Kobble Fort

deadly world of oblivion

[kobblefort]

Hoistedworked: Origins

Alright, okay, yeah. Back on the wagon, right here in the woods. It's still plenty remote, cold enough to teach a Dwarf to speak in clicks, and it is actually capable of sustaining life. Sure it's no glacier but the glacier was always a shitty idea. We can at least carve something out here. Like some ideas are actually just bad. Like too bad to manage. This one though is basically fine. We can do this.

See? Look at this shit, it's beautiful. Plants. Trees. Actual solid ground. Since I never introduced the actual decapods before, let's pretend these are all just the same guys, okay? Just for convenience's sake.

Cikuti Worthoars, who likes bobbit worms for their knobs and angles. Oh yeah and suddenly the snow cleared up. Don't ask me, I don't know why.

Cutichi Strengthtown, AWESOME name. He likes to eat seahorse meat and loves two-grain wheat beer.

Chetek Boattrussed, who likes kangaroos for their pouches. 🤔

Cukikuki Townriddle. Big fan of eating giant Brown Recluse spiders, even though she hates cave spiders. I'm not going to ask.

Scukikik Denttongs. Big beak dog fan.

Retuti Livingwheel, groundhog fan and mead drinker. Wonder if we can actually get a bee colony set up here.

And finally Cikuki Prisoncrafts, goat eater. Well, please forgive me if I kind of breeze past the "starter base setup" phase here.

Or, well, I would, but... nobody wants to work. That's not some boomerism, nobody will just pick up the tools to chop wood or dig holes. They gather plants fine, and took apart the wagon without any trouble, but now they're just... gawking...

Reading about it on Reddit, it seems the solution is to just retire the fort and then immediately un-retire it. So we'll try that I guess.

come on... come on... YES!!

We don't even make it all the way down 10 stories before discovering the cavern this time. And before you ask:

yep, fucked up normal grass again. Whatever. It's not as big of a deal this time. One day I really ought to properly ask how that even happens, but for now, I'm just rolling with it.

Up above, all that happened in the two weeks the game makes you wait whenever you start fortress mode again is that the crabs spilled all their prickleberry wine. What a tragedy!

After about a season, we've got a pretty nice setup coming together. All the stockpiles are hidden away under the big main meeting area, the aquifer drains into a cistern, things that rot are kept safely away from the average crab's path, and walls are being built up top to make a more secure entrance. We've eaten a boar and silky sea slug while food stocks were low, and the giant leopard we brought with us "went missing" some time ago - which probably just means it's dead. Giant raccoons have been harrassing us up on the surface, but that's the point of setting up our defenses. It's a much more auspicious start than our first expedition, and with self-sufficiency actually taken care of, we'll be able to get our paper economy and library off the ground sooner than later. We've also found a bit of native platinum quite high up in the earth, but once you start the metal economy, it feels like you just sort of become a metal economy fortress. So we'll hold off on that for now. Also, the giant wolves keep wandering into our meeting hall. Don't worry, they're ours, but they'd probably suit us better outside fending off the raccoons... Oh, and nobody has bedrooms yet. Nobody's too pressed about that, though. One time a really drunk guy came over to my house and when I said "alright that's it for the night" he was like for sure, peace out, slapped my hand, fistbumped me, grabbed his things and walked 5 steps out the front door to fall asleep sitting up on the stairwell of my apartment. So people can do that, people can just sleep on stairs. My roommates found him and were like "what the fuck" and I was also like "what the fuck" because I figured he'd just go home. I think they just let him sleep though. I would've heard it if he fell down the stairs and he didn't. So you can do that.

There's not a lot to say right now. We're not making a ton of money, but we're sustaining ourselves fine.

Defenses are coming together fine, too. Our giant wolves had pups and the pups have the zoomies. It's wonderful.

There's a quantum stockpile now to make woodworking a lot easier. For those not in the know, a "quantum stockpile" is a 1x1 stockpile that gets filled by having a minecart dump into it. The cart races down from the surface, and is just long enough that it doesn't crash at the end, though also just too long to auto-dump - so instead, the solution is to make whoever finishes filling the cart hop in and ride it down so that they can push it the last couple tiles. Or at least, that's the plan; at first crabs just kicked the cart down the ramp, but since I changed it to be ridden instead, everyone's been too busy putting a ceiling over the main "courtyard."

Here's our "administrative wing": counter-clockwise from the top, it houses our expedition leader Worthoars, production supervisor Boattrussed, and sheriff Channeledchain. We've got a hospital set up earlier than we need it for once, but nobody's been appointed chief of medicine yet. I ultimately had to run DFhack drain-aquifer just because the "mist generator" started overflowing, but I've set up "ponds" where any crab with nothing better to do will chuck a bucket of water down from the top of the stairs. The result is the same, so it should cheer everyone up. They'll need it, since...

Roofing the main area has everyone caught in a snowstorm, and though nobody's particularly miserable at all, it's still dragging some crabs down. Oh, and I like this.

Efficiency be damned, I wanted a cool bedroom setup, and looking down into the great hall right when you wake up seems pretty cool to me.

An agitated giant raccoon attacks, but it's put down pretty quickly by the giant wolves. The bigger threat is our own lack of forethought.

I wanted to put grates up above the farm plot there, because I'm not actually sure whether you still need outdoor plants to get sunlight and rain or whatever, or if a tile that was directly exposed to the sun at any point just counts as "outdoors" forever. I honestly think it's the latter but you know what they say about eggs and baskets and all that type of shit.

The problem is that crabs kept trying to put floors down on these tiles, which was possible because they could walk over the grates to reach them, but didn't register to the game as structurally sound, so the floor just instantly collapsed every time they tried to do it. Well, at least nobody died.

Except for just now. I tried to make the quantum stockpile also include rocks, and it worked! But people keep walking out in front of it and getting hit. Somehow, a shrimp survived just fine, but this metalsmith fucking died. It seems obvious to like, not walk on minecart tracks, especially if they're set to the "no" traffic setting, but it's apparently not. A bit of judicious wall use seems to fix it, though. We also make probably the ugliest fucking graveyard I've EVER set up.

Right off to the side of our main noble quarters for whenever we either get a mayor, get elevated to a barony, or whatever else, I just made... I don't know. This spaghetti nightmare. I don't care. If crabs were dying in battle, then you know, I'd take it serious, I'd make a big whole thing out of it or at least plop down the quickfort windmills. But what am I supposed to feel about a guy bashing himself with the fucking minecart? Like... you get what you paid for. And now the next poor saps to die in this fortress get what you paid for too.

Our first artifact is created! Its name translates to "Slippants." Ok. It just has an image of a decapod in it. Not even any particular kind of decapod in specific. But it instantly makes Hailcloistered, or jesus christ how am I supposed to remember this, Ricikikikitikik into a legendary armorsmith. Which is, you know, cool. Yeah, we could probably get some armor going. I neglected to mention I set up a metalsmithing business; I didn't want to, but there are so many metalsmiths in this fortress that they started a guild, and I always wanted to try actually placing workshops in a guild-relevant area instead of just having all the workshops in one place and guild halls somewhere else, so it's a little inefficient, but it looks cool, so who cares.

...and that right there is the last thing I wrote before I stopped playing for 8 months.

I feel like the reveal was always coming: "I was just doing this as a weird cry for help cloaked dick-deep in 69 layers of irony." Like on the surface it looks like it is just a person freaking out but then one layer lower it's actually just a guy fucking around but one more layer it's freaking out again and on and on and on. I don't know what to say besides that. I'm in the first really healthy relationship of my life and trying not to mess it up. I'm still soul-crushingly poor with no real skills or job prospects. I do still play the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress, though much more rarely - I often boot it up with big ambitions to make some Content for The Tube, actually, but I'm simply too good at the game, so nothing interesting happens in my forts, and I end up with twenty gigabytes of footage and ten pages scribbled in a notebook covering six years of fortress management where the most interesting thing that happens is like, I set up a milling industry.

I'm not really interested in Daarunbay Detevay anymore, I'm sorry. It's not like I've deleted it, I keep pretty extensive backups of all my worlds and saves for the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress, even though I rarely actually use them, so it's not really going anywhere. If there's any interest I could probably like, put the world folder on pixeldrain or mediafire or whatever and try to compile a mod list, but I'm not making any promises and I doubt anyone really wants that very bad anyway.

...and that right there is the last thing I wrote before I forgot about this draft for 2 months.

In that time, the Adventure Mode beta appeared. I stayed up all night waiting for it to come out, but it was still rough enough that I didn't dive all the way in just yet. However, I realized something after playing as a cockatiel man who got viciously killed for starting random fights with innocent dwarves in my own half-abandoned fortress which went to hell because apparently the AI lets all of the animals out of cages and unlocks all the doors when you retire a fort. There might still be much more to do in Daarunbay Detevay. Rat World may be doomed but there's no reason we couldn't make a party of Rat Bandits. Better yet we could embark from Rushsly on the mission of a lifetime: to kill Vakeek Malignreasons.

So I don't know. Maybe we're going to do that. Maybe I will actually make some YouTube Content and I'll never reveal there that I was the Kobblefort guy but you could see a video and recognize my loquacious schizotypal affect, and you'd be like "dude, aren't you the guy who did Kobblefort?" and I wouldn't respond or maybe I'd be like "what is that" but you'd know. You'd know it was me. But just for the record please don't go around asking Dwarf Fortress YouTubers if they're the Kobblefort guy. Because either they don't know and you have exposed a YouTube person (much more normal than Tumblr people, on the whole) to Kobblefort or you have put me on the spot. So yeah, just forget you ever read any of this, except for during the time where you're reading it. I'm trying to do the exact opposite of "death of the author" here. This is "death of the reader." No that sounds fucked up. This is "life of the author." Sure. See you soon

[kobblefort]

Orbsarmor: What Could Possibly Go Wrong

Here we go again.

Not a tree in sight, nor another living being. Which means no beds, at least not until we've made it to the caverns. But uhh, speaking of which...

The very first frame I unpaused, I was told "a section of the cavern has collapsed," which is really quite strange. So I went to reveal it, just to check - and see how far we'd need to dig down before we hit trees, and, well... we won't. These are not cavern layers. That green stuff? It's grass. Trees do not seem to grow in it, or at least, none of them have yet. Oh, and some of those little "HFS tubes" might have shattered down on the third cavern layer. If you don't know what that means, absolutely do not worry about it one little bit okay. Either way, if we want any kind of farming to ever happen here, we'll have to get down there and get to work on it. And we basically need farming to happen here, but before any of that we need stairs, a way of dealing with the aqueduct (I'm just going to reuse the Blackfaint method since decapods actually like waterfalls) and some kind of meager little production setup.

And fuck it, here we are at -62, starting a production area with Amontillado'able doors. Unfortunately, we have no underground seeds, 3 logs, no trees in sight, and a long time before our first caravan. But the queen gets what the queen wants, and the queen wants the perfect library - far, far away from any and all distractions. Well, it's more than a bit likely we'll just die trying. But I think sometimes you have to think "what if I DON'T fail?" And yeah sure that's been co-opted by all the morons who really run the world and get to blow billions killing themselves in submarines or trying to make AI write all the movies. But I think it obviously has some kind of value anyway.

There's a yeti up on the surface. And well I'm not saying that we could hunt it for food if we get hungry, but... we could hunt it for food if we get hungry. Just a thought!

Oh huh, that's pretty early. Well you snooze you lose right. You guys got here early!

When they ask us what we want, we're not shy. We explain the fucked up caverns problem to them and they just sort of shrug because they don't really go to the caverns.

We've gotten enough marble blocks carved out and good enough rough gems to get enough plants, meat and fish to tide us over a good while longer, but before we can bring any of it downstairs... this happens? I've never seen this before.

I think it's because of this?? Are they all about to die of exposure?? Should I be glad I haven't even gone through everybody's character screens yet???

Nope after a few minutes everyone turned out fine. Nice. Another huge W for crabs. So here we have the beginning of our "starter base," where we intend to make sure we can get self-sufficient before we bother killing ourselves for the paper economy. It'll be... well more than just a little hard, all things considered, but up on the top the orthoclase buildings are our construction workshops, and all the cobaltite ones are for kitchen-related activities. Except for the farmers' workshop, which is kinda food but it kinda flexes to textile production too, which I suppose we'll need to do at least some of.

Then a random cave-in kills one of our bobbit worms and it just gets me thinking, dude something is really fucking wrong with this whole fortress. I just... I don't think this is going to work man. We can't grow anything, anywhere. I bet you think I'm exaggerating.

Look this is fucked. Cavern didn't work. Literally nothing up on the surface. We gotta pack this shit up man. We're gonna try this shit somewhere else. Tell the Queen that shit didn't work. Daarunbay Detevay is a glitchy fucking world sometimes. We're just gonna build the library somewhere else. Did you guys take the caravan apart yet? No? Ok good cause we're not going this far man. We're not doing the glacier thing, it's stupid. We're going to the woods a little south. Let's pack up and try this again.

[kobblefort]

Daarunbay Detevay 2

When you zoom out and look at it like this, it's not really an anomaly. Like, it's fucked up, but it's barely even a footnote.

In the grand history of The Nightmare of Tunneling, which is thousands and thousands of lines long, Blackfaint is two of them. It started and then it ended. The Land of Nails is a cruel place where life moves fast from beginning to end. The Hill of Scars just happens to be one exceedingly fast-paced part of it. I haven't really provided many good visual aids, so here's an image of the Daarunbay Detevay in its entirety which took me way too long to make.

The whole world! The Land of Nails is the western continent, the Land of Dividing is the eastern one. Where's The Hill of Scars in all of this, you might ask?

"Circled" in red is The Hill of Scars. Over on the left in blue, Rushsly. And on the right in puke green, Blackfaint. All the history of The Nightmare of Tunneling, of The Comedy of Sweating, has been constrained to this little western chunk of the continent. We have barely scratched the surface of the surface, even with our deepest dives into the history of kobbles and ratfolk. There's like 10 other major civilized species inhabiting the world, some of them not even on this continent that we've only known a little 1/10th swatch of. For instance, did you know there's fucking crab people?

There's crab people, baby. Well, that's an oversimplification. They're Decapoda, which is an umbrella term that includes lobsters, shrimp, and all kinds of crabs. The Axe of Glaciers live on the edges of the world, where it's cold: all the way up northwest on the glacial Island of Fate, and another decapodian civilization named The Paddle of Furs lives far to the southeast, among The Hills of Dividing and the terrifying Glacier of Corrupting at the end of The Land of Dividing - some even living out on the great ice floes in the arctic ocean. The harsh conditions come natural to such hardy peoples - after all, even the humble shrimp among them can heal well enough to regrow lost limbs.

There may very well be lobsters among us older than the very concept of counting years. And hell, there's one among The Axe of Glaciers who's as old as the calendar. The first King of Decapodia: Kuteci Peaceletters.

There's something very interesting about his reign, besides the "suddenly getting deposed in a coup" part. Yes, obviously, it's the "throwing competition" part. Obviously, losing 10 years in a row is one thing - but in the very first one at Bronzeskies, the seat of AoG, he actually won that one. The fact that he put the competition to rest until right at the end of his reign is just... interesting. Did he keep trying it again thinking he'd recapture the glory of his youth? Been there. Did his desperate attempts turn everyone against him? Been there. I don't throw controllers or anything because them shits cost like $60 for a good one but I haven't been able to enjoy fighting games for over 3 years because lately when I lose I get so fucking mad I punch my desk. Part of my ego is inextricably linked with the idea that "I have to be good at games." If I hop on an FPS and get headshotted over and over I have to just turn that shit off. I physically cannot handle "getting dominated" because I have so few avenues for success in my life that I have latched on to "yeah, I'm good at Sniper in Team Fortress 2" as one of my last pathetic desperate reaches for validation. I don't know what's wrong with me. I try to not be like this. I'm reading The Inner Game of Tennis but it hasn't really helped me yet. I can't play Street Fighter 6 off my friend's Steam family-share library because if I get put in the corner and don't tech the throw twice in a row I just have to turn the fucking game off, I alt-f4 out of it immediately, I can't stomach failure and victory only even feels like a reprieve from loss. I realize this is so much more pathetic than just being bad at games. In fact a guy who's bad at games and a good sport about it is probably the best thing you can be, because whenever anyone says "wow you're bad at this" you can just be like "Yeah I was too busy going outside and having sex and stuff." But I haven't been!! I've been here, sitting at my fucking desk, playing video games!! I should at least get Fortnite wins and not just in those first few games after you haven't played in a while where the whole lobby is bots, I mean I should be able to out-snipe any zoomer in the world with my 20 years of Counter-Strike experience or at least I fucking tell myself that, even though I've never fucking practiced the game or its particular flavor of sniping, or when I have it's just for like 5 flaccid minutes of not challenging myself because my ego is too fragile to actually let me!! I mean I'll tell you up and down the fucking block that battle royales are a literal cancer that caused "good map design" to be amputated from the modern multiplayer first-person-shooter genre and that actually is true but you'd never know it because I'm such a fucking bitch who fucking cries over never winning in Apex Legends even though I like Titanfall 2 way better but I can't fucking play that either because I get too fucking mad and competitive and hard on myself to enjoy it unless I'm playing absolutely perfectly!! Like what the fuck!?!? I'm 30 years old!! If I went back to my 10-year-old self and said "this is what you grow up to be, little guy" he would start downing shots of bleach right there on the spot!!! But I don't know how to change!!! My ego, my wavering sense of self completely dominates me and prevents me from enjoying my life and my so-called passions!! And it really feels like there's no way to fix it short of just tripping on so much acid I completely forget my current personality!! Even then what if it just comes back!!

The one who deposed Kuteci and reigns to this day is the former baroness, Scucutk Raspboats, whose true goal is to create a great work of art. Throughout her life, she has written eleven pieces of literature, but she only bothered to name six of them: Errors In the Keep, her first. The Journey Into Scucutk Raspboats, her third. The Truth About the Decapod fourth, The Wizard'S Guide to Creation sixth, Discourse on Pagesnarling (named for her barony) eighth, and After Genius tenth. Her last book, untitled, was writen in 163, and just 5 years later she would seize the throne in Bronzeskies and thus the throne of all decapodia, aided by Rerrr Crazyletter, the baroness of Gorgelearned, and Rerrr's daughter Cecichi Springchannels, duchess of Diamondtangled.

Legends Browser 2 seems to not like how many mods I've got running, but it doesn't look like we're missing too much. Besides their positions of significance in The Axe of Glaciers, they are mostly unremarkable women - all unlucky in love, but who isn't?

Why does any of this matter? Because it's clear Scucutk cannot write her true masterpiece from where she sits. Caravans are sent out all the time in search of a better location for a true grand library, one where she might finally create the artifact that has eluded her for all her life. Because I've never actually played a cold-weather biome, and it sounds both fun and more manageable than whatever the fuck Blackfaint ended up being. Because playing as lobsters and crabs sounds really funny

So at the northwestern tip of the world, we'll try it again. Unlike in other video games, it's very fun to lose in the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress, I've talked at length about that already. So why don't we try to make the greatest library Of All Time in possible the least hospitable environment Of All Time?

What could possibly go wrong?????

[kobblefort]

Blackfaint: Rat World Forever

This is what happens when I click on the "PETITIONS" button, which no doubt is alerting me that the newly established farmers' guild wants a hall. I don't think your average player of the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress is ever going to see this. It's kind of cursed, but it's kind of magical. I can't dismiss it, which will drive me crazy since it does that little "shimmering" animation. I suppose I'll just have to assume that making the guild hall nice enough will make it stop. I don't know, I'm not in a hurry to please them. Now if there was a herbalists' guild, though? Those are the guys holding it down.

Another strange mood takes another rat straight to the clothier's shop that made Eeteek go berserk and start the fight that ended in their death. I suppose Vatekeek Learnedmaligns thinks it will be fine for him which in my opinion is the proper rat world attitude.

Also, things were going too well for a minute there, so here come 9 lesser rodent people. I was telling this to someone earlier but I think that rats are pretty cool in real life. Rats are like dogs stuck in rodent bodies basically. But mice are horrible little skittering creeps that will randomly run out from the walls just to die in the middle of your fucking floor like oh do you mind if I randomly die here, if I just roll over and die in the middle of your fucking floor, well I'm going to do it if that's alright, actually me and my 100 little cousins thought it would be cool to just scamper around as fast as possible at 3 AM and then randomly suddenly die, there's no way to get us out besides doing chemical warfare on yourself, blame yourself for living in a garage even though it wasn't your idea and you didn't want to do it. So basically mice fucking suck and the rodent men, naturally, are mice, compared to us, the superior rats. And we're really gonna need to figure out a way to make sure they end up dead on the floor. Which should be totally doab

This sucks man

I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. The violence is fast and extreme and really fucking bad and we don't have nearly enough graves to start burying everyone. The only people who can really fight are the miners, and the mouse people brought actual steel spears this time: that's a huge advantage in range and damage. We're down to 13 rats. Considering I was thinking that we would actually get to 50 and then maybe that would let our rats elect a mayor of some sort which would maybe let me use the Nobles & Administrator screen and its myriad functions, this is a pretty fucking shitty result. I guess worrying about the surface first was the wrong move but honestly it was a blind 50/50 anyway. It might be worth it to just say fuck it and lock off the caverns for a while. There's no way with this few rats that we could easily set up any kind of bulwark, we still have 100-something food, I don't know I'm kinda just feeling pretty gutted over how fast things went to shit like from okay to terrible in an instant, I know I just did that "rat world forever" bit like 30 seconds ago in your time and 30 minutes ago in mine but yeah I'm not feeling it.

This fucking asshole pays me back for being nice and refusing to Cask of Amontillado his ass by flipping out and dragging our population down to 10 so far, maybe more. Even with a copper pick splitting his leg open he still crawls along trying to fight anyone who gets near. He struggles on and on until finally an herbalist Ch'tk Sinscaly who's tired of this shit walks over and strangles him to death.

Wow, I wonder why. Next fortress, workshops are DEFINITELY going to be set up for easy cask-of-amontillado'ing.

This asshole is here now. I don't know. The caverns are already sealed off, so who cares. I've never seen something break through sealed doors, but now I definitely am not going to unseal them. It kills the last few mice in a matter of seconds and then sets about lazing around right by the entrance to the cavern to make sure we never go back in there again.

Yeah come on in guys don't mind the other 10 notifications. Sure we can host some fucking elf poets and shit. Whatever. Is one of you naked? Lol, cool.

Oh yeah don't mind all the bloody fucking warm corpses starting to stink on the ground. Yeah this guy failed to Express Himself so he went around killing people. You get it. Right. Sorry we don't have time to watch you fucking dance or whatever we have to feed and water the grievously injured. But yeah stay as long as you like. Actually you know what though try not to eat too much. Just gonna say it we're not gonna have this food forever.

No Thicivi I don't think it is and you might not actually be a very adequate observer.

This shit happens downstairs which sucks. RIP our first forgotten beast I guess. Gotta watch out for those steel spears man. They're bullshit.

The bodies are just sitting on the floor because we're using the empty tombs for people whose remains we can't recover. I just had an idea, because I hate the caverns now and want all mouse people to suffer. What if we just drowned them. Right? Hear me out. It's a pretty common and kind of grim trap in the real world to drown mice by making them take bait in the middle of a bucket on a thing they fall off of into the bucket. Well what if we brought the bucket to them? And by which I mean dug a bunch more aquifer taps that led straight down into the cavern layer and just flooded it to hell? I think it could be funny. If we were always doomed to never make it here then why not do something fucked up like that.

Look at this face in the cistern. It's like an omen. I didn't make it on purpose but now it's here. Telling me "this is a place of great suffering." And you know what my reaction to that information is? Yeah I hope there's more.

So here it is. An absolute mess of exposed aquifer surface area, leading to little narrow high-pressure tunnels that terminate with one little spigot into the caverns.

And it's working. It's working fast. Yes, I used DFhack to speed it along - two injured miners were not about to hustle on it and I wanted to see it start happening already.

Maybe this was just a party that got out of hand. You know? Maybe this was just a shitty idea. Leaving the warband to settle down? Fuck that. Other people make fortresses. Ratfolk take them. This was never a fortress. This was just a big bucket to drown a bunch of stupid fucking mice in.

The ten of us left can head back to Malignreasons, wherever she's camped now, apologize for our stupid little excursion, take the flogging we're given and go back to doing what ratfolk are really supposed to do. None of our original seven have even survived, besides K'keek Vicescourge, after all - with their untimely deaths they left all the shame and humiliation for us. Rat world was pretty cool for a second there, it really was, but it's time for us to get back to our real lives. Real rat lives.

You can see there in the center, the rodent men scrambling for high ground as the water comes up to their knees. Their home ruined, some of them washed away to be drowned in their cages. Of course it's inhumane, but was the way they jammed us with spears and chopped us with axes humane? Besides, humane? News flash, we're fucking rats!!

Everyone starts filing out. Some head back toward the warband, some just head whereever their feet take them. Everyone but K'keek Vicescourge, who spends a bit more time here. Carving stone coffins that will never actually be filled. The guests just stand in the sad, empty dining hall, completely dumbfounded. And K'keek starts on one last project.

With a ghost at her back, in the worst mood of her life, but still compelled to carve it and place it. The first statue ever made at Blackfaint. And the last one. The only one.

She's ready to go now.

Rat world sucks.

Rat world forever.

[kobblefort]

Blackfaint: Rat World Sucks

Starting off with some gratuitous violence here; I go to let people back into the caverns because fuck it why not and our weaver (who was once our fisherman) Eeteek Terrorslip turns out to be fucking SCARY. I might have given a few rats a boost to a couple combat skills because I need to at least somewhat even the odds against the "not being able to make military squads, put in training orders, even use any of the manager/work order features" handicap I gave myself by hacking the ratfolk to be playable, but it wasn't big enough for me to expect this. The way Dwarf Fortress combat logs describe wrestling is always absurd, it sounds like she's just tearing apart this poor bastard piece-by-piece like ripping a big sheet of saran wrap. Which is awesome. One thing you can't say about the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress is that it's not metal.

Our stone carver Keerrak Blackplunged isn't built quite so different though. Neither is Kikiteek Jackalgranite the engineer, Vekkak Hailedthieves (which sucks - that was an awesome name) the mason, or Shrit Ringtorments the fish cleaner.

Gladnessleap needs to get fucking got, though it is funny that such a dangerous bastard gets such a cutesy name. Sounds like a My Little Pony character, right? I guess that makes sense. The ratfolk name their enemies cute stuff because they're all named shit like V'keek Boneslaughter. So naturally they'd reserve names like "Sprinkle Wedding" for their most loathsome enemies. Because being called some shit like "Pulmonary Embolism" is cool as fuck in rat world.

He's finally taken down by Keekeek Prairiedevils splitting his head with an axe, and the fighting ends again, at least for a time.

There is a remarkable amount of vomit everywhere and also the aquifer drain ended up working a little too well so I wasn't actually able to make a cistern so I never put down any wells so I never set up a hospital. It's really not ideal in rat world. A helpful little notification informs us that we didn't get any migrants this season, and I have the feeling a caravan is never coming. Things are just never really easy in rat world, you can always see the bottom coming up at you, it's like falling off a building in slow-motion which also describes a lot of my dreams well maybe not the slow motion part. In my dreams I'm always getting to these fucked up high places that are just super unsafe and I keep wanting to leave, sometimes there's no way down anymore, sometimes the way down is even more dangerous. If I ever get on an elevator in a dream I know for sure I'm about to die in it, which is kind of funny because I don't have any kind of elevator phobia in real life - I am uncomfortable with heights but I think a reasonable amount of acrophobia is basically normal and you're better with it than without it.

Quick update, right up there the end of that paragraph ^ is where I stopped playing Dwarf Fortress for 21 days. Really couldn't tell you why!! Actually the month of June seemed to just disappear entirely, I've been trying to get another day job and also got into TF2 rocketjump maps which I think was a huge fucking net negative for me, those kind of autistic skill-game activities can just suck the life right out of me, when I discovered the game Waveland it literally ruined my entire life for 6 days straight, I had to get a high score on the global leaderboards, I had to master all the tricks, I was not sleeping I was not eating I was just grinding. So yeah I should avoid things like that but I didn't which is why I spent so much time distracted from the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress, even if this current fort really is a bit shit because of the technical issues. Oh also I saw the bottom coming up at me in real life because I had to do a fucking financing program on my electric bill because it got up to like $300 because I thought I could just apply to this program to get assistance paying for it but it turned out that had not been accepting applications since the end of May. So maybe Rat World got a bit too real. Or maybe now I'm in the right headspace to truly write out Rat World. Either way now I'm back to it and all that has changed is a Dwarf Fortress update to let me see more of the dead plant graphics so I can notice how they are different from the live plant graphics (they used to be the same) and be taunted ever more for daring to put myself through rat world. But I am not a bitch unless a woman makes me one so we've fucked around enough it's time to get right back to Rat World.

Surface farming seems like kind of a bad idea, but also like kind of one of the only ideas we've got, so we might as well start surface farming. I think also if we're not getting any kind of caravan from the Warlord's settlement or any other NoT splinter factions, we sould start looking into setting up some defenses. And I mean some real fucked up shit too, like if everyone wants to kill us then fuck it. Ballistae are cool, as are most things that let you use the suffix "-ae" to make the word plural, and unlike most martial arts, even without any sort of militia hierarchy we'll be able to train rats in siege engineering.

Before any of that can exist, we need walls. And we might have accidentally made a bit too much wall and sealed ourselves in, but we can fix that. Surface farming is going okay, but do you notice the problem? Yeah we only have grains and prickle berries. Literally the only things ratfolk can eat are boar tails and cave tubers, and since cooking a plant doesn't result in it yielding any seeds, we just have to keep going down to the caverns and harvesting wild cave tubers and boar tails forever, even if we have stumbled onto alcoholic self-sufficiency. This really is a "crust punk" fortress I guess, we may end up starving but we won't do it sober. However the caverns have been generous with the cave tuber yield, and with all these other alternative alcohol sources we might actually find ourselves able to eat plump helmet spawn, which is a welcome fucking third option in the rat world diet.

We've actually got a pretty fucking decent cave spider silk economy set up for ourselves - leather would be better, since everyone is more or less a conscript while we don't have a military, but livestock aren't really an option for us. And of course, there's no way to make silk shoes, which means everyone gets to stay fucking miserable about running around on their bare feet. Also, the wagon's finally unloaded. I didn't end up taking the stockpiling business too seriously. Maybe in the next world, but not in rat world.

I mean for fuck's sake look at what we eat. Winter arrives on the calendar, but at least it's always the same dead temperature here. Maybe one of the fucked up trees will drop just a bit of fruit and 3 or 4 people will get to eat it before it's all gone. Maybe we'll survive long enough to set up these ballistae or maybe everything was fucked from the start. Sometimes about miserable situations in the real world I ask, "what kind of god." Well I know what kind of god now, me. I didn't do it on purpose but I'm here I made the rat folk build this shitty rat hole in the rat ground. Dark

Oh shit what's up bro.

It's no envoy from the warband, but having anyone else join the party is pretty nice. We have no idea how he heard about The Black Oats, considering the only contact we've had with the outside world were some dwarves loitering menacingly up on the surface, but it's nice that he did. Maybe he just found our crappy block walls around the hole in the ground and went "well that seems like how ratfolk live" and walked right in. Hope you like cave tubers dude. But don't worry. If you get tired of cave tubers we also have some finely minced cave tubers. Before he leaves, he strikes up something of a friendship with Kirra Hexlancer, seeming to always be greatly amused by her stories.

Yeah it's no wonder where she got them. Rat worlddddd

This looks like nothing right now, but soon it will be a temple to R'k'in, the god of Muck. 21 out of our 24 rats worship R'k'in, so it seems only appropriate we get somewhere to pray. We'll also be working on tapping the aquifer upstairs.

I'm really not sure this will actually do anything, but it looks promising, and it was a bitch to dig out, and also I spoke way too soon after letting this aquifer drain for just a minute or two it's really started filling up the cistern and emergency drain. Hey there's no way this could come back and bite us in the ass right? Don't actually say so if there is we don't actually want to know. There's really no reason it shouldn't be fine, I think. I almost wrote a whole-ass letter to my ex but I didn't. It wasn't anything super weird it was just like, "hey I miss you so I want to talk to you" but it was probably the right move to talk myself out of it. The truth is that I would not be able to even attempt to keep shit platonic I want to sleep with her more than I want a million dollars and I don't even mean have sex I mean literally I just want to hold her while I fall asleep and know she'll be there in the morning but that's stupid and I have to be normal and it's not normal to say hey I did kind of creep your twitter and I like your drawings still can you save me from agonizing debt and failure nope well I know you can't and you have a whole other relationship that's obviously going way better anyways and I think I just ended up in a whole other relationship that I don't really know if it's going to be any better like to be honest I'm scared to even ask if it's like official or whatever I don't want things to change I've just been having fun flirting with my really good friend and if it develops into something cool and if it doesn't that's also cool I feel like putting a name like "dating" on it makes it scary and changes the dynamic and you know just so many things go wrong with "dating" and i don't want anything to be forced I just want to have fun probably kiss them and who cares what else it's normal.

Our weaver, Eeteek Terrorslip, can't get enough bones or maybe just wanted normal cloth instead of silk but whatever the case it's just not gonna work for her. She goes berserk.

She attacks Kikeek Menacebreeds, a miner, and it's a really fucking vicious battle. Ch'eeka Wheelwraiths, a brewer who's been really pulling his weight around here gets into the fray too, but Kikeek is the one who takes the brunt of the damage, being left seriously injured and frothing over with impotent rage "at all enemies." And that's a wrap for winter! Wow this game goes so fast since the new update, did they already update to SDL2 or am I just tripping??? Oh and also I just realized that even once I get the hospital built in here, we won't really be able to do anything, since without any access to the Nobles & Administrators panel we can't actually set any chief medical personnel. So it turned out that tapping the aquifer was the least of our fucking worries, LOL!!!!!!!!

Kikeek can't move from her spot, not that there's anywhere to put her.

There are literally no options on the Hospital page if you don't have a chief medical dorf/kobble/rat/anything else you'd like to be, so it's just a flophouse with some holes in the floor. One of the things I don't like about setting stockpiles is that oftentimes your little people will refuse to use stuff until it's been stockpiled away, so since the mechanisms for the wells are sitting on the floor of the mechanic's workshop instead of on the floor 5 feet away, nobody wants to actually build the well. Actually they're refusing to do it for some other reason maybe. I don't know. Maybe sometimes you just don't build a well, rat world, etc. In mid-spring we're informed that "the fortress attracted no migrants this season." Again.

The wells finally go up and the first thing that happens is someone washes giant ibex blood off themselves. I have no fucking idea when anyone actually encountered a giant ibex, so the fact that their clothes remained wet with it for that long is mortifying. But hey look up there! Our drink and food levels are actually awesome!! Even if our moods are generally terrible and we eat literally nothing besides mushrooms and alcohol, we are making some kind of way in the world. Hell, Kikeek is already up and moving again (though taking it easy on actual mining work) way faster than some of the chumps who were injured earlier - one of them choosing to literally just lay o nthe floor in that bottom-left corner of the "hospital" instead of the bed for whatever reason.

And look, the cistern's actually fucking filling!! Wow yeah snore-fest, wake me up when there's a transtern am I right!! I'm just kidding. But maybe this is the wrong time for jokes. Because you know a triumph in rat world is 50 times harder than a triumph in kobble world or dorf world. They'd be pogchamping and soyjak'ing and having all sorts of internet meme reactions to this wonderful waterfall mist generator in the middle of our fort that spritzes everyone on their way down the main staircase - but who gives a shit?!? Natural beauty means nothing in Rat World!!! We found gems too and we put them on the fucking floor not even in a box just on the floor by some dirty old pants that got encrusted with blood and puke and worn all the way threadbare. Because we don't fucking care about your shiny shit! We don't care about pretty shit! We're not here for a good time! We're going to build some big-ass ballistae and if you come over again waving your fucking swords around at us we're going to shoot you with arrows so big they explode your head like a watermelon!! None of us even know what a watermelon fucking is! We've just heard that expression used so we're repeating it, but we really have no context!! Literally none of us have ever seen one!!!

RAT WORLD FOREVER!!

RAT WORLD SUCKS!!

[kobblefort]

Blackfaint: Origins 2

I feel that this entire song is emblematic of rat world, but the "conversation" part at 2:49 is most important for our purposes of understanding it. This is how I imagine all of the rats speak to each other and the kind of things that they speak to each other about. "Well not really because I fucking had to buy beer" "That's fucked up man" is the kind of thing they are all saying to each other with that exact cadence. I think the lyric "Raise your hand if the system has missed you, man" also applies to rat world because the system has quite literally missed us - we can't create military squads or appoint administrators because the warlord needs to at least appoint a caravan leader for us to get the Nobles & Administrators screen back and I don't think she gives a fuck - it's still Vakeek Malignreasons last I checked and yeah she's a little busy seeking that artifact and doing other dubious necromancer activities. But it's okay, we're just treating this like a challenge run. Rat world is kind of like how I live because there is no structure to my life and I have never held a single job for more than three months in a row. And I try not to drink alcohol anymore but sometimes I still do and I just immediately start scrolling through my contacts looking for people to flirt with, harangue about Media we both like, or ramble at about some story I'll never actually write (usually all 3 at once) I only have an apartment by literally an act of god extending divine mercy directly to me and it's a fucking mess where I eat the $1 for an 8-pack hot dogs from Aldi cut in half to make them lie flat on sandwich bread with just diced onions and seasoned salt. "You take what you get in rat world" is one of the things we say in rat world, besides "Fuck it!!" lol, thats the main thing we say in rat world but yeah there are other things we say in rat world basically.

There's only two and a half more Z-levels we have to grate up before the aquifer drain is complete and we never have to think about it again. Considering there's 11 levels from the aquifer to the drain that means out of the 176 grates we needed to make there are only 40 left.

This farmers' guildhall I'm making just to have it out of the way when it inevitably becomes necessary kind of looks like a buttplug. Oops almost out of food and drinks again :\ rat worlddddd

A problem is quickly becoming apparent: rats get upset over not wearing shoes, but rats can't actually make shoes. I'm not sure we will ever actually get a caravan from The Nightmare of Tunneling, much less any other merchants, and without being able to actually assign any squadrons, sending them out on missions to retrieve them from any poor settlement that catches my eye won't be possible either. Keeping seed stocks up is another problem, and since I'm running the mod that fully forbids the eating of plump helmets, we can't rely on the plentiful stock of those from the caverns. It's sort of just a race away from the bottom right now, constantly scurrying out to grab handfuls of boar tails and cave wheat and cook them up just to watch them scarfed down. I am, however, deeply enjoying the fucked up layout of this fortress so far. Maybe when we get 50 rats they will be able to elect a mayor and thus start having administrators? It's entirely possible we see the end of this fort without ever being able to use some absolutely critical features of the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress. But nobody said rat world would be easy.

As a matter of fact it has just been confirmed that rat world is easy. The dwarves have come to wreak vengeance upon us!! And it's like what did we even do!? Sure we're part of a civilization known for havoc and pillaging and violence but none of us did anything! I literally went and checked! The only one who did anything is Ikeek Hatredeel.

And she never even killed a dwarf, just a kobble! Come on! Whatever you're mad about it probably wasn't us!!

The best we can do right now is breaking down the stairway and setting up hatch covers to bar shut just above the bedroom level, which is above the main floor. The dwarves don't seen to even notice the entrance to our little hamlet, at least, which is good. It's just as well, what business do we have up on the surface? All the plants are dead and what little we left in the wagon was just a few sheets and crutches. (I am notoriously bad at remembering to break down my wagon because I hate "all-purpose" stockpiles and only designate piles as they're needed, but I don't want my kobbles/dorfs/rats to leave stuff on the ground, so I usually just leave it there for like... a year at least.)

They just keep dancing around a dead tree. There's really no reason we can't wait them out, but then again, if a forgotten beast comes wandering in through the caverns, we'll be kind of fucked. But that's rat world dude. The thing about rat world is sometimes you're just helplessly scurrying around looking for plants to cook into the saddest little biscuits ever while some dwarfs come trying to maim you for no fucking reason. They've got a lot of silver weaponry, which makes sense because we are monsters, and the one with the steel crossbow could cause some real problems.

Giant monkeys appear, which is almost always cause for celebration, but ESPECIALLY now. They're not doing so great against the dwarves though.

We got some tablesss

Me too

The only way any food gets put on the table in rat world is by everyone scampering out to the caves every few minutes to grab more of whatever they can find growing wild on the floor, which has to be arranged manually. Then I manually have to go over to the kitchen and put "prepare easy meal" on repeat until it runs out, which is usually 30 seconds and 5~15 food units after I press it. If you'll permit me to be honest right now rat world is just really not feeling that sustainable. I'm not going to say like oh I give up and just let the dorfs come kill us all or whatever but you know sometimes rat world just actually sucks.

Speaking of shit that just sucks, I feel like the rodent men should be chill with us, but well...

They're not. Luckily, we're fucking fast in rat world, and as long as we keep the numbers right, stronger than them too. We can't just bar off the cavern since then we'd starve, so the only real option is just... every rat for themself.

But the truth is that rats together are strong. Do you not understand this, rodent people??

oh wait, this might be bad... Yeah we got nothing on steel weapons actually.

It'ikik ghoulscar, who was described as someone who was "made deeply uncomfortable by differences in culture or appearance," does not survive a stab to the brain. What should I not say he was racist?? Ohh his body's still warm you can't say he's racist!!! Well he was a racist is the thing. I don't think he'd even object to be called that. I don't know though because most people who'll admit they're racist are a lot less racist than people who vehemently refuse the idea that they could ever be racist. A guy who says "yeah i'm racist" is probably going to catch himself letting media/institutional/just stupid shit he thought when he was a kid bias cloud his judgment, but a guy who says "You're Calling Me RACIST??? That's Like Calling Me The N Word!!" has completely internalized whatever "FBI Crime Stats" are on HTTP colon slash slash BootSuckerNews.Cuck without even knowing what the words "materialist political theory" mean when you string them all together like that. Like I'm just going to say it I trust a guy who listens to Cum Town to actually not be evil when it counts a lot more than a guy who thought Million Dollar Extreme World Peace was a good show. Oh and for the fucking record I actually was a huge fucking MDE fan when they were new, I'm talking about the 00s when I was a teenager and they beat Tim & Eric to market with the "insane editing" game and did it way better. Shit like Malbone Trucking and Extreme BassFX were and are genuinely still funny, I don't care man, but the TED talk was basically the end of an era, all the shit that came afterward where Sam Hyde just records himself yelling into a mirror is absolutely fucking insufferable, and the fact that when they finally got their shot at TV after that they just made a fucking crappy sketch comedy show where all the jokes are edgy teenager trying to get in trouble bullshit instead of utilizing any of their previously many strengths is the biggest fucking let-down in the world, Sam Hyde let his ego blow up like a fucking car bomb and was helped along to do so by post-Stormfront invasion 4channers, 90% of whom just thought he was crazy and that it was funny to see a crazy guy yell into a mirror and record it with a cell phone, I will never not be so disappointed that it gives me a fucking ulcer about what could have been, sometimes I go back and watch College Cunts and it's almost hard to enjoy because it's like wow this is where it ended - this glimmer right here is the last diamond before they started just shitting. Oh god, what we lost. What did we lose again? Oh shit, yeah, the game. We're down to 18 rats.

Kikeek Menacebreeds takes one down. Nice, good shit.

The last remaining rodent person earned the name Nightsea from the fracas, and just starts camping one last area. He seems to stop being hostile and just lets everyone pass him as they run around the caverns freely. Maybe he'll make a good bulwark against the first forgotten beast we have to deal with, I don't know. For now he's just an annoyance. Youve got to take the Ws you can get in rat world that's one thing for sure. As an anarchist it annoys me that the game requires a strict military hierarchy in order for citizens to start arming themselves and training but I guess we can start putting down some traps. But first, you know, five rats need to get buried real quick before they start haunting this bitch. Also, a while ago a "Glassmaker" went into a strange mood and has just been standing in the door of their bedroom - Been there dude!! I have no idea what to do about that, I'm not bothering with glass here, they refuse to claim any kind of workshop so I guess I'll have to just let them do their thing and eventually weather whatever kind of tantrum they're going to have.

In the worst moods now are Eeteek Terrorslip, K'keek Attackdemons, and Vatekeek Learnedmaligns. Eeteek in particular has just really been upset over not owning any shoes. Embarrassed about it, angry about it, sad about it. Like I'm sorry. I would love to do something about it. But, well, I can't!! Maybe - and this is a big fucking maybe - we'll be able to make leather out of the rodent people and then maybe we'll be able to make shoes or at least boots out of their leather, but I'm not optimistic about it!!!

Oh that was fast. See Eeteek there's a guy you could learn from, she doesn't mind having no shoes. She doesn't mind having no clothes at all!! She's just fully embraced the mania in this bitch!!

Burial time, lol. Oh and despite the advent of some giant ibexes, a giant tick, and other random terrifying creatures, all 10 dwarves up on the surface are completely unbothered. Siege is going great for them. Ass holes

The "natural mist generator" is really not good enough to offset all the miserable violence, ratfolk don't particularly care for natural beauty anyway.

Kikiteek Jackalgranite suddenly has 11 fucking children, all of whom are good to go and get straight to work the second they're born. Dude what the fuck is even going on in rat world.

After setting up some cage traps around the cavern entrance (sorry, I know they're OP, but I need them for this fort lol) everyone cleans up the blood on the main floor and starts partying. Uhh except R'eekeek. R'eekeek dies.

It's still not really feasible to actually open the doors back up yet, but the tavern has been officially "opened to the public." I'd also like to start building a library but I don't know if this is the fort for it. Ratfolk library seems like a great way to get some necromancers on deck and well, necromancers are always a rare treat.

I'd really like the dorfs to fucking leave already too. There's actually some live prickle berries and red spinach on the east part of the map, but of course these Ass Hole's are just camping out here keeping us from prosperity. I cannot imagine that any rat still enjoys cave tubers but that's all we got.

After ages they finally fucking leave and we can go scoop up the goodies. Spinach and prickleberries baby!!! Sounds awful actually but when all you've eaten for like 9 months is the same thing it must taste awesome.

If it's not one thing it's always just another.

Our carpenter is caught out during the attack, but she's fucking fast. Every time she sees one of the rodent people she just dips the fuck out of there across the entire map, then goes back to just wandering around. We barred her in there, but we'll eventually have to do something... There's twelve rodent people running free, three in cages, and Srekitdret running around randomly like he's our fucking mascot or something.

She actually manages to do some serious damage, but she has other things on her mind, and would just really prefer not to fight I guess. The fact that there's a thing called "Holy Ape of The Faith of Tribes" sounds really interesting to me, I'll have to learn more about that. If we survive. Or actually if we die it'll be a good excuse to hop back into legends mode. So either one is fine by me!!!!! Fuck it!!!! Lol I hit the 30 image limit I'll probably update again tomorrow

[kobblefort]

Blackfaint: Origins 1

The Hill of Scars is wide, its western half already filled to the brim with settlements of all kinds - humans, kobolds, Stella elves, lapines and even dwarves. Its most fertile and welcoming lands have been snatched up long ago, and so anyone who wishes to strike out has only the barren eastern plains and dunes left to them. You can barely see it amidst all the outposts, fortresses, towns and cities and hamlets and villages, but the yellow square east of the Gulf of Mastery's inlet and just south of the river marks a new one; or at least, an attempt at one. Caring not how close they set out to either the humans' tower to the west or the kobold fort Ripekills to the east, a new outpost is established by a small group that broke off from their larger one.

From The Nightmare of Tunneling comes yet another little group of outcasts: The Seducer of Dimpling, settling the little patch of terrifying untamed wilds they will call Vrikrokoki: "Blackfaint."

As you might notice, we got started early. I had to hack the "Additional Races: Ratfolk" mod from the Steam Workshop myself to make them playable, and unfortunately, this for some reason means I can't set any nobles and administrators. I tried a few times, but it's no good - I think I fixed the problem, but I would need to generate a whole new world to fix it, and after all the time I've put into this one already we are not doing that. So we head straight in, where before anything else...

We're dealing with this aquifer as fast as possible, which for now will make the main stairway incredibly fucking dangerous. We'll be fixing it with a bunch of wooden grates, of course, but until then, better hope nobody gets too drunk. Even though all we brought to drink was dark elven vodka.

Our administrator, or caravan leader if my hack wasn't such a, well, hack, is Kirra Halllies. Though she's strong, she doesn't actually like getting into physical confrontations. She's humble, thoughtful, and more hopeful than your average rat. However, she's quick to form negative views about things, and finds the pursuit of art to be a waste - even though art and natural beauty often moves her.

It'ikik Ghoulscar, our woodcutter and carpenter, in addition to everything you see here: likes magnetite, platypus leather, the color scarlet, flails, shields, and amulets, and prefers to drink tomatillo wine. He also hates lizards.

K'keek Vicescourge is an awesome fucking name. I have incredibly high hopes for this anxious egoistic mess of a rat.

Kikeek Menacebreeds is another awesome name, and is something of a space case. She has less of a warlike view of the world than most ratfolk.

Eetekak Strikehate (how do these names keep getting better) doesn't take things personally, but that's for better and for worse.

Eeteek Seduceworked seems useless to me. Why would ratfolk farm?? Ratfolk pillage!!!

And last but possibly not least, Eeteek Terrorslip is a chronic oversharer who can't take care of herself and cracks under pressure. She's literally me. I'm actually worried about how similar she is to me. Well except me personally I always experience strong cravings or urges. The more I read of this panel the more upset I get because I don't want to get too attached here; this is a "Terrifying Untamed Wilds" biome we've settled in after all, and we're headed straight into the first cavern layer.

The first thing to dig out is a meeting area. We've got no livestock to worry about keeping alive, but we've got to work kind of quickly against the aquifer: the quick and dirty drain is already spilling over a bit.

It's a bit of a crap solution, and we'll have to make sure to fix it up properly so that it can drain off the map soon, but we don't even have beds or a place to drink vodka. On the plus side, the drain acts as a "mist generator" for a free and easy mood boost. Well, again, not free, I could totally end up fucking flooding the entire base, but who cares, we're fucking rodents. We're here for a bad time, not a long time. Our lifespans are already pitifully brief, there is no point to not just fucking around and doing whatever we want. Kobbles might fancy themselves to be silly creatures but they get so serious about rocks and dragons and shit. But this is rat world. You've entered the rat world. And here in the rat world we do things a little fucking differently heh heh you know "Fuck it!!!" That's basically the rat world motto, you just say "Fuck it!!!" three exclamation points of course - Just fucking kidding dude!!!!! You can use as many exclamation points as you fucking want in rat world!!!!!! I just owe it to you to keep it real with you man rat world is a little different, we do things a little different in rat world.

Rat world also kind of fucking sucks man I just gotta keep it real with you like there's barely anything to fucking eat in rat world, and we have to plant seeds and shit like chumps because well it kind of really just fucking sucks in rat world. Not a single tree on this entire 3x3 embark tile seems to be able to give fruit, it's the middle of summer and yeah nothing man, rats don't really get to have fruit here in rat world which kind of sucks.

We're planting cave tubers and quarry bushes like fucking assholes, LOL. Gotta do what you gotta do in rat world though.

A fucking bunch of dudes show up to rat world which is pretty tight because there's like no food and we all sleep on the ground., But thats' kind of how shit goes in rat world sometimes LOL I'm actually like super worried about how we're going to get food going on in rat world but maybe if we just head straight for the first cavern layer we'll be able to get some grub on without running into too many like fucked up little cavern dwellers or forgotten beasts.

It doesn't take long either which is fucking tight it's literally just 13 layers below our little "main chill zone" area. We'll need to wall off what we call a "chill area" for specifically non-tweak kinds of creatures (us) to get away if tweak kinds of creatures (forgotten beasts) start throwing the vibes off, possibly with like doors or some such shit.

Honestly rat world is kind of popping off right now, we've got like economic forces impacting shit and shit which is honestly like, tight. The food number got down to like 8 for a second but we popped it back up to ~30 which is awesome. Since we can't get a bookkeeper or whatever we'll never like, actually know for sure what kind of numbers are going on, unless getting whatever our version of a "mayor" is finally gives us back the Nobles & Administrators window, but yeah right now we're kind of just chilling hard with cavern access and shit.

The bedroom layout is going to be "A little different" lol as most things in rat world are - I figure the "windmill villas" is a bit complicated for rats really and how much space do they need, it's chill to just leave your shit whereever you like in rat world nobody cares, so you don't need a cabinet or a chest, basically just a door and a bed should be good enough. You can't go around expecting too much shit in rat world like you get what you get in rat world. The resting heart rate of a rat ranges from 250 to 400 beats per minute if you can fucking believe that. That's just how things go in rat world it's a fast-paced life you live you die. Ok. And more important than anything you gotta party in rat world, rat world is ALL ABOUT PARTYING.

The "tavern" is now called The Black Oats. There's still nowhere to stand but people finally started having mugs to drink out of. Even guys who "disdain merriment" have to do at least a little dancing in rat world. The two customary dances in The Nightmare of Tunneling are The Berry of Glossing and The Vermilion Flute.

I still don't know how to parse these, my brain just can't convert this into imagery, sorry.

Our carpenter decides to make a crutch called "Drenchedgear the Prairies of Insight" which is fine. Nothing too interesting about it and we don't really have a concept of "value" in rat world so it's no problem. Just a cool thing we have now I guess - Fuck it!!!!!

The somewhat phallic aquifer drain is safely completed. A miner got kind of wet in the process but it's fine. There's also floodgates at the south end with a lever attached just in case I want to drown out the entire first cavern layer or something later; idk you have to be ready for things.

THIS DUDE'S NAME IS SRAKEEK STOLENCACTI!!!!

I'm going to bed now

[kobblefort]

The End of Rushsly

Endgame spoilers for Dwarf Fortress under the cut

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.

Thanks for reading

[kobblefort]

Rushsly: Almost The Bottom 3

SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT probably I can't script this shit man I'm liveblogging this game raw it happens how it happens.

Ant people are back, and they're getting pretty thoroughly fucked by Ashan Plaguehole the Labyrinthine, or at least that's what it sounds like through the walls deep below the fortress. Cool. We'll check in on that again later

Even the deep-dwelling dwarves are astounded by the wealth we've accrued: we sell them the platinum goblets that feel too fancy to drink out of, they gawk at just how many gems we've accrued, how finely they can be cut. And yet we must seem strange to them, so endowed and yet so deeply unsatisfied. Most of our clothes have gone to tatters from overwear, our once thriving glass industry has been dormant for some time. It's nothing, we insist, it's nothing - but our eyes don't light up at the glint of gold. We seem sluggish, almost like we're moving at a low framerate, take a little too long to recognize jokes, and even longer after that to recognize them. We leave them with a great handful of gems we find unworthy to sell, and they thank us profusely. When all is said and done, we have a great deal of thread, new clothes for at least a few kobbles, plants of all kinds, and kobble get chease LOL.

Down below, it turns out Ashan can wield a spear, and does so with remarkable prowess: a wood spear is plenty sharp enough for its ends,

and so too for the ends of 13 ant people, a giant bat and a giant olm. I've never actually seen a forgotten beast wield a weapon before. It almost seems like it would be exciting to fight: a good match for our own Beast Slayers. But we can't take our eye off the prize.

From the other end of the second cavern layer arrives another bird (even though it has the squid icon lol,) a wren named Lidod Minesweats - probably a Dwarven name? Also I completely missed this when it happened, but Ashan apparently killed Ancoji Necroshafts, the lizard that finished off Fiva after his own encounter with the ant people from before, I wonder if a pattern is about to take shape here.

They head straight for each other.

Unfortunately, since they're both forgotten beasts, the combat log is unintelligible, but Ashan takes the wren the fuck down; not without taking some damage, most notably having an impaired ability to stand.

I forgot to look it up but this is an ankylosaurus apparently, so Ashan looks like this but green and with thin membranous wings and it's "bloated." We all on the same page here? Ok me neither. But alas.

Zhasrca Foldcounselled is way the fuck in there, near the very bottom of the earth, chopping away at the stone, only hitting granite after granite after granite. Then he finally hits something!

Just some more native gold. Just as he does, he declares himself finished for the day and tears off his busted old ocelot-leather trousers, hopefully to pick up a new pair on his way home. But interestingly, the gold wall is warm - potentially unsafe to dig through, since there could be magma on the other side. And then, up topside...

Well fuck.

The dwarves said they would leave a while ago, but hadn't yet, and so the fighting is mostly contained to them, but unfortunately, a craftsbold named Zirga Futurestrayed who was on her way up to chat with them was bitten. There's nothing for it, we're just going to have to expel her as soon as the fighting is over. Hopefully the dwarves actually fucking leave, but due to how long it took for anyone to pull the drawbridge up, two of them and a donkey are crushed by it. Awesome. People need to stop just standing there on the fucking bridge.

I have no idea how to parse this, but it feels like this guy Vucar could maybe sort of be bit? Considering how he won't fucking leave, it becomes tempting to just send our squads up there and kill him to make extra sure, but he's standing on a tile with two other dwarves who seem fine according to the combat logs. Ultimately, the problem is solved by just deconstructing the trade depot. And I learn as they leave the map that apparently one of them stole one of our platinum goblets. Not cool dude. Actually, that might have been Zirga leaving with all her horrible injuries, which... fair enough. You can have that. Sorry it had to be this way but the alternative was we kill you. And we didn't kill you! But if you come back in weregecko form there'll be no fucking mercy, not a chance. Whatever, threat over.

Progress is slow and frustrating down here: just magma walls with the occasional little vein of gems. Every little rattle of the alert tabs is a disappointment. Morion, pitchblende, heliodors, I don't give a shit. I just want the one thing. I know there's all sorts of other things I could have but I don't want them. More migrants show up, bringing our population up to 135 and our framerate down to like 49. They also brought a fuckload of animals for whatever reason, which is just great of them. Deleting the trade depot somehow handed over possession of all the animals the dwarves brought along to us...

and the underground pasture is starting to look even more crowded, so it's time it gets expanded. But hey we all love when things get expanded right.

Zil, still the angriest lil kobble in the whole fucking world, comes up and starts just digging with its hands, which feels totally unnecessary especially since Zil is the one who got its lower spine torn apart. Oh well go off I guess, who gives a shit, this isn't what I want.

Trying to dig one more layer down is a fruitless endeavor at first.

Up in the section of the fort I don't even care about anymore some dickhead makes a large gem out of green glass and decorates it with green glass gems and green glass rings. I feel like that sums this whole fort up. We should put it on a display stand outside so you can see it when you walk in, like "guess what we got in here."

I seriously can't fucking win dude

Gold, gems, magma, gold, gems, magma, gold, gems, magma it goes on and on forever.

More of these cunts, i don't care, drawbridge going up, drawbridge staying up. If you're in a hurry to step on a cage trap, then hurry up and do it already, otherwise go fuck yourselves and give Vakeek Malignreason my regards.

Welp so much for those fucking cunts wait hold on what the fuck is this

I've never seen this before. Is it about to happen? Am I almost there?

Do you fucking morons ever give it a rest I'm on the fucking precipice here

well the meat grinder awaits.

Oh not you guys too.

At least none of my own people are in danger here, but the Winged Voice left in a bad mood due to the drawbridge being up without considering why it might be up, and I don't like guests having to do our dirty work. There's such a thing as hospitality you know.

And honestly having to walk through this fucked up part of the trap hallway entrance is something I don't even want my kobbles to do.

Honestly whatever may as well get rid of these fucking pointless gems. Hopefully get some cloth and leather to give all the kobbles new clothes. It's not what I want.

But I don't know if I'm the kind of guy who can ever actually have what he wants.

[kobblefort]

Daarunbay Detevay 1

Before I finish up with Rushsly, I'd like to do something a little different and dig through Legends mode for a bit to see the ancient history of our world, Daarunbay Detevay, the Dimensions of Portent. I know it might seem kind of like a pacing killer to pull back right before the end, but I'm going to want to get into my next fortress after Rushsly right away, and this stuff will be relevant far beyond the peaceful retirement (or total destruction) of Rushsly.

Along with the in-game Legends mode, I'll be using Legends Browser 2 to navigate the fucking 4gb XML file that Dwarf Fortress spat out at me when I asked it to export all the legends information. Obviously, we're not going to go over everything, that just physically isn't possible. But trying to wrap up all these little events into a brief(-ish) history of the world interests me, so that's what we're going to do, and there's no better place to start than at the beginning of time.

Well, Dwarf Fortress does put some events before the calendar starts, just to make sure that you can have stuff like forgotten beasts and titans who aren't literal babies if you try to start the game at too early of a year. But as you can see, among the myriad births of many civilizations, there's us!!! The Comedy of Sweating, first led by Otsu Trailedspurted. And there's the very first kobblefort before any others: Landsswallow!

Otsu's accomplishments are... well, few. She fell for another girl right after setting out to Landsswallow - a stockkeeper named Dicr, and their relationship had a bump or two, but by the time they died, they seem to have patched it up. We can't even know how old she was when she died, due to so much of her life taking place before the recording of time, but we can learn about what killed her!

One of the first known forgotten beasts - Gronane Kupaanugos - Divedmenace the Evil Moistness - lmao - a great one-eyed chicken with a poisonous bite. The kobbles of Landsswallow were not hardy like the ones of Rushsly; one has to wonder if they ever even learned steelworking in their limited time on earth. The record of Divedmenace's life shows it facing almost no resistance, besides just two warriors who came to confront it.

It has been dormant since the year 80, but in addition to its fifty-four notable kills, it did away with sixty-three creatures. What happened to Landsswallow?

170 years after its tragic destruction, just around the time that Rushsly started, a few outcasts settled in its long-abandoned ruins. But let's go back to the early days.

If Landsswallow was the only fortress, we would have never been kobbles, and thus never have settled our kobblefort. There were two more, Plantershred and Phlegmsunders. How long did those last?

Plantershred, a hillocks that kept livestock and apparently ran quite a decent tavern which let in ratfolk and gnolls, made it a good 32 years before being destroyed by a single hill titan, a great humanoid made of coral with massive mandibles called Yssyushu Rocktufts. Their sacrifice was not in vain - the beast never fully recovered, and just two years later was defeated by another kobble. Also, I don't know where else to put this, but I really like how one guy tried to settle in the ruins of Plantershred and just got fucked up by a bronze colossus, not even the same hill titan, just some other overpowered bastard showed up to ruin his day.

But what of Phlegmsunders? Well, this might be exciting after those last two: Phlegmsunders still exists! Well, almost.

Though it survived agonizingly close to our own time, it was unfortunately taken over by a group of ratfolk necromancers, The Doomed Muds. Actually, 237 was a great year for the ratfolk, and thus a terrible one for us.

That's five entire settlements that were taken over by The Doomed Muds, all too recently, and thus explaining the modern hostilities between ratfolk and kobblekind - the wounds of war have barely even started to scab. The strangest thing about The Doomed Muds is that they are not even ruled by a ratfolk: their first leader was a Stella Elf named Tarus Orangerelief, and once she was captured and sealed away by a different group of ratfolk, ones who weren't quite as keen on necromancy, the position was changed over to a human necromancer, Ismir Glistenedclustered. And while evil is always evil, it's not always banal - the story of Tarus is an interesting one.

Once a humble soap maker, her first love was a nine-year affair, and her second was ten - this only seems to make sense, as her lifestyle seemed quite nomadic. In the midst of it, a strange vanity overtook her: one that made her feel she could not age, could not die, that it would not be acceptable. So she trained under a necromancer, changed her name, moved away and became a butcher - possibly so that she would have an ample stock of corpses to practice with - and took on her own apprentices, along with a third husband. She even wrote a book at one point to try and spread the necromantic arts!

Two years after she penned it, she began the string of vicious attacks that would greatly damage The Comedy of Sweating and kick off what came to be known as "The Fell War" - which continues to this very day. Speaking of wars...

Our first lasted 55 years, against a splinter group of kobble necromancers. Our second was the aforementioned Fell War, which continues to this day against the ratfolk necromancers. There was one war that lasted only a year and was in fact made up of only a single battle against the humans, with 86 casualties: The Squeezing War.

Just a few months after, they accepted a peace offering from the kobbles, but it only lasted 11 years before tensions flared up again. And as of just a couple years ago, we have been embroiled in The Conflict of Wars against a ratfolk civilization known as The Nightmare of Tunneling. They have been around as long as us, and changed warlords 21 times in that length. The current one, who menaces us now, is named Vakeek Malignreason.

Once a humble planter in a peaceful hillocks, at least when she was not out raiding and pillaging, Vakeek was standard-order rank-and-file cannon fodder, with something of a talent for bonding with her comrades. But as far back as 78 years ago, after already putting literal hundreds of battles beneath her, she began dreaming of taking an artifact for herself: The Conflagration of Sport, an iron spear made by a lapine 71 years before she made up her mind on it. Knowing how long it might take, she became obsessed with immortality in order to make sure she could not be stopped from her goal even by death.

For a time, she was even enslaved by a group of gnolls known as The Ace Seductions, and made to work as a butcher before apparently earning the privilege of working as a poet, authoring three poems before escaping to become a scout back with her kin, The Nightmare of Tunneling, taking a husband and finally settling in the NoT hillocks Shockedhate after blowing her cover as a necromancer once more in Plaguejuices. For twelve years after that, though she was nominally a "gelder" at home, all she did was fight. Joining and eventually leading assaults, sometimes upon the same place over and over until the ratfolk could finally take it, she was finally crowned warlord in 241 and settled in the fortress of Towermaligned. Her life since then has been nothing but battle and training, and no doubt she has some hand in the many ratfolk attacks Rushsly must weather, along with the many other Comedy of Sweating outposts, towns and fortresses. The martial nature of Rushsly is no outlier to the world, especially not The Hill of Scars where all these warring factions live, but is simply a reaction to it; an extension of it.

What does all this mean? Well, nothing, really, but nothing "means" anything. All of this is just a series of random "events" generated by a computer with no real rhyme or reason besides a certain pre-programmed internal logic to what can and can't happen. Without someone to interpret it, it is literally just garbage data, and it has taken me the much better part of the evening just to scry even this little bit of meaning from the four gigabytes of literally just words that were generated so that I could play a funny little computer game.

But when you do play that funny little computer game you get to imbue the garbage data with meaning. Our pattern-seeking human brains find narratives and extract stories from the endless spaghetti of code. We learn things that were never actually taught and understand things that never actually made any sense because that's what we like to do. Life is also a bunch of random shit happening with no real consistent logic to it besides certain rules we know as "physics" or "causality" that are so iron-clad they may as well be computer code too. In our time alive we can only ever really be one person, or well, only ever inhabit one body, and so the easiest way to pull out strands of meaning from the swirling ramen broth of the universe is by focusing on characters.

We can try to see things through Alsrta Moltenend's eyes, a vagrant who had the job of caravan voice randomly thrust upon her as a matter of convenience, whose only real material contribution to the world was a nice wooden bin, whose eldest son was killed by a were-beaver, who tried to have a random kobble put to death for not making anvils or necklaces or whatever for her fast enough.

We could look at it with the perspective of Zhasrca Foldcounselled, an otherwise completely unremarkable miner besides the fact that he is one of the only Yekal worshippers in Rushsly.

After all, his life just might be about to get vastly more interesting.

[kobblefort]

Rushsly: Almost The Bottom 2

ENDGAME SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT... MAYBE. THEY DIDN'T REALLY HAPPEN LAST TIME. BUT THEY COULD HAPPEN THIS TIME! YOU NEVER KNOW!

-116 is stripped for gold, but reveals no more. The project must be paused again - flux stones are needed to continue steel production, so a big random chunk of dolomite is carved out. Migrants arrive, but only a few, bringing our population from 108 before the siege to 115. Perhaps they heard what we're about to do. Maybe they just heard how much our fortress is flourishing.

Indeed, they are just enough to tip us over from being a "town" to a "city," and our wealth must be known all over the Hill of Scars - maybe even all across the Land of Nails.

One must wonder if they know of the beasts lurking in the depths, if they hear of the ratfolk pitifully sending handfuls of themselves to die against our walls, of the potential doom we flirt with at the bottom of the earth.

The child Sraraz Jokedknit is taken by an unknown force, and at just the same time we can hear Kerrik Perplexnightmares doing battle with our old buddies, the olm men.

And just like that, the beast is dead. It seems like prudent timing to make sure the first cavern layer is absolutely, completely walled off.

Yes, I'm hesitating, I know I'm hesitating, I always hesitate, I know jumping into the water makes it way easier to adjust to the temperature than slowly dipping in one part at a time, I know I have to just dig straight down already, but that doesn't mean I'll do it, not without a fuss, not without dragging my feet and trying to talk myself out of it.

Sraraz's artifact is Sorudrzl - Bustkindled - hey yeah I'm into busts kindling - sorry - and it's worth a whopping 22900 whatever-the-units-of-value are. Half of that number is of particular personal value to me for reasons I am not about to disclose but just know that I feel even more nervous and unsettled. But I've wasted enough time, and I'm not a superstitious man; we'll dig, damnit, deeper still, and deepe

Are you fucking kidding me man??? From the southern plains a fucking big-ass minotaur comes. I somehow doubt that it "seeks harmony" and it's time to draw up the bridge real fucking quick. By "seeking harmony" do you mean like "not having anyone left to have problems with?" If you wanna talk we can talk with us in here and you out there otherwise yeah we're not gonna talk. Bridge up doors shut everybody in - hey we might finally get to try that magma trap from literally years ago though, that could be cool.

Her first order of business is attacking the random aardvark we had lazing around outside the fort. I don't even want to post the combat logs, it was brutal, it was not quick, but it served to show us that she's fucking mean and fucking fast. Next she literally charges down a leopard and... like...

This shit is fucked up dude. She's not getting any closer to the base, but seeing the shit she does makes me think maybe it's time we test out our catapults. Remember those??? Will they even work????? One way to find out!!!

The first volley misses by a mile, but at least the sight of boulders flying through the air scares her up into some trees. Well, for a moment, anyways.

Investigating her "Military" tab shows a history of violence that apparently only started once she was 169 years old: hard year, I guess, but no reason to take it out on us or our random little wildlife creatures. She's been hiding in the trees for a while, and though the catapults are good at scaring her, it's just not possible to hit her from our position. The marksbolds will be stationed up on the turrets above the drawbridge (safely behind the drawbridge) but they probably won't be able to land any shots from there either. It's a total standstill.

This fucker shows up on the second cavern layer? Honestly who fucking cares?? Like we're so fucking busy??? We don't even go down there but we literally have this asshole up a tree blocking our access to the entire outside world???? Well, we're going to try and bait the minotaur up top into a bad position. Whether that puts us in a bad position... I dunno. We'll fucking see.

The plan is to send the one kobble in the worst possible mood of the fortress to bait it into the lava trap, and unfortunately, that'd be Zil. Despite having a pretty great time of things by its own admission, it has failed to grow close with any of its squadmates and teeters on the edge of a total psychological meltdown. So like, you know, if it dies... well...

Well we're not going to find out I guess!? Saraz Fishedpraise, an unproven wrestler fucking charges out to yank it down from the tree with his spear, stabbing it in the fucking gut - then the lung, then through the hand so cleanly it tears not just muscle but ligament and nerves. But...

well, do you see that "puddle"

It's actually pretty fucking deep, and Saraz gets thrown right down it after losing control of the battle. As the minotaur charges down the hole she saw the kobold come from...

...the thing I was planning to use Zil Dentedleaks for happens. A truly fearsome foe, but once again, not even past the first row of traps. I genuinely don't think I'll use cage traps in my next fort lol they're so fucking overpowered. I know forgotten beasts and werebeasts can't trigger them but fuck dude, a whole-ass minotaur? Well, at least now we get to throw her down a hole and she dies. A bit anti-climactic but... that's Rushsly for you I guess. Time to recover Saraz's body.

Ty is on cleanup duty again, hauling the 602-weight minotaur cage, almost five times the weight of a boulder of jet, to the garbage hole, where if she does not die immediately on impact, she will eventually be killed. She just thinks: "I feel alright."

I deduced from the location of a gem-studded pillar of obsidian in the second cavern layer where we might be more likely to find what we're looking for - maybe.

But when we get there, it's nothing. The tunnel is rerouted for a bit before I ultimately decide we'll dig one more Z-level down.

Mica. Cobaltite, bismuth, granite. Galena, worthless goddamn galena again; silver is "consolation gold." Could it be one layer deeper, just one? 118, a nice, happy number. It would have been nicer if it was 117, like John Halo. 118, right? 118?

118. Here we go.

I can smell it, man.

This alert makes me nearly jump out of my fucking skin. Cool, man. "The Goldenrod Raven." Why are you even still using iron? Whatever. That's great. We're almost there. Whereever we're getting, we're almost there. Granite, microcline, prase, we have to be close. Cassiterite, for fuck's sakes, it has to be here. Was it "adamantine" this whole time? Have I been reading it "adamantite" the whole time, saying "adamantite" this whole fucking time? Seeing the name every single time I go to punch in a work order and just misreading it every single time?? Where did I get "adamantite" from if it's always been "adamantine???"??? ??? ?????

A gnoll right now are you fucking kidding me???????

A gnoll army right now are you fucking kidding me!?!?!? Well, at least I forgot to lower the drawbridge after the minotaur attack. But seriously? Gnolls? Right fucking now???

One of them walks directly and immediately into a cage trap. The next one stands back and frets about, realizing the entrance is full of traps. A third one charges right past them and dodges an iron disc trap to jam themselves right into another cage trap. Two more nervously fret about the trees, no doubt psyching themselves up to get into the fortress and wreak some havoc, then they just walk straight into the cage traps. One more runs off the map, possibly to finally make the smart idea of going home and saying "We should not go to Rushsly, they have cage traps" - and the one fretting around just outside the cage traps without warning their friends about the cage traps finally leaves with them. Well, that's good.

And as the gnoll madness and my own random little bout of madness starts to break, we get visitors. Our old pals the dwarves. We put the bridge down for them but they insist on coming around the long way. Well guys welcome in welcome in. Just make sure you be good and careful of those fucking cage traps

[kobblefort]

Rushsly: Almost The Bottom

SPOILERS FOR ENDGAME CONTENT UNDER THE CUT.

Two miners into the depths: Zhasrca Foldcounselled and Nucra Framegarnishes.

Doors shut firmly behind them. I can't think of a worse omen than Nucra fondly remembering a conversation with his wife.

Up on the surface, a single thief is spotted approaching the fortress. Why now?

Cire Osokcat is caught by them as he heads out to dump some trash, but they breeze right past him... and he decides right then "I'm going to go fishing." Right after the drawbridge lever was pulled. I draft him into the military just so that I can specifically force him to move off the bridge in the vain hopes that he isn't caught in the mechanisms and lost.

He ignores the order, but fortunately runs off the bridge to chase one of the ratfolk down. Like an idiot trying to beat a train through a crossing so he can get to Joe's Crab Shack but ironically being saved by having some kind of road rage incident. Did you have to do this now, Cire!?!?!? The bridge is up, the ratfolk who made it in are targeted, and the one outside the base will hopefully walk right into our traps any second now.

The miners are literally still at work down at -116, cracking through gold vein after gold vein. The earth truly does run rich down here. Maybe this will all turn out completely fine. Maybe Rushsly will be the most grossly wealthy fort of all kobblekind.

Due to the fact that no scouts ever survived to come back and tell the ratfolk "hey don't go into the big-ass animal den," one of the thieves walks straight into the animal den.

It takes Ace Steel just a single swing to split one of the ratfolk's heads open.

His compatriot can only give a few seconds more of chase before being literally chopped in half by the swordmaster Shycla Zhizorsa.

The one who ran into the den is torn apart by the dogs before finally being finished off by a giant rattlesnake. The drawbridge is lowered once more so that the military might set upon the final thief.

Though he tries to run home, possibly to give the advice of "we really need to stop fucking with Rushsly," Ace Steel is faster, angrier, deadlier. Chopping off his arm, smashing his nose, knocking out his teeth, before one stab in the leg from Sheslas Spurnspread's dagger leads him to just plain run out of blood. And just like that, it's time to clean up. A waste of time, but an amusing one. The poor bastards, our constant enemies, fated to never even know what's below the surface of our fort. They have no idea of what we're on the precipice of, they wouldn't understand if they did. In another world, I feel bad for them, have sympathy for their plight, maybe even like them; in this one, I just want them out of our way. Adamantite will be ours.

But god damnit, the bastards are so fucking persistent!! Taking no heed of their scouts' inevitable demise, after however many fucking raids they've already sent and failed, they spring another ambush upon us.

Susle, a potash maker (which is a job that actually matters in my fort for the first time since I started playing the game) is shot twice, once in the rib and once in the knee, but almost manages to evade his pursuer...

until he decides not to run straight in through the trapped entrance, and instead try to flee out into the woods.

By the time the kobbles start actually taking heed of the civilian alert, more of them are wounded. Ilzi Dwelltube, a clothier who must have been one of our newest arrivals, similarly just tried to run around between the trees instead of getting to safety just a few tiles away, and takes eight fucking bolts for his trouble before making it past where the ratfolk can pursue him.

Susle tries to crawl to safety, fighting so hard, harder than any kobble ever should, but...

It's no use. Susle does not live to see adamantite, and the ratfolk who took it from him just saunter around outside all self-satisfied over finally getting a single win over the kobbles. One of them wanders off, three more just kind of loiter.

We get our first beast from the third cavern layer, but it's not like it can get in, nobody even goes near the fortifications that peer into the third cavern, who gives a shit. Well, the least we can do is put down the three fucking rat bastards that remain before they can dare to get home to their shit-encrusted little hole in the ground and brag, and so our own militia are sent out through the long trap tunnel to put them down.

Arm cut open, head cut off.

The crossbow bolts that are not outright parried are still effortlessly blocked, bouncing hopelessly off the kobbles' heavy steel armor. Another head lopped off. Go for a hat trick?

Three heads. Yeah motherfucker. Hat trick. We'll do one big patrol of the entire map before sounding the all-clear and letting Susle be buried.

After a quick sweep, there's no more rats in sight. The corpses will just be left out there in hopes of being understood as a warning: see how far their heads landed from their bodies? That could be you. But it hurts to see Susle go, and on the subject of hurting...

Six scars now mark the poor clothier. He's fixed up well enough, but it's doubtless he'll be able to walk without a crutch again.

Cire, the doctor who is still erroneously listed as "guard captain," fares a bit better, though there's never anything good about a skull fracture, just things that could be worse about a skull fracture. He prays to Tulrac Dungsgalls, the god of death, disease, and deformity. Hey I like some triple D's myself you know what I mean heh heh ohhh yeaaah sorry. Just trying to add some levity to the situation I guess. One has to wonder if it is Tulrac's influence that will win over this fortress, or Dasël's - the god of rain and rainbows. I fear we are headed for death, though it would be nice if we didn't.

Before you ask, I didn't leave the miners trapped in the shaft this whole time - right as the ambush kicked off, I let them out to hang back and sit on standby with some drinks and snacks. They say you should basically never fight a war on two fronts - I don't know who says that, maybe nobody actually says that because it's obvious, and it's actually just the sort of wisdom you get clued in on by absorbing all sorts of other wisdom and hearing all sorts of other things, I don't know. Because sometimes someone will be like "They say blah blah blah" but then nobody actually says blah blah blah, it's not like a quote from someone, it's literally just them putting "common sense" into words. And on that note I've always thought "common sense" was bullshit. "Common sense" just means you made an assumption that ended up being proven right, and people who talk a lot about how "nobody has anyone common sense" tend to actually just be making a bunch of assumptions and putting themselves into a feedback loop of thinking well my assumptions were right before so they're obviously going to be right this time too. And I mean it's not actually hard to see how people get like that anymore, because nowadays media and journalism and all that shit is more about validation than verification. And that goes for everyone on every part of the political spectrum, I probably get my brain blasted just as bad being a Mao-appreciating-but-otherwise-agnostic anarcho-communist as like, your average small-business-tyrant Fox News conservative does. There's hardly ever any real investigations, that shit doesn't make money and nobody wants to fucking hear it when you tell them that thing they thought was wrong, they just don't, nobody in the entire world likes that besides the very small percentage of people so deeply committed to science or competition or whatever else that they can literally just shove their ego out of the way, that's only like 3% of people and they're busy winning fucking Super Smash Bros. Melee tournaments or fucking around with electron microscopes. Another good way to blast your fucking ego out of here is with psychedelic drugs like acid or mushrooms but as a big fan of both I gotta say doing acid makes it very hard to write. Anyway

Finally lifting Susle's lifeless body from the shade of a great citron tree, Ty Lovelyseduce finally carries him to his final resting place in a green glass coffin, just like the other kobbles we've lost. He will never see what comes next to Rushsly, whether riches or ruin, put suddenly to his final sleep just days before the world would change. But her thoughts as she lays him down are not of dread, fear, or pain. They're of optimism.

Adamantite is the perfect material: it can make near anything, from armor to clothes, from weapons to coins, light enough to dance in yet strong enough to protect - if the rumors are true, at least. And the promised days must be close, now, they have to be. Golden days of wealth and fame, where kobbles can live without fear of bolt or blade.

The earth must surely relent soon.

[kobblefort]

Rushsly: Final Preparations

Even if the "endgame" spoilers don't start in this episode, they are going to be talked about at length from this point on.

This is your last warning: if you want to find out what's at the very bottom of the world for yourself, do not read beyond this point until you have.

There are other valid reasons not to read this Let's Play, such as "thinking the author is a narcissistic maniac who spends more time trying to do bootleg therapy on themself than the actual game," or "being a bit weirded out by the whole kobold thing," or "just not wanting to read a novel-length stream-of-consciousness psychodramatic diatribe that is sometimes vaguely about a digital ant-farm." But I care far more about preserving the wonders of this game for the people who enjoy it than I ever will about appealing to the particularities of anyone who is already inclined to dislike me or my work, so one more time, endgame spoilers are just one click away here. If you want to see the bottom yourself, you should dig to the bottom yourself. If you like playing the game, I think it is something worth doing at least once. This will be my first time playing this content, but not my first time seeing it, and I kind of wish it was. Spoilers under the cut.

I guess I should apologize for how I ended the last episode. I had been feeling very weird and worked myself up acting like nothing had ever gone right for me. I'm feeling better now. I played a bit of the new Zelda game like everyone else - well actually I played it a bit before it released too, because I think Nintendo is evil and that pirating their games, even leaked ones, is ontologically good - that I refuse to financially support them by buying their products firsthand, even if I must get kind of a shitty 15-24fps version of the experience. I make no argument that their games are not good and fun and well-designed but I think many of their corporate practices are basically inexcusable, litigating a man into lifelong indentured servitude is some shit a pastor would make up a story about the devil doing, having a crack team of prosecutors called "Nintendo Ninjas" isn't cute or funny, it is inexcusably vile bullshit that speaks volumes about what kind of world we've built ourselves to live in, where our modern myths and fables are Intellectual Properties and Trademarks. I have been making lots of contraptions, none that particularly measure up to what you might have seen on the internet - some of them embarrassingly being made obsolete by the game's own built-in schematics just minutes after I finished devising them. I have also not been barbecuing the koroks or shooting them with lasers or blasting them off on rockets or anything like that. They are cute and funny little dudes and I have no particular interest in seeing them suffer. I read an article a while ago about how phenomena like the widespread Korok crucifixions are caused by the same sort of psychological response as how you kind of just want to bite things that are obscenely cute, because our human brains don't really know how to deal with the feeling of "this thing is too cute." At least, I imagine they have to be similar responses going on there.

Kerrik Perplexnightmares appears in the first cavern layer - clearly named by the ratfolk. It almost brings a smile to my face to think of it mauling the rat-bastards that so frequently besiege us, but just as soon it brings a frown to think about how its "deadly dust" might be able to slip through our fortifications. Fiva is also still fucking around on the second cavern layer, apparently still seriously wounded from its battle with the ant people; speaking of which, checking the "Creatures>Others" tab displays none of them, but none of them appear under "Dead/Missing" either. Whether they went back into hiding for another ambush, fled the caverns beneath Rushsly entirely, or were so thoroughly dismembered that whatever remains of them would not be recognizable as ever belonging to a sentient being is currently unknown, though the second option seems most likely and the third seems least likely. They did appear from the western-most edge of the second cavern, they could have just as easily left that way.

Its ability to stand and ability to grasp are apparently "somewhat impaired", and funnily enough, checking the "Treatment" tab lets us know that it needs diagnosis and a crutch. The only way the kobbles are giving the poor lobster bastard a crutch is by mauling it with one. Rushsly has truly become a violent fort, and I'll need to start designating a third military squadron as soon as this last window into the final cavern layer is completed. Which, in the tireless toil of kobble industry, it is.

We can see most all of it besides the northeastern corner, and still not a fucking trace of magma. If it does exist, it will be at the very bottom of the world.

Our newest crop of migrants brought with them quite a lot of kobbles who were already adequate in some form of fighting or another, if not competent or even accomplished. With 211 steel bars in reserve, and a whopping 1475 iron bars and 61 bricks of coke (not the kind that makes you scheme to start a massive Wal-Mart return-scam scheme that spans four states, lasts for six years and results in a net profit of over 868,000 dollars - the cool kind) in case we run through that, outfitting them is only a question of time, not resources. And yes, Kody wanted to call them "The Frigid Knots." Go ahead, make your furry porn jokes. But for what it's worth? I'm anti-knot. I'm anti basically any "animal style genitalia" besides hyena girls with huge dicks or like, shark furries with double dicks, but they should still be recognizably human. I guess maybe a little frond here or a little flaring there is fine but I don't know, don't get carried away man. Like you know when you see one of those artists who just draws dicks as little red or pink triangles? I can't stand that. And hell while we're at it, no feral shit for me either. I'm in this furry shit for definitively humanoid bitches with some animal aesthetics I'm not trying to jack off to an actual dog dick, that's gross to me. I'm not a cop but I'm allowed to be grossed out. Us old bastards call that "squicked." I'm allowed to be squicked. You can go back over my earlier posts for evidence of my arguably "weirder" fetishes if you want but I'm not going to give a shit because weird is subjective and I think you can obviously tell just from this paragraph alone that I'm kind of unconcerned with joining any sort of larger consensus on "normality." I've got my own "normality" going on and it works for me. I am incredibly normal: I am, after all, the average of all my traits.

The mine shaft that will lead us to glorious adamantite starts right here, just outside The Curled Pepper, but it won't start going too deep without some serious fortifications and a contingency plan in case we dig right into the final layer instead of hitting an adamantite vein. I have a plan for safely digging out the adamantite - as safely as one can dig out adamantite anyway - but before that step can begin, I want steel hatch covers and a backup set of steel doors in place. Though I'm completely prepared for Rushsly to fall on an emotional level, I would like that to simply not happen - being able to retire the fort once I feel I've had as much fun with it as I'm going to have would be a blessing. And what do we have to lose, should I carelessly fuck up?

Well, for starters, I haven't even begun on Dralas' Beast Slayer quarters lol fuck whoops!! Not that he's discontent with his four-tile chamber in the awkward set of bedrooms that I have been going out of my way to show because I hate them. And what sort of things go on in Dralas' life? Well, of his many passing acquaintances, being not even particularly close to other members of his squadron, he has made a friend:

Gatr Leagueknowing - Maybe he should know a better fucking game, LOL!!! Why are you playing an RTS where you only get to control one guy!?! Sorry - the Holy Fish of the Goldenrod Creed, who leads ceremonies in the Pale Chapel, actually has many friends, perhaps as a result of his liturgical duties, but...

He himself only considers Dralas a "passing acquaintance." Ouch

But there's not too much time to ponder the minutiae of kobbles' social lives - a third Forgotten Beast appears, this one joining Fiva on the second cavern layer. Wow, an eyeless lizard and an eyeless lobster. They're so similar I'm a bit worried they're going to fuck instead of fight.

But no lol obviously they fight. They fight hard, they fight fast, and then it's over. One must wonder how it would have turned out if Fiva managed to recover from its scuffle with the ant people, but that's not what happened. Ancoji Necroshafts the Fated (holy shit) escapes with a single bruise on its rear right foot. Fiva is the one I made that badass little intro graphic for, isn't it? Sorry to see you go out like that, Fiva, though I wonder if this might be a little more honorable than getting sniped through some fortifications by a kobble who doesn't even care about doing the deed. The 462-year-old lizard scratches right through the lobster's brain and it's all over.

All the way up top-side I notice these rabbit merchants and their guard have just been... stuck chilling in the trade depot for at least a month after their supposed departure. I pull up and then pull down the drawbridge to try and reset their pathfinding, I run dfhack fix/stuck-merchants a couple times, no dice. Also right after doing that I find out you're not actually supposed to run fix/stuck-merchants when you have merchants on the map, but ahh whoops I dunno, live and learn I guess. I should really read command descriptions before I make assumptions based on their name but to be fair like when merchants are stuck on your screen it really feels like that's what the command "fix/stuck-merchants" is for, how would I even actually know if merchants are stuck off my map? Well I really don't know what to do about that. It would be funny to just fucking kill them but they're cute little bunny people and I need to be minimizing the amount of enemies I have at any given time if I want to survive the dig for adamantite.

We commission Agcu Riu: "the Fall of Beaks" for Dralas' bedroom. It doesn't look like we'll be able to find aluminum any time soon, but one with iron walls, billon floors and a gold "welcome mat" seems more than well-appointed enough.

Our Hammer Lord On decides to name her shield "The Confusing Famine." I kind of wish she'd grown attached to a steel one instead, but I suppose the tools you're comfortable with are always better than the more expensive, flashier ones. Right? Well I don't know because steel is literally stronger than iron, but oh well. This is the second object a soldier has named, after Ace Steel's steel battleaxe "Styletongues." Looks like things are going well for them, and they'll soon have company in their barracks: even though no training orders have actually been given yet, some members of The Frigid Knots have already grown antsy enough to pick out their weapons and armor.

Quite a few masterworks have been created in the new batch of weapons, and checking who made them makes me realize that Orml really ought to be appointed to the military: she's a legendary fighter, legendary observer, and master spearbold after all. The Frigid Knots will do well to have a master among them to learn from; it should hopefully bring the less skilled of the group up to speed a bit faster.

Ancoji has been sitting perfectly still this whole time after finishing off Fiva. Up on the first cavern layer, Kerrik just slowly swims around. Menacingly... as menacingly as a giant frog can get.

Training finally begins for TFK.

The final shaft is almost ready. A tight security protocol will be enforced whenever any adamantite mining operations are going on. The outer steel doors, inner steel doors, hatch covers on Z-90 and hatch covers on Z-91 will all be sealed for the entire length of time that a mining team is in the shaft. This is to buy a construction team enough time to wall off the shaft entirely if it becomes necessary. As I've already stated, if we break through at the wrong spot, we have a matter of single frames to react accordingly, and two or three miners' lives are, unfortunately, a fair trade to keep the other 100+ kobbles safe from the possibility sudden violent and painful death. In the event that we are not able to seal off the bottom layer for any reason, we will have no choice but to draw up the above-ground and below-ground bridges to cut off access between Rushsly and the greater world entirely. What we find down there could literally doom the entire Dimensions of Portent if we do not immediately take the proper cautions to contain it. Maybe I'm being overdramatic. Maybe I'll wish I was even more dramatic later. All I can know for sure is the general gist of what lies at the bottom of the earth, and how dangerous it can be. -114 is the deepest depth of the pools in the third and final cavern layer. From -115 to -129, anything could happen. Vast and impossible riches guarded by incredible beasts. An ocean of magma to spew forth, a relatively painless and uneventful adamantite-and-diamonds mining experience.

In interest of not taking for-fucking-ever and having the group awkwardly split up, miners will be moved to these admittedly quite shit barracks on -90, and the burrow system will be used to keep them from fucking off all the way up to near the surface until such a time as the final layers are exhausted. The marksbold squad are training hard just below The Curled Pepper, ready as they'll ever be for whatever comes next.

Through me you enter into the city of woes; through me you enter into eternal pain, through me you enter the population of loss. Abandon all hope, you who enter here. "Inferno" is actually very funny for a lot of different reasons, but that quote still goes hard as fuck, you can't not like it. I know this has been kind of a shorter episode, maybe you're glad about that, but this seems like a good place to cut it. I want to have as much room as possible to let whatever might transpire next breathe.

[kobblefort]

Rushsly: Second Cavern Arc 3

The truth is that I am unimaginably empty.

Not just hollow, but in fact, a vacuum. An impossibly intense absence of pressure exists at my core, a black hole that exists simply to suck up anything and everything that comes too close, and the rest of me is simply a series of mechanisms to fruitlessly attempt to fill it. I have no other true direction besides to seek ever more food, more drinks, louder music, stronger alcohol, harder drugs, funner games, endlessly more furry porn with bigger and bigger breasts and cocks overflowing with oceans of cum and milk. At times I am made nauseous by it, so bloated and gravid with garbage that I vomit, and yet even when I have taken too much, eaten too much, done too much, I am not full. I must simply lie on my side and wait for the pain of overconsumption to pass before I just consume some more.

The idea that I was ever a child frequently makes me laugh. Of all the dull and blurry memories of youth, I will always remember one in particular: my parents had put me to bed when I was still very small, just barely graduated from a crib. There was a "toy plane" in my room, or at least a kind of seat that was more-or-less shaped like one. Not tired at all, I climbed from my little bed, sat down in "the pilot's seat," and I just sat there all night, imagining I was flying, daydreaming adventures whose specifics have long since left me, but which no doubt involved Sonic and Tails and Knuckles and Bomberman and whatever other copyrighted-intellectual-property imaginary friends came to visit the mind of a sheltered child. I just sat there alone in an empty room, imagining, until the sun had come up and my parents came to wake me. They figured I had woken up early, and for no reason in particular I decided not to tell them I hadn't slept at all. So many years have passed since that innocuous night, and with each one it feels more and more impossible to imagine that I was ever a child, much less one that could be so completely satisfied to spend an entire night in his own imagination. A high-twenty-something number of years later, I have been smoking cigarettes for a greater amount of time than had passed before I ever took my first drag. If I were to start recounting my drunken, drugged and dumbfucked adventures, we would probably never get back to talking about the greatest simulation game of all time, Dwarf Fortress.

And we will return to the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress in just one moment more, but for now, I suppose I want some kind of absolution. Even though this writing is entirely anonymous besides being shared with a few deeply trusted friends who already know all this shit about me, and will leave no mark on my real flesh-and-blood life or the vast majority of my other online parlances, I wanted to say it. In a way, maybe this is how I can start to come to terms with it. I am an empty vessel, I am a gaping void, I am a vampire. Shapeless, formless, an elemental hunger, an unquenchable thirst. The obsession I call "love" is nothing more than an overwhelming desire to be classified, objectified, given shape, given form. And when it inevitably breaks down, when the black hole at my core sucks so hard that the ad-hoc structure of a "self" we made collapses, there is nothing left but to devour my lover like everyone else. Hey maybe that's where the vore fixation comes from!

I don't know what to do about any of that deep personal shit, but sometimes I feel like I know what to do in the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress. And what I know now is that it takes the miners, smoothers and fortification-carvers an unruly amount of time to get down to the third cavern layer, so I've decided to start moving the base down into the depths. The kobbles will be availed of a third tavern (though admittedly, the failed arena one never quite caught on) along with some other amenities to try and corral them closer to the depths. Nobody likes a long commute, after all, especially when you don't even get paid, you just get fucked over after spending 2 entire hours hauling your ass across the entire city and some change and have to spend two-and-a-half more to get back to your empty fucking apartment where you're still broke and you can't pay your bills.

The kobbles are far from broke, and Shumros Cer brought us an absolute embarrassment of leathers - we probably asked for that, I don't know, I forgot. In the interest of being diplomatic we buy way more of it than we could ever actually want or need, in exchange for gold and platinum crafts by the boxful.

The Stella Elves bring a large assortment of clothes, along with quite a decent amount of literature. These would be interesting in another fortress, but literacy has never been of much import to the kobbles. Clothes and booze are nice no matter who you are, however, and are bought for just a fistful of gems.

The Nillians bring some kind of glitch I think - I don't really care lol, just looks funny. But they also bring an impressive assortment of steel tools, weapons and armor, and of course more booze. A box of gold and platinum nonsense will send them happily on their way.

Down in the second cavern seems like a good place for our new tavern. Fiva the Abyss of Crevices keeps creeping around, but with no way in, the lobster has nothing to do but wait for some dumber, less cautious creature to blast with its poisonous gas.

While not even training, Ace Steel decides she really, really likes a steel battleaxe she got her claws on lately, and names it Silrurvy: "Styletongues." Tongue style??? It's tail time????? Gex the Gecko getting his pussy ate????????

"The Curled Pepper" is established - and populated, with an almost uncharacteristic quickness. Provided the kobbles actually choose to congregate here more often, rather than all the way up in The Permanent Snack, it should significantly cut down on the time it takes to map out the final cavern layer.

This dumb fucking glassblower goes into a strange mood and starts requesting a bunch of shit we already have tons of I don't know what you want!! Leather, got it! Forest, we have tons of wood! Glass??? Look the fuck around you!!! A quarry? What do we even have besides stones?? Shining bars of metal?? How does 1417 iron 56 gold 135 zinc 193 steel 27 pig iron 75 platinum 40 tin and 624 billon sound to you??? Not good for some fucking reason?? Then I don't know. Just die, I guess. Just go insane and die. I consider "cask of Amontillado'ing her ass."

I do, in fact, "cask of Amontillado her ass." At least, until I realize by "glass" she means she literally wants a piece of raw green glass. That should have been obvious to me in retrospect. Sorry I almost killed you over a minor inconvenience, lol!!! In the real world this would be analogous to if you were "a bicyclist just trying to get to your shitty miserable kitchen job alive" and I was "an SUV driver trying to absolutely maximize his time at TGI Fridays happy hour." Does that feel good to think about??? Actually the closest I've ever come to being outright killed on my bike was by a Tesla literally clipping me with their mirror. It was not a narrow road or anything, the driver was just a fucking moron. (This was in like 2014 where you still had to be kind of astute to realize how fucking stupid Elon Musk was, he hadn't posted himself into an embarrassing grave yet.) I still think the irony of a Tesla driver almost killing a bicyclist is really funny. "Yeah I drive an Electric car so I'm helping an environment! Nevermind how many entire ecosystems have been bulldozed to put up cloverleaf interchanges! Don't think about where the electricity for these batteries actually comes from! Don't think about what kind of insanely unsustainable industrial processes are required to make just one of these exploding-battery pieces of shit! I'm helping because I bought the right thing! Now quit hogging the bike lane, I'm trying to be environmentally friendly over here!" I hope whoever that guy was killed himself. Actually, I hope he failed to kill himself. I hope he shot himself but didn't really stick the landing. ANYWAY, as Ty Lovelyseduce chips away at her artifact, the year 255 suddenly begins, starting our sixth year in Rushsly.

The bird towers spot a gnoll thief, but we're not falling for the same trick twice. We pull up the drawbridge, wait a while, and...

So much for that guy. We'll wait a while yet to see if he brought any friends, but if there is another ambush, they're playing it a bit smarter this time themselves.

Acl himself comes up to haul the gnoll into the dungeon, satisfied with simple work as always and letting himself drift through his memories. Hell yeah. That's our wyrm. That's my mother fucking guy that's my fucking dude bro hell yeah bro dude fuck yes. That's my mother fucking dude

"Embraceallied the Wet Zeal" exists now, I guess. Ciri Snarlspurns is not from our fort, and I still don't feel like busting open Legends mode, but it seems a little weird for this artifact to be dedicated to someone Ty doesn't even know just becoming an apprentice trapper. That's not a very impressive job or anything. I mean, like, cool, but just an apprentice? Maybe this is the beginning of some kind of tragic story I'll never know.

Two kobbles reach the absolute worst possible mood, and two more hover just above it. The military kobbles I can at least mitigate by setting them back to training - that always seems to help them blow off steam, and the winter is over after all - I don't really know what to do about Zhag but I've decided to just not worry about it and accept whatever disaster comes of that decision.

The marksbold squad are finally getting their own barracks just below the deep tavern. It'd be quite nice if they managed to pop some shots off at Fiva, but I don't want to keep stationing them and un-stationing them all the time, so this seems more efficient than whatever other solution.

Some lapines come over to tell Acl how nice our fortress is and some random rumors I'm not going to check for a long long time, if I ever do at all.

Oh fuck, ant people!!!

They have no business with us, but they absolutely fucking blast Fiva, who retreats underwater to the edge of the map. Hopefully those two problems sort each other out in one way or another.

A new wave of migrants brings us from 88 to 108 kobbles, and a decent amount of them might not actually be useless. Most of them will probably get assimilated into the military sooner than later - this is an adamantite or bust fortress, and I don't feel like busting right now.

More of the final cavern layer is finally revealed. And I'm just gonna say it I do not feel bad about dfhack'ing in those magma pits at all. -110 out of -129 and no fucking magma in sight, as if getting it up 127 Z-levels would be even remotely feasible. Well, it would be feasible, anything is feasible, but there is only a certain level of misery I can accept while playing a video game. That's kind of the point, right. In real life, the misery just never stops, and you don't get to choose the level you're willing to face. You can't tell the girl who keeps trying to bend you to stop before she breaks you in half. You can't tell your mom to stop ripping the curls right out of your hair with a narrow-toothed comb because she doesn't understand how curly hair works or how you're supposed to treat it. Now you're a white kid with a "jew-'fro" for the rest of your entire educational career! You look in the mirror and you feel fucking embarrassed at looking like a sad, fat clown and everyone calls you "Superbad" because you look like Jonah Hill AND Seth Rogen. In a video game you can go back with what you learned from failing before. But in real life most of your mistakes or spots of bad luck or bad things that happened to you don't actually have the kind of purpose that "dying in Dark Souls" has, there's nothing to actually learn from them and no meaningful way to adjust your behavior. Damn, yeah, I shouldn't have dropped out of high school - Guess I'll keep that in mind for the next time I'm in high school!!! But I guess that's a selfish way to look at it. Sure, I can't do any more about myself, but a basically infinite amount of people will come after me. Maybe that's why I'm supposed to write after all, even if it will never satisfy me. Sure I'll never be able to go back and fix my own life, but if someone ever tells me "I'm thinking of dropping out of high school" I can tell them all about cuts and burns and nerve damage and crying in a walk-in freezer - tell them "if you think 'student loan debt' is bad, wait until you have to work at a fucking White Castle and end up literally maiming yourself just to afford fifteen square-feet in a four-bedroom one-bathroom apartment while entitled rich boomers try to make up their mind on whether you should be a slave, homeless, or just straight up killed, despite the fact that they need people like you to feed them 3 times a day." Good things happen to other people. Everything can go right for you and everyone can like you and you get to make thousands and thousands of dollars off webcomic music and then nothing ever stops you from getting to make your videogame and you never sleep outdoors and you never eat out of a dumpster and you never try to figure out which bills you can put off and for how long. But most people's lives aren't so magical and I guess people like me exist to inspire people like you, to be what a "bad guy" looks like, to be a "tragic side-character," when people like me finally write our own story we've dreamt of since we were kids you don't even fucking read it, and the only way people like me get our flowers is after we fucking die young in some "tragic" stupid and preventable away, THEN it's time to call me a great artist, THEN it's time to read the manuscript, so I can become part of YOUR mythos instead of ever having my own, I can't fucking do this anymore I don't want to play on the fucking computer anymore this isn't the end of the series or anything I just don't fucking feel like writing anymore right now. I'll be back later and we're going to find adamantite.

[kobblefort]

Rushsly: Second Cavern Arc 2

Our stockkeeper (remember her? fuck dude, I don't) apparently threw herself into the fray, and for her troubles gets her clothes rips to shreds and a steel spear jammed in her gut. I have no idea why the fuck she was there, she's not in the military, I would really fucking prefer it if she was not there but I guess she just sort of decided to join in. Awesome.

Our main doctor throws himself into the fray, too - ideally he's just there to rescue anyone who gets hurt in the conflict, but then he ends up charging ahead of the soldiers like he's the fucking vanguard. And because that wasn't fucking chaotic enough...

Shislik gives birth to twins. Yes, right there, in the middle of the fucking battle.

It does not slow her down.

It's over.

The only one to take any serious scrapes was Aslas Spoilsutters, who lost her tail, fractured her spleen (I don't understand how you fracture an organ but ok...) and lost the ability to stand. I'm not sure if she'll pull through. I hope so. I need to figure out what the hell she was actually doing getting involved in the first place. For now, there's cleanup to be done.

Ace chalked up another four. And with her literally-just-born babies in tow, all she wants to do is keep sparring. Shycla Cystnoble, her sparring partner du jour, got her own first kill in the melee, as did Rias Squarelauds, a fellow swordmaster.

Most promising of the new recruits is Saraz Fishedpraise, who scored just as many kills as the Beast Slayer herself, and is already a competent spearbold and skilled striker in barely any time at all. Maybe some day he'll be a proper Beast Slayer himself - I'm noting down that he likes talc, electrum, moonstones, and... green glass? Well I don't know where to get talc or how to make electrum but he really ended up in the right fucking place for green glass. And as you can see in that screenshot, Aslas is up and moving again. She's a bit faint, and she'll need a billon crutch to get around, but she can get right back to keeping stock of the kobble economy, with losing her entire tail barely registering as a hiccup.

I can't be sure how many of these were actually killed in the ambush, rather than earlier by the forgotten beasts as they rampaged through the first cavern layer, but on top of those, we have an additional 4 caged prisoners who, after the failure of the arena idea, we are simply just going to throw down a big hole so that they die, as is apparently our custom now. And just like that, besides - or, well, maybe including - the giant eyeless lobster lurking in the depths, things just go right back to normal. And so, with just a bit of greed in my heart, I decide it might be a good time to dig down to elevation -100 - out of a total of 129. The chances get higher and higher of running into "Hidden Fun Stuff" with each level, so if you're concerned about endgame spoilers, I won't be offended if you tap out. It seems a bit early to be saying "endgame," considering our fort isn't even populated with 100 kobbles yet, much less the Winged One and their entourage, but most forts simply do not survive cracking into their first big adamantite vein. I have a good feeling about Rushsly, but my intuition is often wrong. And while nothing happens when we hit the depths...

On the first cavern layer again, a big-ass bird with "deadly blood" arrives. Hyahyata the Deep. I'm not busting out the MS Paint effortmode for this one, its name isn't cool enough, sorry. We've near-completely closed off the first layer after the olm men ambush, besides two barred-shut doors - glass doors, again, unfortunately, but they should hold well enough against a creature with literally hollow bones. This will be another fight for the marksbold squadron, and we're straight to work fortifying another position to fire upon it from. It flutters around the cavern wildly, but doesn't seem to have caught the kobbles' scent or anything.

We quickly carve out a turret, station the marksbolds and have them wait just a moment for it to fly by, and when it does -

A single shot from Dralas Containedbanded tears through the great bird's wing, sending it careening around 20 Z-levels down, where it splatters into pieces upon hitting the ground.

Well, congratulations to our newest Beast Slayer. He'll need a room built right away - though both aluminum and orpiment only occur near magma, which besides the filthy bit of cheating I did way back at the start, still hasn't been discovered anywhere in the 112 Z-levels we've explored (from the highest bird tower, 7 to the lowest mine shaft, 105 - yeah I went a little deeper than I said I would.) In fact, in the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress aluminum is tied with platinum for the second most valuable metal. I really prefer hooking up my Beast Slayers with their preferred elements, but it seems like even if we find some all the way at the very bottom of the earth, it'll be a chore to get it back up and smelted. But fuck it, this whole game is about chores anyway. You do chores so that your funny little computer screen characters can do more chores. Let's keep digging. Alllll the way down to 115, why the hell not?

And then we breach the third and final cavern layer. Beyond this can surely only be Hidden Fun Stuff. Starting to feel a bit stupid for calling this the 'Second Cavern Arc,' LOL!!!!!! But it's fine. We'll seal up the hole quickly and set about safely surveying the area. And, obviously, getting some aluminum for our troubles would be really nice.

All the way up on the surface, another one of these dumbfucks gets caught by the Bird Tower.

A lot more than one, actually, but they get scared and fucking scatter when they see the armadillo that just sort of lives outside our gates... roll up into a ball and unroll a couple times.

Fuck, it's actually a whole-ass ambush though!! The clever bastards managed to trick us into sending out our main force instead of hunkering down. Well, any kobble worth their weight in rocks can appreciate a good trap. The question is, will they regret it, or will we?

I wish I could rewind the game to capture GIFs sometimes, because one of the ratfolk literally exploded into a shower of its constituent parts like a firework.

Yeah I think they're the ones who regret it. Though in the fray, we noticed some gnoll thieves among their ranks - the ratfolk making any kind of alliances is obviously troublesome, and we don't know whether the gnolls will prove any tougher than the ratfolk. And oh shit

Zil Dentedleaks took a nasty injury in the fray, and awaits rescue by its fellow it/its bitch Kody Inkblighted, who doesnt even finish its drink before heading over to carry Zil to the hospital.

Zhag Gillpoker, one of the newer recruits, took a nasty scrape himself, and so they'll be keeping each other company in the hospital.

Closer analysis reveals Zil might have gotten hurt a lot worse than we initially thought - having your spine and its nervous tissue "torn apart" seems like the kind of injury that could end a career entirely. Though it and Zhag are both up within just a few days - Zil with a crutch - and they attempt to get straight back to training.

But winter is a time of rest for the kobbles, and so they're finally taken off duty for the season. Around just the same time, a farmers' guild is established, and they petition for a guildhall to organize in.

It's really no bother at all. You want a guild hall? Here, have a grand one. Zinc, iron and crystal glass floors with a platinum accent in the middle. Detailed billon walls and a gold pillar at the entrance. Worth a whopping 12706 whatever-the-symbol-is whatever-the-currency-means-eroo's. Go nuts guys I don't give a shit. We're rich

Shycla decides what she'll do with her free time is stand around the site of the carnage and just think about stories she's been told.

And just like that, we're suddenly very busy.

We've got more than a few gold and platinum crafts to start passing around to all these lovely guests. But the trading will have to wait for next time, because this has been quite an exciting, information-dense session and I can feel my brain overheating a little bit. Next time we'll be buying some crap (if anything is worth buying,) surveying the final cavern layer and building Dralas a nice Beast Slayer bedroom. And much like an episode of Mobile Suit Gundam that lulls you into a false sense of confidence, I'm going to end this episode by randomly blurting out WHO WILL SURVIVE???

[kobblefort]

Rushsly: Second Cavern Arc 1

Tell me about it, lol. You and me both

There comes a time in any new and many veteran players' fortresses when you realize that you should have gelded or just straight-up butchered those fucking dogs you started with all the way back at the start because you are never going to need this many dogs - but before you go hacking them all up for meat that your dumb-ass kobbles (or dorfs, if you're boring) will just leave to rot on the floor, consider that it could be fun to train them into war dogs. They'll almost certainly all die within a single invasion if we do, but it feels better from an ethical standpoint than having our kobbles just straight-up massacre an entire horde of dogs. For now though, we are going to cull a couple of them so that Kikli can finish her artifact. I have nothing against dogs but sometimes they do scare me. I don't know what it is, but when you look too hard at a dog's face, like really look too hard at a dog's face, it seems to activate this primal instinct of like "oh fuck. This is a beastie. It threatens my little monkey troop." But usually you can just keep looking and it will just be a friendly domestic dog. But you know, like, there's dingoes, which look just like normal dogs but are actually fucked up bastards that will maul you. In Australia they built a 3500 mile long fence to keep dingoes out of Queensland. If you take the highest possible estimate of the Great Wall of China's length, the Dingo Fence is just over a quarter as long. I don't know what that really means or if it has any implication, I just suddenly decided I really need to know how long the Dingo Fence is in comparison to the Great Wall of China. But you know, it really fucking makes you think!!!!!!!!!

Just as Kikli gets her hands... paws? claws? on the bones she needs to get started, we get yet another ratfolk snatcher in the fortress.

It survives for about 10 seconds once it gets into the fortress proper. Of course, ratfolk never seem to come just one at a time, so we'd better be ready for another attack. And since the spring is over, it seems like as good a time as any to set the military back to constant training.

Kikli's masterwork is... a single boot... depicting the coronation of a Winged One from many years ago. Not our current one, however. Right now, all I know about them is their name is Canr Adrmicala. I could pop into Legends mode eventually to try and find out what their deal is, but I'd like to save that until later. You know, when I inevitably end up "between fortresses."

But figuring it's best to put that off as long as possible, we take advantage of our burgeoning population and expand the military. This fort is quickly beginning to resemble the United States. Once we get some nobles moving in to start making absurd demands and having innocent people jailed for not playing along with their idiotic ideas of how the economy should work, we can start grilling all-pork-refuse hot dogs and shooting guns. Well, that noble thing actually does happen in the game. Hot dogs, someone would have to mod that in. Guns, same, but I'm almost certain that somewhere there is already a Dwarf Fortress mod that adds guns and I just didn't download it because my brain automatically went "that sounds stupid" as I glanced over it. I don't hate gun nerds or anything, I definitely have the kind of mechanical-focus autism that makes me enjoy them as a triumph of engineering. But 99% of the time someone starts talking about their guns, they are inevitably going to come off as an absolute psychopath or a total pussy (I apologize for using 'pussy' as a derogative here, I am a huge vagina fan, but I couldn't get any other word to land with the same impact.) I particularly appreciate the people out in rural areas that refuse to go to fucking Costco without their fucking Heater. "I need to be Strapped if I'm going to walk into a Wal-Mart. That situation could turn sideways real fast." You are the person that turns situations sideways you fucking freak! All I hear when people say that kind of thing is "if I got into a fight I would get my ass kicked and I do not have the humility to handle it, so I need my Kill People Button on me so that nobody messes with me." You're a fucking bitch! Maybe you do need that gun, because I could probably rip your arms into pieces like construction paper! Though I did grow up in a distant suburb, I have spent most of my life in "the bad part" of a major city that sheltered, TV-poisoned weirdos like to imagine is an active warzone, and I have never felt the need to walk around with a gun, because even though I am kind of an abrasive person with a mean face, I don't go around starting problems and I don't try to insert myself into problems when they happen around me. In a way, out in the suburbs kind of is more dangerous, because everyone is obsessed with their Castle Doctrines and gets almost no opportunities to verify or validate their idea of a consensus reality, isolated as they are in the series of lonely little boxes that comprise the alienated American life, so they just drive themselves more and more paranoid and insane (as cable news' profit margins demand of them) until they freak out and go Max Payne 3 on a fucking post office because another insane racist boomer on 4chan told them that "AliExpress is actually an LGBT666+(the + is an upside down cross) child trafficking operation and there's this new thing called communisexual," and yes I said racist, only the absolute fucking worst of them will admit it but of course they are all racist, the thing they are so scared of in my city and every city is that black and brown people just walk around in public like they're normal humans or something! Yes I do live in "the hood" and there's a fucking farmer's market every weekend. What I'm trying to say here is, well I don't know, I wouldn't call myself a Stalinist per se but when faced with an overwhelming amount of people who genuinely believe just awful and evil things who regularly fantasize about doing Righteous Violence, I start to get the idea of the "gulag," you know, I think a "re-education camp" is actually a nice compromise between "letting paranoid bigoted reactionaries run around making everyone else miserable and violently terrorizing marginalized people" and "just fucking killing them, just fucking executing them in the streets with firing squads."

The fortress gains a new handful of migrants, just six this time. Of more importance, however, is the plan to keep expanding the base. Deeper and deeper, until we hit sweet adamantite - the siren of the earth that sings all fortresses to ruin.

Deeper.

Deeper, still - but not before we break to collect the resources we uncovered in this shaft. Gold is gold, gems are gems, the earth bleeds bounties to the kobble that strikes it.

Deeper, still. Our advance is halted by the cavern opening up below the mine shaft, which is a good enough excuse to slow down for now. Two layers of cavern means twice as many attack vectors for forgotten beasts - though we'll be sure to close up the opening right away, of course.

Carefully notching out fortifications to look through in the perimeter seems to be the safest method to map these caverns - they've proved worthwhile before, at least against fire-spewing beasts. Black-cap and spore trees would be exciting additions to our wood stocks, but right now the risk involved in going out to cut them is just too high.

Even with all precautions taken, any party could always be your last party, so you simply must party whenever the opportunity arises. Even two of the new marksbold recruits managed to sneak away from training for a moment - "just grabbing some drinks," sure. Maybe one day they'll deeply regret it - if they had just that one last bit of training, maybe catastrophe could have been averted, or at least subdued. This could be what that song "How To Save A Life" is about. Is that even the name of that song? I don't know, I've only ever heard it due to acute FM radio exposure. I don't even know who plays it. Not gonna check either

Dwarves arrive, setting up nice and intrusive-thought-repellingly far from the bridge. For a relative pittance of gems, we take all the meat they have on offer (I will regret this,) some some extra steel armor and picks, and as a little token of appreciation we gift them a big handful of gold coins. Buy yourself something nice, kid.

They also get a front-row seat to see us setting up our first few catapults. These will ostensibly fire right through fortifications, and hopefully not bust through the ceiling or something - it seems to have worked before, in a different fort, anyway - and might be a smidge more forgiving than the ballista. And as we cut away more fortifications into the second cavern layer...

Bro what the fuck ???

Apparently, though I hadn't even noticed it, the first "crime heinous enough to require a Reaper" was committed. And Acl was not actually able to finish the criminal off with a single killing blow. Let's check the Justice tab to see what the crime was, and...

"Violation of production order" you'll fucking try to kill someone after that? Fuck me this fortress really is becoming America. What the fuck, lol.

She barely even just got here, hardly started training, and already has to go through this shit. I don't even remember what Alsrta wanted made, but Case was literally just hanging out doing what she was supposed to be doing. I expected the nobles with ridiculous demands to show up a lot later, but it seems we're perfectly capable of growing unreasonable authority-abusing freaks right here at home. The kobbles elect the Clan Leader, not the player, and it would obviously be terrible for everyone's mood to just straight up kill or expel her, but you know, accidents can always happen.

Shortage of patience yeah no fucking kidding. Actually, I've just thought of a fitting enough "punishment" for her.

There. You want to see someone stabbed for not making you a funny little hat or whatever, well you can walk right over and do it yourself. I'm like 300% sure this won't backfire on me. Well, whatever.

We've mapped the entire second cavern layer. And no sooner do we finish than we receive our second uninvited guest.

Yeah I really went all out on the MS Paint for that one. Poisonous gas seems like exactly the kind of thing that fortifications won't help against, but we'll really just have to see what develops.

It's like it's specifically getting in position for where we'd like to fire on it from. Of course, nothing can ever be too easy, so Acl picks right now of all times to be possessed and try to make an artifact. Maybe trying to kill that poor girl changed something in him. He also picked the farthest possible stoneworker's shop from all the stockpiles, so that'll put him out of commission for a good long while... I'm more worried about Acl, honestly. I have to wonder if I'm underestimating this big blind lobster. We'll see how it reacts to a few volleys of bolts.

fucks sake cunt would ya get back over here

It ignores a few missed bolts and just goes for a swim. As the marksbolds jump back and forth between fortified positions futilely trying to get a good shot on it, another wave of migrants shows up, bringing our population to 86 and thus reclassifying Rushsly as a "town."

I'd say I wished they understood the gravity of the situation, but it doesn't actually seem too grave at all. The lobster literally and figuratively can't even see us, has no way in, and is kind of just chilling.

Acl makes a wind horn (that's normally made out of bone...?) out of granite and dog leather. Imagine if your homie just came up to you one day after not talking to anyone for like, a week, and he was just like "Hey sorry about that. I got possessed by unknowable forces, so I had to make a flute out of broken bits of sidewalk pavement." Personally I would freak out, I would flip the fuck out and just go crazy. But I don't know. Maybe I wouldn't. Got to find somewhere to put this fucking thing now. But then, suddenly, from the first cavern layer:

OLM PEOPLE! They chase off Zhat Lovetwists (kind of horny name,) our hospital's diagnostician, who was down there seeking granite boulders to cut into blocks.

Luckily, she's agile enough to escape, and after fleeing unscathed she just... goes straight to sleep. I mean, okay. That's reasonable, I guess.

The small squadron of olm people cautiously advances, but our larger and far more deadly squadron of killer kobbles sets up position just outside the mine shaft. We cautiously open just one hatch to let them into the funnel, but......

I run out of images in this post so I have to leave it on a cliffhanger LOL my bad!!!!!!!!!!

[kobblefort]

Rushsly: Into the Depths 4

I'm interested in this guy for some reason. He just became a Swordmaster, and he seems like kind of a dick.

Sorry for another slow update. I've been playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, easily the second greatest simulation game of all time. It took a while for me to actually get into, but as you might have already surmised, I don't particularly loathe the idea of having to study a video game in order to play it. I was trying to get back into Caves of Qud recently as well, but for some reason I just haven't quite been able to find the fun in that one as easily as I can with CDDA - I know I'm probably missing something, but it just feels a little bit too combat-focused to me, whereas CDDA feels so much more centered around its two unfathomably massive but surprisingly accessible crafting menus that just blast my brain with dopamine every time I open them, and I am the kind of pervert who gets more endorphins from "building a brazier and figuring out how to heat up a can of beans in a video game" than "blowing up a guy's head with my psychic powers." Of course, Caves of Qud is incredibly good, and I'll happily affix my seal of recommendation to it as well. Regardless, this is not a blog about either of those games (though don't be surprised if I end up sneaking a little CDDA interlude in later down the line - probably when Rushsly meets its terrible end) so let's get back to the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress.

ALSO IF YOU WANT TO GET INTO C:DDA, DON'T BUY IT ON STEAM LOL. IT'S A FREE AND OPEN SOURCE GAME. ONLY ONE OF THE MANY DEVS EVEN GETS ANY MONEY FROM STEAM SALES AND IT'S THE EXACT SAME VERSION AS THE STABLE BRANCH WHICH IS AVAILABLE FOR FREE. I mean I guess if you already like the game and just really want to pay $20 for Steam achievements then whatever I'm not a cop, but if you're just haphazardly tossing money around like that, you should throw some at me too, because I have barely any food in my house, $3.12 to my name, and am about to run out of cigarettes.

112 new bedrooms are all but complete, and thus need a bit of smoothing and engraving so that any new migrants don't feel ripped off. So many bags have been made and so much sand has been collected that getting all the furniture made and placed took hardly any time at all, helped along by the ridiculous amount of glass doors I made early on because I hate having to worry about doors.

Bunnies are here for some reason. We don't have much to export and they probably don't have anything we want, but whatever, I can whip them up some gold crafts real quick I suppose. The first thing anyone makes is...

a little figurine of a lapine killing a kobble. Well, okay. Yeah they can have that I guess

Down below, the forgotten beast creeps a little too close to the main caverns stairwell for comfort. It shouldn't be able to get in, at least not without making a racket far enough away from the civilians, but the military heads right back to their station. A fifteen-day leave is admittedly pretty short, but...

Well, the fate of these olm men who were hiding in wait is more than enough justification to get back to work.

It seems to have quite literally burned all its fat away. I remember when I was a kid I kept trying to look up "how to do a liposuction on yourself at home" and I never got any satisfying answers, the general consensus seemed to be don't do that, why the fuck would you do that, are you insane? so I just sort of gave up. I have always been pretty fat, even when I lifted weights every day, hell there was a time when I was snorting ritalin every day and only eating a small meal once every two or three, and I still had some pronounced titties. I'm reasonably active now and still have entire weeks at a time where I only eat one meal a day, but it never seems to go away. Being teased for having fat fucking boobs as a kid was probably the origin of several fetishes that still ravage my mind to this day but it's fine. Having a girlfriend say "your boobs are bigger than mine" definitely didn't do something very weird to my brain. I'm normal and have only the normal amount of body dysmorphia that makes you see your weight written down at a physical and go "wait, is that right?" because I was expecting to be 70 pounds heavier than that, and I don't resent my skinny fuck friends with such fast metabolisms that they can eat 4 entire family-sized bags of potato chips a day and still lose weight while my body takes days on end to digest a single small bowl of salad. It's totally fine because high school is over and has been over for a long time and I didn't get to be beautiful like I wanted and that's fine. I hardly even loathe myself for my appearance anymore, I've grown into kind of a chubby Adonis whose somber beauty would stun everyone he passed on the street if he ever let down his hair. I won't, of course, because I am deeply terrified of being made an object of desire, and other weird people don't bother me at all anymore when I tie my long hair up and hide it under a hat, besides maybe a guy who's piss drunk loudly talking to himself about how he could beat everyone in this train station's ass at 11 in the morning and gets strangely entranced by the bright warm color of your sweatshirt like a fucking bull. But that's fine too. You just don't make eye contact or look his way or even give any kind of recognition that he even exists. Oops, but for some reason he walked all the way over to get on the same train car as you, even though you specifically walked away from him! Just sit down and stare out the window until you lose aggro. Pause the music in your headphones so you can hear him talk about how tough he is and watch everyone else on the entire train try just as hard as you to not acknowledge him. At one point you catch him seeing his own reflection in the mirror and talking to it like another person. Don't worry, he'll get off in just a couple stops. Why was he taking the train while sipping straight off an open bottle of liquor before noon? Where is he going? Just let these questions slip away from your mind as you unpause the album you've listened to 80 times already. You will cross paths with several hundred other people today, but this is the only one you'll remember, and his drunk ass will DEFINITELY not remember you. Does that make you feel big, or does it make you feel small?

I have kind of a ballsy plan to deal with this particular beast, and make a bulwark against future ones: digging fortifications into the caverns will let my marksbolds fire... at least somewhat safely, I hope. I'm going to find out the hard way whether it can blast fire into the fortifications, but I at least know for sure we can blast bolts out of them.

As that gets put together, we get a BIG migrant wave - 22 in all, and quite a few animals with them. I'll go inspect them later, this project is a bit nerveracking.

We'll start with just one tile - that way, if it can fire back, we at least won't have put any more civilians in harms way than we absolutely had to.

One of the newbies, Syl Destinedechoes. I'm so nervous it's starting to hurt my stomach

IT'S WORKING!!!!!!!!!

And slowly but safely, Rushsly gains its second Beast Slayer, Vala Knitpolish.

It means nothing to her. Well, I'm sure she'll feel better about it once she gets a fancy new bedroom. Oh, and a statue -

In the midst of the chaos, I decided Ace Steel's room would look even better with a statue, so I had a gold one commissioned of her chopping the forgotten beast Murlu's head off. Either way, Vala's fond of zinc, which is a metal we haven't actually used at all yet, but it's no bother at all to go crack into a couple sphalerite veins for a hero.

We can only hope it improves her outlook on life; the game lists her at the most neutral possible emotional state, "content," but her personality tab stating that "she doesn't really care about anything anymore" is kind of sad - any kobble should be overjoyed to have killed a forgotten beast. Maybe she thought the way we did it was too cheesy? Well, we'll see how she feels with a zinc-walled bedroom and a statue in her likeness.

The amount of livestock is getting pretty damn high, and I don't like keeping them up on the surface, so it's time to dig an artificial pasture underground where they can munch on floor fungus to their hearts' content - and once that's taken care of, their old pasture will be a great place to set up some siege weaponry. I've historically had shit luck with ballistas, just because the "only hits targets on the same Z level" part is a bit painful to work with, so I'm going straight for catapults instead.

It's party time again! The fortress is safe for another little while and spirits are high. Let's dig into a random assortment of the new kobbles.

I don't know if any of them will ever do anything important - I automatically like Kasa Palmgazes because he came to Rushsly already a high master miner, and the black kobbles just look cool.

I really really particularly enjoy Rias standing off to the side, watching the party, and just thinking "Merriment is worthless." He's literally one of those wojak memes. It rocks

Vala's statue is completed, and her room is finished. Just next door, Ace Steel's husband Zolr secrets away a meal from the dining room, eats it alone in the bedroom, and then complains about the lack of dining tables. He's a bastard. But he's also living the ultimate dream of "glomming on to a vastly more famous and successful wife without having to really work or anything" so, well, I can't help but put in the order for a table for him.

Bad design jumpscare lol!!!! You thought you'd seen the last of that horrible fucking floor, didn't you. Well too bad. I think it's funny and now you have to look at it again. Anyway, Kikli Shakenmarks, bored at church, decides she's going to create an artifact or at the very least go insane trying. Will she succeed? You'll have to find out on the next episode of Rushsly because I want to go back to C:DDA now. I think this is probably the end of the second arc, we've proven our mettle against the layer-1 forgotten beasts and are nigh completely self-sufficient. I'm actually pretty proud of that, usually I have at least one big weakness as far as resources/production goes and just rely on trading to fill the gap, but these kobbles really got their shit together. I'll try to think of a cool title for the next arc, but it's probably going to end up not being that cool, or if it is cool it won't actually be relevant, which will in turn diminish the coolness. Ok yeah bye