Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 92: More Dwarfy and Hacky Releases!

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

Hello everyone! This episode we talk about version 50.11 of Dwarf Fortress, and 50.11-r2 of DF Hack.

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. My name's Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we are back for episode number 92. Oh. Yeah. Getting close to that century mark.

Getting close. Yeah, let's time it out. When's that going to be? And will it be coinciding with the next big deal? update, the Adventure Remote Update. Well, we've had a lot of pretty regular updates since the Steam release came out 11 now.

All right. We had version 50.11 was released since our last recording session. I think that was mostly a maintenance update. Is that correct? You know, we could talk about the patch notes for 50.11. I'm sure that that would be exciting. Yeah, they fixed

some Linux crash problems. It looks like it's mostly mostly some bug fixes and things like that. One thing I like. Ballista arrows that chop down trees now count for tree cap diplomacy. Oh, thank God. That was, I mean,

that for me was ruining the game. So I was furious, and now I'm pretty reasonable about it. Have either of you had elves try to cap your tree chopping since the version 50 came out? Yes. Yes.

Yes, they still get angry, and then I've had them ambush me when I've declined their offer. I don't know. Maybe I've just not done enough to piss off the elves, but I've not had a problem with the elves thinking that I am an ugly, you know, bag of water. Don't give up. Well, they haven't bothered me, but I can tell you exactly why. they're confined to the entire southern continent that has no connection to my lands so they can physically come to my home

and knock on my wooden door and tell me that I stink. However, I do plan on making a bridge at some point. We will see. Is it close enough to where you can make the bridge? It could be possible, but the fortress that I would need to build, is not going to be a beauty fortress.

It is simply going to be a large mining pit and then me making a long bridge and then instantly not using the fortress anymore. Okay. Have you been playing with mostly the same world, Roland, since the version 50 came out? Actually, I've not only been playing with the same world. I've only made, I believe, four different fortresses

in the world and I'm still sitting in number four and it's it's been running for god knows how long and it is the same people and now I even have not the the first generation that settled in my fortress but we are closing in on the third and the first generation of settlers has almost died out completely and got replaced by their children and I cannot seem to find a good way to end the fortress. So it just kind of keeps on going. Invite a were limer.

Can I suggest something? Stop making alcohol. Stop making alcohol. Hmm. That'll do it. Well, that would be a very permanent end. Well, we know that tantrum spirals have gotten better. We can see what we can do to piss off our dwarves

and cause them to tantrum. That would be fun. I think you can also start attacking all the nearby towers. And if you do, if you get a couple of wars going on a couple different fronts, that can usually wrap things up pretty quickly. Yeah, this is exactly what I'm actually going to do in the next. There is only a few goblins left in the north,

and I was going to crush them by making a military fortress with like 200 people. But as it turns out, the remaining goblins are very weak with my current fortress, which started as a scholar fortress like a large library was the main centerpiece already they are strong enough to just besiege the goblins and actually do severe damage. I've destroyed either three or four settlements already.

Wow. So I'm not sure if I actually need the military fortress anymore. I'm still going to do it. The tower still gives me a hard time. I still, I have to say, I still really struggle with defeating towers. I've not tried to attack them myself. I've not pushed my luck with that, but I've had other

things to worry about in my main fortress. I've had this one fortress running for, well, since before the summer break. And I believe that pretty much all of my fortresses that I've done that I can remember have all been in a single world since version 50 came out. So I don't know if that says anything about the longevity of worlds that are generated with this version, or if it's just that I'm settling down in my play. Start building forts on the ice caps. That'll humble you fast. Yeah, I'm not looking for death.

Right, okay. Death usually finds you. I see. That's the way I play, too. Yeah, I actually had a goal in mind for this fortress that is not going to be able to be met, it looks like, and I'll get into that a little bit later. So other things that have happened for the $50.911

and release. They've done some tutorial fixes, some squad situation, some graphics work. So it looks like it's mostly little things that are fixes, which are good. And he said as much that there's just some minor things to tweak and then he's going to start working the adventure mode stuff. So great. So DF hack also for those folks who use it. And if you don't use DF hack, You know, I would like to encourage you to give it a try. You can use it as little or as much as you want to. Installing DFHack really doesn't take away from the game in and of itself. I don't think it takes away from the game at all.

I think it's very additive. But there's lots of nice, cool utilities that are in there that just make your life easier. So this most recent release, 50.11 R2, they've added some things like one-click collapsing of the big long stocks list so that you can just see how many you have in each category without having to go through and manually scroll through 450,000 gabbro blocks. You can also have surge bars in pretty much any creature tab. So, for example, if you go into others and you're being besieged by, I don't know, 400 cavern dwellers and 12 goblins and one forgotten beast, then you do not want to scroll that.

list. So the search feature gives you the option to simply type in, like, forgotten beast, and then you find instantly the forgotten beast, and then you can zoom into there without you having to scroll through like 500 plus entries, which that's pretty nice. That also works for dwarfs, so you can, you know, search your dwarfs directly by name. That is a very nice feature. Does it work? I wonder, for wear beasts? Because I would have used that had I had it available to me recently because I had a boatload. Well, I don't think they get, how you say,

uncloaked by the search feature. It simply searches for their name. So if they... No, this is while they were active and I was trying to target them. Okay. Then probably, yes. Yeah. All right.

So, yeah, thanks a lot to the folks at DFHack for releasing the, for writing that utility. set. And thanks a lot to Tarn for making another release of Door Fortress. It's making our lives wonderful. And sucking up hours and hours of our time. A tomb zone, automatic

tomb zone creation. I'm going to have to check that out. Haven't tried yet, but part of the D.F. Hack update is that automatic tomb zone creation. Now, this may have been changed, but whatever version 50 came out, I was not able to create multiple tomb zones

unless I had each of my caskets walled off in their own separate room. Yeah, with a door, right? Yeah. Yeah, with a door. So looking at the graphic that they have on the release on Steam for the D.F. Hack 5011R2, it looks like that can be a thing again. So you don't have to carve out your each individual tomb like you used to. So I'm hoping that works.

I'm looking forward to trying that out. Yeah, I didn't. I'm not sure how it's supposed to work. I was just playing with it before the show, and it looked like it was asking me to do the same thing where you zone it out. So I'm not sure what it means. Maybe I've just misunderstood, but let me know how you guys get on with it. We'll do. Our last episode, we were discussing not being able to get Dwar Fortress to run on the Mac. And we had a comment in Reddit on episode 90, I believe. it was by a ready user named Lodot that suggested a link, and I'll put this in the show notes,

about how to do an override of a DLL to make it work on Mac. And did you, you tried that out, Tony? I tried it out, yeah. And, I mean, so far, so good, it works, it works really well. I've generated a small world on the Mac and not a very populous one. I think I got 25 people here. And I've got, you know, graphics frames 60 FPS and regular frames, you know, multiple hundreds. So it runs, I mean, it runs like you'd kind of want it to run and D.F. Hackworks as well.

So pretty cool thing. There's one trick that you need to do to get it to work. So as far as I've seen, there's no comprehensive, here's how you play it on a Mac from start to finish easily. But if you pull together stuff found. in different places, you can sort it out. So the guy that posted on Reddit was talking about, I think, maybe already having a copy of

the game that he got off of itch.io or whatever, and so he could put it in their directory and then run it. And then there's somebody else who's saying, you know, if you've bought it on Steam, you can go in and edit one of the, you know, one of the config files in your Steam folder and then it'll trick the Steam launcher on Mac to download the Windows version.

So that's what I did. And I did that, and then I manually installed DF hacked. Anyway, you'll figure it out if you go there. The real trick is to do this DLL override in, what's it called, wine. Yeah, it's an MSVCP 140 atomic weight, it looks like. Yeah, I mean, it's not gentle on the CPU on the Mac at all by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think it's very gentle on the Windows CPU either. yeah like it's it's you know

Mac is like you know I'm playing it's you know it's 210% CPU but you know for the system that's not that much. And I think there might be a memory leak or two somewhere in a Indoor Fortress because if you leave it running for like 72 hours you'll find that it's using you know

8 gig of RAM Hmm interesting to know I should try that before I just go out and start blabbing off crap, I should actually check that again. It used to be that way. 4705, I know that I would leave it going for a long time, and it would build up memory leakage.

It looked to me like because it was using up a godly amount of RAM. But I'll try that again. I'll run that experiment. Yeah, I do. I mean, it seems to be running great on the Mac. Yeah, I mean, I can play it as though I have a Windows machine. It's pretty doggone cool. And, you know, battery, I was able to play it on battery for like four hours, which, you know, the max battery usually lasts about 10 or 12.

So, yeah, it's pretty hardcore. But, yeah, hey, man, no complaints for me. I'm impressed. This is not to say we don't need a Mac version, by the way. I don't want to convince anyone not to do it. Stopgap, I guess. But I mean, if you think about it, it's playing under emulation and it's still highly performant. It's pretty cool.

I haven't tried with a giant world or anything like that, but that'll maybe be next. I'm doing a small world, and I'm just going to try to conquer everybody and see how it goes. Do you remember version 47 well enough so that you can do a mental comparison between the two? I mean, it's not scientific, but can you tell whether it runs better on the Mac than the old 57 did? I mean it seems to run pretty darn well Like not like when I'm play when you're playing it like never am I thinking I'm doing this under emulation and it sucks Like it feels pretty native so that's neat and this isn't like the newest generation of mac it's an m1 pro if that makes sense to mac people yep And so I would imagine you'd probably do better with one of the newer ones even but heck

This is doggone impressive I would say the one thing that doesn't work particularly well is the track pad so if you're playing be prepared to use the keyboard or connect a mouse because the track pad is just not i mean you can you know you can you can't scroll with the track pad is what i'm trying to say but um you can click and do stuff with it but you can't really scroll yeah that may be the part of the some of the sdl stuff because scrolling even on windows doesn't work like a windows application really some of the some of the things that you could normally do like select the scroll bar and hit page down will typically scroll down a page um that that doesn't work with the uh with with the sdl with door fortress as it is now you typically

just have to click the down arrow on the scroll bar a lot of times sometimes the down arrow on your keyboard will make it go sometimes it won't i think it depends on the menu maybe a little inconsistent have you guys found that as well the the mouse wheel on windows does seem to scroll okay. Like, you know, I'm, I've got it running on a Windows machine and a Mac right now. The scroll wheel works great on the Windows box. The Mac is not terrific. Doesn't seem to always work well.

If you're on, for example, the diplomacy screen, if you're looking at the trade items, I'm not sure that the scroll wheel works on those. Okay. Maybe it's something with my computer, but I'm sure that if I'm mistaken, someone will let us know. You know, in the Discord, I need to put a Cunningham's Law channel. Place for you to go

to tell us that we mess up and up, which that's fine. You know, I think that's actually a nice idea. It's a great way to do it. Yeah, Cunningham's Law is still the best way to get information. In fact, I'm going to do that right now. We're going to add a text channel called

Cunningham's Law. Is this as in Richie Cunningham? Is this the kind of thing where it's like, you know, in quantum physics. Like, when you observe the particle, the waveform collapses, like, is this, if you identify something is a Cunningham's law question, does that mean no one's going to answer it because they know they're being

correct? I think you've more often or no, I think you're Are you think, do you think I'm shutting down discourse? I think if you say this is a Cunningham's Law question, you definitely can't use the scroll wheel and door fortress. People are going to be like, yeah, you can and they're going to look at it and

like, but I'm not telling you because now I know that you're trying to bait me into giving you proper information. Oh, I see what you're getting at. Okay. Dot, dot, dot. But if you go out and emphatically state something that's incorrect on the internet, people will instantly try to jump to correct you. But see, I think if you tell people

I know this is incorrect and I'm trying to go into giving me the proper answer, they'll say, aha, I'm not going to be helpful now. Okay, but because... I believe this is a psychological question. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yes, because

what overweighs in that current situation? Is it the person feeling, oh, I'm being played, or is it the person being allowed to spout wisdom? And I believe that pretty much everybody on this planet will go the way of spouting wisdom if they can. So even if you state that this is a factual Discord channel where you say something wrong, I think they will still get in there

and tell you what is right because they have the ability to do so. And they want to let you know. Yeah. You know what? I think for science... I do it too. I think for science, we test this.

Well, it's there. It's there. It's a Cunningham's Law channel on the Discord server. And the description is, let us know what we messed up because we do it very often. Yeah, I'm thinking you're right.

This is for science. We test this. And it'll also help us get corrections out there because, you know, before now, no one ever knew how to, wait, wait, Eurist at DFRontable.com. And we've had a few things that we've had to correct because of that too, so. Well, we got Mac working out of it, so that's pretty cool. That is a good point. That's, yeah, yeah.

And it's a little snarky. But I, you know, we fully admit that we screw things up all the time. Door Fortress is a complex game, and there's a lot of things. out there that are common knowledge that are necessarily so. Confidently incorrect would be a way I would state my knowledge about that. Hard game

simple person. Hey, come on. I love it. You do it. Man. Oh, I thought he was being self-referential there. Not mostly. I don't have to get one of those self-love jackets now. I think that may have been in the pre-show. So a self-love jacket is apparently a European term for a straight jacket.

The German word? Is it German or is it European? No, it's more of a funny way to reference it. Gotcha. Huh. Well, I think it's funny. So I'm going to go with that. In the resonant verses of the renowned Bard-Logan Hastings,

the saga of New Tower of Showing unfold. As the haze of battle against the malevolent goblins lifted, and the valiant dwarven soldiers were duly honored in their final repose, Mayor Obok-tultrated surveyed her realm with a heavy heart. She questioned the wisdom of her decision to unsee Elder Bim from the mayoralty in years gone by, and a gnawing doubt crept into her soul. The certainty that she had erred loomed large. Yet, with or without the flicker of hope, the bastion must endure, for the mere thought of abandoning. was beyond contemplation. And so, as the silver orb of the moon inch toward its full splendor,

Mayor Obok strode resolutely into the fortress, determined to steer her charge back onto the righteous course. Such was the tale spun in verse by Logan Hastings. So we had Defonzo on last time, and DeFonzo was starting to get into a little bit of a technical talk. And he made the comment that he didn't know that it would be good podcast. podcast subject matter and I guess I want to ask you to and our listeners

what they think whenever we do go into the weeds a little bit into the tech stuff because I think that it is very interesting to learn a little more insights about how things work under the hood and I like the detailed tech talk about the things that you do when you're modding and such I think it makes good content but I guess I'd like to know

the opinion of you two and also the opinion of our listeners because at the end of the day this is for us but it's also for the people who listen to it I'm a tech nerd so you know if somebody wants to talk to me about the intricacies of multi-threading and why it's challenging in this environment that's cool if somebody wants to talk to me about you know using Ida Pro to scrape memory registers like I'm down with that but I do understand that may lack a broad appeal. So hey, I'm in it to win it, but I always find it interesting. Well, I do find it interesting too. I don't understand it fully. For me, half of the time, you just sound like tech wizards. But nonetheless, it is interesting to listen to it, even if I have nothing to

add. We had a very technical episode a long while ago. We had a guest on. And it... Ralfa. That was Ralfa, who was the leader of the Dwarf Fortress language server. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The raw language server and also the Dwarf fortress storyteller. Which was, and I'm not sure if it would still work anymore, but it was a API that you could use to access Legends mode so that you could use it to create apps

that accessed the Legends mode data. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That is correct. That is exactly what I mean. I... And that was all from memory, believe it or not. I didn't even have to look that out.

I can't tell you what episode number was. Yeah, me neither. But go ahead, Roland. I only sat in the background and I was like, uh... Oh! Yeah, cool. Yeah. Okay.

But... Well, to be honest, I sat in the background a lot on that one, too. know what an API is, but whenever he really got into the weeds on it, I sat in the background as well, but I found it very fascinating. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Oh, yeah.

That stuff's super cool. I mean, it's super fun to hear how they're doing it. And, yeah, like, trying to, and again, we, we've been very fortunate to have someone from the DF hack team swing by the Discord and chat with us about stuff. And that is another development effort that I think is truly Herculean in nature. because, you know, the cliche of trying to, you know, build the airplane while it's flying, I think is pretty apt for that because you're effectively trying to maintain a feature set for an application that is, you know, constantly changing, completely outside of your own control,

and it's constantly changing. And at any moment, Tarn could push an update that breaks the entire thing. And not like he's trying to do that, but just like these guys aren't maybe necessarily in the closest of contact and his problems are not their problems and their problems are not his problems and and and so the fact that it keeps running and it works as well as it does is pretty dang cool and a testament to the effort that those guys put in and I'm using guys in a gender neutral way there those folks those individuals um so yeah I'm seriously impressed it's it's it's neat need no yeah I need to uh to approach them, or we need to approach them and ask them if they'd like to come on and talk

about DF hack, because that would be, am I getting to the weeds? But, man, those would be some interesting weeds to explore. Yep. Well, yeah, and weren't we talking about maybe doing a little chit chat about DF hack and things that people like about it? And I, you know, I'd love to talk through some of the features that people find really useful because I feel like I'm constantly discovering things that make the game better for me, like auto clothing and auto butcher, which I had completely somehow missed out on until like two weeks ago.

Well, yeah, I did a very similar thing. I was away from the Internet for about five days recently. What? I know, right? So I was away from the Internet, but I did have Door Fortress and I did have D.F. Hack. So instead of, you know, surfing the horrible headlines that we have around the world right now,

I was surfing the DFHack help menu. And I was like, wow, I didn't know it did that. Wow, I didn't know it did that either. Oh, wow, that's cool. Let me try that. So, yeah, there's lots of really cool features in DFHack that some of them I might not want to use, but it's kind of neat that they're there. Like, I don't know that I would ever want to use the blueprinting.

What's it called? It was a quick fort? Oh, yeah, I've had zero luck with that. Maybe I would love to hear somebody who thinks that's neat and why they think it's neat and how they're using it because I'm too thick to figure that one out.

Yeah, so, yeah, I think that we should give a DF hack a little bit more love just to let people know some of the cool things that you can do with it. So, we may make that a regular feature coming up. Sounds good.

I'd vote for that. DF Hack Corner. Yeah. And if you're not playing with auto farming, that's pretty dang cool. Okay, but I'll plug that one. What does it do? So I'll probably,

probably a lot more that I don't know, but if you build your plots, it figures out the right crops to grow at the right times, and then it handles crop rotation for you, and they just kind of get on with it. And then, you know, so they'll make, like, whatever those rock nuts or whatever that crap is that I never really thought much about. Like, they'll sort all that out. And then all these weird seeds and berries and whatever that you end up with, like the fistleberry or the, you know, cranberry or I don't know whatever rhubarb you know all those things they'll figure out how to plant that

and rotate through it and then you'll have it and then if you set up the right workflow for like brew alcohol from fruit it you'll just magically have multiple types of alcohol which keep everyone even happier so it's not just mushroom wine or whatever

anyway pretty neat I'd say play with it because I bet you it does a heck of a lot more than what I've just described hmm interesting okay yeah yeah it's it's neat auto clothing seems the same kind of neat check that out i think that's even more powerful potentially but i've used it for a few things and it's pretty neat it seems to take care of a lot of the clothingy aspects of like pigtails to the pigtail industrial complex it seems to sort out for you so i'm gonna i'm gonna cut this part because it's it's a very

It shows a very poor podcast etiquette here. So I was looking up something else while you were just discussing the stuff that you were talking about, Tony. Whenever you were talking about QuickFort, did you talk about the Excel spreadsheet being able to copy and paste basically Fortress blocks? Did you talk about that? No. I mean, from my perspective is if there's a game and then somebody starts talking about Excel being involved, I become furious and want to walk out of the room. I don't know that it's Excel per se.

It can also be a CSV. You get your spreadsheet out of my game. I might have to bring a work to this. So I think that another thing that the QuickFork does, you don't ever have to actually do the spreadsheet thing. You can export a file that has the blueprint of a, maybe this isn't QuickFort. Maybe this is something else, but there is a command.

It might be what it does, yeah. There's a command that you can take a Z level and you can export it to a file so that whenever you come load up another fortress, you can go to a Z level in that fortress and import that dig pattern. So that you can, let's say that you have a particular layout of industry or something on the floor that you really like to use, then you can. can export that layout and then import it into your next fortress. So that was a big thing that was not working for a while, I think, in 4704 or 05, that

ended up taking a little while to get taken care of. But they did fix it almost, you know, just before version 50 came out. But that does work now. So I hear. All right. I would love to hear somebody talk about that because I do feel like one of the more monotonous parts of the game is the building of bedrooms

or whatever. Like, oh my God. It's better than it used to be. It's better than it used to be. With the multi, uh, you can multi zone bedrooms now, which is better than it was. But yeah, it's still. Yeah, it's still a little tedious. It's a little arduous.

I would, I would love a little improvement on that. But hey, man. I mean, the quick fort is exactly what you're looking at. Like, what you need. You can make an unmount. mind blueprint just in any rock area and you're like oh yeah you know I love this

and then you just copy that and then you have it as a stamp feature that you can just stamp all over your friggin Z-levels I actually did a video on that hey hey hey hey

we'll link that in the show notes if it still exists. Look at me I have a Twitch channel I streamed it I made a video of that and it is it is fairly easy to use and of course I did not even get anywhere with that I just made a few I believe it was bedrooms and then I made temples I made temples exactly you can rotate the blueprint so it is really like a stamp feature so you can make clover style bedroom arrangement and you stamp it north and then west and then south because you can't

rotated it's it's pretty neat i believe you could probably just stamp your entire fortress out in like 15 seconds and then you have your entire fortress for like 200 dwarfs takes a while to mind though yeah uh fastorff also a df act tool yeah i like that one for just you know like when you want to try something out and you you have an idea or a concept and you're pretty sure it's going to fail and you don't want to spend a lot of time getting attached to everyone in the fort and you just need to knock something out pretty quickly that's worth that's your friend okay well i'm going to keep playing with it because i've had really mixed experiences with the the quick fort so um i guess maybe i should tune into your stream if it's saved somewhere

and and have a look and see how you did it because i don't think i'm getting it and just because you can export a spreadsheet file it doesn't mean that you actually have to open it Oh, yeah, yeah. If it uses a spreadsheet and I don't know I'm using it, then I'm down. Yeah. It doesn't want to excel. It's just a data structure, man. It's just a data structure.

In the annals of archaeological discovery, the venerable potato bomb unearthed an ancient tome, detailing the final days of the dwarf fortress known as New Tower of Showing. The closing entry of this chronicle, was apparently written by a fortress visitor who bore witness to the fortress's tragic demise. The downfall of the fortress can be traced to their own shortcomings as they failed to contain the scourge of lichanthropy.

A solitary dwarf, who could barely stand and seemed on the brink of death, would miraculously transform into a wear limer each month, securing a fragile grasp on life. A migration wave of unfortunate timing only compounded their woes. Yet black salvation arrived in the form of Sabulalila, the enigmatic demon of Crystaldove. Cruel fate placed the demon in a meeting with their lone one-length Wehrleamer dwarf, who, by virtue of being the sole survivor, held the position of Mayer. When the moon reached its full brilliance, and the mayor transformed into the hideous wear creature,

the demon of Crystaldob swiftly vanquished the unfortunate mayor-turned Weir-turned Beast. Now, only the stink of this foul abode remains. I am leaving this tomb. And thus, as potato bomb relays, the tragic saga of Iridum Nast, New Tower Ruff showing, was consigned to history. May its tale of tribulations serve as an enduring lesson for generations of dwarves yet to come. Okay, so I was surfing on the A Strange Mood. podcast Discord channel.

I was a committing Discord adultery, yeah. And one of their listeners who is also in our Discord channel named Rurik, for some reason, I thought this was a really, really cool idea,

and I wanted to point it out. So this is reading directly from the A Strange Mood Discord channel. Anyone build huts to keep Fisherdwar safe? You can construct over the water source and set the zone over a floor grate

and surround the grate with a raw fish stockpile. So, in essence, you could build a, like, a bridge or a hut over a river and protect your fisher dwarves, just put a stockpile there. And by extension, you can put your fish processing plant right there at the river. Have either of you done that? Nope. I've done it once.

When was that? That was a million years ago. But I tried it. I saw it on the subreddit. Somebody was talking about, oh, yeah, they can fish. through greats and I was like, what? Then I tried it out. Yeah, mind blown.

It works pretty nice. It works pretty nice. But the question in many cases is why. If you, for example, are in a very savage jungle biome and there's like constant attacks by, I don't know, flying creatures, huge elephants, tigers name it then it makes sense

to box in your fisher drawers where they don't actually have to go into the wilderness to get to the water and the source of fish is just too good to pass up sometimes especially if your farming is not running properly or whatever else

you don't have animal husbandry no egg layers whatever then fishing becomes very interesting to use. So maybe that's a... Can you get fish fat? Can you get tallow from fish? No.

I mean, I don't think so. Not from the caught fish, not from the vermin fish. But if you use like a dry drowning chamber and you get a shark, I'm pretty sure there's shark tallow, yeah. That sounds like a lot of trouble. just to make soap. Yeah. Yeah, that's what dogs and cats are for.

Exactly. Yeah. So anyway, shout out to Rurik. Thanks for hosting that. I found it for some reason really compelling, and I want to really try that. Can't do it right now. I will tell you why here in a little bit. But, yeah.

And a strange mood podcast, this last episode was a great one. I want to shout out to those fine folks over there, Drew and Kristen. Okay, let's see now. I want to talk about my fortress that has gone all to hell. And so, yeah. I had wear lemurs. I had a were limer problem. I had a were lemur problem that grew exponentially, and I was unable to contain the issue.

And it was my fault for not at the very beginning snuffing out the very first wear limer in getting everything compartmentalized. But I'm going to make a long story short here. My fortress went from 160-something dwarves down to 17. Yeah. Well, that's good. I mean, 17's better than zero. Yeah, there's a lot of dead bodies around.

There's too many bodies to clean up. My dwarves that are left. For all I know, next full moon, they're going to be wearleamers too. all of them are wear lemurs, then, you know, I'd be able to make the fortress work with that. But I think that my goal of constructing a colossal statue may not work out with this fort. Damn. Oh, that's a toughie. And you also got to be careful because if you make too many wereleemers, it messes up your future endeavors.

because the migrants to your fort will also then, you know, like if you start a new fort, all your migrants are going to be baddies also. Oh, shoot. Yeah. So you'll see, you know, so one thing you can do or one thing I've done is I'll give them nicknames. And then when they come to my fort in a new one, I'll just insta kill them.

It's a good idea. Just to try to call the population. It's not infallible, but it, you know, it's one strategy. I suspect Roland you've probably got. some thoughts and theories on that. Wait, go again? So if you populate the world with wear lemurs, like he's doing, I guess, by having a wear

lemur fort, then they will, and then you retire that force. Yeah, not on purpose. Yeah, not on purpose. But just, you know, that's whoopsy-dipsy-dazy. Yeah. That's the way this one has fallen. So, yeah, go ahead. They don't, like, they'll still exist in the world.

So if you start another fort, those where lemurs will migrate to your new fort and start causing you mayhem. So what I've done is I'll put a name on them if I think they're infected, like a nickname on them. And then those people will migrate to my new fort. And then I can see that they may be infected and then I'll just kill them or put them in a like put them in a burrow and lock them in and see how they do on the first full moon or whatever. I suppose you could do that. I usually kill them. I mean, that is a way to deal with wear infection, I guess. But yeah, it can spread.

Like, it's a pandemic. Yes. Once it's become a pandemic, yeah. It's tough to get it, you know, and there's no vaccination for that. I just had an idea of how I can prevent that from happening for the future fortresses, though. I can take, whenever it's not a full moon, I can take my entire fortress population, put them in a particular, well, basically, either just trap them, wall them in to where they can't get out and then abandon the fortress, or take them wall them in and put a flood trap and

kill my remaining dwarves. Well, you know, a vengeful god. Happens. Yeah, I think you have to actually go for the second route here, because I am unsure how the game keeps track of whether or not a creature is taken. technically trapped when not in a cage. I had the same idea with a vampire. I had a vampire in a hole in my wall,

and the vampire just moved away from the fortress. I saw that later in, what's the called Legends? I saw it in Legends mode, and he escaped from my fortress, which means that the game does not actually check that well, whether or not somebody is walled into a place. So I believe that if you wall off your entire civilization population, then you still probably get visitors from that place. It also does weird things with injured dwarves.

I had a fort where I think a forgotten beast came through and everyone was losing their ability to stand. And so I had hospitals just full of injured dwarves. And so I went through and tagged them all and was like injured and useless. so I'd quit putting them in squads. And then finally I gave up and retired the fortress. But then I noticed those injured dwarves suddenly had the ability to stand again, and they were migrating into my fort.

So I don't know what happened. Something weird happened. They were healed. They were healed. Something healed them. Yeah, it was really strange because I, you know, it was all set to expel or execute. And then they were fine.

So I thought, well, okay, it's good to sometimes not be so hasty. So, yeah, the megastructure that I had planned on having done by the time we had episode 100, and I was going to do a grand reveal. That doesn't look like that's going to happen. Never say never. Unless I can go between now and then. Ever say never. You know, it could, we'll try again. You're going to probably by the next episode, we're going to have a new fortress, and we are probably going to hear during the interludes of the episode you're listening to right now.

we will have the story of the fall of New Tower of Showing Sadness. It's the way it goes. It's a little fortress, man. Things don't typically end well. Losing is fun, right? Losing it is fun. After fun.

Doing it again. The great philosopher David Ellsroth relayed. Once upon a time, in a prosperous land known as the wealthy rag, there lived a dwarf named of Uslashed, claw. Avuz was a peculiar character, for he had a unique way of dealing with life's challenges. Whenever he needed to recall something, he would have conversations with inanimate objects, and he had a deep affinity for working outdoors, even when the weather was less than pleasant.

One day, the leaders of the wealthy rag saw potential in Avuz, and they made an interesting choice. They selected Avuz to lead an expedition with a noble purpose, to establish a new fortress that would help expand their civilization. On the 5th of limestone, in the year 113, under the leadership of Avuz, a small group of dwarves, six, to be exact, or seven if you counted Avuz himself, set out on a journey to a hilly region in the Great Land.

There, they worked tirelessly and founded a fortress they named Pew Pepper. And so, David Ellsroth shared this tale, showing that even those who appear peculiar or have their unique ways of doing things can become leaders and achieve remarkable feats when given the opportunity. The story of Avuz-Lashdklaug reminds us that it's often the unconventional thinkers who bring about significant change and progress in the world.

So what have you guys had going on in your fortresses? You know, still playing the same fortress, but I took a breather. I played a different game with a settlement building system. What? Yeah. Huh, I know. Which one? Just for kicks.

Just for kicks, and I, I wanted to play something different in between. Which one? Don't leave it, it was actually fallout four. Oh, right, I've heard of that one. Yeah, I was craving a little bit of a shooter action, and then I was reminded that, oh, yeah, there is a settlement system, buddy. And now I'm no longer shooting. I'm just fast traveling from my settlements. and building them up.

And the one point I like fallout for, because you do get the ability to actually display things. Like, there's junk items in the game, like forks and spoons and tablecloth and whatever. So you can make an apartment, and you can fill it with books, you can fill it with plates, you can fill the fridge, except for the parts where you can't. And then it sucks and it annoys me.

For example, there are no fridges in the game. Why? Why, why, why can I not build a fridge? Ah! Or other parts, because it has like a weird snap-on feature. Like the building parts are magnetic. And they're supposed to be some kind of magnetic magic bullshit going on. And then you snap the building pieces together to build like a big house.

And it works great until it doesn't. And then I, I... Ooh-hoo-hoo-hoo! I'm very happy that Dwar Fortress doesn't have that, and the building is so much freer, and I can build towers and buildings, and I am not constricted by this magnetic feature sometimes, because it makes me angry.

But on the other hand, the small details are missing in Dwar Fortress. I mean, I'm not sure if I want, like, plates and spoons and four, into the game, because then the game clutters to absolute death. Fallout 4, the OCD extension. Yeah, you have to clean every place of junk. It, oh, my God. But, yeah, it makes me appreciate the way that War Fortress is played and the way that you can't craft and build things in War Fortress.

also again still playing the same fortress and I'm I do kind of want to end it but I don't know how I don't know how to put an end and to say like okay period this is where it ends I don't know how to do that so it just keeps on going there is no version of abandon the fortress to ruin there is but I don't want to do that I could just you know let the world I'll take over and have it, but I want like a personal end, like a, hmm, like a, not exactly roleplay end, but I want a chapter ending, you could say. I want a chapter ending to this fortress where it feels good to say, okay, I'm done. And I, maybe I just have a personal problem doing that. Have you been playing Tony at all? I have. So I have my kind of like my big long-term project going.

It's been before it's, I don't know, 10 or 12 years old, which, you know, for me, that's a pretty good run. It's got a couple of libraries, several taverns. I've got war elephants. I'm conquering nearby civilizations. I think I'm up to like 200 citizens. And that was the one where I started with the civilization of one. and so I thought well you know a punch hole in the caverns and start bringing in as many adventures and migrants as I could so that one seems to be going pretty well I've resurrected a fallen civilization so that's fun now I want to go into legends mode and try to figure out what caused the fall in the first place and so that's going pretty well and then on my Mac I started a pocket world with the intention of testing it but then I got kind of interested in conquering the the whole pocket world.

And so I'm kind of wiping every other civilization out right now to see how that goes. And, you know, that's fun. So those are my two things. Both of you tend to be more concerned with the things that are going on in the wider world outside your fortress than I am. With me, everything is always focused on what is going on inside my fort. And not exactly macro managing, but I don't really pay that much attention to, the what's going on unless, you know, except for whatever things come from off the map and attack me.

For me, I usually try to get the forts to be sustaining. And then once I do that, that lets me focus on what's going on outside of it. So for the pocket world, I'm struggling to get migrants. So to populate my armies and keep them, you know, to keep them flourishing, I guess. That's a little slow. I don't know if I need to get some like Luther Van Druss album.

to encourage the doors to propagate themselves or something. I don't know. So that's been a bit of a challenge. But basically, once you get the fort sustainable and you've kind of automated food and drink creation and got some recreation stuff and you're not trying to constantly expand, people are pretty chill and they can drink in the taverns and hang out and make crafts and do whatever they want,

then it's like you just kind of turn your attention to the wider world and start trying to ruin it or improve it depending on how you view it. That's kind of my perspective. Yeah, I can fully agree with that. I often look at the world and then I instantly have some ideas

and what to do and the better my fortress is doing and I don't have to take care of the drinks and food situation any longer then I start to give myself some new inspiration on what to do, and often I simply look at the world map and go, hmm, where's the next idiot that I can attack?

And, yeah. I have to say, though, I've had very few plots with the two forts that I'm running now. Like, maybe I'm just better at protecting my artifacts. So usually I'll make a room off the tavern and put some glass in and then put all the artifacts behind a locked door. And I don't know if maybe they can't see them through the glass, or I don't know, whatever it is, but no one seems to be, like I'm not getting any criminal conspiracies, which is kind of a bummer because those are fun to deal with, but that doesn't

seem to be happening as much. So maybe I should try to set up some honey traps or something. I don't know. But that's kind of, that's, you know, that's why I'm not doing as much internal stuff. I might have had, because I had several artifacts that were stolen, but that's another thing that doesn't trip my trigger very much, so I don't usually follow up on them. I'm like, you know what, that artifact's gone. No one seems too pissed off about it, so say love you. Oh, see, it really makes me mad when they steal stuff. Like, I'll conquer civilizations to try to get stuff back, even if it's a dumb toy boat. Like, somehow it just rubs me the wrong way. Don't you dare? I'm usually too worried about turning my, you know, my guild hall into a grand guild hall

because the guild has requested it and finding that that is a lot harder to do in version 50 than it was in version 47. Oh, I got a tip for you to make that easier. And I think maybe we talked about this in one of our episodes, but what I've done is you make the room bigger than you maybe normally would. And then instead of wasting all the time,

smoothing the floor or whatever, just take some of your gold bars or iron bars or whatever and use those to make the floor. and then have them carve the floor or engrave the gold or iron floor and that'll usually do it and it doesn't even have to be a very big it doesn't even have to be a very big spot

like I just go and you know I usually try to have you know a dozen gold bars on hand I'm really big on aesthetics whenever I'm looking at my map so I don't know if you recall when we did do the succession fort so many years ago one of the things that I did was I had the dwarves lay the Dwarfortress Roundtable emblem on the floor.

So, yeah, I can make pretty designs on the floor with gold and engrave that gold and it might look really cool and be worth a lot of my, hey, cool, thanks. Yeah, I do that. I think it was mentioned, but I didn't recall that. I've been doing it just very basically, like, if it's

a Ranger Guild, I do an R on the floor and gold so I can remember what guild is what. I have trouble finding, like, for example, I will have a a noble who needs to have their office improved because they have, because they're requesting a, you know, a better tomb or a, you know, a better office or something like that. I have trouble going back and finding which office is theirs. I don't know of a easy way to do that. Somebody tell me the easy way to do that in the Discord or send us an email at Eurist at DFRoundable.com.

U-R-I-S-T at D-F-R-R-Table.com. All right, anybody got anything else to talk about before we wrap things up here? No. I think we got it. All righty then. It's a wrap. I like wraps.

Okay, so thanks so much, everybody, for listening to the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable podcast. We'll be back in a couple weeks with more dwarfy goodness. Again, if you want to get a hold of us, you can send us an email at EURIST at DFRoundtable.com, or even better, you can join the Dwarfortress Roundtable Discord server. You can find a link on our website, DFRoundable.com. And, yeah, we'd love to talk to you. It's, you know, I'm finding that, that Discord channel, honestly, a heck of a lot more fun than I thought I would. So, yeah, it's just been a lot of.

a lot of fun. A lot of great conversation on there. Everybody should join. You, listening right now, you should join as well. Unless you're already on there in that case. Thank you for joining. Or just make loads of different accounts and, you know, sock puppet your way to success. Exactly. Exactly. Okay, guys. Oh, Roland, did you read what you should say at the end of the episodes? Yes. There were several good ideas. I will keep mixing them up.

So for this episode, you want to... Yep, let's wrap it up here. All right, everybody, thanks for listening, and good luck and dig deep. See you next time. And I am requesting Drake's for next year's cameraman. Thank you, and goodbye. This has been the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes.

at DFRoundable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwarfortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. If you'd like to contact us by email, the address is Urest at DFRoundable.com. That's UR-I-S.T at D-F Roundtable.com. If you'd like to interact with the hosts and listeners of the podcast, you'll find a link to join our Discord server in the main menu of our web.

website. If you'd like to help support this podcast financially, you can find us at patreon.com slash df roundtable. This is a conversational podcast. All craftsmanship is of the highest quality. Thanks, Delfonso.