Dwarf Fortress: Difference between revisions

* [[Animal Wrongs Group]]: Elves, but for trees (they still eat and tame animals.) They will be horribly offended when presented with anything made from wood or charcoal. They can't tell steel made with charcoal from steel made with mined coal, so they'll take either; but any glass but green glass needs wood ash to turn into pearlash, and beds and bins must be made of wood, so elves are notoriously unpopular. This is taken to new extremes when a single wooden decoration will turn an otherwise saleable (and "buy out the whole caravan" valuable) steel craft into grounds for packing up and leaving (and probably laying siege later), and you can't readily tell that this is the case unless you examine ''every single trade good you offer'' in minute detail.

** Particularly infuriating is the fact that ''[[Hypocrite|they themselves sell wooden items]]''! Not only that, but they'll even get offended when you sell them the stuff you bought from them.

* [[A Load of Bull]]: Minotaurs attack your Fortress and can be found in Labyrinths in Adventure Mode. They are less than a tenth the size of any other semi-megabeast, but more than make up for it by naturally being experts with ''all'' melee weapons, including socks or the limbs of the last dwarf.

* [[April Fools' Day]]: Version 0.31.01, two years in the making, was released at about 1 AM, PST on [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|April Fools Day]]. The Bay12 site still broke within ''minutes''.

* [[Berserk Button]]: Every single Dwarf has one. You just need to push the right buttons. Thankfully, players are rather good at that.

* [[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.

** Often played straight in-universe, however. If you have an engraver whose favorite food is cheese or a civilization whose symbol, by the whim of the [[Random Number God]], is cheese, you will see carvings of the stuff ''everywhere''. This became a bit of a [[Running Gag]] in [[Boatmurdered]].

** There was a report on the forum of a dwarf who suffered an abdominal wound in combat that caused his guts to pop out. The dwarf was taken to the hospital and actually recovered, but his guts weren't put back inside in the process of sewing him up. Now the ASCII representation of the dwarf actually has a pair of red "~" characters trailing him wherever he goes to depict the intestines he's dragging around behind him. [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything|Toady One thinks of everything]].

* [[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.

* [[Hair-Trigger Temper]]: Some creatures (badger, honey badger, wolverine, black mamba ''and all derivatives thereof'') are "PRONE_TO_RAGE" - they have a chance of flipping out just because some non-friendly creature is in sight. Which makes them attack any creature at all and [[Turns Red|gives strength bonus]].

* [[Thermal Dissonance]]: Nether caps are stuck right on the water freezing point. Even after being chopped down and fashioned into items. Forever. Even in contact with magma.

* [[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.

* [[Turns Red]]: Dwarves can "enter martial trances" when severely outnumbered, while many species (including dwarves) can become "enraged" in a pitched battle. How likely any given character is to do either is heavily affected by their randomly-generated mental traits.

* [[Unbreakable Weapons]]: For now anyway, though the obsidian weapons are supposedly going to be particularly susceptible to this.

** One of the most common symptoms of the evil rains from the 2012 release is nausea. If you embark in an area with this type of weather, it's virtually guaranteed that your entryway and halls for dozens of tiles away will be covered in pools of vomit.

* [[Wide Open Sandbox]]

* [[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]]''.

** As [[Three Panel Soul|Matt Boyd]] once [http://threepanelsoul.com/2008/04/21/on-dwarven-fortresses/ found out], if the source of these cats is a pair owned by fortress residents, their refusal to give up their pets can force this down a road not dissimilar to the Shoe Event Horizon that took place on [[Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy|Frogstar B]]; basically, dwarf society reaches the Kitty Event Horizon and their entire socioeconomic structure starts to revolve around keeping the population in check.

*** 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.

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

** [[Crapsack World]]: See above