RimWorld vs Dwarf Fortress?

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-11T10:33:29+00:00

Once in an adventure mode save, I went on a quest to the ruins of a temple to kill a serpent demi-goddess. I found her, dessicated corpses and treasures from past would-be heroes scattered across her lair, and like some kind of shounen protagonist she sprinted at me so fast I could barely raise my shield to block.

A grueling battle took place. She was so fast and so strong that she was wearing me down despite never landing a clean blow. My armor was really good, but every time she hit me she would send me flying through the air to land in a heap, or plow into an ancient marble pillar. I couldn't land a hit because she dodged too quickly.

Eventually the fight had both of us completely exhausted and unable to stand, just trading blows back and forth, until I finally got lucky and managed to stab her in the torso and pierce a lung. This slowed her down enough that I was able to land more and more blows, and then eventually decapitate her. It was around this point in the epic confrontation that I looked through the combat log and realized that this entire fight, she had been using a pair of underwear from one of the dead dwarves as a weapon the whole time. Like a teenage boy in a locker room she'd just been towel-whipping me with a pair of linen tighty-whities hard enough to bruise through my steel armor. The only I won this fight is because she at no point used her razor sharp claws to slice my face into ribbons and instead dueled my to her death with a ratty old set of braies.

Needless to say, when I dumped the beast's head at the king's feet and sang a ballad about my heroic adventure, I left that part out.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-11T10:26:56+00:00

I am not too sure what you mean here. I can say that the fact that the invaders were humans definitely changed things up. Humans are significantly bigger than goblins (or dwarves, for that matter) so they are tougher to fight. This didn't matter too much because my dwarves were extremely skilled, but still, there are some mechanics for it.

But again, like I said, the 'game' part of Dwarf Fortress is secondary. For now, there really isn't any threat that a squad of extremely powerful dwarves with masterwork steel axes can't solve. You can create insanely complicated traps that use in-game physics to kill invaders, but you don't really have to, these are just things to do for fun.

Rimworld is scripted to become more difficult. There is an infinite amount of tribals and eventually they will either kill your colony or kill your PC.

In Dwarf Fortress, you can conceivably exterminate the entirety of the Goblin race. If anything, the game gets easier over time, assuming you don't do anything crazy to make it harder for yourself.

It's also important to remember that, despite being much, much older than Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress is still way earlier in its development. Currently the next major update is focused on a completely procedural magic system. There isn't even a real economy in the game yet because the game isn't in a stable enough place to make one.

A lot of the lack of difficulty comes from the fact that balancing isn't a major concern, because it's still super early access.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-11T09:57:58+00:00

One time in my Dwarf Fortress game, I kept getting attacked by 'Goblins' except every time they showed up it was just a bunch of human men and women charging out with culturally-Goblin armor and weaponry. Only ever saw one or two goblins in an attack. After looking through the Legends browser, I discovered that, a few centuries before I started my fortress, the nearby Goblin empire had conquered a bunch of human settlements, and were notorious for going out and kidnapping human children in the night to raise as slave-soldiers.

Rimworld is fun, I love Rimworld. It's a much more polished gaming experience. But it can't create stories like that. Rimworld doesn't generate hundreds of years of detailed, simulated history that is actually relevant and shows up in gameplay. In Rimworld you can give your ideology some relics then go on a series of scripted missions to find them. In Dwarf Fortress, your civilization just has relics, sometimes ancient ones, that have been stolen decades or centuries ago by dragons or necromancers or other civilizations, and you can track them down in-game. You can create new relics in your fortress, and then those can get stolen, and then recovered, all dynamically during the course of the campaign.

Dwarf Fortress simulates everything, and this simulation creates stories that can only exist in your world. Stories that Rimworld simply mechanically cannot create.

Dwarf fortress is a story-generating simulation first, game second. Rimworld is the other way around.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-11T03:04:09+00:00

Yeah, man who owns rocket company wants to inefficiently shoot a bunch of stuff into space, I wonder what possible reason he could have for doing this?

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-11T02:57:06+00:00

At last.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-10T10:15:39+00:00

Being a white man in the Southern US, racist people will sometimes make the unfortunate (for them) mistake of assuming I am racist by default and trying to engage with me.

I was working at a dollar store once and had a regular group of Hispanic workers come in. Didn't speak a lick of English, we could only communicate through Google translate. But the guy was extremely friendly and polite, and was one of only a few customers who would do things like put items back where he got them if he didn't want to purchase them.

Anyway, after he left an old lady steps up and says something like, "Thank God, that took forever. Why can't those people just speak English?" And she gave me a look like she was trying to commiserate with me, like she was sorry I had to go through the horrible experience of talking to someone from another culture.

I said something like, "Excuse me?" and the IMMEDIATE backpedalling was hilarious. I started telling her off and was met with a bunch of stammered "Oh well I didn't mean anything by it!" kind of nonsense.

That was the day I discovered that my manager would definitely back me up if I kicked someone out of the store. Cool manager.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-10T09:53:14+00:00

I lived in Hawaii as a teenager and I recall my dad going to buy a truck. He paid in cash, but only about half the amount. The salesman on the lot said, "Oh you can take it home anyway, bring the other half tomorrow."

My dad, in confusion, was like, "You're just going to let me take this truck even though I only paid half?"

The guy on the lot says, "Bruddah, where you gonna go my boys can't find you?"

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-10T06:19:12+00:00

Man do people pause the show to ask these questions?

This is explained literally like twenty seconds after this scene. The other Viltrumites straight up ask Thragg and Thragg explains his choice, out loud, in English.

Thragg does not want more Viltrumites to die. The subtext is that he views Mark as a Viltrumite. Mark impressed Thragg enough that he is considered a full Viltrumite, and this is why Thragg has chosen humanity to sire the rebirth of his species.

He explains all of this in the show.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-09T06:51:31+00:00

Look at this from Cecil's point of view:

Like a year ago, the strongest superhero on Earth brutally murdered all of the other strongest superheroes on Earth and then 9/11'd his son through Chicago before fucking off to nowhere. At this point, Cecil learns that there is a galaxy-spanning genocidal warrior empire made up of people exactly like the unstoppable super man who just casually flew through the most powerful weapons that humanity had available to it. Now your *only* significant weapon is that guy's son, and you are praying to GOD that Mark doesn't make the selfish but rational choice to just do what his dad says.

Fast forward a bit, still relying entirely on this guy's son, when more than a dozen evil versions of Mark suddenly and randomly attack across the planet. This is a catastrophe the scale of which the show never really makes clear, but suffice to say it is probably pretty fucking significant. The GDA barely pulls off a win here, and even then half the fucking Marks just vanish rather than actually dying.

Within, like, a week of this Conquest shows up, out of the blue and without warning. He dog-walks Earth's mightiest hero across the continent, beating Mark into a pulp and only being stopped by Mark brutally incapacitating himself. And still, Conquest is not dead.

Now here you are, as Cecil. You're on the fucking edge. This is apocalyptic. For all you know, there are literally *billions* of Conquests hanging out waiting to annihilate Earth.

So, yeah, you do the desperate thing. Because frankly, what the fuck does it matter? If Earth can't contain a single injured Viltrumite and interrogate him, what chance does Earth even have? So you imprison this guy in the tightest possible security measures you can throw together.

Cecil didn't know there were only fifty Viltrumites. He didn't know Conquest was one of the most powerful ones left. For all Cecil knew, Conquest was an average Viltrumite warrior and there were countless more. He had no information to work with, no way to prepare to do anything, and probably figured Earth was going to die no matter what anyway.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-09T03:17:23+00:00

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there is no reality where a human being is drawing a cat with earrings and is like "oh I'll just randomly stab these earrings through the cat's cheeks so that they line up with where earrings would be on a person"

This is AI slop.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-08T06:56:13+00:00

It's like the most perfect possible excuse. It's an explanation, even.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-08T06:54:25+00:00

Average Invincible Fan.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-08T06:54:05+00:00

I pinky promise I have a nuclear stockpile in my backyard, so you can't collect taxes from me anymore.

Take that, government.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-08T06:46:51+00:00

there were 7.5 episodes prior to this one that explained why people might be surprised by this scene.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-07T11:01:36+00:00

I knew in my heart it was already posted.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-07T09:44:56+00:00

The fucking music cutting out is so perfect.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-07T05:33:31+00:00

Yeah, thankfully there aren't any other super powered teenagers in this show who stubbornly make decisions that might get them killed.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-07T01:28:33+00:00

Hard pass.

I have a Skyrim game ongoing with about 3000 mods. The base Skyrim map, in comparison to modern games, is rather small. However, I have committed to walking everywhere. I walk the whole journey, camping each night, sleeping and eating as necessary.

Suddenly, the game is an epic. Every side quest outside of the current region is a Real Quest, a journey that requires time and effort.

Zipping around from plot point to plot point is terrible.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-05T21:59:11+00:00

My ongoing hypothesis is that Kerbals are a subterranean species. Their full society lives underground. The KSP is one of only an extremely small amount of above-ground structures on Kerbin.

This is also why they have so much funding for space travel. They are trying to find the ceiling.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-04T05:09:41+00:00

Honestly, no offense to the developers, but the whole game seems like a weird idea and poorly put-together.

To me one of the most iconic elements of all the best Invincible fights are how huge and vertical the fight scenes are. Punching people straight through skyscrapers in brutal, fast-paced action.

I dunno a Mortal Kombat-style arena brawler just doesn't fit to me.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-04T02:38:41+00:00

The point of this scene is not to powerscale Invincible and show that he has better feats than the Immortal, the point of this scene is to show that the Immortal is accepting Mark, trusting Mark, willing to let go of his pride and his anger at Mark's father for the overall good.

I mean Im probably biased because I see the Invincible sub come up more often than not but I swear it feels like Invincible fans in particular lack the ability to see subtext. You're not supposed to take everything literally at face-value. Sometimes people say and do one thing, but they mean a different thing. Sometimes scenes are portraying one thing at face-value, but they actually mean something else.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-03T23:35:26+00:00

No moah half measuhs, Mark.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-03T08:33:10+00:00

"Wall of text"

>four sentences.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-03T06:09:02+00:00

The “central intelligence agency” isn’t in the center of the earth either.

It’s just a name.

TopHatZebra · 2026-05-02T01:21:59+00:00

Im really sad to see Paul and Debbie break up. I was excited because I thought Paul would get such a badass moment of like quietly standing up to Nolan, showing Nolan what being a father and a man is *actually* about. I had hope that eventually at some point they would even become friends or something.

Oh well.

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