The game Dwarf Fortress is notorious for a handful of reasons. Officially titled Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, it's known for its depth as a procedurally-generated city-building game with a dizzying learning curve. Perhaps more notably, though, is its rudimentary 2-D aesthetic, composed entirely of colorful ASCII text symbols.

Despite its 1980s visual look, Dwarf Fortress was actually created in 2006 and runs on a fairly complex physics engine. Because of this, over the years modders have been able to improve upon its graphics. Players can now choose to experience the game using a 3-D isometric viewpoint. How it got there is thanks to a whole daisy-chain of mods that built on each other's successes.

The Stonesense utility renders the game in a 3-D isometric viewpoint. According to modder Japa Illo, an early member of the Stonesense team, the utility relies on DFHack, a community-made library that reads the game's memory and can be parsed, thus allowing for additional utilities to render things while bypassing the initial ASCII output.

Dwarf Fortress' original ASCII graphics. Screengrab: PeridexisErrant

When Stonesense first launched in 2009, it could only render static instances of the 3-D isometric view, although a somewhat real-time view could be achieved by holding down the refresh key. Then, in 2011, it became possible for DFHack and Stonesense to be side-loaded into Dwarf Fortress by masquerading as SDL, the graphics library that Dwarf Fortress uses.

Thanks to this, Stonesense was able to render 3-D graphics on a much faster basis—but only in a separate window. The main ASCII-riddled window had to still be there underneath. In mid-2013, Illo told WIRED, modder Warmist released a DFHack plugin called RenderMax, which replaced the Dwarf Fortress renderer with its own, allowing for effects such as real-time ASCII lighting.

Thanks to this change, the modder Caldfir, the main developer of Stonesense itself, was able to build upon Warmist's renderer and overlay the Stonesense screen directly onto the main Dwarf Fortress window—as of the most recent version of DFHack, which launched on June 20, 2014.

In the game's primary mode, you play as a group of Dwarves who set out to construct and defend an underground fortress, developing it into a thriving civilization. Everything in the world is procedurally (randomly) generated, making the game similar to Mojang's hugely popular Minecraft, but with a focus on building a civilization rather than controlling a single character. The donation-supported game was created by brothers Tarn and Zach Adams, and has developed a cult following since its first alpha was launched in 2006. It continues to be updated frequently, with an entirely new build expected to launch in the coming weeks.

The new Stonesense version is still fairly buggy (much like Dwarf Fortress itself), but its release has spawned a flurry of renewed interest in the utility, Illo said. But while it makes the game significantly more visually pleasing, you're still on your own for that learning curve.