Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 101: Still Dwarfy After All These Years

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

FYI: Spoiler Ends At 45:30 Story Dwarves Channel Download Jonathan's WereMoose World

Welcome to Tor Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for All Things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we're back once more to talk about all things Dwarf fortress, as we have done for five years now. We have just passed our five-year mark. Guys, that's a bit of a milestone. Yeah.

Yeah. You know what? I should maybe get myself like a. plastic, what's that called? Black? Yeah, just hanging somewhere, you know, like five years of podcast. Five years of service. Yeah, we can...

I've talked to the corporate people about that, you know? Yeah, we've got access to a 3D printer. We can print those plaques up for folks. That is a genius idea, actually. Oh, my God. Well... Yeah, Patreon gifts. My supervisor hasn't noticed, so I don't know that that's going to happen for

me. So I want to open this up with a little bit of a question here. We got a packed episode this time. I almost said this week, but we're a bi-weekly show. So I want to open up by asking you to if when they open up the Dwar Fortress demo mode on Steam, are you going to switch to the beta branch to try out the adventure mode? Wait, demo mode? What now?

Well, they're going to release the adventure mode in beta a bit before they release it for the main branch on Steam. And I think that I heard that they're going to be doing that on Tarn's birthday next month. So my question is, are you going to immediately switch branches and start playing adventure mode? Are you going to wait until it comes out for the full release? I think I play in beta anyway. Do you? So, yeah. I think that's what I'm set.

in on with yeah yeah yeah it's actually a very curious idea let me just because there is a possibility that I also just mine says theater I don't yeah mine says door fortress and then in square brackets next to it it says beta so I'm going to assume okay beta public oh my heavens there's a lot of them there's experimental there's public beta there's 50.11 50.10 09 and 08 lots of things or none I guess I can just... Are these all branches you can... Yeah, these are all the branches you can do.

Or there's private betas for those who are in the know. Not I. Yeah, that's probably for blind. Yeah. The private beta. So yeah, so you too, Roland, huh? No, I'm apparently not playing a beta, but I am using the beta from D.F. Hack. That's the thing.

And I'm not sure if I'm going to download the... beta for that. I mean, I am quite giddy for it, but, you know, the fine polish is actually something that I'm still interested in. Well, I'm going to definitely switch branches so that I can play on the beta. So I think that we're going to give you some peer pressure rolling and try to get you to do it as well so that we can talk about it on the podcast. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's fair. I would say it comes down to how long the beta is. the only way to play adventure mode if we're talking about like what is it like half a month um then if they hit their release date it will be about half a month yeah i'm all i'm all for the

beta i don't i haven't noticed any stability problems basically i just want to make sure that df hack works that's kind of my that's true that's true that's my only real consideration well i did whenever i switch to the beta branch, I saw a lot of stability issues right off the bat, so I wasn't on it very long before I switched back. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, it was fairly early

on, I think. It was I think whenever they were coming out with the yeah, I don't remember when it was, but it was probably after a few months after the release, switched to the beta branch. We should ask our listeners to chime in on that.

and what ways they think the beta is worthwhile or dangerously insane or somewhere in between. Well, yeah, you know, kind of what you're getting into, whenever you do a beta, and that you're doing something that's going to be less stable, probably, than the main one. But you get the early features, so it's here and there. I love me a good feature. Yeah, and just for the portraits, yeah. You know, I will have to see. If the beta is only out for like a few days,

then I might just be too scatter brain to actually notice that I could have just downloaded the beta to get it sooner. I think that's the most realistic idea of what is going to happen here. Yeah, I'm impatient, I think, is what it comes down to. I want it now. Well, if I was going to turn on my prediction part of my brain, I would say that it's going to be in beta for a while because there's going to be probably some game-killing bugs that they didn't catch that they will have to fix before it comes out. That's just, you know, this is a pretty huge, pretty huge change. Oh, yeah, for sure.

Yeah, no. I'm also half expecting that they change a major version number on it. Oh, yeah. You don't think it'll be 50.12. It might be 51. What do you think? I don't know. I'm thinking it might be 51.

It might be 50. We made a big jump to Steam, didn't we? Were we at 49 before Steam? 47. 47. What happened to be in 49? What do you think happened to those? 49 was a dwarf fortress, the perfect game, and we will never get to play it.

Well, I don't know if our listeners remember, but the version number, was at one time signified the percentage of what they felt was done before they had the complete game. So version, you know, 35 was considered, you know, around about 35% done. So if you look at it that way, I would think that if 50 was kind of half done, then adding adventure mode to it probably puts it up, you know, maybe they'll go to 60. Who knows? Wow, it could be, I don't know. What do we think?

Should we do an informal pool here? I've been wrong on these things so many times that I... Well, that's half the fun. You kind of got to, yeah, you've got to be wrong. I haven't heard anybody in the community talk about changing major virgin numbers, so I suspect that it'll be 50 dot whatever's next. Yeah, if I was guessing. I think 50 dot whatever's next is, I agree.

Yeah. Well, last episode, we started talking about pump stacks and then put the Knicks on it because we wanted to actually give ourselves more time to talk about them. So, pump stacks, they confuse me. Yep, yep, I didn't really do as much with them. I ended up getting really excited at having a game that was going great where nothing could go wrong. So maybe that, maybe I should experiment more with them there.

How did it go with you? I mean, for what person? purpose are you building them? Well, you got to pump stuff and stack them. Well, typically it would be to drain a dwarven toilet, you know. Pump and stack. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I would think that, you know, drain a dwarven toilet back into the river.

Back into the river. That's... Is that not what you do if you're excess, whenever you flush the dwarven toilet and to get to the goblinite that ends up there, do you not, do you not drain it back out into the environment? I do drain it, but I use the border wall to the outside of the map. I smooth it and put fortifications in, and then I built a few grates before that, and usually most of the items will be flushed next to the grates.

Sometimes they will get pushed through. Sometimes they get pushed through those fortifications as well and just stop existing. But most of them stop before the grates, and then I just, you know, like and then flushes and then the water amount that I had stored is gone and then the water just evaporates. I don't really drain it back into a river. I just shove it off the map, I guess. Oh. I would, in my mind, I would think to pump the water back out to the surface and put it back in the river from which you got it.

I kind of had an idea of wanting to do something with magma and pump the magma to the surface or something like that and use it as a way to kill waves of intruders. I thought that would be fun, but I didn't, I don't know how to do that. I still haven't messed with magma a whole lot. I've gotten to it a couple times, but mostly I just leave it alone because, you know, I don't want to crispy my dwarves too much.

Yeah, I either do that or I punch holes and start, having the demons appear, and they're very difficult to get rid of the demons. I don't much care for them. I know that pumps tax are a way to get magma up to your workshops, if you don't want to have your workshops all the way down where the magna C is. Ah, that's, see, that would be useful, I think, yeah, to have, like, a little reservoir that you've pumped up so that you don't have to go down there and you could just wall it off. Yeah.

But, okay, so are you making dwarf powered pump stacks, or are you making like water wheel or windmill powered ones? Because the machine-powered ones are a little bit more complex because you essentially do have to build a whole setup of machinery that brings the power to the machines. The only time that I've successfully implemented a pump, it was being water wheel powered. And that wasn't a pump stack, though. It was just a single pump that would pump water out of the river and into a trap area where I was funneling invaders to and then drowning them. It worked very well, but I don't know if I could consider that a stack. So pump stacks, for those who aren't aware, are a way to get a liquid from, one z level to other z levels i guess you think of it mostly as multiple z levels away right

yeah i know that mike who was on a couple episodes ago uh he heard us talking about pump stacks i think in the last in our last episode and he said that uh that there is a quick fort pump stack plan so i i quickly looked at that tried to implement it very quickly and i got confused, so I did not successfully do that. But, you know, I did the same whenever I first started doing Dream Fort, and I worked my way through that. So I'm planning on trying to work my way through the pump stacks with Quick Fort to help me set them up. Because it's, I know that it's very fiddly. Even whenever you were using the water, when I was using the water wheel to set up my water base trap, I know that setting up the pumps were kind of fiddly there. And I had to,

I had to build it and I did it wrong. So I cut it back down and did it again. I think that I just followed the Dwar Fortress Wiki's instructions on that one. Yeah, pump stack. Let me see the last pump stack. Oh, actually, the last pump stack that I did was in the current fortress. I wanted to get some more water into my aquarium. And if you get the ultimate idea of a single pump in your head correctly, then the pump stacks become so much easier to do

because essentially the pump takes from one end of the pump and shoves it to the other side of the pump, right? Like it drains the water in a level below the pump and then shoves the water in front of the pump. The cool thing is also that the front of the pump is like a block so the water can't just flush your dwarf back

which is, it's so important. If you then have pump A on the bottom level draining from the C or the magma C or whatever it is, then the next pump for the pump stack goes above it on the next Z level above and it looks into the opposite direction. So that the drainage, the butt end, so to say, is at the front end of the pump below it. and then they pump into the lower one pumps into like one tile that you dug out and the pump above takes the water from that tile and pumps it in front of itself and you don't need much more than one tile because if both pumps are powered by the same source either dwarf or water wheel whatever they do pump at the same speed so the amount of water is going to be sucked up at the same speed as it is going to be sucked up by the next pump as well. I hope that was comprehensible. I fear it wasn't. No, I think I get what you're trying to say, thus the stack. Yeah. Because one takes from the one below it, which takes from

so it kind of just pipe funnels up. Do you have to keep building pipes up to do that? Or does it? No, no. You don't have to build pipes at all. It's just you have one free space, then the pump, then one free space, and then in the layer above it, you again have one free space, the pump stack facing in the other direction, one free space. And then you go there where the water is being pumped in, where it sucks from, I mean, where it sucks from, you break through into the layer below. you channel into the layer below so you can actually see the water being pumped in there. It's, I could draw it, but I can't

really describe it. I've just realized. No, I get it. This made a wife, we don't talk about pump stacks on podcast. Yeah, that, but let me try to rephrase it one other way because Roland explained it. Tony said it another way, and I think that I'm going to try saying it a third way. Oh, do it.

Sounds amazing. So, in essence, you're pumping from downstairs into a tile that's right in front of you. Then your next layer of pumps will be right above that tile in front of you, and then it pumps into a tile in front of it. Then you kind of can keep stairs stepping up a Z level, up a Z level, where you're taking basically two tiles and pumping from below you to in front of you with each of those steps.

Is that the right idea? I think that that is correct. You don't have to make like a step, like a stairway step out of it. You can just invert the pump itself and then it also works perfectly. And then you actually like have a pump tower that with one, two, three, four tiles in, you know. So for example, if you have a cavern that you have to go through, just four tiles is perfectly fine to actually have a pump. stack maybe one to the left as well for the the energy but otherwise you just need a tiny tiny bit of space to actually get a proper pump stack going and some people like to place iron bars

on top of the channeled out things because pumps can pump water out from below through grates and bars but that's not really necessary because if you if you close the thing up anyone then no dwarf can fall in, so. Can a dwarf get sucked up into a pump? No, but they're going to be very confused what is happening, and they're going to just, you know, not be able to get out properly. Well, you know what? I said that I was having trouble getting my dwarves to fill my wells and metal bent.

I don't know if you recall that, but I was. I was having that problem. I finally fixed that problem. I still can't get them to fill the stinking wells with buckets, but I ended up channeling from my river into the reservoir area of the Dreamfort plans in my metalment fortress, such that I had a series of floodgates that allow the water to flow from the river into my fortress reservoir in such a way that I can safely do it without flooding the fortress unless all four floodgates are open at the same time. So I finally have water in my wells in my fortress. So that was an accomplishment. That's nice.

You know, I really have to check out those dream for blueprints because apparently you can also reduce water pressure by having like a not not a straight path. But how you say like. Yes, I know exactly what you mean. Very necessary. Like diagonals. Yes, you can remove all water pressure by letting the water pass through one diagonal tile. Really? Yeah, and it keeps your, like, because I tried that the wrong way one time,

and I think I built a passage for water to come in, and I made it straight, and then I put a door there to try to stop it, or a floodgate, and it basically just rushed in and knocked everything out and completely ruined the fort. So what, does it behave like a kind of like a light reservoir? Sorry, like a light aquifer The diagonal tile? No, no. It does land in the water. Like you have a large reservoir, but the well is below it.

And usually then the water would push through and just come out of the well if it's too much water. And instead of building like an L shape to get it around the corner, the water, you can have like one diagonal tile. And then all the water pressure actually gets removed. but it still fills up after. Yeah. So it won't push the water up.

It'll just make it seven deep and no more. Yep. And it won't ruin anything you put in the path either, which is kind of cool. That's an interesting bug feature. I think it's a feature. Feature. Or a mechanic. I mean, I don't think that's too buggy.

I can see how that would make sense. It's like you can think of it like whenever you have one of those inverted pet waterers, where as long as you have a vacuum above it, but it's not going to exceed the outside air pressure and it keeps it from dumping all over your floor. That was not a good analogy, was it? No, it's great. That totally makes sense.

I get it, I get it. Not quite on board. So have we pumped all of the content from our pump stacks? I think we might have. Is the well run dry? I think the well is actually now very undry. Yeah, I think the well is very wet, a little confused. In the midst of the year eight, as told by historian Andrew Campbell,

Aeson Dent Post, among the earliest of his kin, found his abode within the stronghold of Meadowbent, commencing his journey as an apprentice in the craft of soapmaking, yet the allure of gastronomy beckoned him, steering his path towards mastery in the culinary arts. heir long the clarion call of duty summoned him to the fray amidst the assault of incineration wherein he displayed unyielding valor leading a stalwart band in the defense of metalbent in recognition of his indomitable leadership he was anointed with the noble title of baron subsequently upon the tragic demise of the inaugural and sole monarch zifon town assault who fell gallantly while safeguarding the bastion of seared busts asan ascended to the throne of the castle of stop thus becoming its sovereign ruler. Hail King Ascendent Post, may his reign endure within the hallowed halls of Meadowbent,

ensconced within the illustrious civilization of the castle of Stops. May the blessings of the Dwarven deity, Istraff Totwalt, perpetually grace his reign. So recalls the history of Andrew Campbell. You can find his scrolls in finer libraries around the portentous plain. I'm going to keep messing. with it. It's like any of those things. I think the more you do it, then the more it starts to make sense. Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, if you get the, if you get like a proper image in your head

on how a pump works, the pump stack is actually much easier than supplying a pump stack with energy. Because if you have like 20 windmills far, far above and you're trying to pump magma from the sea, then honestly, getting that energy to your pumps is much, more of a hassle than just building the pump stack. That seems really difficult getting them powered would be hard. That's probably what I haven't done it. It's so many mechanisms. You've got to get your

pump stack powered though, right? Yeah, because it's just so much faster and you don't have to do anything for it. It just runs, especially on like wind energy. It's like free energy, free pumping. Exactly. Should we look at our

queue of questions. What do you guys think? Okay, so before we do that, I want to, I know that it was mentioned a couple episodes ago. The person who made the dwarfy song, Story Dwarves, is the name of the YouTube channel. And they did a song that they tried to base on the description of a dwarf fortress song like that will be sung in a tavern. Do you remember talking about that, Roland? Yep.

Okay. So I finally actually sat down and listened to it. It is freaking mesmerizing. I know, right? Whoever, I don't know if it's a they or just a he, but it seems like that it's a, it might be a single person channel. I'm not sure.

But yeah, I hope, I know that that had to have taken a long time and been a real pain in the butt to do that. But it was absolutely mesmer. his uh his 12 note scale that he used to to make the composition it almost has like a almost like a native american vibe to it but also sort of dwarfy in the tokonesque dwarfy sense i i want to hear much more of that i agree so so i checked out uh the first videos of his two series or their two series that are on their their channel and i'd like to recommend in that everyone go out and check those out.

One of them is kind of a Western-themed adventure mode storyline, kind of in the vein of Krug Smash that he's doing. It's got kind of a Western twist to it, so it's really cool. And he sings all through it. And the person is quite a talented songwriter and singer, and it's really cool. And then there's another one that seems that it's going to be more like a tutorial fortress. But, yeah, I think that I just want to shout out to story dwarves and make sure.

that uh you know just let our listeners know to check it out if they haven't already and i'm double checking now just to make sure that i've got the name right i think it's story dwarves yeah story dwarves learned hands is kind of the the more traditional tutorialish kind of for it where they talk about what they're doing while they're doing it with their uh with their musical twist to it and then the other one is the ballad of urs and bimble that is the western themed one and both of those are very different from each other, but very good. So shout out to story dwarves. Thanks for taking the time to do those creations.

They're great. Indeed. All right. That's very cool. So we do have some listener questions. Most of these came in from the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable Discord server. Who do we want to start with? The colonization.

Let's start with the Pickleman. Oh, the Pickleman. Better. Yeah. From Tekken. Pickleman. Oh, yes. Lord Pickles.

Techett. It has now become famous for pickling lots of things. Pickling the green sausages, yes. A master fermenter. All right, Tekken asked, what is something that you regularly do in your forts that has no real utility and provides no advantage for your fort, but you do it anyway out of principle or habit? Oh. For myself, I love pretty florida. floors. So I will like to make cool patterns on floors wherever I can. I like to have, you know, pixel art on my floors, dwarf heads, cool designs and things like that. That's, it does, you know, has no effect on the happiness or anything of my, of my dwarves have those floors, but it makes me happy. So I like to do that. Yeah. That's a good one. Okay. I think I would go in the same direction. I like to make the dance floor.

in my taberns into a checkerboard so that, you know, it has like different colors. Most often I use metals, sometimes wood, because there's some really pretty wood. The red wood, for example, goes very nicely with towelwood, and then you have like a red, white checkerboard. Very cool. And when I make my three-by-three rooms, I also now put wooden floors into, and while that does increase the value a little bit, so, you know. I do try to mix them up.

So it's not like the entire floor has all yellow, funky wood floors. It's more so that I try to make each individual room have a different type of wooden floor than the room next to it, simply so that it looks like a little bit more chaotic but also more lively. Like every dwarf actually has a complete different room. They're not living in some kind of hostile where everything looks the same. Well, that sounds pretty useful in the fact that I wonder if it makes happiness better or something. Well, yeah, the wooden floors at least increase the value and the value increases happiness. But I don't have to mix them up.

But other than that, I just realized that most of the things that I was going to say here, do increase the happiness quite directly, like statues and corners of long pathways, or making the main tracks where my dwarfs track along always have some kind of engraving road kind of thing where I have like an engraving, and then free space engraving, free space engraving, and that only is on the main roads

where a lot of dwarfs constantly walk by. Mostly because it looks better to me, not exactly because a dwarf that walks over it. It's like, oh, what a nice engraving. That is just like an additional cool thing that happens. And I think that that's, I mean, it doesn't provide no advantage, but it provides more aesthetic advantage for you. Yeah. Because if you were going for full advantage, then you just, you know, engrave all of them instead of every other one. That's true, yes.

Yep, I get that. I think there's, that makes sense. I guess I would say I don't think I do. anything like that uh i don't i'm not very good with the aesthetics of things because inevitably something happens and all the time i've spent doing it then goes to shit oops um so yeah i don't think i do that so do you still build stuff on the ground level on the outside level first and then put a wall around it and then start working underground i do yeah i always i always wall around because i like to embark near towers and if you don't do that you get screwed okay so that may be

that may be advantageous to your fort but yeah that's the only reason i do it yeah it's just to give me it's just buys time for that first invasion of that first siege that seems to happen like five seconds after i embark but it does give a fortress a particular vibe that you that you don't get whenever you start by tunneling underground and and you know just yeah it gives you a surface yeah it gives you a surface presence i guess i guess one thing is i like to build taverns above ground. So if I'm going to build a fortress tavern, I put it

above ground and then I build roads on it to try to make it seem more hospitable because I feel like, hey, the inside of the fortress is the private zone of the door. We don't want people cruise in that. And I also have found, but

I guess there's a utility in that that I've discovered, which is it seems like people steal artifacts less because all kinds of seedy elements come into the tavern. And if it's above ground and not part of the fort per se, then it's harder for them to get in to steal the stuff. But I don't know if that's true or if I'm imagining it. Well, okay. I can see the utility of doing that, because if you then have like a panic room underground and soldiers still get into your base, like goblins or whatever, then, you know,

they have to go through the visitors first. Interesting. Or the whalebeasts. Although the question is, does the wear beast infect less by biting, simply because it's above ground? Hmm. I doubt it. I think that wear beasts are, you know, the scourge of dwarf fortress right now.

I think once you get a world that's got them, you're going to be in trouble. Yeah, I think you're right. I wish I couldn't get a world back where I had them. I'm still sitting here, completely vampireless, completely wear-beaseless. I'm now starting to make my own. Let me send us a copy of my saved world that has them. You can have all the fun you want with wear-bees.

Ironically, please do. You know what I think it is? Okay, yeah, sure. I will. I think it has to do with age of the world. because I... Oh, I thought with my age. Yeah, okay.

Well, could do. No, I've noticed that I have a world that is the default, whatever it is, 100 years or something. And, I mean, I feel like I kind of won that world because I've got a military where everyone is like near legendary because they train all the time and they're still happy because there's a lot of alcohol. And then I've basically sent them out on raiding missions

and conquered all the goblins near me, and then I decided to conquer all the elves, because why not? Basically, any time I send them to raid a place, they, you know, I just demand surrender or conquer it, and then the squad stays behind, and then I send a messenger to send everybody back, and then I rinse and repeat. So it's kind of a slow process, but there's not much more to do.

Like, I can't lose. Like, every time there's a Titan that comes in or a forgotten beast my squads just go wipe it out pretty quickly and i have really good doctors so people get healed quickly it's it's going great and there's no wear beasts because i think that would i think that would ruin it because i don't think i'm very good at getting rid of them so are saying that you beat the game i'm saying i beat the game yeah i actually stopped playing that world because i was just like well literally nothing's going wrong oh that was my that's my war rhino world which i had some great times with war rhinos are pretty effective in i would say effective when you don't send

them to raid other towns like don't don't send war animals out with your squads that do raids because that seems to bug out pretty frequently but they're amazing for fighting people who are so stupid that they'll invade you because the rhinos just smash everybody to bits they're very cool Interesting, because I actually, I remember that. The last time, I believe, you already mentioned that, and I was like, you know, I do actually have elephants. Let's train some war elephants. Then I trained some war elephants, and then I got them into a pasture where the human soldiers that are attacking me, they have to go through. And agonizing failure, the war elephants didn't do anything.

They literally stood around, and they got punched by the human. and stabbed and whatever, and they didn't do anything. Were they assigned to people in your squad? No. That seemed to be the difference for me. Really? When I assigned it to a dwarf and then I dispatched the squad, then it seemed like the rhinos got into it.

It wasn't 100%, and I think there's still some bugs maybe in how that all works, but it seemed to work pretty well. So the war-trained animal now has to be assigned to a soldier in order to properly attack? Well, yeah, I saw the same thing. They just ignored invaders. They didn't, like, they didn't show any initiative. Let's just put it that way.

They just kind of hung around. Interesting. Yeah, you know, they were just, like, Rino, I guess in general, is kind of fearsome, but it's kind of like a armored animal, right? Well, it's not kind of like that it is. But, yeah, it seemed to do well when, only when assigned, but the big problem that I had was

rating with them that is not that did not work well and I don't know why but my squads would like go and then it would do that thing where they never come back yeah hmm that is okay you know so that maybe

maybe still work in progress but yeah I think I'm going to write that down so I remember that I have to assign my war animals to soldiers so they work properly yeah I mean Give it a shot and see what your take is. And, of course, if anybody and anybody listening has thoughts and theories, take them to the Discord. That'd be awesome to hear about it.

And if you're not in the Discord yet, then what are you doing? Yeah, it's literally the... Some people don't care for Discord. It's the only use case for Discord. It's stuck. No, I get it. I get it. A lot of people assume that it's eventually going to go the way of everything else that was once good and go the corporate evil route.

I don't know if it's going to happen, but it could. Well, we'll see if they start making money, maybe. Who knows? So, Roland, I did find that world. It's called the mythical planet. I will retire. I've got a spare save on it, so I'll retire the fortress that's going on that save, and I will send it. You know what I might do?

Yeah, I think I will. I'm going to post it to our website so that you can download it or anyone else who wants a world that is guaranteed to have Wehrmose. That is very much. Yeah, it might be worth some fun. Yeah, fun with you know, exclamation points surrounding it in all caps, yes.

Yes, yes, exactly, with the full set of caveats. In the annals inscribed by the venerable chronicler boss J313, it is recounted that in the ninth year, upon the triumphant ascension of Aeson Dent Post to the throne of the castle of stops,

the denizens of Metalbent embarked upon the construction of a majestic suite befitting a dwarf of his renown. This regal chamber was bedecked with the wondrous marcosite bed named Gushud-Purlances, while its floor, wrought of steel and iron, bore intricate engravings depicting the grand sagas of the portentous plain. Moreover, his throne room was graced by the presence of the legendary artifact, the green glass throne combine fight, encircled by masterfully crafted cabinets and pedestals supporting priceless treasures. Within his dining hall, furnishing's rod of steel and jet provided a noble setting for feasting and camaraderie. In solemn reverence, his royal mausoleum was adorned with an abundance of treasures

and artifacts, each imbued with a divine inspiration. Upon its completion and his occupancy in the 11th year, King Asin Dent Post found contentment. In gratitude to his loyal subjects, he initiated and enforced the crafting of crowns fashioned from various materials, thus decreeing their exemption from trade henceforth. Such is the chronicle penned by Boss J313, preserved for posterity. The following question was provided by the Discord member, Mr. Tux. For some reason, the hosts lost their collective minds and did not attribute the question to Mr. Tux during the recording.

Dufuses Have any of you on the podcast ever try to colonize the circus? If not, how would you prepare for it if you wanted to try? Well, that's an amazing question. It is. Is that even possible? Colonizing the circus? Apparently, if you don't want spoilers, you may want to stop listening for about the next five minutes or so.

I'll put a time mark of when we stop talking about this question in the, the show notes I'm pretty meh on that I'm like come on something that's been around for 20 years that's the worst kept spoiler in the world did you guys know that Darth Vader is actually Luke's father

oh my god oh man I was just going to watch that movie Snape kills Dumbledore oh my god but yes apparently you can colonize the circus you can go down there and you can build

structures and you can fight the demons to a point as it does work with normal animals if you kill enough at some point they stop spawning but that means you have to kill quite a few demons not just like 10

but on paper it is possible in real life I mean just considering that arch crystal that already did that took like 500 years in-game

to actually build up a fortress and train cave dragons and giant tigers and stuff. That is already a lot to put into the game because I played for like 110 years in one of my fortresses in the previous one. And that already took a very long time to do. And I only had like 80 people in there. Now, the thing is, I don't want to go into hell. like unprepared. And unprepared does not just mean, like, I have dwarfs with legendary armor, like, combat skills, and, and, and, uh, legendary, amazing master-crafted armor made from steel and Edmontine.

Cut candy? Well, I mean, we're, we're already cutting this from Spider-R-Dar. I think it's, uh, I think it's okay to talk about things that are part of the. The light blue metal. The light blue metal. But I would also want some serious war animals. So elephants, for example, would be nice. Optimal would be giant elephants.

But then there's the question, how the hell do you keep them alive because they need so much food. But, I don't know, 500 years, if that's the goalpost of, like, how long you need to actually get stuff going. Tony, you said you beat the game. Try that. Yeah, maybe I will. I don't seem to be able to have much success fighting the demons.

They are really powerful. And I thought I had solved this one time by opening something up, letting a whole bunch of them into a room, and then dumping lava on them with a floodgate. And they were fine. They didn't really care about the lava. They just kept moving around happily in the lava. And I was like, well, that sucks.

Yeah. that that is the thing they are very much fire resistant and the funniest thing about this is not only are they fire resistant but if you kill them and you get their leather the leather is also fire resistant very funny is that is something that happened to me like two years ago i apparently had a like a devil leather tunic or whatever and that devil leather tunic i don't know how i got my hands on that by the way i did not kill a demon but the demon leather cloak or tunic or whatever it was superheated by magma and people kept like taking it and wearing it and then dying melting oh no because it was superheated leather oh so you don't want to have them using that no no no no that's no you don't have to superheat it like i did but uh apparently Nelting people by wearing very hot leather is something that can happen in the game. So be careful.

Even if you do kill them, don't make like a leather armor out of it. That has a weird side of it. Duly noted. Yeah. Duly noted. You'd think it would cool after a while, but if it's supernatural, I guess it's supernatural. Well, I'll take my hubris for it and try to go find those guys, see if I can. and spice up life a little bit.

Yeah, do that and write down what you do and take some screenshots because you can make a cool story out of that. Yeah, well, we'll see. You never know. Maybe we'll... Maybe it'll work. Maybe do just take any unfair solution

into play that you can, like rock falls and ballistic tracks. and war animals because one demon is very much a fort-ending scenario in my opinion, just one and you never get just one.

Fort-ending, but perhaps not world-ending. Yeah, they seem to stay inside the fortress, but I might be wrong. I've never seen them in like the rest of the world, even after I dug into hell.

So, oh, because you you let them loose into the world? I thought you could kill the whole world if you did that. Yeah, I thought so too and I wanted to try it out so I dug into hell

in different fortresses on a specific island but nothing ever happened with those demons in world generation and they just kind of hung around I guess. Okay. Something else to try.

Yeah, it is. That sounds fun. As recounts, by the minstrel Garzini in his ballad, in the sixth year of his reign, King Asyn Dent Post found himself in possession of all he desired, a mighty fortress, a thriving civilization under his stewardship, and a royal dwelling that stood unparalleled within the portentious plain. Yet, a disquietude began to stir within the heart of the king. Troubled visions of a radiant azure substance, rare and coveted, haunted his dreams, beckoning as a tribute to his own grandeur. For the streams of migrants from distant fortresses had ceased their flow, and the steady accumulation of misfortunes had dwindled the populace of his cherished metalbent to a measure he deemed unfit for its status as the capital. What shadow veiled the paths of migration? Thus, on a morning in the balmy embrace of early summer, in the year 15, King Asen awoke with a newfound resolve.

His dwarves would embark on a quest to uncover this elusive element, fashioning from it a moment. monument befitting his stature, a towering pyramid hewned from the depths of jet, crowned by a pinnacle adorned with the fabled Azure hue. With this decree, the king dispatched his finest miners to scour the depths in search of this priceless substance, as immortalized in the verses of Garzini, echoing through the annals of antiquity. Okay, so we have a question from Mvlado and Tony, why don't you, it's a multi-part question, so Tony, why don't you take the first part? All right. Okay. M. Vlado asks, do you think devs should prioritize adding functionalities that are in DF hack already, or focus on what is not in DF hack? I don't have an opinion.

You know, I think it comes down to the kind of DFA command that we're talking about, because if we're talking about something like the search feature in the previous version, yes, they did implement that. They did implement a vanilla search feature, and that's pretty good. That is very, very good. I love that. But if we're talking about something like, what is a feature, like source, making water, spouts or whatever. That's, that's not necessary. That's not necessary. I think I think the most

cheaty quote unquote command that I would actually like to see in the vanilla game to some degree is clean owned X. Where you can tell you at worst to just lose that stinky worn shirt, my boy. We have beautiful new leather tunics. Just grab one. just get rid of the old thing. I think that is the biggest, like, outlandish, cheatiest, come on, that I would personally like to see in Vanilla game. You could implement it in Vanilla in a way that wasn't cheaty, though. You could have a setting saying that, you know,

dwarves have a higher percentage of throwing away old garments whenever they're damaged for new ones. What? I don't understand why they will go ahead and continue. continue to wear super-tattered stuff anyway. Oh, and there's like piles of new nicer stuff. Yeah, it's really, really annoying. They'll have like unable to acquire an object for so long,

but there's like a whole, like stockpiles of all sorts of objects. Yeah, yeah, I would love to see that. Like, we'd be like, go switch it up. Dress and undress, please. Yeah, yeah. And clean-owned kind of forces that, but... Clean-owned. Yeah, clean-owned and then X, and then it destroys every.

everything that has a little bit of wear. And I think that forcing your dwarf to actually get rid of the tattered thing is just so good sometimes. Yeah, I think so too. I feel like they should I feel like they should know how to do that on their own. You said

that's kind of a vanilla? What do you mean? No, no, no. I said, I would like to see that in vanilla. Okay. That would be a good vanilla addition to have a setting such that you can tell the dwarves will have a higher probability of getting rid of something whenever it's torn.

I mean, for the flavor of the game, it's still kind of cool to see a particular dwarf who has fallen in love with a particular sock, even though it's completely worn and tattered, and they just will not get rid of it. But in general, it'd be better to see your dwarves do things the way, you know, you would expect real dwarves to do. And that's prefer, you know, newer shiny steel armor

to that old dented, up, nasty-looking copper piece that they've been wearing. Yeah. yeah i mean if they if they have an emotional attachment that seems cool like that that's kind of game a fight but i don't even think that's really what's happening i think it's just they don't know how to do it yeah so yeah i think it depends on the on the the tool that you're talking about i mean i never would want to or expect to see fast dwarf implemented in vanilla yeah agree unless they start making cocaine out of i don't know plump helmets or something and basically the mechanic would

Yeah, they work faster, but they have much shorter lifespans. I don't know. Now we're getting into remorough territory. Okay, Roland, do you want to take the next one from Emblado? List your wishes for four priority additions slash changes to DF after adventure mode. I do have an opinion on that one. My biggest feature that I would like to see added would be Mac support. I would love to see a native version of the game.

I don't have to use a bunch of crappy hack type stuff to get it to run. That would be cool. I'd love it. I can see that. I can see that. For my part, I would like to see the Army thread. The Army, what do they call it? He has a word for his threads of development.

Military, his military stuff. Not just military, but there was going to be an Army build. where you could have more interaction and more features about armies on the larger scale than you have right now, something that is more along the lines of organizing an army to send it off to do the things now that are done simplistically, like the raids, have more control over it. Oh, right, like have a commander be able to control five squads or something. That would be pretty easy. Yeah. I'd like to see more development done on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the wider military and the army and the strategic and maybe tactical boats. I'd like to see boats. That'd be pretty neat.

Yeah. Boats. So then you can because right now I feel very disappointed when I have a continent that, or a world map that's generated and I can't get between the two continents or whatever. There's just no way to travel them. And like I can't do the little bridge fortress or whatever that that, that, that, that, be need. I'd love to be able to have that. Okay. That's a good one. That's a good one. I think for me, it is definitely something that I noted lately, and that is we do have an announcement setting. Like, you can go into the announcement and say, hey, I don't actually want to hear about this. But for some reason, I can shut off sparring. Maybe I'm like completely dense and I don't see it. But I've, I've went in there and I just clicked around and I am not able to shut off sparring, not combat reports, just training fights.

I don't want to see training fights because I think that there is a maximum amount of entries in your announcements because sometimes I leave my computer and I get like something to drink and I come back and I have new announcements and I hover over them. It is a empty bubble, but the only bubble that has like 400 entries, and it is massive. It is physically massive on my screen. It's the sparring bubble. And I don't want to see that. I don't care about sparring.

I love it. It's cool. I don't want to read about it. And I just wish there was a single, like, clickety click in the announcement settings that says, this person doesn't want to read about sparring. Don't give me reports on that. Thanks. Very cool.

Yeah, I think that the game kind of treats sparring as regular combat, as far as the announcements go. Yeah, yeah. If you toggle off pretty much all combat reports, then you don't get sparring, but then you also don't have combat reports. Like, I tested it. I threw a cat into combat. There was nothing. I couldn't read it. There was legit nothing.

The cat just evaporated into thin air. It's like, okay, combat is gone. but um i had a i had a second idea and now it's gone damn it well i know that they were talking about for a long time the magic release and i i don't really know that i care to see that one so much really like we're talking you don't want to see firebolts or what do you mean yeah that's how we're talking i don't magic is such a nebulous concept my idea of magic my magic my be completely different from the next person's idea. I guess we should probably trust Toadie into doing things that are good for the game.

But I like the fact that it's more of a simulation that has a realistic feel to it rather than a magical feel to it. Even the necromancy, that's probably as far as magical as I would want to go, undead and necromancy. But that's just me. You know, I think I heard him say something along the lines that there will be like a scale in the world settings where you can just say, this is a very magical world or this is a very mundane world. So if you don't like the magic, I do believe that at some point we will just have a slider that says, nope, this is mundane. Cool. I like that idea. Yep.

like the army arc and the magic arc I'll have to go back and listen to the original Dwar Fortress talk episodes I need to work my way through that series again because it's been a while since I've listened to them always great okay so

the third question from Imvlado was tell us about your current fort goals and how do you pick fort goals in general we should have started that that one that is honestly such a vast thing to talk about Should we pause on that one and give that due time next session? Because I feel like I would be hurrying through.

I think that would be fair. I think that's a good idea. I would love to give that the time that it's worth. Because I think that is a very worthy. Yep. And we're running kind of long as it is. So, all right. So we're going to wrap up this episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable.

Everyone out there, thank you so much for listening. and hope you have fun playing Dwarfortress. Until you hear us next time, good luck, and dig deep. Dig deep. Bring me some Capybaran meat, please, next fall. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode.

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