Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - In which Gladiators, Bloodlines, Fine Dressmaking, and Petting Pets are Considered – XI

Episode Date: July 28, 2019

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Hello and welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. Your favorite German Roland. And I'm Tony. So how did the Bloodlines Fort thing turn out? Like, were you guys ever able to get it running or functional in any meaningful way? We have been talking in the last couple of. weeks about doing a fortress that we pass amongst the three of us and detailing on the

website, maybe in the podcast, the actions that happen in that, in that fortress. I got it running on my old, see, I only have one dedicated Windows computer right now, and it is a laptop from 2011. I guess that I'm going to eventually get a new computer and get a new, a more modern one. But in any case, that one, it ran it. But it was flopping between 20 frames per second and two frames per second. So I don't know if that is actual FPS death, but it has got to be pretty close. And it surprises me because I have never had any problem with a fort that has been less than, actually, I've never had any problem with any forts.

And I know that I've gotten them to be bigger and more complicated than the one that you presented me with. So I'm wondering if my computer just can't handle the MF tile set. I think it's more likely that it's the 1,050 years of history. Yeah, probably that cause problems. Because I notice, even on my computer with an SSD and stuff, when it goes to save, it's just like, okay, well, I guess if you needed to go get something done, go, now's the time. So that's a thing that I noticed. What does the 1050 years actually buy us? A lot of time, I guess.

A lot of history. It's pretty cool. If you go into legend, I mean, what does it actually get us? nothing yeah i mean i think it it gives the ages a time to you know because it's like the age of the unicorn the age of the phoenix or whatever that kind of flips around based on whichever titans i think correct me if i'm wrong whichever titans tightening the most at that moment yes um so okay um my my semi correct knowledge will come in here um as far as i know of Obviously, having a longer history results in having a longer history and more stuff has happened.

And yes, the times will like change over time. And it will be called like age of legends, age of the mountain titans or whatever. And the mountain titans don't have to be very active in what they're doing. They just have to have the most followers because people can start cults. around titans when the biggest cult has the possibility of

changing the current history going on and the only way to get into the next century is to basically kill that exact titan obviously if you are playing in an old world and that

titan has been tightening around the world for let's say a thousand, fifty years that guy has a bit of scars but also is quite good at fighting now so you might want to reconsider doing that but I'm currently playing in an older world right now

I have made also a old world just to test out if my launcher is actually more stable with the old world and it seems that he is for some reason I don't know why but anyway you have more visitors and you have more travelers because more has happened and for some reason more people decided to go out and wander and become adventurous so my tavern is way more filled than ever and also you have just less titans going on because in a thousand fifty years many of them died but on the other hand you have more zombies more necromances more vampires And in my current world, it's interesting because I only have one wearer's, which is a wear moose. And there's nothing else but wear moose and just wear moose.

Perhaps we should try at least for our first game that we're doing this bloodline game. Maybe we should try a 250 year world and see if my computers can handle that any better. Yeah, that actually would go a bit better. Yeah, let's do that. I'll have the door just assigned right away to build that world. Awesome. Is a bloodline game a generic term for what we're talking about doing? Or is that the proper name for our world that we are doing? Well, normally bloodline games are just the sharing of worlds, but usually you play as long as one specific dwarf is your mayor, you know? Like bloodline, you are the dwarf mayor. And as soon as the mayor dies or he gets like somebody else gets elected, then you give it away because normally you just

have a bit more time to play. Playing by years is also fine and I don't think that it has any other words for it. Okay. I like the idea of doing the playing by year for the main reason that But if we do it by a year, I think it will give me a chance to more often see the improvements and the changes that you two have made to the fortress. And, you know, you guys may look and see what I did to your precious world and kick me out of the, out of the game. But, I think that's half the fun, though. Yeah. Just kind of seeing what happens. Like, because I think for the for the 1050 experiment, you know, I was able to, and, and, like, and,

Luck plays a huge part of it because right away I found some kind of a flux stone and then a lot of iron. So I was like, ooh, jackpot steel industry. So even at the end of that first year, I'd already been able to get us a semi-thriving steel industry, which in other embarks I've never managed to do in the whole time. You know, I end up with crappy copper and goblinite, basically. Okay, well, that's good to hear because I saw that you had a steel industry going after the first. year and I'm thought oh my god this guy is an incredible player that was an anomaly oh yeah no I am an incredible player let's just be clear about that that's all this inside I was just joking about that luck stuff no it's skill yeah flux

flux stones are pain in the neck because I feel like either your embark has it or it doesn't and then you've got to like go dig down almost to the caverns or whatever to find marble which I guess is like the universal flux or something but whatever I found in that one I can't even remember what it was called but I was like, oh man. Probably marble. No, it was something else. It was one of the other flux variants that now I've totally spaced.

Oh, on that note, slight diversion. I was at a gem and rock show with one of my kids. And he was talking, this older guy was talking to one of my kids. And he's like, see, this is what I mean. Kids today should be in here experiencing things. You don't learn about rocks, gems, and minerals from video game. And I just wanted to be like, actually. Actually, let me tell you a little something about one game that I play, because I know what hematite is.

Roland, you talked about dwarf fortress tournaments that you read about. What? Yeah. This is a Reddit thing, I think. and it didn't happen last year I think it happened before that what is dwarf fortress tournament is basically

the element of PVP in our game so you make kind of an adventurer you go like I want to play a Redman and I want him to have a bit of dodger and a bit of shield user and blah blah and you can also

go ahead and say I want him to have, let me see, iron short sword and a iron helm or whatever. There are rules how much you can spend on points, you know. I think you have to stay in line with the demigod stuff and that comes with the normal adventure. So you make this adventurer and then you take the base stats from your adventure and give it to someone that hosts the D.F. tournament. The old guy that usually did it is now not able to do it. So two others took it up and just sent your adventurer to them and they will cage your adventurer. So your adventurer will be recreated and then put into the dwarf fortress testing area with other adventurers.

and then they will fight against each other to the death. I remember there was even kind of betting going on, like people betting on their adventures. Quite amazing stuff come out. Last year, there was some really funny stuff going on. I remember someone having a recluse Spider-Man or something. Those are my favorites. Yeah, and he just,

equipped him with shields and that guy had I don't know like six shields or more but no weapon if I remember correctly he wanted his Spider-Man to just

bite people and thought that the six shields would give enough protection for the Spider-Man to be like an immovable object which worked fine, but he

completely forgot to add stamina and that Spider-Man got exhausted really, really quickly collapsed to the ground and got ripped to shreds by somebody else. Whoops, see, I was going to say, the Spider-Man is really fun to play an adventure mode because when you're

battling, you can like grab somebody with your mid-left arm and then you can grab their jaw with your mid-left arm and with your lower right arm, you can grab their head and you can wrestle them like that and then you also have a sword in your upper left in your upper right or whatever and so you can just basically be this chopping grappling

machine it's pretty fun i like that class a lot you can have a lot of fun if you play a very strong spider-man with a legendary wrestler that is the fun of ages yeah i wanted to actually make my adventure of this tournament but i think i missed a deadline, actually. Okay. Hold on a second. I've got to escort my cats again. Run. Run.

I hope this doesn't get cut. Yeah. I think they're a little more calm. They've decided that the wrestling match needs to happen in my office today. Yeah. So I guess we were seeing the rules and

and how it all kind of fits together and not really sure about maybe maybe we should talk to that guy who's running but i bet that person knows by the time this airs it'll be over uh morphius dark water is the person who made the the post for the fourth annual gladiator tournament is open for sign up so cool that was only two days ago so you might want to check again rolling to see if the deadline is indeed passed because if they made the initial post two days ago Surely the signup isn't passed yet. Oh, yeah. I see it's, I just saw Saturday, but it's not this Saturday. Okay, good.

From yesterday, yeah. Mm-hmm. So yeah, you should have time to get in then. Oh, and for betting, you start with 100 gold coins. You can only bet on one gladiator. The amount you bet is absolutely up to you. And then a spreadsheet will calculate your winnings if you win. So I'm seeing Morpheus Darkwater.

Is Morpheus and Darkwater two different people, and they're posting this as a unit, or is Morpheus Darkwater a single entity? It's the combined organizational, there's a hostile takeover of the Morpheus account by Darkwater merged into Morpheus Darkwater

is one user somebody else is running it too I saw looking for their names so that I should Yeah It could be that It's Jebjid Why would you take that name?

Oh my God I can't pronounce it It's like, I have the post from the poster about the tournament, which has a giant happy man in front. The poster just says hosted by Morpia Starkwater. But yeah, it looks like if the poster is anything to judge by, then it's just Morpheus Starkwater who's hosting it this year. So thank you, Morphia Starkwater.

we will follow this and yeah we'll have to see if we can get him on the on the podcast and to talk about us to talk about it that's yeah i can have that's interesting to hear a report on interview of the champions the yeah hey you know what seriously yeah we could get uh like the the winner on or maybe the finalists on and they can talk about their their death match like the adventurer himself or the guy that made it the guy that made the adventure, yeah. Aw. I thought we would actually get like a tiger man

and he's like, I am the sleigh of beasts. Rita Beannit my name is. I've slain many foes before. It would be cool to actually have

a, you know, Alpaca man on here, but I don't know if those really exist. Well, I would definitely voice him, but then I would only speak in like the usual dwarf fortress stupid stuff. Like, how was your thing? It was a broken German in, yeah. Just speaking German.

That's fine. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, but then it's like weird when you ask me a question and I go like, yeah, I I just had it really like Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, definitely that.

It sounds awesome. Maybe it'll buy me some breathing room on the because I don't know if I mentioned it, but I'm working on a fort that I'm trying to have as many residents in the fort as people downloading the episodes. I saw that, yeah. So, you know, yeah, a good German episode would maybe help, give me some breathing room because it might not be downloaded very much.

no offense to our German it'll be it'll be huge in Germany though listen yeah it'll be huge bigger than Hasselhoff yep oh my god yeah I don't I don't know

I actually saw just one post on the subreddit that was made in German but fantastic and the whole comment section was just full of Germans flocking into that post like I like

I like also I was like oh god okay I'm doing I'm doing something I've started something

a little new on the website and I put a link in our in our menu on the website to a diary of my

newest fortress and it was kind of inspired by a mix between Brave Mule and what I was reading with a boat murdered. We also had talked about the fact that actually trying to do a diary and the voice of one of your dwarves might help you get into the dwarf's head a little bit better. And I do think that I'm finding that is the case because now I am going back

and checking for his feelings for each entry that each diary entry that I make. Whenever something significant happens, you know, even minorly significant, I am putting it in a diary entry for that day. And for most of them, I'm also checking to see, you know, what he's feeling that day. Like, I was annoyed because I am not drinking from goblets. This guy that I'm following is my embark leader, and he's the bookkeeper, and he's also the broker. I've gotten through maybe six months. Whenever I planned carefully my embark, I screwed up and didn't bring an axe.

Oops. We can't cut that We can't cut down in your head We were able to tear apart the wagon And And turn that into some beds Because this is not the first fortress In this world

We didn't start At the normal starting time For an embark Like the beginning of the year So I had to wait a little bit longer There was no Dwarven caravan in the winter I don't have an elven caravan That didn't come in the spring

So we ran out of alcohol hall, and things are not going the best right now for this fortress, but it is very entertaining and fun to be writing about it on an entry-by-entry basis in the head of one of my dwarves. So that's called Bodhis Ransack, is the name of the fortress. And eventually, if the fortress makes it long enough to settle out a little bit, because of the name that the system chose for it, Bodice Ransack, we're going to be dressmakers. why not I actually had to look up

what a bodice was I thought that it was the actual human part of the upper part of the dress but no it's the actual part of the dress see you know you just learn so much you just learned so darn much with this game

now you've never have known that otherwise so looking forward to that and I suppose that for our bloodline fortress we'll do something similar with that probably closer to the boat

murdered. Yeah, I mean, I was just keeping a day-to-day journal in one of my favorite text editors that I'm very passionate about called notepad.exe on Windows. Seems to have done the trick. Okay. Yeah, I would also make it like a day-to-day thing or at least week-to-week. Day-to-week game time or? Game time, yeah.

Okay. So it's a bit of writing, obviously. if you do it like day to day in game time a week to week thing would be way easier and then your general entries could be a bit longer because it's just about the whole week I would probably pick out one dwarf I like

and then write out of his eyes about the fortress it doesn't even have to be someone in a higher position So not especially the mayor. So I could, for example, if our dwarfs get like a bit grumpy and he decides to scream at the mayor, I could actually write, I screamed at the mayor today. That was satisfying. Yeah, I was taking it on what I thought. Maybe this is just me inserting myself too much.

I'm not sure. But I was just taking it on things like on what I saw as like key points that happened. like today a caravan of elves came and those jerks complained that our stuff was stored in wood barrels and stormed off in a huff I really hate those elves or you know that kind of stuff like or when a caravan arrived or whatever or a migrants arrived that was always really exciting as well so I mean I was just kind of pegging it on key well and stuff that I found interesting and that's what I'm doing with bodice ransack as well yeah right on it's not necessarily day to day or even week to week. In fact, there was a period of a month that I went without making

a journal entry because all I was doing was mining and waiting for a caravan to arrive. So nothing particularly interesting happened until I realized the caravan wasn't coming. And then I made an entry out of despair of my leaders saying, things aren't going well, we're out of alcohol. Uh-oh. Well, we talked about my fortress, For some reason, I just love saying that. It's such a fun name. I like having the system pick my fortress name

because it will shape things into something that I would never have even thought to do. Yeah, it's way better. So, Tony, you opened the pits of hell this week and everybody died. Did you start a new one after that? Yeah, so the whole

like that world, that fort, I embarked on a waterfall, which is always kind of a risky thing from an FPS death perspective, but I felt like my system is up to the challenge. And so it was going fine. So I had multiple Z levels. So I had like one Z level that was like,

10 below the embark so sort of like river up top and a huge waterfall so what I was going to do is build at the top of the waterfall on the land build the fortress down and then take some of the river channel it off and then have a traps hall so I could have like the toilet flush into a waterfall that drained down below and flush out all the stuff but unfortunately no one ever came to raid before I cracked into the pits of hell on that one. So, whoops.

And then, yeah, so that one really, unfortunately, never got off the ground, which is a shame because I kind of like the world. But you live and you learn, right? And so the new one that I'm working on, like I said earlier, I'm trying to get it to have as many residents as I can absolutely possibly reasonably get. And I've got it set to right now in the world. And the fort's still really young.

And I've got my FPS set to 350, and it's still doing great with that. Like, everyone's just sort of, like, frantically running. Anytime you do anything, it's just, like, instant. They just jump to it. So that's pretty cool. So I'm going to kind of watch how it slows down and just see how big this fort can get. Optimistic that I can get at least 500. We'll see.

Roland, have you been working on a fort this week? Yeah. Yeah, I got really inspired by a certain fortress, by a certain man. He built into the water. And I thought, like, I can do that too. Yeah, so I did that, and it worked great. I was amazed by it, how easy it actually is to build, like, a giant platform in the water and then make your fortress on that platform.

and okay so a little bit I dug down so I can have the subterranean farm plots okay yeah but mostly because you can actually not make any crops when you are in the ocean biome so you can't make farm plots on that platform it doesn't work I tried it out it's it's really sad but it just doesn't and yeah it's it's so super fun because now I don't have really so much space to work with and everything is kind of crammed and small and I really struggle with making rooms for my dwarfs. Currently they are, I don't know, I'm like five years in now and they still are living in a dormitory, all of them, like my 110 dwarfs or something, are living all in the dormitory. And I have not at all enough bets for that. So they sometimes grump about that.

Like, I want beds. And I'm like, sorry, I don't have space for that. Because all the wood I get is basically just going into constructing more space on the platform. And a friend of mine saw that and was like, oh, you make a boat. And I was like, oh, I'm making a boat. Yeah. And now I'm trying to figure out how to make it look like a boat. So I will actually try to make it look like a boat.

So with sails and everything, like a real wooden boat, of course, I mean, it's not a boat. There's a shaft down into the stone layer that can build. And there are also things I worked on the sea bottom. Whenever the ocean froze, I just dug down and tried to make a glass greenhouse on the ocean bottom. And that worked. So I tried to do two. One is actually ready. So my dwarfs can go in.

this is a place where they get sand to have like a sand industry like glass industry and i will try to make like maybe i will put something there i'm not sure what because my tavern is supposed to be on the boat somewhere down there i will think about that maybe i will just make it like the burial ground hmm and then when it's all full i can just reflut it oh yeah yeah that sounds pretty cool yeah the other greenhouse actually has some kind of problem because i the something shattered the roof and now it's full of water i don't know what happened but it should have i also tried to make a well but i i i don't know what happened but it always was salty water and um i tried to pump it because when you pump salt water, it becomes clean water, you know. It's like for a life. Yeah, exactly right.

Just, hmm, but it didn't work. I don't know. My screw pump had spew out clean water, but like a millisecond after, when it hit to ground, it got salty again. And I know that any cavern that has saltwater in it will forever have salt water in it, but it never had salt water in it, so I got really confused. Hmm. Oh, yeah, just a quick thing, because the update notes said anything about mounts, yes, yes, that is cool.

But while that is cool, there was also petting of your pets in it. Oh, that's wonderful. That's the change that we needed. And that's really, that's what I think is going to bring this whole steam thing all together. Yeah. And you know that there is also the thing in that you can basically pet anything. Any, okay, maybe you shouldn't pet like the zombie tiger because he will not like that. But there is the possibility of you going up to any animal and.

petting it on the head and that is just the most beautiful thing i've my my heart i will totally make an adventurer and only sneak around until i like see people sleeping and then just pet them on the head when they sleep so they don't get aggressive and try to hurt me because i touched them just like in real life yeah yeah it sounds like we've got a premise for an after school special here. It's Roland's version of that Dave Matthews video where he just walks out and hugs everyone he sees on the street. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Just like that. Terrify. Ah, lovely. And now you can actually have dogs and pet dogs. Like, oh, thank you, Grand Master Tody. All right. Well, this Christmas is going to be more excited.

I'm betting the Steam release is going to be out by the holidays. That's my... Oh, I think it is. I'm sure. I will be happy if the Dwarfortress classic release that's going to happen before they even start working on the steam thing gets released by Christmas. I don't know, man. I feel like 4413 is coming any day. I think it'll be 4513.

Any day. Any day. I love your optimism. So I think that's going to wrap up this episode of Dwar Fortress Roundtable. You can catch us on the internet at df roundtable.com. Catch all of our episodes. And yeah, we'll be back talking to you again in a couple weeks. And until next time, everybody, have a great day.

Bye, bye. This has been This has been Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. You can find all our past episodes at dFroundtable.com. Please stop by and leave a comment or suggestion in the comment section of this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwarfortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. Music is Sky Q. Etlin composed by Kevin McLeod. You can find Kevin McLeod's music at Incompetec.com. You can find a link in the show notes.