Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 67: In Which Foes Are Discussed

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

This episode was meant to continue our "What is Dwarf Fortress" conversation and ended up drifting quite a bit. But we had fun anyway! Kitfox Festival Adams Brothers InterviewLink to Bay 12 Games artwork on graveyards that we discussLink to other Bay 12 gamesWhat *was* called the Destination Linux network - home of a bunch of great podcastsanchor to the dev notes referred to in the episodeDF Talk podcast

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. A very simple to answer question. It is legend. Tony. I'm on the Westphalia coast of Germany. It's a beautiful sunny. and Jonathan.

You get a headphone pre-amp because my level is a lot lower. As they present insightful, irreverent, and often incorrect analysis. And always remember, losing is fun. So welcome back, everybody, to Dwar Fortress Roundtable. And we've decided to continue our discussion of interesting things that new people don't know about Dwar Fortress. But before we talk about that, there was a couple of releases. You know, I heard mention. that Tarn and Kit Fox games on Friday, I guess it was, had some sort of a broadcast.

Let me see if I could find that. Yeah, like a Twitch livestream, was it? Yeah, did you, did you catch that? Did anybody catch that? I did not. Sadly, no. No. I found out about it after it was over, so.

Yeah, it wasn't in a bad time for me, sadly. Like when you were asleep? I'm never coordinated enough to get, to make those kind of things. best I can do is have a podcast to rehash it for me George. Yeah. Seven days ago, Tarn and Zach interview Kit Fox Festival. So, I tell you what. Kit Fox Festival.

Where was that? That's what it says on the latest video from Kit Fox Games on YouTube. I didn't know they had a festival. That's exciting. Yep, it's Tarn and Zach and Alexander. So I will watch that and report on it next time. All right. So we have no idea what they said in there.

Sadly, no. No, it's a mystery. So I don't even know why I brought it up. I think that this will be part of the stuff that gets cut from the episode. So, yeah, that happened. These tombstones are, the clickable tombstones are nice. I mean, you know, they're not a statement that you make a lot in the world at large. But there's utility to a clickable tombstone.

my dad plans out burials for the local municipal small town cemetery so don't get on his wrong side don't get on the wrong side of him or he'll put you behind the dumpster no no he sells the plots pretty much right that's what I'm saying it's a most well you get to pick your plot right it's between you and McDonald's no it's a very pastoral setting it's a it's a beautiful little cemetery but so well i know when i'm good gravestones and i'm i want a good view actually just yesterday i was in a graveyard looking at gravestones and people who were buried in the 1800s did you click on any of them you know i'll try that next time it's the worst when you see them they're just like oh it's mod she died of a stubbed toe and you're in you know you kind of like oh that sucks

amazingly few real life tombstones actually have the cause of death on them surprisingly a lot of kids when you go to those old cemeteries you know and you look around it's just like 10 kids per family basically in there and they're all like 10 or less yeah you know like three year olds are dying and one year olds are dying and it's like they're just basically those old cemeteries are just a bummer fest because they're just filled with kids very sad chibedaya infant son of so-and-so well thank vaccinations i i have to say i'm kind of jealous of cool old graveyards because we don't have that here anymore i know in europe yeah there's nothing old there now yeah yeah and especially here in germany i know that uh if you have rested for 80 years

it's either you pay for another 80 years or you know like your your ancestors or you get dug up really and then your tombstone also gets like removed and somebody else subscription model coming to everything you can't even get away from these models when you're dead man yeah no it is a subscription model i'm not a fan of it so when you actually go over a graveyard now it is literally just graves that like the oldest you will see are 79 years old oh my goodness unless you go to specific other graveyards of the specific religions for example a large jewish graveyard is here and obviously they don't do that because it's weird.

Some awkward stuff happened. Yeah. Yeah. And then you have like actually old graves and you're like, wow, cool. But, uh, yeah, that really wouldn't fly here. Yeah, no, we're, well, we move, the U.S. moves graveyards, like, you know, that, that happens, like in New York City. Yeah, but we pretend it didn't.

What's that? But we pretend it didn't happen. Yeah, like whole parts of New York City just built on cemeteries. San Francisco's the same way. L.A.'s got that. You know, they're like, you know, What? That cemetery is it proper. It's good. Let's dig them up and move them. And that happens. And then they make movies about that stuff happening, like poltergeist or whatever.

It's good material. So now I will have to go take a picture of the oldest gravestone at that cemetery and use it for the episode image. Just make it clickable. It's all they care about these days. So that was a cool look at tombstone. I like the idea that if you click on the tombstone, it brings up the, bit of information if it's on the tombstone information about possibly how they died because Zach and his little blurb underneath that image said that he didn't even know that this person had died until he saw the ghost at which point he memorialized them and we have what's in the picture so link in the show notes I'm looking right now at the at the post that they made

and the very last one says summer 102 uneasy dwelling upon experiencing trauma became inclined to avoid excitement. I mean, that's like everybody now, I feel like. Like post-pandemic, no one wants to go out now. Everybody's just taking it easy. It's kind of hilarious. Is this? It's in one of his screenshots.

It was just one of those things when you're like, oh, there's so much like us, these guys. It's pretty neat the way that they've, that he's organized thoughts and you can click on thoughts and memories to sort of filter out what, you know, when you hit that Z screen or whatever, the info, and it's usually kind of like a wall of text. Yeah.

It looks pretty neat that they've done. some filtering here to make it more readable and tells you when this stuff happened that's cool strongly looking forward to it I'll probably get this I'm thinking about picking it up how about you guys oh yeah yeah maybe maybe you've always got cobald quest to fill in the gaps if you need have you guys played that cobald quest no no it's in their other games Bay 12's other games I've played World War I medic, and I have played Liberal Crime Squad. And I've played Slaves to Armagh, God of Blood. Okay.

Hmm. Off the three there. What was your clear pick? My clear pick for the most unplayable game would be Slaves to Armach, God of Blood. Yeah. But probably the most playable, the best one was World War I medic. Okay. You know, it's a, it's a little 90s.

90s style little game I don't remember much about it actually Copold Quest looks a lot like Adventure mode Oh yeah It's a roguelike probably It's a cobald running around a cave

I'm not really sure what you're supposed to do Quest I suppose Survive Survive Don't die So in the stream today If anybody's looking at it You're seeing just a blank

Legends viewer And instead of trying to actually play the game while we're recording, which wasn't working very well, I was going to bring in the legends mode of this really old world that's very hard and have a look at it. But unfortunately today, I didn't start that export process

until 10 minutes before we started recording. So it's still, I don't know if it's still going or dead, but the process is still cranking away. So we'll just leave it out. It does take a really long time. Sometimes you can see the files writing, but I haven't even seen them make the file yet. So I don't know what's going to happen here.

Who knows? Is this the same computer that you're streaming from that you're recording audio on? Yeah. Yeah, but it seems to be handling it like a champ. It doesn't seem to be too bothered by that. Is that your like mega I-11? It was pretty awesome four or five years ago.

I don't know how awesome it is now. It doesn't need to be replaced. Don't pressure me, man. I haven't got a new CPU since then. So it's still more awesome than mine. I had heard it was just impossible to buy any sort of computing gear now. And so I was like, oh, well, I just forget about this until somebody tells me it's easy. I don't know.

I've heard it's improving. I've heard it's improving. The GPU prices are back down close to manufacturer's suggested price from what I hear. That'll be of a huge, huge relief to so many Door Fortress players. That is according to the Destination Linux podcast. Maybe Linux Out Loud, one of the various Linux podcasts that I listen to. Well, it'll be great news for the PlayStation 5 version of Door Fortress when it comes out. Or maybe hardware addicts.

Oh, God, can you imagine playing Door Fortress with like the PS controller? People would do it and they'd be really good at it. And that's the thing that's crazy about that. If they released it, somebody would figure it out. Somebody would learn how to play it. Either we discussed that before or there was a fever. dream. Okay.

I mean, you know, a little of both. A little of both. Oh, no, maybe I dreamed it. That's possible. My dreams are filled with Dwar Fortress. Yeah, and then the VR version

for Adventure mode, that'll be pretty cool. I mean, it would be pretty cool. We have had this conversation before. We probably have. I think in Fortress mode, I think, you know, a VR version would be cool.

Actually, I do too. I think kind of Minecrafty. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's right. Tarn, keep that in the back of the mind there. You're knocking this code out. I don't think it's going to be Tarn that will do it.

I think that will be a, that will end up being a plug-in. I mean, I don't even know. It's pretty, pretty ambitious thing to think about with current compute to do something like he's trying to do with the level he's trying to do it and then tack in all that other stuff on top of it. I don't know. I hope I live to see something like that, but it feels a bit ambitious at the moment. Yeah, I'll go pick up my meta-ocular. The Thrift Store, whenever... Let's do it without that one if we can.

Let's try to use that non-Facebook. It doesn't feel very tarned to use the Facebook one. But I don't know. Maybe he's a huge Facebooker. Who knows? I doubt it. Also, yesterday, there was a DevNotes released with some interesting tidbits in it.

And it looks like they are almost done. The exact quote is, almost out of stage one of the roadmap we posted earlier this year there's still the hauling stuff to do and lots of little missing submenus but we'll find them all so they're almost out of stage one of the roadmap let me look up the roadmap to see what that was it seems like the first stage one was looked like it was going to be the lengthiest roadmap do we not have that roadmap I don't have the link right

I guess can go to our that we could find it Page, Google. Okay, roadmap post. I found it. Yeah. Yeah, so stage one of the roadmap, and I'll just quote it here. Finish the menus that haven't been upgraded yet. These include the graphics and layout for justice, health, diplomacy, and hauling. These aren't small tasks.

Each will take weeks. I'll also be working with Jacob during this period on the sprites we need to update throughout the project. He submitted the new weapons recently. For instance, I got a new batch of music from the composer. Oh, neat. It's important to get these things incorporated in a timely fashion so everybody can keep working. All right. So true it is.

Looks like they're going to be the next step on the roadmap is working on the remaining UI changes, adding the tooltips and the X's to close windows and so on for the things that they haven't done already. Progressing. Fantastic. That is very good. Yeah, yeah. If you want to read about the new dev update, it is at Bay12games.com. The link is Dwarf Fortress. Gary Jeffrey invites you to the Cobalt Tummy, Hatchet Romances First and Only Tavern, where this month, you can hear Tosid Madelvooker tell the epic tale of heroism and tragedy where in the late autumn of six, the dwarf Ereth Boatskold became the king of the trumpets of conflagration.

Food, wine, and entertainment can be found at Gary Jeffries, the Cobalt Tummy. Stop by today. Last time that we got together, we talked about how we would explain Dwar Fortress to friends and, you know, just exactly what is Dwar Fortress anyway. There was a couple of things that we didn't get to that I would like to touch upon. and one of those things is what the heck are these different kinds of enemies, monsters? I don't even know that they're necessarily enemies. That's the wrong term because I'm sure that you can have your fortress mayor be intelligent undead, right?

Your fortress mayor can. Well, I think that happened in a specific video of a specific YouTuber. Which one? Was it? Crug smash? Tech Ed? Who? He said the word.

Yeah, no, it was Croxmash. And the one with the cool blue beetles he did. If I remember correctly, no, was it an intelligent undead or was it just a necromancer at the end? I think it was a necromancer. Oh, okay, okay. It was a necromancer. Okay. But one of the dwarfs got resurrected as an intelligent ad did, if I remember, correct.

and lost, like, basically a soul and was not able to interact with anybody else anymore. But he seemed content. Yeah. I wonder what happened to him. I don't remember the entire series. I just remember the really cute-looking, really large beetles. I have fallen way behind on my Krug smash watching. I need to spend a couple weeks to catch up.

I've been on a bit of a break, so I don't think you've missed much. I don't think that he's been I think he's working on something new and big it sounds like from what I hear. I haven't seen anything for months. Yeah, and the Beatles stuff is a little bit older. Like the entire arc of that is

completed. So, uh... That was the one that immediately followed Honeystoker, I think. Could be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the giant... I'm on his Patreon and he puts out pictures pretty frequently. So I think he's busily doing something, but I don't know that there's like... I checked and I don't think

there's anything new to watch or hasn't been for a while. Cool. Well, good luck to Krug Smash. Indeed. That's some high quality stuff coming out there. So there's several different kinds of baddies in Door Fortress. So there are different classes. And my question is, what's the difference among forgotten beasts, night creatures, and intelligent undead? Forgotten beasts and night creatures are different things, right?

Yes Forgotten beasts I know are created procedurally When the world gets generated And you run into them Typically in the caverns What are night creatures Well they're also

Randomly generated Per world that you generate So you also get Weird things Like sometimes it's just a What are they had ones A shadow woman That is

very much just a humanoid figure made of shadow so it's like shadow people stalking you but sometimes you get massive mini-legged trolls or or creatures of weird sentience that you can't really make out what they are imagine nightmares come to life and they are called night creatures because they're very much just found in the, I was about to say single-player mode, adventure mode. I've never seen any in Ford mode, really. But in single-player mode, when you used to go out and you slept in the woods, then you sometimes got ambushed by things. And nowadays, it's mostly animals that ambushed me so far.

So I feel like it's not as many night creatures as it used to be. Because back in the day, you just went out in the woods. You slept a single night in the woods and you instantly got ambushed by night trolls or, I don't know, laughing men or some really weird obscure stuff. The difference between the forgotten beasts and the night creatures is where they come from, like where you can encounter them. Because forgotten beasts are in caverns and they're really, really big. while night creatures are more like, you know, shadow people that stalk the forest for your soul. And you can usually just encampter them in the night in uncivilized places. Okay.

That kind of explains why I don't ever recall running into one in fortress mode because apparently they don't show up a whole lot in fortress mode. If at all, yeah. Now, a Colossus, there will be, sometimes I'll have a Colossus show up or some other giant beastie. Those are not night creatures, those are just things, those are just monsters? Yeah, those are... Don't they usually die off at the beginning, those big fellas? Yeah, very often. The Colossuses and the Titans?

They're not very strong compared to what other things lurk above. but no they're not night creatures they're counted as correct me here if I'm actually wrong but I think they're being used as forest titans to some degree Titans that's the word I was looking

for titans yes the forest titan is the same thing as a forgotten beasts but not in the cavern but you know above you get Cyclops too yeah but in the same category you also have like rocks and dragons and all that jazz.

And they always get like this neat little pop-up, you know, when they enter your map. I've noticed in, I call it the new version, the January version, the most recent version. It doesn't seem like the wear beasts are quite as numerous and present in the world. I don't know if I've just had some really good luck, but I haven't had as many problems with them. Is that what you guys are seeing too? like not quite as bad. It used to be every fortress I started, it would be like until the wear beast came. You know, I wonder if it's hard to tell that, though, because whenever we create a world, at least when I create a world, I tend to play on that world for

a while. And I think that the world I'm in right now is particularly tame. So it may appear to me that there's not many wear beasts because this particular world may not have many wear beasts, but somebody else could generate a world. And it might, you know, have a really high population density of wear giraffes. So, I don't know. Yeah, no. If I look back, I do really think that it changed. Yeah.

Because let's see what even, which version was on. I don't remember. But a while back, I used to play fortresses and I could just set my clock until where a beast came. It wasn't a question of if, it was a question of when. okay sure you know I always play words with a fairly high amounts

of monsters and savagery and whatever but I could really just wait until it happened and then I had to deal with it. It really wasn't a question of if but nowadays I am surprised when I get one

and the ones that I get I've had several children that were We're Beasts so they were slightly smaller than the actual form and easily dealt with, which ultimately was kind of horrifying, you know, because then I had like a dead child there. But yeah, no, no. And every time I check the legends, I only have like two or three people actually roaming

around as wear beasts and like biting some people. And the people that are just bitten, not like transformed themselves, they are counted as wear, bit, blah, blah, blah. And they usually die very, very quickly. And I tend to only have one sword of wear beasts now. Yeah, you know, back in the day, I used to have like llamas or lizards. A wear llama, yeah. Yeah.

And now it's only just one type always. Like everything is just one thing. Like there is nothing else but like a wear panda, for example. Ah, yeah. It's time now for Memorial Gardens, brought to you at this time by the Confining Silver's Memorial Hall, under the Caring Administration of Clino Dev. This is an exceptional boxlight memorial to Dumed O Boxterlot. The slab reads, in memory of Dumed or Boxterlut, drowned, in the year seven. Expedition leader of the confining silvers five to seven, lover of the irons of turquoise. This is an exceptional Micah memorial to Logum Kikrostorad. The slab reads,

In memory of Logum Kikrostorad, drowned in the year seven, the color goldenrod made him happy. This has been Memorial Gardens, brought to you at this time by the Confining Silver's Memorial Hall, Klinodev administrating. Well, I had high hopes of bringing in the XML file here to look at our legends viewer, but it's, just crashed. Legends viewer just crashes on load. So I don't think my copy of Legends viewer can handle the export. So anyway, so if anyone's watching, you're not going to see anything for this one, unfortunately. Input string was not in a correct format. You can't even get to see. You don't get to see the error message. Sorry, everyone. I wonder how much of it also has to do with the age of the world. I get lots of Titans in my fortresses. Really? And I get lots of dragons. Interesting. And I get

lots of uh not so many rocks but the thing is also i use very very young worlds i set it on the the first setting and start off in year five with my fortresses because i have found that the uh young young worlds they seem to keep the frames per second higher longer the because it's not working with the long history it seems or if nothing else i'm impatient and it doesn't take very long for the world to generate the last the last the last The last year, year and a half or so, I've been playing on either young worlds or very young worlds. Yeah. Either the five year or the 25 year ones.

Yeah, I think you're, I think you might be on to something because the older world, like, you know, more years, more problems. Because I'm looking at this file right now, the XML file for the really old world that I was trying to do, it's 5.13 gigs. It's a very, very big XML file, which I suspect is part. of the reason it's not looting. Yeah. So that happened. Wow. That could be a case where the Legends file is just too big for the Legends view.

I think it might be just too big, sadly. I mean, you get to a point with a text file that your text editor can't even load it. Yeah. Well, five gigs is a push. But I guess we can still look at the Legends viewer because the game itself still seems to be working. So there were a lot of historical figures in this world. Wait, how old is this world? This world is, it's probably a really easy way to tell that.

This world is 1,042 years old. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, that, you know, there's a reason why it takes so long then. Yes, there's a lot of stuff that happened. A lot of stuff. Oh, I think we killed this week. Wow, that's a lot of forgotten beasts. This one, I think, killed one of my fortresses.

Oh, wow, that's a lot of forgotten beasts. Yeah, it's been a busy... It's a busy, yeah, palace golf. Devoured a hen, not the hen, one hen. Crappy hen. Look, it killed everyone, and then my guys finally killed it in this latest fortress. Do you recall how large the world was that you generated? It was a medium size.

Okay. Look, we had a hill titan, contemporary years. Oh, yeah, female nightcrows. Creature. Go on that. Go on that. Let's see what we're. Okay. Female night creature. For those of you watching on News Channel 8, we have Tony showing the legends viewer from within the dual fortress game itself. So we're looking at a night creature. I've never come across one of these in fortress mode.

They have a long straight tail, lumbers steadily from place to place. Its eyes glow orange and its black skin is rough and cracked. Now you know why you fear the night. Okay. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, so it is very much like a randomly generated nightmare that attacks you. Very unfun, by the way. It didn't last very long. It only lasted 71 years, and then it was killed by some random dude. 71? I want to see you last 71 years, buddy.

Well, this fortress is pretty old now. I've left it running. Four kills? Okay. I mean, this is pretty bananas. Oh, I suppose we could filter on string for a night creature. Let's do it. Let's see how many we've had.

Before you retired your fortress, did you back up your saves folder? Yeah, it'll come back. Cool. So you can continue. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not into the persistence there. So I see.

We're getting everybody with night terror, terror, night. Because there's some of a cold night creature. You know, they have also randomly generated name names. Oh, that's true. Male groom of... This guy's called Male Groom of the Shadow Freak. That's a great band name. That is amazing.

That was a Black Sabbath album in 73. I think it might be. He's called Thiltu Amrina. Let's have a look at him. He was a groom of the Shadow Freak, born in 90. Good Lord. What is a Shadow Freak? It's kind of awesome, though.

I feel like I'm humanoid and there's just a lot happening here so I have a question for you guys I was I was kind of thinking about how these games get older and why you know younger worlds are probably better to play if you have a computer

that doesn't have quantum processing capabilities what what do you like do you get so is it basically playing on each cycle? Is it playing every turn for every creature everywhere in the world?

Or is that stuff happening in the background? How does this, like, what do you guys? How do you get things is working? I think it works every turn, every creature in your fortress.

Okay, but what happens to the rest of the world? Because I thought stuff was still happening. I think the rest of the world has procedural generation stuff happening not on the micro level, but the macro level. Okay.

So he's like, oh, in every season, these events happen. and then he puts those into the world because I'm just trying to figure out how do you keep it? How do you keep the state of the entire world unless you're updating it every turn? Yeah, that is a really good question,

but I'm completely out. I think they are. Like software and hardware and the app. I don't know. I don't know. I wonder if there's anyone we could find that could answer. I know somebody who could probably answer it. Yeah, I think there's one person I can answer that.

Somebody write this question down so that next time when we have Tarnon again we actually ask him that question. Yeah, I think it's a good one. That would be a good question. That would be able to be curious about it. And he would talk for like three hours on that.

I would listen for three hours because I find it really fascinating. That was not, I was, you know, that sounded snarky. No. That was not a dig. No, I was hoping for something like that. I was like, oh, he talked for three hours.

That sounds really cool. I still go back to the old Dwar Fortress talk episodes and that's what they, were. You know, Rain Seeker or Capintastic would ask him a question. And he would expound on that question for like 25, 30 minutes. And then he would say, you know, what was the question? And no one can remember what the question was, but you got a half hour of awesome content out of it. So anybody out there, if you've not listened to the Dwar Fortress Talk podcast episodes, I think at this point there's like 26 or 27. They started really early on, I think before 2010. And I

After the Steam release was announced, they made a few more episodes, but a lot of them, the content is actually out of date, but it is a really fascinating look into the Tarn's mind as he's creating these things. It is just a really good listen. Go do that. Bay 12 Games, there is a, on the Dural Fortress page, there is a podcast link. Or you can subscribe on whatever your podcast provider is. Mr. Gutsi invites you to the shrine of the Hammers of Death, a temple for no particular deity. All visitors are welcome. Come for some quiet time, so that you might deepen your connection with your supernatural being of choice.

The Hammers of Death is located just through the Micah Door in the back wall of the cobalt tummy. Mr. Gutsi bids you, Solasemkin. I'm looking through the lineage of the fortress that I'd been sharing while we streamed. And it seems like I started it in the year 10.30 something. Yeah, 1038 it started. And then I retired it for purposes of recording this in 1042. So that's four years. Pretty good.

Pretty good. So what was that? You set it spinning and then when you woke up the next day, you just stopped it? No. I've just been playing it, you know, occasionally through it. No, no, no. I mean, whenever you were generated the world. Oh, to generate the entire ancient world?

I can't even remember. I think it probably could a couple hours. You know, it's, I would like to, I would like to take a look. You know, this would be something easy enough to do. Graph out the curve whenever world generation happens on, you know, years per second, ending up being years per minute and ended up being, you know, years per hour. Oh, yeah. On the generation.

So I bet it's like a natural, like an E to the X kind of a kind of graph. One of the things that happens to me when I'm generating the worlds is and why I haven't used to set it and forget it, like start it the night before and then come back in the morning is because it usually crashes during the world, Jen. And so I don't know when it's going to crash. So you can't, you know, it's like I feel like it almost. You almost can't do that because you're sure to hit a crash. And then sometimes I think that's like it hits a bug in world generation and then you die.

But you're not really ever sure quite when you hit that. So Tony, do I repeat myself? Justin in the chat room wants you to comment on your FPS because he just noticed the FPS. I can't see what it is, but I'm sure it's a 400 or yeah. You can't decide if it's $3.99. or 400. It seems to be struggling to decide that. Obviously, I've put it in a cap in Fortress mode.

Yeah. So I think I've capped it at 400 FPS. Yeah, Justin, Tony has a really hot computer. I had, at least as he says, it was five years ago. It was great for the time. But yeah, I put in a graphical cap at 400 FPS, which is why it's sitting there stuck at 400 FPS. And yeah, this is mostly because of legends,

because it actually doesn't have to work that much right now. It doesn't really need to do much, yeah. Even in Fortress mode, though, your games go much faster than nine. I like the 50 frames per second cap. Yeah, and I mean, I'm not using anything particularly special. It's an I-9-9900 from like 2018, but it was pretty good with its single speed. Single, what are you? Single thread performance was really good.

So that's why I picked it, which is. always a smart thing to do when you're picking a computer chip. But, yeah, I'm sure that there's stuff that does better now. Like, I'm sure the new Macs will probably destroy it when the game gets compiled again for Mac. Back to your conversation, though, you wouldn't have that problem with crashing if you would do five-year-old worlds. I know. I keep thinking about that. Maybe I should be playing those younger worlds. it both has it's like up and downs you know in the in the young worlds you get a lot of the the cool night creatures and and basically every dragon and stuff is still alive so there's a lot of things happening um especially if you put the civilization so low then the possibility of the monsters actually getting killed off is even lower um on old worlds right yeah and In old worlds, all the monsters are dead, but we've made our own, let's say it like that.

Yeah, I was going to say, yeah. The true danger. You have a balance. The graph somewhere crosses at some point in the history of your world where the undead outnumber the forgotten beasts. Because the undead continually increase in number and the forgotten beasts continually decrease, right? well it's almost like by the time the world's old the only thing that survives are the truly scary things yeah exactly like you don't you don't have any more easy mode stuff it's all just really horrifying things that are but the variety is lower yeah there's more variety but um it's like

actual evolution where everything got pressed into specific niches and if you're not good enough like if you're a blob made of vomit or steam you're not going to survive very long But if you're like a winged demon from hell made of stone, you're going to have a good time. Yeah, you think it gives the game more time to pick the winners and losers. Yeah. But the description of the vomit fire monsters are so interesting. I mean, I agree with you, but they sadly don't fear too well when fighting against literally anything. Yeah, that just means I can throw my, you know, my cooks at it.

it and it will not live. But sometimes those can be some of the worst, those vomit fire monsters because they spray the toxic debris all over you or whatever, and yeah, that sucks. Beware it's deadly dust. Should we put an adventurer in this crazy world? Should I spin that up really quick before we wrap up today? Sure. Why not?

Go ahead. Yeah, we've managed to crash. So dragons. Yeah, dragons. dragons I find except for the fact that they burn down whatever trees I have or large swaths of trees in my map

and make it really ugly I found dragons aren't that difficult to kill in dwarf fortress have you guys found the same I've had few run-ins but yeah maybe old world new world thing yeah I haven't had too many run-ins

I might do new new world every fortress I've had has run into at least one dragon in this world crazy that's a lot of dragons. Yeah. I don't think of ever see. You should save that world seed.

How do you find out what seed your world had? That's in the World Region 1 World Genparameters. Text. If you, there's probably lots of ways to get at this, but the way I know how to do it is when you export your legend stuff, it will tell you the history seed, the seed, creature seed. It has all sorts of stuff in it. I have no idea how to use those. people understand that stuff, it would be pretty cool to... Yeah, I didn't even know that could possibly exist. Wear beast number, nitral number. Yeah, there's all kinds of stuff.

But if there's 50 of those seeds, then it might not be... It might effectively be something you can't do. With a lot of games or with a lot of roguelikes, I know that you can put in an actual seed number. Brog comes to mind. There's competitions where they release a particular seed and everyone plays the same seed in Brog. and there's like little tournaments and stuff. So you can reproduce the world. I'll tell you what adventure mode gets interesting when you're doing these old worlds

because I can choose to be boats faction soldier or demon of nil or I can be an elf or flagamber's hand, glitter phantom's hand. I could be a hand. Like, does that, is that what I can be somebody's eye? Am I literally going to be somebody's eye? Manos, the hands of fate. No, no, no, no, no. They're just called that.

They can literally be anything. So you could look like a malformed horse for all that, you know. I might, should I, what do you guys think? Should we be a demon of nil? That sounds pretty cool. People aren't going to like that. We'll just randomly. Yeah, we'll have to do that again so that we have a three-headed adventure mode game.

That was a lot of fun. Oh, yes. That needs to be, that needs to happen soon. I just make all of this crap up because I just don't care enough about it's going to die anyway, so it doesn't really matter. You know, try not to overthink. So you can be a necromancer experiment. Awesome. Yeah, I try not to overthink these things because I just die anyway.

So I vaguely make them swimmers and climbers. I want to be a human fighter. And, wow. Yeah, I think you got to be an ax man, right? Whatever that one is. You know, my preference is Spears, but... Spears, it is. Good enough. He'll be fine. Off we go.

Everything's perfect. This guy's going in. Guns blazing. Yeah, I don't know. How do you see more about your dude in adventure? I don't really know enough about this thing. Oh, God. Not smart enough to play this game. No, I'm definitely going to mess up the actual thing. It was an inventory. I think it was Z. Not sure. Well, it tells me. I think you lean the other direction here, Tony. We're like, I don't know that I'm going to play

because whenever I'm playing Draw Fortress while we're recording it. I'm like, I shouldn't do it. Wait, I'll put in adventure mode. Let's do that. And then I'll totally throw the whole thing into chaos. Brilliant. Just by me not knowing what I'm doing in this thing.

That's the way we do it. Yeah, I have high hopes for learning how to play adventure mode at some point in my life. What was the question before? Dragons, just animals. It was the question. Right. Yeah, I'm trying to get back to the actual podcast here.

Wait, what are we doing? Dragons. We're talking about monsters. Are we on? Bad guys. Yeah, Dwar fortress. Yeah. You know the game?

Easy. Easy. Easy. Easy. Easy. Easy. Easy. Dragons.

Yeah. Yeah. I think they also count as some kind of like hill titan entity, but ultimately they're... So they are Titanic? Well, well, well. Well, well, that's a problem about dragons, because the dragon itself is more like a Chinese dragon. It doesn't actually have any wings,

and it's basically they're a large lizard. No, I had a flying dragon. What? I mean, maybe they can fly, but they don't have dragon. Yeah, words. They don't have wings. I know that. But I think they might actually be able to fly without wings.

Is that right? They fly with rocket power. Yeah, it is very Chinese dragonish. So. Interesting. They flew around and torched at least, you know, maybe he wasn't flying. Maybe I'm just imagining that. But I just assumed that he was flying around and torching my forest.

He definitely torched my forest. Yeah, they really do that, yeah. Somewhere in the back in the show notes or. somewhere I've got a picture of the great pyramid of whatever that fortress name was but all around it is burnt forest because

the dragons iron traded I think that was the name of that fortress that is a bummer when those things come I had a flame titan or something come one time and destroy everything just burned everything to the ground because I was dumb and had wooden walls and I think it burned those down too we were talking about where beasts before

are they their own category of monster they're not my creatures I'm not 100% certain. This is mostly me pulling things out of my nose right now. But as far as I'm aware, every time the, as I call it, like the small pop-up window looks slightly different than the other things, it is a different category and where beasts are something else. And like technically night creatures are something else.

They have a pop-up. It just never happens. Where creatures have the message, don't they, that say, you know why you will fear the night or something like that right no that is not technically the actual night creature that's just on that no that was wherebees yeah yeah oh undeads in general okay yeah and then undeads also have like two different kind of things so for example if you only have one uh or like a bunch of intelligent undead the message is different from just champlain corpses because i got once really confused why the hell i

get like a weird message. I don't remember what the message actually said, but the corpse message is like the dead walk hype while you still can. Oh, yeah. Right. Right. And the intelligent under one was slightly different. It was more akin to like the dead allaying siege or something. And I got really confused with that. But yeah, wear beasts are their own thing and hill titans are their own thing and like dragons and and and like giants and whatever are also their kind of own thing because they're not randomly generated like hill titans and then we have uh the underground hill titan version which is forgotten beasts and then we have night creatures and somewhere we also have uh undead yeah there are layered monsters too monsters that can that you know you stumble

on and lay in their layer yeah there's like giant jaguars and stuff in there because I've had quests before where they're like go west and kill the jaguar that's terrorizing the village and you do it and you come back and everyone's like no one cares I certainly do miss my run-ins with with with wear beasts I love the idea you know of wear llamas that's just awesome yeah wear giraffe wear hamster or where was it a wear cavy beast yeah wear monsters are what made me realized that I needed doors on my fortress because there was a fortress that was taken completely out by a were beast because it had no doors.

It's one of my first fortresses. Yeah, the whole where beast situation also made me reevaluate the hospital stuff. And first I was like, yeah, maybe I do need a hospital. And then I realized like, yeah, maybe I need something that is like more of an actual hospital than just one room where throw everybody in. Hmm. Ah.

Hadn't thought of that. Can a hospital span multiple rooms? A single hospital? Yeah, you can just slap like the area over the entirety. So you have like a block that I do. And inside the block there are like several rooms and like some operation rooms and stuff.

So that when somebody is laid to bed, they're in their own room and if I see like okay this is a wearerbees I can just lock the door and that's it and you know then I don't have to deal with that anymore

okay well that's a great idea I typically just make a big room line the side of it with containers beds and traction benches and just have them on there never really occurred to me to have several rooms

yeah then you can lock them in there until the next full moon. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because otherwise you will have, like, always the situation. You'll either forget to actually check people, and then you, oh, people died, huh? Or you have basically just three people turning inside the hospital and, like, ripping the other still healing dwarfs in the other beds apart. And then you, you know, hmm, not bad. Yeah, suddenly you look down and your levels of your, your,

Fortress are covered with blood and chaos is raining. And if you have like a small room, you can do it one by one each dwarf on its own. And then you can say like, okay, I have three infected as it seems. And you are not infected so you can leave now. So, you know, it's great. Well, folks, I've got a luncheon that I need to attend. So I think that we're going to talk next time about what is up with Wells in this game. Wells.

We'lls. We're going to talk about what is up with elves in this game anyway. Planned on doing that this time, but, you know, we just got so enraptured with beasts that, you know. It was quite a beastly episode. Well, at least it wasn't arches again. My cat really does not want me to be in a podcast right now. Knows about the soap, man. Clown at the door.

It knows about the soap. Yeah, I can hear her. Very cute. No, she obviously doesn't know about the soap or she. she would be running instead of coming in here. Complaining that I'm about. Anyway, kitty, kitty.

So have you guys got anything that you'd like to mention before we get off the air here? I don't think so, but golly gee. Let's go make a fortress. I'm going to do a younger fortress. That's my thing. I'm going to try to get something

that's a little newer than this and see how that treats me. Yeah, we can check out dragons. How about that? Yeah, it's good dragon hunting. It'll be like we'll celebrate the world of Warcraft expansion with Door Fortress. Yeah.

Yeah, okay. So maybe I should build up a new world and a new fortress. Because the world that I have right now just isn't particularly challenging. I'm not getting anything really that's threatening my fortresses. Anyway, getting off track. That's hubris right there, my friend. You're going to get wrecked. That's fine.

It makes for good stories, right? Yeah, it does. Absolutely does. Awesome. Well, okay, so thanks everyone for tuning in to Dwar Fortress Roundtable. And until next time, To-to-Loo. Happy Fortressing, everybody.

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