Developing Battle Magic in Dwarf Fortress. (Tarn Adams Interview)

The following is an interview I hosted with co-creator of Dwarf Fortress Tarn Adams on my stream. We cover recent feature updates and the planned development for 2026. I've attached the full video as well an mp3 if you prefer that format. Below you can also find a transcript of the interview.

Developing Battle Magic in Dwarf Fortress Interview with Tarn Adams final

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BlindIRL:
it's been a while, like
a year, like 10 months, I think, since the last time we did one of these. So a lot of things have happened and a lot of changes have been made to the game and a lot of updates have released. So I guess kind of my first question here is pretty simple, like, how are you and how are things and what's your take on the current state of the game?

Tarn:
Well, everything's fine.
doing all right.
still trucking along.
Same as ever, really.
The move's all gone well and I'm just kind of enjoying enjoying things here. It's all it's all good.
if that's right, then there was what adventure mode came out
then the siege stuff came out.

BlindIRL:
The last one of these we did was right after the adventure mode release,
think.
dies, we've had the archery remake, we've had
behaviors, we do an ammo remake, rework and then the siege update and now the really big road map.
don't we start back kind of from the beginning, I guess,
adventure mode is in the game now since like the last time we talked and people have had time to mess around with that. But
think like
rework to how ammunition and ranged combat in adventure mode works kind of
changed the adventure mode pretty dramatically in ways that I think a lot of people may have missed.

Tarn:
Yeah, I mean, the main thing there was just making it so they didn't have a huge delay after you shot your arrow, because the way it worked before, it was like you would initiate shooting as your attack and it would cost you time.
And so there was but there was no lead time. It was just time afterwards. So you could be standing somewhere and you could instantly shoot an arrow at somebody. And if they were your only opponent and that arrow disabled them, then that's great. Because it's an instant thing and you are at no risk and you could just do it. But if you have to wait six full steps or moves of theirs after you fire and there's anything else going on, then you're just a sitting duck. And that's kind of the opposite of how it works in real life. Right. In real life,
all of the time is in the preparation.
And then once you're ready to fire, firing is almost instantaneous.
And then you can run or something. Right. Rather than waiting. So it changed things kind of the way we like to do it. Like like if we have a system, we want to model, we want to make it more realistic so that future additions make sense and we can just keep riffing on things. Absolutely.
just have a natural scaffolding that comes from the sort of the reality of it.
So, yeah, I was I was really happy to put that change in. And
effect in fortress mode of that particular change isn't as obvious because it's just a big tumult of people shooting weapons and stuff. But it's all in there like dwarves fire their weapons the exact same way as it works in adventure mode. So there's the delay before they have to and they can take aim, which is a huge thing to, of course, shout out to aiming.
That's a big deal. That's made the made the marks dwarves, you know, at that peak lethality. Right. It's like it's it's very dangerous now because they just like to shoot people in the head if they can make that shot. Why not? I think it's probably slightly too easy, but I mean, it's fine. We've just given the the enemies a lot of new tools. So it's fine if that's the way the arms race is working right now,

BlindIRL:
especially when they send like the expert marks goblins or whatever.

Tarn:
Yeah. And all their like matrix dodging, dodging swords, masters and stuff or whatever that will just bat the ammo out of the sky and then jump aside. I nerf that slightly as part of that. So you can't like dodge many bolts at once, which they used to be able to do. Now there's there's a little less of that, but it's still it's very hard to hit them with an initial single isolated bolt.
But then, of course, your skill balance is against that. So it's just that those numbers go up together. And with the bolt thrower, assuming you have ammo sitting around, which is not an easy assumption because they churn through it, you can saturate the field and then the dodging is less effective.

BlindIRL:
Certainly.

Tarn:
So like in a kind of course, you can squish them with a rock.

BlindIRL:
Oh, no. Or dump lava on their head. Whatever is the most convenient for you at that point. But like continuing to kind of work our way through history at this point.
After that, we got a surprise update, which I think kind of caught everybody by surprise, which was the rework of dies, which came out roughly at the same time, I think, and has kind of flown under the radar a little bit. So I'm curious what caused that strange mood?

Tarn:
So I guess so. I mean, there's a lot of different things went into that one.
have been drab forever. And so that's always been a little bit on my radar.
But there was just a ton of data entry, right?
these things were like
player base did wood densities, right? And
they might have had done some die collection and suggestion forms, too. But but we never really drilled down and was like, you got got it to the point where every plant in the game, we looked at it. And so,
wife, Steph, and was like, oh, I can do that. And we and I collected all of the plants and colors and stuff. And I was like, OK, it's done. We can do this.
that was cool. It was just like, yeah, we all we all like colors in this household.
And my room quite drab
to the other room, of course,
this is what it looks like when you haven't moved your your books from Washington state yet. I know I don't know what kind of statement I'm making here with this bookshelf. But it's it's like it's not it's not like I'm a proud non-reader or something. I mean, I just haven't been able to move my books.
waiting to waiting to be filled. I have enough books to fill it, too. But yeah, that's not going to happen any time. It's so hard to move like books from,
you know, several thousand miles away.

BlindIRL:
They don't like shipping container pretty much.

Tarn:
Yeah. Yeah. Or a lot of flights

BlindIRL:
in a big suitcase.

Tarn:
That's the current plan is just like, yeah, it's like, I will not be wearing a change of clothes that day because I want three extra books. Something like that.
Yes. Yes. They'll make it eventually.

BlindIRL:
Leave a couple changes of clothes back in Washington state. You know, just like have that for when you.

Tarn:
There's like laundry and stuff. We got this covered. We can do it.

BlindIRL:
Oh, that's certainly my form of travel. I tend to like bring a change of clothes that just go to the nearest store.
Yeah, it's cheaper than like paying for a suitcase on a flight.
yeah, that's interesting. I think that the the dies update is neat because like I keep finding stuff that like I didn't realize came into the game around that time. Like there's so many different plants that you can process now
cute my old plant processing job to work on pigtails. And it's like, what, what about cabbages?

Tarn:
Yeah, there's so many there's so many colors like like we couldn't even do justice because we only have like one color outcome per plant. And in real life, that's also something I know we have more because you can tint. Right. But that's against the material you're dying. Right. So you can do the tinting of the material. But even within one plant like leaves, you can get multiple colors. So it's yeah, we you know, we've scratched the edge. I think we don't need to. We don't need to do that part. But but there are other things we were going to get to. You can do all kinds of cool stuff
there's a long list
not finished die stuff that we'd love to do if we can have the alamores. You know, we talked about this before. Maybe or somebody I talked about this with somebody. Maybe who is that? Did we not talk about alum and mordents and heap leaching?
Possibly. Maybe. Yeah, someone's heap leaching something somewhere, but it ain't us yet. We're getting there. Some someday there'll be a heap and we'll leach some stuff and do mineral dies. But that's later.

BlindIRL:
Yeah, I think we did talk about that briefly,

Tarn:
Yeah, yeah. So yeah,

BlindIRL:
the the I guess the question that I have about dies is like a lot
could still be made to it, obviously, but I think that the dies historically and now in the modern game, I think kind of.
Show places in the game where micromanaging production chains can be a pain in the butt.
And I think that the dies are an interesting like thought experiment on like maybe finding ways to improve the feasibility of like queuing up a die chain without just getting 150 job cancellations and saying, screw it,
even when it comes down to just like the availability of bags.
I'm curious if you have any plans to look into like production chains surrounding stuff, especially in a world where like, you know, you've talked about magic in a very real way recently.
And I'm curious if production chains are a priority for you at all at the moment.

Tarn:
Yeah, I mean, it's starting to I mean, it's it's it's it's it's percolating up where there's this upward pressure that grows and grows and grows. Same with like clothing and and damaged clothing, where repairing clothing, that kind of thing,
think it's related to the production chains because it's just another goddamn like logistically messy thing.
I don't have I don't have specific thoughts. I basically have to read read a lot more about the pain that people are having. I just know it's there and it feels like it's something we've been thinking more about. So I mean, we tried to add a bunch of helpful things with dies
in terms of like specification of plants and different plant jobs and stuff like that. But I think, yeah, there's just some some larger sweeping things that need to be done, and I'm not sure what they are.

BlindIRL:
I think it certainly has like gotten better since before the dies update, because like now you can like specify like certain things, like what kind of plant you want to process and stuff, which I recall correctly, you can do before.

Tarn:
Yeah, that's all new. That was all with the dice.

BlindIRL:
I think the biggest one for me at the moment is just like bags and accessibility to bags and stuff that dies go into because it's just like, OK, make a thousand bags because there's no other way that I have to like function with this because between like dyes, sand and seeds, it's like everything's calling for bags. And it's not quite like barrels where stuff can just mix.
Right. It's the one thing.

Tarn:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BlindIRL:
So it's like

Tarn:
there's a well, I think I think at some point, you know, people are using like giant cauldrons and vats and other larger containers. Right. And not not trying to like like once you have an industry going, you shouldn't have like 900 bags. It's just a waste of material. You should should be should be using fancier containers. Feel like a dwarf would have a
keg, except it's not explosive. It just has dye in it.

BlindIRL:
It could be flammable.

Tarn:
Well, you could also, you know, yeah. There's got to be flammable fudge out there. That has to be a thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I imagine. Imagine. Imagine a lot of them are flammable. And I mean, I don't know if you have to dry them and stuff to make sure the oils and stuff are another.
That's a trouble.

BlindIRL:
That's a thought.
Speaking of stuff exploding, fast forwarding in time a little bit, you mentioned earlier that, you know, it's kind of hard to hit goblins with your first shot because of the skills that they have, although it's they can't dodge multiple bolts. Now, I think that kind of brings us up to like the current real consumer of ammunition, which is like bolt throwers. So yeah, bolt throwers actually use so much ammunition that I have turned up the mineral generation in my worlds because I was running out of iron. Like literally in the first few forts that I ran after the siege update, I straight up gave up. I was like, I don't often play with higher mineral scarcity, but I'm going to turn up the number by about a thousand because I need more material.

Tarn:
Well, you need that trade update is what you need so you can order shipments of iron or bolts directly just just because you're hungry for them.

BlindIRL:
I'm already doing that. It's just I can't get it in high enough quantity. I mean, I've been in.

Tarn:
Oh, no, that's what I mean. You need you need a real like a real update where you're like, not just like, well, this is my priority item. You're like, no, I will give you, you know, this specific thing that you want. Like three artifacts. If you will give me nine thousand steel bolts.
I mean, that'd be a better trade.

BlindIRL:
Yeah, I would absolutely.

Tarn:
Quite a while ago. Yeah.

BlindIRL:
You can totally have these three left socks.

Tarn:
yeah,
interested like

Tarn:
thing about the siege update that was finally breaking people's spirits and being like, I just want to parlay. I just want the parlay to work so I can give them an artifact. So they'll get off my back for a little bit. And I was I was just cackling. That's the greatest things. Like I love I love that that that there's a little more attention now.

BlindIRL:
I had

Tarn:
people's precious artifacts may be leaving the fortress of their own free will.

BlindIRL:
I had a parlay request. I was like, there's no way I'm going to win this. And I sent a my mayor to go debate the parlay. And they demanded an artifact which belonged to a human visitor who is hanging out in my tavern.
I couldn't kill because they were a noble.
So I pointed a ballista at them after locking them in a one by one by one room, shot them with the ballista. And by the time I finished killing them, I found out that it had canceled. The job and my mayor wouldn't deliver the artifact.
Oh, we got invaded anyway.

Tarn:
Yeah, well, I mean, it was it was a good, a good effort.

BlindIRL:
We called it a draw. I died horribly.

Tarn:
Yeah, yeah, it's too bad. I mean, it's hard to make the game recognize things like you just want to be able to deliver an ultimatum to that noble. Like, you know, you can you can either give us the artifact or we'll give the package of you containing the artifact to these goblins and see which one they pick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just see which one they choose to it or not.
But there's some like I hadn't even thought of that scenario, right? So it's like the game can't can't can't adapt that well. But now we just have to keep them coming, keep thinking of things. And and eventually we'll be able to do that.

BlindIRL:
Yeah, for whatever it's worth. That was definitely like a well played game kind of situation.
You don't meet me like what was even better was like, I didn't want this guy hanging out in the fort. Like I tried to kick him out twice and he kept coming back. He was just a monster hunter. I was like, get out. Like you shouldn't be here.

Tarn:
But, you know, well, especially he's got a whole army of goblins following that more of that. Yeah, although that's not how it works. I mean, they were just being opportunistic about it. But but but the the the questers would be following them. The ones that try and steal things. But I don't think they try to steal from people holding things. I think they just get frustrated about that.

BlindIRL:
Those are maybe the ones that just hang around forever.

Tarn:
Yeah, yeah. Well, they can have a they can have a bar fight now and, you know,

BlindIRL:
I wonder if they convince them to like turn it over like in the way that they can convince people to give artifacts to them like.
Get them as an agent.

Tarn:
Yeah, I don't they don't try it like they they just aren't they don't recognize the the adventure as like a state to be negotiated with. I think it's the kind of thing that's just going to slowly come in the more the more kind of situations we
Sure. We'll eventually get there.

BlindIRL:
Invaders are a lot smarter now. They kind of go out of their way to figure out how to destroy the fort, which is a pretty massive difference. I mean, I think Dwarf Fortress has gone through different eras over the years where it gets harder and then it gets easier. Like if you go back to the versions in the 30s, like the game will just kill you in the first 90 seconds, like
to 30 percent of the time, you know, I experienced like one in like two out of five will just kill you for some reason, like something will just run at you and you'll buy.
And then that kind of stopped happening for a while in like the 40s. But like the tantrums got real bad for a bit there. And then like those have been like toned down a whole lot. And there's been a lot of moods that have been added to like, you know, keep dwarves and higher spirits. And I think like we're kind of in one of those harder segments again where the game is a lot more punishing.
And was that the goal of the siege update, like to make the game
us all up again?

Tarn:
Yeah, I mean, it was it was I think like 47 or five or 50, you know, whatever, 52 or whatever was probably like peak easy Dwarf Fortress in a sense,
I mean, not not unfun, but it is unfun if you were coming for a war game or whatever.
And now you can you can have some fun with that again.
I think
there's things about it that are too punishing in an unfair way right now
that were that we're we need to do some more work to fix. Like the siege stuff was too important to have
like the population sputter as
quickly as they do. Like you do two sieges and a lot of these civs would be exhausted. So we allowed them to pull more goblins through the the spire if it's open.
And there's a gate. So there's some cheaty stuff like that that we're not we're completely on board with because you need to have warm bodies to make the game fun right now. But we're going to shut that stuff off once there's more a little more army stuff, which is one of the reasons we're pointing toward that just to get that's kind of a stopgap measure to keep the game kind of active and interesting.
just generally, I think, I mean, a lot of it's just I think it's going to stick now. It's a lot of its keepers. They're just I mean, it's more varied. There's nothing that's inherently hard about more varied opponents aside from having to be able to withstand a bit of a variety. So that that I think that's definitely staying in the all the pathing and stuff. Just great stuff, I think.
of the pure numerics of it are the part that I don't like right now.
especially when you're on hard and the sieges are close together. I mean, just getting two hundred, two hundred, two hundred, two hundred, two hundred. That's a bit much. I mean, it's just kind of like, eh, I'd rather have them come at you with something more interesting and space it out again, which is what's going to happen when we start sending, you know, magical sieges, for instance, and also when we get the underground stuff in there, then we can start we can make like hard mode sieges farther apart again, I think.
it's just not fun if you
like through no fault of your own, you don't get caravans or migrants as often because you're defeating sieges, you're not being sieged, you're defeating invasions that aren't sieging you. They're just coming and washing against your defenses instantly without hanging out. That shouldn't be a siege at all. It's just because of the time
warp effect of Fort mode, how they like a siege takes a month. Just by people having to walk across your map, right? So that's not fair. I'm like, like you shouldn't lose your resources because of that. So I don't think they should come like every two seasons, even on hard mode. That's just kind of stupid. But that's where we're at now. I think it's I think it's a good place to park as we work on the next stuff.

BlindIRL:
Like historically, like the way I always kind of saw it was like, you know, you get the bigger sieges, but like interspersed between that, you get the kidnappers and those guys. To me, that's kind of the thing that should be bound, saying out the bigger sieges now.

Tarn:
Yeah, that's how it works right now. There's a raid.
minimum raids between sieges.
And I think on hard mode, that's just set to like two or something, though, isn't it? I don't know. Well, it's just I think it's too tight.

BlindIRL:
I've definitely turned it to zero before.

Tarn:
Yeah, well, then you get them every. Yeah, yeah. And then it's still a coin flip, I think, against their brazenness number, which increases every time they send a raid.
Anyway, that's all that's all in the weeds. But it's like that you you basically roll against our siege frequency number once you get to the minimum raids. And so you
you just have those two levers to play with. And
feels like
the more interesting the sieges get, the more you can decrease the percentage and increase the the raid number. But also, I mean, all that kind of falls against the larger kind of geopolitical setup once we get the armies moving around and stuff. Then we can we can really lean more into where did you embark your fort? How are you? How much are you messing with people? How much are you under the radar rather than having these
coin flips and stuff, which is just kind of silly,
but necessary right now, I think. And I think once you're in open war with somebody, there's always going to be some element of coin flipping or something just to say, like, are they mustering an army? Are they
planning to stage an attack? How often should they do that is more of a regular army behavior, general behavior
rather than
something to do with where everyone's at like in the world.

BlindIRL:
Yeah, no, I
do think it's like in a pretty interesting place right now, although it does currently feel as though fortresses are kind of engineered to fail again, like I think for a while there, we were definitely in losing is fun. And then it kind of swapped, as you said, to like peak easy to our fortress, which was kind of like losing is optional. And now we're definitely back into the losing is fun category, unless you specifically turn off sieges.
And it's been interesting, especially like in the last few weeks, like it's been a while since I've seen new thoughts added to things to try and keep moods up. But now, I guess, as of yesterday, I'm a little sick right now, so I didn't get to play much yesterday.

Tarn:
But yeah,
good thing is your constructions wouldn't deconstruct. Oh, no.
Yeah, no, yeah. No, there's new patch up and we've already fixed a few bugs and your work details. Girl bar wouldn't have worked. No, I didn't see people talking about that one. Yeah, that's all fixed.

BlindIRL:
Good.
now have triumphs. So dwarves will like everybody, including the bunny rabbits in your fortress will feel triumph after defeating a siege, which they should at natural.

Tarn:
They should. I don't care if I screwed that up. Bunny should. Yeah,
no, I mean, the dogs already have a bunch of weird thoughts anyway. So who cares? Well, I mean, we'll change it once they have something else they can like. Oh, the farmer seems happy. And then the bunny is content or something like that. Until we put that in, they can continue feeling triumph. Yeah, it's important. It's good for the animals to understand the general vibe. They're just picking up on the general vibes. Yes. And I know I mean, that was that was like the triumph thought at sieges was something that we talked about before this, like during the initial siege planning and before that, that's been running around for a long time, and it was in our shortlist of things to make the initial siege update. But the initial siege update, most stuff didn't get into the initial siege update. We got a lot of stuff in there. But but this was one that I've that that especially seeing how punishing they are like the siege, the siege stuff was basically successful enough that suddenly it jumped to the top of our list. So it's like we at least need to get your, you know, children through the long,
body hauling marathon that they're about to experience after you win. Right. So they need to have some kind of counterbouncing.

BlindIRL:
Happy. It's knocking on my door. I will be right back.

Tarn:
Oh.
Hello, Chad. I can't I can't see you if there's a chat there.
But I hope everything's going
Hello.
Yeah, are there beers? Do we have lots of beers? I can't see anything, but I know that beers go up in this chat.
Lots of beers
get a vile force of darkness.
Can get a get a cheese cheese for everyone.
I can get a get a

BlindIRL:
become an artist, but I can't work is going on.

Tarn:
Yep, can get that.
What else does it bring out? You're dead. We can do that one.
Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Do I know any of the other ones?
Uh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, yeah. What else goes on in there?
What else goes on in there? Oh, yeah. I don't know if anybody's been anybody's subbed or anything, but thanks. Thank you.
To all you who blind hasn't been able to thank.
That's cool. Keep it up. What else? What else? What else?
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I don't know. And enjoying enjoying the release, enjoying working on
just kind of tuning it up, you know,
having having having having little little invaders. OK, I've been yammering on. I've been taking the piss a bit as they say here.
But hopefully there's some beers in the chat and stuff.

BlindIRL:
I have received a very large package from Canada Post, which I think I know what's in that, but I need to look at that later.

Tarn:
So that's cool. Hopefully it's a surprise, although if you want the thing that you ordered, also that I hope that's in there, but also some additional goodies.

BlindIRL:
The thing is, I haven't ordered things, but I'm expecting a few things from different places. So I

Tarn:
do. That's right. Different people can just send you stuff.

BlindIRL:
That's weird, isn't it? Yeah, so it's just very fun. Arrives at like 1030 in the morning when I'm in a livestream.
we are where we at. We were at seizures, balance, attack patterns and pathing and things engineered to fail and the new moods being added. So like, I guess my question is like, is this something that we're going to see more of like when the game gets harder in order to compensate for that? Like, what is your priority? Is it to give the dwarves more like kind of mental attributes to cope with the difficulty, but keep the level of destruction the same? Or are you thinking more give us more tools to fight back against it or a combination?

Tarn:
I like both. Right. I mean, the the the the thoughts make for great stories. It's always been one of the central things of Dwarf Fortress and people are always checking those moods, right, to see what's in there. It lets you. It's the only window you have into the dwarf soul. Right. You know, it's it's a great way to see what they're thinking. So we love those. But no, fundamentally, it's about the tools like like fundamentally you want to
like have a new way to deal with a thing, especially if there's no good way of dealing with it. Then we ought to provide you with a way to deal with it
so that it's not just frustrating. Like if there if there's not some choice to be made or some something, then it's just kind of a kind of a dick move or whatever to waste you in a particular way, even if there is, you know, some satisfaction in the moment like right after the siege release, just watching streams and cackling and stuff. I mean, those days are over now. Now we're back to being helpful.

BlindIRL:
I mean, you know, I think you're still allowed to cackle when this fall apart.

Tarn:
Well, I mean, the dynamic leader pathing I put in just yes, we made the game slightly harder just for fun. Like if you trap the demon, like like like off of the demon will like come into your fortress and you can just wall them in. And then they just kind of meander around.
That's because they've been separated from the main invasion pathing and don't know how to think anymore. So they go into explore mode, which would hopefully bag them a few dwarves, but not much else. But no, the demon leader was was deigned important enough that they just onboard a whole new pathing routine and they will now break through your walls.
And get at the juicy chunks inside. Other things would do that. Like if you just if you just like lock an ogre, even if they have a pick or something, if you lock an ogre in a little room, it won't start picking its way out because there's just no like CPU cycles available for everyone to have their own personal invasion plan.
But the demon is has been given that ability because we want our demons to thrive and survive.
Rams also have the ability just because they're easier to do. Like like if a ram gets frustrated and surrounded by walls or something or trees, it'll just start going in random directions, ramming stuff down.
it's called ram page with a hyphen in the code. It's but that's OK.

BlindIRL:
Is there a whole page like dedicated to it? Just like a whole bunch of blank

Tarn:
Oh, well, I mean, it's not blank. It has instructions for how to do it.

BlindIRL:
It's a single line of spaces, but you know.

Tarn:
That's right. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm just slow on the uptake today.

BlindIRL:
It's OK. It's later in the day for you than it is for me. I'm still happy on coffee. Yeah. So my
guess kind of the next subject is just
Got to pull some ballista. I've been useless for a very, very, very, very, very long time to the point where it made more sense to like over engineer a minecart rail to just like fire things at things.
Now, I think I like I haven't tried them since, but I think it would be quite difficult to set up automated minecart shotguns now because of
destructibility of them, I guess.
like you do need a lot of defenses for them. Otherwise, something could just break them. So I guess
question is like
now that the priority is back on
actual dwarven engineering instead of dwarven big brain engineering.
How did you go about like making them viable again? Right. Like
can aim now, right? They can look up and down.

Tarn:
Yeah.

BlindIRL:
Did you go through multiple iterations or was it just kind of a this is how we fix this?

Tarn:
Yeah, no, it was all it all that all happened in basically a day.
We had lots of ways that we wanted to make them better, but we were on such a timetable that like like you'll notice the
catapult bolts don't fire in a parabolic arc, for instance.
Two reasons for that.
One, no, it's all the same reason they'd miss everything. It would be too slow. Like if you can see the parabola, then the guy would have moved 20 squares by the time it hits the ground. If you can, that's if you can enjoy the parabola. If you can't enjoy the parabola and just goes, then it would look like gravity was broken. So I think so that's why they just shoot in a straight line. I am not happy with it. I want them to lob. But I think I don't know how to make them viable because they need to. They need to predict where the enemy is going to be. And I don't think that's very reliable.
And, you know, maybe someday we'll get to that point.
And but right now, I don't mind them just like, you know,
blasting people with a rock. That's kind of what their vibe anyway. I mean, that's that's that's that. That was just kind of how that evolved. And then Ballista basically the same thing except the ammo has different behavior. So it's kind of like the difference between fireball and lightning bolt and D&D or whatever.
but yeah, multiple things that we wanted to do. We didn't get to parabola as we wanted to get height mattering, which is frustrating not to have that because it's just stupid when you put a catapult on a tower and it's like this catapult's now objectively worse. Great. That's just dumb. But, you know, we would like it to be better. And that wouldn't be too hard to too hard to fit.
basically that's 10 minutes that I could have spent that I spent elsewhere and we'll get there probably pretty quickly.

BlindIRL:
I think for me, the only thing with catapults that I feel like I would really want is just the ability to either load more boulders at a time or more objects into catapults.

Tarn:
Oh, more objects for sure. Oh, that's that's also that was on the short list. And we promised people we'd do it. You want a cow, you get a cow. Everyone wants to put a cow in a catapult. Everyone wants to put some kind of exploding chemicals in there. People want to put, you know, goblin body parts and stuff and just, you know, any any number of things you could put in a catapult. It's not like the code would be any different.
It would be a little weird now because like the cow wouldn't be lobbed in a beautiful arc. The cow would be like lasered at the enemy.
It's like Gary. And then it would call the, yeah, the projectile skidding code and the cow would just leave this line of blood.
But but yeah, so it kind of give you the ballista effect, too, because it wouldn't blow up into shards. So it'd be kind of like a ballista bolt once it lands and it would just collide into everybody.
Probably be as effective as a ballista, really.
So, yeah, keep up your kind of supply. You know, if you can keep your cow supply up.
Just have a it's like you don't put a stockpile next to your bliss. Oh, you're a catapult. You put a pasture.

BlindIRL:
Yeah. Well, I mean, right now I put a stone stockpile, but I mean, to each their

Tarn:
Yeah.

BlindIRL:
But I probably would still keep using stones to be honest.

Tarn:
But I think. Oh, sure. Yeah. No, you just you do it once and then you get tired of it.

BlindIRL:
Back in the day, I was definitely experimenting with like trying to fire like coal boulders through lava to set coal on fire. And it never quite worked properly.
You know, like, you know, experiments like that and stuff.
This is like the kind of the next thought in this line, which is just like the amount of ammunition that bolt throwers go through.
Was that an intentional thing to make me use them less or turn up my mineral deposits or because like I've kind of found myself using them as like last ditch effort things now.

Tarn:
Yeah. I mean, we knew we wanted the raid.
To be there, we knew it. We knew it drains resources.
We know most people play on minerals everywhere, but it's it's still something that we knew was going to be. It's still you have to do the jobs to keep them up and you have to do the explorations, the mineral exploration to keep them up. No, it's it's it's it's kind of where we wanted to be in the sense of we want you to be able to do that. Now, if there's some other option where, you know, you can set the person like, hey, conserve ammunition, crank the thing four times as slow. You're just here to help a little bit
so that you kind of kind of save ammo and just kind of help a little bit in the siege, but you're not always like just just kind of absolutely ganking the first goblin that comes by with like 500 bolts. And then everyone else can just walk in on the shot at.
I think it would also like help if
people realize they were under fire and tried to take cover and instead of like just soldiering on every time. Like if you were fighting the humans and you just started, you know, peppering them a bit with bolt throwers on like don't fire a lot mode. And then but then they all try and, you know, scatter or whatever
or go a different direction. I could raise the heat map just for getting shot at and see what happens. If they're like someone's timid, that'd be very interesting to see. Watch them kind of probe the different areas without having to lose 50 people first. Like, I don't know. Yeah. No, I think there's a lot. There's a lot. I think bolt throwers basically we just started with them. There's a lot of settings that I think would be interesting on them. I kind of like the initial setting we chose just because it's funny.

BlindIRL:
Yeah. No, I think the initial setting, which is just like Gatling gun the mall is like kind of great for a lot of reasons. I mean, like
me turn up my mineral scarcity is kind of a big deal as far as I'm concerned. And like
is kind of amazing to see the dwarves literally have machine guns. So there is that.

Tarn:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the real thing they they've had those things, but they just jam all the time and they but I mean, they they do. And they're just not as powerful. I mean, but I mean, I saw the little the the the nice the nice man on the video is like, this is my historical recreation. He's like.
And like in in dwarf time, like if you discount the 144 times fastness and bring it over to adventure mode time, it's firing at like the accurate rate. I mean, it's firing pretty slow. It's not firing like a Vulcan cannon. It's firing like a shot every high. Don't know two seconds or something.

BlindIRL:
Yeah. With a jam every minute.

Tarn:
Yeah, that's what it needs. It needs it. That's that's the real problem. But this is dwarven engineering.

BlindIRL:
Absolutely. So it doesn't. It doesn't jam reliable, right?

Tarn:
no. We say that. But then you're like, oh, yeah, the weapon traps jam with chunks. I'm like, well, doors just haven't figured that chunking. It's like organic chemistry.

BlindIRL:
It actively right. Like there was a dwarf in that trap maintaining it.

Tarn:
It would be funny if it was a dwarf underneath the weapon trap. That's just like.

BlindIRL:
Just like the firing of the pins. I mean, how else do you think like the like strange mechanisms that connect through time, space and time work?

Tarn:
You know, yeah. I mean, people would just make those like vampire operated or whatever. You just trap the vampire underground underneath the weapon trap and just like you'll get blood to drink if you use the weapon trap. And they're like, OK. And they just open their mouth and just. Oh, the problem.

BlindIRL:
With vampires now, which is not a sentence that was on my bingo card for today, is that like if you try to do any of the old school vampire engineering, it's great until they need to attend a meeting.

Tarn:
And then they just do they have too many personal problems and stuff?

BlindIRL:
Oh, that's just like it's sad that they just like, I need to yell at a manager. And then you're like, you're locked in the room in the dungeon in the basement. Man, look, I can't actually chain you up because your prison sentence expired 150 years ago.

Tarn:
Oh, that's too bad. That's too bad. I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, lots of little things about vampires. Like I didn't even know about that one. I mean, that sounds like something to fix. I know people want a better like, you know, investigation, justice, screen interrogations, all those things to be like more usable for him. I'm aware of this.
And I got people yelling at me for fixing the little thing where it's a zero kill. I'm like, I don't want it to say zero kill. That's almost as bad as when they were blue all the time. But but but I don't
Yeah. No, no, no, no, I understand. I understand people don't like the don't like the vampire minigame so much.

BlindIRL:
But, you know, the vampire minigame, like I really like the vampire minigame. I just I wish there was more resolutions other than have a brick to the head.
Yeah. Or I'll unlock you in this prison cell forever and forget about you. You know,
or expel it. And then they come back with a different name six weeks later, but look exactly the same, which is very funny. The same kills. They're going to say, I know you're lying about your name, but like.

Tarn:
Well, yeah, I don't know why they should just find some food out in the hillocks.

BlindIRL:
Certainly.
Yeah. So the next thing I kind of have about here is like just kind of fortress survivability in general. I mean, like with the change yesterday, which admittedly I haven't had much time to mess with, like I did 20 minutes of testing in two forts with a couple of different pick materials, looking at the speed of mining, because as of yesterday, like, yeah, trees when chopped down, material matters, wood density matters. And when mining from rock, pick material matters and stone density matters. And it's and obviously, I guess skill would still factor into this. So higher skilled dwarf. Yeah.

Tarn:
And this is I just I just changed it today again because it was a little too harsh. OK.
And but that meant that legendary. So there's there's only so much you have. You have one duration slider, right? But there's a lot of things vying for its attention. There's the material of the wall, the material of the pick, the skill of the miner
vying for this thing. Now, that's that's like one variable and three other variables. The material, of course, you could reduce that to one variable. So there's two, but there's still two variables in one thing, which is bad. So when we made it so that the the copper picks worked a little bit faster because people were just like, you know, very unhappy.
That means that legendary miners
go as fast relative to a novice miner because there's just not many ticks in the game. It gets squeezed. So now legendary miners only go twice as fast as novice miners rather than like 16 times as fast or four times as fast or whatever it was. It was ridiculous.
I don't mind seeing them chew up the stone and they still will. They'll like a legendary miner will go as fast. It just won't be as relatively fast because we needed to account for pick material now, not just low skill.
But it's all it should be much more like if you if you were put off by the speed of even an iron pick in a proficient miner was slower. That's now in line with how the game used to work. So that's that's just because, yeah, I didn't I didn't mean to put people through such a shock. I didn't want to put the change in,
but and it's in because a still pick will go four times as fast. So you're still pick twice as fast. Don't know two and a half, two and a half times.

BlindIRL:
I'm not worried about the change. I think it's a good change to have. It's just one of those ones that like makes you rethink chunks of the game again, because it's like, OK, so if I'm settling in a rocky wasteland and I'm not sure what type of rock I'm going to be on and this is a terrifying biome and there's giant undead monsters on the surface, I guess I better put a bunch of points into legendary and bring some iron picks. Right. Like suddenly that's now a consideration. And I think like there's going to be some growing pains there where people need to like
rethink how they start a fort. And that's fine. That's good, if anything. But it's just kind of trying to figure out if a like was this stuff accounted for in advance or is this us compensating for something that wasn't accounted for necessarily?

Tarn:
the system still needs a lot of work because as people if people will go in and look at the stone ros, there's not a lot of material differentiation there. And that was not a data entry thing I could tackle. Like so what you're getting more is just the material of the pick mattering. And then as people noticed, native silver, native copper, a native platinum, native gold, all did have the material of their of their of like their their pure form.
They had the material properties. So they were 10 times as slow to mine as the other stones. And I changed that in the one today. I'm just like, we'll deal with this later.
Yeah, it's it's because it's like it's treating like a solid wall. It's called gold nuggets that you get out of it, but they're not nuggets. It's like a solid wall of gold. And you're just hitting it with a pick. Of course, it's going to be hard. But when when I just change the properties back, because it's not like the gold nuggets are like, you know, loosely together in rock formation or whatever. So it's like it shouldn't be that hard to mine. But I just couldn't put in an extra variable. I'd like to put an extra variable and then give them their properties back.
that's another huge data entry thing is getting all the like sheer impact compressive type forces, the engineering forces for all the stones to be different, because then, granted, will be different to mine from sandstone. Right now, it is not.
But your pick matters. And that's that's a big thing. Copper, iron, steel, bronze. Those are big choices now are big things that like if you're if your minor gets squished and you're stuck with a copper pick, you're going to feel it.

BlindIRL:
Certainly.
A lot of people, when they think about mining in video games, they automatically go to Minecraft. I know even my brain still does like diamond pickaxe should be best pickaxe. Right. Gold pickaxe should be better than iron, because I don't know video games. But at the same time, like it's it's interesting to see like kind of all the different factors of this like
in and like not just a direct game balance way. You know, like I think that's kind of the historic thing with Tor Fortress is that like it does balance differently. It does balance in the oh, this takes a while to do not because like it actually would take a while to do in most video games, but because like it's just you're dealing with heavier materials.
And I think that that's really cool. So I'm curious to see what I think it'll actually.

Tarn:
I think I think the balance depends a lot on when we get to to trading. Like a lot of things are going to depend on the world trade situation and how like, because I mean, I'm kind of in the middle mineral rareness camp. It just can't be supported broadly right now.
And I we're going to be the default is going to be set much lower once you have what you have effective means for trade.
And then you'll be able to to basically scout out the good locations for some some one some mineral or another like you, whether it's iron or whatever, and then become a trade hub or become a military powerhouse because of this thing that you did right now with I mean, with minerals on everywhere, that's just not a thing. Yeah. So I think I think this this enters into that with mining material and everything else.
And then, you know, and who knows who knows what what kind of weird magic stuff is going to happen, but that's never good. The game is not going to be balanced around that kind of thing. I want magic. There might be magic.
Yeah, because because some some yeah, exactly. Some universe is going to have them and some is not. And so we're we're always going to be balanced around the real world stuff.

BlindIRL:
Yeah, I'm just waiting for somebody to find the perfect magic universe with everything

Tarn:
and just share that. See, well, I mean, just set your world parameters and just say, yes, yes, yes, yes, all ubiquitous, all, all, all and just get the mushiest, horrible setting, like ready player one ass thing that's just filled with all your

BlindIRL:
stuff in support to the center of the fort and like insta.

Tarn:
Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's that's that that was on our list is like,
Would we like to tackle teleport for the initial magic release? I'm like, people will hate teleport because teleport is yes. Yes, the freer and easier, the less survivable poor regular dwarves are.
And yes, anyway, well, this this is our bright and happy future.

BlindIRL:
I'm imagining a friend of mine's game path of Acra where like it has a teleport ability and that game auto plays itself. If you hold down tab, it's just like teleport to nearest enemy, like double armor, do damage to everything that you're not touching. Teleport again after turn, just hold down tab. Boom, everything's dead.
Yeah, yeah, stuff like that.
we've got a big roadmap coming up right now, and there's a lot of things on there that we've seen before that were talked about previously as part of sieges, you know, bringing back underground invaders as much as is reasonable and other things such as the one that people keep talking about is temple magic. So how do you see that manifesting in game right now if you have an idea of what that's going to look like?

Tarn:
Yeah, yeah. So I think that I think what we were going to need to do a little bit of fundamental work to understand what the hell is going on out there. And I think that's that's that's where we're gonna have to start. So just getting getting some of the new players in play in world gen things like the the demon sorcerers and a bit more understanding of what what the what sort of other wizards are in the world and understanding like like deity inflected things that people can pick can do. So we'll get that. And then, yeah, we wrote down several different ways that it that it that it that it might manifest. There's sort of like, like the defensive sort of oppositional effects where you can negate
magic in in one area of your fort, you can negate it for a particular kind. And those are those are kind of sort of just it's sort of like just keeping up with your your cleaning your room or eating your vegetables or whatever. Right. If you've got certain types of problems in the world, then these are the sort of things that you defend against.
But then there's there there are things like, you know, do you do you want to just just have some people duking it out on the field?
And that's that's another thing that we're kind of excited to see. And then there's things like protecting individual dwarves or groups of dwarves against effects and things like that. So offense, defense, resistance and nullification all on the table. And it's one of these things where we list these things out. They're not hard to implement. And then we we have to actually see it in play probably to have a good sense of where it's at. We can say it, but yeah, games complicated enough that it's a little tricky to think of which one of the which ones of those will play out the best. Probably just keep them all and see and see what the relative power levels need to be and the relative frequencies.
But we'll see where we'll see where that lands. That's kind of what we're thinking, though, and that this also forces you to generally keep up your temple hygiene.
If you if you've been used to shirking your petitions and eating the occasional unhappy thought, but not really caring.
Yeah, price is going up.
one of the very first things we'll do just jumping ahead slightly for half a second with the with the kind of diplomacy angle stuff is letting you see your petitions.
Because if they become that important, I mean, come on, it's well past due that we just have a list of what you what you're what you've promised and what you need to do and what it'll come do and all that kind of thing.
that is one angle. But we decided like and I know something like some people were talking about this and it's of course, it's always been our interest to make things broadly more interesting. So temples are not the only thing we're leaning on anymore.
We we figured, you know, if demon if we've got demon trained sorcerers and we got necromancers all these bad things going on out there that we're going to put in some spell casting type things that aren't strictly religious, but that aren't all just absolutely psychotic.
Like whatever it is that makes the necromancers learn their thing also turns them completely anti social and weird.
Like they don't even need to be chased out of a village before they start raising dead bodies. Right. They're just doing it. They're like, Oh, the secret of life and death is that we need to have as many zombies as possible. And then, yeah, it's like that's the secret. It's just you want to be surrounded by dead bodies at all time that are like walking around and then you start doing it and people get upset. But

Tarn:
that is not the only kind of wizard we want to have. And so we're going to do some stuff and we're going to let you let them live in your fortress because that's fun. It's fun to have like this is this was in the version of the game before it originally released. Right. You had the thing where the undead attacked in year seven
the wizard character came in year four and asked for a spare dwarf to come on an adventure. And if you did it, the undead invasion was canceled. And if you didn't do it, then people started having nightmares in the fortress and then the undead come and it was not an easy invasion.
this is just that,
know,
better realized where you've got. OK, now you can you can actually engage with the world this side of the world. And these people, much like the temple defenses, like the categories don't change just because you slap God on it or not. Right. It's just that they'll still be doing the same things. But but you'll be participating.
I think I mean, we're just we're just hoping and we're going to be leaning on it that that this will just become amusing. Right. We want to have little laboratory workshops with wizards in your fortress. And you have dwarves that are assigned as research assistants. Certainly. And that it's it's it's like it's like not mandates like in the sense of a noble, but it's like
person really wants you to go get some stuff and you send out some dwarves to go do it and then they go and mix potions or something back in the in the fort. And yeah, you hope they're good at it, you know, and you hope they're making good decisions.

BlindIRL:
So my question is for resident wizards, which I think is kind of a large part of this current future feature topic.
what's this going to look like in game? Is this going to be a noble? Is this going to be like the alchemy workshop coming back and having function? Is this going to be a zone? Is this going to be like what is this going to look like to the player?

Tarn:
Yeah. Option four, it's going to be a location like a tavern or a library
so it can have multiple zones in it. And the main zone that we've contemplated right now is something that we're a placeholder. We don't know what any of this stuff is going to be called yet, but the placeholder name is a laboratory zone where you put workshops and then these workshops are generated based on the type of thing going on. So we've already talked to Jacob a bit about doing like procedural layers on the on a on a shop to make them look different ways and stuff. And then you'd be doing whatever kind of thing the wizards into with that or kind of materials and such that the wizards into.
it'd be in that in that in a zone within this location. And you could assign some assistance, probably in the same way you assign priests and hospitals and tavern keepers. Not sure. And then they'd be able to do those jobs.
And that that would make the wizard happy enough to participate in whatever fortress defense stuff is relevant to them. OK, that's that's the general outline.
the wizards are
whatever is out there that's not demon trans sorcerer necromancer, right? Whether it's just some Gandalf type character that that came from the beginning of the world's kind of a first generation wizard, whether it's some some, you know, seventh in the line apprentice
you've invited, because that's one of the things that we have thinking about with diplomacy is being able to make an invitation. So you're not just a recipient of things, but you're can exert
influence outward getting tasks with the new. Yeah.
Yeah, the messenger. Yeah, we have we have a list of like eight or 10 things we want the messenger to be able to do. Part of it is just like, hey, don't kill me anymore. This is why. But part of it is like, hey, here's a specific request I have. I'm going to make you the best laboratory ever, as long as you give me a whole ton of vials of explosive things, this stuff in my catapults or whatever.
And they're already drawn, by the way. We have art for that. So so
aiming those directions. It's I think it's we're leaving ourselves a lot of room to kind of go where things feel best. And that's just part of that same the same with the sieges, right? We just kind of kind of eventually gravitated towards certain directions. And I think it's important to
give ourselves that's the space for that. But basically, we want to have, you know, I don't know, three different angles on resident wizards. We want to have a few angles on new people that are attacking you
and something with temples. And then that's probably enough for this time, right? We're trying to get this thing out. You know, it's it's come. It's not we're not on the long schedules anymore. So that's just a nice, a nice compact thing. It's got some, you know, parts that bubble out of it. And we'll try and keep it under control. We got diplomacy. We've got army changes, which we haven't talked about yet.
And that's that's kind of this. That's this release.

BlindIRL:
Cool. Yeah. No, I'm like when I when I saw the the roadmap pop up the other day, I just kind of looked at it when, all right, well, we're not going to see anything until like April. It's kind of how I thought.

Tarn:
But oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, that's there. There's it's going to take some time. Certainly. But it's not going to it's not going to take, you know, what we just can't. I mean, we just can't do that anymore. We're not on the year thing anymore. It's just it's not it's not possible to to stay afloat
with that. But I mean, I know when you say see anything, I mean, I think you see some stuff. Sure. You might not play it, but you might see it. But like and and of course, we're still, you know, partly out of necessity, given what just happened with this patch. But also just because I'd expect, you know, the
same monthly cadence up until then of like, hey, here's a cool thing.
Yeah. I mean, we just dropped 357 animal portraits out of the Blu-Ray. I mean, things to keep things keep coming.
And there's more and more and more stuff out there that I mean, I remain the bottleneck here. I've just got to I've got like, ah, I've got so much to put in. I've got lots of cool stuff to put in that's already drawn.

BlindIRL:
one other thing I would like to talk about with magic before we move on to the this might be some of the most talking we've done before getting into audience questions. So it's running pretty long so far. But the one other thing I want to ask you about magic before we get into like diplomacy stuff coming forward.
What is kind of like, what is the plan to make the game readable? I know that like the game defaults to 80 frames per second. And for a lot of people, it continues to run in like the high fifties, with the exception of some extreme examples where people have like more than 250 dwarves and things run slower.
In at least for me, in a lot of cases, like I'll afford of 200 dwarves and I'll still be at 60 70 FPS.
the closest analog in my head right now to magic are the abilities that the intelligent undead have. And it takes me a while to discern what they're actually doing when they arrive in the Ford. Like I have to like, yeah, that's their descriptions. So how are we going to have spells that are readable to the player?

Tarn:
Like, yeah, yeah, no, we never got to the graphics for that. We never got to the graphics for those for for the the whatchamacallit, the undead spells.

BlindIRL:
So like ice balls, which you can see.

Tarn:
Yeah, that you can see. But yeah, but if they if they if they cast like blisters or nausea or whatever, then you're just not going to get you're not going to get your eyeballs or whatever. They're not going to you're not going to do that. You're not going to see anything. I'm sitting on some graphics for that. And then at least you get and this is there's like animations and stuff we'd have we'd have some now I think it would still be it's still like just like regular combat. It's still like there's crazy lots of stuff going on.
mean, people just step through it, you know, with the period or whatever, when they're like when is in pause, when you really want to see everything. But if you just want to say like, oh, wow, there's a bunch of magic shit going on, you'll be able to see it because there'll be effects all over the screen. So that's that's already Yeah, we've got some drawn and we'll need some more. And we're going to yeah, I mean, things going to blow up. There's going to be explosion. You're going to see the explosion.

BlindIRL:
That was going to be the next thing I was going to say. So explosions.

Tarn:
Yeah, there's got to be explosions because we don't have them yet. And it's overdue by a decade or something.
I mean, we used to have those came in the cave ins were nice before when we had our little seven by seven cave ins or whatever you get little dust dust explosions all the time. But other than that, and dragon fire is pretty cool.
Other than that, we don't have like a big cool like wish type thing. And yeah, I want I want explosions that don't blow up walls that just kind of frag a hallway or a room, a laboratory that where I wear a thing blew up. And you're like, ah, shit.
And that's that's funny. And then but then I want explosions that that blast walls apart and tear giant rents in the earth. And we'll see how much we can get get in the rent category before we feel it's unfair. Like because people people are tolerating a bit of mining now. They're tolerating a bit of ladder building.
You know, I don't know if they'll tolerate like here's a 10 degree arc that's just whoa, blow off my headset. A 10 degree arc that's just blasted through 20 tiles forward. I think it'd be funny, but I don't know if it'd be tolerable.
Like, especially if there's if it's I mean, you can't do it all the time or whatever. But if even if it was giving you like a month of warning that some ritual is being cast and they're about to blast a hole through the front of your fortress and, you know, make sure you do something about it. I still don't know if it's not. These are the big questions that we're going to be asking in this release.
And I think
mean, some of it is supposed to be unfair in these situations.
But I'm not sure how much can be withstood. You know, it's like sometimes you're on the losing end of a really shitty thing that happened. And that's like someone cast flame strike or whatever. And there's a bunch of columns of fire coming down from the sky and you weren't prepared for it. Or somebody's flying around on a broomstick blasting you and you didn't build any kind of bolt throwers or whatever archers. And you can do nothing except stay underground where it's nice and cool.
We'll see what we get. I mean, I think we're not we're not trying to be unfair. And that's part of what the resident wizards are about.
we're going to just just add some flavor.

BlindIRL:
So I know in the future you're planning on adding scenarios.
Are you thinking of explosions as purely an offensive defensive thing or are you thinking about explosions as like offensive defensive, but also utility?

Tarn:
I'm not a big, big demolitions expert when it comes to like using dynamite to make a big tunnel or something

BlindIRL:
bunch of TNT into a cavern layer to clear out all of the pesky bricks and the sides and just get rid of every just make a big open space.

Tarn:
Yeah, if you can do it, you can do it. I mean, that's that's that it sounds like something that the player would want to do. I think this this also I mean, this gives rise to a question. That's something that people have occasionally asked me about. And I'm like, I wasn't like rubber to the road enough to really have good answers. And I'm still not is like
this wizard type character in the way that I've
of envisioned what the first one's going and will be like
a visitor, visiting scholar type person rather than a fortress assigned person, although that the second someone reads a book or something, then suddenly you're in the other situation. But like,
how do how do you actually get them to like, you know, if you if you're like, this is supposed to be a fight or something, you go fight there. And they're not a squad member, right?
They're their own person. Can you give them suggestions or do you tell them like, and this would be with the utility stuff, too. Are you like, you know, you live here, we do all these little tasks for you and stuff. We give you a lot of food and booze and stuff. And we just want to mark a few X's on the map and you you can help us a lot. It's like, sure, that that kind of thing. It's just like, it's just a kind of an interface and behavior thing,
right?
things that we think of or decide to do that other people thought of, etc. Like we're having conversation now about this,
a bad that

BlindIRL:
make it into the things that make it in. What if I cage trap him and lock him in the basement surrounded by krundles so that he makes a big explosion?

Tarn:
well, I mean, the cage, the cage mechanics are there. They still like they just need a goblin to release them first. What if I don't have to put the prison

BlindIRL:
in the caverns surrounded by a bunch of krundles so it causes a explosion.

Tarn:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or dump them.

BlindIRL:
After he wrote a book about how to have the powers so that I can then give him to one of my I'm just.

Tarn:
Yeah, yeah, no, no, the pit pun. Yeah, yeah, that's not my problem. That's the player's problem, for sure. And I think, yeah, then then you wouldn't even need a utility ability, would you? You'd just need a utility. You'd just need ability, would you? You'd just need a pit pun command or whatever and take care of it.

BlindIRL:
I think what I'm trying to say is like I already like use demolition mining
like digging out a layer, removing all supports, just putting a support on the dropping it, right? Like I, people have been doing that for ages to like expose caverns below and stuff. Yeah.
And it would be neat to have like a way to do that in a utility sense in a way that's intended, but also coming up with ways to make that work when it's not intended is just as much fun.

Tarn:
either, or. Yeah, no, there's gonna, there's gonna be a pile of new pile of new things to mess with. And that's, that's certainly something that's coming in the stem. Super exciting.

BlindIRL:
I'm not gonna lie, I kind of jumped out of my seat a little bit when I saw diplomacy mentioned.
And I realized that's kind of the last thing that I'm making it to before I get to user questions. And then I do have a handful of them here is picked out.
But for diplomacy, like
much are you thinking to add? And there's kind of, I think two real standout things for me, which is just
diplomatic options in general, and then the outside army's stuff, like anything in the overworld to me that exposes what's going on in the overworld is interesting. And I'm just curious how you're thinking about implementing the outside of fortress

Tarn:
Yeah, there were there were two, two kind of big prongs that we're gonna lead this, well, three, really.
So the first one is just basic messenger function.
the current diplomacy events suck right now. And you can't lead any of them, you're just a recipient of them. So unless you're like demanding tribute or something, which is hardly, you know, counts.
So yeah, messenger send out messenger send out messenger to ask for various aid, send out messenger to sue for peace,
send out messenger to just, you know, antagonize people without using a squad, requesting alliances,
making demands of people, these are all just kind of like, like on the on the table without using a squad, for instance, maybe a squad would have to come with them in some of those examples. But
being able to stop a war is a nice thing. I mean, that's kind of a number one on the list is just that situation where you've accidentally killed a human caravan. And you're like, I will do anything if you guys would stop attacking me. And we're gonna just be able to send a messenger there, they might ask for some reparations or something. But it's like,
be able to deal with that situation rather than it just being like the end of the world all of a sudden.
And then the other stuff I mentioned doesn't make sense without talking about the other army stuff we wanted to do. So the the other army thing was first making it so right now when when a when an enemy decides, hey, we're going to attack, they just instantly pull together an army and in two days or whatever, they're on top of you, like there is no preparation.
Doesn't make any sense at all.
So we're going to add this is all subject to change. But the basic idea right now is we're going to add a mustering phase that takes quite a long time. It doesn't change the frequency of sieges at all. It's just the what's going on in the in between times is something now rather than nothing.
So the the as they they're preparing their army, then you have a chance for some kind of scout or spy. We already have scouts, but we haven't used them as such. And there's also just any hillocks that are attached to you would also give you this ability to to say like, okay, there is there is something going on and now I can prepare. And so you'd be able to send out a squad to the hillocks, say, and you'd be able to muster up some people and they would be able to be set on a patrol duty where they can intercept, they can harass and possibly even turn back someone before they get to you. There would be a whole thing with the see the like the old C screen, which is now the world map button you press to to like interact with these things. That means, you know, hey, there's some flags for little squads and also just a little thing there to select different sites and factions to send messenger to probably just kind of more traditional strategy game stuff. Really, that's what we're envisioning for this. Just kind of getting getting that like, there's only so much we'll be able to do by, you know, like you say, April or whatever it's going to be. But we just like to push that to a point where we're like, you know, we're in this game now. This is this is part of what this game is supposed to be. And yeah, so it feels like a feels like a like it'll be a good start. And that would involve being able to utilize the many warm bodies that get out there surrounding your fortress. You know, there's like several hundred dwarves out there. You're not using it all if in the best of forts or even goblins. Right. It's like these goblins look to you for their economic security or whatever. And if someone found a pits near you and then you're suddenly like, you know, you're you're someone affiliated with them or not. And you might be able to get them on your side against their own civilization or whatever. I mean, that's all sounds pretty fun.

BlindIRL:
Yeah. I mean, we've been talking about this all from a very fortress mode sense, but like to my knowledge, the game already kind of does stuff like this, but only surfaced in adventure mode, right?

Tarn:
there's
little armies moving all over the place, but there's no defensive activity.
And that would be the difference.

BlindIRL:
Yeah.

Tarn:
I mean, there's patrols, there's the patroller guys, but that's that's that's not mustering a defensive. And it happens in world, like there are defensive armies that go get sent out on the fields and half of those battles take place on the field rather than the site. And that's because it was a, you know, there was a defensive
taken. Sure. And that just hasn't been carried post world gen. And that's something that's going to change here.

BlindIRL:
like probably further out based on reading through the kind of to do list or a roadmap or whatever you want to call it.
And that is cross mode play, I guess. Yeah. Is this something that that's lending itself to at all? Or what was your picture for that?

Tarn:
Yeah. So basically the idea, I mean, the more the more things you add, the more options you have for cross mode play them. That's it's like the the we've tied cross mode play to the cabin stuff because we haven't we haven't done like we said, cabins are going to be the first big adventure thing we do. Right. Then we just haven't got back to adventure mode. There was always going to be at least two siege releases. And but then, yeah, then we're looking at this this stuff. And I cross mode play was a way to like we wanted to motivate
the cabin release for everybody, because I know some people are super into it. I think it's cool.
And it's also like we can't disappear into it for too long or there'll be some kind of rebellion. So that's why we're throwing
in dwarf mode, somehow incorporating it. And that's like we had lots of there's just you know, there's as many ideas as you can think of for how that would look right. If you can select some dwarves in your fortress and that is now your adventuring party, right, is is one way to start from fort mode. And then adventure mode, of course, you just like flip the switch and now I'm in fort mode or whatever. It's like, well, OK, like we can always do that.
It was just not like a whole human town mode thing made that less attractive, especially because the last time we had a chance to look at any of this stuff, it was an absolute nightmare to work with constructions. I think that's not so much the case anymore. Like they're a bit easier to work with. So I think I think being able to say like, well, maybe I do want to just flip on the fort mode switch with my adventuring party is almost not a bad idea. I'm kind of worried about what the where that leads to. I mean, but I'm not against it, right? It's something we've always been thinking about, like swapping and stuff. But like, I don't know. I think I think we're getting closer to that. I like the cabin. I like the way it works, too, though, where you you don't change your focus character.
Like you don't just switch into some kind of fort mode. And now like you didn't just start a party, you start with a single adventurer that just had some buddies, but they're not in your party and you're just this one person. You don't want to switch like a fort mode where they're just kind of walking around and you've lost your association with them, your strong association and kind of camera view and limited knowledge that came from being inside that person. So I think that's one thing. But I think doing doing a swap to fort mode in a form of retirement or in a form of party activity, I think are both tantalizing.

BlindIRL:
That's interesting. I like to me cross mode kind of in like pops up in my brain in two ways, like that the first one is like, you know, the obvious start as an adventurer, become a fortress or play a fortress and then send out an adventurer kind of thing. Those are I think the obvious ones that everybody goes to. But I also think of like playing adventure mode, seeing things from legends or fortress mode and then a pop up happens and you get some of legends. And I think we kind of got a little bit of that with the siege update, you know, and the commanders show up, it gives you a tiny bit of history.

Tarn:
Yeah. Well, the engravings have always done that, right? I mean, there's there's there ways there's ways that they're they were accessed. And it's of course, the looming thing is why don't you just have the legends button sitting there? We've talked about that before. And yeah, still still, I mean, I'm not not a not against it. I mean, obviously the poor vampire suffer, but they always do. And, you know, whatever. And plus, plus, I can I can I can just remove their events. Like you click on them. And he's like, what's your history? And he's like, I came to this fort in the year 96. And I was also born sometime.
I did.

BlindIRL:
I definitely was born in the last 300 years, certainly.

Tarn:
Yeah. I mean, they generate a fake name and they generate a fake profession when they make their identities. There's no reason not to attach like three historical events that didn't happen to their identity, too.

BlindIRL:
I love the fake professions because I every now and again, you just have a bard showed up covered in armor and artifacts made of gold. It's like, yeah, yeah.

Tarn:
It's just all made out of like human bones and stuff. Actually, they hide those, right? I believe that was done like when when when a vampire shows up wearing human rings and stuff, it deleted them all. I think.
I don't remember that. Do they have a cleaning, like little cleaning routine, just a little bit of self grooming for leave everything, you know, making sure that looks like a total creep. Yeah. Yeah. Just there should be a little pile buried on the map somewhere. That's very positive.
No, I think I think the yeah. No, legends, moda school. I mean, it'd be it'd be great to this is just kind of show it.

BlindIRL:
I think every time we do these, I always kind of borderline like land in the suggestions realm outside of questions. But like
been thinking a lot about legends, especially about like what you've talked about with like just giving us the browser directly. And I still want that. I think they'll be awesome as like an optional toggle. But
would be really cool to have a chronicle of all of the legends that you've seen, you know, like whether that be statues or stuff that you found, like just a list of like, because you know how in legends you can go to a specific for its history. I would like to just be able to look at what has happened thus far in my own fortress or history that I've discovered from my region, which is usually like because I, you know, the last four I did, like everybody's really obsessed about this one jackal that killed somebody once 150 years ago. Like obviously that would be like the first thing in that region's history, right? Because like that's a notable event that happened. I think that anything that exposes portions of legends that are relevant specifically to your fortress
a massive positive to the fortress.

Tarn:
Yeah. I mean, they draw, they draw from the pool of things that are more related to their site when they're doing engravings. There's a higher probability of that. And also like, like when the game, when, when we, when in the very first incarnation that you know about where you're like, like you do the fourth and you do the adventure. When, even when the game was first released, I think there's a flag on every single event, which is no longer used called hidden and everything was hidden and you, you did not get to see them in legends mode unless you saw an engraving or something depicting it. And that's the only way that you could see it. That was, you know, deemed too hardcore. Like no one would ever see anything there. There might be, yeah, legends start up spirit or something starts up here. Yeah. It's just sitting there, but it's like, I don't, I don't think the, the way it's exposed has even been kept up to date. So it's probably a broken toggle by this point,
time. That was kind of, yeah, just the foundation of how this thing started. And so it's, yeah, it's interesting to think of like how, what is a more kind of, I don't know, modern is the right word, but I'm a more like in line with current DF way of thinking about that. And it would just be like making the legends mode button or buttons within fort mode, just kind of be more cool. Like just kind of show you stuff that's more relevant to you. Show you like how, yeah, I mean, you could even order by popularity and engravings for something. It's just like, or show you the relevant engravings that are like, and then you could like highlight them on your fort and zoom to them or whatever. Like, oh, that's cool. That one's over there. I mean, yeah, just even looking at the legends thing and seeing that there's like an engraving marking next to it that says that there isn't, there is artwork in your fort of this kind. You click on it and it's like, oh, that's really cool. And you find all these ones in your temple related to the God and all that kind of stuff.

BlindIRL:
I've even seen things like from, from my chat where people are just like, it would be cool if like I could go to a fortress history screen and like look at what the last faction requested for trading.
You know, yeah.

Tarn:
Oh, for sure.

BlindIRL:
That's, that's with them and they wanted amulets. Right. Got

Tarn:
Oh yeah. No, that's the stuff that you used to be able to do that. Maybe you can write up until they arrive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, oh, does it delete it at that point? Yeah.

BlindIRL:
Which is when I need to remember.

Tarn:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think, I think, uh, yeah, we're going to get more abilities just in this next release along those lines, just being able to keep up, keep up with stuff. But historically lesson, yeah, historically is not what we were aimed at, but I know I think it would be cool.
Just having a little chronicle.

BlindIRL:
Up in my head is when you have diplomats come through from trading caravans and they say, there's much to share.
And the way you find that is going to like news in the world jet menu, but it doesn't show you anything in any kind of chronological order. It'd be neat if it was just like, here's a list of the events that I'm sharing.

Tarn:
Well, it used to, it used to info dump. It used to, the reason that it says that is because the previous incarnation was junk where you scroll through 23 pages of nonsense. It was brief. Um, it was there though. And it was just like, because it was all garbage, I mean, it was just like shit. That was like the dude is sitting there like being the most boring dinner guest ever coming in and just being like, yeah, so there's like this mayor elected here and this mayor elected here, this new heart leader, this new heart, all this person joined the heart over here. This person settled in this town. This person settled in this town. Oh, by the way, giant goblin invasion. And you're like, Oh, okay. And then you look at your sea screen world map and you see the arrows for that. Right. And the other stuff you didn't write down because it was, it was not as notable. I think this just gets back to the central problem of any game like this, which is just exposition and summary. It's impossible, but we, we do our best and, uh, we, we swung between two extremes there. There's obviously a happy medium where you get to see some of the big picture items. You get to see them chronologically. You get to see them by importance. Uh, for sure.

BlindIRL:
I think that the, the pop-up for the sieges though, with just explaining a little bit of history of the commander, like I had one show up who got divorced the year before. And it was very funny. You know, stuff like that is just perfect. Right. Like that, that's what I was like, it was famous for getting divorced.

Tarn:
It's
yeah. Yeah. I understand.

BlindIRL:
That always see why you're talking.
Yeah.

Tarn:
I mean, all it does is it just searches for the most important event in that person's life and, and shares the news.

BlindIRL:
Yep.

Tarn:
I love that.

BlindIRL:
More of that. Because that, that's the ideal, I think.
There is one more kind of question. This could become another big topic, but just question that I have before we dive into some audience questions, assuming we still have some time,
um, is what's the state of the Luell overhaul and who's working on it primarily? Is it still Putnam's thing?

Tarn:
So let's see. Um, so you'll see in the, uh, the, the recent release, we got the forgotten beasts kind of the pictures got spoofed, spiffed up. Um, I don't know if you've seen a forgotten beast recently, but they will be including the, um, I just kind of noticed this with the, um, the human, the demon commanders. They all just kind of looked like dude, like colorful. They have the colors, but they didn't have any of the, the extra features like trunks and stuff. Um, because the, the Lua, uh, didn't, didn't, we just weren't done. And so, uh, I didn't want to waste Putnam's time on that. So I went through and finally I've got some Lua, Lua learning, uh, underway. So I, I, I, I fixed that part up, uh, I got it converted and, uh, now, now they're shiny again while Putnam's working on more important stuff like, uh, interface widgets and getting stuff out there so that we, uh, we, uh, can expose more and more of the interface and people can do like total conversion mods and new menus and shit.
like whatever they want.

BlindIRL:
That's extremely exciting, but just the interface related things, um, just in general, but, uh, yeah, I think that kind of, yeah.

Tarn:
So that's, that's, that's, that's one of the things that Putnam's working on. We don't have a timetable because we don't know how that's, I mean, it's just a thing, right? You just see how it goes. Um, but yeah, so I'm, I'm, uh, Putnam still does Lua everywhere though. Uh, so Putnam is still the main Lua person, but I am now able to do small additions and do, uh, do debugging and stuff a little bit, uh, just a little bit. Um, but it was enough to get us our forgotten beasts and, uh, we're hoping it'll be enough for me to go through the magic without having to bother them too much.
Uh, so I can, whatever new powers and things that need to go into Lua and not be hard coded because that's where powers are now, right?
That I can just do that.
This is, this is the hope. We'll see how it goes.

BlindIRL:
The way that you talk about powers makes me think that like the magic update was actually just Todie one getting the powers of Lua.

Tarn:
I think it's part of it. Yeah. I mean, that was, that was like, whatever since we decided that Lua could be done, uh, that's kind of the home of all that stuff now because, uh, well, everyone to be able to jump in on it. And it gives me the power to do a few more things. Um, we haven't yet done things like, and probably won't this time, don't know. It depends on how hard like doing actual like spell scripts and stuff. Like we're, we're approaching that. Um, but haven't done it. Uh, I don't know like how, like, cause that's one of those things where you need to have like little Lua instances or whatever running while the game's running and, and just doing little things, right? I don't know anything about the CPU stuff on that or the other things for that, but it's the kind of thing that, that I'm, I'm looking at for sure, uh, as a, as a future thing, we don't need it yet. We're going to just blow shit up in the standard way. Um, but we'll get there and we'll, we'll look at that. I mean, it already does run scripts post beginning of world gen, because whenever a necromancer
makes a new experiment or something, it's running another instance of Lua scripts to get that done. So, uh, we do have that ability. I just don't know how well it works in real time. Sure. It's fine. I just don't know how to do it. Um, but we'll, we'll be able to get through that. Oh, that'd be super cool. Cause cause my, my own scripting language is garbage, right? I mean, like, like it's not made for this. And obviously that's just not my, my skillset or priority, really. But, uh, if we have something sitting around that does it, then suddenly I'm quite interested in, in writing a custom spell scripts.

BlindIRL:
now working into audience questions. Keep me up to date on like time stuff. Like if you got to go, just let me know. Um, the first thing I have under like audience questions comes in from an anonymous viewer and they say, what is the pre-release testing schedule like for updates with huge chances or with huge changes like yesterday's, uh, I, I know that it used to be three toe playing, uh, for, for, uh, for a year. And is that still the process?

Tarn:
Um, yeah, more or less. I mean, the, the, uh, Zach's always playing. So we just, I have a test branch, you know, I have branches on steam. We just throw up a test branch where they've got all the debug stuff. And, um, it depends on what's going on, whether or not we, we have time to catch things. Like we caught a bunch of bugs before the siege release that were nasty. Uh, like, like see save corruption and stuff like that. You all didn't see. So like, like we're, well, I know some of these patches are rough, but it's like, it could be worse. Um, and, but this one, like the, the, the, the little thing on this one, like with the, the, the, the construction's not working, right? Like take something like the deconstructing time being broken. It's like you, you play for a while. If you don't happen to tear a wall down, you don't see that one. And then you're like, Oh, where's my unit test for that? And I'm like, well, God, you know, unit testing in dwarf fortress is a difficult thing. I mean, I know, I know some, some games do well keeping up on it. I don't know how.
Uh, I do have some, I've got a baby writer unit test now because I'm sick of that one. Uh, so yeah, literally before every release, I have
an expecting mother,
have a baby and then go get a drink of alcohol while carrying the baby.
And, um, that's that like, it will always be done now before every release. Cause I, that happened twice. It was incredibly embarrassing. Like, cause it was the same cause. I just changed the siege, mounted AI and forgot that the babies were going to be riding their moms again. It just like total, total, like, like just, just oblivious to that having happened before. Um, and now it's like, it's not even as much of an issue because I finally tore them apart. Now there's carrying and writing. They are different. Um, so it's even more safe, but I still got my unit test cause you never
has to go get drunk every release. Just, just yeah. Go drink a whole barrel of whatever carrying a baby. Um, and I just have a few more, you know, like smacking someone's, uh, foot with a boulder and get having them get operated upon dumping some water on some, uh, some, uh, some lava and having, uh, you know, 80 dwarfs in a room together, messing around and then just, you know, some it's not as much as I should have, but I just wasn't unit test oriented. I have a bunch of debug stuff and a bunch of tests I run, but not, not like this. So I'm finally getting back on the train, but it was one of the things I'm kind of glad the way I did it because players find bugs. I fix them. That's worked up until now. And, uh, now I'm just trying to be a little more cautious about it, but it slows things down. I mean, I took, took time to make those tests and I'm still not sure what I think about it.
I mean, people talk about test driven development and stuff and, you know, eating up an extra 75% of your time or whatever. And I
have that kind of time.

BlindIRL:
I made my favorite of the year was still just everybody eating and drinking in slow motion and starving to death for the should be all. It's like, why is it starving and standing in the stockpile? Well,

Tarn:
yeah. Yeah. I just want the game to work most of the time. That's what I want. I want the game to work.

BlindIRL:
It's fine,
yeah.

Tarn:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. I mean, we're trying to find a balance. That's all I'm saying. We're trying to strike a balance. Totally fair.

BlindIRL:
Um, the next one is something that I know has come up before, but I still think is about one of the most common questions I get in my chat. So it's worth asking again, I think, which is can attack animations be added to similar to when enemies are digging or in adventure mode?
minor indicators are great, by the way.

Tarn:
Yeah. So I think, um, the only thing stopping us from doing that remains the same thing, which is just we do a sample like
a representative variety of the actions going on and then place the place animations for those. If we,

Tarn:
of those things where 30 people hit 30 people, then the game would not be able to represent everything and you wouldn't see anything be an absolute mess. The way things work and four months is so fast. There's so much going on. Uh, I'm not even sure what looked good with two people, but I think, I mean, maybe it'd be cool if it showed an animation for a sever
something like that. Like when a good thing happens, uh, that's, I mean, an extreme thing happens. I, so no, we have, this is an active discussion, like, cause we've got them sitting there. We could just do it, but I, I, I haven't really had time to sit down and test a good representative sampling, uh, that would, that would do it. I know that showing them all is basically been on arrival. That's just too much, but, um, yeah.
I think there is some, uh, some, uh, level where it looks cool. And I, I definitely agree that, that, that we should do
Sure.

BlindIRL:
Um, the next audience question I have here comes in from Austin and they say, uh, will there ever be extra depth added to the raid system? I love how it works right now. And it might be interesting to have an actual hand in controlling a military group rating a site or a town potentially for more precise rewards or extra storytelling

Tarn:
Yeah. I mean, we're doing that with this, with this whole army muster Hillocks thing is one start to that, getting you so that you can have a larger group go in. Now we always had this kind of big idea of actually being able to shift the camera over. That's still like a one way of time to do it type of thing that was going to happen with the map rewrite that no longer exists. So it's like, is there going to be a camera rewrite?
Um, well, yeah. I mean, that's the idea at some point. Don't know when. Uh, and then there's some kind of like, well, is there going to be a middle ground where you're doing like some decision-making or something during the raid? Um, that, uh, is something that we were talking about, not for this release, but in this army kind of things that are happening now, uh, like this genre of, I mean, just I'm not, whatever this, um, uh, set of things. I mean, they're not called arcs anymore. It's very annoying, but, uh, like, like after we get referred to them, they're not an unbroken arc, right? It's like just little arclets, little pieces of arcs,

BlindIRL:
a series of storylines in an anime.

Tarn:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, so yeah, yeah. The, the game will improve. The game will become stronger. The game will defeat its rival. So it's, it's like the, the, um, uh, the first thing we do with the army is you send a squad out. You can now see a bunch of little indicators on the world map of where your squads are
out in Hillocks for longer periods of time, making requests, but also like leading potentially like another hundred dwarves or something. And yeah, or humans or whatever, like whoever you can get on your side, right? If you ask for an alliance and then you're like, Hey, give me 200 humans from the capital and we're just going to go cause some trouble. Uh, then yeah, you'd have an indicator for that now, but they would still just bump into each other and then just give you a report back. Now, if you, we had this thing that we had mentioned before where it pops into the, uh, adventure mode travel map or even the adventure mode site travel map and gives you like, uh, like, like those, those things from Kenburn civil war or something with the bars and the arrows and stuff. And you can make little orders and things like that. We've, we had been threatening to do that even in ASCII, right? Cause it's all an ASCII. So we had to think about how to do an ASCII. We thought about that a bit cause it gave you some very nice bars, right? ASCII is well known for its bars and lines. It's 205 is like the double, double lines, 206 and stuff. And one eight six for double vertical lines, like stuff like that, you know, you can make some nice lines in ASCII. Um, and, uh, that, that is the stuff where we don't know when that's going to happen. Um, but it was kind of the next step after what we're doing that, uh, for armies is like, okay, now let's zoom in and actually let you give some orders or something. That's not this time, but it is a kind of, um, figuring out where that fits in as a, as a big part. Uh, and that probably predates the camera stuff.

BlindIRL:
Okay.
Good to know.
next audience question I have comes in from some otters and they say, could we get events in fortress mode, like foot races and festivals or from legends mode?

Tarn:
Uh, yeah. So that's, that's, um, we, we, now we've, we've, we've always said we wanted parody, right? Like we want them to be the same. Uh, and that's like,
one was one of the ones where like, it's not a priority because we have to write a whole game inside of the game. Uh, and it would be something that like, there's a timetable issue. It's like, we don't have the weddings anymore either because it's like a timetable issue. Like, do you have a month
to,
uh, like run this ceremony? It would take a whole month, but then it's like, we're slowly headed toward it anyway. Like when we talk about having a fairs and we talk about having the hillocks be able to send you people to multiple depots or depot like stalls and things that you set up in your forts, you have a constant kind of back and forth with the outside world. I, I think you start to get to this idea of festivals again and ceremonies. And I think, I think we, I think we'll find ourselves facing that once we do the fair stuff, when suddenly you've got like an extra 50 people in your fortress from, and they're all dressed in nice, bright, happy clothing coming from the hillocks. And you're like, we should throw a party.

BlindIRL:
You know,
think like, whenever this subject comes up,
you envision it in a very like grandiose gameplay kind of way. I envision it as like a different dance in the tavern. It's like, to me, it seems like a very small thing, but like the gameplay implications of it are also kind of a, an interesting thought provoking thing.

Tarn:
it was just cause I know that there's like, like, what was it like, uh, instrument string throwing competitions and stuff. And I'm like, Oh God, this sounds like such a headache to code. But like, yeah, yeah.

BlindIRL:
Cause half of them are playing their guitar anyway. Right.

Tarn:
Oh, I know. No, it's ridiculous. Like it's, it's absolutely ridiculous. The amount of simulated instruments and stuff that are going on. It's like, it's, it would be so embarrassing to actually be in one of those. Well, that's why, I mean, I, I, I mean, I, I don't even know how well instruments are working like now. Like if you made the instruments, would they use them?

BlindIRL:
Do unless they're handheld, then they just leave them in the chest and mimic them anyway.

Tarn:
That's my, that's, that's the big issue. I want the, they should actually pick up the damn thing. We went through all that trouble.

BlindIRL:
They do use, um, the stationary constructed

Tarn:
That's cool. That's cool. That's something that, that, that fills me with joy.

BlindIRL:
If they know how to play them.

Tarn:
Well,
well yeah, they should just go for it. You know, it's just a giant suspended drum. What could go wrong? You just hit it.

BlindIRL:
Everybody gets upset. It's like the performance was abysmal.

Tarn:
Yeah. I don't think they have any right to complain because they were just sitting there going like,
they were doing the star Wars canteen out of just hanging out. Um, they're all being doof balls

BlindIRL:
they should be. Um, yeah, that's good.

Tarn:
It's good. Good stuff.

BlindIRL:
The next question comes in from a vinc here and they say, this is more of a modding question, but it also relates to certain giant variants of creatures. Is there plans to sometime or somehow fix pools so that large roaming creatures, uh, can spawn in them as of currently in legacy versions, a bug exists, preventing them from spawning.

Tarn:
did large creatures ever spawn in pools?

BlindIRL:
Large underscore roaming is what they've used here. Yeah.

Tarn:
Well, I just, I don't know that I don't know that that ever happened. I mean, they were just fraternals really, but, um, they should be in the rivers. Do they, do they spawn in the rivers? There should be hippos and stuff in rivers, but I don't know if they, if that works, but, um, no, it's just something that

BlindIRL:
maybe in fortress start.

Tarn:
Yeah. No, I suspect I heard about a general kind of river pulley bug and that might be what they're getting at, but I mean, certainly bug bugs, we like to fix.
get fixed from time to time.
not sure about the actual spawning in the pool though. I mean, it'd be cool because you can have all kinds of like creatures in pools doing horrible things or

BlindIRL:
a creature that just is the pool. Just eats you.

Tarn:
Um, yeah. Yeah. Why not?

BlindIRL:
Question from long time watcher, but not player. And they say, how important is software architecture indoor fortress? I've heard a lot about your component system and do you care to share some existing insights? Uh, you've learned while working with it over so many years. My favorite was the cats getting drunk bug.
Laughing emoji.

Tarn:
Yes. I think, I think, uh, first of all, like I don't know that much about software architecture when it comes to
technical stuff. And I, all I do know is that when people talk about component systems, they could mean two different things. One of them is kind of the like memory optimization thing where you have large sort of arrays of each variable set up in a certain way. And the other one is where you're kind of doing object oriented programming, but you're not using objects hierarchies because those could be very annoying. And so you just kind of have little parts of things that can, that can manifest, uh, which I do quite a lot of. Um, although I'm still stuck with some object hierarchies that I wouldn't have, uh, used now knowing how annoying it is. So, um, yeah, I think, I think,
I, it's, it's, it's, it's something that, yeah, I love, I love to do more of it. Um, probably complained about the tool object before it's just kind of
absorbed every new object in the game as a tool. Uh, because that is kind of the entity component system I've got. And it's not that interesting right now, but, um, I think every object will eventually become a tool and then I can get rid of my object tree.

BlindIRL:
It's just tool fans all the way

Tarn:
Even a boulder will be a tool someday.
Uh, close the liquid, like a actual liquid will be a tool someday.
Preacher will be a tool.

BlindIRL:
I mean, he probably already is. I always assign liars as preachers.
like a question comes in from unseal Seth and they say,
is a well-crafted copper pickaxe worse or better than a poorly crafted copper pickaxe as of now?

Tarn:
Poorly. So what, so we're doing copper,

BlindIRL:
like a master work versus just baseline,

Tarn:
adjust dig duration. Okay. Here's a just dig duration. The function, um, looks at your difficulty, grabs your materials and compares them. And here is the crafted crafted variable. Get the quality of the craft,
multiply times craft quality plus five, then divide by five. So a master work pick is twice as fast as a, um, on
pick and you get 20% bonus for each level. So a well-crafted picks like 20 and a, et cetera, 20% better
speed. Now, because of the thing we were talking about before, where you only have like five gradations of speed or whatever, it's more like it just goes into the pool of things that might get you from six to five to four clicks. So you have to balance it with a minor skill, balance it with the materials at play, but crafting does help as much as skill like craft quality. So if you have a masterpiece pick in the hands of a novice minor, it'll be like a legendary minor with a regular pick, which is silly, but you have to balance these variables somehow.
Certainly. If I were a minor, a novice minor, like I am a d dabbling minor, then if I had a legendary pick, I would be shitty still, but, um, that's not how the game works.

BlindIRL:
I mean, depends on how legendary that pick is. It just helps you feel how that's a thing.

Tarn:
It's like a dwarven masterwork pick could make me the legendary minor that I always wanted to be.

BlindIRL:
I mean, it's just like, if you have, uh,
I don't know why I'm immediately going to guitars, but it's just like, uh, like, if you have Prince's first ever guitar, obviously you'll play better than if you just are using like a Walmart special. I think so. I think so. I would imagine so. Would at least help the, yeah,

Tarn:
at least slightly better. Yeah. I mean, looking at that, I'm like, Oh, should I really leave it at, uh, you know, at two times improvement, not like at
improvement. I'm leaving it for now. I'll let it shake out for me.

BlindIRL:
Me re-smelt my picks. Um, yeah.

Tarn:
Oh yeah. Just keep re-smelting them. Actually, like, uh, yeah,

BlindIRL:
the thing that this really makes

Tarn:
me think it's going to be as bad as like the factorial quality where you're just like, you have, you don't play a factory, but like the, uh, they have five, they have five different qualities for machines and you can just keep remaking them. Keep recycle, keep doing it. And you've turned a thousand things into one thing. And it's like two levels better. That's what the picks are going to be like in dwarf fortress. Now, except it's much easier to get a higher quality pick.

BlindIRL:
Yeah. Well, the question is, can you get them to equip

Tarn:
Um, that I don't know what I don't do. They even pick up the good material picks. Do they swap any picks out?

BlindIRL:
I, you know, I've tried unassigning and reassigning and like unassigned forbid reassign many times.

Tarn:
think you just have to keep killing your miners in cave-ins. This may tell you, you get one holding the right pick.

BlindIRL:
This might end up just being like one of those, um, how do I put it? Uh, like we need civilian uniform assignments again, but like, yeah, give us like a drop down. I use this pick you moron. Damn it.

Tarn:
Yeah. Yeah. I think they, I mean, if they, if they, there's certainly the codes there for them to swap, uh, uh, for, for like, uh, military stuff. Like if you have, they'll just pick up the better sword eventually. I think the more value it takes.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. It's a little dwarves after all. So, so I think we can get there is what I'm saying. It's not a lost cause. We don't need a giant new interface. We just need them to think occasionally.

BlindIRL:
Yeah. Making the dwarves think is generally a good thing. I think, um, except for when like, you know, the dwarf decides they just want to drink a lot and that dwarf happens to be a fire mage and it happens to be in your tavern and it gets punched in the head by a dwarf who's on a tantruming rampage.

Tarn:
Um, anyway, we'll see what it's like. Low level explosion, but explosion nonetheless.

BlindIRL:
Oh yeah. That's just, you know, a couple of hairs scorched off.
traumatizing for a good to lose a beard after all occasional pool of melted fat. That's fine. That's just liposuction. Um, so the,
sorry, I'm just like cracking up here.
the next question I have here comes in from buddy and they say, uh, will there ever be an extension or a rework of relationships in adventure mode? I would love to be able to raise a family from,
and form meaningful rivalries and friendships, et cetera, during an adventure play through.

Tarn:
I mean, that's one of those things we had, we've had in one of those lists, right? For a million years. Yes. Um, we've even threatened love poetry and stuff, although in the era of chat GPT, I'm not sure those threats carry any weight anymore. Um, cause yeah, it's like that, that sort of text generation, it doesn't, it doesn't fill the heart with glee quite as much anymore. Um, cause there's just so much of it out there. And, um, I mean, we, we'd have our own special spin on it, obviously, and it would be lovingly handcrafted as well, but I'm not sure it's worth the time like it would have been before, but in any case, yeah, I mean, that's, that's, um, that's something that, that we'd, we'd, we'd like to do. Uh, it's, um, yeah, it hasn't, it hasn't been the highest priority, but it's been there. So I think it's one of those things that when we get back to like the cabin stuff, for instance, um, we're going to start thinking about like, Oh, well, can you keep animals? Can you make a carpenter thing?
And then, uh, you know, you'll have furniture. You can already do that a bit in the old version. I think you can, you could have a carpenter thing and I think you could place furniture. Um, but I don't know if you could actually make anything. Uh, I don't, I just don't remember. It's been so long since I've looked at that stuff was like seven years ago or something. But, um, so I think it would just start to gravitate in that direction. I think, I think that's, that's kind of a, um,
a, a point of gravity for that, that kind of feature. Anyway, is when we get to the adventure stuff.

BlindIRL:
right. Um, I've got another question here from anonymous and they say,
Any plans to add a date or time indicator to save files?

Tarn:
Like as the last time, yeah.
Oh, the last time you loaded it out. That's so that's, that's, that would definitely be a Putnam question. Cause it's, cause real world dates are beyond my, my ability. They're one of the hard things to work with in computers. I don't know how to do it. Um, I'm sure it's a thing
it's real. I'd feel so weird and uncomfortable seeing like 2025 or 2026 in my dwarf fortress load screen. I'm like, you ran worlds in a long time, didn't you? I mean, that's, that's like, uh, that's, that's going to be a big file to move around.
I don't know. I feel, I feel a little unsettled,
but I understand why people want it, of course. And, and like just being able to do like a quick continue button, all that kind of, that's like standard video game stuff. And I understand why people want that stuff.

BlindIRL:
For sure.

Tarn:
Um, I just don't know how to do dates.
look it up on the

BlindIRL:
Now this next one,
I got some of my questions scrambled here. Um, this, this next one comes in from, uh, Kel, a tennis, and they say, approximately how many copies of dwarf fortress have sold on steam?
can share.

Tarn:
Um,
where we need to be approximate about it, uh, do, do, do, do, do, do you click the button, you click this button and
then you click all history. Oh, there it is. Um, so there's, there's differences between like returned units and retail units and steam units. But I think, um,
ones that were actually sold to human beings,
1,070,000.
And, uh, we have it, but we have a 10% return rate. So it's, which is, I hear actually pretty good. Um, but that's, so it's more like 9,063, 900,000 or 9,963,000, not 9 million. Oh, no. That's 963,000.
That would be nice. But no, 963,000, uh, accounting returns, which you don't need to count, which is why we said like, Hey, a million copies sold. Cause they were sold, but then, you know, some of them given back,
but we'll get to the real number at some point soon.

BlindIRL:
Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that's still a huge number.

Tarn:
No, it's great. I mean, it's not as great. I mean, that's, that's great. That's like a, that's like a gold record or something, right?

BlindIRL:
It's like, just like a couple more holiday sales and you'll be there.
Um, yeah.

Tarn:
Yeah.

BlindIRL:
Wow. That's a big number.
kind of final question I have here, uh, from the audience, because we've taken almost two hours of your time now, uh, comes in from a devilish potato and they say in game cavies, rabbits and chinchillas yield nothing but a skull when hunted or butchered. In real life, these are all of these creatures are raised for both meat and fur as well as being pets. I'm wondering if this is just an oversight or if there was a reason for making them valueless outside of trade. They seem so pointless. Otherwise,
I love the idea of making soft chinchilla for mittens for my dwarfs.

Tarn:
Yeah. I always say they're, they were just, it's the tyranny of computer division algorithms and me and then oversight after that, like,
not putting it as a high priority fix, uh, once I, because I did know that's the case and then I kind of forget when I hear it, but then I'm like, no, you should,
The problem is if you, the reason, okay, I, I remember now the inertia. It's not, it's not like a strong reason not to do it, but any little bit of inertia, as you know, there's things pulling at me all different directions. So the inertia on the KVs is I need to make sure you don't get a piece of meat for every organ because then you'll get like 10 pieces of meat from the KVs. So it needs to, it needs to nullify all the organ meats and just give you like, it's just like the remains from the rats and stuff. It needs to be called like a KV chunk.
You get a KV chunk and you can eat it. It's like, it's just a chunk.
Yeah. It's just a little KV chunk. And, uh, and then it could give you like, I don't care. Yeah. It's like chinchilla. I don't care if it gives you a fur unit, you know, it's fine. One for a unit. How many units does like, uh,

BlindIRL:
even just yarn.

Tarn:
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. How much do you get from like a, like a cow these days?

BlindIRL:
like not, not a lot. Um, I think it's, yeah, so there is what I've slaughtered the cows for.

Tarn:
No, I meant, I meant leather. Like how much leather do you get from a cow?
three.
not. Yeah. So I mean, this is a little weird getting one from a chinchilla,

BlindIRL:
but we already get partial bars back from certain things, right?

Tarn:
Yeah. Yeah. We got, we can have partial chinchilla bars and then yeah. So you're like, you have these chinchilla bars and you're like, you're like, yeah, it's like, um,

BlindIRL:
you could get one thread back.
Oh yeah. You could do it thread because like you get thread from yaks and that sometimes gets used, used for stitches, but they're more interested in using my adamantine stitches than the yak thread, which I just gave away to the humans.

Tarn:
Chinchilla chisels, they'd be very soft when they chinchilla stitches,
but they're kind of powdery. Is there like chinchilla powder? Do they leave a little powder wherever they go? Is that something I hear?
They, well, okay.
So like the feather

BlindIRL:
tree egg yolks in my trading depot and then charging me for it, which is quite annoying. Um, but, uh, when it's like, why don't you just shower before you got here? Um, so, and I know that chinchillas roll in dust to keep their pelts
dusty, I guess. Uh, so maybe like when you slaughtered them, they just leave dust.

Tarn:
Like after fluffy womblers chill, like dusty like that, or maybe it's just covered with egg starch and feathers and, and, uh, bubble bubbles too, right? There's bubbles in the good land. So they'd be little bubbles.
I just kind of groom. I bet they groom a lot.

BlindIRL:
I mean, they'd probably groom similar to a Pokemon where like they just do like a nonsensical thing and all the dustflakes.

Tarn:
A little shake. Yeah. A little shake.

BlindIRL:
I always thought of them as just tribbles
from Star Trek.

Tarn:
Yeah. Yeah. That is. Yeah. They just, they move a
It doesn't show them tribbles moving in Star Trek. Is there any episode of Star Trek, which shows the tribbles actually moving because they like get places, right?

BlindIRL:
They just kind of like appear in places, but they also like fall out of things. Like they kind of clown a little bit, but like, that's just cause there's a lot of them there and they just roll. It's like that.

Tarn:
We don't know how they got there.

BlindIRL:
Like that zip block commercial where like they open the, the, the, the covered and all of the like plastic,

Tarn:
like traveling through subspace or something.

BlindIRL:
Well, they were, they were teleported to

Tarn:
like the different places that the

BlindIRL:
tribbles were a gift.

Tarn:
Oh, and they were just teleported into various closets.
there we go. That's the thing.

BlindIRL:
They're like Ramblins. They replicate when you feed them, except it doesn't matter the time of a

Tarn:
Yeah. Yeah.
That makes sense. Everything makes sense though.

BlindIRL:
Yes.
They dancing whamblers, very popular in my chat,

Tarn:
but yeah, Chinchilla chunk and thread
like a reasonable solution.

BlindIRL:
the bottom of that. This has been lovely. I certainly feel like I've taken more of your time than I said I would. So I have to say a big thank you as always for taking the time to swing by. It's been a long time between this one and the last one, but we had a lot to talk about. So maybe that's a positive thing.
It's lovely to see the game getting to an era again, where new things are coming in and we're also still getting the same kind of behind the scenes, like infrastructure development that Putnam's working on and stuff as well as like new features coming into the game. So I guess kind of as like a closing question for this, I just would like to ask, what are you looking forward to working on next?

Tarn:
I am looking forward to what I'm actually working on next for sure, because that's great fun.
And I just like, I like where that's going. I mean, I like, I like where all that's going. I like getting to like the underground map rewrite stuff
having all of this other framework that we're building out now to say like,
what, what are we going to cause? What the question is, what are we going to put down there? Right. And we didn't have as much stuff as, you know, to put down there. Now we're going to have tons of stuff to put down there and it's only going to be more like we're going to get more, more and more stuff. We've kind of thought this through and it'll kind of be, well, we'll see what we've picked when the different roadmaps and things come out as we get to the underground map rewrite.
That's it. It's going to be, it's going to be a nice
thing. I'm really looking forward to
that having a lot more control of the spaces down there, which also tie it right in, like tie the modes together much more closely because the things that you'll discover in Fort mode will also be adventuring environments in a way that the underground cave layers currently are way too samey. Like you wouldn't ever go on an adventure in the underground cave layers because you'd be like those monstrous layers that come to your Fort. You're like, I want to die. And you go down and fight things and then die.
But there could be cool stuff down there
your dwarves will be able to mess with it and adventurers will be able to mess with it. And I like the idea of getting back to some maps like that again, too. I haven't done a map in a long time.
Well, that's kind of a basic procedural generation object, right? I was like, I'm doing maps.
It's like, yeah,

BlindIRL:
it's like back in the good old days.

Tarn:
Yeah, that's right.
Do my maps
maybe the technology I get there will also let me ever change an NPC fortress again because I haven't been able to change them for years and years because the map code sucks so bad. They're unchangeable right now. Doesn't suck. Happens for years.
Yeah. Well, I mean, they're pretty terrible, though. I mean, navigating one of those things is a nightmare. People hate it.

BlindIRL:
You know, it's weird is like, yeah, I'd want to have navigating them as a nightmare. But once you understand how to navigate them, they're super straightforward. It's like the first time you have to navigate them. Yeah, they're hell. But like, I figured out so many tricks to just like get to the surface like that. It's like just get to a cavern layer and then just like walk and then teleport to the surface. It's like, nah, it's funny.
But yeah, I do agree. It just it just takes too much
capacity.

Tarn:
It'll be cool. Yeah. And yeah, just getting this more modular structure and is going to let us make those fortresses so much more cool.

BlindIRL:
Certainly.

Tarn:
Yeah.

BlindIRL:
thank you once again for lending us your time. I think chat very much appreciates it. And I think it's time to say goodbye and take us out here. Yeah.

Tarn:
Oh, bye chat. Bye chat. It was nice interacting with you, especially when blind was away.

BlindIRL:
Yeah, you get some more beers. I think I got a merch preview sent in actually

Tarn:
Can we get some more cheese for everyone, please?

BlindIRL:
Oh, one more thing I should mention right before we disappear is the adventure mode soundtrack is going to be coming out on vinyl soon. So you can go preorder that
chats.

Tarn:
That's nice.