Bay 12 Games: Dwarf Fortress Talk

Dwarf Fortress Talk #21, with Rainseeker, Capntastic, Threetoe and Toady One, transcribed by DG, PeridexisErrant, PT Fort, Yazman, and others!

sfx vox:	(guitar music)
Rainseeker:	Hey everybody, this is Rainseeker. I'm here with Capntastic, and Tarn Adams, our illustrious leader, also known as Toady One. And we are here to announce that there is a brand new game called Dwarf Fortress that you should all be playing.
Capntastic:	It's free!
Toady:	It's all new!
Rainseeker:	And it's all dwarfy!
Toady:	And it's not released yet. (laughing)
Rainseeker:	But it's still new. So anyway, welcome back to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk. We're going to be discussing today combat mechanics! And, what was the other thing?
Toady:	We have redone the conversation engine since the last DF talk and... and done a little bit more with uh insurrections against goblin occupiers. So, yeah. So we have two whole things to talk about.
Rainseeker:	Excellent.
Toady:	(Chuckles)
Rainseeker:	Alright. So, combat mechanics. All fun.
Toady:	Yeah yeah. So yeah...
Rainseeker:	So let's go. The... For now, let's talk about exactly what that looks like for each turn. What's the process that we go through when we start fighting somebody.
Toady:	Yeah the interesting thing is that it's not... It doesn't feel like turns anymore. It's really really... We had, we had... The traditional thing you get in games like this more or less is a lot of different models. But... A lot of it comes down to trading shots. And Dwarf Fortress has been like that, where you attack, they attack, there could be counterattacks, and we try to do some interesting things, like dodging out of the way or charging, so that you would... there would be a sort of kinetic element to the combat, where you'd be moving around a bit, but you were still exchanging instantaneous attacks back and forth, and it also depended on sort of your overall speed number and so on, so someone might be able to hit you twice while you're down, and that kind of thing.
	So now, what it's like to just walk through a turn, so when it's your turn, someone's standing next to you, but they might be doing something. They could be in the middle of a process. In terms of the clicks of the world, where normally when you take a step in the game it takes about 9 to 10 ticks of the clock if you're walking. And so an attack now, it might be, depending on what you think the tile size is and so on it's a little slow, but the average attack now will take 6 ticks, but... so an attack is incoming for part of that, and then the person's recovering from the attack for part of that, so when you're standing next to, say, a goblin, there could be a little red arrow that pops up. We try not to make it flash ‘cause the flashing bugs people, and so if I wanted to add even more flashing, so the arrow kind of evolves at you, like (noise).. And little dots turn into a little arrow pointing at you. And that means that you know there's an incoming attack, and it's a red arrow for an attack and a green arrow just to see where the creatures might be moving. And there could be lots of arrows in the same spot, in which case it kind of staggers the animations and it takes longer to get through them all.
	So you know that the goblin is attacking you, and that means that you're going to want to change how you respond that turn, ‘cause if you initiate an attack, yours is not going to get there first even though it's your, quote, ‘turn', right? This is just sort of, you're just in your head now acting, and things could already be happening, so you don't get to control the action if the action is not yours to control. You can try to get to the point where you're the one initiating the move. In that case, you can take more options, but for instance if a goblin is swinging a sword at you, and you have a good combat observer skill, you could, you might see, sort of:
	‘Imminent attack. Goblin is aiming wild attack with his wild iron shortsword slash at your right arm' or something like that.
	So it gives you more information the higher your skill is there. And if you see an imminent attack like that, you just want to probably parry that if you have a weapon of your own. And so you do the regular attack menu from Shift+A. If you want to be meticulous about it, you go through the Shift+A attack menu, and say okay, I'm going to choose a parry and bat the sword out of the way, in which case that really improves your rolls, for a parry, and decreases your dodge and block rolls, if you have a shield. So you make, you make decisions about which rolls you want to amplify and if you just wait then you get the regular sort of passive rolls but that's taking a big chance with your life.
Rainseeker:	Now does that include, for instance, if... you know, there's an incoming attack. Is it going to tell you what is the highest chance to succeed in dodging or parrying?
Toady:	It never, never really gave that information before, and it's not really a change now. It depends on a lot of things, but mainly your skill roll. The black box is the enemy's skill roll. And, you're not privy to that information. So it's still... it's kind of a.. The chances of the rolls are usually, directly dependent on your skill. I guess it could remind you of your... what you're best at, which would probably be a nice thing to do, since you can get that from your Z screen anyway. So, it could tell you what you're best at.
Rainseeker:	And you increase these skills by practice obviously, so...
Toady:	Yeah.
Rainseeker:	If you're doing a lot of parrying, you going to... You're going to stay as a parrier primarily.
Toady:	Yeah. Then you run into the problem that still exists in the game that you can't parry punches, bites, kicks... So you either want to take up the shield or learn how to dodge. And dodging - active dodging involves jumping to another square. You can't actively dodge and just say ‘oh, I want to dodge.' The passive dodging, if you get a really good roll, still does that. But but... You will be kind of dancing around a lot. If you've... If you've got incoming natural attacks all the time, if you don't have a shield. I mean at some point we're just going to do the thing where you can slice off somebody's arm if they're trying to use it on you, or whatever, but...
Rainseeker:	Yeah if you're getting punched with a hand you know, you can parry it. Fairly effectively.
Toady:	Yeah just put the sword in the way.
Rainseeker:	Yes. (laughter) And there goes a hand.
Toady:	Yeah, we'll get there eventually, it's just not... The, the strange thing about this release is that we're just trying to do the stuff that was foisted on us by the attack/move speed split, that kind of broke everything up into actions-
Rainseeker:	Right.
Toady:	And the whole thing got junked. So this is not nearly enough of the combat stuff as we eventually wanted to do for our official combat arc. But, it's looking like the combat arc, the initial stages of the combat arc. So there's kind of a... It's sort of messy to find a stopping point where we're satisfied that we're not totally destroying the flow of combat in the game. But at the same time, there's going to be all kinds of things you can see where there's sort of missed opportunities or potential for improvement that come out of this new system that we just don't have time to grab right now. And there... But I'm really happy with how it's all turned out. It's, it's... You feel... way more involved, and the combat feels really alive with all these kinds of things pointing at you and you're deciding exactly what you want to do. It's it's, I think it's a neat system. It's kind of a good compromise between sort of a real time game like the, the Elder Scrolls type game where you're sitting there trying to time whacks on people and so on. And running around and the sort of strategy tactical combat of a SSI-type game (Strategic Simulations, Inc.) or rogue-like game.
Rainseeker:	Right.
Toady:	But without the ‘I move six tiles and the other guy moves six tiles' part of those games. Or at least the SSI-type games. The rogue-like games are more discrete, but. This should be interesting, I'm not sure, I'm not sure what other examples exist like that, because you'll get, you know, hundreds of seven-day roguelikes produced now. So there's probably been some experiments with stuff like this. But... It's... it's... it's interesting. I think, I think it's worth a try even if it's rough now I could have definitely see that this is going to be a better system. So I like it.
	=== musical interlude by Ollieh === [9:15]
Rainseeker:	Alright so you'd mentioned earlier the wild attack? What does that mean?
Toady:	So you've got, quite a... as usual we're dumping options on you. Fortunately, the menu isn't any deeper than it was before. You still... You say ‘Strike', you say the part, and then you get the... The old menu you had, just a list of ‘I wanna punch with my right hand or stab with my sword or slash with my sword'. And now at the bottom of that screen, you've got options. You can decide whether you want to charge. Charging is a little stranger now because it's a separate movement action, that gets Incorporated into your attack. And you can also decide if you wanna do a... an adjective, kind of, on your strike. Right now, this is again we're trying to link some things in, to get some mileage out of the system before we actually go in and go all in on the combat systems. So right now you have four choices. You don't have to take any of them. You can just do a regular attack which in general will take three steps in and three steps out, or you can do a quick attack which will be two steps in and two steps out. Sort of like a jab or a little stab or something. But that decreases the velocity of your attack by fifty percent so you wouldn't be able to penetrate maybe even certain leather armours or whatever with your dagger or whatever. And so if you want to do a little, little jab though, and get it in quickly before the, before the person lands an attack, and you think you can get some mileage out of that then you can do that. You can also do a heavy attack which makes it four steps in and four steps out but increases the velocity by fifty percent. And then there's the wild attack which is kind of a roll of the dice, you do two steps in and then something like five steps out. So you're just kind of going in really fast, you get the velocity bonus, but you have a minus to hit. And you also become unbalanced and unsteady for some turns while you're recovering. So that people can hit you easier but if you really have a... if it's a desperate thing, you can do that. And then the final option we have was a precise attack. It's five steps in so you are really taking your time and you get an increased roll which kinda increases everything about the attack. And most often you just use that on someone who's unconscious or something. You can just end the fight when you have a clear shot or if you're being frustrated by the person's attacks and dodging. Then. it might be an option you can use to have a chance to score a hit even though you won't get as many attacks in. And then the final option in the menu is the, the option to set it as a multiple attack and then you can go in and then add another action like a moving away or climbing while you're doing this one attack. Or you can choose another attack if you want to do something like stab, stab two daggers at once. The penalties are massive so it's, it's not something you really wanna do. It's more for like, stylishly stabbing somebody a bunch of times when they're unconscious. Or when you're sneaking up behind them and you wanna jab two daggers in their ribs or whatever.
Rainseeker:	Or if you're fighting like a roomful of low-level, just, just guys.
Toady:	Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It is sort of the expression of your hero... heroism or whatever. If you comes in and there's like, a kobold on the left and the kobold on the right and you want to stick them both at the same time in your... you have, uh, you're very good at what you do. Then you can go ahead and take the massive, kinda seventy five percent cut to your roll or whatever, and still manage to hit them. So it's... yeah, it's something that has limited utility but because this is not just like switching up your swords like ‘attack with the left, attack with the right, attack with the left'. This is attacking with the left and right at the same time. There's a sort of goofiness to it which makes us really cut the rolls down. But it's something you could do. It's not... People get in fights about this and people tend to have very strong views about martial arts in general and so we're just taking a slow approach to this.
Rainseeker:	Post about it on the forums, guys!
Toady:	Yeah well they beat you to it already. There was a very hot Future of the Fortress topic for a while there. So it's, it's (laughing) We're just... we're going slow. I'm... I'm... I'm confident about the direction we're taking it. I don't think we're ruining the game or anything so...
Rainseeker:	So what is... How does the uh... What skills have you incorporated into this in the new stuff you do?
Toady:	There's no, there's no, if I remember, there's no new ones but the observer skill comes up a lot more. It used to... The observer skill used to give you... which is the sort of... it's called situational awareness in the code and it's just sort of for … for observing. And a kind of paying attention to your surroundings and especially during a fight. And it used to just help you with being hit from the side and so you wouldn't get the ‘hit you from the side' minus or whatever, and it also helped you judge when people were going to charge so you didn't get surprised by people's charges. But now it's used to give you for four or five little pieces of information about the attack, depending on how good the roll is, and that can really make a huge difference in your decision making so that skill became a lot more important. I haven't broken up parrying or anything like that, so there's not like ‘defense with a sword' versus ‘offense with a sword' - and I'm not going to do any kind of break ups of those skills until we get to the actual combat styles and techniques, in which case this is going to blossom into, you know, a hundred different things and you know, get rather out of control which is nice, for that part.
Rainseeker:	So what would you say is the most important skill right now for combat?
Toady:	Knowing how to use your weapon is still the most important thing you can have, but you will be flailing away wildly if you don't know what you're doing with observing. Fighting has always been an important skill, there's just this fighter skill, and it kinda gives you bonuses to all your rolls and also lets you pick up a weapon you don't know if you get in trouble and lose your weapon and, and if you have the fighting skill you're given a small amount of skill with that weapon, commensurate with your fighter skill divided by two or four or something like that that lets you still continue on in the fight. That'll matter more when you can lose your weapon in more ways. So, then there's dodging and armour-using. Armour using is actually a little less important now, it used to be that armour use as a skill would let you move faster, because it would count the weight less of the things that you're wearing, but now moving faster is not, it's still important to get good skill rolls which it helps you with because it makes you less ungainly, but if you are just moving now it'll cut your movement speed by a lot if you're wearing a bunch of heavy stuff, and carrying a lot of heavy stuff that you don't know how to use but your attack speed isn't affected the same way it was when before it would make you attack five times as slow and move five times as slow, now you just move five times as slow, and just get the minuses to your attack but not the ‘move in slow motion' (lethargic noise) or whatever, it was pretty silly the way it was before. But now people on the ground can attack quickly, they still get minuses but they don't attack three times as slow as their counterparts standing above them so it makes a lot more sense now and people on the ground are more dangerous.
Rainseeker:	Kay. You want to throw anything in there captain?
Captntastic:	So how does all this meld together and play, I mean have you pulled off any amazing stunts, or like fun stuff?
Toady:	(laughter) The use of the ground is still - I mean, you still dodge away that part feels about the same because dwarf fortress always had kind of a lot of movement in combat but, but the meshing of the attacks is fun so you can, you can catch people's, like if you target a grab attack on an incoming punch and uh.. so I did a thing in the arena where I increased my stealth quite a bit then fought against someone who didn't know what they were doing, and then using the observer skill you see they were coming in with a left handed punch and so I just waited until the punch was imminent and then shot out a catch with my left hand. Which is just grabbing their hand with my hand, and then it, it knows what that means now. So it interprets that as intercepting their attack and stops their attack. So I caught the hand with my hand, and then I caught the other hand, put him into wristlocks and broke his wrists.
Captntastic:	Nice!
Toady:	So you can do things like that now. You can intercept attacks that are coming in. If you, if someone's swinging their sword at you, you can come in and grab their hand and intercept the attack again.
Rainseeker:	Now, if you've broken his wrist, is he gonna stop fighting?
Toady:	This is, (laughter) the new part about, way early on when we were doing the bandit occupations of town we added all this stuff from non lethal combat about yielding, and all that. And that comes up even in the arena now! I think I might end up changing that so you can have a setting on the arena about, is this no quarter fighting? or is this non-lethal? ‘Cause, ‘cause right now in the arena if you set ten people on ten people and then just say three or so on one side dies, then that side will just all stop and scream ‘I yield, I yield' and the other side will stop fighting too and just stand over them with their swords and that'll be the end of the arena fight. And there are some other funny bugs happening now, like if you take three people in the arena that are all sorta on the independent side so everybody's fighting everybody they all just run away, they're all like ‘I'm not fighting two guys!'. (laughter) Everyone runs away. There are, there are issues and problems from the new yielding code right now, but I'll probably just have an option in the arena to set what level of intensity you want, so then you can set up like a bar fight in the arena or something. You can also set up mounts in the arena now, ‘cause I have, thats another thing about the move/combat speed split stuff, it counts your current momentum in the attack, as long as your momentum - your velocity vector or whatever, is pointing toward the guy and the guy is either not moving or not moving away faster from you so that there is actual motion toward the other person. And if a person is running at you, you actually get the same bonus. So as long as there's relative motion, that's at least ninety degrees. So it could be perpendicular motion, or motion toward the person, then you get a bonus to your swing speed that's in line with how fast you're moving, so, and it also takes into account the speed of anything you're riding. Now this doesn't mean I've added in adventure mode mounts yet - there's probably some bug in the arena when you control a mounted adventurer or whatever but it's something we're, I don't know how far I'm gonna get with that but it's fun to, it was fun to control the mount. I created a horse with a person riding it and then another horse with a person riding it and then took control of one of the horses and then just kind of rode around and tried to get my person the best gallop I could to dismount the other person or whatever. It'd be a fun game by itself I guess, it's like controlling the horse. So that'll all be interesting when we get that done and it is probably going to be something that causes adventure mode mounts to happen sooner rather than later, but I'm trying not to add anything else this release because it's getting long in the tooth.
Rainseeker:	Now if you have a spear lets say, a longer weapon, could you hit a person running at you sooner than he could hit you?
Toady:	This is one of the main things we haven't done in terms of the combat arc, is reach. I mean, reach is a really really really really important concept that hasn't been explored in Dwarf Fortress yet and we were almost going to jump in, and because there are so many things you wanna do when you get this new combat stuff in, you wanna add all sorts of things that make it more and more realistic or whatever and so we drew the line. We were thinking about letting you sort of guard a square in a direction, so you'd sort of set your weapon like a spear in a certain direction so someone can't even enter that square, and it's going to be interesting when we start controlling space so that all the battles don't end up with two people next to each other all the time, ‘cause people should be farther away from each other especially when fighting with weapons than they are right now, where it's, there's still no.. it's like there's all the interesting things about attacks interweaving with each other and so on but there's still no kind of calm periods or testing periods and it, it's not quite sure where that's going to fit in. And reach is a part of that, getting tired and like, losing your gas tank is part of that. Also though there's a there's a big psychological aspect of that, about seeing what the other person's gonna do and almost kinda playing poker with them to try and figure out.. do they always fall into a pattern where they jab left, jab right or whatever. And then there's a lot of things that come into fighting somebody that slows the pace down and we can only try to approximate this as best we can and we haven't really attempted that yet. But it's definitely, for for people who still think that, that, that, you know it's way too wild right now the way people just kinda go at each other like beasts, it's, that's something we acknowledge and you know, I just mentioned, you know three or so things that would definitely help and I'm sure there's more out there. So they're all do-able, the psychological one's kinda the hardest, ‘cause I mean are you supposed to kind of memorize the patterns or just have the game give you a bonus over time if you're a better fighter than they are or something like that, the longer you fight them the more you kinda figure them out and get bonuses are some of the... so there's abstract ways to do it there are non-abstract ways to do it, we haven't really thought about what angle we're gonna take.
Rainseeker:	Right. So now if you're, speaking of a psychological angle, if you're fighting a, say you're fighting a group of goblins or ‘evil creatures', if you kill a couple of them will they split up and run, or realise you're better than they, or..
Toady:	Yes. Yeah, yeah. People are endowed with slightly more sense now. And..
Rainseeker:	Are there creatures that don't?
Toady:	Are there creatures that don't? This is one of the easy to fix bugs that's also in the arena right now. When I was playing an aardvark, I was fighting another aardvark, and the aardvark yielded to me. So I'm sure it's something that I wrote down, 'cause there are a bunch of bugs, I'm pretty sure that that was written down way back months ago and that was just one of those things I was going to go handle during cleanup, but yeah there are going to be things that don't give up. The dead likely aren't going to yield and run away, uh, animals..
Capntastic:	Zombie yield, zombie yield!
Toady:	(laughter) Animals will probably be able to run away but they aren't gonna talk about it too much. And then people will, there's already a personality component to this. So some people yield more easily than others. Then there's also, when people get enraged there's that whole sort of rage thing, that, there's aside from the yield effects there's also the, if you become enraged, or a dwarf or whatever becomes enraged. Or a badger as often happens becomes enraged, then it only lets them throw wild attacks. So it's not a, it's a less advantageous state than it was previously and yeah. So it's, but you don't want to be hit by one of those either. It's still better to be more talented or just to stay away. Stay away from something that's angry.
Capntastic:	So if you scare someone away for instance, will they go for help at this point?
Toady:	Oh no no, that's.. that's.. so that's basically beyond the scope of what we've done. However if you start a conflict with somebody, now this gets back to the other thing that we were working on, which is improving the goblin insurrections and the conversations and stuff.. when you get a, when you start a fight with, say, a goblin in a town now, that gets saved as an event. So not only can you talk about that now then other people, but the goblin also knows that this happened, and if the goblin manages to get away from you and get offloaded, then everybody in town will, there's a timer on it, so it kinda propagates information more slowly, then it becomes a foregone conclusion then that the goblins are gonna know about that. And so the goblins will know then that you just tried to start a fight with a goblin, or that you killed a goblin if someone else saw it, and then gets away. So you can eliminate witnesses and so on, but if someone does get away, then that information will propagate. Now that doesn't mean that the goblin is running back to that location to bring help immediately at least at this point. There's still kind of talk about, in the notes here, the notes talking back at me that I wrote months ago that there would be organised groups coming to hunt you down, which is something we put in the tracking information for. And right now patrols can hunt you down, when you're walking around you leave tracking information and they can pin it, and snoop up the trail and follow you during wilderness travel, but it doesn't happen in the context of the insurrection and in the town guards and it may, but it may not and so it's not something I want to promise at this point, when we're kind of chopping things out, we're kind of,
Capntastic:	Eventually that's the plan.
Toady:	Yeah, that is definitely the plan. Yeah. And, so, I guess we can talk a little bit more about the conversation changes now unless you guys got more questions about the fighting and so on.
Rainseeker:	Uh, I have a minor kind of tangential question.
Toady:	Sure.
Rainseeker:	So, I know you said you'd kind of added like underbrush and twigs and stuff right?
Toady:	Yeah.
Rainseeker:	So is there eventually going to be, like in the near future, like throwing caltrops down, or making little traps, or putting wire across a room or tripping people, or making people step on glass or whatever. It seems like that would be kind of feasible at this point.
Toady:	It is, it is more feasible now. We have, ever since we added the.. the trees having all of, I don't even remember what they're called in the raws now, if they're called like plant growths or something like that. But the trees have, the trees have leaves and I used all the different kind of uh.. samaras or whatever the flying keys are called. It's the kind of thing I had some retention of the names and words when I was just copying down lists of plant parts and so on. But there are lots of new things in the game, flowers and leaves and so on. Fruit, and that kind of thing. Finally can have a fruit fight in Dwarf Fortress, although I imagine the thrown things are still a little more lethal than they should be. (laughter)
Capntastic:	Urist McDwarf was killed by apple!
Toady:	Oh, apples are definitely lethal. And uh, so what that led to though, especially during Fall, when all of the leaves fall of the trees, is it led to these, a couple things, it led to item clouds, which are, kind of like a, they're stored like a breath attack or a mist. But they're a cloud of small items, and then when they land on the ground they turn into an item spatter. So, so we can start thinking about, at least it's another way to think about a lot of small objects, like broken glass or lots of little caltrops, or coins for that matter, but lots of other stuff. And there's information lost as usual, which isn't necessarily a bad thing when it comes to, you know, not wanting to track the specific information about the little object when it comes down to that level. And yeah, stuff like that becomes more feasible because the feet interact with spatter of all kinds so you could definitely see some of that stuff happening. And yeah, of course I have no idea when, but it's all on the table with the new, the new storage system makes interesting things possible. I think you can already mod in item cloud breath or whatever, like if you wanna make a modded creature breathe little daggers at people you could add a little dagger like the carving knives from the tool raws. You could make them breathe forks at people or something.
Capntastic:	I wanna give somebody a honey breath. Or a bee breath, even better.
Rainseeker:	Yeah!
Toady:	Yeah, you can't breathe monsters yet, but you could add an item that's analogous to a monster or something, like a little figurine of a bee that you breathe at people or something. Then add another reaction that makes them come to life. I don't know what people manage to, people manage to do a lot of things. But creatures and interacting with, and making things from scratch and stuff are still , if I remember. I'm kind of out of touch, but uh, that's still feasible. You could probably do something there.
	=== musical interlude by Ollieh ===
Rainseeker:	So, it seems like Dwarf Fortress is getting to the point where you can talk to NPCs, and characters, and interact with them, and coerce them into punching goblins with you! How is that going to work?
Toady:	Yeah, it's a party, it's a party where you have goblin-beating time with your little friends and drunks.
Capntastic:	And everybody's invited! (laughter)
Toady:	Yeah they're not friendly, so we don't feel sorry for the goblins. And we've got drunks back in little fake taverns again so you can kind of get the right people for the job. So you can talk to people, and, and people, there's, the overall situation with the town which is something you can become aware of by talking to them. And when you talk to them now, it works the same way, the same sort of clunky, K, move over the cursor thing, and press enter. But then you get a topic list which is, you can do the kind of things you did before, where you greet people. And when you greet them now it gives you, instead of popping you to a screen where it gives you a list of options and sort of the summary of what's been said, it gives you a list of options but more like you're attacking somebody. Like, like there's a list of options and you still see all of the surroundings. And you select an option, and then it gives you an action, again analogous to moving or attacking, and then when your action's time has ran out, the timer for it, you will say what you wanted to say and it pops up in the announcement queue.
Rainseeker:	It's because you're attacking them psychologically?
Toady:	Yes, this is all psychological warfare now. And they'll say something back, if they understand the context of the conversation that they're in. And so they, on their turn, if they don't have something more important to do (like running off and fighting or something), then they will look at the conversations there and decide what to say to who, and what to talk about then initiate an action of their own and it will come back to the, to the announcement log. Now, to make this not totally annoying, when you talk to somebody, you go into a kind of a waiting mode, so that you anticipate that you're going to be replied to, and then it just waits for the reply to come in. So you don't have to like, press period a bunch of times to wait for the guy to say something.
Rainseeker:	Especially if he's very slow-witted.
Toady:	Yes, yes or if he's, but it runs a timer carefully though so if the guy's off doing something else it won't wait forever and lock up the game. At least, hopefully it works right. So they'll reply for you and that creates the context for the conversation. It kind of operates in pairs for the most part where you say something and then the reply is expected, and then the conversation goes back to being neutral again, where no one's in the driver's seat and the next person to talk kind of creates another pair of things that is said. And that can change the context of the conversation. And when someone says something it assigns numbers, so that it will put a little 1 next to what they said, and then it will go, 1 will appear on them, so that you can see who said what. So if you're in a crowd and someone shouts something, it'll pop up and you can see what they said or who said it. And kind of keep control of who's saying what in the conversation that way. Also when you talk to people you can look back at the log of what's been said and it shows you automatically what's been said so that you don't get lost. And so you can bring the conversation, you can say "what's going on now?" and they'll tell you about an occupation, or if an army is coming, or other things that have happened, like they heard there was a fist fight where a bunch of goblins got beat to death or whatever.
Toady:	So they tell you about these things and then you, when you're in the context of talking about the insurrection, that's when you can drop a line about, well hey let's go do something about this. And right now the bar to entry, just to keep the game going, the bar to entry's pretty low, (laughter) in terms of hey let's go do something about this and then you, you can get a companion. And the companion, like before, they just travel around with you and all that kind of thing. But now it's an agreement is formed, where there's some understanding that underlies every single thing about companionship in the game now about why they're with you, and kind of how long they're going to be with you, and then they can use that information to decide whether or not you're actually furthering this common goal, you know if you just want to wander off out of town with someone who's supposed to be helping you with the insurrection that companionship isn't going to last very long and the person will probably just leave while you sleep or whatever. And that's probably all going to be in with the release. I mean, a lot of that already is in, but I haven't made the companions leave yet, but that's very likely to go in so you can't abuse your privileges. But there's also standard companionships, the bar is good for things like that. These fake bars. I just need to aggregate where to find these people so I put them in these fake taverns, this isn't the tavern release by any stretch of the imagination but there are drunks and mercenary type adventurer people. And all the scouts and monster hunter type people from world gen all hang out in these fake taverns now, just sitting there. And so you can go and talk to them. So you can have people travel with you in the standard, lead me to glory and death type way, in which case they don't have a very high standard for continuing the partnership. I mean guess I could make them get bored if you don't do anything for a week or something and then split.
Capntastic:	Right, come with me adventuring in the hats district! I have to get there! (laughter)
Toady:	I like that's the agreement, that it's like a day of shopping. That's the exact type of thing we want the system to support though is like, "let's go on a shopping trip together!" And then people would be like "Alright, let's go!"
Rainseeker:	And you could go identify if this hat is actually made out of troll skin.
Capntastic:	You, little girl, how are you at identifying troll skin? oh I'm the right person!
Toady:	It would be great, it would be great, and we could have, and you could split up the spoils at the end, it's like it's a divide the plunder, and then..
Rainseeker:	Imagine having a hideout, you know, a little fort of operations, a little base. A sort of, camp grounds.
Capntastic:	Can you convince right now, like little kids and people who are inappropriate for the task to come with you?
Toady:	They didn't come with you before, and now you can get more people to come with you on insurrections than before, and I know for a fact written in the notes right now is, maybe kids shouldn't come with you to kill the goblins. (laughter)
Toady:	It was a known problem, and still is. It will be fixed before, before it's over with, so you don't have the children's crusade or whatever and everyone's well.
Rainseeker:	(laughter) That's funny.
Toady:	Well yeah, and we were hoping that, that so yeah and Capn mentioned the hideouts, and so on. When we get to that part of the game where you're able to set the site for yourself and can create your own little entity and so on, then people will have, they'll all have a reason for being there, and they'll all have a reason to, for how long they think they're planning to stay, and whether or not they come with you to do things, or whether they're just hanging out there to re-arrange the furniture, or whatever. It should all fit under the system, the system's very broad now about what an agreement can be about. It's just kind of sitting there as a nice abstract entity for the game to look at. It was something that was missing before, when people would join you, they would just, they became a variable, a relationship variable was set in them that you are their leader. (laughter) It's like they lost all their agency at that point, didn't understand anything about what was going on, why they're with you, and so on. That's all changed.
Capntastic:	So can you now go to goblins, and talk to them? Eventually bad things and have them join you?
Toady:	They don't have a reason to join you right now so they're all like... the goblins in the town are all on the job right? They're all occupying the town and... You can talk to them though it's a standard thing right now in the game where... This is from the older code from before, would make it so someone is in a civilization that disagrees with you but they're not outright trying to kill you then they just say don't talk to me. That's how it works with the goblins right now. They just tell you not to talk to them and that may or may not be changed depending on how this whole posses of people hunting you down and all that kind of stuff... What will we end up skipping and what we end up putting in for this time may make the goblins more interesting but when you go to the goblin sites themselves they don't particularly care right now if I remember. There's all this kind of nebulous gray areas that need to be worked out since goblins have home sites now, and aren't always at war with you. You used to only meet them through kinda ambushes or by going and killing everyone that lived in their little homes and so on. Instead of just sneaking around and getting caught and there's a troll shearing pit. It's all sort of this, this gray area now that just needs to have a yes or no decision made about it. We we're planning to put in you know more conversational options or something. A lot of times now we're just going to be ‘no' , it just turns into a violent situation immediately.
Toady:	That's just something that we'll have to go through as we do our final checklist of issues that need to be worked out. It's still quite a long list of issues that need to be worked out.
Rainseeker:	'Cause eventually you could use bribery.
Toady:	Yeah, you should be able - I mean eventually you should be able to, like, grab someone's kid and bring it to the goblins. Be like, Hey, I'm a freelance snatcher, or something like that, or bring them the heads of elves or something like that. You shouldn't have to be good all the time. That's one of the things about having freedom of choice in a video game. So the goblins shouldn't kill you immediately, although if they don't have a reason not to kill you, then, you know, free stuff or whatever. So, it's not smart to go to the goblin place. It shouldn't ever be a really good decision, unless you have a really good reason to go there. But yeah, I'm not sure how that's going to work out. The main thing that's missing, actually, in all of this is the sort of crime-and-punishment type of stuff, because you can't get captured by the goblins, right? The crime-and-punishment arc is not all about, strictly, you stealing from the market stall and then being dragged off to some type of dungeon and then having your hand chopped off and then being released or something. It's about being able to lose control of your character, and to be imprisoned or to be dragged somewhere, and that's just not in the game right now, so it's really hard to do an interaction with the goblins that isn't just either friendly banter or you just getting chopped to pieces on the spot. So there's a good reason why that thief role is in there. It's a pretty expansive thing. Part of the hero role is going to be exploring you being able to sort of interrogate captured people and so on. We didn't get to that part. It was on the table for this time, but we moved toward the active world for deaths, succession, and army stuff instead, and so we'll just have to do that some other time.
	=== musical interlude by Ollieh ===
Capntastic:	I like the idea of, you're in the sewers and you don't notice a pile of broken glass and you accidentally step on it, it makes a bunch of noise, and you hurt your foot. Just causes a whole bunch of problems.
Toady:	Well, stepping on broken glass in the sewers would cause all kinds of problems.
Capntastic:	Yes.
Rainseeker:	Oh yes. Or even stepping on, like, bones hidden under trash, you know. The noise then alerts the giant frog in the room next door to you.
Toady:	Yeah. Yeah. We just don't want any punctures and introducing of small microbes into your foot, and stuff like that.
Rainseeker:	Exactly. Is that, like, here now? That's not here now, right?
Toady:	Broken glass isn't here, but infected wounds are here.
Rainseeker:	Okay.
Toady:	And the level of grime and filth on your body leading to a higher rate of infection is already here.
Rainseeker:	Oh. Wow.
Toady:	That's why using soap is a good thing when you wash yourself, because it reduces the grime level down to a much lower number than regular washing. But I don't even remember if the dwarves... do the dwarves seek out soap properly and use it to wash? It's one of those fringe industries that doesn't get a lot of testing. But, if they use soap when they're washing - maybe the surgeons do, I don't even remember anymore - but it reduces the grime level down and the wound is much less likely to get infected when the grime level is zero or one than when it's like, three or four or five. And you can't see the grime level on the dwarf. It's one of the invisible variables. Of course, there's also just being, like, completely mud and blood-spattered or whatever that you can see. That's a really high level of grime, but the smaller grime level of just not having cleaned yourself also causes an increased rate of infection.
Rainseeker:	And do we have medicine for infection to parlay infection, or...
Toady:	No. No. Infections are bad, in the game.
Rainseeker:	Those are pretty scary right now.
Toady:	Yeah, it's kind of like getting gangrenous on the Civil War battlefield, or whatever. It's not good...
Rainseeker:	: You don't have any penicillin right now.
Toady:	Yeah, I don't remember if the surgeons hack those wounds off or if the infection just means you're dead. I don't recall. I know they excise rotten tissue to decrease the rate of infection. Well, yes, so that's one of the happy parts.
Rainseeker:	No kidding. Does that happen to your adventurer as well?
Toady:	Yes, and it's one of the more annoying things about adventure mode. It's why the adventure mode medical stuff is always sitting there, waiting to be added. It hasn't made it in yet. Yeah, your adventurer can have their wounds infected, and then you are just deciding what to do with your final moments in the game, or whatever. Your final moments could last a while, but you have to make peace.
Rainseeker:	What happens if you retire in a village after you're infected?
Toady:	I don't think there's a check for it, and I think you know, score, you just happen to cure yourself, or something. Now, I'm not a hundred percent sure. For all I know, it just saves it and then it's just Oh, you're still infected, or whatever. I haven't tried it, so it's hard to say because it applies some healing, but it doesn't get rid of your scars, so it keeps some wound information, 'cause all the scars are just wounds that have a flag on them that says it's a scar.
Rainseeker:	Yeah.
Toady:	So it may or may not. So it's one of those things where it just depends on what I put when I put the 'replaced person in town' function or whatever. Yeah, I really don't remember. You know, ideally it would carry through all the effects, but I know it doesn't do that, 'cause it doesn't kill a lot of people that are waiting to die.
Rainseeker:	So we're still not at a place yet where we can take over historical figures, right?
Toady:	Yeah, that's correct. We're not at a place where we can do that. I mean, there's nothing stopping it, right? Because when you unretire an adventurer you're just taking control of a historical figure. So there's nothing technical about stopping it. There are just conceptual problems about, what happens when you take over the king of this or the king of that. It's just silly, I guess, 'cause they don't recognize your authority or anything. So it's kind of goofy that you can do that. But, yeah. It's one of those things where - I mean, I'm sure we've talked about this in the past, where it's like there's paying somewhat service to that. There's doing some kind of worldgen parameter where you can set it that it can't be done, so you don't feel tempted to sort of spoil your game by making all the bad things in the world jump off cliffs and then go hit play, or whatever. So there's some small concerns and missing swathes of content, but there aren't huge barriers to doing that.
Rainseeker:	I suppose an easy way out would be to suddenly, if you're the king, have your advisors declare that you're possessed and that you're no longer acting like the king and you are now dethroned, so you could leave and people would recognize you as the former king of such-and-such.
Toady:	I guess it would be one of those things where there's also, even if you choose to take control of a peasant there'd also have to be a thing where it's like, 'And your family doesn't recognize you and they think of you as a stranger now,' or something because you'd be possessed, because you would talk to them like strangers or whatever. Or not strangers, 'cause the people in your starting town, at least, know your name and know who you are and they greet you a little differently already, but they wouldn't recognize you as a family member, because the traditional adventurers don't have family members so I didn't have a reason to put that in. So, it stacks up, and it becomes a non-priority item until we add something, you know? Something that makes it matter, 'cause what is the point of taking over a historical figure, if all of the historical things about it don't matter yet?
Rainseeker:	Yeah, yeah. And the interesting thing, too, I think - or I was thinking about earlier today - would be to be able to have a lineage, a succession. For adventures, you know. You get married, you have a child, and you take over his line again. Maybe you could have some training that you could give your child, and then he gets some bonuses or something.
Toady:	Yeah, the elements that - I think there's four or so elements that we decided broadly make that up and that's all in the development notes for the pre-version 1 stuff. So that's all going to go in sometime. We just have to get through the various hurdles of getting a spouse, and doing the time-forward motion, and stuff like that. And we've gotten quite a bit further with that now. I mean, your retired adventurers can already get married now.
Rainseeker:	Oh.
Toady:	They can go off and just act like regular people and all retired adventurers are single. (laughter)
Toady:	It's probably one of those times where people are going to want to put in options for how they act when they retire, or whatever. Run over to the goblins and get married or whatever.
Rainseeker:	(laughs) Get married to a goblin chick, yeah.
Toady:	Like, don't do that.
Rainseeker:	Goblin women.
Toady:	It's unclear how much control there's going to be or what's going to happen. Right now, it's all just, wing it. It's just, like, you become a historical figure. You can go move to a dwarf fortress and - if you're a dwarven adventurer, you'll move to a dwarf fortress, and next time one is played, become a citizen of your fortress, and then when you retire your fortress you'll be able to unretire your adventurer from your retired fortress and leave. And then when someone unretires the fortress, then that guy will be gone off wherever he's going and then he'll migrate back.
Rainseeker:	Now does he keep all the skills he might have had during play on Dwarf Fortress, or...?
Toady:	Yeah. Yeah, he keeps everything. He'll probably just drop a sack. I don't remember how it works, if he just drops all of his items or whatever, because dwarven citizens don't carry backpacks filled with meat or whatever. Goblin heads or whatever weird things people put in their backpacks in Adventure Mode. But the skills are the same. The name's the same, the wounds, the scars are the same. Everything that's tracked on a unit is tracked, everything that gets saved is saved, there's just no difference between adventurers and dwarves.
Rainseeker:	So right now it would be a good strategy - interesting strategy, at least, if not good, but if you wanted to increase your adventurer's skills, to just straight out take him to Dwarf Fortress, retire him, play Dwarf Fortress for a while. Build him, you know, have him train, and then take him back over.
Toady:	Yeah, throw the adventurer in the danger room, and you could pretend that was his time with the monk learning the ways of dodging spears or whatever, and then unretire him, and... yeah. Yeah. That all works. It'll be interesting to see what people come up with, and what absoulutely bizarre and stupid situations come out of it.
Rainseeker:	So for this release, what we want to see on the comment section about this podcast is we want to hear if anyone has done this. Strategy is taking an adventurer, retiring him to a dwarf fortress, trained him, and then used him for regular adventuring. So, someone leave us a comment and tell us if you've done this, or if you haven't, give it a try and let us know how it goes.
Capntastic:	I don't know if that would be more effective than just, like, holding down the throw rock button.
Rainseeker:	(laughs) It's more interesting, I think.
Toady:	Slightly more entertaining, hopefully. Yeah.
Rainseeker:	Yeah, I mean, 'cause it'd be cool at some point to get Adventure Mode to a place where you can kind of play a metagame with your adventurer. Like, just tell him, go visit the monks and train with them for a while.
Capntastic:	With an 80s rock montage.
Rainseeker:	Exactly! 80s rock montage! I like that. And then you just play some of your little guitar there, Tarn, and do a montage where you see, like, little ASCII visuals of him training. In stop-motion, you know.
Toady:	Oh, I'm no good at electric guitar. I never played it long enough to get the buzzing to stop, 'cause it's way more sensitive. It's like, (makes buzzing noise). Yeah, wasn't for me. I just gotta get better at my muting.
Capntastic:	Use that raw power. (laughter)
	=== musical interlude by Ollieh ===
	[Q&A]
Threetoe:	Welcome to the question and answer section of Dwarf Fortress Talk, this is ThreeToe and we'll begin answering your questions. Our first question comes from Ardor: what would you like to do, which you feel computers are currently too slow to do?
Toady:	Well, I don't have any particular features that I cut because we were looking at it like ‘well, [the] CPU is not powerful enough to handle this feature,' it's about numbers all the way through - we already have two liquids, we'd love to have more liquids, it's not that we feel that computers are too slow to handle more but that it's hard to add more, it's hard to add all kinds of things.
ThreeToe:	Yeah, so like making the map sizes bigger. Yeah, thats not possible right now until computers are a lot faster,
Toady:	More memory. Going to 64-bit is a big deal, having a thousand dwarves in your fortress - yeah, things we'd like to do; we'd love to do two thousand dwarves, ten thousand dwarves.
Threetoe:	Next question comes from Lizabelle: would it be possible to mod all supernatural features out of the game?
Toady:	So, in the original Armok we had this system - of course we didn't actually finish anything in the original Armok - but the system was going to be kinda had this atmosphere, and I think it was going to be called a plot / mood / atmosphere system, something like that we were thinking about how widely the world generation could cast its gaze, and one of the ideas there was to just completely get a super natural features and so it's going to be possible; it is possible now to get rid of quite a bit of stuff. There might be a few things you can't shut off in the parameters.
Threetoe:	Like how the ages were named even, so with the power that transfers division fairy tales stuff like that, was also part of that idea of magic going away towards the end of it, that was always kinda one of our ideas.
Toady:	And the passion for ancient history and the like. We'd love to have Hittites fighting each other... it's hard to explain-
Threetoe:	Alright, well the next question comes from Vincent, he asked... the Dwarf Fortress consolidated development page says that it's outdated; when was this done and in what way is it outdated? Are the arcs still current and is the new page being kept up to date?
Toady:	Um, so, I guess that it was a long time ago - several years ago now - that the consolidated development page was created and we moved over from the core/req/bloat /arc system over to just having a more partial recent development page. It's outdated in the sense that I mean we have the bug tracker now, the wrecks of the old development page were, a lot of those were just bugs so it's not like we've changed our direction at all, it's just that that particular system was becoming cumbersome and unwieldy and was annoying to like every little thing to keep track of it, so all of the arcs as far as I remember them it's all still the idea of what we want to do so there's really nothing we dropped, as far as I remember. I don't keep the new page up to date on a daily or weekly basis; it mostly gets updated on releases so that means it can go for a year at a time without getting changed, but it does get updated at releases.
Threetoe:	It's just different ways of organising it, it's not really out of date or anything - all that stuff is still there...
Toady:	Part of it's just a motivational thing, changing the way we organize the notes just keeps things fresh and keeps us moving forward.
Threetoe:	Vincent has another question: Will the town growth be simulated to the point of individuals deciding to make specific houses or open up specific shops?
Toady:	Not on a day-by-day basis, with every single individual. We already had to go to the sort of civilization population instead of historical figures, just to get the population numbers up to a point that we could do things like the Army Arc later on. But at the same time, the growth of the town would be - is going to be simulated. New shops are gonna open up. There are specific people in specific houses. Every single historical figure has their situation known, so those sorts of things will have to be updated on an individual basis. There's going to be a lot of it, especially for the people that you kind of come to care about, and anyone you talk to becomes a historical figure in Adventure Mode, so it does have a lot of updating to do and that'll have to be handled.
Threetoe:	Vincent's last question: Do you have any time frame for working on full simulation of the Dwarf Fortress world economy, would this be difficult to implement fully due to memory constraints?
Toady:	We never have a timeframe for anything. There's just dependencies like when we get to the Dwarf Fortress end, and taverns we'll want to have an economy up for that probably, or some kind of payment system or something. Something to make the tavern make sense. In that sense, since we wanted to kind of, I mean, we're not sure exactly when we're going to work on that, but those are on kind of a similar time frame in any case. When you ask, 'Would it be difficult to fully implement due to memory constraints, well, the idea of full implementation of anything that's sort of reality-based, you can use up as much memory as you want, and we're just gonna have to set aside as much memory as we can to the economy and get as far as we can within those constraints, and it's really not clear exactly what that's going to mean.
Threetoe:	Ok, the next question is from James, Do you have any future plans for liquid pressure, or will powerful pumps ever make pump stacks obsolete; and will Volcanos ever erupt?
Toady:	Don't have specific plans for liquid pressure. I mean, we're always hoping to, uh, people's ideas about that. We're not engineering or mechanically-minded people, so as much as anything we rely on the community to come up with ideas that within our sort of 1400s+ dwarfiness timeframe, and if there's ways besides the Archimedean screw or whatever that people have for pump ideas, and we can kind of think about how to make that work, CPU-wise, with the liquid model and water pour. Whatever is feasible there. For volcanos, it would be sad to have volcanos and not to have them erupt (chuckles)
Threetoe:	Yes. Very sad. The next question comes from Tom: Will the player in adventure mode ever get a spouse?
Toady:	There are developments for that. It's definitely going to go in at some point. We've threatened various things like poetry generators and so on, and even as it stands now I think if you take your adventurer and retire them in one of the empty fortresses that's in the currently released version, or if you take a adventurer and take them to an actual NPC or AI fortress in the new version and retire them, then they can become not just a migrant to your fortress and get married there, but they could also, in the new version, get married just hanging out at their wherever they're retiring (that they're human). So, it already happens, even in the currently released version. Maybe if you get your migrations just right, but as for actually doing it yourself, going out there and going through actual conversations, meeting people, finding someone that...
Threetoe:	Having someone assigned to you.
Toady:	(chuckles) You could be ranched, that's true. There's any number of ways this could happen. The development notes have all the things about children, possibly, or playing playable heirs, houses, all that kind of stuff. It's all in there. No timelines, as usual.
Threetoe:	Next question comes from Mike: Are the hauling updates complete? I was wondering is there are any plans to address the minor annoyances that still exist.
Toady:	Nothing's ever complete. There was the number one voted suggestion had to do with that stuff, and we did a lot of things. The minecarts, in particular, but also wheelbarrows and all sorts of little things. But if there are minor annoyances, those are, of course, on the table, especially when we roll around to the post-release cleanup period, where we always do old bugs, new bugs, little features, not-so-little features, that kind of thing. They get out of control, so it'll depend on what we notice and what community feeling is and so on. And I know that one of the big things we didn't address from the voting was the restacking, which is still a big problem. Anything that comes up, we have have a bunch of notes and of course people will continue to talk about things.
	(guitar music)
Threetoe:	Next question's from redskull: Are conveyor belt buildings anywhere in the plans?
Toady:	I don't specifically recall. We already have those minecart rollers, so that's practically a conveyer belt already. Anything that's feasible. We have a list of machines and devices and parts of devices that people have come up with that they think fits within the timeframe. There's a big arc for that, actually, working on that stuff, so if people come up with different feasible ideas for conveyer belts, we don't have anything against it. It's not going to be like modern or anything, but whatever fits, we're willing to put it in, assuming it's dwarfy enough.
Threetoe:	Ok, the next question comes from Connor: Is there a set period where the dwarfette is pregnant, how random is it? how similar is the baby to the parents? If two master blacksmiths have a child will it be born a master blacksmith or will the parents teach it the trade as it grows up? What if the baby just wants to be a dancer?
Toady:	(chuckles) So right now I think the pregnancy period is kind of goofy. I think it's always, and I could be wrong about the exact numbers, but it's always three seasons for a civilised critter, and less for an animal, which is of course completely goofy. It's not randomised at all, and that's just got to be put in the raws. Just one number, goes to the raws, everything's better for everybody, but it just hasn't happened yet for whatever reason. The baby does have a fake little genome thing that makes the baby similar to their parents just physically, in terms of their appearance, but there's no kind of skill proclivities or talents or anything passed down, aside from however much attributes capture that. There are some attribute numbers that are, if I remember correctly, have a genetic link to them, although I don't 100 % remember that. Until we get more stuff like that, and we do anything with child rearing or education or anything that the child is free to be a dancer and has no sort of blacksmithiness to it. That'll change over time, probably, but we haven't really planned out a course for that.
Threetoe:	Ok, next question comes from Marcus: What is your opinion on stills requiring water to produce certain types of booze?
Toady:	I think it's fair. I think water-
Threetoe:	It'd make it about twenty times as hard to start a fortress but...
Toady:	laughs Yeah, I mean you'd always have to start next to a river, or have to dig down to the water. But if we set up things like rain barrels I guess, was one of the ideas floating around, something like that. I think the booze making process is one of the easier ones maybe and...So it's, I mean it's not the end of the world, and I think it's probably a good idea in the end.
Threetoe:	Next question is from Eich: I would like to ask about fps death - it would be way more fun to start in a larger area with a constant frame rate, even in mountain ranges where you can dig from one end to another like true Moria, is this even possible?
Toady:	Ah...No. laughs Not even in a 64 bit system I don't think. You'd need to crank the CPU way up for that to be feasible. There are some things we've discussed in that context about being able to run even a sixteen by sixteen fort which would be slow. Which would be to cut out some of the lower areas, if you choose, and just have a shallow fortress. In which case you'd be able to run it without much difficulty but going beyond a world map square and selecting several world map squares and having something like a sixty four by sixty four fortress, or something like that from the embark screen, that's just completely unfeasible. Now at the same time, there're a couple things that kind of mitigate this when we get to hill dwarves and deep dwarves in particular for this. You'll have the feeling that your fortress, and in actuality through the deep dwarves, your fortress...It's direct influence will be spreading through the mountain and that kind of gives you a Moria feeling. There's also the ability to retire fortresses and leaving them alive so you can kind of build up one mountain range over several games. And your other fortress will still be alive so you'll be able to trade with them and otherwise connect with them and get this feeling that you do have a mountain-spanning civilization but keeping the whole thing in memory and running is just not feasible at all.
Threetoe:	Ok, the next question comes from David: If you assign multiple of a single type of room to a single dwarf, what determines which room they will use at a given time?
Toady:	That one was...If I remember, I looked this up. When I saw this question I sort of looked through the code because I, you know, when it comes to real particulars like this it's impossible to remember everything. And it seemed like it was the value, it was this weird sort of...I don't even remember how old, I mean it's probably before the first release. They look at the value of the mastering piece of furniture. So if it's like a bed or a table they just look at that. They don't look at the total value of the room. So it correlates somewhat with how happy the room's gonna make them but it's not perfect and it's kinda strange. It's one of those things that when I saw that I was like Oh, I'm gonna make a little note. But of course the little notes get buried sometimes and so on. So I have no idea what the time frame is on making that all work together with how the system actually runs but that's what I think I saw when I looked at the code. laughs
Threetoe:	Yeah, it's very ancient code. OK, David's other question is: Going into the new version, will elvish druids be able to use their skills to shape trees?
Toady:	laughs Well, it's in the story, but we didn't add anything to do with that yet. It's one of the things we'd like to add for elves in the future to differentiate them a bit from people but we just haven't done anything with that kind of magic at all yet.
Threetoe:	Next question from Jeffrey: Will there be things like holidays or celebrations, will an adventurer be able to participate in dances or other festivals? will traditions change over the years and will there be people who act as avatars for the gods or religions? Could people become known as prophets?
Toady:	Yeah, so we have...If you look at the powergoals which are over on the old Consolidated Development page. All of those, as strange as some of those are...There are lots of festivals and there's one about...Called the Prophet of Aa or something about prophets, and people talking to their gods and different festivals and holy days.
Threetoe:	Yes, for instance the Plump Helmet Festival which has made it's way into my ascii reward stories lately.
Toady:	laughs Yeah, it'd be great to have the dwarves chill out. Like right now they just have parties. It's like Oh, we're throwing a party. Oh, we're throwing a party. Oh, we're throwing a party. If the parties had something to do with something...They do weddings, I guess, but they don't do anything else. It would be cool to have different festivals. It would be cool for them to commemorate the slaying of the dragon that came to your fort and create a whole new festival for it. All kinds of stuff is kind of in the...The activities we created that I think are mostly just used now for training, like military training, demonstrations, like they'll do a dodging demonstration or whatever. Teach the military how to dodge. That code is set up, and it was set up specifically with things like festivals and dancing and parties in mind. Just anything that involves a choreographed kind of activity with a bunch of critters is fair game there and hopefully will make it in over time.
Threetoe:	Next question comes from zooeyglass: How much do you struggle to ensure that the dwarves are not simply little humans, have suitably dwarven characteristics, make up their own society and so on. Do you have lore written down, or a scheme for dwarviness?
Toady:	We don't have too much written down along those lines. I mean, we mostly just run with what the stories say as we write them. We do want to make the non-human races non-human. But at the same time the dwarves are the hardest ones there because when you play them we don't want it to be...Like if you download the game for the first time, having something completely weird that you don't identify with at all would be I think not the way we want to go. So dwarves I think are going to be stuck being slightly human for that reason. And at the same time the human societies are going diversify a great deal.
Threetoe:	Yeah, I think also that the player has a lot to do with how the dwarves end up. And so it's your fault, in other words.
Toady:	laughs Yes, if you've got your vampire tower where you feed people, dwarves rather, where you feed your dwarves vampire blood and send them out to patrol your perimeter, I mean that's not quite what the traditional folk tales had in mind. laughs
Threetoe:	Yes. Yes, you're the ones that are inhuman.So the next question comes from Maddie: Regarding succession, will family have some priority such as the child of a monarch becomming the immediate successor and so on?
Toady:	Yeah, so that's directly reflected in the raws right now. When you have the position that says that the successor is how that entity position works. And so that's how we're going to have that. Have it work for those positions. But there aren't any really complicated family dynamics right now. I mean it's all very early on still. We're just starting that kind of thing for the larger world so it's not going to be completely interesting. But we are going to have some basic stuff.
Threetoe:	Jordan asked: Can your adventurer get better at jumping, is there a skill based on the creature?
Toady:	There's just no skills, nothing associated with that. Right now it's very simple. It might not actually last that way before we get to the release because there's a little odd...How it works right now. Right now it's just based on your speed. So the faster creatures that can sprint faster and then press the jump button can jump farther based on their speed but I don't have a skill for it. Attributes don't matter yet. There's just not a lot of...Because it's either one, two or three tiles or whatever, there's not too much resolution there. It'd be nice to think of a way if it's not...If it's based on too many things of like knowing how far you're going to be able to jump before you arrive at the cliff face going full speed and then discover that you're just not going to jump far enough. So I've made, the system right now acts in a predictable fashion and we'll work from there. But it's just good to have basic jumping in right now.
Threetoe:	From John: When will the dwarven economy make it's way back into the game and make the process of growing a fortress feel much more grand and important. Now this is the second question about the dwarven economy and I just wanna say that you know, going back in time, the original economy I think was so that you would make coins and the coins would be paid to dwarves that would randomly slip them around in the fortress in their rooms. Just so that the adventurer would come in and find treasure in every room kind of I think was the original idea for that. So that's how it started, anyway.
Toady:	laughs Yeah, it was just about treasure placement. We made sure that they always brought the coins back to their rooms so that when you were wandering around the fortress there'd be...It'd be a nice surprise any time, or not really a surprise if you remember your own fortress, but just opening the door and there's the treasure. Obviously we've grown a bit beyond that and then we got annoyed with the economy and had to take it out. I don't recall but I think we said earlier that the taverns and inns is our current thinking right now about when the dwarven economy is going to restart. I don't if that makes the fortress feel grand and important because you turned the fortress into an inn before the economy finds it's way back into the game. laughs It's sort of the opposite.
Threetoe:	I think the other problem with it is all the dwarves just never had enough jobs. Like the massive amounts of stragglers just, they didn't have enough money to pay for their rooms and stuff like that. The idlers.
Toady:	Yeah, it's a difficult problem to get everything working right, but yeah, maybe your dwarves will clamour for more jobs a little more aggressively than they did before. If you start ignoring them and they start going broke. But we'll have to see how it pans out. It's one of the things where next time the economy goes into the game there's no chance for it getting turned off again. I mean if we go into it, we're gonna dedicate ourselves to fixing it. Because it's more time for it now. I think it was a little premature when we tried to have it before and didn't have the larger world, and didn't have any goods in the larger world. Now that all that stuff's in, the economy can actually make sense and we can start working it into trading with other people and so on. And make all those systems consistent based on supply and demand. All that kind of thing. So when we do it next time it'll be for keeps.
Threetoe:	Next question comes from Ben: Are magnetic pistons ever going to be implemented? It would be fun to move z-levels around once you get enough resources...
Toady:	Well...So we did promise moving fortress pieces. We don't really know what that's going to involve. If that involves taking a rope and hauling things around a shaft like an elevator. If that involves, you know, magma driven mechanized mech fortresses with particle projection cannons or whatever that shoot magma at people. Who knows what people will come up with once we put in the mechanics, Fluid, messing with fluids is always annoying. Because fluids take so much processing time and so on. So I'm not sure what exactly's going to come out of it. As I said earlier with mechanisms and machines, we don't really have a feel for that stuff so people just come up with their specs and ideas and when we get to the moving fortresses, if people have stuff for us to look at, we're gonna consider everything and there's gonna be a whole lot of stuff going in at that time. All kinds of bits and pieces. We're gonna try and think about making things as, sort of, into their little constituent elements as much as possible so that people can realize all kinds of different machines and not just go by some script that we wrote for them. So yeah, just keep throwing ideas at us on that stuff and when we get to it we're going to do some interesting things hopefully.
Threetoe:	Next question is Jochen who asks: Toady - since you have a math background, do you actually sit down with pen and paper and do mathematical models before starting to implement them?
Toady:	Well, the tablet comes out quite a bit, but it's mostly for map making. Just drawing the maps and then thinking about how to make them pop up. It's hardly ever for equations. Occasionally, I write down something like that, but math doesn't get super complicated in Dwarf Fortress. There's linear algebra and there's, of course, lot's of regular algebra. But not modern algebra, just the old type of algebra from junior high and that kind of thing. So yeah, it's just not, you know, not a whole lot of banach spaces coming into it. Or anything that I studied. laughs No geometric measure theory in the game at all. So, not really. I mean, I do write down equations sometimes just to kinda get the scaling right when you got a bunch of different variables, but it's nothing...I don't think that wouldn't normally be done.
Threetoe:	And the next question is for Zac: What is your professional background? All I have to say is that ‘Ha! I don't have one...' (laughter) Professional author, or game designer?
Threetoe:	Well...No, I've never really had a real job, I think. My background, I guess, is I have a Bachelors in Ancient History and I've taken a lot of computer science classes and I actually have written quite a few games that never got released. But yeah, I mean that's all I can say really. I've worked kind of manual labour type jobs once in my life so, I really...Yeah. Professional author.
Threetoe:	Are you planning to make skulls and brains a little more tough? every fight seems to end with the skull being crushed or jammed through the brain...
Toady:	Well, hopefully this is already fixed for the next release. I didn't add...I didn't go quite the direction, I guess I wanted to end up going there, by adding more geometric information to the parts and stuff to kind of explain what the part looks like. There just wasn't enough time but I made them larger. I mean, I don't remember, they were kind of a ridiculous size. So the largeness for now I think helps enough. And if we wanna get them back to a, I don't know, appropriate size and geometry and hardness, and all that, it might get tweaked later on. But I've been pretty happy with the results of sitting there and sort of boxing someone in the head over and over and not just having their skull collapse after a few hits. It takes quite a bit more in the next release.
Threetoe:	Could you speak about procedural methods used in Dwarf fortress, and which methods are more successful than expected, and which methods do wish you'd spent less time on. Do you have any general advice on integrating procedural content into the games?
Toady:	So I don't have like, kind of formal background here. So in terms of names, I mean I've mentioned in the past the kind of midpoint displacement diamond square stuff [indistinct] that you can use for map generation. Everything else is just trial and error. So I don't have specific named algorithms to recommend and ones that I wouldn't. It's just all about iteration, getting something that you can see and then asking yourself how does this deviate from what I expected? Especially if you're doing like real world modeling or at least fantasy world modeling in the sense that you know what to expect more or less. You can always fix your deviations and, I mean, not always but it's not as bad as it might seem to think about what's going wrong, why it's going wrong, looking at your algorithm and what kind of element that actually exists in reality or what would cause the deviation. Things usually, unless you iterate over hundreds of years, for instance in world gen or whatever, you're not gonna get some kind of crazy chaos behaviour that is beyond your control. Most of the time it is in your control and you can think about those things and add to it. So I mean it's just, I mean I guess that I'm not sure if any of that actually counts as advice cos it's just like Keep trying laughs You'll get your result and just try and think consciously about what you're doing because all of the bugs have reasons that they happen and all the deviations have reasons that they happened.
Threetoe:	That's right. Never give up.OK, the next question comes from Matt. Will we ever see good wizards (ala Gandalf) come into worlds and build towers like the necromancers do. What sort of plans do you have for them and how would they interact with player fortresses? Do you have to be nice to the good wizard who visits your fortress every few years to heal you paralysed and injured dwarves? Well, this one...There was actually a good wizard in the beginning, in the first few versions of Dwarf Fortress that would come and ask for help to defeat an evil wizard...
Toady:	Yeah, it was an army of the dead, right? laughs Yeah, he'd actually...When he asked for help, he asked kind of specifically for one of the dwarves, I have to...I don't remember if he asked for any dwarf or, I think he might have asked for a dwarf by name, or something.
Threetoe:	Yeah.
Toady:	He's like, I must bring Urist with me! laughs And then so you kind of have this little mini Hobbit journey or whatever.
Threetoe:	Yeah, I can't remember if he, if the army of the dead would come anyway. And you would just pick...No, no.
Toady:	No, no. They could thwart it. They could thwart it. And if they failed to thwart it, like if you, they never failed to thwart it, but if you failed to send off the dwarf that the Gandalf-type wizard wanted to steal, then one of your dwarves would have a dream when they were sleeping that an army of the dead was coming. Then it was always around the sixth year of the fortress or something that an army of the dead would come and it would be a difficult fight. Especially in the 2D version where you're kind of boxed in, and have them coming at you and never leaving. So I guess to answer the question, it's certainly the type of thing we want to consider. I mean I have no idea...Building towers, I think we're gonna try and have a broader idea of what they do and how they act and what things they can do. And yeah I don't know if they'd come and heal your paralyzed and armless dwarves, or whatever. laughs That's wishful thinking in a hard world, right? laughs Sometimes dwarves are just, you know, they have to deal with the consequences of your actions.
Threetoe:	Ok, the next question's from Akos: Will you ever implement ports that make sieges and trading possible on isolated islands, how much do you plan to make oceans part of the gameplay, will you have navies or pirate ships that can fire on fortresses?
Toady:	So we love this stuff, right? We have, we played Pirates! and Ancient Art of War at Sea and stuff, and...
Threetoe:	And multiple submarine simulators.
Toady:	Right now I'm reading the whole kind of history of one of the big greek wars and there's triremes ramming everyone and doing all kinds of things and so on. So yeah, we love boats. We've talked in the past about how boats might work so we don't need to go into kind of the technical details, those'll be in the transcripts of the old talks. But it's definitely one of the things that we're planning to do. And kind of incorporate it fully into gameplay everywhere.
Threetoe:	Akos, second question: Are you planning to have roots on larger trees that reach down to the first cavern layer?
Toady:	So I guess, actually most tree roots don't actually go very deep underground at all. There are a few exceptions and we've got parameters now that let you kind of set what the roots do for your trees. I don't remember if it's oaks, one of them has a big tap root or something, but even then the tap root doesn't kind of go down through, you know, fifty tiles of granite or whatever. laughs At the same time it's a cool image, right? To have roots coming down into the cavern.
Threetoe:	Having a dragon nibble on the bottom of 'em.
Toady:	laughs The World Tree that goes down into the Land of the Dead and all that kind of thing. So I think it'll happen sometime. Maybe not with the traditional trees. Maybe with the fantasy trees. Maybe in stranger environments, but yeah, we like roots, we like trees.
Threetoe:	Ok, the next question comes from dhokarena56, and they ask: Do you have any plans for the expansion of farming in the near or further future? It's been noted that the farming system is one of the last system that produces free stuff with no drawback - do you have on the drawing board any plans for the expansion of the overall agricultural system?
Toady:	So we don't have a timeline for it. You can see the notes on the dev page and of course that's supplemented by multiple forum threads that are pretty hefty on this topic. We're all for reforming farming. We kinda took a morale hit when we got rid of our Nile flood farming from the 2D version. That's very difficult to bring back into a 3D system. And so I just haven't gotten back to farming since then and it's only kinda gotten worse and worse over time. At some point we'll come back and clean that up though.
Threetoe:	Yes, kind of reminds me of the water-for-booze question and it's just like, it would make the game twenty times as hard if you couldn't get mushrooms from nothing.
Toady:	Yeah, and at the same time you know, people want a little bit of challenge when it comes to those systems. Hopefully not too annoying. But kind of interesting maybe you know, terrain based, that kind of thing.
Threetoe:	It is too easy to...Yeah.
Toady:	Yeah. So yes, we're definitely pro...Pro stuff. Pro new farming.
	(guitar music)
Threetoe:	Will we see more dynastic or clannish behaviour, or will the dwarves remain more individualistically oriented? Can an usurper count on the support of his brethren even if his claim is weak to other people? How will vampires and bandit gangs be factored in?
Toady:	So this is one of the things that when we started these position claims, and we started talking about factions and so on, and we talked about having reputations with families and so on, this is one of the things we were thinking about. And one of the actual main things we were thinking about because families are one of the only things in the game right now that are links between people that could determine their behaviour. There's not a whole lot for them to work with right now other than what town they live, what civilization from, and then who their family is. I wouldn't expect too much with this next release because there's just no mechanisms through which they can act on sort of realizing their ambitions right now. So we're kind of pre-army arc and just trying to get the ball rolling on some really basic mechanics but it's definitely the intention to have the families matter a lot more. When you bring up things like bandit gangs, right now the bandit gangs exist in a vacuum but they are generally led by historical figures that have family ties nearby in the communities that they're harassing and so on. And that should have a huge impact. Whether or not it's to create conflict within the family, or to have their family aiding them in their activities and so. Of course vampires can get all strange with that kind of thing. So it's definitely the exact sort of thing we wanna milk to get great sort of emergent stories. It's one of the main elements we wanna use. At the same time, we have done nothing. laughs Aside from the few things in fortress mode that can happen. So yeah, but it's definitely something we're always look at and always kind of...Delaying the realization of, but it's always there. And hopefully we'll get to that.
Threetoe:	Next question's from Meg, and they asked: Will we be getting bug fixes to polish the existing bugs such as the AI in this version? And if so, to what extent?
Toady:	So after this release...So when you ask about the next version, not really. I mean there's a big kind of AI guts rewrite that's actually happened in Fortress Mode regarding their prioritization and so on and how they think about things that's gonna make things like job priorities more of a low hanging fruit in the future. But when it comes to actual bug fixing, that's not what these large releases are intended to accomplish. What happens right after the large release is a series of smaller releases. Sometimes, you know, a couple in a week. And many many many of them that will address old bugs, new bugs, clean up portions of the interface, address minor annoyances and add in features to the game that are just meant to be more helpful to people playing. Especially things like Fortress Mode which we've been neglecting a bit with our focus on Adventure Mode in the big releases. Fortress Mode sees a lot of changes in these smaller releases as well. So if you're waiting for things like that don't pin all your hopes on the next version, but that should be the time when you get excited about Fortress Mode and fixes, and bug fixes, polishing and that kind if thing. So you should be excited about the next release cos it means it'll be the beginning of the process that you want.
Threetoe:	Ok cool, so the next one is from... Anthony, and: In a fortress with a hundred or so dwarves, managing labor settings and military composition to keep the fortress working becomes difficult due to the of micro-management involved. Is there a way that the player can at some point no longer need to worry about which dwarves do which jobs, or who exactly is in a particular squad?
Toady:	So the kind of question here, it's sort of has to do with...It comes down to two different philosophies of how a large fort should be handled. There's kind of the I'd say, I don't know, Majesty method or something where the dwarves manage more of their own affairs. Could even set work for themselves and so on and kind of have less involvement from you and sort of realize their own little lives that way. And of course the problem with that method is that you lose control as a player over some of the things you wanna do. Then there's the other branch you could take which is improving the ability to set jobs and micromanage things that utilities like Dwarf Therapist and so on do. This is sort of the spreadsheet approach or otherwise to make more management possible where it just kind of breaks down what the methods we're currently using. And we are not really for a sort of spreadsheet approach. We wanna have, we wanna try and find another solution, not saying we have even found a solution there. And we like dwarven autonomy, but we are kind of mindful of the fact that it can take control out of your hands. So without kind of committing to a specific course of action, those are the things that we're mindful of and we definitely realize that it's not a tenable position that we're holding now, that the game really does become hard to work with when you have lots of dwarves. And we'll just have to kind of work with that slowly when we get to the next set of releases and so on.
Threetoe:	Next question is from MrWillsauce: To what extent will invaders be able to dig? Will they only be able to dig through certain z-levels, or through certain types of stone, or will certain types of invaders be able to dig to different extents?
Toady:	Well, it's hard to say exactly what's gonna happen. They should be able to affect a siege upon you that can invade a fort that is, you know, where you've just shut your doors or something silly like that and that's supposed to save you from everybody.
Threetoe:	Or throw up a brick wall or something.
Toady:	Yeah. Just something like that. Just not very impressive. At the same time it'd be very silly if the invaders could come and just sort of dig out your whole map and dig down giant like, turn your whole fortress into a quarry or whatever. And I definitely think that different races would end up having different abilities. If you got invaded by dwarves I think expecting your fortress to have new tunnels would be a very fair thing to expect. And goblins too, for that matter. The way they're shaping up they have kind of a underground tunnely nature to them whereas humans should have some things they could try to do but wouldn't necessarily involve a lot of tunneling unless you've kind of restricted yourself to the soil layers. It is odd in the sense that the timeframe is so fast that you could have a siege that lasts a whole year and in that time there could be some digging done even in real life but it's...I mean, I'm mindful of people that don't want their fortresses utterly destroyed by digging, but yeah the whole brick wall thing is just silly so...Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean we're not going to have them like making a weird sort of swiss cheese pattern out of your fortress but, if they don't cheat, and they don't know where your fortress is, they are gonna have to do a kind of exploratory tunnels all around your entrance, or whatever. So yeah, we'll have to see how that turns out.
Threetoe:	I know that you don't have plans for a multiplayer option any time soon, do you at least have plans for shared worlds with trade between players?
Toady:	So, we've seen these ideas and things like this in the suggestion board and so on, so that you might be able to export a file that has a trade caravan that you sent off the side of the map or an army that you've marched off the side of your map and then you save it in the file that might be, you know, lightly encrypted in some way and you could send it off to your friend. And then your friend could load it in their fort - it might not even know if it would be an army or a trade caravan or something and then they get that marching on the map. You could kinda send those back and forth. It's a fun idea, it's not really a high priority idea and then there's difficulties with the raws. You'd have to make sure they had the same kind of raw files that you do exactly or the whole thing would break down. And even things like world history and so on can get in the way if you're not in the same world then references that you send off the map on like the artwork on an item for instance up would no longer be legal so there'd be all kinds of little bugs and things to work out and all kinds of the particulars to iron out. So it just hasn't been a high priority... I think it's a cool idea to have but it's not something that's gonna happen anytime soon
Threetoe:	The next question's from Eggman360, and he asks: Do you think we should be able to dip items into liquids, or wash items, or collect liquids and other contaminants?
Toady:	Absolutely. We love this-
Threetoe:	Yeah, we'd be somewhere behind Nethack if we didn't have this in there.
Toady:	Yeah, especially cos we have item contaminants. We have this really kind of complicated poison system. We already have dwarves that wash stuff and we can have liquid, we already have liquids that can be in containers. I mean, so it's really just very very low hanging fruit for Adventure Mode. I'm assuming that it's Adventure mode that's being talked about here because of the way the question was phrased. But even in Dwarf Mode being, I mean that's one of the things where we kind of thought it was undwarfy to kind of coat your stuff with poison or whatever. But so...Yeah definitely. You should have complete freedom to do any of those things. You should be able to dip an arrow in vampire blood and shoot it at somebody and possibly infect them or whatever. I mean any kind of, any kind of option like that. I mean you could do that once you become a vampire. Just constantly get your blood all over stuff and try and convert the whole world then we'd probably have to look at that conversion mechanic and change it to something a little more traditional. laughs Or something, cos it just gets out of control. Or allow it to float.
Threetoe:	Next question, actually the last question, is from Daniel, and he asks are there any plans for improving the interface for placing buildings or furniture?
Toady:	So there're never specific plans about doing something, you know, on any kind of time line or whatever and for things like interface changes when we kinda get in the mood to, like the recent change to the unit screen, it's just kinda something that's been either sitting in the notes or that people have kind of suggested at some point in the past. I don't have specific things there. There are things you can do I guess. If I remember correctly, the full context of the question was for things like placing, if you want to place a bunch of furniture out of the same material just doing simple things with simple sort of keeping track of which material you last placed or being able to place multiple buildings without it having to pop you back out of the menu. And there are certain complications with that when it needs to know what items are available and whether or not they're accessible and all that kind of thing. So I think, I'm not sure, I haven't thought about it too deeply, but ditching the system where it earmarks a specific item, or rather leaving that system as an option, but making most things just you place it and you say a desired material and the item's not necessarily earmarked, it might work better. But then again, you'll get into more situations where the item is unavailable if it's not telling you. So, I mean it's kinda a complicated mess but definitely I can see when you're placing certain types of rooms that the repetitive stress injuries that we cause to the player are pretty unacceptable and there should definitely be options for going ahead with it even if you're not just kind of assured of having the materials available.
Threetoe:	Alright. Well, that brings an end to the questions. I hope everybody's satisfied with their answers.
Toady:	Yeah, so that was, I think that was about thirty people and we got another seventy or so to go. laughs
Threetoe:	Yeah.
Toady:	So we'll catch those in the future Dwarf Fortress Talks. We're moving through the questions at a good clip now and hopefully we'll get to everybody.
Threetoe:	Alright, thank you everybody for contributing and listening and downloading. And tell all your friends about Dwarf Fortress.
	=== musical interlude by Ollieh ===
Capntastic:	Alright. Thank you for listening to another amazing episode of Dwarf Fortress Podcast. I'd like to thank...Hold up. laughs There's like eighteen people to thank.
Toady:	That's right. That's right. Yeah, I've got a list written down here. You can start with the ones you remember and then I'll come up with some other ones.
Capntastic:	I'd like to thank Rainseeker.
Toady:	That's right. He's on, he's at the top of the list.
Rainseeker:	Thanks. You're welcome
Capntastic:	Toady-
Toady:	Yep, I'm number three. I'm number three.
Capntastic:	Tarn.
Toady:	Tarn is number three on the list. What do you think number two is, then?
Capntastic:	Ah...Scamps.
Toady:	No no no.
Capntastic:	Zack.
Rainseeker:	Capn!
Toady:	No, it's you! Thank yourself!
Capntastic:	Oh, it's me. Thank me. I'm contributing. Umm...Emily Menendez.
Toady:	That's right.
Rainseeker:	My sister.
Capntastic:	Ollieh.
Toady:	Yeah, Ollieh, these are the music peoples.
Rainseeker:	And then-
Capntastic:	All of our viewers.
Toady:	That's right. All of our viewers and people that view the podcast when they look at the...
Rainseeker:	laughs
Capntastic:	I'm flying blind here!
Toady:	That's right.
Capntastic:	It's tough.
Toady:	Everyone that asked questions, they get thanked. Everyone who contributed. That's definitely on the list. I don't know what the transcript situation is. Mallocks did transcripts up to a point and then he retired for a time and someone did a transcript for...We never put it up but someone did a transcript in the thread for Dwarf Fortress Talk 20 and I'm not sure if mallocks is coming back or not. And so we'll thank mallocks for the transcriptions that he did.
Capntastic:	He did a great job.
Rainseeker:	Yeah, thanks mallocks.
Toady:	Yeah. And then whatever happens we've got other transcripts in the future, they'll ever be crowd sourced transcripts like the last one, if I remember, I wanna credit the right people eventually but we'll do that when I figure out how to put it online and stuff. And the same situation holds for this episode, so...
Capntastic:	Yeah.
Rainseeker:	And any, by the way I've a little business called Measures of Joy Bakery dot com where you can order gluten free goodies if you like. And-
Toady:	Gluten freeeeee.
Capntastic:	They look really nice.
Rainseeker:	Yeah, thank you.
Capntastic:	Look really good.
Rainseeker:	Thank you, thank you. They're really good. My wife spent eight years developing gluten free recipes. So they're excellent.
Toady:	Yeah, yeah. We have a link, I think. Uh...A link, a link, a link...
Rainseeker:	Yep.
Toady:	And yeah. Capn's got his things going on.
Capntastic:	Yeah.
Toady:	It's always a party over there.
Capntastic:	Working on stuff. [indistinct]
Toady:	Stuff.
	=== musical postlude by Ollieh ===
Threetoe:	Ok, are we keeping the boy here?
Toady:	I don't know. I don't know what we're going to do with this recalcitrant fat kid that jumped into my lap. Causing trouble, causing grief. Argh! Ah, ya claws...Now he's on the back of your chair. laughs
Threetoe:	Yeah, ok. That's a good place for him.
Toady:	laughs