Look & tools

Tilesets, character sets and colour schemes

The classic display looks like text because, underneath, it is text: a grid of characters drawn from one small image. Understanding that makes the whole look of the game easier to change.

Newcomers who see a classic Dwarf Fortress screenshot often assume the game has no graphics at all. That is not quite right. It has a graphics system, but a very old and very economical one, inherited from the text-mode computer games of decades past. Every symbol you see is a small picture called a tile, and all of those tiles come from a single image sheet the game loads when it starts. Change the sheet and you change the look of everything.

A world drawn from a font

The tile sheet is laid out like a font. The official wiki's tilesets page explains that a character set is an image containing 256 tiles, always arranged in a 16 by 16 grid and matching the IBM Code Page 437 character set, and that these tiles are used to display all of the classic graphics. Each tile has a job. One is a wall, one is a dwarf, one is a tree, one is a letter used in menus, and many do double duty.

That character set has a history of its own. Wikipedia's article on Code page 437 describes it as the character set of the original IBM PC, whose text modes gave each character cell an 8-bit code and therefore 256 possible symbols, alongside some accented letters, Greek letters, icons and line-drawing shapes. Game makers working in text mode used those symbols as building blocks for maps, walls and monsters, and Dwarf Fortress inherited both the approach and the look.

The roguelike tradition

This way of drawing a game world belongs to a whole family of games. Wikipedia's article on roguelikes describes the genre as traditionally built around procedurally made levels, grid-based movement and permanent death, and notes that early examples were played on text-based interfaces and terminals. Dwarf Fortress shares a great deal with that tradition: a grid, symbols standing for things, a world assembled by the computer rather than by hand, and consequences that stick. Its adventure mode is the part of the game closest to a traditional roguelike.

With only a fixed number of tiles, the game has to reuse them. The same symbol can stand for several different objects, told apart by colour or by context. Experienced players learn to read these combinations almost without thinking, but for a new player it can be baffling. This is the main reason people install a custom tileset: not only to make the game prettier, but to make it clearer. The same official page lists increased visibility, aesthetics and small size as the usual reasons players make their own.

Square tiles or tall ones?

Tilesets come in two broad shapes. Rectangular tiles, taller than they are wide, look like the text of an old terminal and keep words in menus easy to read. Square tiles make the map look more like a map, since a room that is as wide as it is long actually appears square on screen. The official page sums up the trade-off: square tilesets usually look more attractive but are slightly less readable. Many players find one they like and never change it; others switch depending on whether they are building or reading.

Tile size matters too. Larger tiles are easier on the eyes and show detail better, but fit less of the fortress on screen. Smaller tiles let you see more at once at the cost of squinting. If you play on a large monitor, a bigger tileset is often the single most comfortable change you can make.

How colour works

The game colours tiles as it draws them. The tileset itself is mostly white and grey, and the game tints it for each object: a green tile might be a shrub, a red one a creature you should worry about. The official page explains that the game picks a foreground colour, a background colour and a tile for each thing it draws, uses the background in place of a specific magenta shade on the sheet, and treats the other colours as a mask against the foreground. In practice this means a single tileset can be recoloured completely without redrawing a single tile.

Colour schemes and accessibility

The colours the game uses are themselves adjustable, which opens up useful possibilities. Players build colour schemes for several reasons:

Comfort. Softer, lower-contrast colours are easier to look at for long sessions than the saturated defaults of old terminal palettes.
Clarity. Some default colours sit close together and are hard to tell apart. Pushing them further apart makes important things stand out.
Colour vision. Players who have difficulty separating certain colours can adjust the palette so that the distinctions the game relies on remain visible to them.
Mood. Some simply prefer a warmer or darker look, much as people choose a theme for their text editor.

If you try this, change a few colours at a time and play for a while before changing more. It is easy to create a scheme that looks lovely and hides the one warning you needed to see.

The modern edition

The commercial edition draws the world with full graphics by default, which removes most of the need for a custom tileset. The classic tile display remains an option, and the tilesets system described here still applies to it. Players who learned on the text display often keep it, and the graphics sets page covers how the community added pictures before the official art existed.

A practical approach

If you are new and using the classic display, try a square tileset at a size that suits your screen, and give it a few hours before judging. If you are comfortable with the defaults, leave them alone. The purpose of all of this is to let you read the fortress easily, because a fortress you can read is one where you notice the flood before it reaches the dining hall. For keeping the game itself running smoothly, see the performance page.