knight-otu

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 03/13/2025 - Dwarf Fortress 51.08 Released

Toady One, from the Dwarf Fortress Development Log:

Hotfix for a freeze bug in adventure mode travel. The lua test on Steam also got a quick fix.

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 03/12/2025 - Dwarf Fortress 51.07 Released

Toady One, from the Dwarf Fortress Development Log:

Continuing along with the routine patches after the adventure mode release. Fortress mode * Allowed use of last material when placing simple one-stage buildings and constructions * Stopped land holders without a residence from automatically moving to and gumming up capitals * Animals marked for slaughter and then assigned as war animal pets are now unmarked for slaughter * Stopped hidden zones in NPC fortresses on reclaims from clouding information in tomb and dungeon sheets * Work orders: changed "stone stones" to "stone boulders" and "stones" to "boulders", because they can be made from ice Adventure mode * Allowed ordinary destiny adventurers to start anywhere in their civilization * Handled infinite loop having to do with sites near oceans * Unstackable items no longer stacked in character creation * Movement blocking announcements are displayed during travel properly * FPS display no longer blocks the speed readout * Potential containers are no longer shown with nonsense directions when placing items * Classic combat indicators are displayed in the correct position * Changes to fort mode sound level sliders no longer affect adv mode sound levels General updates * Stopped projectiles and falling creatures from falling through thin floors if they hit a sideways obstacle first * Creatures with multigrasp weapons should no longer be generated with shields * Fixed potential troublesome loop involving stone inclusion loops * Creatures without exertion have their exertion set to zero * Handled situation where FPS caps could underflow * Fixed potential overflow in corpse sizes

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 03/07/2025

Toady One, from the Dwarf Fortress Development Log:

Cheerfully continuing along with the next routine patch, hopefully next week. So far it's the normal collection of bug fixes, and an added goody of being able to use your last material for simple buildings and constructions. The lua test is going well and has received a few updates so far. No ETA yet as to when that'll be merged with the main branch, but it's going smoothly enough. GDC is coming up in 10 days. That will likely push the patch following 51.07 into April. We'll probably also start in on the first siege coding then as well.

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 03/01/2025

Toady One, from the Dwarf Fortress Development Log:

There's a report for this month. In addition, there's a Future of the Fortress reply in the new thread.

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 02/26/2025 - Dwarf Fortress 51.06 Released

Toady One, from the Dwarf Fortress Development Log:

Just posted another fixerly release. Probably do a few more of these before starting on siege stuff, and patches should continue during that process. Also have started what'll hopefully be a quick experimental test with lua over on a Steam branch before we merge that in everywhere. I did a lengthy interview over on Blind's channel. They also provided a link to the raw audio.

And from the Bay12Games forums:

Release notes for 51.06 (February 26, 2025): Cheerful little release as we get back to regular progress. Fortress mode ) Made some strange mood dwarves not get stuck at workshop selection stage ) Stopped people from claiming and using inactive bedroom zones ) Stopped the dead from claiming inactive tomb zones ) Decreased prepared food item value ) Made custom announcement settings load properly ) Added setting to turn off visible rectangle dimensions ) Added crash safeguards to report popups and other widgets ) Fixed seed cap limit and made deletion of seeds over cap respect planting status Adventure mode ) Added escape/rbut to leave adventurer difficulty selection ) Fixed issue with adventurer race selection lists not being unpopulated on exit ) Fixed buffer overrun involving tents ) Fixed crash related to site plot use allocations ) Added highlight to adventurer destiny selection in Classic mode General updates ) Added crash safeguard for syndromes ) Updated some metal elasticities ) Fixed graphics for tiger, whale, and whitetip reef sharks

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 02/12/2025 - Dwarf Fortress 51.05 Released, and Roadmap on Steam

Toady One, from the Bay12Games forums:

Fortress mode * Fixed crash on justice screen and adjusted convicts menu position * Fixed crash relating to empty work details list * When choosing rectangles, shows dimension of rectangle * Allowed numbers and symbols in unit list search Adventure mode * Display speed and gait and momentum on main screen * Summoning abilities should work now * Stopped creating beast rumors (and thereby kill quests) for civilized predator/subterranean creatures (new worlds only) * Added button to go back to destiny/difficulty selection from character creator * Classic mode travel maps now show up properly Graphics additions/changes * Tree growth pictures (leaves, flowers, fruit, etc.) * Added zombie syndrome class to husks so they'll display properly (new worlds only) * Option to print only periods for the ground in Classic mode returns

In addition, Alexandra from Kitfox Games posted the rough roadmap for the following development work on Steam here.

[knight-otu]

I want to speak out against the whole push towards DEI. I feel that ever since you made the push to make identity the forefront of a character it has hurt the stories you tell. Captain Sisay's race was never the focus of her character and she was a complete badass! And I fear if you did it over again Gerrard would be trans, black and disabled just because. It also cheapens the stories of world devastation when characters worry more about their gender than Bolas destroying everything.

The reason I started this blog is so we can have frank conversations about things, so please let’s talk about this.

Imagine if every time you turned on the TV or watched a movie, no one looked like you. For some of us, that’s never happened. We see ourselves constantly, so it’s hard to truly understand what not seeing yourself represented in media is like.

I do have a personal window to this experience. While I am white and male, there’s an area where I am the minority - my religion. Jews are just under two and a half percent of the US population. I have had many experiences where I’ve been in situations where everything is geared towards a group I do not belong to, and zero consideration is given that not everyone at that event is part of the majority.

You just feel invisible and like an outsider. It’s not a great feeling. And I just experience it a tiny portion of time, only things that are geared specifically towards something religious. Most minorities have this feeling all the time, whenever they’re outside their personal community.

Now imagine, after years of not seeing yourself ever, you finally see someone that looks like you, but nothing about the character rings remotely true. They don’t sound like you, they don’t act like you, the facts about their day-to-day life are just wrong. It’s clear whoever wrote the character didn’t truly understand the lived experience of the character, so the character feels fake.

You bring up Sisay. Michael Ryan and I didn’t technically create Sisay (she played a small role in the Mirage story), but we did do a lot to flesh out her character as the creators of the Weatherlight Saga. We turned her from a minor character into a major one.

And while I’m proud, in general, of our work on the Weatherlight Saga, I don’t think we did justice to Sisay as a character. Neither Michael nor I have any knowledge of what it’s like to be a black woman. Nor did we ever talk to someone who did.

And if you’re someone like us that has no knowledge of that experience, you probably didn’t notice. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

Imagine if we made a movie about your life, and we just made everything up. We invented people you never knew, we gave you a job you never had, and we had you say things you’d never say. The movie might even be a good movie, but your response would be, but that’s not my life - that’s not me.

Now imagine we put the movie out, and people that never met you assumed that was what you were like. When people met you for the first time, they assumed things, because, you know, they’d seen the movie.

That’s what misrepresenting people does. It not only makes them feel not seen, it falsely represents them, spreading lies, often stereotypes, making people believe things about them that aren’t true.

Our move towards diversity is just us trying to better reflect the world and the people in it. We’re trying to do to everyone else what a certain portion of people get every day without ever having to think about it.

But why are we “making it the forefront of their character”? We’re not. We’re making it a part of their character. But in a world where you’re not used to ever seeing it, it feels louder than it is. Things that are a natural part of the world that you’re used to feel like the background of the story because you understand the context to it.

If a man kisses his wife before going off to a battle, that’s not a big deal. It’s just a thing a husband might do to his wife when he leaves. It’s not the forefront of his character. It’s just part of his life. But you’ve seen it hundreds of times, so it feels normal.

When someone does something that isn’t your lived experience it pulls focus. It seems like a big deal, but only because it’s new to you. It’s just as mundane a thing to that character as the man kissing his wife is to him.

Even the turn “pushing” implies that it’s unnaturally here, that we’re forcing something that naturally shouldn’t be. But why? That thing exists naturally in the real world, and it doesn’t make the real world any less. Maybe you’re less aware of it, but is making you aware of how others live their life “pushing” something on you?

How you live your life is represented constantly, everywhere. Why isn’t over-representing your experience at the expense of everyone else’s “pushing” it? Why is media only being the experience of those in power the “proper way”?

Having more depth and variety doesn’t lessen stories. It makes them deeper, more rich, more nuanced. In short, it makes them better stories. In my former life, I was a professional writer. I took a lot of writing classes. One of the truism of writing is “speaking truth leads to better stories”.

There’s another famous quote: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” You’re used to being over-represented, so being a little less over-represented feels like something has been taken from you. But really it hasn’t. Having a better sense of the rest of the world comes with a lot of benefits.

I’ll use food as an example. Let’s say all you were ever exposed to was the food of your heritage. Yeah, that food is really good, but sometimes isn’t it nice to eat foods of other nationalities? Isn’t your life better that you have a choice? Isn’t your exposure and access to the food of other nationalities a positive in your life?

Exposure to variety is a positive. It allows you to learn about things you didn’t know, experience things things you’ve never experienced, and get a better sense of understanding of your friends and neighbors.

Our actions are not to harm anyone, and if you think that’s what we’re doing, please take a minute to actually absorb what I’m saying. You’ve spent your whole life metaphorically eating one type of food, and we’re just trying to show you how much you’ve missed out on.

And while this might not impact you directly, we’re making a whole bunch of people felt seen. We’re bringing joy. Think of it this way. We make a lot of cards. Not every card is for you. But if it makes someone else happy, if they get to include it in a deck, and it makes Magic better for them, how is it harming you that we include it? You have so many cards that you can play.

To this poster or people that share their viewpoint, the narrative that a gain for someone else is an attack on you is just not true. As I just pointed out above, you play a game all about personal choice, about players getting to choose how they play and enjoy the game. Why should life be any different than Magic?

Thanks for reading.

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 02/03/2025

Toady One, from the Dwarf Fortress Development Log:

Adventure mode is out. Here's the report for February. Here's the February Future of the Fortress reply.

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 1/23/2025 - Dwarf Fortress 51.02 Released

Toady One, from the Bay12Games forums:

Download (Click refresh on your browser if it doesn't show up) Release notes for 51.02 (January 23, 2025) Adventure mode is back!  I put in a keyboard look cursor as a last step before launch, but I'm sure there's still quite a bit of Classic cleanup to do.  But at least the mode is alive again.  This is good.

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 01/01/2025

Toady One, from the Dwarf Fortress Development Log:

This is a report to start the year. This is the Future of the Fortress reply.

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 12/12/2024 - Dwarf Fortress 50.15 Released

Download (Click refresh on your browser if it doesn't show up)

Release notes for 50.15 (December 12, 2024)

Graphics additions/changes (+) Expanded graphics for containers (+) Added ability to view worn clothing by dye or by profession (+) Shields in right arms displayed in correct order

Major bug fixes (+) Fixed crash in Linux related to object pools

Other bug fixes/tweaks (+) Added some safeguards to ages of generated migrant children (+) Made tutorial close button behave consistently when tutorial is minimized (+) Made the agitation decay setting work properly (+) Removed case sensitivity on unit filters (+) Fixed some issues with list sorting (+) Fixed crash related to possible null building in sheets (+) Fixed a crash with creature variation mods (+) Fixed some threading issues in unit loops (+) Fixed problem with mod version compatibility setting (+) Fixed command line world generation (+) Made game respect caste population ratio in more places (+) Fixed some possible null pointer references (+) Added more information to crash log headers

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 12/03/2024

Here's a report for the month. Also a the Future of the Fortress reply.

My condolences to the Adams brothers for the loss of their father.

[knight-otu]

Dwarf Fortress Beta Update

I don't usually post about the steam updates, but since the beginnings of the chosen/divine direction updates have been posted, here's some quick impressions -

The deity tells you to go to a temple to offer your service. It seems you don't actually want to go there, as all the priests prefer to hang out in the city keep. Hopefully that'll be resolved soon.

My character was tasked to find a remnant of creation, "The Elder Lightning," from a lair with a dwarf servant of storms, or a similar title.

I don't think they used storm powers, but they drank a "mysterious liquor" during combat. This may have been a healing drought. While I gathered one portion of it, I haven't yet used it.

As this is only the first of the updates, I suspect the elder lightning I'm carrying now has no magical properties. I have yet to re-fnd my quest giver (perhaps they did relocate to the temple after all?), but my understanding is that the quest is it, with some difficulty variations.

Poking around in legends mode suggests there are three tiers of mysterious site and, for my world, dwarven storm shamans, with the one I went to being the most common, and presumably easiest/weakest of the bunch. Maybe if I find the priest again, I'll be asked to go to more difficult ones, but that's conjecture.

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 11/01/2024

Toady One, from the Bay12Games forums:

Ah, things have been a bit marriagey lately and I missed the October logs and reports and things. I did manage the Future of the Fortress reply to September's questions before I left, and here's the reply to October's questions. Here's the late October report and the timely November report.

Congratulations to Tarn!

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 09/25/2024 - Dwarf Fortress 50.13 Released

Toady One, from the Bay12Games forums:

Major bug fixes Linux trainer crash fixed (again) Added crash guard for bad civilian alert Graphics additions/changes Dwarves/humans/elves/goblins/kobolds have child and baby images, new equipment, and palette support Garden and crop plants have more images Mandible portrait fixed for experiments Other bug fixes/tweaks Good/bad thoughts about tombs work Poisonous forgotten beasts work more reliably Various minor tweaks to input/layout Fixed drinks being destroyed on unretire Fixed a few broken sorts

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 09/01/2024

Toady One, from the Dwarf Fortress Development Log:

Here's the monthly report. Here's a Future of the Fortress reply.

If you've been worried that Zach hasn't been writing in the Devlogs and the like recently, Tarn assures us that everything's cool, it's just trouble with coordinating, and the monthly reports shifting:

Flying Teasets asks: Why has Zach stopped posting monthy announcements with you? Is it due to a business change or a private matter?

Toady answers: Everything's cool.  We've just had a little more trouble coordinating it lately with all that's going on, and the monthly report became something different after the Steam release, so it's in this current form now.

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 08/02/2024

Toady One, from the Dwarf Fortress Development Log:

A report for August and a modest Future of the Fortress reply. Here also is the summer update video.