# Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is a single-player fantasy game. You can control a dwarven outpost or an adventurer in a randomly generated, persistent world. It is renowned for its highly customizable, complex indepth gameplay.

The game is played with keyboard only, though there exist mods which enable mouse support via plugins. Without any graphic mods (tilesets) the game is displayed in a terminal-like window with ASCII characters (screenshots).

## Installation

Install package dwarffortress from the official repositories.

Alternatively there are some AUR packages coming with bitmap tilesets:

- dwarffortress-ironhand
- dwarffortress-mayday
- dwarffortress-myne
- dwarffortress-obsidian
- dwarffortress-phoebus

Note: Enabling multilib repositories on x86_64 systems is required due to 32bit dependencies.

You will need to be in the games group to run Dwarf Fortress. If you are not in the games group, add yourself, then log out and back in again:

    # gpasswd -a USERNAME games

## Tools

### Dwarf Therapist

Dwarf Therapist (dwarftherapist-hg in AUR) is an almost essential mod to tune dwarvish behaviour (makes life a lot easier). For it to work on current kernels you will need to disable a kernel security feature, since dwarf therapist directly accesses and modifies the memory of a running dwarf fortress instance. This setting is called `kernel.yama.ptrace_scope` and defaults to `1`. You need to set it to `0` for dwarf therapist to work:

    # sysctl -w kernel.yama.ptrace_scope=0

and then

    # sysctl -w kernel.yama.ptrace_scope=1

when you're done playing and have closed dwarf fortress and dwarf therapist.

For more information see sysctl.

Warning: You should not set this to `0` in `/etc/sysctl.d/` by default since it is an important security feature in the kernel! It is best to set it manually whenever you play dwarf fortress and reset it back to `1` when you are done playing.

Alternatively, you can just give that permission to dwarftherapist:

    # setcap cap_sys_ptrace=eip /usr/bin/dwarftherapist

Category:

- Gaming