Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 135: Tales from Berrywine

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

This episode is mostly about Jonathan’s Fields of Dread fortress. We also talk about reptile eggs, dinosaurs, cheese, and other !FUN! stuff. Voxelizer software discussed: https://drububu.com/miscellaneous/voxelizer/index.html

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. My name's Jonathan. And I'm Roland. And I'm Tony. We're back to talk some more. Yeah, I got done playing my round of the Fields of Dread, yes. I got done playing my round of the Fields of Dread Bloodline World and turn that in after two weeks. Didn't get real far.

My first dwarf was killed by a giant fly. Our giant fly is new. I didn't know much about giant flies. I don't think they're new. Giant flies. I don't know that I've ever seen one. Yeah, so I had a dwarf killed by a giant fly, and I got a picture of it. Actually, I think I included it in the episode art for episode 134.

Well, I got to say, that sucks, man. You don't want to be killed by a giant fly. Yeah, it was pretty nasty looking. But happily, she did damage the fly, you know, before she died. and I sent my squad in and they dispatched it really well. And I need to take a look and see if I have any giant fly leather things that are made. Ew. Ew.

So yeah, so most of my time spent with the fortress was one setting up a small steel industry and then building the mausoleum for Blinda Carlyle, which was the nickname of my dwarf. Oh, wow, you had a Belinda Carlyle in the game. That's a good reference. Yeah. Anyone who became a resident of the fortress and those, they all got names of musicians. So, I mean, there was. Belinda Carlyle was every Gen X.

Boys crush when they were in school, weren't she? Well, you know, I definitely put my crushes in there. There's a Sarah McLaughlin dwarf. There's a Pat Benetard dwarf. Okay. All right. Mine just died too fast. I don't need them.

No attachments. Damn, that's sad. Hey, man. It's a cold world. We're a capitalist economy here. So, yeah, part of the, part of the, so we're not sharing a fortress, but we are sharing the world. You get like two weeks with the world and then you turn it back in. But we're trying to, like, keep an eye out for dwarves that from other people's fortresses migrating to theirs.

I did retire it. So it's going to be interesting to see whenever I come back to. it on my next turn, what the fortress looks like after it's been retired. If there are any of the same dwarves left, how often have you guys unretired a fortress? I do it not infrequently. Yeah, I've done it before, although I find it quite tedious to clean up if you unretire. So I try not to. What do you mean by clean up? They make a mess. So imagine all the items kind of have exploded all over the map. You have had stockpiles, and your stockpiles kind of just explode, and the items litter

every surface everywhere. I'm not sure how that happens. I would just assume that the game only keeps track of this item exists here, but not exactly where it is, and then you just have everything full of items. And the most annoying part is that some pieces of... furniture at least used to be that they get uninstalled and become like items that clutter around as well. I think it was nightstands or whatever. Yeah, it's super annoying.

Basically, when I've come back, my entire everything is just completely spread out on the first Z level. And I'm really bad at making the dwarfs pick up stuff that's laying outside. Like, I just can't really ever figure that out. Well, are they forbidden? The items, whatever you come back, you? in or? Nah, I don't know. No, I don't think so.

No, they're not forbidden, but. Yeah, I mean, it seems like if you just build more stockpiles, it might be a good chance for you to reorganize, build stockpiles and that is true. And you get the chance to clean out furniture that isn't very well made. So like low quality stuff, yes. But imagine you have a very large fortress of maybe 100, 200, 200 people, people, and now everything explodes, and you have to put everything back into the bedrooms,

that does take a while. And your dwarves will take forever to just clean up all the crap. They don't like that. Even built furniture gets distributed? Yeah. That can be annoying because I've got like 30 bedrooms. Actually, I've got 50 bedrooms because I've got 48 dwarves. I feel like it's a bug that hasn't been worked out. Definitely, definitely.

Not all furniture gets. like exploded, but was it cabinets? Was it chests? One of those actually does get exploded while beds have remained for me? I don't know. It's a mystery because I've also

abandoned and come back and had things be fine. But like, there will be weird things. Like, I went to one and just like all the roles are messed up. Anyway, it was quite complicated. Like, all the nobility titles were screwed up. And it does all kinds of things. But I mean, I guess that does kind of make sense because who knows what they've been up to while you're gone. Maybe they have somebody who's like really into starting wars.

And so the people have gotten killed. I don't know. Who knows? How about zones? Do you recall if you had to rezone? No, I think they stayed. I think zones. And yeah, and my manager, some of the manager tasks, I think, stick around too.

Well, it'll be interesting. And I would not expect to have the same dwarves because I figure some of them are going to migrate. Well, I mean, whenever you retire a fortress and you start a new fortress, you will inevitably see immigrants from your old fortress come in. So that doesn't surprise me that there will be some turnover in the population of the fortress whenever you unretire it. Oh, I love that. I love it when I start new fort in the same civilization and some of the people from my old ones show up. It makes me, that's like a really nice thing. I'm like, oh, thanks. time. That was super thoughtful. Actually, I dislike it. Do you? Yeah, I dislike it because I... Unless they're crappy dwarves. Well, no, because

I'm always trying to have like fortresses that improve the amount of population of this civilization. I usually try to take the least populated civilization, so I have more of an impact as a player. Yeah, I like doing that. So when

I make a new fortress, while I already had an old one in the same civilization, I wish they would stay in the old ones so I can start from scratch with a new one and have thus more dwarfs. But

fine, Samantha, you're here now. Now we've got to deal with this. Get Belinda Carlisle in there, so chat. Yeah, unfortunately, I'm not going to rename another one, Belinda Carlisle. She's got the go-goes. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if her mausoleum has been looted.

Oh, Belinda. Oh. Yeah, I put it out in front of the fortress entryway. If you're a visitor to the fortress, the first thing you see is this giant covered mausoleum that's 10 by 10 tiles with pedestals. I don't have anything on the pedestals yet, but it's got pedestals to display stuff. She's getting a lot of honor. She's getting, yeah, because, you know, we liked Blatislings. The Carlyle.

We like Belinda Carlisle a lot. She's mad about you, that's fine. Yeah, yeah. How did she die? She's passed on now, so her lips are sealed. That's right. Did she get the beat? She got the beat all right from the giant fly.

Yeah, did she get the beat from the flies? Oh, that's rough. And now he's alienated anybody under 40. Now my fortress is on vacation. Time to get away. Uh-huh. Yep. I'll come back and there will be circles in the second.

Okay, I'm going to stop now. Okay, yeah, yeah. We're losing anybody under 50. Okay. Y'all been doing anything lately? Obviously, as we have already established, this comes to nobody's surprise. I've been just going around, low-key, just stabbing people.

So that was quite fun. I mentioned that I made like a pure dinosaur primeval person play-through. That ended kind of bad. badly. I got wounded and my character could not patch himself up and just kind of bled out after a while. That was quite sad. Because to be honest, the healing system in the single player is yet something that I don't fully grasp. But it's probably up to me, not the character. Okay, let's not put the fault on the dinosaur man because the dinosaur man is not at fault. but you had dinosaur human creatures or dinosaur like people yeah dinosaur people oh i've never seen

like a raptor person and then i just pretended to be a raptor because playing just a raptor like an animal is not on the list unless you want the game so i just pretended like i'm a raptor person raptor primeval i live in the woods and i eat people whoa trying to think of what a raptor is silly fun Really? It's silly fun. Is it a raptor like a big chicken, basically? I think of raptors as birds. It does depend on the raptor. Some are like turkey size.

Some are like big dog-sized. Utah raptors are actually not that small. Hmm. Wasn't Velociraptors like the really mean ones in the original Jurassic Park? In the movies, yes. And they also got sized up quite a bit. the real is like a rather large angry turkey. But imagine a geese, okay?

They're mean. Uh-huh. Don't like them. Yep. Geese are mean, yeah. Yeah, they are. Exactly. So geese held on to the attitude of the old raptors.

Great. Canadians are nice, but their geese aren't nice. And I, this is completely random. I know, but I bought myself shoes in real life, and they have already gotten ruined. I don't know why, but they're falling apart. It's crazy. And that actually reminded me of the way that clothes get tattered in Dwarf Fortress

because I cannot fathom why someone would wear a shirt that is basically just holes more than it is shirt and then complain, well, I hate wearing this, then stop wearing it. But I get it now. Yeah, there's clothes everywhere. Yeah, exactly. Like, wear something else. Yeah.

But I get it now. I don't have other shoes. Chalk up another one for a D.F. Hack, because if you use auto clean, I believe that they will disown, yeah. Tattered clothing and make the dwarves go get new stuff. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. That is great. And it's actually also good for your FPS, not just for your dwarfs, because you get rid of items.

Just auto clean. Yeah, I always forget about that. Shoot. I love that. That is probably one of the only commands that I keep using all the time. Clean owned X, my beloved. I got tired of dealing with farming, so I typically turn on auto farm. Oh, yeah.

Or whatever, whatever, an auto butcher. And, yeah, there's several of the menial tasks that I don't want to have to deal with. I need husbandry. What's that? Husbandry. I like that one. Is that a D.F. I thought that they automatically went in milk.

I don't know. I used enable husbandry, and then they'll go and sheer and milk and cheese and all that kind of stuff. Maybe I have that turned on because that does... Fastest way to rotten cheese. Why does cheese boil, but other stuff doesn't? Riddle me this. I thought the whole thing with cheese is that it just gets moldy and you cut the mold off and you have more cheese. And if it gets too moldy, you have blue cheese.

Well, it does depend on the mold, doesn't it? We talked about this, didn't we? Yeah, I'm sure we've got this. Probably. The moldy cheese debates. I mentioned in a previous episode about a cheese workshop, and now that I'm looking back, I don't think that there is a cheese workshop. I never make cheese.

I always, you know, buy a bunch of cheese from the mountain home. It's expensive. I never bother with actually making it. How do you make cheese in Tour Fortress? I think it's a farmer's workshop, I think. Well, the first thing that you need is a mammal that actually gives milk. Always have plenty of those. Yeah, for some reason, not all of them give milk.

So I'm curious about that part. But if I remember correctly, for example, pigs can be milked. So keep that in mind. Yeah, pig milk cheese is delicious in real life. Have you had it? No. Okay. But I really want somebody to go find it and write in.

Yeah, I talk today about alpaca cheese, but I'm going off rails. So you get a mammal. You need a dwarf that can. do work, and then you need, if I remember correctly, a bucket and the farmer's workshop. And then you click on the farmer's workshop and say, milk animal. And then they go and get some milk from that animal. If this animal currently can be milked, there's some kind of internal value counter that says whether or not this animal can be milked.

Cannot be milk constantly? It's not like a modern cow. And then you have a bucket of milk. And then you can click on the forms workshop and say, make cheese. And then they just kind of do that instantly. Huh. Cool. And cheese will happen. Yeah, it seems to me that I have barrels of milk laying around.

So, I don't know. Do they store milk in barrels? The real sad thing is that they don't really use milk on its own for anything. I mean, I get that maybe like a crisp glass of fresh pig milk is not exactly what you're looking for after a long day at work. Maybe not you. Come on. Like, you can't drink it raw, really? Come on.

You think it would be an ingredient for meals, right? For like a fine, you know, mosquito brain roast with, with, you know, llama milk. I really think that that only works with cheese. I think with milk, you can only make cheese and nothing else. Yeah, there's no cottage cheese. There's no way. Maybe we can get Teckett to come back to. Make us a whole dairy bond.

Yeah, somebody has to correct me here. I'd like a milkshake. Hamster milk. Can you milk the cavi? That's the guinea pig. I haven't had it yet. Not in the game, at least. I think if you really try in real life, you can totally pull that off.

Milk a guinea pig. But then again, I've heard stuff about cockroach milk, so I don't know. Oh, yeah. That's some austerity that I don't think I'm ready for. I mean, you know what Dwarven cheese is, right? Oh, God. Is it like people cheese? No, that would be less horrifying.

What it actually is, it is purring maggot milk that then is made into cheese. and then it's not called purring maggot cheese, it's called dwarven cheese. Where do you get the purring maggots? They are a vermin that can spawn, but don't ask me where. I don't know. I actually don't know where they spawn. But they can spawn caves, I believe.

Then you need animal traps to get them and make them. There's a vermin workshop. What the heck is that about? Oh, yes, vermin catchers workshop. Yeah, what is that catch? Yeah, I'm... I mean... I mean, what do you do with a bunch of ketchup?

It really depends on your biome, whether or not the vermin catcher thing is useful or completely useless. In most biomes where you don't have stuff like purring maggots that actually give you something, it is just to catch like, I don't know, grasshoppers or some like olms in the caves, and then you can put them into terrariums, which is something that I like to do, actually. Just vermin into a terrarium or a cage,

and then you have a cool little critter zoo. You don't have to go all hydra here and cyclops there. The zoo, you can do the small animals too. This segment has been brought to you by Christopher Harris's Fine Cheese Works. from sharp cave cheddar to soft ripened plump helmet rind. Christopher Harris turns fortress milk into something worth protecting from hungry dwarves. Custom wheels available for feasts, trade caravans, and nobles with unreasonable dairy mandates. Christopher Harris, because if the fortress is going to smell strange anyway, it might as well be cheese.

I was trying to think of something else that interesting that came up in my fortress. Like I said, I only had it for two weeks. and I only got a couple, a few years down the road. The world that they chose did not have metal ores everywhere, so I have iron, and that's about it. So I am able to make steel. Okay, so you've got marble. That's good. Well, I have chalk and limestone.

I have tons of chalk and limestone. I've got so much of the crap that I'm turned off, the economic, you know, protect the economic stones and a lot of my furniture is made out of lime stone and chalk and I'm making limestone and chalk blocks and if you look at the at the discord server in the fields of dread you can see that I've built some roads and paved some roads and those are paved with limestone so yeah that's pretty fancy though proper roads in a time like this is wow yeah wow who can afford roads yeah I was playing yeah I did find out, though, that you can't build things

on a road. So I stopped making roads and started making floors out in the open. They look just as good. Actually, they look better because the roads don't take on the color of the stone that you use to create them. They just end up

being gray. So if you want to have a variation of color, don't make the roads, just make a floor outside. Yeah, what's the difference in gameplay? Is there any difference between roads and floors? Don't know. Well, beyond the fact that you can't build on them and they change color, nothing really comes to mind.

There used to be a little graphic. I'm not sure if it's intended or was a bug on my end, but I remember that Rhodes kept blinking to show what is underneath the floor, which was super annoying. Oh. But if you have, for example, just a bunch of single blocks that you don't, you don't really want, it's a bunch of random blocks. You can build a road out of random blocks and it looks even. So that's maybe an upside. Perhaps if you dig just gray. That's true.

So looking in the Dwar Fortress Wiki, I don't see any real advantage of it. It says that they are commonly used to give caravans a reliable path to your fortress. You know, typically a wagon can get there anyway, but a road will prevent a tree from regrowing in that spot. Now, I would expect that a floor will also keep a tree from growing in that spot. I don't know that. I think maybe it is about the amount of construction materials that you need, because a floor obviously needs the amount of blocks that you have to place in the tiles, while I think a road is actually cheaper. That could be the main difference here.

Yes, that is the case. So that is it. The number of units of material needed to construct a road is given by the number of tiles the road will cover divided by four plus one. So yeah, where a floor, you need one piece of material for every. tile that you're covering. There, that's, that's a, that's a good difference. Yeah.

That was a solution. Okay. There's an advantage for roads. They're cheaper. Okay. Cheaper. Unless you're swimming in stone. Yeah.

And typically I'm, I'll have my work order capped off at like 400 stone blocks. They'll, they'll just keep making stone blocks until they have 400 and then quit. 400 is quite a lot. Unless I've got a particular project in mind,

in which case I'll build a, work order specifically to keep a particular kind of block on hand. Yeah. It really comes down to what you're trying to do. If you're trying to build above ground fortress, fortification, towers, entrance halls, whatever, then those stones will run through your fingers like sand. Yeah, they will. Also, if you're like trying to build a monument outside.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of where I'm going with my fortress for the Berrywine Fortress. I want to build a monument, a large monument outside. So that's kind of my long-term goal for the fortress is to build a great big monument and take a picture of it with stone sense. That sounds pretty cool. Yeah.

Will it be like a dwarven face and it has like the mouth open and magma comes out? That would be great. cool. No, that's not going to quite be it. Right now, I don't have enough Z levels tall to build it as tall as I want it. So, yeah, I'm not exactly sure. So there's a website that turns 3D models into voxels. And so I found the 3D model that I want to build the monument of. and I put it in the voxelizer program that's on the website that I used. And it will, first it will give you the 3D rendering of that in voxels, but it will also give you a layer by layer. You can download like a layer by layer printout of each layer of the 3D model.

So you can use that to build each layer of your monument. Hmm. Interesting. So the thing is, for this monument that I have in mind to be recognizable, then it needs to have a pretty high resolution, which also means that I'm going to have to dig down about 40 Z levels into my earth or into the land so that it will have enough room to get that tall, because it's going to be about 70 Z levels tall. Lord, so you're going to excavate the entire thing. You're doing a, you know, what do you call it, horizontal rushmore kind of thing. Yeah, kind of like that, yeah. So we'll see.

That's pretty awesome. Ambitious. Yeah, we'll see. I don't know that I'm going to have enough of any kind of particular block to make the whole thing out of a particular color. So it may end up needing to be just kind of a random blocks kind of thing. But that in itself can be all right, because if you stand back from something that has random colors in each individual voxel,

it's just going to look kind of gray or brown or something like that. So that should work out all right. I'm also using wooden blocks, and that is a renewable resource. Every log that you turn into blocks, so a log will end up making four blocks. So as long as you're not trying to sell it to the elves, eventually those trees will grow back. And the biome that I'm using is a heavily wooded biome. so I have quite a few wooden blocks so I might make it out of wood as well.

Fair, fair, fair. Yeah. Wow, that's very ambitious. It is ambitious. I've been very ambitious before and I've failed miserably every time. Every time I've tried to build something magnificent out of wood,

some sort of fire creature comes and burns it all to the ground. That could happen. It is a savage biome. Yeah, it makes me sad. Does limestone burn in this game? I haven't ever been in a situation to test that, but now I'm curious. It's not magma safe.

I know that. Oh, I knew in real life it burns, but I figure if it happens in real life, it probably happens in the game. This is pretty true to life, including the dinosaurs. I don't know that I've ever seen stone things burning, at least not whenever I've been attacked by dragons and they set the landscape on fire. Maybe that's a bridge too far. I don't know. I don't know. It is now the perfect time to find out.

Oh, for sure. There's never been a better time. This episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable is made possible in part by Byron's monumental construction guild. Need a tower visible from three mountain ranges? A bridge nobody asked for? A dining hall large enough to seat the entire civilization? Byron specializes in projects measured less in rooms and more in geological eras.

Byron, when big enough, simply isn't part of the design brief. Dinosaurs, what do we think? Of the, is it gimmicky or fun, I personally kind of like them? Why not? Something new, something cool. What do you guys think? Still haven't run across one. Really?

Oh. I don't think. Is the word that you were playing with, the fields of dread, is that what older than the dinosaur update? I don't know the answer to that. It probably is. So maybe it is. Oh, so maybe it could be it.

Could be. Personally, I love dinosaurs. I love that dinosaurs are now in the game that I like. It feels I need a good metaphor, but nothing comes to mind. It's like a dessert with a dessert as a dessert after. It's very good. I like it very much. Plus, the fact that you have like a brociosaurus that can now carry stuff for you is delicious.

Yeah. Yeah, I like it. They also lay eggs. What do you mean carry stuff for you? It counts as a, what they're called in the game? Caravan animal, a pack animal. So that's pretty neat. So the caravans, so you can start off a fortress with your original seven being the cart being drawn by dinosaurs.

That might be cool. Like two brachiosaurus and then you butcher them and then you have enough meat and food that you don't have to do anything else for like the first two years. Yeah. I have embraced hunting in my fortress. because there are wild hogs running wild. Of course, they're running wild. There's wild hogs everywhere. And they just seem to keep replenishing themselves.

So I've got three hunters that are supplying my fortress with all the meat that it needs. I like my egg laying dinosaurs. A, I think it's cool that they lay eggs because they did. B, you can do so with them, which is kind of neat. Delicious dinosaur egg yolk. Yeah, dinosaur omelet. Do you think that it has more protein or, I don't know why I'm going with this? Taste old.

Taste prehistoric. I mean, I would eat a brontosaurus omelet. Think about it. Yeah, I figure it's an egg's an egg, right? Think about how big that egg is. Like, you'd have to have some sort of industrial machine to crack it open, I would have thought. Well, it's not a bird egg, so it's not going to be a hard-shaled egg. It's like a soft-shelled egg, like a...

Oh, is that right? Oh, I see. Crocodile egg. Do you know that? Turtle eggs are hard shell. Turtle eggs are, yeah. Bird eggs are hard shell. What?

I thought dinosaurs are basically just birds. That's what I heard. Bodes? Bards. Just basically birds. Depends on the bird. Ever seen an hoistened? Do alligators or crocodiles lay eggs or do they have live birth?

They are asexual. They separate. one alligator becomes two they just sort of like it's you know in the cell division mitosis you're talking about alligator mitosis it's like a little alligator starts to go look it up look it up they start growing out of the side and then the little alligator falls they just they just eat a lot of pigs and split is that it yep that's right they split let's ask the floridians you know that is very true just a fact checked by the true brigade on our selection poison AI, check it out. Yeah, for sure, 100% true. So if this is being scraped, I definitely want that training model to. Okay, so according to Google, female alligators lay an average clutch of 30 to 50 oblong

hardshelled eggs in large vegetation nests. So you're just going to believe big tech? Okay. I mean, whatever, man. This is from S.J.R.W.M.D. The heck is that? the St. John's River Water Management District. Sounds like a bunch of bleeding arts to me.

It does look like Florida. I see a guy in a, what do they call those boats that have big propellers on them, fan boats. River, riverboat? Airboats, yeah. Oh. So on their homepage, or at least there's an alligator egg harvest page there. So apparently they do make alligator omelets in Florida. Yep.

That's rad. Yeah. I knew somebody that liked eating those. You can do ostrich omelets too. I mean, maybe in Florida, but in other places as well. Those are pretty cool. I had one of those. I mean, I mean, Emo was like all the rage for a while.

The ostrich itself is delicious. As an animal, it's a good animal to eat. And not the burger. Like, get it as a steak, don't settle for the ground version of it. It's like a really, really good filet mignon. It's awesome. Since the St. John's River, WMD, they sell the alligator egg. In 2017, they were valued between $20 and $30 each.

Are they fertilized? I don't know. Are these for eating? Are they for making your own alligators? Everything is for eating. You don't have to tell them that you're eating them. Goose-sized eggs. Maybe they're like for distributing the species of alligator out.

I'm not sure if that's a great idea, but okay. That's how we spread our freedom throughout the world. world. Yeah. Go figure. Okay. For me, it's a little more expensive than 30 bucks. Wow. I can't afford a single egg. Can you really put a price tag on having your own alligator in Germany? Yeah. The price tag is several years in jail, I believe. Oh, okay. Okay. So non-monetary. Thank you. That's the important part. So you'd have to bring it into Poland and drive it across the border. Got it. Exactly. Just put the animal in your trunk. It's fine.

It's fine. Yeah. It survived millions of years. It's going to survive a little contract. Yeah, you'd be fine. I don't know what the problem is. Throw it at the fast food worker in the drive-thru. Baby alligator. I'm sure they're cute. Yeah. The dinosaurs breed pretty quickly, and you can war train them, which I think is really neat. So you can have like war raptors or war dinosaurs.

that I've never heard of. That is very cool. I really appreciate the fact that they've gone off-piece with the dinosaur names, and we're not sticking to your, like, third-grade, you know, stegosaurus, bronosaurus, you know, that kind of T-Rex. Like, we're not doing that. We're going otaku dinosaurs, and that is why I'm here. Like, that's great.

You mean as in less commonly known variants? Yeah. Yeah. Because there's kind of the, you know, I don't know, like a, we call them like the emo dinosaurs or something. You know what I mean? Like, you know it's a dinosaur, but you never heard of it. The emo dinosaur. Yeah. I'm not going to sell shares in that one.

By the way, I find that it's really cool that they didn't just include dinosaurs, but also other prehistoric animals, like prehistoric mammals and stuff like that, or like stuff before dinosaurs too. That is... Very, very cool. I personally, big fan of things that came after dinosaurs, like tarot birds and all that jazz. I mean, okay, we already had jabbers in the game. Let's be serious. We already had big birds that could have been trained to fight your war.

It's slightly different if the bird is actually not like a fictional bird, but a very real prehistoric animal that now runs across your screen. And, um, I'm here for it. Today's show is sponsored by Noam Gals' Eggery and Poultry Management. Need breakfast for 200 dwarves? Want to know which nest box is producing and which one is just occupied by an angry bird? Noam Gow handles collection, storage, hatching, and the delicate art of keeping tomorrow's chicks out of tonight's omelette. Gow, putting all your eggs in exactly the right baskets.

If you look at the Discord, I just pasted in the mausoleum to blend of Carlisle. Oh, wow, that's, oh, wow. And you can see the road leading up to the mausoleum. I'll use that as the episode art. That is pretty cool. Yeah. I see Dolly Parton. That's cute.

That is nice. Dolly Parton's one of my dwarves, too. Yeah, Dolly Parton. There's Mick Jagger, Judith Durham. Sam Cooke. Yeah. Fair cool. There's Senate O'Connor.

She's up there at the North door. Nothing compares to her. I know. Who's that? Eshton, huh? I think Eshton is the pet of one of your dwarves. I bet you're right. I bet you're right.

Can you nickname pets? I don't think you can you can you? I don't think you get to do that, but your dwarfs definitely get to do that. Got a nickname of all, Steve. Oh, up there in the... far left-hand side of the, of the picture, you've got Sam Cook. That's awesome. And the river is frozen there.

There's some blood on the river. Oh. Creepy crawlies. Do you guys get those things? They look like hands. And when you punch into the caverns, they appear everywhere. And in this fort that I've got, basically, they're kind of like, they're just like litter. There's so many of them everywhere, and they're all dead.

And they're just piling up and rotting and causing my asthma. It's sort of like, you know, when you're just, You do the D.DF. Cat Fountain or whatever. And it's like, it just spawns endless cats. Excuse me? Yeah, you can, you can do that. There's like a cat explosion or something. And it'll like spawn endless cats, I think.

Oh, it spawns cats. I thought cat explosion prevents a cat sposion. Oh, does it? I thought there was one that would just spawn endless cats. Anyway, I don't know. That's what the creepy crawlies are doing, man. And like, I don't know. Can I eat them?

They seem like the minute that they die, they rot. I don't know, A, where they're coming in. I know they're coming from the caverns, but like, I don't know how to stop this. It's madness. I know it's a traditional part of the game, but I do not bring cats with my caravans anymore. Oh. I do not bring cats with my embarks. Why is that?

I bring a couple dogs. Why no cats? Well, sometimes, you know, they will bring the migrants will bring some in. But, uh, yeah, I got, I got sick of dealing with the over. population of cats and I don't I don't like to mess with the fiddly part of you know fix auto butcher

that keeps the cat population under control but it does give you loads and loads of cat soap which I would imagine is unpalatable for a large portion of it. I know it's a game but that kind of unsettles me in the real world I do like cats so I don't really like the idea of just you know butchering them. It's not soap

I understand yeah I get that I get that I do too Yeah. Plus, the funny thing is if you don't bring cats, you have less problem with dead vermin that clodders your fortress, I've noticed. So it feels counterproductive not to bring cats and then have less problems with dead vermin, but it kind of works. Well, that makes sense. And the measma that they cause occasionally in random places, you're like, why isn't a miasma there? There's nothing happened there, and it's not a butcher place.

have you ever noticed a decreasing issue with the miasma it doesn't seem to be as big of a problem now as it was several versions ago i don't think it's the version i think it's actually us being more capable at the game yeah it's gonna say that seems like a you thing because i still suck and i still have a lot of my asthma oh okay you got good well one of my i have a a list of of baseline work orders that i import that i've got saved and one of those things is to always keep some some coffins you know always keep ten coffins on hand and it's i'm always pretty quick to to build myself a little graveyard so that whenever i do have dwarves that pass on for whatever reason they can be buried quickly and not have to deal with ghosts or, you know, rotting bodies.

Ghosts annoy the heck out of me. Yeah, I can believe that. You know your fortress, too. Especially if it's a violent ghost, and he suddenly pops off the arm of one of your very good military dwarfs. Oh, yeah. Fun. I do try to keep my dwarves pretty happy, so, and I know that the mood of a ghost is

correlated to the mood of the dwarf when they died. Yep. So, yeah, my happiness. Today I learned. I didn't know that. Yeah. Oh, you know what? That Sam Cook that is up there wandering around the wilderness in that picture,

he is my sole dwarf that is unhappy. I've got all of my other dwarves are at least neutral and better, but that one dwarf is unhappy and I can't make him happy. I probably should expel him. So does it mean we should kill dwarves when they're happy so that if we end up with ghosts, at least they're happy ghosts? Like, is that kind of hedging our bets? But you also don't want happy ghosts because any ghost is a bad ghost.

It just depends on like, okay, do we have to call like the Ghostbusters? And it's like, he-haha fun time. Don't cross the streams. Or is it like bad ghost and you are dead? Nearly headless, Nick? He seems like a good ghost. You know, in Dwarf Fortress, who the Ghostbusters really are, right? your stonecrafters.

They're going to say the slab maker. They're the people who engrave the slabs, right? Engrave memorial slab. That is also something that I do very often. Yeah, too often. Yeah. I always keep slabs on hand so that I can engrave them and put those ghosts. I also like putting slabs outside my fortress for people to see the memorials.

I don't think of them as gravestones so much as memorials. you know, obelisks. Oh, I thought you were using as like a threat. These are all the people that have died here. Just be careful. Yeah, for the new migrants, right? Oh, yeah. Look at this guy.

It can develop that way, depending on how badly the fortress is going. But for the most part, unless I've had a disease run through it, which occasionally will happen whenever a forgotten beast spreads deadly dust. You know, I don't typically have that many slabs.

that are engraved. And like I said, I typically will have coffins handy, so I don't need slabs if I get them buried quickly enough. I could definitely tell you that every time I tinker with magma or water, the amount of slabs needed in my fortress spikes rapidly. And I'm really sorry for everyone that just got drafted again to get a new pickaxe and go down into the mines. Guys, don't worry about it.

You will survive. You're one of the survivors. Don't worry. It'll be all right. Get in there. Sometimes I do kind of feel bad, you know. We'll take care of your wife and kids. Okay.

Anything else pressing that we need to cover? Not much happened in the actual release world since our last episode. No, it sounds like we're still cooking on the next big update. So that's exciting. Yep, I'm not sure how much I'm looking forward to that. I kind of like the magicless world that we have, where necromancy is the limit of the magical stuff that happens around.

But you can always turn it off. Yeah, exactly. You can turn it off. And I think the fact that we do get a little controller to say, many magic please or you don't want any then it's fine wait you can turn off the magic update I didn't realize that I think it's gonna be a setting go into your settings and turn it on what are you waiting for it's right there it's in the settings don't but yeah similar to dinosaurs all right so let's wrap up this one up and we will play some more door fortress and talk to you

All about it next time. Sound good, guys? Yes. Everybody have fun with Dwarfurtress. Keep those stone blocks on hand. You're going to need them. Dino might. And that wraps up episode 135 of Dwarfortress Roundtable.

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