Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - In Which Kruggsmash Reveals Ancient Secrets of the Eternal Realms – III

Episode Date: April 8, 2019

Find Kruggsmash at http://kruggsmash.comDonate to Dwarf Fortress at http://www.bay12games.com/support.htmlMusic is "Skye Cuillin" by Kevin MacLeod find his music at https://incompetech.com 0:30 Introducing Adam, aka Kruggsmash1:27 Adam's DF Origin Story3:35 Talk about Tilesets6:24 Kruggsmash Art and Producing a Video Series10:30 YouTube Success15:30 SPOILER ALERT16:00 Beekeeping24:00 Emergent Gameplay in Dwarf Fortress29:45 Outro

Hello, you bearded bastards, and welcome back to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable. I'm Jonathan. And I'm Ronan. And I'm known as Krug Smash, although my actual name is Adam. And we are very happy to have Adam here with us today to talk about Dwarf Fortress on Dwarfurtress Roundtable, the podcast for all things dwarfy. Adam, you are known for doing the Krug Smash video series on YouTube. Right now, your series is Honeystoker, correct? You got it. Ips to Targuscosh, Fortress of Vampire Dwarves and Beekeepers.

I think that yours was one of the first videos that I watched on YouTube whenever I was learning for Fortress. I've only been playing for about a year, and yours was one of the tutorials that I used to help me get started. and I've been watching your videos from the start, well, not from the start. I did watch your videos from the start, and I think I commented last time. You can hear the progression of your online persona from the beginning, very beginning your first videos, to your rich content now. And it's just great to hear. A progression.

That's a nice way to put it. They were damn rough back in the day, certainly. So how did you discover dwarf? fortress. Well, let's see. The earliest evidence I've seen that I've been playing it, I think I've been playing it since 2011, and my brother told me about it. He told me about some game where you play as a fortress of dwarves, and you can tell them to do whatever you want. And, you know, it's kind of, man, at the time I was more into, like, orcs and goblins, that sort of stuff. Dwarves kind of bore me. But then, then he went on and told me that, um, you could have silly things happen,

like a Dwarven mother could have her baby stuck in a beer keg, say, which I don't think it actually happened to the game, but he told me that and it perked my ears up. So I went and I played it and it did not do it for me. I put it down for probably a year or so. Then I was like, you know what, I'll take a step at that game again, and I've been playing ever since. I think that might be a common theme, at least it was for me.

I also tried playing it. I didn't get it. I put it down for a couple months. and then a friend of mine recommended that I try it again. And the second time I went in, I was hooked. Yeah, I've heard a lot of that, definitely. Of course, it's difficult to get on the first try, definitely. Yeah, it happened to me too.

I took it up in three years ago, four years ago, whatever. And the first thing, when I went into, I was like, what is you going on? And I don't know, I spent 10 minutes, just looking at shrubs, I think. Like, what is even this map? Bound to happen. I wasn't hooked yet, but later on I actually found out that I could build walls

and then it clicked with me and I built stuff ever since. Yeah, yeah, that certainly will happen. I didn't have so much trouble with the actual look of the game at the start. I used to play Aski games from when it was very, very little, so almost immediately upon jumping in, I saw like grass, trees, dwarfs. Okay, that's what all is. It was mostly the UI I had trouble with. Roland, you said that the user interface at first gave you pause. Do you use a tile set, or do you use the straight Vanilla Dwar Fortress? I use kind of both, actually. For my main play game, I use a lazy nupe. I do have the Vanilla

game. somewhere lying around because I'm trying raw editing and there's some I don't want it in my main game I have extra worlds I have an extra game folder and I just do stuff in that and there's some three-eyed ravens I edited and I don't know some yeah like from Game of Thrones you know they do might be made of steel

for reasons and there is some other creature I don't remember how I called it it's just as big as a dwarf but it can breathe fire

and it tends to spawn in the Embark that sounds terrible yeah it absolutely is terrible you got to know that Roland likes playing in evil biomes too so

absolutely yeah but Roland Do you use a graphics aftermarket, if you will, graphics set, or do you use the stock Tour Fortress tile set whenever you're playing? In my raw editing game, I just use the normal stuff. In the lazy new pack, I use some tile set, but I'm not sure which I actually use.

But I use one, yes. I use Phoebus most of the time. I will try some of the other ones, and I've just settled on enjoying Phoebus. So Adam, is the tile set that you use? use in your videos stock dual fortress or is that a custom set that you've built i made it i made the whole thing that's awesome yeah it took a little bit of doing i had worked on it for a while then i was started using my videos there and it's kind of funny everybody hated it at first like

it was unanimous if somebody had a problem with my videos it was the damn tile set and then i kind of faded away and now more than anything i hear that people like it and i see people wanting to use which that's great, I guess. One of the reasons that I started off and I'm continuing to use the Phoebus tile set is that it has more of a 8-bit sensibility to it, if you will. Yeah. But I also know that while I'm watching your videos, that your tile set leads to helping picture things in your mind because it's much more abstract.

Yeah, that's something I really like with Door Fortress, definitely. I like the abstraction. It makes you think. So, yeah, I noticed on your web page, Crunkshmash.com, that it looks like your art preceded your Dural Fortress playing. Is that correct? Somewhat, you know, I've been drawing since I was very young. You know, you get into high school and your 20s and stuff, and you don't really do it so much. I would do it from time to time, but I really didn't have much motivation to.

And then I started doing my Door Fortress videos, and I thought, hey, wouldn't it be cool if I started doing some pictures? It started out, I think it was in my Steel Clutches series. In one episode, I did like three pictures at the very start of the episode. And then I thought, you know, maybe I could sprinkle these throughout the episode and just kind of evolved from there. But it's a great motivation, you know, having a video series and being forced to draw the pictures, it's good. I need that motivation to draw, I guess, and it's really helped me. you put out your episodes pretty much it's like clockwork weekly it seems it's obvious that your actual session probably last two or three times as long as you're editing down for the episode plus you come back and you have a really slick sounding audio to it you have the zooms the pan and scans and you somehow have time to draw what seven eight nine artistic works that look great for each episode what universe do you live in such that you have 42 hours in a day i don't know I honestly am still trying to figure it out myself.

I am doing these videos full time now, so it is my job. But before that, I did Monster Killer. And while I was doing that, I worked an actual job as well. I mean, it was got awful. It was really bad. I had no time to do anything else. I kind of realized that if I want this to be a thing, this is what I have to do. So, I mean, for, I don't know how long that took.

It ended up being like 30 episodes or something like that. I'm trying to think, what, six, seven months? something like that, that entire time it had no free time whatsoever. But, yeah, worked out, I guess. And still, I mean, the episodes, I'm working a 60 hour work week, probably. I'm trying to

figure it out, but it's something like that. Yeah. I love the works out. But the faces of the you've given the dwarves, the personas and their expressions. And I was trying to think of what's the name

of the, I guess she's the Baroness of your fortress, the one that just you kicked out of the temple so that she'd stop praying for a year? Mm-hmm, At tear, of course. At tier, yeah. She is so cute. She's pretty cute.

Yeah, I'm curious to see where she goes. I mean, you can never tell, you know, she might end up doing something amazing, unlikely, or she could end up getting crushed by a tree. So, yeah, you don't have, and I want to get back to this here in a little bit, because I want to talk about Moses and the, in the lead up to Honeystoker.

It appears as though you don't know what's going to happen whenever you sit down and start recording a video. I mean, really when I'm playing, it's just a let's play. I just edit the crap out of it and add some pictures of music and all that stuff in. But that's kind of scripted in a way, I suppose. Every sentence by itself is scripted as I sit there. But it is all pretty much reactions to what's going on.

I mean, you can't even script War Fortress at all. No, certainly not. now that's when the game really shines honestly is kind of just going with the flow you know that sort of thing is the freaking genius of this game it's great it's not it's not like tarn adams planned on having those particular things i don't think those sort of things seem to just be emergent gameplay definitely yeah definitely there's so so many thousands upon thousands of elements and different things that can come together in different ways. And it's all essentially the same every time you play.

There's dwarves. There's dwarves. Forgotten beasts, Titans. But it's just the interactions between them, the history that they make. You never know what to expect. That's crazy. So I did notice that you have like 35,000 plus. YouTube subscribers.

And for a obscure niche game like Dwar Fortress that people think of as having a small community, difficult to play and all that, that many followers is just amazing. It's insane. It really is. I never thought I'd have this many subscribers ever. Was the ramp up slow? Oh, incredibly slow, definitely. I made my first steel clutches, it was called Evil Kings episode in June of 2016.

And up till this past October, this past October, I had 17,000 subscribers. So since then, I've gotten all the rest of them. It's been, it's snowballing, definitely. It's just taken a long time to get to this point. Do you attribute that to Honeystoker? Have you done anything different in marketing yourself? No, I don't market at all. It's just all people putting myself up on Reddit or other places, too.

I think that I discovered you simply through a YouTube, I think there's a lot of that tutorials. Yeah, a lot of my, the people who watch, from what I understand, if I'm reading the comments correctly, they don't even play Dwar Fortress. They have no interest in playing, but they like watching my videos, which is great. That's one of my own goals. I wanted to get Dwar Fortress out there to people who don't know about it, because I really think that it can appeal to a much greater audience than it currently does, you know?

Yeah, especially with your pictures you draw, people actually see what in the game is happening. Even those that cannot actually, like, do anything with Aski can now see what is happening. And especially your colorful drawings are really nice to look at. Well, thank you very much. Yeah. Yeah, I figured it would help a little bit.

You know, if you see a capital G wandering around in the caverns underground, it doesn't look like much, but if you see a picture of a towering, goose with a trunk and patchy feathers, then, you know, it's a little bit more interesting, something with your mind to play with. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Was there anybody else who inspired you to start doing the let's plays? Not really, no, actually.

This might sound a little petty, I guess, but, you know, I was playing Dwarfortress when I started making these videos, and one of my incentives was because there were so many videos out there that I didn't really care to watch. I wanted to make a video that I wanted to watch. I got, you know, edit it up and make it a little quicker, that sort of stuff. All the big names in Door Fortress Let's Play is back in the day, which, you know, they weren't technically very big at all. There was no editing. It was just them playing the game.

So there'd be long, long pauses, a lot of little finicky things, which, I mean, I'm in love of Dwarfortress. and I know it's more appealing than that. Well, yeah, there's so much time that you spend watching your dwarves dig out bedrooms. Yeah, absolutely. But that's probably not the most compelling video to watch. No. Especially when you're not driving the action. Yeah, there has to be editing in order to make watching someone play Dwarf Orch just interesting.

There has to be a whole bunch of editing. Yeah, I mean, just imagine someone is doing like, 200 bedrooms then they have to be dug out then beds have to place in them and then he needs to assign every single bedroom like yeah it's an hour oh definitely definitely when i'm recording i'm often amazed by because when you watch one of my videos i'm constantly talking it's a constant flow of speech but when i'm playing it's like okay dwarves is another forgotten beast down in the caverns and then it's just me sitting there staring at the screen for 45 minutes like oh here it comes up through the tunnels underneath the fortress silence silence

wiping my nose getting a drink it's all got to be edited out or else it's you know yeah the finicky stuff yeah that being said there are a lot of fantastic dwarf fortress streamers out there but i'm not able to do that i can't talk like that i mean it's just not a gift I'm given. I'm better at editing and drawing and that sort of stuff I guess. Yeah, me neither. I have too much MPC energy for that. I'm cutting in here to let you know that there are some minor and major spoilers coming up in this next section. If you have not yet watched the Honeystoker series or the prelude to Honeystoker series on Crook Smashes's channel, you may want to skip the rest of this episode

and come back and listen again after you've caught up on Adam's current playlist. We will be coming back next time with part two of our roundtable with Adam, in which we talk about forgotten beasts, Dwar fortress coming to steam and itch, and the state of our fortresses. So if you've not watched Honeystoker up to the current point, I highly recommend that you stop now and come back afterward. We'll still be here.

Otherwise, continue on and enjoy the rest of this episode. Well, Roland, have you got any other interviewey-type questions that you'd like to ask Adam? Well, for example, I'm not sure how bees actually work in the office. I'm really trying my best to make meat because I do like meat in real life. So I always try to have hives, have bees, and set off stuff. but it doesn't work really good. It's super finicky and not my thing to do in dwarf fortress. I try to, but I don't get it.

So why would you actually go and set up a fort based around beekeeping? Well, it's all part of that whole fluid flow that I was talking about earlier that led to the current series. Okay, so after I did my tutorial, when I first started going full-time here, I started Waterkeeper, and that was intended to be a short fortress, right? Wherein we kind of explore aquifers and see what we can do with them. Love that, relax. What's that?

I love that, by the way, the waterkeeper, that was really neat. Yeah, it was a fun little experiment, definitely. And it was intended to be a short fort, just a little enclosed experiment. You know? Like monster killer. Exactly. And so I did the three episodes of that. Then I figured, you know, because a lot of people had suggested to me that if I do those short

fortresses, they keep them in the same world. So, you know, I had that in my mind as I went on from there. Let's see, what did I do after? It was after Waterkeeper. We were approaching Halloween and I wanted to do a special Halloween episode. At the end of Waterkeeper, we had that vampire show up, which I had in the back. mind. They're kind of not the most common thing in dwarf fortress, for me anyways. I get more wear beasts than anything. So we had that vampire and I figured, you know, if I want to do

another short fortress where we could have a vampire fortress that I could do it in the same world and have easy access to a vampire. We were approaching Halloween at that point, so I want to do a Halloween Dwar Fortress episode and started Dark Mine. And that was, again, supposed to be a short fort in which we discover if we could actually make a vampire fortress. So I started that in an evil biome and it had those evil clouds there, which showed up and turned all my dwarves into psychotic zombie warriors and killed each other. Bound to happen, I suppose. Anyways, that fortress was supposed to be a vampire fortress filled with evil cultists, but I also had a bunch of those animal man adventurers in there. There was like moose people and goat people and rat people and wild boar people.

and since there were adventurers after the fortress fell I was able to take control of the last one that was there which happened to be Moses from Honeystoker and I figured okay as I said it takes me 60 hours to do these episodes sometimes and the fortress had fallen halfway through the episode and I'm like how am I going to cobble this into an episode I'll just take this wild boar man

and head out in the world and do something I guess I don't know So at that point, you changed to adventure mode, right? Yep. And just kind of wandered around. And I'm thinking like, okay, I'm going to go gear up and maybe I could still make a vampire fortress, I suppose. And that's kind of what led to Honeystoker eventually. He met Ack, and then the two of them went on Little Adventures one and decided that they

needed more money because they were poor as hell. And so this isn't a part of the game. This is my own decision making here. I thought they would fund a fortress. That's not a game mechanic or anything like that. But I could retire them somewhere and then start a new fortress. And on my Patreon, I had a poll to see what people wanted the fortresses industry to be. And it was decided that it would be a beekeeping fortress.

As silly as that is, that's what people wanted. So that's what we did. I figured that made sense, too, because the wild boar man and a goblin aren't exactly the most intelligent folk out there. Moses didn't know how to read. so he's probably just like I don't know bees honey you sure why not so that's how that fortress

started just as a little money making a scheme from the scumbag wild boar man and a nasty spy goblin and yeah that's why it was a beekeeper fortress I guess I see yeah that's how it led there

you speak of you speak of Moses as a scumbag wild boarman from the point where he first survived the fall of dark mine in my head he was a benevolent character he was he was a very sympathetic figure i right you know i say he's a scumbag but like i think it's because most people say he's a scumbag i never actually decided what his motivations are in his mind it said that he was um seeks to better his own position or something like that and so really that's all he was trying to do i guess if he

survived longer we could explore that more but he's gone now so we're left to wondering what he would have eventually done cut short in the prime of life yeah damn shame so yeah it's also a shame that uh that the bees went away fairly early in the uh in the storyline yeah fairly i mean they've been there the entire time they just haven't been a focus oh i guess are the now you dug out a pit, right? Is that what turned into the swimming pool? Yes. Okay, so you dug out the pit, you put the beehives at the center of it, and you had one of your dwarves was a beekeeper for a while. Yep. Yeah, we still have a beekeeper. Is that still alive?

Yes, Zathan was her name. She was the one beekeeper for a while and then became a messenger, but we do have other keepers now. Yep And they were still there The pit got turned into a swimming pool And that's how I learned That bees can survive Absolutely fine underwater

Doesn't make a lot of sense To me, I suppose But Could you say Could you say underwater again? Underwater Why? Thanks.

Well, you cut out at the end of that And I'm going to paste that into Oh here, I'll help you out Underwater Underwater Underwater right now I have to make choices which one's the best

feel my pain I'm going to sit in a pub for like three hours and you know just fred over which one of those I should use now welcome to my freaking 60 hour work week

which one do I want Jesus in fact it's not this past episode but the two that preceded that there were two instances where I would say something and I said the exact same thing

afterwards and normally I'm very good at editing those out but you know every single person who watch a video you know about it someone die no you're all right Roland yeah yeah I'm fine I'm fine okay let's I'm gonna take a quick break here I'm gonna I'm gonna stop the recording and switch to a second track because I find if my tracks get much oh so in length they start bogging some stuff down so yeah sure I know that I love the... The faces that you've given the dwarfs, the personas and their expressions.

And I was trying to think of what's the name of the... I guess she's the barreness of your fortress, the one that just you kicked out of the temple so that she'd stop praying for a year? At tier, of course. At tier, yeah. She is so cute. She's pretty cute.

Yeah, I'm curious to see where she goes. I mean, you can ever tell, you know, she might end up doing something amazing, unlikely, or she could end up getting crushed by a tree. So, yeah, you don't have, and I want to get back to this here in a little bit, because I want to talk about Moses and the lead up to Honeystoker. It appears as though you don't know what's going to happen. whenever you sit down and start recording a video. And, for example, a good one is you didn't appear to really expect Moses to die.

No. No, I had no idea what, I mean, really when I'm playing, it's just a let's play. I just edit the crap out of it and add some pictures and music and all that stuff. So the reactions, you know, a lot of people think it's scripted or something like that. Certainly not scripted. Time to write a script at all. Um, but, you know, as I said earlier, I do have many takes. I say things multiple times.

I sit on my computer in silence for maybe five minutes before I say certain things. So it is kind of scripted in a way, I suppose. Every sentence by itself is scripted as I sit there. But it is all pretty much reactions to what's going on. I mean, you can't even script War Fortress at all. No, certainly not. Lord, no. but that's when the game really shines honestly

is kind of just going with the flow does that also include and you know we can cut this part out if you don't want to reveal this yeah um but so leading up to honey stoker whenever whenever Moses's plot was being revealed and I'm not going to reveal it too much but there was an event that happened

just before the plot twist and it was whenever I believe It was whenever Moses and his goblin buddy were on their way to, maybe to the Honeystoker Fortress itself, but there was a, there was a encounter that they had. And it's where Moses realized something was not quite right about his companion. Do you know what I'm speaking of? Yes. Okay.

So that led, it seemed, in the plot, to the plot twist that made the entire, Honey Stoker driving Vampire Fortress Line possible. I got the entire lead up to Honey Stoker is just one big tangle of fluid events. It's wonderful. I love it. I love thinking about it.

Wow. That's awesome. Yeah, the event which you're speaking of, if I am thinking of the right one, was... I'm going to say it out loud here, and I will cut this out because it is a huge spoiler. I'm talking about whenever the goblin, whenever man, I can't remember Moses's companion's name.

What was it? Ack. So whenever Ack was fighting the goblin and Moses was trying to get him to not kill him and he went ahead and just went off and killed the goblin anyway to protect himself as it turns out. That's what let Moses know that the guy was two-faced. Yes.

Actually, his name is Snamas and he is a spy for the torment of witches. Which is, that wasn't a surprise to me right then. I knew it actually from the instant I saw him. So that was organic? Fairly. You know, like beforehand, I knew he was a spy. But, like, I had to, I wanted to, I actually, when I was playing,

I wanted to keep that dude alive, but then Ack ran up and killed him like that. And I figured, okay, how can I be pissed at him and make it a little story element? Well, he is a spy. Maybe I'll reveal it now. What I might end up doing is tagging this on to the end. of the episode, or maybe have it be bonus content or something like that, because I don't want it to be spoiled for anybody, because that was mind-blowing whenever Moses shoved him,

you know, realized and explained how he knew the truth, and then, you know, turned the vampire. I mean, sure, but you also revealed that Moses dies. That's a good point. Maybe you should put a little Yeah there will be For this episode or something Yeah and I will also probably move that stuff to the end

And say you know what If you have not actually watched Honey Stoker from the start And even the series that was the prelude to Honey Stoker You just put a pin in this one And come back in a few months after you've watched Yeah there you go I know he was a spy from the instant I saw him You could see in the pictures that I drew of him when I first encountered him in the buttery belly tavern

that he was wearing a helmet with the gray parrots of the torment of witches on it, which he was, in fact, wearing. So right when I saw that, I was like, wait a second, that's kind of strange, you know. So I ducked out into Legends mode and saw that he was a spy. So I just kind of kept that in the back of my mind the entire time I was dealing with ACC in the actual play there. That's going to wrap it up for this episode of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable. Again, join us for next episode for part two of our roundtable with KrugSmash. Thanks again to Adam for taking time out of his hectic schedule to give us some insight into his great video content.

You can find Adam at Krugsmash.com or on YouTube. The links will be in the show notes. And if you can, please stop by Bay12 Games.com to donate a few coppers to Tarn and Zach Adams to show appreciation for the great game they generously dedicated their life to. That may sound grandiose, but that's just the way it is. Music is Guy Cuellen,

composed by Kevin McLeod. You can find Kevin McLeod's music work at Incompetec.com. Links are also in the show notes. This is a diorite podcast. All craft dwarf ship is of the highest quality. It is encrusted with oval diorite cabbichons, studded with iron,

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