Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - In Which Turkeygeddon Confronts A Lone Bard While Vomit and Filth Engage In Mortal Combat – IV

Episode Date: April 21, 2019

Thanks again to Kruggsmash for stopping by to visit! Find Kruggsmash at http://kruggsmash.comRoguelike Radio episode with Tarn AdamsDonate to Dwarf Fortress at http://www.bay12games.com/support.htmlMusic is "Skye Cuillin" by Kevin MacLeod find his music at https://incompetech.com 0:38 Forgotten Beasts4:45 Roland Tells the Tale of Turkeygeddon!8:15 Reflections on Monsterkiller15:45 Dev Notes: Steam and Itch26:45 State of the Fortresses30:45 Jonathan Introduces Umstizkol: Sizzledwheels32:12 Wrap up

Hello, and welcome back to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan, along with my co-host Roland, and you're about to hear part two of our conversation with Adam, also known as Krug Smash. Just a bit of meta here. I'm going to do my best to release these episodes now every two weeks on Sundays. This has been a bit of learning experience, but I think that most of the kinks have been worked out, and I do hope that things have become much more regular now. So, I hope you enjoy the show. So at the end of last episode, Roland teased a subject that he didn't know that we had time to get into in that episode.

And that was, turns out to be forgotten beasts. Ooh, my favorite. Yeah, I know it's your favorite. you have painted so many of them and they two are my favorite I mean where else can you get like a feathery chinchilla whatever thing that wants to eat your dwarfs

right? You gotta love it gotta and you have also to remember that everything is just enormous so it's not like a life-sized chinchilla but it's like a bus-sized chinchilla. Towering. Yeah, it's whew. And you know the mod?

I forgot the name. Dwarf portrait. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah, and that mod is in the lazy new pack, and it shows you how a creature looks. in not really an artistic way but more of a it's quite interesting to look at

to be honest terrifying I think is the word that you're looking yeah especially if you look at angels or demons oh yeah but this mod also shows you every single forgotten beasts that existed in your world and I think they don't even get removed from the list if they die i tried um they don't get removed so i'm fairly sure that they just stay on the list and i have one world where i have um everything made for evil because i like evil biomes as you heard i'm a psychopath um yeah and i have a lot of

forgotten beasts and when i scroll down through the list i have like i don't know 250 I scroll for a minute through all the forgotten beasts and I know exactly that like a third of them will maybe come around to my fort and a third is still like so many and especially when you look at them you get these wonderful descriptions you know and it's it's like all the beasts and all the beasts and All the animals just mesh together in some hydra's thingy, and you can get, like, I don't know, elephants that spray webs. Just try to imagine that. I love to. I love the challenge. It's crazy.

I remember the first time I had encountered a forgotten Beast. It was in, you know, some long-and-go-forgotten fortress. I dug down to the caverns, and I think it might have been my first time down there. and there was a ramp that led down into a pool of water and in the water was a dead forgotten beast and I don't remember how I saw its description but it had feathers and was a snail and it was just dead in the water

and I didn't know what the hell of forgotten beast was I didn't know that was a part of the game and so I was like is this thing going to come to life and kill my dwarves I don't know what this is I have no idea and so for years I was just playing through the game and just being wary of this forgotten beast

eventually I just kind of ignore the thing and I was like all right it just must be some dead thing maybe you can encounter these corpses down in the caverns of like a fossil or something you know something I lived long ago and then out of the blue a forgotten beast attacked me I don't know what the hell kind of was at this point

but you know I was like oh my god these things are alive they can attack you this is terrible but it was great I love that stuff yeah yeah I have had one instance where I tried to get some candy, but I was way too greedy.

And so I had a mild clown infestion. And while I tried to manage that to some point, which didn't work, obviously. And I forgot a beast attacked. And the fun thing was the forgotten beast was a blob of vomit, I think. And all the demons that attacked were actually filth broods. So I had this fight between a blop of vomit and a humanoid composed of filth and grime.

It was wonderful. Oh, the goddamn mess right there. Yeah, it was wonderful. I actually cut some screenshots and edited it together in a fairly bad. Editing, yeah, I uploaded it to Reddit, but got quite ignored. It's a shame. What the hell? It's a mess. Who wouldn't love to see that? Fantastic. Yeah, I think the last thing I remember about the board was actually that everyone died except for one bard.

It wasn't even in my civilization, but for somehow... for some reason my fortress didn't crumble to an end and so i just stayed there and the grime and vomit was still fighting underground you know this was still going on and just one bard going around the tavern alone and just drinking out the barrels and was like hey i'm alone i don't have and um why the fight was going on my turkeys actually He spouted so many pools that I think I ended with 300 something turkeys and lacked my computer to the point that I actually had to return my fortress, not because it crumbled to an end, even though I hadn't had anything left in it, or because demons attacked my fortress, but because turkeys would have anything left in it, or because demons attacked my fortress, but because turkeys would not stop to lay eggs. I mean,

can we just take a second and appreciate that Dwar Fortress has spawned us a scene where a lone barred in a turkey-infested fortress was drinking by himself while armies of filth and vomit were fighting far beneath the earth.

Yeah, yeah. Wonderful, wonderful. But this instance actually gave me some kind of paranoia of fear against turkeys even in real life yeah I suppose that would happen

and I don't really like turkeys anymore in the game I'm sure I know that they're good egg layers but I tend to slaughter them in the first year because no no not again PSD yeah I got you yeah

yeah All right, I missed most of that conversation about Forgotten Beasts. I came in at the end where turkeys are terrorizing Roland. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I can give you like a shortcode of it. Oh, that's okay. That's okay.

I will hear it, I'm sure, on the editing process. Okay, fine. But, well, this way, you don't have anything to add to it, but okay. I am very much still a Dwarf fortress, a newbie, and I'm a little bit ashamed to say. that I actually have not run into a forgotten beast in real life. In real life? Wow. Oh, God.

You see, one of the things about Krug Smash videos is that they have given me a little bit more confidence in actually going into caverns and taking on the beast. Because I was one of those and have been one of those players who, as soon as they had a cavern, wall it up. You don't want them, you don't want them getting in there and. killing all your dwarves, which at this point in my, in my proficiency with the game, that still probably will happen. But one of the weird and neat things that I, that I really like about, especially monster killer, is you took your fortress and moved it to the cavern. Yeah.

Pretty wild. Suicidal? It was. It actually was, though, because monster killer was actually. supposed to be a short and so i the way i was playing it was incredibly suicidal i figured we'll live in the caverns and we'll just fight every single forgotten beast that shows up and we didn't end up dying so i mean that's that's the reason it went on for so long is you know i eventually started caring for the damn place and actually started taking care at the dwarves but

you know it was originally supposed to just to die out like within one or two episodes that does raise the question are forgotten beasts in the current release of dwarf fortress not as challenging as they once were i'm trying to think there's been a few changes when i first started playing monster killer from what i understand the aggression of the beasts was a little screwed up like they wouldn't go for your dwarves sometimes and so at one point i had updated and they did become more deadly in the series you could see that i think we fought some sort of a bird or something and I gassed all my dwarves and a few of them died. Yeah, I recall that.

Yeah, and I was like, oh, boy, this, that's what's going to happen. That's how it's going to be, huh? But up to that point, you know, we were knocking those things out of the park left and right. The certain forgotten beasts can show up and demolish your dwarves in the right situation, no problem whatsoever. Yeah. And like, you know, there's so many other ones, they'll just show up and it's like, they'll just fall apart. Like, they'll walk into your caverns and a child will walk up and slap up. them and they'll just die.

Like ones made out of like snow, say, they'll just fall apart, no problem. Or even ones made out of fire, it's usually not a problem either because the problem comes from, you know, they're starting fires all over the place and those can engulf your dwarves. But having them made out of fire, it means they're basically made out of just air and they'll just fall apart. It also means that you can't put them on a pedestal. Absolutely. I think the worst beast I've ever come.

was some kind of small bird that sprayed webs and I didn't add any marks wolves so I knew that my squads would all die but I hoped that they might get one lucky shot at the bird but it turned out that the bird hovered over my dwarfs instead of coming down and just sprayed them with webs until they couldn't move anymore. And I don't know, like 10 minutes after, and I had no dwarfs left in my entire fortress. Those webs, they are terrible. They are terrible.

Big time. You have to get a lucky hit in or you're losing everything, basically. It's either webs or extract, I think, because extract causes syndrome. and some of them are really, really fun. I mean, dizziness is, like, who cares if your dwarfs are dizzy, you know? But, for example, imagine an extract that can stun your dwarfs several minutes. And that's horrible if they are in fight.

And they punch the beast, get stunned for several minutes. Like, I'd like to imagine they still in the pose of punching, you know, like completely The beast stunned. Frozen place. Yeah, the beast can just go ahead and kill them. They can't do anything against it. Or if it's some kind of extract that causes rotting or necrosis,

especially your cats will get into that and just die of necrosis all over. It's horrible. It can be real bad, definitely. I had one where it was pretty interesting a sprayed gas. over the place and the dwarves father creature absolutely fine but then after combat they started falling asleep and like they were just wandering around the the fortress like normal and then they started getting i think dizzy and then they would fall asleep for several days and then they would just wake up spontaneously and you know it's inoffensive but it's still interesting like you know

what else what are the limits of these these gases you know what can't happen i don't really know I haven't looked into it that much, I guess. My asthma is pretty nasty, too. Oh, yeah, definitely. I make your dwarves miserable. Although not nearly as so as the poison gas that wiped out a few of your dwarves, you know, 20 turns later. After everything seemed to be just fine, they start dropping.

It looks like we're good. Fortress explodes. So, yeah, with the fortress that I have just recently started, I am actually planning on, and this may be silly. but you know what it's a game that's that's why you play it to have fun so i'm going to actually be a little more brave whenever it comes to exploring the caverns and try to do some mining down there and and just see what happens that's how you get to good stories though by no by really pushing the limit you know the best way to play i think is to play on like the razor's edge

between safety and danger i guess you know be safe but only just just barely safe. Keep things interesting. Yeah. And you might even make an enemy for life. Me and troglodytes, for example. Well, if I run into a troglodyte on the street, I probably will be his enemy. On the street. Just glaring at each other. Walking down the street, mind of my own business and a troglodyte comes up and hits me. Yeah, they would do it. That's an enemy right there. That's an enemy right there.

So the big announcement in the Dural Fortress community over the last couple weeks was that they are going to release, you being Bay 12 games, is going to release Dwar Fortress on Steam and Itch I.O. It's super exciting. It's a move away from how they've done things in the past. A huge move, yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. I'm very glad for them. I'm really hoping that this can get Tarn Adams some cash, actually.

I'm sure it will. Yeah, I'm very sure it will, especially since it's announced. So it's not this kind of obscure game to download somewhere on the Internet. you know you can just of course it's not free anymore on on steam but that's fine that's fine it's it is now on steam so it is now in the light of vision of gamers you know so we might actually get a more people playing yeah yeah certainly certainly yeah i had no idea where to download it even I think I came to the game over Joel right and I think he said something about Bay 12 and I was like tell me more about that and I had to dive into the net for a whole day until I actually found

Bay 12 because I had no idea how to actually search for and then I found the game and I was like who and I started it up and I have no idea and then yeah I first came into a I first heard about or actually first decided to download and play Dwar Fortress after I heard the interview on roguelike radio with Tarn Adams and I'll put the the episode number in the show notes but they did a hour-long interview with Tarn on Rogue-like Radio. And the fact that his life was what I, at one point, aspired in my life to me, that just really, really turned and to Tarn Adams himself, because he sleeps till noon, gets up, code, does his email,

codes until 4 o'clock in the morning, goes to bed, wakes up, wash, you know, leather rinse repeat there is a sort of appeal there it's hard to explain but I can understand it definitely I cannot live that sort of life right now I've got a wife and a 14 year old daughter and that was my at one point my fantasy life

well it still is mine so yeah Adam if you want to start off with an episode of a of a roguelike radio I really suggest that you use that you start with that one I will again put that in the show notes, the episode, and link to Rogelike Radio. Well, I'll certainly be taking a listen.

I'm not sure if you've, have you played Rogelikes? Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. Familiar. They only produced, I think, two episodes last year, but from about 2011, I think, Roguelock Radio first started making episodes. They were doing monthly episodes for quite a few years. It's kind of trailed off now.

you'll get an episode maybe once every six months now but they're still in my feed then so one thing that i that i hope i'm hoping that this doesn't lead to the shift of dwarf fortress into a more commercial like game no no lord no i wouldn't worry about that at all i hear a lot of people scared about that and i say put those fears to rest definitely i do like the fact that he committed to always having a free version of Dwar Fortress that is Vanilla Dwar Fortress. And I can very much see, because of the way he's programmed it and the way that he uses his Raws and the fact that modders have such a, I don't want to say easy time, but modding is such a big part of the ecosystem of Dwar Fortress, I can very much see how it could have parallel lines

and have the Steam and ICHIO version of Dwar Fortress just kind of be the blessed. mods, if you will. Yeah, I've heard a lot of people afraid that this new change will lead to dark things, that sort of stuff, but I'm really not worried about it. Like, who knows what'll happen? But, you know, the guy's been running the game since 2006, right?

And the entire time, you know, it's not like he advertises it, he makes his money from donations, and, you know, he makes it all publicly visible to people, and I don't know, he's just He seems got to have a real good on his shoulder A real good head on his shoulders Yeah, he's a

Stanford PhD mathematician I mean Yeah, certainly Think about the things he could be doing You know, and he's doing this This great thing and You know, running off donations And providing a game for free

I've heard him say before I forget where I read it But like he likes having a game That people can play even if they don't have the means to buy it which come on that's amazing this day and age you got to appreciate that oh so much so much i also love the sensibility of the game the fact that it shows what could happen when you don't spend all of your time money and effort into producing slick graphics and instead put it into gameplay mechanism that you can have such a beautiful you know such a beautiful experience that and like I said I'm not deep into this game at all yet there is so much more that I have to explore

and I still am just amazed at the immersion that you get whenever you play this game it's just awesome I'll tell you what I've been playing the game since 2011 I really do feel like I've scratched the surface too you know like there's infinite stories I can come out of you know and I mean you never know what you're going to see so you can play the game a thousand times and still see things that you've never seen before. As soon as it gets released on Steam, I'll probably go ahead and buy it and download it. If for no other reason, I want to see the new graphics tile set that they've got for it. Oh, hang on.

It's actually, you can't buy it yet, but it's on Steam already. So you can look at it on Steam. I don't expect it will be over. I wouldn't think that it would be over, you know. I think it may be $20, if that. That's what they're thinking. I've seen that post in a few places. Yeah.

I think that's a good price point for it. Yeah, definitely. But the tire said looks so good. Oh, my God. It looks pretty darn good. Oh, my God. Here on the Steam side, there is like a disclaimer because there's some kind of violence in the game.

and the description goes as follows. Dwarf fortress contains detailed descriptions of violence and two-de-sprites inflicting violence on each other. The dwarfs also drink alcohol heavily and alcohol consumption is required for a fortress to run smoothly. Dwarfs can experience mental anguish and in extreme cases this can lead them taking their own lives or the life of others.

Does that get it a mature audience rating? I think it actually, yeah, yeah, I think it actually did it. I don't know. Oh, surely not. I mean, it's a lot less violent than a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Ah, childhood. And it is just 2D sprites after all. Yeah, I'm pretty excited for this.

I am too. And I heard they will also on the workshop on Steam, you know? So you just have to click on stuff and your game is modded. Which I am extremely excited for. That's one of the reasons I don't use any mods because they're so darn finicky. Yes, yes. And especially if you can upload stuff in the workshop. Like, I don't know.

It's still a role-based game. on steam the version but it would have to be it would have to be um if so i might be be able to actually upload my own raw edit to it and it's wonderful love it that is such a big part of the ecosystem of people learning to play the game because it's a great you know one-click install and boom you have it it will be interesting to see if the commercial versions, if you will, constrain the game to what is available in that version only, or if you're going to be able to do the modifications. Yeah, from what I understand, the Steam release is going to be exactly the classic mode,

just with the music and graphics and stuff. And so I was listening to his Discord the other day. He was on Discord. And from what I understand from that, he was saying that all the mods can changeably. Great, great. Yeah, I missed that. I saw that that happened at like 11 o'clock at night after it was over with. I was very sad.

Yeah, I saw it the next day. I was like, damn. It's pretty exciting. All right. So, yeah, I'm excited. I hope he gets paid. And I hope that that leads to the community growing. And as long as it stays under his control, his and Zach's control and nobody else's,

then I think that it's still going to remain in safe hands and we're going to get continued development. And hey, you know what? If he's eaten better, maybe, I don't know if, I don't know how you can work on one project this long without getting burned out. But it sounds like he's still not. Who knows?

Yeah, kudos. We talk each week so far, each week being three now. We talk each episode about our own fortresses. That lends me to ask you, Adam, do you play fortresses other than the ones that you're recording? Or is Honeystoker your fortress right now, period? That's it. That's all I've got.

I wish I had time to play more dwarf fortress. Every once in a while, I'll start another fortress and play it for an hour or so. and, you know, I usually run it into the ground or get bored or, you know, do some stupid stuff. Yeah, I don't really have time to run a dedicated fortress, really. It takes me a long time, you know, when you start up and you got to figure stuff out. And it really takes hours and hours. Actually play a fortress, you know, I don't have time for it. It doesn't surprise me at all.

Like I said, I'm surprised that you can get what you get done, done. Because it appears that you would need more hours in a day than 24 to do. Yeah. So, Roland, how's your, how's your Dwarven World Domination project going? It's going great. So far, I punched some goblins and my squads vanished. That's fine. I have to take the drawbacks.

So is there a story behind that you punching the goblins and the squads vanishing? Not really. but there is this stuff that you can now send still not a master of that it somehow works but I'm not good at what I'm doing for some reason a few of my squads came back

but then I found out that one of my squads is actually not being able to do what I want so I cannot station them I cannot say kill this kill that and I was like Hmm, that's weird. Are these squads that you have sent from your fortress off-map to attack the Goblin Strongholds?

Yeah, exactly. And they were supposed to be back now. And when I look into my military screen, it's full still of dwarves. But it turns out every single drug is dead. And they haven't really seen them dying, so they're not sure. They're dead. So my military screen still thinks they're around, but they're not. And it's weird.

It's weird. Yeah. Have you run into anything like that, Adam? Oh, yeah, definitely. There's such a pain. The whole squad setting them out thing. Yeah, that can be a bit buggy. I don't right at the end of Monster Kill, I had sent a squad out, and I forget what happened,

but one of the members was basically locked into. position on my map and I couldn't do a blessed thing with them. They were just stuck there slowly dying and, you know, I didn't bring it up in the video because like I think it was like the last episode where it started happening and, you know, I couldn't

really make much of it. So I was like, all right, well, I guess I'm ending it anyways. It's frustrating. You know, if it had happened several episodes before and I had a dwarf just in a catatonic state staring out in the desert, that might have bothered me a little bit, but I guess I got lucky with timing. Oh, that's

Beastmaster and Monster Killer. Yeah, that was, that was, I think that was near the beginning of Monster Killer, where your, where your animal handler basically went out to the desert and went into a trance and just sat there and dehydrated himself to death. Yeah, poor soul. So sad. Dwarfurt just got to love him. I have decided to take Roland's idea about the way he starts his world up and his fortresses and run with that.

So I created myself a brand new, large world with a short history. It started, my first fortress embarked at year five. And so it is now a new fortress in its first year. I have 14 dwarves. It is called Oomstiz. call or sizzled wheels sizzled wheels sizzled wheels that was just the random name that was picked and i liked it so i like that we're still uh i'm clearing out the first level i've just made bedrooms and we are uh you know just gearing up we got our first uh inbound set of seven

dwarves that uh that have migrated in and i think in about a month or two we'll be getting our first caravan from the from the mountain home so no i'm looking forward to to filling everybody in on the progress of umstiz call sizzled wheels it's copyrighted i can't use that to i can't use that no it's mine um stis called sizzled wheels we spoke about it earlier but i want to explicitly ask everyone to drop a couple dollars in the coffer of Tarn and Zach Adams if you can. The link to how to donate to them will be in the show notes. They have a Patreon, or you can go to Bay12games.com, and there you can find links to donate. Everybody, get out and play Dwarfortress. Thank you so much, Adam, for coming on to talk with us today. Any time that

you want to come back, the idea behind Dwar Fortress Roundtable is that we would like to have people from the community on with each episode, not just be me and Roland talking back and forth. Yeah, it's excellent. Keeps it interesting. Yeah. So you are welcome anytime that you want to come on. Absolutely. This was a, it was pleasurable. I enjoyed it. Great, great. All right, Roland. You got anything for us? Um, no, I think I'm done. So, Adam, if people want to see your, your content, how do they find you? On YouTube, you know, just search, Krugsmash Dwarf Orchers, I'm sure you'll find something. And there's also Krugsmash.com that has lots of his artwork that is collected there.

And it's just beautiful. So, too damn kind. All right. So until next time, this is Dwarfortress Roundtable. And we hope you have a very pleasant, Dwarby Day. This has been Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things dwarfy. You can find all our past episode. episodes at df roundtable.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 Door Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. Music is Skykew Ellen, composed by Kevin McLeod. You can find Kevin McLeod's music at IncombeTech.com. You can find a link in the show notes. This is a Shale podcast. All craftsm is of the highest quality. It is encircled with bands of Oval Shale Cabichans.

And until next time, you bearded bastards.