#kobblefort

The furnace floor, where I already had to alter the stockpile by a single tile so I could put down a floor tile to stop the growth of a young tower-cap. I fucking hate floor fungus!!

The catacombs really do look a bit shit from this angle sorry kobbles. The little magma pockets do look cool though.

The (secondary now, I guess?) production floor is such a fucking mess and I hate it but I'm never going to do anything about it.

The tavern and chief's chambers look pretty cool though! I like that the dogs get sprites but my kobbles are just the letter "k." I feel bad for the people in the bedroom below who have a clear glass ceiling. Imagine trying to sleep and a bunch of motherfuckers are dancing above you and you can not only hear but see it the whole time. What a life!

And the only other floor of any visual interest is the barracks+hospital+dungeon floor. I like that stonesense makes the wells into faucets. Kobbles got plumbing lol

It always hurts to give a miner a different job, since I like it when the mining gets done fast, but since he wasn't particularly great at it anyway: Zhag, the miner who did not give a single shit about breaching the caverns, has been transferred to the military right around the time that a couple years of constant training starts really paying off for On Speechlessmonstrous and Zomrca Lulledjackals. In fact, it's sparring with one another that brought on this "level-up."

Two girls, both keenly aware of their bodies and the way they move, pushing each other to greater and greater heights of martial prowess. I don't care who you are, that's yuri. And also they're drunk. But kobbles, like dwarves, are basically always drunk. There was a time when I'd be like "Same! That's so me, lol!!" but it's long been over. I don't actually miss alcohol, I just miss the way alcohol used to feel, the effect it used to have on me. For the last little while, whenever I finally gave in to the temptation to knock some shots back every 2 or 3 weeks I would just suddenly jump-cut straight to the next day, waking up with literally all my clothes on including my goddamn socks like a fucking bastard feeling absolutely miserable in every physical sense and terrified that I had fucking humiliated myself and made lifelong enemies in the 25 Discord conversations I didn't remember starting. Now if I try to drink at all my body just says "no, fuck you. Go to bed" and all I can bring myself to do is lay down and get five to seven hours of miserably low-quality sleep - while still lucid enough to take my socks off, thank fucking god. I can't complain, really. The time from my early 20s when drinking made everything beautiful and everyone into my friend has long been over. If I never wake up in a stranger's bed or literally drooping halfway off the couch of their back porch again it'll still be too soon. But it's fine for kobbles to drink I guess. They were literally programmed to do it

At only 136 steel bars, it feels a bit too early to be getting the kobbles into steel armor, but new weapons and shields should do them well - provided they're not all too attached to their current gear. The dream is, eventually, adamantine, but to tell the truth I've never actually gotten that far in a fort. They either died in a horrible violent tragedy or from the miserable slowness of FPS death far before we could chance upon any Hidden Fun Stuff. To be completely honest, despite making a few attempts as early as early as 2009, even installing it on the computers at my high school and getting away with playing it all through study hall because nothing that looks like that could possibly actually be a game, I really never figured the game out or had any real success. I just didn't have the patience to either learn to read the ASCII or manually check every tile every time I wanted to know what anything was. This was back when carp were serious threats and rhesus macaque invasions were commonplace - the Brazil era, as I've literally just now decided to dub it - but half the things I take for granted really weren't even in the game yet. Also, on those same high school computers I managed to install Cave Story, and I got all the way to Hell before getting hopelessly stuck, which is what happens to me basically every time I play Cave Story, though I did manage to beat Hell & Ballos just once as a kid. I like to joke that my soul is stuck in Cave Story Hell forever until I finally beat it one more time, but sometimes I get scared it's not a joke. One time my friends came over while they were tripping on acid, and I was stoned and playing PaRappa the Rapper, and they were watching with so much delight but then I got to the bathroom level and just couldn't fucking do it, failing attempt after attempt, and one of those same friends professed to me years later that he feels like part of his soul is still trapped in the PaRappa the Rapper bathroom level, instead of experiencing the catharsis of the big concert finale level. The other friend from that time is no longer my friend because he burned down his fucking house with a turtle and several dogs and cats inside. All the dogs and most of the cats escaped but the turtle did not and since then he has been in permanent rehab because every time he almost finishes up at a halfway house he decides "you know what, I should take mushrooms right now. I should get so high on cough medicine that I can't even pretend to function for 5 minutes. While I'm in this fucking halfway house that I could be free from if I just waited one or two more weeks to take these mushrooms or cough medicine." I mean I can't really begrudge him the drugs but, well, actually I think I can. I can begrudge anyone for anything if I want. He also had a pad on the floor where his dogs could shit instead of just taking them out, I mean that's not just on him that's on his whole family being fucked up. Basically just fuck that guy

We'll be breaching the first cavern layer in earnest soon. I'm not quite sure what I actually want to do down there - fungiwood and tower-cap don't actually interest me, considering how much wood we have on the surface, and farming has been going so well that we don't really need anything edible from down here, either. Maybe I just want to stir the pot. Maybe I just want conflict. You know there's a reason why people who play this game say "losing is fun" and it's beca

Oh Fuck Oh Shit No No No Oh Shit Get The Fuck Out Of There Everybody Get The Fuck Inside Right Now Oh Fuck Oh Fuck Oh Fuck Oh My God Please No ... errr .......

Everyone has more than enough time to get inside safely, because... it's a fucking giant tortoise. In the time it takes for everyone who was topside to get safely into the base, the weretortoise has... not moved a single tile.

The moat bridge is retracted, marksmen are poised and (hopefully) ready to fire, but uhh... I don't want to say I overreacted, but I may in fact have overreacted.

Its kill record is not impressive, either. I'm more impressed by the names of some of these places it's been. "Grayhatchet" is actually pretty cool. "Questsloshed" that one sounds kind of horny... "Womansoak" That's what they call me when I walk up in the fucking club LOL !!!!!!!! Sorry. I'm going to be normal again.

The were-tortoise reverts back to a lobster (yes I have the mod that adds crustacean civilizations installed on this world) and skitters away off the map and far from my mind. Honestly, he might be more intimidating in this form. However strong the were-tortoise form might be, it's not exactly effective. Another thing I learned is that the statue "radar" does not actually tell you where or which statue was toppled, it literally just says that one was. If I wanted to put in a bunch of effort, I could set up a system where I have statues of one material put on the west, another material on the east, other materials north and south, maybe even go 8-directional with it, but I kind of don't care. The reason that people who play a lot of Dwarf Fortress say that "losing is fun" has two reasons. First of all, there is no real "winning" in Dwarf Fortress - you can become the new Mountainhome of your civilization, sure, but that's more of "the best game state you can attain" than a victory. It ultimately just comes with more challenges: an entourage of picky, problem-causing nobles and a king/queen/gender-unspecific-position-of-royalty/whatever else show up to make demands, and it's not like you export a certain amount of wealth and roll the credits or something. The second is that, since you cannot win, getting your fortress to be perfect, infallible, and autonomous only actually serves to make the game boring. Losing is not just a learning experience as far as the actual mechanical game goes, but an exciting event that changes the story and landscape of your world. After this fort inevitably goes down in flames I am going to keep playing in this world and Rushsly will be not just a memory in my mind but something that existed and changed the culture and history of The Land of Nails, the biggest continent in The Dimensions of Portent. (Kind of a lame name though. Why don't you portend to go fuck yourself, lol. Not you the reader, just a general unspecified "you".)

There's motherfucking gold in them there hills, tons of gems too. I'm prone to ignore stuff like silver and cassiterite because it's not that valuable and more important not that interesting to me, but I can absolutely be tempted by the glint of gold, and much like Sonic Adventure 2's breakout MILF Rouge the Bat I always love a good gem. If you don't think she's a milf you're looking at the wrong pictures - the wiki is wrong, the writers and designers of the games are wrong, she is a 43 yr old cougar. And me well I just want to be the pudgy twink 10+ years younger than her that she is just ever so slightly emotionally abusive towards, not in the traumatizing way just the sexy way. Like "the hurting your feelings but then you also get aroused from it and afterwards she's like yeah you know i didn't actually mean it" way.

Fucking kitchen full of fucking miasma

Just USE THE BARRELS YOU FUCKING BASTARDS

Like why do they do this

With nothing but perfect timing, a metalcrafter falls into a strange mood that makes him cry out for:

-metal bars (He's already taken a platinum one)

-logs (We have plenty all over the fucking place but he won't grab any)

-silk cloth (We have 100s of these too, he won't take any)

-bones (which means we have to slaughter an animal in the same disgusting butcher room with the miasma and all the meat already just sitting on the floor.)

Zylr has made an enemy out of me but I am honor-bound to help his bitch ass create a masterpiece so fuck it.

He takes the bones and... just keeps bitching. I don't know. Does he just want more bones? Because I'm not going to be heartbroken over killing another horse. Fuck it. I'll gladly kill another horse. I hate horses and want them to not exist.

And yes, he did literally just want more bones.

And downstairs, they finally started putting things in barrels. Not before letting our food & meat stocks drop by literally hundreds of items, but I guess a win is a win. kind of. Not really a complete win yet either there's still very much some shit on the floor. Fuck it I'll just make them throw it out too. What were you really going to do with horse nervous tissue, like be honest. As usual I had to run cleanowned in dfhack like 5 times to make the kobbles actually start taking out the garbage but they did it. (I know the military backpack glitch but I don't understand how meals got claimed as owned without even making it out of the kitchen (I don't feel like explaining the military backpack glitch right now but I can later if someone asks me to (We're kind of losing the fucking plot here though (and suddenly I care about that))))

Zylr had the good sense to offer this to me instead of keeping it as a personal treasure, and I mean, 20k value ain't bad. Most interestingly is the chain either has an image of itself on it, or is making a reference to another platinum chain that exists somewhere. It would be really funny to just put it in the dungeon and tie criminals to it, but it feels weirdly appropriate to put it in one of the churches, so I'm going to do that instead.

AMBUSH TIME!!!!

The fucking pricks are going after our bird towers. It's so personal now.

Their necromancer doesn't even make it past the first row of traps.

A boar that their necromancer resurrected literally kicks one of them to death. I don't think these guys are very good at this.

With their... leader(??) and three of their most fearless caged, and one of their least lucky shredded into fucking bits, the stragglers just awkwardly wander off the map to go hide. They didn't even make it past the third row of traps on the very first level.

They also did not even make a dent in our bird numbers, despite them being the only targets they were able to even take shots at. Though this does serve to prove we need to reinforce the Bird Towers to prevent unnecessary loss of bird life, that's literally all it proved. They will one day be back with more, they may come back with the idea of maybe not walking straight into the trap hallway, but for now they are idiots who barely managed to kill a single goose.

I don't know if you know this, but something happened in 2020. Well, obviously something happened in 2020, but I think what I'm thinking about might not be the thing that immediately comes to mind when you think about 2020, though it is probably a knock-on effect of it. You see, in 2020 a lot of people went Online who were just not supposed to be Online. Don't get me wrong, everyone was already on their way Online, whether willingly or by a kind of zeitgeist coercion - Boomers had finished terraforming Facebook from a clunky but quirky place to find out about parties and join groups for making esoteric image macros with other drug addicts who you would eventually just sort of meet at parties into a place for 30-comment family-shattering arguments to rage over an article your uncle found on TotallyTrueNews.RealWebsite about how public schools are forcing their students to say "I'm gay" over and over instead of the Pledge of Allegiance by 2018 at the absolute latest - but this was a more immediate event. Stuck at home with no other viable avenues for social fulfillment, a lot of people who shouldn't be on Twitter downloaded Twitter, a lot of people who had previously brushed it off started viewing and eventually making TikToks, started spending more than 48 seconds a day looking at Instagram (a rookie mistake, especially before reels) and though I'm not actually too familiar with this site we're on right now, I'm sure at least one 53 year old just showed up here and acted like they belonged while completely failing to accept or assimilate into the culture - not like, a fujoshi 53 year old, that's always kosher, I mean like owns a frozen yogurt store and listens to NPR 53 year old - again these aren't inherently bad, okay, so let's say a specifically not sexy 53 year old. (There is so much more to being sexy than being attractive, I NEED to clarify this, but this paragraph is already far too scatterbrained for me to get into it.) And because of this, something really bad started to happen. The veil was cut through between "the real world" and "the internet," all the way. Sure, you could argue this happened all the way back with the first Amazon sale, or the first time someone got a PayPal Business account, but we're talking about when the merge became complete.

A very long time ago I was a sheltered child, gravitationally anchored to a two-story house in a suburb that was closer to the country than the city, shuffled around schools every two years as part of some poorly-thought-out program for "gifted" kids where we got the same exact curriculum as any other kid in the district with twice as much homework, half as much socialization, and one particular teacher so miserable and cruel that I still find myself hoping she dies in some kind of "stepping on Legos forever" incident some twenty years later. (She seemingly went out of her way to make sure every student in our cohort broke down crying in front of the entire class at least once. I think I might actually be the age she was when she taught us now, and I can not imagine being okay with making a child cry, let alone intentionally trying to make it happen.) I certainly had it better than many in a material sense, the middle class really used to exist before 2008 and I was there in it, but my home life was actually pretty awful in the non-material senses, and in so many neglected hours I was able to take solace in one place. First over dial-up, then through DSL, and finally via glorious cable connection, I was able to leave the real world. On forums, on chatrooms, in game lobbies and Flash cartoons, I was specifically somewhere else.

Digital cameras were expensive and rare. Webcams... existed, I guess, but a 144p image on a CRT screen over AOL Instant Messenger's awkward protocol hardly made for a seamless connection, and I never had one anyway, because what the fuck did I or anyone else care what I looked like in real life? My Furcadia avatar was the real main event, or even better, my Graal Online character - an obscenely obscure game now, but it seemed bigger than the whole world when I was 9 - I was not bound by the name my parents chose for me but instead liberated by the handle I dreamt up for myself. There was no image or shape of me to weigh me down, only my thoughts and the way I managed to translate them. And there was another quality of this place that would inform my later disdain for capitalism, though I didn't know it yet: that everything was free. Though they could never find their way onto the Animal Crossing Forums or Starmen.net, and especially not Hell Is A Forum (thank god) even my parents could figure out Napster and the CD burner on our beige old Gateway desktop, and would boot me off to go play with my Dreamcast or my Genesis ever so often to burn a mix for the car or their workout - though they were trolled by that one Bill Clinton MP3 more times than any of us would like to admit, and I'm sure at least two or three of the many viruses that eventually did that old machine in came from there. Still, this was not a point of controversy, did not upset anyone besides, well, Metallica and the RIAA - it was just how the internet worked. If you could digitize something, turn it into data, break it down into a series of machine-interpretable binary bits and hexadecimal bytes, then it could be shared completely freely; there was no way to stop it from being shared completely freely. Once a thing was on the internet, it belonged to the internet, and this was not some dystopian AI-corpus financial instrument, but a worldwide triumph of human connection, a bastion of culture available to anyone with a machine and a modem. Learning things, finding things, talking to people was all so free and so easy, and connections were so beautifully earnest. Forums built around mutual interests made fast friends out of people who simply wouldn't meet in the real world, would otherwise just feel alone in their hobbies and pastimes and artistic ambitions, let everyone experience the joys of sharing in mutual passions without the aches and costs of travel, the gross fleshy trappings of physical life. You were free to just download Christian ska songs and roleplay as being an evil wolf with angel wings and talk about anime for crying out loud - which was really not normal at all yet for an American in, let's say, 2003.

My heart is warmed by younger people rejoicing in digital nostalgia, but I really wish they could have been there for the whole thing. "Y2K" was so much more than an aesthetic, it was a way of seeing the world, of experiencing the present and envisioning the future. It is truly ironic to have "digital millenium," two of the most hopeful words in the world to me when I was a kid, be the first two words of "DMCA," one of the most soul-crushing. On some level, we must have known it couldn't last forever, but the decay creeped in so slowly that you almost couldn't notice it, not unless you really looked. Paywalls went up, copyright takedowns went out, messageboards went down. Little by little, even the concession of "shareware" became corrupted by the wrong kind of perverts - coin-counting suit-wearing fun-hating puritans that, trite as it is, really did want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. Rent-seekers claim-jumped domain names by the thousands and asked exorbitant fees to let actual creators use them, the definition of "spam" grew looser and looser until it became normal for a total stranger to E-mail you a fucking advertisement, and all the SheezyArt's and VCL's were either crushed underfoot or congealed into the same all-encompassing grey goo of Social Media, a more Accessible internet not to the people who needed it, or even particularly wanted it, but who saw it as a resource to exploit.

But for a long while, the internet was still ultimately the domain of people who wanted to be there. The Facebook boomers barely ever breached containment, and anyone with any sense knew how to keep their paths from crossing. Twitter was still overwhelmingly weird, Facebook still at least had safe pockets that made it worth logging on every couple of days. But 2020 ended this completely. The trends of the last few years reveal it so plainly: a lot of people who genuinely don't belong on the internet are on it and just stuck here now. NFT guys were never even supposed to exist - people like that are supposed to just try to one-up each other at consumer-goods conventions with luxury watches or elaborate decorative rugs. The people crying out "Mister King Elon, Sir, my Blue-Check has improved my Reach, but people still aren't liking my Tweets! What's going on!?" should be harassing each other in country clubs. Televangelists should not even physically be able to access e621 but they do, and after they finish jacking off to femboy foxes with giant cocks in striped socks like everyone else does, they feel compelled to go online and tell a crowd about how "Liberals are putting litterboxes in classrooms because the teachers make kids identify as pansexual nonbinary catboys, we need to start kidnapping endocrinologists," a crowd that should not be following for-profit parishioners on Twitter, they should be in a La-Z-Boy yelling at the TV and buying the world's shittiest kitchen knives off the Home Shopping Network.

And I mean, what do we do, right? Is this just the new cycle? Something cool comes around and we get to have fun with it for a few years until the boomers come shit all over it? How long can we go on like that? I'd say quite a while longer, actually. The truth is that a new cool thing will arise, we will have a place again for the actual weirdos and outcasts who make everything of any sentimental and cultural value to coalesce together, one that the Finance Fuckers and the Status Seekers and the hate-spewing freaks can't figure out how to get on, don't even want to get on. I don't know what it will be or where or how, but this all comes in waves. In nature, the prey population rises, then the predator population does too, then the prey population falls, then the predator population falls. There is summer and there is winter. In the human world we have made things markedly more complex, but we still operate on the fundamental principles of nature, there is still a morning after every night no matter how long. Somewhere, somehow, a new world is coming. It has to be. And somewhere in this world, something is waiting for you.

I think things like the greatest simulation game of all time, Dwarf Fortress speak to what the internet and computers really are, really can be, really should be. I think the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress is not just a relic of a more optimistic time but something that keeps the spirit of the old internet alive. Tarn once said that people who actually play the game are simply beta testers, and it is only by sharing our experiences with it to others that you get to actually "play" it. I really like that, I feel as though that concept contains the very "collaborative spirit of giving freely" from the old internet. So how about I get back to beta testing the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress for you.

New problems are often just old problems. On the left we see that more food has been left to rot on the floor, because of course it has, at this point I think they just like doing it. On the right we see that, well, I didn't really designate anyone to throw out the forgotten beast corpse or its associated parts, so... that's kind of just stinking up the place. Right at the main stairway, too! Well, down a hole on the surface it goes.

We needed more flux stone for steel production, so I went to dig into the dolomite wall of our church/main tavern floor, but it turned out to be hiding a massive iron vein. Well, there's still enough dolemite to be worth it, and it's not like more iron is bad, it's just not particularly good.

Chief Acl himself, apparently quite a religious man lately, takes the task of throwing the ratfolk necromancer down a very deep hole, cage and all. It's a quick and merciful death, which the other ratfolk will surely come to envy in time as it's now their turn to be chucked down. Well, that plan kind of has a hitch.

Only the first ratfolk is actually successfully thrown down the pit - the next two see the pathetic fate that awaits them and immediately make a break for it. And then...

Ace Steel, the Beast Slayer, catches one, beheads them, and then...

chops the other one in fucking half. Jesus Christ

And in the background, just as a little aside, our bird towers spot three ratfolk thieves trying to break in. It's too bad they haven't been able to send any survivors back to warn them about all the traps. Well, they won't get the chance now, either. These particular ratfolk are just going straight down the garbage pit because, well, I dunno, the "arena" feels like a shit idea after all.

Hey, Nillians are here! I've never seen these folks before. Hope they aren't squeamish like elves, because they got here just in time to see ratfolk thrown down a fucking garbage chute. We'll give them a nice warm welcome, and also I feel like getting some special quarters set up for the Beast Slayer. I don't want her to feel as though her hard work isn't being appreciated. Of course, she's not the only member of the military...

Dralas Containedbanded, a fine crossbowbold in his own right, has fallen asleep right in the middle of the main tavern as a party rages around him - another member of his squad, Almda Smileurn, snoozes away in the lower one. I take it they're enjoying their leave to the fullest, as they should. It'll be right back to training soon enough.

The trading post is absolutely run at this point - we seem to be popular, despite the fact we really haven't been exporting much. And oh god they're doing that thing with the wagon don't do it don't do it don't crunch it don't smush it. Okay. I'm better now. I traded with the Nillians for their instruments; we're almost completely self-sufficient now, so nothing else they have is particularly interesting.

In political news, we're a Realm now! Which means Acl's lodgings are no longer good enough, and has also inspired Alsrta Moltenend to enact a ban on the export of iron anvils. Which... yeah, sure, whatever. They're not exactly our money-makers. In fact, I don't think we've ever sold one. So yeah, sure, who cares.

Ace Steel now has a grand bedroom to share with her husband Zolr Fatvenoms (cute name) that includes satinspar furniture (her favorite rock) and pig iron walls (her favorite metal - she's worth slowing down the steel production for...) right next to the tavern. It's also around this time that I discover the population cap was set to 50; I figured we just weren't getting a lot of migrants because we weren't creating or exporting a lot of wealth, but...

That's pretty obviously not true. So I crank it back up to 200 and set about digging out some more apartments. We've been eating through vertical space pretty quickly, but as far as horizontally, there's still tons of room, and while it's obviously more efficient to just stack them instead of spreading them out, I don't particularly want bedrooms any closer to the caverns than they are, so instead I make the aesthetically questionable decision to just smush them all onto elevation -5 with the other 3-tile bedrooms.

In between all their stairwells, we create a grand mausoleum for Acl, who is apparently no longer content with just a platinum sarcophagus in a crystal glass chamber up where the proles get buried. I'd say royalty really changed him, but it kind of didn't.

There he is, putting together some random pauper's bedroom.

We got another live one! This one's a bit more worrying than the last - I can't imagine it having fire powers will bode particularly well for us.

A floor below, the hatches are locked, and both squads are set to patrol the point where it could feasibly break through. We only got a glimpse of it before it disappeared into the fog of war, but it seemed to be climbing along the walls if not outright flying, so once again the whole "don't open up the caverns on the ground level" thing turned out to be meaningless.

God she's so badass. I shouldn't even be scared. But I am, precisely because she's so badass. Losing such a great kobble would be a death blow to the fortress' morale, much less my own. The beast appears every now and then on the map, swimming around just at the edge of our revealed look into the caverns. Just now I got up from the computer, walked over to the fridge, uncovered a pan of spaghetti I've been saving since last night, and ate two handfuls with my bare hands. I just sort of tilted my head back and lowered them into my mouth. I don't know why I'm like this, my fork is clean (I only own one) but I didn't want to eat a forkful of spaghetti, I wanted to eat a handful of spaghetti. And I did, and I liked it. I don't know. Maybe that early image-generation AI was on to something. Eat spaghetti with your hands some time, just give it a try. Why not? What are you afraid of? Anyway, as we wait with bated breath...

Alsrta, our caravan voice, is suddenly elected clan leader by the kobbles, requiring the construction of some new lodgings for her. Something I forgot to mention is that, besides the triplets she had while drunk, she had a fourth child, a peasant. When I try to click over to them in her "Relations" tab...

...it turns out he was the peasant crunched up in the bridge by the first were-beast attack. Uhh, fuck, sorry dude. In spite of it all, she's actually in the best possible mood. Maybe it's just the bump from getting elected, but she hasn't showed up on my radar of "kobbles in shitty moods" at all. I'll admit it's a pretty low-quality radar, and I am a pretty low-quality radar operator, but like it's there, and she hasn't really pinged on it.

Checking a random engraving in her room reveals that the kobbles worship a deity of deformity, disease and death named "Tulrac Dungsgalls." That's so fucking metal

On the other side of the spectrum, our most unhappy kobble is Zil Dentedleaks, who doesn't seem to actually be having a very bad time or any serious current issues. I mean like sorry about the trauma and shit but pretty much everyone has that at this point.

Speaking of trauma, the first bird tower gets its windows, but nobody particularly wants to get this dead peachick out of it, so uhh... I guess it's staying... This isn't related but just now at 288 hours of playtime on the Steam release I have just fucking now figured out how to get my kobbles to gather fruit. People have told me "you're so smart" for a lot of my life and I've always been dumbfounded by that, because if they saw how many obvious and simple things I miss they would probably not say that. I'm not sure what causes me to make problems 1000x more complicated in my head than they actually are but I've basically always been that way, I could read before I could tie my shoes, I can grasp the theoretical stuff in algebra just fine but actual basic arithmetic like making change is completely impossible to me, and when I play puzzle games I often flounder around trying absurdly overcomplicated solutions for entirely too long because some part of me just does not believe the solution can be simple and so unconsciously overlooks the most basic and obvious options. I don't know if this is an autism thing or what - yes I am autistic if you somehow couldn't tell - but it has made my life impossibly frustrating at times. You should see me play Zachtronics games, I like them but the kind of solutions I come up with on my first pass are fucking efficiency nightmares.

I like that this gets announced via the combat log for some reason, lol. Relax lil buddy we have literally no interest in any facet of your existence. We're just building some bird windows. The bird towers all have windows now and I find myself suddenly wondering if we'd have been able to just wall them in and carve fortifications, but oh well. Glass is free, baby!!!

Steel is most assuredly not free, but we have it now, and besides some iron pieces they've grown attached to, all the kobbles get some sweet-ass upgrades. There's also been some more personnel shuffling...

Kody, Ris, and Iltos were all in terrible moods, so I figured we might as well give them positions of authority, because, well, I don't know. I don't know what my reasoning was there. Zil was also made into the first squadron leader basically just as a lark.

Huge day for it/its bitches. No gender no problem. Well actually they're all fucking miserable. Agender, aproblem. A man, a plan, a canal: Paizuri! Uhh, wait, that's not quite right. Panama. Not paizuri. But whatever. You can't win them all. Sometimes you do everything right and you just lose anyway. Sometimes the person who goes through your entire 3 year history of Instagram posts and makes you really feel actually special and not just like another little bug in the world and makes you realize you're perfectly able to thrive in a polyamorous relationship isn't actually polyamorous and just wanted to enlist someone to tank a bit of emotional abuse from their clingy obsessive self-deprecating and wildly insecure partner. But I said I wasn't going to talk about David Cage. When success is impossible, what's important is to fail in fun and interesting ways.

Continuing the trend of boring artifacts, Roron Lastmelt creates a sheep wool cap with absolutely no distinguishing features.

Again, huge day for it/its bitches.

Moods are bad enough to make me consider building a mist generator, but I'm probably not going to for two reasons. First of all, levitating water around all willy-nilly like that can do some serious damage to the framerate, and it's already starting to struggle a bit outdoors even at just 50 kobbles. Second, it just sort of feels like cheating, and I understand that this seems insane considering I literally cheated to make the magma furnaces and wells, but I am literally dialing the difficulty level to my exact desired specifications and if you can't appreciate that I don't know what to tell you. Not having to run up and down 100 z-levels to make metal stuff, good. Putting kobbles in perfect moods for basically free after 5 mins of investment, bad. That's the game at least it's the way I see it you're free to see it some other way. You don't like how I play it's only like $30 on Steam and the ASCII version is literally free. Sorry I keep getting defensive, I just really need to win the argument against the demons that detract from everything I do residing inside my own head.

While the thought occurred to just gift them to the visiting Dwarven traders, it was ultimately decided to just throw the ratfolk prisoners (and their undead dog) in the dungeon and have them stripped of all their weapons and armor. And suddenly I decide, you know what, it would be funny to force them to fight in an arena, but just as I start digging one out:

Hey remember how I said we'd be fine as long as no forgotten beasts who can fly don't show up? Ok well something really funny just happened.

It must've smelled kobble blood, because it heads straight for the exit of the caverns, where I immediately stationed both squadrons. Unfortunately, it sunk its teeth into a civilian before they were able to stop it.

Susle loses an entire fucking foot, but under the full might of our expertly-trained steel-armored kobble army, the forgotten beast Murlu is not long for this world.

As the kobbles pile on, the beast is barely able to retaliate, and Ace Steel wins the killing blow, slicing the monster's head clean from its body. While she may have started out as kind of a mean-spirited joke about pro wrestling, she has won a great victory today. And so, she deserves a slightly less stupid title, even if I'm going to keep the name.

Shislik "Ace Steel" Trimgleeful - the Beast Slayer. Hell of a first kill to put on the record

Interestingly enough, the corpse is spattered with some ratfolk blood it must have spilled on the way here - too bad the enemy of your enemy really isn't your friend. It's a catchy saying, but sometimes the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy. Sometimes trying to see things in binaries will get you into real bad fucked up situations. But we are most assuredly out of this particular real bad fucked up situation.

I think the entire military has earned themselves a little vacation, at least for a time. Even Zil's mood has improved from the victory, though Ris is still in the absolute worst possible mood - his work is just about to begin. Or... well... it should be?

Susle basically refused bedrest, and while he's still faint, he only laid down long enough to be evaluated and given a crutch, then immediately got up and went to get drunk and have a bath. He headed back to the site of the battle to pick up the sock and shoe that once belonged to his now-dismembered foot and put them away in his bedroom cabinet, in case he ever needs them again or something, and now just wanders. We'll have to check back in on him later, but for now...

We're making progress on our second tavern and the ratfolk arena. The randomly generated name The Tooth of Midnight is very fucking cool and appropriate, and in just a bit we'll be able to toss the rat bastards down that hole to duke it out with whatever other nasties we can capture. The necromancer might just need to take a magma bath, though, I don't like thinking about the kind of cascade he could cause with those powers. Everyone else, though? Well they came here looking for a fight, and damnit they're going to get one - but we're keeping their weapons and armor, lol.

But that will all happen later, because I am being asked to play FPS games with my Gang, and would never deign to Leave my Gang Hanging, even if it means having to peel myself away from the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress for a few hours. So that's all for now, next time we'll throw some rats down a big hole.

Humans showed up to trade and seem to just be stuck here. The rabbits haven't left either. We didn't actually have any crafts to trade with the humans so they just sort of stood around. Eventually I read that when this happens you can get them to leave by deleting the trade depot. However this also made the humans just drop everything they brought and leave. I guess that made it our stuff. Well this could be a funny exploit but I don't know if they'll just see it as stealing.

Before the migrant wave even finishes I have to make it clear that this is not a hunter-friendly fortress. If you want to run around shooting arrows do that shit somewhere else. We don't do that here.

We're getting quite a sizeable population now and whoa hey hold up what the fuck

Some ratfolk dickhead broke in!!! A peasant Almda is just punching the absolute fuck out of her. Just going at her head like a fucking speedbag.

I mean holy shit

I love when they say this.

As Almda beat the ratfolk to death, a woodcrafter created their masterpiece across the room. Can you imagine being that kobold. Just like "whoa, that's crazy. I'm busy though"

Things are going smoothly. I'm trying a different bedroom setup for once. Glass production is going kind of slow, they keep canceling stuff because they "need sand-bearing item" (it's usually right next to them but they won't use it for some reason) I'm sure there's some way to fix this but I'm not sure what it is. "I ball to remember" - thought that came to me so vividly while i walked through the kitchen that I had to say it out loud. "I ball to forget" the only logical conclusion to that thought.

Rushsly was elevated to a Warren (kobble version of a barony) and crystal glass operations are up and fucking running baby!!! Big things poppin!!!!! We also have enough fucking iron and billon to get absolutely rich but the faster the economy go up the sooner we're likely to get raided and there's still no military here. You might be wondering how I got all these magma furnaces without embarking on a volcano or digging into Caverns 3 well baby I fucking cheated. I busted open DFhack with ` and I went to gui/liquids and I made some little magma pockets. I don't know how to get kobbles to move around buckets of magma without killing themselves in the process but if I did I would still probably do this. I'm still ultimately just using the resources I have and I'd never outright cheat to fix a kobble's mood or survive a siege or anything like that, sometimes I just get sick of the clerical bullshit! Maybe that sounds fun to you. Maybe it sounds insane for me to say that about a game that is, in essence, literally just clerical bullshit, but what is more insane than caring? I am still going to attempt to make steel completely legitimately, if you think me speeding things up so that I don't have to deforest the entire map and wait three times as long for the coal to actually get moved around ruins the integrity of the fortress then I don't know just stop fucking reading and you'll be better off.

We are also establishing a hospital even before we establish a barracks (I have decided to go the military route after all though traps are still in the cards) and guess how I got those water tiles two z-levels beneath those wells. Go ahead guess. Actually it's not a great solution because they will eventually dry up given enough use and I certainly don't want to manually re-fill them but by the time that becomes a problem I should be able to breach the caverns (relatively) safely and make me a mother fucking pump stack. I refuse to use windmills because I believe they make power too easy while also providing a really bad defensive weakness (I have had a forgotten beast break in through the axle tunnels and slaughter my entire fortress because of that one-tile-wide vulnerability) so drawing waterwheel power from the caverns is simply what I'm going to have to do. And yes I know that's a weird double standard for a guy who magically summons the water and magma from console commands but this is not a competitive game!!! When you boot up Dwarf Fortress it's YOUR choice whether you want to play as some kind of omnipotent god, minor deity, or literally just advisor to your little ant-farm of fake people. And I like being a minor deity with power over little time-and-effort-saving things but ultimately leaving matters of actual survival in the hands of my kobbles.

Just found a fat-ass native platinum vein, you wish you were me so bad.

A big part of why I'm so hesitant to breach the cavern layers is actually just that once you do, all your un-floored areas start growing cave fungus, which I hate. It can even start growing trees which will bust through your entire base but you can't really cut them down early you just have to literally build floor over them which is annoying and takes up so many resources. Some of it, like the red fungus, looks cool but most of it just looks ugly. However it does let you pasture your animals indoors which is always a boon, invaders fucking love to kill animals and if you can just have them sealed off in their own little chamber where nothing bad happens to them you don't have to worry about them. Once the kobolds get barracks set up and a bit of training under their belts I guess I'm just going to have to deal with it.

Right we've fucked around long enough, barracks time. And I smoothed them because if they're going to be stuck "constant training" they may as well get to enjoy the place. I particularly like having the dungeon right next to the barracks because it means any attempted jailbreakers will have to try and sneak through a room full of heavily-armored goons who are in the middle of swinging their weapons around. I don't really have the logistics set up for leather armor but I have an absolute fuckton of iron so it might be good enough to just make a 10-kobble melee squad and 10-kobble xbow squad with iron armor. For some reason, holding off until I have steel production up and running just seems like a bad idea.

I saw this notification and thought "oh shit, is there another thief or something" but it turned out my kobble actually just had a panic attack at work thinking about her friend dying in the Fucked Up Bridge Incident. This is a fucked up game. If you ever ask "what kind of god would make monkeys that get anxiety and have to drive big metal boxes to go operate a deep fryer all day," well, us I guess. We do that. Maybe this is what "god made man in his own image" means right. We've literally evolved so much that we can simulate being the same uncaring god doing the same awful things to little unassuming people. As above so below. I feel pretty normal playing Dwarf Fortress. It feels like a very natural behavior to me. Am I simply taking after my own creator

Ratfolk tried to sneak in, but gave up the element of surprise by shooting at some boar halfway across the map. Welp time to lock shit down! To be honest they seem more like they got lost on a hunting trip than they came here to fuck with us but we don't actually need to go topside for much of anything. And that "anything" includes making a good 10 or 20 sets of iron armor. Be our guests ratfolk... stay as long as you like.

Sometimes when I'm just sitting here doing this, I think about how happy I'd be with a soul-sucking spreadsheet job. Like the guy from OfficeSpace was such a bitch! What was with Generation X and going "no maaan, you don't want a job with fixed hours where you don't get cut or burned or blow out your knees! Having the same weekend every week and only having to worry about fucking up your posture will suck your soul out, maaaan!" Passing papers around pointlessly and doing fake social niceties for it sounds great. If it's so bad then give up your fucking paid vacations and holidays off and liveable pay and just switch places with the guy pushing carts around the Wal-Mart parking lot while 60 year old Xanax addicts in pickup trucks and SUVs try to run him down as practice for when they finally live their ultimate wish fulfillment by driving their car into a bunch of protestors for daring to temporarily mildly inconvenience them.

Not now bunnies

Oh I guess they have no beef with each other. That sort of makes sense they're both rodents right. Well uhh they just keep standing there on the edge of the map.

It seems kind of arrogant for William Shakespeare to say "All the world's a stage." Maybe not arrogant, but I don't know, of course you see it that way, you're a fucking playwright. What about everyone else? To the dishwasher, is all the world that salad you barely even took three bites of? What about to the soldier? Is all the world a target, a threat, an enemy? It is convenient for us to only see life through a pinhole. Both for us and the next pigeon up on the higher wire. Life isn't really a play or a fight or any one thing but as long as you never drop out you don't have to worry about that. You can stay right on a track and become a software engineering guy who can't cook instant noodles for himself or tell the difference between different species of trees. People always told me "ginkgo biloba trees smell like cum" but I've never smelled it. I've never really considered cum to have a smell, maybe I just don't have smelly cum. I mean I know the smell of a cum rag you toss in the corner of a room that you ended up forgetting for way too long and had to throw away, but that's more of just a bacterial smell to me I think and I've never smelled something like that while I was walking out in public, even around ginkgo biloba trees. It feels like you can generate infinite cum in life sometimes, like even when you haven't eaten or drank you can still make some come out of you, but you will run out eventually. I'm not sure about the "semen retention" guys, I kind of believe more in the "balance of fluids" thing. You can definitely have an excess of cum sometimes and it makes you act like a fucking idiot. If you don't jack off or otherwise dispel excess semen (as if anybody even has sex anymore - Not gonna catch me doing that nerd shit!) at least once every few days everyone can tell and they think you're wound-up and stuck-up and way too aggressive over little things. At the same time if you masturbate too much that's also weird and everyone can tell that too. Just do it once every two or three days to keep your levels normal. Hop on e621, punch in "breast_expansion dragon" and you're good to go. You're normal again.

Some migrants showed up, got into some martial trances, and then all died futilely to the four ratfolk rangers that kinda just won't fuck off. Well, actually, one of them went home. I guess he got his fill of fucking around. I don't really feel the urge to take revenge because I didn't know any of those guys really. We don't really need a fish cleaner and we certainly don't need any milkers or shearers so I don't know what to tell you. Bad day to show up. You really should have phoned ahead. You really should not have showed up to your girlfriend's house after she ignored your calls for like 3 hours obviously she was cheating on you!!! Sometimes a girl is just giving you those psilocybin mushrooms to try and subtlely convince you that you want to break up instead of just saying "we should break up" maybe direct communication isn't that great maybe you should just play weird interpetive-dance games with each other trying to change each other's minds instead. Sorry. I said I wasn't going to talk about David Cage.

Alsrta, previously the gelder, is now our Caravan Voice (manager) because Anl was stuck in a strange mood that I thought was going to fail but we managed to sneak a kobble out to collect a single log for him. She seems better at it anyway. Also, after drinking booze straight from the barrel even though there are plenty of cups, she gave birth to three children: Anl Crystaldepth (badass name) Iltos Coveredspells (decent name) and Zhatrsi Homagebutters (I'm sorry lil lady) making the need for protection clearer than ever. Death and birth within just moments of each other. Existence, even in this little pixelated simulation, is far too complicated to ever summarize with just a witty quote, but we keep trying. Maybe there really is an all-encompassing philosophical Theory Of Everything that's catchy and fits in as many characters as a tweet. Before they let the Twitter Blue perverts write as much as they want, I mean. I'm not sure 140 is realistic but 280 could probably fit it. Everything in the whole universe can be flattened into one slogan. Why else would everyone be trying to build an ideology out of little quotes and zingers

The kobolds are dancing around and listening to stories casually like there aren't any murderous ratfolk creeping around outside. Feels kind of opposite to real life. Everyone locked away in their McMansion is glued to one of three boxes telling them that everything is going to hell and everyone is out to get them and that we are in an untold flood of violence and despair. Then you go outside and you walk through that "bad neighborhood" and it's just people going to the store to get fucking groceries like everybody else. But I guess kobolds live more communally. And I can't say I'd ever want my bedroom to be right next to anyone else's ever again - even if I do get a box and a cabinet!

Some of that food they be making sounds good as hell

Kody Inkblighted has an appropriate name for someone who is regaling everyone with poetry. Apparently it also thought the last person doing poetry sucked.

DANKNESS AND NOTHING MORE LOL!!!!!

In the third cavern layer, one forgotten beast shows up to kill the previous, as tends to happen with forgotten beasts. Up above, the kobbles finally make a refuse pile and discover just how much mussel shell waste they generate. The butchers got to work fixing the "why do we have 30 stray dogs here" problem. And down at the bottom of the world, after all hope was given up on and we just started digging massive chunks like wild cunts...

A pocket of water, obsidian, and gems. Well, it's not adamantine just yet, but I've never even seen a "star ruby" before. And on top of that...

It literally explodes into flames when you hit it sometimes.

Treasure, treasure!!! Literally buried in the walls! A twisting metal scimitar named Leto Bemta - the Boat of Salves - worth more than one of our entire bins full of gems thus far. Obsidian and diamonds. It has to be close. And there's also...

blood? But Zirga wasn't a miner, they never even came down here. And R'eekeek, didn't they die years ago?

It needs to be carved out fully and completely. Nobody's been hurt by the water gushing forth yet, which is a blessing - it's already slow enough for the miners to get down here from the tavern or their apartments. But it's not adamantine yet. More, more. Come on, give me more.

I get more.

Anl was pretty cool. Getting his head exploded by the stomp of a snow wraith is at least a quick way to go, if not a glamorous one. The snow wraith earned herself a name with that kill: Shosclylr. "Badfogs." She takes a second to acquaint herself with the world of the living for a moment, then charges up the stairs. The marksbolds have already been sent down to deal with her. There's no reason we'll have to seal the whole shaft up over one single monster, right?

Even a well-made steel helm only offers one extra second in the face of this beast. I didn't really know Almic. She kills a woodcutter who was in the area picking up gems the same way, Driliv. I didn't really know Driliv either. Tulys Worthspun and Case Griffonboats are next, marksbolds. She just kicks the poor bastards' heads into paste. Kikli Shakenmarks and Syl Destinedechoes die just as fast, and she hasn't even taken a scratch.

A new title, "the Mongrel of Mirroring." I'm calling it off. I'm sealing the shaft. Urd Putridcharms, Alcr Dressworm and Rota Tickbrave barely escape before the hatches are sealed and the doors are barred.

But there was one last person in the shaft. Nucra Framegarnishes.

It ends the same way.

With the last of its prey killed, pulped in a mere instant like all the rest, it just sits there, self-satisfied. It doesn't need to eat or sleep or anything else; it can wait forever.

I can't know how everyone in this room feels about having been turned away before going to face it, but I can't imagine it's good.

This would be a good place to stop, you know. The fortress is entirely self-sufficient, fully stocked, we could just say that we learned our lesson, closed off the shaft entirely and never went back. That avarice's wage can only be paid in blood, that there are things kobble kind was never meant to find.

But what kind of climax would that be?

I want my adamantine.

We've dealt with beasts like this before. There's a way to do this without any more undue bloodshed. There's absolutely no reason to stop. We still have five miners left, and plenty more layabouts who can become one if the need arises.

Once the shape of the monster is revealed, most kobbles that come down to assist in preparing the fortifications turn tail and flee as soon as they enter the firing chamber. Nucra Framegarnishes has begun rotting, stinking, seeping the miasma of death through the walls - and reminding everyone of the agony that not being able to bury them provides. Winter ends, and the year 256 begins. A seventh year of Rushsly. That's supposed to be a lucky number. But even the marksbolds don't believe they're safe, and make up excuses - just before reaching the chamber, "oh, I've got to fill up my waterskin." "Am I sure these are the right bolts?" "I think there might be a better-fitting pair of gauntlets upstairs, I should try those on first."

More goddamn gnolls. The two that almost make it in are crushed in the drawbridge. Why now?

Cire Ghostivy, who always seems to be out on the surface when this happens, is bludgeoned repeatedly by a gnoll thief using their bag as a weapon. It goes on for agonizingly long until he finally dies. These gnolls are from The Ace Seductions, for what it's worth, so they probably didn't get the memo about the fake entranceway with all the traps, as evidenced by one letting his hand get sliced off by a serrated iron disc before, you guessed it, stepping right on a cage trap.

Those who don't anticlimactically step on cage traps end up shredded by the weapon traps instead. Their lives and deaths are hardly worth mentioning. But down at the bottom of the earth...

It takes a few handfuls of bolts, but the snow wraith is finally defeated, bursting into chunks of its constituent snow before us. Finally, it's safe to bury the fallen kobbles. You might notice by the absurd little patrol route that it took some real finagling to actually make the kobbles attack, but finagle we did.

I'm not sure "pyrrhic victory" is the right word to use here, and I can't be assed to look it up, but it certainly isn't a feel-good story. Dralas Containedbanded got the final shot, so we won't be congratulating a new Beast Slayer. Tomb space is starting to come at a premium, and it's hard not to think: all that just for some gems? We already had gems. Adamantine, damnit, adamantine. What I want is adamantine.

Anl Crystaldepth, son of clan leader Alsrta Moltenend, created this magnetite scepter during all that chaos, with a truly impressive value, though it's not particularly interesting. It feels like a lot of the artifacts we've created just have images of gems on them - along with the gems, obviously, sometimes it's like they can't get the gem they actually want and just draw it on there. Very few pieces that tell any kind of story, though if we're here in a few years, that'll probably change - Badfogs the Mongrel of Mirroring might not be the catchiest name, but it should prove hard to forget.

The butchering spree had very predictable results.

Some action from the second cavern layer gives me a pretty good idea of where, exactly, my framerate went, so I cheer on Ashan Plaguehole's optimization efforts. I notice a bunch of kobbles canceling jobs and panicking and start wondering why until I remember...

they can literally see into there, lol. And unfortunately...

It takes this many goddamn names in the combat log to do it, but Ashan goes down at last. The ant people go back to their business, and we've got to get back to ours.

I don't learn my lesson.

Through Zhasrca Foldcounselled's sacrifice, it is finally revealed to us.

One little completely inaccessible tile of adamantine deep at the bottom of the great magma sea.

You know what?

Fuck this.

I'd grown tired of this fort a while ago, thus the slowing pace of updates. The deep-digging schtick ground all our industry and the actually fun stuff going on in our fortress to a halt. After checking with "reveal hell" in dfhack, I discovered two "HFS Tubes" with the tiniest bits of adamantine to recover from them that are completely inaccessible from just about any angle without going through the hassle of waiting for kobbles to set up pumps and die stupidly channeling out magma. I could just go gung-ho straight into the hole and unleash all the demons and everybody dies, but why? Is that really funny? Is that really interesting? Of course you thought I was going to do that because I am unhinged and it's funny to make all the pretend little virtual people die stupidly but I don't want to. I like my kobbles. I like Ace Steel running around with her three kids in one hand and her massive steel axe in the other casually being one of the greatest warriors kobblekind will ever see. I like Acl Controlledown running around doing the most menial fucking chores like fetching water and burning logs into charcoal despite being the literal founder of the fortress, I like Alsrta Moltenend randomly freaking out about the prospect of someone not making her a bunch of rings fast enough, I liked Cire Ghostivy's dumb ass always being out fishing when trouble came and finally having to pay for it, I liked Zil Dentedleaks being so miserable it was on the precipice of snapping for every moment of its entire life yet never actually doing it. I know it would be totally freaking epic o_O;; for everybody to just all suddenly die stupidly but this game is about stories and that's a dumb story. Rushsly isn't about kobbles getting Punished For Avarice it's about bird towers and were-turtles and drawbridge accidents. So it's going to end here.

There will be plenty more forts because I really like to play this game and writing about it makes it feel a lot less like a waste of time. We're still going to find out what my deal with David Cage is but not today. I said this much earlier but Rushsly will quite literally still be here, persisting in the world as the self-sufficient fortress we created, maybe even becoming the kobble equivalent of Mountainhome in time if the next schmuck who runs it doesn't get everyone slaughtered by gnolls and ratfolk. It's not like there wasn't a climax here: I think the carnage Badfogs caused was more than enough of a big final action sequence to satisfy me and Zhasrca breaking into the magma sea was exactly where I'd like to cap off the denouement. So that's it. Rushsly is retired. As long as they can keep the meat off the floor and the forgotten beasts on their own side of the walls, they might just make it indefinitely. I'd like to make a much less ambitious fortress next, one with a twist - this one was plenty of fun but very straightforward. I'm thinking about either Untamed Wilds or a glacier, and since Rushsly was so isolationist (visitors were never actually allowed into taverns or temples, just for trading) I'd like to do one that's a bit more "public." Whatever the case, we'll be back in Daarunbay Detevay soon. Very soon. I mean like, probably tonight soon.

Armor and weapons are created. Training begins. However the ratfucks have already left the area. It's not really a waste, since I will eventually need the military, but it kind of feels like it, because the ratfolk got to just come in and kill some kobbles and then leave with no bother at all. We've been made Bitches of this world...

The kobbles bury Alzlr tooth-by-tooth. Moods sure are dropping around the fortress! But the worst mood goes to a certain ranger turned guard captain...

In the midst of taking this screenshot, he jumped from the second-worst possible mood to the third-worst, so I guess training is going well for him. It makes sense. When you see people who are like "I pick up heavy stuff and put it back down until my brain stops making the bad thoughts" they do that because it works. You literally can run away from the bad feelings, like physically run, or at least make a really heavy dumbbell go up and down, you can just take a brisk walk away from the bad feelings. It's very frustrating that it works this way because the very last thing you want to do when you have the bad feelings is do the things that meaningfully get rid of the bad feelings. It's easier to just drink alcohol but then you just feel even worse later. I don't understand people who smoke weed to "get away from their problems" because I literally become my problems, I get high and scared and the only way to fix it is to clean my apartment and make active steps toward getting my shit together, but I guess some people do smoke weed to specifically not do that, and that's probably bad too, but I don't know, it doesn't seem as bad as drinking I guess.

I've come to the opinion that everyone in a green shirt is useless to this fort. Animal dissectors, hunters, whatever, we really don't need that shit.

Working on some upstairs fortification and suddenly we are menaced by a fucking Werebeaver. I wish I got a screenshot of it but things happened real quick.

A hunter and a peasant run out on the bridge to fight it there, which is both the worst place for them to do it because they will be crushed and instantly deleted by the moving bridge, but also the best place for them to do it, because the were-beaver will also be crushed and instantly deleted by the moving bridge. And so, both the were-beaver and any potential infected it created are obliterated with minimal casualties and the single pull of a lever. Look yeah it's fucked up as hell but I've seen too many fortresses go down over were-beasts. The last time I had to do the trolley problem for a video game was the quiz at the beginning of Prey and that hardly counts. It's better for any potentially infected to die because simply put if they don't there will be way more death. So we say goodbye to a hunter and a peasant (I have to pretend I'm not pleased with this) and life goes on. However the were-beaver got WAY too close to our door, mere tiles away from dooming the entire fort, so I've decided to build some bird towers. "What is a bird tower" you might ask?

I'll get back to you on that, but first I have to memorialize the guys crunched up in the mechanisms of the bridge so that they don't come back as ghosts and haunt us. Seu Dacrilz was apparently a fellow glove pervert - RIP to a real one. 😔

Nobody knew what to say about Gralit, who was a hunter, which, you know, oh noooo, that sucks sooo baaadd haha xx, im sooo sorry. Either way, the catacombs are starting to get uncomfortably full over here, seven occupied coffins and two memorial slabs. I'm going to use the slabs to block them in so that if a necromancer ever attacks they can't raise our fallen homies, and it's also very space-efficient. I'm sure that's cold but I'm following the golden rule on this one. I'm literally an organ donor, the second I die they can cut me right open and start giving out my guts like Halloween candy. I don't give a shit, I don't need it anymore. What's the deal, is it going to make me look fucked up for my funeral or something? I don't care, I'm literally not even going to fucking be there.

So the idea behind a bird tower is that you put some birds on top of a tower. Well, ideally just one bird, but we have a peacock and a peahen, so if we lock off their pen with a nest box they'll be able to have some babies, which will ultimately let us expand our bird tower operations. Animals can "scout" for enemies that don't automatically reveal themselves when they appear on the map but instead need a kobble or animal to actually physically make line-of-sight visual contact with them. The reason you have to use birds is that because in Dwarf Fortress, rather than having to feed birds with tiles of grass, they simply generate insects and other tiny vermin into existence around them, which they themselves eat for sustenance. I've heard they plan on changing this mechanic eventually, but I don't want them to, because it's quite useful and more importantly really funny.

Sparring has begun so "RIP my mentions!!!" as someone who just posted something inflammatory on purpose would say. Unfortunately, unlike someone who just posted something inflammatory on purpose and is very clearly in the wrong, I cannot just say "Alright - I'm muting this now." I don't know how I fucked up my alerts like this or how to fix it but oh well shit happens. It's not that big of a deal. It used to make a little clicky sound every time a move happened which was a that big of a deal but now it's just kind of stopped. In the kitchen I suddenly had an intrusive thought of me taking my chef knife and just absolutely cutting myself into pieces. The imaginary vision of seeing the blade slice right across my eyes is still so vivid that I keep physically cringing, LOL!!!!!

Oh fuck me, more ratfolk thieves. Pretty disappointed in the Bird Tower for missing them completely.

However they were absolutely fucked on by both squads in an instant. A little annoyed at how much bow-bashing I'm seeing, ranged weapons in the current version of Dwarf Fortress are a bit fucked and I'm sure the mods are only making it worse. Archers carrying around bolts and crossbowbolds carrying around arrows, it's pandemonium. Well they'll figure it out. Or they won't.

Dwarves roll into town again. Our economy has been banging hard as fuck lately so hopefully we'll be able to buy up all of their meat and cheese and booze and whatever other stuff looks shiny. To a kobble, seeing a shiny thing is like how playing Xbox 360 is for us.

koble eat chease lol

The dwarves try to hardball us into selling all our ammo to them, but that sounds like a terrible idea, so we just give them more gems. And one stack of arrows, because that was worth 1000* to them, even though dwarves don't even use arrows. Whatever though not my business how you wanna spend your money! We walk away with absolute mountains of fine cloth, meat, fish, and vegetables.

Making steel is taking forever, and trying to move the metal bar stockpile up one floor is a total shitshow so far. Speaking of floors, one simply has to wonder whether it's time to dig for the caverns or not yet. Forgotten beasts and that ugly mold lurk below, but it's also where you can get black and blood-red wood by chopping down mushrooms, so it's impossible to say whether it's good or bad. We haven't actually needed power for anything, the kobbles are doing fine without milling and minecart rollers would be a lot of trouble just for me to fuck up and crash heavy iron minecarts into poor innocent kobbles over and over because I suck at minecarts. I've been thinking about making one of those "minecart shotguns" that just crashes into a barricade and shoots a bunch of spikes or something everywhere, but for now, I'm going to try serrated disc weapon traps because I've never really used them before.

The rainbow worshippers have had a good run of being the only religion with a temple but I'm afraid we're going to have to make at least a "general purpose" temple. For off-brand religions. In case you worship the store-brand god. The Wal-Mart of churches, if you will

Clicking on this random tile is how I found out the emblem of our civilization is three cabbages. That makes me really happy. I just had this idea for the trap tunnel of paving a road into the base with lignite or bituminous coal stones, then having magma waiting behind some floodgates above it so that it can drop down and start the entire road on fire, or at least I think that's how it would work. I'm going to try it out, it'll work in tandem with the iron sawblade traps I think.

Will it actually do anything? Impossible to tell. For once I'm actually kind of excited to get invaded. Speaking of invaders these guys just showed up that are the opposite of that.

Can I be real with you man I don't like what you guys are doing. I don't know if it's weirder or less weird that you milked a more sapient creature than just a kangaroo. I would already not like you milking the kangaroos in the first place but that's just something we do with animals we're all past that I guess. Like if I sold you human milk would you buy it. I don't know. But they had a drake and a goose so fuck it, second Bird Tower complete. The peacock and peahen are sitting on 6 eggs right now but who knows if they were actually fertilized or not.

Let's actually take a minute just to get some zoomed out shots of the base, show what a fuckfest it is.

First floor below the moat level is pretty normal. Just some farms, and then a Craftsbold guildhall that they never really use. I really like diagonal doors, but I haven't actually been using too many in this fort.

Below that, the "throw shit on the floor" floor. Pretty much all furnaces with two asheries, and the stockkeeper's bedroom+office+dining hall (left) and the caravan voice's bedroom+office+dining hall (right (There is no difference besides the color of that one door (They're also a bit shit)))

Catacombs floor. That pit you're seeing in the bottom left was original my garbage dumping pit but then it was kinda where I wanted to put my moat and the kobbles didn't really like throwing stuff into the water for some reason so I had to dig a different garbage pit.

Miscellaneous fuckery floor. This is a nightmare, lol. I wanted to "have fun with organic shapes" at the start but I kind of just made horrific spaghetti. I mean it's efficient spaghetti is the thing, these kobbles get shit done fast. Except steel. That's taking forever, almost 4 seasons since I finally got the steel process started and it's only yielded 80 bars so far. Still I can probably get started on steel weapons soon.

The Merriment Floor. We got our tavern The Permanent Snack, temple to the god of rain and rainbows The Pale Chapel, off-brand church with a window to view into the burning floor trap, and (I really hope I don't regret it lol) and just through the tavern is the Chief's chambers. Yep you can go straight from getting drunk to yelling at the chief, he's literally right next door, he has to pass through the tavern to get to and from his bedroom, we don't let his ass slide for anything!!! If we make it until the Winged One comes over, that'll eventually be their lot in life too. We don't let nobility just slink around private gardens and luxury apartments having secret little meetings here your ass is EXPOSED.

Did one of the kobbles literally do the "bucket balanced on the door" prank. Do you see that shit in the bottom left did they do that??? what the fuck?????

Military area. The archery range is temporarily shut down because I fear I have the "arrows/bolts disappearing through the floor" glitch again (it has happened before) but after a couple seconds of observation the kobbles don't really care that I clicked pause on the zone and will continue shooting at the targets. They do however use the little arrow return gutter downstairs but when there were more targets, more ammo seemed to just disappear. Like there were all 5 targets in a row there for a while and the ammo was just gone.

I appointed this zesty girl to the position of "Caravan Tactician" (militia commander for you dwarf purists out there) literally just to make her move out of the construction area, but she has "Unmet need: Fight" so I think this could be good for her. She disdains romance AND friendship, I really like her vibe. Well let's hope that fucking bridge gets done soon and for real this time.

Here is my tavern/dining hall overlap (I Don't Give A Fuck) which the kobolds decided to call "The Permanent Snack." The kobbles drink Dwarven wine and rice beer out of green glass goblets. I'll admit I went a little crazy with the jet blocks but when you find jet you make jet blocks and when you make jet blocks you use them, it's really just that simple. Ok? Don't freak out. It doesn't have to be a problem. You can just let things happen. Struggling for control will only tear it away from you sooner. I should know. Dwarf Fortress is a game about how you can do everything right but then your little guys all decide to just jump over a wall and get killed by zombies. You have to just "let the world be" as Big Boss says at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, which is a game I fucking hate but we don't need to get into that now.

Speaking of rocks and also things I hate, mining has been making me miserable because of this fucking kaolinite shit. This and the plaster-making rock which is named unfortunately close to an anti-Romani slur are the bane of my fucking existence because it means I have to set my auto-mining designations really carefully and specifically instead of just dragging out a big box over the entire floor once I've dug out the shafts.

Here is a good example of what I was just talking about with the whole not having control over things. You might notice how the planned bridge is one pixel taller now! Well you see the kobolds decided they were simply not going to build it. They just automatically suspended construction every time it was ready because of "item blocking site." Can you see the item that blocked the site? I sure can't!!

It's not on this Z-level either!!! But you have to just be thankful for what you have sometimes and you can't forget about that. Green glass isn't the most wildly profitable crafting material or anything but it's functionally infinite. So even if the canceled work orders notification window keeps filling up because your little guys keep forgetting they have entire hordes of charcoal and coke and bags of black sand it's okay, because eventually they will make coffins and statues and altars and serrated discs. Have you ever had the guy at a head shop try to prove how good American-blown glass is by just straight up dropping a bong on the floor and being like "that cheap Chinese shit would have just Shattered bro!" because I have, and I'll give you a word of advice, don't buy that fucking bong, the damage is already done, the only question now is whether it shatters right there in the shop or when you're home and it spews putrid bong water everywhere because you're a disgusting 19 year old bachelor who hasn't learned to actually take care of himself or his things and maybe never truly will. But maybe that's the specialty of American glass. You can pretend it's not broken, and it can pretend it's not broken, and for a while even though it is functionally broken and going to explode at just the clinking of a little ice cube a little too hard, you can tell everyone it isn't technically broken despite the structural damage being certain and irreversible since three weeks ago. I have this weird feeling that we pretend all sorts of things aren't broken in America

Why the fuck is my main production floor like this, what the fuck is wrong with me lol.

The glassblowing floor is quite nice though. I still need to make offices for my little buddies I'm not sure whether I should do it on a stone floor or just carve out into the one loamy sand floor I haven't touched yet.

THEY'RE HAVING A PARTY!!! I love the song that plays when they do this. The way they "dance" by just shuffling positions around the room is also very cute and funny to me. I should probably tell them to pick up those dead critters though I don't know if they'll do it themselves. Probably not, right? What's a dead lizard on the floor at a party, right? A skink is a pretty big lizard to be quite honest. I dated a girl who had a pet skink and I remember being so surprised when I touched it. Their scales are very smooth and supple but completely firm. I mean they've got no give at all. Something about the skink was just like, this guy is harder than he ought to be. I forgot his name. I wish I was not such a shitty partner who took everything personal and broke up over fucking Facebook messenger but you can't turn back time. Besides she isn't even the one I became pitifully, embarrassingly obsessed with for the rest of my life. Parties are a time for socialization so let's learn about some more kobolds! It is almost the end of our first year and we received eight migrants.

Man the cards sure are stacked against her!!! This is Osgi Ritelurk. She is a "competent weaver" but I feel like her miserable hater energies would be pretty well suited to the military if I end up taking that whole angle seriously instead of just focusing on moat + traps. I haven't built a good trap corridor in a while though so that might be what I end up doing instead. Do people still say "trapping out the bando" do people still say "bando." Part of me never left 2014. Why would I? Things still seem like they're going to turn out alright there

On Speechlessmonstrous wants to help, but she also wants to fight. Been there

oh my fucking GOD WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS AGAIN WHERE IS THE ITEM??? SHOW ME TE ITEM YOU DENSE MOTHERFUCKERS

Kikli is a complicated woman. She's like "I don't like to be tied down" but then she owns a pet cat. I guess that's not that weird. Cats will kinda figure their own shit out, they don't need all that much attention. Dogs you have to walk several times a day every day or they're going to go insane and apparently the only way you can deal with that is to just leave them in your apartment building hallway to bark it out for a few hours! It's not like that's a nightmare for the neighbors when it happens at 5 in the fucking morning several times a week or anything. Like sorry guys but you know how dogs are! Just put them in the fucking hallway and make them everyone else's problem like the fucking dad of the serial killer from Heavy Rain. Sorry. I swore I wasn't going to talk about David Cage. I'm not going to talk about David Cage.

Her name is Ty Lovelyseduce

Vala Knitpolish is 9 years old but has two lovers that's kind of fucking weird what kind of mod is this????? I guess it's not that weird if they're her age. I don't know. I don't think children should ever do anything. I think they should be basically hermetically sealed so that you never embarrass yourself and nothing fucked up ever happens. Well for a kobold 9 years old is not a child. She also already has the right political ideals. Again another good candidate for the military if I do one. Peasants always make me mad, like get out of the way and let someone actually good at things do them.

"I'm killing you. I'm killing you. I'm not thinking about anything else. My programming is just, get that fucking guy" - Germ 98

Some rabbits came to trade! I have to resist the urge to kill them. It's not their fault my stupid fucking piece of shit kobolds won't just build a fucking bridge and have to just manufacture imaginary reasons that they can't no matter how I set it up or what materials I use or fucking anything. They have nothing to do with it! But anger like electricity seeks the path of least resistance and I am angry enough to rob these fucking bastards for all of their shit and then put them in cages and throw the cages down a hole. But why would I do that

Yeah come on in guys welcome to Rushsly I'm just trying to figure out why the kobolds have marked some of these tiles of the world just completely fucking forbidden and never to be touched!!!

These tiles!!! These fucking tiles!!!

Trying to get them to remove them led to this fucking disaster

Col Lashshimmers: she was "often lustful" and "found the whole idea of introspection offensive." That's all we ever really learned about her I guess. She gets a green glass coffin in the floor I was thinking about putting offices on. I like to use the same layout for tombs as I do for bedrooms. Don't read too much into that please.

I set up a lever to knock out the supports which I don't know why I built instead of sacrificing any more kobolds to these stupid fucking Cursed Tiles That Must Never Be Touched. Well I guess I get why they were superstitious now! Even though it's kind of their own fucking fault! I mean it's my fault I should have designated that more carefully so that they wouldn't just run out and kill themselves. There's always something you could have done. You didn't have to let anything happen, ever. If you had the courage to say "do you know how fucked up this is" instead of just running away and letting him dig his claws in deeper and convince her YOU were the problem. If you took a deep breath and slowed down and thought about what to do instead of just freaking out impulsively you wouldn't be here playing Dwarf Fortress alone until 4 in the morning, you'd be asleep in the arms of the only person you've truly loved for maybe your entire life. Sorry. I said I wasn't going to talk about David Cage.

I don't know, I guess let's just try the bridge from another angle. Oh you guys are still here? Yeah, hold on, sorry for the wait and that you had to see a woman die in a construction accident. We'll sell you a box full of gems in exchange for a bunch of fruit, meat, booze and cheese please.

I know they're rubbing their paws together pleased as fuck that they managed to pass off a barrel of "tomatillo wine" on us, that sounds fucked up. Well I don't know, I guess Bloody Mary's are supposed to be good. I've never had one and I probably never will.

Destroying the fucked-up failbridge was strangely cathartic. Except we kind of might have accidentally hurt the lapine merchants. Well to be fair it said they "embarked on their journey" a while ago then they just sorta didn't. Like guys don't just stand around, it's fucking dangerous, you literally just saw someone die here a couple days ago, leave.

We get a big fucking migrant wave which means I have to update the pasture which is already feeling like I built it too small because of fucking course I did but I don't want to break into cavern layers yet so I don't know, maybe we should actually just butcher some animals and eat meat. I think the horses should die first because they are horrific grotesque creatures from Hell that were spurned by God. (You can look this up, it's in textbooks)

Lots of new faces!

This bitch's job is Gelder. Her entire job, her purpose and passion in life, is chopping off the fucking nuts of animals. That's how she's made it this far. 28 years old. Gelder. Proficient gelder. Society has a place for each and every last one of us. It's just up to the stupid fucking socioeconomic systems we live under whether we actually get to get in or you just carry boxes full of phone cases back and forth until your legs give out and a guy who walks directly into walls because he's too busy staring at The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy on his phone to look where he's going calls you stupid because you can't figure out what the fuck he meant by his genuinely fucking inscrutable barely-English (even though English is his first language) instructions. Maybe your calling really is to chop the fucking balls off bulls but then you just have to tank emotional abuse from wine-drunk boomers at TGI Friday's until you die because you never met anyone who needed to hire a girl to cut their bull's balls off.

"Sloppedshower" is such a funny surname that I'll resist my deep-seated impulse to kick this wet fucking blanket out. One of the things about hunters and rangers is that they clog up your notifications and waste all your ammo with their shitty hunting, and they LOVE to start guilds and demand big fancy guild-halls even though they contribute less than your average peasant because those guys are at least around to move stuff. How dare they unionize, even though it's actually just a minor annoyance to me that can be, 9 times out of 10, solved by allocating some resources I literally wasn't even doing anything with. I wonder if this is how the capitalist feels about my life, too. Does Kroger too function just the same as the petulant manchild playing his numbers-go-up game with the fake/abstract little people? "I love Undertime Sloppedshower," lol.

This is going to confuse the fuck out of me in 4 hours when I've completely forgot about it and just see his job title pop up somewhere. Well anyway let's talk about traps shall we? Not the music genre unfortunately (though if you have a girlfriend I highly recommend putting on this classic of the prototypical genre or maybe this one to frighten her) I mean the serrated iron disc kind.

Across 5 Z-levels, this is the general layout of traps. Let's start from the bottom because that's where invaders will hopefully think it is a good idea to enter the fortress from, via an unassuming little ramp down into the ground while thinking "those idiots really left their back door open!" So just to start things off we have the old faithful, cage traps - they don't always work, but when they do work, they always work. It alternates in rows with sets of sawblade traps, which I've never actually used in a fortress before, and the first two levels are just that. The third level is where things get interesting - stonefall traps are, for the most part, completely fucking useless unless you use them in tandem with environmental hazards. For some reason they are incredibly easy to dodge, but the successful dodging of our literal rat-bastard invaders is exactly what is being banked on, in order to plunge them into deep, deadly little puddles of water. You can kill real rats kind of like that using a bucket that they fall into to drown them, but you shouldn't. If you're going to kill any kind of creature drowning is obscene and cruel. And also remember that when you die and go to purgatory you will be killed just the same way as everything you have killed, down to the last little bug, so if you ever must kill anything be absolutely sure to make it quick, merciful, and painless. The rats in Dwarf Fortress aren't real though and they also like to kill my cute innocent little kobbles so I feel fine about finding the humor in them barely staggering through four rows of sawblade traps just to fall off a tiny precipice and drown. Anyway after that there's a little "reprieve room" for the bastards who survived to regroup - I might add more traps later, but everyone having to haul around the big iron mechanisms and boulders was really cutting into productivity, so we'll see about that. Finally there's the piece de resistance - still being constructed because the coal is very far away and heavy, but either way it is exactly what I said it was, a paved road made out of bituminous coal that will (hopefully!) be ignited by pockets of magma when the floodgates are opened by an unassuming little lever posted over by the tavern. At the end are doors which will bait the invaders as long as they remain unsealed, which works for now, though ideally something more reliable like a retractable bridge over a big-ass hole would make a far better final bulwark than just some literally glass doors. But I'm choosing to believe this stuff is all glass in the "Morrowind glass armor" sense not the "Headshop guy dropping a perfectly good bong on the tile floor to try and prove a vaguely Sinophobic point" sense. But why go through all this trouble anyway? Let's answer this by digging into the minds of some more kobbles, we haven't done that for a while - I think we'd do well to start with our glorious leader Acl Controlledown.

We see him working on the same drudgery as any given peasant must, intricately engraving every single tile of the three-space apartments.

He draws monkeys (I highly approve) trees and plants all over the bedroom of a random archer as selflessly as any kobble with 1/10th of his stature. He performs religious rites and makes friends and gets scared thinking about dead bodies. Anyone should be proud to toil under such leadership as would literally carve a drawing of a monkey into their bedroom wall just to make them a bit happier! When's the last time you saw a politician in the real world do any actual work? They hardly even make phone calls for themselves. They don't even drive their own cars! And whose bedroom does he do this for?

A mother who left both her lovers and her child behind to strike the earth here, who likes poetry and music and pangolins and turkeys for their snood!!!!! and will gladly fight for peace, will gladly kill for Rushsly, has already killed for Rushsly, might one day die for Rushsly.

A few stories up Kody Inkblighted comes under a fey mood, and begins weaving away an artifact of sheep wool, bristle cloth, and... jet blocks?

Its artifact is completed just as the fire-road is, just as the winter ends, just as a brand new year begins. The year 253, our fourth year in the fortress - a good enough fortress to be certain, not a great or terrible fortress - but good enough is never really enough. As anyone who's spent a little too long with an opiate habit can tell you the only such thing as "enough" is too much. And so with above-ground defenses mostly taken care of (though we could admittedly use some more bird towers) it's time to break into the cavern layers.

The plan for now is to just keep digging down the main 3x3 stairway, starting at -10 and cutting out "vents" every 5 floors. I'd very much like to not accidentally dig out onto the ground level, since that way we should be more-or-less protected from any forgotten beast that can't fly, but in Dwarf Fortress you don't really choose what happens. The simulation ultimately doesn't care about you or what you want and in a world of overwrought games where characters yell out the solution to puzzles before you're even finished looking them over that kind of agnosticism is refreshing. Even RimWorld, a very similar game to DF (and quite a good one, greetz fly out to all the RimWorld fans 🤝) there is an AI narrator system in place that tries to algorithmically tool the experience to a satisfying, demanding but fair level of challenge. Dwarf Fortress has no such pretense, things just happen and YOU have to be the one that adapts. But it's historically been quite easy for me to play this game by just ignoring my kobbles entirely, barely spending a second on the Personality tabs and just treating the game as a purely mechanical exercise. I guess that's the point of this whole blog, to rediscover the fun over 250 hours into the Steam release by letting the game and I write a story together instead of just being just a game. I also like to dot this story with absurd and far-too-long asides and anecdotes because I am an insane person, and there is a certain kind of catharsis in randomly telling strangers on the internet stuff like "I was haunted by a vision of straight-up biting a guy on the bus for sitting in this weird sideways manner right in front of me that made me have to keep making awkward glancing eye contact with him" though I do apologize if you were just here looking for normal Dwarf Fortress content. I am not a normal person and have no interest in making normal things. I would recommend "Kruggsmash" and "hoodie hair" on YouTube if that's what you were looking for because I find their videos to be particularly high quality, though I can't imagine anyone who wants to get off this fucked-up ride is actually still here, especially not at the end of this fucking barely-relevant run-on nightmare of a paragraph.

Well that was fucking easy, didn't even have to deviate from the staircase at all. However, we can barely actually fucking see any of it - the height of this cavern layer is -15 but the little bit of floor we can see is at -71. Jeez

We're going to carefully dig down to -60 without exposing ourselves, then punch out just a small hole to get a better look.

Zhag Gillpoker forges fearlessly ahead into the great unknown - not just fearlessly but all-around emotionlessly, actually. Provided nothing fucked up happens to him in the immediate future he's definitely getting transfered over to the military - breaching the caverns should get at least some kind of reaction, even from an admittedly "cheerless" kobble. Oh well, down we go!

Up on the surface, bunys arrive with a wagon, and I think about how I really need to move the trade depot a couple tiles over so that I'll stop being so tempted to smush whoever's sitting on it, or more likely, won't accidentally smush whoever's inevitably on it when the next invasion occurs.

The metal/glass production floor got all cleaned up just in time for the mold to start showing up :\

Kobbles have started doing my least favorite thing, leaving piles of meat/meals on the floor even though there's tons of empty barrels. I think they'll stop if I dig out more space and make the stockpile bigger, and I had the good sense after like 10 forts whose denizens inevitably started doing this to start making sure my kitchen/butcher/raw food stockpiles are walled off, but it never gets any less annoying. I mean look at the empty pots and barrels right fucking there, mere steps away! Do not come crying to me when it starts giving off miasma, this is your own fault!! I think I get so instinctively mad at this because it reminds me of roommates leaving dishes in the sink so long they got moldy or started to stink, then acting like I was somehow contributing to the problem when I literally only owned one pan, one pot, one bowl, one plate, one fork, one spoon, one butter knife and one chef's knife and washed them every single time I used them and also had to hide them in my room because I didn't want them being used and left in the fucking sink with the expectation that I would clean up after their lazy bum bachelor asses like I was their mom!!!!

The problem is mitigated, at least in part, by gifting a frankly astoundingly valuable pile of prepared food to the bunys, because they are cute and I like them so I want them to have a nice little lunch on their way home. We relieve them of all their cheese, all their leather, and most of their cloth. A couple lucky kobbles will also be receiving new socks and shoes.

A diplomat meets with Acl to tell us all about the latest developments in buny civilization and I'm so smitten with how adorable these guards are. Look at those cute little wooden spears!!!

The diplomat, amusingly known as Minefield, checks out our temples approvingly, particularly enjoying the doors, before heading off on his way. I love these guys. I want all bunnies to be happy.

Making more room for the stockpile only made things worse. If those meals in the tavern start rotting I'm about to flip the fuck out

Way down below, we've finally got a good view into the cavern, and have found... absolutely no beasties at all, to our pleasant surprise.

Up on the surface we've QUADRUPLED our peacock numbers!!! You can't see because the screenshot isn't animated but a couple of those tiles hold TWO lil homies. In addition to that we also bought a live goose off the bunys, so we are in absolute bird business. Just as an extra bulwark we're also going to put up some random statues as a secondary alarm system. If you're not in the know, you get a notification when a building is toppled, and rampaging bastards like were-beasts and raiders love to destroy statues. This means that you can get a general "radar"-like sense of where enemies that haven't been revealed yet are, because the game will show you where a statue was felled, even if it's not allowed to show you who felled it yet. Since green glass is basically just free to us at this point we may as well dot the entire edge of the map with statues. This is kind of a lot of work just to weasel out of having a squad patrol outside but I just don't want to take that risk!!

A single migrant arrives, and with him, the realization that we have no siege weaponry. He should make a good fit for the military at least, though I fear I have already begun thinking about ballistae and catapults and the kinds of fun that can be had with them...