Can someone explain Dwarf Fortress to me???
It’s a colony sim in a somewhat standard fantasy setting, with the twist that nearly everything is procedurally generated in unnecessary detail. Town names? Procedural. Instruments? Procedural. The history of the world you’re in? Procedural. Ancient horrors sealed deep below the world? Procedural. The gods themselves? Procedural. Your job is to help your horde of alcoholics survive whatever meticulously simulated nonsense the game decides to throw at you. It ranges from pretty standard, like invading armies, to fantastical, like vampires you have to solve criminal cases to catch, to deranged, like that time I dug up a demon made of fire that was effectively invincible in combat because everything’s pathfinding was too messed up by the smoke it gave off to fight back. For a general idea of how strange it can get, read Boatmurdered, an old written Let’s Play still beloved by the community.
So the Developers are Playing God playing god
In addition, virtually everything is simulated, which has led to some hilarious bugs in the past. To get a good idea of the level of detail, the tears in a dwarve’s eyes are tracked, and can be theoretically spread onto other things (though granted im not sure if it has been tested, hard to get them off the eyes i imagine), these ‘other things’ (any part of any creature/object in the game) would then be stained with those tears, which is itself tracked, and those tears will remain there until removed.
Wasn't there also the issue with cats just turning up dead in someone's tavern, and then it turned out that when a dwarf decided to do something while in the middle of drinking, they would just toss their alcohol on the floor, and then cats would walk through the tavern and get the alcohol on their paws, and so when they later groomed themselves, they would technically ingest the alcohol and immediately die of alcohol poisoning?
Unforeseen Consequences, The Game
A classic way for a new player's fortress to fall is by failing to make new clothes. After a couple years the old clothes start to rot off the dwarves bodies and then the sight of naked children causes a huge negative mood spike for the whole fortress. This causes what is called a "tantrum spiral" fortresses rarely recover from a tantrum spiral.
Once I had a vampire problem. Vampires are hard to find, but you'll know when you have one due to the dead dwarves with bite marks that show up. Eventually I found out what happened: the very first vampire had fallen down a well and died thus tainting the fort's water supply with vampire blood. So the entire fortress was vampires. They fed on incoming migrants with the new members of the fort living or dying based on whether they drank from the well before one of the other vampires got to them.
Dwarf Fortress is a game where things just sorta happen.
The cats thing was more elaborate than that, IIRC. Blood alcohol content is actually simulated based on body mass, but alcohol is only measured in integer units, which is usually fine for dwarves. However this meant that when a cat licked its paws, it consumed one pint of alcohol in one go. Which is significantly worse for a cat.
It was also a common mistake (has possibly been patched now?) for new fortresses to pick up beehives and immediately get obliterated. Attacks on fortresses scale with the wealth value of a given fortress. This is all fine and good, except in the case of beehives, because every individual bee has a treasure value. Even if that value is only a fraction, an entire hive with tens of thousands of bees still comes out as absurdly valuable. So suddenly you'll be facing frequent attacks by wildly overlevelled enemies.
And the mermaid farming, which I believe was actually patched on account of being so fucking grim.
The mermaid farming thing was, basically, mermaids existed. Sentient people, half fish, you know. But the thing is, their bones were really valuable, because they were rare, because dwarfs DID NOT LIKE killing them- that's a peaceful sentient person! You can't murder them! But people figured out that, hey, a mermaid dehydrating to death doesn't count as murder, so they started making these insane airlock systems to mass farm and murder mermaids without it technically being murder so thw dwarves wouldn't have mood spirals about the mass killing of the poor poor mermaids and they could sell their bones. The creator understandably went "what? What the fuck? Hey stop that" and made their bone value really low to stop people doing that.
Imagine, if you will, God devaluing your bones
Dwarf Fortress labels creatures as either intelligent or not. Intelligent creatures can't be butchered, or trained as pets, except for gremlins, which are sapient but can be trained as pets. Which has interesting implications about dwarf/ gremlin relationships.
