Five fortresses stand between the goblins and your factory. They hold only as long as you keep filling their orders.

You're a dwarf with a pickaxe on the edge of an empty map. You set a water wheel by the water, run a shaft from it to a drill, the drill chews rock, a belt carries ore to the furnace. Electricity was never invented here and never will be: everything runs on water, steam, brass and rivets. Flat ground runs out faster than you'd think, so the factory doesn't spread outward, it goes down, floor by floor. And down those same shafts you dug, the goblins come to you.

THE FORTRESSES HOLD EXACTLY AS LONG AS YOU KEEP SHIPPING

The board shows a road: goblins at one end, your factory at the other, five named fortresses in between. (By release, a full map and a deeper simulation behind it are planned.)

An order here isn't a line reading "20 iron, 200 gold" — it's a particular fortress running out of that iron. You can top it back up now. Or you can raise its wall permanently instead, and gamble that it lives to see "permanently".

A fortress can be lost. Not "reputation −5" — Kaz-Dur, which stops writing and stops holding: the fewer of them left on the road, the more goblins reach you.

You're not the commander. You supply the war.

WATER DOESN'T CARE WHOSE FLOOR IT IS

Water here flows on its own. It spreads, pours from floor to floor, and finds every hole you forgot about. Whose shaft it is, yours or the goblins', makes no difference to it.

Hence the obvious trap: a full tank up top, a sluice above the shaft, the wave walks in, the sluice opens. Nothing further is required of you.

And hence the disaster, because that same trap can drown everything you built — water doesn't stop on its own.

Liquids aren't only a hazard here: without them there's no alloy and no steam. Pumps, pipes, tanks and drains exist for exactly one reason — to make liquid go where you decided rather than where it would rather go. It doesn't always work. And below the water there's lava, which is a different conversation entirely.

THERE'S NEVER ENOUGH TORQUE

All the power here is rotation, and it has to be carried. The wheel turns a shaft, the shaft runs half across the map and three floors down, splitting into branches, and at the end of every branch something is working.

Two numbers are enough to complicate all of it: torque and speed. A small gear turns a big one slower, a big gear turns a small one faster, and some machines don't just want force, they want RPM. So you can't drop a machine wherever it's convenient — you have to run a shaft to it and think about where exactly.

The steam engine isn't decoration here, it's a necessity: at some point plain water wheels stop being enough to turn a factory that size.

WHAT FLOOR ARE YOU ON?

You run out of room on the surface somewhere around hour two. There's as much of it as you like further down, but a new floor isn't just new space: power has to reach it, ore has to get down there and back up again. Every level you descend is paid for in construction.

The upside is that you see all of it at once. Every floor runs at the same time, and through the holes you dug yourself you watch furnaces working below, water spreading, and goblins climbing.

As long as iron keeps moving down that road, the line holds. The dwarves need iron!

And long live dwarven capitalism!