Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - In Which We Have Army Talk, Mole-man Soap, and Leaden Wine Barrels – For the Elves! VII

Episode Date: June 2, 2019

Note: It was raining hard at Tony's place and it was a bit before we figured out what it was. At about 10:00 into the episode we correct it. Show Notes: 0:05 Intro1:00 Getting Value from Caravans5:10 Commentary on Training Your Military21:41 Making Pewter Products to Market to Elves24:45 Dealing With Werellamas30:51 Dwarf Fortress Productivity Management34:00 Dev Notes37:10 State of the Fortresses41:33 Tip of the day : Go To a Lever With 42:12 Wrap Up and Shout Out About Avarice RPG Links: Avarice by C. Steven RossScenario Generator for DFFischer Price ToysBlueKnightBrownHorse TutorialsIncompetechBay12 Games -- Please Donate!Featured Picture Attribution

Hi, and welcome to Dwarf Orters Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfing. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. And I'm Tony. And we're here to talk to you about, about Twelfortress. Yeah, it reminded me of that Saturday Night Live skit. We're here to pump you. Yeah.

Have you all been? Well, I was a bit sick, so I couldn't play. Oh no. That sucks. Man, that's rough. No dwarf fortress for me for an entire week. That's good. At least it means no dwarves were harmed this week.

So that's a positive. Oh, wait, except for mine. I had a bit of a bloody week in the fort. Whoops. I had a kind of eventful week for my fortress as well. So we're doing some massive rearranging in my fortress. But we'll get to all that later. I think first we're going to talk a little bit about military and squads and things like trying to get your dwarves to not be a bunch of wimps who run at the sign of a tiny beast coming at him.

That's the safe approach. Yoan, you also wrote that you breached the cavern for once. Yes, I have. I have not actually explored it. Yet there is a little wide area that is coming off of one of my passages that I was building. And while I didn't immediately wall it up this time, we did not see anything as of yet. We've not explored it. The reason is, I don't have a military yet.

All of my dwarves are still peasants. I mean, I have a few nobles, of course, but all of my dwarves are concerned with things like building beds and digging tunnels and making gemstones. Because gemstones, I have determined, seem to be the. the most efficient way to use your resources to get more food from the caravans. Yeah, that's pretty solid. I didn't really think about selling gemstones to them. I just, I put somebody on a workshop and just have them building rock crafts or bone crafts to the end of time.

Or if they go nuts, then, you know, whatever, chuck them in the magma and find somebody else to do it. It's a, it's a democratic for it, for sure. I'll run into situations where I Overweigh the caravan So I'll have my stone crap You know, I'll try to sell them 700 stone doors But they can't carry them all

So what's good about the gemstones The cut gems Are that they are small, they're light And you know, ounce for ounce They probably have the best Value density Yeah, that's a That's a great idea.

I sometimes end up, like, accidentally putting an artifact in the stuff going to the trade depot and then they see it. And then that's all they want. And things get awful from there because I'm not going to give them an artifact. I, you know, I don't, I just don't even know these guys. So why would I give you an artifact? I just have to go steal it back. Or just kill them.

Yeah, or just take their stuff. Just take their stuff if it's elves. Yeah. But wouldn't be a bit more effective if you actually, we've encrusted stuff with the jewels and then sell that to the caravan. Like, for example, you make a bone scepter and you encrusted that with stuff

and then sell it because that's way more worth, but it's still kind of light. It might be. I have never encrusted anything with jewels. What? It's fantastic. It's fantastic. Just imagine you have a solid gold table

and there are giant jewels, like, in it. I can imagine that it would be really awesome. I have, who encrussed things with jewels? I'm about to. Now, now that it's been discussed, I think I'm about to just, I mean, heck, I think that's what I think that's how am I calling. Does a jewel do that? Yeah.

I'm using a mod that opens up a gem forage that lets me build like beds and doors and stuff out of gems, which I find really useful, because then you can get these really cool like lapis lazuli bed or, you know, pink termaline door, which I think looks cool. So, I mean, I just love the idea and just thinking about how that would work.

I want a diamond throne. Yes. A throne out of solid diamond. You can do it. Only that throne is able to handle my fat ass. Yeah, now I want to do it. Tony, are any of your dwarfs named Elton, John?

Not yet. Normally, whenever I hit caverns, I just wall them up and pretend that they're not there. But on y'all's advice, I'm not going to do that this time. But I still don't have a military to speak of. And in this particular fortress, I haven't trained. anybody and nobody's in a squad yet i have done that before but my squads have always ended up being used to hunt down where beasts never to actually fight in an organized manner where beasts yeah that's tough stuff yeah especially if you have a bigger animal not fun to deal with

but do you do you just give them weapons or do you actually provide armor for them you know i typically say no uniform doesn't that just have them go grab whatever they want to want to grab. Yeah. So I tell them no uniform. And I have never actually specified anything about what they're doing. So whatever we happen to have in the shop is what they, what they take with them. Hmm. It seems like a pretty undisciplined military. I guess. Hey, you know, you guys just do whatever you're going to do. It's fine. You know, if you feel like fighting, that's fine. If you want coffee, that's fine, too. Whatever. Well, part of my fortress restructuring is, aimed at the military and I am moving from right now most of my fortresses on the ground level

all of my workshops and and all the storage and stuff but I have actually started carving out some areas about about 10 Z levels deep and the first thing that I've carved out is an area that is going to be a fairly large training center and I'm planning on using that area to have my military train up that's a good idea One thing I'm not sure about is the size of the training barracks actually makes a difference in the training. I have the feeding it does. If you have a giant barrack, they will just stay for their own and like fight with, I don't know, just swing their salt in the air or whatever. And if you have a smaller barrack, I have the feeling that they tend to actually, like, they do stuff together.

And they have one teacher that shows them a sword play or how to use a shield or whatever. And more dwarfs attend those teachings, I think. So you think that maybe a smaller room makes them be more organized in their training? Well, it seems to have a positive impact, just like the size of a tavern does have a positive impact on social. values. If you make it too large, the dwarfs just scatter all around and not really have someone to talk to or

to train with. Oh, interesting. Hey, Tony. Would you mind turning your mic sensitivity down a little bit? Your typing is triggering your mic on your thing and we're hearing all the keystrokes. You know what? I think you're hearing the rain. Sorry, I'm going to

unmute unless I'm talking. Yeah. Let me just be more away. It could very well be. Now it's silent without the sound of the rain in the background. Sorry about that. That's fine. Yeah. So are you saying that it might be a good idea for me to have a smaller training barracks rather than a big 20 by 30? I think yes.

I'm not sure about this. But in my personal experience, I just seem to get my dwarf's experience in fighting faster up when I, I give them a small room. I saw on somebody's YouTube video two different training areas. One was set up specifically for archers and doing target practice. I don't know how they did that, but maybe just all of their archers were sent to one particular barracks and their other squads went to another.

You can define which squad trains where. And so you just make one the Archer squad and say, you can use the Archer Barracks and this is not an Archer Barracks so we only want like Soul Fighters and the Archer Baric also obviously needs

targets and then you have to define a target range for them which should not be too short or they will or it get weird and they kind of stand directly in front of your target but it shouldn't

be too long or they won't be able to shoot correctly. And this all has to be inside of the barrack. You set where the archers should train. And then sometimes it can happen that some archer actually goes there to train once a year. Well, I saw in this particular YouTube video, I saw a group of maybe five or six archers. And the target that they were shooting at, they looked like they were shooting across maybe six or seven tiles.

It was pretty neat looking. I think the archery stuff's broken anyway because I've trained archers and you can kind of actually see them in their training. And then when the push comes to shove, they sort of run out and they might, might fire an arrow. But otherwise, they just end up like throwing the crossbowet them and, you know, smashing the enemy. Yeah. Yeah, like, bud, you've got like, four. fortifications and this great place to stay safe and you've just sort of run out by yourself and your leather armor and now you're dead and everyone said and you didn't need to do that so I think there might be a bug there or or I just don't know how to play the game and that is also a strong possibility but that's been my experience with archers it's rough um yeah yeah I totally agree you know um I've learned one thing how to fix a kind of kind fix arches of obviously the still broken but you just have to wall them in so the not like 100% wore them in but at least you have

to make the archery practice right next to where they should stand and fire at invaders but the thing is it should not be directly outside or linked to the entrance so the wolf actually goes to the fortification and fires through instead of thinking, hmm, I can jump over this wall and bash

someone's head in. You have to wall them in so they rather stay and fire behind their vault-in fortification stuff instead of going the long way around for an hour and trying to kill

somebody in close combat. Yeah, I've seen that, too, where they put the, they'll build a barracks, and on top of the barracks is a roof, and the barracks was near the entry gate to the fortress, and all the archers would get stationed on the roof of the barracks so that they would be shooting at the people from the roof instead of being down on the ground with them. And in order to, in order to get outside, they would have to actually go back into the barracks and wouldn't have a direct access to getting to the invaders, except. shooting at them from the roof. Yeah, yeah, exactly. When you said walled them in, when you said walled them in, for some reason, what came to mind was Imperial Sardukar from Dune. You know, you set your archers in their own sub-fortress with their own nasty food

and their own lousy conditions, and you make them be really hard and trained archers. And then only when there's anybody that's threatening the fort, do you let them out of their cage no not like that oh my god i'm not that of a horrible person that oh man this these sports are sounding less and less pleasant as the day goes on you know i i just i just got scared of archers after having squad after squad just completely churned and chewed up so now i now i go for the armed silver gold bronze just thugs basically is kind of with war dogs that's been my That's been my go-to lately. That's something I can't do.

Assign war dogs to someone. It doesn't seem to work for me. I don't know. You know, I can make archers work a bit, but I can't assign war animals to anybody. So the animals will still linger around in the pastures. And when I don't assign them to a person, pasture, they will just go to my tavern and just stay there. It's a bit annoying.

That is unusual. That is unusual. No, mine I'll usually go out. I mean, the war dogs definitely don't fare very well in raids because they seem to be the ones that get killed the most, which then make the dwarves who own them sad. But yeah, I haven't had any problems with that part of the military. What's your name? Damn. Well, I try. giant wall polar bears once it didn't work I had some

giant polar bears trained for war but they didn't work it was frustrating I noted on on a Krug Smashes bringing him up again this video or this

podcast is brought to you by Krug Smash no I saw him I know right well he's paying a good portion of our salaries so wait a second you guys can pay zero dollars

on zero dollar installments over a long period of time in dog bone artifacts yeah he had bred some war boars is that right yeah war boars

but he attached them to the squads but I didn't know that they did anything but just followed behind the squads I don't think that they actually did any fighting at all maybe they're there to maybe be like tanks and decrease the chance that anybody's going to target a dwarf just like the World War to Warcraft hunter

you send your pet in and you shoot them with your gun yeah I don't know mine my dogs all seem to die when I send out squads to go raid other civilizations It just comes back. It's just like complete canine carnage. Everybody comes back without their pet. But fortunately, we've got very fertile dogs in the fortress. So there's always a, you know, there's always a ton of them to, you know, staff them back up again.

War dogs are a bit squishy, yeah. But they work great for fortress defense. You just throw them at goblins in massive amounts, like 50 war dogs at once. And it doesn't matter if they die. So you have some food later on. It's fine. It's fine. I also noted that there is for each.

Okay, so you have a noble that is the leader of your military, right? And then each individual squad has a captain of that squad. Have you noticed the characteristics of the dwarves you picked to be your leaders making a difference in your military? I honestly don't care about that. I just see, okay, you're pro-efficient Warhammer dwarf or whatever, you can come in and that's really the only thing that matters for me. I should take care of, like, look into their brains and like,

wait, that's a weird phrase to say. Look into their brains. Weird. Brats for mine mosquito brains and mosquito brain flower and mosquito loves. You know what I mean. Like, look into their thoughts. not in their mushy brain

I don't know sometimes especially after fights some get really really fast depressed some are really unaffected and I had it two times

that a dwarf actually run away from a fight even though he was trained and fully equipped and I was like oh okay I later found out that his brother called, he was like a pacifist, so he despised any kind of personal

conflict. That made him very, very unuseful for any kind of militia activity. Yeah, I just picked him out and he retired as a soldier. Yeah, I don't know if you guys saw this, but somebody on Reddit had been posting these military or just these guides to Door Fortress in general. It's somebody called Blue Knight Brown Horse. And it's these really cool, I mean, it's like a drawing with this typeface, basically, that they've, I mean, it's all hand done, but it's like just a guide to it. And it's kind of like an overview guide of how to how to staff up your military or how to, you know, how to train your, you know, whatever. So it's pretty cool. You know, it's all done very neatly in a notebook. And then the person like takes picture of the

notebook and posts it. And it gives you a real good idea of like what a noble does and how to like how to assign dwarves certain roles and how to make sure that they're training and stuff because uh that was that was one of the things that got me is I'd build these squads and then I'd forget to set them to actually train. And so I could never figure out why my dwarfs were completely useless. Um, it's because even though they had these great barracks that aren't training. So it's some pretty interesting stuff. Did you say blue knight brown horse? That's right. Yeah. I'm just double checking it. Yeah, Blue Knight Brown. This stuff. Yeah, I remember that. I'll get that in the show notes for this episode. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, and

it's really neat. Like, graphic, you know, the graphic design of it's really cool, too. And whoever did it, it's got a good, you know, is a pretty cool artist. So, it's just neat when these kind of things come together. Yeah. I like it. So shout out to Blue Knight Brown Horse. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and anything to help demystify the military, I think is great. So as I say, you know, like I totally muddled that part. You know, I'd build these squads and they were trained up, but they were still, you know, making cheese or whatever. I'm like, dang it, come on. But yeah, there's like all kinds of things, like building

mushroom plantations and, you know, all kinds of, all kinds of useful tips there. You know, you could have the, you know, the mushroom plantation of your dreams. Some of it looks kind of too complicated for me to do, but I love the idea and certainly makes me want to try some of the stuff. And it's not just the military that it's nice to have all these different, that we have all of these different resources for. It's kind of a recurring theme that this game can get pretty much as complex and as deep as you want it to get.

But as soon as you learn how to, you know, get some food and dig some holes, you can start having fun with the game. And then you can go down the rabbit hole as deep as you want. For sure. These things that people are building, like the. screw pump towers and stuff like that and magma pumps and all that and it's just it is kind of endless I and mine carts that's another one that I I've yet to I mean I've built mine cart tracks and I tried to do it and it just sat there and thought I don't I think this is my indication

that I'm not quite ready for this looks useful there's there's so many things that I have never, never even touched that I'm just such a neophy. Yeah, like you could have entire, entire, you basically could just turn your Ford into a pewter-making colony, I suppose. Because I see that pewter. I've never tried to do that. I'm desperate to try to get steel up and running, and I've had some luck with it. But my last few embarks have had no iron. And I think that's one of the core components. You can make pewter? Yeah, you can do pewter, which is, I think. I can't really, maybe a mug and then everybody gets lead poisoning

and the full guys, I don't know if that's a thing. Your craft stores would then make pewter chess sets, you know? What even is? Oh, I see. It's like, what, lead and aluminum? Is that it?

Yeah, whatever it is, I know that it kills the user. Maybe not a great idea, but hey, you know what if the dwarfs don't know it's bad for them, maybe it's not. Or maybe in this world, you know, it's fine. You know, it's lead poisoning. So anyway, the moral of the story is,

a pewter maybe for crafts for elves i don't know you know just like a passive aggressive way to yeah i see i see it's genius yeah we're going to do lead everything for the elf you can definitely i i intend to make lab barrels to store feeding i mean that's kind of stupid but it's it's not no it's great it's great it's great here take some dwarven wine in the lead barrels yeah i just I just imagine it's like these early-on cans of food, but not non-sized, but actually dwarven-sized, so giant barrels that look like cans of, I don't know, macaroni. Hey, that's a fun tavern. Why is everyone sick after a while?

That's not good. So I think with that tag you, because sometimes I'll get these messages and it'll say something like, migrants have arrived despite the danger. And, you know, I'm looking around and everything from my perspective seems to be okay. I don't know what danger we're talking about. I don't know if you guys have ever seen that. But I always, I really want to get to the bottom of what's the danger. Yeah, yeah.

Sometimes, I think sometimes your thought is like, well, you have like two troglodytes down in your minds. Better watch out. Sometimes it also happens when you had a fight. Even a brawl sometimes can trigger that message. directly before the migrants come, I think. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. I just trying to figure that out because I'm like, gee, I think I've done an occupational health and safety is, you know, my rating's great.

I don't know what's going on. Yeah, and then that stuff happens. Or like a wear jackle or a warehouse comes when a trade caravans in town and attacks the trade caravan and then suddenly you're at odds with the mountain homes because you got attacked. That is an upsetting situation. We have another subject now. We have to do an episode on where beasts.

On what kind of wear beasts have you? Where's zebra so far is my favorite? That's pretty neat. Pretty horrifying, yes. I've got wear hyenas in the world that I've currently been playing. And I've actually gone on to the D.F. Wiki and written out the dates of all of the different full moons. So at least I have some kind of planning. So, you know, like the day before the full moon, I'm kind of ready with the military in case something happens and ready with the tombs to wall in the potential fight.

That's a great idea. The day before the full moon, part of your standard practice is to close up the outer doors of your fortress. the wear beasts can't get in. Yeah, unless they're already in. Yeah, the wear beasts have been the downfall of more than one of my forts. I've had worlds that I think were already just completely overtaken by some sort of wear beast because every single migrant wave would have at least two in it. And then I eventually had to just abandon that world and curse Tote for his thorough

simulations because it was just really rough. I bet that where hyenas laugh just like me. You remember my old word, right? I don't have too many wearbies in it, for some reason. I mean, it's a giant world, but I have not so many. They are all wear llamas, I think. It's just one type of werebees, just one type, and they all bit each other. Yeah, I don't think that I have seen a situation where there was more than one variety of

Weirbeast in my world. But by the time the wear beast starts showing up in my fortresses, usually that's going to be close to the end of it anyway. Fair enough. Well, you should definitely get into military then, because a good suit of armor

can definitely protect your dwarfs from a nasty bite from a wear zebra. That's a very good advice. Learning how to build squads and get any kind of military at all, was indeed prompted by wearbees

because I wanted to have somebody to be able to go out there and kill the wearbees. Yeah, and this is where I cue my crossbowman to come out and just start trying to bash them with the crossbow whilst wearing pigtail trousers and nothing else or whatever. Well, you know, my archers, with no training at all, whenever I send them out, they have tended to actually use their bows and arrows

to try to kill the wear beasts and whatever it is that they're going after. So I've not run into this situation where they're trying to bash them with their... At least I haven't noticed it. Yon, do you use just any dwarf as an archer or do you tend to use rangers or hunters? Any dwarf.

I just find one and I click this guy's an archer. Get them to the bolts. I don't even remember how how I specified it. I don't know if there was a checkbox on dwarf therapist that I checked or what, but I don't know. Well, I seem to flow better when I take Rangers or Hunters because they are already trained in bows and crossbow stuff. and even when they are not training directly in the not working barracks,

they go out and hunt and train while, well, not attending their military duties. That could very well be it. It could be the fact that I, especially in my early dwarf fortress playing, one of my main sources of food was hunting, or at least I tried to make it my main source of food, as we talked about previously, I tended to just kill animals and let them rot. But we did have a lot of people

and shooting things with bows. So that may be where my archers came from was from hunting and they were already trained from it. Yeah, that makes sense. Because I remember reading now something like if you put a ranger or a hunter in your squad of non-archery-based dwarfs, they'll struggle with it or they'll feel out of place.

So that makes sense. So maybe it is better to just do that. I'm going to experiment with that and have some measurable stats on that. Because now I'm super intrigued because I would love to have functional archers. This is exciting to feed my forgotten beast with archers instead of brute force, biting its ears or whatever. I hope you guys know that different types of metal produce different, useful sorts of bolts or arrows. I tend to make them

out of wood. Oh my god. No. Wood is the worst just next to bone because it's quite light white and you cannot make them really sharp. So I tend to use silver. They're

really heavy and they sometimes even punch through armor. So even a goblin in iron armor will get fricked up by my silver bulls. That's an intriguing point. I used bone and wood for training arrows,

or at least to hope that they use those for training arrows. But yeah, for real stuff. Interesting. It occurred to me that I was. will sit down to play dwarf fortress and I will not be able to stay on task. I will sit down planning on, working on my military and an hour and a half later, I'm, you know, doing something completely unrelated to that. And then I'm done with my session and I go, gee, I didn't do anything that I wanted to actually do. It's like real life, right? I think it's not really the war

fortress thing. If you're just flowing through your stuff, if you have a plan, but you don't really go along with your plan and get distracted by other things, other stuff and you end up harvesting plums or, I don't know, trading was there else again, even though you actually wanted to make your military work. That's fine. I mean, it still has to be done at some point, both the military and the trading. So just doing this, then doing that, then doing this again. I think that's fine playstyle. You know, there's nothing to be, to make better about that.

That's a good point. It is, it is play. I'm thinking, do I need a to-doist boards explicitly for Dwar Fortress? That's where that scenario generator comes in handy. You can, you know, if you really want to challenge, you know, You end up, and one of the parameters is the only industry you can have is a soap-making industry or something. Like, while that changes things. I need the Fisher-Price version of that, though.

Well, then you just make toy boats. Fisher-Price-Price version? What? Oh, I'm sorry. Fisher-Priced is a toy company in America for toddlers. They make, like, trucks with big plastic wheels and things that are safe for two-year-olds to put in their mouths. So what I meant was I need the very rudimentary version. of the scenario generator that says farm mushrooms.

You could call it the Playmobile version of Dwar Fortress. Yeah, I should totally get that generator going. Just imagine a world and everything of Fortress is actually through and through made and plant only based on that generator. Sounds great. I went deep into a soap making thing because I kept getting attacked by these moleman people or whatever,

and they were so irritating that I noticed that when I killed them, I would have moleman person tallow. So I just decided to start making moleman person soap. And that was the only thing I had. And then I kept selling it to every trade caravan that came through. And then as I started new forts, I've noticed that moleman person soap still shows up in the trade caravans. And I feel very proud of this accomplishment.

And I hope it's a lesson to the moment, people, that we will dominate you so badly. Oh, my God. Love it. I look through the dev notes that he posted on the 15th. And from that, I pulled out what I was questioning on our last episode, like, what does he mean by End of the World? And he specifically is talking about zombie apocalypse. So the world ending by zombie takeover, created by a necromancer. And I know that one of them was he's chasing down a bug where the zombie armies of the

necromancer would occasionally wander off and join performance troops. And I actually felt sad. I was like, no, that's not a bug. That's like one of those glorious things. I would love something more than to have that zombie singing troop come to town because A, it's probably better than most pop music and B, it just sounds great. I mean, I love it. They wouldn't drink

much alcohol and, you know, they'd be funny. Would they still attack you? Well, that's the question. Although that would also be kind of fun, I think, you know, suddenly the dancer started attacking. I don't know. The already rotting dancer with one eye and

maggots in the stomach suddenly attacks you and you're like, what? You are undead? No way. It's a great way for people to see their relative again? Hey, or I'm totally getting derailed by this, but just imagine they don't attack you

and all your dwarfs linger around for the show and like, well, the dance is quite nice, but they still get the frightened stuff because they see undead people. So they're, hmm, I like this dance, but I'm very scared of the undead people dancing in front of me. it's sort of like people watching horror movies you know people are scared by it but at the same time

they're intrigued and entertained so i don't know maybe it'll make them better somehow so if he if he can't fix the bug i would say that's fine but uh yeah just leave it in there i'm just happy that he shared it because it is really hilarious it may also be a game breaking bug, you know, that if that happens, then something that we're not considering happens that just destroys the game. And, you know, I feel like as awesome as it sounds, I'm totally happy to take his lead on. No, trust me, you guys really don't want this because I feel like this developer is definitely somebody who could introduce very sadistic things into the game.

And if this is something that he looks at and he's like, yeah, no, we're not going to do that. I feel like there's a reason behind it because otherwise I think it would just sort of have happened true so yeah it didn't look like that he had too much more on the on the dev notes like last time it's pretty much more the same right now i mean i'm hoping that that's a good sign that things are you know it seems like it's getting kind of narrowed and focused and like hey if we have a you know a christmas update that would be pretty sweet yeah yeah yeah So as we mentioned before, my fortress, which is called Village Umstizcal, Sizzled Wheels. Village? What's that mean? It says village. Mstis call.

I think it has to do with population. Yeah. Your size. Cool. So I have a population of 76 right now. Now, did I hear someone say that at 80 is where you attract the vile forces of darkness? It seems to be the general consensus on that one. I need to kill some dwarves because I don't want to teach. Oh, you know how to do that?

Just go send them out to attack a goblin fortress. That'll help you fly under the radar. I do get your dwarves. I was thinking more along the lines of, so as we said, I actually did open up my caverns, but I haven't actually explored any of them. So I should send, have just a bunch of my dwarves that I look through and don't care for. and give them wooden swords and send them down to the caverns. Yeah.

Give them wooden swords. Oh, that's harsh. Here, guys, take a toothpick and go fight a forgotten beast. Come back when you have some friends. Well, it would be just a stick. Horrible. I want to take a screenshot of my discovery of the caverns here. I pulled up my instance just to look at the name and size of my fortress.

And the minute that I loaded it, a forgotten beast had arrived. And I was like, come on. Real is great. Are you doing this now? We are. And then I ignored it while I was talking to you guys. And then it got in and killed about, I don't know, enough people to make it a thing. Well, is the pause button would be handy there.

Well, it would. And that is how I notify. That's how I noticed what was happening. It's like, oh, okay. My manager's dead. Well, easy come, easy go. You know, at some point, dwarves, you need to take responsibility for these things. My first Z level with caverns is 30, and I am following them on down here.

The bottom one is 49. The caverns are 19 Z layers deep in this. Well, I hope nobody is jumping down there because that is a deep, deep drop. Oh, that's my pit. Yes. Yeah, I was about to say, may I make a recommendation? Oh, yeah. If you want to shore things up, put some spikes at the very bottom just as a, you know, a belt and suspenders approach.

Yeah, like a spiky toilet. Roland, you said that you were under the weather this week. Did you get to play any at all? No, sadly not. Oh, bummer. Tony? Yeah, I did. I've been trying to figure out my post-seege cleanup.

So I took a page from Roland's book and I've tried to build a flushing toilet structure for my siege entrance. So I've built a huge retaining wall thing filled with water and then a little siege entrance. And then, yeah, so then after the siege, hopefully I can just flush it all out with water and all the carnage will be washed away. But in the first siege I had, I'd forgotten that one of the walls wasn't completed by the dwarves. I guess they'd suspended construction. So the siege just came right through. And so that was not, you know, an ideal situation for anything. But, yeah, now I have another siege in progress.

So I'm really hoping to see how things go. So they went around to trap. They did. They just walked right into the fortress, which was, yeah, not really what you want. but um yeah oh well well next time you need to do it with magma man i i would love to do with magma but um i'm not i'm not there yet my confidence of magma is still somewhat lacking you know i would totally do that if i would know how to use my cards then i could do that but one of my big discoveries this year has or this year this this go around has been if you click on something that you've

attached a lever to and you push control m it'll take you directly to the lever that's connected to that so you don't have to go hey what's this lever do what's this lever do like it'll they'll actually just it'll work which is for me really exciting I'm very very happy with that so I've flooded my fortress a lot less and you know close the right gates and haven't smashed Stores. It's been a really good, it's been a good time. I'm glad I learned that one. That's been useful. That's amazing. Yeah. Control M. Okay. So I guess that'll, uh, better wrap up our episode. I do want to give a shout out. I talked about that RPG on our last episode. And I didn't know many details about it. It's

been released now. The RPG's named Averis, and it's based on Dwarf Fortress. And it's actually bought it and downloaded it and it's pretty neat it's great he he's sending it through drive-through RPG where you can do a suggest your own price kind of deal so you can take a look

at it and you know donate or pay what you think it's worth so that's a that's generous it's got some cool artwork from from Krug smash in it and so I'll put a link in the show notes to to where you can take a look at that

and if you want to download it, then you can. And so I think that's cool that someone is kind of branching out. You know, if it inspires RPGs too, then all the better. Yeah, right on. It's always fun to see creative things that people do with stuff. I always think people do with stuff. Yes, indeed. I am an eloquent speaker, for sure.

Lots of words. Only the best words. I know the pain. I know the pain. yeah it's actually some good writing in the in the r yeah uh it's a good read regardless it's amusing and it's very dwarfy so yeah cool so good job uh i think is i think the gentleman's last name is ross again i will put his name in the uh and the a link to to download that in the show notes so anywho neat yeah so you guys got anything else you want to talk about today

no i i think that's good all right well I guess that'll wrap up this episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable. Thanks everybody for joining. Please go ahead and send in your request for shoutouts to people who have created tutorials that you look up to. And we will get some recognition out to people who deserve recognition. I want to thank everybody for subscribing and downloading to the podcast. It's been getting some good growth and, you know, tell your friends. And we'll keep on creating episodes as long as you all keep on listening to them.

It's been fun. So next time, I'm Roland. I'm Jonathan. I'm Tony. Have a great week. This has been Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundable.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 Dwarf Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. Music is Sky Q Ellen, composed by Kevin McClain. You can find Kevin McLeod's music at Incompetec.com. You can find a link in the show notes. This is a microclined podcast. All craftsmanship is of the highest quality. It is encircled with bands of radiant cut-clear zircons. This podcast menaces with spikes of microcline.