Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep.88: We’re Back!

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

Hey you wonderful folks. We're back for another season of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable. And now we have a Discord server! Join our new Discord Server: https://discord.gg/fYXX7p6nP

Welcome to Dwar Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfey. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. So, long hot summer, huh? Oh, I didn't ask you. Did you get hit by the rain from Hurricane Hillary? Tony, not rolling.

We got humidity and cloud cover and some sprinkles. but we, you know, we came up pretty unscathed. Roland, did the Pacific Storm cause you any trouble? No, apparently not, but it is quite hot here. Oh, no sprinkled, so. It's like the entire Earth right now is a savage biome. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's been, like our summers finally started, which is great, because it's been a really cold summer for us,

and it's been pretty crappy. So I, for one, welcome warmer temps. So I'm sorry to hear you guys are having a rough go. I played Door Fortress last night. I don't know about you guys. Oh, really? Oh, that's so good that you did that, because now we have something to talk about.

I know. I put down Baldur's Gate for the period of, like, I get a couple hours, and I was like, right, we're doing this. Okay. So it's great. Did he just leave the recording? Did he bail? Is he out? He's just like, you know what? Yeah, I only see two people.

That's going to break God. I hope Missouri didn't just fall off the face of the other. Oh, no. Oh, no. Are you doing? We're still recording. I love it. Okay. Okay, that is interesting. it is two on stage yeah his internet must have gone out or something oh that sucks apparently we have to go into a new session okay all right see you on the other side

side Meanwhile, around 15 minutes into the future They got kind of mad They're not going, they actually saved it Oh, I think they did There is some really Really good content there Some really good Valdera Skate content

Yeah, we were really had some good Boulder Skits Yeah, yeah, we haven't got the Valder's Gate from wonderful stuff yet So has anybody played much Dwar Fortress over the summer It's been a long hot summer. Funny, you mention it.

Hey, Roland probably has. A lot. I love the pointed finger in my direction, and I even love it more that you're absolutely correct, yes, I played quite a bit. So I've got lots of questions to ask you about $50.09. Is that the new version that I... Released in July?

It's the beta, right? It's in like, well, it's all beta, right? Oh, right, yes. I completely... R-C-3-R-C-2 came out yesterday. I'm loving the version. Really? Yesterday?

Yeah, it's just yesterday. Small update. Oh, that's a D-F hack. Well, so D-F hack, I haven't had any luck getting D-F. Like, once I went to the betas, D-F hack broke and doesn't work anymore, even if I put it in its beta channel. There's nothing I can do to convince it to run. shoot I had trouble with the beta channel whenever I first tried it so I thought you know what

I'll just go ahead and just use the main line but it does make sense for for the beta channel to have release count which right absolutely I mean I'm enjoying the beta features and I can live without DF hack I guess that's kind of where I landed on that's the end of my treatise since DF hack came back I have been you know I use it all the time so I would rather have D.F. Hack and be on the main steam line. Yeah, I agree with that. I like D.F. Hack,

and even if I don't use it, like, all the time, I get, like, really frustrated when I want to use it, and I don't have it. I'm like, ugh. So I just put Dwar Fortress onto the main not beta line, and I'm like, it works fine. Also, it makes my game not as crashy

at times, you know, when they're, like, a new beta thing comes out, and I had that happen like twice and I was like you know what I don't know I already have enough crash problem sometimes and yeah why you want to be signing yourself up for more drama yeah I'm kind of with you on that one so my big question about 50.09 is have they improved the announcements system over whenever we last spoke with our listeners same yeah same

I know that they're working on it Yeah I believe that Putnam's working on it So fingers crossed for 50.10 Yeah Yeah for sure What's the The graphics library they use?

Is it SDL? That's an excellent question Yes, it is, yeah Looks like they're using SDL2 Yeah, they updated from SDL to SDL2 Which should in theory I think the ports for Linux and MacOS, if I'm not mistaken.

That would be very welcome for the Mac user among us. Like playing it on Windows is fine, but, you know. And I'd like to see the, I'd like to see the, a full-blown native Linux version of myself. Actually, I've not even tried to do it on Linux, even with, under Steam running, because of what they use Proton right, typically. Proton is the translation layer, if you will.

It's very, very effective, very effective, though, impressively so. The Door Fortress will run on a Mac under the, if you're on the Mac data for Sonoma, there's a thing called Gameporting Toolkit, and that will run most Windows games quite well. So if you are waiting around and you're stuck and et cetera, et cetera, you can use gameporting toolkit. And there's other hacks to get it to run to that people have made. But I found the game porting toolkit one to be pretty good for the meantime. But it's still not as good as just playing it on Windows.

You've got to work around at least. Exactly. For a while, it wouldn't run at all on a Mac, would it? It wouldn't run it all on a Mac. No, you're trapped on a Windows box. But, no, it's cool. Like, I get it. You got to go where the users are,

and the users are on Windows. So, any groundbreaking to doisms rolling with your play? Have you kept that Succession Fort going over the same? Yeah, we still continued with the Succession Fort. In the last week, we got a little bit swamped with a lot of other stuff, So it is currently paused, but up until to that point, we continue to play. And it was bogus what happened. For example, a attacker tried to channel to a forgotten beast, and when he gave me that safe,

he completely forgot to cancel the last mining thing, like the last block to mine, to break into the place where the forgotten beast was. and he just like texted me a private like oh by the way maybe checks on minors and um it's kind of hilarious and then he he didn't want to say outright what it was he was just like oh it's a surprise and i'm like uh uh but then he he came out and was like you know there's a forgotten beast and when i started my game the forgotten beast was gone it just vanished from the map it was gone never found it again not even bones It's a happy story.

Well, it kind of, I kind of thought of like whenever a pilot of an airliner is, you know, passing the controls off to the co-pilot so that he can, you know, go back and take care of some personal business. And then he tells us by, oh, yeah, or left aileron as an operative, just thought I'd let you know that, uh, bye. By the way, we're crashing. Well, yeah, we're crashing. I'll be directly on to the floor. I'll see you guys later. For example, something very interesting happened in my private.

a private fortress. And that was... Well, fortress after dark. Yeah. Well, and not that kind of interesting. Did you seduce a bear? Or wrong game, sorry. Oh, that hurt my brain.

I actually had to think what you're referencing here. Yeah, we'll go there in a minute. Can we please continue about the interesting thing in your private portrait? So, you know, I'm obsessed with food in the game, and I really love when my food is like diverse and I have like a lot of it and every dwarf can take his favorite food

go to the nearest masterwork table made of gold encrusted with gems and sit there and it goes like and then it's like I don't know polar bear tallow roast or whatever and he's like oh god this was the best food I've ever eaten in my life and I really love when that happens so I was like okay how do we

expand the variety of food items and the easiest way for that is to hunt or at least to get animals that spawn onto your map and cage them and get them and slaughter them and blah blah blah blood everywhere yeah and uh i made an underground trapping system i made that like 40 in game years already uh so one has been running for a very long time and it has been functioning perfectly. No hiccups, no problems. Sometimes I get like cave fishmen that try to get into my map through that spawn tunnel, but they have no chance. There's a lot of traps. And then I expanded onto the third cavern because, you know, there's different creatures that spawned in the different caverns and I'm like, okay, maybe I get some hungry heads or whatever. And,

And that spawn thing is a pretty much exact copy of what I did before, with the exception that now it doesn't work. And I'm very confused because my game gets super crashy every time I use it. I don't know why. So I will paint you a quick picture. There's a bridge and everything else in my cavern is walled off. So when the bridge is down, things can spawn onto the bridge and then walk. into a trap corridor. Very

easy. Now in theory if I push up the bridge again it is a wall. Nothing can spawn. Nothing will spawn and I can get my dwarfs to the traps to, you know, get rid of them and put new cage traps in. Now

that works in the first I built. It doesn't work in the second I built. When I open it, things spawn in and when I close it they just continue to spawn. on top of the closed bridge, they spawn in a wall.

That sounds like a bug. Yeah, it... It feels like a bug. Yeah, yeah, I already submitted it to the bug tracker with infos and, like, screenshots and whatever. And I don't know how to fix it. I can straight up not use that spawn, like, area when I have enemies enabled,

because then these cave fishmen would spawn, and they just spawn. They spawn on top of the bridge. How can you do that? They want it more. They really want to be there. Yeah, but I don't want them to be there. So the great Garzini told the tale many ages ago, when this ancient planet was not quite so ancient,

there was the time of the mythical planet. dwarves shared their days with elves, men, goblins, dragons, and necromancers. In the world of the mythical planet, in a fortress known as New Tower of Showing, there lived a dwarf named Elder Bim. Elder Bim was a sage of unparalleled senses. His kinesthetic prowess and prodigious memory were whispered of in awe. A bard's gift graced his lips, while his heart found solace in aiding others. Duty coursed through him, tempering his thoughtful nature. Though conflict he evaded, he revered martial valor.

A purpose, profound and veiled, tugged at his core. The enigma of his calling remained, yet he held unwavering faith that Mondal Ibercrash and our ra raucist, in time, would unveil it. Meanwhile, warm embraces adorned his meetings, bonds kindled beyond words. Thus was penned the chronicle, set forth by the hand of the scribe Garzini. Is the bug tracker still Discord? Yep. That's just... Not ideal for a bug tracker.

That can't be sustainable. It's just can't be sustainable. I wouldn't think. Unless they've got someone who's, you know, transcribing the bug reports from Discord into a real bug tracker. Yeah. I don't work there.

It's tough. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. You know, I would imagine there's a lot that's changing because I think if you've been like if you think about how the game worked it was kind of darn doing his thing and it was kind of like he was the product owner and he knew exactly what he wanted to do and he could figure out what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it and it just kind of worked and now I think he's trying to adapt that style by including new people and I suspect

it's just going to take some time to figure out what that looks like and that's cool I mean I'm just thrilled that he got help, you know? I think that's cool, I hope it, but let's him. It sounds like fun. I'm doing the stuff he wants to do. Yeah, well, I think it's cool, you know? It's like, what more could you want than having a development team where you can kind of focus on the stuff that you want to work on and other people can focus on the

stuff that they're good at and want to work on? Like, that seems pretty great. So I'm glad this structure is there. I haven't gotten around to doing it, but I really want to catch that, uh, that interview that Tarn announced in, um, uh, uh, the Bay 12 games side about the blind interview with him and Putnam. Have either of you watched that? Only a very tiny bit of it.

I bet it's got to be nice to have some new passion injected into the project. It's probably taking some getting used to for Tarn, but you got to think that it's helping put some more life and excitement into it. I hope so, anyway. New points of view. I mean, even if Tarn is the benevolent dictator for life, you know, he's still, I'm sure, getting input from Putnam. I like him as a benevolent dictator. I'm kind of enjoying how it's going. I love the fact that now we're seeing things like SDL and multi-threading experiments.

Like, I think that's pretty darn cool. So, like, that's neat, you know, because I think when maybe we talked to him before and he was like, yeah, that's not my jam. so it's cool. I love the fact that it's like it's not his jam and they found a way to start looking at making it happen. I think it's, yeah, I'm bullish. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Did you say multiplayer? Multi-threading. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I don't think multiplayer's that likely. That is still a few years off. Like, what the hell did I miss? I think multi-threading.

So if I said multiplayer, No, no, you probably said multi-threading, and I just misheard it. I'm going to go ahead, Roland. No, I was just going to expand upon multi-threading because I did test it out. You know, it is in the game. And I wanted to see how it works and whether or not I do actually gain FPS or not. So I fiddled around with it and I put it on and I put it off and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. and on average I would say I do not have more FPS

but I can safely say that I do not lose FPS for the normal reasons I would usually do for example normally I had a certain FPS breakage whenever I switched to look into caverns especially in the fortress that I play right now I have no no clue why no other caverns have ever lagged my FPS the way that my current

caverns do, but whatever. And before, I was on a stable, like, 20 FPS when I looked onto my caverns, at 30 in pretty much every other place, sometimes even 40.

So the FPS break was immense when I looked into my caverns. And now with the multi-threading, I am at pretty much 27 everywhere I look. It doesn't matter if I'm looking into caverns or flowing water or onto like 400 dog puppies. It doesn't matter.

I have my stable FPS and that's great. 400 dog puppies. Sounds like a slaughter fest coming up. I mean, I don't have 400 dog puppies. I was just saying I have like maybe 120. That sounds like somebody's going to be getting some new dog leather slippers. It's actually all going into war dogs, and then I'm going to, well, I'm going to put them somewhere. Let's say it like that.

Dog army. I've been capturing elephants, and that's pretty cool. So I'm trying to figure out if I can do something with them. If I can pull a carthage and have war elephants, that would be pretty neat. But I've yet to do it. I hadn't really captured elephants before, but. But this new thing has a whole lot of them on the map. And they're not that nice.

But, yeah, have you guys had any experiences with elephants? I never messed with elephants except for occasionally to try to avoid them when they would come on my map. But I never bought any from elves. And I never trapped any or dealt with them at all even before in the years that I've been playing the game. Hmm. That is curious. I think I got maybe like three or four in all my place. I can't remember when I ever trapped my own elephant. I only remember like a bunch of rhinoceri. I'm pretty sure I just bought them off of the elves. And one time I got a giant elephant and I didn't know what to do with him. So I just chained him up outside and very quickly he was stopping. because it is almost impossible for you to feed like a giant elephant unless you modify that grazing number a little bit. Oh, there, the seeds could be a problem.

They might end up being food done. They might be food elephants. Okay. So when you say you chained them up, did you mean you actually chained them up, or did you make a pasture that was large and just assignment to the pasture? Yeah, I know that, like,

large pasture would help. Now, I know that. Back in the day, I didn't. I just chained them up. And I was like, you know, grazers never need any bad volume of attention. I was wrong. I was very wrong. Dude was starving very quickly. And I felt terrible. I think grazing starvation was a problem more in the 44 and 47 versions than it is now. I would agree with that. If you over-populate your pastures, though, they'll trample it down. and you have to keep moving them. I have found that with this release. So you just kind of have to go through

and delete the zone and move it, and then they figure it out. But it takes forever for the, to grow back to. To grow back and then you can get a new spot. And like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The good thing about 50 is that the zones are a lot easier to resize

without having to delete the zone. You can expand your pasture now. That is true. Yeah. But I have to admit, I'm just putting my grazing number to, like, 300 and it's good it's good because now i don't have to move pastures and uh except for when i'm in a mountainous biome then they will still eat all the grass and i have to move it but if we're talking about like lush i don't know broadly forest whatever then i don't really have to move it

unless i have like 400 friggin grazers in a single pasture and then you have like aggression problems anyway and you you shouldn't have that. So Bader's Gate, huh? All the people are talking about it. Have you guys played it? No, I haven't. Tony? I played it and I like it.

It kind of gets me past my lack of fondness, shall I say, for turn-based games and scratches a lot of the itches that Door Fortress scratched. Like, it's kind of one of the things where, you know, in games you can usually sort of figure out what it wants you to do, like, what's the good path and what's the bad path, and you can kind of game your, like, I'm going to be the good guy. And so you can play it through as like a good guy,

and then you can play it through as a bad guy, and then you can kind of fiddle around the stuff. Like, this thing's so complicated that I don't even know if there are those clear linear choices. I don't have a clue. It's just, I don't know where we're headed. You know, it's like you're just going to end up making decisions. And then you're like, oh, no, that I thought that was a good thing to do.

But now I've killed 100 people, including children. And I feel like I'm not a good guy anymore. But, yeah, it's pretty unusual. So I would say it's a good game. shout out to Drew and Kristen at the Strange Mood podcast. They did an entire episode pretty much on Ballard's Gate. And they linked it loosely to Dwarf Fortress by saying, it's not adventure mode, but it's getting there or something like that.

Yeah, that's pretty good. I mean, it is kind of. I mean, it's linear and it's structured. I'm also really sure there's... So whoever designed it, there are. And... You said there's dwarves in it? Yeah, there's dwarfs in the game.

So you can make a dwarf and live out your wildest... Dwar fortress fantasies in Adventure Mode. It sounds like it's very, let's say, adult-oriented and you can be pretty dastardly in it and do some pretty awful things if you're playing evil. Dwar fortress adventure mode, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's with graphics.

It's hilarious. You can do things, dwarf-things, like if somebody's body gets blown apart, which I'm not saying I was ever responsible, for that, but your barbarians, and again, I'm not saying that I would ever do this, can throw the limbs of the body at the attacking army. So that's kind of cool. I just want to put that out there. Very Dorffy. Cool. So, cool, cool, cool, cool. Side eyes, side eyes. Great, awesome. Yeah, sure, throwing body parts. Cool.

Yeah, man. That's what the door fortress is all about, right? They're not thawing them, but having them fly in a ballistic arc whenever you smack someone upside their head with a shoe. Or, I mean, back when we also played the adventure mode together and we put things on fire. So, you know, just going around and setting someone's tavern or livelihood on fire is also very much the option. If they ever released it, we've got to do that again. That was fun. Oh, yes. that was a lot of fun

which I guess it would be a good time to mention that by the time this episode is released we should have a listener Discord server available that we might we're not going to commit anything because we're not the

committing kind of people but we might do some string on there and so it'll be a public it'll be a public Discord server and yeah by the time that you get this, you should be able to go to our website to get the link for joining the server. And we've had several listeners say, hey, interact with us, please. And me, you know,

me, I wanted to set up an IRC channel on Dalnet, which I did do. But then, you know, I was the only one ever there. Then you looked at the calendar and you saw that it was 2023 and you thought, oh, The kids don't use this anymore. I love open standards. So I think that IRC could still be a good thing. Yeah, it's not secure. So don't send your credit card, you know? Yeah, it's the year of the Linux desktop.

Well, I would love to have you guys join. If people are listening, it would be really cool to hear from, you know, hear from people who are enjoying playing the game and just kind of want to shoot the breeze on it. It would be cool. Meep. I believe in memes. Yes. Hop in and tell us all about what's going on in the Dwar Fortress because

there's not a lot of people that you can talk to about this on the street before you get weird looks. So you will not get weird looks in this community. Because, well, first of all, we can't see you. So, you know, there is that. But second

of all, you know, come on. Well, all summer, I wore my Dwar Fortress shirt as often as I could, and still no one walked up to me to say, hey, yeah, a great shirt. Door Fortress, go. You did mention that it was hot where you are, so I hope you were changing and washing that shirt because that could also be an explanation.

I believe that I modified that with as often as possible, and the possibility is when it's clean. Okay, nice thing. Of course. Of course, of course. Or the other thing is, I have multiple Doer Forty shirts, of course. I don't. I have the old school shirt that just has the old school shirt that just has the old asky smiley face and underneath it says, strike the earth.

So if you recognize that as Dwar Fortress, then you're, you know, a real Dwar Fortress player. You're a money. That's stupid. You're at least an old school Dwar fortress player if you recognize that as Dwar Fortress. But does the announcement still say strike the earth whenever you start a fortress? Oh, yes. Because I haven't read them since 4412. I just pretty much see the message and I just hit enter and start my fort.

Yeah, the death countdown begins. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Who's going to die first? In days of old, when the minstrel Bostribus raced the halls with his enchanting melodies, he unveiled a tale of mystic prowess. Through his dulcet voice, he revealed the ancient lay of Enosuvathorvatoris Torrell, the lay pewter short sword,

known as Blanchred the Seal Dagger of Law. Forged by the masterful hand of Weaponsmith Udnandvukur Matoleton, its creation was shaped under the otherworldly influence of a Faye Mood. In mid- Autumn of the Year 107, Blanchred the Seal Dagger of Law was shaped in the form of a lay pewter short sword. All crafts worship was of the highest quality. The object menaced with spikes of lay pewter and alabaster. On the sword was an image of a tapered baguette cut gem in chisoprase.

On the blade was an image of a giant snowy owl in Andesite. With reverence, the artifact was presented to the noble fortress Grand Authority, the violet rack. Its splendor, too magnificent to be concealed, found its destined abode within the 44th level. bedroom foyer, an emblem of prestige and heroism. So resounded Bostribus' melodious voice, carrying the echoes of ages long past, as he sang the saga of an Ozuvothor Vedas Toral, forever inscribed in the annals of heroism and legend. Well, I'm setting some goals for myself in my, in my triumph and return to Door Fortress and my deprioritization of Baldur's Gate.

I'm going to build a, I'm trying to replicate the idea of Carthage, which was one of those civilizations in antiquity. It's pretty interesting. You know, walls, moats, and elephants, that sort of thing. So I think that'll be quite fun. Oh, yes. I was trying to one,

I was trying to remember what the civilization Carthage was known for. They were concurrent with the Roman. Alphabet. It was a big one. Yeah, yeah, they were the Phoenicians. They made boats and the alphabet, so they were pretty cool with that. They, um, they're really interesting. They basically had naval domination for years because they made these really awesome ships that could punch holes in other people's ships below the waterline. And they would just go smashing up against them and, you know, just rip into anybody's fleet. So they tangled with the Romans. for years. And, well, like, you know, a long time they had naval domination, like a thousand years. They'd been building these great ships. And then they lost one, got washed up on a beach, I think somewhere in Italy.

The Romans are like, this is cool. So they tried to take it apart and figure out how to build the ships and didn't do a very good job of it. And then solved the problem another very, very effective way. But we'll save that for a future podcast. No, Tony, that seems just a little bit masochistic to have a ocean. bearing civilization in a game that doesn't have workable ocean tiles

well I'll tell you what it certainly means that I don't have to put in defenses for sea because there's no sea going threat right now so that's pretty cool if ever we get to boats and I start seeing goblin armadas goblin fleets arriving by sea

that's going to be a that's going to be a day awesome when it would Yeah It's really cool Yeah You're defending an island

And from all sides of the island You get attacked Well That'll be, you know Like some battle royale game Be like Fortnite Yeah Yeah exactly

You know The thing about building You know Dorf Carthage Is like You know Carthage lost Right I mean, like, there's no secret there.

I hope I'm not spoiling anything for anybody, but they didn't do great. They messed it up and they fell to the Romans. And that's exactly what my fortress will do, although it probably won't fall to the Romans. It'll probably fall to my own ineptitude. Damn you. I was going to take a Western civilization course, and then you spoiled it. That's a good one.

There's a lot to unpack there between the Phoenicians and the Romans. It's pretty cool. Well, cool. Keep us updated on it. So is that fortress actually in? process now? Is it in progress? It is. We're having a little troubles. Everyone's getting a little hungry.

Yeah. We'll see how that goes. Well, we're working on it. We're working on it. Maybe not a necromancer butcher next time. A necromancer? Is that your fortress

leader? Accidentally, the necromancer was he got scared by the elephants and then started resurrecting butchered animal corpse parts oh boy

it is so gotta be aware of that I think it's I think have you guys seen this when necromancers get scared or frightened or

whatever threatened they start they start bringing things back to life yeah that's randomly yeah yeah yeah that's how they do that

if they just walk around your fortress they won't actually do that like if they're your citizens they will never really use their powers unless they get

into a fight and then they go like zoom zoom zoom, zoop, zoop, and just shoot at whatever is there. And then you have, like, I don't know, skin flaps that have come back to life with, like, an arm. I get it. I get it. If I could raise the dead, if I was getting attacked by a monster, then I think that the first thing that I would do is raise corpses that happen to be around me and throw them at the monster.

And, you know, be damned the consequences later. If I could raise the dead, I would just raise dead to, I don't know, play games with me. or like work for me and then I can sit around and read books yeah but man they kind of smell funky yeah I don't have to be in the same room with them that's why we do remote work these days you know yeah because you're a co-worker is a skeleton

yeah just set them up with a zoom link and their dental hygiene or whatever it's not going to be a problem as long as they're getting there as long as they're establishing their goals and delivering you know results for you then I see no reason that they can't work remotely in the cemetery or wherever. They agree with that.

In the annals of time, let the verses of the master barred Patrick Shaw weave a tale of shifting fates. It was the autumn of the year 108, when the very threads of destiny wove a new chapter. In this turning of the seasons, Vett-Obock-Lornish emerged triumphant

in a mayoral election, surpassing the venerable Elder Bim. With the burden of leadership now lifted, Elder Bim found respite from the labors of fortress founding. Yet, in the shadowed realm of Vatet Obok's first night as mayor, a vision arrived like a whisper from the ethereal realms. In the realm of dreams, a voice beckoned her to prepare for the construction of a colossal monument,

a grand edifice to grace the surface with brightly colored stone. So spoke Patrick Shaw, the renowned, carrying forth the words of this tale that would become etched in the annals of history. In the ebb and flow of time's ceaseless river, destinies converged and diverged, and the fortress of Newtower of showing embarked on yet another chapter of its storied existence. I've become quite a fan of the Strange Mood podcast, but I was going through their Discord channel, and there's a user on there named, I hope I don't pronounce this wrong, I probably will, gosh Kozakan, who asked this question that I thought was really interesting and I wanted to present it to YouTube. So the question that he asked was, when looking at examples of constructions to add to your fort, do you prefer screenshots from the game or spreadsheet style line drawings? And I answered them that I prefer to see like a stone sense screen capture of it. But then I thought about it afterward, and I think probably more useful would be like graph paper layouts. So if you're looking for inspiration at other people's like, say, megaconstructions, how do you prefer to see those? Would you prefer, like, graph paper, or would you prefer seeing screenshots, Roland?

That is an interesting question. Well, I would say it depends on the megastructure. If you're trying to build a, I don't know, like a dwarven face made of clear glass with the mouth, like gushing, magma then that is a very visual and it might be better to show it with a screenshot maybe even with stone sands because then everybody was like oh wow yeah dwarven face you know magma yes yes i yeah my eyes work um while if you have a megastructure like a a massive i don't know stone fortress just like an above ground human-like medieval fortress then that would look good on a screenshot but showing how many rooms you have and blah blah with like a layout plan would work better

because it's like less visual-esque that's yeah what do you think tony uh i mean if a game ever makes me interact with a spreadsheet, then it's probably not a game for me. I don't understand how that would work with spreadsheet. I would thought, I was thinking graph paper. I can imagine how it would work with a spreadsheet where you can do it in like Google sheets or whatever you can have cells divided up into small pieces and you can, you know, like shade them in. Like I've seen that kind of stuff.

I just have a, I just have a disposition that doesn't enjoy spreadsheets. So I don't know. For me, show me a screenshot of what you've done and I can figure it out. And if I can't, then I can just look and wonder and awe at the magic that you've created. You know, like it's totally fine with me. Statements like that or what gets you kicked out of the nerd club? I can be kicked out of the nerd club. If the nerd club means I have to attest the loving spreadsheets, then I'm going to start a new nerd club.

It's the nerd club that doesn't care about spreadsheets. And we'll see who wins. Yeah, I've got to tell you, the one of the things that I most love about D.F. Hack is Stone Sets. I know it's an independent utility, but it's also easily built into, easily invoked by D.F. Hack. And I really missed that whenever the first few months of version 50 being out. Love it. Okay. Can I time check us really quick here?

That is about to start wrapping things up. Okay, cool. Yeah. All right. Great minds think I like. So welcome back, guys. It has been a long hot summer, but we're back, and this is the beginning of season six, I believe it is. 12.

Season 246 of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable. Oh, wow. Let's be on season 50.09. I have 242. Exactly. We'll treat it like version of no. Good. Awesome.

So, yeah. Yeah. Okay, then. Well, everyone have a good time playing Dwar Fortress. Good luck and dig deep. And we'll catch you next time. See you guys later. Good crafting.

Hey, we'll see you on the Discord. How about that? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we'll see you on Discord. This has been the Dwarfortress 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

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