Doves

“

Click to listen

— The Engineer shooing away a dove.

”

Doves appeared in all Valve-made maps with the exception of Arena maps, Target, and Item Test. There were 78 perched doves in total.

There were two types of doves: perched and flying. The perched doves did not move, blink, or fly; they remained perfectly stationary, unless attacked or touched by a player, which would cause them to explode. The explosion caused no damage or knockback. Doves that had exploded would re-appear at the beginning of a new round. The Über Update removed the doves from maps.

On June 17, 2011, the Team Fortress website was updated with pictures of doves and dove droppings across the top of the main page. Additionally, clicking on one of the three doves "perched" at the top of the page lead to three different pictures, each with different connotations to the Medic: a bombed, ruined hospital; a waiting room; and a doctor's office, respectively, all of which appeared empty and abandoned. On June 20th, 2011, the doves on the main page were removed due to the redesign of the Team Fortress website.

When used, the Meet the Medic taunt spawns many doves that fly from behind the Medic. A flying dove has a one out of one hundred chance of being released whenever a Scout is killed via gibbing.

Locations

See Dove locations for a listing of all dove sightings.

Update history

June 8, 2011 Patch

[Undocumented] Doves have been added to all Valve-made maps.

June 10, 2011 Patch

Fixed a problem related to spawning multiple entities unnecessarily between mini-rounds.

June 17, 2011 Patch

Fixed a server crash triggered during entity cleanup.
[Undocumented] Added a new "Dove" model with flight animations.
[Undocumented] Scouts now have a 1 out of 100 chance of having a flying dove spawn when killed via gibbing.

June 23, 2011 Patch (Über Update)

[Undocumented] Removed doves from the maps they were placed on.

Bugs

There was a dove near the center of Well on a rafter that could not be killed through conventional methods, as it was inside of a clip brush that blocks all weapons fire or entry. This dove could only be killed by sticky jumping and hitting it with the Ullapool Caber or through the use of noclip. None of the other doves had this problem.