![dwarf fortress ascii square dwarf fortress ascii square](https://i.imgur.com/bJc5gMv.png)
Yeah, all of those work, but dwarves tend to get upset if their pets die. So you just don't allow animals to become pets, right? Well, unlike most animals, you have no control over this process with cats - they are ALWAYS available as pets (in fact, they adopt a dwarf, not the other way around - works exactly the same way, but it's a cute little detail), and thus can turn "immune" to crowd-controlling butchery at any moment.īut okay, there's ways of getting rid of excess animals other than butchery, right? Just drop 'em off a high ledge somehow. If an animal is adopted by a dwarf, it can no longer be butchered. Fortress animals can be made available as pets, which allows dwarves to adopt them. This is where the pet system comes into play. This development can be kept in check by butchering excess animals (with the useful byproducts of this process being meat, leather and bone). This leads to clogged hallways and, even worse, excess processor load due to the calculation of every pet's behaviour. Animals are assumed to fend for themselves and thus do not consume food or require any other sort of upkeep, which means that they can theoretically multiply endlessly. Given that there is at least one adult male and female of a given kind of pet in the fortress, the female will eventually give birth to offspring. The cat problem (better known as catsplosion) isn't a bug like melting dwarves is, it's a "feature." It's a variety of systems working as intended which end up resulting in a rather unfortunate situation.