The story of the game’s creators has been told before. The default tileset for Dwarf Fortress, possibly adapted from the 1981 IBM Monochrome Display Adapter font. It’s “visually terrible,” Slate once wrote, “insanely difficult, and beautifully weird.” What makes the game so memorable is the incredible depth of its simulation and the deliciously vivid stories it inspires using nothing but words and a simple palette of symbols. Zasit was a procedurally generated character in Dwarf Fortress, which the New Yorker once described as “ SimCity ’s evil twin.” In the game, you shepherd a colony of dwarves through the building and expansion of a remote outpost in a dangerous, fantastical land. Though rendered on my screen with just a single ASCII character, Zasit Bomreksezuk had depths I would never see. And I knew her pages of biography, extensive as they were, showed only a portion of her simulated character: selections of interesting or unusual facts, not the whole dossier. I knew, more anecdotally, that she tended to finish tasks quickly and reliably that I could count on her to get a job done. I knew that, like many of us, she detested purring maggots. Yet I knew she had very long hair arranged in double braids and an angular chin that she was strong, but slow to heal and quick to tire that she liked fine pewter, colors in a dark olive shade, and drinking apricot wine that she had an amazing memory and an iron will but little patience. She existed for only a handful of days on my laptop’s hard drive before perishing near the end of a frigid winter. It was just the first of nine paragraphs describing Zasit Bomreksezuk, a Stonecrafter in my dwarven fortress of Zedotkol. She sometimes feels sad at being separated from loved ones. She felt pleasure having an intellectual discussion with a lover. She felt satisfied remembering getting into an argument. She was exasperated when caught in the rain. She was content after eating a fine dish. She felt love remembering talking with a lover. “She feels euphoric due to inebriation,” the bio began: Within the last season, she felt fondness talking with an acquaintance.

Dwarf fortress tileset font