Dwarf Fortress Talk #13, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks

Cities
    Generation
    Populations
    Growth
    Adventurer impact
    Attacks and battle damage
    Resource scarcity
    Adventuring potential
        Adventure mode merchants
Questions
    Government types
    Grass growth
    Fortress trading
Credits

Rainseeker:Hey, welcome back to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk! We are here with myself, Nathan Miller also known as Rainseeker, and across from me is Capntastic, he's almost like he's in the room with me ...
Capntastic:How's it going?
Rainseeker:... and also our illustrious leader Tarn Adams, also known as Toady One.
Toady:Toaaaady One!
Rainseeker:And next to Tarn Adams is his cat ...
Toady:Actually Scamps has an unknown location right now, so he's going to be prowling and clawing me at his will ... I'm kind of worried now, I don't see him.
Capntastic:It's the anticipation that really makes it interesting.


Rainseeker:So, we are going to be talking today about cities and the nature of cities in the game, including how they impact fortress mode, and how they're going to be handled for adventure mode. I think they're mostly there to make adventure mode more colorful, am I not correct?
Toady:Well, there's a lot of stuff going on there ... I'm going to add a lot to do in adventure mode. There are going to be places where you can conceivably hang out for your entire game eventually, doing all sorts of things, so they should end up being really important overall, just like that were and are today.
Capntastic:Things to do, people to see.
Toady:That's right, there's peoples everywhere, thousands and thousands of little peoples.


Rainseeker:So what we're looking at here - and if you guys have seen on the website we have some pictures of what these cities are going to look like, and that's on the dev page, correct?
Toady:Yeah that's right, bay12games.com/dwarves, the main Dwarf Fortress page has the latest pictures and by the time this recording comes out there should be even more pictures.
Rainseeker:So you can check them out as we're talking about it. So now what we're looking at is an overview of the city. If you're looking at you'll see there are a number of pre-made buildings and usually there's a river, possibly going through it and what is happening here Tarn, how is this thing being generated?
Toady:Well, right now it places the centre of the town, it just picks out a spot and spreads out buildings from there respecting whatever wall or keep it's decided to put down, and it spreads ... It sometimes goes over the water... It fills out the entire area, the idea is that the vast majority of these cities were formerly agricultural and would have had those old manor-style maps that we had before, but they've got a market now and are now the central hub for at least the surrounding villages that get linked to them. So you've got these maps ... The oldest maps, the ones that are currently posted as of the recording don't have market squares or anything, so you don't actually get to see the market at this point but presumably those will be ready before long. Because of how it has to integrate the city grid with the cities it doesn't really have the same former-manor structure that it once did, although for the parts that are still agricultural that could return or not, depending on the timetable. But basically you have denser city buildings growing out from some central point and taking over some portion of the formerly agricultural area. So the cities are always the same basic size in terms of the overall area that's considered part of that city, it's just the percentage that's town and the percentage that's agricultural is varied based on the population, pretty much. That's why they always have the same overall shape, it's because all the villages have the same overall shape too, nothing's really changed about that.


Capntastic:What can you tell us about the people that currently live in these places? Do cities have populations yet?
Toady:Right now during world generation ... We kind of stopped the caravan arc part way through and then did the first release and then did some bugfixing, but as of then world generation had assigned a bunch of professions and all of the villages would just have people that were doing farming, mining, and various agricultural related work, they'd butcher the animals on occasion and so on but nothing like ... you wouldn't just get a bunch of silversmiths placed in the random villages that were there. But when a market springs up it looks at the resources that are available from the villages, whether that's ore or leather or ... Ow! (to Scamps) what is this cat ... He just snuck up behind and did the claws like usual, and now he's getting his belly rubbings ... So once you have a market - and there's a market from the very beginning, from your one or two or three or whatever there'll be a market location selected for the beginning villages, and that's where it centers all of the secondary craftwork. So you have all of the ore and things being brought to that town and you have the professions springing up, the ones that can spring up around there, and every village and town has a list of needs based on the population and the items that are currently stored - it stores all of the items numerically now - and so if people have a desire for beds or weapons or crafts of various kinds they'll start to use the resources they have and they'll also look at the neighboring markets that they link up with and see what needs they have, and basically build the things that they're best at building using the resources they have. That starts to create profession counts in the towns and specialty counts in the towns so it keeps track of how long they've been doing a given thing and how many people are doing it. So you get some specialization and the remainder of the town doing the other jobs that need doing. In the end you have a numerical breakdown of the population of the town by profession, so we have for a given town up there that might have a thousand or two thousand people or whatever, you'll have a specific breakdown of all of the professions and those are used - or going to be used depending on where we're at when this is released - to populate the buildings with workshops and so on, to reflect who lives in the city during world generation.


Rainseeker:So do you have plans to allow the cities to grow organically over the course of world generation, and is that going to continue on into adventure mode?
Toady:So city growth right now during world generation ... It does not have the specific city map set aside during world generation because it takes a certain amount of time to generate one of these maps and it would slow down world generation a bit to have the specific locations of every building tracked and it would also be pretty memory intensive. So right now what it does is it numerically tracks the buildings and things, so it knows how much is there, but it doesn't know specifically where it's location or how many streets there are and the exact shape of the road network and everything. It just knows what's there and those numbers increase or decrease depending on what's going on. Once world generation ends then it has that information ready to create a map of a city, so that when you go to the city for the first time it will then generate a map based on that information. So there's still an opportunity for the appearance of organic growth there because it has historical information and it has population variation over time and it can keep track of how many ... It doesn't currently keep track of when every building was built but doing that to some extent would be feasible, in which case you could do a bit of organic growth for the time during world generation.

After world generation it's basically the same story. You have nothing happening right now changing in the towns, and the timeline for that is not really well known, we'll see when we get to it ... I think it was release 5, I'm going to go and check now ... there was a release there that really gets at the dynamic of the situation; right now we're just trying to get things to show up at all, so you have to be a bit patient with what we've got. Release 5: changing populations, food use and other world generation stuff moved to actual play; that entire release is basically dedicated toward making the situation more dynamic in the cities. So if people moved to a town then that needs to be reflected in the growth of the town, even if you've visited the town before; if you've visited a town and it had a population of one thousand and you play the game for twenty in-game years ... that would be a lengthy series of adventure mode games but it's not just adventure mode games being played, it's fortress mode games which pass the years quite quickly ... and so you can end up with a town, you know if its population changes from one thousand to two thousand and you've already visited the town in adventure mode then you would have a map for that town and that map would need to be updated, so basically it would need to take a summary of changes - it can't keep track of anything - but a summary of changes, and continue to create the city, basically, and more or less tear up farm land and extend the map outward. So the extent to which that's possible with, say, five hundred years of world generation history ... It's not something I'm doing right now as various people have noted, about these maps, and I don't have all the information stored that I need but it's certainly a feasible thing that shouldn't be too difficult overall.
Ollieh:(interlude music)


Rainseeker:So what would happen if your adventurer, say, went into town and slaughtered all the innocent civilians and then you started a new game and came in to that same town would it regenerate with fewer buildings or would they keep the buildings and just have a small population?
Toady:How many of the civilians are innocent, you know?
Rainseeker:None of them!
Toady:Once we get to release 5 that's when the wholesale occurrence of adventurer antics is going to have a real impact on how the city survives. If you go there and kill all of the silversmiths then that's going to kill the silver industry in that town, and that's going to affect trade. People have been looking at how fragile the relationships right now are in world generation, when you have these insane boom/bust cycles where you just have thousands of people disappearing or growing back up based on a given industry failing or not working out properly or just because the game is very sensitive and not very smart; at this point especially. It would impact the whole world because if the silver trade was the only way that the surplus in another town was getting traded as well then that town would also become impoverished because they'd have a bunch of goods they couldn't move anymore, and then everyone would begin to suffer. That's what we're going for with release 5 ... Release 4 has merchants moving around on the map and that should start to get the goods to flow but the impacts come in release 5, and by that time your antics should have real meaning. Until then you're just going to be hanging out at bars and drinking and stuff ... and kind of wandering around town causing trouble to no real end, but it'll have an impact at that time, that's what we're hoping for, that's kind of the whole goal of that release.


Capntastic:How will cities respond to attacks by either goblin hordes or megabeasts, will there be battle damage?
Toady:That's army arc stuff, so this is ... we're talking about further down the line after the nine releases that have been scheduled, then we're jumping into the army arc, and yeah, these cities are sitting here waiting to be destroyed, basically, by people willing to go through and do the hard work, so ... There are a couple of scenarios that will have to be handled in the army arc. There's the player attacking with a dwarven army, attacking a city like this ... so you'd have essentially those maps I've posted ... it can't have the whole thing loaded at once because the maps I've posted are generally seventeen by seventeen embarks and that would be a memory problem just by itself before you even think about the speed ... but you'd have the embark level map or a slightly zoomed in version of that and you'd be able to tactically order your guys around. You can basically imagine those maps you're looking at ASCIIfied, and then having your soldiers laid out and then do a Ken Burns The Civil War thing with them, where you've got your armies moving around, the bars of armies and they would be somewhere and you'd be somewhere else, and then your guys would move and their guys would do whatever and eventually you'd be into the buildings and the buildings would possibly suffer for it. In the biggest cities I think there are around twenty five hundred buildings and just tallying ... there's only going to be a few cities that size in the whole world, and when it comes to tallying damage on twenty five hundred structures that's just a drop in the memory bucket. If you were going to do four bytes per building that's ten thousand bytes, and I think a dwarf is bigger than that, so it's not a big deal to tally the complete destruction specifically of each building as it's razed, if you're going through doing that kind of thing to the town.

So there's the dwarf version and then there's the abstract version which in the end is probably going to be the one that looks the least satisfying, when just some town across the world where you haven't been yet has been attacked and fifty percent of it has been destroyed by some goblin rampaging army or a megabeast, and then you go to that city and it has to sort of simulate fifty percent damage on the city. So it'll just pick out buildings, maybe choose a direction of attack and choose how the fire spread or whatever and blow up a bunch of buildings, and then rebuild on top of that. And then there's the other type of thing that it'll need to handle, which is if you're an adventurer in a city at the time that it's being attacked. Then it's going to need to be able to deal with your moving frame of reference versus where the attacking armies are and also what are all the civilians doing. It's quite similar to how the dwarf mode version would work though, if you're not just on a tactical map but if you're zooming into specific battles that you want to watch in dwarf mode; like if you want to zoom in on the gate when it's being attacked, or zoom in on one quarter of the city when it's being attacked and actually watch what's happening. Then you have to deal with the same stuff which is, you know, you've got maybe two or three hundred civilians loaded in addition to whatever armies are in that area. The civilians are going to have to be pretty brain-dead to have that continue to run at a proper speed but they would be able to follow mass paths out of there. It's way easier to do fast pathing on a city with roads and so on, and if there are blockages then they might just get stuck in dead ends and burned to death or whatever, and that's just going to be part of ...
Rainseeker:Part of the fun.
Toady:If you want to call it that, that's what it is. I'm basically always going to be extra mindful of the speed concerns that come with having cities with large populations, and there's basically going to be a lot of people hanging out in their houses, and a lot of people walking along roads, and that's not bad, because that's what happens in cities, so I think we'll end up in good shape. The vast majority of the people aren't going to be loaded at a given time so it's pretty easy to keep it under control, I think, as long as the cities don't get larger than they are now. But even if they do ... you could have a world spanning city, it just doesn't have all the people loaded.
Rainseeker:That would be actually kind of spooky.
Toady:Yeah, it could be kind of like a Trantor thing where you pave the whole thing with steel and have people wandering around on it ...


Rainseeker:Alright so what's going to happen to a city that runs out of the main resource that it uses. Is that going to be possible?
Toady:Yeah, I guess so, especially if it relies on trade rather than ... I don't know how we're going to do exhausting mines, we're going to get further into that in release 2 when we do mines and specific mine maps and improve the geology at bit ... but especially if you're just relying on some other city for trade, like if you get all of your ore from another city or basically another trading bloc - so it's got its villages supplying it with ore and then you trade the ore for something else so that your guys can work - then if that route is cut off by war or whatever then you get the typical problems you have when that kind of thing happens: a bunch of people can't work and then, you know, trouble. Lots of trouble. I guess until we make them smarter they just starve to death, as of release 5 like we were talking about. When they actually have to make ends meet then they'll be in a lot of trouble and you basically have ... the population would riot or disperse or you'd have people moving east, moving west, moving north, moving south.
Rainseeker:You get them moving out, or stealing food ...
Toady:Well the town could be looted before their leave but they can't stay forever, you can't support a population that isn't being fed. It should be intriguing, release 5 is really going to be the one - and that's why I've set aside release 5 just for this kind of thing - that's going to test how resilient the models actually end up being. It's really testing the whole premise of the game, basically, that you can have systems like this that don't totally fall apart, or they only fall apart when they should, more or less. It's something that I can't say how it's going to turn out, there are too many moving parts to know if it's going to work or not, and I hope it works because that's kind of the whole thing we've been aiming at for years is release 5, more or less. Is the world actually going to survive being alive?
Ollieh:(musical interlude)


Capntastic:Alright, so, we have cities, and we have adventurers. What happens when you mix them? Let's say you're an adventurer, you've got some weapons, you're a tough dude, you're in the middle of a functioning city and you want some cash. What do you do?
Toady:That's right. So, you come in there and - let's say you're not completely incompetent, and you maybe have a bit of a reputation or not - so what can you do? Well at first we don't have taverns, we don't have inns, we just have these people, right? There's just people hanging out in the city, and basically we'll have to go with the most clichéd garbage at first, probably. You know, things to kill, that kind of thing. Bandits have analogues in cities, just things like are there criminals hanging out in a location, are there sewers, are there catacombs, that kind of thing. I can tell you there are going to be sewers and catacombs, of course, and you just have to look up Roman sewers or Parisian sewers to see that it's not all modern fantasy cliché stuff, although throwing monsters down there is ... Zach and I were talking about this, if you have your sewer system connected to the river and you have hippos in your river then you can have hippos in your sewer.
Rainseeker:Unless you have grates ...
Toady:Well, if you don't invest in the grates then you've got hippos.
Rainseeker:'Yes, small adventurer who's barely done anything with his life. Go down in the sewers and kill whatever's down there.' You'd be like 'No problem, I can kill rats', and then you're confronted by hippos. That's really a bad ending.
Toady:It should be exciting.
Capntastic:Leave your preconceptions behind.
Toady:That's right, you never know, never know what you're going to find down in the sewers. Carp even ... Carp aren't as dangerous, but there might be ... They get right through the rivers, anything you find in the rivers, if they don't grate off the sewer entrances then you've got trouble. So sewers are fun little places to place all kinds of outlaw peoples and that kind of thing ... This is the kind of typical farming of fantasy garbage you should have come to expect by now, so just to have something to do we're going to start there and you can already look at the release schedule for the actual interesting stuff like taverns and so on that will open adventure mode a bit, and adventure mode trading which is one of the giant points about the arc.

But just at first your adventurer is just going to be able to do typical adventurer things there, and of course there's no non-lethal force action yet so if you're helping people bring criminals to justice based on the strength of your prior reputation as a dragon and night creature killer - and they're like 'Can you help us out?' - then you'll just be murdering people, until the tavern release. The tavern release will have non-lethal fighting because there'll be bar fights and we don't want bar fights to be like 'You punch him in the face, jamming the skull into the brain, killing him instantly' or whatever. We're going to have to change combat a bit to make fist fights work because right now fist fights are way too dangerous, but it should work out in the end. If you have the reputation for it ... It would be strange if you just wandered into the town, no-one knew who you were, you weren't famous for anything and you were like 'I want to go on the night patrol and look out for criminals for you'. It'd be like 'Yes, we trust you to patrol our streets' ... That'd be kind of silly.
Rainseeker:Unless you were raised in that town.
Toady:Exactly. If it was your home town then just like you have people warning you around the bogeymen outside when you're in your home town they say 'Nice to see you' and they know who you are ... If they know who you are then they can trust you with that kind of thing. That's another thing that can happen, we were thinking - depending on time - before the tavern release we can extent night creatures to make some city varieties; things that could be in houses and in the underground, all kinds of things. Once you've got a house you can start haunting it with things but once you've got catacombs of course you can go nuts with that. We were thinking of getting some basic sewers and catacombs in even in this first release, just to give you something to do in the new cities aside from wander around and purchase things from the many many many many stores and markets.
Rainseeker:I want to get a job as a hat merchant. Make hats, and sell them.
Toady:This will happen. Your dreams are going to come true, isn't it great?
Rainseeker:I can't wait. I want to put flowers on them ... and also feathers ... I want fancy hats.
Toady:Let's see, when is that ... release, release, release ... Release 9 is when you're going to be guaranteed to be able to trade and sell things and so on. However release 8 lets you buy cottages and other properties, so we're getting into that whole ... you know, is the game going to be like one of those things more like Patrician, where you can be in multiple towns and have properties and move your caravans around, that sort of thinking ... we're been reading a lot about how those things are structured. The things that might be difficult for you to get into as an adventurer is that kind of production and retail thing where if there's a guild structure that gets put on top of this, which is very likely, then you might have a lot of trouble breaking in if you don't choose that as a character generation option because you weren't apprenticed early on ...
Rainseeker:Yes, I was in the hat guild early on in my characters development.
Toady:Yeah, so then you might have a chance at that kind of thing. But guilds aren't a foregone conclusion for every city either, and then you can just be the guy who makes necklaces and sits out on the street and sells them to people that walk buy on a little mat until you get chased off by the guards ...
Rainseeker:'Do you have a permit for those necklaces?'
Toady:So we're hoping to give you some opportunities there. The big thing is going to be the trade orientated thing, like you'd be able to buy up certain goods from one town and then set up a warehouse in another town perhaps and sell to local vendors, for them to sell further if you don't want to set up a store yourself or are not able to. We'll be exploring that stuff in releases 8 and 9 and hopefully ... We haven't thought quite as much about how the economies would go in a village, because there were peddlers that kind of move from village to village, like 'I'll sell you a hammer and I'll buy your ... whatever, buy some vegetables or buy a cow you don't need and move it to the next town and sell it there' - I'm not sure they took livestock per se, but you know what I mean - and just being one of the local peddlers would be a lower status version of the larger caravan operations that you could engage in. But when it comes to actually making stuff and then selling it you'll just need to find an avenue for doing that, but hopefully we'll be getting into stuff beyond the trade, but the trade is going to be the main focus in those late releases. What else can you do as an adventurer ...
Capntastic:Friends!
Toady:Yeah, you'll have friends. That's the taverns, I guess taverns are all about making friends, no matter how it's done.
Rainseeker:Friends and connections, hey?
Toady:I don't think the tavern thing will be done until you can get into a fist fight with somebody and then just laugh it off with them afterward and then get drunk and then you both pass out missing half your teeth.
Capntastic:There you go, the classic scenario.
Toady:Then they could go out and kill a dragon with you, or you could die trying to do that anyway when you're still drunk.
Rainseeker:You can't earn a dwarf's respect until you punch his teeth out.
Toady:We'd have to start adding thing in like 'Dwarves grow their teeth back every two weeks' or something; the necessary things or they'll all end up looking like Tank Abbott or something, just toothless ...
Rainseeker:They're well adapted to bar fights. Part of their evolution.
Toady:That's right, they'll have redundant livers in their knees and stuff.
Rainseeker:Alcohol is not toxic to them at all, actually.
Toady:It'd be too bad if ... They have to get drunk, but maybe they ... We'll see. Because you want to have the dwarves be distinguished and yet recognizable. I guess their teeth just might be rooted a little more deeply than the average tooth so they don't get busted out quite as often, because they're going to be boxing each other in the face all the time.
Rainseeker:Maybe they only slap in the bars, they don't punch.
Toady:Dwarven slap fights ... it'll be too much, too much.
Ollieh:(musical interlude)


Rainseeker:Hey, welcome back to the third half of the show. We're going to be addressing our questions from Dwarf Fortress Talk listeners, and if you want to ask a question, Tarn, where do they go to ask?
Toady:They go to the Dwarf Fortress General Discussion section of the forums and there's a stickied thread there and it will give you the exact format.
Rainseeker:And feel free to ask as many questions as you like but please make them succinct, we get a lot of long rambling questions that are hard to ask. With that in mind, I will take the first one from Argembarger, I'm sorry if I slaughtered your forum name: 'What kinds of government types would be included in Dwarf Fortress, and will they have any effect on how the entity as a whole is managed?'
Toady:Right now the different entities have different positions that have different responsibilities, and so right now we haven't really explored anything interesting, everything is more or less dictatorial now, to the extent that decisions are being made at all, and they aren't really, but when we start getting into the army arc stuff and maybe a bit with this caravan stuff it'll start to matter. At that point we're really open for any division of responsibilities that could possible come up. What we're starting with is just this whole warlord/king thing, but the elves already have distinctions in their government between the druids and queens and warrior princess type situation they have there, and each of those types of people would have different types of responsibilities. So you'd have conflicts at times between what each of those three people want to do, but they're essentially coequal branches of government there; that's the intention, I'm not saying any of this is happening now because we haven't got to anything relevant yet. If later on the humans start to branch out - because right now there's only one human entity, so it doesn't have any diversity at all - but when you start getting diversity there we start divvying up the responsibilities for both the sites and for the larger government, and if there ends up being, like we have know, those mayoral elections in dwarf mode, if you end up with a number of elected representatives and have several people that each have their own personalities weighing in or voting on actions that can be taken then we're all for that. It's not much more difficult to do than individuals making decisions, which like I say haven't been done much either, but when a single warlord can make a decision to do an attack or not then if you have to weigh the votes of five people and have a majority rule type situation then it wouldn't be that much more difficulty, you'd just have to watch out for the processor intensiveness of it; if you want a senate of a hundred different people then it starts to become a processor problem. But we don't really have the populations to support very large bodies, very large legislatures, but hopefully we'll start to have things like codified laws; whoever's making the laws having them written down, in a lot of the different societies. We're starting with the simple ones and hoping to spread out from there, no timelines of course on this, but it should start to come to a head in the army arc because that's when decision making is going to become very pressing, because they'll have very specific decisions they have to make.
Ollieh:(musical interlude)


Capntastic:'Does grass growth change in different biomes and circumstances? Is there any chance of us developing a precise formula for the pasture area needed, factoring in the chance of grass regrowing, trample, and grazing?'
Toady:Right now there's no difference, it just comes in kind of randomly. It's more or less like when you see the raindrops falling; you also get a regrowth pattern that runs a little slower than that but more or less at random. You could calculate what's the average growth of a given block of grass, so theoretically you would be able to come up with a precise formula, however making grass growth rates change is certainly the kind of thing that sounds fair, especially if you want bamboo to grow very quickly, for instance, then it would and that would change all of the formulas. To the larger issue, if the larger issue is 'My animals are starving and I don't know how big to make my pasture' then I think that's probably the issue that should be addressed. We added without a lot of help for the player and for the starving animals you kind of have to manage ... you know 'Oh I see a starving animal, I'm going to place a new pasture/enlarge the existing pasture, move the animal if they have to be moved and then they can continue eating'. Having that be handled more automatically, or giving you some more notifications, that'd certainly be a reasonable thing ... making farmers able to do things without your absolute hand holding all the time is certainly a legitimate point if that's the one being made. Definitely, we'll need to do that.
Capntastic:Just to be certain though: soil type and similar has no bearing on grass growth?
Toady:No, no. Well, I mean it has to support grass growth at all, and then basically when it hits the square, when the regrowth hits the square it just adds twenty five percent to the grass length, and then when the animals are sitting on top of it they kind of mow off one percent as a time, it just goes 'one percent, one percent, one percent, one percent' down to zero, and then they move to a different square and start nibbling there. But then the old square could be hit and suddenly it's got twenty five percent ... and twenty five percent you can't tell, it just says 'sparse grass' again. So sparse grass will appear, and then it will become regular grass, and then dense grass, maybe with one doubling in there and it just drops these twenty fives all over the place. Then the people can go eat them, and the twenty fives become fifties and then seventy fives and one hundreds over time as the square is hit multiple times. It's kind of random and just grows back ... you know, over time.
Capntastic:It's one of those things that isn't quite as complex as one might assume it to be at first glance ... for now.
Toady:Yeah there are a whole lot of things like that. We have the dev page of course, where there's a whole farming improvement section where it's like 'Will we get into soil pH and the eight hundred other things that come up with farming?' and then at that point grass is obviously going to be a different little beastie there, but not right now, it's just dumping grass on you from the sky or whatever ... it's raining grass, little grass packets.
Rainseeker:'It rains grass here!'
Ollieh:(musical interlude)


Rainseeker:'Will players be able to construct wagons now, and if not will there be saddlebags or something to justify carrying as much as the current caravans do? Will there be a system in place to make sure the caravans you send come back with things you want?'
Toady:Now this is relative to you being able to send you caravans in the future ...
Rainseeker:Yes.
Toady:If you can send out caravans you're definitely going to need to be able to build the things that you send out ... In terms of saddlebags and stuff right now it's been a lot more important just to let the caravans carry a lot of stuff so that they would be meaningful at all, and we haven't worried about the actual capacity or the equipment there, so that might continue to be the case if your caravans are going to have to be able to carry an insane amount of stuff we might just not worry about it all. We're certainly not anti-saddlebag if you move over to something like adventure mode the equipment all gets more specific there and in dwarf mode if the trading capacity ever makes sense then we'll deal with it, but the trading capacity might not ever make sense. Because of the accelerated time frame you can't always make sense out of the amounts that are going to be in and out, so we might not worry about it. In terms of being able to ... if you do send out a caravan making sure it doesn't just come back with a bunch of garbage, rather than the things you want, then I think that'll be covered by the new trade agreements. When you are making more specific trade agreements that actually address your wants and needs rather than having to play grab bag with the wagons and hope that you get anything that you're going to want based on just some general preferences that you mentioned and then they occasionally will bring some extras of certain things, they might still bring you twenty cages monkeys, one of each kind of gibbon or something ... That'll definitely be handled with the agreements, no matter how sending out caravans works or how the caravans that'll be arriving at your fortress work, one of the main focuses is going to be allowing you to control the goods that come with a great deal more precision. Because the caravans don't want to waste their time either, in the end, especially when we get to the releases where the outcome of the caravan is going to have something to do with how prosperous people are and how likely they are to eat in the future then they're going to want to try and trade everything they can to you, so just bringing worthless crap will be bad for everybody.
Rainseeker:Right.
Ollieh:(musical interlude)


Capntastic:And that should conclude this month's Dwarf Fortress Talk.
Rainseeker:Bye!
Capntastic:See ya! Thank you for sending in your questions, thank you for listening, thank you for being you.
Toady:That's right, and thank mallocks ...
Capntastic:Do we have any other thanks?
Toady:Yeah, yeah, we're going to thank mallocks for being mallocks, for doing the transcript, and we're going to thank Ollieh for being Ollieh for doing the music, and we're going to thank Emily Menendez for being Emily Menendez for doing some other music. And we're going to thank Rainseeker and Capntastic and Toady One for being themselves as well, and the question and answer people and ...
Capntastic:You're welcome.
Toady:... we're going to ... in my credits list I think I hit everybody. There's a new thing in the credits list that says 'Tell people to donate'.
Rainseeker:'Och, don't forget to donate!'
Toady:There you go.
Capntastic:I'd like to thank Dwarf Fortress fan Jeremy for being a fan and being named Jeremy.
Rainseeker:And I'd like to thank everyone who donated this past month. Good job!
Capntastic:Keep it up.
Toady:Yeah it reminds me of this flower place that's in town here where it has this little billboard that says, you know 'If your name is John come in today for a free rose', so I guess we'll just pick a name every episode and thank them. So all the Dwarf Fortress fans named Jeremy, this time around, thanks.
Capntastic:I was thinking about just having it be Jeremy every month, but your idea actually might be more productive.
Rainseeker:I'd also like to thank Scamps for personally hurting Tarn. Someone's got to do it.
Toady:I think Scamps was ... He's sitting on the floor there being remarkably calm and just chilling out, I've been happy with Scamps's performance this time around.
Rainseeker:Good job Scamps.
Capntastic:Go Scamps!
Ollieh:(musical postlude)


Bonus section

Toady:You know, is the world actually going to survive being alive, really? Or will it just have to be dead being dead instead of being alive being alive. If you let being dead being alive it's just chaotic mess and that's probably unacceptable.
Rainseeker:This is going to be really confusing to read for our people.
Toady:That's right, and I apologize to mallocks and the fans for this Rumsfeldian turn of phrase here.
Capntastic:I'm sorry mallocks.
Toady:'The dead alive, and the dead dead, and the alive dead.' It's very supernatural, but ...
Rainseeker:Let's pause for a second and allow for a transition.


Rainseeker:So how's your little kitty there?
Toady:He's looking out the window, looking out the window here. I just cleaned the apartment recently so he's been running around enjoying the new found floor and stuff.
Rainseeker:You've trained him to clean the apartment? That's great.
Toady:No no, I had to do work and he gets to enjoy all the benefit. He has a lot of fun when he has more clear tracks to around on and stuff. He's been trouble, my hand's all cut up and scratched, but that's par for the course.
Rainseeker:Because he's really excited about it?
Toady:Yeah, he'll just come up and claw me in the back and I'll turn around and look at him and he'll be already rolled and showing his belly, and he's just supposed to be sitting there getting his rubbed or whatever.
Rainseeker:'Yeah I clearly tell you with my claws in your back that you are supposed to rub my belly. How much more clear can I be?'
Toady:That's his only way of getting attention really, just to come up and claw you. I don't know, it's not a good habit but it's too late now.