As if the injury descriptions weren't already ghastly enough in Dwarf Fortress, the legendary outpost builder is getting a "meat biome"

"Lots of meat terrain - muscle, bone, vertebral walls, sinew, sphincters."

Legendary outpost builder Dwarf Fortress is getting a meat biome. A terrible netherworld of bone and artery. A sunken redoubt of gristle and gizzard. An appalling labyrinth of squirt and squelch. Honestly, the biggest shock here is that Dwarf Fortress doesn't appear to have a meat biome already. It certainly has plenty of florid descriptions of fatal injuries.

These foul omens arrive care of a massive "Future of the Fortress" thread on the Bay 12 forums, in which studio co-founder (and prominent genAI disliker) Tarn "Toady One" Adams fields questions about the on-going development. As a forum thread, it's not a formal news source, so please season these tales of gutsy geology with whatever Condiment of Scepticism you consider appropriate.

There's no date for when the new biome might arrive, but Adams says it'll likely exist underground, and will be revolting. "Lots of meat terrain - muscle, bone, vertebral walls, sinew, sphincters," he promised. "We would have rivers of blood/fluids if we ever get to the fluid update, but no new fluids as it stands. We had thrown out the idea for maple syrup style taps on the vertebral walls for cosmic spinal fluid but alas, this is not in the game." At the very least, there won't be any meat trees, but you can mine the meat for resources.

Adams doesn't discuss the origins of the meat biome in the thread – is it more of a headless, fungal phenomenon, or is there some kind of huge mammalian cadaver down there? If it's the latter, one consolation is that the meat biome can't be resurrected. "Ha ha, I don't think regular meat can be animated currently?" Adams remarked in response to a question about biomes of squirming, zombified meat. "So probably not."

The bulk of the conversation around Dwarf Fortress at present concerns forthcoming changes to the magic system, together with how arcane knowledge is categorised, transmitted, preserved and lost throughout each procedurally generated world. There's a lot of speculative chat about that in the Future of the Fortress thread, too much to cleanly summarise. It's saying something about the density and stature of Dwarf Fortress that the addition of flesh caves feels like an afterthought.

Developer Bay 12's current plans for the game also include a crystal biome, which I would say is the nicer option, but then I remembered that this is Dwarf Fortress, the game in which you might end up getting besieged by the ghosts of the very children you callously sent to hunt down a wild elephant. There is absolutely going to be something in the crystal biome that gives you nightmares. Dazzling, prismatic nightmares.