This was a particularly insidious one because the usual strategy of culling excess livestock doesn't work out when applied to dwarfs' pets (pets can't be designated for slaughter, and other means of making pets die will make their owners upset). With most animals, you can avoid the pet adoption issue by just not marking them as available for adoption, so you wouldn't have to worry about a dogsplosion, sheepsplosion, etc. Cats do not become pets through that system. Instead, a cat adopts a dwarf.

A somewhat effective solution is to use male cats for stockpile protection, and keep female cats caged (which IIRC stops both adoption and breeding) and only let one out at time (cage any resulting (female) kittens immediately). There's not (yet) any simulation of evolutionary pressure to adopt a owner quickly, so you can just prefer kittens that do so for the next breeder when the current one dies of old age.

Gelding (neutering) the male cats also works, but is less sustainable if you don't have a reliable source of replacement cats from migrants or trade caravans for when the current ones die of old age. Spaying is not supported AFAIK.

You can also just remove the ADOPTS_OWNER token via raws editing.

I. M.> No. I'm, I'm simply saying that life, uh… finds a way.

And get sad because his pet died. And then eventually start tantruming and a tantrum spiral would begin.

It's so crazy when you try to make dwarves feel great all the time and then the simulation comes up with some completely insane causal chain that messes up everything.

I once tried to isolate a miasma problem with a wall. Which works fine, unless the dwarf tasked with building the wall decides he needs a break, sleeps on the floor and then gets grumpy because he just slept on a hard surface in a smelly area.

My understanding of the legend is that a player began experiencing a catsplosion, and wanted to find a way to get rid of the cats. So he started tinkering with the game a bit, and eventually tried setting the blood temperature to a very high number. This killed the cats, but also had the unfortunate side effect of setting them on fire. And the cats were multiplying faster than they were dying, so there was a massive, expanding fireball of burning cats.

If this legend is wrong, I'd love to hear another version.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Catsplosion

TIL this was a bug and how it was a bug! Wow! Back when I played DF it really seemed like it was simply accepted folklore that the carps in DF were really strong and the common advice was don't build your base too close to rivers. Having not played in a long while, I had always thought this was intended.

At some point, we got into a discussion over art style and realism. He made an observation that still sticks with me.

"The style sets expectations. When something breaks a real world law of nature or logic because of a bug, it doesn't feel as jarring, because the style is already cartoon-y."

It made me think about just how malleable expectations are with regards to game systems. Train a player to expect realism, and breaches become infuriating. Train a player to expect the unexpected, and the unexpected becomes intriguing and fun.

(More modern tip of the hat to Fortnite)

Even fortnite has a kind of logic to it, haphazard as they may be (though it’s also so loosely defined, that I find it completely uninteresting — it’s a dumpster fire of cosmetic items with no real theme or nuance; this is because its more a modern shopping mall [ an arbitrary context for social groups ] than a game system).

It’s why simpsons can revert (nearly) all damages every episode (that’s simply the rule of the world), but if it tried to violate that rule and persisted those changes in any meaningful way, it would feel like complete nonsense. (They do however do it for self-referential jokes and such, but these aren’t persistence so much as temporary anomalies) At best, they’re allowed to forget something exists altogether.

Sounds like the answer is more taverns.

I'm curious if the fix was to just remove the dirt from the simulation or if Tarn actually went ahead and simulated infections (or more realistically, used an existing infection mechanic).