History VideoGame / DwarfFortress

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** 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. [[TooDumbToLive 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. [[TooDumbToLive 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 [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=60989.0 received its own shout out]] in the latest WorldOfWarcraft expansion.
** This is a direct quote from this [[http://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/dvgns/one_of_my_fortresses_finally_had_enough_effec-%20t_on/ reddit]] (pay no mind with the extinction of the HFS, [[UnusuallyUninterestingSight Arrival of the Golden Age]], [[{{HSQ}} 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."''
** Will eagerly pass through rooms with ''the whole floor'' burning (lignite/graphite grates, little magma washing) -- "the mere fact that a location is on fire will not stop them from walking through it. On the plus side, goblins are just as stupid."
** "[[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=35517.0 My epic first dragon encounter!]]"
** There are numerous stories on the forums of Legendary warriors battling far weaker opponents only to dodge a weak attack right off a bridge, stairs, cliff, into a lake, down a well....
* AttackOfThe50FootWhatever: 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. [[spoiler:Although cage traps can stop most of them dead]].
* AttentionDeficitOohShiny: The dwarves have this in spades.
** Must. Have. Socks!
* AxCrazy 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 [[SuperDrowningSkills drowns two feet away]] [[TooDumbToLive from a stairway up out of the well]]. Urist [=McDolt=]'s brother, Urist [=McWoodchopper=] changes his name to Urist [=McDwarfchopper=]. HilarityEnsues.
** See also DisasterDominoes. 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 [[AWorldwidePunomenon 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.
* AwesomeButImpractical: Perhaps the crowning example would be turning your fortress into a turing-complete fluid logic [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=49641.0 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. [[MemeticMutation In a cave, with a bunch of rocks!]]
* BadassBookworm: 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'.
** On another positive note, once your bookkeeper has "done enough work" and stops working completely, even if he dies you'll never need another one again as the books stay perfectly updated forever. Apparently the bookkeeper becomes so experienced he can [[TheAuthority foresee what the stocks will be in the future]] and [[DeathNote even takes his own death into account.]]
* BambooTechnology: 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/DwarfFortress community page]] and [[Awesome/DwarfFortress CMOA page]] for details on the most impressive achievements, but even run-of-the-mill fortresses make use of magma-based {{wave motion gun}}s.
* BeneathTheEarth: 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.
** {{Eldritch Location}}: The [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61507.0 Adamantine Space Elevator.]]
* BoobyTrap: 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 [[TakenForGranite sculpt statues]] from the freshly-formed obsidian rocks [[AndIMustScream 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.
* BoozeBasedBuff: Without alcohol, your dwarves will begin to take more and more breaks, and your fortress will slow down to a snail's pace.
* BottomlessPit: 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.
* BunnyEarsLawyer: The Dungeon Master is an adept animal trainer, grants you the ability to tame unusual creatures, and is talented at running a furnace and blacksmithing. He or she also often wanders around the fortress wearing only gloves, socks, shoes, and a thick stack of capes.
* {{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 [[http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Hive hives]].
* CaveBehindTheFalls: [[http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Waterfall A common way to promote health of body and soul]]. Waterfalls in general are useful to generate mist which makes dorfs happier, but falling water (over a floor grate/bars) in major passages also makes a walk-thru DecontaminationChamber.
** On the Fun side, it creates potential for flooding if the sewer system below it fails, "job cancelled" message spam if it hoses dorfs trying to clean the grates from all this dirt and can significantly drop framerates on slower computers. Pressure plates based automation can reduce these issues (as long as it doesn't fail due to a butterfly, guppy or crocodile, ''[[EverythingTryingToKillYou of course]]''), but not quite eliminate them.
* CommandAndConquerEconomy: Though there are ways to reduce the amount of micromanaging required, generally you have to order everything to be built.
* TheCoronerDothProtestTooMuch: FanNickname: [[http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/40d:Unfortunate_accident Unfortunate accidents]] [[MakeItLookLikeAnAccident 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.
* CrazyCatLady: 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 [[ThreePanelSoul Matt Boyd]] once [[http://www.threepanelsoul.com/view.php?date=2008-04-21 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 [[HitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy 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.
** [[http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/catsbeard_9105.jpg 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 McCatbeard]]
** Mainly because "Keep tightly closed" door setting is buggy and causes a lag, though.
* CruelPlayerCharacterGod: Half the point of the game.
* DecontaminationChamber: Theoretically, dwarves [[http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Cleaning try to clean]] both themselves and dirty floors. [[ArtificialStupidity 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 (doing 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 [[CaveBehindTheFalls waterfall]] or "[[http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/User:Uristocrat/Dwarven_Bathtub Dwarven Bathtub]]".
* {{Determinator}}: Dwarves tend to be this, whether they're MadeOfPlasticine or MadeOfIron. 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 [[TooDumbToLive simply stand out in extreme cold and heat until they die]].
* [[DidYouJustFlipOffCthulhu Did You Just Build A House In Cthulhu's Backyard?]]: It's finally been done, someone actually [[spoiler: [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=65024.0 colonized hell!]]]]
** More impressively, almost, the forum's response was generally 'meh'. With one commenter seriously suggesting that ''the player build a hell-cannon that fired demons!''
** Alternately, there were also recommendations of building a tunnel that linked [[spoiler: hell]] directly to [[ScrewYouElves the nearest elven settlement.]] As well as a recommendation of building a cafeteria there so people "dine in [[spoiler:hell]]" literally.
** Community forts have finally managed this. The ongoing fortress [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=84451.0 Deathgate]] pulled this off.
* DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu: Deploy enough military and you can take down anything.
* DifficultButAwesome: It could be argued that the ''entire game'' is this trope, what with the [[http://www.vayapotra.es/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/2rmqi6o.gif steep learning curve]] but the awesome things that can happen. [[http://df.magmawiki.com/images/e/e6/FlowchartDF.png This]] outlines the ''bare essentials'' needed for a self-sustaining fort. 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 [[UnusualEuphemism Fun]]. [[http://i.imgur.com/glPVP.jpg Here]] is a similar diagram for getting your military operational.
* DiggingToChina: [[spoiler: Digging to FireAndBrimstoneHell]], more like.
* DisasterDominoes: 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 AxCrazy. Considering the quote for the page explains how you're most likely to have Fun in Dwarf Fortress, this shouldn't be much surprise.
* DisproportionateRetribution: 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 DisasterDominoes); 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 [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin large steel war hammer]].
** Players themselves are often more than willing to dish this out. Many [[UpperClassTwit Nobles]] have bedrooms that come complete with traps that will fill the room with magma, just in case they get too demanding.
* DissonantSerenity: 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 "[[BloodKnight take joy in slaughter]]". Self-explanatory.
** Waterfall create mist. Dwarves for some reason love mist. In this case death is by drowning, of course.
* DrivenToSuicide: 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.
* DropTheHammer: the appropriately-named Hammerer.
* DugTooDeep
--> "Horrifying screams come from the darkness below."
* EatTheDog: 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.
* ExplosiveBreeder: Dwarf Fortress has cats, which breed quickly: it's up to you whether you choose to see this as an annoyance or as a plentiful supply of [[EatTheDog meat]] and leather... (or trade goods if you don't feel like indulging in VideoGameCrueltyPotential.)
** 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 [[IncendiaryExponent flaming]] [[LudicrousGibs 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 birdsplosion.
*** 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.
* FluffyTamer: Having a Dungeon Master will let you tame all sorts of strange and horrible creatures, ranging from dragons to crocodiles to [[DemonicSpiders Giant Cave Spiders]]. Or at least, they're supposed to; they're bugged at the moment.
* ForMassiveDamage: With the physics derived combat damage calculations introduced in the 2010 update, weapon traps with 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 LudicrousGibs flying everywhere if an unwary foe steps on really full one made with good materials.
* FungusHumongous: 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 [[UpToEleven huge net damage boost]] to [[ForMassiveDamage an already powerful weapon]].
* {{Full Frontal Assault}}: Dwarves don't mind if they're clothed or not, so there have been numerous instances of them going into battle naked. The success of this is varied.
** Due to a bug in the current version, when a dwarf's clothes get worn into tatters, they will find something suitable to replace the worn out item ... and then store it in their room. About the only way to get your dwarves to ''stop'' running around naked after a few years is to assign them to the military and give them uniforms.
* GuideDangIt: The controls. There's [[http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Main_Page 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.
*** Or look at the raw files... assuming you can read them.
* HideYourChildren: Averted. There are many many many stories of women giving birth, WHILST IN BATTLE. Babies in fact make good shields for mothers who run into battle.
** Not to be confused with hiding your children because a goblin snatcher showed to ''try and abduct them.''
* HorseOfADifferentColor: There's a bunch of exotic mounts... Goblins sometimes drop in riding things like Voracious cave crawler (building-crushing carnivorous centipedes) and Cave crocodile.
* HundredPercentHeroismRating: 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.
* TheHypnotoad: Cats. Dwarfs don't adopt cats as pets - cats adopt dwarfs. This is the cat's primary defensive protection against bloodthirsty butchers who can't slaughter animals who are someone's pet.
* ICallItVera: If a dwarf gets sufficiently attached to a weapon, they will bestow a name upon it.
* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: Menacing spike traps.
** ThisIsADrill: Enormous corkscrew traps.
* ImprobableWeaponUser / ImprovisedWeapon: Coins, pebbles, and even your opponent's ''vomit'' can be thrown ForMassiveDamage.
* InUniverseGameClock: 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.
* KillItWithFire: Flooding a map with magma. [[TrapDoor Dropping]] critters into magma. 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.
* KillItWithWater: 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 KillItWithFire 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.
* KingIncognito: 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.
* LavaPit: Players love these. ''{{Boatmurdered}}'''s arguably most famous bit was the attempt to completely wipe out the local elephant population with magma streams.
* LetsGetDangerous: 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.
* LetsPlay: A popular pastime in the [[Community/DwarfFortress 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. [[PoorCommunicationKills Miscommunication]] and differing playstyles are a prominent source of Fun.
** [[http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/ Boatmurdered]], a long and storied succession game held by the SomethingAwful 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.
** [[http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Headshoots/ Headshoots]] and its sequel [[http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Syrupleaf Syrupleaf]] are also quite notable.
*** [[http://gemclod.goondorfs.net/ Gemclod]] from the same source is pretty good as well.
** {{Bravemule}} is another notable example, featuring illustrations and music. Instead of a succession game, it's done by one person.
* LoadsAndLoadsOfRules: We're not kidding about the "insanely complicated" thing.
* LordBritishPostulate: See [[Awesome/DwarfFortress the CMOA page]].
* LuckBasedMission: 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 centremost 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 TotalPartyKill 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.
* MadArtist: 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 [[NakedPeopleAreFunny throwing away their clothes]] while [[FreakOut running around babbling madly]] until they starve to death, being DrivenToSuicide, or going completely AxCrazy.
** 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: [[http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Planepacked Planepacked]], a statue WITH THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE WRITTEN ON IT. Including ''[[BeyondTheImpossible 73]]'' [[LogicBomb 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.
* TheMadnessPlace: See Mad Artist.
* MakeItLookLikeAnAccident: So, one of your nobles is demanding you make them glass windows... despite [[DidNotDoTheResearch 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" [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial which they had nothing to do with whatsoever]].
* MalevolentArchitecture: 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}}: What {{Boatmurdered}} quickly became -- a directed magma flow annihilating not only the invading goblin army but all wildlife in the general vicinity tends to do that.
** Really evil biomes also have special plants and horrible things like eyestalk grass. The dev notes for the upcoming version also indicate that the worst Mordor-like hell-on-earth settings are going to have the occasional shower of blood and/or cursed soul-consuming mist as well.
* MundaneUtility: BottomlessPits? 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 {{Squick}}ed hard enough to mod the value of mer-bone to the bare minimum. Previously, it was comparable to dragon bone in value.
* NintendoHard: Not only is the game hard to master, it's also hard to ''learn.''.
* NonHumanUndead: Any kind of living creature can have a zombie or skeletal version, including monsters like dragons, giants, and imps.
** Giving rise to such hellish creatures as skelephants, skeagles, and skarp. See KillerRabbit and MadeOfIron, above.
* OnceKilledAManWithANoodleImplement: Someone once killed a bronze colossus by throwing a fluffy wambler at its head.
* OurGhostsAreDifferent: Dwarf Fortress ghosts just want [[DueToTheDead 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... ''[[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=70423.0 throwing parties??]]''
* PaintTheTownRed: 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.
* PointlessDoomsdayDevice: Players love to make these, especially in succession games. For more information, see the community page.
* PoweredByAForsakenChild: 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.
** [[HumanResources Mermaid farming]].
* PowerGlows: 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 [[SuperMode super saiyan]], as any dwarves who reach legendary will likely also be Superdwarvenly Tough or Extremely Agile or some such thing.
* PressurePlate
* QuicksandBox: The game doesn't come with a tutorial. Some aspects of the game have complex and undocumented requirements. The wiki -- or failing that, a geology textbook -- help out a good deal with both points.
** Or practice repeatedly making new fortresses and abandoning them when things go wrong -- which they will (losing is fun!) -- until you start to get the hang of making a working fortress. Or at least one that's not so dysfunctional.
** While not for DF:2010, [[http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-utter-newby-tutorial-for-dwarf-fortress-part-1-wtf/ this one]] at After Action Reporter is pretty informative for a beginner.
* RespawningEnemies: 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.
* RubeGoldbergDevice: It's amazing what can be done with a couple of pumps, windmills, gear shafts, mechanisms, axles, levers and pressure plates.
** We did mention the [[AwesomeButImpractical computer]], yeah? And the [[KillSat orbital]] [[WaveMotionGun magma cannon]]?
* RubeGoldbergHatesYourGuts: 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.
* SchmuckBait: Building destroyer monsters crush anything they can break. Including the only support standing between them and a [[ChunkySalsaRule major cave-in]]. Or floodgates reservoirs of magma 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 [[ChunkySalsaRule obsidian encasement]].
** WhatDoesThisButtonDo: 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.
* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: 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.
* ScrewYouElves: So many wonderful ways to say this. See the VideoGameCrueltyPotential entry below for more details.
* SelfImposedChallenge: This fortress will be nude! This fortress will never trade! And so on.
** A [[FullFrontalAssault nude fortress]] is par for the course. ''The opposite'' is an actual challenge, due to a bug which prevents dwarves from putting on new clothes when their old ones wear out to nothing.
* SharkPool: Critters from carps to crocodiles to worse monstrosities. Especially tamed ones -- after all, you can simply leave stairs for dwarves accidentally falling into the moat, as long as no one else makes it to the stairs alive. And collect meat, bone, leather and eggs as byproducts in peaceful times.
* SingleSpecimenSpecies: Forgotten Beasts. Possibly Titans as well, depending on how you classify them.
* SnowMeansDeath: Metaphorically and literally. Leaving dwarfs out during the winter can cause temperatures to dip low enough to freeze their bones and collapse and die in the snow. Winter is also the only season where no race sends a caravan, which can doom you if you desperately need an item. Technically if you're at peace with the goblins they might send a caravan during the winter, but [[ChronicBackstabbingDisorder don't expect this blessing to last long...]]
** And that's completely forgetting that water ''freezes instantly'' trapping those unfortunate enough to have been standing in the tile in ice, killing them.
* SpikeBallsOfDoom: The spiked ball trap component.
* SpikesOfDoom: 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.
* TrainingFromHell: 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.
*** [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=91093.0 Dwarf Science has now come up with an alternative for children]]. However this time Spikes are replaced with Wild or Rabid animals.
* TrapDoor: Retractable bridges are often used this way.
* TooDumbToLive: 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 [[INeedAFreakingDrink getting drunk]] is a way better idea than protecting the fortress against the goblins that are ''right outside the front door''.
* TunnelKing: Dwarves being Tunnel Kings is a central mechanic to the game.
* TunnelNetwork: Dwarven fortresses tend to be underground. You do the math.
* {{Understatement}}: While people laying siege to your fortress are known as "Invaders", [[AttackOfThe50FootWhatever megabeasts]] are appropriately noted to be "Uninvited Guests."
* UnusableEnemyEquipment: Humans and Kobold clothing and armor is the wrong size for your dwarves. [[JustifiedTrope understandable]] as they are vastly different size compared to dwarves.
** With DF2010 you can now equip those exotic weapons whips, pikes, and bows.
** Also wrong sized metal armor from humans can be melted down for metal bars.
* VideoGameCaringPotential: Varies, but with each dwarf having an [[NominalImportance astonishing]] degree of [[MauveShirt 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.
* ViolationOfCommonSense: If you can get a single metal arrow or bolt out of the stack (by recovering it after it was fired, for instance), melting it will produce about two and a half times the raw metal it would've taken to make it.
** And again, holding back ''magma'' with ''ice walls.''
* WarElephants: Can be trained as of the 2010 version. ''Keeping'' them trained is another matter, though, as tame elephants are bugged and will 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.
* WaveMotionGun: To a lesser extent, Ballista arrows keep going until they hit a wall, taking out everything in their way. To a greater extent, any defense based on magma floods, used most infamously in {{Boatmurdered}} to destroy goblin armies.
** Some players have taken this further by using a network of very tall towers to build what amounts to a magma-based KillSat.
* WaxOnWaxOff: [[http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Cross-training Cross-training]].
* WithThisHerring: 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.
* YouFailEconomicsForever: The "Dwarven Economy" was so horrendously broken that [=DF2010=] removed it completely.
** ThreePanelSoul [[http://threepanelsoul.com/2009/07/21/on-mixed-economies/ 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=].

!!List of tropes specific to Adventure Mode:
* AlwaysABiggerFish: 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.
* BadassBoast: Legendary enemies who are capable of speaking will tell of their feats as soon as they can see you.
* BagOfHolding: Partial -- 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.
* BodySurf: Via GoodBadBugs, it's possible to suddenly shift from controlling an adventurer to an underground creature (even [[spoiler:a demon]]), then to bodyswap to some other animal every time you go to sleep.
-->"[[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=75246.msg1888981#msg1888981 I'll bet you didn't know cave crocodiles have high musicality.]]"
* CoupDeGrace: 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 ([[ArtificialStupidity even if the head is much better armored than other vital parts]]), but players have been known to [[CruelAndUnusualDeath drag the process out]].
* DeathSeeker: "I will agree to travel with you if you lead me to glory and death." -- Said by some {{NPC}}s upon joining the party. Although they don't specify ''whose'' death.
* DumpStat: 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.
* GrievousHarmWithABody: You can use ''anything'' as an ImprovisedWeapon in Adventure Mode, including your opponent's leg.
* IdiosyncraticDifficultyLevels: 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.
* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: 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.
* ImprovisedWeapon: In Adventure Mode, everything is a weapon. Including skulls, fistfuls of sand, vomit, and [[GrievousHarmWithABody 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... [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=56935.0 or even a fluffy wambler]], killing no less than a [[MadeOfIron Bronze Colossus]].
* InstantDeathRadius: 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.
* InventionalWisdom: 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.
* KillItWithIce: 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.
* KleptomaniacHero: You can take anything lying around not marked as being someone else's (and thus you need to pay for), even if it's lying around a guarded fortress.
* 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.
* ManBitesMan: 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.
* NewsTravelsFast: All you have to do to let an entire city know that you killed the monster is tell one person.
** Your dwarves will claim items dropped by victims on a battlefield even while they are working underground. This can cause problems if they [[TooDumbToLive decide to go claim those items]] while the siege is still underway.
* PreviousPlayerCharacterCameo: You can meet your own retired adventurer.
** Better yet, you can recruit him too!
* RetiredBadass: 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...
* ShopliftAndDie: 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.
* TalkingIsAFreeAction: Currently all conversations follow are very formulaic and only one-on-one, but the stated eventual goal is to get to the point where the adventurer can regale a growing audience with tales of his heroic deeds.
** There is a special screen just for legendary enemies telling you what they have done, which can be quite a list.
* TantrumThrowing: If a dwarf becomes depressed enough they might start smashing or throwing things.
* ThingsThatGoBumpInTheNight: When peasants warn that you shouldn't stay out at night, lest the bogeymen get you, ''listen to them''.
* VideoGameCrueltyPunishment: Inverted. In some situations, cruelty is rewarded: if you find a small, defenseless creature (like a groundhog, monkey, or elven child), 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.
** Sometimes it plays out very straight: while gladiatorial "[[TheSpartanWay Dwarven Child Care]]" works as training, the most "successful" experiment so far ended up with one mental attribute noticeably degraded -- the discovery that these aren't constants being the "success" part here -- while one physical attribute was noticeably raised in process... but dropped back soon after the end, along with ''another'' mental attribute. In exchange for meager skills that could be trained with minimal risk upon puberty, plus less than foolproof desensitizing. Not counting a permanently crippling attack by some ghost from whom the caged dwarfling had nowhere to run.
* WalkingTheEarth: 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.
* WelcomeToCorneria: The {{NPC}}s 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."
* VillainTeleportation: If you try to run away from bogeymen, they just teleport into your path.
* YouAreTheTranslatedForeignWord: 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.
----
''Urist [=McTroper=] cancels Play DwarfFortress: Interrupted by TVTropes.''

** The .34 release ups the DarkerAndEdgier quota quite a bit with such wonderful additions as necromancers, werecreatures and zombies that can turn your dwarves into weredwarves/zombies, evil clouds and rains that can have the same syndromes as forgotten beasts and demons, and more.

** ''Everything'' in evil biomes will rise again after a while. Dismemberment will only result in the individual parts coming back for revenge.

** But not AllMythsAreTrue, because it doesn't derive mythology from all possible sources. Indeed, it might best resemble late-middle 20th century fantasy literature.

* DeathOfAThousandCuts: In the current version, being in contact with magma or 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.

* XMeetsY: When stripped to its barest essentials, the game is pretty much a fusion of ''DungeonKeeper'' and ''{{Rogue}}''.

* NighInvulnerability: Enemies without brains or other internal organs ''are'' almost literally unkillable with blunt weapons alone. This includes zombies and undead and megabeasts like the Bronze Colossus.* NobodyPoops: Played straight, which is noteworthy considering that pretty much everything else is in this game.\\

** Enemies without brains or other internal organs ''are'' almost literally unkillable with blunt weapons alone. This includes zombies and undead and megabeasts like the Bronze Colossus.

%% Memetic Badass is already in the Community page -- no need to add it here.
* NobodyPoops: Played straight, which is noteworthy considering that pretty much everything else is in this game.\\

[[caption-width-right:211:[-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 ''DwarfFortress''.-] ]]

*** With the newly implemented ghosts, dead sentient creatures have a chance of doing assorted things to harm or annoy your little dorfs. 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.

* NowThatsUsingYourTeeth: 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.

** There was recently 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. [[TheDevTeamThinksOfEverything Toady One thinks of everything]].

** According to a [[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html?pagewanted=all recent New York Times article]], this could be 20 years from now. DF fans don't see this as a problem.

* LuckBasedMission: Recent 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 centremost 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 TotalPartyKill thanks to a bug caused by the way freezing and melting works.

* ElementalCrafting: 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 [[IncrediblyLamePun 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.

** At times it seems that the entire population is balanced on the [[IncrediblyLamePun axe-edge]] of utter insanity.

* TheAllSeeingAI: Goblin sieges use a pathfinding AI that automatically knows the fastest way into your fortress. The players, [[GoodBadBug of course]], abuse its quirks (particularly regarding avoidance of locked doors) mercilessly.

* TheAlcoholic: EVERYONE.

* RealTimeWithPause: The game would've been completely hopeless without it. Then again, it is completely hopeless anyway, at least for your poor Dwarves.

[[caption-width-right:211:[-You want a dwarf? There's your goddamn dwarf. You want some better graphics? '''Screw you.''' Dwarves can do lots of stuff. Like digging. Can you dig? '''Hell no'''. Play ''DwarfFortress''.-] ]]

* DifficultButAwesome: It could be argued that the ''entire game'' is this trope, what with the steep learning curve but the awesome things that can happen. [[http://df.magmawiki.com/images/e/e6/FlowchartDF.png This]] outlines the ''bare essentials'' needed for a self-sustaining fort. 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 [[UnusualEuphemism Fun]].
* DiggingToChina: [[spoiler: Digging to FireAndBrimstoneHell]], more like.

* RidiculouslyCuteCritter: 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 start sieges and steal children. Kobolds living in the same caves [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=45296.msg884498#msg884498 can be friendly]].