Here's our first video look at Dwarf Fortress's cute new graphics

Dwarf Fortress is looking lovely, and I could listen to developer Tarn Adams talk about it for hours (actually, I have). The video above is a more compact five minutes, but it also gives us our first live look at the graphical version of Dwarf Fortress coming to Steam and Itch.io. Adams spends the first couple minutes talking over a zoomed-out version of a newly generated world, giving us a good look at a map now drawn with pixel art graphics. It's cute! I love the little castles and caves, especially.

The dwarves use a generic placeholder sprite for now, but Adams says that in the final release their sprites will reflect some of their physical characteristics, which are described in exhaustive detail in Dwarf Fortress.

"We're still at the early stages, as you can see with the text graphics still around the edges. This is all very preliminary as we're working through it, but it should be pretty cool by the time we're done. We have a lot more to work on, and a lot more news to share as we go as we update the pictures and the usability of the game, so it'll be easier to get into."

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).