this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
944 points (99.3% liked)
Gaming
6453 readers
432 users here now
!gaming is a community for gaming noobs through gaming aficionados. Unlike !games, we don’t take ourselves quite as serious. Shitposts and memes are welcome.
Our Rules:
1. Keep it civil.
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only.
2. No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry.
I should not need to explain this one.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Try not to repost anything posted within the past month.
Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
Logo uses joystick by liftarn
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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 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:
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
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).
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
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.