Not to mention the dozens of "DF with graphics!" clones currently living on Steam... none of which remotely approach the complexity and flexibility of the original (though they do look better and have better UIs)

It's very different, but Rimworld gives me a similar feel to dwarf fortress in regards to depth, and has a far better interface.

Not that it's close to done yet.

Rimworld is a very direct clone of Dwarf Fortress, but in a Sci Fi setting and by a professional game dev. Tynan Sylvester previously worked on BioShock Infinite.

It has proper graphics (though simple, it is a one man project). It includes utilities like Dwarf Therapist. The random events are not so random, but tries for better story telling.

There are some limitations, which might or might not be fixed. For example, there is no digging down, only one z layer, so you cannot build elaborate fatal traps.

Overall, I really like it. :)

That sounds kind of like old schools DF, where you dug to the right instead of down.

Prison Architect may be more influenced by Dungeon Keeper than Dwarf Fortress but it's pretty deep and complex.

I haven't tried other DF inspired games from Steam, though...

Chris Delay has called PA "my very own Dwarf Fortress" and it was directly inspired by his work on Subversion, a failed "universal simulation" game based on similar ideas as DF.

Subversion tried to generate everything and have deeply complex simulations -- mostly because he realized Introversion couldn't design every last detail by hand at the scale the project was trying to provide. PA itself was actually directly the result of Chris realizing that he had more fun trying to build these intricate simulated scenarios than actually playing them.

There's a beautiful demonstration of Subversion where he shows a heist scenario with intricate alarm and security systems and how the player could just bypass all of it by simply shooting people -- that was apparently the dying blow to the project.

I hear that claim, but do you have sources to back the fact that Minecraft was significantly influenced by DF? I mean, there was a crafting mechanic before DF, right? And not many gameplay elements from DF found their way into Minecraft at all.

Dead links galore, the way back version has the images, but not the games nor videos:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091102174928/http://notch.tumb...

Notch cited DF and Infiminer as influences.

Surely Sim City be classed as being based around a crafting mechanic?

How so?

>> "To an extent, the entire crafting genre owes itself to DF"

There's plenty of crafting games way before DF. In fact, some of the earliest RPGs I played, like Neverwinter Nights (1991), allowed crafting weapons and armour. Maybe crafting has taken off a bit (too much) since DF.

Different kinds of crafting, definitely. Not just a quantitative difference. DF and it's descendants, you take apart the world to rebuild it. RPG crafting is just fetch quests and recipes.

There is no name for this genre, though.

I'd try "survival sandbox". In Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress the initial goal is to survive. Later the game turns into a sandbox where you can build magnificent structures. For the sandboxing there is some complex simulation going on (biomes,fluid dynamics,etc).

Survival sandbox seems pretty good... but I don't think that difficulty curve description is accurate.

http://i.imgur.com/YzevDTs.png http://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/4/40/FunComic.png

Interesting point, apparently no one knows where that image originated, or what it originally said.

I know EVE was in the original version I saw years back, and there seems to be some misattribution to XKCD (presumably due to the art style and humorous graphs?). Bonus points if anyone knows the POTBS reference offhand.

http://images.mmorpg.com/features/4577/images/LearningCurve....

https://m.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3m1ahz/which_games...