Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 94: Shooting the Breeze with BlindIRL

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

BlindIRL joins us to discuss a lot of random stuff.

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we're welcoming back today, Blind IRL. And I counted them up, and I think that this is your fifth appearance blind. Welcome back. Is it really five?

Geez. Hi. Yeah. It's good to be back. And today you get another punch on your card, and after your next one, you'll get a free quiz note. so that's pretty cool. Oh, wow.

We actually still have some of those around here. I don't even know if it didn't. I don't know if they still exist. They do exist. They're just very uncommon and in very odd places. So, yeah, we had Tekken on last episode, and I said that, I think that I said that it was his fourth appearance on the podcast, and then I went back and counted them up,

and he had been on six times, including the time that you and you and Tech had run at the same time. So, yeah, this is your fifth unless I miscounted. So welcome back. Well, it's good to be back. How are things going? Things have been all right. I mean, it's been a, I recently have come to the conclusion, well, not really come to the conclusion,

but I have to come to the acceptance of the fact that I've been making, like, active live-streamed content on the internet for 10 years. So I've been counting my gray hairs. That's kind of, that's been my week, is just kind of coming to the realization of that. But aside from that, you know, just staring at, like, my notification announcements for Dwarf, fortress updates and continuing to do my thing on the internet. Well, let's make a pitch out to Just for Men gel, the hair coloring for men. Get rid of those groups. There you go. I was going to say, you can't be, at least you have hair, you know, I guess

people that have been stream longer might not even have it anymore. Yeah, I don't quite look like a northern lion yet. I'm not an egg. Well, Blind, you had a couple of prestigious guests on your, uh, your stream just a couple weeks ago. And I think that the wording that they used on Steam was that you grilled Tarn and Zach about adventure mode. So how'd that go? Well, I mean, I grilled them.

I think the one there was one very notable event out of that, which has nothing to do with adventure mode, which I informed Tarn that vampires are always blue, and he was completely unaware that vampires are always blue and always visible.

Like the color blue or just generally sad? No, like they're always blue like when they come into your fortress they're blue like they are blue people they are not hard to spot because they are just blue good to know because he mentioned something about vampires like doing something like you know that they're always blue right and he goes wait what like they literally they they are always blue a hundred percent of the time they look like zombies he's just like oh man and then just like cursing up a storm so i i think i had formed him about a bug that he was completely out of that's been in the game for a year um

we've also come to the conclusion that and I can also ask you guys hear this but when you get sieged by goblins in version 50 do you ever get attacked by trolls alongside of those sieges? You know what I haven't seen trolls for some time because I'm convinced Tarn like

took don't feed the trolls a little too seriously and we have no trolls left because I only see them as wild animals in the caverns yeah you know what you're right come to think of it they have not been part of anything and I was just thinking it was like the worlds that I built or whatever and they just

I don't know just didn't like them that was my initial assumption but it's been like nine worlds the odds are getting bad yeah now that you say it I have not seen even a wild troll there's zero trolls in our worlds okay sure enough I'm playing the same fortress all

the time but still I mean I don't like the trolls so I'm glad to see him gone the door smashing bastards but yeah we could take this out of context and it would be about internet civility. Yeah. Just don't like the trolls.

No, I don't either. Take that out as a sound bite. But yeah, no, those are kind of like the Fortress Mode discoveries that we kind of made. We also talked quite a bit about like Marks dwarves because like the current status with Marksors is they're about as functional as they were in version 47 aside from the ability to select specific ammo types, which largely is completely functional as long as you're willing to do some cheese when you're like training them. otherwise they'll just, you know, fire them all into the targets and destroy all of your arrows or bolts or whatever you're using and you'll run out really quick. Yeah. So if you're okay with, like, digging a trench in front of your training targets so that they

drop down a Z level and you end up with just billions of unstacked bolts, which doesn't actually, like, cause any issues whatsoever for them be, like, their effectiveness. It just takes them longer to gather their ammo. And then if you're using bins, they can't just put them all into bins and that doesn't actually change the amount of time. them to gather their ammo it just takes more time for civilians and your dwarves to put them into the bins as long as you're okay with that process um they they are like largely as functional as they were in version 47 do the bins work with ammo now because there was a while there

where we're if i'm not mistaken maybe it was 44 maybe it was sometime in 47 but uh that uh if if you if they would put their their ammo in bins they wouldn't collect them yes if the ammo has enough, if the bins have nothing but ammo in them. Okay. So as long as it's an ammo specific stockpile, yeah, it works just fine. Great. Well, that means that that was one of the problems that I had with supplying my dwarves.

It would just get very unwieldy to have a whole bunch of bolts whenever you could have one bolt per tile. So, yeah. I mean, the way that I find it to be the most effective is like they, I know some people will say things like, oh, they won't go gather ammo again. Like, it's very much a min-max process. you have to make sure that they are

basically in battlements that have no way of accessing the enemy so like there has to be a trench in front of them with an overhang or they will just dodge through the what do you call it the fortifications and then just attack the enemy you have to make sure that the

ammo is closer to them than the enemy so if like you basically need them to be in battlements with like ammo underneath them in the wall or behind them and then lock them into that space and then set them into a patrol route to patrol between their ammo and where you want them to fire from. And it's a bit of a process to set up, but it's no, it's way easier than like, you know,

setting up ballistas. And, and it works very consistently. And I've been, the two main uses that I've been using them for is, um, knocking stuff off of walkways with bone bolts. So it's like, if I'm short on, on metal, um, it's because they, they tend to dodge out of the way of bolts, regardless of material. So if, if you just bring bone bolts, it's like, it's, it's, like, it's super easy to just use that to knock them into traps or off of walkways. And then the other thing I've been using them for is just steel bolts on bigger walkways with just like gaps and trenches. And then they literally, I've had them take out 150 goblins with like 20 marks dwarves

in less time than a melee squad would. Wow. And if they don't kill them, then by the time the goblins have gotten through, they're all injured. So it's just like, it's a non-concern. and you can send half-armed dwarves in and they'll just clean up the mess. Cool. Well, as long-time listeners will know, we have a long-running schick about archers on this podcast.

So, and, yeah, I haven't touched archers since the new version has come out. But I think that you have convinced me to go ahead and do so whenever I get my problems with wear beasts sorted out. Yeah, you and the wear beasts. I don't know if you ever, like, if you guys were ever really in the anti-backerbeasts. backpack club but uh use backpacks backpacks good now oh okay it's just part of this squad equipment okay well the the the issue with backpacks before was like when they put a meal into their backpack it would be claimed as theirs so when they would unequipped the backpack they put it in their room and then it would rot that was the old bug um when it when they put an item and when they put food

in their backpack it's not claimed as theirs now so they can eat it whenever they want while they're on the job or whatever but um if it's dropped out of their backpack then it just gets put back in the stockpile now my goodness you know just when you know a game i had completely forgotten about backpacks this game is so freaking rich yeah there are so many things that you can so many holes that you can go down that are that are somewhat optional but can improve the can improve the experience of playing the game like backpacks i've been existing just fine without backpacks oh yeah but but yeah you just say that and go you know why am I not equipping backpacks on my people?

That sounds like it's good if they can bring their food with them. And then if you want to take that to like the actual galaxy brain level, you build a, what do you call it, your barracks? And then you make a dining hall in your barracks. And then you connect the dining hall to either the tavern or your barracks. And then your soldiers will use that dining hall that's right there. And if you connect it to the tavern, then they won't prioritize that dining hall,

but they'll probably just use it because it's very close. and then they will get happy thoughts for watching performances in their barracks while they're training. Oh, interesting. Because you can connect any zone to any zone as long as it's not a named zone. You can't connect a named zone to a named zone

but you can connect any named zone to any other zone. How did you come up with that? You just click the plus symbol on the zone. So you go to the dining hall, you click the little plus symbol and then you scroll down the list and just select what you want. You can connect a dining hall to a tavern or a temple or barracks or whatever and that's not new is it that's no it's been in the game

forever yeah as long as zones have been in the game and i just i just realized that recently i think that i was reading i think that it was when i was going through the dream fort uh documentation that uh that it talked about the way that it uh that it arranged its dining hall and its tavern and it gave me made me do a little bit more of a deep dive on on sending up your your meeting area zones and how that they can overlap. There are some things you can't do, but I can't remember off the top of my head what they are. I mean, like the default thing is like connecting bedrooms and dining halls to taverns, right?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. But like the unintended outcome is like, oh, you can like connect a library to an animal training zone and then make all of your scribes into animal trainers and they'll keep all of your animals trained or whatever, stuff like that. I do remember what it was now. For whatever reason, I'm having a hitch whenever I'm trying to. to have a dining hall and an office belong to a particular dwarf in, you know, for example, the mayor, but you can't overlap them because the chair is already claimed as part of the office and the table's already claimed as part of the dining hall so it doesn't want to zone them together. Yeah, I don't think you can connect, like, once something is assigned to a dwarf, you can't connect it to an external zone because then it is the property of that particular dwarf.

I think it negates that Maybe if I unassigned the pieces of furniture from the dwarf And then try to assign those And have them overlap the zones Maybe then I can reassign them to the dwarf Okay, I'll try that Maybe I need to try zoning prisons with taverns actually So they'd serve alcohol to prisoners

Yeah Is this like the prison riot mod? Yeah, what? You know, have a whole bunch of drunk prisoners No, I mean, that's just... You know, they riot anyway, right? If you set up a tavern riot with a tavern keeper, you're going to end up with a dwarven riot eventually.

Not always. That only happens if you allow them to get over-intoxicated. How do you stop them? From getting over-intoxicated? Make sure they all have bedrooms. Oh, did then they go home and behave themselves? Dwarves specifically will get over-intoxicated if they fall asleep on the floor. Oh, right, because the tavern keep keeps feeding them out.

alcohol while they sleep yeah yeah and then they brawl under the and then if they're in a crappy mood then they brawl under the influence although if you have tavern visitors then good luck because humans have very low alcohol tolerance just like real life so much like us yeah i've just taken it as a matter of course that eventually i'm going to see vomit on the floor of the tavern because there's been a fight breakout it does no one seems to actually get hurt too badly by these fights but uh and they eventually resolve themselves but yeah and then the wear moose comes and you're doomed. You know, and that's the way it typically happens, so I'm sure we'll get into that again

later. If it seems like every episode now, we're talking about my damn weird creatures, but. Yeah, you should just roll yourself a new world, man. I think you got... I don't want to. It's a challenge now. Lock the doors. It's fine.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the doors are quite powerful. Let's don't, let's don't nerf the doors. Well, locked doors have always been invincible against rare creatures. Wear creatures. Yeah, I've had trolls knocked down the doors. Yeah, well, that's working as intended. Yeah, I actually, I had a forgotten beast

melting doors the other day, which made my brains fall out. It was just a ball of fire. What kind of wear beast was it? It was a ball of fire that shot fire with a shell. The classic. Yeah. And I had stone doors. I was like, well, I'll just throw some, like,

direate doors down here. And then, like, I panned back over a minute later, and the doors were gone. And I was like, what the hell? So are we talking to wear beast or a forgotten beast? Forgotten beast, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. I'm like, I'm like, what kind of, uh, wear beast, wow. Where magma man.

Where, magma, man. We're making both of those. Well, any, any, uh, sentient creature, uh, I think they call it any, any learning creature that, uh, that gets bit by a aware creature can catch the lichentropies. So, um, I've never seen an edible person wearer. I haven't either, but, uh, that would be neat, though. Yeah Badger Man becomes badger Yeah

Wear badger Bear badger Or does it become a wear a human Dair badger Wear human Sadly I don't have any To test it out Neither the animal man

Nor the Were People All right Arena mode science, go Yeah That's right Well I just embarked to an untamed wild

So I might have some Animal men Go for you lose people And, well, you got to know that this continent that I'm on is just freaking filled full of wear moose. So where mooses, wear moose is wheremease, wear mooses. So you settled in Canada? Yeah. I think it is called the Great Land, right?

Oh, yeah. Check out. White North. Yeah, my continent that I'm on is called the Great Land. And my civilization that keeps spawning these, these, uh, embarks is the wealthy rag. and yeah so this is a fort number five

that I just started in this same rag from the same civilization the previous four have all fallen to lycanthropy yeah it's been a mess

you really hate to see it it's just a question off time I'm sorry I think you should just embrace it and basically force you just run an aware creature fort and just every full moon I tried

it's it's tedious It's a pain in the ass to do. They kill everything, don't they? Well, yeah, it's just a pain. It's not very much fun, so. Renowned historian Boss J-313 tells in his history, Tales of the Great Land. In the dawning days of the year 123, the wealthy rag leadership received a message from the newest outpost dragon labors. Things were going well.

We had set up our fortress. defenses, and had fended off three separate Wormuz attacks from outside the fortress. Once the moon passed fullness, we quickly released the poor infected beings from their misery, with axe and hammer. But late last year, something went wrong, and apparently someone failed in their charge, because a visiting dwarf in the Helm Tummies Tavern transformed into a Wormoose. We tried our best to contain the spread, attempted to sequester any dwarves who may have become infected, but it was futile. Dragon labors lost over two-thirds of its populace, including all the leadership. There are only 14 of us left, who have been hiding in a locked

and barricaded food stockpile for some time. With great reluctance and some fear, we have decided to abandon the fortress to ruin. This place is just too difficult to defend. Please send no more migrants this way, as there will be nobody here. You can find tales of the Great Land by Professor Boss J313 in Better Bookstores Everywhere. So we were talking about, you were talking about that bug with the vampire, the vampires being blue. And that reminded me that we now have a, what looks like a real bug tracker now, instead of just typing in your bug into Discord, which I think is a very big step forward. I think that the new bug tracker is well admittedly I haven't touched it nor used it at all aside from looking at it

but it is definitely a bug tracker and there is definitely bugs on it so yep it's it's good to see that working as intended a heck of a heck of a start as somebody who's like you know not even remotely knowledgeable about how things like that like when I run into a bug I just like send somebody a DM and shoot them a save file and forget about it like if I have to make an account sign up for a thing. I'm already out. But many, many people are not lazy like me and will actually go do it. So my goal is to when I run into a bug, just yell at chat room to go report it. And then I don't need to worry about it. One of the biggest things about an actual bug tracker is it gives you the opportunity to search for the bug and to see if it already exists and if people have reported on it. And if so, it allows you to add a comment to that bug or add more information for the developers. And that really didn't work very well at all. Whenever it was just being collected in a Discord channel. So I'm really happy to see that.

And before the version 50, before the Steam slash Kit Fox transition, there was a bug tracker for Dwar fortress that was handled on. I think it's just, yeah, that. So, yeah, they lost that for whatever reason whenever they switch over to 50, but it's really good to see that they've got one back. Yeah. I think it's important, especially whenever, now that you have more than one developer working on the program.

Oh, yeah, that's a big difference. I just wanted to bring that up Because yeah That was one of the things That really stuck out to me About that latest Kit Fox update Is that there's now a real bug tracker

Happy to see it Yeah that's probably the biggest news I mean the rest of it Is just like screenshots right And anybody who's played Have any of you guys Had played Adventure Mode much In older versions

A little Yeah the old time In the olden days Yeah yeah This looks so cool though I love the look Yeah It looks neat

Yeah. So. Go ahead. Blanna interrupted you. No, it's fine. I tend to interrupt other people, so just talk over me. I, uh, I, I, I've, I've got, uh, some theories right now because I don't know, maybe a month ago.

The Kit Fox account was in, in my chat talking about working on a, uh, air quotes trailer. So I've been like, because realistically like the information that we got out of, um, the, the interview that I just did with Sack and Tarn was a lot of stuff that if you've played the game before. You know, right? Like, you're going to be traveling around on the overworld on a map. Okay, we have a rough idea of what that map's going to look like because we've seen the very primitive versions of those maps in ASCy over the years, right? So we, if you've played the game before, you probably have an idea of what it's going to look like even without seeing any screenshots, right? But what I think we actually care about is like development

timelines, release dates, and footage. I know that there's a trailer in the works. And if you look at the logical places a trailer could be released in the next few weeks. There's not that many things coming up. There's a bunch of big indie live streams in December. So it could be one of those those big announcement streams. There's the game awards coming up. There's the PC game show coming up. And then there's also the ability for them to just like drop a thing and be like, hey, this is here. So I know that there is footage being recorded for a thing. I know it's in the works. And there's only so many places they could release it. And also we have the, one-year release anniversary coming up.

So that being said, I don't know if this trailer actually includes footage of adventure mode, but I do know that there is a trailer. So we're going to be getting something in the next couple weeks. It's just a matter of when and what's in it. I hope it's narrated by the In a World guy, because that would be a really good trailer. You know what I mean. It's just like the guts glory ram guy. In a world where Moose takes over

In a world where everybody dies Both of those worlds are my current Fortress world right here I thought it was cool The kind of the preview in those screenshots Of the procedurally generated Creatures that you can see a portrait of That's I'm kind of looking forward to that

I know that it's fluff But it's cool fluff Fluff is good Yeah With the procedural portraits thing During the conversation with Tarn, the question of what are they going to look like in Aski came up. And I think we may have convinced him to go back to his old 1980s Asky faces days to draw like colored squares in Aski to make approximations of face designs. So you're welcome if we get that.

Thanks. You've delayed it another eight months. no Tarzan said it would probably delay the whole project by about four days so you know honestly worth it in Dwarven terms

yeah that's that's just a blink of an eye yeah that's it's like you and I drinking a cup of coffee absolutely totally worth it if it delays a release by four or five days that I'm okay with that

as long as we get like angry Aski faces in little dwarf portraits I haven't loaded the new version in Aski yet you should look at it It looks pretty cool.

I did. I loaded it and I looked at it for a few minutes and was suddenly missing the Phoebus tile set. So then I switched back to a graphic sky. What can I say? You should look at it when you're getting sieged by something with a lot of archers. Oh. Because it's just like a cloud of tiny little spines. It's like a porcupine exploding.

It is fantastic. Just little bolts going every which way. Yeah, I just pulled up the picture of the tavern from the adventure mode preview screenshot, just the hippo man wrestler Cueb Rosmete. Hello, it is good to see you. Did you see the back and forth on the Dwar Fortress subreddit about the hippo man? No, I did not. Well, everybody wants to date the hippo man.

Yeah, they want to date him. That was a, I, um, there were interesting posts. Wow. I guess he does look a little bit like Jason Kelsey. Yeah. I don't know who that is, but now I want to see this hippo man. again. What of my favorite bits out of that whole thing was,

Neo Rice, Nio Rice is good, who's the artist to Drew the Hippo Man, popped into the comments section and said, I had complete artistic freedom and used that freedom wisely. Yeah, I'll say. I mean, it's an amazing rendition of what a,

you know, what a hippo man would look like. It's one of the most dangerous creatures on Earth. Is that a shadow or is that like an Amish beard on him? That is definitely a shadow. Okay. But I can see the Amish beard now that you mentioned. Is the hippo man dangerous?

Like real hippos? I mean, are you asking, would it be strong to be a hippo man? Because things with lots of body mass are strong. That's the reason that elephant man is one of the strongest adventure mode characters. I think it is a fine portrait and really good, you know, eight-bit graphics-y style art, but I don't know

that I see sexy in here. Well, obviously just not your vibe. Yeah. I guess not. Just not your style. Don't kink shame. Let's don't kink shame on the show, okay?

You like hippos. And that's fine. Do you have like a larger version of that sprite somewhere? Because I only have the picture that I can see on Steam and I can't even zoom in. Can you not click it?

Well, it's on a, If you go to... Where is it? I'm trying to find it. Let me press the link. I'll plop it into your Discord. Thank you. For research purposes only, obviously.

Yeah, so that you can, like, create a full-body fan art of this. Yeah. Or a full-body? Or a pillow? A body pillow? I'm only seeing a headshot. Can we do a hippo-man? Hippoman body pillows?

Yes. Kit Fox, we got merch ideas for you guys. Oh, my goodness. Look at that. Look at that absolute unit. Look at him. Wow. And in regards to the screenshots, the last one that I sent, which I think is actually very interesting.

And the reason I think this last one is very interesting is one of it includes the little portrait. But the reason it's really, really interesting is the fortress that it's in, which is a fortress called Aqua Ways, which was made by one of my community members, which shows that we have safe compatibility. Oh, yeah. Is this something that I can post, is this image something that can post to our listeners? Oh, yeah. All that stuff's public. The hippo man. I knew that I'd seen the top two

But I hadn't seen the third one yet with the fortress But please continue blind But yeah, so that shows that we have safe compatibility Because that's apparently running in the version That's apparently running in the version That has adventure mode in it Oh, now I get what you're trying to say Okay, okay

Yeah, that's cool Oh That could be doggone useful Which means you can already start building Adventure mode worlds if you really want Oh, I see Okay. So then in 2027, you will be ready to hit the ground running.

2027? Nah, it'll be out before halfway through next year. That's great. I'll tell you what, I'm not going to ditch this world because if this is save compatible, this world that is packed with wear moose might be a really interesting adventure world mode. No, adventure mode world. To quote what Zach said, it was really hard to maintain save compatibility between version 47 and version 50 because of the amount of saves

that we're already running in version 50. But now that they've got the break, it's very easy to maintain save compatibility from version 50 to version 50 plus adventure mode because all that they need to do is make sure that adding adventure mode in doesn't break the saves that are currently there. Oh, that makes sense.

So, very cool. I think we're going to get a new major number? Going to go 51 or 55 or something? I didn't ask. I don't know. Maybe. It'd be interesting. that's part of the surprise yeah when they do bring it out

we're going to do another set of streams where where Tony and Roland trying to teach me to play adventure mode again because that was a blast well we had a good time yeah we said else on fire it was good yeah we really did enjoy

those days I'm looking forward to it because I mean just the UX UI looks pretty cool I've been playing Caves of Cud a little bit to kind of get used to the I mean, that game's pretty nuts. That's kind of what I would imagine it would be like... I love Cud. Now you can, like, cut your arms off voluntarily and use them as weapons or whatever.

It's gotten a little. Get it? Yeah, the Caves of Cud patch notes are also enjoyable, like the Door Fortress Patch Notes. Well, I went through my, I went through my Legends mode and found that the wear moose, at least one of them, was killing people with socks. It was like whacking people over the head with a wool side. do that. I mean, you don't love that, but you know, it does, it is known to happen.

Talking about weird beasts equipping things, I only once got a Minator to actually take up a sword and kill someone with a sword, and I was riding that high for weeks

after, and I've never gotten to any minor tour to pick up a weapon ever again and it makes me very very mad so did did you ever get to do that blind what get a minotor to pick up a weapon or any any giant creature that comes by and is evil like any

forest titan my current world every single giant eton and cyclops that have shown up have been carrying a minimum of like ten artifacts what yeah what kind of world are you playing swords shields shield

Cool one. Yeah, and like good artifacts, too. Like, I've gotten several steel swords. I've no idea who's making them. A lot of them have cobald names, too, which is really weird. My theory is that, like, the cobalds are stealing them and then naming them, and then the, like, giants are stealing them from the cobalds. But I'm collecting them, so that's been fun. Huh.

I've definitely had, like, colossuses pick up articles of clothing and use. those as weapons, which you don't want. Well, I mean, Bronze Colossus is actually better if they pick up a sock because that's less effective. You have a higher chance of survival if they pick up a sock. But aside from that, no, I mean, it's not like I've ever really tried

to get them to equip a weapon, so. I know that giant crabs can equip weapons and open doors and pull levers. Excuse me? They got lots of arms, crabs, don't they? Don't ever tame giant crabs unless you are your entire fortress to fall over. Okay. They can and

Do pull levers. I didn't know they were tameable, to be honest. They're not tameable, they're trainable. Trainable. Got it. Yeah. You can't fully tame them because there's no baby state for giant crabs. They just appear as more adult giant crabs.

The reason that particular fortress was a problem was because I was like, you know what would be really funny is if I trained two giant crabs and had a giant crab pen. Awesome. Suddenly I had 14 giant crabs and it was like, oh, God, they breed really quickly. Also, they're adult size immediately. Well, I'm just going to slaughter these. And then I realized that, oh, right, I'm in a resurrecting biom. So when I slaughter them instantly, I have eight undead giant crabs because every single one of their claws, their titan, and all their legs become undead giant crabs, which is fine, because they die really quickly.

So, like, all the butcher needs to do is just, like, punch them a couple times or just like, they just need to get stabbed once by any military dwarf. So that portion was fine. The problem was it would scare the ever-living piss out of the poor butcher that just slaughtered it. So butcher grabs crab, slaughter's crab, runs away screaming, military cuts down all the things, and there's already eight more crap. there because they're breeding so fast yeah the fortress got taken over by crabs and then they started opening doors and pulling levers and it was scary is undead crab meat is delicious as regular crab meat you know I wasn't worrying about it at that point so I'm not sure you have you just created endless food I don't I

don't think that something once it's been resurrected is then edible oh no sadly it's not pretty right oh I'm sure because you're looking at perpetual emotion machines for food right Well, it's not like once those legs are slaughtered, you get eight more legs. So I think infinite food is actually just farming. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I guess we do have that, don't we?

In real life, too. I mean, I'm growing lettuce in my closet. Real life hacks. Okay. What? Intentionally or? Yeah, intentionally. Okay. Sure, that's lettuce.

Yeah. No, it's absolutely lettuce. Like, I keep posting pictures of the line of everybody's like, sure, it's lettuce. I'm like, have you tried growing weed? It's really, really hard. Don't try that. It's legal, man. Unless you know what you're doing.

No judging here. As somebody who's tried that, it's not easy. I live in Canada, it's legal here. Obliged not to make any comments about that. Yes. Oh yeah, in Germany, you'd go to German jail. It'd be weird if you didn't go to German jail if you went to any jail. Extradited to, you know, Romania or something.

As has become customary at the end of the calendar, year. The Dwarf Fortress Roundtable podcast would like to recognize the generous patrons who have financially supported the show through the year. Michael Eller, Lucas, Brandon Wright, Christopher Harris, KV, Potato Bomb, Logan Hastings, Uris J. Jennings, Garzini, Loghammer, Clean O'DEb, Adam Hudson. Stay tuned, because coming up, we'll continue the roll call of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable Nobles in a few moments. Salute. So speaking of Minotors, you were talking about having Monitors pick up weapons. We had a listener in our Discord that said that they got attacked by a Minotaur for the

first time. It came toward the head off of a donkey, then passed out from exhaustion. And I had noticed as well, minotars don't seem to be particularly strong. Are they night creatures? But, yeah, like I told, Blue Whale of Doom, a dwarf or two with a hammer and a mace can probably take out a minotaur. Your mileage may vary. One door for the pickax and a dream can take about just about anything. I don't know if they hit it correctly. That's right.

I love the idea of minotors because I was a big fan of Greek, legends or whatever. And minotaurs are cool, but God, they're not great. They're not great. Like a bronze colossus is so much more of a threat. Even a giant can be more of a threat. And the minotaur can arrive in your fortress. And like, the dude knows about, like, how to swing an axe, but he will just simply not equip one. Come on, it's just the mental image of a bronze colossus. In my head, there's this, this, uh, Harryhausen creature walking across my map. It's great. And with

the stop motion style movement. I just love it. Minotors just think of, you know, men with bullheads. Yeah, or women with bullheads. It's just a tall dude. It's a tall dude. It's a tall dude with the weird head. That's all

it is. So, yeah, I love the colossi. I had a viewer who was complaining that the combat and Dwar Fortress was too easy, which I don't disagree. It can be pretty easy at times. And so they were asking for recommendations for mods.

And nobody really used enemy mods at the time in my chat. And so they went and they explored the Steam Workshop a bit and found a couple. One of the mods they installed allowed for Colossuses to be made out of any metal. Okay. So they added steel Colossus, brass Colossus, and, copper colossus and iron colossus to their world. That's actually cool. And they were just like, yeah.

And they're like, this seems like a really good idea. And then almost immediately they got attacked by a steel colossus. Also, it like massively increased the population of colossi in the world. So there was like basically a forgotten beast number of them. And they had to like delete the world and like not use that mod again. Because have you ever, okay, so you know how hard it is to kill a bronze colossus, right? Imagine that dude was made of steel. Yeah.

Because that's like a 40% power upgrade. Yeah, that's a 4% percent. Maybe four. That's tough. You basically just need adamantine to kill it. Yeah. Well, then you can roll those adamantine colossus, as colossus. Or a, you know, a wooden cage trap.

Yeah. Okay. That's right. Somebody needs to actually look up plural. Colossi? I think it's colossi. I'm pretty sure it is. It feels right to me to call it that.

Yeah, it's colossi. According to Merriam-Webster, it's colossi. Okay. Well. I think that I interrupted you starting to say something else, Tony, about two minutes ago. Was there a thought that you wanted to complete? No, there really aren't very many of them. I'll interrupt then with something completely unrelated.

A group of ferrets is a business. Ah, very nice. Yeah, I love collective nouns. Any of that kind of talk here is going to get you. Murder of crows. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, talking about crows. Ever heard of the movie The Crow on the Orient Express?

no but it sounds like snakes on a plane but maybe a bit more measured is it like a post-apocalyptic mystery we'll never know we will never know something something about plural i just realized that this this joke goes nowhere and it was only funny in my head well you've you've got lots of these good ones the like i think some other ones i think you've got a round effect i think you've got a Rumba of Rattlesnakes, I think, is one of the ones that... A rumba? A rumba. A rumba, rumba of rattlesnakes, I believe, is correct. How's it written?

And rumba, like the dance. Frogs, I think, I think you have an army of frogs, which would be very appropriate for this game. I'm trying to think of the other ones that I remember. So would a fortress of dwarves work in this context? I think it absolutely would. Just like, I don't know if you live in a tourist area where people have segways and they ride on those, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've chosen a shame of

segways when you see a bunch of people together on those, I think is what you. And speaking of segways. Oh, oh my gosh, look at you. Look at you. Continuing our list of patrons for 2023, we have Mr. Gutsy, Brendan Poole, Beard Moe, Andrew Campbell, Byron, Patrick Shaw, Ba'J-313, David Eltsroth, The Jogolobalist, Mondragar, Burma, Nomegal, and Roma Vermeulen. Your generous donations are applied to content delivery services, website hosting fees, audio recording services, and music licensing. Thank you so much for your support this year, and we hope you find your donations well placed. Your craft's worship is indeed of the highest quality.

Okay, let's look at some listener feedback. Thank you for sending us emails. If you would like to send a email to the Roundtable, you can do so at Eurist at DFroundtable.com. That is UR-I-S-T at D-F Roundtable.com, or you can just join our Discord and ask us yourselves. but yeah that if you want it read on the air better chance if you send us an email although one of these is from like last june so i can't really say that it's a great chance of getting it right there's no sLA here best effort best effort system so aden wrote hey delvers i'm a new listener already i'm in love with the podcast i'm also a bit of a new player and was wondering if

you all ever talk about the roles of each noble and the requirements do you recommend anything besides the wiki to watch or read to learn more about it meaning the roles and i'm i'm assuming we're talking about the nobles but we did cover the nobles in a in a episode some years ago i think it would probably be worth revisiting again in a in a closely future episode just basically cover all the all the nobles that you can assign do you guys have any uh any you know look up references other than the df wiki that you go to for looking at things like like if you need to learn more about a particular noble? I don't know if I'm a good person to ask this question.

Who is that? Because there's nothing I need to look up anymore. That's a good point. Okay. That is a flex. Well, no, whenever you spend, you know, 50 hours a week playing in a Fortress, you kind of get these things down, right? No, I mean, I could tell you what the job of a druid is,

which is like the Elven King equivalent. Huh. I didn't even know that was a thing. I know. They used to summon trees to attack the fortresses in a very, very, very old version of the game. That would be awesome, though. But now they do nothing, except for show up as visitors occasionally. You know, it would be kind of neat to have a canonical way to play other races in the dwarf game. Maybe in version, you know, 78 will get something like that.

Like many things, it is a planned feature. Exactly. Beautiful. So, yeah, I think that the Royal Fortress Wiki is going to be your best bet, Aidan. Thanks for asking the question. And, yeah, we're going to, I think that we'll schedule a episode that focuses on nobles and the roles and nobles. What are they good for? That would be a great, that would be a great one.

Yeah. I think that would be beneficial. All nobles are therapists and not all therapists are nobles. There you go. That's right. Just in real. Jarno, Jarno wrote him. And I just wanted to personally thank you for the discussion about AILMs and providing the link to the Stokiastic Parrots article.

It was awesome and I'm probably going to use that as a reference many times in the future. Loving the podcast, Liores, Jarno. So, yeah, you're welcome. I think that that spawned some nice discussion. Thanks, dude. It's great paper, too. Yeah, I think that we all learned a lot about that subject matter whenever it was the hot topic on the, on the, on the, discord and on the podcast there for a little while.

So yeah. Yeah, it's always fun to read a paper by people who aren't trying to sell you something. Any other commentary on that? Not for me. Not being present. It's kind of hard to say anything. So. Okay.

So, okay. And an anonymous Eurist wrote in, yo, dwarfs of the roundtable. I know reading the wiki spoils the fun, the dwarfy fun. But the wherebees page will tell you that transformers. lichenthropes have the trap avoid token in the raws potted two topics in one shot which does exactly what you'd expect and gives me the link to the wear beast page and all the best anonymous urust anonymous urst the thing is yeah so so this is relating to i think it was the last episode maybe the one before where i talked about the the the wear moose that ran across a row of 20 traps and it

confused me and i didn't know what was going on was it going too fast so Yeah, I was on that page a ton, and I missed every time I was on that page the fact that it says that lichanthropes in their transformed state have the trap avoid token. So, yeah, they don't set off traps. So I was informed that by several people. But on the other hand, there were several people who I would have thought might have known that as well, who apparently didn't. So that's why they didn't get caught in the case. cages is because lachanthropes in their transformed state don't set off, set off traps. Interesting.

I have an unpopular take when it comes to this subject, which is the wiki doesn't spoil fun. The idea of fun is you're giving the fun to the dwarves. The player doesn't need to be surprised by the fun. The player's job is to control the fun to cause interesting outcomes. If a rare creature getting into your fortress is an interesting outcome, you should know how to allowed for that or how to prevent against that if you want to. So I don't think reading the wiki spoils the fun. I think reading the wiki gives the player the knowledge to cause the fun in the way that

they think is interesting. It's like there's 12 different kinds of ghosts and different ways for them to become certain types of ghosts. But if you don't know how ghosts work, then when a particular dwarf dies, if you don't want that dwarf to become a ghost, maybe you want this other dwarf to become a ghost because of things that happened in their life and because you think that might be an interesting story bit for your personal fortress, maybe having a howling hunt in the walls

is not necessarily a negative and more just an interesting story arc for your fortress. But if you didn't know that, then how are you going to allow for that or have that as a possibility? So I don't think reading the wiki spoils the fun. I think reading the wiki gives the player the knowledge to be able to orchestrate the fun that they want.

That's a good point. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you. You know, the fun is kind of what happens. happens. And if people are getting frustrated because they can't figure out why something's happening or not happening, like, that's going to ruin the, like, actual fun. So, yeah, man, I totally agree with you on that. And look, this game is deep enough that you actually need a reference. So in this case, and I totally agree with you blind, in this case, I was interestingly surprised by the fact that this Wermus jumped the traps. And yeah, I went to the, to the

Fortress Wiki and just apparently just skimmed right through that, that, that, that line. But now that I have, now that I have experienced the issue and I have a resource to go look up and try to solve that issue, I think that makes it even more fun because, because you experience something, you get the joy of the experience and then you get the joy of learning how to deal with that experience, uh, through such the, through the great resource that the Dwar Fortress Wiki is. and and you know no one should ever be kid that is a wonderful wonderful wiki it is very well done the articles in it even whenever they are a little bit uh maybe have a little bit of uh i don't want to say that there's it wrong information but but they are quite authoritative articles that tend to be spot on and they tell you whenever they have their they're what do you call it whenever they they have the different versions that they apply to um no what what version that the information came from yeah there's there's a word for that but that is done

so well that whenever whenever the the article may not be quite up to date unless you know that at the top and yeah yeah i'm i'm rambling here but yeah the the dwarf fortress wiki is one of the best wikis i've ever seen there there's definitely out-of-date information on there i mean i've definitely seen stuff on there where i look at it and go up yep that's wrong but i'm also way too lazy to edit it so but um it it it is a pretty solid way i think like the version 50 portions of the wiki still need some work but like it's oh yeah yeah it's getting there it's better than it was uh you know six months ago by a long shot well yeah also a huge shout out to people who do edit it because like you blind i also look at something and like oh that's not right

close page you know i'm like oh bummer anyway keep looking but yeah so anybody that takes the effort to go do that. Thank you very much. It makes it better for everyone. So really appreciate your hard work. Thanks, Anonymous Eurist, for your, for your email, your comments. So again, if you would like to send in an email, you can do so at Eurist at Daffrontable.com or, you know, why aren't you in our Discord? There are tons of people now in our Discord. I'm, you should do it. If you do Discord, if you do Discord, please join ours. We don't make any money off of it, but but we want you there because the the discourse in the discord channel has been wonderful yeah yeah and kuisnos free kuisnos subs no no no we're not we're not going to be telling people we're

giving stuff away again oh yeah that's right we're not we're not we're not we're not we're just don't tell them you giving away v bucks that's right v bucks yeah for door fortress that's for the new in-app purchase function that's coming yeah for the season pass that's right what do you get in the season pass. New skins for horse? New races to play it in venture mode? New playable race. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, you have to pay to unlock every single other race, including all of the individual animal people, or by, I don't know, how the heck would you grind levels on a battle pass for You win a date with Hippoman is basically what you do. Oh, God. Well, I guess I'm

unsold on that battle pass, then. Thanks. Just save me some money. It's the only way, speed dating with hippo men. Okay, so I think speed dating with hippo men is Kit Fox's next, like, solo developed, really. That's a new game. Yeah, hippo man, boyfriend simulator or whatever it is. Boyfriend Dungeon, that's what it was. Yeah, it's a mod, or it's a downloadable content for Boyfriend Dungeon. Yeah, that's it.

I don't know what that game is. It just doesn't sound good, though. The funny thing is speed dating with animal people would probably be very popular. Yeah, I mean, yeah. it would do there's a market for it there's a probably an untapped market there i say yeah are we gonna lose our our non-explicit tag yeah the ghost of jobs is gonna come kick our asses okay so i don't think that we're gonna get into my uh my wormoose uh my fortress defense topic because we're uh we're coming up on the top of the hour anyway we should um put a discord channel for that and then we can

all talk about that more about my uh about my uh about my about my my, my, my Wermoose world. Waremeese, yeah. Say, I do want to mention, though, that I have continued it. I did consider giving it up because I lost another fortress to, to what I'm calling bad management now, because I'm, I'm still having trouble doing all the things that I could do to protect myself from, from the Lachanthropy, but I'm now finding it to be fun as a challenge to try to protect myself against the, the were creatures.

Yep. So, fortress number five from the wealthy rag is now, is now in process. That name is just tragic. Yeah. God, help us all. So I'm enjoying the world now, and we're going to go ahead. And given the fact that we may be able to use these saves with the adventure mode when it comes out, I might see if I can make this last until him, or at least not delete the world whenever I stop using it.

because I think that a world full of wear moose in adventure mode could be a lot of fun, Dwarfie fun. Blind, is there anything else that you would like to bring up while we still have a couple of minutes left? Um, not, not, not nothing off the top of my head. No, just thanks for having me on the podcast again, mostly. It is always just a total blast sitting around and shooting the breeze with you. It's, it always ends up being wonderful. Off the cuff, wonderful conversation.

I feel like I'm rambling again. So Roland, take a. over? Yeah, first of all, agreed. Second of all, I do have one little thing that I want to mention before we go. What's that? And that is a listener, Rurik, to be specific, actually build what I had talked about in a previous episode. The absolutely invincible adventure mode playable playable playable character thing that I wanted to use to test

a few things concerning necromancers and I got it actually built and now it's called a Gernund as a creature name it is a whole thing it is amazing

what was it it had like several limbs let me check it is pretty massive it has seven heads six arms four legs four legs. It has wings. It has a scorpion pincer and it is made of steel. And that is pretty cool. That he just sat down and made that thing for me as like a little housewarming gift, I guess. And I'm going to install it into an older version and actually

fiddle around with that and uh yeah so older version as in as in version 4712 or or older version like an older world no like an actual older game version because you know adventure mode not out yet oh yeah so i will keep you updated on how many elven heads i can stack uh very nice very cool well thank you if if you're interested listener into using the creature guernun how do you pronounce that again gurnund gurnund i can't make my tongue roll that way but um it's all about the umlats baby using this creature i will post the uh the text file to the show notes or at least a link to the text file in the show notes that you too can download and you can be roland's invincible creature it's me and

Thanks so much. Thanks so much for Eric for bringing that to us. That's very cool. Dang. That's really good. Well, once again, Blind, thanks so much for joining us on Door Fortress Roundtable. This is episode 94. We're getting close to 100.

We're so close. Holy cow. I don't know what we're going to do. Well, it's going to be free trips. We got to do something. Maybe we'll record an episode for episode 100. Oh, that's a great way to start. Record an episode.

for episode 100. It took my brain a second to process that. I can't make an argument against it, so let's do it. Be weird if you didn't. Like, just don't record anything. Just put out like 90 seconds of silence.

No, like, we stop it, 99. That's, that's it. It's going to be like that John Cage thing, 90 minutes of silence, whatever. I mean, you made it past 69, so you're doing okay. That's right. Yeah, we did.

Yeah. There was some tongue-and-cheek humor in that one, so. Not banned yet. No. So blind, would people, want to get a hold of you or see your work, where do you suggest that they go to do that? You can find me at Twitch.tv slash B-L-I-N-D-I-R-L, and if you just type the word blind and

Dwar Fortress in no particular order into YouTube, you'll find me pretty quick. And I do also stream on YouTube as well when I'm streaming Dore Fortress because Twitch lets us do that now. So if you want to, I don't know, backseat me or like yell at me or I don't know what people do over there. I don't really read the chat. So like you can, you can just like whatever you want over there. If you actually want to talk to me, though, you have to be in the Twitch chat. I do look at the YouTube chat moderated, but I don't read it much. Well, to be fair, also, if you type in the word blind and the phrase Dwar Fortress in Google, it comes up with you. So, I mean.

It used to be if you just type in the words Dwar Fortress and Speed Run, you'd actually get me because of a weird SEO thing from a completely unrelated thing where I ended up with a world record in a game. For a while there, if you just typed in Door Fortress Speed Run, you'd find me to, but since I deleted all my clips, that doesn't happen anymore, unfortunately. I also want to remind everybody that I am planning on having a Doom celebration on December 10th. I've got a server up for Z Damon.

If you're interested in that at all, stop by the web page, DFRonTable.com, or hit me up in the Door Fortress Roundtable Discord channel, and we'll talk about it. And it's going to be a lot of fun. So look forward to doing that. Okay. Fun fun. Well, folks, we're going to wrap this up now. This has been Dwarf Orchrist Roundtable, episode number 94.

And thanks again, Blind. And everybody, good luck and dig deep. I actually had something and it's gone. I hate myself. It's not too late. I can cut all this crap out. Is it a quiver of cobras or a bask of crocodiles? So, well, on the running jubes.

joke is that Roland is trying to have a funny quip at the end of the episode and he keeps coming up with one and having people suggest one and he keeps missing the cue. You know what? I'm saying 2024. Yeah, that's your resolution.

We're going to hit 2024. We're going to workshop this. We're going to hire writers. We're going to have a nail the shit out of this. We're going to have a shared document. We're going to have a shared document that has Roland's exit text. That's right.

we're going to put teams of interns on this for the next for the next one okay guys so i think that we're going to call this oh i didn't tell anybody this so let me throw this again i do think that we're going to break until the beginning of next year we're going to take december off so uh you're going to be missing a couple episodes from actually you're not going to miss them they're just not going to exist well because because you know we're such lovable teddy bears you'll mourn for the loss of what would have been but we'll never be so yeah so if you uh if you uh just really really get to uh to missing us you know go go watch blinds videos and think that he was on our podcast and how wonderful that was right i mean yeah or you could

just go through the backlog and listen to stuff you've missed or forgot that's true that's what i'm doing i've done many times with other podcasts yeah yeah i've gone back and listened to some of our some of our early ones and it's a little painful go show up in the twitch chat yep painful okay Folks, catch y'all later. See y'all next year. See ya. Bye. See ya.

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