Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 52: Traps! With Nathan from Paranoid Metroid

Episode Date: June 6, 2021

We welcome in community member Nathan to talk traps, stockpiles, and other dwarfy subject matter. Nathan also has a new YouTube channel called Nekruxx Paranoid Metroid - though it wasn't launched at the time of recording so we don't mention it during the main recording session. Enjoy! Nekruxx Paranoid Metroid YouTube ChannelKruggsmash's Kingtrap - the fort with the flood trap.Bay12Forums thread by Kipi on room value Support Dwarf Fortress at Bay12Games.comSupport Dwarf Fortress Roundtable on Patreon

Check out today's guest Nathan on his YouTube channel, Nekrooks. In 10 minutes, he more clearly explains stockpiles than this podcast did, given an hour. Say LaVee. Welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we are welcoming today, Nathan.

How you doing, Nathan? Hello, I'm doing great. Nathan heard our live stream last week. Actually, I had been listening to your podcasts for a little over a year now, I think. Oh, thank you. I pitched it a while ago. And then I lost my headphones at work, so I missed, like, the last five episodes. Do you think it was related to you listening, the loss of the headphones, or do you think it's separate?

I'm just wondering. Okay. Okay. I had actually thought about joining you guys a long time ago, but it was always kind of up in the air. You know, I hadn't played the game too long all in one go yet. So I was like, I don't really know what I'm talking about. But now I heard that you guys welcoming people on again. I was like, this is it.

I got to do it. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure why we stopped doing that. It wasn't ever on purpose that we stopped doing it. Wasn't it a board decision that happened? Yes, it was from the high ups, you know. That's right. those dammed vesters. I know, right?

So Nathan, how did you get into Dwarf fortress? Well, that's actually kind of a hard thing to remember now because it happened at the same time that I got into Linux and I had gotten into Rimworld before that. One of my earliest gaming memories is Sim Tower, which is kind of a dwarf fortress of its own, if you know it. Yeah. And so I've always kind of been in it.

of these games, played the SIV games and stuff, and I discovered Rimworld through a friend about five years ago. And then I think I switched to Linux after that. And then I believe the series of events goes, I saw a review of Dwarf Fortress by a hilarious guy on YouTube. Then I looked it up and I found out it runs on Linux. And it's a lot like Rimworld. When I started playing it, I realized that. And I was like, this is the game for me. But I did the same. thing everyone else does, I played it for about 10 hours, and then I threw it away because I was like, this is unplayable. Wow, I hate this.

Sure enough, here I am. I'm back. That's interesting. I never really thought of the connection between, you know, the similarities between Simtower and Dwar Fortress, but yeah, there's a lot there. Yeah. I mean, obviously, the game is way smaller, but you're still building structures that that perform tasks interrelated with each other in order to avoid various types of fun, which is, you know,

cockroach infections instead of goblins killing everybody. But yeah, with, you know, apples and oranges. Yeah, I think I think you're right. I think it's a great comparison. And if you thought about it, Early Door Fortress was 2D. There was just one Z level, which, you know, if you take a small embark location and limit it to one Z level, Sim Tower would be like a vertical version of a. horizontal

early dwarf fortress so yeah that's cool I'm sure that the Adams brothers played some Sid Myers

games back in the day I would be shocked to hear that they didn't yeah yeah Maxis games yeah I don't think that they're like

Apex Legends guys should say that I don't they are I didn't say anything I was just you know Apex Legends okay there we are again and we forget

Rollin is like 20, so. Yeah, Roland knows it Apex Legends is. But he has no clue what SimCity is. I have actually been playing it, okay? Don't, don't bully me for this. No, that's cool, man. My kids love it. Right there with Minecraft.

Shut up. Hey, I played Minecraft when it came out. I really enjoyed that when it first came out. How to survive for one night. That felt so accomplished. not dying overnight. I've been playing a lot of old-school doom

with a friend of mine and we threatened to start playing Fortnite but we went back to playing Zendron. The Westwood Entertainment Doom, that one? The strategy, real-time strategy one?

No, no. The, what? Doom. Are you saying with an M or an N? Doom is in, I'm going to go kill monsters or Dune is in I live in a desert and eat spice? M. Okay.

John Carmack and Got it. And John Romero, that doom. Got it. Got it. Yes. What a difference. A lot of collapse.

Yes, it does very much so. I am really looking forward to that Dune movie coming out, especially whenever I found out that he's going to direct both of them. Oh, way off. Okay, sidetracked the end. Yeah, and I still don't know if we're an M or an N. Because any of that made sense. M. Michael.

Okay, good. Because I think they're making another Dune movie, too. Wow. Can we get it, guys. You're old. We get it. all right back to telitubbies with guns okay it's telethubbies with guns

I wonder about them which one's the minor which one's the wax worker which one's the um right so well when we like originally I do actually have a question if um you know because people say like yeah I played it for like two hours and then I stopped playing it but how long was the pause

because most people actually tend to not play it for like a year or even longer. And then suddenly something like pops up in the head or something. And they're like, well, I kind of want to get back to it, you know? Yeah, it was at least almost a year, if not over a year. I guess the impression it left on me was I could get 90% of the entertainment for 10% of the effort playing something like Rimworld. So I just kind of gravitated back to that. But eventually it kind of wore down on me and it kind of made me, being away from it,

it made me think, but there is really so much more than 10% above Rimworld. Like, I can't get 90% of this out of anything. I can only get 30% of this of Door Fortress out of Rimworld. So eventually it drew me back. And I was like, all right, so let's try this again. we'll put in a tile set and I'll try to focus on the basics at first and it's just the second time around having that initial experience just pushed me through the intimidating parts fast enough to keep me in it then do you still play with the tile set or do you go

oh yeah or graphics absolutely tile set I mean yeah the only reason I would play ASCII is because I'm considering running it in text mode so I can do it over an SSH without a graphical interface and play it at work. Huh. Yeah, I think tile sets the game changer. It was for me.

Yeah, truly. The text is awesome and it's fun and it's cool. Like if I was playing somewhere and I wanted to look like I wasn't playing a game, I've not, you know, I've occasionally turned off tile sets, but usually it's just for a specific reason. Because, man, I don't know what it is, but like the semicolon and the period and the one fourth fraction, I just, I don't know, I just can't see it as well.

I do have a question about that. Can you play this game over SSH? Is there an Incurses version that plays for Dwarfortures? Because I was under the impression that even the ASCII, and I'm flying air quotes here, Askey tile set was indeed a graphics tile set and not actual. actual text characters. So it is a graphics tile set that just uses characters as pictures. But in my adventure to find out how to SSH into my PC to play Dwar Fortress, I found that there is an init config file setting for text mode.

Now, I haven't tried this yet. It could be completely unusable. It could not even exist anymore because I don't know what year that came from, but I found it in a guide. and so you can turn on text mode, in which case, I suppose the game actually plays in, like you said, probably end curses or something like that. Yeah, you're right.

You're right. If you go into the any file, I think it's in there when rendering mode, it can be 2D, and then I think there's one option that's just text. Cool. So that's true, Askey. So all of you purists out there who are going to give me trouble about using a tile set,

I just want you to know that you're using a tile set, too, It's just a really crappy one. And if you want to be hardcore, you've got to switch that to text mode. And then you can come at me. Cool. I would love to be able to do Tor Fortress over SSH on my Linux server. Sounds like another great way to suffer through playing the game. Exactly.

Never let it leave your life. It should always be there. But then again, couldn't you just let it run forever and just check it sometimes? because I know there's an option of like turning off the pause stuff. So when like something incredible happens, your game gets paused, right? You can turn that off in the in it file somewhere. And that plus letting it run on the server, wouldn't you be able to like extremely go into the direction of having a four, go for 200 years or something?

Because it like runs through the night if you want. Only if there's an auto labor system. I suppose Now you're talking my language I don't know I feel like the game provides enough logic that you could craft

an auto labor system through the regular menus I mean you have the manager and you know through the manager you're able to tell your rules

make sure that you have this amount of drinks and this amount of food so you know they should be good they should survive according to the wiki you can even have

your military automatically travel to patrol your fortress? Really? Yeah. That is amazing. You can set points for them to travel between and do patrols, but I haven't experimented with that yet. That sounds complicated. It's kind of a thing that I, that's kind of the way that I judge the success of a fortress

or this is something I kind of decided on Rimworld on doing colonies, is how long will it survive without my input is kind of how good I feel about the colony or the fortress. And in this case, right now where I'm at with Dwar Fortress, I'd give it about 40 seconds before someone goes into a strange mood and can't find silk and kills everybody. We've all been there. Attention members and guests, Jack Dillon is the new manager of the Gilded Corridor, Guild Hall of Crafts Dwarf Guild, the Lacey Guild. It's located deep inside the halls of Sizuksum.

Come learn and enjoy fellowship. I suppose, if it means anything, I could place myself here a little in the group for the short time that I'm here anyway. I feel like my play style on Dwar Fortress is somewhere around Roland's level of perfectionism, especially with logic and stockpiles and stuff. Especially with stockpiles. You should see all the links on my stockpiles. Oh, man.

Are you really linking stockpiles to things, to workshops and stuff? All the time. Oh, I'm doing that now, too. I link stockpiles to other stockpiles. Yeah. That is a heroic effort. Thank you for your service. It's the only way to get my people to reliably make soap I've found.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. Okay. I'm also somewhere around Jonathan's level of experience. I haven't been to the circus. Actually, today's topic we're going to bring up at some point, I guess, is traps. And I have not really caught anything in a trap yet.

So, yeah, I just have my military dwarves go punch things if I need to, you know? And if they die, great, my pop cap goes down or my population goes down. I've got 20, like, hammer lords and mace lords and legendary spearmen. So, yeah, I'm having a little bit of trouble. trouble with traps, too. We'll get to that later, but, uh, yeah, I, I see, I actually see what you're doing in your fortress. And we kind of have to, like, talk about the amount of goblets you have there because it's terrifying. Um, no, no, no, no, they're all waiting sitting there to get traded onto the trading, uh, depot, uh, in, you know, later this month, whenever the, uh,

purchase up, but, so. What did you think about it? You see I'm at 20 frames per second. What's They look like stone. They are. I make mine out of lead, just so OSHA can complain. Nice. Massive aggressive, do you trade those to the elves? I should, I should. But I actually, I like the idea that I have lead goblets in my tavern for all the guests and everyone.

Vibing ancient room. If I had enough of lead, I would make one of those buckets, jugs instead of barrels. Oh, yeah, yeah, large pots, I assume. Potts. Trade those videos. Okay. Where were we before we started looking at my fortress? So we were talking about, okay, so I'm going to look at our agenda for today.

So we're going to next talk about our personal fortresses or fortress I, as they're known. Before we do that, perhaps that we should just skip that and go on to talking about the topic because we're 30 minutes in, around 30 minutes in, and I think that we're not. not going to have any problem, fill in the time. Ah, so you guys let me talk too much. No, no, no, no, no. No, absolutely not. It is good whenever we don't have to look for stuff to say. Ah, okay.

This is a conversational podcast. All craftsmanship is of the highest quality. I like that. You should actually take that and, like, put it in every single podcast, that is. Okay. I'll try that. So last week, Tony decided that we should talk about traps today. And Nathan felt that his expertise was high enough in traps that he should be the focus of the conversation.

Absolutely. Yeah. So traps are things where when something touches it, it outges them. Yes. Or it can also just catch them. True. It matches them emotionally. It does.

Yes. Everybody wants to be in a cage. Well. I have had a lot of spare cash lately. and I've been spending a lot of money on giant spiked balls and corkscrews and axe heads. Are we still talking about Door Fortress or is this? Yeah, same, same. This is your home depot shopping list.

You mean like in real life? You're actually building traps in real life. Yeah, what do you guys? I mean, are you cage traps or weapons traps? Because I did the Paradex Cicicicicerat. I wish I knew how to say that properly. I think that's right. All right. That's what it's spelled anyway.

We'll do it. We'll do it that way then. It's the way it's spelled. Oh, that always works in English. Yeah, so I followed that guide, and he's all about the discs, the serrated discs in there. And so I've just unquestioning followed that one for a while. And then I started experimenting with cage traps because they're ridiculously effective. Yes. You can have a rock or you can have a forgotten beast or whatever and anything. They're like, they're just so overpowered. It's like, why I want to do anything other than cage traps? trap. They're completely effective. You can capture a whole goblin army in cage traps.

Yeah, but you have serious downpoints to the cage traps and that is the pathing system because as soon as somebody gets trapped in a cage trap the millisecond that triggers, all dwarves

will try to secure the cage and rush in. So when you actually not have like a single rock or like a single large, terrifying animal, but like a whole goblin army and one goblin got caged, then half your fortress will try to secure that goblin, rush out, and get killed if you are not, like, careful about what you do and, like, closing off doors. Like, they'll all go in and try to take the cage and put it in the animal stockpile or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of annoying. Here's a question. Is that animal hauling if a goblin gets stuck in it? That is animal hauling, yes. I would just turn off animal hauling except for like two guys. How many animals are you really hauling? No, no, you would assume so, but it's not just animal hauling, I assume,

because it still happens when you turn that off. Oh. But it may also count as, you can stone me if I'm wrong, but it may count as like furniture hauling because even people that do not have animal hauling activated will try to get to that goblin. Did you just say you can stone me if I'm wrong? And has that been something that somebody's threatened to do to you before? I'm just like, because I've never heard that as a threat before.

No, it's, anyway, where was I? So the problem is... You were getting stoned in caverns, I guess. Shut up. When, for example, I really like building bridges, not for the sake of, building bridges, but for the sake of, like, getting them up. So my idiot dwarfs stay inside when a siege is happening. Because when I use cage traps, I really want to make sure that the goblin army is, like,

either repelled, dead, or caged before I even start going in there and, like, getting those cages. Yeah. A civilian alert also works, but if you forgot about that, you have civilians next. of the cages, and that will not be good for them. I've been using boroughs to keep them away, and that's been treating me pretty well, having not found any other better way to do it. Well, once you get into the military menus and you realize how alerts and civilian alerts work, everything becomes way nicer in a siege because you can tell all of your civilians to just

go hang out in the tavern or the bedrooms, and they won't do anything. they'll just stay there and your military can do whatever they want however they want however i have to warn listeners that have not tried that be aware that your dwarfs will not even leave the what is i called the borough um when they are hungry so they might actually starve when they don't have food or drinks yes that's why you put a refrigerator in the middle of the bedroom so that everyone can get up in the middle of the night and have a snack no like seriously like Getting your dwarfs into a tavern that actually has some drinks in it will suit them better than putting them into the bedroom where you have no drinks, even though they can't sleep there. But, you know, that's why I build a small tavern that has some drinks in it.

So I can, like, burrow them in there. And they still have something to drink if they don't solve. You know, I typically make a huge bug out, a huge, you know, attack-style burrow that encompasses all of the underground portions of my fortress. I have a couple of draw bridges that I use to close off the outside. You know, I tell them to stay inside, basically, and they can continue to work for the most part, as usual, while the soldiers are outside fighting. That's how I typically do it. That's pretty good. I use a very similar system where I have a double bridge system, meaning that I have my military in a secure place between bridges.

the goblins are outside of both bridges and my civilian population is inside both bridges. So the civilians can work while I can still open a bridge to release my military upon the dwarfs the goblins that are caught in my traps. So that's a very nice system, especially when you have the part where the military is training is the same part between the bridges. So you don't have to give a military alarm so they can still train before everything happens. But everything is like secure and walled off. That is very nice.

I like that. I do a similarly defensive thing with drawbridges, but I tend to build behind a waterfall, a very tall waterfall, usually at least 10 to 20 sea levels high. And my drawbridge will come out from behind the waterfall, which is split in twain by some structures of to make a mist generator for the entrance, because that's cool. And so when you're walking to my fortress, you walk from the other side of the river, across the river, through this waterfall. And then you have to go up a level into my actual fortress. Well, the hallway, before you go up a level, is kind of my security trap.

The drawbridge can close behind you. Floodgates will close in front of you. And then there's a channel or a column for water, a shoot, whatever. I can't think of the name, that will flood that entrance hallway. So not only will the drawbridge close and prevent people from getting in, but anyone who has gotten in will be drowned in my entryway. That's awesome. Nice.

Yeah, I like that. And that just gave me the idea of, this is a question that I had, I've not tried it. Can you hook up one lever to two different bridges? Yep. Yeah. Okay. So you have one lever that is controlling two bridges. One is a couple Z levels above the other one.

And you have them whenever they get opened, they interrupt a waterfall that's coming from a few Z levels above them. So that whenever they're open, when they're open, the waterfall is hitting the bridges. But whenever they're closed, the waterfall is being allowed to go on down to the walkway that's the entrance of your fortress. So that you can, anyone who's trying to get in there would have trouble because they would have to go through the waterfall. I don't know. That may or may not work. Yeah. with the shot Relax at Cleanodefs the golden plum tavern

Come enjoy the spirits and dance your troubles away and then collapse in one of our reasonably priced rooms All visitors welcome Well that's actually That whole subject I think is pretty relevant If we're talking about traps Because obviously the game has traps It has an item you can build

called a trap, but Dwar Fortress allows for so many creative trap designs that I would never fill a hallway with traps that required steel to make. That would seem like a waste of steel to me. I would rather make a pitfall out of floodgates.

Because you could capture 30 goblins and it costs you, what, 10 stone or something? And that pulls us back to Roland's Dwarven Toilet. Yeah, T.F. Dwarven Toilet, TM. It's a great thing. and you just chuck everything down there

and then you can't forget about it because the first dwarf toilet TM that I ever built was in a zomification biome. So when everything actually survives the fall, it doesn't matter because they're like 54 zombies down there. It's fine, you know, it's going to be dealt with. Do I have to clean it out? Like, bi-annually?

Yeah, sure, but, you know. So I did your toilet one time And I dug a big, you know, channel, you know, D-H thing, big round hole, redirected a rip and put my entrance to my fortress in there with floodgates and so forth. And then redirected the river into it, so it filled. So when a siege came, the whole thing made a pond over my entrance and no one could get in or out. And then I would wait for everybody to gather in there and then flood it. And then it wasn't quite deep enough to kill them.

And so they just kind of hung out there. So I opened my drain, which would let me out of the fortress again, which went down into the caverns. And it swept the whole siege down into the caverns where they didn't die. And they just lived forever in the caverns, sieging away at everything down there. So that was not my best attempt because then I didn't know what to do with them. I see. That's an interesting idea. Yeah.

I guess there were lots of problems with what I did. For listeners who may be new to the podcast, the Dwarven Toilet is trademarked by Roland because soon after he mentioned it, Krug Smash did a wonderful Dwarven Toilet Trap, which I will link in our show notes to the episode where he did that, which it was pretty cool, where he in essence trapped a bunch of goblins and then drowned them. It was pretty violent. Yeah, and to this day, I will pretend as to I gave him this idea. I'm not sure about it, but I will pretend until I die.

I did. Yeah. I mean, you know, the timing was very sus. It was. He had recently been on our, on our podcast. Yeah, and we talked about it. So we were on his radar. On the radar.

Hmm. Well, to be fair, I accidentally stumbled upon that idea. So I think it might be a little, uh, it's, it's, it's not a novel. It's not a novel idea. But, uh, I discovered it because, well, I don't really do the toilet thing, because I always have grates and I, you know, so creatures don't go through things. but I discovered it because I have farm floods. I have a lot of vertical shafts.

That's the word shafts. I have a lot of flood shafts on my fortress. In fact, it takes me several years to really get a fortress developed because I have to dig down like light shafts from my farms and stuff. Anyway, I have another flood shaft that floods my farm underground. And then I have drains that drain the water away. Into the caverns? No, unfortunately just into the river.

outside, but maybe one day. And I had a siege that managed to make its way across ice. They came in winter because they're smart, I guess, and climb up the gear mechanisms for my water mill to get into my fortress. And they got into my farm area because that's where my mill is. So I had to think fast. So what I did was I flooded my farm, but I flooded all the way to seven deep, to drown everything in the farm area.

Because they had building destroyers, so I couldn't just, like, close them off. So I let them in, and then I drowned them in my farm. And I discovered the magic that is trapping and drowning sentient creatures, because, you know, that's just a fun time. Oh, yeah. Has Roland written all over it? Yeah, but usually my traps are more spiky, even if they don't need spikes, I still do spikes, simply for, you know, the feeling of somebody getting, like, impaled upon a, still sitting spike on the floor that is like you know a mind cinema for me i love it yes speaking of spikes i have a question for you guys about that um how have you guys tried the pressure

trap spikes where you have like a pressure plate that puts the spikes up because i can't get that to work and i see that i see that our that our krug smash fella seems to do that pretty well and i've yet to make it work so is there a trick to it or how do you guys do that i mean it's user error you see you make a what they're called again pressure plate no no no no the spears you know like standing spikes uh-huh um you make those you you build them as a trap and then you make a pressure plate and then you link them it it you know like a bridge you just link them okay so if i build a spike um an upright spear or spike yeah and put that somewhere and then link that to a pressure plate, that really should work. Okay, so it was obviously user error. I'm going to keep,

I'll keep working on that. But you have to remember that the pressure plate has to be triggered once for the spear to like come out and go in again. So one trigger means like two actions. And secondly, you really have to be careful when linking several, several spears, because that could mean that somebody triggers the pressure plate while one dwarf is trying to like make more spears linked to the pressure plate happened to me it's not fun also if you put your pressure plate into a place where a lot of dwarfs go in and out for example you have one door in your tavern and you put the pressure plate in front of that and will trigger the spears continuously and that is very cool but you also have a problem of getting the pressure plate installed in the

first place well i think that the greatest idea combining everything doing some mildly genocidal trap brainstorming from what we've seen so far is taking a floodable hallway with an ominous flood shaft hanging overhead and lining the floors completely with spike traps so that you can trap the enemy in there and repeatedly stab them while they drown do they work underwater do do spike traps work underwater i suppose yes yeah they do we saw that in in someone's video our friend crug smash yeah he had some little trap the bottom of a well, and he threw something down a well, I believe, and stabbed them repeatedly in the well. Jesus Christ, it was the most brutal thing I've ever seen in the game. Now, that's the welcome committee. I need to do it still. That guy, after that one, I wanted to send him a message to just be like, are you okay, buddy?

Like, is everything okay? Like, you just trapped a video game character in a well for eternity, and you have a button that just pokes him so he bleeds occasionally. Like, are we good? Is that okay? Well, I guess, so the other thing you could do with traps, I haven't done anything really with traps. This was not the episode for me, but, you know, I'm trying my best. Another thing I've read you could do is use cage traps to pit enemies to dump them into pits.

Well, do animals get hungry enough to eat creatures that you dump in pits? No, sadly, I think so, no. Well, that's upsetting. So you can make a pit of wild boars and feed. goblins to them? No, that would be fun. Sadly, sadly you can't. You can make a pit of war crocodiles, though.

Ooh. Yeah. If you train them for it to be war animals, they will attack enemies. Yeah. Okay. And then you can't put the goblins in, and then they will have a hard time. But do remember to actually strip your goblins. Otherwise, you will have, like, armored goblins with weapons fighting against crocodiles.

Now, how do you do that? Because that's very important. Yeah, not easily. I'd love to hear Roland's methodology. Yeah, how do you strip your goblins? Well, I honestly just... Stop it. I just use the DF hack console command of strip-caged.

Oh, yeah, that makes things easy. Thank you. Somebody on the wiki said that there is a vanilla game option of stripping enemy. but I don't have the brain cells to actually pull it off so just use the automatic strip caged and then they dump everything they wear on the floor and your dwarfs can pick it up and it works good

because that way you can make sure that the goblins that you want to pit are not weaponized so they can't kill your superior crocodile crocodile army and like few swings well see that's why I was wondering about hungry boars because I could do away with corpse disposal as well as strip the armor from the inside by removing the goblin via boar maw.

That was my thought process. I was like, just eat the goblin out of the armor and then I'll wear it. Yeah, I wish that would be a thing that I think boars would just get scared because they're not war-trainable. So I got to get them hungry. Come on, time.

Make it happen. Yeah, it would be cool. you can actually make a large arena and then put large enemies like a giant or a cyclops in there and they would smash the goblins and you can actually give giants or cyclopses cool weapons you can just drop them and they maybe pick it up you know just let them run around until they pick up the weapon and then they smash like goblins with i don't know a sock a leather shoe whatever you give them you know like gladiator stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Is there an easy way to dump items and not creatures into a pit? Because when I go to the options, I think I only saw creatures, caged creatures. This gets into the...

You have a dump? A dump. But you can't just immediately dump over the edge. Don't you have to make some sort of retractable floor? No, well, the problem is with the dumping sentient creatures,

for example, goblins, do... Like, goblins or large animals, like, cyclops what is the plural of the cyclops cyclopsies cyclopians

yeah that's it cyclopians if you have those they will count as enemies of your fortress eternally it doesn't matter if they're being hauled or not but if a dude is

holding for example a goblin and they see a military dwarf of yours that military draw will immediately get called into action against the creature that is being hauled, even though the creature itself right now is peaceful and doing nothing. So they will jump the creature and try to kill the creature,

thus breaking the creature free of the hauling action and making it into a real enemy that can fight back. Okay. So hauling goblins is not a good idea. What I usually do is just, you know, the whole like putting a cage, to a lever and then unplugging the cage so it pops up and the people can run out and when the arena is like done

everybody is like dead I send either my military in to actually clean the rest of the survivors or just my civilian crew to like clean it up again and retrieve the cages again because that is the most secure way how you get arena but you don't get like

people trying to hold dangerous animals through your fortress because it doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Gotcha. So I think Tarn Adams has some work to do. We want caged creatures to give happy thoughts to people who hate them instead of making them want to kill them. And we need boars and other wild animals to become desperate if they get hungry enough and willing to eat armed creatures. That's what we need in this game for real. Yeah, but then again, the most animals don't actually eat. Like, if they're not grazes, they don't eat.

You know, you can put, yeah, it is. What am I doing with my, with my goblets? What am I supposed to bury their corpses or leave them outside to be ugly? Like, they don't deserve to be buried, and I don't deserve to have to look at them. No, no, no, no, no. You have to think about it positively because you can put out a field of goblin corpses in front of your, fortress entrance to show that you are

a fortress that is able to repel a goblin siege. Yeah. And it is also giving like a lot of happy thoughts to your dwarfs when they go outside, you know? Gotcha. Well, I bet you...

We need to make totems out of your goblin skulls and set them outside the entrance to your fortress. God, I wish the mudding community is going to be pretty cool. When this hits the steam release days, which I think we've just crossed year two since Steam was released. I believe it was released in, or it was announced in,

in what, like, March or April of 2019. This segment is brought to you by Logan Hastings, creator of Zizkanon-Yul, the reticent mirrors in the city of Sizuksum. The reticent mirrors is a green glass armor stand, decorated with table-cut green glass gems and encircled with bands of table-cut precious fire opals. All craft's worship is of the highest quality. Well, here's another question I have about how things might work.

And I understand these, like, are all directed naturally at Roland, so because he's the guy who's going to answer all these. Oh, I appreciate the vote of context, sir. No offense to the other guys. Thanks, funny. Roll has been on the wiki more than once. I can tell. But anyway, so how does seeing ugly things work such that I might be able to make a moat of bodies that only incoming people see and not people in my area? So like, let's say I have a field. I channel out a moat. I fill it with the corpses of my enemies because what else do you fill moats with water? And then you put a bridge. So they have a field. So they have a lot of moat. I fill it. I fill it with the corpses of my enemies. Because what else do you fill moats with water? And then you put a bridge. So they have to walk across a field of their decaying brethren. But I don't want to see it because that's ugly, right?

That's for them. Can I just put like a wall up? I think you can do a pathing, you know, or you can set the walkways or you can like set a path for your people to take. And I forget the Kafka S layer of keys that you have to do for that. And then fortifications maybe. D-O-R to restrict pathing, I think. but yeah yeah yeah they could be a i mean i would approach it this way you have either the option of

actually making the corpse mode a thing further outside of your fortress so it's like quite a way outside of your fortress but it's still quote unquote inside so you have like walls so every every person has to go through that for example uh traders right traders come with wagons wagons need at least three blocks wide path so to make sure that the trader is taking that path make it at least three blocks wide and then

a like a door in the back can be like one block wide making traders only take the long path because only the long path is getting them to the depot. Okay. You can also like just

tell your dwarfs to never take the big road by restricting it, yes but what I noticed is very good you can make the long way as long as you want because the traders have to take it and the back door

is literally just a back door with like two traps in front but you lock it every time your dwarfs don't have to go out so for example if you don't have fisher or hunters or whatever you just lock the door because nobody has to go out the back door and everybody that is coming in has to go through the corpse mode

that would be one way of doing it yeah okay okay so what's the distance do we know the distance then that dwarfs can see things is it like 10 tiles no it's like it's like adventure mode seeing so it's not even 10 tiles it is around 5 to 7 depending on how good their perception is but you know if you if you make it like 10 tiles away from you actual fortress. Nobody will probably see it. It's a great idea. I really love it. I'm going to try it myself. Gotcha. I got plenty of corpses. I usually get populations really fast, so my goblin sieges will come in pretty quick. I have 140 dwarves in my current fortress, and it's only

three years old. So it's like, I don't know, like I might have a lot of bodies. Justin Lothelma offers shelter for your tired spirit at the warm abbey. Shrine to Suvers. The Saffron Orange of Sparks. Join Mayor Coble and Jeninale in celebrating the works of Suvers on the large dance floor. All visitors are welcome. There's a couple things that I want to talk about real quick. We'll start wrapping up. I want to follow up on the room values conversation that we had the other day.

So if you weren't in for that, we were talking about how do you turn an opulent bedroom into a royal throne room into a royal throne room? And one of our folks in the live stream mentioned that you should, like, plate the floor with gold. Yeah. That's how they usually do it. So I did do some looking to see if you can find out the actual value of a bedroom. And I believe that the answer to that is no. But there is a thread on the Bay 12 forums. It was started in like 2012, so it's relatively old.

But a lot of the stuff that's in it still makes sense. He did some Dwarven science to find out the ways that you can make. room values increase to go from, you know, like an opulent to a royal throne room, for example. One of the things that I thought was interesting is that gaps in walls apparently significantly, even if there's a door in it, significantly increase the amount of things that you need in a room to take it from one quality level to the other. So what they did was they had no doors in any of the bedrooms, and they only had them accessible with stairways above and below.

And that is what I did. So I want to show you, yeah. I will put a link to this picture. I'll put it on our website. And the people who are in the live stream can look at this on the live stream. But if you look at the live stream, you will see my bedroom system now that is, it is very neat. So if you smooth the floors, you engrave them all. And my mayor, he's not quite got a royal throne room yet, but he has definitely got an opulent throne room.

so it's and it makes things look really neat if you do it this way so oh i see i think that's really i think you're onto something there man yeah that's interesting yeah also also the uh while i think that they the visual continuity in the game where you have gems embedded in the walls uh i don't think they look as good but they do apparently increase the value quite a bit yeah yeah that's true building everything out of gold i think helps too so good chairs Well, in my current fortress, I have a lot of gold. So my mayor's bedroom is made of gold. But I found a better way to make targeted royal bedrooms.

Like, let's say you just need your royalty to have royal bedrooms, build a pedestal, and put an artifact on it. Yeah. I've done that. I mean, a single artifact can often make a bedroom with no decoration whatsoever, not even smooth stone royal. I have a $100,000 dwarf bucks coffer in the bedroom of the person who made it. And it's like, all right, royal bedroom.

Oh, just by putting that really expensive or like artifact thing. Okay. So right now my mayor's quarters are an opulent mayor's quarters. So I just put a pedestal in there. It is a master pedestal that has been decorated with lots of gems. I'll take a look at my noble screen and see right now. now the mayor's throne room is currently opulent. I'm going to assign one of the artifacts to it, and we will see a good one,

a real good, like a battle axe or something, you know, make it something edgy. But yeah, that's a great idea. I suspect that if I put my nicest artifact in there, my nicest artifact is... Can you find artifacts on the stocks? Precious Fire Opel Throne. I think that might be it. What's that? That's a great question.

Artifacts on the stock. On the Stocks menu, I don't think so. I think you have to hit capital L, don't you? You do. Yeah. That's the only way I found it. Stocks menu can be, feels a little limiting. Because even finding out like what food you have is not easy.

Yeah. Or maybe it is and I don't know. So that might be a question. If my bookkeeper could get his act together, you can tab to show each individual item by tabing modes in the stocks menu. If the bookkeeper has tracked it, I believe you need that to happen. and you can do that set like hardcore yeah if you knew that your your artifact is a battle axe then you could just go to weapons and hit tab and probably find it there i wonder if that would

give you any any luck well my most valuable artifact is a steel pick but it's currently being used by one of my squad leaders i can tell you right now i mean i've taken rooms that are just barely smooth and outdone my royal bedrooms just by putting a bracelet on a pedestal in it. And I do that to all my artifacts now. As soon as someone starts a mysterious construction, I assign them a specific bedroom and install a pedestal so I don't lose that message and forget who made it. Interesting. I'll install it.

I mean, then again. I have a museum that I have a whole bunch of pedestals in. And every time that an artifact is made, I move it immediately to the museum. Yeah, same. You should make a statue garden too. What does statue gardens do? Yeah, you can assign them to either other locations or to specific people and people start to hang out in them like an actual museum and like going around like going

wow, cool stature. It can be good, but I have yet to see a lot of people actually doing it. I suppose it might have something to do with people being art-inclient. not because somebody that is an art incline might not go to a museum that often. But it can boost moods like a lot. Yeah. Well, that's actually

exactly the, your impression is exactly what I imagine people at art museums talk like. Yeah. Like, wow, stature must be like Roman Gothic yeah. Oh, here's an idea.

Can you feel the octagonal mood swinging that this statue inhibits in its watchers. I believe it's re-contextualized the dampness of the fort. It's turned the dampness into dankness and everyone likes a dank fort. Then again,

about the artifacts, you have to be lucky to actually get a really good artifact. Because if you're like children just continue to crank out bone artifacts that are worth like the same amount of unsubstableness. smelted gold ore

that what are you going to do with that like put it in a in a room is like nice but you know it has no effect so I usually hope for actually good artifacts

but when I get them like I once got a clear opal table so that was pretty cool and obviously I put that in my tavern because communism and we have to share not kidding

but I felt that was me? No. Appreciate it, brother. Thank you, Comrade, for speaking up. That was a good question, though. I like it.

But I felt that just putting this really cool, really expensive artifact into a room for just one person would be kind of a waste because I can potentially like elevate the mood of everybody in the

tavern in the fortress instead of just one person. but maybe I just don't care enough about my royalty. I don't know. They usually just get smoothed rooms and like an extra bed or like extra chests and like, yeah, come on, stay silent. Now, that's absolutely true. I don't play for optimism or optimism, optimism.

I don't optimize my fortresses. I like saw on Jonathan's Fortress here, I would have mined away all of those different colors and replaced them with stone block walls of the same color and just not engraved anything because I'd rather my dwarfs suffer with unengraved walls than have to look at a bunch of purple blotches. So when I'm thinking about stuff like that,

I'm thinking, what makes sense to me? That guy made the artifact. He deserves it in his room. Everyone else? No, they've got some gold statues in the tavern. They can go gawk at those. I suppose, yeah. But then again, like crystals or like ore in the walls,

can really elevate the mood of everybody that is living around that. So, you know, it can be good, especially if you have, like, a grumpy one that you put into a room that has, like, a lot of crystal in the walls. Hey, I just put in the pick. So let's find out, as we're wrapping up here, what the value is of this room now. It is still opulent.

Yeah. Well, it wasn't a very, I mean, you need, like, a tens of thousands of gold. I think item to do a major change. This one was 100,000 something, so maybe it just hasn't had time. Yeah, it's my, it's my pick, the steel pick. It is worth. Steel pick.

It is worth 166,800. Whoa. Jeez. I wonder how my room. What's the most recent artifact? Better defend that fortress, my guy. Oh, you know what. Somebody's going to come take it.

What's that? Maybe items on pedestals don't change the value, and I'm only thinking of artifacts. that are installed as their own structure. So, like, the coffer I was talking about, that is its own building. It's not on a pedestal. Well, if I would have put a coffin in there. If I put one of my art,

I've got like three artifact coffins for whatever reason. They're morbid. But, uh, yeah, if I put that in there. Okay. So in order for me to not have to spend the entire next week editing this podcast, I think that we should start wrapping it up. I do, too. Awesome.

Thank you. Okay. So we're going to skip the mailbag. And, uh, we'll take care. So thank you, everybody who's for writing in. If you want to send us a message or if you would like to be on the podcast, you can send us an email to Urist at D-F-R-R-Table.com. That's U-R-I-S-T-T-R-I-Table.com. Nathan, thank you so much for joining us and talking about dwarf stuff.

Yeah, thanks for having me and letting me ramble here and there. Hey, it was awesome. Absolutely. About monstrous creations. What other wonderful kinds are there? None that I know. It is, and I forgot to date stamp last time. It is also a Memorial Day weekend, 2021.

It is May 30th, 2021 as we record this. If no one else has anything that is pressing and needs to be brought up today, I think we're going to wrap this one up. What do you say, guys? Wayno. Yeah. Sounds good to me. Until next time, this has been Dwarf Fortress Rwai.

RONTable and have a great week. See you later. See ya. Until next time. See you, everyone. Attention members and guests, Potato Bomb invites you to the Golden Mines, Grand Metal Smith Guild Hall of the Hall of Boulders, located in Suzuki. Come learn and enjoy fellowship.

This has been the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRontable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments. section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwar Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. You can find video content on our YouTube channel, and you can send us an email at Urest at DFRoundtable.com. That's UR-I-ST at D-F Roundtable.com. Please consider donating to the creators of Dwar Fortress at Bay12 games.com. If you'd like to help support this podcast, you can find us at patreon.com

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