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> What’s your favorite bug and what caused it? > A: It’s probably boring for me to say, but I just can’t beat the drunken cat bug... That was the one where the

by mabbo 5y ago

> What’s your favorite bug and what caused it? > A: It’s probably boring for me to say, but I just can’t beat the drunken cat bug... That was the one where the cats were showing up dead all over the tavern floor, and it turned out they were ingesting spilled alcohol when they cleaned their paws. I think that bug explains very well just how deeply complex Dwarf Fortress really is. Drinks can be spilled. Some drinks have alcohol. If cats step in something it sticks to their paws. Cats clean their paws, causing them to ingest what's on them. Enough alcohol will kill a cat. Put together: dead drunken cats.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Unfortunately it remains unexplained (by the article) why this is considered a bug. It would be unethical to test, but this seems like perfectly cromulent behavior one might actually see in real life.
- paavohtl 5y ago
  IIRC the actual bug was that cats licking their paws made them consume an entire tankard's worth of beer with each lick, which made them drunk (and dead) with just a few licks.
  - Arrath 5y ago
    Yeah this is what I recall being the case as well.
- yung_steezy 5y ago
  I agree these types of features really embiggen the game
  - beamatronic 5y ago
    They're perfectly cromulent features.
    - ant6n 5y ago
      careful, its unpossible not to get downvoted with these kinds of jokes (err, low effort comments).
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Cats in bars don’t die of alcohol poisoning regardless of the amount of beer spilled on the floor.
  - Filligree 5y ago
    The actual bug here was a mistake in handling of liquid volume. The cats were ingesting a tankard’s with with each lick, and they’re smaller than dwarves, so that killed them.
  - praptak 5y ago
    I read about a cat who used to visit a pub and learned to lick beer from under taps. The cat got banned from the pub for its own good but I don't believe it was anywhere close to poisoning.
    - kingofclams 5y ago
      Do you have a source for this?
      - praptak 5y ago
        No, I read this a long time ago in a paper press article and I cannot dig up anything electronic.
- MikeTheGreat 5y ago
  My experiences with cats (at least in my own life) is that cats prefer not walk into an area with a sticky floor if they can avoid it. Clearly there's a bug here where the cat will keep wandering around on the sticky floor, and then keep consuming the alcohol off it's paws. The obvious fix is to add a feature wherein different creatures have preferences about where they go next, and then use that to have the cats avoid the bar floor if they can. As a bonus you can include stuff like "Cats don't like hanging out in crowded areas" so that they'll also stay out of the main hall when the army is gathering to muster forth, etc. (/s, but only slightly :) )
  - Filligree 5y ago
    No need for the /s. This is precisely the level of simulation Toady is hoping for, and there are many equivalent examples already.
  - db48x 5y ago
    Good suggestion. It would occasionally be nice if the _dwarves_ would avoid stepping in things and tracking it all over the place. The only reason that the cats were in the tavern in the first place is that pets follow their owner* around.
    - philipov 5y ago
      The * refers to the fact that cats are the owners, and dwarves are their pets. A truly accurate understanding of how cats work.
  - queuebert 5y ago
    And this is how you get 700k lines of code.
- alexander-litty 5y ago
  Liquid items are funny in the game. When you look at an item listing and you see something like “Mead”, that is truly all the item is —- it isn’t a cup of mead, it’s just a vague amount of the liquid mead itself, as if your hand was the only thing keeping it from hitting the ground. But there are containers that can hold your liquid. You have mugs and goblets that hold one quantity of “Mead”, giving the impression that one count of mead is like a generic serving size. You also have barrels and pots that hold stacks of “Mead”. Creatures are kind of like walking containers and have their own detailed inventories. Among the things you’d expect to find like armor, weapons, and books, you might also find a “coating of tears” on a crying dwarf, or perhaps a “spattering of blood” on a murderous elf. They’re not just static inventories for the fun of a story, creatures do interact with them and use them. Dwarves covered in a vomit item will (hopefully) put any available soap in their inventory and use it to clean themselves in water, for example. Cats are simple and just clean themselves with no water or soap needed. The catch with them is that they ingest whatever they have cleaned off of them. So, putting all this together: The problem was that cats pick up a whole “serving size” of alcohol and proceed to clean themselves, ingesting the entire serving. The bug surrounds the vagueness of liquid sizes. And it was fixed accordingly! Cats are still vulnerable to the effects of self-cleaned alcohol, but the strength is now proportional. https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195#c33644 https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195...
  - db48x 5y ago
    My favorite feature in Dwarf Fortress is that all eyelids automatically clean their associated eyeball, just so that players don’t post about how their dwarves have vomit on their eyeballs.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      Ahh, so if a dwarf would have a missing eyelid because of combat or some mining accident, then they could have vomit on their eyeballs.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- shrimpx 5y ago
  The bug was a numerical error that would cause cats to drink something like the equivalent of a pint of beer for every lick, and therefore die prematurely. He talks about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY
markus_zhang 5y ago
Not sure what's in the code, but I think each cat (which is some sort of entity by itself) is composed by body parts, which at the lowest level owns a bunch of attributes/components. Would that make sense?
- pixl97 5y ago
  The bug in this case was the minimum alcohol value a cat could like from its paws was above the cats LD100, so if they licked their feet when soaked in beer they would die.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    Ah, that's interesting, so it's actually a bug. But yeah it shows the sophisticated system underneath.
ericschn 5y ago
The beginning of this video https://youtu.be/VAhHkJQ3KgY https://youtu.be/VAhHkJQ3KgY has Tarn Adams speaking about this bug.
- mabbo 5y ago
  This is my favourite bug story I have ever heard. And told so well.
- Agentlien 5y ago
  I love that video. I tend to link it when I want to explain Dwarf Fortress to someone.
7373737373 5y ago
I wish there was a description of how this works technically
- mabbo 5y ago
  ericschn below has a link to a video of Tarn explaining it. It's wonderful.
partomniscient 5y ago
10 years ago, there was this article about another unexpected behaviour: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-o...
AndyMcConachie 5y ago
One of my favorite Twitter users. https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs It's just funny Dwarf Fortress bugs.
- suzzer99 5y ago
  LOL - 5386: Imprisoned Vampire Elected Mayor
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    > Imprisoned Vampire Elected Mayor That's not even (necessarily) a bug: whether convicts can win/hold elected positions is a aspect of applicable law (albeit a weird one), vampires (IIRC) have high social stats and skills and so are well-postioned to win elections in general, and dwarves (and for that matter humans) don't necessarily update their opinion of someone just because they were convicted of a crime (especially if they don't hear about the conviction, which (knowledge transmission) I recall was added to the game modeling at some point). So this is like a headline "Bob Smith Convicted of Murder; Wins Mayoral Election Anyway", which seems weird-but-possible in real life.
    - seanhunter 5y ago
      Yeah exactly. Also top tip is if you actually catch a vampire in DF a known thing is to imprison them in a room with all your switch levers in and a desk and chair so you can make them your accountant. They don't kill anyone that way and can do useful work.
- cpeterso 5y ago
  A similar Twitter account publishing funny bug fix notes from other games: https://twitter.com/TheStrangeLog/ https://twitter.com/TheStrangeLog/
pavel_lishin 5y ago
Reminds me a little bit of something strange I saw in Rimworld - all of my dogs were developing liver cirrhosis! It turns out that my dogs weren't alcoholics - it just happened to be that beer was the only food source they had zoned access to, so they were drinking it out of hungry desperation, and while it gave them enough calories to live on, it also gave them cirrhosis.
- OrsonSmelles 5y ago
  Yeah, I've definitely accidentally created packs of booze hounds that way. Definitely a head-scratcher before you get what's going on.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  One time a raider broke into my animal pen and started attacking my animals, but got shot down by a turret before they could cause any lasting damage. I didn't pay it any mind, but that raider had brought in a good chunk of Yayo (the game's cocaine analogue) that had scattered around in the pen when he died. By morning I had a herd of inebriated megasloths hunting down my colonists en-masse.
- publicola1990 5y ago
  In reality, the beer might have killed the dogs, since the hops in the beer is toxic to dogs.
  - addingnumbers 5y ago
    Hops outside of beer is toxic to dogs, it causes malignant hyperthermia. It's a problem for brewers who leave their hops where the dog can get at them (usually spent hops in the trash or a compost heap). Beer brewed from hops doesn't cause hyperthermia, it's harmful to dogs because they experience the same effects of ethanol poisoning that humans do (e.g. cirrhosis), at much smaller doses.
ygra 5y ago
Noita also had a fun one during early development: deer drowning in their own urine. And now that I dug up the Reddit AmA thread (https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/d7cqjz/we_are_nolla_games_the_team_behind_the_upcoming/f0z8mzc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/d7cqjz/we_are_nolla_...), there's a comment there about the drunken dead cats ...
- b0rsuk 5y ago
  Noita simulations are better told as animated gifs.
devenvdev 5y ago
Other amusing DF bugs: Dwarfs trying to clean their inner organs (dwarf wounded, doctor closes the wound, dirt stay inside) Undying children in the moat water (for years... just swimming there...) Killer carps (there was a long time during which carps were really overpowered because constant swimming was buffing them up really good, dwarfs getting close to water sources were eaten by carps) Catplosions (Tarn loves cats, cats reproduce, too many cats kills DF performance)
- kd0amg 5y ago
  Catplosions (Tarn loves cats, cats reproduce, too many cats kills DF performance) This was a particularly insidious one because the usual strategy of culling excess livestock doesn't work out when applied to dwarfs' pets (pets can't be designated for slaughter, and other means of making pets die will make their owners upset). With most animals, you can avoid the pet adoption issue by just not marking them as available for adoption, so you wouldn't have to worry about a dogsplosion, sheepsplosion, etc. Cats do not become pets through that system. Instead, a cat adopts a dwarf.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Verily, the dwarf would pick up a cat to take it to the slaughterhouse, the cat would adopt the nearest dwarf (the one carrying it) and then the dwarf would slaughter the cat. And get sad because his pet died. And then eventually start tantruming and a tantrum spiral would begin.
    - alpaca128 5y ago
      > And then eventually start tantruming It's so crazy when you try to make dwarves feel great all the time and then the simulation comes up with some completely insane causal chain that messes up everything. I once tried to isolate a miasma problem with a wall. Which works fine, unless the dwarf tasked with building the wall decides he needs a break, sleeps on the floor and then gets grumpy because he just slept on a hard surface in a smelly area.
Psyonic 5y ago
I don't know much about Dwarf Fortress, but why is that a bug? It sounds like it follows reasonably well from the behavior in the game.
- resonious 5y ago
  It sounds like the actual bug was about quantity. Walking on the tavern floor resulted in 1 entire serving of beer on the paws, and cleaning resulted in ingesting that serving.
quickthrower2 5y ago
Sounds like it’s not a bug but working as intended
- azernik 5y ago
  The bug was the quantity. Cats that walk around in a place with spilled beer will indeed lick themselves clean, but the amount of beer ingested is tiny. Imagine getting drunk by licking beer residue off your hands.
VectorLock 5y ago
Space Station 13 is another game with a lot of serendipitous emergent gameplay but with a slightly less steep (but still insane) learning curve and multiplayer antagonist fun.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
>Enough alcohol will kill a cat That's what intrigues me, Not played the game but this must because there were a list of things which could get the cat killed right? Then how come this is an unexpected bug?
- L-four 5y ago
  The bug was the volume ingested when the cat cleaned it's self, was incorrectly calculated to be a whole standard drink.
  - Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
    Oh wow, that makes sense. Thanks.

by mabbo 5y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

Unfortunately it remains unexplained (by the article) why this is considered a bug. It would be unethical to test, but this seems like perfectly cromulent behavior one might actually see in real life.

paavohtl 5y ago
IIRC the actual bug was that cats licking their paws made them consume an entire tankard's worth of beer with each lick, which made them drunk (and dead) with just a few licks.
- Arrath 5y ago
  Yeah this is what I recall being the case as well.
yung_steezy 5y ago
I agree these types of features really embiggen the game
- beamatronic 5y ago
  They're perfectly cromulent features.
  - ant6n 5y ago
    careful, its unpossible not to get downvoted with these kinds of jokes (err, low effort comments).
spoonjim 5y ago
Cats in bars don’t die of alcohol poisoning regardless of the amount of beer spilled on the floor.
- Filligree 5y ago
  The actual bug here was a mistake in handling of liquid volume. The cats were ingesting a tankard’s with with each lick, and they’re smaller than dwarves, so that killed them.
- praptak 5y ago
  I read about a cat who used to visit a pub and learned to lick beer from under taps. The cat got banned from the pub for its own good but I don't believe it was anywhere close to poisoning.
  - kingofclams 5y ago
    Do you have a source for this?
    - praptak 5y ago
      No, I read this a long time ago in a paper press article and I cannot dig up anything electronic.
MikeTheGreat 5y ago
My experiences with cats (at least in my own life) is that cats prefer not walk into an area with a sticky floor if they can avoid it. Clearly there's a bug here where the cat will keep wandering around on the sticky floor, and then keep consuming the alcohol off it's paws. The obvious fix is to add a feature wherein different creatures have preferences about where they go next, and then use that to have the cats avoid the bar floor if they can. As a bonus you can include stuff like "Cats don't like hanging out in crowded areas" so that they'll also stay out of the main hall when the army is gathering to muster forth, etc. (/s, but only slightly :) )
- Filligree 5y ago
  No need for the /s. This is precisely the level of simulation Toady is hoping for, and there are many equivalent examples already.
- db48x 5y ago
  Good suggestion. It would occasionally be nice if the _dwarves_ would avoid stepping in things and tracking it all over the place. The only reason that the cats were in the tavern in the first place is that pets follow their owner* around.
  - philipov 5y ago
    The * refers to the fact that cats are the owners, and dwarves are their pets. A truly accurate understanding of how cats work.
- queuebert 5y ago
  And this is how you get 700k lines of code.
alexander-litty 5y ago
Liquid items are funny in the game. When you look at an item listing and you see something like “Mead”, that is truly all the item is —- it isn’t a cup of mead, it’s just a vague amount of the liquid mead itself, as if your hand was the only thing keeping it from hitting the ground. But there are containers that can hold your liquid. You have mugs and goblets that hold one quantity of “Mead”, giving the impression that one count of mead is like a generic serving size. You also have barrels and pots that hold stacks of “Mead”. Creatures are kind of like walking containers and have their own detailed inventories. Among the things you’d expect to find like armor, weapons, and books, you might also find a “coating of tears” on a crying dwarf, or perhaps a “spattering of blood” on a murderous elf. They’re not just static inventories for the fun of a story, creatures do interact with them and use them. Dwarves covered in a vomit item will (hopefully) put any available soap in their inventory and use it to clean themselves in water, for example. Cats are simple and just clean themselves with no water or soap needed. The catch with them is that they ingest whatever they have cleaned off of them. So, putting all this together: The problem was that cats pick up a whole “serving size” of alcohol and proceed to clean themselves, ingesting the entire serving. The bug surrounds the vagueness of liquid sizes. And it was fixed accordingly! Cats are still vulnerable to the effects of self-cleaned alcohol, but the strength is now proportional. https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195#c33644 https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195...
- db48x 5y ago
  My favorite feature in Dwarf Fortress is that all eyelids automatically clean their associated eyeball, just so that players don’t post about how their dwarves have vomit on their eyeballs.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    Ahh, so if a dwarf would have a missing eyelid because of combat or some mining accident, then they could have vomit on their eyeballs.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
shrimpx 5y ago
The bug was a numerical error that would cause cats to drink something like the equivalent of a pint of beer for every lick, and therefore die prematurely. He talks about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY

markus_zhang 5y ago

Not sure what's in the code, but I think each cat (which is some sort of entity by itself) is composed by body parts, which at the lowest level owns a bunch of attributes/components. Would that make sense?

pixl97 5y ago
The bug in this case was the minimum alcohol value a cat could like from its paws was above the cats LD100, so if they licked their feet when soaked in beer they would die.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Ah, that's interesting, so it's actually a bug. But yeah it shows the sophisticated system underneath.

ericschn 5y ago

The beginning of this video https://youtu.be/VAhHkJQ3KgY https://youtu.be/VAhHkJQ3KgY has Tarn Adams speaking about this bug.

mabbo 5y ago
This is my favourite bug story I have ever heard. And told so well.
Agentlien 5y ago
I love that video. I tend to link it when I want to explain Dwarf Fortress to someone.

7373737373 5y ago

I wish there was a description of how this works technically

mabbo 5y ago
ericschn below has a link to a video of Tarn explaining it. It's wonderful.

partomniscient 5y ago

10 years ago, there was this article about another unexpected behaviour: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-o...

AndyMcConachie 5y ago

One of my favorite Twitter users. https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs It's just funny Dwarf Fortress bugs.

suzzer99 5y ago
LOL - 5386: Imprisoned Vampire Elected Mayor
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > Imprisoned Vampire Elected Mayor That's not even (necessarily) a bug: whether convicts can win/hold elected positions is a aspect of applicable law (albeit a weird one), vampires (IIRC) have high social stats and skills and so are well-postioned to win elections in general, and dwarves (and for that matter humans) don't necessarily update their opinion of someone just because they were convicted of a crime (especially if they don't hear about the conviction, which (knowledge transmission) I recall was added to the game modeling at some point). So this is like a headline "Bob Smith Convicted of Murder; Wins Mayoral Election Anyway", which seems weird-but-possible in real life.
  - seanhunter 5y ago
    Yeah exactly. Also top tip is if you actually catch a vampire in DF a known thing is to imprison them in a room with all your switch levers in and a desk and chair so you can make them your accountant. They don't kill anyone that way and can do useful work.
cpeterso 5y ago
A similar Twitter account publishing funny bug fix notes from other games: https://twitter.com/TheStrangeLog/ https://twitter.com/TheStrangeLog/

pavel_lishin 5y ago

Reminds me a little bit of something strange I saw in Rimworld - all of my dogs were developing liver cirrhosis! It turns out that my dogs weren't alcoholics - it just happened to be that beer was the only food source they had zoned access to, so they were drinking it out of hungry desperation, and while it gave them enough calories to live on, it also gave them cirrhosis.

OrsonSmelles 5y ago
Yeah, I've definitely accidentally created packs of booze hounds that way. Definitely a head-scratcher before you get what's going on.
smoldesu 5y ago
One time a raider broke into my animal pen and started attacking my animals, but got shot down by a turret before they could cause any lasting damage. I didn't pay it any mind, but that raider had brought in a good chunk of Yayo (the game's cocaine analogue) that had scattered around in the pen when he died. By morning I had a herd of inebriated megasloths hunting down my colonists en-masse.
publicola1990 5y ago
In reality, the beer might have killed the dogs, since the hops in the beer is toxic to dogs.
- addingnumbers 5y ago
  Hops outside of beer is toxic to dogs, it causes malignant hyperthermia. It's a problem for brewers who leave their hops where the dog can get at them (usually spent hops in the trash or a compost heap). Beer brewed from hops doesn't cause hyperthermia, it's harmful to dogs because they experience the same effects of ethanol poisoning that humans do (e.g. cirrhosis), at much smaller doses.

ygra 5y ago

Noita also had a fun one during early development: deer drowning in their own urine. And now that I dug up the Reddit AmA thread (https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/d7cqjz/we_are_nolla_games_the_team_behind_the_upcoming/f0z8mzc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/d7cqjz/we_are_nolla_...), there's a comment there about the drunken dead cats ...

b0rsuk 5y ago
Noita simulations are better told as animated gifs.

devenvdev 5y ago

Other amusing DF bugs: Dwarfs trying to clean their inner organs (dwarf wounded, doctor closes the wound, dirt stay inside) Undying children in the moat water (for years... just swimming there...) Killer carps (there was a long time during which carps were really overpowered because constant swimming was buffing them up really good, dwarfs getting close to water sources were eaten by carps) Catplosions (Tarn loves cats, cats reproduce, too many cats kills DF performance)

kd0amg 5y ago
Catplosions (Tarn loves cats, cats reproduce, too many cats kills DF performance) This was a particularly insidious one because the usual strategy of culling excess livestock doesn't work out when applied to dwarfs' pets (pets can't be designated for slaughter, and other means of making pets die will make their owners upset). With most animals, you can avoid the pet adoption issue by just not marking them as available for adoption, so you wouldn't have to worry about a dogsplosion, sheepsplosion, etc. Cats do not become pets through that system. Instead, a cat adopts a dwarf.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Verily, the dwarf would pick up a cat to take it to the slaughterhouse, the cat would adopt the nearest dwarf (the one carrying it) and then the dwarf would slaughter the cat. And get sad because his pet died. And then eventually start tantruming and a tantrum spiral would begin.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    > And then eventually start tantruming It's so crazy when you try to make dwarves feel great all the time and then the simulation comes up with some completely insane causal chain that messes up everything. I once tried to isolate a miasma problem with a wall. Which works fine, unless the dwarf tasked with building the wall decides he needs a break, sleeps on the floor and then gets grumpy because he just slept on a hard surface in a smelly area.

Psyonic 5y ago

I don't know much about Dwarf Fortress, but why is that a bug? It sounds like it follows reasonably well from the behavior in the game.

resonious 5y ago
It sounds like the actual bug was about quantity. Walking on the tavern floor resulted in 1 entire serving of beer on the paws, and cleaning resulted in ingesting that serving.

quickthrower2 5y ago

Sounds like it’s not a bug but working as intended

azernik 5y ago
The bug was the quantity. Cats that walk around in a place with spilled beer will indeed lick themselves clean, but the amount of beer ingested is tiny. Imagine getting drunk by licking beer residue off your hands.

VectorLock 5y ago

Space Station 13 is another game with a lot of serendipitous emergent gameplay but with a slightly less steep (but still insane) learning curve and multiplayer antagonist fun.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

>Enough alcohol will kill a cat That's what intrigues me, Not played the game but this must because there were a list of things which could get the cat killed right? Then how come this is an unexpected bug?

L-four 5y ago
The bug was the volume ingested when the cat cleaned it's self, was incorrectly calculated to be a whole standard drink.
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  Oh wow, that makes sense. Thanks.