The real gold were the bugs we met along the way.
Eg. 4th November release notes:
- Hospital patients and babies don’t shut off the brains of people carrying them, again.
Classic babies
Dwarf Fortress bug reports are incredible. Since this is lemmy I’m sure people have heard of the alcoholic cats but it’s a fun reread
I just can’t beat the drunken cat bug… That was the one where the cats were showing up dead all over the tavern floor, and it turned out they were ingesting spilled alcohol when they cleaned their paws.
I think that bug explains very well just how deeply complex Dwarf Fortress really is. Drinks can be spilled. Some drinks have alcohol. If cats step in something it sticks to their paws. Cats clean their paws, causing them to ingest what’s on them. Enough alcohol will kill a cat. Put together: dead drunken cats.
I vaguely remember that part of the problem was the game didn’t differentiate between licking a small amount of ale and drinking a whole glass. So the cats were basically chugging a beer each time they cleaned their paws
This might be the best advertising I’ve seen for this game, and now I want to try it.
It’s on sale on steam right now. I said screw it and am diving in mostly blind, only watched one video on steam after reading this post. Wish me luck
Or how carp was overpowered, and could take down entire squad of dwarves that wandered too close to water.

I need more DF bugs, that game is such a gem. Bought it 3x on Steam, just to support devs even more. Apart from Patreon I mean.
Tarn mentioned a couple of his favorite bugs in this interview:
My favorites are the one where the farmer walked over to the furniture stockpile, grabbed a bed, walked over to his farm and planted it, and the one with the injured hammerer. The hammerer is the dwarven executioner. When both of his arms were broken and he was unable to hold his hammer to administer Dwarven Justice, he still went ahead with the punishment, but he bit his victims. This included shaking his head vigorously and tearing their arms off, which he then held in his mouth for years.
What the fuck is this game I am not capable of evening
deleted by creator
When I read “injured hammerer” I initially read hammer, which made me think of an ARK Survival Evolved bug from years back. This was more unhinged though.
Regardless; vehicles, I believe, are basically just dinosaurs without a lot of the dinosaur-ish abilities, as far as the code is concerned. At least that used to be the case. When rafts were initially implemented, they’d forgotten to disable the hunger functionality on them, because over time your raft would starve to death.
One of the few games so special that even bugs improve the experience.
IIRC, the devs re-used code for dwarves blinking, which resulted in cats licking their beer-soaked paws at the same rate as blinking. Even a small amount ingested per lick at that rate led to alcohol poisoning.
Why was the game tracking when dwarves blink wtf??
Because they would go blind if they got blood in their eyes
so it knows for how long dwarves are affected by spilled beer in their eyes, duh
Oh my god, I didn’t know how complex Dwarf Fortress is (I’ve played rimworld so I’m familiar)
Yeah, no, it’s ridiculously, nonsensically complex. In the most delightful and unexpected ways. Like, it’s not necessarily complex in the ways that you think it is or should be complex. It’s complex in ways that you never even would’ve imagined. For no real reason. Just because.





