Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 56: In Which Whiprule Is Honored

Episode Date: September 26, 2021

We are finally back from summer hiatus. In this episode, we catch up with each other's dwarfy gaming. Paranoid Metroid - YouTubeJuly Tarn Steam UpdateTarn's Spiral Stairs UpdateClinodev's Annotated Craftlords Embark ProfilePeridexisErrant's Starter Pack

During today's segment breaks, Jonathan had planned on featuring artifacts from his new young fortress bomb-wreck-a-lid, Whiprull. But the idiot forgot to hook the bridge to the lever, and an invasion of 50 undead and necromancer experiments put an end to that. Yeah! We're back! Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for All Things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan.

I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we are back after a slightly extended summer hiatus. Back, back, back. I'm back, baby. I had a goblin siege in my yard. In the yard? Yeah, they were trying to block off my wife from bringing the groceries in.

It was just horrible. I have a joke to insert here, but I'm not going to. So let's move past that Gobbon Siege. I'm glad that you survived. Yes, yes. And so did all of my cats. Okay. No soap, no cat soap over the summer.

Oh, well, yeah. Well, not for my cats. Hey, man, if I put Miamics in the front yard, it's all bets are off, man. There may be a lower population of cats in the neighborhood, and we may have some fancy soap in the house now. But they weren't from, you know, we have the same number of cats. cats as we had when we started. Oh, okay.

That's fair. Fair enough. Yeah. Understandable. Have a nice day. I hope everyone had a nice summer, a nice summer break. Yeah, I'd say so. So I played less Tor Fortress than I had planned while I was out.

You know what? Honestly, me too. I ended up playing very little. I jumped in a couple times. And I don't know if you guys have this problem, but I get kind of, I don't know. I think I spend too much time trying to find the perfect world and the perfect starting location and I'll roll a new world and spin it up and start looking around. And then that takes all the time that I would have probably spent playing the game. And then I start a fortress and then I decide, I don't really like this location.

So I retire it and then I hop and I hop. It's sort of like Door Fortress channel surfing. I don't ever find anything to do. I just keep killing fortresses and starting again. So that's where I am. Hmm. I see. That happened to you, Roland?

Well, I got more into legends because I can't even say that I had no time because I had a lot of time on my hands. But I wanted to get more into legends to learn about more of my people and my fortresses and the backstory and stuff. And that kind of spiraled. Like, I had two weeks where really spiraled into legends mode. to the point where I made myself a really old world and I let it generate I don't know throughout the night or something

because I said it like almost everything too high so I had a lot of people in an extremely old world my PC ran really hot and did not like doing that but I got a really nice world and that world is atrocious it really is

all necromancers all the time. Oh, no, it's funny because the first two necromances that popped up in the world were killed in around 10 years after becoming a necromancer. Oh, cool. So the first man that became a necromancer wandered around after learning the secrets and stumbled into the layer of a dragon and burned to death. Okay. Cool. How's a like a secret? of life and death working out for you. Very warm. The second goddess head smashed in

during a attack of goblins on his what is that, his small town and he didn't really do anything and I'm not sure about this but I feel like he was one of the first two or three casualties in the entire war and the entire war had like five

so that was a bit disappointed. pointing and then about 150 years going to like nothingness, nothing really happens, nothing terrifying. It's just a lot of beasts and a stupid amount of rocks going around and just killing everything. And then rocks? The next necromancer pops up. Oh, oh, R.O.C. Those birds. R.O.C. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Bunky. It is called rocks, right? Yeah, yeah. ROC. It's not a word that I knew until I played this game. Yes, me too. And when you say a lot of rocks going around killing people, I'm thinking you're talking stone traps.

Yeah, no. What is that Pokemon? Gio-dude? I have never played Pokemon in my life. Yeah, I just missed Pokemon. I winged it. Well, too old then. Anyway.

Yeah, only just. But that was really fun. and there is so much story to tell and so much story to read and I tried to explain it to my mother over dinner like a few times because she was like, oh, what are you looking at?

And so I tried to explain it. But every time I did, I realized after like three minutes in that I sound like a mad mad, mad rambling about like conspiracy theories because you really don't have the connections. You have to make them on your own. So it's like,

oh yeah this man did this artifact and this artifact then got stolen and that's why the elf 250 years later went out to a cool ass adventure to get this artifact and like what are you talking about what there's no story you're making this up and I'm like no no it's there you have to look at it you see you see yeah yeah you should think about politics get into that maybe I was thinking, I was thinking that a lawyer would have a lot of fun, like a prosecutor, would have fun with Tour Fortress mode, Legends mode, because they might be able to spin up a thread that would be very convincing. We get caught up in the justice system in the fortress mode.

Bam, bam, bonk, that's the justice system. It's very, uh, yeah, just bonk people. It's not exactly, uh, fair system, but, um, it's a system. It's very thorough. in meeting out justice. So, yeah. I have a habit of doing the fortress surfing as well, except mine is not so much with a new world. Mine is almost completely the first two years of my fortress.

If after the first two years of my fortress, I have things in a more chaotic state than I like, I tend to want to retire the location and go on somewhere else and start up again. Yes. Yeah, I know the feeling. I've done that a little bit less over the last probably six months to a year or so, because I'm trying to dig a little deeper into the gameplay mechanics, and in order to do that, you typically have to go for a little bit. Yeah, you have to keep it alive.

Nope. This is the Bard's Ode of Whip Rule. Stanza Primus. Euris J. Jennings was the purveer of the first tavern in Whip Rule. The mechanical spires was founded in 125 and had 10 goblets, five musical instruments, and a 36 tile dance floor. The pub is awaiting adventurous souls to uncover its secrets, buried beneath the 7th level living quarters. You know what I got excited about? Now I'm thinking, earlier in the summer there was a DF hack update that let you save a world.

world and then it would continue to age it and then you could jump back in and so I was like man this is so so I think the concept was you could play your fortress for like 10 years or whatever 20 years whatever and then you could save the fortress and then you could run this df hack command and then it it would kind of put the game back into world gen mode or whatever for a certain period of time so the fort would keep going and you'd see it like counting days up so it'd be like you know the 14th, the 15th, 16th, 17th, and then it would kind of keep doing that. You know, like when you first start the game and it plays it for 15 days for you. Right.

So that's what this plug-in would do. But it's incredibly slow. So you don't want to do it. Because I thought, oh, it would be really fun for it. And then I'm going to, you know, leave the world for 30 years and see what happens. And it was like, I left it running overnight. And I'd gone about a year and a half. And I was like, well, that's not working the way.

wanted it to, too. Oh, yeah, I guess maybe you put your save on another computer and run it for a work week. To get my three years. Yeah, so I think it's an amazing community modification to, you know, to DF hack, but it's very slow. I think you could do it maybe for a day or two at a time. Well, well, first steps, right? It's open source.

So someone can go in there and go, wait, if I tweak this little widget and mess with this do hickie here, I can increase the speed, perhaps. Totally. The first spaceship we put into space didn't land on Mars, you know, so. And this is literally the same thing. Literally the same thing? Literally the same thing. I wanted to talk a little bit about Plano Dev's, well,

Clano Dev's birthday this month. Happy birthday. Oh, nice. Happy birthday. That's awesome. I'm going to get him a copy of Door Fortress. I want to talk about, though, something that I tried out at his suggestion. I was trading messages on Reddit.

And he suggested I try out Kleeneo Dev's annotated Craft Lords Embart Profile. I took a closer look at it, and it's called Annotated because he actually annotates the profile file that is in the – I can't remember what the folder, but it's in the folder structure. And do you know what I'm talking about when I say the profile files? When you embark, you're – you're presented with a series of things that you can start with, like Gourney's Easy Peezy and that kind of thing, right? Exactly.

And it's in the starter packs. Okay. I'm starting a new one right now. So I intend to look at this in a moment. Okay. So I know that it's in Paradexas Arant's starter pack. Right. I'm not sure if it's in everybody's,

but if you start up with Paradexas or Rons, who released a revision 5, I believe, while we were away. Just came out September 5th, I think. Yeah. So clean our devs annotated craft lords embark profile is one of the profiles that you can choose if you're using the starter packs. Instead of preparing carefully, you use that. What makes it annotated is the actual file that is used to create the profile that is saved in the Door Fortress file structure has the annotations in it. Now, there are other places on the internet that you can find it, I think, page.

spin, there's a pace spin post of it. But it tells you the exact reasons why he chose each of these particular things, like why these skills went to these dwarves and why these particular things were included in the, in the embark. But there are no picks. There is one axe, and that is included begrudgingly because too many people asked why there wasn't an axe, I think. There are no weapons. There's no armor. but what there is is one bar of coke as in the cold party man then i'll get the doors moving geez all right clean out but and then there's there's components to create uh bronze so the first one of the first things you do according to and there's instructions for this for getting started

in the annotations one of the first things you do is set up a smelter and you set up a metallurgy forge and you create your picks and then so it's it's very well laid out and I started doing that whenever we first started our break and I played with that for a while when we were on vacation and I think that's the way I'm going to be going from here on it really helped me learn a lot about crafting because what I had done before up until this point and we've been playing for what we've had the podcast now for like two and a half years and I've been playing for I guess a couple years before that. And this entire time, I have depended on the caravans for my weapons.

But this has taught me that it is really not that difficult to create, you know, to create your materials that you need to do metallurgy. And your dwarves will be able to create better weapons and better goods than you're going to be able to buy. So it's pretty great. Okay. That sounds pretty neat. I'm going to try it here as soon as my world gen.

But I don't get what is the plus I gain from not straight up having a pick in my starting units. Well, according to the write-up that Clenotiv has, the way that it is set can give you basically about a year's head start on your fortress digging. You'd have to actually read the thing to find that here. Okay. I'm looking through the annotated Now see if I'm going to find that exact quote If it's not something that you're interested in Then I'm sure it's not something that you would want to do

But I did find it to be interested in anything that makes me smarter about how to play the game That's true, yes That's my baseline here Low Low Barrier entry for me Yeah, that's the way I approach it too And he has put it at an excellent price point I might add Yes

He wants very little of your money for this, somewhere in the realm of $0.0.0. And here's another thing. Oftentimes, your actual embark will not, your civilization will not have access to the things that he has put into the embark, which throws a wrench into the things. If there's no access to bituminous coal with your civilization, that's one of the things that you need to be able to make code. to do your smeltering. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Well, when that happens, and that happened the very first time that I did it, I found out quickly that you could replace the bituminous coal with lignite and make coke out of lignite.

It's a little bit more expensive, but it is a substitution. And boom, there's one more thing that I learned. And then through that, I had a better understanding of the process to go from raw materials to Coke to smeltering metal. But I did just want to mention it because I've learned a lot now. Someone as advanced as Roland may not get the educational benefits out of this embark that I did. But if you've always wanted to dig deeper into things like making your own weapons and finding out what the different kinds of stones properties help you with, then I recommend that you check it out. Well, there's one thing I'd say to do in Door Fortress is always dig deeper.

It's always a safe way to clean the doves, annotated craft floor. It's open emberk profiles. Yeah, it's pretty good. That's pretty great. Yeah, I'm looking at it. And it's a pretty solid build, especially I like the way that he did his dwarfs and that he put like skills. And there is quite a bit of fighting going on in his skills because the first two have armor, discipline, and teaching.

It's the first and the third, sorry, spear, shield, teaching. So that's interesting. So you already have some fighters. So you could potentially even start this in a serious threat biome, like hostile, reanimating. That's the word. I should try that. You're looking for a challenge.

Oh, yeah. I always know. I think it's enough of a challenge to have to make my own you're like, hey, what happens if I do this in a zombie wasteland? Yeah, a zombie wasteland with no trees. Yes.

And have it be, you know, either frozen tundra or hot desert. Yeah. Ooh, I really like my hot desert simply because they have so much sand and I love myself the glass industry. Love.

Oh, love it. It's like free items. This is a bit of an aside. I accidentally started in a frozen tundra biome. I wasn't paying much attention whenever I picked my embark location. And there were no trees and everything was frozen. There was no river. So it was not hard to solve though because my first dwarf,

I just sent straight down digging until they got to the cavern. And at that point, we had access to water and trees. I'm not quite as afraid of starting at a place with no forest as I once was. until just very recently, if it didn't have at least forested and preferably heavily forested, I didn't want to use that embark location. That's funny, because I stopped going into forested or heavily forested areas. Why is that? Mostly because I had very bad experiences with forgotten beasts or dragons,

setting my map aflame, and then the game crashing. due to FPS death. So I only started biomes where they're only spas trees because I enjoy that more. I don't need that much wood. I just need it for beds at some point. And if I have access to the underground and there are mushroom trees,

then I'd rather take those instead of like over, like, ych, normal trees. This is the Bard's Ode of Whip Rule. Stanza Secondaris. The Church of Earth, founded in 125, was a temple of the Pink Doctrines, honouring gems, metals and stones on a 49 tile dance floor with five musical instruments. The resident priest there was the venerable Logan Hastings. Sayers told of the prophecy that would later be known as the coming of doom,

foretold to converge on this temple's floor. So I can't remember who all was on what episode when we last left, but toward the end of our spring run of the podcast, I actually started harvesting Adamantine. Were both of you all that? Yes. Yes, I remember you talking about that you were just getting ready to start cleaning some out of the deep cavern layer.

And I think we were both waiting with bated breath for an update on how that went, because it always goes well. Well, the adamantine in this case was surrounding the magma pool, sorry, the magma sea. And I did not buy any tickets. And so I didn't see any joyful occurrences after that. I did have a few dwarves get fried by the magma pool whenever I picked into it. It wasn't the, so this is another little side story.

If you can imagine, if you will, a level with the magma C in it. And what I wanted to do was fill up a magma reservoir so that I could have magma be the fuel for my forges, right? The idea was dig a tunnel up to the edge of the magma sea and have a four by four room or sorry, a two by two room and dig straight up from that room such that there were to the top level of the magma c so that whenever it levels out you know how fluids work and it will just be a pool of magma there right and everything would have worked fine i don't know if i described that well did that make sense to you guys somewhat i think so yeah i think so much like if you have a uh two bodies of water connected by a a tube at the bottom if you change the level of one body of water the other one will level out with it yeah

because of fluid pressures. Yes. So, yeah, that's kind of what I was going to be doing with the magma, except the two, the two pools, the two little bodies of water, would be rooms that were connected by a tunnel at a lower level of the magma seat. And everything was working fine until I realized that I somehow had trapped a couple dwarves in a room below that that got flooded with magma. And it goes really, really slow.

And the magma flowed. Much slower than I thought it would, which is probably got me a little bit cocky and not paying attention, and a couple of dwarves got fried. But, yeah, after that point, my frame rate just went through the floor, and I was running at about two frames per second, and I ended up getting rid of that fortress. No. Okay, so leveling out certain rooms does not work that way, yeah? No, I think that it would have worked. You just left dwarves in there. I just left dwarves in there, yeah.

Oh, okay. Actually, I left dwarves. I left dwarves below there. The problem was they were below the room that I cleared out. I'd forgotten that I had a staircase going on to the lower level that I was storing some stuff. Yeah, in any case, dwarves died. It happens. It happens.

It's worth a death of a few dwarves if my knowledge base increases, right? The advancement of technology is worth a few. Few deaths. Got to break some eggs to make an omelet, man. True. Some torven eggs, some turkey eggs. This is the Bard's Ode of Whip Rule. Stanza penultimate.

The Geert Teeth Tavern was founded in 126, with a 50 tile dance floor, 10 goblets, and five musical instruments. Its remains can be found just south of the mechanical spires. It is said that forgotten beasts are yet lulled to slumber by the haunting voice of tavern keeper Jack Dylan. It is yet no more. Yet no more. I guess I was thinking I had some questions about there was that video that that Tyrone posted about the, was it the spiral entrance or something like that? and yeah that oh that was such a video that was yeah the update the steam update yeah so that that that spiral entrance where people are using ramps to get into their fortress um and i know other popular art gameplay YouTubers uh use that exclusively I am fascinated by that it looks really cool I cannot figure out how you do that it just seems so excruciatingly difficult

to kind of map out the ramps in the series and it kind of spins and spirals down in these ramps and I was watching one of the videos and I just saw this thing go down like 30 layers 30 Z levels and it's just 30 series of cascading ramps downwards and I like is there a macro for this or is this just somebody who is incredibly detail oriented because I can't do it. I love the look of it

but man I just it hurts me to think about how that happens Maybe there's an easy way, I don't know. I don't tend to, I don't, yeah, I don't tend to, uh, to do it in as tight of a spiral as like Krug Smash does, but I do spiral down just so that my, um, the caravans have as short a path as needed to come down to my, my trade depot. But I can, I think that I can see how you would do it. Dig a shaft straight down.

Then come back up to the top and put your, uh, do your channeling. three by three along the sides. Wouldn't that work? Yes. Yes, it does. Because I tend to do basically exclusively channeling when it comes to my fortress. Because I not only like the look more, but I also like the feeling more. And if you have, I'd like to do really deeply set fortresses.

So they're below the latest. dirt layer. So I have the entire fortress just in stone. And to get to there, I have to channel down quite a bit. Yes, that's true.

And there are like nudges and crooks and sometimes I have to go around water and blah, blah, blah. And the way down is actually fairly long. But that's good because that also means

I have a longer time to react to outside threads. Like wear beasts, goblins, invasions, whatever. and worst case, they get to my entrance, but nobody actually gets down there because somebody is always in the tunnels.

Does it look good? Yes. Is it useful? Only an attack, because otherwise you have a way, way longer path that your dwarves have to take to get up. But hey, also, in the fortress itself, I started doing these shafts down.

So I have a middle shaft And my entire fortress is around this middle shaft So like in the northern section We have the like the kitchen and the food stuff And the entrance up again into the farming area And this shaft is not only Like a place of transportation Where my dwarfs go up and down

But it is also a very effective way Of me just dumping things into this shaft from every single level. So I don't need 10 dumps or like a dumping ground that is far, far away. I just have one thing and this is reachable from every level. You know, it's on every level. Yeah, I get it. Yeah.

You can just dump something, just dump stuff down there if you want. Exactly. And the dump is fairly large. So the entire lower thing of the shaft is the dump. and then sometimes I clean that dump by the Dwarven Toilet method, so I flush it away with water, or I get myself some magma to do it, or sometimes I just use bridges when I'm lazy.

Okay, so here's the point where you need to make sure the bottom of that shaft is the magma C. So you dig all the way down far enough to where that shaft goes all the way down to magma so that whenever you throw it in unless it's magma safe it's going to be toasted yeah but that comes with a bit of a backdrop because then you have uh your fortress open to the magma sea and if yeah some things you magma crabs you know yeah no i'm not talking about magma crabs but um i had it happen this is actually one of the bigger downsides to my whole setup because if goblins get into your fortress or you have a fortress in

a reanimating biome or somebody is actually fighting inside of your fortress. Then you have people dodging down the shaft and that is not good and they keep smashing into my floor. I can't circumvent that by

putting soft material on the bottom floor so that the splash damage is lessened but they still hurt themselves. But now if I were to open it to the magma sea I would have, like, basically instant death every time somebody falls down. And, eh.

Hmm. I don't know that, I mean, yeah, I can see how that might be a problem. Yeah. Also, I like Dwarven Toilets. I can also see how that might not be a problem, but what's that? I just like doing Dwarven toilets. They're funny to me. Tony, what, what format of, of, Fortress Entrance do you prefer, channeling or digging into the side of a hill?

You know what? I, I tend, I've, lately I've kind of stuck in my rut of I will just kind of pick a random spot, maybe close to some water, and dig a stairwell straight down, and then build a fence with a drawbridge around it. You always put your trade depot up on the, on the outside? Yeah, I make them expendable. And I put them outside my drawbridge, usually, because I once had a, I, well, I've smashed caravans. by accident. Oops.

And yeah, I just shove them on the outside. And then, you know, when goblins or whatever come in, you know, they might destroy that. But that's usually the extent of it. And depots are pretty easy to rebuild. And then, yeah, I just go straight down and hope that my drawbridge can go up. I've had problems with wear beasts in that approach where they get through. But I guess putting up guard dogs and stuff around would help me. solve that, and that's worked pretty well in the past.

So that's what I've been doing. That's interesting that you folks are both, both prefer the channeling method. I want the outside of my fortress, I want the main fortress to look like the entrance to Moria at the Holland Gate. Yeah. So you have to dig into the side of a mountain

in order to have that very, very, to me, dwarfy method of entering. And you've got the, all this is based on Hulken, right? For a while. Lonely Mountain main gate, I picture it to be a giant door into the side of the mountain.

I mean, yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you. I also like to channel into a mountain so I can see the first step, so to say, on my channeling down. But I don't like the whole thing where you can chop a tree and suddenly you have a hole.

Oh, I hate that. Got to go a couple. layers down. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was a trial and error move. Like, why is everyone in my fort? Couldn't even see these stupid holes. And the next thing why I dig even deeper now, not just into the dirt layer,

is because I stopped doing the farming being accessible directly to my entrance. So you have to go down to my fortress, through the meeting halls, to the kitchen, up through the kitchen. then you are in my farming area. I have done the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. It is very positive.

You got a tunnel up, yes. And especially if you're like being attacked or you have to wall yourself off. Because I tend to also build outside of my fortress. You know, my entire fortress is stone. So I get a lot of stone, especially at the start. I can build a lot. Even more if I do blocks. And then I can build like a cool entrance, you know, a cool entrance.

a cool entrance and build worlds and so I can have my animals outside and make some extra farming areas outside but they're all expendable because when actually something happens and I'm not completely done

with walling everything off I still have a second drawbridge that goes up and the entire outer fortress is open to the enemy but the inner fortress the fortress that is not, just comes at the cost of your animals dying constantly, but hey.

Yeah, one of the first things on Kleiner Dev's craft Lord's profile, you know, one of the first things you do is you slaughter your vehicle stock pullers, you know, your yak or your water buffalo. If one of them happens to be female, harvest cheese from it first. Delicious yak cheese. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, one of the ways I used to do my, my, my, entrance is when I thought I was really clever in first learning how some of the mechanics were, because I would dig out kind of a big, like, gradual slope. And then at the bottom of it, I would have your sort of Moria entrance.

And then I would have a series of drains all around the entrance. And then when a siege came, I would fill that, I would wait till, I would leave my door open as long as I could and get them all to come down into this like gradual sloping channel thing, and then I would lock my door, and then I would open the floodgates and let the river race in and then drown as many of them as I could. And then once they were gone, then I would close the gates to the river and then drain all of that water back down into the caverns. And then I could go up and harvest all the goblinite that was left behind. That's nice. I know that. And it was kind of fun to do. But, you know, it took work.

Yeah. It wasn't an instant gratification, but I spent a lot of time doing that. And then usually by the time I did that, I'd be like, oh, somebody's starving and they've gone crazy and I'd lose the fort. But, yeah, I'm trying to, I might go back to that. Actually, it was pretty fun to watch it happen. We should request Nathan from Paranoid Metroid to create a video about, you know, a micro video about building a shaft entrance as shown on the steam announcement of, the spiral entrances. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That'd be a good little short, short video subject for, for Nathan, if you're

listening. Yeah, those are cool. Those videos are great. Straight to the point. Not a lot of, you know. Yeah, his latest one was traffic areas, which was great. I loved it. I've not actually even touched that, but I can absolutely see how that could really make things more efficient. And maybe even might save you some, some frame clicks. He also has, uh, has, it doesn't look like that he's posted the finals yet, but he has posted nice narrative videos about the entire sixth annual Dwar Fortress Gladiator Tournament.

Those are pretty cool. I wasn't following that this year. How did it go? I've been following it through Paranoid Metroid's videos. So it doesn't look like he has the finals posted yet. So I don't know exactly how it. If you want to kick back with a, you know, a dwarf an ale on a, you know,

a Sunday evening tonight, then that might be a good way to spend an hour or so watching the descriptions of the fights. They're pretty violent. I hope so. He does it with a sports cast sort of. Imagine the podcast race. Don't imagine it too closely because this is one of my least favorite parts of the less than stellar Star Wars prequel trilogy.

But imagine the podcast races. No, not podcast. The pod racing scenes in the Phantom Menace with the announcers looking on. That's kind of the feel of the video. So check them out. They're great. Paranoid Metroid. Links in the show notes.

This is the Bard's Ode of Whip Rule. Stans of Terminus. The Great Oracle Potato Bomb tells us of Godinamugas, crafts dwarf's dwarf who was possessed but did not claim a workshop she died of dehydration in the church of earth when she was unable to respond to the call of her fay mood her village mates built workshop after workshop to beck and goden from the middle of the dance floor but it was to no avail on the second day of granite the year being 127 here she laid down and here she met armok this event is known as the coming of doom it was

It's less than a month later that an invasion of foul undead and necromancer abominations brought about the fall of whip rule. Dorshod Les Carmignon, Baylock Carminion. Oh, where are we with our pool on the release date? Did we talk about that before? Did we choose when we thought the release might come out and then, did we speculate on that, when might seem come out? us speculate about a release no no way we already yeah no I'm pretty sure we did that like three

times now have any of us already been wrong no I don't think so no I think that uh there's most of us have we're thinking spring of 22 someone hoped that it would be December or so of this year And I think the most realist among us had chosen late 2022, like about a year from now. Yeah. So I don't know. You know, I'm enjoying watching the videos come out. I'm enjoying the game as it exists right now. Yeah.

It's still pretty doggone great as is. Yeah, I think I said something like somewhere February, March, 2022 seems pretty safe. I hope that he's able to get it out with enough enthusiasm left for the fact that it's coming out on Steam that he can still get purchases based on that enthusiasm. Does that make any sense? I think that once it comes out, there'll be a, you know, because I think it'll still be, I think it's probably still six months to a year out. But I do think, but when it does launch eventually, I think people will get riled up again. You know how I feel like it's always kind of like that with Door Fortress is like something happens and then. kind of ramps up enthusiasm and then it sort of falls off and then something else happens and then it ramps up and falls off so my feeling is that it will that's probably almost certainly what would happen once it gets released on steam i'm hoping it gives him a higher amount of

steady income so that we can have a a better chance of having door fortress development to be continued and someday maybe the mythical version one will actually be released. Most certainly will. And then there's VR release. We'll get the VR release. And you can be your own war in a world of pixels. Okay. Yeah.

Well, you know, I've played it in VR. So, and it's pretty fun. How? What? You can just, you can cast your desktop to VR. And then you can have an IMAX. So basically your brain thinks it's an IMAX-sized screen of Door Fortress. Oh, that's pretty nice.

Yeah. That sounds to me like it would give you serious motion sickness. Oh, you just don't have to look around a bit. It's pretty cool. You have very, very, very big screen is kind of the way it translates to. Hey, one thing that I wanted to talk about real quick, or not real quick, in the July video release that Tarn made, he focused a lot on the on the trade interface and one thing that I saw on there that I don't think there's a corollary right now whenever you're doing trading and you show the trader's profit

there is a certain level of profit that the trader will get where he'll always accept your deal and then there's it gets down to where there's a point where your broker's negotiation skills comes in right yeah well that is color-coded in the steam release so that if it is green that you're offering enough profit that they will always take it. But if it's yellow, the negotiating skills comes into play. If it's red, then they will never accept it. Oh, damn. That's pretty cool.

And here's what I thought was really cool. The trader will now make a counter offer. So if you don't offer him enough and he does not accept the deal, he will say, if you throw in this crown that's worth 4,000 silver pieces, then I will go ahead and accept the deal. So he'll counter. He'll counter. Yes.

That is so cool. That I really like it. Not so much. I like the idea of it giving you the color signal of whether or not the transaction is guaranteed to succeed. But what I most like is knowing what it is that they want to make it succeed. Because I have been in dealings with elves before so that I said, okay, how about this? And they say, no, you're insulting me. So I say, how about this?

And they say, no, no. and then I give them what I think is my entire fortress, and they still say no, and they get pissed off and leave and say that they're never coming back. So I'm like, well, what was it that you wanted? You can't really wait with the elves, can you? No, but... They're a fickle lot.

Yeah, and it may have just been because it was elves. But on the other hand, there may have been something that I could have offered them that would have had them accept the deal. I don't have to say yes, but if they say yes, I want all of the children in your fortress, I would have gladly handed those worthless dwarves over and everyone would have been happy. Hmm. Well, they are.

They're worthless for about, you know, what, seven, ten years of game time? Yeah, if you do not use them, you can do a lot of weird stuff with children. And I'm not talking about danger rooms right now because they... That's a great quote. I'm going to make a sure to that. Oh, yeah, that one's pulled No one's going to pull that one out of context.

That could never be taken out of context. Thank God for editing. What kind of things are you talking about? So, for example, I've noticed that they do go into guilds. So if you have a guild hole for a specific thing and a dwarf, a dwarven child is in that guild hole, it will passively gains guilds.

Oh, wow. Very cool. So if you take, for example, your children and shove it into a room for blacksmithing or diagnosing or just general doctor stuff, you have a chance of getting better doctors, even when they have not worked as a doctor before, they might gain skills by just chilling in a guilt hole. And I think that's very practical because now what I do is I take my children and stuff them into a guild hall. usually it's doctors because I really like the whole doctor thing and I like doctors to write books about it but you know it works it's great so you could you could have you could set up burrows so that your children live eat drink and work where they have access to this guild

hall where they would sit around and recreate yeah and by the time they become adults you could have pre-made manufactured legendary weapon smiths by the time they become adults? Well, not legendary, but I mean, I have not seen any of my children actually going into good skill mastery, but they gain some skills. I think the best I've got was almost pro-efficient as a diagnosing. Still, it's better than nothing. Even though he had never worked. Yeah, that's a good starting point.

It's a apprenticeship. That's pretty good. but it's setting up a barrel for children is really annoying because they need quite a bit of stuff. So what I did, what seems to be somewhat effective is I make a larger guilt hole for doctors and put a stockpile in. And that very stockpile is the only stockpile in the entire fortress that takes toys. So if you want to play with your toy, go with the doctors and, you know, sit around. while playing with your rattle and like rattle in the doctor hall have fun if you want to play

with your little spinny whistle in your mini forge you're going to have to do it in the main lecture hall of Columbia University School of Medicine yeah exactly you know passive passively taking in the information it's perfect it's amazing well I do have to say that not doing this podcast every two weeks does affect my drive to experiment and play the game more because now that we have had this discussion I now want to drop the mic

fire up to a fortress and try all these things that we've talked about yeah yeah I'm with you man got me fired up I want to get back out there and start digging okay so we are back and we're planning on having some guests coming up so listen in for that and I think that

we're going to just call this one today I hope that everyone has a great week and everyone plays lots of dwarf fortress yeah you'll have anything to add today I got nothing and I think it's it's great to be back and yeah if you have any thoughts about stuff you want us to matter on about next time definitely drop us a line and let us know all right well then until next This is Dwarfortress Roundtable, and everybody have happy Fortressing. Bye, bye. See ya. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast.

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