Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 81: Version 50 and New Players, With Nick Rust

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Nick Rust from The Literate Gamer podcast joins us to discuss new players since the release of v.50

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfy. Every couple weeks or so, your hosts gather to talk about our favorite game, Dwarf Fortress. So let's join your hosts, Roland. That is an amazing introduction. That one is spot on. Tony. Let's talk specifically about the nature of the decision and the risk you took, how it and Jonathan.

Okay, okay, great. Great. Then we'll see you later. Thanks for your time. As they present insightful, irreverent, and often incorrect analysis. Joining the roundtable today is Nick Rust from the Literate Gamer podcast. To be frank, I don't. I just throw them into a dwarfish pit of death and suffering

until they work themselves into traumatic psychological states and everything collapses. And always remember, losing is fun. Welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable. We've got Nick Rust here from the Literate Gamer Podcast. Welcome to the podcast, Nick. Hey, what's up? So this is the part where we ask questions. This is where we start asking questions to these people.

And then we let them start talking, and then we go, oh, that's a great point. So we're going to start off with what's the most complex or intricate system in Dwell Fortress that you have mastered? and how did you go about learning it? Oh, for God sakes. That's a good one. That actually is a good one. I know, right? So, yeah, like, the game is pretty oblique about how many different systems are involved in it.

As far as the most complex one, like, I feel like I've got a really good handle on soap. So that soap is, like, second nature now. I would probably say glass. I just recently, like, as of, like, premium, did I start dealing with glass? I mean, it's cool, but I'm like, I don't know if the value is really there. And I was like, one time I was like, oh, let's just do this. I haven't really done clear glass, though, because it's a giant pain in my ass. So I just started doing clear glass for this current fort.

I couldn't resist the temptation of doing it. And it actually, after having thought for years that it was just a nightmare is actually pretty simple to automate. And these dudes are just cranking it out left and right. So I was blown away by how not complicated it was. So if you've got soap down, then this would be very easy because it's very similar kind of series of dependencies that you have to get set up. And then look out world, clear glass everywhere. Tony, are you tapped into magma or are you running your smel throes? No, no, I'm destroying forests.

But I've already got a pretty bad relationship with the elves at this point. So bring it, gang. We'll bash you to death with our crossbows. So our subject today is new players coming into Dwarfortress, especially in a lot of the steam release. And, you know, how new players might approach Dwarfortress now as opposed to the way that they would have had to have done it, you know, in years past. With things like the Lazy Noob Pack, not being as necessary with premium mode, it seems like it'll be a little bit easier. So let me ask you, how many of you guys started with Lazy Newb Pack? I didn't start with it.

I was playing with it from the beginning up until the point where I switched to premium. You did it all along. You started and then ended the run with it. Yeah, I picked up the game a couple of times just off the website and was trying to play an ASCII. And, you know, it wasn't my favorite experience. He didn't really get into it. But yeah, once Lazy New, once I realized how that worked, then that kind of made it more accessible. So I think it was a pretty likely conduit for a lot of people.

bet you know yeah i i tried doing with askey and just too much uh so i ended up really learning the fort through lazy new pack too so i think it's paradox of saran one of the people who's has a lot of hand in creating the the lazy new packs don't like that name at all they want them they tried to kind of lobby for having it changed just being called a drawer fortress starter pack which i think is a great idea because you know even whenever i didn't consider myself a new but I liked that because it just made it easier to sub in, you know, tile sets and all that stuff. So, hey, man, I'm not lazy. What's that?

I'm lazy. I said, hey, man, I'm not lazy. I am, but. Oh, I am. Yeah, I'm too. Yeah, I can understand that. I'm definitely lazy too. I only installed the lazy new pack and then I slowly took everything out, like all the,

the automated work systems and auto nestbox and everything to the point where, I only played lazy new pack to have the little browser where I can just put in like, oh, yeah, today I want to have 100 dwarfs, or I won 60 dwarfs, which honestly is the only thing that I actually changed after a while. And everything else was basically the same game. I just didn't want to go into the raws and, like, edit it there. So, Nick, what is your origin story with 4-4? So I play a lot of games.

Hence your podcast, but yeah. Right, right. And Tor Fortress has always been my white whale of a game. Like, I first tried to get into it like 2008, 2009, like shortly after boat murdered, incident happened. And then it was just raw asky and I was like, I'm not going to, I don't have the time for this. And then it was probably like 2014, 2015, some weird things happened at work. and I was basically benched for like seven months with, like, no work while I tried to figure out what my entire department was doing.

And I was like, well, I'm never going to have an opportunity like this ever again. So what can I spend eight hours a day doing? And the answer was figuring out how to play Door Fortress. And so that's the story of how I got paid to play Door Fortress for like three months. That's pretty awesome. It was. But all things considered, like, this is my favorite game

this is the one I'm willing to put at the top of the entire stack of everything else and it's really weird because I am really concerned or really interested in things like approachability, new player experience like meta, things like how do we play games not just the game itself

and the fact that I would pick this one as my favorite seems weird but you know let's go back to that phrase of yourself a moment ago that sounded interesting um how do we play games and not the game itself yeah so it's like a like a deeper philosophical bent on on the playing of games rather than just the mechanics is that what yeah in a way like like we're like so i'm genuinely pretentious person so i kind of have to just lean into that well you do play a fortress so yeah right yeah it's all how you tell other people about it. That's that you wouldn't understand. Right, but there there is a bit of a

disconnect between like player experience in terms of how I feel about a game or how much I enjoy a game versus how good that game actually is because I love some absolutely terrible games and I really hate some really genuinely good games. And so that disconnect to me is very interesting because it's hard to quantify. So that's the kind of thing that we try to talk about. like, okay, I'll give you a really good example, for spoken. This is an absolute terrible game, and I haven't actually done it on my podcast yet, so I'm about to rip this thing a new one. But I played the whole thing, like start to, I actually, I actually completed it.

Most games, I only get about 80% of the way through, so I don't really spoil them when I do an episode on it. And then after I do the episode, I'll go back and finish it if I, if I want to. I'm a big advocate of only playing games. until you're satisfied. Like, I'm not a completionist. I don't think that if you start a game, you need to finish it.

You should just follow the fun. Like, it's literally a game. If it's not fun anymore, why do you keep playing? That one, I did finish, but it's a bad game. So I have very mixed feelings about that. But the overall experience is apparently better

than the game itself as a standalone, like, subject. Yeah. So a new user experience, for that would be probably objectively better than a new user experience, perhaps for Dwar Fortress, especially if Dwar Fortress you're playing and you realize three hours into it that you still don't know what you're doing and can't make anything happen. That's a great game with a poor user experience at the beginning there. It is. It's so much better than it used to be, though.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm genuinely impressed at how well-perienced. premium works. I really thought that we were just going to basically get like an official you know, lazy new pack bootstrap tile set application. I did not expect the depth of the, like there's still some work to be done. We all know that. The menus are a little out of control. But overall, I'm very impressed with how everything works. And in particular, I really like how they did like the dwarves, like all the different parts that go to

together, they get stitched together to make your little dwarf look different because it's like all of the things they're wearing or carrying around are literally displayed in the little spray. And I'm like, that's, that's not a lot of real estate. So that's pretty impressive that they were able to do that. I thought you were going to save the, uh, the character sheet for, uh, for the dwarves that that that's a huge improvement. Oh, my God. That's my favorite, my favorite single thing about the, the premium version of dwarf fortress is that all of those things that you had to go digging. for about your dwarf are now there on a tabbed interface that is just great so there's something I want to I want to talk about I want to talk about this podcast that I found I bought a new phone and as I was loading back up all my podcast subscriptions I looked for I was going to load up dwarf fortress talk so I searched for dwarf fortress and I found a new dwarf fortress podcast out there called A Strange Mood, the Couples Dwar Fortress Podcast. I've listened to the first two episodes, and I'm listening on the third one,

and I hope everyone goes and checks that out. It's by a couple, Kristen McFarlane and Drew Bushhorn. The actual website is A Strange Mood Podcast.com, so you can find it that way. I know that they're on Apple Podcasts, but it's great. they're both playing through fortresses and as they come up across the term and this would be a great podcast for someone who is new to dwarf fortress

to listen to because as they're playing their fortresses they will introduce a new term and then once they introduce that term they will go into a little bit of depth on what that term means for example I can't think of it but like FPS they would talk about say FPS

and then they would give a you know a 30 second to a minute explanation of what you mean by FPS as it relates to Dwarf fortress. So, again, a strange mood, the couple's Dwar Fortress podcast. I recommend that everyone who listens to this

podcast, go check that out because I know that they'll love it. And I'll say, uh, the production value on that one, it's actually pretty good, too. Um, yeah, I was pleasantly surprised. So, so you've heard it too. Cool. I have. Delightful. Attention members and guests,

Roma Vermeulen, liaison to the The Autumnal Guild of Farmers requests that you stand by for the following important message. Hey, farmers, do you ever feel like you're the only ones in the world who appreciate a good manure joke? Well, fear not. The Beach of Sun Guild Hall is here to provide you with the camaraderie and laughs you've been missing. As a member of the Autumnal Guild, you'll have access to all kinds of quirky events and activities, from mine cartraces and tomato tosses, to alpaca milking competitions and millstone karaoke and you'll be surrounded by a group of farmers who get your sense of humor and share your love of all things agriculture join us today and let us

prove to you that there's more to farming than just mushrooms and sweat with the beach of sun you'll have a community of hilarious down-to-earth dwarves to laugh learn and grow with so don't be a chicken come on down to our coop this message was paid for by the autumnal guild Roma Vermeulen Guild Liaison Okay, so I want to take a minute to talk about the tutorial itself. I've not done it, so. Ooh, yeah.

Who here has done it? Just Nick? Negative. I think I tried. I think I started and I was like, uh, okay. I don't think so. Yeah, so I've run this tutorial like five times. And I've worked with a few other people.

that have been doing it and it makes some specifically poor choices. The biggest one is the tutorial as it's walking you through things it introduces the concept of stockpiles. The first big cardinal sin it has you do is to progress through the tutorial

you have to make a stockpile and you have to set it to accept all. Oh yeah, it's a bummer, isn't it? Yeah, and I was like, why are you doing this? This is terrible advice to give to new people. Yeah, it kind of makes you not want to use stockpiles ever. Right.

It's kind of what I... Unintended. One of the first real hurdles of playing Dwar Fortress is kind of realizing what kind of game it is because, like, we use genres to talk about games as a kind of short hand so that we can just, you know, kind of get a leg up on understanding how this particular game is supposed to work and how its systems do all that kind of stuff. And this particular game does not fit into any one bucket well. Because it is the, you know, 20-year-old fever dream of a brilliant mad genius who's literally just typing this stuff out and his, you know, little hermitage and then going, I think I'm going to simulate everything. So it comes off weird. And that's why we love it. But, like, it doesn't have a typical, like, Colony Sim part to it.

I think it's most advantageous to really first consider it to be, like, an emergent storytelling device and everything else is secondary. Yep. Yep. I would agree with that. I guess I would. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that there's, it's almost like the story's going to unfold.

And your job is to basically make sure that they all stay alive long enough to do that. Or the longer you go, the more story unfolds. Right. And personally for me, the coolest part about the game is finding the thread because it's not very apparent. Like it doesn't just go, here's the story as it's unfolding. Like all of the details and bits and pieces are there. You just have to go out and collect it.

Like I was engraving some tile floors just to make them look fancy. They weren't in any particular place. And they kept like engraving this particular. like alligator and this human fighting and it was like 30 years before the fortress had had been had been settled and it was like it was like one out of ten tiles in this particular entrance area and I was like apparently that particular human killing that particular craig or alligator was a traumatic event in this like society and and then I didn't actually go into legends mode because I my one complaint is I wish it was an easier way to do legends mode

Premium. Yeah, for sure. To go out and find out more backstory about why that alligator was important or what, but it's the little details like that that really make this game stand out. Like, nobody's doing as much as this game is doing while it's doing it, sometimes to its detriment. I really wish that someone could implement, or that Tarn would implement the style of interface that was with Meph's libraries, where

where it's not necessarily easy to access but with Meph's libraries you could get a glimpse into the legends mode by reading a book that was written and put in your library that was really sweet

it was the bookkeeper workshop wasn't it was that what it was the bookkeeper workshop yeah he had modded in a bookkeeper like just a workshop or like a librarian's workshop and if you went if you if you you you know there was activity in that. It was like launch legends. But I think from what I

understand is there was like a risk of corrupting everything because of how it all works. So, you know, every time you did it, it's like, okay, you might Well, if Putnam's working on the inside, then, yeah, Putnam's working on the inside, maybe it could be done without a, without the corruption issues. It would be cool. And I, you know, I actually miss things like, um, Legends viewer. Those were really good tools to have. I would love to see that get updated. And, obviously, I think someone's probably interested in working on it. Nick, I have a counter to your emergence narrative idea, though, in that it's been six years that have been playing.

And to me, it still is primarily a builder. It's primarily construct, you know, cool rooms and cool things for your dwarves to do. I still, I know I should, but I still don't pay that much attention to the emergent stories, which, you know, it's fine. It's however you want to play it. Yeah, that's fair. I mean, and that that that harkens back to how personal experience flavors are individual takeaways. So much of this game. As a builder, it's pretty good, actually.

It's a little rough around the edges. But no one else has quite the amount of freedom or just sheer insanity allowed. Oh, yeah. I know that I'm missing out by not examining the the narrative on it. But I get impatient. I just want to build more and pay more attention to that. and solve problems that have come up because of the way I'm developing my fortress and not paying as much attention to the things that the dwarves are thinking about.

I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think it, for, I would say for me, it depends on what's going on. Like, I had a fortress where somebody was coming in, and they kept corrupting the dwarves in the fortress, trying to get them to steal artifacts, and it was really quite successful. And, like, everybody was involved, and they were just putting leverage on everyone, and they'd go and take something and meet out in the woods and occasionally I could catch them and occasionally I couldn't and yeah I mean that was kind of weird it just felt a bit a bit you know more scripted than I'd have thought but I don't always have that happen I don't go to the

crug smash levels of detail well I don't think anybody does that's why he's that's why he's that's why he's got it that is true that's why it's genius I also like the narrative so um and I feel the justice system is actually a very good way for people to get their nose poked into it by force because you you get something stolen and then you question like oh what happened and then you have to go into the justice system and actually interact with your dwarfs and you find like stories emerging and plots and whatever and actors and then the game actually shows you a weird list of people that might have been in that plot and the moment you look at that and you see like oh wait hang on i saw that name before oh that's my miller then the story just starts to sprout in your head and i really like

doing that and i yeah okay i sometimes feel a little bit bad doing that on my streams that i do um because I feel that is fun, but it's not the crog-smashy. I'm actually sitting here and, like, painting pictures for you kind of way. It's more of a stringent, I'm trying to peel an onion with my fingernails, and it takes me 40 minutes to coherently understand what is happening. And then I'm like, ah, you know. And so it might not be a good content for some other person to look at, to listen to, whatever. But I think it is so very interesting that it's a little bit like L.A. noir where you have to play detective and you have to puzzle some pieces and people together and why are you doing this?

Where do you live? And back in the day, before the steam thing, that went completely overboard. Because then I had, like, Legends Viewer open and a map, and I started painting on, like, paper with my actual hand in real life. And I, ugh, that went overboard. But, yeah, it's very fun. I think, though, that this is something that is you as a veteran player coming into the Steam. version or the premium version was able to suss out

quite easily. Not sure that someone who's brand new to the game, though, would be able to intuit how to enter the justice system and get it kicked off. Yeah. I haven't played the tutorial. Does it even mention the justice system in the tutorial? It does not.

I don't even think it's doing stock stock piles for everything. Yeah. And then roll to your flow level we're at. I don't even think it introduces the military squad menu, which is I mean, militaries, we all know militaries need work.

But for a new player, okay, so like, there's a series of technologies that you need to master or like part of the difficulty with the game. It's not the game itself. It's learning how to think the Door Fortress system or the Door Fortress way to figure out how to interact with the game is

largely the biggest challenge. I would say that military is actually like a mid-level problem that you can put off for a couple of fortresses to deal with later. Unless you're really unlucky. Right. Well, and then that's a learning opportunity and that's fun. Capital F-U-N. My first real fortress that I let go for a while was just some like dwarf hippie commune

where they would just sit around and dance and drink beer all the time. and like I didn't even have any kind of military whatsoever and then a wear lizard shows up in the middle of my tavern and just totally wrecks it and then everyone turns into wear lizards and I was like well now it's apparently time to learn how to do military stuff and I think that's the best way to actually approach the game is get used to the idea of running lots of fortresses like and don't get too bummed out if you have to start over

like literally learning how the game works through failure is genuinely part of the appeal and the fun especially at the beginning. I completely agree. I completely agree. My first, I decided that I needed to worry about Fortress Security whenever I had a wear something,

I think it was a wear llama come in and basically destroy the fort that I made. So it wasn't very old. That was my first introduction to the military was because I decided that I probably needed it. Yeah, and Fortress Security itself is a pretty big deal. Like most of, like I hang out or have been hanging out since Premium came out in the Kit Fox Discord,

specifically in the Door Fortress Questions channel, because I realized there's like, I don't know, half a million people that have absolutely no idea what they're doing that are going to be like coming in here. So let's, you know, I camped out there to answer some questions. And Fortress Security is a pretty big deal. And unfortunately, there was a bug. I don't know if it's fixed yet or not,

but building destroyers, were being stopped by forbidden doors. So I've seen a lot of bad habits that have come up around that where a lot of new players were using forbidden doors as a security device. And you need to not do that. For the polite monsters. For the very, very polite monsters. Oh, I'm sorry. You're locked. I'll respect that. I totally. My bad.

And as a veteran, like, I wouldn't even have thought to do that because I learned, I don't know, my second fortress that, like, doors are suggestions. Especially like setting forbidden, like the only thing a forbidden door will work on on your own dwarves. Everyone else is just like, okay, I'll just open that door. So like I think it's really important for new players to understand that you really need to control the like the ingresses to your fortresses, both from the surface and from the cavern. So as soon as you pop that cavern, you need to like wall it off and then you need to like strategically build an entrance into that cavern so that you can control it. And the only thing that's really going to be a real effective, like security device is a drawbridge. So put a drawbridge in the way, put a left, connect the lever.

Those are two things. Not super easy, but you can figure it out. It's fine. I like to put my levers in places where there are a lot of people like to hang out, but not like in the middle of the dance floor. Because, you know, doors will get drunk and knock them over and break them. And so you can like make sure that there's someone near the lever to turn it on or off whenever you, need to. And then that way you can control what can come in. So if a forgotten beast shows up in your second or third year and you're not equipped to handle it because you just took my

advice about not having a military and you're like, cool, what am I supposed to do about that? Well, you close the door and wait for him to go away. Klino Dev invites you to the turquoise dinners dining hall and tavern to enjoy the written work, life with the tree, for a limited time only. This is a cinnamon grossular-bound codex. The written portion consists of a 92-page guide entitled Life with the Tree, authored by Clino Dev. It concerns the forest retreat, muted blazes.

The writing could only have been produced by a merciful spirit. Overall, the prose is not awful, but not very good either. Life with the Tree With Clinodev, dancer. Available for a limited time at the Turf. I wanted to circle dinners on the 12th level of the town of control relics. I wanted to circle back to the part where you said wall of the caverns, because I, at some point, it clicked in my brain, like, oh, yeah, things spawn at the meb edge.

I can't build at the map edge. I can just build over the map edge, so nothing can spawn. I never like, wait, what? So I did that, and it worked before the Steam version, by the way. I have only done it now. What do you mean by what he's saying? You wall off your caverns, where the caverns meet the map edge? Yep.

You make sure that the caverns become basically a large room. There is no more connection to the outside. And because I was like, maybe I can control where things spawn. And yes, you absolutely can control where things spawn. And then you put like drawbridges and key traps, and then it's all fine and dandy. And suddenly the caverns look a lot less scary. And if you get every single tile and nothing spawns in water or whatever, because let's be honest, nothing really did use to spawn in water, then easy, breezy, you have a completely pacified cavern and you can just open it up to your children. and they can play in it.

But now the whole situation where the cavern dwellers came in, and now I'm a little bit scared of caverns. Yeah. Or the stuff that lives there already, you mean? Like the giant old men or whatever. And they just hop in. So my current try, I sadly have no real answer right now,

but I did wall of most of my camera. already, and now I just put my enemies to on again, and now I'm letting people run through in the hopes that at some point I will figure out whether or not Karen Dwellers will spawn if I shut off the whole place or not. But, yeah, because Cameron Dwellers killed half my fortress, and I was like, yeah, not fun. Is it the Chogletites that did the killing, or was it the people get freaked out and then go nuts? Oh, that was an antmen. Yeah. you get the wasps in there too so I think initially

you need to wall off the cavern from like the perspective of of where your fortress goes into the cavern like that's the first thing you need to wall off so that you can at least just seal up your fortress and write that cavern off if you need to for a while I have done a couple of trials and premium of trying to

basically like domesticate the entire cavern floor and as you pointed out with cavern dwellers it is a giant pain now. But I've had limited success, like actually just doing giant, massive building projects to just, like, be like, all right, we're just going to build a four-story wall right here with a big drawbridge to get in and out. And so, like, I built myself a giant, like, zone inside, just outside my, my, the entrance to my fortress for, like, farming and stuff. And I even went out and built, like, a, a roof for it if I couldn't connect it to the top of the cavern layer.

That worked fairly well. I turned cavern of Baders off for a bit because they were really buggy and the game got in a nasty habit of trying to spawn like 200 of them, but off the map. And then the FPS would just absolutely tank. So FPS is going to be the thing

that's going to kill most of your fortresses. You need to be aware of that now. The game will just keep simulating stuff as it goes. And the more complex things are, the more your frame rate's going to drop until it becomes basically insufferable to play that particular fortress. People like Sethatose,

who's been on the podcast a couple of times on my podcast, did Art Crystal with like 250, 500 years of history or something ridiculous by just like dealing with it, just like accepting that four frames per second was how he was going to play the game.

Sounds like a really patient fellow. He is. He's a great guest too. if you haven't seen the art crystal fortress i can't recommend it enough like everything's made of clear glass there's like 3,000 statues in the damn place it's crazy like he he literally colonized hell and he keeps he got bees down there because one of the weird quirks about the game is once a once a tile is exposed to the sky it always counts as being outside or on the surface even if it's no longer on the surface so you can like i have an actually

done this, but I'm like 95% sure you can. You can just channel up a bunch of dirt and then build tile like tile floors on top of it and then just build surface and then just farm surface crops there. So you have a nice little controllable pocket that you can access to your thing. But he managed to get a hole all the way down to the surface of howl so that he could keep bees down there. Because it counted as being on the surface and it was ridiculous. And he had like artifact bone cages that he managed to put bloodmen in and then he had a mistake with like magma so they caught on fire but because they're artifacts they'll never go out so he's just got a couple of you know bone cages with bloodmen in them that are on fire and in the middle of

his throne room it's pretty metal hilarious have you ever seen the the quick start guide on on the dual fortress wiki there's a that's a that's the tutorial that i that i started off with and it's the one that I have always guided people to for learning how to play Dwar Fortress. You know, I don't think I've seen it recently. Yeah, and it has not been updated completely for premium. But that is an excellent, excellent tutorial. And I think the Tour Fortress lends itself much better

to tutorials that are kind of in print than it does to tutorials that are walkthroughs for a, you know, like a guided tour in a game. So I don't know. It just seems like that. That's the best way for me to learn things. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the strongest components of the game is literally the community. I mean, it's literally why all of us are here right now talking about it.

Yeah. And so, like, I get into a lot of game communities for what I do on my podcast. That's, that's kind of how I work. Once I work on a title, I go out and I find the people that are really into that particular game and I talk to them about why they like it and stuff like that. this is i can genuinely say one of the best gaming communities out of all of the ones that i've seen and it's it's it's it's weird it's almost like we're all a bunch of harrowed like you know vets with PTSD that are sitting around sharing stories about all the terrible things that we've seen and we love it when new people come in and we're super supportive because we're like muckle up buddy

you have no idea one of my favorite parts of this is uh i was doing all this work with the tutorials going through it a few times i managed to figure out kind of after the fact the logic that the game is picking because it'll pick an embark location for you and the things that it that it looks for like trees i believe it looks for a source of water and oh metal it looks for a good spread of metals one of the things that the game does not specifically look for though and picking a tutorial embark location is evil and i was like you know what that's the most dwarf fortress tutorial thing i can think of because I had a couple of people that were like,

That's really funny. Hey, is it supposed to rain elven blood? And are my, is everything I butcher supposed to come back to life? I'm like, supposed to? No, but I'm not surprised. So that's fun. I don't know if it checks for untamed wilds or not, though. That's new.

And if you're a new player, I specifically advise you against play. Oh, it checks for an aquifer. It puts you in a spot with no aquifer. That was the other big thing. That's kind at least. It is. It is super kind. Hey, I'd like to circle back to, we were talking about the community.

You're talking about the community a few moments ago. And as someone who has a podcast that is not specifically dual fortress related, you probably get a wider view of other communities, like I said, than we do. Us, Dual Fortress Roundtable is the only podcast that any of us have ever been involved in. And so our interaction with the Dwar Fortress folks are the only real, at least for me, the only interaction that I've had with communities like that. But we were kind of prepared to get barbs and, you know, the occasional nasty message from listeners who disagreed with us on something.

And it is surprising. We're in our fifth year now of this podcast, and we have never had a actual malicious comment or email from anybody. And we've got a decent size listener base. But it was, it's just that speaks so highly of this community and how, how friendly they are. So yeah,

I just wanted to throw that in. It's nuts. Like this is one of the, basically the only gaming computing I can think of where like, Cunningham's law still works here. Um, in the sense that like, the fastest way to,

to get an answer is to give an incorrect response. And then somebody's going to come in and correct you. But when they do it in Torf Fortress, it's typically, like, 90% of the time, it's not malicious. It's like, hey, there might be a better way to do this. This is how I've done it in the past. Now, I have come, like, I was helping somebody to try to solve some kind of problem about something. I might have been about fishing in caverns or something. Or it was about stair placement.

People get weird about stairs in dwarf fortress. It's a thing. Oh, yeah. You could do a whole episode. on how to do staircases, especially now that the premium changes have hit. And some dude was just like commenting on my staircase. Oh, no, it was my entrance. He was like, your entrance is not, it's not optimal.

I was like, cool, not an optimal player, dude, don't care. I was trying to help somebody else solve a problem. That's the only time I've ever run into anything like that, even remotely close. We have blind and tech it on, I think it was in our last episode. And, and yeah, both of them, I hate, they seem to hate the new stairway thing. And where I'm not sure what you're feeling is rolling because I don't think you wait in on that. But I know that me and Tony were like, yeah, the new stairways are great. Yeah, I think it's cool.

Oh, I'm, I am pro stairway change, by the way. Like, I get why this is going to sound derogatory, but I made it in the best way. I get why the crusty old door fortress vets don't like them because there's a certain, like, there's a certain style and approach to, like, building that the old staircase is kind of, allowed for, that the new staircases aren't really doing the same way, and it looks a little weird. But from like a new player experience perspective, it's way better. It's so much better. Like, figuring out how to dig a workable staircase was, was historically one of the big, big first challenges that you had to do. But now that problem has mostly gone away. Yeah, I think it was last season, early last season of the,

podcast where I finally figured out how to build one wall on top of another because of staircases. That was the whole hang-up. I wasn't doing my staircases right. It just didn't make sense to me. But now it does. I still am having trouble

getting my dwarves to build stacked walls, but that's a management question. It's not got anything to do with the mechanics of the game so much. You have more of those funny chatbot questions. Well, let me go ahead and tell the listeners what we're talking about here because that's mostly in our introduction. But before we were actually recording, we were talking about this question that I fed to chat GPT.

And mine was just, you know, let's just looking for some ideas for nice interview questions that it might not have thought of that we could ask Nick and another perspective guests in the future. So I say, give me 10 interview questions regarding to a fortress. And so the questions that it gave me turned out were job interview questions for someone who is applying for a position to run to a fortress as their work. And these questions are from the point of view of a manager asking a job. Maybe we get us to Tarn for any team building he wants to be doing. The thing is, while we're sitting here talking, I'm realizing that some of these questions are quite pertinent. like one of them is how can you walk me through how you would approach building a successful fortress into a fortress and what that's kind of what we were just talking about what is some of the first things that you need to do as a new player to have a successful fortress what kind of foundation do you need and here's another one is how do you balance the need for security and defense with the need for resource production and expansion into a fortress question number eight also quite pertinent so yeah we were just talking about that had a security versus versus, you know, resource production.

It's a question from the economist. Go ahead. Go ahead, Nick. I was going to turn the table around a little bit. And I was going to ask you guys, what do you think are the things that a new player should learn out of the gate of the jump to be as successful as they can? Like, what are your first steps? I'm still changing because what was my first steps, I think, are not maybe as important anymore. But in general, I build a stockpile early on to get all of my stuff out of the outside, get it underground.

But I don't include everything in it. I don't include rocks. I don't include wood. Certainly don't include refuse or corpses in my general purpose for stockpile. Quick side note, I realize we mentioned that you don't want to set all stockpiles. We didn't explain. to anyone that doesn't already know why you don't want to do that. For one, it's a logistics nightmare because moving things from stockpile to stockpile

can be irritating if you don't know how to do it right. But the most important one is if you add refuse to a stockpile, everything in that stockpile will start to degrade. So you will ruin all of the stuff that you put in that stockpile. Go ahead. Yeah, well, that and you'll just have miasma just constantly on top of your stockpile, which is horrible, horrible. And I don't know if they cover that in the tutorial, but,

keeping miasma out of your fortress is even more important now than it was in pre-premium dwarf fortress because they seem to be more reluctant to take the crap out of the out of the fortress that causes the miasma miasma how do you pronounce it let's go with uh let's go with myasma myasma yeah i think myasma is the i think they're both actually technically correct though so the position we're taking on this is it's a long eye but in any case did they talk about miasma or they don't not really and there's a whole component about

like hauling refuse outside of the fortress that has to be enabled in the labor's menu to even get them to do that because all of the new all of the labor's menu stuff is new so like dealing with that is an ordeal even for veteran players and yeah

yeah I've this morning I was actually spent quite a while trying to figure out how to mark goblinite as pick it up unforbid, unforbiting goblinite. I was like, well, how do I do that now? Because if you try to do it the old way, you end up having six mouse clicks to, I think, to just

unforbid one item. I didn't realize that there is now a thing that you can unforbid everything at once in a particular pile. Yeah, and you can click and drag and make a, like, a big area of just unforbidding two. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

I didn't realize that. I ended up figuring it out. That was going to be one of the questions I asked today on the podcast. This is annoying. Yeah, awesome. But, you know, someone who's coming into the system for the first time, they're not going to have those habits that some of us are having to unlearn. So in a lot of ways,

maybe people who come to the, to Dwar Fortress for the first time, we're going to have it easier than us people who are trying to make changes to the way we do things. And Nick, I heard on your podcast the other day that you mentioned people discussing, veterans discussing having to overcome their muscle memory. And that is definitely something that we've gone over several times on this podcast because all of us are in that camp. You guys are crazy. Didn't all of you remap your Z up and down to the old?

No. I'm remap free. I just decided to learn the new way of doing it. That's why I'm doing it now. Not be stuck in tradition in old ways. The new way is so much better, though, because it's on the left hand, and it makes sense because it's up and down EC. That's the first day. I was like, oh, thank God, they changed that.

Yeah, I'm with you. I hated, hated, hated having to hit shift. Yes. Oh, is it question mark? Crap. Oh, I didn't help me in you now. Dang it. Hang on.

And then see. Yeah, I'm with you, man. I was able. I got to where I was doing that without even thinking. I didn't think I need to hit shift less than shift. greater than. It's just that's what my hand did whenever I needed to traverse a Z level. It just happened. It wasn't a matter of thinking anymore, which is, you know, what we were talking about, the muscle memory. And that was the way it was for all of the keyboard hot keys. But, you know, I'm learning how to change them. I still don't like E&C because I think it's too close to WASD. But, you know, okay. That's why I like it. I have two things. First of all, having that changed was like, getting my eyes ripped out. I actually had trouble

visualizing in which layer I was. And I accidentally, in my very first stream that I did on the Steam version, I put layers in the wrong layer. I was like, oopsie. Now I'm, where am I? And I had to change it.

And now I can see again. And I can visualize it better again because I'm so used to it. Also, I don't have the problem of like, oh, it's just one hand because I have a German keyboard layout so the two fingers that I use to go through my layers

are just my left hand little finger and brain finger. The two buttons are right next to each other. So it never was a question of how many hands do I need because the buttons are directly next to each other.

How many hands do you normally need to operate a German keyboard? And this is an example of the Kermudgens talking about What's that, Tony? I said, how many hands does one normally need to operate a German keyboard? Five. Four. Many hands.

These big words. The opinions split here, yeah. But we are the curmudgens that I think that Nick was talking about. Yeah. So here we are again. We're going off on a rant about the hotkey changes. Yeah, I'll tell you what, I, having to hit shift and then another button to do anything is like the opposite of good user experience.

Well, but it's like putting in a clutch and shift in your car. It's not two operations. It's one atomic operation that, after you've done it for a while, never mind, I got to stop this. Back to a beginner-friendly podcast. This segment of Dwarfurtress Roundtable is brought to you by Mr. Gutsi, creator of Uver-de-Duc-Bismara Vogue, Lull Manors, the Polly of Dredging. This is an apricot wood cup.

All crafts worship is of the highest quality. It is encircled with bands of apricot wood and oval limestone cabbashones. This object menaces with spikes of pear wood, naked moldog leather, and siltstone. On the item is an image of Lor Walwads the dwarf in hematite. Over-deduc-Bismara Vogue, Lull Manners, the Polly of Droughty of Drought. Dredging by Mr. Gutsy. Another top quality artifact from the town of control relics. I have one question, and this is, I found out, is a question that you can judge the character of a person by.

So the question is... Oh, great. I don't want to answer this. What is the first thing that you do for your dwarfs? Is it make a tavern, make a temple, or make a general meeting hall? Let Nick go first here. So historically, I've made a tavern first, but now that Putnam has been digging into FPS issues, one of the largest contributors, according to the understanding now, is dwarves scanning, dancing dwarves for attractiveness or relations, because apparently there's logic to check to see if I'm related to these people that are dancing, and that's a big contributor to the FBS thing.

I'm actually changing my meta now to try and avoid taverns if I can or big dance floors to try and tamp down on the FBS. overhead because I'm primarily playing on a laptop when I'm playing Door Fortress so I don't have as much like general CPU I can just throw at this game so I have to be very careful with the choices I make historically it's always been a tavern first

Tony what about you it's still pretty what's the first thing I do yeah well no among those three different kinds of locations tavern temple or meeting area you know generic I

well I used to do a dining hall, but then that turns out to not be as effective. So I will probably do a tavern, but I put the table and the food in it, and I make it just for that fort so I don't start getting in a bunch of yoho elf dancers or whatever. Well, I would do a generic meeting area without a location, a name of any sort, just to get my dwarves out of the outside and into shelter. And I still will do that. I'll still just put up a little, four by four meeting area that's in the first room that I dug out

just to get them to where they're not hanging out outside. For new players, this is important because the wagon is actually considered a meeting area for the dwarves until another one is designated. So they're kind of dumb. So if you don't actually give them

somewhere else to go hang out, they'll just go hang out at the wagon for a while while you're doing other stuff. The animals do. It's annoying. And then they get rained on or attack. And that... They don't like that. They don't like to get rain done.

So you, Roland? What's the first one you do? I also used to do taverns first, like straight up taverns and basically do nothing else and try to get chairs and tables in. But I had a test run and I made a temple instead. And I found just a general temple, just no deity, no specific deity. You've been reading Kleeneuve's comments, haven't you? Yeah. I've been reading a few things.

And I noted that while the mood boost that I would get from a tavern and they get drinks and I lay out the whole tavern and make a bar and drinks in the corner, whatever, is far larger that the temple, the early temple seems to alleviate some of the problems where you make a late temple. and then you have people that hog the temple for like months on end doing nothing else but praying. And in that particular one, I dug out a lot so I don't have a temple at the very start of my fortress because it felt weird. But I slammed a temple in and it worked surprisingly good. And then I just later on made a tavern and that worked good. But I can't really say that I noted any FPS differences.

I think that my CPU just might be too beefy to actually make that difference. Humble brag. Just a little. Yeah, just, you know, place it in it. Well, I got a new machine coming. I buy CPS based on, yeah, yeah, I buy based on single thread performance. I did. I did actually do that.

That's what I've done in my last two. Well, Roland. I don't know if it was in a, in, in, in the Discord or if it was on the subreddit, but Clean Odev had talked about what he does is builds a general purpose

temple, first of all, is the very first meeting area because that will tend to increase the dwarf's happiness the most whenever you have a brand new fortress. Yeah, yeah, and I wanted to try that out. So that's what I might start trying to do. Yeah, I wanted to try that out. It worked very good.

I'm not going to support his claim that that's the biggest mood. booster because a good tavern with like goblets made of metal that is the biggest mood booster in my opinion but it worked very well and yeah but it's a quick win goblets made of metal you say oh yeah goblets made of metal yeah it gets people in and that's all that you need and then you get the the whole like praying to isha's or whatever of your bookmarked list and only the few people that actually need a specific temple then you okay yeah sure like It's year seven.

Let's make a temple for you and your family. I learned something that I'm going to explore in the next couple of days. Today, this morning, from dealing with new players that I never would have considered, there's this one particular guy that I've been, is like one of my Dwar fortress acolytes. There's a few people I've been messaging on Dwarfords on Discord with trying to help their forts. And he's a streamer, so if you want to check out, I'm pulling up at M12G on Twitch.

He's been doing some good stuff. He's learning the game pretty well. But today, he told me that his first guild hall was doctors. And I was like, what? How the hell did you get a guild of doctors first? That is bizarre. Okay, so here's how he did it. One of his first starting dwarves, he gave them, you know, doctor's skill.

and then he set up a hospital almost immediately. And he said once he set up the hospital, like he started getting like four or five doctor skill migrants coming into his fortress after that. So like I think you can kind of juice the kinds of skills that people are bringing into your fortress by establishing zones early on. And I really want to play with this and see if I can replicate it myself to get, I want to see if I can bumrush a doctor. doctor guild um because if i can i'm so i like i have i've hit like 70 or 80 dwarfs before before i got a doctor and that's that's not good like you need a hospital ideally around 30 dudes so

that's that's kind of interesting and i thought i would bring that up hmm that's really fascinating yeah yeah i never would have thought that you could you could get a doctor guild first How have FPS been for you guys in this latest release? Like, what's your, what do you find in? I've had no troubles with it. And none at all as of yet. And that could be because I'm managing my production a lot better than I was before premium because I no longer now have, you know,

just unlimited piles of crap that's laying around my fortress because I'm using work orders. So I don't know if it's because of the premium or because I'm just better at managing my forts than I was. I've, uh, I've been pretty stable in the 200s. Like, I've got, I've got FPS of like 200 plus with more than 200 dwarfs. So that's a pretty big thing. I mean, there's a lot of fluctuation. Like it'll go to 65 for a while and then it'll go back over 200. But yeah, 200 dorses doesn't seem to be a huge problem anymore. Well, here we're doing it again. We're doing it again. For anyone who FPS means frames per second. And if you have too much stuff going on in your fortress, a lot of times that will

slow your game down and you'll have a lower frames per second right at wit you know it can get bad enough to where you just have to retire or abandon your fortress because it's unplayable so just everything starts going so slow you can't do anything and there's two numbers listed for the FPS the first

number listed is the simulation FPS and the second one is the display FPS so simulation will always be higher than display not always but whenever you're really crushing it they're right and the update in particular uh that should help with this is the game is now auto pruning dead things from the list because before it was keeping track of every random thing that

ever died in your fortress did they implement that i heard that they were going to i believe that was the last patch like three days ago i think that was in o seven right yeah it was okay cool cool because uh because i think it was either tech it or blind we're talking about that it was going to be coming up and i wasn't i didn't know that it had actually been implemented. Cool. Yeah. So that should fix a lot of issues.

Yeah. Because you could get, you could get like basically no more migrants because the table was too big and things like that. It also contributes to FPS because the game is just tracking all of that stuff. I like, I like the animal husbandry aspects of door fortress for whatever reason. So I like to,

like, you know, one fortress I decided I wanted to domesticate Kapibara. and so those things breed like crazy. And so I turned around and I was like, oh my God, I've got like 200 capybara. Same actually. Back in the day, I just had to press Zet and then I would instantly see the number of animals that I had in my fortress. And I didn't really look for any animal number in this steam update.

So I just slammed some, I think I used alpacas and I put them in a cave, in an area and I was like, yeah, okay, go nuts. And after a while, I looked on my animal list and I had to like, scott, scott, scott, scott, scott, scott, scott, scott, scroll down because I had so many alpacas and I was like, way, way, way, way, wait. I easy had also like 200, 250 alpacres. Then I just had to go through and like kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. I feel bad, but, and, yeah.

It's a lot of wool. Yeah. I mean, alpacas are great because they provide both milk and thread and meat and leather eventually as they go through the industry process. So that's a real strong choice for bringing in animals. I do want to caution new players against trying, even though it's really cool, trying to raise alligators or crocodiles because they lay like on average 26 to 29 eggs per clutch. So I think the cat'splosion should be renamed the alligator plosion because it's crazy intense. I've got hippos. I'm trying to do something with hippos.

Probably going to regret that, huh? Have you guys played with hippos? Have you played with hippos? Oh. I haven't done hippos. I have a little clear glass enclosure in my, in my tavern. So, yeah, so everyone can look at hippos. That's great.

that's what that's what you need okay so nick thanks for joining us i hope that we stayed somewhat on the topic of new player stuff i know we got off but we always do you know got off topic so thanks for joining us um if people want to hear you want to meet you online or all that kind of junk uh how do they contact you what's your uh what's your uh links and websites and stuff well uh so i'm the host of the literate gamer podcast but i basically live on reddit um i'm not giving that handle out though here right um i mean uh i'm all over i use the the twitter account for literate gamer uh as the primary point of contact uh i don't know why i'm still on twitter uh as i watch it slowly collapse uh but you know i haven't found a good replacement yet i i thought about trying to mastodon but chatting people off your front porch that's the best equivalent i think i've just been leaning more into into discord now that i've been um so i mean you can find me in the kit fox uh discord server uh sinister octopus

it's my handle there i usually hang out in the uh the df questions channel for the most part i don't even know that i've ever been in the others um but yeah i mean i'm always willing to talk about door fortress so but i recommend that our listeners you're here check out the uh the literate gamer podcast and download that uh subscribe you know listen to the huge freaking backlog there's like 200 something episodes yeah yeah are they weekly or well they used to be weekly ostensibly weekly yeah yeah they used to be weekly we're we just came off of um basically a sabbatical well i'm I'm working on the podcast. It's been not great.

Like, COVID hit us pretty hard. We were both working in health care at the time. Not ideal. And then our listenership just fell off a cliff. And we were weekly for a while. And then I couldn't keep up that cadence. So he started doing like short,

like shorts episodes to keep up the, the regular weekly thing. And I don't think the shorts have gotten progressively worse as time went on. So, I don't know. I'm currently working on my own podcast and I have like five years of backlog that I need to figure out what I'm going to do about it. There's something you want to plug?

No, plug away. It's serial. It's a serial podcast, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just working on my side. I've thought about doing a history podcast, but I haven't taken the time to do that yet. So I've even thought about getting into streaming.

I don't know if that's for me, though, so we'll see. Well, thanks so much for coming on and we'll have you back and we'll chat some more because, you know, any anybody on here who can talk with us about because they don't always do things the way we do. Right. Like it's like with the Dr. Guild thing, it's literally been an eye-opening experience. And like if your new player getting into Door Fortress, like we've talked about a couple of times how much the community is a vital part of that. but like get into the the kit fox discord and ask questions like there's literally like an entire bench of grizzled vets that are that are willing to help you troubleshoot things like it's almost like you know an IT question kind of approach the reddit the subreddit is very active

and very nice once you learn the rules so use that as a resource so yeah the subreddit is super friendly as well yeah it is you don't lose the questions and answers on the subreddit too so you can historically search for things which is pretty neat and something that is gone with discord yeah you're given the uh you're given the search algorithm on reddit a lot of credit here but anyway well you got to use google more yeah yeah yeah i don't mean search on reddit i mean you know search redid via google yeah all right well everyone i hope everyone has a wonderful time playing door fortress if you're a new user uh hope you uh stick with it they can because it is a very rewarding game once you put just a little bit of time into it.

They say that there's a learning curve to it, but once that curve starts flattening out, you just get riches of enjoyment, and it's very fulfilling game. Or whatever the heck you call it. It's genuinely one of the games is the longest learning curve. Like, I didn't feel like I understood how to play this game until I was like 20 hours into it.

That's insane. Yeah. Yeah. I will say this, though. I think people who've played it a long time talk it up and make it sound, harder and more Kafka-esque than it really is, and it's not. And when you figure out how to, it just, it just kind of builds and radiates outwards. So it's like, you learn this. And then it makes sense.

And you learn this. And you make it make it make sense. So it's, it's not as, I would just say, don't be discouraged if you're, if you're picking it up and it feels overwhelming. It's not that bad. Yeah, I think the runway has gotten a lot shorter with premium. I think that 20 hours is now down to like four. Yeah. So come back next time and you'll hear more Dwell Fortress Dwar fortress discussion. I must have Dwar Fortress Talk, but that's not our podcast.

I wish they would do another... I wish they would start to do in more episodes of Door Fortress Talk again because we need to hear more of the... They might. They might. Oh, yeah? He has been talking about it. Awesome. Yeah, I'm going to reach out to Tarn after GDC.

I'm going to see if I can get both Tarn and Tanya on separate episodes to talk about both sides of the Dwar Fortress domestication process. so cool looking forward to that looking forward to that yeah beautiful okay so everyone happy fortress and we'll catch you next time thanks again nick thanks thanks terrific this has been the dwarf fortress roundtable podcast you can find all our past episodes at df roundtable dot com stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode while you're there you can subscribe to dwarf fortress round Table 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 Urist at DFRoundable.com. That's UR-I-S.T at D-F Roundtable.com. Please consider donating to the creators of Dwar Fortress 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 storeship is of the highest quality.