Dwarf Fortress News

Hello again!

Mostly I've been spending these last two weeks moving apartments after 13 years in one place. So much junk... and my vacuum caught on fire, ha ha ha. But there was still a bit of time for work, and now we can show you the very important DF industry, beekeeping!



This industry came about after the community voted on which of some hundreds of animals should be added to the game over a decade ago. Being a practically minded community, the animal that led to naturally to several new industries was the overwhelming favorite! Above you can see some artificial hives, ready to accept wild colonies.



Hives can be populated either using a wild colony, or by splitting an existing colony in an artificial hive. You'll want to balance your splitting and gathering of products, since gathering products destroys the hive in question.



Natural hives can take some time to appear and aren't on every map. Above, I've used debug commands to place all of the possible wild hives together. From the top going counterclockwise, there's a bumblebee colony, an ant hill, termite mounds, and then the one we are looking for, the honey bee hive!



Once installed, the bees will begin working (the second hive down on the right side has little bees buzzing around it.) You can also see an individual wild bee above the right column. These pop up around artificial and wild colonies, and are mostly okay, but will occasionally sting!



After a time, the bees' work is done and products are ready to collect! I've also split the first colony to another colony on the left side. In this way you can keep expanding your industry.



Here you can see the products in the hive building, wax honeycombs and some royal jelly. Royal jelly can be collected in a jug and used in cooking (though as old hands know, there are some jug storage issues there we're still working on!). Honeycombs themselves must be brought to a screw press. The pressing produces a wax cake and also some honey which can be stored in a jug. Honey can be used in food or made into mead, and wax can be used for crafts.

- Tarn

Hello!

This time we'll revisit bridges, which Patrick has done another pass on.



Here I've set up a double wooden drawbridge. You can see now where the mechanisms are, and thus can tell from the image itself which way the bridge will raise. (The fisherdwarf has been busy catching salmon, steelhead trout, and mussels, but I didn't make a food stockpile, so they are littering at the riverside.)

This is the bridge in action:



This might keep some invaders out of your fort, but you'll often want to build further defenses deep underground in case things go terribly wrong.

Here's a stone bridge over an internal moat:



The water isn't necessary if you dig a deep enough pit, but it's fun to play around with nonetheless. For this moat, I connected a surface stream to my fort using a channel and then a staircase. The water flows into the moat from a submerged hallway at the northern side. Of course, due to water pressure, this is incredibly dangerous, so a submerged hallway on the southern side connects to a staircase which drains the water further down into the natural underground caverns. Lots of giant mushrooms currently being rained upon down there. You can avoid this by using floodgates and only admitting as much water as you need.



When the bridge goes up, dwarves in the hallway are safe from arrows, though the way I've set this up, the initial lever puller would be exposed.



Here's a steel bridge, or diving board, above a volcano, along with a pit zone. The game doesn't care what's below the pit zone particularly - once a prisoner or beast is designated, a dwarf will bring them over and throw them in. You can use this to create lion pits and stuff like that, or you can use it over volcanoes and other such places, as you like, for captured thieves or invaders.

- Tarn

PS: Alexandra from Kitfox here, the one who posts on Tarn's behalf. Hi! I did an interview with content creator BlindIRL that's worth checking out. Stay tuned for future community events!

Hello again!

Over the last few weeks, part of what we've been doing involves trade in the fortress, both making it look better and adding some new practical pieces as well.



Here we have some full wagons on the bottom of the screen bringing much-needed supplies to the player, through a bamboo forest. There's also a yak with some bags packed on it that is part of the caravan as well, and a few bodyguards. On the wagons and animals, there's not a lot of graphical real estate to work with, so the images reflect the amount of stuff being carried (there are four levels), rather than specific items.



Once we get to the newly redesigned depot, though, the situation changes, and we can show specific trade goods on the tables. The tables at the top are for the visiting merchants, and they also get the northern stool. The bottom tables show the goods the fortress is willing to trade (which are selected by the player), and the fortress broker sits on the southern stool.

In the image above, the left side is before the wagons arrived, and on the right side, the wagons have unloaded (you can see the wagons resting at the very top.) I've also brought the, um, goods I had on hand in my little test fortress, ha ha. It is a bin of wooden crafts and some turtles we caught. I'm sure the thriving capital of the dwarves will love my little turtles.



Just for fun, here's an image of the depot in the old version. I've circled it in green in case you have trouble picking it out! The separate tables and the ability to tell who is trading which item are new to the graphical version.



We're still working through the trade screens. Here you can see what we have for bringing items to the depot so far. It's a little easier to select groups of items now, as well as bins containing various objects, but we're also going to allow direct selection at stockpiles and from the items themselves, so you won't have to handle everything from the depot, which could be very cumbersome to say the least.



A little of this applies to adventure mode as well! Here I've packed some items on my trusty donkey, and that is visible now as I lead the critter through the village.

- Tarn

Hello!

Levers in Dwarf Fortress can be hooked up to all sorts of buildings and machines, such as doors, floodgates, gear assemblies, cages, spikes, and bridges. In the old game, this was a reasonably painful process, where mechanisms had to be manually selected, lists scrolled through, and afterward it was very difficult to figure out which lever was linked to which building without just pulling it and seeing what horrible things happened.

This has been changed now! In the video, you can see what we currently have:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

When you click "link lever", two appropriate mechanisms are chosen by default. You decide what to link the lever to by clicking on it, and once you've hooked it up, both the lever and the linked building have a list of links with a recenter option. So hopefully there will be fewer unnecessary tragedies.

Patrick has also drawn up some new barrels, with their contents, so that you can get some information about your food stocks at a glance.



Here we have some dwarven wine and rum, as well as meat, fish, plump helmets and seed bags.


- Tarn

Greetings all!

Alexandra here with the Spring video dev update showing off all the latest features in Dwarf Fortress with Tarn. This time, we have some new, exciting developments in the Fort including bedrooms, tombs and a visit from an elven caravan! We have have big updates on the building interface and zoning placement.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

That's it from me today, see you next update!

-Alexandra