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I played a lot of Dwarf Fortress in high school.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Dwarf Fortress is a videogame where you try and manage a group of dwarves building a new settlement in the wilderness. It's legendary for a difficulty curve that resembled the Cliffs of Insanity, partially because it was a complex simulation of as many things as the developer could simulate and partially because of the opaque user interface. There were lots of ways to die in Dwarf Fortress, but the way that stuck with me the most was the anvil problem.

In Dwarf Fortress, your dwarves can craft mighty weapons and study armour, utilitarian buckets and elegant jeweled crowns, all the things you'd image fantasy smiths making by pounding away at an anvil in their forge. One of the things they could make on their forge was an anvil. If you didn't [...]

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