Dwarf Fortress Uses Version Control Now? Tarn Adams' Quotes and Solo Dev Lessons

"I didn't like the feeling of committing my code into a kind of black box." That's a line attributed to Tarn Adams, the creator of Dwarf Fortress, from 2013. Now word has gone around that the game uses version control. In the developer community, that's fairly symbolic news. It was practically legend that one of the most complex games in the world had run for well over a decade without the tool.

The starting point is a short blog post Simon Willison published on October 11, 2026. I'll follow it and sort out what can actually be confirmed and what can't.

What kind of game is Dwarf Fortress?

Dwarf Fortress was made by Tarn Adams of Bay 12 Games and his brother Zach Adams. According to a Game Developer interview, the game was first released on August 8, 2006, and a PC Gamer article says the brothers had been developing it together since the early 2000s. You lead a band of dwarves and build a fortress, while the game itself generates the world's terrain, its history, even the relationships between characters. Unexpected events keep piling up, those stories spread by word of mouth, and the game built a long-running cult following.

For a long time the game was free. Then a paid version came out on Steam on December 6, 2022. The publisher is Kitfox Games, and it added graphics and an easier interface. Game Developer reports that the free version is still available.

The Steam launch in numbers

According to a PC Gamer article from December 13, 2022, sales reached about 300,000 copies by day six. In an interview, Tarn Adams mentioned a Kitfox announcement of 160,000 copies on day one, and said sales were now about double that. The article's headline says the Adams brothers must adjust to a new reality of being millionaires, so the reaction was big. These numbers matter as background later in this post.

What is version control?

Here's a short explanation for non-developers. Version control is, simply put, a "change log" for code. If you've ever used Word's track changes or restored an earlier version of a document, think of it as that idea stretched to every file in a project.

The most widely used tool is Git. The basic flow looks like this.

git add .                       # Stage the changed files to be recorded
git commit -m "Fix dwarf AI"    # Save the changes with a description
git log                         # View the history so far
git switch -c map-rewrite       # Create a branch for experiments

There are two key terms. A commit means "save the state at this point," and a branch means "split off a line to experiment on, apart from the main line." Joining a branch back into the main line is called a merge, and the trouble that arises when two people changed the same spot differently is a merge conflict.

What has Adams said over the years?

Simon Willison's post lines up three of Tarn Adams' comments in chronological order. What follows is what that post presented. The translation and summary are mine.

The 2013 comment is quoted only as a Reddit link, so I couldn't open the original to confirm it. Willison linked the 2016 comment to page 3 of the PC Gamer interview, but I couldn't find that sentence in the page text I retrieved. Please treat those two as Willison's quotes passed along as is. The 2023 comment, on the other hand, I confirmed directly in the Game Developer original.

The context of the 2023 interview

The interview ran on March 14, 2023, just after the Steam launch. Asked how it was working with a publisher, Adams said he was mostly happy. Uploading builds had almost no friction, and Kitfox was great. Then he added that the process was much more complicated than before, with Discord channels to check and version control to use.

What I'd note here is the tone. He doesn't announce that he "adopted" version control. He mentions it in passing while describing how his work environment changed. That suggests it had already become routine. But that's only my interpretation.

Why did it change?

Let me separate what the interview confirms from my own guesses.

Here's what's confirmed. In the same interview, Adams said a new programmer, Putnam, had joined that year. He also said, in effect, that the game "wasn't designed from the start for multiple people to work on." As we saw, the publisher Kitfox and various contributors for art, music and more had joined as well.

From here on it's my analysis. When you write code alone, the gain from version control can look small. You only coordinate between yesterday's you and today's you. But the moment a second programmer touches the same code, things change. You have to track who changed what, and merge the parts you edited at the same time. At that point version control stops being optional and becomes close to mandatory. I think it's reasonable to say Adams switched tools not because his tastes changed but because the way he works did.

Branches, merge conflicts and Adams' worry

The most interesting part of the same interview is where he talks about future plans. Adams mentioned a big job, the "map rewrite." It reworks structural problems left over from the move from 2D to 3D, and a large part of the code has to be torn up. He also said he doesn't want to go through another multi-year big-update cycle.

He then said, roughly, that if version control keeps working well, he could push that job forward on its own branch while continuing to patch the main line and even add substantial features. But he expects substantial merge conflicts, and admitted he has no experience with that side of things.

This passage shows that version control isn't just backup but "a tool that changes your development strategy." In the past, a big rewrite meant stopping new features for years and running on a single track. With branches, you can run two tracks at once. The price comes later, when you merge, and Adams knew exactly that.

What this news doesn't confirm

Before I wrap up, let me draw a clear line.

• The exact time of the switch is unknown. All we know is that he said he didn't use it in March 2016 and said he did in March 2023.
• Which tool they use isn't in the sources I checked. There's no basis for saying it's Git.
• Willison made a joke in his post, roughly lamenting that they adopted it "before becoming millionaires" from the Steam success. What I confirmed, though, is that the December 2022 PC Gamer article already reported big sales, and that the interview mentioning version control is from March 2023. From these sources alone, I can't tell whether adoption came before or after the success.
• It looks like fresh news, but the comment it rests on is an interview more than three years old. Willison brought it back up and put it together, and I couldn't find any recent announcement from the dev team.

Lessons for solo developers

Adams' case can be read in two directions. One is "you can make a great game without version control," and the other is "once the team grows, you'll eventually need it." Both are true. But you should consider that he got through more than ten years that way because he understood the whole codebase by himself. It's hard to apply directly to the typical solo developer.

It's also worth learning from the fact that Adams said honestly that he has "no experience" with merge conflicts. The later you adopt a tool, the later you get to practice with it. If you practice branches and merges early on a small project, you can start a big rewrite without fear once the project has grown.

In the end, the message of this news isn't a lecture telling you to "use version control." It's that tools follow the way you work, and the way you work changes as your team and scale change. Even a developer who guarded his code alone for nearly 20 years changed tools once he had new colleagues. Gauge what stage your own project is at, and prepare one step ahead of when you need it. That's the practical lesson I'd take from this story.