We'd all love to learn how to play Dwarf Fortress, just like we'd all like to climb Everest, or write a best selling novel. Dwarf Fortress is great, but not exactly a user-friendly game. To get to grips with it you'd need an enormous and meticulously illustrated manual, hundreds of pages long, right? Good job that one's just been released then.
It makes a strange sort of sense that O'Rielly, a publisher that usually specialises in dense technical manuals, would be the ones to print a guide to the what has to be one of the most complex games out there. Who better to explain the fine art of magma moat construction? Getting Started in Dwarf Fortress clocks in at a weighty 238 pages, and if you've tried to play the game, you know every one will be needed
The book is written by Peter Tyson, whose guides for After Action Reporter have helped a lot of people get to grips with the tiny bearded madman simulator, but are now sadly out of date. Better yet, it's illustrated by Tim Denee, who first came to our attention for his spectacular illustrations of the fate of forts Oilfurnace and Bronzemurdered . We liked him so much we had him illustrate our own PC Gamer Dwarf Fortress Diary , chronicling that time we all got drunk and opened a portal to hell, a process we usually refer to as'deadline day' (pictured above).
If you're interested in obtaining a copy, you can get it from the O'Reilly website . If you want to see more of Mr Denee's awesome illustrations, check out his Dwarf Fortress comics .
