettle) that the game considers important to the character. The available equipment will depend on your civilization; many players will benefit from choosing only metal weapons that fit their skills (if available), good armor, and some animals (such as wolves) that may be able to support you in the early stages of the game if needed.

Enter the world

After selecting all of the above options, your role is basically completed. There are some other options you can customize, such as your name and background, but this is almost entirely narrative filler. Once you have completed the entire creation process and generated at a location that suits your character, you may experience a lack of direction (although the fate of the chosen one will at least give you some tasks to guide you somewhere).

When prompted, it is worth browsing the tutorial for this mode, but it is very basic and is mainly to teach you some important control methods. The next section is designed to help new players find things to do, rather than wasting time when food is exhausted or being attacked by strange beasts.

Survival and fun

Just like in Fortress mode, your adventurer needs food and drink (assuming your character is not an extreme situation, such as a vampire or an experimental monster). Drinks are not hard to get; if you have a kettle you can have it from the start, you can fill it in the river and drink water from your kettle if needed. Food is more complicated; getting food in the wild is very tricky, and the dwarf fortress community usually recommends that the animal be hunted and then slaughter them (some plants can be collected as well). However, this can be dangerous and/or unreliable, at least at low levels.

It's better to find a town with a market and buy food. Better yet, many homes (especially large houses or direct fortresses) will contain food that you can be found with little or no risk (and, for those with moral highness, there is little or no risk that actually affects the home residents). Whatever your approach is, the goal is to get 25 items you can eat, you should almost always have enough, and if you need to leave civilization for a while, you should have time to get more. Those interested in video game food may also like to come here to read about things in Palworld, or here to read about the numerous foods in Genshin Impact.

Once you meet your needs, you will want to start setting one or two long-term goals for yourself. Tasks are one of the most obvious ways to start a sense of purpose, especially if you become a noble firesider near your spawn position in the beginning. Talk to people around your starting civilization (you can talk to people using k) and ask about the troubles of the area. Then they will give you a task that you can view through your task screen. Use the Task Screen to help you guide to the target's location. At the time of writing, all missions are about hunting down targets and killing them. Once done, you don't need to go back to the task publisher to complete the task; talk to anyone (or crowd) and use the "Come specific events or rumors" option to tell people what you did. This will give you fame.

As you gain fame, you will find it easier to recruit NPCs to join your ranks, which is crucial to defeating more difficult mission bosses. At this point, your goal should be to form a strong army of soldiers, get quality equipment for yourself, and continuously improve your reputation by completing tasks until people start to suggest you talk to a king, queen, or civilized equivalent. If given enough time, you will eventually be directed against deadly enemies such as dragons and behemoths. This is the final game; these creatures are so hard to deal with, and it's almost impossible for you to beat them alone. Only with a strong enough team (possibly dozens) and high-quality combat abilities can you have a chance to win. In fact, the mission will eventually lead you into a tough boss battle (although it can be defeated, if you have enough skills, unlike the bad guys discussed here).

Of course, missions aren't the only fun thing you can do in adventurer mode. This is especially true because you can take the things you find on the trip to your retired fortress, place these items where you can remember, and then access these items later if you re-enable the fortress (assuming the dwarf there didn't move it elsewhere). Some notable things that adventurers might want to try include:

• Infect the curse to become a vampire or an orc.
  • The easiest way is to knock down the statue of the god you adventurer believe in. Curses are a topic worth writing alone, but the rationale is that they usually make you stronger in battle, may give you interesting abilities, and will also bring weaknesses you haven’t had before.
• Steal the unclean stone slabs of the Necromancer from their towers.
  • You can learn about the location of these slabs in Legendary mode. They are extremely powerful objects that enable readers to create undead creatures. An exciting possibility to use this slate is to store it in your retired fortress and re-enable it. The dwarves can then copy the words on the slate and produce large quantities of unclean words (as well as books and scrolls, rather than heavy slates).
• Attack the vault.
  • These are the final game dungeons, and the community is often reluctant to talk about them, as too much discussion on the topic can ruin the pleasure of discovery. Without too much detail, the vault contains many powerful enemies and extremely powerful items that are not available by any other means. They can be hard to find, often requiring you to ask about the venue near the NPC and be lucky enough to get an NPC close enough to mention it and they choose to talk about that location (you can increase your chances of not missing out on learning vault opportunities by spamming your message requests multiple times before giving up).
• Destroy one or two civilizations.
  • Have a strong enough character that you can go to a civilization you don't like or a civilization you think is a valuable challenge and sabotage it. You can even kill the nobles and other important NPCs in their society. Remember that if you save what you do to the world, it will continue to Fortress mode as you play the game in the same world.

Final Tips

This article cannot list every useful tips and tricks about adventurer mode. However, some important suggestions to remember include:

• Ignore tasks that seem too difficult. At the beginning, you will have limited force, only basic equipment, and almost no companions . You can find easier tasks and then come back later to complete more difficult tasks.
• Recruiting companions regularly. As you gain fame, recruiting NPCs will become easier and easier. While capable fighters are great, the reality is that anyone who is added to the team will usually improve your survivability.
• Random roaming is not your friend. The typical dwarf fortress map is very extensive and not designed like the typical modern RPG world. It is usually best to focus on where NPCs gather, where NPCs guide you, and monsters, as well as other points of interest you recognize through legendary mode or on the map.
• At the time of writing, treatment is unreliable and is done primarily by “walking around” while you travel quickly. You can only hope that your healing speed exceeds any damage you may suffer. Curse can actually help here; orcs will be completely healed when they return to their normal form.

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