Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep.12: In Which Gentle Rolling Evil Leads To Casino Fortresses and Chickens Fighting Bobcats

Episode Date: August 12, 2019

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Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And this is episode 12 of Dwarfortress Roundtable. How much do you guys use D.F. Hack when you play? Because I'm finding, like, there are certain things in it that I think are really helpful. Like, I like to set the, you know, I know I could do it with managers or whatever and create 10 of an item and then have them do it.

But I've been using the alt-W function where you can set workflow limits on certain items. So, like, I can tell the dwarves to have, you know, 30 to 35 barrels of alcohol produced automatically. And then I don't have to go back and kind of keep figuring out that they've run out. I found that one to be pretty useful. Do you guys use any of those DF hack, not sheets, but like optimizations? Is there anything? Well, to be honest, I don't use the optimizations. I straight out use the cheats sometimes.

So for example, there once was a really big goblin invasion. And I thought, okay, this is like 100 goblins or more plus trolls and whatever. I will not survive this. So because I thought like, okay, this is literally the end for my photo. I will just sit here for a while and see it die. I could also just have fun with it. So I went and spawned like a minor tour right into the army of goblins. And that was fun.

Sadly, that guy just killed like three goblins and then died himself. I tried it with a rock. That guy killed a few more. war, but was also sadly struck down. And then I took my military leader and elevated him on basically everything. I made him like Hulk, so extremely fast, extremely strong, extremely durable. They threw him at their goblins, you know, and he killed a lot of them, but it wasn't enough. So my fort still crumbled to an end.

But it was just fun to see how it dwarfed without any weapons, but clad in steel armor could actually rip governments apart just because he was that strong. Yeah, sometimes I also use the source command, which can suck water up. For example, I had a flooding a while back because I was trying to build a self-regulating well system, and then it started to flop my fort and it came to my magma forges and because I spent so much pain and time making my magma forges that high up in the earth layer, I just used the source command to suck up all the water so it stops draining and because if I hadn't, probably my fort had crumbled. Yeah, so you're sort of like using it to say. of something that, I mean, yes, I know, that's fun, but still, sometimes you're not ready to quite sit yet. No, no.

One thing I like in workflow is if you build the thing that cuts gems, the jewelers workshop or whatever, trying to go through and then figure out what types of gems you have and then cut them is, I just, that's not quite the level of minutia I'm looking for, but it's really cool because if you do any sort of cut gems in that thing and then you use the DF hack workflow, you can tell it to cut gems of any kind. So it'll, I guess, keep making different kinds of gems based on whatever's laying around as opposed to you having to get really prescriptive about what it's using, which I found pretty cool.

I don't use the DF hack too much. I turn it on and I actually do use auto labor. I've started using that recently after I got a little sick of micromanaging. I'm not sure exactly how much good it's doing. This is my first fortress that I've actually. started with it turned on, so we'll see how that goes. It's not that I'm not using it because of any philosophical reasons. It's just that I haven't really gotten deep enough to find where it would be really handy for me. But I've got no problem with using it. I just

haven't done it much. Yeah, I'm with you. I like auto labor. I think when the fort gets really, really big, that's when I find it very beneficial to start using some of the shortcuts because just trying to manage those massive, and I'm not very good with therapist. I think I'm playing on a 4K screen and therapist I don't think is very good on a 4K screen because it's like so small I have to like get a magnifying glass that to read it. So inevitably I don't use that. But auto labor is awesome. Like, you know, if you're trying to do a mass. massive fort. I can't see a better way to try to do it. Otherwise, maybe, maybe I don't have enough dedication and that's my problem. But it's, it's saved me a lot. I have been using

auto labor, but also have been using dwarf therapist to nudge auto labor. And I have actually found that that that does work. Auto labor will override dwarf therapists, but apparently it doesn't hurt anything to use them both at the same time. And I've not had any system crashes because of it as of yet. And, you know, it could just be that I am not doing anything and it's just bias that is making me think that I'm doing some good with it. But I, for example, found that nobody was actually building my still. I put in a still to, because we ran out of alcohol, I put in a still right beside my plump helmet little farm. And I waited and waited and no one came in to actually build it. So then I looked on dwarf therapists and saw that there was nobody

who had the brewing skill turned on. So I kind of thought in my head, well, it seems like that's something that auto labor should be handling. But in any case, I went ahead and clicked the brewing skill and then someone came up and built the still and had someone start brewing mushroom wine.

So maybe I've got something wrong with my auto labor if just the act of ordering the building of a still should have indeed caused someone to have that labor turned on. I was just thinking about it, like broken D.F. like if df hack is broken or if um or something like that like one problem i had one time was i had manually upgraded df hack at least i thought i had but then some of the scripts weren't updated properly so things that i thought were working weren't somebody put a script out on gethub that

will it's a python script and it'll go out and grab all the different components of door fortress for you and build you a lazy new launcher with all the update eight pieces and it works across Linux, Mac, and Windows. So, I mean, for me, on the Mac, it was great because I think the official Mac, Lazy Mac Pack, is still using 4409. And this one will go out and build you the latest of everything, which is pretty neat.

Oh, it's nice. Yeah, speaking of which, the 4412 just turned one-year-old. Woo-hoo! Happy birthday. Yeah, happy birthday. Oh, really? some cake for it. Yeah, it's July 7th.

Yeah, so we've passed it. We didn't even, I feel like we didn't even commemorate the first anniversary of 4412. That is true, yeah. How did we miss that? I don't know.

I guess we were on vacation. Sorry, 4412. We'll send a belated birthday card. Another anniversary is that it is the eighth anniversary of episode 15 of Dwarf Fortress Talk being released, which is the podcast that inspired me to want to do this podcast.

That's the one that has a TOTI-1 Capintastic and Rain Seeker. And also early on, Amper Sand was a co-host. And in the later episodes, Threato was on there doing Q&A stuff too. So if any of our listeners just want more Dwarfortress, content than we're providing and they have not already subscribed and have listened to all those episodes of Door Fortress Talk. I highly recommend you do it

because that gets you right into the head of TOTI-1. It's pretty awesome. Have you guys listened to that podcast? I listened to some of the earlier ones when I was first hunting around for a Door Fortress podcast and I was like oh cool and then I think it was just kind of old and they were talking about

something that was a planned feature that's now part of the game and I was like, oh, maybe this is just too. It is very old, and a lot of the things that they say on there are, I'm not going to say obsolete, but don't take it as the way the game is. But what it does do is give you a great insight into the way the dude thinks. And that's cool. And so there's some of his talks from, like, game developer conference and all of that,

which are super cool, too. you can kind of see where he's headed and what he's thinking and you know all of that neat neat stuff it would be great if if my if my podcatcher shows up with episode 23 sometime of dwarf fortress talk I love that um by the way you put something in the podcast inside about hireable moving pieces and what was that that was actually his notes in the seven four dev notes it says um oh yeah i see i see uh i finished the other major plot plots with hireable moving pieces sabotage abduction and artifact theft which sounds to me like you can have mayhem for hire i i have no idea how this works but yeah well i don't either

it feels like adventure mode to me i mean i that's what that's my guess or just stuff that's going to happen when you generate the world i think that he does that a lot i think that he uh develops for adventure mode and then then migrates things that are appropriate into the fortress mode oh yeah so later in that uh july fourth commentary he said i'm finding the work a tad too abstract now that we're out of world gin so i'm going to bring adventure mode into the mix now this will start with completing mounts uh and so on but hey mounts he has gotten mounts apparently working. I want my dudes to be cruising around on beak dogs.

That sounds amazing. Oh, yeah. And, you know, since we are going to steam with a game, he also posted some dev notes on Steam, which are basically the same, to be honest. But there is one big difference, because we have a note from Kid Fox games at the very end. And it's nothing big,

but they just give us a tiny, tiny preview on what the sprites for some animals will look like. Cool. Oh, yeah. Cool. And it's really nice, you know. The elephant is adorable.

I would like to cuddle him. And the beak dog is, I think it's the beak dog. It's absolutely terrifying. It looks awful. I like the cuddly beak dog. look personally. Yeah, I like, of course, I am biased.

Don't say it, man. Don't say it. Oh, you did. I like Dr. Smashes. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.

I knew it. In a minute in, and here we are channeling. A pair of heats. We'll allow it. But, you know, what's the best thing about those, uh, kill fox sprites is, um, there is some red skin before the elephant,

and I'm also like, what, what, what are you? Like some kind of dog. Turns out it's a zombie cat. They do different sprites for a zombie-fied creatures. And that's, wow, yes. I would think that they would just like make them gray or something. This is a gray donkey. It means it's a zombie donkey.

Yeah, I'm wondering if there's. Donkey is gray anyway. Yeah, I think they are, aren't they? I guess it depends on your tile set. Or your donkey. I mean, in real life. Oh, yeah. Hey, man.

I'm just thinking that it depends on my real life tile set of the week, right? I just Google donkey. And, yeah, it's great. Donkeys are great. You had to goooker. Hey, man, I didn't want him to be referencing some sort of, like, you know, southeastern United States Florida indigenous donkey that we'd never

heard of. I want to know. I want the facts. Okay. Actually, the first picture is the Shrek donkey. Oh. And in the morning, we'll have waffles. Oh, no one got that reference? No, sorry.

Is it from Shrek? It's from Shrek, yeah. Okay. Well, I will be happy to cut that deadpan out of the podcast. I'm not going to say it's rambling, but there was that last, that 725, it's a bit of a read. I don't, what is he talking about with dice?

I don't, what part of this game have I totally missed? Yeah, I added dice. Okay, so tell me more, Mr. 1. Do I call it Mr. 1? I call him. I want to be too informal here. It's not just that he added dice. He adds dice and that apparently has an integral role in divination.

Totally, right? Of course. You got to throw it to dice if you're going to divine something. Do I yield? Do I genuflect? Roll. Oh, okay. Yeah, I don't, yeah.

It's interesting. I can't wait to see how it pans out. And then at the end, it talked about gambling. So I guess that's also a type of divination. church of the casino or something. I don't know. Church of Vegas? Church of Las Vegas.

Yeah. That's what I always think of. The aquifers change is, I think, pretty cool. What's that? About aquifers change on the 717 notes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That, to me, sounds like a big deal. Because I think that's going to really, it's going to fundamentally change the way I think

people play. Because right now, I think a majority of people play aquifers by modding them out of the game so you don't ever have to experience them which I always felt like was kind of a loss in some ways because I think there's goodness to have there but the way he's changed him sounds pretty neat he hasn't changed all of them though

yeah the old ones are still the same pain aquifers yeah about 5% of them will be the old style it says and they will be well he indicates 5% yeah he indicates that they will be clearly marked on the embark and on the site finder which leads me to believe that the new slow aquifers slow flow aquifers will not be

marked on your on your embark map or your or your site finder so interesting surprises for you oh interesting well fun surprises are fun I mean it would be crazy to get like halfway down and then all of a sudden hit an aquifer and go oh no Oh, there goes the fort. I guess I could see that. I guess I could see that happening. So, yeah, it just sounds like those last two entries, he's been having some fun.

I read through this and that 725, 2019 entry that he made, and I just wonder at what level this guy's working on sometimes. The top level, basically full performance. I think this is the way I would change it. So does he think in terms of, of pros and then his fingers just code crap? I don't know.

It's again, I think we've talked about this before. I've never convinced anyone to play this game. Like, I talk about it with friends and not one has ever said, okay, yeah,

I think I'll give it a go. I had luck. I talked to one person into playing Rimworld and he played it for a while. And then, actually, we don't speak anymore. No, I'm just kidding. But,

but yeah, this one, and I have a lot of, Lots of friends who I think would totally be into it. And yeah, it's just, it's a funny one. And I think it's quite artistic what he does. I guess that's probably why it's in MoMA. But yeah, it is. It's kind of like art meets coding or something, I guess, in some ways.

Pretty neat. His dev notes are definitely, I don't read dev notes for other games because they're not interesting. But there's always kind of an entertainment factor to his as well. So, you know, it's like totally worth reading everything. time. I'm like, oh, Dev Nets. It's great. I can't wait. Yeah, and sometimes by reading them, I thought that is not a thing. And then he stated that, yeah, no, I changed it into this.

And I was like, oh, that was a thing. Oh, okay. Especially when it comes to, like, evil stuff, like evil biomes and stuff like that. I just thought they're incredibly fixed and nothing really changes. But it seems that even in the current episode, that's not really the case. Yes, I read that evil biomes from these dev notes, that evil biomes, if they are being generated by a necromancer tower and they are radiating out from the tower from one location to the next, that those will recover in time if, for example, the necromancer's killed and the tower goes. and the tower, you know, is no longer active, the biome will slowly return to its non-evil state. However, biomes that are, I can't remember what the word he used, but biomes that started off as evil will stay evil and won't improve over time.

Weird. So primordial biomes or whatever, I guess it's like the very land itself is innately evil or something as opposed to there's a, you know, a gentle rolling evil or something. A gentle evil. I wonder what kind of timeframes we're talking about. You know, I wonder if it's a fast enough phenomenon such that if you built your fortress, if you embarked to a tile that is right next to a necromancer tower, if your biome would become more and more evil as time went on,

or if it's such a slow process that it takes, you know, 100 years for you to notice any difference. I hope it's not on the dev cycle, time scale. Cheers to see me. I have created the fortress called Luridwips for our pass-around. I am currently about three months into Luridwips. What I've been doing is putting my little diaries in the Bloodline channel on the Discord server. I would like to have it be visible, though, to our public.

Yeah, you'd like to have it publicly available. Yep, yep, yep. So somewhere on our website would be good. I don't like at all the Fortress that I'm working on, the diary for that. I don't like that page at all on our website. I've got to figure out something better than that. The days and years of Dwar Fortress don't equal days and years. of hours.

So I can't do it as just a regular blog where I put the dwarf fortress date as the date that it's being published. That would be ideal. Yeah. Maybe I should write a WordPress plugin that does dwarf fortress years for a blog. Hey, that's an idea.

You know, I was basing it off of like when I did our first thousand-year-old fort that seemed a little too heavy. I was basing that off of just kind of when something interesting happened, or at least something interesting that I thought happened, like, you know, two caravans a row in a row or a wear beast attack

or we found Flexstone and started making steel, you know, those kind of things. I was sort of picking it off of those big events. That was kind of how I was doing it. Not that that's good or bad, but that's just I was just trying to figure something out too because I had this.

I did strike bitchimus coal, bathumous coal, bitumous coal. Yeah, I first. Perfect. Yeah, you don't want to know how I say that. I'm sure I'm butchering the hell out of it. It's not one of those words that I have ever said out loud before this moment. How do you say it?

Well, I say it really, really German. Go for it. I want to hear this. Bitumus. Bitumus. I like that. It's probably something in the middle of that. It is the official D.F. roundtable pronunciation of it.

Batumis Cole. So apparently you can turn that into Coke and use that as a nice fuel. Yeah, instead of trees, which I like because it just keeps things easy so they don't have to go outside because my people never seem to like to go outside. It seems to always really upset them because for whatever reason, maybe I should start embarking in the desert so they don't get so fussy about the rain, but everyone seems to really hate the rain. But to be fair, rain is, okay, so while dwarves, this. dislike rain a lot. I, as a player, like rain a lot

because it gives so much like atmosphere and especially you know, you told me that you played a lot with a sound sense. Yes, I do. I have started doing that and it's at so much atmosphere, even though it's kind of weird because I used to play it just

completely silent and but now sometimes it makes weird noises and I'm like still what's going on. But the atmosphere is so great and that's why I still do rain biomes because then I have rain and thunderstorms

and stuff. Oh, that's cool. I didn't know it did that. Neat. Yeah, I don't care for the music with SoundSense. If I'm going to hear music, I want to hear TOTI one's guitar work because that to me is the music of Dwar Fortress.

When someone goes into a strange mood on SoundSense, you will hear a crazy sounding dwarf talk about, you know, needing to go into himself and come up with something creative and deadly or something like that. That's great. I had a guy go crazy and kill people because he couldn't drink from a mug. And I was like, man, you need to calm down. Like, a lot. Like, it just really, you really need to just, you're like a 20 and we need you at like a 5. Yeah, it's, it's, it's that part of the stress. It's like, dude, you just drank your beer from a keg.

Like, that's, you just, you got the whole keg to yourself, buddy. You know, be happy. But I guess they don't see it like that. Um, let's see. I, yeah, I played mine. I've got this fort going where I'm trying to, I'm trying to turn it into the biggest, like the biggest fort I can. And I didn't play it as much as I could because I was traveling and I only had my laptop, um,

which is not as powerful as my desktop. So I'm at 157. So it's coming. And I'm still at about 200 frames per second. So I'm still doing okay. A lot less on my laptop, though. My poor little laptop was down to about 35 or 40. So this is very quickly becoming a desktop-only fort.

But let's see what I can manage here. Got to keep the animals in check. and, you know, all that. And it's actually the randomly generated name was Rockskeeper, which I thought was very Dorfish and awesome. I like it. Yeah, yeah. So far, it's, the world seems pretty neat.

Doesn't have too much goblin chaos going on. I think I've managed to eradicate one goblin civilization already just to get some action going. Kind of contemplating, killing some elves right now just to, you know, keep things moving and give myself some challenge because my squads are pretty powerful and yeah so that's what I'm doing and it's all just and I guess trying to

kill off my army that's probably a good way to develop a high population for it so I should probably chill but yeah it's coming along do dwarfs play games in taverns right now games of chance gambling I don't think so I really want that

to happen now because something you said a moment I thought that you were going to say that you were modeling Vegas with your fort. So I thought that would be an awesome. I have a casino fort. Yeah. Well, in fact, this will be a thing of the future where

the dwarfs play games in the tavern and you as a player can actually gain control of a dwarf that currently plays and you can play the game yourself. Yeah, that doesn't sound like much fun to me. It would be great for adventure mode, but I'm not sure

that I would want to do that if anyone else wants to do it that's fine I'm not I'm not dissing it but I didn't know to me that much give me poker in dwarf fortress and I'm in I would be in adventure mode if I was an adventurer

and I was I was you know playing poker in a tavern you know I like the abstraction that you are the god figure of your fortress and you are the spirit that is that is influencing your dwarf but not controlling their actions.

Well, I mean, God has to play poker sometime, you know. I remembered what I had going on. I tried to do more in my old world, which is now around 800, something around late 800 year. and I needed some space from that because things are really getting slow and heavy there there are just so little elves left so little humans left

and all I have to do is now clean up a bit of goblins but the goblins are only in freezing biomes like really freezing biomes pure winter and that is I hated I hated so much I tried to embark somewhere and half of the map was just pure ice

because I didn't see that there was some kind of glacier going on so I couldn't really build a fortress I tried to do it out of ice and smooth the ice and it's complicated Yeah, that frozen biome stuff's really hard. And I didn't realize it moved.

So imagine my surprise when I did an embark, and it was really cool. And then I got frozen in and no one ever came to see me. Yeah, that is really horrible. And I sent like a few dwarves out just to annoy the goblins next door, like make a small ding-dong ditch and run back to me. so the goblins knocking on my door and go like, what is going on

and then I can like slow with them in my beautiful traps apparently made of ice but the squad never came back and I think they must have died on the way or something

because the goblins never got really the invitation to wage war on me so I don't know what happened as I said freezing biomes bad bad stuff rather give me like a haunted biome where everything resurrects

and things are going downhill very fast. I rather play that than play any more freezing biomes please. I never make it very far in the haunted biomes because it seems like every

embark before I can do anything my hunter goes out and kills something and you have to Disabled hunting on all dwarfs and really watch off a lot. And realize that, because I had a, I don't know, like a ghost of a hippo come in and wipe this. Wipe the floor with us. No way to stop that, I guess.

Whoops. Anybody got anything else that they want to talk about for now? Not me. Are those chickens in your background? Oh yeah, you know what? Let me go on mute. Oh, that's okay. Sorry about that. Yeah, one of them's, I guess, seen something and it's going crazy right now. I don't know if it's a problem.

Free chickens if anybody wants them. I mean, I would absolutely take chickens, but yeah, I'm living on the other side of the world, so that's a bit more. Yeah, I can't really pack them on a plane and ship them over. I don't think the world works like that. the world works like that. I think they would be sad. I mean, you could.

You ship the chicken to me, Tony, and I will pack a couple of cats in with it, and then I'll send that to roll with it. Yes. Yes. These chickens have fought a bobcat and done okay. I mean, they came and got help,

but one of them managed to, you know, get pretty far into the bobcat before almost getting eaten. They're pretty tough, but yeah, they're about to find a new home, because we're moving and I can't take them back to the city. I think they're not city chickens. Okay.

Cool. All right, guys. Yeah. So everybody have a great period of time. Enjoy the next sequence of events in your life. Yes. And all of our listeners out there too, enjoy the next sequence of events in your lives. Goodbye, Anna.

All right, guys. Catch you later. See you later, guys. Later, guys. This has been Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Please stop by and leave a comment or suggestion in the comment section of this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwarfortress Roundtable,

or find us in the podcast service of your choice. Music is Sky Q. Elin, composed by Kevin McLeod. You can find Kevin McLeod's music at Incompetec.com. You can find a link in the show notes.