Dwarf Fortress rocketed out of the gates in 2026 with, even by its own bonkers patch note standards, one of the saddest six-word stories ever told: “Mothers no longer seek ghostly babies.” This is a game that perhaps only Crusader Kings can match for patch note madness, and it turns out that the above update introduced another problem. Naked dwarves, anyone?
Dwarf Fortress is nothing if not granular, and this extends down to individual dwarves having to be clothed, and this clothing itself having considerable complexity with regards to quality, use, etcetera. The previous update suddenly had dwarves appearing in both the units screen and the citizens list without any clothes, though in-game they still went about as if fully clothed.
The knock-on effects of this could be quite something: if a baby dwarf died by falling down a shaft, for example, the mother would just loiter at the top. Further to that, the motivation to seek out their baby meant they would neglect everything else, including drinking water, and die themselves.
Update 53.09 sorted that, and update 53.10 has taken care of the nakedness, but in such a sprawlingly complex simulation as this, it’s probably only a matter of time before another similar issue crops up.
Dwarf Fortress has a long and storied history of this kind of thing, after all. There was the time that undead cats could adopt dwarves, for example, or when vampires went around accusing babies of killing their victims. A personal favourite is the philosophical patch note observing that it “seems impossible to satisfy a need for ‘introspection'”. There are games, and then there’s Dwarf Fortress.
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