Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Dwarf Mode Discussion => Topic started by: Khegit on October 13, 2013, 08:14:29 pm
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Alright...what is it with Dwarves and alcohol? They drink large mugs of it every day, three times a day, twenty-four seven. They do this from the moment they're birthed until the day they die. If any other race, humans, elves, goblins, drank like this, they would die of a shot liver before they turned twenty. Even then, they would never be able to get anything done, drunkenly stumbling around, in a constant state of ecstasy. Dwarves cannot only walk in a straight line, they can build, construct, craft, forge, cook, fight, speak coherently, and especially, brew more alcohol. I wanna know everybody's thoughts on this. Is it biological, like, do all dwarves have supercharged livers? Or is it magic, as in, some sort of magical affinity that only the dwarves possess?
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http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Beards
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They actually do have super-charged livers, in a sense. The dwarven liver is 50% bigger than the standard humanoid liver relative to body size, according to the raws.
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That actually explains a lot.
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They're not really immune to alcohol so much as they depend on it to live, it's a key component to their metabolic processes. See for non-dwarves alcohol is indeed a mild toxin, but for them it's more like a vitamin. Without it they can't digest food properly and so start to slow down and get irritable. Kinda like caffeine addicts before they get their morning fix, only much worse since dwarves typically spend their entire lives with some amount of booze in their systems. I bet expectant mothers are advised to drink more often than normal so ensure the baby gets enough to develop properly.
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It could be that the booze is fairly weak and drunk as an alternative to potentially nasty water.
Perhaps the dwarven body is so adapted to alcohol that they can't handle the microfauna in water, and the slowness caused by alcohol withdrawal is actually sickness caused by water too dirty for them to handle.
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Screw pumps purify water though.....besides, there's no way someone could drink that much booze every day of his life, especially as an infant, without being wasted all the time, then later, dying.
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ahhh you are right about someone. but what about somedwarf?
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It's almost as if the game isn't 100% realistic.
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Screw pumps purify water though.....besides, there's no way someone could drink that much booze every day of his life, especially as an infant, without being wasted all the time, then later, dying.
Infants would most likely be fed by their mother. And seeing as Mead was pretty much all anyone drank in some areas of the for world for a quite a while, as water was definitely not clean enough and could easily sicken or kill, I think Dwarves with super-livers would do just fine.
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Screw pumps purify water though.....besides, there's no way someone could drink that much booze every day of his life, especially as an infant, without being wasted all the time, then later, dying.
"Small beer" was an everyday beverage for everyone, even children. Its alcohol content was around 2.5% (or perhaps lower). Per the link, those involved in manual labor might drink up to 5.7 liters of small beer during a work day to stay hydrated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer)
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Somehow, I doubt this is the beer the dwarves are brewing....besides, they make all kinds of booze, including strong stuff, like whiskey.
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Screw pumps purify water though.....
If you think that aspect of DF is an intended part of the simulation, sure. If you think it's a side effect of the way that pumps handle water, or a side effect of the way the game handles contaminants, not so much.
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Somehow, I doubt this is the beer the dwarves are brewing....besides, they make all kinds of booze, including strong stuff, like whiskey.
Yes, but here I have to link back to the larger livers.
Besides, dwarven wine is a staple, and that can't be that strong.
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Its a placeholder. The general idea is that dwarves need alcohol to be functional, whereas other species get drunk drinking alcohol, which should lower productivity and cause other undesirable results.
In other news, any creature belonging to your fortress that needs to drink will prefer alcohol over water. I found this one out from playing modded humans and other races a long time ago. The [ALCOHOL_DEPENDENT] tag only means work slows down after being without drinking alcohol for a long period of time.
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Yea, ancient Romans/Greeks drank a lot of wine, too. Often watered down, at least for children. Again, we're back at the "water wasn't always/usually safe" thing. For a more modern example, this persisted in navies and on merchant ships well into the industrial age, I think. Rum was given to sailors, so they could mix it with water; one of the reasons being to cover the awful taste of the water that had been in wooden (not modern/sanitized) barrels for weeks. And the last rum rations in Her Majesty's Navy were only given out in the 1960s IIRC.
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Freshwater on ships and well water in cities tended to be not very safe, but i suspect the bias against drinking water is seriously overstated. AFAIK, it was considered odd in ancient Greece/Rome _not_ to water down the wine - someone who drank unmixed wine was an alcoholic. The huge aqueducts were built to get drinkable water to Rome. Labourers commonly drank watery vinegar, and in the Bible, you find many places where people drink plain old water; and judaism has no anti-alcohol taboo.
Hygienic standards and thus water quality went down the crapper in the middle ages, though; i'm still not sure it was as bad as it's often made out to have been.
Oh, the topic? Yeah, i think dwarfs just have a different metabolism, so that alcohol doesn't mess up their brains and they have a quicker/less damaging mechanism to break alcohol down.
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I'm going with the vitamin of this one. Dwarves are internal combustion engines, they burn a food-alcohol mixture to move, which is why they don't excrete, and when the internal alcohol reserve runs low they start diluting the alcohol component with beard hair (which is infinite) and their remaining supplies and with water to make them last. Dwarves can attain an essentially perfect dilution, allowing them to live solely off water, but they are running off a inferior fuel.
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It's almost as if the game isn't 100% realistic.
Of course not.
We've still got fifty years before we reach that point.
I do like the idea of the dwarves having different bio-chemical tolerances than their tall, beardless counterparts...
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It's almost as if the game isn't 100% realistic.
Of course not.
We've still got fifty years before we reach that point.
I do like the idea of the dwarves having different bio-chemical tolerances than their tall, beardless counterparts...
And because I'm an idiot, I posted this twice.
Fantastic.
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I'm certain that the ultimate goal of Toady and ThreeToe is not to make their game a hyper-realistic simulation. Absolute realism general doesn't make good stories after all.
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I've always thought dwarfs are naturally knurd (see the Discworld books or http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/index.php/Knurd for details). They need alchohol to smooth the rough edges off reality and function normally.
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Dwarves are internal combustion engines, they burn a food-alcohol mixture to move.
Can i sig this?