'the Return Of Baby Driver': The Dwarf Fortress Siege Update...
On Monday, Dwarf Fortress received its eagerly awaited Siege Update, which revamps Fortress mode sieges by giving invading forces all sorts of dastardly new tools and behaviors to circumvent, demolish, and overrun the player's fortifications. Dwarves, meanwhile, received new toys to stem the tide of besieging goblins, like autocrossbow turret emplacements and metal-fortified walls. Overnight, the fantasy settlement sim has rewritten decades of player defensive strategy.
One of the interesting complications added by the Siege Update, however, is an unintentional one. Shortly after the update went live, players started reporting on the Kitfox Games Discord that, inexplicably, dwarves in their forts were dying of starvation and dehydration. And not just any dwarves: The moms were refusing to eat, and their babies were the culprit.
The problem, you see, is that moms are like horses—in Dwarf Fortress, at least. In DF, mothers always hold their newborn babies until the infants reach an age where they can walk, play, and feed themselves. To achieve that, the game actually uses the same systems that let soldiers ride war mounts: While we're shown a dwarven mother holding her child, Dwarf Fortress essentially considers the baby to be "riding" their mom. It's like a mommy mech situation.
Dwarf Fortress is basically Neon Genesis Evangelion, is what I'm saying.
The Siege Update, as it happens, did some considerable war mount revising, increasing the number of potential war mounts fielded by goblin siege forces and making flying mounts more reliable. In the process, it seems the update accidentally swapped who's in charge of piloting moms: Where dwarven moms typically direct their own pathfinding and job selection, the update made it so the babies were suddenly in the driver's seat.
Unfortunately that spells death for the mom, because babies in Dwarf Fortress—understandably—don't know how to do anything, eating and drinking included. I fired up an old save to confirm it: I watched one of my fortress moms march determinedly towards the task she was pursuing when I'd last saved, and when she got there she just stopped to wait for her inevitable end. The baby was calling the shots, except it doesn't know what shots are, because it's a baby.
What's fascinating, as Dwarf Fortress developer Putnam noted in the Kitfox Discord, is that this exact bug has happened before. In earlier versions of Dwarf Fortress, goblin besiegers who arrived riding amphibious mounts would of
Source: PC Gamer
