Unzip the package for your platform, run its setup launcher, and play. See the Beta 3 release notes for what changed.
(Those links are the ready-to-play release zips. The green "Code → Download ZIP" button is the source code — that's for developers, not for playing.)
Play one Dwarf Fortress fortress with your friends, at the same time, each from your own browser. One person hosts the running game; everyone else clicks a link and they're in, no account or no setup on their end. (Everyone playing should own a copy of Dwarf Fortress, grab it on Steam and support Bay 12. This is about playing the game together, not around it.)
A lot of prior DF multiplayer projects were really cool but felt more like tech demos than a fun way to actually play with friends. This one is built to close that gap: it's not a screen share, every player gets their own camera, their own cursor, real controls, native-style panels, a WebGL renderer, and the game's own art and audio, live in the browser. You can see everyone's cursor moving around the fort with their name on it. When someone drags out a mining designation, you watch the box grow. It's the difference between watching someone play and playing together.
Dwarf With Friends is a DFHack plugin for Steam-era Dwarf Fortress (v0.53.15, DFHack 53.15-r2). It's a beta: the everyday 90%+ of fortress play is built and tested; the rare corners fall back to "ask the host" instead of pretending to work.
The host loads the C++ plugin into their running game. The plugin reads and safely mutates the live fortress and runs an embedded HTTP/WebSocket server that serves a dependency-free browser client. The map streams as delta-compressed 16×16 blocks over a binary WebSocket protocol into a per-player world cache; panels and actions travel over HTTP. Each browser renders and drives its own view, so players pan, change z-levels, designate, build, and manage the fortress independently against the one shared simulation.
flowchart LR
DF["Dwarf Fortress<br/>simulation"] <-->|DFHack| P["dwf plugin - C++<br/>HTTP + WebSocket server"]
P -->|"binary block/AUX frames"| B1["Browser - player 1"]
P -->|"panel JSON + actions"| B1
P --> B2["Browser - player 2"]
P --> B3["Browser - player 3"]
For the full design, see docs/ARCHITECTURE.md; for the file-by-file index, docs/MAP.md.
Seeing each other
- Everyone's cursor glides across the map in their own color with their name on it, smoothly interpolated and fading across z-levels
- Watch a friend's dig or designation box grow live as they drag it out
- Their camera viewport shows on your minimap; z-scrollbar markers show what depth everyone's on
- Ping any tile MOBA-style, everyone sees the expanding ring in your color and jump to the position or unit from the chat.
- Click a player and follow their camera live, until you move
- Built in chat with layer colors, join/leave notices, unread badges, and history that survives a reload
Actually playing — ~130 real actions against the live fort
- Designate digs, chops, plants, and traffic; place buildings, stockpiles, zones, and burrows
- Squads (schedules, uniforms, positions,), work orders, labors, nobles, justice, locations, hauling, stocks, kitchen, standing orders, and nicknames
- A attribution marker shows which players ordered certain workorders or items.
Feels like real Dwarf Fortress
- ~97 interactive screens rebuilt in HTML/CSS to match the Steam UI, screen by screen — except the windows are movable, resizable, and remember where you put them
- In most cases behavior is verified against reverse engineering of the actual game
Sound & visuals
- The host's own game music, ambience, and announcement stingers stream to every browser (basic but working; opt-out — see docs/CONFIG.md)
- High frame rate, adding additional players costs negligible preformance for the host.
- A toggleable, orbitable 3D voxel view of the fort, built live from the same tile data
- Optional rain/snow weather particles (disable in settings menu)
Built to hold up
- The map streams as delta-compressed 16×16 blocks over a custom binary WebSocket protocol that scales with player count instead of linearly with it (see How it works)
- Reconnects are cheap: the client acknowledges what it has and can request a fresh keyframe, so nothing desyncs silently.
- Anyone can pause or unpause; the fort auto-pauses if someone disconnects; unpausing can be restricted to the host; host-side saving is guarded against collisions
- Runs on basically anything with a browser (technically even a phone, but good luck with that)
Sprite art is never redistributed: the plugin reads the host's own Dwarf Fortress installation and each browser uploads only the cells it needs. A host running DF Classic (no premium art) still works — friends see simple placeholders.
Use the setup launcher in the release zip. It also verifies and repairs an existing install, so re-running it is always safe.
- Download the Windows or Linux
DwarfWithFriendszip from the project's releases page (not a source archive). - Unzip it on the computer that runs Dwarf Fortress. On Windows, double-click DWF Setup.cmd.
On Linux, run
./dwf-setup.sh. - Follow the setup page that opens in your browser, then open Dwarf With Friends. On Windows,
use the desktop shortcut or
Dwarf With Friends.cmd. On Linux, use the application launcher or./dwarf-with-friends.sh. The host panel opens in your browser; click Start hosting, load a fortress, and share the friend link (and a join password, if you set one — optional).
Friends join from their browser with the link. Full walkthrough: docs/INSTALL.md, or docs/MANUAL-INSTALL.md if you'd rather do it by hand (including a Tailscale option instead of the default tunnel). If something gets in the way, see TROUBLESHOOTING.md. Found a bug? docs/REPORTING-BUGS.md explains how to report it well — it's a beta, and good reports get fixed fast.
The everyday flows are solid, that's what my friends and I actually play on. But occasionally the host will need to tab back to the Steam client for things that aren't in yet: trading, some niche corners of the justice and hospital systems, missions and diplomacy, and petition decisions. Rebuilding the entire DF interface in a browser is hard, so there are UI quirks I know about, and I'm planning a larger update fixing the jank for the next beta release. Linux hosting is new and currently uses the shared host camera and placeholder unit portraits instead of the Windows-only native rendering paths.
This project was built almost entirely with AI coding tools (Claude Code and Codex) by someone who is not a software engineer, but not as a one-shot prompt: it's been weeks of obsessive iteration, testing against the native game, and cleanup to make this repo genuinely accessible to poke around in. If you're smarter than me (likely), I'd love your corrections and PRs.
This repository is a source checkout for development; supported downloads come from the releases
page. The plugin builds as an external plugin inside a DFHack 53.15-r2 source tree (CMake target
dfcapture_public, output dwf.plug.dll on Windows or dwf.plug.so on Linux); the browser client
is plain JavaScript with no install or bundling step.
# Build the plugin (inside a configured DFHack 53.15-r2 tree; see BUILD.md for setup)
cmake --build <dfhack>/build-msvc --config Release --target dfcapture_public
# Run the full offline test battery from the repository root (no DF install needed)
node tools/release/launch_preflight.mjs --stage=suitesThe browser UI was verified during development against an internal screenshot-parity studio that renders the production DWFUI builders beside native Steam captures. That studio and its private screenshot corpus are development-only and are not part of this public distribution.
- Build: docs/BUILD.md — prerequisites, the external-plugin layout, and install paths.
- Develop: docs/DEVELOPMENT.md — onboarding, the test-harness culture, the DWFUI component rules, and where to add a new panel or endpoint.
- Contribute: CONTRIBUTING.md, and read AGENTS.md first — its Dwarf Fortress safety rules are mandatory.
The client has no npm dependencies and the plugin vendors cpp-httplib and stb_image_write under
third_party/.
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
src/ |
The C++ DFHack plugin: transport, world streaming, per-family routes, and write guards. |
web/ |
The browser client and its generated sprite/token JSON maps. |
web/js/ |
The client's plain-script modules and the DWFUI shared component system. |
host/ |
The zero-dependency Node installer and host-management UI. |
scripts/, dwf.lua |
DFHack Lua entry points, including the guarded native-write engine. |
tools/ |
Offline builders, the test harness and gates, release packaging, and deploy helpers. |
docs/ |
Architecture, build, install, configuration, naming, and the codebase map. |
third_party/ |
Vendored dependencies (cpp-httplib). |
Some dwf-* and dfcapture* names describe an earlier implementation or a deliberately retained
runtime identity. Read docs/NAMING.md before assuming a name means stale code.
Dwarf With Friends is licensed under AGPL-3.0-only; see LICENSE. Because it serves players over a network, the AGPL entitles anyone you host for to the source — which is this repository.
The project grew directly from Gabriel Rios's SourceAirbender/multi-dwarf and retains that project's copyright and AGPL license. UPSTREAM.md records what was inherited and what Dwarf With Friends subsequently added.
It runs on DFHack (Zlib) and continues the multiplayer approach of DFPlex (Zlib), which itself builds on webfort (ISC). It embeds cpp-httplib (MIT). Full attributions and third-party licence texts are in NOTICE.