[A sinister plot has come to DwarfFortress: somewhere in the ASCII world, a bad guy is sending infiltrated dwarves to steal artifacts from your fortress, and now you can stand up to the DwarfCops! DwarfFortress. contains one of the biggest additions to Adventure Mode in years. But for many, the most important aspect of this update is that it is the last update before the developers focus on graphics integration and the launch of Dwarf Fortress on Steam.

We wrote about this latest update when it was released, and developer Tarn Adams is now delivering what is probably the first of a few bug-fix patches. Such patches usually follow a major release of Dwarf Fortress, as the vast simulation of Dwarf Fortress always presents unexpected problems. The update will not include all of the villainous features Adams originally planned, and will be available after launch on Steam and Itch.io. But what's in there already sounds fun, just like Dwarf Fortress:

"In the test heist, visiting infiltrators who turned over a dwarf traitor, Omrak (whoever that may be!) ), who were warriors who turned them in using their shared beliefs, came clean on their masters, and it all showed up in the report. So, even with the lapse in functionality, there should be a healthy set of details from time to time in the fort mode of play. Interestingly, instead of mentioning Omrak, the first bug reported that the top villains "used their common belief in unidentified creatures to play for sympathy."

Bug fixes have produced some excellent patch notes so far:

The big question now is how long it will take to rebuild Dwarf Fortress as a graphical game with a more friendly interface Adams has not set a date, but once the villain bug is fixed, "we will shift completely to graphical work on Premium DF. Months of programming work will likely lie ahead, but on the bright side, a good portion of the art is already done and ready to be implemented.

One of the artists working on the tilset for the new release wrote on Reddit, "There is a long thread on the Dwarf Fortress forums about the graphics packs. Here are a few sprites that artists have posted in the last few months.

Adams posts updates at least once a month on the Dwarf Fortress website and forums, and also posts news on the Steam page. We expect these updates will soon be applied to the progress of the graphical version of Dwarf Fortress, which we hope will be playable by 2021.