Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 128: We’re Not Quite Dead Yet

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Whew – it’s been a long wait. Sorry bout that! But we think we’ve turned out a nice episode about the latest updates and the DFRoundtable Discord Succession Fortress. Enjoy! Timberfox13 Video Mushroom Mead Video

Welcome to Dwarf Orchrist Roundtable at the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we're back after our winter hiatus. So I hope you guys had some nice time off. Yeah, nice time off. Except for you who were out of power for a while.

Yeah, that electricity thing seems, I mean, I've really grown to like it. But, you know, it reminds you of what you. you have when you have it. So. I've found it incredibly useful. Like, it's something, I mean, something that I do tend to use every day. It is. So, yeah, you know, I like it.

I like it. I like it. It keeps my food cold. I like that I can make coffee. Yeah, I can make coffee. I don't have to make a fire to do that. So, I mean, all of that's great. When my internet is out, I realize from that feeling in my gut that I'm actually addicted, to the internet. Yeah.

I need to look up when the Vatican City was built. Oh, ah. You know, other and things that come to mind. Where's the grocery store? I don't know. Hey, Google, give me a recipe for faux sourdough bread. Or my favorite.

Hey, Siri, play Despacito. It's great on conference calls. I hope somebody is listening to this without headphones, and their, my phone goes off by this. Yeah, it's one of my favorites. Yeah, it's great on a conference call on somebody's not wearing headphones because you'll get them.

Sorry, everybody. This break was a little bit longer than we expected, but, you know, power outages and I ended up having to, you know, work overnight shifts for a while and one thing led to another, and we're here, though. Brand new year.

Can you believe it? Well, well, do we start with the, the patch notes or with warm beers? Let's start with the patch notes. So yeah, there's been several updates since we last talked with you folks. Met. See, 53.07 had just come out whenever we last recorded. Actually, I think that it came out the day that we recorded.

And where are we now? We are currently at 53.10. Yep. Updates are coming fast and furious. Okay, so there's some great classics in here. My favorite, not to get ahead of ourselves, but, you know, I want to. Mothers no longer seek ghostly babies. I mean, that's just sad.

That's sad. It really is. So what? Whenever a child was squished by a bridge, the mother would just like go keep looking for them whenever they became ghosts? Yeah, what the trail? It sounds like. Trying to care for a ghost? Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, where's my child? Oh, there he is. Ah, I'm afraid of him. I mean, there's some just brilliant bug fixing in here. Stopped a few illegal wear beast types from being created. What do you think an illegal wear beast type is? I would have thought anything's fair game.

It's a wear beast without his green card. Exactly. Is that what I'm saying? Oh, it's a little on point. Wait, wait. In which patch notes are you seeing illegal wear beast? It's in the, uh, January 7th.

January 7th. January 7th. 53.09 ended our daily hell that was illegal aware beasts. They did add invasion creature cap

and invasion creature strength to the difficulty settings so you can edit that now. Boy, that's good. If the invasions are a little bit too much for you, then you can back them off. That's nice.

That's neat. Yeah. Bless. I mean, Seriously, that's great. Because I remember the days of invasions where you'd have like a thousand and there's not a lot of hope there. What else do we have here? That patch update that came out on January 7th had a lot of stuff to it. It's huge, isn't it? Yeah. It was a massive one.

This is something that I like. Creatures that leave statue corpses. Now leave statues of themselves rather than of random creatures. Thank God. Oh, that's neat. That means the bronze colossus now becomes a statue of itself. So, like, just shuts down so you can put it on your front door and go like, yeah, I killed that. Yeah. That's really cool. So when you kill a bronze colossus, it becomes a statue? Yep.

Has that always happened? I think so. I believe so. Cool. That's doggone, cool. Animal traps can catch subterranean water creatures like cave lobsters again. Yum. So I didn't know that you could throw an animal trap in the water and catch things.

Yeah. I didn't know that either. I tried it once. There's some goofiness to it because I don't think your dwarfs just use the animal trap and put it in the water like a lobster trap, for example. But you would have to make a drowning chamber, like an air drowning chamber where you flooded with water, then you wait until there's like vermin and fish and then you empty it. and then you get to the fish. I'm not sure if that has changed, because, oh, that was a while ago when I did that.

I like this fix right here. If an egg hatches and the mother's assigned to the zone or pasture, the baby is now also assigned to the zone. That's handy. That is great. That's really nice. Yeah. Then you're no longer overrun by turkeys and whatever baby ducks are called.

On the other hand, I always like the weird little. migrations of freshly hatched chicks that would go from where the nest boxes are, slowly trundling down through my fortress to get into the tavern. Yeah, yeah. Why do they do it to the tavern? They always go to the tavern, yeah. Here's a good one that could have been funny, if we would have caught the bug. Soldiers, given an order while hauling, will now drop their hauled job items instead of taking

them along on duty. You got a soldier who gets called to action And he's carrying a cabinet Around with him on his back While he's trying to fight goblins That's beautiful I'll just take this Urrist

Drop it I really love The advanced simulation foibles Actually talking about the portraits For a second Have you managed to Check them out No but I did read

Tarn's update on that. Oh, there was some people got confused. What's the deal of people? I think people got mixed up thinking that procedural generation was somehow AI art. And they're different things.

Very different. And one is, oops, did I just get us canceled? And one is a perfectly reasonable way to do things. With a long history in gaming. With a very long, rich history of this is how you do things. Yeah, so it's a shame. All the way back to the early 80s.

Well, I mean, I love the passion around being vehemently against AI art, but I do think it's very important to also have an understanding of the thing that you're mad about. And that's my soapbox. Apparently, there were some users who were kind of asses about it to the artist. and there's no call for that. That always happens for some reason. Yeah. It's not. And this is why, honestly, people stop with the social media.

Just knock at the, just don't do it. Just make that your 2026 habit. Yeah. Instagram or Facebook, delete that shit. Get away from it. We were kind of concerned about that sort of thing whenever the audience for Dwar Fortress widened with the premium release. and and you know the steam because you know it was fairly community driven not that it's not now

but it was very much a niche community community community community community community you know I'm trying to say it was it was you know maybe a little bit more friendly and there's elements now that have come in that is a more general population that's playing the game which is good I'm glad that it's got a wider, but you also have bad things that come with popularity. It is, but you can also not be around those people very, very easily by deleting all your stupid social media stuff and tuning out. It's bad for you. It only works if it makes you hate each other. Anyway, that's my...

Can't tell you enough, folks. Stop it. Yeah, I was talking with a coworker about that. why I explained him why certain social media platforms are evil because they thrive on making people angry. Yeah, that's how it works. That's how they make money. Yeah, the algorithm incentivizes making you mad because that gets you responses.

So yeah. Anyway, soapbox. Yeah. Hoping off. Soapbox, baby. Soapbox. But I think the point that I have is you're using it to make people. feel bad, you are the problem.

That's what I'm saying. Stop it. Stop being mean to people. Jesus. Be good humans. Be good to be what do the Bill and Ted say? Be cool to each other. No, be excellent to each other. Man, that's embarrassing. I even got my Bill and Ted wrong. Sorry, folks. Roland's being very quiet here. Is Roland part of the problem?

The part of the problem? No. No, I actually haven't really seen the portraits. 53. What? Seven portraits? Because they got changed now. They're different now. There's examples.

If you look at the steam. Oh, they're awesome. The stray dog. He looks so cool. Yeah. The upgrade is definitely there. I highly, highly appreciate the current portraits that we have. And if anybody got really mad and sad about the portraits that got introduced,

they have been changed, all of them. So, yeah. My horse looks awesome. Like, it looks great. I just can't stress enough that anybody who's getting themselves bent out of shape about this needs to go and understand what procedural generation is versus what AI slop is. They are two totally different things. Chill out.

Yeah, and so far, the artist that made the portraits and the little, well, it's not really sprites now, is it? But the sprites? He has been doing a great work in this. Yeah. So, I agree. I mean, look at the panda bear and the polar bear from

the steam updates. Okay? Yes, yes. They are amazing. Yes, I agree. So I'm quite happy about how they look. I still have to check out all the creatures that exist. Curious, what kind

of creature will now become my new favorite because of the portraits. I can definitely tell you that I really like how the dog looks. It's not the dog that I used to have, but I think it comes close to the dog I would have in the future again. Sometimes people are, you kind of get fixed on the way things were, and it's hard to, you know, get things right in your head. So anyway.

Some of the creatures got meaner looking, which is kind of, cool. Yeah, I need to see some of these more vicious things. Guido, Guido slash Neo Rice is good. I'm not sure if that's two people or one person. That's the artist. So if it's two people, thanks people. Yeah. I still haven't, I still haven't gotten attacked, sieged yet. Oh, I have. I've still not built a bolt launcher. What's it called a bolt? Bolt thrower. I've still not built a bolt thrower, but I haven't really needed to because my, my army of 40 plus the squad of 10, I can't remember what the kind of squad is called, but it's the cops. They are doing a very good job. And I also wonderfully rediscovered patrols.

So I've set up my schedules now so that three out of four of their training periods, they spend training, but one out of four these squads spend patrolling. And I've got it set up such that at all times, there's at least one squad who is patrolling the perimeter of the fortress. It's pretty great. Oh, outside. Yeah, outside. Oh, okay. So what are they, like, if you're not being sieged, what do they do? They just walk around.

They just patrol. They just patrol. Can you have a patrol inside, like coppers? I'm sure. You set up waypoints. That's pretty nice. I suppose, yeah. Does it, how does that work for training?

Does it, um, I'm not sure. Does it, like, does it help them train? I wonder. I'm not sure, but the thing was that I was having some, some issues. getting my squads out to intercept the invaders in a timely manner. So I figured if I always have at least one squad out there patrolling, then that squad is always going to be, you know, basically men at men who can go out there and take on the bad guys and hold them up

while the other ones grab their weapons and come on out. Yep. That makes sense. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. That's a cool idea. Yep. Very cool. Any other update notes that we want to chat about? What else do you see in there?

Anything spicy? I mean, the spiciest was the mother's not seeking ghost children anymore? No. Yeah. You hate to see it. This segment has been brought to you by Delta Whiskey's industrial grade magma lubricants. When your floodgates stick, your piston squeal, or your magma refuses to flow with proper enthusiasm.

Delta whiskey keeps everything moving smoothly. Delta whiskey, slick enough for machinery, bold enough to drink, though maybe don't. Well, we have the definitive answer to the portable saves. So the portable means that it saves it like the old style. So if you want to experience it with your saves kept in the dwarf fortress directory structure, then turn on portable saves. Yeah, equitable is the good one. Yeah, so it seems that whenever we were getting, what's the right word for it,

we were getting sassy. Sassy. About how much we disliked the app data. So it's not just Windows, that sort of thing in Linux, which, assuming in Max, it does the same thing too. And I went back and listened to it, and I can see how a listener pointed out to us that it kind of sounded like that we were ragging on Putnam. Oh, no, that's bad. Yeah, we did not mean that at all. Far from it.

Nope, didn't mean that. Ragged on Windows. Always assume Microsoft. Just assume they are the ones that have done something wrong. Sorry, everybody. We've gotten over the years, the three of us very familiar with each other, and we will start mouthing. And we never think to each other that we're mouthing. in a angry kind of manner, but I guess we need to be a little more careful about that because

it can come off sounding unfriendly, and we definitely don't want it to come off like that. I make the commitment that if I say something that sounds crappy or unfriendly, please call me on it and give me a chance to apologize because I definitely didn't mean it, and I want to make it right. Well, we've been doing this for almost six years, and this is the first time that anything has come back for a comment that we weren't exactly on our best behavior, which, you know, that's a pretty good record for a podcast. Try harder. Is what I'm hearing.

I'm hearing. Try harder. Push it. Push the limits of engagement. But thanks to that user for pointing it out. And we'll be more careful in the future. Yeah. Appreciate it.

Seriously. And Putnam. And Putnam, we love you. And we love the development team and everything about what has gone on with the game in the last few years because it's just been awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, seriously.

Exactly. Awesome. Thanks for making mothers no longer seek their ghostly. And thanks for multi-threads because that has fixed. That's cool, too. Yes, that has really freaking fixed. Yeah. All those framework problems.

Whenever it kicks up and says, you know, things are getting a little hairy, would you like to turn on multi-threading? Every time that happens. And it seems to happen for me. Every time a new four. Fortress comes, it starts off in single-threaded mode, apparently, but it gives me that message whenever I start losing frame rate, and every time I do it, it fixes it. It gets me back up to, like, a 60 or 70 frame rate whenever I was, like, at 30 or 40 before. So, kudos.

I just put on multi-threading all the time. It's just, yeah. We needed that. Yeah, it was good. Well done for making it work, too, because of the way the simulation works, it doesn't really lend itself to multi-threaded operation. So that obviously took time to be very thoughtful about how to fix that. That's cool. Yep, yeah. We like it. So let's talk about warm beers.

Warm beers, if you don't know, is the community fortress that's been going on on the Twor Fortress Roundtable Discord server. And Dauanzo, he actually mentioned it last time he was on, that he was going to kick it off. And he kicked it off, and it has been running. ever since. And that fortress is impressive. It's got some really cool traps. There is a magma death tower is what they call it. So what they do is they pump magma up to the top of the tower and you can close your fortress entrance doors with magma safe doors and then flip a lever and it will dump magma off the sides of the tower onto the entrance.

So it's like the hot oil from, you know, from the medieval traps. It is really impressive. Bless. Bless them. Timber Fox 13 was good enough to make a little video. Well, a little video. It's 30 minutes long. He gave an extensive tour of the fortress.

And he demonstrated the magma death tower operation. And it was really, really funny. It was impressive. The best part about that is you don't have any clean-out to do afterwards. Everything just burns away. Isn't it great? Is that right? The magma just goes away?

It evaporates. Yes and no. It evaporates? Yeah. At some point it will. It just takes a while. It does not evaporate as quickly as water. And it will set your map on fire.

But, you know. I was going to say, the magma is probably going to evaporate before the trees are done burning. Possibly, yeah. It is, as Timber Fox said, that it is probably a defense of last resort, because it does make a little bit of a situation where if you have dwarves that are outside, in the case of warm beers, right now, those dwarves are trapped. I think that they are going to make a secondary entrance somewhere else on the map so the dwarves can get back in if they get trapped outside. That's funny. Yes, it was. Yes, so the Warmbier's is built on a volcano.

So, yeah. Yeah, I saw that. Very cool. I also massively enjoyed in the video. He shows, well, how do I describe it? It's a room. And the room is several Z-levels high. And there is just some structure in there.

And I stared at it while he, He was talking and I was like, what, what is that? That doesn't look like somebody's strip mind, like an or vein. It looks the opposite. Somebody made a huge room and then left like a weird amount of just randomly or sorted blocks in there. And then he zoomed up. And it's a fall trap, but it's a really elaborate fall trap. So, there...

That sounds doggone cool. There's a path through the room to get into the fortress, and that is like the siege entrance. The trick here is that the tiles are not next to each other, but they're like diagonal to each other. So that means the little idiot goblin has to like hop diagonally and is a little slower, and it's full of traps. and every time the goblin gets onto a new tile, he is attacked by the trap and then has to dodge, probably dodging off the little tile, and then falling to his death.

That was interesting to look at. There's an additional complexity to that, that it took me probably three times watching that section to actually finally get. So on the very bottom level of this, you have mine carts that are slamming into the walls. And those mind carts and those slamming into the to the bottoms of those pillars that are the path that the goblins are taking, you know, the ones that if they dodge off of, they die. So the mind carts slam into those pillars and create an impulse.

And when that impulse happens, that encourages the goblins to dodge. Oh, yes. It makes some flinch. It does. It makes a flinch and then they fall to their death. It is amazing. And then you can, I think that they got it set up where you can flood that room with magma. Just to really hammer home the point.

Yeah, it is, it is diabolical. It is. I don't know this for sure. It looks like Rurik's work. Probably is. Oh, yeah. Some of the best trap builders, I guess. It is, it is amazing.

So everybody go out there and check out, check out that video from Timber Fox 13. it is called Run Gang Return to Castle Warm Beers which is... I like the fact that they called it Warmbiers, that's also really funny. Is it... I wonder if that was a random or...

I feel like there was a little bit of maybe selective randomization. Well, I can't... Now I'm drawing a blank on what my current fortress is called, but something like Rock Mountains and it was completely random. It was not something that I told it to do, so it's pretty cool.

I'm wanting to get involved in the next one because I think that I can learn a lot from these people. True. I will probably be like my turn will just be the maid. I will just clean up messes. I will try to basically hold the fort down for a year and, you know, straighten things up and maybe do my decorations that I love to do. You know, funny patterns on the floors. But I've got a little more time now. So I think that I'm going to, if not in warm beers.

I'm going to be involved in the next one, I think. Sounds like a good plan. It's taking off much better than the ones that we started did. Yeah. I mean, you know, it is a little slow here and there, but yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I also think that it is a good learning experience, especially if you have somebody like Rourik that will make, like, the weirdest, most elaborate death trap ever,

while I usually am more the kind of guy to just, yeah, this is a hallway. It fills with the water. This is pretty much the extent to where I can go. Yes, Dwarven toilet. Or that, or that. This episode of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable is made possible in part by Loghammer's trap components and timberworks. From pressure plates to perfectly disposable wooden bridges, Loghammer supplies the parts that fail exactly when you want them to.

Loghammer. If it's not Loghammer, it's just fuel for the magma. You guys have played in the last few weeks. I have, but my fortress is pretty stable right now. I've got that good fortune. I think it's got like 140, 150 people in it. I do have some unhappiness happening. I've got dwarves that are emigrating with the caravans at times, which is fine.

If they don't want to be here, good riddance. I'm afraid, I keep on telling the mountain homes that I don't want to have the increased involvement with the government. Every time I get a caravan in, they say, we want to recognize you're wonderful, you know, so why don't you promote someone to be a noble? And I'm like, no, thank you. But whenever I do that, I don't get to ask them for. specific things.

Oh. Which is fine. I don't really need anything. Oh, right. Yeah. Okay. Right, right, right. Last time I had that happen,

they came three or four times and asked me that. And finally, I just had a noble move in, and then I became the capital. So it was forced upon me. We'll see if that happens this time. Yeah, I also enjoyed playing just smaller fortresses, usually. So I always try to deny the caravan when it's like, hey, you want to have some nobles here. I'm going to push some nobles in your direction. No, thanks.

I got enough. Thank you very much. Yeah, eventually I think they give you no choice. That's fine. That's fine. Whenever it happens, then I'll begrudgingly build a royal quarters. I did build a jail with sewers underneath it for, I don't guess it's sewers if it's fresh water, but water channels underneath the jails to put the well in. And I put

artifacts in each of it to keep the people happy. So I've had, see, I was having these children having tantrums and people were getting mad and people were fighting. So I just kind of had to put a stop to that. And so now there are people chained up in my jail of eight cells. Do you use your military to lock them up or how do you do it? There's a Captain of the Guard squad. Captain of the Guard, does it? Yeah, the Captain of the Guard. Yeah, the Justice System.

Yeah. So until you appoint a Captain of the Guard and make a squad like that, then you're not going to be able to have people get locked up as far as I know. I think that's the mechanism by which people go to jail. And if you don't have jail set up, then they will just beat them. That's not typically what you want because the beating sometimes becomes fatal. Yes. And also just ethically.

Let's just, let's, we're not, it's, you know, it's not about punitive. So you built one sock too short for the mayor. Yep, you got to die. That's it. That's it. That's it. Yeah, so the best way is actually to make some prison sales as soon as you can. And or you can also appoint a hammerer and then give him, let's see, like an adamantine mace.

just, you know, make sure he has never been in the military that dude, because I made that mistake and was like, uh-huh, yeah, at Mantine Mace, it's not going to do any damage. And I forgot that I accidentally gave that to an immensely buffed wharf. Yeah. I have trouble ever finding out of Mantine. Yeah, so do I. Is it true that every fortress has a magma C if you go deep enough? Pretty sure, yeah. I'm pretty sure that's the way it works. I have trouble finding it. Just got to keep poking. Just dig deeper. Nothing bad ever happens if you just keep digging deeper. I'm pretty sure that the magmacy itself has to be there.

I have heard stories that sometimes the game generates a tile where you play on, where there is little to know at Mantine. But I'm pretty sure the magmacy has to exist. Yeah, I think it does. I think you can find it. I had one fortress where it actually bottomed out. I was at level negative 124, and I don't think that I could go any deeper. Now, I did not clear out that entire level.

There was a small part of it that was mined out. But, yeah, I never did find magabon that one either. That was the one where I had the invaders from the deep with the steel armor and weapons, and there were giant old men riding cave crocodiles. It was pretty brutal. Yeah. I, you know, I had to play a little just for the sake of checking out the new portraits. I made a new fortress, and I did not want anything like crazy going on, okay?

Just 15 dwarfs is what I was aiming for. It's a very tiny, very small fortress in a very nice neighborhood. And, you know, I'm... High property values. I'm just playing and at some point, I'm so happy that I noticed that. You know how when you have two biomes, the water in the two different biomes freezes at a different point in time. So in my case, I have river that runs through two biomes. It starts in one and ends in the other.

and the lower part the southern part is like temperate shrubland and the river freezes several months earlier than in the northern part where the river starts really and this has a very interesting effect the lower part freezes sooner and the upper part continues to push water down into the southern part but as soon as like one little bit of water touches the southern biome, it instantly becomes a block of ice, generating a natural dam. And the northern part keeps on pushing more and more and more and more water into the biome. And it literally builds up, like, a massive sea behind. Yes. And this is the worst part. Because usually, you would just have, like, a river and it freezes, and the other

part doesn't and it's like yeah whatever i had a z level difference the river starts uh four z levels above the level where it leaves the map again and so actually let me just show you a picture i have it somewhere because this is i'm wondering what happens whenever summer comes yeah yeah i can tell you i can tell Let me just put the... Oops. It's in insights. And it looked like that. So, you know, the lower part is the frozen river,

and the upper part is the unfrozen river, and it would keep on generating more and more and more water. And as soon as it touches, the lower biome would make an ice wall. And then the water would, like, continue to just swirl behind the ice wall. And my fortress entrance, at this point, my fortress is just a hole in the ground. My fortress entrance is also just a hole in the ground at the lowest part of the map. And I saw this after I checked out the caverns a little bit. And it was like, oh my God.

I was scared. And I had to quickly build like a little tower to make sure that the tower goes above. the water that could potentially like drain into my fortress. Yeah. And then the upper part also froze. And I was considering, okay, do I mine it all away to make sure that it doesn't flood the map? But I wanted to know, I wanted to know whether or not if it like thaws again, is it water again? And is it going to like drown the map?

the answer to that is yes and at first it is the same thing again the northern part freezes later and thaws earlier and then pushes even more water

into these crevices and then at some point the lower part unfreezes and you know it's dwarf fortress it goes like snap and it freezes and snap it unfreezes instantly and when the lower part unfroes a massive tsunami just crashed into the valley

and like ripped everything with it I think I had one person die, one llama die because they were just like grabbed and smashed by the masses of water so is this fortress still active this is yeah I managed to make like a little tower so water can't get into the entrance I would like you to film

next season whenever it does this again, if it does it again. I'd like you to film a video of it because I'd like to see that I have to check out how to make a proper time lapse video because I think it would be very interesting to just see it freeze

and then unfreeze and then the water crashing down and it keeps doing that every single winter and so I'm considering using that as some kind of like defensive technique. It's just I never expected to have a fortress that has like nature that is so interesting. It becomes way more interesting than the actual fortress itself.

I'm not sure what video editing software you use, but I know that Kaden Live will do time compression like that. It will turn a five minute video into a one minute video or however long you want it to. You can, it ends up being like time lapse. What's that? Caden Live, okay. Yeah, it's a KDE app. Oh, okay, okay. It's not as fully featured as something like Vegas.

But it's free. So, yeah. Free is in free speech and free is in free beer. So you can both drink it and shout it. That's right. Today's show is sponsored by Decombe Broadroo's Magma Side Brewery. Brewed dangerously close to flowing lava for that extra kick. Deckham's ale pairs perfectly with watching enemies melt behind fortifications.

Deckham Brodrew, raising a toast to engineering decisions that can't be undone. Mitchell Peterson sent another email. This time with mushroom mead. Oh. Yeah, mushroom mead. There's a YouTube video of some folks that made mushroom mead. The name of the YouTube video was City Steading Brews. That's the name of the channel of YouTube.

And they made a mushroom and garlic honey wine. Oh. So I think they said it was a mead. It was made out of the water that was used to rehydrate Chitaki mushrooms. So, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. You could do that for real, couldn't you?

Keep those mushroom liquid suggestions coming, Mitchell. Appreciate it. Hmm, yeah. I wonder how that tastes like. Awful, I'm sure. Wow. Don't not until you tried it. Like a sweet, tangy mix of the earthy flavors of mushrooms and the sweetness of honey.

Maybe they've used a kind of mushroom that adds something more to it. Well, it might end up tastes a bit like a mushroom soup if you're driving. it warm. Yeah. Isn't most mushroom soup the like cream of mushroom soup type of thing? Yeah, but it doesn't have to be. You can, I mean, golden mushroom soup is, is not. It's very savory.

Huh. Yeah. Okay. I'd try it. I would drink it. I'd do anything once, you know. Okay. Yeah, I mean, you can eat.

Well, you can eat every mushroom one time. Some, you can eat more than one. That is true. That is true. You can eat a rod of plutonium once. That's right. It's an eat once kind of thing. Okay, I'm not stupid. I'm not going to go out there and just randomly pick a mushroom off the ground and just chomp and say, I tried that once. Because three days later, my liver's gone.

Well, you can see it like this. Some of these mushrooms you can eat, and some of these, they have so much calories. You will never need to eat again in your life or something like that. Wow. Okay. So what else we got? Anything? What about goals for the next fortress here? I'm starting again. I just took every save game that I had and blasted it and put it away. And now I'm rolling a new one for 2026.

But I did manage to, over the holidays, introduce the game to my niece and nephew. And he definitely got really into it. And I don't know what was happening. I had to get up. And I left the game in her capable hands for a little bit. And she had tunneled and hit us. an aquifer, but managed to figure out how to wall it off. All on her own.

So I was pleasantly impressed by the youth of today picking up the game so quickly. Yeah. She needs to be introduced to Kleno Dev's drymines mod. Yes. Well, I thought we had that loaded up, but I don't know, whatever it was, we managed to hit a wet patch there. What are you going to do? Yeah, some people actually like the aquifers.

And I understand that for advanced play, they can be. very useful, but I'm not advanced. Yeah, I don't know. I think there's the DF hack stuff, which is really cool that'll like turn it into a, you know, water for you or whatever. But I'm too dumb to work that out. I think that I'll go ahead like you and roll a new fortress because Rock Mountains is, it's awfully stable. And it is getting chaotic, you know, entropy sets into my fortresses every time. So I'm still trying to find that that perfect organizational system.

This one lasted much longer before chaos kicked in. But or I could also, you know, destroy all my buildings, go down 20 levels and start with fresh area. I can try that. But, you know, my above ground is looking a little, it's just looking a little yucky. my problem is I don't like it whenever I have for example

a floor or a roof that has multiple colored tiles that are in random order like whenever I forget

and just tell it to choose the nearest item to build that of oh yeah like like rainbow stuff yeah

yeah that gets annoying but it's easy to do it's ugly and if I'm going to sit here and stare at this

thing for hours I want it to be visually pleasing so yeah yeah I made a Lego

millennium falcon years ago out of random bricks that we had and it totally looked like the hoopedie of star wars in a kind of an uncool way like yeah all right it's like it's like a unicorn vomited glitter all over the star wars universe yeah yeah it was it was like one of those things that you thought might look cool and then actually was was the opposite of cool yeah rolling that picture's going to be our episode art for this for this episode Okay. Yeah. It's a really cool picture.

I mean, it's, I love the physics of it. Let me say. Oh, side tangent. I found a game called Songs of Six. I don't know if you guys have seen that. It's got a free demo. Totally worth checking out if you want a distraction from Door Fortress. Holy cow.

I didn't think it was possible to get, like, more in the weeds on some things, and it manages to do it. I mean, I don't even understand. what's happening here, but it's wild. Epic City State Simulator. Vast Battled Simulating thousands of citizens and soldiers. Yeah, you have to keep them alive first. That's kind of where I am.

I'm like, they usually starve to death before we build armies, so I'm my own worst enemy at this point. Oh, so you're saying this is a great game? I am saying it is a really, really great game. It sounds like our early attempts at Dwar Fortress. Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's got a tech tree and everything else. Yeah, it's, it just takes things to new levels. It's pretty cool. It's funny. Dwar Fortress has a tech tree. It's just not revealed anywhere, except for the wiki.

Yeah. You have to figure it out on your own. Okay, well, it is coming up on the top of the hour. So why don't we wrap this episode up? It's great to be back. I am going to roll before our next episode at New Fortress like Tony and we're going to run this one throughout 2026 or until it dies. I'm going to be a little more what you say

be a little more risky with it. I think that I didn't start in a savage biome this time which may have been part of my problem with it being a little gentle. Yeah, I like to start in those savage biomes because if you start in the bubble blub or fluff or whatever it is,

it can be really hard to find cool animals and stuff like that. I didn't care for that. You mean like a good biome? The Bluffl Fluff. I just started one in a Bluffl Fluff biome. I don't know what that is. Bubble Blub, a peaceful biome. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Well, on the other hand, you do get unicorns. Oh, unicorns. That's right. Thank you for the remember of that, the reminder of that. Bubble Blub. That's it. Bubble Blub.

Bob. Yeah. It's suddenly found in good aligned regions providing nourishment for majestic unicorns and other fine creatures that happen to live there.

I don't know. The good, like they're generally good biomes with the weird stuff and the unicorns and the blue grass. I think I've tried it twice and it's,

I think it's not easy simpler because everything is weird and the only trees that you properly get is like feather wood. Yeah. So. I like a little bit of chaos, but not so much as that I'm in like a haunted biome. Although maybe I should just learn to play those. They can be quite great.

I can tell you that. They can be great. But the start is, oh, especially if you think you know what kind of biome it will be. And you think, oh, this is reanimation. and 15 seconds after the start, you get the notification that a cloud of roiling mist has arrived. And you're like, oh, this is not a reanimation biome. This is a ghoul biome. And then you have like mist zombies and they rip someone apart.

And you're like, okay, so that's happening. And then that person stands up and you have normal zombies. And you're like, okay, so we have mist and reanimation. That's great. Okay. And then your fortress ends. Yeah, and then it's like when the corpses that have died, then become corpses that then kill things, that break things apart into more corpse pieces that then reanimate it. You know, that is a normal zombie, like, pipeline.

The mist zombie pipeline, I think, is much cooler because the mist coats someone in, like, slimy slime or whatever. Oh, God. And that gives the syndrome of, they become a zombie. a miss zombie. So if they scratch or bite someone, that like slime, that goo is now the other person as well so that means you have like a

normal zombie media infection rate at some point. Sort of napole. Dorman Napal. Pretty neat. Hmm. That's pretty cool. Warm Beers is an expert fortress for Dwarven Napal. It's called Magma. Magma.

The magma death tower. That's great. All right guys. So we're going to wrap this one up. Episode 128 is in the books. Crazy. So everyone, get out there, play Dwarfortress. And we'll see you next time. Yeah. Offer-Zen.

Offi to see. With some least in my. Bye, bye. Bye, bye. Chisie. And that concludes this episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable, brought to you by Delta Whiskey's magma slick machinery, log hammer's suspiciously reliable trap parts,

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