v50 Steam/Premium information for editors
  • v50 information can now be added to pages in the main namespace. v0.47 information can still be found in the DF2014 namespace. See here for more details on the new versioning policy.
  • Use this page to report any issues related to the migration.
This notice may be cached—the current version can be found here.

Dragon

From Dwarf Fortress Wiki
Revision as of 19:13, 10 October 2016 by Rriegs (talk | contribs) (Capitalization; improve wording)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
xTATTEREDx  · +FINE+  · *SUPERIOR*  · ≡EXCEPTIONAL≡  · ☼MASTERWORK☼
Dragon
D
Urist likes dragons for their terrible majesty.
Biome

  • Any Land
Attributes

Building destroyer: Level 2

· Megabeast · No Exert · Steals items · Fire immune · Fanciful · Exotic mount

Tamed Attributes
Pet value 10,000

Template:Tame attrib proc/

Trainable:  Hunting   War 

Size
Birth: 6,000 cm3
Mid: 5,000,000 cm3
Max: 25,000,000 cm3
Food products
Eggs 1-3
Age
Adult at: 10
Max age: Immortal
Butchering returns

(Value multiplier ×15)

Food items

Meat 113-173
Fat 42-65
Brain 4-8
Heart 2-4
Lungs 8-18
Intestines 14-27
Liver 4-9
Kidneys 4-8
Tripe 4-9
Sweetbread 2-4
Eyes 2
Spleen 2-4

Raw materials

Bones 66-110
Skull 1
Teeth 3
Skin Scales

Wikipedia article

v50.12 · v0.47.05
This article is about the current version of DF.
Note that some content may still need to be updated.
A gigantic reptilian creature. It is magical and can breathe fire. These monsters can live for thousands of years.
Size comparison between a dragon and a dwarf.

Dragons are gigantic fire-breathing, green reptilian megabeasts, eventually becoming the second largest land creatures in the world (behind the giant elephant). They are a different creature than the similarly named cave dragon.

While based on the occidental dragon model, dragons do not fly nor have wings, and are not intelligent. They are immune to both fire and magma; however, they can still drown if immersed in the later. They frequently exhale jets of extremely hot (theoretically 50000 °U , over four times the heat of magma) "dragonfire", which can injure things that are immune to normal fire, such as the bronze colossus. Only dragons and cave dragons are naturally immune to dragonfire; however, dragonfire can be blocked by creatures equipped with shields.

Dragons are covetous and seek to steal items from your fortresses to bring them back to their lairs. Dragons generally succeed in doing so on worldgen, but most of the time when they attack a player fortress they get caged, killed or succeed in burning the whole fortress down.

Dragons are the glass cannons of the megabeasts. They aren't especially durable for a megabeast and can be slain quite easily with traps or skilled soldiers, however their dragonfire will melt every other non-shield-using creature in the game (except for sponges), they breathe fire over a long distance (20+ tiles) and they breathe fire often.

Some dwarves like dragons for their terrible majesty.

Dragon Size

Dragons slowly grow to become one of the largest creatures in the game, finally reaching their adult size of 25,000,000 cm3 after 1000 years. As a hatchling, dragons are quite tiny, at exactly 1/10th an adult dwarf's size, but they grow very rapidly, at roughly 25,000 cm3 per year. Dragons reach dwarf size shortly after its second birthday, are more than double a dwarf at about year 5, and add another dwarf in size roughly every two years after that.

  • At 23 years, a dragon is the size of a giant cheetah.
  • At 100 years, a dragon is the size of a draltha.
  • At 200 years, a dragon is the size of an elephant.
  • At 320 years, a dragon is the size of a hydra.
  • At 800 years, a dragon is the size of a bronze colossus or an adult roc.
  • Thereafter, a dragon is the second largest creature found on land. (The giant elephant is the largest land creature, while the giant sperm whale is the largest creature found anywhere.)

Defense Strategies

Dragonfire can be blocked if the victim is using a shield, and it will be more than 99% of the time. Though they are among the physically weakest of the megabeasts, Dragons are still massively powerful in melee combat, so they can be hard to take down without a good military. Possibly the best defense is to use piercing weapons like crossbows and especially spears and hope you get lucky and hit a vital organ which can bring it down immediately. An alternative is building one or multiple cage traps, possibly beforehand, which will probably cage the dragon making it harmless. You should know that wooden cages and stone mechanisms will be destroyed by dragonfire, so either make sure both cages (or weapons, or supports) and mechanisms are impervious to dragonfire, or more simply ensure that the dragon has no reason to breathe fire by removing animals and dwarves from the trapped area. While they won't fire on buildings normally, a stray blast (at your outdoor livestock or bait animals, say) that catches any traps, doors, bridges not made of dragonfire-safe materials will melt and deactivate them. This can be used to your advantage since dragons will destroy the bridge they are standing on, even if they aren't aiming for it. Also, dragons make good companions if you are able to reanimate them as a necromancer

Domestication

Dragons can be captured in cage traps and trained if you're lucky enough to catch one. Currently, knowledge of animal behaviour is based on the civilization level and depends partly on the animals available for contact in a given civilization site. Such a rare megabeast as a dragon is unlikely to have had any civilized contact aside from adventurers attempting to slay them and other violent contact; as such, your fort will have to build the knowledge base from the ground up, making dragon-training a highly difficult task. Bear in mind that even with a skilled animal trainer at hand, your first attempts to control such a powerful and elusive beast may result in half your fortress burning in dragonfire. Even after training, a dragon may sometimes still be hostile towards the dwarves in the fortress and begin attacking as soon as it's set free, so they should preferably be placed in a restraint until the player is 100% sure they're no longer a threat.

If you can manage to endure its long-untamed wrath, you'll have a massively valuable pet that can lay eggs. Dragons can also be trained as war or hunting animals at an animal training zone. While a trained dragon is an immensely destructive tool at your disposal, it is also very eager to use dragonfire against your enemies, which can be exceedingly fun if it happens in your grass, booze stockpile or meeting area.

Since version 0.40.05, creatures lacking the [CHILD] tag can lay viable eggs, therefore opening the possibility to successfully breed dragons. Hatched dragons will immediately be considered adults, though they will still need to progress through 1,000 years of growth to reach full size. As they are born adults, it isn't possible to create fully tame dragons without modding.

Irregularities, Bugs, and Future Plans

Dragons have been observed to occasionally wear some armor (breastplates, greaves, leggings and boots). This armor is specified as "Large [metal][armor type]" and gives the dragon the same protection as any other species might get from it. This is a bug, as dragons can't normally equip items.

Toady One has mentioned that he plans to eventually extend the random creature generator of the game to create different species and varieties of dragon within certain constraints, calling it "Half-Random", with ideas for variants including just about anything dragons have been given in literature, such as acidic blood, while maintaining a basic draconic structure.([1]) He has also commented on the game's current portray of dragons as wingless unintelligent creatures, citing his reasons to be the many ways dragons are depicted in real life sources.([2])

One of the old power goals referenced stealing dragon eggs as part of an adventurer mode quest.

D4Dwarf.png This article or section has been rated D for Dwarf. It may include witty humour, not-so-witty humour, bad humour, in-jokes, pop culture references, and references to the Bay12 forums. Don't believe everything you read, and if you miss some of the references, don't worry. It was inevitable.


Contrary to popular belief, a dragon is not in fact toothless, and will tear you to shreds, resulting in fun.

They will, in accordance to popular belief, however, burninate the countryside, the peasants, and any thatched roof cottages that happen to be around.

Though dragons are thought to make their lairs in dungeons, actual sightings of "Dragons in Dungeons" are extremely rare.

"Dragon" in other Languages Books-aj.svg aj ashton 01.svg
Dwarven: måmgoz
Elvish: vutheni
Goblin: kusnath
Human: tamun
Retrieved from "https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=Dragon&oldid=227298"