《矮人要塞》创作者 Tarn Adams 谈生成式 AI 厌恶、 bloated AI 代码与 Steam 销量

Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams on bloated AI code, vampire computers, and surviving on Steam

It's impossible to not be swept up in Tarn Adams' enthusiasm. To speak to him is to feel like you're talking to the happiest man in gaming. Along with his brother Zach, he's been working on the wonderfully chaotic procedurally generated world of Dwarf Fortress since 2002, and he is far from tired of it. If anything, he's more enthusiastic than ever.

"There's just so many cool things to work on when you're writing a sort of expansive, scope-bloated simulation game," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. We can feel the waves of excitement coming off him as he tells us about the latest addition to Dwarf Fortress: procedurally generated magic systems.

It's something he has wanted to do for a while – a "giant web of knowledge that relates to generated cosmological facts and some sort of mythological history", as he describes it. His eyes light up as he talks about the mind-bendingly complex and chaotic interactions that are possible with the new Myth and Magic update. It's clear he has a deep, deep love for all this, undimmed by the years.

"That's how art should be, right?" he says. "I mean, I could be morose and stuff. I sometimes am, maybe when we're talking about AI."

That's the one thing that takes the light out of his eyes. He reflects on the anxiety felt across the industry of being laid off, workers worried that they're going to be replaced with "some kind of robot that can't even do your job at this point, because people are just jumping on the bandwagon very early."

He notes that this isn't unique to games. "I have friends working in medical UI stuff, it's also just sweeping through there. They're like, 'Are you using AI enough in your job? Can we fire these two people now and replace them with a robot?' And it's like, no, but then they do it anyway."

With his deep knowledge of procedural generation, Adams has been working with traditional AI for decades, but now generative AI has tarnished its name. "You can't even use the letters anymore. I just talk about dwarf behaviour or something like that, I can't call it dwarf AI."

"You can tell when you grab a vibe-coded game and your fan starts spinning"

He has never been tempted to dabble with generative AI in Dwarf Fortress "for a million reasons," he says. "I don't think it would really boost my productivity at this point."

He talks of the "bloated" nature of AI-written code. "You can tell when you grab a vibe-coded game and your [computer] fan starts spinning. It's not good enough. But even if it were, I'd still have reasons not to do it.

"I think the only thing that would push me forcibly, against my will in that direction is something about platforms. If I could no longer release the game on Windows because Microsoft did some Copilot-ass thing that forced you to do some sort of gen crap to get your game recognised there, then I'd have to seriously think about it, because all my players are there. And they can strongarm you, they've done it in the past with other stuff."

Limitless possibilities

Once we leave AI behind and return to Adams' favourite subject – Dwarf Fortress – his characteristic enthusiasm returns. His brain is brimming over with ideas for where Dwarf Fortress could go. "There's always stuff to work on."

He'd like to add a complex economic simulation, as well as boats. The two are tied together, he explains, since water transport allows cheaper transfer of goods. Once those features are in, even further avenues are opened up. "It doesn't close things off, it just adds more. I'm excited about a great many things, the world's an amazing place."

Graphics are a fairly new addition to Dwarf Fortress – originally the world was represented by letters, numbers, and symbols before the game got a new graphical tileset in 2022, when it was published on Steam by Kitfox Games. "Before we even went on Steam, graphics was the top requested feature," says Adams. "Just any graphics."

That Steam launch was an enormous success, with the game selling nearly 500,000 copies in its first month. By April 2025, that figure had climbed past 1 million. Over the years the game has built up a dedicated community, who have done extraordinary things with mods and utilities.

"These things all spring up without any input or encouragement from me"

"People put computers in the games," says Adams. "They had a working version of Space Invaders." They have even come up with a computer that's powered by vampires, he says, which live forever inside the machine, but "just get progressively angrier about not having drank anything." Players have industrialized the production of vampires by putting vampire blood in well water and then sealing up that section of a fortress while hapless humans take a drink. "And then you've got your vampire operating system or military," he says. "These things all spring up without any input or encouragement from me, I just watch it happen."

He notes that the new procedural tree for the magic update is available for modders to tinker around with as they please. "The whole generator for the tree is written in Lua, and that can all be changed. So you can do small modifications to the tree or write your own tree… People that are comfortable with Lua can do amazing weird stuff."

Not that flush

Several indie developers that have seen outsize success have later moved into publishing. As Thatgamecompany head Jenova Chen told GamesIndustry.biz recently, investing in other indies is the natural choice for indie studios that have a sudden "overflow of cash".

Adams says that although Dwarf Fortress has made plenty of money, it's "not enough to feel that flush. It was enough to make us not worry about health care now, and it's enough to continue paying artists and audio people, but not more."

Adams says there's enough in the bank to keep Bay 12 Games going for years, and that the game is "still paying for itself." Nowadays, it's a much bigger operation, with around 15 people working on Dwarf Fortress. "We have a core group of five additional people aside from me and my brother, but then there's all of Kitfox that does all the marketing and publishing stuff," says Adams. "And then outside of that, you've got people making trailers or something like that. So the money goes pretty quickly."

The game's business model also doesn't monetise existing players. Updates to Dwarf Fortress are free, there's no paid DLC, and everything is included in a one-off purchase. "We're priced at US$30 and that means less and less now," says Adams. "That's like three, four cups of coffee, and it used to be a lot. And yeah, when you have a game that lasts as long, I mean, at some point you usually do price increases rather than decreases, right? I guess that's theoretically what a DLC kind of is. It's something we're just going to have to navigate now to keep the ship afloat. We'll figure out how that's going to work."

All of this requires a different mindset from the Patreon model that Bay 12 Games worked under for years before launching on Steam. "You still support old players, but you need new players now, because that's how the artists are getting paid, that's how the programmer's getting paid, is just fresh players," says Adams. "As long as free updates like this bring people into the game, then we're good."

"If you're on sale for a week, that's two and a half months of business"

Of course, actually attracting new players and standing out among the thousands of other games on Steam isn't that easy. "That's where you're just fighting for your pop-up," says Adams, referring to Steam's highlighting and discounting of specific games. "We're just right at the threshold where we occasionally get a little pop-up. And it makes a difference, because when we have a sale, we sell ten times as many copies as the normal background. So even if you're on sale for a week, that's two and a half months of business."

All of this is new for Adams and his brother, who spent years as a two-person team surviving solely on donations. Now, Dwarf Fortress has more mouths to feed. "It's like being on a pirate ship or something," he laughs. "People get their shares, and you keep the crew together."