Now that 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 changed the game to shut it down.
The story recently resurfaced on Reddit (opens in new tab) and went viral thanks to brometh on Twitter (opens in new tab). 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 water from the chamber, drowning them with air, and harvesting their bones. Developer Tarn ‘Toady’ Adams was said to have been so horrified by the genocidal farm that he “nerfed the value of mermaid bones into the ground in the next version.”
Learned today that the Dwarf Fortress community came up with a mechanic so ethically horrifying—a system for mass-asphyxiating mermaids to profit off of goods crafted from their skeletons—that the creator himself said “absolutely not” and nerfed the value of mermaid bones pic.twitter.com/xh4BO2H2CvNovember 8, 2022
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 the merperson murders. The truth might actually be more upsetting, though.
The stories of the mermaid farm seem to date back to a 2008 forum thread (opens in new tab), where one user raised the possibility of building an underwater funnel that would lead merpeople into 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 eventually became clear (opens in new tab) 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 posters in that thread speculated (opens in new tab) that their own terrible ideas were the cause of the changes to the game.
Lemme share my favorite quote from that thread (opens in new tab). “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 Fortress forum poster. The real hilarity has begun. Well, aside from the TV part.
Dwarf Fortress officially hits Steam on December 6, complete with fancy new features like, er, graphics. While the game’s been in development for over two decades 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 games like Minecraft.