You want a dwarf? There's your fucking dwarf. You want some better graphics? Fuck you. Dwarves can do lots of stuff. Like digging. Can you dig? Hell no. Play Dwarf Fortress.
Losing is fun.
— Official motto
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 dozens 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, and an extremely fanatical fan base.The main game is Fortress mode, which plays like a dizzyingly complex 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: thus, losing is fun. If you intend to play this game, keep that in mind.◊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. Or you can get the Lazy Newb Pack, which includes the above + tutorials + assisting software and loads of useful stuff here.See the community page for tropes and links relevant to the Dwarf Fortress community.
The game in general provides examples of:
Abnormal Ammo: You can encrust your ammunition with bone details, wood or gems.
The Alcoholic: "...S/he needs drink to get through the day." Everyone.
All Myths Are True: There's always supporting-to-conclusive evidence to be found for any event of the Age of Myth: razed hovels, plundered hoards, injured victims, surviving eyewitnesses, and the beasts themselves. Averted by a few mythical beasts, magical creatures, and gods that are flagged to appear in procedurally-generated art but will not appear in any world.
All Natural Gem Polish: Averted, mined gems must be polished and cut to improve their value.
All Trolls Are Different: The creatures simply named "troll" are big, hairy brutes that goblins use to tear fortifications apart (and shear like sheep), but the Night Creatures best match the old troll mythology. They're even procedurally generated so no two are alike, with a penchant for taking human mates and transforming them into beasts like themselves, and a taste for human (or elven or dwarven) flesh.
The All-Seeing A.I.: Goblin sieges use a pathfinding AI that automatically knows the fastest way into your fortress. The players, of course, abuse its quirks mercilessly (particularly regarding avoidance of locked doors).
The famous "Goblin Meat Grinder". Lock down your fortress but leave a single way in. This way is littered with infallible reciprocating pointy sticks. As soon as a creature approaches the end of the corridor, doors lock and other open. Now the only way in is on the other end of the corridor. Which is provided with the same mechanism. This keeps the o-so-clever AI terminally walking the walk of pointy pain.
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.
Averted, from the point of view of the dwarves. It isn't unheard of for dwarves to be bedridden for life (often leading to the player euthanising them), or to have even worse injuries (say, to be missing all their limbs and still be working).
Angst? What Angst?: Since happiness/sadness is quantified in-universe, as a simple sliding scale, it's possible for a large number of minor pleasures to completely cancel out tragedies that would normally be expected to cause a Heroic BSOD. 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."
Animal Wrongs Group: Elves, but for trees (they still eat and tame animals.) They will be horribly offended when presented with anything made from wood or charcoal. They can't tell steel made with charcoal from steel made with mined coal, so they'll take either; but any glass but green glass needs wood ash to turn into pearlash, and beds and bins must be made of wood, so elves are notoriously unpopular. This is taken to new extremes when a single wooden decoration will turn an otherwise saleable (and "buy out the whole caravan" valuable) steel craft into grounds for packing up and leaving (and probably laying siege later), and you can't readily tell that this is the case unless you examine every single trade good you offer in minute detail.
Particularly infuriating is the fact that they themselves sell wooden items! Not only that, but they'll even get offended when you sell them the stuff you bought from them.
According to Threetoe's Stories, this is because elves use magic to make trees and plants grow into items.
A Load of Bull: Minotaurs attacks your Fortress and can be found in Labyrinths in Adventure Mode. They are less than a tenth the size of any other semi-megabeast, but more than make up for it by naturally being experts with all melee weapons, including socks or the limbs of the last dwarf.
April Fools' Day: Version 0.31.01, two years in the making, was released at about 1 AM, PST on April Fools Day. The Bay12 site still broke within minutes.
Desperate flailing ensued to keep it mostly operational. Oh, the stories I could tell.. - Baughn
When the rendering engine was rewritten, a UNIX-only command line display was added. It's not used much, except for screencasting; using a terminal to watch someone play DF takes a lot less bandwidth than streaming video, and is easier to host.
Badass: In one reported fight between a dwarf mayor and a berserk sword-master, the sword-master had just finished chopping off all the mayor's limbs when the mayor bit the sword-master's head off.
Any Military dwarf that earns the right of a *Insert-Weapon-Here* Master or lord. They can dispatch goblins like no ones business.
Badass Adorable: Because of a hilarious incident exploiting throwing mechanics in Adventure Mode, fluffy wamblers are now memetically notorious for being the only natural enemy of bronze colossi. In addition, various forts and/or adventurers that breach Hell often find baby animals and/or wild birds entering the fray with the inhabitants.
Bare Fisted Monk: The Wrestling skill. Rather than Eastern Martial Arts, everyone engages in pankration. It helps that they can bodily fling Goblins.
Now that the throw command actually throws your opponent, much fun can be had. Your dwarf adventurer can now fling his goblin opponent off the mountain. Your Bronze Colossus adventurer, on the other hand, can throw his goblin opponent so far and hard that he hits a tree on the other side of the map and explodes into limbs, meat, and skin.
In previous versions, champion wrestlers could be terrifying, capable of punching a charging knight's warhorse out from underneath him, hard enough to punt the animal back 40 feet and have it explode into gristle on impact. The 6ft tall, heavily armored, highly trained knight will then rapidly find all his limbs snapped by a short, blood-and-vomit-encrusted psychopath, leaving him crippled and helpless whilst being slowly stomped to death through the protection his armour still offers against normal attack.
Since DF 2010, unarmed dwarves can no longer damage armored foes as easily nor gain superdwarvenly strength.
Beneath the Earth: Since DF 2010, practically all areas now have several layers of extensive underground caverns complete with giant mushrooms and creatures such as giant cave spiders.
Berserk Button: Every single Dwarf has one. You just need to push the right buttons. Thankfully, players are rather good at that.
Blessed Are the Cheesemakers: For most players horribly horribly subverted, if a dwarf happens to end up as cheesemaker, he will propably be used as test subject for traps or enlisted into the military right away... or worse.
Blood Knight: Dwarves gain positive thoughts from engaging in slaughter. And that's before insanity drives them berserk.
Blue and Orange Morality: The ethic system makes it possible to create a race with some weird morals. The vanilla game already has elves, who find it unthinkable to kill plants, but are perfectly okay with eating the corpses of their enemies in battle.
Body Horror: Often a result of randomly generated Forgotten Beast syndrome. Includes the "Kitten Rot", which as the name implies causes the skin of the infected to completely rot off, leaving behind a horrible mass of living miasma. In its most basic form.
Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Personal descriptions of dwarfs string together happy and sad events with no distinction for either. To wit:
Bunny-Ears Lawyer: This would be the Dungeon Master in a nutshell. This Dwarf loves cloaks so damn much that he will collect and wear thick stacks of them to the exclusion of any other item of clothing except socks — because every dwarf loves their socks. However, this dwarf will also tame and train the most powerful, exotic and badass beasts you can catch; giant eagles, elephants, dragons, and monkeys.
Cast of Snowflakes: Each dwarf has his/her own personality traits that influence how they respond to certain events and how they go about their day. DF2010 adds even more details, now including what each creature looks like.
Cats Are Superior: Cats choose whether they have an owner, not vice versa. Cats are also the only creatures that can kill vermin for you and are vital to protecting your food stocks.
Clock Punk: Dwarven technology tends toward this. You can build Turing-complete computers out of Dwarven clockwork.
Child Soldiers: In Dwarf Fortress, most children mature by the age of 12. This can lead to entire squads of teenage bearded psychos with battle axes and alcoholism.
Experiments in "Dwarven Day Care", aka locking a small child in a room full of crowded animals so that the violence of fighting for their life every day would harden them to tragedy and cause them to develop combat skills. It was pronounced a partial success when one experiment resulted in a child taking a permanent change to mental attributes— aka, permanent mental scarring.
Comedic Sociopathy: One of the things that draws a lot of people towards the game.
Colon Cancer: The full title is Slaves to Armok: God of Blood: Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress: Histories of X and Y.*
In which X and Y are synonyms of "greed" and "hard work", selected randomly each time the title screen is loaded.
Contractual Boss Immunity: Large creatures cannot be killed by smashing them with a drawbridge because they keep them from lifting or closing. Forgotten beasts, titans, and demons are all immune to traps, and along with megabeasts and night creatures can only be killed by each other in worldgen.
However, if you manage to stun an enemy (by, for instance, putting giant cave spider webs on cage traps), it cancels the effects of the trapavoid tag. A few minutes of this shows why Contractual Boss Immunity is a necessary game mechanic.
Megabeasts can still take injuries from encounters with non-megabeasts in worldgen. This leads to the occassional incident in which a megabeast arrives on a fort's map and promptly keels over dead from accumulated wounds.
Convection Schmonvection: The game has a complicated temperature system, yet Dwarves have no problems working right on the edge of a magma pit, in workshops made of ice.
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.
Only applicable to constructed walls. Natural ice will melt from lava. That's right, Dwarven Engineering is so unspeakably Bad Ass they can even make unmeltable ice walls!
Owners of weaker computers also tend to turn the temperature off entirely to save the resources. It is not usually purposefully used for exploits, however it sometimes leads to badass moments.
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, and even takes care of layers of skin and certain veins and nerves.
With even more complex body system modeling and medical options in the latest version, a dwarf (or other creature) can survive having had most or all of their limbs removed, skin burnt off and eyes gouged out with sufficient medical care to clean and stitch them up before they die from blood loss or infection.
Whether such a dwarf will be able to walk and work again is another matter. Nerve damage is impossible to recover from.
Cruel and Unusual Death: If you're a character in this game and you're lucky, you might die from being shot by an elf and slowly bleed to death as your hometown is burnt to a cinder. If you're unlucky, a Giant Desert Scorpion will rip your axe from your hands and hack you to death with it.
Some monsters can exude, spit or bleed poisons that can, as just one example, cause only your hands, feet and eyes to rot away before causing your lungs to bleed until you die of suffocation. And that's if you get a lucky combination that kills you outright versus only rotting all your skin off.
Some rather creative traps qualify, namely one which pumps water into an exposed corridor which freezes instantly, killing the victim and encasing their stuff in ice for your dwarfs to mine out later. A similar situation can happen if the temperature is turned off, by mixing water and heat-less magma, encasing the victim in obsidian.
Darker and Edgier: The 31.17 update made the overworld of Dwarf Fortress much nastier, with bogeymen ready to tear apart anyone foolish enough to sleep outside and Night Creatures infecting humans with The Corruption. Worse, unburied dwarves now might come back as ghosts. They may throw parties for the rest of your dwarves, or attempt to kill everyone in the fort, depending on what their mood was when they died.
Dead Baby Comedy: Hoo boy. Babies are frequently used as "Dwarven Body Armor" by female soldiers, as just one example. Most are accidental, but still.
Rarely, dwarf women with a baby will forget their weapons, at which point they will use the baby as a bludgeon.
Deadly Disc: The dwarves can forge large serrated discs, a type of weapon that can only be used in weapon traps. Up to ten discs at a time can be placed in a single trap, and due to the way weapon damage is calculated, they are one of the single deadliest (and messiest) conventional trap types in the game, prone to causing Off with His Head!, An Arm and a Leg, Overdrawn at the Blood Bank, and Ludicrous Gibs all at once.
Death of a Thousand Cuts: In the current version, being in contact with magma for a short time will cover dwarfs or other fleshy creatures with tiny cuts that causes them to leave a huge trail of blood behind them as they bleed to death. Bronze colossi on the other hand, apparently can't be killed with any number of blows from hammers or weapons of weaker materials than bronze, as the only way to kill them (in combat) is to dismember them.
Department of Redundancy Department: The rather complete fortress-naming system allows for enormous amounts of redundant names among the almost limitless possible names, for example, "Goldenforest the Forest of Gold".
The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Yes, the dev team is basically one guy. (plus his brother as co-designer, but still only one coder). 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.
Devil but No God: The gods of the world are worshiped, and occasionally holy wars are fought in their names, but the gods have no impact on the world beyond that (in the current version.) Demons are found ruling over populations of humans (typically by posing as the aforementioned silent gods) and goblins (who can be controlled by brute force), and their numbers in hell are limitless.
Elemental Crafting: In the new version, materials are indeed important, but in different ways: a silver war-hammer will do more damage than one made from steel thanks to its density, but makes a poor thrusting or slashing weapon as it does not hold a fine point or edge under wear. On the other hand, the shear values (which determine how fine an edge can be) make steel a better choice for cutting edge technology. On that note, adamantine is a very rare metal and is extremely effective in bladed weapons (an admantine sword can slice limbs off a bronze colossus with ease), yet is almost completely useless for blunt weapons, because its density is comparable to styrofoam.
Elves VS Dwarves: Remember to establish good trade relations with elves. -Lead goblets- make great gifts.*
Though they don't poison anybody. Yet.
Or even better, anything made of pitchblende*
A form of uranium ore, also containing radium and lead
.
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.)
This is invoked more by the players than the game itself. While Dwarves and Humans have the most in common, Elves are far more often allies than enemies of Dwarves. At least until their diplomat demands that you stop cutting the wood you need for bed, barrels, and charcoal. Or until you accidentally offer their traders the wooden box your trade goods are in. ...You know what? Screw You, Elves!
Given how elves regard dwarves during diplomatic meetings, it's a wonder the two races don't go to war more often. The 'short jokes' are rather uncalled for.
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. Others make their crossbows out of steel and cross-train their marksdwarves extensively as hammerdwarves to compensate.
Oddly, the current version has certain situations where crossbows are more damaging than warhammers: bludgeon crossbows have a much greater surface area than warhammer, which makes attacks less likely to damage through armor but more likely to damage a vital when they do.
Endless Game: There are no actual winning conditions as of yet. 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.
Epic Fail: The best games end like this. The forums generally consider the only "winning condition" to be to fail so spectacularly as to prompt forum members to declare that you've won the game.
Case in point: Boatmurdered's inexplicable fiery apocalypse and ensuing tantrum spiral.
Feel No Pain: [NO PAIN] is a token often found in more alien creatures. You can sever or shatter every limb a Night Beast has and gouge out their eyes, leaving them with nothing but teeth to bite into your inside, but they'll keep going. Turns out that's enough.
Foreign Queasine: Dwarves will butcher any edible non-sentient, and they will eat any part of the body that can be made edible. Elves will eat anything, including defeated foes. Adventurer Dwarves will butcher and eat sentients if they get hungry enough.
Fork Fencing: Slicing forks are surprisingly good weapons due to having an incredibly tiny contact area.
Funny Animal: Dwarf Fortress knows a good number of sapient anthropomorphic animals, from "Tiger-Man" over "Snake-Man" to "Cave-Swallow-Man". Modders can make any animal bipedal, give it hands, and mark it with the [Can_Learn] tag (among others).
Game Mod: By editing the raw .txt files, many aspects of the game can be added to or changed. The mods created by the community range from minor bugfixes to Fallout, Zombie ApocalypseandMy Little Pony Friendship Is Magic total conversions and everything in between. The game is highly mod-receptive, and Toady has stated that he wants a high level of end-user modification ability, which will have its own high-level programming language that's trivial to pick up and start using.
Everything's Worse with Bears: For instance, you can make bears (already trainable) rideable. In other words, war bears..
One of the many Something Awful DF Lets Plays, namely Syrupleaf, features new demonic enemies added to the game this way.
The number of parameters controllable by the raw .txt files can lead to some bizarre mods, like one where a certain type of rock has its burning temperature set to below freezing, making it dangerous for a miner to uncover that type of rock (this was actually used in a certain Let's Play).
You can even modify a current game by saving it, editing the .txt raw files, and restoring the saved game (though the extent of possible modifications is limited compared to a regular mod). For example, if a giant eagle is harassing your fortress, you can edit the creature definition for giant eagles to increase its body temperature to the point where it bursts into flames, remove the ability of giant eagles to fly so that it plummets to the ground, and so on.
You can modify chickens so that, instead of laying eggs, they lay live bees. Dwarf Fortress: crimes against nature simulator.
Global Currency: Played straight in Fortress Mode, as all traders use the same currency, though you could argue that as justified due to them coming to you. Averted in Adventure Mode, as each civilization has their own currency and you can only exchange them outside of their civilization of origin by selling the coins themselves (which are literally worth only the material they're made of), but played straight in that all currency has the same worth when it comes to buying good.
Gorn: Yes, in ascii text: the combat system describes the slashing of throats and gouging out of eyes with worrying relish.
The new version has tissue layers and individual ribs and teeth. Just... wow.
And, as mentioned under many other entries, well-equipped hammer-users can turn just about any enemy into an exploding mess of body parts, which will splash around the area of impact, turning it red and leaving chunks that can be "examined" to get details of what's on that tile, such as "partial Goblin Wrestler torso" or "Urist McUnlucky's left arm.". A weapon trap with ten serrated disks tends to do this too, especially if they are high-quality and/or made out of steel (or adamantine...), and can splatter blood for several tiles.
There was a report on the forum of a dwarf who suffered an abdominal wound in combat that caused his guts to pop out. The dwarf was taken to the hospital and actually recovered, but his guts weren't put back inside in the process of sewing him up. Now the ascii representation of the dwarf actually has a pair of red "~" characters trailing him wherever he goes to depict the intestines he's dragging around behind him. Toady One thinks of everything.
Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Quantized movement often makes it seem this way, units that move or dodge off a ledge hanging in the air for a tick before plummeting.
Hard Head: Averted in that even with maximum toughness most direct hits to unarmored heads are instantly fatal. Played straight in that there are no concussions, just brain damage: head injuries that aren't instantly fatal have no effect except from the pain and bleeding. It's possible to shatter someone's skull without damaging their brain and thus doing no irreversible damage.
Hollywood Healing: Averted in that individual tissues have their own rates of healing (nervous tissue doesn't at all), and tissue can become permanently scarred. Played straight in adventure mode where quick-travelling, sleep, or waiting for any amount of time instantly heals essentially anything that can heal. Also played straight by a bug in the current version where eyes can be heavily damaged but not completely destroyed, and grow back very quickly (truer than you'd think) to full functionality (as unlikely as it sounds).
If You Die I Call Your Stuff: Dwarves have a disturbing tendency to run out in the middle of a siege to loot socks off a dead body if they have the chance. (You can auto-forbid items on death to curb this behavior, but where's the fun in that? Note that this is now the default since DF 2010.)
I'm Melting: This is generally the way fire hurts a unit: tissue of living non-plants don't really burn when caught on fire, it just melts and keeps the fire going. Also, a bug in the 2010 version in semi-rare cases caused dwarfs and other creatures to melt when caught in the rain.
Implacable Man: The Bronze Colossus, unlike other megabeasts, will suffer no status effects from pain or nausea, cannot be stunned, and will continue fighting even after its limbs have been bashed off. Kill It With Fire can make him even more "fun"; he will incorporate the molten metal into his attacks long before the fire eventually destroys him.
This also applies to any creature that is coded with the tokens NOFEAR, NOPAIN, and, occasionally, LIKESFIGHTING. This means that (duh) they don't feel fear, or pain, and will actively search for something to kill, regardless of whether it needs to eat or not, and once it finds something, won't stop until it's opponent dies or has run far enough that the pursuing creature finds something else to stalk and kill. The most feared of these creatures (asides from the Bronze Colossus) is the Giant Cave Spider.
Improbable Aiming Skills: It's possible for projectile weapons to remove teeth and nothing else. This◊ is one interpretation.
Improbable Power Discrepancy: To quote the game's creator: "I think I made the fish too hardcore." Carp are still hardcore, but they have been replaced at times with elephants, and, more recently, unicorns. There have been entire wars fought against unicorns.
This also applies to several of the weapons: in the current version, due to the combat system accurately representing contact area of attacks but not the amount of force one would be capable of putting behind them, dagger stabs and whip lashes are absurdly good at penetrating armor.
Badgers are the new carp. The regular badger is a snarling, furry ball of anger who will enrage and attack your dwarves for no reason other than they exist. Giant Badgers are ten-foot-tall, snarling, furry balls of anger who will enrage and make Ludicrous Gibs of your dwarves for no reason other than they exist. On the other hand, an army of trained Giant War Badgers is enough to cut through just about any siege like a hot (snarling, furry and angry) knife through butter.
Occasionally a titan or forgotten beast, which are normally very powerful, will have a body made of a material with almost no ability to maintain shape (such as a liquid, or fire) causing their body to fall to pieces from the slightest touch. The only reason they make it to you in the first place is because of Contractual Boss Immunity to being killed by non-megabeasts in world-gen.
An amusing subset of these are Forgotten Beasts and Titans that encounter and fight non-megabeasts in world-gen, only to show up at your fort and then retroactively implement the injuries it supposedly sustained in those fights, causing it to drop dead at the edge of your map.
Or an FB will show up in unexplored sections of your caves— since your dwarves aren't aware of them, there's no arrival message, but resident creature-men can fight and kill them there, and even earn names and titles for doing so. You may often notice this when, on the units screen, there is a forgotten Beast listed as dead.
Insurmountable Dwarf-Height Fence: A constructed wall is the only truly reliable barrier against building destroyers, goblin thieves and anything that can't fly: sealing your fort in completely with walls is possibly the only way to ensure invasions won't destroy the fort before you have a functioning military. Armok save us all the day gobbos learn how to jump and climb*
Or you could just add a roof, but where would the Fun be in that?
Kill It With Fire: Fire monsters are the most dangerous sort. A burst of dragonbreath can cause incredible amounts of trouble. On the flip side, nearly all enemy creatures are vulnerable to fire, including dragons.
Dwarves who are ‼on fire‼ will not decide that they should avoid flammable or explosive things, and so will tend to decide that they either a) need to sleep on a wooden bed to recover the damage they've taken from the fire, or b) decide they really need a freaking drink. Alcohol is typically stored in wooden barrels, and explodes.
Ironically, Forgotten Beasts made of fire, ice, and many other "elements" are laughably easy since they come to pieces on the slightest contact.
This being Dwarf Fortress, players have created systems to trap goblins in a flooded room, then retract the roof to expose and freeze the water. Advanced versions prevent freezing by keeping magma behind a wall until the whole room is flooded and then removing magma, thus being resettable as long as pumps are powered.
Killer Rabbit: Carp were infamous for this. With the introduction of aimed attacks, large fish have gone back to being deadly, sturgeon to an even greater degree than carp, as they can easily bite off limbs.
Then there's the Undead Carp, its like a normal Carp, but actually listed as "Evil", very hard to kill and it swims on land...
Lava Is Boiling Kool Aid: Partially averted: magma spreads out just as quickly as water (and behaves exactly the same when pumped), but is unaffected by pressure and thus is difficult to get to flow up. However, if you turn off temperature in the init file, your dwarves can swim in it.
Lava affects creatures ever so slightly less in DF2010, which for example can give your dwarf miner enough time to run away when breaching a magma pipe. Not much more than that, though.
In previous versions, bauxite and raw adamantine were the only magma-safe rocks, while all other stone items would melt when exposed to lava; some user modifications added realistic melting and boiling points to each type of stone, allowing them to be magma-safe, and the latest version actually made all of these official.
Legendary Carp: A thing of the past in the new version, but the legends still remain.
Lethal Joke Item: Occasionally, dwarves will equip items that are... not usually defined as weapons. A particularly well-known bloodline game, Headshoots, featured a dwarf that spent most of the game wielding a satchel. This was used to regularly uppercut one goblin and killing three more before the first hit the ground.
Inverted with adamantine warhammers and maces, which sound deadly but are basically indestructible wiffle-bats now.
Loads and Loads of Loading: Code optimization and multi-threading support are among the many, many things that Toady One is still working on. Be prepared to wait for a while if you're generating a huge world.
Lord British Postulate: If Toady stats it, DF players will find a way to defeat it. Then they'll usually move on to weaponizing it.
Low Fantasy: There may be dragons and elves, but there's hardly a drop of magic to be found. It's just you and your dwarves, struggling to survive in an untamed world by means of industry, alcohol, and cold, hard, steel*
On the other hand, modding is easy enough that adding features like magic could be done if desired (at least as far as innate attacks go), which could be used to make the game much easier (or harder)...
.
Magic is supposedly on the to-do list, though pretty far down. However, the version to follow DF2010 will add spontaneously generated undead in evil areas, random monstrous curses that can spread (e.g. vampires & werewolves), and enemy necromancers who raise legions of the undead.
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, individual fingers and toes and skin-, fat-, muscle and bone-layers. 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.
It doesn't stop at melee combat. When something is burned ludicrously, you get to pick through the burning corpse. You see such awesome things as "xx!!cat brain!!xx" (The !!s mean it's on fire, the xx meaning there's not much left of it.)
Similarly, "Cacame Apebalded the Immortal Onslaught" ("Cacame Awemedinade Monípalóthi" in Elven), the Elf King of Dwarves.
Made of Iron: Internal bleeding isn't implemented in the current release, making it possible (in theory) to pound on an enemy with a blunt weapon for days or months at a time, crushing every bone and organ in their body without killing them. In practice, a crushing blow to the skull, which will ram it through the brain and kill the target, is common.
Magic is Evil: Development on the DF magical system has begun, and the first type of mage that will be introduced are necromancers.
Mars Needs Women: The reason Night Creatures kidnap mortals of the opposite gender.
Martial Arts and Crafts: Picks, despite being mediocre weapons, can be pretty dangerous in the right hands. The skill to attack with a pick is Mining, and busy miners train up that skill far faster than military dwarves with mere sparring. Guess what happens when some critter jumps on a Legendary miner?
Nigh Invulnerability: Enemies without brains or other internal organs are almost literally unkillable with blunt weapons alone. This includes zombies and undead and megabeasts like the Bronze Colossus.
Nobody Poops: Played straight, which is noteworthy considering that pretty much everything else is in this game. Toady has stated that even though he's fine with fertilizer and sewers, adventurers and fortress dwarves having to go to the bathroom (on top of so much existing self-maintenance) would be a needless distraction that breaks immersion.
North Is Cold South Is Hot: Sometimes averted, sometimes not. When the world-generator is set to create an island continent, the position of the "hot" hemisphere and the "cold" hemisphere is randomly chosen, so it can either be played straight or inverted. Larger worlds avert it completely, with an equator and two poles.
The Not Secret: The 'Hidden' Fun Stuff, which just about everyone finds out about from reading Lets Plays well before encountering it themselves.
Obvious Beta: See Good Bad Bugs. Still pretty damn good for a game that's technically still in alpha.
Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo: Dwarf Fortress is technically a sequel to the defunct Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, making it Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress: Histories of X and Y.
One-Man Army: With enough training and good enough weapons and armor, a lone dwarf can reduce entire hordes of Goblins to literal pulp.
One Steve Limit: Averted hard, unless you use the nicknaming feature to distinguish your dwarves. There's a reason 'Urist' became a reference for the generic Everydwarf. In your fortress, it could be Malfol or Domas...you think Bomrek is a distinctive name? Well, you get four of them in your next migration wave.
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 specialize in dressmaking? Nothing much to stop you.
Our Elves Are Better: The new cannibalistic war hungry elves are just another one of the Fun little additions to this game.
Our Goblins Are Different: Supposedly the antithesis race to dwarves, and the player is supposed to consider them "evil", although the truth is that they are the least xenophobic and least hypocritical race in the game. They are still murderous demon worshippers, and that equality comes from treating the babies they snatch as their own.
Our Mermaids Are Different: They're sentient and generally relatively nice if left alone. In previous versions, their bones were valuable enough that several players made a major industry regarding trapping, breeding and killing them for their bones. The developer was squicked enough that he devalued the bones in a patch once this was discovered.
Our Monsters Are Weird: Forgotten Beasts, Titans, and demons are randomly generated, and the results are very, very strange.
Our Vampires Are Different: Still in development, but the plan is for each world generated to have its own version of vampires. Some will be able to pass for living, some won't, some will lose powers in the sun, others will be destroyed by it, and so forth.
Our Zombies Are Different: The new combat system uses organ damage/bleeding as a significant factor in determining death. Zombie and skeletal creatures are rather lacking in organs and blood, so they wound up nigh impossible to kill. Well-trained dwarf militia could fight even minor skeletal creatures for several months before the game would decide they had been bludgeoned enough to be considered "dead." Subsequent releases patched in better damage calculation for undead creatures, but it's still extremely difficult to kill a skeletal undead with blunt weapons only.
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, though you can tweak it to make one on purpose. This trope does however apply to veins and clusters of metal ore for Rule of Fun and balance reasons.
Perpetual Alpha: Technically not perpetual. Word Of God says that Version 1.0 will be when Toady makes 100 core elements.
According to a New York Times article, this could be 20 years from now. DF fans don't see this as a problem.
Perpetual Motion Machine: The mechanical energy needed to pump water up one story is only one tenth the amount generated when the water comes back down and powers a water wheel (although the wheel itself draws another 1/10, and the machinery connecting the wheel to the pump will probably take somewhat more). Power the pump with the water wheel, prime it once with manual labor, and it will endlessly generate power.
Physical Hell: (Super Spoiler Alert!) Yes, you can dig to hell now. Just don't expect to win the resulting battle, as there are literally billions of demons and some don't even have organs to destroy, making them Nigh Invulnerable. Additionally, they are all flying, magma-proof, drowning-proof building destroyers, so once freed, odds are you won't be able to contain them again. It's possible, though: several players have succeeded in colonising Hell. Including putting civilian quarters down there just for the sake of "tonight we dine in Hell" jokes.
Purely Aesthetic Gender: Well, no stat (or even anatomical) 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.
In fact, having a female/male/genderless-only race only affects how many of them there are (with, you know, the inability to make more children a factor).
Animals can become pregnant even if the males and females are kept physically separated. Dwarves presumably use the same mechanics for determining pregnancy. This has led to the widely-accepted theory that creatures in the game reproduce via spores.
Raised by Orcs: Goblins actively kidnap children and raise them.
This works both ways. It's rare but not unheard of to get a goblin envoy from the nearby Dwarven civilization. If they are second generation "Dwarves," they will even get a Dwarven name.
Under rare circumstances, during world generation, a demon may conquer a nearby civilization which will nonetheless remain friendly with you. Very, very occasionally you may have a fort that gets visits from a demonic diplomat from a nearby human or elf civilization. Or even a Forgotten Beast.
Raising The Steaks: Evil-aligned, "haunted" areas are full of zombie and skeleton animals, which are ridiculously hard to kill. Skeletal enemies lack vulnerable internal organs, so piercing weapons — normally the fast track to a One-Hit Kill — are a lot less effective, and undead enemies cannot bleed out or be overcome by pain or exhaustion. A hit-point system was implemented until exactly what was keeping them moving becomes more developed and thus easier to deal with.
Rasputinian Death: The ultra-buggy first release of the 2010 version of Dwarf Fortress features plenty of these. Creatures will tend to live through an enormous deal of torture before dying, including major organ damage; it is suspected this may change with future releases. Most interesting is the fact that, at present, unliving opponents such as bronze colossi are very nearly invulnerable; the only way to kill them is to completely disassemble their bodies (very difficult because their bronze tissue absorbs a great deal of damage, unless you make their own weight work against them by dropping them from a great height) or to dump magma on them until they've been reduced to a puddle.
Reality Ensues: When the game's physics isn't hilariously buggy, it can produce some of this. For instance, adamantine items are ridiculously valuable, don't bend or break under any amount of stress once formed into items, can be sharpened to an incredible edge... with density akin to balsa or styrofoam. This means that while adamantine armor is Nigh Invulnerable and edged weapons are capable of producing a One-Man Army in skilled hands, adamantine maces, warhammers and projectiles are a joke.
For that matter, while the armor itself is nigh-impossible to penetrate, non-rigid adamantine objects still provide little protection from blunt force, meaning you can be hurt by a bronze mace even when wearing adamantine chain-mail.
You also cannot go around kicking ass with your bare handsand no armor, as even the most skilled wrestlers are still highly vulnerable to any armed opponent.
Real Time with Pause: In fact you need to pause to give any order. The game would've been completely hopeless without it. Then again, it is completely hopeless anyway, at least for your poor Dwarves.
Red Baron: Sentient beings that starts racking up kills have bestowed upon them a badass title such as "The Awe-Inspiring Warrior Ram". Otherwise-unnamed monsters who do the same will eventually pick up a nickname as well.
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. At worst, kobolds send thieves who can settle on scavenging equipment left from dead enemies — contrast goblins who start sieges and steal children. Kobolds living in the same caves can be friendly.
An in-canon example would be the fluffy wamblers — chibified humanoids (like an elemental, but composed of fluff and pudge and kitten-sized) with eyes and nose. Food-gnawing vermin that appears only in good aligned biomes and apparently so adorable dwarfs won't butcher them. And we're talking about a race who will gleefully butcher a newborn puppy should the need, want, or thought arise.
Screw You, Elves!: A pretty standard response to the Elves arriving is something along these lines - unless, for some reason, your fortress is in need of cloth. One particular thread was dedicated to constructing a giant artificial tree out of blocks of charcoal and decorating it with Elves in cages. Most everone else's method of getting rid of them is like everything else in the game; magma.
Shown Their Work: Regarding geology; the game has dozens of types of rocks, sorted by the geological formations they're most likely to appear in. This is not to mention the accurate distribution of flora and fauna in those geological formations.
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." Elves do not like it when plants are mistreated. And you Can't Argue with Elves.
Single Specimen Species: Forgotten Beasts. Possibly Titans as well, depending on how you classify them.
Space Compression: A dragon takes up one square; so do dwarves and cats. The only thing that doesn't (not counting buildings) is traders' wagons.
This can and will lead to rather hilarious geometric paradoxes — a tile is large enough to contain a dragon, but not large enough to contain two kittens without one of them crouching. A tile can theoretically contain 1,000 dragons as long as 999 of them aren't standing up.
Also, thousands and thousands of rocks can be piled onto a single tile.
Pretty much anything can be stored on a single tile and remain useable with just a little micromanagement. Fan Nickname "Quantum Storage."
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.
Subsystem Damage: For practically every living creature, the game keeps track of the health of individual body parts, down to fingers, toes, internal organs, skin and tissue layers, teeth, and individual bones. Nausea, pain, exertion, and blood loss are also tracked. A framework for poisons, venoms, and diseases also got installed.
An Arm and a Leg: Slashing weapons (particularly weapon traps full of serrated discs) will sever arms and legs and send them flying. This is amusing but creates a huge mess to clean up. Dwarves with missing limbs lose the ability to carry some items, to walk without crutches, or even to do any work. You may find yourself killing off your veterans just to make the "cannot pick up equipment" messages go away.
Chunky Salsa Rule: Destroying a creature's (last) brain is instantly fatal. So is chopping off all of its heads or its upper/lower body. Creatures that lose their lungs to damage suffocate. Etc.
Also, cave-ins, being encased in cooling magma, and being frozen in ice completely ignore Subsystem Damage and are always instant-death.
"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."
Also, wrestling. "Gouge left eye with right hand"
The *wooden bolt* hits the goblin swordsman in the left eye, breaking it. An artery is severed!
Syndromes can affect only certain body parts. It can and has happened that a randomly generated syndrome from a Forgotten Beast does nothing but cause your dwarves' eyes to rot out. (They don't seem to mind all that much as long as they get medical help. Being constantly drunk probably helps them cope.)
Individual extremities can be targeted, including fingers, toes, ears, noses, and teeth, and aimed attacks in Adventure Mode will allow you to break or cut them off one piece at a time.
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.
A popular form of play amongst the player community. Individuals take turns running a dwarf fort for a set amount of time and passing on the save to the next players. See Boatmurdered, Headshoots, and Syrupleaf entries mentioned above.
Suicidal Overconfidence: The puny Troglodytes or any other aggressive but 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.
Throw It In: When Toady One was testing out the code for adventurer mode necromancers, he discovered he could raise a butchered animal's skin as a separate entity. He kept it because "it makes about as much sense as a walking skeleton."
Turns Red: Dwarves can "enter martial trances" when severely outnumbered, while many species (including dwarves) can become "enraged" in a pitched battle. How likely any given character is to do either is heavily affected by their randomly-generated mental traits.
Unbreakable Weapons: For now anyway, though the obsidian weapons are supposedly going to be particularly susceptible to this.
Unicorn: Part of the fauna in good lands, and occasionally ridden by elves. Their horns pack a mean punch if you get in a fight, but goods and food made from their remains can fetch a very nice price.
Universal Poison: Previous to DF2010 basically how poisons worked. With DF2010 oh so very, very hugely averted. Syndromes can have one or more of over a dozen different effects, each of which may affect one or more body parts or subsystems and have values determining chance of resistance and recovery time, if any. Beasties can bite, leak, breathe, spit, ooze and bleed toxins that can be inhaled, injected or received on contact. Depending on the particular combination, they can range from a temporary minor dizziness to causing your arms and legs to rot off, your skin to blister, excruciating pain over your entire body followed by full neural paralysis resulting in death by suffocation.
Even further averted with medical procedures that can potentially do surgery on infected body parts before the syndrome can spread or cause further side-effects like infection.
Worse in that poisons can now spread like diseases through contact with infected blood.
Unobtainium: Adamantine is even important enough to set off a major event in game.
In the 2010 version, there's a second kind of Unobtainium known as "Slade", which is unimaginably heavy and impossible to even scratch. Even with Adamantine picks, you cannot mine it out. Someone did find a way to obtain single stones of it (by digging a ramp up underneath a slade floor), but it is nigh unusable in dwarf mode. If you hit up the arena though, you can spawn creatures wearing slade armor wielding slade hammers. They're as effective as you think they would be.
Unfortunately, you can't actually make anything with it in Fortress Mode. (See Upper Class Twit below for why this can be bad.) Similarly, some dwarves will like impossible animal materials, like oriole tooth.
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 random items regardless of which materials are available. In earlier versions, they could even request items made of slade, a material which cannot be mined and which they should not even know exists.
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.
It also seems that your dwarves have no nudity taboo, and also only change their clothes when they wear out so completely that they disintegrate, so clothing also counts.
The non-meat, non-metal portion of goblinite becomes this. Until industries pick up, a Goblin Christmas is a windfall, but after the inferior loot piles up, it becomes such a chore foisting it on the caravans that players come up with more inventive disposal methods.
Video Game Cruelty Potential: There are endless examples but for now we'll just leave you with this thread, a debate about how best to traumatize dwarves into becoming resistant to tantrum spirals. The agreed upon solution? Drop puppies on them. From the ceiling. While they're eating. Until they just. Don't. Care anymore.
Viral Transformation: Night creatures are able to create mates for themselves by transforming villagers.
In the upcoming 0.32.00 version there will be curses which can be transferred via bites/wounds.
The Virus: Venom from Forgotten Beasts is sometimes transmissible, potentially leaving your entire fortress poisoned.
Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Dwarves can get Cave Adaptation if they spend too long underground, which causes them to vomit when they are aboveground. Creatures who have taken significant damage will vomit from pain. Send a well-trained squad of Cave Adapted dwarves up top to brutalize a goblin attack and you wind up with both sides spending as much time vomiting as fighting and a technicolor battlefield.
Artistic License - Physics: Also known as "Dwarven Physics." It's not only possible, but easy, to build a perpetual motion machine, and melting a metal item only allows you to recover one third of its original mass (though this could be explained by poor recycling techniques resulting in much of the material being lost with the slag). The same unit block of stone can be used to make a one-tile wall, three mugs, or as little as one toy boat, with no waste material in either case. Some of these will probably be fixed eventually.
The perpetual motion machine issue actually arises from trying to apply the laws of physics too accurately, while simultaneously trying to bend them in the name of the Rule of Fun. The flow rate of screw pumps is two orders of magnitude greater than it should be for the power applied due to using a one dimensional quantity (liquid depth) as if it were a three dimensional one (liquid volume). Correcting this "bug," however, would result in the pumps either moving liquids so slowly they would evaporate before reaching a depth greater than 1, or require 100 fully powered water wheels per pump (assuming tiles are 10 x 10 liquid levels in size, as their power generation seems to indicate for a given liquid flow rate). Choosing not to try to think too hard about it seems to be the best compromise for the sake of gameplay, at least until flow rate calculations can be rebalanced.
You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Dwarves and humans have standard hair color, but elves will occasionally have white or green hair, and goblin hair colors are mainly shades of purple, with pink and red on the extreme end of their relative spectrum.
List of tropes specific to Fortress Mode:
And I Must Scream: Creatures in cages can never die of anything but old age or escape on their own, and the cage will last forever. You could theoretically lock an elf (or other immortal creature) in a cage, put the cage in the center of a mountain, collapse the path you dug to get him there, then forget the elf forever. He'd be there forever.
It's also possible for horribly injured dwarves to be bedridden the rest of their lives, with their motor and sensory nervous systems destroyed. Euthanasia is recommended, not just to end their suffering, but also because they'll be a tax on your water and food reserves.
"Zelersostet, 'The Prime Weevils': Engraved on the wall is an exceptionally designed image of a dwarf and a frog demon by 'Emperor Sankis' Gatinbomrek. The frog demon is striking down the dwarf."
Particularly painful example from the old version: 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.
You can assign specific uniforms to your dwarf soldiers, and if there is not exactly what you have assigned, they will grab the next best thing. Now let's say you're holed up because of a full-on siege but one of your soldiers dies for the above reason. He has better equipment than one of your other military dwarves, who will now try to head to his corpse because there's a really nice pair of boots out there. Then he dies and another dwarf thinks, "You know, his crossbow was better than mine..."
Urist McOblivious gets thirsty; Urist McOblivious goes to nearby pond; Urist McOblivious fails to notice that the pond is surrounded by bits of his fellow dwarves that have been torn apart by deadly carp; Urist McOblivious takes a drink; various pieces of Urist McOblivious join the various bits of his fellow dwarves. Urist McDumbasabrick gets thirsty....
There is a workaround on the wiki specifically to prevent your dwarves from sealing themselves in the room when they install a floodgate onto the only entrance. This is apparently a common enough act to have received its own shout out in the latest World of Warcraft expansion.
"The cyclops then proceeded to chase the kitten around for 10 IRL minutes before squishing it. However, after it squished the kitten it ran into a murky pool and drowned itself."
Will eagerly pass through rooms with the whole floor burning (lignite/graphite grates, little magma washing) — "the mere fact that a location is on fire will not stop them from walking through it. On the plus side, goblins are just as stupid."
There are numerous stories on the forums of Legendary warriors battling far weaker opponents only to dodge a weak attack right off a bridge, stairs, cliff, into a lake, down a well....
Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Once either population or accumulated wealth is big enough, they will come. They can be killed with a lot of training and some luck... but don't think simple doors can stop them. Although cage traps can stop most of them dead.
Ax Crazy Urist McGloomy tantrums, destroying Urist McMason's masterwork table. Urist McGloomy calms down. Urist McMason tantrums, haphazardly batting Urist McDolt down the communal well. Urist McDolt flails about and drowns two feet awayfrom a stairway up out of the well. Urist McDolt's brother, Urist McWoodchopper changes his name to Urist McDwarfchopper. Hilarity Ensues.
See also Disaster Dominoes. To the community, it's known as a "tantrum spiral" and has been known to kill many a fort.
At times it seems that the entire population is balanced on the axe-edge of utter insanity.
If they are extremely unhappy, a dwarf may occasionally be inexplicably overcome by a "fell mood". From the wiki:
A dwarf that goes into a fell mood will always take over a butcher's shop or a tanner's shop. If neither are available, any other workshop will be used instead. The dwarf will then murder the nearest dwarf (bonus if it's a noble), drag the corpse into the shop and make some sort of object out of dwarf leather or bone. Once the artifact is completed, the fell dwarf will become a legendary bone carver or leatherworker. Strangely, none of the other dwarves seem to mind the murder.
Awesome, but Impractical: Perhaps the crowning example would be turning your fortress into a turing-complete fluid logic computer. Building it will take in-game years and a ridiculous amount of space, resources, and dwarfpower. Operating it will tax your system to the limit and require approximately an in-game week to complete a single opcode. On the other hand, you've built a computer. In a fantasy game. In a cave, with a bunch of rocks!
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', 'Perfectly Agile', and 'Superdwarvenly Tough'.
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.
Bamboo Technology: Abstractions like levers activating arbitrarily remote machines built out of stone cogs apparently by infinite-distance quantum entanglement, and bugs such as perpetual motion machines made with water wheels and screw pumps allow for some amazing things. See the community page and CMOA page for details on the most impressive achievements, but even run-of-the-mill fortresses make use of magma-based wave motion guns.
Beneath the Earth: Where you'll be spending most of your time. However, If your dwarves stay underground for an extended period of time then come back onto the surface, they will become nauseous, and vomit all over the great outdoors.
Bizarrchitecture: Quite possible if you try hard enough. 'Dwarf physics' is very forgiving in a lot of ways.
Booby Trap: Anything from mostly single-use "trap" tiles, like weapon and cage traps, to player-designed deathtraps, which can spread magma around dozens of tiles. And then dump water on it, freezing survivors in solid rock and drowning the rest.
A somewhat popular pastime is to then order your stoneworkers to sculpt statues from the freshly-formed obsidian rocks containing your enemies (or nobles, as the case may be) and put them on display around the fortress. While such undeath is not implemented (yet) in the game, it's still fun to imagine.
Unless you get fifty statues of elves with broken toes or humans taming eagles.
With the newly implemented ghosts, dead sentient creatures have a chance of doing assorted things to harm or annoy your little dwarfs. The way you fix that is to bury the corpse, or carve out a memorial in a stone. Nothing is more satisfying than encasing Elves in stone, then stopping their ghost from pissing you off by turning the rock their very bodies are in into the local Elven ghost prevention mechanism.
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. The latest version removed these, though you can still "discover a deep pit" within the caverns.
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.
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.
On the Fun side, it creates potential for flooding if the sewer system below it fails, "job cancelled" message spam if it hoses dorfs trying to clean the grates from all this dirt and can significantly drop framerates on slower computers. Pressure plates based automation can reduce these issues (as long as it doesn't fail due to a butterfly, guppy or crocodile, of course), but not quite eliminate them.
Command And Conquer Economy: Though there are ways to reduce the amount of micromanaging required, generally you have to order everything to be built.
Crazy Cat Lady: An unchecked cat population will create this, even after it becomes so large your frame-rate slows to a crawl. Also, Dwarves do not adopt cats. It's the other way around.
As Matt Boyd once found out, if the source of these cats is a pair owned by fortress residents, their refusal to give up their pets can force this down a road not dissimilar to the Shoe Event Horizon that took place on Frogstar B; basically, dwarf society reaches the Kitty Event Horizon and their entire socioeconomic structure starts to revolve around keeping the population in check.
Fortunately, both Crazy Cat Dwarves and their pets can be disposed of with a simple room that involves a long hallway with spikes in the floor, and a lever at the end that operates them.
Decontamination Chamber: Theoretically, dwarves try to clean both themselves and dirty floors. More likely, they will not only walk in goblins' blood and vomit, but contaminate the whole area with germs or poisons quickly melting a dwarf into puddle of pus (doing the same to others on contact), if they can find any. So once the player can afford this, any entrance into habitable area tend to involve something like a waterfall or "Dwarven Bathtub".
Determinator: Dwarves tend to be this, whether they're Made of Plasticine or Made of Iron. Results...vary. To put it mildly. One dwarf has been seen charging through lava to brutalise a kobold, surviving without a scratch. Others will latch on to nightmare beasts from the dark places of the earth, even missing their entire lower bodies, and beat them into submission. Still others will simply stand out in extreme cold and heat until they die.
More impressively, almost, the forum's response was generally 'meh'. With one commenter seriously suggesting that the player build a hell-cannon that fired demons!
Alternately, there were also recommendations of building a tunnel that linked hell directly to the nearest elven settlement. As well as a recommendation of building a cafeteria there so people "dine in hell" literally.
Community forts have finally managed this. The ongoing fortress Deathgate pulled this off.
Difficult, But Awesome: It could be argued that the entire game is this trope, what with the steep learning curve◊ but the awesome things that can happen. This◊ outlines the bare essentials needed for a self-sustaining fort. Note that it does not mention that getting a muddy cave often requires mechanisms and floodgates or an early expedition into the cave layers, which could as well be a source of quick Fun. Here◊ is a similar diagram for getting your military operational.
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. Considering the quote for the page explains how you're most likely to have Fun in Dwarf Fortress, this shouldn't be much surprise.
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.
Players themselves are often more than willing to dish this out. Many Nobles have bedrooms that come complete with traps that will fill the room with magma, just in case they get too demanding.
Dissonant Serenity: Reviewing the dwarves' descriptions after they die can reveal a number of them in varying stages of happiness at death. Some reasons:
Waterfall create mist. Dwarves for some reason love mist. In this case death is by drowning, of course.
Driven to Suicide: Melancholy dwarves, and other creatures, will attempt to throw themselves off a cliff or drown themselves (in lava or magma) - or, failing that, by simply starving themselves to death.
"Horrifying screams come from the darkness below."
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.
They also produce a steady supply of skulls for totems, which can be traded for goods, and bones, which can be used for a variety of things, but the most common and useful is making training ammo for your military.
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... (or trade goods if you don't feel like indulging in Video Game Cruelty Potential.)
You can also go into the config file, change cats' body temperature to be hot, and for bonus hijinx, give them the [SEVERONBREAK] flag so that their body parts fly off when damaged. This results in every cat on the map exploding into flamingchunks of gore, and is known as a thermonuclear catsplosion.
Since their addition to the game, egglayers, especially birds, have become even more spectacular at breeding than cats, since they can produce 10+ young at a time and unhatched clutches don't count toward the species population cap, allowing them to surpass it with ease. This is usually known as a birdsplosion.
Saltwater crocodile. 3 years to mature, but lays up to 70 eggs at once, becomes valuable after a year and such slaughterbasts when tamed make better guards than even war-trained dogs. Same for Cave crocodile, but up to 60 eggs, more valuable materials and a bad habit of tearing down wooden buildings.
Fluffy Tamer: Having a Dungeon Master will let you tame all sorts of strange and horrible creatures, ranging from dragons to crocodiles to Giant Cave Spiders. Or at least, they're supposed to; they're bugged at the moment.
For Massive Damage: With the physics derived combat damage calculations introduced in the 2010 update, weapon traps with purpose-built weapons (giant spiked balls, corkscrews, large serrated discs, etc.) do considerably more damage than equivalent material hand-held weapons used in the same type of weapon, especially when up to ten of them are packed into the same trap. This may also result in Ludicrous Gibs flying everywhere if an unwary foe steps on really full one made with good materials.
Fungus Humongous: The Tower-Caps, mushrooms so large they can be made into beds. The new version adds many more varieties growing in the expansive underground.
The game treats such fungus as a form of wood, and anything that can be built from wood can be built from such fungus. A particular breed of fungus found in the deepest caves has triple the material density of the other breeds. Thanks to the game's material-based combat system, this makes ballista bolts made from such wood three-times more massive than usual, resulting in a huge net damage boost to an already powerful weapon.
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.
Due to a bug in the current version, when a dwarf's clothes get worn into tatters, they will find something suitable to replace the worn out item ... and then store it in their room. About the only way to get your dwarves to stop running around naked after a few years is to assign them to the military and give them uniforms.
Hell, the everything. Without a guide, the only way to figure out which stone is magma-safe is by losing fort after fort by trial-and-error.
Or look at the raw files... assuming you can read them.
Hide Your Children: Averted. There are many many many stories of women giving birth, WHILST IN BATTLE. Babies in fact make good shields for mothers who run into battle.
Not to be confused with hiding your children because a goblin snatcher showed to try and abduct them.
Horse of a Different Color: There's a bunch of exotic mounts... Goblins sometimes drop in riding things like Voracious cave crawler (building-crushing carnivorous centipedes) and Cave crocodile.
100% Heroism Rating: Dwarves love their history, and if your adventurer has done anything noteworthy within range of a fortress embark, they will canonize the player in artworks. As of 3.18, an adventurer acquires renown for slaying beasts and bandits within a single civilization, and will be greeted with respect, even awe if they have high enough reputation to get quests directly from region rulers. As your reputation goes up, you're also capable of recruiting more people to fight with you at once, getting as much as 9 1/2 times as much as a reputation-less adventure could.
The Hypnotoad: Cats. Dwarfs don't adopt cats as pets - cats adopt dwarfs. This is the cat's primary defensive protection against bloodthirsty butchers who can't slaughter animals who are someone's pet.
I Call It Vera: If a dwarf gets sufficiently attached to a weapon, they will bestow a name upon it.
In Universe Game Clock: The game keeps track of how long your dwarfs have been at the fortress, and things like weather, available crops, and arrival of traders are tied to the season.
Kill It With Fire: Flooding a map with magma. Dropping critters into magma. Floors made of lignite or graphite grates set on fire. Flamethrowing critters from fire imps to dragons plus some machinery to restrain and/or protect them... you get the idea.
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.
Additionally, pressure can cause finding an underground river at the wrong spot and with the wrong fortress layout to flood everything.
King Incognito: Striking adamantine before the dwarven king would normally arrive makes him come in the guise of a migrant. This doesn't stop him from demanding lodging fit for his job, though.
Lava Pit: Players love these. Boatmurdered's arguably most famous bit was the attempt to completely wipe out the local elephant population with magma streams.
Let's 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 and get more wealth they up the ante. Goblin sieges can now include larger goblin squads led by weapon master, building-destroying trolls, trap-avoiding master thieves, cavalry mounted on Beak Dogs and leaders on flying mounts who can bypass all of your carefully constructed ground-level walls and moats. Those attacks will continue, getting worse each time, until you either really have fun, or you just burn the entire fortress area with lava.
Let's 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, a long and storied succession game held by the Something Awful community, was many people's introduction to the game. It illustrated a lot of the game's elements, with a recurrent emphasis on those associated with madness and death.
Luck-Based Mission: 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.
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 laugh maniacally, grab other dwarves, drag them into a workshop, murder them and make their corpses into stuff.
One particularly memorable result: Planepacked, a statue WITH THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE WRITTEN ON IT. Including 73pictures of itself.
The LP of Headshoots featured a dwarf struck by inspiration while lame. He would try to crawl to a workshop, but dwarves tasked with tending to the wounded automatically dragged him back. This happened for long enough that he went insane and committed suicide.
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...
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.
Really evil biomes also have special plants and horrible things like eyestalk grass. The dev notes for the upcoming version also indicate that the worst Mordor-like hell-on-earth settings are going to have the occasional shower of blood and/or cursed soul-consuming mist as well.
Mundane Utility: Bottomless Pits? You now have a garbage disposal. Unicorns? Delicious, and products manufactured from their bodies fetch a fine price. Magma? Invaluable.
Farming merpeople is no longer economically viable in unmodded games. Toady One found the thread and Squicked hard enough to mod the value of mer-bone to the bare minimum. Previously, it was comparable to dragon bone in value.
Nintendo Hard: Not only is the game hard to master, it's also hard to learn..
Non-Human Undead: Any kind of living creature can have a zombie or skeletal version, including monsters like dragons, giants, and imps.
Giving rise to such hellish creatures as skelephants, skeagles, and skarp. See Killer Rabbit and Made of Iron, above.
Our Ghosts Are Different: Dwarf Fortress ghosts just want a proper burial. Until they get at least a grave marker, they will haunt the people they knew in life. Their actions range from "misplacing" items, to violently attacking the people they hated, to... throwing parties??
Paint the Town Red: You'll end up with blood all over whatever godawful fields of traps you set up in front of your fortress, and in the latest version, buggy mechanics for bathing will leave a giant pool of the stuff around your well when your dwarves come to clean themselves off.
One of the biggest complaints is that blood in water multiplies infinitely. One blood spatter in a puddle and every one of your dwarves that walks through will get a coating of that blood, tracking it everywhere, without ever diluting into nothingness.
Some players love having a map covered in the blood of their slain enemies, others find it annoying as hell that it gets tracked everywhere and never goes away. A recent release added a toggle to turn it on and off, satisfying both camps.
Pointless Doomsday Device: Players love to make these, especially in succession games. For more information, see the community page.
Powered by a Forsaken Child: Dwarves sometimes go into "fell moods," where they go out and kill the nearest dwarf they can find (hopefully a noble or someone else you don't mind losing), butcher them, and make an awesome artifact out of their flesh or bones.
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.
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.
While not for DF:2010, this one at After Action Reporter is pretty informative for a beginner.
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.
Rube Goldberg Device: It's amazing what can be done with a couple of pumps, windmills, gear shafts, mechanisms, axles, levers and 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.
It took thirty dwarves six years to build, uses more than a hundred mechanisms, twenty pumps, a dozen pressure plates and seven floodgates, refills and resets itself automatically, slams the gates shut and activates when an enemy steps on the pressure plate ... and accidentally floods your entire fortress with magma.
Schmuck Bait: Building destroyer monsters crush anything they can break. Including the only support standing between them and a major cave-in. Or floodgates reservoirs of magma which they may or may not escape — if a magma-proof pressure plate seals the exits with bridges, a tough and otherwise untrappable creature undergoes magma-frying, and if it survives that, room-wide obsidian encasement.
What Does This Button Do?: Gremlins will happily pull any lever they can find — whether it floods the whole map with magma or does nothing except trapping or killing anyone who pulls it.
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.
Death of a squad leader will cause an invading squad to bug out. If the leader of the siege is killed, the entire siege panics and tries to run away.
Self-Imposed Challenge: This fortress will be nude! This fortress will never trade! And so on.
A nude fortress is par for the course. The opposite is an actual challenge, due to a bug which prevents dwarves from putting on new clothes when their old ones wear out to nothing.
Shark Pool: Critters from carps to crocodiles to worse monstrosities. Especially tamed ones — after all, you can simply leave stairs for dwarves accidentally falling into the moat, as long as no one else makes it to the stairs alive. And collect meat, bone, leather and eggs as byproducts in peaceful times.
Single Specimen Species: Forgotten Beasts. Possibly Titans as well, depending on how you classify them.
Snow Means Death: Metaphorically and literally. Leaving dwarfs out during the winter can cause temperatures to dip low enough to freeze their bones and collapse and die in the snow. Winter is also the only season where no race sends a caravan, which can doom you if you desperately need an item. Technically if you're at peace with the goblins they might send a caravan during the winter, but don't expect this blessing to last long...
And that's completely forgetting that water freezes instantly trapping those unfortunate enough to have been standing in the tile in ice, killing them.
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, installed into weapon traps, or also be placed at the bottom of a pit to increase the damage done to anything that falls into it.
Training from Hell: One very efficient method of training your military dwarves is to make them train in a room filled with spear traps set on repeat. They'll constantly be getting experience from dodging and parrying the spears. Of course, should they fail to parry or dodge even once, horrible injury may result.
Wooden training spears will cut down on the injuries, but pets (like war dogs assigned to your troops) and babies/children will take damage as if hit with actual spears and die rapidly if they enter the training room.
Trap Door: Retractable bridges are often used this way.
Too Dumb to Live: Dwarves have a bad tendency to cancel their job at the worst possible time to do some useless action. Like when Urist McSoldier decides that getting drunk is a way better idea than protecting the fortress against the goblins that are right outside the front door.
Tunnel King: Dwarves being Tunnel Kings is a central mechanic to the game.
Tunnel Network: Dwarven fortresses tend to be underground. You do the math.
Understatement: While people laying siege to your fortress are known as "Invaders", megabeasts are appropriately noted to be "Uninvited Guests."
Unusable Enemy Equipment: Humans and Kobold clothing and armor is the wrong size for your dwarves. understandable as they are vastly different size compared to dwarves.
With DF 2010 you can now equip those exotic weapons whips, pikes, and bows.
Also wrong sized metal armor from humans can be melted down for metal bars.
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. This can extend past the grave, with many players taking the Egyptian approach, and sacrifice huge riches into their tombs.
Violation of Common Sense: If you can get a single metal arrow or bolt out of the stack (by recovering it after it was fired, for instance), melting it will produce about two and a half times the raw metal it would've taken to make it.
And again, holding back magma with ice walls.
War Elephants: Can be trained as of the 2010 version. Keeping them trained is another matter, though, as tame elephants are bugged and will starve to death while eating. The usual solution is editing the raw files to decrease their grazing requirements or just turn off grazing for them altogether.
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.
Some players have taken this further by using a network of very tall towers to build what amounts to a magma-based Kill Sat.
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.
Artistic License - Economics: The "Dwarven Economy" was so horrendously broken that DF2010 removed it completely.
Also contributing to the removal decision was the matter that stacks of coins did not get re-stacked after being separated, leading to an ever increasing burden on CPUs.
List of tropes specific to Adventure Mode:
Always a Bigger Fish: It's been the case for many adventurers where an ambush or attack is suddenly interrupted by a swarm of wild animals which often turn the tide of battle.
Badass Boast: Legendary enemies who are capable of speaking will tell of their feats as soon as they can see you.
Bag of Holding: Partial — your adventurer can carry around a dozen dead wolves, three barrels of booze, a massive supply of food, and 800 million fistfuls of sand in his backpack, but the weight will still slow him to a snail's pace.
Carrying a giant will slow you down significantly. Picking up a second will slow you down significantly less. There's no difference between carrying three giants in your backpack and carrying thirty.
Body Surf: Via Good Bad Bugs, it's possible to suddenly shift from controlling an adventurer to an underground creature (even a demon), then to bodyswap to some other animal every time you go to sleep.
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. Although they don't specify whose death.
Dump Stat: With Adventurer creation now letting you lower attributes below average to free up more points, attributes that currently serve no purpose in Adventure Mode (like Creativity, Patience, and Memory) or at all (Musicality) have officially become this.
Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: No direct difficulty levels, but in Adventure mode there are three tiers for the level of ability points you start with: peasant, hero, and demigod.
Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Certain races (like goblins) will leave impaled enemies around their fortresses. Meaning that if your adventurer dies against them, you can come back with a different one and see his impaled corpse. And use it as a weapon.
Improvised Weapon: In Adventure Mode, everything is a weapon. Including skulls, fistfuls of sand, vomit, and your opponent's severed leg. This is mostly due to a bug that makes thrown items ludicrously deadly, to the point where you can cave someone's head in with a lucky throw of a sock... or even a fluffy wambler, killing no less than a Bronze Colossus.
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.
Inventional Wisdom: As any given game progresses, the chances of something improbable and absurd happening because the player forgot precisely what a certain lever or pressure plate does approaches almost certainty.
Kill It With Ice: The aforementioned freezing is the most annoying and, due to the common practice of training swimming to get stronger, one of the most common death in adventurer mode.
MacGyvering: The sword is stuck in the enemy's leg? What weapon to use now? What about the ripped off arm over there, or throw some blood, mud and vomit.
Man Bites Man: With aimed and chosen attacks implemented, adventurers are now free to attack by biting completely at will instead of only when their arms are cut off.
News Travels Fast: All you have to do to let an entire city know that you killed the monster is tell one person.
Your dwarves will claim items dropped by victims on a battlefield even while they are working underground. This can cause problems if they decide to go claim those items while the siege is still underway.
Retired Badass: Retirement is the only way play a new game in the same region without killing your current adventurer. Better make sure you didn't retire any of your past legendary+++ swordsmen adventurers in the town you're about to rampage through...
Shoplift and Die: Steal anything in Adventure mode and it's automatically acknowledged by everyone in the civilization, who will immediately proceed to attack you. Toady has stated that fixing this is on his to-do list: part of enabling the "Thief" Adventurer Role means changing thievery from automatically recognized to discovered and investigated by townfolk (which you can counter by changing your appearance), then they will arrest you alive if you surrender.
Currently downgraded to 'Shoplift and Get The Silent Treatment' — no matter what your reputation with the faction, you're instantly branded Criminal, and no member will speak to you. This means they won't give you quests for which they weren't going to reward you for anyway, but more importantly they won't let you stay in their houses overnight forcing you to hide from bogeymen in mountains, lairs, and beaches.
Sssssnake Talk: The serpent men, when you speak to or as one in adventure mode. This is caused by the [LISP] tag the species has.
Talking Is a Free Action: Currently all conversations follow are very formulaic and only one-on-one, but the stated eventual goal is to get to the point where the adventurer can regale a growing audience with tales of his heroic deeds.
There is a special screen just for legendary enemies telling you what they have done, which can be quite a list.
Tantrum Throwing: If a dwarf becomes depressed enough they might start smashing or throwing things.
Things that Go Bump in the Night: When peasants warn that you shouldn't stay out at night, lest the bogeymen get you, listen to them.
Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Inverted. In some situations, cruelty is rewarded: if you find a small, defenseless creature (like a groundhog, monkey, or elven child), you can use them to raise your wrestling skills significantly. You can go up several levels in a very short time, provided you're willing to be unnecessarily cruel to your opponent. Especially if you're playing a creature like a bronze colossus, who is capable of pinching off body parts. Start with the fingers and toes, then pull out the teeth, then ears, eyes, nose, any other extremities you can target, then finish off with a pinch to the head. If you want to finish him. You could always just leave the poor guy to bleed to death, if he's still alive when you're done.
Sometimes it plays out very straight: while gladiatorial "Dwarven Child Care" works as training, the most "successful" experiment so far ended up with one mental attribute noticeably degraded — the discovery that these aren't constants being the "success" part here — while one physical attribute was noticeably raised in process... but dropped back soon after the end, along with another mental attribute. In exchange for meager skills that could be trained with minimal risk upon puberty, plus less than foolproof desensitizing. Not counting a permanently crippling attack by some ghost from whom the caged dwarfling had nowhere to run.
Walking the Earth: Becomes this, over the course of a long-lived adventuring career. If your character comes from a particularly uneventful corner of the world, then it begins this way.
When asking a child his profession: "You look like a mighty warrior.""I'm four!"
Now it's been slightly expanded:
"You look like a fine warrior!" "I'm a thresher." "You look like a fine warrior!" "No, I'm a thresher."
Villain Teleportation: If you try to run away from bogeymen, they just teleport into your path.
You Are The Translated Foreign Word: Sometimes names are listed in one of the in-game languages and sometimes they're translated, with relatively little rhyme or reason which is used. This variation is occasionally used as a compromise, such as on the blurb shown on embark.
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