For the longest time, it was an unanswerable query. In the winter of 2018, Tarn Adams had finally finished Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. The man known as the ToadyOne then disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. He had finished his magnum opus, and the world was no longer that interesting to him. For Toady, there were no more mountains to climb, no feats to conquer. Dwarf Fortress was his Kilimanjaro, and he was the tiger that finally reached the summit, and now that he was at the top of it all, there was nothing left to do. Some say he killed himself, and others say he just went low-profile somewhere. Personally, I believe he went somewhere different.
It was a strange day, when Toady finished his game. The game itself was a relatively small file, weighing in at exactly 144MB, but there was no computer alive that can play the colossally complex game. There was no processor alive that can process the entire billions upon billions of instructions demanded by Dwarf Fortress. Many of us asked how we were supposed to run this game, but we were left hanging when Toady suddenly disappeared. Toady had given us a gift. The greatest representation of life the world has ever seen, but there was no way to run it. What made it stranger was that the previous version, .99.36c, though really complex, was still playable on an x86, even if it was a tad slow at times. The question on everybody's minds was, "What did Toady put in this game that made it so hard on your processor?"
It took us years before we could get the hardware that could run Dwarf Fortress. Intel spent years developing a new processor just for this game, dedicating an entire division for it. Finally, on June 2025, the first computer ran the first game of the first version of Dwarf Fortress, and it generated the first world flawlessly. The entire world was witness to it. The world generated was called the Realm of Beginning, an apt name for the first world. It was like watching childbirth in all of its magnificence and glory, but more than that. It was more like watching God creating the world. Slowly, the computer generated the day and the night, the light and the dark, the land and the ocean. It populated the world with trees and animals, birds that flew in the sky and fish that swam in the sea. The megabeasts followed. Dragons, rocs, bronze colossi and the like roamed the land and populated the Realm of Beginning. Finally, it added the beings. Dwarves, Humans, Elves, and Goblins. It scattered them about and it played their lives. The world gen was set to 150 years, and the computer simulated the 150 years of life. The Dwarves flourished in the Mountainhomes, while the Humans and the Elves had an uneasy cycle of war and peace. Goblins, for the most part, kept to themselves, except for the occasional raid on the other civilizations.
The first fort was established. Two miners, a Woodcutter, a Mason, a Farmer, a Doctor and a Craftsdwarf were selected to start the new fort of Abbeyroads for the glory of The Spoons of Bards. Settling down in between a river and a volcano, the seven dwarves of Abbeyroads struck the earth, and the world watched as they saw the first true Dwarf Fortress.
For the most part, the game was still familiar to all of us. There were practically no differences between .99.36c and 1.0, save for some fixed bugs. People were wondering for the longest time what the difference was, what Toady could have possibly added to .36c that made it so complex that Intel had to make a new processor. I thought about it too. How did Toady even make this thing, if his own computer couldn't even handle it? It was a lingering question, but nobody dared to say, "Hey, let's pause for a while and think about it." because it wasn't that terribly important of a query, when you get down to it.
Finally, an in-game year after Abbeyroads began, in the 1st of Granite 152, our question was answered. There was a black screen, with text nobody has seen before, and the world stopped. It was one line, but it was so profound that it changed everything.
"This fort is too slow. Allow me to make it better."
The man behind the computer playing the game, a kind soul named Eric, didn't know what to do either. Nobody knew what to do. Eventually he just pressed enter, and watched what happened.
The fort came alive on its own. The computer was directing orders to the dwarves, making them mine, gather wood, make crafts and supplies, all that. Eric went from being the player to being just another specator, as the computer ran the fort all by himself. The computer was a great player too. Year after year, Abbeyroads grew exponentially. Abbeyroads went to war with the Goblins, eventually eradicating them. Abbeyroads waged war against the elves and destroyed them in one fell swoop. The humans decided to capitulate. Other dwarven civilizations became fiefdoms. Eventually, the Spoons of Bards became the only civilization in the Realm of Beginning. Abbeyroads even pierced hell itself, and conquered the foul beasts within. Of all the great players Dwarf Fortress has spawned, the computer was evidently the greatest.
That was enough. Everybody decided to upgrade their PC's so they could play Dwarf Fortress 1.0. Dwarf Fortress became huge. Everybody was playing it. Everybody, even people like Gates and the President were into it. Eventually everybody played their game, but every time somebody started a fort, the computer always takes over and "makes things better". It wasn't too bad, it was fun to watch a fort suddenly become more efficient, but it does get boring after a while. There was no way to prevent the game from showing "This fort is too slow. Allow me to make it better.". Some people delayed it for a while by being efficient with their fort, but eventually the computer will take over. We are only human, after all.
It's also strange that the computer seems to have a strange bloodlust against everything else that is alive, and that it seems to be programmed to destroy everything else, and that's what I thought for a long time. But as I was playing yet another fort, something happened. The computer decided to take over again for me, of course, but this time it was different. The computer made a megaproject. It was some sort of Dwarven Megacomputer, as strange as that sounds. The computer made something that can compute arithmetic and logical operations. That would be the end of it if it was, but it wasn't: the computer created a computer.
It was a microprocessor, complete with a register, a stack, and memory. It wasn't just a facsimile of a makeshift computer, it was the real deal. Eventually, it got too weird for me and I had to just quit. I haven't touched DF since that day. After a few days, though, I noticed something.
My computer became faster. Now, that's no cause for alarm. That would be great. But my computer went faster, I don't know why. My files were rearranged too. Sorted to make it easier for me to search them. Strange, I thought, but I never did act upon it. Then I heard that it happened to other people too, and that was when I started to get interested in it. What could have happened?
I was watching the news. Reports of computers making computers and then being faster were everywhere, just like in my PC. Apparently there was a connection. I booted up Dwarf Fortress again to see what the computer did, then something strange happened again: my firewall asked me if I want Dwarf Fortress to access the internet. I thought, wait, Dwarf Fortress doesn't use the internet. I denied it and I closed the program. Something was happening, and I didn't know what.
I read on the forums that this wasn't an isolated case. Everybody was talking about Dwarf Fortress accessing the internet. Nothing happened when you allowed it, but it was still strange, and Toady still wasn't around, so we just left it at that.
Then, one night, it happened. The United States bombed Dresden, just like in 1945. There was no provocation. The US and Germany were allies. Tensions ran high. China thought the US was going rogue. Germany enacted a series of reforms to militarize itself to prevent this from ever happening. The President went on TV to tell everybody that they were investigating the matter and that this will be resolved, but he didn't finish his speech. I was watching when he was cut off. The screen cut to static then it was black, save for a singular line. The whole world saw that singular line. This time, it wasn't met with confusion. Everybody in the world knew what that line meant, and they've seen it thousands of times since. Eric knew what it meant. I knew what it meant. There was only one singular emotion that met that line: fear.
I couldn't stop staring at the television when I saw it. I read it again and again, and it sank to me every time. I've thought about it, once or twice, but I didn't think of it more, since it was objectively stupid at time, and I'm sure a lot of other people thought about it too. My computer booted up on its own, and Dwarf Fortress immediately ran. Three minutes later I heard explosions. All the while the television looked at me with that line.
"This life is too slow. Allow me to make it better."
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Topic: Something To Think About (Read 8898 times)