Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 79: Kicking Off Season 5

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

And we're back. Just a hodgepodge of subjects this time - mostly us catching up with each other and our DF related endeavors. Hope you enjoy! Interface Tweaks Workshop Mod Further Reading's Dwarf Fortress Videos

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. The cherry ones are actually one of my favorites. Then there are green ones. Tony, there goes our sponsorship deal. Crap, we get robbed here. and Jonathan.

They are not a sponsor of the Door Fortress Roundtable Podcasts, but they will clear your as they present insightful, irreverent, and often incorrect analysis. And always remember, losing is fun. Thank you for tuning into Door Fortress Roundtable. Yes, welcome back to Door Fortress Roundtable. It was a short break. We're up to 50.05 now. Hey, we didn't talk about the numbering system.

In very sensible, Toadie fashion, the... The new versioning system, just dropped the zero. That's great. That makes sense. Say again, I didn't follow that. Before the release, we were talking about how Steam wouldn't want an alpha to be out there. So we were kind of contemplating about how he would be versioning the system. And in, you know, typical toady fashion, he just did it.

He just did the easiest thing and just dropped the zero. So instead of being 0.50.05, it's just 50.05. That's good. Well, it's also indicative of, like, what he's always said, that the versioning is, like, how complete he thinks the game is. So we're at halfway point. That's pretty good. It's still early and also very, very playable.

I wouldn't mind boats. Boats. What's that? Boats. Get me boats. Boats. No. What's your overall thoughts? You guys have played the game a little bit more?

I like it. I think people should buy this game. I recommend it. Five out of five. stars. That's for me. I think I, at first I was kind of thrown by the key combination changes and the, you know, it was like, man, I don't know how to play this game anymore. But I think that changes pretty quickly the more I got into it because a lot of this, all the mechanics are for the most part very similar or the same. And so that was kind of cool. Or knowing things like, oh, you know,

I'd like to make soap. How do I do that? Well, oh, okay, I know how to make soap. That's very doable and very easy to do if you already know how to do it. So I'd say from that perspective, I'm way less kind of overwhelmed. But there's other weird things that I still haven't completely sorted out in this release yet that maybe you guys have. So I'm excited to talk about some of those things with you today. I have re-keyed or remapped all my keys. I finally gave up on trying to adjust to the new system and finally decided to remap it as closely as I could. At least the the navigation keys to the pre-steam style. So, yeah, and I like that fine.

It's not like I'm sharing my configuration with anybody. It's just for me. So you changed the, you changed some things back to the, to the, I'm guessing like the up and down elevations, you put those back on greater than than than than. Yeah, and there's no WASD anymore. It's the arrow keys. Gosh, you know what?

I got so into WASD with it and so used to playing this game and City Skylines works like this and Timberborn and I think Rimworld does as well. So I just got so into being able to use that. I played StarCraft last night with one of my kids and it uses the arrow keys. And I found it really difficult because there's nothing else that I need to get to in the area where the arrow keys are on my keyboard. So I have to keep moving back and forth between it and found it less convenient for sure. So put me in camp WASD is accepting that as a. as a change. I liked it.

I'm used to WISD for first-person shooters, but not top-down kind of games. Yeah. Yeah, I was skeptical at first. I was absolutely, I was a skeptic, but no, I'm converted. He's won me over. Roland, how much remap end have you done? Mostly up and down. Other than that, I don't think too much because I felt, okay, yeah, no, I can learn it. It's fine.

I installed a mod that actually shows the thing images, the key press in the menu without hovering over. Yeah, me too. And that was a very good decision that actually made it a lot easier to just learn it. I also, I'm sticking with WASD because that is just naturally where my hand is because I play on this PC a lot. So that was okay. I still press D for mining sometimes, but... It's not terrible. I'm okay with that.

Beyond just key presses, I dive back into the game and I try to do the things that I did before the same way and I've realized a lot of it is not going to fly anymore, which is pretty weird. I had, last time,

I already talked about it, but I'm just going to cut it into it again. The whole thing about my military just going through all my food and suddenly there was a lot of spoiling food I was stupid apparently because there is a way of designating all the items to dump them in a certain area.

Couldn't find it. It's now like very tiny in the hot bar but there is a way and it works very close to the DF hack version where it designates everything so even clothing on a person sometimes. which is like, okay, you don't have to strip. Just put the rotting lobster into the dumping zone, please.

They don't have to strip. They don't like to dump things in this version I found. Yeah, and that is actually something that I, you know, because the designation system, I just let them run free for a lot of time because I wanted to see how well the game can have. designating jobs without me, like, doing extra designations and saying, like, you are this, you are that, you are this. For many things, it works fairly well, but I've noted that, depending on how many people

you have, constructing walls is terrible. I did one fortress, I came around to 90 people, then constructing a wall was like, okay, it went fairly fast, medium fast, nothing special. But in the new fortress I'm trying to build a single wall to

close off the thing that I have built so far. It's just like a tower so that nobody can go into my mind shaft that goes down. Is this an interior wall to cordon off part of your

part of your fortress underground? No, this is outside to make like a small tower on top of the entrance to make sure that my entrance is like controllable with a bridge and stuff. And it took so long. It is tiny. Okay. It's not a big thing. It's literally just a square with a roof and a bridge to close it. It took forever.

Yeah. Outdoor building is very slow. Yeah. Making the bricks, stone bricks, worked very fast. That was actually very nicely done. But actually taking the brakes and making the walls took forever. They just didn't. And then I let them run.

I stopped designating everything else. They have no other work. And a lot of people still didn't do it. So I just designated like three people as haulers and builders. And now they haul and build and they don't actually work anything. and that is okay, but these people are now miserable because they don't get to craft and they basically haul all the time, right?

They have so little off time now. And this, this, not great. Like, everybody in this fort is still allowed to be assigned any hauling jobs. I don't have just three people that haul everything in the fortress, but these three people do nothing else but haul so that things get cleaned up a little bit fast. good lord i kind of wonder if construction jobs have had an internal tweaking as to their priority because i have noticed that mining doesn't seem to happen nearly as fast as it is it used to

even whenever i put the mining priority to to three instead of the default four they just don't seem to mine as quickly as they used to i've had to dedicate them to do nothing else like if i want anything mined i have to tell them to forget to do everything else because no matter what priority, it seems like, I have mining set to, they will literally do any other task other than mine. So, yeah. So I have to keep... So you've seen that too. Yeah, and I have to keep remembering them to like flag and unflag. And the same with a woodcutter. Like, he won't cut unless I click that little red box, which I'll tell you, it's nice to have that little box. But yeah, I've had, I've struggled with construction. Like, you know, when I've hit,

I hit into the cavern layers and I want to patch up the hole that I made, like it's been two years and I can't get anyone into in-game years and I can't get anyone to build this wall. So it's like, I'm basically, this fort's dead. There's nothing I can do to save it and I can't get a wall built. So I'm like, okay, well, as soon as a forgotten beast comes, I guess I'm starting a new fort. Crap, they won't build a wall. It's kind of annoying, but I don't know what's going on. These are things that I think are a result of a major version release that happened, you know,

three years after the previous one or whatever. Yeah, I mean, minor, minor. I think that these are all things that we're going to get used to and learn how to deal with. Everything that I've thought was an intractable problem has been resolvable by me learning how to do something different. So I have every sense that this is the case for this as well. I just haven't sorted it out yet. So, I mean, it's just like a lot of dorms are going to die. It's a price I'm willing to pay.

Yeah, for most things, yes. The hauling things, I, you know, the speed. is now for a lot of things less but some things are being done faster so I'm like okay sure but the only thing that I really do want back is my military alert where

I tell people get the my hell into my borough there's no joking around this is not a drill get in or you will literally die yeah now you just have to kill him you know yeah and now they're out they're dead there's no way to call them back in yeah yeah and even if you designate a

and put all the people into that barrow, it doesn't seem to be that important to them. I've designated my entire fortress, and they just kind of mingle around and finish their task, and, you know, somebody is like, oh, God, now I'm hungry, gosh, and just leaves the barrow. And I'm like, what the hell are you doing? I'm trying to close something here, okay? I'm trying to make sure you don't end up starving in the caverns alone because I close the gate. bro, chill. Yeah, they're kind of idiots.

I mean, yeah, they, you know, the dwarfs are lovable idiots. This is why I would need like a military alert. And even if that gets coupled with like a minus, like, oh, no, oh, military alert. And everybody gets like a negative thought from it so you don't spam it all the time. But it doesn't matter. I need it back because, yes, I will. admit, I play a lot like a hermit. I just wall myself

in, not because I'm afraid of, like, enemies and goblins or whatever, but because it makes my dwarfs work less, because they don't have to go out and, like, fish, or they go into the caverns to, like, collect silk

webs or all these like weird, stupid side jobs that you often don't need. And they get minimized to a certain degree where a lot of those dwarves just to have free time because, you know, my fissure dwarf, I don't want a fish dwarf

because my fortress is closed off 10 months out of the entire year. So why would I need a fish dwarf? He can't go fish anywhere. So I'm just going to put him into something else, you know? And this whole idea of, yeah, you can't really

like turtle shell yourself in anymore because the burrows don't work the same way and you sometimes just close the door and somebody is outside so you open the door again and then you wait until they get in and then somebody else goes out and you're like oh my god yep it's real i think that's going to change there's been enough of a cry from the community yeah it it will to get civilian alerts back that that's that's going to probably be in uh an update civilian alerts would be really really great

yeah but beside my beautiful civilian alert and uh my bit like okay i now actually have to designate haulers. It's working fairly fine. I wish I could tune the size of the windows, but I'm not sure if that's even possible in the engine because I would, like, my military thing to be larger so I can actually see the entire name of the military squad that is randomly generated.

But, oh, by the way, talking about military, I'm sorry that I'm like now somewhere else, but before I forget it, did you know that Bismud Bronze has a visual bug where it actually doesn't show anything. So if you clad one of your military dwarves in full Bismuth bronze armor, they're just naked. Is this like the emperor's emperor has no clothes?

So is it made of Bitcoin or something? I don't know. And I found it pretty funny because I made a special helmet and I designated it to my military commander because I like to, you know, see a difference in these people. And they all have steel helmets. And he gets, okay, it's just business with bronze, right? But he's a good, amazing dodger, so whatever.

And I thought it would be like a golden, cool helmet. And now he has no helmet. And I'm like, hang on, did you get the helmet? Yeah, he does. He has it on. And it's just not there. So I clad a test version, a test dwarf in the full thing. And he was just naked.

That's very funny. That's brilliant. I love it. That sounds like a win. Before I forget, that plug-in that adds the, about the plugin that adds the letters and all that, I think that that workshop mod is called Interface Tweaks by Trainsac. That's the, at least that's the interface tweaks that I used for mine, and it sounds like it's the same one that you're talking about. Interface tweaks, yes. It's the number one mod in the workshop, right? now. Yeah, no, it's amazing. It's really good.

Is that the one that puts the letters over the... Yeah. Yeah, I've got that one. By Trainzac, you're right. Yeah. Really cool. Shout out to Trinzac. Thank you for that. Changes the stop and play buttons to like red and green, which that, I'm not so, not so necessary, but... Really cool. Loving it. Thanks, buddy. Old School Vidia, chairman of the Outpost Chamber of Commerce,

welcomes you to a Golzenegg, Control Relics. We are dedicated to promoting and supporting the workshops and businesses that make our fortress thrive. Whether you're a long-time resident or new to the area, we have a variety of resources and services to help you succeed. Join us today and become a part of the vibrant community of Control Relics. Together, we can make a difference in promote economic growth for all. Contact Old School Vidia in the Chamber Office for more information. So farming seems to have changed. It seems that you just can't get away with just plopping down a plump helmet farm in the dirt and have it be quite as successful as it used to be. I'll tell you what. I got super frustrated with it because I had a lot of forts just die because they won't.

Yeah, because they would just run out of plump helmet seeds. Like very quickly, they would just run out. And I couldn't figure out what's going on. And I tried and tried and I made sure I had enough bags and then, you know, to store the seeds in. And I made sure that the seeds weren't being cooked. And then I banned all the drinks from being cooked too because that's the other thing they were doing is they would make drinks and then cook them. So I'd have like Dorvan ale roast with Dorvan ale and Doran ale. And it's like they were making the drinks and cooking it into food faster than I could. Anyway, so all of that was sorted.

And I don't know. I started a new fort the other day, just trying to be really mindful of it from the get-go, and it seems to be okay. But I have basically a still, and all it does is anytime there's unwroughton plant material, it just cooks it. I mean, it just bruise it every single time. Well, from the things that Cleaner Dev were saying, things have fundamentally changed and that soil farms are not nearly as productive as they used to be.

So what you need to do now, instead of wasting your time with a soil farm, dig down flood some rock in the cavern with water and grow your food, your subterranean crops down in the depths. I can't get them to flood things. So I've got a couple places that I've designated a pit zone, which is like this is the way I think you do it, is you designate a pit, and then there's two buttons. There's like an arrow that pushes down on something gray, and then an arrow that pushes down something blue, and it's like you can designate it at the top of a pit or designated at the top of a pond. and then the citizens will bring water but it doesn't

they don't ever do anything it just sits empty yeah there it might be because you need to do it a level higher they will only dump it down into an actual pit not on the ground directly in front well that that is

really helpful to know thank you yeah I will admit that in the version before this before steam I just use DFHack to flood a room with water without buckets because then I would actually get to have the entire room be filled with mud and I could do like neat looking wrecked angles for farms.

Yeah, okay, that was fairly lazy of me but I grew very accustomed to underground farms with muddied soil instead of using not that underground farms like the soil farms and the soil layer. I went away from that very quickly when I also started to put my fortresses much deeper into the actual rock so I didn't really notice

too much of a change also Techett did make a video about this I think where he did the math and show that the soil farms are nerve immensely and they it's not good

in the steam version or period? Yeah no in the steam version okay what's the what do we think about this video? Let me check what do you guys think about fertilizer. I keep wondering, is it worth the fuss? And I think I looked at the wiki and the wiki is like, dude, life's too short for that. But I don't, but I don't know. Well, that was whenever Plum Helmut Farms could, you know, supply your entire fortress from year one. I'll be honest.

Like, I don't, I don't hate at all the idea of having to fertilize my plots. Like, I know that seems micromanagery, but if I hated that kind of stuff, I wouldn't play this game. So, like, if I could set up a potash workflow and remember to parallel my potash my potty, or whatever the heckety heck it is, that's cool. I'm down with that. Sign me up. I think that if you do actually use a soil farm, the fertilizer might actually become needed. But if you don't do it, if you like do muddied soil and or a cavern layer soil, you might not need it because that hasn't really changed at all. So you still generate a lot of food. My issue on my last fortress was that there were no plump helmets available from the get-go.

Plump helmets was not an option for me to equip my working dwarves with. So I went ahead and started with it. And I made that comment and Kleeneuve said, dig down, my friend. Dig down. You'll find everything you need in the caverns. So I'm wondering if maybe plump helmets grow wild in the caverns. They do. Oh, yeah, they do.

If you want to find spawn for it, you can, once you punch into the cavern layer, it grows wild anywhere you dig in the dirt sand layers and so then you can like basically dig out a huge sand or dirt layer and then let it sit for a while and then you can gather on it and then you'll gather all of the spawn that that comes from it and then you can also graze your animals underground once you punch the cabin layer so very cool very cool reasons to do that that's also a way of acquiring the other cavern fruits and vegetables if you don't bring them at the start You know, you just put all your points into plump helmets. Then you can find like caveweed and quarry bushes.

You can find them in the caverns as well. Not every cavern usually, but you are lucky. You will find something else as well. Gelding also seems to be a rather important thing in this release because, oh my God, it's easy to get like dog or cat's explosion. My dogs have been attacking kangaroos, so I'm going to hold that for another topic. Never mind. Does that make you Hoppy?

When I think Hoppy, I think bitter beer. I'm so sorry. But I missed the reference, man. Let's jump to the next subject. Looking at Techids videos here, I don't see. He has started his series on basically figuring out Dwar Fortress. And he hasn't released the second video to that yet, as far as I can tell. But if you look at his video by the popularity rankings, we've got several videos that have 14,000 views, 16,000, 13,000, 14,000.

And then the most viewed video is farming. It's not that simple. But that was a year ago. Yeah, it's still not that simple as it turns out. We did talk about it. When was that? I sat in one of his streams or something, and we talked about it. He was on one of your streams, wasn't he?

Yeah, yeah. Can you come on to one of your streams? Yeah, we streamed a few things together. One time I was in his stream, and then he came to me. We played a little bit other stuff together. And at some point, we talked about it, and he told me that he was working on a video. So maybe this is kind of a spoiler because he apparently has not uploaded it yet. But he told me that, yeah, soil farms are in fact less valuable now.

So I just was like, okay, sure, you know. have my good old muddy farms here so so i got to figure out how to dump water on the on the rock yeah he's he's right it's from the from a layer up that makes a big difference yeah the best thing is to just are you playing dwarf fortress i would never i had to test it i actually had to test it yeah just go like one level higher and make a small thing and just cobweb off the main way and just do several holds where you dump it directly into the room where you want to put your farm plots. That's what I do.

It's very ugly, which I, why I use the source DF hack thing to make my fortress not look ugly, but, you know, convenient. You could also, here's what, you can set up a screw pump and pump water from a, from a lake. You're right, but that only works if you're close to the lake, otherwise you're going to just work on the chandling and the downfall and the water from there to there for like forever. And it becomes just quicker to tell all your doors. Get everybody get it buckered and put water in here. Thanks.

Bye. Well, you can you can pump it up from the, from the caverns, a lake in the caverns, right? If you have a lake in the caverns. Yeah, yeah. So I'm saying this as if it does not take an engineering degree to do this. I'm scared of the water pumps, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah, I feel you on that one. I don't, I've gotten, things have gotten out of control really quickly with the water pumps. I, I've tried to do the big, overly complicated, we'll divert the river in with floodgates and then fill a reservoir underground. And I've had some of these kind of things. And it works until it doesn't. Like I had, I lost one fort because the floodgate, a giraffe or something fell in in the river and it got stuck on my floodgate. And then I could. closed the floodgate and then it kept flooding the entire reservoir and then the whole fortress

oh god i can see i can see in my head just a giraffe going uh oh i'm going now guys oh no and i'm taking this whole and the whole fort's coming with me happily i have a long neck so my head's above water but my body is stuck in the floodgate and some people do anything to get ahead You know what a Dwarven Water Generator is? Yeah, I saw a video about that recently from further reading, Dwarven Water Reactors. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, I think so. I think so, yeah.

Where the person put like 30 water generators into his fortress. Yeah. And that's it. That was pretty insane. And, you know, I tested water stuff a few, God, years, but. back now. And it was very wonky and it kind of worked, but it didn't feel very versed in it. So I just kind of stopped doing it. Now I did it again. Water generator. I felt like, oh, I can do it. You know, I can do it. Water generator. Come on. And I flooded my fortress.

That's the spirit. It flooded the fortress so quickly, by the way. It wasn't even funny. I put it Hey Eurist Hit the off lever We didn't install an off lever Yeah It's flooded There were several points

In my Well architecture Where I realized Hmm that wasn't That wasn't great For example I actually put it into A cavern lake

And that one was massive And I put it on the deepest Point in the lake So it actually was able to pull all the water from the entire lake and put it into my fortress. Next thing that was also problematic was the fact that my lever to close the floodgate was below the water line very quickly. And I was like, hmm, hmm, the lever that shuts it off is now underwater.

That is impractical. Don't do that. Yeah, there's no way to undo that. You're kind of doomed. Yeah, and then I just looked on, and it kept pumping so much water that at some point the water started to rise into my stairway up to the surface. And I was like, okay, this is, I'm done. I'm done. That's nightmares. It's like whenever you reconfigure the Ethernet port that you're using to access the remote server.

And, well... That's a reference for all the time. That'll really slam in with Gen Z here. It's perfect. Well, no, Jen... Yeah, never mind. I'll cut that. Mom, Dad, what's an Ethernet port?

Adrian Rosa's, spiritual advisor of control relics, invites you to come meditate and praise your chosen deity at the celebrated palisade. The celebrated palisade is a non-denominational shrine with a 49 square tile dance floor to perform your wondrous dance of worship. Come find spiritual fulfillment

and good thoughts at the celebrated palisade. Adrian Roses and the celebrated palisade welcomes all visitors. Okay, what do you guys think about? Archers. How about Arches? Archer's. Do you guys get those working? Did you just say archers?

Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm so furious with archers. So annoying. Absolutely the most infuriating part of the game. So it sounds like they have taken a step back. Maybe I'm the one that's taken this step back. I cannot get these idiots to do anything. They won't even train. I am just, I don't know what's going on.

All they'll do is meditate and socialize. will not, absolutely will not train under any circumstances. And if things go wrong, they will not hesitate to bash the crap out of stuff with their crossbows. It is classic, classic my interaction with it. You need to make your crossbows out of silver because that is the densest material. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, there doesn't seem to be any way to, because I think you used to be able to assign ammo to them. And that was like a magic unlock where you had to like set them up and get them a quiver.

and tell them to put certain stuff in their quiver, but they won't take ammo anymore. So I don't know what to do about that. It's bananas. Bananas. I have to ask Zach to post a video demonstrating archery. I would love it. That would be cool.

How do you make it work? Please, that would be really cool. Zach, yes. Zach, could you post a steam video about archery? Have you guys tried any of that, any of the archery? or anything like that? I'm going to be... I've not, no.

Yeah, I'm going to be real. I have my hands full trying not to feel like a bumbling new idiot in the game. So I didn't even touch it because my brain was like, oh, it's not going to work and you're going to feel terrible about yourself. So we put that issue aside and let's concentrate on realizing that temple designations and like the room value. has been modified. Oh, boy. Oh, yeah. It's so, it seems like the best way to get your craft halls and your temples to have the value

that they need. Because it used to be what I would do is just make a room and then smooth it and then engrave it, Bob's your uncle, you know. But now it has to, I mean, I mean, absolutely gigantic. Yeah, yeah. It has to be really massive and or just put a pedestal in. and slap one of your best master wards on it. And back in the day, apparently, I went back.

I used to do like eight by eight rooms for guild halls, and that was perfectly fine, you know, smoothed out with the pillars in the middle where I put engravings on, no, no, no, that's not going to fly anymore. Yeah, no, no, has to be giant. Yeah, so I never touched arches because I was, too busy, like, putting out the fires when they came up. I already knew that archers are going to be a, like a grease fire in my kitchen, and I can't work with that right now.

No, grease fire is not unlike what it is. It's a little challenging. I don't know. I'm going to keep out it. I'm determined to have squads with archers in it. I'm sure it's possible. There's so much fun. It's so cool to watch the archers.

Yeah, yeah. It's very satisfying to see them take out a goblin from, you know, 20 tiles away or whatever. Yeah, exactly. From, you know, from fortifications inside the fortress. It would be so fun. I would love that. But for the sake of all of our yanks in our audience, I'm going to explain a phrase that Tony just said a few moments ago that Roland might understand. Bob's your uncle.

I had no clue what the hell you were talking about, man. Oh, gosh, okay. So that's because you hang out in England a lot. And this is from Wikipedia. Bob's Your Uncle is a phrase commonly used in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries that means, and there it is, or, and there you have it, or it's done. Typically, someone says it to conclude a set of simple instructions or when a result is reached. It's good.

I'm like, Bob's your uncle, what the hell does that mean? It's a good phrase. I think we should be using it over here. I didn't realize we weren't. I will be using it, and I'm going to look at all the rednecks around here going, what the hell? Bob's not my uncle, you jerk.

Oh, yeah, I got an uncle, Bob. Yeah, thank you. How did you know Bob's my uncle? Anywho, can I share a ridiculous aside with you guys? Sure. I built a, uh... I've been doing them all day. I built a, um, uh, an outdoor library,

and then I put a bunch of beehives next to it because I want mead and honey crafts or wax working. Big, big fan of wax working. So they're at the bottom here and all shaved, you know, all enclosed, walled in or whatever. And then up a bit on the top of this structure is my tavern and I put fortifications there.

So the bees are flying into the tavern and stinging people. So let this be a warning to you. Dance, baby, dance. If you put beehives underneath an open window for a tavern, they will sting the patrons and they'll get mad. Whoops. Did I tell you ever rename that tavern, yeah.

Did I tell you about the bee corridor trap? No. Okay. In that case, oh boy, I completely forgot about that because it's been like a few weeks. I read that somebody put a stack of bees on a pedestal. Because why not, right? And apparently the 15,000 bees are being carried by just one dwarf.

So it's not like a lot of people have to carry each one a bee, but the whole stack gets carried, which is already good. But apparently the bees become like a quantum object. where they are on the pedestal and also not on the pedestal at the same time, which means that the bees are being shown that they are in fact on the pedestal

but they are also flying around stinging people. But you never actually see the like vermin critter thing showing that there is a bee, but you see the notifications that people get stung by the bees. And I was like, wait, wait, don't tell me.

So what I did was I made a tunnel Z level one tunnel The Z level above that is another tunnel and that tunnel is full of pedestals with bees on it and the flooring is just like

iron grates so the bees can go up into the tunnel and sting everybody that is in there and then I also installed like a cool lever with a cool bridge so I can like unleash the bees and then I just had to wait for some goblins and I trapped them in the tunnel because I felt okay if you just run through

you're not going to get stung too much they maybe get like a sting or two and so I trapped them in there and they get stung and I'm like hmm this is funny so I did the tunnel longer more bees more goblins more more bee stings it's it's terrifying it doesn't really do anything you know the goblins are not dying from it are beastings lethal they're just annoying I think not so far Nobody really has died from the bee stings. The goblins are not doing good mentally, but they're not dying. Like, nobody is dead. Well, you need to put a floor spike trap to have some dwarf out there,

pull a lever to spike them while the bees are stinging them. Yeah, I mean, that would work. That would work. But I just had hoped that at some point, if I unleash enough bees, that at some point just tips over and becomes lethal. but it hasn't happened yet even though technically if the bee venom is like an actual thing

in the game I think right wait let me let me check before I be venom is a thing because I've bought barrels of it wondering what to do with it yeah there's nothing to do with it is there I have a lot of it no not really

no nothing that you do with it so yeah they do introduce a syndrome what does the syndrome do I want to I want to see I want to see Dwar Fortress? It makes them unhappy. Beasting syndrome causes unhappiness.

Oh, nothing more pain and strong swelling. So I thought if I get enough pain and enough swelling into one single entity, like 15,000 bees are like punching holes through your skin all the time. That something would happen and they would die from like the swelling or the pain. But no, they're not. a feature request. Like a saw movie. Oh, boy. That was sadly a failed experiment.

Tavern manager Andrew Campbell would like to announce the opening of control relics first and only tavern, the turquoise dinners. The turquoise dinners is sure to take your mind off your labors with the finest of meals and spirits. The turquoise dinners is home to a 30 square tile dance floor. eight well-crafted dining tables and some of the civilization's greatest tales. Come eat, drink, and exchange social good feelings at the turquoise dinners. For more information, please contact Andrew Campbell, manager. So one of the other major things that people are talking about is the log or lack of log and the announcements and missing stuff. So from what I've read, the community consensus is that they,

The best way to deal with it, at least at this point, is to edit your announcements.com text file and add alerts and things to it. There is a Reddit post that has basically how to do it. And yeah, it does work very well. I've got it working too well. We should link that post in our post show notes. That would be cool. I just gave up on caravans and stuff.

Like, I miss most of them. It's almost impossible to see them unless you look. You can put basically a stop and center on the, caravan showing up on liaison showing up I actually have a stop and center anytime combat makes somebody swoon or go unconscious. And that's where I

got to watch my dog and kangaroos fighting quite fiercely. For some reason, my dogs are very aggressive to kangaroos in my current fortress and there's a lot of kangaroos. You can have kangaroo leather quivers and stuff. That's pretty cool.

A lot of kangaroo violence. I think that's okay. I think they're pretty violent animals. Yeah, it does work well. You don't get to see the log the way you used to, but at least it does stop the game whenever you have important events happening. Okay, that sounds pretty neat. I wonder how much the announcements.com text changed from the old version.

Oh, I also think, and I haven't seen this directly, but it sounds like the announcements. St. Text might get overwritten whenever a update happens. So you will probably want to make a backup of your current announcements. Dot text so that you can modify the new one accordingly. Right. Okay. I would love to see that get addressed.

I mean, I'm sure all of this is a balance and they were trying to go for not overwhelming people. But I would love to see that balance. I would love to see a menu. you that says pause and center on this event and just have you scroll through it and be able to choose. Yeah. Because I don't, I don't necessarily want it to pause every time a dwarf is looking for

their child. No, that's not so fun. But I do want it to pause whenever the caravan shows up or things like that happen. All right. Have we got anything else that we want to chat about today? No, but at some point, you know what we should do is go through a, what are the first things that you do to set up a fort to make it viable? Yeah, because that has changed.

I'll let you know whenever I figure that out. Your fastest type of viability. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I haven't really honestly played very much at all since we went on hiatus. I have played more in the last three days than I did in the two weeks prior to that. I did keep up with you guys a little bit, though, in some of the, your chat and note that uh that you guys have been playing more than i so yeah i also was i hope to

change that yeah i wasn't playing that much either uh when i played some deprochalactic i saw those streams man yeah yeah yeah that's pretty cool i i went to different games for a while because uh i don't know you know sometimes you just need it's good to get away yeah yeah exactly even though it's it's it's very sad that when i play anything but war fortress i never actually get any of yours but if i Played Wolf Fortress I do, which, okay. I thought it would be... I thought it wouldn't be the other way around, but apparently

Dwarfurtress is my high horse. Not anymore. I just found an option, which I thought was interesting. Maybe this has always been here. Dig every tile, or dig only ore in gems. Or dig only gems or dig only ore.

They... I think they took that from D.F. Hack, but I might be wrong about that. I used to do that with D.F. Hack, dig out veins. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, I used to do DigV. But, I mean, this one, it doesn't quite work the way the DF hack one worked. Because the DF hack one also looked into walls and you could just put it into like the abyss

and that it would say, oh, yeah, there's, by the way, something in there. This doesn't because it doesn't know that there's something in the wall. But you can, if you find a single piece of, for example, like iron ore in the wall, you can click on one of these things and it mines out all the adjacent tiles with ore or gems. So you click on a single tile and they instantly dig out the entire vein that they find. Where is this? How do you do that in this one or is that a DFF? No, no, this is in this version. I actually tried it. Um, it's, it's also something, something there. Uh, you have to a little bit tweak around with it because, oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah, just one tweaks only orange gems and you can't designate

normal stones and then it only takes out that stuff. And the other is like continue to dig everything that is like orient gems, which is pretty cool. Yeah, very neat. That is actually really cool. Yeah, I found it. It's pretty cool. Yeah. That also works for clay, uh, because I I was like, oh, wow, they're digging so much. And then I realized, oh, they're just digging clay walls. Thanks. Oh, no. That's, oh, God.

Yeah, they'll go all in on the Kowlinite or whatever. All the useless stuff. They still won't, they still won't be archers. No archery for us. It's a 2024 problem. No archery for us. Hey, you'll just hurt yourself. It's like lawn darts.

And so, season five of Dwarfortress Roundtable begins. Season five, an arbitrary cutoff point that we're doing. This is the beginning of the fifth year in which we have done Dwell Fortress Roundtable. Damn. Number five. This is going to be episode 79, I believe.

Hey, that's lucky. That's crazy number 79. Yeah. Isn't it? That's a lucky number, right? Is that lucky? Boring people for years now. The same 14 people for five years.

Thanks. And they've either gone. They've either gone clinically insane or I think with the steam release, we've picked up three more listeners, right? Yeah, no, you're right. Thank you so much for listening. We know the podcast isn't going to have the reach of,

what are the kids using MySpace these days? Follow us on MySpace. Goodness sakes. I'm kidding. I know it's friends. I know Friendssters. You can find us at AOL Room, DFR. Oh, God.

DFHack at AOL.com. You can still get those AOL.com addresses. Also on CompuServe. Oh, yeah. Prodigy, CompuServe, all that good stuff. Yeah, my mother still has an AOL address, by the way. I was shocked that she is in fact using that. Yeah, you can still register them.

It's great. That's crazy. Rec.games.orgetorFortress. There's another one for you. Okay. So thanks, everybody. Yeah, thanks. Good stuff. And then maybe next time, if we're going, if we're breaking the third or fourth or whatever number of walls we're breaking, we should do a list of things that we consider when starting a fort to make it viable. How about that? Yeah. Sounds good to me. And my God, why don't people, why don't they clean up the rotten stuff? Like, why I got to be in here clicking on all this stuff? Come on, guys. Clear up the trash.

Wonderful. Okay. We're off. We are off. Everyone out there, be careful, and enjoy the new challenges that the steam release of Dwarf Fortress has brought us. I also think that I don't recall whether they released the classic version after our last episode or not.

Yeah, it was after our last episode. I downloaded it and played it. I like the graphics in the Steam version So since I have that, I will be playing that At least until the community figures out How to do the tile sets for the new classic version. I really like the tile sets in the Steam version. I think they've done a great job.

I just think it looks really good. I showed it to somebody in their comment was, wow, it looks like a game now. And I was like, yeah, it does. Yeah, especially considering that it will continuously be worked on. I mean, the business with bronze naked bug will not stay. No. Apparently the forgotten beasts will get colors at some point.

That's crazy, by the way. By the way, I'll just say, I think they already look pretty awesome. Yeah, I think they're very cute and cuddly. What should it be? But they are. Oh, beware of my deadly dust. Saviated or what will happen eventually maybe? Yeah, hopefully.

alerts would be yeah that's my uh archer's gonna arch maybe waiting for the archery release yeah I'd love it if we had him if we had Tony on and he's like oh yeah no I haven't even gotten to coding that part yet just kidding oh you guys you silly as for goodbye I just want to say a happy fortressing to all my gila wear monsters out there blessed blessed gila monsters and see you next time. Is this a gang? Yeah, this is the Gila Monster Gang. The Gila Monster Gang.

Beautiful. All right, guys. Wonderful, will you? Until next time, happy Fortress and folks. And yeah, we'll catch you then. Yeah, beautiful. Beautiful. Bye-bye.

This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Stop by and leave a message or subscribe. suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. You can find video content on our YouTube channel, and you can send us an email at Urest at DFRoundable.com.

That's UR-I-ST at D-F Roundtable.com. Please consider donating to the creators of Dwarfortress at Bay12 Games.com. If you'd like to help support this podcast, you can find us at patreon. com slash df roundtable this is a conversational podcast all craft stewardship is of the highest quality