Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - In Which Roland throws Children at Trolls – II

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

1:45 - Roland's lazy barons fail his recovered fortress5:24 - Misadventures in Adventure mode9:00 - Jonathan's tragic fortress fail. Kruggsmash - Honeystoker video with spike trap hall13:10 - Roland throws children at trolls14:40 - Worldgen topics20:30 - Dev report - Villans22:15 - Embark plot size27:20 -Worldgen basic parameters29:55 - Spam the Memes - Roland teases next week's show.Bay 12 games Patreon Page“Skye Cuillin” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for everything Dwarfie. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. And we're coming to you again for our second episode to talk about things Dwarf Fortress-related. So, how was your week, Roland? My week was absolutely fantastic because I played Dwarf fortress. Are your classes in session, right? now um no i have uh free time i was supposed to um have an practica in my lab but i don't whatever

well yeah i um i had a very busy week and i didn't get to play dual fortress very much at all this week uh right after we did our recording i played that night and i will tell about what happened with that fortress here in a here in a moment so we did get our first episode episode published. So we are now an official real podcast, I guess you'd say. We at this moment are not yet on iTunes, but I'm hoping that that will be coming up in the next couple days. We've got a few downloads, a few hits on our website. So everybody, if you would like to subscribe, then you can go to the website df roundtable.com. And you can find everything that you need to know to subscribe there. Or hopefully if you search your podcatcher choice. We'll be in the directories, all the popular ones, very soon. So you've been playing dwarf fortress this week a lot. Anything exciting and new going on in your fortress? Sadly, I do have this world, which is very old, right? And I tried to recapture one of my first fortresses I made in that world. I can't really play anymore because I used to have

about 200 dwarfs or something and now I have 41 which are mostly just barons and kings and whatever and they don't exactly work and there are cats and dogs

all dead lying around and the worst part is I'm in a haunted biome so if I unpause my game everything will rise and kill my dwarfs I don't know yeah That's not much fun.

So whatever you said that you recaptured it, is that a situation where you choose the same, and I've never done that sort of thing before. So do you choose the same location to embark to, or do you unretire the fortress? How does that work? Well, you unretire a fortress, and then you come back when it's still, when it's not a ruin, you don't get new dwarfs. it is a ruin you get new dwarfs so again you go there with seven new dwarfs and then start up again but if there are still people living there and it doesn't matter how many people still there you don't get new dwarfs and um well i wish i had gotten some because my barons are not really fond of working yeah and it's it's still the same fortress i

had before, but things are different. So your dwarfs kind of work while you are away. So they do make food. They sometimes even cut jewels and do crafts stuff. But the most unnerving part is actually that they will open doors. And well, that's not fun because the entire surface of my world is full of zombies and they open the doors to upstairs. Yeah. You said if you unpause it,

then you're going to have a fortress that's overrun with zombies because you're an evil biome. So if you do that and you kind of let the zombies wipe out the people that are there, that's probably not what you want. But

after that, when that fortress is dead, can you go back and embark with a new seven dwarves to that same location and reuse the building? Yes, you should be able to do that. It then counts

as ruin, I think, if everything is dead, which means that even, like, one person hidden in some small space, in some small cramped space, and the entire thing is not a ruin. So you have to be sure that

everyone is dead, and then it should crumble to an end and then you should be able to unretire the ruin yes so is that the fortress that you uh that you spent your time working on this week trying to to get your your barons off their rears yeah uh well it doesn't work i ended it now but i had so many artifacts so many good artifacts and they're all gone now and i don't know where they went Maybe they were, I heard that whenever you retire a fortress, many of the artifacts will become hidden. It will have a special tag applied to them in the program such that they are hidden so that as an adventurer, if you go in, yeah, if you go in an adventure mode, you can root around in the ruins of the fortress and dig up the artifacts. and bring them out and be famous among all of the villages, I suppose.

Yeah, I haven't really played so much of Adventure Mode, to be honest. I did for a time, so I know what to do, and I'm not dying because of thirst or starvation or whatever. But, yeah, it's not my thing to do. I enjoy more building my fortresses and building up my civilization, you know. I'm the same. I did play adventure mode one time. And I've been playing the game for about a year. And I have only played adventure mode one time.

And somehow I started, I was a dwarf, but I started sitting in a tree with elves. And I could not figure out how. to get out of the tree. I would go, I could tell that I could go from one flet to another. And as I went from flet to flet, I would be talking to these same three or four elves that were just hanging out in the tree with me. But I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to get down. So I spent about an hour trying to get out of the tree with these elves that I really couldn't stand. And I finally gave up and kicked it back into fortress mode.

Never really got stuck in a tree, but there's always the possibility that you have to jump down. But it can happen that you actually break your legs. Well, and also, because I was doing it blindly, I didn't check any instructions or anything like that. I was kind of expecting it to have roguelike control mechanisms, which are usually the VI keyset, the VI commands, H.JK&L for, left, up, down and right, I believe, or use the keypad. And I couldn't quite get either of those to work, and I really was just trying it just to see what it was about. And I knew that I was going to want to come back to Fortress Mode anyway.

So I was self-sabotaging, I guess. I do want to revisit it sometime, but the next time I do revisit it, I will not start in a heavily wooded area, because I think that may have been why I started in a tree. Well, I've never started in a tree, but I tend to either play elephant men, if possible, because they're massively strong, or just anything with wings. Wings would have been handy. Yeah. Fly out of the tree, yeah.

But things, so animal people with wings tend to be really small, so you don't really can find any armor for you. That's a bad part. I spoke of the fortress that I was running with. And it was a thriving fortress of about 200 dwarves, and everything was going great. I had just started working on training a military for this fortress. I had repelled one siege already. It was not a very big one. It was four or five goblins and some,

I think there were some humans. Oh, no, there were some humans that were coming in. But I repelled those with no problem. But this time, I was seized by about 80, 80 goblins and dwarves. So 80 goblins and dwarves attacked my fortress. And I thought, well, you know what, that'll be fine. I'll just go ahead and send my squad as it was out.

One hour later, all that was left of my entire fortress was one child dwarf. Oh, no. He was 11 years old. I think that he was about to turn to an adult to where he could actually do some work. The goblins and dwarves that remained, there was about 20 of them that remained after all of my other, all the rest of my dwarves and my fortress residents were killed they were hanging out in some of the lower levels of the of the cave of the mines and this dwarf child successfully successfully avoided these these goblins and dwarves for about three months yeah and yeah it's about three in game months and it didn't it didn't matter because he got spotted by a dwarf and that dwarven child was killed and I saw the message on the screen, very anticlimactic, I must say.

It said, the strength of your fortress has been broken. Oh, no. And the next keystroke brought me back to WorldGen, the main menu. Yeah. So I had said in our last meeting that I had never sent a fortress to completion to where it ended. I can no longer say that. I had a fortress die on my. I don't know if that's good, right?

I also had not enacted, enabled any traps at all. I found that I need to concentrate perhaps a little bit more on training my dwarves for military service and actually equipping them instead of having the most powerful weapon that any of my dwarves wield would be a pick that they are using for mining. And also I need to do a little bit more studying of traps

and watching the the Krug Smash series on the Monster Killer Fortress has given me a lot of nice ideas for traps. Also, his current series that's going on is Honeystoker. Yes. Yeah, Honeystoker. So that one, he has a very long haul that whenever an invasion comes in, he will flip a lever and close off his main entrance hall that diverts in the invaders down this really long haul

that has spikes on it. And these spikes are controlled by pressure plates. As the invaders come in, the ones in the front get stabbed by spikes that come up through the floor as people in the back step on the pressure plates. That's a pretty neat track. It's not as effective as I would have thought that it would be,

and I think that he has said something along those lines in his video. But it's a really neat thing to do because he can lock those invaders in that hallway so that they have nowhere to go. So they just keep going back and forth and end up stepping on the pressure plates and there's blood everywhere, spikes through the floor. Oh, no. My God. So I learned that I need to think more about defensive measures

and less about what I'm going to trade for when the next caravan comes in because that's where I had all my attention focused pretty much. Yeah, I know that feel. But I tend to like bury myself in. I go all this defensive. I have maybe like two squads and they're mainly for clearing my cavern of troglodytes or whatever. But I have walls and everything is shut off and drawbridges and weapon traps everywhere. Tends to work out most of the time.

Sometimes it doesn't. one time i had a moat um two no just one level deep and i found out that uh trolls can swim really good yeah wouldn't have done that yeah well they slaughter it about all my dogs and my kids and that was about it those poor kids my good thing and the kids actually tried to fight the trolls, and by that they halted the trolls on their tracks. So my military had actually time to go on top and kill all of them. So are you saying that your fortress's strategy was throw the children at the trolls until the military gets there? Exactly. Yeah. And you know what? It works. It works so good.

Somehow that seems very dwarf fortress, you know? Yeah, it works so good. When I started my new fortress, I went ahead and used the same world that I had used in my first one. So I'm embarking three years after my first fortress had started. I had never done that before. Does the game change noticeably as the world matures? Well, it depends on what you count as noticeably. if you play enough and if you have made another fort

already in the same civilization that you're playing right now you can actually get dwarfs you have before in one of your fortresses again as migrants which I didn't know of until to the point I got a dwarf named Claire

and I was like hang on why have you a name Well, it turns out she was one of the people that lived in my first fort in the entire world, and I didn't know that they can actually go off the island, because my first fault was on an island. And she got off somehow and came to my new fort with her daughter, I think. She had also a weird name. Was the daughter, it was a child dwarf still? No, they're just related.

And they migrated together. That's neat. I think if you dive into this whole family thing, dwarf fortress, you tend to see things completely different. Like one time I had a dwarf that got a big happiness minus from being yelled at. And I was like, why would you get yelled at? And it was actually his mother, that yelled at him, and I like to think that it was some kind of family dispute. I want to start paying more attention to that,

and the YouTube people that I have watched whenever I'm not able to actually play have really led me to understand the value of doing some sort of role-playing in it, and that you can attribute and read between the lines, as it were, With the sparse but relevant information that the game actually gives you, you can look at it and imagine the things that are actually happening in their real world, much like you like to imagine that it was a family dispute was why his mother yelled at him. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And if you have an older world, your families tend to be much, much bigger. and if some families are like weirdly structured so it looks like those dwarfs spawned later on in the world gen because they have little to no family and no family history but sometimes you can find families

that actually spawned during the first years of your world and so they have massive families and one time I actually had also a bard come to my fort and for some reason it was actually the aunt of some of my dwarfs which was weird because the bard was human I don't know how that works but I have not had many travelers of course again my fortresses don't tend to get too old but I don't tend to have a whole lot

of visitors. Other than whenever I strike a cavern, I immediately get monster hunters that want to come into my fortress and hunt monsters, and I tend to let them in. Well, yeah, about visitors, there's one thing I noticed, and this version, 44, right, is very dry on visitors, because I used to play 43-9, and oh my God, I had to kill off visitors from time to time because I had way too many and they would lag my fort and now it's like oh my god

I have one barred whatever after 10 years it's very different actually and I don't know if that's my fault or if TOT actually changed something but it is noticeably I would say the latter is probably

the case because I again I don't tend to get visitors at all unless unless I hit a cavern and it gets opened up and they want to go down and hunt cavern cave beasts so but I still have problems with wear beasts I think I don't pay enough attention

whenever my dwarves kill off a wear beast I don't think I pay enough attention to the combat log and seeing who got bit because what I need to do is I just to hold those people up in a room for you know a couple months to see if they ever turn into a wear beast and if so just you know unfortunately just jail them there um yeah um jol had uploaded some new video and uh in that video he had a wear capybara which is a tiny creature actually right and that was horrible because i think it was actually very strong and slaughtered

dwarfs. And I don't know, but capy bearer is not so big. It's like a squirrel. It's one tough squirrel, though. Oh, yeah. I think that the big arc that TOTI is working on right now, I believe that that is villains. He is going to be bringing in. villains into Dwell Fortress and I'm not sure if that is something that is going to be more adventure mode or more fortress mode. It's supposed to be both, I think. That would be cool. Yeah, I think he wanted to have the player to choose if you want to be good or bad in adventure mode.

And in the Fortress mode, you could get thieves or bandits that live in your fort and try to cause mischief of some kind. Yeah, it's not like the player already does enough mischief on its own in Fortress mode, you know. It gets even worse now. So I kind of wonder the posting he made on the dev notes, and this was yesterday, it's dated March 9th, said that he's been working on several final plots for villains in order to round things out and make use of the new dungeons and so forth says that he'll continue working on it after the game developers conference that's going to happen the 18th to the 23rd so hopefully after that

it won't be long before the next release comes out it's been a while it's been since what july of last year yeah it really has been a while yes What generation? I mean, for example, I heard that people tend to make small words, but with a very long history, so about a thousand years, but a pocketside world or something. I don't know. I mean, sure, you have like really long history, but if you don't have so much space and where it plays, does it really matter, you know, because I make big worlds and short history, so I have more place to settle down, because I tend to be really, really picky when it comes to fortress locations. I have been trying to be less picky about my fortress location, and that all I really care about is that it's not an evil biome and that it does not have an aquifer. So those are kind of the only two now that I really pay attention to. I started off being extremely picky.

and it would take me, you know, two hours to actually get a game started because, number one, whenever I did the find utility, it would take so long to get through the world map. This last game, this last world that I generated that I've played, I'm playing my second fortress on, it was a smaller world. It seems to me that my actual embark location, the area that I have to build my fortress in, that seems smaller as well. Is that the case? It shouldn't be, but you can actually change the size of your embark. Yeah, yeah, you can change it. You can make it bigger, you can make it smaller. And, of course, if you make it bigger, your computer will literally catch fire at some point.

But you can make it smaller. And one time I tried to make it as small as possible because I wanted the good juicy FPS. But yes, it's very. small it's very small and making it bigger is not a good idea really not i don't guess that i have changed it is the default embark size on the bark map the smallest map is it a three by three grid yes it should be yes so you're saying that you can change that to a four by four or a two by two two if you wanted to yeah i think the smallest is two by two i'm not sure anymore but you can definitely go even six by six

Wow, that would be very large. It is way too large, and your computer says just nope and jumps out the window. So perhaps I have mindset for this particular embark as a two-by-two. Maybe I hit a keystroke and didn't realize what I was doing, changed it, and just didn't notice. I did notice that I have less area to dig out before I have to start mining another level down. Yeah. It hasn't made that much of an impact on my getting. gameplay as yet.

Just my fortress is not quite as sprawling on any given Z level as it was on whenever I was using the larger worlds. And again, I don't think it sounds like it was not the fact that I'm on a smaller world. It's the fact that I did something that must have changed the

size of the embark location that I chose whenever I embarked. Yeah. Yeah. So you could also have like a pocket world and then make I don't know, six by six embark location, which of course means that

the entire location you embark in will not be available anymore. If you know what I'm talking about, if you go in Dwar Fortress, what generation, and you want to make a new fort, you can always hover

over already existing towns and stuff, and they always tend to be enormous, you know, what I mean? Right, right. Even though if you go in adventure mode there, they are not as big as they looked. That's because they have a giant embark location, which makes it impossible for you to just sit somewhere on the edge of that. So it might be even possible to actually have an embark, which is as big as those pre-generated towns. Interesting, interesting. Yeah, I had always wondered, whenever I was looking at the embark screen, those places that were not available to me, I knew that they were towns and there were villages, but I actually thought that I was looking at actual walls that were city walls and that you just could not embark within those city walls. But now I realize that was not literal walls that I was looking at. That was just a space that was reserved and just not allowing me to embark to that location, right?

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I too like to think it's kind of like city walls because it looks cool. This last world that I generated, I tried to make everything to be as beneficial to me as I could with my limited knowledge of what I was actually doing. But I think that I had a smaller world size, a high number of civilizations, a high number of, and I'm not sure. sure what the maximum number of sites. I'm not sure what that really means, but I chose a high of that. Low beasts, low savagery, and everywhere for mineral occurrence. I think sites is about just random world stuff like layers and how often they can generate itself.

I'm not sure on that. I'm not sure. But I think civilizations is just just how many people are there, and sites is how much, well, sites you can encounter like layers or caves or whatever. So more sites means more towns, I think. Okay. We'll have a topic one of these days of the advanced world generation parameters, and I will study up on those before we come in to record it. I knew that I wanted to talk a little bit today about the world generation, mostly it was just to ask you what your preferred world generation parameters were for the basics. Do you go into the advanced and play with those?

Yeah, I did for a time until I found that I have no idea what I'm doing. I tried to make a super savagery world, like everything evil, just everything haunted. Turns out it doesn't work like that, or I don't know how to make it work, because the game just kept crashing. But people actually do that kind of stuff and send out, put their worlds on the internet. So you can already download wonderful words, like one small island that is just full of beasts and everything is haunted and you don't want to be anywhere near this. It's nice to play, but I don't know, like having 200 necromancer seems kind of excessive to me. so are these people posting save files yeah

so it's not they don't have a fort already it's just the world final just the world oh yeah well we need

well we need to take some screenshots of our fortresses to post on the dwarf fortress roundtable website might make occasional posts just about what our current worlds look like if anybody cares to look at them. And anybody listening, if you

would like to send us a image of what your favorite fortress looks like, you're welcome to do so. We'll put it on the web page. Yeah, just spam the memes, guys. What's that? Memes. Oh, yeah.

Just memes. I want more of them. One thing that I want to make sure that I get in this week that I meant to talk about last week and did not, I encourage everyone who enjoys playing Dwar Fortress to, if you can, donate a little bit of money to

TOTI-1. You can find the link to donate with Patreon on the Bay12games.com website. And, well, have you got anything else that you'd like to go over? Maybe, but I'm not sure

if it fits right now. I think it would be better if I save it for next week, so I can like go really into detail okay this has been episode two of dwarf fortress roundtable we are going to reach out and see if we can get a community guest on next week because again that is one of the goals of the podcast to bring in community members to talk about dual fortress and it doesn't just have to be a youtube content creator anybody who wants to talk with us we would love to have you on just drop us a message and we'll get you on so you can talk with us about our

favorite game. All right. Yeah. All right. So we'll see all of you folks next time on Dwarfortress Roundtable. Goodbye. This has been Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for All Things Dwarfee. Join us for each episode as we discuss the game, the community, and the obsessive compulsion to play. You can find our podcast at D.F.Roundable.com. If you have any comments, ideas for discussion, or would like to appear on Dwar Fortress Roundtable, please leave a message in this show's comment section at D.FRoundtable.com.

The theme song is Skai Kuelan by Kevin McLeod. Find Kevin McLeod's music at Incompetec.com. The link is in the show notes. This is a Cassiderite podcast. Allcraft Dwarsmanship is of the highest quality. It is encircled with bands of casseterite. This podcast menaces with spikes of casserite. On the podcast is an image of a pigtail in orthoplace.