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Dragon

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!!UNKNOWN!!  · xTATTEREDx  · +FINE+  · *SUPERIOR*  · ≡EXCEPTIONAL≡  · ☼MASTERWORK☼
Dragon
D
Urist likes dragons for their terrible majesty.
Portrait

No portrait

Biome

  • Any Land
Attributes

Building destroyer: Level 2

· Megabeast · No Exert · Steals items · Fire immune · War animals · Hunting animals · Fanciful · Exotic mount · Egglaying

Tamed Attributes
Pet value 10,000

Template:Tame attrib proc/

Trainable:  Hunting   War 

Size
Birth: 6,000 cm3
Mid: 5,000,000 cm3
Max: 25,000,000 cm3
Food products
Eggs 1-3
Age
Adult at: 10
Max age: Immortal
Butchering returns

(Value multiplier ×15)

Food items

Meat 113-173
Fat 42-65
Brain 4-8
Heart 2-4
Lungs 8-18
Intestines 14-27
Liver 4-9
Kidneys 4-8
Tripe 4-9
Sweetbread 2-4
Eyes 2
Spleen 2-4

Raw materials

Bones 66-110
Skull 1
Teeth 3
Skin Scales

Wikipedia article

v50.14 · v0.47.05
This article is about the current version of DF.
Note that some content may still need to be updated.
A gigantic reptilian creature. It is magical and can breathe fire. These monsters can live for thousands of years.

Dragons are gigantic fire-breathing, green reptilian megabeasts, eventually becoming the largest land creatures in the world.

While based on the occidental dragon model, dragons do not fly nor have wings. They are immune to fire and magma (and are not harmed by being immersed in it, they will however drown in it). They breathe out a jet of extremely hot (theoretically 50000 °U hot, over four times the heat of magma) "dragonfire" which can injure things that are immune to normal fire, such as the Bronze colossus (dragonfire is, however, a blockable attack if a creature is using a shield). Only Dragons and Cave Dragons are naturally immune to dragonfire. They are also not trapavoid.

Dragons are covetous and seek to steal items from your fortresses to bring them back to their lairs. Dragons generally succeed in doing so on worldgen, but most of the time when they attack a player fortress they get caged, killed or succeed in burning the whole fortress down.

Dragons are the glass cannons of the megabeasts. They aren't especially durable for a megabeast and can be slain quite easily with traps or skilled soldiers, however their dragonfire will melt every other non-shield-using creature in the game (except for sponges), they breathe fire over a long distance (20+ tiles) and they breathe fire often.

Some dwarves admire dragons for their terrible majesty.

Dragon Size

Dragons slowly grow to become one of the largest creatures in the game, finally reaching their adult size of 25,000,000 cm3 after 1000 years. As a hatchling, dragons are quite tiny, at exactly 1/10th an adult dwarf's size, but they grow very rapidly, at roughly 25,000 cm3 per year. Dragons reach dwarf size shortly after its second birthday, are more than double a dwarf at about year 5, and add another dwarf in size roughly every two years after that.

  • At 23 years, a dragon is the size of a giant cheetah.
  • At 100 years, a dragon is the size of a draltha.
  • At 200 years, a dragon is the size of an elephant.
  • At 320 years, a dragon is the size of a hydra.
  • At 800 years, a dragon is the size of a bronze colossus or an adult roc.
  • Thereafter, a dragon is the largest creature found on land. (The giant sperm whale is the largest creature found anywhere)

Defense Strategies

Dragonfire can be blocked if the victim is using a shield, and it will be more than 99% of the time. Dragons are also massively powerful in melee combat, so they can be hard to take down without a good military. Possibly the best defense is to use piercing weapons like crossbows and especially spears and hope you get lucky and hit a vital organ which can bring it down immediately. An alternative is building one or multiple cage traps, possibly beforehand, which will probably cage the dragon making it harmless. You should know that wooden cages and stone mechanisms will be destroyed by dragonfire, so either make sure both cages (or weapons, or supports) and mechanisms are impervious to dragonfire, or more simply ensure that the dragon has no reason to breathe fire by removing animals and dwarves from the trapped area. While they won't fire on buildings normally, a stray blast (at your outdoor livestock or bait animals, say) that catches any traps, doors, bridges not made of dragonfire-safe materials will melt and deactivate them. Also, Dragons make good companions if you are able to reanimate them as a Necromancer

Domestication

Dragons can be captured in cage traps and tamed if you're lucky enough to catch one. Currently, knowledge of animal behaviour is based on the civilization level and depends partly on the animals available for contact in a given civilization site. Such a rare megabeast as a dragon is unlikely to have had any civilized contact aside from adventurers attempting to slay them and other violent contact; as such, your fort will have to build the knowledge base from the ground up, making dragon-taming a highly difficult task. Bear in mind that even with a skilled animal trainer at hand, your first attempts to control such a powerful and elusive beast may result in half your fortress burning in dragonfire.

If you can manage to endure its long-untamed wrath, you'll have a massively valuable pet that can lay eggs. Dragons can also be trained as war or hunting animals at an animal training zone. While a tamed dragon is an immensely destructive tool at your disposal, it is also very eager to use dragonfire against your enemies, which can be exceedingly fun if it happens in your booze stockpile or meeting room.

Dragons do not have a [CHILD] tag, and therefore their eggs do not hatch in fortress mode.

Irregularities, Bugs, and Future Plans

Dragons have been observed to occasionally wear some armor (breastplates, greaves, leggings and boots). This armor is specified as "Large [metal][armor type]" and gives the dragon the same protection as any other species might get from it.

Toady has mentioned that he plans to eventually extend the random creature generator of the game to create different species and varieties of dragon within certain constraints, calling it "Half-Random", with ideas for variants including just about anything dragons have been given in literature, such as acidic blood, while maintaining a basic draconic structure.([1])

One of the old power goals referenced stealing dragon eggs as part of an adventure mode quest.

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