Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 47: In Which We Discuss Dropping Goblins With Blind

Episode Date: March 21, 2021

Blind joins us as we chat about lots of stuff, including how goblins go "splat' and how pretty windows are. Sprite sheet with elvesDwarf Fortress Wiki Gravity pageBlind's Twitch and YouTube channels Support Dwarf Fortress Roundtable on PatreonSupport Dwarf Fortress at Bay12Games.com 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/

Note to listener, the Dwar Fortress Roundtable podcast does not condone dropping sentient beings from any height. Fatal or not. Except maybe goblins. And the occasional elf. Dwarfie Talk for over two years now. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. And yeah, we've been doing this for two years. Oh my God. Yes, it's March 9th was when the very first episode was released. And today's date is March 14th, 2021 as we record this. So it's been just over two years that we have been doing this. Two years. On the one hand, we've been doing this like every week, I feel this is amazing

but two years damn that's a long time yep we have released every two weeks pretty much on clockwork

I think that there is a couple of weeks in there that we one thing happened or another and we weren't able to release

but for the most part we've been every two weeks just shooting the bull and it seems like people want to listen to us then

I'm happy about that but Yeah, and, you know, I think a good old shout-out to the fans is required at this point. Because, you know, what would we be without the people listening right now? Well, we'd be a couple of nerds talking to each other about Door Fortress. Ah, oh. Oh, we should mention that Tony hasn't gone anywhere. Tony actually, what just hasn't been able to make it to today's episode, he is traveling.

So I'm here It's all good Hey there he is Hello Ended up oddly free this morning Hey blind How you doing We're welcoming blind into the podcast now

I'm sorry if I just crashed you But No it's fine You're welcome to crashes yeah And I was in the middle of saying That Tony's traveling right now So he is not here But we were talking about

Just on March 9th We passed our two year mark As a podcast So, gee whiz, you've been doing this for, what, seven years, blind? Yeah, it's been a while, seven and a half now. Let's see, what else we got here? Elves, we got pictures of elves. Who dropped those elf pictures?

Was it Tody or was it meth? That was Kit Fox Games, technically, who posted it in the newsletter. Roland, you said that you weren't sure how you felt about them because they were cute? Is that right? Yeah. Like, you know, it's one thing to, like, be inhumane and sadistic to the small letter E. It's something different if you actually see a humanoid person with a face getting, like, slaughtered by your dwarves. I don't know.

I don't want to feel bad. But then again, I kind of should, shouldn't I? Do the elves have umlots in the game? When they're soldiers, yes Okay. Oh, only when they're soldiers. Interesting. Yeah. I did not know that. Same with the humans.

When humans are soldiers, they have little umlots above the U's. When elves are soldiers, they have little umlots above the E's. Huh. Yeah, that's why you get attacked by like umlaut E while when you are in a tavern on like single player, not a single player adventure mode then you just see like normal ease without the oomode

it took me like two years to actually get that though don't worry I kind of wanted to bounce off something that was said earlier about them being too cute looking like the elves being a little bit too humanoid and lifelike almost

and the thing that I kind of wanted to say is like my issue with them is they look way too close to the humans canonically they are they have less body volume air quotes than humans the same body

volume and the same armor sizes as dwarves but the sprites that we have are all the same size I kind of wish they were like two pixels smaller okay fair like size wise next to them because the dwarves are also like

roughly the same size as humans but they're just bigger and the bald dwarves are kind of looking like battle babies almost which isn't a bad thing I'm totally fine having an army of cayus to go attack whatever I'm attacking but that's kind of the look that they're getting and I kind of wish that the dwarves sprite

was like one pixel smaller all the way around and the elves sprite was one pixel shorter all the way around but I have a feeling that's something I could fix with a mod in like an hour. I get what you're saying, though. Whenever I first saw the page that was released and had the three rows top to bottom, at first sight and after just reading the released text, I didn't realize that we were seeing elves, humans, and dwarves all in that picture.

I thought that they were all just different body styles at first of elves. And then after looking at... at a little while, I realized that we were seeing the wider, stumpier dwarves than humans and elves. And yeah, you're right. The humans and elves look pretty much the same except the elves had pointier ears. The elves also have squintier eyes. Like, the actual number of pixels in their eyes is longer. So like three or four pixels for their eyes instead of the humans, which have one. Wow. Okay. That's some dedication to sprites right there. I mean, if I look at it for longer, then I kind of see it, but damn, okay.

My biggest worry is when they're all moving, when the game's unpaused, I'm not going to be able to tell the difference. And people in YouTube comments have, like, claimed and informed me that this is the way it's intended. Like, you're not supposed to be able to tell the difference. Like, in Tolkien, the only difference is elves have attitude. And in this, the only difference is elves are the bad guys that we're supposed to be murdering. But as somebody who's often, like not enemies with the elves because I find them boring to fight because they're just too easy

I'd rather like buy weird animals from them like unicorns and giant bears so I tend to be at peace with the elves and for me they just kind of look identical and it's a little bit silly well yeah and you know in Tolkien the elves

didn't you know eat their their prey whenever or they're you know the fallen combatant opposition so they have weird hobbies dwarves of necromancers who cares. I'm pulling up the,

the picture of the elves and I'm looking at them here. Yeah. Except for the point of years, I can't really see the difference in the squinty eyes that much. Now, you have to zoom in on that.

It's basically really just a single pixel. Yeah. You certainly won't be able to see that as much whenever they're, like you said, in motion and on a full-size game screen. Unless humans show up in wooden armor,

then it should be fairly easy to tell the elves from the humans in battle, hopefully. Although I will never forget the one time I was playing Dwar Fortress, and I got invaded by what I thought was 220 elves. And then after they started demolishing everything that I had, I realized they were all completely kidded out in steel. One of the scariest things that's ever happened to me in Doreport. How? Because they were completely taken over by a goblin sieve,

and I didn't realize that until I examined one of them after. they killed my army. Bummer. That is not cool. That is very terrifying. So me and my copper and iron armor just fell apart. But I thought only dwarfs

have steel. I don't know how it happened, but it happened. I've certainly been attacked by goblins with steel weapons before. Maybe not fully kidded out and full suits of armor, but something happened in World Gen

where that was just a really scary goblin faction. Steel goblins, hmm? After we got off the podcast last episode, there was one thing I wanted to ask you, blind, that I had forgotten and didn't do, but this gives me the opportunity to do so. In all the time that you have played Dwar Fortress,

if you can recall some especially cool story, an especially cool Dwarfortress story that you'd like to tell. I tell this story frequently, so I can't remember if I told it or not, but did I tell you the story of the crazy undead human necromancer Dwarven Queen Lady? No. Okay, so I had this human necromancer who was,

this happened during, like, the day the villains part one patch came out, so February 2020, question mark, whenever they released that patch. And I was just, because they added a whole bunch of, of updates to legends at that point. So like, you know, I think they added adultery, cheating, uh, divorce, uh, a lot of other fun things like that. So we were just reading through legends and laughing her ass off. Um, and we, we found this human queen of a dwarven civilization who happened to be a necromancer. And she had a pretty unremarkable childhood. It was one of those

like kind of grew up just like, you know, stealing stuff, did some gambling. Eventually became obsessed with life and death. became a necromancer and then like murdered a few people plotted to kill a few people and became queen of this dwarven civilization that she was born into uh which had a relatively large human population and uh then the second she became queen she systematically would get married two to three times a year and plot to assassinate those husbands assassinate them and res them as a zombie um oh god and within like 15 years she had like 100 and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of undead ex-husbands.

And from what I could tell, more or less the entirety of her army was undead ex-husbands. I never examined it further, but she, as at the point where my legends ended, was still getting married three to five times a year and was murdering every single one of her husbands. That's probably the weirdest story I've ever run into into her fortress. If I had that in my Legends mode, I think that I would try to seek out where she was based and place a fortress near that, because it would be awesome to be attacked by the queen and all of her ex-husbands.

Or even just like an army of the ex-husbands. Yeah. That is one black widow right there. Damn. That's something. have you played much this last couple weeks rolling i tried uh but sadly not as much as i like to i just i i have a weird bug where i cannot play my the very old worlds that i generate um because my pc just keeps crashing like not just the program it's my entire pc and so i'm kind of

stuck either with newer worlds or the worlds I've been playing. So I got back to the one world I've been playing for three years now. I don't know. Is this the one that you're trying

to wipe out all other sentient beings on the planet other than your civilization of dwarves? And it's going great, to be honest. Especially with the whole, I can now raid people. It's so much easier suddenly.

it's lovely there are no cyclopians or like etons giants whatever of that stuff all gone dead killed by me there are only two forgotten beasts left and i'm not sure where they are um they are just three hill titans left um because they are chilling in the most northern part on a small island and like battling each other and I'm not going to go there because you know there's no point and now the the goblin civilizations

have come under my scrutiny because you know elves come on that's not really a challenge is it so I've been starting to raid the goblins but not just raid them but raise

their sides and like I do that as soon as a squad comes back I just get let them eat something, chill out, I'll load the stuff that they got from, like, raiding or raising. Then I throw them out again so they can, like, raid again. I've been amassing wealth and, I don't know, like furnishes. Sometimes they come back with it, like chairs or tables.

Like, why would you steal a table? It's not even a good table. So are you playing this still on 44? 12 or were you able to convert it to the newer version? Yeah, I'm now playing it on the newer version. There are some minor bugs. For example, I had like a lot of squads getting stuck and so on. But that is simply because I've been very, very into like playing this exact world.

But it's fine, you know. They don't seem to be dead. and as soon as I like retire a fortress they don't despawn or like go poof into like thin air but instead they mingle around the world and suddenly tend to become adventurers instead yeah that's that's pretty fun even though the the whole adventurer thing is rather well bleak because now in the world there are mostly dwarfs there is a full island of humans there are no other humans except for that island so if you want to see something else

than dwarves or like a few elves then you're not going to have fun in that world because I killed like basically everything except you know the only part where you can have like quote unquote fun in capital letters is when you sleep outside during the night and you just hope for the night creepy crawlers to come

sounds like your mission's pretty much accomplished then Well, there are still sentient races, okay? They are still sentient races, and I still have vampires. Also, there is one single necromancer that is very reluctant to not die. Yeah, he keeps, like, repelling my sieges. So, Blind, I started up with your philosophy of sell or destroy all of your excess stuff. And it's going pretty well. I tried to do that on the fortress that I was working on for the last few weeks.

And I just had too much stone that I didn't want to just throw on in somebody else's cart. And it was going to take too long to actually build things with it. So I retired that fortress and started a new one. And it is going to have your philosophy. Although I still am going to try to get a fairly good-sized fortress, because I want to see if I can build a very tall tower. I mean, you can do some pretty impressive stuff and just demolish and get rid of the excess.

Whenever you build something like, let's say that you build walls with your stone, do you think that that takes those stones when they get turned into walls? Do they take those stones out of each individual time click consideration for it? Or does every stone that has been put into a construction still need to be reckoned individually.

So this is kind of out of the realms of my understanding of the game, but what I do know is this. When something is in a stockpile, it's not being tracked unless it gets disturbed. So if something is in a stock, like if you made a block and you put it in a stockpile, it's not being tracked unless it gets hit by water or something. If you make a block and it's constructed,

it cannot be disturbed because it has no physics objects. So in theory, it shouldn't be affecting the moment-to-moment gameplay. But if you go and select, like I have so many rocks and blocks built that if I go to select, especially in Long Death, if I go to select the blocks screen in the stock screen, so if I scroll down to blocks, the game will seize up for about 45 seconds

before it actually tells me what blocks I have. And it'll also do that with the iron and metal box. screen because I have it's like 37,000 used blocks on that screen so it's there

and they are keeping track of them I think it's just when you're running around in game they're a non-issue because they can't be disturbed by anything that could bother their physics so those blocks that are showing up on your block screen they are in constructions yes

well the red ones are so there's two in the block screen, right? There's white number and then there's the red number. The white number or gray number is the number that you have available, and then the red number is the number that are constructed or being used. You know, that is another thing that I wasn't aware of what it meant. I'd seen the two columns of numbers on the stock screens, and I always told myself, you know, you need to really look up and find out what those numbers mean. So I think I do. It's the same with like clothing, right? So the lighter color is stuff that's not being used and in a stockpile or on the ground somewhere. And the stuff that's red is the stuff that's claimed. And that number

can change whenever a dwarf dies because all their clothing and stuff becomes unclaimed and you can sell it. Well, there is my thing about Dwarf fortress that I've learned today. Awesome. Thank you. I actually learned something about Dwar Fortress this week. And that's if you, when you're trading stuff and you're trying to bring stuff to the stock screen, if you just go into the search function and hit x it'll automatically give you everything in the fortress that's degrading really oh yeah yeah yeah because I stumbled on this

on accident like a while ago and I was like hmm I just kind of want to sell the dumb stuff that the humans kept dropping in my tavern so let's let's see if I can find some of these genes right and it

kind of worked if you just press x it just shows you degrading clothing and that's great you can just like spam it all like yeah yeah take it well take all of it depending on how old your fort is because in my case it also shows me degrading books degrading choirs degrading bins degrading boxes degrading furniture and degrading beds hold on hold on books can degrade yes if they're not if they're not bound yes choirs can degrade Oh, oh, God. But if they're bound, they cannot degrade. I don't think so. Oh, oh, God. Okay. Now I have to bind all more books. Oh, no.

Book bindings are really easy to do, though, fortunately. Yeah. It's been during the last month that I made my first bar of soap. I've not even thought about, you know, binding books yet. There's always more to do. You know, how do I say? I tend to play very young roles because that is, apparently the only thing my PC likes to handle and when you have a young world you have so many achievements and like accomplishments and knowledge to learn that when you do um dedicated scholars

they write so many books and i had this one mega project where i built like a library outside of my fort like an actual uh temple ruin kind of thing like a greek temple and i made that into a a three-story library. I became obsessed with the libraries and dwarf orders because you have books they're randomly generated and the knowledge in there is just fantastic

and sometimes you have people coming there trying to learn new stuff like forgetting the books there then you can like describe new copies of them and you have like diaries of people just explaining

how their life was. You have stuff where a dwarf wrote a full-on 200-page book about having a grudge on his wife. It's amazing. What's that blind? I was just saying that's a mood.

Yeah, I've got a library, but I haven't got anybody in there writing, or actually, this is in the fortress that I retired, so I don't guess I do have a library yet, but yeah, I had put some bookshelves in there. there didn't really know what to do with it i bought some books but i never for off of some caravans but i never did check to see if they had actually put the books in the library does that happen automatically if you have a library they just stick books in it yes assuming you have

bookshelves yes i i did have books i do have bookshelves in it so yeah then they they should have just put them in there so i guess that's like the book stockpile is your bookshelves yes in a way it's it's more like the way goblets get naturally stored in your tavern when you have chests in a tavern. Yeah. Didn't know that either. Wow. There's just so much I don't know.

So now I know to put chess in a tavern so that they will put the goblets in there instead of carrying them all the way back and they're just leaving them in the, uh, yeah. A lot of times I just leave them in the, uh, in the stockpile with the drinks. If you hit L, uh, for the location screen, I think it's capital L for the location screen. and scroll down to your tavern and then I think it's A on the keyboard

I'd have to actually look at it but there's a button and you can set the number of goblets you want to store in there and that's the only one that your tavern keeper will use yeah and if you set it to like 200 they will take every single goblet

or mug or whatever you have in your fortress and store it there and then they only take those because there is no mug outside of your tavern anymore that's really good And especially if you then put some, like a small storepile of drinks in your tavern, they don't even have to, like, run around anymore. They just get a mug, get something to drink, they're happy, and they stay in the tavern.

So I'm assuming that the same thing will happen with a dining room. Is there a difference between a dining room and a... Well, dining rooms are a room designation and taverns. are zones, so I don't think so. Right. Okay, so yeah, so the dining rooms you designate whenever you select tables and, okay. Which also is something that's getting changed

coming up because rooms are no longer, there's no longer going to be the distinction between the Q furniture rooms and zones. It's just going to be zones for the Steam version. So will you zone bedrooms?

Yeah. So there was a an update that TOTE posted on Bay 12, which basically just reads that this was specifically for bedrooms because they were setting up bedrooms in the new UI, and they were trying to figure out how they were going to tutorialize the current bedroom setup where you press Q and then claim the bed and then designate what the bed's going to be, whether it's a dormitory barracks or bedroom, and then size it. And you have to have the bed in the room in order for it to be a bedroom. And they more or less have just decided that instead of going that route, they're just going to say you plop a zone on the bedroom and there doesn't need to be a bed

there for it to be a bedroom or assigned so it's easier to swap out furniture and stuff and easier to tutorialize so they only need to tutorialize one room system instead of multiples and this is going to carry over to other room types like barracks my my question is will you be able to do that over a large area of multiple bedrooms just once because right now it's like a carpal tunnel syndrome generator you go or enter arrow arrow arrow or enter arrow arrow you know do that 50 times if you laid down 50 beds it'll be great if you could just zone out the bedroom area and have the bed define the bedroom itself or something like that that would be neat but I have a feeling it's probably just going to be like click drag click drag click drag click drag click drag right click a sign

right click a sign or that or they'll just go claim them themselves We are going to be living in this weird world of mouse support. Yeah, that is weird. That is hella weird. And I've talked to my friends about it because, you know, I keep bugging them about Dwarfurtress. And I'm like, oh, did you know the new update will have mouse support? They turn around and like, how do you play the game if you don't have mouse support now?

Well. Yeah, mouse support is great. Oh, go ahead. I was just going to say, my favorite thing to tell people is just say, with my eyes and a screen and a computer, when people ask me how I play the game. But, you know, mouse support is fine, as long as you don't have that be the sole way to do something. You know, I'm very much a keyboard shortcut kind of guy, not just in poor fortress, but in while I'm actually doing day-to-day computing, a mouse tends to slow me down a bit, especially when I'm doing things like, running a text editor. I don't know.

We'll see. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what it's going to be like. And also how these things trickle down to the Dwar Fortress Classic. Everything is moving over to Dwar Fortress Classic accessibility features-wise. UI, mouse support new key combinations. Everything's moving to Classic because they're not supporting multiple UIs. The only difference is Classic won't have music and Classic won't be for sale and Classic won't have the pretty pixels.

Okay. Interesting. We'll see if it's an improvement or a degradation. I mean, I have a feeling there's going to be two groups of people who play classic. There's going to be the people who go, this is garbage. What is wrong with all of you? And keep playing the older version forever. And then there will be the rest of us who are just like, what's wrong with you?

Yeah, it's hard to, it's really hard to know for sure what it's going to be like because we've really not gotten to play. So maybe someday. Maybe someday. I heard, like a small bird, has been tweeting me that maybe, maybe this late summer, maybe, maybe, who knows? We'll see how smooth moving goes for turn. Oh, yeah, that's right. He's getting kicked out of his place.

That sucks. He's got to move in July, so. Yeah. I'm hoping by November this year, and that's the gist that I've got to. gotten from everything, but I still just tell people when it's done when people ask me, because I really don't know, but that's my hunch, is that

that's what they're aiming for, because that's what they were originally aiming for was November 2020 and then 2020 happened. Yeah. Although, to be honest, the 2020 part probably didn't change the way he did his development a whole lot. He did get smoked out for a good three months,

because so did I. Oh, yeah. The awful wildfires last spring. He talked pretty heavily about how he was having trouble developing as many hours a day and just working in general and getting out of bed because of the fire. And yeah, I couldn't get out of bed and talk for more than four hours a day. It was awful. And I was, I'm further north than he is.

Dwarf Fortress news since we last got together in the last two weeks. In the news, fear, just the screenshot of the elves. Yeah, it was the main thing that happened. That and the, uh, and the room's rework.

I can't remember if meth dropped that. I think, I think you talked with meth about the map update right after our, our last episode. So the meth dropped a release that had some, some more map stuff on it. There was a very sneaky screenshot release, which was released through an interview that I did with Meph right after the recording of the last podcast, yes.

Which is more or less the same world map that we saw before, except it had the spooky biomes and some new structures. The previous world map that was released and has like half the biomes, and we're missing a lot of structures. so we now have like abandoned settlements and necromancer towers on the map and a bunch of other cool things um it's out there it's up on reddit it's it's in the background of the video that i posted and so it's findable um but it's it's not super heavily being pushed by anybody right now i don't think it's the forefront of their marketing currently cool i might use that as our backdrop for this week's episode go nuts yeah does anybody have anything else that they just are dying to get off their chests about dwarf fortress. Yeah, I actually have a quite cool thing. Okay, it's not that cool. It's just me ranting about sadistic ways to kill people in dwarf fortress again.

Oh, okay, cool. But that's kind of the point of why here, isn't it? Yeah. So, you know, I like to chuck things down like a pit because that's quite easy. It's easy, it's quick, and it's free of charge. And then you just clean up the pit afterwards. But I noticed a few things. For example, while it works, I want to find out why and how to make it better.

So I was sitting there and making several pits in different depths. but then I got a new idea what if the goblin still has this iron armor on does this actually change his like final velocity when he crashes into the floor and does the armor actually deflect some of the damage that he takes when he is crashing onto the floor so I made

humane experiments with humane or inhumane here no no humane very humane people came to me and asked me to be my subjects okay so it was anyway

so as it seems the the final velocity is I'm trying to read it out by making the shaft deeper and then seeing a how fast actually goes but that is a bit wonky because that is dependent on my fps but um i kind of make it out to my my my damage output that i have so for example i just chuck one person with armor out and one

person without and then i look who's taking more damage and then i make the shaft deeper and do it again um at some point the person without armor will just disappear basically and do a fine paste on your floor uh while the person in armor takes considerable amounts of damage can lose limbs but stays like somewhat in shape so they don't like explode into gore um still alive No, no. I think the ultimate point was 36 Z levels deep, set levels deep, is good enough to like kill many things, but I tend to go for 55 to 60 and then you kill even the goblins in iron armor because it seems that why they go faster. so the terminate velocity is a bit higher they also can reflect some of the damage especially when they are good in like

the armor skills when they have like good armor skills they can deflect more damage which it kind of makes no sense but okay but they can actually yeah you know if you if you want to do this in a dwarven science way you're going to have to do this hundreds of times

for each whole level and record the damage that they've taken in comparisons because you need to minimize the impact of the random number generator on the amount of damage that they're taken as they fall. I have a way to make this system 100% successful and also make it so you don't need to dig it as deep and also make it so you can also get the iron armor back without having to do as much cleanup. It's called put like two inches of lava at the bottom.

bottom of the pit? And then just like have a little drain in the middle so it can drain out. And then it's just just magical clean armor. Yes, that is true. But there is a better way to maximize the damage output. Because I looked into how the damage is actually, how you say, like calculated? Calculated. So as it seems, not only the terminal velocity is calculated, the weight and the density of the thing that impacts on the density of the thing that is being impacted on. So the density of the floor is having a huge impact on the general damage. So when you lay out a wooden floor made from feather wood, for example, the goblins

will basically just bounce off the floor and take very little damage. I have people survive a 60 Z-level drop because they just bounced off the floor and maybe got some broken limbs but survived it perfectly fine while when I was laying out lead bars as flooring even dwarfs

without with armor on they just splatted into gore and then I did some more technique but further down the line okay so I looked up Okay, what's the highest density material in dwarf orchards? And as it seems, it's... Obsidian?

Slate, yeah. So I laid out slate on the floor. I bought slate from the humans. I laid it out on the floor and holy crappo. That changed everything because now I don't even have to do a 60 level drop. I just have to do really a 30-level drop and have a thin layer of slate on the floor and it splatters people into gore.

And I can easily pick off their... Okay, I mean, the armor is bloody and it's cruel and whatever. But the armor is still rather fine. It's not being destroyed by it. I mean, it takes some damage, but only if they actually try to deflect it. If they fail, the armor doesn't seem. to take any damage from it, which is really cool.

So, Blind, I think what we have to realize here is the point that Roland in his sadistic tendencies is going for here, I think lava would probably be more efficient and easier, but it would not be as entertaining. Yes. Yes. I relatively, I beg to differ on the entertaining front, because I relatively recently had a fortress where I had a tube dug from the glacier that was on the surface. all the way down to the magma sea and I had a bunch of big bridges going across it.

Now this tube went right down through the center of my fortress and I had a gem in class windows all the way on the inside on my fortress layers and it went right through the center of my tavern. So my dwarves are all hanging out and partying and then suddenly just what? Just 50, these goblins just fly past. And they're just, you know, dancing and partying and telling poetry and someone pulls a lever and whew! Fifty more golems come falling down. So I don't know about you, but you can do some pretty entertaining things with lava. Oh, yeah. No, I agree.

Because the great thing about my pits is they're like, I like to call them toilets because I have like a flushing system in where I can like redirect a river or like underground water to flush out the remains of the whatever and just press it out of the map so that it destroys the items. and they don't get calculated anymore without my dwarfs touching them. What do you flush them out to, into a river? No, usually I dig so deep that I go into the caverns and just make like a small, small, how you say that, canal, channel through the caverns. and then with enough water pressure, you can just push it out your map and the eye of the system.

Yeah, yeah. So that works great. And one thing I just have to add for everybody out there that is trying to make a pit to throw things into, I have to remind you to actually smooth the, like, walls of it because otherwise whatever you throw into it might actually get to cling onto the walls and try to climb out again

and even if it's not succeeding in it it might scare your drop at worst to death which is not cool especially when they're like trying to chuck other goblins in and they scare get scared and let the go not cool hadn't that happen

so smooth it and then nobody can like grapple anything and if they try they just start smashing from wall to wall at like a hundred kilometers per hour. That's fun. Also, yeah, as you said, Blind, doing like Windows is really cool.

I had the same idea, actually. So I had a massive pit, like a six by six tube in the middle of the map, and my entire fortress around it, and all the cool, interesting social activity places were directly on the tube and could look into the tube and several of them even had like fortifications

which turned out to be not the best idea but anyway and my dwarf sometimes got spooked when a goblin was like falling behind the window very closely and yelled at them

I literally had a combat log where a goblin was yelling at a person like he got chucked down he was yelling at the person and then he smashed onto the floor that was a good combat lock that's amazing

like the goblin's face takes the full force of the impact and the impacted part explodes into gore I got a question about the mechanics of windows I saw that the dwarers were wanting to buy windows from me and so I decided that that was going to be what I focused on building that particular week but then I couldn't actually figure out how to

actually build windows. Is that something you construct into the wall? They're like stores, question mark, right? Hmm? We're like you have to make the window, because I usually use gem windows, but like you have to make the glass or you have to make the glass or the raw glass and then you make the raw glass

into a window, if I'm not mistaken? No, no, no, no. It's a bit different because raw glass is just a like piece of glass that is basically unusual unless you want to make a gem out of it. Right. You have to go into the glass furnace and then specify which kind of glass you want and then press on make a window because if they're going to do... From the furnace?

The glass furnace, yes. Okay. Well, what about, so gym windows, you wouldn't put a gym into the glass furnace, would you? No, no, no. That works differently because for the gym, gem windows, you just need gems. And I'm not sure. I don't think they have to be cut.

What's that blind? Three cut gems. Cut, okay. Capital Y. Yeah, three cut gems, and then they will just make them into a window for you. Yeah, right. And for the glass, you need the furniture item, glass window. And then you can just construct it with a epsilon or something.

Okay. Well, it sounds like I need to be doing something with my cut gems rather than just embedding them and stuff I'm going to sell. because is there an advantage? I mean, it sounds to me like the gym windows would be a heck of a lot easier to make than the glass windows. You run out of gems surprisingly fast,

but they really like looking at them. If you use multiple types of gems, they flicker between the colors and you can make pretty neat radiating rooms. I've seen the discothex. Yeah. So that's how people are doing that. You can make a disco, that is true.

Also, gem windows tend to be a lot more worth than the normal green glass windows. If you do like clear or crystal glass, that is different. So where do you make the gym windows? Is it a jeweler's workshop that you make the gym windows? No, no. You can, you just need three cut gems somewhere in your fortress. And then you can already construct it.

And they just put the gems into a window shape. So if you're going to sell windows to a caravan, and you, it sounds like you can't do the gym windows because those have to be constructed in place. You can only do the glass windows because those get built and then constructed. Yes, they're further. Well, you can see my confusion about the subject.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It's a little inconsistent on how you do that. So cool. I learned another thing about Dwarfurtures. A little bit inconsistent, like most things in Dwarfortures. Wonderfully inconsistent. But let's be honest, like there is good, thing about actual glass instead of gem windows there's no limit to them because if you have a

like a sand source you have a sand source and it's never going to be depleted you can make unlimited glassware whatever and that's pretty cool it's not as satisfying as mining out more gems though that is true but uh i mean do you play on uh what minerals cost of these do you play? Either normal or rare. Okay. But like that's not a lot of gem wind. Okay.

I mean, fair. Fair. It's pretty cool if you actually... It's a valuable centerpiece. You know what I mean? Yeah, true, true. Do you do like discos in your tavern? No, I tend to just use one type of gym.

Pick a color and roll with it. I find multicolored things distracting. Although I do have a area that I kind of imagine in my head is like a lighthouse which I pretend is a fire which is a yellow gem a red gem and a white gem and it looks like a fire oh that's cool that's a good idea actually so you can like put them in fireplaces and the dwarves like being near them because it's tastefully arranged gems and it's literally the exact same color combination as fire except fire and dwarf fortress moves like a thousand frames faster a second and it's like a spam flashy thing versus this is like blink blink blink blink blink

that works yeah because i've seen people like do how would you even describe this like textures and pictures moving pictures i've i don't remember when when i saw this but like years back i saw a person that made the dwarf of dwarf fortress you know like a dwarf face that is blinking in Dwar Fortress with a gem windows. Like, what? I like some of the stuff that Kupo has done with animations and in different rooms with just everything, alternating colors in a pattern.

In our board of Bloodline Fortress, I did the Dwar Fortress roundtable logo in the floor with wooden floor tiles. That looked pretty nice, but yeah, if I do it again, I'll have to do it with... So wait, so now... Windows in my head is a vertical thing, but you guys are speaking of putting them on the floor

as if they're floor decorations. Well, yeah. You see, it's like a table or a chair. It takes up a square when you look at it, but it kind of doesn't. They can't have through them, though, like a table or a chair. Yeah, and for the windows, they can.

So it's like a really thick window. So technically you could wall a dwarf in with windows. Yeah, but if they get Berserk, I think they can smash them. Which is why I have blast doors in some of my fortresses sometimes where I I'll have windows like looking out to the outside world and then like just have a lever that just closes up a drawbridge in front of every single set of windows all the way around the entirety of the fort every time we get invaded. That is smart.

Yeah, I should probably do that. but I don't tend I tend to dig really deep but I had a problem with cavern windows once so yeah I should have done that

I like embarking into mountain sides and then just like hollowing out the mountain basically oh that is very dwarfy yeah I agree yeah

I like mountainside fortresses better than the ones where you have to channel down also yeah it just seems much more dwarfy you're right.

Channling down to like the third cavern layer and you know, accidentally discovering the circus when you're just auto mining is also a lot of fun, which is something I did yesterday. Yikes. Oopsie. Whoops. All right. I think that that probably is going to do it for the episode.

Thanks so much, Blan, for stopping in and chatting with us again. It's a less of an interview and more of a fire scientist. chat today, which is... Sorry for just kind of crashing. No, no, no, no. I was glad you did. I got messed up by daylight savings last night, so I was like trying to get to sleep after having a long afternoon nap, and I was looking at the clock and it's one, it's four, what?

So I kind of got screwed up by daylight savings last night, so I just only like was 30% awake when I saw a DM come in. I was like, what's that? So here I am. Okay, well, until next time, I expect Tony will be back. He will probably be done driving his caravan across the desert at that point. But so, yeah, this is Dwarfortress Roundtable, and we will catch you next time. See you. Bye.

Thanks again, Blind. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundable.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

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