Swordtreaty!

I've been sick the last couple of days, and so I've been playing a lot of Dwarf Fortress, which explains the lack of blogging (oops...). I mentioned the entertainment value of the RNG (random number generator-- it's what decides the random factors in video games) in Dwarf Fortress; today, I thought I would give you some more examples, in my current fortress.

I finally downloaded the Lazy Newb Pack (LNP), a very useful thing that allows me to turn off aquifers and invaders and contains tools like DFHack, which allows me to designate whole veins to mine and see what my moody dwarves need. It also comes with several graphics packs, which are neat, although I was fine with the ASCII art of the base game. So, having gotten these useful things, I started a new fortress (my last one, Splashbronze, fell to invaders). This is the saga (so far) of Swordtreaty.

First things first, I turned off aquifers and invaders. I wanted to get some practice with long term things without having to worry about a siege of 97 goblins, battle toads (that the goblins were riding), and trolls, like I had in my last game. Also, I don't yet know how to deal with aquifers. I also set my world to be a bit smaller and have less history and savagery, but more minerals-- really, I wanted a fairly easy game. I found a site that had everything I wanted-- deep soil, a river, shallow metals, deep metals, lots of trees-- and picked one of the ready-made embark teams that came with the LNP. It was a good site, nice cliffs so I could have a protected entrance (even without invaders I wanted to practice building a better defense system), easy access to the river so I could build a well easily, lots of trees, and when I started excavating for my fortress, I almost immediately hit copper and aluminum.

Then things started getting annoying. As I am excavating the very first part of my fortress, I get a notification that my hunter cancelled hunt: dangerous terrain. A little while later I get a notification that he has been missing for a week. Sure enough, he fell into the river and died. When a dwarf dies, if his body is not properly buried, he will haunt the fortress. I knew it would be some time before I could get coffins made and a burial chamber built, so I expected that I would end up with a ghost. What I should have expected is that no one-- not my hunters, not my fishers, not my woodcutters, not any of the dwarves out collecting materials from outside-- would be able to find the body. The Ghostly Hunter claimed the first coffin I set up, but since I can't retrieve his partial skeleton (the only part of him I can find), I'm stuck with a ghost. He's not being too troublesome-- since he was one of the first seven, not many of the dwarves in the fortress know who he is, so he doesn't torment them much. At this point I kind of like him.

So I get my fortress mined out, and I've struck huge veins of native gold, as well. I'm excited-- I have a lot of trees, so once I get a wood furnace and a smelter, I can start making things out of these valuable metals! ... and then I find out that none of my dwarves can operate the wood furnace. I appoint a manager and look at the workshop-- a dwarf must have at least novice level furnace operation to use the workshop. That means that I can't just toggle the ability on in a bored dwarf. I don't know why that one workshop has that issue; all of the others I can just give a random dwarf the ability to use it and they will. Apparently not so with the wood furnace. So I resign myself to waiting. Surely one of my migrants, at some point, will have the proper skill.

My fortress now has a population of 225-- with a population cap in the game of 200, so I get 2 or 3 migrants a year-- and not a SINGLE dwarf can use my wood furnace. And I have found a huge amount of copper, gold, and galena, which can be smelted down into lead and silver. So I am mining the depths in the hopes of either finding a magma vein (and then maybe figuring out how to make a magma forge), or breaching the underground cavern and having a few of my dwarves die off from various beasties, so I can get more migrants. At this point I would mine out adamantine just for the demons to come and kill off some of my population. Damned useless dwarves.

One thing I tend to forget about is making clothing. I've rarely had a fortress last long enough for this to be a problem-- clothing will eventually degrade and rot, but I've not had this problem because I tend to fall to invaders fairly quickly-- but I forgot about babies growing into children. Babies don't need clothing, but children do. And I wasn't paying attention to the children-- they can't be assigned any sort of work, so I don't really notice them. Until they start throwing tantrums, that is.

Dwarves have moods. Good things, like eating a fine meal or dining in a nice dining room or admiring their own bed, will give them a happy moodlet, while bad things, like being caught in the rain or being annoyed by flies or the death of a loved one, will give them a bad moodlet. So will being unclothed, it turns out. So when one of my children threw a tantrum I went and looked at their mood-- they had been embarrassed by being uncovered lately, and were upset at having no shirt. Oops! So I built a whole bunch of clothier's workshops and started making clothing. Only there is no option to make shirts! I cannot find a way to make shirts! So I made some dresses and robes and trousers and socks and shoes... and my children are still tantruming, running around naked as far as I can tell. The best part is that I have had two go stark raving mad, which means they strip off all their clothes (...) and then eventually die of dehydration or starve to death. And it seems that my adult dwarves are stockpiling clothing now, keeping it in their rooms. Dammit, dwarves! Won't somebody please think of the children?!

I do rather like that I have invasions turned off, because I've got a pretty strong military anyway, so when there is a thief, I send like twenty dwarves after him. I had an ambush once-- six goblins, and then another six. Oh no! What ever will I do? So I sent four squads out-- thats forty dwarves. The ambush didn't last very long. I'd have sent all of my squads, but there were merchants at the depot so I left two squads there to defend, in case a goblin got away.

The other fun thing I've got that I've never had to deal with before is nobles. The dwarven civilization decided to make Swordtreaty a barony, so I appointed a dwarf to baron. This meant that he needed a much bigger and nicer bedroom, some armor stands and weapon racks and cabinets and chests, and his own office and dining room, and a tomb. Recently he has been promoted to count, which meant he needed even nicer things, but fortunately the stuff I gave him was already good enough. Unfortunately, he and my mayor have the option of making mandates and demands. And both are demanding, you guessed it, things made of metal! Dammit, dwarves, I need to have a furnace operator before I can make shit out of metal! Their mandates, however, are always entertaining. Make three crutches! Make two more crutches! Don't export any crutches! Make three more crutches! Apparently my mayor is really worries about inuries. My baron, on the other hand, was obsessed with slabs. I didn't even know what a slab was before he demanded that I not export any; he apparently realized that there were not any slabs to not sell, so he then demanded that I make some. I think I may put them in his room, since he is so fond of them. The mayor, having gotten eight or nine crutches for himself, moved onto demanding bucklers, and then moved onto large cut gems... at which point a different dwarf got elected mayor. I wonder if the dwarves saw that as corruption?

I can easily see, having played a bit more, how games like Boatmurdered and Bravemule have been woven into the hilarious stories they are. I think I might have to, on my next go round, chronicle the whole thing with a bit more accuracy. I might even try to go back and chronicle this one. I rather like Swordtreaty, with its ghostly hunter, useless ores, naked children, and demanding nobles.

Some great ways to be non-productive

Today I got myself addicted to two new games. Well, re-addicted to one, newly addicted to another. The new one is this, a simple but very entertaining game where you can explore variation by mutation in flowers. Or, to put it more simply, where you can breed a flower to look how you want it to. There's a button that says "evolve-o-matic" where it will randomly select which traits get passed on. It's really neat to just let it run, and see what you get. Given that I've been arguing with creationists (and others who merely "doubt" evolution) recently, it amused me. Creationists always seem to make the mistake of thinking that evolution is a random proceess, and that's one of the big hangups they have-- they don't believe that randomness can 'create' the diversity we see in life. But evolution is not random-- there are environmental pressures that determine what traits get selected for. It is, in fact, far LESS of a random process than the whims of a divine creator. Anyway, this simple little simulator-- that IS random. There are no environmental pressures selecting for any particular traits, and so it will come up with different results every time you run it. If, however, you step in, you can play the role of those environmental pressures-- in a dry environment, plants with smaller blossoms do better, because they do not have the resources to sustain larger blooms, so you can select for smaller flowers, and in that way direct the evolution of the result. I thought it was neat, anyway.

The other one is a viciously addictive, not so little, surprisingly complex game called Dwarf Fortress. It's been in development for about a decade, and is coded entirely by I think two people. It has no graphics to speak of-- ASCII characters make up everything in the game, with a lowercase 'c' representing a cat and an uppercase 'E' representing an elephant, and various symbols creating the landscape and structures-- but it has a fascinatingly complicated AI.

The point of the game, in Fortress mode, is to build, defend, maintain, and turn a profit with a fortress. You begin with seven dwarves and a cart full of resources. You have to carve out a fortress, build farms, workshops, living quarters, and defenses. Several times a year merchants will arrive, so you can trade goods you have produced for supplies you need, and several times a year a new batch of migrants will arrive, the number depending on how well your fortress is doing. You will also have an increasing number of attacks, as years go on, from kobold thieves to armies of goblins, from wild animals in the outside world to cave spiders in the depths, and if you delve too deeply you can awake the forces of Hell. Your dwarves can starve or go mad from lack of alcohol, they can drown or burn in lava, they can fall down wells or walk into traps. There are a seemingly infinite number of ways to lose, and there is no way to win. As anyone who plays the game will tell you, "losing is fun!"

But the real fun, for me, is in the dwarves themselves. They each have names, relationships, likes and dislikes, a randomly generated (and surprisingly detailed) physical appearance, things they are good at and things they are not so good at, and they will adopt pets, form new friendships and relationships and, much to the player's frustration, choose which tasks they want to do. You cannot control them. You can toggle the skills that are active-- if, say, your miner won't stop carrying rocks, you can turn off the rock hauling skill, and he will stop doing that. But you cannot tell them what to do. You can create tasks, but they will decide which to do when. The miners will carve out everything you have designated to carve, but they will do so in odd patterns. If you pay attention to what they do, when given options, you can get a surprisingly clear picture of their personalities. I had one who adopted every cat in the fortress. If you set them to engraving, some will have favorite subjects-- I've seen dwarves obsessed with cheese, for example. For a simple little game, these guys are incredibly interesting.

If you're going to play it, however, I would suggest you bookmark the wiki and reference it frequently. Losing may be fun, but it helps to have a headstart. It is, as I said, a surprisingly complex game.