Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 54: Learning How to Play with Nathan from Paranoid Metroid

Episode Date: July 4, 2021

This episode we talk a lot about tutorial videos and other resources to learn how to play and improve your Dwarf Fortress skillsets. Thanks again to Nathan for joining us for another episode. Paranoid Metroid YouTube ChannelPerridexisErrant's DF WalkthroughThe Sixth Annual Dwarf Fortress Gladiator Tournament infoSupport Dwarf Fortress at Bay12Games.comSupport Dwarf Fortress Roundtable on Patreon

Sign up for the 6th annual Dwarf Fortress Gladiator Tournament is open now at the Dwarf fortress subreddit. Listen for more information in the first break of the show. Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we're welcoming Nathan back, who was on a couple episodes. ago. Greetings, Nathan. Hey, there he is. Greetings. Fantastic. Well, I enjoyed your video. So,

thanks for posting it. I thought that was really good. Oh, yes. I'm glad. I actually, uh, I, uh, I am working on another one right now. I just was on my computer doing some Kaden Live work and waiting for my introduction. Hmm. Well, awesome. Last time that you were in, Nathan, we didn't mention your YouTube channel because it was not quite off the ground yet. But since then, you have gotten your YouTube channel up and going. So you want to talk about that for a bit? Tell everyone about it. Sure.

I've got two videos out right now, and I'm about to release another one hopefully today. And I guess kind of my first target for subject matter was kind of going into detail about how the basics, what's normally considered basic and fundamental in the game, can be elevated to a more advanced level of game. and how important it is to take those basic concepts and perfect them because it really is like a foundational part. So stockpiles was the first video. And then work order management was the second video, both of which are things that you could just tell your dwarves to put things in a place or you could just tell them to make a chair or you could describe to your dwarves a more advanced, more self-sufficient way to run things.

So that's what I wanted to do. That is definitely one thing that I need to improve on, because I am still in the situation where I tell dwarves to build things and I tell dwarves to move things. Although, as we, I think we talked about it last time you're on, I have advanced my stockpile management a little bit more, but I still have never even used the manager for anything other than someone to occupy an office. us interesting yeah and actually some of the inspiration that caused me to to think of that as a video subject is because of how long it took me to get to that point despite having come from

rim world where I did all those things it still took me forever to start doing them again here in dwarf fortress I was like this is silly why as soon as I made a manager I was like why have I not done this before I've been wasting my time telling dwarfs one at a time to build coffers have either of you Tony or Roland used the manager to manage your production yeah I always do I really like it manager is a super cool time saver and I mean I use it in combination with the what do you call it the whatever it is alt W the DF hack thing the workflow manager I use them both but um you don't need to pretty good yeah um I mean I use it too like i i stopped using the normal uh workshops because the manager is so much easier um but

until a bit ago i was just using the manager as overview over all the stockpiles meaning that i still went in and was like i need now 10 doors please and put that in into the manager in instead of the normal workshops. But now I'm trying to get into the whole ongoing orders.

So my current fortress has a lot of dwarves and I try to keep them fed and like drunk with just workshop management. And it seems to be working fairly well

right now. Nobody has been starving. I have a lot. of drinks and I haven't touched the manager in like two years in game time now so I suppose it's going fairly good yeah there's a lot more I think you could do with it gosh it would be really cool somebody made a really helpful video to go through how only someone could do that I would totally watch it I think there's a this new YouTube channel out there called Paranoid Metroid.

No kidding. Yes. I think that, do you know anything about that, Nathan? Paranoid Metroid, does that sound familiar? Yeah, I've seen it. I've been visiting it fairly frequently right now. Yeah. That's great.

Actually, I don't want to, I feel like stockpiles have been such a sticking point for the last episode I was on and even some episodes before that. I heard you guys talking about them. So I don't want to stick us on it too long. But my next video is actually going to be about the difference between the refuse stockpile, the corpses stockpile, and the dump and garbage dump, and the difference between the three. Because I don't know how you guys approached that when you first started playing Dwar Fortress, but it was a huge point of confusion for me. So we've got the manager video now, and then I'm going to go kind of back to stockpiles for a little bit on my channel. to talk about that and help new people understand

why their corpses aren't where they want them to be. That's cool. I never had much problem with that because the way I learned was through the Dwar Fortress Wickey's Fortress Mode tutorial. And it, one of the first things that it does is have you build separate refuse

and corpse stockpiles, and it explains pretty well the difference between them. And because I never actually made it all the way through that tutorial, I still haven't made it all the way through that tutorial. I started it over and over again probably 30 or 40 times. So that part of it, everything that happened at the beginning of that tutorial got drilled into my head because I was almost brainwashed with it. But if anyone else is out there trying to learn tour fortress and they've had trouble with other ways,

I really recommend the Quick Start guide on the Dwar Fortress Wiki because it is really, really good. Indeed. Yeah, the Door Fortress wiki is an extremely expansive resource. It's actually something I touch on in a brief note in this video. It's a real short video because I got a lot of important stuff going on this weekend. But I touch for a second on how I use the wiki as a learning resource for my videos and how honestly, even in my videos, you should go check my work at the wiki because I don't make the videos by reading the wiki and then translating it into video form i'm actually just talking about

how i do things but uh for that reason the wiki probably has more information than i have to offer so it's always worth just going to the wiki and if they have a tutorial i haven't used it but new players could definitely benefit from that probably more than anyone's single video or or a small set of videos. It is very extensive, though, and it is perhaps overly detailed. So it just depends on what you want. So I've learned a lot from, from tutorial videos. In fact, the first time that I tried to play to a fortress, I was following along,

and gee whiz, I wish I could remember. We probably covered it in previous episodes. But it was someone's tutorial video about the first things that you do. do whenever you start a fortress and it was in vanilla df mode and it was all of the key sequences and stuff so um that's one way to do things uh another way is the wiki but the wiki can be overly detailed sometimes yeah i get a bit lost i love the wiki for um you know looking up things like what's a volcanic stone that won't like what's not going to what if i make my mechanisms out of this will it kill my dwarves or a volcanic magma

prove. That's the kind of stuff I like to look up there. I haven't really ever thought of it for tutorials. I just blindly followed and did exactly what Paradexis Arendt told me to do in his really brilliant walkthrough guide getting started thing. And so I don't, I don't question the master, guys. I don't question the master. It's a great, it's a great resource for answering the question, how do I do X? Because how do I make glass? How do I make soap? Yeah. Yeah, you're The wiki is how you do that, really. I mean, it's also fantastic for information dense topics where a video would have to ramble on for two hours to cover everything. For example, advanced world generation.

Oh, gosh. Oh, yes. I would never turn on a video to hear someone described to me all of the parameters of advanced world generation. That would be a headache, two hour long. headache and other things like armor as well. I don't want to listen to someone tell me what coverage each type of shirt offers. You know, it's way easier to go to the wiki and see the chart because it's an information dense subject. You just put your finger on something, which I think is really important, which is really good. What I like in a video is where you take a certain concept

and you're like, hey, here's how I do stockpile. And you just sort of walk through that. Like, I don't need to know, like you just said, like the wikis for that. I don't need to know every option of every permutation because, man, those are hard to watch and I can just read it on the wiki. But like videos that really hit the spot are the ones where it's like, hey, this is how I do this. And you showed something in like really clear way in like two minutes. I don't need to know all the parameters. Yeah. That was absolutely a concern of mine. In the first video as well about stockpiles, which actually I think comes up as my second video, because I transferred it over, but in my video about stockpile logic, it was a concern.

It was a bigger concern in my manager's work order management video because I could have talked for days about how all of the different purple text, the inequality text, work. I could have talked for days about the, you know, how to apply this to farming and how to apply this to cooking and how to apply this to clothing and all that stuff. But it was, I, I re-recorded thrice, three times. I re-recorded that thing because I was like, I don't need, people don't need to hear me talk about how to do everything. They just need to see me do something. And then they can go and they can go to the wiki and be like, well, he didn't cover what this specific line means, but that's easy enough to look up. And then, you know, apply it to my needs.

Yeah, the way she's overwhelmed, you know, you stop being informationally and start being overwhelming. And I think finding that balance is tough. Yeah, it is. The Arena Masters present the 6th annual Dwarf Fortress Gladiator Tournament. Registration is open now. The deadline for sign-up is 1,500 hours GMT, July 11th. Head to the Dwarf Fortress subreddit for the rules. The sun was slow.

setting in the arena city, shining upon the crowds of people waiting before the gates of the grand arena, looking forward to the opening of the gates, be it to register, to witness the new contestants, or merely to entertain themselves through watching the mass of sentient people of all stripes and forms. A shade amongst them moved quickly, trying not to be seen. Again was she at this square, blending in, keeping an eye on this forge, where leaving. legends rose. Heroes and villains lived their stories, with many of them ending in a brutal death. This blood sport was cruel beyond measure, and still equally enchanting, even to her. But it was not time for these thoughts. Slowly but steadily, the people grew restless,

demanding the arena to open quickly, but the ritual had its strict order, and it was not going to be disturbed due to impatient spectators. A few minutes passed in a cacophony of cries, laughter, and talks, before finally, a hooded dwarf, wearing the holy symbol of Armach, ascended upon the balcony, overseeing the entrance. They raised their hand, forcing the horde of spectators and gladiators' aspirants to quiet down. Then they spoke, their voice seeming to thunder across the entire city. while the sky continued to grow redder. The sixth annual Dwarf Fortress Gladiator Tournament is a friggin' amazing community competition.

Don't be a fuzzy wampler. Use the link in the show notes for all the details. So what you can do is have a second layer of videos or a second set of videos later. This is called like post-grad dwarf fortress. Yeah. I was thinking of like 202 or something. Yeah, yeah, a master's course. Yeah, I like that.

Yeah, do it. I love it. I didn't cover any quantum stockpiles or anything. I don't really use them. So I'm not qualified to cover them right now anyway. But those things could be covered in future video. Who knows? You know, you could have it basically say, you know, if you're watching this video,

then that means that you want the minutiae. Then you want to hear the details that are going to bore the common human being. But if you're here, that means that you want to know how long you should actually have the manager screen open to optimize your processor utilization

to make you have two more chairs in this fortress year. And I might go, you know, one of my videos might be about like how to keep clutter down and help frame rates. Although that's another thing. I don't know if I'm qualified to talk about because I don't often experience frame death,

but like those videos could be quite long and detailed, you know, if I choose for them to be and there's things like path finding and an upcoming video of mine is going to be, I don't know how far out this is. This might be after all these like advanced basics videos, but about vertical fortress design and that may go into detail about path finding or at least about distance calculation based on vertical fortress designs versus flat ones, and that could get really mathy. And I could spend 15 minutes just talking about the math on that.

But I don't want to yet. That'll be Dwar Fortress 202, not 101. Master's course. You could time that one with the steam release, so it gives you a couple of years to work on that. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, is that too soon? So what you're saying is you already have,

have a road map and we will judge you whether you get to that roadmap fast enough or not. Okay. Yeah. He's on Valve time. He's going to issue full refund to us. I'll refund your time back. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that.

I've never had a problem. I'm not sure why this is, but I've always been able to see three steps as Z levels being the same as three steps vertically and, or sorry, horizontally or whatever, on a plane in, in my fortresses. I think that the, the biggest issue with vertical fortress design, and this is actually something, despite me always doing vertical fortress design, is something that I still somehow get caught up on every time I start a new fortress, which is how do I organize my industries and my levels to be close together and to be efficiently placed? relative to each other with vertical fortress design.

Because when it's horizontal, when it's all flat, it's easy to see. Like, okay, so I've got my wood stockpile here, and my carpenter workshop is to the right of it, along with my Boyer Workshop, and they just use the wood. But then I got a wood burner below it, or to the south of it. And then that wood burner feeds a pile to the south of that, and then below that is my smelter and my metalsmith's forge. And, you know, so there's kind of this easy workflow.

it's two dimensional, but then you add three dimensions and you're like, well, I want to keep everything within 10 squares of the central staircase because that's kind of how I've done the math to know that going up and down is only as long as going left and right. And so then you're wondering, well, okay, I have limited space on each floor before I defeat the whole purpose. So I need to put my wood stockpile on one floor, my wood products and furniture on another floor, and somehow fit in between there, the carpenter and boyer workshops. Then I need to have my wood burner. Is it on the same floor as the wood stockpile or is it just below? And then where does that go? The charcoal. Does it go with the wood burner above the smelter or is the smelter on the same

floor across because then it has to feed back up to the metalcraft, the metalsmiths workshop, which is also feeding a furniture stockpile for metal furniture or product stockpile for metal products. And I want that metal product stockpile to be on the same floor as the wood product stockpile. So I have a single floor with all my products I can quickly look at. So there's a lot of considerations and then, you know, it kind of blows up into this thing. So I usually actually spend over half an hour planning my fortress when I started because vertical fortress design not just the concept of walking distance. but actually the concept of designing a workflow in a vertical fortress can explode into a daunting task. Wow, okay.

You put way more like brain capacity into your force than I do. Yep. I was thinking that too. Yeah, I just dig like my, I have a usual layout that I use almost always. It's fairly okay for me. and I just dig it out slowly over the years and so like most of my fortresses do end up looking very, very closely to each other

and I'm not like, oh yeah, like my wood stockpile has to go no, it's like yeah I need a woodstock pile and have like enough space here let's dig it out, boys. Yeah, and that's perfectly, I'm sure that that will work. That's the thing with dwarf fortresses.

I bet you you could do everything in the game without any risk of failure without any experience of fun, just doing that. So really, in a sense, it's totally unnecessary to go to the depths that I would go to or other people might go to for Fortress Design. But it is also really neat to see your dwarves working in this organized workflow in this planned space and having everything kind of naturally culminate into the product that you want it to be. I can see Dwarf Fortress playing being a class in an industrial engineering

a course curriculum at some university. That would be great. Hey, it's aspirational for me. Like, when I look at those videos, I'm like, man, I'm going to be able to do this. This is going to be awesome. What a great idea. Like, for me, it just gets me excited when I see this kind of stuff because I do things. Like, I'll have an idea and I'll go chase the idea down.

But I figure I'm going to die or get bold. board before I get the idea done anyway. So I kind of just go through the motions sometimes in, you know, tossing up a fort just to test out or play out a concept or an idea. And the idea of like building out one of these really cool, complicated, well-planned fort sounds like a fun way to play it, actually. Like, that's different than I do. And I kind of think that might be fun.

I might go do that. Maybe that'll be my next school. I would say that it's like the, is it left brain that's the more logical side? supposedly, according to old school teaching. We're not going to hold you to anything. Anyway, I'm pretty sure left brain is supposed to be the more logical one. It's kind of like, you know, you see like Krug's Smashes Fort, and you see these like interesting artistic concepts, and he wants things to look, to give a certain impression

visually. And he will put a lot of time into what amounts to ultimately totally useless, or not useless. It's just totally inconsequential. Yeah, exactly. So he's putting all this time in that case as aesthetics. It's inconsequential either way. Well, I'm doing the same thing, but I really like the numbers. I really like to know that my dwarves are making their metal crafts as fast as possible. From the moment they chop down the tree to the moment they have the metal crafts made, I want to know that it was all done in a logical and optimal way. And that's my aesthetics, so to speak.

That's what I will spend a lot of time, inconsequentially, work toiling away at, you know, at making my fortress do it that way. This segment is brought to you by Lucas, creator of Dilefnasuch Rerrith Samim, a diorite figurine of the dwarf Asmal orb clenched surrounded by dwarves and diorite. All craft's dwarfship is of the highest quality. The artwork relates to the ascension of Asmal Orb Clenched to the position. of Queen of the Pick of Ramparts in the Year 1. It is decorated with giant hamster bone and canaff and menaces with spikes of giant flying squirrel

leather. On the item is an image of traction benches in diorite and an image of mantis men in Kakapo leather. Last time you were on, you did mention that if you had some gems that were embedded in bedroom walls that you would probably take the gyms out and replace them with with with with regular walls because you didn't want to see the variations and colors there so that's an aesthetic choice um so what wins out um honestly it's i just like everything to be neat and tidy that's kind of my thing so i say that aesthetics aesthetics are second but if it's a matter of eliminating chaos, then it's, then it becomes important again. I don't really care

what shape my fortress takes aesthetically, but I do care if there's aesthetic chaos in it. I do not like that one room looks, one bedroom looks way different from another bedroom. I want all my bedrooms to be the same. Yeah, and a clean workspace is a safe workplace. True. I quit A quick viewer question, though. Okay, I'm trying to read it out, but I'm probably going to butcher words. Okay, so how do we feel about pathing and multi-threading? If we could give up consistently deterministic pathing in favor of multiple concurrent pathing threads, would you think that it is worth the trade-off?

Absolutely. If I understand the question. I think he's been drinking. I think the question is introducing variability into pathing, so dwarves don't always take the same path. And the trade-off is that your computer can use more of its resources to determine those paths, I believe, is the question. Yeah, I think that's what it is, isn't it?

Yeah, that's what I read it or heard it. Is it moot? Because the actual game-determining, the game processing, apart from graphics, I think, is single-threaded with Dwarf Fortress. And from the way Tarn has talked, he has no interest in changing that because it's just something that he doesn't want to delve into. It would mean that he would have to rewrite all the code from the ground up. He was pretty clear about the multi-threading. And I think multi-threading is tricky because the way that I understood. the game worked is that basically every processor cycle, it's recalculating everything in a

specific order. So I think he was saying that it was difficult to basically multi-thread in that kind of a scenario because you want everything to be calculated in a certain, very specific order. I'm no software engineer. So by all means, you know, correct me if I'm wrong here, anybody. But I imagine there are some things that can be compartmentalized. For example, the wounds and the health details of your creatures don't necessarily need to be exactly in time with the rest of the calculations of the game. If a sword strike hits a dwarf who technically should have lost his foot last frame but didn't because that thread is lagging behind or hasn't, you know, hasn't synced with the rest of the program, well, who cares? You know, like, so one strike in the game landed on a foot that shouldn't have existed. But, you know, it's not going to break the game.

It's going to add a little bit more chaos to the results of things. But, I mean, the result is you get multi-threading. The result is an enormous performance boost. I'm not saying Tarn should do this or that he will ever do this. It would be extremely complicated to implement still. But it's not impossible to multi-thread the game. I don't think. It's just not, you know, it's not reasonable.

So, and I'm also not sure that he actually does have it totally optimized for the pathing anyway. If there's a choice between having the optimum path at, you know, say, a thousand clock cycles and having a good path that it's not optimized at 500, I, of course, I've never seen the code, but I suspect that he's probably doing a good path rather than the optimum one. that seems like it would be a good trade-off to make anyway. Thanks for the question, Bradley, by the way. That's a great one. Yeah, it is. There's a lot of threads on the Reddit about this as well,

which I think are really interesting. But I think WorldGen would be a pretty cool use case for multi-threading because I feel like you could do a lot of interesting stuff there. I have a feeling, though, that Tarn is more of a, like, I want to put the coolest features into this game, and I don't want to get hung up on the, programming kind of annoyances because it does feel like

they're kind of programming annoyances. You know what I mean? Yeah. It would be cool if he had somebody that he trusted enough to kind of help him with multi-thread and optimization, but I can also imagine that why change

a great thing? Like, he's doing pretty cool stuff by himself. Especially when we're going to have quantum computers by the time the steam release comes out, you might as well just, you know, just stick with what you got. true yeah i know i was thinking about that the other day and like how what what uh door fortress could do with with quantum computing and and there there i don't know that it would work but i think it

could in a lot of ways because quantum computers are really good at like monte carlo simulations and um i think that that's a problem that door fortress had yep uh forgive me what's the monte carlo simulation oh that don't okay well i think apparently it is some very computer sciencey thing Yeah. It's boring. It's like the traveling salesman problem? It's so boring. I'm practically putting myself to sleep just thinking about telling you about it.

Okay. So the traveling salesman problem, Roland, is a pathing problem trying to find optimum paths among cities. That is that a traveling salesman has to go to 12 cities and he wants to find the optimum path to go to all 12 cities. And it's a very hard computer. a computer intensive problem. Exactly. It's like dealing with probabilistic outcomes and uncertain outcomes

and, you know, kind of generating lots of results in sampling to get it, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I actually, I've got an interesting thing to expand on this maybe. First of all, I'd like to say, hopefully I do get this vertical fortress design video out because pathing being a problem

is something that vertical fortress design eliminates. Well, it doesn't eliminate. It mitigates. Anyway, also, so when you go into the designations menu and you go into your routes, set traffic areas, and you say high traffic, normal traffic, low traffic, or restricted. So far, I only use restricted to keep people off of frozen rivers, basically. Well, if you set high traffic areas, does that eliminate a lot of this computational load? for pathing or does it just like choose after the fact after it still does all the work? Do we know?

I think it actually favors a high path with a like a. So if you put a massive highway into your Ford and designated with like a high priority, then the dwarfs will actually go around a slightly longer corner instead of the room in the middle that is maybe shorter. I tried that in my fortress because I accidentally put a workshop in there. And they always went through the workshop instead of like the main road around it. And that annoyed me like for aesthetic reasons. And when I put in the high traffic area, they walked around it instead of through the workshop.

So I suppose, yes, they do it before they start. thinking about passing. Okay. That's actually... So then that sounds like it would help with... It would help with computational. You know, that may be interesting to try some Dwarven science with. I'm actually looking at it right now.

I just opened up that menu, and this is interesting. I've only ever used it for restricted, so I've never even read this menu. But I'm realizing now that what this does is it increases the cost of movement through each square by a specific amount that you can customize. So a normal traffic cost is two. a high traffic cost is one, meaning you want this to be a high traffic area, so it only costs one movement, whereas normal is two. So I think you're literally plugging values into the path-finding algorithm.

I think that's what this is letting you do. It's telling you this square here costs two units, you know, of travel, whereas this one only cost one. And then the restricted costs 25. So, like, you know, you better need to go through there. I don't know if that would help with your algorithmic complexity, though. I don't know if that would save you any, if it still got to look up the move value of a particular tile, then I don't know that it would save you any computational time by setting the pad. I guess it depends on whether or not the algorithm calls options based on, so like if the algorithm sees two options and one is a cost of 25 and the other has a cost of two, does it call all of the possibilities beyond that 25 and just stop thinking about it?

or does it run through the whole path and then just add that 25 in? I don't know. I don't know how pathing works. I'm talking way out of my league here. I'm going to have to put a warning on this. You know, any episode that mentions the word algorithm more than three times has to have a warning label on it saying that this is a tech episode. Right.

Yeah. Attention citizens and long-term residents of SuzukiZum, Brandon Wright, proprietor of the newly completed cake of craft Tavern invites you to view the master artwork of great engraver Edem Anasnish in the tiles of the intimate dance floor. Come enjoy our sewer brew, imported from the human civilization of Rithadbeel, the adventurous kingdoms. Share and enjoy. How about, I've got a question, can I, can we divert to a pick-up topic or a side topic? How do you guys feel about that? Moving on to a new topic. It's less technical for sure, and it's certainly one to

opinion. When you're building a fort and you realize that you are in an area with no or little iron, how do you guys go about building your armor and weaponry? Wrestlers. I just sacrifice wrestlers. So that's cool. So you basically are just, you're on the migrants train. Yeah. Well, I mean, I get plenty of them. Feed the war machine, please. I actually I just do whatever I can I make it out of copper or whatever

and if my dwarves die in combat my population goes down and I probably got some goblinite so you know win win yeah so harvest the goblinite smart yeah that's that's been my number one is just going to copper

and then silver warhammers and um absolutely I haven't really experimented much with bronze like a little bit because I seem to have a bunch of it in one of the forts I'm playing, so I've got bronze armor, but I don't know if that's better or worse than copper.

I'm sure that Wiki would tell me. It's better. Bronze is better. Yeah, it's a tiny bit better. Your top three, sorry, I would say top four then.

The best is adamantine. The second best is steel. Third best best is Bismuth-Bronze, and then the fourth best is bronze. Interestingly, silver is below copper. Silver apparently just, it's like the most sucky thing you can build things out of it.

Warhammers are good, though. Yeah. That's subject to context, because in Warhammers and Maces, silver is great. And that's the first thing I make in most of my fortresses because I usually have silver.

Exclusively, yes. Cool. Didn't know that. Didn't know that. So I was looking at armor whenever I was read about it. What's that? And you can like make them,

like the more of them you have, I think the more they'll use them. At least that's the way that I had understood it. I actually. Interesting. So there's. Silver Warhammers,

they'll go pick them up and start using them. Interesting. Sounds like there's a complete episode in utilization of metals. I have a complete video, I guess, in making uniforms for your dwarves because you can, in fact, tell your militia squad

to use silver warhammers exclusively. Yes, yes. You should actually, if I can like backseat a bit, you should actually try to get technical on that and maybe tell the listener how, to take those values and actually put it into the goddamn game so that you don't have to do it in every single fortress again and again because I would love to see that.

Yeah, it's very useful. So military is more, it's not something I'll put in my advanced basics because I feel like just making squads is already more than basics in this game. But you, so I have a squad here that's called the hack and slash, and they're all ax lords because I forced them all to use silver, or not silver, steel axes.

And so when they go and they spar and they do their thing, they're always using axes. So they're just 10 ax lords. And it only took a year to make them into 10 ax lords because there's no fumbling around with like, oh, well, this guy's using a mace. What's up with that or whatever? You know, they're just, they're in there. They're doing their thing with their axes. They've got the armor on that I want them to have on.

send them out to combat and they're like we know how to do this this is what we all do we we slash and hack and it's another thing that you want to you can tell your archers to have nothing on their body except for a crossbow yeah so if you well yeah well yeah I meant as in the weapon where preferably at least underwear I don't know new dwarven crossbowman that might be interesting terrifying but yeah um so that's that's a whole thing itself because I started doing that so my my squads as of right now for example I have a dedicated archer squad for fun not for utility but then I just go with a spear dwarves because I really like spears hammers axes and now very new the sword the swords and they're just

dedicated squad so ten each and even if you don't don't fill up the squads. They learn so much faster than when you have, like, a squad of, like, mixed dwarves that I don't see the point anymore in, like, doing a mixed squad. I don't either. I've got two squads. My second one is the weapon bashers, and they, uh, they're all hammer lords with their silver war hammers.

They look cool. I've got a mixed squad that ended up that Mace lords, hammer lords, axe lords, uh, because you know all they ever did was sit there and train you know they haven't really run up against a really tough invasion opponent yet there's been like three goblin sieges and the last two haven't lost a single dwarf and the the fighting was over very quickly so so it's been nice but i i do understand if you're trying to optimize it and if you're trying to get trolls or something like that it probably be better to have it also feels good it goes back into the vein of like wanting things to be tidy i like having a axe squad. I like knowing that these dwarves are my axe dwarves and that I will send them to where I want my axe dwarves to be. And if there's armored opponents, maybe I'll use the spear dwarves because I'm pretty sure that's better against armor. It's just, it feels good, you know, but you don't really need to do it. I suppose it only takes a little bit longer to train your squad up if it's mixed. But, you know. Yeah. And I think Krugsmash approached one of

his forts that way where he had like squads and one was like the rock bashers. or, you know, and it just, it all looked really neat and tidy and uniform and just put together in a way that I felt like made the simulation of the game feel deeper and more interesting because you had these squads and you could sort of then imagine that they were the rock bashers. And of course, they are rough and tumble and they get drunk in the tavern. You know, it just like, I felt like it really added richness. Otherwise, it's just like you're kind of pulling levers in some sort of weird simulation. So I second your idea and also find it aspirational because I'm not very good at it.

something else that I might do a video on is just dwarf management, basically processing migrants, because in the same vein, being able to take in migrants and compartmentalize them and make these migrants into potential recruits and these migrants into cheap hauling labor because they can't handle stress or something, just being able to put dwarves, large numbers of dwarves into groups that have a single descriptor or a single purpose makes the game not it makes it easier to get deeper into the simulation because it doesn't seem like such a mob of random dwarves you said in processing migrants I thought like of a little dwarven Ellis island yeah yeah that's exactly what it is though they come in I go into dwarf therapist and I go

down the list I'm like none of you have any jobs right now all of them are gone so now who's better than my current worker at something okay you get promoted now that guy doesn't have a job now I go through all my jobless dwarves and I'm like, which one of you have any military skills? All right, your potential recruits or you're getting recruited right now. Everyone else, I might read like their personality to see if I could recruit them based on their ability to handle conflict, but maybe I'll just make them into peasants or something. So it sounds like that you are also a dwarf therapist fan. Oh, yeah.

I really enjoy it. I don't know that Roland and Tony share my love of the. of the app of the utility. Hey, Tweet, they're on. I mean, it's okay. I just don't know how else to process dwarves like that. You know, like, how else do you get through them and put them in the right place? The game doesn't make that easy, especially when you get 19 migrants in one wave.

You're like, I don't want to deal with this. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I don't know. I know everyone's going to hate it, but I use auto labor and then I don't ever have to think about it. I know. I know. It's what you want to spend your time on. right so if you if you can use auto labor and then spend your brain energy on on making your

your your squads you know really kick ass and and have them have all kinds of shiny steel armor and and silver war hammers then yeah it's yeah it's whatever you want to spend your your time in the game with yeah i ended up um for a while like when i first started playing it i'm playing on a 4k monitor and therapist when i brought it up i needed a magnifying glass oh yeah to read and i was like well this stuff sucks. I'm not going to do this. And so I just kind of didn't get into the habit of it. And then once I did start playing around that, I was like, holy crap, this is really

detailed. And then I was like, or I could just use auto labor and I don't think about any of this stuff. And so you can see in my lazy ass world what went out. Well, it sounds like Tarn agrees with you because they're talking about implementing auto labor in the upcoming, you know, major release. Yeah. I mean, as long as they keep the ability for people to use therapists, because I think that there's a lot of value in that where you would be able to have dwarf that would truly specialize as where auto labor will do it best to try to find the right person. But if you don't, you'll end up with a whack worker that becomes, you know,

a legendary engraver just because of oops, you know, just because you, he was available and you had him smooth out an entire, you know, 200 tile floor. You know, now it's like you've accidentally got legendary, you know, so it's like basically everybody's a jack of alteration. and a master of none, but... Yeah, and also, like, I want two farmers. Like, I don't know what auto labor wants, but I want two legendary farmers in my fortress. I don't want three.

I don't want six or just one. I want two. You're right. Yeah, and you'll lose that. And, like, I can't have... And you lose a lot in the simulation, too, because I don't know that, you know, Udiab Katembarbek, he's a legendary beekeeper,

but now I have him... Yeah, but he's also a, you know, shoveling manure. You don't like him. Yeah, he's... Totally. yeah do you know what I mean it's like yeah you totally lose that control and I think if if I were you know better at the game perhaps then I would want that level of control or I just wanted to play it differently yeah I think it's awesome and I hope nothing changes in that after well it's absolutely about what you want to spend your time on like Jonathan said because what you like you like if you play the game like I do if you let go if when I've made enough videos if you go in my videos and you try to emulate my exact play style you will never go to the search and you'll never raid other civilizations. These are things I don't do because I will spend dozens of hours just making my fortress neat.

Just making it tidy, making it work well, making it work how I want, making my little squads. I'll get like two raids and I'll already have like multiple squads with specialized uniforms and I haven't even killed, you know, 30 goblins yet. So, you know, it's all about what you want to do. You could do the level of detail in certain things, but you might never touch. other things that you might want to do. Yeah, true. Yeah, I feel that. I've been getting more and more into the whole military thing

because before that I was just a farmer. I sat my ass down on Dwar Fortress and I made like so much food that I could probably supply the entirety of every single civilization upon my continent. And because I really liked reading the descriptions. That's it. And now I've been getting more and more into the whole like smithing and and forging weapons and like not even raiding, you know, just having a good military. That's it.

I'm not even talking about raiding. I'm just, you know, talking about how do I get my dwarfs to train effectively? How do I get my dwarfs to train good, fast and so on? and that already in itself is such a dense topic that I've been I've been walking back to the wiki which I haven't done for maybe two years like seriously and I sat down and I read about it and I was like hmm how do I can make the how can I get like this like this this zero point zero percent one better stuff for my squad And I, it's a lot.

Yeah, I've spent a lot of time raiding and and building up military squads and sending them out and conquering villages and stuff. I've enjoyed that a lot, kind of watching the hilarity that ensues with that. Attention members and guests, manager Christopher Harris would like to announce that the Sepia Glen has been bestowed the degree of Grand Guild Hall of Farmers Guild, the Flaxon Hall. Located in Suzukism, the finest masterworks are displayed in honor of the farming profession. Come learn and enjoy fellowship. I'm actually, I'm looking into, I looked into advanced world generation. Sorry, I'm just going to segue us way over to a totally different field. I looked into advanced world generation because we were talking about rating before.

And I tried making some old worlds and getting like the historical field. figures and the site caps and all that stuff, population caps, to optimize so I can make a 2021 world, but not a, not a pocket world, like at least medium-sized world. And what do you mean about 2021? Like 2,021 years of history. Oh, okay. So bring it up to date, basically. Do you like necromancy? Well, here's what I found. This is so interesting with old worlds, at least right now, what happened in my world was some necromancer who had a bad go of it. He tried manipulating some goblin leaders at a tower, and it never worked out.

And then he got banished after learning being a necromancer apprentice. He went to a town, and they suspected him of being a necromancer because he never aged. And then he got kicked out, and he was wandering the wilderness. And then he started this band, or he took over some band called the Azura Sorcerers. And it wasn't even part of a sieve. This isn't listed on the sieve, like list. I went to the legends viewer even to try to get more information. And he took over everything.

Out of like a hundred and something sites in the world, or no, a thousand something sites in the world, he had over 900 of them under his control for a... civilization that's not even listed on the sieve screen they owned everything and it was all because of this one guy who started the he was still alive running around i think the last place he was seen was the elven place so if you really want something if you don't want to do all this fortressy uh like optimize your vertical fortress layout or whatever and you just want to go find cool characters and stuff running an old world i discovered is a great way to make super villains that you can spend your time hunting down and like prepare

pairing an army just to go kill this one guy. That's awesome. Nella Mother Waves, that was his name, I remember. He was a wild boar man necromancer, and he owned the world. There weren't even goblins left. There was only like 2,000 goblins left. They were all undead. Everyone was undead.

Yeah, that's the problem I found with that one. And man, it's relentless. Like, if you, like, basically when I was playing those old worlds, like the very first thing you do is cut down trees and build a wall. And if you didn't do that, you were dead. And, like, second. It was insane. Sometimes I couldn't even get my last wall segment built before I had an invasion.

Like, oh, my God. And be prepared to go without migrants. My civilization had 12, a population of 12, and they were all animals. The only thing that was left of the last dwarven civilization was their horses. So I was like, all right, I guess it's just me. So I was like, I'm going to have to burrow down, bunker down, be impenetrable and then just breed dwarves to recreate civilization. Yep, yep, yeah, you're the last.

So you, you know, you do get to have the king. That's kind of fun. But it's just you. So, yeah, wild. Okay, guys, I think that we need to, to wrap this one up, this episode of Dwar Fortress Roundtable. If anyone wants to send us an email again, send it to Eurist at df roundtable.com. That's U-R-I-S-T-F-R-T-R-T-R-T-R-T-Roundtable.

Nathan, thank you so much. I don't even know if we actually explicitly stated. Your YouTube channel is Paranoid Metroid. Yes, Paranoid Metroid. Two words. Yeah, I put it in the chat before. Great, great, great. So, but for all of those, for all of those people who are not on our live stream,

which you can find every other Sunday, typically, there's going to be some interruption coming up here. so it may not be as regular as it has been or will be, but you can find the link to the live stream at DFRoundtable.com or on our YouTube channel. So thanks again, Nathan. Thank you for coming in. It's always a blast.

Okay, until next time, this has been Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, and have a happy fortress, everybody. Be good. See you. See you. 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 Dwarfortress 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 DFRoundable.com. That's UR-I-S-T at D-F Roundtable.com. Please consider donating to the creators of Dwarfortress at pay12games.com. If you'd like to help support this podcast, you can find us at patreon.com slash df roundtable. This is a conversational podcast.

Allcraftsworship is of the highest quality.