History VideoGame / DwarfFortress

** In 2013, Bay 12 forumgoers developed [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=134512.0 the "Shaft of Enlightenment"]] after they [[GoodBadBugs discovered a glitch]] involving [[SpikesOfDoom being pushed down a two-storey fall onto a spear]]

* WeirdWeather: One version had superheated rain that could literally melt the flesh off a dwarf's body. It was considered a bug and, naturally, players found ways to [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=55001.0 weaponize it.]]

* WorstNewsJudgmentEver: Dwarves carve the legendary events and histories of their fortress into the walls. Sometimes these will be of great epic battles or the forging of legendary artifacts; but they have an unfortunate tendency to do things like focus on the deaths of random animals, uninteresting yearly trade agreements, [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking or particularly well-made wheels of cheese]].

** In 2013, Bay 12 forumgoers developed [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=134512.0 the "Shaft of Enlightenment"]] after they [[GoodBadBugs discovered a glitch]] involving [[SpikePit being pushed down a two-storey fall onto a spike]]

* 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.

* CursedWithAwesome: You can desecrate an altar or temple and have a deity "curse" you to become a vampire or werebeast. The former means you don't need sleep or food (besides blood) anymore and cannot tire out, and gives you a huge bonus to your physical attributes (although they become fixed). The latter causes you to randomly turn into a huge beast once a month, and the transformation just happens to heal any wound or scar (including missing body parts) you might have at the time. The only downside is developing a WeaksauceWeakness to a random metal.

* DarkIsNotEvil: In Adventurer Mode, it's 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 it's recommended--night creatures are MadeOfIron while necromancers have [[EverythingsDeaderWithZombies an easy supply of allies]]. Becoming a [[TechnicallyLivingZombie husk/thrall]] is another matter entirely, as people will [[EnemyToAllLivingThings react appropriately]] to your unlife.

* TheTetrisEffect: Just wait until you start dreaming in ASCII.

* DevilButNoGod: The gods of the world are worshipped, and occasionally holy wars are fought in their names, but do very little themselves aside from [[spoiler:handing out [[CursedWithAwesome 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 [[spoiler:their numbers in hell are [[ZergRush limitless]]]].

* TheBard: As of version 42.01 they can now visit your fortress, and you can even train your own dwarves to become one and you can even play as one in Adventure mode. In true df fashion there is a different skill for every single different kind of poetry, every single different style of song and every instrument, and every single type of dance. You can even create your own forms at high skill levels! Not to be confused with TheStoryteller or WanderingMinstrel, see below.
* TheStoryteller: They can visit your fortress and you can play as one of these in adventure mode as well, in true DF fashion there is a skill specifically for storytelling and talking as well. They will tell stories of long dead kings, living kings, and of course the occasional dragon stealing a pair of socks.

* VendorTrash: Crafts, totems, toys, musical instruments and mugs can be used for two things - selling to the seasonal caravans and, back when Economy 1.0 was still around, shop stock. On the other hand it's a great way of getting rid of the average fort's mountain of stone.

** It bears mentioning that an excess of clutter, including large amounts of vendor trash and actual trash you have no use for, can affect the framerate and generally slow the game down, so disposal becomes a relevant topic if you plan to run a fort for more than a decade.

** Mass-manufacturing plant fibre clothes as VendorTrash. They're ''very'' profitable, the logistics chain for making them is one of the less complex ones and traders always have loads of cloth anyway, but they're not exactly a dwarven sort of trade. (Though turning your fortress into a third-world sweatshop is definitely the sort of thing that appeals to [[CruelPLayerCharacterGod the memetic DF player.]])

* YouGottaHaveBlueHair: 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.

** The player community can fall into this at times. [[AffablyEvil They're typically rather civil, at least as far as internet communities go]], but they frequently consider VideoGameCrueltyPotential to be both amusing, and a mandatory requirement for enoying oneself; whether they are to keep a friendly group of Kobolds alive, or use the buggers as meatshields, is considered something worthy of actual debate. Meanwhile, tossing dwarf children into pits filled with angry dogs and gleefully massacring kittens to use their bones as building materials for giant doomsday devices with which to slaughter your enemies, dwarven nobility, or both, is considered sufficiently standard behaviour that ''not'' participating in it (or something roughly equivalent) at some point, will have you labelled as an alarming aberration, and liable to recieve accusations of being a disguised elf.

** The ethics 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, [[ImAHumanitarian but are perfectly okay with eating the corpses of their enemies in battle.]]

** 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.

* ClockPunk: Dwarven technology tends toward this. You can build ''Turing-complete computers'' out of dwarven clockwork.

* RidiculouslyCuteCritter: Despite being represented with only the 'k' symbol, [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=85689.0 people seem to interpret kobolds as dimwitted, yet lovable humanoid creatures]] who are just trying to survive in a world where every other civilization hates them. [[FanNickname The fanbase calls them "cutebolds".]] 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]].

** [[invoked]]The non-meat, non-metal portion of goblinite becomes this. Until industries pick up, a "[[FanNickname 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 selective disposal methods.

* TheCoronerDothProtestTooMuch: FanNickname: [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/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.

* CriticalExistenceFailure: Not in this game. The extremely complex combat and damage system 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.
** 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.

** 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.
* {{Cthulhumanoid}}: Octopus men, squid men, and nautilus men.

* FluffyTamer: The Dungeon Master in earlier versions, who let dwarves tame all sorts of strange and horrible creatures, ranging from dragons to crocodiles to [[DemonicSpiders 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 ''Series/FatalAttractions'' episode."

For slightly-less-notable Bay 12 Games products, see VideoGame/LiberalCrimeSquad.

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

* 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.

** While your crossbow bolts may typically be made out of normal metal, they can also be carved from the bones of your enemies. Any bones will do, even those of sapient creatures, so long as they're already freely available, with ironic results as you return a goblin to his comrades at high velocity.
* AbsurdlySharpBlade: Swords, axes or spears made with [[{{Unobtainium}} Adamantine]], a super-light and absurdly durable metal. Because it's so light, any hammers or maces made out of it will simply bounce off of enemies like a balloon (''or a wiffle bat, somewhat more accurately'').

On March 13th 2019, Tarn announced that ''Dwarf Fortress'' is coming to UsefulNotes/Steam and itch.io with a new tileset and enhanced graphics support and audio. He said that he will continue updating the free ASCII version on the Bay 12 web page as ''Dwarf Fortress Classic''.

On March 13th 2019, Tarn announced that ''Dwarf Fortress'' is coming to Steam and itch.io with a new tileset and enhanced graphics support and audio. He said that he will continue updating the free ASCII version on the Bay 12 web page as Dwarf Fortress Classic.

* ALoadOfBull: 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, [[ImprovisedWeapon including socks or the limbs of the last dwarf they killed]].

* LudicrousGibs: 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 '2's--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.

* HandicappedBadass: [[SubsystemDamage Thanks to]] [[ChunkySalsaRule the combat system,]] anyone can become this, including yourself in Adventure mode and your dwarves in Fortress mode. All you need is a crutch and enough time to grind crutch-walking, and you are back up fighting against the best of them.

** You don't even need a crutch. You can just crawl around and slay [[AttackOfTheFiftyFootWhatever megabeasts]] without breaking a sweat, although you move pretty slowly. Some [=NPCs=] will even move as fast as the PC can, in Adventure mode... despite missing their legs.
* HandyMouth: A mod giving cats a grasping mouth allows to avoid error message "[[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Cat_cancels_Store_Item_in_Stockpile:_Too_injured Cat cancels Store Item in Stockpile: Too injured]]". (They sometimes think that their hands are cut not realizing they never had any)

''Urist [=McTroper=] cancels Play Dwarf Fortress: [[TvTropesWillRuinYourLife Interrupted by TV Tropes]].''