Dwarf Fortress

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
You want a dwarf? There's your fucking dwarf. You want some better graphics? Fuck you. Dwarves can do lots of stuff. Like digging. Can you dig? Hell no. Play Dwarf Fortress.

Losing is Fun.

—Official motto

Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress is two games: the game it is right now, and the game it hopes to be. Its goal is to be nothing less than a fantasy world simulator, simulating dozens of nations and hundreds of thousands of characters over a thousand years, where you can watch history unfold from a godlike perspective or take the role of any character or civilization and make history. And to cap it all, it intends to do it in ASCII character graphics.

It's not there yet (it's technically still in alpha), but it already has about two games worth of content, and an extremely fanatical fan base.

The main game is Fortress mode, which plays like a dizzyingly complex hybrid of Dungeon Keeper and The Sims, if all your little people were manic-depressive alcoholics. The Adventure mode is rougher and less polished, like a very freeform Roguelike. Both modes have no way to win, but hundreds of ways to lose: thus, losing is fun. If you intend to play this game, keep that in mind.

Dwarf Fortress is free, with further development paid for by donations. You can find the game here, the invaluable gameplay wiki here, and some graphical tilesets here. Or you can get the Lazy Newb Pack, which includes the above + tutorials + assisting software and loads of useful stuff here.

See the community page for tropes and links relevant to the Dwarf Fortress community.

Tropes used in Dwarf Fortress include:
  • Abnormal Ammo: You can encrust your ammunition with bone details, wood or gems.
  • The Alcoholic: "...S/he needs alcohol to get through the working day." Every dwarf, except in Adventure mode. From birth. Dwarves will only go sober if hospitalized, or if there is no alcohol available (and this will cause their productivity and mood to drop precipitously).
  • All-Natural Gem Polish: Averted: mined gems must be polished and cut to improve their value.
  • The All-Seeing AI:
    • Goblin sieges use a pathfinding AI that automatically knows the fastest way into your fortress. The players, of course, abuse its quirks mercilessly (particularly regarding avoidance of locked doors).
    • The famous "Goblin Meat Grinder". Lock down your fortress but leave a single way in. This way is littered with infallible reciprocating pointy sticks. As soon as a creature approaches the end of the corridor, doors lock and other open. Now the only way in is on the other end of the corridor. Which is provided with the same mechanism. This keeps the o-so-clever AI terminally walking the walk of pointy pain.
  • All Myths Are True: There's always supporting-to-conclusive evidence to be found for any event of the Age of Myth: razed hovels, plundered hoards, injured victims, surviving eyewitnesses and the beasts themselves. Averted by a few mythical beasts, magical creatures and gods that are flagged to appear in procedurally-generated art but will not appear in any world.
  • All Trolls Are Different: The creatures simply named "troll" are big, hairy brutes that goblins use to tear fortifications apart (and shear like sheep), but the Night Trolls best match the old troll mythology. They're even procedurally generated so no two are alike, with a penchant for taking human mates and transforming them into beasts like themselves, and a taste for human (or elven or dwarven) flesh.
  • Amusing Injuries: We are many, many versions away from seeing the message, "Urist McDwarf cancels swing pickaxe through load-bearing pillar/pull lever to drop drawbridge on own head/blithely ignore being set on fire/Armok knows what else: Not that bloody stupid." Hilarity Ensues, often.
    • Averted, from the point of view of the dwarves. It isn't unheard of for dwarves to be bedridden for life (often leading to the player euthanising them), or to have even worse injuries (say, to be missing all their limbs and still be working).
  • Ancient Tomb: The 2012 update added elaborate burial tombs where sentient creatures born and died during world generation will be interred. It makes for excellent Dungeon Crawling in Adventure mode, and a source for necromancers to summon their armies from in Fortress mode.
  • Animal Wrongs Group: Elves, but for trees (they still tame animals and use them as weapons.) They will be horribly offended when presented with anything made from wood or charcoal. They can't tell steel made with charcoal from steel made with mined coal, so they'll take either; but any glass but green glass needs wood ash to turn into pearlash, and beds and bins must be made of wood, so elves are notoriously unpopular. This is taken to new extremes when a single wooden decoration will turn an otherwise saleable (and "buy out the whole caravan" valuable) steel craft into grounds for packing up and leaving (and probably laying siege later), and you can't readily tell that this is the case unless you examine every single trade good you offer in minute detail. At least, petrified wood (stone) is okay.
    • Particularly infuriating is the fact that they themselves sell wooden items! Not only that, but they'll even get offended when you sell them the stuff you bought from them. According to Threetoe's Stories, this is because elves use magic to make trees and plants grow into items - which eventually was implemented so elf- goods are marked as "grown"; if you sell to elves something in a container bought from them it doesn't get them overexcited.
  • April Fools' Day: Version 0.31.01, two years in the making, was released at about 1 AM, PST on April Fools Day. The Bay12 site still broke within minutes.

Desperate flailing ensued to keep it mostly operational. Oh, the stories I could tell.. - Baughn

  • Artistic License Physics:
    • Also known as "Dwarven Physics". It's not only possible, but easy, to build a perpetual motion machine, and melting a metal item recovers from 10% [1] to 150% of its original mass depending on the item. The same stone boulder can be used to make four blocks - each sufficient for one-tile wall - three mugs, or as little as one toy boat, with no waste material in either case. Some of these will probably be fixed eventually.
    • The perpetual motion machine issue actually arises from trying to apply the laws of physics too accurately, while simultaneously trying to bend them in the name of the Rule of Fun. The flow rate of screw pumps is two orders of magnitude greater than it should be for the power applied due to using a one-dimensional quantity (liquid depth) as if it were a three dimensional one (liquid volume). Correcting this "bug," however, would result in the pumps either moving liquids so slowly they would evaporate before reaching a depth greater than 1, or require 100 fully powered water wheels per pump (assuming tiles are 10 x 10 liquid levels in size).
  • Ascended Extra: No dwarf is inherently more important than any other dwarf. As such, any dwarf that manages to get favored by a player, or even the community, is this.
  • ASCII Art: The game is actually graphical, but uses ASCII characters and a few others as its default tileset.
    • When the rendering engine was rewritten, a UNIX-only command line display was added. It's not used much, except for screencasting; using a terminal to watch someone play Dwarf Fortress takes a lot less bandwidth than streaming video, and is easier to host.
  • Attack! Attack! Retreat! Retreat!: How most goblin sieges develop: after seeing some of their companions (or their captain) beaten, the invaders will quickly turn tail and take their leave.
  • Awesome McCoolname: The random name generator can oftentimes produce these. According to dwarf language's file, "Urist" means "dagger", by the way. It can also produce some really, REALLY weird names. For creatures and anything else that have names - "Boatmurdered" is not nearly the weirdest settlement name.
    • One well-known character was known as Cacame Apebalded, The Immortal Onslaught, providing both an awesome name, and a what the hell name. Being the Elven King of the Dwarves made his full description, 'Cacame Apebalded, The Immortal Onslaught, Elven King of the Dwarves' a surreal combination of awesome, weird, and what-the-hell.
  • Badass: In one reported fight between a dwarf mayor and a berserk sword-master, the sword-master had just finished chopping off all the mayor's limbs when the mayor bit the sword-master's head off.
    • Any Military dwarf that earns the right of a *Insert-Weapon-Here* Master or lord. They can dispatch goblins like no ones business.
    • Badass Adorable: Because of a hilarious incident exploiting throwing mechanics in Adventure Mode, fluffy wamblers are now memetically notorious for being the only natural enemy of bronze colossi. In addition, various forts and/or adventurers that breach Hell often find baby animals and/or wild birds entering the fray with the inhabitants. The Deathgate community fortress actually had a random duck earn the unofficial title Darkwing the Netherfowl after it managed to kill two demons by itself.
  • Badass Normal: Who knew that depressed alcoholic midgets can fight The Legions of Hell and win?
    • Any Dwarf can with time, practice, and/or luck turn into a legendary master of effectively any trade. It does not matter how good they were at the start or what their family bloodline is like.
  • Bare-Fisted Monk:
    • The Wrestling skill. Rather than Eastern Martial Arts, everyone engages in pankration. It helps that they can bodily fling Goblins. Now that the throw command actually throws your opponent, much fun can be had. Your dwarf adventurer can now fling his goblin opponent off the mountain. Your Bronze Colossus adventurer, on the other hand, can throw his goblin opponent so far and hard that he hits a tree on the other side of the map and explodes into limbs, meat, and skin.
    • In previous versions, champion wrestlers could be terrifying, capable of punching a charging knight's warhorse out from underneath him, hard enough to punt the animal back 40 feet and have it explode into gristle on impact. The 6-foot-tall, heavily-armored, highly-trained knight will then rapidly find all his limbs snapped by a short, blood-and-vomit-encrusted psychopath, leaving him crippled and helpless whilst being slowly stomped to death through the protection his armor still offers against normal attack.
    • With the blunt-attack combat rework in Dwarf Fortress 2014, hand-to-hand combat has been buffed up since the previous release. While you're still no longer able to punt warhorses, a well-trained dwarf is perfectly capable of punching or kicking your head so hard that it "explodes into gore", helmets and caps be damned in some cases.
  • Battle Trophy: Immigrant dwarves might arrive with jewelry made from the bones of creatures they've killed. In the case of especially prolific warriors, this can consist of dozens to hundreds of items of bone jewelry.
  • Beneath the Earth: Since Dwarf Fortress 2010, practically all areas now have several layers of extensive underground caverns complete with giant mushrooms and creatures such as giant cave spiders.
  • Berserk Button: Every single Dwarf has one. You just need to push the right buttons. Thankfully, players are rather good at that.
  • Big Badass Bird of Prey: Giant eagles and the even bigger rocs.
  • Big Creepy-Crawlies
    • Creepy Centipedes: "Voracious cave crawler", by half bigger than a cow, building destroyer (can crunch stone). Tameable, and sometimes goblins ride these.
    • Giant Spider: The apex predator of caverns that can take on some megabeasts, thanks to web-slinging. Building destroyer (wood only). Can be tamed and/or used to produce unlimited amount of silk (more valuable than normal, at that).
  • Bizarre Alien Biology: A lot of... uh... lifeforms. Not only animals. Especially in more "magic" surroundings.
    • Planimal: Good surroundings have Feather tree that grows feathers for leaves... and eggs for fruit. Evil surroundings have Staring eyeball "grass" that blinks and is actually composed of eyeball tissues and Wormy tendrils (muscle "grass")... though these are harmless and even edible for livestock.
    • Waddling Head: Gorlak (living in Good surroundings) is a goat-sized sentient critter with big tusks and humanoid appendages.
    • Pond grabber is a hermaphroditic aquatic predator the size of a dog, with beak and four clawed tentacles. Normally they leave dwarves alone, but occasionally may wrestle and drown someone.
  • Blessed Are the Cheesemakers: For most players horribly horribly subverted, because cheese doesn't have quality levels and doesn't take too much time unless you have a great herd, so this skill is mostly useless.
    • If a dwarf happens to end up as cheesemaker, he will probably be used as test subject for traps or enlisted into the military right away... or worse. At least, Legendary Cheesemaker immigrant tend toward "useless sort of a peasant". A cheesemaker trained from zero non-stop is likely to have 6 good attributes and is ready for either more profitable craft or militia: see Wax On, Wax Off below.
    • Often played straight in-universe, however. If you have an engraver whose favorite food is cheese or a civilization whose symbol, by the whim of the Random Number God, is cheese, you will see carvings of the stuff everywhere. This became a bit of a Running Gag in Boatmurdered.
    • "Welcome to ☼☼☼THE LITTLEST CHEESEMAKER☼☼☼. Blessed are the Cheesemakers, for they need it the most".
  • Blob Monster: Cave blobs, small cavern creatures that pose little threat. Some procedurally-generated beasts may be blobs made out of a given material, ranging from weak snow or water to highly tough iron or steel.
  • Blood Knight: Dwarves gain positive thoughts from engaging in slaughter. And that's before insanity drives them berserk.
  • Bloody Hilarious: Losing is Fun.
    • Note the capitalization. It's there to indicate that losing is not just fun, but that you aren't really having Fun unless you are losing.
  • Blue and Orange Morality:
    • The ethic system makes it possible to create a race with some weird morals. The vanilla game already has elves, who find it unthinkable to kill plants, but are perfectly okay with eating the corpses of their enemies in battle.
      • They eat their enemies because they are delicious.
    • A possible explanation for Dwarves that end up getting into acts of absurd cruelty while still behaving otherwise civilized.
    • The player base can get involved in arguments over whether to keep a group of friendly kobolds safe or use them as a meat shield against invaders, meanwhile slaughtering kittens and throwing dwarf children into pits full of angry dogs without a second thought.
  • Body Horror:
    • Often a result of randomly generated Forgotten Beast syndrome. Includes the "Kitten Rot", which as the name implies causes the skin of the infected to completely rot off, leaving behind a horrible mass of living miasma. In its most basic form.
    • Evil biomes have rain and fog banks that induce this on anything unfortunate enough to be caught under them.
  • Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Personal descriptions of dwarfs string together happy and sad events with no distinction for either. To wit:

Kol Tölunimush has been ecstatic lately. He killed somebody by accident while sparring recently. He took joy in slaughter lately. He has lost a lover to tragedy lately. He has witnessed death. He had a satisfying sparring session recently.

  • Bucket Booby Trap: A closed door acts as a wall (i.e. blocks vertical movement too). Thus if floor on the level above it is channeled out and something is dumped into the hole, it won't fall through until the door is opened or broken. Buckets and other containers are appliable, but simple fall doesn't spill the contents; however, it works with an arbitrary number of anvils or pouring into the hole water... or magma.
  • Cast of Snowflakes: Each dwarf has his/her own personality traits that influence how they respond to certain events and how they go about their day. The 2010 release (0.31) added even more details, now including appearance and mannerisms.
    • And in the 2012 release (0.34), each migrant that arrives to your fortress has a history, family, and possibly even previous kills!
    • The 2014 release (0.40) goes even further by describing in detail their personal beliefs and their lifelong aspirations.
  • Catch Phrase: From v0.34, a dwarf's Thoughts and preferences screen starts with a personal tagline (hardcoded).
  • Cats Are Superior: Cats choose whether they have an owner, not vice versa. Cats are also the only creatures that can kill vermin for you and are vital to protecting your food stocks.
    • Though if you're not careful, they can out-breed everything around them. This is referred to as a catsplosion, and if allowed to continue can cause severe lag. And once it's started, culling them back down will make the cats' adopted dwarves very unhappy. Two favorite solutions are 1: to cage each kitten as it's born, then use it for meat, 2: to keep the breeding individuals in cages, eat the female kittens, and let the males roam about.
    • Thankfully, changes to breeding mechanics (animals no longer ignore distance/isolation) and the ability to geld male animals mitigated this sharply.
  • Child Soldiers: In Dwarf Fortress, most children mature by the age of 12. This can lead to entire squads of teenage bearded psychos with battle axes and alcoholism.
    • One forum thread from the old days of 40d reported something similar happening to a human child kidnapped by Goblins. At the age of 13, she started a religious war, which apparently ended with her getting killed by a seven year old.
    • Experiments in "Dwarven Day Care", aka locking a small child in a room full of crowded animals so that the violence of fighting for their life every day would harden them to tragedy and cause them to develop combat skills. It was pronounced a partial success when one experiment resulted in a child taking a permanent change to mental attributes... a.k.a. permanent mental scarring.
  • Climb, Slip, Hang, Climb: Climbing skill both prevents slipping while a creature climbs a wall and stops falling. Chance of this actually working depends on the surface, though, so Trap Doors still work reliably if you smooth the walls.
  • Clock Punk: Dwarven technology tends toward this. You can build Turing-complete computers out of Dwarven clockwork.
  • Comedic Sociopathy: One of the things that draws a lot of people towards the game.
    • There really is no limit to the absolutely horrible things the player can get up to. Check under Video Game Cruelty Potential for a partial listing.
  • Colon Cancer: The full title is Slaves to Armok: God of Blood: Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress: Histories of X and Y (where X and Y are synonyms of "greed" and "hard work", selected randomly each time the title screen is loaded).
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Large creatures cannot be killed by smashing them with a drawbridge because they keep them from lifting or closing. Forgotten beasts, titans and demons are all immune to traps, and along with megabeasts and night troll can only be killed by each other in worldgen.
    • However, if you manage to stun an enemy (by, for instance, putting giant cave spider webs on cage traps), it cancels the effects of the trapavoid tag. A few minutes of this shows why Contractual Boss Immunity is a necessary game mechanic.
  • Convection, Schmonvection: The game has a complicated temperature system, yet Dwarves have no problems working right on the edge of a magma pit, in workshops made of ice.
    • Better yet, the game currently does not check temperature for constructed things at all. Forest fires can burn around compounds with walls built from wood. Likewise, magma hot enough to melt rocks and burn bone can be held back by a wooden wall... or an ice wall.
    • Only applicable to constructed walls. Natural ice will melt from lava. That's right, Dwarven Engineering is so unspeakably Badass, they can even make unmeltable ice walls!
    • Owners of weaker computers also tend to turn the temperature off entirely to save the resources. It is not usually purposefully used for exploits; however, it sometimes leads to Badass moments.
  • Crapsack World: Evil biomes include poisonous rain, deadly clouds and the probability of any corpses rising from the dead. Even joyous areas are likely to wind up Crapsack Worlds as invoked by players (see: virtually every other trope on this page).
  • Creepy Souvenir: Vampires carry a trinket for each person they've killed made from their hair, bone, tooth or nails. Even if they've killed thousand of people.
  • Critical Existence Failure: Averted by the extremely complex combat and damage system which tracks damage (or mangling or removal) of all body parts and internal organs separately, and even takes care of layers of skin and certain veins and nerves.
    • With even more complex body system modeling and medical options in the latest version, a dwarf (or other creature) can survive having had most or all of their limbs removed, skin burnt off and eyes gouged out with sufficient medical care to clean and stitch them up before they die from blood loss or infection. Whether such a dwarf will be able to walk and work again is another matter. Nerve damage is impossible to recover from.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: If you're a character in this game, and you're lucky, you might die from being shot by an elf and slowly bleed to death as your hometown is burnt to a cinder. If you're unlucky, a Giant Desert Scorpion will rip your axe from your hands and hack you to death with it.
    • Some monsters can exude, spit or bleed poisons that can, as just one example, cause only your hands, feet and eyes to rot away before causing your lungs to bleed until you die of suffocation. And that's if you get a lucky combination that kills you outright versus only rotting all your skin off.
    • Some rather creative traps qualify, namely one which pumps water into an exposed corridor which freezes instantly, killing the victim and encasing their stuff in ice for your dwarfs to mine out later. A similar situation can happen if the temperature is turned off, by mixing water and heat-less magma, encasing the victim in obsidian.
    • Legendary Wrestlers in prior versions of the game, in either mode were fond of inflicting these. Anything not wearing adamantine armor will probably be reduced into a pile of broken bones and bruised organs, best case scenario. Worst case scenario, people get thrown across maps so hard that they end up in chunks of gore splattered against walls.
    • Many humanoid monsters like to strangle their victims to death. Given a particularly weak monster or tough dwarf, the combat reports of the victim being strangled can go on for pages before the attacker passes out from exhaustion, giving the victim a slight chance to catch their breath before the monster wakes up and goes about it some more.
      • In this category, Bronze Colossi are notable for being so large they could simply grab a normal creatures head and twist or gouge their eyes out while crushing their skull. However, their behavior system generally causes them to break all of a targets limbs before killing them. As commenters on the forum noted, it's almost like they want to watch the life fade from your eyes and drag out the pain on purpose.
  • Darker and Edgier: Unfortunately for dwarves, every update involves adding many horrible things to kill them and all they love:
    • The 31.17 update made the overworld of Dwarf Fortress much nastier, with bogeymen ready to tear apart anyone foolish enough to sleep outside and Night Trolls infecting humans with The Corruption. Worse, unburied dwarves now might come back as ghosts. They may throw parties for the rest of your dwarves, or attempt to kill everyone in the fort, depending on what their mood was when they died.
    • The .34.01 release gives us such wonderful additions as necromancers and their undead armies, werecreatures and zombies that can turn your dwarves into werewhatevers/zombies, evil clouds and rains that can have the same syndromes as forgotten beasts and demons, evil lands that raise all corpses as life-hating Husks and more.
  • Dark Is Not Evil: In Adventurer mode, its quite possible to become a night creature (a werebeast or a vampire to be precise) and pick up necromancy. You lose no control over your character, allowing you to be as kind or vicious as you please, and in fact its recommended-night creatures are Made of Iron while necromancers have an easy supply of allies.
  • Dead Baby Comedy: Hoo boy. Babies are frequently used as "Dwarven Body Armor" by female soldiers, as just one example. Most are accidental, but still.
    • Rarely, dwarf women with a baby will forget their weapons, at which point they will use the baby as a bludgeon.
  • Deadly Disc: The dwarves can forge "large serrated discs", a type of weapon that can only be used in weapon traps. Up to ten discs at a time can be placed in a single trap, 3x attacks per disc, and due to the way weapon damage is calculated, they are one of the deadliest conventional trap types in the game... and by far messiest... prone to spraying gore, appendages, heads, and assorted Ludicrous Gibs all over the place. In Adventure mode, these same discs can be used as melee weapons with pleasing results, and with high Throwing skill... you get the idea.
  • Death of a Thousand Cuts: In the current version, being in contact with magma for a short time will cover dwarfs or other fleshy creatures with tiny cuts that causes them to leave a huge trail of blood behind them as they bleed to death. Bronze colossi on the other hand, apparently can't be killed with any number of blows from hammers or weapons of weaker materials than bronze, as the only way to kill them (in combat) is to dismember them.
  • Death World: Though not entire worlds, evil biomes definitively qualify. Nothing says Fun like raining filth that makes your dwarves blister and vomit, fog banks that kill everything they envelop in horrible ways and discarded body parts and skins that refuse to stay down and try to kill your dwarves every time they rise.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: The rather complete fortress-naming system allows for enormous amounts of redundant names among the almost limitless possible names, for example, "Goldenforest the Forest of Gold".
  • Description Porn: If craftsdwarves are told to add decorations, the only limit (except for images sewn on cloth or leather) is item or previous decoration on it not being made of the same material. So this may go beyond one page: "If you give your jewellers 185 types of cut gem and let them go crazy, this can happen."
    • Happens sometimes with the procedurally generated descriptions of art pieces (items and engravings) and with dwarves themselves and many other creatures in the latest version. Especially when a bug caused addition of more decorations to an item over and over... as long as the creator can do it and conditions prevent the process from reaching the next stage.
  • The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Yes, the dev team is basically one guy (plus his brother as co-designer, but still only one coder). One guy who, it has been joked, intends to keep going until he has a perfect simulation of reality down to the quantum level. Thank goodness for ASCII characters taking up so little computing muscle: despite the Good Bad Bugs, it's still worryingly accurate in many cases, and can be easily transported on a single USB drive.
    • Given how large USB drives can be, that's worth expanding on: Dwarf Fortress's base files come in at around 13MB, not including any mods or saved .BMP files that you may download or create from it, yet its gameplay is undoubtedly more nuanced and complex than any AAA game title and has a devoted, supportive fanbase and replayability that most mainstream developers would kill for. What other game will simulate fluids, temperature, political decisions, population growth, mass-migrations, genocides, entire wars (down to what each individual did in that war and where they were injured), geological erosion processes, ants, beehives, rainfall patterns, spiderweb and insect waste creation, weapon/armour physics and even basic physics simulations (including now whether or not moving objects can crush dwarves) simply for the sake of fleshing out the background?
  • Devil but No God: The gods of the world are worshipped, and occasionally holy wars are fought in their names, but do very little themselves aside from handing out curses to those who defile their temples and sometimes creating the slabs from which necromancers learn their arts. Demons are found ruling over populations of humans (typically by posing as the aforementioned silent gods) and goblins (who can be controlled by brute force), and their numbers in hell are limitless.
  • Elemental Crafting: In the new version, materials are indeed important, but in different ways: a silver war-hammer will do more damage than one made from steel thanks to its density, but makes a poor thrusting or slashing weapon as it does not hold a fine point or edge under wear. On the other hand, the shear values (which determine how fine an edge can be) make steel a better choice for cutting edge technology. On that note, adamantine is a very rare metal and is extremely effective in bladed weapons (an admantine sword can slice limbs off a bronze colossus with ease), yet is almost completely useless for blunt weapons, because its density is comparable to styrofoam.
  • Elves vs. Dwarves: This is invoked more by the players than the game itself. While Dwarves and Humans have the most in common, Elves are far more often allies than enemies of Dwarves. At least until their diplomat demands that you stop cutting the wood you need for bed, barrels and charcoal. Or until you accidentally offer their traders the wooden box your trade goods are in. ...You know what? Screw You, Elves.
    • Given how elves regard dwarves during diplomatic meetings, it's a wonder the two races don't go to war more often. The 'short jokes' are rather uncalled for.
    • Remember to establish good trade relations with elves. Lead goblets make great gifts![2] Or even better, anything made of pitchblende[3].
    • Another wonderful trade good: magma. Lots of it. But don't worry about packaging it; just pour it into the trade depot, seal it off to keep your dwarves from stealing it, and let them choose their own.

(The Fortress of Boatmurdered takes no responsibility for fatal immolation caused by its magma exports. Magma is used at your own risk and the risk of everyone around you. Do not taunt magma unless you have modded in bauxite clothing.)

    • In world-gen, however, dwarves are actually the civilized race least likely to be at war with anyone without players deliberately provoking them.
  • Emergency Weapon: Annoyingly averted in Fortress mode. Soldiers or hunters equipped with projectile weapons can only use them as blunt instruments, not very effectively; buffing the crossbow's melee damage is many a player's first modding project. Others make their crossbows out of steel and cross-train their marksdwarves extensively as hammerdwarves to compensate.
    • Oddly, the current version has certain situations where crossbows are more damaging than warhammers: bludgeon crossbows have a much greater surface area than warhammer, which makes attacks less likely to damage through armor but more likely to damage a vital when they do.
  • Endless Game: There are no actual winning conditions as of yet. Earlier versions had the potential to end in a The Lord of the Rings-esque "you Dug Too Deep and unleashed a horrible demon" ending, but the latest versions let you play with essentially no time limits.
  • Epic Fail: The best games end like this. The forums generally consider the only "winning condition" to be to fail so spectacularly as to prompt forum members to declare that you've won the game. Case in point: Boatmurdered's inexplicable fiery apocalypse and ensuing tantrum spiral.
  • Eyes Do Not Belong There: Staring eyeball is a kind of grass found only in evil biomes that is made out of eyeball. Cows can still eat it though.
  • Failure Is the Only Option: "Losing is Fun!" became the official motto for a reason.
  • Feel No Pain: [NO PAIN] is a token often found in more alien creatures. You can sever or shatter every limb a Night Beast has and gouge out their eyes, leaving them with nothing but teeth to bite into your inside, but they'll keep going. Turns out that's enough.
  • Fog of Doom: Weather in evil regions includes a variety of clouds of randomly named materials ("execrable soot", "accursed gloom", etc) which cause randomly determined symptoms, ranging from mild dizziness to all of your internal organs rotting to becoming a zombie.
  • Foreign Queasine: Dwarves will butcher any edible non-sentient, and they will eat any part of the body that can be made edible. Elves will eat anything, including defeated foes. Adventurer Dwarves will butcher and eat sentients if they get hungry enough.
  • Fork Fencing: Slicing forks are surprisingly good weapons due to having an incredibly tiny contact area.
  • For Science!: The "magma sciences" are good at setting items on fire. See the Community Page.
  • Funny Animal: Dwarf Fortress knows a good number of sapient anthropomorphic animals, from "Tiger-Man" over "Snake-Man" to "Cave-Swallow-Man". Modders can make any animal bipedal, give it hands, and mark it with the [Can_Learn] tag (among others).
    • Some of the _______-Men are just downright creepy, made even weirder by their nondescript ASCII chips. Slug-Men, for instance, have no bones, and have inedible flesh. Luckily, they don't seem to be very enthused about defending their space, and sort of just slither around the overworld area aimlessly. Rat-Men, on the other hand, seem to exclusively live on the edge of volcanoes.
  • Game Mod: By editing the raw .txt files, many aspects of the game can be added to or changed. The mods created by the community range from minor bugfixes to "more detailed industry" to Fallout, Zombie Apocalypse and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic total conversions (of course, this still being Dwarf Fortress: one such mod is named "My Little Fortress - Friendship is Magma") and everything in between. The game is highly mod-receptive, and Toady has stated that he wants a high level of end-user modification ability, which will have its own high-level programming language that's trivial to pick up and start using.
    • You can make bears (already trainable) rideable. In other words, war bears..
    • Syrupleaf, one of the many Something Awful Dwarf Fortress Lets Plays, features new demonic enemies added to the game this way.
    • The number of parameters controllable by the raw .txt files can lead to some bizarre mods, like one where a certain type of rock has its burning temperature set to below freezing, making it dangerous for a miner to uncover that type of rock (this was actually used in a certain Let's Play).
    • You can even modify a current game by saving it, editing the .txt raw files, and restoring the saved game (though the extent of possible modifications is limited compared to a regular mod). For example, if a giant eagle is harassing your fortress, you can edit the creature definition for giant eagles to increase its body temperature to the point where it bursts into flames, remove the ability of giant eagles to fly so that it plummets to the ground, and so on.
    • You can modify chickens so that, instead of laying eggs, they lay live bees. Dwarf Fortress: crimes against nature simulator.
  • Gem-Encrusted: Just about any physical object that does not rot can be encrusted with cut gems to increase its value. This ranges from ammunition to furniture to decorations all the way to mechanisms and barrels.
  • Global Currency: Played straight in Fortress mode, as all traders use the same currency, though you could argue that as justified due to them coming to you. Averted in Adventure mode, as each civilization has their own currency and you can only exchange them outside of their civilization of origin by selling the coins themselves (which are literally worth only the material they're made of), but played straight in that all currency has the same worth when it comes to buying good.
  • Gods Need Prayer Badly: The only way gods interact with mortals is by cursing those that profane their temples. The only way for them to have temples to begin with is to have enough followers in a town. A god without any temples is effectively powerless, a god without any worshipers to spread their name at all is doomed to eternal powerless obscurity.
  • Gorn: Yes, in ascii text: the combat system describes the slashing of throats and gouging out of eyes with worrying relish.
    • And, as mentioned under many other entries, well-equipped hammer-users can turn just about any enemy into an exploding mess of body parts, which will splash around the area of impact, turning it red and leaving chunks that can be "examined" to get details of what's on that tile, such as "partial Goblin Wrestler torso" or "Urist McUnlucky's left arm". A weapon trap with ten serrated disks tends to do this too, especially if they are high-quality and/or made out of steel (or adamantine...), and can splatter blood for several tiles.
    • There was a report on the forum of a dwarf who suffered an abdominal wound in combat that caused his guts to pop out. The dwarf was taken to the hospital and actually recovered, but his guts weren't put back inside in the process of sewing him up. Now the ASCII representation of the dwarf actually has a pair of red "~" characters trailing him wherever he goes to depict the intestines he's dragging around behind him.
    • The 2014 release ups the ante with even more detail on blunt weapon trauma. Parts can be "smashed to a pulp" or "explode in gore" among other new, lovingly-detailed descriptions.
  • Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Quantized movement often makes it seem this way, units that move or dodge off a ledge hanging in the air for a tick before plummeting.
  • Grows on Trees: Elves produce finished goods via "shaping trees". Dwarves often feel "interested" in the grown wooden furniture.
  • Guide Dang It: The game has no instructions or tutorial. Learning to play at all, and learning to build a sustainable fort even in friendly environments, all but requires one to find online guides.

This is a masterwork mechanism by ToadyOne. All workmanship is of the highest quality. It is decorated with obsidian and encircled with bands of elf bone. The object menaces with spikes of candy, learning curve, insanity, goblinite and fun.
On the item is an image of dwarf in candy. On the item is an image of human in candy. On the item is an image of elf in elf bone. On the item is an image of goblin in goblinite. On the item is an image of elephant in dwarf bone. On the item is an image of cheese in candy. On the item is an image of me. Dwarf is surrounded by the cheese. Human is surrounded by the cheese. Elf is surrounded by the cheese. Goblin is surrounded by the cheese. Elephant is surrounded by the cheese. I am surrounded by the cheese. The cheese is on a fire. The dwarf is screaming. The human is screaming. The elf is screaming. The goblin is screaming. I am screaming. The cheese is laughing at me.

    • There are various comics about DF learning curve.
    • Accidentally destroying your fortress or killing your adventurer in the most stupid of ways might as well be a coming of age story, whether it be flooding your fortress with pumped lava or water, building a fortress on a plain that floods when it's high tide, or accidentally jumping off a mountain.
  • Hair-Trigger Temper: Some creatures (badger, honey badger, wolverine, black mamba and all derivatives thereof) are "PRONE_TO_RAGE": they have a chance of flipping out just because some non-friendly creature is in sight. Which makes them attack any creature at all and gives strength bonus.
  • Hard Head: Averted in that even with maximum toughness most direct hits to unarmored heads are instantly fatal. But decently armored dwarves can survive getting their skulls shattered without any lasting effects.
  • Helping Hands: With the latest release, body parts severed from the undead can be easily reanimated by necromancers and mummies. They can even do this to body parts severed from living beings, so adventures can find themselves in the unlucky circumstance of having to fight their own severed arm.
  • Hilarity Ensues: Look, if you actually get upset when one of your dwarves gets into a foul mood because you killed his cat on accident, beats up another dwarf who then gets ticked off enough to put his pick into the head of another dwarf who then lies there decaying on the ground, causing bad smells that drive a handful of the other dwarves unhappy enough to pick up axes until bleeding and/or insane and/or dead dwarves litter your fortress, you're playing it wrong. Losing is fun!
  • Hollywood Healing: Averted in that individual tissues have their own rates of healing (nervous tissue doesn't at all), and tissue can become permanently scarred. Played straight in adventure mode where quick-travelling, sleep, or waiting for any amount of time instantly heals essentially anything that can heal. Also played straight by a bug in the current version where eyes can be heavily damaged but not completely destroyed, and grow back very quickly (truer than you'd think) to full functionality (as unlikely as it sounds).
  • I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: Evil regions have such names.
  • If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: Dwarves have a disturbing tendency to run out in the middle of a siege to loot socks off a dead body if they have the chance (you can auto-forbid items on death to curb this behavior, but where's the fun in that; note that this is now the default since Dwarf Fortress 2010).
  • I'm Melting: This is generally the way fire hurts a unit: tissue of living non-plants don't really burn when caught on fire, it just melts and keeps the fire going. A fairly typical effect for random syndromes caused by Forgotten Beasts is rot or dissolution. Also, a bug in the 2010 version in semi-rare cases caused dwarfs and other creatures to melt when caught in the rain.
  • Implacable Man: The Bronze Colossus, unlike other megabeasts, will suffer no status effects from pain or nausea, cannot be stunned, and will continue fighting even after its limbs have been bashed off. Kill It with Fire can make him even more "fun"; he will incorporate the molten metal into his attacks long before the fire eventually destroys him.
    • This also applies to any creature that is coded with the tokens NOFEAR, NOPAIN and, occasionally, LIKESFIGHTING. This means that (duh) they don't feel fear, or pain, and will actively search for something to kill, regardless of whether it needs to eat or not, and once it finds something, won't stop until it's opponent dies or has run far enough that the pursuing creature finds something else to stalk and kill. The most feared of these creatures (asides from the Bronze Colossus) is the Giant Cave Spider.
    • Everything in many evil biomes will rise again after a while. Dismemberment will only result in the individual parts coming back for revenge. The only ways to prevent this are to butcher the offending corpse and tan the skin so it doesn't rise[4], throwing the thing into a pool of magma, or pulverising it with a drawbridge.
    • Certain evil biomes feature "husks", which normal creatures get turned into when caught in a creeping cloud. Though they can be killed, they're far stronger and tougher than animated corpses, feel no fear or pain, have no hunger or need to breathe and possess a singular hatred of all life. They can only be killed by beheading, bisection, or splattering it into tomato sauce. They may still have bits of dust from the cloud on them, still carrying the symptoms of infection. This can easily lead to an unstoppable Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Improbable Aiming Skills: It's possible for projectile weapons to remove teeth and nothing else. This is one interpretation.
  • Improbable Power Discrepancy:
    • To quote the game's creator: "I think I made the fish too hardcore." (At one point, any physical activity buffed your stats for all physical activity. Carp are always swimming, so they became invincible in battle.) Carp are still hardcore, but they have been replaced at times with elephants, and, more recently, unicorns. There have been entire wars fought against unicorns.
    • This also applies to several of the weapons: in the current version, due to the combat system accurately representing contact area of attacks but not the amount of force one would be capable of putting behind them, dagger stabs and whip lashes are absurdly good at penetrating armor.
    • Badgers are the new carp. The regular badger is a snarling, furry ball of anger who will enrage and attack your dwarves for no reason other than they exist. Giant Badgers are ten-foot-tall, snarling, furry balls of anger who will enrage and make Ludicrous Gibs of your dwarves for no reason other than they exist. On the other hand, an army of trained Giant War Badgers is enough to cut through just about any siege like a hot (snarling, furry and angry) knife through butter.
    • Giant sponges not only move and attack your dwarves, but in previous versions, they were fully invulnerable to damage. The pulping mechanics of version 0.40 has made them killable, however.
    • Occasionally a titan or forgotten beast, which are normally very powerful, will have a body made of a material with almost no ability to maintain shape (such as a liquid, or fire) causing their body to fall to pieces from the slightest touch.
      • One memorably pathetic titan was composed of snow and ended up being cut in half by the first crossbow bolt fired at it
      • Or a Forgotten Beast will show up in unexplored sections of your caves: since your dwarves aren't aware of them, there's no arrival message, but resident creature-men can fight and kill them there, and even earn names and titles for doing so. You may often notice this when, on the units screen, there is a Forgotten Beast listed as dead.
  • Improvised Weapon: Dwarves can actually forget to grab a weapon when going into battle, leading them to do battle with whatever they have at hand, whether it be rocks, helmets, backpacks, babies....
  • !!Incendiary Exponent!!: Fire is a good source of Fun. And now that all you need to move magma around is a nickel (for example) minecart, Fun is more readily available.
  • Insurmountable Dwarf-Height Fence: A constructed wall is the only truly reliable barrier against building destroyers, goblin thieves and anything that can't fly: sealing your fort in completely with walls is possibly the only way to ensure invasions won't destroy the fort before you have a functioning military. Armok save us all the day gobbos learn how to jump and climb.[5]
    • Now that the creatures can climb, you at least have to add an overhanging floor above walls and fortifications. Though others still can't deconstruct your walls or construct stairs next to them.
  • It's All About Me: Necromancers have a tendency to write books about themselves. Then they write essays about the books about themselves.
  • Karl Marx Hates Your Guts: Regardless of your world or location, prices for goods and materials are always fixed, although it is possible for the prices to be raised by a given % based on randomised trade agreements and a high appraise skill can get better prices also. Conversely, anything besides an unprepared corpse part, untamed animal, or bone has a minimum value of 1 per unit, even random stuff like rocks or snow which can be found right next to a merchant's feet, so the safest way to gain money in Adventure mode is to pick up hundreds of the rocks you find in infinite supply next to a shop and sell them.
  • Kevlard: Fat realistically serves as a layers of tissue that may take damage from an attack instead of a more important body part. More bizarrely, in Adventure mode, you can repeatedly set yourself on fire and put it out after a while to remove all the fat in your body. If you survive you become effectively fireproof because heat does not kill you through burning, it kills you by melting tissue (which except at very high temperatures is usually fat) to make you bleed to death.
  • Kill It with Fire: Fire monsters are the most dangerous sort. A burst of dragonbreath can cause incredible amounts of trouble. On the flip side, nearly all enemy creatures are vulnerable to fire, including dragons.
    • Ironically, Forgotten Beasts made of fire, ice and many other "elements" are laughably easy since they come to pieces on the slightest contact.
  • Kill It with Ice: When the temperature drops below freezing, water turns to ice instantaneously when exposed to air. Any creature unfortunate enough to be standing on that square when it happens is 'encased in ice'. When you mine that square out, all you find is a skeleton and anything metallic the victim was carrying.
    • This being Dwarf Fortress, players have created systems to trap goblins in a flooded room, then retract the roof to expose and freeze the water. Advanced versions prevent freezing by keeping magma behind a wall until the whole room is flooded and then removing the magma, thus being resettable as long as pumps are powered.
  • Killer Rabbit: Carp were infamous for this. With the introduction of aimed attacks, large fish have gone back to being deadly. Sturgeon are still like this to an even greater degree than carp, as they can easily bite off limbs.
    • Then there's the Undead Carp, its like a normal Carp, but actually listed as "Evil", very hard to kill and it swims on land...
    • Giant sponges. Sponges are near-impossible to kill or seriously harm on account of having no vital organs, no blood and normally not feeling pain, so they tend to, uh, sponge all attacks, from wasting all ammunition a hunter carried to stopping whole waves of the undead. Sponges are immobile and have no appendages to attack with, but any creature can "push" creatures standing next to them, causing very little damage... for its size. Normal sponges are the size of a sheep and can be dangerous to dwarven children. Giant sponges are over half a ton. Thus they serve as flypaper for anything hostile, while clumsily trying to bump into the enemy... which usually is dodged, but when dodge fails, smaller creatures end up broken, and once they cannot dodge well, pulped like they were ran over by a steamroller. A giant sponge can eventually kill almost anything non-flying that approached it.

> carp fleeing? THIS IS NOT DF ANYMORE
It was fleeing from a giant sponge, the creature which usurped its title of "king of the sea" by virtue of being unkillable prior to pulping. So it's weirdly appropriate IMHO.

      • Oh, and there's a bug that allows them to occasionally get enraged and charge.

Without a nervous system, the only thing it can feel is ANGER.

  • Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: Magma spreads out just as quickly as water (and behaves exactly the same when pumped), but is unaffected by pressure and thus is difficult to get to flow up. However, if you turn off temperature in the init file, your dwarves can swim in it.
    • Lava affects creatures ever so slightly less in version 0.31, which for example can give your dwarf miner enough time to run away when breaching a magma pipe. Not much more than that, though.
    • In previous versions, bauxite and raw adamantine were the only magma-safe rocks, while all other stone items would melt when exposed to lava; some user modifications added realistic melting and boiling points to each type of stone, allowing them to be magma-safe, and a later version actually made all of these official.
    • Lava has its own advantageous issues though.
  • Legendary Carp: A thing of ages past, but the legends still remain.
  • Lethal Joke Item: Occasionally, dwarves will equip items that are... not usually defined as weapons. A particularly well-known bloodline game, Headshoots, featured a dwarf that spent most of the game wielding a satchel. This was used to uppercut one goblin and kill three more before the first hit the ground.
    • Inverted with adamantine warhammers and maces, which sound deadly but are basically indestructible wiffle-bats now.
  • A Load of Bull: Minotaurs attack your Fortress and can be found in Labyrinths in Adventure mode. They are less than a tenth the size of any other semi-megabeast, but more than make up for it by naturally being experts with all melee weapons, including socks or the limbs of the last dwarf.
  • Loads and Loads of Loading: Code optimization and multi-threading support are among the many, many things that Toady One is still working on. Be prepared to wait for a while if you're generating a huge world.
  • Low Fantasy: There may be dragons and elves, but there's hardly a drop of magic to be found. It's just you and your dwarves, struggling to survive in an untamed world by means of industry, alcohol, and cold, hard, steel.[6]
  • Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields make you very capable of blocking attacks.
  • Ludicrous Gibs: The game's health system is very in-depth, keeping track of every part of every character's body down to eyes, internal organs, individual fingers and toes and skin-, fat-, muscle and bone-layers. Gibs, represented as red 2s (or green, or grey, depending on whether it bleeds blood or goo) will litter the surrounding environment if enemies are dismembered, disemboweled, hacked in two, or thrown into a wall with enough force to blow apart. It gets even better in adventure mode, which lets you take control of a single adventurer. This mode includes a blow-by-blow account of every fight, and the ability to pick up and throw the severed bits of enemies: or anything else, for that matter. Thrown objects- even socks- will often hit with deadly force, breaking bones, damaging organs, or splattering brains across the floor. Ludicrous gibs indeed.
    • If an axedwarf is sufficiently experienced, he/she can eviscerate goblins so spectacularly the goblin's left leg ends up in a nearby tree. Meanwhile, if a mace- or hammerdwarf gets a sufficient velocity on his goblin, the goblin can explode into every single one of his components. "Where did that guy's arm go again?"
    • Something similar can happen to your dwarves at the hands of goblins. Sorry, that should be "at the hands of goblin wrestlers".
    • A basic Dwarf recruit who hasn't had time to go grab a weapon can still beat up kobolds so spectacularly that the kobold's left arm ends up in two pieces.
    • Even kobolds get the opportunity to do this. In Kobold Camp, a modification for the game, champion level kobold soldiers, using bone armor and copper weapons, can easily knock the limbs off goblin raiders, who use iron armor and weapons.
    • It doesn't stop at melee combat. When something is burned ludicrously, you get to pick through the burning corpse. You see such awesome things as "xx!!cat brain!!xx" (the !!s mean it's on fire, the xx meaning there's not much left of it).
    • This can come back to bite the dwarves in the ass when in evil biomes, as every severed part reanimates as an individual enemy. As a result, you might find an entire army of angry limbs besieging your fort if you rely on sharp weaponry a bit too much. Either way, see the part about magma.
  • Luke Nounverber: Naming for everything works this way.
    • Occasionally throws up Names to Run Away From Really Fast if something or someone with a sinister name turns out to be, well, sinister. The aforementioned Boatmurdered counts here.
    • Similarly, "Cacame Apebalded the Immortal Onslaught" ("Cacame Awemedinade Monípalóthi" in Elven), the Elf King of Dwarves.
  • Made of Iron: Internal bleeding isn't implemented in the current release, making it possible (in theory) to pound on an enemy with a blunt weapon for days or months at a time, crushing every bone and organ in their body without killing them. In practice, a crushing blow to the skull, which will ram it through the brain and kill the target, is common.
  • Magic Is Evil: Development on the Dwarf Fortress magical system has begun: the first type of mage to be introduced was the Necromancer.
    • Interactions, files added that can be used by creatures, are the source of "magic". This means the Dwarf Fortress users can add their own magic. It hardly needs to be said that the magic will be used for evil and cruelty. There is already a spell to crush your opponents lungs at a thought. It can get far, far worse.
  • Mars Needs Women: The reason Night Trolls kidnap mortals of the opposite gender.
  • Martial Arts and Crafts: Picks despite being mediocre weapons can be pretty dangerous in the right hands. The skill to attack with a pick is Mining, and busy miners train up that skill far faster than military dwarves with mere sparring. Guess what happens when some critter jumps on a Legendary miner?
  • Medieval Stasis: Word of God says the available technology isn't going to get past the 14th Century.
  • Minecart Madness:

Toady One: "I set a hauler to ride a minecart to its next stop. That happened to take the dwarf down eight ramps and then up a launch ramp into an open cavern. High up in the cavern there was a wide ledge and on the ledge there was a goblin, chilling out right where I had created it. I activated the dwarf's squad, and he had just enough hang-time at the top of the flight arc to get a punch in. The goblin struck back but the dwarf jumped on to the ledge, where they continued to fight as the cart fell down into the darkness."

  • Necromancer: Who, as expected, lead armies of zombified creatures (or their severed parts) against their foes.
  • Nigh Invulnerability: Enemies without brains, other internal organs or blood are almost literally unkillable with blunt weapons alone. This includes certain kinds of undead and megabeasts like the Bronze Colossus.
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: While vampirism and werecreature curses are mutually exclusive, adventurers can still become one of those as well as a necromancer and sort of ghoul called a husk. The severed parts of werecreatures raised as undead will still transform regenerating into a full body with a full moon. It's quite possible for a fortress to be swarmed by a growing hoard of clones of the same person. There are also reports of werecreature ghosts; worse yet, there are necromancer ghosts who, to the horror of many, can still raise corpses (including their own) despite being dead.
  • Nobody Poops: Played straight, which is noteworthy considering that pretty much everything else is in this game. Toady has stated that even though he's fine with fertilizer and sewers, adventurers and fortress dwarves having to go to the bathroom (on top of so much existing self-maintenance) would be a needless distraction that breaks immersion.
  • North Is Cold South Is Hot: Sometimes averted, sometimes not. When the world-generator is set to create an island continent, the position of the "hot" hemisphere and the "cold" hemisphere is randomly chosen, so it can either be played straight or inverted. Larger worlds avert it completely, with an equator and two poles.
  • The Not-Secret: The 'Hidden' Fun Stuff, which just about everyone finds out about from reading Let's Plays well before encountering it themselves. This is unlikely to change as the game has a very high bar for entry, and only by reading about how interesting the game can be are most people willing to learn. It doesn't help that the game has no instruction guide, and learning to play all but requires use of the wiki.
  • Obvious Beta: See Good Bad Bugs in the YMMV page. Still pretty damn good for a game that's technically still in alpha.
  • Oddly-Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo: Dwarf Fortress is technically a sequel to the defunct Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, making it Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress: Histories of X and Y.
  • One-Man Army: With enough training and good enough weapons and armor, a lone dwarf can reduce entire hordes of Goblins to literal pulp.
    • Urvad Strangercanyon from Laboredowners. Was abducted by goblins, ran away, returned to his home settlement (massacred by this time) when he was 12. Goblins (with pet trolls and a few "converted" dwarves and humans) raided the reclaimed settlement. Their losses were 1308 of 1813. Same happened a year later (1217/1734). Urvad scored 2525 kills total (though his huge pack of dogs and all the attle running around probably helped a lot).
  • One Steve Limit: Averted hard, unless you use the nicknaming feature to distinguish your dwarves. There's a reason 'Urist' became a reference for the generic Everydwarf. In your fortress, it could be Malfol or Domas...you think Bomrek is a distinctive name? Well, you get four of them in your next migration wave.
  • Our Dwarves Are All the Same: The entire point of the game, really. The Dwarvern civilizations in Dwarf Fortress vary little from the model set by other universes. Well, except for being far more Ax Crazy, manic-depressive, and likely to engage in insane, colossal projects for no clear reason.
  • Our Elves Are Better: Elves are extremely protective of forests, to the point where they may even declare war against a civilization that harvests too much. They also occasionally devour enemy combatants after battle.
  • Our Gnomes Are Weirder: They live in Good (diurnal Mountain gnome) and Evil (nocturnal Dark gnome) mountainous regions. They will steal your booze if they can. Also, rather expensive extract of Kobold bulb is called "gnomeblight" and is a lethal contat poison (causes necrosis) to both species.
  • Our Goblins Are Wickeder: Supposedly the antithesis race to dwarves, and the player is supposed to consider them "evil", although the truth is that they are the least xenophobic and least hypocritical race in the game. They are still murderous demon worshippers, and that equality comes from treating the babies they snatch as their own.
  • Our Mermaids Are Different: They're sentient and generally relatively nice if left alone. In previous versions, their bones were valuable enough that several players made a major industry regarding trapping, breeding and killing them for their bones. The developer was squicked enough that he devalued the bones in a patch once this was discovered.
  • Our Monsters Are Weird: Forgotten Beasts, Titans and demons are randomly generated, and the results are very, very strange.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: These are often mortals cursed by a god to wander the night searching for blood. They are effectively immortal, can go without food, sleep or water, and regenerate damage quickly, especially when well fed, but otherwise act like the living. A fortress can even be infiltrated by a vampire in the waves of migrants, who will feed off sleeping dwarves (preferably when no one is looking). They will even try to accuse other dwarves of being the vampire to throw attention away from themselves. Any mortal that drinks the blood of a vampire becomes one themselves, including the Player Character in adventure mode, and even dwarven citizens if their blood happens to contaminate the water supply.[7]
  • Our Werebeasts Are Different: Much like the vampires, they are created when the gods curse a mortal, only this curse makes them turn into the form of a beast every full moon. This can be any beast, be it a turtle, rhino or even gopher, among many others. Every time they transform, all of their wounds are healed (even missing limbs), but they also drop all their items.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: The new combat system uses organ damage/bleeding as a significant factor in determining death. Zombie and skeletal creatures are rather lacking in organs and blood, so they wound up nigh impossible to kill. Well-trained dwarf militia could fight even minor skeletal creatures for several months before the game would decide they had been bludgeoned enough to be considered "dead". Subsequent releases patched in better damage calculation for undead creatures, but it's still extremely difficult to kill a skeletal undead with blunt weapons only.
    • Subsequent versions added many more zombie options, including necromancers and evil biomes that cause all corpses to rise as undead. This applies to body parts as well, so long as at least one has a GRASP tag (mouth, hands, pincer, etc). Chop up a zombie and moments later you could be fighting the remains of the zombie's corpse, his left arm and head. Depending on circumstances, they will keep rising until you dump them in magma.
    • The latest version also introduces "husks": undead beings with a singular hatred for all life and much stronger and tougher than they were in life. Living things covered in cursed dust become husks, and the dust covering one husk can spread to curse more if it isn't washed off. This can quickly lead to an unstoppable Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Palette Swap: The fact that the game's done in ASCII graphics makes this a justified case.
  • Patchwork Map: Averted completely in that the world generator takes weather effects into account to always create a realistic map, though you can tweak it to make one on purpose. This trope does however apply to veins and clusters of metal ore for Rule of Fun and balance reasons.
  • Perpetual Beta: Technically an alpha, but not perpetual. Word of God says that Version 1.0 will be when Toady makes 100 core elements. According to a New York Times article, this could be 20 years from now. Dwarf Fortress fans don't see this as a problem.
  • Perpetual Motion Machine: The mechanical energy needed to pump water up one story is only one tenth the amount generated when the water comes back down and powers a water wheel (although the wheel itself draws another 1/10, and the machinery connecting the wheel to the pump will probably take somewhat more). Power the pump with the water wheel, prime it once with manual labor, and it will endlessly generate power.
  • Perpetual Motion Monster: The result of combining the tags [NOEXERT], [NO_EAT], [NO_DRINK] and [NO_SLEEP], often found on inorganic, undead or especially strong monsters.
  • Physical Hell: (Super Spoiler Alert!) Yes, you can dig to hell now. Just don't expect to win the resulting battle, as there are literally billions of demons and some don't even have organs to destroy, making them Nigh Invulnerable. Additionally, they are all flying, magma-proof, drowning-proof building destroyers, so once freed, odds are you won't be able to contain them again. It's possible, though: several players have succeeded in colonising Hell. Including putting civilian quarters down there just for the sake of "tonight we dine in Hell" jokes.
  • Pointless Doomsday Device: Dwarven Physics, coupled with constant threats and lots of creative players, lends itself to this.
    • One of the most famous examples is "Operation:Fuck The World" from Boatmurdered: a lever that, when pulled, released a flood of magma across the plains. In practice, however, Fuck The World proved to be more of a standard Doomsday Device, ruining the surface world and its hordes of rampaging elephants, while only tangentially starting the fortress' fiery downfall by setting off a host of other issues.
  • Post-Modern Magik: Dwarven Physics tend to result in unusual uses of old fantasy tropes. The Forgotten Beasts, especially. Beware the fearsome Werechinchilla!
  • Punched Across the Room: Happened a lot in earlier versions, toned down considerably now.
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: Well, no stat (or even anatomical) difference, but female Dwarfs can have babies.
    • Not so much having babies but dropping babies out of their wombs. Pregnant dwarfs don't get any motherly leave and just keep working. So it's not that uncommon one of your miners pop out a baby while in the middle of digging out a tunnel. Same with animals. Happened more than once dogs giving birth to puppies while in the middle of battle.
    • Also, Dwarven women will carry their children into battle, if they're young enough. Even if they are warriors. Even if they are warriors trained primarily in wrestling. This may result in a domino anger-death spiral when the baby is almost inevitably impaled on something.
    • Not only that, but dwarves will wear clothing items regardless of gender... thus, you can see men wearing, among other things, a skirt, a dress, a pair of trousers, a loincloth and several other items.
    • In fact, having a female/male/genderless-only race only affects how many of them there are (with, you know, the inability to make more children a factor).
  • Rain of Blood: This is a regular occurrence in evil biomes, when it's not raining disease inducing slime.
  • Raised by Orcs: Goblins actively kidnap children and raise them. Goblin-raised entities act exactly like ordinary goblins, and can be seen snatching more children and participating in raiding parties. Even more horribly, snatched dwarves will adopt goblin aesthetics and shave their beards.
    • In a bit of a twist, their snatching tendencies mean that, after a few centuries, the original goblins often end up outnumbered by snatched elves, dwarves and humans/the descendants of same. Goblin-raised elves have the natural high stats of elves, with none of the culturally-imposed wooden equipment, making them far more deadly than regular elves or goblins. Fortunately, the raids in fortress mode are composed entirely of goblins and sometimes dwarves snatched from you.
    • This works both ways. It's rare but not unheard of to get a goblin envoy from the nearby Dwarven civilization. If they are second generation "Dwarves", they will even get a Dwarven name.
    • Under rare circumstances, during world generation, a demon may conquer a nearby civilization which will nonetheless remain friendly with you. Very, very occasionally you may have a fort that gets visits from a demonic diplomat from a nearby human or elf civilization. Or even a Forgotten Beast. Dragons and Minotaurs also were seen.
  • Raising the Steaks: Evil-aligned, "haunted" areas are full of zombie and skeleton animals, which are ridiculously hard to kill. Skeletal enemies lack vulnerable internal organs, so piercing weapons -- normally the fast track to a One-Hit Kill -- are a lot less effective, and undead enemies cannot bleed out or be overcome by pain or exhaustion. A hit-point system was implemented until exactly what was keeping them moving becomes more developed and thus easier to deal with.
    • Now that corpses and even individual body parts that aren't processed into stacks will actually come alive in those places, basically the only way to survive is to go vegetarian (with both food and items).
    • Undead sea creatures can travel over land. This can range from slightly embarrassing, when your starting party is slaughtered by a school of skeletal carp, to downright terrifying when the nigh-unstoppable zombie whales come to visit.
  • Rasputinian Death: The ultra-buggy first release of the 2010 version of Dwarf Fortress features plenty of these. Creatures will tend to live through an enormous deal of torture before dying, including major organ damage; it is suspected this may change with future releases. Most interesting is the fact that, at present, unliving opponents such as bronze colossi are very nearly invulnerable; the only way to kill them is to completely disassemble their bodies (very difficult because their bronze tissue absorbs a great deal of damage, unless you make their own weight work against them by dropping them from a great height) or to dump magma on them until they've been reduced to a puddle.
  • Reality Ensues: When the game's physics isn't hilariously buggy, it can produce some of this.
    • For instance, adamantine items are ridiculously valuable, don't bend or break under any amount of stress once formed into items, can be sharpened to an incredible edge... with density akin to balsa or styrofoam. This means that while adamantine armor is Nigh Invulnerable and edged weapons are capable of producing a One-Man Army in skilled hands, adamantine maces, warhammers and projectiles are a joke.
    • For that matter, while the armor itself is nigh-impossible to penetrate, non-rigid adamantine objects still provide little protection from blunt force, meaning you can be hurt by a bronze mace even when wearing adamantine chain-mail.
    • You also cannot go around kicking ass with your bare hands and no armor, as even the most skilled wrestlers are still highly vulnerable to any armed opponent.
    • Thanks to Procedural Generation of Forgotten Beasts made as Mix-and-Match Critters made from any variety of materials given magical animation, they can sometimes only survive by having Plot Armor. For example, a Forgotten Beast made of ash could be Famed in Story having shaped the world's history, but it loses that Plot Armor when it encounters the player and its ashen body will likely fall apart in a stiff breeze shortly thereafter.
  • Real Time with Pause: In fact, you need to pause to give any order. The game would've been completely hopeless without it. Then again, it is completely hopeless anyway, at least for your poor Dwarves.
  • Retraux: Part of the reason why the graphics are practically impenetrable ASCII is the fact it's patterned after the roguelikes of old, that could only accept such an interface.
  • Ridiculously Cute Critter: Despite being represented with only the 'k' symbol, people seem to interpret kobolds as mentally retarded, yet lovable humanoid creatures who are just trying to survive in a world where every other civilization hates them. According to the fanbase, cutebolds are another term for DF kobolds. At worst, kobolds send thieves who can settle on scavenging equipment left from dead enemies... contrast goblins who steal children and start sieges. They are often simply allowed to steal junk stored in the open, like troll fur socks left after goblins bite it. Kobolds living in the same caves can be friendly.
    • An in-canon example would be the fluffy wamblers: chibified humanoids (like an elemental, but composed of fluff and pudge and kitten-sized) with eyes and nose. Food-gnawing vermin that appears only in good aligned biomes and apparently so adorable dwarfs won't butcher them. And we're talking about a race who will gleefully butcher a newborn puppy should the need, want, or thought arise.
  • Screw You, Elves: A pretty standard response to the Elves arriving is something along these lines... unless, for some reason, your fortress is in need of cloth. One particular thread was dedicated to constructing a giant artificial tree out of blocks of charcoal and decorating it with Elves in cages. Most everone else's method of getting rid of them is like everything else in the game; magma.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: Know that the adamantine is there for a reason.
  • Shout-Out: Every fortress starts out with seven dwarves. Or alternatively, a Shout-Out to the seven dwarf lords.
  • Shown Their Work: Regarding geology: the game has dozens of types of rocks, sorted by the geological formations they're most likely to appear in. This is not to mention the accurate distribution of flora and fauna in those geological formations.
  • Silly Reason for War: The wars in world-gen history can be like this, especially if elves are involved: "The War of Ignition was waged by The Imperial Fells on The Council of Lances. One of the most significant causes of the conflict was a dispute over the treatment of plants." Elves do not like it when plants are mistreated. And you Can't Argue with Elves.
  • Single-Specimen Species: Forgotten Beasts. Possibly Titans as well, depending on how you classify them.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Firmly embedded on the cynical end. After all, losing is fun.
  • Sobriquet: Sentient beings that starts racking up kills have bestowed upon them a Badass title such as "The Awe-Inspiring Warrior Ram". Otherwise-unnamed monsters who do the same will eventually pick up a nickname as well.
  • Space Compression: A dragon takes up one square; so do dwarves and cats. The only thing that doesn't (not counting buildings) is traders' wagons.
    • This can and will lead to rather hilarious geometric paradoxes: a tile is large enough to contain a dragon, but not large enough to contain two kittens without one of them crouching. A tile can theoretically contain 1,000 dragons as long as 999 of them aren't standing up.
    • Pretty much anything can be stored on a single tile and remain usable with just a little micromanagement, using "Quantum Stockpiling".
    • Likewise, you can fit your fortress's entire animal population into a single cage, including 5 elephants, two cave crocodiles, three dozen cats and kittens, 15 dogs and a partridge in a pear tree.
  • Stealth Pun/Genius Bonus: The character "&" is used to represent Demons in the game. UNIX users use the same character as a way to start a process in the background
  • Subsystem Damage: For practically every living creature, the game keeps track of the health of individual body parts, down to fingers, toes, internal organs, skin and tissue layers, teeth and individual bones. Nausea, pain, exertion and blood loss are also tracked. A framework for poisons, venoms, and diseases also got installed.
    • An Arm and a Leg: Slashing weapons (particularly weapon traps full of serrated discs) will sever arms and legs and send them flying. This is amusing but creates a huge mess to clean up. Dwarves with missing limbs lose the ability to carry some items, to walk without crutches, or even to do any work. You may find yourself killing off your veterans just to make the "cannot pick up equipment" messages go away.
    • Chunky Salsa Rule: Destroying a creature's (last) brain is instantly fatal. So is chopping off all of its heads or its upper/lower body. Creatures that lose their lungs to damage suffocate. Etc.
      • Also, direct hit with cave-in, being encased in cooling magma, and being frozen in ice completely ignore Subsystem Damage and are always instant-death. A raising (against the wall) or lowering (against the floor) drawbridge is known as "Dwarven Atom Smasher": it not only kills, but utterly destroys anything and anyone except very large critters.
    • Eye Scream: From the dev log...

"Eyelids clean the eyes so you don't have to soap them off, but if an eyelid is torn off, I think they might soap the eyes."

      • Also, wrestling. "Gouge left eye with right hand."
      • The *wooden bolt* hits the goblin swordsman in the left eye, breaking it. An artery is severed!
    • Syndromes can affect only certain body parts. It can and has happened that a randomly generated syndrome from a Forgotten Beast does nothing but cause your dwarves' eyes to rot out. (They don't seem to mind all that much as long as they get medical help. Being constantly drunk probably helps them cope.)
    • Individual extremities can be targeted, including fingers, toes, ears, noses and teeth, and aimed attacks in Adventure mode will allow you to break or cut them off one piece at a time.
  • Succession Game: In both Adventure mode and Fortress mode, great accomplishments are recorded in the 'Legends' mode. You can also visit former Forts in Adventure mode, and they become a dungeon crawl full of beasts and monsters.
    • A popular form of play amongst the player community. Individuals take turns running a dwarf fort for a set amount of time and passing on the save to the next players. See Boatmurdered, Headshoots and Syrupleaf entries mentioned above.
  • Suicidal Overconfidence: The puny Troglodytes or any other aggressive but weak creature will always attack any Dwarf they spot. Even if the dwarf is an Ultra-Mighty, Perfectly Agile and Superdwarvenly Tough Woodcutter with an adamantine Battle Axe.
  • Super-Detailed Fight Narration: thanks to the combat system that models detail down to the organs you lose.
  • Super Fun Happy Thing of Doom: Random name generator is Pretty Much What It Says On The Tin.
  • Tech Points: Skills and abilities, both civilian and military, are enhanced by using them (and gradually "rust" otherwise).
  • Teeth Flying: Arrows can occasionally target and remove teeth, sending them launching with the bolt. More spectacular blunt mouth trauma can throw the entire set of teeth out at once, spewing them out of the poor creature's mouth in every direction and just generally creating a headache for clean up.
  • The Tetris Effect: Just wait until you start dreaming in ASCII.
  • Thermal Dissonance: Nether caps are stuck right on the water freezing point. Even after being chopped down and fashioned into items. Forever. Even in contact with magma.
  • Tree-Top Town: Elven forest retreats.
  • Try to Fit That on A Business Card: A title awarded for kills, even to animals, can be a bit of a mouthful.
  • Tunnel Network: Dwarves and goblins build tunnels in world gen. Much like roads, only underground.
  • Turns Red: Dwarves can "enter martial trances" when severely outnumbered, while many species (including dwarves) can become "enraged" in a pitched battle. How likely any given character is to do either is heavily affected by their randomly-generated mental traits.
  • Unbreakable Weapons: For now anyway, though the obsidian weapons are supposedly going to be particularly susceptible to this.
  • Underground Monkey: Not a lot, but there are many "giant <critter>" and "<critter>man" derived from base versions.
  • Unicorn: Part of the fauna in good lands, and occasionally ridden by elves. Their horns pack a mean punch if you get in a fight, but goods and food made from their remains can fetch a very nice price.
  • Universal Poison: Previous to Dwarf Fortress 2010 basically how poisons worked. With Dwarf Fortress 2010 oh so very, very hugely averted. Syndromes can have one or more of over a dozen different effects, each of which may affect one or more body parts or subsystems and have values determining chance of resistance and recovery time, if any. Beasties can bite, leak, breathe, spit, ooze and bleed toxins that can be inhaled, injected, received on contact or contracted through ingestion. Depending on the particular combination, they can range from a temporary minor dizziness to causing your arms and legs to rot off, your skin to blister, excruciating pain over your entire body followed by full neural paralysis resulting in death by suffocation.
    • Even further averted with medical procedures that can potentially do surgery on infected body parts before the syndrome can spread or cause further side-effects like infection.
    • Worse in that poisons can now spread like diseases through contact with infected blood.
    • The 2012 update averts this even further by adding syndromes that fundamentally change the affected creature's stats and behaviour. Evil fogs that turn creatures into angry, Nigh Invulnerable thralls are one of the most memorable of these.
  • Unobtainium: Adamantine is even important enough to set off a major event in game.
    • There's also a second kind of Unobtainium known as "Slade", which is unimaginably heavy and impossible to even scratch. Even with Adamantine picks, you cannot mine it out. Someone did find a way to obtain single stones of it (by digging a ramp up underneath a slade floor), but it is nigh unusable in dwarf mode. If you hit up the arena though, you can spawn creatures wearing slade armor wielding slade hammers. They're as effective as you think they would be.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Vampires are supposed to garner suspicion in world gen from feeding on people, but it's currently bugged to the point that a vampire can consume thousands of people in one village without getting caught.
    • Likewise, there can be a dozen witnesses to a vampire feeding on and killing a sleeping dwarf and none of them will do anything about it, other than accuse the vampire of murder.
  • Upper Class Twit: It can be difficult to tell whether your nobles know anything about anything. It's not impossible for dwarves to die in droves because your Baron keeps asking for random items regardless of which materials are available. In earlier versions, they could even request items made of slade, a material which cannot be mined and which they should not even know exists.
  • Vendor Trash: Crafts, totems, toys, musical instruments and mugs can be used for two things: selling to the seasonal caravans and: once the economy starts. shop stock. On the other hand it's a great way of getting rid of the average fort's mountain of stone.
    • On th' other other hand, wha' sort o' pansy dwarf don't need lots've rocks?
    • The non-meat, non-metal portion of "goblinite" becomes this. Until industries pick up, a Goblin Christmas is a windfall, but after the inferior loot piles up, it becomes such a chore foisting it on the caravans that players come up with more inventive disposal methods (magma, "atom smasher" exploit) and/or simply dumping them where kobold thieves and other magpies can scavenge freely.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: There are endless examples but for now we'll just leave you with this thread, a debate about how best to traumatize dwarves into becoming resistant to tantrum spirals. The agreed upon solution? Drop puppies on them. From the ceiling. While they're eating. Until they just. Don't. Care anymore.
  • Viral Transformation: Night Trolls are able to create mates for themselves by transforming villagers. In the newest version, vampires and werebeasts will transfer curses through their bites and blood.
  • The Virus: Venom from Forgotten Beasts is sometimes transmissible, as it subjects the victim to a randomly generated illness and ones that gradually dissolve some tissue into puddles of (contaminated) fluid are relatively common. Which may eventually leave your entire fortress melted down to Empty Piles of Clothing or rolling on the floor in agony.
    • .34 adds the ability for vampirism and lycanthropy to be contagious, as well as the framework for any other contagious interaction the inventive player can think of.
  • Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Dwarves can get Cave Adaptation if they spend too long underground, which causes them to vomit when they are aboveground. Creatures who have taken significant damage will vomit from pain. Send a well-trained squad of Cave Adapted dwarves up top to brutalize a goblin attack and you wind up with both sides spending as much time vomiting as fighting and a technicolor battlefield.
    • One of the most common symptoms of the evil rains from the 2012 release is nausea. If you embark in an area with this type of weather, it's virtually guaranteed that your entryway and halls for dozens of tiles away will be covered in pools of vomit.
  • Wide Open Sandbox
  • World Tree: Not quite, but Highwood have trunks 3x3 tiles wide and height up to 12 z-levels.
  • X Meets Y: When stripped to its barest essentials, the game is pretty much a fusion of Dungeon Keeper and Rogue.
  • You Are the Translated Foreign Word: Sometimes names are listed in one of the in-game languages and sometimes they're translated, with relatively little rhyme or reason which is used. This variation is occasionally used as a compromise, such as on the blurb shown on embark.
  • You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Dwarves and humans have standard hair color, but elves will occasionally have white or green hair, and goblin hair colors are mainly shades of purple, with pink and red on the extreme end of their relative spectrum.
  • Zerg Rush: Necromancer towers are filled with zombies that can easily overwhelm an adventurer.

List of tropes specific to Fortress mode:

  • And I Must Scream: Creatures in cages can never die of anything but old age or escape on their own, and the cage will last forever. You could theoretically lock an elf (or other immortal creature) in a cage, put the cage in the center of a mountain, collapse the path you dug to get him there, then forget the elf forever. He'd be there forever.
    • It's also possible for horribly injured dwarves to be bedridden the rest of their lives, with their motor and sensory nervous systems destroyed. Euthanasia is recommended, not just to end their suffering, but also because they'll be a tax on your water and food reserves.
    • You're actually rewarded for doing this to vampire dwarves: even though they feed on other dwarves, they still count as members of your fortress and thus you don't get a Game Over even if all you have left is one vampire dwarf. Since they don't hunger or age, you can just seal one in a room forever and your fortress will never die, even if the vampire goes insane from being naked. That is, until the ghosts come to pay him a visit...
  • Apocalyptic Log: Engravings can devolve into this.

"Zelersostet, 'The Prime Weevils': Engraved on the wall is an exceptionally designed image of a dwarf and a frog demon by 'Emperor Sankis' Gatinbomrek. The frog demon is striking down the dwarf."

    • This follow-up to Boatmurdered qualifies too.
  • Aristocrats Are Evil: You may be forced to conclude this. Though it's more evil in a "Pointy-Haired Boss" kind of way than an "Evil Overlord" kind of way.
  • Artificial Stupidity: The death of all too many dwarves.
    • Particularly painful example from the old version: you, the supreme overlord, have mandated that no-one goes aboveground because of an army of besieging goblins... so dwarves march out to do a job, cancel whatever it was they were going to do, and then just loaf around and catch some rays until the goblins kill them. They had it coming too.
    • You can assign specific uniforms to your dwarf soldiers, and if there is not exactly what you have assigned, they will grab the next best thing. Now let's say you're holed up because of a full-on siege but one of your soldiers dies for the above reason. He has better equipment than one of your other military dwarves, who will now try to head to his corpse because there's a really nice pair of boots out there. Then he dies and another dwarf thinks, "You know, his crossbow was better than mine..."
    • Urist McOblivious gets thirsty; Urist McOblivious goes to nearby pond; Urist McOblivious fails to notice that the pond is surrounded by bits of his fellow dwarves that have been torn apart by deadly carp; Urist McOblivious takes a drink; various pieces of Urist McOblivious join the various bits of his fellow dwarves. Urist McDumbasabrick gets thirsty....
    • There is a workaround on the wiki specifically to prevent your dwarves from sealing themselves in the room when they install a floodgate onto the only entrance. This is apparently a common enough act to have received its own shout out in the latest World of Warcraft expansion.
    • This is a direct quote from this reddit (pay no mind with the extinction of the HFS, Arrival of the Golden Age, and the Cast Obsidian Tower):

"The cyclops then proceeded to chase the kitten around for 10 IRL minutes before squishing it. However, after it squished the kitten it ran into a murky pool and drowned itself."

"Cat! Free to a good mountainhome!"
"...But the cat's dead."
"That's the best part!"

I love that they attempted to sell you Schrodinger's cat.
You just HAD to look inside it, didn't you?
BTW, that cage should've been made of pitchblende to make it work best.

  • Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Once either population or accumulated wealth is big enough, they will come. They can be killed with a lot of training and some luck... but don't think simple doors can stop them. Although cage traps can stop most of them dead.
  • Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny: The dwarves have this in spades. In earlier versions, it was much worse, with dwarves instantly abandoning whatever job they were in the middle of the second they got hungry, thirsty or sleepy (which would occasionally spell doom for your fortress if the dwarf who was on his way to pull the lever that raised the drawbridge to seal out the invading goblin hordes suddenly decided he wanted a beer), but now dwarves will complete whatever job they're doing before going off to take care of something like that.
    • Must. Have. Socks!
  • Ax Crazy Urist McGloomy tantrums, destroying Urist McMason's masterwork table. Urist McGloomy calms down. Urist McMason tantrums, haphazardly batting Urist McDolt down the communal well. Urist McDolt flails about and drowns two feet away from a stairway up out of the well. Urist McDolt's brother, Urist McWoodchopper changes his name to Urist McDwarfchopper. Hilarity Ensues.
    • See also Disaster Dominoes. To the community, it's known as a "tantrum spiral" and has been known to kill many a fort.
    • At times it seems that the entire population is balanced on the axe-edge of utter insanity.
    • If they are extremely unhappy, a dwarf may occasionally be inexplicably overcome by a "fell mood". From the wiki:

A dwarf that goes into a fell mood will always take over a butcher's shop or a tanner's shop. If neither are available, any other workshop will be used instead. The dwarf will then murder the nearest dwarf (bonus if it's a noble), drag the corpse into the shop and make some sort of object out of dwarf leather or bone. Once the artifact is completed, the fell dwarf will become a legendary bone carver or leatherworker. Strangely, none of the other dwarves seem to mind the murder.

  • Awesome but Impractical: Perhaps the crowning example would be turning your fortress into a turing-complete fluid logic computer. Building it will take in-game years and a ridiculous amount of space, resources, and dwarfpower. Operating it will tax your system to the limit and require approximately an in-game week to complete a single opcode. On the other hand, you've built a computer. In a fantasy game. In a cave, with a bunch of rocks!
  • Badass Bookworm: Order your bookkeeper to take the most accurate inventory of your stocks possible. He, a weak, unassuming social dwarf, will proceed to lock himself in his study, and work silently for roughly a season. Eventually, he will re-emerge, and after all those hours of updating the records, will have acquired the character notes 'Ultra-Mighty', 'Perfectly Agile' and 'Superdwarvenly Tough'.
  • Bamboo Technology: Abstractions like levers activating arbitrarily remote machines built out of stone cogs apparently by infinite-distance quantum entanglement, and bugs such as perpetual motion machines made with water wheels and screw pumps allow for some amazing things. See the community page and CMOA page for details on the most impressive achievements, but even run-of-the-mill fortresses make use of magma-based wave motion guns.
  • Beneath the Earth: Where you'll be spending most of your time. However, if your dwarves stay underground for an extended period of time then come back onto the surface, they will become nauseous, and vomit all over the great outdoors.
  • Bizarrchitecture: Quite possible if you try hard enough. 'Dwarf physics' is very forgiving in a lot of ways.
  • Booby Trap/Deathtrap: Anything from mostly single-use "trap" tiles, like weapon and cage traps, to player-designed deathtraps, which can spread magma around dozens of tiles. And then dump water on it, freezing survivors in solid rock and drowning the rest.
    • A somewhat popular pastime is to then order your stoneworkers to sculpt statues from the freshly-formed obsidian rocks containing your enemies (or nobles, as the case may be) and put them on display around the fortress. While such undeath is not implemented (yet) in the game, it's still fun to imagine.
      • Unless you get fifty statues of elves with broken toes or humans taming eagles.
      • With the newly implemented ghosts, dead sentient creatures have a chance of doing assorted things to harm or annoy your little dwarfs. The way you fix that is to bury the corpse, or carve out a memorial in a stone. Nothing is more satisfying than encasing Elves in stone, then stopping their ghost from pissing you off by turning the rock their very bodies are in into the local Elven ghost prevention mechanism.
    • Drowning Pit
    • Lava Pit
    • Shark Pool: Anything from badger to carp to cave crocodile.
    • Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: Many players love to build complex traps.
  • Booze-Based Buff: Without alcohol, your dwarves will begin to take more and more breaks, and your fortress will slow down to a snail's pace. Dwarves literally slow down when deprived of alcohol.
  • Bottomless Pit: Generally considered to be a boon to your fortress. The latest version removed these, though you can still "discover a deep pit" within the caverns.
  • Cap: Population caps and FPS caps, FPS acting as a measure of game speed.
    • Which can thankfully be raised -or lowered, since a fortress that reaches the default population cap can bring a high end gaming machine to its knees- with some trivial config file hacking.
    • Only 60 productive hives.
  • Cave Behind the Falls: A common way to promote health of body and soul. Mist neutralizes miasma that makes dorfs unhappy and itself makes dorfs happier (which was even more important with the old mood system). Waterfalls in general are useful to generate mist, but falling water (over a floor grate/bars) in major passages also makes a walk-thru Decontamination Chamber. Even when there are no contaminants, dwarves simply like walking through mist.
    • On the Fun side, it creates potential for flooding if the sewer system below it fails, "job cancelled" message spam if there's too much water at once (e.g. whenever it hoses dorfs trying to clean the grates from all this dirt) and can significantly drop framerates on slower computers (though how much depends on construction (e.g. waves in a big reservoir make it worse)), and not as much as spreading blood and dirt all over the place does. Automation based on pressure plates can reduce these issues (as long as it doesn't fail due to a butterfly, guppy or crocodile stuck in a floodgate, of course), but not quite eliminate them.
    • Previously, if there was a waterfall on your map, dwarves had a strong tendency to cross the river at the point at which the water falls over the cliff, getting washed down and either being smashed against the bottom of the cliff or floating around until they drowned. Other dwarves would then try to claim their stuff, ad infinitum, until a whole fortress could be found floating face-down at the bottom of the falls.
  • Command and Conquer Economy: Though there are ways to reduce the amount of micromanaging required, generally you have to order everything to be built.
  • The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: "Unfortunate accidents" tend to befall nobles. Like being accidentally told to pull a lever that for some inexplicable reason locks their bedroom door and opens a floodgate that fills the room with magma.
  • Crazy Cat Lady: An unchecked cat population will create this, even after it becomes so large your frame-rate slows to a crawl. Also, Dwarves do not adopt cats. It's the other way around.
    • As Matt Boyd once found out, if the source of these cats is a pair owned by fortress residents, their refusal to give up their pets can force this down a road not dissimilar to the Shoe Event Horizon that took place on Frogstar B; basically, dwarf society reaches the Kitty Event Horizon and their entire socioeconomic structure starts to revolve around keeping the population in check.
      • Fortunately, both Crazy Cat Dwarves and their pets can be disposed of with a simple room that involves a long hallway with spikes in the floor, and a lever at the end that operates them.
    • This is a Crazy Cat Dwarf Jpeg Image. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. On the item is an image of Urist McCatbeard. On the the item is an image of cats. The cats form the beard of Urist McCatbeard. The artwork relates to the cats' adoption of Urist Mc Catbeard.
  • Cruel Player Character God: Half the point of the game.
  • Decontamination Chamber: Theoretically, dwarves try to clean both themselves and dirty floors. More likely, they will not only walk in goblins' blood and vomit, but contaminate the whole area with germs or poisons quickly melting a dwarf into puddle of pus (that will do the same to others on contact), if they can find any. So once the player can afford this, any entrance into habitable area tend to involve something like a waterfall or "Dwarven Bathtub".
  • Determinator: Dwarves tend to be this, whether they're Made of Plasticine or Made of Iron. Results... vary. To put it mildly. One dwarf has been seen charging through lava to brutalise a kobold, surviving without a scratch. Others will latch on to nightmare beasts from the dark places of the earth, even missing their entire lower bodies, and beat them into submission. Still, others will simply stand out in extreme cold and heat until they die.
  • Did You Just Build A House In Cthulhu's Backyard?: It's finally been done, someone actually colonized hell!
    • Alternately, there were also recommendations of building a tunnel that linked hell directly to the nearest elven settlement. As well as a recommendation of building a cafeteria there so people "dine in hell" literally.
    • Community forts have finally managed this. The ongoing fortress Deathgate pulled this off.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Deploy enough military and you can take down anything.
  • Difficult but Awesome: It could be argued that the entire game is this trope, what with the steep learning curve but the awesome things that can happen. This outlines the bare essentials needed for a fully self-sustaining fort; granted, any part (except perhaps making wooden beds) can be skipped. Note that it does not mention that getting a muddy cave often requires mechanisms and floodgates or an early expedition into the cave layers, which could as well be a source of quick Fun. Here is a similar diagram for getting your military operational.
  • Digging to China: Digging to Fire and Brimstone Hell, more like.
  • Disaster Dominoes: Often what kills your fortress when it isn't simply massacred by goblins or drowned by accidentally tunneling into the river. One unhappy dwarf irritates fifty others, and within five minutes every single dwarf in the fortress has gone literally Ax Crazy. Considering the quote for the page explains how you're most likely to have Fun in Dwarf Fortress, this shouldn't be much surprise.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: If there is a kobold civilization nearby, and your dwarves notice the kobolds, your civilization menu will say that exports from the kobolds are "petty annoyance" while offerings to the kobolds are "death".
    • Also, while "Dwarven Justice" does cover legitimate crimes such as vandalism or violence, these things rarely happen except in a fortress which is rapidly heading towards oblivion (see Disaster Dominoes above); said Justice is more often administered because a noble demanded a certain item be made, a bismuth bronze cabinet for example, and nobody built it because your current map doesn't contain the materials to make a bismuth bronze anything. The recipient of the justice is a randomly chosen dwarf with metalworking skill. And while it is possible to build "official" jail cells, there exists a dwarf noble called the Hammerer, whose only purpose is to administer Dwarven Justice by means of a large steel war hammer. Of course, arming your Sheriff/Captain of the guard/Hammerer with a nicely decorated training hammer made of very light wood is an option, but they'll hammer goblins with the same nerf weapon too; ultra-light crossbows are better, as they will be used normally on enemies and as bad hammers in melee, including on "criminals".
    • Players themselves are often more than willing to dish this out. Many Nobles have bedrooms that come complete with traps that will fill the room with magma, just in case they get too demanding.
    • Vampires get off relatively easy: punishment for a vampire sucking the blood out of a dozen of your fort's dwarves may only be 50 days in jail, or even just a punch in the face by the captain of the guard if you don't have restraints built. Not like it matters, however, as vampires are Made of Iron and will probably survive their own execution with nothing but some bruises and one very tired hammerer.
  • Dissonant Serenity: Reviewing the dwarves' descriptions after they die can reveal a number of them in varying stages of happiness at death. Some reasons:
    • They like to "take joy in slaughter". Self-explanatory.
    • Waterfall create mist. Dwarves for some reason love mist. In this case death is by drowning, of course.
  • Driven to Suicide: Melancholy dwarves, and other creatures, will attempt to throw themselves off a cliff or drown themselves (in lava or magma)... or, failing that, by simply starving themselves to death.
  • Drop the Hammer: the appropriately-named Hammerer.
  • Dug Too Deep: Dig deep enough and you will eventually reach Hell, instantly triggering an invasion of demons. More insidiously, all veins of adamantine (the best metal in the game) lead to Hell, making mining it a very risky prospect.

"Horrifying screams come from the darkness below."

  • Eat the Dog: Often considered to be the ideal solution to the "catsplosion" problem. Dogs and cats are also the most cost efficient source of live meat at startup, costing nearly 3/4 less per unit of meat than cows.
    • They also produce a steady supply of skulls for totems, which can be traded for goods, and bones, which can be used for a variety of things, but the most common and useful is making training ammo for your military.
  • Explosive Breeder: It was worse when all creatures "reproduced by spores" (didn't need to meet and mate, just have male and female present on the same map), but some still show impressive results if not hindered.
    • Cats breed quickly: it's up to you whether you choose to see this as an annoyance or as a plentiful supply of meat and leather... (or trade goods if you don't feel like indulging in Video Game Cruelty Potential).
      • You can also go into the config file, change cats' body temperature to be hot, and for bonus hijinx, give them the [SEVERONBREAK] flag so that their body parts fly off when damaged. This results in every cat on the map exploding into flaming chunks of gore, and is known as a thermonuclear catsplosion.
    • Since their addition to the game, egglayers, especially birds, have become even more spectacular at breeding than cats, since they can produce 10+ young at a time and unhatched clutches don't count toward the species population cap, allowing them to surpass it with ease. This is usually known as a chicksplosion or an eggsplosion.
      • Saltwater crocodile. 3 years to mature, but lays up to 70 eggs at once, becomes valuable after a year and such slaughterbasts when tamed make better guards than even war-trained dogs. Same for Cave crocodile, but up to 60 eggs, more valuable materials and a bad habit of tearing down wooden buildings.
  • Fluffy Tamer: The Dungeon Master in earlier versions, who let dwarves tame all sorts of strange and horrible creatures, ranging from dragons to crocodiles to Giant Cave Spiders. 34.06 removed the dungeon master and now lets you tame almost any animal right from the start. The catch is that without knowledge from the parent civilization or a really good animal trainer... well, to quote Toady, "your fort might end up like a Fatal Attractions episode."
  • For Massive Damage: With the physics derived combat damage calculations introduced in the 2010 update, weapon traps with huge purpose-built weapons (giant spiked balls, corkscrews, large serrated discs, etc) do considerably more damage than equivalent material hand-held weapons used in the same type of weapon, especially when up to ten of them are packed into the same trap. This may also result in Ludicrous Gibs flying everywhere if an unwary foe steps on really full one made with good materials.
  • Fungus Humongous: The Tower-Caps, mushrooms so large they can be made into beds. The new version adds many more varieties growing in the expansive underground.
    • The game treats such fungus as a form of wood, and anything that can be built from wood can be built from such fungus. A particular breed of fungus found in the deepest caves has triple the material density of the other breeds. Thanks to the game's material-based combat system, this makes ballista bolts made from such wood three-times more massive than usual, resulting in a huge net damage boost to an already powerful weapon (metal arrowheads are better, but more expensive, and wood is a renewable resource).
  • Full-Frontal Assault: In some earlier versions, dwarves didn't mind if they were clothed or not, so there have been numerous instances of them going into battle naked. The success of this is varied. Note that 34.06 reintroduced unhappy thoughts from being naked, as part of the clothing bug fix.
  • Guide Dang It: The controls. There's a wiki for a reason.
    • Hell, the everything. Without a guide, the only way to figure out which stone is magma-safe is by losing fort after fort by trial-and-error.
      • You can read the "raws", text files which describe almost everything that can exist in the game. This includes the melting point of the various stones.
      • One of the status menus (for enabling/disabling various types of stone in construction) lists all types of stone, states which are magma-safe, and even lists additional uses for each.
  • Hide Your Children: Dwarf Fortress isn't squeamish about putting children and infants in terrible peril. Dwarven women will even give birth whilst in battle. Babies in fact make good shields for mothers who run into battle.
  • Horse of a Different Color: There's a bunch of exotic mounts... Goblins sometimes drop in riding things like Voracious cave crawler (building-crushing carnivorous centipedes) and Cave crocodile.
  • The Hypnotoad: Cats. Dwarfs don't adopt cats as pets... cats adopt dwarfs. This is the cat's primary protection against bloodthirsty butchers who can't slaughter animals who are someone's pet.
  • I Call It Vera: If a dwarf gets sufficiently attached to a weapon, they will bestow a name upon it.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Spear traps. Menacing spike traps...
  • Improbable Weapon User/Improvised Weapon: Coins, pebbles and even your opponent's vomit can be thrown For Massive Damage.
  • In-Universe Game Clock: The game keeps track of how long your dwarfs have been at the fortress, and things like weather, available crops and arrival of traders are tied to the season.
  • An Interior Designer Is You: And your dwarves, of course.
  • It Gets Easier: Dwarves have a psychological trauma stat. As it increases, they're less affected by negative thoughts.
  • Kill It with Fire: Flooding a map with magma. Dropping critters into magma. Dropping things into magma from great height to spray magma mist. Floors made of lignite or graphite grates set on fire. Flamethrowing critters from fire imps to dragons plus some machinery to restrain and/or protect them... you get the idea.
  • Kill It with Water: It's not unheard of for players to have drowning traps and/or drowning chambers to provide an unpleasant fate for goblins. Should the player make a mistake somewhere in the design or construction, it's quite likely to end up with the entire fortress becoming submerged.
    • This is occasionally combined with the aforementioned Kill It with Fire example, as when magma and water are combined, they create obsidian. Rarely you will find a player who has constructed a death chamber with access routes from both water and magma with the express purpose of encasing whatever comes in to that room in obsidian.
    • Additionally, pressure can cause finding an underground river at the wrong spot and with the wrong fortress layout to flood everything.
  • King Incognito: Striking adamantine before the dwarven king would normally arrive makes him come in the guise of a migrant. This doesn't stop him from demanding lodging fit for his job, though.
  • Lava Pit: Players love these. Boatmurdered's arguably most famous bit was the attempt to completely wipe out the local elephant population with magma streams.
  • Let's Get Dangerous: Goblin attacks work this way. At the beginning of your fortress they only send small and weak raiding parties, but once you hit 80 population and get more wealth they up the ante. Goblin sieges can now include larger goblin squads led by weapon master, building-destroying trolls, trap-avoiding master thieves, cavalry mounted on Beak Dogs and leaders on flying mounts who can bypass all of your carefully constructed ground-level walls and moats. Those attacks will continue, getting worse each time, until you either really have fun, or you just burn the entire fortress area with lava.
    • Plans for future updates indicate that this will only get even worse: there are already plans to incorporate miners into sieges, who will dig their way to the inside of your fortress if you don't stop them fast enough.
    • Climbing has been all-but-guaranteed for invaders in the next release. Thought those 5-unit-high walls were good enough? Think again!
  • Let's Play: A popular pastime in the community thanks to the game's flexibility and unpredictability. It's customary for famous dwarves to be named after the participants in the thread, and the audience to have a say in the fortress' policy.
    • Succession forts, where control of the fortress passes to a new player every ingame year, are also popular. Miscommunication and differing playstyles are a prominent source of Fun.
    • Boatmurdered, a long and storied succession game held by the Something Awful community, was many people's introduction to the game. It illustrated a lot of the game's elements, with a recurrent emphasis on those associated with madness and death.
    • [Headshoots/ Headshoots] and its sequel Syrupleaf are also quite notable.
    • Bravemule is another notable example, featuring illustrations and music. Instead of a succession game, it's done by one person.
  • Loads and Loads of Rules: We're not kidding about the "insanely complicated" thing.
  • Lord British Postulate: If it exists, the players will find a way to kill it. Probably in a really awesome fashion. Then they'll usually move on to weaponizing it.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Versions include a lot more useful information about the region you're preparing to build on, but the spawn-point of your starting settlers and their wagon is as close to the center of the centermost embark-map square as possible. This can occasionally be a nuisance if you're the wrong side of a river from a good site to dig in and haven't got much in the way of materials, and occasionally causes a Total Party Kill thanks to a bug caused by the way freezing and melting works.
    • Also, selecting 'Embark Now!' rather than 'Prepare for the journey carefully'. See below.
  • Mad Artist: Every now and then, one of your dwarves will be so stricken with inspiration for an artifact that he'll simply drop what he's doing, take over a workshop, and demand items to work with. Success produces an awesome and valuable artifact and may promote the Artist to Legendary in the appropriate skill. Failure results in the dwarf either throwing away their clothes while running around babbling madly until they starve to death, being Driven to Suicide, or going completely Ax Crazy.
    • In fact, depending on the Mood that takes them, some of them laugh maniacally, grab other dwarves, drag them into a workshop, murder them and make their corpses into stuff.
    • One particularly memorable result: Planepacked, a statue WITH THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE WRITTEN ON IT. Including 73 pictures of itself.
    • The LP of Headshoots featured a dwarf struck by inspiration while lame. He would try to crawl to a workshop, but dwarves tasked with tending to the wounded automatically dragged him back. This happened for long enough that he went insane and committed suicide.
  • Make It Look Like an Accident: So, one of your nobles is demanding you make them glass windows... despite failing to notice that you're not in a locale where there's glass. Shortly after, many players have found that the aforementioned nobles have suffered an "unfortunate accident" which they had nothing to do with whatsoever.
  • Malevolent Architecture: It's more or less possible to make your fortress invincible by rigging it to reduce any invader to a fine paste. It's just as easy to accidentally flood your own fortress - or the entire world - with water. Or, slightly more difficult since it doesn't flow up as readily, magma.
    • Even more fun in succession games (and occasionally in your own) where someone has set up mechanisms with levers located close to each other. One raises the drawbridge in order to repel a goblin invasion, the other opens the floodgates that keep your fortress from flooding with magma. Neither of them are labeled...
  • Mordor: Really evil biomes have special plants and horrible things like eyestalk and finger "grass". In the newest version, the worst Mordor-like hell-on-earth settings also have showers of blood and cursed mist with similar symptoms to forgotten beasts.
  • Mundane Utility: Bottomless Pits? You now have a garbage disposal. Unicorns? Delicious, and products manufactured from their bodies fetch a fine price. Magma? Invaluable.
    • Farming merpeople is no longer economically viable in unmodded games. Toady One found the thread and Squicked hard enough to mod the value of mer-bone to the bare minimum. Previously, it was comparable to dragon bone in value.
    • A whole lot of elaborate mechanical Pointless Doomsday Devices can be used like this. Pumping magma up to a more usable level? Melt your enemies, or use it to make magma-powered forges more accessible. Combine it with a water pump to encase goblins in obsidian? You now have a way to mass-produce a valuable stone. Cage trap caught some otherwise-dangerous creature? Install the cage as furniture for your dwarves to admire, keeping them content.
  • Nintendo Hard: Not only is the game hard to master, it's also hard to learn.
  • Non-Human Undead: Any kind of living creature can have a zombie or skeletal version, including monsters like dragons, giants and imps.
  • Our Ghosts Are Different: Dwarf Fortress ghosts just want a proper burial. Until they get at least a grave marker, they will haunt the people they knew in life. Their actions range from "misplacing" items, to violently attacking the people they hated, to... throwing parties??
  • Paint the Town Red: You'll end up with blood all over whatever godawful fields of traps you set up in front of your fortress, and in the latest version, buggy mechanics for bathing will leave a giant pool of the stuff around your well when your dwarves come to clean themselves off.
    • One of the biggest complaints is that blood in water multiplies infinitely. One blood spatter in a puddle and every one of your dwarves that walks through will get a coating of that blood, tracking it everywhere, without ever diluting into nothingness.
    • Some players love having a map covered in the blood of their slain enemies, others find it annoying as hell that it gets tracked everywhere and never goes away. A recent release added a toggle to turn it on and off, satisfying both camps.
  • Powered by a Forsaken Child: Dwarves sometimes go into "fell moods", where they go out and kill the nearest dwarf they can find (hopefully a noble or someone else you don't mind losing), butcher them, and make an awesome artifact out of their flesh or bones.
  • Power Glows: For a loose definition of 'power.' Dwarves who reach Legendary in any skill will cycle from their sprite's normal color to a slightly brighter shade of that color and back every second or so. This is basically the dwarven equivalent of going super saiyan, as any dwarves who reach legendary will likely also be Superdwarvenly Tough or Extremely Agile or some such thing.
  • Pressure Plate: Can be set to react on weight of passing creatures (including or excluding your citizen), liquid level or minecart tracks.
  • Respawning Enemies: Area and site specific enemies respawn every year; as does magma, which is technically part of the terrain, but can certainly seem like an enemy if your design relies on that vent you drained being permanently drained.
  • Rube Goldberg Device: It's amazing what can be done with a couple of pumps, windmills, gear shafts, mechanisms, axles, levers and pressure plates.
  • Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: A favorite pastime is the invention of various elaborate ways of dealing with pests such as nobles and the like.
    • It took thirty dwarves six years to build, uses more than a hundred mechanisms, twenty pumps, a dozen pressure plates and seven floodgates, refills and resets itself automatically, slams the gates shut and activates when an enemy steps on the pressure plate... and accidentally floods your entire fortress with magma.
  • Schmuck Bait: Building destroyer monsters crush anything they can break. Including the only support standing between them and a major cave-in. Or floodgate of a magma reservoir from which they may or may not escape: if a magma-proof pressure plate seals the exits with bridges, a tough and otherwise untrappable creature undergoes magma-frying, and if it survives that, room-wide obsidian encasement.
    • This, of course, is used by cunning players to trap or kill building destroyers.
    • What Does This Button Do?: Gremlins will happily pull any lever they can find... whether it floods the whole map with magma or does nothing except trapping or killing anyone who pulls it.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Goblin sieges tend to rapidly run out of steam when they hit heavy resistance and/or ridiculously long passageway of weapon traps, and the last few survivors begin discreetly marching in the other direction.
    • Death of a squad leader will cause an invading squad to bug out. If the leader of the siege is killed, the entire siege panics and tries to run away.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: This fortress will never trade! This entire fortress will be sober! This fortress will be nude! And so on and so forth.
    • The story that immortalized the name "Urist" was a challenge game to make an entire fortress with a single dwarf (i.e. killing off all the others).
  • Spike Balls of Doom: The spiked ball trap component. Has the same 3x attacks as Serrated Disk, but doesn't make this much of a mess and consequently doesn't often get jammed with the pieces of its last victim.
  • Spikes of Doom: Dwarves seem to love making things that menace with spikes. There are also "menacing spikes" which can be linked to pressure plates, installed into weapon traps, or also be placed at the bottom of a pit to increase the damage done to anything that falls into it.
  • Tantrum Throwing: If a dwarf becomes depressed enough, they might start smashing or throwing things.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Dwarves have a bad tendency to cancel their job at the worst possible time to do some useless action. Like when Urist McSoldier decides that getting drunk is a way better idea than protecting the fortress against the goblins that are right outside the front door.
  • Training from Hell: One very efficient method of training your military dwarves is to make them train in a room filled with spear traps set on repeat. They'll constantly be getting experience from dodging and parrying the spears. Of course, should they fail to parry or dodge even once, horrible injury may result. Wooden training spears will cut down on the injuries, but pets (like war dogs assigned to your troops) and babies/children will take damage as if hit with actual spears and die rapidly if they enter the training room.
  • Trap Door: Mechanized hatch covers. Retractable bridges are often used this way, too.
  • Tunnel King: Dwarves being Tunnel Kings is a central mechanic to the game.
  • Tunnel Network: Dwarven fortresses tend to be underground. You do the math.
  • Understatement: While people laying siege to your fortress are known as "Invaders", megabeasts are appropriately noted to be "Uninvited Guests."
  • Unexpected Successor: Nobles are dying, titles are inherited. Sometimes by your dwarves. And since your dwarves don't leave the site... How "unexpected" this is may vary though: if you choose an extinct or dying civilization, when you press "embark", the game will warn via confirmation screen that this settlement is going to be ears-deem in nobles (nobles have requirements, demands and mandates, thus it is something to be considered carefully, much like e.g. an aquifer layer).
  • Unusable Enemy Equipment: Humans and Kobold clothing and armor is the wrong size for your dwarves, being too large and too small, respectively. Understandable, as they are vastly different size compared to dwarves. Goblin and elven equipment is the same size as dwarven one, but is also inferior in quality: goblins are incapable of smelting bronze and steel, so they only use copper and iron, and elves make their entire wargear out of wood. Including swords and axes.
    • As of version 0.31, you can now equip those exotic weapons whips, pikes and bows. Also, any weapons can be used in traps.
    • Useless metal items can be melted down for metal bars. Thus leading to the joke that goblins are the fourth ore of iron...
  • Video Game Caring Potential: Varies, but with each dwarf having an astonishing degree of personality built into the game, players can get damned protective of a few favorites. They still die in droves though. It's common practice to take better care of the original seven dwarves. This can extend past the grave, with many players taking the Egyptian approach, and sacrifice huge riches into their tombs.
  • War Elephants: Can be trained as of the 2010 version.
  • Wax On, Wax Off: Cross-training.
  • With This Herring: Of the extraordinarily large number of skills and items available to take with you when starting a new fortress, only a relatively small percentage of them will increase your chances of living to see the first caravan. You will have this brought home to you very rapidly the first time you select 'Embark Now!' instead of 'Prepare for the journey carefully' when starting a new fortress.
  • Worst Aid: Training a new medic will involve a lot of incidental malpractice. One notorious misdiagnosis by a skill-less dwarven idiot led to a minor cut on the arm being misdiagnosed as rotting lungs which were then removed surgically. "Oh. They weren't rotting after all. Let's take a moment of silence for Urist McLearningExperience."
  • Zombie Apocalypse: Quickly becoming the easiest way for a fortress in an evil biome or within the vicinity of a necromancer's tower to die, due to corpses and body parts spontaneously rising up to attack you and refusing to stay dead.

List of tropes specific to Adventure Mode:

  • 100% Heroism Rating: Dwarves love their history, and if your adventurer has done anything noteworthy within range of a fortress embark, they will canonize the player in artworks. As of 3.18, an adventurer acquires renown for slaying beasts and bandits within a single civilization, and will be greeted with respect, even awe if they have high enough reputation to get quests directly from region rulers. As your reputation goes up, you're also capable of recruiting more people to fight with you at once, getting as much as 9 1/2 times as much as a reputation-less adventure could.
  • Always a Bigger Fish: It's been the case for many adventurers where an ambush or attack is suddenly interrupted by a swarm of wild animals which often turn the tide of battle.
  • Anyone Can Die: Which leads to...
  • Apocalypse How: with enough wrecked fortresses and berserking adventurers, expecially in a small enough world, civilities will eventually deteriorate, then crumble.You can then proceed to cause the extinction of all sentient races.Then that of every single living being in the world. And because The Toady One Thinks of Everything, your world will acknowledge this by entering the Age of Twilight/Death/Emptiness.
  • Badass Boast: Legendary enemies who are capable of speaking will tell of their feats as soon as they can see you.
  • Bag of Holding: Your adventurer can carry around a dozen dead wolves, three barrels of booze, a massive supply of food, and 800 million fistfuls of sand in his backpack, but the weight will still slow him to a snail's pace.
    • Carrying a giant will slow you down significantly. Picking up a second will slow you down significantly less. There's no difference between carrying three giants in your backpack and carrying thirty.
  • Body Surf: Via Good Bad Bugs, it's possible to suddenly shift from controlling an adventurer to an underground creature (even a demon), then to bodyswap to some other animal every time you go to sleep.

"I'll bet you didn't know cave crocodiles have high musicality."

  • Coup De Grace: Unconscious foes are open to any attack you like, which will be guaranteed to hit and due massive damage. So you can execute them anywhere you like. The AI goes for decapitation/skull crushing (even if the head is much better armored than other vital parts), but players have been known to drag the process out.
  • Death Seeker: "I will agree to travel with you if you lead me to glory and death." -- Said by some NPCs upon joining the party. Although they don't specify whose death.
  • Dump Stat: With Adventurer creation now letting you lower attributes below average to free up more points, attributes that currently serve no purpose in Adventure mode (like Creativity, Patience and Memory) or at all (Musicality) have officially become this.
  • Grievous Harm with a Body: You can use anything as an Improvised Weapon in Adventure mode, including your opponent's leg.
  • Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: No direct difficulty levels, but in Adventure mode, there are three tiers for the level of ability points you start with: peasant, hero and demigod.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Certain races (like goblins) will leave impaled enemies around their fortresses. Meaning that if your adventurer dies against them, you can come back with a different one and see his impaled corpse. And use it as a weapon.
  • Improvised Weapon: In Adventure mode, everything is a weapon. Including skulls, fistfuls of sand, vomit and your opponent's severed leg. This is mostly due to a bug that makes thrown items ludicrously deadly, to the point where you can cave someone's head in with a lucky throw of a sock... or even a fluffy wambler, killing no less than a Bronze Colossus.
  • Instant Death Radius: Only with stealth and really good armor can you have a chance of killing some of the more powerful ranged opponents if you have a melee weapon.
  • Inventional Wisdom: As any given game progresses, the chances of something improbable and absurd happening because the player forgot precisely what a certain lever or pressure plate does approaches almost certainty.
  • Kill It with Ice: The aforementioned freezing is the most annoying and, due to the common practice of training swimming to get stronger, one of the most common death in adventurer mode.
  • Kleptomaniac Hero: As of version 34.01, you can take anything lying around not marked as being for sale without angering anyone, including gear lying around in keeps and stockpiled goods in warehouses. Except for stuff in cabinets, which can't be opened because of a bug.
  • MacGyvering: The sword is stuck in the enemy's leg? What weapon to use now? What about the ripped off arm over there, or throw some blood, mud and vomit.
  • Man Bites Man: With aimed and chosen attacks implemented, adventurers are now free to attack by biting completely at will instead of only when their arms are cut off.
  • News Travels Fast: All you have to do to let an entire city know that you killed the monster is tell one person.
  • Previous Player Character Cameo: You can meet your own retired adventurer. Better yet, you can recruit him too!
  • Retired Badass: Retirement is the only way play a new game in the same region without killing your current adventurer. Better make sure you didn't retire any of your past legendary+++ swordsmen adventurers in the town you're about to rampage through...
  • Shoplift and Die: Steal anything in Adventure mode, and it's automatically acknowledged by everyone in the civilization, who will immediately proceed to attack you. Toady has stated that fixing this is on his to-do list: part of enabling the "Thief" Adventurer Role means changing thievery from automatically recognized to discovered and investigated by townfolk (which you can counter by changing your appearance), then they will arrest you alive if you surrender.
    • Currently downgraded to 'Shoplift and Get The Silent Treatment': no matter what your reputation with the faction, you're instantly branded Criminal, and no member will speak to you. This means they won't give you quests for which they weren't going to reward you for anyway, but more importantly they won't let you stay in their houses overnight forcing you to hide from bogeymen in mountains, lairs, and beaches.
  • Sssssnaketalk: The serpent men, when you speak to or as one in adventure mode. This is caused by the [LISP] tag the species has.
  • Talking Is a Free Action: Previously played straight, as conversation was always one-on-one, instantaneous, and in its own menu. As of version 0.40, conversion is now in "real time", so to speak, as each bit of speech is an action directed toward a specific person or to everyone in the area, while conversations are overheard by anyone in earshot.
  • Things That Go Bump in the Night: When peasants warn that you shouldn't stay out at night, lest the bogeymen get you, listen to them.
  • Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If you find a small, defenseless creature (like a groundhog or monkey), you can use them to raise your wrestling skills significantly. You can go up several levels in a very short time, provided you're willing to be unnecessarily cruel to your opponent. Especially if you're playing a creature like a bronze colossus, who is capable of pinching off body parts. Start with the fingers and toes, then pull out the teeth, then ears, eyes, nose, any other extremities you can target, then finish off with a pinch to the head... if you want to finish him. You could always just leave the poor guy to bleed to death, if he's still alive when you're done.
  • Villain Teleportation: If you try to run away from bogeymen, they just teleport into your path.
  • Walking the Earth: Becomes this, over the course of a long-lived adventuring career. If your character comes from a particularly uneventful corner of the world, then it begins this way.
  • Welcome to Corneria: The NPCs can become very repetitive in adventure mode.
    • When asking a child his profession: "You look like a mighty warrior." "I'm four!"
    • Now it's been slightly expanded:

"You look like a fine warrior!"
"I'm a thresher."
"You look like a fine warrior!"
"No, I'm a thresher."

  • Wide Open Sandbox: Taken to an extreme in that there is no way to finish or win the game, and the only goal is to not lose.

No longer present, but appeared in old versions:

  • Angst? What Angst?: Since happiness/sadness is quantified in-universe, as a simple sliding scale, it's possible for a large number of minor pleasures to completely cancel out tragedies that would normally be expected to cause a Heroic BSOD. The DF Wiki features a quote describing dwarves as being "strange creatures who balance out at 'happy' because on one hand their wife was eaten by elephants and on the other they just ate in a REALLY NICE dining room."
    • 0.40.14 changed to more multi-dimensional and personality-related emotion system. And "stress level" became more of a long-term thing, since it doesn't have to react on everything at all.
  • Big Eater: For a while tame grazers were bugged with requirements set so high that larger ones would starve to death while eating. The usual solution is editing the raw files to decrease their grazing requirements or just turn off grazing for them altogether.
  • Bug War: Due to a bug in 34.01, giant mosquitoes tended to show up in swarms of over a hundred, killing FPS and dwarves alike. Thankfully, this was fixed in the subsequent release.
  • Bunny Ears Lawyer: This would be the Dungeon Master in a nutshell. This Dwarf loves cloaks so damn much that he will collect and wear thick stacks of them to the exclusion of any other item of clothing except socks -- because every dwarf loves their socks. However, this dwarf will also tame and train the most powerful, exotic and badass beasts you can catch; giant eagles, elephants, dragons, and monkeys. He or she also often wanders around the fortress wearing only gloves, socks, shoes, and a thick stack of capes. It was also bugged into usually never appearing at all, so Dungeon Master as such is removed after 0.34.06
  • Droste Image: An amusing bug made items add images of themselves, because the given object already exists when we're adding decorations to it, and artifacts (and possibly masterwork) are automatically notorious enough to be depicted in art. Hence things like Planepacked.
  • Never Bring a Knife to A Fist Fight: In previous versions, champion wrestlers could be terrifying, capable of punching a charging knight's warhorse out from underneath him, hard enough to punt the animal back 40 feet and have it explode into gristle on impact. The 6ft tall, heavily armored, highly trained knight will then rapidly find all his limbs snapped by a short, blood-and-vomit-encrusted psychopath, leaving him crippled and helpless whilst being slowly stomped to death through the protection his armour still offers against normal attack.
    • Since DF 2010, unarmed dwarves can no longer damage armored foes as easily nor gain superdwarvenly strength.
  • You Fail Economics Forever: The "Dwarven Economy" was so horrendously broken that DF2010 removed it completely.
    • Three Panel Soul illustrates this.
    • Also contributing to the removal decision was the matter that stacks of coins did not get re-stacked after being separated, leading to an ever increasing burden on CPUs.

Urist McTroper cancels Play Dwarf Fortress: Interrupted by Trope.

  1. ↑ Which at least could be explained by poor recycling techniques resulting in much of the material being lost with the slag.
  2. ↑ Though they don't poison anybody. Yet.
  3. ↑ A form of uranium ore, also containing radium and lead.
  4. ↑ Except dwarves will never butcher sentients, and that band of goblins that ambushed you just happen to be made of sentient creatures. Oh Crap indeed.
  5. ↑ Or you could just add a roof, but where would the Fun be in that?
  6. ↑ On the other hand, modding is easy enough that adding features like magic could be done if desired (at least as far as innate attacks go), which could be used to make the game much easier (or harder)...
  7. ↑ Needless to say, this latter fact is routinely abused by the player base to make all-vampire fortresses.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress?oldid=2019008"