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Dwarf Fortress
You want a dwarf? There's your goddamn dwarf. You want better graphics? Screw you. Dwarves can do lots of stuff. Like digging. Can you dig? Hell no. Play Dwarf Fortress.

Losing is fun.

Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress is two games: the game it is right now, and the game it hopes to be. Its goal is to be nothing less than a fantasy world simulator, simulating tens of nations and hundreds of thousands of characters over a thousand years, where you can watch history unfold from a godlike perspective or take the role of any character or civilization and make history. And to cap it all, it intends to do it in ASCII character graphics.

It's not there yet — it's technically still in alpha — but it already has about two games worth of content.

The main game is Fortress mode, which plays like a dizzyingly complex (and getting more so every day!) hybrid of Dungeon Keeper and The Sims, if all your little people were manic-depressive alcoholics. The Adventure mode is rougher and less polished, like a very freeform roguelike. Both modes have no way to win, but hundreds of ways to lose: the page quote is an unofficial motto.

Dwarf Fortress is free, with further development paid for by donations. You can find the game here, the invaluable gameplay wiki here, and some graphical tilesets here.

See the community page for tropes and links relevant to the Dwarf Fortress community.

Strike the Earth!

It provides examples of:

  • The All Seeing AI: Goblin sieges use a pathfinding AI that automatically knows the fastest way into your fortress. The players, of course, abuse its quirks (particularly regarding avoidance of locked doors) mercilessly.
  • Amusing Injuries: We are many, many versions away from seeing the message, "Urist McDwarf cancels swing pickaxe through load-bearing pillar/pull lever to drop drawbridge on own head/blithely ignore being set on fire/Armok knows what else: Not that bloody stupid." Hilarity Ensues, often.
  • Animal Wrongs Group: Their tendency to get offended when presented with anything made from wood or charcoal is one reason the elves are so unpopular.
  • An Interior Designer Is You: And your dwarves, of course.
  • Angst Dissonance: The DF Wiki features a quote describing dwarves as being "strange creatures who balance out at 'happy' because on one hand their wife was eaten by elephants and on the other they just ate in a REALLY NICE dining room.".
  • Annoying Arrows: Brutally, BRUTALLY averted. A single arrow or crossbow bolt can puncture a few internal organs with a single shot if you're unlucky, leading to a swift death.
    • For example, they might pick off both kidneys while somehow avoiding anything in between - or both 'ears', same. This is due to the game lacking any real notion of dwarven biological geometry, and will be averted in the next version that goes so far as to model 'individual blood vessels'.
  • Artificial Stupidity: The death of all too many dwarves.
    • Particularly painful example: you, the supreme overlord, have mandated that no-one goes aboveground because of an army of besieging goblins...so dwarves march out to do a job, cancel whatever it was they were going to do, and then just loaf around and catch some rays until the goblins kill them. They had it coming, too.
  • Ax Crazy Urist McGloomy tantrums, destorying Urist McMason's masterwork table. Urist McGloomy calms down. Urist McMason tantrums, haphazardly batting Urist McDolt down the communal well. Urist McDolt flails about and drowns two feet away from a stairway up out of the well. Urist McDolt's brother, Urist McWoodchopper changes his name to Urist McDwarfchopper. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Badass Bookworm: Order your bookkeeper to take the most accurate inventory of your stocks possible. He, a weak, unassuming social dwarf, will proceed to lock himself in his study, and work silently for roughly a season. Eventually, he will re-emerge, and after all those hours of updating the records, will have acquired the character notes 'Ultra-Mighty', 'Extremely Agile', and 'Superdwarvenly Tough'.
    • It becomes even more interesting when one thinks about where they get the paper. There is none. The solution? THEY ENGRAVE IT IN THE WALLS. Urist McDwarf, Neanderthal Accountant.
    • On another positive note, once your bookkeeper has "done enough work" and stops working completely, even if he dies you'll never need another one again as the books stay perfectly updated forever. Apparently the bookkeeper becomes so experienced he can foresee what the stocks will be in the future and even takes his own death into account.
    • Likewise, management exercise. Your manager will become so very badass from tracking down dwarfs and ordering them to make several hundred bars of soap that he'll also become 'Ultra-Mighty', 'Extremely Agile', and 'Superdwarvenly Tough'.
  • Bag Of Holding: your adventurer can carry around a dozen dead wolves, three barrels of booze, a massive supply of food, and 800 million fistfuls of sand, in his backpack.
  • Bare Fisted Monk: The Wrestling skill. Rather then Eastern Martial Arts, dwarves engage in pankration. It helps that they can bodily fling Goblins..
  • Better Than It Sounds: Quoth the page: "Micromanage a collection of absent-minded, depressed, alcoholic midgets with beards into building an underground house in the middle of a hostile wilderness. The official motto of the game is 'Losing is fun!'".
  • Bizarrchitecture: Quite possible if you try hard enough. 'Dwarf physics' is very forgiving in a lot of ways.
  • Booby Trap
  • Booze Based Buff: Without alcohol, your dwarves will begin to take more and more breaks, and your fortress will slow down to a snail's pace.
  • Bottomless Pit: Generally considered to be a boon to your fortress.
  • Bunny Ears Lawyer: The Dungeon Master is an adept animal trainer, grants you the ability to tame unusual creatures, and is talented at running a furnace and blacksmithing. He or she also often wanders around the fortress wearing only gloves, socks, shoes, and a thick stack of capes.
  • Call A Smeerp A Rabbit: According to the author, the Beak dogs are actually large velociraptors. Goblins ride them.
    • Word Of God states that they are actually inspired by either Shriekers or Assblasters from Tremors.
  • Cap: Population caps and FPS caps, FPS acting as a measure of game speed.
    • Which can thankfully be raised -or lowered, since a fortress that reaches the default population cap can bring a high end gaming machine to its knees- with some trivial config file hacking.
  • Cast Of Snowflakes: Despite the ASCII art. Each dwarf has his/her own personality traits that influence how they respond to certain events and how they go about their day. The player can view these traits by selecting each dwarf.
    • But they are ALL alcoholics!
      • They prefer different types of alcohol, though.
  • Cherry Tapping: Meatgod!
  • Chunky Salsa Rule: In fact, there isn't even a Hit Point system at all; killing an enemy requires you to smash their head in, bleed them to death, destroy a vital organ, cleave them in two, or otherwise harness the Chunky Salsa Rule.
    • By hitting a goblin hard enough into a surface with a hammer (Goblin Golf), or nailing them with a serrated disc trap, you can end up with basically Goblin Salsa.
  • Comedic Sociopathy: One of the things that draws a lot of people towards the game.
  • Command And Conquer Economy: Though there are ways to reduce the amount of micromanaging required, generally you have to order everything to be built.
  • Colon Cancer: The full title is Slaves to Armok: God of Blood: Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress: Histories of X and Y.  *
  • Convection Schmonvection: Averted by the insanely complicated temperature system the game runs, yet Dwarves have no problems working right on the edge of a magma pit, in workshops made of ice..
    • Better yet, the game currently does not check temperature for constructed things at all. Forest fires can burn around compounds with walls built from wood. Likewise, magma hot enough to melt rocks and burn bone, can be held back by a wooden wall... or an ice wall.
  • The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: Fan Nickname: Unfortunate accidents tend to befall nobles. Like being accidentally told to pull a lever that for some inexplicable reason locks their bedroom door and opens a floodgate that fills the room with magma.
  • Critical Existence Failure: Averted by the extremely complex combat and damage system which tracks damage (or mangling or removal) of all body parts and internal organs separately.
  • Crowning Momentof Awesome: Some characters have these constantly. This troper had a single axedwarf cut the head off a dragon in a single move.
  • Dead Baby Comedy: Hoo boy. Babies are frequently used as "Dwarvern Body Armor" by female soldiers, as just one example. Most accidental, but still.
  • Death Seeker: "I will agree to travel with you if you lead me to glory and death."— Said by some NPCs upon joining the party.
  • Death Trap: Several variations, with the possibilities limited only by your devious little mind.
  • Demonic Spiders: The giant, venomous, web spitting kind. Also Wolves.
  • The Dev Team Tarn Adams Thinks Of Everything: Yes, the dev team is basically one guy. (plus his brother as co-designer, but still only one coder). There's even game data on him. Not even the swine flu can keep him down for long.
    • One guy who, it has been joked, intends to keep going until he has a perfect simulation of reality down to the quantum level. Thank goodness for ASCII characters taking up so little muscle; despite the Good Bad Bugs, it's still worryingly accurate in many cases, and can be easily transported on a single USB drive.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu: Deploy enough military and you can take down anything, even Hidden Fun Stuff: demons from the bowels of the earth.
    • In the current version, at least. Previously, digging out a random, unknown amount of adamantine would end the game with a message that your fortress had dug too deeply. On the other hand, if you came back as an adventurer, there would often be a very strong, but still killable demon lurking somewhere in the fortress.
  • Disaster Dominoes: Often what kills your fortress when it isn't simply massacred by goblins or drowned by accidentally tunneling into the river. One unhappy dwarf irritates fifty others, and within five minutes every single dwarf in the fortress has gone literally Ax Crazy.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: If there is a kobold civilization nearby and your dwarves notice the kobolds, your civilization menu will say that exports from the kobolds are "petty annoyance" while offerings to the kobolds are "death."
    • Also, while "Dwarven Justice" does cover legitimate crimes such as vandalism or violence, these things rarely happen except in a fortress which is rapidly heading towards oblivion (see Disaster Dominoes); said Justice is more often administered because a noble demanded a certain item be made, a bismuth bronze cabinet for example, and nobody built it because your current map doesn't contain the materials to make a bismuth bronze anything. The recipient of the justice is a randomly chosen dwarf with metalworking skill. And while it is possible to build "official" jail cells, there exists a dwarf noble called the Hammerer, whose only purpose is to administer Dwarven Justice by means of a large steel war hammer.
  • Dropped A Bridge On Him: just one of the many amusing death traps players have invented.
  • Drop The Hammer: the appropriately-named Hammerer.
  • Dug Too Deep: Hidden Fun Stuff.
  • Ear Worm: the background music, a rather hypnotic six-string guitar piece by the game programmer himself.
    • it's ability to get stuck in your head combined with the listener's inability to actually remember how it goes suggests it may be some kind of etherial god music.
  • Eat The Dog: Often considered to be the ideal solution to the "catsplosion" problem. Dogs and cats are also the most cost efficient source of live meat at startup, costing nearly 3/4 less per unit of meat than cows.
  • Elaborate Underground Base
  • Elemental Crafting: Averted: what the equipment is made of is important, but item quality can as much as double the effectiveness.
  • Elves Vs Dwarves: Remember to establish good trade relations with elves. -Lead goblets- make great gifts.
    • Another wonderful trade good: magma. Lots of it. But don't worry about packaging it; just pour it into the trade depot, seal it off to keep your dwarves from stealing it, and let them choose their own. The Fortress of Boatmurdered takes no responsibility for fatal immolation caused by its magma exports. Magma is used at your own risk and the risk of everyone around you. Do not taunt magma unless you have modded in bauxite clothing.
    • Actually, it's in your best interests to keep the elven caravans annoyed with you; happy elves will bring loads of cloth, which you really don't need, especially in a healthy fortress, while unhappy elves will bring interesting animals and fascinating crops, which you will want to get.
  • Emergency Weapon: Annoyingly averted in Fortress mode. Soldiers or hunters equipped with projectile weapons can only use them as blunt instruments, not very effectively; buffing the crossbow's melee damage is many a player's first modding project.
  • Endless Game: Like the motto says, "Losing is fun!" Earlier versions had the potential to end in a Lord of the Rings-esque "you dug too deep and unleashed a horrible demon" ending, but the latest versions let you play with essentially no time limits.
  • Everything Trying To Kill You: The Random Number God is probably Chaotic Neutral, Magma should be treated as Lawful Evil, and everything else is somewhere on a sliding scale between True Neutral and Chaotic Evil. And your dwarves are Neutral Stupid.
  • Explosive Breeder: Dwarf Fortress has cats, which breed quickly: it's up to you whether you choose to see this as an annoyance or as a plentiful supply of meat and leather.. You can also increase the body temperature of cats in the config file to make the "catsplosion" literal.
  • Eye Scream: From the dev log...
    "Eyelids clean the eyes so you don't have to soap them off, but if an eyelid is torn off, I think they might soap the eyes."
  • Failure Is The Only Option: "Losing is Fun!" became the unofficial motto for a reason. Also, there are no actual winning conditions as of yet.
  • Fan Nickname: "Dorfs", "Dorf Fortress", "Urist McX", "Cutebolds".
    • Hidden Fun Stuff has received the nickname "clowns", meaning that the Glowing Pit is now the Clown Car.
      • Beware the "S"illy "o"bnoxious "F"olk.
  • For Science. Members of the online fan community, when asking about something that's never been tried, are implored to do it FOR SCIENCE! Dwarven science has already accomplished a number of interesting feats with the game engine which the developer probably never had in mind.
  • Fungus Humongous: The Tower-Caps, mushrooms so large they can be made into beds.
  • Full Frontal Assault: Dwarves don't mind if they're clothed or not, so there have been numerous instances of them going into battle naked. The success of this is varied.
  • Game Breaker: Arrows and thrown objects.
  • Game Mod By editing the raw .txt files, many aspects of the game can be added to or changed.
    • Everythings Worse With Bears: For instance, you can make bears trainable and rideable. In other words, war bears..
    • Bjorn cancels dig: IS A BEAR
      • The as-of-this-edit current Something Awful Let's Play of DF features new demonic enemies added to the game this way.
    • Other highlights include Roman Empire and Fallout total-conversions.
  • Good Bad Bugs: Due to a few of the particulars of combat and skill training, along with an overpowered bite attack, carp have the ability to very quickly tear your people to shreds.
    • See also the note on pickaxes under Improvised Weapon.
    • Some now-fixed bugs that came with the move to 3D and got named due to their humorous nature:
      • Contents Under Pressure: melting a bolt or arrow down for scrap resulted in 30 bars of metal instead of 1/30th due to a * instead of / in the code.
      • Love Conquers All: chained animals break free upon spotting their owners
      • The Most Dangerous Game & We All Fall Down: Both involved the removal of the floor on which a dwarf was standing, either by himself or another.
      • You and What Army? If you embarked on goblin tower, then soon abandoned (or all 7 dwarves died), then went and reclaimed the fort, the game would calculate the fortress wealth including all of the goblin loot, making the reclaim a force of 150 dwarves or more.
      • Infinite Blood/Mud aka Wipe Your Feet: mud and blood as pseudo-liquids had a "wet" flag that when a dwarf stepped on it they'd track it a few squares, which would then also be marked as wet, and as it took so long to dry dwarves would re-wet squares with other squares causing an eventual takeover of the entire fort. Bridges and Grates over open space "wiped off" the dwarves feet, containing the mess.
      • Buff Swimmers: any creature that naturally swam raised their Swimming skill, and due to the total exp of all skills being used to calculate attributes, natural swimmers ended up supernaturally strong.
    • Endless Quiver: A recent "feature" has been discovered that lets a marksdwarf carry a quiver with thousands of arrows, making him a one dwarf army, since crossbows fire like machine guns.
    • A good bit of the popularity of the game — aside from the whole ridiculously-detailed fortress-building thing — is due to various bugs, perhaps "misfeatures", that produce unintentionally hilarious results: for example, dwarves not recognizing that they are on fire before attempting to drink from the extremely flammable booze stocks. The developer's constantly updated progress log is a good source for these stories.
    • And then there's throwing in Adventurer Mode, which permits your brave dwarf to kill his enemies by hurling fistfuls of sand that shatter bones.
    • And of course, the nicely illustrative, 'Got rid of world gen crash during succession after death of prolific long-standing position holders with inbred descendants.'
    • Your Mileage May Vary on a bug in the way cooking ingredients work, which enables a cook to produce solid meals out of nothing but booze; majority opinion regards it as an exploit that will not be missed, but that doesn't stop all of them using it.
      • It is kinda hard to tell your chefs what ingreedients to use.
    • Undead fish that walk on the land. It seems that the only thing keeping the fish in the water isn't a lack of legs, but a need to breathe water, and once they no longer need to breathe anymore...
  • Gorn: Yes, in ascii text: the combat system describes the slashing of throats and gouging out of eyes with worrying relish.
    • The next version is set to have tissue layers and individual ribs and teeth. Just... wow.
  • Grievous Harm With A Body: You can use anything as an Improvised Weapon in Adventure Mode, including your opponent's leg.
  • Guide Dang It: The controls.
  • Hide Your Children: Horribly, horribly averted.
    • Yeah, quite horribly, many many many stories of people giving birth, WHILST IN BATTLE. then a few stories about their newly born child boldly sacrificing itself by taking an arrow wound to the head
  • Hilarity Ensues: Look, if you actually get upset when one of your dwarves gets into a foul mood because you killed his cat on accident, beats up another dwarf who then gets ticked off enough to put his pick into the head of another dwarf who then lies there decaying on the ground, causing bad smells that drive a handful of the other dwarves unhappy enough to pick up axes until bleeding and/or insane and/or dead dwarves litter your fortress, you're playing it wrong.
    • Losing is fun
  • Holy Shit Quotient: The update log.
    • In a one off line when working on blood, this "but I had to leave just before I tested the dwarf with the boiling gold blood." Holy. Shit.
    • Also, the entire game qualifies. From your first "holy shit!" when you realize that the game really is as complex as people say, to the "holy shit!" you will say when a goblin siege arrives at your doorstep and your military is not prepared for it, to the "holy shit!" you will say when you narrowly survive with dwarves with massive injuries, to the "holy shit!" you will get from reading about the enemies, to the "holy shit!" you will say when you finally beat the HFS, this game has a massive HSQ. And all that is just the beginning.
    • World Generation takes into account elevation, temperature, rainfall, stone layers and whatnot? Holy Shit.
    • Also, the game generates centuries of history with the origin of different civilizations, wars, notable critters, conquering...
    • Wow! The detail in this game is so staggeringly deep that the dev team must spend weeks working out ... wait, one guy writes this? Holy Shit.
  • Impaled With Extreme Prejudice: Menacing spike traps.
  • Improbable Weapon User / Improvised Weapon: Coins, pebbles, and even your opponent's vomit can be thrown for massive damage.
    • The humble pickaxe also merits a mention here; it has respectable DPS but in the damage class with the highest probability of scoring a One Hit Kill, and thanks to the way the skill system works, skill accumulated using it as designed translates perfectly to how skillfully it can be wielded as an Improvised Weapon.
  • Improbable Power Discrepancy: Carp. To quote the game's creator: "I think I made the fish too hardcore.".
    • On the other end of the spectrum, megabeasts are complete wusses after the first 2 years or so.
  • Incendiary Exponent: Dwarves generally don't notice they're on fire until they keel over. In Boatmurdered, a berserking dwarf with nigh-demigod stats beats a soldier into chunky salsa while on fire. See the Let's Play entry below.
    • Don't forget the baby and the cow that the demidwarf took down, too.
  • Instant Death Radius: Only with stealth and really good armor can you have a chance of killing some of the more powerful ranged opponents if you have a melee weapon.
  • Kill It With Fire: Fire demons are the most dangerous sort. A burst of dragonbreath can cause incredible amounts of trouble. On the flip side, pretty much everything in the game other than fire demons and creatures that live in magma is vulnerable to fire, INCLUDING: thanks to a bug. dragons.
    • Also flooding the map with lava.
  • Kill It With Ice: When the temperature drops below freezing, water turns to ice instantaneously when exposed to air. Any creature unfortunate enough to be standing on that square when it happens is 'encased in ice'. When you mine that square out, all you find is a skeleton and anything metallic the victim was carrying.
    • This works the same way in reverse, which is one cause of...
  • Kill It With Water: it's not unheard of for players to have drowning traps and/or drowning chambers to provide an unpleasant fate for goblins. Should the player make a mistake somewhere in the design or construction, it's quite likely to end up with the entire fortress becoming submerged.
    • This is occasionally combined with the aforementioned Kill It With Fire example, as when magma and water are combined, they create obsidian. Rarely you will find a player who has constructed a death chamber with access routes from both water and magma with the express purpose of encasing whatever comes in to that room in obsidian.
  • Killer Rabbit: Carp... oh dear Armok, carp.
  • Lava Pit: Players love these.
  • Lets Get Dangerous: Goblin attacks work this way. At the beginning of your fortress they only send small and weak raiding parties, but once you hit 80 population they up the ante. Goblin sieges can now include larger goblin squads led by weapon master, building-destroying trolls, trap-avoiding master thieves, and cavalry mounted on velociraptors.
  • Lets Play: A popular pastime in the community thanks to the game's flexibility and unpredictability. It's customary for famous dwarves to be named after the participants in the thread, and the audience to have a say in the fortress' policy.
    • Succession forts, where control of the fortress passes to a new player every ingame year, are also popular. Miscommunication and differing playstyles are a prominent source of Fun.
    • Boatmurdered. That is all.
  • Loads And Loads Of Loading: Code optimisation and multi-threading support are among the many, many things that Toady One is still working on.
  • Loads And Loads Of Rules: We're not kidding about the "insanely complicated" thing.
  • Luck Based Mission: Recent versions include a lot more useful information about the region you're preparing to build on, but the spawn-point of your starting settlers and their wagon is as close to the center of the centremost embark-map square as possible. This can occasionally be a nuisance if you're the wrong side of a river from a good site to dig in and haven't got much in the way of materials, and occasionally causes a Total Party Kill thanks to a bug caused by the way freezing and melting works.
    • Also, selecting 'Embark Now!' rather than 'Prepare for the journey carefully'. See below.
  • Luckily My Shield Will Protect Me: Done right for once; shields add a bonus to the block/parry roll rather than just boosting the armour stat.
  • Ludicrous Gibs: The game's health system is very in-depth, keeping track of every part of every character's body down to eyes, internal organs, and individual fingers and toes. Gibs, represented as red 2s: or green, or grey, depending on whether it bleeds blood or goo., will litter the surrounding environment if enemies are dismembered, disemboweled, hacked in two, or thrown into a wall with enough force to blow apart. It gets even better in adventure mode, which lets you take control of a single adventurer. This mode includes a blow-by-blow account of every fight, and the ability to pick up and throw the severed bits of enemies: or anything else, for that matter.. Thrown objects- even socks- will often hit with deadly force, breaking bones, damaging organs, or splattering brains across the floor. Ludicrous gibs indeed.
    • If an axedwarf is sufficiently experienced, he/she can eviscerate goblins so spectacularly the goblin's left leg ends up in a nearby tree. Meanwhile, if a mace- or hammerdwarf gets a sufficient velocity on his goblin, the goblin can explode into every single one of his components. "Where did that guy's arm go again?"
    • Something similar can happen to your dwarves at the hands of goblins. Sorry, that should be "at the hands of goblin wrestlers".
    • A basic Dwarf recruit who hasn't had time to go grab a weapon can still beat up kobolds so spectacularly that the kobold's left arm ends up in two pieces.
    • Even kobolds get the opportunity to do this. In Kobold Camp, a modification for the game, champion level kobold soldiers: using bone armor and copper weapons. can easily knock the limbs off goblin raiders: who use iron armor and weapons..
    • A quick primer: Swords and axes can cause extremities to be cut off, whilst maces and hammers have a knockback effect. Spears, pickaxes and projectiles like crossbow bolts cause piercing damage and have the best chance to damage internal organs, the most Boring But Practical option and a near-complete aversion of this trope.
    • It's not at all uncommon to see a soldier dwarf hit an enemy (or another dwarf) so hard that it will leave a bloody trail several tiles long before impacting a wall and exploding.
  • Luke Nounverber: Naming for everything works this way.
  • Mac Gyvering: The sword is stuck in the enemies leg? What weapon to use now? What about the ripped off arm over there, or throw some blood, mud and vomit.
    • Also, making fully functional crossbows from bone.
      • Leading to the Age Old Question: Do you get more -Elf Bone Bolts- per elf than it takes to kill an Elf?
  • Mad Artist: Every now and then, one of your dwarves will be so stricken with inspiration for an artifact that he'll simply drop what he's doing, take over a workshop, and demand items to work with. Success produces an awesome and valuable artifact and may promote the Artist to Legendary in the appropriate skill. Failure results in the dwarf either throwing away their clothes while running around babbling madly until they starve to death, being Driven To Suicide, or going completely Ax Crazy.
    • In fact, depending on the Mood that takes them, some of them grab other dwarves, drag them into a workshop, murder them and make their corpses into stuff.
  • Malevolent Architecture: It's more or less possible to make your fortress invincible by rigging it to reduce any invader to a fine paste. It's just as easy to accidentally flood your own fortress - or the entire world - with water. Or, slightly more difficult since it doesn't flow up as readily, magma.
    • Even more fun in succession games (and occasionally in your own) where someone has set up mechanisms with levers located close to each other. One raises the drawbridge in order to repel a goblin invasion, the other opens the floodgates that keep your fortress from flooding with magma. Neither of them are labeled...
  • Martial Arts And Crafts: Pick is a dangerous weapon (gives the best critical hit chance, along with a spear). The skill it uses for attack calculation is Mining. There's a lot of digging around. Guess what happens when some critter jumps on a very experienced miner?
  • Military Mashup Machine: Nazushdur Anrizgeshud Nom, one of the finest examples of Dwarvern hubris awesomeness.
  • Memetic Badass: Captain Ironblood, Morul, and the Elf King of the Dwarves, Cacame Awemedinade (who's most notable for being considered the only elf that's loved by most of the fanbase).
  • Mordor: What Boatmurdered quickly became - a directed magma flow annihilating not only the invading goblin army but all wildlife in the general vicinity tends to do that.
  • Mundane Utility: Bottomless Pits? You now have a garbage disposal. Unicorns? Delicious, and products manufactured from their bodies fetch a fine price. Merpersons? Their bones fetch a price usually reserved for dragon bone, if you don't mind expending some effort. Magma? Invaluable. A portal to the depths of hell itself? Once you've disposed of the demons who crawl out: (not easy), you have the world's most awesome way of disposing of goblin prisoners and other unwanted things, plus whatever the demons left behind.
  • Naughty Tentacles: "Engraved on the wall is an image of Tentacle Demons and Dwarves. The Tentacle Demon is committing a depraved act on the Dwarf." Aside from that lovely picture, your dwarves can have fondness for certain attributes of certain creatures, including Tentacle Demons for their "corrupt intentions".
  • News Travels Fast: No matter how quickly you get back to the city, they already know you killed the monster they sent you after.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The next version's Hidden Fun Stuff could qualify. A gigantic skinless gorilla blocks your path, its lurid exposed veins undulating as it murmurs your name! The horrifying creature grabs your body and crushes your guts. THEN IT BREATHES FIRE ON YOUR FACE!.
    • Assuming you dream in ASCII :p
      • And most DF players do dream in ASCII. Insomnia ensues.
  • Nintendo Hard: Not only is the game hard to master, it's also hard to learn..
  • The Not Secret: The 'Hidden' Fun Stuff, which just about everyone finds out about from reading Lets Plays well before encountering it themselves.
  • One Dwarf Army: With enough training and good enough weapons and armor, a lone dwarf can reduce entire hordes of Goblins to literal pulp.
  • Our Dwarves Are All The Same: The entire point of the game, really. The Dwarvern civilizations in Dwarf Fortress vary little from the model set by other universes. Well, except for being far more Ax Crazy, manic-depressive, and likely to engage in insane, colossal projects for no clear reason.
    • There's nothing to stop the player subverting this a bit, of course. Want to build a community of dwarves who live in wooden houses on the surface and specialise in dressmaking? Nothing much to stop you.
  • Our Elves Are Better: The new cannibalistic war hungry elves are just another one of the fun Fun little additions to this game.
  • Palette Swap: The fact that the game's done in ASCII graphics makes this a justified case.
  • Patchwork Map: Averted completely in that the world generator takes weather effects into account to always create a realistic map. This trope does however apply to veins and clusters of metal ore for Rule Of Fun and balance reasons.
  • Pointless Doomsday Device: Dwarven fortresses, especially those in succession games, seem to develop these with distressing frequency, often involving lava. Building your first Pointless Doomsday Device is practically a dwarven Rite Of Passage.
  • Power Glows: For a loose definition of 'power.' Dwarves who reach Legendary in any skill will cycle from their sprite's normal color to a slightly brighter shade of that color and back every second or so.
    • This is basically the dwarven equivalent of going super saiyan, as any dwarves who reach legendary will likely also be Superdwarvenly Tough or Extremely Agile or some such thing.
  • Pressure Plate
  • Previous Player Character Cameo: You can meet your own retired adventurer.
  • Punched Across The Room: Happens a lot.
    • People started to realise just how powerful Morul was after he hit an orc which then exploded after hitting a wall about a quarter-mile away.
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: Well, no stat difference, but female Dwarfs can have babies.
    • Not so much having babies but dropping babies out of their wombs. Pregnant dwarfs don't get any motherly leave and just keep working. So it's not that uncommon one of your miners pop out a baby while in the middle of digging out a tunnel. Same with animals. Happened more than once dogs giving birth to puppies while in the middle of battle.
    • Also, Dwarven women will carry their children into battle, if they're young enough. Even if they are warriors. Even if they are warriors trained primarily in wrestling. This may result in a domino anger-death spiral when the baby is almost inevitably impaled on something.
    • Not only that, but dwarves will wear clothing items regardless of gender - thus, you can see men wearing, among other things, a skirt, a dress, a pair of trousers, a loincloth, and several other items.
  • Quicksand Box: The game doesn't come with a tutorial. Some aspects of the game have complex and undocumented requirements. The wiki - or failing that, a geology textbook - help out a good deal with both points.
    • Or practice repeatedly making new fortresses and abandoning them when things go wrong — which they will (losing is fun!) — until you start to get the hang of making a working fortress. Or at least one that's not so dysfunctional.
  • Raised By Orcs: Goblins actively kidnap children and raise them. Goblin-raised entities act exactly like ordinary goblins, and can be seen snatching more children and participating in raiding parties.
  • Raising The Steaks: Evil-aligned, "haunted" areas are full of zombie and skeleton animals, which are ridiculously hard to kill.
    • The reason for this is that all undead critters can swim and walk on land, even the fish. Ever encountered a zombie whale? No? Good for you.
  • Respawning Enemies: Area and site specific enemies respawn every year; as does magma, which is technically part of the terrain, but can certainly seem like an enemy if your design relies on that vent you drained being permanently drained.
  • Retraux
  • Ridiculously Cute Critter: Despite being represented with only the 'k' symbol, people seem to interpret kobolds as mentally retarded, yet lovable humanoid creatures who are just trying to survive in a world where every other civilization hates them. According to the fanbase, cutebolds are another term for DF kobolds.
  • Robinson Goldberg Contraption: It's amazing what can be done with a couple of pumps, gear shafts, mechanisms, and levers / pressure plates...
  • Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: A favorite pastime is the invention of various elaborate ways of dealing with pests such as nobles and the like.
  • The Scrappy: Everyone hates the elves. They're irritating, stuck-up little bastards who spend all their time getting snooty at you for chopping down trees and trying to sell you poor-quality trade goods. Elves are basically the reason people invented trade-depot-drowning traps.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Goblin sieges tend to rapidly run out of steam when they hit heavy resistance and/or ridiculously long passageway of weapon traps, and the last few survivors begin discreetly marching in the other direction.
  • Screw You Elves: So many wonderful ways to say this. See the Video Game Cruelty Potential entry below for more details.
  • Sealed Evil In A Can: The Clown Car.
  • Self Imposed Challenge: This fortress will be nude! This fortress will never trade! And so on.
  • Shout Out: Every fortress starts out with seven dwarves.
  • Shown Their Work: Regarding geology; although the occurrence of veins of metal ore and the like in DF is considerably more common than in the real world, the game still has dozens of types of rocks, sorted by the geological formations they're most likely to appear in.
  • Silly Reason For War: The wars in world-gen history can be like this, especially if elves are involved: "The War of Ignition was waged by The Imperial Fells on The Council of Lances. One of the most significant causes of the conflict was a dispute over the treatment of plants."
  • Small Annoying Creature: Cats. They can't be assigned as pets like other animals, and they breed like tribbles: which causes the framerate to fall exponentially from having to track so many small animals; this is called a "catsplosion". Dealing with them inevitably causes headaches.
    • Cats can also be a valuable resource. They breed really fast, so you can butcher and use their bones for crafts, their skin for leatherwork, and their fat and meat for cooking. Entire forts have been made with economies centered entirely around the butchering of kitty cats.
    • Even worse, when kittens grow up into cats they will spontaneously decide to "adopt" a dwarf. If you then kill that cat (for some reason like there being over 9000 cats infesting your fortress causing framerates to plummet) the dwarf it owns will get a severe penalty on his/her mood. Go on a cat-clearing project and your entire fortress can quickly degenerate into a catastrophic downward spiral of despair.
    • They also kill vermin which is pretty handy most of the time, but if you want to build a cave spider silk industry, a cat killing all the spiders is the worst. They also drag dead vermin to their owners. Corpses rot, creating miasma which obscures your vision and makes your dwarves unhappy.
  • Space Compression: A dragon takes up one square; so do dwarves and cats.
    • 1,000 dragons can potentially fit into a single square, provided 999 are lying down.
    • Also, thousands and thousands of rocks can be piled onto a single tile.
    • Likewise, you can fit your fortress's entire animal population into a single cage, including 5 elephants, two cave crocodiles, three dozen cats and kittens, 15 dogs, and a partridge in a pear tree.
  • Spikes Of Doom: Dwarves seem to love making things that menace with spikes.
    • There are also "menacing spikes" which can be linked to pressure plates or installed into weapon traps. If linked to a pressure plate, these will shoot up, kill any hapless dope standing on it, and if the panel is pressed again will retract and leave the impaled goblin to collapse into a bleeding heap.
  • Stop Having Fun Guys: Some of them react with utter disgust towards anyone who uses a graphics pack rather than the default ASCII
  • Subsystem Damage: For practically every living creature, the game keeps track of the health of individual body parts, down to fingers, toes, and internal organs. As mentioned above, an update is planned that will add tracking of skin and tissue layers, teeth, and individual bones. Nausea, pain, exertion, and blood loss are also tracked.
  • Succession Game: In both Adventure Mode and Fortress mode great accomplishments are recorded in the 'Legends' mode. You can also visit former Forts in Adventure mode, and they become a dungeon crawl full of beasts and monsters.
  • Suicidal Overconfidence: The puny Troglodytes: or any other weak creature. will always attack any Dwarf they spot. Even if the dwarf is an Ultra-Mighty, Perfectly Agile and Superdwarvenly Tough Woodcutter with an Adamantine Battle Axe.
  • The Tetris Effect
  • Time Keeps On Slipping
  • Try To Fit That On A Business Card: Titles are awarded for kills. Even to animals.
  • Turns Red: The alligator has become enraged!
    • Dwarves in big trouble during a fight can also enter a "martial trance", granting them that much more of a chance to survive. While rage increases attack strength, going into a trance does... other things.
  • Unbreakable Weapons: For now anyway, the obsidian weapons are supposedly going to be particularly susceptible to this.
  • Understatement: While people laying siege to your fortress are known as "Invaders", megabeasts are appropriately noted to be "Uninvited Guests."
  • Unobtainium: Adamantine is even important to set off a major event in game.
  • Unusable Enemy Equipment: Goblins' narrow equipment can clutter your fortress, and humans and elves try to sell you weapons and armor you can't use, but understandable as it is made to fit certain creatures.
    • Note that other races' equipment can come in very handy - any weapon can be put into a trap, metal can be melted down and clothing makes great Vendor Trash.
  • Upper Class Twit: It can be difficult to tell whether your nobles know anything about anything. It's not impossible for dwarves to die in droves because your Baron keeps asking for green glass items - on a map with no sand, the key ingredient of glass.
  • Vendor Trash: Crafts, totems, toys, musical instruments and mugs can be used for two things - selling to the seasonal caravans and: once the economy starts. shop stock. On the other hand it's a great way of getting rid of the average fort's mountain of stone.
  • Video Game Caring Potential: Varies, but with each dwarf having an astonishing degree of personality built into the game, players can get damned protective of a few favorites. They still die in droves though.
    • It's common practice to take better care of the original seven dwarves.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can kill things by dropping drawbridges on them. You can kill things by throwing them off cliffs. You can reroute lava through your least favorite noble's bedroom. You can kill your dwarves' pets for food. You can do unspeakable things to children. In Adventure Mode, you can tear out people's eyes. And that's just the start of the list...
    • And you can strip goblins naked, and bung them in a cage. When you have enough, send your most badass champions into a room with it and pull a lever to seal the champions/goblins in and open the cage. Then watch as goblin parts are spread widely around the area.
    • There's also the option of imagining the looks on the trader's faces as you engage your deathtrap system that seals them in the trade depot and then floods it, killing them without getting you blamed for it and giving you all the stuff they no longer need to take back! Just don't try this with magma, it won't end well.
    • There's really not much to say about this other than... TRUE DORF!
  • Violation Of Common Sense: Also known as "Dwarven Physics." It's actually possible to build a perpetual motion machine, and melting a metal item only allows you to recover one third of its original mass. Some of these will probably be fixed eventually.
  • Wide Open Sandbox
  • Welcome To Corneria: The NP Cs can become very repetitive in adventure mode.
    • When asking a child his profession: "You look like a mighty warrior." "I'm four!"
  • Wave Motion Gun: To a lesser extent, Ballista arrows keep going until they hit a wall, taking out everything in their way. To a greater extent, any defense based on magma floods, used most infamously in Boatmurdered to destroy goblin armies anything and everything within some miles on a regular basis.
    • Some players have taken this further by using a network of very tall towers to build what amounts to a magma-based Kill Sat.
  • Wax On Wax Off: Cross-training.
  • With This Herring: Of the extraordinarily large number of skills and items available to take with you when starting a new fortress, only a relatively small percentage of them will increase your chances of living to see the first caravan. You will have this brought home to you very rapidly the first time you select 'Embark Now!' instead of 'Prepare for the journey carefully' when starting a new fortress.
  • The Woobie: Again, kobolds.
  • X Meets Y: When stripped to its barest essentials, the game is pretty much a fusion of Dungeon Keeper and Rogue.
  • You Fail Economics Forever: The "Dwarven Economy" basically doesn't work at all, and it's generally advised that you take advantage of the fact that you can turn it off completely in the settings file.

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