Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 119: We’re All Gamers

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Hey folks - this one may not be for those with sensitive ears... Subject matter is of an adult nature :). That said, we had a wonderful time talking all about mods. Below is the link to the Lizard Man image we were referring to. Not posting it myself as it's probably a copyright strike if I do! https://images.app.goo.gl/HCeZ3bhHxk72NUNu6

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for All Things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we're here to talk about people. No, I'm not going to do that. Oh, we're here to talk about people. We're here to talk about people.

People who are imaginary. Also people who are not imaginary, but they do things for imaginary people. Well? Yes. That's our listenership. The imaginary part that is, right? Yeah, that's it, that's it. Is our listener on?

The one guy. No, my mom's not a guy, but yeah, she's... Oh, hi, hi, my mom. So nice. So have you guys been playing much this last couple weeks? Not much. I'm actually kind of in my exam face. I just got out of it.

This is the first week and after, so to say. so obviously I had to spend my day the most efficient way and I think I have not really moved out of this chair at all I just played Stellaris the entire day so sadly not many dwarfs but I have tried something that we will talk about later or do we want to go into the mod thing well let me tell you this little anecdote before I forget it

So I was at a meeting the other day, and I was wearing my Dwarf fortress t-shirt that says nothing but was taken or is taken by a fey mood. And the guy says to me, what does that mean? And I said, oh, it's a game Dwarf fortress that I play. And it has to do with that. And he's like, oh, so you're a gamer? And I said, well, no, no, I play two games. I play Dwarf Fortress and I play classic Doom from 1993, 94. So, yeah, I play those two games, but I'm not a gamer.

And it's true. This is the only two games that I play. I play chess. I'm pretty sure that still makes you a gamer, by the way. Yeah, I think any games make you a gamer. Well, then everybody's a gamer because everybody plays games. To some extent. Is it Solitaire?

Does Solitaire make you a gamer? Yeah, it does. Baseball makes you a gamer. Really? Mindkeeper, Minecraft? Not Minecraft. Mind Sweeper. Mind Sweeper.

Definitely. Okay, listen, the fact that there is so much skill necessary to properly play a minesweeper, we're not talking about like easy mode. We're talking about like hard mode 500 tiles. Play that in an hour. That is a true game. Okay. Okay.

Okay, so what we've learned today is we're all gamers. I think we have an episode title. Anyway, Roland, you were going to tell us about your, well, geez, I can't remember now. I'm an idiot. You're going to tell us about something. Yeah. So on the, oh, you put that down in American, I don't know, American dates. Wait, let me think.

That is, it's backwards for you. That is like four days ago, right? Hezia. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not sure how to pronounce the name, Kizian, in the server wrote. Have you played around with any recent mod since the Steam release? The workshop has a great deal of fun mods from a recent mod that adds smokeballs for your dwarfs to making the dragons procedurally generated like the other mega beasts.

So of course, the kind of insane person that I am, I heard that and I went and I got myself the smokeable mod. I am devastated because I don't think you can put a mod into an existing game. Oh, I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't even know if you can put a

mod into an existing world. No, I think you have to burn it to the ground or Big Bang it into existence. Yeah, as far as I got it, you have to start a new world and then activate the mod, which is a fairly decent

way to do it, because that way you can have several worlds at the same game version that use different mods. So it's perfectly fine for you to download a mod that adds orcs and then only play one single game that actually has orcs. And if you switch to a different continent, like a different game world, whatever, then you don't have orcs if you don't load them in. That's quite nice. but it's so sad that I don't get to place a hookah like a water pipe into my Sword Kingdom Snake Fortress

and because that would have been amazing and so if any of the listeners know a way I don't care how cheaty it is to put a mod into an existing world that would be amazing but yeah apparently you can totally get your dwarfs hooked on weed that that is apparently a thing a hook is not for smoking weed that's true uh interesting that you know that but um with uh with oh man i i so okay so here's the backstory uh when i was in college my best friend was from jordan and uh he went back home and came back and and brought me a uh hooka from jordan and uh yeah so it is I'm not even going to say that it's one of my vices. Occasionally, like some people will smoke a cigar, I'll smoke a hookah occasionally.

It is wonderful. So the flavors are delicious. It's a nice ritual. So, yeah, I enjoy the hookah. It's not for cannabis, though. It is for tobacco, molasses, and fruit. Yeah, the real-life version, at least, is this one lets you actually smoke a lot of very weird things. I think I did.

So I see Teckids Farmstead mod in the library here. So did you build a new world and incorporate it into it? Yeah, I'm about to do that right now. No, I'm at the smokeables mod. Yeah, I see it. It's on the front page here. It's called Topples apostrophe smoking. And it's just what I thought is I always wanted that.

It even comes with a little extra. visuals so you can actually see the dwarf or the goblin hold the hooker in the hand and i wonder if they have long bottom leaf they do have something that is called pipeweed at least so we're getting very close but there's there's a stuff there's a whole whole array of things that you can smoke also in a hooker that is pipeweed hemp marijuana they do make a difference hashish opium shisha Golden Solve Vapor There it is, she's a green dragon. Good Lord.

There's also something called Philosopher's Lament. I don't know what that is. Warbo Tincture, essence of tumult, and extract vapor. Although that sounds like risky business to me. That is definitely. Interesting.

So if you want your dwarfs to be addicted to smokebolts and they generate like puffs of cloud. And when I say puffs of cloud, I mean, you can put down essentially like a room vaporizer, okay? And it generates massive amounts of cloud, and everybody that walks in essentially gets really high. So... All right, so we're just going to give up on our Apple-friendly rating for this episode.

Yeah, that's going to make it hard for us. I wonder if they just, like, repurposed the, and recolored the miasma graphics for the smoke. Pretty much. Is it shorten the lives of the doors? I don't think so. I don't think lung cancer is in. Everybody's walking around with high blood pressure there. Yeah, that's right.

Yep. That's something new. The water that feeds stone, told by the spirit of Lucas. In the summer of 66, the dreams of fountain splashed began to take form. The river, ever whispering beside the mountain, was no longer a boundary, it was a tool. Manager of Us Pantpage, with ledger in hand and mud on his boots, stood beside the flooded cavern soil of their first engineered farmland. Scouts had promised fertile soil beneath the mountain, but only stone had been discovered after

ample time of searching. So they created mud by routing channels from the river to the ideal spot for mycology. The fields glistened, mushrooms. rooted, and dwarves, who once depended on imported fare, now tilled river water plots, deep within the mountain's bosom. This is how the dwarves thrive, not by

what is given, but by shaping what is not. Presented through the clear running inside of Lucas. So what other mods do you folks use? Well, let me go to my mod list. The mod list, my mod list is incredibly

incredibly long, okay? All right. Now, I will take a moment and simply read every single mod in my mod list. We start with audible alerts, because then it goes dingling when there is an alert. Who does that one? If you float your mouse over it, it'll show on the right side. I wish it said, this is audible for the audible alerts. Trainzac.

Uh-huh. I've got a Trainzac mod. And then I have interface tweaks also by Trainzac. Trainzac is apparently really cool guy This interface tweak thing Has been in my mod list Literally since the game came out Yeah mine too

Never change it I never even updated it by the way Interface tweaks Yeah it's just They're not to update They should yeah Steam should do that for you Yeah

That's its thing isn't it True Then we also have Topples smoking Which is the previous smoking more that we talk about and uh teckett's kitchen oh i need to work on that one do you have your list up tony i do so i'm using a number of the accurate graphics packs from rhino and mcnuggy i'm using dog accurate dog cat domestic animals and accurate ungulate graphics

or do we pronounce it undulate i don't know i don't know uh those are the ones i'm using i use Audible alerts, which is weird because I play all games without sound. On-off burrow activation button from Tau. I find that to be kind of helpful. See through smoothing designations by Trainsac. Klineodev's dry minds, and those come from Klinodev. Creature graphics extended. Oh, it conflicts with other mods.

Okay, well, whatever. Never mind that one. Interface tweaks, yep. I put the procedural dragons in here from Nautilus, so that's cool. Cave spider syndrome recovery, I don't know why I have that one in there. I don't know that I struggle with cave spider syndrome, but I think it might have been one of the first mods, so I put it in there. And then Techets Farmsedds. And that's my thing. Oh, there was also one called Outlands, non-specialized labor icons, which seemed really cool, but then it adds. a new workshop that lets them train weapon smithing and armor smithing,

and I didn't think that was right, so I stopped using it. It felt a little cheaty to me, so I stopped that one. Those are my mods. So with the cat and dog accurate graphics on that, I remember that, oh, boy, what was his name? He was working on the graphics on the new dwarf fortress, release until he was it. We had him on the podcast. Yeah, boy, golly. Not Meph.

It was Meph. Meph. It was Meph. Great. Thank you. So Meph had his starter pack, if you recall. And in his starter pack, I believe it was Meph, had all the individual species of dogs, which was great, except for the fact that it added each individual species to the list of things that you had to deal with. Yeah, so you could have different rules. So instead of just having dogs' cats, you would have Cocker Spaniels, German Shepherds. Does your dog and cat accurate graphics do that to you as well? No, it doesn't.

I think it just changes the sprites, although I did find that hilarious where I was like, you know what, I don't want Basset hounds in this fort. I'm going to make Basset soap. No offense to Basset. They're kind of messy and smelly Basset hounds. Sorry if that's controversial everyone. Well, I thought there was a great idea except the execution of it was a little annoying whenever you were actually trying to get something done in your fort

and you had to scroll through a list of 50 different species of dog. Oh, for sure. I'm not sure if you can actually add like different species of one creature and the creature remains just one creature, if you know what I mean? Probably not. I think he made new animals. I think it was back in the ye olden days. Yeah, he had to. He had to. Yeah, and I think that's how you did it. Yeah, it was a good, it was a good trick. Well, my, uh, my list of mods is, I don't know if it's quite as long. It's not. So, uh, I have clino devs dry mine. because I never want aquifers. To me, they are nothing there to be an annoyance.

I've not really found a useful purpose for them. There probably is, but it's not worth of trouble. I use bourbon's dark depths and bourbons dark floors. Both of those take the blue tint out of, you know, the multi-level views. They have this blue tint. It takes the blue tent out and turns it into grays and blacks. And there's a blue tint to the floor.

as well and it takes it out of that sort of a little like that detailed landscapes is by uh by pos that adds graphics to 384 vanilla environmental tiles good grief what it does is it gives you varieties of grass there's like 32 species of grass heathers thistles reeds so you have a very much more varied landscape whenever you're looking at it it's beautiful what's that one called Detailed Landscapes. It's by POS, P-O-S-S. Cool. I'll check that out.

Interface tweaks I use. I have a micromod-enable Morning Stars because Morning Stars are my favorite melee weapon. That's by G-G-Bot. Oh, so you can craft them on your own? No, but you can use them. Your dwarves can use the Morning Stars that you can pick up for, you can't build them, but you can use them whenever someone brings them to sell.

But can't you use them anyway? No. Really? Nope. Morning stars, a foreign weapon, and you can't use it. You can use a mace. It's very close, but you can't actually use a morning star. At least that's the way it was originally whenever it was released.

Perspective Walls, it changes the graphics just a little bit to give you a bit more of a 2.5D. That is by Comrade 2.2. Tomb, T-U-M, Comrade Tomb. Rounded Hills is also by POS. I use that. I use Tekken spiders, and I use War Possums, which is by Arcane Lane. It adds the ability to train war possums. Well, thank God for that.

I know. I don't know that I've ever actually employed it, but I just like the idea of it. I like possums. So, yeah. Yep. Okay. So, wait, this war, possum mod adds nothing

but possums then can be war train yes that's right I like possums what can I say I think someone needs to build one that's like war skunks that would be great I got sprayed by a skunk a couple weeks ago smells good yeah it smelled wonderful

you know knock me down I can't say that ever happened to me well I was trying to trap a groundhog as someone said on the the discord server ground hogs are the cobalds of real life so my neighbor was having problems with the groundhog and she wanted to poison it and it's like no I don't want to poison it let me see if I can trap it so I tried to trap it and what I did was trapped a skunk oh so I went and when I released it from the trap it uh it weakly tried to spray me and it got my jeans so it still was pretty strong

yeah that sucks that was my week how was yours skunky uh yeah so yeah so those are my mod so Thanks, Keziah, for asking that question in the Discord server. Yeah, that's a good one. It's, I'm finding more stuff I want to add in now. This is cool. All right. Are you all looking at the Steam list? Oh, I'm looking at the workshop right now.

Yeah. Anything stick out to you? Procedural Dragons. I got that one ticked in here. So what's that do? Is that just... So it says turns dragons into a beast with many different body types and colors. cave dragons also have new body types and layered graphics.

So these are, so this is a graphical mod too. Yeah, it adds sprites for the dragons and then it, it procedurally generates them. The only thing I hope is that it doesn't turn it into some sort of like weird internet dragon kink thing. You know, like that's a thing on the internet. Like people fantasize about doing things to dragons that are sort of like, I mean, cool. like you do you but it like kind of creeps me out personally but like I don't want to shame anybody if they like dragons fifth edition dungeons and dragons ruined a lot of things for people yeah man whatever if you want to shit up a dragon god bless you but you know like it's just

a weird we might as well go all the way we've lost our clean rating yeah we've lost the clean rating today drug content oh boy we'll let the sensors get to us thank you toples thanks toples for losing us our rating I see another beautiful mod I think I seen it before. It is more vanilla creatures. And it just adds a bunch of creatures that are either partially already in or at least adjacent. So for example, the fluffy wambler is this little podgy vermin. And it adds a giant fluffy wambler that is no longer a vermin, but like an actual animal. That is very interesting. What else does it add? So you can have cave tree ends.

That's pretty cool. Ooh, you can also have the beautiful giant desert scorpions back if you want to do that to yourself. You remember those? Can you have a mouse in a scorpion fight? That feels like that is a reference to something. Yeah, I'm not sure it is. I just think of the old friends episode where, where Ross's monkey

was going to go to a monkey fight where he was going to be given a hammer. I think this one's from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is kind of like Friends 2.0. Is that fair? Is it? I've heard about it, but I've not seen it. It's always sunny is a good show.

It's worth watching. Okay, boys, this mod went from hilarious to good to absolutely peak. There are cheese men. Cheese men, okay? It is a wheel of cheese with legs and arms and a little happy smiley face. Oh my God.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. This is the vanilla mod? What is a vanilla mon? Is that what you're saying, the one that you were just talking about vanilla creatures? Yeah, more vanilla creatures. Yeah. Okay. So, man, bone towers.

What in the name of Christ is a bone tower? An evil and tall stack of bones that shambles through the. darkness underground. Okay, so it is walking bones. Oh. The gabbro crab is awesome. It turns stone into an animal. That's something. What a world. What amethyst crabs. Leather man. Bitumenous coal sprites. Candleman. Excuse me? This looks dangerous is what this looks like. Giant flesh ball floating guts. I mean, this looks like a great way to go. Oh, look, unicorns. My God. They, so you can equip the cheese men with armor. Oh, nice.

So there's one thing that I miss about pre-50 dwarf fortress is the different graphics packs that you could use. So I'm looking through here, and I see one that was posted by Raphael KB called NeoDwarf version 0.50. And what it looks like, now it's not ready for prime time. It looks like it's still in like even just alpha mode, and he's looking for help with it. But it's a pack to overhaul and mod all the graphics of Dwarfortress. Wow.

I'm looking at the graphics that he has his photos on Steam there in his pictures. They look pretty cute. It looks kind of more old-school. I kind of miss the, you know, the Phoebus pack and all the different graphics packs, the tile sets that you could put in for Dwar Fortress. Not that, I mean, the new Dwar Fortress is beautiful, and I've totally got news. to it, but I did like that variety. I did like to change it up

occasionally just for the heck of it. Yeah, I agree. You could really give it some flavor by which graphics packs you put in there, yeah. I'm wondering if the new Lua extension will perhaps make some of that sort of thing easier? Probably not. I don't know. With all the amazingly expanded graphics,

it probably is just a big task to go in and mod them now. They just re-skinned Morrowind. So there you go. Not a gamer, so I don't know. Oh, so you're saying you want to play Dwar Fortress on the Unreal Engine, yeah? Is that what you want to do? Let's port it. It'll run great.

Oh, God. Oh, no, there's a, you know, you save that. There's, there is, I think, Lua interfaces to, oh, there's another game engine that's, that's free. Uh, unity? Free as in free speech, not free as in free beer. Yeah, it's the, it's not the epic one. It's the Unity one, yeah. Unity's not free as in free speech.

It's free as in free beer. Sure. What? Now I've got to look up with this. It's an old person reference, don't worry. Old person reference. All right. It's, it just talks about, like, you can, it's free as you don't have to pay for it,

but you can't really, you can't really do everything you want with it. Yeah. Oh. Like, free speech free is like, I'm supposed to be like some places like you can say anything you want. You don't get in trouble. GoDOT, or Godot, depending on how you pronounce it. Most people don't actually say it. Oh, Go, Godot. Yeah, Godot. Yeah, I don't know how to say that either.

And I have actually started using that. I've taken a few tutorials on it. I like it. I'm going to, that's, if I get back into, you know, hobby game development, it will be with that and not with Unity. I was using Unity, but they did like a retroactive change to their policies to their, to their, to their licensing such that if you have created a mobile game then you had to pay them

for things that you had released in the past oh yeah that's right they tried to make that go through that was a big stink they did that self-sabotage business move and kind of knocked themselves out of the yeah well done it was just a dick move I mean yeah I think everyone responded accordingly yeah they backed off of it

too late but uh the damage was done right too late yeah so so Godot is is free and open source. That's neat. As in free speech and free beer. So, and it's a pretty good, it's a pretty good engine. Are you going to go vibe code a new game with Gemini or something? No.

Be cool. I wonder if you can vibe code good old games. I have way too many hobbies. Hang on. Hang on. I'm the Jen Zeeler here. I should be doing that. You should be vibe coding something.

Yeah. That's right. That's right. You should do that. It would just be an angry game, right? Well, you could then turn it into something like Celest. which is I consider to be a mid-platformer that people have described as like

the single most moving experience of their life and I'm just like, what am I missing here? This game sucks. Which one? Celeste or Celeste, something like that. Probably going to make some people really mad today by saying that. I don't know. I just thought it was a really meh platformer.

Whatever, to each throne. Now that I've isolated and alienated a number of users. Well, we're Tor Fortress players. so we'd like to do that. If it's not Twelfortures, it's not a game. Let me have some more hot takes next week. All right. Hot takes.

Anywho, okay, let's see if we get back on track. No, we should do that. This is not the game platform podcast. But yeah, I think that Godot should, or that Twelfortures should be rewritten in Godot. Cool. Yeah. I'm on it.

Go on that time. Get on that tarn. Yeah. I'm going to vibe code it. All right. So thank you, Kesea, Yeah, for sending in that question. That was a good one.

Yeah, that was a cracker. Thanks, Cizia. There are several people who, Roland, wanted to comment on your snake family tree from, I think it was a couple episodes back. It may have been last episode. So that got me thinking, is there a way to actually export a family tree of your fortress? Or would you have to do that manually? Something that's actually, you know, genealogy looking, not like a word cloud. Yeah.

You can do that. Yeah. I've seen those. That might be a mod. The Legends mode or Legends viewer used to do that. That should be a mod. Let's say it like that. Well, doesn't Legends mode let you do that?

Or you can go find your dwarf and it'll show you their grandfather and grandmother and great-grandmother. You're talking about the old Legends viewer, right? Yeah, does this Legends viewer next to it? I can't remember off the top of it. My worlds are all blending together here. Yeah, not really. Not really. Okay.

Legends Viewer Next is awesome. Don't get me wrong, but I think that's one of the things that, and I think they're still working and adding features. So if the creators have got to pull it up here. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's an active development. So that's awesome. I think it only is able to show you parts of the family tree. So like direct relations, but it, for example, doesn't really show cousins or people that are not important to the person that you're looking at. So if you look at the person, you usually just see either their parents or the children,

sometimes also siblings or their grandparents, but not really that much more. And if you have such big family fortress that has like essentially three, four families that grew together into like one big twisted family, It does not do them justice. The way that I exported the information was very not very straightforward. There was somebody that wrote a tool, like a Lua script, and that exported certain information, certain relationship information. And then you had to put that into a website that would then display it to you. And the problem is the website did not really interact very well with the information that I gave it.

It did work very nicely for small dwarfish families. It worked very nicely for them. The problem is just that the weird snake relations broke everything. So I think that you need to spend some time drawing this out on paper with... Oh, yeah. Do it in the Tolkienesque maps. style like the genealogy in the back of the Lord of the Rings and yeah and so you need to get on that Roland you are so right I should probably get on that cromtech cromtech is the uh

legends viewer next uh lead developer so so yeah that would be uh if cromtech if you happen to be listening that would be a great thing to uh to add to the wish list or at least a way to export the information you know it does not have to be just displayed in dfack or legend vort but at least give me the option to export it and use that family relation info on i don't know like a website or these um these mind map stuff and they can like display it a little better that would be there would be a dream control and for the wait the question from Wesley. I would love to see the 200 plus snake man tree.

I can share the funny little pictures that I took, but they're not very good. Also, I definitely crunch down the pixel camera. Resolution? Yeah, the resolution. So they're not very readable anymore. But I will definitely show anything. if it is good to look at and readable.

Hammer, poem, fortress, carried by Klineodev, Wind of the Deep Archive. With a booming voice and a warhammer at her side, militia commander-led focus paddle surveyed level 34, where dust rose from newly constructed barracks. She proclaimed with dignified pride, if we are to defend fountain-splashed, we do it with rhythm, rhyme, and readiness. Two squads of five, that would be the beginning.

Yet this was no simple march of arms. These halls now held verses. The aquamarine reason echoed alongside the clatter of armor. Soldiers recited poetry as they drilled. Let's vision, sharp as her tactics, lived in every line. Even in war, Fountain Splashed sings. Recorded by the Windscor, crawled parchments of Clean O'Dave.

So I started a new fortress, and this time it didn't come out with the cool names that I thought it was going to, or at least I didn't expect it to. So I manually named my fortress for what I'm going to be using as its goal. It's called Fountain Splashed. Okay. So this one, the focus on this one is going to be waterworks. I want to play with waterfalls. I built it up on a high mountain.

And my goal is to have pump water from the river up to the very top of the mountain and have a giant waterfall streaming down from the top of the mountain into a canal that empties back out into the river. I want that to be driven by windmills. so okay that's awesome okay yeah we can windmills do work in in current world fortress right they do cool i haven't i haven't tried windmill power since version 47 so yeah i have it i built a windmill execution machine well um a while back lane it was it was that one that i had where you would you would be put in the room and then the cage door would open and then there was a series of mine carts racing back and forth and then the exit opposite so you might get lucky you might

make it across all six mine cart tracks with them going so fast but usually the lead mine cart flattened you and uh that was that was a thing oh i think you could also probably hook them up to uh spikes uh windmill maybe to could you do that uh trigger trigger uh trigger spikes with a windmill? I don't know about that. I think that's too fast because I linked some spikes to a plate in front of the tavern once. Because I thought a lot of people pass through, trigger the plate, and then the spikes extend just, you know, faster. But I don't think it did anything because the spikes have some cool down time.

And the plate triggers it too fast. So I'm not sure if the windmill could pull that off because it's too fast. I don't know. One of my favorite traps was one that Krug Smash put in a fortress where the enemies would trigger the spikes themselves as they walk across through the room, through the trapped room. Yeah, that was brutal, just brutal. Yeah, that was savage. Dead goblins. Dead everything.

Dead body cleaners. reason when I do it. Wasn't it? Gotta be careful with those execution machines. It's really easy let them go wrong. Yeah, I used to think

that you couldn't do things like trap a dwarf in a cage that dwarfs set. I thought that dwarves are immune to dwarf cage traps. You can. Yeah, I found that out

whenever I had a bunch of cages in front of a room that I'd trapped a forgotten beast in, and I then unlocked the door so that the forgotten beast can come out and get into the traps. Well, the dwarves rushed in there to fight the forgotten

beast and the forgotten beast was fighting them and during the melee some of the dwarves ended up being trapped in the cages. So I was like, what's up with that? I didn't think that was supposed to happen. Yeah, I think if they dodge, they're not a human.

That's right. That's right. They can dodge into them. So this is the same like child sickness then happens when you are fighting somebody close to water and they dodge and they just fling themselves

into like the abyss or the water or whatever and so they can totally get trapped by their own trap that they even build themselves if they just dodge a light punch. Gotcha. Well, that does

make some sense. You have to be careful around those traps, Timmy. Don't play yourself into the abyss. All right. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to fountain splashed and the fun stuff. It's still very early in that. I've not had a chance to play with it too much. But it does have a nice environment. It's about a third of the map is a very, very steep mountain face. You know, we got to talk about the dwarven Moria style entrances. So I wanted to have a fortress that had that sort of thing, too. And then it just opens up on a huge plane that has a river running through the middle of it. Oh, nice. You could make, for example, like a pump stack to the top and then have water running over the entrance of your Moria.

And at some point, if you're cool enough, you can exchange water for magma. That's sneaky. Well, I was thinking more of a misgenerator thing. I don't think I want to make a magma mist generator that my dwarves walk through whenever they enter the fortress. Okay. I can see your point. I mean, I do want to keep dwarves.

I don't want them all to die from... Does Mazma make... Does magma make mist? Yes. It can make magma mist, but I'm not sure when it does that because it doesn't happen like water when it's flowing. It also sometimes happens.

happens if you drop a heavy item into magma from above, which is why I have stopped using like a dumping ground for trash that is filled with magma, because I sometimes had backslash. I haven't made a pump stack with version 50 either, so. Yeah, you can do magma splash. I've had that problem before where I've, I thought I would. being clever doing something and I dropped a big section of flooring into the magma and it splashed up and killed everybody like yeah yeah great oops you do easy anybody got anything interesting to say about their own fortresses not not really i i have been trying to get the

the the these smokables to work that is definitely a system i have also installed in uh d and installed a few of these creature mods to just figure out what is there, because I came to the conclusion that maybe more creatures in an adventurer world would be cool. But then I also learned that me being completely unfamiliar with most of these creatures means that I don't know what's happening on screen sometimes. And it wasn't the vanilla expanded creatures I installed. It was, let me see one mod for playable orcs

and one mod for playable lizard men but like the the Warhammer lizard men and that was weird because suddenly I could play like a really big lizard

man and I wasn't aware that I was like I don't know like three meters in size I ripped people apart and I was like oh my god That was interesting, but I de-installed it simply because I felt that doesn't really fit into my idea of what dwarf fortress is. Dinosaurs are cool. Lizardmen with weapons are also cool, but it doesn't really feel like my dwarf fortress, you know what I mean?

I'm with you. I guess. Lizardmen always, always were featured fairly large in my Advanced Dungeons of Dragons, you know, the old first edition. my fortress, I'm not my fortresses, my campaigns that I would build. I really like lizard men as a, as a, you know, a foe for my adventures. So I can kind of see lizard men being a good feature in dual fortress because, you know, it's, it's always been part of my, my own personal, you know, fantasy set. What kind of lizard man?

Are we talking about a skunk gecko man? or are we talking about like weird dinosaur creatures that are from this is more of a weird dinosaur creature kind of thing it's it's a it's a humanoid bipedal lizard man who stands up i think in the old gary gigax monster manual from 1978 or whatever it has a picture of him holding a mace i was pretty young at the time so i think that this one i did some coloring in with my with colored pins in my monster manual so so that's yeah I really dig those he had a sword

he didn't have a mace I thought he had a sore it is very crocodile like and they do have like dinosaur mounds also my back is killing me today I don't know why what is happening what's those spikes you

but yeah So I don't know where we got off on that. See, to me, that doesn't, because in my head, D&D was the Gary Gygax creation from the 70s and not what it became with later editions after Wizards at the Coast got hold of it. Isn't this just like a big lizard man or something or crocodile man? What are you saying? We didn't have those in OG, D&D. No, we did have them. But I'm talking about the stylization of the picture.

To me, the one that is just above it with the half-nealing lizard with a sword and because that's what I grew up with. Yeah, yeah. That's the pen and ink. I was just kind of imagining this was like the we got the artist's paints kind of thing. We're selling enough books, Gary. Let's buy some paint. Okay. Yeah.

If they were selling enough books, he probably wouldn't have been ousted. But okay. Yeah. It's all worked out, I'm sure. That was, yeah, yeah, that was a whole, the drama of Dungeons and Dragons. Well, I think for a while, it was the gateway to Satanism, and you were going to go to hell if you did it. Like, I remember that. It was part of the satanic panic in the 80s.

It got sucked up into that. I'm sure Door Fortress would be that way, too. artifacts and omens, curated by the eye of Michael Eller. A table of gypsum, carved fine and called winnosing, was the first. Then came a mug, petalwury, etched with images of blind cave bears. And finally, sensed short, an oaken bracelet bearing the likeness of Eudel Swamp Granite in magnetite. Three artifacts, each unbidden by plan, arrived like messages from the stone. They were placed carefully, two in the guildhall.

of miners, who now called themselves the Hall of Merck, and one in the temple foyer, where visitors pass and ponder. Were these signs, portents, or just the mountains speaking in the hands of its workers? In fountain splashed, even a mug may carry the weight of prophecy, preserved with reverence by Michael Eller. Okay, I think that we're, I think that we can start wrapping this up. Move it. Move it, move it, move it.

Move it along. Is there anything else that we want to cover today? Well, I would like to point out that I have downloaded Techets mod, but I feel really bad because I have not really touched upon it. Yeah, we Yeah, I've got to have Techett on here to talk about his food box. Yes, we really need to do that. Yeah, let's have a, let's have a, let's focus. You're invited on, man.

Come here and talk about the, we'll have our, our booking staff, reach out to your management team. Sorry, I just got clawed by a cat. We won't do that to you. Yeah, let's, let's get him on here to talk about food. And we're starting to get closer and closer to our hiatus. so yeah we need to have some people on here it's been a yeah a lot of a lot of naval gazing the last couple months so introspection focusing on our core values like cat soap and mosquito

brains yes and war opossums apparently that's right we got to get some more I want to have war opossum soap and hookahs and hookahs oh I should do the creature mod here and I could see if I could make soap out of every one of the new features. Oh, yeah. Maybe I'll do a soap fortress, and I can have giant magma crab soap. Well, if you can mod it so that soap is a

construction material again, that would be good. Well, you can definitely have soap men, so that's a thing. Whoa, we're going to get all, what is it, Ex-I bit, X-Men, soap men, can you do that?

Would it just be like? I think it does avoid. because they're sentient, but you could, if you get soap back to a building material, you can create a fortress made out of soap, and soap men are living in it. And then they scream because they don't know if they're made out of building material or the building material is made out of their flesh. Yeah, and when it rains, man, can you imagine that stairwell? Can you imagine the smell?

It might be nice Soilin soap is made out of soap, man But what if it's like scented with like I don't know, let's say lavender It could smell really good Lavender for it, lavender soap That's not bad What other soap smells

I don't like lavender soap I'm sorry It's one quarter cleansing cream Let's reach out to the listeners What so do you like? What are your favorite? Put down in the comments below What is your favorite kind of soap?

I like caress oh yes it's very nice I feel like there's like a you know like you could go all Freudian with that oh caress really how was your childhood at the other at the other end of the spectrum there's dial dial yeah dial it's a 80 cents a bar

it's perfect it's the soap for the American consumer well I can definitely say I prefer liquid dish soap because I think it's just easier to drink that way oh yeah I mean, if you're drinking it. Does soapmen drink soap? Yeah, what do they eat?

That's tricky. Well, we'll have to get the soap men out and have them on show. You should definitely check that. Soap man, there it is, soap man. Perhaps next time we'll have an entire episode based on soap man. But for now. There's also Sandman. Inter Sandman, yes.

That's right. It's coarse and it gets. everywhere. For now, we're going to wrap this one up and wish everyone happy Fortress making and have a good time with DwarFortress. Yeah. Happy soaping. Happy soaping. Peace. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. 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-Roundable.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 DFRoundtable. This is a conversational podcast. All craftsmanship is of the highest quality. Thanks, Delphonseo.