Dwarf Fortress on Steam now has the game’s best management tool

Dwarf Fortress hasn’t been on Steam all that long, but it’s already proven to be a colossal success. The colony management game has really been decades in the making, and in that time there have been plenty of mods and community additions to Dwarf Fortress to help you either manage the chaos or ignite it into oblivion. In fact, the well-loved Dwarf Therapist extension, which helps you manage and check on all your Dwarfs, has been updated, and now includes the new Steam version too.

So what exactly is Dwarf Therapist and what does it do for everyone playing Dwarf Fortress on Steam? It’s all about making your Dwarves easier to manage when they start to pile up. The management tool is “designed to run side-by-side with Dwarf Fortress” and offers “several views and interface improvements” while you play.

You can import and manage any number of custom professions across forts, assign multiple dwarves to a custom profession, and use a more flexible UI to manage your labours and professions quicker too. Dwarf Therapist also lets you view all pending changes before they actually come into the game, and lets you group dwarves by several criteria to help with management.

The idea of streamlining your dwarf management in Dwarf Fortress on Steam is definitely appealing, as the more Dwarves you get the more menus you have to crawl through to sort out each of their labour preferences, so having something like Dwarf Therapist on hand while playing would just make everything smoother.

According to Redditor songwind, the current version of Dwarf Therapist for Steam is read-only, “at least as far as labor assignments are concerned,” with another user noting that it is “still hugely useful for being able to compare dwarf skills and the like.”

That said, many are noting how even in its potentially more limited Steam form the Dwarf Fortress add-on is great for acting as a much quicker reference for things like moods, likes, skill levels and all of those dwarf details.

So, while basically a requirement for the classic version of Dwarf Fortress, the Therapist still has a lot of uses for those you playing on Steam. If you’re new to the game, it’s definitely worth checking out. You can learn all about it on the Dwarf Fortress wiki, or you can download it from GitHub. There’s also lots of information about installing Dwarf Therapist in this Reddit thread.

Alternatively, you can download a Dwarf Fortress mod that adds 905 Pokemon to the game, all of which have unique abilities and game mechanics they feed into. The game has also been doing very well, with Dwarf Fortress selling nearly 500,000 copies in its first month on Steam.

If Dwarf Fortress is absolutely up your street and you want games somewhat similar to it, we have lists of the best city-building games and best survival games you should take a look at.