this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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Nah the best bug was cats dying of alcohol poisoning because they'd walk through the tavern, get booze spilled on them, and then lick it off themselves when cleaning. Since they weren't programmed to drink booze directly, they had 0 tolerance for it and would easily die from it.
The kicker is, everything you mentioned is intended behavior.
- animals wander around (maybe implemented just to make things more lively)
- creatures get splattered with whatever liquids are splashing around (perhaps initially implemented to have dwarfs get splattered with blood on a kill or to have things gradually get wet close to a waterfall)
- animals clean themselves, licking off whatever dirt there is
All these mechanics just naturally interact, by virtue of being implemented in a generic way, which allows for this amazing emergent behavior.
IIRC the bug was that the amount of booze ingested by the cats during cleaning wasn't scaled correctly to how much splatter they received or should've. Either way they ended up with excessive amounts of alcohol and overdosed immediately.
Jesus, I need to read that source code.
You and me both. I want to mod shit into the game that can't be done through the RAWs. 😩
Nonono, alcohol tolerance is a function of the creature's weight, and it works perfectly.
The problem was the amount of alcohol that would get transferred on their paws when walking on spilled booze. If the alcohol was spilled from a mug, then the game would place the equivalent of a full mug of booze on each paw, which would then be ingested when the cat cleaned them.
Four full mugs of beer would be more than enough to waste anything the size of a cat.
Thank you for posting this correction. I was about to do it but you have saved me the trouble. Here have one of these Lemmy arrows
My favorite was groundhogs biteing with their faces. Not their mouthes, their entire faces.
They would bite a lion I'm half.
I'm going from memory, and can't find a link.
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
I like the one where they let werewolves sense other evil creatures and it resulted in an update where they all immediately climbed to the tallest thing they could (usually trees) and start screaming because they sensed the circus below
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
DF is a unique, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes hilarious, always interesting experience. There's nothing like it, although many people have tried.
Rimworld is the only one that kind of comes close. I do think it's more fun than DF as a game though.
Work enthusiasim companies expect for minimum-wage be like.
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.
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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
As soon as you are able to keep a fort alive and prospering, you'll feel like a god!
Good luck bit you won't be able to dive in blind, it's far to complex to do it without tutorials and so on. It's a bit hard to get into it initially as the learning curve is steep and the UI clunky. (I played several years ago though so hopefully it improved) Also just for people to know the game is open source and free (like in free beers) if you don't want to buy it on steam. On Steam you support the developers though
And on Steam you get actual graphics!
Just try and fail and then start reading wiki for whatever you can't get working.
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My favorite bug ever.
Tarn once explained it in more detail: the game's code is object oriented, and the small amount of beer on a cat's paw inherited all the variables of a full mug of beer. And the game uses a creature's body size + amount of alcohol ingested to calculate/simulate drunkenness (all the way to alcohol poisoning and death).
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
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I always hear about Dwarf Fortress being the spiritual progenitor of Rimworld; "It walked so Rimworld could Run" kind of thing. But honestly everything I'm reading in the comments makes it sound even MORE fucked up than Rimworld (in the best kind of way).
Did rimworld players ever collaborate to perfect a method for trapping merpeople and forcing them to breed so that they could air drown the babies to harvest the valuable bones?
It got so fucked up the dev stepped in to lock the forum thread and nerf the value of mermaid bones.
You should look up mermaid bone farming if you want to be horrified. It was so bad. Toady actually stepped in and made mermaid bones worthless so that we would stop the atrocities. Normally he's all dwarves will be dwarves and blood for the blood God but this was the first recorded instance of him nerfing the game to change the way players played the game.
Rimworld has some guardrails built in. Dwarf Fortress has... less than guardrails.
For example: soap making.
Do animal fats still differentiate between baby, child, and adult?
There was another bug where dwarfs would sometimes go blind after a fight. The problem was that they got blood in their eyes and had no way to get it out. This led to the addition of eyelids so they could blink away blood.
Starting with 2 cats would mean the extinction of local wildlife because they would breed and hunt everything until there are only cats.
Dwarf Fortress is so complicated that the bugs tend to be hilarious.
Then there is boatmurdered… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boatmurdered
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI1UmlfP1Cg
Fredrick Knudsen video on boatmurdered if you would rather listen/watch
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The simulation is more insane and deep, but the game itself isn't as fun imo
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
My favorite was
"Cats randomly dieing... Alcohol poisioning ?"
Turns out fur had the same liquid container code as mugs, and the minimum size was a pint...
Not quite. The bug chain went like this.
They added cats. Because the dev has a cat, he had the cats have some catlike behaviors, including licking itself clean. This tied into the ingestion code, deliberately.
The ingestion feature hooks into the new syndrome system. There are all kinds of procedurally generated poisons that can do all kinds of nasty things, mostly for the “forgotten beasts” that dwell in the caverns to make use of. While he was at it, he added the syndromes for a couple of canonical substances as well, primarily alcohol, inputting the values for a serving of beer, whiskey, etc, that a dwarf might drink, so that they can get drunk, and even sick if they overindulge. This is calculated by body weight.
Elsewhere was included a contamination feature, so that walking through puddles would get mud on your dwarves boots and clothes.
Then he added bars for the dwarves, and gave them carousing features such as quaffing, which would end up with spilled drinks on the floor.
Result? Cats walk through puddles of beer, get it on their paws, and lick it off. The syndrome information of the beer or whiskey or whatever is then applied to the cat. This is not a bug, this is intentional behavior.
The bug was that the full dosage of the syndrome was applied upon ingesting a contaminant. So the few drops of beer or whiskey were being treated as if they were full servings, so when the alcohol was applied to the cats’ body weight, which again, was an intended feature, it absolutely overwhelmed them and the cats started dying of alcohol poisoning. Just from the smattering on their fur.
It’s an awesome series of steps and combinations of systems to get this bug, and 99% of it was fully intended. And that’s all you need to know about dwarf fortress.
Appreciate the full details, that game is a masterpiece, and that was a bit too long to copy-pasta/research at the time. [Gives internet gold star]
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For anyone anyone who wants a good idea of how fucky Dwarf Fortress is go listen to the Jabroni Mike stream on Boatmurdered. I will spoil nothing.
Remember E stands for Elephant.
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This sounds like a lyric in the most epic metal song of all time.
It’s even better because it’s kind of true. Kids believe the weirdest shit and most of the time when they realize they were wrong, they just correct their misconceptions without explaining them to anyone. The next time a kid asks you how something works, ask them how they think it works; it’s like listening to Calvin’s dad’s explanations of the world.
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