Dwarfs - F2P: Colony Management, Arcade, Base Defense, and Sandbox Modes Explained

The Overseer's Job: Colony, Gold, and the Beer Supply

As the new overseer of an underground dwarf base, your job is to manage a small colony and make it as rich as possible before the dwarfs meet their inevitable doom. The colony's members act on their own: they explore the caves for you, they mine for you, and they fight for you. To survive as long as possible, you steer and guide these greedy little fellows toward the richest points in the caves while avoiding the dangers along the way. Gold and supplies drive the colony's survival, and the riches you accumulate define how far you can push.

The Town Hall anchors the base, and its essential supply of beer must be protected. If you don't keep an eye on the dwarfs, their behavior can lead them to destroy the Town Hall and that beer store, which is why steering them well matters as much as chasing wealth. The documented loop is a balance: send the colony to the richest points to grow its riches, avoid the dangers in the caves, and keep the dwarfs from wrecking the Town Hall and its beer supply, since that supply is essential to survival.

Arcade Mode: Difficulties, Time Limits, and Random Caves

Arcade Mode strips the colony down to a focused digging run. Four difficulty levels are available, ranging from casual to crazy hard-core, so the same cave layout and monster set can be tuned toward a relaxed or punishing session. You also choose a time limit, spanning from five minutes up to endless play. Within that window, the dwarfs go after all the gold and monsters they can handle, and the clock or the absence of one shapes how aggressively you can push into the depths before the run ends.

Each Arcade attempt uses randomly generated caves, so the map differs from run to run and you cannot rely on memorized layouts. The difficulty choice and the time limit stack on top of that: a high difficulty setting and a short limit combine into a tight, high-pressure dig, while an endless limit gives the colony room to keep exploring the freshly generated tunnels. That randomness is what makes the game different every time, since the gold and monsters you encounter are placed anew rather than repeating a fixed arrangement.

Base Defense, Rush, and Dark Modes: Three Twists on Digging

Base Defense Mode reframes the digging loop as tower defense without a tower. Instead of placing a fixed structure, you send your dwarfs to carve the routes themselves, and those excavated paths become the layout you defend. Once the tunnels are shaped, the mode shifts to holding them against incoming waves of monsters, so the digging you direct early determines the ground you are protecting later. The dwarfs still do the tunneling, but here the passages serve as the defensive plan rather than a mining run.

Rush Mode pushes spawning and digging to extreme rates, with dwarfs appearing at a frantic pace and tunneling in every direction, turning the ordinary colony rhythm into a scramble. Dark Mode instead limits the light to the tunnels your dwarfs dig, so every passage carved is also a source of illumination, and the surrounding spookiness shapes where the colony can safely operate. One mode multiplies the activity, the other constrains visibility; both twist the same act of digging that anchors the main game.

Learning and Building: Campaign Challenges, Sandbox, and the Codex

Beyond the free-play modes, a Campaign Challenges section teaches the overseer role through tutorials that walk you through the basics in a few minutes, then tests those overseer abilities in separate challenges. The two halves work as a pair: the tutorials introduce the duties, and the challenges let you apply them under pressure. Sandbox mode sits apart from that structure, giving you a construction toolset to create your own caves rather than guide the colony through one provided to you.

Supporting all of this is the Codex, an integrated reference that gathers the game's dwarf knowledge in one place. It accompanies the built-in help system and includes video tutorials meant for new overseers, so a player learning the role can read the reference material and watch demonstrations rather than infer rules from play alone. The learning layer therefore spans three forms: short tutorials for a first pass, the challenges that apply what they show, and the Codex with its videos as the standing library you can return to.

Monsters, the Spider Queen, and the Dwarf Cannon

The caves are not empty. Alongside the gold the colony chases, hostile creatures populate the tunnels: zombies, goblins, skeletons, spiders, and dark elves all appear as enemies, and a Spider Queen stands among them as a distinct threat. The colony's autonomous members handle much of the fighting on your behalf, but the same independence that lets them explore and mine makes them vulnerable in a head-on clash. Steering them toward rich points therefore means weighing the monsters between the dwarfs and the loot, since a fight the colony cannot win costs more than the gold it was meant to secure.

When the Spider Queen herself comes for the colony, the fallback is the Outpost's Dwarf Cannon, and the documented use is blunt: it fires dwarfs at her. That weapon turns the colony's own members into ammunition, a last resort rather than a routine tactic, and it marks the line where ordinary cave fighting has failed. The surrounding catalog entry frames this as the option that remains when nothing else works, tying the cannon directly to the Spider Queen encounter. Keeping beer and Town Hall intact still runs through every part of the loop, but against this particular enemy the Outpost's cannon is the named answer.

First published Oct 27, 2026.