Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 131: Burnout and Other Fell Beasts

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

This episode, we cover the latest DF and DF Hack updates, what happens when you start to lose your focus with a game, and more discussion of Cobaltfangs. Enjoy!

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. My name's Jonathan. And I'm Roland. I'm Tony. Since I tweaked my parameters that I've been working in this world and with this fortress, it has brought back a lot of joy to my dwarf fortressing. So everybody out there, I recommend that you go in and you tweak a parameter or two of things that interest you and generate a world.

And you might find that those small tweaks really subtly, but, definitely changed the playing experience. It's great. So like what? That's what I'm wondering about, like, what are you tweaking and what's making a difference? Because there's so many options. I tweaked the temperature and I tweaked the,

I think it was called the geographic mesh. But I basically tweaked how rough the landscape is. And I'm still running on that same fortress that I was, that I talked about on the last episode. I actually saved it. I did not have to kill everybody. But it is still the fact. fact that those caverns are so close to the surface and the magna sea is so close to the surface,

it really changed the feel of the fortress. I've also noticing that I'm getting a crap ton more, and I didn't touch the parameters for Weirbees, but I'm getting a whole lot more baddies coming in. So it's been a bit of a challenge. So, yeah, it's been really cool. But before we talk about that, let's talk about the fact that, I know that D.F. Hack had an update. Did Dwar Fortress itself get enough? update two?

Yep. Last Wednesday. I really didn't even notice that there was an update until I saw the DF hack update and the explanation that they had for it. So did anything big happen in the Dwarf fortress update? I think it was mostly crashes and stuff that got addressed, but also it said something, where is it, food-related things? Yes.

dwarfs seek good meals more aggressively. Ah, that's nice. Yeah, it makes the food, I think food and mood are tied, right? Is that kind of the way? Oh, yeah. Like, if I eat a nice meal of, you know, three mosquito brain cocktail as opposed to, you know, egg loaf, then I'm going to be happier, I think is this. Yeah, here we are. Made happy food thought levels easier to obtain, and dwarves seek good meals more aggressively

and value better foods over worse ones more precisely. So I believe this does mean that the dwarfs are more inclined to look for meals that they specifically like or have ingredients that they like. So, for example, if somebody likes mosquito brains, they are going for mosquito brain soup instead of everything else, right? Oh, so it's even more specific. So ingredients matter. I hope so. I haven't really seen it yet in action, considering that I don't have too much mosquito brain soup in my fortresses. Sure.

But at the very least, it sounds like they will, if they have a fine meal and an elaborate meal, whatever the name is for that really good meal, they'll pick the really good one over the mediocre meal, hopefully. Even if that means they have to walk like two steps further. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, in my new dining hall, I have put some food storage stockpiles that have nothing but prepared meals in them. So I'm trying to reconfigure my barracks to be optimum barracks and have everything that they need nearby. They've got a dining hall.

I've got like four barracks that are built right next to each other. I'm still working on them, but I've got four barracks that are right next to each other. And I put a dining hall in the middle of it. it and I've put some amenities. I've got nice pretty trinkets that are around. So for your military, you mean? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Although other people are using the dining hall as well. It's put there so that the military, if they get hungry, they won't have to go far to eat. Mm-hmm. That makes sense. I see. Okay. Yeah. So you're putting the dining hall in those so that way they don't disrupt training too much.

That's right. That's right. Mm-hmm. I have put basically nice quarters in the barracks separate from the fighting area. Everybody has a bed, so anyone who wants to sleep, they won't all be taken up. There's a chest for everybody. There's a cabinet for everybody. There are two armor stands and two weapon racks.

They are all made of platinum so that they're really nice. There are artifacts in the barracks. Very cool. So that they all get happy thoughts while they're. while they're training. That is really just the easiest way of getting that quality up, huh? Yeah. Yeah.

And of course, it's me. So they are, you know, the floors are fancy as well. Of course. Yeah, you always do the nice patterns. I do actually now wonder, what would the offset mean of your dwarf, no longer having to walk through the entire fortress? to go and eat something, but just like change the room, like walk over there. I wonder if that is a large increase in training time.

Should be right. Well, when I read the Dwar Fortress Wiki and it talked, I think it was Dwar Fortress Wiki, it may have actually been on a Reddit post, but I did some research on an optimum barracks and it included things like a 10 by 10 area having armor and weapon. in stockpiles within the barracks itself and having food and drink stockpiles there so that they don't have to spend a lot of time going to search for their food and drinks that can eat, drink, and then get right back to work. So it sounds like it sounds like it may not have been insignificant.

So, you know, I haven't got it fully, fully set up yet. They're not actually training in their new barracks yet. So I'll probably be able to tell you next episode. whether I noticed a difference or not. Okay, yeah. They're still training in their original barracks. Just waiting for that upgrade. Yeah.

Yeah, I've been spending quite a while on it because I've had several things that have interrupted my construction projects, which we'll get into here in a little bit. I can imagine what that might be. So D.F. Hack also had an update. Of course, they do that every time that there's a dual fortress update. And I noticed one of these bugs in my day-to-day playing. So I have auto slab turned on. What that is is whenever somebody dies, they will automatically engrave a slab.

If there are blank slabs available, they'll engrave a slab for someone who needs to have a slab engraved. I guess if they haven't been put into a coffin and they're in danger of creating a ghost, they will automatically build a slab for them. So the caption on the release on Steam for the DFHack update 53.11R2, it says, what do you mean? You didn't want 133 memorial slabs for Eurist? So while I'm playing, I go to see if there's any slabs that need to be placed because I did notice that a ghost had popped up.

And I see that I have like a whole bunch of slabs for the same dwarf. I'm like, well, that's kind of odd. Yeah, so there was like three or four different dwarves that had like 12 each of the slab. So they were using up all the slabs to make multiple memorials for these particular dwarves. So I went ahead and placed them. I mean, once you grave a slab, you might as well place it. It's going to be like a cult. Might as well place it down.

You're going to have like a hundred to one dwarf and everyone's like, who is that guy again? So yeah. He's everywhere. Yeah. It's everywhere. This guy is crazy. So let me see if I can find it here. So, yeah, Athyl Thastarkal Doranitas Am has a whole bunch of slabs for him.

If I can take a look at this slab. It says, this slab reads in memory of Aethel, whatever that words were, born 152, put to rest in the year 254, Slayer of the Goblin, Noglusu, hated noble, loving father, admirer of horses. So I've got tons of slabs for this particular dwarf. Can you see how many? You know, I probably can. I'm not going to go into now because I'm just sitting here clicking, and I've got like five of them in a row that are all the same dwarf.

I don't know if they say the same thing, though. Goblin the glue suit and a hidden no bowl. It would be funny if they're different. Oh, yes, if they've carved a different scene for this guy's life each time. Yeah, that would be great. I don't think that's the way it is, though. No, it looks like they're all the same. They're just doops.

What if you sold them to passing elves or something? Oh, well, there's difference. Oh, they're different. Well, I mean, if he has more than like two likes or he likes horses and something, then there is a chance, obviously, that the gravestown well, not just say he's a lover of horses, but he also liked snails. Yeah. Yeah. I've got one that says lover of horses. One says devoted father.

One says admirer of circles. So they all, they did. say some separate, some different things. That is really lost. Here's one same guy. Significant loss. At one with native

aluminum. Wow. Yeah, I've got a lot of iron. I do have a lot of aluminum too, but I've got a lot of iron and I don't have any, I still haven't found any significant flux. I think I found a square or two.

So I have a lot of iron furniture, a lot of iron coffins. I mean, I had over a thousand bars of iron, so I figured I might as well use it. I wasn't using it for weapons anymore. So, yeah, that's one of the things that the DF hack update fixed. Another thing was, you remember that rename your world while it's generating that I talked about last time?

It turns out that that was a DF hack thing. And whenever I tried to use it after that episode, It hung up my little forges. So I was like, well, that kind of stinks. So one of the bugs that they fixed was that renaming was hanging up the game. So they fixed that. Ah, well, that's, well, I'm happy to see that, you know, the bug that we addressed got fixed, right? Yes, there we go.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Take a bow. It is interesting. and I haven't noticed this happening to my install yet, but there is an announcement in the DFHack update that says, I'll just go ahead and read it because it says, important, please read this.

Steam has changed the way the Steam client installed DFHack in a way that it prevents it from working automatically. Until we update our deployment mechanics, this means that users using DFHack via Steam may have to manually copy DFHack from the location Steam installs DFHack into, into Dwar Fortress's folder. Steam users who have to do this may also have to launch using the Dwar fortress entry

in their Steam library, not from the DFFHack entry. Well, I typically launch it by the Dwar fortress entry in my Steam library. I also launched it this morning from the DFHack entry. Neither one of them gave me any problems. So I don't know if that's one of you first installed DFHack.

Oh, I thought it was interchangeable. I just will sometimes they are launching DFHack. hack works and sometimes it doesn't. Now I just launch the game and usually everything just kind of trucks along with it. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. I've been just starting a D.F. Hack and it starts the game with D.F.

hack in it and I never thought about it. Yeah, I typically will launch Dwarf because, well, typically I'll just go down to the start bar and start typing dwarf and then hit enter and it launches it. So I have a question for you guys with the Steam release.

When I use DFHack, sometimes it'll tell me that like it's sinking something to the cloud. What's it? Do we know what D.F. Hack is sinking to the cloud? Like, it's not sinking save games, unfortunately. It would be really neat if we could do that. That's something I would have seized. But I don't

think it is, or is it? Or am I totally missing something? That was my question. Well, now you're asking real questions. Coming in hot. Well, I've noticed that whenever I launch from another computer, that it sometimes

says that my game is out of sync with Steam and and ask me if I want to play anyway. And I'll be like, yeah, yeah, that's fine. I don't care. And typically it happens whenever I'm on another computer and I have Tor Fortress running on a different computer. I don't port my saves between computers. I have different worlds and different games on my laptop for my desktop.

But I don't know what they're thinking. Well, look at you guys go. I just have one PC. So I don't even know what a cloud save do in general, to be honest. Yeah, you're young. Yeah. And the cloud safety thing is... It's amazing.

Like, I'm upstairs in my attic, and I want to play the game on my desktop, and then now I'm sitting outside, and I want to use my laptop. I, you know, like, don't make me mademly safe. I still have the issue... I still have the issue to where whenever I try to remote into my computer,

I can't see the Dwar Fortress playfield. It's just a black screen. It's running, but for whatever reason, I and I'm not installed in administrator mode anymore like I was so I don't know it's odd because I know that I did that and and I was I was chastised that is a bad idea you know installing to a fortress or any game in administrator mode uh I mean you know Yolo Yoko the only computer wants What's, yeah, you'll be fine.

You should see the idiot things people are doing with OpenClaugh. You'll be fine with Door Fortress. With Open What? Open What? Just Google it. Google it later. You'll see. It's, it's weaponized stupidity.

Anyhow. It's an AI thing that lets you, puts you, it puts an LLM in charge of your entire desktop system and lets it do things. So some dude, like, ended up buying himself five, different cruise tickets because he connected it to his payment platform and booking.com or something anyway. You can imagine the silliness happening. So windows. Hilarity. Hilarity. Anyway, cut. Interesting. Open claw, personal AI assistant. Okay, I got to check this out. Who owns that? Is it Open AI? Oh, some dumb company bought it. One of the AI grifters bought it, either meta or OpenAI.

remember which one. I think it was Open AI. You know, I think MetaBot, the other one that, yeah, anyway. I kind of want to try it out because the longer I go, the more nihilistic I get. Containers, man. Containers, there's prompt injection everywhere. You run it, you're going to get your disc wiped. Anywho. Okay. Okay, maybe I won't.

Just be careful. It'll do anything. It doesn't care who tells it that. There's a Wikipedia entry for. It's sort of like your drunk buddy. Yeah, it's like your drunk buddy at the bar. Like, don't say something as a joke or even try it because they're going to go do And then you'll go out. That does sound kind of fun, but very dangerous. Maybe get yourself like a second PC and installed it on there and just let it on.

There you go. Yeah. Just be careful. I wonder if you can play Door Fortress and what strategies it would take. What would an LLN do? Wasn't there like a stream on Twitch for a while where some program just played Dwar Fortress? I think I read a Reddit post about that. It seems like that.

I think I read a Reddit post where someone was using the ASCII version and found that was easier for the AI to play the game than the graphics version. I think it was something. Makes a little bit sense because it would be less for it to interpret. Yeah. The thing that I watched once was however very slow. So there wasn't a lot of stuff happening on the screen. didn't make or like a super good stream to be honest but yeah well yeah i found it interesting this segment has been brought to you by michael ellers memorial engravings in stone works

when a dwarf earns their place in fortress history whether through heroism craftsmanship or standing in the wrong place at the wrong time michael eller captures it forever and finally carved stone from grand halls to quiet tombs michael Eller, because every dwarf has a story worth engraving. So, Tony, have you played much dwarf fortress since we last? Yeah, so I've been cranking away at my fortress. I still haven't had that massive siege. I keep getting ambushes, goblet ambushes, and tons of snatchers.

So I found a setting that will now pause and alert me when there's this new snatcher, which I like, because they're just freaking relentless in this fortress. And they're taking all the children. Yeah. So now they're like hiding in trees. So I had a few of them hiding in a tree and they were shooting arrows and they weren't coming down. So I just sent somebody out to cut the tree down. That seems to have solved the problem.

But they're goblins ambushing from trees, which I've seen elves do that, but I haven't seen goblins to it. So I've got this like great defensive setup and all these idiots are doing is just coming in and like trying to sneak in and deal stuff. So they're waging a guerrilla war on me and I'm not prepared for it. That's what I was... That's my problem. I have several questions. First of all, if you say ambush, you actually

mean ambush, like an elven ambush where they suddenly get like uncovered and like a bunch of idiots sneaking around? Yeah, it'll say something like, there's an ambush. And then I, in it, pauses and I go up and I look and there's like four of these little goblins in a tree.

What are you guys doing? Why are you in the get out of the tree. Stop that. I have not seen Goblins ambush. Yeah, me neither. Yeah. I haven't seen it either. So that's happening. I have an emerging war grizzly armada, which is kind of fun. Ooh, nice. And I had auto butcher on, and it got a little aggressive at first and wiped out my reserves. Oops, but I have a lot of grizzly soap now.

Take the good and the bad. sometimes, you know. So that's cool. I've also got brown bears, but sadly you can't train brown bears to be war animals, which is kind of a bummer. Anyway. There's a, wait, there's a difference between a brown bear and a grizzler bear in the game? Yes, there is.

And in real life. Yeah. Oh, that is... Yeah, isn't that something? Now I'm realizing there is a chance that I've never had a brown bear, because otherwise I would have realized this. Well, I know, and I'm feeling the same. I was like, man, two kinds of bears.

It's going to be a bear war. Bear, bear, bear, bears. And I think there's other bears. There's like, you know, there's this. Yeah, there's polar bears. There's black bears. Yeah, there's black bears. There's sun bears.

Those are another kind of bears. Sun bears are also in here? No, I don't think they're in the game. I don't think they're in the game, but they're another bear that exists on earth. Well, you know. in real life, yeah. So that's where I am. But the other problem I'm having is with labor.

So I've got miners. I've got wood cutters. But the jobs for those guys will just queue up and they won't do it unless I use the prioritized DF hack command. Once I do prioritize dig or prioritize whatever it is chop wood, then they'll go do it. But otherwise, they just absolutely will not do it. And so I think I'm doing something wrong maybe. I've got something set up wrong.

But anyway, basically, nobody will work unless I manually tell them to go do it, which is kind of not what I was hoping for. That is... I've never used that particular command. Yeah. Oh, I got kind of frustrated because I was like, oh, my God, you have axes.

You have everything you need. Why will you not work? Have you tried, for example, for the digging designations using the... like the vanilla... Priorities? Priority system. The fact that I am now, Ing probably says, no, I'm not sure.

Okay. Because when you tell them to dig, somewhere at the bottom of your screen is like the option of setting the priority system, or like not doing it. And it's like, just do it whenever you can. And usually they get to it quite fast. but you can also tell them that this is like priority number one this is super important drop everything to it right now and maybe that helps if it doesn't hmm so yeah um to keep doodling with it and see what i can find out but yeah it's uh anyway that's my yeah tony take a look at the

the podcast insight channel i just pasted in the control bar with the priorities expanded for digging You can have priority one to seven. And seven is low, one is the highest. Yep. I use that constantly. I'm going to do that then on the priorities. Okay, cool. Maybe that's what I'm doing.

So I know that whenever you have like, whenever you build a workshop and things like that, you can click on that workshop that's not constructed yet, and you can say make this a priority. And then whenever you click that, usually a dwarf will immediately take up the job. But that's on a one-by-one basis. And I don't know that that applies to things like mining and tree-cutting. But, yeah, setting the dig priority, that's an integral part of my game. All right.

I'm going to mess with that. Cool. So, Roland, you're having trouble getting a new fortress started? It's not even just a dwarf fortress problem. I've realized that by applying, for example, a Rimworld. And I always have, like, a problem getting back into, like, oh, it's a new start. It's new people. It's a new fortress.

And I've mentioned the, like, weird, freezing biome fortress. That was nice in all. But I ended up not focusing a lot on my dwarfs, but instead setting up the defenses and digging modes and whatever. Then I had like a minor military incident happen. Let's call it an incident

where goblins came by and were like, okay, let's test these defenses. And sadly, many dwarfs died because I did not have very good armor at that point. And I did not know who died. And this might sound weird to some players, but that annoyed me because it really showed me that I had no connection to these dwarfs because I had focused on other things. So what I did is I put it aside.

I started something new. I started even smaller. And now I'm playing with just 15 little dudes. and I'm trying to get to know them. You know, get back to the basics, to the role play, fantasy mindset, game where it's just a lot of little dudes in a little little cave,

and they dig and they make... Actually, it's quite nice, playing with only a few people because it means your kitchen is one single room and your cook only has to make like 20 prepared meals and they are going to last for, ever.

So it is nice, but I don't know. I always think back about like the snake fortress or like even older fortresses. And I'm like, I could do something grand, you know? But it sounds like you might have a touch of burnout. Yeah, maybe. That could actually be. Yeah. You got to go with a goal.

You got to come in with a goal. That's kind of my thing. is like I'll pause for a bit and then I'll think of something that I want to do or test and then I get all super excited again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I tried that with a few people. Just, you know, my goal is to get to know them

and have like a small family fortress. And when I see that, oh, yeah, now these two large families are marrying together and now it's like one large family. I think that is my current goal. So I have some dwarves that I pay attention to, but in general, I kind of think of my fortress as more like an ant colony. It's an organism of itself, and the individual dwarves can come and go and be replaced, but it's the fortress as a whole that I tend to focus on, which is I guess why I kind of like having, you know, a population of around 100. because that helps things get done faster,

and it gives you the leeway to have a catastrophic event, take out a large percentage of your dwarves, and still survive, and still have the fortress survive. Interesting. Yeah. In very large fortresses, you tend to only remember, like, a few dwarves, like very important dwarves, maybe a mayor,

maybe a manager, people that you click on quite a lot, right? but for example in the fortress before the snake fortress I made a library and this is when I had a bard come in like I screen all bards ever because I only want specific bards and I only want bards with actual skills like if they come to my door and they can't even play an instrument or sing and they want to be a bard there's the door you leave now don't come back and this specific person only managed to get a place in my fortress because their last name was DoorDash. No. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And I found that so funny.

No product placement, by the way. I'm not being paid for this. And then I was like, okay, I have to take this person in. This is one in a million chance to get this name. and DoorDash obviously was special because of the name, but she ended up being a major character in the fortress. She moved with me to the two sword kingdom, the snake fortress, and ended up dying there.

So she was with me the whole time, and she had a family, and she also had an affair with my one, like, major bard that had like nine women crawling after him crazy dude by the way for a bard that was that well well what was he yeah my my um tavern performer was a ladies man that's i love that that's amazing and she was also into him and she ended up having um i think two kids and they still live in my Fortress. And you know, that is what I like. That is what I like. These little family

stories that develop and you know that it develops. And then you have like, oh, this is not just a dwarf. This is literally the daughter of DoorDash. And then it's like, oh yeah, the daughter of DoorDash is right now,

my manager and my fortress. That is so cool. I like that. Yeah. We'll be right back after this word from Uber Eats. I was going to say, my fortress had a dwarf called NordVPN, which now leads to our segment. Curious. Squarespace.

Yeah. All these podcast sponsors. Earth Man scape. We're going to get so, yeah. Who's shaving supplies? For the conscientious beard trimmer. I'm just saying they obviously, these things work, because here we are on our show, promoting them for free. I don't know what any of these products are.

don't buy this crap. You don't need it. Whatever you're thinking about buying, you don't really need it. That's my advice to you. Stop buying things. Anywho. Well, I hope you're either able to get back into it

or are able to morph your playing style such that you can, you know, lose yourself in a fortress again, man. Because it's a great game. It definitely is a great game. It's not going to lose me as a player, but there is a chance I'm going to put it aside for a while. Just play something else.

It has enough. nothing to do with it, you know, either get back into FPSs or maybe what a Warcraft is calling again. Yeah, mid-night's out. Oh, I don't, I don't, I don't play any of that. I don't, you're a private server game. You're a private server game. Of course, of course.

Are you a classic masochist? Ruffel village gang, only and only ever. Nothing else for me. Thank you. Thank you very much. But, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's just the game is so good and I'm not bad right now.

You know what I mean? Yep. Yep, yep. Well, so long as you are able to make commentary on ours, then you have our permission to set the game aside for a while. Of course. I'm also probably just going to check with the game in, like check in the game from time to time just to see what changed.

Because I don't remember. when that was. I didn't play for like a little while and there were two updates and suddenly everything was different and my mods didn't work anymore and it was like, ugh. There was a little weird. So I'm going to keep checking in and of course I'm going to

say things. It's just I think I'm going to relax with War Fortress for a while. Play something else. I bounce in and out as well. I bounced into Rimworld for a while and had a really good time and then I kind of step to side from that.

But then I found this other game called AllWall Fall. It's a demo that was in the, it's a indie developer thing from Steam or whatever. And that was cool. So, I mean, there's all these other really cool kind of involved games. Oh, Songs of Six, if you want another sort of Door Fortressy challenge. That thing's, that thing's, it's like somebody played Door Fortress and they were like, right, what if we made this a little bit more complicated? More complicated?

It is. That is something that I haven't heard from a lot of games yet. It is delightful. But, I mean, in the fact that, like, songs of six, like, you'll fail. You'll fail hard. And it's pretty punishing and unforgiving in some ways, but in a fun way, if that makes any sense. Like, it's really easy to starve everyone because you've made a mistake. And you're like, oh, I'm sorry.

They're all dead now. Well, crap. Hopefully we'll continue. Yeah. Anyway, I totally recommend that game. I think it's another one of these. Tarn Adam specials where it's like one person doing all the development work. And it's, it's crazy. Like, I'm not even to battles yet. And I've been playing it a lot. So, like,

at some point I'll learn how to do battles. But yeah, I'm 115 hours in and I've yet to do anything other than be absolutely obliterated because I was too slow building an army and training it. It's fun. So anyway, I would recommend that if you're feeling burnt out. And then it's fun to go back to Door Fortress because you're like, true. Ah, comfortable. That is always the thing. I've played

a lot of Rimworld in the meantime, too. And Rimworld is good, but when I go back to Dwar Fortress, I also feel that Dwar Fortress is slower. Like, everything happens slower. Rimworld is sometimes just like,

oh my God, wake up. Yeah. It shakes you by the shoulders. and Dwarf Fortress is like you sit at your desk and you're chill or you watch a movie and the drums and it's like, yeah, okay, you come back and nothing happened, by the way. It's nice. Also, Rimworld does not have Z levels and I still think in Z levels. So every time I plan anything in Rimworld, I'm like, oh, I wish, I wish. But.

Yep, that's one thing it would be really neat if it had. But I think his way of getting around it was that you can travel. You can pick up your whole colony and then resettle somewhere else on the map, which I haven't done. And that would be kind of cool on Door Fortress if you could just be like, great, this fortress sucks. We're all moving, folks. Get in the caravans. Let's go. And you have to, like, fight your way across the world.

Anyway, it's kind of neat. That mechanic's kind of neat. That is very neat. So I'd like to come back to, you talked about you have certain mods. So I posted my wear world, my wear beast world to, I think that I did a Dropbox link and posted it to the website so that people could download it if they wanted to. And Criddle noted that I had, I think it was the Cleaner Dev's Dry Mines. It would let him load the world because of the Cleaner Devs Dry Mines mod. And so, yeah, I should probably let everyone know.

There are several mods that I use. And I think that if you just install them, you don't have to design a world with them, but if you install them, if you're using Steam and you install them, then you would be able to load that world. I did put a list on the Discord server. I think it was just in the meeting area.

It was the mechanics, the mechanics channel. The list of all of the mods that I use is like seven or eight of them. So just if you're going to download that modified world that I made, then be aware of that. So thanks Criddle for pointing that out. I just didn't think of it whenever I posted the save. In fact, I didn't really realize that mods would prevent you from being able to load a world.

I guess it makes sense, but it just didn't think of it. Yeah, I would have thought that that one about dry mines would have just, would have really only impacted things during a world gen. You'd think so. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure all these systems are way more complicated than any of us realize, because it all looks like magic when we click the button and make it go. And some of them may not keep it from loading.

Like interface tweaks, that just, I think, mods the user interface. I don't believe that that changes. Well, of course, I don't know. Like I said, it may have, you know, tentacles into deeply into the game that I'm not aware of. But in any case, sorry about that, Crittle. If anyone else wasn't able to load the save, I apologize. But I did put a list of all of my mods. in the Discord server, so hop on there and take a look.

If you really want to load that world, then you might need to download all of those mods. And I guess that will only apply to the Steam release, and I don't think that the mods are the same for the classic version. I don't know. I've not played the classic version. With classic, you mean... Just to ask you on the script for free?

Yeah, the free release. Nah, I'm not an ASCII guy. Never was. But I, you know, I appreciate it. that's not to me. Yeah. I have only sometimes switched to Aski and the Steam version, but I haven't actually downloaded,

like, the non-Steem-free version and played that. Yeah. This episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable is made possible in part by Jamie McAllister's Cavern Survey and Expansion Guild. Thinking about building below, Jamie McAllister maps out safe routes, identifies local wildlife,

and strongly suggests where not to dig next. Whether you're tapping the caverns for resources or just curious about what's down there. Jamie McAllister, helping your fortress grow carefully. So let's talk about, actually I don't have any new updates on

Warm Beers. Warm Beers is still going. I recently read that Delphonzo is going to be taking over a turn soon, but I'm not sure where they're at. So I don't really have any commentary, except to say that I'm very proud that the Warm Beers is being hosted on the Tool Fortress Roundtable Discord server. It is still going months and months later, so that's pretty darn cool. Warmbier's brought to you by Coors. Brought to you by DoorDash.

By Coors DoorDash. Okay, got you. Anyway, so Cobalt Fangs. When we last left Cobalt Fangs, I, I thought that I was going to have to destroy the fortress because of a were beast infection. Well, I figured out a way around it. What they did was I put everybody into squads. And then I built basically unfurnished barracks for everybody.

And five days before the full moon, I separated into groups of ten all of my dwarves as much as I could. It wasn't perfect because not everybody got into the barracks in time. but I separated all of them with armor and swords and stuff. And whenever the were beast change occurred, then the people who were trapped with the were beasts all had armor and the were beast didn't. So after about four or five full moon cycles, I had all of the were beasts eradicated for my fortress.

So that worked very well. I now have a actionable plan to deal with wear beast infections. And I've had two since then. And with both of those were beast infections, I have been able to contain it. So I believe that I can deal with wear beasts now. So it is no longer something that I fear. However, I do have a child wear beast now. Oh, my goodness.

His name's Reg. And his dad lives in the fortress. So I couldn't bring myself to off him. No. So I, whenever he was. he was in the hospital and he turned into a wear beast and of course being a where beast healed him. So then he was like wandering around the fortress and I finally got him trapped in the, he went to the offices to play, the manager's office to play. So I had a little office complex that was easily walled off.

So I eventually trapped him in that office. So now there is a child that is in these three room complex. that every full moon turns into a warehouse. And I kind of want to see if I can figure out a way to give him some food and some toys and some things to make his life better. But I don't think that I'm going to off him. I think that he's just going to end up living out the duration of this fortress in these little rooms.

I actually posted a picture of Reg the Warehorse in the Discord server for you guys to see. Um, where a horse? Another thing that we talked about last episode was the fact that I had some death zombies. I found out the source of those death zombies. One of my militia captains is a necromancer. Oh, that's pretty awesome. That's exciting.

Yeah. One of my, uh, one of my, uh, one of my militia captains is a necromancer. Uh, Zephron, Seirmeid, sent, let me actually find out what his, uh, uh, Zephron, Bridgerens, the courageous fright. creator of Rithgobber Elishanar. I think that they've edited the names in the character cards of

Dwarfurtress where they're a bit more elaborate. Yep. So Zephron Bridge Reigns the Courageous Fright. He is a necromancer militia captain. So he does apparently occasionally raise the dead whenever they get killed out on the

field. Because I have several where's or sorry death zombies hanging around my Portress, and they're friendly. They don't scare anybody. And if you look at the Discord server, I actually posted a character card of a death zombie that's actually working. This death zombie is placing an item in a tomb.

Oh. Yeah, that's kind of cool. It's Aethel Medibakaster, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, dwarf doctor death zombie. It's Aethel Blockade. The name of the dwarf is Athel Blockade. block, the autumnal shadow. That's the

dwarf's name? Yeah. That is the dwarf's name. How do you? That's a lot for a little dwarfs. I have found that I'm getting that a lot. I'm getting very elaborate names for the dwarves.

I like it. Say, okay, well, hang on. Back up. First of all, he can work. Second of all,

Dr. deaf zombie is awesome. Is he a doctor or does he have doctor skills? I suspect that it was a doctor before it died. Oh, and then it keeps his like work name? So whenever it was a dwarf doctor before it died, and then it got raised up, so it's a dwarf doctor death zombie now.

Doctor death zombie. I think that's a terrific name. Is he manageable or is he's totally separate? Well, I've not actually tried to. I've not tried to assign tasks to them. I don't know if you do that. I may have to try that next time I'm deep in the game. But he's working.

He's hauling items. He's placing items in tombs. It wouldn't surprise me if that's all they can do is basically do child labor. But hey, you know, they're hanging out. They don't scare them. That has some implications. Just remove hauling from every single normal person and only let it be done by death zombies. And children.

Put those children. You know, same thing. I see no problem with this. Replace workforce? No, I'm not going to go. Yeah. This is like that game, what's that game called? Oh, man, I'm totally spacing the name of it.

It's not called Eve. It's called something else, and I can't space in the name of it now. But you can, like, grow zombies in your farms and then harvest them up and do all sorts of really unseemly and only. Harvest zombies. things. Yeah, you can like harvest elderly people and turn them into slaves. Like it's a completely insane game. What is the name of this game now? God, I'm totally spacing it. R in. I don't feel like I'm... Oh, Ellen, E-L-I-N. Do not be fooled. It is not the little anime thing that you think it is. It's

kind of insane. How is it written again? E-L-I-N. It seems like it might be Stardu Valley, but it is very, very much not Stardu Valley. Today's show is sponsored by Klinodev's squad coordination and monster response training. When a forgotten beast comes slithering out of the caverns and your militia starts improvising, Klinodev brings order to the chaos, clear commands, proper formations, and at least a plan that lasts longer than a few seconds. Klinodev, because charging in all at once isn't always the best idea. So I don't want this podcast to become the, the, the, the, Cobalt. things podcast, but I do have a couple more interesting things to talk about it.

So I'm having trouble sustaining a population because whenever I get up to close to 100 dwarves, I have catastrophic events happen. And they tend to be, well, I had an invasion of goblins that was particularly violent that took care of a bunch of dwarves. So I keep dropping down to around 50. then my population will grow back up to near 100, then it will drop back down to 50 or so. So I have a ton of tombs,

and I have a ton of memorial slabs. But one thing I've noticed about this particular fortress, and I'm in untamed wilds, but I'm always in untamed wilds. That's typically where I put my fortresses. So I don't think that it's any worse because of that. But, for example, I have about, every once twice a year I will get a

a forgotten beast and once or twice a year I will get a what do you call them they're like I'll get giants and hydras and and those kind of monsters that come from from the upper world so the most devastating of which was I had a hydra attack and I sent my very capable army to get the hydra while the hydra was attacking I also got a forgotten beast that made its way into my fortress. So all of my army was up dealing with the

hydra. The hydra happened to be creating its own death of zombies. I didn't know the hydra doing that. Wait a sec. What? What? I don't know, but they were some badass death zombies because they were not friendly. They were killing all the livestock. They were killing every dwarf that came near it. So, and these, these dwarf zombies, my, my good ones, my happy ones, are blue. These death zombies made by the hydra were purple. So, yeah. So anyway, so I had that attack, and then I had the forgotten beast attack at the same time as the death zombies. So that's my most recent big catastrophe. Meanwhile, I'm trying to build a new military complex. I'm going to disband all of my squads and reform them.

and put them in this new military industrial complex that I'm creating down in the caverns. Oh. Yeah. So, yeah. How do you feel like building in the caverns? Are you, this is one of my, one of my big things about when I, because I always want to start building in the caverns and doing stuff. But like, do you build roofs on your stuff when you go down there? Well, what I've been doing is, part of it is I'm building some regular constructions where I'm hollowing out where the caverns are not, but it's on the same level as the caverns.

And in some places, I am taking parts of the caverns that have level floors, and I am putting constructed floors down on them. I'm clearing out the mushroom trees, which I love the mushroom wood, by the way, because it's very colorful. It makes really nice construction materials. I love that you know that. That's awesome. I'd never thought about that as a difference. Yeah, I didn't realize wood.

I like red in my fortress, and bloodthorns and goblin caps both create red blocks. So every time that you make a block, and I like the fact that the Dwarfortress has changed the wording now, instead of just make stone block and make wood block, it's make four blocks. So it explicitly lets you know that whenever you take a log and turn it into a block, you're actually turning that log into four blocks, which multiplies your construction ability by four. So turning your logs into blocks, if you want to build things out of the wood, it will be very good for you if you decide to make the blocks rather than just doing the logs in the raw state. But you have feather wood, I think, is white. That makes sense. There we are. We have fungi wood is yellow, tower cap are white.

So, yeah, it's nice and colorful. But what I will do is I will clear out an area. and then I will build walls. I kind of like working with walls now, and I have tons and tons of low-value metal. I have tons of copper bars, and I have tons of iron bars. So I'm building walls and such out of iron and copper a lot now.

Wow, big spender, huh? Iron walls. Yes. Oh, no, you know, it's like... Look at that iron wall in this fortress. Nice. I don't know if you ever saw the movie. be Mystic Pizza, but one of the interesting things about that was they were,

it was set in Connecticut where lobster, lobstering was the main industry. And they were sick of lobster because all they had was freaking lobster. You know, it was like, ooh, lobster, wonderful. And they're like, oh, gosh, lobster again. So if you have tons of it, it's, its value, you know, goes down. Maybe not to the outside world. I can still sell it. I've not been dealing too much with the caravans because they don't need anything.

from them? Yeah, and I often feel that bars are a bad product to sell. You kind of have to make product out of it for it to have value and because the bar is actually kind of heavy. So if the trader does not come with like wagons, but just pack animals, they can't carry that much. And I don't know, if you ever get heavy into like goblinite production. then you will have the problem that no matter how large you make your storage,

unless you make a quantum dump, you don't have enough storage. Yeah. So I get that. I get that part. It's interesting that you mentioned goblin sieges. I have had very few goblin sieges. I have had a lot of beasties and a lot of giants. And for example, one dwarf who,

tends to tantrum. I'm not sure why, but he single-handedly killed a giant. So I named him, I nicknamed him giant killer. That's, I love the nicknames. Yeah. You got to love the nicknames. Yeah. I used to nickname them. I used to nickname them like goofy nicknames just to keep track of them, mostly so that whenever I start up a new fortress, I can identify one that had migrated from my old fort. But now I'm, I'm actually trying to give them nicknames that that makes sense, like, that one, a giant killer. Speaking of cool nicknames, Krug Smash, our buddy's back.

Oh, cool he is. He's done a couple of siege update videos. Awesome. Popped into my feed and I was very excited to see some updates. Sege update videos. Now, that is the content I'm looking for because I have not touched the siege update guys. I've not managed to do that.

Oh. Yeah. A small fortress. You know, you don't get sieges. Uh-huh. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Or ambushes. God dang it. Anyway, this dude, this dude seems to get tons of them. So he's had some totally gory sieges and has made great use of the siege weapons. So it's, again, very satisfying Crook smash experience. Awesome. Check it out if you haven't. I will be checking that out.

We have to bring the button back, huh? That's right. Do-do. Crook-mash. Well, you know what that came? from right. No. It was the sound that it makes in the game Gallagher

whenever you hit the start button. Oh, yeah. Okay, now I know exactly what you're at. Prepare to qualify. That's, yeah. That's a pole position. Yeah, that's right. So back in the day, Roland,

to play video games, you needed to go to a place that was called an arcade. And you had to put these little things called quarters. into the games. They were round pieces of metal that were fashioned and stamped. They were named quarters

because they were one quarter of a dollar. Yeah. In Germany, you probably put Deutsche marks. Yeah. Okay, it's not that old. It's not that old. Gallagher?

I bet you people paid Deutsche marks to play Gallagher. I bet you they did. When did the Euro? When did the Euro become well adopted? It's the 90s one. I was already alive. was in the 90s

I think it was in the 90s Galaga I think was made in 1980 so yeah yeah Gallagia is ancient Gallagher can vote and drink yep if it were up I used to drink pictures of beer

and play Gallagher I could play for like an hour and a half on a quarter that's the spirit it ain't no Dragon Slayer I hated Dragon Slayer God F that game man Yeah

Too much Awesome looking Yeah it was It was playing cartoon, right? It's just designed to steal from me. Anyway. What?

It was cool on the Commodore Amiga. I'll give you that. Anyway, back to the basics. Well, I think that we're out of time, guys. Oh, my God. Okay. There we go. We did it.

Rowland, you got anything else for us? I just found out that I'm younger than a video game, which is available on Steam. So that's great. To be fair, I think we all might be younger than video games. Like, there were people playing games, video games, before any of us were around. You know, 1969, there's a fuzzy time where you talk about what video games were. If you're talking about commercial video games, I predate them.

I think that, like, 1971 or so was the first coin-up. I printed Ponged a couple years. Yeah, 1972 is Pong. Yeah, and before that, I think that was this, there was, I think that someone tried to commercialize space war. Yeah. Anyway, this is a different podcast. It's a different podcast. All right.

Tony, you got anything else to add? I got nothing. I got, I got lots of ideas again on my notepad here for Dwarf Fortress. I'm going to go dig in. Cool. I got, I got homework. Dwarven homework. homework.

Nice. Roland's going to go rekindle his love and enthusiasm by trying songs of six, right? Yeah, or the World Warcraft. Generic FBS, you know. Go back to my rules. Alan, Roland, Ellen needs somebody like you to go check it out because there's depths to explore. Roland, try to find a Daiku Mud server. What now?

Daikumud. Look it up. D-I-K-U-M-D. D-I-K-U-D. MUD. I think it's one word. It may be two words. A server. What the hell am I looking at? Oh, boy. Yeah. This is also the type of video game that you can bring

to work and pretend that you're working. And when your, your boss watches over your shoulder, he's like, wow, this dude is crazy good at Excel. So Daikumud cost my roommate his collegiate career. He, um... Bad luck. Yeah, he got... So this is early internet days. This is like, 1992, 1993, somewhere in there.

And my roommate was an engineering student, and we had access to Sun Microstations that were hooked up to a Sun Super Mini. And he got hooked on multi-user dungeon games, which were text base, kind of like Zork, except they were a little bit more advanced in that you were playing other players in the universe, right? So you log into the server, you create a character,

and you play basically text dungeon games. And these were called Muds, multi-user dungeons. They're kind of the predecessor to MMO RPGs. So, yeah, if you go out and try to find a Dikunud server somewhere and play a game on, you'll probably get bored after a half hour, but it's neat to think about the video game history on them. Okay. Yeah. Muds and mushes, yeah.

Oh, and this Deku Mudd's from, it's from Germany. There you go. Hey. Oh, no, it's not. It's from Denmark. Sorry. Oh. Same thing.

Oh, hey. Oh, God. With that, we are going to bring episode. How to make everyone hate you. 131 of Dwarf Orchrist's Roundtable to a close. All right, guys? And I do apologize. Yes.

Okay, we'll catch you all later. And we'll go out there and play Dwarfortress. Aios. See you guys. He goes. And that wraps up, episode 131 of Dwarfortress Roundtable. brought to you by Michael Eller's Lasting Memorials, Jamie McAllister's cautious cavern expansion, and Kleeneuve's monster fighting discipline.

Thanks to our patrons for helping us build, remember, and occasionally survive what's waiting below. 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 Dwarfortress 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-S.T at DFRoundable.com.

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