Dwarf Fortress will let dwarves pet animals and I'm sure that won't backfire
Oh great
If you've been following our Nate's attempts to build a Dwarf Fortress zoo in the Basement of Curiosity, you might think it couldn't get much worse between the paved-over Bird Hole and the monstrous bristleworm. Oh it can. Two words: petting zoo. A future update will add the ability for folks to pet animals, y'see.
"Oh god," Basement of Curiosity head keeper Nate Crowley responded.
"You can pet animals now," developers Bay 12 Games said in a development update post last week. We can see the video games industry continues to reverberate with aftershocks from the impact of the 'Can You Pet The Dog?' Twitter account. But this wouldn't be Dwarf Fortress if petting were that simple.
"Necromancers can pet their zombie animals too, and the living can try too if they are foolish," the post continues. "Hmm, I think a necromancer might also be able to pet their zombie humanoids, due to how it does the detection."
Oh good. Great. Lovely.
The post also got into other progress on pets and mounts, and yes of course necromancer adventurers can ride beasties they raise.
Given how the complexities of Dwarf Fortress can interact in surprising ways (a classic example being cats vomiting and dying all over pubs after walking across boozy floors then licking their paws clean), I'm sure terrible things can happen simply when stroking a good boy. And I daren't even consider the horrors waiting should Nate try to make a petting zoo.
Petting should arrive in Dwarf Fortress sssssooonnnish? The game's still free to download from its site. A premium version is coming to Steam with a price tag to cover new music, an official graphics tileset, and more of Bay 12's medical costs.