Development in 2017 (RSS Feed)

• 12/25/2017 Here are some bug fixes to close out the year. Notably, visitors shouldn't arrive in such large numbers so early on, and fewer of them should overstay their welcome (in old saves, people already in transit will arrive, but it should taper off.) Adventure mode commanders etc. should recognize more of your accomplishments properly and not talk about unknown creatures so much, but identities have introduced some non-trivial issues there that we'll have to build through more carefully, and there'll be some ongoing silliness.
  
  Major bug fixes
  
  • Fixed crash from guide agreements
  • Fixed crash related to off-loaded items coming into play
  • Made agents and roaming questers respect visitor cap
  • Fixed problem causing agents not to check fort for tavern
  • Made fort-visiting questers leave properly
  • Made fort claim certain looted artifacts properly instead of leaving them on edge of map
  • Fixed several cases of "unknown creature" utterances
  • Fixed problem with neighbors not recognizing you, including commander and other quest givers
  • Stopped undisplayed items from lingering on display furniture
  • Made dwarven off-site squads stranded during preparation return to the fort
  • Made 32-bit Mac version recognize new keys
  
  Other bug fixes/tweaks
  
  • Fixed broken plant indicator on food stockpile
  • Made opinion monologues on performances etc. show text properly
  • Made log show completed kill orders properly
• 12/25/2017 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.44.03
• 12/22/2017 I've fixed a few crash bugs, stopped the main overpopulation-by-visitors issues, and a few smaller issues. There are a few more issues I want to look at before I put the next version up (display cancellation spam, issues with cancelled raids, etc.), and I'll continue working from there.
• 12/15/2017 All right, I've returned from Montreal, so we can finally start moving toward the second bug-fix release of this delayed cycle. As usual, I'm going to be starting with the worst new issues on the tracker before we get to old bugs and small suggestions/features, but once we get there, we are planning to take advantage of the new world map screen in fortress mode, and to clean up the basic adventure experience, and much more, before the myth/magic development finally begins.
  
  I'm sorry about what many of you, both supporters and other creators, had to go through over the Patreon fee changes recently, and we of course understand people that decided to pull their support over the increase. Their planned changes now seem to be shelved for the moment, though it's a bit disconcerting to enter a period of more financial uncertainty.
• 12/01/2017 Here's the report for the beginning of the month. Future of the Fortress has many characters, so it is broken into two parts: Part 1, Part 2.
• 11/23/2017 Hopefully this'll stop the problems we've been having in world generation!
  
  Linux Update: I should be able to test the Linux drive on Saturday once I get the hard drive enclosure, and we'll go from there. Apologies for the continuing delay.
  
  Major bug fixes
  
  • Fixed world gen crash associated to agents checking on site government after it collapses
  
  Other bug fixes/tweaks
  
  • Stopped returning pet dogs from petitioning for sanctuary like rescued prisoners
  • Stopped uncontested raids reports from starting at year 0
• 11/23/2017 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.44.02
• 11/22/2017 This is the artifact release, featuring the ability to send your dwarves off to cause trouble in the world, improved kobold sites, cover identities, artifact questers, and a bit of artifact diplomacy.
  
  In fort mode, the 'c' screen which used to list civilizations still does that as a suboption, but its main purpose now is to show the world map and allow you to interact with it. You can either raid a neighbor generally, or send off squads to recover specific artifacts or rescue particular people (in which case, the squads will still bring back other artifacts and prisoners, but focus on the goal.) A squad questing after an artifact will seek out information if the first site doesn't work out, and this might take several months, so be prepared. Squads can also be captured during raids, though typically someone will return to tell the tale. When squads return, a report will become available; a yellow 'R' will appear over on the left margin, and pressing 'r' will let you see it. Sometimes reports are quite lengthy as squads stumble from tavern to tavern; you can press enter to skip to the end of the path animation.
  
  There are some rough edges here! Be sure not to send off your commander if you are planning to reorganize your military, as they are the only one with the power to assign new squads and cannot do so while off the map. There was a last-minute hiccup with artifacts known to be held by people (rather than stored on sites); these fort-mode missions will be fruitless for the moment; the most common instance here is books authored by people that then hang on to them, so don't try to steal their books! It says on the map screen when an artifact is held by somebody, so it should be easy to avoid. Raids do not bring back non-artifacts or build skills; these issues may or may not be addressed in the short-term depending on difficulties that arise.
  
  The interactions with heroes and invading armies are more straightforward. There will either be 'P'etitions or a diplomacy popup to handle.
  
  In adventure mode, you can assume a cover identity. You do this from the 'k' conversation menu (if you are already talking to somebody, it'll be hidden in "start new conversation".) If you choose to link your identity to a civilization, you'll be carrying that baggage with you, especially when you are being interrogated by goblin guards, so one should be prudent. To turn off the identity, go back to the "assume an identity" menu and choose the 'x' "no identity" option. You can also reuse existing identities from this menu.
  
  People in adventure mode that are seeking an artifact will list "missing treasure" among their troubles, and you can then inquire further.
  
  In order to name an object, use 'I' to interact with it, and it'll be one of the options for appropriate objects. For example, you can give a name to your spear or waterskin, but not to the water or food you start with.
  
  There are also various adventure rough edges. For instance, if you pick up and then immediately replace a museum piece in adventure mode, and then tell somebody about it, you'll get credit as a Treasure Hunter. It'll be difficult to fix that without additional property information, etc. It's also generally hard right now to find artifact quests, as most things are in their proper place and/or not subject to an outside claim. We'll be working with this a bit as we generally work on stabilizing the release.
  
  Overall, many of the changes occurred under the hood, in preparation for the myth and magic release, but now the magic release will be able to incorporate artifacts of all kinds without additional delay, so hopefully it was time well spent.
  
  As usual, your old saves should work, but please back them up before diving into the new release! It is quite likely that forts will fall into technical ruin as bugs come up and are handled at this early stage. Old forts won't have object additions like the pedestals and display cases, but they should be able to send out raids from the 'c' screen.
  
  We will be focusing on the worst bugs (crashes etc.) at first, and then we'll broaden out into other bugs, old and new, and minor suggestions/usability improvements, as well as a general smoothing out of the new features. We're still working on the design side of the first magic release, so we anticipate we'll be doing smaller releases for a while.
  
  ADDENDUM: My Linux computer died during the release process, so the Linux version will have to be delayed until we figure that out.
  
  New stuff
  
  • Ability to send out squads to raid sites, rescuing prisoners and recovering artifacts
  • Display cases and pedestals, museum zones, both in forts and other sites
  • Can view the world map w/ rumors from fort mode
  • Artifacts created during worldgen: dwarf moods, named heroic objects, holy relics, heirlooms
  • New artifact events in play and worldgen: questers seek artifacts and ask for or steal them, invaders demand artifacts
  • New historical events associated to the creation of artifacts (used in fort and worldgen)
  • Agents used by civilizations to gather information, can assume cover identities
  • Improved kobold site maps
  • Goblin site denizens demand an identity instead of immediately attacking every stranger
  • More modding control over pets and other animals
  • Adventurer can assume a cover identity at will
  • Adventurer can name their possessions
  • New adventurer reputations related to artifacts
  • New religious activity: monks, pilgrims and prophets
  • Museums and other room types can be added to fort locations like taverns and libraries
  • Various additional data in the XML export
  
  Major bug fixes
  
  • Fixed weapon trap crash vs. item breakage
  • Fixed bug preventing monster slayers from visiting those forts with monsters to slay
  • Made animated skulls, hair and other bits easier to pulp
  • Made idle and vermin-hunting dwarves come down from trees more successfully
  • Made thirst/hunger and being pushed out of the way less likely to terminate dances
  
  Other bug fixes/tweaks
  
  • Alphabetized broad stock screen categories
  • Fixed problem with historical bodies not respecting wounds/processing
  • Fixed bug causing religions to worship too many gods, with duplicates
  • Made simple burrow beasts start in caves as possible
  • Fixed broken historical collection linkage with beast attacks during festivals
  • Fixed one instance of broken animal person greetings
  • Stopped natural animals from w.g. rampaging through sites owned by entities at peace with wildlife
  • Took age into account for w.g. fights vs. body size (e.g. proper dragon size)
  • Stopped people from being enough to satisfy a need to see great beasts
  • Made visitors less nervous about going to neutral locations
• 11/15/2017 That took a while, and there were many deaths, but it seems the infiltrating companions are sorted out now... I manifested with a party of bound companions this time, named "Buddy A", "Buddy B" and "Buddy C". All the same, when confronted by a goblin glassmaker near a watch tower, Buddy A quick-wittedly shouted out "My name is Tode. I'm a human beast hunter from <correct entity name>." And for now, that works. Buddy A held this identity until we made our way out of the site. Your buddies don't yet screw up for any reason. You can screw up, if your identity is chosen very poorly.
  
  Some bugs next!
• 11/08/2017 Down to two now! The various remaining artifact issues were uneventful. Now the main thing left to do is handling all this companions-during-infiltration business, the issue being that a goblin might address one of your companions instead of you, due to line-of-sight, etc., and your buddy needs to be able to pipe up intelligently to save all your lives. Might take some days due to the various various ways it can All Go Wrong.
  
  Then finally some bugs I promised to do before the release. Normally, we do bug-fixing for a while afterward (and of course we'll still do that), but e.g. dwarves being stuck in trees and broken undead tissues managed to get to the pre-release promise list, in some discussion or other. So we'll see how that goes after the companion identity stuff is handled. Then we should be ready!
• 11/01/2017 Here's the Future of the Fortress for the month, which also has a report.
• 10/29/2017 Where are we at... I made sure rulers could form new artifact claims post w.g., to keep the world interesting, and made sure adventurer-named artifacts were indeed generally uninteresting to people, despite technically being artifacts. We'd hoped to set up more subtle town-level identity tracking, by alias and appearance, but I ran into trouble there, so it still has to track identity by actual incidents and rumors, rather than just your greetings, community-wise. That is, an individual will track your aliases when you introduce yourself, but they won't pass that information around in a way accessible to the broader community unless there's also a barfight or artifact involved or something, at which point the information will be pooled by any survivors a few hours after the incident area is offloaded.
  
  There are four things left to do. Handling artifact questers in the case that site building maps are realized at the mid level, handling some issues with goblin artifact recovery squads, handling a promise to manage player adventurer party infiltration of goblin sites using identities w/ companions, and doing a few promised bugs. Ha ha, probably another Deadline Disaster from Team Great Predictions over here, but at least the last things are becoming done around the right time.
• 10/21/2017 Two main things this week were testing encountering an artifact quester in the woods while holding their artifact, and some quibbling with fort-mode artifact questers. The woodland artifact quester didn't go so well at first. I used my debug power to manifest as the Manifestation, holding the quest crossbow, which I immediately handed over. When I asked the quester about it, he said "An unknown creature has given an unknown creature <correct artifact name>. I don't care one way or another." There was an obscure bug causing his inability to reflect on the situation properly; visual IDs required some third party to have seen the handover, and I'd done all the testing up until this point in crowded mead halls. So I sorted it out and got a happy reply about turning over the crossbow properly. Reloaded, tested out various personality combinations, got mugged, etc.
  
  Still racing against the clock! What have we got, ten days left in October? Hmm...
• 10/13/2017 Back in May, I mentioned invader demands for artifacts, and the petition system there, where you can choose to send a dwarf out to negotiate. You can then bring the siegers the artifact they are demanding (if you have it and choose to do so), and I mentioned then that there were a few bits to finish. So those bits are done now, and the testing as well... and did it need testing! Ha ha ha. So many deaths, so many misunderstandings. Human soldiers spooked by a barn owl and then blasting everything that moves, diplomats shot in the back on their walk out, satisfied invaders leaving stragglers lingering forever on the map, and on and on.
• 10/06/2017 Okay, everything has been handled -- here's a recording of the relevant part of the stream from the Experimental AI in Games workshop. Tanya X. Short from Kitfox Games kicks the day off, then I appear at 36:18. You can find the other talks on their channel. It was much earlier than I'm used to getting up!
  
  Also, here's the Future of the Fortress for the month. Now for our yummy yummy dev nuggets.
• 10/01/2017 Here's the report! The Future of the Fortress will be a little late, but should be along soon. Let's see if we can't take care of it all this month!
• 09/25/2017 Mostly been playing around with post-world-generation secret agents lately, since most of the testing I'd done up to this point had been on their world generation histories. And there were lots of tells... still are many, but it is better. Elves showing up as peddlars, but the game giving them away as "Warrior" in their travel logs, their printed color being according to their soldier type instead of their cover, and that sort of thing. The old vampire secret identity code wasn't helping since vampires didn't try to hide these types of professions. But I've confirmed that they try to collect the correct type of rumors from your dwarves and can successfully bring them out of your fortress and back home, as well as being able to successfully target the other sites they visit throughout the world once world generation is over. Hopefully that's the last we'll hear about agents as we check these last things off.
• 09/19/2017 Sorry about the delay -- as mentioned in the B12 report, I was at the Progression Mechanics conference at Northwestern, but I was unexpectedly unable to get a post up here. Work continues and I should have another entry up before too long about how that's all going. For now, here's a video of my emergent narrative talk. The entire conference is here: Day 1, Day 2 part 1 (same link as my talk), and Day 2 part 2.
• 09/07/2017 I set a lone dwarf to travel over to a dragon cave to recover a cotton chausse. The treasure had belonged to the humans, a favorite piece of clothing and now holy relic of their first nature priest, but the dragon had taken it almost a century earlier. So, hey, why not bring it to the fortress? Maybe give it back to the humans to improve relations, or failing a visit from them, keep it in a little museum in a display case for the dwarves to admire. Uzol, my questing dwarf, managed to sneak by the dragon, but found no chausse. So he decided to go barhopping to the east to see if he could pick up any signs -- that's all I was testing, the barhopping code. I didn't expect him to actually find a rumor, but he did. Apparently, a mercenary had gotten to the dragon cave two seasons earlier, and brought the chausse back to the human temple, to its rightful place.
  
  Uzol had orders, though, and he followed them to the letter. He broke into the temple and brought me back the relic... now I guess I have a save if I want to test being invaded by angry humans.
• 09/01/2017 This is the report, and this is the Future of the Fortress reply.
• 08/31/2017 There had been a promise to get pet war dogs to travel with squads that you send on raids, rather than having them stay home waiting for their masters. So that's now properly completed. If your vision of dwarves is less about crafting in the mountains, and more about a lone dwarf descending from the hills to attack a village with a pack of a dozen hounds, your vision is now a reality. That's how I tested it, anyway. Five of the dogs were struck down, but the humans will now think twice about whatever it was they were thinking about, that's for sure.
  
  Along with this, the game now more properly handles babies that are carried off on site raids. There are still a few issues (which I'm not going to handle for the first release). For instance, if a baby is the lone survivor of a failed raid, they will unerringly crawl back to your fortress all on their own. At least they are no longer active combatants. Also fixed various issues with cancelling squad orders.
• 08/24/2017 Made your off-site raids a bit more interesting -- if you lose, sometimes a part of your surviving force can be imprisoned, and you can go rescue them if you'd like to try. The prisoners caused various problems with position selection. My imprisoned expedition leader just walked home while still considered a prisoner due to some erroneous travel code exclusive to position holders. The game would also select imprisoned dwarves to be position holders which stopped the fortress from working properly (since they couldn't be replaced or do their jobs or make appointments). I fixed every one of these problems I could find, but I'm sure there will be some ongoing issues with that. Various other fixes to squad reports, their injuries, etc.
  
  Last month around this time, there were about 20 nuggets left. That number went up and down as work happened and crap popped up -- now there are about a dozen. So progress! Not as much progress as I had hoped, as usual, but not so bad either. I'll keep plugging away at it.
• 08/17/2017 Main thing this week was replacing the giant unintelligible news/rumor dump from the outpost liaison with a display on the world map, over in the new mission map screen. So you can see where the wars are being fought and where the sites are being founded/reclaimed, rather than just hearing the names and not having any idea what's going on. The replacement isn't great, but it's better than the less-than-worthless confusion we used to have.
  
  I also fixed some problems where artifact reputation from rumors was getting confused as the state of the world changed (that is, artifact rumors needed to carry a bit more data with them to remain understandable as sites changed hands etc.), and a few other issues.
• 08/10/2017 The various fixes have continued. There was a hot potato artifact bug during world gen sometimes during events like forgotten beast attacks -- an entire extended family would die but still manage to meticulously pass off the artifact as the beast tromped around, sometimes 20+ times. This can happen in the upcoming release, but far less often. I did a bit with the adventure artifact log, prophecies, and finally got some good tests in on destroying artifacts in fort mode vs. rumors for people looking for them. Poked around and fixed a bug causing divergent world gen results.
  
  The weather report said "Smoke" instead of "Clear" or "Partially Cloudy", with a little wavy smoke icon I'd never seen before instead of a sun. Can't see across the little inlet here, and the moon has been red. Has been the case for the last few days, but the icon was new.
• 08/05/2017 Here's the Future of the Fortress reply. I posted it a few days ago but in my traditional August heat-addlement forgot to link it here. We don't have AC, so Scamps's freezer packs have been deployed! They are placed in a bag he likes, and he hangs out there.
• 08/01/2017 Here's the report for the month. I should have the Future of the Fortress post ready around tomorrow.
• 07/27/2017 Latest is tracking how the now-tradeable artifacts are handled by wagons, pack mules, and animal thieves, since the non-historical critters and vehicles aren't supported by the rumor/claim framework, but they still carry artifacts off the fort map. In order to set up the historical events and inventory transfers, I ended up making the historically-relevant merchants abstractly swipe the artifacts from their wagons and mules the moment they leave the map. It'll be easier to handle properly when we handle traded objects more generally, though there's still the issue of who "holds" the artifact when it is sitting in a wagon which is owned by somebody. The current structures don't admit much vagueness. For animal thieves, they get to become historical themselves, and roam the world map with their treasures.
  
  The list is down to about twenty nuggets like this, which take a day or two each. Not that I'd extrapolate a release date from that... it never works that way. But we're getting there.
• 07/20/2017 We've (almost) recovered and are back at work on the release. Today I did a hundred conversation changes where identities were being given away by old forms of incident, rumor and circumstance utterances... I'd been putting it off for a while since it was pretty mind-numbing. We're a bit behind on rewards and other correspondence, but we'll try to catch up by the end of the month.
• 07/13/2017 I have great news! A marriage ceremony is taking place this Saturday at a dwarf fortress in the Pacific Northwest. It will be just about as dwarfy as possible. I, Threetoe, am finally getting hitched to a princess from a royal bloodline. Thank you for all of your support, without which none of this would be possible. As veteran players well know, the dwarves will have to take a few days off to "attend party." After we get back we will hustle to get out Art Rewards and continue toward the imminent Artifact Release.
• 07/06/2017 Highlight this week was making sure other dwarven civilizations can in fact retaliate if you decide to bother them. So I sent my expedition leader by himself across the plains to the next mountain range to raid a mountain home. He did not survive. The next season, eight well-armed dwarves and two of their goblin buddies attacked my remaining six dwarves by the wagon. So one needs to be careful!
  
  Current project is turning all of my dwarves into children, letting them be kidnapped by goblins, and then growing them back up so I can send them off on rescue squads.
• 07/01/2017 Here's a Future of the Fortress reply, starring Llurbin the giant cave spider and the monthly report.
• 06/29/2017 Fixed up several issues causing artifacts to not appear where they belong. They'd often be lost on sites and never found, even after routine situations where you'd expect the artifact to be passed on. For instance, a bronze helmet that was the symbol of the dwarven duchess was lost on site after the duchess passed on from natural causes, and it took several years for another dwarf to find it and give it to the next duke -- the handover process is now more routine. Kobolds are also no longer allowed to make claims on artifacts (they still steal them, of course). They always store them in the trophy room now -- finding a single artifact held by a kobold somewhere in the living area was too difficult. Artifacts were disappearing out of my backpack, and that's sorted out.
• 06/22/2017 The more generic fixing process has begun, where I come to terms with various problems, mistakes and promises made throughout the last year! Arranged some display furniture, did more xml, cleaned some teleporting artifact issues, and got halfway through a promise about how library quests would work regarding copied books. It'll be more random than usual like this for a while, but I'm making forward progress. Nothing funny to report... just a lot of me grumbling "I brought *your* hammer back from the giant's cave. What do you mean you don't care?!"
  
  The procedural generation book I co-edited with Tanya X. Short is out! It's called Procedural Generation in Game Design. To celebrate, we did a Roguelike Radio episode with a few of the author-hosts. Earlier, Zach and I also contributed some recollections to an article in Polygon about games developed in childhood.
• 06/15/2017 Things are still a little rough and square-ish in parts, but we're calling it for kobold caves. The new entity animal framework is set up, though I've only used it for kobolds. It's pretty basic -- you can compel an entity to use creatures that either belong to a list of classes (classes can also be excluded), or by their token, and you can set them to either use matching animals from the environment or to get a free environment-independent starting population as with the current domestic creatures. You can optionally override the mount/wagon puller/etc. roles defined in the creature definition, setting them to always or never be used for those roles. Kobolds use their new entity animal definition to keep as pets any creatures in the surrounding environment that are in the new poisonous class which do not have the new mammal class. In my test cave, this led to a scary pit room filled with giant cave spiders and rattlesnakes.
• 06/08/2017 Kobold caves are well underway. Suffocated due to a weapon trap coated with giant cave spider venom. The site layouts are a little more involved now than the up-down natural caves, spreading out over a few z levels with some traps, guard posts, living chambers, animals, eggs and stolen objects. I've been working with the old entity animal code, but the next step is to update that to allow more control over entities and their animals. For vanilla DF now, that'll be so kobolds can focus on poisonous creatures, but hopefully it'll be a bit more flexible for everybody, probably focusing on creature classes and tokens. The old tags will still work as usual.
• 06/01/2017 Here's the report and a Future of the Fortress reply. Off to kobold caves!
• 05/27/2017 Just some grinding away this week, including the weapon trap crash that has been around since the last release. The last major step is to get the kobold cave maps up to a point where they are suitable for retrieving artifacts from. I started refamiliarizing myself with the relevant cave/site code today. Aside from that, it's a bunch more random tweaking and cleaning and promises to keep, but at least the end is in sight out there.
• 05/20/2017 Invader demands went more or less as planned, though I have bits to finish. If a sieging army wants to talk, there's an initial petition to arrange a parley, which is not delivered physically -- they hang back outside in relative safety, since you people have a tendency to drop magma on things. If you ignore the petition, they'll attack eventually, otherwise, a dwarf will go out and negotiate. To make it fair, the invaders will never attack your dwarf until they have time to get back inside, even if negotiations go poorly -- ideally there'd be some sort of middle ground where the meeting occurs, but we don't have time to get through the complications of that now.
  
  In any case, if you have the requested artifact, you can bring it to the enemy commander, or you can refuse. If you don't have it, you can pass along what you know, or you can refuse. An agreement acts as a peace deal which will last as long as those things normally last (it has a positive effect on relations for years which may or may not overcome existing hostile attitudes, and the effect is especially strong in the first few years).
• 05/13/2017 The more straightforward and well-informed questers can now demand/request artifacts directly. For single heroes or small groups, it works by the petition system (meeting with the proper dwarf first), to avoid pause/diplomacy spam when multiple groups arrive over some hot tip. This will also allow you to wait for a few petitions if you want to play favorites. For invader demands, which are next, we'll go to the full diplomacy screen for added drama.
  
  Accepting a request to transfer/surrender an artifact just triggers a simple task to deliver it to the waiting representative. Similar to last week's tavern inquiries, rejecting a direct request currently leads to three options -- immediate conflict, leaving and sneaking back in, or slinking off and possibly reporting back to whatever artifact-interested party they were working for (which could lead to an escalation to invasion).
• 05/06/2017 So this month, the idea is to switch over from your fort sending out squads of dwarves on various missions to the fort being the recipient of artifact-related questers and larger groups representing artifact claims (such as an army seeking to recover or seize an artifact). The easy starting point was questers that attempt thefts. Questers so inclined can now sneak in from the edge and try to take their target artifact, either running away or fighting if they are caught, depending on their temperament.
  
  We also allowed questers that are uncertain of the artifact's location to visit your tavern if you have one. Dwarves that are unable to hold their tongues can confirm the presence of artifacts, and then the quester can decide if they want to leave and sneak back in, or if they'll simply request/demand the artifact. Which is the next thing I'm going to add -- there's a bit of choreography there if you comply (since the artifact will need to be retrieved and handed over), but whatever I do should also work for the army requests/demands which'll come after that.
  
  If you don't have a tavern, questers will simply attempt a theft or make a demand without confirmation. If they demand an artifact that you don't have, you can tell them you don't have it, or you can pick a fight if you want. Also in this vein, we've had several questers come in succession for the same artifact -- this generally happens if a populous town/hangout has a "message board" quest for one of your artifacts and several heroes are already in transit before any change is obtained. Even if you give an artifact away, or don't have it, you might have to tell a few people off before the information spreads around. I haven't done it yet, but hopefully you'll have the option to tell second questers the specifics about whom you gave an artifact to so they can go chase after that person if they want.
• 05/01/2017 We have Future of the Fortress reply and the report to start off May.
• 04/27/2017 The main highlight this week is the post-mission report screen. When your dwarves come back, they give you a new sort of report that you can view at your leisure from the 'r'eport list. We based the report viewer more or less on the flight/sub sims we played a long time ago, where you get the exact path of your dwarves unfolding on the world map as time advances uniformly, and it gives you historical events as they come on the side, including who they are tangling with during site raids and what happened. The dwarves do seem to be engaged in some buggy jumps on to islands as short cuts, and we'll try to sort as much of that out as we can, but I'm sure this new level of visibility is going to be a cornucopia of bug-fun after the release. In any case, we're ready now to switch over to fort mode diplomacy for next month!
• 04/20/2017 It was a hectic-not-DF-wise week with city trips and family visitors, so there's not much to report. Continuing to handle fort expedition problems, and started a bit on the random promises list, with some XML additions as well as making the next release a little easier on utility makers in terms of finding global variable addresses. There are still four unresolved expedition issues, but then hopefully we can get started on fort artifact diplomacy!
  
  Chris Bratt of Eurogamer made a video regarding the cat tavern bug. That page also includes the longer audio interview. Dan Pearson of Eurogamer (who interviewed me last year) also posted a DF article.
• 04/12/2017 Now, on top of the rescued prisoners, we've finally got our first artifact "retrieval", though it wasn't mine. So I guess it was stealing. Bad dwarves! I sent three of them to sneak into a human town, and they brought back the sanctified skull of the first priest from the moon temple as well as a perfect gemstone from the lord's castle... when my heroic soldiers got back they just pitched the skull on the ground (ongoing issues!). I also cleaned up additional new problems with the noble/military screens, and an issue that came up with assigning museums as sub-rooms of taverns/temples, etc.
• 04/05/2017 We rescued our first child! The seven dwarves are now caring for Obol, a four year old human they found in the goblin pits. An impressionable child, she inherited the goblin ethics of valuing power over others and her personal dream is to take over the world. I'm sure it'll be fine.
  
  I'm balancing out abstract equipment strength numbers and working more with the post-worldgen raid/battle code, since it wasn't really geared toward smaller numbers of well-equipped player dwarves fighting at sites. That'll merge in with the reports they give when they return, which is the next project.
• 04/01/2017 It's that time again: here are this month's Future of the Fortress reply and the report.
• 03/26/2017 Here are the additional parts of the PC Gamer interview: part 2 and part 3.
  
  Working out the various raid issues. We anticipated there'd be lots of problems with suddenly sending a bunch of fort-involved citizens off the map, and there have been. Dwarves electing new expedition leaders when you send your current one away for a few days, lots of that sort of thing. I've successfully started a war with a nearby human civilization, so that's definitely in for next time, if you want to be unneighborly. I have yet to recover an artifact or a kidnapped child, but we should be there soon!
• 03/18/2017 I did a PC Gamer interview with Wes Fenlon at GDC this year. There should be additional part(s) that I'll link to as they are posted.
  
  Here's the panel I was on at GDC.
  
  We have little missions for groups of squads, and they can leave the map now. The current possibilities are rescue missions for kidnap victims, artifact recovery missions, and generic raids if you just want to start trouble. There are myriad issues to sort out, as expected. I'll let you know if anything amusing happens!
• 03/11/2017 Here's an interview I did with the Literate Gamer.
  
  So we have a map up! The borderline useless 'c'ivilization screen has been replaced by a world map you can scroll around (the old civ/treaty information will still be available in there). You can get site information, travel times, approximate populations, diplomacy states and so forth.
  
  The odd time differences continue to cause trouble as usual -- on a medium map, going from tip to tip on a world-spanning crescent shaped continent takes ~18 days. So if there aren't weird interruptions (like your dwarf squad stopping for a bender at a human tavern), you can expect even the longest journies to be over in a month or so, which passes relatively quickly in fort mode. We might adjust the times a bit if it's too strange, but we'd like to keep everything as consistent as possible (since there are lots of non-player armies moving around the map at these speeds).
  
  Next up, we should be sending our first squad out of the fort and into the world! This will bring up all sorts of issues (what happens to the squad/military interface when half of a squad has walked off while the rest are dawdling, does an off-site squad try to return through an active fort siege?, etc), and we'll tackle them as we go.
• 03/07/2017 And here's the promised Future of the Fortress reply. Fort mode work begins tomorrow!
• 03/06/2017 I've returned from San Francisco and GDC! The talk seemed to go well, I met a lot of people... and was recognized on both of my flights, which is a new one. The burnout is real, though. I should be back together in a day or two. We'll have Future of the Fortress up tomorrowish -- here's the Bay 12 Report. Then we can get started on fort mode!
• 02/22/2017 Alright, I'm ready to move to dwarf mode for this release! The main features will be the ability to send dwarf squads off the map, artifact-based diplomacy with sieging forces and others, and artifact-interested questers and critters coming to the fort.
  
  That'll have to start next month -- in a few days I'll be leaving for GDC. It was healthy for Bay 12 when I went there for the first time last year, so I figured I give it another go. I'll be back on the 4th, so there will be a delay on the monthly report and the Future of the Fortress reply.
• 02/15/2017 More progress... the artifact encounter problems I'm aware of are fixed, and NPC questers can go on near-fruitless quests in play to find artifacts known to be lost in the wilds (and find them if they happen upon the exact spot). You can sometimes find these ill-fated heroes wandering around out there, but there isn't currently a way for them to get more refined information.
  
  Your adventurer can now name any of their legally-nameable objects (so e.g. no arrow stacks, but you can name individual arrows). This elevates the items to historical status, so you'll get events recorded about them. That doesn't mean other people will care about them. There's still a bit to do, and GDC is creeping up at the end of the month (I have a short talk again), but we'll hopefully be through the boring cleanup part soon and get to dwarf mode off-map squads.
• 02/07/2017 The adventure mode cleaning continues. The logs will be a bit dull while I test and correct, unless something amusing happens. The guards have moved on from interrogating me over delivered artifacts to instead interrogating their own master. I returned an artifact, and the lord took the figurine over to an empty pedestal in the hall and stood there making cheerful remarks. A guard, confused again, ran over and demanded the location of the figurine. The lord was like, "Over my dead body!" They would have started fighting if I didn't break out to debug. I think in this case the guard didn't understand furniture, and also didn't think about their loyalties in the context of item encounters, and so flipped out when the item became "invisible". I'll keep smoothing it out! I've also cleaned up some other random issues.
• 02/01/2017 Here's a Future of the Fortress reply and this month's report.
• 01/23/2017 All right, so we're looking at four chunks left for this release, which'll take some time yet. We have to polish off adventure mode, which involves a lot of testing and tweaking. Today I added some more popups to the trade screen so you'd know your artifact gifts have been properly recognized and continued to fix up artifact transfer problems. There are still all sorts of strange things going on. For instance, when I returned a figurine to a lord, he stuffed it into a personal pouch where his guards couldn't see it, so some of them started interrogating me since they thought I'd hidden it and didn't actually see the hand-off. Lots of permutations to work through.
  
  Second of the chunks, there's fort mode! We need to handle artifact diplomacy and the sending of recovery squads off the map, which should be entertaining. Third, we need to finish the map changes I put off (e.g. kobold caves). Last, there are some random requests and promises that have accumulated (some memory address help for modders, a little bit of XML, a few priority bug fixes).
• 01/16/2017 I went ahead and added the ability for player adventurers to assume identities today. You can't pretend to be specific historical figures or deities, but you can be pick a name, profession, origin civilization and object of worship. All positive and negative reputations will be associated to that identity for as long as you assume it, unless you screw up. You can have multiple identities and flip between them (or return to your true identity). I'm still patching up some weird behaviors, but we're almost out of this specific identity grind now.
• 01/10/2017 Ha ha, this rabbit hole is pretty deep! There was a cascading split of various reputation data objects according to true, visual, historical and false identities, and lots of tracing up and down partial data to see where a new bit of information should be stored or what it implies. It is taking a while to sort it out. My brain broke a few days ago, but I feel more like we're coasting downhill on it now. Some problems we had of rumors revealing the identities of people they shouldn't have (especially as the rumors aged) have been patched up -- it can keep track of information about false identities indefinitely, and it can also keep track of independent reputations for the same person between several identities, even for old data where that distinction used to improperly collapse.
• 01/04/2017 I'm having fun chasing down issues with agent identities and rumors and so forth. A lot of the conversation/reputation code wasn't able to cope with the change, and we've needed to differentiate more between visual identification or whether an incident just involves the real and fake historical identities of people in the abstract, especially when you ask a person their opinion about somebody but only know an alias (which you don't know is an alias). People now think more carefully about where their information came from when they decide what they think of people, and do some cross-referencing of known identities and so forth, but they also have to skip certain rumors in their heads that pertain to a person where they can't make the connection (because they don't know a given alias or true identity). So if you ask after a goblin agent using their true name or an identity used in a previous town, people in the current town the agent is infiltrating will properly say that they don't know who you are talking about, even if they have a lot of information about the agent under their current alias -- or they might have an opinion about the old identity if they heard a rumor about it. Where the game previously formed a single set of reputations for one historical figure, people can now give different answers for the true historical figure and each identity, as well as what they think on sight (which may or may not involve any names -- they keep track of which identities they associate with the physical appearance).
  
  We're also trying to keep more identity information intact as rumors fade out over time, to stop covers from being blown by the passage of time, and we also want a bit more realism in terms of linking witnesses that know the physical appearance to somebody else in town that got to know a name/alias of the people and their appearance, but didn't see the incident. For example, if the player robs somebody without saying their name, a problem with the new system was that only the people that witnessed the event thought ill of the player even after a few days, since other townspeople could no longer make the link between the player and the event. However, if the player talks to enough people in a small enough town either before or after the robbery, then whatever name/alias they used should become linked to the incident after a bit of time (the normal rumor spread time). It's difficult to get it right, and it's not going to be quite up to the level where it'll need to be for the justice/crime features later on, but we're trying to keep everything pointed in the right direction.
• 01/01/2017 Happy new year! A Future of the Fortress reply and the 2016 report.

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Dwarf Fortress started October 2002, this log was started around the same time as the "back to the dwarf game" thread.