v0.31:Known bugs and issues

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v50.14 · v0.47 · v0.34 · v0.31.25 · v0.28 · v0.23 This article is about an older version of DF. More Info · V

PLEASE SUBMIT BUGS TO THE OFFICIAL BUG TRACKER - THEY WON'T GET FIXED IF THEY ARE ONLY LISTED HERE.
Dwarf Fortress Bug Tracker

Please link to the mantis tracker issue as well as the forum post if possible.

This page recently underwent a major cleanup edit. See the talk page for more info.

As the version is new, and we're still discovering bugs, a lot of unverifiable information is going to get added to this thread. It is recommended that new entries be added with "(confirmation needed)", and that others can discuss and document each bug on the discussion page. Following confirmation of a bug with a specific description of what's occurring, the parenthetical can be removed.

Please also read the 'Not Actually Bugs' section before adding bug reports!

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.

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

• There are currently very few or even no fish. This includes brooks, rivers, oceans, ponds, lakes (underground and otherwise). You may get a few turtles sometimes.

Forum Link

Bug Tracker

Fixed in .22. There may still be an issue with fish getting extinct eventually after 20+ years.

Buildings and Zones

• Can't farm on dry soil underground.

Forum Link

Bug Tracker -- Fixed in .31.19.

Also, when you have selected Smooth Stone for a farm plot area, the dwarves will clean away the mud right from under the farm plots, rendering them useless until re-irrigated and rebuilt.

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

Forum Link

• When linking buildings to levers/pressure plates, the view may center on a different building than the one that is currently selected. (However, the view switches to the correct building after it is selected)

Bug Tracker -- Fixed in .31.13.

• 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

• Non-alive creatures (like bronze colossuses, zombies and blizzard men) cannot be destroyed (possibly because they can't bleed to death nor have their brain destroyed). Arena testing has revealed that dragonfire and magma can melt bronze colossuses, and falling from very high up may kill some undead creatures.

Forum Link -- Fixed in .10

• Shield-bashing has no effect with a wooden shield

Forum Link

• Ballistae have been nerfed considerably: They now easily glance off normal clothing and are very unlikely to kill anything with armour.

-- Fixed in .10

• Animals with teeth do nearly no damage. Don't count on your wardogs to help defend your fortress.

Workaround

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.06

Labors

• Hunting Issues

Forum Link

• Miners now cancel mining designations when they can't reach them

Forum Link -- Fixed ^v0.31.03

• Metal goblets are sometimes iron, regardless of input

Forum Link --Fixed ^v0.31.11

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

Forum Link

• Workers are too dedicated, dehydrate themselves. This was intended as a helpful feature, as dwarves will try to finish what they are doing before running off to eat. However, many players view it as a bug, because it can cause dwarves that are far from food to begin with to starve to death. Working while hungry or thirsty also causes unhappy thoughts, slower work, and worse quality work.

Forum Link

Bug Tracker --Fixed ^v0.31.07

• Cooking with alcohol is buggy

Forum Link -- Fixed ^v0.31.08

• When crafting shell crafts, craftsdwarves never actually produce a shell craft, but instead sit forever with the same shell, with their skills increasing.

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.11

• Dwarves take orders to prepare meals with liquid ingredients like dwarven syrup, wine, and rum, but almost never do it and instead dump the liquid inside the kitchen where it sits cluttering it up and can't be moved... Because it's liquid.

Bug Tracker

Workaround: Using dwarven syrup works just fine for me, but my cook always grabs at least one solid ingredient. Ie, 3 stacks of syrup + one stack of cheese -> finished and edible meal.

Workaround: The liquid seems to be underneath the kitchen. If you remove the kitchen, some dwarf will come along and clean the spill. Then you can remake the kitchen. I'd recommend simply disabling all cooking of booze.

-- Fixed ^v0.31.08

• Making Rock Short Sword results in a wooden short sword. Especially annoying when making an adamantine sword! (multiple reports)

Bug Tracker

-- Fixed ^v0.31.13

• Metal items may require fewer bars/wafers than announcements lead you to believe. Since price of items is affected by what went into creating it, this can lead to your adamantine armor being worth far less than it would otherwise.

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

• Parties never end, sometimes eating up half the labor force.

Workaround: Undesignate whatever the party is gathered around and it will end.

-- Fixed ^v0.31.11

• Soap-making task is missing from the workshop. Issuing work order through the manager does work. Also with cutting clear and crystal glass.

The soap making task has two reagents, one of which is a barrel that [CONTAINS_LYE]. The bucket the lye is produced in doesn't count, since it's a bucket, not a barrel. Make sure you have 1) a dwarf with the appropriate hauling task enabled, 2) an empty, usable barrel, and 3) a food stockpile with lye allowed that accepts barreled inventory. Once the lye is in the barrel in the stockpile, check the soap shop again. Don't know why the glass is wonky, though. -76.102.26.49 06:27, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

-- Fixed ^v0.31.09

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

Bug Tracker

• Making waterskin in leather works results in a weird item called "flask" (simply that, no mention of leather or whatever) that is never used and stays forever in the workshop. Those don't seem to cause clutter in the workshop either. (A metal variant (Ex. Iron) is now capable of being created at a metal smith, probably causing this bug. Soldiers will carry an Metal Flask).

Bug Tracker

"Flask" can be traded, but isn't automatically moved to stockpiles (It's neither a leather good nor a finished good). They do seem to clutter leatherworkers shops, which must then be destroyed and rebuilt (0.31.06). ~Neftaly Hernandez

You can also use the View Items in Buildings command t to mark the Flasks for dumping to remove the clutter (0.31.06). ~mk

More on metal flasks- a friend of mine noticed that when he assigned the job "make iron flask", in would go iron bars and charcoal, and out would come 3 gold flasks. I did the same thing, except I used coke instead of charcoal, and got 3 gypsum plaster flasks.

Making adamantine flasks results in iron flasks.

-- Fixed, works fine in .16

• 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 body parts

Not a bug, just means it needs various parts that go in the refuse pile, shells, hair, etc.

• 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.

• Fey mood; Dwarf took only dog bones into the craftsdwarf's shop. Produced an iron figurine with an image of waves in dog bone on it.^Bug:0093 and ^Bug:0359 Fixed ^v0.31.11

• Fey mood;A different but related bug: in most versions, all bone artifacts are stripped of all additional decorations ^Bug:2806Fixed ^v0.31.22.

• 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

Creature Data

• Descriptions sometimes take strange objects: "She likes to consume she"

Forum Link

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.14

• Giants and giantesses are mapped to the wrong gender.

Fixed

• Unicorns give birth to elk fawns.

Fixed

• Mountain goat fawns are called "Stray Horse foal", although having all the features of a mountain goat.

This is due to what is assumed to be a copy/paste error in the raws - The raws list "Mountain goat kid" as well as "Horse foal" as possible child names, so it randomly picks one.

Fixed

• In BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:STANDARD_HEAD_POSITIONS both eyelids are around the right eye and clean the left eye

Fixed

Stockpiles

• Problems with categorization. (Stone is considered metal)

Forum Link

Bug Tracker

• Custom stockpile options don't seem to always work

Forum Link

• Dead vermin never rot

Forum Link

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.04

• "Take from stockpile" is broken

Forum Link

Fixed in .10

• 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.)

• The arsenal dwarf may assign weapons/armor that do not belong to you.

Bug Tracker-Goblins -- Fixed ^v0.31.06

Bug Tracker-Caravans -- Fixed ^v0.31.06

Arsenal dwarf position deleted in .10

• 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 dwarfs 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)

• Bolts assigned to a squad that is then disbanded do not free up for use by other squads automatically.

-- Fixed ^v0.31.11

• The default settings are such that your military dwarfs will train, train, train, and possibly starve in the process. Thirsty and Hungry tags are guaranteed to appear for any soldier (as they are when a dwarf does anything else in this release) because Dwarves will now try to complete a task before they eat/drink.

Military/Guide -- Fixed Training dwarfs eat and drink properly in .16 (stationed military will not eat but are fed by civilians)

• Dwarves will continue to train in barracks even after being removed from a squad. (Because they are completing the task they started before they will move on to something else, changing your alert helps here as well).

-- Fixed ^v0.31.11

• Dwarves will sometimes use many weapons and armor at once. When they have two weapons in the same hand, they seem to be unable to attack with either weapon.

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.11

• Dwarves who die are still listed in the military screen in their squad without any notification of their death. This could lead to a user assigning the best equipment to a squad leader without knowledge of his demise.

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.11

• 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.

• Copying an empty order causes an immediate crash.

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.03

• Going to the schedule grid of the inactive group causes an immediate crash.

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.03

• 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.

• Marksdwarves use any assigned bolts for training, regardless of ammunition settings.

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.22

Medicine

• Surgeons may endlessly perform surgery on dwarves with no effect.

Bug Tracker

Fixed

• Surgeon provided constant "suturing," each time using up thread. May be related to above problem. -- Fixed ^v0.31.07

• Any blood smear or pool can spread indefinitely. The most common problem is a pool of blood in a high-traffic area. This causes every dwarf that touches it to get blood on them. Each dwarf will then eventually wash it off, creating another pool of blood by the well, which is likely another high-traffic area. Eventually you end up with the dining room and food stockpiles all coated with several dozen different creatures' blood.

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.16 - An init setting to stop blood spreading has been added.

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

Bug tracker

• a bone doctor may get stuck on an 'apply cast' job while getting water. a workaround is to forbid all buckets, unforbid one and wait until it gets filled (e.g. to give to another patient or to fill a pond), forbid the filled bucket to cancel the job, then unforbid it and wait for the apply cast job to start again

forum thread

bug tracker -- Fixed

Items

• Eating a masterwork meal will cause the cook to suffer art defacement. -- Fixed ^v0.31.07

• Quarry bush leaves might not appear in the kitchen menu, and dwarves might not cook them, rendering them useless except for trading.

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.02

• 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

• When the mayor dies, all nobles are removed until a new mayor is elected.

Workaround: To speed up this process, set the population required for mayors to '1' in the raws (raw>objects>entity_default.txt).

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.05

• Former mayors continue to demand accomodations and make mandates. You can check their mandates by going to that specific dwarf's thoughts. This can cause fun as dwarves are arrested for not fufilling demands.

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.05

• 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

• Arena does not work for graphics mode.

Forum Link

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.02

• 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

• Elf traders may stay a long time.

This is because creatures that the elves come with do not have pack animal values set on them, yet elves are able to use any creature as a pack animal. Check what is carrying their goods when they arrive. Often it will be warthogs, which do not have trade capacity values. Which apparently makes them carry enormous, ridiculous loads and take forever to load/unpack.

Workaround: A fix is to go into the creature_large_topical.txt file and add in [TRADE_CAPACITY:XXXX] under the warthog's [PACK_ANIMAL] entry (where XXXX is the weight you want them to carry). Or just remove the [PACK_ANIMAL] tag altogether. Be forewarned, you may or may not have to make a new world for the fix to take effect.

Workaround: with the game paused and the depot in view, designate treecutting d - t, and just hold down the mouse button until the depot display no longer flashes between items very quickly.

Why this works: it has been known that certain parts of the game engine keep running while the game is paused. These include cat-dwarf adoptions and the trade liaison conversation. It appears to also apply to traders loading up their goods, and probably to unloading goods as well.

Bug Tracker -- Fixed ^v0.31.06

• 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.

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)