On a sudden idea, I wondered how Pico-8’s palette would look in Dwarf Fortress. The result doesn’t look that bad, I’m giving it a spin to see how it looks in game.

Dwarf Fortress (or at least the Classic Version) emulates the look & feel of an old terminal, using by default an IBM font with the classic 4-bit EGA palette (1 bit for RGB, one for intensity). The exercise was to make a palette looking like this one as closely as possible with Pico-8’s colors, eventually tapping in the extra colors if needed. And in the end they were indeed needed.

I have a few notes regarding the color selection:

• I started with having a black to white ramp using the color 6 and 7 for grays but it turned out that the normal light gray is not really discernible from the white in many situations. Nevertheless, I love how they look on the stone parts.
• The lack of blues and cyan made me cheat a little bit and I fear that the light blue and light cyan are maybe a bit too close.
• The yellow and light gray blend quite a lot on my screen, so maybe they should be changed at some point?
• I couldn’t use the browns as they were too dark. The orange works well here.

Here’s a few screenshots. They’re took with that palette and the CLA tileset¹:

And here’s the palette code. Download this file or copy-paste the code block in colors.txt and the game will adopt those colors.

[BLACK_R:0]
[BLACK_G:0]
[BLACK_B:0]
[BLUE_R:29]
[BLUE_G:43]
[BLUE_B:83]
[GREEN_R:0]
[GREEN_G:135]
[GREEN_B:81]
[CYAN_R:18]
[CYAN_G:83]
[CYAN_B:89]
[RED_R:190]
[RED_G:18]
[RED_B:80]
[MAGENTA_R:117]
[MAGENTA_G:70]
[MAGENTA_B:101]
[BROWN_R:255]
[BROWN_G:163]
[BROWN_B:0]
[LGRAY_R:162]
[LGRAY_G:136]
[LGRAY_B:121]
[DGRAY_R:73]
[DGRAY_G:51]
[DGRAY_B:59]
[LBLUE_R:6]
[LBLUE_G:90]
[LBLUE_B:181]
[LGREEN_R:0]
[LGREEN_G:228]
[LGREEN_B:54]
[LCYAN_R:41]
[LCYAN_G:173]
[LCYAN_B:255]
[LRED_R:255]
[LRED_G:0]
[LRED_B:77]
[LMAGENTA_R:255]
[LMAGENTA_G:119]
[LMAGENTA_B:168]
[YELLOW_R:255]
[YELLOW_G:236]
[YELLOW_B:39]
[WHITE_R:255]
[WHITE_G:255]
[WHITE_B:255]

PS : This is not the post I was mentioning last time, still working on it.