Not quite. The bug chain went like this.

They added cats. Because the dev has a cat, he had the cats have some catlike behaviors, including licking itself clean. This tied into the ingestion code, deliberately.

The ingestion feature hooks into the new syndrome system. There are all kinds of procedurally generated poisons that can do all kinds of nasty things, mostly for the “forgotten beasts” that dwell in the caverns to make use of. While he was at it, he added the syndromes for a couple of canonical substances as well, primarily alcohol, inputting the values for a serving of beer, whiskey, etc, that a dwarf might drink, so that they can get drunk, and even sick if they overindulge. This is calculated by body weight.

Elsewhere was included a contamination feature, so that walking through puddles would get mud on your dwarves boots and clothes.

Then he added bars for the dwarves, and gave them carousing features such as quaffing, which would end up with spilled drinks on the floor.

Result? Cats walk through puddles of beer, get it on their paws, and lick it off. The syndrome information of the beer or whiskey or whatever is then applied to the cat. This is not a bug, this is intentional behavior.

The bug was that the full dosage of the syndrome was applied upon ingesting a contaminant. So the few drops of beer or whiskey were being treated as if they were full servings, so when the alcohol was applied to the cats’ body weight, which again, was an intended feature, it absolutely overwhelmed them and the cats started dying of alcohol poisoning. Just from the smattering on their fur.

It’s an awesome series of steps and combinations of systems to get this bug, and 99% of it was fully intended. And that’s all you need to know about dwarf fortress.

This story was what got me into DF in the first place

Was that just so you could get a pint of blood from the cats? And then the cats die of alcohol poisoning because you have a secret vampire cat and they normally hit the bottle pretty hard, but with not enough blood disorder they get wasted too easy and thus die.

You know what I just got an idea