Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 90: 50.10, 50.10-r1, and AI

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

In this fun episode, We discuss the new releases of DF and DF Hack, our fortresses, and the role of AI in DF and video games.

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And if you can't tell, I am in the midst of hay fever season. And I figure everywhere around the world in the northern hemisphere, 70% of humanity knows what I'm talking about. Because I think it's a worldwide. phenomenon these allergies. Sign of the

times, man. Is ragweed a problem in Berlin? A ragweed? I don't... wait. Ragweed? Like a rag and a weed? I don't even know. No, it's a particular kind of plant. I don't know. Maybe it's indigenous to the western... Or to, you know,

North America... You guys, I just looked it up and my computer, and my computer says, in German it's called Ambrosie, which makes it sound actually pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, we don't have that here. But we have a lot of other plants that stink up the atmosphere. And my brother has allergies as well.

I'm spared. I'm so lucky. Hoo! But he is not. Well, Roland, the really good news is you still have time because you can develop allergies well into your adulthood. So don't worry. You don't have to feel totally left out.

It could still happen. Oh, boy. I just wanted to leave it on a sunny note here for you. Oh, thanks. You're left out. Eh, no problem. So this is episode 90 of Dwar Fortress Roundtable. Oh, God, it is.

Goodness. Yes. This is another round, arbitrarily named episode that is only round because humans have 10 fingers. Episode 90. Most, most humans. Yes, yes. That is, I guess, the default. Factory issued.

Yeah, it's the factory issued. Dwarves also have 10 fingers typically, unless they are members of squads that have seen action, in which case, fingers might be lost. Is that right? Do they... I don't know. Did the dwarfs have fingers? Yeah. It's a question for Tarn.

They have fingers, but how many? That's ten. I'm pretty sure they do have ten. Can you lose individual fingers in Dwarf fortress? Oh, yeah. They probably come back and haunt you or something if you're in their own file. I know that you can bruise the fat underneath the skin of a... It's not surprising that they are that detailed.

So version 50.10 was released since we last. since we last recorded an episode. And in typical fashion, they released it the day after we recorded our episode. Yeah. Well, I love that we coordinate that with them. I think that's, I mean, it's just great. It's really great. You know, it used to be, A, they released a new version of D.F. Hack.

There's going to be a release of Dwar Fortress soon. Now they released an episode of Dwar Fortress Roundtable. They must be about to release an episode of a version of Dwar Fortress. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. It's like D.F. Hack is like catching up to the releases now. It's the upside down world that we're in.

I have had a chance to play the game a few times. I've spent a couple hours with it. And yeah, this announcement browser, the tabs for the announcements, it's exactly what I was looking for, I think, so far. It's really nice. And I like the fact that you can see the combat logs for individual dwarves from the dwarf's detail window. That's really neat.

It is, it's really organized nicely. And there's stuff that I think I never saw before, which is really cool. And the other thing that I like is you can personalize it so you can have it pause and re-center on certain things. So like when the diplomats arrive, you can know that and not miss the caravan. I really appreciate that. That's made things kind of fun. So you can customize.

the uh the pausing from the yeah from the answer's window in the settings you can go in and it lets you what are there i'm doing this from memory now because i don't want to load the game up while we record because then oh yeah i'm getting distracted and you're like what uh no there's oh got it got it yeah it is better than i expected like so like not that i have low expectations but like i didn't imagine it would be that configurable so it's really cool oh that is cool oh wow that's that's totally detailed it's yeah i mean i can't imagine wanting to do some of those things but i know that there are probably people listening who are like finally on weapon twist i can pause the game and re-center that's awesome that they've given us that now this is what i've been missing for my

life you can pause and re-center on a vomit action yeah oh hell yeah it's just like real life every time a dwarf vomits you can recenter on them you know that's i it seems hilarious but Also, maybe not the worst idea I've ever heard, because sometimes that means things are going badly, or like somebody's gotten into a fight, or you've got a norovirus outbreak. You've got to get on that stuff. Actually, what would be interesting is pausing and on biting when fighting were beasts. Yes, that would be really good. So you'd know if you needed to handle things, maybe? So I know that if a were beast bites your dwarf, I don't know if you have to actually see that the skin was broken or not,

but if a were beast bites your dwarf, that dwarf is most likely infected. How about if your dwarf bites the wear beast? Then your dwarf is just kind of kinky, but nothing really happens. So, okay, so they probably won't catch lachanthropy from biting a were beast. Yeah, they're perfectly fine. They're just a complete maniac. I did have a dwarf bite of wear beast. I followed the combat very, very closely.

Oh, by the way, we were talking about our last episode, the Baroness Consort and trying to figure out why she was hostile. It was because she was a wear beast. And by the time one of our dwarves saw her, she had apparently had turned back into her dwarf form. Yeah, I caught her with a cage trap, along with a wear lemur that was a gobliner. in its normal form.

But I tried to trade them off to elves. And Roland, you told me in a message that, be careful if you try to sell sentient beings because they get uncaged, yeah. They get uncaged. Yes, and this did happen. I thought I was going to be able to sell them both of the were creatures to the elves,

but the elves let them loose and took the cages. The Weirleamer escaped off the edge of the map, and I had to sick some squads on the on the Baroness Consort, unfortunately. And she didn't make it very much longer than that. Do we do a moment of silence on that? Or is it all right?

Nah, she wasn't a very popular figure in the fortress anyway. She spent a good part of two months, maybe even longer than that, maybe three months. Out in the open in her cage by the front entrance of the fortress because she was on display. They had a little animal cage section that was out in the open, and the dwarfs would gawk at them as they walked by. Very polite, very dwarfy. Okay, but back to the task at hand, we had a version 50.10 released, and I think that the big difference that I know is the announcements, it's the one that I really paid attention to a lot. Was there anything else that was notable that you guys are aware of for the release? I read about Marxdorves being sorted out, but I haven't had an opportunity to test whatever

was supposedly broken or needed fixing. Yes, I kind of agree on that. I had a discussion with actually somebody in our new Discord about Marks Wars and their marks was returning from a raid and then dropping all their gear on the floor and then only advancing into the fortress so i tried to raid with my archers a little bit to like replicate the the bug or that behavior let's say it like that and weirdly enough i never got to really replicate it uh i got it i got it at one point somebody dropped all their armor it was not the entire squad and then i just try to oh can i like do it again if i load

that save just a second earlier and then it was gone like I don't know what happened it's so weird but I don't know either what got fixed and I don't think they were that

well they were somewhat broken because they sometimes took ammo and sometimes they didn't and that has been fixed but other than that where's the release notes I thought that they would be on the Beethoven

games.com devlog, but I'm seeing that they have an announcement where they made the release, but I don't see any dev notes there. As in the change log. I think the change log is now just on Steam on the main page, if you click on the game.

And here it says ammo assignments are updated properly when changing uniforms. Oh, oh, this is interesting. Removed ownership of food items whenever they are dropped stops rotten food hoarding in rooms

I remember that happening several times and at least two times when I was on a stream where people just especially like in the squad you don't assign them a backpack and they go and grab some food and then they have it in their hands and at some point they drop it to do something else and then they forget about the food that is now on the floor

because they just dropped it and they just walk away and they go and get new food because they now need a food item, and then they just burn through all the prepared food that you have in your fortress in, like, two days because they just chuck it everywhere. If that's actually fixed, that's amazing. I like the sound of that. In the annals of history, as chronicled by the scribe Lucas with quill and parchment, during the autumn of the year 110, marking the fifth year since the fortress's inception,

Mayor Oboktaltrated meticulously scrutinized the surveys crafted by the skilled dwarven engineers. Her discerning gaze settled upon a site strategically positioned near the entrance of the fortress, bisected by the majestic river coursing through the passionate dune. It was here that the grand undertaking of Fortress Iredum Nast was destined to take root, the new tower of showing. Two imposing platforms, each spanning a remarkable 14 by 12 units, were meticulously erected using Hewn Andesite blocks, gracing either bank of the mighty river.

Stockpiles of these blocks were arranged in proximity to the construction site, and the labor of shaping the grand edifice began. This monumental tower, as ordained by the hand of destiny, would serve as a beacon of dwarven engineering excellence within the realm of the wealthy rag civilization. Mayor Obok found solace in contemplating the dreams of the late elder Bim, confident that his cherished memory would find due honor. Thus, the indelible record stands,

as etched in the enduring annals by the ancient historian Lucas. So you guys have been playing much? Yes, I have been playing mostly trying to pay attention to the new announcement system. But I also found that, well, the day that I downloaded the 50.10 version, I also tried to run D.F. Hack, and of course, D.F. Hack wasn't updated yet at that point. The next time that I started Door Fortress, which I think was the next day, D.F. Hack was updated. So there is a DFHack version 50.10-R1 that seems to be the current version. And there's been some nice little changes to DFHack, too, if you use it.

I noticed what stands out the most to me was the squads menu. If you have DF hack running and you are going to add people to the squad, you have a secondary menu that comes up by the list of dwarves that you have to choose from to add to your squad, and you can sort them by their melee effectiveness, their mace effectiveness, their need for training, their stress, all of those numbers that have values that apply to an attribute of the dwarf, now you can sort by whenever you're choosing dwarf. warves to add to your squad. It is really, really handy. I don't think this existed before. If it did, I didn't notice it. But yeah, it is just wonderful. You can also, I'm not sure what the search, there's a search function. I'm not sure what you're searching for. If it's a name or I think it's the name. I hope it's. It is name, yeah. Is that new or does that, did that exist before with PFAC? You could definitely search for things, but that might also just have been like a D.F. Hack added feature because I can no longer tell, if I'm being honest. But the whole

like melee efficiency, range efficiency thing, that is, that is like fully new. Yeah. Have you, have you got Dwar Fortress open right now? You're rolling? I have to admit that yes. Okay. So, so click on your squads, your squads menu. I have it open. I'm looking at it right now. It's freaking amazing. Isn't that great? Yeah. I can even search for stress, need for training. below the things that are the sorting order choices you have filters built in filters for dwarves so if you don't want to see anybody who is critically injured you can exclude them in the in the squads menu yeah if you open up if you open up squads and then you like click on a member of a squad and it brings up the let's add more people to your squad yeah yeah i think the one above it is way way more interesting because it tends weak mental fortitude include, and that means I can just exclude people from going into the military when they're like bonkers.

Well, here's where I use this, and it's the most practical use of it that I've found so far, I set critically injured to only so that it only shows people that are critically injured. And if any of those people are in one of my squads, I remove them from the squad because I don't want them, I don't want them to be critically injured and then get called out to go fight goblins, right? Yep. True. Yeah, it's really cool.

Really cool. You can exclude nobility. That's just darn great. It looks like you can also sort out ranged potential, too, so you can find out, I don't know how it does it, because it looks like some of these people have no relevant skills, but it's determined that they are potentially good fits for your military. Yeah, the most interesting thing about that is that you have one mealy, efficiency and a different point for mealy potential yeah and same with ranged yeah yeah so with

the ranged and they look for apparently different things because if i click on mealy efficiency the people that are up with the green 100 are obviously the people that have been training in my military fortress for like 20 years now but when i click on mealy potential the like the person with the biggest number is just Atyr Catanek, who is a scholar, and he only has a 47. And then the first person that is actually a soldier only has a 64. So I'm very interested in what those numbers actually mean. I can't remember. Roland, did you play with, oh, oh boy, I can't remember.

I can't remember the name of this. It was the spreadsheet-like utility used with version 47 and earlier. It was like the dwarf therapist. Thorf therapist. Yeah. You had me in spreadsheet. Yeah. I did.

Love it. Big Excel fan. Huge. You should listen to my other podcast on Excel. It's really high. I do play in Excel. Yes. That is my game.

We have had, we have episodes. 16, 32, 52, 51, 62, and I think 67, all talk about dwarf therapists. So if you're interested in those, just go back. Those are all random numbers. I don't think that, I don't know that those actually talk about it. But we have talked lots about dwarf therapists. But I think that those numbers that you're looking at that are in the column to the left of the list of dwarves, I think those numbers correspond to the tendencies that,

were in the dwarf therapist that you could sort by on the attributes tab in dwarf therapist leadership the sword hammer all that kind of stuff i think that those are the same numbers and i assume that they are attributes that are applied to dwarves by the game no yeah dwarf therapist just kind of goes in there and like takes it out but i i am simply not certain about like efficiency and potential numbers. I did consider them to be a dwarf therapist,

internal mathematics telling me, oh, this dwarf is good for Mili, but I... What if it's not? Maybe it's not. Maybe it's not. Yeah, it just seems that it would make sense that someone

with a low potential would not ever be able to attain a high efficiency, perhaps. What if you believe in them? Well, If you believe in them, then you're going to make them a teacher. And they can stop believing in other people. It's wonderful. If you believe, they put a man on the moon.

Man on the moon. A dwarf on the moon. That's in 60.0. Space travel. War on the moon. Okay. Anyway, sorry, I'm on allergy medications. My apologies.

So, yeah, version 50.10 of Dwarf Fortress is out, and version 50. 50.10 R1 is out for Dwarf Fortress or DF hack, so wonderful. And I'm really looking forward to all of the digging that I can do with this. One of my favorite DF hack functions, and I am willing to be lambasted for this, but is Fastdorf because, you know, I got stuff to do. I don't want to sit around a little day waiting for people to carry a block. It doesn't seem to work anymore in 50.10, which is sad. everything seems to take a bit longer and I'm playing around.

So that's something in this. Are you still playing the beta branch? No, I'm on just regular whatever 50.10 is. Everything's consistent. D.F. Hackworks. It's just that particular function doesn't seem to work very well. But, yeah, you can see if you get it working, but it ain't working for me. I never had used it before.

It is good stuff. Things typically happen too fast for me in the game anyway. So I don't typically want to speed by Dorffs up. I want to slow them down. I guess I use it in a different way, which is I'll queue up a bunch of things that I want to do while it's paused, and then I'll fast-dorf and then let them go do it. And then I can see how it works. Let it rip.

Yep. Let a rip. And then if things get a little tense or if I feel like I'm losing control of a situation, I will then turn it off. But, yeah, otherwise, I found it to be a pretty doggone useful thing. I'll have to try that. Whatever it starts working again in version 50.10, that is. Yeah, I mean, try it and see. It could just be me, you know.

I'm not sure if anybody who's on the dev team for DFAC listens, it seems like that somebody chimed in maybe in the public discord, but it seems like one of the DFFHack programmers chimed in recently about a comment I could totally be me who knows

but yeah maybe they'll chime in send us an email or a message do you know how to use a computer sir did you reboot a computer a what Stop Door Fortress and restart it

Is your problem solved Ebcock Problem exists between keyboard and chair. That's a good one. An ID10T error. Yeah. It could easily be that.

Anyway. Unearthed from the depths of history's dusty embrace by the hands of intrepid archaeologists, the poetic narrative penned by Madrigar, chronicled the creation of great chambers beneath the fledgling project, aptly christened irredom. The commencement of this endeavor coincided with the onset of winter in the year 110, as the surface world succumbed to the icy grasp of frost, rendering the mighty river immobile in its icy slumber.

Within the subterranean chambers of this monumental mine lay the heart of the operation, where stone workers' workshops buzzed with ceaseless activity, and stockpiles teamed with the finest stone, awaiting the skilled hands of the fortress's master masons. Each of the mine's ten levels encompassed a circular chamber, none less than 25 units in diameter. Here, diligent dwarves toiled and unearthed stony treasures of cinnabar, obsidian, microcline, cobaltite, and stibnite, destined to be meticulously shaped into the very building blocks that would constitute the grand form of irerdom. Yet, as the season of winter gradually yielded to the awakening embrace of spring, reports emerged of a foreboding dampness that had taken hold on the highest level of the mine. Thus recounted the poet Madrigar, chronicling a tale destined to unravel beneath the earth's crust. So does anybody have any stories of fortress fun that they have done?

I had my war elephant's fort, which was going pretty well, and then I had all these necromancer creatures in there and they, I don't know, they were just not very good. And they fought a lot and they didn't seem to take joy from anything. So everyone was just really sad. So I tried killing a lot of them by the hospital where everyone was injured. I took the floor out and then dropped them into the cavern to their death. You know, it's a little elaborate, a little bit, a little, you know, a little crazy maybe, but, but it, but it was effective in getting rid of them. but I don't think it really saved the fort. So I ended up having to retire that one.

And I started a new one with the Dwarven Civilization Population 1, which was something I didn't think you could really do. But I seem to have brought it back. And now I've got, you know, I'm getting lots of attention from the home, from the mountain homes, which I don't really understand how there could be much of a mountain home with only one dwarf in the civilization. But anyhow, Dwarven Civilization, Population 1? Population 1. Does that mean one dwarf or one settlement? One dwarf. It was the queen.

Yeah. But I still get caravans, so I don't really know where the caravans are coming from. I don't know where my seven dwarfs came from. So who knows? So it's just one person that sends out of these caravans, and then it's kind of also the person that comes in the caravans, question mark. Yeah, it seems like it. And so my tactic to try to get the civilization growing was to build a library,

and to build several taverns and then take every single entertainer that wanted to come entertain guests and everybody who wanted to fight monsters, you know, so I did that, and then I built a tavern in the waterfall. So there was a waterfall, and I just built a tavern around it. So that's been kind of fun.

And, yeah, it's, you know, I'm up to 170 population now, and people seem genuinely happy. So, yay. Cool. I don't remember if I talked about it before so I'm just going to do it again. I have a tendency of hoarding and this is not a problem just in Dwar Fortress but it is in virtually every single video game that I've ever played.

I am a video game hoarder and I usually steal when the video game gives me the opportunity to do so. So this has chaotic neutral person. This has brought me to the point where I have a weapon stockpile for just exotic human weapons that I kept buying because they look cool and my like gremlin brain was like oh that's a that's a cool weapon you kind of went in and you can put it on a pedestal and someone's room and then they can look i never did that but i kept buying the weapons and at some point i just had way too many weapons and some of them weren't even good they were just like bronze warhammer without any quality on it like

like, okay. So I thought to myself, you know what? Let's get rid of most of that. But I had some left. I just kept some left because, you know, a hoarder. I can't get rid of all of them. And I made myself a exotic weapon squad because, you know,

what else is there to do? And... Of course, right, yeah, sure. So what qualifies as an exotic weapon? Well, for me, an exotic weapon is virtually any weapon that my dwarfs can't do by themselves. So that might be a two-handed sword. That might be a long sword. It could be a scourge.

It could be a pike or anything. So it's a weapon that a dwarf can employ, but the dwarves can't make. Correct. That is what I consider to be an exotic weapon out of the eyes of my dwarfs. wars. Gotcha. I put some into this squad. I just made a squad without any special.

It's, how you say, I made a uniform, but then applied no weapon. So every single person in the squad has a different weapon. And I apply it to them personally. So, for example, one of them has an iron scourge. And the other has, I think a lash it was. Well, that, for example, is a moaning star. then a lash. Okay, a scourge is a whip, used as an instrument of punishment.

Yeah. It doesn't sound very nice. It has like, it's like a whip, but it has like several whips, and the whips usually end in either some kind of knives or bells or like heavy metal bulbs. And I was like, wow, that sounds like a terrifying weapon. and it is. I also have a bronze whip person here, but the scourge man is crazy strong. He is crazy strong.

Well, he is also a very good soldier, but he is the amount of body parts that fly around the map whenever he is attacking anything that does not have armor on is crazy. He is scourging goblins to death while they have full armor on. It doesn't matter if it's leather or copper or whatever, he catches them and he punches through their armor.

It is absolutely crazy bloodshed whenever he's on the battlefield. And this entire exotic weapon squad, so one scourge man, one whip, one morning star. They go through entire sieges at this point because they're good soldiers and they have crazy weapons. And the scourge person is so good. I love scourges. And now I'm very upset that I can't make them on my own, but I have to kind of rely to check every single human caravan if they have like an iron scourge and it will never have any quality modifiers, which is very sad because, you know, that would be cool. Is it like the old cat of nine tails?

I don't remember what that's a reference to, but it seems like that was a, maybe it was a Dungeons and Dragons weapon. Has anybody heard the term cat of nine tails? that. It does ring a bell. It does ring a bell, but I can put my finger on it. I think it's, I think it's like a whip with nine, with nine, uh, basically is what you're describing as a scourge. Kind of, kind of, exactly. And, um, Tony, did you, did you say that you'd heard of it? Yeah, yeah, I've heard of it. I know of it as a weapon. And it seems to be some sort of a flogging thing with, uh, like a whip with a bunch of tendrils at the end of it. tassels, I guess, is what I would describe it as. Google to the rescue, I think that it is a script. Am I right? Yes, you are exactly right.

And now a scourge is simply that, but has like something at the end. Yeah, it looks like the cat and antinthales. It looks like it's just a little knots at the end of it. Yeah, I think you put like pebbles or rocks in there too. What I remember, it hurts a lot if you get hit by one. That is pretty sick. A big fan of scourges.

I had my people, my soldiers run around and just normal quality, just random steel armor, nothing cool about it. I was like, okay, I have to change this. So now every single piece of gear, I put spikes on. I rent spikes. So they essentially have like anti-bear armor. It doesn't really do anything in a fight, but I think it would look cool if a dwarf with a scourge is running at you and he is like very spiky like a hedgehog

nickname him Sonic all right giant hedgehog's carrying scourges I've got a grizzly bear in my uh or it's a black bear I've tamed him and he really didn't like being in a cage it said it made him sad so I felt bad about that so I put him I put him in his pasture and then I tried to pasture a large wild boar with him and he he killed it So that was sad. So I guess he needs to be kept by himself. I've made him available as a pet, but no one's taken him up on that.

Aw. I think he's just misunderstood, and he wants to be someone's pet, but he can't because, I don't know, I think everyone's afraid of him. It's too bad. I mean, you could assign him to, like, a child, and then he keeps a child safe. I could do that. That's a great idea. I tried to make him a war creature, but he would. You know, I think Grizzlies are the only thing you can war train in the bear family.

Normally, at least. Well, no, I think polar bears as well. Polar bears, okay, I've yet to, I'm not very, yeah, I haven't had awesome experiences with the ice sheets. But I should probably try one of those again. I think in the real world, polar bears and grizzly bears are very closely related. Yeah, I think polar bears are one of those no-fun kind of creatures. when you watch videos of people who live up in... What is that part of Norway and Swalbard, Long Gearband or something?

Whoever you pronounce that in Scandinavian. And they go out with, like, rifles. Not like we do in the U.S., but to fend off polar bears. They look so cuddly, though. We have some in our zoo here in this city, and they look very cuddly, but then the... The zookeeper is like near them in the enclosure, like throwing fish into your realize, wow, that bear is absolutely massive and I completely misjudged its size because it's far away from me. Yeah, I think they're known to be dicks, so, you know, they don't just drink Coca-Cola or anything.

Like, I think they're genuinely dicks, so. Did I just ruin our podcast reading? Does the FCC allow it? Hello, future podcast editing Jonathan here. And the answer to that question is, no, you did not just ruin our podcast rating, at least not to FCC standards. I can't speak for Apple. But a link to the Wikipedia page that I'm citing for that decision is in the show notes. Let's carry on now.

You know what? I'm not the one going extinct. So, you know, karma. You know, I was going to, I don't know if I told you this or not, I was planning on building a, giant statue as my mega project, right? Well, I still am. But I'm building a, uh, kind of a colossus-like monument where it is going to be straddling, uh, it is going to be a humanoid figure, probably dwarfy in nature, straddling the river. So I'm, did I tell you guys that last time? Uh, I don't know. Did you mention it in the discord? I don't know. I've been, I've been sitting

on it. I've been trying to figure out what my plan was, but I've been sitting on it. But I finally, uh, determined. And in the little story time interlude in the podcast, this fortress has been being detailed. And finally, the fortress has gotten its focus, and that is to build a statue that is going to be straddling the river. And the idea is that it's going to be like the ancient wonder of the world, the colossus. So, yeah. So in order to get that going really well, I started a couple of platforms on either side of the river to start my construction. And then I decided that I wanted to have my block manufacturing happen nearby the structure itself instead of in the main fortress area. So I built about a 20, 20 Z level deep shaft and used a DF hack to do dig circles

all the way down and mined them out and I made little, uh, some stone stock piles and on the surface I've got these block stockpiles. So I'm doing block manufacturing. Well, at some point, some of my digging apparently got a little out of hand and I see that somebody, I get an announcement that a dwarf has been knocked unconscious and then I follow it and it turns out

that somehow my mine shaft of 20 something Z levels deep, start with a diameter of about 20 something squares, is filling up with water. Uh-oh. Yeah.

So somehow I accidentally did one of those corner cuts to a river block. So yeah. So we're filling this thing up with water. So I decide that I'm going to salvage the situation, right? So I decided that I'm going to build

a relief for this river water. I dug all the way down to the caverns. I built a channel down to where we basically got a 40 Z-level waterfall that will be happening. And I channeled everything out so

that I could relieve some of the floodwaters out of my mine shaft and dump it down into the into the caverns. Now that all worked very well. In about two months I got this utility structure dug out. But unfortunately I forgot to turn the stockpiles off in the flooded area. So I have got lots of dwarves that have been washed down into the caverns through my relief valve system. And I've lost, so far I've lost about 20 dwarves.

Oh, Lord. Those are getting close to genocide numbers, pal. Well, you know, you might think that, but I have 152 dwarves in my fortress right now. So I had the population despair. Well, you're fine. And it's like, it's like China. Where if you're a one in a million kind of guy, there's dozens of you. So it's cool.

So I finally decided to turn off of the. those stockpiles and what I should have done in the first place I realized now was I should have made that one of those words guys helping find the word for the for the area that dwarves get locked into and borough borough yeah thank you thank you what I should have done is had a built a burrow around it and forbidden my dwarves from going there forbade my dwarfs from going there but I but I didn't I I was a silly fortress manager and and ended up with 20 or so dead dwarves. Oh, it happens.

Yeah, I think that all of the dwarves that are going to die have died because it's been a while. And once the winter comes, we're in late summer now. When the winter comes and that freezes up, I'm going to put a wall there where the water's coming in, and I'm going to be able to probably reclaim my mine shaft. But, yeah, so that's the update for New Tower of Showing. Well, you know what? If you want to make an omelet, you've got to crack a few eggs. I was just about to say

You know, mega projects require souls How many people died making the Burj Dubai You know Making what? Making what? The Burj Khalifa in Dubai The tallest building in the world Oh, yeah.

There are some nobles that I'm seeing in my nobles list that I didn't ever really recognize seeing in previous versions of Dwarfortress. For example, and now this isn't a noble, this is a category of jobs, orderlies. So I know what an orderly is in real life. It's the people who, you know, work in health care in military situations typically. They haven't met hospitals, right? So were there orderlies in Dwarfortress prior to?

version 50? No, no and yes, there was no specific job for that field, but you had the job of feeding and cleaning prisoners. So the job itself existed, but the actual... Prisoners or patients? Hmm? Prisoners or patience? Both. Both. It was always for both. And the actual orderly tab, we cannot click on it and assign people to do those things. things, that is new, but the actual job isn't. Okay, because I noted that whenever you try to select people who are good for the orderly job categorization, it brings up people who are like sutures, bone people, uh, diagnosticians.

So, uh, so, yeah. I hadn't, I had never, uh, seen that before. That's not, that's not a noble position. A noble position I had never seen before was champion. What does the champion do? Do we, is that also a new 50? No, that is also not a new one, but I believe the champion is pretty funny because what they do is absolutely nothing. They don't really get any power.

They're just cool. They just get a cool title, and they sit around, and they get to demand certain things. But, yeah, that, you know. Well, I think that I... Oh, sorry. No, you go ahead, Tony. I was going to add to that. What about the messenger?

That one seems pretty useless to me. The messenger, I always assign somebody dutifully because it feels like a good job, but I don't know what they do. Oh, I can tell you. I know. Okay, how do I use them? In lightness.

Back to the champion for one second because I had Google it, and I was slightly wrong because they do actually do something. The champion will lead combat demonstration in the barracks. But, you know, they don't need actually any skills of qualifications. So it's like you can put any idiot in there. But technically, if you have a cool military dwarf that you really like

and you want to, like, honor him, you can give him the noble role. Now, back to Messenger. Well, before we get off the champion, it turns out that I assigned it fairly correctly. There was some time back we became a barony, our fortress did. And now we are a county because the baron became a captain. count. And I assigned the same dwarf that was the count to the champion, noble. So I think that that sounds like it to be about right, because your barons and counts don't really do anything much. And your champion, it seems like could be a nice addition to that counts duties.

Yep. What do you think? So, yeah, okay, on the messengers. The messenger is sent out if you want to do treaties with, I believe they're called hold buildings in dwarf fortress like holdings connected to your side for example if dwarfs founded like a new small town

like a day's travel away from you you can send the messenger there and request new workers and then he just like wanders off and goes there and talks to them and brings them back and I it's

pretty nice if you're lacking like one or two workers or like a cheesemaker here and there, but I'm not too certain how good they get integrated into your fortress because they keep the title of, like, very often you get either merchants or prisoners and they keep the title for very, very long. And sometimes they behave slightly off. So I'm not too certain how well they get implemented into your actual civilization into your actual fortress because they're just, you know, they're just weirdos. But if you need a helping hand, you can send for them.

All right. I know that holdings, according to the Tor Fortress Wiki, are sites that are linked economically, militarily, or socially to your fortress. So I guess, I haven't seen it so much in version 50, but in earlier versions, you would see a pop-up that would say, so-and-so is depending on your fortress for its economic, success or something along those lines. I would say

that that is probably the game telling you that you have a holding. But I think beyond that there is no function yet. I would assume that at some point you can, I don't know, sue for peace with other people

for example and then the messenger might be of interest again. But as of now, the only real function that the messenger has in my in my worldview at least, is you sent them out to, like, get new workers into your fortress. Another one that I hadn't noticed before

was the hammerer. That's a difficult word to say. The hammerer. That dwarf apparently is your fortress executioner that it puts people to death. Was that existing in version 47 as well? It was always a funny little thing because if you don't have a hammerer,

you get a lot less violent executions, I would say. If you have, for example, a prison, more dwarfs are thrown into prison instead of getting just beaten on the street. And if you have a hammerer but no prison, pretty much everybody gets executed all the time. He doesn't actually have to kill them, per se. He just beats them really, really hard.

So sometimes they do survive. but he does grab a hammer or a maze of any kind that you have lying around so if you don't you know if you don't check he grabs a steel warhammer and then everybody dies awesome but you were able to do funny business where it could build for example an adamantine mace or whatever or like a wood mace from elves and then give him that and then he just really strongly paddles people and they're like oh no i'm sorry uh I repent, and then they get to live. So my current fortress has a hammerer, but no dungeon master, which I think dungeon master holds the same slot in nobles as the sheriff used to? No, the dungeon master is something weird. Hang on, because the sheriff is still the... I don't have a sheriff option anymore.

Yeah, the dungeon master becomes the sheriff, but the militia captain is still the person that actually makes the interviews. So I always thought, or at least for a long time, that the dungeon master was the person doing the interviews, but no, that is not correct. Well, you're a lot heavier into the justice system than I've ever been. I've never really paid much attention to it. Yeah. Oh, it's pretty neat. You can start doing investigations and stuff.

Yeah, but... I've had some really fun things there. It's not finished, and sometimes you really notice that it is not finished, because you get a little bit rough around the edges. example, when I saw Todi, now I can't say that, how cool, I told him that I am waiting for the day when I, the player, can

assign the punishment to a crime, not just tell my dwarfs, like, punish him, but like punish him by putting him into a cage, or this person has to be put to death. Like, you know, I want like a and he is very interested

in that, so that's great. How did Tony react to that? He was like, oh, yeah, no, that's coming. At some point, that could mean anything. But, yeah, the dungeon master really doesn't do too much. He is, he pretends like he needs scheme, the schemer skill. But on the wiki, it says they don't make any mandates or demands. They have no downsides to their existence,

and they can be appointed for the sole purpose of flavor in your fortress. But what they actually do, I'm all about Fortress Flavor Yeah, it's delicious Have you done much with the justice system, Tony? I've, I had one fort where I had a whole bunch of artifacts And the people were really, really scheming to steal them And there was some sort of criminal syndicate

That was like sending people in and like extorting the doors To go extorting my citizens to go steal stuff And then meet them in the woods to hand off the artifacts or whatever, it was, it felt pretty elaborate and kind of, kind of cool. And I've really only had that level of engagement and depth like once with it, but it was pretty, it was a pretty neat experience and I, I really enjoyed it. So I, yeah, I'd love to keep playing with it because it, it did feel pretty neat. But it was kind of hard to get to the bottom of some of the crimes because I think maybe,

as you said, it's not quite finished yet. Yeah. Bard Brandon Wright, with a somber ballad, chronicled the harrowing events of the spring in the year 11-within Iroredomnast. As the Great River thawed, it became painfully evident that the dwarves had excavated their minds too close to the unforgiving banks of the mighty stream. As the ice melted, the first level of the mine succumbed to a deluge, turning the mine's stairwells into inadvertent flooding. gates. The relentless river filled the uppermost chamber, and its treacherous waters cascaded downward through the stairwells, inundating one level after another. Many fine dwarves were trapped, seeking refuge in the yet unflooded levels. Facing this dire predicament, the fortress

began a valiant emergency civil engineering operation. The fortress's most skilled miners feverishly dug a shaft, striving to locate an outlet for the encroaching waters. On the 23rd level from the surface, they penetrated into caverns. From there, they tunneled into the flooded levels, releasing the perilous waters into the depths below. Lives were tragically lost. Some dwarves trapped in the mines were swept into the caverns by the torrent, and even a few of the brave miners involved in the rescue met a similar fate. As the muddied chamber floors were laid bare, all dwarves knew that the spring of 111 would forever be etched in memory as the season of the wet death. Yet, this ordeal, a testament to the

unyielding determination of the dwarves, only served to strengthen the fortress's resolve. The monumental project would persist, and the lives lost would be immortalized within the towering edifice. So sang the venerable bard Brandon Wright, a tale of both tragedy and unshakable fortitude. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and read an email from one of our listeners named Renzik. Hi, my name is Rensik.

I wanted to ask the roundtable about implementing AI-like chat GPT and its clones into Dwarfurtress. Maybe you have, like, a menu where you can talk directly to your dwarves and really get to know them. There was a mod for Skyrim like this, but I think Twirl Fortress would be a crazy way to implement this. Tell me what y'all think about this. Greetings from the scorching desert of Arizona. So this was received in the summer whenever it was absolutely horribly scorching. still out there. So my first thought was, yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

But Tony knows a little bit more about large language models and their applications than I. And he has convinced me that it's probably, with our technology today, not going to happen. It's just not there yet. Is that right? Yeah, I think it's a really cool idea. Like, I mean, who wouldn't want that where you could click on any door for Goblin in your fort and then have like a seemingly sentient conversation with them that was like interesting

and relevant to the world where your fortress took place and they had knowledge like any of the citizens who lived in that fort might and you could interact with them i mean that sounds kind of like a dream come true and it would be really neat but that's but that's that we don't have that technology Even though things like chat GPT feel like you're talking to some kind of sentient being, that's like our brains tricking us. And you see that same thing happen kind of each time these, and I'm using air quotes here, you can't see me, but I am human-like chatbots happen. There was one in the 60s called Eliza.

And if you read about what people wrote about Eliza back in the same, 60s. It feels very similar. It's like, oh, my God, the computer knows me. And it's alive, you know, is anybody in there? But really, you know, it's, it's kind of parlor tricks to, to sell the idea of this really narrow language generation model. So, I mean, and there's a lot of technical reasons why it wouldn't work to or why it can't work and we don't have the tech. But it's a sweet idea. It'd be awesome if it worked. I totally agree. So we talked about this offline a little bit. And what. really brought it home to me that we weren't quite there yet was I, I fed all the information that I could about a particular dwarf into a chat GPT. And once I had fed that information in, I was basically chatting with this dwarf, and the dwarf was telling me about this vein of ore that he mined. So then Tony said, okay, ask him for a detail about that vein of ore.

So I did, and the Dwarf gave me that, or the chat GPT gave me that detail, and continued chatting with him again for a while, and Tony said, well, okay, ask him again for that exact same detail. And the detail that he gave me was completely and totally different than the first one that he gave me. I kind of was able to see the light of what you were trying to describe to me, some of the problems with it. You know, and kind of without getting into the guts of how it all works, and there's some interesting people that write about this, there's a paper. called on I think it's called On the dangers of stochastic parrots and it's by a linguist and an AI

researcher who goes by the name of Timit Gebrou and she's amazing if you listen to podcasts with her on it. She's super knowledgeable and very realistic about how things work and what we can do. We'll link that in the show notes. Yeah, she's amazing

and you can find her on a lot of the tech podcasts and stuff kind of making the rounds right now because she's very sensible. And in high demand, I'm sure. Yeah, and I mean, she's very knowledgeable, but she's definitely not towing kind of the party line that's making the rounds of like, oh, my God, we're all going to get turned into paper clips. Like, she's much more grounded in reality and how things work. But I think the big problem is, is like, that GPT doesn't really, it doesn't understand what it's telling you. So, you know, it's guessing.

It's guessing the next letter and the sequence based on. what you've asked it. So if you ask it, you know, a question about, you know, how much salt should I add to, you know, my cake, it's going to go out and kind of go through its database and, and, you know, think about, like, where have I seen salt and cake, you know, mentioned together and what would be the most likely answer that I could give? But then it doesn't, it doesn't keep that in mind. So you, it doesn't have a state or any sense of, like, logic. It can't keep a theme or a thread. And we just don't have that.

And that's not really how large language models work. So we need to invent other technology in order to do that really cool, awesome sounding thing. But I don't think we're really even close to researching yet what we'd need to do some of that stuff. So, I mean, it's probably a lot farther away than the people selling these large language models would lead you to believe. I know it's shocking to think that somebody trying to sell you something might mislead you, you know,

because car dealers are so honest when you go there. You know, I can always trust the salesman. So anyway, you know, that's kind of at a high level. It's an awesome idea. It would be so cool to see it, but we just don't have the tech yet. Well, thanks, Tony. And thanks for in Zek for the email. Anything to add, Roland?

You played with the one that he mentioned. Oh, yeah, the Skyro... Well, I didn't play it myself because it's pretty big, but I did see it online, and I... Okay, I'm not a friend of mods. I have to, like, say that

before I start getting into this, but I'm not a real friend of mods, because at the end of the day, I always question, if I cannot play the game that I'm playing right now with the mods that I've installed, that I don't actually like the game,

I just like the mods. So it is for me always a question, why should I install a mod and is the mod necessary? So a chat, GPT, or like an AI... Well, D.Fagg adds to the game, but it only adds... Well, it adds a lot, but the functions that I use are essentially just,

like, I make the game faster. I got it. I got it. I got it. I was just being this one. Yeah, yeah. Okay. But D.F. Hack is what you might call, what you might consider to be a light mod instead of a heavy mod. Not that it's a small modification, but that it has light effects on the gameplay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It improves the experience. Or one could argue that improves the experience. Yeah, exactly. And for example, I use it to either make my dwarfs a little faster or, uh, click on a dwarf and actually check what the exact numbers

are, where is his strength at, what is the actual number for his strength? What is the actual number for his depression? And how is he vulnerable to stress? Like, what is the actual number? Versus, I install

a mod that adds, like, Naga people. Yeah. And the idea of being in, like, a fantasy role-playing game, like talking to people and the the person is just kind of talking back because they're supported by a language AI model is cool. I simply question why it has to be dwarf fortress that is like the basic foundation to

that because you essentially take the life and the entire work of one person and you slap a massive mod onto that to just like have a nice foundation and a pillar that in my eye simply does not fit. And so the idea is cool. I simply

question why you need Dwar Fortress as a foundation to do this. Yeah, I mean, I think it's yeah, kind of thinking about that like, well, why? Why would it not just be a different game? And I think it wouldn't be a different game because the technology doesn't work like that. I think is the short answer.

but I mean if you if you did it implemented in dwarf fortress or if toady did it you would be able to have a conversation with a dwarf but it would be plausible sounding nonsense so you know they might tell you about a dragon attack and a village nearby and then you'd leave and then that village wouldn't exist and there wasn't a dragon and when you went back to talk to people about it no one else would know about that so I think like the experience itself would just be frustrating I think for people and you would not know am I seeing nonsense or am I seeing something that's actually actually related to my game plays. I think it would be pretty frustrating for people. You see, I think that that was the original Chad GPT slogan, but they didn't end up going with it. A plausible sound and nonsense. Yeah, so much for me getting a job there. You know, whatever.

All right, yeah, thanks, Rinsick. And if anyone else wants to send in an email, then you can do so at Eurist at DF Roundtable.com. That is UR-I-S-T. at DF Roundtable.com or you can actually chat live with us and other listeners of the podcast by joining our Discord channel. You can go to our website, DFroundtable.com, to get the link to join the Discord server. And we would love to have you there and engage in chat and all that kind of fun stuff, the things that you can do in a community-based chat client. I think I'm going to

take my foggy brain and take it off line here because I think that we have pretty much come to the end of episode number 90 of Dwell Fortress Routable. Yeah. Crazy a jean. Coming up on that big

episode 100 in 10 episodes. I'm not sure. Triple digits. We're going to have a big giveaway. It's going to be a Snickers part. Yeah, I don't know if we haven't really talked about what we're going to do

for episode 100. I want to do something. Maybe another meta episode. Like with episode 50, we did a lot of talking about the podcast. We might do something like that again. What a barbershop quartet. If you have any ideas of what we should do with episode 100,

send those to Erist at DFRoundtable.com, and we will take them into consideration. Yeah. Okay, guys. Cool. You'll have a good week. Hey. See you next time. Yeah, everybody.

everybody out there. Good luck and dig deep. Thanks for listening. Not too deep. Ciao, folks. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com.

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