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Nah the best bug was cats dying of alcohol poisoning because they’d walk through the tavern, get booze spilled on them, and then lick it off themselves when cleaning. Since they weren’t programmed to drink booze directly, they had 0 tolerance for it and would easily die from it.
I always hear about Dwarf Fortress being the spiritual progenitor of Rimworld; “It walked so Rimworld could Run” kind of thing. But honestly everything I’m reading in the comments makes it sound even MORE fucked up than Rimworld (in the best kind of way).
There was another bug where dwarfs would sometimes go blind after a fight. The problem was that they got blood in their eyes and had no way to get it out. This led to the addition of eyelids so they could blink away blood.
Starting with 2 cats would mean the extinction of local wildlife because they would breed and hunt everything until there are only cats.
Dwarf Fortress is so complicated that the bugs tend to be hilarious.
Then there is boatmurdered… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boatmurdered
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI1UmlfP1Cg
Fredrick Knudsen video on boatmurdered if you would rather listen/watch
Those are hilarious examples!
EDIT: Okay clearly the cat alcohol story is already infamous and is recounted much better about a dozen times in this very thread. XD
Also don’t forget players discovering tons of dead cats, apparently from alcohol poisoning.If I recall correctly, their fur absorbed liquids. The cats walked in booze. Each paw counted erroneously as a full mug of beer absorbed. When the cats cleaned themselves, they drunk themselves to death.Game is absolutely bonkers wild and a gem of emergent mechanics.
For anyone anyone who wants a good idea of how fucky Dwarf Fortress is go listen to the Jabroni Mike stream on Boatmurdered. I will spoil nothing.
Remember E stands for Elephant.
BlindiRL did one too, just recently:
I haven’t seen the one by Jabroni Mike, but Fredrik Knudsen has a good breakdown too.
The Jabroni Mike one was done with Fredrik Knudsen like 4 years ago. Also if you want to watch Fredrick Knudsen do a Mage the Ascension game he does one with some of Bruva Alfabusas crew, also it’s on Bruva Alfabusas channel.
The real gold were the bugs we met along the way.
Eg. 4th November release notes:
- Hospital patients and babies don’t shut off the brains of people carrying them, again.
Classic babies
My favorite was
“Cats randomly dieing… Alcohol poisioning ?”
Turns out fur had the same liquid container code as mugs, and the minimum size was a pint…
Not quite. The bug chain went like this.
They added cats. Because the dev has a cat, he had the cats have some catlike behaviors, including licking itself clean. This tied into the ingestion code, deliberately.
The ingestion feature hooks into the new syndrome system. There are all kinds of procedurally generated poisons that can do all kinds of nasty things, mostly for the “forgotten beasts” that dwell in the caverns to make use of. While he was at it, he added the syndromes for a couple of canonical substances as well, primarily alcohol, inputting the values for a serving of beer, whiskey, etc, that a dwarf might drink, so that they can get drunk, and even sick if they overindulge. This is calculated by body weight.
Elsewhere was included a contamination feature, so that walking through puddles would get mud on your dwarves boots and clothes.
Then he added bars for the dwarves, and gave them carousing features such as quaffing, which would end up with spilled drinks on the floor.
Result? Cats walk through puddles of beer, get it on their paws, and lick it off. The syndrome information of the beer or whiskey or whatever is then applied to the cat. This is not a bug, this is intentional behavior.
The bug was that the full dosage of the syndrome was applied upon ingesting a contaminant. So the few drops of beer or whiskey were being treated as if they were full servings, so when the alcohol was applied to the cats’ body weight, which again, was an intended feature, it absolutely overwhelmed them and the cats started dying of alcohol poisoning. Just from the smattering on their fur.
It’s an awesome series of steps and combinations of systems to get this bug, and 99% of it was fully intended. And that’s all you need to know about dwarf fortress.
Appreciate the full details, that game is a masterpiece, and that was a bit too long to copy-pasta/research at the time. [Gives internet gold star]
This story was what got me into DF in the first place
Was that just so you could get a pint of blood from the cats? And then the cats die of alcohol poisoning because you have a secret vampire cat and they normally hit the bottle pretty hard, but with not enough blood disorder they get wasted too easy and thus die.
You know what I just got an idea
Dwarf Fortress bug reports are incredible. Since this is lemmy I’m sure people have heard of the alcoholic cats but it’s a fun reread
I just can’t beat the drunken cat bug… That was the one where the cats were showing up dead all over the tavern floor, and it turned out they were ingesting spilled alcohol when they cleaned their paws.
I think that bug explains very well just how deeply complex Dwarf Fortress really is. Drinks can be spilled. Some drinks have alcohol. If cats step in something it sticks to their paws. Cats clean their paws, causing them to ingest what’s on them. Enough alcohol will kill a cat. Put together: dead drunken cats.
I vaguely remember that part of the problem was the game didn’t differentiate between licking a small amount of ale and drinking a whole glass. So the cats were basically chugging a beer each time they cleaned their paws
This might be the best advertising I’ve seen for this game, and now I want to try it.
It’s on sale on steam right now. I said screw it and am diving in mostly blind, only watched one video on steam after reading this post. Wish me luck
Good luck bit you won’t be able to dive in blind, it’s far to complex to do it without tutorials and so on. It’s a bit hard to get into it initially as the learning curve is steep and the UI clunky. (I played several years ago though so hopefully it improved) Also just for people to know the game is open source and free (like in free beers) if you don’t want to buy it on steam. On Steam you support the developers though
My favorite bug ever.
Tarn once explained it in more detail: the game’s code is object oriented, and the small amount of beer on a cat’s paw inherited all the variables of a full mug of beer. And the game uses a creature’s body size + amount of alcohol ingested to calculate/simulate drunkenness (all the way to alcohol poisoning and death).
Or how carp was overpowered, and could take down entire squad of dwarves that wandered too close to water.
I need more DF bugs, that game is such a gem. Bought it 3x on Steam, just to support devs even more. Apart from Patreon I mean.
Tarn mentioned a couple of his favorite bugs in this interview:
My favorites are the one where the farmer walked over to the furniture stockpile, grabbed a bed, walked over to his farm and planted it, and the one with the injured hammerer. The hammerer is the dwarven executioner. When both of his arms were broken and he was unable to hold his hammer to administer Dwarven Justice, he still went ahead with the punishment, but he bit his victims. This included shaking his head vigorously and tearing their arms off, which he then held in his mouth for years.
What the fuck is this game I am not capable of evening
DF is a unique, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes hilarious, always interesting experience. There’s nothing like it, although many people have tried.
Work enthusiasim companies expect for minimum-wage be like.
When I read “injured hammerer” I initially read hammer, which made me think of an ARK Survival Evolved bug from years back. This was more unhinged though.
Regardless; vehicles, I believe, are basically just dinosaurs without a lot of the dinosaur-ish abilities, as far as the code is concerned. At least that used to be the case. When rafts were initially implemented, they’d forgotten to disable the hunger functionality on them, because over time your raft would starve to death.
Thermonuclear catsplosions were my favourite
One of the few games so special that even bugs improve the experience.
IIRC, the devs re-used code for dwarves blinking, which resulted in cats licking their beer-soaked paws at the same rate as blinking. Even a small amount ingested per lick at that rate led to alcohol poisoning.
Why was the game tracking when dwarves blink wtf??
Because they would go blind if they got blood in their eyes
so it knows for how long dwarves are affected by spilled beer in their eyes, duh
Oh my god, I didn’t know how complex Dwarf Fortress is (I’ve played rimworld so I’m familiar)
I’ve seen and picked up describing Rimworld as Dwarf Fortress for babies (positive). Sometimes I want a baby game! Like, 1000+ hours of a baby game. Don’t judge me.
Yeah Rimworld is definitely my go to if I want to play DF but don’t have the energy to deal with the complexity of DF. Both are great.
Yeah, no, it’s ridiculously, nonsensically complex. In the most delightful and unexpected ways. Like, it’s not necessarily complex in the ways that you think it is or should be complex. It’s complex in ways that you never even would’ve imagined. For no real reason. Just because.
I’m digging rimworld and have df owned but odd sometimes the names of things are “fuzzy” to my eyes. maybe font, coloring, whatever … I just can’t find myself connecting to the names. I’ll keep trying though.
Check your resolution and scaling settings if it’s literally blurry. If you’re not using an integer multiple of your monitor’s native resolution, fonts can become hard to read because they don’t scale evenly into the pixels available. Sometimes games launch for the first time with weird defaults for resolution, so worth having a look if you haven’t already.
You can give them nicknames in game if that makes it easier. You can also change the pool of names or even the entire dwarven language if you want, it’s all text files (at least in the ascii version, not sure about Steam)
thanks!! good ideas.
It’s a different but amazing flavor of shit crusader kings or rimworld say
Removed by mod
That sounds like a pretty standard event from my memory of playing DF lol
Thats metal as fuck
Babwug new band name called it
godddam
id love a babwug and btbam concert
This sounds like a lyric in the most epic metal song of all time.
It’s even better because it’s kind of true. Kids believe the weirdest shit and most of the time when they realize they were wrong, they just correct their misconceptions without explaining them to anyone. The next time a kid asks you how something works, ask them how they think it works; it’s like listening to Calvin’s dad’s explanations of the world.
Better than the one where werewolves dected hell below and thus climbed scared on trees?
I feel like that has vastly deeper meaning than it was ever intended to. A philosopher or sociologist could probably write their masterwork with that title someday.
Some bugs are so good, you leave them in.
Ah the fish wrestling game
I just love this game. I don’t have the time to play but I love reading the weird shit that happens in it.
I don’t seem to hear as much anymore, but for a long time this was me with EVE Online.
I kept reading r/Eve for years after winning. Seemed to slow down after the casino war, then the Mittani left. Just today I see that Pandemic Horde is disbanding.
I think eve might be winding down honestly. New player experience is still fucking awful and the people that had time and money in the past to dedicate to eve seem to be moving on.
Not saying it’s going to die soon probably just a gradual slow down.
I never really played that one or followed the stories on it, but I always thought it might be a good fit for me because I remember there were a lot of excited players when Excel integration was announced.
A user base excited about data and spreadsheets? Hell yeah.
