Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 53: In Which Cheese is Considered and Mail is Read

Episode Date: June 20, 2021

This episode follows up a few threads from previous episodes. And we also cover some listener email and comments. It's a bit shorter (and a bit more chaotic) than usual because due to scheduling issues, we recorded two episodes on the same day. Another consequence of this is that there will be no live-stream next week. But we should be back for another livestream recording on July 11th. Kruggsmash Fun with Minecarts videoDev News: BeekeepingSupport Dwarf Fortress at Bay12Games.comSupport Dwarf Fortress Roundtable on Patreon

Wisconsin, birthplace of Dungeons in Dragons is the featured state of the day. Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Round Table, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. Welcome back, guys.

So last time when we had Nathan on, I think that we were talking about using text mode. I successfully successfully got that going. It's actually pretty cool. It runs much crisper, much more responsive than running it

directly on Windows, surprisingly. Yeah, well, that'll do it when you strip out all of the fancy gougas, you graphics-loving kids. Well, not even that. Well, it may be the graphics. You know, we were talking about the fact that

even Askey mode, whenever you're running just natively, is a tile set, that it runs over SSH more responsibly than even Vanilla Dua Fortress does whenever you don't change any settings. So all I did have to do was change the in the init. text file that's in the, I think it's the home folder slash libraries, something. There's a file in there somewhere in a folder called init. So you just go in there and you change that. And it tells you all the options that you have for your for your different text modes but yeah and different graphics modes and for fun in there you can also change stuff around so i found in the constant challenge that i have playing

dwarf fortress on a mac you can make edits in there and change things to like i think it's like frame buffer or something and that can improve sort of the lagginess of the ui so all sorts of fun you can have with that interesting with that any frame buffer that sounds so scary frame buffer Yeah, I don't know what it does. Would that be like it's setting up the screen draws in a virtual screen and then popping it all at once, like graphics programming? Sure. That's exactly what it does.

Absolutely. I have no idea. Did you say that you have done text mode on your Mac before? Yeah, yeah. I've done a bunch of those because there were just challenges getting it to run. And when I had that new Mac with Apple Silicon on it for a while, I was doing that. worked pretty well, and I've played around with the text mode on Linux a little bit. But yeah, it's like if you enjoy playing Dwarfortress in full Aski mode, then I would say,

why wouldn't you use text mode? Yeah, I think it might know what I mean. It's compelling to me. I don't know why. Also, I like Unix. So maybe that's why it's part of it. Yeah. Last episode, whenever we had Nathan on, a great episode, we'll have to have him on again.

sometime soon. Why not? And yeah, why not? We also were talking about I lost my damn train of thought. What were... So we were talking about text mode? Yeah.

Or did we transition from that? I was in the middle of trying to transition from that. We were transition. Okay, so I'm going to set you up for a transition. Well, that was a great discussion on text mode, Jonathan. What else were you thinking about talking about today? Let me look back at the notes. That's not helpful.

I'm trying to pull them up, too. I'm like, where the heck is this? stuff. After our last session, you know, we were trying to make some opulent throne rooms into royal throne rooms. And I believe that that is the case. For whatever reason, the algorithm does not count the value of the thing on a pedestal when counting the style of the throne room.

So what it does is it calculates the value of things that are built there proper. So it would count, I think, the value of the pedestal, but not the artifact that's on it. However, whenever I put a artifact chest into the room, then it became a royal throne room just fine. So I would say that that's probably like a very minor, minor bug. But it's a good thing to keep in mind when you're trying to prop whenever you're trying to prop up the value of some rooms. Go ahead. That is super interesting. That makes a lot of sense because I'd put artifacts in rooms and I'm like, look, dude, you've got all of the artifacts in this fort and you still think your room sucks.

What is going on? I'm about to throw him into the pit, and it's really, it's just a bug and I almost killed the king for it. That's because you gave me a dilapidated wooden pedestal to put this, you know, this incredible, you know, the arkinstone on, right? The elf toenail crown or whatever. God, I had one of those one time. What the hell? Wait, what? Has science gone too far?

Somebody, somebody had made an elf toenail crown. And I thought, you know. That's disgusting. Can we talk about that? That's not okay. Like, it's just, that's just a bridge, too. You know, I think I was asking one day why Dwar Fortress on Steam is like, you know, you have to tell it that you're older than 18 or 21 or whatever.

And now I know why. It's because of all, Tony L. Crowns. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely bad. I'm not like the bloody combat where you can, like, decapitate people. The head sails off in an arc. Okay. Fair enough. That's probably grim. Yeah. Well, that and the puritanism of the American society when it comes to alcohol.

So, you know, it's like the dwarves are knee-braided all the time. Yeah, Roland, I don't know. But yeah, no one in the U.S. drinks alcohol. We banned it in our Constitution back in the 20s. And so, yeah, we're just a dry nation, basically. Honestly, if I... Oh, didn't I tell you? We repealed that in 1930 or so. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, you can drink again.

Well, I haven't gotten that far in the history book. I'm just into the sort of like early 30s, so I'm glad we got all that war business out of the way. It's okay. I've got a speakeasy setup in my basement. Okay, good. Yeah. I don't want any spoilers, but I've been making mushroom wine over the pandemic, and I feel like it's turning out pretty well. Sorry, I think that we interrupted you, Roland.

What did you say? No, I just wanted to say that I would have believed. that if I didn't spend some time in the US. So I know you have alcohol, but the quality of your beer is like a different discussion. We like to call it American Swill.

Yeah. It's more like water. There is good beer here. It's just usually not produced. Well, it depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for water, oh, we just lost Tony. Oh. So we have temporarily lost Tony. I think that he will

be back in a moment. Attention members and guests, Mr. Gutsi welcomes all stoneworkers of the Guild of Spines to their new Guild Hall, the Walled Avalanche. While there, be sure to admire the masterful granite table created by Kell Regingis. Come learn and enjoy fellowship. I did catch what he said there. He's back. Hey, sorry, can you guys hear me now? Yes. Can you great? Yes.

That was very weird. All of a sudden, an error message popped up, and I couldn't hear you guys anymore. Hmm. Maybe sad. So what I was saying is if you are looking for good beer, you can find it in the States, but it's almost always going to be done by a macrobrewery or by someone's home brew setup. The major beer manufacturers, you know, if you are looking for something that you can drink like water, then American beer's fine. Grocery store beer is pretty bad.

I went to Belgium one time, and I walked into the grocery store and I thought, oh, I'll just buy myself some beer because I'm at the grocery store in Belgium. And I know Belgians make great beer. And I was just, I ended up not being able to make a decision because both sides of the aisle were filled with like the best beer you could possibly imagine. And it was all like less than a euro. And it was like overwhelming for me. I just, I came out with nothing. And my wife's like, why didn't you buy beer? And I was like, I have to go.

I can't cope. So, yeah. Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk on beer. Yes, it's very close to, like, dwarves and stuff, so it fits. You know, we are talking to a German, and, you know, Germans are known worldwide for their beer. And sausages. True. Of various kinds.

If for no other reason, I need to visit Germany so that I can experience the sausages. I love sausages. Yeah, I think they do that pretty well. Let's all meet in Wisconsin. Whoa, we got way off track there. We did get a little off track, but that's okay. Actually, though, beer and alcohol, they're fine for subject matter on tour fortress roundtable.

That's right. Dwarves love beer. Hey, and mead. How have you guys done, how are you guys, have you guys done mead? I have never, never set up anything with bees. But that's some really neat looking stuff that, uh, that Tarn posted earlier in June on the uh the steam update stuff did you see the pictures of the hives and stuff be such a tease tarn tarn all these glorious screenshots getting everybody so excited buddy we are looking forward

to this release i don't know what to think about the user interface there there's the section with checkboxes that say things like hive with a checkbox beside install colony when ready and gather any products it looks pretty cool Yeah, I mean, it's pretty much the same that we have right now, but you can actually click it with a mouse. I think it's actually even like the same text. They didn't change that at all. Oh, okay.

But it's cool. I like the beehys because they have this like, how you say this, like grunchy fantasy bee feeling to them. Fantasy bee feeling is the name of my new band. Fantasy bee feeling. Yeah, write it down, people. You know, honestly, I really hope that in the future of Dwarf fortress, I might be able to put bees in, like, beehives and actually use them,

not just for, like, the fun of it. Because right now, I just do bees because I can't do bees, but not for, like, actually, like, having any kind of stuff working with it. Like, wax working? Who? Do bees or not? Not dubies, that is the question. Zah is the master tailor of Bogzosh Moos, the Brigandah Fungi, a sleek giant cave spider silk vest.

All craft's dwarf ship is of the highest quality. On the vest is an image of dwarves in precious fire opal. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of slapams by the buff tomb of the pick of ramparts in the early spring of the year five. You can actually bring cheese into the United States from foreign countries, just to put that out there. But I don't know about the export rules for cheese.

Yeah, but no, like, Kinderang. Yeah, if you're not selling it, it's... The King has made a mandate. No export of cheese allowed. The cheese list. You will get on the cheese list. All right. Back to the show.

Do you guys ever make cheese? Have you ever done a cheese fort? Oh, yes. I have never made cheese in my fort. So what's involved in making cheese? Animals and patients and green grass. Most of patience. Yeah, mostly patience. Really? Why green grass? The animals that make the cheese eat that. And if they don't have enough access to it, then they don't make milk or they'd starve to death. When people talk about milking cats for cat cheese, is that just BS? I don't think you can milk cats, can you? No, no, they don't have the, is it like milking tag? Anyway, the tag, they don't have that. Like, only very few animals in the game actually do have it, which is sad.

So you can't milk everything, but you can milk, for example, pigs. So you can make pigs milk cheese. I think you can get that in the real world. Yes. So there is one animal that you wouldn't need the green grass for. If you're making just, you know, hog cheese, then, you know, pigs don't require grazing land. So you can raise them, you know, in the basement of your fortress. You know what?

Pigs don't require grazing land. Is that true? Yes, that's true. Yes, that's true. Well, damn. Well, pig cheese for it. Here we come. Yes.

I'm actually going to start getting pigs into this fort. Yes, there. It is very viable. And if you slaughter a fat pig, it gives so much meat. Also, they reproduce like capybarras. It's, woof. But if you think about it from an economy perspective, you could get cheese from some of them. You could get bacon and, you know, other pig products from another one.

But I guess you do risk having a totally not kosher fort. so that's okay I think that's okay okay so can you train things as war animals no but you can definitely mold that in

that is absolutely possible well you know if that's the case you could also mod in that you could make cats milkable sure sure I mean when we talk about modding you know there is no like point in stopping

you can also make like a dragon's milkable dragon milk cheese the epic quest of getting my hands on dragon milk cheese oh that sounds fun yeah a crog smash i had the idea first you heard it here first did he make a did that guy make a a dragon milk for no but i think he's he's off like playing with like robots and stuff now i think so i think you've got some time because he's he's playing with missile lockers or something

well we'll know where he gets his ideas if we come back uh And we have the first fortress that he comes when he comes back to Dwarven lands has, you know, milkable dragons. Then we know. Then we know. So I've just researched it. We don't drink pigs milk, apparently, just to, you know, put it bluntly. It sounds like it's disgusting. Watery. Humans?

Yeah, humans. I think pigs drink it to be fair. And dwarves do. I don't want to milk shame anybody if they do like it. But yeah, it sounds like it's watery and disgusting and gamey. So really, everything you don't want to milk to be. Yes. We got the question here, right?

What would be the most economical animal in dwarf fortress while we had the discussion about using all of the animal? And I do think it's like either llamas or apuckers, because you can slaughter them for meat, you can share them for wool, you can milk both of them. and I think the llama is a bit better because it's a bit larger and gives a bit more meat but they grazes so you have to have like some kind of pasture

it's not like pigs you can like throw the poor pigs into like a can you have grazing areas in the in the caverns is there any way to have a grazable yes like the

okay so that's an option then yes like the the fungi and stuff that counts as like eatable stuff for grazes. However, not every tile has that and the overworld

has like on every tile there's basically grass. So like an overworld pasture is or it has to be not as big as like an underworld pasture. But it works. It can be done. So I do have a question about that. So whenever

I break into the caverns, eventually almost every stone floor is covered with I guess it's fungus, moss, whatever. Because have you noted that whenever you break into the caverns, I guess the fungus spores spread out of around your fortress and you end up with fungus or moss or something growing everywhere? Is that stuff grazable?

The stuff is growing everywhere? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. That is also very much grazable. And it doesn't have to be when you break into the caverns, I think. But I might be wrong about it because I... I know exactly what you're talking about. But, for example, my kitchen is far away from, like, the whole cavern stuff

and still has, like, moss going on. But you can, if you let it sit for a while so that moss and shrooms actually accumulate, then you can put, like, horses in there. I tried that once before. Cool, cool. So. Yeah, I've done that, and it got eaten. Something came and ate everything.

So it was bad experience. Cavern, like something flew in. Some forgotten beast flew in and ate everything. So that was sad. So do be careful in the caverns because remember they go up. And so if you have a flying thing and you have a little pen for your animals, the flying thing can come over and eat them. Yes.

And sadness. Sadness prevails. Ah, yeah, didn't think about that. So you're talking about the llamas. So can you train llamas as war animals? What are the animals that can be trained for battle? We've got dogs. Oh, my God.

That is a good question. I only know about dogs. I think rhinos, elephants, and not all bears, I think, just grizzly and polar. I'm pretty sure I have a black bear and I can't war train that. So you can train rhinos for warrants. I'm pretty sure you can. Can you? Because I have a couple of male rhinos.

I'm just waiting for the elves to bring a female. mail, so... What about rabbits? No. War rabbits. No. Wasn't that a Jefferson Airplane song? War Rabbit, yeah, it's one of their best.

I like War Cavie, the sequel. It was really good. What if you could do War Cavies and you could, you know, it'd be like that, would you rather face one cabby-sized dragon or hundred dragon-sized cabbies? Well, technically, I would take the dragon-sized cavee because dragon-sized... is like a wonky definition since when the dragon is like hatching, it's about as small as a cat. This segment is brought to you by Brendan Poole, creator of Ruth Oshamesh,

Distances Sprinkled, in the city of Suzuk-Sum. Distances sprinkled is a precious fire opal throne. All craft's worship is of the highest quality. It is encrusted with pear-cut precious fire opals. On the throne is an image of goblets in precious fire opals. Last episode, we also ran out of time to cover our mailbag. So, why don't we take a look at the mail that our users have sent to us? You know, you need to edit in here?

What's that? You've got to edit in that you've got mail. No, don't do that, sorry. No, I do like that idea. I was just thinking copyright. I figured that time war. Yeah, I bet AOL is hot defending that trademark. That's, boy, I bet they lose billions each year on that one.

You know, the thing is, I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not. I don't even know myself, to be honest with you. I don't know what's going on here. Like, I just show up. If you want to send us email and ask us a question or make a suggestion or just tell us how wonderful or horrible we are, Feel free to do so. It might be time to see professional help.

Send us an email at Eurist at DFRoundable.com. That's UR-I-S.T at D-F Roundtable.com. And you can also leave a message on the episode of your choice on the website. Honestly, I probably will have a better chance of catching it if it is coming in through the email because I only go back through the website to check for new comments a couple times a week where I'm looking at the email pretty much every day. So anyway, a person named Jonathan, not me, wrote in and indicated whenever we were covering our stockpile episodes, a couple of things that we missed out on were quantum stockpiles

and mine cart aided stockpiles. I have used a quantum stockpile before, but that is, for whatever reason, that's one thing that I kind of think of as, you know, a step too far in cheating the system. Have you guys used quantum stockpiles before? So for everyone to let anyone know, a quantum stockpile is, in essence, a dump that you put, but you are purposely putting your things that you don't want to dump but are actually wanting to use in the dump so that you have an infinitely large tile, in essence. So, have you guys used those before? I did, but I don't regularly because, I mean, it's sort of solving a problem I don't have. Yeah. I mean, it depends on what you use it for.

My forts are fairly large now because I just have the processing power on this PC. So I kind of like, how? Brag, yeah, but I splash out with my stockpiles simply because now I can see stuff better and I don't have to like put it on small tiles and stuff. But I used to do a lot of ammunition quantum stockpiles because ammunition was always like something that annoyed me dearly. You know, that's a good idea. The ammunition is a place where I don't think that I would consider it cheating. You know, I guess it's because I always wanted to use it. If I needed it, it was with stone.

And part of me is like, you know, if you collect so much stone, you should have problems storing it. So, but ammo, yeah, ammo would be a great way to do that. However, it's not readily accessible in a quantum stockpile. Is it, don't you have to? Oh, yeah, it's a pain in the neck. Yeah, you have to have to actually manipulate the stockpile to, the stockpile to, to, like, reclaim the stuff, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. I found it, I found it kind of challenging micromanagey, so I gave up. But we didn't cover that on our last episode when we could have. Also, mine card a dig stockpiles. Yeah, I've still never. I've laid down a few tracks. And I think that I got a mine cart moving once just to make sure that I did it. But I am not to that advancement level yet, I don't think.

Oh, yeah, mine cart. It's tricky. Yeah. This, Jonathan, not me, said that he uses a mine cart loot, apparently, to deal with his refuse and corpses so that they don't have a problem with myasma. Oh, sounds useful. Crug smashed a lot of mine cart in some of his earlier videos. But I just like you, Tony, and the quantum stockpiles. It's just not something that I've run into really needing yet, I don't think. yeah the mine cart stuff's pretty neat but yeah with with quantum stockpiles I think where I

I mean I used it as a trash dump more than anything else because it served that purpose very well but otherwise yeah the otherwise you're just kind of in there having to forbid and un forbid and so you can guys because you can go in and un forbid things when you need it and then they go grab it and put it in another stockpile but then maybe there's this whole other layer of like 3d chess that people are playing with stockpiles kind of like what Nate was talking about where he's like I feed this stockpile with this thing. And I guess his video talked about that. If you guys watched it, it was pretty awesome. But it was like, this stockpile

feeds this thing. And then this workshop takes and puts here. And it was like incredibly efficient and impressive. So maybe there's some way to do that kind of stuff with it. I don't know. I'd be really curious. So if anybody has cool ideas that

you're listening right now and you're like, guys, you don't get it. How can you not see? This is what the benefit of the stock point-up stockpile is. That'll be awesome. Tell us about it. Yeah. absolutely for favor thanks uh thanks jonathan for sending in the email stephen a riddley sent in a email saying that yeah he agrees that the transition from rimworld to dwarf fortress that we had talked about in previous episodes is uh seems like

rimworld is a is a nice gateway drug for dwarf fortress it does have that aspect to it yeah it's it's good that way but uh he also said oh so we were talking about now i think that this was before our episode with Nathan. But we had also talked about setting up the text mode stuff and remote playing of Dwarfortress. And apparently there's an app out there. It's an iOS app that you can get apparently at the Apple store called Dwar Fortress Remote. And it is a, it sounds like it's a subscription service, but you run.

to control yours. What's that? You can set up an instance of Door Fortress that you control and you can control it. I don't know that you have to pay a subscription, but at least you used to have to. Okay. Oh, so you've done this before? I have, yeah. Yeah, very briefly.

Cool. So, yeah, it's... Check it out. Door Fortress Remote, and apparently it's got the Space Fox tile set on it. So what is it? Like, you just kind of do like a remote desktop session or like a remote desktop session or like a terminal services session or something into the server?

The way it used to work, I don't know, unless they've done something special with it recently. Yeah, basically you'd set up, you'd unpack a tar file or whatever on your machine, and it would be an installation of Door Fortress. And then DF Remote was basically just an iOS client that you could use to play Door Fortress, and you were just sort of controlling that instance

that you had on your machine. So you'd have to leave your machine up on the same network to be able to play it. And I'm sure it's cool. But at the time, I found it challenging from the UI perspective, because my phone is not very good like that. I feel like I'd want a keyboard to play Door Fortress. And without a keyboard, I feel a bit useless. But it's neat. So he said that he did it with his iPad, which probably would make it a little bit easier than a phone. Yeah. Yeah. And if you had, I don't know if, if, Maybe now it has its own sort of remote, you know, somebody's got like Door Fortress banks of servers or something. Maybe that works. I don't know. But I think I has to connect to your own machine. So, you know, figure out how you do that.

So if you make Dwar Fortress Remote and you like to come on this show and talk with us about it, send us an email. And we'll be happy to have you on and we'll go over what motivated you to do this. If you're not listening, then never mind. Yeah, so it looks like, yeah, it looks like they've got a hosted version of it, five bucks a month you can pay, and you can go wild. Five bucks a month, you can purchase a server subscription instead of maintaining your own server. You can upload and download your saving games at any time, and it includes a three-day trial period. So thank you, mefiki.com.

The developer is called MiFiki. I'm not sure how we say that, but there we are. All right. Thanks, Stephen Ridley, for sending the email in. And Robert G. sent a question and a suggestion, asking if we could do a talking segment where people submit their dwarf fortress stories and the group reads through their favorite ones submitted. Seems like we do that occasionally whenever people send in there. But I don't think we've made a segment out of it. Have we done that before?

If you send it, we will read. If you send it, we will read. read. So with this, Roland? Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yes. I hadn't heard you breathe in a while.

Still alive. Still alive. That's good to hear. Good to hear your voice, man. I don't know if you heard this. Roland is, this is day one without coffee. So he's, he's. That's fine.

Well, it's evening there, so you can go to bed soon. And then wake up and not make coffee in the morning. No, no, no. No, no. Well, it's, um, it's, um. Going well, it sounds like. Wow. Okay.

Thanks, Brain. Anybody else got anything that they want to cover today? I got nothing. No, not really. I believe it was a very comprehensive discussion on cheese, pig cheese in Wisconsin, so thank you all three. And llamas. And lamas.

And pigs. And their delicious cheese. Jeez. Oh, that sounds really nice. Okay, so until next time, this is your friends at Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, wishing you a happy fortress. See ya. Bye.

Blood Toast, new patron of the temple of the prime entanglement, invites you to come meditate and praise your chosen deity. The prime entanglement is a non-denominational temple with five musical instruments to accompany your dance of worship. All visitors are welcome. 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.

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