Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 66: In Which The Gang Asks, “What IS Dwarf Fortress, Anyway?”

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

This episode, we take a step back and consider how we'd describe Dwarf Fortress to someone who hasn't played before. We also get off track and talk about dogs as mayors. Mayor Max Support Dwarf Fortress at Bay12Games.comSupport Dwarf Fortress Roundtable on Patreon

Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, episode 66, recorded April 10th, 2022. Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. Every couple weeks or so, your hosts gather to talk about our favorite game, Dwarf Fortress. So let's join your hosts, Roland. There's also a third option. that, you know, is... Tony, Roland, it's like going from Stuttgart to Hamburg. And Jonathan...

It's like, when your brakes over heat and you're driving through the mountains, just pull over to the side of... As they present insightful, irreverent, and often incorrect analysis. And always remember, losing is fun. Dwarf Fortress Roundtable is brought to you in part this week by Tolto's. Hey, kids, do you crave justice? Well, now you can have it with Toltoes. On the back of every box is a special puzzle.

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Questionably delicious. 10% of proceeds to Paltopo Points Gives Memorial. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable. So how are you guys doing? Very nice. Well, really enjoying the turn of the seasons here in northern hemisphere. I suppose they turn as well in the southern hemisphere,

but they are turning into the more favorable seasons now, I think. Yes. I guess that depends on who you are, though. That's true. If you're Santa Claus, turning to winter is probably good, but, yeah. If you own a ski resort. It's probably getting worse in the Southern Hemisphere for it. Are there a lot of good ski resorts in the Southern Hemisphere?

There has to be at least one. Well, Australia has ski resorts. Yes. What about Chile? If we have any Chile in, listeners, let us know if you have ski resorts there. And is it the Andes? They're in Chile. They've got a lot of mountains there.

Yeah. Yeah, it just depends on whether they're the skiable ones. I'm sure they are. I'm sure somebody's sitting here going, oh, come on, guys. Yeah. Yeah, they are. Anywho That's par for the course

Yeah Anyway I was thinking last week That we have In our entire run of episodes This is number 66 here We have never sat down

And just said Hey, what is Dwar Fortress We talk about everything As if you know What Dwar fortress is That you've played the game before Because really If you're going to get to episode 66

In this podcast You probably already play Dwar Fortress But Or it might be time to contact someone you love about getting help. I don't guess that is completely true because I do have a friend I've brought up before that listens to the podcast just to hear us talk. It doesn't actually play the game. Hey, friend, how's it going? Right.

So where should we dig into this thing? It's kind of, I don't know about you guys, but everyone I know doesn't play it. I think you guys are the people that I know that play it. everyone else that I know doesn't. And so it can be really tricky to talk about to people that don't know. And sometimes you'll hear people who are like, I looked at that and it looks like an Excel spreadsheet. Yeah, yeah.

And you can try to tell them that it doesn't have to look like that. But by the time you finish the sentence of saying, well, it doesn't have to look like that. They've already stopped listening. Yeah. So, yeah. You must be using dwarf therapist, right? I see my dwarf therapist often. Thank you very much.

No, I, yeah, so I guess that's kind of one of the things is like, where do you begin to talk about like this in a way that people would continue to listen to what you have to say? Yeah. I usually start with it's an indie game. And then I usually qualify that with saying, well, you know, it's not really a game per se. It's like a simulation. Yeah, yeah. You're sort of along for the ride. And then it starts going off the rails, right?

Yeah, yeah, and then you just get into the massive cobweb of trying to explain it, and you're like, oh, yeah, and it's like a simulation. You see it's like a fantasy thing, and you make your world, and blah, blah, blah. But I always default to trying to explain it with other computer games, because usually I do talk to people that at least know what Sims are. and I really like the explanation of it's like SimCity but every Sim is like really fleshed out every item is really fleshed out and the Sims die all the time

and it's devastating and horrific and really cool also I bring up the favorite animal and say that of that animal that exists like a human kind of version, you know, helps making people be interested in the game. On that note, it's not always a human version because I think somebody posted to the subreddit that an alligator had ascended to the role of king of a civilization. Yeah, I saw that. You're just a normal alligator, and he was king.

And that's when people will look at you and just blink a couple times and then say, should we go somewhere? yeah how does an alligator they're not sentient are they was this in legends mode yeah so it's just a trick of the legends mode thing huh I mean honestly there have been worse choices that people have voted into power in the real world than an alligator

I mean there is a dog as a mayor somewhere I've read a story about that he was even re-elected I think even multiple times and it's like a very fluffy golden retriever oh boy it's very cute So I can't see why somebody would actually elect an animal just out of protest, you know? Every single candidate is bad. So I'm going to elect this alligator that just, you know, eats things.

We throw things at the alligator and it eats it. And that is the whole elected official of our town. Like, yeah, you know, I want to buy a street. You know, make a street or buy a house. And you're like, oh, yeah, you have to talk to the mayor. Yeah, well, where is he? He's over there, eating the chicken. Well, Roland, you'll be happy to know that at least seven dogs have held the office of mayor in the United States.

What? Seven. Wow. Is that all? Just seven. It looks like... Remember the Snoopy for president years. It looks like Kentucky has three dog mayors, which is pretty exciting.

California's got two. so that's great and Minnesota has one and the California one of them is idle wild which is this little tiny town up in the top of the mountains between Palm Springs and Los Angeles and so I feel

it's probably very tongue-in-cheek where where where where currently I think the mayor passed away after his second term in idle wild so Roland each individual city and and township in the U.S.

basically chooses its own form of self-government. There are various kinds. I can't remember what the terms are for them. One is where the mayor is the chief executive and has quite a bit of power. There are other types where all the power is vested in a city council where they could have a mayor, but the mayor is pretty much only a figurehead or a ceremonial position. So I could very much see on a council-led city or town where the mayor is totally ceremonial and they could elect a dog, you know.

Yeah. So it's for those listening, if you'd like to see about the mayor that we're just talking about, he has a website called mayor max.com. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. And yeah, we'll link to this in the show notes. And the mayor has now been replaced by a trio of mayors, Max, two, Mikey and Mitzie. Oh, my God. Delightfully cute golden retrievers.

I can't believe this. we seem to be serving. Welcome to Twor Fortress Roundtable, your American civics lesson. And dog mayors. All right. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's probably not a lot to do in idle oil. You know, they're not going to build anything and not much happens there except people from L.A. and Palm Springs who want to see snow. Yeah, true. But, but it is still, it is still a very weird thing. Dude, its purpose is like for people in California to go play in the snow for the hour to drive up, you know, fill the bed of their pickup truck with snow and then drive back down to the sun and have snowball fights on the beach.

Anyway, back to Dwarf Fortress. Sure. So anyway, that's basically it. Thanks for listening today. So if you were going to give a comp for a video game, what would be the first game that comes to mind to say, okay, Dwarfortress. Have you ever played X? Hmm. Well, what is it? I will insert crickets there. Rimworld is often a gateway drug into Dwarf Fortress, but that in itself requires a bit of a leap.

But it's a, you know, we've talked about Rimworld before. It's also an excellent game. Loads of fun, maybe potentially even more brutal in a lot of ways. I think the Sims is a decent way to look at it. Yeah. Yeah, but the big difference here is that SimCity, you manage like a whole city and like a hundred thousand of people, but the big difference is that those people in SimCity are not real Sims. Like they have no personality. They do nothing.

They're just, you know, shapes walking over your pavement and like filling the streets, but they're not actually doing anything. right now I'm not talking about SimCity I'm talking about the Sims yeah right but in a much grander scale yes yes if you take you know if like the like the Sims will be like one bedroom in a fortress yeah yeah I think it's kind of like I almost think of it as like a story that you're allowed to kind of play along with and in guide and I think it's a story that's kind of going to tell itself and then you can make choices to try to not die. But, um, yeah, I think one of the big things that differentiates dwarf fortress from real-time strategy games and, and likes the Sims and things like that is that your dwarves, even if you give them orders, have autonomy. You can tell them that you want them to do something, but if they don't want to do it, they're not going to do it.

They'll go do something else if that, if that's what they choose to do. other games that you can compare it to i mean the yes you can compare to rimworld but rimworld in itself is already so like special and niche that it really does feel like just like the difference between like milk and skim milk i'm not trying to shit on you know room world it's very nice game but i'm just saying it's it's so close and i can't really say it's like it's like Like, you can't describe it as like Rimworld because it's so close. It's like distant cousin. Dwarf fortress, Rimworld with extra fat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like Rimworld, but like fantasy Rimworld with several Z layers. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like if you've played Rimworld and you like that, then, and you want it to take it sort of a little farther, this is probably the game for you. Yeah, maybe the people who I would be telling about Dwarf fortress who don't know what Dwell Fortress is, probably don't know what Riemworld is either. Yeah, possibly. Exactly, exactly. So the lady in the supermarket line the other day was very patient as I told her all about it.

Oh, no, you didn't. I'm joking. I always feel really bad when I tried to, like, tell my mother about it because, you know, I feel like an insane rambler sitting there, like, the Brambley, like, the Brambley. breakfast table and like telling her like oh yeah you know there somebody drew the one forgotten beast that I talked about or or whatever and I'm like I'm really excited you know and she's she's also excited because I'm excited but then I'm trying to explain it and she sits there and it goes like I wonder how you can get all these things in your head and I'm like yeah yeah it's called dwarf fortress wiki yeah it is it is

I try to explain a single screenshot and that already reminded me of how abstract the entire game is because at some point you just lose the sense of abstraction. You know, you see what you're looking at. I start the game now and I see what I'm looking at no matter which tile set I play. And I see people moving around and stuff.

I still struggle with that in Aski. I'm still not very good when it comes to ASCII at visualizing things. Yeah, it is harder on ASCII. That is correct. But ultimately, it comes down to it. You know, there's a tavern. So every single person in the tavern is like socializing. And then you automatically build like a small little thing around that where like people are talking to each other.

And I can really see like some of the grunchy dwarfs with their hands on their hips talking to each other. I'm not like, hmm, yes, my day was really nice. I tanned 54 beak dog pelts today. But try to get that into the head of somebody that never played it. Well, it is tough. Like, you talk to people about, you can find out all this stuff about different dwarves, and there's so much to them. Like, I'm just looking at this one that seems to be having a hard time,

and you can kind of figure out what is interesting to me. And when I've talked to programmers about this game, they will often comment that is a lot of, that is a lot to try to keep track of in a game from a variable's perspective. All of these things that Tarn is kind of doing for each one of these creatures, you know, having each one of these feelings sort of manifest itself as some sort of a variable in the development environment, I think, makes people's heads hurt. But it's super interesting. So maybe that's a way through if people can program software, you can tell them, look, you don't know. understand. He's simulating toenails. Yeah. Do you know what that means? But that goes so quickly into like a whole rabbit hole, you know, when you explain what you

see in a combat and then they're like, wait, he's chopping off the head and they assume it's like some kind of animation and they're like, no, it's like presensual randomly generated combat. So there is actually a item sword that is interacting with a body part. head and slice it off because the person that is swinging the sword is strong enough and then you you see their face just

starting to frown because they don't know what the fuck you're talking about you're not like what what you're like yeah you know the strength of the dwarf has like strength parameters and then he swings the sword in a specific way and you're like

I sound insane when I try this you do get the look in their eyes once they find out that this is not animated that you just actually have to go to a separate screen and go back and read what happened they look like, why would you want to play that? Yeah. That does not seem like it would be fun at all.

Well, it's tricky too because I do have a friend that downloaded it and brought it up. And I think sometimes people don't take you seriously when you say, no, no, you should absolutely use some kind of a tutorial for this or some sort of guide because otherwise this isn't going to make any sense to you at all. And I think in the modern video game era, even if you don't understand a game or have a clue or it seems kind of LeBrenton, you can usually figure it out if you just sit down and start pressing buttons and bashing away at it. But I think this is a bit different because

you really can't in any sort of meaningful way, or at least I couldn't. And I tried to get into this game many times over the course of the last decade. And it wasn't really until I found the Paradix's tutorial that it all just kind of clicked. So that's yet another plug for that one. I think there may have been one exception, but it seems like every guest we've ever had on here has had the same story. They try to play the game. They hear about the game.

They try to play the game. They go, this is just unplayable. And they stop playing it for a few months. And then they come back and, you know, three months, four months. six months later, they play it again, knowing what they're getting into, and then they stick with it and they play it. I mean, that's the way it was for all three of us, right? It was pretty much. But I don't think I have that much of a layoff phase, truly. I just stuck by it and tried to learn it. Maybe you're the special one. I just went through that whole

tutorial, and it got me enough to understand how to keep the fortress alive. long enough to start trying to figure out other things. Yeah. And that was really all it took. Just don't die. Mine certainly was the Dwar Fortress Wiki Quick Start tutorial. That is what drove it into my head.

I didn't even ever, I don't think that I have ever played it all the way through, but it got me up with farms. And once I was up with farms and building bedrooms, from there, you've got enough under your belt that you can start experimenting and playing with things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, we've spent 30 minutes and... We've got it. Everybody knows now. Dog mayors. We've covered Idawell's dog mares. Dwarf Fortress Roundtable is brought to you in part by a grant from potato bomb, creator of O'Kir Tudrug, the elder of vandalizing, a shale scepter. All craft swarf ship is of the highest quality. This object menaces with spikes of shale, willow, and blackwoods.

bronze. On the Scepter is an image of D-Duck sign rocks, the dwarf in Onyx. Also on the item is in ankles, the bulky cave spider silk shoe in black pie rope, and an image of a bark scorpion in pigtail. But, you know, that is just talking about the fort mode, by the way. Yeah. And now try to explain that it's not just SimCity, but it's also Sims in like, an adventure mode kind of type clicker Skyrim-esque shopping simulator, wrestling simulator, you know. Adventure mode's much easier to explain, right? It's like a really detailed RPG. Yeah, but it's... Have you heard of Dungeons and Dragons?

But it's also like generated per tick. So it's not like a life action kind of thing. It's per tick. True. True. But if... if you were trying to tell somebody, you know, what Dwar Fortress Adventure Mode is, that's a lot easier than Dwar Fortress Fortress mode. I mean, you can go into as much detail as you want. Yeah, it is different than any, you know, Baldur's Gate game or anything like that. It is procedurally generated.

But if I'm trying to tell my dad about an adventure mode, I would find that much easier than telling him about Fortress mode. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's easier to talk about adventure mode because it makes more sense to be. people because people have played those kind of games before, but I think it's harder to play, infinitely harder to play than all of other games. It's a shame. It's less fun.

Like it doesn't have, there's no structure to it. And I think part of the thing that people want in a game is some element of structure, but I'd say adventure mode only works if you have a plan for it going into it. Maybe that's wrong. Maybe it is okay to just drop in. I guess I could kind of imagine that. But really, it does,

it's not going to tell you to go do stuff. And the idea of quests, that doesn't really work right now, I don't think. So you're kind of on your own to sort of figure it out, you know, like some YouTube streamers do. Yeah, yeah. Oh, can you hit Forgotten Beasts in Adventure mode? Is that a thing that happens? Yes, yes, you can. But most of the time you don't actually get the possibility to get very close, you know, because they're huge and they're fast.

and unless you know what you're doing you're going to get crushed very quickly I tried that once it was over in like two takes that checks out then you have Legends mode yeah yeah which is the story mode

that one's kind of easy to explain because I've told people about that one and I think nowadays because of stuff that people see about AI and like all the open AI stuff. I don't think that one's as hard for people to grok because people can kind of imagine the computer can write a story. Yeah, I'd like to explain it like you're some kind of scholar in a very large library, like in the in game library. And every world has like its own

library with the own history for that very specific world. So you can just walk in and like cross-reference things. You know, you you go in and you check the year or their specific item and then you see the connections between the item that was used by that specific person to kill that specific person. And then you go to that killed person. You realize like 10 years later he got resurrected as a zombie and you're like, oh, neat. I'd like to imagine that as you sitting there and like trying to piece together a story from just, historical books that somebody wrote during the world. And you're basically sitting at the end

of the timeline and just reading all of this. That's a good way to describe it, I think, because it puts together some kind of a narrative. Yeah, but you have to piece a lot of it together yourself. Exactly. And I think there are definitely YouTubers out there who are really good at that and can do it in a way that makes it feel like a really coherent narrative by filling in the gaps very creatively. And I think if you're looking for that kind of a game where you can almost give yourself a sense of purpose when you play it, like, you know, you've decided that, you know, the alligator became the baron of this town and you're going to be the one to, I don't know, rescue them from themselves or so, you know, like if you, you can kind of like shim yourself into the story. And I think that would change and add a lot of richness in depth. I'm not very good at that, though.

I just kind of go for it. I think that I've heard Tarn Adams describe the game as a fantasy world simulator. And not so much a game. Since there's no end goal for anything in the game, you create a world and you watch it play out. Try not to die. Yeah. from different levels of, you can either look at it in the micro level or the macro level. I mean, the ultimate micro level would be adventure mode and the ultimate macro level would be Legends mode,

where you're just reading it as it played out. And everybody's favorite mode, it seems, fortress mode is somewhere in the middle there. You watch your fortress play out and you try not to die at doing it. That's the hope. Adam Hudson, manager of the Muffin of Bells, invites you to visit the tavern this week to experience Tyrist Relic Uttered, performing the dance The Mello Style, a participation dance originating in the trampled island. This proud dance is punctuated by sluggish spins and is accompanied by a chanter, who always provides the rhythm and should evoke tears, the Muffin of Bells, located on the 12th level of Iron Traded. So there are a few terms that I thought that we might go over that perhaps are unique to Dwar Fortress. And whenever we say them on our podcast and someone's listening who doesn't play Dwar Fortress,

they might really not know what the heck we're talking about or what we mean by them. And one of them that we say quite often, unfortunately, is FPS death. So, Roland, why don't you describe exactly what FPS death means? Okay. It describes your PC's inability to complete the next amount of processing power needed to get the next tick done in a coherent amount of time, meaning that it feels like you're slowly cranking up the graphics level on the game that you're playing right now. So you start out with a really good amount of FPS, like 120 or whatever. you know, the amount of FPS that I would need to play a shooter, for example, and then

you slowly crank it up. So at some point, you will notice you're now only at 100 or just the word CADs. Yeah, that's not an explanation. Let me, let me, but in here for just a second. FPS, by the way, stands for frames per second. Yeah, like the amount of pictures per second that you see that your PC has to generate to make a moving picture out of it, like a moving video. But I do think the concept is somewhat different than it is for people who might be thinking about FPS in the terms of like CSGO or something. It's less about, you know, screen refresh and, you know,

because I think if you talk to most gamers about the difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS, you know, they'll say, oh, 60 FPS is a lot of, a lot smoother of an experience. But really, it's, it's not like that. It's almost like it's the amount of compute that can be done within a second of the game play. And so, yeah, it's a funny, I feel like it's, it's kind of an inconsistent use of the concept of FPS, because it's not a, it's not like a first person shooter kind of thing where, you know, it's like you're literally like scrolling around and looking in the screens, redrawing that many times. This is just the number of cycles that it, you know, the CPU is taking to execute everything that needs to

happen that turn. And for computer geeks, the game runs in a single thread. So it's executing everything all at the same time. And, and I've understood that to be, you know, less of a, the developer doesn't understand how to use multi-threading and more of a, these things actually really only work if they execute sequentially. You know, it's like the game's not really designed to be broken up into different threads and executed separately. it all sort of needs to happen at the same time. That's kind of the way I'd understood it. No, that is also the way that I understood it.

Because, for example, the weight of a mace being swung has impact on the actual damage that you do when it swings against a body. So you have to process the density of the weapon, so the weight, the density of the weapon that is swinging against the density. and weight of the body that it is slamming into and then on top of that you have layers of clothing that can pad the impact and then the clothing can rip or tear and make the next swing happen differently plus then you have in the body your bones and like organs that can be influenced and and you see this is like a whole like line of processes that you have to do and at some point you have your PC has to do so many that it can't continue doing them at a pace where you feel something is progressing in your fortress it's so slow that your PC is trying

to chug out the movement patterns of like 200 dwarfs and 400 cats and he's like please fill me up with water make it stop and and gives out like three FPS if you're lucky or even just one. But there are inefficiencies that happen, though, where you can enact some element of control over that. And I think in this fort that we have streaming, a cat got trapped on the wrong side of a door in the caverns, and that brought the FPS down to, like, one.

And I think it's because the game just gets stuck trying to figure out, I don't really even understand what's happening there, but it had something to do with the cat being stuck outside the gate. And that in itself was enough to topple the FPS of the fort until I opened the door for the cat and then everything's bed back up again. And I've seen that same thing. Sometimes if somebody gets stuck in a tree that can break your game. So sometimes you have to play a little bit of Sherlock Holmes to try to figure out where, you know, if suddenly the fortress starts dying like that, you have to figure out how to unstick it. Unless your fortress is just too big or your computer's old, in which case you're probably doomed anyway. because just having a lot of dwarves can slow you down.

Like this particular fortress that we're streaming right now is, you know, I think it has, it has 144 dwarves. And so this fortress is running at, I think, 60 FPS, which is totally playable. But if, you know, if it doubled that, we'd probably see diminishing returns pretty fast on that FPS. Yeah. If you want to find out more about FPS stuff

and the things you can do to mitigate it, we have a couple episodes, I think, that we go over that and I'll try to link them in the show notes. Oh, that was cool of us. Yeah, I know, right? So I don't know if we actually covered this one in any of those shows, but I have seen recently, I don't know whether it was on Reddit or someone sent in an email to us, but their way to do it to help with FPS Steff was to play a one-by-one tile embark location.

Whenever you're choosing your embark location, typically I think it's three-by-three. if you narrow that down to one by one, you still have the vertical room to do all of the fortressing that you need, but your map just isn't nearly as big on the surface, and each layer is not nearly as big. And they were saying that that really,

really does a great job for helping out with keeping your FPS up, even with a really complex fork. Shrink in the starting location size. That makes sense. I think if you're getting started in the game, too, it probably gives you a bit more of a chance to not be completely overwhelmed by the vastness of a landscape as well.

Yeah, you have to choose it really carefully, though. At least I would think so to make sure that you put that right up against a river. Well, yeah, a river, but also make sure that for like maximum efficiency, you actually don't want a place with a lot of trees because trees can also take away some of the processing power. So I think a small river, it may be even a brook, no waterfall in a almost or completely treeless environment like a desert. Yeah, I would hesitate before recommending someone brand new to the game chooses a desert for their embarked location. Yeah, because then your dwarves get angry when they can't sleep.

I think there's one called sparse woodland or something like that. Yeah, because what you could do is you could deploy in a place with a few trees or quite a number of trees and just clear-cut it and then you get the benefit of having all the wood. Yeah, every so often, because they keep spawning in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I do.

Yeah. I didn't know that the trees grew. Yeah, they grow constantly. It's, I... Interesting. I started completely ignoring everything that has, like, high tree density because it bugs me.

It really does annoy me. so I usually only go for things that have like sparse trees and even when I ignore my trees because at some point I will not need more wood I just don't they will keep on growing and at some point I will have like a really big forest and then I have to clear cut the entire map again cool I'll have to pay attention to that

I never realize that happened it takes a while I guess that you know once you punch down into the into the caverns a spoiler alert there are caverns under your Fortress. There's all sorts of fun down there. But once you punch down to the caverns, you can have access to pretty much all the wood that you need from the fun wood. Better wood.

Yeah. You think that's better wood? Yeah, obviously. It has better colors. That's true. Also mushroom wood. And if you find nether caps, then you have cold beds. Okay.

Obviously, you wouldn't make a bed out of it. you would make a barrel out of it so you can cool your beer, but it's just me. Nethercaps, okay, tangent here. I've never heard of this term. What is a nether caps? I think I know nether caps either. Really? Okay, it's an underground tree.

There are a lot of different underground trees. One is a nether cap. It's like a darkish blue. That tree is very cold. I think it's around freezing temperatures, like zero degrees or something. So the wood itself is technically not magma safe because it's wood, but it can sustain, like it can survive some fire because it's cold. It's very funny.

So you can technically make a pump stack out of it or something, like a screw pump stack out of the nethercap wood, and it will be fine even if you're pumping magma. Don't sue me if it goes wrong, though. Um, I personally just use it for barrels because it's a nice RPG kind of thing, you know, like cool beer. Hmm. However, just quick note, they're not in the first cabin layer. They're usually in the second, sometimes, but mostly they're in the third, if you have a third.

Spoiler alert, there are more than one. Yeah, they're more than one. And they get increasingly bad, the further down you go. Well, bad. Yeah. Well, yeah. You know, the creatures become more absurd. The trees become, you know, the first, like, big mushroom.

Yeah. And then you get, like, bloodthorns, which apparently is not something that looks like a tree. It looks more like a bloody piece of intestine growing. Amazing, by the way. I love that idea. So, yeah. Justin Lothammer, patron and manager of the Shrine of the Pax of Justifying, invites you to come meditate and praise your chosen deity. Come honor your chosen deity by playing a song of honor on one of the five fine quality arolas, recently imported from an elven caravan.

Or if you'd prefer, draw the green glass bow across the steel strings of the Ardvark Bone Subet. The Shrine of the Packs of Justifying, all visitors are welcome. I think that the last little topic that we're going to cover here today in our intro to dwarf fortress is the concept of fun, that is surrounded by exclamation points and in all caps, fun. And you'll see it written on the forums that way a lot. And that is tied to the idea that losing is fun, which is kind of the dwarf fortress mantra. Losing is fun. Yes. It's mostly the idea that there is no end goal.

You know, there's no, like, winning screen. It's not like you can kill all the enemies, and then the game is like, yeah, you won. You are now the dwarf fortress. Nothing like that. It just keeps on going. If you kill every single entity in the entire game, guess what? Nothing happens. You just continue with the game.

So you can win, thus you can only lose. So I have heard somebody say that eventually your fortress will fail, no matter how. how long it goes, eventually something is going to happen to bring it down, whether it's strife from within, attacks from without. But have you, and either one of you, I've obviously never done this, but have either one of you just let a fortress go so long after, Roland, you've killed everybody else in your, in your world before, right? Or for the most part?

Well, I had like a goblin island that I just, you know, continue to have, because I found it funny, like a world zoo. But I killed almost every single elf. I killed almost every single human except for like a very small civilization of, I don't know, like 20 humans in like two towns. I also kept more like pets and they kept being friendly to me. So I had no reason to antagonize them. And no, no forgotten beasts, no wear beasts.

I eradicated almost every single vampire until I put a vampire as adventurer in the game. No more necromances. There was really nothing to do. I just had dwarfs, dwarfs and some dwarfs, and that was about it. So it might be a fun experiment. Now, if I'm not mistaken, something happened and you ended up losing that world, right? Yes, because I'm a smart man. I gave my old PC to my brother, I cleaned the disc, and after that I realized I did not take several things out of my games, like my Minecraft worlds, my World Fortress worlds. Smart. Hurds.

Yeah, you know, that happens occasionally. I am the other end of it, that this is completely unrelated, but I cannot get rid of a computer without backing up everything but the operating system folders on to, some external drives. So I have stacks of drives that have all kinds of old junk that I'm never going to use again, just sitting in my garage in a drawer. So I'm a pack rat. I just always feel like I'm going to need that piece of data that I never actually will.

Yeah, that is good. The other end of the bell curve is really bad, especially considering my dwarf fortress world that I played was like, I don't know, four years old. and I kept playing on it so I don't know what the actual amount of hours was that I put in but definitely three digits and my Minecraft world was literally 12 years old

so that hurt so it would be interesting to get another world maybe a tiny world to that situation again to where everything else in the world is taking care of and then just let it go and see how long, how many years it will build up

if you just let it run all the time. Yeah, that is a good question. I think it would ultimately still default to like zombie apocalypse because the main race in your fortress will be dwarfs and dwarfs can have necromancers. So if you let it run for long enough,

you will have a huge amount of dwarfs, but also some necromances, and they will then quickly spread and reanimate whatever they find in the world, including all the forgotten beasts that you have slayed. Yeah, Tony, the world that you're streaming right now, that is the one that is full of necromancers, right? It is. It's pretty gruesome from that perspective. Yeah, I've tried this world a lot in different incarnations, and yeah, pretty much the whole thing is, is dominated by necromancer towers. I guess there are some islands down in the south, which... I wonder what's special about this location that you're in now,

that it's not, that it hasn't succumbed to the undead sieges. Well, I don't know. That's a really good question. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. Every other place that I landed, there's one tower nearby, which we're at war at, but they haven't been over to bother us yet. So I don't know if there's something that stands in the way or I don't know. Every other thing, this was my, I called it my huge.

hubris fort because the first fort I started, I was like, I'm going to build a fort on the ice sheet just to show that I know what I'm doing here. And it was like, I lasted not even a whole year before the zombies came and just wiped us clean. And then I was, you know, just trying to make it sequentially easier on myself. And I kept failing. And then I built this fort kind of is a, and I told you so to you guys. I'm like, look, it really is hard. And then of course, now this fort's been going for several years. So I feel like a bit of a heel. But I've struggled with this one. It's just danger, danger island. But there is a goblin. island in this one as well where nearly the whole thing the whole island is almost all goblins like it's just goblin pit everywhere yeah yeah exactly and the problem with that is you can't really get rid of those anymore because as a single adventurer you can't go into like the really large pits because that might just break your game you know fps death as we have explained and building a fortress is like instant sieges as you get over the border of getting sieges so you know yeah the safe way to play in this one would be to go to one of these islands with the i'm not sure what the quotation marks mean on the world map uh volcano something right

no that's the carrot right i think the volcano is the carrot oh okay then it's probably red forest because the world map actually does show the differences in colors and trees depending on the season. Oh, it described it as a prairie. So maybe that's maybe quotation marks or prairies. That makes sense. Grass. Yeah, prairies.

That's right. Quotation quotes are prairies. Okay. Well, hey, you learn something every day. Prairies are a green type of punctuation. And then a little circle is a human monastery. Okay. Well, goodness.

you learn. All right. So I think we're going to wrap this up for today. We are probably going to do another one of these episodes because I had like five topics that we might cover as, you know, phrases that Dwarfurtress players say that everyone else in the world just looks at them and goes, huh? And so we have a few more of those, like the difference among forgotten beasts, night creatures, intelligent undead, what the heck's up with elves? and things like that. So we will revisit this in another episode in the future.

But until then, I hope everyone has a good time playing Dwarf fortress. And I guess we will catch everybody later. That was a really quick wrap-up. It was smooth to the point, and I feel appropriate. Yes, that's okay.

Do we need to close the loop on the dog mares, or do you feel like we've covered that? Oh, God. Well, I think we can pick it up next time again. How about that? Yeah. So for everyone out there, happy fortressing. Well, that's awful.

God. Happy fortress. I need to, like, script out the ending of these stinking episodes. All right, so until next time, everyone have a good time having Dwarfurtress, and I will edit together something that isn't horrible from that. So you guys want to say goodbye? See you later, guys. Yeah, goodbye.

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