When they say "Losing is Fun", they mean it.
Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.
- The Consolidated Development
page is rather ripe with these:- "Core59, LOVE AND ROMANCE, (Future): Though some of the dialog is likely to be an entertaining trainwreck, especially if coupled with a random poem generator (yes, that's a threat)"
- And now, years after that page was written, poetry generation is finally in development.
- "PowerGoal 90, BY THE POWER OF MOTHRA, (Future): You say a prayer to Mothra in the face of your enemies and are filled with great strength. You rip the heart from the chest of your adversary and eat it in front of his quailing comrades."
- "Core59, LOVE AND ROMANCE, (Future): Though some of the dialog is likely to be an entertaining trainwreck, especially if coupled with a random poem generator (yes, that's a threat)"
- The Devlog chronicles Toady One's progress in programming the game, testing features, and fixing bugs, past and present. Besides odd snippets that are amusing on their own without context, quite a few of these entries tend to oscillate between Nightmare Fuel and Black Comedy, especially where injuries and violence are concerned.As I was watching, blood splattered on the walls and floor, and another dwarf ran over to diagnose the patient again, while the dabbling surgeon moved between repairing the compound fracture and trying to stop bleeding from malpractice.
- This thread chronicles the adventures of SpiralDimentia and forum members managing to trick him into removing the cotton candy sword from a curious structure and experiencing spoilers. To his credit he took it with a great sense of humor and it turned into an epic thread of awesomeness.SpiralDimentia: Oh god, you guys are dicks, I think I just unleashed a horde of demons into my base.
SpiralDimentia: Okay, so the migrants have managed to release the bronze colossus...- To everyone's surprise and delight, SD quickly gets over his shock and turns the thread and his fort's horrible demise into a Moment of Awesome involving well-timed migrants, an imprisoned bronze colossus, at least two reclaim attempts, and fanfiction.
- At one point during the thoroughly insane succession fortress Battle Failed, a forest titan named Guzzlebones wandered onto the map and invaded. The dwarf army nobly stood to face it. Then it ran off to chase a cat.
- Several of the wiki articles qualify, especially the ones "Rated D for Dwarf." See Batman, Unfortunate accident, Goblin Christmas, and Scamps for candidates.
- Also, the redirect "Useless crap".
- Also, the redirect "Useless crap"
- Engravers, who tend to troll other dwarves (mostly the ones in a position of power) by covering every fifth tile they engrave with an image of the relevant position holder surrounded by their most hated vermin (worms, bats, toads, insects, etc), and cowering. Not only are they engraving the fort with political satire, but the mental image is hilarious.
- Quite a bit of the engraved material is worthy of a good chuckle.
- And as of recent updates in DF2014, the player can essentially mandate hilarious images in engravings and statues.
- Also, engravers can occasionally be incredibly uncreative. As one player put it:
I had a fortress where roughly 90% of the engravings were of buckets, buckets surrounded by dwarves, and buckets surrounded by screaming dwarves. - As polished as the game is, sometimes the grammar is a bit off. Case in point? "His guts is broken."
- You can also get a report that, "His guts is fractured."
- And with cave-ins, "It [double space] the (dwarf) in the body part".
- And the hilarious "Floating Guts guts".
- This thread about a bronze colossus that was chasing after a kitten:"The Bronze Colossus punches The Stray Kitten in the head with its right hand, but the attack glances away!"
Poster: It tried punching it in the head at least 12 or 13 times, but every time the attack glanced off. What the hell was that cat's head made out of, slade?- Also, someone pointed out that when the colossus was eventually killed, a speardwarf was able to sever body parts, but an axedwarf didn't.
"The Speardwarf stabs The Bronze Colossus in the left lower leg with her adamantine spear and the severed part sails off in an arc! The Speardwarf stabs The Bronze Colossus in the left upper arm with her adamantine spear and the severed part sails off in an arc!"
terkiey: Anyone else notice this in the combat logs? The spear was the one severing limbs at the start. But the axe couldn't. How the hell do you stab a bronze colossus' arm off with a spear!?
Doomshifter: They push. Hard. - This thread has perhaps the most hilariously unexpected Killer Rabbit of all time: The giant sponge. They have the [MOUNT_EXOTIC] tag. Draw your own conclusions.Without a nervous system...
The only thing they can feel...
IS ANGER. - Due to copious amounts of Noodle Incidents and unfortunate selection of topics and titles, the procedurally generated books can be quite funny. Some examples include vitriolic rants against a random town the necro never visited, and books about books about books about themselves, give or take a few layers.
- It gets better, now that your dwarves can write books themselves. Threads are already popping up with gems such as "Give Me the Troglodyte", "Can Sundials Save the World?" and "Probing Without Limits".
- This is a statue of five elves and a bed. The elves are screaming. The elves are striking a triumphant pose. The bed is burning.
- It gets better, now that your dwarves can write books themselves. Threads are already popping up
- A Note to Urist - wherein fortress Overseers express their frustration with their epically stupid dwarves.
- On the Adventure Mode page on the wiki, one of the FAQ's is, "I managed to escape but all my limbs are gone. Now what?" It then goes on to talk about what you can do, depending on what limbs you are missing. If you have all your arms and legs gone, it talks about how you could wrestle people to the ground and kill them using only your teeth.
- "I killed a bronze colossus, and you'll never guess how." He killed it by knocking its head off with a cute fluffy wambler.
- My epic first dragon encounter.
- Forum member GoombaGeek Badly draws your reports!
- THE WAGON THREAD: now with were-wagons, wagon-loads of puns, Oregon Trail references, wagon adventurers, wagon epitaphs, and more absurdity that you can process!
- DF Talk #19: Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One discuss ways to discourage nonsensical training methods like having the credit your adventurer gets for slaying a troll diminish, as villagers come to see them as the dumbass who throws rocks and wrestles badgers all day.
- When being interviewed by Penn State's Society of Physics Students, one of them asks a question about future development with the density of magma, as at current Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid.Student: Well realistically if you drop a cow down a volcano it should just sit on top of the lava and burn to death instead of falling down into the magma sea and revealing all minerals on the map.
- The titanic complexity of Adventurer Mode allows for a large number of unintentionally amusing Shout Outs. For example, in a single playthrough you can quite happily go around murdering people with a silver hammer, kill a giant with an antler, fight off your own severed hand, raise cash by selling otter's noses, jaguar's ears and badger's spleens, bite someone's legs off after losing all four of your own limbs, and find the exact value of a pair of dingo's kidneys.
- Greatly entertaining is the ability for legendary warrior dwarves to dismember enemies so explosively that the combat logs read "...and the severed part goes flying off in an arc!"
- This take on Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
- Note that there are no "missing" letters. The letters used are the ones represented in the dwarven alphabet.
- Add in the extra letter in the form of Th. The author decided that dwarves probably would have a unique letter for that sound.
- Note that there are no "missing" letters. The letters used are the ones represented in the dwarven alphabet.
- Behold ! The elusive thermonuclear catsplosion!
- !!xStray cat pancreasx!!
- Vampire dwarfs do not drink wine... but they still get alcohol withdrawal.
- Among the many unhappy thoughts that can be triggered by way of ghost attack...He has been attacked by a dead and still annoying acquaintance lately
- "So I retired and unretired a fort, and all the fortress pets are now clothed. The yaks, the cats, the dogs, everything."◊
- "I must leave."◊
- A user had issues with dwarves climbing trees and getting injured when they inevitably fell out. Another user suggested building a meeting area so that the dwarves would stop wandering off.PK1312: Alright, so, I made a well and designated it a meeting area and now I have a new problem: Dwarves jumping to their deaths down the well.
- One of DF2014 added the ability to geld animals in Fortress Mode, but it can also occur in combat during Adventure Mode. Ouch.
- STEALTH WEREMAMMOTHS
- "Confronted by a dog." Or, the story of how the reign of a legendary necromancer adventurer overlord, who has had hundreds of kills under his name, comes to an unexpected end... by the hands of an ordinary dog and a bunch of farm animals. Said livestock later go on to engineer a successful rebellion against the humans living within the community.
- "Knowing no mercy, Nikot stole a cherry! This vile fiend even murdered Mafi Fanggorge!"
- In the 0.42.02 changelog:Toady: Fixed world generation freeze caused by error in poetry refrains
- 0.42 both introduced taverns, and expanded the dwarves' emotionality. The end result of this, of course, is that the Bar Brawl has been fully implemented, as many players are starting to notice.
- A new bug: your depot exploding because someone turned up to trade with a bag of magma."It's magma, in a bag. I call it...BAGMA!" - Urist McMerchant, shortly before his death in a mysterious fire
- So, what happens if you put two cages with cats in them in a bag and put that bag into a mug? This.
- And now someone has managed to make someone drink themself.
- The fact that the game can't come up with any better way to describe that death than "you have died in a cage"
- And now someone has managed to make someone drink themself
- Now that it's possible to select what images you want carved or engraved, you can design some of your own hilarious scenes, helped by the fact Planepacked-level amounts of things happening with over a million individuals doing multiple horrible things to each other at the same time. For example.
- It also leads to massive Video Game Perversity Potential, especially given some of the action elements that can be specified. Alternatively one can go for absurdity, such as "the moon is unnaturally contorted," "the menacing spike is impaled on the goblin," or "the dwarf is embracing the elf."
- In early 0.42 versions, cats would pick up spilled alcohol from Inns and taverns. As spilled alcohol is considered 'dirty' by the game, cats would usually try to clean themselves. Unfortunately for the cats, early versions of 0.42 had a bug that caused the game to treat spilled alcohol as a whole mug. Cats would usually die of alcohol poisoning because of this.
- This account, which doubles as an Awesome moment, in which a player that had only been playing the game for a few days and was barely acquainted with the forums, stumbles into a Vault and manages to slaughter several angels before running off with the slab. This is a feat that gives even veterans trouble, and it was accomplished by someone decked in goose leather who was also green enough to be utterly unfamiliar with the Fan Nicknames used by the fanbase (to the point clowns were thought to be literal). The whole tale, already badass on its own, becomes hilarious as well, as a result of this.
- Even better, the demon he won was killed by a roc long before he got the slab.
- And what makes it funnier is that the roc is also responsible for the deaths of the player's previous adventurers.
- In 44, due to a bug, it is possible for animals◊ to give away the location of artifacts in your fortress to visitors or potential spies.
- The Modded Hell community game. As its name implies, its a massive collection of different mods, with completely different themes and sources - Mario, Zelda, Darkest Dungeon - amongst stuff that isn't sourced from anything, all edited to work together and occasionally to be even less sane than it was before. The fortress is inhabited by a civilization of six-armed, metallic Koopas. It goes about as well as you'd expect.A simple bar fight could easily turn into a fruit salad in seconds - the very first quote on the thread context.
- When a player retires a fort and looks at its history in the Legends screen:In the midautumn of 252, the [leadership] at the settlement of Bookchamber regained their senses after an initial period of questionable judgment.
- Dwarves will create art to commemorate momentous events in their fortress's history. One of the things they do this for is the creation of valuable artifacts. The art they create can itself be an artifact, which can lead to a vanity spiral. Say a master engraver creates an artifact engraving of a mighty victory; the next engraving they make could very well be a carving of themselves making the legendary carving. And if that carving is also an artifact... you'll quickly end up with the walls of your fortress covered in exquisite, high quality carvings of dwarves making carvings.
- There's a bug where thieving critters can steal stepladders while a dwarf is standing on one, leading to the poor dwarf hanging suspended in mid-air (since they're now unable to climb down the stepladder) until someone else comes into the area, resulting in the poor dwarf learning that Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress. Dwarf Fortress: now with extra Looney Tunes.
- Ordinarily, if you attempt to look at an untrainable animal's labor preferences, the game will state "This animal cannot work." ("This adorable animal", if the animal in question is a baby.) However, cats have a unique dialogue for this: "This animal isn't interested in your wishes".
- A minor one, but due to the way anatomy works, thanks to snakemen's lower halves being all tail, civilized snakemen wear but a single boot/shoe on the very tip of their tails. The mental image is always good for a giggle.
- Unlike other main civilizations, Goblins are unable to use pack animals or wagons. This usually doesn't matter in game that much... unless you successfully manage to extort a tribute out of them. Usually, tributes arrive with a caravan and guards much like a trading wagon, but with goblins... it's a single unguarded goblin carrying the (usually meager) tribute by hand, plopping it down in your trade depot, and then scampering off.
- It's possible for creatures in general to change personality traits and values due to experiencing mental trauma of some kind. Fair enough - however, one of the most common cause cited in-game for said traumas for Dwarves tend to be stuff like standing outside while it's raining
