Dwarf Fortress issues a 'naked dwarf fix' after accidentally turning players' pride-and-joy into bearded nudist colonies | PC Gamer

Dwarf Fortress, but a wizard — (Image credit: Bay 12 Games)

Dwarf Fortress rocketed out of the gates in 2026 with, even by its own bonkers patch note standards, one of the saddest six-word stories ever told: "Mothers no longer seek ghostly babies." This is a game that perhaps only Crusader Kings can match for patch note madness, and it turns out that the above update introduced another problem. Naked dwarves, anyone?

Dwarf Fortress is nothing if not granular, and this extends down to individual dwarves having to be clothed, and this clothing itself having considerable complexity with regards to quality, use, etcetera. The previous update suddenly had dwarves appearing in both the units screen and the citizens list without any clothes, though in-game they still went about as if fully clothed.

It's not quite the all-time classic that the dwarven mother bug was, but that's a doozy. One of the things any good settlement has to manage is dead dwarves which, if not properly memoralised and buried, can return to haunt their former comrades. These fortresses are obviously dangerous places, and so sometimes a newborn dwarf dies, but the problem was that mothers were programmed to seek out and hold their babies until they're 12 months old: and this was extending to what the patch notes call "ghost babies".

Dwarf Fortress — (Image credit: Bay12 Games)

The knock-on effects of this could be quite something: if a baby dwarf died by falling down a shaft, for example, the mother would just loiter at the top. Further to that, the motivation to seek out their baby meant they would neglect everything else, including drinking water, and die themselves.

Update 53.09 sorted that, and update 53.10 has taken care of the nakedness, but in such a sprawlingly complex simulation as this, it's probably only a matter of time before another similar issue crops up.

Dwarf Fortress has a long and storied history of this kind of thing, after all. There was the time that undead cats could adopt dwarves, for example, or when vampires went around accusing babies of killing their victims. A personal favourite is the philosophical patch note observing that it "seems impossible to satisfy a need for 'introspection'". There are games, and then there's Dwarf Fortress.

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."

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