Rushsly: Into the Depths 1
Sorry for no updates yesterday; I spent the entire day making food, watching longform YouTube videos, and working on some other artistic outlets. In the interest of maintaining my anonymity until at least the end of this project and possibly indefinitely after that, I won't be sharing them (well, I can't send home-cooked food over the internet anyway - yet! Get on that shit, techbros!) but you'll be relieved to know they turned out well. I'm only just now sitting down at the computer this evening after a day that mostly tanked due to me starting to feel under the weather, but I think I know the cure - and obviously, it's the single greatest simulation game of all time, Dwarf Fortress.
There's no better way to start off a session than crashing the game, so I decide to make a nice and agonizingly slow "quick"save and throw Rushsly into Stonesense, the isometric-3D fortress visualizer which is notoriously stable when used with the Steam release and mods. Well actually it was working fine before I tried to maximize the window, then it crashed. I could find some way to blame the program for that, but I've been reading "The Inner Game of Tennis" lately, and though I'm not very far into it, I get the gist that I probably shouldn't, but also I shouldn't blame myself either? When I say not very far, I mean literally 4 or 5 pages. Are you even allowed to say you're "reading" a book when you've barely made it past the foreword and preface? Fine. I'm browsing The Inner Game of Tennis, and I'll consider myself reading it in 20 or 30 pages. Anyway, the fort looks pretty unassuming from the top, besides that "chimney" which is not actually there, but I can't get anyone up there to destroy the "downward staircase" tile without creating another "downward staircase" tile, which I'd need to get someone up there to destroy on and on over and over forever for the rest of my life. It doesn't have an "upward staircase" tile below it so it's purely a cosmetic blemish. Clear glass tiles also look very funny in Stonesense.
The furnace floor, where I already had to alter the stockpile by a single tile so I could put down a floor tile to stop the growth of a young tower-cap. I fucking hate floor fungus!!
The catacombs really do look a bit shit from this angle sorry kobbles. The little magma pockets do look cool though.
The (secondary now, I guess?) production floor is such a fucking mess and I hate it but I'm never going to do anything about it.
The tavern and chief's chambers look pretty cool though! I like that the dogs get sprites but my kobbles are just the letter "k." I feel bad for the people in the bedroom below who have a clear glass ceiling. Imagine trying to sleep and a bunch of motherfuckers are dancing above you and you can not only hear but see it the whole time. What a life!
And the only other floor of any visual interest is the barracks+hospital+dungeon floor. I like that stonesense makes the wells into faucets. Kobbles got plumbing lol
It always hurts to give a miner a different job, since I like it when the mining gets done fast, but since he wasn't particularly great at it anyway: Zhag, the miner who did not give a single shit about breaching the caverns, has been transferred to the military right around the time that a couple years of constant training starts really paying off for On Speechlessmonstrous and Zomrca Lulledjackals. In fact, it's sparring with one another that brought on this "level-up."
Two girls, both keenly aware of their bodies and the way they move, pushing each other to greater and greater heights of martial prowess. I don't care who you are, that's yuri. And also they're drunk. But kobbles, like dwarves, are basically always drunk. There was a time when I'd be like "Same! That's so me, lol!!" but it's long been over. I don't actually miss alcohol, I just miss the way alcohol used to feel, the effect it used to have on me. For the last little while, whenever I finally gave in to the temptation to knock some shots back every 2 or 3 weeks I would just suddenly jump-cut straight to the next day, waking up with literally all my clothes on including my goddamn socks like a fucking bastard feeling absolutely miserable in every physical sense and terrified that I had fucking humiliated myself and made lifelong enemies in the 25 Discord conversations I didn't remember starting. Now if I try to drink at all my body just says "no, fuck you. Go to bed" and all I can bring myself to do is lay down and get five to seven hours of miserably low-quality sleep - while still lucid enough to take my socks off, thank fucking god. I can't complain, really. The time from my early 20s when drinking made everything beautiful and everyone into my friend has long been over. If I never wake up in a stranger's bed or literally drooping halfway off the couch of their back porch again it'll still be too soon. But it's fine for kobbles to drink I guess. They were literally programmed to do it
At only 136 steel bars, it feels a bit too early to be getting the kobbles into steel armor, but new weapons and shields should do them well - provided they're not all too attached to their current gear. The dream is, eventually, adamantine, but to tell the truth I've never actually gotten that far in a fort. They either died in a horrible violent tragedy or from the miserable slowness of FPS death far before we could chance upon any Hidden Fun Stuff. To be completely honest, despite making a few attempts as early as early as 2009, even installing it on the computers at my high school and getting away with playing it all through study hall because nothing that looks like that could possibly actually be a game, I really never figured the game out or had any real success. I just didn't have the patience to either learn to read the ASCII or manually check every tile every time I wanted to know what anything was. This was back when carp were serious threats and rhesus macaque invasions were commonplace - the Brazil era, as I've literally just now decided to dub it - but half the things I take for granted really weren't even in the game yet. Also, on those same high school computers I managed to install Cave Story, and I got all the way to Hell before getting hopelessly stuck, which is what happens to me basically every time I play Cave Story, though I did manage to beat Hell & Ballos just once as a kid. I like to joke that my soul is stuck in Cave Story Hell forever until I finally beat it one more time, but sometimes I get scared it's not a joke. One time my friends came over while they were tripping on acid, and I was stoned and playing PaRappa the Rapper, and they were watching with so much delight but then I got to the bathroom level and just couldn't fucking do it, failing attempt after attempt, and one of those same friends professed to me years later that he feels like part of his soul is still trapped in the PaRappa the Rapper bathroom level, instead of experiencing the catharsis of the big concert finale level. The other friend from that time is no longer my friend because he burned down his fucking house with a turtle and several dogs and cats inside. All the dogs and most of the cats escaped but the turtle did not and since then he has been in permanent rehab because every time he almost finishes up at a halfway house he decides "you know what, I should take mushrooms right now. I should get so high on cough medicine that I can't even pretend to function for 5 minutes. While I'm in this fucking halfway house that I could be free from if I just waited one or two more weeks to take these mushrooms or cough medicine." I mean I can't really begrudge him the drugs but, well, actually I think I can. I can begrudge anyone for anything if I want. He also had a pad on the floor where his dogs could shit instead of just taking them out, I mean that's not just on him that's on his whole family being fucked up. Basically just fuck that guy
We'll be breaching the first cavern layer in earnest soon. I'm not quite sure what I actually want to do down there - fungiwood and tower-cap don't actually interest me, considering how much wood we have on the surface, and farming has been going so well that we don't really need anything edible from down here, either. Maybe I just want to stir the pot. Maybe I just want conflict. You know there's a reason why people who play this game say "losing is fun" and it's beca
Oh Fuck Oh Shit No No No Oh Shit Get The Fuck Out Of There Everybody Get The Fuck Inside Right Now Oh Fuck Oh Fuck Oh Fuck Oh My God Please No ... errr .......
Everyone has more than enough time to get inside safely, because... it's a fucking giant tortoise. In the time it takes for everyone who was topside to get safely into the base, the weretortoise has... not moved a single tile.
The moat bridge is retracted, marksmen are poised and (hopefully) ready to fire, but uhh... I don't want to say I overreacted, but I may in fact have overreacted.
Its kill record is not impressive, either. I'm more impressed by the names of some of these places it's been. "Grayhatchet" is actually pretty cool. "Questsloshed" that one sounds kind of horny... "Womansoak" That's what they call me when I walk up in the fucking club LOL !!!!!!!! Sorry. I'm going to be normal again.
The were-tortoise reverts back to a lobster (yes I have the mod that adds crustacean civilizations installed on this world) and skitters away off the map and far from my mind. Honestly, he might be more intimidating in this form. However strong the were-tortoise form might be, it's not exactly effective. Another thing I learned is that the statue "radar" does not actually tell you where or which statue was toppled, it literally just says that one was. If I wanted to put in a bunch of effort, I could set up a system where I have statues of one material put on the west, another material on the east, other materials north and south, maybe even go 8-directional with it, but I kind of don't care. The reason that people who play a lot of Dwarf Fortress say that "losing is fun" has two reasons. First of all, there is no real "winning" in Dwarf Fortress - you can become the new Mountainhome of your civilization, sure, but that's more of "the best game state you can attain" than a victory. It ultimately just comes with more challenges: an entourage of picky, problem-causing nobles and a king/queen/gender-unspecific-position-of-royalty/whatever else show up to make demands, and it's not like you export a certain amount of wealth and roll the credits or something. The second is that, since you cannot win, getting your fortress to be perfect, infallible, and autonomous only actually serves to make the game boring. Losing is not just a learning experience as far as the actual mechanical game goes, but an exciting event that changes the story and landscape of your world. After this fort inevitably goes down in flames I am going to keep playing in this world and Rushsly will be not just a memory in my mind but something that existed and changed the culture and history of The Land of Nails, the biggest continent in The Dimensions of Portent. (Kind of a lame name though. Why don't you portend to go fuck yourself, lol. Not you the reader, just a general unspecified "you".)
There's motherfucking gold in them there hills, tons of gems too. I'm prone to ignore stuff like silver and cassiterite because it's not that valuable and more important not that interesting to me, but I can absolutely be tempted by the glint of gold, and much like Sonic Adventure 2's breakout MILF Rouge the Bat I always love a good gem. If you don't think she's a milf you're looking at the wrong pictures - the wiki is wrong, the writers and designers of the games are wrong, she is a 43 yr old cougar. And me well I just want to be the pudgy twink 10+ years younger than her that she is just ever so slightly emotionally abusive towards, not in the traumatizing way just the sexy way. Like "the hurting your feelings but then you also get aroused from it and afterwards she's like yeah you know i didn't actually mean it" way.
Fucking kitchen full of fucking miasma
Just USE THE BARRELS YOU FUCKING BASTARDS
Like why do they do this
With nothing but perfect timing, a metalcrafter falls into a strange mood that makes him cry out for:
-metal bars (He's already taken a platinum one)
-logs (We have plenty all over the fucking place but he won't grab any)
-silk cloth (We have 100s of these too, he won't take any)
-bones (which means we have to slaughter an animal in the same disgusting butcher room with the miasma and all the meat already just sitting on the floor.)
Zylr has made an enemy out of me but I am honor-bound to help his bitch ass create a masterpiece so fuck it.
He takes the bones and... just keeps bitching. I don't know. Does he just want more bones? Because I'm not going to be heartbroken over killing another horse. Fuck it. I'll gladly kill another horse. I hate horses and want them to not exist.
And yes, he did literally just want more bones.
And downstairs, they finally started putting things in barrels. Not before letting our food & meat stocks drop by literally hundreds of items, but I guess a win is a win. kind of. Not really a complete win yet either there's still very much some shit on the floor. Fuck it I'll just make them throw it out too. What were you really going to do with horse nervous tissue, like be honest. As usual I had to run cleanowned in dfhack like 5 times to make the kobbles actually start taking out the garbage but they did it. (I know the military backpack glitch but I don't understand how meals got claimed as owned without even making it out of the kitchen (I don't feel like explaining the military backpack glitch right now but I can later if someone asks me to (We're kind of losing the fucking plot here though (and suddenly I care about that))))
Zylr had the good sense to offer this to me instead of keeping it as a personal treasure, and I mean, 20k value ain't bad. Most interestingly is the chain either has an image of itself on it, or is making a reference to another platinum chain that exists somewhere. It would be really funny to just put it in the dungeon and tie criminals to it, but it feels weirdly appropriate to put it in one of the churches, so I'm going to do that instead.
AMBUSH TIME!!!!
The fucking pricks are going after our bird towers. It's so personal now.
Their necromancer doesn't even make it past the first row of traps.
A boar that their necromancer resurrected literally kicks one of them to death. I don't think these guys are very good at this.
With their... leader(??) and three of their most fearless caged, and one of their least lucky shredded into fucking bits, the stragglers just awkwardly wander off the map to go hide. They didn't even make it past the third row of traps on the very first level.
They also did not even make a dent in our bird numbers, despite them being the only targets they were able to even take shots at. Though this does serve to prove we need to reinforce the Bird Towers to prevent unnecessary loss of bird life, that's literally all it proved. They will one day be back with more, they may come back with the idea of maybe not walking straight into the trap hallway, but for now they are idiots who barely managed to kill a single goose.
Unfortunately, speaking of idiots, our marksbold squad was deployed up to the fortifications above the trade depot, and despite getting a clear shot on one of them, fucking did nothing because the ones with bows keep picking up bolts and the ones with crossbows keep picking up arrows. Since different types of ammo is a mod thing, there's no actual option to force them to use one or the other, I guess our best bet is to just dispose of all the bows and arrows and force everyone to use only crossbows. I don't feel like doing that right now though and I've also hit the 30 image limit again so you'll just have to find out whether that even works or not on the next exciting episode of Rushsly. I probably should have ended it on a cliffhanger but I think it's funnier if the thing you have to look forward to is just me cleaning out some traps, figuring out to do with some prisoners, and trying to fix a military logistics problem. This ain't that new-fangled Witch from Saturn Ion gundam show this is the classic 1979 gundam. WHO WILL SURVIVE?