Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 77: Version 0.50.02

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

Version 0.50.0x is out to great fanfare and excitement - Two days after its release, the gang discusses their experiences with the premium edition.

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. We can't put it that way. I did not leave my house in two days. I'm going to be honest with you. Tony... I feel like clean it ends here with us in spirit. Thanks for the aquifer thing.

by the way. And Jonathan. There is a snarkiness that I find amusing of some people who... As they present insightful, irreverent, and often incorrect analysis. And always remember, losing is fun. Today's episode is all about our reactions to the release of version 0.50.01. Is that right? Oh, God.

Don't... Yep, 50.01. Halfway point. So in another 23 years. We will have a final version of this game. So with VR. Just shy of our 70th birthdays, guys. Yeah.

Just VR dual fortress. Can't wait. Or whatever. VR. On our last episode when we talked to Tarn and Zach, I just made the assumption that anyone who was listening to the episode knew who the hell they were. I didn't, I pretty much said, hey, yeah, they create Dwarfortress,

and then we just went on with it. No intro, no backstory, no news. I feel like that's okay. I feel like that's okay. I mean, kind of, yes. If you don't just accidentally click on this podcast, I mean, no. Yeah, I agree. I agree.

I feel like, yeah, if you've stumbled your way into this and you're thinking this is a sports podcast, for example, you're probably feeling very lost at this point. We're huge on Spotify, right? Huge on Spotify. Also, to be fair, there was a different episode. You should check it out, everybody, by the way. It's one of the earliest. They're already in here, and I think we do actually make a really good coherent introduction who this is.

That's true. You're probably right. If they got it, if they made it to this version and this episode, then I think they know. Yeah, you're probably right. I agree. I agree with what that guy said. Yeah, I've been writing down things as I come across them, and sometimes I'll answer my own questions, but sometimes I end up more confused than I thought I was.

But I've managed to a lot of the things that I was just like, wow, I don't know how to do this anymore. You can figure it out. How has been the experience for you? I feel like I'm learning to play the game again. But maybe it feels like I'm learning Portuguese after I'm fluent in Spanish or something. So it's not like learning a whole new language, I guess. I think I was talking to Techett.

And he was a little concerned about my reaction to it because I apparently have a reputation for being someone who is highly resistant to change. And while that's true in a lot of respects, I mostly am resistant to changes Microsoft makes to their products because they seem to want to change. things just for the sake of changing them, not for any good reason except for, hey, we need to change this because where Dwar Fortress, it had changes that happened that needed to be made. So, yeah. So as far as that goes. Yeah, I hear you.

I mean, you know, like I share some of that. Like when I opened up the game, I was like, I don't, I don't, I have to use the mouse for everything. That's a big change. And then I started to see there are keyboard shortcuts, but... Not for everything, though, yeah. Yeah. And it will probably take some time to learn all that stuff.

And then maybe shortcuts that are hidden in there that I don't know about yet. Again, this game was released two days ago. We actually held off recording... We were supposed to record last Sunday, but we kind of held off just so that we could make a kind of a quick reaction. I almost had video to the release. Imagine it. So that we can have for once we have like timely news in the Dwar Fortress community.

Timely news. Yeah, exactly. We've got us. The steam release, I guess, came out. Do we, did we talk about that yet? Any day. I'm not sure that I can make an informed opinion, have an informed opinion yet on what changes are flaws and what changes are simply changes and improvements because I'm not used to it.

Well, do you want to talk about highs and lows? Like, what are your highs and what are your lows? Sure, sure. All right. you want to go first I volunteer you I volunteer Roland I'm going to start

smart move let's start from east to west let's do that oh okay okay my high is definitely

I can look at for example a squirrel and the squirrel is not a dot the squirrel is an actual small

red cute squirrel on my my map. And I saw it and I was like, oh, and I wanted to click on it, but it's still a vermin, so you can't. But it's very nice to see. You can now actually see that there are critters. You don't have to like look for them specifically, like really scrunch your eyes and go like, where are they? They are there and you see them. And I still have to see all animals and I still have to see anything other than dwarfs and humans. Humans, I haven't even seen their faces.

I've always, I saw three people and their helmets on. So I have to see all races. I have to see all animals. I have to see anything scary, like monsters or demons or whatever. And I am so excited because they do look good. And that is, I mean, obvious, you know, graphic update. We get graphics high. Yeah, it's graphic. We get graphics. That's pretty insane. Sometimes I just looked at things how they look because they're cute. I do want to know how clothing gets dyed and whether or not you see it or not, because I don't think you do. But yeah. So do we want to do the cons immediately with the same person right after the pros or do we want to like have all three to say something good? Yeah, let's do a round of pros and then around a con. Let's do that.

All right. So what are your pros then? My biggest pro for the whole thing is the dwarf information interface. I realized that all of that information was there in the game before, but now all I have to do is click on my dwarf, and I have 12, 14 or so, whatever tabs that let me know all of the information right there in one handy place. I knew I was going to like this, but I didn't realize how much I was going to love that,

tabbed interface for the dwarves. For example, I never realized that immediately after creating a artifact, the dwarf might make a cute little quote about the artifact that they just made. So I had my first artifact was created. It was like a scepter. And the dwarf that made it, I clicked on her almost immediately after she created it. And she said, I'm going to have it pulled up here. She said, I shall name you Crevispoe, the Boney Finder.

That was very satisfying. That would have been lost a time because I never would have clicked on her. Yeah, the whole Dwarven interface, all the information that you have now at your fingertips, instead of having to dig 12 menus deep to get all of it. Love it. I agree. You can carry that same kind of live update thing to one of my big pros, which was if you click on a workshop, you can see who's there, what they're doing, and then,

you can watch them bring the material to the workshop and then you can see when the thing's been made and then you can see them take it away again and i think that's kind of neat i like that real-time vibe oh um talking about the the clicking on people if if i still may add to the positives you know you can click on visitors and you get the same amount of detail about every single visitor. That's crazy. Because before you had a visitor and you clicked on them and it said the name and the occupation and oh yeah, it's a visitor. You don't know anything about this person unless they talk about themselves and then reveal information about themselves. Now, you are the actual omnipotent god that clicks on somebody and you know, you know their family and you can

see, oh yeah, this person right next to them is like their uncle and they're apparently both soldiers in the same army and they're like walking around oh yeah a soldier in this military squad and their mother is called so-and-so and they're wearing this and this i mean you can see what they're wearing before but it's it's good it's good you can you can click on everybody and see their like thoughts and personality and i think it will actually make a very very big different when it comes to wear beasts or them i've we will see it I think that it's funny that Roland thinks that I might be played well enough to get visitors because I'm still in like year two of my fortress.

I've run out of food a couple times. I've run out of drink. I've got 20 dwarves. So, yeah. This is the first time that I've ever gotten an artifact with 20 dwarves. But then I had those 20 dwarves for a long time. And I got a message that said that I didn't attract any migrants to see. Yeah.

Yeah, so sounds like Roland, you've adapted to the new interface much better than I have. Oh, you know, talking about it, I think this is the perfect moment to jump into the negatives unless anybody wants to add any positives. I'm sure we're going to be gushing positives for like, oh, what's that, what's that, Tony? Yeah, I mean, I've got a couple things that I really liked that we didn't mention. I liked the, I love the zoning for the bedrooms. one of my least favorite things to do and why I often didn't create bedrooms for them and just let them suffer

was because it was such a pain to go in and individually zone and scope each bedroom and the fact that I can like make the bedrooms and then tell it and it sorts it out that is a true awesome quality of life I think it's very cool

I mean I'm also just like completely wowed by the graphics on the main map, it looks fantastic. And I mean, it always just looked like Asky to me. And he kind of figured it out. But it really, they've done an excellent job with all of the sprites and all of the graphics caverns look amazing. Yeah.

So I mean, I think it's just, it's really taken to the, to the graphics well. And so I'm really happy with that. And then like I said, the live view of the doors and the live view of the workshops, I think is pretty doggone cool. I want to add one more quick pro. I think this is probably the best soundtrack that I've heard since Civilization 3. Oh, I've got to turn on the sound. Civ 3.

Oh, yeah. If you've not listened to the ambient music. I was afraid I was going to hugely miss Tarn and his guitar, which I would like to have that as an option. But, wow, this music is great. To me, Civ 3's soundtrack was the one to hold up as the best soundtrack ever. But this one, yes, I think that this might be up there with it. Awesome. Agreed.

Yeah. Dwarf Fortress Roundtable has been brought to you in part by David Eltsroth, creator of Namak Bufut, Quiltusks, a brown zircon throne. All crafts' warship is of the highest quality. It is encrusted with oval graphite cabbichons and encircled with bands of radiant-cut brown zircons. This object is adorned with hanging rings of brown zircon. On the item is an image of Aeson Cudgel Rever's The Dwarf,

and dwarves in brown zircon. Aeson Kudgelrevers is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Asin Kudgelrevers to the position of Queen of the Gleafel Seals in the Year 1. Also on the item is an image of the royal drums the pig-iron floodgate in Pigtail. Nemak Bufut, Quiltusks, a brown Zircon throne, from David Eltsroth. Okay, so warts, of course. I would like to preface this by saying that whenever you talk about criticisms of a game,

especially something that we've gotten so used to playing, and you've got to be sure to differentiate between flaws and changes, because some of these things that have changed that I might perceive initially as a flaw, it may be that it's an improvement, and once I get used to it, I will see it that way. It's too soon. right now for me to make some of those calls. But there are some things that probably are safe to say need some improvement. Yeah, I think you've made a great distinction there.

As I've been playing it, I was kind of like a little frustrated at first in a couple of places because I was like, man, I can't, so I can't do this anymore? Why does this keep happening? Like, took me an unexpectedly long time to figure out where the option to turn off cooking mushrooms was. So everyone was dying of thirst because when they cook the mushrooms, they destroy the spores. Then there's no more spores left to plant more mushrooms. And then they can't make alcohol and then everyone dies. So that took me a very long time to find that option that was kind of easy to find before. So there have been a number of things like that. And I was getting

annoyed. So actually what I did was I sort of writing things down that I couldn't figure out how to do with the intent of either asking you guys that are looking around online or just figuring it out myself and answering my own questions. And then I was kind of left with things that were, I think, actual bugs or glitches. And that's been kind of helpful for me

to kind of make that distinction between, is it broken or do I just not an ad to do this thing that I used to know how to do? Yeah. My big one like that was, how the hell do I tell the yak to be slaughtered? Yep. Previously, I always clicked on the yak,

went hit P for preferences, and hit Y for, or I think it was S, to turn on, yeah, slaughter me. But you do that now from the creatures menu. There's probably going to be a lot of stuff like that, where probably the way that I did it before was not the primary intended way that Tarn had in his mind to interact. Yeah, the biggest irritation that I've had was dealing with aquifers, which is why he turned them off, before you could basically tell the doors like,

yeah, I know it's wet, but I really, really want you to dig there anyway. And they just flat out refuse in some places. And so it's like then the whole fork got flooded because they just wouldn't like dig it out and build a wall. So I would love a way to just say, look, I know the dangers here. I know digging in wet tiles is total madness, but I still want to do it. And it's going to be okay. You know, I'd love to have that option, be just to be like, I don't care that you don't want to dig here, you need to do it anyway. That would be my one thing I would love to see changed. I think we can mod that in. I think we can. I have two. And one is just like me being PV and like used to a different interface. It was E and C for going up and

going down and no no no no you're supposed to use your mouse wheel oh that is even worse yeah that's that is yeah um i had to unbind it i didn't like it at first but i'm i'm growing okay with it it annoyed the crap out of me at first and the more i started to use it the more i was like oh okay i mean true true but my mouse wheel is so fast that one millimeter is one click which means if i scroll a little bit, that's like 10 levels. That's, so it's a no-no for me. So I had to unbind it both. I put it back on the usual controls.

And the funny thing that I noticed is I can see again. You know, you have like a picture of something in your mind, especially when you build up or down and you kind of see like a skyscraper, but you see floor by floor. And now you see it in your head, right? And I got that back. In my stream that I did when I unboxed the game, so to say, I did several mistakes that are basically just me not seeing the game anymore, in the 3D version in my head. And now I can.

And it was just unbinding it from E and C, binding it to the old thing again, and I'm good again. Yeah, that is very interesting, that it's the psychological model of the three, 3D aspects of the game was changed by the change of those key bindings. Yeah, it was funny. I've kind of gotten used to E&C, but that is still the one that my muscle memory keeps coming back to is my pinky goes on the shift key and my forefinger goes on either the less than or the greater than symbol to move up and down. Yeah, yeah.

I like the no shift key thing, because that particular key bind, while I got used to it, I feel like it wasn't the best UI experience. That's true. Like, we got used to it, but having to hit shift, and then these keys that if you accidentally at the question mark took you to the help menu, how often did you do that? You did that a lot. You're like trying to scroll up and you thought, well,

help menu, great. That is the big plus on like playing on a German keyboard. There is nothing around these keys that I have to press to go up and down that I could hit that do anything. That's not where your oomelot key is. No, it's on the other side of the keyboard. It's like down left. Or the funny B, the fast-looking B.

The fast-looking B on the S-S set. Yeah. My biggest flaw, I would say, is list traversal. I do not want to have to use list traversal, you know, going through a list. Oh, yeah. I don't want to have to use the mouse. scroll wheel to get through a list. You know, it was not ideal that you had to use a switch between the plus and minus and the

arrow keys, but at least there was a keyboard option for changing the location of your selection in a list. Now, can you say more about that? I'm not following. Which, what list? For example, Trade Depot. Trade Depot is one example, yeah. Trade Depot.

Yeah, a little complicated. Well, no, but this in particular, well, also, let's say that whenever you're placing, a door and you have 50 doors that are in your stockpile. I know, Techett, that's overpopulating your stockpile with doors. But if you have 50 doors in your stockpile, I like the doors. And you want to find a particular one, you can't use your arrow keys or the plus minus key to traverse the list. You actually have to use the mouse to scroll through it.

And I really think that. So if you haven't run across it yet, Tony, I'm pretty sure that you will. You'll see what I'm talking about. missing the traders. Yeah, I keep missing them. I just moved a whole bunch of stuff to the Trade Depot and then the trader left before I got there. So, dang. No, no, they're there, but they're not trading. I don't really understand. All their crap is there, but they're gone. But yeah, I'm having trouble with the new lesser caravan that comes during the first year because before, part of my strategy was just to build a whole bunch of trinkets and trade them for. a crap ton of drink. Whenever they should at this time, they had like two barrels of Dwarven ale,

and that was it. So, attack them. He warned us about that. That's what you do. Just attack them. Just attack them. Yeah, I've got these merchants that come and then they don't trade. It's a little disappointing.

But, yeah, do you know what I mean about list traversal? Do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, scrolling up and down in the long list, yeah. You can't move through a list with your keyboard anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to use your mouse to move through a list. Yeah, it would be nice to be able to do that. I think it's fundamental, actually.

Yeah, and on top of that, there's one thing that bugged me. It's a lot simpler. But on the scroll bar, there's like arrow up, arrow down. You can click on the arrow to move it. But if you hold it, it doesn't keep on scrolling by itself. That may be able to be set in the key bindings. I haven't looked, but I know that there's an option for repeating in the key bindings. What's that?

Here's another funny one. If you're typing, if you use a hotkey or if you use the hotkey menu and you want to name your locations or if you want to name your workshop or your stockpiles and you type in WAS or D, the map will move. So the hot keys, even when you're, even when you're typing in a window and it's supposed to be capturing input, it's also sending that input to the kind of main game loop as processing it as a key stroke. So I suspect that's a bug because it's kind of weird because I was doing something and it was like was like the whole map's going crazy. So that's something that I think is probably not an intended function. So I would say, you know, whatever game loop is in play would probably be best suspended when you're taking text input because it kind of messed a couple things up. That's related to another thing that I have that I'm going to bring up here in a minute. But before we go there, Roland, have you got the game open in front of you?

now? The game? Yes. No, it's not. Should I open it? Well, I was going to walk you through what I'm talking about the repeats. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Give me light. So I will wait for you. Ten seconds.

This segment of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable is made possible by a grant from Adam Hudson, creator of order Lemler, the incineration of fanciness, a pigbone table. All crafts worship is of the highest quality. It is decorated with pig bone, apple wood, and llama wool and encircled with bands of naked mole dog leather. This object menaces with spikes of brown zircon, bauxite, and apple wood. On the item is an image of Aeson Cudgel Revers, the Dwarf and Dwarves, in cave spider silk. Aeson Cudgel Revers is surrounded by the dwarves.

The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Aeson Cudgel Revers to the position of Queen of the Gleafel Seals in the Year 1. Order Lemler, the incineration of Fanciness, a pigbone, table from Adam Hudson. So there is a fundamental change that has happened with this release, and I don't know if it's good or bad or indifferent or just, you know, just different. The game does not suspend whenever you enter menus. With Classic Tour Fortress, any time that you like went into the designations menu, when you went into the stockpiles menu, any menu that you entered, the game paused

automatically, except for the squads meeting. Every other menu, the game would stop. That doesn't happen with the Premium Edition. Whenever you go into your designation menu to designate tiles for digging out or mining, the game's not paused. They're doing things in the background while you're setting your designations for mining or placing buildings or whatever. That's probably a good thing. It's just something I'm going to have to get used to because it is a fundamental change, I think. It's also wiped me out. I like the fact that it doesn't pause necessarily when I go into the menus, but it has also, I have also, like I got up last night and went to have dinner, but didn't realize the game wasn't paused. And then I came back and everyone

had starved to death. Um, whoops. Uh, so yeah, it's, as I said, my door and body count's pretty high. So, dude, turn on auto save and tell it to pause after every auto save. That's also an option. Oh, that's a good idea too. Go to settings option or go to settings and then click the game tab the third option is is pause after every auto save oh okay that was a i think that was a df hack thing before i could be wrong maybe but so roland do you have the game open yet yeah uh if you go to the settings menu and you go to the key bindings tab notice that there is a column that says don't repeat delayed repeat fast repeat so if we can find the one for uh clicking the mouse down on the scroll bar

if we can add a repeat. Oh, I think I know what you mean. I don't want to look through it right now, but it may be there. Scroll bar page up. Okay, okay. That's okay. Okay, I should probably fast repeat,

don't repeat, delayed repeat. Yeah. Okay. I should try this. Probably not right now, but. So this is the kind of thing that I was saying that you got to have to be careful to differentiate flaws from changes because things are being done differently.

And right now, I can't intelligently say that this is a bad thing. Because for all I know, there is a list traversal option somewhere in these settings that I haven't found yet. I do think it's odd that the cursor keys, for as much as I know, they don't really do anything, do they now? I don't believe so. Yeah, the cursor, yep, there is no arrow keys on there. Are there no arrow keys on some keyboards? Is that one of the reasons why we took it out? I mean, yeah, on like a shorter keyword version, but...

Commodore 64 had two cursor keys, but this doesn't run on that, does it? Not yet. Not yet, it doesn't... Not yet or not anymore. Sunday project. Maybe it was a launch title for Z-64. Well, it does run on it, but whenever you start world creation, if you started it in 1985, it would still be running. I got to say world creation is another perk.

It's gotten a lot faster. And his introduction of the 100-year world, I think, is a great happy medium for people who might just want to get in and start doing stuff. I've only created one all right and just started playing it. So I've not really had a lot of experience with that yet. Yeah, I did it at 250. And it's like, you know, three and a half minutes or something. It's no big deal. It was pretty darn fast.

And Tony, your thing that you liked about being able to see the things happen in the workshops as they're happening, that wasn't even a podcast. as they're happening. That wasn't even a possibility in the old version because whenever you had a workshop click to look at the things going on inside it, you were paused. You were paused, yeah, and you couldn't unpause it.

But it's kind of cool. You can see them as they're working. If you click the Dorf who's working, you can see them saying, I finished up some work. I am very satisfied. Now I'm euphoric due to inebriation. You're like, awesome.

Well, that's cool. Yeah, I'm probably going to like that once I get used to it. Once I get used to it. It's just I'm going to probably lose some fortresses in the meantime, because I forget that, you know, whenever I am sitting there obsessing over the shape of my bedrooms for 45 minutes. In the meanwhile, all of my people are getting killed by goblins. Yeah, I haven't lived long enough to get invaded by goblins yet. Are the necromancer still around? I haven't seen any of them yet.

I have, I actually found, like, two or three towers. I saw them on the world map. They looked like scrungly little black tree-like towers, like a bit of mushroomy, I would say. I was like, hmm, what is this? Then I hovered over, it said the human dog tower. So I think I do have necromances. I should check that in the world. But I think they're there. You can't see the purple zones very well, or at least if you can, I haven't figured that out.

How many fortresses have you guys done? Oh, dear. Three at this point. I'm still on my first one. It's not going well, but I'm still on it. More than three for me. Yeah, I just started every time a new fortress. I have nothing to come back to and the others.

Yeah, it's been a start, slow, fail, fast kind of experience. You know, because for a while, it just took me forever to tell them to stop cooking the mushrooms. Like that I realized, because I think whatever it was in DF hack or some setting in the old version, it was automatically disabled. by default so I stopped thinking about doing it and yeah I've run into some unfortunate things with that that wiped out a bunch of my forts at first why is everyone starving why is everyone dying of thirst and that that would be why making nest boxes was tricky or than I thought at first so you know a lot of it's due to my own trying to learn how to replay this thing yeah how about regular people have you if you engaged with normal people playing this game

since it's happened. Before we get to that, there's one more thing that I want to talk about with the new interface. Tell me if this happened before. I had two dwarves sleeping in the same bed

at the same time. Did that happen before? If they're married. Two dwarfs in the same bed? Yeah. If they're hooked up, I've got one with a lover. I have that now.

Atoskapath has a lover. Oh, was that, did that happen in classic? Because as long as I've been playing, I never noticed two dwarves sleeping in the same bed at the same time. You know, it just flips between them as if two dwarves are standing.

on the same tile? I once saw a mother and the child that was slightly older sleep in the same bed at the same time, but I don't think it just happened very often, but it can. I've got 20 dwarves in my fortress,

and I've seen that happen already, so I think that that's cool. I've got a similar thing about it. I've got a manager and a bookkeeper is the same guy, this guy called Thob Askelming, and then Thob Askelmeng has married Thob Kosoth again.

So the Thobs have been married. And they're both, I can't just assign one of them. So like if I assign a manager to a chair or to an office, it assigns both Thobbs. I can't have just one. Interesting. So both of them have that as an office. And I can't unassign people from it. So you can either assign unassign everyone or just or not.

And then when I click assign it puts, puts, them both in there. So the married couple, I guess, are working very closely together. It's kind of the story that I like. That sounds like it might be a bug. Yeah, I think it might be a bug. Yeah. Bring your spouse to work day. Probably an interesting, it's an interesting thing.

But yeah, it's like a whole family experience in my manager's office because now the kids are in there. Yeah, I don't know what's going. Like, listen, I'm going to throw you into the fire if we keep this up, guys. Never getting any work done. Yeah, I'm like, I can't get my test because the kids are. running around crazy. Come on. This is not working. Maybe that was influenced by the pandemic in 2020 and, you know, kids, I'm trying to do a Zoom meeting here. Please stop banging the hands. Is that way everyone's working from their bedrooms? I was trying to figure that out. Did they have

video conferencing in DoorForge? Okay. So anything else to add, Roland, before we move on to wider community chat? Yeah. Oh, right. I wanted to add. one thing. The fact that we can see what kind of metals we embark with is Chef's Kiss. Yeah. Delicious. Neat. I like the Sprites on the world map

and it says like play, sand, and soil actually does make a bit of a difference and it tells me how deep it is. I can see how far the nearest neighbors are so I can actually settle somewhere where I get barely the humans, some

goblins and the elves. and just really make sure I get in the right position. So that's amazing that that now is a possibility. Ultimately, I also want to make sure that it's clear that I'm a fan of this game. I do have my problems with some of the things, which basically can be brought down to muscle memory and key binds. And I believe that if I do more in the settings, I will have a lot less problems with the game, how it is right now.

Otherwise, chef's kiss. I like it. Yeah, I'm going to try to work with the game as it comes out of the box for the time being without doing a lot of key mods. Because I want to see, like I said, if they're flaws or if they're just changes, and if they're just changes, then I will get used to them. If they're flaws in three weeks, I'll still be annoyed at those things, and then I might work on changes. But I'm assuming that these key bindings are going to be the same in classic to a fortress now. And if that's the case, if that's the case, then I want to not have to rebind my keys with every, you know, with every release. Because hopefully there's going to be releases more often than once every two and a half years.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe not. Well, it does say time is relative. Yeah, I have, I still have yet to figure out a lot of stuff that I think will. be important. I'm with you. I'm just going to try to figure out how to play it all as in, I'm using air quotes vanilla. The only mod I've used is the no aquifers thing. I didn't, I didn't download the full Pokemon re-skin of the game. I'm sure you guys rushed right out to do that. That's, that's the other top mod in the workshop. Yeah, we're going to have a whole

episode about mods coming up because there's lots of questions that I have about that that I don't want to get into today. Yeah, the big one is if you're trying to add. one just to save everybody what it took me to figure it out when you're generating a world you have to click the but there's a button in world gen called mods and then you click and you add your mods and then you build the world with those mods in it so if you're cool if you've downloaded the aquifers mod and you don't understand why you keep hitting aquifers it's probably because you didn't generate the world with the mod built into it so I think it's an unusual way to do mods but I like it because it means that I could use

different mods in different worlds at the same time, I think it gives a lot more flexibility even if it's not totally intuitive at first. So that's what I'll say about that. Justin Lothamer, Fortress Public Relations Officer, would like to announce the retirement of the Dwarven Metropolis of Sosidcaten, Ivory Channels. Ivory Channels, with a population of 199, is the most successful fortress in the patron's sponsorship era of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable. Ivory Channels boasts nine axe lords, ten swordmasters, five mace lords and six hammer lords. It is the home of six grand guild halls, a tavern,

three temples, and six military squads. In five years, ten artifacts have been crafted and thirty-one pieces of military gear have been bestowed names by their owners. Truly a jewel of the civilization the gleeful seals, ivory channels will live in the annals of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable History as a beacon of success. Justin Lothamer has officially drawn the fortress of version 0.47.05 to a close. Armach has truly smiled upon them. Okay, so I hear that Dwarf Fortress did pretty well on its first couple days on Steam, huh? It sounds like it.

Sounds like the word, word is out. It's now in the shop, like, one of the first things that you usually see, if you click around, is Dwell Fortress. What are the, what are the user reviews? That's the word. I think they're, like, well, very positive. Yeah. You saw the one that was like, do you mean that this game that's been free for 25? I want to actually quote this one.

I want to actually quote this one because I actually wrote it down because you can't copy and paste out of a state. But in case that it disappeared. Windshift S. Winshift S copies the text in Steam. Windshift S. Well, it just takes a screenshot for you. So this is a quote. Watch the review count and tell me how sane people can post a gushing positive

10 out of 10 game of the century review on day one. 20 minutes ago, the count was 1700. Now it's 1900. Have all these people been playing free dwarf fortress for 25 years and just waiting for an opportunity to pay $30. And that was followed by 2,437 variations of yes. It's about the shape of it. Yeah.

So I think that the wider gaming community, I've seen this, I say us, I've seen the Dwarf Fortress community referred to as cultists, as religious zealots, as fanboys. And, you know, I would balk at religious zealots. But, you know, if the Rocky Horror Picture Show fan base is a cult, then, yeah, the Dwar Fortress fan base is cultish. That's fine. We love the game.

It's an awesome game that we've been playing for years and years and years. And, yeah, we've been waiting for another way to be able to show our appreciation to these people who have been giving their entire lives for the last 20 years to produce this work of art. So, yeah, I've been waiting. I was happy to fork it over. Yeah. Yeah, it's cool.

It's, I mean, you know, it's a learning curve. Like, let's be honest. But it's, you know, if you like this kind of a thing. Was that the comment that you were talking about, Tony? Yeah. But yes. I thought it was a delightful, delightful response. Yes.

It was great. There was like you go through page after page after page of everyone saying yes. And occasionally interrupted by someone who says something else, but, you know, 50 pages of 100 replies of yes. That's great. Yeah. My yes is in there somewhere. Here, here. Yeah, I've got a lot to learn, though.

Holy mackerel, I've got a lot to learn about how this game works. Like, I kind of, it's almost, yeah, it's almost like having to relearn it in a lot of ways. So I'm glad that it's out. And now the fund begins. Has there always been, see, I've never actually been in any other big gaming community. Well, maybe Doom. I've paid attention to the Doom community.

But the Dwar Fortress gaming community is the only really community that I've spent a lot of time chatting with other community members about. Is it actually Insular? Is it looked at askance by people from other gaming communities? Does that even make sense? Yeah. We are very insular. We are cultish.

And if you look at the subreddit, how it used to be before the Steam release, there was a very distinct tone and how people spoke to each other and about the game. The forum is kind of the same. It still is. So, yeah, no, I think there's like a big flavor

of actual cold in this. Yeah. Maybe it's because we see that Tarn and Zach are regular people who are doing this cool thing, and they see more like, more like friends and acquaintances rather than a faceless company who's building a game. So we, oh, look, there's a patch that just came out. Look at that. 50.02. Oh, really? Cool. There is Tarn here. They've done some just hit this just in, breaking news. It says he's listening live

and trying to patch in So what's the patch out? Do you see the update notes? Yeah, he says he's fixed to crash from compressed menu lists. Change the init option for interface pixel width to be a percentage of the screen to fix widescreen issues. Stopped fishing from hugely amplifying creature agitation in the world. Okay, great.

Haven't run into that yet. Has updated improved images for planned walls, floors, and fortifications. I would assume that's the engraving thing, where it's like if you engrave a room, you can no longer see the room. Updated doors, hatches, chests, and other containers so that pallets will affect handles and other add-ons. The mods delete it, but made the behavior consistently not palatize these add-ons. And missing occupied animal-trapped images have now been included.

and then Kit Fox has something to say but I'll leave well it's good to see that the Tarn took some time off after the release right that was facetious well you know how it goes I think he kind of is standing by waiting to fix this stuff that's just like oh crud this got through beta whatever yeah the way he talked he knew that was going to happen you know and then yeah and I mean you know he's kind of like it's a big release you got to kind of address some of the big day one things which I think is okay it's cool hopefully he'll Stop working on it. Catch up on Wednesday on Netflix or something.

The fishing causing agitation sounds like that could have been a bug that could have had stories about it. It just didn't last long enough, you know, all the animals in the world getting pissed off because you're, you know, fishing too much. Yep. Totally. Well, I'm building my list of things that I have to relearn. I don't know how to do the military stuff anymore.

I can't even get squads to turn up and train. So, like, there's a lot of re-learning. I think military was always really complicated. I don't think I ever really got the knack of it. Have you gone there all yet? Yeah, I've built a, have you built a military? Of course. It's the first thing I did.

Let's be honest. Is it? It is different. It's easier to make a new uniform. Let's say it like that. is actually one of the big things that I noted very quickly. It is much, much easier to make a new uniform, like spears, for example, which I do, because I'm obsessed with them.

It is easy to tell them to train. You don't do it over the weapon rack anymore. You just zoop, zoop, zone, train here, and then done. And, you know, a lot of people liked putting your squads on, like, sometimes training, sometimes you have time off or people like me that say train, always, never sleep and now you have the option

and it's already there in the game you can say no training, some training, always train. Oh, cool. And that's pretty cool as well. I haven't found that menu option yet. I'm looking forward to that. I'm pre that.

I've managed to like zone the thing but I can't get them to do anything. Yeah, my current Iver channels, I have like six squads of ten now, and on those, as I add more squads, I give more time off to the other squads, because I use the same five training rooms for all the squads. I guess maybe there's four training rooms, but in any case, yeah, I micromanaged the scheduling. So I wonder if that is an option that's no longer there, or it's fine if it's not. I probably didn't need to micromanage the training. Can you still micromanage it, Roland?

The military, to some degree, I would say. But I have not, I did not actually dive in yet too far. I just wanted to check, does it work? Do I get somebody to train? I did. Can I get them to equip? I wanted to see the armor. That worked so far.

Now comes some micromanaging. so yeah I'm sure that we'll be able to talk about this game and this release further at some point if not today, right? Do you think? We'll never go to revisit this.

Might as well. Yeah, might as well go ahead and keep talking about it. Yeah. All right, Tony, I know you got a heart out at the top of the hour, so. Yep, I do, I do, I do, yep. Let's go ahead and wrap this up.

Overall, overall impressions, I love it. I think that it's great. I'm glad that it's doing well. And as things go, it'll get smoother. And yeah, wonderful. You guys? He nailed it. Nailed the launch.

Absolutely nailed the launch. Very nice. Game even better. Super excited to keep figuring out how to learn to replay it. Hey, I hope there was a launch party. Deserved it. Big, deserved it. Big thumbs up.

Love. All right. We're not a cold. So everybody. If you haven't got the steam version of Door Fortress, then wait a couple of weeks, and they're going to have the classic release of version 50.02, I guess, at this point. There were probably more patches before then. But, yeah.

So, everybody, don't spend too much time ignoring your family and playing Door Fortress. Or do. Or do. And you can blame us. All right. We'll see everybody later then. happy fortressing yeah awesome

see ya this has been the dwarf fortress roundtable podcast you can find all our past episodes at df roundtable dot com stop by and leave a message

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