Dwarf Fortress' arc is long, but it bends toward, well, no arc In a chat with PC Gamer at GDC, Dwarf Fortress creators Tarn and Zach Adams talked a bit about the game's most They talked a bit about their approach to the most important patch. In a nutshell" Bite-sized updates at a faster pace. Big weights are dead.

Tarn said the model for Dwarf Fortress updates at this point is not to "see what we can do for 26 months. With new artists working on the game's sound and audio, and Kitfox partners working on the game's marketing, Tarn is aiming for something a bit more "tidy."

After all, Tarn's previous approach of fleeing for months to work on major updates (usually called arcs, even after the game's development roadmap dropped that term) often produced only half-baked results. "But now it's like, 'It's not an easy sell.' I've done half of it!"

"And can we sell it?

Zach Adams, Tern's brother and co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, elaborated on that: "All the arcs are gone, we sacrificed arcs and chopped them up smaller." For example, Zach said, "Turn always wanted to design a procedural magic system and do all of these things with the Myth and Magic release, or arc.

That Myth and Magic arc is both anticipated and feared by fans. On the one hand, it promises to add a system of beautiful, goofy magic and gods to the game's already massive sandbox mechanics. On the other hand, "actually building it means the Adams brothers will be off the ground for a long, long time to finish it": the Big Wait."

"The Big Wait was something we always warned everyone about," Zach said.

"Big Weight is dead," Tarn confirmed." No need to wait... We can get the fragments."

Zack said, "We never really completed the arc.

Sounds good to me. Certainly, the content of Dwarf Fortress used to have the charm of a haphazard geyser, but a steady stream of smaller updates seems more sustainable and better for Adams' mental health. Moreover, this approach seems to stem from the game's unshakable position since the premium version: "Things feel more stable," Tarn said, "We're not despairing, worrying, or freaking out ... We are shaking the bottle and seeing what gets dropped in there. We can have a more quantitative update production process."