Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep.112: Resolutions: Could This Be Magic?

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

And we're back for 2025. In this episode, we catch up on our fortresses and chat about our resolutions for our fortresses! Kruggsmash: Peacefulhome

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. I'm Jonathan. And I'm Roland. I'm Tony. Like the necromancer experiments that keep getting your fisher dwarves, leave for a while, and then they're back. Rock and roll. Okay. So, where are we, gents?

How have your fortresses? We are in 2025. Oh, yep. That happened That's crazy Yeah Yep Coming up on six years

Of podcast excellence That's right Yep Yep We're gonna get the Award from YouTube soon I think You know the plaque

That you can hang up Diamond Play button or whatever That's right That's right Yeah Yeah We might get that

If I would ever Post anything to YouTube Yeah Yeah I suppose that is I'll I'll write in And see if that's a prerequisite I think it might be

Well Anyway Goals and such anything exciting happened with you guys Dwarfey wise over the break I didn't I didn't actually play that much I gamed out some scenarios of things

that I was ready to start doing how about you guys well I have to say my my entire fall winter start of new year so many things came out okay there was a new project

Zomboid update I got the Eldon Ring DLC I got the card game Volatro. Oh no, not that one. And I got Hell Divers too because it was reduced in price. So honestly I've been absolutely

cranking my PC to the max, just playing different games. When it comes to Dwarfurtress, I know that my Discord name is like a funny little ha-ha-uris sadism spikes, but I am a monster when it comes to adventure mode. And I'm afraid of that

a little. Uh-oh, what What happened? Pray do tell. Well, you know, so I picked it up mostly so I can just tell a story and I played two adventurers and one was a hyena woman because

hyena people just have this neat little thing where they can wear both dwarf and human-sized armor. So I really like to play them. But I had generated a large world and I got nowhere because it took me like days to get anywhere.

So it generated a new world, but the new world only had humans left. Oh, no. I was not able to play anything else. How old was the world? I think that one was 250 years, I believe. Wow, that quick and the humans are, or the, everybody else is gone. Does it seem like that in, like, I think in earlier math, that wasn't very long. Like, that was kind of default in the 40 series, right?

but now I feel like the world ages quicker or something. Am I off with that? Do you guys, what do you think? Does it feel like... It has Methuselah syndrome. Yeah, I mean, right? It just feels like things die quicker, die out quicker now. Yeah, well, there is, it also depends on the size of the world

because I usually go for larger ones to build my fortresses in, but this one was a small one. And I was hoping to get like a price. proper god-called religion thing going, but that didn't happen. However, it was very noteworthy that there are quite a few goblins left, but I can't play any goblins in adventure mode. Oh, really? Yeah, I could only play humans.

There were dwarfs left, according to Legends mode. I could not select them. There were also... What was it? Some intelligent creature man was also left over, but I could also not select those. I could only select humans. And I also found a cobald pit or cobalt fortress. Apparently, like a fortress went into the hands of cobalts.

I'm still on my way to get there. but what are a co-bole fortress that's a new one like i didn't know that they could do that yeah me neither i really need to check that out i believe it was originally built by the dwarfs but i don't think it was taken over by the goblins during like any kind of military action because otherwise i don't see how the cobalds could have gotten it back from the goblins Yeah, right? What are those birds that kick the other birds out of their nest and steal it? Is that the...

Yes. But I mean, Cobold's like, they don't even say anything, right? Yeah, okay. They're just too small. They're not exactly military strength potential, if you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm on my way to get there.

Besides, you know, murdering peasants and civilians on my way to get there, he-he-haha. I found... Cetism spikes. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's really bad. The truth comes out. I found, let's say, a house.

It's just like a very rectangular block of stone that was randomly in the wilderness. And I went in there and I instantly got attacked by a lion and a cheetah as well as two goblins. And when I clicked on the lion and like punched him in the face, it said my character was punching the crystal tiger in the face. Oh. And I was like, what? The crystal tiger? Crystal tiger.

Sounds like a Marvel series. Yeah, and I also punched a crystal cheetah. And the people that were in there, four goblins, one elf, were all called keeper of the crystal. I've, okay, yeah. Hmm. Interesting. So it was just like a civilization name, or is it like a different species? That's bizarre.

It was added to their. person like a title, like a prophet or priest title. So I'm not sure what exactly happened. But the weirdest part about this is actually this. The elf survived my assault. I was stabbing and stabbing and stabbing and he kept surviving it to like he was actually very resilient. And at some point he drank odd liquid.

Like it said the elf drinks the odd. liquid. And I'm like, what is happening? I didn't know that. That sounds very good. You know, or a dungeon hack, right? And the crazy part is he regenerated parts

of his body a few ticks later. Uh, yeah, I know. Well, you got to find you some of this strange liquid. I got this strange liquid and I drank it and it didn't do anything. But wow. Let me just open this in

browser and yep the legends browser oh are you using the legends browser is that is that back are we doing that again is it no no no I'm only sending you a screenshot of how he

regenerated but it says basically the tall else spearman's second toe right foot regrows wow and it re-grew bone skin fat muscle and it re-grew his one hand entirely.

Whoa. It did, however, not regrow the, like, his guts were spilled, and that did not change. And he was still bleeding from it. He's not a necromancer experiment, is he? No. No, he did not seem like a necromancer experiment. And the rest of the people also had no, like, odd liquid on their person. He was the only person with, like, a water, uh,

what's that called water basket leather thing? Water skin, right? Water skin, thank you. That was full of odd liquid. And it only had like three gulps of it. So I took one to see what it does, but so far nothing has happened to my character. Well, that's weird. I didn't, you're pushing things I didn't know were possible.

You're pushing the balance of what I thought we could do. While I was playing that, I was so confused. like, okay, did I miss that much? Do we now have magic? Yeah. Growing magic potions? Yeah, yeah. Because I've heard that there are some kind of potions and that like night trolls can make

weird alchemic things happen. They can take vermin or whatever and make like goo and soup or stew or whatever and you can drink it and it sometimes has randomized effects. But I didn't know that you could find a weird house made of stone. and people have straight up regeneration potions in there that is

that is completely new to me yeah I think I've never heard of that I mean you're wow no I didn't know I did not know maybe he's slipping some magic stuff in there yeah maybe he's

you know doing a little bit maybe he's exceeding expectations yeah well you know it is the the beta branch so you know are the experts

environmental branch. That's true, yeah. Glipping cool. The team at Dwarf Fortress Roundtable would like to clang their masterfully decorated mugs together and give a hearty Dwarven cheer to all of the legendary patrons who have supported the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable

during 2024. Raise your tankards for Gulf. Delta Whiskey. Desim Broadbrew. Sir Nanagans. M. Rob. gnome gal and mandragar your generosity keeps the ale flowing and the fortress thriving all hail the great patrons may the beards on their chins never fall out so roland you're still drawn to the to the large worlds huh i i pretty much have have abandoned everything but pocket worlds now for adventure for no just just for in general i just kind of like the feel of the pocket worlds.

Okay. They're faster. They're so much easier to avoid the analysis paralysis when you're trying to pick a embark's location. No, that's true. I really do like it. Yeah, I don't know. You know, every world is New Zealand, right?

Yeah, no, I totally get it. The small words are faster. There's more stuff happening. I also feel like you get a few more visitors because everything is much closer to you. Yes. So any person living on the continent anywhere can much easier get to you. It's just I'm very picky about where I start and what my area should look like. So I like my large worlds, simpler because I do get a lot of freedom to where I start.

I also like them quite empty for my fortress modes. So I also do reduce the amount of settlements that my world can have. because I like the RP kind of mental idea that my world is like this, this untamed, natural world where I only have these small pockets of civilization. I've gotten much less picky on the locations of my starts and my embark locations. It used to be that I would, you know, really fret and just think about it for a long, long time. And now, you know, I don't even necessarily embark where the little green. square is on the on the map i might go somewhere near that but yeah i've i've not seen that have any really negative consequences for for not you know going into the the green area where i search for

in fact i i just did a an embark that was in a mountainous location and i hadn't done that in a long time i picked locations that were flat so that i could have a lot of a lot of area but i really do enjoy the the I really enjoy being on a cliff face where you can dig straight into it and start your fortress that way oh clever yeah yeah I I kind of enjoy that so I've got a river that's at the very foot of the mountains and at the the mountains you know take up the rest of the of the embark location it's really cool there's some there's some trees and stuff but yeah it's just one big cliff face I love it that's cool so what um so you dig straight into the cliff and then And then do you have a plan for how you build it or is it just gangbusters?

Well, I dug a one tile wide hall straight into the cliff and built a temporary stockpile for everything to get the wagon out of the rain. Cut down a few trees and that's kind of my staging location. And then I sent a couple dwarves to dig a stairway, a stairwell all the way down to the level where the river is. and that's going to end up being my main entrance where the river is. But in the meantime, and I don't know if this always holds that whenever you start off on the cliff side, way up high, above where the river level is, then you get a lot of Z levels that don't have caverns. So I've got probably 15, 20 Z levels from where my dwarves embarked down to the river level. and I dug all the way down through that and there's no caverns in the mountain.

So I'm thinking that maybe the caverns are going to be below the river level. Whoa. So it gives me a lot of opportunity to dig lots of rock before I breached the caverns. So yeah, I do enjoy the mountain sides. That's pretty cool.

That is pretty cool. Do you have an idea how to like style your entrance with like big, big statues of dwarves or like a massive stone? ramp? Speak, Mellon, and enter? Yeah. So I have a question

for you guys, and in the old an old math, Dorf Fortress, you used to be able to do an embark with one dwarf, so you could have like the crazy hermit thing. Have we, have you guys, what am I missing? I don't. I thought that was a mod. Ah, is it a mod? Okay.

I, I think there is at least a DF hack command that is something, something hermit. and that kind of expels the other six dwarfs. So you kind of do stop with six dwarfs, but then it expels the other ones or something. I see. Okay. Okay. Oh, I see. I get it.

I was, that was one of my scenarios. I was trying to work out different scenarios that I was going to chase this year. What stupid things will I do this year? And that was one of them. I was going to have a hermit cat lady, and she was going to sustain the, entire fortress off of cats and cat-related products. Cat-related products.

Yeah. Uh-oh. She loves her cats, but she also needs to eat. So she has to make some tough choices from time to time. And I think it's a good story. You know, that actually reminds me. I believe that was good God. Three years ago, question mark.

Krug Smash had uploaded a video of a small, almost family-like fortress where he only had like five people in it or something. Oh, I remember that. Was that like the Arctic snow or something like that? Is that... Maybe I can't remember. I think it was like in the caverns

and they were just living in the caverns in one spire. He had like mined out and made it into a little home and they didn't even go back to the surface at all. That one resonated with me. And that was also my first try of recreating like a proper family fortress. I had the first starting dwarfs and then I let it run a little bit until the first people married. And then I expelled the rest. So I think I only had four dwarfs living in that fortress.

It's two families. And I tried to make everything like really small and really homely and really cute. That was so nice. But you got nowhere with that. you had just four people working so just getting a tavern done mined out set with tables and everything oh yeah took very very very long and like grinding up the skills for your dwarfs what about using uh dare i say it the uh fastorf mud yeah yeah but it it still takes a while because you if you don't click on like allow all jobs on all four dwarfs then you still have like one dwarfs that only does that and one that does that and then it is kind of a lot of work especially like getting food and getting stuff done and chopping wood and mining and creating furniture and with all the side jobs you're already over the limit of the dwarfs that you have so at some point you actually are very

very happy when you have children in working age, because they can now actually haul things and help farming. Yeah, my reluctance to use fast dwarf is just gone. I use it whenever it's needed. I like to watch my little dwarves do their thing and kind of, you know, hypnotize myself by watching them run back and forth or walk back and forth. But whenever there's nothing else going on and I'm just wanting to get something done, Fast Worf, it is.

I'm with you. Yep. Yeah, I'm with you. I do the same thing. I mean, I, because I feel like I go through a lot of iterations of things that I want to try. And it amuses me when everything can get done quicker. Because then I can, like, I don't know, you know, Silicon Valley Way, fail fast. Right?

Right? That's what I'm doing. Move fast and break things. That's my approach to doorports. It's time for another round of Dwarfee thanks to our incredible supporters from 2024. Let's strike the earth and celebrate Boss Traibus. David Eltsroth. Andrew Campbell.

Patrick Shaw. Lord Byron. The Great Garzini. And Logan Hastings. Your support is as sturdy as Adamantine and as precious as a finely encrusted artifact. Thank you, noble patrons of the podcast. Praise them with great praise. So whenever I started up Dwarf Fortress again, I looked at my saves and there was like seven worlds and it had been long enough since I had played that I didn't know what any of them were.

And I was like, what the hell is all this stuff? And that made me think that, and Mike, if you're listening, this may already exist in D.F. I'm not sure. But it would be nice to have the date of the last save that's posted on the world whenever you look at it on the main. menu because you know I think they're an alpha order or something I don't know what they're in chaos order is what they're in yeah I agree I I pulled one up last night just to kind of see check in on things and see how everybody's been doing and yeah I was like pulling things up from ancient times and I was like oh gosh yeah I remember this fortress and what I did here and I feel like then I got stuck maybe it's ADHD or

something but I will very quickly iterate through things you know move on right when I hit an obstacle, start over. Yeah, I renamed my saves folder to saves.old. Yeah. Started fresh. Sometimes you've got to do the purge. Yep. Yeah, yeah, I feel that.

I also had a bunch of manual saves that were just called like save 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and randomized normal saves. And at some point I was like, oh, my God, there's so many different years. And now I've got something up because I took the wrong save and went with that. So I made like one save for that specific world that I've been playing for so long and to call it just the great save. And I don't do any other saves anymore. I just save over that and over that. Well, I did notice that now on the main menu, whenever you, actually when you create a world or at some point, there's an option for Control T to rename your

world now. That went away for a while. It was an option in the original Tor Fortress. So I don't know if it's df hack or just something that he has added back but you now have the chance to rename your world again which which can be nice you can add things like october 2025 or whatever so so you can date your your worlds well i'm down with that that would help i mean i guess you can also just look at the file dates but that feels well you can't do that from the main menu you can you have to go into the finder whatever your operating system uses for and and if you haven't gotten this before. I'm pretty lazy. So, yeah, right. No, I'm good. I'll just pick this one.

Hey, they say laziness is the mother of invention. Don't beat yourself up about it. You wouldn't have anything. Honestly, I keep, I keep saying that to my parents, but I yet have to invent anything. Well, you haven't been lazy enough. That's actually kind of something your parents should be proud of, in my opinion. Like, you've been too busy to invent something. That's great. You're clearly not lazy. There you go. Anyway, I'll be here all week.

I wonder if there's, speaking of saves, I wonder if there's ever going to be implemented the uploading saves to Steam. Oh, yeah. Oh, the cloud saving. Yeah, I would love to be able to play the same save on a different install of Door Fortress on my laptop so that I can,

whenever I'm, you know, hanging out someplace else and I'm just sitting there with a laptop, I can, you know, play the same fort. I schlep stuff onto my NAS. That's a crappy way to do it. But, yeah, I think you're, what you're describing sounds good. So you're talking about an external hard drive and you just have dwarf orders on there? Well, it's probably network accessible over the internet.

Oh, I see. Okay. Well, I mean, before the Steam update, I just put Steam on my external hard drive and played it from there. It's not like it really makes a difference whether or not you're playing it from like your fast SSD or an external hard drive and actually worked very great. It's just the load times that are...

Oh, not that much. Honestly, I was surprised about how well that worked. Yeah, I played off a thumb drive for a while. Ah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it wasn't a great experience, but it also wasn't the worst experience I've ever had. So I'll take it. I'm using my laptop a lot more in the last year or so.

And, you know, if you have a thumb drive sticking out the side of your laptop and you're like trying to haul it around and you know you knock it against a wall or a door yeah break it so i had one of those the USBC ones that looked like uh i don't know it looks like the ubiquit it's like super super tiny not very fast but i need one of those very very functional i need one of those what like is the size like a a mouse dongle oh even smaller yeah they're really tiny yeah they're really cool hmm i need to i need to get one of those yeah the warning they're a little slow like let's be honest it's you're not going to be breaking any land speed records for this so but

but i mean once you're loaded you're loaded so like on a even on like uh usb three point whatever yeah i don't know i mean i think you sacrifice speed for size so you know it depends on what you're after but it's like once you get it loaded you're good to go yeah yeah if you look at uh you know new egg or whatever your whatever your uh system of record is that you like to use one of the i think it's like samsung has one that is super tiny not particularly expensive easy to lose oh easy to lose yeah you just have to leave it stuck in your computer oh good point yeah i would recommend usbc because it can go smaller that i think there's some that'll just like totally disappear into the port anyway we could we could go down uh we could

go down a rabbit hole here pocket knife to dig it back out look if i if i can't swallow the usbc drive, then I don't want it. Exactly. That's the new way that spies, you know, carry data across the borders. Smuggling. And if it's... Swallow a USB drive. Yeah, you just don't fill it too full so you don't, you know, feel sick on the flight.

You're good to go. Honestly, I'm just thinking about it. Why don't you just bring like a cassette tape at this point? Nobody is able to play it. You just say, oh, yeah, it's my music. And they will be like, yeah, okay, go through. you're weirdo but well I already do that I think Gen Z

is big into there a lot of those guys are listening to tapes again which you know baffles me because it's such a little crappy medium it ain't me and because I'm Gen Z uh Gen Z doesn't do it A day some let's just be some Gen Z

do that I think it's madness like it's just awful I really really hate tapes always have you know I don't hate tapes what I dislike is the fact that you have to do so so much manual labor these days

because you're so pampered by like an MP3 or like a YouTube video that can go like 10 hours while the cassette you have to take out flip put back in every what 30 minutes

you can have you can well here let's pull up a chair like the really old ones pull up a chair the proper real cassettes from back in the day. Pull up a chair. Let's talk for a moment. Yeah. No, you can. You know, a reel to reel like an eight inch, you know,

open reel set up to carry around with you. Yeah, they had 120 minute tapes. They were like really, really thin and they would quite often. They were like more tangle and break prone. They were like, imagine the crappy medium of a cassette tape, but somehow crappier.

And that's, that was the experience. Yep. I was, I was a Maxwell fan. Yeah. So we could load, uh, Fortress off of a cassette tape. That's what you do. You get yourself a cassette drive. Right. Exactly.

The coolest thing ever until you try to use it and realize how slow it is. It's still generating a world. It is still generating a world. Yeah. I mean, really seriously. But I bet you anyway. No. No.

So we live in a world now where there are actually really, really fast single core CPUs now. Like I think we're breaking records for how fast single cores are running. So this is a great time to be a Door Fortress player. Yep. Single core performance. Yeah, man. Just put together a new computer for my dad. I'm going to have to do it for myself soon.

How's the single core? He had to get a new one because his system that we built in 2014 didn't run his MetaQuest 3 very well. You hate to see it. Isn't that supposed to be an Android device? Doesn't it supposed to run itself? Well, he has a flight simulator on his computer that he wants. that he wants to use the headset for. And I've got to tell you, it's pretty cool.

Even on his old, you know, ancient machine, it was pretty good. So we're still waiting on the motherboard to come in. The MetaQuest is like a VR or a headset, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's what, you know, whenever Facebook bought Oculus. Oh, yeah. Right.

Yeah. So, yeah, I've got a, I've got a, I bought a MetaQuest, too, and I liked it for, for an exercise program. and then I went out and bought a Middekwest 3. So, yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. It's great for watching movies. Yeah. Hmm.

Okay. It's like a high-deaf giant widescreen in front of your face. It's really cool. Yeah, it's definitely cheaper than the Vision Pro, which is. Oh, yeah. That's a toughie, that one. I think that they've come down a little bit in price since they bricked like 20% of their customers' headsets.

Some would argue if Facebook bricks it. if it's done you a favor. I know, right. Luckily, mine was not affected by it and neither was my dad's. That's good. Yeah. I, uh, yeah.

So, Door Fortress. Oh, I wonder if you could play Door Fortress on a, on a, on a desktop on MetaQuest. Oh, you can.

Oh, yeah, you can. Because you can, you can run a desktop, a Windows desktop on it. So, yeah, there's tools you can do it.

You can do it, yeah. That would be just, just like looking at a desktop but the desktop is bolted to your face, right? That's exactly what it is. It's not like you move your head and you actually move around the map. But it's virtual, man.

Yeah, it's true. Virtual. Wow. I want to see virtual the VR version. You can shut out everybody around you while you play Dual Fortress. VR Adventure mode. How do you like that? Do you like apples? There's an app for that.

There is an app for that. Yeah, I see I'm not so bad. We could do that. I don't know. I get a bit queasy after a while. I don't know. Sorry, I ran us off the real. We're allowed. Yeah.

We'll take some liberties here and there. So who had January 23rd for the Adventure Mode release date? Is that the actual date or is it too late for me to claim that date? Is that what you're saying? I think so because they announced it. Oh, right. Okay. Never mind.

Yeah. Yeah. So the 23rd Adventure Mode leaves beta. Okay, so what are we what are our hottest things that we're going to get when it leaves beta Are we basically just getting what we have now? Are we getting something else? What do you guys? Yeah, I just think it's basically what we have with less crashes Although the last time I played, it was very uncrashy. It actually ran surprisingly well Yeah, I have to say I play it on a Mac and everything's still trucking along like a champ. It's just as fast. as it is on my Windows machine, which I guess

is, you know, saying something maybe? I don't know. Have you got an M3? I have an M3 max. Yeah, I bet it's even faster on the M4 Max, so somebody can let me know what that extra single core gets you. But it's running under emulation, so that's the weirdest part. I mean,

man, if he ever ports it, whoo. But the max simulation is pretty good, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, it feels like playing it on my Windows machine in a lot of ways. Do you still have to buy something like parallel no you can use a there's a free thing called whiskey and it just uses wine so if you can you know and it wasn't particularly complicated to figure out i think somebody on uh one of those sites reddit or whatever had a good way to do it so real neat it works yeah i also like wine

yeah yeah and i think i too enjoy wine yeah for sure well we can all toast together yeah it works mushroom wine. Wait, it's mushroom ale, right? Yeah, mushroom wine. What's the, what are the wine types that they make? Oh, they'll make wine out of anything, man. They'll do it out of like prison wine or whatever. Mash up some fruit, put it in the trash bag, and shove it in the toilet. Oh, boy. Actually, talking about wine, I do need to point out, I'm not sure if I've mentioned that before or not, but I've been making wine because Dwar 4

Got me interested in that. Oh, okay. Honestly, Dwar Fortress cooking got me acting unwise. Okay, I've been buying weird stuff and, like, baking weird things and feeding my family with it. And now they're, like, very curious what I'm doing next. I've done amaranth flower cookies. Yeah. I've, yep.

Pretty interesting. No doubt. Yeah. Spelt. I've used spelt since I, since I've made. belt bread. It works. It works. I made also some barley bread. However, I'm not really good at making bread. Let's be real. Oh, I got you. I got you. Oh, this will be some bonus content, but I got you. I got you a foolproof way to make bread. Oh, yeah. Okay. Let's go. Just take four things. All you

need is four things. You need flour, water, salt, and yeast. That's it. So you measure out your flower, your water, put it in, put a little salt, put some yeast in there, stir it up. in a bowl, just bind it. Don't even, don't go too crazy. Just make sure there's no dry flour around in a mixing bowl, put the lid on it, come back in the morning, slop it out, kind of roughly roll it up, or you can make it into little baguettes or whatever you want to do, shove it in, cook it in the oven as hot as your oven goes for, I don't know, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, something like that, until it's done. It's easy. No kneading, no nothing. You can't go wrong with it. It's totally foolproof.

there's my there's my bread yeah you'll have to you'll have to post that to the post it yeah you will not fail you will you'll you'll over the break i made some shabbata bread okay is that how you pronounce it shabada sure that's yeah it was it was really really good it was it was kind of like lazy person sourdough so you know i i did the starter i put some some water yeast and and flour and stuck it on top of the refrigerator for 24 hours. And then I used the rest of the recipe with fresh flour. And I did use my KitchenAid to do the kneading and all that. But it came out really good and nice and bubbly.

And it didn't have the sourdough whang to it, but the texture was a lot like sourdough. It was really good. Yeah. I mean, bread making doesn't need to be very hard. The one thing I would encourage Americans to not do or to stop doing is stop putting sugar in it. Your bread doesn't need to be sweetened. Unless you're making cakes, you don't.

You don't need sugar in it. That's my thing. Everything will be okay. Just don't do it. Sugar's not one ingredients I really ever put in bread. It's not needed. Yeah, not needed at all unless you're making a sweet bread. You know, that is such a nice callback to the fact that I'm European and I get to enjoy normal bread.

Yeah, well, that's so fortunate. We have to make our bread here if we don't want it sweetened because by golly, we put sugar and everything's here. Not just sugar. High fructose corn syrup. Yeah. Well, you know what? Where sugar belongs. It belongs with wine. I was originally talking about wine. That's right. Yeah. Speaking of fermentations. Yeah. And I got myself some blackberry wine. And while this one turned out much sweeter that I wanted to, it is actually very nice. It is very drinkable. And this time around, it is actually very clear. So you can really see through it.

All right. I'm so happy about that. All right. If you want it to be less sweet, you can use. use champagne yeast that'll make it real dry yeah um i i technically didn't i know what my problem is i didn't really properly mix the sugar into the sugar water and uh so there was like a little bit of sugar left on the bottom um and that was my mistake but yeah do you measure your alcohol content i don't have that um i want like a spectrometer yep i think it's called yeah it's a pain in the butt is that the thing that measures your specific gravity yeah It does.

Massive pain in the butt. When I was brewing a lot, I just did the taste method and the drink one and see how you feel method. Yeah, I'm doing that right now. I've told the story about the cider, right? Did you make some toxic cider? Well, a friend of mine used to do brewing, and it was great. He had a, this is when he was single, but he had an apartment. And in the spare bedroom for the apartment, he had three pinball machines, the Adams family,

Paragon and PinBot, one from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And also in there, he had a chest freezer that he modified the thermostat of so that it stayed at 33 degrees. And he kept a keg of a pony keg of American swill and a keg of homebrew in it at all times with taps. So he built the taps into the lid of the freezer unit. It was just awesome. So one time he made a hard cider. And it was so freaking good. So we're watching football one day

And I drink a glass of cider And these are pints, right? I drink a pint of cider And, you know, almost through the second quarter of the game He says, you're ready for a refill? I'm like, sure, give me another pint. And I drink another pint. And then, you know, after halftime,

I get up to go get another pint And I could barely stand up. It turns out it was something like, like 12% alcohol damn it was really strong and it went down so smooth it was really good those are belgian numbers right there yeah that was one of those days where i ended up in front of his apartment you know on my hands and knees in the yard throwing up his offer but it was a good time when that until i got that point live the dream that's what i say oh those crazy days of my youth is there a dwarven hangover is that do they do they have it are they ever negatively impacted by alcohol yeah yeah yeah

They're like Bender. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They are, but not the day after, but if they drink too much, they do fall unconscious, so they're not genetically impervious to the effect of alcohol. Dwarven alcoholism. It's tough. And I think they don't get a hangover because they wake up and just add seven in the morning, have the first counter beer.

Hair of the dog, I think is what we call that. Hair of the dog. Yep. Yeah, you try to drink away your hangover, cure alcohol poisoning with more. That is a weird phrase to use for that? I don't know. Okay. Okay, what's the etymology?

I blame our ancestors. Hair of the dog. Okay. Etymology. See, it's a, it's an educational podcast. It comes from an ancient folk remedy for a rabid dog bite. Well, there you go. What?

According to Google's AI. Well, okay. Which is, you know, could be quite wrong, but, you know. Well, it's the gamble. It's the gamble we're all taken these days is to, Did I get it right, or did I just BS you? And it's fun. What a fun time.

And finally, a triple-braid bearded thank you to our last group of legendary patrons supporting the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable in 2024. To Potato Bomb. Mr. Gutsi. Christopher Harris. Lucas. Pline O'D. Michael Eller.

and log hammer. We raise our pickaxes and salute you. Your support is the magma that powers our podcast. May your stockpiles be full and your goblins few. Here, here. So I think that last year we did this, and I have no idea what these resolutions were, but it's the new year.

So I think it would be a good time for each of us to make a New Year's dwarf fortress resolution. Okay, yeah. And I'll go ahead and start. Okay, please do it. My resolution is to have, from start to finish, a fortress that stays organized and dies of its own accord, not just me dumping it because it gets too chaotic. That has been my goal since I've started playing, and I don't think that I've ever had a well-organized fortress that didn't end up just going all higgily-pigily. So there it is. Seems like a good goal.

I'm working on it right now. my mountainside fortress okay it's so far well organized so far yeah so far how many years are you in uh one okay

organized but it's been a long year because I've been doing a lot of planning sure no it's good and I am using the DF hack journal the gooey journal I love that you've had the times of that yes it is my favorite feature of DF hack I think yeah that's cool

let's see New Year's resolution. I want to play an adventurer from start to violent finish. That is not me killing off the character on purpose, but actually trying to make this character survive and see how far I can go. You can wrap that up in about 30 minutes, right? It's just end up in the wrong place. Probably, but so far I've been just going around, like beating people on taverns. Awesome. Being pretty good about that, though. So. well that's a good one um i okay i think i'm going to do i'm going to try to actually

build a scenario out in my head either using that scenario generator that we've talked about in previous times or come up with one of my own and then see it through again just i'm going to try to see it through and i you know i i can tell you where i fail at this is i get to a point and everything's just working and i can just leave it and i don't know what to do next because everything just works and so I need to just kind of see it through and just ride the highs and the lows I guess I don't know do you limit your uh your population uh no so sometimes I die fDS death and then I get just uninterested and I shut it down and start a new one so maybe limiting the population even fast dwarf doesn't help sometimes yeah does I mean does this do you guys

limit your populations maybe that's something okay yeah that's I don't depending on the play style that you want to have, I would actually suggest somewhere between 70 and 90 to 100 dwarfs would be quite nice because for me, that is the perfect range of, like the perfect amount of dwarfs, I mean, where I can somewhat remember who they are and I get enough people so I can have several people per, like, job general area. So I can have a few cooks and a few smiths and so on so that when somebody is sleeping or whatever, I actually have enough people that can also do the job. That seems really smart. I never managed to remember to do that. So maybe that'll be my thing. I'm going to start one with a limited population because you're right. Anything after 90, it's just too much to keep up with.

Yeah. Like you just can't do it. But the other thing that I run into is I'm kind of a sucker and I will take in the adventurers and, you know, like the entertainment troops and stuff. Like, I'll let them come in. And so sometimes I have like a fortress of 90 people, but there's a lot of kids or other people who don't do work. So am I screwing myself? I don't know. No.

You know, if your fortress is doing enough work, the change. children are not really like an inhibitor. For example, I think my big fortress has like almost a third kids, and it doesn't matter because they have their own little room. They don't do any work. They just relax and be happy. But enough other things are being done in the background so that my kids can just sit around. So I don't really see kids as like this downside.

You just have to make sure that children are not hanging outside. and like getting attacked, that's pretty much it. Before we took the break, I was on a particular world for quite a while, I think, that I started last summer. But there was something weird about the world. It was very much bereft of migrants. So I really did have a hard time getting new dwarves to come in. So those, my last few fortresses, and I made them all run for quite a while, if I remember correctly. but they always kept a low population, typically, you know, in the 30s.

So limiting the population wasn't an issue for me then. Okay. So I don't know. We'll see if this new world that I created is any different. Right now, like I said, I'm just done like a year and I haven't had a migration wave yet. So we'll see. Well, I'm in. I'm going to do it.

I'm going to start limiting the heck out of stuff and we'll see where it goes. All right. Happy New Year. Anybody got anything else they want to cover today? No. Feeling good. Okay, well, let's wrap this one up. Glad to be back.

It's great to talk to you guys again. I've missed Jans. I always do whenever we take our little hiatuses. Hyatai? Hyatis. When we take our breaks, I always really do miss talking with you. Our Hieronymus.

I agree. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, likewise. All right, guys. So until next time, everybody. We've got our marching orders. We've long and dig deep.

All right. All right. We're back and nice that you're listening in again. Thank you for sticking with us. This has been the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwar Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice.

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