Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 27: The Undead Are Tough Zombies, and Other Observations.

Episode Date: April 5, 2020

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Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we are here today, bunkered down. I think the whole world is trying to stay away from other people with the social distancing movement. How's that going for everybody? It's good.

I've moved my microphone two meters away from everyone. so I'm trying to respect that. So if my audio is a little quiet this week, you'll know why. Yeah, me as a hardcore introvert, I am good. And actually, I'm really good because I got to play Dwar Fortress in the entire week. I know I should be studying, but never mind. We can get lots and lots of more hours of Dwarf Fortress and now that everyone is being ordered by their respective governments

to stay at home as much as possible. You know, it's a lemonade out of lemons, I suppose. Yeah, I wonder if it means that some of the steamworks progressing faster. TOTI put a Dev Notes release out on the Bay 12 Games slash Dwarf website that had some photo examples of how the graphics work is coming. Did you all see that? Yes. And now I'm going to unmiss it right now.

Ooh, we are so prepared. My God. Yeah, my goodness. How did I miss that? I think, yeah, I just haven't been. Oh, it's very lovely. It's a lot like some of those early pictures showed. I saw on the Bay 12 forms that somebody was talking about Meph's pack because Meph had his, you know, his tiles set and launcher on the DFFFD.

And then it said it was for 4704, but then it was actually 40303. And then he had basically just said, yeah, sorry, the steam stuff's, you know, getting really busy right now. So I haven't been able to do it. So, you know, I think everyone was like, oh, no, no, no, please don't turn it. Just leave it the way it is. Forget it. Forget we asked. We don't care.

So that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's coming along. It looks, you know, it looks like it could be a combination of not surprisingly any of the meth and Mayday tile sets. So that's pretty neat. Oh, yeah. From his ride up, it sounds like he is more deeply involved.

in the aesthetic values of the of the graphics work then I really thought that he was going to be based on you know the chatter that I'd heard through the last year or so that he was going to be doing the mechanics part of it but the actual graphics work was going to be offloaded pretty much to Meph from that right up the D and Mayday yeah that's what I had understood it's going to be a collaboration between meth and Mayday and that's pretty cool because I really like both their tile sets. Does maybe, you know, I don't think that I've ever played Mayday's tile set. Is it actually called Mayday?

It is. Yeah. I would recommend giving it a look if you've never played it. It's less, I mean, it's lighter weight than like Vettlinger or Meph's tile sets. But it has a really cool, it's reminiscent of things like Phoebus and Space Fox. It's pretty cool. I like it. I like it.

I started playing Vettlinger's tile set on this most recent fort that I had. And on second visit to it, I do like it. I like it a lot. One of the great things about it is you can zoom in more, because it's a 32 by 32 tile set. You can zoom in more and it doesn't get blurry like the 16 by 16s do. And it's awesome on a 4K screen. So you can have full 4K glory of Door Fortress, which I mean...

4K glory of dwarf fortress. It's time to go 4K for dwarf fortress alone. You got to do it. Roland, I saw you post to the Discord channel. Basically, the results of your fortress. Could you elaborate on that? So I have not played 0-4 yet because it's not out for Windows. Anyway, I'm still playing on 0-3.

I went ahead and made a, what's it called, a ruin assault. And for my experience, ruin assault can be two things. You know, you go ahead and claim a lost ruin for yourself. So they used to be dwarves, but they're not anymore. And sometimes you have like creatures, creepy crawlers, weird bullshit going on, just mean things hanging around your fortress. And for this fortress, I actually had just had a family of magma craps and the magma man in my forges but that's fine I just locked them

away and didn't touch it so that was fine however in this fortress I had more forgotten beasts come in than in any other fortress I loaded the what's it called

the legends view up to see how many I got and I got 25 25 Certain Beasts. Okay, well, I've played the whole week, but still, 25 Beasts is like a lot. I had, sometimes I had like two in a year, and it got so bad that I had to just lock up my caverns completely. So my first cavern layer is now cleared out again. My second cabin layer is absolutely bonkers and can never be entered because they are like three or four forgotten beasts still linger.

ring around in every corner and the third is somewhat walled off so I can get my water supply but the caverns are teaming so then I started raiding after a while because I had nothing else to do and the goblins didn't show up for a while where did they go yeah but I didn't rate the goblins I raided a tower and because well there was a tower to my north and for some reason they actually ignored me for a while and I had now a fortress of like a hundred dwarfs so I got a bit cocky and greedy and was

like, come here, you know, and I rated them and they brought back some books and me being lazy, I didn't check the books and me being lazy I didn't check anybody on what they're doing.

I just tried out and you some training stuff in the caverns. I made some some more clothing item fabrication levels and after a while i saw a report plop in like the fisher dwarf necromancer so and so uh stopped stopped his work and i was like hang on wait a second um and then i was like i didn't get any migrants what the heck is happening so i clicked on my unit list and oh I suddenly had like

10 necromances and I was like oh surprise turns out I had a book that is called mortality revealed or something along those lines and well it contains some secrets and by now

first of all I was like I was I didn't like it because well necromances are really annoying to handle especially if you have also non-necromances in your fault then stuff is

going to hit the ceiling hit the fan is it actually not hit the ceiling isn't it it's just going to hit the roof and the ceiling and the cabin floors it's going to hit all over like everything is going to be bloody and gross anyway

so I thought okay what should I do now but I decided to let it run along and see where it leads because I want some fun and now my entire fortress is well it's a necromancer fort and the only people that are not afflicted by this I always I almost want to say curse are my children because they cannot read by a vampire dude that is locked away and like cursed to train in his deep, dark room somewhere and my few were beasts that are also managed to log in. The rest are all necromances. And at this point, I am looking forward to the next goblin siege because that is going to be crazy.

I have four squads of extremely well-trained militia, and all of them are necromancy. So this is, it's going to be just great. Like, oh, at that point, I stopped playing because I'm basically now waiting for a siege and I will see how it goes. So I will post the picture that you posted to the website of the unit list of your folks. And if you don't mind, I would like to read the description of the Mortality Exposed book. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, that'd be awesome.

Mortality Exposed, a pitch-blend-bound codex. This is a pitch-blend-bound codex. The written portion contains a 54-page manual entitled Mortality Exposed, authored by Ushur Mission Roops. It concerns the secrets of life and death. The writing is quite cheerful, yet it is quite self-indulgent. Overall, the prose is amateurish at best. I love the book descriptions.

These are great. But you have to imagine that this book contains the secrets of life and death, and it's cheerful, like, it can't be too bad, kind of. Cheeful, self-indulgent and amateur at best. It's kind of funny. So you're going to hold on to that fort and wipe out a massive group of goblins that come in. So necromancers are immortal, right, once they become necromancers? I suppose so, yeah.

I've never actually seen a necromancer die from old age, so I just assumed, yes. So you get a goblin attack, your necromancers go out there, kill goblins, and then raise them. That's what's going to happen. That's going to be, you know, it'll be interesting to see what happens so long as you don't end up with frame death. Well, yeah, that could be a problem, especially since the last siege that I've got was like 120 goblins, and they usually tend to get bigger over the years. I might also just make everybody into a military dwarf and send all of my fort off to, like, go somewhere and kill people, we will see. Also, one thing I just wanted to throw out there, I did not know that if a siege of only experimentals from necromances can attack you, that the siege message is different from

just normal undead. Oh, did you know that? I did not know that. Yeah. It says not like the dead still walk, hide while you still can, like the normal zombie thing. it says forms twisted from their nature legion of the night but hope remains oh and i did not know that and it showed up and i was really confused because i never saw it before and it's the message when just experiments attack you experiments are not typically undead though right they are exactly

they are just weird they are what happens whenever you take an elf and mix it with a Edelman. Basically, yes. They don't have to be undead and they don't even have to be strong. I think it's actually kind of a raw mixing. Yeah, imagine what you would get from a

B movie from the 1950s, and I think that that's what is in my head. The amazing Caterpillar Man. I had a bloated corpse guy, become my mayor. And he had a wife, and things seemed to be okay. She was

apparently, she was a dwarf, and she was okay with him, and a bloated corpse. Good for them. It's nice to see people be happy. You know? Look, just because the guy likes his plump plummet donuts doesn't make him a bloated corpse. Yeah, so they are

usually intelligent to some degree. I've also seen sentient beings made into non-sensient beings, but that was really weird. And they still acted like sentient beings, even though they did not have the tag.

So I've had some challenges with very early undead attacks. They're pretty, pretty ruthless. I have as well. That's going to be my story for the day. Yeah, well, how about this for a segment? So you want yours first or should I go? No, go for it. You should definitely go.

So I was using Predexus Arant's D.F Starter Pack, 4703 on a on a windows machine and it was a new fort everything was going quite well i had had it was like three or four months in and i had just gotten my first starter or my first migrant wave and i saw the dead walk message and at that point i was a little bit surprised because in the past you always have had a bit of a buffer until you get to i think the trigger has been like 60 dwarves and before that point you're not going to get hit by a goblin siege it's possible that you might get hit by a wear a wear beast but chances are you know that didn't happen every time and you know the zombies may not happen every time either but the wear beast you can hide from and it

will typically go away after a couple days it turns back into whatever form that it had and it runs away well i had two zombies show up on my map I had 13 dwarves, and they came in and decimated the fortress. It was completely wiped out by two zombies. One was a goblin, and one was a swords elf. Swords elf. Yeah, but it was quite sad. Everybody got wiped out but one, and this one held out for the longest time.

They were doing like a yo-yo march from almost off the screen, almost to the entrance of the fort it would see a zombie and runoff and it did that for a long long time it had gotten to where it was starving and dehydrated and still doing its runaway attack runaway move but finally it was able to get into the fortress the first thing it did was went and got drunk got something to eat and then went to bed and as soon as that last dwarf woke up from their slumber it went outside of Truman, got killed by a zombie. Sad story.

Yeah, it seems that there might need to be a call for balancing the power of the zombies, because Yeah, I had a similar story in that I had, I actually had defenses up, and I had a wall built or, you know, a drawbridge or whatever my go-to is, and that was built, and then I had another, you know, it's sort of like a courtyard, drawbridge goes down. I had meant to pull the drawbridge to the courtyard up and instead pulled the drawbridge that was over that was like near the stairwell so the zombie was let into the courtyard and then the door went up so basically it was one contained legendary axdorf you know undead whatever undead and legendary axdorf and i was like oh that's fine i have three squads

of pretty much mixed in axe lord legendary type fighters myself and then i had a whole squad of archers and so i was like oh you know what archers have a back entrance they'll come up they'll shoot down from the top pelter at you know pelter and then my three squads of legendaries will take care of her so i was like ah that's cool i got this everyone else is kept out so all three squads went up and she wiped out all 30 of those dwarves in no time at all and then the archers instead of going where they were supposed to go ended up just kind of throwing their crossbows at her and doing melee attacks with the crossbows instead of shooting arrows classic and so that was 40 dwarves dead and then the gate was open so she went down into the fort and wiped out the rest and it was a

two hundred and twelve or so person fort yep one just one against a really well-trained group of 40 militia and then of course everybody was dead except for the mayor who was hiding in his chambers and i just had to abandon the fort and leave the mayor to his face I couldn't see it. I just couldn't bear it. I mean, you have to imagine that as soon as something becomes undead, it triples its stats. So even like a cat or a chicken is already a fearsful enemy for your dwarves. But a legendary fighter dwarf is like, that's a fortress killer.

That's actually a fortress killer. Yep. All you need is one. That was a little more than I'd imagined. So I was like, right, got to make sure I pull the right lever next time. There's a lot writing on this. So, Roland, is it that as soon as they go from being the land of the living to the land of the dead, that their stats literally triple?

Yep. Or was that figurative speech? No, I actually mean it like that. As soon as something becomes undead, It triples its stats, but it also locks the stats. So they cannot improve, but they also cannot decrease. But they are tripled, yes. Is that in the Raws?

That is something that I read in the Wiki and the Dwar Fortress Wiki. And that said that the stats triples. So I assumed it's actually somewhere in the Raws. Well, if we have historical, historic figures throughout the world generation raising much more undead, perhaps that stat will be revisited such that they don't get, you know, tripled instantly and you don't immediately have legendary fighters. It'd be nice if maybe, you know, let's say that in year one someone becomes undead, maybe their rate of increase of their skills. Well, you said that they lock immediately So that they don't ever increase But they don't ever decrease either

Hmm Don't know So something else has happened That seems to have upset the balance Maybe it's just the fact That there's a heck of a lot more zombies out there now Because there's a lot more necromancers Yes, I think that's the problem

And also the problem is That they are more driven I mean, okay, that's the purpose I mean they are supposed to be driven driven. But before that, they were just chambling corpses. You know, they're standing in a corner and hitting their hat against the wall undead. But now they're actually like Daisy undead, really, really scary and they will freak you up. So they go from, you know, night of the living dead zombies to 28 days later zombies. Yes. Yes. Yes. And,

They are still very much, like, stab-wise, the same. But now they have a reason, and they can be sent out by necromancers and necromances and now have goals and stuff. So that's why we suddenly have this massive increase of undead creatures that come to your fortress to, like, punch your dwarfs instead of just standing in a corner and hitting their head against a wall, which is actually something that I saw a zombie do in the dwarf office.

Well, I can guarantee that these zombies now have purpose because these two zombies came in and their purpose was to snuff the life out of every last dwarf in my fortress and they succeeded. Yeah, I feel like I'm always good for a, you know, a chuckle in the game, but I just

there gets to be a point when, yeah, things get a little serious. And, yeah, that was kind of I was like, oh, okay, I didn't think I'd be dead so fast. I just, I guess I thought that you, I mean, I'm not sure what it would have taken to stop this siege. Maybe there's nothing. Maybe that's, that's it.

I don't know, whatever it is. I guess I hadn't realized that there was, that was going to be a problem I was going to have to deal with. So, doily noted. If it ever happens again, then you should consider cage traps because cage traps are extremely overpowered, and they're always worth their money, so to say. Good idea. And then you can just get the dwarf of the zombie or whatever in a trap, and then you can't dispose of them securely and safe.

Oh, I can see a Krug Smash artistic drawing now of a zombie in a cage, and the Fortress Dwarves just sitting there observing him with their hands on their chins like thinking dwarves. Like, look at the art. It's a zombie in a cage. Well, you know, well, someone will figure out strategies and I've got to try cage traps because that sounds like that might be a good one. Unless you get overpowered by a, you know, invasion of 70 zombies, in which case you're

hosed. But my two zombie attack, cage traps could have probably handled those had I. Part of the problem was I didn't realize that I was going to have to worry about that so early in the fortress development. So, I guess security should be right after farming for the, you know, order of business. Yeah, I'm a big drawbridge believer, and I was watching one of those Cug Smash videos, and he seems to just be a believer in putting a door in and then just locking it. Every time I've done it, it feels like something just mashes the door down, and then that's the end of that.

So I don't know how he makes such kick-ass doors. I don't know what's going on there. Well, this follow-up fortress that I just built, the first thing that I did after I got all of my stuff inside was built a mechanic shop, built a bridge, and then a lever. So, yeah, it is, I am, I've just had my first, my first caravan visit, and the drawbridge has been operational for months. So I've done that too because I want to be able to keep the zombies out. Although, I got to say, I don't know if the zombies come in now if they're ever going to leave on their own. Not like a goblin siege.

A goblin siege will eventually give up and take off. Yeah. I'm not sure if the zombies will. Yeah, I once had a fortress that was just behind a door and everybody just had to dash down two doors. I think one stone door, even one wood door, but they never did. I personally think it's because it's not a pathing issue, but it has to do with pathing where they cannot find the way into the fort in order to bash down your door.

You know what I'm talking about? I'm not sure that I do, but it's probably because I don't understand how the pathing works. Well, they only find a path when the door is open. And as soon as you close it again and then lock it, They stop finding the path into your fortress and thus don't ever get to the door itself. Oh, I see. They're like, oh, that's nothing. I can't get in there.

So I'm not going to try to go to it because I can't. It doesn't look like anything because the door's locked. Yeah, I suppose it could be imagined like a Tolkien dwarven door that's invisible when it's locked. I always imagined like stone doors being like that. but um speak friend and enter but uh they can definitely uh bash down uh called uh what what doors they can't do that uh i i personally always go with drop bridges because uh that's just way more secure yeah but sometimes a good old rocky door is quite enough cool cool

After one of our podcasts, I think we were talking about how to make archers work and fortifications seem to be a thing that was good. So what I did and had some success with on one fort was I built a wall around it and then I built a floor around the top and then fortifications around that and then put some ammo very close to that where the stairs were they'd climb up. up and they used it. And I had a little goblin siege come through and they basically just reamed them with copper arrows the whole time. And it drove the siege away. And I was like, yay, that feels like I was working as intended. But that was my one success there. And then, of course, against my

legendary axelor, they thought of the crossbows as bludgeon, which was, you know, oh, that's the way it used to work, darn. So I'm still, I think, just very unsure of how archery is, to work. I also had problems with them in my latest fort. You have to have like you have to make sure that you have enough bolts so they can shoot.

Sometimes I forget that I need to make bolts and they don't train and I'm like, why do you not train? Well, apparently I just bought some arrows. I bought just arrows but you need bolts because if you have a crossbow

you cannot use arrows. you also have to always set your squat to active so it's s then the the squad activate the squad and then press t and uh that should work and for me it works best if your archery range you want the archery range to be not wide so sometimes they you dwarfs are really stupid you know if your archery range is too wide they just stand somewhere in the range and look straight ahead and see no target and do not shoot because they're that stupid so you are you have to make sure that it's just one block wide how do you do that well it's it's it's it's works best if you just make a wall around it so it's really just a small tunnel and at the end of the

tunnel you put the archery target and i tried that out and it works so good i'm amazed so you're basically just making like really long narrow corridors or not even long necessarily but just narrow corridors just narrow just narrow and then they can stand in front of the actual target instead of just next to it and like oh there's the target let's shoot at it um well you can even recon you can even recon that into like a real world style and have your archery target practice range be like an indoor shooting range with with guns because you know you have the spot where the station that you actually fire the firearm from but there is a tunnel that you're firing down so yeah i can see that i've never actually been to to no that

that's not true. I've been to a firing range, but there are no tunnels. I mean, I didn't have... They're not tunnels either, but it kind of feels that way. It kind of more like a bowling alley. But anyway. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bowling alley. That's good. That's good. Yeah. Like a bowling alley. And you have to make sure that the dwarfs can stand in front of their respective, like, bunch of kegs so they can shoot at them. Yeah. And that worked. That works. actually really good. You don't actually have to put like the ammo stock pile next to them. You just have to make sure that your ammo stockpire is somewhere in your fortress and is always a bit filled so they can restock. And yeah, I mean, that's it. But for some reason,

some of my arches didn't actually fire. They just stood around doing nothing while being trained having crossbows and bolts they're still bugging on but at least i get them to train but i never get them to shoot at enemies do you know the pain of having actual trained arches and not getting your arches to shoot at things instead just standing there getting ripped to shreds by enemy crossbow fire Okay, well, we're coming up on an hour of recording. There's a couple more things that I want to get into this episode. Yes. First of all, I was planning on doing a let's play Dwar Fortress at OzCon 2020.

Well, thank you COVID-19, but OzCon 2020 has been canceled, so I won't be doing that. But, you know, there's everything in the world is getting canceled right now, so I shouldn't be too upset that this little comic book conference got canceled. So I was a little sadden by that. We had made our dwarf fortress sign and everything. At least we'd cut out the letters and the little dwarf head, me and my dad. That was fun, though. Yeah, man, this is a crazy world.

Yeah. So just gives everyone an excuse to stay home and play lots and lots of dwarf fortress. Yeah, we'll be sure. Sheltering in place with 47-0-4. Yeah. Letting the development work get on. Hopefully the steam release will be out in two weeks. Yeah, we had a little conversation with Alexei Peppers, and she had chatted with Tarn at a rogue-like virtual meetup.

And apparently the work is really going well. I know that we talked about it earlier in the podcast this time. But, yeah, it sounds like that things may be happening a lot sooner than I personally expected them to happen, hoping so. Hey, that would be a glimmer of hope right now, but we need. Thanks, Tarn. Yeah, Tarn, sheltering in place and putting all of his energy into. Keep that guy in place. Yeah.

Do you know GDC for him? No, he's going to work on the steam release. If you're listening, shelter in place, we'll send you whatever you need. shelter my friend shelter the other thing that i wanted to to mention was uh to shout out about all the great movement that we've touched on it before but the the utility packs for this new release of dwarf fortress it is not the end of march yet the release happened less than two months and and while all of them are still in beta form on one sort of the other we've got so you said that Meph has got some updates on his.

Is that correct? Yeah, he's at 4703. Very cool. Predexicer Sarrant is in, is at 4703. Jekawa's lazy MacPack is sitting at 4704. Have you had a chance to play that since they've released the 4704, Tony? I certainly have. It's working like a charm, so thanks, Jekawa.

Great, great. McArchid E1's Linux Dwarf pack is sitting at 4704. Now, I have never actually used that one. In fact, it was just yesterday whenever I was taking a look at the survey of all of the different Linux new packs that I even noticed its existence. I'm going to try that this afternoon, and hopefully I'll have a chance to report back on it in our next episode. But Inase Linux LNP is sitting at 4703, and that is what I have been using. for the last few games that I've played on my Linux boxes, which is my laptop mostly.

And it seems to be working pretty much without a hitch. I did have a crash whenever I was doing an embark yesterday. That's been the only crash that I've had for any of these Linux noob packs. So thank you so much for all of the people who are working on these. All of these seem to have text will be text in place and seems to be working great. Yeah, everything seems to be progressing well And we're close to having all of our solid releases out So that's really nice

Okay Well, does anybody else have anything I think that we covered everything on our list If anybody else have any new news that they'd like to talk about I think we're solid Cool Everybody be safe I know social distancing has become a bit of a cliche

But you know I guess that's how we're going to have to get through this be careful, wash your hands and all that kind of junk that they told us when we were kids, but we didn't listen to. Stay away from everybody. Okay. Awesome. Have fun and play some D.S.

Yeah. So, I suppose, until next time, this is Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, and happy fortressing people. Hey, see you later, guys. Bye-bye. Bye. This has been Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for All Things Dwarfee.

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