Liquid items are funny in the game.

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...

My favorite feature in Dwarf Fortress is that all eyelids automatically clean their associated eyeball, just so that players don’t post about how their dwarves have vomit on their eyeballs.

Ahh, so if a dwarf would have a missing eyelid because of combat or some mining accident, then they could have vomit on their eyeballs.

Yes! And the next time they cleaned themselves, they would use soap on that eyeball, if it was available.

IIRC the actual bug was that cats licking their paws made them consume an entire tankard's worth of beer with each lick, which made them drunk (and dead) with just a few licks.

Yeah this is what I recall being the case as well.

My experiences with cats (at least in my own life) is that cats prefer not walk into an area with a sticky floor if they can avoid it.

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 :) )

No need for the /s. This is precisely the level of simulation Toady is hoping for, and there are many equivalent examples already.

Good suggestion. It would occasionally be nice if the _dwarves_ would avoid stepping in things and tracking it all over the place. The only reason that the cats were in the tavern in the first place is that pets follow their owner* around.

The * refers to the fact that cats are the owners, and dwarves are their pets. A truly accurate understanding of how cats work.

And this is how you get 700k lines of code.

The bug was a numerical error that would cause cats to drink something like the equivalent of a pint of beer for every lick, and therefore die prematurely. He talks about it in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY

I agree these types of features really embiggen the game

They're perfectly cromulent features.

careful, its unpossible not to get downvoted with these kinds of jokes (err, low effort comments).

Cats in bars don’t die of alcohol poisoning regardless of the amount of beer spilled on the floor.

The actual bug here was a mistake in handling of liquid volume. The cats were ingesting a tankard’s with with each lick, and they’re smaller than dwarves, so that killed them.

I read about a cat who used to visit a pub and learned to lick beer from under taps. The cat got banned from the pub for its own good but I don't believe it was anywhere close to poisoning.

Do you have a source for this?

No, I read this a long time ago in a paper press article and I cannot dig up anything electronic.