Dwarfs trying to clean their inner organs (dwarf wounded, doctor closes the wound, dirt stay inside)
Undying children in the moat water (for years... just swimming there...)
Killer carps (there was a long time during which carps were really overpowered because constant swimming was buffing them up really good, dwarfs getting close to water sources were eaten by carps)
Catplosions (Tarn loves cats, cats reproduce, too many cats kills DF performance)
This was a particularly insidious one because the usual strategy of culling excess livestock doesn't work out when applied to dwarfs' pets (pets can't be designated for slaughter, and other means of making pets die will make their owners upset). With most animals, you can avoid the pet adoption issue by just not marking them as available for adoption, so you wouldn't have to worry about a dogsplosion, sheepsplosion, etc. Cats do not become pets through that system. Instead, a cat adopts a dwarf.
A somewhat effective solution is to use male cats for stockpile protection, and keep female cats caged (which IIRC stops both adoption and breeding) and only let one out at time (cage any resulting (female) kittens immediately). There's not (yet) any simulation of evolutionary pressure to adopt a owner quickly, so you can just prefer kittens that do so for the next breeder when the current one dies of old age.
Gelding (neutering) the male cats also works, but is less sustainable if you don't have a reliable source of replacement cats from migrants or trade caravans for when the current ones die of old age. Spaying is not supported AFAIK.
You can also just remove the ADOPTS_OWNER token via raws editing.
H. W.> You're implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will… breed?
I. M.> No. I'm, I'm simply saying that life, uh… finds a way.
And get sad because his pet died. And then eventually start tantruming and a tantrum spiral would begin.
It's so crazy when you try to make dwarves feel great all the time and then the simulation comes up with some completely insane causal chain that messes up everything.
I once tried to isolate a miasma problem with a wall. Which works fine, unless the dwarf tasked with building the wall decides he needs a break, sleeps on the floor and then gets grumpy because he just slept on a hard surface in a smelly area.
My understanding of the legend is that a player began experiencing a catsplosion, and wanted to find a way to get rid of the cats. So he started tinkering with the game a bit, and eventually tried setting the blood temperature to a very high number. This killed the cats, but also had the unfortunate side effect of setting them on fire. And the cats were multiplying faster than they were dying, so there was a massive, expanding fireball of burning cats.
If this legend is wrong, I'd love to hear another version.
TIL this was a bug and how it was a bug! Wow! Back when I played DF it really seemed like it was simply accepted folklore that the carps in DF were really strong and the common advice was don't build your base too close to rivers. Having not played in a long while, I had always thought this was intended.
At some point, we got into a discussion over art style and realism. He made an observation that still sticks with me.
"The style sets expectations. When something breaks a real world law of nature or logic because of a bug, it doesn't feel as jarring, because the style is already cartoon-y."
It made me think about just how malleable expectations are with regards to game systems. Train a player to expect realism, and breaches become infuriating. Train a player to expect the unexpected, and the unexpected becomes intriguing and fun.
(More modern tip of the hat to Fortnite)
Even fortnite has a kind of logic to it, haphazard as they may be (though it’s also so loosely defined, that I find it completely uninteresting — it’s a dumpster fire of cosmetic items with no real theme or nuance; this is because its more a modern shopping mall [ an arbitrary context for social groups ] than a game system).
It’s why simpsons can revert (nearly) all damages every episode (that’s simply the rule of the world), but if it tried to violate that rule and persisted those changes in any meaningful way, it would feel like complete nonsense. (They do however do it for self-referential jokes and such, but these aren’t persistence so much as temporary anomalies) At best, they’re allowed to forget something exists altogether.
Sounds like the answer is more taverns.
I'm curious if the fix was to just remove the dirt from the simulation or if Tarn actually went ahead and simulated infections (or more realistically, used an existing infection mechanic).
It turns out that my dogs weren't alcoholics - it just happened to be that beer was the only food source they had zoned access to, so they were drinking it out of hungry desperation, and while it gave them enough calories to live on, it also gave them cirrhosis.
Beer brewed from hops doesn't cause hyperthermia, it's harmful to dogs because they experience the same effects of ethanol poisoning that humans do (e.g. cirrhosis), at much smaller doses.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-o...
And now that I dug up the Reddit AmA thread (https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/d7cqjz/we_are_nolla_...), there's a comment there about the drunken dead cats ...
When you look at an item listing and you see something like “Mead”, that is truly all the item is —- it isn’t a cup of mead, it’s just a vague amount of the liquid mead itself, as if your hand was the only thing keeping it from hitting the ground.
But there are containers that can hold your liquid. You have mugs and goblets that hold one quantity of “Mead”, giving the impression that one count of mead is like a generic serving size. You also have barrels and pots that hold stacks of “Mead”.
Creatures are kind of like walking containers and have their own detailed inventories. Among the things you’d expect to find like armor, weapons, and books, you might also find a “coating of tears” on a crying dwarf, or perhaps a “spattering of blood” on a murderous elf.
They’re not just static inventories for the fun of a story, creatures do interact with them and use them. Dwarves covered in a vomit item will (hopefully) put any available soap in their inventory and use it to clean themselves in water, for example.
Cats are simple and just clean themselves with no water or soap needed. The catch with them is that they ingest whatever they have cleaned off of them.
So, putting all this together: The problem was that cats pick up a whole “serving size” of alcohol and proceed to clean themselves, ingesting the entire serving. The bug surrounds the vagueness of liquid sizes.
And it was fixed accordingly! Cats are still vulnerable to the effects of self-cleaned alcohol, but the strength is now proportional.
https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195...
Clearly there's a bug here where the cat will keep wandering around on the sticky floor, and then keep consuming the alcohol off it's paws.
The obvious fix is to add a feature wherein different creatures have preferences about where they go next, and then use that to have the cats avoid the bar floor if they can.
As a bonus you can include stuff like "Cats don't like hanging out in crowded areas" so that they'll also stay out of the main hall when the army is gathering to muster forth, etc.
(/s, but only slightly :) )
https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs
It's just funny Dwarf Fortress bugs.
That's not even (necessarily) a bug: whether convicts can win/hold elected positions is a aspect of applicable law (albeit a weird one), vampires (IIRC) have high social stats and skills and so are well-postioned to win elections in general, and dwarves (and for that matter humans) don't necessarily update their opinion of someone just because they were convicted of a crime (especially if they don't hear about the conviction, which (knowledge transmission) I recall was added to the game modeling at some point). So this is like a headline "Bob Smith Convicted of Murder; Wins Mayoral Election Anyway", which seems weird-but-possible in real life.
That's what intrigues me, Not played the game but this must because there were a list of things which could get the cat killed right? Then how come this is an unexpected bug?
Imagine getting drunk by licking beer residue off your hands.
> A: It’s probably boring for me to say, but 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.