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[Cabbagetroll]

I like to pretend that humans bring gallons of blood and ichor with them to trade to dwarfs because of three key ideas:

(1) Humans simply do not understand dwarven behavior and society. They bring these bodily fluids because they actually think dwarves really like and use them for something. Why? Well, because of idea number

(2) Dwarven forts are sually covered in blood from sieges/ambushes/FUN. Traders see this everywhere and assume that the dwarves put it there on purpose, as a stylistic choice. "But wait," you might say, brimming with skepticism, "Humans bring this to me on their first trip through, and my forts aren't ALWAYS covered in gore at that point." The human traders are here, chosen for the trading trip by Human leaders, because they've traded with other dwarves before. Probably your host civilization, too. "But wait," you rudely interrupt again, ashamed of the obvious ease with which your previous point was so masterfully dismantled, "fellow dwarves have brought this sort of stuff before. Why would they be so ignorant of dwarven culture?" Which brings us to point number

(3) As your fortress moves farther and farther away, socially, from the Mountainhome, tastes change to meet the local area's flora and fauna. The Mountainhome guesses wildly each year what things might entice it's subjects living abroad in the hopes of appealing to everyone in the kingdom. They assume that your local population may have gained a taste for blood, so they ever so helpfully send you some every year.

Now for my question: what sorts of explanations do you impose for the game's various quirks and nuances?

[Nyan Thousand]

Do you really want to tread this path? There are some things that are unexplained, not because they are not worth explanation, but because trying to do so would be fatal. Dwarf Fortress is one of them. Armok knows what kind of post-Lovecraftian horrors you would induce in your brain trying to figure out what makes these dwarves tick.

[saltmummy626]

my explaination for some things is usually "BECAUSE I WILL IT!!!" the other things that happen that I cant explain are just sunspots or polyps.

[Sabreur]

1)  The Vampire Mayor was a former accountant for the trade union.  Thanks to his tampering with the records, they still think that trade in blood barrels results in a forty thousand dorfbuck profit per year.

2)  The barrels were empty, but they accidentally left the lids off when passing through an area with evil rain.

3)  The barrels aren't meant for you.  The traders also visit the elves, and those guys have some weird culinary tastes.

4)  The goblins have figured out how to transmute blood and ichor into copper, iron, and silver.  While your fortress is blatantly ignorant of technological advances in the outside world, the rest of Dwarven society is diligently researching this strange alchemical process.

[Tirion]

Last I checked, you can cook blood with some luck and micromanaging. Granted, that was when you could cook booze too.

[crazysheep]

Last I checked, you can cook blood with some luck and micromanaging. Granted, that was when you could cook booze too.

You can still cook booze..

[Callista]

Yeah, the only thing that changed about booze and cooking is that now you can't make meals out of nothing but booze.

What I wanna know is, how come my dwarves cancel attending a party to go get a drink? Isn't drinking something you can do while you party?

[Nyan Thousand]

What I wanna know is, how come my dwarves cancel attending a party to go get a drink? Isn't drinking something you can do while you party?

The dwarves think of partying as more of a chore than anything. Just another job that needs to be done. Dwarves will stop PARTYING HARD PARTY PARTY PARTY HARD to drink, eat, sleep or go on breaks, then they'll finish their WHEN IT'S TIME TO PARTY WE WILL ALWAYS PARTY HARD time. This is because Dwarven parties are serious shit. Dwarves spend their PARTY time not PARTYING HARD, but actually just standing there trying to hone their telepathic powers. (This is why dwarves are sometimes seemingly omniscient)

Look, I'm not going to pursue this line of thought any more. I'm afraid I might get an aneurysm just by thinking about this.

[caddybear]

Yeah, the only thing that changed about booze and cooking is that now you can't make meals out of nothing but booze.

What I wanna know is, how come my dwarves cancel attending a party to go get a drink? Isn't drinking something you can do while you party?

( they don't actually drink while partying, I think. They stand around and socialize but where's the fun in that)

Well that's explained by the dorf mind, which is quite different to ours, spots the difference between drinks which are consumed as a part of social activity to those that are drunk to slake their thirst. So a dorf could drink 3 barrels of sunshine in a party environment but would gain zero nourishment from that. To circumvent this, the dorfs make a mental choice to leave the party and drink and come back. Without actually ever leaving the dining room, or even moving from their spot. Marvelous.

The mysteries of the dorf mind are numerous indeed, friends.

[snoopychicken]

3)  The barrels aren't meant for you.  The traders also visit the elves, and those guys have some weird culinary tastes.

This sounds like a good possibility, Elves have exotic animals, maybe they import blood to feed certain animals, or maybe they convert it to fertiliser for their trees.
Hmmm that actually sounds pretty cool, maybe dwarfs should be able to use barrels of blood as fertiliser(like we do in the real world)

[Loud Whispers]

1) The mountainhome is already dead. The migrants and merchants arriving escaped before the halls fell, and have yet to discover the truth. The liaison is always a spy.

[ObiWorm]

3)  The barrels aren't meant for you.  The traders also visit the elves, and those guys have some weird culinary tastes.

This sounds like a good possibility, Elves have exotic animals, maybe they import blood to feed certain animals, or maybe they convert it to fertiliser for their trees.
Hmmm that actually sounds pretty cool, maybe dwarfs should be able to use barrels of blood as fertiliser(like we do in the real world)

Or to make black pudding.

[snoopychicken]

Or to make black pudding.

It'd certainly help with hangovers when the booze runs dry. 

[byrnsey]

Desalinizing/sanitizing screw pumps work because they aren't Archimedes' screws, as us humans would naively assume.  Dwarven engineering, coupled with the black hate in the pit of a dorf assigned to pump operation, means that the screws reach velocities similar to that of a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbopump.  This creates such a huge pressure drop the surface of the water is essentially under hard vacuum, and boils.  The vapor is then sucked into the pump, centrifugally spun out until only pure H20 is left and deposited on the other side.  This is why the pump is not actually *in* the water it pumps.  Also the evaporation/condensation process makes the water extremely, shockingly cold, which is why dorfs who get caught in the backwash end up in the stupidest places.

[saltmummy626]

anvils. think about it for a second. kind of like the question of the chicken or the egg.