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Dwarf Fortress from scratch

The entirely player-made universe.

DF from scratch (dfscratch) is a project to redesign and rebuild the world of Dwarf Fortress entirely from scratch. We start with a vanilla version of DF, delete all raws with their creatures and bodies and templates and materials, and build an entire new player-made universe by hand.

How to play?

1. Download Dwarf Fortress for your OS and unzip it. We highly recommend using a separate installation of DF for dfscratch.

2. Delete the entire raw folder from you DF folder. Failure to do this will give you a crazy (and probably broken) mix of vanilla DF and dfscratch.

3. Download the latest dfscratch release (or one of the earlier releases, if you want to try them out) and unzip it.

4. Copy the raw and data folders from dfscratch over the original raw and data folders in your DF folder. (The files in the data folder should overwrite the corresponding files from vanilla DF.)

5. Start playing.

For tips on how to play the new races and what to expect, see the initial forum post.

Dfscratch is a work in progress, and we're glad, nay, desperate to receive feedback from players! If your try it out, you're more than welcome to post a journal of your game events at the official forum thread. Any reports of bugs or any unexpected weirdness are particularly welcome.

How to contribute?

If you're reasonably familiar with DF modding and want to take part in the project, feel free to sign up for a modding turn. Dfscratch is developed as a "succession" project, meaning that modders take turns being responsible for the development of the world. Currently, each turn lasts two weeks; a list of past and upcoming turns can be found in the forum thread, where you can also request a turn for yourself.

You're also welcome to contribute code outside your turn, or even without signing up for a turn at all, e.g. by posting it to the thread or by submitting a pull request on GitHub. In that case, you also need to ask the person whose turn it currently is to approve your code for inclusion.

Before signing up, please read the rules for modders. To learn how to use (or not use) this Git thingy, see dfscratch and Git.

Links

• Official forum thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=127552.0

• Project wiki: http://dfscratch.shoutwiki.com/

  • Alternative wiki 1: http://df-from-scratch.wikia.com/

  • Alternative wiki 2: http://dffs.wikia.com/

• Things we found useful / Modding resource collection:

  • Perl scripts for editing DF data files: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=127552.msg4641172#msg4641172 (To do: put these in Git.)

  • Wiki rip reference of modding tokens: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=6588

  • Workshop graphics utility: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=2068 (honorable mention for providing source)

  • Language generator: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=7174

Credits

The DF from scratch project was created and is supervised by Halfling. This GitHub repo was set up and is maintained by Vyznev. Raws have been contributed by Halfling, BFEL, Mastacheese, StLeibowitz, LaularuKyrumo, Sackhead, Kopout, HugoLuman, Zanzetkuken, Reemer30, Putnam, Vyznev, Gnorm and possibly others. Dwarf Fortress is designed by Tarn and Zach Adams and is copyright (C) 2002–2012 by Tarn Adams.