v0.31:Known bugs and issues

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Dwarf Fortress is a constant work in progress, and is thus full of bugs. Some of them are minor and completely harmless, some are small and annoying, and some are major and even game-changing. This page is a historical list of some of the best-known bugs in v0.31; an official compilation of all bugs, and their development status, can be found on the Mantis Bug Tracker. Please do not report new bugs for this version; if the problem still exists in the current development version it should be reported on the bug tracker for that version instead. If you have issues signing up for the bug tracker, see the forum bug tracker board for instructions (but don't report bugs on the forum either).

Bugs fixed in v0.31 have been moved to Recently fixed bugs and issues.

Not Actually Bugs

• Animals are listed twice in some places, including the embark and trade agreement screens.

They're listed twice because they separately list males and females.

• Weird coloured letter in top left corner

" C " means new combat report

" H " means new hunting message

" S " means new sparring message

Forum Link

• No option for magma in the finder

Magma is guaranteed everywhere now.

• Unable to add items or skill points on the embarking screen.

Check your keybindings! By default the keys to add and remove items and skills are + and - on the numpad.

• But even + and - don't work!

This page might help

• Wrestling will take much longer than combat using any kind of weapon (unlike in 40d.) One can set init/announcements.txt to show wrestling chokeholds in fort mode.

• Fey moods can request body parts - it just means it needs various parts that go in the refuse pile, shells, hair, etc.

Embarking

• You can embark with some rather unrealistic prepared foods (such as fly brains, which in real life go at about 900 thousand brains to the pound). These unrealistic foods have also been seen in trading. This may be related to further issues involving vermin's organs. (Each 'Unit' of Food is representative of enough food to feed a dwarf for just over a month.)

• You may get a "Cavern Collapse" announcement as soon as you arrive. (Perhaps many times, if you have a volcano in your ocean...)

Bug Tracker

• Reclaiming a fortress removes all mud from the caverns, causing problems such as no more underground trees. ^Bug:133

• Using the flux search option on the embark screen often yields false or misleading results.

Sites

• Magma pipes in volcanoes extend to the top of the map, past the mountain itself.

Forum Link

• Magma tubes remain the same shape and size the whole way down and may be square.

Forum Link

Buildings and Zones

• Construction and/or deconstruction can occasionally force some dwarves to idle.

Forum Link

• Setting workshop profiles according to minimum and maximum skill levels does not work, typically resulting in no one being able to use the workshop. Setting a profile for individual dwarves still works.

Forum Link

• Going to the zones menu and changing the placing type to flow, and then pressing ESC causes a crash.

Forum link/Bug tracker link requested

• Kiln gives message no task available when there is plaster, ash, buckets, and charcoal available

forum link

• Sometimes, building a Smelter inside a burrow will prevent you from queuing up jobs. Use your Manager to queue up jobs instead, or remove the Smelter from the burrow to solve this problem.

Forum link/Bug tracker link requested

• Ashery takes all the buckets whenever it is making lye, but never returns back. Cause seems to be when it takes a bucket that has water and makes lye on it.

Combat

• Some combat maneuvers have no effect.

Forum Link

• Attempting to grab a bodypart with a weapon leads to "you grab *** by *** with your *weapon* but nothing is grabbed

• Attempting to "pinch" various body parts shows "you adjust you grip on***" and nothing else.

• Alligators can wear armor

Forum Link

• Shield-bashing has no effect with a wooden shield

Forum Link

Labors

• Hunting Issues

Forum Link

• Manager screen doesn't show you materials for traction benches

Forum Link

• Metal items may require fewer bars/wafers than announcements lead you to believe. This mainly results in adamantine being far less scarce than it should be, since most items require only a single wafer instead of up to 9.

Bug Tracker

• Wood cutter. Tried to upgrade his axe to a steel one, never cut another tree in his life after being forced to dump his copper battle axe. It's like wood cutting had a seperate profile and he was the only one excluded; Sure enough, turned one of my jewelers into wood cutter and it worked fine for him.

• Woodcutters can chop down trees with (wooden) training axes.

Bug Tracker

• Immigrants can arrive with only peasant labors enabled, even if they are legendary jewelers. They may sometimes have weird labors enabled. (Stonecrafting master lye makers.)

Bug Tracker

• In the orders menu, there are options (in Workshops) for auto butcher, auto kitchen and auto fishery. Pressing b toggles the visible status of all 3, while k and f appear to do nothing (but actually toggle the options correctly). Fix (binary patch) exists for Win32 versions.

Bug Tracker

• Making crystal glass is broken. Fix (binary patch) exists for Win32 versions.

Bug Tracker

• Dwarves will occasionally go exceptionally out of their way to get a material while a giant stockpile is sitting beside them (I saw my carpenter travel half the map to get a log while there was a stockpile of 20 logs beside him)

This will happen if the stockpiled items are already reserved for another task (sometimes happens en masse if you're designating constructions from the material). If this still functions as it did in 40d, dwarves will count the number of tiles to an item 'as the crow flies' rather than checking the actual pathfinding distance, meaning that they regard items above or below their workshop as being very nearby even if the travel distance to reach them is substantial. Oddtwang of Dork 16:20, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

True, but I wasn't using wood for anything, only had 2 carpenters active and the wood was on the same Z plane as my workshops. The usual explanation doesn't fly for the one event I saw.

Perhaps they had the wood hauling labor enabled and were going to haul it?

I did have a similar event, where I put some food for a militia force to patrol a cavern I uncovered around 40 z-levels down from my legendary dining hall. This resulted in 20+ dwarves venturing through deep dangerous caverns to get food. It was particularly bad when a forgotten beast showed up and massacred 15 of them.

• Canceling a job at the metalsmith can jam the shop if the item was being actively produced at that time (Cancelled job to stop untrained armorer from working on an adamantium plate armor, shop jammed and no other orders ever went through. Ordered deconstruction and then halted deconstruction to clear this up.)

• Magma can be marked for Dumping if: There was a construction (Such as a floor) beneath it, and it was deconstructed, or if there was any non-magma-safe object beneath it (roads, floors in particular) and the object melts or is deconstructed, the magma can be designated for dumping via the mass designation tool.

• Dwarves sometimes fail in collecting webs due to pathing issues.

Bug Tracker

Moods

• Fey moods can request "rock bars." Has been seen to ignore all metal bars, ores, other rock, and rock. (Confirmed)

I've had the same situation, but my dwarf made do with bars of Coke.

Rock bars refer to bars of any inorganic material, since inorganic materials have all been lumped together.

• Glass Makers will not use a Magma Glass Furnace to manufacture their artifact. A traditional Glass Furnace is needed. (0.31.04-.17)

Confirmed to occur in .17. 74.192.98.80

• Sometimes a possessed dwarf will not use the requested materials even though all of them are available. (Not the same as the "rock bars" issue.) I think they don't want to take leather out of a bin.

Players having this problem should install the latest release of DFHack and run the "showmood" plugin to confirm exactly what it is that the moody dwarf wants (and compare it to what has been collected so far). --Quietust 21:57, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Stockpiles

• Problems with categorization. (Stone is considered metal)

Forum Link

Bug Tracker

• Custom stockpile options don't seem to always work

Forum Link

• There is no category for wood blocks. As such, wood blocks can not be removed from carpentry workshops.

Bug Tracker

• When setting stockpile options for a "Weapons/Trap Components" pile, the "Metal" list does not contain "iron".

Bug Tracker

Military

Main Military Page Main Military Equipment Bug Tracker Page *If you set a kill order (squads -> kill -> select the target from the map) and the target escapes to outside of the map -> crash. (segmentation fault). Fixed in .25, thankfully.

• Dwarves who are assigned to squads seem to be permanently affixed to the soldier life - changing schedules, training options, switching out dwarves, disbanding the squad: nothing works. All they do is eat, drink, sleep, Individual Combat Drill and take Kill orders. (Multiple reports, bug incidence is somewhat inconsistent, deconstructing assigned barracks sometimes helps.)

Bug Tracker --Acknowledged (There may be several duplicate bug reports.)

• Squads can get into a "permanent civilian life" and will never go into "recruit mode" unless ordered to "station" or "Kill a target", upon canceling this order they will go back to civilian mode. (Although they will perform individual combat drills, but in civilian garbs unless you replaced their equipment) Kenji 03 11:54, 5 April 2010 (UTC).

You mean they're supposed to not be civilians while training? Oh... yeah maybe that is a bug, never seen anything else personally - foarl 10:19, 09 April, 2010

This bug is different - not civilian clothing, but civilian jobs. They'll work in workshops, haul goods, sit idle with "No Job", etc, and never attempt "Individual Combat Training". They do appear to equip assigned gear, though. -- 5:50, 10 June, 2010

Yes I can verify this bug. I have version .10 and it is still present-- None of the 4 dwarves in 1 of my 2 squads will take on 'active' military roles such as macedwarf, marksdwarf, etc... unless they are performing a move or attack order. When a kill order was cancelled (because it was completed) they even dumped their weapons and armor right where they were! At the same time the other squad works fine other than they are all endlessly waiting for a training excercise to begin. I was able to work around this by disbanding the squad, firing the militia captain & recreating them. 17:00EST 19 July, 2010

This sounds like it may be a misunderstanding of the military system, because this is actually the default mode for soldiers. If their current task is "no scheduled order", they'll do civilian life + combat drills (without the soldier icon, and possibly without uniforms), but they'll respond to move/attack orders normally. The "inactive" schedule (the default schedule) has "no scheduled order" throughout. — Wisq (talk) 05:45, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

• When Reclaiming a lost fortress, soldiers will not use any armour or weapons assigned to them, insisting on training and fighting unarmoured and barehanded. This behaviour seems related to the arsenal dwarf position - when the fortress population becomes high enough and a dwarf is assigned to the position, soldiers will finally use the equipment they have been assigned. It seems that, on reclaiming, the game acts as if you need to have an arsenal dwarf right from the start, despite there not being any way to assign one.

• Military orders are not removed from memory when saving/abandoning a game. When loading another savegame or starting a new fortress these orders will be applied to its squads.

Bug Tracker

Workaround: Quit and restart df before loading a savegame or starting a new game.

Medicine

• Dwarves raid caravans for cloth (maybe thread as well) for the hospital zone.

Bug tracker

Items

• Obsidian does not appear in the accounting stone menu.

Workaround: Remove edge tags from raws.

• Reclaim mode, some items recovered become immobile, even when claimed instead of forbidden. Buidling on the area they occupy is impossible, as dwarves won't move the item.

Workaround: Make water wash the item into a river, or somewhere it will be destroyed.

Workaround: Channel under the item, dropping it to a lower z-level. This makes the item usable again.

Workaround: You can use DFhacktools to unbind the work order on stuck items.

• Dwarves will frequently abandon meals they've claimed for eating, resulting in rotting food scattered about the fortress that can't be stored, hauled, or dumped by any dwarf, including the one who claimed it.
  • Build something on the tile to solve

• Dwarves may drop a bucket somewhere, and constantly try to use that bucket again, but not be able to find it, resulting in endless announcements.

• Dwarves are incapable of putting on clothing that they've acquired, causing them to wander around naked as their clothes wear out.

Bug Tracker

Nobles

• Dungeon masters (along with the appointed nobles Hammerer and Tax Collector, but those are missed significantly less) will never turn up, no matter how the Fortress progresses.

Bug Tracker

• Presence of Dungeon Master doesn't allow for taming of exotic pets. ^Bug:2036

Graphics

• After generating a world and embarking, you may notice missing tiles.

Workaround: Restart Dwarf Fortress.

• In the 'z'-status menu, there is no image for nobles/administrators. Instead, there is an empty space where the purple dwarf should be.

Bug Tracker --Open

Saves

• Renaming a save (ex. "Region2-spr-1050" to "Region2") may invalidate the save, even if you give the save its original name back. ((Confirmation needed))

I had to reload an autosave (Region1-sum-1050). Renamed the file folder(to Region1), no problems encountered (was able to load, save over, etc.)

Trading and Depot

• No one brings wagons, even if there is a clear path to your depot.

Bug Tracker

• Dwarves may try to eat unowned food at the Depot, but realize their mistake halfway and stop... then try again... you can see where this is going.

• Wagons do not park in the same Depot of where the items and merchants are, if there is another Depot. This makes it impossible to trade unless you destroy the wagon's Depot.

• (But if you keep this up until the merchants decide to leave, they will not pack their items, but instead leave them there. Destroying the Depots will make the merchants actually go; they can't leave without their wagons.)

Bug Tracker

Program Lockup

• When typing quickly in to the search tab for naming groups and fortresses at embark crashes may occur

• The DF process sometimes locks up (freezes) when alt-tabbing to another window and back.

Workaround: That happened to me fairly often in the 40d# series. Try hitting the Alt key (I think it was Alt anyway) before you give up. 75.210.204.237 04:42, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Alt did not work, neither did control, shift, enter or any combination of those--208.81.12.34 18:22, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

My lockup issue seems to be related to Lotus Notes. I only get the lockup when running Notes, and I don't get locked up when not running Notes.--208.81.12.34 17:12, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Frequent Runtime Error Crashes

• On Windows 7 machines, frequent C++ Runtime Error crashes. Performance becomes increasingly slow until this occurs. (confirmation needed) ^v0.31.17

In addition, Dwarf Fortress.exe process is not terminated after this crash, though window closes, requires manual termination of process to stop it.

This is not a specific error, but a general class of errors that may occur in windows. Try running in compatibility mode (available in most Win7 editions) --72.64.105.184 04:29, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Running DF on Win7, I do not experience any crashes. I do however experience lockups when saving, although these just pass over if I wait long enough. --194.78.66.68 14:31, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

If waiting long enough causes it to return to the titlescreen, then it wasn't a lockup - it was just taking a long time to do its job. It's only a lockup if it never comes back. --Quietust 14:41, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Feature Corruption

Aborting an embark (especially after using the Site Finder) can leave "feature-*.dat" files behind in the /data/save/current/ directory; if a new world is generated at this point, that data will be incorporated into the new world, resulting in horribly corrupted embarks - raw adamantine spires reaching high into the sky, slade landscapes, and often outright crashes on embark. This can be avoided by deleting the feature-*.dat files prior to the first embark; the bug itself was not fixed until version 0.34.03.