laruna-softpaw

[laruna-softpaw]

Hey guys I made it into the cool kid's club

[laruna-softpaw]

aww its so cute, i wonder if-

oh. yes.

[laruna-softpaw]

Dwarf Fortress stream today!

#dwarf fortress

[laruna-softpaw]

I REALLY need to come back here more often. I only have, like, 130 followers on Twitter because apparently posting links early on got me shadowbanned. Also the comments on any highly-engaged Tweet are just. Unreadable. If you haven't been on Twitter after 4/20 you have no idea how insufferable it is there now.

#twitter #it's seriously so bad now #bluesky looks like fun but it's run by tech bro clowns only slightly less stupid than elon

[laruna-softpaw]

Stream today in half an hour!

https://www.youtube.com/live/t8W_qBogDRk?feature=share

[laruna-softpaw]

Streaming today!

#dwarf fortress

[laruna-softpaw]

Streaming Dwarf Fortress Steam today!

https://youtu.be/YXaSB_Puqnw

#dwarf fortress #livestream

[laruna-softpaw]

Streaming Oblivion today

#the elder scrolls oblivion #Youtube

[laruna-softpaw]

I want to draw the dwarf with 30 kids standing in a triumphant pose with a big gold star on his shirt saying "THIS DWARF FUCKS"

#dwarf fortress #it's probably not that uncommon but i never tried to count up the children in a dwarf's relationship list #getting to just see a number when you click on a dwarf now is nice

[laruna-softpaw]

My first look at Dwarf Fortress Steam Edition is now up!

#dwarf fortress #let's play #i complain about some aspects of the new ui that are a little pedantic but i'm within my right #Youtube

[laruna-softpaw]

low key obsessed with the life story of this bard who lived in a dark pit and created literary works with names like “The Sun Sets on Contempt” and “Animals: Slowly Nobody Foretells” while carrying on an on-again-off-again gay love affair with a night creature, ultimately becoming a baron and then being murdered so his bones could be made into a scepter named “Boltedtumor the Disloyalty of Owls.” how am I supposed to start my fort while all this is here

[laruna-softpaw]

I have many opinions about Dwarf Fortress on Steam and a lot of it boils down to either UI design nitpicks or me needing to get used to all the changes. But I'm very happy with it so far and I'm extremely excited about seeing people on my social media dashboards playing it and talking about it.

The funniest thing that happened to me in my first 90 minutes is a dwarf that I clicked on and saw "2 lovers, 30 children" in his bio. The dwarf information pages are a HUGE improvement for sure.

#dwarf fortress #we stan a polyamorous king and his 30 children #i recorded my first fort yesterday so that will be on my channel this week

[laruna-softpaw]

Dwarf Fortress stream today! Come hang out!

#dwarf fortress #livestream #Youtube

[laruna-softpaw]

Dwarf Fortress stream today!

#Youtube

[laruna-softpaw]

I was browsing Dwarf Fortress Bugs on Twitter and here are a few of my favorites

[laruna-softpaw]

"It's the adamantine, Jerry! The dwarves go crazy for it!"

[laruna-softpaw]

Hello can you please write more about ethically dubious enterprises in dwarf fortress i love hearing about it

Apologies for this being a bit of a late response, but I'd love to write more about horrible, horrible things in Dwarf Fortress! So I took a little while to brush back up on one of my favorite stories:

The Dwarven Firefighter Weight Loss Program.

Now, you might be thinking, "does this involve forcing your dwarves to exercise and become more physically fit"? Of course not! That *does* exist in the game, naturally - in particular, screw pumps that pull liquids from one Z-level down up to the current level make for fantastic workout machines. Coincidentally, those same pumps can also be used to make a perpetual motion machine for theoretically infinite power, but that's a story for another time. Right now, we're talking about a far faster method of weight loss.

Burning off all your fat. Literally.

Back in previous versions of Dwarf Fortress, what killed you wasn't the horrific pain of fire sending you into shock, or even having your internal organs turned into soup. No, what ACTUALLY killed people that caught on fire was blood loss. Fat is the dwarven body's most flammable material, and when a dwarf started burning, they would continue *being* on fire until their fat began to actively melt, at which point it would turn into grease and start just *pissing* blood. The thing is, once all of the fat on a body part had been turned into grease, they just... stopped bleeding. The game recognized that there was nothing else to liquify, and in most cases, that was a perfectly functional implementation. Dwarves would usually be long dead by the time their fat ran out, and given that turning into a corpse doesn't do anything to stop the fire, bleeding to death from melting fat was generally followed in short order by turning into a pile of ashes. One could be forgiven for looking at this from an outside perspective with no knowledge of Dwarven Anatomy (TM) and thinking that dwarves simply turned to ash after being on fire long enough.

As with anything, though, this unusual implementation of dying by fire was exploited mercilessly by the community. It turns out, once a dwarf had no fat left, they not only became effectively immune to further damage from fire, but I believe their fat layer would be marked as "scarred", meaning it wouldn't grow back. Once it was all burnt off, it was *permanent.* The kicker is that instead of rolling on the ground screaming, dwarves seem to be *completely and utterly nonplussed* when they're burning alive. They will continue to go about their day as though everything is totally normal. What this meant was that if a dwarf lost all their fat and somehow survived, they'd be capable of surviving being on fire theoretically forever. There's just two small issues:

1: It's not very easy to safely start or control fires in Fortress Mode.

2: Dwarves aren't very bright.

When a dwarf catches fire, they tend to go about their day as usual, like I mentioned. The issue arises when said dwarf decides it would be a lovely idea to go and drink some beer while they're, y'know, *on fire.* Now, keg explosions weren't implemented (and I don't know that they ever were), but boiling liquids and scalding steam DEFINITELY were. Not only would the burning dwarf spread their fire to everything in their wake, filling the underground fortress with smoke, but they'd burn off all the alcohol stores, one of the main components of a healthy dwarven diet. As cool as it was to repeatedly set a dwarf on fire to get a citizen capable of shrugging off being ablaze, it often ended up being a liability more often than not. Not only was it a dangerous and inexact science to get to that point, but the uses once the process was complete were few and far between.

... *Unless* you happened to be regularly going up against the few enemies in the game capable of slinging fire around.

Fire imps, magma crabs, fire and magma men, and the occasional titan or forgotten beast (randomly generated monsters with abilities that range from making necrotizing dust storms to chucking fireballs) aren't exactly common foes in Dwarf Fortress, but in the few cases where they DO appear, they tend to be extraordinarily dangerous. The fact that most of them can spontaneously generate out of the magma sea, one of the few sources of renewable smelting once charcoal and lignite have run out, means that forges in the lower recesses of a fortress will generally have an infestation sooner or later. Normally, this is a perilous situation; not only is fire quite lethal under most circumstances, but smoke tends to disrupt pathing for dwarves, making it difficult to evacuate the area in case of an emergency.

That's where the Firefighters come in.

Since many of the creatures from the magma tubes are quite fragile (save for the magma men, given they're made of molten rock), their main danger came not from direct combat, but from causing either uncontrolled fires or the likely loss of an experienced soldier sent to deal with them. Medical skills are difficult to train, and as a result, there's generally only one hospital to a fort, and it's generally going to be closer to the upper levels to defend against sieges rather than the rarely-attacked underground - a melting warrior may very well expire before reaching safety. But with the advent of turning dwarves into walking masses of fire-immune scar tissue, the choice between the safety of the forges and the life of a champion swordsdwarf was no longer necessary.

Was this at all useful? Not even a little bit. By the time someone had managed to put together a contraption capable of creating these skeletal supersoldiers in the first place, they could've already made a far safer setup by pumping magma to the upper levels of the fortress. It's even possible to build in such a way that creatures from the magma sea literally can't breach into the fort in the first place. But Dwarf Fortress is not a game about being "efficient", or "smart" - it's about doing profoundly stupid nonsense, like making a flame-proof little psychopath that does to fire hazards what Doomguy does to demons.