Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 45: In Which We Consider Entropy and Soap

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

A Clean Dwarf is an Organized Dwarf. --Urist Orderedsoap Blind interview with Toady OneSoap procedure at DFWiki -- and it sounds a bit more complicated than we let on in the show :) Also at the DFWiki... Islands 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/

Warning, the hosts of the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable podcast are not experts at Dwarf Fortress. Even with the odd chance that they sound authoritative, they may not be correct. Follow their advice at the peril of your dwarves. Welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things dwarfy. This is Tony and rolling with me, Jonathan. How are you guys doing? Hello. That's great.

Yeah, pretty good. So it is Sunday, February 14th, Valentine's Day. And if I would have been thinking ahead, this would have been a good time to talk about Dwarven relationships. But didn't prep that. That's okay, I guess. We still have it next time. Yeah, we'll survive. because when this airs anyway, it's going to be so far past that day.

There's a week delay. There's a week delay. Exactly. Do you know how volatile these relationships can be? Tell me about it. An empire can arise and fall in a week. That is true. This is the first time in a while that we've had all three of us together at the same time.

You know, let's party. It is. We've been socially distanced for a... number of episodes and now the gang's back. Last time we were together, the 47.05 had just been released, and Plino Dev had released a couple of caveat mTOR packs. So now, Paradexas Arant has released the first version, the first release of his Linux Noob pack, and that is what I am running on at the moment. Yep.

Have you had a chance? Is it running well? Good. Yes. I'm having no problems. I mean, my only problems are my own ineptitude with the gameplay, so we're back to normal, you know? Nice. Yeah. It's like, you know, I can kill myself. I think that I have noticed the stress levels are not as high this. I'm not even having to pay any attention to my dwarf stress level, so. Yeah, I mean, same thing.

I had been playing older worlds, so I rarely, I rarely. survived to where I would have to think about stress like usually the undead siege came and killed everyone long before I would before my poor gameplay killed the dwarves but yeah now

there's I'm going to roll us I've started a very young world and you know we'll see how it goes stop necromancy before it takes root I did have a necromancer show up as a as a as a migrant and instead of worrying about

what was going on with that and how that might cascade. I just, as soon as I found out that it was a necromancer, I exiled him. Oh, kill on sight, dude.

Yeah, exactly. You got to kill it. Kill it now. No exile for the... When you see a brown or cloose, you step on it. You step on it and you call the exterminator. Take it down.

Exactly. But now I've got a vampire and that's not quite so easily, not quite so easily rooted out. Oh, yeah, that can be a tough game. But yeah, I'm, I'm, having my fortress now is like four years old, I suppose. I've got about 110, no, I look down here, I've got 98 people in the, in the fortress.

And it's going just fine. But that kind of brings up the main topic that I wanted to talk about today. And that is, as your fortress ages and your dwarves have dug more and more out, how do you keep any sense of organization in your fortress? I've found that when I'm going through my day-to-day fortress operations, you know, they say the center doesn't hold, and I find that is very true in Door Fortress. It seems that everything just gets disorganized and ragged,

and I'm not exactly sure what I was planning on doing, so things just tend to take on a mind of their own. How do you guys deal with that? My stuff ends up pretty messy, honestly. I don't think I've mastered organization. I try to do custom stockpiles and stuff for food and seeds. I try to keep that stuff separate. I try to make a pasture.

I just bare minimum is kind of what usually shakes out for me. I have been doing, in this fortress especially, it's been almost all custom stockpiles. Yeah, so whenever I'm trying to haul things to the trade depot, there's some of the things that list as finished goods that I want to keep and some things that I want to. to just ship out because we don't need 720 bracelets and crowns and things like that. So that's the stuff that I like to sell. But the finished good stockpile also includes things like crutches and ropes and basically anything, I guess, that is not in what they call arbitrarily furniture. Whenever the trade, whenever a caravan shows up, I go to, I click on the Trade Depot and go to

G, move goods to the trade depot, and then I run through my list. And typically, I go down to crafts and move all the crafts. That's why, especially I used to do it, now I'm trying to reserve my, my masterpieces and keep them further away from the trade depot so that all the things that I want to trade are closer to the trade depot than the things that I want to reserve. And instead of just selling all of my crafts, I will only sell the crafts that within like 27 spots of the trade depot. That's working out pretty well, actually.

So, yeah, that's working out pretty well. But at the same time, I have learned to go into the stockpiles that I put near my trade depot and make sure that the only things that are in that are things that I want to trade. Because if you don't do that and you have a lot of stuff that you want to trade, it takes forever to navigate that trade menu whenever you have. you know, all of your stuff mixed together and you have to go one by one and make sure that you're not selling a, you know, a wooden splint to the elves. Yeah, you know what? I stopped putting things in bins. And I had a few bad experiences with the elves where just even them seeing rock crafts presented in a wooden bin, made them go to war with me or whatever. And I was just like, you know what, bins just suck. So I stopped using bins entirely.

and I have yet to build a fort and I did in the last year where I used bins. You can still do like metal bins, you know, and they won't freak out about that. What kind of bins? Metal bins. Makes sense. Like, when you have some trash metal like zinc or lead,

then just do bins with that. That's a good idea. Yeah. Does that help the fire? See, this is why I listen to this podcast because I pick up so many useful tips from it. He listens to his own podcast. All right.

But, you know, I do agree with the whole bin problem because for some things, bins are excellent. For some things, they are terrible. I mean, if you are trying to trade with the elves and you have wood bins, then that's not going to happen. You know, trading is not going to happen because you all have to sort out everything out of the bin. and that's terrible.

We'll take forever. Having your ammunition in the bins makes your dwarfs unable to, like, pick ammunition up for some reason. So they, like, don't do it and just run around without ammunition. On the other hand, if you have, like, six million necklaces, then you might want to consider doing bins, yeah. Exactly. Well said. One thing I just wanted to clarify, make like stockpiles with everything in it, Jonathan? I don't do that very much at all.

I do that one of the fortress first starts just to basically get everything indoors. Once I start actually organizing a little bit, I end up creating stockpiles and those original stockpiles get removed so that everything gets moved in the rightful places. So, no, I don't typically do stockpiles or everything. But if you look at the Finnish goods category of stockpile, that might as well be everything. I mean, there's, you know, you got crutches, and you got urns, and you got mugs, and you've got, you know, the fancy stuff that you're putting jewels in so that you can make some money. Yeah, I know it's, it's annoying. And that is why I try to, like, split up my finished goods stockpire as much as I can, for example.

sample crutches, I get an extra stockpile either in or next to my hospital so that the finished good stockpile that is in my main crafting area is free of them. They're just like ropes or large gems or something like that or I don't know, like scrolls or stuff that I don't don't really need, but important stuff gets its own stockpile just to make sure that I can look at the stockpile and go like, oh, yeah, it's pretty

empty, I should make new crutches. Same for soap, by the way. I still have never made a bar of soap. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Yeah. What? Okay, let's, you have homework.

You absolutely have to make some soap. First of all, it's a very satisfying part of the game, I think very satisfying part of the game. So what do you do with it? You don't have to do, yeah, yeah. Like they wash themselves and they like groom themselves,

wash their beards, wash their hair. And the best part is they can wash off infections, meaning that if a dwarf has like a serious wound then it can be you know, you don't stick a bar of soap in your dog wound

but they do it. Um, so they don't get infections, uh, medicine. I feel the need to clarify here. I know in general what you do with soap. I don't want to make people think it's the COVID-19 pandemic. I don't know what soap is for. You know, Anthony Fauci has been telling me for a year now what soap is for. So I get that.

Yeah, no, no, it's, it's just for clarification that the dwarfs actually use soap in a normal, I'm using soap sense kind of way. Yeah. that we normal humans in the real world would use soap, you know, except for like I wouldn't stick like a bar of, of like, thick soap into my red dog wound. But okay. It's just a failure of creativity, my friend. You've never tried it.

Yeah. I found it really useful because I've had dwarfs die because they're like, you know, somebody, somebody couldn't clean, couldn't dress wound, no soap available. And now it's like, no soap available. what the heck um that's so yeah that's why i got into it and then once you figure out how to do it it becomes pretty straightforward to just get it right do you know what i mean like it's it's it's not like mind cards or something where you'll literally spend portions of time just trying to figure out how mine cards work like it's it's pretty straightforward you just do this this this this

and so it's like it's yeah it's not too bad and you know if you have like a big cat industry dog industry, in general, like, butchering animals going on. I don't know why I started with cats. We've talked about soap. Yeah, yeah, if you have that going on, then soap just becomes a natural byproduct of the whole chain. You just have to set up like some ash making, a lie maker, stuff like that, and then it just comes natural.

And suddenly you butcher a single cat and you have like 250,000, of cat soap and you're like when did that happen well then yeah and we don't use cat soap around the house in real life just to put that out there but uh cats that's right I just need more

there's lots of feral cats around here so I guess I could it's a failure of my own imagination apparently but no it's yeah it's it's definitely a thing that I use because inevitably like there's too many cats and dogs like it just kind of happens over the growth of a large whart and you don't want to have

10 frames per second so you end up having to call some of these lovely beasts and so yeah that's why I usually end up with dog soap or cat so if it's not because I'm a sadist or anything so a quick aside what is a fed Zolben's fist um that sounds like one of you yeah go ahead I was going to say isn't that one of you're undead when you're intelligent undead is that what it is it says that it's a wild animal. I've got one attacking my fortress that I had seen. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they do

sometimes count as animals or animal men, but they're actually like intelligent civilized beings, but they like transformed so much that the game now counts them as animals. It tried to think of it like not as animal, but like a bestial,

you know, that would make more sense. Do you think you what was it called, Jonathan? It's called fed Zolben's fist and it's dead now my my squad you know what you should do is create some Fidzolben's fist soap is yes yes for example do that okay well then so tell me what the workflow is from the time that you kill something to the time that it becomes soap well if you have no soap industry at all yet yeah okay okay what you what you want to do is you need a butcher workshop.

Got one. Good, great. You need a, what's it? A furnace. A wood furnace. You need a wood furnace first and then an ashery.

And then you just need the soap makers workshop. Okay. So butchery, do you actually have to render the fat or does the some kind of? No, they do it automatically. Yeah, they do it automatically. It's pretty so yeah

yeah thanks doors shades of the paper street soap company coming up into my head sorry old reference to old movie fight club old movie oh god it is now it's like 20 something years old

no this is 1999 right sheisa yeah great movie though anyway so yeah there's a lot of stuff about soap in that movie yes it's hey you know what they know about injuries and keeping your injuries clean

and they know soap out of the dwarves oh god um yeah cats did they do cat soap no they did they sure did uh do uh human soap so oh nice that's great i always want to scrub myself clean with the fat of my enemies then who wouldn't want that wonderful wait for the modding community is all i've got to say for this game because i guarantee you you're going to be able to use goblin soap once that's of these cons. Or elven soap. Well, could you not do that anyway?

Can you not butcher a goblin? Well, no. I mean, sadly, you can't because it counts as an actual sentient creature. I know it's like a whole discussion about this. Like, are L sentient, but you're both going to eat them. Yes. I think, yes, they are sentient for the purposes of the... Well, if you can trade with them, they're probably sentient.

Yeah. we can we can dislike their sentience but agree to disagree um anyway uh i think we kind of spiled away from the original theme actually yeah like entropy entropy fighting entropy in the fortress one good way yeah yeah like one good way of doing that is for example making elaborate industries like not just baseline industries but actually like over shooting by a lot. So, for example, making a massive soap industry to the point that you can

just buy out the traders every single year just using soap bars. Is it dumb? Yes. Would it work? Yes. Would you fight entropy doing that? Absolutely. Would it be a great story for your podcast? Oh, absolutely.

But, for example, I fight entropy by, I have my layout stuff going on and I just do my layout that is fairly like the same between fortresses I just change very few things from fortress to fortress but I always have like a plan of what I'm trying to make

like oh yeah let's let's find out about beekeeping or something so I make a fort that is almost 99% the same as the one before except for the fact that I now have a massive the beekeeping industry and I always overshoot like completely so that while the rest of my fortress is running because the current setup is the old setup meaning I know it's stable so I can like focus on the new thing and sometimes the new thing is an industry branch sometimes it's just military sometimes it's dumb stuff like let's raid a tower until I get the necronomicon it doesn't really matter

I just do so and most of the time I do things very like alike than the fortress before meaning that I do a lot of the Dwarven toilet simply because it's quite efficient when you try to get rid of things but sometimes

the game still is like oh you're trying to make bees work well guess what buddy you don't have any bees or oh yeah like a forgotten bees burned down all your hives or something like okay cool and then your like your focus shifts and you have something going on like all the time i get more and more into the whole role play thing like i'm

starting fortresses with not more than 30 people um and then i let them roll and until i hit like 50 80 100 you know and then i know my dwarfs i know the history i know the family i know their likes dislikes and stuff because if you just get like a hundred dwarves 200 dwarves in the first year or the first two years then it's too much and they like blur into this weird mess of like minions at your disposal and i try to like keep it very close very like family branches kind of thing so that i know yeah this family is like a beekeeping family and they got a kid, so I just note down that this kid is going to be a beekeeper as well, or something like that, you know, and...

Do you think they ever wonder, do I have free choice, or is my fate decided for me? Poor Doors? Oh, oh, I could do an entire podcast about this as well, but, uh, hmm. You know, I would like to do that, Roland, but it, I get to where I just feel like it's taking so long to get through a month of game time. I'm reading, which, you know, I guess it's what you're, what are you in the game for? What's, what's your, what fun do you get out of it? Personally, I get the most joy out of watching them carve stone that maybe I'm just a boring person, but I enjoy watching them, watching them just dig out the areas.

And it sort of tweaks a little bit of dopamine reward for the, for the OCD part of my little brain that, uh, that whenever, okay, so. They have dug out this massive area of stone, and they've put it all into a pretty stockpile now. Let's go have them dig out something. It's, oh, look, they hit this beautiful blue stone, this cobalite or whatever that's called. By the way, which is now my favorite stone in the game because I like dark blue. And I like it whenever they make lots of thrones and tables and all kinds of stuff out of this dark blue stone. It's great. Yes.

So, yeah. Yeah, see, that's it. It's like, it's kind of what you want to draw from it. Yeah. Like Roland said, he wants to do the role play thing. That's, that's awesome. He's able to do that. I mean, I get a little impatient sometimes waiting for them to dig out.

So I will use, like, I have my frame rate set to unlock. So, like, right now they're cruising along at 322 frames to second. Jesus. Okay, it's just fantastic. I got to say, that's one of the things I respect about Krug Smash so much is that there's no way that I could, that I could go deeply into these dwarves and, and, and, I mean, you are given a lot of information about your dwarves, but there's so much that you have to fill in yourself.

And he does such a great job of bringing personalities out in those dwarves that he puts on his weekly episodes. So I wouldn't, I'm just not good. I love watching it, but I'm not the best at doing that myself. Yeah, I do get it. It's not very easy because just playing the game, skimming along, and like having your horde of minions. is super fun.

I know, but I have to say that I got into the game because I wanted to like slow pace things and like the whole roleplay thing about dwarf fortress is so relaxing to me because I know that the game is waiting for me so I can just sit here for like 44 minutes reading descriptions of like just 10 dwarfs and imagining them in my mind what they're wearing, how they act and stuff.

And for example, now I have a military draw of that is really depressed because he had to butcher some else. Now I'm going to assign him away from the squad so that he can like recuperate and drink some wine with his family and stuff. Just so that not because I don't want him to get like crazy depressed or something. Like honestly, I don't care about that. It's more about the whole thing of I'm trying. to like make it a bit more special like making it about a single wolf I'm sorry I missed that

what did he do to the elves to make him depressed oh no not the elves aren't depressed the elves are dead oh he he got depressed because he had to kill the elves yeah yeah he saw some dead bodies and did not like that gotcha gotcha

I thought we're supposed to care less about that now are you seeing that yeah yeah no they they do care a lot less because I had about 15 dwarves in my military and they all saw bloodshed and only a single dwarf

actually is now dragged down from it so yes and usually I actually screen my dwarfs like actually screen my military dwarfs for like not the not the skill because

they can they can like train that but for the mental capacity that they have. A strong dwarf is cool, but when the strong dwarf has, like, no, no, like, happiness propensity, meaning that he gets depressed easily or that he, like, sees a lot of negative things in his life, then he's, like, not the best fit for military dwarfs. And the man that is, has basically no empathy at all, but is somewhat weak, is a better

fit simply because, you know, I can train him and I can like assign him to the POM stack for two years so he gets buff. But I cannot make his mind change so much. Can do only little tweaks, you know? Right. And now this man actually got so depressed that he killed his friend. And now another person is sad. Oh, yeah, and that happened because I was talking about reassigning him and didn't do it but you know this is like the little things

that I do and when I get into the hole I'm trying to like find even if it's like small things like my barony likes lead on everything so I try to make like lead statues of her and put it in her room

even if it's like small things like that I can put so much time in this game simply by just looking at the tiny details. So I got a quick question. We were talking about organization and bringing stuff to the Trade Depot. Do either of you know how to filter the trade screen for furniture?

You can, it's, I have not been able to find anywhere in the trade menu how you can see your furniture except to go just to the all and see everything. I mean, you can just search for it, I guess. You could just type in thrones, like rock thrones,

and then just thrones show up. But I just want to remind you, yeah. You know what? I need to send you a Valentine's Day box of candy because I did not even know that freaking existed. Which one? Oh, my goodness. The search feature?

What's that? Yeah. I didn't know that that was even in the trade menu. I've, for whatever reason, for three years, the S has eluded me, and I have now seen the S and I have seen the light. Wow. Huh. Who knew?

You did. I didn't, but I do now. Thank you. That's made my life so much easier. Does it work? Yeah, yeah, sure. You know, but trading furniture is a bad thing because it's quite heavy. Well, that's okay.

It all ends up right beside, like I said, I put all of my goods that I wanted to, trade right next to the to the trade depot anyway. Okay. So, but it's also, uh, easy to make and easy for them to make, uh, nice stuff. So, but yeah, you're, you're right. It is heavy. So they won't be able to carry as much of it away. Wow.

Goodness sakes. I did, I'm, I'm just shocked that I didn't know that that existed, an epiphany on the podcast right here. Yeah. You heard you here first, folks. So I have another potentially epiphany moment. Okay. that I want to ask a question about.

So, you know, when you have a world where there are different islands, and then occasionally those islands are close enough together so that an industrious player could build a bridge, does the game connect the islands if you build a bridge, or is it just fun for you? What do you mean? Does that make sense what I'm asking? So, like, if I build a bridge between islands,

Does that mean that my dwarves can suddenly now travel between islands or the game if it ages? Like, you know, when you create a new fort, does that open up movement between these two islands? So can I start seeing caravans or attack things in other continents if one of my forts builds a thing there? A while back, I actually saw a threat about this. And as it turns out, like the world generation doesn't really, you know, know what to do with bridges, especially like long ones. So you won't really get like any trade caravan suddenly coming in, but you can use them as an adventurer. So suddenly like going on to like a small island that was like impossible to get off before is now suddenly an option. So an adventurer can't do it, but the caravan doesn't seem to like it.

I see. Interesting. Yeah, because I was sort of wondering about that because I have this one and it's like the span is far too long for me to be able to do anything meaningful with the bridge. Like, it's ridiculous. I had to go and basically stretch the embark box to be huge and then game complained about how big it was and all that. So I just dug a tunnel with big ramps. And so now, like, if you use the Trade Depot, you know, that whatever it is, capital H or what is the thing that capital D?

Capital D shows you wherever, yeah, it shows you where the Trade Depot can go. like they can go under there they they should like it's a huge tunnel underneath the ground so I was just kind of hoping maybe that would mean that I could attack things down there and and all of that so was it this island is it under an ocean connected now or is it under a light yeah yeah and when I look at the world map now it shows my fortress spanning the spanning the islands here so I think I may have reunited my continents so it's interesting see if I can raid things in other islands and stuff now it looks like I can well that's fun huh And then we'll call it the Tommy Strait. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm wondering, because now it says that I could, this doesn't say inaccessible anymore. That's interesting. Huh. Hmm. Huh.

Now it says 22 days travel, but that's, we could do that. Oh, that's cool. So even your squads can actually use the bridge. That is nice. Yeah, I embarked on this island in the far south. And then I connected the islands. And now, yeah, I can get, I can now kill these elves. Oh, that's so satisfying.

It's basically a whole island full of elves that are at peace and they're not connected to anyone. That's wonderful. But you know what this means, right? You know what this means? Because I'm pretty sure the threat that I saw was from the old update,

like the one before without the whole squad and like going out and killing things. So maybe that changed. Maybe this means that when you send a dwarf to like a settlement and go like, hey yo we are approachable now then maybe they do actually send people then well then the question that I have now is I'm going to retire this fort because job well done um and will my new civilization

be able to travel to all these places and use that tunnel that is the question oh that's a good question yeah because maybe the game has time to reset a little bit yeah let's see I mean because it's not this this thing wasn't connected to my fort so hey I'm a but to see if this works. What an exciting world we live in. I love it. So I'm just by listening here and they're like, oh, my God, dude, there are friends and threads and threads about this.

I just discovered something that everyone do. Like searching your trade goods. That's the joy. I know. Yeah, I think this would be a good place to stick in the fact here that we like talking about Dwarfortress, but we don't know what we're doing. I wouldn't have been off more if it didn't hurt. Does anyone know that?

Does anyone really? I guess that's maybe the point of the podcast. You could argue Tarn, but then I think didn't he say one time he doesn't really play Fortress mode? So maybe he doesn't know either. Just saying, it is truly an unmanned. Yeah. It worked. I bridged the islands.

You can do it because I just set up. up far, far away in a different continent. And these two were inaccessible, and now they are accessible. That's cool. That is sweet. Doggone exciting is that. That is just super. So all I did was dig a tunnel to connect the island, and now everybody can get to it.

So that's fun. If you look at the long view, then your fortresses can shape the world in ways that we didn't expect. That's worth some further investigation. Yeah, that's exciting. Now everything's connected. How fun. Oh, I wonder if you can change pathfinding too Like if I could build other little fortresses and bridge things

Because now it takes 22 days to travel there But if I build another bridge Here, I wonder if that would shave off the tunnel Well, yeah, can you Yeah, that brings the idea Can you artificially, it would take forever But can you artificially create a landmass With fortress after fortress?

Oh, God! You mean like an actual island Made by dwarves? A dwarf made island. that you can embark to in another embark. Oh, yeah, because I see this tiny little island out here in the middle of the ocean. So you're saying basically just go to the end and then see if it will let you, oh, golly, you're just full of ideas.

That's a good one. This is like a Dwarven terrain generator. Why not? It goes slow because you've got to create a new fortress and a new embark for each little incremental distance. that you create, but, you know, I think it might be able to be then now. Yeah, as I found this island here, it's a red squiggle island, which I think means it's a desert. Yeah, that should be great. I'm going to connect this up.

Wow, and a tower out on an island. Boy, yeah, let's bring those guys in. That'd be fun. So I want to talk real quick before we wrap up. I want to talk a little bit about a good news, bad news kind of thing that I heard. I listened to Blind IRL had a, or Blind, I call him both. At least I'm not calling him Blendy R.L. All right.

So what's Blindy say? So he had an interview with Tarn that he released a few days ago. And I really recommend everyone go out and listen to that interview because it's a really nice interview. And you hear lots and lots of input from scamps, Tarn's cat. But they talked about 4705. They talk about Adventure Mode some. And the thing that really perked my ears, though, was their talk about. about this upcoming steam release.

And it was nice. Yeah, Blind did a really good job of asking some kind of, I'm not going to say that he asked hard questions because it wasn't like a gotcha interview. But he did a good job of asking some hard questions, like, is the steam release ever really going to be done? And in wonderful, typical Tarn method, he says, yes, it'll be done.

I have no idea when. So, but yeah, he said, he mentioned that he didn't really even know how to gauge how far along they were, except to list the things that they want to do and need to do. And I got a little bit scared when he started talking about, and then we've got to work on adventure mode. Oh, dear. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, man, that scares me. That makes me think that, okay.

Yeah. You know, software development is hard. And, you know, I don't think anyone will doubt that. But, you know, and I think that's also kind of like, you know, Tarn is a one-man show or two, let's say two-man show. And so I think that's a lot to kind of take on on your own. So, you know, he doesn't have a project manager saying, hey, you know what, that sounds like an awesome thing for the next release. Let's just do a point release with these five things in it. And then we go.

You know, I think he's probably thinking of it more like, man, this is my vision. and this is what I wanted to be, you know? And so it's, you know, if you're, if you're kind of operating like that, as Door Fortress always has, it's always going to be kind of a time is subjective sort of thing. Well, all that was the bad news part of it. The good news is, is that then they started talking about, well, I can't really, I can't really give you a date, you know, time is subjective, but it'd be better to have it sooner than later, and we're thinking we would rather have it re-release this year than next year.

That's not the exact words, but that was the gist of where the conversation went. So it made me hopeful that maybe we will see it, the steam released by the end of this year. And that seems to be, he's not saying that he's putting a mental target on it, but that seems to be kind of an unofficial, perhaps mental target launch period, if you will. Well, I think that makes sense because now more than ever people know about this game. And, like, I'm talking normal people that don't know much about weird computer games. Like, now, they'll all say things like, it's just a bunch of squiggles and it's just colors and lines. And that game's too impossible for me to ever play.

I'm too dumb to know this. But I think, you know, it's like the fact that it's come up that much in public knowledge is pretty impressive. You know, like, people know it. And then the next step is, I'm curious, you know, that's that, you know, it's good. There's a lot of popularity now. That was one of the big things that he was talking about, though. Almost all of his discussion about the steam release was talking about the fact that the new version needs to be much better at bringing people into the UI. And that while they realize that they aren't U.X professionals and that UX professionals are a thing, they're doing their best to make it be easier to use.

Things like, always talk about like beds. You know, we talked about beds a few episodes ago about the fact. that it would be nice if you didn't have to go R, enter, enter, R, enter, enter, or enter, ad nauseum. He talked about selecting beds and basically doing a drag

and drop a square around them for selection. Now, he did not specifically say in multi-selecting bedrooms, but, you know, that was the kind of thing that he's working on now. So that's good news. And I was happy to hear

that we're at least thinking about a release date being within the next year, year and a half, and that hopefully it's not going to turn into vaporware. That's my biggest fear. That's, that's my biggest fear is that we'll end being vaporware. And I really hope that it has an end to development. So, awesome. Well, happy, happy, happy. We're, yeah, I mean, I think. The link will be in the dwarf, in the dwarf notes. The link will be in the dwarf notes to the interview with Tarn.

All right. Yeah. Okay, well, happy Valentine's Day, everybody. Yeah. Well, until next time, this has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast. We will catch y'all in two weeks. Later, Skater. See you guys.

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