Dwarves will be able to go watch the autumn leaves fall when Dwarf Fortress finally hits Steam. In a new art shared by creator Tharn Adams, the trees in Dwarf Fortress look amazing, with a variety of fruits growing on them, and the leaves changing color from green in the spring and summer to orange and red in the fall, a completely new feature from the original ASCII version of the game. to govern the colonies. The splash of color makes the game almost look like Stardew Valley.
Like everything else in Dwarf Fortress, trees are procedurally generated, and Adams says the team is still working on some of the nuances of branch placement. This is an important detail, because trees serve not only as a source of food and wood – they are also useful when a dwarf has to run away from an angry animal. However, they can only climb strong branches, so it is very important that they all point in the right direction.
As veterans of a highly detailed game will no doubt expect, Dwarf Fortress has a wide variety of tree species, and thus a wide variety of fruits to harvest from them. In one of the screenshots posted on Steam, Adams notes the presence of round limes, guava, coffee beans, carambola, kapok fruit, avocados, bitter oranges, cashew apples, papaya, citrons, lychee and more.
Each fruit tree will blossom, bloom, and eventually bear fruit, after which the leaves will turn orange or red and fall to the ground. Adams says the team is still working on the animation effects for this (and for now they’re using “a really bad poster that I drew”).
A release date for Dwarf Fortress on Steam has yet to be announced, but it’s possible the game will enter Early Access later this year.
