Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 104: Sex, Violence, and Minecart traps

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

Hi everybody! It's time for another episode of DF Roundtable. Today we talk about cicadas, dealing with population problems, and mercilessly grinding up the undead. Enjoy!

Welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And I decided to speak in a calm voice today. Yeah. Well, it's summer, so. So you say that Dwarfortress Adventure mode is not crashing so much on your Mac now, huh?

Yeah, VMware released. VMware Fusion for the Mac for free now. Really? So you can install arm windows and steam, and then it works really, really well under VMware Fusion. So if you were struggling to play the game, it seems to run pretty well. Is VMware still owned by Oracle? God knows.

I mean, I read an article and it said VMware Fusion is now free. And so I Googled, how do I download VMware Fusion? and it takes you to the, like, the Broadcom support portal. And for the life of me, I couldn't figure it out. And so, like, I had to Google search, how do you download it? And it, I mean, it is not easy. So, you know, this is me saying to Broadcom, get your house in order, guys. This is a joke.

This is 2024. We can put people on the moon. But you can't figure out how to link software. Like, this is crazy. That sounds about right for Oracle because to download the MySQL Community Edition, and you have to go through all kinds of hoops and stuff to register your account. And I think that there's a tricky way you can hold your mouth just right and lift your left leg and not have to register with them to download it. They made it fairly easy now.

If you've got a Mac, you can just say, hide my email. And then, you know, like you can then immediately then go delete that email so they can never contact you again. Well, and yeah, if you have Linux, then you can just do App Get My Secret. cool server there you can there you there you go that's even easier not as much registration on that one yeah well we are we are living in the future guys so uh vmware is uh is a help with that that cool cool yeah yeah so anyway it used to be really expensive like you know kidney donating expensive and it's not now so that's a that's a fun thing that happened in you just have to give them all your toenails that's right toenails are they worth anything am i missing out

on a secret toenail market? No, no, that was just the first full-away body part that came to my mind on the spur of the moment. Well, that's good. It's a, it's a G-rated podcast, so... But what's up there, Roland? Actually, I had something,

and you won't believe this, but I forgot what I was about to say, and now my Discord crashed. Uh-oh. Can you not do this Discord? Yeah. Oh, I thought you were talking to me. I was like, yeah, I can come back to you. If you... Oh, my God.

Sorry, teacher. I forgot to study. That's how I feel sometimes, yeah. So have either of you been playing D.F? I have. I got to share a real exciting thing I learned from one of Mike's videos. This was not at all the point of the video. In fact, I think it was probably assumed knowledge, maybe. But you can dig a channel to the edge of the map to drain off water.

And that was a really cool thing that I didn't know you could do. So I'm pretty excited. about that. Wait, what do you mean? So if you've got an aquifer or if you've got some source of water that keeps draining into places and you don't want to like try to figure out where the caverns are and dump it into that, you can channel to the edge of the map and then it will happily drain off of the edge of the map. Oh, channel or mine? I see. I see. Yeah. It's now you. Yeah, it's you. Yeah, it's you. Yeah. So you just do a little channel like that to the edge of the map.

Oh, and then you build a fortification at the very end, because I think it won't let you channel to the edge, and so you build a fortification, and off it goes. Yeah, you can dig the last tile to the edge of the map, otherwise things could spawn, and the game doesn't want you to do that. So you can just smooth it and put like a fortification in, and boom, the water goes off map. Yep. Yep, that was a legend for me. That was... I had no clue that that was a thing. That was a real game changer.

I don't know that I've had a situation where I wanted to do that. Oh, once you learn it, like, it's sort of that thing. Once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I'm telling you, you're just going to be draining like Madman. But no, I think the video, the point of the video was something else, but which I still can't figure out. I think the point of the video was to create an aquifer tap, but. Yeah, I was going to say, that ain't happening for me. for a little thing.

I wonder if that would alleviate the pressure on a fast aquifer. Hmm. It might. It made me feel a lot better about things. So I was, yeah, that was cool.

It's been so long since an aquifer has even been a thing for me because I use the no aquifers, the no aquifers mod pretty much exclusively. Yeah, I did too. And then now I've decided to

give it another chance. So, yeah. Yeah, I don't regret it. Well, okay, okay, then we have three different options here, opinions, because I also played a lot with like no agri-agrifier mod stuff, and I was like, you know, give it another chance, but as it usually is with past relationships, you can't really go back, it's never going to be the same. So I have created a world, and it has aquifers, but I do like the world, but I don't like

the aquifer. So now I have to live with it. And thank God I have not come across a fast one, but the constant drippy, drippy, drippy, wet rock is slowly crushing my will to live. Well, yep, you're remembering why you left that girl some point in the past. Yeah, yeah. All the memories are coming back. All the, like, bad stuff. It's like, oh, right, you hated that. On the other hand, it is a pretty nice adventure board, so I'm not going to throw it out. So, Tony, with your newfound adventure mode, have you found anything interesting to update us on? Like with your opinion of the feature?

Oh, it's only been a few hours that I played it yesterday or today, maybe an hour. So, no, not much. It's just it's not crashing, so that's really cool. So here goes nothing. I basically, just to see if it would work, generated a tick man. You know, like ticks are fun. Everyone seems to like him. I was just pushing buttons to try to get it to create,

but apparently I put a lot of points into singing and poetry. So I started singing someone a song, and they started crying saying it was the most beautiful thing they'd ever heard or something like that, and that they were super happy, they were elated or something. I was like, oh, that's nice. You know, I didn't think a tick had a good vocal range, but there you go.

Yeah, I like that too, the fact that the people who, even though they didn't like me, I was annoying them and they thought that I was scary because I had a weapon drawn. I think that I recited poetry and they really dug it. Well, it's, yeah, it's nice. So I thought that was funny.

I chuckled. I lulled. Can you try something? Because, you know, the tick, you're a tick, right? So you should be able to bite someone and, like, draw their blood.

Yeah, this guy likes my song. Let's see, how do I bite him? Do I attack? Is it Shift-A? I'm not... Really start a conflict? I'm not too certain. I don't have any weapons. Strike, wrestle, or dodge. Just like bite him with your mandibles

and, like, sucks. But yeah, I don't know what button to push to do it. Otherwise, useability. I don't know. Coming soon. Nope, I can't do that. Craft or butcher? Nope, can't do that. I'm a bad influence. talk, I can jump, I can climb a hole, I can search for bugs.

Well, that's cool. I don't know, man. I don't know how to do it. I don't know. All I've got is, um, I don't think the tick can actually bite. I don't think the tick can bite. Well, I wish that was real, but, uh, okay. Yeah, maybe, maybe I can't. Maybe I just don't know to do it. So they did have a, uh,

new patch for the beta of 51.01, the adventure mode update. So it's beta 14. It looks like the big thing that's visible that they added is they added a trade barter demand conversation menu. So that's a new item that they have added to the adventure mode options. So I think that's how it's going to end up rolling out just a little bit at a time. As they get something done, they update the beta. It's a nice way. I haven't played adventure mode since we tried it out for that episode.

Yeah, me neither. Now I'm obsessed about wanting to learn how to bite, so I'm hoping maybe somebody will tell us. Okay, so we'll check in with Tony in about 20 minutes. Oh, I'm here. I'm back. I ain't going nowhere. In the hallowed days of old, the esteemed scribe Sir Nanigans took upon himself the joyous duty of inscribing the chronicles of Queen to Bowl Wheel Channel. Ascending to the throne of the strong standard in the venerable fortress of Meadowbent in the 17th year, Queen Tabul assumed residence in the royal quarters, finding them to her liking. A connoisseur of fine foods and wine, she commanded the fortress chefs to craft lavish meals for all, knowing well the value of such luxuries to dwarven happiness.

A seasoned warrior with the honor of two goblin kills, Queen Tabul grasped the crucial importance of a formidable military. Yet, she also saw the need for balance. Thus, she decreed that her masters of martial craft should cultivate the social arts, reducing the number of squads from four to three and easing their training regimen to allow for more time in fellowship. Queen Tobol harbored a vision of change for the fortress. While King Aeson's reign was noble, she believed his pursuit of personal legacy had been his downfall. Resolute in her desire to steer metal bent towards a different path, she sought new ways to showcase the fortress's greatness.

Thus began the illustrious tale of Queen to Bull Wheel channels, as penned by the hand of Sarnanigans. So my king died. RIP. Yeah, King Asin Dent Post. He was the king of Metal Bent and he passed away. He got scratched during a battle. and I've lost a couple dwarves to goblin attacks

and he was scratched actually he was wounded I think by a goblin's bolt the problem was he got taken to the hospital and what I didn't realize is my chief medical dwarf had been killed so my hospital turns out you can have lots of doctors assigned to a hospital but if there's no chief medical dwarf

the hospital doesn't work It doesn't diagnose people and it doesn't heal people. Oh, dear. So my poor king sat there for, this is not exactly what was said in the storyline that was created last episode. But so he sat there for three months with his infection growing and he ended up dying because I'm like, why aren't they working? Why is this? I mean, the hospital was working fine before. Everyone else got healed and walked away.

I see my asthma coming from the rooms in the hospital. Yeah, it turns out that whenever I went to check and I was going to replace my dwarf and then I looked down as like, oh, hospital will not function without a chief medical dwarf. Great. That's rough. Yeah, King Aeson passed on a queen. It won't. I said I didn't know that it wouldn't function. I thought it was like more of a best effort thing.

Yeah, that'd be nice. but no okay guess not all right more points to realism i guess yeah yeah i guess so shnikes no work without middle management am i right i know right well the middle management is just running around not knowing what to do if they don't have a CEO and we're back to corp fortress that's right forgot about that so now we have our our queen and we still aren't getting any migrants. We're getting trades now. We're getting trade caravans because whenever I went and demanded tribute from a nearby dwarven outpost and a nearby human outpost, both of them started sending me caravans. So that was a great idea, guys. Thanks. What did you do? I sent and

demanded tribute from a couple of nearby fortresses. One was human and one was dwarf from other civilizations. You demanded tribute. Okay. And then that. That triggered. the trade caravans to come from those civilizations. Oh, that's cool. Okay, that's a neat trick. That's a neat trick. So I think that it was Roland that told me to try that, and it did work. It works great, but I do think you need to have like a king or some kind of monarch, because it only worked for me when I had a queen, and when she just kind of vanished into

nothingness after I resettled, it stopped working. and I only got the tribute from then on. But, yeah, it's a good way. The king hadn't even had Rigamortis set in before the civilization promoted another, one of my dwarves to queen. So, yeah, it was immediate the monarch. There are a couple of more outposts to our civilization, and I don't know for sure how to find out the exact population of the civilization,

but I don't think that it's very strong. But we do now have a queen. But the bad thing about that is now that we're the capital still, we're not going to get any more migrants. So I've got a new plan. Okay. The new queen, I think, is going to become an isolationist. And we're going to see if we cannot increase the population of our fortress through natural dwarf and reproduction. We're going to try and make it as safe as possible from the inside, not have to worry about what's going on from the

outside, hopefully wall off the cavern so that we don't have to deal too much with forgotten beasts, because we tend to lose a dwarf or two to forgotten beasts occasionally. I mean, we're down to 50-something dwarves in my fortress now up from a high of 80-something, and we're not getting migrants. So the only other way that I know to increase the population of this place is through reproduction. You can build a tavern. I have a tavern. Yeah, and then just take all of the, you know, like all the people that come in that want to hang out with you.

Like, you know, they want to like stay for the purpose of enchanting your visitors or whatever. If you do that enough times, like if you do that, that'll, that'll make you bigger. But you'll get all sorts of weird things like elves and people and everything else. I don't think that I've had a single person petition to become a. member of my civilization. And as a matter of fact, I don't even think that I have gotten anybody who wants to reside here

to hunt monsters. I wonder if my tavern is private and not open to the public. Yeah, it might. It can also just be your world because in my current main played world, at some point, the adventurer

just stopped coming. You know, they are all dead. Oh, it's tough. It's a young world. Yeah. It is. Sometimes I got like older worlds, 250 plus years, and they had a lot of people coming in and a lot of people partition. Sometimes I don't. I have very few. So it actually might be your world. I hate to say it, but that could be it. Also, about the, I don't want to say breeding. I was about to say dwarf breeding.

Reproduction, I think, is a nice way to put it, yeah. reproduction yeah uh i tried it and something that is very important is to check if most of your dwarfs are married because if they're not married you're going to have a bad time actually getting them to have like families but if you do get them to be married and most of your fortress is married and they marry fairly fast then the best thing to do this this might be purely like me saying bullshit but put like a bed somewhere into the tavern, or have a secondary borough that is basically just a tiny, tiny bedroom

where you put your entire fortress for a few days until they're, like, very thirsty. Because I think that every time I did that, a while later, I had a lot of children pop up. Well, we can turn my tavern into studio 54. That'll work. Yeah. I think it does, and that's the best way.

And still, that's going to be a little bit of a, like a, it's not that easy as what I'm trying to say. Because I keep trying to do it. I do have, because I used Quickfort, I do have some in-rooms that are part of my tavern. My stupid mayor claimed one of those in-rooms and turned it into her bedroom. It's a two-tile bedroom, and she took it as her bedroom. I think you can reassign her. I did. I did.

Whenever I built her a very nice mayor's quarters and said, get out of that stinking hole-in-the-wall studio apartment that's off the bar, Mr. Mayor, or Mrs. Mayor, or whatever. But, yeah. So, okay, yeah, I will give that a try. See if I can maybe put a disco ball up, some lava lamps in the corners. have some mushroom wine available for everybody put on some berry white and see what happens yeah it's a great idea you never know man is how this is how magic gets made i mean if that is not how it works and i don't know either i'm having a kid or two in the in the fortress so it's it there are some of them who are reproducing i think that i think that first cousins are

I think that they will, in Dwarf Fortress, I think that the mechanics of the game, I think that I heard, at least in the past, that first cousins are okay, but anything closer than that, they will not hook up. The, you know, parents and offspring won't hook up, brothers and sisters won't hook up, but cousins will. I think, I don't know that, I don't remember what the answer for aunts and uncles were. I do believe that there's a Dwarf Fortress talk episode that he actually looked that up and gave the answer. are four but yeah yeah yeah different societies yeah that's it's pretty funny you know especially if you do that for like two three generations and then you check their family history the family trees have become like large clans and it's um it's very it's very cool i think it's very cool i like that in my in my latest one um you just have like clan families and then it's like the the on just like

the mayor and this dude is like everybody in the militia are like cousins and and the people in my library are cousins and everybody is a cousin so yeah I do wish that they took family names that's yeah that's one thing that's kind of sad although I think if you end up generating like a world that is like 2,000 years old or something then you just have like I don't know uh Uruist de Silva and everybody is called the same last name wise but then again the game kind of do you say urs de silva are they Brazilian I read like an article about that where I think it was the last name de silva that becomes so popular that in like 300 years or something I do believe it was

Spain is going to be called the exact same but don't like I think it's a Portugal isn't it Portugal or Brazil? Maybe. I don't remember that is like over a year, year ago since I read the article. Actually, I do think Dwar Fortress would not suffer that too much because it kind of cheats in people whenever you start. So you always have like a nice influx of new family names. Actually, that would be cool.

You can do it manually a little bit with nicknames. I just wish I had the ability to give them like a third name that is put on the end and not in the middle, you know? Yeah. Hear now the song of Metalbent, as sung by the minstrel Mondragar. Metalbent, a fortress of great renown, faced a dire plight. Its population dwindled, beset by mysterious deaths that had claimed many lives over the years. These woes were not laid at the feet of the late King Asen, but rather,

the perils of the treacherous caverns had exacted a heavy toll on the brave dwarves. Such tragedies, alas, often befall even the most stalwart of realms. For many years, new settlers had been scarce, and Queen to Bull Wheel channels knew this must change. Determined to breathe new life into metalbent, she devised a grand plan. The current tavern, the clean joke, catered exclusively to citizens and long-term residents, fostering a sense of closed-minded exclusivity. To attract newcomers, Queen Tabol decreed the construction of a magnificent new tavern, one that would welcome all visitors with open arms.

This new haven would hire the finest performers and offer such hospitality that travelers would be enticed to stay, adding their strength and numbers to Meadowbent's populace. Whether dwarf or otherwise, all were welcome, for in these trying times, the fortress could afford no such discrimination. Thus, the decree of Queen to Bull was made known, and the song of Metalbent's revival was sung by the Minstrel Mondraghar in days of old. I had a fortress where I'm near a necromancer tower, and... Again? Yeah, I can't get away. I can't quit you.

Yeah, so I'm near one of those, and so of course they send their friends constantly, but this time I was able to... to get enough cage traps set up, so it's less of a problem. Caged traps rock. Yeah. So anyway, what do you do with all of the cage invaders? I had 52 invaders, and I had 52 cage traps. So I've got like 52 of these things. So I was trying to figure out what to do.

So I was putting them all in a room, and then I was like, eh, that's boring. So I decided to start playing with mind carts. And it turns out, mind carts are really cool for dealing with prisoners. So the way the design is worked out is I've got kind of a round track like they're kind of like right next to each other the tracks in a curve shape if you can imagine it like two tracks parallel

with curves connecting them so the mine cart goes in circles and then I've hooked it up to a windmill so it goes really fast and then I put two cages at one end of this long narrow room and then I start the mine cart spinning around really really fast

fast and then I put the cages on a lever so it lets the people out and then they see that there's an unlocked door and then they try to make a run for it but they don't make it and so the mind cart just kind of clobbers them and a couple times it's like they'll get knocked onto the other side and then the mine cart will come around and knock them back and it just like butcher's them so it's a very effective way and it also gives them the sense of you know you might escape, but of course they don't, because they would just escape right into another cage trap. So

that's, it's effective. Wow. That's pretty sadistic. Yes. Yeah. It's great, though. It works really well at those, you know, tricky undeads. Yeah, it, it solves that problem, so. It sounds like a horror movie.

Yeah, it's pretty fun. Those high tech horror movies like the cube and things like that. Yeah, it's pretty fun. Yeah. So anyway, so that's, that's, that's what that's what i've got going on in my execution chamber my h h homes little thing and i'm you know i'm sure people would be walking by because it's right by the main road and i'm sure people are like what's going on in there with the windmill and the stench but no it's cool nobody seems to really mind so it's outside yeah it's outside yeah yeah i thought that would be the easiest way to do it so so you what

do you build build your cage and release them and then they just wander to the door and get run over cool Yeah, I'll send a picture. Yeah, it's gnarly, but it's darned effective. And it's like if you needed to do quick executions, now the next iteration will be trying to do more. Because right now I've got it so you can only kill two at time like this. So I'm trying to think, you know, is there a way I can do it, you know, with more mine cards? And I don't know if mine carts collide with each other, I suspect they do.

This is getting uncomfortable. We're talking about industrializing murder. so you hooked up a windmill so it's powered by windmill how'd that go is it's it goes crazy well they were climbing out for a while because they can climb up the windmill really and so that was that was problem

so I had to put a roof on it and then yeah and then I just kind of made it I just sort of kept adjusting to them being able to climb that now they can't really now that nobody's fast enough to not. There was one guy that kept getting hit by the mine cart,

and he just kept losing the ability to stand. But unfortunately, he'd lose it on the track. So then he would be run over again. It's tough. It's a tough world. You know, I'm not going to lie. That's brutal, man. It's a tough world, man.

I guess so. That's pretty crazy. What are you going to do? Can't fight City Hall. Yeah, that sounds worthy of eric sadism spikes. It kind of is. Yeah. Usually I just make like what you call them misery pits, I guess.

Like you dump and forget, like an ubaliette, you know, you don't forget and then they just kind of mash each other's heads in and you're whatever. But that's a pretty effective way of dealing with things. All these guys are friends, though. The problem that I'm having is like all these guys are friends. So they don't, so I put them, I have a. couple in just kind of in the caverns in a little pen down there and they're just chilling and since they're undead they don't need to eat so they just i think they're going to last forever well true if if you put enough undead at some point they start fighting each other

or at least they used to do that i remember i had like undead chickens or turkeys or some kind of some kind of bird and they kept fighting each other for like eternity basically. So it is possible to get them to fight each other. It's just completely unreasonable because they never really die from it, you know. That reminded me of something. So we're in the middle of either the 17 or 13-year cicada hatch that's going on. And I have seen more turkeys, wild turkeys, in the last probably two, three weeks since the cicadas have

started hatching then i have probably in the last five years here i saw three tom turkeys together just walking along the highway one of them was strutting his feathers out had it all spread they all three of them had really long beards it was it was really wild and i really think that they're out and about because there's so much food for them because i hear that turkeys love cicadas oh i see so it's you think it's a food thing i think that they are uh basically the entire area is just one big buffet for them now anytime that you go outside during the daylight hours there's just this low drone it sounds like a uh star trek the original series phaser just constantly going off yeah i'm i want to go out to the woods with my digital recorder

and get a get a uh sound bite of it because it's pretty weird wow that's That's pretty cool, so it's really loud, is it? It's pretty loud. Now, in town, it's not as bad because there's not as many, not as big of a concentration of trees. But where I work, I go out to the rural areas a lot. And whenever you get out there, especially around a national forest, it is just really loud. And I hear it's going to get worse for about a month and then it's going to start dying back off. Wow.

Yep. Neat. Little buggers have red eyes, too. They're weird-looking. That's not cool. Yeah, I, you know, I've never really had cicadas. Like, we don't have them here. I only went to vacation into the south of Europe once, and they had them.

And that was a weird experience, because these little shits, they keep screaming all the time. And it's fairly loud. Like, you wouldn't expect it. You can. It's not like a bird where you. where you look really good and then at some point you see the bird and you're like there you are but they're so tiny and so loud and oh that's summer here man uh so typically the cicadas have a rising and and falling pitch to them they will uh their their song will rise and it will

it will continue for five 10 seconds and then it will fall again and they do it in unison this particular species of cicada though that is out is just a constant drone and no rising and falling pitches at least it could also be that it's such a cacophony that they may be rising and falling and you just can't hear it under the mass of sound that all of them are producing i've got a picture of them of uh have a couple of them on my hand that i'm going to send you a picture of can you go out and pick the little husks off or whatever you call them oh yeah carapace is that what it's called Yep, they're mold or whatever. I don't know what it is.

Yeah. Could make a necklace out of them. Like, soup. Birthday gift. Soap. Soap or soup? A delicious cicada soup. They look crunchy.

They would be crunchy. So like popcorn. There was somebody that was trying to start a company that made, like, cricket bars. And that made me think of, like, mosquito brain cocktail and stuff like that. Mosquito brain roast. That's what Dwarfortress needs. It needs cicadas. because they are being a cicada man would be awesome they look like little space aliens they're awesome

become a bard annoy everyone yes oh god definitely yeah let's do it i don't find the sound annoying at all i find it to be it's comforting isn't it yeah it's it's very much because of where i where i live and where i grew up so are there cicadas in the workshop already come on are there let me wait did i write it wrong I think I get, I don't, I don't think they exist yet. Oh my God. I don't think, I don't think so. We got tick, man.

So that's kind of neat. Tick, tick people are fun. Okay. A picture of them on my hand just showed up in the podcast Insight. Do we have anything else to World Fortress to talk about today? Good Lord. Well, yeah, I think so. What do you have been?

up to you there, partner? Wait, hang on. Apparently, there are cicada things in the game. However, currently, it looks like

it can only be a forgotten beast. So you can get a forgotten beast cicada. Like, you can, for example, get, like, forgotten beast

dinosaurs. But apparently, beyond that, it doesn't exist. Well, you know, they were up over on the West Coast, and they grew up in, you know, Oregon. They may not even have them up there.

I'm not sure. I'm surprised you don't have them in Germany. It's too cold. It's too cold. We have funny, weird bugs here as well. They're also like once a year here, but no cicadas. They make no sound. They're just like zombie bugs.

Yeah. Cicadas make lots. They make an impressively large sound. for the size of that. I think that they're mostly hollow. I think that their abdomen is mostly hollow, so it is like a resonation chamber. Not much of a meal.

So welcome to the entomology podcast. Today on entomology, we'll be studying. Entomology roundtable. Today we have Professor Roland from Berlin University. All right. So I found it interesting that whenever my king died, he did not get planted in. his tomb.

I expected him to get planted in his tomb. I thought that that was a bug that they had fixed. What happened to him? He got buried in with the rest of the riffraff down in the, in the mausoleum. So, yeah. Yeah, it's like they just picked up his body from the hospital and drug him down to the depths of the basement and shoved him in a casket that was there. It's not even a particularly well-made casket. It's just, you know, made out of conglomerate.

so but the upside of that is is i had no trouble at all getting my queen some royal quarters because she just moved in where the queen where the king was and she now has his tomb so yeah i was i thought that i was going to have to make another entire tomb for the queen and then i thought well okay so i'll make these tombs in a star pattern around the king around the royal quarters and as my monarchs die and get replaced then they will have their own own tomb, but they will get to take over the former royal quarters. You know, it's basically the palace. But so, yeah, since the king was buried in the regular casket downstairs, then when

he died, he lost ownership of all of his possessions. Yeah, the queen just moved right in. She's fine with it. That's wild. She's not real happy. She is at a level two happiness. She's like not red, but she's orange. I'm going to see if I can help.

Oh, she hates the responsibilities now. You know, the responsibilities of hanging out in your massive bedroom and like eating crab cakes. Yep, maybe. Yeah. So I have a question for you guys. The Embark profiles. So when you just install fresh door fortress, can you get. embark profiles from the

Steam store. What do you guys do for that? Or do you just go and create your own each time and save it? You know I have only got the one Dwar Fortress version 50 install and I created a profile early on and saved

it. Yeah. That's what I got to do. Yeah. I think I wonder if Plino Dev's craft dwarf profile would work on this version. I haven't tried it. Yeah, I think they work,

but I just was hoping that I didn't have to. I was basically, I'm like, lazy. I just want to get to it. I don't want to do a lot of fussing. Don't want to overthink things. Just need my turkeys and my chickens and, you know, people that can do stuff. And then we're good to go.

Then don't even worry about preparing carefully for your M-Bark. Just go. Just go. I mean, really, honestly, if you... Don't they start without axes or something? No, no, they don't. No, they start with the basics, so it's just you may not be optimized. But if you're not into min-maxing, then what does it matter?

I like to, I used to, and I think that I do the embark carefully more by habit than anything else at this point. One time I did that so that I could make sure that I had plenty of alcohol when I started because I would always I would always run out of alcohol because I was lousy at getting a still set up whenever I first started playing but but now it's not even a problem so yeah okay well I'm just gonna I'm gonna go Yolo not gonna waste points on making him a swimmer or whatever you know you get an anvil you get a you get a couple picks basically all I want only two picks so expert uh I just want expert

Fisherdorfs. That's all we're going to do in this fort. It's going to be fishermen. It's a fishing fort. Nothing else. They can become experts at that. Oh,

so that's default. Oh, I see. I always need more spawn, more seeds or whatever, because inevitably I'll forget and then they'll brew up or eat all of the seeds,

which is kind of a bummer, and then they starve to death. And it's all. Yeah, out of farm rules, man. I don't farm rules. It does. I think this is something

we were talking about in the Discord. or making sure that we ban them from cooking certain types of things? Well, you know, I'm thinking about it, and I think I've been just using Quick Start lately because I don't really need anything in specific. Quick Start gives me, well, they're not random, random dwarfs. It's usually just the same. But ultimately, I don't really care about their job.

because you can train a dwarf so fast that, you know, bringing an almost legendary fisher dwarf to your embark is going to flood your entire starting village with fish. So I don't really need it. I just, you know, I just, let's go. Let's go. I don't care. Pack it up, boys.

So what do you think? Chickens or turkeys? turkeys turkeys they make bigger eggs yeah they make bigger eggs better eggs

if you're trying to mean max I do think it's turkeys because they lay also a little more eggs because you know size sadly doesn't matter because otherwise

it would be either goose or like a very very large underground birds emos do we have emos got elk birds

ostrichs right but I think so. I like ducks. That's all I'm going to say. I like ducks. You know what, you're right. I want to chop that out and make that a drop.

I like ducks. I'm going to call this Duck Fortress. That's all we're going to do, Duck Fortress. I had a friend that used to have a friend that raised ducks. And that was cool. Occasionally, I'd get duck eggs. And they're delicious if you're baking. So that's a thing for everyone to keep in mind.

Substitute duck eggs. So are you going to actually? actually build a fisherman's fortress. Is that right? Is that your plan? Yeah, why not? Let's do it. That's all we're going to do is fish and we're going to survive off of trading and selling fish and any crab shell amulets and that kind of crap.

And we're not even going to dig. We're just going to fish. That's what we're going to. That's it. That's what we're doing. I know you had designs on finding the circus. How did that go? I couldn't find it.

He gave up. Yeah. Wow. You couldn't find the circus? Sad, huh? Couldn't find it. Punched holes down everywhere. And, yeah.

How many dwarves you got? 200 something. Well, um. Enough to sacrifice to the good of the cause. One thing that you can do, you can try this. As you go down really, really deep, you can use one of the DF hat commands that are, is dig. And there's an exploratory dig that you can put in to, that will basically dig a diagonal across the entire level. So if you get your dwarves down, or actually if you just set your cursor down at level negative 150 or whatever, and do dig EXP, I think it is, you'll have to look it up.

I'm doing this from memory. Dig EXP and then ladder. It will dig a ladder pattern across the entire level. So it's a way to easily without having to manually set up the exploratory dig pattern to do that. And that may help you find it. Yeah, that might be what we do. Might go back in that. Look in the DFHack, in the DFHack GUI launcher, do a search for the dig command.

And that's one of the things that it will do. I think it's either EXP dig or dig EXP. In his seminal work, sociology and dwarven relationships in Metalbent, Professor Christopher Harris chronicles the visionary endeavors of Queen to Bull Wheel Channel. whose reign began with a profound transformation of society in Meadowbent. At the dawn of her rule, Queen Taborl wisely tempered the fortress's emphasis on military prowess, ensuring the realm's security without overshadowing other facets of life. Her grand plan unfurled with the construction of the tavern the berries of constructing,

situated near Meadowbent's entrance, a beacon of hospitality for all who approached. Recognizing the importance of knowledge and unity, she commissioned, a grand library, a sanctuary for scholars to devise subtle means to encourage unions and the flourishing of large, noble families. Ever mindful of Meadowbent's heritage, she aimed to ensure that its native stock would continue to thrive and surpass the numbers of any newcomers she sought to attract. Casting aside the egocentric projects of her predecessor, King Asin, Queen to Bull redirected the talents of her finest dwarves toward endeavors that would elevate the collective joy of her people. Her legacy would be one of museums filled with wonders, serene gardens,

mist generators that enchanted the air, and opulent furnishings that adorned their dwellings. These creations were designed to foster contentment and pride among her subjects. Discover the full account of Queen Tables' transformative reign in sociology and dwarven relationships in Metalbent by Professor Christopher Harris, a tone detailing her success in reshaping the fortress's destiny. So do you guys bring cats into your fortress? And if so, why or why not? That's one of the negatives of starting your fortress from the auto start is they let you have cats. They let you have cats.

Yeah, I mean, do you want cats? Is there any, is there like a good argument to have them? They breathe so freaking fast, man. The cats breed like rabbits. Yeah, I just end up making soap out of them And then I feel bad and, you know You're a very soapy animal Soapy animal, oof

Well, the problem is they adopt dwarfs so fast That you can't kill them fast enough Yeah, it's tough You have to use auto butcher It doesn't work for pets Oh, damn You can't butcher a pet Well, I don't know

I always bring cats I like cats I galed cats. You can do that, by the way. Just, you know, for all the listeners out there, please gel your animals. Yes. Yeah, I gelled the cats. Did they do anything?

Are they just for pets? Excuse me? What? Do the cats do anything useful for the fort? Are they just for pets? Yeah, they kill vermin. So if you have, like, a lot of vermin that is attacking your food stockpiles or your your unstored food somewhere

then they obliterate it however I do want to point out that that is negative when you're trying to have some kind of aquarium going on or like a massive terrarium where you want to have some vermin to put

into these things and you're going to have a bad time because your cats obliterated the entire population of like native lizards and the nearest 50,000 hectares. So have fun. Yeah, whenever I do the

prepare carefully for Embark, I never bring cats because I know that some of my migrants are going to bring cats with them. Oh, of course. That's where they come from. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So I seem to be talking myself into reasons to use the prepare carefully for Embark. so but yeah if you if you if you just go ahead and do take the take the time to make one that is close to what you like and save it then it'll always be there available for you so it's not the ultimate laziness way but you know that may even be easier than hitting that save button may be easier than downloading from somebody else's just do it once and be done except I just forgot to hit save on the one that I did recently so do it again and be done what are you going to do. Cats. I actually, I haven't really thought about cats. I just, you know, I bring a few, and then I geld all mails until I have just one left, and then I don't care anymore, and then it's just like a whole bunch of cats. But if you keep active with, like, gilding the cats,

then you simply don't get that explosion part happening. The same time, cats are fairly useful for various things. I mean, there's soap, there's meat, you can chain them up outside. So like the, what they're called? The cobalds, the cobalds can sneak in because, you know, the cat checks them, like vision checks them, it sees them. Yeah. Or like, the same goes for, what's the thing? Where beasts? They can sneak up on you if you have like some can't cat stationed around the map and then they sneak onto the cat and then they bash the cat to death

and then you have like a few seconds left to get actually everybody inside without being infected or like testing out various traps question mark I would never do that of course but

a cat can set off a trap? Well can they? You know for example you have a one of these wonderful mind card squashers and you want to see like...

Not an in-game trap, a manufactured trap. I would of course never do that. You know, that's Dwarven toilet style. That's animal testing, but animal testing, period. Let me see if I can, I'll post a photo of my delightful

contraction. Plus points if you post a screenshot the second you'll put a cat in A cat. I don't know if I have any cats in this fortress, but I'll look and see. I'll, I'll, I wonder if I can make a pen on top of a mine cart track. I wonder if that's a thing that you can do in the world of the fortress of dwarfs. Well, there's my Sunday afternoon. Yeah, I don't know if you can do that. They're very picky about that. It's very picky. So how did you hook up your windmill to the mine carts? Well, oops, it just knocked my headset off. I'll send a, I'll put a photo in of the whole. Shebang and you guys can see I'd love to get people's comments on my

efficiency Yeah I just used the mechanisms or whatever You know the what do you call them? The gears or something Mechanisms And then I use the Whatever those other things are got I don't know what they're called

Pipes no you use pipes It's a pipes It's uh rolling axles out here Axles maybe it's axles Jack into the Matrix here And I didn't actually have Door Fortress running What? What?

How's that for discipline? Discipline. Yeah, I don't either. This is the quality we come to expect here in this. This is no shim-sham, you know, flim-flam operation. All right, let me, I definitely thought of you, Roland, as I was building this. It's like, you'd approve. But I'd need some sort of way to wash out the toilet.

So you can see on the far right, that's where the cages go. And you can see the bits of mechanisms that have come apart. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's pretty good. Where's the windmill? Well, on top, I guess.

I'm going to, yeah, yeah, here, I'll zoom up a level here so you can get a full. Oh, okay. So the windmill is in the Z level above the. Above, yeah. Okay. So, and I did that because otherwise they would just. climb out, which was sad, and I didn't want that to happen. I guess you

smoothed all the walls? I just put a roof on it. And honestly, they don't make it. Yeah, there's no way. There's no way out for them. And then I just lock the doors. And the door is way too far. That door, yeah. They just, they just, they love the idea of it.

And then I just kind of lock and unlock and lock and It's a sad, sad state of affairs for them. But it is really fun to watch it. And you can see there's like bits of, I think that's somebody's nose. I was going to say, is that a tooth? It's, um, human pikeman corpse right ear cartilage. Ah.

You hate to see it. What's the, uh, the mass of bloody pulp? Um, let's see what that is. That is human pikeman corpse left, lower leg and right upper leg. great so that's that and then i have a uh there's like bits of there's lots of gray langers they like to climb in and then they get run over but that's their fortress a movie by eli roth uh let's see oh yeah i've made a dump a dumping ground which is like a hole in the ground and they they just chucked the bodies in there after they finish oh dear yeah there's like all sorts of corpses of all of these

things and yeah it's pretty gnarly how do you guys get them to clean up the the crap that's outside like you know if somebody loses their shield or whatever how do you get them to clean that stuff up because i had it is somewhere in the orders um it's like behind kitchen somewhere uh standing orders i believe and then you have to check and uh claim all other death items or whatever uh and i always put it to like claim everything even if that means they kind of want to clean up during the siege but that's fine because you know I have this

beautiful DF hack button that you know puts them all into my burrow and then tells them if you go out you die so they don't that's very nice I like DF hack by the way not sponsored not sponsored

it's really good yeah I find like it's even better now than it was in the olden DF hack days in the old version like they've really they've really risen to the occasion. It's pretty awesome. I'm a fan. I'm a fan.

Yeah, yeah, agreed. And, you know, I've been going back through my fortresses, mostly because tech had questioned what I've said in like a previous episode. I described how I tend to improve industry. and features and then add them into my mental blueprint, I said. So I actually wanted to see if I can find like an older Ford and check out how my kitchens have evolved. Sadly, the oldest forts I found were like three years old.

You lost a computer, didn't you? Yeah, I gave my computer to my brother and I was very stupid about it because I just cleaned. And like, I was like, oh, reset everything. And then I was like, oops, wait, my Minecraft worlds. Oops, my dwarf fortress worlds. Oops, my SkyRM-safe files. But they're in Steam. But, oh, my God.

So, anyway, I lost pretty much everything. And so these are fairly fresh before the Steam release. And you can see that I already have, like, a very distinct style. but I ended up getting stuck a little and then playing again in the older version and like checking out what is happening there checking out what my dwarfs were doing in my older worlds

and that was quite nostalgic I would say but I would not be competent enough anymore to actually restart like a whole game with serious business kind of play style this was everything is running everything is working i just get to watch for a while but man the the the shortcuts they're gone they're gone from my head do you guys are you guys noticing uh better performance yes these ask youth definitely things because i've done two things one is

i got myself a newer laptop which has got a lot better single core performance but i'm i mean I can have pretty stacked forts now with lots of people, like 155, and I'm still getting, you know, 200 frames a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, funny that you mentioned that, I remembered something. I saw somebody on the subreddit talk about them having 500 dwarfs. And then I also question, like, have the performance issues gone? Like, is this game actually more stable than it used to? And I can give you the answer because I've been playing a little older pre-Steem versions.

Yes, absolutely. Like, this game, the picture I put into the Discord, that fortress has 85 people. And my current one has like 110. And my 110 one with better graphics. is running better than the 85 people with, you know, like a tile set. That's pretty crazy. Yeah, I'm grooving on it. I've noticed it's, yeah, I've noticed that I'm not as worried about hitting FPS death as I used to be.

Yeah, so shout out to Putnam for that. Yeah. I think she's responsible in this case. I was going to say, is it most of Platinum's work? I would believe so. Yeah. I love it. Corn has been doing menus again?

I haven't really looked for performance problems, but since version 50, I have not had any reason to go looking for my performance issues because I've had done. And I have, as we've talked about before, I have a fairly old computer. So, yeah. Yeah, it's an exciting world we live in, gang.

Like, this is, we're getting there. We're getting there. Like the stream that meanders through the elegant canyons, so this episode of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable has come to its discharge into the river. Discharge is a bad word. I want to strike it from the record. Not a fan. Sounds like a hospital word.

Well, while I was saying the sentence, I thought mouth, but that's probably not the best of it. So the episode seems to have flown to an end. I want to thank everybody for listening to Dwarfortress Roundtable, and if you've not done so already, please consider stopping by the website to join the Discord server so you can chat with all of your friends and have a merry old time. But either of you guys got anything else you want to cover? No, I, yeah, no, no, not at all.

Please feel free to comment on the efficacy and efficacy. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, efficacy and efficacy. So both of those for the murder chamber. Yeah, exactly. If there's a more ethical way, to euthanize the invaders, you know, I'd love to hear it. You know, you talked about how you were doing that, and it felt really icky, but then I realized that I had missed

that you were talking about undead. Oh, yeah, only undead. Suddenly, the ickiness kind of, you know, just wafted away in the way. Yeah, yeah. And honestly, like, these guys, they're just, they suck. Like, they keep invading, and then they send somebody over, and they say, we would like a parlay to avoid loss of life. And so I'm like, sure, no problem.

And then they attack anyway. If you can't trust a necromancer's undead, who can you trust? You know, the morality of that aside, let's discuss that in our Discord server. You can find us on the link below. So I would love to talk to you about the morality of stripping the undead of personality. Thank you very much. Stay hydrated, friends. Good luck and Dick Deeb.

Adios, team. Bye. This has been the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwarfortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. If you'd like to contact us by email,

the address is Eurist at DFRoundable.com. That's UR-I-S-T at D-F Roundtable. com. If you'd like to interact with the hosts and listeners of the podcast, you'll find a link to join our Discord server in the main menu of our website. If you'd like to help support this podcast financially, you can find us at patreon.com slash DFRoundable. This is a conversational podcast. All Craftsorship is of the highest quality. Thanks, Delphonzo.