Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Episode 137: Spookyfort VII with Delphonso

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

Tony and Roland are off saving the universe, but Jonathan and Delphonso are here to talk about Spookyfort, mod portability, aquifers, and sky levels.

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. I'm Jonathan. And I'm Del Fonzo. Oh, I got a memo. The Justice League called Tony and Roland back together again to help with some universe threatening power of evil. Yeah, the only solution is a Dwarven toilet, so. Yes, yes, a Dwarven toilet and dry wit, so yes, they are going to be getting together in fighting evil this week.

But is a wonderful, very generous gesture, Delphonzo, very graciously stepped in to fill their shoes today. Welcome, Delphonzo. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. See, what time of year is it? It is, um, it's October, right? Yeah.

Some would call it spooky season. Spooky season, yeah. Okay. Jurassic Park and Necromancy. What's up with that? Um, I don't even think that we really know. need to talk about Spooky Fort because this is the annual appearance of Delphonseo to discuss Spooky Fort. It's the only time I show up.

For those who are just tuning in, what is Spooky Fort again? Okay. If you don't know, and I guess you'd be living under a rock made of heinous smoke, if you didn't know. Or he metat. Spooky Fort is a yearly horror or Halloween-themed community fort. It's held on the Bay 12 forums. For the last year and this year, I have duplicated the Raws, which make it a glitched fortress. And so you get things like stones made out of smoke.

What's the tie in with Jurassic Park and Necromancy? Dinosaurs have been on my mind a lot lately. There's a museum nearby with dinosaurs in it. My daughter's getting to an age where she really wants to, like, go out and see stuff more. And I made her watch Jurassic Park, her first horror movie. Well, there's more disturbing horror movies to watch than that. For sure. At least you didn't start her off with Terra Fire.

Yeah, for sure. And with the dinosaur update, this was my original plan, and I was kind of going back and forth between using the new premium steam or whatever, itch version of Dwar Fortress, or sticking to the old version. And ultimately, I chose to stick with the old version. But the theme remained the same, which is, let's get some dinosaurs. Let's get some dinosaur skeletons, and we'll get the dinosaur skeletons walk around. And we're going to go back to Y4705 here in a little bit.

But before that, does the idea for the fortress theme come first? Or do you start it up and then think of it? What comes first in this kind of case? And how long does it take to prep it before you kick it off? I usually spend all of September building the mod pack. So I dig through a bunch of mods. For example, I've been playing Eldon Ring lately. There's an Eldon Ring mod that's complete, so I put that in for a while.

And then I kind of test things out and make a few forts and just see how everything works together. And if anything interesting starts to happen, I make notes on it. I also take quite a long look at that error log because you start mixing lots of mods together. You can start getting some errors showing up. And then right around the end of September, I trim everything down just to, I have. handful of mods, and so this time it was primal by Enemy Post, which is a dinosaur collection, and also other prehistoric animals. And then just a handful of other ones. Belldom is one that I always put in, which is a reference to the Coraline novel and movie. And there is a hybrid, like

the new Jurassic Park movie, Jurassic World movies. They're weird hybrids. Someone made a mod of those as well. So we've got a weird pack this time. So this is played as a community fortress, correct? Yeah, it's a succession game. I don't know exactly what that term is community fortress or succession game. I think of it like a bloodline fortress where you take a turn and you pass it off to someone else and play a turn. Yeah, yeah. It's a bloodline fortress.

Yeah. Right. And how many people do you typically have participate with you? So Spooky Fort is always, we try to do three-day turns because it's only the month of October. So that gives enough time for 10 people. A lot of us can get through a year in a day until the save starts to get really slow. So we usually get like somewhere between 10 and 15 turns. And that could be 10 to 15 different people or a group of eight or whatever.

It kind of depends on the year. And then at the end of it all, do you write up a synopsis of the story as it went? A horror movie ending conclusion, more likely, with most of the characters having died and one or two of them seeing a potential for a sequel. Well, you know, at its heart, it is Dwar Fortress, right? Losing as fun. Yeah, and usually we dig into hell or something by the end of the fortress anyway. I still have never breached. I've gotten close, but I've never breached the circus. I've never actually poked through the adamantine and seen the clowns. Every time I get close to it and I run into the adamantine, I chicken out.

So I don't know why I'm always, I have trouble sabotaging my fortress, I guess. I will tell you this. It is very scary right away. And then it becomes just like the caverns where it's just like, hey, it's just another place. Just another place where your dwarfs fall down into. Okay. Yeah, I might have to go further on that then next time. And nothing can destroy a bridge.

So just have a bridge, you know? Like just close it off with a bridge if things get too intense. Huh. Nothing can destroy. Well, of course, can they, do you know if they can destroy a bridge in the 50 plus with the new siege stuff? Jonathan, I'll be honest with you. I do not play the new version. Okay, so maybe they can, maybe they can't, but.

If the bridge is down, you can't pull it up if there's something bigger than a dragon on it. I do know that. That's true, probably still. But if your bridge is up, I think nothing can interact with it. And you can hold me to that. If your fortress dies, come at me. Yes, I will hold you personally responsible for every financial penalty that I get for having my, Fortress be breached

unexpectedly by bridge failure. Yes, every cent. You said that it has, what, duplicated saves, duplicated raws? Duplicated raws, yeah. What does that exactly mean? In a community fort,

which is from like 2016 or something, called Don Thunderd, the designers of the succession game, they took the stone and inorganic material file and you put it into the Raws file twice. So it's just like inorganic stone and then inorganic stone copy. And for whatever reason, when the Dorforge's program runs and it reads the same things twice, it gets real kooky real quick. You get divine materials being spawned as stone layers.

You get a placeholder name called Rock, which is incredibly cursed. You'll get a placeholder name. You'll it boulders out of the stone walls that are actually divine materials, and then you can melt down the boulders into divine metals and craft your own divine swords and things like that. And they all have silly names, like slick metal or misty cloth or heinous smoke. Yeah. Oh, also the dirt is technicolored, and it flashes between every type of dirt that there is. Awesome. So it looks like a 19, early 80s disco.

Great. Yeah, yeah. Could dwarves actually mine divine materials like they can in the other stone? It acts exactly like any other stone, and that's why it's so weird. And then you melt it down to smelt whatever the divine material is out of the stone? So some of them you can. Some of them, because they are not stones, cannot be used, which is quite annoying. So we have misty cloth in the fort, and then we also have cussiterite and alabaster.

and both of those are sort of economic stones or non-economic. I forgot which term is. They're ores. Ciciderot, I don't know as an oar. Alabaster, I think, is... Alabaster can be used to make plaster and things. Oh, can it? Okay.

Yeah. Yeah, your dwarves don't want to use it to make furniture, but in the... I always tell them to do it anyway, but now. Yeah. All of our furniture is made of alabaster and cussiterite because we have nothing else to use. The misty cloth drops rocks like boulders, but they cannot be used to build anything. And I also don't know if they could be melted yet because, boy, I have not played door fortress very much lately. And I forgot how to make a fortress.

And the fortress I made is an absolute train wreck right away. And I'm not even close to getting like furnaces or anything set up. Yeah, I've run into that as well with running into a lot of economic stone. was there was a recent fortress I played where there was I think it was a little bit of claystone but not much almost everything on every layer that I mind out was either limestone or chalk and both of those are flux stones so I'm sitting here with very little things to build furniture out of and just a plethora of flux stone around so I was like okay you know to heck with it I will go ahead and tell you to start making chairs out of out of limestone and if we start running low,

then I'll break out some more miners and we'll go looking for some more. But yeah, that's, that's fairly typical for me. I don't usually, I won't use ore where I can smelt it into a, you know, a metal. I won't ever use that for a, for a non-economic purposes. But yeah, some of them, I don't care that much about. Yeah, gypsom fine. You only can use so much plaster. Well, if you're doing it right, you need a lot of plaster for the castes. Well, maybe I guess maybe my style of play is a little more conservative because I don't. You usually have a whole lot of injured dwarves at any given time. I don't know.

I don't know. I used to always, like, just seal up my fortress and play it that way. but then I found the game felt quite, I don't know what the word would be, slow maybe, because it wasn't like it was not fun. It was just that there wasn't any pressure, right? You only get pressure if you want it. So since then, I've always designed my fortresses to be partly open in some way, either having a long vertical pit or having like a very wide open entryway

and sort of like Mines Amoria, grand entrance, and then small, close off a bowl areas that I can quickly throw the dwarves who I want to keep alive. You know, like not the children or the fishers or anything like that. Yeah, I get that. I think that I like to play the game less as a real-time strategy, you know, Command and Conquer and Original World of Warcraft and, or not sorry, original Warcraft thing.

Look what they've done. Anyway, yeah, I tend to play it more as an erector set. rather than a real-time strategy. So I do. I try to seal up and I find that the sieges are like an annoyance and I try to deal with them as quickly as possible. And then I go back to, you know, making my pretty floors and trying to build my towers.

Yeah. Have you encountered any all caps fun with the new siege update with that style of play? I did, but it was trivial to defeat. I try to get a very, like three or four really, really highly trained squad. squads to start with, and I will try to get a steel industry going as quickly as possible so that I can have really nice armor. And once you do that, you get some really good fighters, and you can take out a pretty good sized siege, even if they have the battering rams. And I have not yet had anybody try to dig underneath under my walls. So, yeah, maybe I've gotten

lucky. That's the one I'm still waiting to actually see. I haven't seen that as well. As I mentioned, I don't play very much of the new version, but that is something I'm really like, I kind of just want to, like, set up a fortress and just let it run until somebody digs in. I just want to see it happen. Yeah. The way my Fields of Dread fortresses are going, maybe I should do that because I'm not being very successful, and we may talk about Fields of Dread here coming up as well. Which one is this? Is this seven? Seven, yeah. It's been seven years of spooky forts. Spooky Fort seven. Started off, obviously, before the, I almost said the fox, almost,

Fox Trot, Stone Fox, Fox, Fox. Kit Fox? Thank you. I almost said before the Kit Fox buyout, but it wasn't a buyout, but. Buyout, off corporate takeover. I don't know. Imagine them wanting to get paid. Go figure. Yeah, I know. I was just looking at that.

I think Spooky Fort four was the one that was in, at the time, I think it was like 50.1. But as we mentioned just briefly, transferring modded files was just too much. And then as well, like the Bay 12 forums, not very active. The people who are there are mostly people still playing 47.05. Yeah. There are people playing the new version as well. but a higher proportion of them are playing the old version. So it's, I don't know, I think that's probably where it's going to stay.

I wonder why that is. The people who moved on to the 50 plus versions, did they migrate out of the Bay 12 forums? Did they migrate over to like the Kit Fox Discord? Because Discord is great for what it is, but it is not a forum. And you can't use it like a forum because the conversations are ephemeral in Discord. In a forum, they are there to be looked up at a later time. I think that our movement move away from forums is not good for the sharing of long-term Internet knowledge. Yeah, they're clunky.

They're not perfect. But, you know, they, if you do all your discussion on Discord, then it is gone as soon as it happens. Yeah, I find it very frustrating to get like tech help these days because like before you just look up some old bit of equipment and you'd find a forum post for it and then you'd find somebody with a very similar problem to you and their solution, right? And these days, instead you're directed to a Discord channel and then you check the pins and then it's not in the pins and then you ask you shout into the room whether or not anybody can help you. and then they give you a solution sometimes, and then that person goes. So if you have backup questions or anything like that, follow-up questions.

I don't know, man. I don't know what happened. Yeah, the same question will get asked like 50 times by 50 different people in 50 different weeks. It's like it used to be whenever they would, when you would be directed to go to an IRC server for support. It didn't work. Yeah.

But yeah. Anyway, so old man shouting at the shouting at the cloud. Welcome to the two old guys shouting about technology podcast. More tangent. I'm going further. You know, that's why we need rolling. Johan, you cannot stop me. Linux Mint used to be packaged with an IRC with the Linux Mint support IRC built in. And they drop that.

Instead, when you open up the browser, it leads you to the forums because it's just a better way to provide information. Yeah, yeah. I love IRC, and I also love Discord. It's great for what it is, but it's not good for preserving tech support information for long amounts of time. Anyway, how do we get off on that? I'm so sorry. Squirrel. Speaking of being as old as dirt, the name of this year's spooky fort is Cryptkeepers.

Thank you. Put in cheering right now, Jonathan. So I'm, okay, I'm getting Cryptkeeker. Cryptkeepers mixed up with the old action comic tales of the Crip. I think it was Action Comics. Oh, Tales from the Crip. Do you remember those? Yes.

Yes. We've got them hardbound in my local public library. Yes. It is nice. It is. They're creepy. So, so Cripkeeper, is that right? Cripkeepers.

Cripkeepers. Okay. A shame to say that I don't know the reference. Help. The Cryptkeeper? That's all right. The people at home get it. Is that the,

on the, the half hour TV show, the, what was it, Tales from the Crypt? Yeah. I'm, I'm,

I'm saying, yeah, I think it was Tales from the Crypt. The, the, the, the, rotting away

skeleton zombie thing. Yes, exactly. That's a very bad sense of humor. That guy? I'm sending, I'm sending you a picture. Yeah,

it was Tales from the Crypt. And then the TV version. Got it. Got it. Okay. So I was thinking of the right thing. So, whenever,

I thought Tales the Crypt that was correct. Yes, it was the... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was that on TBS? I got no clue, man. Yeah, that dude. Yeah. Looks like Eddie on a bad day.

Eddie from Iron Maiden. Yeah. This segment has been brought to you by Clean or Dev's Haunted Fortress Reclamation Service. Have you inherited an abandoned stronghold where the doors opened by themselves? The halls echo with unexplained screaming and half the former residents still haven't realized. they're dead.

Cleano Dev's experienced crews will identify troublesome spirits, locate neglected remains, install memorial slabs, and get your fortress back into livable condition. Klinodev, because a little history gives a fortress character, but 50 angry ghosts is

probably too much character. All right, that's it for Spooky Fort. Spooky Fort's great. Come read Spooky Fort. Come read the old forum posts and old stories and the ones that are still ongoing. Water lures is amazing. It's been going on for as long as Spooky Fort, I think.

Well, you say that's it for Spooky Fort, but I'm going to transition to a spooky fort tangential topic here. And feel free to rant all you want. We are not beholden to 50.x just because it's 50.x. There's a lot of things about the pre-50 that I wish we're still active. I don't know why. I'm not back there. But what we tend to focus on on this podcast is the post 50 version because I think we like the shiny graphics.

I don't know. But so one of the reasons that it is not being brought over up to the 50 is because of the difficulty with transferring mods with saves. Is that correct? Yeah. This is like a, this is a pain for the people who make the mods. It's a pain for people who want to play with mods. I feel, I don't know, man. I'm pretty unsatisfied with the workshop integration.

Feel free to rant all you like. This is a safe space. All right. Let me take out my dentures real quick and turn up my heroinade. Good deal. For any of the listeners, I don't know, your listenership. Mostly 50 plus. There's a lot of people who still have some faithfulness to the old burgess.

So we've got a good mix. Okay. I don't think any of them are like, oh, no one can ever play the old one because it's not the new one. No, I don't think that at least I don't get the feeling that we have, we have, I don't get the feeling that we're tribal at all. Yeah. Okay.

So for those who don't know, before version 50, before the premium version, the way that the saves were structured was totally different. And the way that the saves worked is it took an entire copy. This is very inefficient. So I understand why they changed it. it would take an entire copy of basically the whole DF file and save that as your save. So in every save file of 47.05 and before, you could find all of the raws for all the creatures, for all the materials, for all the interactions, everything like that was already in the safe.

After version 50, in order to have workshop integration and also the ability to update your mods without people having to start a new world, which are good features. Instead, the raw file is sort of saved separately, and it is read by the game, which allows you to make changes while the game is going. But it also means that if any file's name is changed or something along those lines, it is no longer compatible, and it kind of breaks down. That makes sense. That makes sense.

I understand why, but it made it a whole lot easier to. to move things around and whenever everything was saved within that Dwarf fortress folder, because it's a game. It's not a productivity app. It's not something that needs to be spread across your entire hard drive. It is a freaking game, people. Just, no, sorry, I'm ranting too. See, it's catching.

This is what happens with Tony and Roland art here. I know. We don't have Roland's perspective, you know, the new stuff, Gen Z. Although there are a lot of benefits to the new save structure, it does mean that if I sent you a save, you would have to have the exact same mods I have installed in order to open that save. And I ran into that. Yeah, you posted your world that was taken over by Warebeast, right? Mm-hmm. And I'm not going to use the Dry Caverns Mod because I love aquifers and you're a monster.

Yeah, you know. So I couldn't open the safe without installing those. mods, which, uh, yeah, yeah. If there was a one-click button that made it easier, you know, this would be much less of an issue. I had several mods. That was just one of them. And it wasn't just you. There was some other people who, who wanted to use that fortress, and they weren't able to because of the mods that I had. Well, it makes it tougher whenever you don't know that you're going to be sharing the save to start with. If you know that you're going to be sharing the save, like with warm beers and with

the fields of dread, the community fortresses from the Discord channel, then yeah, you just do it without modding. I guess it just changes your the way you gotta do it. Yeah, it just, it comes with its own,

it swings aroundabouts, right? Like it's got his benefits, but it has different downsides. Gotta play vanilla. Different downsides are worse than the same old downsides you're used to dealing with. Yeah,

and it pretty much makes sure that you have to play vanilla. Otherwise, you've got to make sure that everyone has the exact same mods, which for, for spooky fort, the whole point of it is that it's a modded, glitched version of Dorff Fortress. Yeah.

And I go through and I tweak the mods as well. Like I'll remove a few creatures or things like that, which is totally not an option from the workshop. Yeah. Well, I guess it is. As they say, the totology, it is what it is. As the elves say, say la vie. Happily, we do still have those old versions forever.

Honestly, I kind of want to go back to play the old versions because I never was much for the extended Aski character set for the, I always liked the tile sets. But I did like the variety that the different tilesets gave me. I could have like five different ones on five different playing sessions for the same Ford if I wanted to to get a different feel for the game. So was it you who told me that the muscle memory will come back quickly if I go back? Oh, it's so deep in. It's crazy. It's... Is it?

I don't think I've played 47.05 since last spooky fort. But I played a bit of the new version and was, you know, I remember some of the commands for the new version. And as soon as I was back looking at Askey, it was just like, oh, yeah, build, workshop, loom. Right? Like, I just... Yeah, and I do everything with a mouse now on the version 50, where before it's, you know, if I wanted to get to the, I don't know, the specify what mature.

I want to use to make the chairs and the stone, whatever that workshop was called in the old version. I didn't even think about it. It was like Morse code. I'd just reel off that character sequence on my keyboard without thinking. I think it started with D. This episode of Door Fortress Roundtable is made possible in part by Mr. Gutzi's aquifer control and drainage company. Tired of miners canceling jobs because the walls keep dripping, accidentally turn your future dining hall into a municipal swimming pool. Mr. Gutzi specializes in pumps, drainage shafts, control breaches, and the careful application of dwarven engineering to enormous quantities of unwanted water. Mr. Gutzi, when the mountain starts leaking, don't panic. Give us a call and maybe move the furniture

upstairs. Do you want to talk about the community forts inside the Discord? Yes, yes. So a year ago, you joined us and we discussed perhaps setting up a bloodline fortress centered on the Discord server with the version 50 plus Dwarf fortress. And you went forward with that and wow, it ended up being a great success, Wormbears. Man, I started Wormbears on Christmas. I'm insane.

Yeah, it lasted for like six months and had a large number of turns. Yeah. It ended up dying because of frame death, right? Yeah, basically. Everyone built too many things. It's really hard to tell what every mega project was supposed to be doing. But yeah, it went on a good seven months. And that's pretty good for a community fortress, a succession game. So to avoid that situation, the latest version of the community fortress is the Fields of Dread. And it's more of a community world rather than the community fortress. So everyone takes a, you know, I can't remember. Am I supposed to have it for a week or two weeks? I believe the turns are two weeks. Good, because I have another week to go because I haven't done it. I'm the wrong person to ask.

Honestly, I'm not running these very well. I think Criddle is running the fields of dread more than me. Didn't work have a turn in it, too? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And who else was it? Rinsick, Rinsick as well. I think that Rinsick has a turn.

Anyway, there's several people. playing in the in the fields of dread. I'm actually playing in that one as well. I've got two separate fortresses that are in it because because my monument that I want to build is tall, right? And whenever I started my first fortress... May I tell the name of this monument or the name of the fortress? Well, the first fortress was Barry Wine, the sweet drink of youth.

Yeah. That was the first fortress. fortress. This fortress is, oh, let me, let me bring it up here because... I've got it right here. Bright Boot, the big, brave buster of balls. I love this game. I love the fact that you can play with the custom naming of your fortresses and your world, for that matter,

and come up with some really interesting, some really interesting fortress names. And honestly, the name of this fortress is. the only reason that I'm still using it, because I found out, shut it on this from before, I don't know why I didn't, that the ceiling height of a world is not shared among sectors. What I mean is if you build one fortress and then go build another one, it will not necessarily have the same ceiling height. That is, whenever you just keep hitting up, up, up, up, up in Z levels, it tops out at some point. my first fortress, the Berrywine Fortress, it topped out at, I believe it was in the 40s, I think it was topped out in the 40s, maybe the 50s.

But the ground level, the ground Z level on that one, was 20 something. Well, I thought, well, you know what, I need to have a 60-something height for this particular monument that I'm trying to build. So I went ahead and found a fortress that was near sea level. It's a matter of fact, it's just right off of a sea level lake that's in the world. And the starting the surface Z level there is negative one. But it only goes up to a Z level of like 15. So it's like, oh. So it doesn't matter.

However I start, it's just going to go up a certain number of Z levels and stop. It doesn't, it's not going to give you everything. Although this one does go down to 200 in the, sorry, negative 200 on the Z level. where the old one bottomed out at like negative 126. So I don't know who was aware of that. You probably were. I wasn't aware of this either. And it feels very shallow to me, 15 levels.

Feels very short, actually. And I may not have that number exactly right. But the point is that the depth of the sky, if you will, is dependent, it seems, on the surface Z level, rather than an absolute value across the world. Yeah. I mean, I understand that, right? Like one embark would have, let's say, 250 layers. I feel like that's fair enough.

Yeah. But I feel like, I don't know, 15 vertical levels. I mean, I guess it is enough for most things, right? Like, it's kind of a hassle to build up. Yeah. Okay. Now I'm going to have to open dwarf fortress. I don't tend to open the Door Fortress while we're doing the podcast because I get so sidetracked.

Loading. Continue active game. Fikuk Zevut. The Fields of Dread. Schenkog etagastel testile. Testicle. Beban. Breepan, Breit, the big brave buster of balls, right.

Shincaug edagastastal, Bibon. Incog etagatast stall be fine. It's almost there. I try to do that with the actual Dwar Fortress listener Discord channel. It's some Gratushulolol, some horrible... Oh, you mean Gushidrear, Lammis Nul-Rol? Yeah, that's it. Okay.

Elevation negative one at the surface. Yep, elevation 15 is where it tops out. So 16 levels of surface. Well, if you get to the highest hill, it's not even that much. I think that there's like two or three layers of mountains that goes up. So it's not that much. So what I am going to be doing now, I think, is I'm going to be doing the Michelangelo method of I'm going to build what I can above ground. And then I'm going to take away all of the dirt that surrounds my monument so that my monument will be dug down deep.

And I don't know what it's going to happen whenever I run into it. cavern, but we'll cross that bridge whenever we get there. So that's how I'm going to be doing this. This is a big monument that I'm wanting to build. It looks like 60 tall. That's all right. Dwarves are used to just digging out, digging out many layers down.

And you'll get rid of the aquifer in the process. Yeah, well, the thing is, you can't dig it. You have to channel it. Yes. You can't mind it. You have to channel it because if you just mine it, you'll have a whole bunch of floors. Yeah. So, so.

So, okay, I'm ready to be schooled. How do you deal with light aquifers? Because I don't, I find them fiddly, and they take away from my monument building, which is what I am all about with the Fortress. So I don't know if you were playing Door Fortress back when they were heavy aquifers. Oh, yeah. We're the only aquifers, right? And I always set no on the, on the find thing. So, yeah.

Oh, I would just play with them and work your. way around them. That's it. So, so I guess that's what I should be trying to. Well, what I ended up doing with this was I ran until a light aquifer. And, and I went ahead and dug out the room around it, but what I did was channel some, basically channels in the floor so that it dumped the water that's seeping out of the

walls down into basically a well that is four or five layers deep. I don't know if, I don't know if the water will eventually fill up that well. Oh, it will. It will. Oh, for sure. Okay, well, then I guess I need to find some way to pump out the water. A bit of a windmill with some pumps to get it out on the surface or something. I mean, you could potentially have it, like, if you cleared a whole floor underneath that aquifer level,

you could have the water spread out enough that it would be evaporating as fast as it's dropping down. But honestly, the best way is just a wall off the aquifer. That's like the easiest solution, I think. Yeah, that's a lot of work. You're already making blocks. You said yourself. You got thousands of blocks. Oh, I do.

Yes. I'm very much a block. Well, not in this fortress yet. This fortress is pretty young. So we'll see from the ceiling, too, because the layer above. That does not happen as often as you think. And if it does happen, you find the tile that is getting wet and you build a wall there, which will put a floor on the area above it, which will seal off the, water. If you dig the entire aquifer out, does it go away?

I presume so. I don't think you can dig the edge. So the edge should still be dropping water. But if you walt, if you fully walled all of that off, aquifer god, baby. Simple as that. Okay, well, you know, I'll try not to gripe and moan about them too much. Aquifers are great. Your dwarves can fish in an aquifer and they can get unlimited fish without getting rained on. Where did the fish come from? I don't know. How are they even catching up?

If you ask too many questions, the whole thing just falls apart, so. Okay, so we've touched on aquifers. Yes, I am an aquifer monster, and maybe someday my opinion on that will be changed. Today's show is sponsored by Lucas's Lost Artifact Recovery Service. Has a priceless crown disappeared into a forgotten stockpile? Did the legendary axe leave the fortress in the hands of some merchant 15 years ago?

Or is your favorite artifact sitting in the goblin stronghold several hundred miles away? Lucas tracks down missing masterpieces, reconstructs their history, and helps arrange their safe return. Lucas, because if a dwarf spent three months in a strange mood making it, you probably shouldn't just leave it lying around somewhere. Some quick notes on the community fortresses. Mm-hmm. Warm Beers did 17 years, and it's probably done. Fields of Dread has had 17 forts, actually maybe more if you count the Big Brave Buster of Balls. Mm-hmm. I love it.

It's also had a few adventurers. All the adventurers I tried to do crash the game. I don't know if anybody else is having this specific issue, but my game crashes all the time in adventure mode. Oh, man. Yeah. I'm thinking of maybe doing another one. Maybe I'll start it on Christmas again. Another one more like Warm Beers,

where it's a Succession Fortress instead of the world. I had this community fortress on Bay 12. It was called Ended Treasure. And it was a test of whether or not you could destroy artifacts. Because Tody says in one of the old interviews, one of the old DF talks, that artifacts cannot be destroyed. If you crushed them with a bridge, they disappear,

and they are shuffled back into world gen, and they can show up other places later on. But there had been lots of changes since then, and so I wanted to see if that was true. And so it was a pocket world, and the job was everyone played adventurers. They went out, and they picked up as many artifacts and books that they could. They took them back to the fortress called Ended Treasure,

and they crushed them under a bridge there. It was super fun for adventure mode. And then they went out and looked for the, everyone knew what artifacts got destroyed. So then they went out and see if they come across it again. Yes, exactly. That sounds like fun, man. It was really fun. And it was also a good way to play adventure mode, especially for people who don't play much of it.

Because you have a goal and then you also have a, yes. You have something you have accomplished right away. Absolutely. Yes, that's what I was about to say. That gives you a reason to play adventure mode, rather than just wander around and look at trees. Yes. If you do that, I'll be in.

Okay. Sounds great. I'll wait until Christmas. It'll be a Christmas gift. That works. That works. Yeah. I asked TOTI through the future of the fortress thing, and TOTE suggested that the code has changed enough now that those artifacts do not come back. But that was before version 50.

And so now I wonder again with the addition. of the myth and magic, like this sort of stuff in the works, have artifacts change again? Maybe it's time to test it. Also, it was very fun to go out and steal artifacts from Necrimancer towers and crush them. If someone wanted to play Fortress, although that would kind of defeat the purpose of the succession, if you could actually start creating and then destroying your own artifacts. Because artifacts are littered throughout the world anyway, right? from from world gen? Yeah, in world gen, they're created.

Also, heroes will name their weapons occasionally, which I believe gives them the same tag, artifact tag. Because then if you hold a named weapon in your fortress, even if it's named by a hero from your fortress, visitors will show up and try to steal it because it is tagged artifact. By hero, you mean flunky dwarf,

the who got really lucky and killed six goblins and named his sword? and named his wooden sword that was a training weapon. Exactly. Splinter Striker. And then books are also somewhere in there with a similar tag, but I'm not sure exactly.

Yeah, some of the books have such similar titles, though. As a matter of fact, I wonder how many, how do you know that you're not looking at a copy of a book rather than the original? It says copy. Oh, does it? Okay. Yeah.

If it's a copy, it says, you know. There's your answer. It says copy. What I learned in the tower, copy is what it was. And we've also been kind of looking for a reason to play some live adventure mode again with me, Tony, and Roland sharing a screen and recording it and putting something out there on the YouTube channel. We do have a YouTube channel. It is dead and empty and hasn't been touched for three years, but we do have one. I think the only things on it are us playing a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a.

adventure mode where they were trying to teach me how to play. Yeah, that would be awesome. Yeah, I've mentioned before, but adventure mode is actually my favorite part of Door Fortress. And I've put more hours into Adventure Mode than I have in the Fortress mode, probably. Did you play Rogelikes? I did. Do you play roguelikes? Yeah, I do.

Awesome. Awesome. What's your favorite? Oh, Caves of Cut. Caves of Cud? Yeah. Just the amount of options. is for me, it's impactful.

My favorite is Brog. Have you played Brog? I have, yeah. I love Brog. Part of the reason that I love it is because there was a, and it's been a year or two since I've done this, there was a weekly competition in Brog where you use the same seed, and everyone went in and tried to get as far down as many points as they could before they get killed.

And it was wonderful. And I'll have to look back out. That seems like something that I need to get back into. It was something, I think it was called the, weekly brogue or something like that. But yeah, it was, it was really neat. They just on Monday, they would publish the seed. And if you got the chalice of Yandor, the amulet of Yamdor, whatever it was called,

if you got it, then you, you posted that you won and you posted your score. And then if you didn't, the idea is that you only play it once and you just post your first score. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. So. Cage of God has a daily mode built in.

which is the same. Yep, and it's got a leaderboard. And I've been on it because I was the only one who played that daily seed. Maybe I should buy Caves of Cud. I don't need another game. I don't need another hobby. I've got too many as it is. You don't need Caves of Cud.

You need ended treasure two, the Adventure Mode Fortress. Coming to the Gashudrear Lamas Nolar official round fortress. Round Fortress. That's right. listener Discord server. It's coming soon. And if you don't know how to play adventure mode, now is the time to learn. And I will probably be in there giving lots of tips because it's actually the version

that I love the most. Yes. Okay. Well, I think that that would be a good place for us to wrap up. Thanks so much for, you know, taking the place of the slackers who didn't show. I know, I know we probably are still here because they defeated the evil. flushed him right down the Dwarven toilet. The Dwarven toilet, that's right.

That's right. The existential threat has obviously been averted. If you are hearing this, then they were successful. Thank you for your service. They'll be back next time. Exactly. All right, thanks, Delphonzo. No word.

Is there any place that you like to be gotten a hold of? Yeah, if you want to ask me anything, I'm always in the server. It's basically the only Discord server I pay attention to. Oh, nice. Thank you. Or you can find me on the Bay 12 forums in the Spooky Fort Thread, which you should go out and read today. And that wraps up episode 137 of Dwar Fortress Roundtable. Brought to you by Clino Dev's Ghost Infested Fortress Reclamation, Mr. Gutzi's Aquifer Taming Engineers, and Lucas's Lost Artifact Recovery Service.

Thanks to our patrons for keeping the dead memorialized, the water where it belongs, legendary treasures somewhere we can actually find them. This has been the Dwar Fortress 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 service of your choice. If you'd like to contact us by email, the address is Urest at DFRoundable.com.

That's UR-I-S-T-A-S-T-A-S-E-R-T-S. at DF Roundtable.com. If you'd like to interact with the hosts and listeners of the podcast, you'll find a link to join our Discord server in the main menu of our website. If you'd like to help support this podcast financially, you can find us at patreon.com slash DF Roundtable. This is a conversational podcast.

All Crafts Worship is of the highest quality. Thanks, Delphonseo.