Techme101.com

The stunning piece of gaming history that is Dwarf Fortress, a game that you quite possibly have never played before and one that you absolutely should start playing the second you finish reading this page, is finally getting the hugely anticipated Adventure Mode added to its Steam version.
For background, in case you have missed out on the last two decades, In 2010 Wired ran an article on Dwarf Fortress. The world took note. What the hell is that? They collectively thought as they stared at screens full of ASCII characters that, if you squinted and looked at a certain angle, could potentially look like Tolkeinesque map.
That my friends, was Dwarf Fortress in its pre-Steam days and there is genuinely nothing like it to this day still. It is still, without a doubt, the most incredible world simulation, spanning centuries of (made up) history and such a fiendish game mechanic that once you “get it”, you will be forever hooked.
These days after a stupendously successful Steam launch that brought the game to a much wider audience, and also toned down the intimidation levels by replacing the ASCII characters with actual graphics, players have long pined for the original’s Adventure Mode.
The ASCII graphics of the Dwarf Fortress original.
Now after almost 18 months on Steam, devs Tarn and Zach have pushed a beta version of Adventure mode, which is free to play to all Dwarf Fortress owners, who will suddenly find they have virtually a whole new Dwarf Fortress game to play.
While not everything is included yet it is a solid start, a devlog over at Bay12 Games lists what is currently available:
“A lot of the Adventure mode experience is there. You can currently, in the released beta, create a party in character generation, visit your old forts, retire, unretire, get NPC companions, take quests, fight monsters with the various melee/wrestling/ranged options, set fires, tell stories, and travel the world. Portraits are available for dwarves, humans, elves, goblins, kobolds (minus some clothing variations), animal people (no items), and necromancer experiments (no items). These portraits are in both modes.

So what’s the difference between Adventure mode and Fortress mode?
The clue is in the name really. Fortress mode is DF’s staple, you are building your own fortress, over hundreds of years and need to take care of every little detail – mainly have you got enough booze for your fellas.
Adventure mode sees you create a party and head out to the rest of the world that the game has generated. It’s tough, but it’s fun – more like an adventuring turn-based roguelike combining all the things you love in Dwarf Fortress but allowing you to wander into places such as human towns and the like.
But what is Dwarf Fortress?
At its heart Dwarf Fortress is the game you dreamt of when you were a kid if you played D&D and role-playing games. It, fundamentally is a colony management sim, but one with the depth of which you have never seen before, in Fortress mode. You don’t win at Dwarf Fortress but you can lose. you build your Fortress and keep it going as long as you can – over centuries hopefully, building it ever strong to repel the many dangers you will encounter.
Adventure mode, as described above, takes you out of the Fortress into the world that has been created. At the start of a game of DF your PC will take a good while creating the world, including thousands of years of history, dwarf lineages, and historical events, any of which could end up being a part of your game.
It is also worth noting that you do not have to buy the Steam version of the game. The original version in all its ASCII glory (which can even be modded with more ‘normal’ graphics is available for free at Bay 12’s site. It also has the complete Adventure mode in it.
Whatever you do with Dwarf Fortress, don’t just look at the graphics and be instantly turned off. That would be like looking at Minecraft and saying the graphics are too blocky.
The post Dwarf Fortress – long awaited Adventure mode comes to one of the greatest games of all time, but what actually is it? appeared first on ReadWrite.

Fortnite players exploiting a glitch to obtain more X-Box digital currency are now in digital V-Bucks debt.
Epic Games, owner of the Fortnite franchise has cracked down on a complicated loophole that some players took advantage of to boost their in-game balance books.
The popular Epic looter-shooter has become a microtransaction machine, dropping costly new cosmetics on a weekly and sometimes daily basis to entice users, and nefarious methods are often used as a means to pick these up more cheaply.
V-Bucks debt for cheaters
Certain workarounds in gaming can net players a small-term advantage or boost their balance for popular titles like Fortnite. This particular scam was dubbed “the Argentina method” by users on Reddit.
This digital fraud involved players using other countries, mainly Argentina, to acquire V-Bucks via a different version of the Microsoft online store. These players would then ask Epic for a refund on cosmetic items purchased via the scam and add more currency.
This method has come to a halt and these opportunistic Fortnite players are now waking up to a negative balance. The exploit was used prominently across the Fortnite community, but not all gamers had taken up the convoluted approach to adding more ill-gotten digital currency.
A well-known name in the Fortnite community NotPalo posted on X about the negative balance that scammers have been seeing:

Fortnite ha comenzado a retirar cosméticos y pavos que se hayan hecho con el método de Xbox que salió después del parcheo de Argentina.
Este método era literal estafar a Xbox, entonces por eso remueven todo.#Fortnite pic.twitter.com/gpg4avxJly
— NotPalo (@NotPaloleaks) April 16, 2024

“This method was literally scamming Xbox, so that’s why they removed everything,” he says.
FNBuzz, a community news provider would back up the news broken by NotPalo and share an image of a player in -6150 in V-Bucks debt on their socials:

Fortnite and Xbox are starting to remove and refund cosmetics from people who used a glitched Xbox method to obtain skins in Argentina.
People who did this Exploit are now starting to have a negative amount of vbucks.
(via @NotPaloleaks) #Fortnite pic.twitter.com/YTXyaZWHAE
— FNbuzz | Fortnite News (@FNBRbuzz) April 16, 2024

Epic Games have not responded officially to this specific issue, but have been blunt in their “Why was an item removed from my account in Fortnite?” stance on the official site.
“Do not purchase V-Bucks or any other content from third-party sellers or websites. Do not use any third-party websites offering V-Bucks giveaways,” Epic’s message reads.
Some scammers remain undaunted on the Reddit entry, saying “Turkey is cheaper” and “It was good whilst it lasted.” So there will no doubt be another digital domain that these players can flock to now the Argentina method has been wiped out.
Image: Epic Games.
 
The post Fortnite players fall into digital debt after V-Bucks glitch gets hammered appeared first on ReadWrite.

Pennsylvania sees record highs in gambling revenue as it reached $554.6m in March which is 7.64% higher than March 2023.
Pennsylvania lawmakers legalized online gambling in 2017, making it the fourth state to do so. This resulted in online slots, table games and poker, and other forms of gambling being legal.
The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board oversees gambling in the area and released a March report to share the revenue findings of the best-performing month.
The last month eclipsed the previous high revenue month of December of last year where $542.2m was generated.
The main source of the income from the new all-time high was said to have come from retail slots which generated $227.9m during March, despite the number of slot machines in the area reducing from 25,643 to 24,886.
Land-based table games weren’t found to be favored by punters last month, as revenue from this source fell 0.8% to $85.2m.
The online market soared in this state though, as Internet Casino-Type Gaming (iGaming) revenue amounted to $191.1m which is a monthly record for this form of gambling in Pennsylvania.
The operator that fared the best in the online gambling world in March was the Hollywood Casino at Penn National Race Course which secured $72.3m in iGaming revenue.
They were followed by the Valley Forge Casino Resort which reported $50.8m, then Rivers Casino Philadelphia came in third with $32.8m of revenue.
Pennsylvania sees a decline in the sports betting market
While revenue went sky-high for some, the sports betting market has struggled to pick up traction in the Keystone State.
Revenue is sitting at 10% lower than the previous year, with $45.5m contributing to March from sports wagering.
Valley Forge Casino Resort came out trumps in the Pennsylvania sports betting market along with its partner FanDuel.
Sports wagering wasn’t at the end of the pile though in terms of revenue, with other game types like video gaming terminals, iGaming poker, and fantasy contests generating even less interest.
Featured Image: Photo by Heidi Kaden on Unsplash
The post Gambling revenue in Pennsylvania reaches all-time monthly high appeared first on ReadWrite.

A top research institute created with the lofty goals of investigating the ‘big-picture questions’ and assessing what the future holds for humanity..will now not play a part in that future.
The Future of Humanity Institute was founded in 2005 by Professor Nick Bostrom and a select set of researchers from Oxford University.
The Institute published numerous academic research papers on subjects like AI safety, existential and catastrophic risk, AI governance, digital minds, biological risk, human enhancement, moral uncertainty, effective altruism, grand futures, long-term, and ethical theory.
While the official website used to be filled with the most recent research papers and news, this has now been overtaken by a long piece of text with the caption ‘2005-2024.’
It’s revealed that on April 16 2024, the Institute was officially closed down.

The Oxford University Future of Humanity Institute, 2005 – 2024:https://t.co/NgUCPg7VLZ
— Andrew Maynard (@2020science) April 18, 2024

The team behind the Institute describes its 19-year existence as having included “a series of research contributions that helped change our conversation about the future and contributed to the creation of several new fields and paradigms…
“Over the course of its 19 years, FHI inspired the emergence of a vibrant ecosystem of organizations where the kinds of questions that FHI investigated can be explored.
“Topics that once struggled to eke out a precarious existence at the margins of a single philosophy department are now pursued by leading AI labs, government agencies, nonprofits, and specialized academic research centers.”
Future of Humanity Institute shuts its doors due to several failures
The website statement reads: “Over time FHI faced increasing administrative headwinds within the Faculty of Philosophy (the Institute’s organizational home).
“Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed.”
A final Future of Humanity Institute report was attached to the statement, with a section on ‘where we failed.’ Within this, the team writes: “We did not invest enough in university politics and sociality to form a long-term stable relationship with our faculty.”
The organization and scaling-up process was also outlined as an issue: “The early informal structure cannot be maintained beyond a certain size, and must be gradually replaced with an internal structure.
“Doing this gracefully, without causing administrative sclerosis or lack of delegation, is tricky and in my opinion we somewhat failed.”
Featured Image: Ideogram
The post Top research center, set up to assess humanity’s future prospects, shuts appeared first on ReadWrite.