Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 132: Traps with Rurik! Lots of Traps.

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

Hi folks – this episode, we’re with Rurik! from our wonderful Discord server community. Head over to our website and join in the main menu. We’d love to see you there. We chat with Rurik! about traps, Warmbeers, remote Dwarf Fortress, and how we may see a revival of old school DF! Enjoy.

Before we get started, a quick note from the overseer's office, we ran into a few technical difficulties during the recording of this episode, which is one of the reasons why it took a bit longer than usual to get this one produced. I've done my best to smooth things out at the forge, and the audio improves as the episode goes along. Thanks for bearing with us, and now grab a mug, pull up a chair in the tavern, and let's talk dwarf fortress. Welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things dwarfy. My name's Jonathan. And I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we are joined today by Rurik from the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable Discord server, whose name I can't pronounce. Are you active on Reddit, Murik?

Well, not so much on Reddit. I'm mostly the story when I have Discord these days. In the past, I spent a fair bit of time on the 80 forums and tend to write and tweeted most of the Wiki to memory. You also appointed us at Dwarth Worlds, which we're going to have the creator of Wolf Worlds on in an upcoming episode. Fun. Yeah, yeah. So thanks for hooking us up with them.

Yeah. There's a few different different four fortress-related Discord channels, and so, yeah, they encountered that link in one of the rules. Also know that you were pretty active in the Strange Moods Discord server. Yeah, I mean, I believe you. I know it's been a long one. Yeah. You know, real honest, it's in a way, so everybody's the time to talk about.

And so we just going to be patient and be ready, well, be ready when I'm ready. So there were some development notes that dropped while we were away. Here's one. I'll just go ahead and read it. And this seems like it's going to be so much nicer whenever you're trading to the caravans. I've changed, this is from TOTI, I've changed how Ben's work on the trade screen. so you can select all the items by clicking the bin and then uncheck items if you want to remove a few

rather than the other way around. Yes, that was a very annoying aspect of trading. Oh, yeah. Whenever. Q-O-L. Yes. I mean, massive, dude. So back to the 4705 functionality.

That's nice. Regression to the good. It's nice, yeah. There's a lot of 4705 functionality I'm waiting to return. Yeah, it took me. while to get over my anger about stairs not working the way they used to. Oh, yeah. Oh, I remember those

conversations. I still am too stupid to really understand, but I love it. Yeah, stairs is one and in Legends mode when you export them with the world maps, you could then use those to open up ISO world and get an

entire world on a symmetric projection. And it's kind of one of the main ways I used to use for picking end up locations. It's because you can scroll around the world and see where the mountains were and Alice and finds that you're looking for. But you can't do that right now and it kills me. You know, Legends mode is always just a part of the game that I've just, every once in

while I go to it whenever I'm looking for something specific, I've never hung out there too much. I've never lost in Legends mode. I'll just put that out there. I think I've lost plenty in Legends mode, mostly hours. Time doesn't count. Okay. Actually, interesting that you bring up Legends mode, because, you know, last episode, I kind of mentioned that I have trouble with the game and I'm not really enjoying it right now. So I had like a little vacation away from my PC. And to ease myself back into the game, I thought, let's, let's like browse the windows, so I say.

Let's make a world and just look at legends because, you know, that's nice. not actually playing the game, but it gets me hungry, if you know what I'm. And the modern version is not really where I wanted to be with Legends browser, for example, the old add-on. So that is also a functionality that I'm really missing. The whole Legends browser add-on does not work that well just yet. It really doesn't, and I miss that. It was one of the, tended to be, like one of my first things that I would do is make the world, dump the Legends file, and then go explore everything in the Legends browser. And yeah, I kind of miss that. And I've been trying to play with some of the codebase, but I'm such a crappy coder. I can't get my fixes to reliably. Just ask chat GPT.

Yes, that's all it is. Yeah, I'm sure. No, Roland, that's too dangerous. I don't want to accidentally manifest my world over the surface of the earth. But yeah, so my solution was actually changing the version. So I found an old version on my PC, like an old, um, lazy new pack that I never apparently be installed. It still had some old worlds in it. That was interesting. Um, and I just generated worlds in the old version, uh, because the legends viewer back then worked so well, but isometric worldview, that is something that I have not seen. Oh, you're missing out. Yeah, ISO world. It's easy to find. I'm pretty sure it's on the file vehicle.

Is this different from Stone Sense? Yes, yes. Because Stone Sense deals only with your embarked. ISO World gives you sort of a Stone Sense view of the entire map. Oh, wow. Oh. Okay. How to get that?

How to do that? Well, yeah, like downloading the application, just search for ISO World. you'll find it. And then, yeah, take your, go into Legends mode, and I think, or is it X, to give you the list of maps to export. Is this like a Steam add-on? No, no, no, no, no.

This has been around since like 34. This is old ancient technology. Before the war. Yeah. So, yeah, I go into Legends mode, and there's a button that will say export maps. And just dump all of them, depending on the size of your world. It'll take a little bit of time because it can be like 10 to 20 seconds per map as it generates the bitmaps.

This is all pre-50. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah, pre-50. I'm waiting for this to that because it's such a cool feature. And yeah, you can, like, it'll give you the hype, whist or without water. It'll give you, like, the bio maps and evil and salinity. and rainfall. You can see the actual like rain cloud shadows or whatever they're

called where it actually interacts with the and so all of those get integrated into the ISO world and so you can also switch layers and see like where the trade routes are or where the high evil zones are.

And yeah, it's a really interesting way to view the world. And also if you're playing adventure mode, it has the ability to actively sync with the game that you're playing. And so as you walk around in Adventure Road, the ISO world will scroll with you. And so you can see like your pin on the on the map. Oh, that's, I, I, so it's only for the, uh, only for the, it's only for the, it's only for

47 and below. Okay. I wonder what it would take to get it. Okay. So I found the threat, uh, that does look very promising. I think this is it and this looks like magic to me.

It really does. So you can see the different maps and can be exported. I really like the trade map. Looks like SimCity. That's amazing. Yes. It looks like the 1990s versions of SimCity, yeah.

Can I manage my traffic, please? Now imagine... Dang it, there's smog. Oh, that was awesome. Imagine you can play the game like this. That really changes things. I'm going to

still, I'm waiting for the VR version. Okay, so when we have the great split in the Dural Fortress community of the pre and post 50, which direction is the podcast going to go with? Because I'm

going to have to go one or the other because I'm not going to, you know, if I have to re-learn the muscle memory again, then, you know, I'm just going to stick with it. willing to relearn this. Oh, yeah? If you were going to switch back for you on pretty 60?

Yeah, shouldn't you struggle for a little bit? I mean, yeah, it's like right on a blight. You would have your brain would reconnect that pretty quickly. I do miss the tile packs. I really do. The other feature with, I was talking about the local Embarquette's works. I know this.

It's one of the artifacts. You're going to the BFMO? Yes. It was a website online, I found the door sources of place topics. Do you call use a little tool to assemble those exporting sitemops into a file that's uploaded. Through a name, people appearing to scroll around and a few-a-map-year-map online. It comes essentially a 3D screenshot and zoomed in an item and scroll up and down three-lays through the sea layers. So rather than trying to post a serious pictures on Discord or a beverage to explain by Killing,

used to be able to give people a link and say, here, this is where I felt. Let's see all the slices always eat all together and that again is missing for now we don't change that ability in post 50. Okay, so we now have a clickbait title

for this episode. Why version 50 sucks. Oh, you guys, I tell you. I'm like that. I'm the one that likes it. I like my version 50. I didn't like my.

I quite enjoy. Actually, I'm just waiting for these extra missing features because they had so much fun and use. And the third with the minute is, do you guys remember, you used to build recording videos in the game? Dwarfurt just had its own built-in integrated movie record. Right. And you can use OBS, and you can know make a big thing. But again, like the map archive, there was, I think, semi-exam. colon and it would often record controls and so you could record whatever scene or your battle

or your crazy wine carts or whatnot and drink kind of that began as a file that you could upload and share and show people that that is a news to me as well well I didn't realize since like day one like that's going all the way back to it to 40d maybe Tody didn't know anyone used it and so we should tell him hey man that was cool put that on the list of things that, you know, he might add in the future. I have to say one thing, just as an aside here, I am super excited by the cadence of their updates and releases about stuff. That's really neat. There's a lot more stuff. Like that, you know, like we just got the thing where he's talking about doing some magic stuff. Like,

that's cool. That's cool. I love it. It seems like development suddenly is like warp speed. Anyway, that's my aside on that. magic stuff. That scares me. Yeah. I mean, we're all going to get, I mean, it's going to wipe us all out. Let's be honest about that. We're going to get absolutely wrecked. And he's going to be sitting there in his place watching the forums going, that's right. Yeah. Well, on the March 31st development notes, he talked about spending time working on the labs. So apparently there are going to be laboratories that are kind of like,

I guess the equivalent of magic workshops, but there's going to be different types of them, I guess, depending on what kind of magic that you're, well, this, this, whoa, I mean, huh. What? I hope it doesn't end up being such a situation where the magic dominates the game, because I, I kind of like the, uh. I wonder if it'll be, I, I feel like he, I mean, that should be your choice. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm trying to say. Yeah. Thank you. According to what Toadie was talking about, and D.F.

Many, many years ago. He introduced things. He was then she being a world gentleman someone with that the world's following all the way up to, well, you can pick how much procedural nonsense you want to the world. So hopefully he sticks with that.

He tends to. It's not like the procedural generation, sorry, the world generation parameters. It's not like that there are too few of them right now. There are so many. There are so many. Yeah. Well, yeah, no, when he was talking about adding in the muscle magic, he used to be some of the dog. You could go from a level of zero magic and go to mine or something. It's a lot of crazy. This segment has been brought to you by Mr. Gutzi's sanitation and refuse hauling. Garbage piling up? Mysterious goo in the hallway? something in the corner marked do not touch that's definitely still moving.

Mr. Gutsy handles it all with a shovel, a strong stomach, and a strict policy of not asking follow-up questions. From refuse piles to more complicated situations, Mr. Gutsy keeps your fortress clean, or at least clean enough that nobody complains out loud. All right, let's talk about warm beers. Turn. It's been a little bit since I've checked into warm beers.

I did notice some of the chat on the Discord server that we were kind of talking about frame rights. Has warm beers maxed itself out? We're on some point right now, but I think partly that's due to some switches that left on that shouldn't have been, and we're still waiting for the volcano to finish refilling. It's been in several months since I've had my turn.

I actually just yesterday got these mortification. It's already coming up to this recording, so I'll be taking a look for this time alone myself. I don't know. We've got lots of fun stuff going on, and I think while it's some of the background stuff, settles down, hopefully the little astronomy should pick up. Well, good. It makes me happy that this fortress has been running for six months. I think that we can call this one a success. Yeah, and despite all my crazy death tramps, I haven't managed to completely destroy the ruin yet. So really am I doing a good enough job. Okay, so would you describe the Dwarven shower?

The death shower. The shower was sort of a collaboration of myself, Timbershocks, and it was the sword. Shout out to Timber Fox. He's made a few nice videos. Well, he's been doing great stuff, yeah. So there was three or four of us that we're discussing a show to help Parmit with emptying out a little bit. Yeah, we came to the idea of it was running a pump stack up from the caverns. to just throw water down in the volcano to just pass the obsidian.

And that worked really well. That was Timbers' idea. And then when my last turn came around, I was looking at it, and I realized that the access to the water in the caverns was pretty slow. And so it was working, but it wasn't really able to maximize full slow rate. And so that was why I extended the lake by multiple. Z levels. Once you empty out the volcano, it takes that long to refill it. Yes and no. The volcano actually refills pretty quickly. The water flow got left on for longer than

it needed to be. The other mine cart cheating, like portable hole drains that were dug into the side of the volcano got left open for a couple years longer than they needed to be. But yeah, no, volcano was refill at a pretty substantial rate. So you do need, it is quite the battle to get the level down to where you can work with it and keep it down there while you're working. So I got to know, did anybody get written up for that? And did anybody have to write up a root cause analysis to give to the director? There were a lot of words that went missing. I mean, six, he's one that we think there was a lot of children's using the moment of law.

So you had one job. Throw the dang lever. That can sometimes be incredible. difficult for them. Pulling the lever can sometimes just be too much. And they're like, you know what? We can't manage it. They really don't have good work, I think. We're giving up.

There's an old pen sketch, like an old Dwarven comic that I've seen around the internet from years and years ago where it's a couple of frames that's showing like the goblin invasion and somebody's, they'll pull the lever and there's a dwarf right next door who's reaching for it

and you see the word double that says, wait! It's my lever to pull. I'm come in, it zooms out and out and out and down like a hundred Z levels, there's, you know, some old slow dwarish. It's like, I'm coming from a lever. Oh, God. Yes. He's got his crutches and you're like, uh. How many times have we seen that guys?

Yep. Yep, yep. Where the furthest possible one is the one who claims the job. That's usually why I try to put my lever room next to the tavern with a hangout in the hopes that those idiots that don't have a job right now, they pick it up, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes it's just the last dude in the last mine shaft and he's like, oh, yes, it is me. Can you assign lever pulling? Maybe.

You can, I think, assign ownership of a lever because I believe it counts as a workshop. Does it? That's interesting. I'm not positive. I could be wrong. You mean as a labor assignment where you have one or two dwarves that don't do anything but lever pulling? Yes, that you can definitely do. That's what I was thinking about.

Yeah, as long as your population is high enough and you can get this specific with their work, have a couple, three, four dwarves that have nothing to do but pull levers. if you need to assign those levers to those dwarves, fine, but have no responsibilities except pulling levers and hanging out in the tavern getting happy. Yeah, I think that's definitely a way to go. You also make use of vampires and lever rooms. Oh, that's a nice idea.

Or you make a kindergarten and you shove your kinders, your kinders, really? Your children, yes. into the kindergarten with a burrow and you set them to only do chores lever pulling and then the lever in question is in the kindergarten and therefore the children will just hang around drink mead, eat good food, play with their stuff

and when the lever needs to be pulled they're already there. Sounds like a plan. You just need actual like children for that. If you don't have children. This is not going to work. So just like a side note, if you have like two people, like two children. I mean, I love child labor. Those nimble little fingers certainly can tightly stitched garments. Well, they do make good shoes.

But the point is that they have this annoying tendency that they don't really drop their jobs and playing as a job. So there is a... I was just going to say, you have to hope that they're not all in the middle of make-believe because you'll never get into stop. You need more children to increase the chances of this being done quickly.

That's why if you only have two and they're both playing make-believe, they're not going to stop playing make-believe simply because, I don't know, like a siege happened or somebody is drowning the entire fortress. Doesn't matter. They don't care. I mean, you could make

use of combining your kindergarten with like a floodroom. and just have a regular timer that resets everyone's jobs by having, you know, surges of ways washed through the kids on a regular basis. Well, that certainly fits my moral and ethical standard, so I'm in. That sounds great. It sounds like you're going to really build a good reactive military force in the future. And it can swim.

And they can swim. Only the ones that survive. Yeah. User Lucid, I believe, over on the Dwar Fortress's unofficial Discord server, had a whole class, basically. They put together a big PDF on explaining the use and building of floodrooms and how to do, like, timing and to minimize a number of drowned dwarves. and they liked to control their temples and zones where people tend to get stuck for long periods of time

by being able to either manually or just automatically have the room closed off so that people would get access and come in but then go home and do something else from time to time. It was kind of a neat concept. I haven't played around with it personally, but I like the idea. Hmm. All right. So step back. Dwarf fortress unofficial Discord server? I don't know what you call it. Only I will show do it as the Bay 12th server personally,

but it's not absolute main phone by... The old one. The old one. Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Because like Kit Fox is official Dwar fortress, but there is a just dwarf fortress discord server. Gotcha.

So yeah, the old one. Yeah. Yeah, the OG discord. The OG Discord. Yeah. I feel like the way things should work. Yeah. I have both of the muted because it's just like spam.

I mean, not literal spam. Oh, no. Not little spam. Spam is in way too much conversation and talk for me to keep up with. I mean, I'm technically on the Kit Fox Discord, but I haven't agreed to their crazy terms and conditions, so I don't actually use that one. What do they have? What am I missing? I don't know.

Yeah, fair enough. Okay. But, no, they like the main dwarf fortress. Discord is pretty easy to stay alone to you. I have most of the channels muted, so I only follow like Fortress Mode, Adventure Mode, and Tavern, basically. That may be my problem. Well, and questions.

Yeah, because there are a bunch of other channels, but I just, I muted most of them and just picked the topics that I like primarily. And, yeah, it's not too bad when you filter it some of the noise. And, yeah, I spend a lot of time on there answering people's missions, big times. I don't think I'm in that one. I'm in the Kid Fox one, but the other Dwarf fortress one, I don't think I'm in. Could you, like, send an invite? Were you not in the, uh, in it?

So it was the one before, before the World Fortress ever was with Kit Fox. I was there a link on the Discord. It's got the old school graphic of the, uh, of the dwarf at the beginning, from the opening movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know the one that you're talking about, but, um, I might have cleaned up my Discord servers too much. That'll teach you. That'll teach you for the Murray Condo thing.

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I would like to also talk about that I'm not even sure what you would call it There was a particular trap room where the enemies had to navigate a set of diagonal tiles that were a number of Z levels above the floor. So I was, for whatever reason,

whenever I was looking at Timber Fox 13, his video demonstrating it, I was thinking that the carts were slamming up against the bottoms of these pillars. Backwards. They're actually from the roof.

What? So, yeah, there is a weird little collision exploit, I guess. Something to do with when a mind crack falls on the floor, the Z level immediately below it registers as also being hit. And so you trigger dodge effects without actually being in physical contact with the

mine truck, which means no amount of corpses or bodies can pile up and clog and stop the mine cards moving because it doesn't actually touch anyone. That's a cool trap. It is. It is. Man. That's... Yeah. It's on the Trappisccripted page of the wiki. It's been there for ages. Old videos like kind of twisted logic gaming. This video is on YouTube demonstrating different versions of this build. And yeah, it's just something I ran it was one day.

And then I paired it together with some other knowledge. I'd seen somebody post on Reddit. about how to shorten the mine card shotgun. And so, yeah, the build that you see in Warm Beers is just kind of a combination of a few different ideas that I picked up from other people. And, yeah, made it into, I think right now, it's every 31 ticks of the game,

the mine cart hits the tile, which is a little bit faster than repeating floor spikes, which trigger every 40, or 50 ticks, which is significantly faster than trying to flip Adam Smashers, which are every, like, 200. So it's

faster. If I wanted to get really fiddily, it's possible to put two line carts per track, which would then cause any impact to happen. I'm trying to remember, it's been a while since I did my science.

It's like twice the right. It's like, it's like, it's like, It gets down to like 11 or 15. Like, it's pretty fast. Oh. Where, yeah, and, you know, it's not necessarily going to cause huge damage, although the injuries can't happen. But mostly it's just about trying to trigger the dodge,

which is why I made, I was originally just going to do a pit trap with several Zs and spikes. But then I realized, we're on a volcano map. Let's just make it, you know, have one jump to a little. Right? But yeah, I have, in my screenshots folder, I have some samples showing like 11 pages of text of this one goblin sitting there and just dodging and dodging and dodging. I think you got hit once. So it's not the be all and all.

You can use them to defend you, but yeah, if someone's got a high dodge skill, you're not going to hurt them. And that's why I made it so that I'm hoping that they will make the mistake and step off the edge. That's so good. So you're, yeah, that room. Yeah. No, go ahead to finish up. I got another. I was going to say, yeah, there was those few different layers of traps going on in that room.

Taking advantage of the traffic designations that you can set for your dwarves to tell them. which tiles should be prioritized for use. There is a longer pathway that leads around the room that is safe, quote unquote. That, like the long dwarf path, every tile uses a standard issue weapon trap that comes in the game, which causes pathing issues and blocking for enemies because they will see their friends get skewered and then be like, oh, well, I don't want to step on that trap. So the shorter path is where all of these mine cart suppers are, and they don't have weapon traps.

They actually do have upright spikes just on them permanently in the upright position because it's possible for the mine cart to knock them into the spikes to do additional damage. So the dwarves can walk through the weapon traps and not get hurt because they are immune to those. They're aware. It is a problem if you have trap-of-void creatures following a dwarf. But again, the basic enemy path in logic is to take the shortest possible path. So even if you're trap-ovoid, even if you're stealth and sneaking in and hidden, they're going to cut through the underneath the mine carts,

and they're going to have problems with dodging, regardless of what kind of creature they are. And then the third layer is there are some doorways. There's like just some freestanding doors. that you will see which are good for breaking limousight, or good for deflecting possible arrows, archery as dwarves are fleeing. They are marked as restricted traffic. You do not want to open one of those,

because directly above the door is a pipe full of magma, and it's a hot shower. So anyone who walks through these doors, which, again, goblins are prone to, will just be showered in magma. Beautiful. Yeah. So I had a lot of fun building that. It's good times. Yeah, I saw whenever you mentioned the traps page on the Wiki, I went to the traps page.

And then I realized that there is an entire secondary traps page that is much more detailed with much more fiddly traps that is just awesome. It's not traps. It's the trap design article in the Dwar Fortress Wiki. I don't know that I've ever been there, but there is some really cool stuff on there. I believe that was the page that I was actually referring to. And the last one on the list, if you scroll it, like there's a big list at the top that has links to all of the different designs on that page.

The bottom one should say in Minecraft Thumper. When falling mine carts land on a floor, they injured creatures in the tile below, add some rollers in a very short track loop to maximize damage potential, Since the mine cart remains physically separated from its targets, it shouldn't jam or jump off track. Nice. And it's listed as a bug. Yeah, I was going to say, that feels like a...

Oh, it is totally an exploit. Absolutely. That's a defect. Okay. Just to be absolutely clear, the mine card falling on the floor above the tile can and will actually hurt the entity below it. Yes. All right. That's...

Absolutely. I'm not going to right now because I don't want to reset my connections a little bit. I'm done, but I will drop a couple of screenshots in the episode discussion. Cool. Cool. Yeah, and I may, if it's all right, I may use one of those for the, at least in the episode art for it. So there's the only thing you think you can use. Yeah, I just usually pull things from the episode that we talk about.

It doesn't, it's not necessarily aesthetically nice. It's just some pictures. I don't know if anyone ever even looks at the episode art or not. Listeners, do you even know that we have episode art that's unique for each episode? I think that can only be seen on the website, right? Well, now I also upload it with the episode itself. So if your podcast catcher downloads images that are specific to an episode, it should show up in your podcast catcher as well.

I use an antenna pod, and it shows up in an antenna pod. So as the episode art. But, you know, I should, I should like, collect the best ones and create a digital scrapbook out of them. That would be interesting. So are there any other traps that you're especially proud of in warm beers? I mean, tramps in warm beers, not at the moment. I have some other designs that I'm going to be working on on this next term that I'm especially proud of. but that's mostly

shish-sh-sh-sh-strap secrets. Although, one thing that I'm going to be building that's not a secret is to help empty the cage tracks. I'm adding an automatic pit mechanism. So you don't have to

manually assign creatures to the pit to empty the traps, to refill them, to capture more goblins. Again, those little glorious minds. and some phones, if you have a mine cart set to load cold straps on its cargo, and then you slam that cart into a wall at a high speed, it dumps its contents.

We all are familiar with the mine cart shotguns. Well, when you shotgun cage traps, although we hit a second obstacle, the cage traps themselves will shotgun their contents. Oh, wow. So you can set up a double shotgun and throw your captured scenes into a hole automatically. So you load the cages into the mine carts? Yeah, and then you shotgun the mine cart, and you just have a one tile gap in a second post to hit the cages into, and then they will shotgun whatever is inside them. And now you have a bunch of cages.

What? So do you have an additional impulse that's like not real world possible for once the cages release their contents and those items get shot? I don't know how inertia really works in Dorf Orchrist, but do you extend the range of your shotgun with your contents of your cages? You can, yes. If you're doing like a long, long hallway and just naturally letting the cages hit the ground, where they may, then yes, you can extend the range and it will curl your 50,000 naked bulldogs or whatever you've crammed into one cage out onto the battlefield. So yes, you could do that. Again, going back to Twisted Logic Gaming, a fantastic YouTube channel.

He has done just that in some of his shotgun videos. He has a really, really long hallway. and loaded up some cages and then when they hit the ground, the animals that were inside also came out with an extra. Is he back active? Yeah, twisted logic, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, we had him on basically right before

they started an extended hiatus, so I didn't know that they had come back. Well, he's not super active these things. He's been playing some other ones, but yeah, there's lots of stuff. stuff on his channel from quite a while ago. Today's show is sponsored by Mondragar's Tavern Management and Crowd Control. Got too many visitors, bards performing over each other,

someone just threw a mug and now it's escalating. Mondragar keeps the drinks flowing, the crowd's moving, and the situation just barely under control. From nightly rushes to full-on chaos, Mondragar makes sure your tavern stays lively and mostly standing. Roland, I cut you off, earlier, there was that you were about to make a comment on the double impulse mine cart shotgun and cage traps?

That is very, very, okay, I'm highly interested in this now. I'm highly interested. I'm highly interested. Because I, we have already established, I love putting animals into the toilet. That is a sentence that you should never take out of context, please. Somebody needs to put that in the shit door fortresses, Reddit. That's the new episode title. Yeah.

I like to put animals in the toilet. I love flushing animals down my toilet. Yeah. Put that into that title. Your landlord hates you. But, okay, listen, wow. My mind is just blooming with possibilities here. The problem actually might be that if you go too fast and the creatures out of the cages fly too fast,

they obviously smash apart. So I... Because, see, my idea is you could potentially get a undid cleaning system going. If you are in a reanimation biome, then you don't want all the bits and pieces and, like, dead corpses to clutter around because they come back alive. Right. Even like a strand of hair will come back and your drawers go like, oh my God, it's moving. So a lot of traps with cages, then they get caged. and then you can just shoot them automatically into the nearest toilet and flush them away.

Yeah, there you go. Oh, my God. That's a bad. The real question is just because the animals will experience, you know, the full force of the impact, what is the benefit of this? I mean, horror is obviously a good benefit because if I shoot like half a billion, naked mole rats at the incoming goblin tide, they're going to go, oh my God, these wars are crazy. But, like, what is the net?

Well, here's another response. I guess it's on the angle. I mean, if you just want to the shock and horror value of watching, coming your infamy invaders, watch you decimate by local populations of wild animals as they have to now wade through the courses. That sounds like Roland. At the wind end.

If you're looking to add additional combat value, then make the target landing zone where the animals are going to be coming out of the cages out of wooden blocks. Uh-huh. To like that you fall. The way Borch Fortress handles impact code is when you fall on the ground, essentially the ground makes a slam attack

against you. So material density matters. So if you have, especially if you have access to like featherwood, or willow, or there's a couple other really lightweight woods. Tile the ground in wooden blocks.

And then when the ground punches back, it doesn't have as much oaf behind it and it won't do as much damage. So you can make a safe landing zone for these hapless creatures being shotgun out of cages. And then they can actually engage in combat without being quite so badly damaged.

That's really interesting. I never, so I really enjoy making my floors pretty, and I have really gotten into using wooden blocks to tie my floors with, but I never thought about the secondary effects of the different materials that are on the floor. Cool. They make a huge impact, by the way. If you do it like me and you have these shafts where you just dump stuff into, I'm I love tiling them into something dense, either iron, steel, platinum, whatever I get on my grubby fingers.

Gold. Just use gold. For example, it's a little odd to put gold into the trash compactor, but the difference it makes is so crazy. Because even like a drop, a normal drop, no floor, just normal rock, some things might survive that. If you, however, lay in gold, the survivability on that fall is cut in less than half. It's really, really, really effective. It's even more effective than just dropping them on spikes I found. Huh.

Well, cool. So next time we start off a community fortress, I think that I am going to, no, I'm going to pledge here. I will join and be active in the next community fortress after it crinks up. because there is so much that I can learn from these things. Yeah, just the traps, right? Oh, there's no reason we can't take a turn in a wormbears if you want. Well, you know, it's already pretty much established, and I could take a turn,

but then I would have to go through the trouble of learning everything in the fortress and how things are working. I think it would just be easier to start off from scratch at the beginning. Or you could be like any of the other players and just ignore everything else that's going on and do your own thing. That's true. That's true. I think I'm definitely going to grab warm beers and just look around, because I want to really get my, how you say, trap mechanic leveled up, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So just I got kind of sidetracked on that whole shotgun thing. The next big megaproject that I'm planning is going to be pretty up your aisle, Jonathan, to not be too specific. I am taking into account some of the tastes and preferences of our hosts. It's probably going to take me more than a year to build. It's going to be fairly large. The great pyramid of warm beers.

Well, I can cut that if you want me to. Well, no, no, that's fine. I had some plans that were fairly moderate, And then I had an inspiration that made me realize I could increase the efficiency significantly. And so by having such a better design, I expanded the scope and then realized that what I was trying to do was going to actually require more floor space than it was physically possible upon this particular handmark. So I had to dial it back down a little bit. But where I'm at right now, I'm going to be using at least 50. entire Z levels

of space for digging, and then probably another 8 to 10 rule Z level, this not fully, but like about half or a third of them. And we're

in the, I don't know, 8 or 900, mine carts, 10 to 15,000 mechanisms God knows count. Good Lord. But that's less than it was going to be. Like, originally I was, I had done the original mass,

and it was going to be 30 plus thousand mechanisms. Oh, my gosh. I was simplified. Okay. Yes. It's making me sweaty. This is simple. So, yeah.

All right. So that'll be coming out in about 2030. Why much? We'll see. I'm going to tell me. get the groundwork of the digging laid out at the end of the end of it. Just that much space. It's going to take time for the little

towards to dig before you can start building. And then, building and building and build them. It's going to be super cool and everyone's brains are going to explore. That's, that's my course. Awesome. Awesome. What do you think your FPS will look at? The R.I.S. when there is going to be fatal to look at.

What's that all? What do you think your FPS is going to look like? It should not actually affect the FTS any significant amount. Okay. Yes. Cool. Because despite all that complexity,

very little of it should be utilized at any one particular point in turn. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I don't think it's going to have an overall negative impact too much. But we'll see. All right. So we are coming up on the top of the hour. And I think we're going to wrap up this episode of Dual Fortress Roundtable, number 132.

Rurik, you got anything else that you'd like to add here? No, I think I'm good. I've managed to cover some of the key bits that we wanted to talk about. Roland, got anything else? Oh, God. I feel like you're just shown a line into my eyes and like, now tell me the secrets.

Oh, God. No, no, buddy. Tony, got anything else? I'm feeling good. I'm feeling motivated. I'm going to get out there. I'm going to drown children and build switches. Wait, is that what we're doing?

I forgot. It's swimming training, okay? Not drowning. That's right. No, that's right. Well, drowning for the ones who don't get it. Soft drowning. Swimming training is like drowning, but slower.

In the fortress, we call it tough love. And that's okay. Any of that's been a lot of Sundays. Well, thanks for coming on. Yeah, man. Really appreciate it. We'll have you on again because I realized about a half hour into it that I didn't ask the question that we always asked people whenever they first come on the podcast, which we will have to ask you next time. And that is, what's your Dwarf Fortress Journey story? How did you come to the game? But I don't think we're going to have time for that one today because that usually ends up being at least 20 minutes long of conversation.

Well, I mean, really quickly, I started in 2013 9 with 40D. Back in the days where if your dwarers weren't throwing tantrums, it meant they were dead. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yep, yep, yep. So how did you discover it? I find a moment that made me into it. And, you know, started just sending you messages being like, hey, there's this cool thing you need to get into. I'll only, I sound the utterly, utterly, utterly.

newbie tutorial or it had some ridiculous name that was like a something awful tutorial threat that I spent like a month going through learning the how to do and then like I said I spent a lot of time on the forums back in the day reading and

reading the wiki and far too much time that I should have been doing my actual day job playing board switches is that not your day job sometimes it's like it so the main question I have for you is when you first started playing Door Fortress did you play for a while

then quit then come back or did you start and stay with it if you can remember I just bounced I was not really I've kind of done I've been muscled through and I mean I've taken breaks here and there but I know I've always

always had an instant self and the Warthorthorthers kicking around some of the common patterns is you start playing Dwarfurtrish, you go oh my goodness, this is incomprehensible and you drop it, and then you come back again, and the second time it clicks. That seems to be a

typical experience. Yeah, I didn't go quite that range. I stuck with it until I got it. And then, once I knew what I was doing, I mean, I break down a little for on the other things. But, you know, I would have luck agency was the rest of that because it's going to start a whole time that we need to

change for us. Well, maybe we'll get into that one next time. Yes, that would be a lot of fun. All right, so that wraps up this episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable. Everyone, have fun, get out there, dig, play, and yeah, we'll see all next time. All right, thanks for us. Thank you. Thank you.

And that wraps up this episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable. brought to you by Mr. Gutzi's thorough cleanup services, Lucas's dependable stone furnishings, and Mondragar's steady hand in the tavern. Thanks to our patrons for helping keep the fortress running, the halls tidy, and the mugs only occasionally airborne. And before we go, due to some unexpected and unplanned real-life happenings here in the fortress, this will be our final episode of the season.

We'll be back in the fall with more dwarfy nonsense, but in the meantime, keep an eye on the YouTube channel. We're planning on some let's plays and other. other fun content over the coming months. Until then, strike the earth. This has been the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to 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.

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