Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 41: In Which We Close Season 2 With Dwarven Science

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

We're taking a break for the end of the year and will be back in January. We'd like to thank the Dwarf Fortress community - and especially Tarn and Zach - for being so awesome. This is more than a game. It's a hobby, and every thriving hobby has passionate people who drive camaraderie and innovation. Well, Dwarf Fortress certainly has that, and we thank the community for accepting us as graciously as it has. Everyone have a safe remainder of 2020. We'll see you in a couple months! Bay 12 Games November UpdateSteam Powered update!!!Science!!! on RedditDFRoundtable YouTube page Support Dwarf Fortress Roundtable on Patreon Musical Attribution - Thanks so much to Kevin MacLeod for making his awesome music available to content creators! Skye Cuillin by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4371-skye-cuillinLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Folk Round by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3770-folk-roundLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

I had to go into a bank and I was like, okay, do I keep my mask on or? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I get it, man. You'd think, okay, are they going to think I'm a bank robber? I'm walking into a bank masked. Yeah. Welcome to Dwarfortures Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan.

I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And today we're going to look back a little bit at 2020, but not 2020 as a whole, as it applied to the entire world, because that would just be a really depressing podcast. We're talking Fortress, 20. Fortress 20, which had wonderful good things. Arguably started very strong with a new release. I think we're all getting a great deal of enjoyment. Yeah. Dwarfortion, dwarf version.

Dwar Fortress version 47.01, which was the first release in the 47 series, happened on January 29th. And one month daywise later, on February 29th, the current version 4704 was released. So a flurry of releases there in a one month period in February of 2020. And I think there's some bugs or some. Isn't there like a bug release or something? Didn't he say that didn't we just see that there's talk of some kind of an update that might do, that might be like a bug release? Oh, I did not kick that? It's separate some of this.

Maybe did I hear that? Hmm. But there was like some bugs that were. Maybe this was part of this 2021. Yeah. I don't know. Because I'm curious because I swear at one point I remembered the idea of necromancers coming to the tavern and hanging out was supposedly a bug. but it seems so entrenched in how the game works now

that I wonder, is it a bug or did I hear that? You know, I guess that's going to have to define to depend on how you're defining bug. He did say that that was an unintended thing to happen. He said that on, I think it was his interview with Blind. But yeah, he definitely said that he didn't mean for that to happen. Well, it certainly has an impact, doesn't it? if anybody else has noticed

holy buckets definitely yeah so if you get a necromancer what you need to do is burn all your all your writing materials and stop raiding outside fortresses and your stone

stop with the stone as well because you can I think you there I think I saw that on Reddit somebody had a necromancer stone that basically yeah that there was a stone that the secrets of life and death were written on yeah

so that sort of makes it harder doesn't it kind of hilarious have you seen okay I'm sorry I'm retaliating a bit from the discussion but have you seen the screenshots that were posted

in the last report yes you talk about the one that came from Kit Fox or the one that came from Bay 12 games Bay 12 because I have really sat down and looked at it but oh my god it tells you your population it tells you your iblers but it goes beyond that it tells you how many dwarfs are feeling happy like what it's

going to be kind of neat huh i mean that that info screen is pretty cool fun it's amazing and it tells you how much food stuff and drink stuff you have so you don't have to press zet every like 15 minutes. I hope that some of the key binds are still there because I still find that I'll rely pretty heavily on them just because that's how I've learned. But I think he said he's going to keep all the key binds. So even though it'll have like this nice graphic overlay, I can still do my old school keybinding stuff.

Nice. Whenever we come back in January, I think we're going to have blind on maybe even for the first episode. But yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing his take on it because you know that screen that has all the filtering on it? Yep. The bars are big, bold red and big bold green,

which is tough if you've got red-green colorblindness. Oh, yes, the lack of colorblind options. Because how does it work right now? You can set your own color palette now in any files, can't you? Truly. I didn't know that you could do that currently. Yeah, I think you can. I think in the lazy noob, there's a section where you can adjust the color palette.

What you like? noticed that it makes a huge difference, but I'm also not trying to do anything with it. Yep. Hopefully there's I mean, it's not I wouldn't think that it's exactly a highly accessible game as it is.

I was trying to remember if it was someone did a video on either trying to play just a rogue like with a screen reader or playing Dwar Fortress with a screen reader. One half, one half, one fourth, semicolon, semicolon, period, period, period.

Period. Zero. Zero. That would just suck, couldn't it? Yeah, it would. You know, it probably had to have been a, uh, something like rogue or, or net hack or something like that. People played over SSH. I've seen that where it's trying to draw the screen over SSH. Really? Yeah. Yeah. My confusion is trying to think of how that would work because it's a, even though it has a, kind of a, ask you looking interface, it's, It's not really Asky. It's like, I think, the SDL library or something like that. Yeah, it's drawn.

It's drawn. It's just painting with Asky characters. That's all. Yeah, so I'm wondering how you would do that straight terminal. I have no idea. And it is also one of those things I just don't even want to find out about because I think it sounds like it'll be awful. I think that originally it was it was done with Curses, which is, Roland, if you didn't know, curses is a text user interface library.

And I think it was started off on Unix Machines. And it was so that you could make full-screen displays like you would see in the 1980s in a library at a terminal. The dream. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Nothing but fun ahead of us. So what do we think?

And what's our, do we have our Super Bowl pool for when the new release, the art release is coming out? what do you guys think the new the new release before the big wait are we still doing the big weight or did that kind of get no no we we are going to do this afterwards yeah yeah the big weight i think is going to happen i think there's going to be like an army update or something like that uh after or an update of some sort before the big weight but after the steam release to finish up some of the things that you wanted to get done for the villains release but didn't yeah because i had kind of when i was listening to how they were talking about it i was kind of thinking more like instead of there being this big weight it's going to be more like a a bunch of smaller weights and so that dev's not going to be in these

big huge fits and starts it's going to be more of like well we're fixing this and adding this and fix i don't know maybe that's well that's i think what you're going to have happened before the big weight but i if i'm not mistaken even recently he had said that when the big weight comes when they're So the big weight is for the myth and magic update. And I heard there's going to be some extensive rewriting of some of the base code that's going to need to happen in order to implement that. And that's what was going to cause the big weight. So I don't know that the big weight is going to be able to be avoided. If they are ever going to have the, I'm flying air quotes here, 1.0 release, you know.

I'll be interested really to see, you know, it's it's really not that important but the versioning I thought that it all referred to the percentage complete that he thought he was it does now but uh but I don't know that that Steam will be cool with having a alpha version 0. Yeah that's right

Steam's going to drive this Steam's going to start driving a lot of this stuff huh? You know I don't know if content was if that's the case but they'll probably be doing the version number. They'll probably have to take out that this is an alpha version, therefore it will crash a lot whenever you first create a world. Yes, exactly. Well, it'll be fun to watch how it steamifies and see if, I mean, on one hand, like, I'm glad that it now offers a framework and probably will

draw in more people, which I think is cool. The downside is, you know, I wonder if it means that he's going to have to adapt and change to this new kind of more traditional software development thing. Although I don't know that Steam necessarily cares one. No, I don't think so either. I mean, look at games like Caves of Cud and the binding of Isaac and all these other indie games that they still, you know, Steam isn't driving them. Steve is just the publishing platform for them. Caves of Cud. I haven't played that much this week to be on.

I just haven't really, I haven't done much with my forts because I think I got a little discouraged when my supposedly successful attempt at my crazy, insane world. Like, I don't want to give up on it because I feel like there's some way to make this work, this crazy planet that I've generated, a crazy dwarf world that I've generated. Like, I just want to have some foothold into this world where change can come. surely some wonderful dwarf is going to be able to make a different, things will get better. I mean, it does sound like a good world to play adventure modern. Yes, I bet you it would be, but, well, you know what, I did it, and I set out, and then immediately we ran into an undid army, and it was like, oh. Yikes.

Whoopsy-dupsy. Oh, they're fast, the undead armies. Oh, golly. oh golly so I'll be interested to get your guys perspectives on it because it seems like kind of a a whoopsie-ups world

yeah I still have to play your world because I am very interested especially in using it for adventure modes because you know that's a lot of chaos and stuff happening

it works great for adventure mode but I haven't really played that much in the last week but I only played for a presentation I actually did a presentation about a dwarf fortress and that's the spirit that's cool yeah tell us more I wouldn't say it was good But I tried to influence some people in my class about Dwarf Autris.

And of course, I also dropped the slight hint of me doing this podcast. Yeah, I don't think they got the hint, but my teacher did. So it's all good. That's cool. So, yeah, did you just give a presentation about, you know, just how Dwar Fortress works or tell us more about your presentation? Okay, yeah. It was more of a general presentation, so nothing really that specific, not like, oh, yeah, you can see this, you can see that. I only had eight minutes, so I couldn't just dive into the working mechanisms or, uh,

show a creature text. I would have loved to do with that, especially since I did some raw changes and stuff myself. But I mostly talked about, well, this game is super old and super fancy, and it looks like shit. But I love it. And then I showed them. screenshots from my own games, I showed them a few small videos of the game where stuff is just moving around and one of them was actually me having, oh my God, my brain.

I come on. I had, what's it called? Drinks? No. Drinks? Well, that explains it. I'm struggling hard. Yeah, I had a siege and I saved it onto a video. I recorded it.

Okay. Okay. So I had a siege and I was able to record that siege and then played it to them in a fast forward mode so they could actually see the whole siege playing out from the point where the goblins raided my map to the point where the goblins got into my fort and i had to send out my last remaining security last resort squads and they saw a lot of blood and i didn't really explain a lot of the stuff that was going on because there's a lot going on, you know, I was just, oh, you see this? This is a tooth flying through the air. Or you see this? This is a cat

getting stabbed to death. And everybody was really horrified. And my teacher was like, oh, this is, this is very violent. Awful. Yeah. And I have two questions for you about this, Roland. One, was vanilla door fortress or did you use a tile set? No. I mean, I had some screenshots, older screenshots I did from my own fortresses that had a tile set in it. But because I wanted to shock them, I made a lot without them. And the whole goblin siege had no tile set. And wow. And they were like, yeah, this stuff is going on. Stuff is. It's the main. Red, yeah. You're trying to drive the code anymore.

I just see Goblin, forgotten beast. Oh, my God, yes. I know that one-fourth is roots. I manage to, I think I've managed to get somebody into it now. Somebody that I thought would be totally into it. I think he's very calmly and patiently playing through the PE starter, you know, that paradoxes. I really don't even want to try.

trying to say the name. The PE, like, intro walkthrough, the Door Fortress Walkthrough, which I think is the best, probably most, it's like the clearest step by step. Here's how this works and here's how this fits together with this, like building blocks on to how to get into the game. Is that a video? No, it's just, it's text. It's what you call it before. We have. We have, yeah, and I am supporting that again because I think it's a really, really good way to get people into.

it. I got to say, I really like the Dwar Fortress Wickeys, uh, quick start on their, uh, on their page. So for, uh, for having someone learn how to play it for the first time. I think it does a really good job. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do well with text. Sometimes videos don't. Oh, it's, yeah, the Dwarfortress Wiki one is text as well. I'm not so good at clicking like and subscribe or whatever listening to all that. I'm just like, get to the point. Don't forget to ring the bell. That's right. Smash that like button, guys. Well, I hope that you got a good grade on your presentation. No, probably not, but it's fine.

I have the chance to talk about something that I like, and that is all the good grade I need. I mentioned the last time that it had been a while since TOTI had presented an update, and in that period of time since our last episode he has released too it wasn't like i thought it would be it wasn't immediately after our episode but on a november 1st they released a dev notes on bay 12 games dot com and looks like november 5th they released some notes on steam which is you know totally different content than what was released on bay 12 games so actually i like that they're not They're not copying it, so I have more...

Yeah, they're not crib in it. That's cool. More stuff to read. So what are they telling us on Bay 12 if they're not? Bay 12, it's... Pictures of stockpiles and talking about the fact that you can filter your stockpiles now. And there's basically lots of images on there of things like all of the different kinds of armor. It's just displaying a example of these.

our interface looks much it's cleaner yeah I do want to remind you that you can sort stockpiles right now but the important part here is that you now can paint

stockpiles which means that you don't have to make a square at any sort you can just go around a pillar or you can make an an L-shaped thinglybub stockpire.

And that is super, super cool because imagine the possibilities of that. You can now use every space in your fortress without colliding into walls and stuff. It's really cool. Yeah. I still do that. But the way I do it is by making, you know, if I've got a diagonal, sorry, a room that is rotated 45 degrees where it's a diamond shape instead of a square. That would be like a worst case scenario for trying to create a stockpile with a square.

But I will, instead of just one stockpile, I will have, you know, 12 stockpiles. 12 different stone stockpiles in the same room. But it pretty much ends up being the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, I feel as though we don't get a lot of. support for circular rooms in the game. So you end up kind of having to do some real weird stuff to, like, if you want to have your inn be a round room, you've got to do some funny, funny business.

I don't remember if it's a Reddit post or if it's in the wiki, but there is a guide to making circles in Dwar Fortress that tells you how many, for a particular diameter circle, it shows you the best way to do it. It's pretty cool. Okay, that's cool. Yeah, because I always worry if I do like this plus this plus this, then it creates four zones and now my CPU is going to get bogged down trying to trek four stockpiles or four.

Oh, that's still a thing. Disparate zoned areas. Yeah, I'm like, that's kind of a bummer. I hadn't thought about that. You know, the other optimization thing that I really, really want is I really want to see not having to do bedrooms, not having to map out bedroom every time, like to flag every single room with a bed in a door as a bedroom. I would love it if that just kind of, you know, as a thing instead of having to, do you see what I'm saying? Like, I don't want to have to go in and toggle every single room. If I'm building 46 bedrooms, it's just like, well, as we're going to see here in a moment, whenever I, whenever I do the dramatic reading of the mission statement, um, uh, three toe actually mentions about the length of time that it takes to create bedrooms. So he doesn't go into any details, but, uh, it's possible. that that concern is going to be addressed with the steve place.

That would be pretty cool. So then that was the Bay 12 games dev notes itself. And then if we look at the Steam notes that KleeneoDev posted in Reddit, there is other information that's on the Steampowered.com. I'm sorry, yeah, Steampowered.com. Okay, yeah. So the post title on Steam is Glass, Stone, Bridges, and, or blood and in this he uh he is going over the some more of the basic drawing uh the basic user

interface look and feel not so much the details that he went into on the bay 12 games but i found something out in this that i didn't realize he's making glass tables can you use glass as a construction material for making things like tables um yeah i'm I'm pretty, okay, I'm a hundred percent sure you can make statues, armor stands, and weapon rags. And so I'd say, yeah, I think you can make glass tables, yeah. Well, he certainly did. I didn't know if that was something that was new. But so, yeah, I didn't know that.

Apparently, of course, I guess it could also be that I have maybe made one glass producing setup in any of my fortune. They don't typically last such that my fortress gets that mature. Yeah, you've had some challenges. Yeah, I'm not so good with glass, clear glass, because that's the one that needs the potash, right? Yeah, yeah. That one kind of does me. Or is that crystal glass that needs the potash? Wow.

There's green. No, no, no, no, no. The clear glass is the potash consuming thing, yeah. Then how do you make crystal glass? Um, you, you need rock crystals for that shit. Ah, to add the, uh, yeah, the, the, the stone component to it to make it, you know, sing when you clink it. I don't even know what the difference between real life crystal glass and playing glass. Potash.

Minerals, potash, yeah. Rock in the, rock in the glass. But so there's a, so yeah, two announcements that, uh, sorry, two updates that came out on Bay 12 games. and Steam. And let's see, we also had the November future of the fortress and the Bay 12 Games updates. The report to start November. So I think that I will, at this time, do my monthly dramatic reading of Three Toes mission status, unless one of you would prefer to do it. Go for it. I don't, I wouldn't want to disappoint. Mm-hmm. All right.

Colossal is the gravity pulling all conceivable factors into place that they circle the center, the glowing orb of success and playability that is the foundation of things to come. For instance, with the mouse it is now possible to stock your piles. With only a few flicks of the mouse, it is now possible to organize your goods and equipment which before would have taken a confusing trip through a maze of tangled menus. The next target will be placing buildings and displaying varied furniture types and traps.

Lo, I have tested what we have now, and it is good. I dug out the ubiquitous nest of dwarven bedrooms in less time than it would take to designate a single meeting room in the classic version. I also managed to flood the whole thing with an aquifer. It looked awesome and is only being improved over time. Solid greatness awaits. Congratulations to the generous, Threato.

There we go. Pretty cool. So, yeah, it sounds like, I don't know if it is exactly what you imagine, but something is going to be done to make making bedrooms quicker. At least digging them out will be quicker. Designating them, you know. What was the exact words? I dug out the nest of dwarfen bedrooms.

Okay. So he didn't say that he designated them. He just dug them out. So, yeah. Yeah, it would be. nice to be able to put one block of selection over the 400 bedrooms that you have just dug and make them all individual bedrooms, like one bedroom per bed. As long as you put the cabinets and containers within a certain number of squares from the bed,

they will automatically get included with that bed as that bedroom. I like it. But, I mean, there are problems. with that, because if you automatically put, okay, see, the thing is, if every room where a bed is in automatically becomes a bedroom, then what about the hospital? Well, I would say that you would have to select the area that you want to turn into a mass bedroom. Yeah, I think maybe the hospital zoning would override it.

You know, you have to be designated as a hospital zone. so maybe that overrides it. Oh, well, there you go. Turn it into a bedroom zone. You know, I had a bedroom zone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally, like everything in this area is a bedroom so they can just go nuts and claim them and stuff like that.

Yeah. Yeah. That's it. I think that's the answer, a bedroom zone. Yeah. That's what we need, another zone. One more zone to manage, right? Pit or pen.

You know, I'll tell you something. One way I've been solving it is I've been using Fastorf in DFT, hack. I don't teleport with it, but I do have them move faster. I just like, come on, guys, let's get your skates on. And that, to me, has made it a little bit, I don't know, more enjoyable when I'm trying to dig out a big thing as I can have it go all fast or as quick and nice. I have never heard of this fastorff you speak of. Please tell me more. Yes, if you do in your DF hack window, just type in Fastorf space one space zero. And if you do one, one, then they teleport. And I don't like that very much. The teleport, I think, breaks things. You don't really need it. But the fast

or it's basically like they just move faster. So it's kind of, you know, if you start having frame rate problems, that's one way you can kind of sort it out and keep the game playable for a little longer. So does time itself speed up or is it just that the dwarf speed up in the given time that they have? Like, are they actually going instead of one tile per clock click, they start going like two titles per clock click or something like that? Yeah, yeah. You don't speed up the time itself, but I think the code works that way

that there is a speed in the game. So the game knows how fast something is, and I think it just cranks it up like a lot because only dwarfs are affected or everything is affected. You can vary in that. Cool. So it is indeed a cheat. Mm-hmm. Yes.

Okay. Not that anybody's keeping track of, you know, your games. We don't have the centralized dwarf fortress world server that are, you know, that you can hack into and try to game the system and make your fortress be the one that has the super special artifacts. No, nothing of the sort. Microtransactions. No, I'll tell you, I like it just because when I'm, I'm trying to, I used it in my, in my crazy world because sometimes trying to get the walls built before the first siege comes is just unbelievable.

You know, like I've got, you've got, you know, maybe a month before the first undead siege comes. So there's no time to spare. Like, it's instant. You're doom if you don't get it right. So that one is a good, it's good. Yeah, that's the only way I can win or not. I had another fortress fall miserably. Do you tell.

Those are fun. Yeah, I did the classic, and I could swear that I had tested it. But I had a fortress that was going really well, and apparently I forgot to hook up my lever to my bridge. Oh, yeah. So when the goblin attack came, they were, you know, inside the, Fortress in no time at all. So I basically sat and watched my dwarves get slaughtered.

I did, though, I did get archers working. I got them trained. I got them to pick up bolts. And they were actually shooting at the goblins and trolls that were invading the fortress as the goblins and the trolls were invading the fortress. But they weren't very successful because all they had were wooden bolts. but they shot at them it was wonderful they did not try to bash them over the head with their crossbows they actually tried to shoot at them so so what was the what was your

strategy for getting it to work what did you change to do that or was it just happenstance so it was it was just that I sat down and went over that instruction set the Byron goddess a couple months ago combine with your information that you have to have enough quivers in order to have it work right. So, yeah, I set up a stockpile of wooden bolts right by my firing ranges. I set up my firing range targets, and I set up some archers who their only purpose in life was to be archers. I turned off all of their other jobs and just set up.

them up to be training as archers and had a squad of four of them and they all trained themselves up really nice so it was kind of cool and I also used that strategy so that I wouldn't just you know waste the forest behind my archery targets I channeled out a one Z level deep little trench that that would catch the missed bolts so so every once in a while I would come back in there and collect the spent arrows and they would go back to the stockpile that that worked really well. That sounds cool. Yeah.

So he had suggested that you use bone bolts for practice, but I didn't have a meat industry. So I didn't have a good supply of good, useful bones. But it seemed like that the wooden bolts did just fine, made them at a, I think, a craft dwarf shop. So I heard the wooden bolts just like that they don't have the ability to get through armor and stuff. They just slenture. That's right. That's why my guys, you know, only got off about 10 shots each before they were pounded over the head by a troll.

But they got it. They did try. So I think that I had like, I had bought from a caravan some, some real bolts. But I'm not sure that they ever went and picked them up because I think that they were stupid enough such that whenever it came time to actually fight, they still tried to use their wooden bolts. Everything happened so fast that I'm really not sure exactly what happened. because I went from having almost 100 dwarves of my fortress down to having like five in a surprisingly short amount of time.

And at that point, I just started following a child dwarf as he ran through the fortress and evaded the siege for a little while. But eventually my strength was broken. If I did have a wish, it would be that dwarf fortress had some closure screen, like in other roguelikes, whenever you die, you can see what stuff you were carrying, you can see how much money you had, you can see what your points were. With Dwarf Fortress, when that last dwarf goes, it's done. The screen disappears.

You have no way to see immediately at least, you know, how big your fortress got, how much wealth it had provided. It would be nice to be able to see the last Z layer screen. screen right after, or sorry, the last, you know, Command Z where you bring up your, your stocks. It'd be nice to be able to see that immediately after dying. Okay. We just have the option for it. But I know this is far-fetched, but that's why I like vampires.

You wore them in and your fortress can never crumble. Who? Big brain time. Oh, yeah. Of course. You always survive. because you've got one person who's not going to die. But what are you going to do?

I guess if, I mean, golly. Give him a pick so that he can dig himself out and do Harry Carey while, you know, whenever you're done. Well, yeah, that is a possibility or just, I don't know, make dinner and come back to a migrant wave. But wouldn't the migrant wave get eaten by whatever's killed the fortress? Well, kind of depends on what your fortress has died from. If it's demons, well, yeah, but if it's goblins, so there is the chance that the goblins leave. If it's undead, then, well, they're not going to leave, probably, but. I get it, though.

Yeah, yeah, I get it. At least it's not, at least there's a chance that something positive might. be able to come out of it. Yeah. That's an interesting thing. And then if you've got your migrants, well, they'll probably have a mess to clean up first thing. That's going to put them in a bad mood.

That is true, especially if they have to walk through a minefield of their bodies, and then they have to clean it up afterwards, and they are in the rain. Talking about bad mood, I'm not sure if that's a good, thing to start right now. But have you heard about the memory core bubble theory? No. Please elaborate. So the general thought is that a dwarf has memories and core memories.

And the difference is that a memory only stays so long in the dwarf's mind, can maybe come into his mind at a later point, but at some point it will be deleted and overwritten by other things. But then there are core memories which cannot be overwritten. And you have only a few of them. I think the number was six that there is a guy on this subreddit and he tried to prove it. Yeah, that's what I was looking for.

I was looking for that right now because, yeah, I know that post. It was, I think that something called something like Dwarven Science. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But go ahead, go ahead and please explain to the listeners. So when a dwarf arrives, even if the dwarf is a bit older, had a life outside your fortress, the moment he reaches your map, goes onto your map, the core memory stuff is activated. he didn't really have memories and only the moment he steps onto your map the whole memory thing

becomes active so the first few things become core memories the first few things that he sees are more likely to become core memories simply because he doesn't have any yet so the system tries to fill them up with information that he gathers sadly it is very like that the first things he will experience are like dead bodies, rain, cold, or not being able to sleep in a proper bed or whatever, like negative things. So he's very likely to experience bad things, and those bad things will become a core memory. And then this dwarf is basically rurant.

because a core memory can be memorized over his entire life. I don't think a core memory has any, like, date of... No expiration date, yeah. Yeah, expiration date, thank you. So, if you have bad luck, then this dwarf will remember seeing corpses over and over and over again. and it is really hard to get rid of core memories but it seems to be possible it seems to be possible that they can be overwritten by feelings or emotions that are strong enough and only after a certain time so a very newly acquired core memory will not be able to overwritten no matter what but a older core memory has the potential to be overwritten by something else, something that is equally strong or stronger in the emotional potential. Wow. So you'd have to have core positive events in order to undo some

of the damage. Do we know what core positive events are? Well, all positive things and all negative things seem to be able to become core memories. So I'm not sure if seeing a stature is a enough, but I haven't seen it as a core memory yet because they don't seem to be able to remember that a lot. But seeing corpses is definitely one. That's a negative. I'm sorry. They don't like that. Getting a child seems to be a very positive core memory for some dwarfs. Getting married or having a spouse is a core memory, a positive one. Creating a master war. is one, and I also seen equipping masterful stuff, like not even military-related, just masterful shirts, seems to be able to become a core memory.

Okay, so the name of the actual thread on Reddit is, science experiments with memories, stress, and happiness, an application of the blank slate hypothesis. It's a really good read. It's long, it's detailed. Some kind of detail. Yeah. Salford Sal put the work in on that. It's a pretty amazing post and very, very interesting.

And honestly, yeah, after I read that, this was probably a month or so ago, after I read that, it did change the way I was thinking about what my dwarfs were experiencing. And I don't know that it made any. difference in how I was able to deal with it. But it did make me, it almost made me want to have a particular dwarf experience more things immediately after having something bad happen. You know, they get caught out in the rain, so then you go to an amazing dining room and have a meal, right? Mm-hmm.

But yeah, it's very interesting. You know, it also shows how kind of a fairly, a fairly, simple game mechanic can have such profound effect on the gameplay long term because this this mechanic doesn't sound like it would have been that hard to implement at least coming up with the memories and actually having the dwarves experience the events probably had some complexity to it but the the algorithm for for making memories long term looks like was pretty straightforward, but it certainly has a long-term effect on the game. It can cause a, you know, a tantrum spiral in your fortress and, you know, it'll be over with.

Yeah. And I, okay, I've heard a lot of people, especially at the start of the whole update, a lot of people mentioned how broken the stress system is and while yes many of the positive modifiers weren't really working the way they should you know i think it is a good system because if you have positive things you have positive reinforcement and your fortress just spirals upwards and there's no stopping it there's still some things that are completely broken but But still, you know, it works. On the other hand, if your fortress is sliding downwards,

then it goes faster and faster. I was still able to come back from one, but I had to shot my dwarfs, basically, to the outside world. It was really hard. I lost some dwarves to depression, et cetera, but I think as soon as the modifiers are cleared up, and we get less extreme dwarfs than this is a good system. I like it. Yeah. I've not had as much problems with version 47 for the mood of my dwarves as I did with version 44.

It seems that some improvement has been made. Yeah. I don't think that he has defined what those improvements may have been. Yeah, I haven't really had the tantrum spiral since 47. It's been, I wouldn't say relatively smooth sailing because I've had a lot of other problems. but the tantrum spirals, that's not, that's not a, that's not a, that's not still a thing that I'm struggling with. Oh, and that reminds me, we had talked a last episode about how we hadn't running across very many, uh, wear beasts.

I've had like five show up since then. So, yeah, it was just, it was just dumb luck. Jeez. Okay. Yeah. One of them was, uh, the wear beast was actually one of the caravan guards. And as it was leaving, it turned. So as the caravan's starting to leave.

my fortress all of the uh there was all kinds of you know mayhem going on just outside the fortress walls so there none of my dwarves actually got involved in it but but the uh but the the the caravan guards killed their cohort almost immediately so it was great interesting well that's not uplifting but uh hey i guess it happened yeah yeah but the fact that even the caravan guards are not safe from that. Yeah. So amazing. You know, they're not just spawned in

NPCs, like random blank pieces. They are still people with actual history because, you know, you can't just be infected. Like,

blows my mind. Yeah, well, you know, it actually, it's possible that it could be, but it's, yeah, it's nice to think that there was a history there for it. You know, say that any particular MPC in the game has a 0.001% chance of becoming a wear beast. But yeah, we'll just pretend that's not so. All right.

All right. We are at the top of the hour. Yeah. So we are going to take our winter hiatus after this episode. So we're going to be gone until the beginning of the new year. So got another great season of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable coming up. But we're going to take the last month and a half or so of 2020 off. And we're going to look forward to a wonderful year in 2021 that is full of rainbows and streets lined with gold.

And we are thinking that we may do some mini one-off as well, right? thinking about some yeah some videos yeah yeah fun little things to keep me to get the rest of that uh of that uh adventure mode video edited as well or youtube content for you guys actual youtube content imagine this bro my blown man so i think it would be great to demo this this crazy world that I keep talking up and just see how we do collectively. Yes. So that could be a thing.

Golly, what fun we'll have. And I will, do you want to do that as a live stream or record it and then post it? Sure. We'll decide that later. We'll decide that later. That sounds amazing.

Let's do it. Nice one. Well, I think, think it is actually safe to say that I want to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. This is so surreal. But, yeah, I enjoy this year in the podcast. In the podcast.

Yes, in the podcast. I was going to say, it was a little rough the year for a lot of stuff going on. I really enjoyed the political upheaval in the past. pandemic. It's been great. It's been a hoot, seeing what's going to happen next. Yeah, it's, you know, it's like I always read these post-apocalyptic novels, and it's great. My bucket list item has been filled. I'm actually living one. Awesome. Yeah, you see, Warhammer 40K fan fiction doesn't seem so absurd now. Yeah. So, yeah, everybody, we'll be back at the beginning of 2021, as Assuming that no one unleashes the demons in our fortress doesn't get taken out.

But if that doesn't happen, we'll be back early 2021, and we'll talk more Door Fortress. And we'd like to thank everybody for listening because it is so much fun, you know, just sitting around talking about it every couple weeks. I'm glad that people were listening. Rocking all. Indeed. All right. Well, until next time, this is Dwar Fortress Roundtable, and we'll catch you later. Keep playing games.

Peace out, guys. Bye, bye. be this has been the dwarf fortress roundtable podcast you can find all our past episodes at df roundtable dot com stop by and leave a message 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 you can find video content on our youtube channel and you can send us an email at urrest at df roundtable com that's u r i s t at d f roundtable.com please consider donating to the creators of dwarf fortress at bay 12 games.com if you'd like to help support this podcast you can find us at patreon.com

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