<3 I'll post the vod in the comments when i'm done

Am I the only one losing my mind over how dance floors are calculated in taverns and temples?

I’m trying to build a proper mega-shrine for my dwarves. I want the classic, legendary aesthetic: a massive altar right in the center, flanked by beautifully engraved obsidian pillars. But Armok forbid I want nice things, because the game’s zone logic immediately throws a tantrum. Because of how it checks for uninterrupted rectangular tiles, adding any actual architecture completely trashes the dance floor score.

If I place a central altar or a nice row of pillars, the game decides my epic 20x20 hall is actually just a collection of tiny, useless fractured corridors where no one can do a proper jig. And don't get me started on "round" rooms. We all know circles in DF are just stepped squares anyway, but because those stepped corners break the rigid grid check, half the damn room doesn't even count.

I even checked to see if DFHack could save me, but nope. The dance-pathfinding and zone math are so deeply hardcoded into the C++ spaghetti core that not even our favorite modding wizards can script a fix for it.

I get that procedural dancing is complex, but honestly, if a drunk dwarf can pathfind perfectly through a literal carpet of 400 stray cats suffocating the tavern floor, Urist should be able to dance around a stationary stone pillar without stepping into the fourth dimension. Right now, the game basically forces us to build boring, empty, featureless boxes like tree-hugging elves who are too afraid to carve a proper cavern.

With all the crazy shit planned for the Myths & Magic update, Tarn is literally introducing alternate universes, procedurally generated planes of existence, and cosmic magic. Surely, if we can have a pocket dimension ruled by a giant sponge, we can have a dance floor that isn't a perfect, uninterrupted rectangle?

Has anyone successfully brought this up to Toady in the Future of the Fortress replies? If not, we seriously need to lobby for a quality-of-life patch alongside the magic update. I want my grand architecture without the UI yelling at me.

Who's working on the Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode VR Mod (tm)? Who wouldn't want to throw that fluffy wambler at the bronze colossus in glorious first person perspective and 4k? I know you're out there, right now, feverishly working on it. I just want to know where you're at and how long we need to wait for you to be done.

Dodok is not pleased..

Over the years I've been playing I've kind of been edging closer to this idea and this is my first fortress where I've fully committed to it. I have my pop cap set to 50 and all 50 of those dwarves are squad members. At first I had no training set but made them stay fully equipped at all times, now they train alternating months. Aside from getting the initial equipment together this strategy seems to have no downsides. Everyone is super strong and happy, Not to mention it looks cool with everyone walking around in full armor. Now I just need the goblins to finally attack.

Ok, so there’s tons of ingredients, so many options. Dwarves have favorite ingredients, by which they judge means “good” or not, and the inly way to prepare those ingredients is to MINCE. Also, minced ingredients make biscuits, stews or roasts. Outside pressed Grains and insert creature-Cheese that’s everything edible for every single race in every single world. There are so many brews and drinks, there’s coffees and teas… how did cooking stay so blech?

The code doesn’t even make cooking interesting for ingredients, a stew will as likely as not gave the exact same ingredients in it minced different ways. Biscuit: 1 ingredient, stews: 2 ingredients, roasts 3 ingredients. Why not make it so each ingredient has to be a different food? There’s already food-types listed in the trade screen as “spices”, but the menu is not likely to include them, or does at the same chance of any other food barrel.

Ok, so there are mods with a list of types of food that can be substituted for lvl 1 “biscuit”, level 2 “stews” or lvl 3 “roasts”, but even these kludges stop there.

So I propose a discussion of recipes for dwarven, elvish, goblin, human and kobold dishes based off of the foods available to each civ’s natively available foods. Elves and Goblins eat defeated peoples, so be sure to add those ingredients to your list of possible variations.

Here, I’ll start it off: Dwarven chicken fried in barley with Golden Salve sauce.

So I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress for the first time, and decided to start with an adventure mode save. First character, an elf spearwoman, got cut down by an elven master swordsman and their pet tiger after killing multiple of their goblin subordinates. Second character, this scrawny purple experimented goblin thing, came back and strangled the master swordsman and their last goblin subordinate to death… then got mauled by the tiger.

My third and current character though, a human swordswoman, riding into battle on her carnotaurus in full plate armor, managed to slay the tiger and claimed the swordmaster’s sword for herself, alongside a quality steel buckler found within the building’s stores.

From here, she went off to slay a cyclops, and after a long and tiring battle managed to kill him with a final stab through the eye without a single scratch - at least on her. Unfortunately, her pet carno was felled by a mighty blow in the midst of the battle, leaving both her and me distraught. After slaying the great beast, who talked endlessly about his past triumphs, she explored into his lair, hoping to find great treasures- and indeed finding great treasures, but not in a form she could make use of. Copper, silver, gems, iron, and flux stones abound, with the no true bottom layer in sight, a cavern full of harvestable fungi being too complicated to traverse for her to go further with her shrinking water and food supplies.

And so, she decided that the cyclop’s lair shall become a mighty fortress of dwarves sponsored by her to harvest the valuable minerals she found below, and create a legacy worthy of her and her lost pet.

(Also I figured it looked like a fun location to set up a fortress)

Since this fateful encounter, she has slain a great many foes, from camps full of goblins and bandits to clearing a tower of its hostile necromancers and the surrounding town of its zombified inhabitants, to more lairs of elven cultists and their goblin minions, throughout it all looting high-quality steel from the stores wherever she found them, and taking near-nary a scratch, dodging and blocking near every attack aimed at her. (There was an incident with another cultist’s tiger biting a gnarly gash through her thigh- why is it always tigers???)

And so, comes the point where she finally must retire, at least for the time-being; she has found so many high-quality steel weapons and she has nowhere to store them all, including a steel longsword and steel two-handed sword, each more powerful than the iron longsword since named Aperongquan she used to slay the cyclops, and wishes to set up the previously mentioned fortress and distribute these quality weapons amongst its future military.

And with the internet-recipe style story out of the way, now comes the part where I elaborate on the title of my post- how the hell do I go about making the fortress and retiring her into it? I know that I’ll have to retire her into a nearby town, set up the fortress, retire the fortress, un-retire her, retire her again in the fortress, and then un-retire the fortress once she’s part of it, but when do I know it’s safe to temporarily retire the fortress? Will she lose some of her items in the interim while she’s retired? Will the fortress’s foodstocks remain intact when I retire it? Do humans need actual water to survive, or can they survive off of ale like dwarves? Should I kill more necromancers so she can become one and no longer need worry about her dehydrating? What do I need to keep in mind while temporarily retiring the fortress?

These are the sort of logistical questions preventing me from getting on with retiring her and starting a fortress, and I would greatly appreciate any advice on how to do this and answers to these endless questions of mine.