Dwarf Fortress will soon offer new ways to abuse your hapless subordinates. The upcoming Arena mode will provide an open playground for testing the game's NPCs, allowing you to place different creatures, choose their skills and equipment, and set them against each other for twisted amusement. You can assign combatants to teams, give them special traits like "necromancers," tinker with the weather, and place obstacles like snow and mud.

DF creator Tarn Adams said in an update posted on Steam yesterday (opens in new tab) that the patch should be coming "early next week." Arena Mode has been on the regular ASCII-style Dwarf Fortress for a while, but like Adventure Mode (opens in new tab), it's one of the things left on the Steam version's to-do list. In addition to letting you fulfill your fantasy of being a Dwarf Caesar Augustus, the Colosseum offers several new arena maps in addition to the regular version's arena maps.

According to Adams, the developers "hope to add an editor and save/load/share functionality to these maps in the future," but have not given an exact release date for that. At the very least, a save/load feature will be included, allowing people to leave and return later to an ongoing brawl.

Players who are not naked bloodthirsty will also find the arena a useful tool for testing mods before they are released. If you develop an entirely new genre of dwarf, you can throw it into this mode to make sure it doesn't crash your hard drive before publishing it to the Dwarf Fortress Steam Workshop (opens in a new tab).

Dwarf Fortress has already been updated several times since it finally appeared on Steam early last December. In that time, the game has earned nearly $10 million (opens in new tab), beat its two-month sales forecast, and even landed a second programmer (opens in new tab). Oh, and it's also pretty good (opens in new tab).