Magic News + Dinos？! - Tarn Time (Spring 2026)

Hello, I'm Tarn Adams from Bay12Games, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress. Our latest patch is focused on quality of life. We have tooltips that show the products and required materials for tasks now. The military will wear their boots properly. The game now shows the petitions you've accepted that require you to build a temple or guild hall, and we've changed how bins work in the trade screen so it's more intuitive. It's much harder to accidentally delete your squads. Clothing wears down more slowly, Meanwhile, we've also been working on the next major update. Artist Jacob has prepared some hundreds of procedural layers that we can meld together into all sorts of eclectic magical workshops to support the procedurally generated magic systems of our fantasy worlds that you'll be researching in your fortress. Whether the magical research involves alchemy, herbs, raw energy, runes, mechanisms, bones, sacrifice, or just plain old books and scrolls, we have it covered. We've also been working on the thousands of years of magical history leading up to play in the new era mode of world generation, so we can have deeper, older, more magical ruins for your dwarves to dig up and explore. Speaking of wizards, we're pleased to announce that we're collaborating with Wizards of the Coast to release the Secret Lair Dwarf Fortress drop. I remember going to the Wizards Game Center that was around almost 30 years ago in Seattle when I was studying mathematics. Zack and I would play video games, grab some magic cards, and see what we got for our decks. Now I've worked with the team at Wizards to adapt five cards with Dwarf Fortress ASCII art and flavor text, vampire, dragon, demon, and goblin snatcher, as well as some dwarves and cats in the tavern for the communal brewing card. Last, another surprise. So, some of you will remember the animal sponsorship drive that happened way back at the end of the 2000s. It's the main reason Dwarf Fortress has such a large set of real-world animals. Ever since then, there's been the idea floating around to expand our real-world creatures into the past to prehistoric or extinct animals. And we'll be doing just that early this summer. Neo Rice is Good has been working on prehistoric creatures from the Cambrian Explosion all the way up to the more recently lost Dodo and Thylacine. And dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs. See you then!