Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep.133: ManWolfPig!

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

We are back to kick off season 9, talking about the new updates and some more advanced worldgen.

Welcome to Dwarf Orchrist Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. And I'm Roland. I am Tony. So we are back after our break. Welcome back, guys. Howdy? Yeah, it's really good to be back.

It is. It's fun. And there's a lot to talk about. I miss you guys. Oh, yeah. Same. As is usual, something big happened while we weren't recording. So, yeah, that's part for the course, right?

I like to think that it gives us time to ruminate and reflect on it so that we can provide the most optimal content for our engaged listening audience. It also gave me a chance to go back and play some old civilization. Yes. Checkers. Checkers. That's my summer. I got Siv 3 for like $5 from Steam and played that while I was on vacation. Still very playable.

I had like the most amazing tour on vacation. I went to the Mussel Sholes Sound Studios in Mussel Sholes, Alabama, which is a recording studio that had all kinds of major classic rock songs recorded there. Wild Horses by the Rolling Stones, Brown Sugar, Leonard Skinnerd made what was supposed to be the first album, but ended up being the last album. It was recorded there. It was just amazing. Free Bird.

All time rock and roll. Bob singing the Silver Bullet Band. Actually, it was Bob Seeger in the Mussel's Rhyl's Rhythm section, recorded there. Yeah, it was just so awesome. That's pretty cool. The silver bullet band does sound better, like, as a name. Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess if we're workshopping it for him.

Well, they also are known as the Swampers, so Bob Seeger and the Swampers wouldn't be too bad. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Who are any of these people? Who are these people? Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I really feel that I'm Gen Z and you're not. That's it.

It's okay. True there. Yeah, yeah, I mean. So did you guys do while you were away? Have you guys had summer vacations? Oh, you know, summer vacation is so fun because it usually means for me that I have to work more, not less. So the actual vacation part is yet to come up. It was blazing hot over here for a while.

Thankfully, that is over. Now it's just overcast and a little rainy. But who we? It's probably good that we didn't record when it was hot because I could not have sat here in any kind of appropriate manner and recorded for an hour in that heat. That was unbearable. So that was my summer so far.

I did sit through the birth and generation and a landfill of a tropical storm while I was on vacation. We spent a week down on the Mobile Bay and I saw the formation of tropical storm Bertha. That was kind of neat. It wasn't really a big deal.

It was a great name. I know. It's a shame that it didn't become a hurricane because then it could be big Bertha. Oh, man. Yeah. You know, like, where did the great names go? Hurricane Esther.

Like, those are good. ones like Hurricane Bertha Yeah So a great Granny name Camille You got French people

using that still But you get your esters And your bertha's And your Mildred's Hurricane Mildred That'd be a good one Wait That's real

Hurricane Mildred No But it's a great old lady name No I'm surprised I would not have been surprised If there was a Hurricane Mildred Of course They don't get down to the M's

All that often Well, they do more now than they used to. Now we're going to start repeating Hurricane Aaron, Hurricane Bbertha. I think they decided to do that. They decided to, because they had to hit like Hurricane Alpha, Hurricane Beta, like two or three years in a row. I think that they changed their policy that they went back and started names again, back from A. When do we get to use like other country names to, like, stop being so Ameriocentric with our hurricanes and have like Hurricane Balder? and Hurricane Magnum, Magnus, you know, like, those would be great.

They do some right now. They do form in the Gulf of America, usually. So, you know. In the one? In the, oh, that would be a good name. But if that one comes up, you, you better have some kind of basement. If Hurricane Roland comes, I am going to be running for cover, even where I am so far inland, because that one's going to be sadistic.

True. Yes. Well, the update. Should we talk about some updates? Well, before we talk about the update, before we talk about the update, I want to talk about, there's two updates. I think there's two updates, but we can. Well, there's two main, yeah. Is it the same update or was there two updates?

Was the diplomacy one in a different update than the dinosaurs? Diplomacy and dinosaurs, I think those were two different updates, maybe. But for me, it felt like one. Before we talk about that, though, I want to talk about world generation. and my quest to have a Roland-like world so that I can create ice dams and fun with that sort of thing. So I have, so I pretty much work a lot of the summer on this particular aspect. I've done a lot more time in world generation than I have actually playing the game.

But I have found a couple of parameters that are easy to tweak, that they generate reliable worlds in that I mean you don't have, a thousand rejections and then it says you're sure you want to continue and then you can't continue and you go a thousand rejections again with these tweaks so far I have gotten a playable world within you know 100 or 200 world generation attempts so in the world generation parameters there are a few parameters that you can tweak that will allow you to have have rivers that flow from a, in my case, I'm looking for a temperate biome into a cold biome because I want to have my rivers freeze at different points in the year and thaw at different points in the year.

So the first one that I tweaked was the minimum and maximum temperature. So the default on those are 25 and 75. I change those to the minimum temperature to be at 10 and the maximum temperature to be at 30. And that seems to give you, whenever we combine it with the other tweaks I'm going to tell you about, that seems to give you a biomes where you have the warmest one is a temperate zone and the coldest ones are freezing. So I think it was the minimum was 10 and the maximum was 30. So I'm scrolling down here through the settings. I tried messing with the mesh sizes and every time that I did that, I ended up with untenable. worlds. It never would create a successful world. So the next one down, this is underneath the

mesh size parameters, is the pole parameter. So the pole parameter sets how many poles that you have in your world. You have a north pole and a south pole, one or the other, neither. If you set it to have either a north pole or a south pole, not both, I just chose mine to be a north pole only, because here in the northern hemisphere, I kind of think of the north pole as being the colder. That's the correct way to think of it, by the way, just to editorialize that for our listeners. The correct American way. So I set that one to just be north. So you don't have a South Pole.

You have a North Pole and everything below that is kind of like, it's almost like you're just dealing with one hemisphere of a world. And then I scrolled down and the next one that I tweaked was the erosion. passes. I think that's what it's called. It's the erosion cycle count. Now, the default is 250. I bumped that thing all the way up to 1,000. And here's, here's one more thing that I should have told you at the beginning because for whatever reason, once you change the width or height of your world, it resets all the parameters that you have set. So if you change a bunch of parameters and then you change the width of your world, it resets them. Oh.

Don't know why. That's good. So after I have told you all of these parameters to change, I go back and say, first, change the width of your world. So what we're looking for here is a world that is taller than it is wide so that you have a, sort of a vertical rectangle of a world to where you have a tall, skinny world in essence. So I set the width to the minimum, which is. 64, set the width to, actually, it looks like the width goes down to 17.

I set the width to 64 and the height was still a 257. Now that I'm looking at it, it says 65. So I set the width to 65 and the height of 257. So those are the only things that I change. And when you do that, you end up with a world that has mountain ranges that have rivers flowing out of them. And the rivers all, at least the five or six worlds that I've generated, seem to always flow from the mountains to an ocean and you can tell just by looking at the overall map kind of

which way the river's flowing and you also have lots of transitions from from temperate climates to cold climates and it's it's easy to find places where you can have a a oblong embark i usually go three wide six tall and so that you can place it over the river and you can can get your change. So to recap, change the width to 65 and the height to 257, change the maximum temperature to 30, the minimum temperature to 10, change the pole parameter to north pole, and change the erosion cycles to 1,000. You do that, you run your, your world gen, and it should give you a playable world, and you pop it open, and you're going to see that you're going to have a lot of rivers that are flowing north and south in the map,

and then you can have some fun with it. The thing that I don't like about it so far, or at least it's not optimum, and I'm still going to learn some tweaking. Not a lot of, with that erosion cycles up to 1,000, it does give you lots of long rivers, but it also gives you less of a elevation change. So that's something I'm still going to have to tweak on. All right.

But yeah, this has given me some playable worlds, and I've stopped obsessing about world generation parameters and started actually playing the game now. So, okay, so any questions. That sounds like the way. That is pretty cool. First, I was unsure what you meant by Roland-esque worlds.

I thought you were going for a very sadistic, mean world with a lot of like... Yeah, I do too. stuff in it. But yeah, no, this absolutely makes sense. That's pretty cool that you now have a way to consistently have a map with this freezing river phenomenon. I don't know how we're going to call that even.

Because that has so many possibilities for Fortress defense. It's very good. Well, one of the things I'm planning on doing with that is, even if it's a flat area, I'm going to try digging some pits for the water to flow into and then freeze

and see if I can do some playing with that. But it just adds another dimension of fun. All caps with expectations at each end. The all-caps fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's how I spent my summer pretty much. That in touring recording studios. and enjoying tropical storms. I mean, that sounds pretty great, to be honest. I'm going to have to try that. I think I've fallen into that same problem that we've talked about before, which is basically the world just, when I generate it,

it turns into crap and it won't work. So I think it sounds like you're offering some good suggestions on how to realize my world-building dreams. This segment has been brought to you by Keefe the Green Wizard's geological improvements. Is your fortress built on perfectly ordinary stone? How dreadfully boring. Keefe specializes in rerouting rivers, relocating hillsides, and convincing the landscape to better suit your architectural vision. Results may include waterfalls, scenic overlooks, and the occasional accidental cavern breach. Keefe the Green Wizard, because the mountains should fit the fortress, not the other way around.

I'm going to have a confession here too. No. I bow my head in shame. I actually used ChatGPT to help me learn about these parameters. And it was quite helpful. It kept me from having to go through 50 different Reddit threads where people disagreed on things to do. Whether, you know, whether ChatGPT told me the correct things. to do. It gave me things to do that seemed to work. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's great. And also,

the other added bonus of using chat GPT is the more people that use it, more often, the faster that company will die. Go out of business forever. So that's really good news. The feel warm about that. The faster the people will die. Yeah, they lose so much money every time people use it, the more people they use it, the faster they burn money and the faster they collapse because they can't figure out how to make money, which is kind of funny if you think about it. sustainable. Well, it doesn't, does it? So go out there and use chat to E.P.T. everybody, but don't pay. There you go. Well, I'm certainly not paying. Exactly. Oh, no. Well, I may be paying with my soul, but I'm not paying with currency. I'm not a fanboy for any of this kind of crap, because, like, I don't really care about it other than that I just think it's kind of dumb.

But the chatbot that's built into the new version of Apple's operating systems, so like this stuff that'll come out in September, you can install it now as developer beta. Like, it actually works. So Siri is actually a pretty decent Door Fortress companion now, which is really interesting. If you're just trying to ask it questions, it mostly gets it right. And it's free. So there you are. Yeah, Siri is actually surprisingly useful in the new one.

And there are also some open LLM models out there that you can use, which I should. Yeah. You absolutely don't have to pay. Better network citizen and use some of the open models. You can. RAM is your problem. You can. Yeah.

RAM is your problem. I am not part of the solution. I am part of the problem. I fully admit that. There is no solution, nor is there really a problem. so I think we're all in good shape. Unless your problem is too many trade caravans. That's my new world's problem.

This episode of Door Fortress Roundtable is made possible in part by Delta Whiskey's diplomatic banquet hall. Nothing builds lasting friendships between civilizations like overflowing mugs, expertly roasted cave lobster, and pretending not to notice when the elves complain about your furniture. Whether you're hosting mountain homes, Humans or those smelly goblins, Delta whiskey helps make every state dinner a memorable one. Peace is temporary, but good ale is forever. I don't know. Have you guys played much of the diplomacy?

Sounds like you've been focused on world building, which is awesome. Yep. And Roland, you've probably been killing things. Also awesome. That is correct. Yes. Yeah. No, I ended up getting really excited about the diplomacy thing.

And so I have like armies of messengers and I keep sending, I call them the fluffers to go out and say nice things. If you do that enough, people start to really like you. And then I have like trade caravan traffic jams. Really? You went with fluffers? Yeah, I've got fluffers. You went with fluffers. Okay.

Yeah, I have an army of, of. Enough said. Enough said. It is a gene. Ring pride. That's the name of my fortress. ring pride. So everybody's out there fluff and ring pride. And so the cool thing is, is there are always traders ready. There is almost always a traffic jam of wagons trying to come in and trade. It's

really funny. But building multiple trade depots, really doesn't, they only dock one. So multiple depots don't give you anything. You have that many caravans? Yes, it's getting a little crazy. And some of them just bring crap. I mean, yeah. Like a lot of the human ones, if you don't have, good relations, they'll just bring you cheese. Like, you know, thanks for that. Cheese and leaves. What's wrong with cheese? Well, you know, you can have too much of a good thing when the fifth caravan turns up

full of cheese. You know, like right now I've got 6,000 food and 25,000 drinks. So I'm well stocked. The way I look at it, it saves you from having to build a cheese workshop, right? Correct. And all the, all the root-a-baga leaves I want or whatever. Yeah, it is funny. So that's really cool.

And you can try to make peace with the goblins. So I made peace with some of them. I know goblins. They're not sending trade caravans. I don't know if they're incapable or if that mechanic doesn't work. But they'll send diplomats and come talk to me about stuff and share information, which is interesting. Yeah. Okay.

That's actually good to know that it now works this well because I'd like sending people out to just get attention. and possibly get like a trade caravan from these humans as well or from these. But the fact that you have, did you change the amount of different civilizations in the world? I think I usually use maybe more than usual when I'm doing the auto world gen. So I might say a number of civilizations. And I think it usually puts it in the medium. I usually bump it up one, but not to the extreme because the extreme just gets a little chaos, a little chaotic. But this one's been cool.

Okay, okay, that makes sense. I also like to play with more civilizations, so it makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I enjoy that. But, like, I've got these civilizations, the human civilization, so you can go and make contact with them. And then once you've made contact, if you have a bad diplomat that can make things worse, like you can piss them off.

That's not so good. And then I was having one problem because I think, I don't know if this is true or not, but one of my diplomats is a goblin. And I sent the goblin, who's pretty accomplished as a diplomat to a human hamlet. And they didn't. And now I'm like, now they're really mad at me. So I don't know if it's that they're just racist or if my diplomat just rolled the wrong dice.

I have no idea. Maybe racist. I don't know. Orbitable. But it's doggone cool. And we're not even to the dinosaurs yet. And if you want dinosaurs, my trade caravan strategy is the way to get every new species in the game because I have all of them.

Before we get to dinosaurs. So we think that diplomacy, I guess I could look on the Bay 12 game site. So the diplomacy update came out a bit before the dinosaur update, right? Yes, I believe so. Now keep in mind, I don't read any patch notes. I will read the headline that they post. and then I go in hot. So I will try to do more of the reading of that now that we're recording again.

But sometimes I sort of like the surprise of finding the things out myself. I don't know. That's our patch notes, spoilers. I don't know, maybe. I don't think so. It looks like that in May 13th, the Lomacy release came out. So new to me. I got totally sucked into a couple other games.

So I was pulled away from my dwarfs, but I'm back. You know, it's with a, and we kind of covered last season a little bit about burnout. And this is a game that you can really end up burning yourself out on. I had some thoughts on that because I did. And I would, and I think we talked about it. It was, yeah, I was kind of like, oh, I better go play it. But there weren't really that many updates. and I feel like we'd kind of pushed a lot of our hypotheses about things to different directions.

And I think I was like, all right, well, I'm just going to put it down for a bit. And then I went out and played a whole bunch of other games and had a good time with those. But like all games, eventually you kind of run into diminishing joy returns, you know, and it's good to take a break from it. And then you come back and there's all these things you've been thinking about that you can then go enact. That's kind of the way I felt about this. Yeah, it didn't take real long for me to finish my SIV. adventure.

Yeah, I mean, it's fun. It is what it is. It was nostalgic. I played another game. I played this game. It's one of those zombie survival. It's basically kind of door fortress with zombies, but based on real map data. So you can like make your neighborhood into the fortress and you can go raid other buildings and stuff and bring back supplies.

It's kind of cool. But, you know, diminishing returns. It doesn't have the depth of this, but it was fun. Today's show is sponsored by Loghammer's exotic beast containment. Giant reptiles getting into the food stockpile? Curious hatchlings wandering into the mayor's office. Loghammer designed sturdy pins, reinforced gates and fences strong enough to convince even the most enthusiastic thunder lizard to stay where it belongs. Loghammer, because every fortress deserves impressive livestock at a respectful distance.

Have you had a chance for all to do any gaming at all since we've been gone? Um, I have tried to go back to Fortress mode, but it didn't just catch it. Because I fell into like a little trap where I wanted to have as many dynos as quickly as possible. And I had like a zoo going on and I was clambering more dynos quick. And I ended up not being able to get as many dynos as quickly as I wanted. And then I ran dry and I felt really embarrassed. because I actually had dwarves die of thirst again. Oh no.

So I was like, yeah. Noob. Yeah, exactly. So what I did was I want dino content, but I can't be bothered with a full fortress right now. So what I did is, simple. I made an adventurer right now. And I don't know what it is.

Dinos are cool, but the Intellodon man is just not. I think. For those that don't know what that is, it's a very large pig-like creature. It is not a dinosaur. It is a mammal, but it's pretty cool. And there's the human version of it. I think it's odd that the description specifically mentions that my legs are untrained and thin, but let's not talk about that. I don't skip leg day. My pig has a lot of strength and can just rip people apart. It's very fun. Holy cow. I just pull the thing up.

It's like a wolf pig. Yeah, it is crazy looking. And when I was younger, I had like a picture book about not dinosaurs, but everything that came after dinosaurs, including these guys. And I remember these really

horrid-looking CGI pictures of them got burned into my little child brain and they never left me. So when had the option of just playing them. Obviously, I had to. They're really fun and I'm not really surprised that Tony found out instantly that I'm just going around killing things because that really checks out, doesn't that? Yeah. Did I do anything fun so far in the adventure mode? I found

dice. The cool down is massive so I don't really get to play with the dice too often. It gave me a breastplate of shimmering armor. Was it shimmering? Was it shimmering? Was it? Rainbow colored. Holy metal armor. It's pretty nice, but not crazy. Holy metal armor, nice. See, I still haven't gotten any of the divine metals or anything like that. So I'm still, now I'm hunting for the circus.

But I think otherwise I've kind of conquered things. I have so many war Afrovenatars now. Like, I just have pages of them. So I also have a lot of Afrovenatars. tar soap. I've got hunting buoy boitiraptor, whatever the hell that is.

I've got a whole bunch of them. They look like big chickens. And then I've got some mono-nichus dinosaurs that people are now using as pets. Let's back up for just a second. You said that the way to get lots and lots of dinosaurs is to have lots and lots of caravans. Explain that, please.

Well, you can ask the caravans to bring them. So the better, it seems, now somebody could totally prove me wrong on this, but this is my, this is what I'm inferring based on just trial and error. It seems like the better relations I have with humans, the more goodies they'll bring with them. So I trade them like gold trinkets or, you know, whatever's high value and I gift stuff to them. And, you know, basically I make them want to come. and then when we have diplomacy with the humans, I can request what I want from them now. And it presents you with this massive list of creatures.

And so I'm like, yep, all of them. And I don't know what most of them are. Like what is in Agiro Cassis? I've got a couple of those. I don't know what it is, but I've got some. And then I've got Arkelon and I've got Heliocoprion, which looks like a shark. So I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with that or how it's. in a cage. But so yeah, there's so many of these things. And yeah, you can just request them and then

the humans will bring them. And then you just have to feed. And the cool thing is, is when the humans bring them, they're already domesticated. So if they're war-trainedable, you can just immediately war-train them in the cages. And then you can pasture them however you want to pasture them. And then, yeah, they war-train up really quickly. And then you can assign them to your troops and then you have to make sure that once they're war trade they're not still in the pasture otherwise your squads get stuck i think but yeah they've been super awesome like it's great i've got like an unexhaustible supply of these things now so so one thing that's been added with the dino release is a new world gym parameter in the basic parameters it's a real-world extinct

creatures parameter and you can go everything well the options are extinct isolated untamed wilds any wilderness and domesticated. Did you have to choose the domesticated World Gen parameter to get it so that the caravans would bring the dinosaurs? That's a good question. Did you change that at all? I didn't use any advanced world gen parameters.

Not advanced. This is a new regular parameter. I didn't change anything from default other than I just, what did I say? Let me look. I'll have to go back and look because maybe I'm lying to you all, which was entirely possible,

entirely possible that I would get this wrong. Now, this is just in the regular world gym parameters where you pick the size of the world and the length of history. There is a new one that says real world extinct creatures. And I'm going to just read the tool tips that go along with each of the settings. Extinct indicates that they are extinct in this world as well. If you choose isolated, it states,

they live only in savage islands and on very small savage biomes. If you choose untamed wilds, it says that they are only found in untamed wilds, and that's the default, I think. The any wilderness setting indicates that extinct creatures can be found in any wilderness, and the domesticated option states that extinct creatures, many civilizations, keep them as pets and as work animals. I've obviously done that. I think just disregard what I said before.

Obviously, that's what I've selected. I'm sure I must have done domesticated because they're domesticated when they come in the cages. So that would check out. So anyway, it's a very neat way to get them. Have you had any show up and like roaming, wandering animals? I haven't had any of them. The only animals that are on my map are, I was going to call them Kia's, but they're not Kia's. Are they the big birds that steal your things?

I can't remember what. Keyes. Yeah, those things that are feeding. Okay. Yeah. Well, I know it's a, for us, it's a short episode, but let's go ahead and wrap this one up here. Just say we're back, and we look forward to talking more about Dwar Fortress and playing more Dwarfortress and, you know, send us an email if you have any questions. And, you all have anything to add for today?

Trade on. Deep deep. Dig deep and don't worry. All right. And, wow, this is Unix. I know this. Okay. We should start with the Jurassic Park theme.

Yeah. Or with the thumb, thumb of the foot treads and the water in the glass jiggle. You know that? I was thinking. I was thinking. I was thinking. Well, if you want to come up with the folio, audio for that Roland, I'll be happy to include it.

And that wraps up episode 133 of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable. Brought to you by Keefe the Green Wizard Making Mountains more cooperative. Delta Whiskey proving diplomacy is easier after a good meal and log hammer keeping the fortress one step ahead of its oversized reptiles. Thanks to our patrons

for helping our worlds grow larger, our neighbors friendlier, and the dinosaurs properly fenced in. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwar Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast

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