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7[[caption-width-right:350:[[EarnYourFun Losing is Fun!]]]]
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9->''"We don't want another cheap fantasy universe, we want a cheap fantasy universe generator."''
10-->-- '''Tarn "Toady One" Adams, 2006'''
11
12''[[ColonCancer Slaves to Armok: God of Blood]] - [[OddlyNamedSequel2ElectricBoogaloo Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress]]'' is part {{Construction and Management|Games}} simulation and part {{Roguelike}} created by brothers Tarn "Toady One" and Zach Adams. The brothers began work on the game in 2002, and it saw its first alpha-release in 2006. Strictly speaking, the game is really two games: the game it is right now, and the game it hopes to be. Its goal is to be less of a video game and more like a supremely complex fantasy world simulator, simulating dozens of nations and hundreds of thousands of characters over a thousand years or more, where you can watch history unfold from a [[SimulationGame godlike perspective]], or take the role of any character or civilization, and make history. And to cap it all off, it intends to do it all in [[ASCIIArt extended ASCII character graphics]].
13
14It's not there yet--it's technically still in alpha--but it already has about two games' worth of content, and an extremely fanatical and devoted fanbase.
15
16The main game is '''Fortress Mode,''' which plays like a dizzyingly complicated hybrid of ''VideoGame/DungeonKeeper'' and ''VideoGame/TheSims'', only that all your little people are now stumpy, manic-depressive alcoholics. '''Adventure Mode''' plays like a very freeform {{roguelike}} - similar to VideoGame/NetHack or VideoGame/{{Rogue}} [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Adventurer_mode according to some]] - in the vast procedural world that your fortresses inhabit. Both modes have [[EndlessGame no way to win]], but hundreds of ways to lose, and hence the community motto: '''Losing is Fun'''. If you intend to play this game for any longer than five minutes without dismissing it as a glorified Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, [[http://imgur.com/mHXiz.png keep that in mind.]]
17
18The key word for describing ''Dwarf Fortress'' is "[[ComplexityAddiction complex]]". The game makes vigorous attempts to simulate real-life physics, biology, and even chemistry as accurately as possible, with a surprising degree of success, at the cost of user-friendliness. For example, in lieu of HitPoints, the game has a detailed, ''[[VideoGame/IterVehemensAdNecem IVAN]]''-esque SubsystemDamage mechanic for all dwarves, monsters, and other creatures, [[GrapplingWithGrapplingRules and an attack targeting system that allows any unit to attack or grapple any part of its opponent's body with pretty much any still-attached prehensile appendage.]] The game only gets more convoluted from there, becoming denser with each update. The fans joke that Tarn Adams, who remained the primary developer on the game (''[[https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/975370/view/3625992251197549466 at least until Dec 22, 2022]]''), will continue to make the game more and more granular until it reaches the subatomic level and begins to simulate quantum mechanics and particle physics. Judging by the way the game is growing, that prediction may become true, and everyone can then become an unlicensed theoretical physicist.
19
20''Dwarf Fortress'' is free, with further development paid for by donations. You can find the game [[http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves here,]] some graphical tilesets to make the game easier on the eyes [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Graphics_set_repository here]] or [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?board=28.0 here,]] and the invaluable gameplay wiki [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Quickstart_guide here.]] Or you can get the Lazy Newb Pack, which includes the above + tutorials + auxiliary software and loads of useful stuff [[http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=7622 for Windows,]] [[http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=7922 Mac,]] or [[http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=12762 Linux.]] If you're interested in learning how to play, you can also check out [[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL06686270DA5FF439 this video series]] on Website/YouTube by {{Lets Play}}er and veteran dorfer captnduck, or look up the [[http://en.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress active Reddit forum]]. And now there is even ''[[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=110480.0 a book]]'' written by Bay 12 forumite Tiny Pirate.
21
22Fun fact: ''Dwarf Fortress'' was one of the first video games to be featured in the [[http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=164920 New York Museum of Modern Art.]]
23
24On March 13th 2019, Tarn announced that ''Dwarf Fortress'' was coming to Platform/{{Steam}} and itch.io with a new tileset and enhanced graphics support and audio. He said that he would continue updating the free ASCII version on the Bay 12 web page as ''Dwarf Fortress Classic''. The non-free version was released on December 6th, 2022, with the free version released a couple weeks later.
25
26For slightly-less-notable Bay 12 Games products, see ''VideoGame/LiberalCrimeSquad''.
27
28----
29!!The game in general provides examples of:
30[[foldercontrol]]
31
32[[folder:Tropes A-D]]
33* AbnormalAmmo:
34** You can encrust your ammunition with bone, wood or even [[BlingBlingBang gem]] decorations.
35** In Adventure Mode, the game is perfectly fine allowing you to use a limb from a being made of magma, or something similarly hazardous to hold, as a lawn dart.
36** 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.
37* 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'').
38* AdoringThePests: Dwarves might have rats, cockroaches, or flies as their favorite animal.
39* AIGeneratedEconomy: Showing us the pitfalls of giving the AI control over sectors of the economy is the cut [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Dwarven_economy eponymous feature]]: when some conditions were fulfilled, all dwarves were awarded private accounts to spend on food and other items they could buy from shops--except for nobles and [[AsskickingLeadsToLeadership legendary dwarves]], who could take whatever without spending anything. Dwarves were able to buy shops and sell items in it for their own benefit. This led to bizarre things like children of nobles/legendary dwarves being ''poorer'' than average, and dwarves spending all their time counting their coins.
40* TheAlcoholic:
41** Every dwarf, except in Adventurer Mode, "needs alcohol to get through the working day". 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). This becomes a slight problem in 0.42 and on, since alcohol poisoning has now been implemented and dwarves have been known to pass out drunk and drown in their own vomit.
42** 0.42 also introduced the ability to make taverns in your fort with the potential of having non-dwarf visitors live in your fort. They will normally not be reliant on booze, but if they face enough mental trauma to get "doesn't really care about anything anymore" added to their description, they will also embody this trope.
43** Ever since 0.42, adventurers may now start with or gain alcohol dependency, dwarf or not. This may stem from their values and ethics, or a change thereof, but more often than not it's triggered by severe trauma.
44* AliceAndBob: The DF community equivalent is "Urist [=McSomething=]" with the surname being descriptive, such as Urist [=McTantrumSpiral=] or Urist [=McDragonChow=].
45* AllMythsAreTrue: 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. The exception is a few mythical beasts, magical creatures, and gods that are flagged to appear in procedurally-generated art but will not appear in any world.
46* AllTrollsAreDifferent: The creatures simply named "troll" are big, hairy brutes with cyan blood 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.
47* TheAllSeeingAI:
48** Goblin sieges use a pathfinding AI that automatically knows the fastest way into your fortress. The players abuse its quirks mercilessly (particularly regarding avoidance of locked doors).
49** 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, [[TacticalDoorUse one door locks and another opens]]. Now the only way in is on the other end of the corridor, which is provided with the same mechanism. This keeps the oh-so-clever AI terminally walking the walk of pointy pain.
50* AncientTomb: The 2012 update added elaborate burial tombs, where sentient creatures that were born and died during world generation are interred. It makes for excellent DungeonCrawling in adventure mode, and a source for necromancers to summon their armies from in fortress mode.
51* AnimalisticAbomination: Forgotten Beasts, while procedurally generated, start off with some creature type as a "base" and add random features from there, which may be contradictory. The result is something that resembles a known animal, but has several unique and horrible characteristics that no other beast like that has. Among infinite examples; a giant penguin with no mouth that intones the names of all those it meets, or an eyeless cicada made of vomit.
52* AnimalWrongsGroup: Elves, but for trees (they still tame animals, and eat them if they need to survive.) They will be horribly offended when presented with anything made from wood or charcoal. They know nothing of metallurgy, so they can't tell steel made with charcoal apart from steel made with mined coal, therefore they'll take either. Any glass but green glass, however, needs wood ash to turn into pearlash, beds must be made of wood, and wood is the preferred material for bins, so elves are notoriously unpopular. Even a single wooden decoration in a craft will make them storm out of the trade depot and probably later send archers to your front gate by the hundreds. This doesn't mean they can't make ''all'' of their crafts from wood, because [[GreenThumb they can shape them with magic without killing the tree]]. In earlier versions they'd even get offended if you tried to sell them [[{{Hypocrite}} their own wooden goods]]. The current "grown" wooden goods solved that issue.
53* AnimateBodyParts: Various severed body parts--including skin and hair--can be reanimated by Necromancers and clouds of gas in evil biomes.
54* AnimateInanimateMatter: A number of very rare, very powerful entities are randomly generated in nature and appearance. Many resemble regular, if monstrous, organic beings, but many others are composed of a single substance, which can be organic or inorganic. Their threat level tends to vary based on their component substance; ones made from liquids, gases or powders such as smoke, water, snow or ash are extremely fragile and easily killed; ones made out of fire are just as fragile, but set anything they touch aflame and also explode when killed; ones made out of rock, glass, gems or low-grade metal are much tougher and more dangerous; ones made from weapons-grade metals like bronze, iron and steel are immensely dangerous and powerful beings.
55* AprilFoolsDay: Version 0.31.01, two years in the making, was released at about 1 AM, PST on [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin April Fools Day]]. The [=Bay12=] site still broke within ''minutes''.
56-->Desperate flailing ensued to keep it mostly operational. Oh, the stories I could tell... - Baughn
57* ArcWords: "[[DarknessEqualsDeath Now you will know why you fear the night]]."
58* ArtisticLicensePhysics:
59** Also known as "[[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Dwarven_physics Dwarven Physics]]." It's not only possible, but easy, to build a perpetual motion machine, and melting a metal item returns a fixed amount of metal which is almost never the amount that went into it (in fact, sometimes it's ''more''). The same chunk of raw stone can be used to make a one-tile wall, four stone blocks that can themselves be used to build a four-tile wall, three mugs, or as little as one toy boat, with no waste material left over in any case. Some of these will probably be fixed eventually.
60** 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 RuleOfFun. 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, as their power generation seems to indicate for a given liquid flow rate). Choosing not to try to think too hard about it seems to be the best compromise for the sake of gameplay, at least until flow rate calculations can be rebalanced.
61* AsciiArt: [[{{Retraux}} The game is actually graphical,]] but uses [=ASCII=] characters and a few others as its default tileset.
62** When the rendering engine was rewritten, a Platform/{{UNIX}}-only command line display was added. It's not used much, except for screencasting; using a terminal to watch someone play DF takes a lot less bandwidth than streaming video, and is easier to host.
63* AttackAttackRetreatRetreat: 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. As of 40.02, with the addition of a new (currently buggy) morale system, most conflicts very quickly turn into just the "Retreat! Retreat!" part.
64* AscendedExtra: 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.
65* AscendedMeme: One of the official songs in the non-free release is called 'Koganusan', Dwarven language for "Blog/{{Boatmurdered}}". It being a somber vocal piece that plays after a fortress has fallen is, if anything, [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption entirely appropriate]].
66* AuthorAvatar: In community (the player posts what is happening in a particular fort, and the community writes about it) and SuccessionGame (same as a community fort, but the save is passed from player to player) forts, it is common to name dwarves after participants, and many people will request a 'dorfing' just because.
67* AuthorCatchPhrase: Toady often uses "he he he" in development posts after mentioning something particularly grim.
68* BadassArmy: If you train it and take care of it well, your militia will become one of these.
69** You can now send these armies out to raid and raze other civilizations' sites, the lairs of evil creatures, or to murder elves.
70* BadassBookworm:
71** In previous versions, even the skills as far away from combat as possible trained physical attributes. If you ordered your bookkeeper to take the most accurate inventory of your stocks possible, he, a weak, unassuming social dwarf, would proceed to lock himself in his study, and work silently for roughly a season. Eventually, he would re-emerge, and after all those hours of updating the records, will have acquired the character notes 'Ultra-Mighty', 'Perfectly Agile', and 'Superdwarvenly Tough'.
72** 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 [[ComicBook/TheAuthority foresee what the stocks will be in the future]] and [[Manga/DeathNote even takes his own death into account.]]
73* BadassNormal: Who would have thought that a bunch of bipolar, alcoholic midgets could fight [[spoiler:TheLegionsOfHell]] [[DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu and win]]?
74** Any dwarf can, with time, practice, and/or luck, turn into a legendary master of effectively any trade. It doesn't matter how good they were at the start or what their family bloodline is like.
75* 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.
76* BareFistedMonk:
77** The Wrestling skill. Rather than Eastern Martial Arts, everyone engages in pankration. 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.
78** 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.
79** With the blunt-attack combat rework in [=DF2014=], 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.
80* BatPeople: Bat men only have four limbs--their arms double as wings like in real bats--and live in tribes underground, being one of the few underground animal people capable of flight. They can also be found on the surface, where like the other surface-dwelling animal people they don't form tribes and are essentially bipedal animals.
81* BattleTrophy: 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. In particular, [[spoiler:vampires and other immortal monsters with potentially centuries' worth of such trinkets]] tend to invoke this in spades. Oftentimes this is used as an early detection mechanism by savy players.
82* BeneathTheEarth: Since DF 2010, practically all areas now have several layers of extensive underground caverns complete with giant mushrooms and creatures such as giant cave spiders.
83* BerserkButton: Every single dwarf has one. You just need to push the right buttons. Thankfully, players are rather good at that.
84* BizarreAlienReproduction: The [[AbductionIsLove night troll]] (no relation to the [[AllTrollsAreDifferent troll]]) has to kidnap a sapient non-goblin creature and morph it into another night troll of the opposite sex (called a spouse) in order to breed, despite the fact that most worlds have multiple "natural born" night trolls of both sexes. Additionally, the offspring are always the same sex of the natural born parent.
85* BlackComedy: The game's bread and butter.
86* BlingOfWar: Most players don't bother to, but it's certainly possible to decorate your militia's uniforms and equipment. You can even make gem-encrusted ''crossbow bolts''. In Adventurer mode, decorated armour is quite a common sight.
87* BlobMonster: 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.
88* BlockingStopsAllDamage: Shields are able to block the huge area of effect from dragonfire and similar {{Breath Weapon}}s, [[UnbreakableWeapons even if they're made of wood.]] Shields can also completely deflect attacks even from monsters whose body parts are larger than their target. On the other hand, shields do ''not'' negate the momentum from an opponent charging into you, so they can still knock you over then.
89* BloodKnight: Dwarves gain positive thoughts from engaging in slaughter. And that's before insanity drives them [[AxeCrazy berserk]]. However, as of [=DF2014=], it seems dwarves become horrified by the deaths of anything with the [CAN_LEARN] tag instead, at least initially before the player's actions leave them emotionally dead. This ranges from goblins and other dwarves, down to freaking ''crundles'', making it problematic to deal with the emotional fallout. Won't stop disciplined soldiers from bounding into a horde of goblins to bash their brains in, though.
90* BloodyHilarious: The combat reports. Sometimes they are [[RuleOfCool so absurdly over the top]] and full of ShockingMoments you can't help but have a good laugh.
91* BlueAndOrangeMorality:
92** The ethics system makes it possible to create a race with some ''weird'' morals. The vanilla game already has elves, who find it utterly ''unthinkable'' to kill plants, [[ImAHumanitarian but are perfectly okay with eating the corpses of their enemies in battle.]]
93** A possible explanation for dwarves that end up getting into acts of absurd cruelty while still behaving in otherwise civilized fashion.
94** 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 enjoying oneself; whether they are to keep a friendly group of Kobolds alive and... relatively safe, or if the little buggers are to be used as meatshields, is considered something that needs to be seriously debated. 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 be regarded as an alarming aberration, and render you liable to receive accusations of being a disguised elf from other players.
95* BodyHorror:
96** Often a result of randomly generated Forgotten Beast syndrome. Includes the "[[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=70899.0 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.''
97** Evil biomes have rain and fog banks that induce this on anything unfortunate enough to be caught under them.
98** Necromancers can now create "experiments" from captured creatures. These experiments range from regular humanoids with pitch black skin and extra limbs, to giant amalgations or blobs made up of multiple creatures. Notably, these [[AndIMustScream creatures can be intelligent and may remember their past life]]. If they're lucky, they can even rejoin society.
99* BonsaiForest: In older versions, all trees were one tile high. The 2014 update introduced multi-story, complicated trees.
100* BraggingRightsReward: [[spoiler:Fighting through the freakishly powerful guardians of a vault nets you a demon's true name, to command or banish it as you please, but you're more than a match for such a being if you manage it in the first place.]] Unless, of course, you got absurdly lucky which does happen.
101* BreadEggsMilkSquick: Personal descriptions of dwarfs string together happy and sad events with no distinction for either. To wit:
102--> Kol Tölunimush has been ecstatic lately. He killed somebody by accident while sparring recently. [[AxCrazy He took joy in slaughter lately.]] [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone He has lost a lover to tragedy lately.]] He has witnessed death. [[TrainingFromHell He had a satisfying sparring session recently.]]
103** Can sometimes escalate into FridgeHorror when the connection between the thoughts becomes clear. Of course, this being ''Dwarf Fortress'', [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential it's more like Fridge Hilarity.]]
104** From the devlogs:
105--> "Fixed item storage crash related to minecart being destroyed"
106--> "Cleared old activities properly so they aren't considered by dwarves for too long"
107--> '''"Stopped dwarves from trying to clean their own missing or internal body parts"'''
108* BreakableWeapons: The 43.04 update changed it so that weapons and armor could suffer damage from combat, depending on the difference in material properties. As a result, leather armor is now woefully ineffective even against wildlife, while obsidian is liable to break if used against metal armor. This is in addition to normal, gradual wear and tear for non-armor clothing, which has been around for longer.
109* BreakingAndBloodsucking: Vampires prey on your dwarves this way. When vampires go on "break" they will hunt for a sleeping dwarf to feed on.
110* BunnyEarsLawyer: In older versions, this would be the Dungeon Master in a nutshell. He loved cloaks so damn much that he would 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, he would also tame and train the most powerful, exotic and badass beasts you could catch; giant eagles, elephants, dragons, and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking monkeys]].
111* ByTheLightsOfTheirEyes: It is possible to assign a tile to represent a creature only hidden from sight by light levels, with this trope represented by using quotation marks (") for that tile. By default, kobolds get this treatment, and are even explicitly mentioned to have glowing eyes as a racial trait.
112* CallARabbitASmeerp: Warriors who act as servants and bodyguards to a lord are normally called housecarls. In Dwarf Fortress, they're called hearthpeople.
113* CallASmeerpARabbit: Magma Crabs are not actually crablike, lacking any discernible appendages other than a pair of finlike wings. And they can spit magma.
114** Averted with the Steam/itch.io release, as their sprites do resemble crabs with wings on their backs.
115* CastOfSnowflakes: 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.
116** And in the 2012 release (0.34), each migrant that arrives to your fortress has a history, family, and possibly even previous kills!
117** The 2014 release (0.40) goes even further by describing in detail their personal beliefs and their lifelong aspirations.
118* CatsAreSuperior: 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.
119** 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 favourite 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.
120** Thankfully, changes to breeding mechanics (animals no longer ignore distance/isolation) and the ability to geld male animals mitigated this sharply.
121* ChickenAndEggParadox: An anvil is required to make a forge and a forge is required to make an anvil. There is a [[invoked]][[MemeticMutation meme among the players about where the first anvil came from]], since no dwarf would be able to build the forge to create the first anvil. In gameplay terms, embarking without an anvil carries a risk, as you'll dependent on a trader having one for sale in order to perform any blacksmithing.
122* ChildrenAreAWaste: Children eat your meals and drink your booze for 12 years without doing or learning anything useful. Birth rates don't come close to matching a successful fort's immigration rate or basically ''any'' fort's death rate, so children won't really give many long-term benefits even if you're patient and successful enough to have the same fortress span multiple generations. Even worse if you're unlucky enough to get a wave of migrants that consists almost entirely of children and your fort has suddenly become an orphanage. The Steam release tweaked this: Bad news, childhood now lasts ''18'' years until they can start doing adult work. Good news is that they can now do minor tasks like construction and hauling before they reach that age, giving such orphanage forts a massive taskforce of haulers that leaves the adults free to work - just be careful not to have them hauling corpses and their mangled components, children don't have as many distractions as adults and they can end up ''really'' unhappy about all the death they see.
123* ChildSoldiers: In ''Dwarf Fortress'', most children mature by the age of 12. [[OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame This can lead to entire squads of teenage bearded psychos with battle axes and alcoholism]].
124** One forum thread from the old days of 40d reported [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=46772.0 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''.
125** Experiments in [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=91093.msg2532118 "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 [[ConditionedToAcceptHorror harden them to tragedy]] and [[TrainingFromHell cause them to develop combat skills]]. It was pronounced a partial success when one experiment resulted in a child taking permanent change to mental attributes--aka, ''permanent mental scarring''.
126** Vaguely averted with the Steam update, which made children only recruitable once they're 18... vaguely, because children that get caught in violent situations are still unusually dangerous thanks to all the hauling they now do; they've been known to beat up predators and even adults, and once they age out, that same strength is well-put to a weapon.
127* ChunkySalsaRule: There is no HP system in Dwarf Fortress.[[note]]Undead corpses were an exception, before the 2014 update.[[/note]] See SubsystemDamage.
128* ClockPunk: Dwarven technology tends toward this. You can build ''Turing-complete computers'' out of dwarven clockwork.
129* ColonCancer: 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.
130* ColorCodedStones: The game has diamonds of five colors as well as clear, and also blue, clear and pink garnets in addition to red, and so on and so forth. It assigns the standard colors to emerald, ruby, sapphire, amethyst, topaz and quite a few others, though.
131* ComedicSociopathy: One of the things that draws a lot of people towards the game.
132** There really is no limit to the absolutely horrible things the player can get up to. Check under VideoGameCrueltyPotential for a partial listing.
133* ConditionedToAcceptHorror: It is possible for dwarves exposed to repeated but manageable mental trauma to build up a resistance to it. In the case of military training, this is actually part of the goal, as a well-disciplined militia member will, through repetition, come to enjoy fighting enough that it overrides their horror at witnessing death.
134* ContentWarnings: The Steam page warns that "Dwarf Fortress contains textual descriptions of violence, and static 2D sprites that may have violent ends. Alcohol consumption is required for a dwarven fortress to run smoothly, as described in text. Dwarves can experience mental anguish, and in extreme cases this can lead to them taking their own lives or the lives of others."
135* ContractualBossImmunity: Large creatures cannot be killed by smashing them with a drawbridge because they keep them from lifting or closing. Forgotten beasts, titans, and [[spoiler:demons]] are all immune to traps.
136** 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 [[CurbStompBattle this]] shows why ContractualBossImmunity is a necessary game mechanic.
137* ConvectionSchmonvection: 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.''
138** 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''.
139** 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!
140** 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.
141* CookingMechanics: Fruits, roots, meat, milk and cheese, and other kinds of food can be consumed either raw or cooked. Like all crafted goods, they have a quality level, which in this case affects the [[MoraleMechanic happiness gained (or lost) by whoever eats them]].
142* CosmicHorrorStory: In a [[CrapSackWorld world]] where [[EverythingTryingToKillYou everything is dangerous]], most gods are [[GodIsEvil either evil]] or [[JerkAssGods decisively malicious for other reasons]], and [[AnyoneCanDie individual lives are fairly meaningless]], the entirety of DF can feel like this at times. There's also the fact that [[GodOfEvil Armok]] is apparently [[ApocalypseHow destroying]] and [[WorldBuilding rebuilding the world]] repeatedly [[ItAmusedMe so he can revel in the violence]] he subjects his [[AndIMustScream hapless creations]] to.
143* CorpseLand: Evil biomes are often full of dead bodies by default. These will often proceed to reanimate and make more dead bodies out of your dwarves, particularly if unprepared.
144* CreepySouvenir: Vampires carry a trinket for each person they've killed, made from their hair, bone, teeth, or nails. [[HyperspaceArsenal Even if they've killed thousands of people.]]
145* 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.
146* CruelAndUnusualDeath: 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''. If you're '''really''' unlucky, you may have all your limbs broken and are left to die from the trauma, thirst, or the elements, unable to move.
147** 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.
148** 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''.
149** 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.
150** 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.
151* CrystallineCreature: Amethyst men are humanoid beings made out of crystalline amethyst, and live deep BeneathTheEarth. As their bodies are made entirely out of mineral, they can be very dangerous foes: they feel no pain, cannot be suffocated, are difficult to damage due to most weapons glancing off their stony skin, can punch a dwarf to death with ease and are building destroyers. They cannot be butchered like other creatures, instead leaving behind an amethyst when they are killed.
152* {{Cthulhumanoid}}: Octopus men, squid men, and nautilus men all resemble humans with cephalopod characteristics, ranging from a shell and tentacles to the classical Mindflayer-style "Humanoid with an octopus for a head".
153* 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 or permanent nerve damage) you might have at the time.
154** However there are downsides to werehood. You gain a WeaksauceWeakness to a random metal and won't know which until you're hit by it, transformation destroys all non-leather clothing you have on and removes any armor you're wearing, your transformed state might actually be weaker than your normal body if you're experienced enough, anyone who sees you transformed (including companions) turns hostile, and the curse type might have you [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking turn into something lame like a werezebra]].
155* CycleOfHurting:
156** Big monsters have a tendency to use charge attacks and bowl you over again right before you can stand up, which is even more likely in Adventure Mode.
157** Too much pain from taking hits will knock you unconscious. While unconscious, you will get hit more often. Do the math.
158* DarkerAndEdgier: Unfortunately for dwarves, every update involves adding many horrible things to kill them and all they love:
159** 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 [[AllTrollsAreDifferent Night Trolls]] infecting humans with TheCorruption. Worse, [[DueToTheDead unburied dwarves]] [[spoiler:now might come back as ghosts.]] They may [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=70423.0 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.
160** The .34.01 release gives us such wonderful additions as necromancers and their undead armies, werecreatures and zombies that can turn your dwarves into dwarrowwolves/zombies, evil clouds and rains that can have the same syndromes as forgotten beasts and evil lands that transform the living into Life-despising Husks.
161** The .40.01 release aimed to create a living, breathing world, and in doing so amped up the grittiness of the overworld. Cities may be terrorised by marauding goblins who actively assassinate civ leaders, or worse, may be run by what is essentially TheMafia of medieval times. And that's not getting into the gods, who [[spoiler:are now jolly good mates with demons and not only help them go up into the outside world, but guard their demon friends' treasure with absurdly powerful creatures.]]
162* 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. Being seen as a transformed werebeast also turns any witnesses (even companions) hostile.
163* DayOldLegend: The game will have engravers start depicting epic events on the walls and precious items of the fortress as soon as the event has happened. Maybe they're just vain. In prior versions it's even possible, thanks to a particular bug involving sequestered items (ones dwarves can't get to, and don't necessarily realize they can't get to), to have an artifact contain decorations depicting ''[[DrosteImage the artifact itself]]'' (presumably including its decorations...) as well as the event of its completion.
164* DeadlyDisc: 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, and due to the way weapon damage is calculated, they are one of the single deadliest (and messiest) conventional trap types in the game, capable of tearing a victim into each of their component pieces. In Adventure Mode, these same discs can be used as melee weapons with pleasing results, and with high Throwing skill... you get the idea.
165* DeathOfAChild: [[DeadBabyComedy It wouldn't be as FUNny otherwise.]]
166* DeathOfAThousandCuts: 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.
167* DeathWorld: Evil biomes, especially Savage and Evil biomes. Nothing says '''Fun''' like raining filth that makes your dwarves blister and vomit, fog banks that kill everything they envelop in horrible ways or try to start a ZombieApocalypse of discarded body parts and skins that refuse to stay down and try to kill your dwarves every time they rise.
168* DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment: 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".
169** Dwarf job titles always have the word "dwarf" replacing the word "man" (such as Swordsman = Swordsdwarf). In Adventurer mode, creatures that aren't the same race as your character will have their race shown next to their name and title. When playing as a non-dwarf adventurer, you might encounter characters such as "Urist Lastname, Dwarf Axedwarf".
170* DescriptionPorn: Happens sometimes with the [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Planepacked#The_Description procedurally generated item descriptions]], and with dwarves themselves and many other creatures.
171* DevelopersForesight: Dwarves in fortress mode, and adventurers in adventure mode, that hold conflicting values will have special descriptors for this interaction. For example:
172---> "(Dwarf/adventurer) finds obligations confining, and is conflicted by this since they believe in the rule of law."
173** Stark raving mad dwarves will have "Running around babbling!" listed under their status... unless the dwarf is unable to walk, in which case it will say "Crawling around babbling!" instead.
174** It is possible to assign an "in the dark" tile to creatures, and the game fully expects you to use quotation marks (") for this to represent ByTheLightsOfTheirEyes. So much so, in fact, that a specimen of such a race that loses an eye will instead be represented by an apostrophe ('). This is perhaps most easily tested using kobolds, which have glowing eyes by default.
175* 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]]]].
176* DidntThinkThisThrough: More often than not, a good chunk of "fun" comes from things ''the player'' didn't think through, such as drainage for a water (or magma) device. [[spoiler:Or digging through an adamantine tube.]]
177* DivinePunishment: Characters can find themselves cursed with vampirism or lycanthropy for disturbing graves, toppling idols, or abusing sortilage-oracles.
178* DragonTamer: Dragons can be captured and tamed for use as warbeasts, hunting animals, and as a source of dragon eggs, which can be hatched to get more dragons.
179* DugTooDeep: One of the many ways a fortress can be destroyed. The game's opening animation even depicts an instance of it.
180[[/folder]]
181
182[[folder:Tropes E-H]]
183* EarnYourFun: The very ''motto'' of the game is that losing is fun.
184* EldritchAbomination: [[ProceduralGeneration Procedurally generated]] Titans and Forgotten Beasts are definitely this, from humanoid elephant creatures with green hair and six arms to giant winged mantises made of stone. They are BodyHorror and OurMonstersAreWeird incarnate, and will even be worshiped by your dwarves after attacks.
185* ElementalCrafting: 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 adamantine 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. There's a reason it's called "cotton candy."
186* ElvesVersusDwarves: This is [[InvokedTrope 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 diplomats demand that you stop cutting the wood you need for beds, barrels, and charcoal. Or until you accidentally offer their traders the wooden box/barrel/bin your trade goods are in. ...You know what? ScrewYouElves.
187** Given how [[JerkAss elves]] regard dwarves during diplomatic meetings, it's a wonder the two races don't go to [[ElvesVersusDwarves war]] more often. The 'short jokes' are rather uncalled for.
188** Remember to establish good trade relations with elves. Lead goblets make great gifts![[note]]Though they don't poison anybody. Yet.[[/note]] Or even better, anything made of pitchblende[[note]]A form of uranium ore, also containing radium and lead, though again, radiation poisoning isn't yet implemented.[[/note]].
189** 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.
190---> [-(The Fortress of Blog/{{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.)-]
191** In world-gen, however, dwarves are actually the civilized race ''least likely'' to be at war with anyone without players deliberately provoking them.
192* EnfantTerrible: Dwarven children are just as possible to go crazy and attack other dwarves as adults are. Thanks to all the years of hauling (otherwise known as ''chores'') they do, they can develop some serious strength; enough to overpower adults and murder them, and the justice system has no way to prosecute minors. Some players have reported mad dwarven kids with homicides in the ''dozens''.
193* EndlessGame:
194** There are no actual winning conditions as of yet. Earlier versions had the potential to end in a ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings''-esque "you DugTooDeep and [[spoiler:unleashed a horrible demon]]" ending, but this was removed in favour of letting you play with essentially no time limits. (Though it is still quite possible to dig too deep, you now have the chance to fight and ''win'' against [[spoiler:the forces of the Underworld]].)
195** The closest thing to a 'winning condition' (even though it doesn't actually end the game at all) that has been added so far is the Mountainhome Quest after becoming your civilization's capital: your monarch will demand 'seven symbols' and a 'true throne' to elevate it from the Capital to the true Mountainhome. [[spoiler:The seven symbols, which can be any item, as well as the throne must be made with either divine metal or adamantine - both of which can only be found by breaching 'unusual volcanic walls' - be it by killing angels and looting their gear, getting lucky and finding lost divine artifacts, or digging through a pillar of raw adamantine and breaching Hell, the sheer difficulty of the challenge make it as worthy of a 'final boss' as Dwarf Fortress has gotten so far.]]
196* EpicFail: 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: Blog/{{Boatmurdered}}'s inexplicable fiery apocalypse and ensuing tantrum spiral.
197** One game ended almost as soon as it began, because the fortress was set up.. [[TooDumbToLive on top of magma.]]
198* EverythingsCoolerWithLava: You can build {{Lava Pit}}s to drop your enemies (or [[YouHaveFailedMe dwarves]], or [[TheScrappy nobles]]) in, make lava aqueducts to your forges, [[RuleOfCool lava cascades]], obsidian factories, or install lava central heating for your dwarves. (It doesn't do anything though), or even [[Blog/{{Boatmurdered}} flood the whole map with lava]] (although that is incredibly impractical in the current version).
199* ExpertInUnderwaterBasketWeaving: A few skills have such limited use that any migrants that arrive with levels in them under their belts are highly likely to end up working as haulers or janitors, or having to learn a different trade skill from scratch via practice. Examples include Cheese maker (cheese has no quality level, so skilled cheesemakers add no value to it), Fish dissector (used only to extract mog juice from moghoppers) and Wax worker (unless you have beehives they're out of luck).
200* EvilLaugh: Your very own dwarves do that when they enter a fell mood. [[UnusualEuphemism Fun]] will surely ensue.
201* ExtremeMeleeRevenge: Often combined with DisproportionateRetribution. An angry enough Dwarf won't stop beating you until you're reduced into a broken, bloody mess on the ground. At least they're nice enough to [[MercyKill finish you off]], so you don't have to slowly die to all the internal injuries you gained during the beatdown!
202* EyesDoNotBelongThere: Staring eyeball is a kind of "grass" found only in evil biomes that consists of literal eyeballs growing from the soil. Sometimes they blink at passersby. Cows can still eat it, though.
203* FailureIsTheOnlyOption: "Losing is Fun!" became the official motto for a reason.
204* FantasticFruitsAndVegetables: While plenty of real-world crops exist, plenty of fantastic ones do too. Other than the obvious subterranean fare, good and evil-aligned biomes will often contain more fantastical plants than more mundane biomes.
205* FantasticLivestock: Purring maggots are milk-producing vermin, while goblins shear trolls like sheep.
206* FantasticVermin: Fantastic species such as pixies and fire snakes are defined as vermin, meaning creatures that spawn randomly and spoil food, along rats and bats. The most unusual ones tend to live in evil biomes (which can hold demonic rats, pulsing bloodsucking insects and ghostly spiders) and the sometimes rather alien underground layers (which can produce infestations of crawling masses of fingerlike appendages or of the aforementioned snakes made out of fire).
207* FantasyGunControl: With a bit of MedievalStasis. Nothing more complex than ballistas can be made in terms of projectile weapons, but [[SchizoTech you can certainly engineer water-based saws.]] According to WordOfGod the tech is meant to cap out before gunpowder. GameMods, of course, can and will avert this.
208* FeelNoPain: [=NOPAIN=] 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.
209* FertilityGod: Some deities can be generated with Fertility among their spheres.
210* FirewoodResources: Logs go directly into carpenter's workshops and be used directly in constructions -- even if the construction is a smooth flat road. Further, when logs are used for constructing things like walls you can disassemble them to get the log back and then turn the log into a bed/door/etc. In the 2014 major content patch, trees are given variable sizes instead of one log from each tree, and the speed at which the log is transported back to the stockpile varies according to the mass of the wood; oak logs are noticeably heavier than something like willow, for example.
211* FogOfDoom: The surfaces of evil regions have a variety of clouds of randomly, [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast scarily]] 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.
212* ForegoneConclusion: [[DownerEnding You're]] [[CruelAndUnusualDeath going]] [[BlackComedy to]] [[BloodyHilarious lose.]] ''How'' you lose, however, is almost entirely up to you.
213* ForeignQueasine: Dwarves will butcher ''any'' animal with enough meat on it, which includes normal domestic animals like cows and sheep, but also things like dogs, cats, aardvarks, and forgotten beasts if you get a fleshy one. They will also eat pretty much every part of the animal except its cartilage and nervous tissue; brains, eyes, heart, lungs, tripe (stomach), liver, sweetbread (pancreas), spleen, and intestines are all edible as 'prepared organs'. Dwarves will also cook any ingredient with any ''other'' ingredient regardless of how well they go together (which doesn't matter in-game), giving you things like yak brain and oyster biscuits, cat intestine-crocodile egg-durian stew, and roasts made of syrup, potato wine, quarry bush leaves, and tallow. Elves and goblins go even further by not having the dwarves' cultural restrictions against eating sapient creatures; elves will eat defeated enemies and goblins can butcher sapient creatures specifically for their meat.
214* ForgingScene: The opening cutscene contains one, rendered in glorious AsciiArt.
215* ForScience: The "magma sciences" are good at setting items on fire.
216* ForkFencing: Slicing forks are surprisingly good weapons due to having an incredibly tiny contact area.
217* FullFrontalAssault:
218** In some earlier versions of Fortress mode, 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. Version 34.06 reintroduced unhappy thoughts from being naked, as part of the clothing bug fix.
219** It's entirely possible to have an adventurer go around completely naked (with predictable results for those that try to fight tough beasts with no armor), which, as of the 2014 version, does not evince any reaction from townspeople. On a related note, it is even possible to trade items with civilians in exchange for the clothes on their backs.
220* FunnyAnimal: 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).
221** Some of the _______-Men are just downright creepy, made even weirder by their nondescript ASCII chips. Slug-Men, for instance, ''have no bones'', and 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.
222* FromBadToWorse: ''Every single game.'' If something goes bad, it's safest to assume that it can only get worse.
223* GaiasVengeance: The v50 update added the ability for animals, regular, giant or animal-person, to become 'agitated' as a result of deforestation or excessive fishing, and will fly into a murderous rage agaisnt your dwarves that will only stop with their death. They can even appear in packs, have fun!
224* GameHuntingMechanic: Both Fortress and Adventurer modes allow the player to hunt wild animals to get their meat, bones, skin and ivory.
225* GameMod: 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 ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'', ZombieApocalypse, ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'', and ''Franchise/SuperMarioBros'' total conversions 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.
226** You can make bears (already trainable) rideable. In other words, ''[[BearsAreBadNews war bears]].''.
227** ''LetsPlay/{{Syrupleaf}}'', one of the many Website/SomethingAwful DF {{Lets Play}}s, features new demonic enemies added to the game this way.
228** 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 LetsPlay).
229** 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.
230** You can modify chickens so that, instead of laying eggs, they lay ''live bees''. ''Dwarf Fortress'': crimes against nature simulator.
231** There are also a lot of mods devoted to expanding the options available in adventure mode, especially crafting. The most notable is [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61304.0 Wanderer's Friend]], the source of many derivative mods. Notable derivatives include [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=140950.0 DF Wanderer]] and [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=153036.0 Adventurecraft]], both of which add their own twists and updates.
232** [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Cheating Some of the easiest and simplest mods to make]] are essentially {{Cheat Code}}s--you can make dwarves TheNeedless, produce valuable materials ''ex nihilo'', create a free StatGrinding workshop...
233* GemEncrusted: Just about any physical object that does not rot can be encrusted with cut gems to increase its value. This ranges from [[BlingBlingBang ammunition]] and [[BlingOfWar armor]] to [[CoolChair furniture]] to [[ConspicuousConsumption decorations]] all the way to [[EverythingsSparklyWithJewelry mechanisms]] and [[IfIWereARichMan barrels.]]
234* GiantFlyer: Giant eagles, many other giant variations of a bird, and the even bigger rocs.
235* GiantSquid: Giant cuttlefish, octopi and squid can all be found in savage oceans.
236* GlassCannon: Forgotten Beasts made of something weak may be this if they possess a dangerous attack such as [[InstantDeathRadius deadly dust]], [[DeadlyGas poisonous gas]] or [[AllWebbedUp webs]]. Attacking these with rangers is recommended.
237* GlobalCurrency: Played straight in Fortress Mode, as all traders use the same currency. In Adventure Mode, 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.)
238* GodIsEvil:
239** Armok, God of Blood, is a cruel god of war who only keeps worlds around as long as they entertain him, and destroys them once they cease to do so--i.e., once civilization, peace and stability spread.
240** As it turns out, gods and demons [[spoiler:are in league with each other. Gods may occasionally raise a demon from {{Hell}} using a legendary slab, letting them build huge spires of slade as gateways to the underworld and slade vaults full of priceless treasure and freakishly strong Angels, who actively protect the demonic site.]]
241* GodsNeedPrayerBadly: One of the few ways the Gods [[spoiler:(currently: 44.03)]] directly interact with mortals is by cursing those that profane their temples... and the only way for them to have temples to begin with is to have enough followers in a town. [[EverybodyHatesHades Gods of death]] can create slabs engraved with knowledge about necromancy, but they still require a worshipper to whom to bestow this slab, and thus to affect the world. However, their ''indirect'' dealings with the mortal world are much less dependent on worship and ''much'' more dire of consequence [[spoiler:– and by "indirect dealings", we mean ''unleashing a demon from the underworld'']].
242* {{Gorn}}: Yes, and ''PLENTY OF IT'', in ASCII text: the combat system describes the slashing of throats and gouging out of eyes with worrying relish.
243** And, as mentioned under many other entries, well-equipped hammer-users can turn just about any enemy into an [[ChunkySalsaRule 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.
244** 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.
245** 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.
246* GravityIsAHarshMistress: Quantized movement often makes it seem this way: units that move or dodge off a ledge hang in the air for a tick before plummeting.
247* GrievousHarmWithABody: It is possible for dwarves, or anyone in general, to use severed body parts or even entire corpses as melee weapons. In earlier versions of the game, babies were technically coded at things that could be wielded, and this resulted in dwarven mothers wielding their newborns as weapons if drafted.
248* GrimUpNorth: Or Grim Down South, depending on the case. While this does not happen all the time, it is highly likely that a [[{{Mordor}} large Evil region]] will be generated in the glacial areas during world generation.
249* GroinAttack: You can't quite ''aim'' for these without mods yet, but occasionally, in reports, strikes to the lower body will be helpfully announced as "a gelding blow!", often causing them to pass out from the agony. The details will be left to your imagination. Since the 2014 release, the player can geld pets to prevent overbreeding.
250* GuideDangIt: The original game had no instructions or tutorial - learning to play at all, and learning to build a sustainable fort even in friendly environments, all but required one to find online guides. 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. Later lessened in severity in the Steam release, which included some in-game tutorials, though it by no means scratches the surface in regards to the more complex mechanics.
251* HammerHilt: Some weapons are highly versatile this way, even if the "how" is not visualized. Swords can do pommel strikes for penetrating blunt force (very useful against armor), and polearm shafts can be smashed into the enemy, which isn't as powerful but has its uses. Of course, this is fairly normal for a game that lets you slap people around with the flat side of an axe.
252* 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. If they can get [[ImprobableWeaponUser a properly heavy metal crutch]], all the better. The character doesn't even need a crutch, they can just crawl around and slay [[AttackOfTheFiftyFootWhatever megabeasts]] without breaking a sweat, although they move pretty slowly. Some [=NPCs=] will even move as fast as the PC can, in Adventure mode... despite missing their legs.
253* 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)
254* HardCodedHostility: Any civilization with the [BABYSNATCHER] or [ITEM_THIEF] tag is automatically and forever hostile to any civilization that lacks the tag. Respectively, [[OurGoblinsAreDifferent goblins]] and kobolds have them by default, but you can mod in as many hostile races as you like.
255* HeavyMithril: The band Booze Control released a song based on ''Dwarf Fortress'', especially ''Boatmurdered''. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlGw8QJC2-w Strike The Earth!]]
256* HelpingHands: 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.
257* HenotheisticSociety: There are abstract [[https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Force "forces"]] who are worshipped by the elves. Although they are not considered gods in the traditional sense, they are nonetheless glorified by their elven followers.
258* HilarityEnsues: Look, if you actually get upset when [[DisasterDominoes one of your dwarves gets into a foul mood because you]] [[KickTheDog killed his cat on accident]], [[DisasterDominoes beats up another dwarf who then]] [[AxeCrazy gets ticked off enough]] [[DisasterDominoes 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, insane and dead dwarves litter your fortress]], you're playing it wrong. Losing is Fun, after all!
259* HollywoodHealing: Individual tissues have their own rates of healing (nervous tissue doesn't at all), and tissue can become permanently scarred. But in adventure mode, quick-travelling, sleep, or waiting for any amount of time instantly heals essentially anything that ''can'' heal.
260* HollywoodTactics: Because individual dwarves cannot be given much in the way of micromanaged orders in combat (once they [[BloodKnight spot a target]]) they tend to engage in certain forms of tactical idiocy, such as charging into melee when armed with a crossbow, or [[TooDumbToLive attempting to engage]] [[TheLegionsOfHell large packs of clowns]] solo) dwarves will frequently suffer from various versions of this flaw. At the same time, canny players can avert some of the [[IdiotBall problems]] displayed by individual military dwarves through the use of [[BenevolentArchitecture hardened defensive emplacements]], copious amounts of [[SpikesOfDoom reciprocating pointy sticks]], [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill overly complicated]] [[NoOSHACompliance mechanical]] [[DeathCourse traps]] along all entry points and the [[LavaAddsAwesome liberal use of magma]].
261* HorseOfADifferentColor: A wide variety of animals have the ability to be mounted, from regular horses to elephants to every giant animal found in savage biomes. When starting a party in adventurer mode, it's possible to give yourself a mount, or claim stray animals you come across as mounts. However, this isn't possible in fortress mode, as playable dwarves can't mount, though invaders may come riding mounts during sieges. The type of mount depends on the attacker: humans will come atop mundane animals like horses, camels, or sometimes [[BearsAreBadNews grizzly bears]], elves will ride {{unicorn}}s and giant savage beasts, and goblins ride [[FeatheredFiend beak dogs]] and subterranean monsters; if the RNG hates you enough, they might come riding ''[[BossInMookClothing cave dragons]]''... though if it's feeling funny they may also come riding Giant Toads that will inadvertently drown their riders in your moats.
262* HunterOfMonsters: A possible visitor type. If you have breached the Caverns, they will ask to become residents of your Fortress. They cannot be given direct orders, but will occasionally go to the Caverns you've discovered and search for monsters to kill.
263[[/folder]]
264
265[[folder:Tropes I-L]]
266* IDontLikeTheSoundOfThatPlace: Evil regions have such names. And even (theoretically) non-evil places can end up with names like ''Blog/{{Boatmurdered}}''.
267* IgnorantAboutFire: Dwarves have an unhealthy relationship with fire. Specifically, they have a complete indifference to it. A dwarf on fire will continue with his/her normal routine, setting everything on fire that they pass. This will last until they burn to death or are somehow extinguished.
268-->"Y'know, it sure is HOT in here. I could use a nice strong [[MadeOfExplodium alcoholic]] beverage to cool off. I'll just take a shortcut through the cloth stockpile and make my way to the booze stash."
269* IKnowYourTrueName: [[spoiler:Learning and invoking a demon's true name can be used to command or banish them.]]
270* ImAHumanitarian: Elves are okay with eating any creature, sentient or not, even one of their own race, if they defeated it in battle. However, they refuse to actively butcher sentient creatures for meat.
271* ImMelting: 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. Also, a bug in the 2010 version in semi-rare cases caused dwarfs and other creatures to melt when caught in the rain.
272* ImplacableMan: 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. Trying to KillItWithFire can make him even more "fun"; he will incorporate the molten metal into his attacks long before the fire eventually destroys him.
273** This also applies to any creature that is coded with the tokens NOFEAR, NOPAIN, and, occasionally, [[BloodKnight LIKES_FIGHTING]]. 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.
274** ''Everything'' in many evil biomes will rise into zombies. Making things worse, 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[[note]]Except dwarves will never butcher sentients, and that band of goblins that ambushed you just happen to be made of sentient creatures. OhCrap indeed.[[/note]], throwing the thing into a pool of magma, or pulverizing it with a drawbridge.
275** Certain evil biomes feature zombie-like "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 ZombieApocalypse.
276* ImpossibleThief: In the early releases of 0.40.0x, kobolds were able to steal [[spoiler:the legendary weapons of the gods, wielded by angels, which dwell within sealed vaults that have never been opened.]]
277* ImprobableAimingSkills: It's possible for projectile weapons to remove ''teeth'' and nothing else. [[https://photobucket.com/gallery/user/thatother1dude/media/cGF0aDovTm93dGhhdHN1c2luZ3lvdXJ0ZWV0aC5wbmc=/?ref= This]] is one interpretation.
278* ImprobablePowerDiscrepancy:
279** 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 later, unicorns. There have been entire wars fought against unicorns.
280** 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, making dagger stabs and whip lashes absurdly good at penetrating armor.
281** 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 LudicrousGibs 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.
282** 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.
283** 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.
284*** One memorably-pathetic titan was composed of snow and ended up being cut in half by the first crossbow bolt fired at it.
285*** 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 the resident [[https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Animal_people animal people]] 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.
286* ImprovisedWeapon: 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, ''[[BlackComedy babies]]''....
287* [[IncendiaryExponent !!Incendiary Exponent!!]]: Fire is a good source of Fun.
288** For even more [[CruelAndUnusualDeath Fun]], trap a Bronze Colossus in a pool of magma. [[GoneHorriblyWrong They tend incorporate being 600 degrees hotter into their attacks before melting.]]
289* InexplicablyPreservedDungeonMeat: Food left around will decay and spoil, but it will be preserved almost indefinitely if put in a food stockpile--it can still go bad, but takes years. In adventure mode, food you find will be perfectly edible.
290* InfinityMinusOneSword: High quality steel equipment is much less difficult to find than adamantine equipment, and for the most parts, it can hold its own quite well. Also, unlike adamantite, steel makes good blunt weapons as well.
291* InfinityPlusOneSword:
292** Any artifact adamantine artifact sword (or other cutting weapon). Adamantine holds an incredible edge, and artifacts are of the highest quality and don't suffer from wear.
293** For crushing weapons such as maces and hammers, artifact platinum weapons are this instead, due to its very high density. [[note]]Platinum normally cannot be made into a weapon, but dwarves making an artifact can use it anyways.[[/note]]
294* InjuredSelfDrag: Happens thanks to the game's [[SubsystemDamage ridiculously detailed damage system]]. Creatures may be forced to crawl if their legs stop working due to injury, or if they run out of stamina and collapse from over-exertion.
295* InsaneTrollLogic: The reasons for gods to [[spoiler:create vaults and release demons upon the world]] can be this. In some cases, it makes sense; a god of misery and suffering doing it [[ForTheEvulz to spread those]], or a god of valor giving heroes a foe to fight. However, sometimes the act will be done "after pondering the ineffable subtleties of" or "uses of" one of their spheres; even if the sphere is one like youth, that would have ''absolutely no good reason'' to [[spoiler:help a demon escape into the mortal world]] - one god in particular did so after pondering the ineffable subtleties of ''fish''.
296* ItsAllAboutMe:
297** Necromancers have a tendency to write books about themselves; then they write essays about the books about themselves.
298** The creation of a masterwork is considered an event depicting, and dwarves pick their decoration subjects at random; thus you may have a craftsdwarf decorate an item with an image of himself making an artifact. To make things more hilarious, engravings of masterwork creations can be masterworks themselves, so you can get an engraver making a carving of himself making a carving of himself making a carving, and so on until your entire fort is a monument to this one dwarf's vanity.
299* JokeItem: Hammers and maces made of Adamantite are pathetically weak due to having almost no weight.
300* JumpPhysics: In both modes, people can jump right through fortifications, bars, and grates.
301* KarlMarxHatesYourGuts: Regardless of your world or location, prices for goods and materials are always fixed. 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 [[BoringButPractical pick up hundreds of the rocks you find in infinite supply next to a shop and sell them.]] [[AnEntrepreneurIsYou Supply-and-demand based values]] are in the works for the Caravan arc.
302* {{Kevlard}}: Fat realistically serves as a layer of tissue that may take damage from an attack instead of a more important body part. More bizarrely, in Adventure Mode you can repeatedly ''[[ViolationOfCommonSense 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.
303* KillItWithFire: 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.
304** Ironically, Forgotten Beasts made of fire, ice, and many other "elements" are laughably easy since they come to pieces on the slightest contact.
305* KillItWithIce: 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, [[CryonicsFailure all you find is a skeleton and anything metallic the victim was carrying.]]
306** This being ''Dwarf Fortress'', [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential players have created systems]] to trap goblins in a flooded room, then retract the roof to expose and freeze the water. [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:Vattic/Orcsicle_maker_Explained 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.
307* KillerRabbit:
308** [[LegendaryCarp 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.
309** Then there's the Undead Carp: it's like a normal Carp, but is actually listed as "Evil", is very hard to kill, and [[FromBadToWorse it swims on land...]]
310** [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=101243.0 Giant sponges]] will kill anything that approaches them. Not bad for an animal that's not supposed to even ''move''. Without a nervous system the only thing it can feel... is anger.
311** In a game where the majority of people wield axes and warhammers and crossbows and swords, wrestling sounds like a hilariously underpowered form of attack. At least, until you see what [[CruelAndUnusualDeath wrestlers]] [[SickeningCrunch tend]] [[ColdBloodedTorture to]] [[DeathOfAThousandCuts do]] to people they fight.
312* LavaIsBoilingKoolAid: 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. If you turn off temperature in the init file, your dwarves can swim in it.
313** 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.
314** 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.
315** Lava has its own [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59894.0 advantageous issues]] though.
316* LegendaryCarp: A thing of the past, but the legends (and page quote from [[WordOfGod Toady]] himself) still remain.
317* LethalJokeItem: Occasionally, dwarves will equip items that are... not usually defined as weapons. A particularly well-known bloodline game, [[http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Headshoots/ 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.
318** And [[InvertedTrope on the other hand]] there's [[JokeItem adamantine warhammers and maces]], which sound deadly but are basically indestructible wiffle-bats due to adamantine being extremely light.
319* LifeWillKillYou: It doesn't matter how many dragons he's slain single-handedly, how many towns he may have leveled, or how many civilizations hail him as a hero, your adventurer or legendary axedwarf can (and probably will) still fall into a lake and drown, or die to a runaway minecart.
320* LightIsNotGood: Titans from good-aligned biomes are still dangerous to dwarves, and [[spoiler:angels are the most powerful and vicious creatures in all of ''Dwarf Fortress'']].
321* LiteralDisarming: This is a relatively common tactic among players; hacking off an opponent's hand deprives them of not only a weapon, but parrying capabilities, as well, leaving them open for a potentially fatal blow. [[TakeAThirdOption Or just leaving the option of having them bleed out.]]
322* LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading: 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.
323* LowFantasy: There may be dragons, elves, zombies, werebeast curses and [[LegionsOfHell circus clowns]], but there's hardly a drop of magic to be found.[[note]][[PerpetualBeta Yet.]][[/note]] It's just you and your dwarves, struggling to survive in an untamed world by means of industry, alcohol, and cold, hard steel. This was finally changed with the Villains Update, which made Necromancers more active, granted them the ability to make experimental monstrosities, create servants with magic powers, and also added dice Gods can use to curse or bless people in the world.
324** DarkFantasy: Approaches this trope more and more with each release. See DarkerAndEdgier.
325* 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.
326** 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?"
327** Something similar can happen to your dwarves at the hands of goblin wrestlers.
328** A ''basic'' dwarf recruit, who hasn't had time to go grab a weapon, can still beat up a kobold so spectacularly that the kobold's left arm ends up in two pieces.
329** 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.
330** 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.)
331** 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.
332* LukeNounverber: Naming for everything works this way.
333** Occasionally throws up NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast if something or someone with a sinister name turns out to be, well, sinister. The aforementioned Blog/{{Boatmurdered}} counts here.
334** Similarly, [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Cacame_Awemedinade "Cacame Apebalded the Immortal Onslaught" ("Cacame Awemedinade Monípalóthi" in Elven), the Elven King of Dwarves]].
335[[/folder]]
336
337[[folder:Tropes M-P]]
338* MadArtist: Strange Moods cause dwarfs to produce something incredibly valuable, but defying any logic and sometimes laws of nature, like a gold anvil or earring so engraved it would require nanotechnology to fit all the engravings on them.
339* MadeOfIron: Neither internal bleeding nor cumulative damage were implemented in releases prior to [=DF2014=], 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. With the most recent release, the combat system has been reworked, allowing for much more effective blunt weapon combat and many fewer cases of MadeOfIron. (Except for randomly-generated creatures who may actually be made of iron...)
340* MadeOfPlasticine: It's not uncommon for creatures to get their heads punched off, or shot in half with an arrow. Items such as socks and backpacks can also be used to inflict impossibly severe injuries, and [[http://i.imgur.com/IDKZk.jpg snowball fights can be deadly]]. One of the funnier examples of this is a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQP1-psRiYs let's play dedicated to a character fighting entirely using his own loincloth]]. And with the coming and going of various bugs, the level of plasticine varies; one of the more infamous was during the time force was introduced into combat, the twisting of limbs was such that even punching someone in the fingers would cause their wrists to snap like twigs and bend their elbows and shoulders until they pointed backwards, tearing every ligament, muscle and tendon up. Even a light punch to the face that barely rattles the taker would tear their neck skin for no apparent reason.
341** There was one infamous case where the head of a [[MadeOfIron Bronze Colossus]] went flying after the player tossed basically the local equivalent of a '''''tribble''''' at it.
342** If the game is lenient with you, you may encounter Forgotten Beasts, Titans, [[spoiler:Demons or Angels]] made of a weak material such as snow, ash, grime, mud or steam. [[JustifiedTrope They are just as fragile as these imply]], and any and all hits that land will sever limbs, if they do not OneHitKill outright.
343* MagicIsEvil: Development on the ''DF'' magical system has begun--the first type of mage to be introduced was the {{necromancer}}.
344** 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 [[VideogameCrueltyPotential will be used for evil and cruelty]]. There is already a spell to crush your opponent's lungs with a thought. It can get far, far worse.
345* MarsNeedsWomen: The reason Night Trolls kidnap mortals of the opposite gender.
346* MartialArtsAndCrafts: 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?
347* MedievalStasis: WordOfGod says the available technology isn't going to get past the 14th Century.
348* MedievalUniversalLiteracy: Averted, with literacy being a skill to put points in, to be able to read.
349* MentalShutdown: One of the four types of insanity a dwarf can hit when their stress is at a terminal point is Catatonia, which afflicts those who are neither irascible, anxious nor depressive and those who "become completely helpless in stressful situations." The effects are simple: The dwarf's mind seemingly shuts down completely, and they will just lie there staring off into space with no reaction to any stimuli until they starve to death, or something else kills them (which they will not even react to).
350* MinecartMadness: In newer versions, you can create minecarts complete with physics simulation to haul goods (and other fun stuff). The "madness" part is obvious after this, given the nature of the game. They are proving to be very, very Fun. Among other things, they move fast enough they become hard to hit... and allow attacks from a cart.
351--> '''[[http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_2012.html#2012-04-12 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."
352* MissingSecret: Pearl, amber, and coral are all materials implemented and mentioned in the game interface, but it's impossible to acquire them, since they don't generate normally.
353* MortalityPhobia: This can be one of the motivations for an NPC to begin learning necromancy.
354* TheMourningAfter: Characters whose lovers or spouses die used to never find another lover or remarry. In recent versions, while they may experience trauma from their spouse dying, they can find other lovers and spouses.
355* NatureIsNotNice: Savage biomes, particularly 'neutral' (neither Good or Evil-Aligned) Savage biomes, are full of giant-sized animals and animal-people that are by default extremely dangerous: a Bluejay is normally a cute harmless bird, a giant bluejay? It can tear up unarmed dwarves with ease. v50 made Savage biomes even more unfriendly with the addition of 'agitated' animals, which can cause what is basically a siege of giant, very angry, very murderous animals on your fort.
356* {{Necromancer}}: Who, as expected, led armies of zombified creatures (or their severed parts) against their foes.
357* NinjaPirateZombieRobot: While vampirism and werecreature curses are mutually exclusive, adventurers can still become one of those as well as a necromancer and a 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 horde of clones of the same person. There are also reports of werecreature ''ghosts''; worse yet, necromancer ghosts, who, to the horror of many, can still raise corpses (including their own) despite being dead.
358* NighInvulnerability: 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.
359** If the RandomNumberGod really hates you, you may get a Forgotten Beast made of some extremely tough material such as a magma-proof stone, hard gemstone, or steel.
360* NightmareFetishist: It is possible for dwarves to like certain creatures for...various reasons, such as goblins or trolls for their "''terrifying features''", or sea monsters for their "''horrifying appearance''"
361* NobodyPoops: 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.
362** See also the LordBritishPostulate entry above, which explains why a majority of the fanbase (whose attention to detail is normally acute) is fine with playing this one straight. ''Nobody'', even the few players who didn't mind the whole Mermaid Farming thing, wants the forums inundated with ingenious design concepts for a [[{{Squick}} raw sewage drowning trap]].
363* NonHeteronormativeSociety: Non-heterosexual orientations were eventually added as personality traits, but there aren't any societal ethics related to it, thus homophobia is nonexistent by default. In a somewhat comical extension of this, no one in-game even accounts for the orientation of ''domestic animals'', despite that obviously affecting breeding ability.
364* NorthIsColdSouthIsHot: When the world generator is set to create an island continent, the position of the "hot" hemisphere and the "cold" hemisphere is randomly chosen. Larger worlds have an equator and two poles.
365* NotTheFallThatKillsYou: Armor [[http://www.nuklearpower.com/2009/09/08/episode-1170-happy-landings/ blocks damage from falling.]] A heavily-armored character can survive quite long drops unscathed. This is mostly due to the way the game simulates fall damage, which is basically grabbing a block of the material you landed on and beating you with it. It's also why long falls onto featherwood won't do any damage (it has very low density), while a werewolf taking a brief fall into silver would basically explode into gory bits.
366* TheOathBreaker: Oath-breaking is one of the [[DeliberateValuesDissonance ethics]] tracked by civilizations. In-game this generally only affects [[ScrappyMechanic mandates]], resulting in your dwarves being punished for not making an item a noble orders to be produced (even if it's impossible to make.) Mind you, dwarves as a race take this as a pretty serious offense, worthy of jailtime or a couple of possibly lethal hammer strikes.
367* OddJobGods: The game may, for instance, generate a god of salt. Sometimes these deities can get FlightStrengthHeart as well; it's perfectly plausible to find a god of death, war, murder and... rainbows.
368* OddlyNamedSequel2ElectricBoogaloo: ''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''.[[note]]Where X and Y are synonyms of "greed" and "toil", chosen at random on startup.[[/note]]
369* OhCrap: Since conversations in DF as of version 40 are now simulated in real-time and recorded in the combat log, your military will do this a lot when particularly badly pummelled. Or slightly pummelled. Or as soon as the enemy shows up. "Does it all end so quickly!", Yes, Urist [=McRecruit=]. Yes, it does....
370* OneDoseFitsAll: [[AvertedTrope Body mass dilutes the effects of poison]], making a given dosage less effective and/or take longer. A giant cave spider biting a dwarf will cause it to suffocate from paralyzed lungs, but a dragon will only feel slightly numb.
371** Played straight with Giant Desert Scorpion venom. It causes the necrosis of the nervous system and the brain, so no matter the creature attacked, once it is stung, [[YouAreAlreadyDead it is already dead.]]
372* OneManArmy: With enough training and good enough weapons and armor, a lone dwarf can reduce entire hordes of Goblins to literal pulp. 1 dwarf VS 100 goblins? It's possible to {{Curb Stomp|Battle}} the 100 goblins with just one dwarf.
373** Nothing's preventing you from having several of these in your fort. Hell, you can even have a whole army of One Man armies.
374* OneSteveLimit: Is not respected by the game, unless you use the nicknaming feature to distinguish your dwarves. There's a reason 'Urist' became a reference for the generic [[{{Everyman}} 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.
375* OnlyAFleshWound: People of all races will ignore severed limbs, their entrails hanging out of them, and arrows sticking through everywhere in their body. In fact, legless/armless/quintuple amuputee warriors tend to move ''faster'', for some bizarre reason.[[note]][[ArtisticLicensePhysics They're lighter?]][[/note]]
376* OpenSecret: The 'Hidden' Fun Stuff, which just about everyone finds out about from reading {{Lets Play}}s 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.
377** Still, some players try to hide certain facts (seriously or jokingly) by calling [[spoiler:demons]] "clowns", [[spoiler:adamantine]] "cotton candy", [[spoiler:hell]] "the circus" and [[spoiler:demonic fortresses]] "circus tents".
378** Though when someone somehow [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=80043.0 doesn't know about it]], things get hilarious quickly.
379* OriginsEpisode: The whole game, of all of the monster-filled underground ruins in every other game.
380* OrphanedSetup: One bit of in-game dialogue has shades of this, using two randomly chosen creatures every time it comes up.
381--> Did you hear the one about the carp and the forgotten beast?
382* OurAngelsAreDifferent: Guardians. Very few will see them. Fewer still live to tell of it. They're procedurally generated, much like Titans and Forgotten Beasts. [[spoiler:Guardians are created by specific gods and have descriptions associated to their progenitor's spheres. They are found guarding vaults, and are known fight even modded adamantine colossi to a standstill. Your reward for defeating them is a BraggingRightsReward by the time you're powerful and/or cunning enough to manage it.]]
383* OurDragonsAreDifferent:
384** Dragons are a type of megabeast--extremely rare, gigantic and powerful monsters, a category also including Bronze Colossi, {{roc|Birds}}s and [[OurHydrasAreDifferent hydras]]. They have no wings and are mentally just animals, and breathe dragonfire four times as hot as magma, which will injure even creatures normally immune to fire damage. They're themselves immune to fire, dragonfire and lava, although a dragon completely immersed in the latter will still drown.
385** Cave dragons are relatives of true dragons adapted for life underground, with limp, useless wings (despite regular dragons having no wings to begin with) and large, staring eyes. They're not true megabeasts and cannot breathe fire, but like surface dragons are immune to dragonfire. Goblins sometimes bring them along during sieges.
386* OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame: The entire point of the game, really. The Dwarven civilizations in ''Dwarf Fortress'' vary little from the model set by other universes. Well, except for being far more AxCrazy, manic-depressive, and likely to engage in [[PointlessDoomsdayDevice insane, colossal projects]] for no clear reason. They're the only civ that can use steel, they can enter 'martial trances' in combat, and will occasionally enter a MadArtist mood and create a legendary artifact or go nuts trying. They have a reputation for [[ArtificialStupidity not being the brightest]], though that's mostly the fault of [[GoodBadBugs game limitations]].
387* OurElvesAreDifferent: Elves are extremely protective of trees, to the point of not accepting any wooden goods in trade (or goods that tangentially involve wood) and declaring war on civilizations that fell too many trees. They also tend to get into disputes over their habit of eating the corpses of enemies they killed. They make all their goods (including armor and weaponry) by 'growing' them from living trees, with some trees in their sites (Forest Retreats) being designated for that purpose. Elves are at peace with nature and are never attacked by wild animals, and often tame them. Unlike other civs, they don't worship gods, but instead forces that permeate the forests. Their [[AssInAmbassador snotty attitude]] in diplomatic meetings and the ease of offending them means that players are very likely to say ScrewYouElves and use them as test subjects for their doomsday devices.
388* OurGoblinsAreDifferent: These ones are TheNeedless and biologically immortal. Their civilizations are designated as Evil, and their sites are called Dark Fortresses and Dark Pits. They always end up at war with other civilizations over their tendency to kidnap children (which are then raised as goblins) and their utter disregard for ethics, and they're the only civ guarenteed to attack fortresses without the player doing something to provoke them. Goblin sieges are comparatively easy to thwart, since their armament is generally sub-par and their tactics amount to a ZergRush. The community outlook on goblins is generally somewhere between 'source of loot' (goblinite, the fourth ore of iron) to 'target practice', and their baby snatching is often PlayedForLaughs as the goblins saving dwarven children from [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential the players]].
389* OurHydrasAreDifferent: Hydras are megabeasts--extremely rare, gigantic and powerful monsters, a category also including Bronze Colossi, {{roc|Birds}}s and [[OurDragonsAreDifferent dragons]]--described as dragon-like beasts with seven heads. While only around half the size of other megabeasts, they can attack with all seven heads at once, thus overwhelming single opponents or keeping multiple attackers at bay simultaneously. They also possess a strong HealingFactor, a rarity in the game, that allows them to heal a hundred times faster than other creatures can, although they cannot actually regrow lost heads.
390* OurMermaidsAreDifferent: 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 [[HumanResources trapping, breeding and killing them for their bones.]] The developer was [[{{Squick}} squicked]] enough that he [[ObviousRulePatch devalued the bones in a patch once this was discovered.]]
391* OurMinotaursAreDifferent: 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]].
392* OurMonstersAreWeird: Forgotten Beasts, Titans, [[spoiler:Demons]] and [[spoiler:Angels]] are randomly generated, and the results are very, ''very'' strange, sometimes even looking like something straight out of ''Franchise/ResidentEvil''. More consistent, but still bizarre, are the many-tentacled Sea Monsters, and the various creatures such as Pond Grabbers, Green Devourers, and Cave Crawlers that live BeneathTheEarth.
393* OurOrcsAreDifferent: Necromancers can experiment on sapient creatures to create procedurally generated entities with names like "night's warriors" or "Tooltwist's eyes"[[note]]Tooltwist being the name of the necromancer that created them[[/note]] that basically fill the "orc" role. They're the big, powerful minions of dark magic wielding villains who hole up in towers. They're ''not'', however, AlwaysChaoticEvil, and can escape to join other civilizations; if able to reproduce (some have NoBiologicalSex), they can even produce independent populations.
394* OurVampiresAreDifferent: These are 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 be infiltrated by a vampire in the waves of migrants, who will feed off sleeping dwarves (preferably when no one is looking.) They will [[ArtificialBrilliance 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 PlayerCharacter in adventure mode, and dwarven citizens if their blood happens to contaminate the water supply.[[note]]Needless to say, this latter fact is routinely abused by the player base to make all-vampire fortresses.[[/note]]
395** When vampires were first introduced into the game, [[ArtificialStupidity they weren't very selective about who'd they'd accuse of their own crimes]], and thus would sometimes end up pointing the finger at babies or livestock.
396* OurWerebeastsAreDifferent: 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.
397* OurZombiesAreDifferent: 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.
398** 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.
399** The same version also introduced "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 ZombieApocalypse.
400* PaletteSwap: The fact that the game's done in [=ASCII=] graphics makes this a justified case.
401* PatchworkMap: 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 RuleOfFun and balance reasons.
402* PerpetualBeta: Technically an ''alpha'', but not perpetual. Version 1.0 will be when Toady makes 100 core elements, [[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html?pagewanted=all which he has estimated]] could take until around 2030. DF fans don't see this as a problem.
403* PerpetualMotionMachine: The mechanical energy generated by water falling onto a water wheel is ten times what's needed to pump water up one story. Power the pump with the water wheel, prime it once with manual labor, and it will endlessly generate power.
404* PerpetualMotionMonster: The result of combining the tags [=NOEXERT=], [=NO_EAT=], [=NO_DRINK=], and [=NO_SLEEP=], often found on inorganic, undead, or especially strong monsters.
405* PhysicalHell: [[spoiler: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 NighInvulnerable. 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 ''colonizing'' Hell. Including putting civilian quarters down there just for the sake of "[[Film/ThreeHundred tonight we dine in Hell]]" jokes.]]
406* {{Pilgrimage}}: Pilgrims are roaming the roads to go to sites with temples dedicated to their god and then pray there. Some of these pilgrims can become prophets.
407* PointlessDoomsdayDevice: Dwarven Physics, coupled with constant threats and lots of creative players, lends itself to this.
408** One of the most famous examples is [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Operation: Fuck The World]], from ''Blog/{{Boatmurdered}}'': a lever that, when pulled, released a flood of magma across the plains. In practice, however, ''FTW'' proved to be more of a standard DoomsdayDevice, 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.
409* PointyHairedBoss: Nobles have quite the reputation for this. They will regularly make mandates and export bans determined by their preferences, but without taking feasibility into account. You have a noble that likes glass? He'll mandate glass items despite the total lack of sand on your map. Or ban the export of glass trade goods ''just before'' the caravan leaves the map and it becomes impossibe to obey. Nobles can also have impossible furniture demands, like wanting a metal bed (impossible except if a strange mood happens to yield an artifact one). There's a reason that [[MakeItLookLikeAnAccident Unfortunate Accident]] has entered the dwarven lexicon; unreasonable nobles are quite prone to pulling levers that turn out to make their rooms into drowning chambers or drop them down a spiked pit, or somesuch.
410* PowerEqualsRarity:
411** Generally, the harder it is to obtain a specific material, the stronger it is when used in gear: only Dwarves can smith Steel (making it a bit problematic to obtain in Adventure Mode) while other civilizations cap out at Bronze or Iron at best; Adamantine is the strongest material for edged weapons and armor, and it's also the rarest, and it can only be obtained by player-run forts.
412** Crafted items have general quality levels: Normal, Well-Crafted, Finely-Crafted, Superior, Exceptional, Masterful, and Artifact. For most items, this simply determines their value and how elaborate their description is - but on weapons and armor, it directly affects their strength. While it is possible for skilled blacksmiths to pump out high-quality weapons and armor to outfit your army, there is no way to control when and how you'll obtain Artifacts, making Artifact Weapons and Armor the rarest and most powerful.
413* PowerfulPick: Mining picks are pretty decent weapons. And they use mining skill, which is quite a bit easier to max out than weapon skills (in fortress mode, anyway.)
414* PostModernMagik: Dwarven Physics tend to result in unusual uses of old fantasy tropes. The Forgotten Beasts, especially. Beware the fearsome Werechinchilla!
415* PuffOfLogic: ProceduralGeneration of a world can occasionally result in things that make sense from the world map but are impossible with the more detailed simulation from actually being in a place, leading to things like land collapsing the second after it is observed.
416* PunchedAcrossTheRoom: Happened a ''lot'' in earlier versions, toned down considerably now. However, it's even deadlier whenever it happens now, as the minecart update made skidding across the ground a bone-shattering experience, even with a "weak" one-square flight.
417** Larger creatures are still perfectly capable of sending smaller victims flying several tiles with a single blow.
418** Boosted a bit more in the 2014 release. Dwarves are still no longer capable of punting a warhorse across the map, but with the new pulping and fighting mechanics added, a skilled fighter is perfectly capable of punching your head clean off and sending it flying across the room.
419* PurelyAestheticGender: Not even aesthetic, because of the simple graphics. Well, no stat (or even anatomical) difference, but female dwarfs can have babies and male animals can be struck by [[GroinAttack "a gelding blow"]] in combat.
420** 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 pops out a baby while in the middle of digging out a tunnel. Same with animals, dogs giving birth to puppies while in the middle of battle happened more than once. And then, those same puppies ''joining in the battle''.
421** 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.
422** 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.
423** 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).
424* PurpleProse: Books written by necromancers can be described with "the writing is excessively ornate". Often suggesting over-elaborate, flowery writing about the author himself or analysis of his previous works.
425[[/folder]]
426
427[[folder:Tropes Q-T]]
428* RainOfSomethingUnusual: Evil biomes have "evil weather" including rain of blood, other bodily fluids, or toxic sludge. Getting caught in any of these will not only make your dwarves miserable, but can also make them sick.
429* RaisedByOrcs: 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.
430** 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.
431** 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.
432** Under rare circumstances, during world generation, a demon may conquer a nearby civilization which will nonetheless remain friendly with you. [[spoiler: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 [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=79137.0 Forgotten Beast]].]]
433* RaisingTheSteaks: Evil-aligned, "haunted" areas are full of zombie and skeleton animals, which are [[DemonicSpiders ridiculously hard to kill]]. Skeletal enemies lack vulnerable internal organs, so piercing weapons--normally the fast track to a OneHitKill--are a lot less effective, and undead enemies cannot bleed out or be overcome by pain or exhaustion. The only way to truly destroy them is by crushing whatever is keeping them moving into a pulp.
434** 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).
435** 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.
436* RandomlyGeneratedQuests: Quests or "Agreements" can be given by local rulers to slay monsters and bandits or cause troubles for another faction.
437* RasputinianDeath: The ultra-buggy first release of the 2010 version of Dwarf Fortress features plenty of these. Creatures lived through a great deal of torture before dying, including major organ damage. Nonliving opponents such as bronze colossi were very nearly invulnerable; the only way to kill them was 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.
438* RealityIsUnrealistic: Many a player has bemoaned accidentally buying a gay or asexual animal hoping to breed it. As it turns out, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals that isn't as uncommon as one might think]].
439* RealTimeWithPause: 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.
440* RedBaron: Sentient beings that start 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 [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast nickname]] as well. However, if the RandomNumberGod decides to entitle you "The Towel of Slapping", you may prefer to simply be called "Urist".
441* RemovingTheHeadOrDestroyingTheBrain: Zombies with heads are instantly slain if you smash or sever them. ''All'' of them, if they're a MultipleHeadCase. But they can be re-reanimated if they have any grasping limbs left...
442* {{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.
443* 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. 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]].
444** An in-canon example would be the fluffy wamblers--{{chibi}}fied 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 butcher a newborn puppy should the need arise.
445* RocBirds: Rocs are a type of megabeast, a group of extremely rare, large and powerful creatures that will attack you fortress when certain conditions are met and are generally capable of wrecking fortresses on their own. They are the third largest creatures in the game behind fully-grown dragons (which take fifty times as long to reach their full size) and giant sperm whales, and the biggest flying creatures of all. A newly hatched roc is as big as a fully-grown giant eagle.
446* SapientEatSapient: The [=[EAT_SAPIENT_KILL]=] and [=[EAT_SAPIENT_OTHER]=] ethics tags determine whether a race is willing to eat creatures with the [=[CAN_LEARN]=] tag. Members of civilizations with the first tag (elves and goblins, in vanilla) will eat the bodies of those slain in battle, but unless they also have the second tag (goblins in vanilla) they won't kill sapients ''for the purpose'' of eating them.
447* ScrewYouElves: 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 everyone else's method of getting rid of them is like everything else in the game; magma.
448* SealedEvilInACan: [[spoiler:Know that the adamantine is there ''for a reason.'']]
449* SeaMonster: Plenty.
450** Named-as-such sea monsters are giant horrors native to evil oceans. They're not described in detail, but have six tentacles, two claws and powerful jaws. They're quite dangerous, but very valuable if you can kill and butcher one. When dwarves like them, they do so for their "horrifying freakish appearance".
451** Savage oceans are home to numerous seagoing terrors of their own, including sea serpents and giant versions of cephalopods, orcas and sperm whales; each is approximately ten times the size of the base version, and giant sperm whales in particular are biggest things in the game, bar none.
452* SeaSerpents: Sea serpents are immense marine creatures--some of the largest creatures in the seas, in fact--resembling serpentine dragons with flippers instead of legs. They spawn in savage oceans, although only one serpent will spawn in each suitable biome.
453* ShapedLikeItself: Sometimes happens in item descriptions, resulting in things like "cubical cubes".
454* ShapeshiftingHealsWounds: [[OurWerebeastsAreDifferent Werecreatures]] instantly heal all injuries every time they transform. Since this was the only way to heal permanent injuries such as nerve damage and missing limbs before the Villains Update added the healing blessing, some players of Adventurer mode would and some still do [[CursedWithAwesome deliberately become werecreatures]] with this in mind. This has led to an bug where cutting a werecreature to pieces and reanimating the pieces as a {{Necromancer}} caused each body part to eventually [[FromASingleCell regenerate into a full-sized clone of that werecreature]].
455* ShopFodder: 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.
456** [[FunetikAksent On th' other other hand,]] [[OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame wha' sort o' pansy dwarf don't need lots 've rocks?]]
457** 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 selective disposal methods.
458** And now that clothing deteriorates and dwarves get bad thoughts from wearing old clothes, after a couple of years, your fort will start getting littered with old clothing that dwarves trade in for newer stuff. Atom-smash it, toss it in magma, or sell it to caravans and tell them it's "vintage."
459** Mugs eventually became useful for drinking in taverns (and [[ImprovisedWeapon armament]] for the occasional BarBrawl), children can play with toys, musical instruments can be used by performers, and dwarves can claim random wearable crafts to sate their needs to acquire something and/or be extravagant.
460** Many plant and creature extracts do absolutely nothing, but the caravans like them a lot. Golden Salve has 100 value (and comes in lots of 5), but you can't do anything with it, not even show it off for dwarves to admire (which you can do with crafts). Gnomeblight has the same value, but since there's no mechanic for putting poison on things, you have to do some serious planning if you want to see it actually work.
461** It bears mentioning that an excess of clutter, including large amounts of shop fodder 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.
462** Mugs, along with cups and goblets, finally left this category as of DF 2014, as drinking without the aid of such a vessel would generate an unhappy thought. They are also necessary for a Tavern to serve drinks with.
463* ShoutOut:
464** Every fortress starts out with [[Literature/SnowWhite seven dwarves]]. Or, alternatively, a ShoutOut to [[Literature/TheLordOfTheRings the seven dwarf lords]].
465** [[Literature/MobyDick Sperm whales can be admired for their "vengeful nature" and have a very small chance of being white.]]
466** Vampirism gets started when [[TabletopGame/VampireTheMasquerade a god curses a mortal to forever wander the night in search of blood.]]
467** Certain deep structures are made of an undiggable type of rock called slade, likely named after [[Music/{{Slade}} the hard rock band]].
468* ShownTheirWork: 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.
469* SillyReasonForWar: 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 CantArgueWithElves.
470* SingleSpecimenSpecies: Forgotten Beasts. Possibly Titans as well, depending on how you classify them.
471* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism: Firmly embedded on the cynical end... but with the twists that it's [[BlackComedy all in good fun]]. After all, [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption losing is fun]]. That said, the game's complexity and procedurally-generated nature make it possible to tip either end of the scale (particularly with the player's involvement). Idealistic playthroughs are just more challenging and tend to be less entertaining.
472* SpaceCompression: A dragon takes up one square; so do dwarves and cats. The only thing that ''doesn't'' is traders' wagons.
473** This leads 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.
474** Pretty much anything can be stored on a single tile and remain usable with just a little micromanagement, using "Quantum Stockpiling".
475** Likewise, you can fit your fortress's entire animal population into a single cage, including five elephants, two cave crocodiles, three dozen cats and kittens, 15 dogs, and a partridge in a pear tree.
476* StandardFantasyRaces: The civilization-building races are the dwarves (who you play as), the humans (your most common allies and trade partners), the elves (who will go to war with whoever threatens their forests), and the goblins (who will war with anyone and everyone, and are often ruled by demons). Other species in the world include a tremendous variety of barbaric animal people, thieving gnomes, and a selection of giants, cyclopes and ettins who mostly just raid other people. Dragons, hydras and similar monsters appear as rare megabeasts that occasionally attack cities and fortresses.
477* StealthPun: The character "&" is used to represent [[spoiler:Demons]] in the game. UNIX uses the same character as a way to start a [[spoiler:[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_%28computing%29 daemon (background process)]]]].
478* SticksToTheBack: Weapons and shields can be strapped to the upper body when not in use. This works with ''all'' weapon types, including spears and pikes. [[HyperspaceArsenal There is no limit]] to how many times this can be done, and it's possible to do [[FullFrontalAssault even if your character is naked]]. It only applies to weapons and shields, though, so you still need a backpack to store other items.
479* StoryDrivenInvulnerability: Randomly generated megabeasts, like Forgotten Beasts and Titans, are invulnerable during world generation, that they may wander the world and shape history through their actions. They only become vulnerable once the player has an opportunity to interact with them, otherwise they might get killed early on and the player will never see them. This is especially true of random megabeasts that are made from materials that would otherwise be particularly delicate and would never have survived otherwise.
480* 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.
481* TheStrategist: The Tactics skill, which the militia captain at the head of any raid (and the head of any armies in general worldgen) have to roll for any battle against the opposing leader, and which skew every roll in such battles in the tactical winner's favor. A good Tactician can skew these rolls obscenely, leading to armies burning down entire nations in a single run and, in Fortress mode, you being able to systematically whittle down entire fortresses with hundreds of enemies to ruins devoid of any civilized population with just [[Series/GameOfThrones ten or twenty good men]].
482* SubsystemDamage: 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. It also monitors ''what kind'' of damage: bruise, cut, puncture, break, etc. Nausea, pain, exertion, and blood loss are also tracked. A framework for poisons, venoms, and diseases also got installed.
483** AnArmAndALeg: 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.
484** ChunkySalsaRule: Destroying a creature's ([[MultipleHeadCase last]]) brain is instantly fatal. So is [[OffWithHisHead chopping off all of its heads]] or [[HalfTheManHeUsedToBe its upper/lower body.]] Creatures that lose their lungs to damage suffocate. Etc.
485*** Also, cave-ins, being encased in cooling magma, and being [[CryonicsFailure frozen in ice]] completely ignore SubsystemDamage and are always instant-death.
486*** As of v.40, it's even possible to turn zombies into chunky salsa. Being mangled beyond recognition prevents a zombie from rising up again.
487** EyeScream: From the dev log...
488---> "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."
489*** Also, wrestling. "Gouge left eye with right hand"
490*** The *wooden bolt* hits the goblin swordsman in the left eye, breaking it. An artery is severed!
491** 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.)
492** Individual extremities can be targeted, including [[{{Fingore}} fingers, toes]], [[EarAche ears]], noses, and teeth, and aimed attacks in Adventure Mode will allow you to break or cut them off one piece at a time.
493* SuccessionGame: 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.
494** 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 Blog/{{Boatmurdered}}, [[http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Headshoots/ Headshoots]], and LetsPlay/{{Syrupleaf}} entries mentioned above.
495* SuperDetailedFightNarration: Thanks to the combat system that models detail down to the organs you lose.
496* SuperFunHappyThingOfDoom: Random name generator is [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Pretty Much What It Says On The Tin]].
497* TakeThatAudience: The message you can read in Legends after retiring a fort is "In [year], [fortress group] of [civilization] regained their senses after an initial period of questionable judgement". The judgement in question being the ''player's''.
498* TapOnTheHead: Played somewhat realistically. Living creatures that take a blow to the head may suffer anything from dizziness, unconsciousness, neck-snapping, skull-fracturing, or instant death, and there is no real way of controlling what happens.
499* TechnicallyLivingZombie: Whereas normal undead start as corpses, husks are created by exposing living beings to assorted evil weather. They gain immunity to all the usual vulnerabilities save decapitation and bisection, as well as the normal ways to render something DeaderThanDead (drawbridges, cave-in abuse, etc).
500* TeethFlying: 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.
501* ThereIsNoCure: Some toxins and curses have ''no'' cure nor end, meaning they last until the death of the sufferer. These include mummy curses (less luck for launch) and cave spider venom (permanent dizziness).
502* ThermalDissonance: Nether caps are giant mushrooms which are always ice-cold, even if submerged in magma.
503* {{Treants}}: In pre-release versions, elves could animate trees to turn them into treants, but these were eventually relegated to being fictional in-universe (showing up in artwork), and later removed entirely. Treants are occasionally seen in mods though, which tends to go about as well as expected given magma is the universal dwarven problem-solver unless the modder plans for that and makes them able to [[InfernalRetaliation survive being immolated]].
504* TryToFitThatOnABusinessCard: A title awarded for kills, even to animals, can be a bit of a mouthful.
505* TurnsRed: 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.
506[[/folder]]
507
508[[folder:Tropes: U-Z]]
509* UnbreakableWeapons: Before the 43.04 update, weapons could tolerate anything short of temperatures beyond the material's ignition or melting point, or being crushed under a drawbridge.
510* UnholyGround: "Evil" biomes, which are host to strange and [[EverythingIsTryingToKillYou often hostile life]], where even [[RainOfSomethingUnusual the weather is unnatural]] and [[HostileWeather potentially harmful]], and the [[TheUndead corpses of dead things rise again to end the living]].
511* {{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 [[OrganDrops their remains]] can fetch a very nice price.
512* UniversalPoison: Basically how poisons worked in versions 0.28.181.40d and earlier. As of version 0.31, 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.
513** Medical procedures can potentially do surgery on infected body parts before the syndrome can spread or cause further side-effects like infection.
514** Worse in that poisons can now '''spread''' like diseases through contact with infected blood.
515** The 2012 update added syndromes that fundamentally change the affected creature's stats and behavior. Evil fogs that turn creatures into angry, NighInvulnerable thralls are one of the most memorable of these.
516** Averted with Gnomeblight, a substance made from kobold bulbs that is ''only'' toxic to dark and mountain gnomes.
517* {{Unobtainium}}:
518** Adamantine is even important enough to set off a major event in game.
519** "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.
520* UnstableEquilibrium: Letting too many dwarves get upset will cause everyone else's moods to go down, and if not caught quickly, can result in an uncontrollable tantrum spiral. And keeping dwarves happy requires a lot of work producing items for them to admire.
521* UnusualEuphemism:
522** Among players, [[spoiler:adamantine]] is sometimes called cotton candy, [[spoiler:demons]] are referred to as clowns, [[spoiler:the underworld]] is called the circus, to [[LateArrivalSpoiler try]] to avoid spoilers for new players. Endgame content in general may be broadly called "hidden fun stuff".
523** Within the game itself, "gelding" is used not just in veterinary contexts, but also for any incidental GroinAttack that sterilizes the target during a fight. In certain sentence structures, the parts themselves are referred to as "the geldables".
524** "Fun" is generally used to refer to things going pear-shaped, like your Legendary+5 Swordmaster losing their mind and going [[UnstoppableRage berserk]], your miners accidentally breaching a magma pipe and flooding the fort with molten rock, or [[spoiler:[[DugTooDeep accidentally digging into the core of an adamantine vein, unleashing]] TheLegionsOfHell into your unprepared fortress]].
525* UnusuallyUninterestingSight: 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.
526** 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.
527* UpperClassTwit: 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.'''
528** This being ''Dwarf Fortress'', this quite often results in players [[TakeThatScrappy killing nobles with all manners of ingenious death devices]]. The simplest being a fancy room that locks from the outside with a fancy lever as well. Get the noble in there, have a commoner pull the lever, and watch as the noble burns to death in lava. Rinse and repeat.
529* VictoryIsBoring: Taken to the logical conclusion. The game is HARD, with several obstacles preventing you from doing anything right, yet players accept and even enjoy the challenge of building a stable fortress such that every unpredictable death is equal parts frustration and mad laughter. "Losing is Fun" is the motto of the community for a reason, after all.
530* VideoGameCaringPotential: Feel like a benevolent ruler? Want to keep all of your dwarves in an eternal state of bliss or make an Utopia with them? It's not only possible, but even doable without too much fuss!
531* VideoGameCrueltyPotential: The Game. There are ''endless'' examples, but for now we'll just leave you with [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=85641.0 this thread]], a debate about how best to traumatize dwarves into becoming [[ConditionedToAcceptHorror resistant to tantrum spirals]]. The agreed-upon solution? [[spoiler:Drop puppies on them. From the ceiling. While they're eating. Until they just. Don't. Care anymore.]]
532** Let's put it this way: the only limit to the number of different death/torture traps you can build is your capability to make the subject X and the object Y collide at high speed. And then some.
533** One of the accepted ways to grind wrestling is to choke an enemy unconscious before breaking every single bone in their body with various grabs, throws, breaks and pulls. The end result is usually an unstable biomass vaguely resembling what it used to be, for Wrestlers in either Fortress or Adventure mode.
534** A way to try and make super soldiers (or any useful Fortress-bred dwarves at all), known simply as "Dwarven Daycare", is to lock a baby in a tiny room with a bunch of dogs. Before long the dogs will grow aggressive because of overcrowding, and the child will be forced to defend itself. A steady supply of dogs is ensured. This is repeated until the child matures into an adult at age 12. An upgraded approach includes precisely burning the child's subcutaneous fat off its body, making it fireproof.
535** In previous versions, the [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.34:Danger_room Danger Room]] was a brutally effective method of training soldiers in Fortress Mode. Combining a room filled with weapon traps thrusting wooden training spears in and out of walls at dangerous speeds with a bunch of soldier dwarves with little to no armor and shields quickly taught them how to dodge or block dependably. The mortality rate was usually high, unless you used wooden spears instead of more lethal weapons, in which case the only things to die were babies carried by mothers - something that many players sadly consider to be a "feature" rather than a design flaw. The Danger Room has been made obsolete in more recent versions, which have buffed the damage of wooden training weapons in traps (so that they now seriously injure trainees in the room) as well as the effectiveness of sparring, the standard military training method.
536** "Live training" involves capturing invaders in cage traps, stripping them naked, and carefully releasing them for your fully armed and armored dwarves to butcher. More dangerous creatures like trolls can be dropped into pits and used for target practice by marksdwarves. For bonus cool points, have observation platforms where [[GladiatorGames civilians can watch the militia doing this live training from a comfortable remove]].
537** After the Civilization screen got improved, you can now expand your cruel ambitions beyond the site of your fort. Want to slaughter completely unrelated sites of civilizations that don't even hate you, even your allies? Want to rob entire cities blind and take their most prized possessions? Want to be a fort-sized agent provocateur and drag your own civilization into a war with another by sheer dint of blood spilled? You can.
538** You can [[GameMod go into the raws, change cats' body temperature to be hot]], and for bonus hijinks, 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.
539* VideoGameTools: The game offers several. Axe and Pick (Mining skill gets trained a lot) also double as good weapons; others, not so much.
540* ViralTransformation: Night Trolls are able to create mates for themselves by transforming villagers. Vampires and werebeasts will transfer curses through their bites and blood.
541* TheVirus: Venom from Forgotten Beasts is sometimes ''transmissible'', potentially leaving your entire fortress poisoned.
542** .34 adds the ability for vampirism and lycanthropy to be contagious, as well as the framework for any other contagious interaction the [[ForTheEvulz inventive player can think of.]]
543* VomitIndiscretionShot: 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.
544** 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.
545* WeaponizedOffspring: Thanks to the detailed simulation and WideOpenSandbox nature of ''Dwarf Fortress'', it's completely possible, even with a vanilla version, to use quickly reproducing non-pasture animals such as turkeys or peafowl as an infinite source of ammunition to blast off lava cannons onto enemy hordes. The trick is to [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential set the ammo on fire prior to launch]]. And of course, you probably have some dwarven kids running around as well, contributing nothing and learning nothing while depleting your booze stock for nine years...
546* WanderingMinstrel: They exist in both modes now and you can even play as one. And if you want to stop wandering you can take up a job for a lord as their personal jester.
547* 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.]]
548* WelcomeToCorneria: The {{NPC}}s can become very repetitive in adventure mode.
549** When asking a child their profession:
550---> ''"You look like a mighty warrior."''\
551''"I'm four!"''
552** It's been slightly expanded:
553--->"You look like a mighty warrior!"\
554"I'm a thresher."\
555"You look like a mighty warrior!"\
556"No, I'm a thresher."
557** Adventure mode conversation in 0.40 has become much more dynamic; still, this trope happens quite a bit. Most infamously:
558--->[[MemeticMutation "It was inevitable."]]\
559"It is terrifying."\
560"It is sad, but not unexpected."\
561"I should leave."
562** In later versions, dialogue can appear in combat reports as well. Expect to see a lot of "Death is all around us. This cannot horrify me" and "Begone fear!"
563%%* WideOpenSandbox
564* WordSaladTitle: happens frequently in-universe with the randomly-generated names.
565* WorldOfBadass: In one reported fight between a dwarven 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''.
566** Any military dwarf that earns the right of a <Insert-Weapon-Here> Master or Lord. They can dispatch goblins like nobody's business.
567* 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]].
568* 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.
569* ZergRush: Due to a bug in 34.01, [[BigCreepyCrawlies 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.
570** In addition, necromancer towers are filled with zombies that can easily overwhelm an adventurer.
571** This is what happens when [[spoiler:you break into hell. One demon is enough to grind a fortress to fine powder, but they come in ''swarms of hundreds''.]]
572** This is the staple tactic of goblins: generally being not as well-armed as dwarven soldiers, they make up for it in numbers.
573*** Elves are much worse than goblins; they can siege a fortress with ''50'' individual squads! They both have the numbers for it (being breeding immortals) and ''need'' them (all their weapons are wooden).
574[[/folder]]
575
576!! List of tropes specific to each mode:
577
578[[folder:Fortress Mode tropes: A-D]]
579* AndIMustScream: 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.
580** 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 and take medical staff's time.
581** 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 GameOver 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. [[spoiler:That is, until the ghosts come to pay him a visit...]]
582* AnInteriorDesignerIsYou: And your dwarves, of course.
583* AnvilOnHead: Falling anvil traps [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=117360.0 have been worked out,]] and due to the peculiarities of how the game handles physics, they're about as dangerous as in a cartoon (IE: likely to stun and that's it.) Dropping arrows or ''seeds'' this way is much more lethal.
584* ApocalypticLog: Engravings can devolve into this.
585--> "Zelersostet, 'The Prime Weevils': Engraved on the wall is an exceptionally designed image of a dwarf and a frog demon by [[Blog/{{Boatmurdered}} 'Emperor Sankis' Gatinbomrek]]. The frog demon is striking down the dwarf."
586** [[http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Journal_of_Kith This]] follow-up to ''Boatmurdered'' qualifies too.
587* AristocratsAreEvil: You may be forced to conclude this. Though it's more evil in a "PointyHairedBoss" kind of way than an "EvilOverlord" kind of way.
588* ArtificialStupidity: The death of all too many dwarves.
589** Particularly painful example from the old version: you, the supreme overlord, have mandated that no-one goes above-ground 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]].
590** 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, "[[TooDumbToLive You know, his crossbow was better than mine...]]"
591** 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]]....
592** 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 a ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' expansion.
593** 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]], and the Cast Obsidian Tower):
594-->''"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."''
595** 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."
596** "[[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=35517.0 My epic first dragon encounter!]]"
597** 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....
598** It's common knowledge that a dwarf being chased by an enemy will ''never'' run towards the heavily-trapped and fortified entrance to your fort, but in some other - inevitably fatal - direction.
599** Goblins can turn up riding giant toads, which they appear to think makes them immune to drowning. It doesn't.
600** The 2014 update brought multi-tile trees and climbing, and with it came a host of pathing bugs. Fleeing dwarves will often get stuck in trees, where they will proceed to starve to death. The best solution is often to clear away all trees while starting a fortress, which doesn't help with elven diplomacy...
601** For a while with the early 2014 release, flying animals would often fly themselves into trees, nearly always causing instant death by blunt trauma.
602* ArtisticLicenseEconomics: The "Dwarven Economy" was so horrendously broken that version 0.31 disabled it completely. Memory hacking could be used to forcibly turn it on, but until version 0.40 it would simply crash the game (due to various bugs in the code).
603** ''Webcomic/ThreePanelSoul'' [[http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-mixed-economies illustrates this]].
604** 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=].
605* 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]].
606* AttentionDeficitOohShiny: 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.
607** Must. Have. Socks!
608* 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.
609** See also DisasterDominoes. To the community, it's known as a "tantrum spiral" and has been known to kill many a fort.
610** At times it seems that the entire population is balanced on the [[IncrediblyLamePun axe-edge]] of utter insanity.
611** If they are extremely unhappy, a dwarf may occasionally be inexplicably overcome by a "fell mood". From the wiki:
612--> 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.
613* 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!]]
614* 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 [[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.
615* BarBrawl: Added in the 2015 release, but only natural considering these dwarves: Occasionally, fistfights will be started among the rowdier dwarves in your fortress, and will often spread to just about everyone in the tavern, and occasionally the whole fortress. Death is unlikely unless children are involved or someone dodges off a cliff, but injuries are very, very likely, especially if they decide to bludgeon others with their (likely stone-made) goblets.
616* 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.
617* {{Bizarrchitecture}}: Quite possible if you try hard enough. 'Dwarf physics' is very forgiving in a lot of ways.
618** EldritchLocation: The [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61507.0 Adamantine Space Elevator.]]
619* 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.''
620** A somewhat popular pastime is to then order your stone workers 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.
621*** Unless you get fifty statues of elves with broken toes or humans taming eagles.
622*** 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.
623* BoozeBasedBuff: 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.
624* BoringButPractical:
625** Mass-manufacturing plant fibre clothes as ShopFodder. 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.]])
626** Using short swords and wooden shields for one's militia tends to be considered this by some, since wooden shields work just as well for everything but bashing for a fraction of the cost and swords can do everything spears, axes, and hammers can (with a stab, pommel strike, and slash), [[JackOfAllStats just not as well as any of them]].
627** For fortress defense, cage traps and drawbridges. The former is about the only thing that can instantly, reliably take anything not immune to traps out of the fight, and there are additional workarounds for rendering trap-immune creatures vulnerable to traps. The latter can be weaponized to crush most creatures flat, and if set up right you have a barrier no building destroyer can touch. [[spoiler:Except for dragonfire and being in contact with certain superhot demons, which WILL melt any bridge eventually.]]
628* 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.
629* TheCaligula: Nobles often qualify as this, making absurd demands and ordering anybody who doesn't comply to be severely punished, usually by the Hammerer.
630* {{Cap}}: Population caps and FPS caps, FPS acting as a measure of game speed.
631** 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.
632** Only 60 productive [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Hive hives]].
633* Catch22Dilemma: An anvil is one of the most important tools to embark with, because it's the required tool for crafting ''anything'', even ''other anvils''. Starting without one, either from incompetence, a SelfImposedChallenge, or the [[LuckBasedMission randomized]] "Embark Now!" option, leaves you unable to craft until a merchant comes by selling one or an offsite mission gets lucky. [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Anvil The wiki article]] has some fun pondering how this is possible.
634* CaveBehindTheFalls: [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/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.
635** 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 plate-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.
636** 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.
637* CharacterDevelopment: As of 0.44.11, significant events in a dwarf's life can permanently change their values and personality, for better or for worse.
638* AChildShallLeadThem: The Mayor position goes to the dwarf with the highest social skills in your fort at election time. Since children raised in your fort cannot be given labors and spend all their time socializing, they tend to have ''very'' high social skills when they hit adulthood. Combined, this means that a lot of forts tend to wind up with at least one 12-year-old mayor.
639* CommandAndConquerEconomy: Though there are ways to reduce the amount of micromanaging required, generally you have to order everything to be built.
640* ConservationOfNinjutsu: Goblin sieges end up ramping up to sometimes hundreds of units, way more than you can ever hope getting into your militia. However, after a few years in the game, if you've kept them alive your militiadwarves will be so well-trained that the dozen or so of them will curb-stomp an army many times their sizes. It's not even that uncommon of an occurence to see one single dwarf [[OneManArmy destroying the entire siege.]]
641* TheCoronerDothProtestTooMuch: [[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.
642* 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. [[CatsAreSuperior It's the other way around.]]
643** As [[Webcomic/ThreePanelSoul Matt Boyd]] once [[http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-dwarven-fortresses 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 [[Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy Frogstar B]]; basically, dwarf society reaches the Kitty Event Horizon and their entire socioeconomic structure starts to revolve around keeping the population in check.
644*** 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.
645** [[https://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 item is an image of cats. The cats form the beard of Urist McCatbeard. The artwork relates to the cats' adoption of Urist McCatbeard]]
646** Also, catsplosions can be taken care of by gelding all incoming male cats for a while now.
647* CruelPlayerCharacterGod: Half the point of the game.
648** CrapsackWorld: See above.
649* CycleOfHurting: A bridge can be linked to a lever to make it retract, dropping anything on it to whatever fiendish surprise you've set up below. For additional entertainment value, you can set a dwarf to keep pulling the lever. Invading hostiles that survive the fall will climb out and [[AIBreaker keep trying to cross repeatedly until their morale breaks.]]
650* DayHurtsDarkAdjustedEyes: This is called "cave adaptation". If a dwarf has spent more than a full year without seeing the sun, they'll experience mild dizziness, pain, and fatigue. If it's been more than a year and a half, they'll experience moderate symptoms, plus nausea--so if you don't go out of your way to get them some sun in their daily lives, your entrance hall is likely to be a perpetual vomit-splattered mess. Alternately, if you ''never'' let your dwarves see the sun, then being cave-adapted is effectively meaningless.
651* DeathCourse: A common method of fortress defense is to build an exterior entrance such that anything coming in must run down a gauntlet of traps, possibly while being peppered by crossbow bolts launched from behind fortifications.
652* DecontaminationChamber: Theoretically, dwarves [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/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 a puddle of pus which does the same to others on contact, if they can possibly find any on the map. So once the player can afford this, entrances into habitable areas tend to involve something like a [[CaveBehindTheFalls waterfall]] or "[[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Stupid_dwarf_trick#Bathtub Dwarven Bathtub]]".
653* {{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 brutalize 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]].
654* [[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!]]]]
655** 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.
656** Community forts have finally managed this. The ongoing fortress [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=84451.0 Deathgate]] pulled this off.
657* DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu: Deploy enough military and you can take down anything.
658* DifficultButAwesome:
659** Mist generators are contraptions that constantly generate mist, as the name implies. They are hard to build, and fluids being what they are you risk flooding your fortress. However, as mist provides dwarves with a happy thought, a properly-built generator in a busy spot will keep your dwarves very happy, and make tantrums a problem of the past.
660** 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://i.imgur.com/SLIGtiY.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.
661* DiggingToChina: [[spoiler:Digging to FireAndBrimstoneHell]], more like.
662* 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.
663* 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."
664** 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]].
665** 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.
666** 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 MadeOfIron and will probably survive their own execution with nothing but some bruises and one very tired hammerer.
667* DissonantSerenity: Reviewing the dwarves' descriptions after they die can reveal a number of them in varying stages of happiness at death. Some reasons:
668** They "[[BloodKnight take joy in slaughter]]". Self-explanatory.
669** Waterfall creates mist. Dwarves for some reason love mist. In this case death is by drowning, of course.
670* 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.
671* DueToTheDead: An actual gameplay mechanic. Failing to give dwarves a decent burial, or at least a memorial slab somewhere, makes their next-of-kin ''very unhappy''. [[spoiler:It can also result in the deceased appearing as a ghost, with consequences that range from merely annoying to potentially disastrous.]] Nobles also get unhappy about not having an assigned tomb that befits their status in life.
672** Since the 2012 release, this has gone somewhat meta. Remember those {{Ancient Tomb}}s mentioned earlier? You can embark right next to one. And ''move in''. As long as you don't disturb the coffin in the middle, which has consequences that can readily be imagined, the only thing stopping you from filling some poor schmuck's final resting place with drunken bipolar midgets and covering it in blood and vomit and inexplicable masterwork engravings of cheese is your own conscience.
673* DugTooDeep:
674** Dig deep enough and you will eventually reach [[spoiler: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.]]
675** Even before reaching [[spoiler:Hell]], when digging in the very lower levels of the world you can occasionally unearth a Forgotten Beast that was sealed inside an air pocket inside the layers of rock. Said Forgotten Beast will usually wipe out your miners and make a beeline straight for your fortress.
676[[/folder]]
677
678[[folder:Fortress Mode tropes: E-H]]
679* 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 embark, costing nearly 3/4 less per unit of meat than cows.
680** 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.
681* EvilDetectingDog: A cat will reveal if its new owner is a vampire in the adoption announcement. This is considered as a bug.
682* ExplosiveBreeder:
683** 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.)
684** 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. Two notable examples are saltwater crocodiles and cave crocodiles, which lay up to 70 eggs and up to 60 eggs respectively. Combined with their valuable materials and strength in combat, this makes them extremely useful to a fort.
685* FastTunnelling: Mining is much faster than would be physically possible in RealLife. This is mainly an AntiFrustrationFeature, but can also be HandWaved because it's ''dwarves'' doing it.
686* 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/FatalAttractions2010'' episode."
687* FungusHumongous: The Tower-Caps, mushrooms so large they can be made into beds. There are many more varieties growing in the expansive underground.
688** 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 [[InfinityMinusOneSword an already powerful weapon]].
689* GuideDangIt: The controls. There's [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Main_Page a wiki]] for a reason.
690** Hell, the everything. Without a guide, the naïve way to figure out which stone is magma-safe is by losing fort after fort by trial-and-error.
691*** 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.
692*** 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.
693* HeroicBSOD: With the revamp of emotions in 2014, an unhappy fortress no longer tantrums en-masse. Instead, a dwarf may react to a close fellow dwarf's death by ''breaking down and sobbing''.
694* HideYourChildren: ''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.
695* 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.
696* 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.
697* HypnoticCreature: 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.
698[[/folder]]
699
700[[folder:Fortress Mode tropes: I-L]]
701* ICallItVera: If a dwarf gets sufficiently attached to a weapon, they will bestow a name upon it.
702* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: Menacing spike traps.
703** ThisIsADrill: Enormous corkscrew traps.
704* ImprobableWeaponUser / ImprovisedWeapon: Coins, pebbles, and even your opponent's ''vomit'' can be thrown to devastating effect.
705* IndustrializedEvil: When introduced to the game, merpeople, although unbutcherable, had bones that were several orders of magnitude more valuable than most other sea creatures. Cue several attempting to set up seaside forts for the purposes of establishing "mermaid farms" with which to capture, breed, and air-drown merpeople, then sell their bones for a huge profit. Toady One responded by {{nerf}}ing the value of merperson bones to the default.
706* InterfaceSpoiler: An attempt was made to avoid this, but it wasn't completely successful. While in development, Toady realized that vampires would be unable to infiltrate the player's fortress without the UI giving them away. So, he modified the UI and a few game mechanics to accommodate stealthy vampires, including:
707** Dwarves disappearing and anonymous crimes. In the old system, you are informed when a dwarf is attacked or killed and told who the culprit is. Now, you are only informed if there is a witness to notice the deed. Dwarves who haven't been seen recently are quietly added to a list of missing units, crimes will likewise be silently added to the justice screen if there are no witnesses. So dwarves can turn up dead and you won't know who killed them, but if you're attentive you'll know they vanished. Vampires can also frame other dwarves for their crimes.
708** Migrant skills. Vampires were given old, unused skills before other migrants were. So, the vampire was the only newcomer with a half-forgotten trade. All migrants can have old skills now.
709** Fake identities. Previously, you knew almost everything to know about a dwarf by reading his bio. Now they can assume false identities to hide their real age and potentially lengthy kill records. Their relationships can hint at their identity: a spouse not present in the fortress or armies of relatives suggest a vampire. This is were problems creep in: if the dwarf worships a god then that deity will be listed as a relationship. The deity's history can be viewed, providing a list of worshipers and curse victims, and listing a vampire's original identity. If you assign a nickname to a dwarf, ''the list will display the nickname rather then the assumed and real names''. Thus, vampires can be spotted via the UI by nicknaming all newcomers, because giving Urist [=McCheesemaker=] the nickname "Doofus" results in the god's history reading "Cursed 'Doofus' [=McStonecrafter=] to prowl the night in search of blood".
710** Played straight with the advent of dwarfs being horrified at the deaths of other dwarfs, however. Now, it's possible to find "was horrified by the death of Urist [=McVampirebait=]" messages in dwarfs' thoughts; this is pretty much proof positive that the dwarf in question is the vampire responsible, especially if Urist [=McVampirebait's=] body had not been found and thus didn't even realise they were dead until seeing that thought.
711* 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.
712* InvasionOfTheBabySnatchers: Goblins. They're actually fairly nice to any young dwarfs they snatch, though.
713* 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.
714* ItGetsEasier: Dwarves have a psychological trauma stat. As it increases, they're less affected by negative thoughts.
715* KickedUpstairs: Dwarves with little-used occupations, like cheesemaking, soapmaking, and fish dissecting, are better suited for promotion to management positions than hard-working miners, carpenters and masons, since noble dwarves cannot do real work apart from hauling goods to and from the trade depot. Bonus points if said dwarves have a dull personality too; their "preferences" dictate the goods they will end up mandating the construction and banning the export of should they become nobles, so dwarves with lofty ambitions and a taste for expensive items or hard-to-make crafts like crystal glass can become a real headache compared to some boffin with an odd fondness for chains.
716* KillItWithFire: Flooding a map with magma. [[TrapDoor Dropping]] critters into magma. Dropping magma onto critters. 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.
717* KillItWithWater: It's not unheard of for players to have drowning traps and/or drowning chambers to provide an unpleasant fate for goblins. Or anything that needs air to live, for that matter. 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.
718** 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.
719** Additionally, pressure can cause finding an underground river at the wrong spot and with the wrong fortress layout to flood everything.
720* 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.
721* LavaAddsAwesome: Rivers of magma flowing through your fortress ranks high on the cool-o-meter. It's also useful as a free infinite source of heat for forges and kilns, as well as particularly fiendish traps.
722* TheLavaCavesOfNewYork: As noted just above and below, you can deliberately engineer this, and it is very useful (and potentially extremely "fun") to do so.
723* LavaPit: Players love these. ''Blog/{{Boatmurdered}}'''s arguably most famous bit was the attempt to completely wipe out the local elephant population with magma streams.
724* LavaPotVolcano: Because of the way volcanos are generated, they almost always have this appearance when they break the surface. Typically, their "pool" is simply the top of a very tall lava pipe extending down to the magma sea deep underground.
725* LeeroyJenkins: The Monster Slayers that you get once you've breached the caverns, who desire nothing more than to grab whatever they have and go live in the dank depths of the earth to kill everything that comes across. Nevermind the fact their skills can usually fall short of what you need to even survive down there when the caverns are a DeathWorld even by DF standards, the fact Forgotten Beasts prowl the depths, they most likely know this, and they ''still'' charge at them alone, or the fact the dwarves they're "helping" aren't obligated in the least to bail them out if things go wrong. While not all of them are dwarves, one does still wonder if they're like ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}}'' Slayers and this is all just [[SuicideByCop a form of elaborate suicide]].
726* 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, you just burn the entire fortress area with lava, or the enemy civilization runs out of things to throw at you.
727** 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.
728** Climbing has been all-but-guaranteed for invaders in the next release. Thought those 5-unit-high walls were good enough? Think again!
729* LoadsAndLoadsOfRules: We're not kidding about the "insanely complicated" thing.
730* LordBritishPostulate: If it exists, the players will find a way to kill it. Probably in a [[Awesome/DwarfFortress really awesome]] fashion. Then they'll usually move on to weaponizing it.
731* 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 center-most 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.
732** Also, selecting 'Embark Now!' rather than 'Prepare for the journey carefully'. See below.
733* LuxuryPrisonSuite: Because Dwarves are ''rarely'' ever thrown in jail for reasons a player would deem legitimate (usually it happens due to the capricious whims of a noble), it's generally suggested to make your prisons (assuming you ''do'' have one) as comforting as possible so the (probably wrongfully) imprisoned dwarf doesn't become too unhappy, and/or dead from not being provided food or water.
734[[/folder]]
735
736[[folder:Fortress Mode tropes: M-P]]
737* 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, turning into unresponsive {{Empty Shell}}s, or going completely AxCrazy.
738** 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'''.
739** One particularly memorable result: [[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Planepacked Planepacked]], a statue with the entire history of the world written on it. Including ''73 pictures of itself''.
740** The LP of [[http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Headshoots/ 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.
741* MadeOfIndestructium: Artifact furniture can't be destroyed by trolls and other building-destroyers, but they'll still make a bee-line to it and try. This makes artifacts very useful to bait building-destroyers away from your fortress (and into a field of traps.)
742* MakeItLookLikeAnAccident: 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" [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial which they had nothing to do with whatsoever]].
743* 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.
744** 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...
745* MiscarriageOfJustice: Entirely possible, especially if a noble is upset. Vampires are especially cunning about diverting unwanted attention from their bloodsucking antics. It's even possible for a victim to be convicted of the crime that was committed against them.
746* {{Mordor}}: Really evil biomes have special plants and horrible things like eyestalk and finger "grass", showers of blood and cursed mist with similar symptoms to forgotten beasts. And corpses tend to spontaneously animate as zombies.
747* MundaneUtility: BottomlessPits? You now have a garbage disposal. Unicorns? Delicious, and products manufactured from their bodies fetch a fine price. Necromancer towers nearby? Raiding them is an excellent source of fine literature. Magma? Invaluable.
748** If you are lucky enough to find a breeding pair of rocs or hydras, they can make a remarkable addition... to your meat industry. Both have a huge size, rivaled by few creatures in the game, have valuable remains, and rocs in particular can even be fully domesticated (although keep them away from your military dwarves, they attack each others due to a bug).
749** Farming merpeople is no longer economically viable in un-modded 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.
750** A whole lot of elaborate mechanical [[PointlessDoomsdayDevice 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.
751* NakedNutter: Dwarves who become too upset can go insane in a variety of ways. One of them is becoming "Stark Raving Mad". Dwarves in this state take off all their clothes and run around aimlessly until they are calmed down, or die of starvation or dehydration.
752* NameMcAdjective: As dwarves have their own names and tend to share first names, the name "Urist" (dwarven for "dagger") became the standard placeholder with "[=McJob=]" being a reference to how generic dwarves are in other fantasy worlds. With this it makes it easier to talk about specific dwarves and their jobs like "Urist [=McCarpenter=]" or "Urist [=McSheriff=] or "Urist [=McUselessNoble=].
753* NintendoHard: Not only is the game hard to master, it's also hard to ''learn.''.
754** The community made more than a little noise over the fact that Tiny Pirate's ''Dwarf Fortress'' book was not published by a publisher as Brady or Prima, known for their game guides, but by O'Reilly, known for publishing technical manuals.
755* NoKillLikeOverkill: 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.
756* NonHumanUndead: Any kind of living creature can have a zombie or skeletal version, including monsters like dragons, giants, and imps.
757** Giving rise to such hellish creatures as skelephants, skeagles and skarp--or, gods forbid, husks and thralls. See KillerRabbit and MadeOfIron, above.
758* OneDrinkWillKillTheBaby: Nope. Pregnant female dwarves still need alcohol to function properly, and so do ''their new-born babies''.
759* OneHitKill: There are some ''very'' nasty random weather effects out there. {{LetsPlay/Waterburned}}, our own succession fort, has some downright homicidal "evil glooms" that just kill the hell out of anything they touch. Of course, since this is Dwarf Fortress we're talking about here, a cloud of instant death ''isn't'' [[ZombieApocalypse the worst weather effect possible.]]
760** Atom Smashers. Essentially they're drawbridges fashioned into traps by the player. It somehow has the ability to instantly eliminate anything to the atomic level, be they creatures or objects, to the point where [[RetGone there will be absolutely no trace of their existance anymore]]. It has limits however, and creatures of equal size or bigger than an Elephant will [[NoSell instead break the Atom Smasher.]]
761* 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??]]''
762* PaintTheTownRed: You'll end up with blood all over whatever godawful fields of traps you set up in front of your fortress, and buggy mechanics for bathing will leave a giant pool of the stuff around your well when your dwarves come to clean themselves off.
763** 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.
764** 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 later release added a toggle to turn it on and off, satisfying both camps.
765* PointlessCivicProject: Building at least one is traditional, the more gratuitous, the better. The forum even ran a contest to see who could build the best tower out of [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=45908.0 soap]], in a game where soap is surprisingly hard to come by. However, this is just as often as not a subversion - aside from keeping your otherwise unused dwarves occupied, many such constructions increase the economic value of the fort, drawing larger groups of migrants and larger, richer trade caravans (and better-equipped invasions).
766* PoisonedWeapons: The Forgotten Beast syndromes [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=139121.0 can be applied to weapons]]. See the Body Horror entry to understand how much Fun may occur from this.
767* 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.
768** Taken to literal levels when the mood affects the mother of a baby dwarf. To quote [[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=114255.0 a certain player]]:
769---> "Miss Dwarfette, hereforth referred to as Casey [=McAnthony=], was nursing another baby, a five-month old dwarfette named Litast, and only child after the miscarriage. And she was taken by a fell mood. (...) I didn't realize she would go for the nearest member of the fort. (...) Maybe I got lucky and she murderificated a vampire before it could do harm. (...) NOPE. IT WAS HER FUCKING FIVE MONTH OLD DAUGHTER. SHE KILLED HER DAUGHTER AND TURNED HER INTO A PICK. A GODDAMN PICK. WHERE DO YOU EVEN GET ENOUGH BABY FOR A PICKAXE? THERE ISN'T ENOUGH BABY."
770* 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.
771* PrecautionaryCorpseDisposal:
772** Corpses not given a proper burial or memorial will spawn a ghost to haunt the area. What that ghost will do ranges from generic haunting shennanigans to [[TheFunInFuneral organizing their own Wake]].
773** ''All'' corpses can potentially arise as (potentially hostile) undead when in certain Evil biomes or in the presence of a necromancer. Under these circumstances, some players resort to disposing of them via destructive means, such as dumping them in magma or using the "Dwarven atom smasher," to ensure they don't threaten the fortress's survival.
774* PressurePlate: The cornerstone of all Dwarven automation. Can react either on liquid levels or weight of a creature or minecart.
775* PricelessPaperweight: Some legendary artifacts created by your dwarves and by other civilisations are elaborately crafted examples of mundane objects, like buckets and bins. If not displayed on a pedestal, the dwarves will use these artifacts just like an ordinary item of the same type, e.g. assigning a legendary bucket to the hospital chest for giving water to patients.
776[[/folder]]
777
778[[folder:Fortress Mode tropes: Q-T]]
779* RainOfBlood: This is a regular occurrence in evil biomes, when it's not raining disease-inducing slime.
780* ReallyGetsAround: Version 0.40.06 had a bug where dwarves were literally "breeding like animals." Instead of only having children with their husbands, dwarven women chose a random man to be the father of their children.
781* RespawningEnemies: Area and site specific enemies re-spawn 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.
782* RollercoasterMine: Minecarts were added in version 0.34.08. Carts transport 5x more than wheelbarrows, can be filled with anything (up to ''magma'', if the material allows, without frying the driver) and dumped automatically at the pre-rigged point without slowing down. They also easily accelerate to great speed, which makes them derail on the next turn, grapeshotting their contents at dangerous velocities. And, naturally, easily ride down anyone not shy of the tracks' "low traffic" status, be it a cow, goblin or tired dwarf homing on the closest bed no matter whose.
783* RoyalsWhoActuallyDoSomething: They're not supposed to, but a bug makes the monarch (and every other noble, for that matter) works and even fight like any other dwarf.
784* RubeGoldbergDevice: It's amazing what can be done with a couple of pumps, windmills, gear shafts, mechanisms, axles, levers and pressure plates.
785** We did mention the [[AwesomeButImpractical computer]], yeah? And the [[KillSat orbital]] [[WaveMotionGun magma cannon]]?
786* RubeGoldbergHatesYourGuts: Well, more like "Rube Goldberg ''loves'' your guts splattered all over this needlessly-complicated deathtrap." A favorite pastime is the invention of various elaborate ways of dealing with pests such as nobles and the like.
787** 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.
788* 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]].
789** This, of course, is used by cunning players to trap or kill building destroyers.
790** 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.
791** In adventure mode, any place that has loot laying on the ground is either a trap, surrounded by nasty monsters, or belongs to someone, and if you take it, Losing is Fun.
792** "Curious underground structures", otherwise known as [[spoiler:demonic fortresses]]. Basically, they're giant dungeons full of undead, with a masterwork adamantine sword lying somewhere on the bottom level. [[spoiler:Taking the sword opens a gateway to Hell.]]
793* 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.
794** 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.[[note]]At least in theory. A bug in more recent versions of the game often causes attackers to simply stop and stand around when their leader gets killed or captured, before finally trickling away (in-game) months later.[[/note]]
795* SelfImposedChallenge: This fortress will never trade! This entire fortress will be sober! This fortress will be nude! And so on and so forth.
796** 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).
797* SpikeBallsOfDoom: The spiked ball trap component.
798* 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.
799* StayInTheKitchen: Invoked by players due to game design. Female dwarves are equally capable of fighting, but they bear children regularly and will carry their "Dwarven Baby Shields" ''everywhere''. So it is normally recommended to restrict the military and hunting of dangerous game to males only, [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential except for players intentionally going for dead babies]].
800* StinkBomb:
801** Any corpse left to rot for a decent period of time will start emitting Miasma, a thick purple smog that gives dwarves extremely unhappy thoughts. Zombies that aren't ''completely'' rotted tend to be a walking version of this.
802** Certain toxins/poisons can cause immediate rotting of body parts without first killing the dwarf suffering from the syndrome. You wind up with walking Stink Bombs stinking up the whole fort, giving bad moods to all your dwarves, and generally clogging up the hallways with opaque miasma.
803* SupremeChef: Let a dwarf make enough meals and they will eventually become a legendary cook, producing gastronomic delights worth a king's ransom out of lizard tripe and yak intestines.
804* TantrumThrowing: If a dwarf becomes depressed enough they might start smashing or throwing things. One is fine, but if the dwarf pisses off other dwarves (or worse, kills them), other dwarves may [[DisasterDominoes start other tantrums]] and generally end up to eleven in a fortress-ending tantrum spiral.
805* ThatPoorCat: Cats are given to wandering freely, including plenty of jaunts in the fresh air outside your fortress, and aren't too concerned with such trifles as an order to ''get the hell inside the fortress, that horde of goblins and trolls are '''not''' cat people!'' On the plus side, they do a great job of delaying invaders, who will chase them single-mindedly (often straight into traps) while you get your defenders in position.
806* TrainingFromHell: What many players resort to.
807** 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.
808** 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]]. The training involved getting pushed into this again and again until you either parry the spear and achieve enlightenment or die.
809* TrapDoor: Retractable bridges are often used this way. As well as floor grates, bars and hatches, though they aren't so unbreakable.
810* 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''.
811* TunnelKing: Dwarves being Tunnel Kings is a central mechanic to the game.
812* TunnelNetwork: Dwarven fortresses tend to be underground. You do the math.
813[[/folder]]
814
815[[folder:Fortress Mode tropes: U-Z]]
816* UndergroundCity: A large enough fortress can become a self-sustaining city; assuming it survives that long, of course.
817* {{Understatement}}: While people laying siege to your fortress are known as "Invaders", [[AttackOfThe50FootWhatever megabeasts]] are appropriately noted to be "Uninvited Guests."
818* UnusableEnemyEquipment: 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.
819** As of version 0.31, you can now equip those exotic weapons whips, pikes, and bows. Also, any weapons can be used in traps.
820** Useless metal items can be melted down for metal bars. Thus leading to the joke that goblins are the fourth ore of iron...
821* UriahGambit: One popular way of getting rid of unwanted dwarves is to set them in a squad and send them on an entirely impossible mission against an enemy site, so that they die in the attempt. And if they [[SpringtimeForHitler somehow manage to succeed]], try it again until they finally get killed, or end up conquering an offsite location and stay there to never return.
822* VictoryIsBoring: Once you've gotten past the learning curve, making a completely safe and secure fortress is actually relatively easy, but most players consider this to be removing all the "fun."
823* 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.
824* WalkOnWater: Given enough speed, minecarts can go ''[[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=109460.msg3285528#msg3285528 skiprocking]] on water''. Or magma.
825* WarElephants: Can be trained as of the 2010 version. ''Keeping'' them trained is another matter, though, as elephants (and a few other grazers) are bugged and starve faster than they can eat. The usual solution is editing the raw files to decrease their grazing requirements or just turn off grazing for them altogether.
826* WhatTheHellPlayer: Most of the cruelty you can inflict on your dwarves will go unnoticed, but if a crime is reported and you choose to convict a different dwarf than the one that numerous dwarves are accusing (or worse, a child, a baby, an animal, or ''someone who was dead at the moment of the deed'', or ''the victim him- or herself'') everyone will be understandably shocked.
827* 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.
828* WorstAid: 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=]."
829* WorthlessYellowRocks: Silver, gold and (to a lesser extent) platinum are so plentiful in embark sites that have them that it is possible to furnish whole rooms with chairs and tables forged out of the stuff (and doing so is a good way to increase the value of spaces that need to meet appraisal targets, like guildhalls). Subverted in that precious metals and crafts made from them still have high monetary value in trading, in spite of their abundance in the world.
830* ZombieApocalypse: 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. Some turn victims into nearly unstoppable life-hating husks/thralls, so if the cloud was made of thrall-making dust, "FUN" is more likely to have the fort than the other way around.
831[[/folder]]
832
833[[folder:Tropes specific to Adventure Mode]]
834* 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.
835* AnyoneCanDie, which leads to...
836** ApocalypseHow: With enough wrecked fortresses and berserking adventurers, especially in a small-enough world, civilizations will eventually deteriorate and 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 [[DevelopersForesight The Toady One Thinks of Everything]], your world will acknowledge this by entering the Age of Twilight/Death/Emptiness. Age of Twilight is when the majority of creatures in the world are mundane; the ages of Death or Emptiness are entered when there are no more civilized beings in the world - the Age of Death after there has been at least an Age of Myth/Heroes/Twilight, the Age of Emptiness if no such ages have existed. Even in these desolate Ages, you can still play.
837* BadassBoast: Legendary enemies who are capable of speaking will tell of their feats as soon as they can see you. [=DF2014=] lets you boast to anyone you can have a conversation with.
838** The player character's boasts get more badass depending on whom you've managed to kill. If your victim was a high-ranking dwarf or elf, your character may make a racist comment while boasting.
839* BagOfHolding: 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.
840** Carrying a giant corpse will slow you down significantly. Picking up a second will slow you down significantly less. There's no difference between carrying three giant corpses in your backpack and carrying thirty.
841* BigLabyrinthineBuilding: Fortresses and Mountain Halls of Dwarven Civilizations are infamously labyrnithine: they are massive, span multiple Z-layers, have plenty of rooms and no clear way to get out. Starting in one and then trying to get out can count as an adventure in itself.
842* BrutalBonusLevel: [[spoiler:Angelic Vaults.]] There is practically no reason for you to go inside one except for the challenge and bragging rights. The freakishly strong creatures inside there will never travel outside [[spoiler:because they were created to protect the slab within the Vault]] and pose no threat to anyone. It also contains the closest thing to a FinalBoss Adventure Mode has: [[spoiler:An Archangel]]
843* CombatPragmatist: ''Everyone. Especially you.'' You can break limbs, disarm foes, and spend half a day whaling on their unconscious body until they die. [[BlackAndGrayMorality There is no such thing as chivalry,]] only Fun.
844* CoupDeGrace: Unconscious foes are open to any attack you like, which will be guaranteed to hit and do massive damage. So you can execute them anyway 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]].
845* CurbStompBattle: What trying to take on [[spoiler:a Vault]] with anything less than legendary in all relevant combat skills and a full set of the highest quality gear will quite certainly lead to you being on the receiving end of.
846* 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).
847** Though some will specifically ask to be lead to a warrior's death when asked about their profession, often after describing the sheer boredom of their profession in their hometown.
848* DumpStat: Adventurer creation started letting you lower attributes below average to free up more points, but some attributes currently serve no purpose in Adventurer Mode (Creativity, Linguistic Ability, Patience) or at all (Musicality). Also, Analytical Ability is only used for knapping stones, which is something that is essentially only done for StatGrinding purposes.
849** As of 42.01 these stats are no longer useless, as you now can write books and perform art forms of all different kinds, of course you may not want to play as a bard, so this still applies in some cases. In fact, some players have taken to dumping combat stats so they can be better bards! [[spoiler:Why fight dragons when you can gather an army of poets and take on the GODS?]]
850* GrievousHarmWithABody: You can use ''anything'' as an ImprovisedWeapon, including your opponent's leg.
851* IdiosyncraticDifficultyLevels: No direct difficulty levels, but in adventure mode, there are three tiers for the level of ability and attribute points you start with, the latter of which also decides your maximum attributes: peasant, hero, and demigod.
852* 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.
853* ImprovisedWeapon: In Adventure Mode, everything is a weapon. Including skulls, fistfuls of sand, vomit, socks, 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 [[ImplacableMan Bronze Colossus]]. Entire builds have been made around thrown bones and ballista bolts.
854* 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. [[NoFairCheating Or modding the files to play as a tyrannosaurus.]]
855* IOwnThisTown: Adventurers can claim a site for themselves and try to convince the locals to serve you. Works best if you [[YouKillItYouBoughtIt kill the prior leader]] right after you stake your claim.
856* ISurrenderSuckers: You can fake a surrender to get a surprise attack. This puts you and the enemy in [[LeaveNoSurvivors no quarter combat]], so that they won't fall for your tricks again.
857* ItsAWonderfulFailure: If your fortress was abandoned or wiped you, Adventure Mode allows you to explore the shambles of your once-thriving fortress.
858* KillItWithIce: The aforementioned freezing is the most annoying and, due to the common practice of training swimming to get stronger, [[YetAnotherStupidDeath one of the most common deaths in adventurer mode]].
859* KleptomaniacHero: 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).
860* 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?
861* 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.
862* MonsterAdventurers: With a bit of supported scripting, you, too, can now become a Scorpion Man and stab wolves in the face with venom. Any species capable of supporting a civilisation can be made playable.
863* NewsTravelsFast: All you have to do to let an entire city know that you killed some monster is tell one person.
864* NintendoHard: Even more than fortress mode! Dying by being surrounded by a wolf pack after traveling out of your home is ''incredibly'' common.
865* PreviousPlayerCharacterCameo: You can meet your own retired adventurer. Better yet, you can recruit them, too! Or break every bone in their body and gank their stuff. Or loot their long-dead corpse.
866* RatedMForManly: So very much, bordering on TestosteronePoisoning, sometimes. There is not much to do (yet) but explore, kill stuff, or take quests which are about killing stuff. Which is already pretty manly, but add numerous bugs, especially in earlier versions of the game, and you suddenly have the potential to become ''superheroically'' badass.
867** Throwing was once hilariously overpowered. You could pick up your own blood [[BloodyMurder and throw it and kill stuff with it]]! Or throw things you shouldn't really be able to throw ([[RuleOfCool but which are utterly awesome to throw, nevertheless]]), like large serrated discs, ''dragon corpses'', or other stuff.
868** Carrying infinite weight. You get slowed down by what you weigh, so it's not very useful in combat or in exploration, but yes, you can easily carry a hundred elephant corpses.
869** The {{Badass Boast}}s named enemies produce before fighting (to seemingly no-one in particular if you're nearby, but in hiding) seem right out of a ''Conan'' movie.
870** Everyone seems to be a ProudWarriorRaceGuy. "I will follow you if you lead me to glory and death", indeed.
871** Wrestling is very manly, and it's not pro wrestling either! Have you ever wanted to wrestle with a bear and win? You can, with sufficient skill and strength!
872** You can wield any item in the world as a weapon and strike people with it without penalties (excepting perhaps speed). A fork? No problem, and they are actually good at piercing armor (don't laugh). A sock? Yes, and you can kill people with it! A sword, or any other weapon? Of course. A pickax? Yes, and it's pretty damn deadly. [[CharlesAtlasSuperpower A life-size iron statue of some dwarf, which is around seven times heavier than your character is?]] YES! The corpse of that ''elephant'' you just killed? [[BluntYes Yes]].
873** There is a special screen just for legendary enemies telling you what they have done, which can be quite a list.
874* RetiredBadass: Retirement is the only way to play a new game in the same region without killing your current adventurer. Additionally, your adventurer may move on from random monster slaying, after 'retiring' into some other profession during world-gen. Better hope they didn't migrate to the town your (dwarven, or otherwise) adventuring party was about to pillage...
875* SacredHospitality: Thankfully, something given by members of any civ you haven't committed a crime against, otherwise you'd be screwed when night comes and you're alone.
876* ShopliftAndDie: It used to be that if you stole anything in adventure mode, you would automatically be acknowledged as an enemy by everyone in the civilization, who would then 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 having thievery make the townsfolk attempt to sleuth you out (which you can counter by changing your appearance), then arrest you alive if you surrender.
877** 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.
878* SssssnakeTalk: The serpent men, when you speak to or as one in adventure mode. This is caused by the [LISP] tag the species has.
879* TestosteronePoisoning: As already discussed under RatedMForManly, one can play their adventurer(s) this way. Nothing is stopping you from going around murdering outlaws wearing only a loincloth and two axes made from the bones of your enemies, going unarmed against an army marching towards your home town and/or hunting ducks by grabbing them by the throat and biting their head off.
880* TheStateless: Any player choosing the Outsider background starts in the wilderness, instead of a village, since they have no allegiance to any power.
881* TalkingIsAFreeAction: 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.
882* ThingsThatGoBumpInTheNight: When peasants warn that you shouldn't travel alone at night, lest the bogeymen get you, ''listen to them!''
883* {{Tyrannicide}}: The player is able to slay rulers in adventure mode; some of these rulers can be demons or other dark creatures.
884* UnwinnableByDesign. The game has no real end, and there is no real way to "win". [[SelfImposedChallenge You set the goals yourself]].
885* VideoGameCaringPotential: The 2014 update to Adventurer Mode conversations allow you to, among other things, open up a barter menu with {{NPC}}s, companions included. Handing over spare armor in exchange for any clothing competing with that equipment slot ([[ArtificialStupidity so they'll actually equip it]]) can help your meatshields last a little longer.
886* VideoGameCrueltyPotential: 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.
887* VillainTeleportation: If you try to run away from bogeymen, they just teleport into your path.
888* WalkingTheEarth: Adventurer Mode 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.
889* WideOpenSandbox: Taken to an extreme in that there is no way to finish or win the game, and the only goal is to not lose ...interest in whatever weird thing you're doing that non-dwarven lawyers would surely advise against (mostly because you're not following the live long and prosper model).
890* WorldOfBadass: Indeed. Everything that isn't hardcoded to flee will fight you to the death. Even the children, even the harmless ''pets''. Also, once you reach a fleeing creature it will stop fleeing and attack you, and only unconsciousness (or death) will stop them. Are you a legendary swordsdwarf and is your enemy a toddler who was just born? Doesn't matter, toddler throws itself into the fight with reckless abandon.
891** BadassAdorable: Because of a hilarious incident exploiting throwing mechanics in adventure mode, [[RidiculouslyCuteCritter fluffy wamblers]] are now [[MemeticBadass memetically notorious]] for being the only natural enemy of bronze colossi. In addition, various forts and/or adventurers that [[spoiler:breach Hell]] often find baby animals and/or ''wild birds'' entering the fray with the unholy inhabitants. The Deathgate community fortress actually had a random duck earn the unofficial title Darkwing the Netherfowl after it managed to '''kill two [[spoiler:demons]] by itself.'''
892* WorldOfHam: At least, all your enemies seem to be hammy. Even the NPC's go on that way sometimes.
893* YouAllMeetInAnInn: Taverns tend to be one of the best places for beginning adventurers to recruit companions.
894* YouKillItYouBoughtIt: As of the 2014 version, the simplest way to claim a site in Adventure mode is to shout your claim to it, then immediately kill the previous leader.
895** As of version 0.40.17, night creatures can now kill the owner of a shop, and then take over the shop (and yet they still sell things to people, just like the previous owners.)
896[[/folder]]
897
898----
899''Urist [=McTroper=] cancels Play Dwarf Fortress: [[JustForFun/TvTropesWillRuinYourLife Interrupted by TV Tropes]].''

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