Dwarf Fortress: Difference between revisions

The Adventure mode is rougher and less polished, like a very freeform [[Roguelike]]. Both modes have no way to win, but hundreds of ways to lose: thus, losing is fun. If you intend to play this game, [http://imgur.com/mHXiz.png keep that in mind.]

See the [[Community/Dwarf Fortress|community page]] for tropes and links relevant to the Dwarf Fortress community.

* [[Big Badass Bird of Prey]]: [[Giant Flyer|Giant eagles]] and the even bigger rocs.

* [[Blessed Are the Cheesemakers]]: For most players horribly horribly subverted, if a dwarf happens to end up as cheesemaker, he will probably be used as test subject for traps or enlisted into the military right away... or worse.

* [[Blood Knight]]: Dwarves gain positive thoughts from engaging in slaughter. And that's before insanity drives them [[Axe Crazy|berserk]].

* [[Bloody Hilarious]]: ''Losing is Fun''.

{{quote|Kol Tölunimush has been ecstatic lately. He killed somebody by accident while sparring recently. [[Ax Crazy|He took joy in slaughter lately.]] [[My God, What Have I Done?|He has lost a lover to tragedy lately.]] He has witnessed death. He had a satisfying sparring session recently.}}

** Can sometimes escalate into [[Fridge Horror]] when the connection between the thoughts becomes clear. Of course, this being [[Video Game Cruelty Potential|Dwarf Fortress, it's more like Fridge Hilarity.]]

* [[Bunny Ears Lawyer]]: This would be the Dungeon Master in a nutshell. This Dwarf loves cloaks so damn much that he will collect and wear thick stacks of them to the exclusion of ''any other item of clothing'' except socks -- because every dwarf loves their socks. However, this dwarf will also tame and train the most powerful, exotic and badass beasts you can catch; giant eagles, elephants, dragons, and [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|monkeys]].

* [[Cast of Snowflakes]]: Each dwarf has his/her own personality traits that influence how they respond to certain events and how they go about their day. DF2010 adds even ''more'' details, now including what each creature looks like.

** And in [[DF 2012]], each migrant that arrives to your fortress has a history, family, and possibly even previous kills!

** Though if you're not careful, they can outbreed everything around them. This is referred to as a catsplosion, and if allowed to continue can cause severe lag. And once it's started, culling them back down will make the cat's adopted dwarves ''very'' unhappy. The best solution is to cage each kitten as it's born, then use it for meat.

* [[Clock Punk]]: Dwarven technology tends toward this. You can build ''Turing-complete computers'' out of Dwarven clockwork.

* [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything]]: Yes, the dev team is basically ''one guy.'' (plus his brother as co-designer, but still only one coder). One guy who, it has been joked, intends to keep going until he has a perfect simulation of reality ''down to the quantum level''. Thank goodness for ASCII characters taking up so little computing muscle; despite the [[Good Bad Bugs]], it's still worryingly accurate in many cases, and can be easily transported on a single USB drive.

** Given how large USB drives can be, that's worth expanding on: ''Dwarf Fortress'''s base files come in at around 13MB, not including any mods or saved .BMP files that you may download or create from it, yet its gameplay is undoubtedly more nuanced and complex than any AAA game title and has a devoted, supportive fanbase and replayability that most mainstream developers would kill for. What other game will simulate fluids, temperature, political decisions, population growth, mass-migrations, genocides, entire wars (down to what each individual did in that war and where they were injured), geological erosion processes, ants, beehives, rainfall patterns, spiderweb and insect waste creation, weapon/armour physics and even basic physics simulations (including now whether or not moving objects can crush dwarves) ''simply for the sake of fleshing out the background?''

* [[Devil but No God]]: The gods of the world are worshipped, and occasionally holy wars are fought in their names, but do very little themselves aside from {{spoiler|handing out [[Cursed with Awesome|curses]] to those who defile their temples and sometimes creating the slabs from which necromancers learn their arts}}. Demons are found ruling over populations of humans (typically by posing as the aforementioned silent gods) and goblins (who can be controlled by brute force), and {{spoiler|their numbers in hell are [[Zerg Rush|limitless]]}}.

* [[Elemental Crafting]]: In the new version, materials are indeed important, but in different ways: a silver war-hammer will do more damage than one made from steel thanks to its density, but makes a poor thrusting or slashing weapon as it does not hold a fine point or edge under wear. On the other hand, the shear values (which determine how fine an edge can be) make steel a better choice for [[A Worldwide Punomenon|cutting edge technology]]. On that note, adamantine is a very rare metal and is extremely effective in bladed weapons (an admantine sword can slice limbs off a bronze colossus with ease), yet is almost completely useless for blunt weapons, because its density is comparable to styrofoam.

* [[Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress]]: Quantized movement often makes it seem this way, units that move or dodge off a ledge hanging in the air for a tick before plummeting.

* [[Guide Dang It]]: The game has no instructions or tutorial. Learning to play at all, and learning to build a sustainable fort even in friendly environments, all but requires one to find online guides.

* [[Hard Head]]: Averted in that even with maximum toughness most direct hits to unarmored heads are instantly fatal. But decently armored dwarves can survive getting their skulls shattered without any lasting effects.

* [[Helping Hands]]: With the latest release, body parts severed from the undead can be easily reanimated by necromancers and mummies. They can even do this to body parts severed from living beings, so adventures can find themselves in the unlucky circumstance of having to fight their own severed arm.

** Badgers are the new carp. The regular badger is a snarling, furry ball of anger who will enrage and attack your dwarves for no reason other than they exist. Giant Badgers are ''ten-foot-tall'', snarling, furry balls of anger who will enrage and make [[Ludicrous Gibs]] of your dwarves for no reason other than they exist. On the other hand, an army of trained Giant War Badgers is enough to cut through just about any siege like a hot (snarling, furry and angry) knife through butter.

** Occasionally a titan or forgotten beast, which are normally very powerful, will have a body made of a material with almost no ability to maintain shape (such as a liquid, or fire) causing their body to fall to pieces from the slightest touch. The only reason they make it to you in the first place is because of [[Contractual Boss Immunity]] to being killed by non-megabeasts in world-gen.

*** Or an Forgotten Beast will show up in unexplored sections of your caves-- since your dwarves aren't aware of them, there's no arrival message, but resident creature-men can fight and kill them there, and even earn names and titles for doing so. You may often notice this when, on the units screen, there is a Forgotten Beast listed as dead.

* [[Improvised Weapon]]: Dwarves can actually forget to grab a weapon when going into battle, leading them to do battle with whatever they have at hand, whether it be rocks, helmets, backpacks, ''[[Dead Baby Comedy|babies]]''....

* [[Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence|Insurmountable Dwarf-Height Fence]]: A constructed wall is the only truly reliable barrier against building destroyers, goblin thieves and anything that can't fly: sealing your fort in completely with walls is possibly the only way to ensure invasions won't destroy the fort before you have a functioning military. Armok save us all the day gobbos learn how to jump and climb<ref>Or you could just add a roof, but where would the Fun be in that?</ref>.

* [[It's All About Me]]: Necromancers have a tendency to write books about themselves. Then they write essays about the books about themselves.

* [[Karl Marx Hates Your Guts]]: Regardless of your world or location, prices for goods and materials are always fixed. Conversely, anything besides an unprepared corpse part, untamed animal, or bone has a minimum value of 1 per unit, even random stuff like rocks or snow which can be found right next to a merchant's feet, so the safest way to gain money in Adventure mode is to [[Boring but Practical|pick up hundreds of the rocks you find in infinite supply next to a shop and sell them.]] [[An Entrepreneur Is You|Supply-and-demand based values]] are in the works for the Caravan arc.

** Ironically, {{spoiler|Forgotten Beasts}} made of fire, ice, and many other "elements" are laughably easy since they come to pieces on the slightest contact.

* [[Kill It with Ice]]: When the temperature drops below freezing, water turns to ice ''instantaneously'' when exposed to air. Any creature unfortunate enough to be standing on that square when it happens is 'encased in ice'. When you mine that square out, [[Cryonics Failure|all you find is a skeleton and anything metallic the victim was carrying.]]

* [[Killer Rabbit]]: [[Legendary Carp|Carp]] were infamous for this. With the introduction of aimed attacks, large fish have gone back to being deadly. Sturgeon are still like this to an even greater degree than carp, as they can easily bite off limbs.

** Then there's the Undead Carp, its like a normal Carp, but actually listed as "Evil", very hard to kill and [[It Got Worse|it swims on land...]]

* [[Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid]]: Partially averted: magma spreads out just as quickly as water (and behaves exactly the same when pumped), but is unaffected by pressure and thus is difficult to get to flow up. However, if you turn off temperature in the init file, your dwarves can swim in it.

** Lava affects creatures ever so slightly less in ''DF2010'', which for example can give your dwarf miner enough time to run away when breaching a magma pipe. Not much more than that, though.

* [[Super Detailed Fight Narration]]: thanks to the combat system that models detail down to the organs you lose.

* [[Super Fun Happy Thing of Doom]]: Random name generator is [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Pretty Much What It Says On The Tin]].

* [[Teeth Flying]]: Arrows can occasionally target and remove teeth, sending them launching with the bolt. More spectacular blunt mouth trauma can throw the entire set of teeth out at once, spewing them out of the poor creature's mouth in every direction and just generally creating a headache for clean up.

* [[The Tetris Effect]]: Just wait until you start dreaming in ASCII.

* [[Throw It In]]: When Toady One was testing out the code for adventurer mode necromancers, he discovered he could raise a butchered animal's skin as a separate entity. He kept it because "it makes about as much sense as a walking skeleton."

* [[Try to Fit That on A Business Card]]: A title awarded for kills, even to animals, can be a bit of a mouthful.

* [[Unobtainium]]: Adamantine is even important enough to set off a major event in game.

** In the 2010 version, there's a second kind of [[Unobtainium]] known as "Slade", which is unimaginably heavy and impossible to even scratch. Even with Adamantine picks, you cannot mine it out. Someone did find a way to obtain single stones of it (by digging a ramp up underneath a slade floor), but it is nigh unusable in dwarf mode. If you hit up the arena though, you can spawn creatures wearing slade armor wielding slade hammers. They're as effective as you think they would be.

* [[Unusually Uninteresting Sight]]: Vampires are supposed to garner suspicion in world gen from feeding on people, but it's currently bugged to the point that a vampire can consume ''thousands'' of people in one village without getting caught.

** Likewise, there can be a dozen witnesses to a vampire feeding on and killing a sleeping dwarf and none of them will do anything about it, other than accuse the vampire of murder.

* [[Vendor Trash]]: Crafts, totems, toys, musical instruments and mugs can be used for two things - selling to the seasonal caravans and: once the economy starts. shop stock. On the other hand it's a great way of getting rid of the average fort's mountain of stone.

** [[Funetik Aksent|On th' other other hand,]] [[Our Dwarves Are All the Same|wha' sort o' pansy dwarf don't need lots've rocks?]]

* [[Video Game Cruelty Potential]]: There are ''endless'' examples but for now we'll just leave you with [http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=85641.0 this thread], a debate about how best to traumatize dwarves into becoming [[Conditioned to Accept Horror|resistant to tantrum spirals]]. The agreed upon solution? {{spoiler|Drop puppies on them. From the ceiling. While they're eating. Until they just. Don't. Care anymore.}}

* [[Viral Transformation]]: Night Trolls are able to create mates for themselves by transforming villagers. In the newest version, vampires and werebeasts will transfer curses through their bites and blood.

* [[X Meets Y]]: When stripped to its barest essentials, the game is pretty much a fusion of ''[[Dungeon Keeper]]'' and ''[[Rogue (video game)|Rogue]]''.

** Or ''[[Lemmings]]'' meets ''[[Age of Empires]]'', or ''[[Settlers]]'' meets ''[[The Sims]]''.

* [[You Gotta Have Blue Hair]]: Dwarves and humans have standard hair color, but elves will occasionally have white or green hair, and goblin hair colors are mainly shades of purple, with pink and red on the extreme end of their relative spectrum.

* [[Zerg Rush]]: Due to a bug in 34.01, [[Big Creepy-Crawlies|giant mosquitoes]] tended to show up in swarms of over a hundred, killing FPS and dwarves alike. Thankfully, this was fixed in the subsequent release.

** It's also possible for horribly injured dwarves to be bedridden the rest of their lives, with their motor and sensory nervous systems destroyed. Euthanasia is recommended, not just to end their suffering, but also because they'll be a tax on your water and food reserves.

** You're actually ''rewarded'' for doing this to vampire dwarves: even though they feed on other dwarves, they still count as members of your fortress and thus you don't get a [[Game Over]] even if all you have left is one vampire dwarf. Since they don't hunger or age, you can just seal one in a room forever and your fortress will never die, even if the vampire goes insane from being naked. {{spoiler|That is, until the ghosts come to pay him a visit...}}

* [[An Interior Designer Is You]]: And your dwarves, of course.

* [[Apocalyptic Log]]: Engravings can devolve into this.

** "[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=35517.0 My epic first dragon encounter!]"

** There are numerous stories on the forums of Legendary warriors battling far weaker opponents only to dodge a weak attack right off a bridge, stairs, cliff, into a lake, down a well....

* [[Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever]]: Once either population or accumulated wealth is big enough, they will come. They can be killed with a lot of training and some luck... but don't think simple ''doors'' can stop them. {{spoiler|Although cage traps can stop most of them dead}}.

* [[Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny]]: The dwarves have this in spades.

*** Unless you get fifty statues of elves with broken toes or humans taming eagles.

*** With the newly implemented ghosts, dead sentient creatures have a chance of doing assorted things to harm or annoy your little dwarfs. The way you fix that is to bury the corpse, or carve out a memorial in a stone. Nothing is more satisfying than encasing Elves in stone, then stopping their ghost from pissing you off by turning the rock ''their very bodies are in'' into the local Elven ghost prevention mechanism.

* [[Booze-Based Buff]]: Without alcohol, your dwarves will begin to take more and more breaks, and your fortress will slow down to a snail's pace. Dwarves literally slow down when deprived of alcohol.

* [[Bottomless Pit]]: Generally considered to be a boon to your fortress. The latest version removed these, though you can still "discover a deep pit" within the caverns.

* [[Cap]]: Population caps and FPS caps, FPS acting as a measure of game speed.

** Which can thankfully be raised -or lowered, since a fortress that reaches the default population cap can bring a high end gaming machine to its knees- with some trivial config file hacking.

* [[Command and Conquer Economy]]: Though there are ways to reduce the amount of micromanaging required, generally you have to order everything to be built.

* [[Crazy Cat Lady]]: An unchecked cat population will create this, even after it becomes so large your frame-rate slows to a crawl. Also, Dwarves do not adopt cats. It's the other way around.

*** Fortunately, both Crazy Cat Dwarves and their pets can be disposed of with a simple room that involves a long hallway with spikes in the floor, and a lever at the end that operates them.

** [[media:catsbeard_9105.jpg|This is a Crazy Cat Dwarf Jpeg Image. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. On the item is an image of Urist [[Mc Catbeard]]. On the the item is an image of cats. The cats form the beard of Urist [[Mc Catbeard]]. The artwork relates to the cats' adoption of Urist [[Mc Catbeard]]]]

* [[Cruel Player Character God]]: Half the point of the game.

** [[Crapsack World]]: See above

* [[Determinator]]: Dwarves tend to be this, whether they're [[Made of Plasticine]] or [[Made of Iron]]. Results...vary. To put it mildly. One dwarf has been seen charging through lava to brutalise a kobold, surviving without a scratch. Others will latch on to nightmare beasts from the dark places of the earth, even missing their entire lower bodies, and beat them into submission. Still others will [[Too Dumb to Live|simply stand out in extreme cold and heat until they die]].

* [[Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?|Did You Just Build A House In Cthulhu's Backyard?]]: It's finally been done, someone actually {{spoiler|1=[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=65024.0 colonized hell!]}}

** Community forts have finally managed this. The ongoing fortress [http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=84451.0 Deathgate] pulled this off.

* [[Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?]]: Deploy enough military and you can take down anything.

* [[Digging to China]]: {{spoiler|Digging to [[Fire and Brimstone Hell]]}}, more like.

* [[Disaster Dominoes]]: Often what kills your fortress when it isn't simply massacred by goblins or drowned by accidentally tunneling into the river. One unhappy dwarf irritates fifty others, and within five minutes every single dwarf in the fortress has gone literally [[Ax Crazy]]. Considering the quote for the page explains how you're most likely to have Fun in Dwarf Fortress, this shouldn't be much surprise.

** The game treats such fungus as a form of wood, and anything that can be built from wood can be built from such fungus. A particular breed of fungus found in the deepest caves has triple the material density of the other breeds. Thanks to the game's material-based combat system, this makes ballista bolts made from such wood three-times more massive than usual, resulting in a [[Up to Eleven|huge net damage boost]] to [[For Massive Damage|an already powerful weapon]].

* [[Full-Frontal Assault]]: In some earlier versions, dwarves didn't mind if they were clothed or not, so there have been numerous instances of them going into battle naked. The success of this is varied. Note that 34.06 reintroduced unhappy thoughts from being naked, as part of the clothing bug fix.

** Hell, the everything. Without a guide, the only way to figure out which stone is magma-safe is by losing fort after fort by trial-and-error.

* [[Hide Your Children]]: Averted. There are many many many stories of women giving birth, WHILST IN BATTLE. Babies in fact make good shields for mothers who run into battle.

* [[Mad Artist]]: Every now and then, one of your dwarves will be so stricken with inspiration for an artifact that he'll simply drop what he's doing, take over a workshop, and demand items to work with. Success produces an awesome and valuable artifact and may promote the Artist to Legendary in the appropriate skill. Failure results in the dwarf either [[Naked People Are Funny|throwing away their clothes]] while [[Freak-Out|running around babbling madly]] until they starve to death, being [[Driven to Suicide]], or going completely [[Ax Crazy]].

** In fact, depending on the Mood that takes them, some of them '''laugh maniacally, grab other dwarves, drag them into a workshop, murder them and make their corpses into stuff'''.

** The LP of Headshoots featured a dwarf struck by inspiration while lame. He would try to crawl to a workshop, but dwarves tasked with tending to the wounded automatically dragged him back. This happened for long enough that he went insane and committed suicide.

* [[Make It Look Like an Accident]]: So, one of your nobles is demanding you make them glass windows... despite [[Did Not Do the Research|failing to notice that you're not in a locale where there's glass]]. Shortly after, many players have found that the aforementioned nobles have suffered an "unfortunate accident" [[Suspiciously Specific Denial|which they had nothing to do with whatsoever]].

** Death of a squad leader will cause an invading squad to bug out. If the leader of the siege is killed, the entire siege panics and tries to run away.

* [[Self-Imposed Challenge]]: This fortress will be nude! This fortress will never trade! And so on.

* [[Spike Balls of Doom]]: The spiked ball trap component.

* [[Spikes of Doom]]: Dwarves seem to love making things that menace with spikes. There are also "menacing spikes" which can be linked to pressure plates, installed into weapon traps, or also be placed at the bottom of a pit to increase the damage done to anything that falls into it.

* [[Video Game Caring Potential]]: Varies, but with each dwarf having an [[Nominal Importance|astonishing]] degree of [[Mauve Shirt|personality]] built into the game, players can get damned protective of a few favorites. They still die in droves though. It's common practice to take better care of the original seven dwarves. This can extend past the grave, with many players taking the Egyptian approach, and sacrifice huge riches into their tombs.

* [[War Elephants]]: Can be trained as of the 2010 version. ''Keeping'' them trained is another matter, though, as tame elephants are bugged and will starve to death ''while eating''. The usual solution is editing the raw files to decrease their grazing requirements or just turn off grazing for them altogether.

* [[With This Herring]]: Of the extraordinarily large number of skills and items available to take with you when starting a new fortress, only a relatively small percentage of them will increase your chances of living to see the first caravan. You will have this brought home to you very rapidly the first time you select 'Embark Now!' instead of 'Prepare for the journey carefully' when starting a new fortress.

* [[Worst Aid]]: Training a new medic will involve a ''lot'' of incidental malpractice. One notorious misdiagnosis by a skill-less dwarven idiot led to a minor cut on the arm being misdiagnosed as rotting lungs ''which were then removed surgically''. "Oh. They weren't rotting after all. Let's take a moment of silence for Urist McLearningExperience."