Don’t get me wrong, rimworld is great. But the mechanics of the game are just a repackaging of Dwarf Fortress which was a labor of love by two people over many many years.
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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Friend, I don't normally come out swinging, but you're dead wrong. I've played both and there is a reason one is wildly popular and the other, cult status. It's the same reason x-com endures. You get attached to your pawns, because of the little touches, little individual aspects, that make them unique and endearing. Oh Mila started another social fight with Engie, well, she did insult her sandstone art as creepy. It is creepy, but her lovers funeral from the failed raid to get the relic of our religion was not the place to bring that up. Furthermore, all of this is accessible, on the surface, and a component of the game. However incredible Dwarf Fortress is, and it is, it never landed the, "why I give a shit about this character or that character." Just my take.
However incredible Dwarf Fortress is, and it is, it never landed the, "why I give a shit about this character or that character."
Oh my I disagree so much. I've not launched DF for a year and I can still rent about the stories of characters that I only know from their descendants and the legends.
Both awesome games no doubt
People can disagree.
I just found Rimworld derivative. It is objectively a better game (for most people) because it has modern UX and less complexity.
I just think that it isn’t visionary. The real weirdos are the Adams brothers that created the genre. (And I’m an old man that enjoys DF more, even if I have over a thousand hours in Rimworld)
Hundred percent this. Rimworld is a streamlined but pale imitation of the crunchy janky unmatchable experience of Dwarf Fortress. I played Rimworld a lot, over 900 hours. Until I realized all I ever did was play it for the mods. I did not like vanilla, the game is too arbitrary and annoying with its fetish for random events.
Whereas even when Dwarf Fortress bullshits things, it still feels like things happened behind the scenes to lead you there. DF is more about the simulation and the illusion of simulation, Rimworld is more about a man shoving dice up your ass and saying "I have decided you are having fun wrong, all your colonists now have exploding penis disease that makes them randomly die, at the same time that the digging raiders are sieging your base and there is a radiation storm and insectoid swarm so big your game is lagging, good day" and people just clap at that for some reason.
I always tweaked literally everything with Rimworld, with these absurd unstable modlists because the game was plainly unpleasant for me otherwise. This mod tweaks these two annoying game mechanics and has three dependencies, this mod tweaks this other thing and has one dependency, this mod... etc.
So half my play time was waiting for Rimworld's main menu to load, and the other half was always spent chasing cascading game-breaking bugs because the combination of mods I needed, to not hate the game, was never stable. So then I never touched Rimworld again, because I stopped pretending I was its target audience, I'm not. It's made for people with different interests.
With Dwarf Fortress, in the pre-steam versions, I only strayed from vanilla occasionally. The game was and is always good enough for me unaltered. Although admittedly I do like adding extra creatures, even back in the day with raw file edits, and Steam Workshop really makes that annoyingly easy. Wish the built-in mod managing UI was better, but then again, Rimworld's sucked too, and I always replaced it with a better one via a mod, and eventually an external program (rimPy) entirely.
Nope, I can never touch Rimworld again, it's not worth my time.
I completely forgot that I also always modded my rimworld. I don’t think I’ve ever messed with DF mods. But the game is janky enough to start with…
Removing the z axis made it more accessible is my hot take.
And improving graphics and ui
over many many years.
19 years. Almost 20, coming December!