Oh my, that dwarf mood is the same thing that exists in the webfic Worth The Candle. A blind focus descends on someone randomly ('forge frenzy') and they create a unique magical item, to the exclusion of food and sleep. In WtC, such magical items are called entads, referring to magical artefacts that are created in this way.

So either Alexander Wales (author) played Dwarf Fortress, or it's a wider trope that both are drawing from.

OK I did a google and I found the author saying in an AMA that he wasn't inspired by Dwarf Fortress:

I have never played Dwarf Fortress, so no. The closest inspiration I can think of is one of the Drizzt books, where Wulfgar gets the mythical warhammer Aegis-fang made for him by his adoptive dwarf father Bruenor Battlehammer. It's been probably twenty years since I read the book, but the chapter where it got forged really stuck with me. Forge frenzy is kind of that, amped up, with worse materials.

Entad

An Entad is a magic item, created by means of a forge frenzy. Conceptually they tend to be most similar to magic items as seen in Dungeons and Dragons.

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I tend to have "strange moods" that last about 6-8 weeks at work, roughly every 1.5 years.

Over the last 7 years at my current job, only two of these have produced anything useful, but they've probably been about as valuable as everything else I've done combined. One weird pattern is that the valuable ones made the least sense up front – like "rewrite key data pipelines in a language none of us have heard of" or "move a bunch of stuff from one piece of infrastructure to a seemingly identical piece of infrastructure." The ones that seemed to make sense up front, on the other hand, never amounted to anything. It's gotten to the point where my cofounders actively encourage me to work on things that don't make sense!