Dwarf Fortress kicks off another year of bonkers patch notes with the saddest 6-word story ever told: 'Mothers no longer seek ghostly babies'

A trio of dwarves descend into the depths in the Dwarf Fortress key art. — (Image credit: Kitfox Games)

Fantasy megasim and mad magnum opus Dwarf Fortress has a long and cherished history of absurd patch notes and bug reports, having gifted us with bangers like "Made the corpses of small animals that die out of water stop teleporting" and "Bug: Ghost of vampires still drink blood." With its first patch of 2026, Dwarf Fortress is already hitting the ground running in what's likely to be another year of unhinged update literature.

However, while DF's patch notes often skew towards absurdist comedy, update 53.09 features a bugfix that's raw tragedy: "Mothers no longer seek ghostly babies." Sorry, baby shoes. We found a sadder six-word story.

Key art of a dwarf fortress under siege. — (Image credit: Kitfox Games)

For the uninitiated, properly attending to your settlement's dead is one of the many obligations the Dwarf Fortress player has to manage. When a dwarf succumbs to one of DF's countless hazards, you don't just suffer the loss of a worker and the emotional toll that's dealt to their grieving loved ones. If a dead dwarf isn't adequately entombed or memorialized, there's a chance that their restless spirit will return to haunt the fortress, further tormenting those who've outlasted them.

And if your fortress has suffered a particularly dreadful loss, you could very well find yourself with a phantasmal baby on your hands.

As a further complicating factor, the mothers of dwarven newborns are programmed to seek out and hold their babies until they reach 12 months of age, at which point they become autonomous children. Until now, that prerogative has—heartbreakingly—extended to ghost babies.

Dwarf Fortress — (Image credit: Bay12 Games)

If the idea of a mother so desperate to cling to her child that she instinctively seeks out their ghost somehow wasn't miserable enough, it could cause productivity headaches, too. Ghostly dwarves will sometimes emerge to haunt the spot where they died. If a dwarven child drowned or fell down a chasm—things can go very badly for a dwarven child—their place of death might be inaccessible for their grieving mother.

As a result, the mother could get locked in a purgatory of trying and failing to find a way to her ghostly baby, ignoring all other tasks and priorities—potentially to the point that she could die of dehydration.

As of update 53.09, dwarven mothers are now more measured in their grief, sparing them from that compounding misery. But in solving a tragedy, simulations have a way of producing another: Now, should a ghostly dwarf-bairn linger in some distant tunnel, its wails will go unheard.

Videogames, huh? Anyway, the patch also adds some updated creature portraits. Those are cool, too.

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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