Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 120: Tekkud’s Farmstead with Tekkud

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

Tekkud's back to talk mods, farming, and gets dragged into nonsense with the gang. A good time was had by all! twitch.tv/tekkud https://www.youtube.com/tekkud The Workshop Page: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3475873434

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 Teked back to the podcast. Welcome back, Teked. I feel welcomed. We've been talking about you for like a month now.

I kind of went MIA for a while there, so I'm glad people were talking about me. You stay it three times. You got really heavy into Project Zamboyd, right? Right. After my move and my job change, I got heavy into a few games because I wasn't set up to really do anything serious in terms of streaming. So I just kind of started doing other games for a minute. Zomboid was one of them. Valheim was another. You know, went around the block. Okay. Right. I know Hello Kitty Adventure Island came out too in the last year. I don't know if you guys have had a chance to check that. I got like a thousand hours in that. Yeah. Yeah, me too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. Ever since I got that elephant, it's awesome.

How many hours does steam think I have into a fortress? It has got to be something ludicrous Because I will leave it on in the background And just let my dwarves go about their business Gabe doesn't judge Uh, 3,372.1 hours of a dwarf fortress Wow On Steam?

Yeah, on Steam Literally a lifetime Well, it's, honestly, it's because I will leave it up in the background And I'll occasionally I'll walk by the computer And it will be paused because of a season change because I have it set to pause on seasons. And I will just, you know, set it spinning like a top again and go do my other stuff. Hey, this is a safe space.

You don't, it's fine. You can just enjoy those 133 days straight. It's good. We're good. That's a pretty respectable number. Yeah. We actually respect you more for it here. So it is a safe space.

Well, you've played three times as much, or perhaps idled three times as much. I'm not sure how the division works out. But I've got a thought. on Steam so but I did start in 2017 or 16 or something so you know I have a few hours before steam yeah yeah there's been a few updates it's also hard to guess how much you had before because I definitely had a lot of time before that and a lot less time on Steam so honestly I think that Steam registers your minutes whenever you have the stinking start menu up. So if you just save a fortress and you're sitting there on the menu screen,

I think it's still counting your hours. So it's a useless metric, really. Like most metrics, useless. Well, designed by the man to keep you compliant. The numbers themselves are useless, but we incentivize that which we measure. so if you're actually trying to get yourself to do something in particular to improve yourself in some manner taking metrics from it whether they be useless or not

is a way to get yourself to focus on those things yeah I played the Sims 2 yeah remember that that's a Sims thing make him sit in a room and paint for 48 hours do you ever do that Sims 2 anyone it's a torture game like Fortress I never did like Sims 2 I was a Sims 1 kind of guy torture game yeah interesting you need to be a painter I will put you in a room and remove the door. Well, how's that different than what we do to our dwarves? Oh, that's what I'm saying.

It was like, it must have been one of Tarn's inspirations for this game. Like, you know, you don't build a swimming pool and remove the ladder for nothing. Seriously, you could do that. You could have, like, really annoying people come visit you in that game. I'm going to invite him to the pool. And then hit pause, go into creative mode and delete the ladder, the thing. And he couldn't figure how to get out of the pool. And he's just like, wh-ha!

ground, yeah. Yeah, and then that's the end of it. Oh, I remember that. You know, word never got out. So just fewer annoying people in town. So that's cool. Drowning the problem, children, since the Sims 2, video games, that's what we're here for. That's what they do.

Oh, that's back to the Sims 1. You could do that in the first one. Drown your way out of it. That's, I think, isn't that one of those Gwyneth Paltrow health fit things? I don't know. Maybe not. I'm sure there's some text-based adventure from like 1970-something that has a character. or you can drown, too, just to get them out of the way or something.

I bet drowning characters has been probably in games since the very beginning. Speaking of text adventures, if you go to Gemini or your, you know, pastiche maker of choice, you can actually play Zork and stuff with them now, which is kind of cool. They will become Zork. Zork. Zork was a text adventure from 1936. Is he using the old code? I don't know what it's doing

It's magic, man Just doing what it thinks it's doing I think because Zork was bundled into Linux distros for a while I think somehow it's like I think it's just gobbled it all up Anyway, no sort of to do Zork was originally in I think it was the AT&T distribution of Unix

It's an infocom game Yeah, Z ORK Yeah It was one of the I think it was originally like late 70s It came from a colossal cave adventure I think is the original, what it was based on, which was a really, really early Unix,

something that was packaged with early, early Unix. So if that kind of thing interests you, you should check out the podcast, Advent of Computing. It's great. I believe Colossal Cave got some kind of remake or re-release or something, too. I've heard about it recently. Yeah.

That's the only reason I know that that game exists. And this seems to work. I wasn't computing whenever it was new. What's that, Tony? Yeah, I think it works. So I'm not like a Zork aficionado. I didn't spend a lot of them. I don't have like, you know, 4,000 hours in Zork or anything.

But, yeah, check it out if you want to experience Zork. One of the cool things about Zork was that it was one of the first examples of a domain-specific language with basically a virtual machine that they built for porting Zork to other platforms so that they wouldn't have to port Zork itself. They would just port the virtual machine to new platforms so that they can keep the actual codebase of Zork. the same, whether it was Apple 2, IBMPC, Unix, what have you. Now it's part of the cultural zeitgeist. Interestingly, it was taken into the so-called game canon as one of the 10 most important

video games in history. I buy that. You don't have to, you can play it for free on Gemini. Just go up and tell it, let's play Zork, and then off it goes. But if you don't play it on an old machine. Is it really the same? Just use Internet Explorer version 6 or something. Yes, it is.

Fire up a terminal in Linux. These are the continuing chronicles of Fountain Splashed. Chapter 7. The Mercy of Mayer Obscurecraft, conjured by Keefe the Green Wizard, seer of the verdant light. They say Avuz obscure craft came to fountain splashed with haunted eyes and pockets full of silence. A veteran of the doomed fortress future flag, she carried memories like sharpened rocks in her satchel. Yet when the people cried out for leadership, it was she who answered.

Reluctantly, quietly, but firmly. As goblins tore through livestock and barracks were thrown into chaos, Avuz joined the fray herself, Hammer swinging as a proud member of the top pillars. When the dust settled, and the mayoral seal was hers, she demanded nothing. No grand office, no parades. Just that mistakes be learned from, and that mercy guide the hand. Some call her unkempt. Some say she mutters and forgets where she left her goblet.

But none doubt her heart, nor her will. Preserved in glass-leaf memory by Keith the Green Wizard. Okay, so let's talk about the Fortress. Yeah, let's do that. Tech and one of the main reasons we have you on here is because of your food mods. I just so, oh, okay, mods, yeah, right. Those food mods, give me food. Also, your adventures in pickling things in real life.

That's interesting to talk about, too. Oh, yeah. Well, I made some sauerkraut recently. Because it's very dwarfy. Wonderful. Yeah. But, yeah, it's finally, my mods finally out in a mechanically finished state. it's not yet play tested and no graphics but it's out there it's out there you can pickle stuff

it's techids farmstead tech is yeah it is yep yep it's uh it blew up it blew up into something so much more than it was ever supposed to be so was this the same mod that you're making chocolate with yes i should probably chop it up honestly i should chop it up into like into like just the plant stuff just the animal stuff i don't know but i really don't want to have to do any more work on it. That's fair. For the un-initiated, what does... Sometimes it is what it is.

What does this mod give the player if they install it? Well, let me see. Let me try to improvise a podcast-ready spoken summary of the mod. Well, look, you can go off the deep end, if you like. We enjoy getting sidetracked and talking for, you know, a half an hour on the minute details of whatever. I guess you could say that if you want specifically a... ground plants. If you're looking to make plants more useful without making the game easier

and without adding any like foreign flavor to the game, just stay in inside of Dwarf Fortress, what it was always meant to be, then the Farmstead Mod allows you to, it makes farming viable with virtually all above ground plants. It fixes and completes a lot of broken and incomplete parts of above-ground plants. And it also throws in some dairy products just for the heck of it. And a couple bonus things like Bayberry Wax, which that one as an example was a note in the raws. So it's not outside of the scope of the game.

It was just never done. So I did it. What do you mean when you say you fix above-ground plants? Well, if you're playing vanilla, you can't have beans. You just not. You just can't. You just can't have beans. That's terrible.

That's true. So it's also you're underground with a bunch of dwarves. Do you really want to bring that in to close not-vanaded spaces? Maybe that's by design. You have to light your torches somehow. Yeah, okay. Also, certain things were, you can tell that there were eras of development in the game just by looking through the raws.

And one era was an era before growths on plants. That's when sunberries were probably in, and they are just the plant. Then cranberries were added with the, the berries as a growth and no one ever went back and made the old things new. So I did that. So now sunberries actually yield sunberries from a bush rather than just being made out of sunberry bush matter, which is what the beans problem was. Bean pods are made of the bean stalk.

They're just bean matter. Like not bean matter. They're the bean plant matter. So I was like, no, we're got to get rid of that. We're making the pods and the fruits. We're making them, you can grind them, some into flour, some into like, like, you can make soy sauce out of soybeans, stuff like that. Oh, man. So, basically what, the problem I identified in the game, because I don't, I actually, it's weird, I don't use mods.

I don't play games with mods. I only have made mods. I don't actually use other people's mods because I tend to find that they add a lot of personal flavor, and that's great. but as far as my game goes, I don't want, I just, I'm not looking for other people's flavors in the game for myself. So I tend to just avoid mods. So I tried to make mine very much like neutral and inside of the scope of what the game was always meant to be. So that's the inspiration behind just like there's just so many plants that were supposed to work and they didn't. Like, soy milk is in the raws as a note.

Soil milk. Tarn wanted to add soy milk. Hmm. But you couldn't. And then I made it so you can. You can get yourself a soy latte now, too, can't you? Yeah. I was just about to say.

Yeah. Coffee. Finally. There's coffee in the game now? Yes. There's coffee and there's chocolate and there's bayberry wax. And those are three tree-based products that didn't exist before at all. there is anything else new like brand new i did add one okay so i did add one item that is sort of flavor

but i feel like it's inside of the dwarf fortress theme and that's i added mandrake uh as a sort of like magical plant because there are evil biomes and there's good biomes and there's all of these like evil and good plants and i just felt like there should be an interesting neutral biome plant, at least one. So I threw Mandrake in there, and the elves can make elixir from the mandrake that will give your dwarves happy thoughts as well as put them to sleep.

So it's a narcotic, basically. But dwarves can't make it. I just threw that in the mod because I was like, it should exist, but I don't, one of the things about the mod is I did not want to make the game any easier at all. In fact, it's a little harder because I changed the growth duration and seasons for all the

above ground plants, so they're no longer all super fast growing all year around. But I wanted the game to have more interest without being easier. So I just gave the elves, the elven elixir that they can make. You can trade for it, I suppose. That's pretty neat. That's a fun additional mechanic. Yeah. I think. I'm down. Also, coffee. Coffee is, so, so the mod has some easy things and some complicated things. Coffee is the second most complicated, a far margin between that and the first, I think. and it fulfills the need for alcohol. So if you want a dry fortress, you can just caffeinate the crap out of your dwarves. Awesome.

Oh, now we're talking. Do you have to run the beans to a kiln? You have to harvest the coffee cherries. You have to extract the seeds from them at a farmer's workshop. Reason being in real life, you do have a process to extract the beans that involves fermentation. It's not just, you know, just get beans. You know, just take them out. Dry them and roast them.

Yeah. Then you roast the extracted beans. Then you grind the beans and then you can brew the grounds. Awesome. That's pretty great. Yeah. How about can I do co-fermentation with cold fruit in an anaerobic process? Well, I suppose if you, I suppose if you barreled them together with something, maybe.

I'm just asking the tough questions. Yeah. No, my dwarves aren't snobs. Yeah, so there's simple things. There's simple things like you can just turn celery into pickled celery. You can turn ratweed into sewer crout. Oh, sewer crout, huh? Yeah.

That's a good one. But then there's also chocolate. I made this one, Roland will probably appreciate this one. For those of us that like complex systems and industry, I threw chocolate in there as kind of a favor to people who like, you know, like soap's too easy. A soap is like, you know, soap is like baby's first manufacturing. process. Yes. So I put chocolate in there and chocolate is like a nine step process. Nine steps. Yeah. You have to collect the cacao pods. You have to extract the seeds from the cacao pods just like coffee. You have to then roast the seeds. Then you grind the cacao beans or

cacao nibs. They're roasted cacao nibs now. You grind the nibs into chocolate liquor, which is not alcohol is just ground anyway then you press one unit of that to receive cocoa butter and cacao press cake after that you can do the process again to make another chocolate liquor batch add some of the cocoa butter from your previous into the chocolate liquor as well as sugar to make a chocolate bar or just chocolate hey it's for dwarven sugar yep and then yes finally then you can grind the cacao press cake into do cocoa powder and you do whatever you want with that. Flavor your coffee.

Yep. I added some sugar too because sugar was a necessary thing for both all the fruit jams and marmalades. Basically any fruit can be jammed. And the new sugars are beet sugar and sugar cane. I added a new plant, sugar cane. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah.

That's a good one. I like me some sugar cane. Yeah. So now almost any embark should have some kind of sugar. sugar, except besides sweet pods, although, well, maybe that's not true. It's probably like 50% of embarks because of the way that plant, you know, distribution works. So I wonder if I can open a barista in my library now. Maybe that'll help some of these scholars write more.

Oh, my God. That is such a good idea. I have to write that out. I need to drop a barista thing off. That could be one of my new labors. I did make a mocha latte as a demo of the mod. Yep. I brewed coffee. I added chocolate. I added milk. And I added sugar. And I made a, I think what they technically considered to be a sugar roast. But we're going to call it a mocha latte. Can we grow soul patches for the barista? Oh. So he knows. So we can. Modified facial hair. Could there be a syndrome perhaps where coffee causes the facial hair to change?

it turns you into a barista if you drink enough suddenly you know all you can do is talk about your soul patch and the band that you're not in that's awesome yeah I love this I feel like Mandrake would increase a dwarf's skill in acoustic guitar busking

can I have buskers outside my fort along with last week's episode where we covered the smokeables little kids selling outside the fort That's awesome. I was about to actually speak about that smokeables mod again for a second. Yeah, you're going to be careful.

I don't want to end up with us getting it. No, no, no, no, no, not that much. I had to give the last one an explicit tag. I just couldn't get the references out. That's okay, but I just wanted to say that I'm so happy that they apparently just work together that well, your mod and the smokeables mod. Yes, that's something that I consider. I did consider, like, there is hemp in the game.

There's not tobacco, weirdly, even though tobacco is a pretty, like, it's kind of a big crop in the real world. So I considered it, but then I just decided that that's kind of a alien flavor for the game. And if someone wants to add that in, they can. But as far as I'm concerned, dwarves don't smoke weed, even if we do. But if you want your dwarves to smoke weed, then you go ahead. and you grab that Smokables mod, just know that this is something people should probably know if you're interested in my mod.

In order to make all this work, I have to effectively erase and redefine all of the plants. So if you put my plant mod after anyone else's, if their plants are modified versions of vanilla plants, it's going to destroy, it's going to erase it. It's going to just wipe it out and draw my plants over the top. I wonder if the game will, at times the game will, the game will tell you whenever

mods conflict. I wonder if it would warn you about that. I don't know. Whenever you, on the screen, whenever you're building the world, it will tell you like this one conflicts with this other mod. I don't think Dwar Fortress does that. I'm guessing

it. Sashes everything together and it's like, yeah, I guess he wants it like that. Best effort. If enough people ask me... Last week. Mm-hmm. I think that last week, one of us had one that said that it conflicts with another. Yeah, I've seen things like that. Another mom. Well, if enough people complained about a conflict with a popular mod like, say, advanced agriculture, then I could put

it into the description that appears inside of the game that there is that conflict. I can manually write that in for people because, yeah, I'm sure mine does conflict with advanced agriculture and probably smokables. But, you know, if you put theirs after mine, it'll probably affect mine. But a lot of mine would probably stay intact because Probably still come through. Yeah, because I affect a lot of plants. There are some non-existent ethereal plants in a plain of existence outside of the dwarves in my mod, too. Not because I wanted, not because it's any kind of magical content.

It just has to be done for it to work. So there is a roasted cacao tree, as well as a roasted chestnut tree and a roasted coffee tree. There's also the all pickle. The all pickle The all hail the all pickle The all pickle is responsible for the existence of all of the pickles Because you have to You have to define the materials in such a way

That I couldn't make I couldn't make the stockpiling work If I put the pickles into the definition of the plants themselves They had to be a growth And they had to be a growth on the all pickle, which I think is many plants, but I don't know. Wait, wait, wait. So there is a plant that grows all kind of pickles.

Yes. Because you had to have the, like the actual cucumber become a different part, like a different vegetable. Yes. So if I actually, I can open it up real quick. Let's see. But the all pickle does not actually spawn in the world? It does not.

So plant, so all pickle. dot txt here this is my favorite file i've ever written before um it is it is the plant is all pickle and uh it has uh materials for uh cucumber artichoke bitter melon capers eggplants garlic onion squash tomatoes tomatios string beans broad beans chickpeas peas and peanuts uh and then it has a growth tag for every single one of those as well as and this file includes more plants which i guess are just like sub-pickles or something for ratweed, muck root, bloated tubers, asparagus, cabbage, wild carrots, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's 258 lines long of just mythical pickle plants that don't exist.

If you were to go in, that is an interesting way of doing it. Yeah, it's the only way you can do it, unfortunately. Oh, so. You know, mythical pickle. What that means, if you would enable the all pickle to actually spawn in the world, you could essentially have a shrub that gives like 40 different pieces of food. Yes, if you farmed it, let's see, the all pickle, if you were to farm the all pickle, and you'd have to include a lot more definition for it.

But if you were to farm the all pickle, it would produce, let's see, 12, 15, items when you harvested it. Wow. Yeah. But that's the thing with these raws. That's what you got to do. There's even one, let's see, there's the roasted, so a roasted cacao tree is in the definitions and in the raws.

If you could plant trees, so if they add tree planting or another mod adds tree planting somehow, you could in theory roast cacao beans into roasted cacao nibs and then plant a roasted cacao nib and it would grow into a largely undefined roasted cacao tree. Luckily you can't do that. Wow. Well, that would save time growing them pre-roasted. Yeah. Yeah, right? Just grow them and harvest them. But that's one of the weirdnesses, weirdnesses, weird things about the raws is that seeds, each plant can only have one kind of seed. If you produce a seed, a seed by default always refers to the seed. token and that can only have one in the plant. It's just the plant material applied to the generic

seed item. So in order to have it stockpiled as seeds, the roasted cacao nibs, I had to make a second plant that had roasted cacao nibs as seeds. Otherwise, the roasted cacao nibs would have been stored somewhere else. And every time I ask for advice about mod making, I get advice from people who are a little bit more lax about their stockpile preferences and their stockpile forgivenesses. And they're like, oh, well, usually people use cheese for the category for these things. And I'm like, excuse me, but pickles are not cheese. And neither are roasted cacao nibs. They're definitely.

That's insane. You can't store it in cheese. Exactly. Actually, very few things are cheese. In fact, I believe I can only think of one category of things that counts as cheese. Well, I mean, Tour of Fortress stores buckets with furniture. It's true. I almost made bread.

I almost made bread. But the cheese problem, that was what stopped me. I was like, I can make bread and I could put it in the cheese category because bread and cheese goes together. It goes. But no. But it's not cheese. Chapter 8. Of goblins and poets, transcribed by the whispering ruins of Delta Whiskey.

The goblins came in spring, and fountain-splashed wept. Livestock fell, and brave dwarves bled, their songs unfinished. But from the heart of the fortress came steel. Six captains now guide stalwart militia squads, their battle cries echoing through the barracks of level 34. Yet amid the clang of arms, there is music. Kivish Newt clasped, the fortress's first poet, stands on the polished floor of the nut of tomes, reciting verses to quiet the shaken.

Near him, patrons drink from clay mugs while dancers move and practiced spirals. It is said he has composed a new cycle, the salted horizon, inspired by the siege and tempered by hope. Even in war, fountain splashed remembers to sing. Offered in Song and Silence by Delta Whiskey Okay, so I've, I had that radio silence there because I was digging through the Dwell Fortress. I actually just installed both advanced agriculture and Tekkins Farmstead into Dwell Fortress. So my next world that I create will have, it will definitely have Tekins Farmstead. I'm not sure that it's going to have advanced agriculture because I'm afraid that they will conflict and I won't know what to do with it.

But in any case, where I got the idea that Dwarfortress warned you about conflicting mods is, on the mod perspective walls, which is one that I use from Comrade Tom, the last line of perspective walls says must be before vanilla environment and conflicts with obvious engravings. So that may be something that Comrade Tom added to the description. It's almost certainly if it knows what it needs to be before. The thing is, if I click on prospective walls and. put it in my list, it goes orange until I'm in the list of mods, until I move it all the way up in the mod list until it gets before vanilla environment.

Interesting. So that tells me that it is a mechanism built into the game that is identifying the fact that this thing conflicts. That is interesting. At the very bottom, that prospective walls is in orange, and on the right-hand pane, it says that it must be before vanilla environment, and that it conflicts with, yeah, obvious engravings. Add mine in and see what that says because, so you're right, I guess I should probably be a little more visually descriptive.

This is podcast. So you're right. It's saying, it says must be before, and then it has blue text, which tells me that's definitely a game thing, and then conflicts with, at least it's the game parsing something, and then the prospective walls in the modelist is orange. I wonder if you add mine, it should conflict. Oh, look at that. Advanced agriculture, yours doesn't conflict, but advanced agriculture conflicts with a crap load of stuff.

So I think the mod creator has to do something about that because mine conflicts with probably any single thing that touches plants. I rewrite every single vanilla plant, except for the trees that have no fruits. So I have not added some kind of conflict definition. Well, that would be interesting to find out how that works. Yeah. oh you can't see my screen good goodness sakes i can so people will just have to know that i mean i guess if you're using my mod just uh whichever one matters more to you put that one last there's that same deal with advanced agriculture uh with a picture of it i will include these in the show notes

links to these pictures in the show notes and they'll probably end up somehow in the uh episode art so it probably is something that the uh that the mod creator has to do so you may have have that in version 1.1. Yeah. It conflicts with shearing is not killing. That's a mod I should really get. I mean, I don't really like too many mods, but shearing is not killing makes sense, so that elves don't hate you for selling wool products to them.

It's like one line. That is. Yeah. I just thought they're like progressively vegan. Well, except they're not because they are cannibalistic. Well, is, are you vegan? Well, that's true. That's true.

However, I thought the reason for that is because they perceive that if you are already dead, you have to be, like, put back into the cycle of nature. And the only way that that happens faster is if they do it themselves, which is also the reason why they keep crying when they eat people. That's a life, man. That's a life to live crying over every meal because it was, you know, old friend. That would be, that would be tricky, but, um,

Donor party, the Donner party mod. Donner mod, yeah. Yeah, that's tough. Yeah, I don't know if vegans can be cannibals, but I guess they can in this game. What about, what do you guys think about some of these aggressive mods that,

uh, Rimworld has where you can like organ harvest and so on and so forth? You know, would dwarves do that? That's just a rim world. That's just in Rimworld. I thought you had to mod it in, but yeah, maybe it's been a one else since I played. It's naturally in Rimworld, which is one of the big reasons why I actually do have and play the game.

Of course it is. HR is calling again. Hold on. Well, I mean, you know, check out my... Get Becky on the phone. Discord name, yeah. Sadism spikes, right? So, anyway. I thought that was a lifestyle choice. It is. It is. Okay.

If you want to... Whatever. Back to the actual topic. I think it's a good mechanic, but I don't think it would fit into a dwarf fortress, because I do kind of want to imagine my dwarfs as like whimsical creatures to a certain extent. And I don't think they go around organ harvesting other people. Well, it's low tech, right? So what are they going to do to have the surgeon replace a liver? But would they make goblin soap? We already do have the organs, and the organs are already like parts of the creature themselves. Yeah, but it's a one-way street.

They can only be damaged. I don't think that they could be repaired. I feel like they would eat goblins. I don't know. I feel like they would eat goblins. Who's that? Dwarves? The dwarves, yeah.

I mean, I think that would be okay. I don't know that they wouldn't. Like, they don't really look like people. I definitely think that they would eat a troll. They eat crondles. Coal roast. They eat any crundles? Okay.

Well, so then why not dwarves? But crundle's unsentient. Why not, they aren't? No. Well, we can all just pretend that goblins aren't sentient, right? They're close enough. Oh, I'm thinking Gorlax. They're riding that line.

With the ease of which the goblin siege can be defeated, I don't think they are sentient. The fact that they keep coming back and asking for a parlay, yeah, you know what? You might be right. That might just be instinctual. Yeah. I'm looking forward to making the sieges a little. little bit more tough again they uh they've gotten to that's why i enjoyed the fact that the underground invasions were so tough in that one fortress that i had uh future flag it's gonna be a bear

if they can start tunneling though who that's gonna be that's gonna really up the stakes here yeah good well i mean how would you like if they could tunnel i think you're screwed i don't know how you defend against that you put a moat down you put a magnet trap they just they just tunnel around it you figure it out. Yeah, I'm not sure if they can tunnel around it like that. I mean, for example, a hidden magma moat, not like an open one, but a hidden one. Yeah, how would they know? They wouldn't know about that. They tunnel directly in and then burn to a crescent. Yeah, and that would be the end of it. And maybe they can't tunnel through steel. Also, they can't tunnel anywhere if my military is so good that it dispatches them at the

corner of my map. The tunnel right into that blade. does lava melt steel beams no it does not if you want the literal answer to that no that was a I'm sorry that was really stupid I know I know where you're getting at reference from the Zygote oh gosh yeah yeah I think there's an answer in all cases to be honest with you I think we're good um cool yeah I'm excited to see some more some more challenge I'm excited to see a balance in general of combat because it's true like dwarves are exceedingly powerful they are outrageously powerful

they their skill ramps up too quickly in training and uh you know there needs to be like a cap on how much how powerful dwarves can get in the barracks uh most games these days have that they have like oh you can train up to level 25 but then you got to get out there and you got to start snapping next if you want to get better than that yeah i learned in the 47 version that the best way to get my dwarves to be actually good fighters was to go out and kill things. Even if it was, you know, you send your dwarves after a badger that helped get them to be better fighters than fighting each other did. I typically will put like three out of my first 20 into a squad and forget about it.

And then in a year, I get all worried because the goblins show up and I wasn't paying attention to my military. But then I remember I have those three and they're all legendary now. And they go out and they turn them into a fine. tartar. Yeah. But you can't eat it. That's the problem.

That is the problem. You can't make goblin sausage. I mean, at that point, you would have to, like, remove the slosh from the nearby trees. I'm not sure if you want to eat that still. You had to say sausage, and I was supposed to not be working on this mod anymore. Nice. Perfect. That should be a different mod.

That should be a different mod. Yeah, I think that's the non-vegan. You get divided into vegan and non-vegan. Well, there's already. cream and butter and buttermilk and skim milk in the mod too well i guess they don't eat those do they but what if the cow consents goblin worst so i think you can i think you can work around this so here's what you do you make animals right just a little bit sentient so they can consent to getting their milk and then and then if you've if you have consenting cows or consenting pigs or or whatever

then i think vegans would be happy right isn't that whole thing? I do see a major problem in this because the cow does not consent to being butchered. Well, no, but you're not butchering it if you, if, you know, because you're just asking it for its milk. Well, that's, that's easy. You just get the milk from kangaroo people or something. You know, they're sentient. Snake men. I think snake people put milk out. Wait, wait, can you milk, uh, like, milkable animal people? No, they're not, they're not, they're not actually milkable, but I mean, hey, Stan, come here

for a sec. I got to do something. You're doing. Do your hands off of me. What are you doing? Hey, ow! Damn it. Hey, that's mine. The snake people do lay eggs, and they're perfectly fine eating said eggs as well.

Do you have a snake person for them? That's what I was about to ask. They shouldn't. No, it's a snake. No, are all anthropomorphized creatures, mammalian? no don't they just have ducts i think they have milk ducts that's what i'm going to say no no it's a snake with arms guys is it a snake with arms it is a literal snake the literal size of the actual snake with two twigly arms on the side or is it a person with scales nope i'm just not sure if we're

at like some sort of weird genetic facility that's experimenting on people or a furry convention it's they could be coming from one or the other. Can you milk a furry? Yes. If you're looking for a technical answer, yes. You ask them nicely. Is that how we get consent in here? I'm going to have to download one of the cat girl mods, and I'll let you know.

I don't even know if this is going to be able to be, uh, yeah, this may be our second explicit one in a row. No, that's fine. Hey man, I don't think anybody's paying attention anymore to the moderation stuff. I think you're good. After episode 117, Door Portrait's Roundtable is now a just an explicit podcast. We're talking about biology here. This is science.

Come check out our only fans. Chapter 9. Tiring, Thunder, and The Trap, Recorded by Loghammer, Chronicle of Glorious Clutter. Three new relics now grace the halls of fountain-splashed, and each tells its tail. Skirt merge, a plum-wood ebble, hums with the voice of the divine, echoing from the shrine of phantoms where a brook's name is praised. Balanced liver, a copper male shirt, gleams proudly in the fish of spring, its curves honoring the hands that tilled the soil. And then there is Tysen Noram, the tiger-eye trap. Quiet.

Humble. Displayed in the nut of tomes, it waits, not to catch beast or thief, but to remind dwarves that beauty can lie in strange things. In this fortress of water and poetry, even traps have stories. Noted with great reverence, and some spilled ale, by loghammer. Wait, are there cow people? I don't think so. Hang on. I don't think there's any domesticated animal people.

they're in their own file. No, the closest that we have to cow people are just minotors, right? Well, I guess that is a cow person. That is a cow person, but there's not really like a nice cow person. Yeah, no, it doesn't exist. It only exists as the pre-domesticated animal. Greetings, cow men and women. Do we have cows?

We just, we have yaks, but I don't think we have little cows. Do we? But only the domesticated version. Yeah. Are there wild cows? I don't know that I've ever had a cow. Have I ever had a cow? I usually go for cows if I want to do an animal focused for it.

Otherwise, I just do sheep because they're very useful. But cows are a great addition. Do migrants ever bring them in? Because I don't know that I ever remember seeing a cow in any of my fortresses. Cows seem to be a sort of rare find. Typically, they don't bring in. Horses are a lot more common. Yeah.

but less useful. Yeah, I've had horses, lots of mules, alpacas. But maybe I just haven't ever decided to buy a cow at the beginning of my... Yeah, I modded them, so they're definitely in there. I added yogurt, butter, stuff like that to cows, sheep, goats, and purring maggots. Oh, lovely. I want a purring magma... Yeah, you can now get Dwarven butter, which is purring maggot butter.

purring maggot butter. God, I can't say the word maggots too early. Dwarven milk yogurt. What is it really? I wouldn't eat it. I wouldn't eat that. Is it from the dwarves? Like, have we milked a dwarf to get it? Stop.

Seriously, I saw something in... I don't know. I'm like, genuinely, I'm wondering now. I don't have any agricultural or food mods. I'm trying to remember what it was. I saw something that surprised me that it was dwarven something. and it was, um, oh. I think the only things that come with the prefix Dwarven are...

I think it was Dwarven wine. That's plump helmets. Dwarven ale is pig tails. Dwarven rum is sweet pods. And Dwarven beer is long, is cave wheat. Okay. Yeah, and then the Dwarven milk is, uh, is purring maggot. And I don't know, is it called Dwarven cheese?

Is it just called like Dwarven milk cheese? Yep. Yep. Yep. That's what it was. It was wharven cheese. That's the one that confused me because I was like, dwarf and cheese, is that cheese made out of dwarf milk? Yeah, kind of is. Technically, yes. And it's funny because we get that kind of question on the subreddit sometimes. And then everyone in the comments, I remember it specifically that like a few months ago, somebody asked, what the hell is a dwarf and cheese and why do I can milk my dwarfs? would you um would you eat something called human milk cheese yes i mean just depends it's made from human milk or is it the same as like there's just like purring maggots that give milk yeah purring maggots versus uh i feel like i should avoid going to be closest but yeah i try it

i'm sure sometime in the you know 1970s uh new esotericism movement someone has made human Oh, you don't have to go that far. I mean, I'm sure you could find it at the farmer's market. Speaking of Gwyneth Paltrow. I will just say this. You can't tell me. I think in my life, I've drank more cow's milk than any other kind of milk. So I think the equivalent of like the word cheese, human cheese is now just like cow cheese because we have more of that.

Western civilization and all that. We're a baby, so maybe I don't know. How do you quantify? What is a baby drink in the first six months? That's a lot of milk from a human. Well, that's six months compared to, you know, 50-something years. Yeah, but it's not for a real meal, but for me. That's all you get.

I mean, I don't know, man. Now I'm wondering. I also was mostly bottle fat, so, you know, double extra. Yeah. I mean, what a world, huh? I'm just glad they used the word dwarf-in milk instead of, or a dwarf-in cheese instead of dwarf cheese. Because dwarf cheese carries a much different kind of. Like, what is that?

I don't know what that is. Yeah, that's another episode. And a mod, a mod all to itself. Yeah, you won't find dwarf cheese in my mod. Nope. Good. I do have one question. What color would it be?

Dwarf cheese. White? Well, because not all milk has the same exact color. Yeah, I've seen Star Wars. They have blue milk in that. Well, kind of. That's a fact. That's a fact.

Because I was thinking that goblin milk would be. green. Oh, yeah, it might be. Like, you know, when you put it in the sugary cereals and you eat up all the lucky charms and then the milk that's left is green. And delicious. Delicious, yeah. Yeah, lucky charm. Exactly. Whatever bad is. I just had some this morning. Listeners are going to get their money's worth this one. Do you not have Count Choculo in Germany? Count Chocular. Oh, my God. Count Chocular. No. Seriously. Oh, man. Imagine a chocolate cereal, but reduce the quality by like 80%.

Exactly. Chocolate flavored cereal, I think, is what it calls itself. Just to be very clear. We'll just, we'll mail you a box rolling. You know, you could make that. You can make that. It will last forever. In my mod.

Get some cocoa powder. Count Chocula. You can make count Chocula. Get some cocoa powder. Get some wheat. You know, cook a little wheat, cocoa powder and milk meal. You got yourself, you got yourself a little barren, ocula the game has vampires i just bought rice from a human caravan that came in because i wanted to

see if i could cultivate rice you know i could make cocoa crispy's with your mod absolutely if i can cultivate that rice oh wow yeah that's nice so you know what cocoa crisps are no you can imagine oh my lord oh my god listen what has this country been doing i only had one type of like cereal and that was like a cinnamon pillow type thing Oh, it's called Cinnamon Toast Crunch. No, no, not the brand stuff. Okay, I never bought the brand stuff. I bought the stuff from like a Lidl, the unbranded Lidl cinnamon thing.

And that is my cereal. I did not eat anything else. I thought everybody ate Mucely in Germany. Okay, so. That is in cereal. I want to pull us back towards the dwarf because I actually, we're starting to run out of time. And I actually have a question. I would like to ask.

So my first Tekken mod that I installed was Tekken spiders. And the purpose of that is to give you some above-ground spiders to threaten your dwarfs. Is that correct? Yes, as well as a source of silk, too, above-ground. If you ever have a 1.1 or 2.0 version of Tekken spiders, if you can somehow increase the frequency of the occurrence of those spiders, I think it would be great because I still don't. think that I've run into a spider above ground and I've been using that mod and just about

every world since it's come out. So I don't know what the deal is. You kind of have to seek out the golden orb weavers because they are a tropical forest spider. And that's kind of how they are in real life. You can find orb weavers in other places, but they need tall things. So they tend to live in the forests and in warmer places. The black widows on the other hand are meant to be in pretty much any temperate biome. But the way that animal distribution works in the game is even if you, the ubiquitous token is broken. So I can't do that, unfortunately.

And I wouldn't want to do that with something that's dangerous anyway. But even if you define a lot of places that they can be, the game will only scatter them over a certain percentage of the land regardless. So like you won't find camels in every desert. Only in the desert areas that it randomly decides this. is a place where camels are endemic, but not that desert over there, that kind of thing. Does the savageness of the biome have any impact on the prevalence of the spiders? Only their giant form.

They are quite literally a copy paste and then an adjustment of existing spiders. So they will function with no surprises. They're just like any other, they're like the cave spiders or the brown recluse spiders. They just have slightly different biomes, slightly different, like sizes and sexual dimorphism, stuff like that. So here's the stats that I, whenever I do my embark search, I always go for with a river, less than or equal to deep soil. Of course, the metals, the flux and all that. I will always do no aquifers. Everything else I put, I don't care about.

I don't typically choose evil biomes to go into because I don't like that kind of a challenge. But so I should occasionally run into these spiders, right? Yeah. Let me tell you the exact description of where they will show up. I can't remember exactly what the tokens were, but I can tell you in one second here. Cool. They will show up, Golden Ord Weaver, Black Widow, scrolling up, Black Widow spiders will appear. Oh, that's a Black Widow spiders.

by your person. Let's not get crazy here. Let's start with the regulars. Ooh, Lordy. Oh, I love that idea. Biome. Any temperate, any tropical, and desert badlands. So really they should be anywhere

except for mountain or freezing biomes. I typically like the temperate biomes with mountains on the map. So maybe I should go for some tropics and some flat tropics. Let me try that next time.

I mean, it could just be how big are your worlds? Typically, I do pockets. Really? Huh. So you should be finding... Yeah, that baffles me. Oh, you know what the problem is. I believe what happens is the game will fill a particular biome or region or whatever.

However, it delineates. It'll fill that space with X number of creatures. And once it reaches that number, it stops adding new creatures to the endemic life. So you can never get a place. place that has everything that belongs in that biome. I believe. I made this mod years ago, but I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere. So if you have a pocket world, you're effectively gambling on what does and doesn't exist

entirely. Yeah. Not only do I do pocket worlds, I typically reuse the world for a long amount of time. So I like to have fortress upon fortress upon fortress in the same world because I like the continuity of that idea. Maybe I should try a little bit larger world, or maybe like a medium. Well, one of the reasons why I picked a pocket world is because of the frame death bit. And that doesn't seem to be nearly the problem that it once was with 12-4.

So maybe I should, my next world should be a medium world. It affects save speed a little more than actual frame rate. Not to say it doesn't affect frame rate. I think it does. But world size is more of a save-size issue, I think. I don't care about that. So, yeah, cool, cool. All right.

Thanks, man. I like spiders. I like spiders a lot. Yeah, I know a lot of people do. And I even put a warning in my mod description about how realistic the models are. And I've considered going in and modifying the graphics for the cave spiders because they look too plushy. You know, they look like a toy that you'd buy at the mall, you know, how to build a spider workshop. Yeah, yeah.

So I have considered bringing them to parody with mine and making them look way scary. Yeah, for years I tried to talk my wife and let me bring a tarantial into the house, but it was like a no-go, nope. You can get away with a lot of things, man, but bringing a tarantula into the house, it's not one of them, so, yeah. You don't like tarantulas? My wife doesn't. Oh, right.

Well, don't give her one. That sounds like. Well, since we live in the same domicile, maybe a different mother's day gift. I don't know. Just, just tossing that out there. Listen, the best spider to have as a pet is definitely the Australian Funnel Web spider. because it never leaves the terrarium

unless it's a male then you have a problem that's the one that'll chase you that is the one that kills you in like three minutes and it gets pissed off and it'll like run after you yeah

which is or say to some splikes folks or a sedum splikes no but jokes aside the female actually doesn't leave the terrarium so that's... I used to keep black widows how do you sex a funnel spider uh well

if it doesn't leave the terrarium you have a female if you're dead then it was probably male it was probably a man dead then that's that the one that hides out in the toilet um no it's it's the one that like builds tunnels and and shields under the the little lid and then you disturb the lid and it jumps out the male is however not as venomous i think it's mostly the female so teckin you say you used to you used to raise Black Widows? Yeah, so I saved one from work, and I decided to keep it as a pet for a little bit, and named it Ingrid.

Ingrid was the progenitor of another batch, I guess, you would say. They tend to narrow themselves down to one for you, but, but, uh, so where did you get the male breeder? I didn't have to. So something about, I think, most spiders, maybe all is that they tend to only really have to mate once because they. store male spider sperm. And so they're fertile forever, they're fertilized forever for the rest of their lives.

So she laid like two egg sacks, but I would keep them in tall, straight walled glass like vases and stuff that I would just get at the thrift shop because they can't climb glass. So you don't have to worry about like carefully opening a lid and managing where the spider is. I actually didn't keep lids on them. They just opened to the air. Wow. So my wife wouldn't go for trenches. I wonder she'd go from Black Widows. You probably already have some, man. Go out to your woodpile, honey. They'll be fine. Just go out to the wood on it. They need to breathe.

Just go out to your firewood pile behind your house and start moving the logs, wear gloves, and you'll find black widows. They live where you live. Well, I think we need to start wrapping this one up. You think? I think so. Yeah, a little. Really? Thank you so much for coming on. It's been too long, man. Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me.

Yeah, I was away for way too long, but hopefully I'll be back in full soon. I have been streaming, so you can see me streaming. Hopefully I'll be back in more ways than one, though. We'll see. I've got to say, I know that it's been a while since you've been able to do it, but I did love your tutorials. Yeah, those were awesome, by the way. Agreed. Still very good.

Yep. They didn't get less good. I've got to get into the graphics now and put some out with the new look so people don't get confused. Okay, that's another episode of Dwar Fortress. Roundtable, this one was number 120, 120 episodes down, and who knows how many to go. So is there any place that you want to, uh, to pimp for people to check you out online or anything? Uh, you can find my mod on Steam. Techett's Farmstead is the mod on Steam.

Other than that, you can find me on Twitch, or you can find my old videos on YouTube. It's all under the name Techett. T-E-K-K-U-D. And we're not there. Have fun playing Dwarfortress, and we'll catch you next time, right? You better join again. Craft some rock dwarf guys. Better come. You better come. Keep listening.

And make some chocolate. Good luck. This has been the Dwarf Fortress 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 U-R-I-S-T at D-F-R-Rontable.com.

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