Follow TV Tropes

Following

Characters / Dwarf Fortress

Go To

Characters include the different creatures you can meet in the game, as well as some Memetic Badasses the fandom has produced.

    open/close all folders 

Civilized creatures

    Dwarves 
A short, sturdy creature fond of drink and industry.

The current default playable race in fortress mode, and a playable race in adventure mode. Known for creating incredibly complex fortresses, and being really stupid.


  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • Urist McMiner cancels dig through supporting structure; killed by cave-in.
    • They're notorious for having awful priorities, like looting corpses right before getting murdered by whatever threat claimed the previous victim; wasting all your seeds by cooking with low-value ingredients; electing someone to mayor even if it's quite obvious said person is a vampire; nobles imprisoning dwarves for not completing mandates regardless of the reason (for example, there was a tantrum spiral and now everyone with the relevant skill is dead; the fortress had more important work than making useless trinkets for nobles, or the item was literally impossible to craft). And so on.
    • There's a reason the forums have a thread for players to express their frustration at the stupid things their dwarves do.
  • The Beastmaster: Dwarves can tame the vast majority of animals in the game. The definition of "animal" extends to dragons, hydras, rocs and giant cave spiders. Imagine THAT as your cavalry. However, "exotic" animals can turn on you, especially if your civilization knows next to nothing of the animal in question.
  • Beware the Silly Ones: They're all lunatics, yes. However, they are capable of amazing feats (see "Towersoared") and strong-enough dwarves can fight an Eldritch Abomination to a standstill.
  • Cast Speciation:
    • As of the latest version, the emotion and thought work means it's perfectly possible to have sociopathic dwarves.
    • While the majority of dwarves see martial prowess as a worthwhile goal, most want to raise a family, master a skill, or create a legendary masterwork; rare are the ones who want to be a legendary warrior
  • Day Hurts Dark-Adjusted Eyes: Dwarves who remain underground for too long undergo cave adaption, which causes them to get sick the next time they go outside - particularly bad cases generally result in the entrance to your fortress getting covered in vomit. If you make a dwarf adventurer in a mountain hall, they will start the game with maximum cave adaption.
  • Driven to Madness: If miserable enough (or incapable of completing their strange mood), they risk becoming insane. This manifests in four possibilities: berserkery, melancholia, catatonia or running around naked.
  • Freak Out: Enough stress on a dwarf will lead to their normal behavior being temporarily overridden by one of three responses depending on personality- anxious dwarves will stumble around obliviously, depressive dwarves will become depressed, and irritable dwarves will throw tantrums. They will recover eventually, but too much freaking out and they will go permanently insane.
  • Functional Addict: They're all alcoholics, probably because they need alcohol to get through the day. Once alcohol was actually given an effect, dwarves were set to have a higher resistance to it than the norm.
  • Girls with Moustaches: The relevant code for female dwarves having heavy facial hair is Dummied Out by default, but there's a plaintext comment right next to it telling you how to reenable it, if you want to.
  • Long-Lived: While not biologically immortal like goblins or elves, they can live for almost two centuries. It's very common to see dwarves in their 70s and 80s.
  • Mad Artist: Dwarves can go into a 'strange mood' once in their life, in which they halt all actions and claim a workshop relevant to their best crafting skill (or a random skill if they are peasants).
    • They will ask for a specific list of items, and once gathered, use those components to create an artifact: a unique, very high-quality, indestructible item. It can end in them creating a hilariously useless item (ex: a bone musical instrument), something which looks unimpressive, but is in fact quite useful (like a stone door), or something awesome, like an adamantine battle axe.
    • If the moody dwarf is unable to complete the mood for whatever reason (an item is not available, the workshop is deconstructed, or a magma forge loses power), they will go insane.
    • There are five types of strange moods: Fey, Secretive, Possessed, Fell, and Macabre. All except possessions will increase the dwarf's relevant skill to Legendary, which ranges from useful to insanely useful. The only other difference between Fey and Secretive moods is how the dwarf states their demands (Fey is clear, Secretive dwarves sketch pictures). Only unhappy dwarves can enter a Fell or Macabre mood. Macabre moods are similar to fey moods with the exception of the dwarf using some sort of bone in his work, but Fell moods fit the trope best- the moody dwarf will murder another dwarf and make some artifact out of their victim's remains.
  • Mighty Glacier: Compared to other races, that are stronger and tougher but less agile (and therefore slower). It's not very noticeable in-game.
  • Miles Gloriosus: The first releases of DF2014. Even super-badass legendary military dwarves will flee from a harmless wild animal as long as they are not on duty.
  • Our Dwarves Are All the Same: The cultures of all the other humanoid races vary wildly from one generated world to the next, but the Dwarves are purposefully coded to stick more closely to the expected stereotypes so that the player can more easily understand what they're getting into when they start a game.
  • Proud Industrious Race: They are literally defined by their affinity for drink and industry, and as the game's main playable race they have access to a huge variety of industries, from smithing and masonry to beekeeping and soap-making. They are also the only major civilization that can craft steel equipment.
  • Skewed Priorities: Dwarven priorities are famously terrible due to dodgy AI. They've gotten better over the years as Toady has fixed a lot of the bugs (they actually notice when they're on fire now, and you can stop them from running out to snatch dead dwarves' clothes in the middle of sieges), but their AI still has zero concept of value or planning for the future, meaning they'll still cook away all your seeds and drop important jobs whenever they get a bit thirsty.
  • Super Mode: Combat trances, which happen when a dwarf is attacked by 2 or more enemies. It tends to make dwarves quite a bit better in combat.
  • Tantrum Throwing: Considered the de-facto dwarven reaction to prolonged unhappiness, and frequently a catalyst for Disaster Dominoes. DF2014 mitigated this significantly by reworking the happiness system and by introducing two different reactions to stress depending on a dwarf's personality. Tantrums still happen and they're still a problem, but tantrum spirals are rare and prone to fizzling out unless the player is deliberately going for one.
  • Trademark Favorite Food: All dwarves have randomly generated food preferences. Eating or drinking something they like will give them a (potentially quite strong) happy thought, and a dwarf will never complain about lack of variety with their favorite foods.
  • Tunnel King: The most common type of fortress is below ground - they're dwarves.
  • Underground City: Unlike fortresses, dwarven mountain halls are completely disconnected from the surface and can only be accessed via underground tunnels.
  • Upper-Class Twit: Dwarven nobility is infamous for this. Their rooms must be grander than normal rooms, or they get irritable. They will also mandate the production of or forbid the export of items they like, punishing dwarves who may or may not have been involved if their demands go unmet. Demands quite famously don't take feasibility into consideration, so a noble could get upset because he mandated glass items in a fortress with no sand, or wanted something made of slade (rare and entirely unworkable). Because of their idiocy, it is popular among players to find ways to "entertain" their nobles.
  • Wizard Needs Food Badly: They're capable of living without alcohol, but it will make them so slow as to be nearly useless.

    Elves 
A medium-sized creature dedicated to the ruthless protection of nature.

Arrogant elves who demand that you limit your tree-cutting. They will send a trade caravan each year, which will bring wood (it's okay when they do it, because they can use magic to get wood without killing trees), wooden goods, bags of sand and/or clay, fruits, rope and cloth made from plant fiber, and tame animals in cages. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from going to war with them if you don't find these goods worth putting up with them.


  • The Ageless: Elves have the potential to live forever, which is why they never become necromancers. Though elves can't die of old age, they reproduce just as frequently as the mortal races.
  • Animal Wrongs Group: They have some secret method of harvesting wood without killing any trees, so they'll trade you plenty of wooden items. But they don't like it when you try to trade wood or cut down too many trees. If your fort survives long enough, an elven diplomat might try to impose a tree-cutting quota on it, or merely insult you for razing the forest. In earlier versions, they'd even get offended if you tried to sell them their own wooden goods! The current version solved that issue. As of the latest version, they're also a standard one for animals; they'll even get pissy and accuse you of kiling animals if you sell them wool or eggs, never mind that the collection of these items in no way harms the sheep or the chickens. Oddly enough, they have no issue with milk or cheese.
  • "Ass" in Ambassador: Elven diplomats' idea of diplomacy mostly involves coming into your fort and insulting you because you have cut trees. There's nothing preventing you from concluding negotiations with a battle axe.
  • The Beastmaster: If you go to war with them, you'll find that their primary danger besides their archers and numbers is that they can bring a wide variety of dangerous mounts with them.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: They're perfectly happy to eat their fallen enemies and comrades in battle. However, may the gods help you if you try selling them wood.
  • Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: At first. They live in forests, don't use metal or technology, are "at peace with nature", and are the biggest tree-huggers you'll ever encounter. And then you discover that they are willing to slaughter innocents over cutting trees, and then eat their corpses.
  • Fantastic Racism: When they come to chastise you for having chopped down trees, the aforementioned diplomats will refer to the entire Dwarven race (verbatim) as 'your stunted kind'. And if you haven't cut down any trees, they'll express joy and surprise at you for (paraphrased) 'not committing the atrocities that come so easily to your people'.
  • Friend to All Living Things: Even more so than dwarves. They can tame any animal with no difficulty, and even use Unicorns as mounts. They also have the [AT_PEACE_WITH_NATURE] attribute, which means that wildlife won't attack them.
  • Green Thumb: Elves can shape their wooden weapons and armor without needing to chop down trees. One of ThreeToe's stories explains that they use magic to do this. This is, in fact, exactly how they build their forest retreats of trees planted in perfect rows. In fortress mode, however, their wooden goods are special only in that dwarves can only make training weapons out of wood, whereas elves have slightly more lethal wooden weapons.
  • Knight Templar: Their habit of eating war dead. It's even stated outright in their creature description!
  • Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Goblin-raised elves, which lack a culturally-imposed ban on using metal equipment.
  • Long-Range Fighter: Normally, elven warriors carry wooden armor and weapons, which are about as effective as you expect in melee combat against iron and steel. However, their archers can maim your military.
  • The Nose Knows: In Adventurer mode, their sense of smell is stronger than that of the other main races.
  • Our Elves Are Different: They live in forests and in harmony with nature, and consider cutting down trees for any reason a terrible offense — they themselves sing their tools out of living trees, but tend to go to war with people who give them wooden objects. They also eat their enemies' bodies.
  • Sapient Eat Sapient: Elves don't kill people to eat them, but if a sapient being is already dead, then they will happily eat the corpse, since leaving it to rot would be a waste of resources (and an attempt to gainsay the use of death-magic, perhaps?).
  • Screw You, Elves!: To the Dwarves, they're more annoying than terrifying.
  • Video Game Cruelty Punishment: They will be offended if you offer them wood while trading. Doing it enough times will cause them to attack the fortress responsible. And if you seek to raid them, you better be ready to confront their gigantic wall of war animals first, which can include such things as grizzly bears.
  • Zerg Rush: Since they're immortal but reproduce just as quickly as mortal races, they have huge recruiting pool to throw into wars. And they need those large armies, since their armor and weapons are made out of wood.

    Goblins 
A medium-sized humanoid driven to cruelty by its evil nature.

Your most common opponent in fortress mode. They will send ambushes, sieges, and child snatchers to your fort. The equipment you can loot from the battlefield is a good source of iron if your fortress doesn't have any, giving rise to the fan nicknames Goblinite (the fourth ore of iron, mined by killing goblins and melting down their equipment) and Goblin Christmas (the time of year when goblins come to get themselves killed to provide good little dwarves with plenty of Goblinite).


  • The Ageless: Much like elves, goblins cannot die of old age.
  • Always Chaotic Evil: They are nothing less than outright called evil in the game, seem to attack you and kill your dwarves for no reason, are rather cruel to their enemies, and also kidnap children. The kicker is that the goblins then raise them as their own without prejudice. This is evidenced in the character personality options in Adventurer mode. If you try to create a goblin adventurer, it will be impossible for your character to have any propensity for love, peace, kindness, generosity, or discrimination.
  • Ambition Is Evil: Their entity values show that they are extremely ambitious for power.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Goblin leaders frequently get taken out and replaced during worldgen, whether by fellow goblins or other things. Treason may be the only behavior they consider a crime, but no one said that a successful traitor has to answer to the law.
  • Dirty Coward: Unlike dwarves, they tend to flee from battle at the first sign of resistance.
  • Equal-Opportunity Evil: Due to their child-snatching, a goblin settlement can often have as many humans, dwarves, and elves as goblins. Not to mention trolls as "pets" and their more exotic rulers they often have. Prior to DF2014, they were the most multi-cultural of the main races, before other entities (and later on, animal-people) could move to other civilizations.
  • Evil Counterpart: To the dwarves in Fortress Mode. While humans and elves are also capable of organizing themselves into armies and attacking fortresses if the player pisses them off, the goblins do so without being provoked by the player, so they are more likely to serve as an "evil army" needed to be dealt with in the game.
  • Genuine Human Hide: Since they have no problem with butchering sentient creatures.
  • Hardcoded Hostility: Goblins from goblin civilizations will be out for your blood whether you play fortress mode or adventurer mode. Depending on the version, goblin members of other civilizations may or may not be hostile to their own fellow citizens.
  • Hates Everyone Equally: Always Chaotic Evil plus inability to discriminate equals this trope.
  • Invasion of the Baby Snatchers: "Snatcher! Protect the children!" Notably, goblins will then raise them as their own, though some children can be rescued in Adventure Mode if it isn't too late.
  • The Kindnapper: One interpretation of snatchers. This depends of how you treat your children, however.
  • Lack of Empathy: Their empathy and sympathy statistics are very low, although not as low as HFS denizens.
  • Might Makes Right: They seem to believe in this, and will accept any leader powerful enough to force their will on them.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Goblin sites, civilizations, groups, and individuals always have at least one "evil" word in their names, such as hell, monster, poison, sin, etc. Given the random generation, they either usually end up sounding appropriately evil or just disgusting (Pusfountain isn't exactly intimidating).
  • The Needless: Goblins in versions post-2010 don't need to eat or drink, though they do sleep.
  • Our Demons Are Different: Dwarf Fortress goblins start proliferating after a powerful demon breaches the Underworld, strongly implying they are a type of demon themselves. In worlds specifically generated with no demons in them, goblins will take their place as the inhabitants of the Underworld and remain locked there until a faction breaches it by accident.
  • Our Goblins Are Different: They act a lot like the stereotypical orc, despite orcs not existing in Dwarf Fortress, being an Always Chaotic Evil race of cruel and murderous marauders who attack everyone who's not part of their empire.
  • Raised by Orcs: Snatched children. That can assault your fortress later if they survive for long enough. No, you have no other option than to kill them.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: All goblins have red eyes that glow in the dark.
  • Sapient Eat Sapient: The most notable example among the different civilizations. Whereas elves will only eat the bodies of those slain in battle (because to do otherwise would be wasteful), goblins can butcher other beings specifically for their meat.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Goblins riding giant toads will allow their mounts to jump into large bodies of water (as the toads are amphibious), resulting in the goblin drowning.
  • Token Heroic Orc: Like other races it's possible for them to end up in other civilizations through various events such as site takeover, taking on the ethics of their new parent civ. Like with elves, due to being The Ageless any sort of authority a goblin gets they'll keep unless they meet a violent end.
  • Zerg Rush: They lack the token that allows invading forces to use proper siege tactics, and instead will just charge in to whatever traps you've laid.

    Humans 
A medium-sized creature prone to great ambition.

Trading partners, and potential besiegers. They're smarter about it than goblins, and more dangerous than elves because they aren't limited to wooden weapons.


  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: While their actual ethics remain static, recent updates allow for a highly randomized selection of values allowing for considerable variation in the average human's behavior.
  • Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Procedural Generation randomizes their appearances (averting Humans Are White) and clothing styles, but their culture is fixed and akin to Middle Age Europe. With some of the tweaks added in DF2014, they've shifted a bit more towards the Horny Vikings image, best seen in adventure mode. The new values system makes them (among other things) tend to value martial prowess, perseverance and power. Their towns also include mead halls for towns too small to warrant a castle, where local lords and ladies rule the land, all swearing fealty to a king or law-giver (depending on what the randomly-generated culture entitles their leader). Later on DF2014 changed things yet again. While they retain the similar Horny Vikings motif of local lords in mead halls, their values can now be randomized during worldgen.
  • Humans Are Average: Played straight, in regards of stats and weapon/armor availability. However, they are bigger than all of the other races, giving them a slight bonus to damage and toughness.
  • Humans Are Diplomats: Aside from your dwarven kin, they are likely to be your primary trading partners. Humans aren't as smug and easy to insult as elves and generally bring useful trade goods, so most fortresses keep good relationships with them.
  • Humans Are Warriors: Among their most prized values, aside from family and friendship, are martial prowess.
  • Klingon Promotion: Hamlets and towns can be taken over by adventurers, by staking a claim to the area and killing or driving off the current local ruler.
  • Proud Warrior Race Guy: Possibly more than dwarves.
  • Wake-Up Call Boss: Human sieges, for anyone used to just elves and goblins zerg rushing themselves into your traps. Humans actually use proper siege tactics. They'll set up camp near your fortress, harass any dwarves outside, prevent all trade, and wait for the the tantrum spirals to do their job for them. They're also better equipped than elves, more disciplined than goblins, and won't fall for any trap their diplomats have seen before. Luckily for new players, humans are usually at peace with the dwarves, and will probably remain so unless provoked by the player.

    Kobolds 
A small, squat humanoid with large pointy ears and yellow glowing eyes.

Small, thieving, "mammaloreptilian" goblin-like creatures with shining eyes and an affinity with poisonous critters. They skulk in caves and thrive in stealing trinkets from other races. They speak in their own incomprehensible tongue and are incapable of communicating with other races.


  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: Let's say it is very different from what most people will consider standard morality.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Kobold bandits, archers especially, are not to be taken lightly in adventure mode. Even in fortress mode, if their bumbling attempts at theft actually accrue enough success, they can eventually send ambush parties. While they're a lot easier to eliminate than a goblin ambush, they're still quite capable of taking a few dwarves with them.
  • Dirty Coward: More than any other race in the game. Though it must be said that against dwarves, they have not much chance, so running away is generally the most sensible solution.
  • Fluffy Tamer: They've somehow found a way to domesticate venomous cave creatures, such as helmet snakes and giant cave spiders.
  • Fragile Speedster: They run very quickly when discovered, however they tend to get killed easily.
  • Glowing Eyes of Doom: While "doom" is a fairly huge exaggeration, their eyes do glow in the utmost dark, visible as yellow '' in Adventure mode if they're too far away to see directly.
  • Hardcoded Hostility: Kobolds will pester everybody, and in some versions they'll start fighting each other as well. This is due to them being unable to communicate with other races, making it impossible for them to ask for peace, and as such they are mutually hostile to every non-kobold group.
  • Impossible Theft: In early versions of v.40, they could steal from sealed divine vaults, whose treasure and secret are guarded by possibly the strongest things in the entire game. They may still steal trinkets from demonic spires built as gateways to the Underworld itself.
  • Our Kobolds Are Different: Acording to a drawing by Toady One, they resemble short, squat humanoids with brown skin, pointy ears and glowing yellow eyes. They're described as "mammaloreptilian" — although their raw files show they're entirely mammalian in a biological sense, they do lay eggs. They're the most primitive of the main sapient species; generally strictly in the Copper Age. They live in simple tribal groups, usually inside caves, keep poisonous animals as pets and often sneak into fortresses to steal things.

    Animal People 
An orange striped person with the head of a tiger.

The world of Dwarf Fortress contains humanoid variations of its animals, often described in-game as resembling a human with the head of that particular creature. There are two distinct types: subterranean animal people tend to reside in primitive underground civilizations and can be playable in Adventure Mode under the right circumstances, while the ones found on the surface are little more than bipedal animals and do not use tools or form societies.


  • Beast Man: As per the description, they're a person with the head, the coloring and — if applicable — the wings of an animal.
  • Blow Gun: Subterranean animal people are pretty much the only users of them in the game.
  • Loads and Loads of Races: Most of the animals in the game are covered, including different types of insects. There are even plans for there to be giant animal people as well, just as there are already giant versions of the wild animals. Becomes Massive Race Selection in Adventure Mode.

Gods

    Armok, God of Blood 
God of gods, Armok creates worlds, revels in bloodshed and conflict, and then destroys them and starts anew when he grows bored. While not present in the game proper, he's beloved by the playerbase, who are typically more than eager to find ways to appease him.
  • Blood Lust: Literally. Armok demands for blood to be spilled in his name.
  • Destroyer Deity: Destroyer of all the worlds in Dwarf Fortress, obliterating those that cease to have the conflict they crave.
  • The Ghost: Not actually present in-game, and Toady One has no plans to implement him.
  • Jerkass Gods: See this official description of him: "Armok, the God of Blood, is just about the only constant in these chaotic random universes. A general sense of conflict keeps Armok appeased — when the universe becomes too boring it is set on the anvil of creation to be reforged. The destruction of the world by Armok will arise inevitably in most game worlds. As civilizations spread and the frontier closes, the world will start to look homogeneous. Armok, looking upon this decadence in disgust, will reform the world. Basically, when the universe has become too boring, it will be changed."
  • The Maker: Creator of all the worlds in Dwarf Fortress, creating worlds where conflict may reign.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Armok, God of Blood.
  • Player Character: One common interpretation is that Armok is the player. In which case the sobriquet of "God of Blood" is well-earned.
  • Religion of Evil: Maybe. Players tend to build giant obsidian cathedrals with Human Sacrifice and lava moats and shed rivers of blood to appease him. If this doesn't scream "not a nice god" to you, nothing will.
  • Top God: One of the very rare certain facts about him is that he's The Maker of all worlds in Dwarf Fortress, which includes the procedurally-generated deities that mortals worship.
  • War God: He is to be appeased by violence and the shedding of blood.

    Minor Gods 
Every world is home to a number of procedurally-generated deities, who are associated with a number of spheres. They're often depicted in works of art as dwarves or humans, though some take the form of animals. Elves uniquely worship a god-like "force" that permeates the wilds rather than the same deities as everyone else.
  • Because Destiny Says So: Gods of fate perform the ritual to bring demons into the world "because it is destiny".
  • Blood Knight: Gods of war and fortresses may bring demons into the world "so that great fortresses may be raised and tested in siege" or "so that war may rage". Justified, since you know, they ARE war-gods.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: Gods who don't have a clear motive for raising demons might do so while contemplating the "ineffable mysteries" of a sphere they share with the demon. These can be some strange spheres indeed, including such things as food, rainbows and peace.
  • Curse: Some gods tend to curse their mortal followers in vampire or werebeast form for profaning one of their holy places. And adventurers can directly earn the ire of said gods by toppling statues in their temples.
  • Fantasy Metals: Among their creations are procedurally generated, ultra-powerful metals of unknown nature. They're used by Angels, who guard the slade vaults of allied demons. Artifacts and items made of such metals can also be found in Fortress mode, within gem-studded walls.
  • God of Evil: Some of them will collaborate with demons and bring them to the overworld for pleasant reasons such as "so that more might die" or "so that the world may bathe in misery forever". Additionally they're responsible for the existence of werebeasts, vampires, and necromancy (by non-mummies).
  • Good Is Not Nice: Gods of bravery or valor may decide to summon demons "to provide opportunities for bravery to rise" or "to provide the opportunity for acts of valor to be performed". Additionally all deities, no matter how nice they're described, are capable of cursing people into werebeasts or vampires... and those cursed will then almost always go on to kill a lot of people unless they're killed first.
  • Jerkass Gods: Many are straight-up demons masquerading as deities, and even the real ones generally ignore their worshippers and their civilizations. Even when they're not raising demons from the Underworld, they have more of a negative than positive effect on the world; they seem to hand out curses more often than blessings. Necromancers in particular count as quite the negative influence, as while werebeasts and vampires essentially act as supernatural serial killers, necromancers will raise armies of undead and create many a foul creature. Any fortress or other settled site near a tower is in danger of being attacked, and it's not uncommon in Adventure Mode to find a village or hamlet near a tower to be destroyed and filled with undead...
    • To put this in perspective, in a world without gods, necromancers (and thus experiments, intelligent undead, and infected ghouls), vampires, and werebeasts will not be present. While in a world without any deities unique demons will just create underworld spires and leave the Underworld on their own, the fact remains that a sizable amount of a given world's evils is due to the divine.
  • Necromancer: Gods associated with death tend to teach necromancy to mortals.
  • Odd Job Gods: Some of them. You can perfectly well have a god of family, law and murder, although it doesn't happen often. Considering gods are randomly generated, this makes sense.

Notable individuals

The (sapient) Memetic Badasses created by DF play (or just stories) and accepted by the community as such.

World-gen figures

    Âsax 

Âsax

A cave swallowman who killed one forgotten beast and dueled several others to a standstill (and he would have killed them if they weren't bugged) before dwarves found him and took him in.


  • Badass Normal: He had no magic, no divine purpose, no heroic lineage. He was just a birdman with a spear and a shield.
  • Bird People: He was a cave swallowman.
  • Named Weapons: Apparently Âsax had a short memory. His spear got a new name basically every time it hit something.

    Cacame Awemedinade Monípalóthi 

Cacame Awemedinade, The Immortal Onslaught, Elf King of Dwarves

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lily_abdullina_cacame_web.jpg
The Glorious Elf King

The only elf that is beloved by the fanbase.


  • Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Was made king specifically because of how much of a killing machine he was, and has collected even more impressive accolades since being crowned.
  • Boomerang Bigot: An elf legendary for his hatred of his own kind to the point that he became a king of a dwarven civilization. It's to be noted that it's not the elf species he hates, but the cannibalistic elven culture. He has no problem with elves raised in other cultures, like himself.
  • A Child Shall Lead Them: Cacame was 7 when the dwarves conquered his home city in 90, and became the king of the dwarves in 99, making him 15 or 16 on his ascension to the throne.
  • Dragon Rider: He rode a zombie wyvern.
  • Elves vs. Dwarves: He's an elf, but he sides with the dwarves against other elves in the elves vs. dwarves conflict.
  • Mind Screw: He's an elf. He's a king of dwarves. He's an Elf King of Dwarves. Any doubts?
  • My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Other elves ate his wife. He swore off cannibalism after that and joined the dwarves.
  • Red Baron: The Immortal Onslaught.
  • Royals Who Actually Do Something: Much more so than normal Dwarf Fortress kings. Cacame killed a dragon, broke sieges, and did not once mandate the production of something stupid!
  • One-Man Army: Out of boredom, he single-handedly sortied against a large, well-equipped Human siege army, and routed them.
  • Screw You, Elves!: Despite being an elf himself, he swore off his kind's traditions and led the dwarves against them in retaliation for the murder and consumption of his wife.
  • Unskilled, but Strong: He once took down a dragon in single combat with nothing more than "competent" hammer skill.
  • You Are a Credit to Your Race: General community reaction. He's just about the only elf beloved by the fanbase.

    Gedor Luslemostuk Oth Banik 

Gedor Puzzlesneak the Knot of Hexes

A demon created during worldgen with an obscenely high kill count (as in in the high quintuple digits).


    Tholtig Momuzidek Lelumdoren 

Tholtig Cryptbrain the Waning Diamonds

A dwarven queen with an obscenely high kill count, most of it elves.


  • Badass Family: Most of Tholtig's relatives by either blood or marriage were combatants in the war, and many of them had their own long list of accolades. Even Tholtig's relatively peaceful brother-in-law amassed 118 kills before retiring to become a diplomat. Many battles saw multiple members of Tholtig and Logem's extended family on the battlefield at once.
  • Battle Couple: Her husband Logem, himself the son of heroes, was another notable warrior who had 1955 kills in his lifetime. Near the end, he and Tholtig were the only two warriors left and defended the mountainhome alone for ten years.
  • Bittersweet Ending: After centuries of bloodshed and countless victories against the elves, Tholtig died undefeated after the death of her entire clan, including all her children. The elves never recovered from their losses in the Conflict of Martyrs and soon faded away too.
  • The Epic: Her story. It's kind of a sad Epic, but it's glorious and awesome one nevertheless. The official Bay12 forum thread narrating her story is called "The Legend of Tholtig Cryptbrain: An Epic of Bloodshed, Despair, and Glory".
  • King in the Mountain: "A story is told by the dwarves to their children, that one day, when demons rise from the underworld to bring about the world's end, Queen Tholtig will lead out her clan of heroes from their tombs under the mountain, as well as a horde of the skeletons of elves slain by her and her people, and the ensuing clash will tear the surface of the earth asunder. A different legend is told by the elves. They say that Tholtig's spirit is still walking the realm and possessing elves, causing moods and forcing them to perform depravities like chopping trees to make wooden rings, amulets, and bins..."
  • Last of Her Kind: The last living member of her civilization. She lived out her remaining years still fighting off the elves from her ancestral home of Circletower, before finally succumbing to old age. Other dwarven civilizations are still alive in the world, though.
  • Meaningful Name: The Waning Diamonds. Now see the parallels between her story and her nickname. It's totally coincidental, but still.
  • Never Mess with Granny: Tholtig was still driving off armies of elves even at the ripe old age of 156. Many of her companions also kept on fighting until their own deaths by old age. Alas, Tholtig never was an actual grandmother; all of her children were childless and unmarried, possibly because the lack of eligible marriage candidates.
  • One-Man Army: Personally killed 2341 individuals, mostly elves. In the last ten years of her life she was the only combatant dwarf left, singlehandedly defending against ten seiges and killing 419 elves.
  • Outliving One's Offspring: Tholtig and her husband outlived their ten children, all but one of whom died before turning 40. Eight children died fighting the elves, including two during Tholtig's first battle as queen. Of the others, one was killed by a hydra, and the crown princess was killed at age 90 by the same titan their ancestors had once fought. Tholtig's grandfather was in a similar position, having outlived all but one of his seven children.
  • Royals Who Actually Do Something: See One Dwarf Army. Many of Tholtig's relatives also qualify: Her grandfather Meng claimed the throne after defeating a titan in a duel, and her husband's father was a disinherited prince who fought during Meng's time and continued to serve long into Tholtig's reign. Circletower's main defenders in its last decades included the queen and her king-consort, their children, and the former prince.
  • Warrior Prince: A queen and an undefeated warrior.

Boatmurdered

    Ral "Stark Raving Mad" Swaeringen 
A profanity-prone overseer of Boatmurdered. The fortress's elephant problems got really bad during his reign, and he began Project Fuck The World. Unlike all other rulers, he left after his time was up, paying another dwarf to impersonate him while he left through an escape tunnel.
  • Ax-Crazy: If "Project: Fuck The World" is any indication.
    StarkRavingMad: I've started project 'Fuck The World,' a top secret attempt to funnel magma to the outside. I'll kill those elephants. I'll kill all those fucking elephants.
  • Body Double: He made the wise decision of ditching the place once his year was up, explicitly stating at the end of his entry that he'd paid another dwarf in Boatmurdered to pretend to be him (as opposed to later rulers, with whom it was accepted that the dwarves named after them were the rulers themselves).
  • Expy: Deliberately of Al Swearengen.
  • Got Volunteered: By a noble from the dwarven capital. He suspects it's related to his having recently discovered gold.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Recognizes that, once his time is up, it's best that he escape from Boatmurdered, and does so through the use of a body double.
  • Shout-Out: Makes several to Deadwood.
  • Sir Swears-a-Lot: Extremely so, considering he's an expy of Al Swearengen.
  • Only Sane Man: Despite his aforementioned tendencies, he's able to share this role with a number of other rulers. He recognizes the stupidity of the fortress's setup and the dwarves who live there, and comments on it frequently.

    Emperor Sankis/Sankis the Beardless 
A dwarf who took several turns as overseer of Boatmurdered. In her non-ruler time, she's the fort's legendary engraver. Word to the wise: don't mess with her artworks.

    "Unknowing" Momuzfikod, Eighth Circle Warmage 

A human nerd whose short stature and beard led to him getting mistaken for a dwarf and made ruler of Boatmurdered after he got kicked out of his mom's basement. He's obsessed with Wizards and Warlocks, and seems to have some trouble telling the game apart from reality. Ends up being kicked out of his job after opening the door to goblin intruders after he rolled a 20 for the goblin commander.


  • Because Destiny Says So: Rolled a d20 die to determine if an impending goblin siege would be able to break through the doors. When his roll turned out to be a 20, he opened the doors for the invaders.
  • Easily Forgiven: Even though he's found guilty of letting the goblins into the fortress, all they do is remove him from his position and demote him to a regular dwarf.
  • LARP: He's obsessed with Wizards and Warlocks, and sincerely believes he has magical abilities. When he inevitably fails to cast spells, he claims to have failed all his attack rolls.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: Believes he's in a D&D-esque high fantasy, complete with magic missiles and attack rolls. When he inevitably fails said rolls because Dwarf Fortress is low fantasy, he attributes it to a fumble.

    Giginlimul "Mystic Mongol" Fliergold 

A harsh lawmaker who became ruler of Boatmurdered after one of Sankis's turns. Unluckily, she became ruler again after him, and he had annoyed her by dismantling her tomb. His fate involved elephants and a mysterious drowning.


    "Guerilla" Burialgears 

A military dwarf and the final ruler of Boatmurdered. During his reign, a tantrum spiral caused by the smoke from a burning catapult (oh, and the fort being on fire) killed everyone but him and a small child. He left to seek his fortune as an adventurer.


  • Crazy-Prepared: Wears two suits of armor.
  • Despair Event Horizon: He crossed it very early into his entry.
  • Dual Wielding: Two swords, to be exact.
  • I Need a Freaking Drink: His first entry notes that he's just consumed the last alcohol in Boatmurdered. "We are all doomed."
  • Madness Mantra: After seeing Boatmurdered's final spiral into insanity and death, he staggers away from the burning fortress mumbling two of these:
    "All burn..."
    "Any place is better. I must press on."
  • Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Once he and Dodók are the last dwarves alive in Boatmurdered, he leaves the fortress to her and departs.
    "Any place is better. I must press on."
  • Sole Survivor: Of Boatmurdered, almost. "Almost" because there was one other survivor — Dodók Sabrefrenzies (and StarkRavingMad had secretly left earlier too).
  • Survivor Guilt: He has a lot of it by the end.

    Dodók Sabrefrenzies 
The last dwarf of Boatmurdered.

Towersoared

    Derm the Soulchopper 

  • The Magnificent: The Soulchopper.
  • One-Man Army: Killed 20 Forgotten Beasts solo, and alternate-reality testing proved that he could single-handedly wipe Towersoared off the map.
  • Training from Hell: The fact that he does almost nothing BUT train. He has no real social connections to Towersoared as a result.

Headshoots

     HolisticDetective Shovethzuglar Remnosim Etlar 

One of the mightiest champions of the fortress Headshoots, HolisticDetective became legendary for her sheer indestructibility (thanks to her artifact adamantine plate armor) and her habit of fighting with a rat leather backpack instead of a proper weapon. Though she defended Headshoots valiantly and well for many years, she was ultimately corrupted by insidious whispers from a demonic pit and turned upon her own people, bringing about the final destruction of the fortress.


  • Always Someone Better: Impressively enough, Holistic's fellow champion Nemo2342 was even tougher than she was and had a higher body count by the end of the Let's Play.
  • Ambiguous Gender: Headshoots' players flip-flopped on whether Holistic was a male or female dwarf, occasionally referring to them with different pronouns in the same update. By the time they started Syrupleaf, though, they'd settled on Holistic being female.
  • An Arm and a Leg: Holistic gets both hands cut off in her showdown with Nemo2342 at the end of the Let's Play.
  • And Then John Was a Zombie: At the end of the Headshoots Let’s Play, Holistic is turned into a skeleton and slaughters every living thing in the fortress alongside Nemo2342.
  • Cult of Personality: One of the other dwarves in Headshoots declared Holistic to be a goddess and set out to “endarken” the forts inhabitants by setting as many of them on fire as possible. (This was part of her player’s scheme to wreck the entire fortress, though it didn’t work out.) She’s executed for this by an adventuring Hammerer in one of the LP's appendices, then comes back from the dead to wreak vengeance on the fortress’ inhabitants in the finalè.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: At one point, Holistic kills a dragon without it laying a claw on her. She also effortlessly demolishes several of Headshoots' best soldiers after being turned into a skeleton.
  • Dissonant Serenity: Holistic managed to stay ecstatic even while the rest of the dwarves in Headshoots were on fire, killing each other, or killing each other while on fire.
  • The Dreaded: After her fall, Holistic becomes a figure of terror, and at least two subsequent Let's Plays (Syrupleaf and Spearbreakers) posited that she had become a powerful demon lord and modded in horrific demons called the “Spawn of Holistic” that routinely besieged the fortresses.
  • Fallen Hero: Holistic was corrupted from one of Headshoots’ greatest heroes into a terrifying undead scourge that massacred many of the fortress’ denizens.
  • From Nobody to Nightmare: Holistic started out as just an ordinary dorf wrestler, but quickly grew into a legendary champion with impossible stats who was then corrupted into a skeleton and went on a rampage through the fortress, killing everyone she came across.
  • Good Bad Bugs: At the time of the Let's Play, there was no cap on dwarves' stats. One player ran Holistic through an external editor to check her stats and found that her highest stat, Wrestling, was at 77. For perspective, a dwarf with a stat of 15 is considered "legendary".
  • Improbable Weapon User: Holistic quickly got into the habit of bashing things to death with a backpack. In her showdown with Nemo at the end of the Let’s Play, she manages to kill him with her teeth after he cut off both of her hands with his axe.
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: When she’s turned into a skeleton, Holistic kills several dwarves by bludgeoning them into paste with her backpack, deliberately breaking as many bones as possible before going in for the kill.
  • One-Man Army: Holistic routinely destroyed groups of goblins and kobolds without breaking a sweat and at one point single-handedly killed a dragon without being harmed. Later, she and Nemo massacred the entire population of Headshoots between them, with Holistic killing several of the fortress’s best champions.
  • Would Hurt a Child: After being turned into a skeleton, Holistic killed several dwarf children during her rampage through the fort. The player who’d unleashed her notably felt guilty about doing so after watching her chase down and mortally injure a fleeing child before killing the last noble and her children.

Others

    Logan Cudgelurdge 

Logan Cudgelurdge

The most badass dwarven child in the world. Originally intended to be a test subject for a Super Soldier Project, he surpassed all expectations, climbing up 13 flights of stairs with his throat torn out to the hospital, then he forged a battleaxe fit for Armok himself. While there have been other Dwarven badasses in the past, what makes Logan so special is that the feats mentioned above happen when he's 8 years old . Also, while previous Dwarven supersoldier projects have had... questionable morality at best, throwing the children into dog pits for 12 years, Logan's ascension to Supersoldier happened with minimal mental scarring (well, as minimal as Dwarf Fortress can be), making him more like Captain America than a psychopath.

Each Logan story has Logan performing increasingly badass feats, which picks up once he's made a supersoldier via swimming in a chamber for a solid month. He goes from struggling to fight against a rabid dog, to killing a Blind Cave Ogre 500 times his size, to ripping through entire well-equipped and highly trained Goblin kill squad with his bare hands. He's become a beloved figure on Reddit, symbolizing what the fanbase is capable of.


  • Charles Atlas Super Power: As the creator put it, "the secret to becoming a supersoldier is to make your child Michael Phelps". Logan spent a month in a swim chamber, training his swimming skill, which also raises all combat-related attributes except toughness. When he got out, he was strong enough to punch the brains out of humanoid skulls.
  • Super-Soldier: Explicitly designed as such.

    Morul Cattenmat 

Morul Cattenmat, the Most Interesting Dwarf in the World.

An attempt to see what would happen if a dwarf got legendary rank in all increasable skills in 40d Fortress Mode. The end result was a hilariously strong dwarf due to how ranking up skills equated into stat buffs in that version.


    Planepacked 

Planepacked the Limestone statue

Okay, technically Planepacked is not a character, being an artifact, but it is still a legend in the DF community. Planepacked occurred as the result of a glitched strange mood, creating a limestone statue incorporating a lot of non-Euclidean geometry. Aside from being highly encrusted and menacingly spiky, Planepacked is engraved with the entire history of the world up to its creation, including 73 images of itself.


  • Accidental Discovery: Planepacked's creation happened because of a glitch with strange moods — a moody dwarf who claimed an outside workshop and was then ordered underground would not stop gathering materials and would work on his artifact for a very long time, resulting in the creation of mega-artifacts like Planepacked.
  • Alien Geometries: Presumed to be how Planepacked manages to fit all that decoration and engravings.
  • Droste Image: Planepacked contains multiple engravings of itself.
  • It Only Works Once: Planepacked's creator was unable to replicate the bug and the community didn't know how it worked until someone else accidentally created another mega-artifact, an obsidian floodgate called Broiledprinces. The bug has since been fixed.

Megabeasts and Semi-Megabeasts

Megabeasts

    Bronze colossus 
A gigantic magic statue made of bronze and bent on mayhem.

A massive golem made of solid bronze, widely considered the most powerful of all megabeasts, as they take near no damage from any material inferior to steel.


  • Blood Knight: They're "bent on destruction and mayhem".
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Thanks to being made of solid inorganic material. They're immune to pain, stunning, dizziness and disease, aren't subject to exertion, and can't be nauseated or suffocated.
  • Death of a Thousand Cuts: In DF2014, enough hits that do more than glance off will eventually crumple the relevant bodypart and kill it. With vampirism or some other method of boosting strength, a mere human can even manage this with a copper spear.
  • Expy: Of Talos, the original bronze colossus.
  • Golem: They're bronze statues animated by magic.
  • Hardcoded Hostility: As with all megabeasts, towards non-megabeasts. Most notable because bronze colossi were popular creatures to mod to be playable in Adventurer Mode, but DF2014 made it so this makes citizens equally hostile to bronze colossus adventurers.
  • The Juggernaut: With no needs, biology or any kind of animating principle to target, they're perpetual motion machines whose only purpose is to murder everything they can see, and with no weak points to target only the kind of overwhelming force that'll crack and slice through pure and solid metal will come anywhere close to giving them pause.
  • Kill It with Fire: A possible way to kill them, but not a very good idea: due to their huge size it takes quite a while to melt them to death and bronze has a melting temp slightly below magma's, so fire hot enough to start melting one can cause fires or kill other living things nearby it with the heat it gives off.
  • Lightning Bruiser: Huge? Check. Fast? Check. Ridiculously tough? Check. Very strong? Check. They're not one of the most terrifying enemies of the game for nothing. They are, overall, the most dangerous of the megabeasts, even if dragons generally have more damage potential.
  • Living Statue: They're magic, animated bronze statues.
  • Nigh-Invulnerable: Due to being made of solid bronze, they are VERY difficult to kill, unless you are well prepared.
  • Perplexing Plurals: The plural for bronze colossus is bronze colossuses according to the game, though players use colossi just as often.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Thanks to an infamous incident, fluffy wamblers are considered this by the community. More conventionally, bronze colossi are still vulnerable to traps, cage traps in particular. Or you can abuse the Square-Cube Law and give them a good long drop, as their sheer weight means they tend to fall apart from falls that would merely bruise a dwarf.

    Dragon 
A gigantic reptilian creature. It is magical and can breath fire. These monsters can live for thousands of years.

Among the largest creatures in the game when fully grown, dragons are among the most dangerous of all megabeasts, with their dragonfire being hotter than the surface of the Sun.


  • Breath Weapon: They have the most powerful breath weapon in the game. Not only does it have huge reach, but dragonfire is extremely hotnote  and can easily melt or burn most of the materials in the game. It won't melt unmined stone or constructed walls, however.
  • Determinator: They have a very high Willpower stat.
  • Glass Cannon: By megabeast standards (compared to dwarves, they're Lightning Bruisers). Physically, probably the frailest of the megabeasts (In DF dragons don't have extra-tough natural armor). But their weapon skills and especially breath weapon mean they can destroy nearly anything in their path, unless that thing is wearing a shield.
  • Greed: Standard trait for Western dragons. In Legends mode, they go and steal stuff from civilized settlements, then hoard it in their lairs, most often improbably worthless baubles like dog bone amulets, so looting a dragon's lair for treasure is not necessarily that good. Averted in fortress mode, where they just will burn your fort to the ground or die trying.
  • Kill It with Fire: They all can shoot out fire so powerful that it can melt practically any material and living being in its trajectory,
  • No-Sell: They're not subject to exertion, which essentially makes them utterly inexhaustible in combat. They're also immune to fire, magma and excessive heat in general, and likewise for their flesh, bones and other body products. This makes sense, considering the extreme heat of dragonbreath.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: Very close to the standard mold, except they don't fly nor do they have wings. Their fire is much hotter than "standard fire", even beating the heat of the Sun. They are also mindless beasts.
  • Technicolor Fire: In the premium version of the game, dragonfire is blue.

    Hydra 
A giant dragon-like monster with seven biting heads.

Massive megabeasts with seven heads, hydras can attack multiple times in a single tick, making them exceptionally dangerous.


  • An Arm and a Leg: They're easily capable of shaking off limbs or removing torsos from things smaller than itself due to its high natural combat skills, great size, and superior strength after biting. Assuming it doesn't kill something outright from caving in or removing a head by biting it, which is the main combat hazard it poses to your adventurer or your dwarfs and causing the above tropes to happen.
  • Feel No Pain: Pretty much required to properly exploit their redundant heads.
  • Healing Factor: Although a rather weak one. Their wounds close faster than most other creatures, but they're unable to regenerate severed body parts (such as heads).
  • Lightning Bruiser: Their massive size, high nature combat skills and the fact attacks from different body parts can occur simultaneously makes their multiple heads heighten their damage to lethal power.
  • Multiple Head Case: They have seven heads, which allows them to perform multiple biting attacks against a single foe or engage multiple attackers at the same time.
  • No-Sell: They're immune to pain, feel no exertion and can't be stunned. This allows them to continue fighting unhindered even if you cut one or some of their heads off.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: They're to be related to dragons, and resemble smaller and multi-headed versions of their kin.
  • Our Hydras Are Different: Creatures resembling 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 Healing Factor, 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.
  • Unstable Equilibrium: If they get even a single bite to hit, which they eventually will given how many heads they have, the battle's pretty much over. Conversely, any injuries that reduce speed (nausea, difficulty breathing, being grounded) massively reduce their lethality.

    Roc 
A bird of prey so large and ferocious it dwarfs many dragons. All beneath its mighty wings should fear the sky.

The largest flying creatures in the game, rocs are one of the species of megabeast.


  • Fragile Speedster: Out of the megabeasts, rocs have the greatest potential for bypassing your defenses, but have even less natural protection than the scales dragons have, with less raw destructive potential as well.
  • Giant Flyer: They're bigger than full-grown dragons, and the largest flying animals in the game.
  • Roc Birds: Birds of prey of monstrous size, they're the third largest creatures in general and the biggest flying creatures of all. A newly hatched roc is already as big as a fully-grown giant eagle.

    Forgotten beasts / Titans 
In the deep, there are beasts so fell and terrible, that only they know what they are, for none who have met them have lived to tell of it... they are the Forgotten Beasts, born of the chaos from before the world's birth... they have waited, brooding in the dark places of the world... and now... by digging too deep... we have awakened them.

Forgotten beasts and titans are monstrous procedurally-generated megabeasts, with forgotten beasts living underground and titans living in the surface. They can range from anything from a gigantic humanoid made of coral, to a skinless fire-breathing cobra, to a flying, poison-spewing dimetrodon made out of gemstone.


  • Animalistic Abomination: Many resemble gigantic versions of normal animals, but with aberrant traits ranging from the mild — extra eyes, extra limbs, poisonous spittle — to the extreme — flesh-rotting exhalations, for instance, or being made of living ash or coral.
  • Breath Weapon: Some of them can spit fire, or webs, or toxins with various effects.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: They're immune to pain, stunning, dizziness and disease, feel no exertion and can't be nauseated or suffocated.
  • Dug Too Deep: Your fortress is at risk of forgotten beast attacks once you breach a cavern. Still not as dangerous as what lies further down.
  • Eldritch Abomination: Not all of them, but mostly the ones who don't make any sense, such as gigantic blobs made of grime or salt that do not dissolve in water. Or six-legged quadrupeds.
  • Glass Cannon: In direct comparisons to others that are extremely tough, some will die in one hit due to being made of liquid or gas.
  • "Instant Death" Radius: A lot of them have deadly dust or gas. Oftentimes your dwarves will start rapidly rotting after fighting one of these monsters. The deadliest dust attacks can throw dwarves several tiles across in the air and smash them into walls.
  • Killer Rabbit: Some of them most definitely don't look dangerous, mostly by looking ridiculous or being based on "cute" animals. Hint: they are, in fact, very dangerous, and they will kill your dwarves.
  • Nigh-Invulnerable: A few forgotten beasts can be this if the Random Number God hates you, typically when they're made of weapons-grade metal like bronze, iron, or, Armok forbid, steel.
  • Our Monsters Are Weird: Every single one. They're randomly generated monsters made from animals, materials, some extra body parts or all three in tandem. And, again, six-legged quadrupeds.
  • Our Titans Are Different: Even from version to version, and even without considering the randomly-generated properties. Titans in older versions were merely large humanoids.
  • Rent-a-Zilla: More or less. You may even get fire-breathing dinosaurs AND it's not that uncommon. However, they CAN be killed by your military.
  • Zero-Effort Boss: Some of them, due to being made of liquids, fire, ice, salt or something else with low to no consistency, can very literally come apart the moment a random dwarf or animal walks up to them and strikes them.

Semi-Megabeasts

    Cyclops 
A giant humanoid monster with a single eye set in its forehead.

A massive semi-megabeast with a single eye, who lacks any special abilities beyond sheer brute strength.


  • Classical Cyclops: The classic destructive one-eyed giant.
  • Go for the Eye: Being blinded severely hinders the AI, and doing so is much easier when the target only has one to begin with.
  • Warmup Boss: They're generally considered among the least deadly of the semi-megabeasts. Unlike ettins they aren't immune to pain, and unlike minotaurs they don't have natural combat skills. Like all semi-megabeasts, their attack trigger stats are lower than megabeasts, making them arrive to attack your dwarves sooner.

    Ettin 
A giant humanoid monster with two heads.

A two-headed semi-megabeast, distinct for being immune to being stunned.


  • Multiple Head Case: Grants them all-around vision so long as both heads have intact eyes, and makes them a lot harder to put down by aiming for the head.
  • No-Sell: They're immune to being stunned.
  • Our Giants Are Bigger: A very standard depiction of the D&D Ettin, as a giant with two heads.
  • Wake-Up Call Boss: Like all semi-megabeasts, their attack trigger stats are lower than megabeasts, making them arrive to attack your dwarves sooner. Unlike other semi-megabeasts, ettins are more likely to survive long enough to give your militia-dwarves a good fight.

    Giant 
A gigantic creature resembling a human, almost unparalleled in size.

The largest of all semi-megabeasts, giants lack the special abilities of other miniboss-creatures, but make up for it in sheer weight.


  • Our Giants Are Bigger: In all aspects they're basically aggressive, uncivilized and utterly enormous humans. Nothing more, nothing less.
  • Warmup Boss: Generally considered among the least deadly of the semi-megabeasts. Unlike ettins they aren't immune to stunning, and unlike minotaurs they don't have natural combat skills. Like all semi-megabeasts, their attack trigger stats are lower than megabeasts, making them arrive to attack your dwarves sooner.

    Minotaur 
A giant humanoid monster with the head of a bull.

Inhabiting labyrinths, minotaurs are the smallest of all semi-megabeasts, though they make up for their small size with sheer skill in weaponry.


  • Beast in the Maze: One always spawns in a labyrinth.
  • Improbable Weapon User: Once they get into close combat with your dwarves, they can make use of any item forcibly removed from their target's possesion via wrestling.
  • Instant Expert: They have natural skills with literally every weapon, no matter how absurd.
  • Our Minotaurs Are Different: Classic fantasy minotaurs, resembling giant bull-headed people and living inside labyrinths.
  • Wake-Up Call Boss: Like all semi-megabeasts, their attack trigger stats are lower than megabeasts, making them arrive to attack your dwarves sooner. Unlike other semi-megabeasts, minotaurs have the combat skills to potentially give as good as they get.
  • Weak, but Skilled: Compared to other megabeasts and semi-megabeasts, they're the smallest and most mundane in terms of weaknesses. But their natural skills mean they can hold their own depending on what they get their hands on.

Notable standard creatures

While most animals in the game are just the same thing you'd see from the real life counterpart, some gained various levels of notoriety, with some being given the name of Kings of Beasts (meaning something similar to Memetic Badass on this wiki).

Common animals

    Badger 
A small mammal with a striped face. It lives in groups and is ferocious in combat.

Mostly famous for being the terror of most fortresses in the days of 0.31.25, especially in their Giant form - little more than an inconvenience in the current version.


    Buzzard 
A medium-sized, red-faced black bird that searches the temperate lands for carrion.

Your average turkey vulture. Doesn't sound so bad? In this game, they're a ravenous, food-stealing swarm, and a very common one at that.


  • Bandit Mook: They give kea a run for their money, but are notable for being present in even more biomes. Any food item on the surface is subject to being stolen by these birds should it not be protected.
  • Feathered Fiend: Unless you capture, train and tame them, in which case they become worse chickens.
  • Too Dumb to Live: They'll often try and steal from visiting caravans, and be promptly shot down by its crossbow-wielding guards. It can be very annoying as it may cause the caravan to leave early.
  • Zerg Rush: They appear in flocks of anywhere between 5 to 10 birds, which can be particularly bad for a starting fortress who hasn't had the time to take their food items underground yet.

    Carp 
A medium-sized fish found in lakes and streams. They are bottom-feeders and tend to gather groups.

When carp were introduced, they were absurdly ferocious. Nowadays they act as you'd expect a benign fish to, though their reputation is eternal.


  • From Bad to Worse: When their living kin were Demonic Spiders, zombie carp and skeletal carp added the ability to move on land and all the powers undeath offers. And husk carp in the current version still count as Demonic Spiders.
  • Improbable Power Discrepancy: In real life (and the current version of DF), carp are peaceful bottom-feeders. In older versions of the game, they were famed as ferocious beasts.
  • Legendary Carp: The very quote from the page.
  • Magikarp Power: Not just literally. Part of their lethality in older versions was due to how gaining experience in skills affected attributes, while aquatic creatures built up the swimming skill despite being innate swimmers. While all aquatic creatures where affected by this, other factors combined with a steady increase in strength to make carp quite lethal with a high-enough swimming skill.

    Cat 
A small mammalian carnivore. It is usually domestic and hunts vermin.

Cats have a long history with Dwarf Fortress, thanks to the so-called catsplosion. They are unique in that dwarves don't adopt cats as pets, but rather, cats adopt dwarves as owners, provided they have a preference for them.


  • Cats Are Superior: You don't adopt a cat, the cat adopts you. This can lead to a large number of cats all 'adopting' the same dwarf as their owner without warning.
  • Disaster Dominoes: What a catsplosion tends to result into. Numerous cats belonging to the same dwarf die at once (in older versions, probably because you're butchering them to free up space), leading them to have a tantrum and cause mayhem, leading any other affected dwarf to have a tantrum of their own, until the entire fortress is having a tantrum spiral.
  • Explosive Breeder: They hold this reputation, thanks to older versions of the game struggling much more with cat overpopulation, though the introduction of gelding has all but eliminated the issue. They don't actually breed any faster than other animals.
  • Mascot Mook: Their antics go hand-to-hand with any discussion of the game. Acknowledged by the official site, which has a collection of ASCII sprites featuring numerous animals, including a cat (as the letter c), followed by a cat surrounded by many other cats.

    Elephant 
A huge, hairless mammal, found grazing in grasslands in groups. It eats plants which it lifts up with its long trunk. When angered, it will attack with its long tusks.

The terror of Boatmurdered and of the first versions of the game, elephants are now Gentle Giant creatures who will leave you alone... if you don't provoke them, that is.


  • Awesome, but Impractical: In earlier editions, while excellent and powerful war animals, elephants were literally impossible to maintain — they starved faster than they could eat, and invariably starved to death.
  • Beast of Battle: They can be trained for war and hunting.
  • Cruel Elephant: Insanely aggressive in former versions of the game. Nowadays these are far more calm, but still not to be pissed off.
  • Difficult, but Awesome: Training them for war. Yes, an army of War Elephants will crush nearly any mortal enemy you can face, but they're grazers, and as such require a constant source of grass. They're also not that easy to find, and breeding elephants takes ages (they're not adults until the age of 10). Used to be Awesome, but Impractical in previous versions due to a bug causing them to always starve faster than they could eat, but that has since been fixed.
  • The Dreaded: In 23a, they were widely dreaded by the playerbase due to their extreme aggression and toughness. See Boatmurdered for more details.
  • Horse of a Different Color: They're among the dozens of animals that can be used as mounts by surface-dwelling NPC factions when they siege you.
  • Mighty Glacier: Its speed is not abysmal, but considering it is far stronger and tougher than fast...
  • War Elephants: You can make them these by training elephants for war.

    Kea 
A small, green, intelligent mountain parrot.

By far the most infamous Bandit Mook of the game, what should be just a small cute parrot quickly becomes the bane of a fledgling fortress as they swarm the wagon and steal everything of value in it.


  • Bandit Mook: No other animal has the reputation of the kea. The little critters can steal both food and crafts, so should one take hold of your legendary artifact, you can say goodbye to it.
  • Feathered Fiend: Unless you capture, train and tame them. They don't have much use beyond laying eggs.
  • Too Dumb to Live: They'll eagerly throw themselves at caravans and be shot down by the crossbow-wielding guards. It can be very annoying as it may cause the caravan to leave early.
  • Zerg Rush: They appear in flocks of anywhere between 5 to 10 mayhem-minded individuals. A kea attack upon a new embark has doomed many a fortress.

    Mandrill 
A large monkey with blue face and rump. It lives in large groups and often survives by destroying crops and stealing garbage. The males are larger, with powerful jaws.

A well known species of primate with a colorful face. Most famed in the DF community thanks to Boatmurdered, where they were essentially The Dragon to the elephants. Mandrills in the current version are far tamer, though not entirely harmless.


  • Bandit Mook: They're thieves and will try and steal both your food and your crafts, from random socks to your most precious artifact given the chance.
  • Beast of Battle: Trained and tame mandrills can be given war and hunting training. You read that right: war mandrills. However, due to their small size, they're about as effective as dogs in that department.
  • Maniac Monkeys: Particularly in the older versions of the game, and still capable of causing some injury to passing dwarves today.

Fantasy creatures and variants

    Beak dog 
A creature from the evil swamp. It resembles a squat, wingless bird with powerful beak and legs. Its blotchy skin is brightly colored.

A bizarre, squat wingless avianoid, that are about as heavy as a gorilla, found in evil marshlands. They're domestic animals in goblin civilizations and their favorite war beasts.


  • Beast of Battle: Notably, exclusively for goblins. Dwarves can only use them as common pets and livestock.
  • Feathered Fiend: It doesn't actually have feathers, but it's an evil and aggressive bird-like creature anyway.
  • Horse of a Different Color: They're the main mounts of the goblins. Expect them to come in great numbers during sieges.
  • Mix-and-Match Critters: They look like a rainbow-colored mix between a lovebird and a Graboid, which were an inspiration for them according to Toady One.
  • Non-Indicative Name: They don't resemble nor are anything close to dogs.

    Cave dragon 
A gigantic monster, once a dragon, now adapted to and polluted by the underground. Its wings fall limp at its side. Its face is full of incredibly long teeth. Its eyes are large to penetrate the darkness.

A rare subterranean variant of the dragon, smaller and missing the fire breath. These immense monsters are the largest cavern creatures in the game and may be the doom of many dwarves should they go against it, or a boon to your fortress should you manage to capture one.


  • Awesome, but Impractical: It's theoretically possible to capture a breeding pair of cave dragons and have them breed to give you a whole bunch of war dragons. However, they're born as small as foxes and their growth is very gradual, taking 1000 years to reach their full size. It'll take around 4 or 5 in-game years until a cave dragon is large enough to pose a significant threat to most humanoid enemies.
  • Beast of Battle: If you're lucky enough to capture one, it can be trained for war and hunting. Just pray it's a mature one.
  • Boss in Mook Clothing: Despite not being a megabeast, it has the same natural combat skills of a normal dragon and is significantly larger than a forgotten beast when fully grown.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: It's not subject to exertion, making it inexhaustible. It's also immune to fear.
  • Horse of a Different Color: Goblins can use them as war mounts, should the RNG hate you enough.
  • Immune to Fire: It's immune to common fire and dragonfire.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: It's much like a normal dragon, but it curiously sports a pair of atrophied wings while the megabeast version doesn't have any to begin with.
  • Rent-a-Zilla: An adult cave dragon is as large as a basking shark, outsizing forgotten beasts who are Kaijus in their own right.
  • Wings Do Nothing: It has wings but can't fly with them, due to them having atrophied after millennia living underground.

    Fluffy wambler 
A fluffy, pudge-filled being, known for its warm heart and stumble bumblings.

A type of tiny humanoid critter found in good regions.


    Giant cave spider 
A large underground monster with eight legs and sharp, venomous fangs.

A spider the size of a horse that lives Beneath the Earth. Terror of the underground. It has a paralyzing web attack and a neurotoxic, paralytic bite. It can kill every single other King of Beast, provided it can use its webs.


  • All Webbed Up: As if their lack of pain, redundant limbs, and asphyxiation-causing paralytic toxin were not bad enough, they are also capable of projecting webs at their prey that immobilize them, allowing their pincers to deliver a shallow-but-lethal, bit on the head.
  • Demonic Spiders: In more ways than one.
  • Didn't Need Those Anyway!: They can't pass out from pain, and can't die from blood loss, so lopping off limbs do nothing unless you can ground one by severing four of them. This, combined with the unpredictable nature of what body part the AI will target, is what makes them so hard to kill in Fortress Mode.
  • Feel No Pain: They're immune to pain, a trait shared by most arachnids in the game.
  • Giant Spider: It's the same size as a grizzly bear.
  • Lightning Bruiser: Their redundant members and chitin give them quite a lot of defense and they are fast. They tend to kill their opponents slowly however, so it's more like a fast Stone Wall.
  • Monster Organ Trafficking: With some careful effort and luck, it is possible to capture a giant cave spider. With even more, very careful effortnote  it is possible to set up a safe giant cave spider silk ranching operation. Giant cave spider silk is an enormously valuable cloth, but risky to gather in the wild (what with the giant cave spiders that produce it still about) and this method mitigates that danger.
  • The Paralyzer: Their venom causes paralysis, except it leads to death by asphyxiation, Dwarf Fortress being as developed as it is.

    Giant desert scorpion 
A gigantic arachnid with huge pincers and a poisonous barbed tail. It is found in the savage lands.

Exactly What It Says on the Tin. They are encountered only in savage deserts. They also can equip weapons, as impossible as it should be.

Has been Dummied Out as of version .42.04. Despite mentions of a future replacement, it didn't come to pass.


  • Awesome, but Impractical: Yes, you can technically catch them in fortress mode, tame them, put them over piles of crossbows and bolts, hope they pick up both and pelt your enemies with bolts. Fired by giant scorpions. However, it is quite unlikely and unwieldy considering you can just use your own dwarves for marksdwarf duty. They at least learn how to fire crossbows well.
  • Big Creepy-Crawlies: Over two times the size of an adult human.
  • Feel No Pain: They're immune to pain, a trait shared by most arachnids in the game.
  • Improbable Weapon User: Their pincers mean they will pick up any item in the game and use it as a bludgeon. Or shoot crossbows. They can kill you with your/your dwarf's own weapon in adventure/fort mode after they wrestle away your weapons/shields from your/your dwarf's hands.
  • Lightning Bruiser: With their redundant body parts, speed, pincers, poison, chitinous armor, and sheer size, they qualify.
  • Make Them Rot: Their venom kills by causing envenomed creatures nerves and brain to rot away.
  • Metal Slime: In former versions, they were somewhat rare, but could even be found in packs. Now, with the addition of hundreds of animals in savage biomes, you'll be lucky to find a group of these even if you embark on the right biome.
  • One-Hit Kill: Their venom will quickly kill any creature that has both a nervous system and blood, unless they're immune to poison.
  • Scary Scorpions: Even without venom they're enough of a threat as is; they're big enough they can just pull you apart with their pincers.

    Giant kea 
A monster many times the size of an ordinary kea.

A seemingly ordinary parrot... only rendered huge, and no less eager to snatch any item they can get their talons on. They're infamous for combining the normal keas' flight and tendancy to home in on any available items with the size to make them a serious threat.


  • Bandit Mook: Attracted to whatever you leave lying around or otherwise accessible, even if it means tearing through half your fortress to get to it.
  • Giant Flyer: Bigger than a grizzly bear. Not the largest Giant Flyer in the game by any means, but few such birds will make a beeline for your fortress like these will.
  • Horse of a Different Color: They have the tags that allows surface-dwelling civilizations (usually elves) to use them as mounts. It rarely, if ever, happens, however, not that you should hope for it to ever happen.
  • Killer Rabbit: To quote the wiki: Giant kea will kill your dwarves faster than you can say, "It's just a big parrot, what harm could it do?" Even if they don't kill any dwarves, Armok help you if they steal something important early in a fort's life like your only anvil, or your picks, which will make it much harder for your dwarfs because of the lack of being able to forge real armor or replace metal objects that get stolen or render your dwarves unable to dig in and make a actual fortress or get away with stealing a masterwork-crafted item that makes the dwarf that crafted it finally snap from all the strain of dwarf life and start a tantrum spiral that proceeds to destroy your fort.

    Giant mosquito 
A huge monster in the shape of a mosquito.

Your average mosquito, except as heavy as a lion. They suck the blood out of people they bite, as you'd expect from a mosquito, though the much larger size means one bite might be enough to kill a dwarf.


  • Big Creepy-Crawlies: It's a mosquito over twice the size of a man.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: In version 0.34.01, they spawned in groups of 100 to 200 at a time, giving you a monstrous swarm of giant, dangerous insects who'd kill your dwarves either through violence or through sheer game lag. It was quickly fixed and now they only appear one at a time.
  • Horse of a Different Color: They have the tags that allows surface-dwelling civilizations (usually elves) to use them as mounts. It rarely if ever happens, however.

    Giant sponge 
A huge immobile sponge.

Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a Porifera the size of a grizzly bear. It was infamous in DF2012 for being completely invulnerable to combat damage. They would charge and kill dwarves who come close to the river, despite being immobile — essentially invincible carp. DF2014 has nerfed it considerably, however, due to improved combat mechanics.


  • Artistic License – Biology: Strangely, they can also become enraged or unconscious, despite not having a nervous system. But this is due to a bug and some tag not working, considering that Toady generally shows his work a lot.
    "Without a central nervous system, the only thing they can feel is anger."
  • Fake Ultimate Mook: Undead versions in .34. They gained immunity to air-drowning in exchange for collapsing after taking enough hits, rendering their effective invulnerability moot. Regular versions have taken a blow too as of DF2014. Now a thralled giant sponge is another matter entirely...
  • Glass Cannon: The addition of pulping has rendered them much easier to damage, but their push attacks are still bizarrely powerful.
  • Horse of a Different Color: Theoretically speaking. They have the tags that allow them to be mounted by surface races, but it doesn't actually happen.
  • Killer Rabbit: Not so much cute as pretty in the same way flowers are (going by their real counterparts) and utterly unexpected when it comes to being a threat.
  • Mighty Glacier: In .34, they were invulnerable to damage due to having no body parts or blood. Their only mode of attack is pushing things, but their size means that said push can break your skull.
  • Nigh-Invulnerable: In its debut version, it could not be killed in combat. The 2014 version nerfed it quite a bit, however, due to the addition of pulping damage. Enough blunt strikes and it does fall apart, especially since sponge-tissue is even more fragile than flesh.

    Merpeople 
A man-like creature with the tail of a fish instead of legs.

Half-man, half-fish humanoids who live in good oceans. Mostly unremarkable, save for that one time the community found out how valuable their bones used to be...


  • Human Resources: For a given definition of human, but mermaid bones were some of the most valuable material in the game. Naturally, this led to players capturing a breeding pair of supposedly sentient merpeople and butchering then for their bones to make trinkets out of.
  • Horrifyingthe Horror: Though not the Merpeople themselves they did contribute to this. The above large scale merperson breeding and air drowning for bones actually disturbed the creator enough to nerf the value of merperson bones. The same creator who is noted to have given a dwarf molten gold for blood while testing the new damage system.
  • Our Mermaids Are Different: They're pretty standard as far as mermaids go, but they don't really behave any different from wildlife yet, much like other "wild" intelligent creatures.

    Troll 
A huge humanoid monster with coarse fur, large tusks and horns.

Large, evil humanoids who live Beneath the Earth. They destroy buildings they come across. Most notably, however, is that many of them serve the goblins as living battering rams, serving as an essential part of their sieges.


  • Alien Blood: They have cyan blood.
  • All Trolls Are Different: Dwarf Fortress trolls are large humanoids with gray fur, horns and tusks (which coincidentally make them resemble Sulley a lot). They're not very smart and have a nasty disposition. Unlike most depictions of trolls, they have no enhanced regeneration or vulnerability to fire and acid in particular.
  • Always Chaotic Evil: They're marked as [EVIL] in their files and, fittingly, are never not hostile.
  • Dumb Muscle: They're very strong and can demolish buildings, but have a penalty to their skill learning rate (as is the case with other "primitive" races) and can't communicate verbally.
  • Horned Humanoid: They have a pair of horns which they can gore people with.
  • Slave Race: To goblins, although they never seem particularly perturbed by it. Goblins shear them for their fur and use it in their textile industry, essentially making them the dark pits' equivalent of sheep, and use them as living battering rams during sieges. At the same time, trolls can freely gain names, titles and non-military professions in goblin society, implying they have roughly the same rights as goblins but are simply too stupid to take advantage of them.

    Unicorn 
A horse-like creature with a spiral horn growing from its forehead.

Found in good biomes, these creatures don't act too differently from common horses. But while timid in the wild, they're the preferred mounts of the elves, and far more dangerous under their employ.


  • Fake Ultimate Mook: Wild unicorns are the largest and as such deadliest creatures in good biomes, though they're entirely benign and prefer to flee from attackers rather than fight back unless enraged, meaning even your most inexperienced hunter can kill a unicorn with a shabby crossbow and some wooden bolts.
  • Horse of a Different Color: Elves can use them as mounts during sieges. Elven-controlled unicorns are hostile to your civilization, unlike wild ones, and as such won't shy away from fighting you.
  • Horn Attack: Their preferred means of combat should they fight dwarves.
  • Unicorn: Essentially horses with an extra goring attack, only found in good-aligned regions and often used as a mount by elves.

Night creatures

    Bogeymen 
You are surrounded by incessant cackling.

Infinitely spawning blighters that appear when you sleep in the wilderness alone. They're the reason why every prospective adventurer should consider gathering a party.


  • Boss in Mook Clothing: At the start of your adventure, when you are typically poorly skilled and equipped. They kinda degrade into Goddamned Bats later.
  • Evil Laugh: Their arrival is heralded by incessant cackling, which doesn't stop until they're gone.
  • Fragile Speedster: Very hard to hit unless you are a very good fighter. But when you do hit them, most of the time Ludicrous Gibs happens. This would only make them annoying, if they weren't also...
  • Glass Cannon: They have very high strength and impressive combat skills, and tend to punch/gore/bite right through steel armor despite being the size of a child and very squishy.
  • The Imp: Their appearance. They don't really act like stereotypical imps, however.
  • No Body Left Behind: The corpses and body parts of slain boogeymen turn into smoke and vanish in the sunlight.
  • Nerf: Received both this and a Balance Buff in the villains update; they became slightly more powerful, but do not spawn outside of evil biomes anymore.
  • Pintsized Powerhouse: They're smaller than kobolds and can break every bone in your body if you're not careful.
  • Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: When peasants warn you not to sleep outside alone, listen to them.
  • Trash Talk: A bogeyman's description states that "it hurls vicious insults constantly", not that you can actually hear it.
  • Villain Teleportation: They do this if you try to run from them.
  • Weakened by the Light: Exposure to sunlight causes them to disappear and their corpses and severed body parts to turn into smoke.

    Experiments 
In the midautumn of 99, Zutshosh Rotbegan performed horrible experiments in Copperbasic.

Unfortunate people and animals who fell victim to a necromancer's magical experiments. Successful experiments appear as monstrous humanoids, not unlike bogeymen and night trolls. Failed experiments, on the other hand, are non-sentient monsters that come in many different forms.


  • Monster Adventurers: Humanoid experiments are playable in Adventurer mode.
  • The Needless: They do not eat, drink, or sleep. However, they do have limited stamina.
  • Playing with Syringes: Experiments are created by necromancers or certain goblin leaders who experiment on captured citizens and livestock.

    Ghosts 
[A ghostly dwarf] has risen and is haunting the fortress!

If a member of your civilization (usually a dwarf from your fortress) isn't properly entombed or given a memorial, they may return to haunt you as a ghost. Whether these ghosts are docile or not depends on how the person was in life.


  • Berserk Button: Whatever you do, don't take down a dead dwarf's tomb. This will always cause the dwarf to return as a malevolent ghost which regularly murders dwarves.
  • Due to the Dead: All they ask for is this. Burying the body or memorialising it in a slab will put them to rest.
  • Fright Deathtrap: Sadistic or Murderous Ghosts may occasionally scare a dwarf to death.
  • Ghostly Goals: Broadly, every ghost's goal is to be buried or memorialised so that they can rest in peace. Individual ghosts will vary between Type A and Type B depending on their personality traits, ranging from semi-harmless (like Forlorn and Restless Haunts) to extremely dangerous (like Murderous and Sadistic Ghosts).
  • Our Ghosts Are Different: They arise from dwarves who were never buried and or memorialised. Even the same fortress may have different kinds of ghosts, depending on what they were like in life. Most will hang out scaring your living dwarves (which gives them unhappy thoughts), but some will attack and kill living dwarves as well. Sometimes they even throw parties!
  • Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: Some kinds of ghosts make noises at night, topple furniture, misplace items, or harass dwarves. The worst kinds can beat and torture people or even scare them to death.

    Mummies 
Who dares to enter my house? I curse you!

The preserved remains of dead rulers, interred in tombs that they watch over, even in death. Awakening them by approaching their sarcophagus, vandalizing their tomb, or stealing their treasures will invite their wrath. Not only will this entail a curse, they also have the ability to animate corpses, and plenty of their servants are interred with them to facilitate this.


  • Animate Dead: Like Necromancers, they can create mindless undead minions or more intelligent forms of undead.
  • Berserk Button: Defiling their tomb by stealing their treasures, approaching their sarcophagus, or setting off a trap will immediately wake them from death and attack the adventurer responsible.
  • Curse: The most common effect is a reduction in skills. Not that most adventurers will live to figure out what the curse did to them.
  • Due to the Dead: All they ask for is to be left alone. Defiling their tomb is a surefire way to make them angry, and the only way for them to appear after worldgen.
  • Human Sacrifice: They're buried with dozens of corpses to animate if disturbed, resembling the funerary rites of some cultures that sacrificed and buried servants with a deceased ruler.
  • Just the First Citizen: Because rulers lose their title upon death, the mummies will be identified by their other profession (such as a beekeeper mummy).
  • Mummy: Fairly typical as far as "mummies as undead monsters" go: Preserved, intelligent and very protective of their belongings.
  • Nigh-Invulnerable: Mummies are essentially husks with the powers of a necromancer.
  • Zerg Rush: Their favourite tactic is to mass-reanimate the corpses buried with them. Since there are dozens of them in any one tomb, this is the result.

    Necromancers 
The dead walk. Hide while you still can!

Former mortals that were taken by an obsession with their own mortality, seeking it to extend their lives by any means. In doing so, they take on devout worship of a god of death and learn the secrets of life and death, becoming immortal and gaining the power to raise the dead.


  • Animate Dead: Their main ability — they can raise corpses by the dozen, but little else.
  • Bad Powers, Good People: Sometimes a necromancer will just live out their lives in their communities. If they join your fortress, they will function like other dwarves and can be an excellent asset.
  • Early-Bird Boss: For most attackers to arrive at your door, you need to either pass certain thresholds of population and wealth to be sent, or to directly aggravate other entities in the map. If a necromancer is close enough they can completely forego this limitation and start knocking at your door before you even have a door, showing up in the first year early enough to leave you without your Autumn caravan. Mercifully, their amounts still depend on wealth and population, but even just three walking corpses with armor and weapons are a giant threat at that stage.
  • Immortality Seeker: All necromancers are motivated by the desire to extend their lifespan. Elves and goblins never become necromancers because they are already The Ageless.
  • Playing with Syringes: They may perform "horrible experiments" during world generation, resulting in unique, monstrous-looking night creatures that may escape into the wild.
  • Mad Scientist: As of 0.47, they now perform "horrible experiments" on animals and people in order to create new night creatures.
  • Mage Tower: They're usually found living in these, which they raise on becoming necromancers.
  • Magic Is Evil: They were one of the first types of sorcerer introduced in the game. They will cause endless amounts of Fun if your fortress is nearby one.
  • Maker of Monsters: They can create Experiments out of people and livestock, with successful experiments being vertebrates and failed one being blobs.
  • The Necrocracy: They can sometimes be found ruling civilizations.
  • Necromancer: These ones got their powers from a slab with the secrets of life and death gifted to them by a deity. They live in dark towers and raise the dead near them. They can sometimes besiege fortresses.
  • The Needless: They have no need for sustenance, as they know the secrets of immortality.
  • Night of the Living Mooks: Necromancers may use their undead slaves to siege a fortress.
  • The Sleepless: They don't need to sleep or rest.
  • Spell Book: The source of their knowledge, and thus their powers. Only copies (which also work to propagate necromancy) are books, however; the original is a Ten Commandments-esque stone slab, to make the divine connection even clearer.
  • Straight for the Commander: Necessary to end the sieges they bring, and a surprisingly valid strategy when it comes to raiding too; necromancers aren't necessarily good commanders, and their mindless undead even less so, such that necromancer armies are much more vulnerable in their home towers thanks to getting tactically outwitted (and worldgen combat not being too favorable to undead).
  • Wizards Live Longer: They stop aging once they become necromancers.
  • Zerg Rush: Zombies in a necromancer siege come by the hundreds. Carrying weapons and armour.

    Nightmares 
With singular purpose it seeks to destroy the living.

Necromancers who worship a deity of nightmares may gain the ability to summon these abominations in battle. They are smaller than forgotten beasts, and disappear after a short while.


  • I'm Not Afraid of You: A more literal weakness here: Nightmares aren't hostile to creatures with the [NO_FEAR] tag, ignoring them completely since they have no fear, and thus no nightmares of their own.
  • Living Dream: They're literal nightmares brought to life and made to attack their presumable bearers.
  • Real Dreams are Weirder: Procedurally generated as they are, they can take some bizarre shapes, even when nudged into more fearsome forms. Ever had a dream where you were chased by a gigantic, eyeless horned dinosaur?
  • Your Mind Makes It Real: Somewhat, in that while creatures that literally have no fear and thus cannot have nightmares won't make them go away, Nightmares themselves will not even try to harm them.

    Night trolls 
Now you will know why you fear the night.

Monstrous, randomly generated humanoid creatures that kidnap mortals and transform them, turning them into mates to breed more of their kind.


  • Abduction Is Love: Their hat. Worse is that they come in both sexes (oddly enough), so nobody is safe.
  • All Trolls Are Different: Procedurally generated, even, so they're all different from each other as well. However, they explicitly have no actual relation to trolls.
  • Always Chaotic Evil: Utterly hostile to everything else and fond of butchering sentients for food and fun.
  • Body Horror: Quite often. Procedural generation allows for all sorts of nasty mutations from the base humanoid form, and they'll actively inflict them on anyone they wish to keep as a mate.
  • The Corruption: They create mates for themselves by kidnapping and transforming villagers.
  • Evil Smells Bad: Most creatures in the game smell like themselves, but night trolls always smell like "death" or "bug innards".
  • The Fair Folk: They have hints of this. Toady plans to have the local villagers give them nicknames.
  • Mars Needs Women: Played with. For some reason, they never mate with other night trolls, despite coming in both sexes. Instead they kidnap a non-goblin sapient and morph them into a night troll of the opposite sex; the children are always the sex of the original parent.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Most of their procedurally generated names are usually linked with darkness, death, or evil. Such names can be Night Hag, Moon Horror, Night Monster, and so on.
  • The Needless: Night trolls don't need to eat, drink, sleep, or breathe.
  • Non-Indicative Name: Not actually related to trolls.
  • One-Gender Race: Subverted. You'd think that this would be the case since they need to kidnap opposite-sex mortals in order to breed and their children are always the same sex as the original parent, but in actual fact, "natural born" night trolls come in both sexes.
  • To Serve Man: Among the things you can find in their lair are the organs of sapient races.

    Undead 
The goblin corpse stands up.

The undead are the re-animated remains of various living creatures. In addition to the above necromancers, undead can occur in evil regions spontaneously, making a more persistent hazard than a necromancer would.

Certain types of undead, called husks or thralls, may also be created through exposure to some of the nastier effects of randomly-generated evil clouds. While they won't get back up again if killed (unless re-animated as a zombie, which is different), they retain the skills they had in life, whatever equipment they were wearingnote  and worst of all, may still be infected with the substance of the evil cloud that enthralled them.


  • Elite Zombie: "Intelligent" undead almost always have some kind of magical power in addition to their ability to wield weapons and armour. They also retain their original loyalties, allowing you (or Necromancers) to build a particularly powerful force out of your allies.
  • Mighty Glacier: They are usually much stronger yet slower than the base creature and are unaffected by pain or bleeding, however while they can still block if they have a weapon or shield they cannot dodge which makes them far weaker than they used to be.
  • Nerf: All Undead could once dodge and even zombie birds could shatter bones, with zombie kea jokingly called ninjas by the community pre-nerf. In even earlier days Husks were even immune to magma! Now, while regular zombies have gotten slightly stronger again and husks still remain dangerous foes, they are nowhere near the terrors they once were, and zombie avians are a matter of simply hitting them once and watching them go flying until they die on impact.
  • No-Sell: They're immune to blood loss, Feel No Pain, can't be knocked unconscious, will never tire, will never flee from battle, and can shrug off any damage that isn't "pulping" a bodypart or the classic method of taking down the dead without much issue.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: Even from update to update. They've gone from Nigh-Invulnerable to easily de-animated in a few hits to a middle-ground but not too tough if you know what to do and have decent combat skills.
  • Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Zombies can be killed via severing or pulping (severing or blunt damage respectively) the head, neck, upper body, or lower body. Very, very rarely sometimes they won't die from head decapitation/destruction due to a bug but slicing off any other limb will cause the game to notice their headlessness and kill them.
  • Snowballing Threat:
    • A ghoul attack can quickly become one, as their bites will turn victims into more ghouls.
    • Husks can be similarly Fun to deal with if their body is covered in condensed evil cloud stuff, as they run the risk of spreading the effect to living beings nearby and thereby creating new hostiles.
  • Technically-Living Zombie:
    • Husks are made by contact with the substance causing the effect, whereas normal undead start as a corpse.
    • Infected Ghouls share many traits of undead such as needlessness, opposition to life, and a host of immunities. They're still "alive" in a sense, however, as they're vulnerable to dying from blood loss and are capable of breeding, as opposed to the sterile and bloodless zombies.
  • You Can't Kill What's Already Dead: Zombies aren't using any of those lovingly detailed organs any more, so a lot of the swift, ruthless ways Dwarf Fortress players have to kill a living thing don't work here...other than you know, just chopping their head off.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: If you embark on an evil region, a zombie infestation may be truly endless unless you make every single corpse you encounter Deader than Dead, and promptly. Husks are even more Fun than normal undead, as there's a chance whatever substance infected them will condense on their bodies, spreading the effect to anything that survives a brief period of close combat with one.

    Vampires 
[A dwarf] has been found dead, completely drained of blood!

Like werebeasts, they are former mortals cursed by a god. Unlike werebeasts, vampires are a much more insidious threat — they disguise themselves as normal citizens, even taking false names and fabricating their life history, to hide their habit of drinking people's blood in their sleep.


  • Blessed with Suck: For quite some time it was much closer to Cursed with Awesome, but more recent DF2014 updates introduced a major drawback: anyone who witnesses you feeding will flip out and go fully "no quarter" hostile. It doesn't matter how famous a hero, and it no longer depends on who or what you're feeding on.
  • Cursed with Awesome: Are created by curses from gods, similar to werebeasts, and have similar drawbacks if discovered. However, as the curse renders otherwise-mortal creatures essentially needless and greatly physically empowers them, it's not uncommon to find players poisoning their fortresses water supply with vampire blood in order to turn all their dwarves into vampires.
  • Day Walking Vampire: Aren't affected by sunlight.
  • I Do Not Drink Wine: ... But do start complaining about alcohol withdrawal.
  • Implausible Deniability: Ever since they were introduced, there have been occasional bugs regarding their efforts to disguise their identity in fortress mode. In particular, their tendency to blame others to add confusion often led to patently absurd accusations, such as blaming babies or nearly harmless animals. More importantly, they'll still go through the effort of trying to pin the blame on somewhere else even if they were caught red-handed by multiple witnesses, as ultimately it's up to the player to order a conviction.
  • Lightning Bruiser: They have double the agility, strength and toughness of non-vampires; it's not unheard of for one to survive a full-on Hammering from a ☼silver war hammer☼. This is one reason why many players turn their adventurers into vampires.note 
  • The Necrocracy: Can sometimes be found ruling civilizations.
  • The Needless: In Fortress Mode. They'll drink blood every so often, but don't actually die of thirst if isolated from the population. Sealing one up and keeping them from being harmed or going insane can render a fortress functionally immortal. Even though the need to drink blood is present in Adventure Mode, vampires in both modes still don't need sleep or food.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: They mostly follow the standard vampire model, but are also deceitful social chameleons who take deliberate steps to kill people in secrecy. Or, if they're powerful enough, they'll openly overtake their civilisation.
  • Vampire Bites Suck: They tend to kill the dwarves they feed from, and those few who do not die become faint with blood loss and need to recover.
  • Vein-o-Vision: They can sense living creatures with blood through walls.
  • Viral Transformation: Unlike classical vampires, they don't change creatures they bite. However, drinking their blood does transform the creature into a vampire.

    Werebeasts 
[A dwarf] has transformed into a werelizard!

Former civilised mortals cursed by the gods as punishment for profaning a temple. At the full moon, they turn into a monster crazed for blood and flesh.


  • Blessed with Suck: They're prone to changing forms at the worst possible times. In adventure mode, dropping ones entire inventory in the middle of a fight can turn a would-be rampage into a Curb-Stomp Battle in favor of any nearby armed opponents. Even worse for NPC werebeasts, they spend their off days hiding in their lair, not even bothering to put on clothes or armor. And finally, anyone who isn't a fellow werecreature will react with hostility at the sight of one.
  • Curse: First-generation werebeasts come from mortals cursed by a god.
  • Damage Reduction: Transformed werebeasts have an inherent x0.5 force multiplier against any incoming blows, making them far tougher than a regular mortal or beast.
  • Involuntary Shapeshifting: They can only assume a bestial form in the full moon, which tends to make them change into their weaker, human, naked form at the worst possible time. In adventure mode they are in their human, naked, weaponless form 30 days a month.
  • Magic Pants: Averted: body transformations remove or destroy all clothes and armour.
  • Our Werebeasts Are Different: Very different. Visibly, they can be created out of a very wide variety of animals,note  such that seeing an actual werewolf is rare. And while werecreatures of smaller animals are still dangerous even if less so, werecreatures of big animals are something you don't want to face; a were-elephant can be a nasty threat...until the day of the full moon ends and it transforms back. In truth their biggest threat is the infectious bite and the headaches that may result from it.
  • Shapeshifting Heals Wounds: Transformation (both to and from werebeast form) fully restores missing limbs and heals nerve damage, making it the only source of outright regeneration in the game. Some players intentionally turn their adventurers into werebeasts because of this, as it allows badly crippled adventurers to regrow severed limbs and regenerate damaged nervous tissue (including spinal injuries).
  • Viral Transformation: Their bite transforms other creatures into werebeasts, though it must break the skin to work.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: All werebeasts are generated with an inherent weakness to a randomly-chosen metal, causing them to take ten times the normal force from a strike by a tool made of this metal. This can include incredibly common metals such as copper, iron, or the classical silver.

Hidden Fun Stuff (SPOILERS!)

    Angels 
Radiant creatures that were created by the gods to be their servants. This does not mean that they are good beings. They are best known for guarding the slade vaults of demons, whom the gods themselves were responsible for bringing up to the mortal world. They outshine even the demons as the most powerful things in the game.
  • Angelic Abomination: Even outside of "Assistant" angels, the angels can be associated with various spheres, with their appearance ranging from utterly vile to outright bizarre accordingly.
  • Animalistic Abomination: "Assistant" angels are generated like Forgotten Beasts with similar end results. Despite their strangeness, they're considered the least dangerous kind of angel.
  • Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: Every angel's description includes a tidbit that depends on which divine sphere the angel is associated with. Angels of balance have a symmetric appearance, angels of dreams are difficult to remember clearly, angels of torture are covered in spikes and barbs, and so on.
  • Brutal Bonus Level: The vaults Angels occupy are one. They're labyrinthine structures with a few simple puzzles to solve, filled with murderous and highly powerful angels armed with some of the strongest gear in the game; despite that, there is absolutely no requirement to challenge them in either fortress or adventure mode..
  • Celestial Paragons and Archangels: An Archangel is always the last one to guard a slab in every vault. They are (usually) humanoid, enormous, well-equipped by their deity's sacred metals and have the skills of a Grand Master in everything that is combat-related. Nothing in the game other than a Legendary adventurer with luck on their side can hope to stand against one of them.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: They're immune to pain, stunning, dizziness and disease, feel no exertion and can't be nauseated or suffocated.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: It is probably the hardest task in the entire game, but it can be done. In one famous case, a newbie player managed it entirely unaware of how difficult it should've been or what he was even looking for.
  • Fantastic Metals: One of the reasons that they are so dangerous. The divine metals that they carry as weapons are almost as strong as Adamantine. And because they aren't are light as Adamantine (still much lighter than steel; about the same density as water), they aren't as hilariously ineffective when used for blunt weapons.
  • Humanoid Abomination: "Soldier" angels, who wear equipment made of the divine metals, may or may not be made of flesh and are naturally Talented in all the arts of war. They're not even much bigger than a dwarf, usually, but their God's sphere-dictated appearance betrays their true nature.
  • Light Is Not Good: They are some of the most dangerous and vicious creatures in all of Dwarf Fortress. They also guard the possessions and the true names of unspeakably evil beings.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Archangel usually has a particularly menacing one, such as the "Ruination of Dreams" or "Suicide's Destroyer."
  • Our Angels Are Different: They are created by specific gods and have descriptions associated to their progenitor's spheres. They also do not shout "Fear not!", because you have every reason to fear them.
  • Rage Against the Heavens: Basically what you do if you decide to fight them. It likely won't end well for you.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: Sometimes, they can be found entombed within gem-studded obsidian walls, waiting for some poor dwarf to break them out. Such angels are less powerful than demons, individually, but are armed and armored with divine metals.
  • Super Boss: Archangels are on par with unique Demons in terms of size and combat skills, with a host of immunities to boot. There's only one in a vault, but it's more than capable of instantly slaying an adventurer. There is absolutely no need to fight them; indeed, the only way to do so is to actively seek one out in adventure mode.

    Demons 
Horrifying screams come from the darkness below!

Horrifying Eldritch Abominations that inhabit the underworld. When you've Dug Too Deep, they'll swarm your fortress in masses of hundreds or more. Don't expect to survive a fight against the Legions of Hell.


  • Always Chaotic Evil: They're even explicitly marked as [EVIL] in generated raws, and their mental parameters are such that it's impossible for them not to have domineering, extremely cruel personalities.
  • Breath Weapon: Not all demons have one. Some demons breath fire, other spit webs, other can emit various toxins that can very well kill your dwarves... or give them a headache.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: They're immune to pain, stunning, dizziness and disease, feel no exertion, can't be nauseated or suffocated, and can't be affected by traps (unless they're webbed.)
  • Demon Lords and Archdevils: Unique demons are indicated to be something like leaders to the 'generic' demons, and are some of the few to spawn with unique names.
  • Did You Just Have Tea With Cthulhu:
    • Sometimes a human civilization sends a diplomat to your fortress. Sometimes that diplomat is a demon. The non-hostile demon will meet with your leader, make some meaningless but polite small talk, then leave. The encounter may be harmless, or extremely !!FUN!! if the demon is made of fire or spat flesh-eating toxins all around your fort due to an enemy appearing in his line of fire. And sometimes, in the extremely rare case they're taken prisoner in a siege, you can liberate them from wherever they're captured, and they'll gladly ask for sanctuary become citizens of your fort.
    • In Adventure Mode, the Demons that present a God Guise to become the overlords of Human civilizations are no more malicious as any other human lord, and you can converse and receive quests from them as you would any other.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: With sufficiently badass soldiers, it's entirely possible to defeat the demons' initial invasion of your fortress. Or simply cunning, deadly traps.
  • Dug Too Deep: The page image. Dig deep enough through a certain blue metal and you will see.
  • Eldritch Abomination: They are terrifying, alien, godlike creatures that live in the Underworld.
  • Evil Overlord: May be an aversion. While some named demons take over human settlements (by posing as a deity) or goblin settlements (by force), they don't rule better or worse than normal rulers, as civilization ethics are tied to the civ, not who's in charge of it. It IS implied that demonic rule is part of the reason behind goblins being Always Chaotic Evil, as it's normal for goblin civilizations to get a demon ruler sooner or later.
  • Final Boss: The closest equivalent to a Final Boss fortress mode has, for now. Earlier versions had leader Demons better fitting this trope. They also can apply in Adventure Mode where they lead Goblin kingdoms. Although you only (usually) fight one of them rather than an entire army and, depending on the the random body a demon could have, it could be a Zero-Effort Boss or even tougher than Angels.
  • God and Satan Are Both Jerks: Gods currently have quite a bit more influence on the world, and one of the ways is collaborating with a demon to build huge spires and vaults of slade and terrorise the outside world.
  • God Guise: Instead of taking over Goblin civilizations, Demons evoked in the overworld may sometimes present themselves as gods to a Human civilization and take it over.
  • Humanoid Abomination: The Demons evoked in the overworld are considered unique demons who tend to be various animals 'twisted into humanoid shape'.
  • I Know Your True Name: Invoking the true name of a demon, engraved in the slab in a demonic vault, gives you power to banish it or put it under your command. A demon companion is more of a Bragging Rights Reward though, because if you manage such an amazing feat, you're already a god among men. (For the reason why, see the section just above.)
  • "Instant Death" Radius: Same reason as the Forgotten Beasts, having similar procedurally-generated material emissions.
  • Lack of Empathy: By mechanics; not even the biggest outliers among demons can feel anything that resembles empathy for another being.
  • The Legions of Hell: Their numbers are unquantifiable. Even if you somehow defeat the initial, possibly dozens-strong Zerg Rush of demons, they just spawn in endlessly from the Underworld's edges.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Nearly all demons have these, although they vary in awe-inspiring factor.
  • Nigh-Invulnerable: Like Forgotten Beasts, some demons can have this characteristic. Inorganic blobs are functionally immortal, save for a few instant-kill methods.
  • No-Sell: Fire and heat of any kind does not harm them, meaning the classic solution of magma is futile. They can't be drowned, are immune to any bioweapon you may have. They however are quite prone to being squished, encased in obsidian, impaled by spikes, or meeting their end on your most powerful warriors' adamantine weapons.
  • Omnicidal Maniac: They're already this in Fortress mode, but the eventual plan is to have them incur the end of the world for releasing them from the Underworld.
  • Our Demons Are Different: Mostly physically: they are generated randomly and can have wildly different forms, from a blob made of steel (which is just as Nigh-Invulnerable as you expect it is), to a random, giant version of animal with a few additional (or removed) body parts, to something made of water (which is hilariously weak due to how the current combat system handles creatures made of liquid). Mentally, they are just as sentient and just as evil as standard demons.
  • Our Monsters Are Weird: Much like Forgotten Beasts, they're randomly generated.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: That shiny blue ore is there for a reason.
  • Zerg Rush: One can tear apart an unprepared fortress, but demons come in swarms. These swarms can be anywhere between half a dozen to almost a full hundred, including unique demons.

Alternative Title(s): Boatmurdered, Towersoared

Top