Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 106: Quickfort With Myk – And We Talk About the Circus

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Season 6 wraps up as DF Hack dev Myk returns to talk about Quickfort and upcoming DF Hack excitement. (World's worst kept secret) Spoiler alert .... we talk about hidden stuff. Skip this one if you don't already know. The DF Hack YouTube page where you can find tutorials and other DF Hack stuff

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. My name's Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we are welcoming back, Mike, one of the developers of D.F. Hack. How you been doing, Mike? I've been doing great. Thank you so much for having me back on the show.

Oh, sure, sure. I think the idea here today is that we're going to kind of take a little bit of a deep dive into quick for it. Well, I have lots of things to say about that. Before we do that, I want to give a quick update on Metal Bint. All right. I locked all my people in the same room together. They improved their happiness very much so.

Oh, God. I put them in there with some drinks and some food and everything was hunky-dory. They seemed to very much enjoy each other's company. The happiness index of the fortress went up. But it's been a couple years now and no babies have come from it. Oh. Yeah. Funnily enough,

the Afonso actually wrote on the Discord about that. I was about to say Twitter. He wrote that it works better if you have a non-specialized meeting area. So you don't make a tavern and you stick them into the tavern and lock the doors using a borough or whatever. But you just make a meeting area.

And apparently you don't need beds. So I was wrong about the bad part. Who was that? I want to give them credit. Was that Rinsick? That was the Fonzo. That was Delphonzo. Thanks, Delphonzo.

And seen. All right, so that's the Metal Ben update. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to discontinue the fortress. I'm going to continue to play with it until it either is destroyed from its own collapse from within

or somehow something kills it from the outside. But yeah, I'm going to keep running it. That's the spirit. Yep. That's the spirit. Slow as it may be. Mike, have you been playing dwarf fortress lately? I've certainly had Dorf Fortress open a lot, although it's hard to say what I've been doing is playing.

Are you playing D.F. Hack? I play D.F. Hack, yes. It's been something of a sprint of development going on for the past couple weeks, which has been a breakneck speed, and we will eventually have a beta out to get this all, you know, tested and released. But there's just so many changes going on right now. I'm just coding. No playing. Just coding. Awesome. Well, thank you for your sacrifice, I guess. I don't know. Well, it kind of feels like playing the game a lot because it's, you know, it's like the matrix. You look at it and you can see what's going on with it. I look at the memory of Door Fortress. I'm like, ah, okay, I see how this is shaping up.

That's, okay, that's going to be cool. That's going to be cool. They're going to love that. So are we working to make sure that it stays up with 51.x that they're coming out with? Is that the goal? Well, we've done that part, actually, because they haven't released a new beta a little while now. Right. And whenever DF development slows down, DF hack development speeds up because we don't have to keep an eye on what's changing. That's a good point. So the 51 compatibility has been stable for quite a while, and we've been working on our own infrastructure

and getting a lot more things done that we couldn't have done before because we just didn't have time. So are there any new interesting features that are going to be? going to be coming to D.F. Hack that you'd like to share with the listeners? Sure. So I think the... Anything that makes you really excited? Yeah, I mean, they definitely are exciting. The kinds of things that we're able to do now is... It's just... It's building more and more. We've been working on getting our U.I is a little more user-friendly. And one of the tools that got a major overhaul is GUE design.

Now, it's always been useful in that you can draw shapes, you can move things around and stamp designations down, but it was a giant text blob and kind of hard to figure out what its current status was and very difficult to use. So it's been completely redone with graphical buttons and much better organization. And you can just draw freeform shapes, drag them around, adjust the points. You can have, you can draw paths that your, your doors will dig out, change the width of the lines make it curved and then do a recurve on it with

bazaer curves. It is Wow. It's quite advanced and the thing is it could have done this for a long time. It's just that nobody knew how to use it so it was going unused. So redoing the UI is it's like having a whole new tool to play with.

You know it's funny you say that I've been using a computer for oh well my first Windows machine was 3.11 so it's been that long and I have just learned how to control a bazaar curve for whatever reason

all these sticking years I never quite would be able to predict what would happen whenever I clicked the second time I guess for those who don't know what a bazaer curve is it's if you have a line

and then you click on a point somewhere outside the line it'll kind of gravity pull the line towards that point so you have a curve and then you can put another line on there and so you can have more of an S curve, and you drag them around to affect how the line curves through space. Yeah, a lot of the wonderful Windows Microsoft tools would never let you change it once

it got laid. You would click once, and it would make it twist, and then you click it again, and it would make it twist some other way that I thought seemed random, but I've just recently figured out what that randomness, how you control it a little bit. Thank you, Wikipedia. So sorry, I derailed you. I'm good at that. I thought you were talking about a bursier curve, so I really was confused,

and I really appreciate the clarifications. Thank you. Well, it can do circles, too, so you can make your own brazier curve that way. Wonderful. Good to know. Thank you. Oh, we're going to lose our clean rating, aren't we? For the lowbrow listeners, the 10-year-olds listening, that was for you.

Because that was actually a significant amount of work, getting that darn algorithm to produce pretty-looking circles, it's a. It took me almost an entire day just of tinkering with that thing. Draw a circle has worked great for, or sorry, dig. Yeah, dig circle, that's right. Yeah, dig circle has worked great, and that was what I was using as the gold standard.

That's what I was trying to match. Because the new algorithm is much more mathematically accurate for ellipses, whereas the other one could do just circles. But when it was a circle, it just didn't look as pretty as dig circles circle. Yeah, yeah, dig circle's awesome. So now the GUI design circle is exactly the same shape. as dig circle circle. Oh, that's cool.

I use dig circle for doing exploratory digging. So I will, like, just sit there and run dig circle three, dig circle five, dig circle seven, dig circle, you know, and just go like the odd numbers over and over again, jumping it up by three or four. And then I'll, like, just draw a line through it and then just have them dig out this, this concentric ring system in a level. I love it. That is exactly what I did to make sure that the lines I'm drawing,

with Tick-Circle Does. That's exactly the pattern I did to just like line it all up and double-check my work. Queen Tables Manifesto on the Art and Necessity of Memorial Slabs. Section 1, the enigmatic allure of stone slabs, discovered by Decombe Broadbrew. Greetings my illustrious subjects. It is I, Queen to Bull Wheel channels, here to clarify a matter of profound significance, and some consternation among metal bent, my unwavering adoration for memorial slabs. Some might ask, why slabs?

To which I respond, why not? Imagine, if you will, the sleek, shiny surface of a jet slab, the majestic blueness of microcline, and the mysterious depths of obsidian. These slabs are more than just rocks. They are canvases for the soul, as if the universe decided to leave its calling card in geological form. Consider the jet slab. It's as if a piece of the night sky decided to moonlight as a decorative item, perfect for memorializing dear Uncle Eurist, who, in an ironic twist, was particularly afraid of the dark. Microcline, with its tantalizing blue hues, serves as a whimsical reminder of cousin Stacud, whose fondness for swimming was matched only by his inability to float.

And then there's obsidian, the mysterious black mirror, reflecting not just the visage of the beholder, but the profound realization that Cousin Thickett's enthusiasm for magma should have been tempered by a basic understanding of physics. Decombe Broadbrew, renowned for his unparalleled ability to excavate ancient texts while balancing a tankard of ale, unearthed the first section of Queen to Ball's Manifesto. His discovery was celebrated not just for its historical value, but for proving that even the finest ails can coexist with archaeological breakthroughs. How are the snake people, Roland?

The snake people are doing absolutely amazing. I have started a little bit of a new fortress in that world on a volcano, which is why I inquired in the Discord about funny new execution methods but I'm not too happy with the way the fortress is shaping up I might just go back to a previous safe so I can redo it and for that I was considering doing more quick for it especially with the dig circle stuff because I wanted to try out some kind of organic circle-ish designs and you said

you changed something about the circles yeah well not not for dig circle but for the circles produced by GUI design are now more pleasing. They used to be much jagged and kind of triangular. Like, dig circle is clearly a circle, but the circle produced by GUI design before looked just like a diagonal square. So it never quite had the same effect. So it wasn't a very circly circle. It wasn't a very circly circle.

I mean, the algorithm is clearly correct, but when it comes out on the screen, it just was way too jaggy. yeah the resolution that you have to work with is fairly low so right it's about getting the circle the theoretical circle you know lined up properly with the tiles in a way that comes out good so gooey design uh i improvements uh anything else that you like to mention uh yeah and we've also had a some fantastic people contributing to df hack over the past month awesome and one of the new tools has been been clamoring for forever now now is gooey tile types. So if you want to just go to your map and play God, you can go reshape

the terrain to your heart's content. Oh my. You can create new mountains and just shape it however it is that you want. Or if you just dug yourself into a vein and you want to fill that vein back up with walls, you can now do that with a few clicks too and play mini god instead of full armock. Oh, that's neat. Even after the fortress has been started? Sure, yeah, yeah. It's It's a general tile editor. So it's, again, these are tools that have always been functional. It's just that the command line usage of tile types has been pretty opaque and difficult to comprehend. And now that it's all visualized on the screen, using the same graphical buttons that we're using for GUI design,

it's much easier to get things in a state where you can be productive and get done what you want to get done. Okay, can you break that down for me? Does that mean I can actually edit the world map? or does it only work in Fortress mode? Oh, it's in the Fortress mode, in the local map. It does open up the opportunity to do things at the world level. We don't have any current tools that act on world structures, but we could.

We just haven't done that yet. So, like, if you want to connect islands, that's in the cards. Not yet, but that someday that would be possible. In my head, I have the old. Sim City map designer. That's what was coming to me, too. I was like, oh, okay.

It's like SimCity 2000s, where you build out your landscape and then you play on it. Dam up the river, build the city in it, and then blow the dam. You have the heart of a dwarf. Oh, you know, it's like playing the Sims and taking the ladder out of the pool. No, no takers. Okay. That sounds like a pretty exciting feature, though. I think that seems very powerful to be able to do that.

It is, and is it power that you can wield? We'll find out whether there's more safeguards that we need to put in place because we're really trying to make things safe and fun for players. And sometimes these tools can be so powerful that you can destroy your own game. So we try to put on the safeguard, so it's not so easy to do that. Yeah, it allows you to crash your fortress. and make corrupted saves. Great.

Yeah, I've done that enough. Okay, wait. Is there a possibility where I can change a specific tile type to, for example, an evil biome? Ah, okay. You want to get technical, huh? Okay. So, the biome is not a tile type,

but it is a map tile property. you can associate any particular tile with any biome that you have access to. So, again, this is not something that we have tools to make really easy, but it is very possible. If a modder wants to do something specific with this, this is possible today, where you can have specific tiles being parts of specific biomes. So like for crop growth or a spot of reanimating terror.

I was thinking of the same thing. You have your little pit in the center of your map that you take things. Or in the center of your tavern. I call it Pet Cemetery. Yeah, yeah, for example, for example. But I was reminded of a previous fortress that I put into some kind of, it didn't say mountain, but I couldn't grow anything. And I was like, oh, this spot is nice. It doesn't have any trees.

Well, I couldn't grow anything above ground. That was very annoying. So there is kind of a possibility to change that around. So I could be able to grow something in a biome that used to be, for example, like a mountain biome. I don't know offhand whether it's arbitrary, that you can set it to arbitrary volumes, or whether you have to have it somewhere on your map. I know that if it's on your map, you can assign any tile to it that you want. But can you just snarf it from other places in the world?

I'm not positive on that. I'd have to go look that out. Hmm. Okay. That's still pretty cool. Any other things that you want to mention about the upcoming features before we, you know, nerd out on QuickFort? Sure. We also have quite an influx of adventure mode tooling that's in the works. So much that I've had to rethink part of our architecture for how to support it properly. So in the next beta, I think you can expect a lot of things coming for adventure mode and improving the experience there.

I've never really thought of DF hack and adventure mode in the same realm. Interesting. No, what do we expect? Yeah, that's why it's been such a big change for us. We've always had some adventure mode tools, but not really a solid, easy-to-use, well-presented corpus of functionality. So what would that look like for a fledgling adventure mode player? So the first thing I brought over was the notification panel. so in fort mode that will tell you things like you know invaders are on the map or traders are ready to trade there's dwarf can't find a needed item right right or moody dwarf can't find or can't find a workshop to be moodyan

haven't had that one but yeah in adventure mode there's different kinds of things you want to keep an eye on and different things that are important so i split up gwe notified to have separate notifications that can appear in each mode and in adventure mode you can look for things like actively losing blood. This is how much time you have left before you bleed out. Did you know that you're drowning? Here are some bubbles to visualize how much breath you have left before you completely drown. And then there's also a version of, you know, here's the local wildlife that you can see. So you can quick zoom to them if you want to run over there and start whacking on an elephant with a stick.

That always, always a good strategy. always a good strad. Elephants are very gentle into a fortress if you've never dealt with them before. And then there's a whole bunch of stuff around conversations and party management, like being able to move someone from your extra party members into your core party, being able to decide that you're done with your current body and you want to jump into somebody else's body. That is now a thing. If someone kills you, you can decide like,

hmm, maybe my spirit can just go inhabit them for a while. And then you can go and play continue your adventure as the person that just killed you. Spicy possession. I like it. Okay. That's right. We've also done some things in the speaking menu. Right now you have to kind of search for things in the conversation to get something that you want to talk about. But the kinds of things that you can search for aren't always the kinds of things that you want to be able to search for. So we've redone that whole interface to be able to search for a wider variety of words to get to where you want to go. like it's important for you to be able to boast about the things that you've killed so now you can search for the keyword slew and it will go and just show you the ones that are things that you have killed that you can boast about so people can start to become more impressed with you mike have you ever listened to the old door fortress talk podcast with uh with tarn and zach yeah yeah i've um i still have that in my subscribed favorites just in case the new one shows up yep yeah i listen to it occasionally all the way through you know once a year or so but uh

But you talk about being able to shift your, in essence, your consciousness to another character on the screen. They actually talked about that for like a half hour on one of the, you know, early teens episodes of Dwar Fortress talk and discussing whether or not that was something that they wanted to allow happen, allowed to be able to happen. Because, you know, in essence, you could shift your, whenever you're about to get killed by the general from next door, you can shift to him and have him go jump off of a cliff. And, yeah. So I was wondering if you had watched, if you had listened to those and taken any inspiration from some of the things that they talked about in the past. Well, this particular tool is not a new DFF tool. It was originally called Linger. And I don't know who eventually wrote it, but that may be where they got the idea from.

Maybe, maybe. And it raises a good question of what capabilities are not in the spirit of the game. And this is, of course, something that we think about a lot. We want to make sure that DFHack is expanding the experience for players and not restricting or going against a kind of vision. So, I mean, in general, we try to err on the side of agency giving players the ability to do the things that they want to do, the things that they find fun. But, yeah, the question of, is this against the design or the intent, is something that is always on our mind, is something that we consider for every feature that we add. Yeah, that's come up on here several times.

And I think that the podcast position that we've come up with is, you know, you're playing the game. It's not a competitive game. Do whatever you want to that makes it feel good to you. To be honest, those comments were mostly referring to already implemented DF hack features. So they were already kind of betted. So, I mean, could you give us an example about what you're talking about? you mean like what kind of ability is against the intent of the game yeah so something a recent

example is the damp dig feature which I added two versions ago I think uh-huh thank you very much yeah that's been right it didn't know that a lot of people were asking for yeah but as part of that you also get to see things like which tiles are aquifers and which tiles are just damp and there was quite a bit of debate there. Is this information that was being intentionally withheld from a player? Is it reasonable that the player would not be able to see this information? Because clearly the doors themselves can tell that a tile is leaking because the water is going to appear. So why shouldn't they be able to visually distinguish between a damp tile and an aquifer tile? So we try to think things through in character and in the game to

make sure that it makes sense and doesn't appear to be against the intent of the design before we go through with something like that. Of course, there's an entirely different class of tools that we call Armok tools, which is just you become Armok, do whatever you want. And for those who don't know, you can hide those tools from the DFAC interfaces by going into the control panel into the preferences and turning on Mortal Mode. So if you have Mortal Mode enabled, all those Armok tools are just gone, and you don't have to be tempted by them. Is Fastdorf one of them? Fastorf is one of them, yes.

I like Fastorf. But it would leave things like the dig commands. Right, yeah, anything like productivity, design, those are clearly not against intent. That is just a helper to the interface, and those are always available. Manifesto on the Art and Necessity of Memorial Slabs. Section 2, the eternal significance of memorial slabs, discovered by potato bomb. But let's not stop at mere aesthetics, my beloved dwarves. Memorial slabs serve a far grander purpose than just looking fabulous.

They are our eternal margin notes in the book of Metalbent's history, scribbled with the sagas of our departed kin. In a world where goblins could attack at any moment, or where one might unexpectedly find oneself on the wrong end of a carp, it's crucial to have these tangible reminders of those who have, quite literally, bitten the dust. Imagine a future where our descendants, delving through the ancient halls of Metalbent, come across a meticulously crafted jet slab. They'd read of Eurist the fearful and laugh at his nocturnal phobia, while feeling an odd sense of pride in their quirky heritage. Our tales of bravery, folly, and inexplicable decisions to punch a cave spider will live on, etched into the stone for all eternity. Without these slabs, how else will future generations know that bravery sometimes means running away, and that wisdom occasionally involves not inhaling the deadly dust from a forgotten beast?

Potato Bomb, whose nickname came from his explosive enthusiasm for uncovering relics, stumbled upon the second section of the manifesto while digging with nothing but a spoon and sheer determination. His find not only expanded our understanding of dwarven humor, but also proved that persistence and a pinch of madness go a long way in archaeology. How would you give the elevator pitch on Quickford and what it does? Quickford is a way to take away the repetition of design. For a lot of things, you know exactly how you want it to go,

and you may do it the same way every single time and QuickFort can just do it for you in one click instead of forcing you to go through the hundreds of clicks that may be required for creating 60 new bedrooms or your standard dining hall that you love to make in every fort but takes a lot of clicks to get done.

So QuickFort is at its core a productivity tool. It's certainly expanded from its original abilities and its goal essentially is to be able to do anything related to the map that you could do as a human in the game, just quicker and more reliably in fewer clicks. So if there's something that you can click on the map and change, then QuickFort aims to be able to do that as well. So if you need to do that a hundred times in a row, you don't need to do it by your own hand.

Cool. I know that I especially love the bedroom layout that's part of the, some of the blueprints that are included with DF hack. So everyone probably who's listening to this podcast knows that I used Quick Fort and specifically the Dream Fort Blueprints to develop the map that I'm currently running and yeah, it was like set up

a ready to go fortress in about two hours instead of spending like three days getting something that was not as efficient so that was really handy that way. One thing I kind of wonder

is what's the best way to develop your own let's say that I've got a particular kind of a tavern that I like to build and I want to save the blueprints of that is it best to just go in and edit a spreadsheet for it or is there a way to take that

snapshot from your screen on your fortress? You definitely can go into a spreadsheet and do it manually. That's not our Tommy's favorite way. And many of the features in QuickFort can only really be done that way because they're too specific or esoteric

to be automatically absorbed from the map. But by far, the easiest way to do this is to fire up GUI blueprint and just select the area that you want a copy of, and it will generate that blueprint for you. So a quick-forward set of blueprints is one blueprint per layer. There's probably going to be a dig layer where you dig out the layout,

and then you're going to be placing stockpiles, you're going to be building buildings. each one of these goes into a different blueprint mode and you lay them down as you're ready for that step. So you apply the dig blueprint, wait for your dwarves to dig it out, and then you can apply your stockpiles and your buildings and get all that built in the second phase. And so blueprint will take a snapshot of everything that exists on that tile

and then construct for you a sequence of blueprints that will recreate that exact scene. including furniture layouts and such? Including furniture layouts, including the names you've given to the buildings. Its capabilities are constantly being extended. Right now it doesn't record, if you've set up links between the stockpiles, it doesn't record that, even though you can put that into a quick-furt blueprint if you're writing it manually. So over time, it will become more complete, but it will at least give you the basics of the digging layout and the building placement and the zones and everything else that's there.

What'd you say the command was? Capture Blueprint? GUI slash blueprint. Goofy slash blueprint. Will that also create orders? So, for example, in Dreamfort, whenever you lay down a particular blueprint, it will tell you, okay, hit the O key to order from your manager, the things that are needed to build this particular level of the blueprint. Is that something that you would have to do manually? or is that included whenever you do the GUI blueprint?

That is included in any blueprint. When you run QuickFort orders or use GUI QuickFort to generate manager orders, it will scan the blueprint whatever it contains and figure out what it is that you need to build in order to complete everything on the blueprint and then it will generate those manager orders for you. Oh, that's cool. That's cool. Awesome. Yeah, a lot of this was just built from my own journey to try to really examine, in the structure and the functionality across Door Fortress. And so I spent a lot of time building things, changing them slightly, tweaking them.

And so I was looking for ways to increase my own productivity. And going and figuring out what you need to build every time was a real big time sink. So getting that automatically generated was one of the great advancements of Quickport over the years. So you adapted Quick Fort from an earlier version to the current Door Fortress. Is that correct? That's right, yeah. Many years ago, there was an auto hotkey script that would just take a sequence of keystrokes and play them back into the Door Fortress window. And back then, since everything was keyboard controlled, it could deterministically make stuff happen in the game as long as you don't run up against the map edge or, you know, accidentally click on a unit where you didn't want to click on one. So it was a little bit brittle, but it kind of worked.

that was taken to the next step and a Python application was written that did much the same thing where it would replay keystrokes back into the door fortress window and I saw that I saw the limitations in that and how brittle it was

and how slow it was for a lot of things and I thought well what if we moved this into DF hack itself think of how much more we could do and so yeah this is a re-implementation of the idea of those two original quick-forward implementations and the blueprints that could be used back then can still be used in Quick Fort today.

Oh, wow. At least for dig and build. The things like rooms no longer exist, now they're zones. So the concepts like that have changed. Those blueprints won't work, but buildings and digging is exactly the same. So any old blueprints you have from back then will still work. So whenever they do updates of Dwar Fortress,

how hard is it to keep Quick Fort compatible with the updated versions? Do you have to do a lot of changes, or is it pretty much stayed static? There was a significant amount of change between version 0.47.05 and version 50, because essentially the keyboard went away for most of the control. Uh-huh. And although D.F. Hack Quickfort did the dig and the buildings and the stockpiles programmatically, it did many of the other things the same way the old. Python script did it by

playing back keystrokes. Like all of the stockpile configuration where you go through and select which of the items you want that stockpile to hold. That was all like, you know, right arrow, down arrow, down arrow, enter, down arrow, enter. Escape, escape. And it would play back these character sequences.

And of course, all that just completely disappeared when we went to V50. So it took me I think a month or two, but it is now completely programmatic and there aren't any keystrokes at all anymore. And all of that was built from the ground up to interact with the Dorfortress memory to create things like zones and stockpile configurations.

But you haven't had to, you haven't had much problems since version 50 came out. And once you got it compatible with 50, they haven't made changes that have destroyed the quick fork too badly? No, yeah. There hasn't been any UI or map related change since then that has had any effect on it. That's good. That's great. So pump stacks. so so pump stacks are the thing that we still have had troubles getting to work it might it might help if i had pump stacks down without quick for it i don't know if you have heard our tribulations with with pump stacks i've been keeping close tabs on it have you not going great have you got any pointers to give us uh i know that may not be the best for an audio medium but you know that's what we do well one thing that i've certainly run into that can cause problems is that that if you start your pump stack too low and the pump itself gets flooded, it will deconstruct. So you want to make sure that you don't even start your pump stack until you get to a layer

that you're sure the water level isn't going to rise above. That's one thing that's caught me a couple times. But other than that, it's kind of straightforward. Oh. Yeah, we're just, gents. You know, dang. I mean, I don't know what to say. I think I'm just not aligning things properly.

I think it's, I'm sure it's an ab-cac kind of thing between keyboard and chair. Oh, got you. Thank you. Yeah. That went over my head. Yeah, totally. I think I'm just not lining things up properly because they'll dig the holes out. I mean, they're very good at digging things, but then, like, I don't know.

Things just don't seem to line up, and I think I'm just putting things in the wrong place. So I guess I just need to spend a little bit more time with it. But I found a more effective way to kill invaders, so I kind of got it stacked with that. And I've been optimizing my killing floors. The difficulty with alignment is actually why I wrote those blueprints to begin with, because it is hard to do it manually. Well, you can lead a horse to water, man. Yeah.

But yeah, you have to dig those channels in very precise spots. And if you do line it up wrong, then it is just not going to work. Your pumps will just sit there and not pump. Yeah, this summer I need to just sit down and just decide that I'm not going to do anything else in the game until I get pump stacks to work and get to where I'm comfortable with them, because otherwise I may never teach myself how to do it, just like with QuickFort. I thought the idea of QuickFort was great for the longest time, and I believe that it was either whenever you were on the podcast before, or maybe it was something in the Discord

server that convinced me to give it a try. And now I am very happy that I did. And my biggest fear is that I'm just going to get lazy and just. do dream fort in fort after fort after fort well now that gooey design is a little easier to use then it might not be so bad to do things organically that way that's true that's true but that's kind of what i'm doing right now too is uh i start with a quick fort or i start with a dream fort and then i extend that with gooey design to get like organic trails coming out from it and and having more of a esoteric living space than than the template is the uh the new interface for for gooey design

Is that available in the beta now, or is that in a point release for the main branch? It's not yet in the beta. It'll be out in the beta probably next week as we're recording this, probably around the 28th or so. Okay. Yeah, 21st or 28th of June. So then by the time the listeners are listening to this, they may be able to check it out in there. If they're in the beta branch of D.F. Hack, then they may be able to use it. Yeah, and we'll run that beta for a few weeks and then push the,

that to stable as well. Because of all the infrastructure changes, we do want to run a longer beta this time just to make sure that everything is completely solid before we push it to the 90% of players who are on just the regular stable branch. It sounds like that that may be a good idea with all of the memory changes that have the potential to crash the game. We're not really afraid of the crashing. That part is pretty safe because the problems that may exist are in the lua layer, and they're not going to crash the game so much as just not work themselves. We just want to make sure that those

things are all smoothed out before we release it stable. Queen to Ball's Manifesto on the Art and Necessity of Memorial Slabs. Section 3, the Humorous Imperative, Discovered by David Eltsrov. Lastly, let us not overlook

the humor inherent in the act of memorializing. For what, What is life without a touch of levity? Memorial slabs provide us a chance to immortalize the sheer absurdity of our existence. They stand as a testament to our ability to laugh in the face of danger, and at times laugh at the face we make when we discover that danger is, in fact, quite perilous. Therefore, my dear dwarves, I decree that every dwarf shall have their own memorial slab. Each slab will tell a tale of bravery, curiosity, and the occasional mishap

with a lever-operated floodgate. It is our duty, nay, our privilege, to craft these slabs with pride, ensuring that the legends of metal-bent endure, embellished with both glory and humor. Let us chisel our history into stone, one entirely avoidable demise at a time. With Jet Black Affection Queen to Bull Wheel Channels David Eltsroff, a legend in his own lunchtime, discovered the final section of Queen to Bull's Manifesto while on an ill-advised quest to find

the perfect sandwich. His knack for unearthing ancient documents in the most unexpected places continues to baffle and amuse his peers. So I know that we talked about the DF hack new features that are coming up, is there anything in particular for QuickFort that you would like to implement? maybe not something that you're actually working on now but anything that you envision for the future of Quickport itself? There are so many things. I have this

you know, Quick Fort was my first major project and I had, I kept this Google Doc that kept on getting fuller and fuller of all the ideas I had from implementing it. And it's pages and pages long now. I want to do things like being able to set the

Zoom hotkeys from a dig blueprint so that if you lay down a level, then you can automatically say, go get the next unused hotkey and have that zoom to this level. Ooh. And name it this. You know, things like that, the map-related items that you'd have to do manually could be done in a blueprint.

And there's no reason to have to do it manually if you can get it done more quickly. I'm not sure if I understand what you just said. I'm sorry. Okay. I talk like an engineer sometimes and I just kind of assume that everyone's following along with me. Yeah. I, okay.

So like, if you hit the H key. and you bring up that panel that I think the top one by default is wagon area. Yeah, when you hit F1, it goes back to the starting spot. Yeah. Hotkeys. And in that section where you can go to any map location and you hit one of the buttons that says zoom here, and then you associate that spot on the map with, say, F2. And you can name it like farming level.

And then from there on, you hit F1, you jump to the surface, you hit F2, you jump to the farming level. and I use that all the time to jump quickly around my fort but it would be much more convenient if that were set up for me automatically from the blueprints that I've already used to designate those levels do you not use that Roland

the hotkeys yeah no I do for like F1 F2 F3 zooms to different spots in your I think I understand what you mean now you mean you set up the blueprint for your farming area and then that like

automatically also makes the hotkey F2 to the farming area. Is that working here? Right, right. Okay. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's life improvements. And we've already implemented things like, you know, set up a tavern and configure it this way, but there's lots more that we could do.

The thing is, the quick fort, dream fort blueprint was the first time that I ever was able to have in rooms in a tavern and have them actually work the way. way the thing was designed to work and never quite groked how you were supposed to associate a bedroom or a rental room in a tavern or to make it an inn

in essence right so the in Dream Fort the tavern that gets set up there has I don't know three or four two tile bedrooms that basically have a bed and nothing else in it that people can can crash in so and they are still

I believe that they are still part of the tavern. Am I right? Yeah, it's set up the way that the game wants you to set it up, but it is kind of an optimistic thing because the game hasn't actually implemented visitors coming to stay in those rooms. It doesn't really work, but once

Dorfort just implements that mechanic, Dream Fort will be ready for it. It is set up properly for that. The funny thing is my mayor actually claimed one of those as her bedroom. I was like, yeah, they aren't, they aren't properly reserved for visitors. Anyone can just go and claim them as a bedroom. It's unfortunate

it. I like the idea of it, which is why I put it in there, but it doesn't really work yet. Well, cool. But yeah, but your tavern had that set up in it, and I very much appreciated that. It's actually quite a cool tavern with the Dream Fort Tavern. So I'm assuming that you are the one who made the Dream Fort Fortress layout? Yes, although it has received a lot of feedback and help from community members over the last decade or so since I've been working on it. It just gets refined pretty much every year where people come. made and say, why has it done this way? And I like, oh, well, because in version 42, that's how things worked. So let's go change that and update it. And you said in some of our pre-show conversation that you're making some changes to dream for it at the present time, right? That's right. Yeah,

I just got a whole raft of very good suggestions, such as we don't really need a temporary trade depot, just build it in its final spot, and that will simplify the startup process. And I was like, hmm, you're right. Let's go do that. And we went and did it. another suggestion was maybe you shouldn't have a well in the middle of the tavern because tavern brawls people fall down that well so I redesigned the tavern area just to not have a well and I moved that over to the very edge

of the hospital so it's a little more out of the way I never could get my stinking dwarves to fill up my wells with buckets so eventually I cut a channel from the river and put some floodgates so that they filled up through the side It took me a very long time to realize I just wasn't going to be able to do it that way

and if I would have realized that sooner then it would have saved me a lot of time and effort and dehydrated dwarves but yeah I kept the option there for Bucket Brigade because some people are just afraid of routing water but yeah routing water is by far easier and more effective.

I'm going to have to jump off in about two minutes so I will leave you guys to wrap it up. Tony do you have any other questions about QuickForth that you want to throw in here before you take off? I don't. I just am truly enjoying it. And I have to say one of my favorite things, I think I've mentioned this before, that I learned from watching your video, is being able to channel the water off the map and then to carve the fortification or whatever to allow the water to flow out is like truly one of the best things that I've experienced in the game ever. It was like, it's like the greatest thing in the world for saving a dying fort. So million thanks for that one. My dors, you saved many adorven life on that one. No, I'm really enjoying quick for it, and I am really trying to figure out how to make even better use of it

and get braver about building the things out. So it's very cool. And thank you for your work on that. Well, thank you very much. Yeah, I'll do some more YouTube videos for tutorials to get more of the information out. Yeah, that's right. We've got to promo your YouTube channel. so tony thanks man and uh have a great summer i'll see you guys later we'll get with you to plan the future

yeah thanks again mike for joining appreciate it thank you and have a good day roland anything else that uh that you want to ask about quick fort or about um dfack in general ask not not really besides uh showering you and praise for doing dfack and quickfort uh i don't really have questions Well, then here's a question for you. Like, as you're going through adventure mode, what do you think D.F. Haq could add to the experience to make it less frustrating or to make it more interesting or anything like that? Can D.F. Hack give us a goal? You know, that's something that I've been thinking about, you know?

Because, okay, one of the basic elements of Dore Fortress is that there is no specific goal. It's more of a, it's more of a toy than a game, as I've heard some other podcasts say. And that's a good thing for a lot of things. but also some people like to have a little more direction or a little more activity. So let me just say that I also think, and this is a point that Roland made in our last episode, I think, that works really well in fortress mode

because you can set in fortress mode aside and let it spin for an hour and then come back and pick it back up and see what's happened. Whenever you're not actively doing things in adventure mode, it ain't doing nothing. So you have to actually do everything with a minutia.

So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how that would work, but... Yeah, for example, when you talk to someone and they're like, oh, no, like a cyclops has been eating my goats, and you ask them, okay, cool, I can kill the cyclops for you. Do you know anything? I mean, ultimately, yeah, it probably is more of a Tody has to do something about that thing, because that person is going to say, I know absolutely nothing. I can't even tell you who could know where the Cyclops is. And I feel, okay, this might just be in my head, but I feel like we will get some kind of direction in the future.

Because if you go into adventure mode and you make your adventurer, you get three options of what to choose from, one of them currently being locked. And it says something about guidance. So I'm not sure if it just means that you get more points in the game to, like, spend on your character. Or if there are no, like, new features plan that actually give you some kind of real guidance, tell you, like, oh, this goes there, the Cyclops is over here. I believe it's more that, that it's an actual feature that will be like, your. advisor in the game where you are the the child of a deity right and your deity is more all-knowing and can give you hints like that i think that is the idea although i've not personally seen the actual implementation of it besides df hack help i i haven't really used that much df help in

adventure mode maybe the casual full heel you know because i forgot oh i'm bleeding but that was before steam. And couldn't you just heal yourself by quick traveling somewhere? What? Isn't that a thing? In adventure mode? You show up at your destination fully healed. Is it? That's my understanding. Oh, well, I didn't even know that. Okay. Apparently I have to try out what happens if I fast travel, but I just remember that I was bleeding really badly because somebody punched me in the in the mouth i think and i lost like teeth i couldn't speak and i was bleeding heavily and i was like ah but uh you said something about like information bubbles like hey excuse me you're bleeding hey excuse me you're you're like hungry or whatever that that could be really cool and if i

add onto that not all adventure wilderness creature people can eat all the things i i clearly remember a problem when I embarked with like an elk person or whatever and they had a piece of meat as like travel food but the elk person wouldn't eat it and then I was like beans and at some later point I don't know what I played like a tiger or jaguar and I picked some berries and I was like I can I can continue living for like two more days and then my tiger person just licked the berries.

So it would also be helpful if the hunger bubble would show you, you know, for the less intelligent people like me, that, oh, you're a tiger, by the way, just wants meat. I know this might be obvious for some, but... Or, you know, edible food is on the map. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Your news starts tingling. Just follow the nose.

It always knows. Since Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode is a rogue-like implementation, we need to figure out a way to put an amulet of Yendor in there somewhere. It needs to be an artifact. I'm an avid fan of NetHack and its history. So, yes, I very much on board with that. Yeah, you just have D.F. Hack place an amulet of Yendor somewhere in a world, say, you know, just maybe whatever you implement. I mean, whenever you load D.F. Hack, it just makes sure that there's an artifact somewhere in the map that's, whether it's, you know, in that world map that it's an amulet of Yendor. And the key for every adventure, the Holy Grail, per se, is to find the amulet of Yindor.

Yeah. Well, I think maybe one way to do that is to find out what the demon slabs are and then go put it in there with the demon slab. Then you have your own little endgame boss to fight as well. Ah, yeah. You know, that is another thing. um so i have not yet i've been playing for how many years roland we've been doing this podcast for five and i played for maybe a year and a half two years before we started the podcast so but i've still never made it to the circus so um yeah i think that that that having

some sort of tools in df hack to help you find the circus might be handy I mean, some of that stuff made ours to exist. It's down. It's down. It's fairly easy. I bottomed out my levels, my Z levels. So I still didn't find it. Did you, though? Did you? Well, they stopped counting.

It's like negative 127 or something like that, 128. But did you dig there? I thought I did. Maybe I didn't. Apparently not. Well, getting into the circus is not. Hard, but I don't know. Every time I did it, I was kind of disappointed because it's just death. It's like, ah, the sweet release of death is claiming me now.

Then you have like 40 boiling fiends that come rush out and just kill your, like, every single living being in the next like six ticks. And you're like, hmm, cool, I like hell. This is adventure. So I'm assuming, Mike, you've gone to the circus? I have, although not that many times, but I am aware of the techniques involved. I do enjoy kind of setting up interesting kill zones where my soldiers have a chance of fighting back. There was someone on the D.F. Hack server just a couple days ago, we were discussing this, where he got the demons to spawn.

I don't know if we're allowed to go into spoilers here. Yeah, you know, I'm going to put in the title, and we talk about the circus. So, yeah, as Tony said, this is like the worst kept secret in gaming. It is, yeah. At this point, it's not a spoiler. So he carved a fortification into the open area of an adamantine spire so that the circus is visible and begins to spawn, but kept them so they were contained within the spire. And then dug out to the very top of that spire was just a floor with nothing underneath it.

Now, if you drop something on a floor in Door 14, it'll just crash straight through. So then you can go and set up a trap or you dig out part of the ceiling above it and collapse a ceiling that is the same size of the hole or the floor on top of the open hole. And the ceiling will just crash right through the hole and go straight through that bunch of demons that have been gathered up at the surface trying to get out of their little trap there. And that did quite a bit of damage and he only needed to mop up a little bit after that. Huh. And I thought that was extremely clever, and I wanted to try that myself a couple times, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. So just Insta killed a bunch of demons?

Or at least seriously named them, because it's having large pieces of terrain crashing straight down through their tile. That's pretty genius. I thought so, too. Like, my best idea was to have them come into an open area that has a bunch of vertical bars built everywhere. So they have to kind of go through this maze. But vertical bars, your bark stores can shoot through without any trouble. So while they're making their way through this maze of vertical bars, we'd be shooting them from the sides and trying to get them all dead before they make their way to the final door and break that down. Oh, great.

We're going to talk about archery. And that worked okay. But I like collapsing the terrain on top of them even better. I haven't even touched archery with version 50 yet. I tried it to set it up and I was not successful. And even in Dreamfort, I haven't even bothered hiring archers to shoot in the target range. Does it work? Once you get it going, then they are pretty valuable, especially for the fire demons that you can't otherwise get close to.

Yeah. Cool. Okay, so we're running a little bit over an hour, so maybe we should think about wrapping up. So, Mike, Roland, do you guys have anything else that you would like to bring up for to discuss on this fine early summer afternoon? I have nothing. Nope. It's like a past midnight where you are now, right?

Yeah, it's eight minutes away from 1 a.m. Oh, wow. So, yeah, I think that we'll... Thank you so much for staying up this late to... Do appreciate it. ...accommodate my schedule here. Yeah, it was a blast. So this is going to wrap up.

Season 6 of Dwarf Fortress Round Table. We will be taking the summer off. We will be back sometime in the very latest part of summer, earliest part of autumn, probably in September at some point, because that's how we do things. So, Mike, thank you so much for coming back on. And, of course, we will have you back on whenever D.F. Hack has other releases or really, whenever you want to come back on, just let us know. Well, that would just be all the time then. So, yeah, you got anything else that you'd like to add before we wrap this one up? Well, there will be new versions of DF coming out before we get back from hiatus.

And there's going to be a lot more to talk about then. Yep. So keep digging. Yep. So we will have you on early on in the next season to talk about DF and DF hack. All right. So everybody, have a great summer. Good luck and dig deep, right?

Yep. have some nice summer weeks and for tony chow chow that was tony what's that i was pretty angry tony oh yeah that's cool we'll use your we'll use your chow as tony's chow this has been the dwarf fortress roundtable podcast you can find all our past episodes at df roundtable dot com stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwar Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. If you'd like to contact us by email, the address is Urest at DFRoundable.com. That's UR-I-ST 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

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