Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep.15: In Which The Gang Discusses Lektadbomrek – Luredwhips

Episode Date: September 22, 2019

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Hello, friends, and welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. If you recall our last episode, we had planned on discussing our Bloodline Fortress, but we discussed it for so long that we decided to make the conversation an episode of its own. So, here is our deep dive on the town of Lechtad Bombrack, Lurid Weeps. the bloodline fort that I laid the shaky foundations of what's the name of the fort again I can't remember oh that's a tough one bloodus lineus yeah we're gonna have to we'll have to pick that out

sometime and because we need to have maybe an intro special theme song for the bloodline fort you know what you're absolutely right maybe I should I mean I could even dump it into legends mode and, like, look at it and see what's going on in the world, and we could talk about that stuff, too. Do a trailer in a world. In a world, yeah.

But it sounds like whenever you got it rolling, you were a little bit surprised at the lack of defensive preparation that I had done whenever I set it up, which is normal for me. I normally pay no attention to defenses whatsoever until I have until after the first caravan has come

hmm hmm yeah a bold choice indeed I do tend to plan ahead like I'm not trying to like sound full of myself okay I'm I still

try to do things better than the last time for example one thing I've noticed is that you dug out in the dirt layer and you built the first part of your fortress in the dirt layer, which I've never done actually. I've always went down deep enough so that I have only stone to make like a stone fortress. That is because in the fortress, sorry, in the tutorials that I have done,

they all talked about the absolute first priority is getting your dwarves out of the open and into underground. And the quickest way to do that is to build your depot location really close to the first entrance and then put a single wide bottleneck between the depot and everything behind it so that you can close it off with doors or traps or whatever so that that is a little bit of protection. But yeah, the tutorials I've always done, that was just the way they did them. They built stuff right there in the first layer and the dirt. And then once you got everything set up and just a little bit,

understandable, then you start digging down. Yeah, I mean, I think you can, I think it works. I mean, hey, whatever. I like doing, I like going to the stone directly. And maybe this is just mental. But I like doing it because then you can smooth the stone. And I, I always try to do that for like mood management to like, oh, well, you know, if I smooth the stone, then they'll be happier.

Hopefully, I don't know if that has any impact. But I felt like, yeah, I just felt like, well, mentally it made me feel better. And then it's like, if things got bad, I could have them and grave a little bit and then they'd have something to read when they were in the dining room, whatever. Again, I have no idea how that system works or if it makes any difference, but I just always assumed, well, this is the way I do it, you know, but it was cool.

Like I said, I think the whole thing with the bloodline was awesome, just seeing how other people approach it. The idea was that once things got established, that top level would end up being abandoned and everybody would move downstairs. Oh, okay. Okay, I get it, yeah. or maybe it becomes housing for the new migrants to the fort

until they can make their own bedrooms in the main fort or the kindergarten that's right or a giant farm oh yeah about the farm Tony you you saw what I did with a farm yeah yeah describe it

yeah so first the farm that Johan did was kind of in the entrance and I was like, no, this won't work. Mostly because I tend to like overproduce on food stuff. Mostly because when I played in the version before this, I had a ton of visitors and those guys always drank all my booze. And so I had to overproduce. And now there's no one really coming to my fort,

but I still tend to overproduce. And I like to have my farms closed off of the rest so that even if I get sieged, I can just wall everyone in the tavern and the tavern is connected to the farm layer. But the farm layer isn't connected to the outside. So the farmer has to basically go down into the fortress, into the tavern, through the tavern,

one layer up again, and then he is in the farming area. So that's nice and closed off. Cool. look forward to taking a look at that and I actually told them to stop cooking the mushrooms because I found if they do that then they end up cooking the whole supply and I think cooking the mushrooms kills the seeds and then eventually you run out a plump helmet spawn and the fort dies I've had that happen a few times oh yeah okay damn I told them to stop

cooking but they can still brew and I guess brewing doesn't destroy the seeds so that's cool I don't know how that would work but it doesn't matter that's how it does so we'll just go with it. Well, you see, in brewing, you mostly use the mushroom stem and not the cat. The cap is where the spores are. Let's actually contact some brewers to get some mushroom wine made and see if, oh, God, I think you could do it. No. God, that would be awful.

Yes. I don't know. There's just there high enough sugar content? I do, you know, I do brewing, but I don't think you should do that. I'm pretty sure there are no carbohydrates and mushrooms at all. No, you have to add sugar. Yeah. That's going to be a horrible.

horrible thing to do. But if I ever make a batch, I'm in a sense, I'm to-toddy. Here's some Dwarven mushroom ale. Enjoy. Yeah, I found so it was interesting. When I got the fort, there were some defenses up, which was awesome, but I

usually build a siege entrance for my fort, which is to say, I specifically direct invaders to a very convoluted route into the fort with traps and stuff. so that, you know, they don't come in the front. Because if they come in the front, then I feel like there's like dead bodies around

and everyone kind of gets wigged out about the dead body. So I built or started to build. I don't know if I actually finished it, but I started to build a siege entrance. And I think it was in phases. Like I used a combination of stonefall traps, which are marginally effective, minimally effective. And then just to get things going, because it seems like there's no metal in the fort. I use the smashy bridge

which is one of my favorite traps which is you fill a hall full of bridges and then you just have a dwarf standing on a lever pulling the bridges and smashing smashing smashing and that quite often scares the siege away as the numbers of the siege go missing and they're like where did Sam go? I don't know he's dead yeah that usually freaks him out

but then the downside of that is there's no like stuff to take off the goblin corpses it's because it gets atom smashed. But it's a cheap and easy way to really hilariously destroy a siege. Dwarven whack-a-mole. Yeah, yeah. I like it, smashy bridge. So if you time it, like you put mechanisms on one bridge while the other one's up,

then you pull it and then they kind of trade places. So one goes down and the other goes up and it kind of becomes this nice little smashy bridge thing, which is wham, wham, wham, wham, wham. That's cool. Yeah, and, you know, it's like the next guy, ooh, made it through that one. The bridge didn't get me, wham, and that's that. And then by the time they try to retreat,

of course, retreating through Smashy Bridge. And it's amusing, if nothing else. How about at the end of everybody's year, they take a couple screenshots of their favorite points of interest in the Fortress, and then we'll use those to put it like on the website. Oh, yeah. for illustrations. I actually did a screenshot of the first artifact we've got.

Awesome. It's somewhere. Have we had any attacks of any kind in bloodline? Like any wear beasts or micro-seges or anything? Has anything happened bad? I think some bird stole seeds, but that's the worst I've gotten so far. Yeah, I killed one of the dwarfs because he was getting, he started a fight in the tavern and like killed somebody else. And so I, we had to deal with him in a very direct way.

Oh, poor at war. But it wasn't grumpy. Good, good. I don't know why, but I tend to like, name. name the most grumpy dwarfs so I can like check on them more easily and I usually tend to like take obvious names like grumpy for example and since I've named them I tend to also get a bit of emotional connection to them and so for some reason I tend to care about grumpy more than other dwarfs even though he's a grumpy asshole I thought it was hilarious because I

I was looking at the Doors and there was like, everyone was doing really well. And then there's just one that just was a miserable, miserable git, you know, flashing red or whatever. And I was like, what is your problem? And then I click on it. And its name was grumpy. And I was like, oh, okay. That helps.

Oh, got it. Good, good stuff. But then if you look at her description, it's something like, she loves interacting with people, generally has a sunny disposition, a positive outlook on life. And I'm like, then why are you so miserable? What is going on with you? Yeah. Yeah, she just had like a bad year, I guess.

Maybe she got rained on. I think I named one other dwarf, but I don't exactly remember what I named him. Was it the doctor? I think I named him Doctor House. Yeah, that's right. I saw that one. Yeah, mostly because I liked the series back then. And normally when I find a...

a dwarf that has quite good diagnostic skills. I tend to make him the chief medical dwarf and name him Dr. House. Cool. I like it. I've oftentimes tried to get a goblin to join my fort and then I name that goblin chief medical dwarf just because I enjoy the idea of a goblin being called

the chief medical dwarf somehow that satisfies me. Like, oh, ho, ho, ho, Mr. Dwarf. I see, you have a cut there. Let me just cut your leg on. Should they trust the goblin? I don't know. But no, this is a pure dwarf fort at this point. There aren't any, nobody even came to visit, I noticed.

I opened the tavern up to the world, too, because I thought, oh, let's get some friends in here. But nobody's coming. Where is everybody? What's going on? They're all elves. Aren't they all elves? All right. I killed.

I killed the elves. They came to trade, and then I needed the animals that they had. And then they got mad because everything was in wooden bins. And I wasn't even trying to trade the wooden bins with them, but I guess they saw them, and then got mad, so I seized their stuff, and then they complained, so I just piped them out. I hope that was okay.

You're monster. No, it's fine. But Roland, didn't you say that the entire world was filled with nothing but elves? Um, yeah, I looked at the math and I was like super shocked when I saw that we had, I think maybe two or three human hamlets, two goblin fortresses or whatever, but the entire coast was littered with elves. And I was like, oh no, it would be easy to kill, I guess, but that's, that's bad news. I maybe I'll pop into legends with it and and we can actually like have a have a look at it and talk more intelligently about the beautiful world around this well part of the thing also is that the world while I first said that I had done 250 years I think that you probably saw that I did 125 so it's a very young it's all good yeah I mean I don't know I think it's I think it's cool I don't have a problem with that it keeps the frame rates nice and high Yeah, but it also makes less visitors, so that's a thing. Oh, that is interesting, okay, because I don't think I've played with a 125 year before, so.

Well, I just tried, and for some reason in older thoughts, I get just more visitors, I don't know, if that's actually what's happening and, you know, but I tend to think of that older worlds, more visitors, stuff like that. That makes sense. There's more things potentially. Yeah. But it's fine. I just have to warn you if we ever get any kind of animal person that wants to stay, I will let them stay because I love animal persons of any kind, especially if you have done stuff like a snail man or a rat woman. Like, yes, please stay. You get the good jobs. Oh, I totally agree. I mean, I want that person to be mayor, you know, a plump helmet man, man. air would be the best thing ever. Yes. That would be great, yeah.

I tried once to get hyena people integrated into my fort, and I made it so that one woman actually became queen, and the same world, I'm playing right now again with another fort. And another hyena man actually came to my fort and was like, Hey, ho, I'm now working here with the migrants, with other dwarfs and I was like, whoa, what are you doing here? It was fun.

I got to ask for a rewind here for a second. You said that you wanted your mayor to be a plump helmet man. Are there plant men? Yeah. Plump helmet man actually exist in the, I think first and second camera layer.

They're quite rare, and they are really squishy. So just one hit from a dwarf will probably kill him. Okay, that reminds me of one of the monsters in the old early 80s, advanced Dungeons and Dragons that probably gave me the most nightmares from actually seeing the little illustration of it in the Monster Manual. And, you know, I can't even remember what it was now, but it was a funky man.

It was a walking mushroom. And for some reason, whenever I was 12 years old playing D&D, That just freaked me out to no end. I'll have to dig out my monster manual. So, yeah, that's amazing. I never thought, I never saw, I've never seen plant people. I wonder if you could have a blackberry bush person. This is like the corticeps, you know, like the fungus that, like infects ants or whatever and ants and spiders and then basically destroys their brain and then turns them into a mushroom.

Oh, yeah, like the loss of us? Yeah, that's right. I think of a plump helmet man as being a pleasant version of that, not a nightmare version. I mean, I just feel like plump helmet men are just like, hey, how's it going? You know, like not, I mean, you're your brain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I imagine plumb helmet man actually like a giant mushroom, like a real mushroom, completely mushroom-like, not weirdly humanoid or anything, just a mushroom with like a friendly face on its stem. and little arms and little leggies, and like, hello guys.

You know what I want is I want the plump helmet man to, like, stand outside my tavern and flip a sign around, you know, like those guys do, to try to get more people into the tavern. Yeah, yeah, that would be cute. You said flip a sign. I thought she meant like a gang sign. Like porn gang signs. No, you know those flippy era. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The plump helmet man gang.

oh I mean about the update you know you can actually start a plump helmet man gang oh my god that would be hilarious and the only thing you do with the gang is like go into terrans and steal all of the booze that is made from plump helmets yeah it is It's what the king will be used.

It's a criminal organization. No, so this is amazing when he talks about using criminal organizations and bandit gangs, and that they've kind of, he's kind of added it in. And so you can, and he describes this 25 member gang with the leader hidden in an abandoned monastery, um, goblin childhood friends that do the organizing and then like, and the, yeah, that's actually doing the work behind the thing is the, is the goblin friend from childhood. Yeah, and then there's an embezzler. So is like, is the embezzler like a criminal within the criminal organization? Has he done that? Because that's pretty cool. That would be

hilarious. I have to add that as soon as this comes out, I will sit down and try to break the game while playing like adventure mode. I will try to get like gang going and then take over a fortress and then basically play fortress mode in adventure mode using my gang, I guess. I hope this works.

This would be amazing. Stupid, but amazing. I feel like I need to do more adventure mode, which I don't do right now. I just don't think it's quite there yet. Just from my point of view, I don't find the engagement there that I do in dwarf mode.

Yeah, I'm using the Mephtile set, which I think has problems in adventure mode. Oh. I think it like, break, like some of the rendering of things break, because I know when you have conversations with it, sometimes like the whole screen gets completely erased by conversations and I can't figure out where things are supposed to be. So I think that I read that that was a known problem. And so I thought, oh, well, I could either use a different tile set or I'm not going to do

that. So I guess I'll just put adventure on hold for now. Yeah, I think that's, I'm just going to blame it on that. Yeah. I mean, the last adventure I did was some insect person and I completely forgot that I wasn't able to swim for some reason and I just drowned in like five minutes. Oh, yes, the deadly water. That's why I stopped doing moats in fortress mode because I ended up killing too many of my own dwarves. Like, you know, they could survive a 10,000 goblin siege, no problem. But you put a moat there and everyone just dies. in like shallow water they're dead and yeah

like the moat just ended up being just chaos for the fort everyone was dying in it like oh well I guess I'll guess I'll come up with other defenses huh I now have

the save downloaded although my computer died and I have no Windows machine at the moment the first components of my new box should be coming in tomorrow I'm hoping to have it assembled by the end of the week. What I'm planning on doing is tonight going to the office and spending about four hours

playing Dwar Fortress on an office computer until from about maybe like 9 o'clock tonight to 1 in the morning and seeing what I can get done there. So what do you guys... Don't forget to crank the frames up. I put the frame rate really high when I plead it. I think that's why I finish so fast. It's because I usually, especially early on with the forts,

I put my frame rate up to like 300 frames per second and then let them do stuff and then I hit pause and tell them to do more stuff. And then I pause it. I definitely am abusing or using the frame rate thing. But see, I'm not sure that I know what to do next because typically whenever a fork gets to its third year or so, whenever it's under my full control,

it is just in just a horrible mess, which, you know, that may speak to, you know, my preparation of fordresses and why, you know, maybe I should think a little bit more about defense and all that to start with. But, yeah, I mean, there's a siege entrance, so I think it needs more traps and I think I haven't, I think I didn't open it to the fort. So I think right now it's just a dead end with a bunch of traps. You'll have to punch a hole in one end of it, which I didn't do yet because I wanted it to be fairly stable before I let goblins into it. But, I mean, that might be something to look at it. Just see if you can see how I did smashy bridge and all that kind of stuff. And then the main bridge for them.

I put a bridge in to keep people out of the fort as well. Okay. I like bridges. I'm a bridge builder. I love bridges. Never can be too many. Never, never, never, never too many bridges. I have not actually taken a look yet to see what you guys have done with what I started with.

But I think on the, on like the top level, I think that I put some, some temple area. as in, but I didn't have the temples fully equipped yet. Oh, yeah. Those are now? Yeah. I took them out. Because I wanted to

make a bit bigger temples and make them in one stone layer so I can engrave at least one wall so I can put the picture of the goddess on the wall. I thought about doing that

but right now I think I just took out the temples and didn't do anything else cool cool great part of this I'm using you guys to learn more about

about fortress planning and like all knowledge in the game is iterative like you learn one thing and then that's the gateway to like five other things and you do that again and it's a gateway to 10 other things and the next thing you know you're building mine card and I'm not to that point yet but yeah I can

I can keep it from getting killed by a siege I guess it's about all like oh definitely one thing you can always do is just mine for metals I'm not even sure if we're actually have iron on the map oh I don't know you're right I saw all that marble and I was like oh awesome we're going to have steel

but then I couldn't find any iron at all and I can find any metal at all other than gold I did see a couple of veins of gold I went down, I punched through to the magma. Oh, that's the last thing I did is I started building. I started trying to figure out where to put magma forges. So, you know, be aware they've punched through and they're down at the magma later in it. Okay.

All right. So, yeah, I will see what I can do tonight if I can make it back to the office. Use air quotes, work. Yeah, yeah. That's why I was. was in the office last night. I was trying to improve the server security. Yeah, that's it.

Working. That's right. You're improving the security by sorting out the traps hole, right? I was planting a Dwarman Adams smasher right at the entrance to our Kolo. Yeah. Oh, you know what I did, which is a little non-standard, and I think maybe bears mentioning, is I built rock forges, which is not part of the base game. but is part of the meth tile set.

And I don't know if it's his mod or if he incorporated it somebody else's, but it's basically, it's a workshop where you can take stone and then carve it into very crude versions of weapons. So I built some like stone axes and stone axe heads or whatever is traps to fill on the traps hall since I couldn't find any metal. I think that they don't, they're not particularly sharp. I think they just do like mauling damage rather than chopping or something. cutting damage, but it's

slightly better than a stonefall trap, but not brilliant in a way, shape, or form. But anyway, if you see those workshops and you're like, it's this, that's the rock forge is what it's called. Hmm. Mm-hmm. Cool. Roland, did you kill the turkeys?

What? No. No. No, no, no, no. Lots of turkeys. Lots of turkey still. And turkey eggs. No worries. Yeah. I saw turkeys. I got a bit triggered, but, I just put the door there. I actually put some nest boxes in there because

I wanted the eggs, but I just locked the door and said like stay there. But I didn't kill them, actually, really, as well. Okay, that's fine. I kind of expected to have no turkeys left whenever we came back in, so.

This close to November in the US, we'll make sure our turkeys are still around. There's a couple of things that I'd like to mention, some people who make comments on our web page, df roundtable.com. I don't promote that enough in our episodes. DFroundtable.com is the homepage for Dwarfortress Roundtable. So you can go there and you can comment and we will comment back to you. Username probably Jody took our advice and listened into one of the episodes of Dwar Fortress Talk, the podcast that TOTI won and some of his

friends made years ago, and they said they really liked it. So I'm happy to hear that probably Jody dug that. Oh, that's awesome. Cool. Yeah. Also, Victor commented that he had checked out a Dwarven dictionary that someone had built. A person with a handle, whether it's Reddit or Twitter, I don't know, Solitarian. Solitarian has built a dictionary of the Dwarven language, a codification of the Dwarven language. And I checked it out. You could dive into it and it could be like, you know, Trekkies learning Klingon. There are a couple pages you can go to where somebody's done like an enter your English word and it'll translate it to Dwarf and back. And I found that really useful when I was trying to attract people through

legends because, you know, it'll have like Eurist wet bridges or whatever. But then in the game, it'll be Eurist Snigithnasagastigil or whatever, you know, so you can kind of of translate the untranslated or retranslate the non-you know yeah anyway the long way of saying that there's a web app that'll do that as well which is pretty cool but i just wanted to mention them and i'd like to thank probably jody and victor for stopping by the website and leaving some comments we love to hear from people who are downloading and enjoying the show we will do our best to get an answer back to you if you have any questions okay i guess we'll wrap it up for this episode

and we will be back next time with more talk about everything dwarfy. Anybody else got anything they'd like to talk about before we say good day. Good day. Good day. Off we dozen. What?

I love it. Until next time, yeah. See you later. This has been Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundable.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 Dwarf Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice.

Music is Sky Q Ellen, composed by Kevin McLeod. You can find Kevin McLeod's music at Incompetec.com. You can find a link in the show notes. Toltotterish, nozum tettush, Ravencrowns, the kind pantomime. This is an oaken podcast. All craft's dwarfship is of the highest quality. It is encrusted with oval granite cabbashions and decorated with oak.