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.
Thermonuclear catsplosions were my favourite
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.
Good luck… And when you get frustrated watch a 30 min starting tutorial before you abandon the game.
Don’t go in blind
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
Have you seen that Rick and Morty episode with the mini universe in a box? That’s Dwarf Fortress lol
Oh my god, I didn’t know how complex Dwarf Fortress is (I’ve played rimworld so I’m familiar)
Yeah, no, it’s ridiculously, nonsensically complex. In the most delightful and unexpected ways. Like, it’s not necessarily complex in the ways that you think it is or should be complex. It’s complex in ways that you never even would’ve imagined. For no real reason. Just because.
I’m digging rimworld and have df owned but odd sometimes the names of things are “fuzzy” to my eyes. maybe font, coloring, whatever … I just can’t find myself connecting to the names. I’ll keep trying though.
Check your resolution and scaling settings if it’s literally blurry. If you’re not using an integer multiple of your monitor’s native resolution, fonts can become hard to read because they don’t scale evenly into the pixels available. Sometimes games launch for the first time with weird defaults for resolution, so worth having a look if you haven’t already.
here’s an example of an online calculator, in case anyone else faces similar problems:
https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/technology/aspect-ratio-calculator.php
there’s a bunch out there, doesn’t matter much which one you use; it’s a simple way to calculate ratios, so you don’t need to do it by hand.
i like this one because of the “nearest standard resolution” hint!
oh solid point. i’m going to check that.
You can give them nicknames in game if that makes it easier. You can also change the pool of names or even the entire dwarven language if you want, it’s all text files (at least in the ascii version, not sure about Steam)
thanks!! good ideas.
I’ve seen and picked up describing Rimworld as Dwarf Fortress for babies (positive). Sometimes I want a baby game! Like, 1000+ hours of a baby game. Don’t judge me.
Yeah Rimworld is definitely my go to if I want to play DF but don’t have the energy to deal with the complexity of DF. Both are great.
It’s a different but amazing flavor of shit crusader kings or rimworld say
I wouldn’t even put CK in the same sentence. Love me some Paradox grand strategy, but DF is a different beast entirely.
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.
Did Rimworld
I would like to point your attention to the great debacle whether it is better to keep your prisoners locked away, breed them (if you get a good traits on a child brainwash it and let it join your settlement) and use their human skins to make those lovely human leather lamp shades which you sell back to their tribes and family - OR - to simply cut them up and sell them for parts, eat leftover human meat and grind their bones into a cheap bonemeal you can use to build walls.
I also fondly remember Christian Pirates attacking my settlement with waves of children suicide bombers, dying from my boomalope stampede.
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?
In Rimworld leather in leathercraft also does not care whats the origin of it. But it’s named appropriately. So you can be chilling on a leather couch made from your grandmother while admiring your new leather art piece you made from your son.
Just like real life.
The simulation is more insane and deep, but the game itself isn’t as fun imo
Yup. You constantly fight the UI and some of the mechanics are very unintuitive.
it’s also super ugly. I couldn’t bring myself to play very long it’s so unpleasant to look at
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
Those are hilarious examples!
EDIT: Okay clearly the cat alcohol story is already infamous and is recounted much better about a dozen times in this very thread. XD
Also don’t forget players discovering tons of dead cats, apparently from alcohol poisoning.If I recall correctly, their fur absorbed liquids. The cats walked in booze. Each paw counted erroneously as a full mug of beer absorbed. When the cats cleaned themselves, they drunk themselves to death.Game is absolutely bonkers wild and a gem of emergent mechanics.
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]
This story was what got me into DF in the first place
Was that just so you could get a pint of blood from the cats? And then the cats die of alcohol poisoning because you have a secret vampire cat and they normally hit the bottle pretty hard, but with not enough blood disorder they get wasted too easy and thus die.
You know what I just got an idea
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.
BlindiRL did one too, just recently:
I haven’t seen the one by Jabroni Mike, but Fredrik Knudsen has a good breakdown too.
The Jabroni Mike one was done with Fredrik Knudsen like 4 years ago. Also if you want to watch Fredrick Knudsen do a Mage the Ascension game he does one with some of Bruva Alfabusas crew, also it’s on Bruva Alfabusas channel.
Thats metal as fuck
Babwug new band name called it
godddam
id love a babwug and btbam concert
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.
Better than the one where werewolves dected hell below and thus climbed scared on trees?
I feel like that has vastly deeper meaning than it was ever intended to. A philosopher or sociologist could probably write their masterwork with that title someday.
Some bugs are so good, you leave them in.
That sounds like a pretty standard event from my memory of playing DF lol
Ah the fish wrestling game
I just love this game. I don’t have the time to play but I love reading the weird shit that happens in it.
I don’t seem to hear as much anymore, but for a long time this was me with EVE Online.
I never really played that one or followed the stories on it, but I always thought it might be a good fit for me because I remember there were a lot of excited players when Excel integration was announced.
A user base excited about data and spreadsheets? Hell yeah.
I see you enjoy spreadsheets. Have you heard of our Lord and Savior Europa Universalis?
I have not, but you’ve piqued my interest. I’m bookmarking your comment so I remember to look it up.
I kept reading r/Eve for years after winning. Seemed to slow down after the casino war, then the Mittani left. Just today I see that Pandemic Horde is disbanding.
I think eve might be winding down honestly. New player experience is still fucking awful and the people that had time and money in the past to dedicate to eve seem to be moving on.
Not saying it’s going to die soon probably just a gradual slow down.
