Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, has over 1,400 hours in Factorio and is currently obsessed with terraforming games: 'Dwarf Fortress just doesn't accommodate a full-on sci-fi thing'

Tarn Adams cannot recall exactly when he first got into gaming, describing his formative computer years as "a haze of learning BASIC".

"I remember there was MS-DOS, but we also had a TRS-80, and I remember the little demon game, little ASCII dude jumping back and forth, which is all just BBS games," says the co-founder of Bay 12 Games. "We had Rogue and other things like that. But that was more in 1984 when I was six, so I already would have played more things by then."

A lifelong programmer, Adams has developed dozens of games. But he is best known for Dwarf Fortress, the fantasy colony sim co-created by Tarn and his brother Zach. From its debut in 2006, Dwarf Fortress has grown into one of the most ambitious and beloved games on the PC, celebrating its 20^th anniversary this year.

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Following Dwarf Fortress's hugely successful Steam release in 2022, Adams now splits his time "half and half" between supporting the existing game and working on new additions to it. "I've been doing these cool workshops, procedurally generated magic workshops," he says. "If you want a nice little plant and some skulls on another table and a big crystal with lightning around it, I got you."

Adams took a break from tinkering with workshops to show me around the digital battlements of his PC. We discussed his current obsession with terraforming games, his childhood experiments in BASIC, and how gaming's greatest factory sim helped him work through a tragic loss.

What game are you currently playing?

I've been playing The Planet Crafter. I had played it before, back when it was in early access and got up to a certain level of content. And then, of course, it just stops. I didn't have frogs or something and it was really bothering me. But I had to stop because there was no more.

It's a terraforming game. You're thrown on a planet—I won't spoil any story elements—but you're on a planet and you have to terraform it, so there are no enemies or anything like that. You can die [from a lack of] oxygen or thirst or [starvation]. But you're not going to get attacked by giant bugs or anything. And you have to make your habitat enough to survive. And then from there, you unlock the little technologies to get the planet hotter, build the air pressure, get the oxygen, and then eventually get water and plants and bugs and creatures.

I set it down for a few years I think, and now it's past 1.0 or whatever, and I got my frogs. So I'm almost done with it, and yeah, it's been blessed.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I tend to be pretty scrupulous about uninstalling for whatever reason. I do still have Terraformental installed, which is one of those incremental games. And it's got a story between various outpost-type things on a planet, and you move between them.

I don't only play outpost planet games, although I'm also playing Terraforming Titans at the same time. And I was playing Terraformers before that. And my brother was playing Plan B: Terraform or whatever. So there's that going on.

I think part of this is we used to have games like this we were writing in the background, and because Dwarf Fortress just doesn't accommodate a full-on sci-fi thing. It's just sort of a different vibe. I do play fantasy games and stuff.

But no, TerraFormental I was playing. That was a blast. It's just in early access. I reached the end of the content, which is a common theme because I tend to play new things that I find that I'm interested in.

[It's] very different from [The Planet Crafter] because you're not crafting at all, you're kind of just solving puzzles as you expand your knowledge of the existing outposts. And it's a text game, it's not a graphical game really, except for maybe some icons. So yeah, it's intriguing.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

If it's not my own stuff, I have all the BASIC games, and also the BASIC stuff that I downloaded from the BBSes, so this would be from the early '80s … The most recent one that I played—I actually had to grab a copy online—was Beast 1984.

It's got blocks you can move around and make a little house with, and this is 25 years before Minecraft did that. And it even has little creatures that get frustrated and explode and blow up your walls. It's like an arcade game. I think my brother and I played it a little differently by creating a little house and stuff. I thought maybe other people did that too, just kind of free form. You can do what you want.

But there are beasts and super beasts that can also push blocks. And there are eggs that get laid by the beasts, and there are beasts that you have to push into lava. There are three kinds of beasts. Just a fantastic little game.

That's one of the oldest. It's hard to say, just in the depths of my BASIC folders, which is the oldest because the dates were kind of lost. When I sort them by a date, a lot of them just say January 1, 1980. And I know some of them are from as late as '89, or something.

My very earliest [games] are like literally "Shit moves across the screen". I found one [called] 'The Adventures of Heidi: How Many Zits Do You Have on Your Butt? …. It's just like the fever dreams of a six-year-old.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

It's easily Factorio. 1,454 point five. It says point five. It's so dangerous. Just get to the end. You have an out now, or you could get the Space Age expansion and get to the end of that. Was that not enough? Then you can install all the mods. I mean, everyone does a Bob and Angel run. Everyone does a Sea Block run, where they just start in one block in the ocean and they kind of spread out slowly. There's things like Nullius, where you can start as the person that created the bugs. And prologue, there's a whole prologue one.

I mean, why stop? Why stop at like five planets or whatever, we can add another eight. And I just did that. At the end of last year, [it] was like 12 or 15 planets or something. It was a lot of fun.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I don't have a thing like that …. I go through phases more. Like, winter is Factorio time.

Factorio winters are kind of my thing. It became a whole thing a couple of years [ago]. When my dad died, I played Factorio for 25 days without stopping, and then I did that again the next year. That was this last winter. And it kind of took on this different aspect for me. Now, I'm not sure I look forward to the winter.

It seems kind of morbid. I don't know. Maybe that's why I'm having trouble with this question. I probably would have just said Factorio, but now it's complicated. Caves of Qud comes back around a lot. And that one, I've won that game now. Not like a Rogue, permadeath win. No way. I can't do it. But on the other difficulty, the roleplaying difficulty where you can save in towns. Like, OK, I will save in a town, thank you. I will not be able to win this game legit ever, because my tongue will just rot out and I'll just be gone.

It's March. So it's on the other end now, and I don't know what's going to happen. This is the only parent I've lost, so it's just kind of working through how that is.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

What I came up with, something that's been hanging around on my computer for many years, is Ableton. And it's a sequencer for writing music. I periodically will write music. And I would miss it if it was not there. I just fire it up, pick some instruments, write a little ditty.

It's not 8-bit, because I use more instruments and things like that. But it's got strong melodies. I don't do soundscape very well because I don't know all the little widgets and envelopes and modifiers you can do to make your swells good. There's a lot to learn, and I haven't invested a lot of time in learning how to do that. So I mostly focus on instruments and instrumentation.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I think it's about half full. Mostly folders related to all manner of things. And then some .txt files that just don't have a folder yet. And then, every once in a while, the folders get put in the folders. And then there's always a folder called 'Last Desktop' and it has a last desktop in it, and that's how we get back to the BASIC games from the '80s.