Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 46 In Which We Visit With Blind

Episode Date: March 7, 2021

Thanks so much to Blind, of Twitch.tv streaming fame! He stops by to talk Dwarf Fortress with the gang, discussing fortress optimization, pop cap, streaming DF and guilds. Blind on Twitch and YoutubeArchcrystal at Bay 12 GamesNoclip's Tarn Adams InterviewBlind's Tarn Adams InterviewKruggsmashLink to Clinodev’s Caveat Emptor release 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. However, from time to time they will have guests who are. This episode is one of those times. It's up to you, the listener, to filter out the host's chaff from the guest's kernels of wisdom. It's usually not that difficult. Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for All Things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland.

Hey, I'm Tony. It is February 28th, 2021, and we have a very special guest, Blind, here today with us. Hi, Blind, how you doing? Hi, I'm doing all right. A little bit early in the morning over here, but doing pretty good. I've got peppermint tea. I'm just hanging out. Yeah, so we have, and please pronounce it for me, because I just,

read it and have all sorts of pronunciations in my head. How do you like us to refer to you? So my username is Blind IRL. I used to be, I would just run with it all caps, but people would like for some reason think the I is a lowercase L. So I just kind of have given up at this point. Everybody pronounces it wrong, but it's literally just Blind IRL.

If I could go on to Twitch and just like convince them to give me the username Blind, I would, but the guy who's sitting on it plays dead by daylight once a year and refuses to sell it. So I'm just never going to get it. I know what I've got. I know what I've got. Yeah. So that's how you pronounce it.

Thanks for clearing it up. I was wondering, you know, if you were like, if your name was like Bob Lind and you're like, yeah, it's B. Lind. I'm Bob Lynn. And that was the direction I was going. That would be way cooler, but no, it's just blind. All right. Awesome.

So, so what's your Door Fortress story? How did you find this, this gaming experience? and what compelled you to want to start streaming the madness? Well, I didn't start streaming with Door Fortress. I've actually been streaming other things for the last seven and a half years now. But my streaming history is kind of different from my Door Fortress history. I never had good computers growing up. My parents never had any money, and I never had a good computer.

So in like 2008, I was running on Windows 98 still, playing old roguelikes. playing things like Moria. I was playing H. Vampires 1. I was playing OG Starcraft without any expansions because I never got the expansions. I was playing, I was playing Adom and just other games of that kind of sort. And I managed to scrap together enough cash in about 2008-ish, 2007-ish, to buy a laptop. And I bought myself a crappy Dell laptop and started playing Counterstrand knockoffs because my parents wouldn't let me install Steam. So I started playing a game called

Crossfire. I was playing all these free to play Garena shooters and having a pretty good time with that and met a couple of people eventually managed to get Counterstrike installed on my computer in like 2008 and started playing that. I was always looking for games to play while

waiting for people to be ready to play games. A friend of mine suggested at one point, or Fortress and I installed it and couldn't figure out what to do, and so I Alt-F-F-Ford. And then I uninstalled it. And then roughly a year later, I did the same thing. And then in 2009, the great curse of the land showed up called League of Legends, and I started playing that with that same group of friends.

And every so often my one friend who was way into it would be like, hey, you should try playing League of Legends in Q again because I was playing. I think I was playing like Mind Sweeper and Tetris and stuff. And so I would install it kind of every six months. I figured it out to the point where I could generate a world generate a world and then eventually get frustrated and close it

and then start playing league and then get mad. And so this kind of just like rinse and repeat for like five years. And I would occasionally like read stories and legends. Like I kind of figured it out to the point where I could like, generate a world and like reading legends and stuff, but never really figured out either of the two main game modes.

And it just kind of progressed until eventually I started streaming. in 2013 and never did anything with DF there. Most of what I was doing was modded old PC games because that's like my repertoire. And eventually it was like 2015 people started bugging me to do it. And I just kind of said no. And then like it was kind of a few consistent people over the years who watched my streams who knew that I had a history with the game.

but also knew that I never properly learned it and really wanted me to play it. And eventually, in I think it was about 2018, I finally just caved and just started streaming basically nothing but Dwarfork. It was just kind of like a 10-year process, I guess. So I knew the game a little bit up until that point, but if you go back and watch the original Vods,

I put up on YouTube, because I put up the first ones, like I was bloody clueless, even though like I kind of knew my game. way around the basics, it was very much a, well, here comes learning curve. Let's go. It took me about two weeks and I got it. Dwarf Orchus is the majority of your streaming now, right? I'd say it's about 60%. I mean, I stream a lot. So it really depends on like what time of day you happen to look at my stream. Like, it's very possible like someone could probably watch my stream every day and never actually see me stream anything else. But I, it's about 60% right now,

I would say. And your streaming is long form, right? You'll do, is it daily that you streams that are the long number of hours? Technically, every day of the week except for Fridays, although I'm taking today off because chat demanded I take another day off. So I figured out a way of making today completely work, like nothing but work. So I'll be editing most of today, I think. What tile set, if any, are you using on your live stream?

So the first one I used, I just used vanilla initially. for like the first week. And because that's kind of what I like. But enough people complained that I started hunting for a tile set. And I'd been watching Craig Smash at the time. I took his tile set and I got my artist to edit it. I actually asked him initially. I was like, are you okay if I use this?

Just sent him a DM. And he said, yeah, that old thing, do whatever you want with it. I don't care. So I just got my artist to make a bunch of edits to it. and I've been using that. And then every time a new version comes out, we make a bunch of edits. And so it's just kind of become its own version of that, I guess.

I thought so. I thought that it was, if it wasn't Krug Smashes, it was based on it because it looks sort of vanilla, but then it doesn't have the smiley-faced dwarves, which I tend to always see. The reason I use that tile set and the reason I use a modified version of Krug-Smashes is because there's a lot of people who have seen the Noclip interview and have seen Krug-Smash's stuff and have never,

ever seen anything else related to Door Fortress, so it looks familiar whenever they stumble on it. Yeah. And so you get a lot of people who are like, oh, I've seen this before. And it's to the point now where some people are actually surprised when that isn't vanilla, because they just expect it to be the vanilla tile set, which I think is kind of crazy. Well, I think it looks so rudimentary and basic and still just like squiggles and dots that it kind of matches what people would imagine squiggles and dots would look like. So that when they actually see the real vanilla, they're just like, Oh, my God. But, you know, Crookes Mass is just, I mean, one teeny tiny tenth of a stepboy, I think, from the vanilla in a lot of ways, you know, because it's not really graphics and it's not really text.

It's just somewhere sort of floating in between there. If I could have vanilla and his dwarf heads, I would be happy with that. Yeah, I think you can. You can. You could make that happen. Yeah. Yeah, that is a world in which we live, that that possibility exists. I mean, tile sets always, it's kind of the thing that people come back to.

And I was talking to somebody, actually somebody I work with and about Door Fortress. And he's like, well, I'm always a purist. But every time I load it up, you know, I look at it. And it's just, it seems very daunting to figure out what the semicolon and the one fourth fraction means. And I just, you know, I was like, you can install graphics. And he's like, but I feel like people say that's not the spirit of it. And I was like, yeah, I disagree. I think the spirit of it is the game, not the way it looks.

That's sort of my, that's my treatise on Doroth Fortress. Thanks for coming. Well, with the seam release coming up, the spirit of it will be whatever you want it to be, I think, because... No kidding. There's two generator-approved versions of it now. I mean, the only reason why we haven't had any real graphics before was probably because TOTI was more. interested in and actually coding than making sprites. Totally.

And I think he's even said that in his... Yeah, in some of his... Yeah, I think he said that. When I met him at Pax, he said as much as that. He said that the only reason the game doesn't have graphics and proper UI yet is they were funded and making UI is boring. That sounds right. I mean, if you think about it, it's a totally different skill set.

You know, he's obviously big into like the world building and the deep simulation and, you know, how many arm hairs does someone have? Like that's, I think that's what makes him tick. But so the idea of the minutia of trying to do some sort of, you know, UI testing and, you know, integration with the rest of it and consistency, I could see why that would be really boring. And so blind, so blind IRLs for blind in real life, right? Yes. So do you see Krug Smash's tile set better than you can make out the vanilla? So for me, it actually doesn't matter. My right eye doesn't work at all.

And my left eye is the equivalent of squinting while looking through a toilet paper tube. So division I do have is actually kind of clear. The problem that I have is actually more with graphical tile sets. So with Asky tile sets, I have no problems, more or less, because I can just look at it and immediately discern, oh, that's just text, right? So it's static, it doesn't move. It doesn't have a ton of detail. But trying to, like, differentiate between a pixel art cat and a pixel art dog moving at high speed on, like, Space Fox or MF style set, that's actually quite difficult for me. So when stuff is moving, it's very easy to differentiate between a C and a D.

but a little pixel art creature is difficult. I can do it. Like, you know, I can play pretty visually complex games. That's not a huge problem. Stuff like Overwatch or Destiny gets to be a bit much. I completely skipped the new Doom because I just took one look at it. And I was like, yep, this would make me feel sick. And I just looking at this, I know I won't be able to discern it, which is a bummer

because I wanted to play that game. But it's the way a lot of action. games are moving these days is to like throw stuff in your face and move really fast and I so so for me it's more of just a um the ability to immediately discern something quickly yeah and i think the 60 frames per second and better that they have that makes me a little motion sick more so than the back of the day when we were talking about 35 frames per second with doom and uh i think that the better graphics and the better smoother sailing gives me more of a motion sickness uh feeling than the old school did. I don't believe I've ever had a problem with stuff moving smoothly. It's more

FOV and stuff blocking the field of view. Like, um, the giant gun on the right, uh, is obnoxious, but like the old school gun in the middle are kind of more towards the center of the screen is less of an issue. Like I've got no problem playing something like, um, dusk, for example, where the, the actual like gun model is quite small. And you're moving just as fast and stuff's just as hectic and the frame rate's just as smooth. But like, because there isn't anything blocking your field of you. It's totally fine, like motion sickness-wise. But it's the reason I gravitate to slower-paced games like roguikes and this sort of stuff these days and less of the old school first-person shooters. It's nice to, you know, to not have to need a GPU or anything

for Tor Fortress to be able to truly enjoy a game. You know, without feeling you're not going to have the right hardware for it because you can't keep up. And to be fair, nobody can keep up with Door Fortress after a certain point. So not even the cluster of the most powerful supercommuters in the world are going to be able to handle some of the stuff that goes on. So your fortress that you're running on now, it's called Long Death, right? I technically have two, but yes, long death is the big one. So that's been running for quite some time now, right?

I can tell you the exact year count, but I want to say it's about 157 years in game. Goodness me. We need to have you on last week when we were talking about keeping the fortress organized because I'm lucky if I get one of the last 10 years before it just collapses under its own way. So to that end, is there anything that you think you do better? than maybe the general player on Fortress organization. Is there anything that you specifically do? Demolish garbage and give stuff away. I see very few people doing that.

So in Long Death, I'm kind of cheating. I basically looked at what Sathatos did with Arch Crystal and was like, okay, how did you do that? I'm not familiar with that. No, I don't know that either. So Arch Crystal is, if you look on the Bay 12 Games forums, you can find it. I actually met him at Pax, ironically, as well, because he's from my city and just happened to be introducing himself to TOTI at the same time as me, which was interesting. But he made a fortress which was 450 years old and a number of versions behind, and it took him six and a half years because its frame rate got so bad so quickly.

And by the end of it, he defeated hell and had a spire built of glass from the fun zone all the way up to the sky and there there's a whole form thread on it and it's essentially oh you know what i've heard it out yeah and the way he did that was he set his dwarf cap down to 40 and never went above that and that's what i've done so i've got my dwarf cap set at 51 um i think the most dwarves i had was 55 at one point um but it floats between 35 to 50 um we've stopped getting migrants from the mountain home for the last 40 years, because they seem to be at war with some goblins or something. I don't know. I just, I don't pay too much attention to them. And every single faction in the world brings us tribute every year, because we have a great protection racket

going on. And so essentially what I think that I'm, I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm doing anything better than other people because, like, you know, everybody plays the game the way they want, and there's plenty of right ways and wrong ways to play to War Fortress. But the one thing that I'm very diligent about doing is whenever I overproduce something, I do, I just give it all away. Like, I will trade as much stuff as a trade caravan can carry and then just either offer it or trade it for like a single gold bar or something or like a sock because I just need to get rid of it. And it's, like I have these massive stockpiles for crafts and old clothing that just get emptied out every single trade period and trade cycle. And when

stuff starts to rot or there's garbage around, I will just like Adam smash stuff. I don't care what it is unless it's an artifact, those get coveted and put on pedestals. But everything else just gets crushed because it doesn't matter and I need to get rid of it. It's to the point where I've had like particularly large garbage piles pile up in my garbage room and then like the frame rate will start getting a little messy

and then I'll literally just pull the lever to smash it and it'll snap back. Like no problems. and the only thing that really screws up the frame rate these days are buzzards because their pathing gets a little messy when they try and dive bomb your dwarves but I've got like 50,000 constructed blocks to the point where like if I try and load the block screen the game will stop responding

I've got like 15,000 blocks of iron because I've found so much iron I've got like just dumb numbers of materials but as long as I don't load it in the stock screen, it's fine. But aside from that, the game's been incredibly stable. What kind of hardware are you playing on? It's always a challenge to find something that will run reasonably well. The best hardware you can run Door Fortress on

is anything with incredibly high clock speed on a single core because Door Fortress runs on two cores. Graphics run on one core, which uses like nothing. And then the rest of the game runs on the other core, which is why, like, if you'll have a particularly framing moment and you, like, hit you or something to pop up the unit screen, like, it'll snap back and run just fine. No problems. It won't be affected by the game running in the background because the game's running on a different core. But, so what you want is the fastest possible single clock speed. I'm using an I-7-7700K, which is slightly over-clocked, and it runs like butter. Before that, I played it on a force. 770K, which is a bit old and was definitely been put through its paces. And it ran also, but like, you know, it certainly runs better on this one. You know, outside of that, it's just pretty normal PC hardware. But I know people who run dwarf fortress on like netbooks. It's just

a matter of like embarking and setting your dwarf cap to like the appropriate size, right? Like, if you're okay with having 25 dwarves and playing on a two by two embark, like yeah, you can run D.F on anything. As long as nobody invades you. Well, set your invader cap down. Oh, that's true. Of course, you can set that. Because by default, the maximum number of invaders is 220, right?

So just like scale that base. And then also you can, by default, Goblins only notice that you exist when you have 80 dwarves. So just drop that down to the point where Galden's noticed that you exist when you have 25 and then set your goblin cap to third, your dwarven cap to 30. And then the invader cap down to like 60 or something reasonable. and then play the game. Well, it's pretty exciting because I think there's some big advances with single core

because I've got an I-9-9900, which does run it really well. But it's obviously no longer the champ. But the new Mac M1 chip is as far as I'd heard. Yeah, I guess the new Intel, I-9-19 or whatever, 111,900. However, we're calling Intel chip sets now. I guess just only scrapes over the top of it. But yeah, that Mac chip is incredible. So I would love to see a native version of that

because I think that would really be a game changer for people playing this game cheaply. Because I think you can buy those machines for like a grand. Yeah. And, I mean, I have to admit that I'm trying to build a PC, which bad timing. But so I bought myself the name. newest AMD risen 9

and I wonder what this beauty will actually be able to pull off when it comes to like amount of dwarfs and animals because currently I do have an I-7 as well and I can

go up to 200 dwarfs without many animals however playing the fortress with like 15 dudes and very limited visitors as well as invaders is such a eye candy because you actually got some frames to work with.

Yeah, and I hope the new processor were like changed that up. Wow, yeah, Horizon 9, that's, you know, depending on which one you got, those are up in the top for single core nearing M1. And since you'll be running windows on it, you'll actually be able to play the game. Yeah, well, I'm actually thinking of getting myself the Linux version. And also, I'm stupid and I'm going to buy a customized water cooling system. So I will overclock the processor, like, almost from the very start. So, yeah, we will see.

We will see. Also, I don't even need a graphics card. I just need a mainboard, some RAM, and I can already play it. Which is good because you're not buying a graphics card now. So that is not possible. That is true. Unless you're willing to pay twice the price or three times now. It looks like the price has gone up to triple.

Thanks, crypto mining. My 1070 is still doing just fine. I'll just keep using that forever. Yeah, I've got a 1080 and that's that. It's really interesting what that's doing to PC gaming because I was reading that some game companies were also kind of like thinking about slowing their release cycle of their games because

what's the point of releasing the hot new 4K game if no one can play it because there aren't GPUs for it. Did you hear about it? It's an interesting thing. Invidia making a line of mining specific cards that have no graphics out plugs.

I heard that that's possible. But I think as long as you can still mine with regular GPUs, they're just going to buy them all. Supposedly they're... The miners are like, cool. Over the last few days, I've seen news come out about how they're putting a firmware block into the RX cards.

Yeah, into the 10-6, or a 36-0. Yeah, to stop them from being able to mine. And, like, within a couple of hours, I saw YouTube video pop up in my subscriptions on how to get around that. Yeah. Like, well, okay, that was fast. Yeah, it's all we can hope for

is that crypto is going to crash. So fingers crossed on that one. Because that's how I got my 1080 last time. was when crypto crashed. I was like, sweet, I can't get a GPU now. Well, I don't even have a 1080. I have a 970x, and it's like crippling at this point because I actually have to work with that in the 3D animation stuff

and using Blender and rendering things. I mean, I can work in Blender, but as soon as I hit render, I can just go for a walk for an hour or something. So that's pretty bad. And I hope to get my, my grabby hands on a good, good graphics card to change it up. You might get your, you might get your wish, actually. I was just checking. I was like, what are the crypto prices?

Damn it. And I looked in Ethereum, which is what people are using the NVIDIA cards to mine. Was it 2,000 a few days ago? And now it's down to, it's down to like 1,200 and falling. So there we go. I'm going to take us way off track here, a quick little anecdote. What are you doing?

Come on. We were playing Scrabble the other night, and we got the new Scrabble Dictionary that has the official words in it. And I saw on the front, the Bitcoin is now in the Scrabble dictionary. And that really pissed me off because Bitcoin is a proper noun. I'm sorry, it's proper down. And so as it was Ethereum in there? No Ethereum's not in there.

So you can play Bitcoin officially, but not Ethereum. See, freaking crypto mining is running Scrabble, too. Can you play a light coin? Is light coin in there? Because light coin's older than Ethereum. Is dwarf fortress in there? Is dwarf fortress in there? Well, yes, because dwarf is in there and fortress is in there.

So, yeah. Right. Oh, okay. I just couldn't put him together. All right. All right. Back to D.S. Let's go back.

Um, so, okay, so let's talk about the old world versus new world. Should we, should we, craddle about that for a little while? Because I know I've got opinions. So how old is all the worlds that you typically start with blind? Typically, 200 to 500? Okay. Long death?

Year five. Yeah, boy. Yeah. Really? Yeah. So I, I, I, I, in like, the versus comment context, I think that it's silly to, like, fight one versus the other. I think they're like scenarios. If you start in a really young world, you get a lot of, a lot less immediate activity, but you get to do things like make discoveries with your scholars because knowledge hasn't been discovered yet. So if you have scholars in a library early, you'll get tons of books written about things. And a lot more interesting things like that. Like my scholars are still pondering various surgical techniques, which gets kind of disturbing. There was one time I, My scholars were all pondering mutilation, just straight up, just mutilation.

And I'm just like, what is wrong with you guys? All right. Time to the fire. Time for fire. So clean the library. It's interesting the stuff that they can come up with. So I think from like a lore perspective, it can be a lot more interesting to start with a young world. Also, especially if you want to like have David versus Goliath situations, you'll get a lot more giants. You'll get a lot more Ettings. You'll get a lot more of those kinds of critters running around.

The big things are still around. Yeah, there's a lot of big things, a lot of land titans. That's when you have your highest chance of getting multiple dragons easily, unless they somehow manage to live for 500 years and hydras and all that sort of stuff. But you'll see less of the wear creatures. You'll see less of the vampires. You'll see less of that sort of stuff. So for me, it's more of a, well, what kind of world do you want your sandbox to be?

Do you want a world full of giants and etons or do you want a world full of ghouls and wear creatures and experiments? Like, what depends on what kind of world do you want to play in, I guess? That's a good point. I hadn't really put too much thought into it. And then was thinking that from a lore perspective, it might be fun to have an old world because there's this kind of rich cultural thing that's happened. and there's all sorts of interesting stuff in legends. And so I started thinking, golly, gee, that would be fun. But the thing I've noticed is basically the older, the world, the more difficult it becomes.

Because the undead are so unbelievably powerful. Like just trying to survive even short periods of time. You know, it'll be like two months in and you'll get an undead siege of like a thousand. Like, okay, well, wrap it up. We're done here. What version are you running on, Blund? so I'm running on long death is running on 0.04 so not the most recent but the one from February of last year and then everything else I'm doing is on 05 whenever it went from a 4412 to 4704 did you notice a big change in the way that uh that your your dwarves uh personalities changed a big big change in their stressing um

I mean, I've always found Door Fortress to be painfully easy when it comes to stress. I've never found any of that stuff difficult to manage. So if anything, the game's gotten easier over the last two to three updates. Because as Tarn said when I talked to him recently, that he's fixed a lot of bugs. So like food works in 05 now, for example. But between 12 to 04, there wasn't as much of a change, but something that, that I was noticing a lot more is, like, friendships that would actually develop because they did the thing where, like, Dwarves would cluster in taverns and stuff

just spread out. So instead of, like, the only way to have dwarves actually make friends and not go nuts was to, like, have tiny rooms everywhere so that they would actually, like, stand next to each other. But he just, like, made them clump up in taverns and stuff, and then they suddenly would actually, like, friendships worked. It's like, what the hell? You guys actually have friends now.

Geez, I can't relate to you anymore. What is this madness? but like I it's so so that that was I think kind of the one main thing that I noticed between those two versions but I think the big jump is definitely between 04 and 05 because it's that's just gotten a lot easier for the for the for the management yeah I mean like I have thousands of hours in games like rim world I got a good amount of time in no more yeah not on stream but I did play quite a bit of it.

And I've got quite a bit of time in a lot of very difficult games. And Dwarf Fortress has always been one of those like, well, okay, once you kind of know all of the mechanics of how to actually keep your dwarves happy, and if you're willing to micromanage, which I think a lot of people who play Dwarf fortress aren't willing to micromanage, a lot of people who play Dwarf fortress, you know, that use Dwarf therapist and Dief Hack and just kind of like macromanage, and dwarves need that micro. Um, so I'll go from dwarf to dwarf and like actually like look at what they need and give them very specific jobs. Um, I'm not quite as crazy as some people I know who will like go into bedrooms and make their bed and like coffer and cabinet out of specific materials. But like you can do that. And so once you kind of do all of that and take very specific care of every single dwarf and, uh, give them all the correct jobs and then like give them a decent amount of off time, which is I think is something that a lot of people don't do. If you straight up just give dwarves like, I don't know, two months to just kind of hang out and socialize, they get a lot happier, weirdly, just like real people. And so like if you can kind of give them what they want to do plus their break periods, the game's been quite easy for a while. I think 12 was a little bit harder to do that because it was more about fortress layouts as well. So the way to like keep them super happy, you'd have to give them really small rooms, pack them into a small space so that they'd make friends. like another streamer who I watched had a running joke that he would create a air quotes friend

chamber which was just a tavern that he'd lock all the doors in for a month which was just a two by two tile and it had alcohol in it that was it was just a it was just a like an infinite stack of alcohol and just a two by two chamber you'd lock all the doors in there for like two days or like two months in game and they'd all be friends by the time they came out or they'd all be exactly one of the two and so that that was always like kind of funny to watch but it's it so it's it's it's now more organic which I really like but um I'm very much anticipating better sieges because currently the game's a little bit dull difficulty wise yeah yeah no I have to agree with you because I personally like the micromanaging thing and I've been getting

into it more and more and more and this point, I'm actually, especially from military, I've been handpicking dwarves, not based on what they can actually do, like, they're good with swords or something, but I'm handpicking them based on

their personality and their stress vulnerability. And at this point, I had a massive goblin siege of about a hundred goblins and many, many animals attack me. And I only got a single dwarf to actually get somewhat sad.

And that dwarf got removed from the squad, had to hang out in the tavern and do nothing for two months. And then I got him back into the squad and gave him mastercrafted steer armor. And now the dwarf is absolutely fine. Also, the friend chamber thing, I tend to do that anyway because, you know, sometimes a just use the boroughs and the civilian alarms to get them into the into the tavern my tavern tends to have some stockpards of food and drink in them and then i just lock the door and so they they have to like chill out in the tavern that is usually not very it's not two by two but it has food it has seeds um i tend to have some beds in there for like the visitors so they can't

actually sleep in beds instead of just on the floor. And when they come out, I had people marry after that. So amazing, because I tend to forget that boss actually can marry, can have relationships more than just having kids if you don't do that. But if you do that, you really realize that, wow, they do have relationships, they do have likings, they can kindle and rekindle love, and they can actually marry, and that is so funny, because it only happened like five times to me in all my years, and it is becoming more increasingly of a regular thing in my fortresses, because I feel like I'm actually doing the right thing, you know, when your dwarfs tend to be happy and don't get absolutely crushed by, like,

emotional baggage, then it's good. But I sometimes still have, like, buggy things going on or cleaning up sieges. However, I also get around that by only having the military actually clean up as well. well you can do all that a lot better like whenever you have a population cap i have not played with the population cap i think i'm going to start doing that right now my my fortress is like nine years old and it's got 150 dwarves in it and i don't know any of them really so yeah there's just too many dwarves to even try to get to know any of them personally something i'd like to say based off of the marriages thing is in long death all my original seven dwarves have died of old age

But, or some of them died of other things, but most of them have died of old age. And I'm at the point now where their great grandchildren are getting married. Oh, that is so cute. Whoa, that's awesome. It's kind of going to have to start playing with a pop cap. That reminds me of a mod that I would love to see, which is if you create a young world, build your fort, let it run, play it for 40 years, 50 years or whatever, and then retire it. I want a mod that would like fast forward time 200 years, just so you can see how things go and then maybe pick back up.

At Pax 2019 during the Door Fortress panel, Taran said one of his dreams for long term that would, because someone asked, it's like, what's one thing that you could do if you had unlimited time but probably could never actually get it done? He's like, I want to be able to restart WorldGen at any time and fast forward and rewind. Yeah.

That's it. Yeah. See, that would be the best. That's like, oh my God. That would be perfect. Did you imagine just have like a scroll wheel to just like scroll back and forth through WorldGen? Oh my God. Yeah.

Let's clone Tarn, get a Tarn army. And then just put him in a like undying robot body so you can become the on the side of itself. I feel like an army of Tart Adams would be very unproductive. I feel like they would just hang out and never actually get anything done. You'd have to put them in separate room. Yeah. That's true. That's true.

And it's single core. So then none of the code would ever work. this isn't great. Yeah, I just, I just love the idea of it. I mean, I realize why it's single core just because so many of the operations depend on each other that you almost need to execute everything in order. So, you know, you can't really send things off to separate processes because I guess it breaks things. So, I mean, I've heard that explanation really well. I would love it if, you know, if there was some sort of like a multi-core developer that just looked at it and was just like, look, we're going to come. with some way to optimize this code because I think that would that would be interesting to see what happened but hey man it is what it is hey I got to say that uh that if our listeners haven't heard that interview that you did with with tar and blind a couple weeks ago uh they really need to get out and check that out that's the you know that may be the best interview that I've heard with him that uh you know they you didn't ask I talked about this last week

you didn't ask hard questions really but you ask questions that uh that got to the point about the steam release and it was just a great interview. Now, I've heard two interviews that you've had with him. Have you had him on more than that? I've had three total. I have to dig for the first one. The first one was in June 2020.

Can we just talk about how cool it is? It's so cool that you can actually, as a streamer, interview the developer and have him on multiple times. I just think that's awesome. So, I mean, hats off the time for making himself available and doing what he does. it's something that I used to do a lot or rather I used to have developers on my stream quite a bit in the early days when I played a lot of open source games so I would just be like hey you worked on multiplayer code for this pop up and talk on this or whatever so like that was actually kind of a regular thing on my channel and then for a while there I worked on a YouTube channel which is now defunct which had like five people working on it where that was all we did basically it was like

Clickbaity reaction videos for video game trailers and then interviewing developers was like literally all we did. And we grew that channel quite well for about a year until we all just kind of win our separate ways. And so for me, it's just kind of something that I've always done. And it probably wouldn't have happened if I didn't have the opportunity to meet him at PACs. So it's a good thing the pandemic didn't happen until 2020. Because if I missed out on Pax 2019, none of this would have happened. How long do you think it's going to be until he implements pandemic code in the game? Do you think that's what he's working on?

That's like, I've got this idea. I was talking about this with chat the other day. I would actually be totally down for it, but I wouldn't want like a disease to come through and wipe everybody out. Maybe like something that would just kind of happen in the background. You know how like in Legends mode you can look at it and it'll be like, oh, well, this city was having a wrestling competition, but you don't really see that in game, right?

Like, that's not something like, the doors aren't going to organize a wrestling competition in game. But, like, you'll read about it in legends, and that's one of my favorite things to see with demons, where demons will just, like, get bored being, like, a goblin overlord and, like, go to all the Dorven Fortresses and take part in all the wrestling competitions,

and it's just, like, Door Fortress is actually just Dragon Ball Z in my mind, and I love it. But when they're doing that, like, yeah, I can totally see, like, oh, like, a, maybe a particularly powerful goblin, maybe the game just decides that a particularly powerful goblin sieve is too strong, so like a bunch of them just die out mysteriously to a plague. It could be a world gen balancing thing.

Another thing that I kind of wanted to mention on the topic of moods that I don't see a lot of people doing is when you have dwarves that are having trouble, like, either making friends or staying happy, something, and this is great also for frame rate for a reason that I'll get to in a second, is you can make guilds before they petition for guilds, and anybody who has that skill can go, and you can set them to open. So if you go into the location screen, you can actually, like, set their restrictions to open so anybody can visit instead of just guild members, because if you have, if you don't have that particular guild, no one will go there.

Quite literally, like, they can't go into that room. But you can set them to open so anybody can just go in and socialize, and they treat them like another tavern. And if you have a dwarf who say a particularly good crafts dwarf, they can teach them other dwarves in there crafting or like stone crafting or gem cutting or whatever it is for that particular guild hall. And they get the exact same positive mood as actually crafting without actually crafting. Yep. Yep. It's very cool. Nobody does that. It's interesting. Does that actually increase their skill whenever they see presentations?

Yes, yes, it does. It is so good. You can have legendary kids before they grow up because they've, like, I had a weapon, an almost legendary weapon smith child before he grew up because he just hung out in the in the smithing like Guildhall for like the first 10 years of his life. It is so good. Like, guilds are so powerful and that, because I tend to make my doctors, scholars. like exclusively they do nothing except for clean corpses do doctor stuff and write books about

doctor stuff and then i make them a guilt hall to like talk about what they're actually doing set it to open so after a while everybody in my fortress has some skill in like the the medicine field which is great because when my doctors die i still have so many like other people left it's great really you should try it and everybody um like okay it's not like crafting because that doesn't give you a good mood by learning about it but it's still something that i learn about which is really handy when you lose a good legendary medic you know that's still good also you get like a ton of good books especially when your um fortress is very young like your world is very young you get so many books like oh my god great i was just saying none of the

books will be any good because they don't know how to write but it'll work it's like the uh the amazon author store um plenty of content but uh it sucks um all right that was unnecessarily rude um no that that's really cool yeah i i always was just thinking you know 250 or higher and yeah, I started a year five world and I'm like, wow, this is like refreshing. People come to visit, everyone seems pretty chipper. The other sieves aren't fully fleshed out yet. It's awesome.

I'm kind of like, I'm all on Young World train now. Oh, one thing I just want to add about the guilds that just came to my mind, this means there's an alternative way of actually training your archers. Yes. You just make a hunter's guild without any hunters and then put your entire,

like your arches, you're supposed to be arches. You make them hunters, so they just mingle in the guild or you make it open and everybody becomes a good archer. That's great. I'm going to say my archers

have been doing wonderfully with my current fortress. Since I've figured out how to do it, it's not been a problem. And they're just kicking ass. yeah i've gotten better i think over the course of this show actually nice i mean yeah same but in this fortress that i have currently my arches are being dumb again and not like using the the 5,000 bolts i have

well that's a problem isn't it yeah and they don't equip stuff correctly but you know that's that's a whole different story make sure you have enough quivers yeah that's right And soap, don't forget your dog, soup. Yeah. So if nothing else that I'm going to take away from this episode is that I'm going to cap my population and see if I enjoy my next fort more for the, for the dwarven personality stuff. Yes. I usually do that for like 50 dwarves and soft cap at 100. So I have many, many children and basically a fort that is growing up while having a stable population of workers.

I tend to have like 80 dwarfs after a while simply because of all the kids that are slowly growing up. So not only am I able to have stable military that is full-time active without actually missing craftsmen, but yeah, they are happy because I can actually, you know, I can take my time with everything, a single one and like indulge their needs. I really wish that there was a popular pre-packaged install of the game that came with all the tools that new players would like but also set the dwarf cap down to like a hundred or something

a little bit more reasonable so you still have fun show up but like a lower number. You mean like a lazy noob pack that is built? A lazy new pack that's built for actual lazy nobs because I believe that the lazy new pack is kind of a kind of an inaccurate descriptor name for it because instead of like what it actually should be called is Dorf Fortress Advanced Tools Pack for Mega Builders

because that's kind of what it actually is. It's great if you're like building a mega project but like you don't need 80% of the stuff that comes with it for just playing DF. All you really need to just play DF is a tile set pre-installed. That's it. Yep. It's like a Cleano Dev's caveat.

mTORPAC that he comes out with right after each release happens. Yeah. He'll put one out whenever he gets a tile set built for a release before even the first DF hack alpha comes out. So yeah, cleaner devs great. Yeah. Well, should we do closing thoughts? Because, yeah, I got a hard stop at the nine.

So blind, if anyone wants to reach out to you, where do they see your content? Where do they get a hold of you? All that sort of stuff. I think if you go to YouTube and type in Dwar Fortress Steam, you'll find 99% me on YouTube. But if you go to, like, Twitch and look at BL-I-N-D-I-R-L, you'll find me. If you go to YouTube and look up, B-L-I-N-D-I-L, you'll find me.

If you look up stupid skull.com, but you have to type in the full HTTP because I haven't, like, actually set it up properly and couldn't really care to. That also works. I think Skull, Skull, Skull-D-Zone used to work, but I'm not sure if they fixed that. Anyway

So anyone else Got anything they'd like to add on here at the end Before we drop out for the episode Nope All right All righty Well blind thank you so much for For coming on here and chatting with us

It's been a blast We'll have to do it again And I suppose until next time This has been Dwarfortures Roundtable And we'll catch you all next time.

Rock and roll. Cheers. Bye, bye. This has been the Dwar Fortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes

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