After 15 years of busted marksdwarves, Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams says archers will finally refill their ammo 'instead of leaping over walls and clubbing people with their crossbows'

As a longtime Dwarf Fortress devotee, the last few years of DF development have felt like a wonder. For most of the procedural fantasy sim's history, there could be years between updates as development progress was subject to the circumstances affecting the Adams brothers' lives and attention.

Since joining with Kitfox Games for the Steam release and hiring on additional developers, however, Bay 12 Games is now expanding its simulation's scope at an unprecedented pace. It's even able to address bugs that have been tormenting players for 15 years.

In a YouTube video published yesterday, Dwarf Fortress co-creator Tarn Adams spoke about a DF update that landed at the very end of June to bring a change that, to any Dwarf Fort veteran, sounded like a miracle: Marksdwarves actually work now.

I'll give you a moment to catch your breath.

For almost half of my life, trying to get a dwarven militia to use ranged weaponry has been a futile, sisyphean endeavor. Long-standing peculiarities with interactions between military stockpiles and dwarven behavior meant getting your marksdwarves to train with their crossbows—let alone field them in actual combat—was like trying and failing to solve the logic of an arcane, inscrutable machine.

Often, the best I could hope for was getting my militia to loose a single barrage of bolts. Otherwise, I'd usually be left watching in dismay as my marksdwarves refused to fill their quivers and instead tried to bludgeon the oncoming goblin invaders with their ranged weapons.

The June update changes all that. As a prelude to an upcoming revision of Fortress mode sieges, Adams said archery has been overhauled, righting a decade and a half of marksdwarf wrongs.

"We changed archer behavior so that they'd better use fortifications that you set up to protect themselves," Adams said. "They will also run off and get ammo, keeping their distance from enemies even when they're out of bolts instead of leaping over walls and clubbing people with their crossbows. So that's an improvement."

Tarn has a talent for understatement.

Ammo customization should now work properly, too, so you can designate cheaper wooden and bone bolts for crossbow training and save your valuable metal bolts for the sieges where they'll matter most. The game now models nocking arrows and loading bolts, too, and marksdwarves can now aim at specific body parts—all of which is affected by an individual dwarf's stats and skills.

With archery becoming yet another vector of Dwarf Fortress's increasing complexity, Adams said even he's caught himself underestimating how many factors influence a dwarf's ability to land a shot.

"Things like weather have always mattered for ranged weapons. When I was testing, I was reminded of this because my test was taking place in a snowstorm, and I was wondering why they were shooting so late," Adams said. "But it's because they couldn't see as far. Lots of little things matter."

The June update also brought new visuals for the game's Forgotten Beasts, adding procedural sprite variations for the primordial horrors with colors and decorations matching their randomized descriptions.

In addition to the looming siege rework, Dwarf Fortress's Lua scripting update is on the horizon. It's currently available for testing on DF's beta branch, where it's surfacing code governing the generation of random creatures and objects for modders to play with. As part of an ongoing process to convert more pieces of Dwarf Fortress into moddable scripting material, Adams says the Lua updates will "blossom into a modding renaissance."

Terrifying. Can't wait.

Dwarf Fortress is available now on Steam. The classic ASCII version is—as ever—free to download from the Bay 12 Games site.