Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 82: Product Placement in Dwarf Fortress

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Well, it's just the three of us today. Sorry it's so late. Our conversation this episode covers fast growing trees, scholar forts, and other fortress concerns.

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. Be clever, amusing, never heard of those things. Oh, God, you're putting me on... Tony. My God, the pressure. The mine cart positioned right below your skull.

And Jonathan. That ought to be good enough. That's four seconds of a fun talk. So cool. As they present insightful, irreverent, and often incorrect analysis. And always remember, losing is fun. Welcome back to the Dwar Fortress Roundtable podcast. How are you folks doing, Tony Rowland?

It's just us for the first time in the scenes in a while. Yeah, I'm doing great. How are your various four-try? Do we call, do we say Fortry? Fortry. Fortresses. Fortresses. I think Fortresses is the right.

I think so, too, yeah. All right, all right. Yeah, I think so. Mine are going all right. It's not a whole lot of interesting progress. I have been off grid for a significant portion of the last couple weeks, which was absolutely wonderful. Went hiking.

If anyone has a chance to visit the Buffalo National River, in Arkansas, I highly recommend it. It is a beautiful, beautiful place. And I actually took a picture of myself standing on a rock or actually had my wife to it with my hands on my hips and my Dwarf Fortress T-shirt. This says, Strike the Earth. But unfortunately, I was so far away and the camera didn't catch the resolution enough so you can't actually read the shirt or make out my face.

Oh, man, you're going to have to go on vacation again. I know. I know. Absolutely, I will. I'll have to wear that t-shirt again too Yeah That's super That's really good

I'm glad that you Managed that Yeah I have I have not done anything Exciting like that And I don't have a DoorForge's t-shirt So maybe It's not official

Well I don't think he makes Official ones does he I think they were talking about They're going to Yeah no There are now official t-shirts With the Steam release Oh okay

I got to get one Yeah I'll check that out It's when you stay I don't know if it'll have the same charm as the smiley face that just says strike the earth. It's more graphical now, yeah. Yeah. And it actually probably

says Dwar Fortress. I believe so, yeah. You know, that's a great thing when you're trying to promote something to put the name of the thing that you want to promote on the thing that you're promoting it with. I'm for that. I think that's a great idea. I bet you learned that in a marketing

class. I didn't picked it up on the back of a McDonald's napkin. Yeah, Yeah, so scholar forts, that's what I've been working on, one of those things, and I have found some interesting stuff. What exactly does that mean? I saw you talking about that in chat. What the heck does that even mean? Well, for me, I suspect like all of these things, it has a different and special meaning for everyone. But for me, it's basically I try to design a fort around making books and trying to get the dwarves to write things and publish as many books as possible. possible. And then that brings in lots of scholars, which then, you know, has that effect of you get these weird science guys and people like astronomy and they start writing weird books and then all sorts of hijinks happen. That's what I've done. The one that I was working on, I built it outside with a clear glass roof and, you know, all of those goo gougas as one would need. I hit FPS problems at like 300 dwarves and I was not enjoying.

it as much so 300 I was like yes it was like it's so many more than I've had before I guess so but yeah I was like near 300 and yeah it was down to like 20 frames per second so pretty crappy um so I retired it and came back and it's still the capital uh but now it's like 80 people and I don't know where everyone went but the king and the queen are still there so a whole slew of barons who knows man these crazy guys I find it amusing that you say that 20 frames per second is unbearable because that was my cruising speed before premium came out. Yeah.

Oh, I don't have the patience for it. I don't have the patience for it. I actually have a funny story because, okay, first of all, I also started a Scholar Fortress. I saw you talking about it in the chat. I was like, you know what? Sounds fun. I am not playing with 300 wharfs.

Like, no, thanks. I'm having 70 people. And I like them very much. And now, there are several problems. My first problem is trees are growing too fast. There are too many trees on my map. Hmm. And I embarked in like a dual biome.

So one and a half of my map is a different biome than the other half. One of them does not have trees. The other has trees. And when I started to build the fortress, both sides had basically no trees at all. I saw like four. I had trouble actually getting one for the first beds. And now, when you look at my map, one part, sadly the part where part of my fortress is in, is so full of trees you can consider the rainforest.

The other is completely free of trees. and my caverns are also showing increased amounts of growing speed to the point where I had to make a cavern quantum dump system so that I can cut trees and quickly make my dwarfs chock the wood out of the cavern so I can lock it up again so I don't have to have the caverns open all the time. most curiously in the fortress I had before that I felt no difference between like

FPS in the caverns, FPS in my fortress FPS on the outside but now I have actually a layer where my computer slogs down and loses 20 FPS but only in two layers if I go below that layer it's fine if I go up it's fine but the two cavern layers I'm actually trying to live in,

I get 19 FPS and I do not know why. That's really weird. Regarding the trees, do you know what kind of trees those are that are growing fast? Is it softwoods by chance? I can see fungi woods growing fast. I wonder if they differentiate the grow rates between, you know, like oak trees and maple trees, they grow

pretty slow. If you talk about a cedar or a pine tree, those softwoods grow really fast. Oh yeah, what style? What's the kind of tree? Like Rambutan or You might be onto something because I have a lot of soft trees. It's mostly palms

like day palms and bitter lemons and whatnot. So yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I do have black caps in my second cabin layer that I'm living in. is as far as I'm aware they're not bad

like fungi wood I don't have too much fungi wood I don't have too much the white tower cap I have a lot of goblin goblin cap

hang on is that a dense wood I wouldn't think so I would think all of those are different types of mushrooms aren't they yeah that has cap on it I think of as being a mushroom. That's true, true, but

nether caps and bloodthorns grow really slowly. I punched into that layer, and there's not a lot of growing going on at that layer. What's a bloodthorn? It's... Is it wood? Yeah, yeah, it's in a third

cavern layer. It's red wood. Like blood reds? I could check for that. But yeah, I think you might be on to something. Maybe he tweaked the speed at which different densities of wood grow. Because I don't remember palms growing that fast. We are up to the point where I had to cut the map,

clean of wood, like the outer map, clean of wood two times in 20 years. And I can show you a screenshot on how thickly this is like grown in. to again as a forest. Thanks. And I feel like that's chogging a lot of my FPS. Oh, that does sound like it. I wonder if you, I wonder if that's just a species of tree thing or if it's a... So, according to Dungeons and Dragons, I kind of look up here.

Sounds like a good thing to look at. Yeah, well, the Bloodthorn is a tough, wiery plant that grows in briar-like patches. that has reddish berries and, yeah, it looks like it's kind of like a vine of some sort, like a big vine. But that is D&D's version. That does not necessarily hold true to Dwar fortress's version, I'm sure. And we got to, I think we're going to have to start generalizing now whenever we say, I wonder if he tweaked it. I don't think that that's necessarily true anymore. Now we've got to say, what if they tweaked it?

Because we got more than just Tarn with their. our fingers in the code now. It's true story. It's true, yeah. Interesting times. Are you ready for a night of entertainment in control relics? Join the throng at Brendan Pools the Berry of Bridging, the city's newest tavern. With a 110 square tile dance floor, you can dance the night away to your favorite tunes.

and don't miss out on a limited engagement from the renowned author Zuthan Ace Banners as he reads his story of the Foundation of Autumn Birth. Plus, you won't have to venture far to find us. We're conveniently located on the first level of the fortress. Come join Brendan Poole at the Bury of Bridging for a night you won't forget. I found an interesting thing here. I retired a fort and then and then have come back to unretire it. But I found that a lot of my doors are traveling, which that's great.

It's good to get out. But when somebody's traveling, like if you're a broker or your bookkeeper or your manager or traveling, you can't replace them. Oh. So you're screwed. So this port is doomed because I have yet to figure out how to untravel them. And I found a few weird things with squads and militaries. So one thing that I found is if you have, and this may be common knowledge to a lot of our listeners,

I don't know, or if this is idiosynocratic, to the new version, whatever, if you have a squad and you send it out on a raid of something and one of the members or more aren't ready to go or can't go because they have a broken leg or their bedridden or whatever, the rest of the squad will leave but never come back and so they will they will perpetually be gone that sounds like a bug yeah I think it probably is so the way I've found you can get rid of it is to kick the guy out that's not traveling or replace him with somebody who can travel and that might usually get the last straggler to get out there otherwise I've I've gotten through it by disbanding the whole squad and then everyone just magically reappears sometimes they don't

but oftentimes you can get them back like that anyway it's just a very strange foible so like you know if you have a bunch of injured dors which is why I abandoned this fortress in the first place is like am I providing a hospice here like what am I doing um like I don't know kick him out do you mean uh expel them from the fortress or just kick him out of the squad either one so you can kick him out of the squad but then you know maybe you still have a disabled dwarf that you're you you might not want to care for, and I'm not advocating for eugenia or anything. Maybe I am. I don't know. But, you know, it's like, what do you do? And I guess that leads me to my next question, which was this fort ended up with so many, like 300 people. There were a lot of, you know, if like one in five were broken down, like you're stuck with a lot of dead weight. What do you do with them? So that was my other thing. It's like I wasn't really sure, so I just abandoned the fort. Questions and comments raised by the guests of the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Lord Fortress Roundtable podcast. It's a game.

I'm not advocating going down to the nursing home and unplugging grand. I'm just saying, in the game. In the game, it would be really neat if there were like a retirement community you could send your doors to. Anyway. yeah so yeah that uh that having a party leave and not come back has got to be a bug and it seems like if you retire a fortress and then unretire it if you're not going to be able to replace a particular noble in the fortress if they are if they are out of town they should at least clear the nobles out of the fortress for whenever you come back and

and unretire the fortress that there are no nobles at all because that that seems like it might be a something to be addressed at a future time yeah i think this is a i think this particular one where your your nobles are traveling your people are traveling i think that i think this could be a game breaker um i don't know that there's any way to get them back except maybe just wait and hope that they come back but like a lot of these are like squads of one dwarf who is traveling and i suspect will never return so and you can't disband the squads either so it's a bit of a bit of a pickle a bit of a pickle we find ourselves in here will not let you disband those squads i definitely try to keep my nobles out of squads except for the the you know the military oh for sure you know how it you know how it is when you abandon a fort anything can happen yeah i rarely unabandoned them go ahead go ahead rolling i i only did it a few times because i like them running in the back background, but every time I did it, all my stockpiles are now empty, and everything that used to be in the stockpile is now all over the map, like everywhere, and the whole map

is just cluttered with stuff. I'm not sure if that still happens in the Steam version, because I have yet to do that in the Steam version, but before the Steam version, it happened to me a few times, and I was like, why, why is this happening? And then I had to spend, I don't know, quite a long while for my dwarfs to just collect this stuff and bring it back into the stockpile. Did you have to unfurbid it? Did you have to unfurbid the stuff? No, no, they instantly went to it and did it, and it was weird. At least is that. Yeah, I've not had a good experience with unretiring fortresses either.

So I don't even think that I've tried it with the version 50. But in previous versions, yeah, it never worked out well. So I just pretty much stopped trying. When I retire a fortress, I consider it done. Yeah, I've done things like that I've done the retire and unretire a few times. I've just, I've never had one where you've come back to something that you're screwed. Like there's nothing you can do. You can't have a manager.

you can't counter your goods you're just doomed like playing the game without a manager is pretty tricky pretty tricky to play this game without a manager nothing gets done so yeah that's a bummer but maybe you can i'm just going to play and see if i can save it somehow maybe they come back what's that maybe they come back yeah exactly but you've got to keep the fort alive until then you don't have any way to batch jobs of You're kind of doomed. I'll just put, like, click on repeat and just let it go where it goes. Yeah, totally.

Exactly. The old, the old school way of doing it. D.F. Hack. I don't know. I stopped using D.F. Hack as well. I didn't find I needed it. I'm not advanced enough, I guess. Well, I haven't used it at all with the, I think that's a beta that's out right now for version 50.

I have not, I've not, I've not installed that. Have either of you installed that at all? I did. Yeah, I installed it that didn't use it. Oh, I did actually use it. I did install it. You should check it out on both my YouTube channel and my Twitch account because I did a small tutorial on how to use it

and how to use QuickFort in a very simplistic way. Oh, QuickFort. That would be good to learn that one. That sounds useful. That's the one for Blueprint. a dungeon, isn't it? I mean, a, not a dungeon. A fortress, right?

Yeah, it gives you, like, stamps. Don't make me carve out the... Yeah, it gives you stamps, and you can go, like, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, and then it's sand it all over the place. Yeah, for bedrooms, it's great. That would be amazing. And tombs would be cool, too. It can also, like, smooth the walls and actually put furniture in it.

So, yeah, it's pretty good. Was there one where you could use a... Excel spreadsheet to load your fortress on, like export and import a fortress. Was that QuickFort? Am I nuts? I have to admit that I only tried QuickFord once before the Steam version,

and it was very confusing, so I stopped. But now it's all implemented in the very game. You don't have any extra additional things. you just open a window inside the actual game and type in what you want to try it again Quick Fort 2 is the utility for drill fortress

that helps you build fortresses from a blueprint CSV XLS or XLSX file so that's Joel PT I don't know if he forked that from something else but it's on a GitHub so don't see when the last update was oh oh gee whiz just ignore this this last update was in 2013 so never mind that was a couple years ago that was a couple versions ago too yeah might not work I said I'm not feeling good about that one working

Got an email a few weeks ago from a listener who's going by G. Rad, who had some problems with the work orders. His work orders tended to be overproducing, overproducing items. And I just basically wanted to shout out and say thanks for the, we corresponded a little bit. I had some messages back and forth through the Urist at DFRoundable.com email address. And I did want to mention to everybody out there that whenever you are brewing drinks and you tell the work order that you want to brew 10 items. So like if we have our drinks drop below 30, then let's go ahead and brew 10 items. So whenever you brew those 10 items, though, for each item that you're brewing, you get five units of alcohol. I think it's five.

So five or is it 10? I think it's five. Anybody? Okay, I'll buy it. Sounds good. Yeah, sure. In any case, when you're overproducing like that, it may be that you're thinking that what you're telling it to produce

is the number of units of alcohol you want, but it's not. It's telling you the number of items that you want to brew. So let's say that you have fruit. So you go collect fruit, you come back, you brew with that fruit. And whenever you brew, you have created five units of alcohol out of that. one fruit batch. So if you tell it that you're going to want it to brew 10 units of alcohol when you drop below 30, then when you drop below 30 units of alcohol, it's going to brew 50 units for that 10. Does that make sense? So if you're overproducing alcohol, that could be

the reason. So you might want to back off the amount that you're asking them to brew on the automatic work order thing. Of course, what's that what's that law that says if I said something wrong. Someone on the internet will point it out really quick. That's Cunningham's Law. Cunningham's Law, yeah. Or is it? Or is it? Tune into the next episode

to see if it is actually Cunningham's Law. Actually, that's a common misconception. People think of it as Cunningham's Law, but that's the Mandela effect, actually. It is the Howard effect, the Howard's Law, because it was named for Ronnie Howard who played Richie Cunningham. Oh, for God's sakes.

I'm full of crap. I'm just BS and sorry. But anyway, thanks a lot, G-Rad for sending in an email. And if anybody else out there wants to send in an email to us to ask a question, we will certainly address it on the show. Eurist at DFRoundtable.com. U-R-I-S-T at D-F Roundtable.com. And if you miss that, you can catch it in the outro to the show.

Outro. That's a fun word to say. So, let's see. What else we got to chat about? out here. It looks like we are still at version 50.07. I just opened up Door Fortress and it did not update. So,

Nope. Has anybody heard anything about what they're working on at the moment? Are they telling us still? Are they still telling us? Yeah, we got, it's March 1st. Aren't we supposed to, isn't there usually an update?

Oh, yeah. Last of the month. It's how we guess we're recording on March 1st. It's probably by the time. someone hears this won't be March 1st but you know hopefully I'll be able to get this out Sunday or Monday for everyone out there we uh because of scheduling issues and I was out of town and I was like said off grid we didn't record at our normal time

nope looks like a no fortress future of the fortress and no dev notes yet so well so you'll know before we do yep we're still in we're in that quantum state the past yeah the past we're in the past right now okay

well I don't know that I have really much to talk about well this would be a really short episode it could be which is fine which is absolutely fine yeah

it could be so yeah I don't know go for it I hate to circle back to it but I have to just look up trees because I was

getting insane over it okay so right from the time by the way I'm literally reading from the wiki so don't this is not my opinion

this is the wiki's opinion from the time a sapling appears it takes about three years for a tree to grow. Okay. Trees make a growth check every once every year and then grow randomly. So it's possible for the tree to reach their maximum height, faster or slower.

And you thought about it being the density or like quote unquote fast growing trees. But if I look it up, one of the trees that I have a lot of is to date palm and that has a high density. it has a high wood density it's actually number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Is a date palm considered, is it considered a conifer? No, that's a palm.

A day palm is a palm tree. Yep. Which is to say very different than a deciduous tree. It is not deciduous, but it's not a conifer though, is it? It's not a conifer. It's a datifer. A dafer.

A thigie fur. A data fur, I guess. I think either, yeah. I don't know what family is. But around here, it's either a hardwood or evergreen. And the evergreens tend to grow fast, pines and cedars and things like that. Yeah, palm trees are really, tend to grow really slowly. It's not a, yeah, it's not one that you plant and hope for shade in a couple of years.

I think they're, they're known to be pretty slow growers. Interesting. Yeah, that's a thing. And what version, Roland, was that covering? on the D.F. Wiki page. This is supposed to be for the newest version, but then again, I feel like they just took a lot from the previous version and just copy-paste it into the new one.

So I'm not sure if this information that is here is genuinely all fully accurate for this current version. Because I feel like it's, okay, I mean, I did play a good like 30 years in that, fortress. I just let it run. Let's not talk about how much time I wasted again. But I managed to get 30 years into the fortress. Was it 30? No, it's around 23, I think. Yeah, it should be slightly above 20, actually. But the amount of trees is still insane. Or is it just my feeling for the time that I'm losing when I'm playing dwarf fortress that makes me feel like oh these trees are everywhere even though

they're just you know taking three years yeah yeah maybe you're just maybe you're just seeing patterns where they aren't i i have to look into it i will actually now look into how fast these things grow and if one or the other tree is growing faster than the other it's not saying that in the Rawls that are posted here on the wiki but you know then again who knows also something that I did say and this is

again a jump by the way this is again a jump something that I said in the discord which I found very funny my scholar fortress called Priest Mines is currently being seized by a goblin civilization called hell of books

and I did not actually plan that I didn't really do anything to the goblin so far I was just trying to build it up and then at some point raid the goblin civilization and they showed up on my turf before that and I looked at their chestplate to find out because they have like

stuff engraved on the chest plate and that usually tells you where they came from so I looked it up and I was like hell of books on my scholar fortress is like I planned it. Delicious. That's brilliant. Love it.

Love it. The hell of books, Goblin civilization must have heard about your scholar fortress and thought, hey, that's lots of books for us to go kill people and eat them and take them and read them and maybe learn the secrets of life and death from. I have not yet gotten any cool books like that, to be honest. I mostly made my own books, and sometimes the humans come by and send me the same, a book every time, but they don't tell me it's the same book because it just says like blah, blah, blah bound codex or blah, blah, blah, scroll. And when it says the name, I'm like, yeah, okay, I have this like six

times already. But if it doesn't say the name, I just buy it in the hopes it's something new. I later then it inspected, it's the same book again. Oh, man. It's a boring book, actually. It's not a great book. I read it. It's boring. I was really happy of a lot of the books that I had. Like, I ended up getting, they were, they went crazy writing. Like, my dudes and the fortress with the missing dwarves, I mean, they did so much writing. It was, it was, it was heartwarming. I mean, you had 300 people. Yeah.

Yeah. How do you even do that? Did you have to, the default is 200, right? They kept coming. Like, people just kept turning up because I had my, and I thought, I thought I would hit a cap. I didn't really understand what was happening. Yeah, I was sure I would hit a cap and people just kept coming in. So like there would be more scholars coming and there would be people coming to entertain and there would be like it was relentless.

I mean, it was just constant. And then more migrants would come and like once it became the capital of the civilization, then everything just kind of went nuts. And then I did start some wars with the elves, which I think may have created refugee situations, but I don't know that. Yeah, I get a crap ton of entertainers. I don't know what's so entertaining about my tavern, but apparently it's the venue to play. So many. What ages are you playing in right now? I've, uh, uh, my world is 102 years old.

Mm-hmm. Is that what you mean? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, yeah, my father is. I made it 10 years with it before I had the FPS problems. And now I've just been, oh, goofing to try to see if I can get. I misunderstood.

I thought you were asking me how old the world was. No, no, no. I was asking about the year of the year in the game world. Oh, like, oh, yeah, one or two. Yeah, my fortress is only two years old, so the one I'm controlled Earlux down. Like I said, I've not progressed very far because, one, I haven't played as much as I would have liked to in the last few weeks. And number two, I'm spending a lot more time actually looking over my dwarfs. years old, though, and I've got a population of 98, and a significant portion of that population

is entertainers. I've got a goblin poet who's just hanging out in the, in the, uh, tavern. It's tough. Right now he's listening. I am jealous. I have, okay, hang on. I actually know all the entertainers, because I have like eight, and they keep coming back, and they keep petitioning. And we have, um, what's his face? Uh, we have castry open leopard. Cool dude. I like him but he's very clingy then we have a dwarf that usually comes with his two friends and they're like a potty troupe right uh performance troupe is the word both of his friends are kind of unremarkable bards but he is very interesting because his i think his left hand was it is rotten and it stinks and he is constantly annoyed that he is smelling miasma and i was like okay what is stinking of

the place. And I found out it's his hand. His hand is just rotten, but he refuses to do anything about it. And it has been years since the first time I saw him. I saw him in the other fortress that is on the other part of the world. But now he's here with me again. And he still has this rotten, stinking hand. And I'm not sure what's up with that. You hate to see it. Yeah. And he's called like golden champions room champions that's his last name room champions right weird dude and he keeps showing up and not petitioning anymore and just stinking of the place and then leaving again but the coolest person shout out is a man called door dash door dash yes like the food delivery service like the food delivery service and when i found him in

In the other Fortress, he came to me, and I was like, you know what, your skills are terrible. You're a terrible bar. You do not even know how to say, play a single instrument. But your name is funny. Oh, I'm going to have to protest about this. I'm going to have to make a big stink on the Bay 12 games for us. We've got product placement now. Product placement.

Yeah, he's going to say, that's tough. We got DoorDash, and then, you know, next thing you know, you're going to have Instacart show up. Yeah. And now he's serving. people, wine and food in my tavern, and I think that's very fitting. Also, he has become an amazing bard, and he usually plays the ochre now. Yeah, the freaking caravan's going to have the Amazon smile logo on it. Just don't say one-click orders. Just don't do that. We're going to sell you the caravan dot so that you can order your drinks anytime you want. Just say.

This segment of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable was brought to you by Blood Toes, creator of a Maserluck Tustum author, belted hail the courtesies of a racing. This is a pecan wood figurine of Cybrec Wheelsbear. All crafts worship is of the highest quality. The item is a masterfully designed image of Cybrec Wheelsbear the dwarf and dwarves in Pecan Wood. Cybrec Wheelsbear is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Cybrec Wheelsbear to the position of Queen of the Wealthy Rag in the Year 1. It is encrusted with cushioned cut milk quartses, decorated with monkey leather and encircled with bands of cedar and buffalo bone. This object is adorned with hanging rings of shell opal and menaces with

spikes of pecan wood, shell opal, milk quartz, and copper. Imazerluck Tustam author, belted hail the courtesies of erasing by blood toes. So, hey, real quick, out of 98 of my people, out of 98 of my people, out of 98 of my population in my fortress that is just over two years old. I guess it's pushing three years old now. But 28 of my 98 are entertainers.

Most of those are bards. A few of them are poets. I have one dancer. But 28 of my 98 are entertainers that are just hanging out, listening to stories and making people wonderful. Wait, are we talking about your citizens or other people?

The population, whenever you look at the top of your screen, and the population and the happiness, happiness numbers, those all include people who are, uh, just want to come in and entertain people. So your population count includes, uh, visitors, that have, that have, that have, that petitioned you. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. They're not necessarily citizens, but they have petitioned you to come in for purposes of entertaining. Right. Yeah. Or monster hunting or militarying. Yeah.

So many bars. Yeah, 28. Wow. Most of them are bards. A lot of them are dwarves. A significant percentage is human. I have a goblin poet. So that's kind of interesting.

Huh. Cool. Yeah. Very jealous. Yeah. Two and a half, three years. And I've got all of this entertainment stuff. So maybe I should, I should be marketing my fortress out as the, you know, the new Branson. You could. Yeah, get yourself a couple of Elvis impersonators and steal guitars and you'll be off to the races.

Yeah, that sounds amazing. One more question. How many of your people are good at dancing? I'm not talking about the bards that you actually now have partitioning to stay, but I'm talking about your citizens. How good are they at dancing and how often do they do it? How can you tell how good they are? It's in the skills. There is a dancer skill.

Well, I mean, I mean, how can I, is there a way for me to, to, in my list of creatures where I'm looking at my citizens, is there a way for me to say, okay, sort these by their skill at dancing? I know, sadly. I would have to just look at them individually. Yeah, you will have to look at them individually. So I don't have time to do that at the moment. I've not noticed them being particularly good, though. Yeah. Right now, I don't see anybody except for my dance.

visitor, I don't see anybody who's currently dancing. Because in my last fortress, I was slightly obsessed with trying to get them to dance because I had a lot of musical instruments and it was like, come on, dance, please. I want to see a steam graphic dance, please, come on. They didn't do it. They did it very rarely and very short. And so I made a new fortress, new civilization, same world. and those people pretend to dance

and it's weird because they do not move but it says that they're dancing it's just a really calm thing yeah I believe they're just standing on the same spot and like moving their body who knows but they are putting a weird figure of a nine

that is like put on the side so it's not even a distinct shape that they're doing but they do the weird nine on the side every single time and then it just says they're dancing and it's like 15 people at once and then they're not moving for I don't know 10 seconds and then they I think I know what they might be happening here so have you ever seen those documentaries about like Woodstock or Haydashbury where you have people who are who are on psychedelics who are standing there slowly raising their arms wiggling their

fingers look like trees blowing in the wind so that maybe there's certain mushrooms that are growing in your caverns oh yeah so maybe these are those people yeah that's the kind of dancing yeah yeah maybe he's put that in there could be could be to grow with your hemp in your the queen mandated that hemp is now legal and all the doors come and suddenly food production is at an all-time high because you can't keep up with yeah yeah and Export of hemp is no longer legal in your fortress. You have to keep it. Just for your adores.

He's a very greedy queen. Queen has mandated brownies. I had a question I was going to ask, and I forgot what it was. It was going to be a good one, too. It was going to be insightful. It was going to bring about world peace. World peace, even. I'm not a world peace.

I'm about to destroy the goblins. Oh, I know what it was. If I had a request for a feature for Dwarf Fortress, it would be whenever you're looking at the character sheet for your dwarf, that's what I'm calling that information thing with all the, you know, 24, six, eight, ten tabs or whatever. I would like to have a arrow that lets you click one button to scan to the next dwarf in the list. So you don't have to go back to the full list of your dwarves.

That's good. I would just like to sit there and click, read about that one, click read about that one oh that's interesting click read about the next one and so on that would be great yeah and that kind of management stuff would be really cool like when you're assigning dwarfs to squads it would be really really really cool to have something where you could organize them by their skills uh because otherwise it's oh really very very time consuming to have to scroll through the whole thing huh if you could just be like show me swordsman i think there was a little utility called dwarf therapist that did that very well huh you guys

your doorth day. And you know what? No, that was great about it, yeah. Yeah, no, it was great. Well, I don't know if you could put them in squads, could you? Could you, can you put people in squads with therapists? Absolutely, you can. You could actually, yes.

It was a little bit complicated. You can sort them by their, by their martial skills. What's that, Roland? It was a little bit complicated, in my opinion. But you could definitely sort them by skills of fighting or I actually had a customized tab. Armour wearing. Yeah, I had a full customized

tab in dwarf therapist where it sorted people with different characteristics so I could not see who had the best military skills, but who had the best military mindset, which I found to be much more important. And now that's on there too, yeah.

It's still possible. You see it when you click on the dwarf, yes. But it's more clickety-clack. Yep, if I wanted to If I wanted to sort all of the dwarves first by their skill with a hammer and then by their leadership abilities, that was quite possible. First you click the hammer sort, then you click the leadership abilities. And it would be like with Excel.

The secondary sort is the previous thing you sorted on. So, yep. I am looking forward to dwarf dwarf therapist being fully compatible with. version 50.x. Hazzah, kudos to, I'm sad that I don't have the name in front of me now, the person or persons who are working on dwarf therapists, but I would love to see legends.

Again, that's one of my legends, legend theory, or any of those things, because I really do miss being able to easily jump in and have a look at that stuff. attention citizens of the city of control relics i implore you to listen to this urgent message from lucas head of the control relics guard the department of dwarven safety is deeply concerned about the recent increase in theft of valuable artifacts from our fortress we cannot let these criminal acts go unpunished the culprits will be found and will face the consequences of their actions

We urge all residents to stay alert and report any suspicious activity to the guard. Let us join forces to safeguard our precious relics and uphold the security and prosperity of our esteemed fortress. Thank you for your cooperation. Lucas out. If I had one utility that I want, it would be a very simplistic one, but I would want, if I click on a dwarf and I see her as character sheet, I want... I want a happiness smile that tells me this dwarf has this or that mood because we used to have those arrows. We do not have those arrows. And now sometimes they get moodles, which kind of work like arrows, but they tell a lot more than the errors back in the day.

They can even tell me, oh, this person is really drunk. This person had a happy thought and stuff like that. But I would like to have, because if you sought them in the big list, you do see the happiness smiling. You can't even sort by a least or most happy. But now the logical next step would simply putting that happiness smile that is already put behind each single name on the character sheet. Again, we do have enough space to do that. Then you could actually click on a person and instantly see how happy. are you? Well, we'll submit this episode to Putnam and...

Yeah, we just put this in. We hold quite sway. We'll just attach this... We'll attach this MP3 to a bug report or a future request. Yeah, that'll be awesome. No, I agree with you. That would be really cool. And I also would like to have... I think that it was Nick Rust. It may have been blind and teched, but someone was on here talking about previous versions of Door Fortress, that big red

arrow lets you know as they're walking by that they're hacked off. I can have 150 complaints, but I love the game. So don't consider the griping and complaining to be a

dis because it's the most awesome game ever made. It comes from a place of caring. Yes. okay anything else anyone want to go over in today's episode only only the notice that i managed to make amazing platinum goblets of all the same quality and i'm very happy about it it was a little bit of hassle oh yeah yeah yeah yeah was that you who said that the way to make your dwarfs happy when drinking is to give them metal goblets yes and i

managed to get every single goblet is around 1,800 something in like dwarf bucks exactly in value so it's all masterful

platinum goblets there is nothing less than masterful I smelted everything else away and then I embellished every single goblet with both bones and brass and duels.

Wow. So that was a little bit of a hassle to go through because I actually had to link stockpiles here and there and blah, blah, blah, and to make sure that they only encrusted the masterful goblets while the old goblets that are not masterful are currently smelted back. But it worked.

I have around 60 goblets, masterful, amazing quality. And every single person that picks it up is like, wow, that is a nice goblet. I'm happy. And there are some expensive beer cups you got there, mister. Yeah. And they're all, how you say, kind of the same, because I managed to actually find a lot of the same jewels.

I have the same bones and the same metal, and then the same metal studying. So they're all very not unique, and I like that. do you make them out of native platinum or do you actually smelt the the native platinum into bars and then make the goblets out of the bars the pure metal bars yeah okay because you can also make a valuable cup out of the I know you can do it with silver nuggets gold nuggets and platinum nuggets and that treats them more like I think they're still considered stone though

yep there's still considered stone but you there was a lot yes yes but you can squeeze like a few percentages out of it if you make metal. So I did that. Also, I like the idea of having a like full-sized actual thick metal platinum

goblet. Like pure platinum is heavy. You can barely lift that thing. It's massive. It's thick. And it's like breaking your god on hands when you try to lift it. I love that. Does it slow your dwarfs down?

wherever they're trying to carry it around or have you noted? Well, good thing they're not carrying it around too much because, you know, I have drinks in my tavern. They only have goblets in my tavern. I don't have goblets anywhere else. So that means they have to stand right next to the

drink bell and that works better. I need to do that. Yeah, yeah. It helps. It helps. It also makes the distance between like thirsty dwarf and the barrel that they're going to drink out slightly shorter.

But they're not weighed down by too much. But you could see that while they were hauling, they were slightly slower than normal. I got one last thing I'd like to bring up. I had a necromancer in my fortress. And this necromancer, I'm pretty sure it was a migrant. But he got killed. And I was a little surprised.

I didn't, for some reason I was thinking that necromancers were immortal? I guess they can be immortal, but get their heads chopped off? Is that right? Yeah, yeah. We're not talking about like Wolverine immortality, but they just get stabbed and they, like, okay, now. It's more of a skeleton in a dungeon situation

where the skeleton is technically dead, but if you bonk it really hard, it dies again and then kind of stays dead. So I was sad and Although I guess I should be happy that Necrobancer didn't make zombies out of stuff in my fortress. Tony, anything to add? I don't think so. I think I've said what I thought needed saying, and now I need to go and play a little bit more of the game. I thought you were going to say, go back to work.

Oh, I suppose I could do that. It's a work day, isn't it? So there you go. Yeah, yeah. So I guess we'll wrap things up here. Thanks again, guys, for changing your schedule. dual to match mine. Appreciate that.

So yeah, we will catch everybody next time. Got some guests that are going to be coming on, but it was nice this time to just chat amongst the three of us. It's been a while. Yeah, it's awesome. Thanks for putting it together, and thanks for your guys' flexibility on a school day. Yep, yep, yep.

School day. You know what I mean. So everybody out there in Dwarfortress, land, happy Fortresson, and we'll all catch you next time. Awesome. See ya. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundable.com.

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