Werebeasts will look a bit more distinct thanks to the latest Dwarf Fortress patch. Update 50.03 adds a grand total of 72 new tiles for werebeasts, which come in a surprisingly wide variety in this particular colony management game. The patch also addresses an array of crashes, and makes selecting materials for your buildings easier.
Dwarf Fortress developer Tarn Adams says the new werebeast graphics include 72 new pieces of art for werebeasts. In the legacy version of Dwarf Fortress, these were represented by the character Ñ, a capital N with a tilde over it. You could determine what kind of werebeast you were looking at by pulling up its information card.
That system allowed Dwarf Fortress to get pretty creative with them: in addition to the more traditional werewolves and werebears, you can also run into things like werecapybaras and werewombats in your procedurally generated travels.
Now more of those fanciful creatures have dedicated artwork to indicate what they are at a glance (and add more visual flair to your scenes of wanton destruction and chaos, of course). Adams doesn’t specify which creatures have new art, so we’ll have to wait until the herd of werezebras comes knocking stripedly at our fortress gate.
Perhaps more helpfully, this patch also addresses several crashes, including ones that would happen whilst sorting pets and livestock by domestication status, when storing objects in recently related location zones, and when examining the squad equipment screen when you have multiple squads in motion.
The patch also adds new ambient sounds for wild areas, forests, grasslands, rainforests, and sieges. Plus, you can now add or remove every item of a particular building material when you’re building a structure that requires multiple units of material.
The full 50.03 patch notes are available on Steam.