Dwarf Fortress dev log remains hilariously grim

If there is one RSS feed you need to subscribe to, it's our one . If there are two, the second one is the dev log for Dwarf Fortress, the ASCII-powered dwarf civilisation sim. The stuff Tarn Adams puts into (or takes out of) that game will frequently blow your mind - he recently fixed a bug where crossbow bolts acted like "flying cheese graters," cutting swathes of people in half. The latest is even better.

He's coded an 'arena mode' to help with his mission of perfecting his realistic combat model - it's a sort of big room that you can spawn things in, assign them to teams, and equip them, before letting them fight in real time or turn by turn. It's playable in the current release . Here's what he did with it this week:

"I fixed up disembowelling," he writes. "During the test (a 20 sword free-for-all), a guy got stabbed in the lower body twice, his guts popped out, and then a third guy came up and severed his exposed guts, so that all seems to be working."

Dwarf Fortress is freeware sustained by community donations. You can donate here . Do you want more Dwarf Fortress stuff? Some tutorials, some cool stories about my fortresses? I play now and again, and I can dedicate space for writing about it if you want to read it. Let me know in the comments.