Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 80: Veteran Players and Version 50 – With Tekkud and Blind

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

BlindIRL and Tekkud join us this episode to talk about long-time players and the new version.

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. All they're hard to see, though. What kind of format would it be? Tony. That's an excellent way to describe it. People take turns.

And Jonathan. And I come back and we're doing a socio-economic discourse on 1950s cinema. As they present insightful, irreverent, and often incorrect analysis. This episode, media content creators blind... Man, I was going to go to Sub-Dherty Who Makes Video Games? And Tekad... ...than I am about the shooty-shooty... Visit to discuss veteran players and Dwarf Fortress 50.

And always remember, losing is fun. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Door Fortress Roundtable. We have with us today Techid and Blonde IRL. Welcome, guys. Hello. What's going on? Not much.

I hear there's this game that we're all talking about. Yeah. It's his Rimworld. Today is our topic. Yes. I mean, here, I was just expecting Techett to just kind of go off on a tangent about something, so I was being all quiet and polite.

I will. Fear not. That will happen. That's fine. I'm charging up. Well, I'm certainly in fear. Tickin, would you like to open the discourse today? Put him on the spot.

Which, what would you like to spend the next four and a half hours talking about? Oh, me, me, me. I have an idea. Let's talk about how you, like, age meets. How age. Yeah. Oh, I can. You know about the game.

Why does my cheese spoil? Cheese should spoil. It should get better with age. Why don't we jump into the first tangent about how I really want processable foods at the farmer's workshop to make more things than just cheese, such as yogurts, dried fruits, dried meats, sausages. Cured stuff and pickles. Yeah, sausages.

Why can't we make sausages at the farmer's workshop? Can we mod that in right now? I'm going to pull up the raws while we're talking. You can just rename biscuits to sausage and make it easy. That's not the same, though. Where are they baking? Well, you'll need to collect fat, lean meats. It's going to say intestines.

Yes. Yes, for casings. It's like tallow and intestines, basically. There you go. Right. It's going to have to be a sourdough because I don't think they have, I don't think that they trade yeast. So baking bread is going to be a little tougher. And you'll need that for your yogurt as well.

Right, right. Kingdoms will rise and fall on the yogurt mother. Well, we were actually here to talk about today was to get the perspective of some other veteran players. of Dwar Fortress about the new steam release and all the changes that have taken place in it. So, so Tek and what's your overall opinions and unvarnished? So, yeah, we know we all love this game because we've invested so much time into it. But overall, are you pleased with the way the release, the release happened? Yeah, unvarnished, huh?

Well, first I should say that all of it, I do love premium. It's absolutely better than the game was before, and it's an amazing improvement to the game. So, I mean, everything else, all the negative points I might say, because I am the kind of person who focuses on the negatives, unfortunately. We'll get there. All stand on the foundation that I actually do like premium. But my first experience with the game was kind of strange and unexpected. I opened up premium, and I was poking around in the new interface and learning how to do things. And my first thought was, is this?

bad like is this is this bad did we wait for a bad thing all this time and of course over time that ended up not being true you know it's just a lot of things had to be changed but i did notice a lot of peculiarities that's a hard word to say that uh that continue to throw me off to this day that are not that important but uh that i've just noticed like how all of the directions are flipped on like menus and the way you scroll and navigate, with the exception of WASD. Thankfully, that's not inverted. But for the most part, I think I haven't held on to any complaints, except for the hotkeys. My only complaint I retain.

So blind, whenever it came out, what was your initial reaction to the new interface and your first impressions? So I've talked about this a couple of times on my streams, but I think that I had kind a unique launch into it that was different than a lot of other people's because I got the game four and a half days early. So I got it like before it was out. So I had time to sit there and fiddle and learn how to play the game with a very limited group of people that I knew who had access to it. Like I knew at the time I knew that Putnam had it because Puttum was in the credits. Right.

I knew that Clino had it because Clino had told me. And so I had a few people I could ask questions, but outside of that, like, I had no access to any kind of assist to, like, relearn the UI. So I was just sitting there cramming, like, 12 hours a day trying to learn the UI. And I want to say that the first six and a half hours was one of the most insufferably frustrating experiences of my life. But once I got past kind of that initial banging my forehead against a window and trying to the delete button.

Like, it legit took me 30 minutes to figure out how to delete walls. So, yeah, I mean, it was a, it was a fun transition of learning, but once I kind of got past that, it just kind of turned into dwarf fortress. And outside of some, like, major balance annoyances with things like the creatures and the caverns, and some stark gameplay differences there, which can easily be changed by just simply going to custom difficulty settings, I mean, it's still just door fortress. I think I kind of echo what Tech had said about like missing the hotkeys. Like I do enjoy a game where every single menu is hotkeyable.

But I also agree with kind of Tarn's sentiment of like the way the UI is now, it doesn't work for the old bindings because it would be completely illogical. And yes, you could just leave the old bindings in there for nerds like us. But at the same time, it would be better to have a completely new hotkey system for the new UI, which from what I can tell is something that Pottenham. them's working on. So for me, it's like all of my actual major frustrations, like, you know, crashes and things are all being worked on. And everything else is just kind of an improvement on the baseline, even if like the flippy bit of learning the new version after, you know, spending a decade

memorizing hotkeys is just growing pains that comes with any major release from a new version of software. I mean, I've gone through this with Adobe Premiere before. So for me, it's like, yeah, It's a new version of the game that was kind of a pain to learn initially, and I'm mostly past it at this point. Now it's just Dwar Fortress. Were you one of the people who did the Let's Learn How to Play Dwar Fortress with Alexandra? Yeah, I was the second person on, yeah. It's Alexander, right? Yeah, it's Alexander.

I thought that you were out. First couple weeks of December now seems to be a blur. Yeah, but for like full transparency's sake, on that stream back in November, I didn't have access to the game at that point, right? Oh, okay. So I was just sitting on a Discord call with her watching her play, trying to decipher what was going on on her screen and then getting yelled at by people in comments later because I didn't know how the game worked. And it's like, well, I didn't know they completely read it stairs. Nobody told me that information wasn't available anywhere. We haven't even brought that up on the podcast yet about them redoing the stairs.

That's like those little things like that, I think are great. You no longer have to like meet the stairway halfway through the, you know, we have to do it up and a downstairs. I love and hate it. I wish we had the old systems still. That's actually one of my complaints. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, really?

Because sometimes I just want to build an up, down stair, and it would be way more convenient to just build the up downstairs instead of having to go a channel out a thing and go one layer down and then make an up downstairs and have access to all three of them. It would be way easier to just, like, pop in a centerpiece. Like, I wish we had like an advanced tools for stairs. That was just the old ones. Yeah, they should definitely have a separate way of doing it.

Because I ask people on my stream about this. this because I said, I'm a veteran player. I played with the original stair designation system for a while. So the convoluted nature of stairs was already known to me. And as a result, the original way of doing stairs is just more flexible. It's just straight up more flexible and more powerful. Because you have to build two at a time now. You can't just build one. For a veteran player who understands how to do stairs the original way, the new stair system is just a limitation. But for a new player, and this is what I wanted to ask them about, because I don't have that perspective. For a new player, would the new stare system be better for them to pick up than the old

stair system? Like, which one has the bigger cons here? The convoluted way of doing it that is more powerful or the more intuitive way that often runs you into a corner. That's, you know, I don't think anyone could come to a consensus. It's really kind of a difficult thing to determine. did is the new stair system better or worse you know because it's definitely i think easier to pick up i think different yeah but on hotkeys though before we get off of that i just want to say

that i think hotkeys kind of underscore my entire kind of impression of premium this the way i feel about hotkeys i feel about i think the whole thing which is that the game seemed a little bit bound to the old way of doing things i think a lot of people spoke up and about hotkeys specifically. People spoke up and they said, we want our hot keys. We want to keep our hot keys. And then they said, well, we're not going to do to the hotkeys because whatever internal reasons. And then people got outraged about that. And they said, no, no, no, no, no, no. You said hotkeys. We want hotkeys. Keep the hotkeys. So they left them in. Well, they left in hotkeys that were designed for a game that doesn't use the mouse. You're supposed to have both hands on the keyboard.

And that's how they make sense. Like the hotkey O, the hotkey O is useless in a mouse controlled game. unless you want to take your hand off the mouse and move it all the way over to your keyboard and search for the O key or your home row or whatever. It's just a pain. And so when they put the hotkeys back in, you can tell they just did it to satisfy the people who wanted the old hotkeys to be retained. Well, I remapped all my hotkeys so that it's more like a mouse and keyboard game. So left hand hotkeys, right hand mouse, no exceptions. And it works really, really well. So I'm glad to hear that Putnam is working on a new hotkey system. because I imagine it would work the same way. But I've almost got the new hotkey system committed to muscle memory now. Yeah. There's also the thing with like hot keys that people keep asking me where they're just like, because I think I've gone the exact opposite direction where people are just like, are you using hotkeys and they keep asking me about hotkeys?

And I'm like, well, I'll use it to like pop up the building menu or something. But aside from that, I'm like completely mouse driven now because the game just doesn't feel like it's designed for hotkeys anymore. Yep, I second that. Like, I'm all one way or all the other. I've gone like almost now. They work sometimes. Yeah.

Like, I use it for Z, a lot to pop up zones. And N. I really wish we could have common menu hotkeys like X back where any menu popped up can be closed with X or, or no, I mean, that's with the right mouse already. I mean, like building deconstructions. So if there's a get rid of this option in a menu, it is commonly bound to, 2x, that would just be awesome, you know? Yeah, I don't know if the game is capable of that based on the way the hotkeys have

worked in the past, but. Yeah. So what about you guys? Have you, well, you actually asked this on the last podcast, I think, on the last episode, you guys rebind a lot of your hotkeys? I have recently installed Door Fortress on my laptop as well. And rebinding the hotkeys is a bad idea, because if you do that and you have multiple computers, then you have to rebind it for all of them.

And I don't know that there's a, is that. there a configuration file that I could transfer from one computer to the other? Probably is, but I need to learn the game the way it's designed to be done now. But I do use the interface tweaks workshop mod, and that has really relieved any of the gripes that I had about the hotkeys, because I can now see them. I don't have to, I don't have to hover over them in order to find out what they are. And I don't like using a mouse that much because it aggravates carpal tunnel. So I love the keyboard.

During December, when I was streaming seven days a week, like 10 plus hours a day, I definitely got some repetitive strain injury in my arm, which has never happened playing Dwarf Fortress for similar amounts of time. This segment of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable is brought to, you by boss trebus, creator of Tastrod Oten, the distinction of wines, a bituminous coal toy axe. All crafts worship is of the highest quality. It is encircled with bands of tapered baguette-cut white jades. This object menaces with spikes of bituminous coal. On the item is an image of dwarves in bituminous coal. The dwarves are traveling. The artwork relates to the foundation of roofdusts

by the trade of orders of the wealthy rag in the year 79. On the item is an image of a pepper plant in pond grabber leather. Tastrod Otin, the distinction of wines, an artifact bituminous coltoyax by Boss Traybus. So Tony, Roland, I've dominated the questioning at this point, so why don't you guys take over some of the intercourse here? Because, yeah, I don't want you guys to not be on the podcast. Yeah, we need some good cop, bad cop.

I actually want to come back to the hotkey point because I was not able to articulate the way that I feel about it correctly. But yes, it's absolutely true that you have to like move one hand from the mouse to the keyboard. For example, capital P for your locations, you have to either you make like a, you have large hands like me and you can press one thing with one thing. and then it's like thumb on the P and you're like, ugh. Or you move your other hand, your mouse hand back to the keyboard. And that is actually very annoying.

So when I think about it, yes, I also just use a few hotkeys. I, like the furthest away from the W is actually M4 mining that I try to use more often because I, you know, I do it a lot. but yeah zones for z is fairly good but for example the p for just stockpiles is too far away again so just click on that instead do you guys have uh well of course you do what am i asking

i don't have labels on my keyboard i have no key labels so that's one reason why it hits me particularly hard to have weird obtuse hotkeys because it's like i have to go back to my home row to know where O is without like counting the keys like oh it's four from the left on the second row down like I know that in the same spot you guys can get keyboards that have the letters printed on them I don't know you know I heard about that but I thought I figured it would cost extra money yeah it probably does that's like just like how they overcharge for those LEDs that's so true like behind their computer keyboards I mean my keyboard cost me $50 and it's a mechanical keyboard.

So I don't know what people are doing here with all these extra upcharges, but no labels, no LEDs, it's the best keyboard. It's a premium feature for sure. Nightmares of typing class in junior high school removed all the letters from the keyboard so you couldn't cheat.

You know, I never had typing classes, and I just lack the brain power to do it. So my keyboard has, well, not fully, because someone scratched off because this keyboard is like seven years old and apparently have greasy hands, but it technically would have some letters on it. But still, who wants to look at their keyboard? Well, especially a German one. Some of those words are huge. It's going to take your hours to take a single word. Get repetitive stress just saying hello. Speaking of German keyboards. Does your keyboard map the keys to the same letters or the same position on the

keyboard? Well, it has to be the same letters. That's how it works, right? Yep. That's how an OS would interpret the input. So your key bindings are actually in different locations than ours. Yes. For example, up down is different for me because it's just directly next to each other, both of the buttons the less and greater than I mean that's why not right next to question mark

yeah or two yeah and what else do I have somewhere else right only the Z and the the V are swapped but the game does track it correctly so if I do press

Z it actually brings up Z but if we're going back to like what a walk for example. Word of Warcraft did not do that. So it got really confused. If I changed the language, it also changes the keyboard layout. That was very annoying.

Oh, really? Mm-hmm. That's not cool. That's not. So World of Warcraft would relocate your key bindings according to the position of the key rather than the actual letter that you would be pressing.

Yeah. That is so stupid, right? Because these are supposed to be like Unicode. Well, I mean, that sounds good for someone like me, but if you like to look at, if you like to know what you're typing and you say look at your keyboard when you type it, then that would be extremely confusing. So I really want to talk about, sorry, we've been talking about key bindings for a while. And I have talked about this on a lot of my podcasts. So I'm going to hijack. I'm going to commandeer this podcast for one moment. I really want to talk about labor getting done in people's fortresses and happiness in people's fortresses.

because I have seen this all over the subreddit, people having issues with this, and they are easy. They are not difficult in premium. They just involve the players kind of reprioritizing. So what do you guys have an experience with labor getting done in your forts and your dwarves maintaining happiness? I feel like it's a little, it's different than it used to be. And I feel like some of the tactics that I used to use previously don't work as well. And it all feels a bit random and higgledy-piggledy to me. Sometimes people will work when they're happy.

Sometimes they won't. And yeah, I haven't really seen a lot of rhyme or reason to it. And if things aren't getting done, I just make the guy do it. You just click that button that's like, don't do anything else except for what you've been told to do. And then, yeah, happiness I've found is kind of hit or miss. And figuring out tantrum spirals, I'm usually not very good because now the notifications are all kind of hidden away. It can be hard to like react to things in real time I've found. Anyway, that's kind of my half-ass version.

I would say that if you don't do anything, you just let it flow and you don't touch it, on average, most dwarfs will be happy. but I think it has become harder to stop one or two dwarfs from drifting away because they don't have skills in anything crafting related so the game will never actually get them to craft something and then they just sit there and they become depressed and sad and whatever and the only thing that is really dragging them down is them not being able to craft. I mean, it can be also, they don't get to pray, but you can do a temple. It can be they don't have friends or family, but you can't do anything against that. But if it's crafting,

back in the day, I could just go on my beautiful Excel sheet and just click on them doing something crafting related, like bone carving, for example. Easy, fast gets the job done. I have a question. Do you I can't really do that anymore. Do you utilize guild halls? Most of the time, yeah? Because that's what guild halls are for. What's that? If a guild hall is public, it satisfies the need for crafting.

Oh, okay. So I now have to really lean into guild halls. So for me with moods in this version of the game, I think it's like absurdly easy, like pathetically easy because it's, I played on version 40, well, the version before when they rebound, the version before 47.05, which was, I think, just 47.02 before they rebalanced moods and made everything, everybody happy, go lucky, I'll, like, a lot easier to please. Because I played long death. And long death was on that older version right after they added villains part one stuff, but before they rebalanced stress and before they made it so they cluster together to make friends easier. So I played the game on a, weirdly high difficulty curve for a very, very, very long time. So I'm used to

dwarves being temperamental to the point where it was literally broken half of the time. And so when it comes to satisfying needs in this version, if there's dwarves that are pissed off in my fort, it's not because, like, I can't satisfy them. It's just because I'm ignoring them.

It's quite easy with just a couple of craft skilled halls, especially if you want dwarves to all have skills in a particular craft. One that I really like doing is just weaving or clothes making. Just have like a big public one that any dwarf from that's smart to citizens only that's high value that also has a dining room in it with a lot of food, kind of like a secondary tavern. I turn off corpse hauling under chores for kids and they just hang and I put a bunch of toys in

there or something and they either hang out in there or the tavern and it satisfies all of their sadness and their need to craft. And if they want to master a skill and have no interest in crafting, I put them in a military squad with no armor and just get them to train in a corner with some friends on a very like inconsistent schedule so they only train like two months out of the year or something admittedly I didn't do this in the last fort but like you can just make them train like two months out of the year and then they will like satisfy their need for martial training and just go do normal jobs the rest of the time and they also make great management staff after

that because they all get administrator and stuff hmm guild holds okay Gil's all of said and talk about that. My current fortress, I have my staging fort up right now, which is just a little basic fortress I put up to kind of house my dwarves. And they go off and they work on something a thousand times bigger. Well, they're all very happy. And I could tell you exactly everything they have to make them happy. And none of it's remarkable.

It's a tavern, a temple, a dormitory of all things, in the sand, by the way. Nothing's engraved. This is all in the sand. new clothes, meals, and more than one kind of drink. That's it. And they're all happy. Well, I did a health check stream recently where I had some issues in my fort revolving around hauling labor, but we fixed that.

And then the few that tilted down into the unhappy went right back up. So that's all you need. I don't have a single, they do not encounter a single engraved floor in their day-to-day life unless I tell them to go do work somewhere in the fortune. they don't live in where there's engraved floors. So something I see a lot, a lot right now, are people telling other people, well, you should make a mist generator. Your dwarves aren't happy.

You could fix that with a mist generator. That's probably partially my fault. Well, I mean, and it's not a bad idea. If you want, if your goal is to skyrocket the happiness of your dwarves as quickly as possible, so maybe that's your goal. But in my opinion, the popularity of the. mist generator recommendation is a symptom of people not really understanding what makes dwarves happy or unhappy because no one needs a misgenerator yeah i mean unless you're on like an

maybe like an ice sheet or something i don't know but no normal player no normal fortress needs a mist generator yes so uh for for me adding in a misgenerator is kind of like sprinkling cocaine into their food um yeah it just it like increases every Everybody's mood tenfold, but realistically, all you need is you just need those needs to be met. The problem is, is they're kind of opaque and the game doesn't actually tell you when they're met. And it's always been this way, right? Like, now it displays, like, when you click on a dwarf, it displays like, oh, need excitement, need this, need that, need that. It says they need it.

It doesn't say that it's been satisfied and will never change. And that's, I think, kind of a artifact of dwarf fortress's design versus, like, modern game design. Because, like, in modern game design, like, I don't know, if you're playing like something like two-point hospital or something, it'll say that they need. and then once they have it, they'll say that they have it. But the Dwarf fortress won't say that they have it. It just says that they need that. And that, like, somebody in my chat was saying that that stuff was new, and it's not. It, like, it showed up at the very bottom of the character sheets previously.

It was down at the very, very bottom. It would say that they are stressed at or underneath the part where it would say they are focused or unfocused after satisfied or unsatisfied needs. And then it would say what all their needs are. And then it's up to you to figure out what those needs need. But things like wander is kind of. of, like, opaque and doesn't mean anything to a normal person. Like, um, and so I think that, what happens is people get frustrated because they don't see that

the excitement one is fixed. Well, excitement just means that they want to join a squad. That's, that's all that really means. It just means they want to join a squad or like, maybe be in the captain of the guard squad or like, be a dungeon master or something. Um, or they want to like, go fight, right? And, or they're going to start starting, uh, uh, brawls in your tavern, right? So you, you need to figure out how to satisfy that dwarf, but you also don't need to do that for every single dwarf. You just need to do that for like 70% of the dwarves, and then the rest will just kind of

figure it out. If there's enough stuff for like a portion of your dwarves, the rest of them will just be fine. So yeah, I don't know. I think that part of it is just like the game, because like Tech had you said that people need a misgenerator for everything. I think part of it is people see that character sheet and they see the unmet needs or they see just the needs.

And then they go, oh God, I don't have. have these needs, even though, like, you know, that dwarf has excitement because there's constant fighting going on in the cavern layers. That dwarf has access to crafts because you have a two different craftsworths guild, a glassmaker's guild, and a metal smiths guild, and a weapon smiths guild, let's just say. And they don't need to wander because there's a library, and they have been able to pray recently, and they've had good alcohol. So that particular dwarf that the player is looking at, if the player doesn't know what they're looking for, might think, oh, no, this dwarf is stress but in reality they're not even like there may be like yellow and like just kind of they

could be better but like are generally fine and then then there's the problem dwarves which feel really hard to fix and this is always been the case once a dwarf gets to the point where they're like super tantrumy or like just really really stressed out and like you know like the classic like red flashing down arrow it's really hard to bounce them back from that and I think that the older versions of the game made that more clear when a dwarf was going that way like those arrows became obvious right away. And it's funny now that we like have the ability to swap between Aski and whatnot, because I've been showing people like what the game used to look like.

And I was like, see, this is way more clear. It's way easier to tell who's depressed. But now it's a little bit harder in my opinion. Like, yeah, they get that little spot bubble above their head for a few seconds, but it's way less clear to me than just like the red flashing down arrow. So people, when dwarves get stressed, they figure, oh, there's nothing I can do. This dwarf is screwed. And then they just crush them with a drawbridge or something.

And then complain that all their dwarves are upset. And it's like, well, you just murdered Eurist's son. Like, what? Or like, someone was asking, they're like, there's this child in my fort that's tantruming. I'm like, well, what's the child doing? It's like, well, they're playing on a corpse pilot. It's like, okay, so they play in the location that they last did a job to.

So maybe remove hauling corpses from children. And he's just like, wait, what? I'm like, well, if you go into standing orders and you go to other and then you go to chores, you can remove hauling corpses because what they do is they'll do a task and then that's where they play. So just make sure that tasks that children tend to, to do end in locations where you want them to play. And so if it's

like, oh, you're hauling the spoils of war and removing corpses, yeah, they're going to end up playing in your body pit. Yeah. I tried just burrowing my kids like before, but now I've removed them from all chores. They don't do chores in my fort at all. Yeah, like, I like some of the chores. I think that like feeding people

at the hospital's great. I think that what's it called? Like, basic item hauling is fantastic. Like, it's super helpful to just have them like hauling blocks and stuff. I have them pushing mind carts. I have the moving stuff to and from mind carts and unloading. So that's all very useful. I have them doing like some very basic things. But it for me, it's mostly just a the ability to move them around the fortress. Because you don't really want them to get stuck in one place. Because I think the only thing that's worse than like a depressed child is a cave adapted child. And kids in the older versions of the game had this habit of just like going to

their bedroom and playing until they turned old enough to go get jobs, which I think is 18 now. It used to be 14, but I'm pretty sure they moved it up to 18. So it's like, I'd rather have a kid that goes outside a couple times a year and doesn't start vomiting when they see the sun versus, you know, just like hiding underground forever. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I think it's, it's definitely taking kids, I think honestly with Dwar Fortress, you kind of have to just think of it like, well, what would you do if you lived there? Like, what would the rules be if you had to live here? If you lived in that fort, would you want your children hauling corpses? Do you think that would make your fort happier if all of the kids had to grow up as corpse haulers? Like, imagine that kids had to work at a morgue

that didn't have body bags or something. Like, what a terrible fortress that would be. So, I mean, yeah, of course you take them off that stuff if your dwarves are getting unhappy. Like, sometimes you just got to look at it and be like, well, does this make sense that dwarves would be unhappy with bodies strewn throughout the hallways? Like, yeah, it kind of does. Maybe you should clean that up. Yeah. And as far as the misgenerators things go, I think like I made a video about misgenerators, right? It's like a 10 minute video and it's got just under 40,000 views right now. And I constantly see screenshots from that video being shared. In fact, there's like multiple, multiple websites that have just like cloned every single one of my

tutorials by just screenshoting the YouTube videos and then writing word for word down what I said in the video, which I think is kind of amusing and you can't convince me those websites aren't run by and AI. But like, I've seen that tutorial spread around a lot. And admittedly, it's a design from the wiki. It's been around as long as I've played the game. Like, it's not a new thing. It's just a lot clearer and easier to make in this version of the game because of the way the game is displayed. Like, it's a lot more visually. It's less opaque, right? So people can figure out that design a lot easier and replicate it. And I think that part of the, the problem is, is you've got people that come from games that are used to going,

okay, how do I win this? Okay, I cheese it, right? And that's, I think, a style of play that is very common amongst like colony builders and town builders, like even the Sims, right? Like, okay, how do I get the thing that I want? Okay, we cheese it. We lock this person in the room with this other person,

make them talk and then give them good food for a while until they start pooping on the floor and then you let them out. And that's, I think, just kind of, the way a lot of people play games where you have to control a colony of people you cheese it instead of like digging in deeper

to try and figure out the actual mechanical reasoning it's you cheese it and I think this is this is something that like you know we joked about Rimworld earlier but like I think this is something that like RimWorld right ran into a lot which is why Rimworld has been balanced into oblivion I think that there's no fun left in Rimworld for me personally because with the exception of the new biotech expansion I would play that stuff at all so I don't know

but at least the vanilla game it was it's balanced into oblivion and there's nothing fun there anymore. Because all of the old G's tactics that used to make the game work, regardless of it, it actually works that way, I've been removed from the game. Because the developer goes,

this isn't how you're supposed to play the game. And I respect War Fortress for allowing us to play the game and I'm doing air quotes right now, which works great in an audio format, which is wrong because it's fun, right? Like, it is not really the way the game is intended to be played when you're using mind cards, to make computers. That's not the way the game is intended to be played, right? If you look at

the way Zach's Fortress is play out, that's, in my opinion, kind of the way the game is meant to be played. And very few people play the game the way Zach does. So when I look at things like Misgenerators, I go, yeah, it's kind of a ham-fisted sideways fix, but it's fun, right? You know, we're not supposed to use drawbridges as defense, but like, I've been on a lot of streams recently and just seen a wall of drawbridges all the way across a map down a narrow hallway. And it's like, well, you're not getting any goblinade out of that. But, hey, if it works. Yeah.

I'm actually, I love a good brie on crackers, you know, but I keep cheese out of my, my fortresses for the most part. With the exception of like elk cheese from the humans, delicious. But the, as far as like strategies go, what's that? That's a but on pump. But, uh, so, for example, vampires. How do I deal with vampires? Well, simple. I put everyone in a dormitory and I staff a guard and I wait for a vampire to get caught

because the dwarves have a vampire problem. The dwarves will solve their vampire problem. I'm not going to go reading through legends with my, you know, omniscience to determine through years of history and my, you know, time traveling existence. You don't just look for the blue dwarf and accuse them? Well, nowadays. Okay. This is, that's in premium, yeah.

but before before premium i would just you know well actually i haven't had a vampire in premium i don't know if they're literally blue they're very obvious yeah i know i know i've never seen one in the in in premium yeah waiting and i was doing magma doing fortifications to get magma into my fords rooms from a volcano and every time i did it people would be like well if you build a bridge and then you channel and then you build a floodgate and then you dig and then channel again and then you use a spider silk sock and you throw a brick up three levels and then

you... What? And then you can get the magma to come out without killing the dwarf. I'm pretty sure you're literally just talking about me saying, hey, go to the top and channel down. No, no, no. I've heard three different ways to do it. Literally is channel down. And they're all a little different. Yeah. Well, with the with the volcano though, you have a vertical wall of obsidian. Yeah. Channel down

into the vertical wall of obsidian. Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's the thing, though. I don't want a hole on that level. I only want a hole on one level. Well, then sacrifice the dwarf. Live your life. Exactly. That's what I do. Just make sure you use a copper picks, so their pick gliderate too. Yeah. And I do, I do get really upset when they bring steel picks, although one made a beautiful memorial in the magma. But anyway, um, but you broke the floodgates, so it didn't matter. the thing is like you're right about people trying to well cheese things that wasn't really a good example of cheese necessarily but it's one of those things where people will do whatever it takes to solve the problem perfectly or with like a repercussion free solution or something it's like no sometimes you know what sometimes you just you want to do something difficult you just break a few eggs make the omelet you know make it happen that's just what you got to do i like to remind people that you Dwarf Fortress is like a world simulation colony builder, but it's also like two parts lemmings. So like, yeah, you'll have like your 15 main character dwarves that you really care about.

And then like 185 members of the cannon fodder squad. And like, you know, if somebody falls into the caverns and gets eaten by a forgotten beast, that's just comedy. Not like a loss. Like that dwarf will be replaced. There's more where that dwarf came from. You will be okay. Dwarf Fortress Roundtable is made possible in part by a grant from Gary Jeffrey, creator of Fycod Cod, the glaze of Blots, a bituminous coal crown.

All crafts worship is of the highest quality. It is encircled with bands of cushioned bituminous coal cabbashons. On the item is an image of raucous boat future the dwarf and dwarves in bituminous coal. Rockest boat future is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf raucous boat future To the position of Baron of the Wealthy Rag in the Year 91 On the item is an image of two tunnel tubes in bituminous coal Fycod Cod, the glaze of Blots, a bituminous coal crown, by Gary Jeffrey.

Do you guys keep your dwarves close to your hearts, all of them? Or are you more of just like these are the ones that that I'll feel bad about losing. They're all expendable. No, I'm very much the opposite. It depends. I play with less dwarfs so I can make sure I get to know each and every one of them

and I love all of them. They're all my little children. I've been getting into the situation where I don't get very many migrant waves or I don't get any. And I don't know if it's that I'm playing with colonies or with civilizations that aren't doing great. Have you been playing in the save for a while?

Because I can explain it if you are. Oh, yeah. No, tell me. Tell me what your theory is. I'd love to hear. Okay, it's not a theory. There's a straight up like lock in the game. If you've been playing on a particular save for like, let's just say, 10 years or something.

Yeah. And there's been a lot of death. When your map that you're currently playing on hits 3,000 entities. So this includes livestock, visitors, invaders, your own dwarves, and the death screen. so you know the number of dead goes above 3,000, including living entities actively on the map. So let's just say you have 200 dwarves and 100 animals and there's like 2,900 dead things on that screen.

You will stop getting migrants for the rest of the game, period. It's a limitation that's been in the game since the very, very, very, very, very first version and is currently trying to, and Putnam's trying, I straight up talked to Putnam about this, is trying to make a fix for it because she was talking about it in my chat. She's trying to make a fix for it where it'll, automatically delete dead at a certain point once it hits about 1500, but then we're going to start losing the records of things like crundles dying, but I don't think that matters.

I could probably live with that. And so then only important named entities will be left on there, but like that's being worked on. So if you want to fix it, and this is like one of the few things I actually use DF hack for, if you go into, I have actually, so on the Steam version, you can just copy the install file, to a separate folder on your desktop or whatever and have two installs. So do that. Install DF hack on the second one,

which is super easy. Just click and drag with the nightly builds. Copy over your save file. Back up your save file in the original one. Copy over your save file to the new one. Open up Dfack and then in the terminal run the command, it's fixed slash clean dead, I think. It's one of the default ones.

If you just type in fix, you'll find it or just Google clear deathless DF hack and you'll find out of the documentation really easily. And it clears that menu with the exception of important named figures that would be in history, and then you can keep getting migrants. Hmm. Ah, very good. Awesome.

So cool. Yeah. That's interesting. I've still never touched DF hack ever. I don't know, a single command. It's awful. I hate it. All I know is that every time anyone's like, my game keeps crashing, then a day later, they're

like, oh, figured it out. It was DF hack. And I'm like, okay, well, I'm not installing this. That sounds really familiar. Yeah. I use DFHack to fix things. I back up a save file, use it to fix something, check if something's bugged,

or if I'm just an idiot, and then go back to my original install. I use it like a debugging tool. It literally just gives you access to the dev tools. That's all it really is. Plus like a bunch of extra side things like, oh, you can spawn a dragon. I used to use it for Fastorf when I was trying to get something done really quickly.

Like I needed to channel out an entire level or, you know, like clear out, make 1,000 bedrooms or something. Fastdorf, too, actually is just straight up a dev tool. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it's GD and hacky, but I'm like, sometimes I'm like, look, I got a life to live here, these bedrooms built, please, work faster. That makes me think of labor getting done or not getting done too. And that's another thing I've seen a lot. People are like, well, my dwarves aren't working on this or my dwarfs won't do this.

As far as labor is concerned in premium, I have found that. that, well, we all have kind of found that there's been a sort of reprioritization of labors in the dwarves' minds. Seems that way. They tend to do other new things before, you know, other things. And this is something that I think has caused a lot of issues for veteran players. And even new players are like, come on, why aren't my dwarves doing this? Why won't you guys just do this?

I just need to build this wall. My biggest thing has seemed to be the mining priority seems to have hit the floor as opposed to the way it used to be. It used to be if you bump up the priority of mining from four to three, then they were pretty much, anybody who had the mining labor would drop whatever they were doing and go do that mining. It doesn't seem to be happening as much anymore. I have started bumping my mining to priority two. That seems to have taken care of it for me if I want something mined right now. But are there other things besides mining?

But what's that blind? I can tell you why. Because all tasks are like the dwarves will go do the tasks in the auto labor setup when they have the highest skill available. So if mining isn't that dwarves highest skill, which it usually isn't, especially if you've taken a break and you stop doing things, because we're used to like dwarves being assigned to, you know, a couple of specific jobs per dwarf and then maybe one leisure job, like one craft and then. like a handful of other things, because we're used to that. The way it works now is because every single labor basically is turned on on dwarves on a priority tier system, right? They will prioritize their highest skilled job.

So if you are telling them to mine on priority four or three or two, they might have four ones in their head that they want to do first. So because they are prioritizing based on their highest skill and based on the highest skills available and the game's got some little algorithm in behind the scenes for all of the different like tasks that are available, let's say you have 40 different jobs that are currently set up and queued, they will select between all of those 40 different jobs before they go mine because mining is not necessarily their highest skilled task

or the task that they want to do for an unmet need. Yeah, and I could tell you right now for new players or people listening to this who just don't want to think that hard about behind the scenes, ultimately what it means for us and something I think veteran players have struggled a little bit with is we as fortress overseers and organizers now have to not allow our fort to produce a large number of jobs, a greater number of jobs than we have dwarves on a regular basis, because this basically, without going into the details, your dwarves aren't going to do the job you want necessarily if they get to pick from an excess of jobs.

from a surplus of jobs. So the solution now, which I think wasn't necessarily necessary before, is to not have a surplus of jobs for your dwarves. Don't make 10 smelters and set them all to repeatedly smelt whatever and then mine an entire layer of ore because you will lose 10 dwarves to every other labor in your fort permanently, or at least until that job is done. So and then you combine that with another labor like farming. You have like five farmers and a massive farm, you know, like 500 farm tiles, and they're constantly

farming. So now you've lost a bunch of dwarves again to farming. They're permanently farming because that's what they want to do. And so the goal now, I think I've seen a lot of people struggle with this is you want to have, you want to measure your labor requirements for your fort, or at least you're asking, you're asking for labor from your dwarves. Because when I'm in my fort, you know, I'm building out my big fort. I've got my staging fort.

Well, my staging fort is very efficient. It has like, you know, three jobs for clothes making entirely. It has two planters planting all of the food. That's it. One brewer, one cook. No one else brews. No one else cooks. That's it.

So with 100 dwarves, naturally, if I want a wall carved out, a dozen dwarves do it immediately. A dozen dwarves, on the job. Go. If I want a wall built, seven, eight dwarves, boom, at a time. Done. Another way that I found is an easy way of kind of filtering through who's currently doing what is if you go to the task screen, which used to be almost unusable in the older versions, but I got pretty good at using it. You can actually scroll down the task screen and say you have like, I don't know, 20 smelting jobs. You'll actually see how many dwarves are currently doing those smelting jobs and how many dwarves are doing other things because that job is just too low on the priorities. So maybe if you scroll down on the task screen and see that you have two dwarves smelting, even though you have 20 smelting jobs, maybe it's time to remove some of those smelting jobs.

Like in the manager's screen, you can set the maximum number of workshops that can do a thing too. So you can have like the really cool big fortress like I like to build. And then just simply restrict the number of shops that can do that job. And so there will be less overall tasks issued to the dwarves in total. They'll pick what workshop they use. But the number of dwarves actively seeking out those jobs, just shrinks because there's, you know, let's just say you have three dwarves that you really want to be doing armor smithing, right? And then you're making 50 steel breastplates. And

you queue up 20 jobs. And a lot of your dwarves that have that task assigned aren't particularly skilled, let's just say they're all better at farming. So they're all farming. Or they're all better at, I don't know, glassmaking. So they're doing glassmaking while those armors are doing the armoring jobs. And it's going to feel like, man, this is taking forever to get done. and also when you go and try and mine, nobody minds because your two miners are also your best armorers. So then, like, it feels like there's nobody there to do those tasks, but in reality, they're just going through their own mental checklist of the stuff that they need to get done. And also, in the task screen, you can go in and pause jobs. So if you, like, run into an issue where

you have 200 doors and nobody's doing the thing you want to do, just pause everything you don't want them doing right now. So I guess it might be fair to say that we're just more responsible now for organizing our labor. It's just something we haven't necessarily had to do that hard before. I think we're just as responsible. I think the way that we organized it previously was completely different. We organized it from the opposite perspective, right? So previously it was you assigned dwarves to the jobs that you want them to do.

Now it's the dwarves do the jobs. So we have to make jobs available that the dwarves are available to do. We're scheduling now instead of job assigning. Yeah. I have a clear glass industry in my latest fort, which of course has a lot of work involved because there's like six steps or something. I was like four to six steps. Well, I have two workshops for each step.

And in premium, something that didn't exist before is the work details. And I feel like a lot of people haven't really spent some time wrapping their head around it. Or they just haven't had enough time to wrap their head around it. But once you get it figured out, it works pretty well. I have about eight dwarves, maybe I think about eight dwarves. So one per workshop, and all of them are assigned to a work detail to do all of that work, except for a couple who are legendary at certain tasks, so I kind of keep them specialized. But for the most part, with premium, adaption that we've had to make as players is these work details.

But if you do them right, it makes your fort run a lot smoother and your dwarves do become available for other things. Because my whole glass industry, it doesn't soak up any labor except for those eight dwarves. And those eight dwarves, they're adaptable. So if the potash making is done, well, then they go on to sand collecting or they go on to, you know, whatever part of that system is currently waiting for work to be done. And there's eight of them. So there's one per workshop. So it flows. And it doesn't interfere with any of my other work.

So I don't know what your guy's experience has been with running out of seemingly running out of available labor or. if you've just, you know, found a way to keep your dwarves productive. Well, for me, the upshot of this is that I've got to start paying attention to labor because honestly, with previous, you know, 4705, I really didn't pay any attention at all to labor. I set the people who did particular jobs and let it go and they seem to take care of everything on their own just fine. So it's another aspect that I need to change the way I prioritize.

whatever I'm thinking about how I'm planning a game out. Attention all craft enthusiasts. Patrick Shaw, administrator of the public guild hall, the creative-constructive plank, invites you to join us for a fun-filled crafting workshop where you can unleash your creativity and learn new techniques. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, our experienced instructors will guide you in creating unique and beautiful pieces.

With a variety of materials and projects to choose from, you'll leave with a sense of accomplishment and a newfound passion for crafting. Don't miss out on this opportunity to express your creativity and meet other like-minded individuals. For more information, contact Patrick Shaw at the Creative Constructive Plank, crafts dwarf Guildhall in the hamlet of control relics. All visitors are welcome. Are you really attached to, um, masterworks because a lot of people seem to want to hyper-specialize their dwarves

in the dwarf therapist style for the effect of making masterworks. Yeah, I don't care. I like them because they're worth more whenever they sell them. Yeah. But it doesn't bother me. They used to also help with happiness whenever you were talking about putting nice things in their bedrooms. Yeah, I was going to say that I like them too.

I mean if I start a fortress I make a tavern and I put like tables in and whatnot but years later I circle back to it and check if they're actually good quality which most of the time they're not so I replaced them with better ones and now I really want to see that the table is in fact better and that it has not been well done by somebody that doesn't actually have too many skills because somebody else did a different job. It has been working fairly well so far. I mean, a lot of people in my fortress have like 15 different legendary skills at this point because I make them craft quite a few of things over the years.

But at the start, it's a little bit iffy because you have to, you kind of have to sit down and actually tell them, no, please, you become a metal crafter. and you become, I don't know, a carpenter. And when the distinction has become very clear because they're like a very proficient carpenter and have no skill metal crafting, then the game really runs fairly good, you know, and my people are doing the crafts that I assign them to.

Nothing is sitting around for a really long time. So I think I have it worked out. But yeah, I sometimes get annoyed when I click on somebody and I see that they have like 20 different skills fairly high up and I'm like, you know. Yeah, that's something that I've seen a lot of with veteran players coming back or getting into premium and new players too. But I think it's mostly veteran players I want to guess because in the past, especially with dwarf therapists. And Dwarf Therapist, by the way, it was never, Dwarf therapist is not a product of Tarn or Zach's intentions for the game. It was just a community-made tool, a product of someone else's intentions for the game. So I feel like people have become kind of attached or familiar with

managing their forts in the way that Dwarf therapist allowed, which is hyper-specialization. Pick a dwarf to make the metal stuff. Pick a dwarf to make the gold stuff. Pick a dwarf to make the glass stuff, pick a dwarf to this and a dwarf to that. And now the game's labor solution is fully functional and it's robust and it works and it solves all the problems, but it doesn't pick a dwarf to do the thing. You can in it, but if you wanted to pick a dwarf to do the thing for everything, you would have 50 work details that would be absurd. You know, so instead, you're kind of, the game is trying to get the player to be like, this is the metal industry. Put your dwarf in the industry and let them work.

And sometimes they will smelt the ore. Sometimes they will make a chair. Sometimes they will make a sword. But it's up to them. You just have an industry and you made a work detail for that industry. And, you know, you can adapt it and you can say, well, don't. do the smelting, just do the smithing. But you still don't want to say only weapon smithing for you.

Well, actually, that's a bad example because that is one place where you may want to have a single dwarf doing it. But let's say like stone carving for making thrones. Like you don't want to say only stone carve, only you and only stone carve. And then only you and only make blocks or whatever. It's just not, it's not the way that the new work details are designed. to enable you as the player. And I think that as veteran player is coming into premium is one place where even people

who have been playing it for five or ten years are like, the hell's up with this work detail system. This kind of sucks. And it's like, it doesn't suck. You just have to stop trying to make so many masterworks in every single thing that you do. Like pick one industry. Like I have a glass industry. Like I said, I'm going to switch to having specialized glass makers who make the

glass things like the tables and whatever. But those are the dwarfs that rise to the top after being in the industry after three years, right? Exactly. Exactly. Like I found a legendary glassmaker in the industry and I was like, okay, we're going to specialize you. You're going to make all the tables and chairs. And that's where like maybe a work detail comes out, where it's only one labor. And I have this one dwarf specialized to it. All the other dwarves in the industry, they do all the crap, you know. They make the potash. I want to bounce off of something that you said to, too. tech it because you said that like therapist comes from a like an outside perspective's take on what the game should be, not the creators

take of what the game should be. Something that I think is worth mentioning is therapist works right now. You just can't assign individual jobs, but if you want to use it as like a background monitor, it works just fine. I've tested it. I messed around with it for two hours and had no crashes. So I mean, if you want to use therapist, you can

and it'll get and give it a couple weeks and it'll be at a point where you can just play the game the way you used to and it'll be fine. But the thing that I really wanted to touch on is a lot of people that I think depend heavily on therapist for very specific job assignments also come from an era where stress didn't exist in Dore Fortress. Like we need to remember like stress, the stress system as it is now didn't make into the game until like 2014 or something.

So like when I first started playing the game, there was no stress, really. I mean, they got stressed air quotes, but the stress system worked. completely differently. So they didn't have like the the personalities that would shift based on things that they'd seen and whatnot. So they would, like if you had a dwarf doing nothing, like temples didn't exist, taverns didn't exist, guild halls didn't exist. So it was viable to just say, one dwarf, you sit here at this workshop and make swords until

your little eyeballs fall out. And that dwarf wouldn't go insane. If you made a dwarf do that right now, they'd get super depressed because they'd stay away from their family. They'd stay away from their friends. they wouldn't make new friends. They'd never get the opportunity to socialize. They wouldn't get to pray to their gods and they would die.

So unless you're using DF hack and typing stress slash zero, like that old management style of I'm just going to make this dwarf do this forever. Actually doesn't work because you will drive your dwarves insane. And that kind of connects back to making, measuring how much labor you create for your dwarves. Not on a fortress wide level all the time. You should do it on a fortress wide level. Am I making more jobs than I have? have dwarves, but also for this one job, like back to glassmaking, I guess, because that's just

in my fort. Do I have too many glassmaking jobs for the number of glassmakers that I have? Because if I do, now we're going to have problems. Because I'm basically sweat shopping this dwarf, you know, which I guess a lot of people have become familiar with running a sweatshop for a fortress. Of course, yeah. Okay, guys, we're coming up to the top of the hour here. Probably need to start wrapping things up. Is there anything that you, blind, or Teked, would like to cover that we haven't covered thus far? Anything in particular that we'd like to...

Well, we haven't really done any complaints, I don't think. You know what? We haven't, but... Well, we can probably actually make another complete episode based on the... Based on the things that we... This has mostly been, like, mechanical things, which is like, it's still good. It's just different. Well, that's fine, because this is...

This particular episode is geared a little bit more towards veteran players who are going to want to hear that sort of thing. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the hotkeys are bad. Those are new and those are different and bad, in my opinion. Agreed. Yep.

I had this cool idea. You guys might want to try this. Sewing circles. I realized the other day I was thinking to myself like in the shower or at work or something, probably while listening to your podcast at work. And I thought to myself, you know what I could generate a lot of crafting jobs with? farming because you can farm an immense amount of resources at once. So why don't I just farm a massive amount of yute or some above ground crop, just an enormous quantity, an absurd amount of yute. And I just set up like 10 workshops that just craft little trinkets

out of cloth. And I could just set every dwarf in my fort to do this thing. Boom, they're all crafted. They have their little sewing circle they go to on Thursdays. You know, they gossip about coddle, like a knitting room, and Melbill. Yeah, exactly. Isn't that the guild hall? Yeah, now you just need to make it into a weaver's guild hall as well. Yeah. Yeah.

So they're in there, they're weaving, they're learning weaving, they're teaching each other weaving. And they'll acquire new things, and they'll practice crafts, and it'll satisfy those little needs that people are like, I don't really know how to do this effectively. And it's like, well, you know, you can get them working over there in the sewing circle, just have them show up make little images of a, you know, an elf getting eaten by, an elephant or something, whatever they want.

All right, well, this has been awesome, guys. Thanks a lot for coming on, Teked, Blind. As long as you don't hate us, we will have you back. Absolutely. Happy to. Still a vile force of darkness. I know, right? Yeah. Well, that's Roland's job on this podcast. I'm not that bad.

Your Discord handle is Uris sadism spikes, so come on. Yeah, that's true. All right, everybody. Awkward. Thanks a lot for joining us out there, and we'll be back next time with another episode of Dwar Fortress Roundtable. Until then, happy Fortress in, everyone.

Thanks, see ya. Until next time. All right, catch you later. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section

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