Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 63: In Which Tekkud Joins The Gang To Discuss Bloodline Forts

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Thanks so much to Nathan for stopping in to talk about the Singemetal bloodline fortress (among other great stuff). Bay 12 Games February ReportAlexandra's Steam News Splatterface IIIDFHack Hermit ScriptRoland's and Nathan's Singemetal StreamsTekkud Youtube Channel

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. Every couple weeks or so, your hosts gather to talk about our favorite game, Dwarf Fortress. So let's join your hosts, Roland. Okay, right now I sport around 2,000 fish. Tony. You know the classic story? No, no, it wasn't in this crazy one, because. and Jonathan.

Looking at whether or not I have enough food for my fortress, whether I need to like you to start. As they present insightful, irreverent, and often incorrect analysis. And always remember, losing is fun. Welcome back, everyone, to Door Fortress Roundtable. So we're back for episode 63, and joining us today is Nathan, also known as Techett from the YouTube channel, Techett. Welcome, Nathan. Hello there. Welcome back, actually.

Yeah, this is time. Stay number three, I think. Glad to see you guys put my name on the chair this time. Got it reserved for me. Well, anything, sir. Sure. Well, we had some other name on there, and at the last minute, I went and had some needlework done to take off the multi-syllable, you know, the one that's like five or six syllables.

Yeah, yeah. Conan O'Brien was our guest, but he unfortunately pulled out at the last Yeah, well, I mean, no offense to Conan O'Brien, but times are moving on. I think it's my time in the sun here. I think I can outdo that guy. Your Door Fortress content is far better than his. That guy's doing. Yeah, I know.

Yeah, crap is my roof to that. What is he ever done? But do you have Max Weinberg playing drums? That's the question. I need a drummer. That's what my channel really needs. Is a drummer? Exactly.

You could just get yourself a Roland. Not the one here, but like one of the, you know. what the OG like the OG so I'm not the OG Roland there's the Roland you know the the the 404 and the 808 you know the Trump yeah you're an electronics manufacturer correct Roland yeah also I also make shoes yeah I'm a hot dog manufacturer you know delicious I'm not laundry and I want to listen to techno yeah I think it was last summer whenever you were on last time yeah if it was even the last season I can't remember so much is happy

Actually, it must have been because I didn't even start my content until the middle of last year. So who knows? What is time anymore? Congratulations on picking up all the subscribers, man. Thanks. Thanks. I did not expect it to happen. So I don't know, fluidly.

Like, it just climbed up to a thousand. And I was like, oh, well, I guess there it is. I'm a professional. Woo! I know what I'm doing. That's the punishment you get for creating worthwhile content. That's a good content, good voice. And, you know, you have people watch it.

So high production value. Go figure. Right. I used to disagree with my ex and others that I have a good voice because, you know, everyone hears their voice differently in their head. And I guess the, uh, the particular frequencies just don't bounce around in my skull the way they do in the air. And then I started this and like the whole world was like, you're an idiot.

Dude, you, yeah, you don't sound, you know, it sounds, you don't sound bad. I was like, oh, well, it's deep resonant and articulate. That's three things that you want. It's articulate when I try. But I'm from the Midwest, so when I'm having a regular conversation, I get a little bit of mush mouth that I have to fight against sometimes. Yeah, I know the struggles of talking English as well. Let's do the next one in German, just so you can feel what it would be like for rolling.

Dwarf Fortress Roundtable is brought to you in part by a grant from Mr. Gutzi, head librarian of Iron Traded's new hall of scholarship, the Creative Treasury. All are welcome to visit the Creative Treasury on Iron Traded's office level to expand their knowledge and encourage happy thoughts. Scholars and Scribes, please contact Mr. Gutsi for information about setting up a residency in the Creative Treasury. All right, in the news, we have what I consider to be quite an exciting development that came out on the Bay 12 Games report on February 1st.

This is a direct quote from Toadie's soundbite, if you will. He said, we are working on a public-facing roadmap now to take us all to the release with some more clarity, not sure exactly when it will be posted, a few weeks or a bit more, perhaps. That is pretty cool. A few weeks or a bit more.

Hey, man, whatever works for him. Like, it's cool. I wanted him to feel good about it. Besides the old dev pages, I don't think that he has ever had any kind of a roadmap that was public fashen. Yeah, that's true. I think this is extremely cool. I've been part of a lot of early access games since like Minecraft, and I think that was my first maybe. There's like two reasons why this could happen.

Either they're under pressure to maintain enthusiasm for the game that's dwindling, which is kind of the nefarious reason to make a roadmap. And usually it ends up not being accurate. or they actually just have a really good idea of what is left to do. They actually kind of know what they're going to do. And I think judging from how TOTI one has approached this project so far, he doesn't seem the type to ever give to the pressure of the corporate machine, so to speak. I highly doubt it's the first. I'm sure he just actually has a good idea of what's left to be done.

I don't even know who would be the one's pressuring. If anybody would have to be Kit Fox, and I just really don't see that happening. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like, Kit Fox doesn't seem the character to be doing that kind of stuff. Yeah, they don't have that twirrelly mustache or anything, do they? Yeah. Twirlty mustache. You know what I mean.

Kit Fox has their own things going. They don't seem to care that much. I shouldn't say care, but they don't seem to have a focus at all on their website, at least about dwarf fortress at all. You know, boyfriend dungeon and. and stuff like that. Agreed. They've got a lot of other things.

Which sounds like an evil, evil game. All that, like something. Yeah, all that optimism, though, aside about the roadmap, I will say this is still video game territory.

And as a result, even the most benevolent video game developer is subject to the pervasive optimism that comes with making dates and roadmaps. So even though Todi is probably being completely

honest. When we see the roadmap, I think we all have to understand that we should expect up to double the time that the roadmap indicates, depending on circumstances. Well, I doubt that he'll even have dates on the roadmap. It'll probably be more like these are the things that we need to do. Yeah, if he's going to do it really, really wisely and tighten it up, he probably won't put dates on it. Every date will be, it'll happen when it happens. Well, doesn't the Steam page actually say time is relative? Yeah. I feel like that's pretty indicative of what we might get, which is totally cool.

Like, you know, I don't want them to cyberpunk 2077 this thing. Oh, let's not go then to that direction. Who? I don't think he's going to do that. 2077. No. He removes a whole bunch of features from the game

and ships it. Urest Silverhand. Like, wait, there's no Z levels anymore? Damn it. But one thing that they have worked on developing, and it's on a roadmap because the roadmap's not out yet. Alexander from KipFox posted a report on the Steam release news, and links to these will all be

in the show notes. It shows that during world development, world generation, a text box is going to appear displaying the significant events that happened during world generation, and every second you're going to get an update of the most important thing this happened in the world generation in the last second of development. So that could be really, really cool. Yeah, that would be fun. I'm really excited for that, super excited for it.

In my opinion, Legends mode is probably the biggest benefit to the player hidden under the biggest pile of confusion. It's like the one thing that would probably be the best boon to the game if it were just dug up and brought to the surface. Yeah, I absolutely agree. Uh-huh. Yeah, totally. That's the one that when you tell people about it, you're like, no, you don't understand.

Listen, this is what's happening. And it's very difficult to communicate that or even, like, have people figure out how to view the legends mode. It's very complicated. I do wish that he would figure out a way to have that legends mode data accessible during a fortress run somehow. And, of course, I don't know how the thing works under the hood. But is the reason that it's not for game integrity so that you don't know what's going on outside your fortress? No, I don't think that's a problem. Meth hacked it.

There's a switch in world generation. If you go into the advanced world generation parameters, you'll see an option for reveal all historical events. And you can turn that off. And then if you were to access Legends mode, I'm not exactly sure how much information is revealed, but you may have a limited amount that makes sense to include in the game, where you don't necessarily know. about this other civilization's elven diplomat that turned into a werewolf and then bit the human civilizations queen and then there was a war i i remember meth has a mod that you can get

that will let you build a library like a librarian's desk or something as a workshop and then you can use that workshop to interact with legends mode yeah it actually works fairly decently yeah uh sometimes it crashes but it has a scary warning on it yeah it has the scary warning of it might crash and then you lose your progress i used it a while because i wanted to find out if that is actually very nice or not and i would quick save every time because it actually did crash a couple of times on me however i i i paddled back a little bit and now i just used the extracted legend stuff of the legends viewer you know that the stuff that you get out with D.F. Hack, export Legends. Then I use Legends viewer on a different window.

It's not updated with every year or every month or whatever. So I can't really see what is happening right now in my fortress. I can only see what has happened in the last year or whenever the last time was I did like the extract of the Legends, which is sad. Because I would love to see the very, the very, um, newest updates to it. Yeah,

all of those legends mode viewers have that same problem, except for perhaps a Meph's library mod, which I'll have to check that out again. Again, I'll link that in the show notes so that you can download, uh,

is that part of Meph's launcher? I believe that it is in his, don't think it's been updated, uh, recently, but in any case, I might not be maintaining it. But the,

but the problem with all of those legends mode, viewers is that you have to remember to dump your legends data between fortresses. And I never do that. Whenever I retire a fortress or one, you know, just dies. The first thing I want to do is embark again. And then I embark again and go, oh, crap, I should have exported. And I'm too lazy to, to, you know, make a copy of my saves and do the whole thing. I'm in that camp.

And this is why I think that this is such a huge development for the game, this little mini view we're going to get during WorldGen. I'm in that camp of I really, really love Legends mode. I really, really like what I can find out, what I can learn about my civilization. I don't use it. I don't use it because it's just like I don't want to have to go to a different program basically to learn about a game I'm playing on another.

Like if it were just more available, I would use the crap out of it. And I think that having like little tips, fun tips, and then a Legends viewer that works in the game might inspire people, or direct people at least. It'll direct people into Legends mode to where they need to be. Like, oh, your civilization, like your civilization just started a war with the elves. Now you know that you can find a war with elves that's relevant to your game somewhere in Legends mode.

Instead of going in blind and sifting through a sea of sands or a, you know, a beach of sand grains, looking for the one that, you know, counts for something. Yeah, if you can have a news feed Of things that relate to your civilization And or your fortress or your enemies Yeah, that would be cool I am very happy that we have what we have Yeah, I mean the external programs

Yeah, we do have those We do have those But again, the only one that I've heard of that possibly could be done real-time, in a sense, is Meph's library mod. Yeah, I got scared off by the warnings on it, and then I moved and I jump around tile sets and went back to the traditional lazy new pack. So I didn't use the Meph pack anymore. So I gave up on that aspect of it.

Save early and often. So those are the big two news items that we've had since the last, Pretty big. The last time that we met. Yeah, yeah. Maybe next time we'll be talking about the new release. It'd be nice. At least maybe we'll be talking about the roadmap to the new release anyway, next time.

Oh, yeah. I did want to just give a quick shout out to Krug Smash's Splatterface. His third annual splatterface tournament, he got some really good art of his combatants. So if you haven't yet to check that out, it's a very entertaining and some very nice drawings of some. very imaginative forgotten beasts that are being used as combatants. Yeah, there we are with a crug smash button again.

You need an old radio broadcast soundboard, and you need a button that goes like, Cucka, Crug Smash. Is this a YouTube channel? I'm not familiar. Never heard of it yet. Does he make videos? Attention members and guests,

Hall Administrator Blood Toes encourages all Crafts dwarfs to come admire the Grand Guild Hall to the Guild of Ceilings, the Constructive Rope. No other Guild Hall in Iron Traded can match the grandeur of the constructive rope and Blood Toes endeavors to keep it that way. Happy thoughts are guaranteed. Don't you wish you were a Crafts Dwarf? Let's take a look at these questions that we've received from our listeners.

got a few in since we have last covered Q&A session and it'll be great to get Nathan's input on these items here. Justin asked in a comment on episode 59 how to deal with excess

prepared food. I suggest he just traded off and he did that, but he also commented that he believes that food stored in stockpiles might be able to become spoiled due to vermin. And that didn't sound right to me

but I don't know can vermin ruin food should I start or do you want to stop Nathan? You probably have the technical knowledge about whether or not vermin spoil food. I actually don't know that one because I don't care. I'll explain why but go ahead.

Okay so the simple answer is yes vermin can spoil food in stockpiles. In the stockpiles yes and there is oh what was it um one of the evil things creepy crawlers evil eyes i'm not sure one of the evil things that actually makes spoil food faster however it seems that this is basically the only vermin that can do that so if you're not in a evil biome or in a good biome even and you only have fluffy wamblers then you're pretty good to go however they might gnaw on it and then it disappears

in a stockpile is the difference here is if you have it in a barrel it's not getting spoiled not by like natural spoiling nor by any vermin that you possibly have so what we're talking about is just raw food sitting on the floor it's like a like a leg of lamp just you know chilling on the floor that that gets spoiled yes on a floor in a stockpile yeah or just on the floor but only like it spoils on the floor naturally we all seen that you know in the butcher workshop there's a lot of sting usually if you butcher too much right but in the stockpile it only spoils if you have one of these creepy crawlers or evil eyes i really have to check that but one of the vermin kinds of the evil biome that spoils it even in the stockpile yeah yeah

i consider excess meals particularly excess meals and food to be more of a spoilage on a fortress than any vermin can enact on the food itself. So I don't really care. I think, in fact, vermin are probably doing you a favor if you have an excess food production problem by helping get rid of some of that crap. Oh, interesting. I've been looking at community forts and stuff lately. And although it's not present in all forts, there are some very well buttoned up forts. there is commonly an awful problem with overproduction of food.

But it looks like it's, it looks like you solve the problem and traded it away, right? Which is obviously a good way to do it. If you don't need a bazillion dwarf bucks, then then I recommend switching to lavish meals only and setting up a work order and then fallowing half of your farms, farm seasons. And just see where your excess goes is, does it continue to grow? Does it begin to dwindle? And then make another adjustment to your farms from there because you're going to cost yourself frame rate and you're going to have gigantic stocks lists or kitchen lists. You don't want that. You don't want that.

You don't want all that food. Nobody needs that much food, especially if you're farming for it. No, you need it. You need all of it. No, no, you need those six, what did I have last? time? Seahorses, you know, just six seahorses, chilling in a barrel. You know, you need those. It's perfect. Ah, yeah, yeah. I just said, if you're a hungry heads, I've got a hungry head here attacking everyone. Remember hungry head? Maybe that can help you with your food, your food stocks.

You know, more hungry heads, it's more amounts to feed, and it's, I mean, it's clearly hungry, so. I do feel the need to give a little bit of context there. Spoiler, spoiler. Spoiler. Spoiler alert, Nathan and Roland run a bloodline fortress together that they stream the management of. And we're going to talk about that here a little bit. But it sounds like one of them prefers to have more food stockpiled than the other. Don't worry. Don't worry. I don't sacrifice the meals.

I just try to make the food into meals. And then Roland can do what he pleases with them. Let it rot. We'll talk about that later, I suppose. Yeah, let it rod, yeah. I don't know if it even matters, but whenever I'm looking at whether or not I have enough food for my fortress, whether I need to, like, either start hunting or bump up production, I hit the Z key and look at my food stocks. I like to see, you know, for a 100 dwarf fortress, I like to see somewhere around 6, 700 food overall in my stockpiles. and that's what I kind of go by

if I don't have that much I try to produce more if I have more than that I back off production is that overproducing no I don't think so no no that is definitely a very sensible

number I think I'm usually like are we talking about like everything together or just other everything minus drinks yeah wow okay you're really like flying low here

because good lord my stockpiles are usually like at 2,000 each oh god i carry i usually okay right now i sport around 2,000 fish three almost 4,000 planned um and slightly over 10,000 other things which includes prepared meals let me just say this roland your one of your three stockpiles for food is larger than any stockpile I've ever made in this game. Uh-huh. Yeah.

For anything. I've never made a wood stockpile that big. I've never made a stone stockpile that big, ever. Yeah, I have to admit in this current thing, I actually have four large stockpiles that are just full with food. And I keep, like, making prepared food now. So this is actually not the apex that I had of, like, a mound. I already sold a lot of it.

And, you know, I make it into prepared meals and sell it for way over the price. So this is absolutely not the apex, but my food stockpiles were so full that every single square was full with a barrel that was full. And then there was like stuff rotting and corners of my fortress because I had just literally not had the space to put it anywhere. I am one of those people that overproduce. So your numbers sound very nice. Yeah, for comparison to mine, I have my manager set up food production orders that usually stop at about 500 or 1,000, depending on my population.

Okay. But, yeah, when food gets overproduced, we're talking like exponential growth levels. We're talking someone, someone has like 500 food items. That's fine. That makes sense. Then it starts to drift up to a thousand. Okay, but no big deal. You're not overproducing.

Overproducing doesn't start until that grows into 10 to 15,000, like it's exponential. Oh, yeah. I've never had that much. Yeah. Yeah. It happens like that. Thanks, Justin, for the question. We'll probably get back more into this.

I have a feeling coming up and we'll discuss. singe metal proper. Russell sent in an email praising Captain Ducks tutorials. He also asked if any of us have tried a hermit fortress, meaning a fortress

where you end up with just one dwarf doing everything. Has anyone else done that? Outside of adventure mode, because that kind of sounds like... The hermit fortress? Yeah. I tried it one time. It was hard.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Russell thinks that the funniest part and also the most tragic is having to kill off the other six dwarves and dealing with your migrants. So you'd have to kill off or dispose of your migrants in some way. I guess you could just exile all of them. Yeah, yeah. There is a very nice thing that you can use if you have a D.F. Hack that is just slap in something, something slash hermit. you have to look up the actual command for it,

but that disables all migrants. So you only work what you have on the map. And I had, I tried it with one dwarf. That was hard, you know, because the poor dwarf has to work all day and only gets very little things done. And then he's really lonely. So you kind of have to make sure that he's a dwarf that actually likes being lonely. otherwise, the fortress really does, just has a limited time of runtime.

Until he breaks. That it can possibly go. Yeah. Yeah, it's very sad. Instead of that, I just tried like a family for it. I had two families and they started to like marry each other. And, no, I had like a nice, large family after a while. That worked way better.

but hermit fortress is insanely hard because you tend to overwork the dwarf and then you're like you know me as overproducer and food items for example I don't even know how much food I need to get a single dwarf through a year so I produced almost a hundred drinks and then realized that that is so much for the single dwarf I basically never have to touch making drinks in the next few years again. But my dwarfs hated it. Like my dwarf singular hated it because he had to work several weeks

just brewing alcohol. It's hard. Tony, how long did your fortress last? Do you remember? Oh, not too long. Yeah, I think he fell in the water and died. That's what I think happened. Was it in this same and same world? No, no, it wasn't in this crazy one because I'm sure the undead would have killed him.

Dwarves and water. man, they don't mix. I know. You should have been more careful. I've never thought about doing a Hermit Fortress from the beginning, but actually somewhat recently I thought about if a fortress were to start spiraling, right? And it just basically is doomed. I would probably try to take some kind of immortal dwarf that might be in my population,

like a necromancer or a vampire or something, and hold them up in a castle or wherever and let the fortress die and then just have this like bitter old vampire or something living among the corpses of his his forgotten friends so to speak and just like have this like tower of my own like this tower of like draculaic sadness draculac is not a word it is now but it's very it's a you know it's easy to envision that but that has to you know there has to be circumstances for that to happen You can't start an embark on the context of a fortress that has been through 10 years of growth and then sudden misery. By the way, I think Draculaic is a great new adjective we have coined a term. For sure. All right. So thanks, Russell, for sending in your question and comment. And we've got another comment here, but I'm going to actually save Calvin's until our next episode.

So Calvin, thanks for sending us in the email. But I think that we may end up having a long discussion about this one as well. If that's okay with you guys. I don't mind. Because we need to move on to our prime topic today, which is to discuss singe metal. So we'll be right back and we'll talk about that. Attention members and guests, Brendan Poole has established the Mitt Roots, Guildhall, to the Farming Guild, the Leafy Hall.

All guild members should spend time at the Mitt Roots to increase their efficiency at bringing forth sustenance from the earth. Seminars will be given this year on establishing above-ground crops for adding variety to the diet of iron-traded citizens. All right, so as most of our listeners probably know, and if you don't, then you need to check out our show notes for a link to the respective stream locations. But Roland and Nathan have a Bloodline Fortress that they're doing together called Singe Metal.

That's right. Singe Metal. Pretty awesome name. So how old is that now? Game years. I just finished year nine. Yeah, so I'm going to start year 10 soon-ish. It's getting there.

It's getting there. Yeah, I'm not sure if I would say the fortress is moving faster than with a single manager in terms of, of growth are slower because there's so much different stuff happening when you have two people running a fortress. Normally, one person will ignore half the game. I would ignore justice. Like, I don't care. Whatever, you know, I hardly ever visited that menu. And I would focus on industry, whereas Roland would probably ignore the time I put into my crafting floors

and instead work on military injustice. Yeah, that is correct. But it's also very nice. because I don't have to get into like the whole food production thing you know I mean we in the fortress there is still slight over production but it's not as stupidly massive as something that I would have crafted myself so everything kind of works I just put in into the manager like I need I need this and that many swords I need this and that many and they do it and I know they do it and I just have to check if we actually have the steel bars for it and then I can't can't go back to doing what I love, which is justice or like military things. But the game is also really trying to make sure I don't have the time and my dwarfs don't have the time. So we got attacked a lot of times, which the attack itself, very harmless, okay? I trained the dwarfs, they're pretty good. They know what they're doing.

You know, they know which end of the sphere goes into the goblin. But the cleanup is terrible. Okay? Yeah. So the worst year was the year six, I think, for me. Because I had three attacks and I finished cleaning every time. And then the new attack would come and I'm like, oh, God, no, not again. And I just sat there with really big eyebags at some point because it was like, oh, yeah, sure.

of course, an attack. And then the else came and I'm like, ah, else, you know, whatever. And then they came with a lot of war animals. And I'm like, wow, it keeps happening. They keep popping into my map. You know, they keep popping in. I think that the game has become sentient against us because...

Yeah, they're really trying. It knows what we don't want to happen. And it's not the fortress. It's not the dwarves dying. It's the fortress becoming cluttered with garbage. And my year included a goblin attack, which was actually mostly dwarves, followed by two elf attacks and a were deer. And I was doing a great job cleaning up.

I have installed a 20-floor, a garbage shoot from the surface down to a garbage dump that goes to the magma from within the fortress. And it was doing a wonderful job. And then the game was like, uh-uh, no, we can't have you looking nice and clean over here. We're going to send you 35 elves. and war animals to pair with them. Another 40 elves go. And then it sends a were deer

that's invincible, apparently. That wear deer couldn't die. So eight, I think eight dwarves got killed or expelled or like seven dwarves. Because it just couldn't get, no one could kill it. It was like, you know, it was like a giant wear deer,

but it wasn't. It was just regular. As regular as a wear deer can be. Those are pretty overpowered creatures, wear anythings. Yeah, that's true. And we didn't have a fantastic guardian angel this time around. So, you know, it was a little different circumstances than the last time.

Just saying, sorry, Swolfi. Her death still weighs heavy on my mind. Wow, okay. I'm going to take that personally. No, no, no, no. You did what you had to do. Ultimately, I agree with your policies. But I had to kill her.

And that was the first time Dwarfortures ever presented me with any real drama that I felt. I had to kill Taltow. I liked her and I killed her. Yeah, it goes hard if you look into characters and such. But the game is really trying to make sure the game is not as smooth as it could have been. For example, I come into an episode and I'm like, okay, let's try and get some rating done. And what happens, I don't get any rating done because we're getting attacked so much and I have to like clean up things. So, oh my God, like, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm actually trying to raid.

I'm not going for the tower, even though I probably should. But I can't raid the elven civilization. It's way too big. I can't rate the goblin civilization. It's way too big. And when I did that, they just got stuck and I got attacked and, ugh, everything was terrible. Well, I have two words for you, Roland. Grizzly bears.

Yeah, I heard. We have grizzly bears now. Yeah. So we're going to go, we're going to march them out there, you know. I don't know how many grizzly bears it's going to take, but we got them. We also need to get another giant leopard. How did we become at war with the elves? Do you remember?

No, I absolutely have no clue. One day they just hated us. Yeah. Yeah. They just stopped coming after a while. And then we received some of the elven ambers. And I figured the second, the elves stopped coming in. because, you know, I tend to look forward to to trading for exotic animals.

They just weren't there. So I was like, what is happening? And then at one time I actually checked it and I saw, oh, we're actually at war with the elves. I assume it has something to do with our parent civilization that just started attacking the elves and we're just a very lonely fortress over there. Yeah, could be. I went into legends before we started this. and I found that our civilization had joined those elves in attacks against goblins, particularly at a site called Watchpad, for over 100 years on a yearly basis.

So we seem to be good friends. And then as soon as we start our four, they're like, uh, well, who are these guys? Hmm. Yeah, the elves being at war is troublesome because now we can't get more giant leopards. Yeah, very sad. Which I really wanted to make giant leopard capes for the, uh, the boners, my personal squad. Yeah, yeah. Can't you go and raid and capture the animals if you do a raid on their civilization?

Yeah, but the possibility of us actually catching a giant leopard is fairly small because the elves, you know, you have to imagine it as there's a lot of animals and the pool of what we could technically steer is very large, but the possibility that they actually decide for like one of the maybe 10 giant leopards or one of the apparently million mandrels that they have, they probably just take a lot of mandrels. War mandrels. Yeah. Oh, man.

Yeah, I had to deal with some of them, some of the mandrels. I've done some developments in terms of a new forge as magma forges now. Well, magma smelters, the forge has yet to be set up. So that's kind of troublesome. I was so close. speaking in terms of when you put orders in and stuff for food and things, I do, I do put a lot of, of restraints on myself because part of me wants to just be like, no, we're going to organize this like this.

We're going to, all these things are going to work this way. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. This is a bloodline fortress, you know, I got play it cool, work with, you know, cooperative attitude. But at some time, at some points, it works really interesting. Because you'll submit a, like a manager order for, say, lavish meals, 500 lavish meals or whatever. And I've actually sort of taken on the role, internal role in the game of the manager in a way. Because I'll see your orders and I'll be like, I see Roland has submitted a request for more lavish meals.

Allow me to create an order, an actual, so I'll like get rid of the 500 lavish meals. I'm like, well, if we make actually 100 per season and we do that, given these particular conditions, that should satisfy the 500 and then continue to make the lavish meals in the future, blah, blah, blah, blah, they type of this stuff in. And I'm like, I'm actually the manager here. Like, I've actually become the, like, Roland is simply submitting requests of me to, and, and, you know, I try to set up the workstations because I'm like, Roland is going to need steel for the spear. So, all right, so once I organize this, and I almost set up a farm, in fact, for paper making. I was like, I could do a two-story crafting thing. I could use the downstairs to dump water in order to create a farm below where we'll grow papyrus or something, whatever we can grow.

And then the top story will become the processing for papermaking. And I was like, because Roland wants books. You know, Roland asks for books. And I as the manager will now create a workflow and hire dwarves to create a bookmaking industry. Do you find that your fortress is more balanced with two of you managing it? Or have you even had it running long enough to know that? Do you find that, but really, the balance is better because of two different styles? Hmm.

I think it is. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. I have a very, like, we have a good military going. We have a lot of, a lot of food. We have a lot of drinks. We have a lot of other stuff. Like, we have even an automated millstone and like a cool waterfall entrance kind of thing going on.

And there's a lot of. stuff happening at once all over the place and yeah like a functioning justice system but also a functioning farming system and also a functioning cool side project where we have like a small how would we even call this like a reverse aquarium in the river um there's a lot of stuff happening yeah yeah an aquarium in the in the kind that you visit not the kind you keep on your your desk like a museum of fish. Yeah, yeah. It is, I'd say it's definitely more balanced,

especially in the context of what can go wrong. So for something to destroy Singe Metal, it's going to have to land first on the right year, and it's going to have to exploit a weakness that isn't covered by the developments of a year when the player who counters that threat was playing. For example, a wear attack on my year was actually a danger to the fork, because I usually get lazy with those, but I took it seriously this time because Syng Metal is rather important.

But that was a real threat to the fortress because I don't have too much experience at doing all of the motions correctly. A lot of times it takes down my fort. Then on Roland's year, where something he might normally neglect that normally may cause a fortress to fail, I probably have that covered. And so a threat really has a small window. It kind of has to hit us at the right year. when we're vulnerable or else the other guy has it figured out.

So normally I totally ignore justice, for example, and maybe someone who needs to be imprisoned doesn't get in prison. It goes berserk in the tavern and gets away with it and now there's a spiral or something. But, you know, Roland's got that set up, so we're good. Yep, yep, yep. Next time you all need to embark to an evil biome. Oh, yeah, that is true.

but I think the next time we would make a bloodline fortress, I would suggest that we actually take a lot less dwarfs in. Make sure that it's all focused and we don't overproduce and there's no clutter. And when there's clutter, we throw things away because it's really hard. You know, I'm the type of guy that clatters in his fortresses as well and in his real life, but that's not the point. So making sure that the fortress actually runs.

very smoothly is that is hard especially if you have like two mines at the same thing you know like two cooks at the same soup yeah and this is actually what would kill the fortress on my end you know like clutter or like when

I get two sieges in and there's just so much clutter that my FPS slowly go down then I would not be able to finish the fortress just of FPS death and you swap one year to time, right? Well, you will be glad to know I brought us up 20 FPS through the cleanup that I've done.

So we're up from 40 something to 60 almost. We occasionally go over 60. So on my machine, I was 40 now. I'm 60. You should see a bump up too. I don't know where your processor lands. But yeah, those are, I think ultimately a bloodline fortress is ours is very successful. I feel like everyone should try one.

but it really works because we don't have a lot of overlap in what we like to do. So Roland doesn't care if I say, well, I hope you don't care. If I say move some of the production that he's doing to a more sensible place for the crafting system as a whole. Like recently, right now the biggest move I'm doing, this is the largest move of Roland's setup that I've ever done. So I'm kind of nervous. but I'm moving all of the bar production by smelting ores to the basement and I'm leaving the upstairs as a melting operation for gear from the surface, which hopefully the fact that we're now on magma forges sort of forgives me for dabbling with your prior work. Oh, no, that was barely work. I just slapped it into some room so I get some things done.

And this is also something, if I may just slide into this, that has happened to me. As you said, you become the manager. You know, I slap in the 500 lavish meals. And the funny thing is, I technically know how to put up the manager stuff, right? But it's a bit iffy. It's not my thing. So I just kind of actually slapped it in there in hopes that you would see that and maybe maybe get on crafting and maybe fix it for me because like manager for me is like make me

five steel swords thank you very much like one time i'm not going to dabble with this anymore and um so so i'm i'm definitely learning from just looking at your layout that's true yeah but yeah it's it's something that could go wrong i imagine if you and the person you're doing a bloodline fortress with like to do the same things i could see this not working out so well but we happen to have a pretty good synergy. And I think one of the most, one of the weirdest things to come out of it is what neither of us do. So we have this great fortress. We got crafting floors. We're making hemp clothing. I'm making socks. Sorry, but we're totally making socks. But we're still making trousers and shirts. I just doubled our clothing industry output. Well, I doubled our cloth

output. I haven't done a second clothesmaking workshop. Anyway, all this stuff is happening, right? We got amazing food. We got a cool entrance. We got a justice system. We got nobles. I satisfied all their requirements. We don't have a single Crafts Guild. We haven't satisfied a single petition, I think. We just, neither of us care. Neither of us care. Yeah.

Gilds are one of my favorite, favorite aspects. I love the idea of. Maybe we should bring you in on the bloodline, you know, so we can have a complete fort because. We actually tried early on in the podcast doing a, doing a bloodline fortress called Luridweps. And I don't really know. know, I think that maybe one of the things you need to do is you need to stream it. You need to actually have some accountability so that you actually get down and do it because

I got lazy. And like, yeah, I'll do it. I'll do that tomorrow. I'll do that tomorrow. And, you know, it just tended to never, ever get done. Yeah. I think the longer it ran to the harder it was to then kind of remember where you'd left off. I think that was our problem.

It would be like four weeks later. Like, what was happening there? I can't remember anymore. And three people, maybe too many. Did you guys have an end goal in mind? Because we're kind of very loose and haven't quite focused down on what we want to do with the fort. Yeah, the end goal was to teach Jonathan how to play Dwell Fortress. Basically, the end goal was don't die.

That sounds like teaching someone how to drive a car by driving them to the store in the car and then putting them in the driver's seat and saying drive home. Maybe if we tried another one, it would go better. But yeah, I think Tony was right. You forget where you left off, especially whenever it's. it's three people and it's, you know, you get it, you drop it off and you don't see it again until two game years later. Yeah.

I try to send, I do like a little write-up, even though I've done the streams. First of all, my streams run very long because I spend a lot of the game doing menu stuff and not watching things run. So I can make a year last seven hours of streaming or more, 10 hours even. So I don't expect Roland to come in and watch 10 hours of. content. And although I try to do my wrap-ups at the end of the stream, those even run on. So I do actually do little write-ups of like the important things that if he doesn't know might explode. You know, like you have to know about this, right? Like I told him about the forge in this latest one.

I was like, you have to install this last forge because right now the dwarves are going to not be able to forge things in the basement without it. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I do these write-ups because you kind of have to, that's one of the most important things, is knowing where you're leaving off. And the stream would work, the stream would work, except we're on radically different schedules. Roland's in university and on a completely different time zone. And that's a totally different life schedule than someone working a seven to three job, you know, in the, you know, Western United States. So I can't expect him to get to the stream. So doing the write-ups really helps, I think.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Kind of that here's what happened. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's very important to, in my opinion, it's part of doing the bloodline successfully. And I can catch rolling streams because I just put in my headphones at work and listen to it so I know what's happening. But it's hard to put your headphones in at university. Or actually, you're mostly streaming when I'm asleep. Yeah, that's true. Or when I just wake up and go to university. So when I'm there, you're usually just done. Yeah. Yeah. But doing. the write-ups really helps with the bloodline, I think. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, it does. Because I just can go check, you know, like we have 10 points today.

Let's see what he did. Oh, yeah, right. Or forgot. We got grizzly bears now. So it does help, especially because I have like a goldfish brain. After 10 hours of my stream, you've forgotten what I said in the first hour? Yeah, yeah. I usually check them a little bit too late. So either I already started streaming. I usually cut mine in half because I can't sit here and do like a 10-hour stream even though I wish I could. So I try to cut them into like four-hour streams. Yeah. And sometimes I have to watch the end of your stream right before I start my year just to like remember.

But do you guys ever take notes when you know you're about to leave your own personal fortress for a long time? You ever like note down what you're doing? You know how you can change from actually digging? to just marking things to be dug for mining. Yeah. I will leave notes, not through the notes sexual process, but I'll leave great big notes like pointing in error and say things like, like the office is here.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I sometimes do that. So I'll write myself notes on my actual map. That's good. Yeah. What gets me is the temples and stuff, like figuring out which room is which temple and which thing is, which workshop or which guild hall or whatever.

It gets super confusing to me. Oh, yeah. On-screen labels would be nice, wouldn't they? Something you can do is remember that the name of the location is the name of this arbitrary entity that is the location, which can span many zones for things like that. But each zone can also be named using the control N function. So when you make the temple right away, whatever the location is, it could be like the, you know, sentient blueberries or something. you can name the location knock goal temple and then you just hit i and you scroll over the location and you're like oh yeah that's the temple to knock goal you know i don't know what the scenting of blueberries

is i don't know what the hell that's telling me you know but this tells me that's true that's true but you have to actually hit i and scroll over it oh yeah it would be great to be able to have like an index of named things items so that you can zoom to them by going to your like you hit control tildy and you see the list of things that you've named I will often forget okay so where is that particular craft dwarf

oh I see where is that particular if you need to find the location and not just figure out what this location is but where that location is even in the locations menu you can't zoom to the location from the locations menu

yeah it would be great to be able to say okay so I am still short about a thousand dollars or a thousand units worth of value for this for this room to be able to fulfill my my contract with the guild i need to what so which which place is that that i need to add another artifact to and yeah you have to actually hit eye and start looking around yeah because the denomination is another thing that's not even the location name right so the guild i think the guild um requirements oh you know what it's all complicated i can't even remember exactly how it works if tarn adams is listening

a little bit more flexibility with engraving things, allowing us to engrave constructed floors and walls would make this so much easier. Because one reason not to decorate the floor of a temple in a way that's easily recognized at a glance, for example, just put a big N on the floor in gold or something for the not gold temple is because you can't engrave it then. You can't engrave a construction. So people want to engrave their temples. And that's also a reason why people don't dig out gems in their walls because then you

can't engrave it. If we could engrave it. Well, in Luridwips, you know, in Lurdwips, I put that we had a big empty space and I put an actual logo in flooring of the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable podcast logo. It looked pretty good. That was, I do like that kind of stuff too. But yeah, but yeah, if you're going to, if you want to smooth or engrave the floors, then you can't do that because that's constructing flooring.

Yeah, and smoothing and engraving is super powerful, especially now in syng metal, because I in the early stages I do mass smoothing right but then as things go on and the smoothing jobs get smaller I dedicate smoothing to a few dwarves we now have two legendary engravers and legendary plus five and then we have one I think that's pretty close like legendary plus three or whatever so I made this tomb for our new baron right because he's a baron he needs a tomb or whatever I'll you know I'll help him make use of that tomb too, but that all in time. But I was like, okay, so I made a tomb. And it's like, it's a peasant's tomb. This tomb is not good enough for me. I'm like, okay, what do you want, dude? All right. So I engraved it. And he's like, it's a mausoleum for me.

And I'm like, all I did was have these guys chisels some, you know, stuff into the walls, probably about fighting mandrills. I don't even know what's on there. But these legendary, there was like six masterpiece engravings in this one small room because we have legendary engravers. So it immediately mausoleum. Yeah. That's a change I made recently, too. I don't remember whether it was on Nathan, one of your streams or if it was Tony or Roland suggested that I not have my entire population be engravers that you just limit it so that they become legendary. Early on, it's fine.

Almost makes it too easy to bump up the value of your rooms. Yeah, yeah. Early on, it's fine because I find that early on you need to smooth out whole fortress levels. You need to smooth out massive amounts of stuff. So you've got to get people on smoothing. So you send 20 dwarves to smooth it, whatever. But you want to leave just enough smoothing left for a group of a few to really get their skills up to snuff during those final smoothing operations so that when you start engraving things, you got some real skilled engravers. And so that really helps because then your engravings, who cares about the smoothing, right?

as long as your engravings are done by experts. Okay, well, we are pushing our limits on time here. They are artificial limits and arbitrary, but... We don't want corporate to crack down on us. Yeah, and cut our, like, sending time again. Right, we need more of those dwarfs commercials. Yeah, we'll be going into overtime here in a minute. And I have to pay him time and a half.

It's horrific. So thanks so much for coming on, Nathan. Yeah, thank you for having me. Maybe the conclusion, maybe with a dire and a tragic conclusion, whatever it is of Singe Metal will warrant another visit. I think you guys might beat the game and get to the credit screen. Yeah, maybe. The credit screen.

Yeah, it will definitely be interesting, have you on for a post-mortem on Singe Metal, whenever that does roll around. What would be a successful fortress to you for how many years do you make it last? I think a successful fortress is almost immortal until you take. your own risks with it. I'd say that, well, it kind of depends what the goal is. And that's something we're going to start figuring out soon, I think. Because I feel like we're finally, our checklist of mechanical things to do has dwindled. And we have to start thinking about what we're going to do with all of this, you know, this prosper that we've gifted ourselves with,

these metals and stuff. So once we figure that out, we'll be able to say, like, well, maybe we'll go try to take down the elves. This should take maybe a few years or something and get an idea of how long it'll run from there. Because right now it's just running into eternity. People keep asking do you guys have an end goal for this? I'm like, not yet, I guess. I don't know. I think your end goal should be the steam release. Right? It should. We should just run until the steam release. Run it to the steam release. Then effortlessly create the new bloodline in the steam release. You know, I am going to make a credit screen, though. You've inspired me, Tony.

The credit screen is going to be a role of the dead slash missings, missing units list. Oh, that's good. Once it's like 10 pages long because a tragedy has happened, I'm just going to have that role. You're playing with me. Congratulations to the forgotten beast that helped us in the herd. Right. Eliminating the weakest of us. Yeah.

Strongest could live. I'll try to make a 10 minutes. minute credits roll out of it. Oh, okay. I see. That's a good idea. I like it. So, Nathan, as if it wasn't obvious that you have a YouTube channel, how would people follow you or find out more about you online if they would like to? Well, you can find my YouTube channel. It's called Techud.

And you can also find me on Twitch. It's Twitch TV, Twitch.tv slash Techud. And that's T-E-K-K-U-D, as it's spelled in the game. Also, I regrettably got a Twitter, but I'm not using it because I hate Twitter. So I don't expect any content there, but it's Tech and One. I can't wait to check it out. Right. Maybe I'll post the food that I make.

I made some mozzarella sticks yesterday. Who knows? That sounds delightful. Well, every podcast release goes onto Twitter here. We did have a Facebook channel until I deleted my Facebook account, deleted, hard deleted it, because of the evil that tends to do in my opinion. I'm not touching Facebook. We won't go there again.

Anti-shout to that company. I don't know if I even will use Twitter at all, and then Facebook, I'm not. You won't even get me to consider making a Facebook page for this journey. This is not in 2010. I'll make a MySpace before I make a Facebook. Actually viable. Okay, guys. All right, then.

I hope everyone enjoys their fortressing over the next couple weeks. And until next time, thanks again, Nathan, for coming on. Thank you. And everybody out there, happy fortressing. 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.

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