Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 25: A Ten Barrel Automatic Minecart Water Shotgun. Hello Nate!

Episode Date: March 8, 2020

Nate joins the gang from Austrailia to discuss minecarts, archers, user interface, and more. Nate's Reddit thread with the original contraptionKruggsmash minecart videoDev NotesFilmMusic.ioIncompetechBay12 Games Donation Page — Please Donate To The Adams Bros! Our Patreon Page

Welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable at the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Tony. And I'm Nate. Roland got called away to fight a battle with forces of evil because it turns out that he is secretly a superhero in his spare time. So he's fighting with a mine card apparently. You never know when the forces of evil are going to show up, and unfortunately it seems that they showed up at an opportune time. But we do have Nate here, and Nate, we appreciate you staying up very late in your location to talk with us today.

Do it again? Okay, so let us get to the meat and potatoes. So a few weeks ago now on Reddit, there was a post about using about weaponized mind cards. and, you know, building some cool stuff with mind cards that would obliterate folks with water from mind carts. And so that was so cool. So we reached out and asked if Nate would come on the show and talk to us about how to do this wizardry and sorcery. And it's actually a pretty good timing because someone else in the dwarf fortress community did something cool with mind carts just recently as well. I want to say perhaps drawing on the same inspiration as we did to pull Nate on.

So anyway, here we are talking about mind carts. And yeah. So it does seem that there's a lot of buzz in the community about mind carts now, a feature that is years old. And it's sort of strange for this to be a thing that everyone's coming back to whenever we have got the new villains release out. But yeah, you know. What's this villain's release? No, hang on. Okay.

We covered that already. Yeah. So I believe it was from one of the previous podcasts that got me thinking back to it. I made this a while ago, the mine cart, water shotgun thing, but just let it die in my saves file for quite a while. And then a friend reminded me of it and I was listening to the podcast all back. And I think someone was saying they wanted to experiment more with mind carts. Yeah, I did right on the eve of the release. I was like, you know what I should do?

I should go and learn mind carts. And everyone's like, why would you do that when the release is just, why would you look at a four-year-old feature? and I was like, look, I didn't know what the tracks do. Like, every time I do it, nothing happens. They just carve the tracks and they sit there. You know, so anyway, you know. I also think that our ineptitude with both adventure mode and mind carts, at least for you and me, Tony, have been a recurring theme in the podcast. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I've played with mind carts again. Love the idea. Yesterday, it was the first time I'd ever gotten them to even put a mind card on the track. So, hey, man, I can see that progress. Yeah. So how, what's the, what's the principle of it all? It's basically a 10-barrel automatic mine cart water shotgun. And we have a show title.

So it just launches globs of water out the danger end at high velocities from 10 separate chambers and each chamber has like 10 or 11 mine carts in it. And it's fully automatic and just keep shooting until you tell it to stop. Or until every dwarf has been killed by it. Exactly. While trying to collect the socks of their fallen comrades. I've seen a few designs on people making it, trying to make it smaller and more compact and automated. I thought I'd give it a shot at trying to make on myself. I haven't seen what something as big or 10 barrels on that I made, but it's definitely a painful process to go through a lot of fiddly bits that don't seem to make much sense, but to get timings and roller speeds working, get them all work. mindcuts to do what you want them to do it sounded like it was completely autonomous like I didn't need to have Eurist mic button pusher standing around like yeah correct so you flick a lever and then it all starts spewing water out the firing end from several several lanes I

guess and then you can pull over to stop it again and hope that your doors don't walk in front of it in the meantime which they almost certainly will Oh, yeah. There seems to be some sort of magnetic attraction to danger and dwarves. I bet he's put that in there in the code somewhere. He has to do that, because otherwise. The faster a mind card seems to go,

the more dwarves want to go and hug it. If there is a mind card there, please ignore restricted areas. In other words, ignore the restriction. Yeah, I've noticed that seems to be a recurring theme is you're going to lose. you're going to lose citizens to the to the mind carts they just can't seem to keep away absolutely and that's why you fill your fort with necromancers right yeah bring it back again

i don't i don't want mom to be dead any directive that you give to a dwarf is at best a suggestion that you would very much like them to to honor they still have their minds of their own it seems oh yeah so when you're building it like how where i mean are you digging a reservoir or what's how do you even start to crack this awful nut? Well, I think one of the biggest challenges is that this world was a one-by-one embark. So it sounds like really tiny that I could seal up the surface with bridges initially

and then have everything funneled through a small area and then I could work on getting the water gun to gun it all down. But then I think I just started small with a single barrel and digging out of the areas and then building tracks on top of it and rollers and then tearing it all apart. when it doesn't work inevitably and smoothing everything and recarving tracks and yes it's quite a painful process but effectively uses a combination of rollers and impulse ramps so the

bottom level is flooded with water and then you need rollers to push the mind cuts through the water but you also have to have it at a certain speed or else they won't fill with water so they travel too quickly they won't fill it yeah so they need to move fast enough and pass parts to that it won't jam but then needs to move slow enough in other sections that they will fill with water otherwise they'll just scoot on through and then they also need to pick up speed again at the end in order to effectively get airborne to launch themselves through a fortification so that they can change directions on the same sort of y-axis because they need to go yeah to get them directly up they need to change direction on the same i guess y-axis so

There's a bit of dwarven physics there where they get airborne and then travel through a fortification because they're airborne and then can travel back up to the firing barrel, I guess. Oh, my goodness. Okay, there's a lot to unpack there. Okay, so what, so talk about the, like, what's an impulse ramp? Is that the, right? Is that the thing that speeds the carts up? Yeah. Yeah, so there are a bug in the game where if you carve a track onto a ramp that one part of the,

track faces a wall, instructed or dugout, and the other part of the track just points in a direction. The mine cart will effectively be treated as falling onto that ramp and gaining speed, and so it'll, even if it just moves onto that tile, it'll gain speed because the game thinks that it's fallen onto the ramp and then travel down it. And so by placing many of these in front of each other, the mind cart gains free momentum and a lot of it. Oh, that makes sense and without that this probably wouldn't work is that correct so like well I'm not sure how fast impulse rollers can get a mine cut but you can get a lot more speed with impulse ramps it's effectively just dropping down so I think Krug Smash in his latest video dealt with mind cards a bit

as well with his shotgun but he had his just falling down I think four or five Z levels to game the momentum to shoot out the everything but this impulse ramps basically have the equivalent of gaining one I guess level of power for every one you make and so you can just put a massive chain of them and it's effectively like a mine cart falling from a great height and picking up a lot of speed very quickly oh I see so it's basically you could do it it would just take more yeah exactly more basically okay I know that in Krug smash's video the other trap that he's set up, not the shotgun, but the little grinder, if you will.

Yeah. He had the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I don't know if he had just one roller or two rollers per loop, but yeah, those, whenever, those got to go on really, really fast, so. Yeah, yeah. You can probably figure out how to do it with, uh, with, with, with, with rollers, I'd say, but, but, uh, yeah, the impulse ramps seem like they're easier. Yeah, and you don't need power to get to the mall, which is, not,

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a biggie. Oh, I see. They can go unpowered that way. Exactly. So it's just free energy and free momentum, basically. So it's kind of where you want to stand with bugs versus making interesting things. But for something like the auto shotgun, I figured it was a fair call to use, abuse it. Hey, it's quantum, man. It's quantum. That's it. You know, you don't have the whole rest of your lives to do this kind of stuff. So you got to get on with it.

I think that's I think it's fair and hey you know what it's a feature in the game right now so let's just go with that right yeah sure I mean I look at it and I'm like okay all right how do you start where do you start with Minecrafts do you do you should we talk about a like a mine carts for dummies I just started my my journey with mine carts last night I had hoped to I had hope to have something to talk about but but but I uh I uh I uh I actually set it up maybe for the purpose that they were intended. It was, I've got a huge cavern that I'm hollowing out in one of my lower levels. And I'm using it to, to move stone from the cavern to stockpile that's quite a ways away.

And I actually have the track set up, but I don't have any carts created yet because whenever I went up to create the mine carts at my carpenter shop, I realized that I had no wood. And then I went outside and realized that, that whenever all the trees, that were accessible to the opening of my fortress on the correct side of the river had been cut already. And so I started to build a bridge over the river to go get the other trees and then a where llama showed up.

Oops, you daisy. Yeah, that didn't work out well last night. But my track is complete. And I figured out how to lay track, which is, you know, that's something. Yep, that's up. And so did you get a mine card on the track or did it just you just basically drew the track down?

I laid the track down and I put stops at each end and I do have a question about the stops but I noted that whenever you lay down a stop, you can tell it with the stop that you want the mind cart to dump at that point and you can tell it the direction in which you want the mine cart to dump when it gets there. So, for example, I had an east-west laying track and I want it to dump toward the west so you can set that when you put your stop down. Thank you, Crug Smash, for letting me know you put the stop down on top of an existing track and not past the track.

So there was also a setting on the mind cart, sorry, on the stops for the friction, whether it's high, low, and anywhere in between. What is that talking about? So that affects how much it's going to slow down the mine cart. So if you set it the highest, it's, for most cases, just kind of stop a mine cart when it hits it. If you set it to lowest, it'll just slow it down a little bit. And so you can have it so if you have mind cards that have a lot of momentum, you want to slow them down. You can put a track stop that has lower friction than the maximum, and it'll just slow them down as it goes over it.

if it doesn't stop and you set it to dump to the north will it keep going even though it dumped out its load that's a good question I usually I've never dealt with that really

I've only ever had to dump it and have them to stop on the same tile but I would imagine so I'll try to report back if I ever get mine carts actually on the track what happens you'll do it

that's neat that's neat uh oh hey oh did we lose somebody or do we gain somebody nope we gained somebody that's exciting is it somebody we know um i hope so oh there he is okay yes awesome awesome yay well we were just chatting about the joys of mind cards We noted, Roland, that you had a force of evil that you had to change into your superhero persona to go fight. Now you've done it. And Roland, we were talking about this particular mind cart fun in that it doesn't require external power. Did I get that right?

So basically you're able to do it with, I was going to call them quantum ramps, but I suppose impulse ramps. probably more appropriate isn't it so um yeah so you can do it with the basically with the ramps dropping onto or the carts dropping onto ramps and stuff to speed them up so that seems pretty cool so even like on a flat straight section you can have free speed and they get very quickly we'll get a lot of speed very quickly for no power which is very handy that is pretty good and then you don't have to fuss with the the the windmills and the mechanisms and the trying to do all that stuff Because that part seems complicated. I mean, I guess there isn't anything that's not complicated,

but that seems even more complicated. So, yeah, I still had to deal with a lot of that anyway because the bottom row needs rollers, which will require power anyway. So I've just drained a section of the cabin layer, and I'm draining that off the edge of the world. And then there's a lot of windmills and watermills, water wheels, that's the one, that just sit above that.

So got a lot of power. but transferring it around is still a pain. Yeah, they're not good about building wires, are they? No. It's not part of the door of engineering. And for any reason, rollers don't transfer power along the roller, I guess. So if you have a big roll, you can only build it like 10 rows long, similar to walls and stuff. But if you just have a long straight line of it, it won't transfer power along the entire length.

but it does transfer power sideways and so if you have a roll two sets of rolls next to each other you can kind of alternate the lengths to zigzag the power through them all but it's very painful to get that to work with in cramped spaces but yeah

fun methods of dwarf physics I guess so one thing I've noticed with mind cards is when I build it and I start putting my roots on it and I do I define the stops It tells me that I can, you know, the Doris will guide it north immediately when it's full of desired items or guide north in 14 days or guide north in 28 days. But it always seems to be north. They only want to guide it north. Is that normal or have I done something wrong?

You can change the direction, I believe. I can put up now. Oh, I see. So you need to also tell it which direction you need to do. Otherwise, they're like north. There's a track's north. I can't push this north. Yeah, exactly.

So when you have that, you can press D to change the cardinal direction that they push it. I got it. That makes sense in the Dorman kind of way. Oh, cool. So I'm assuming that if you have a 90-degree turn in your track, that you don't have to set a direction for each of your mind cart for each direction of track. Correct. Now, minecarts will follow tracks automatically, so they'll just follow along the direction in whichever way it's pushed or going.

So once you get it started, it will go in that direction on the track so long as it has track to travel on. Correct, until it runs out of momentum. So if the dwarf is pushing it, it'll just continue going. If you push it, it'll travel in a direction until it runs that momentum, or if you have rollers, it'll just keep going. Do they do transfer of momentum? If you run into a mine cart with another mine card on the track, well, the first month, mind cart stop and the second mind cart start going? Yes, it will.

Ah. Oh, so you could do cascading bits of joy. Mind cart versions of the little clicky balls on executive deskses. Whatever, Newton's cradle. That's exciting.

The gist is you carve tracks, you do build them or does it matter? Is there any benefit to one or the other? Both work. So you can carve tracks into the ground? Yep. You can carve tracks. It's a little bit finicky to carve it because if you want to carve an angle you have to first carve north-south and then carve

east-west onto the same tile and then remove the designation for the sideways tiles I guess all the tiles adjacent to it that you don't want to engrave ever but you can smooth it and then re-engrave oh I see so you can't just because when you use a tile set and you're driving it looks like it automatically creates like an elbow junction but you're saying like you should probably not rely on that you have to you have to do something or is it you can still carve algorithm junctions and stuff like that into it but if you just want to affect the one corner tile and you don't want to affect I guess the tiles next to it you have to remove the designation the adjacent tiles rather than just corner tile so

you can sort of overlap designations and it'll remember them does I have to say when you're carving the tracks it definitely seems less finicky to to do the carving the tracks because basically it's just like you just draw a line and it carves it that way. Yeah, yeah. Let's just drawing lines, but you have to remember to overlap the corners in order for them to dig it around there, I guess, build the elbow joints that you need. Oh, I see. Whereas most of the other things, if you overlap, um, designations, it'll override what you've done previously. Um, track designations will not override, but kind of add on top of each other, if that makes any sense.

in the Dorevan kind of way I think it kind of does I was I was just nattering nattering on about archers so my experience with archers has been hit or miss I love the concept.

I think the idea is amazing. But every time I build a squad of archers, they run out and start attacking things with their crossbow or with their stone mugs. They don't archer. They turn everything into melee, which doesn't seem like a logical thing. Especially when I've gone all the trouble to get them to have the nice equipment and stuff,

but they still just can't energ it. But yeah, so anyway, I was, I've successfully, built a, you know, a little containment zone around my entrance to my fort and built fortifications on top of it. And then lo and behold, I stationed them up on top with ammo nearby and they ran up and did as they were supposed to do. So I'm, I'm, I'm amazed. I've seen them fanned off an invasion with bows. So I'm like, wow, geez, I feel like I just had this momentous achievement in my Dorot Fortress career. You guys use your bows and arrows to shoot off a seed. That's pretty cool.

Thanks, fellas. So anyway, that's about as much as excitement as I can bring. That's definitely quite the achievement. What version are you thinking? 4703, the hottest and greatest. So maybe it's a fix to archers. Maybe, yeah. I know that there has been trouble in the past with getting archers to arch.

Yeah. It seems very much like a fortress-based thing. Sometimes they'll work and they'll train or might have one or two arches. they go down and train and then it would just be nothing for quite a long time but and they're getting them to actually go and shoot is another issue of itself but yeah it seems very hit and miss for me to get it to work but yeah to get it you've done uh definitely beat a lot of the community to that i think yeah i don't really understand how it happened let's see if they do it again it'd be pretty remarkable yeah i got my arches to work every time when i disable all kinds of

work for them and just tell them okay dude you have nothing to do please train and if they have somewhere you also have to say that they should not use training bolts because that is some weird stuff going on they sometimes then take the training bolts to an actual fight and try to fight the foggown beat with some birch wood um doesn't work really great worse. Is there any advantage to the training weapons at all, except for the fact that they're cheaper than real weapons? I think they're more likely to spar, so they will initiate a training fight against each other, but only if they have training weapons. And this is the best way to train your dwarfs, because you not only get a bit of weapon XP, but you also

train a dodger shield and armor user if they have everything they'll still spar with regular weapons as well i believe really yeah i think i've seen him do that well then never give them training weapons are completely useless the one use i'll give them is putting them in danger rooms or it's basically just a weapon trap linked to a lever somewhere and you fill weapon trap with wooden weapons and then throw your dwarves into it and have someone pull a bunch so you basically poke your own duels with stuff repeatedly

and it rapidly trains their dodging armor use, shield use and occasionally weapons skill if they parry it. Um, it also trains your medicine uh, dwarf. Yeah, come on. Because eventually something will go wrong and you'll puncture a lung or

cut off a limb. But acceptable casualties. I think something's changed because I built a series of archery targets in a training room right now. And immediately when I did it and assigned them, they all started coming in here and arrows are just flying everywhere. So I feel like something's changed. I've never said that before.

If we have Tony one and Zach on again. Hey, buddy. And ask him not to fix impulse ramps. I get the physics. I get the physics. I think it makes sense. I don't think we need. yeah it's quantum yeah like they've been around for a long time i don't know if they'll on the

the soon-to-be-fixed bugs at least i hope i think he's just like you know what no it's just the way it works it allows for a lot of fun and wacky implementations it's like it's a game-breaking issue or anything So, Nate, how did you first discover Dwar Fortress? How did you get involved and start playing the game? A mate from high school was, sorry, two mates from high school were talking about it way back in the day. And I was interested to hear what the stories they're talking about and could not pick. picture from stories how

the game was played. I was trying to work out what the commands were, and it's like every key on your keyboard, basically. And I still don't play it, and figured it was a fun challenge and slowly forced my way into the playing it, and worked it out with much guidance from them.

And yeah, being hooked ever since. Do you remember about what version it was? Oh, no idea. But it's probably close to 10 or so years ago now. So what was that? Two versions ago?

Yeah, basically. Is that 4412? I don't know. Yeah, it is funny. I was helping somebody out that I had gotten interested in this game. And one of the things that they found the least intuitive was the fact that sometimes the up and down arrow keys select things. And then sometimes randomly, it's plus and minus. And it seems just totally completely random. And I looked and it says secondary, you know, it calls it in the, in the, you know, if you try to redefine keys,

if you're playing on a laptop, you don't want to hit shift equals every single time, at least on the US keyboards. But yeah, it, you know, it calls it the secondary, secondary select. I was like, well, I don't get it. I don't really understand what happened there or why it's like that. But anyway, it's probably best not to do us. You know, there is a, there is a logic to it that, that after you've, used it for a while. It has come to make sense. And I think it really has to do with whether or not you have an active cursor on the map or not. If you have an active cursor on the map, the arrows are

going to move your cursor. And at that point, you're going to need to use the plus and minus keys for moving your selection. So note that a lot of times whenever you annoyingly mess up and use the arrow keys to try to select something and you move off the shop, that you were hovering over a moment ago. So I think that that may have something to do with it. Another one that always gets me is the stockpile settings with the enabling it in the first section, then P and F to permit or forbid material in the second section,

then enter to use it in the third one. Always throws me at which one I need to be pressing at the time, right time after 10 years or so of playing the game. Still gets me, have to hit the wrong buttons all the time. I do get a little muddled about when I, like, draw a rectangle versus when I use you and M and H and K to, like, do that kind of fanciful stuff. How many one-by-one forms have I placed down and then had to remove? Too many.

It's the magic. That is the magic. Yeah, that part is a little non-intuitive. I guess maybe it's for building, although I was trying to. do something. Oh, floors, building floors over large areas, a little bit cumbersome. Because of the

drawing the box thing, I can't just, like, draw a path. It would be pretty cool to draw a path. Or like a wall, like if I wanted a big wall to just be able to use the mouse or just, you know, some other non-build eight at a time, plays eight at a time. I'm sure there's a reason. Programming-wise, I just

don't understand. It'll be interesting to see if he hires an industrial engineer to help with the user interface on the Steam version. Probably not, though. Yeah, probably not. Another one that always gets me is the stockpile settings with the

enabling it in the first section, then P and F to permit or forbid material in the second section, and then enter to use it in the third one. Always throws me at which one I need to be pressing at the time, right time, after 10 years or so of flighting the game, still guessing you have to hit the wrong buttons all the time.

Once you have it sorted, it's not, it does have kind of a logic to it, so I'm, you know, I'm not vehemently against it or anything, but yeah, like once you understand how it's supposed to work, then I don't know, it's not so bad.

It's got lots of letters on it, just like your regular keyboard. Oh, it's smell. Do not question the genius. Well, yeah, because I'm sort of afraid if the interface changes now, could I re-learn it? I don't know. Am I capable? I don't know if it's part of the charm of the confusing interface or if it's just another barrier to entry. But I'm quite fun to the confusing mess of letters and capitals and everything that's come to be.

The old interface, yeah, you don't want it to be. I mean, even some of the inspired by games, like what's that big one in space? Rimworld, yeah, which I think is an awesome game, by the way. But its interface is kind of clumsy, too. But I think that's partly from trying to kind of, you know, being drawn in the inspiration of how tarned it is stuff. At least that's the way it feels to me. If they ever do do a major overhaul of the user interface,

let's prepare the community for a big divide and lots of arguments about which was better the old way or the new way. Oh, absolutely. Wouldn't have it any other way. So since our last recording, they did release another bug fix version, and it sounds like there might be one more before he stops working on the bug fixes for a while and goes straight to working on the steam release. We're probably getting pretty close to the final version of version 44 that we're going to have for a while.

I think this previous one didn't do a whole lot of user interface changes, I think. I think, am I correct? It was mostly crash fixes. Yeah, I believe. It feels very samey to me, like interface. I don't think anything's changed there. But the one thing that I would love to see fix is not getting necromancer migrants or other things that raise stuff from the dead because I had a fort that I was really enjoying the other day.

And I hadn't realized that a necromancer had made it into my army. And then on their way back in, they, I don't know what happened. I still don't really fully know what happened if they brought it back with them from the siege. But I'd sent them out to go do some raiding because that felt like they needed that in their lives. So I sent them out and they came back and with them returned a reanimated Adder corpse, which laid waste to the entire fort, the entire military with my legendary axe lords,

like everyone was just wiped clean. And this adder basically just came in and it was like the toughest adder I've ever seen. And, you know, I kind of wish that that wouldn't have happened. But there you are. I feel like it's in Monty Python on the Holy Grail and everyone's running from the killer rabbit.

Yeah. Right away! You know, like in my fort now I've got this guy. He's a fishery worker hollow corpse. I'm like, that's, you know, everyone's cool with that, but, you know, I don't know if that's okay. Is this going to cause me some problems? Do we need to worry about the hollow corpse? But everyone seems to be okay with him.

He's got, like, friends, and he's got daughters, and he's got a lover that's not a hollow corpse. So, hey, you know what, to each their own. Seriously, I'm not. He's not that hollow, okay? Maybe he has a personality. He doesn't feel things. He doesn't see. seem to feel things, but, you know, he's got the whole rest of everything, you know, he seems

okay. But yeah, it's, it's fascinating. So I don't know if that's part of a bug. I think that the Necromancer's coming to town was a bug because I think he acknowledged that, didn't he? Oh, I hear a Christmas song, Necromancers coming to town. That is good. I love it. But for example, I also have. had a few bugs and I'm not sure if it's actually a bug but I tend to have many, many undead

people in my tavern and they're all called this and that frozen hunter and they're like, for example I have a cobalt ranger frozen hunter and a dwarf beast hunter

which is two hunters in one name but hey and the crazy part is They're undead, but no one cares about that. And they all have some legendary skills. It's amazing. This cobald has like legendary archery and legendary dodging. And I don't know where this beast hunter is right now.

But he is stuck in a tree. Okay. Oh, yeah, you're right, Roland. I looked at my hollow corpse and lucky me. He's a legendary fish dissector and a legendary fish cleaner. Wonderfully, wonderfully useful. So I got to think that that is a bug if your dwarves have no aversions whatsoever to the undead being part of their community. Well, if you've got a legendary fish dissector with you, you're amongst greatness.

All very inclusive. It's like pro athletes. They can get away with anything so long as they're talented. exactly I talked about this I like diversity for its but but this one's this has taken things a little too as long as they don't start reanimating the butcher's table and we're cool but yeah I mean I've had things die because I my my butcher was a necromancer and I just hadn't realized it so if you and it all goes to hell in a hand basket if you if you use auto labor and DF hack because it doesn't care at that point it just puts anybody on it so it's like suddenly the fort's gone because it automatically assigned a butchering task to the necromancer. And we're toast. And the cow's skull has come back.

That's all in. I never used auto labor. Is it useful? I like it. I'm not a therapist fan. I find it too complicated and fiddly. So I just use auto labor if I'm trying to get stuff done. Like if I want

to build a fort and have it live while I play with my cards, I just use auto labor because it works for me. But it has its downsides, which are that it doesn't care who it assigns necromancers, for example, but it also doesn't care who it gives it to. So your metal smith might get the job of making the copper, you know, the wooden bench or whatever. It wouldn't, you know, so you don't end up with these, you know, super intricate heirloom items or whatever, like legendary artifacts or whatever. You'll just get, you know, stand and created a toy boat. It is a toy boat with a picture of a toy boat.

Like, it'll just be nothing. Yeah. So I feel it's not. necessary to give a dissenting opinion here because I adore dwarf therapist. And I don't think it's too fiddly at all. I think it's extremely convenient. And at a glance, you can see which of your dwarves are on particular jobs and which ones who are legendary are just sitting right there. So, yeah. Yeah, I can see that. For me, I think it's just straight up the interface of it. Like, if you plan a 4K screen, it seems a bit small. And I know you can resize the cell. and stuff, but it all seems really difficult. And then it's got the professions.

I wish I could, like, swap the X and the Y axis and stuff. Like, there's just things I would do. I know it's open source. I could just go do this, but I can't because I'm not really a programmer. So, hey, whatever. Tweet's their own. I think it's awesome. I think it's cool.

I like the idea. Yeah, with Jonathan on this, I definitely find it very helpful. Roland, where do you stand on? Do you just use the standard interface, right, for job assignments? Well, I've used everything. I started playing with the auto labors, and later on I started to use the therapist instead, so I get more and more dwarf that are actually competent at what they're doing. And then for some time, I dabbled in the raw editing and stuff.

And for that, I had an extra vanilla version without any mods, and there I use the standard interface. But I have to say that as a lazy person in general, I love dwarf therapist because it's just so easy. So it all has the ups and downs. I think doing out to largely paint entire swarves of your fortress to completing certain tasks is also very helpful. Yeah. Get done very quickly. Need that floor smooth really quickly.

Everybody gets the smoothing labor. Exactly. Also helps find useless dwarves that can be used. to fill better roles, reassign all of your fisher doors quickly into miners or something else that you need. The best thing about therapist, in my opinion, is, for example, the whole military thing. You can actually see which of your dwarfs is the best because you see them all at once. You see who's your best fighter, it's your best teacher, who has the most kills. and seeing this stuff just next to each other

is very helpful when you try to make a legendary squad. And the ability to sort on a particular column is nice so that you can just see the names. You can sort by your swordsmen and see all the swordsmen at the top of the list so you can know who to actually pick when you're in the game itself. It's kind of cool. All right, I'm sold.

No, no, we're not trying to push you into anything. But... I definitely think it's... worth all giving a try. Yeah, no, I like that aspect of because I think with auto labor, you do lose that ability to have those cool artifacts created because basically anything happens. And that's kind of a, that's kind of a bummer.

Yeah, definitely handy to get legendary duels and more skills. It's amazing how quickly some of the stuff's coming out, though. I think that's pretty cool. Because now, as far as I know, everything's been compiled and patched, Like, even text-a-text is up and running through some patches that have been put. And I know some terrific hooks have compiled DFHack and TWVT for the different platforms. I don't know if Linux is taking care of, but Mac is done. And, yeah, it's pretty cool that it's happening so quickly and that, you know, we're seeing the lazy new pack is even out there.

It doesn't have TWBT yet, but it's got everything else. Pretty neat. Before we start wrapping things up, I do want to mention. that I haven't touched Lurid Whips since I got it back from Tony back in December because of all of the rush with the release and everything. To remind listeners, Lurid Whips is our bloodline fort that Roland, Tony, and I have been circulating amongst ourselves. So I do plan on picking that back up and hopefully we can give you some updates on where things stand with that because I honestly don't even remember what the four. fortress layout looked like. Well, it's stuck in the past.

It's using the E. Olden version. So maybe we should set sail. Well, we'll have to wait until Meph gets his launcher back up and running. Right. And have the other launcher. Yeah, that's right. Well, we could always blow it away and just do Phoebus and call it today. There's nothing wrong with Phoebus.

I don't think there's anything wrong with just keep letting this fortress go until it reaches its natural end using the meftile set in version 4412 that's fine i'll just have the dwarfs keep digging loads and loads and loads of randomly placed deep vertical shafts of stairways and see a great idea personally i have yet to have a good outcome whatsoever whenever we get attacked by a by uh goblins or anything so uh actually i think i've got a solution which is now i'm going to do that and then write it at a key and defining moment, I'm going to pause it, save the game in passage to be. Oh, God.

And I'm going to have it be from the meeting hall. Well, you'll have to time that pretty well so that that happens to happen at the beginning of the year. So otherwise, otherwise I know you did it on purpose. Challenge accepted. All right. So let's wrap things up. Thanks a lot, Nate, for coming on the show and talking all about your fancy

mind cart water squirder thing. That I was going to come. Super cool. Very fun project. And I think truly something that we are all going to try to get functioning and working. I'll just be happy if I get mind carts working at all.

Yeah, I mean, it's going to be baby steps, really. It's got to be baby steps at least for me. It's a truly impressive project, though, that you did there, night. It's really, really cool. It was very exciting. Even to people who didn't play Door Fortress, they showed it to. It was like that. That's once they understood what they were seeing.

Very cool. Well, next step we'll be trying to get it to work with Magma. I'm going to wait until, I think, the fighting between mods and versions finishes up before I start any serious thoughts. Okay. Well, so till next time, this is Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, and we'll catch everybody later. See ya. Catch you around, see you. Bye, bye.

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