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.
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.
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!!!
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
