Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - In Which Horse Soap, Animal Pits and Auto-Flush Toilets Are Considered – V

Episode Date: May 5, 2019

0:20 Introducing tony1:20 Tony's DF Story -- O'Reilly Dwarf Fortress Book -- PeridexisErrant -- DF Starter Pack7:59 Meph Tile Launcher10:45 DF Inspired Writing15:40 DFRoundtable.com as a Dwarf Fortress fan art outlet18:25 Computer Power26:15 Dev Notes30:30 Design for Performance34:00 Pits & Shafts & Toilets37:45 the State of the Fortress Donate to Dwarf Fortress at http://www.bay12games.com/support.htmlMusic is “Skye Cuillin” by Kevin MacLeod find his music at https://incompetech.com

Hello and welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfey. I'm Jonathan. And I'm Roland. Today, our special guest is Tony. He messaged us over Reddit, and we thought about getting him on the show so he could talk about Dwarfortress. Welcome, Tony. Hey, guys. Thanks for letting me.

invade the rounds table. Invade. The vile force of darkness has arrived. Wait, wait, no, I'm talking about myself. No, that's not right. A caravan, that's right, I'm a caravan. Then show us your good, right? No.

No. Explicit rating. Slap that tag on. Sorry, Apple. So, Tony, how long have you been playing dwarf fortress? Let's see, I think it's like for real, Ben, about probably two years, but I think like everybody, I kind of started in that mode where you download the game and you put it up there and everything's an ASCII and you don't know what you're doing and you start pushing buttons and nothing makes sense. So I did a lot of that and then I kind of gave up and then came back to it and I was like, right, now I'm going to figure this thing out. And yeah, two years later, I'm still working on figuring this thing out, but at least it's fun now.

how did you first hear about the game yeah yeah so i got sent the i got sent a copy of the book the o'reilly door fortress book i started reading that and it just kind of blew my mind because it didn't seem like you should be able to do this with the game and i think at the time it was probably like 2014 or something i don't know when that book came out but it was a while ago and it just didn't really match my understanding of what you could do with the game so i you know i kind of looked at it and was like, whoa. And also, I mean, I think that, you know, that the interface probably, you know, honestly, it probably scared me off a little bit.

But yeah, and that's how it all came to be. I really need to get a copy of that book, not because I'm going to be able to use it so much for learning, because the game has moved on quite a bit, I think, since that came out. But otherwise, just to read the narrative that is put forth in that written book, the the wiki is is fine and you can pick up everything by bits and pieces by watching you know tarn adams videos and his presentations at conferences and things the game really deserves a good story narrative that you know you could actually base a book or a documentary on it yeah right it's it's really interesting and it's so cool to see what some people have done like um i think the one thing that

really, really got me going was there's a guy on Reddit called Paradexas Arant, or Arant, or I'm sure I'm going to butcher, however, that name works. But he or she has done this absolutely incredibly detailed tutorial and walkthrough, including giving you a save game that they based it on. It makes it all so easy, and it kind of, each stage just kind of builds off what you learned in the last one. And so that that's what really got me into it and it just it just made it easy i felt like i was sort of accidentally learning things that that person is definitely like my hero for getting people going in door fortress because not only have they done it in a in a cool way they've all it's just like the way that it's written is incredibly accessible so you know i'd love to see that kind of be linked

to the steam release or something just to get people going because it's it's it's a breeze with that love it and it goes and it goes it goes deep too so you can you can kind of um you know go really deep like he's even got a thing about like training archers and using mind carts fun with magma i mean come on that's that's just that's just the greatest thing ever but so yeah i've got this uh paradexis around df walk through page up here this looks awesome yeah this person has dedicated so much time to putting this thing together and and has kept it pretty updated and relevant. And I believe this is also the same hero that makes the D.F. Starter Pack, which, I mean, come on.

That's amazing, too. So lots of great stuff here. Okay. Well, that's certainly someone that we got to tap their shoulder and get them on here. Well, I mean, I figure if anybody can convince people to play Dorf Fortress and then help them get started, that's great. because as much as I love the game and I have friends who play games, I have never once successfully convinced anyone to play this game because I think it's just the prospect is too scary.

I don't get it. But yeah. I have seen the same thing with my friends. Especially whenever I told them that we were doing this podcast, they would say, oh, well, is this a game? It sounds neat. And I would describe it to them. and they would think that it sounds really cool.

Then they download it and start to try to play it and they go through the exact same thing that it seems that everybody does. They look at it, they become a bit intimidated. It looks as though it's more trouble than it's going to be worth, so they stop. Yeah, and did you think that's going to change with the Steam release? Not if the UI doesn't change.

I mean, meaning the mechanisms of control, it's going to look nicer. It sounds like it's going to sound nicer, but I don't know. The whole keyboard-centric thing, don't get me wrong, I love it. I think that it,

and I don't know if it's because of some elitist thing in my head, but I like the fact that there's a barrier of entry to this game, and I'm part of a club that not everybody's in. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is interesting, isn't it? I, you know, I, I downloaded the vanilla, just the regular 4412 off Bay 12 games and put it up and was, you know, was thinking, oh, I'll just, you know, I'll just play through this. Because, you know, I know how the mechanics work. And I know what the ASCI, I know how the ASCII works.

But the thing that killed me was the lack of, you know, just embedded, just the lack of default mouse support because I'd forgotten just how reliant I am now on the mouse to just be able to click on things to query them or to, you know place the first you know tile when i when i do some mining or whatever it's just it's a lot more intensive without the mouse support so boy it'd be cool to see that bundled in with the steam release yeah i've i don't know i should also say i have played very little dwarf fortress without the lazy noob pack it's i did download vanilla and my first tutorial that i went through was uh was just vanilla dwarf fortress and and i did some work with it. But then I heard about the lazy noob pack. I downloaded

it. It was so easy. That's how I have played ever since. Yeah, I mean, I usually go with two versions. I've talked about this. One normal and one for editing. And both are actually

lazy noob. I have somewhere a vanilla version, so I always have the newest. But I tend to not use that I have two times lazy nube mostly because I have the mouse support and I love

it yeah well I'm lazy and a nub I guess I started using the meth tile pack he has his own launcher that is really good I mean it gives you

pretty much everything you got with the lazy nube pack but it has his tile set, the latest version of his tile set, which I think is great. It looks really clean and nice, and he's done a lot of work on it. And I've followed his dev progress over on Reddit. And I think he's developed a lot of the sprites and workshops and things himself, but he's also poached stuff out of 16-bit Super Nintendo games. So, you know, if you've played those games, you can see things like the tree, I think, that he uses, came from Secret of Manna, Super Nintendo.

So it's kind of cool to see some of those things pop up again. And it's great. It really, I mean, now I just, I can hardly imagine the game without it now, because it just looks so good. And it seems so native. After I talked to you earlier in the week, I did a change to the Meph Light graphics tile set. And I do like it very much. I don't know if it supports text as text, or text will be text. Yeah, and his launcher, all that stuff is built in.

And, you know, you can change the font and all that kind of stuff. And then the one that comes, his tile set that comes with Lazy Noob is, I think, like, his 1.2 or 1.3 version. And he just donated, I guess I should say, or released his 5.0 version. And he's got some really cool things in there. Like I think you can build diagonal walls and he's got banquet tables that he's added in. And I mean, some really cool graphical enhancements. But yeah, and it all, you know, it's all, I think textually text is in there as well. So, and, you know, it's all in his own launcher.

So, you know, it's set up as instant. I'll have to try that. Does he build D.F. hack into it into his launcher? Yeah, he does. Which, I mean, you know, I know some people don't like using that. but I don't know. I go for it. I like using some of the DF hack stuff.

I probably can't tell you a whole lot about what it's like without it because I've very, I haven't used it very much without DFX running in the background. So I get a lot of the benefits without knowing that their benefits, I'm sure. Yeah, that's probably true. I mean, I haven't really even thought about some of the stuff I'd lose. I guess mouse query being one, which I think I mentioned is.

something that my brain can't do without you know i like to be creative with words i like to write i would by no means call myself an author but i like to write things and one of my stories is action. No, two of my stories are actually Dwarfers inspired. One of that is basically just the entirety of my playtime in

a fort called Palm Torch. And the other is a story about a wear beast that is strolling around the world. I like

the story about my fort way more, especially the first, I don't know, page maybe. It's quite good, I can safely say, for myself. It's hard to actually make Dwarfurtress into a coherent story because you have the chunky bits of the game in it, and you have to edit that out and fill it in with more creative, wibbly wobbly words. Yeah, a lot like

a lot like Krug Smash did with with a Honeystoker and the whole Moses plot. Yeah, there's a lot of gaps that you can fill in but it does give you some amazing

cues that you know if you want to be that creative person like you can totally write like a backstory for some random dwarf just based on, you know, these crazy things that they say to you, like, that, you know, like I had a goblin that kept getting aroused at any sort of performance she saw. And I'm like, well, what?

But she was the lone goblin in the fortress. So I'm like, maybe she's just frustrated about being the only goblin in the fortress where everybody probably isn't into her. I don't know. You know, I just, you really have that possibility. Well, for example, for example, in my story, I, thought that the better door is made, the more it actually looks like a lot of the rings a dwarven door, where dwarven doors are, when they are closed, basically like a piece of

the rock surrounding it. And so I thought a masterwork, dwarven door, is exactly like the rock around it and I based it around that thought of it so dwarfs actually go past a hidden door which in my game was just a

locked master work stone door speak friend and enter yeah totally so I mean is that your current fort that you're working on or is that or is this a previous effort

or it is a previous Ford, it actually died about a year ago because of FPS reasons. This was the Ford with the giant toilet in it. It saddens me that I cannot go back to it because FPS death and zombies everywhere basically. Oh, oops. I had luck one time resuscitating a fart. I abandoned it and then

kind of let 10 years or something pass and then I went back to it and I mean it was dirty and there were like cobwebs and stuff everywhere but there were a few crazy dwarves still in it and I took it over and I was able to kind of bring it back from the edge of FPS death and you know kill the tavern and all that kind of stuff have you ever tried to bring something back to life like that or had any success with that I tried actually did it for one Fortress. I don't exactly remember. But that fortress just ran so good even while I was gone. And after I came back

again, that I retired it again because I had no reason to control it any longer. Hey, if they do better without you, right? Like, okay, I'm clearly the negative influence. So, Roland, the things that you said there brought up two separate lines of thought that I'd like to discuss. first is your tail of your fortress that you're using as your creative outlet is that a prose thing or is it done in video form how is it you know what format is it in oh it is typed up just text you know if you'd like you know i think that our our website the dual fortress roundtable website if you'd like to actually get it out to the public then we can certainly post it there um yeah it's not finished i don't know if it ever will. It's quite long. Well, you know, that is certainly an option.

Yeah, yeah. I would totally come back to that. And I would actually like to encourage our listeners if they have anything like that and they would like to have it published. We'd be happy to put a page on the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable website for, you know, community creative stuff. I mean, we probably, if it's a video form, you probably want to publish to YouTube and just we'd do a link because we don't have unlimited bandwidth or hosting space. But we certainly could put any kind of text that anybody would want to do. Within reason, I'm sure that I could see situations where it wouldn't be appropriate, but, you know, that's...

Erotic be for just fan fiction? I mean, what kind of what length of text would be appropriate? You know, just text and not tons of pictures and stuff, it's not going to be a problem, I don't think, because if I recall correctly, the entire three-volume set of Lord of the Rings, if it was text files only, could fit on like two three-and-a-half-inch floppy drives. Well, good, because of almost 8,000 words. Oh, you're nearly there. Text files are very, very small if you're just talking about using the ASCII, or even if it's Unicode. So, yeah, I don't think that the length of text will be a problem.

You would want to make sure, you know, like I said, there's probably some exceptions, and I don't want to just say anybody can post anything on our site. Of course, it's subject to our approval, and if we don't want it on there, we won't put it on there. But, yeah, within reason. And I'm happy to be an outlet for that sort of thing. Except for erotic fan fiction. Thank you. But thank you.

No. You know, if we want to put a red light over a, over a link, then, you know, I don't care. That's fine. Oh, God. What about that? A whole new untapped genre. Oh, geez. Oh, no, no, no, no.

Stop. Goblins after dark. Ferocious. Beasts. Ah, okay. Hey, yo. Anyway, the other item that you brought to mind when you were

talking about your fortress that had died because of frame death, what kind of computer power are both of you harnessing with your Dwar fortress? Are they really fast, hot gaming systems? I've got an I-7, but it's like,

I don't know, for the 4,000 series. So I think it's like five years old now. So it's not a whiz-bang supercomputer or anything. And I mean, is it bad that when I look at computers, I really, the benchmark I want is how many maximum dwarves can I use with the CPU before FPS test? Like is that, are my priorities out of whack here? Because that's kind of one of the things I want to know. They're not out of whack at all. And that's kind of what I was, what I was wondering. If I'm not mistaken, I have heard Tarn Adams talking about the fact that he doesn't utilize multiprocessors that, that well. He's not, he hasn't figured out, at least

whenever I heard this particular interview, he hadn't figured out how to utilize the multiple processors so well. So I don't know that the multi-core is going to help you so much as probably lots and lots of memory and lots of speed per core. Yeah, single thread performance seems to be the key indicator there. And so I think with, like what I've seen, I think with my now ancient I7 versus one of the brand new ones, I think single thread performance isn't that radically different between the generations of Intel CPU. So I don't know that you'd get a huge boost from like an I9-8800 or 9900 or whatever, however they call it, versus you know something just because it's all single thread anyway so excuse me i9

yeah you can buy an i9 now what's the latest one um i know i too have an i 7 um which is three years old now i think but you're completely right the single core speed is not really improving anymore sadly yeah so have we reached max dorff for a while i don't know i wonder I hope not. I do too. I'm like, I want to get a quantum computer so I can play this game. Have these like 10,000 person cities. Like, come on, let's let technology catch up to what's really important here.

Imagine you have like a NASA computer. What I would do is try to play dwarf fortress with 2,000 dwarfs in my fortress. That would be incredible. Yeah, you know, like, yeah, so you can get. at an I-9, 9, 9,900K now. So, and it's, yeah, but I, but again, I think single core performance is your, is your thing there. And I, and there's, there's been a bunch of threads on Reddit that have talked about multi-thread versus single-threaded.

And I think the consensus from some of the people who are better, far better at programming than I had said something along the lines of one of the challenges that Dwar Fortress has is that all of the roles and all of the turns are basically kind of dependent on what happened first. So if you started spinning things off in multiple threads, they'd end up just waiting for each other and it might not make that much of a difference. And I'm sure if there's a programmer listening, they're probably just shaking their head saying, well, that guy doesn't understand. But that was my takeaway from it.

Well, I am a programmer. And yeah, that's quite possible, especially if he didn't do. architecture in the program that was considered for specifically for multi-threading. I don't know, but I have just got a feeling that there is a lot of, I don't want to say spaghetti code

but there are probably code that is fragile. That's probably fair. I think he's even said that. I think he's just like, look, you know, like this is the way it is. But I also kind of appreciate that, you know,

because I think a lot of people have said, you know, if you open source it, then we can help you. And I, you know, I love open source, but I can also kind of see why somebody that's a big ideas guy, like, well, ideas guys like the Adams brothers, I can see why they'd want to kind of play it close to the best. Because I think when you, you know, when you bring in additional developers or you bring in or you open source the product, you know, your vision can have almost take a backseat to the whim of the world or whatever. And I just see them as such ideas guys. I can see why they'd want to be somewhat, you know, play their cards close to the vest or whatever just because I mean they're doing a great job with

it anyway so you know their vision seems pretty awesome anyway so you know I can see why they'd want to kind of be more protective of that not and protect is probably the wrong word but yeah I don't know it's quite a it's quite yeah yeah you don't want to spoil something that's amazing just by and I have absolutely I have no problem with it with it being closed source I do hope I think that I heard him say that in his will it will be open sourced or something like that. I hope that's the case. Yeah, aren't they giving it to the Museum of Modern Art? I thought that's what I'd read because it's already in there, yeah.

Yeah, but I thought upon his death, that it would basically be given open source into the museum of modern art, which is pretty amazing. Yeah, I have no problem with it being closed source, especially if he's making it be free. and you know it is it's a situation where this is his life's work baby it's not like he has grabbed something that was open source and then figured out a way to close off fork it and shut everything down yeah this is his his life's work so that's fine and yeah and you know what I yeah and I mean I almost would rather sort of see him carry out the whole vision and then once he's got it to a point And he's like, okay, this is, boy, this is what I had in mind. Then in 20 years, come back and say, right, now you'll get your 500 door fortresses or whatever.

I don't know. It's just, I don't know. Version 1.0. Yeah, version 1.0. And we're less than halfway there. So that, that to me is also kind of awesome. I love the fact that, like, it's going to continue to evolve. And we're not, and it's not done.

So long as he keeps up the, I don't know, the atmosphere and the philosophies that he has now. Yeah, for sure. And hey, we've got what we have now. So if by chance he said, okay, forget it, I'm selling this to Valve, you know, we still have what we have, which is going to electronic arts and we're going to do micro-transactions. So you want more plump helmets? That's a dollar.

And buy a diamond pickaxe for $199 or wait till the next caravan comes or have a caravan now for another dollar. Get it in the Apple store or Google Play. No, I love the fact that I don't think he'll do that. And I also, that PC gamer interview is really good. I don't know if you guys had to read some of that. But I already thought that he and his brother were amazing developers and, like, game vision guys. But reading that, like they just seem like decent people too, which I don't know, somehow makes it all seem even better.

Has anybody read his dev notes for this last couple weeks? You know, there's a lot to unpack there, but I did kind of skim over it. And, I mean, man, it's just, it's so dense, some of the stuff that he's doing. It's just, I mean, it's kind of hard for me to kind of conceptually figure out how this is all going to play out. But it's these really, like, nuanced details into behavior

and motivations of villains and criminals. And it just blows my mind every time I read it. So I always have to go back and read it like three or four times to see if I really understood what I thought I saw. Yeah, yeah. I'm kind of glancing through the update from day before yesterday. And wow, yeah, that's the most complicated plot here was snatching as it involves the new hideouts and also the disposition of the hostage afterwards.

Yeah. And then he even describes it. I mean, I feel like if he's describing something as bleak, you know, boy, it must be pretty, pretty dark. But yeah, corrupt imprisonment and framing. That, that's crazy stuff. I'm excited. But I mean, on the top level of my head says, there's no way that this can actually be pulled off. But, you know, there's some deep crap in there already. I mean, I've had vampires lie about their name to sneak into the fort. So I guess, you know, I was thinking about that. And I thought, well, if they can lie about who they are to sneak into the fort, I mean, that in itself is kind of cool and somewhat inexplicable. I mean, gosh, if you just kind of pull that thread and see where else you can take it, it's that's pretty neat in adventure mode you can now assume an identity you know yeah for some

reason i made some kind of adventure um the last time to check that out and i think i assumed the identity of some kind of priest of a god of i don't know war or blood or something then i would go around and slaughter things and after slaughtered that I would pray to my God, and after a bit, people actually talked to me like a priest. What are titles for a priest? In the game, gosh, I don't know. Good question. Or do you mean in real life?

Yeah, well, either one, because I don't remember. Yeah, yeah, something like that. And they started to call me like that. And I was like, okay. All right. So what you're saying is the dwarfs aren't particularly adept at checking out who people say they are. I guess that's that skill, adequate judge of character. If you're not very good at judging a character, you'll just take somebody at face value. He actually says something about that in these notes. Come to think of it. It says a villain or their agent will choose a technique based on whichever one they think will provide the best outcome.

So you have a computer without agency making decisions on what they think will be the best outcome. And what's really cool is somehow he's managing to do this without using or leveraging any sort of. sort of like machine learning frame. And I just, I just wonder, man, if you ever start seeing how some of this ML stuff works, what would happen to this game and would it become sentient and just take us all over or something? I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't. Maybe you should edit that out if you're recording because maybe we shouldn't give him that idea.

Or maybe you'll have frame depth during world building. totally yeah i've you know you could kind of almost get that if you if you do too much history but you know there are ways around the computer intensive stuff i was reading actually it was a a video on youtube that i was looking at about people who are hacking the original doom source code and they came across the random number generator in the old game doom and instead of actually having a random number generator that they used, they simply saved in the source code a 256 value array. And every time the random number generator was called, it just advanced the index of the array one step. So there was these 256 pseudo-random numbers that they just saved. And that's

what they used as their random number generator. So instead of actually calling a routine to generate a random number. It just said, what's the next number in my list? Yeah, that's a, that's a cool idea. I mean, it's so interesting, like, trying to figure out how to, you know, how to play that game of how do I, how do I build this really exciting fort, but also know that at some point I'm going to murder my CPU and the fort will die. And it's so interesting to see some of the things people come up with like how do you design your fortress for maximum fps performance or i mean are those considerations that you guys ever take into account when you're making your layouts i don't because i've because i've had a fortress uh become as advanced as that being a problem i'm pretty sure roland

have you um i'm not really thinking about that uh when i build but i tend to actually actually use some kind of techniques like wide hallways and long path without edges or tiny rooms taking off on that so it's always the same very simple design with long straight hallways and it tends to work really great i usually don't have any fps problems at all until i hit like 250 dwarfs or if I try to mass pit some animals like five dogs at once will totally lack everything to shit and suddenly I have like five FPS and yeah I'm with you there I think I read that same tip about the wide hallways and that and then my earlier strategy was to I used to love to build forts on multiple levels so I would build you know like the barracks on one level

and the mayor's chambers or king's chambers or baron's chambers on another. And I'd stack it and have these like 10 layer deep forts. And then I just, it read that you can really dramatically boost your FPS if you start putting everything on one level and being kind of simplistic in how you draw your corridors. And I don't know, maybe this is anecdotal, but it seems to have made a difference for me anyway. I can get a lot deeper into the weeds with the number of doors

and have taverns and all sorts of other stuff and before I see any troubles. But maybe it's anecdotal or maybe it's real. I don't know. Roland, you said that you had the issue with the dogs when you had five dogs that were really killing your processor. Do you think that's dogs specifically or just any kind of animal? It's not really dogs.

I don't know what happens. But sometimes I have too many animals and I'm too bored to just slaughter them because I have too much to eat. So I just get rid of them a great way is just build a mass pit down, a shaft down, and you throw them in and they just die, whatever. And it works great. Just like real life. Yeah, exactly.

Weird thing is, I'm also a great fan of cage traps. And sometimes you have to like clear them out. And if you have 250 cats or something, that's way too much, you know. And also if you have too many normal farm animals of different kinds, like horses, who needs horses? And come on, I can store them. They don't really give milk. They don't really give hair or wool or whatever. Throw them in the pit.

Please, just go ahead. I know that's quite awful, but it's a game. So I'm fine. if you have a lot of animals at once you try to throw away your CPU will catch fire or explode it's horrible I'm not sure if there's any kind of animal that will that is worse for that 10 animals at once it's not good not good the animal thing can just run away so fast because if you're not on it all of a sudden you have this I don't know horse explosion and you know suddenly you have 10,000 horses and stacks and stacks of horse soap and yeah and it can kind of get away from you before

you know what happens so yeah a quick way to do it would be would be really great and that sounds like a pretty good way you've got going there Roland well I know because you know this shaft system of course you can build like a one shaft down and just a throw everything in. That's boring. You can also overdo it and build an eight by eight shaft with completely engraved vaults all the way down to the third Kevin layer with a automatic flush system like I did. It works great, by the way. If you have the flush system done like I did, so the water sprout down and washes everything out of your map, that's great. You should totally try that because cleaning is so easy when you have a giant toilet. Yes, I love that. I wonder if you

could do that for post-sege cleanup because that's been another problem I've had is like a siege comes through and even though I have a siege entrance, everybody gets really, really sad when they see you know bones and guts and gore all over everything. They just totally lose their minds. So yeah, like a quick flush system for that would be super cool. I keep trying to experiment with different ways of doing it which so far have ended up in me flooding my fort so i think probably more work is needed i hear you when i did that automated flush system i had some accidents let's just let it rest of that people died horribly but i managed to actually figure it out and now i have a giant toilet this is great

my fortress umstizcal or sizzled wheels is in a period of doldrum right now i am up to about 45 dwarves and unfortunately this last couple weeks i have not had nearly the time that i would like to have played dwarf but I am kind of aimlessly digging at this point, waiting for something to happen, I think. So I really need to actually create a goal for myself and start working toward it. Well, how about you go into the caverns? Have you done that? No, no, I've not done that yet. I could do that. Yeah. Okay, sure. Yeah, I'm going to dig down to the caverns and everything else be damned. yeah that's the spirit that's the spirit yes and you will get uh let me see bats and troglodytes and cave spiders and uh death dwarfs and it will be wonderful you should do that i will do that

roland uh how's your quest for world domination going my quest for world domination um let me recap people died because of trolls and people died because of me being idiotic and using bridges everywhere to like seal of the cavern and some idiot ran in I remember with his cat to like get silk and I walt him off I have some weird type of, I don't know if it was amphibian or fishmen, some kind of weird creatures going around in my caverns and they have like blow darts and they slaughtered my dwarf and my cat. There's no way I will ever unsealed this cavern again. I've just flooded with magma at some point. but the quest for world divination is actually really slow right now because I'm trying to get this fort really settled in like watchtowers and walls everywhere, neat and secure

and that takes a lot of time. When you flood an area with magma, will it eventually cool and turn into stone? Or does it just stay hot magma? It will cool at some point. It will cool when you put it on top, like on the very top of the earth. It will cool. It will just destroy the block underneath.

But it will not really make a new block of Zidion whatever. So you won't be able to actually close the cavern and then be able to dig through that again if you know what I'm talking about. I do and that was basically what I was asking if you could do that. You would need water for it and cool up the magma quickly and then you could oh my god then you could have closed off cavern like for real like have an obsidian factory

yeah hmm sounds kinky Tony have you got a fortress that you are working on right now yeah I've been I've been kind of working on a world

really that I've been going a little crazy with so the current the current fort's called Mordegel or temple galleys. And the way I've been playing this one is I've got a goblin civilization that I'm trying to fight. And I've run into, I had a big battle with a place called Monster Kisses, which I think is my favorite goblin city ever. But now I've run into a place called Fly Tomb, and I'm kind of playing like Red Rover.

So they keep taking Dorbs Prisoner, and then I rescue them. and then the last rescue mission to get the last dwarf out, they end up then capturing that whole force, and then I have to kind of start it over again. And it seems like FlyTum is inhabited by a hedgehog man monster, who turns out to be the leader of the goblin civilization and is very, very, very ferocious and seems to have endless trolls at his command.

And the population of the fortress is only 40. So I don't know what's going on. So I'm determined to keep building enough forts to eventually conquer FlyTum. So we'll see how that works out. But this is my third fort now. But the others are still alive and doing better without me, but no one's conquered FlyTum yet. You know, that's just amazing. What you just described there sounded like the plot from an epic novel.

Yeah, it's been fun. Yeah. Yeah, it's been so cool. So I had this first four called Gloved Movement, and everything went really well there. But I don't know what happened to that one now. I think people just went crazy. I think it was like a tantrum spiral. But now there's 750 dwarves there and tons of artifacts, so that's cool.

And then the next attempt was called Circle Bodas, which I think is a great name. And there's a thousand people in that one, but it was FPS death. So now, you know, now we're, now we're on to Temple Galley. So we'll see if I can manage FPS and moods and whatnot. But yeah, it's, you know, I love it. It's amazing what you can do with this thing. So, yeah, it sounds like to win the game is you get a fortress so successful that you end up with FPS death and you retire it and you watch it from a fall. See how it does without your guiding hand.

Yeah, and in this one, so my previous two forts, I guess I got really excited by the, idea of having non-dorfs in my forts so my first fort I ended up having all these humans join and elves and okay don't judge me um but yeah I ended up having like an elven army sending them out to go attack and there was just something satisfying about that so then I went I sort of doubled down on diversity fort for the next one and ended up with a goblin mayor and a chief medical dwarf being a goblin which again I think that's awesome and yeah and this one I'm determined to not have a because I think

that they just bring so much riffraff with all of the people who want to entertain and stuff. I don't think my poor CPU can keep up with it.

So I'm trying to experiment to see if I can do temples and libraries and that sort of thing and then still manage FPS. Endless things to do.

Yeah, need. All right. Well, I think this might be a good place to wrap up the episode. Tony, it's been great having you. No, this was fun. Thanks. And Roland, I guess until next time. Yeah, until next time on Dwarf Ortrous Roundtable. See you guys later. Thanks.

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