Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 125: Spookyfort and Bugs with Delphonso

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

Delphonso joins us to talk about this year's Halloween Fort and the joy of unintended consequences in Dwarf Fortress. Video about the Max Headroom Incident Bay 12 Forums Spookyfort Thread Beadographer Conway's Game of Life Dwarf Fortress Bug Tracker

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we're welcoming Delphonzo back again. Again. Hey, Delphonzo. Sounds like you glitched out there a second.

Yeah, there were troubles. I was listening to Classic American Top 40 yesterday, and there was a art of noise with Max Headroom song on it. It was pretty cool to hear that. Wow, Max Headroom. That's a great name. It's a name I've not heard on a long time. Yes. Yes, yes.

Yeah, I don't know who that is. Yeah, you're not old enough. I don't know if Elphons is old enough or not. There's a cool way to learn about it. Go and look up. Somebody hijacked the U.S. TV broadcasting sessions. Ah, yes. Yes, the Max Headroom incident.

Years and years ago in, like, Chicago or some big city. Chicago. Yeah, Chicago. And they just took over primetime airwaves and just started blasting their own content out. and it had Max Hedroom and it was super weird and no one ever found out who did it. Dave Schworsky's a freaking nerd. Huh.

Yeah, no one ever figured it out. It's like one of the biggest mysteries because you should absolutely be able to figure that out. But nope. It was the 80s. Anyway. Interesting. Not even the podcasters who run the FBI

are cracking the code now, so it's big stuff. Oh, God. Are you old enough to remember Max Headroom, DeFonzo? Yeah, the name rings a bell. That's about it. Glitch podcast host from the 90s or something. So all this talk about glitch is because we recorded an entire episode and we lost one of the audio tracks. It was the worst.

It was Tarns. Yeah. And he was giving us all of the information about the full roadmap with dates. It was nuts. Yeah, I'm just filling in for Tarn now. Rather than pipe D'AFonzo's voice into an AI generation machine, we decided we just recorded over and not pretend it didn't happen. But we're going to sort of rehash some of the same stuff that we talked about. It was going to be great, too.

We were going to be talking about Spooky Ford, and I was going to release it on Halloween. Anyway. That's all right. This time around, we'll be... Well, you're early. We'll be right on time for the siege update. Yeah. Also, we're recording this two days before the siege update release, so we're not going to be talking about that here,

although you might expect that from us. Although, by this point, you should know that we're always recording things two days before something important happens. Our schedule is immaculate. Yes, and consistent. We have an amazing tech team here. It's a blessing and a curse, how you guys are always right on time to miss something. I know.

It makes for a good running gag, right? That's how you know we are tightly integrated with Tarn. For those who don't know, Spooky Fort is an annual community fortress that Delphonzo administers, and it is typically run with the pre-steam release. version of Door Fortress because that way you can have all of the cool mods in it, correct? Yeah, so I tried one year to do it in, whatever we want to call it, premium or version 50 plus. 50 plus, yeah. Immediately just ran into issues with mods, transferring between saves and things like that.

And then I don't play very much 50, and I don't play very much 50 with mods. on. So I just thought it would be no big deal. But most of the people who seem to play seem to have a lot of their own mods, which you then have to like kind of deactivate when you activate a save with mods in it. It just became a hassle. 47.05 doesn't have any of those issues. You just upload the save and the save goes over and that's that. It was a simpler time. So since trying it once, we've just stayed in the old version ever since. And to some success, some failure there. But this year, I think it was just a great one overall.

So you posted a screenshot of an amazing glitch that looked like there was a glitter party happening. Okay. So this year, for Spooky Fort, I glitched the save. A long time ago, there was a community fort called Dawn Thunder. And for Don Thunder, they duplicated the raw files before generating a world. When you do this, just because of the way that raws are red, it causes some very weird bugs. So I duplicated the like stone and soil materials files, which causes like, I don't even know why this happens, but it causes things to be made out of things they shouldn't be made out of. So for example, you can end up with stone walls that are made of rock, just rock.

They can also be made of heinous smoke or rusted metal, divine materials, just tons and tons of stuff like that. And soil always is flicking between all of the possible materials that soil can be made out of. So the ground itself looks like it is on fire because it's constantly flickering. If you put your cursor over it, you just get a read out of every material that it could be. and when you cause dust, it causes all of those dust to be all those materials that they could be and flicker like confetti, rainbow, unicorn explosion. That's going to be in the episode art that screenshot. But it was even more impressive because at least with fire, it was only like three or four colors that it will cycle between,

like gray, I think, and orange and maybe some yellows. But it was, with that, it was just, I mean, it looked like a freaking... All the colors of the rainbow. Yeah, yeah, it was, it was like a New York disco on cocaine. It was great. Yeah, Dawn Thunder was had walls of, I think it was heinous smoke, was what it was called. So all the stone walls were like this very beautiful purple. So what, heinous smoke, is that like a divine material that's burning?

How do you make Canis smoke? I'm not sure. So divine metals can be processed. So like if the walls are made out of a divine metal, ours is called pockmarked metal and rusted metal. You can mine it and it will drop a boulder. And if the boulder is melted, it will drop a metal bar, which then can be processed.

But some of the stuff is just, I don't know, it's smoke. It's probably an effect of a spell or something. Something, you know, like, I don't know where it comes from, but it's, it's there. So Rest in Metal was divine. I had a really cool truck then. Wow. So what was the theme of the spooky fort this year? The name of this year was, uh, glitched perdition.

The, that was the theme. The name of the fortress was Hell Rises. I always try and do like a horror movie name. So instead of Hell Razor, I got Hell Rises. It's as close as I could get. And yeah, it's, uh, Just the glitched-out world, and then I added in Pokemon, the Dwarvon mod, because it's just more chaos on top of everything. In my first turn, a bunch of Charmander burned down the trade depot and killed all the merchants there.

Classic Charmander. Do they work like normal animals and world generation to the Pokemon? Yeah. So they seem to be just pets, just normal. animals that happen to be able to spew fire and things like that. So some of them end up being enemies of civilizations like giant alligators are, you know, and sometimes somebody kills an Arbock and makes Arbock bone thrown as an artifact. That's pretty cool.

Okay. It would be nice to see some of those older mods carried forward into the Steam version. So I tried to get in contact with Fire Phoenix, the one who made Dwarvamon. they've moved on fully to 50. Oh, so it is available. There you go. They're making it. If you want Pokemon in your door fortress,

it seems like they even have sprites for everything now. Cool. Geez. Fancy. Which is no easy task with like a thousand Pokemon now. Wait till Big Mario finds out, though. That's going to be a tough one. Yeah, yeah.

We all know the Spider-Man Cuffle. Oh, that was so silly. Yeah. Yeah. I'm still a shock to how silly. that was, but anywho. That was. Anyway, yeah. So, yeah,

Spooky Fort this year, I gotta say, it's been one of the best ones. I really recommend you go out and give it a read. It's very silly. It's very dumb. Lots of, just it's very chaotic this year with Pokemon and people

trying to carve out, finding like slayed and weird materials underground and it was built on a volcano, so we had magma for a lot of stuff as well. It's It's worth a read. Yeah, that's what I was about to ask if you considered this year's Spooky Ford a success. Sounds like you do.

It's always hard to wrap them up at the end of the month, especially because I tend to overload Halloween with a lot of other events. So I'm not super satisfied with how I ended it out, but I'm very happy with how everyone else ended out the whole fortress with a gigantic maw of a rat. spewing magma down the mountainside is how we finished it out this year. That sounds pretty on point. For our other listeners, is there a way to, like, see what you've done after you're finished? I leave the threads up, and we did the archiving effort a couple of years ago, and I occasionally back up these types of threads. And that's on Bay 12 forums, right?

Bay 12 forums, yeah. Right. As far as, like, I would like to do tours of the fortresses. I know you guys were just talking about Armac Vision, right? Like, those utilities already work for 47.05, so it could. You know, it could. It's just a matter of effort. That's true.

You could do a video of walking through the spooky fort. Hmm. I wonder how the Pokemon glyphs would show up in Armach Vision. Hopefully just as letters. I mean, I think that's what they should look like. I guess that's probably what they look like in Armagh Vision just normally, or I guess. I never got it to run well enough on my computer. Not sure.

I feel like I remember seeing goblins or something in Armagh Vision, like little sprites of goblins. Maybe, maybe. I never got Armagh Vision working well enough to be able to see creatures. It would usually just show me a landscape and freeze my computer. Oh, that's about right. That was back in the early 40s, whenever I first started playing. Ah, yes, back in the 40s.

Yeah. This segment has been brought to you by Noam Gals Haunted Breweries, where every barrel creaks, every pint foams mysteriously, and the ghosts of past brewmasters whisper the secret ingredients. Gnome Gals, guaranteed to raise your or someone else's spirits. Okay, so have you got any final thoughts on Spooky Fort before we move on to etymology? Entomology, not etymology. Yeah. Or both. Well, we can do etymology.

Entomology. Entomology. You could do, like, a fusion. What's the etymology of the word entomology? Yes, it is. I am going to actually, I would like to take a quick side step. We were talking in the Dorforses Roundtable Discord about starting a community fort when the siege update starts. And I suggested that I would get that started.

assuming that I would have at least until halfway through December. But it seems like there will be a new community fort starting in days. If you're interested in joining, please come on down to the Discord. I'm sure whatever we make will be an atrocity. Yeah, the siege update looks hard, to be honest with you. It looks like it's going to dial up the difficulty just to weave it. yep I'm all ready to to create a new world for that yeah I was trying to make a fort that it would be ready for it but then I realized the futility of that and so I abandoned hope well since we're on this did anybody attempt to build a star fort that we talked about a couple episodes ago well yeah I did I did and it it came a long way actually I I only made a small star fort a 30 3 by 33

So not like too massive I wanted to look more like a tower In the end I however did not consider one thing A I did not have Too much stone So I wanted to make the floors In between the layers out of wood

So I cut a lot of trees I forgot that in my previous save Like two days before The Ls came by We're like hey stop cutting your trees so I cut all the trees on my map and they started sending an ambush oh no I was not prepared

I was not prepared at all I had like five dudes with spears and my fortress was not ready and I didn't even link up the entrance bridge to anything yet so it was just open bridge not closable yeah apparently the elves came with like

40 gazillion guerrillas and just flooded the entire map. After 30 seconds, I just couldn't play anymore. There were too many gorillas. So the Star Citadel, its weakness is, of course, guerrillas, right? Right. Apparently, yes. I attempted to make a Star Fort, but the problem with mine was completely aesthetic.

It is difficult to make good-looking diagonals whenever you're dealing with a, square grid system. Yeah. Yeah. So my solution for that was to make it freaking huge, just frigging huge, man. It was, I had a six by six embark location and made the star fort like one third of the surface of that, of that six by six grid.

So it was, it was fairly massive. I used a GUI design from D.F. Hack to build my star. That made it pretty easy to make. Like my, I ended up with a five-pointed star. It doesn't do a four-pointed star very well at all. It just ends up being like a cross. But my five-pointed star ended up being looking like pretty good. So I think I'll be all right.

I'll just have to have a big fort. How do you keep people from going in, like in the star fort? I'm, I guess I should probably see a photo of it. And this would probably answer my question. But like they can go in like two things, tiles done. kind of adjacent or whatever, they can just walk through that corner gap. So, like, how do you

how did you make it look like a star for it and not have people just walk right through? Make the walls too thick. T-W-O-O-thick. I see. Oh, T-W-O-thick, thank you. And also T-O-O-thick, yeah. Too, too thick. What?

Hmm? Well, yeah, the, if you have walls that are, that are too deep, that negates the issue of having the diagonal being able to be transversed traversed. That makes sense. It's not even a bad idea, actually. No, I know. I know. I want to fire up the game, but I don't want to

disappear. Our network is struggling, so, you know. Yeah, my brain is struggling. Mine again. I don't think this is us. I think this is... Whose network? Their network. Their network. Yeah. Yeah, I actually tried an eight-pointed star. and I made two how do I explain this

like a four pointed star and then I added four more shapes but much smaller and that ended up looking very good like a compass rose yes exactly exactly yeah like that and it ended up looking kind of

good I will have to see that maybe I get a save from before the guerrillas arrived so I can like show a screenshot but I'm not sure sure if it holds up, if I just stay at 33 by 33, that might be a little too small, especially for later fortresses. Yeah, I think that, I think you may need to go, yeah, a little bigger, a little bigger,

especially if you're going to have whatever they call those fortifications on top of walls where you can send your archers up. That's where you're supposed to put the new weapon. Yeah. I don't know what it is, the machine gun arrow thing. gatling gun the arrow gatling gun yeah oh those dwarven engineers so um for fortress design i found something called beadographer if you want to experiment it's a purler bead website i don't know if you're familiar at all with purler beads but it's it's basically graph paper that you can

plot things out on so i was trying to plot out a star fort in that to see what it would look like and i'm failing because i'm not very good at this kind of stuff but send me a link so i can get it in the show notes. Yeah, I will. Beedographer. Not that I know it. I just googled for Perler Beed Maker and that was the first thing that came up. That's an interesting approach to planning. Yeah. So I was thinking, because Jonathan has made some amazing, like, tile mosaics on the floor. And for some reason, I can't think through how I would do that in the door fortress. I just keep failing. So I was thinking maybe I can mental map it out here in one of these things. So I'll share my experiences with that in future but check it out see if it's helpful what i did is i

took a online graph paper and overlaid whatever image i wanted to put in the floor like i didn't one that was a skull that one was really nice yeah it was just like a like a 50 by 50 skull line art but what i did was i took online graph paper and they used a image editing program and put another layer that was my picture of what i wanted to portray on the floor put that over it and then I use that as kind of a count of cross stitch pattern so

so so I ended up I ended up marking and this was a pre-50 I don't know if I don't even know if you can still mark floors for for later digging but I think you can still designate stuff anyway so that's that's how I did it

because I think um DFF does that yeah and speaking of count of cross stitch I wanted like like have one of these like Faith Hope Love kind of cross stitches on my dwarven floors something like that something like really awesome

The best live work play or whatever In my experimental floors I actually took all the stone that I had access to and made a floor that was all the different colors so that I could see what floors or what stone made what colors so that I could match it up to a pattern

It's really strong to catch animals in cages and then have your zoo spell out a word like the name of the fortress or something. Oh, that's awesome. I do that in my guilds. I'll put like an R for a Ranger Guild in an M for a, you know, mechanics thing just because I keep losing track of whose things are whose,

whose guild halls are whose. I don't make my guild halls big enough for that. I make them big now because otherwise it's really difficult to get the value up unless you just did the gold floor thing I kind of color called them to be honest in my turn on spooky fort there were

Pokemon that showed up with a siege and they were depicted by the letter C the letter O and the letter K and they spelled out cock for me nice just insult onto injury of these unkillable

Pokemon siegers how many were there 69 Or I think maybe they were rearranged. They were actually spelling out O-C-K, like Dr. Octopus's slang name in Spider-Man. Yeah. Right, yeah. Obviously, that was it.

You're going to get us canceled again. You're not supposed to say the assword on this podcast. And, of course, when you say cock, you're talking about the chicken, right? Of course, yeah. Rooster. A mulester. A male chicken. Can you call it a male chicken?

What's the name of the bird? The chicken is the woman. No, that's the hen. That's a hen. Anyway, this is why people come to this podcast. It's really tight content like this. Okay, now that we're talking about wildlife, let's talk about bugs. Okay, great.

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he ain't afraid of no ghosts or necromancers. Speaking of wildlife, I thought I would start off with a classic, the cat-splosion. I don't know if cat-splosion is as much a bug as it is, just unintended consequences of the game that Tarn made. But do you know the story of the cat's explosion? Well...

The story. I do know that I don't bring cats along on my embark anymore, but that's not the story of the cat's explosion. That's just an aside, but no. Pradu tell the story of the cat's explosion. So the cat's explosion is a sort of state that all games would eventually get to if you had a breeding pair of cats. Because cats adopt dwarves, and when an animal is a pet, it cannot be butchered.

And when an animal would be picked up by a butcher to be taken over to be butchered and walked across your fortress, that's enough time for the cat to adopt that butcher. Oh, amazing. Yes. And so you would be like, okay, I got too many cats. Quickly, let me kill off all the males. and then all the males would adopt all of your butchers, making it impossible to get on top of the cat population. If you geld them, does that, is it the same situation?

That is the solution that Tard added in, which is gilding. Oh, that's a great bug. And also truly the way I feel like cats would work. It's a mental game with cats. Wait, so the gilding was added. after the first cat explosions happened to combat it? I believe so, yeah. I think people just wanted a way to prevent their pets

from having more animals without the solution being, keep them away from each other, or kill them. You can, have you guys heard of the game World Box? Yeah. No. As Dorf Fortress fans, I suggest you check it out. It's basically a world simulator,

and you can, I mean, it's, there's no rules. So you just have a world and you can drop things into it and just see what happens. And then you can occasionally, like, throw a comet at it or an earthquake or a meteor. But then, like, your cats will evolve and form their own civilizations and stuff. It's pretty wild. So I was thinking about trying that out and seeing if it truly is the nature of the cat to explode. I feel it necessary now to throw in my obligatory shout out to Conway's of life because

yes anytime that I learn a new programming language one of the first things that I do in learning that language is I program Conway's Game of Life which is similar to that you can set up and drop in cells and see how they take off life

I'm not going to go into it deeply but look up on Wikipedia at Conway's Game of Life it's awesome it's a great rabbit hole for people to dig into and I'm just going to say it one more time World Box has a game of life Conway's Game of Life mode really that you can do, which is fascinating to watch that happen. It's really cool.

I mean, it's not a game in the traditional sense of games, but if you like to... It's a zero-player game. It's a you're playing against yourself, I guess. I don't know. You're playing at your own stupidity, which is why I like Tor Fortress. That is the best kind of game, yeah.

That's what we all did with SimCity as well. You know, like most of the game was just throwing meteors at your own city. Yeah, or The Sims. where it's like you invite people over to swim and then take the ladder out of the pool and watch that happens. Sort of clown painting in every room.

Yeah. Remove the door, steal all the pets. We played Sims very differently, guys. I'm sorry. Have you watched that channel? Let's game it out. No, that's exactly how I played it. Yeah, so did I.

All I wanted to do is be a serial killer. It was great. That's the simulation. That's why it's called Sims. It's serial killer simulator. So, yeah, the cat's explosion. Yeah, yeah. Before I continue with my long list of bugs, there is a bug tracker.

All the bugs that are discovered and handled are community discovered for the most part. If you haven't, if you ever run into something weird, quick save your game, make a copy of the save, and post it up on the Dorf Fortress Bug Tracker. conveniently found at Dorf Fortress BugTracker.com. It's a good name for that site. It used to be called the Mantis Bug Tracker. Oh, my God. Come on. Yeah. Which is a better name, objectively.

I mean, you know, surely it is. If I'm not mistaken, well, I was under the impression that Putnam does a lot of the bug tracking down. I assume in Putnam's still with the team. Before version 50 came out, it was just tarned. So bugs would get their due. but it might be a while before any particular bug got fixed. And I think that somebody out there, correct me if I'm wrong, I think the Putnam is looking at more bugs.

No, you're right about Putnam's contribution, because the way that the bug tracker works is, I don't know, every day 15 bugs were listed usually, and a lot of them were duplicates because it's hard to search a bug, you know? The way that you experience might be a different title and then short descriptions that people are writing. Right. I don't know who, I guess it was Tarn.

I don't know if it was somebody from the community had to go through and mark everything as duplicate or high, like, what's the words? Like, high priority, mid-priority, low-priority kind of stuff. Well, I think that that's part of what Tarn used feature of the fortress for in the old days is, so you had the fortress, the dev reports, and you had the monthly kind of announcement, it. But you also had the Future of the Fortress thread. And it's been so long since I've been hanging out on the Bay 12 game forums that I don't even know if he still does it. But Future of the Fortress was where he would go through and read fairly deep questions from game players

and give very deep answers to those questions. It was really, really nice way to get into the mind of Tarn Adams. I would say the future of the Fortress stuff has the same problem nowadays. Everyone posts like six questions and they're all roughly the same questions, you know? Of how will the goblins dig into my fort? Or another one be like, will the

goblins dig into my fort in a straight line or a curved line? Yeah. Conway's Game of Life, that's how the goblins are going to take. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they do some cellular automata like kind of just random crazy walk path kind of thing.

If you want to watch how they do it, you can take like go to a mining level like a new z level and then select the whole thing for mining and do like this you know the df hack fastorf and just hits you know hit unpause it and you can watch how they do their dig you can see how the algorithm works it's pretty neat yeah yeah it's very pattern that's cool yeah yeah it's neat yeah it's a great idea it's it feels like not to keep absolutely pummeling a point made a while ago but it definitely looks like the game of life the way they dig. Speaking of digging.

Yay! I dig it. Let me quick find a bug about digging. I dig it. Actually, I do have one. If you dig across two Z levels, that algorithm that is going about for how dwarves dig, certainly does not go in the most efficient way if you've assigned two Z levels, because doors will dig a block, go back to the staircase, go up a stair, go over, and dig the block

that's adjacent to that one, but one Z level higher, and then go. go back down and back and forth. How are you doing that? Are you doing like channeling or? You know, if I just dig out like four rooms that are the same size, but on different Z levels. Yeah. And but like on different Z levels and you designate above and below at the same time.

Yeah. Vertical bedrooms. So instead of doing all the ones on level 42, they will do one tile on level 42, then go up to the same tile on level 43, then go down to the same tile. level 45 yeah yeah yeah there's a logic to that don't know if that's a bug but it should be it's very much logic uh literally causing that i'm sure it's about structural integrity dwarves have to dig that way oh man i was gonna i had something you know i need to keep a note beside me to write down ideas because i had something that i wanted to throw in and i can't

remember what it was hopefully it'll come to me before we're done did you guys ever hear about the Carps in early, in early Dwar Fortress. Oh, the carp menace, you mean? Yeah. When they stand up? When they start to, like, wrestle your fisher dwarfs, yeah. I forgot about carp stands up. It's so strong.

Well, you hate to see it, but that's how evolution happens. No, so swimming used to raise your strength. It still does. Swimming will raise your strength in Door Fortress, Adventure Mode, and Fortress mode, if you flood your fortress. But it used to go really fast. And so the carp, who are always swimming, used to get incredibly buff. And so when they would wrestle your dwarves, they would just crush them, like pieces of paper.

That's so stupid. And they would also, like, mull your dwarves, right? The carp. They would drown them a lot, too, because they could just grab them and pull them into the water. There's nothing you could do against a buff car. That's, I mean, that's true. That's terrifying. That's a great t-shirt slogan, by the way.

Similarly, magma crabs used to drown in magma, because they couldn't breathe it. Oh. Well, poor things. Well, okay. Actually, that is interesting. So the magma crabs, they're kind of invincible to the heat, right? To the magma itself, but they couldn't breathe it. Uh-huh.

So you would just have a volcano that's full of. of corpses of crabs? Yeah, I wonder, actually, if a magma crab dies in magma, do they burn up? Hmm. It's a good question. Well, there's only a finite number of the magma crabs, so it's not going to fill up too many levels. Fair, fair.

Didn't you once make, like, magma crab armor and then leather armor and, like, it burned dwarves or something like that, Roland? Oh, yeah, yeah, you remember it well, but it was demon leather. Ah, ah. Is it fire resistant? Yeah, it was fire and heat resistant, and then it heated up, and people put it on, and then they started melting because I think a vest or a cloak was superheated to like 4 million degrees. And then they would slop over burning, and the next person was like, ooh, nice piece of clothing, yeah. I've heard of a, so if you built, okay, ZM5, he's a moder who makes a lot of creature mods.

made men made out of fire, I think. And if you built a fortress on a glacier, the firemen would walk through the walls and belt the walls as they walked. Oh, God. Okay, that's cool. This game's crazy. Like, really, like, the level of simulation is just wild sometimes. What would happen if the human torch fought Iceman?

Hmm. Let me send you by my limited edition comic of that. Marvel team up. Today's show is sponsored by Michael Eiler's bone carving boutique. Fine skeletal decor for discerning dwarfs. Whether it's a goblin skull goblet or a femur flute for your next tavern jam, Michael Eiler makes death look downright classy. Bone up your style at Eilers.

All right. So what's the next bug on your list? Did you ever do the upright spike trading for your dwarves? No. Oh. Upright spike training. Yes. Yeah.

Like the training room and you fill it with spikes. Yes. You should actually use something like not sharp, like wood. And then you put it on a repeater. So they just go up and down, up and down. And then you put somebody in the room. And then you just hope that they will dodge the spikes that now extend from the ground up at like rapid speeds and then they become really

good at dodging that is the idea so if a bit before that if you would drop a dwarf one z level onto upright spikes if they survived it they would become an armor using god uh just because of the skill gain from that specific interaction was insane um and as well as if they put up their shield and blocked it. They would just become unbeatable in combat. Wait. So like one drop would be enough? Yeah.

Yeah. You used to do a drawbridge, not the flip-up one, but just the pullback, disappear one, and drop your squad into a room full of upright spikes. And then the like five or six of them that survived would be unbeatable. Wow. It's kind of like Air Force Paral Rescue. I don't know if that one still works. It actually might just because of, because I know the one.

the one you talk about where you put it on a repeater where the spikes keep coming up that still trades them really quickly too um i don't know i'm i wasn't a fan of it i put a lot of very good dwarfs in such a room i specifically made only soft spikes out of wood and whatever and one of my my best soldier dwarfs got the wooden spike impaled through one of his eyes and died instantly in the first like 20 seconds of it and I was like oh my god and I was clamoring to shut it off and then the next person died and I was like never again well there's one there's more than one way to try to dwarf right good grief true savage that sounds like something that would be in spooky fort sounds like a like a saw

movie right next to our double-decker graveyards Saw 22 Dwar Fortress Well, I like putting On the entrance to the fort I like having people have to walk through the graveyard Walk through the tombs That's kind of the fun thing that I like to do

I do that too Oh, set the mood you mean Spooky Fort this year ended up with The corpse stockpile being in the tavern Yes If you kill your buddy, he's going to be here looking at you I do that too Except it's not so much to set the mood

for the incoming migrants, but it's, I always look at it like a way to, I don't know, to honor the dwarves that have fallen in, in the fortress. You always put the slabs outside in a, in a very well-visible place, just. Me too, honor. That's totally what I was going for. Part of it is so that I can easily go back to where they are and find out what actually killed them, because if you have a dead dwarf with no body, it's sometimes difficult to find out actually how they died. And a lot of times the inscribed slabs will help you learn

how they died. Oh, I didn't know that. That's interesting. Yeah, a lot of times I'll say like impaled by a goblin sword. And killed by drawbridge. Yeah, killed by drawbridge. It will say like crushed to death or something like that for killed by drawbridge. It's how I discovered where my mayor went. Oops. Couldn't find, couldn't find that bugger. I eventually did a slab and figured out, oh, I crushed them. And you know, maybe we ought to paint some safety. lines on the ground for the drawbridge. If you keep up with your dwarfs well enough, you don't have to not have a body to inscribe a memorial slab for them.

You can make a memorial slab for any dead dwarf that you have, whether they're rightfully buried or not. So, yeah, it's fun, fun stuff, memorials. If our listeners enjoy hearing details about the history of bugs, I highly suggest that you go back and check out old episodes of Dwar Fortress Talk. They were sometimes like two hours long, the episodes were, and it's basically Tarn starting in talking about some aspect of programming the game and going into incredible detail about it.

And he talked, there were great, great bug stories, better than any of the interviews. There were great, great bug stories in Dwarfortress Talk. So I highly recommend that you go back and listen to those. They haven't made an episode in a couple of years. There's only, I think, 27 episodes in total, but it is great historical documentation. Yeah, and it's really informative to hear it, like, from the horse's mouth, like, why certain things work. Like, in our lost episode, we talked about how loyalty cascades work, and I learned that. I'm pretty sure from that, yeah, Dorfurt's Talk podcast.

Yep, yep. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's, yeah, it's great. Highly recommend that you, that you check it out. Okay, so what's next on the list? One of them that you guys talked about on an earlier episode, piggyback rides to death. Oh, yeah, to death rides. Which was in the, I think it was 47.01 was the Adventure Mode update, which allowed you to ride horses and things like that. That animal riding code was applied to babies when their mothers would carry them around.

So when a baby was born and the mother picked it up, the mother would then have to follow the baby's pathfinding, which is just crazy walk up down, left, right, all over the place. And they would do that until the mother starved to death. I feel like this is somebody who had parents or who was a new parent working some things out. That's what I think Tarn, you know, maybe secretly has this thing. And he was like, do you know what the solution was to this? what birth control it was to make sure that you had baby eventually walked onto a drawbridge and then you would knock the baby off its mother the mother would leave the baby and go eat and then come back and again because like resume piggyback rides oh boy geez it's kind of

the way it is though if you've had small children you just have to wait till they're two years old yeah you just hope you make it through you eat enough it's it's like seals yeah do you survive, though. Yeah, it's like those penguins. I mean, dwarves eat like four times a year, so it's actually not that bad. Yeah, you just got to bulk up, you know, and then you ride it out or you get ridden out? I'm not sure how you'd say that. Do you know why cardivores don't need to eat? If you have carnivores in your fortress, you don't need to feed them anything. Do you know why that is. No.

Good game design. That's it. Yeah. It's actually because of world gen. Carnivores starve to death during world gen unless they don't need to eat because they can't figure out butchery and animal husbandry

and stuff like that. Are there any domesticated carnivores in dwarf orchards? I guess dogs and cats. So like the goblets have beak dogs. And yeah. The carnivores? Dogs. None of the birds need to eat, right? All the birds are

carnivores. Yeah, they eat vermin. Yeah, the chickens, they like generate vermin in the room they're in, but they don't actually interact with the vermin. Yeah, that's true, actually. They dig about and fight verbi, but I don't think they need to eat it.

I do tend to bring pigs with me because they don't clear out pasture land either. Yeah, whenever I set my stock that I'm bringing with me, it's always dogs and pigs. That is a good point When we got pasture zones

The animals would always all try to eat From the top left corner of the pasture And would starve to death Oh I wonder how long that bug was in there I wonder how many of these I could just make up And people would believe them I mean you could totally do that

Yeah That actually reminds me of something That happened a long while ago I made a very large pasture zone And then I zoned in all the various creatures that I had. The pasture zone was completely overfilled. Right. And I wanted to, I had ducks. So I wanted to have like a little pond. And in the pond,

I had another island. Okay. So I dug down, made a pond, had a little island, only a few tiles. And none of these creatures managed to get across the water to the island. So everything was grazed away. Okay. Just cleared ground everywhere. And the island in the middle was like green and lush and nice. And at some point, some animals tried to cross through the pond to the little island. And I've only noticed because this single tree on the island was suddenly full of cows. I thought you were going to find them at the bottom of the pond. Oh, that also happened.

It was kind of annoying. But I found the cow tree to be more hilarious because apparently they must have climbed up the trees and then crossed through the pond through the branches? I don't know. I don't know. There were cows in my trees. Cows in the trees. It must have been some pretty stark trees. I still

don't get the jumping up into trees thing. But you get like families of animals, like generations of animals up in the trees sometimes. That is always a reason for me to remove all trees from my pastures because

if you then try to get them down, you have to cut the tree, and then this cows are falling from the tree and possibly hurting itself. Ah. Sirs of Bright. Oh. So have you got enough bugs on this list, Stefanzo, to do another episode at some point? Probably.

And if anyone has any good ones, feel free to send them to me, because, I mean, bugs are probably why I love Door Fortress. Yes. When I sell Door Fortress to people, I usually tell them about, like, cats walking through puddles of beer and then drinking their paws and getting drunk and starting bar fights. Yeah, same. Best bug ever? Literally like that.

By the way, like as far as like computer game bugs of all time, that one. Yeah, it's pretty good. Nothing beats that tarn. That's like, I know the code for Door Fortress is part of the Museum of Modern Art collection, but that bug needs to be its own separate exhibit because that is art. He has made art. Just a room full of like surly drunk cats. I mean, yeah, poor things, got their little fur wet and licked their paws.

It totally makes sense. You could see it happening. So, you know. I think it's also a very good reminder of how intricate the game can be and that everything and every single snap is simulated and then starts to interact with each other to a point that you did not anticipate. Yeah. But I also always tell the cat star is just so good.

Unintended consequences. Yeah. if you look at dwarf fortress bugs compared to like a similarly complex game like Crusader Kings or something like that you could just tell there's like a fundamental difference of like

one of these is like a bug arise because of some small interaction whereas in door forces it feels like there's hundreds of steps involved that should have caught this or something you know but yeah now animals are wearing clothes

and showing up at your fortress with a profession. Yeah, there's not very many games that you could get 125 episodes of, you know, reasonably unique talking points. Well, maybe, well, we've got 125 episodes of this show. Maybe 75 of them have unique talking points. But still, it's a really fun, deep game. Well, they are all about Dwarfortress and steak people and Star Fortresses.

And archers, yeah. And archers. And a lot about AI for some reason. True, true, true. And you do have to remember that there will be more the next time we talk, because the next time we talk, there will have been an update. Yes. Ooh, true.

Yep. I challenge everyone to go out there and download, create a new world with a new update and see what it's like. And swing by the Dwarfurtess Roundtable Discord, where I will be adding you specifically to take your turn. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And my life has slowed down somewhat. This summer was just massively freaking busy. And on October 30th, the last commitment was taking care of so that I can breathe a little bit now. So I'm going to be able to sit down and play some dwarf fortress again, which, you know, I've really missed it. So, yeah. So, Alfonso, we'll have you back on again after a couple more episodes to go through the bug list because goodness, bugs are so. entertaining they're great they're great yeah I love to be on thanks guys but until then thanks to Fonzo for coming on and and talk with us again I want to apologize for the fact that

we lost an entire freaking episode um but you know what assuming this one doesn't get lost as well whenever we hit stop recording it's going to be worth it because I think this episode was probably better than the last one so hey cool cool I agree I'll be on another time after after you're doing, ruining one more episode and then taking a second crack at that one. Exactly, exactly. Every time it gets a little better. Yeah, so everybody, get on the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable Discord server. And you talked about trying to name your spooky fort with Dwarven translations.

Well, I did the same thing with the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, trying to find the closest translation of that in Dwarvish that I could. And that is the name of our Discord server. It looks like meaningless nonsense, but it is actually dwarven for something about a table and circular and dwarves. It's very easy. It's Gesha dear lemon nilar. Yeah, it's great. It's a really, it really just drips right off the tongue.

Yeah, exactly. Well, hey, we've got like 300 people that are in it. So, you know, it's apparently people are having no trouble finding it. Nope, they're not. Let's get. If you know, you know. We're trying for a million subscribers by the end of the year. A million.

At the end of this year. Okay. Wait, what year is this? Oh, yeah. Okay, maybe not. Well, maybe. Two months time. You got two months.

We're going to do it. All right. So that's going to wrap up this episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable. Thanks, everyone. We'll be back next time to talk about the siege update and our tribulations, I'm sure, with it. Hell yeah. Again, thanks, Alfonso. Everyone, you can find Alfonso on the dual fortress round table.

chord, as you can find me, Tony, and Roland as well. So until next time, everyone keep digging and have fun. Peace. All right. See ya. And thanks, Alfonso. Adios. Bye.

And that concludes the spine-tingling episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable, brought to you by NomeGal's haunted brewery, Patrick Shaw's corpse-clearing crypt crew, and Michael Eiler's exquisitely unsettling. bone crafts. Thanks to our patrons for keeping the lights dim, the tunnels echoing, and the fortress just a little too quiet after midnight. Thanks once again to Delphonseo for joining us to talk about Spooky Fort. 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 Door 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 DFRoundable.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 dF roundtable This is a conversational podcast All Crafts Worship is of the highest quality Thanks, Delfanzo