Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 73: Advanced World Generation With Tekkud

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Hey everybody - Tekkud joins us for a romp around the Advanced World Generation interface, along with discussion of some of his tutorial videos. Tekkud's YouTube page Support Dwarf Fortress at Bay12Games.comSupport Dwarf Fortress Roundtable on Patreon

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfy. Every couple weeks or so, your hosts gather to talk about our favorite game, Dwarf Fortress. So let's join your hosts, Roland. That is so American, I disagree. Tony. Hey, there might be an opportunity here. There's people that don't like 5G. And Jonathan.

Well, the corduroy isn't why I would be cutting it. As they present insightful, irreverent, and often incorrect analysis. This week, TechEd stops by... Yeah, how does that work anyway? You'd think that something with more thickness to it would be more durable and last longer. To discuss advanced world generation, a topic suggested by listener Brian Johnson. And always remember, losing is fun. So I guess everyone hears that we have Techett back with us today.

Welcome, Tekken. Hello. Glad to be back. It's been a while. Yes, it's been a while for us. Mm-hmm. We didn't even mention this in our last episode. We only planned to be gone for about two months,

and it ended up stretching to almost four. Sometimes. Stuff happens. It's hard to say goodbye and hello again sometimes. How was your vacation, your hiatus? Good. It was fun. Yeah, it was nice.

Raise your hand if you got COVID. Oh, no, actually. I end up getting it going to the most hostile COVID place in the world Florida? Britain, Britain. Very hostile, very much Florida protocols in play over there. Yeah, I've been on a very long hiatus myself

from my channel, not really a hiatus. I'm still kind of every now and then tinkering with things. I'm trying to learn some art, you know, that's going to come back and play into it. But I myself have also been on a bit of a break. Summer months are busy at work, and I've been on something of a journey. So life is life.

Well, I'm really glad that you dropped those military videos before you went on the hiatus because those were awesome. Yeah, thank you. My dwarves, thank you. You've saved many a fortress. Are they shooting bolts? Everybody got their dwarves using their crossbows? Yes.

Well, yeah, until somebody ran out of arrows and threw the quiver. That kind of sucked. Through the quiver? Yeah. oh no I'm not supposed to do that well they weren't using it anymore well I know exactly it's like well I'm in a life or death situation here and I the quiver is expendable the solution is to just give them quivers made out of deadly material right of corduroy adamantine corduroy yeah make sure to fray it a little bit it'd be like a cactus you know it stab you real real small threads and it hurt for like eight hours and you wouldn't know where it is aren't you supposed to be mindlessly reaching into it though when you're Oh, that's true. That's true. Hey, man, I didn't say it was a fair for it. Well, just recently I discovered that my dwarves, and I'm sure everybody's dwarves,

they like to wear so much clothing that I'm sure they would be well protected. They almost always are wearing mittens over gloves, no matter the temperature. Yeah. Yeah, I noticed that. And I thought for a while it would protect them from freezing, but I don't think there is. is like temperature that does that, like there is temperature. I'm aware. I'm just saying that

I never saw a dwarf freeze when he was like on a glacier chopping wood or something. It decreases the armor class by one, right? Yeah. Is that right? No. Oh, it sounded darned authoritative. Sounded like you knew what you're talking about.

What did you say there, Nathan? I was just, uh, I was just going to say temperature is like somehow extremely impotent in dwarf fortress. It doesn't matter, you know? It's weird how much heat your dwarves can put up with and how much cold they can put up with. You know what? That's because the developers are in the Pacific Northwest and they don't really have the same kind of weather that other parts of the world have.

They themselves have adapted. They have. Like, what's the difference between winter and summer in Seattle, a little sun? One place it does matter is that your water freezes and your dwarves can't drink if you accidentally let them run out of alcohol. Which doesn't happen to me anymore because I implemented the Tech and approved method of, running your workshops by work orders rather than just telling them to build crap. That has changed my fortress management and organization completely. So you're not stockpiling tens of thousands of units of things and then wearing your dwarves

down emotionally and physically in order to reduce those stockpiles to dangerously low zeros? Well, I still run a capitalist for it. Come on. This is a source of capitalism here. Of course, that's what I'm doing. but I'm doing it in a more efficient way. No. I do still have my craft swarves building rock crafts with a repeat on.

But that's just so that they can shove all that crap off on the elves and the caravan server to come in. But other than that, no, yeah. I didn't get the food part right. You're really clear in how you described how all that stuff worked. And then somehow, some part of the intricate weave of all of the things failed. And I would either never make enough food and people would. starve to death or they would have too much crap food and anyway, I made a bit of a dog's dinner of it and I got to get back there and try that again. Food, it just has to be right

on a few different levels because first you have to be farming some things that won't get used for drinks and then you need to know that you're farming enough of those things and they won't get used for drinks because you can't share everything between your food and drink or else the dwarves will end up making too many drinks out of it or something. Then you have to have your work order set up for having the proper amount of meals getting made, which that has some math involved because you're making stacks out of stacks. You're not just making one for one. So, well, it is one for one in terms of the amount of food, making the amount of meals,

but your dwarf isn't making one meal per order. So, yeah, like you kind of have to do a little bit of math and you have to just make sure you have your resource your farming or whatever resource it is fishing or something set up to provide enough and it's not getting used elsewhere

and I don't know it's easy to find like one place where you just didn't set something upright I think that's a really good part right there which is something that I didn't think about and it's probably why the whole the whole scheme fell apart

yep I think I were just kind of going for it with whatever they had so it just may be coincidence but I think that The proper management of your workshops also indirectly leads you to have a more populated fortress in that. Again, it may be coincidence, but I've done, I think, three fortresses now where I used the workshop management work orders or workshop management by work orders. And I don't know if the dwarves are spending more time in the taverns or what's going on, but my migration waves seem to be much larger now. than they were before.

I don't know if it's coincidence, but I think that I have, my dwarfs have more idle time. I wouldn't be surprised because my forts, I've been doing the management that I described in my videos for a long time now. And for probably a dozen forts before I made those videos. And so I notice my forts are populated extremely quickly. And I think it's just because you don't realize,

because when you set up those management systems, you don't realize that even though each management system is working slower than it would if you just ham-fisted it and said repeat job, once you get like three or four industries working on their own, they're outperforming what you would be telling your dwarves to do micromanagement's ways. So, you know, you could tell your dwarves to make a lot of stuff at once. But having five systems up, like a system for food, a system for drinks, a system for crafts, a system for stone blocks and furniture.

a system for metal, for pots and things, and all those things constantly working, I'm pretty sure, I would guess it's your wealth, just going up way faster because your whole fortress is sort of constantly generating this background wealth. Well, welcome to Wall Street Week. We are talking today about just in time manufacturing as it applies to Door Fortress. Has inflation hit your fort? Yes, absolutely. It's now eight trinkets.

per caged animal with the elves. It's crazy. Hey, on that demo video that Zach and Tarn did, I saw some people asking in comment places, hey, is the economy back? What caused that question to be asked? I didn't see anything in that video that would lead me to believe that the economy would have changed from what it is now. Oh, I can tell you. Go ahead. Okay.

When he was making the fortress, when he was embarking, and there was a new setting type screen where you can say, like, I want invaders, I want this, and there was a button between normal and hard economy, well, like, hard economy or whatever. And everybody was like, wait, economy, economy? Hard economy? What? That led to the question of whether or not economy is back,

but I feel like hard economy will just reduce the price of trinkets and such. well I would like to see that happened where if if you flood the market with with marble rings that the price of marble rings goes down yeah that would be pretty cool to see yeah that sounds hard though as much as it would be really cool to see I'm going to guess that they just used economy as the word to describe how the hard easy and whatever settings scale world events and raids and stuff with your fortress as well because that's something they've said they're going to do, they're going to change, they're going to have difficulty modes or editable difficulty that adjusts how the world interacts with your wealth levels. Yeah, that sounds like, so probably like, you need less wealth to trigger attacks from goblins or whatever. Yeah, yeah, or much more. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Mr. Gutsi would like to announce the grand opening of the chestnut. of Whips, the new tavern located on the fourth level of ivory channels. Come here, Ostfaint lashes tell the story of the Dwarf's ascension to Queen of the Gleeful Seals. Visit the Chestnut of Whips, Ivory Channel's first and only tavern. Tell them Mr. Gutsi sent you. I'm very excited to see, once this is all in place, I'm excited to see what other kind of events they can put into the game that will perhaps even an economy-based thing that will change not just when the world interacts with your fort, but how?

Because at the moment, Dwar Fortress has a lot of stuff going on and there's a lot of stuff you can do, but every single fort, well, not every single fort. If you go onto an ice sheet, you have different circumstances or an evil biome. You have different circumstances. But every fort outside of those exceptional cases has the same. needs to do things. It's the same list, you know, like, oh, you get to the caverns. Now you got forgotten beasts.

You get to a certain wealth point. Now you got goblins. Oh, and a were beast showed up, you know. So you just, you can be easily prepared. But in the future, if they did implement some kind of economy or geopolitics or something, and then other things can happen. Like maybe a different fortress, a different civilization shows up and says, we're claiming this land from your civilization.

you're under attack and we're going to basically steal your land and usurp this place. And then, you know, that's like, that's cool. That's something that didn't happen last for it. And it's not going to happen next for it either, probably. But it's going to happen this fort. That'd be interesting to see. I mean, that's just obviously a blind idea that I'm spitting out there. Yeah, well, I know that I've reached the point after three migration waves now that I've got to worry about,

about attacks because my population is growing over that, what is it, 60, where they pretty much won't attack you until you have 60 citizens? Did you ever get a migration wave over 22? Holy smacks. I've gotten close. I don't know. I've gotten close. I feel like 22 is about where that's the highest number I recall reading, and I recall reading

it multiple times. So I'm wondering if that's a hard limit. Hmm. Okay. I will keep an eye out for that. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I get those often, the 22. migration waves, probably because I immediately start processing all of my stone. I know a lot of

people use the hide function to just hide boulders. I don't do that. I immediately start making blocks, doors, furniture that I'm going to use to clear up the stone and just get it out of there. And so pretty much as soon as I break ground, I'm crafting. My mason is full-time crafting. And I think that plus drinks, plus just some other things like the barrels that I need and stuff like that probably boosts my wealth enough that my first few migration waves can hit big numbers. I don't hide boulders because it's kind of a trigger to help me know when it's time for me to start looking at mining again. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. I will set up stockpiles and had those stockpiles near my people who use the stone.

But whenever my lower levels are starting to clear up of stone, then, you know, it's time to do some more exploratory mining. I find myself really content without doing too much mining. I have like a metal mine, you know, that I'll use to mine metals. But for the most part, I find a way to build my entire fortress out of the resources that fall from carving out the fortress. I just... Yeah, I like pretty colors of furniture.

I want to find the red and the blue and the greens for my furniture. Oh, yeah, you've got to go mining for those. Yeah. I have to be honest here. I just set my mineral into the highest, so I don't have to dig a lot, and I still get a lot of stuff. And I don't really do it for the metals. If I had a table where I can make a day. difference between the amount of metals I can

find and the amount of gems I could find I would just crank up the gems because I love gems and now I have like I don't know 800 something steel bars I don't know what to do with that but I don't have any gems anymore because they're all gone already they're everywhere Isn't that funny

Isn't it funny that the difference between what people really enjoy about the game I can care less about gems gems to me are just something that you decorate rings with before you sell them yeah exactly exactly exactly but you know in my head i always see uh the the item and if i then go into my tavern which obviously has to has uh the best tables the best chairs the best thrones the best uh furniture that was produced and then on top of that good furniture i need

the best amount of um decoration which is bones plus metal, plus gemstones. And it has to be on there. Otherwise, the thing will not go into the tavern. And it makes me happy if I see it in the tavern. I'm like, it has metals and bones and gemstones. And then I can look up what the gemstone is like. And I'm like, you know, it's cool.

I really like gemstones. Well, I think that it's interesting to the point about people being having different desires in those cases. I'm the exact opposite right now, but I'm thinking about doing a fort your style because currently I basically end up with a pile of gems I'm not using because I only decorate furniture for people who I want to have happy, like the nobles or something, whatever gems they like. If there's no one that likes red tourmaline, then red tourmaline just collects in a box and it doesn't do anything. But I'm thinking about doing a four.

where I decorate every single produced good. Every single table, chair, every pot, every thing. Just every single wheelbarrow, everything gets decorated. And you know you can set up your stockpiles such that the stockpiles that you actually pull from are only holding things that have been decorated with gems. Sounds like it's going to be like Liberace. Do you remember that guy from I think like the 70s or the 80s? He was like the guy that was like all into gemstones on everything.

It's pretty wild. It's going to be a Fabrizzi egg of a fortress. Yes. Yes, yes. Just imagine it. You know, the wealth, the power. You come in as a human adventurer with a spear that is made of like whatever bronze or whatever.

And you steal everything. And you come into a tavern and it's cluttered in massive gemstones. That's, mm-hmm. Love it. Do you remember the, the beautiful shotgun mine cart, shotgun? yes mechanism i think gems carved into certain shapes Nathan from Australia Nathan from Australia from from Australia yeah I think this is shout out tonight hi night and that was the most amazing yeah the most amazing

dwarven engineering and I think this is a perfect use for gems think about the shrapnel quality no some of these gems especially diamonds they're they're really you know they're known for their their hardness and so I feel like they'd be great shrapnel but they're not chatterproof, though. Well, it's all the better. You know, all the better. No, are you insane? Yes.

Roland's going to be out on the field picking rubies out of bloodied corpses and putting them back in the chairs and the tables. Yeah, all I'm saying is if you want gems, we've got so many. I'm just going to start using them is... You can send all of your gems to me. If this was a multiplayer game, I would just buy gems from everybody. Yeah, what about the Door Fortress? Global MMO.

That would be terrifying. I would never step outside again. Yeah, I think that would be one of those where you would have to, God, love you. I mean, some of the people we've had on this podcast would just melt us. Like, this is terrifying. Let's don't do this. I don't want these. I don't want this stuff turned against us, guys.

We can't do multiplayer. We were talking about those migration waves. And my population jumped high, but, you know, I see a pattern here. So I'm getting a migration wave every season except for winter, without fail, every season that I've had a migration wave except for winter. Is that just the way it is, or is that often? I haven't noticed that being the way it is, but I also haven't been paying attention. I've got dwarf therapist up. So summer of the year five, autumn of the year five, spring of the year six, summer of the year six, autumn of the year six.

spring of the year seven summer of the year seven and autumn of the year seven just started so every season except for winter has brought me a migration wave one of them was two but other than that they have all been the least has been nine the most was 20 the wiki is saying that there is never a migration in the first winter but it does not mention a single other point about winter I mean it just I used a search for winter. I didn't find any other results. That's all. As this fortress unfolds, I might come back and keep an eye on that. But yeah, my biggest migration wave, I was wanting to check to see if I had a migration wave of 22. No, I've got one of 15 and one of 20 are my largest two. Most of them are, well, I've got a 10, a 9, another 9, a 7. Well, the wiki is also telling me that there's a maximum size of 10. And I'm just going to have to say that that's straight up BS wiki. Yeah, no, that's not true. It is a wiki.

We can edit that. Click edit. I've already edited something. Yeah, I'll consider that later. But after the whole food calculation fiasco, I'm not, oh, man, I don't know if I'm ready again. I had to recalculate and test to confirm the actual average output of legendary plus five farmers on crop yields. Well, you don't expect a wiki to actually have real valid information. Maybe that's my mistake all along.

Wait, this is Dwarforky, not Wikipedia, so never mind. Tens of us have been updating that thing. We're going to get fired from Dorf Fortress if we keep this up. It's time now for Memorial Gardens. Presented by Brandon Poole, attending administrator of Ivory Channel's Memorial Hall. Ivory Channel's bids a fond farewell to Thob Israfzazir, who died of thirst in the year 6. Thob was a lover of bucklers. An exceptional schist memorial was placed in memory of Eirish Sikh Mugnish.

Eirish starved to death in the year 7. Memorial Gardens is presented as needed as a service of Ivory Channel's Memorial Hall. Brandon Poole, attending administrator. Kynum Rash but you know what the wiki's really useful for figuring out advanced world generation well that's funny you should mention that we were wondering about advanced world generation how does that work for you how's it going how many advanced worlds have you generated well how many advanced worlds have I generated probably the last 10 that I've done have been

advanced okay how many you specify that how is it well I mean around a 10 how is it going? Maybe not well. I've been running into some bugs. However, I am investigating whether or not the bugs are coming from conflicts with my tile set, raws that are being imported and the raws that are meant to be in the game, or if it's some other issue, like the Linux repo maintainers having a bad set of raws or something. Or it could be that world generation is bugged because people have had this problem on Windows and in the past, some of my bugs. that have been occurring and I think it could be advanced worlds generated at large sizes are causing like memory overflows like the lists for things get too long and it's causing bugs but you know besides that world generation goes fine like I'm able to make what I want to make out of it assuming it'll run okay that's interesting I get a lot of nope sorry that didn't work or I end up with something that isn't what I wanted oh yeah crashes yeah or crashes. Yeah, I definitely don't set out hoping that it will crash. But yeah, you know, it's, it's a little tricky. So what, what do you, where do you think we should start? How do we want to talk about this? For someone who's never actually done the advanced world generation and some of our listeners, I'm sure, have not. What is the draw of using the design new world with advanced parameters feature? Why would you want to do that instead of just creating a new world with the basics that, uh,

that they provide in the regular world creation? Well, for me, it's, I like to do a light touch because the draw for me is kind of the light touch results. So I like to add more good to the world because evil grows over time. So if you have a long history, then you're going to end up with a massive amount of evil in the world and not a lot of good places to settle down and have that like kind of good versus evil sort of setting and also it's kind of cool the stuff you can get with good biomes also you can eliminate this is a big one you can eliminate a lot of the area that most players would

never settle that normally takes up large swaths of land such as deserts or you know polar like frigid polar wastelands stuff like that you can you can kind of push those away and get more playable area. So then you have more opportunities for finding your set of resources you want, say a waterfall with metals or something like that in also a livable location. Right. I could see that. You could have a small map that has the same amount of embarkable tiles on it that a larger map has without taking up the processor that a large map does. Yeah. And the changes for it are very simple. There's very simple lines in there like rainfall. my last world that I generated, and these are worlds that don't go through a lot of failures.

They don't do a lot of rejects, maybe 30 or 100 rejected worlds before it gives you a one. I just up to the minimum rainfall to five and reduced the maximum rainfall down to 90 because that eliminated totally soaked swamp land where it never stops raining and it eliminated absolutely parched desert. wastelands where it literally never rains. You do have to change a couple other numbers. There are some region counts that the game wants to hit in order to accept a world, and you have to reduce those if you're eliminating those biomes. So, for example, I increased the minimum rainfall to five, just to get a little trickle, a little sprinkle of rain, even on the driest areas.

And then you have to go to your deserts, expected square count for your deserts, or minimum, rather, I think is how it phrases it in the file, and decrease that because you're not going to get that much a desert anymore. I've been trying to build a world that's big, but where all of the land masses are connected in some way so that you could actually cross from, you know, like one continent to another since we don't have votes. I think that that's kind of neat, but it's also pretty darn tricky to get something reliably out the door. Yeah. I've found that perhaps unexpectedly, the hardest thing to get right in advanced world generation is the most basic part of the generation of the world, which is just where is land and where is sea, because the game either gives you its default algorithm where it sort of places the sorts of continents we all know and love, which are usually like a couple connected and maybe one is separate or something, or maybe they're all connected as one pangea. or you can use the grids in advanced world generation but the grids in my opinion no matter how

much I played with them the world just felt not natural looking it didn't feel it just felt grid like you know and if you make it so broad that it can't register as grid in your mind then you have just like one landmass so it just didn't you know it didn't satisfy what I was looking for but there's a whole lot of stuff you can do with advanced world generation even as little as making a static seed so you can regenerate your world if you lose it. I mean, that's a perfectly valid reason to use advanced world generation on its own. You can totally re-replicate a world you used to have. All you have to know are the seeds and the settings. Oh, that's cool. That's what I was munking with as you were speaking about that. If you replicate

all four of those seeds, the there's, looks like there's seed, history seed, name seed, and creature seed. If you replicate those four, it will generate the same world as it, is it for each time? It has to have all the settings the same too. So you're going to want to look at your world gen file that gets saved in the same place as your world history and your world map dot BMP. You know, you'll get a world parameters file. Okay. But I mean, obviously that might not work across versions for obvious reasons, but it's still very useful because another thing with the seeds, and this is just, this is before you even modify a world where it's still talking default. You still have these use cases. You could generate a world and it could be called something really dumb. And maybe the civilizations are called something really dumb. Like you've got like the story of axles is the name of your civilization or something ridiculous. And you're like, that's stupid. I just want a different civilization name. Well, you just change the name seed. And then you can like re-roll the names. Now it doesn't, necessarily work 100%.

Because if you, like, the history seed is going to change a lot more than that. The creature seed is going to play into things too differently. But the creature seed, I think, is another one that's a little more specific. If, say, you don't have the creatures you want in a certain area, then maybe that can help get those creatures there for you. But I think the creature seed changing it would change more things. But, you know, you can like change one of the seeds and just be like, I like the shape of the world.

I like the creatures that are in it but the names are stupid so I'm going to change the names up fair enough I think I ran advanced world chain like twice and one time

I was just trying a few things out actually I tried to make a world to direct like a D&D campaign in it that worked somewhat but I ultimately went back and just did it with a name files, as you said. And the other was I wanted to try and make the worst world possible, as in like completely overrun with the monsters and evil.

I made a pocket world so that the evil can spread very easily and the monsters don't have to go too far. And I let it run, I think, a thousand years, and nothing was alive anymore. Nothing. Absolutely everything was dead. And only a few forgotten beasts here and there and like two, three necromances with millions of undead had survived.

And I was like, hmm, I kind of imagined this to be more fun. Yeah, it's good to know. It can come out with some strange results sometimes for sure. Yeah. Another thing that advanced world generation, can do on a more practical and less artistic stage is you can change your site caps and your population cap and you can get a large world that doesn't have as much history per year. So I like to do in a large world, I will do 26 civilizations as opposed to like the 48 or

whatever it is because I'm not no one's going to keep track of eight different like elv elven civilizations you know that's right just not going to do it no one cares about the seventh and eighth elven civilization you just want like a few of each maybe or maybe you just want one so you could just have five civilizations because you got to include cobalds in there too and then you can turn the civilization population way down and you can have this large world and although the population will grow above that number after the civilizations are established, it will restrict the total population during generation to say 10,000 people, which is substantially less than your civilization would have had if you went by default.

And, you know, that affects how much of everything else is generated. That affects your artifacts, your books, stuff like that. And then, you know, the game, WorldGen goes faster and history files become smaller. I'm looking at a map on the Dual Fortress Wiki here of someone who generated a map with a particular elevation mesh. So it also kind of let you know, it gives you insight into the algorithms that they're using to create the worlds because the way the different parameters change the shape of the land masses that are in the generated world. It's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, those are two ways. There's two ways to do it.

You can use their mesh grids, which is what I was talking about before, not coming out looking very natural unless it's super, super broad. Like I'm talking like a mesh grid of four by four. You can use those or you can leave those unused and you can just change your elevation parameters and say, I want the elevation to vary more drastically or less drastically between this minimum and that maximum. And those parameters, which are earlier in the file or earlier in the interface, are going to follow the same algorithm as before,

the original algorithm that's used by default. They're just going to tweak where the game, what the game allows itself to get away with during elevation randomizing. Or you could do the mesh thing, and the mesh thing gives you fine-grained control. I just don't feel like it comes out very natural. Doesn't, but it looks very video-gamy.

Video-gamy. If you don't care about your world map and you just want your embark to be what you want your imbark, embark to be, then advanced world generation is for you, because you can do some crazy stuff to a world. You can make hundreds of volcanoes. If you want a volcano embark on a waterfall, you can just drench that world with rain. You can load it up with volcanism, and you could just see the magma spill from the earth and the water pour from the skies. And surely you'll find something that you need. And your world map will look ridiculous. But your, you're, you're, you're,

your fort will be what you want. It sounds like a science fiction setting. Yeah, absolutely. I know that you can take away aquifers in your settings with a... You can take away a lot of stuff. You can take away necromancy. Not even just necromancy in general. You can take away specifically lieutenants.

You can take away specifically necromancer summons, which I'm not sure exactly how that works, but judging by the other tags it accompanies. I imagine that just makes necromancers unable to summon things where they are. Like, they won't summon undead. They will create ghouls. They'll create lieutenants and experiments, but they won't raise the dead, which for some people might be awesome. Because you can still get, currently I have Dong the Human Snatcher something corpse. he's an undead necromancer experiment snatcher and he likes to visit my tavern and hang out

and have a beer every now and then so you know okay does he pay uh you know i don't watch him that carefully and maybe i should he's a snatcher it's right there i also have a goblin criminal visiting at the moment his his title is goblin criminal so i'm not sure if i should arrest him I've had those guys before. One of them was really nice and he stayed around and he like, I don't know. He was like picking up stuff in the fortress and he was like really nice and I don't know. I just feel like I had one and I think that he was given the, you know, I think he just

somehow got viewed by society as the wrong thing because it's hard growing up as a goblin. That was my theory on him. Yeah. Yeah. Like should I send my guards and be like, you're under arrest and be like, what for it? I'll be like, I don't know, your name tag. Like it says right here you're a criminal.

I think context matters. called him a criminal, the goblins or the dwarfs? Because if the goblins called him a criminal, we might actually have a lot in common. Because if he's stealing from the goblins, but not from the dwarves, that's cool, man. Yeah, go and profile him. Yeah, go and profile him. What was it, uh, what's, what was the famous quote? One man's criminal is another man's freedom fighter? Is that, is that how that way? Is that a, is that a, is very American, um, rough on the edges that one. I'm curious how Roland, it treats him. his visitors. Are they esteemed guests or are they fodder and drink and like, what are they

to you, Roland? Chum or chum? His handle ends with sadism spikes. Yeah, it actually does depend on which what I'm playing in. My long world is older than the current generation, so I still have no aquifers enabled and that world has not that many people coming into my tavern I get like four or five

I do get more scholars now that I have a bigger library but not really anybody coming into my tavern I have like a dozen I have dozens of visitors at a time in my current fort

and it seems like the world makes a difference because some world's like no one's around and others there's everybody and I had a wear beast problem in this world that I'm streaming right now and so what I did was I sent the wear beast down to the cavern level the third cavern level

and I locked everyone in there but I also made visitor taverns in the cavern level because I had too many visitors so what I did was I made the taverns I put everyone on a shelter alert so they wouldn't go down there they would stay in the fort

I waited for all of the visitors to go into the taverns with the wear beasts. And then I locked them all in there. And I just let carnage ensue. And I think I did that for three waves. And I have a massive pile of visitor corpses that have just been feasted upon. And eventually, though, all of the were beasts died. So instead of, this is an interesting experiment, I guess. I never thought about it this way.

When put in a concentrated tavern population of visitors, mind you, not warriors, Eventually, the wear beast did die. They didn't become hundreds of wear beasts, which is very interesting. Huh. But yeah, it was not the most humanitarian thing I've ever done in a fort, and I'm very curious why anyone still visits granite point. I feel like it's because there's no Yelp. There's no Dwarven Yelp, so they don't know.

They're in the caverns, too, so you don't have to walk past the body pile. to get to the fort. That is always one of the nicest things you can do for your establishment is if people die and not make future patrons walk past the dead. Definitely good customer service that way. Hide the corpses

so if anyone has a bakery or something. I believe that could have to do with my situation because I'm at war with two towers and two goblins as well as one elven civilization. I don't think anybody comes to me because I'm at war with almost everybody.

That's funny. That is funny. And I feel like at this point in my understanding of how each of you play this game, I can fairly say in a comedic sitcom kind of voice, that's so Roland. That isn't even true. I didn't start that, by the way. The towers attacked me on their own. The else just kind of started as well. They didn't even send a diplomat. I did start with the second goblins, though. Isn't it weird how the guy who loves the military so much just keeps getting in all these wars? I mean, I mean, hang on.

If I wasn't into military, that would just be game ending. If they send like 100 goblins, like 200 million war animals from the else, that would be just it if I wasn't into the military. that much. It's true. It's true. Maybe they wouldn't be sending so many things if your military wasn't so large. Yeah, I was going to say the military industrial complex needs an enemy, man.

Hey, I have 16 military wars. 16. That's not too much. Yeah, but you only have 20 dwarves. I have 68, I think. A lot of children. A lot of children, though. But you would be surprised. I treat my visitors very well. They do usually get a background. check when they arrive because I get like three per year. But I treat them very nicely. They even have a room right next to my tavern. They can sleep there. They have their own bed. Can you say more about the background check? Now I'm curious. Well, I use the... It's going to be easier with the steam release, by the way. I hope so.

To do background checks? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Justice tab. And then you can interview somebody for literally any unclosed misconduct that happened in your fort. You're interviewing everyone that comes in. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I only get like three people per year. And very often my bridge is up so that nobody goes out and like gets sad in the rain. How do you do that?

How do you interview people without a crime? I still, I have just barely touched the justice system. And I don't know how to do anything unless there's a crime. Oh, no. You need a crime. You need a crime. Roland has implemented the American INS. Yeah, you just keep a crime open and you keep it nebulous enough so it can never be solved,

but you can treat everyone like a suspect. You're right. It is sort of like the INS. Yeah, it's amazing. I know exactly who did the crime as well. I know exactly who did the crime and it was me. Okay, let's have details. How do you do that?

Okay, listen. I had a dwarf that was very unhappy in his life. And I was like, you know what? I can use this. So I made a. more unhappy by getting rid of his clothing, by giving him no room, by putting him next to corpses, and then making him live in the caverns for like two years. He was not happy about that, and at some point started punching people in a tavern and

like general misconduct, and I have like 20 cases open because of him. Since then, he has died in unforeseen circumstances, but I do have enough open cases that I can just interview everybody. And apparently, if you do make an interview with anybody, they don't ask about the specific case. They just try to gain all information, which is just amazing. So you need a, it was it the sheriff or the military commander? I don't remember.

I think it was the military commander. There was a bit iffy stuff about that. But one of those two needs to have. have good people skills and conversation skills and stuff. And then he becomes better at, like, gaining information. And so every time I open the bridge, which is like once or twice a year, and people file in and out, I quickly write down, who's coming in? And it's only like three, four names.

Sometimes I get a busy year, and it's like five people, five. five to six people and then I just schedule interviews with the visitors that just arrived and click through them and they don't know anything they're just scholars and they're like

oh I'm just here to read books please let me go yeah I don't believe you so it usually works great and I actually caught one person that came into my fortress to steal

one of my artifacts and I was like you know what I had to rifle through a million people and and do all this and like use use criminal behavior on the on poor innocent visitors but I found actually one that committed not any crime it was more of a thought crime let's be honest it hasn't happened yet but I put him in a cage and that was it Wow. Oh my God. You have implemented the INS. Well, yeah, that sounds really terrible. Congratulations. It's on an absolutely horrific system. You've outdone yourself. Let me get to straight, Roland. I show up to your fort. You open the bridge. I come inside. For the last year, you've had Mebzuth going insane from being tortured in a bedroom full of corpses and being locked in the cavern. He punches a few people up in the tavern like a month ago. I'm showing up and walking into your fort. And I get stopped. by like two big guys and they're like hey look weird shit's been going down in here we need to know where are you from what are you doing here what's going on i don't know if i trust you buddy we've had like this guy beating people up maybe you're one of him um yeah not only that i mean it's dark

they also want to know okay could you tell me a little bit of something about your second grade teacher because we think that might have something to do with urris down there who's whacking people over the head with a bottle. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, you have to remember that the insane dwarf died like seven years ago. He's already dead, yeah.

Yeah, he died like seven years ago. And all the misconduct was before I put him alone into the caverns so he couldn't punch anymore. So it's been like eight to nine years in the game. Technically, the letter of the law here says that because we were investigating ERIS 16 years ago, that means that we can interrogate you now,

even though you are born yet whenever Earth died. Okay, so we're going to use that as the pretense for holding you for an indefinite amount of time in Guantanamo Bay. I hate to make the connection. I hate to make the connection. But it's like TSA, airport security.

Something happened, and suddenly we have airport security, you know. Except they look at you and they're like, Have you ever once ever had a fleeting moment in your life where you've begun to consider stealing something to the dungeon? To the dungeon? No? Yeah, I don't believe you.

Also, do not ask me what happened to the cage. I don't have any. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to ask. You look like a hill dwarf. I can imagine that it, I can imagine what happened. Attention members and guests, Blood Toes calls all woodworkers of the Hall of Basins to the Guildhall the Spring of Iron. Engraved on the floor of the spring of iron is a masterfully designed image of

autumn bite labors the dwarf and a schist ring by Zasset Ducimical. Autumn bite labors is raising the schist ring. The artwork relates to the masterful schist ring, created by the dwarf autumn bite labors for the cradled rampart at ivory channels in the late winter of the year five. Contact blood toes at the spring of iron for more information. Hey, I got a question about the world generation in that when you first open up advanced world generation, if you just pick medium region and don't make any changes to the parameters, is that basically accepting medium for all of the regular general world generation

parameters? I think so but honestly I've never done it before. You'd have to generate five of those worlds and maybe five from the regular menu and just see if they have the same kind of patterns and quantities of things to figure that out.

I think it is. I think it's the same. Well here's where I'm going with that. Tony, whenever you created your really, really long world, the problem with that was is that like Nathan said, earlier, evil has taken over completely by a thousand years and everything is undead. So if you could only tweak the necromancers such that they aren't as effective in some reason or maybe take the necromancers out, then maybe you could have a really long world

that doesn't get, you know, destroyed by the zombie apocalypse. That sounds like a goal worth pursuing. I like it. I'm making some notes. I think I might try that. Yeah. You could do all sorts of stuff. I mean, you can even, it seems like, it seems like Tarn was very on top of what people would want to change in terms of what's available.

So, for example, evil clouds and evil rain are an option in here too. You can change how many kinds of evil clouds and evil rain there is. And I'm sure it's because Tarn was aware that that's a massive game changer as far as how playable the game is going to be or how it needs to be played in an evil biome. And then also you got your necromancer things. Like you can disable necromancer summons and ghouls and only allow lie lieutenants and experiments. And you know there's not going to be that many experiments compared to what would have been ghouls and summons, at least summons. I'm not sure ghouls exactly. So you can do all sorts of that stuff.

Right now the secret number doesn't do anything. There's only one secret. It's a secret of life and death. So that one is like a red herring because that would theoretically change how many. different kinds of secrets like the life and death there would be, but it makes no difference. If it's set to just one, you'll still get necromancers. But yeah, I mean, try turning off, allow necromancer summons. And don't change anything else. Don't even make it a random C or don't make it a static seed or anything. Just go into advanced world gen. Go to medium

region, press E. Scroll down to allow necromancer summons, turn it to zero. And then press escape F6 and enter and you're making a world without necromancer summons that's fun hang it's different it's different can I make crime more often crime up crime oh wait crime yeah crime as in like people trying to steal shit I don't murder people yeah I think crime probably is very emergent so maybe that's really just going to be a matter of of more population and maybe more evil squares or something or somehow get goblins to be more present because they're a big source of crime. But the settings don't have anything that directly influences the psychology of the population

to make them more criminally, you know, criminally minded. That is a shame. That is, we need that. We need that. Like a crime cursor, like more crime less crime. I always felt like it had to do with, yeah, I always felt like it was pretty random, the crime situation. Like, it seems very randomly generated. I didn't see anything that could tweak that.

But maybe there's things that could inadvertently, like changing this could mean that the world is more susceptible to crime or something. That might be something to play with. Another thing that I've seen a big difference between my fort. This is back when we were doing a singe metal. Roland was showing his fort at the time. And he was in the caverns, and his cavern layers were super tall. He had really deep caverns, like eight to 12, I think maybe even 12 to 15 tiles tall. Oh, yeah, that was a curious world.

Yeah, and you can actually, you can make that happen. You can make your cavern passages more or less open with more or less water, and you can make more or less rock layers separating the caverns. So if you ever get frustrated by going into a world and you breach one cavern layer and you're like, all right, maybe I'll find some minerals or something between this one and the next one because I don't want to have to enter the caverns to get metal or something like that. But then the next cavern level immediately starts the tile below the last one. And you're like, great. So there's just like no underground except the caverns. And you can change that.

You can make there be a minimum of one, five, 30 level. between each cavern level. And it's actually not just each all set at once. You can have specifically a number of levels between the first and above ground and between the second cavern level and the first cavern level. And you can change each one of those. So that's another thing you can do with Advanced WorldGen. If you really like the caverns, but you find it's frustrating how they're often generated,

you can change that. And you can make them big, open expanses that are really tall or you have a lot of space between them. Interesting. That is really interesting. Well, there's a lot to play with here. Do we have it? I think WorldGen, all that stuff is still going to be in the Steam release.

Like, I think all they're really doing is tweaking UI pretty much, right? So this content will still be relevant. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Stuff might be added to it, if anything. Stuff might be added to it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, more sliders. Beautiful. All right. We are coming up at the top of the hour now. So I think that we're going to wrap this up here. Thank you so much, Tekin, for joining us. It is always a blast to have you on and tap your knowledge. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, that sounds dorky. It's a hoot. That sounds dorkier. You can use either one of those. It's been a hoot. I'd also, I'd like to maybe challenge you guys a curiosity I've noticed in my forts before we end to this. I'd like to maybe challenge you guys to see what your biggest dwarf in your military is

because I have a dwarf. I have several dwarves that are 120 kilos plus, which is larger than a black bear. Oh, that reminds me. That's an absolute unit. Good Lord. Yeah, I have a dwarf. I called him Rognar. He's the leader of my military, absolute maniac.

Have you guys noticed that? They get huge. Yeah. He is taller than a human. And he's broader as well. He's massive. So check out your military. post your largest military dwarf in your discord and maybe I'll put together an advance or

what is it arena test and we'll fight biggest dwarves uh hang on hang on um Jonathan hello he's not part of it he can't hear us that is weird interesting well let's I guess we're in the next we're in the overtime hour let's go I don't think can we can can can uh can Jonathan hear us I don't think he can no I don't think he can so for his sake maybe we should wrap it up that is weird it is really weird yeah all right well yeah we'll we'll wrap it up for uh Jonathan's sake here yeah so yeah it's been it's been great talking to you about about advanced world gen um looking forward to generate a bunch of other stuff yeah and some military and CIA interrogation yeah

Corteroys Wait, that got cut Nightmare fuel About how Roland manages his You know It takes the darker Darker turn on that whole Walmart Greeter thing

It's just like a light passport control At the border It's not that bad Sitcom catchphrase You have to be Hey I have to get a soundboard With a that's so Roland In a laugh track

You got to do it You know what A soundboard is actually on my two buy list So I will consider that. But it's kind of narcissistic to play that myself. But we will see. We'll just get to a lead motif, maybe with flutes or something. Mm, nice.

All right, then. Wonderful. Well, thanks for joining us today. It's been a blast. Yeah, it's been a while, and it was fun. Yeah, next time maybe we'll be able to chat about this upcoming release. Or it won't be upcoming anymore. It'll be hopefully.

Previously, fingers crossed. Yeah, let's see, you know, January. That's my guess, so. Yep, all right. I'll see you guys next time. All right, see you later. Happy fortressing. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast.

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