Welcome to the Dwarf Fortress Map Archive (DFMA). Dwarf Fortress is a popular single player sim game, made by bay12games.
This here website is a repository and online viewer for player created maps exported from the game. The site revolves around an optimized file format (.FDF-MAP), which can produce files 1/2000th the size of the ouputted bitmaps (for a 28 layer map) and 1/20th the size of equivalent PNG files. This makes them small enough to upload and transfer across the web without chewing up bandwidth. God forbid someone trying to upload the 150MB output file from a midsize fort, we can deliver exactly the same map for ~100kb!.
This site is for uploading and sharing (viewing) maps from Dwarf Fortress with your
friends, family etc.. I'm sure you'll figure it out.
First I suggest you download SL's DF Map Compressor
(or on Github).
Then do what the diagram says:
Also look out for Points of Interest; created by users of the archive, each map can have a navigatable list places that describe the fortress or world.
2022-04-19
Released v1.0.3 of the map viewer with a bug fix for certain PoIs.
Removed pixelDensity setting which should increase the font resolution.
Added more on screen logging for debug purposes.
Added support for dynamically switching map viewer version to http://localhost with the ?version=localhost flag.
Added support for dynamically switching map viewer version to other versions with the ?version=1.0.3 flag.
2022-04-16
Added support for HTML5 map viewer in alpha mode (α). You can now toggle between Flash / HTML on a per-map basis. This mode has been introduced to help diagnose issues with the new map viewer - which can now dynamically load any map or point of interest in the map archive database - which is revealing lots of edge cases. Currently the HTML5 map viewer supports top down rendering of the more recent map types.
Look for these links at the top of map pages:
New HTML5 Viewer Controls
2022-04-02
After Vaevictus checked in to see if I was still alive; we discovered some MySQL errors haunting the site. I've done a pass and fixed all the errors I could find initially - I suspect I may have broken a few things around the site though. Stalled on progress to implement the HTML5 map viewer - still very feasible to implement - just needs some dedication. Also spotted the lack of a CMV player that would be compatable as well.
2020-05-05
Hey all. It's been a while. Flash is dying. I know. Things are changing... I've created a Future of the Dwarf Fortress Map Archive thread on the forums; and a project page on github to rennovate the site, in response to Jacob Blomquist, who has made a P5.js and HTML5 Canvas version of the map viewer. Watch this space, read/reply in the forum, and kee an eye on the project for updates.
2017-08-28
I've updated the link to ShadowLord's DF Map Compressor to its new home on the bay12games Dwarf Fortress File Depot (DFFD). Thanks to Dwarf Comic for highlighting the broken link.
2015-12-02
Applied a 32 password character limit to signup, registration, and login; to address a bug with long passwords locking people out of their accounts. Please get in contact if you encounter any login issues. Passwords are salted, hashed, and stored in our user database. Passwords can be changed/updated from your user profile page after signing in.
2015-11-29
Removed the CMV warning from the Add Movie page; thanks to lethosor for spotting the message was out of date.
2015-08-08
More maps archived for another year...
The Map Archive is causing heavy load on our shared host, so I've enabled page caching on several sections of the site. This has also meant I've had to disable comments for non-authorised users. If you want to comment in future you'll have to sign-in / sign-up for an account. If this saddends you, please get in touch, tweet me at @Markavian or send me an email dfma span>@mkv25.net.
If you encounter any bugs with caching, such as submitting maps, or viewing pages, please get in touch and let me know.
2014-05-31
Maps archived for another year. Ban list updated to include some new words. Continued thanks goes out to dedicated reporters for finding and identifying spam.
2013-05-14
Err, so its been a while, but here's an update!
Good news - hosting for the site has been renewed for another two years, that'll bring mkv25.net up to 2015!, and means that the site has been running for 11 years now.
CMV Editor source code now available on Github: https://github.com/Markavian/CMV-Editor. Any budding C# developers out there who want a tinker, go right ahead. All the solution files, IO encoder/decoder classes, and timeline component are there to be tinkered with.
And lastly, thanks to all the spam reporters who help keep the site clean of ANKFSL$52LFSDFS, "Nice blog", and shoe adverts, your help is much appreciated.
2010-11-26
Fixed bug with PoI links not working on maps with a default PoI set. Thanks to hyndis for reporting the bug; completely missed it.
Movie update, RE: "Movies no longer record properly, at least in the SDL
versions. The recorded files have no content at all, consisting of single
frames."
(0013891)
Toady One (administrator) 2010-11-15 13:59 This should be fixed for 0.31.18.
Get out there and make more movies!
2010-09-05
Added feature to look for a Default point of interest in other maps in the same series if one is not defined. Should help people who upload multiple maps and don't want to have to set a default point of interest for every map entry. Thanks to Rhenaya for sitting me down and sorting this out for me.
Also; increased the max file size for map uploads to 1 MiB for registers users, and 628 KiB for non-registered users.
2010-08-24
2009-05-24
2009-05-16
2009-02-05
2008-11-18
2008-11-16
2008-10-26
2008-08-09
2008-07-19
2008-07-10
Thanks to SL for his great DF map encoder/compressor, without which I would not have had the inspiration to build this site. Also thanks to him for modifying his program over and over to get it to work with my Flash viewer.
The Flash map viewer was created by Markavian, aka John Beech. An avid fan of DF and computer programming. Markavian has been working with web technologies such as PHP, MySQL and Flash for over 6 years, in an effort to make the web a more useful place.
Always cast a thousand shadows on a candle... or something. -M.A. Deup