You can build a microcline "bathtub" with ramps made of cat soap, have an insane noble who demands nickle silver statues in their bedroom, or have a dwarf go axe crazy because you couldn't supply the silk cloth they needed to complete their artifact earring.
Someone killed the most fearsome monster in the game, a Bronze Colossus, by throwing a fluffy wambler at it (essentially, a rabbit-like creature), people power complex traps with perpetual-motion waterwheels, and one guy walled off the entire map and did a mess of complex undersea engineering and trapping to capture and breed the only two sea monsters in his world, so that he could slaughter their children to make items out of their very expensive bones.
Another person built a fluid-logic CPU (using magma as the fluid), and there's a calculator with a nice numeric display (again, using magma) set so that if you trigger an overflow, the magma literally overflows...
He says it took 75,368 mechanisms and 40,000 power to create that.
I should mention, too, that it has a procedurally generated history for each world, that each dwarf has its own preferences, the world itself is generated randomly according to certain user-controlled parameters, etc. Not many roguelikes can legitimately stress a modern computer's CPU in spite of having reasonably efficient programming.
Dwarf Fortress is brilliant. As much as people like Minecraft, DF really crushed the procedurally generated world bit - and then went on to crush a lot of other concepts.
How do I even begin introducing this game?
I guess, first the team: The game is the labor of love of 2 brothers; they are genuinely interested in crafting the best world creator there has ever been.
Till date, I have not heard mentioned any plans to monetize, except vague gestures that some day it will happen. They instead spend hours on how they are going to do things like:
- "Bee colonies found on the map can be collected and placed into clay/stone hives"
"Eggs. They are in the game now. Oh, yeah- dragons get eggs too, along with other assorted animals and thinking beings.."
- Those are some of the more tangential things in the release logs. I am not mentioning the release where they added musclature which is tracked for every being, and used to determine combat, nor am I mentioning the release where the world generator is simulating economies to determine where field appear on the world map.
Their style of brainstorming is..., interesting. The elder brother will write a short story in a fantasy setting. From the story, major plot points which allowed for the situation to occur will be taken for iteration into the game. Things like "As to the story's world of eternal darkness, it should be dangerous to walk alone at night. You never know what will happen." have led to the addition of bogey men that attack you at night if you are adventuring alone.
The game itself is complex. Just the procedural world gen is over the top - First the game creates continents, (and recently an "underworld" cavern system as well). It also decides the mineral map, and the temperature map. Post creation, the game then erodes the world by running rivers which feed oceans and morph terrain.
Once thats iterated over, and an acceptable base created, it begins to populate the world with starting civilizations of elves, humans, goblins and megabeasts. After that, it runs a history and civilization simulator for about a 1050 years. Entire civilizations will rise and fall, cities will be destroyed, legends created, monsters raised into god hood in that time. One of the most famous stories has been of an elf child being kidnapped by the dwarves, being accepted into its society to finally become one of the most famous Kings ever known. You can read the legends of your make believe world, to find out who rose, who fell and what really happened. At this point you have about as much back story as a Tolkien-esque world.
Someone dug through their legends and found the epic story of a single dwarf, queen and last of her line, fending of hordes of enemies alone in her castle long after her family had died to the same enemy. The game generated and tracked the life and death of her family, and the rest of her civilization. All of this was made clear through the battle logs and lists of dead after each battle.
Once all of this is done, you can actually start to play. All of that detailed and loving world gen was just the preamble to what you as a player are about to do. There are 2 modes, adventure - which is the rogue-like mode, and fortress mode - where you simulate a dwarven outpost.
Its hard to talk about the game at the moment without sounding like some sort of super-enthusiast, but it really is everything you would want a fantasy sand-box game to be. Its entirely procedurally created; all stories are emergent from events that happen in the game. All of this is by a game in its alpha, which already has more features than most AAA titles.
Did I mention that the entire thing is done in ASCII?
You can also read boatmurdered: http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/
Its a lets play from the something awful forums and is hilarious reading. Its also from when the game had a set map and had not incorporated a z-axis.
DO NOTE: the game looks like the matrix without a graphics pack and is hell for novices. This game can be used to define for "steep learning curve". Getting to the top though is well worth it.
"Once thats iterated over, and an acceptable base created, it begins to populate the world with starting civilizations of elves, humans, goblins and megabeasts. After that, it runs a history and civilization simulator for about a 1050 years. Entire civilizations will rise and fall, cities will be destroyed, legends created, monsters raised into god hood in that time. One of the most famous stories has been of an elf child being kidnapped by the dwarves, being accepted into its society to finally become one of the most famous Kings ever known. You can read the legends of your make believe world, to find out who rose, who fell and what really happened. At this point you have about as much back story as a Tolkien-esque world."
Some of the most exciting procedural generation I've yet encountered. Not the most visually impressive game, but the code behind it is mind-blowing.