Dwarf Fortress (Video Game)

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"We don't want another cheap fantasy universe, we want a cheap fantasy universe generator."

— Tarn "Toady One" Adams, 2006

Slaves to Armok: God of Blood - Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress is part Construction and Management simulation and part Roguelike created by brothers Tarn "Toady One" and Zach Adams. The brothers began work on the game in 2002, and it saw its first alpha-release in 2006. Strictly speaking, the game is really two games: the game it is right now, and the game it hopes to be. Its goal is to be less of a video game and more like a supremely complex fantasy world simulator, simulating dozens of nations and hundreds of thousands of characters over a thousand years or more, where you can watch history unfold from a godlike perspective, or take the role of any character or civilization, and make history. And to cap it all off, it intends to do it all in extended 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 and devoted fanbase.

The main game is Fortress Mode, which plays like a dizzyingly complicated hybrid of Dungeon Keeper and The Sims, only that all your little people are now stumpy, manic-depressive alcoholics. Adventure Mode plays like a very freeform roguelike - similar to NetHack or Rogue according to some - in the vast procedural world that your fortresses inhabit. Both modes have no way to win, but hundreds of ways to lose, and hence the community motto, Losing is Fun. If you intend to play this game for any longer than five minutes without dismissing it as a glorified Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, keep that in mind.◊

The key word for describing Dwarf Fortress is "complex". The game makes vigorous attempts to simulate real-life physics, biology, and even chemistry as accurately as possible, with a surprising degree of success, at the cost of user-friendliness. For example, in lieu of Hit Points, the game has a detailed, IVAN-esque Subsystem Damage mechanic for all dwarves, monsters, and other creatures, and an attack targeting system that allows any unit to attack or grapple any part of its opponent's body with pretty much any still-attached prehensile appendage. The game only gets more convoluted from there, becoming denser with each update. The fans joke that Tarn Adams, who remained the primary developer on the game (at least until Dec 22, 2022), will continue to make the game more and more granular until it reaches the subatomic level and begins to simulate quantum mechanics and particle physics. Judging by the way the game is growing, that prediction may become true, and everyone can then become an unlicensed theoretical physicist.

Dwarf Fortress is free, with further development paid for by donations. You can find the game here, some graphical tilesets to make the game easier on the eyes here or here, and the invaluable gameplay wiki here. Or you can get the Lazy Newb Pack, which includes the above + tutorials + auxiliary software and loads of useful stuff for Windows, Mac, or Linux. If you're interested in learning how to play, you can also check out this video series on YouTube by Lets Player and veteran dorfer captnduck, or look up the active Reddit forum. And now there is even a book written by Bay 12 forumite Tiny Pirate.

Fun fact: Dwarf Fortress was one of the first video games to be featured in the New York Museum of Modern Art.

On March 13th 2019, Tarn announced that Dwarf Fortress was coming to Steam and itch.io with a new tileset and enhanced graphics support and audio. He said that he would continue updating the free ASCII version on the Bay 12 web page as Dwarf Fortress Classic. The non-free version was released on December 6th, 2022, with the free version released a couple weeks later.

For slightly-less-notable Bay 12 Games products, see Liberal Crime Squad.

The game in general provides examples of:

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Tropes A-D

Abnormal Ammo:
- You can encrust your ammunition with bone, wood or even gem decorations.
- In Adventure Mode, the game is perfectly fine allowing you to use a limb from a being made of magma, or something similarly hazardous to hold, as a lawn dart.
- While your crossbow bolts may typically be made out of normal metal, they can also be carved from the bones of your enemies - any bones will do, even those of sapient creatures, so long as they're already freely available, with ironic results as you return a goblin to his comrades at high velocity.
Absurdly Sharp Blade: Swords, axes or spears made with Adamantine, a super-light and absurdly durable metal. Because it's so light, any hammers or maces made out of it will simply bounce off of enemies like a balloon (or a wiffle-bat, somewhat more accurately).
Adoring the Pests: Dwarves might have rats, cockroaches, or flies as their favorite animal.
A.I.-Generated Economy: Showing us the pitfalls of giving the AI control over sectors of the economy is the cut eponymous feature: when some conditions were fulfilled, all dwarves were awarded private accounts to spend on food and other items they could buy from shops—except for nobles and legendary dwarves, who could take whatever without spending anything. Dwarves were able to buy shops and sell items in it for their own benefit. This led to bizarre things like children of nobles/legendary dwarves being poorer than average, and dwarves spending all their time counting their coins.
The Alcoholic:
- Every dwarf, except in Adventurer Mode, "needs alcohol to get through the working day". From birth. Dwarves will only go sober if hospitalized, or if there is no alcohol available (and this will cause their productivity and mood to drop precipitously). This becomes a slight problem in 0.42 and on, since alcohol poisoning has now been implemented and dwarves have been known to pass out drunk and drown in their own vomit.
- 0.42 also introduced the ability to make taverns in your fort with the potential of having non-dwarf visitors live in your fort. They will normally not be reliant on booze, but if they face enough mental trauma to get "doesn't really care about anything anymore" added to their description, they will also embody this trope.
- Ever since 0.42, adventurers may now start with or gain alcohol dependency, dwarf or not. This may stem from their values and ethics, or a change thereof, but more often than not it's triggered by severe trauma.
Alice and Bob: The DF community equivalent is "Urist McSomething" with the surname being descriptive, such as Urist McTantrumSpiral or Urist McDragonChow.
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. The exception is a few mythical beasts, magical creatures, and gods that are flagged to appear in procedurally-generated art but will not appear in any world.
All Trolls Are Different: The creatures simply named "troll" are big, hairy brutes with cyan blood that goblins use to tear fortifications apart (and shear like sheep), but the Night Trolls best match the old troll mythology. They're even procedurally generated so no two are alike, with a penchant for taking human mates and transforming them into beasts like themselves, and a taste for human (or elven or dwarven) flesh.
The All-Seeing A.I.:
- Goblin sieges use a pathfinding AI that automatically knows the fastest way into your fortress. The players abuse its quirks mercilessly (particularly regarding avoidance of locked doors).
- 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, one door locks and another opens. Now the only way in is on the other end of the corridor, which is provided with the same mechanism. This keeps the oh-so-clever AI terminally walking the walk of pointy pain.
Ancient Tomb: The 2012 update added elaborate burial tombs, where sentient creatures that were born and died during world generation are interred. It makes for excellent Dungeon Crawling in adventure mode, and a source for necromancers to summon their armies from in fortress mode.
Animalistic Abomination: Forgotten Beasts, while procedurally generated, start off with some creature type as a "base" and add random features from there, which may be contradictory. The result is something that resembles a known animal, but has several unique and horrible characteristics that no other beast like that has. Among infinite examples; a giant penguin with no mouth that intones the names of all those it meets, or an eyeless cicada made of vomit.
Animal Wrongs Group: Elves, but for trees (they still tame animals, and eat them if they need to survive.) They will be horribly offended when presented with anything made from wood or charcoal. They know nothing of metallurgy, so they can't tell steel made with charcoal apart from steel made with mined coal, therefore they'll take either. Any glass but green glass, however, needs wood ash to turn into pearlash, beds must be made of wood, and wood is the preferred material for bins, so elves are notoriously unpopular. Even a single wooden decoration in a craft will make them storm out of the trade depot and probably later send archers to your front gate by the hundreds. This doesn't mean they can't make all of their crafts from wood, because they can shape them with magic without killing the tree. In earlier versions they'd even get offended if you tried to sell them their own wooden goods. The current "grown" wooden goods solved that issue.
Animate Body Parts: Various severed body parts—including skin and hair—can be reanimated by Necromancers and clouds of gas in evil biomes.
Animate Inanimate Matter: A number of very rare, very powerful entities are randomly generated in nature and appearance. Many resemble regular, if monstrous, organic beings, but many others are composed of a single substance, which can be organic or inorganic. Their threat level tends to vary based on their component substance; ones made from liquids, gases or powders such as smoke, water, snow or ash are extremely fragile and easily killed; ones made out of fire are just as fragile, but set anything they touch aflame and also explode when killed; ones made out of rock, glass, gems or low-grade metal are much tougher and more dangerous; ones made from weapons-grade metals like bronze, iron and steel are immensely dangerous and powerful beings.
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
Arc Words: "Now you will know why you fear the night."
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 returns a fixed amount of metal which is almost never the amount that went into it (in fact, sometimes it's more). 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.
ASCII Art: The game is actually graphical, but uses ASCII characters and a few others as its default tileset.
- 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.
Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: How most goblin sieges develop: after seeing some of their companions (or their captain) beaten, the invaders will quickly turn tail and take their leave. As of 40.02, with the addition of a new (currently buggy) morale system, most conflicts very quickly turn into just the "Retreat! Retreat!" part.
Ascended Extra: No dwarf is inherently more important than any other dwarf. As such, any dwarf that manages to get favored by a player, or even the community, is this.
Ascended Meme: One of the official songs in the non-free release is called 'Koganusan', Dwarven language for "Boatmurdered". It being a somber vocal piece that plays after a fortress has fallen is, if anything, entirely appropriate.
Author Avatar: In community (the player posts what is happening in a particular fort, and the community writes about it) and Succession Game (same as a community fort, but the save is passed from player to player) forts, it is common to name dwarves after participants, and many people will request a 'dorfing' just because.
Author Catch Phrase: Toady often uses "he he he" in development posts after mentioning something particularly grim.
Badass Army: If you train it and take care of it well, your militia will become one of these.
- You can now send these armies out to raid and raze other civilizations' sites, the lairs of evil creatures, or to murder elves.
Badass Bookworm:
- In previous versions, even the skills as far away from combat as possible trained physical attributes. If you ordered your bookkeeper to take the most accurate inventory of your stocks possible, he, a weak, unassuming social dwarf, would proceed to lock himself in his study, and work silently for roughly a season. Eventually, he would re-emerge, and after all those hours of updating the records, will have acquired the character notes 'Ultra-Mighty', 'Perfectly Agile', and 'Superdwarvenly Tough'.
- 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.
Badass Normal: Who would have thought that a bunch of bipolar, alcoholic midgets could fight The Legions of Hell and win?
- Any dwarf can, with time, practice, and/or luck, turn into a legendary master of effectively any trade. It doesn't matter how good they were at the start or what their family bloodline is like.
The Bard: As of version 42.01 they can now visit your fortress, and you can even train your own dwarves to become one and you can even play as one in Adventure mode. In true df fashion there is a different skill for every single different kind of poetry, every single different style of song and every instrument, and every single type of dance. You can even create your own forms at high skill levels! Not to be confused with The Storyteller or Wandering Minstrel, see below.
Bare-Fisted Monk:
- The Wrestling skill. Rather than Eastern Martial Arts, everyone engages in pankration. Now that the throw command actually throws your opponent, much fun can be had. Your dwarf adventurer can now fling his goblin opponent off the mountain. Your Bronze Colossus adventurer, on the other hand, can throw his goblin opponent so far and hard that he hits a tree on the other side of the map and explodes into limbs, meat, and skin.
- In previous versions, champion wrestlers could be terrifying, capable of punching a charging knight's warhorse out from underneath him, hard enough to punt the animal back 40 feet and have it explode into gristle on impact. The 6-foot-tall, heavily-armored, highly-trained knight will then rapidly find all his limbs snapped by a short, blood-and-vomit-encrusted psychopath, leaving him crippled and helpless whilst being slowly stomped to death through the protection his armor still offers against normal attack.
- With the blunt-attack combat rework in DF2014, hand-to-hand combat has been buffed up since the previous release. While you're still no longer able to punt warhorses, a well-trained dwarf is perfectly capable of punching or kicking your head so hard that it "explodes into gore," helmets and caps be damned in some cases.
Bat People: Bat men only have four limbs—their arms double as wings like in real bats—and live in tribes underground, being one of the few underground animal people capable of flight. They can also be found on the surface, where like the other surface-dwelling animal people they don't form tribes and are essentially bipedal animals.
Battle Trophy: Immigrant dwarves might arrive with jewelry made from the bones of creatures they've killed. In the case of especially prolific warriors, this can consist of dozens to hundreds of items of bone jewelry. In particular, vampires and other immortal monsters with potentially centuries' worth of such trinkets tend to invoke this in spades. Oftentimes this is used as an early detection mechanism by savy players.
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.
Bizarre Alien Reproduction: The night troll (no relation to the troll) has to kidnap a sapient non-goblin creature and morph it into another night troll of the opposite sex (called a spouse) in order to breed, despite the fact that most worlds have multiple "natural born" night trolls of both sexes. Additionally, the offspring are always the same sex of the natural born parent.
Black Comedy: The game's bread and butter.
Bling of War: Most players don't bother to, but it's certainly possible to decorate your militia's uniforms and equipment. You can even make gem-encrusted crossbow bolts. In Adventurer mode, decorated armour is quite a common sight.
Blob Monster: Cave blobs, small cavern creatures that pose little threat. Some procedurally-generated beasts may be blobs made out of a given material, ranging from weak snow or water to highly tough iron or steel.
Blocking Stops All Damage: Shields are able to block the huge area of effect from dragonfire and similar Breath Weapons, even if they're made of wood. Shields can also completely deflect attacks even from monsters whose body parts are larger than their target. On the other hand, shields do not negate the momentum from an opponent charging into you, so they can still knock you over then.
Blood Knight: Dwarves gain positive thoughts from engaging in slaughter. And that's before insanity drives them berserk. However, as of DF2014, it seems dwarves become horrified by the deaths of anything with the [CAN_LEARN] tag instead, at least initially before the player's actions leave them emotionally dead. This ranges from goblins and other dwarves, down to freaking crundles, making it problematic to deal with the emotional fallout. Won't stop disciplined soldiers from bounding into a horde of goblins to bash their brains in, though.
Bloody Hilarious: The combat reports. Sometimes they are so absurdly over the top and full of Shocking Moments you can't help but have a good laugh.
Blue-and-Orange Morality:
- The ethics system makes it possible to create a race with some weird morals. The vanilla game already has elves, who find it utterly unthinkable to kill plants, but are perfectly okay with eating the corpses of their enemies in battle.
- A possible explanation for dwarves that end up getting into acts of absurd cruelty while still behaving in otherwise civilized fashion.
- The player community can fall into this at times. They're typically rather civil, at least as far as internet communities go, but they frequently consider Video Game Cruelty Potential to be both amusing, and a mandatory requirement for enjoying oneself; whether they are to keep a friendly group of Kobolds alive and... relatively safe, or if the little buggers are to be used as meatshields, is considered something that needs to be seriously debated. Meanwhile, tossing dwarf children into pits filled with angry dogs and gleefully massacring kittens to use their bones as building materials for giant doomsday devices with which to slaughter your enemies, dwarven nobility, or both, is considered sufficiently standard behaviour that not participating in it (or something roughly equivalent) at some point, will have you be regarded as an alarming aberration, and render you liable to receive accusations of being a disguised elf from other players.
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.
- Evil biomes have rain and fog banks that induce this on anything unfortunate enough to be caught under them.
- Necromancers can now create "experiments" from captured creatures. These experiments range from regular humanoids with pitch black skin and extra limbs, to giant amalgations or blobs made up of multiple creatures. Notably, these creatures can be intelligent and may remember their past life. If they're lucky, they can even rejoin society.
Bonsai Forest: In older versions, all trees were one tile high. The 2014 update introduced multi-story, complicated trees.
Bragging Rights Reward: Fighting through the freakishly powerful guardians of a vault nets you a demon's true name, to command or banish it as you please, but you're more than a match for such a being if you manage it in the first place. Unless, of course, you got absurdly lucky which does happen.
Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Personal descriptions of dwarfs string together happy and sad events with no distinction for either. To wit:
Kol Tölunimush has been ecstatic lately. He killed somebody by accident while sparring recently. He took joy in slaughter lately. He has lost a lover to tragedy lately. He has witnessed death. He had a satisfying sparring session recently.
- Can sometimes escalate into Fridge Horror when the connection between the thoughts becomes clear. Of course, this being Dwarf Fortress, it's more like Fridge Hilarity.
- From the devlogs:
"Fixed item storage crash related to minecart being destroyed"
"Cleared old activities properly so they aren't considered by dwarves for too long"
"Stopped dwarves from trying to clean their own missing or internal body parts"
Breakable Weapons: The 43.04 update changed it so that weapons and armor could suffer damage from combat, depending on the difference in material properties. As a result, leather armor is now woefully ineffective even against wildlife, while obsidian is liable to break if used against metal armor. This is in addition to normal, gradual wear and tear for non-armor clothing, which has been around for longer.
Breaking and Bloodsucking: Vampires prey on your dwarves this way. When vampires go on "break" they will hunt for a sleeping dwarf to feed on.
Bunny-Ears Lawyer: In older versions, this would be the Dungeon Master in a nutshell. He loved cloaks so damn much that he would collect and wear thick stacks of them to the exclusion of any other item of clothing except socks—because every dwarf loves their socks. However, he would also tame and train the most powerful, exotic and badass beasts you could catch; giant eagles, elephants, dragons, and monkeys.
By the Lights of Their Eyes: It is possible to assign a tile to represent a creature only hidden from sight by light levels, with this trope represented by using quotation marks (") for that tile. By default, kobolds get this treatment, and are even explicitly mentioned to have glowing eyes as a racial trait.
Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Warriors who act as servants and bodyguards to a lord are normally called housecarls. In Dwarf Fortress, they're called hearthpeople.
Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Magma Crabs are not actually crablike, lacking any discernible appendages other than a pair of finlike wings. And they can spit magma.
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. The 2010 release (0.31) added even more details, now including appearance and mannerisms.
- And in the 2012 release (0.34), each migrant that arrives to your fortress has a history, family, and possibly even previous kills!
- The 2014 release (0.40) goes even further by describing in detail their personal beliefs and their lifelong aspirations.
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.
- Though, if you're not careful, they can out-breed everything around them. This is referred to as a catsplosion, and if allowed to continue, can cause severe lag. And once it's started, culling them back down will make the cats' adopted dwarves very unhappy. Two favourite solutions are, 1: to cage each kitten as it's born, then use it for meat, 2: to keep the breeding individuals in cages, eat the female kittens, and let the males roam about.
- Thankfully, changes to breeding mechanics (animals no longer ignore distance/isolation) and the ability to geld male animals mitigated this sharply.
Chicken-and-Egg Paradox: An anvil is required to make a forge and a forge is required to make an anvil. There is a invokedmeme among the players about where the first anvil came from, since no dwarf would be able to build the forge to create the first anvil. In gameplay terms, embarking without an anvil carries a risk, as you'll dependent on a trader having one for sale in order to perform any blacksmithing.
Children Are a Waste: Children eat your meals and drink your booze for 12 years without doing or learning anything useful. Birth rates don't come close to matching a successful fort's immigration rate or basically any fort's death rate, so children won't really give many long-term benefits even if you're patient and successful enough to have the same fortress span multiple generations. Even worse if you're unlucky enough to get a wave of migrants that consists almost entirely of children and your fort has suddenly become an orphanage. The Steam release tweaked this: Bad news, children now last until 18 years until they can start doing adult work. Good news is that they can now do minor tasks like construction and hauling before they reach that age, giving such orphanage forts a massive task force of haulers that leaves the adults free to work. Just be careful when they haul corpses and their mangled components, children don't have as many distractions as adults and they can end up really unhappy about all the death they see.
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.
- One forum thread from the old days of 40d reported something similar happening to a human child kidnapped by Goblins. At the age of 13 she started a religious war, which apparently ended with her getting killed by a seven year old.
- 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.
- Vaguely averted with the Steam update, which made Children only recruitable once they're 18... vaguely, because children that get caught in violent situations are still unusually dangerous thanks to all the hauling they now do; they've been known to beat up predators and even adults, and once they age out that same strength is well-put to a weapon.
Chunky Salsa Rule: There is no HP system in Dwarf Fortress.^note See Subsystem Damage.
Clock Punk: Dwarven technology tends toward this. You can build Turing-complete computers out of dwarven clockwork.
Colon Cancer: The full title is Slaves to Armok: God of Blood: Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress: Histories of X and Y, where X and Y are synonyms of "greed" and "hard work", selected randomly each time the title screen is loaded.
Color-Coded Stones: The game has diamonds of five colors as well as clear, and also blue, clear and pink garnets in addition to red, and so on and so forth. It assigns the standard colors to emerald, ruby, sapphire, amethyst, topaz and quite a few others, though.
Comedic Sociopathy: One of the things that draws a lot of people towards the game.
- There really is no limit to the absolutely horrible things the player can get up to. Check under Video Game Cruelty Potential for a partial listing.
Conditioned to Accept Horror: It is possible for dwarves exposed to repeated but manageable mental trauma to build up a resistance to it. In the case of military training, this is actually part of the goal, as a well-disciplined militia member will, through repetition, come to enjoy fighting enough that it overrides their horror at witnessing death.
Content Warnings: The Steam page warns that "Dwarf Fortress contains textual descriptions of violence, and static 2D sprites that may have violent ends. Alcohol consumption is required for a dwarven fortress to run smoothly, as described in text. Dwarves can experience mental anguish, and in extreme cases this can lead to them taking their own lives or the lives of others."
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.
- 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.
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 badass 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.
Cooking Mechanics: Fruits, roots, meat, milk and cheese, and other kinds of food can be consumed either raw or cooked. Like all crafted goods, they have a quality level, which in this case affects the happiness gained (or lost) by whoever eats them.
Cosmic Horror Story: In a world where everything is dangerous, most gods are either evil or decisively malicious for other reasons, and individual lives are fairly meaningless, the entirety of DF can feel like this at times. There's also the fact that Armok is apparently destroying and rebuilding the world repeatedly so he can revel in the violence he subjects his hapless creations to.
Corpse Land: Evil biomes are often full of dead bodies by default. These will often proceed to reanimate and make more dead bodies out of your dwarves, particularly if unprepared.
Creepy Souvenir: Vampires carry a trinket for each person they've killed, made from their hair, bone, teeth, or nails. Even if they've killed thousands of people.
Critical Existence Failure: Not in this game. The extremely complex combat and damage system tracks damage (or mangling or removal) of all body parts and internal organs separately, and even takes care of layers of skin and certain veins and nerves. A dwarf (or other creature) can survive having had most or all of their limbs removed, skin burnt off and eyes gouged out with sufficient medical care to clean and stitch them up before they die from blood loss or infection. Whether such a dwarf will be able to walk and work again is another matter. Nerve damage is impossible to recover from.
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. If you're really unlucky, you may have all your limbs broken and are left to die from the trauma, thirst, or the elements, unable to move.
- 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.
- Legendary Wrestlers in prior versions of the game, in either mode were fond of inflicting these. Anything not wearing adamantine armor will probably be reduced into a pile of broken bones and bruised organs, best case scenario. Worst case scenario, people get thrown across maps so hard that they end up in chunks of gore splattered against walls.
- Many humanoid monsters like to strangle their victims to death. Given a particularly weak monster or tough dwarf, the combat reports of the victim being strangled can go on for pages before the attacker passes out from exhaustion, giving the victim a slight chance to catch their breath before the monster wakes up and goes about it some more. In this category, Bronze Colossi are notable for being so large they could simply grab a normal creatures head and twist or gouge their eyes out while crushing their skull. However their behavior system generally causes them to break all of a targets limbs before killing them. As commenters on the forum noted, it's almost like they want to watch the life fade from your eyes and drag out the pain on purpose.
Crystalline Creature: Amethyst men are humanoid beings made out of crystalline amethyst, and live deep Beneath the Earth. As their bodies are made entirely out of mineral, they can be very dangerous foes: they feel no pain, cannot be suffocated, are difficult to damage due to most weapons glancing off their stony skin, can punch a dwarf to death with ease and are building destroyers. They cannot be butchered like other creatures, instead leaving behind an amethyst when they are killed.
Cthulhumanoid: Octopus men, squid men, and nautilus men all resemble humans with cephalopod characteristics, ranging from a shell and tentacles to the classical Mindflayer-style "Humanoid with an octopus for a head".
Cursed with Awesome: You can desecrate an altar or temple and have a deity "curse" you to become a vampire or werebeast. The former means you don't need sleep or food (besides blood) anymore and cannot tire out, and gives you a huge bonus to your physical attributes (although they become fixed). The latter causes you to randomly turn into a huge beast once a month, and the transformation just happens to heal any wound or scar (including missing body parts or permanent nerve damage) you might have at the time.
- However there are downsides to werehood. You gain a Weaksauce Weakness to a random metal and won't know which until you're hit by it, transformation destroys all non-leather clothing you have on and removes any armor you're wearing, your transformed state might actually be weaker than your normal body if you're experienced enough, anyone who sees you transformed (including companions) turns hostile, and the curse type might have you turn into something lame like a werezebra.
Cycle of Hurting:
- Big monsters have a tendency to use charge attacks and bowl you over again right before you can stand up, which is even more likely in Adventure Mode.
- Too much pain from taking hits will knock you unconscious. While unconscious, you will get hit more often. Do the math.
Darker and Edgier: Unfortunately for dwarves, every update involves adding many horrible things to kill them and all they love:
- 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 Trolls 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.
- The .34.01 release gives us such wonderful additions as necromancers and their undead armies, werecreatures and zombies that can turn your dwarves into dwarrowwolves/zombies, evil clouds and rains that can have the same syndromes as forgotten beasts and evil lands that transform the living into Life-despising Husks.
- The .40.01 release aimed to create a living, breathing world, and in doing so amped up the grittiness of the overworld. Cities may be terrorised by marauding goblins who actively assassinate civ leaders, or worse, may be run by what is essentially The Mafia of medieval times. And that's not getting into the gods, who are now jolly good mates with demons and not only help them go up into the outside world, but guard their demon friends' treasure with absurdly powerful creatures.
Dark Is Not Evil: In Adventurer Mode, it's quite possible to become a night creature (a werebeast or a vampire, to be precise) and pick up necromancy. You lose no control over your character, allowing you to be as kind or vicious as you please, and in fact it's recommended—night creatures are Made of Iron while necromancers have an easy supply of allies. Becoming a husk/thrall is another matter entirely, as people will react appropriately to your unlife. Being seen as a transformed werebeast also turns any witnesses (even companions) hostile.
Day-Old Legend: The game will have engravers start depicting epic events on the walls and precious items of the fortress as soon as the event has happened. Maybe they're just vain. In prior versions it's even possible, thanks to a particular bug involving sequestered items (ones dwarves can't get to, and don't necessarily realize they can't get to), to have an artifact contain decorations depicting the artifact itself (presumably including its decorations...) as well as the event of its completion.
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, capable of tearing a victim into each of their component pieces. In Adventure Mode, these same discs can be used as melee weapons with pleasing results, and with high Throwing skill... you get the idea.
Death of a Child: It wouldn't be as FUNny otherwise.
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.
Death World: Evil biomes, especially Savage and Evil biomes. Nothing says Fun like raining filth that makes your dwarves blister and vomit, fog banks that kill everything they envelop in horrible ways or try to start a Zombie Apocalypse of discarded body parts and skins that refuse to stay down and try to kill your dwarves every time they rise.
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".
- Dwarf job titles always have the word "dwarf" replacing the word "man" (such as Swordsman = Swordsdwarf). In Adventurer mode, creatures that aren't the same race as your character will have their race shown next to their name and title. When playing as a non-dwarf adventurer, you might encounter characters such as "Urist Lastname, Dwarf Axedwarf".
Description Porn: Happens sometimes with the procedurally generated item descriptions, and with dwarves themselves and many other creatures.
Developer's Foresight: Dwarves in fortress mode, and adventurers in adventure mode, that hold conflicting values will have special descriptors for this interaction. For example:
"(Dwarf/adventurer) finds obligations confining, and is conflicted by this since they believe in the rule of law."
- Stark raving mad dwarves will have "Running around babbling!" listed under their status... unless the dwarf is unable to walk, in which case it will say "Crawling around babbling!" instead.
- It is possible to assign an "in the dark" tile to creatures, and the game fully expects you to use quotation marks (") for this to represent By the Lights of Their Eyes. So much so, in fact, that a specimen of such a race that loses an eye will instead be represented by an apostrophe ('). This is perhaps most easily tested using kobolds, which have glowing eyes by default.
Devil, but No God: The gods of the world are worshipped, and occasionally holy wars are fought in their names, but do very little themselves aside from handing out curses to those who defile their temples and sometimes creating the slabs from which necromancers learn their arts. Demons are found ruling over populations of humans (typically by posing as the aforementioned silent gods) and goblins (who can be controlled by brute force), and their numbers in Hell are limitless.
Didn't Think This Through: More often than not, a good chunk of "fun" comes from things the player didn't think through, such as drainage for a water (or magma) device. Or digging through an adamantine tube.
Divine Punishment: Characters can find themselves cursed with vampirism or lycanthropy for disturbing graves, toppling idols, or abusing sortilage-oracles.
Dragon Tamer: Dragons can be captured and tamed for use as warbeasts, hunting animals, and as a source of dragon eggs, which can be hatched to get more dragons.
Dug Too Deep: One of the many ways a fortress can be destroyed. The game's opening animation even depicts an instance of it.

Tropes E-H

Earn Your Fun: The very motto of the game is that losing is fun.
Eldritch Abomination: Procedurally generated Titans and Forgotten Beasts are definitely this, from humanoid elephant creatures with green hair and six arms to giant winged mantises made of stone. They are Body Horror and Our Monsters Are Weird incarnate, and will even be worshiped by your dwarves after attacks.
Elemental Crafting: 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 adamantine sword can slice limbs off a bronze colossus with ease), yet is almost completely useless for blunt weapons, because its density is comparable to Styrofoam. There's a reason it's called "cotton candy."
Elves Versus Dwarves: 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 diplomats demand that you stop cutting the wood you need for beds, barrels, and charcoal. Or until you accidentally offer their traders the wooden box/barrel/bin your trade goods are in. ...You know what? 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.
- Remember to establish good trade relations with elves. Lead goblets make great gifts!^noteThough they don't poison anybody. Yet. Or even better, anything made of pitchblende^note.
- 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.)
- In world-gen, however, dwarves are actually the civilized race least likely to be at war with anyone without players deliberately provoking them.
Enfant Terrible: Dwarven children are just as possible to go crazy and attack other dwarves as adults are. Thanks to all the years of hauling (otherwise known as chores) they do, they can develop some serious strength; enough to overpower adults and murder them, and the justice system has no way to prosecute minors. Some players have reported mad dwarven kids with homicides in the dozens.
Endless Game: There are no actual winning conditions as of yet. Earlier versions had the potential to end in a The Lord of the Rings-esque "you Dug Too Deep and unleashed a horrible demon" ending, but this was removed in favour of letting you play with essentially no time limits. (Though it is still quite possible to dig too deep..)
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.
- One game ended almost as soon as it began, because the fortress was set up.. on top of magma.
Everything's Cooler With Lava: You can build Lava Pits to drop your enemies (or dwarves, or nobles) in, make lava aqueducts to your forges, lava cascades, obsidian factories, or install lava central heating for your dwarves. (It doesn't do anything though), or even flood the whole map with lava (although that is incredibly impractical in the current version).
Evil Laugh: Your very own dwarves do that when they enter a fell mood. Fun will surely ensue.
Extreme Mêlée Revenge: Often combined with Disproportionate Retribution. An angry enough Dwarf won't stop beating you until you're reduced into a broken, bloody mess on the ground. At least they're nice enough to finish you off, so you don't have to slowly die to all the internal injuries you gained during the beatdown!
Eyes Do Not Belong There: Staring eyeball is a kind of "grass" found only in evil biomes that consists of literal eyeballs growing from the soil. Sometimes they blink at passersby. Cows can still eat it, though.
Failure Is the Only Option: "Losing is Fun!" became the official motto for a reason.
Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: While plenty of real-world crops exist, plenty of fantastic ones do too. Other than the obvious subterranean fare, good and evil-aligned biomes will often contain more fantastical plants than more mundane biomes.
Fantastic Livestock: Purring maggots are milk-producing vermin, while goblins shear trolls like sheep.
Fantastic Vermin: Fantastic species such as pixies and fire snakes are defined as vermin, meaning creatures that spawn randomly and spoil food, along rats and bats. The most unusual ones tend to live in evil biomes (which can hold demonic rats, pulsing bloodsucking insects and ghostly spiders) and the sometimes rather alien underground layers (which can produce infestations of crawling masses of fingerlike appendages or of the aforementioned snakes made out of fire).
Fantasy Gun Control: With a bit of Medieval Stasis. Nothing more complex than ballistas can be made in terms of projectile weapons, but you can certainly engineer water-based saws. According to Word of God the tech is meant to cap out before gunpowder. Game Mods, of course, can and will avert this.
Feel No Pain: NOPAIN is a token often found in more alien creatures. You can sever or shatter every limb a Night Beast has and gouge out their eyes, leaving them with nothing but teeth to bite into your inside, but they'll keep going. Turns out that's enough.
Fertility God: Some deities can be generated with Fertility among their spheres.
Firewood Resources: Logs go directly into carpenter's workshops and be used directly in constructions — even if the construction is a smooth flat road. Further, when logs are used for constructing things like walls you can disassemble them to get the log back and then turn the log into a bed/door/etc. In the 2014 major content patch, trees are given variable sizes instead of one log from each tree, and the speed at which the log is transported back to the stockpile varies according to the mass of the wood; oak logs are noticeably heavier than something like willow, for example.
Fog of Doom: The surfaces of evil regions have a variety of clouds of randomly, scarily named materials ("execrable soot", "accursed gloom", etc) which cause randomly determined symptoms, ranging from mild dizziness to all of your internal organs rotting to becoming a zombie.
Foregone Conclusion: You're going to lose. How you lose, however, is almost entirely up to you.
Foreign Queasine: Dwarves will butcher any animal with enough meat on it, which includes normal domestic animals like cows and sheep, but also things like dogs, cats, aardvarks, and forgotten beasts if you get a fleshy one. They will also eat pretty much every part of the animal except its cartilage and nervous tissue; brains, eyes, heart, lungs, tripe (stomach), liver, sweetbread (pancreas), spleen, and intestines are all edible as 'prepared organs'. Dwarves will also cook any ingredient with any other ingredient regardless of how well they go together (which doesn't matter in-game), giving you things like yak brain and oyster biscuits, cat intestine-crocodile egg-durian stew, and roasts made of syrup, potato wine, quarry bush leaves, and tallow. Elves and goblins go even further by not having the dwarves' cultural restrictions against eating sapient creatures; elves will eat defeated enemies and goblins can butcher sapient creatures specifically for their meat.
Forging Scene: The opening cutscene contains one, rendered in glorious ASCII Art.
For Science!: The "magma sciences" are good at setting items on fire.
Fork Fencing: Slicing forks are surprisingly good weapons due to having an incredibly tiny contact area.
Full-Frontal Assault:
- In some earlier versions of Fortress mode, dwarves didn't mind if they were clothed or not, so there have been numerous instances of them going into battle naked. The success of this is varied. Version 34.06 reintroduced unhappy thoughts from being naked, as part of the clothing bug fix.
- It's entirely possible to have an adventurer go around completely naked (with predictable results for those that try to fight tough beasts with no armor), which, as of the 2014 version, does not evince any reaction from townspeople. On a related note, it is even possible to trade items with civilians in exchange for the clothes on their backs.
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).
- Some of the _______-Men are just downright creepy, made even weirder by their nondescript ASCII chips. Slug-Men, for instance, have no bones, and inedible flesh. Luckily, they don't seem to be very enthused about defending their space, and sort of just slither around the overworld area aimlessly. Rat-Men, on the other hand, seem to exclusively live on the edge of volcanoes.
From Bad to Worse: Every single game. If something goes bad, it's safest to assume that it can only get worse.
Gaia's Vengeance: The v50 update added the ability for animals, regular, giant or animal-person, to become 'agitated' as a result of deforestation or excessive fishing, and will fly into a murderous rage agaisnt your dwarves that will only stop with their death. They can even appear in packs, have fun!
Game Hunting Mechanic: Both Fortress and Adventurer modes allow the player to hunt wild animals to get their meat, bones, skin and ivory.
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 Apocalypse, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and Super Mario Bros. 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.
- You can make bears (already trainable) rideable. In other words, war bears..
- Syrupleaf, one of the many Something Awful DF Lets Plays, 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.
- There are also a lot of mods devoted to expanding the options available in adventure mode, especially crafting. The most notable is Wanderer's Friend, the source of many derivative mods. Notable derivatives include DF Wanderer and Adventurecraft, both of which add their own twists and updates.
- Some of the easiest and simplest mods to make are essentially Cheat Codes—you can make dwarves The Needless, produce valuable materials ex nihilo, create a free Stat Grinding workshop...
Gem-Encrusted: Just about any physical object that does not rot can be encrusted with cut gems to increase its value. This ranges from ammunition and armor to furniture to decorations all the way to mechanisms and barrels.
Giant Flyer: Giant eagles, many other giant variations of a bird, and the even bigger rocs.
Giant Squid: Giant cuttlefish, octopi and squid can all be found in savage oceans.
Glass Cannon: Forgotten Beasts made of something weak may be this if they possess a dangerous attack such as deadly dust, poisonous gas or webs. Attacking these with rangers is recommended.
Global Currency: Played straight in Fortress Mode, as all traders use the same currency. In Adventure Mode, each civilization has their own currency and you can only exchange them outside of their civilization of origin by selling the coins themselves (which are literally worth only the material they're made of.)
God Is Evil:
- Armok, God of Blood, is a cruel god of war who only keeps worlds around as long as they entertain him, and destroys them once they cease to do so—i.e., once civilization, peace and stability spread.
- As it turns out, gods and demons are in league with each other. Gods may occasionally raise a demon from Hell using a legendary slab, letting them build huge spires of slade as gateways to the underworld and slade vaults full of priceless treasure and freakishly strong Angels, who actively protect the demonic site.
Gods Need Prayer Badly: One of the few ways the Gods (currently: 44.03) directly interact with mortals is by cursing those that profane their temples... and the only way for them to have temples to begin with is to have enough followers in a town. Gods of death can create slabs engraved with knowledge about necromancy, but they still require a worshipper to whom to bestow this slab, and thus to affect the world. However, their indirect dealings with the mortal world are much less dependent on worship and much more dire of consequence – and by "indirect dealings", we mean unleashing a demon from the underworld.
Gorn: Yes, and PLENTY OF IT, in ASCII text: the combat system describes the slashing of throats and gouging out of eyes with worrying relish.
- 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.
- The 2014 release ups the ante with even more detail on blunt weapon trauma. Parts can be "smashed to a pulp" or "explode in gore" among other new, lovingly-detailed descriptions.
Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Quantized movement often makes it seem this way: units that move or dodge off a ledge hang in the air for a tick before plummeting.
Grievous Harm with a Body: It is possible for dwarves, or anyone in general, to use severed body parts or even entire corpses as melee weapons. In earlier versions of the game, babies were technically coded at things that could be wielded, and this resulted in dwarven mothers wielding their newborns as weapons if drafted.
Grim Up North: Or Grim Down South, depending on the case. While this does not happen all the time, it is highly likely that a large Evil region will be generated in the glacial areas during world generation.
Groin Attack: You can't quite aim for these without mods yet, but occasionally, in reports, strikes to the lower body will be helpfully announced as "a gelding blow!" The details will be left to your imagination. Since the 2014 release, the player can geld pets to prevent overbreeding.
Guide Dang It!: The original game had no instructions or tutorial - learning to play at all, and learning to build a sustainable fort even in friendly environments, all but required one to find online guides. Accidentally destroying your fortress or killing your adventurer in the most stupid of ways might as well be a coming of age story, whether it be flooding your fortress with pumped lava or water, building a fortress on a plain that floods when it's high tide, or accidentally jumping off a mountain. Later lessened in severity in the Steam release, which included some in-game tutorials, though it by no means scratches the surface in regards to the more complex mechanics.
Hammer Hilt: Some weapons are highly versatile this way, even if the "how" is not visualized. Swords can do pommel strikes for penetrating blunt force (very useful against armor), and polearm shafts can be smashed into the enemy, which isn't as powerful but has its uses. Of course, this is fairly normal for a game that lets you slap people around with the flat side of an axe.
Handicapped Badass: Thanks to the combat system, anyone can become this, including yourself in Adventure mode and your dwarves in Fortress mode. All you need is a crutch and enough time to grind crutch-walking, and you are back up fighting against the best of them. If they can get a properly heavy metal crutch, all the better. The character doesn't even need a crutch, they can just crawl around and slay megabeasts without breaking a sweat, although they move pretty slowly. Some NPCs will even move as fast as the PC can, in Adventure mode... despite missing their legs.
Handy Mouth: A mod giving cats a grasping mouth allows to avoid error message "Cat cancels Store Item in Stockpile: Too injured". (They sometimes think that their hands are cut, not realizing they never had any)
Hard-Coded Hostility: Any civilization with the [BABYSNATCHER] or [ITEM_THIEF] tag is automatically and forever hostile to any civilization that lacks the tag. Respectively, goblins and kobolds have them by default, but you can mod in as many hostile races as you like.
Heavy Mithril: The band Booze Control released a song based on Dwarf Fortress, especially Boatmurdered. Strike The Earth!
Helping Hands: Body parts severed from the undead can be easily reanimated by necromancers and mummies. They can even do this to body parts severed from living beings, so adventures can find themselves in the unlucky circumstance of having to fight their own severed arm.
Henotheistic Society: There are abstract "forces" who are worshipped by the elves. Although they are not considered gods in the traditional sense, they are nonetheless glorified by their elven followers.
Hilarity Ensues: Look, if you actually get upset when one of your dwarves gets into a foul mood because you killed his cat on accident, beats up another dwarf who then gets ticked off enough to put his pick into the head of another dwarf who then lies there decaying on the ground, causing bad smells that drive a handful of the other dwarves unhappy enough to pick up axes until bleeding, insane and dead dwarves litter your fortress, you're playing it wrong. Losing is Fun, after all!
Hollywood Healing: Individual tissues have their own rates of healing (nervous tissue doesn't at all), and tissue can become permanently scarred. But in adventure mode, quick-travelling, sleep, or waiting for any amount of time instantly heals essentially anything that can heal.
Hollywood Tactics: Because individual dwarves cannot be given much in the way of micromanaged orders in combat (once they spot a target) they tend to engage in certain forms of tactical idiocy, such as charging into melee when armed with a crossbow, or attempting to engage large packs of clowns solo) dwarves will frequently suffer from various versions of this flaw. At the same time, canny players can avert some of the problems displayed by individual military dwarves through the use of hardened defensive emplacements, copious amounts of reciprocating pointy sticks, overly complicated mechanical traps along all entry points and the liberal use of magma.
Horse of a Different Color: A wide variety of animals have the ability to be mounted, from regular horses to elephants to every giant animal found in savage biomes. When starting a party in adventurer mode, it's possible to give yourself a mount, or claim stray animals you come across as mounts. However, this isn't possible in fortress mode, as playable dwarves can't mount, though invaders may come riding mounts during sieges. The type of mount depends on the attacker: humans will come atop mundane animals like horses, camels, or sometimes grizzly bears, elves will ride unicorns and giant savage beasts, and goblins ride beak dogs and subterranean monsters; if the RNG hates you enough, they might come riding cave dragons... though if it's feeling funny they may also come riding Giant Toads that will inadvertently drown their riders in your moats.
Hunter of Monsters: A possible visitor type. If you have breached the Caverns, they will ask to become residents of your Fortress. They cannot be given direct orders, but will occasionally go to the Caverns you've discovered and search for monsters to kill.

Tropes I-L

I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: Evil regions have such names. And even (theoretically) non-evil places can end up with names like Boatmurdered.
Ignorant About Fire: Dwarves have an unhealthy relationship with fire. Specifically, they have a complete indifference to it. A dwarf on fire will continue with his/her normal routine, setting everything on fire that they pass. This will last until they burn to death or are somehow extinguished.
"Y'know, it sure is HOT in here. I could use a nice strong alcoholic beverage to cool off. I'll just take a shortcut through the cloth stockpile and make my way to the booze stash."
I Know Your True Name: Learning and invoking a demon's true name can be used to command or banish them.
I'm a Humanitarian: Elves are okay with eating any creature, sentient or not, even one of their own race, if they defeated it in battle. However, they refuse to actively butcher sentient creatures for meat.
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. Trying to 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, LIKES_FIGHTING. This means that (duh) they don't feel fear, or pain, and will actively search for something to kill, regardless of whether it needs to eat or not, and once it finds something, won't stop until it's opponent dies or has run far enough that the pursuing creature finds something else to stalk and kill. The most feared of these creatures (asides from the Bronze Colossus) is the Giant Cave Spider.
- Everything in many evil biomes will rise into zombies. Making things worse, dismemberment will only result in the individual parts coming back for revenge. The only ways to prevent this are to butcher the offending corpse and tan the skin so it doesn't rise^note, throwing the thing into a pool of magma, or pulverizing it with a drawbridge.
- Certain evil biomes feature zombie-like "husks", which normal creatures get turned into when caught in a creeping cloud. Though they can be killed, they're far stronger and tougher than animated corpses, feel no fear or pain, have no hunger or need to breathe and possess a singular hatred of all life. They can only be killed by beheading, bisection, or splattering it into tomato sauce. They may still have bits of dust from the cloud on them, still carrying the symptoms of infection. This can easily lead to an unstoppable Zombie Apocalypse.
Impossible Thief: In the early releases of 0.40.0x, kobolds were able to steal the legendary weapons of the gods, wielded by angels, which dwell within sealed vaults that have never been opened.
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." (At one point, any physical activity buffed your stats for all physical activity. Carp are always swimming, so they became invincible in battle.) Carp are still hardcore, but they have been replaced at times with elephants, and later, unicorns. There have been entire wars fought against unicorns.
- This also applies to several of the weapons: in the current version, due to the combat system accurately representing contact area of attacks but not the amount of force one would be capable of putting behind them, making dagger stabs and whip lashes absurdly good at penetrating armor.
- 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.
- Giant sponges not only move and attack your dwarves, but in previous versions, they were fully invulnerable to damage. The pulping mechanics of version 0.40 has made them killable, however.
- 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.
  - One memorably-pathetic titan was composed of snow and ended up being cut in half by the first crossbow bolt fired at it.
  - Or a Forgotten Beast will show up in unexplored sections of your caves—since your dwarves aren't aware of them, there's no arrival message, but the resident animal people can fight and kill them there, and even earn names and titles for doing so. You may often notice this when, on the units screen, there is a Forgotten Beast listed as dead.
Improvised Weapon: Dwarves can actually forget to grab a weapon when going into battle, leading them to do battle with whatever they have at hand, whether it be rocks, helmets, backpacks, babies....
!!Incendiary Exponent!!: Fire is a good source of Fun.
- For even more Fun, trap a Bronze Colossus in a pool of magma. They tend incorporate being 600 degrees hotter into their attacks before melting.
Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: Food left around will decay and spoil, but it will be preserved almost indefinitely if put in a food stockpile—it can still go bad, but takes years. In adventure mode, food you find will be perfectly edible.
Infinity -1 Sword: High quality steel equipment is much less difficult to find than adamantine equipment, and for the most parts, it can hold its own quite well. Also, unlike adamantite, steel makes good blunt weapons as well.
Infinity +1 Sword:
- Any artifact adamantine artifact sword (or other cutting weapon). Adamantine holds an incredible edge, and artifacts are of the highest quality and don't suffer from wear.
- For crushing weapons such as maces and hammers, artifact platinum weapons are this instead, due to its very high density. ^note
Injured Self-Drag: Happens thanks to the game's ridiculously detailed damage system. Creatures may be forced to crawl if their legs stop working due to injury, or if they run out of stamina and collapse from over-exertion.
Insane Troll Logic: The reasons for gods to create vaults and release demons upon the world can be this. In some cases, it makes sense; a god of misery and suffering doing it to spread those, or a god of valor giving heroes a foe to fight. However, sometimes the act will be done "after pondering the ineffable subtleties of" or "uses of" one of their spheres. Even if the sphere is one like youth that would have absolutely no good reason to help a demon escape into the mortal world. One god in particular did so after pondering the ineffable subtleties of fish.
It's All About Me:
- Necromancers have a tendency to write books about themselves. Then they write essays about the books about themselves.
- The creation of a masterwork is considered an event depicting, and dwarves pick their decoration subjects at random; thus you may have a craftsdwarf decorate an item with an image of himself making an artifact. To make things more hilarious, engravings of masterwork creations can be masterworks themselves, so you can get an engraver making a carving of himself making a carving of himself making a carving, and so on until your entire fort is a monument to this one dwarf's vanity.
Joke Item: Hammers and maces made of Adamantite are pathetically weak due to having almost no weight.
Jump Physics: In both modes, people can jump right through fortifications, bars, and grates.
Karl Marx Hates Your Guts: Regardless of your world or location, prices for goods and materials are always fixed. Conversely, anything besides an unprepared corpse part, untamed animal, or bone has a minimum value of 1 per unit, even random stuff like rocks or snow which can be found right next to a merchant's feet, so the safest way to gain money in Adventure mode is to pick up hundreds of the rocks you find in infinite supply next to a shop and sell them. Supply-and-demand based values are in the works for the Caravan arc.
Kevlard: Fat realistically serves as a layer of tissue that may take damage from an attack instead of a more important body part. More bizarrely, in Adventure Mode you can repeatedly set yourself on fire and put it out after a while to remove all the fat in your body. If you survive you become effectively fireproof because heat does not kill you through burning]], it kills you by melting tissue (which except at very high temperatures is usually fat) to make you bleed to death.
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.
- Ironically, Forgotten Beasts made of fire, ice, and many other "elements" are laughably easy since they come to pieces on the slightest contact.
Kill It with Ice: When the temperature drops below freezing, water turns to ice instantaneously when exposed to air. Any creature unfortunate enough to be standing on that square when it happens is 'encased in ice'. When you mine that square out, all you find is a skeleton and anything metallic the victim was carrying.
- This 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 the 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 are still like this to an even greater degree than carp, as they can easily bite off limbs.
- Then there's the Undead Carp: it's like a normal Carp, but is actually listed as "Evil", is very hard to kill, and it swims on land...
- Giant sponges will kill anything that approaches them. Not bad for an animal that's not supposed to even move. Without a nervous system the only thing it can feel... is anger.
- In a game where the majority of people wield axes and warhammers and crossbows and swords, wrestling sounds like a hilariously underpowered form of attack. At least, until you see what wrestlers tend to do to people they fight.
Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: Magma spreads out just as quickly as water (and behaves exactly the same when pumped), but is unaffected by pressure and thus is difficult to get to flow up. If you turn off temperature in the init file, your dwarves can swim in it.
- Lava affects creatures ever so slightly less in version 0.31, which for example can give your dwarf miner enough time to run away when breaching a magma pipe. Not much more than that, though.
- In previous versions, bauxite and raw adamantine were the only magma-safe rocks, while all other stone items would melt when exposed to lava; some user modifications added realistic melting and boiling points to each type of stone, allowing them to be magma-safe, and a later version actually made all of these official.
- Lava has its own advantageous issues though.
Legendary Carp: A thing of the past, but the legends (and page quote from Toady himself) 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 uppercut one goblin and kill three more before the first hit the ground.
- And on the other hand there's adamantine warhammers and maces, which sound deadly but are basically indestructible wiffle-bats due to adamantine being extremely light.
Life Will Kill You: It doesn't matter how many dragons he's slain single-handedly, how many towns he may have leveled, or how many civilizations hail him as a hero, your adventurer or legendary axedwarf can (and probably will) still fall into a lake and drown, or die to a runaway minecart.
Light Is Not Good: Titans from good-aligned biomes are still dangerous to dwarves, and angels are the most powerful and vicious creatures in all of Dwarf Fortress.
Literal Disarming: This is a relatively common tactic among players; hacking off an opponent's hand deprives them of not only a weapon, but parrying capabilities, as well, leaving them open for a potentially fatal blow. Or just leaving the option of having them bleed out.
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.
Low Fantasy: There may be dragons, elves, zombies, werebeast curses and circus clowns, but there's hardly a drop of magic to be found.^noteYet. It's just you and your dwarves, struggling to survive in an untamed world by means of industry, alcohol, and cold, hard steel. This was finally changed with the Villains Update, which made Necromancers more active, granted them the ability to make experimental monstrosities, create servants with magic powers, and also added dice Gods can use to curse or bless people in the world.
- Dark Fantasy: Approaches this trope more and more with each release. See Darker and Edgier.
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 '2's—or green, or grey, depending on whether it bleeds blood or goo—will litter the surrounding environment if enemies are dismembered, disemboweled, hacked in two, or thrown into a wall with enough force to blow apart. It gets even better in adventure mode, which lets you take control of a single adventurer. This mode includes a blow-by-blow account of every fight, and the ability to pick up and throw the severed bits of enemies: or anything else, for that matter. Thrown objects — even socks — will often hit with deadly force, breaking bones, damaging organs, or splattering brains across the floor. Ludicrous gibs indeed.
- 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 goblin wrestlers.
- A basic dwarf recruit, who hasn't had time to go grab a weapon, can still beat up a kobold so spectacularly that the kobold's left arm ends up in two pieces.
- 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.)
- This can come back to bite the dwarves in the ass when in evil biomes, as every severed part reanimates as an individual enemy. As a result, you might find an entire army of angry limbs besieging your fort if you rely on sharp weaponry a bit too much.
Luke Nounverber: Naming for everything works this way.
- Occasionally throws up Names to Run Away from Really Fast if something or someone with a sinister name turns out to be, well, sinister. The aforementioned Boatmurdered counts here.
- Similarly, "Cacame Apebalded the Immortal Onslaught" ("Cacame Awemedinade Monípalóthi" in Elven), the Elven King of Dwarves.

Tropes M-P

Mad Artist: Strange Moods cause dwarfs to produce something incredibly valuable, but defying any logic and sometimes laws of nature, like a gold anvil or earring so engraved it would require nanotechnology to fit all the engravings on them.
Made of Iron: Neither internal bleeding nor cumulative damage were implemented in releases prior to DF2014, making it possible (in theory) to pound on an enemy with a blunt weapon for days or months at a time, crushing every bone and organ in their body without killing them. In practice, a crushing blow to the skull, which will ram it through the brain and kill the target, is common. With the most recent release, the combat system has been reworked, allowing for much more effective blunt weapon combat and many fewer cases of Made of Iron. (Except for randomly-generated creatures who may actually be made of iron...)
Made of Plasticine: It's not uncommon for creatures to get their heads punched off, or shot in half with an arrow. Items such as socks and backpacks can also be used to inflict impossibly severe injuries, and snowball fights can be deadly◊. One of the funnier examples of this is a let's play dedicated to a character fighting entirely using his own loincloth. And with the coming and going of various bugs, the level of plasticine varies; one of the more infamous was during the time force was introduced into combat, the twisting of limbs was such that even punching someone in the fingers would cause their wrists to snap like twigs and bend their elbows and shoulders until they pointed backwards, tearing every ligament, muscle and tendon up. Even a light punch to the face that barely rattles the taker would tear their neck skin for no apparent reason.
- There was one infamous case where the head of a Bronze Colossus went flying after the player tossed basically the local equivalent of a tribble at it.
- If the game is lenient with you, you may encounter Forgotten Beasts, Titans, Demons or Angels made of a weak material such as snow, ash, grime, mud or steam. They are just as fragile as these imply, and any and all hits that land will sever limbs, if they do not One-Hit Kill outright.
Magic is Evil: Development on the DF magical system has begun—the first type of mage to be introduced was the necromancer.
- Interactions, files added that can be used by creatures, are the source of "magic". This means the Dwarf Fortress users can add their own magic. It hardly needs to be said that the magic will be used for evil and cruelty. There is already a spell to crush your opponent's lungs with a thought. It can get far, far worse.
Mars Needs Women: The reason Night Trolls 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?
Medieval Stasis: Word of God says the available technology isn't going to get past the 14th Century.
Medieval Universal Literacy: Averted, with literacy being a skill to put points in, to be able to read.
Mental Shutdown: One of the four types of insanity a dwarf can hit when their stress is at a terminal point is Catatonia, which afflicts those who are neither irascible, anxious nor depressive and those who "become completely helpless in stressful situations." The effects are simple: The dwarf's mind seemingly shuts down completely, and they will just lie there staring off into space with no reaction to any stimuli until they starve to death, or something else kills them (which they will not even react to).
Minecart Madness: In newer versions, you can create minecarts complete with physics simulation to haul goods (and other fun stuff). The "madness" part is obvious after this, given the nature of the game. They are proving to be very, very Fun. Among other things, they move fast enough they become hard to hit... and allow attacks from a cart.
Toady One: "I set a hauler to ride a minecart to its next stop. That happened to take the dwarf down eight ramps and then up a launch ramp into an open cavern. High up in the cavern there was a wide ledge and on the ledge there was a goblin, chilling out right where I had created it. I activated the dwarf's squad, and he had just enough hang-time at the top of the flight arc to get a punch in. The goblin struck back but the dwarf jumped on to the ledge, where they continued to fight as the cart fell down into the darkness."
Missing Secret: Pearl, amber, and coral are all materials implemented and mentioned in the game interface, but it's impossible to acquire them, since they don't generate normally.
Mortality Phobia: This can be one of the motivations for an NPC to begin learning necromancy.
The Mourning After: Characters whose lovers or spouses die used to never find another lover or remarry. In recent versions, while they may experience trauma from their spouse dying, they can find other lovers and spouses.
Nature Is Not Nice: Savage biomes, particularly 'neutral' (neither Good or Evil-Aligned) Savage biomes, are full of giant-sized animals and animal-people that are by default extremely dangerous: a Bluejay is normally a cute harmless bird, a giant bluejay? It can tear up unarmed dwarves with ease. v50 made Savage biomes even more unfriendly with the addition of 'agitated' animals, which can cause what is basically a siege of giant, very angry, very murderous animals on your fort.
Necromancer: Who, as expected, led armies of zombified creatures (or their severed parts) against their foes.
Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: While vampirism and werecreature curses are mutually exclusive, adventurers can still become one of those as well as a necromancer and a sort of ghoul called a husk. The severed parts of werecreatures raised as undead will still transform regenerating into a full body with a full moon. It's quite possible for a fortress to be swarmed by a growing horde of clones of the same person. There are also reports of werecreature ghosts; worse yet, necromancer ghosts, who, to the horror of many, can still raise corpses (including their own) despite being dead.
Nigh-Invulnerability: Enemies without brains, other internal organs or blood are almost literally unkillable with blunt weapons alone. This includes certain kinds of undead and megabeasts like the Bronze Colossus.
- If the Random Number God really hates you, you may get a Forgotten Beast made of some extremely tough material such as a magma-proof stone, hard gemstone, or steel.
Nightmare Fetishist: It is possible for dwarves to like certain creatures for...various reasons, such as goblins or trolls for their "terrifying features", or sea monsters for their "horrifying appearance"
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.
- See also the Lord British Postulate entry above, which explains why a majority of the fanbase (whose attention to detail is normally acute) is fine with playing this one straight. Nobody, even the few players who didn't mind the whole Mermaid Farming thing, wants the forums inundated with ingenious design concepts for a raw sewage drowning trap.
Non-Heteronormative Society: Non-heterosexual orientations were eventually added as personality traits, but there aren't any societal ethics related to it, thus homophobia is nonexistent by default. In a somewhat comical extension of this, no one in-game even accounts for the orientation of domestic animals, despite that obviously affecting breeding ability.
North Is Cold, South Is Hot: When the world generator is set to create an island continent, the position of the "hot" hemisphere and the "cold" hemisphere is randomly chosen. Larger worlds have an equator and two poles.
Not the Fall That Kills You…: Armor blocks damage from falling. A heavily-armored character can survive quite long drops unscathed. This is mostly due to the way the game simulates fall damage, which is basically grabbing a block of the material you landed on and beating you with it. It's also why long falls onto featherwood won't do any damage (it has very low density), while a werewolf taking a brief fall into silver would basically explode into gory bits.
The Oath-Breaker: Oath-breaking is one of the ethics tracked by civilizations. In-game this generally only affects mandates, resulting in your dwarves being punished for not making an item a noble orders to be produced (even if it's impossible to make.) Mind you, dwarves as a race take this as a pretty serious offense, worthy of jailtime or a couple of possibly lethal hammer strikes.
Obvious Beta: See Good Bad Bugs. Still pretty damn good for a game that's technically still in alpha.
Odd Job Gods: The game may, for instance, generate a god of salt. Sometimes these deities can get Flight, Strength, Heart as well; it's perfectly plausible to find a god of death, war, murder and... rainbows.
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.^note
Oh, Crap!: Since conversations in DF as of version 40 are now simulated in real-time and recorded in the combat log, your military will do this a lot when particularly badly pummelled. Or slightly pummelled. Or as soon as the enemy shows up. "Does it all end so quickly!", Yes, Urist McRecruit. Yes, it does....
One Dose Fits All: Body mass dilutes the effects of poison, making a given dosage less effective and/or take longer. A giant cave spider biting a dwarf will cause it to suffocate from paralyzed lungs, but a dragon will only feel slightly numb.
- Played straight with Giant Desert Scorpion venom. It causes the necrosis of the nervous system and the brain, so no matter the creature attacked, once it is stung, it is already dead.
One-Man Army: With enough training and good enough weapons and armor, a lone dwarf can reduce entire hordes of Goblins to literal pulp. 1 dwarf VS 100 goblins? It's possible to Curb Stomp the 100 goblins with just one dwarf.
- Nothing's preventing you from having several of these in your fort. Hell, you can even have a whole army of One Man armies.
One-Steve Limit: Is not respected by the game, unless you use the nicknaming feature to distinguish your dwarves. There's a reason 'Urist' became a reference for the generic 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.
Only a Flesh Wound: People of all races will ignore severed limbs, their entrails hanging out of them, and arrows sticking through everywhere in their body. In fact, legless/armless/quintuple amuputee warriors tend to move faster, for some bizarre reason.^noteThey're lighter?
Only One Save File: Fortress Mode and Adventure Mode, use a save system that is under normal condition effectively the same as most roguelikes: saves are not deleted when you load them, but you can't stop the game without saving it (or finishing it, if you lose) and selecting "quit" from the main menu. Save Scumming is still possible by forcing the computer to close the program or manually copying the same file, but is considered cheating.
Open Secret: The 'Hidden' Fun Stuff, which just about everyone finds out about from reading Lets Plays well before encountering it themselves. This is unlikely to change as the game has a very high bar for entry, and only by reading about how interesting the game can be are most people willing to learn. It doesn't help that the game has no instruction guide, and learning to play all but requires use of the wiki.
- Still, some players try to hide certain facts (seriously or jokingly) by calling demons "clowns", adamantine "cotton candy", hell "the circus" and demonic fortresses "circus tents".
- Though when someone somehow doesn't know about it, things get hilarious quickly.
Origins Episode: The whole game, of all of the monster-filled underground ruins in every other game.
Orphaned Setup: One bit of in-game dialogue has shades of this, using two randomly chosen creatures every time it comes up.
Did you hear the one about the carp and the forgotten beast?
Our Angels Are Different: Guardians. Very few will see them. Fewer still live to tell of it. They're procedurally generated, much like Titans and Forgotten Beasts. Guardians are created by specific gods and have descriptions associated to their progenitor's spheres. They are found guarding vaults, and are known fight even modded adamantine colossi to a standstill. Your reward for defeating them is a Bragging Rights Reward by the time you're powerful and/or cunning enough to manage it.
Our Dragons Are Different:
- Dragons are a type of megabeast—extremely rare, gigantic and powerful monsters, a category also including Bronze Colossi, rocs and hydras. They have no wings and are mentally just animals, and breathe dragonfire four times as hot as magma, which will injure even creatures normally immune to fire damage. They're themselves immune to fire, dragonfire and lava, although a dragon completely immersed in the latter will still drown.
- Cave dragons are relatives of true dragons adapted for life underground, with limp, useless wings (despite regular dragons having no wings to begin with) and large, staring eyes. They're not true megabeasts and cannot breathe fire, but like surface dragons are immune to dragonfire. Goblins sometimes bring them along during sieges.
Our Dwarves Are All the Same: The entire point of the game, really. The Dwarven civilizations in Dwarf Fortress vary little from the model set by other universes. Well, except for being far more Ax-Crazy, manic-depressive, and likely to engage in insane, colossal projects for no clear reason. They're the only civ that can use steel, they can enter 'martial trances' in combat, and will occasionally enter a Mad Artist mood and create a legendary artifact or go nuts trying. They have a reputation for not being the brightest, though that's mostly the fault of game limitations.
Our Elves Are Different: Elves are extremely protective of trees, to the point of not accepting any wooden goods in trade (or goods that tangentially involve wood) and declaring war on civilizations that fell too many trees. They also tend to get into disputes over their habit of eating the corpses of enemies they killed. They make all their goods (including armor and weaponry) by 'growing' them from living trees, with some trees in their sites (Forest Retreats) being designated for that purpose. Elves are at peace with nature and are never attacked by wild animals, and often tame them. Unlike other civs, they don't worship gods, but instead forces that permeate the forests. Their snotty attitude in diplomatic meetings and the ease of offending them means that players are very likely to say Screw You, Elves! and use them as test subjects for their doomsday devices.
Our Goblins Are Different: These ones are The Needless and biologically immortal. Their civilizations are designated as Evil, and their sites are called Dark Fortresses and Dark Pits. They always end up at war with other civilizations over their tendency to kidnap children (which are then raised as goblins) and their utter disregard for ethics, and they're the only civ guarenteed to attack fortresses without the player doing something to provoke them. Goblin sieges are comparatively easy to thwart, since their armament is generally sub-par and their tactics amount to a Zerg Rush. The community outlook on goblins is generally somewhere between 'source of loot' (goblinite, the fourth ore of iron) to 'target practice', and their baby snatching is often Played for Laughs as the goblins saving dwarven children from the players.
Our Hydras Are Different: Hydras are megabeasts—extremely rare, gigantic and powerful monsters, a category also including Bronze Colossi, rocs and dragons—described as dragon-like beasts with seven heads. While only around half the size of other megabeasts, they can attack with all seven heads at once, thus overwhelming single opponents or keeping multiple attackers at bay simultaneously. They also possess a strong Healing Factor, a rarity in the game, that allows them to heal a hundred times faster than other creatures can, although they cannot actually regrow lost heads.
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 Minotaurs Are Different: Minotaurs attack your fortress and can be found in labyrinths in adventure mode. They are less than a tenth the size of any other semi-megabeast, but more than make up for it by naturally being experts with all melee weapons, including socks or the limbs of the last dwarf they killed.
Our Monsters Are Weird: Forgotten Beasts, Titans, Demons and Angels are randomly generated, and the results are very, very strange, sometimes even looking like something straight out of Resident Evil. More consistent, but still bizarre, are the many-tentacled Sea Monsters, and the various creatures such as Pond Grabbers, Green Devourers, and Cave Crawlers that live Beneath the Earth.
Our Orcs Are Different: Necromancers can experiment on sapient creatures to create procedurally generated entities with names like "night's warriors" or "Tooltwist's eyes"^note that basically fill the "orc" role. They're the big, powerful minions of dark magic wielding villains who hole up in towers. They're not, however, Always Chaotic Evil, and can escape to join other civilizations; if able to reproduce (some have No Biological Sex), they can even produce independent populations.
Our Vampires Are Different: These are mortals cursed by a god to wander the night searching for blood. They are effectively immortal, can go without food, sleep, or water, and regenerate damage quickly, especially when well fed, but otherwise act like the living. A fortress can be infiltrated by a vampire in the waves of migrants, who will feed off sleeping dwarves (preferably when no one is looking.) They will even try to accuse other dwarves of being the vampire to throw attention away from themselves. Any mortal that drinks the blood of a vampire becomes one themselves, including the Player Character in adventure mode, and dwarven citizens if their blood happens to contaminate the water supply.^noteNeedless to say, this latter fact is routinely abused by the player base to make all-vampire fortresses.
- When vampires were first introduced into the game, they weren't very selective about who'd they'd accuse of their own crimes, and thus would sometimes end up pointing the finger at babies or livestock.
Our Werebeasts Are Different: Much like the vampires, they are created when the gods curse a mortal, only this curse makes them turn into the form of a beast every full moon. This can be any beast, be it a turtle, rhino, or even gopher, among many others. Every time they transform all of their wounds are healed (even missing limbs), but they also drop all their items.
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.
- Subsequent versions added many more zombie options, including necromancers and evil biomes that cause all corpses to rise as undead. This applies to body parts as well, so long as at least one has a GRASP tag (mouth, hands, pincer, etc.). Chop up a zombie and moments later you could be fighting the remains of the zombie's corpse, his left arm and head. Depending on circumstances, they will keep rising until you dump them in magma.
- The same version also introduced "husks"—undead beings with a singular hatred for all life and much stronger and tougher than they were in life. Living things covered in cursed dust become husks, and the dust covering one husk can spread to curse more if it isn't washed off. This can quickly lead to an unstoppable Zombie Apocalypse.
Palette Swap: The fact that the game's done in ASCII graphics makes this a justified case.
Patchwork Map: 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 Beta: Technically an alpha, but not perpetual. Version 1.0 will be when Toady makes 100 core elements, which he has estimated could take until around 2030. DF fans don't see this as a problem.
Perpetual Motion Machine: The mechanical energy generated by water falling onto a water wheel is ten times what's needed to pump water up one story. Power the pump with the water wheel, prime it once with manual labor, and it will endlessly generate power.
Perpetual-Motion Monster: The result of combining the tags NOEXERT, NO_EAT, NO_DRINK, and NO_SLEEP, often found on inorganic, undead, or especially strong monsters.
Physical Hell: 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 colonizing Hell. Including putting civilian quarters down there just for the sake of "tonight we dine in Hell" jokes.
Pointless Doomsday Device: Dwarven Physics, coupled with constant threats and lots of creative players, lends itself to this.
- One of the most famous examples is Operation: Fuck The World, from Boatmurdered: a lever that, when pulled, released a flood of magma across the plains. In practice, however, FTW proved to be more of a standard Doomsday Device, ruining the surface world and its hordes of rampaging elephants, while only tangentially starting the fortress' fiery downfall by setting off a host of other issues.
Pointy-Haired Boss: Nobles have quite the reputation for this. They will regularly make mandates and export bans determined by their preferences, but without taking feasibility into account. You have a noble that likes glass? He'll mandate glass items despite the total lack of sand on your map. Or ban the export of glass trade goods just before the caravan leaves the map and it becomes impossibe to obey. Nobles can also have impossible furniture demands, like wanting a metal bed (impossible except if a strange mood happens to yield an artifact one). There's a reason that Unfortunate Accident has entered the dwarven lexicon; unreasonable nobles are quite prone to pulling levers that turn out to make their rooms into drowning chambers or drop them down a spiked pit, or somesuch.
Power Equals Rarity:
- Generally, the harder it is to obtain a specific material, the stronger it is when used in gear: only Dwarves can smith Steel (making it a bit problematic to obtain in Adventure Mode) while other civilizations cap out at Bronze or Iron at best; Adamantine is the strongest material for edged weapons and armor, and it's also the rarest, and it can only be obtained by player-run forts.
- Crafted items have general quality levels: Normal, Well-Crafted, Finely-Crafted, Superior, Exceptional, Masterful, and Artifact. For most items, this simply determines their value and how elaborate their description is - but on weapons and armor, it directly affects their strength. While it is possible for skilled blacksmiths to pump out high-quality weapons and armor to outfit your army, there is no way to control when and how you'll obtain Artifacts, making Artifact Weapons and Armor the rarest and most powerful.
Powerful Pick: Mining picks are pretty decent weapons. And they use mining skill, which is quite a bit easier to max out than weapon skills (in fortress mode, anyway.)
Post-Modern Magik: Dwarven Physics tend to result in unusual uses of old fantasy tropes. The Forgotten Beasts, especially. Beware the fearsome Werechinchilla!
Puff of Logic: Procedural Generation of a world can occasionally result in things that make sense from the world map but are impossible with the more detailed simulation from actually being in a place, leading to things like land collapsing the second after it is observed.
Punched Across the Room: Happened a lot in earlier versions, toned down considerably now. However, it's even deadlier whenever it happens now, as the minecart update made skidding across the ground a bone-shattering experience, even with a "weak" one-square flight.
- Larger creatures are still perfectly capable of sending smaller victims flying several tiles with a single blow.
- Boosted a bit more in the 2014 release. Dwarves are still no longer capable of punting a warhorse across the map, but with the new pulping and fighting mechanics added, a skilled fighter is perfectly capable of punching your head clean off and sending it flying across the room.
Purely Aesthetic Gender: Not even aesthetic, because of the simple graphics. Well, no stat (or even anatomical) difference, but female dwarfs can have babies and male animals can be struck by "a gelding blow" in combat.
- Not so much having babies but dropping babies out of their wombs. Pregnant dwarfs don't get any motherly leave and just keep working. So it's not that uncommon one of your miners pops out a baby while in the middle of digging out a tunnel. Same with animals, dogs giving birth to puppies while in the middle of battle happened more than once. And then, those same puppies joining in the battle.
- 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).
Purple Prose: Books written by necromancers can be described with "the writing is excessively ornate". Often suggesting over-elaborate, flowery writing about the author himself or analysis of his previous works.

Tropes Q-T

Rain of Something Unusual: Evil biomes have "evil weather" including rain of blood, other bodily fluids, or toxic sludge. Getting caught in any of these will not only make your dwarves miserable, but can also make them sick.
Raised by Orcs: Goblins actively kidnap children and raise them. Goblin-raised entities act exactly like ordinary goblins, and can be seen snatching more children and participating in raiding parties. Even more horribly, snatched dwarves will adopt goblin aesthetics and shave their beards.
- In a bit of a twist, their snatching tendencies mean that, after a few centuries, the original goblins often end up outnumbered by snatched elves, dwarves and humans/the descendants of same. Goblin-raised elves have the natural high stats of elves, with none of the culturally-imposed wooden equipment, making them far more deadly than regular elves or goblins.
- 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. The only way to truly destroy them is by crushing whatever is keeping them moving into a pulp.
- Now that corpses and even individual body parts that aren't processed into stacks will actually come alive in those places, basically the only way to survive is to go vegetarian (with both food and items).
- Undead sea creatures can travel over land. This can range from slightly embarrassing, when your starting party is slaughtered by a school of skeletal carp, to downright terrifying when the nigh-unstoppable zombie whales come to visit.
Randomly Generated Quests: Quests or "Agreements" can be given by local rulers to slay monsters and bandits or cause troubles for another faction.
Rasputinian Death: The ultra-buggy first release of the 2010 version of Dwarf Fortress features plenty of these. Creatures lived through a great deal of torture before dying, including major organ damage. Nonliving opponents such as bronze colossi were very nearly invulnerable; the only way to kill them was to completely disassemble their bodies (very difficult because their bronze tissue absorbs a great deal of damage, unless you make their own weight work against them by dropping them from a great height) or to dump magma on them until they've been reduced to a puddle.
Reality Is Unrealistic: Many a player has bemoaned accidentally buying a gay or asexual animal hoping to breed it. As it turns out, that isn't as uncommon as one might think.
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 start racking up kills have bestowed upon them a badass title such as "The Awe-Inspiring Warrior Ram". Otherwise-unnamed monsters who do the same will eventually pick up a nickname as well. However, if the Random Number God decides to entitle you "The Towel of Slapping", you may prefer to simply be called "Urist".
Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Zombies with heads are instantly slain if you smash or sever them. All of them, if they're a Multiple Head Case. But they can be re-reanimated if they have any grasping limbs left...
Retraux: Part of the reason why the graphics are practically impenetrable ASCII is the fact it's patterned after the roguelikes of old, that could only accept such an interface.
Ridiculously Cute Critter: Despite being represented with only the 'k' symbol, people seem to interpret kobolds as dimwitted, yet lovable humanoid creatures who are just trying to survive in a world where every other civilization hates them. At worst, kobolds send thieves who can settle on scavenging equipment left from dead enemies — contrast goblins who start sieges and steal children. Kobolds living in the same caves 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 butcher a newborn puppy should the need arise.
Roc Birds: Rocs are a type of megabeast, a group of extremely rare, large and powerful creatures that will attack you fortress when certain conditions are met and are generally capable of wrecking fortresses on their own. They are the third largest creatures in the game behind fully-grown dragons (which take fifty times as long to reach their full size) and giant sperm whales, and the biggest flying creatures of all. A newly hatched roc is as big as a fully-grown giant eagle.
Sapient Eat Sapient: The [EAT_SAPIENT_KILL] and [EAT_SAPIENT_OTHER] ethics tags determine whether a race is willing to eat creatures with the [CAN_LEARN] tag. Members of civilizations with the first tag (elves and goblins, in vanilla) will eat the bodies of those slain in battle, but unless they also have the second tag (goblins in vanilla) they won't kill sapients for the purpose of eating them.
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 everyone else's method of getting rid of them is like everything else in the game; magma.
Sealed Evil in a Can: Know that the adamantine is there for a reason.
Sea Monster: Plenty.
- Named-as-such sea monsters are giant horrors native to evil oceans. They're not described in detail, but have six tentacles, two claws and powerful jaws. They're quite dangerous, but very valuable if you can kill and butcher one. When dwarves like them, they do so for their "horrifying freakish appearance".
- Savage oceans are home to numerous seagoing terrors of their own, including sea serpents and giant versions of cephalopods, orcas and sperm whales; each is approximately ten times the size of the base version, and giant sperm whales in particular are biggest things in the game, bar none.
Sea Serpents: Sea serpents are immense marine creatures—some of the largest creatures in the seas, in fact—resembling serpentine dragons with flippers instead of legs. They spawn in savage oceans, although only one serpent will spawn in each suitable biome.
Shaped Like Itself: Sometimes happens in item descriptions, resulting in things like "cubical cubes".
Shapeshifting Heals Wounds: Werecreatures instantly heal all injuries every time they transform. Since this was the only way to heal permanent injuries such as nerve damage and missing limbs before the Villains Update added the healing blessing, some players of Adventurer mode would and some still do deliberately become werecreatures with this in mind. This has led to an bug where cutting a werecreature to pieces and reanimating the pieces as a Necromancer caused each body part to eventually regenerate into a full-sized clone of that werecreature.
Shop Fodder: Crafts, totems, toys, musical instruments and mugs can be used for two things - selling to the seasonal caravans and, back when Economy 1.0 was still around, shop stock. On the other hand it's a great way of getting rid of the average fort's mountain of stone.
- Mugs, along with cups and goblets, finally left this category as of DF 2014, as drinking without the aid of such a vessel would generate an unhappy thought. They are also necessary for a Tavern to serve drinks with.
Shout-Out:
- Every fortress starts out with seven dwarves. Or, alternatively, a Shout-Out to the seven dwarf lords.
- Sperm whales can be admired for their "vengeful nature" and have a very small chance of being white.
- Vampirism gets started when a god curses a mortal to forever wander the night in search of blood.
- Certain deep structures are made of an undiggable type of rock called slade, likely named after the hard rock band.
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.
Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Firmly embedded on the cynical end... but with the twists that it's all in good fun. After all, losing is fun. That said, the game's complexity and procedurally-generated nature make it possible to tip either end of the scale (particularly with the player's involvement). Idealistic playthroughs are just more challenging and tend to be less entertaining.
Space Compression: A dragon takes up one square; so do dwarves and cats. The only thing that doesn't is traders' wagons.
- This leads to rather hilarious geometric paradoxes—a tile is large enough to contain a dragon, but not large enough to contain two kittens without one of them crouching. A tile can theoretically contain 1,000 dragons as long as 999 of them aren't standing up.
- Pretty much anything can be stored on a single tile and remain usable with just a little micromanagement, using "Quantum Stockpiling".
- Likewise, you can fit your fortress's entire animal population into a single cage, including five elephants, two cave crocodiles, three dozen cats and kittens, 15 dogs, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Standard Fantasy Races: The civilization-building races are the dwarves (who you play as), the humans (your most common allies and trade partners), the elves (who will go to war with whoever threatens their forests), and the goblins (who will war with anyone and everyone, and are often ruled by demons). Other species in the world include a tremendous variety of barbaric animal people, thieving gnomes, and a selection of giants, cyclopes and ettins who mostly just raid other people. Dragons, hydras and similar monsters appear as rare megabeasts that occasionally attack cities and fortresses.
Stealth Pun: The character "&" is used to represent Demons in the game. UNIX uses the same character as a way to start a daemon (background process).
Sticks to the Back: Weapons and shields can be strapped to the upper body when not in use. This works with all weapon types, including spears and pikes. There is no limit to how many times this can be done, and it's possible to do even if your character is naked. It only applies to weapons and shields, though, so you still need a backpack to store other items.
Story-Driven Invulnerability: Randomly generated megabeasts, like Forgotten Beasts and Titans, are invulnerable during world generation, that they may wander the world and shape history through their actions. They only become vulnerable once the player has an opportunity to interact with them, otherwise they might get killed early on and the player will never see them. This is especially true of random megabeasts that are made from materials that would otherwise be particularly delicate and would never have survived otherwise.
The Storyteller: They can visit your fortress and you can play as one of these in adventure mode as well, in true DF fashion there is a skill specifically for storytelling and talking as well. They will tell stories of long dead kings, living kings, and of course the occasional dragon stealing a pair of socks.
The Strategist: The Tactics skill, which the militia captain at the head of any raid (and the head of any armies in general worldgen) have to roll for any battle against the opposing leader, and which skew every roll in such battles in the tactical winner's favor. A good Tactician can skew these rolls obscenely, leading to armies burning down entire nations in a single run and, in Fortress mode, you being able to systematically whittle down entire fortresses with hundreds of enemies to ruins devoid of any civilized population with just ten or twenty good men.
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. It also monitors what kind of damage: bruise, cut, puncture, break, etc. Nausea, pain, exertion, and blood loss are also tracked. A framework for poisons, venoms, and diseases also got installed.
- 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.
  - As of v.40, it's even possible to turn zombies into chunky salsa. Being mangled beyond recognition prevents a zombie from rising up again.
- Eye Scream: From the dev log...
  "Eyelids clean the eyes so you don't have to soap them off, but if an eyelid is torn off, I think they might soap the eyes."
  - 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.
Super-Detailed Fight Narration: Thanks to the combat system that models detail down to the organs you lose.
Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: Random name generator is Pretty Much What It Says On The Tin.
Take That, Audience!: The message you can read in Legends after retiring a fort is "In [year], [fortress group] of [civilization] regained their senses after an initial period of questionable judgement". The judgement in question being the player's.
Tap on the Head: Played somewhat realistically. Living creatures that take a blow to the head may suffer anything from dizziness, unconsciousness, neck snapping, skull fracturing, or instant death, and there is no real way of controlling what happens.
Technically Living Zombie: Whereas normal undead start as corpses, husks are created by exposing living beings to assorted evil weather. They gain immunity to all the usual vulnerabilities save decapitation and bisection, as well as the normal ways to render something Deader than Dead (drawbridges, cave-in abuse, etc).
Teeth Flying: Arrows can occasionally target and remove teeth, sending them launching with the bolt. More spectacular blunt mouth trauma can throw the entire set of teeth out at once, spewing them out of the poor creature's mouth in every direction and just generally creating a headache for clean up.
There Is No Cure: Some toxins and curses have no cure nor end, meaning they last until the death of the sufferer. These include mummy curses (less luck for launch) and cave spider venom (permanent dizziness).
Thermal Dissonance: Nether caps are giant mushrooms which are always ice-cold, even if submerged in magma.
Treants: In pre-release versions, elves could animate trees to turn them into treants, but these were eventually relegated to being fictional in-universe (showing up in artwork), and later removed entirely. Treants are occasionally seen in mods though, which tends to go about as well as expected given magma is the universal dwarven problem-solver unless the modder plans for that and makes them able to survive being immolated.
Try to Fit That on a Business Card: A title awarded for kills, even to animals, can be a bit of a mouthful.
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.

Tropes: U-Z

Unbreakable Weapons: Before the 43.04 update, weapons could tolerate anything short of temperatures beyond the material's ignition or melting point, or being crushed under a drawbridge.
Unholy Ground: "Evil" biomes, which are host to strange and often hostile life, where even the weather is unnatural and potentially harmful, and the corpses of dead things rise again to end the living.
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: Basically how poisons worked in versions 0.28.181.40d and earlier. As of version 0.31, syndromes can have one or more of over a dozen different effects, each of which may affect one or more body parts or subsystems and have values determining chance of resistance and recovery time, if any. Beasties can bite, leak, breathe, spit, ooze and bleed toxins that can be inhaled, injected, received on contact or contracted through ingestion. Depending on the particular combination, they can range from a temporary minor dizziness to causing your arms and legs to rot off, your skin to blister, excruciating pain over your entire body followed by full neural paralysis resulting in death by suffocation.
- Medical procedures 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.
- The 2012 update added syndromes that fundamentally change the affected creature's stats and behavior. Evil fogs that turn creatures into angry, Nigh-Invulnerable thralls are one of the most memorable of these.
- Averted with Gnomeblight, a substance made from kobold bulbs that is only toxic to dark and mountain gnomes.
Unobtainium:
- Adamantine is even important enough to set off a major event in game.
- "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.
Unstable Equilibrium: Letting too many dwarves get upset will cause everyone else's moods to go down, and if not caught quickly, can result in an uncontrollable tantrum spiral. And keeping dwarves happy requires a lot of work producing items for them to admire.
Unusual Euphemism:
- Among players, adamantine is sometimes called cotton candy, demons are referred to as clowns, the underworld is called the circus, to try to avoid spoilers for new players. Endgame content in general may be broadly called "hidden fun stuff".
- Within the game itself, "gelding" is used not just in veterinary contexts, but also for any incidental Groin Attack that sterilizes the target during a fight. In certain sentence structures, the parts themselves are referred to as "the geldables".
- "Fun" is generally used to refer to things going pear-shaped, like your Legendary+5 Swordmaster losing their mind and going berserk, your miners accidentally breaching a magma pipe and flooding the fort with molten rock, or accidentally digging into the core of an adamantine vein, unleashing The Legions of Hell into your unprepared fortress.
Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Vampires are supposed to garner suspicion in world gen from feeding on people, but it's currently bugged to the point that a vampire can consume thousands of people in one village without getting caught.
- Likewise, there can be a dozen witnesses to a vampire feeding on and killing a sleeping dwarf ,and none of them will do anything about it, other than accuse the vampire of murder.
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.
- This being Dwarf Fortress, this quite often results in players killing nobles with all manners of ingenious death devices. The simplest being a fancy room that locks from the outside with a fancy lever as well. Get the noble in there, have a commoner pull the lever, and watch as the noble burns to death in lava. Rinse and repeat.
- On th' other other hand, wha' sort o' pansy dwarf don't need lots 've rocks?
- The non-meat, non-metal portion of goblinite becomes this. Until industries pick up, a "Goblin Christmas" is a windfall, but after the inferior loot piles up, it becomes such a chore foisting it on the caravans that players come up with more selective disposal methods.
- And now that clothing deteriorates and dwarves get bad thoughts from wearing old clothes, after a couple of years, your fort will start getting littered with old clothing that dwarves trade in for newer stuff. Atom-smash it, toss it in magma, or sell it to caravans and tell them it's "vintage."
- Mugs eventually became useful for drinking in taverns (and armament for the occasional Bar Brawl), children can play with toys, musical instruments can be used by performers, and dwarves can claim random wearable crafts to sate their needs to acquire something and/or be extravagant.
- Many plant and creature extracts do absolutely nothing, but the caravans like them a lot. Golden Salve has 100 value (and comes in lots of 5), but you can't do anything with it, not even show it off for dwarves to admire (which you can do with crafts). Gnomeblight has the same value, but since there's no mechanic for putting poison on things, you have to do some serious planning if you want to see it actually work.
- It bears mentioning that an excess of clutter, including large amounts of shop fodder and actual trash you have no use for, can affect the framerate and generally slow the game down, so disposal becomes a relevant topic if you plan to run a fort for more than a decade.
Victory Is Boring: Taken to the logical conclusion. The game is HARD, with several obstacles preventing you from doing anything right, yet players accept and even enjoy the challenge of building a stable fortress such that every unpredictable death is equal parts frustration and mad laughter. "Losing is Fun" is the motto of the community for a reason, after all.
Video Game Caring Potential: Feel like a benevolent ruler? Want to keep all of your dwarves in an eternal state of bliss or make an Utopia with them? It's not only possible, but even doable without too much fuss!
Video Game Cruelty Potential: The Game. 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.
- Let's put it this way: the only limit to the number of different death/torture traps you can build is your capability to make the subject X and the object Y collide at high speed. And then some.
- One of the accepted ways to grind wrestling is to choke an enemy unconscious before breaking every single bone in their body with various grabs, throws, breaks and pulls. The end result is usually an unstable biomass vaguely resembling what it used to be, for Wrestlers in either Fortress or Adventure mode.
- A way to try and make super soldiers (or any useful Fortress-bred dwarves at all), known simply as "Dwarven Daycare", is to lock a baby in a tiny room with a bunch of dogs. Before long the dogs will grow aggressive because of overcrowding, and the child will be forced to defend itself. A steady supply of dogs is ensured. This is repeated until the child matures into an adult at age 12. An upgraded approach includes precisely burning the child's subcutaneous fat off its body, making it fireproof.
- There's also the Danger Room method of training dwarves in Fortress mode. A room filled with spikes moving in-and-out of walls at dangerous speeds, combined with a bunch of soldier dwarves with little to no armor and shields until they learn how to dodge or block dependably. The mortality rate is usually high, though less so if you use wooden spikes. In that case, the only thing to die are babies carried by mothers, which, sadly, many players consider to be a "feature" and not a design flaw.
- "Live training" involves capturing invaders in cage traps, stripping them naked, and carefully releasing them for your fully armed and armored dwarves to butcher. More dangerous creatures like trolls can be dropped into pits and used for target practice by marksdwarves. For bonus cool points, have observation platforms where civilians can watch the militia doing this live training from a comfortable remove.
- After the Civilization screen got improved, you can now expand your cruel ambitions beyond the site of your fort. Want to slaughter completely unrelated sites of civilizations that don't even hate you, even your allies? Want to rob entire cities blind and take their most prized possessions? Want to be a fort-sized agent provocateur and drag your own civilization into a war with another by sheer dint of blood spilled? You can.
- You can go into the raws, change cats' body temperature to be hot, and for bonus hijinks, give them the [SEVERONBREAK] flag so that their body parts fly off when damaged. This results in every cat on the map exploding into flaming chunks of gore, and is known as a thermonuclear catsplosion.
Video Game Tools: The game offers several. Axe and Pick (Mining skill gets trained a lot) also double as good weapons; others, not so much.
Viral Transformation: Night Trolls are able to create mates for themselves by transforming villagers. Vampires and werebeasts will transfer curses through their bites and blood.
The Virus: Venom from Forgotten Beasts is sometimes transmissible, potentially leaving your entire fortress poisoned.
- .34 adds the ability for vampirism and lycanthropy to be contagious, as well as the framework for any other contagious interaction the inventive player can think of.
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.
- One of the most common symptoms of the evil rains from the 2012 release is nausea. If you embark in an area with this type of weather, it's virtually guaranteed that your entryway and halls for dozens of tiles away will be covered in pools of vomit.
Weaponized Offspring: Thanks to the detailed simulation and Wide-Open Sandbox nature of Dwarf Fortress, it's completely possible, even with a vanilla version, to use quickly reproducing non-pasture animals such as turkeys or peafowl as an infinite source of ammunition to blast off lava cannons onto enemy hordes. The trick is to set the ammo on fire prior to launch. And of course, you probably have some dwarven kids running around as well, contributing nothing and learning nothing while depleting your booze stock for nine years...
Wandering Minstrel: They exist in both modes now and you can even play as one. And if you want to stop wandering you can take up a job for a lord as their personal jester.
Weird Weather: One version had superheated rain that could literally melt the flesh off a dwarf's body. It was considered a bug and, naturally, players found ways to weaponize it.
Welcome to Corneria: The NPCs can become very repetitive in adventure mode.
- When asking a child their profession:
  "You look like a mighty warrior."
  "I'm four!"
- It's been slightly expanded:
  "You look like a mighty warrior!"
  "I'm a thresher."
  "You look like a mighty warrior!"
  "No, I'm a thresher."
- Adventure mode conversation in 0.40 has become much more dynamic; still, this trope happens quite a bit. Most infamously:
  "It was inevitable."
  "It is terrifying."
  "It is sad but not unexpected."
  "I should leave."
- In later versions, dialogue can appear in combat reports as well. Expect to see a lot of "Death is all around us. This cannot horrify me" and "Begone fear!"
Wide-Open Sandbox
Word Salad Title: happens frequently in-universe with the randomly generated names.
World of Badass:
- In one reported fight between a dwarven mayor and a berserk sword-master, the sword-master had just finished chopping off all the mayor's limbs when the mayor bit the sword-master's head off.
- Any military dwarf that earns the right of a <Insert-Weapon-Here> Master or Lord. They can dispatch goblins like nobody's business.
Worst News Judgment Ever: Dwarves carve the legendary events and histories of their fortress into the walls. Sometimes these will be of great epic battles or the forging of legendary artifacts; but they have an unfortunate tendency to do things like focus on the deaths of random animals, uninteresting yearly trade agreements, or particularly well-made wheels of cheese.
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.
Zerg Rush: Due to a bug in 34.01, giant mosquitoes tended to show up in swarms of over a hundred, killing FPS and dwarves alike. Thankfully, this was fixed in the subsequent release.
- In addition, necromancer towers are filled with zombies that can easily overwhelm an adventurer.
- This is what happens when you break into hell. One demon is enough to grind a fortress to fine powder, but they come in swarms of hundreds.
- This is the staple tactic of goblins: generally being not as well-armed as dwarven soldiers, they make up for it in numbers.
  - Elves are much worse than goblins; they can siege a fortress with 50 individual squads! They both have the numbers for it (being breeding immortals) and need them (all their weapons are wooden).

List of tropes specific to each mode:

Fortress mode tropes: A-D

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 and take medical staff's time.
- You're actually rewarded for doing this to vampire dwarves: even though they feed on other dwarves, they still count as members of your fortress and thus you don't get a Game Over even if all you have left is one vampire dwarf. Since they don't hunger or age, you can just seal one in a room forever and your fortress will never die, even if the vampire goes insane from being naked. That is, until the ghosts come to pay him a visit...
An Interior Designer Is You: And your dwarves, of course.
Anvil on Head: Falling anvil traps have been worked out, and due to the peculiarities of how the game handles physics, they're about as dangerous as in a cartoon (IE: likely to stun and that's it.) Dropping arrows or seeds this way is much more lethal.
Apocalyptic Log: Engravings can devolve into this.
"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."
- This follow-up to Boatmurdered qualifies too.
Aristocrats Are Evil: You may be forced to conclude this. Though it's more evil in a "Pointy-Haired Boss" kind of way than an "Evil Overlord" kind of way.
Artificial Stupidity: The death of all too many dwarves.
- Particularly painful example from the old version: you, the supreme overlord, have mandated that no-one goes above-ground because of an army of besieging goblins...so dwarves march out to do a job, cancel whatever it was they were going to do, and then just loaf around and catch some rays until the goblins kill them. 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 a World of Warcraft expansion.
- This is a direct quote from this reddit (pay no mind with the extinction of the HFS, Arrival of the Golden Age, and the Cast Obsidian Tower):
"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."
- "My epic first dragon encounter!"
- 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....
- It's common knowledge that a dwarf being chased by an enemy will never run towards the heavily-trapped and fortified entrance to your fort, but in some other - inevitably fatal - direction.
- Goblins can turn up riding giant toads, which they appear to think makes them immune to drowning. It doesn't.
- The 2014 update brought multi-tile trees and climbing, and with it came a host of pathing bugs. Fleeing dwarves will often get stuck in trees, where they will proceed to starve to death. The best solution is often to clear away all trees while starting a fortress, which doesn't help with elven diplomacy...
- For a while with the early 2014 release, flying animals would often fly themselves into trees, nearly always causing instant death by blunt trauma.
Artistic License – Economics: The "Dwarven Economy" was so horrendously broken that version 0.31 disabled it completely. Memory hacking could be used to forcibly turn it on, but until version 0.40 it would simply crash the game (due to various bugs in the code).
- Three Panel Soul illustrates this.
- 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.
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.
Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: The dwarves have this in spades. In earlier versions it was much worse, with dwarves instantly abandoning whatever job they were in the middle of the second they got hungry, thirsty, or sleepy—which would occasionally spell doom for your fortress if the dwarf who was on his way to pull the lever that raised the drawbridge to seal out the invading goblin hordes suddenly decided he wanted a beer- but now dwarves will complete whatever job they're doing before going off to take care of something like that.
- Must. Have. Socks!
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 away from 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!
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 CMOA page for details on the most impressive achievements, but even run-of-the-mill fortresses make use of magma-based wave motion guns.
Bar Brawl: Added in the 2015 release, but only natural considering these dwarves: Occasionally, fistfights will be started among the rowdier dwarves in your fortress, and will often spread to just about everyone in the tavern, and occasionally the whole fortress. Death is unlikely unless children are involved or someone dodges off a cliff, but injuries are very, very likely, especially if they decide to bludgeon others with their (likely stone-made) goblets.
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.
- Eldritch Location: The Adamantine Space Elevator.
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 stone workers 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.
  - 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. Dwarves literally slow down when deprived of alcohol.
Boring, but Practical:
- Mass-manufacturing plant fibre clothes as Shop Fodder. They're very profitable, the logistics chain for making them is one of the less complex ones and traders always have loads of cloth anyway, but they're not exactly a dwarven sort of trade. (Though turning your fortress into a third-world sweatshop is definitely the sort of thing that appeals to the memetic DF player.)
- Using short swords and wooden shields for one's militia tends to be considered this by some, since wooden shields work just as well for everything but bashing for a fraction of the cost and swords can do everything spears, axes, and hammers can (with a stab, pommel strike, and slash), just not as well as any of them.
- For fortress defense, cage traps and drawbridges. The former is about the only thing that can instantly, reliably take anything not immune to traps out of the fight, and there are additional workarounds for rendering trap-immune creatures vulnerable to traps. The latter can be weaponized to crush most creatures flat, and if set up right you have a barrier no building destroyer can touch. Except for dragonfire and being in contact with certain superhot demons, which WILL melt any bridge eventually.
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.
The Caligula: Nobles often qualify as this, making absurd demands and ordering anybody who doesn't comply to be severely punished, usually by the Hammerer.
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.
- Only 60 productive hives.
Catch-22 Dilemma: An anvil is one of the most important tools to embark with, because it's the required tool for crafting anything, even other anvils. Starting without one, either from incompetence, a Self-Imposed Challenge, or the randomized "Embark Now!" option, leaves you unable to craft until a merchant comes by selling one or an offsite mission gets lucky. The wiki article has some fun pondering how this is possible.
Cave Behind the Falls: A common way to promote health of body and soul. Waterfalls in general are useful to generate mist which makes dorfs happier, but falling water (over a floor grate/bars) in major passages also makes a walk-thru Decontamination Chamber.
- On the Fun side, it creates potential for flooding if the sewer system below it fails, "job cancelled" message spam if it hoses dorfs trying to clean the grates from all this dirt and can significantly drop framerates on slower computers. Pressure plate-based automation can reduce these issues (as long as it doesn't fail due to a butterfly, guppy or crocodile, of course), but not quite eliminate them.
- Previously, if there was a waterfall on your map, dwarves had a strong tendency to cross the river at the point at which the water falls over the cliff, getting washed down and either being smashed against the bottom of the cliff or floating around until they drowned. Other dwarves would then try to claim their stuff, ad infinitum, until a whole fortress could be found floating face-down at the bottom of the falls.
Character Development: As of 0.44.11, significant events in a dwarf's life can permanently change their values and personality, for better or for worse.
A Child Shall Lead Them: The Mayor position goes to the dwarf with the highest social skills in your fort at election time. Since children raised in your fort cannot be given labors and spend all their time socializing, they tend to have very high social skills when they hit adulthood. Combined, this means that a lot of forts tend to wind up with at least one 12-year-old mayor.
Command & Conquer Economy: Though there are ways to reduce the amount of micromanaging required, generally you have to order everything to be built.
Conservation of Ninjutsu: Goblin sieges end up ramping up to sometimes hundreds of units, way more than you can ever hope getting into your militia. However, after a few years in the game, if you've kept them alive your militiadwarves will be so well-trained that the dozen or so of them will curb-stomp an army many times their sizes. It's not even that uncommon of an occurence to see one single dwarf destroying the entire siege.
The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: Unfortunate accidents tend to befall nobles. Like being accidentally told to pull a lever that for some inexplicable reason locks their bedroom door and opens a floodgate that fills the room with magma.
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.
- This is a Crazy Cat Dwarf Jpeg Image. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. On the item is an image of Urist McCatbeard. On the item is an image of cats. The cats form the beard of Urist McCatbeard. The artwork relates to the cats' adoption of Urist McCatbeard◊
- Also, catsplosions can be taken care of by gelding all incoming male cats for a while now.
Cruel Player-Character God: Half the point of the game.
- Crapsack World: See above.
Cycle of Hurting: A bridge can be linked to a lever to make it retract, dropping anything on it to whatever fiendish surprise you've set up below. For additional entertainment value, you can set a dwarf to keep pulling the lever. Invading hostiles that survive the fall will climb out and keep trying to cross repeatedly until their morale breaks.
Day Hurts Dark-Adjusted Eyes: This is called "cave adaptation". If a dwarf has spent more than a full year without seeing the sun, they'll experience mild dizziness, pain, and fatigue. If it's been more than a year and a half, they'll experience moderate symptoms, plus nausea—so if you don't go out of your way to get them some sun in their daily lives, your entrance hall is likely to be a perpetual vomit-splattered mess. Alternately, if you never let your dwarves see the sun, then being cave-adapted is effectively meaningless.
Death Course: A common method of fortress defense is to build an exterior entrance such that anything coming in must run down a gauntlet of traps, possibly while being peppered by crossbow bolts launched from behind fortifications.
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 a puddle of pus which does the same to others on contact, if they can possibly find any on the map. So once the player can afford this, entrances into habitable areas tend to involve something like a 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 brutalize a kobold, surviving without a scratch. Others will latch on to nightmare beasts from the dark places of the earth, even missing their entire lower bodies, and beat them into submission. Still others will simply stand out in extreme cold and heat until they die.
Did You Just Build A House In Cthulhu's Backyard?: It's finally been done, someone actually colonized hell!
- 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.
Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Deploy enough military and you can take down anything.
Difficult, but Awesome:
- Mist generators are contraptions that constantly generate mist, as the name implies. They are hard to build, and fluids being what they are you risk flooding your fortress. However, as mist provides dwarves with a happy thought, a properly-built generator in a busy spot will keep your dwarves very happy, and make tantrums a problem of the past.
- 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.
Digging to China: Digging to Fire and Brimstone Hell, more like.
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.
- Vampires get off relatively easy—punishment for a vampire sucking the blood out of a dozen of your fort's dwarves may only be 50 days in jail, or even just a punch in the face by the captain of the guard if you don't have restraints built. Not like it matters, however, as vampires are Made of Iron and will probably survive their own execution with nothing but some bruises and one very tired hammerer.
Dissonant Serenity: Reviewing the dwarves' descriptions after they die can reveal a number of them in varying stages of happiness at death. Some reasons:
- They "take joy in slaughter". Self-explanatory.
- Waterfall creates 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.
Drop the Hammer: The appropriately-named Hammerer, who administers dwarven justice with a big hammer and a worse attitude. It's advised you build a jail as soon as possible, because if the Sheriff doesn't have one, a noble can have an important dwarf executed because they didn't get their diamond-encrusted, soap-carved spoon.
Due to the Dead: An actual gameplay mechanic. Failing to give dwarves a decent burial, or at least a memorial slab somewhere, makes their next-of-kin very unhappy. It can also result in the deceased appearing as a ghost, with consequences that range from merely annoying to potentially disastrous. Nobles also get unhappy about not having an assigned tomb that befits their status in life.
- Since the 2012 release, this has gone somewhat meta. Remember those Ancient Tombs mentioned earlier? You can embark right next to one. And move in. As long as you don't disturb the coffin in the middle, which has consequences that can readily be imagined, the only thing stopping you from filling some poor schmuck's final resting place with drunken bipolar midgets and covering it in blood and vomit and inexplicable masterwork engravings of cheese is your own conscience.
Dug Too Deep:
- Dig deep enough and you will eventually reach Hell, instantly triggering an invasion of demons. More insidiously, all veins of adamantine (the best metal in the game) lead to Hell, making mining it a very risky prospect.
- Even before reaching Hell, when digging in the very lower levels of the world you can occasionally unearth a Forgotten Beast that was sealed inside an air pocket inside the layers of rock. Said Forgotten Beast will usually wipe out your miners and make a beeline straight for your fortress.

Fortress mode tropes: E-H

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 start-up, 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.
Evil-Detecting Dog: A cat will reveal if its new owner is a vampire in the adoption announcement. This is considered as a bug.
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.)
- Since their addition to the game, egglayers, especially birds, have become even more spectacular at breeding than cats, since they can produce 10+ young at a time and unhatched clutches don't count toward the species population cap, allowing them to surpass it with ease. This is usually known as a chicksplosion or an eggsplosion. Two notable examples are saltwater crocodiles and cave crocodiles, which lay up to 70 eggs and up to 60 eggs respectively. Combined with their valuable materials and strength in combat, this makes them extremely useful to a fort.
Fast Tunnelling: Mining is much faster than would be physically possible in Real Life. This is mainly an Anti-Frustration Feature, but can also be Hand Waved because it's dwarves doing it.
Fluffy Tamer: The Dungeon Master in earlier versions, who let dwarves tame all sorts of strange and horrible creatures, ranging from dragons to crocodiles to Giant Cave Spiders. 34.06 removed the dungeon master and now lets you tame almost any animal right from the start. The catch is that without knowledge from the parent civilization or a really good animal trainer... well, to quote Toady, "your fort might end up like a Fatal Attractions (2010) episode."
Fungus Humongous: The Tower-Caps, mushrooms so large they can be made into beds. There are 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.
Guide Dang It!: The controls. There's a wiki for a reason.
- Hell, the everything. Without a guide, the naïve way to figure out which stone is magma-safe is by losing fort after fort by trial-and-error.
  - You can read the "raws", text files which describe almost everything that can exist in the game. This includes the melting point of the various stones.
  - One of the status menus (for enabling/disabling various types of stone in construction) lists all types of stone, states which are magma-safe, and even lists additional uses for each.
Heroic BSoD: With the revamp of emotions in 2014, an unhappy fortress no longer tantrums en-masse. Instead, a dwarf may react to a close fellow dwarf's death by breaking down and sobbing.
Hide Your Children: Dwarf Fortress isn't squeamish about putting children and infants in terrible peril. Dwarven women will even give birth whilst in battle. Babies in fact make good shields for mothers who run into battle.
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.
Hypnotic Creature: 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.

Fortress mode tropes: I-L

I Call It "Vera": If a dwarf gets sufficiently attached to a weapon, they will bestow a name upon it.
Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Menacing spike traps.
- This Is a Drill: Enormous corkscrew traps.
Improbable Weapon User / Improvised Weapon: Coins, pebbles, and even your opponent's vomit can be thrown to devastating effect.
Industrialized Evil: When introduced to the game, merpeople, although unbutcherable, had bones that were several orders of magnitude more valuable than most other sea creatures. Cue several attempting to set up seaside forts for the purposes of establishing "mermaid farms" with which to capture, breed, and air-drown merpeople, then sell their bones for a huge profit. Toady One responded by nerfing the value of merperson bones to the default.
Interface Spoiler: An attempt was made to avoid this, but it wasn't completely successful. While in development, Toady realized that vampires would be unable to infiltrate the player's fortress without the UI giving them away. So, he modified the UI and a few game mechanics to accommodate stealthy vampires, including:
- Dwarves disappearing and anonymous crimes. In the old system, you are informed when a dwarf is attacked or killed and told who the culprit is. Now, you are only informed if there is a witness to notice the deed. Dwarves who haven't been seen recently are quietly added to a list of missing units, crimes will likewise be silently added to the justice screen if there are no witnesses. So dwarves can turn up dead and you won't know who killed them, but if you're attentive you'll know they vanished. Vampires can also frame other dwarves for their crimes.
- Migrant skills. Vampires were given old, unused skills before other migrants were. So, the vampire was the only newcomer with a half-forgotten trade. All migrants can have old skills now.
- Fake identities. Previously, you knew almost everything to know about a dwarf by reading his bio. Now they can assume false identities to hide their real age and potentially lengthy kill records. Their relationships can hint at their identity: a spouse not present in the fortress or armies of relatives suggest a vampire. This is were problems creep in: if the dwarf worships a god then that deity will be listed as a relationship. The deity's history can be viewed, providing a list of worshipers and curse victims, and listing a vampire's original identity. If you assign a nickname to a dwarf, the list will display the nickname rather then the assumed and real names. Thus, vampires can be spotted via the UI by nicknaming all newcomers, because giving Urist McCheesemaker the nickname "Doofus" results in the god's history reading "Cursed 'Doofus' McStonecrafter to prowl the night in search of blood".
- Played straight with the advent of dwarfs being horrified at the deaths of other dwarfs, however. Now, it's possible to find "was horrified by the death of Urist McVampirebait" messages in dwarfs' thoughts; this is pretty much proof positive that the dwarf in question is the vampire responsible, especially if Urist McVampirebait's body had not been found and thus didn't even realise they were dead until seeing that thought.
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.
Invasion of the Baby Snatchers: Goblins. They're actually fairly nice to any young dwarfs they snatch, though.
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.
It Gets Easier: Dwarves have a psychological trauma stat. As it increases, they're less affected by negative thoughts.
Kicked Upstairs: Dwarves with little-used occupations, like cheesemaking, soapmaking, and fish dissecting, are better suited for promotion to management positions than hard-working miners, carpenters and masons, since noble dwarves cannot do real work apart from hauling goods to and from the trade depot.
Kill It with Fire: Flooding a map with magma. Dropping critters into magma. Dropping magma onto critters. Floors made of lignite or graphite grates set on fire. Flamethrowing critters from fire imps to dragons plus some machinery to restrain and/or protect them... you get the idea.
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. Or anything that needs air to live, for that matter. Should the player make a mistake somewhere in the design or construction, it's quite likely to end up with the entire fortress becoming submerged.
- 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 Adds Awesome: Rivers of magma flowing through your fortress ranks high on the cool-o-meter. It's also useful as a free infinite source of heat for forges and kilns, as well as particularly fiendish traps.
The Lava Caves of New York: As noted just above and below, you can deliberately engineer this, and it is very useful (and potentially extremely "fun") to do so.
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.
Lava Pot Volcano: Because of the way volcanos are generated, they almost always have this appearance when they break the surface. Typically, their "pool" is simply the top of a very tall lava pipe extending down to the magma sea deep underground.
Leeroy Jenkins: The Monster Slayers that you get once you've breached the caverns, who desire nothing more than to grab whatever they have and go live in the dank depths of the earth to kill everything that comes across. Nevermind the fact their skills can usually fall short of what you need to even survive down there when the caverns are a Death World even by DF standards, the fact Forgotten Beasts prowl the depths, they most likely know this, and they still charge at them alone, or the fact the dwarves they're "helping" aren't obligated in the least to bail them out if things go wrong. While not all of them are dwarves, one does still wonder if they're like Warhammer Slayers and this is all just a form of elaborate suicide.
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, you just burn the entire fortress area with lava, or the enemy civilization runs out of things to throw at you.
- Plans for future updates indicate that this will only get even worse; there are already plans to incorporate miners into sieges, who will dig their way to the inside of your fortress if you don't stop them fast enough.
- Climbing has been all-but-guaranteed for invaders in the next release. Thought those 5-unit-high walls were good enough? Think again!
Loads and Loads of Rules: We're not kidding about the "insanely complicated" thing.
Lord British Postulate: If it exists, the players will find a way to kill it. Probably in a really awesome fashion. Then they'll usually move on to weaponizing it.
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 center-most embark-map square as possible. This can occasionally be a nuisance if you're the wrong side of a river from a good site to dig in and haven't got much in the way of materials, and occasionally causes a 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.
Luxury Prison Suite: Because Dwarves are rarely ever thrown in jail for reasons a player would deem legitimate (usually it happens due to the capricious whims of a noble), it's generally suggested to make your prisons (assuming you do have one) as comforting as possible so the (probably wrongfully) imprisoned dwarf doesn't become too unhappy, and/or dead from not being provided food or water.

Fortress mode tropes: M-P

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, turning into unresponsive Empty Shells, 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 world written on it. Including 73 pictures 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.
Made of Indestructium: Artifact furniture can't be destroyed by trolls and other building-destroyers, but they'll still make a bee-line to it and try. This makes artifacts very useful to bait building-destroyers away from your fortress (and into a field of traps.)
Make It Look Like an Accident: So, one of your nobles is demanding you make them glass windows... despite failing to notice that you're not in a locale where there's glass. Shortly after, many players have found that the aforementioned nobles have suffered an "unfortunate accident" which they had nothing to do with whatsoever.
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...
Miscarriage of Justice: Entirely possible, especially if a noble is upset. Vampires are especially cunning about diverting unwanted attention from their bloodsucking antics. It's even possible for a victim to be convicted of the crime that was committed against them.
Mordor: Really evil biomes have special plants and horrible things like eyestalk and finger "grass", showers of blood and cursed mist with similar symptoms to forgotten beasts. And corpses tend to spontaneously animate as zombies.
Mundane Utility: Bottomless Pits? You now have a garbage disposal. Unicorns? Delicious, and products manufactured from their bodies fetch a fine price. Necromancer towers nearby? Raiding them is an excellent source of fine literature. Magma? Invaluable.
- If you are lucky enough to find a breeding pair of rocs or hydras, they can make a remarkable addition... to your meat industry. Both have a huge size, rivaled by few creatures in the game, have valuable remains, and rocs in particular can even be fully domesticated (although keep them away from your military dwarves, they attack each others due to a bug).
- Farming merpeople is no longer economically viable in un-modded 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.
- A whole lot of elaborate mechanical Pointless Doomsday Devices can be used like this. Pumping magma up to a more usable level? Melt your enemies, or use it to make magma-powered forges more accessible. Combine it with a water pump to encase goblins in obsidian? You now have a way to mass-produce a valuable stone. Cage trap caught some otherwise-dangerous creature? Install the cage as furniture for your dwarves to admire, keeping them content.
Naked Nutter: Dwarves who become too upset can go insane in a variety of ways. One of them is becoming "Stark Raving Mad". Dwarves in this state take off all their clothes and run around aimlessly until they are calmed down, or die of starvation or dehydration.
Name McAdjective: As dwarves have their own names and tend to share first names, the name "Urist" (dwarven for "dagger") became the standard placeholder with "McJob" being a reference to how generic dwarves are in other fantasy worlds. With this it makes it easier to talk about specific dwarves and their jobs like "Urist McCarpenter" or "Urist McSheriff or "Urist McUselessNoble.
Nintendo Hard: Not only is the game hard to master, it's also hard to learn..
- The community made more than a little noise over the fact that Tiny Pirate's Dwarf Fortress book was not published by a publisher as Brady or Prima, known for their game guides, but by O'Reilly, known for publishing technical manuals.
No Kill like Overkill: 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.
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—or, gods forbid, husks and thralls. See Killer Rabbit and Made of Iron, above.
One Drink Will Kill the Baby: Nope. Pregnant female dwarves still need alcohol to function properly, and so do their new-born babies.
One-Hit Kill: There are some very nasty random weather effects out there. Waterburned, our own succession fort, has some downright homicidal "evil glooms" that just kill the hell out of anything they touch. Of course, since this is Dwarf Fortress we're talking about here, a cloud of instant death isn't the worst weather effect possible.
- Atom Smashers. Essentially they're drawbridges fashioned into traps by the player. It somehow has the ability to instantly eliminate anything to the atomic level, be they creatures or objects, to the point where there will be absolutely no trace of their existance anymore. It has limits however, and creatures of equal size or bigger than an Elephant will instead break the Atom Smasher.
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 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 later release added a toggle to turn it on and off, satisfying both camps.
Pointless Civic Project: Building at least one is traditional, the more gratuitous, the better. The forum even ran a contest to see who could build the best tower out of soap, in a game where soap is surprisingly hard to come by.
Poisoned Weapons: The Forgotten Beast syndromes can be applied to weapons. See the Body Horror entry to understand how much Fun may occur from this.
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.
- Taken to literal levels when the mood affects the mother of a baby dwarf. To quote a certain player:
  "Miss Dwarfette, hereforth referred to as Casey McAnthony, was nursing another baby, a five-month old dwarfette named Litast, and only child after the miscarriage. And she was taken by a fell mood. (...) I didn't realize she would go for the nearest member of the fort. (...) Maybe I got lucky and she murderificated a vampire before it could do harm. (...) NOPE. IT WAS HER FUCKING FIVE MONTH OLD DAUGHTER. SHE KILLED HER DAUGHTER AND TURNED HER INTO A PICK. A GODDAMN PICK. WHERE DO YOU EVEN GET ENOUGH BABY FOR A PICKAXE? THERE ISN'T ENOUGH BABY."
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.
Precautionary Corpse Disposal:
- Corpses not given a proper burial or memorial will spawn a ghost to haunt the area. What that ghost will do ranges from generic haunting shennanigans to organizing their own Wake.
- All corpses can potentially arise as (potentially hostile) undead when in certain Evil biomes or in the presence of a necromancer. Under these circumstances, some players resort to disposing of them via destructive means, such as dumping them in magma or using the "Dwarven atom smasher," to ensure they don't threaten the fortress's survival.
Pressure Plate: The cornerstone of all Dwarven automation. Can react either on liquid levels or weight of a creature or minecart.
Priceless Paperweight: Some legendary artifacts created by your dwarves and by other civilisations are elaborately crafted examples of mundane objects, like buckets and bins. If not displayed on a pedestal, the dwarves will use these artifacts just like an ordinary item of the same type, e.g. assigning a legendary bucket to the hospital chest for giving water to patients.

Fortress mode tropes: Q-T

Rain of Blood: This is a regular occurrence in evil biomes, when it's not raining disease-inducing slime.
Really Gets Around: Version 0.40.06 had a bug where dwarves were literally "breeding like animals." Instead of only having children with their husbands, dwarven women chose a random man to be the father of their children.
Respawning Enemies: Area and site specific enemies re-spawn every year; as does magma, which is technically part of the terrain, but can certainly seem like an enemy if your design relies on that vent you drained being permanently drained.
Rollercoaster Mine: Minecarts were added in version 0.34.08. Carts transport 5x more than wheelbarrows, can be filled with anything (up to magma, if the material allows, without frying the driver) and dumped automatically at the pre-rigged point without slowing down. They also easily accelerate to great speed, which makes them derail on the next turn, grapeshotting their contents at dangerous velocities. And, naturally, easily ride down anyone not shy of the tracks' "low traffic" status, be it a cow, goblin or tired dwarf homing on the closest bed no matter whose.
Royals Who Actually Do Something: They're not supposed to, but a bug makes the monarch (and every other noble, for that matter) works and even fight like any other dwarf.
Rube Goldberg Device: It's amazing what can be done with a couple of pumps, windmills, gear shafts, mechanisms, axles, levers and pressure plates.
- We did mention the computer, yeah? And the orbital magma cannon?
Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: Well, more like "Rube Goldberg loves your guts splattered all over this needlessly-complicated deathtrap." A favorite pastime is the invention of various elaborate ways of dealing with pests such as nobles and the like.
- 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.
- This, of course, is used by cunning players to trap or kill building destroyers.
- 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.
- In adventure mode, any place that has loot laying on the ground is either a trap, surrounded by nasty monsters, or belongs to someone, and if you take it, Losing is Fun.
- "Curious underground structures", otherwise known as demonic fortresses. Basically, they're giant dungeons full of undead, with a masterwork adamantine sword lying somewhere on the bottom level. Taking the sword opens a gateway to Hell.
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.^note
Self-Imposed Challenge: This fortress will never trade! This entire fortress will be sober! This fortress will be nude! And so on and so forth.
- The story that immortalized the name "Urist" was a challenge game to make an entire fortress with a single dwarf (i.e., killing off all the others).
Spike Balls of Doom: The spiked ball trap component.
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.
Stay in the Kitchen: Invoked by players due to game design. Female dwarves are equally capable of fighting, but they bear children regularly and will carry their "Dwarven Baby Shields" everywhere. So it is normally recommended to restrict the military and hunting of dangerous game to males only, except for players intentionally going for dead babies.
Stink Bomb:
- Any corpse left to rot for a decent period of time will start emitting Miasma, a thick purple smog that gives dwarves extremely unhappy thoughts. Zombies that aren't completely rotted tend to be a walking version of this.
- Certain toxins/poisons can cause immediate rotting of body parts without first killing the dwarf suffering from the syndrome. You wind up with walking Stink Bombs stinking up the whole fort, giving bad moods to all your dwarves, and generally clogging up the hallways with opaque miasma.
Supreme Chef: Let a dwarf make enough meals and they will eventually become a legendary cook, producing gastronomic delights worth a king's ransom out of lizard tripe and yak intestines.
Tantrum Throwing: If a dwarf becomes depressed enough they might start smashing or throwing things. One is fine, but if the dwarf pisses off other dwarves (or worse, kills them), other dwarves may start other tantrums and generally end up to eleven in a fortress-ending tantrum spiral.
That Poor Cat: Cats are given to wandering freely, including plenty of jaunts in the fresh air outside your fortress, and aren't too concerned with such trifles as an order to get the hell inside the fortress, that horde of goblins and trolls are not cat people! On the plus side, they do a great job of delaying invaders, who will chase them single-mindedly (often straight into traps) while you get your defenders in position.
Training from Hell: What many players resort to.
- 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.
- In 2013, Bay 12 forumgoers developed the "Shaft of Enlightenment" after they discovered a glitch involving being pushed down a two-storey fall onto a spear. The training involved getting pushed into this again and again until you either parry the spear and achieve enlightenment or die.
Trap Door: Retractable bridges are often used this way. As well as floor grates, bars and hatches, though they aren't so unbreakable.
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.

Fortress mode tropes: U-Z

Underground City: A large enough fortress can become a self-sustaining city. Assuming it survives that long, of course.
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, being too large and too small, respectively. Understandable, as they are vastly different size compared to dwarves. Goblin and elven equipment is the same size as dwarven one, but is also inferior in quality: goblins are incapable of smelting bronze and steel, so they only use copper and iron, and elves make their entire wargear out of wood. Including swords and axes.
- As of version 0.31, you can now equip those exotic weapons whips, pikes, and bows. Also, any weapons can be used in traps.
- Useless metal items can be melted down for metal bars. Thus leading to the joke that goblins are the fourth ore of iron...
Uriah Gambit: One popular way of getting rid of unwanted dwarves is to set them in a squad and send them on an entirely impossible mission against an enemy site, so that they die in the attempt. And if they somehow manage to succeed, try it again until they finally get killed, or end up conquering an offsite location and stay there to never return.
Victory Is Boring: Once you've gotten past the learning curve, making a completely safe and secure fortress is actually relatively easy, but most players consider this to be removing all the "fun."
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.
Walk on Water: Given enough speed, minecarts can go skiprocking on water. Or magma.
War Elephants: Can be trained as of the 2010 version. Keeping them trained is another matter, though, as elephants (and a few other grazers) are bugged and starve faster than they can eat. The usual solution is editing the raw files to decrease their grazing requirements or just turn off grazing for them altogether.
What the Hell, Player?: Most of the cruelty you can inflict on your dwarves will go unnoticed, but if a crime is reported and you choose to convict a different dwarf than the one that numerous dwarves are accusing (or worse, a child, a baby, an animal, or someone who was dead at the moment of the deed, or the victim him- or herself) everyone will be understandably shocked.
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.
Worst Aid: Training a new medic will involve a lot of incidental malpractice. One notorious misdiagnosis by a skill-less dwarven idiot led to a minor cut on the arm being misdiagnosed as rotting lungs which were then removed surgically. "Oh. They weren't rotting after all. Let's take a moment of silence for Urist McLearningExperience."
Worthless Yellow Rocks: Silver, gold and (to a lesser extent) platinum are so plentiful in embark sites that have them that it is possible to furnish whole rooms with chairs and tables forged out of the stuff (and doing so is a good way to increase the value of spaces that need to meet appraisal targets, like guildhalls). Subverted in that precious metals and crafts made from them still have high monetary value in trading, in spite of their abundance in the world.
Zombie Apocalypse: Quickly becoming the easiest way for a fortress in an evil biome or within the vicinity of a necromancer's tower to die, due to corpses and body parts spontaneously rising up to attack you and refusing to stay dead. Some turn victims into nearly unstoppable life-hating husks/thralls, so if the cloud was made of thrall-making dust, "FUN" is more likely to have the fort than the other way around.

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.
Anyone Can Die, which leads to...
Apocalypse How: With enough wrecked fortresses and berserking adventurers, especially in a small enough world, civilizations will eventually deteriorate and crumble. You can then proceed to cause the extinction of all sentient races. Then, that of every single living being in the world. And because The Toady One Thinks of Everything, your world will acknowledge this by entering the Age of Twilight/Death/Emptiness. Age of Twilight is when the majority of creatures in the world are mundane; the ages of Death or Emptiness are entered when there are no more civilized beings in the world - the Age of Death after there has been at least an Age of Myth/Heroes/Twilight, the Age of Emptiness if no such ages have existed. Even in these desolate Ages, you can still play.
Badass Boast: Legendary enemies who are capable of speaking will tell of their feats as soon as they can see you. DF2014 lets you boast to anyone you can have a conversation with.
- The player character's boasts get more badass depending on whom you've managed to kill. If your victim was a high-ranking dwarf or elf, your character may make a racist comment while boasting.
Bag of Holding: Your adventurer can carry around a dozen dead wolves, three barrels of booze, a massive supply of food, and 800 million fistfuls of sand in his backpack, but the weight will still slow him to a snail's pace.
- Carrying a giant corpse will slow you down significantly. Picking up a second will slow you down significantly less. There's no difference between carrying three giant corpses in your backpack and carrying thirty.
Big Labyrinthine Building: Fortresses and Mountain Halls of Dwarven Civilizations are infamously labyrnithine: they are massive, span multiple Z-layers, have plenty of rooms and no clear way to get out. Starting in one and then trying to get out can count as an adventure in itself.
Brutal Bonus Level: Angelic Vaults. There is practically no reason for you to go inside one except for the challenge and bragging rights. The freakishly strong creatures inside there will never travel outside because they were created to protect the slab within the Vault and pose no threat to anyone. It also contains the closest thing to a Final Boss Adventure Mode has: An Archangel
Combat Pragmatist: Everyone. Especially you. You can break limbs, disarm foes, and spend half a day whaling on their unconscious body until they die. There is no such thing as chivalry, only Fun.
Coup de Grâce: Unconscious foes are open to any attack you like, which will be guaranteed to hit and do massive damage. So you can execute them anyway you like. The AI goes for decapitation/skull crushing (even if the head is much better armored than other vital parts), but players have been known to drag the process out.
Curb-Stomp Battle: What trying to take on a Vault with anything less than legendary in all relevant combat skills and a full set of the highest quality gear will quite certainly lead to you being on the receiving end of.
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).
- Though some will specifically ask to be lead to a warrior's death when asked about their profession, often after describing the sheer boredom of their profession in their hometown.
Dump Stat: Adventurer creation started letting you lower attributes below average to free up more points, but some attributes currently serve no purpose in Adventurer Mode (Creativity, Linguistic Ability, Patience) or at all (Musicality). Also, Analytical Ability is only used for knapping stones, which is something that is essentially only done for Stat Grinding purposes.
- As of 42.01 these stats are no longer useless, as you now can write books and perform art forms of all different kinds, of course you may not want to play as a bard, so this still applies in some cases. In fact, some players have taken to dumping combat stats so they can be better bards! Why fight dragons when you can gather an army of poets and take on the GODS?
Grievous Harm with a Body: You can use anything as an Improvised Weapon, including your opponent's leg.
Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: No direct difficulty levels, but in adventure mode, there are three tiers for the level of ability and attribute points you start with, the latter of which also decides your maximum attributes: peasant, hero, and demigod.
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, socks, 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. Entire builds have been made around thrown bones and ballista bolts.
"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. Or modding the files to play as a tyrannosaurus.
I Own This Town: Adventurers can claim a site for themselves and try to convince the locals to serve you. Works best if you kill the prior leader right after you stake your claim.
I Surrender, Suckers: You can fake a surrender to get a surprise attack. This puts you and the enemy in no quarter combat, so that they won't fall for your tricks again.
It's a Wonderful Failure: If your fortress was abandoned or wiped you, Adventure Mode allows you to explore the shambles of your once-thriving fortress.
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 deaths in adventurer mode.
Kleptomaniac Hero: As of version 34.01, you can take anything lying around not marked as being for sale without angering anyone, including gear lying around in keeps and stockpiled goods in warehouses (except for stuff in cabinets, which can't be opened because of a bug).
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.
Monster Adventurers: With a bit of supported scripting, you, too, can now become a Scorpion Man and stab wolves in the face with venom. Any species capable of supporting a civilisation can be made playable.
News Travels Fast: All you have to do to let an entire city know that you killed some monster is tell one person.
Nintendo Hard: Even more than fortress mode! Dying by being surrounded by a wolf pack after traveling out of your home is incredibly common.
Previous Player-Character Cameo: You can meet your own retired adventurer. Better yet, you can recruit them, too! Or break every bone in their body and gank their stuff. Or loot their long-dead corpse.
Rated M for Manly: So very much, bordering on Testosterone Poisoning, sometimes. There is not much to do (yet) but explore, kill stuff, or take quests which are about killing stuff. Which is already pretty manly, but add numerous bugs, especially in earlier versions of the game, and you suddenly have the potential to become superheroically badass.
- Throwing was once hilariously overpowered. You could pick up your own blood and throw it and kill stuff with it! Or throw things you shouldn't really be able to throw (but which are utterly awesome to throw, nevertheless), like large serrated discs, dragon corpses, or other stuff.
- Carrying infinite weight. You get slowed down by what you weigh, so it's not very useful in combat or in exploration, but yes, you can easily carry a hundred elephant corpses.
- The Badass Boasts named enemies produce before fighting (to seemingly no-one in particular if you're nearby, but in hiding) seem right out of a Conan movie.
- Everyone seems to be a Proud Warrior Race Guy. "I will follow you if you lead me to glory and death", indeed.
- Wrestling is very manly, and it's not pro wrestling either! Have you ever wanted to wrestle with a bear and win? You can, with sufficient skill and strength!
- You can wield any item in the world as a weapon and strike people with it without penalties (excepting perhaps speed). A fork? No problem, and they are actually good at piercing armor (don't laugh). A sock? Yes, and you can kill people with it! A sword, or any other weapon? Of course. A pickax? Yes, and it's pretty damn deadly. A life-size iron statue of some dwarf, which is around seven times heavier than your character is? YES! The corpse of that elephant you just killed? Yes.
- There is a special screen just for legendary enemies telling you what they have done, which can be quite a list.
Retired Badass: Retirement is the only way to play a new game in the same region without killing your current adventurer. Additionally, your adventurer may move on from random monster slaying, after 'retiring' into some other profession during world-gen. Better hope they didn't migrate to the town your (dwarven, or otherwise) adventuring party was about to pillage...
Sacred Hospitality: Thankfully, something given by members of any civ you haven't committed a crime against, otherwise you'd be screwed when night comes and you're alone.
Shoplift and Die: It used to be that if you stole anything in adventure mode, you would automatically be acknowledged as an enemy by everyone in the civilization, who would then immediately proceed to attack you. Toady has stated that fixing this is on his to-do list; part of enabling the "Thief" Adventurer Role means having thievery make the townsfolk attempt to sleuth you out (which you can counter by changing your appearance), then arrest you alive if you surrender.
- 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.
Testosterone Poisoning: As already discussed under Rated M for Manly, one can play their adventurer(s) this way. Nothing is stopping you from going around murdering outlaws wearing only a loincloth and two axes made from the bones of your enemies, going unarmed against an army marching towards your home town and/or hunting ducks by grabbing them by the throat and biting their head off.
The Stateless: Any player choosing the Outsider background starts in the wilderness, instead of a village, since they have no allegiance to any power.
Talking Is a Free Action: Previously played straight, as conversation was always one-on-one, instantaneous, and in its own menu. As of version 0.40, conversion is now in "real time", so to speak, as each bit of speech is an action directed toward a specific person or to everyone in the area, while conversations are overheard by anyone in earshot.
Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: When peasants warn that you shouldn't travel alone at night, lest the bogeymen get you, listen to them!
Tyrannicide: The player is able to slay rulers in adventure mode; some of these rulers can be demons or other dark creatures.
Unwinnable by Design. The game has no real end, and there is no real way to "win". You set the goals yourself.
Video Game Caring Potential: The 2014 update to Adventurer Mode conversations allow you to, among other things, open up a barter menu with NPCs, companions included. Handing over spare armor in exchange for any clothing competing with that equipment slot (so they'll actually equip it) can help your meatshields last a little longer.
Video Game Cruelty Potential: If you find a small, defenseless creature (like a groundhog or monkey), you can use them to raise your wrestling skills significantly. You can go up several levels in a very short time, provided you're willing to be unnecessarily cruel to your opponent. Especially if you're playing a creature like a bronze colossus, who is capable of pinching off body parts. Start with the fingers and toes, then pull out the teeth, then ears, eyes, nose, any other extremities you can target, then finish off with a pinch to the head...if you want to finish him. You could always just leave the poor guy to bleed to death, if he's still alive when you're done.
Villain Teleportation: If you try to run away from bogeymen, they just teleport into your path.
Walking the Earth: Adventurer Mode becomes this, over the course of a long-lived adventuring career. If your character comes from a particularly uneventful corner of the world, then it begins this way.
Wide-Open Sandbox: Taken to an extreme in that there is no way to finish or win the game, and the only goal is to not lose ...interest in whatever weird thing you're doing that non-dwarven lawyers would surely advise against (mostly because you're not following the live long and prosper model).
World of Badass: Indeed. Everything that isn't hardcoded to flee will fight you to the death. Even the children, even the harmless pets. Also, once you reach a fleeing creature it will stop fleeing and attack you, and only unconsciousness (or death) will stop them. Are you a legendary swordsdwarf and is your enemy a toddler who was just born? Doesn't matter, toddler throws itself into the fight with reckless abandon.
- 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 unholy inhabitants. The Deathgate community fortress actually had a random duck earn the unofficial title Darkwing the Netherfowl after it managed to kill two demons by itself.
World of Ham: At least, all your enemies seem to be hammy. Even the NPC's go on that way sometimes.
You All Meet in an Inn: Taverns tend to be one of the best places for beginning adventurers to recruit companions.
You Kill It, You Bought It: As of the 2014 version, the simplest way to claim a site in Adventure mode is to shout your claim to it, then immediately kill the previous leader.
- As of version 0.40.17, night creatures can now kill the owner of a shop, and then take over the shop (and yet they still sell things to people, just like the previous owners.)

Urist McTroper cancels Play Dwarf Fortress: Interrupted by TV Tropes.

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