Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Dwarf Fortress Roundtable – Create New World! – I

Episode Date: March 9, 2019

This is the first episode of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable with Gernund and JohanTux, in which the hosts are introduced, and general discussion of Dwarf Fortress takes place. Show Notes: Original Reddit Podcasts threadVinesauce on youtubeKruggsmash on youtube "Skye Cuillin" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Hi, welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for everything Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. And I'm Roland. And we are here to discuss things Dwarf Fortress related. I am from Missouri in the U.S. I'm a software developer, and I just love Dwarf fortress. I'm Roland, I'm a student from Germany I play dwarf fortress a lot in my free time

because I think other AAA games are quite boring these days I've not played a new release AAA game in quite a long time myself I still like playing the old first person shooter Doom the first one from like 1993 but I'm a bit old school anyway though so I sadly board AAA games in the last time I regret it

it's too much money for a small amount of playtime and the dwarf fortress is like free and you have unlimited playtime you can do everything I watched somebody on YouTube play through the entire Grand Theft Auto 5 he played I guess there are multiple storylines you can do

but throughout that entire game it always felt like you were being funneled into the particular plot line that they had already had planned out for for the game yeah but it didn't seem like that much fun the graphics were astounding

but something we don't see in dwarf fortress every day yes that's true we decided to start the podcast Well, actually, I was looking through Reddit and the Dwar Fortress forums. I was looking for a podcast to listen to because I am kind of a podcast junkie. And I have listened to the original Dwar Fortress talk probably five or six times through from start to end.

So I was looking through the Dwarfortress forums and Reddit for podcasts with Dwarfortress. and I saw Roland's a post from Roland well yeah because someone on the Reddit said that they desperately needed a new podcast and I always thought about like doing something with the game maybe like playing it or something

a podcast seemed nice so I just ask who wants to do this with me because I'm I can be like very shy on my own so I need people to like steer me into it and that was month ago so I was very surprised when actually someone commented on this this thing a few weeks ago someone had responded to your comment to your original question saying hey well why don't you just go ahead and start this up if I recall correctly you had said, yeah, okay, maybe, but I want someone to do it with me, because you didn't, you

weren't sure that you had the time or the, or the experience perhaps to drive a podcast by yourself. And look, podcasts seem to always be so much better whenever you have multiple people who are exactly. Yeah. It feels more like a real discussion and not someone lonely in front of a microphone talking to himself. So yeah, I responded to his post and said, you know, I have considered a Dwar Fortress

podcast. I have a couple of other podcasts as yet unpublished that I'm working on besides this. So I have the equipment and the know-how to record the stuff. So here we are.

Roland, how did you discover Dwar Fortress? Through my favorite stream, actually. It's Joel from Vine Sauce, and yeah, I'm totally making an advertisement for him now, but that's fine. Oh yeah, that's fine stuff. Yeah, and he started to play Dwar Fortress a while ago, and I was interested in it. I didn't understand a single thing on the screen, but that's fine. Because he told everyone what you could see, like trees and stuff and stuff happening. And I was like, this is a good game.

I want this. So I just downloaded it and started to play it. But I had no idea how to do it. And I don't know. I never really watched any tutorials. So I played for two years until I. finally actually got to play it real. Before that I was going to ask you what resources you used to assist you in learning. Well basically just the Wolf

Fortress Vicky. But that's it. So no videos and not anything. That's maybe because I don't enjoy listening to so many people. So I have only two YouTubers or streamers I listen to I don't know so that's a reason for why my thoughts always look weird I guess

I'm trying to remember who it was that I first saw on YouTube for the Door Fortress tutorials because I kind of was the opposite one of the first things that I did whenever I found out about the game

was was go to YouTube to watch some people play it and do the tutorials. I've not been playing nearly as long as you have. I've only been playing since last spring, so it's coming up on a year now. I first heard of Dwar Fortress on another podcast called Rogue-like Radio. Are you familiar with the Rogue-like genre? Yes. So I was programming.

I was learning to program a rogue like myself and I was going through some tutorials and I was really getting into the roguelike scene and playing NetHack and Brog and Dungeon Crawlstone Soup and all that fun stuff and I heard them mention a couple times on that podcast Dwar Fortress and discussing first of all they were discussing how insanely complicated it was and also they would talk about how they didn't really consider it to be a true roguelike just because it's more of a in in fortress mode you know it's more of a simulation so that's where I first heard of it and a friend of mine who I work with told me that it was such a great game and that I should try it out so finally I downloaded it and found

it impenetrable at first a couple of YouTube videos and you know I I walk through a couple tutorials to first set up my stockpiles and set up my first meeting area disassemble my my my wagon and then I stopped playing and I didn't touch it again for a couple months and I don't know what made me bring come back to it but I came back to it again and then it it caught me I was hooked yeah you have like to to overcome this small point and if you go over it you can never go back to any game

because this is so immense I also hesitate to emphasize the fact that it's a complicated game because while it is an extremely deep game it's not that hard to learn how to play and as soon as you learn how to do just a few things that are basic to the game

like create stockpiles and assign jobs once you get those few things down, you don't have to know the entire game to have a blast with it. And there's lots of things that I still don't know how to do. And I've been watching videos and been exploring things on my own.

And I have just, six months into playing the game, I have just started utilizing squads and military. I would just run from things that were trying to attack the fortress. I would try to just block them off. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Listen, it took me about real two years to actually get into military at all.

Because before that, I just fumbled around with farming and trading food and drinks and good items. And only after two years, two years, I was like, well, now I can finally do some military. How about that? Well, it took me forever to even figure out how to how to form correctly. And I don't know why I was making it so hard. It's not nearly as hard as I thought that it was. No, it's not.

And I would end up having, you know, after a year, sometimes even before the first caravan would come, I think that I would be starving my dwarves and they would have the wild. Yeah, yeah. I remember those times. yeah somewhat I'm still in that stage I have recently discovered that right now I don't even tend to even worry so much about about getting food myself I just dig down get some gems I cut them and then I start trading those gems for all the food and alcohol that the caravans bring in and I seem to be getting five pretty good on that right now well it is a way of doing it I guess I normally since I took two years of actually trying to figure out farming I now overproduce food so much

it's horrible it's absolutely horrible my food stock pilots tend to like be larger than anything else in my entire fort and I'm a massive hoarder so I never sell them or do anything with it I just produce and more and more until my fort starts lagging because I have so much food

I have the problem with stone stockpiles and I know that you can do the quantum stockpile thing but I still tend to not do that much I will on my main level I will have a you know a 40 by 40 stockpile of just nothing but stones and then a couple layers down a couple Z levels down I'll have another huge stockpile of stones I don't seem to be able to let myself just leave them in the holes.

Yes, yes. That's some kind of OCD thing, I guess, because I have to clean everything up. Currently, I have about four stone stockpiles, which are massive. One is actually one third of the entire map, because I dig so much. I like to do wide hallways I really like them I go too wide I mean what is too wide

sorry I usually go two tiles wide on my hallways oh two yeah I go four those are large hallways indeed but they help reduce legs I think I guess and then they go long for for I mean there's no

real reason why I do them so long and so wide, I just do it. I mean, it's some kind of role-playing thing, because I like to imagine that my dwarfs have this spacious hallway, and they like it, and this is

like torches on the wall, you know, a white hallway underground. I tend to, on levels that are below my main fortress level, I will start doing exploratory digging and I seem to really like gemstones.

So I'll do exploratory digging and wherever I find gemstones, I will get that little cache of gems in that song. But the problem with that is after I have dug around on a particular Z level for a while, it is just completely ugly and trashed and it's completely disorganized. I'll have tunnels going every which way. 22 wide tunnels that have just destroyed any chance of having

an attractive looking fortress level on that level. Yeah, I'm I tend to do that too but not in the real fortress level. So I just dig deep, deep, deep down almost over the Magma Sea and then do that

because I can easily like wall it off in case of, well, clowns. Yeah, so they just run around in my weird hallway tunnels and my dwarfs just put a wall somewhere and I'm completely safe again. I have had a problem lately with wear beasts and having a wear llama has been my bane

of my current, my current fortress. So I had a wear llama attack. a couple a couple of years ago in game years and it infected one of my peasants that I didn't realize so you know that peasant turned into a wear llama and I sent out my hastily constructed squad to dispatch the wear llama and I didn't realize that I had in that in that squad I had most of my best skilled gem cutters minors so I sent them out, they all got killed. I don't know.

I sent my fortress back, way back, because I've lost most of my highly skilled people because of, well, because of my own idiocy, but fun with the capital F. Yeah, I think where animals are not that big of a deal right now for me, I mean,

I have some crude military and if your military has some kind of protection, it's fine, most of the time at least. But I had one time where I had like a wear mammoth or something extremely giant and just smushed all of my dwarfs in less than two seconds and I think it ended with my one of my dwarfs actually remaining as the last one becoming the mayor and severely depressed while trying to clean

out the tavern of corpses. It was depressing to look at, yeah. You know, I have not gotten, I'm almost embarrassed to say this. I have not gotten so far in a fortress yet where I have actually lost the fortress because all of my dwarves dive, I have had this habit of getting to a particular level in my fortress, learning something new and realizing had I done that from the start, things would have gone much better. So I would go back, start again, and go for three or four in-game years, realize after I learned

something new that I should have done that from the start. Lather, rinse, repeat. well yeah i see where you're coming from yeah but i can safely say that my oldest fort is actually 120 years in game so it is long and this is one of my mega projects i guess because i started the entire so it's um a giant world and it's highly populated it has no history just five years and my mega project is to fill the world with dwarfs then then came the update where you can send squads out right and I was like well how about this I not only fill the world with dwarfs

but I eradicate every single race so I just said dwarfs kind of genocide I tend to build like fort somewhere I can easily access some humans else so goblins and then I built this massive underground fort solely train every single dwarf for military, send all of them out until this fort dies or I well killed every single goblin or human in my area and then do that again and my oldest fort is actually 120 because I'm in the middle of like dark pits of goblins so I have a lot to do I started the world on the year five and the current year is I think 280 I don't know something like that so it took a long long time to actually get there I have dwarf fortress installed on five or six computers in my

house. Primarily, I'm just playing it now on my, on my main laptop that I use for development for, for computer programming. That is the, the computer that has the fortress on it that I'm working on now. That is, I guess it's seven, seven years old now. And this is the one that I have told myself that I am going to stick with. And we're going to let this fortress ride out to wherever it may be. And honestly, part of the motivation for that was because we're doing this podcast.

I just have something that I can talk about and come back to and give updates on. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can talk for hours just about this 120-year-old forward. Well, I'm certainly looking forward to getting updates on your quest for World Bomber. Yes. Yes.

There is even more than just what domination, for example, zombies or garbage flushing systems, and I mean, it's big. Yeah, I'm not nearly, uh, nearly that, that advanced yet. It'll be some time. The great thing about the game is, is you can take it to whatever advancement level that you want, you still have a great time with it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm not playing on a very advanced level.

I just play for a long time. because i don't have any other hobbies i had like free time and i spent days on this fort it's horrible how much how time consuming it can be especially if you get yourself into it in a role play manner so your name all your dwarfs you create backstores on your mind you try to build things, how you imagine dwarfs would like it. Do you want yourself on the

population of the dwarves in your fortress? I usually do like 250 because over that and my computer says like, no, no, I'm not going to do that anymore. I wish I wouldn't

have to. Sometimes I think, well, I've been watching some videos for from a a YouTube content creator called Krug Smash. Oh, yeah. If you've not seen his videos, I have. I have. He is awesome.

Yeah, he is, he is. Yeah, so I noted that he seems to usually like to keep his fortress populations down to, you know, to start off with around 30 dwarves or so. And I like that because then you can almost intimately get to know, the individual dwarfs in your fortress and know them very well and where once you get up to probably over 60 or 70 dwarves

I think that at least me I would lose contact with knowing some of these dwarves so well yeah or you are a massive mega melaniac and you have like 250 dwarfs all of them named with backstories and you know all of them, especially those military dwarfs, because you sent them out so much. You know even who is married to whom?

Too much, too much. Yeah, I don't know that my mind could hold that, but you know what? It might, especially if I've had a fortress going for, you know, 250 in-game years, then it may not be so difficult. Yeah, you tend to like bond with pixels. to the point that if one dies in some kind of accident or an attack or whatever, you actually grieve about him. I don't have that much time each day to play Door Fortress,

but I do try to set aside at least one hour at the end of the evening before I start getting ready for bed and all that. I try to set aside an hour to just dedicate to my fortress. I try to do that every day. I unfortunately don't have the blocks of time available to spend four or five hours on it at a time. But I still get some great enjoyment out of it just in my hour a day or so. It's almost as though I'm just checking in on my miniature people. Yeah, yeah.

I know where you're coming from. I usually just start my fort and then let it run and check every, hour or sore if they have still food or drinks, which they do, obviously, and I just do some other things like serve or learn, study, whatever. Because Dwar Fortress is, can run on its own. I have always wondered how, how the dwarves will manage themselves. I mean, they're not going to really dwarf. For example, if you don't assign him to make beds, if you don't assign any dwarf to make beds and you don't request a bed work order from your manager, will a dwarf on its own end up making

some beds if they need it? Well, sadly not. So we do have to manage to that level at least. Yeah, yeah. So we have to like say make some beds. If you have the ad hack you can for example already tell them that you want rooms here and doors there and some beds in there and then you can go over to the manager and say yeah like do some doors and make some beds and then they will slowly carve out the rooms and equip them with beds on their own that's possible I do use the lazy newbie pack. I started off with just downloading the Vanilla Door Fortress and using it, and I might try that again sometime soon, but I did discover the lazy newbie pack, and I really enjoy SoundForge. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, no. Sounds sense. I think Sound sense, yeah, that's right. I think it's Rain Seeker. It was either Rainseeker or Captain Tastic that... did the voices for the dwarves on that. And I just love hearing the dwarves tell me that there are new migrants coming in and things like that.

Voices? There is situations where, for example, if a group of migrants comes in, you'll hear dwarves tell you, hey, I've come to move in with my son and become a member of this wonderful fortress. and you'll have them telling you, oh, there's no more fish in the swamp, things like that.

Really now? Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. I have really to try that. It also has a music track and a weather track where you can hear it raining. But I tend to find those off, but I really enjoy hearing the dwarf voices. That's neat.

They're in a stereotypical Scottish accent. that's great yeah Bruce McDwarf well when we're talking about languages I like to imagine that

dwarfs for example are like really Scottish because I like I like Scottish dwarfs but when it comes to like goblins I imagine they speak German and yes I speak German of course

but people tell me that German is in this harsh language and sounds kind of angry. I don't understand that, but never mind. That's the reason why I really like to imagine that goblins like talking German and elves are like Finnish or something. Don't know.

My voices in my head of dwarves and elves and goblins come from my exposure to the Tolkien. Not so much the movies, but I read the Tolkien the Lord of the Rings books whenever I was a kid and I had in my in my own mind

what the elves and the dwarves and the goblins would have sounded like I think maybe some of that was also shaped by the by these 1970s rank and bass cartoon production of the Hobbit but yeah I

don't know that I think of them as any particular nationality except maybe British everything's British either not sounding British or

posh and snooty sounding British or the difference between London and Liverpool I guess yeah I don't even to be honest since I'm German

I only know a lot of the rings and the Hobbit in German so I'm not even sure what kind of like languages or accents they have in English. I heard that elves talk like Gaelic or something.

I don't know. Yeah, Tolkien was a philologist, and I do believe that, yeah, that was what he had in mind for the elves. He wrote a complicated language and told backstory for all of his universe. It's pretty neat. I used to be a pretty big fan of it. whenever I had more time to spend digging deeply into things like that. Are there any more topics that you want to talk about?

Well, first, I guess we should talk about a little bit about what we see for the, or ideas for perhaps the future of the podcast. I do like the idea of getting people like Joel from Vine Sauce and Smash. anything that we can get on here. Oh my God, yes. I think it was Crug Smash himself that commented on another thing on the subreddit where I actually ask

if someone wants to help me with videos or podcasts or whatever. So he himself actually was interested in this. Oh, great. That would be awesome to talk to him. Yes. I first discovered him on some of his later videos and then I went back to the very first videos that he made

and it is very interesting to listen how he developed through the time span through the span of his videos he developed his voice character that he uses now whenever he says hello you bearded bastards and that's how he sounds now and it's a very nice character voice and then in the early videos he's using his own personal voice it's it's nice to see the progression of how he went from from how he started to how he is now and so yeah great so I will reach out to him then

and and off offline we'll discuss perhaps who we want to approach first but I did purposely suggest the name Roundtable for this, for that very purpose, because I would like to have not even people who are necessarily flying air quotes famous in the community, but just anybody who wants to get on here and talk to a Fortress with us, I think would be great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. that's why I like the name too because the idea of just getting the normal player base to join you and talking and stuff so you don't only hear people that talk anyway about the game

like Cruxmash I mean you you hear him if you watch his videos there is content from him but the normal player base does not really have content on its own, if you know. Yeah, yeah, that would be great to be seen as their outlet. Dwar Fortress is just too awesome of a game.

It's just too big of a community to not be represented, and I'm not saying that I would ever officially represent Door Fortress, or that a podcast would, but there needs to be a podcast out there so that people can listen to it on the subway.

Yeah. That's oddly specific, but yes. The subway on their commute to work, you know. I listen to podcasts pretty much any time that I am not working or talking with someone else or in a situation where I need to be applying my mind to something, I will be listening to a podcast of some sort. I'm very much a podcast junkie. That's a lot of podcasts, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I don't have time to listen to all the podcasts that I've subscribed. to. Hey, I'm adding another one here. That's great. Okay. I guess we are ready perhaps to wrap up this first episode. Yeah. At this time, I don't have the website up yet. It's fine. It's going to be DFroundtable.com. And I hope by the time this episode is actually released, that I will have that up. On DFroundtable.com, you'll be able to find show notes. You'll be able to find show notes. You'll be able to link to the actual Dwar Fortress Roundtable episodes, and you'll be able to leave comments to interact with us about the show.

Well, you got anything else for us, Roland? I guess not, no. Okay. In that case, until next time, this has been episode one of Dwarfortress Roundtable, and we will see you soon. See you soon. This has been Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. Join us for each episode as we discuss the game, the community, and the obsessive compulsion to play.

You can find our podcast at D.FRoundtable.com. If you have any comments, ideas for discussion, or would like to appear on Dwarfortress Roundtable, please leave a message in this show's comment section at DFRoundable.com. The theme song is Skai Kuelan by Kewelan by K. Kevin McLeod. Find Kevin McLeod's music at Incompetec.com. The link is in the show notes. This is a Cicterite podcast. All craftsmanship is of the highest quality. It is encircled with bands of cassiderite. This podcast menaces with spikes of cacetorite. On the podcast is an image of a pigtail in Orthocles.