As Dwarf Fortress heads to Steam, players remember the worst thing its community ever did

Dwarf Fortress
(Image credit: Bay 12 Games)

Now that 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dwarf Fortress is on the way to finally get its full launch on Steam, fans are👍 retelling the legend of the farm so heinous that the devs change♏d the game to shut it down.

The story recently resurfaced on and went viral thanks to . The legend goes that, in an early version of Dwarf Fortress, the bones of merpeople were particularly valuable. So players devised a way to farm them by trapping them inside a cavern adjacent to the ocean, draining the wꦬater from the chamber, drowning them with air, and harvesting their bones.  Developer Tarn 'Toady' Adams was said to have been so horrified by the genocida❀l farm that he "nerfed the value of mermaid bones into the ground in the next version."

At least, that's the legend. It's tough to track down any concrete record somebody actually building the farm in question, and there's seemingly no record of Adams confirming that any of the changes were made specifically in response to th𒈔e merperson murders. The truth might actually be more u𒁏psetting, though.

The stories of the mermaid farm seem to date back to a , where one user raised the possibility of building an underwater funnel that would lead merpeople ไinto a trap where they could be drowned in air, just as the story goes.

One user suggested that you wouldn't have to rely on the trap - you could just have the merpeople breed. But wouldn't the children take too many years 🐈to mature for harvesting? Nah, you can harvest their bones just fine when they're babies. But wait, dwarves won't butcher sapient beings, it goes against their ethics. Okay, then you'd just need to make the merbabies explode into pieces without direct intervention from a dwarf - they should be willing to craft with skulls they just find♈ lying around.

And so the conversation went for pages and pages, until players seemingly arrived at this concept of a merperson slave breeding farm where ﷽you🌃 would use catapults to dash merbabies against walls so that their bones would land separated from their bodies.

Every few months, somebody would poke into the thread asking if anyone had actually successfully built the merfarm. Inevitably, the answer would be no. Over the course of years, it eve🏅ntually that the farm would never work in the updated version of the game, not least because you can only breed tame animals - not sapient creatures - and because merperson bones were then only worth the 🃏same as cow bones.

Still, the legend of the genocidal mermaid farmers persisted, and that the𒐪ir own terrible ideas were the cause of the changes to the game.

Lemme share my favorite . "You know, one day when this game becomes uber-freakin'-famous and gets television coverage, you just know the media are gonna find this thread. That's when the real hilarity starts." Congrats on your prediction, 2008 Dwarf ಌFortress forum poster. The real hilarity has begun. Well, aside from the TV part.

Dwarf Fortress officially hi🀅ts Steam on December 6, complete with fancy new features like, er, ꦇgraphics. While the game's been in development for over two dec🌳ades already, the devs say they have plenty more in store.

If you're looking for ways to build more things either benign or horrifying, check out the best 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:games like Minecraft.

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the🧸 GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere b﷽etween Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.