I was just thinking about this the other day and was curious. Does anyone know?
How many square miles or square meters is the dwarf fortress map
dwarf-fortress
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I'm a brand new player of this game, so I admit my knowledge of the later things are limited - keep that in mind when reading this answer.
Dwarf Fortress is a hard game, in that there are so many things you need to take care of, and if you don't, things can go horribly, horribly wrong. You have to keep all of your dwarves both happy and safe, and if you don't, you can get into some serious trouble. When you fail, you learn something new about how to manage this task.
Of course, the curve is exaggerated, but the reason it stays so high is because there are so many things which can go wrong if you don't keep a close eye on things. A dwarf goes into a rage? Kill him before he kills everything else. Goblins started a siege? Get your civilians to safety and get your military ready to take them on. Discovered a cavern? Make sure you block it off until you are ready to deal with any monsters in there.
The list goes on, and that's what makes the game hard. But it also feels rewarding to successfully deal with these threats.
There are of course a number of things you can do to remedy that:
- Install a texture pack so you can more easily tell things apart. I personally like the Ironhand texture pack, but there are several others. This will make it so much easier to recognize things at a glance.
- Get Dwarf Therapist. It's a much more convenient way to manage your individual dwarves.
- Choose a really good location for your fortress. I actually ended up discarding several worlds before finding one with a site I really liked.
- Watch tutorials and Let's Plays on e.g. YouTube to get a feel for the game. There are a lot of helpful tutorials out there - my favorite is Djrodw's series on the FogeyGaming channel, which covers all of the basics; he also has a Let's Play on his own channel where some other stuff is covered.
I recommend getting the Lazy Newb Pack, which contains a frontend to configure the game, the game itself, a bunch of tools (including Dwarf Therapist), and a few texture packs (including Ironhand).
Start a new game in the "Legends" mode. This allows you to export a multitude of detailed information about the world, among them detailed maps using the [d] key. The options "Elevations including lake and ocean floors" and "Elevations respecting water level" both produce heightmaps of the world while the other options allow you to export a texture to match it.
The graphics are exported into the base Dwarf Fortress directory (the same one where DwarfFortress.exeresides), under the names ...
world_graphic-el-region name-some numbers.bmpfor the "elevation including lake and ocean floors" mapworld_graphic-elw-region name-some numbers.bmpfor the "elevation respecting water level" map
For the highest size region (257x257), they are 4112x4112px in size. They look like this, scaled down (in order: with lake/ocean floors, with water level):
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Starting on a 2x2 embark, the playable map is 96 tiles across. Dividing each length in half, we can determine that each tile on the Local map is 48x48 playable tiles. Region tiles consist of 16x16 Local tiles, meaning each Region tile contains 768x768 playable tiles.
Most wargame and roleplaying games that use Human-size figures on a grid assume each square represents five feet on a side. Assuming Dwarf Fortress is the same, this results in each Region tile covering an area 3,840 feet on a side: 14,745,600 square feet, or about half a square mile (0.5289).
Extrapolating this to the standard world sizes, you get the following numbers:
Pocket world: 153 square miles. (Roughly the distance from Los Angeles to Tijuana.)
Smaller world: 576 square miles. (About the size of Oahu.)
Small world: 2,234 square miles. (About the size of Delaware.)
Medium world: 8,802 square miles. (About the size of Wales.)
Large world: 34,935 square miles. (About the size of Maine.)
For comparison the Earth has a surface area of 196,939,900 square miles. You would need to generate a 19,296x19,296 world to get a Dwarf Fortress world the size of the Earth.