Look & tools

Graphics sets: replacing letters with pictures

For most of its life the game was drawn in letters and symbols. Players who wanted pictures made them, one creature at a time.

In its classic form, Dwarf Fortress shows the world as a grid of characters. A dwarf is a smiley face, a wall is a solid block, a cat is a letter, and a dragon is a slightly different letter that you learn to fear. Many players come to love this; once you can read it, it is extraordinarily dense with information. But plenty of newcomers bounced off it, and plenty of long-time players simply wanted to see their fortress as a place rather than as text. Graphics sets were the community's answer.

What a graphics set is

A graphics set replaces the symbols the game uses for creatures, and often for other things, with small pictures. The official wiki's graphics-set repository, which covers older releases, describes graphics sets as a way of altering how creatures look on screen, normally used together with a matching tileset, and notes that they can make it easier to tell what is happening on screen.

That last point matters more than it sounds. In the text display, a letter might stand for several different creatures, told apart only by colour. A picture of a bear is harder to confuse with a picture of a badger. For many players, a graphics set was the difference between enjoying the game and giving up on it.

How the art was mapped onto the grid

The trick behind graphics sets is that the game always drew its display from a single image: a sheet of small tiles arranged in a grid, one for each character it might need. The tilesets and colours page explains that system in more detail. Replacing the letters in that sheet with pictures changes the whole display at once, but it has a drawback: every use of that letter changes too. If the tile for a particular letter becomes a picture of a goblin, every word in every menu that uses that letter now contains a small goblin.

Graphics sets solved this by working at the level of individual creatures. The game's editable definition files, covered on the modding page, can point each creature at its own picture on a separate image sheet, so a goblin can look like a goblin without disturbing the text. A complete set therefore involved two things: a sheet of creature pictures, and a set of small edits telling the game which picture belongs to which creature. Profession variants, so that a miner looks different from a soldier, were a later refinement.

Styles players chose

Different sets took very different approaches. Some drew detailed, colourful little portraits. Others kept things minimal, with stylised figures that remained close in spirit to the letters they replaced, so that experienced players did not have to relearn the display. Tile size varied too: larger tiles look richer but show less of the map at once, smaller ones fit more on screen but can be harder to read. There was no single right answer, which is why so many sets existed.

If you play an older release and want to try one, the official repository is the place to look, and this guide deliberately does not recommend any particular pack. Install to a copy of the game rather than your main folder, keep a backup of your saves, and expect that a set made for one release may not fit another.

The modern edition's own art

The commercial edition changed the picture entirely by shipping with its own full graphical presentation, drawn for the game. Creatures, buildings, items and terrain all have art, and the interface was redesigned around it. The classic character display is still available for those who prefer it. For many players this removed the main reason to install a graphics set in the first place, though the community still makes art and other visual changes for the modern release.

Seeing the fortress in three dimensions

A separate strand of community work took a different approach. Rather than change how the game draws its top-down view, a few tools read the fortress and draw it from the side, in isometric or full three-dimensional views. These visualisers are wonderful for seeing a fortress as a whole: the stacked levels, the great halls, the towers and pits that are hard to appreciate one layer at a time. They are generally used for looking rather than playing. The utilities and tools page covers the categories of tools like these without naming individual projects.

Why this history still matters

The graphics-set tradition says something about the game's community. For a long time the game's makers concentrated on simulation, and players filled in the presentation themselves, freely and in large numbers. The same spirit runs through community tools, mods and the fortress stories covered on the stories and challenges page. It is part of why people who have not played in years still feel attached to the game.