Installation
You can either download the binary from bay12games or if you’re on Arch Linux, there’s a package you can snag with the following command:
pacman -S dwarffortress
This will install most of the resources into /opt/dwarffortress, and when you run the game for the first time with the dwarffortress command, it will populate your $HOME/.dwarffortress directory with some configuration files that we’ll take a look at in a bit for adding a tile-set.
Where to get Tile-sets?
I found that the official forums and DFFD site had mostly tilesets that would include all the windows binaries and configurations. Where I’m playing on Linux natively, so I wanted just the graphics by themselves so I could install them myself. So this Github repo has a great selection of Graphics Tilesets ready to be used directly in Linux.
Grab a Tile-Set
I chose the Ironhand set that can be found here, but the directions will work for any other regular tile-set.
Once downloaded, I unzipped the Ironhand_47_04A.zip to a temporary folder.
When extracted, you should see a data and raw folder, on Arch since I had already run Dwarf Fortress once, it had created my local configuration in ~/.dwarffortress so I just copied the data folder over with the following command.
cp -Rupv data/ ~/.dwarffortress/
And afterwards I copied the raw’s over to the /opt/dwarffortress/raw directory.
sudo cp -Rupv raw/ /opt/dwarffortress/
Configuration
Now we just want to check our configuration files to make sure the new tile-set is selected.
You can find it at ~/.dwarffortress/data/init/init.txt, and look for your GRAPHICS: block, and make sure you put in your tile-set preference in the configuration.
[GRAPHICS:YES]
[GRAPHICS_FONT:ironhand.png]
[GRAPHICS_FULLFONT:ironhand.png]
Make sure you update the “GRAPHICS_FONT” and “GRAPHICS_FULLFONT” with your tile-sets png, and toggle GRAPHICS: to YES as above.
Strike the Earth
Now you’re ready to strike the earth! With a graphical tile-set.