Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 130: Trialworld of Fools

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

This episode, we talk about our fortresses, and Jonathan takes over. Download Trialworld of Fools (if you wanna)

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable at the podcast for All Things Dwarfee. My name's Jonathan. And I'm Roland. I'm Tony. So we got some nice commentary from our last episode. We did get a comment for the folks at Warm Beers. Not only can you drain a volcano, they successfully drained the volcano. Good degree.

I know. I haven't had a chance to go look at the saves yet. They said that they've improved the magma death tower. It's called, let me pull it up here. It is, okay, so let me just go ahead and read. This is from Timber Fox 13. So I asked if Magma Respond, like you spoke about. And Timber Fox says, yes, Magma responds fast.

The problem was getting rid of it faster than the respawn. And with the recording being three weeks ago, you probably haven't witnessed the full potential of the Dwarven Shower trademark. Especially not with Rurik's special dispenser disc and the upgrade of the intake. So I'm going to check this out. I actually hope that Timber Fox records a video demonstrating the Dwarven shower with the spatial, the spatial dispenser disc. Not special, the spatial dispenser disc. I wonder what that does. Yeah, yeah, right.

I also like the naming scheme that we are having here. It's basically just a lot of bathroom stuff happening in the dwarf section. They're able to use its full potential, and the result is a 70 Z-level deep, 12-by-12 tile-wide. stable open space hole in the liquid magma of the volcano. Wow. The word. So they've got a 12 by 12 void down through the center of the volcano. That's pretty awesome.

Good grief. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah. So, yeah, keep on trucking, warm beers. Yeah, that's highly impressive. It is. I think that's going to be the master class in how to tame your volcanic urges. Probably could have said that a better way.

Also on the minutes from our last meeting, you do need to upload your snake fortress to dwarf worlds, Roland. I got some comments about that, so people would like to see that. Oh, right, yeah. The new website, right? Yep, yep, yep. Yes, yes. Dwarfworlds.com. Don't go to dwarfworld singular.com because that's a completely different thing.

Yeah, that sounds like a risky site. It's nothing family unfriendly. It's just got nothing to do with Dwarfortress. Okay, okay, okay. Dwarfworlds.com, plural. All right, I guess maybe I've spent too much time on the Internet. All right. Tony, have you been playing Dwarf Fortress in the last couple weeks?

Oh, I certainly have. We're going to start with you. Yeah. So I'm still playing with Siege stuff. This new endeavor that I've got, his weird. weirdly kind of turned into a goblin fort, as in very quickly all the goblin poets in the entire world started showing up. And so now I've got goblin dancers, goblin poets. It's like, it's all goblins. Like my... Are these like the outcasts of their civilization? I don't know.

So, I mean, now this fort's mostly goblins, which is really interesting because as far as I can tell, they don't actually eat or drink, but they still have negative thoughts about not getting alcohol, but then they won't drink it, so I don't really know what to make of it. Hmm. Yeah. Maybe don't have their brand. Yeah.

But you have accepted all these bards and dancers and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I take everybody. They are now permanently parts of your fortress? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's citizens. Yeah, I can even name them as like nobles. so my captain of the guard is a goblin and my chief medical dwarf was a goblin

for a while just because, you know, like that's fun. I have a chief medical dwarf goblin. That's kind of cool. You've mentioned that before, yeah. Yeah, I've done it before. I'll do it again. I'm fascinated. Especially because they don't die too old age, right?

Yeah, yeah. I think it's like this is a, this is, I mean, it seems like I can't make them happy though because I don't know if them being unhappy is even problem, to be honest. But anyway, yeah. So they seem to be upset about not having a nice meal, but then they don't eat. They don't like drinking, you know, like those are the things that I'm trying to figure out. I don't think they tantrum, though.

I don't know. So it's interesting. Not really what I was expecting to have happened with my fort. Is this your 2026? Yeah. This is my new one. Yep. Yep. And so, and I've had a few, you know, start it is full starts here. But yeah, I've got my reinforced wall up. The threats I faced are a few forgotten beasts, which have been easily dispatched with, you know, just a couple of wonks across the head with a steel sword. And lots and lots and lots of wear creatures, which really sucks. But so far I've been able to contain them. Yeah, I got something about wear creatures coming up too. Yeah. Yeah, they cage. One of them caged, trapped.

which was kind of cool. Really? I didn't think he would do that. So anyway, I got him in a cage and then I couldn't figure out what to do with him, so I just walled him up. Maybe he caged trapped before he converted, before he turned. Yeah, I could very well be. I can't even remember now.

I just was like, oh, well, that's cool. Because I was trying to orchestrate all this stuff with burrows to get him to go to a place and then I was going to, you know, chain him up. But I couldn't get that to work. And then all of a sudden he's in a cage trap. And I was like, well, that's cool. Everything's worked out. So now every full moon he turns in his cage, but he can't do anything because he's trapped in the wall.

That's interesting. Yeah. So anyway, he's just my little canary. So I know when he turns, then I, you know, if he, if it looks like nobody else got bit, got bitten. But they still, there's just a lot of wear creatures that have had wear koalas and wear geckos. And yeah, it's been a little, uh, little crazy. If we ever do an episode about what we don't like about Dwar Fortress, where beasts will be my choice for the things that just annoy the heck out of me. They are tough.

I don't like them. Yeah, they are tough. Because I just don't know how to deal with them. Yeah. It always gets out of hand. Yeah. I've got a way to deal with them. That's coming up.

Yeah. Where creatures are definitely challenging. I think it's hard because you can't see when somebody gets. bitten necessarily. Yeah, you have to scroll through all the military reports and really like figure out who fought, who only shot, who only punched, who a bit. And it's, it's very hard. Look who has, has injuries that are broke the skin. Yeah. Yeah. And that's tough to find sometimes. Yeah, those, those combat logs get a little dry. They're a little tough. Yeah.

Yeah. Until it's almost over. And someone's like, oh, the darkness is upon me. I have death all around. I am not afraid. Yeah. And then you're like, well, it's too late now. You're screwed.

Fear is the little mind killer. Yeah. Yeah. That's tough. But, you know, we're doing it. I guess I'll just, I'm just going to kind of keep see what's happening. But I think it's going to be all dwarves or all goblins pretty soon. Really?

Yeah, so I guess they'll never die, so. Roland, how do you deal with wear beasts? That is a legitimate question. Usually with a lot of panic, I have tried to involve my archers in dispatching them more, but we all know that archers can be unreliable at times. So I just really, really hope that it gets killed quickly before it bites anybody. And because I don't want to scroll through all the combat reports, I started to set up my hospital in a way that each bed is in their own room and I could potentially lock them.

So because then I sometimes get the possibility of actually locking a person in before something happens. or they turn. I get the notification and they go and like destroy the bed before the door. It's so and so because sometimes I've had a person that got bit and did not go to the hospital. You know, the zombie survivor that got bit and is like hiding the bite and it's like, no, I'm fine. Yeah. It's a flesh wound. It's merely a flesh wound.

Yeah. And the tricky part is sometimes you're confident that you have contained it. You're like, yeah, my military dispatch it very nicely. It died very quickly, right? And maybe, maybe like, Eurist here in this bed and he, maybe they got bit. And then some completely random person turns and bites like four other people in one combat report that is only 16 lines. and you're like, this is, this is, this is, this is going terribly. Does it take, does it take a little while longer for a wear beast or any beast to get

through a door, then how long does it take for them to bust through a door? That is, I don't know. I don't think they are in this, in this episode, because I had one that came in and he just sat patiently outside the door. I, I put the drawbridge up behind him, and then he just had a single door. that I had locked. He just sat there at the door, just kind of waited patiently. Yeah, I think it depends on the version, because don't ask me the actual version

dates, please, but in a previous version, I know that doors got ripped off their hinges in like nothing, and everyone just walked through doors. Goblins walk through doors. The forgotten beast just ripped it out of the frame, too, and doors were coming. completely useless. And one update later, a massive forgotten beast would just respect the door and would say, oh, no, it's forbidden. I can't go through us.

I'm sorry. Well, I guess if it's locked, yeah. I guess. Better not. Okay. Sorry to bother you. So. So I like your idea of the isolation ward in your hospital.

It kind of brings to mind 1930s-era hospitals from like old movies where there's like pipes exposed in the ceiling and all that. But my thought was to put multiple doors leading to each of your, each of your hospital room so that you could have a little bit more warning time whenever, whenever they wake up. But then, then Tony, you said, draw bridges. So could you make a metal one tile wide drawbridge to be the door for your, for your isolation wards?

Yeah. Because they do take a little bit of time to get through. an iron drawbridge. Yeah. Yes. I think it's... A lot of fiddling, but... Yeah, I think that is very reasonable.

Probably is more likely to actually kill the wear beast when you pull it up. That is the only downside here. Say la V. Yeah, but killing stuff with drawbridge is never really sad right with me. I mean, I'm sad if I take the L, and everyone is infected and is such a... suddenly like a flesh-eating wear mammoth. Okay, that's bad. But I would rather have that over like a drawbridge accident kill.

Yeah, it feels bad. That's funny because to me there is very few things that are more singularly dwarf fortress than drawbridges that atomize beings. It happens to the best of us. I think that's very dwarfy. Yeah, I feel like it happens to the best of it. Oh, yeah. Eventually we run into that problem.

Oh, that's awesome. Are you still planning on doing some cool science with your fortress, Tony? Yeah, so I had a couple things. One thing I did that wasn't working right was I made a room full of quantum stockpiles. And see, that doesn't set well with me. Quantum top stockpiles, yeah. Something went wrong with it. And basically then everyone quit working in the entire fortress.

and I just couldn't get anybody to do anything. All they would do is socialize and drink and stuff like that. And I spent all this time just trying to figure out how do I undo this problem, how do I, how do I, how do I? And never really figured it out. So I deleted all of my quantum stockpiles as one does. And then everything started to work again. That's weird.

So I think they were getting hung up somehow. I think I had done something incorrectly with quantum. stockpiles. I think I messed up. Interesting. That's my theory. So I don't know what the heck I did to my quantum stockpiles. But whatever it was, deleting them made it so then trees would get cut down and things

would get mined and floors would get. And I was using the prioritize and I don't know what was going on. Something went wrong with my plan there. So this fortress is still up and going strong? Yeah. Yeah. It's all goblins. Now they've started working again.

I've built a little... I've got these blowgunner creatures down in the... Down in the caverns. And I wanted to use them as practice for my bolt throwers, which is fun. But now no one will bring ammo

to the bolt throwers, so the bolt throwers are just sitting there empty. So we're still working out. We've got a few problems here and there. But yeah, I've got a lot of... to learn, I think. With like, why do you not bring me bolts?

We have bolts. You just won't bring them jerks. So I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I'm sure it's a... Is that for a bull thrower? Yeah, it's for the bolt thrower. It's just I've put it in a stockpile. I've got bins.

I did it all. And they just won't move any ammo. I got to figure out what's going on with that and why they're not doing it. This is, I mean, 100% the problem exists between keyboard and chair. Yes, I know that I'm doing something wrong here, so I'll figure it out if anyone's listening and has a potential thought to why no one's putting bolts in the bolt thrower stockpile. I'd love to hear it. This segment has been brought to you by Byron's tavern music and morale boosting. When the fortress gets a little too quiet or a little too tense, Byron brings the tunes.

From rousing drinking songs to dramatic ballads about lost pickax. taxes. Byron keeps spirits high and productivity, well, negotiable. Byron, because every fortress sounds better with a loot in it. In my fortress, I had a stairwell that had a space around it that was often occupied, but it didn't have room around it to do anything really with it. So I turned it into a meeting area and put a couple of display furniture in it. I thought that I'd use that to put some artifacts so that, you know, people would get good thoughts from going by them.

And I noted that with the name of that meeting area, it called itself an unnamed museum. So I remember a few episodes ago, I was talking about the fact that you couldn't designate a museum anymore. Now I'm kind of wondering if that just happens automatically whenever you put a display furniture into a meeting area. It just becomes a museum by default. Oh, the game has become much smarter than the players. well I don't know if a museum actually did much you know you could you could call them sculpture gardens I think in the in the past but I'm not sure how much you know mechanisms in the game it took to actually do that I think it was just a labeling because you have a meeting area people gather

there there are pretty things to look at so they get good thoughts I don't know but so yeah I think that that took care of my museum's question. So just put some display, some display furniture and pretty trinkets in a meeting area and you got yourself a museum. Okay. But do you, if you call it, just leave it as a meeting area. Don't change it to a tavern or something else. Right. Whenever, you know, you have the, I don't even remember if meeting areas themselves get names without turning it into a tavern. But you do have a label for the meeting area that you can.

you know, customize. So it says unnamed meaning area, or unnamed museum. Ah. I see. Okay. I didn't actually rename it. It still says unnamed museum, but I thought that was kind of neat. Yeah.

Can I answer my question from a few episodes ago? Yeah. Okay. That's really good to know. I think I might try that. I'm going to fire up my thing and get that it go. Yeah. You also wanted to talk about Whalebeast.

and how you handle them. Yeah, that's going to be towards the end of my narrative here. Okay. So shall we get into that? It's fairly content rich. Yeah, sure. So, Roland, I have been intrigued with your multi-biome embark area. Oh, yeah, you mentioned.

With the ice freezing. And then the unfrozen ice rolling through the river into the colder area. So that is hard to find. Whenever you're trying to look for that on purpose, first you've got to have multibiums with rivers in them to be useful. It needs to be cold as one of the biomes and temperate as the other. Because if you have a freezing biome, it never unfreezes. So it doesn't do you much good. So I had a world that I'd built that I was looking through that.

And I just really couldn't find it. Oh, another thing you have to have, you have to have the river flowing. right way, tough enough to find. And you have to have a change in elevation. You have to have a waterfall as well. I think you have to have a waterfall because otherwise it's not going to fill up the area. There has to be probably some kind of Z level difference, right? Yeah, for your river.

Okay. So I thought, well, maybe I should fiddle with world gen parameters. So. Yeah. So, yeah, I started fiddling with world gym parameters. And I think that that is very addictive. Okay. I always, yeah, I'm, I'm, now I'm intrigued.

How's that working? First of all, I've got to say that did you know that you can rename your world while it's generating? During world gen, you can give your world the new name. So, so I just, I just discovered that while I was waiting for the, for the world to generate with the parameters being tweaked. So I named it trial world of fools. That way I could point out which one was my custom parameters. Trial World. That's funny.

It actually lets you call it trial world. Yeah, trial is one of the, one of the dwarven words that you can do. And World is another one. And of fools is another one. So, yeah. So wait, the naming featured like you have for a fortress. Exactly. Wow.

It's the same kind of options in the same world. old words as renaming your fort. So, yeah, you can do Control T during WorldGen, and it brings up the interface, just like if you're custom naming a fortress or a civilization or anything like that, you've got the beginning of the compound word, the end of the compound word, the of, the, the whole string of things. You can make a really elaborate name for your world. So, yeah, Control T during World Gen, you can have fun with it.

I was hoping to do a world called, you know, Experienced. world of some sort, but I couldn't, experiment was not part of the choices that I had. Yeah. I think you can rename the folder to anything you want. Yeah. But the actual dwarvy name of the world, you have to use the kind of blank and Control T and rename it like a, yeah, like a civilization or a fortress name. Yeah.

Which makes it even cooler. Yep. To me. So yeah. So my new world is called Trial World of Fools. Interestingly, I had a cool name for the, for the, for the, fortress that I ended up with. It was called cobalt fangs.

Problem is there's no cobalt that I've been able to find in this, in this fortress here. And that was purely random. But it was a cool name anyway. Maybe they're just, maybe, you know, that's your story.

You know, they're hungry. They miss it. Came from their homeland. Boy, all they want is called, anyway, I'm just going to stop withering.

So I spent probably an hour, an hour and a half kind of tweaking the world generation parameters, kind of learning what the ones that I, was interested in do. So what I settled on was I changed the minimum and maxima of the temperatures in my fortress, or in my world, so that it would be a little bit colder than your typical world would be. Because if you're looking for frozen rivers, then the hot, warm, scorching biomes don't

do you a bit of good. So I read up in the dwarf fortress wiki, the parameter to change. and it was like the minimum temperature, maximum temperature, I believe, were the ones that I tweaked. Is there a way to find out your world parameters after the fact? Anybody know that? Is there a raw somewhere? Now you're asking questions?

I have not really... It's a toughie. The world generation that much. It's a toughy. In the middle of this, I was like, you know what? We need to get Tarn on here and just have a deep dive about world gen. Because if there's anyone who's gone to be able to tell us all the gory details about it, it would be here. He does know a lot about the game and how it's written.

he might be one of the foremost experts people have asked us to get him back on here and and I've been kind of reluctant to you know kind of bug him about it unless I had a good subject I think world gen would be kind of cool though it would be yeah that's that's useful I don't want to get him back on here to say hey what's the history of dwarf fortress you know yeah tell us about crap I'm just going to ask him about cooking that's that's gonna be

so what's it like to be a millionaire you know none of that that would be not I agree. I think that's really cool. Swell idea. So in order to maximize my chance of having a elevation change with my river, I wanted to tweak the terrain so that it was more variable. So I changed the mesh size of the terrain to, I think I changed it to 16 by 16. I don't know what the default is. By default, it says ignore the mesh size and the mesh weight and it just does this thing. but I don't know what that gives the default parameters to be, because I couldn't find that in the Dwar Fortress Wiki.

But I did change the mesh size to be a little bit smaller, and I think what that does is it makes your individual biomes able to be smaller. It takes a smaller square to plop a biome down before it goes to the next biome. And so I think that that gives you the chance to have more finely, a higher resolution, if you will, of biomes. Hmm. Okay. And then I tweak the mesh weight based on the Dwar Fortress Wiki's description of what the mesh weight does, such that you would have a lot more cliffs that are in the world. And whenever you're doing your embark, you can see the cliff steepness by, I think it's called the elevation button on it, but you can see the little slashes that show how steep the cliffs are.

and they're colored like the red ones are really, really steep. Okay. So, yeah, I did that. And I eventually, after probably an hour, hour and a half of playing with it, I finally hit Create World. And it went through like 400 failed rejected worlds. But the thing is, it went through those 400 rejected worlds like in five seconds. It just like just really just scan them up.

So it didn't take very long at all. whenever it linked on to one that didn't immediately get rejected, it went ahead and built my world out of it. So my world, I went and I did the embark, and sure enough, it had lots and lots of elevation changes. It was, oh, another thing that I did was I put two poles, because if you have a one pole world, then it's going to be warmer at one side and colder at the other,

whether at the top or bottom. If you have two poles, you're going to have cold, moderate, and cold again as you go from top to bottom. Yeah. I figured that would give me more chance to have what I'm looking for, which is a river with a cold and temperate biome and have an elevation change on the river. So I found my spot. And there were tons, whenever I did by a world fighter,

there were tons that matched my wishes. So I'm going to be probably playing with this world for quite a while. I might end up, you know, saving it and put it in my pocket so that I can have it for later if I completely destroy it. So whenever I did my embark, it was just like that. There was a flat area in the middle, and then they're on either side, there's these really steep cliffs, and it's a really desirable-looking embark. So have we got any commentary so far? That, it sounds pretty cool what you did. I'm impressed that you got WorldGen to work properly.

That is also true, yes. I didn't tweak a lot of them. Like I said, those are the only two that I tweaked was the temp of men maxima and the elevation mesh weight, the mesh size and the mesh weight. And also put two poles on it. So, yeah, it wasn't really that disastrous. Now, I had done some tweaking recently also of WorldGen parameters, and I just was basically randomly going through there and changing numbers where I thought it looked good, and that just was a disaster. So I think that if you just tweak a little bit, apparently it has a big change in the way worlds end up. So I recommend if you're interested in that sort of thing, which I, turns out I am now.

Yeah, try it out. Have you actually gotten the map to, like, do the same things that my map does? Like, how much have you played in that? Well, I played for, like, 10 hours yesterday. Oh, okay. On this one world. Unfortunately, while it did have my, most of my desires, the rivers all. on one elevation. It does

all stay in the cold zone. So the river freezes, it stays cold longer. So I don't get what I was looking for. However, I thought, well, this is a very interesting looking embark location anyway. I'll just kind of see what it's like.

It was radically different from what the feel of what my normal worlds are. I dug down a couple levels from, and it started with my embark at the river level, and I think that was at Z-level zero, I dug down 10 Z levels and I hit the cavern almost immediately, the first cavern layer. So I was like, huh, it's like at minus eight was where I hit the first cabin layer.

Wow, that's pretty high. Yeah. So one thing I've found with this particular world are the cavern layers are compressed for whatever reason. By the time coming up, I'll talk about the magma C. I got to the magma C at minus 32. So the magma C is really close to the top. Wow. What is the rest of all the elevations?

This is literally just magma? Oops, oh, magma? That's what happened to me, yes. Oh, my God. Yeah, and dwarfs were killed. Oh, dear. I haven't really, I haven't ever, this is the first time I'd ever run into the magma sea.

I think we've talked about it. That's like, every once in a while I have seen magma at the sides and run into some warm stone, but I have never revealed the magma sea before. It actually tells you, you are looking at a magma sea. There's a message box that comes up that says, oh, wow, I'll tell you what, that's awesome, right before it kills the dwarf who found it.

So what it was was, whenever I ran into the warm stone, I was trying to dig around it and kind of like poking because I'd heard that that's where you can find the cotton candy. So I was kind of, I was kind of dig around trying to kind of look for that. And I had them dig one tile too deep. And I dumped, I let the magma go. And that stuff flows pretty fast. It's not like lava where you can outrun it.

Yeah, true. Yeah, I had the dwarf who found it get, you know, burned tookrisp instantly. I had another dwarf who ended up getting trapped in a layer below because it filled up that room and went down the stairwell and filled up what I had dug out below that. And yeah. So I lost, I think, three, four dwarves, something like that. Yeah, I found the magma sea. Digging in the magma sea is always such, like, again,

a, like a finicky thing to do, because if you're not in the very first layer, everything below the first layer is like under pressure. So the magma will come in there in like two milliseconds, completely fill all tiles, and your dude is gone. Yeah. No room for mistakes. Well, speaking of the top of the magma C, I did find that top of the magma C, and now that I know what to look for, it's kind of obvious.

once you find the magma seed, there is going to be a Z level where you have just a revealed ton of warm stone. So I figured out that, yeah, that was the top. So I can dig that out. And for the first time ever, I used magma workshops. I did a magma smelter, a magma kiln, a magma glass furnace. It's great. Yeah, so I have my foundries in my metalworking industry does not depend quite so much

on coal anymore. I didn't think about it, but it turns out you still need fuel for your metalworking shop because you can't have a magma metal forge. What do you mean? Metal workers workshop. What's that called? Metal smith. You know, the guy who makes weapons and armor.

That doesn't run on magma. You still got to have fuel for that. No, what? Wait. You have a magma forge. No, you don't need stuff for that, I don't think. You might need, like, marble. You need it for, like, you know, you, you,

need, exactly, yeah, for steel, you will need coal. But the magma forge is a magma forge that uses magma to craft, for example, armor and weapons. Oh yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I will be very real. I heavily dislike figuring things out with coal and supply, so sometimes I will cheat in some magma and make my own, like, little magma forge, just for that reason. Magma, I have a, I don't see a magma forge here. I have glass furnace, kiln, magma glass furnace.

It's not under smelters. It is under craft's workshops now, I think. And there it should be under magma forge, like an extra tab. Oh. Yeah. I'll be danged.

Yeah. I didn't see that. Well, I'll be danged. Okay. Yeah. Never mind. I need to dig another hole. But as we'll find out soon,

that's probably going to be in my next fortress. Learn something new. every day, right? Perfect. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. So now I found that out, and I even depend less on, on coal.

So you still need coal for making steel. Yeah. Well, it said in my finder that I had flux here, I'll be thinking if I can find it. I have not yet found a flux. So my, my armies are based on bronze and iron. No flux stone is a real pisser. Yeah. You know, I've kind of gotten used to it.

Bronze, I think looks pretty. So, you know, that's okay. And bronze and iron are pretty close to each other as far as durability and weapon use according to the wiki. What do we think about Electrum? Do you guys ever use that? I never built it. The golden silver alloy. I always feel like I'm in ancient Roman when I'm doing that.

You know, Electrum has actually a use for me, like a legit use where I will specifically use Electrum for, and that is a very weird use. A while ago, I made, I don't know if you remember that, but seeds and planting worked a little different before steam, I would say. When it was fresh on steam, there was like an issue where sometimes your seeds would just go poof and suddenly your dwarfs had nothing to plant with or something. And I was a little annoyed at that, and I wanted to get really. rid of barrels. And so I made electron barrels specifically to only store seeds and them. This allows

me to make normal wooden barrels and just not look at what I'm selling because I know all the important seeds will be in my electron barrels, which are on top of the list. That's a great idea. Thanks. It also looks nice. Yeah, because they're now all look the same. Gold and silver alloy. Very cool thing, I think. I took a look here. The magma seeds. actually on level negative 21, not 30-something. So... What a weird, Mac. That is a weird now.

Assuming that those caves that I hit were like all three layers, I hit three layers of caverns down to the magma C and 21 Z levels. So, I mean, it's like I was digging my exploratory for putting the crap on my wagon, and boom, I hit a cavern. So it was interesting. I haven't actually used the caverns yet. I've walled them up, but because I only had seven dwarves, right? I didn't think that I was in a state where I could handle, you know, lots of cavern beasties.

But, yeah, negative 21, yeah, it's a weird, this world is a weird map, and I'm really looking forward to exploring it. It changes the feel of the game quite greatly. I was surprised. You mean the weird maps? Yeah. Yeah. The things aren't where you expect them to be, and it's not any really harder to deal with. It's just a cool, it's refreshing.

I like it. Yeah. Yeah. This episode of Dwar Fortress Roundtable is made possible in part by Noam Gals' stockpile optimization and barrel logistics. Running out of space? Can't find the plump helmets? Are there socks and the weapons bin again? Noam reorganizes your fortress so food is near the kitchen, booze is near everyone, and nothing important is accidentally stored in the magma safe pile. Noam Gow, because efficiency is the real luxury.

So things seem to be compressed time-wise in this fortress. I'm at like year three, and I have 51 dwarves, and all these things that are happening with me are things that typically would happen after five or six years of in-game time. So things have just really, really sped up, including the fortress's demise. So let's get to Warebees. apparently one of my migration waves had a were beast in it because I had a weird gecko outbreak in my tavern. Uh-oh.

Oh, that's the worst. It is. I mean, lock the door and just leave them to die? Well, yeah. Let them just eat themselves. That's wrong. Well, typically, it'll be like year three where I really start concentrating on my squads because whenever I get to around 50 dwarfs, that's about the time that I realized,

you know, I should get some squads gone because I'm almost to the population level where I'm going to start getting sieges. Well, I got the wear gecko before I got sieges. And I only had one squad and they had just been created. So they hadn't even done any training yet. Oh. Yeah. So it was a bunch of dwarves fighting with their bare hands against wear geckos. A lot of people got infected.

What's that? A lot of people got infected. Turns out, yeah. I thought that I had isolated them. I'd taken and made a, what's the word? Quarantine? No, you do it with the map. Burrow.

Burrow, okay. Yeah, borough. So, yeah, I made a burrow. I went through, you know, the combat list and found all the dwarves that lived through it and put them into a particular borough. And I was ready. There's like five of them that were still alive from my fortress. but then I didn't get them all. The next full moon came.

And those five didn't change, but lots of other people did. So that's pretty much where I stopped my fortress at 2 o'clock this morning. That's amazing. So I don't want to lose this world because I remember that the last time I had a wear beast outbreak and I didn't handle it well, it ended up destroying my world because every fortress that I would build in that world, ended up with wear beasts in the fortress after just a few years. And I don't want that to happen with this one. So I think that I'm going to be doing a very, very evil thing. No.

I think that I might take and employ the magma sea to eradicate my dwarves. To make sure that the amount of wear beasts is decreased in the world. Well, to make sure that the ones that may get out aren't from, my fortress. Oh, I see. Yeah. I see. So I just retired those fortresses on that last world, and that doesn't work because

you get the migrations of these wear-a-beast infected people. So I'm going to like, yeah. That's a hard decision. Yeah, it's going to be fun, though. Yeah. So I was thinking about this morning. Whenever I woke up, I was still thinking about this fortress, right? You know that a game is in your freaking head whenever you wake up the next morning

thinking about what you're going to do about your fortress. So I decided what I might do. Let's put a burrow below the magma sea. Oh, Lord. And what happened by accident to those dwarves whenever we found the magmacy may happen on purpose to the population. These poor 51 dwarven souls, oh, plus a couple of human traders that somehow or another got trapped in the lower next to my fortress and can't find their way out. I don't know what the deal is with that. but I've got human merchants just hanging out in a corridor,

and they have been for like a year and a half. So anyway, that's the story of cobalt fangs. That is also an outstanding name for a fortress. I know, right? I mean, it truly, truly is. There's no cobalt, though. Nope. It's still a great name.

But if where geckos have fangs, we do have fangs. Oh, and I have eight injured citizens in no functional hospital. Oh, no, you need a chief medical goblin. I've got a chief medical dwarf, but... Doesn't count. But... Yeah. It's goblins or nothing.

I'm playing a goblin for it. That's my new... That's my new thing. Okay. That's actually pretty cool. So, can you share the world? Because I'm quite interested in learning more about the world, and especially I want to find out whether or not more parts of the world have this, like, thing where they have, like, thing where they have,

like oops or magma because that is funny. Yeah, I'll zip up this world and the fortress will still be active. So you can check out that fortress before you nuke it and do the stuff with it if you'd like. Maybe I finally get some wear beasts again. Oh my God, I'll give you some. Yes, you can have all the wear geckos you want, buddy. Nice. Today's show is sponsored by Patrick Shaw's lever management and documentation.

services. Have a lever that does something important, but you can't remember what? Patrick labels, diagrams, and color codes your entire mechanism network, so you'll never again wonder which switch floods the trade depot. Patrick Shaw, turning, don't pull that one, into clear written policy. Oh, another weird thing, the dwarves that got killed by the gecko have turned into death zombies. A lot of those. Yeah, I'm assuming that's what happened, because all of a sudden, after, you know, two months of wear Gecko attacks. I've got a crap ton of death zombies

in my fortress. I think that they were my former citizens. What? That is weird. Let me post a picture of my death zombie here. Are they now in like the other tab? Are there enemies

of the state or like what's what's happening? I don't know where they sit as far as the tabs go. I just clicked a picture of one. Hey, you know what? decapitation affects your vision Decapitation compromises your vision That is shocking

Let me post this to the Discord here Control C, here's one of them Dwarf death zombie Vision lost She has no head Well that does make it hard to see What happened to that?

I have no idea Because the tabs don't have much information in them. But in the health one it says dwarf death zombie, a short sturdy creature, fond of drinking industry. She is unbelievably strong, basically unbreakable, agile, and slowed attire. Her lower body is cut open. Her neck is torn open. Her left kidney is fractured.

Her head is gone. And the portrait has a headless dwarf. Is lovely. Say, what do they do? So far, they just stand around in the tavern. Let me take a picture of my tavern. They just socialize, huh? Well, I don't know if they really...

Like, I put pause whenever that second zombie outbreak out, or that second where beast outbreak happened. And I am kind of not doing anything with it yet because I wasn't quite sure what to do. But here is a picture of my tavern. It's not very well appointed yet, because, you know, this fortress, all this has happened in two game years of the fortress.

Wow. Talking freaking compressed time, right? Yeah. There's my tavern. Those blue things are death zombies. Oh, that's nice. Oh, yeah. The entrails on the floor.

Are you in a haunted biome? Are these things coming back? Not that I'm aware of. It didn't indicate haunted biome whenever I... Okay, that picture is amazing. Because it looks like it's the death zombie with the no head. Because it also looks like it's got glass. glasses on somehow.

I was kind of thinking that was maybe blood spurting, you know, blue zombie blood. That's fascinating, actually. That is going to make the episode art, the death zombie picture. Yeah, that makes sense. That death zombie is amazing, yes. Like really zoomed in, too, would be very funny.

That should be your chief medical dwarf right there. Well, they have no personality. They're pretty much like the, zombies from night of the living dead. A lot of doctors I've worked with. Sorry. I think if I had no head, my personality would also

be kind of boring. You're kind of, you know, he's dull. Yeah, magma see on elevation 21. Dang. Yep. Please don't too much commentary on my, on my foreshadow.

I do have some pretty floors, though. Yeah, I was going to say, not all of them are pretty left. I liked the artistic attention to detail with your floors there. I thought they were really cool. Oh, in the cavern? Yep.

I liked it. Checkerboard. I like that. You're very good with the details. I tend to be function over style. And I feel like I'm always missing something. Well, one of the problems with this fortress is there's not a whole lot of variation in stone types. So mostly it's claystone, sandstone, and mudstone that I'm being able to make my floors out of.

I've got quite a variety of woods. from from upstairs. So if I want lighter colors, I've got some, some willow wood. But yeah, like we talked about last, last episode,

my fortresses, I really, I obsess about making them be nice to look at. It also makes the dirt floor areas where you have soil. It makes them much more, you know, usable.

Yeah. Because you can, I hollowed out a big area and of dirt floor, I put, put flooring on it and used walls rather than, constructed walls rather than the soil walls. That's where my, that's where my

barracks were going to be. Anyway, enough about me. I have rambled on for almost this entire episode. You've done great, and we love it. This was very interesting. I've learned something. Yeah. Yeah. I'm down. Is anything else that I can't find flux?

Oh, bad luck. I mean, there is a possibility that there is like a tiny, tiny little bit of flux. on your map and the game is like, yeah, of course there's flux. I didn't tell you how much, though. Well, also, look, I'm only 21 Z levels down and all this has happened. So it may be 30 Z

levels down before I find the flux. There may be big caches of marble. Oh, yeah, true. I'm going to probably nuke this fortress and start over with another one. Also, I didn't get my elevation change on my river like I wanted, but there are

tons of areas in this world because it's a cool temperature. a cool world that I'm going to be able to choose from to try to find that elevation change of rivers. It looked like on the on the elevation map that I would get and I do have a major change in elevation but just turns out that the river flowed through the uh through the temperance sorry through the cold zone. Is that the lower part of the map? What do you mean lower part of the map? Because if the river still flows in the like upper part of the map then you could channel and like make your own funny little waterfall.

I could, I could, but the entire river is in the cold biome. So it's going to freeze all at the same time. But what I could do is, yeah, I could take water and basically build a water tower on top of the, oh, that's an idea. Dover and have a tower? Have you built those before? No, I haven't. Yeah, I'm lousy with pump stacks. That's my biggest problem.

Man, I think I got to spend some time with pump stacks. Yeah. I'm going to have to get good with them because this experimentation that I've gotten into now pretty much requires pump stacks. And now I want to pump magma places that I've found a magma. Maybe the next fortress that I try will not have this much of an easy access to the magma. But this being the very first one, and it's a good-sized world, like 256 by 256 tiles, that makes me think that maybe it's going to be easier to find the magma.

So we'll see. Hopefully. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, Dwarven Water Tower. That's a great idea. We're all and I'll pump the water up, fill it up, and then make a manma, like the L.A. River. Make a manmade river.

It's perfect. And then you can film movies in it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I am too getting these references. Yes.

You getting that? Oh, cool. All right. Anybody else got anything they want to add before we were. wrap this one up? I don't think so. I'm going to keep on, keeping on with my fort and try to figure out why I keep failing on getting them to do stuff. So I'll be able to report back on that. And hopefully someone will listen to this and be like, you dummy, that's how you do this. Well, we've gotten a lot of good feedback from the Discord server on our last few episodes

where we're, you know, basically talking to. Yeah, really appreciate it, folks. So cool. Absolutely. So great to have this. feedback and have people. Oh, one last thing. We did have a couple of people fall victim to our triggering their mobile devices on the episode. I don't know that that was appreciated too much. Ah, it wasn't?

What were we doing? Were we having it play Despacito or something? Yeah, yeah. That was one of them had the Desposito issue. Sorry about that. One of them had their Android device get triggered. Or shall I say Lociento? I victimized myself with it.

I'm driving down the road. I've got my phone hooked up to my car stereo with Bluetooth. And I said that myself. And my truck asked me, Hi, what can I help you with? What? No, stop. That's amazing.

There goes my outro funny joke. What? We love it. What? Oh, were you going to trigger people's devices? Yeah, no, but, you know, that would have been funny. Well, yeah, I think that we should, I think that we should promise not to do that again to people. Yeah, that's save that for work, folks. The only way to win this thing, guys, is to pass it on to someone else next time you're at a work call.

Exactly. Or if you're in an Apple store, it's awesome, too. All right, episode 130 in the books. Thanks, guys. Eight piece. Nice. We're doing it. We've done done it.

Catch you later. All right, see you. Yeah, go pump some magma. Oh, by the way, we now not just have a Discord channel that you can join, but there now exists a Matrix group as well. What's a Matrix group? Matrix is like an alternative messaging service to Discord. Oh, good.

For those that do not have or do not want Discord. Yeah, I was about to have. ask you guys that maybe, you know, we should talk about this once we wrap. But I was curious because I think Discord's starting to force people to upload their ID or something. Yeah, it's going to get funny. So Matrix now exists, too. Okay, that's great. I like it.

And that wraps up episode 130 of Dwarfortress Roundtable. Brought you by Byron's Tavern Tunes and Morale Boosting. Gnome Gals' expertly sorted stockpiles and Patrick Shaw's clearly labeled levers. Thanks to our patrons for keeping the ale flowing, the fortress organized, and the floodgates open strictly on purpose. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast.

You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwar Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. If you'd like to contact us by email, the address is Urist at DFRoundable.com. That's UR-I-S-T at D-F-R-Rontable.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 D-F Roundtable. This is a conversational podcast. All Craftsworship is of the highest quality. Thanks, Delphonzo.