Dwarf Fortress is kicking off 2026 exactly as you'd hope it would: with a minor update offering an utterly wild batch of patch notes. Normal games might tell you things like "nerfed fire duration 3%" or "boosted gun damage 0.2%." Not so with Dwarf Fortress. Here we get patch notes about illegal werebeasts, mythical dream objects, and mothers seeking children lost in the afterlife.
The headline change in the patch notes on Steam is, of course, this: "Mothers no longer seek ghostly babies." I don't really know what that means, but given Dwarf Fortress's heavy simulation system, I can take a guess. Perhaps when a baby dies, that same character is then simulated as a ghost, and previously mothers would've nonetheless kept trying to care for their infant children even in the afterlife.
