WIP DF Talk #25 transcript

Dwarf Fortress Talk #25, with Rainseeker, Capntastic, and Toady One, transcribed by voliol

R: 	Hello, and welcome to today's episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk. I'm Rainseeker.
C: 	I'm Capntastic-
R: 	And with me is Capntastic, yep yep- Go ahead.
C: 	Yep, yep, yep. I'm Capntastic.
R: 	We planned this very well, as you can tell. And with us is our illustrious programmer and game designer of the game of the century, Toady One.
T: 	(chuckles) That's right, the century started a long time ago. It feels like half of my life ago.
R: 	So Tarn let's look really quick, because we were just talking about this before we started recording,
	at our images on the website. These are really cool. I see that you've got the african gray parroy up,
T: 	chuckles
R: 	Which was my special request years ago.
T: 	Yeah, everyone likes ??? (Alex?)
R: 	And that's really exiting. I'm really liking the way that the tiles are like merging together, and the grass overlaps the glass. That's cool.
T: 	Yeah, what else have had? We had... after that we had the spider picture, the mole picture, the giant toad, the cave swallow.
	Various small mammals.
R?: Mmm, look at that.
T: 	And then the gremlin. (laughter)
C: 	I love that gremlin.
R: 	So is that mole a giant beast? Are those the giant beasts - is that a giant mole beast? Is that the point?
T: 	Oh it's not a forgotten beast. That's actually one of the underground critters. One of the fixed critters.
	For some reason - it's such a haphazard selection right; we have the giant earthworm, the giant mole, the giant rat, the toad, the giant cave swallow,
	the giant spider and then some oddities... But that's... I don't know why a toad. I mean I guess there's some obvious reasons why there might be a toad
	- I'm a toad! But the mole and-
R: 	The giant cave swallow though. I mean
T: 	Yeah yeah. And there are giant bats too! Once you have a cave swallow you've got to have a giant bat or you're, you know, kind of attempting fate.
R: 	Unless you want to go off a different direction than every other RPG in existance.
T: 	I didn't know they were so colorful right, it looks so fun now, it's a very fun bird. But, well it's a bright and cheerful game, Dwarf Fortress.
R: 	Is that swallow a dangerous creature, or does it just fly around and be giant?
T: 	Well, anything that's giant is dangerous, especially cause you're playing dwarves, right. So it can snatch you and tear off your little
	dwarfy parts. They used to ride them and shoot the blowgun darts at people. Still one of our great failings is to not have reclaimed the riding underground
	civilizations that attacked through your wells - I wonder if they ever flew the birds up though your wells? Just flew the birds back and forth in the chasm.
	As I recollect there being a variable called PATTERN_FLIER and you set that on and then it would set a path that they would follow, just tracking up and down
	the chasm, just shooting targets of opportunity as they went by, paralyzing your dwarves with cave spider venom.
R: 	ooh, delicious!
C: 	Something about winged beak dogs.
(laughter)
T: 	Yeah, it would have to be in Tremors 5, or something.
R: 	Speaking of spider, I was having trouble sleeping last night. Woke up about 5:30 in the morning, and I decided to take a shower. So I was looking at my iPad in the
	shower as I am wont to do, being careful not to get it wet.
T: 	(laughter)
C: 	A dangerous game.
R: 	And I was leaning against a towel against the wall, when I suddenly felt a little prickly thing, and then I looked down in time to see a spider sitting on my arm.
	And it bit me. And then I slapped it, and it fell off, and I recovered it. And in a panic for the next hour and a half I searched online to try to figure out how
	to (??? deduce) a poisonous spider. It turns out it is a house spider,
T: 	Oh that's good.
R: 	those normal harmless things. But they are kind of agressive when startled, apparently. So he bit me.
T: 	Yeah, I have a whole ecosystem here, we've got... Cause we had a flea blow up. I mean living in an apartment it is kind of unavoidable.
	So Scamps has had his flea medication, I've been vacuuming, making the eggs get scooped up and stuff. And they kind of died down, but, it lead to a spider explosion.
	(chuckles) And then Scamps is the apex predator. Because he will just - when he sees a spider he runs over to it and just
	"chomp". One chomp and it's gone.
R: 	Eats it!
T: 	Yeah just eats it and continues the circle of life. There's probably something that lives inside the
	fleas or something goes through the circle.
	And yeah, I try not to think about it too much but there are spiders
	everywhere. But I like to keep them because they're flea control.
R: 	I allow the daddy long leg spiders to live in my house. They're they're kind of nice I don't mind them. Anything else though is really creepy looking
	so I'll kick those out if I can but otherwise they're dead.
C:	I have an aluminum baseball bat for gently poking any home invaders of the multi-legged kind.
R:  Yeah, it makes sense to me.
T: 	Yeah, once the orb on the back of the spider gets sufficiently big and glossy it starts to terrify me. It's not the
	legs at all just the bigger orb yeah more suggestive of the black widow or whatever. It's kind of scary right.
R: 	Yeah, we have quite a few black widows up here.
T: 	Yeah, that's not for me .
R:  I was scared that it would be a black widow that just bit me. That was what immediately went through
	my head is like a hospital trip (chuckles).
T: 	Yeah, wow, yeah, that's no good.
R:	Aaanyways, enough creepy crawly talk... Capn, how was your week?
C: 	I've been making a lot of bread lately. Just baking and baking bread after bread
	Different methods, I got a book. I'm happy about that. I just finished
	baking two loaves of bread today that I started last night, feeling good about that.
	I think a lot of people are turning dwarves, leisure baking during this social isolation period.
R:	I hear that. I professionally bake as you all know, so that's lots of fun.
	Speaking of baking is there baking in Dwarf Fortress?
T:	Uh, sort of. There's the kitchen. The kitchen, the dubious, dubious kitchen.
R:	I don't remember can we make bread?
T: 	As I recollect, and people have to correct me if I'm wrong, you can mince flour and make biscuits.
(laughter from everyone)
T:  And if that's not really, it's at least that bad.
R:	Chopping, just chopping and chopping at the grains.
T:  Yeah. Obviously after going through the mill, like you have a giant water powered or wind powered mill, and you bring the
	wheat there and get it in a bag and you have this flour. And it's you know perfectly fine as a dwarf would do, right.
	You've got great flour. And then you put it on the table - obviously it needs to be minced more finely.
R:	What the real question is is there a giant that can mince dwarf bones and into bread.
T:	Oh, well, we're slightly further along on that you might anticipate because of the minotaur.
	If you go into the labyrinth it generates this maze, right, and there's a room at the end
	of the maze. It's a little five by five room or something, and they have their bone mill there. And they take the bones
	and they mill them into bone meal. And this is why we added bone meal to the game, for the the minotaur.
	This is, in my not so well read recollection, this is not classical.
	I don't know that the minotaur had a bone mill,
	but it's actually from the incredible string band (?) song.
	"Down in the dark my bone mills roll" etcetera.
	So that's why that is in there.
?:	Okay. [9:20]
T:	Goofy, goofy, goofy british folk music gives us the minotaur with the bone mill.
	And of course they chase you and hunt you through the labyrinth and scream things in the darkness and so forth,
	but the prize is to find their nasty little home. It was kind of a the nasty little home
	series of releases really because the the night trolls also have their habits.
R:	The nasty little homework.
T:  (chuckles) Yeah I forget if they were called habits.
	There is something like that, habits or antics or something like
	that inside the the raw files, where the night trolls that are generated have little weird habits.
	Like one of them will collect beetles and put it in a mortar and pestle and grind the beetles into beetle paste.
	For no reason.
R:	That's good protein.
T: 	Yeah... I mean they could be dyeing their clothes, you know, there's all kinds of-
R:	(???) [10:20]
T:	-they don't wear clothes of course - but maybe they smear it on themselves or something.
	You know we just wanted them to feel like they had little tasks that they were kind of obsessed with,
	that made them strange.
C:	Like X-files monsters.
T:	(chuckles) Yeah. So they're good little critters. And some of them just eat rats and things,
	but they all of course kidnap people and convert them and stuff so they're very bad horrifying things,
	but they have like this side gig of messing with little bugs.
[Musical interlude starts][10:50]
C:	That's wonderful. Little bugs are the best.
[Musical interlude]

R:	We have... I wanted to do something on Reddit, and read some of these posts that
	people have put up on Reddit. There is one where the title is
	this that says "I like this guy". And this is the story of Abin (???) the marksdwarf.
	He says: "Help! Save me! Death is all around us, the horror." And then the hunter stands up
	and then he says "I feel pretty good".
T:	(laughter)
R: 	It's from Count Triple. Hey Count Triple.
C:	Shoutout to Count Triple!
R:	Apparently he's "Just like another day, another day"
C:  Whenever I read these things I can't help but view it like
	an action hero one-liner
	(in a voice) "Death is all around me. I feel pretty good."
R: 	(laughter)
T:	Yeah, I'm trying to remember if that's what happens when their thoughts are
	cleared and they have nothing to talk about,
	or if that's what they think when they're an optimist or something.
	They have personality based lines and situation based lines and they kind of
	mix and match them and it sometimes makes them sound
	very ridiculous, yeah.
R:  Here's another one on Reddit, from
	Cabbage Troll: It says that the necromancer invaders
	have been hanging around outside my fortress for so long they've started
	reproducing.
T:	[Laughter]
R:	The kids are listed as friendly in the unit menu.
T:	[Laughter] That's sorrowful I hope they
	don't send out the military to take care of that,
	because they probably will just have to be like wilderness.
	orphan necromancer invaders. I assume that's not zombies - well I hope it's not
	zombies that are that are reproducing.
R:	Well here it says it says "shadow wolf of frightfulbolts has given birth to a girl".
	So it looks like the wolves are reproducing babies.
T:	Oh those... Yeah if it's wolf - it's not too precise
	with the language, but my guess is if it's a wolf
	then it's probably one of the quadrupeds or hexapods that they bred from the
	livestock. But it's also possible that wolf was just used as a name for a humanoid
	because it had a wolf-like aspect to it, right.
C:  mhm
R: 	mhm mhm
T:	But everyone can... well not
	everyone. It actually decides if they can breed or not. Some of them are,
	what is that called, diamorphic or whatever, and then some of them are just
	just one sort of body or the other, and some of them it doesn't specify.
	There's all sorts of ways the experiments can
	turn out, that's why they're experiments.
R:	Can you have necromancers that aren't
	inherently aggressive to a fortress?
T:	No, sadly. Sadly they're all rather messed up people.
R:	I mean it might be kind of cool if you could have a necromancer show up and
	offer to buy the corpses off of you. You know what I mean?
T:	Definitely one of those branching
	narrative type of things like-
R:	That would be kind of neat.
T:	-is this a good decision? Is this the decision I want to make for the future of my fort? But I mean if the
	necromancer is willing to pay and the dwarves see that like
	shiny metal stuff.
R:	Adn then they turn around and attack your fort with them, yeah yeah.
T:	Yeah, yeah. But now it might be worth it because you'd be able to
	kind of turn the metal around and make some weapons or something.
	That could be a part of a lifelong partnership as long as you're generating
	enough bodies and forts often do that.
R:	Yep. Here's another post from NZ Sloth.
	It says "Dammit, Safety Hat, my favorite dwarf is dead.
	She's followed me for 46 years through five forts. Started as a useless
	forge slave in my first fort in this world and produced my first artifact: a
	lead cap, hence the nickname "Safety Hat". She migrated to every fort since then.
	She was always single and had a bad personality but was always doing useful
	things. And how did she die, with honor and battle defending a friend? Nope.
	Cleaning up after a major goblin invasion and she somehow...
	falls into a volcano."
	[Laughter]
T:	Yeah, I guess that's another argument for the fencing. It's like "could you add
	fences to the game, please".
C:	My fort has a volcano and
	I really hope no one falls into it.
R:	Well, how do people fall? Is it slippery
	ground or is it just like...
T:	No, I mean that's why I'm confused because
	normally it would be something like dodging or something, right?
	The only time I ever hear about that is dodging, but apparently
	there are other cases.
R:	Yeah, apparently, yeah. And is it is it possible that it's just
	something they were doing messing around with bridges or something?
T:	Oh well, I mean the player is always a wild card here.
	The way the person's talking about it it seems like that they weren't, you know,
	collapsing a whole section of floor or anything like that.
	But yeah, there's always other... I mean, if there were mine
	carts around they jump out of the way of mine carts. I doubt there was a falling
	tree, although it could have been outside because it was cleaning up after
	a invasion. If someone was doing a lumber operation they could jump out of the way
	of the tree.
R:	Ah, and that would possibly cause you to
	topple off a cliff.
T:	Yeah, right down to the center of the
	volcano, sadly. The lead hat's not going to help for
	very long.
R:	It's like melting as you...
T:	It's like Terminator 2 maybe they held their thumbs up. It's a great moment for everybody.
R:	She's like "My nightmare is finally over".
(laughter)
T:	Yeah, why she decided to go to the fifth fort this person was running.
R:	I know, "I'm with you, to the very end".
C:	What was her emotional state? This is the the important thing.
R:	Yeah, NZ Sloth, we want to know more. We need more information.
T:	Yeah, cause I imagine they were sad that their
	fat was melting inside their skin, while their skin was unaffected or however it works.
C:	Or they were in rain a year ago.
R:	(laughter) (???)[17:55] rain for a year yeah
	(In a voice) "It rained on me once".
T:	Yeah, still it's like... every time I talk about like the
	triumphant addition of character arcs and long-term memory to Dwarf Fortress
	it's like, well, of course half of these character arcs involve someone getting
	sad in the rain and upending their whole life philosophy.
R: 	(laughter)
T:	It needs work. It's pretty sad, but it's all
	right. Everything will be fine.
R:	Okay. So someone mentions a good omen and that just makes me wonder, like have
	you ever thought about putting omens in the game?
T:	Yeah... Everything to do with precognition and prophecy is always
	kind of tricky. Which is why- what we've done so far with the the like the
	shrines when you... because there's the dice now in the shrines, right, and you
	can roll them. And sometimes it is like "oh good luck for the week", or whatever,
	which is in a sense some sort of omen. Of course we could have stated it a little better.
	I mean the pictures on the dice sometimes are fun.
	But the idea is that we can produce
	something like that omen for you by altering your skill rolls. And that is of
	course just an adventure mode thing. And we
	do bad luck the same way that we did bad luck with the mummies by
	just tanking the occasional skill roll, so
	that a bad thing will happen
	periodically.
R: 	Really?
T:	Yeah, we didn't want to just cut the skill
	rolls by 20% or something. We make it so it zeros a skill roll
	every once in a while, and if that happens to be a crucial
	dodge roll or a crucial attack roll then you will feel cursed.
	Not that it's like so apparent... it really should highlight it by having
	the mummy laugh in your head when it happens or something.
	But yeah, it's not signposted enough, it'll just like generally feel like bad
	luck which the player would have to kind of think back to
	what they did. Why were you robbing a tomb? Or why were you rolling the dice?
R:	Well I was thinking you could do omens like having a bat land on the
	leader or something and like have that be like an omen of an upcoming
	vampire attack, you know, inside your fortress.
	Or bunch of swallows fly you know over the river and that's an
	omen of an attack from elves or something.
T:	Yeah... we did... it's funny, it was like in the pre-initial release, I'm not even sure
	this was in the first release. When there was an undead invasion scheduled for year
	four or five, one of your dwarves would have a
	nightmare the season before, and it would be in their thoughts
	that they had a nightmare about the undead invasion.
	So that that kind of omen is easier to do than the ones that you're talking about,
	when we already know that there's a scheduled event. Like once the army
	leaves to march, of course that's a little more difficult now because armies
	arrive fairly quickly at the destination.
	But it's still possible to just kind of seed it in the AI's head, that hey we want to
	attack you. And it's all the better if
	the omen is not sort of guaranteed to to come true, which is, you know...
R:	Oh that would be kind of cool, yeah.
T:	...fairly common and then then you can set up prophecies
	like that. It's like the sort of Macbeth style prophecies are harder to
	do, when you're like "no one's going to be able to harm you" and stuff like that.
	Then you have to go through all the mechanics and turn them off and make
	sure that you can't accidentally fall into volcano, or whatever.
	Or if you do you're just like magically saved by water that spilled somewhere
	and turned it into obsidian right before you hit the ground, and you hit the
	ground just right, or whatever. And that's just...
	it's too much work, right, but the kind of the kind of like
	foretelling events that the game has already decided to do
	is much more simple.
	And if we go with something like the cave-ins that are... if-when we
	we pull off the idea about kind of scheduling cave-ins when there's structural flaws, and so forth,
	then it could have omens about that kind of event scheduled.
	We could do crop failure. It could be an easy schedule, you just decide that
	a farm plot's gonna fail completely and then
	kind of schedule, like partially talk (?) [22:10] about that.
	Yeah so I see that as definitely the sort of thing that that
	you can get a lot of traction on in different directions.
[Musical interlude starts] (22:15)
R:	Yeah yeah, that'd be cool.
[Musical interlude]

C:	All right well I have a tiny little question, a tiny
	little topic that has a personal favorite of mine.
	When are we going to play as other civilizations when are we going to get
	Goblin Pit? Necromancer Tower? Human... town?
	Human city? Human... harem guard? (?)
R:	Human caves? (?)
C:	Yeah.
	So many options. And procedural civs. I'm sure it's really easy to add all of
	this in just a couple of lines of code, right?
R:	Oh just, yeah, five minutes right?
T:	Yeah... I mean we have our eyes on these things, right. It's like... and you
	know we say that after, you know, 14 years of not having them... although my
	brother's forts often involve a above-ground component. He just makes
	little houses for them outside, and so forth, with a wall.
	But yeah the various challenges
	there. I mean we've experienced them in the new residency stuff
	having humans move into an existing fortress.
	Like especially if you've got different types of critters then you have to worry
	about clothing- of course, because we, you know,
	stupidly made clothing different sizes or whatever, we have to worry
	about that. So in some sense it should be easier to do the the
	single critter fortresses, and then people have experienced the issues with
	that when they're modding, right. Flying critters have horrible
	path finding. With humans you're more just like
	we need a better construction interface right, like to build buildings.
	Even if it is... I mean people
	are probably used to it by now, since there's so many games where you can just
	place things block by block, like building houses like that. I always kind
	of felt bad that... like when you built a big wooden wall
	that it's not like a house raising or something like where you bring
	"bshhhh" -
	here comes the big wall, popping into place, right? It feels like that's how it
	should be. But, I mean, that ship is fairly well sailed so it doesn't really matter.
C: 	??? [24:35]
T:	Yeah, just placing block by block and having this little... you know,
	that's fine. So I don't think that big deal, the big deal is just the
	horrible interface for it when you're like b-shift-c-w.
	At least you can drag rectangles now,
	and enter-enter-enter-enter, and select the wood. But that's
	one of the things that's up to be changed in
	the Steam release, which of course carries over to the Classic
	release as well, of having better ways to place
	constructions, and not having to like select every
	individual log. And like if you don't care
	which maple log, or even if it's maple that they use
	then you should be able to pop down a wall just by going, you know, click-click.
C:	Click-and-drag rectangle yeah
T:	Yeah it's a little more difficult with
	the z stuff but if we if we repurpose the mouse wheel in that interface for
	going up and down z levels, then it'd be like click, and then mouse-wheel-twiddle-click,
	and then you've got a three tall
	seven long north-south wall, right.
R:	Beautiful, yeah.
T:	You still need 21 logs to build it but that's your dwarves' problem,
	not yours.
R:	Right.
T:	And then you've kind of attained
	one of the big stumbling blocks for human
	town mode, is just getting those things nicely
	structured and having easy way to lay out
	roadways, and stuff like that. And then that would be
	kind of the big thing. Then there are sort of
	other stumbling blocks of getting... Well there are a
	few other things to think about. One would be just the
	overall framing story, like we probably don't want the mountain homes
	of the humans like sending you a liaison that requests that you
	uplift a baron, in like the same way and stuff, right? So there'd be certain
	restructuring and the current thinking on that had been
	to do that with the embark scenarios. To kind of think about why you're there
	and then that would be more structurable. Of course that would come after the Myth
	& Magic release, and this is kind of the big point on that is that
	with the Myth & Magic release you set those weird sliders over
	to have non dwarf play because you're playing a like three legged mollusk.
	Then, I mean, human town mode seems attainable
	when you've know done three legged mollusk mode. Of course
	three legged mollusk mode comes before the embark scenarios in this timeline, so
	you'd still have some kind of like output liaison scenario probably with
	your three-legged mollusks. So it's one of these things that we're
	approaching in this modular fashion. As we've noticed in the past with
	several features once you've done enough of the work like this and
	you think ahead to the sort of things you want, and we've
	always kind of wanted to be able to play...
R:	Mollusk man fortress?
T:	Well, more like humans, and necromancers, and wizards
	assistants and things like that, right. So we're always sort of aiming at
	these things with the features that we add, even if
	we're kind of slow about it.
	But you just suddenly realize what
	you can do. Like we had with the villains release, realizing we were able
	to pull off more than we thought we could do
	initially there because of the other structures that had been put in place.
	And now because of what we've done there we're
	going to suddenly realize, and not suddenly realize because we planned for
	this, but realize that oh, you know, all kinds of diplomacy and stuff is open
	now because we've got people that can perform tasks for other people.
	And so you can say out all kinds of things like that now have a framework in place that
	that will more or less work once we
	revisit after the after the Steam release and finish it up.
R:	So what kind of things can you have
	people do, theoretically? Like have people assassinate other people, is that what
	you're kind of talking about, or doing
	trade missions or?
T:	(chuckles) So the people assassinating people
	actually falls within the villains framework itself, so it's like that that
	part was yeah, yeah-
R:	But you can hire people to do that
	is what you're saying?
T:	Yeah, exactly. And in fact that was going to be part of the villain's release, is this kind of
	fort as villain or fort as spymaster thing where all of the plots
	available to the villains, including like preparing an artifact heist
	or doing an assassination mission, doing some kind of blackmail mission to get
	someone generally on your side so you can use them later,
	all of that would be easily available in fort mode just by going into the
	the "c" screen or wherever. It might be
	moved over to the counter, or the espionage screen, or be part of the the c
	world map screen. But we have these kind of messengers
	and you'd be able to set up your agent as a kind of messenger, and send
	them on a mission. Because we have those squad missions
	that you can send dwarves out of your fortress to raid things and steal
	livestock, or whatever. But those missions all use this this thing, just because of
	how they started, it's called the army controller framework, and that's just the
	kind of goal that's sitting in their head
	that controls a group that's moving on the map.
	But now the army controllers can be linked to
	plots and plots live inside the head of every person who is kind of in the
	intrigue game. We don't have them for all
	like 20 000 living people because it would start to be kind of a memory and
	processing problem, but anyone who's sort of opted into the world of intrigue,
	which includes all the leaders in the world but also all the villains and a
	few other players, have the the plots and their plot
	actors that they can kind of say like "what is
	my current perceived place in the game", "what is
	my objectives" and "what plots can I initiate to achieve my objectives
	whether that's-"
R:	Would-
T:	-yeah.
R:	Would you be theoretically able to, like, blackmail a
	leader of another nation into protecting, putting troops outside
	of your fortress to keep you safe?
T:	Yeah, the theory would have to be accompanied by making the
	alliance system work a little better. We have an alliance system now, right,
	in quotes, "the alliance system" in quotes. Because necromancers still take over the
	world, right, so we decided to help civilization live longer by having any
	any civilized people that aren't, you know,
	undead or, you know, ruled by demons and so forth ally
	against the threats that are that sort of thing.
	And then they will send their armies together. That has not been realized
	in fort mode because it involves some timing on the
	world map. But the good news is, of course, the
	army rewrite stuff that's coming before the magic release.
	Before that all that stuff, just
	after the graphics release, we have the villain
	finishing and the army work.
	And army work right now, there's going to be things that are done
	and things that aren't done and as usual we don't know quite what's going to land
	inside the mark and what's not. But certainly on the table is that kind of
	thing; this sort of coordinating of forces, leading forces that are off-site,
	being able to direct them further than what you can do now, which is just kind
	of send them off on a mission, then they come back. But what would it mean to be
	able to kind of raise up a whole army from all of your holdings? I mean it
	constantly tells you about your holdings, right, it's like "oh this
	hillocks group is looking to your fortress
	for its economic security" or whatever.
	I don't remember what the message was, but it pops up annoyingly and you have
	to press enter. And sometimes it's like goblins or something, right, it just
	pops up and you're like "okay what does that mean?". Doesn't mean much.
	And I think sometimes it means you can send for people from
	there, you can like request more migrants anytime you want. You can also exile your
	dwarves. If you want to kick someone out of your fortress you can kick them out
	to those places.
R:	Huh.
T:	Yeah, that's all in. I'm not
	sure how well that that's realized right now but that's technically in. There's
	some weird things about it of course.
R:	So what happens if you exile a vampire to a
	neighbor?
T:	Yeah... they they'd be a vampire
	in the the neighboring village, I don't think that's...
R:	Would they take over though?
	That's what is my question. Like [???] [33:25]?
T:	No no no, yeah yeah. I think vampires are one of those things that post-world gen
	doesn't have the same kind of AI fidelity.
	It'd probably just try and sneak back to your fortress basically.
	But assuming a new identity... (chuckle) it's so ridiculous because they'd assume a
	new identity.
R:	"Hey wasn't that Urist! I thought that was Urist!"
	"No, no, no, that's Uzed."
	"I don't think so!"
C: 	Diffent hat.
R:	"He's wearing a different hat, you can tell."
(laughter)
T:	Yeah, it's like they freshly clean off all their bone trinkets or whatever.
	But... yeah, and the thing that's even worse
	about it is like it would partially work.
	The player would probably be confused by it unless they like looked at the dwarf
	and saw the scars or saw something else that they identified,
	but your dwarves in the counter
	espionage screen where they track identities,
	if that dwarf had been brought in previously or otherwise talked to,
	like they would know that the new identity was fake.
	But they wouldn't bother telling anybody.
R:	(laughter) Oh yeah, that's the vampire we kicked out.
C: 	There's no urgency to reveal a plot, it's just like "oh, yeah, I knew.".
T:	Yeah it's like classified. "This is
	classified information, we've redacted the vampire's identity".
	But the player is not on a need to know basis here.
C:	I'm thinking like the witness protection program.
T:	Oh I'm wondering...
R:	So are you
	planning on like setting up an automated system where you can give orders based
	on like discovered intelligence? Like any discovered vampires for instance that
	show up are immediately put into holding or something?
T:	I think the main
	thing we thought about was migrant kind of...
	like do you have a interrogation thing where you bring people in and
	and talk to them when you're worried about...
R:	This is your interview.
T:	...yeah, agents and vampires and
	stuff. But, you know, as we all kind of experience now when you have
	stricter immigration protocols there's a whole other
	side of that, right. So it's
	interesting to see where that takes the fort, and what that means about
	your reputation with the outside world; what that means with the reputation with
	the rest of your civilization. I mean one of the main things you can have in
	in even in medieval times is like the king
	of the dwarves or whatever, the queen of the dwarves, gives a a writ or something
	to people or a whole group of people the right to the freedom of movement, right,
	and stuff like that.
R:	Yeah yeah.
T:	And so you would be perhaps at odds with
	your civilization, because it seems my impression
	is that you know dwarves are a very kind of... you're allowed to move where you want,
	right, that's very much seems to be how it works.
R:	They're free-loving species, yeah.
T:	Yeah, that's like you can go here and...
	But when we start getting more into guilds and more into
	religious stuff there's going to be
	these sort of natural in-group out-group and exclusion
	practices and so forth that'll be interesting to model on a...
	Getting tensions with your own civilization be pretty
	cool.
R:	That will be interesting, yeah. Getting like the shoe guild
	to be at odds with the glove making guild right.
C:	Yeah.
R:	They want they want better prices on the leather, right, but they fight
	over that and so there's a this competition there.
C:	Just as intense as Game of Thrones.
T:	[Laughter] That's right. The Game of Shoes.
R:	Yeah, "Urist, were you just kissing your sister?".
T:	Oh dear.
R:	"...no."
T:	Well that's a whole
	topic we probably shouldn't go into. It's like how do these family
	trees happen in Dwarf Fortress some of the ones we see?
R:	The monarchies.
T:	[Laughter] Yeah, it's like I'm not sure we have an
	appropriate uncle detector. Does it work? I'm not sure.
C:	Oh no.
R:	We don't have any
	genetics in the game, do we? Oh my gosh, this conversation is going everywhere.
	But like family trees,
	do they have any things that get passed down?
T:	Oh yeah, yeah.
	I mean you can tell when you see like the the
	the eye color and stuff right. And the hair and other simple
	stuff like that just passes down,
	just because it's what people expect more or less, right.
	There are very basic in the sense that you can
	have... there's sort of a dominance-recessive thing but it's - if I'm
	not mistaken is it alphabetical right now? I don't quite
	remember. (chuckles) It's really not in depth the way
	it is now, but yeah, technically you could do things like dog breeding
	and stuff. It would be pretty harsh the way you have to cull to get what you
	want because you can't... I guess you can do gelding
	to kind of close off certain colors of dogs and things. And
	technically that should work, I'm not sure how much people have tried to do
	that.
C:	There was someone on the forums recently who tried that...
	Let me see... "genetics and selective breeding
	science" by moeteru. "genetics and inheritence are supposed
	to be a thing, this is what Toady had to say in DF Talk number eight," -
T and R:	Oh!
	- "from ten years ago"
R:	Wow.
C:	But they did some experiments and their conclusion is, !to put it simply
	attributes don't seem to be inheritable, all the means are within roughly one
	standard error of one thousand, which is what you'd expect if they're generated
	completely randomly".
T:	Okay, so attributes, we're talking about
	like the strength of the...
C:	Mhm mhm.
T:	Yeah. so that's different
	than colors. I mean I don't know if they talked about the colors at all.
	Attributes I have no memory... I thought I you know back as it's probably
	the same roughly I don't know as a long time ago as what I said in DF Talk
	number eight from like 20-, whatever that was, -12 or
	something. My recollection was that there was
	a kind of link to that, but yeah it not
	working would not be the most uncommon thing to hear in Dwarf Fortress terms, would it?
R:	Well that would be cool if you could
	breed for stronger teeth, or just stronger dwarves, or whatever.
T:	Yeah, my understanding was that you could at least for the
	main attributes, but yeah
	sadly broken, according to the forum scientists.
	We try our best. Our best is rarely good enough.
R:	Yep. Bugs happen.
T:	Yeah, bugs and all kinds of other mess.
[Musical interlude] (40:30)

C:	All right, and now we're going to answer
	some questions. If you have questions you'd like answered please send them to
T:	toadyone@bay12games.com , and make sure that the entire subject
	line is "Question for DF Talk".
S:	Meow.
T:	Hey Scamps.
C:	Perfect.
R:	The meow.
T:	Yeah, so here are the questions:
	So we have a question from Recon 106.
	The question is,
	when we do add the Myth & Magic release,
	when we add demons to it, is there going to be a possibility of worlds
	where the demons are not trapped in the underworld, that they're actually roaming
	around on the the the outside? Because
	what we were talking about when we talked about these
	other races, not just demons and things but angels and
	forest spirits, and all that, we just kind of talked about them as if they're out
	there doing their thing, or they're off in some plane somewhere, or
	they're wherever. And indeed that's the idea. The idea is
	that there would be a number of situations,
	it wouldn't always be the underworld exactly as it is with, you know,
	- spoiler alert! - adamantine
	spires coming up from a kind of underworld place that's
	described as being a different place, like the sky is described as different
	when you go down there and do the weather description, so it is sort of a
	different place, but it's really just kind of under too - it's the underworld.
	And it always works a certain way. Yeah. And we're planning on
	having just different possibilities there.
	Although in the next question we'll address
	that. But first, another
	question from Recon 106, is whether or not it'd be possible
	to deal with necromancers
	that can raise your corpse piles and so forth, whether or not
	it would be possible for proactive zombie movie measures
	to deal with that? Which of course you could do now by dumping
	dumping the bodies into a magma pit for example,
	but they want to be able to
	chop off like the heads or something right and just do sufficient
	chopping. Which I believe would be the heads and both hands? Like as long as you
	have a grasper or a head-
S:	Meow.
T:	Yeah, as long as you have a grasp or a
	head you're allowed to come back from the dead, right.
	So that you can be like... is it "thing"? Is that the hand?
R:	Yeah.
T:	Yes, "thing" the hand. We needed to have "thing". "Thing" was required, but also
	just like a head that goes like "wakwakwakwakwakwakwak".
(laughter)
T: 	Okay, so these two
	things are important. So yeah, it'd be a kind of quirky thing to add, you know.
	In the general sense I'm all for it. I have no idea when I
	get to doing things like that but I think it's a...
	Certainly now in the the world that we've created I can see why people are
	thinking about sort of anti-zombie measures.
R:	Well it's very scary out there right now.
C:	We already have werewolf and wereperson plagues. Those aren't fun.
T:	Yeah that's... we made them a little bit harder, your fort
	has to be a little further along, you shouldn't just get them in the first
	season anymore. But yes... and I don't know that there's any really
	good counter counter measures for that, other than just quarantining everybody
	that was bit.
R:	Has been bit.
T:	Yeah but you can't like
	press silver against their foreheads or anything like that.
R:	So now what happens if your entire fortress turns into werebeasts?
T:	My understanding is that it doesn't fall to ruin when they convert? Because the
	worry would be when the full moon happens they all turn into were beasts
	then it would say like "your fortress has fallen into ruin".
	My recollection was thinking of that, and fixing that. But you always,
	like after this many years what side issues and edge cases I've
	fixed versus which ones someone's brought to my attention and I was like
	"oh I really need to fix that". I'm not actually sure anymore whether that's
	fixed, but my understanding is that you would just have them kind of convert and
	then nothing bad would happen. Except the new migrants of course, any new migrants
	would have a very bad day that day. And then you'd have more, maybe.
C:	Fortress Wolfenstein.
T:	Yeah, yeah. I think that's how it works but I may be wrong.
R:	That's kind of funny.
T:	Yeah. Next question is from Firey, I'm not sure how to pronounce any of these obviously, but Firey from
	the forum had a question for DF Talk,
	wondering if the if the myth generator can generate all
	of the vanilla elements, and whether in fact you could
	recreate the entire vanilla thing? This relates to that that previous question
	about, well, are demons not going to be in the underworld anymore, could you
	have all kinds of different demons? But then the flip side is, could you get back
	to Dwarf Frotress are we really just blowing everything up?
	Could you get back to the...
C:	The default.
T:	Yeah, the default setting. And the idea is
	that we'd kind of be growing out from that, right. The easiest thing to
	do, of course, is to change nothing. And then as you're changing things the stuff
	that you haven't changed, of course, is still just sitting there
	and as we build out the myth generator some stuff is just going to get
	changed immediately and other things won't be.
	And as we're doing that we're planning on having the
	ability to recreate the existing situation. Of course it's sitting right
	there so mostly it's easy to have that as an option.
	But also we understand even nostalgia reasons are completely legitimate
	reasons to just keep it there if it's keepable right.
	And having things like - the way the myth
	generator works, I understand why the concern comes up, the way the myth
	generator works when it talks about underworlds and portals and things
	hasn't in any of the examples we've read recreated the
	the existing situation. But of course the existing situation as it stands is
	ambiguous, as we kind of alluded to before. The underworld is under, it sits
	below and you dig down to get there, but once you get there if you press the
	weather button in adventure mode it says that "the clouds are purple swirling
	spirals" and none of that is reflected in the game. I mean, our thinking
	was that you actually did end up in another place that was below
	but also different. And so the nice thing about the map rewrite that comes with the initial myth
	release is that it allows us to realize the default system in the way we wanted it realized,
	but if someone wanted to also just have a lower cave layer
	then that would also be possible. And it's in fact the easier way to do it.
	So it might be described differently though.
	So in some limited sense then perhaps the
	default would not be attainable, unless there's a way to go to the same place
	but have it sky described differently for some reason.
	Which was kind of just covering for our inability to do what we wanted to do.
	Yeah, so that's the caveat I guess on the on the recreation of the default.
C:	Would there be an option to have a just baseline default
	DF classic, however you want to spin it.
	Because I think there's something to be said for having like a baseline
	experience.

[48:50]

T:	Oh yeah, I think I think that's
	that's what's going to happen when you have the sliders on pretty low settings
	too as you kind of... it really will just draw from the files and maybe just
	give you forgotten beasts, and give you a pretty prosaic... I mean the
	myth is going to be there, and of course the lowest slider setting
	was that it's fake, which would probably be the most default setting there is.
	Except for the fact that the vampires and werewolves
	happen, and the demons are released with
	those vault things, and so forth. There's a few kind of default things that
	that that happen but at the same time-
R:	Does that shut down the necromancy then too?
T:	Well, necromancy is also very
	defaulty, or whatever.
	I think the kind of counterpoint is, I mean it's similar to
	the the way we stepped into 3D, right. We lost
	certain cool stuff that we want to recreate, and in fact the map rewrite is
	our way of recreating that. So we're finally returning to some of the
	cool stuff that's going to restructure the the play experience in 3D to
	bring some of the 2D stuff back, have the ability to do that finally,
	with like better underground rivers and waterfalls, and things.
	But the thing here is some of the
	things are just so unrealized, like what it means for those deity curses to
	happen and why these
	secrets of life and death are being given to the necromancers by the deities,
	and things like that.
	Like there's something to be said for the
	default experience, but it would be cool to have a little more information too
	and maybe we can't avoid having more information, or something.
	And then there's the whole other thread here about the about the editors. When you
	say like, people sitting down having a default dwarf fortress experience,
	there's also this one where there might be... we've talked about pack-in worlds and
	stuff being bad in general, but there's
	also this kind of like pack-in setting idea we had just for
	the sake of giving people, like modders especially etc., and also just to keep us honest about it,
	having every kind of thing that you can do with the editors command-wise
	being realized in some kind of pack-in. And then that would actually end
	up being a kind of defaulty setting. Just kind of reclaiming certain
	default elements just by showing you "well, if you want to write demons in an
	underworld this is how you tell the myth generator to always do that".
R:	Have we talked meaningfully about the modding community? I'm just curious
	if we're going to have Steam support
	for the modding community, or if you're just going to keep it the way it
	it's always been?
T:	Oh no, that's a whole
	thing the integration of Steam Workshop.
	And we're actually  having the whole shebang there.
R: 	Whew!
T:	The questions that remain are like mostly technical ones. It's like you turn the
	Steam Workshop on people can sign in get their mods and stuff, but games also
	often have a interface within the game itself where
	you click the Steam workshop button, and it pops up a connecting window to Steam,
	and stuff like that, right. You click on and off, and stuff like that.
	That all is just a matter of like, I
	haven't looked at the API yet, like I haven't gone on Steam and said "what is
	your API? How do you integrate these libraries, and windows, and things?".
	And so that's why I have no specifics, right,
	about what exactly is going to get pulled off on the first release, versus
	how we can improve it over time, how like internet connection stuff works.
	Because in one model Steam handles all the internet stuff. You
	go to Workshop, you click yes-no-yes-no, and stuff.
	And then it knows what mods you have, it patches them into your game,
	but the the game doesn't connect to the internet to do that.
	And then in the other model the game also handles the mods. And that's better in a way because
	it allows you to do more collision detection and other stuff like that,
	right, it's like ideal to have it work that way. But we'll see
	kind of what the hurdles are for that, and that's the only reason that
	I don't have like strict promises about the exact setup. But yeah it's all...
	it should be cool. Because mods are cool, people sharing
	mods are cool.
R:	Yeah, I always feel like
	when games do it well, it provides a lot of interesting content for for the
	game.
	I mean, there are some games that like just totally exploded once they they did
	that, like Minecraft of course.
C:	I'm thinking DOOM.
T:	(chuckles) Yeah, I was a DOOM modder in my own house. I shared it with
	our friends, played our DOOM levels in like 1993 or
	whatever... over like a telephone
	connection, or whatever. Yeah, that was cool.
R:	Speaking of multiplayer games, is there a universe where
	someday two people could play Dwarf Fortress and
	manage the fortress together?
T:	I'm always out of date on the mods,
	right. I think people have done lots of experiments with that now.
R:	Hmm. I wasn't aware of that.
C:	I think there was a version with a terminal two people could connect to.
T:	Yeah because there's that remote DF already that communicates with the one
	that's running in your home, or whatever.
	...and I'm not sure why, I mean maybe...
	if you want everyone signing in, it'd be like a private server
	if you could get that to hook up twice. I mean, people would be fighting,
	I mean, they'd have to figure out how to - like what happens when someone presses left
	and someone punches right? But I'm sure that's a common
	concern that's always figured out.
R:	I mean, it would be nice if each person
	had their own user interface, so they didn't interact with each other.
	You'd have your own cursor so you can see what each person is doing, or whatever.
T:	Yeah yeah, that's obviously a much more involved project
	than... I'm not sure what people have done
	done along those lines in terms of mods because they've done you know most other
	things, so it seems-
R:	But at its core, it's not theoretically impossible.
T:	It's not theoretically impossible. It's generally, you know, away
	from the sort of things we're personally interested in working on.
R:	Oh yeah.
T:	But it's... Yeah, certainly
	certainly in the... and anything to do with like internet protocols is
	completely beyond my experience and expertise,  at all.
	So that's  one reason we haven't done it.
R:	Yeah, that makes sense.
T:	One among many. But yeah, nothing
	outside of, you know, coming up with
	the whole game for why it wouldn't happen.
	It's like how does that work? What are people doing? Who are people playing?
	Who can they control? Do people compete against their orders? Do they like
	have bidding points or something? It's kind of like playing multiplayer Majesty
	or something.
R:	Once you start getting to that place, then each of you might have a certain amount
	of clout with the dwarves. Certain guilds and stuff. That could be kind of fun, I mean-
T:	Yeah yeah, that all sounds really cool.
R:	That could be an expansion, you know. Once you release, you could have the multiplayer expansion.
T:	Yeah, yeah... It's not something I think about much.
[sounds of clanking]
T:	What is that! Here comes trouble!
R:	Uh oh. Does it have a tail?
T:	Well not much of a tail, cause Scamps is manxy-
R:	Oh yeah, that's right!
T:	-but it doesn't stop him from being trouble like a cat. Does it, does it?
	I mean fortunately that had a lid on it, (chuckles) but it's on the floor now.
[Musical Interlude] (57:05)

R:	Well thanks guys, for coming along on this wild ride with us,
	talking about Dwarf Fortress. You know, we're just so happy that you've
	been part of our community for this amount of years. You know what I'm talking about,
	Charlie.
T: (laughter) Yeah, the people-
R:	Let's start thanking people. Who are we thanking, Toady?
T:	Well, everyone who sent questions. That would be Recon 106 and Firey, sending in questions.
	And everybody else out there, this is an opportunity. Dwarf Fortress Talk is back,
	and questions will be answered. Especially now, if yours is the only question, we're going to read it.
	Why I suppose that is a horrible promise to make, because we're going to get some interesting ones now.
R: [laughter]
T:	But we'll go ahead and do it, we'll read them. And yeah, thanks to everybody that helped out,
	not just over the years, but especially last month! And the month before! People helping out now!
	Yeah, Quatch gave me a protocol on how to fix the episode, that was like just...
	step one you do this envelope, step two you look into the spectrogram and do this thing,
	and do the compressor, and do the this and that.
R:	Oh, beautiful.
T:	Yeah, and we should thank Sankis and Will for that as well.
R:	Yay!
T:	If people want to help out we're Bay 12 Games on Patreon, and there is also the little paypal button on our site.
	All that stuff just goes into keeping us going, keeping the lights on on the web site... and feeding, feeding us,
	and rents and foods and things. And the little kitty cat needs his... apparently he's got an addiction to smoked deli meats.
	Can't give him too much deli meats though.
C:	That's the most natural thing in the world.
T:	But is it natural for Scamps to not eat deli meats that are not smoked, and to literally refuse them?
R: 	(laughter) You know what, that's just being a discerning palate, right.
C:	I mean, Scamps can have little-a salami, as a treat.
T:	Yes, it has to be smoked though. I had to eat those deli meats, those labeled as "oven roasted". Oh is oven roasted not good enough for you, is it?
	Just sitting right there, staring at me.
R:	(laughter) You know we're talking about you, Scamps.
T:	(laughter)
C:	I also have a Patreon, Patreon/Capntastic. If you'd like to throw a few dollars my way I have a special Dwarf Fortress tier,
	where when I play Dwarf Fortress I will pull your name out of a hat. Maybe not a literal hat, but I will make a dwarf
	with your name, and if any horrible fate happens I will keep you updated.
R:	And there will be horrible fates.
C: 	Of course.
R:	Yeah, and I'm Rainseeker, and I have a business called Measures of Joy with my wife. We exist in northern California,
	and you can find us on Facebook. At "Measures of Joy Gluten Free" - or "Measures of Joy Bakery Gluten Free". So, have fun finding that.
(laughter)
C:	Choose your fate wisely.
T: 	Yeah, awesome! It was good to get back together and do another show!
[Musical outlude fades in] (1:00:50)
R:	Yeah, and next week, er next time we're going to be announcing the iPad version of Dwarf Fortress!
C:	Oh, don't tell people that.
R:	Oh sorry! Spoilers!
T:	That will be a big surprise...

[Musical outlude]