Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 29: Broken Glass and Cheese.

Episode Date: May 3, 2020

This episode kind of starts in the middle since we had some major audio issues that I wasn't (totally) aware of until it came time to edit. But we hope you enjoy our deep dive about Glass and Cheese. Wiki page on the glass industryWiki page on making cheese Musical Attribution - Thanks so much to Kevin MacLeod for making his awesome music available to content creators! Skye Cuillin by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4371-skye-cuillin License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Folk Round by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3770-folk-round License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of Door Fortress Roundtable, an episode that was beset with technical difficulties, so much that we lost the first portion of the podcast episode, and it was just too rough to recover. However, I think that you're going to enjoy our deep dive into glass and cheese, so. Without any further ado, this is Dwarf Fortress Roundtable. The podcast for All Things Dwarfee will join it already in progress. Well, it'll be interesting to find out if that's a luck of the draw or if, well, it's luck of the draw one way or the other. Either you and me, Tony, have just gotten really lucky or Roland has gotten unlucky. I'm cautiously optimistic because, yeah, I was getting real tired of how many wear beasts so I would have.

So looking for strategies and that and kind of pulling my hair out. Now it's like, A, it's to be gone for now, so that's cool. Got to tell you, though, wear beasts in some ways are easier to deal with than zombies because, you know, they leave. Yeah, I've been taking to trying to get some sort of wall up first. Like, the first thing I do is get everybody underground and then put a wall around the stairs going into the fort. and then do the, you know, just the regular door, and then I replace it with a draw bridge as soon as I can. And then I've been trying to put some kind of a,

and like fortifications around the second layer of the wall so that ideally, so the Marks' doors can get up there and start throwing their crossbows at the invaders. But, yeah, I haven't had a successful, you know, siege repel with that. So far, the undeaders can come and stay right around the top of the map and then don't really do anything. Don't come down by the fort at all. So that's a bit sad to see them so close, but yet so far away,

not coming into range of my archers crossbows. So did you continue working on your glass factory fortress, Tony? So I did. That was going really well. And I was starting to churn out all kinds of awesome glass stuff. And then as I had tunneled down into the cavern layers to build the magma infrastructure to support it, I hadn't realized that there was one particular cavern that they'd punch. into and we hadn't built a wall in the right place and so there was a perfect diagonal access

of an unbuilt wall like they'd sort of built the wall out of order you know if they build the first one then they can't build the diagonal because they're idiots and I just hadn't realized that and then so a forgotten beast in the form of a hairless goose came in and poison spittled everyone in the fort to death and that was the end of that fort whoopsie dopsy fun fun to watch it go though it's like oh well let's see what happens oh yep yep it's gonna well wait one okay then that's that So, yeah, now we're on to phase two of that approach. And so, you know, where there's a dwarf and will, there's a way to get there. We'll strive to persevere.

Well, I had an interesting thing happen, and I'll do a little bit better planning next time. I actually worked around it, but I had a fortress that my embark was in a valley. Typically, I like to dig into the side of a mountain and do it that way. But this one was such that I would have had to have walked way too far away from my wagon to have built into the side of a mountain. So I channeled out a five-by-five square and built down, as you do, right? So one of the first things that I wanted to do was have a security so that if any zombies came, they would be able to just come down into my fort. So I set up, I got everything in from the wagon into the first couple levels of underground,

and then I built a bridge over my five-by-five. or whatever it was channeled area so that the plan was so I'm going to just build this bridge that will I'll hook it up to a lever and whenever enemies come I'll just shut that bridge down and the bridge was like you know eight by eight so it fully covered the hole well poor planning I didn't even have a mechanics shop whenever I built this bridge so I built this bridge and it sealed off my fortress from the outside and I had no way to open the bridge Oh, dear. Yeah, so what I ended up doing was after I figured out that I wasn't going to be able to get outside any other way, I built a side tunnel.

And finally, for the first time, I was able to build upwards and out instead of downwards and in to get to the outside. So I dug out from the bottom to get out to it. So it ended up being fine, but it was kind of amusing that I had some dwarves that were just sitting outside in the open. If there had been any bag guys show up, they would have just been tough because they couldn't get in. Well, I had used Roland's tip of glass making where you use a manager to do an infinite order of collect sand, and that seemed to get them to actually, you know, not have that whole, no bag, no bag, no bag thing. So that was good. If you had enough leather bags on them, they sort of got to it and did what you needed them to do.

So that was cool. So they actually did make glass, which was fun. I haven't had much luck with actual glass making it, so that was cool. But yeah, I just need to not let the fort die. So that's step two is to keep the fort alive, and then take it from there. Don't let the fort die, yes. You'd think it was step one, but it isn't. Yeah, yeah.

Otherwise, my bricks have been dying fast. Oh, yep. Hold on. I've got a problem here. Cat, cat, cat. Oh, no, it's not cat. it's a it's a problem with my recording all right i'm going to have to kill that and i'm going to have you and tony share a channel oh it's going to be crowded in here okay talk to me now roland

um yes lizardman okay i have many lizardmen oh it's that's exciting okay okay so that should be close enough. Dang. Oh, well. Okay, so where were we? Night wings. What's that? What are night wings? What are buffalo wings? No, no.

Night wings. Sounds like an entree at one of those chain restaurants. I thought that sounded like a motorcycle from Honda. There you go. Oh, okay. It's a humanoid jackal with wings. Oh, okay.

Good. Anyway, so where were we? Yeah, so yeah, that's a great question. Well, undead sieges, cages, glass industries. Yeah, yeah, you were. Yeah, so that's where you had just said that you had your manager, your manager said an infinite sandfill order, and I think that Roland was starting to comment on that.

And that's where I realized that I wasn't recording him anymore. Right. make the joke again it's definitely going to be funnier the second time I don't remember what I said yeah so I would just say that the whole that whole tip that you gave about sand and putting somebody on it

setting that order was a good one that seemed to really work because when you use the manager to set infinite sand collection they fill the bags and then they make the glass and then when the bags are empty they don't complain about it they just go fill the bags again so that's pretty neat it seems to actually make glass work um so that's pretty cool i'm very happy to see that suddenly working so that is a nice segue into one of the other things that i wanted to talk about today could you two explain to me the details and the workflow

of how I'm making glass happens. Collect sand, make glass. That's basically that'll get you green glass. So there's... Well, wait, well, wait, wait. Let's stop at the very, very, very beginning, okay? When a furnace and another

furnace love each other very much. So there's furnaces involved? Yes. Okay, didn't know that. Yes, I lost over that. Right. Well, obviously, the first thing you need are bags to fill with sand because, you know, your dwarfs can just pick up a bit of sand and bring it to the furnace. They need bags. So you need some kind of clothing industry. So either above-ground crops like hemp or below-ground pig tails. There's always

the option of just going the route where you tan stuff and have leather. Leather bags work just as fine and in my mind some of them look way cooler. I mean jack leather or stuff like that definitely looks cooler like a normal handbag. Anyway, as soon as you have bags, they can be used to fill with sand. but your dwarfs are not smart enough to actually know what sand is. You have to tell them what the hell sand is and where to get it. Is that kind of like, yeah, sometimes you'll have to source water, so you have to tell them this is a source of sand?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly like that. You go through your map and just look where the hell you have a bit of sand or clay. That actually is the very same. you either set it to sand or you either set it to clay. The difference here is just that clay doesn't need a bag. The cool thing about it is you can set it in your entrance. For example, if you channel down and you have a bit of sand, you can just set it right there.

You have no problems whatsoever because a tile of clay or sand is unlimited. your dwarfs can get sand unlimited from a single tile so you don't have to worry about them ever like deconstructing a tile or emptying a tile a tile of sand is absolutely unlimited there's a lot of sand yes a lot of sand so that's pretty neat you basically just need a single tile with sand i have somewhere even a info chart that's says what the hell clay is and what sand and what's the difference between those two. But you don't need to know that, okay? If you hover like with your mouse over it, it basically highlights sand or clay or none of it.

And as soon as you have set up a specific tile constructing a glass furnace, same as a normal furnace. You need a bit of fire safe material, a bit of wood to make it. And you could also make a magma glass furnace, which doesn't need fuel, but that's same as any furnace, basically. And then you have the option to say to your dwarf's collect sand. And then only then they will start taking a bag, going to the collect spot, filling the bag with sand, and then leaving the bag with sand at the exact spot where they filled it. Yes, that is true. That is extraordinary, but true. Yep. Yeah, and then somebody else, not them, but somebody else can go there and take the bag

and use it to make glass. Presumably the one that wants to make this, the glass, yeah. Yeah, yeah. and so if you actually set up your sand collecting spot in your fortress entrance you have a lot of sandbags like okay so let's step back one one step here so whenever they've they've got the sand actually this is stepping forward a step and i guess i probably just shouldn't have interrupted you i will go backwards later so after they have collected the sand you've sent so do you have to tell the dwarves to go

get the sand and bring it back to the to the glass workshop is there a workshop for glass specifically yeah it's the glass furnace glass furnace okay so whenever you tell uh whenever you assign a job to the glass of uh create glass is at that point will they go collect the sand from the spot where the dwarfs filled the sandbag and then bring it in much like much like uh stone crafter will go out and get a stone and bring it back to the stone workshop or bring it back to the workshop so so you tell it make glass and he goes out and grabs the sandbag and comes back and burns it yeah but you have so so collecting the sand and using the sand are two different jobs that is weird but this is the very baseline um collecting sand one

making something of the collected sand another drop. You still have the bag. The bag doesn't get wasted in the process. You can refill it which is pretty neat. And there are three types of glass and depending on what kind of glass you want you also have a bit of

different ingredients for them. If you just have sand it doesn't matter what kind of sand So black sand, yellow sand, red sand, whatever sand, it all becomes green glass, which is the standard glass, basically. The glass that elves like. Hmm? The glass that elves like.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Then we have the clear glass, which also needs peer lash, and we have crystal glass that needs rock crystal and peer lash. I think crystal glass and clear glass are similar in the pricing, and green glass is the lowest price price. Can you do things with crystal glass that you cannot do with clear glass? No, it's really all the same. It's just the value and the time they need to make something.

So I think green glass is fairly quick to make, while crystal glass takes a while, I think. So with your glass furnace, you can use magma as a source for the fuel for the glass furnace. Besides that, you can't just burn wood. You have to make charcoal first, right? Yeah, yeah, the novel fuel. Okay, so you have a regular wood-burning furnace, or a wood-burning furnace. or a wood-burning workshop to make your charcoal. You can take that charcoal and use that in the glass furnace

or magma if you're lucky enough to have a magma source, right? You got it. Paralash is the one that I'm not very good at making. I always have to go to the... What do you call it, to figure out how to do that. Is Pearlash and potash the same thing? No, they're different. It requires a bit of potash to make

and peel ash is produced at the kiln so you need a new workshop for that it's a type of salt in the real world but I don't know you need something else I think is it just potash I'm not sure let's try it and see I'm about to undergo this having you know what my my hot tip of the of the week that everyone else probably know about but I'm just slow and hadn't come to that conclusion yet was I always would spend lots of time building these really complicated wells where I would bring water in from the surface and have conduits and ducks and floodgates and all this stuff to plumb the fortress and then I just realized in a pinch all you need to do is dig straight down and you find a place where there's water in the caverns and then you go two layers above it or one layer above it or whatever, punch a hole in and build a well.

Bob's your uncle, you're done. Like, why did I never think of this? Why? So many dead dwarves. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. Talking about Peelash, it says that Peelash

is the most labor-intensive product in the game. Challenge accepted. Yeah, because it actually needs not only, a kiln, but you also need a wood furnace and an ashery, which are three workshops, which would use maybe three dwarfs to handle it to make one unit of peel ash. So first thing you need is wood, which you burn to ash in the wood furnace. Then you make the ash to potash

at an ashory. It's a lot of ash right there. And then you need the kiln to make potash and then you make peelash out of potash at the kiln and for every single step you need fuel so that is

really fuel intensive and the fuel can either be charcoal or magma what about magma yeah what about bituminous coal can you burn that bituminous coal

is a type of fuel, but to access that fuel, you actually need a smelter, which then turns one unit of fuel into like five or eight. I don't remember, something of that. But it's basically a massive snowball system where you have one unit of wood coal, and you have a bitumous coal, and you have a bit of bitumous coal, and you make a lot of. of the consumer's coal, and then it's a snowball. So, yeah, but you need to smelter to access the, so-to-say, hidden properties of any stone coal. Much like an ore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so if I'm, if I want to build a glass, then I need to collect wood,

and I need to take a wood-burning furnace and make ash, right? Well, if you really need clear glass, then what you need is a wood, a wood furnace, an ashery, which also needs, I think, a barrel, and a bucket to build, or just a bucket, I think, and a kiln, which is also a type of furnace. And as soon as you have that, you can actually build the glass furnace and then make clear glass. Instead of making green glass, you only need wood a wood furnace to make it into fuel and sand. Cool. Okay. So I just pulled up on the Dwar Fortress Wiki, the glass industry page, and there's a nice flowchart. that talks about what you guys have just detailed for me. So I appreciate that.

It's one of the mystery parts of the game that I have not touched yet. And next week, I think that we're going to talk about cheese making, which also sounds like it's a fairly complicated process. Actually, that one's not too bad. You can semi-autimate that. Yeah, you can semi-automate cheese. making just by having it having a manager milk the animals and then make cheese as long as you have milk you make cheese and you do it at a farmer's workshop it's really that's not too bad okay so that's fine okay um so should i go over like milking fairly quickly because yeah sure why not

we'll just we'll cover cheese making this week too and next week we'll talk about soap nice okay So, because I made a cheese fortress, I seem to be now well acquainted with the essence of cheese. So, for cheese, the first thing you actually need, it's insane, but you need a milkable animal. Because with no, like, cow or pig or whatever, you can't actually make milk. Can you milk your cats? No. Cat milk does not work. Nope.

Doesn't exist, sadly. So like yucks, llamas, opuckers, reindeer, pigs, whatever you want. Put it in a pasture and the best thing that you can actually do is put the farmer's workshop right into the pasture because the milkers seem to be a bit careless and sometimes they milk an animal and just look. leave it free, like let it run and it runs through your fortress, like, it's like, oh my God, what is going on? And nobody cares. That's quite annoying. So put it, put it just in the pasture. Right, right. It's easier. The next thing you want is a manager that sets milk and animal at an unlimited number. So your dwarfs will always milk, an animal as soon as they can because you know animals don't produce milk every

single second so they need a bit of you know recharging so to say the thing you need is a bucket to milk it I think and no actually that's wrong you don't need a bucket because they are in a workshop you just need the workshop and not a bucket but you need barrel to store the milk and if you have set it to repeat order and you have a lot of animals and a lot of milkers you also need a lot of barrels because as soon as a barrel is taken by a dwarf for his job this barrel cannot be used by any other dwarf for maybe even the same job so if you have three milkers and three milkable animals you also would potentially

need at least three farmer workshops and three barrels, or else they will do the job after another and not at the same time. So you've got your milk, and then you just tell the workshop to, was it in a kitchen? Is it, where does cheese get made? It's all in the farmer's workshop. Okay. And you don't need anything else. You just need milkable animals, a lot of barrels.

And then you have already cheese. And the thing is, neither cheese nor milk actually spoils. So you could potentially just let the milk stuff run along for a while, then check on it. See, you have a lot of milk and then cheese it. Uh, cheese it. Make all the milk into cheese at one point. Could also use the manager just to say, make. cheese unlimited number may milk an animal unlimited number and then it just rounds along and you check on it like two months later and you see oh my god I have like 200 cheeses or you check a month later and you have like 2,000 cheeses also one thing to remember I thought that dwarfs could drink milk they cannot they cannot drink milk I had

So that likes sense to just store milk in your kitchen or somewhere in your stockpiles. They cannot drink it. They cannot produce anything out of it. They cannot make it into food or cook it in a meal. They can only make it into cheese. So if you have milk barrels, the only thing you can basically do with the milk barrel is make it into cheese or sell it to the traders. Cool. All right.

They do. There's a lot of spam associated with. with milking. Like if you give it an infinite milking order, they'll tell you many, many times that something can't be milked. There's no empty animal or whatever it says. Or if there's no milk and the cheese orders there, yeah, it'll say, cannot milk animal, no creature, cannot shave animal, no creature. So there's just a lot of spam that can come with it. That's, I guess, one side thing if you don't want to micromanage, turning it on and off, just be prepared, to see a lot of red text in your log.

And Tony, I know that you set up a milking pen in Luridwips. Ah, yes, very important to have milking. Everyone loves the cheese. Yeah. So, yes. And speaking of Lurid Whips, I am planning on picking that fortress back up. I'll go ahead and still use the 4403 or 4412, whatever it was that was before 47 because just because well what do you guys think maybe this is the time let's bring this into

the modern era let's let's roll a new one and see what the heck happens let's go fight some undead what is so is uh is you want to use the meth tile set as well or oh no i just think why don't we just use the p. E. Paradexasaran set and then we can all just choose whatever tilesets we like how's that sound for an exciting way to do this? that sounds all right yeah that might be a little easier yeah you may be the lazy new part yeah yeah what do you think on a

4704 because now it's kind of stable I would say I haven't had any problems with it I'm fine with that so we're tired or it whips it was we'll call that a ramp up that's right that was that was a gateway for it yeah is that okay with you rolling

yeah yeah I'm totally in yeah okay so I'll tell you what I will as last time, yeah, I'll go ahead and start it off. And then whenever my year's up, I can pass it on to one of you two. And you guys can critique my fortress starting and see if it actually happens a little bit better this time than it did previously. Because I have learned, really, I've learned a lot since we first started that fortress was that six months ago, eight months ago. Oh, it's, yeah, it's been quite a while.

So, yeah. So do you want to do? 250 years or 125 or what are you thinking what's what's possible i was thinking just the the 250 default yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah with all the defaults and uh 250 years and all the things that whenever you just turn on the the the world generation it just does it so yeah cool do small world or medium world it's a medium all right let's do it the the only thing that i want to add is if there are no necromancer towers after the year 250, could you please run it along until we at least have one? Sure, sure. Because they kind of build towers outside of world

gen, and I would love to have one. All of my worlds have had, like, this world I'm playing now is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And it's a small world. So it's, it's, it's, it's, It's very necromancery. Yeah, I doubt that it will happen, but, I mean, just making sure, you know, that we have at least one tower I could. So make sure that the world has at least one tower. Yes. Okay.

And I think that I'm going to actually record the video of the world generation. And so that we'll have it for maybe streaming it at some point or maybe posting it to our new YouTube channel that I have got set up. So, yeah. Cool. All right. So rest in peace, lured whips, you lived shortly, but you lived brightly, maybe. Yep, that sounds good.

And then long made the new not so lured whips happen. So here's another question. Do I make up a cool name, or do I just take what's random? Honestly. Random? I'm a big. I love random. Yeah.

Okay, cool. random and we will we will mold the fort around its name wonderful okay okay well that's uh really all i have for today we're coming up on an hour of recording fantastic here we go so i suppose you guys be safe and everybody out there listening uh hope you enjoy uh the podcast stay away from the covids okay so this has been dwarf fortress roundtable everybody have a great couple weeks and we'll see you back here next time See you. Bye-bye.

This has been Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Please stop by and leave a comment or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. Music for this episode is from filmmusic.io. Skykew Ellen and Folk Round are both by you. Kevin McLeod. You can find more music from Kevin MacLeod at Incompetec.com. Please consider donating to the creators of Dwarfortress at bathegames.com.

If you'd like to help support Dural Fortress Roundtable, you can find us on Patreon. Links to all of these are in the show notes.