Development in 2016 (RSS Feed)

• 12/25/2016 Here's a new Threetoe story (link, forum).
• 12/19/2016 Here's an interview with This Exists (Soundcloud, iTunes).
  
  We finished up the monks and other new critters, and today was the first real day engaging with agents enjoying their new covers. The last agent I looked at involved a human town on the border of two separate evil lands that was itself half-goblin by year 50. The demons could send in goblin agents to collect information that arrived there without much suspicion (they'd use humans for the towns farther from the border).
  
  Kutsmob Dentblack decided to assume the identity of a prophet of Oled the Gleeful Healing, the god of justice, and wandered around town shouting about the impending doom of the world. Over the years, he befriended a human priest as well as the gangster boss that hung out at the Fragrant Brunch tavern. The friendships are stored asymmetrically -- they thought of the 'prophet' as a buddy, while Kutsmob considered them information sources.
  
  At the same time, a human from a civilization to the south had infiltrated the town pretending to be a petty criminal, and a goblin from the other evil civilization, pretending to be a bard, had made it in as well. Kutsmob's tradecraft was lacking, and he was 'befriended' by both of these agents, though neither of them knew that Kutsmob was also an agent -- they just thought he was a good information source -- and Kutsmob himself simply thought he had a few buddies to help him pass time during his assignment. It was fun to load up the world and see them all talking together with the ganglord at the Fragrant Brunch.
• 12/12/2016 It wasn't strictly necessary, as usual, but we're adding a few more cover identities to be used by agents sneaking into towns to collect information (they can also use the existing artist, scholar and warrior professions as cover). In order for the agents not to stick out for the player, their cover professions need to be held by real counterparts. So there'll be prophets, pilgrims, monks, peddlers and petty criminals. They won't get many mechanics, but they'll be around. The stuff we do add for them have a secondary purpose to set the stage for the myth release -- the prophecies are stored in a way which aligns with the myth generator we wrote (though that's not coming in yet), and it also relates to an expanded language framework (that's not coming in yet either). It should be good to toy around with those ideas a bit first before we get to the full implementation.
• 12/05/2016 I started the month by doing a survey of rumors and artifacts in several worlds to see how well agents sent out from goblin civilizations will fit into the world. Mostly, they had artifact conflicts with other goblins, so I tweaked some things -- even then, there still aren't an incredible number of agent-relevant situations at first. For instance, a goblin civilization sought two items stolen by kobolds and one held by a dragon. If however, say, the player were to bring one of those back to a human leader, the goblins wouldn't have any way to know without having an agent in place, so it should still be worthwhile. And there are occasional world-gen situations where the idea works.
  
  Working a bit on the criminals in town in preparation for the even more ill-natured agents to come and associate with them. Pulling many criminals out of the sewers and catacombs and into some of the taverns and out on the streets and so on, provided they vaguely fit in to the larger community.
• 12/01/2016 Here's a Future of the Fortress reply and the month's report.
• 11/29/2016 All right, the new encounters are done. If a situation goes particularly badly, an artifact seeker can kill an artifact holder and then actually remember to pick up the artifact to bring it back to wherever they are going, which is unusual since adventure mode characters are generally so oblivious to ground objects. Or it can be more happy. I suspect that next month will start with work on the agents and ne'er-do-wells we promised back in the Sept 26 log.
• 11/23/2016 The current project is handling 'encounters' of people that have an interest in an artifact with people that are holding the same artifact. So if you are a questing adventurer bringing an artifact back to a location, for instance, you might run into other questers, guards, or entity representatives before or during your return, and they should react in some way or another without waiting for you to initiate everything. This might be as simple as you riding a wave of praise back to wherever the artifact needs to go, or it might turn out quite differently if you aren't trusted. The wave of praise should also turn sour if you turn out not to be taking the artifact where they think you are -- but it'll have to give you some wiggle room as well... so we're trying to sort that kind of thing out.
  
  Here's our Creator of the Week interview with Patreon.
• 11/19/2016 Been working through various cases of fading information now that we have loads of data being generated for artifact locations as they move about the world, especially locally. There are six levels of knowing the location of a held artifact as it stands: having it yourself, seeing somebody else holding it at a location with your own eyes, hearing from somebody that somebody was holding it at a location recently, hearing from somebody that somebody has it (but not where), generally knowing in some legendsy fashion that it is said to be held by somebody, and not having any idea. The knowledge fades over a course of weeks and years while maintaining longer-term reputation effects, and it also has to constantly work in any new information and so forth according to their time stamps (at the individual, site gov, site culture and civ levels). But it seems to be working so far! It's very fiddly, but this should take us a long way as artifacts get more interesting (during the magic and economic releases, etc).
• 11/14/2016 I'm back from the Practice conference at the NYU Game Center in Brooklyn -- the talk was recorded, and quite different from other talks I've given, so I'll be sure to post a link when it is available. Apologies for the lack of logs these last two weeks. We should be able to refocus on the artifact release now.
  
  Here's a Future of the Fortress reply from the beginning of the month.
• 11/01/2016 A new month, and a new Bay 12 Report!
• 10/27/2016 I've updated the dev page colorations to indicate where we're at so far. It has been a slog, getting through the knowledge/rumors/incident/witness reports/historical events, since items can be moved in all sorts of ways and we haven't really been concerned about anybody remembering anything about artifact positions before this point in the game. There have been all sorts of conundrums and edge cases. Now everybody's eyes light up when a bard strolls into a room holding Classic Hamlet (which was a book about his home village, I guess), and if your adventurer walks up and wrestles the book away and stores it on a bookshelf in a distant library, witnesses at each stage will understand the who and what and where in case some Hamlet quester comes calling later on. I'm slowly starting to emerge from this sort of work, though there are still several conversation utterances and reputation effects that need to be finished.
• 10/20/2016 Continuing the player adventurer artifact rumors/witnesses/conversations etc. The game needs to understand what's going on when you, say, bring an artifact into view, place it on a pedestal, pick it back up, and then hand it to somebody. If there are people around, they'll create witness reports (which later turn into rumors) for each of those, but the final artifact location is the most important, so I have to make sure the right old reports get cancelled and so forth, even if some of the events last longer or are missed by certain people and not others, and so on. For instance, if one of the witnesses only sees the part in that sequence where you pick the artifact up, they might think you are stealing it, which is sort of reasonable, but not if you just brought it back yourself moments earlier -- they could afford to be a bit more circumspect, maybe just say something and you can be like, "nah, it's cool, I just brought this back and want to give it to somebody". But that's hard to get working, especially as the overall situation becomes murky and complicated. We'll do what we can!
  
  I've done lots of tests of slightly different situations in the same room over and over. I have a little teleporter debug command that causes the last artifact mentioned in a conversation to appear in my hands, which really speeds things up.
• 10/15/2016 It has been a slowish DF week with not much exciting and new to report. Between election distractions, unexpected Seattle trips and non-player rumors being a bit messier than expected, we're only now getting to player adventurers participating in artifact quests tomorrow, assuming the windstorm power outages aren't bad.
• 10/06/2016 The non-player hero-type characters are moving around the map, collecting artifacts and taking them to people that request them during regular play now. They can join up in parties temporarily if there are other like-minded people in their journey's starting town. We still need to handle the details of their site infiltrations and reputations, but it's good to have artifacts moving around. I think the trickiest part will probably be getting them to handle artifacts held by people, especially moving ones (including your adventurers), and that should be coming up after I handle the new rumors and some other issues. There are lots of conversation elements to handle too. So, tons of work to do, but we're moving forward.
• 10/01/2016 Here's a Future of the Fortress reply and the month's report.
  
  Sites can now post invisible messages about artifacts to mimic the game's conversation system for your adventurer. There are various sorts -- families seeking heirlooms, scholars seeking books from ruined libraries, and so on. The next step is to get the non-player characters to respond to the messages and get the artifacts moved around by them. Then we can move to player involvement.
• 09/26/2016 The main map work left to do for this release is the kobold site update. I'm going to take a break from that for a change of pace, though, and move over to artifact rumors and getting some artifact-associated critters running around. The spread of artifact location information needs to be a little more refined than what we currently have available, so there'll be some preliminary work on that. I'm going to start by getting the various wandering taverngoers to gather and spread site rumors, which should give us a good foundation for information transfer in the friendly human-dwarf-elf areas, mostly.
  
  Since they aren't regular travelers, and we really need their civilizations to know about artifacts, the goblins and their demon masters will have to pick up information on the edge of the tavern ecosystem. For this time, that'll mean having their own agents running around, which should be cool. They might have to interface with shadier people in town (who'll have to be understood a little better by the game), or they might blend in themselves if their race wouldn't be out of place (kidnapped humans/elves/dwarves grown to adulthood might finally be useful for something specific). Doing this correctly involves quite a few systems that aren't in yet, and we'll either do or skip those systems based on what we think we can complete in a timely fashion. This is a good time to finally get some more nefarious tendrils out in the world, though, and we're planning on messing with it a bit.
• 09/22/2016 World generation fortresses are a bit more navigable now (managed to get to the surface from a deep site without a surface connection a few times), though there is always more to do there. Some of the apparently disconnected forts just has really bizarre ways to the main staircase -- having to go from the wide hallway to a side hallway, through a door, down a side hallway, through a stockpile, through a door, around a corner, and back to a wide hallway which connects to the main stairwell. Now it tries to ensure that the wide hallways are connected from end to end, which is practically enough. It would still be better to have some engravings and the ability to ask directions.
  
  I've also gotten about halfway through the artifact storage locations for the various site types and situations.
• 09/19/2016 We've returned from the sequence of journeys! Here are recordings of the streams from the two tracks at the Roguelike Celebration: Room 1, Room 2. Direct link to our talk. Schedule to help you navigate.
  
  There are a lot of B12 tasks piled up to unbury ourselves from, but we should be getting back to work toward the artifact release again soon.
• 09/01/2016 Here's the Bay 12 Report! The first half of this month is going to be a bit different, as there are several events in succession.
• 08/30/2016 Here's a Future of the Fortress reply. A bat which was free at my brother's place was successfully ushered outside after dozens of orbits around the top of the room. Zach gained 2 XP. His fiancee Annie says he needs 4 more XP to gain a level. We're approaching a relatively travel heavy (for us) period (three events in three weeks in three different places), so there'll be more stress and fewer dwarf maps for a bit.
• 08/23/2016 There was some heat-addlement this week, but I finished the dwarf jobs I needed to finish, allowed a museum zone to be designated from display furniture (which is more or less like a sculpture garden, but with the new thoughts for displayed items), and handled display furniture placement in adventurer-created sites. Cleaned up some errors with religions/temples in world gen that were impacting temple artifacts. Moving on to other building/map types next.
• 08/16/2016 Started with temple relic storage as a test case, and that seems to work, respecting the pools and so forth. The game has display cases and pedestals now, in all modes. Next I'm going to finish the display jobs in dwarf mode before I get back to maps. You'll be able to display any non-large object you like, and there'll be new thoughts for displayed items similar to the admiration of architecture. So you can set up artifact display areas, or you can just use regular masterpieces, or junk, or skulls, as you see fit. The displayed items show like the food on tables so you can admire them yourself.
• 08/10/2016 All right, we've finished the first of four sections on the dev page for this release -- world generation artifact interactions. We're now ready to situate the artifacts in tile map locations and then move the interactions into the two play modes. This process will surely bring up some issues with what we've done in world generation, but hopefully it's mostly okay! Map code can take a lot of time to update and change (since it's prone to bugs, especially with the third dimension), and I'll try not to get bogged down, but we should also see some interesting additions. More as I get to each civilization!
• 08/08/2016 Today is the 10th anniversary of the first release of Dwarf Fortress! Apparently it was time for us to get a taste of what we've been dishing out, as we've been showered with crayon drawings through the mail. Thanks to everybody that has played the game, enjoyed the stories and supported Bay 12 through the years. On to the next decade!
• 08/07/2016 Larger world gen beasties can play with the items now. There was an unfortunate elven civilization called the Distant Oak that lost three druids in three years. The last one was killed by goblins and had their body hung from a pine tree, which must have made the goblins happy since they organized a yearly candlelight procession commemorating the event back at their tower. On the 110th occasion of the procession, the dragon Niweni attacked, killing several goblins and dwarves. Finally the beast entered the tower and stole the Renowned Gill, a legendary crossbow created by a dwarf for the chameleon demon 20 years before, bringing it back to the cave. 180 years later, the crossbow is still there, along with the dragon. There weren't any attempts to recover it -- such civilization-level quests are the last step for these world gen changes.
• 08/03/2016 Working to wrap up the worldgen artifact interactions we'd like to have for this time. Artifacts can now be given between entities during peace or when peace is made. Heroes can also make journeys (potentially with buddies) to recover heirlooms (still need entity/religious recovery).
  
  I also included artifact claims in war/diplomacy calculations. For instance, in events spanning 124 years, the periclase bracelet Lusterlabored was made by a dwarf in a goblin tower and given to the dwarven master (the original demon was killed by an elephant while invading the elves). Stored in the tower for several years, it was eventually stolen by the kobold Tobogochrursnus. Tobogochrursnus brought the bracelet along on various thefts, only to be cornered by a human hamlet lord, Emim Squashchewed. Emim kept Lusterlabored as a family heirloom for forty years, but this eventually brought the attention of the same dwarven master back in the goblin tower. A war was launched, and Emim went to defend the main human city of Largeplot, where he was killed by the elf Ber (who had grown up in the tower). Ber took the bracelet and assumed the position of administrator over the conquered town. She had a more or less peaceful rule for decades, until the rampage of a werehyena found Ber devoured and Lusterlabored with a new owner.
• 08/01/2016 Here's the Bay 12 Report, and here's a Future of the Fortress reply. We also did an interview with the Stoned Gamer.
• 07/25/2016 Worldgen invaders will now loot artifacts stored in buildings, and thieves can steal artifacts from them as well. For instance, we had Thil, the leader of a group of dawn worshippers living in a human market town which was unfortunately beset by elves over the humans' display of hunting trophies. The elves routinely attacked the town and ate people, and on the third attack they drowned Thil as an example for the other humans. The grieving worshippers entombed the body in a crypt under the town, but they took Thil's bejeweled linen skirt and named it Glowedlull, placing it in their temple. It only took another year before the elves returned and ate some more people, and looted the temple, taking Glowedlull back to their forest home. Peace was made ten years later, but I haven't gotten to the friendlier side of artifact transfer yet, so the skirt is still with the elves! Next up we'll be adding worldgen heroic artifact quests and gifts to round out the worldgen portion of the artifact release. Hopefully all of our recent additions taken together will provide enough backing for fortress mode and adventure mode artifact interactions.
• 07/22/2016 This week was work on underlying mechanics in support of artifact claims. The main interesting addition was a sort of family placeholder mechanic to make heirlooms work. The initial couples all get associated family structures, and then those links are passed along to the children and so forth. Of course, this opens up all kinds of world-determining issues, depending on how marriage interacts with family membership and which child has which inheritance rights over heirlooms etc etc etc, and so forth. This isn't the release to get into it (the family/status/property/law release will make a better attempt). For now, it runs an "importance" check on the family groups during a marriage -- if there is no winner, then it just flips a coin.
  
  Artifacts will pass down family lines to keep them in play longer and to set up interesting conflicts. Even without conflicts programmed yet, we've had some interesting situations. One medium world I ran for 125 years had a dwarven hero named Fath that killed the hydra Osplu Juicepukes. After the fight, she named her steel shield Gladdashed and it became a family heirloom attached to the Kosoth Giltmirrors family group (Kosoth was an original dwarf, and by the end of world gen, that line had 228 living members -- Fath was a grandchild).
  
  During a later koala demon invasion, a goblin named Ngokang Spideryweaver killed Fath and claimed the shield -- even though the invasion failed, Ngokang survived and took the shield back to the goblin capital of Ghoulsullied. A few years later, Ngokang was murdered and Gladdashed lost in the goblin pits, but Ngokang's family still had a claim on it (it's unclear whether goblins will often have strong family mechanics when we remove the placeholder, since it's not a typical value setting for them, but it's fine for now). Ngokang's family group was also identified with an original creature -- Bax Burialscourges, a goblin dancer that was still alive and a member of the Whispers of Evil performance troupe. That goblin family had 49 living members. Presumably, as we continue, it's possible that these 228 dwarves and 49 goblins would come into conflict over Gladdashed in various ways as the artifact is found, stolen, claimed, lost again, etc., especially since it's likely with that many dwarves that several of them would have hands on the levers of power that determine whether their whole civilization goes to war and so on.
• 07/15/2016 I've completed the production/naming of world gen heroic items and holy relics. Sometimes they are potentially useful, like the steel spear used to kill a giant, and sometimes you get an elf commemorating the slaying of a minotaur by naming their wooden low boot which presumably saved their life or something. Our first official holy relic: the hemp trousers of the "First Orange" of a god of light. The second was the Fortress of Grief, a totem made from the skull of another religion's high priest. They placed the skull in the temple, while the rest of the body was entombed in the catacombs under the city. Next up we'll be doing artifact claims and various mechanics to get these artifacts moving, fought over, and otherwise affected.
• 07/08/2016 Dwarven historical figures that have been assigned various artisan professions now have a chance to enter a mood and produce an artifact. It's more abstract than the standard in-play fortress process, but it uses about the same variety of materials (it doesn't do furniture yet). Next up we'll add a few more classes of items (weapons/armor named by heroes, holy relics), and then we'll make claims on artifacts and make the movement of artifacts in world generation more interesting to set the stage for in-play additions.
• 07/05/2016 Here are the first official 64-bit releases! This would not be possible without help from our community -- you can view the exciting and sometimes late-night discussion over in the 0.43.04 release thread if you want to see how the cake was baked. This release should also make worlds generated with the same seed more consistent, and it has a few other minor fixes we managed to sneak in.
  
  New stuff
  
  • 64-bit support, pulling the game from the distant past into the previous decade
  
  Major bug fixes
  
  • Fixed problem with artistic skill assignment causing world histories to diverge
  • Fixed problem with worldgen trade causing world histories to diverge
  
  Other bug fixes/tweaks
  
  • Stopped babies/children from competing in w.g. events
  • Made gorlaks able to open doors, stopped desizing of their heads
  • Fixed some mem leaks
• 07/05/2016 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.43.05
• 07/01/2016 Here is the Bay 12 Report, and here's a Future of the Fortress reply: Part 1, Part 2. We've started up a new FotF thread here.
  
  Here's an OSX 64-bit test version. The main obstacle to being through with the 64-bit version is actually a 32-bit version now -- we lost 32-bit Linux with all the updates we had to do for 64-bits.
• 06/28/2016 We've posted the new development page with artifacts and myths. This is the culmination of years of work on Dwarf Fortress and our other projects which never saw the light of day. We've been playing around with magic systems for years, ever since DRAGSLAY.BAS, and are looking forward to finally being able to place the dwarves into a more meaningful, mysterious and exciting universe!
  
  We'll start in on an artifact release once the 64-bit versions are complete. We might get away with one release there, but the myth/magic dev items will almost certainly happen over multiple releases, and we won't get to everything on the first pass.
  
  Work on the 64-bit version is ongoing. So far we have a windows test version and a linux test version. Here's a 32-bit Windows version that should clean up some DLL issues. We should be almost through with Mac as well -- just need to clean up the sound library situation.
• 06/24/2016 There were some bumps in the ride with the new setup, but at the same time, we're also well on the way to a 64-bit version of the game. If you've been having trouble with the most recent SDL Windows release, or you want to try out a 64-bit Windows version, visit the forums here: test release post. That thread will also work for weird 64-bit happenings. Linux and Mac up next!
  
  Here's a video from the recent Dwarf Moot meetup.
  
  On September 17th, we'll be at the Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco. They have early bird tickets available at that link until July 17th.
• 06/20/2016 Here's another bug-fix release. Assuming no issues crop up immediately, we'll now dive into 64-bit land for next time!
  
  Major bug fixes
  
  • Fixed error deciding when patients should be moved
  • Fixed initialization problem with tools causing stone axes to be thought of as ranged
  • Stopped completed work order jobs from checking off every matching order
  • Stopped masterpiece trades in containers from triggering artwork defacement
  • Stopped storage from always failing in the second tavern/library/temple you define
  • Stopped broken crash-prone entry from appearing at the end of the stocks list
  
  Other bug fixes/tweaks
  
  • Attackers will remove armor from unconscious opponents if it is blocking attacks
  • Made people wear more armor according to their roles again
  • Allowed new citizens with some previously site-wide occupations to be reassigned
  • Allowed some site-wide occupations for dwarves
  • Made combat damage weapon and armors depending on material differences etc.
  • Made dwarves prefer undamaged equipment during the periodic uniform upgrades
  • Allowed strong attacks/shakes to translate some force to joints and parent parts even if blocked by armor
  • Reduced clothing stopping power based on penetration depth
  • Made paper slurries stockpile-able (won't work without updated raws)
  • Fixed problem with adv mode tribute demand check
  • Fixed ghost initial positioning problem
  • Made macros save correctly even if the macro directory is deleted
• 06/20/2016 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.43.04
• 06/19/2016 Today was going to be release day, but then SDL started fighting with the new compiler and they haven't quite stopped yet. We also had a release-mode-only world gen crash that stopped reproducing only when logs were enabled, but that might be handled now. It's a continuing process. Hopefully tomorrow!
• 06/12/2016 It was nice to meet everybody at the event yesterday! I'm not sure if there'll be a video of the live stream, but I'll post what comes up. Here's the Seattle Weekly article that went up a few days before it happened.
  
  As part of the recent fix that brought armor back to invading soldiers and others, we need to deal with the effectiveness of armor, since there are too many fights that never end. To this end, we're going to do armor item damage, some indirect combat damage to joints/necks that get whacked, and some combat AI to make people remove helmets from unconscious opponents. Then the release should be ready.
• 06/05/2016 I've been fixing bugs for the next release. Work orders won't decrease the number of jobs on identical orders any more, and they should store items properly in locations like libraries without hauling them back and forth over and over. Paper slurries can be stored, and traded masterpieces in containers shouldn't trigger art defacement effects. The weird broken entry shouldn't appear at the end of the stocks list. Stone axes will work in adventure mode again.
• 06/01/2016 Here is the Bay 12 Report for the month, and here is a Future of the Fortress reply.
• 05/25/2016 So the plan was to upgrade my compiler and then do another bug fix release before doing 64 bit stuff, so different new problems could be kept separate. That's still the plan... it just stretched out a bit since the compiler installation crashed and destroyed my system. Things are partially back together now, with the new compiler in place. I've been playing around with its static code analysis tool, which located some interesting typos which have probably screwed up the medical bedrest and ghost behavior among other things.
• 05/22/2016 Here are some more bug fixes.
  
  Major bug fixes
  
  • Made customized magma forge jobs use metal instead of making things out of coal
  • Adjusted conflict code to stop taverngoers from joining siegers over petty grievances
  • Fixed material overcount in adv site work menu
  
  Other bug fixes/tweaks
  
  • Made pain from broken tissues depend on relative part size
  • Made embark profiles load fish properly
  • Made assigning an animal to a restraint remove it from pasture assignments properly
  • Made pasturing jobs respect connectivity in creation and in seeing if they should continue
  • Made dwarves remove animals assigned to pastures from cages/chains that are in the pasture
  • Fixed display error causing creature to be described as gigantic too often
  • Allowed metal mechanisms to be made from the job manager
  • Made dragonfire affect metal items and generally amplified fire effects a bit
  • Stopped veins in large mineral clusters from being improperly restricted
  • Stopped placement issue with minerals that had more than one specific environment
  • Stopped woodcutters from using axes without edges (like training axes)
  • Allowed soil critters to live in wider temperature ranges
  • Fixed problem with temperature checks on certain wilderness populations
  • Made construct mechanisms job show material
  • Made mountain travel restriction not affect other actions
  • Allowed adventure mode divers to move through deep water properly
  • Made placing items on tables remove item from your inventory properly
  • Made improvement reactions increase and apply skill properly
  • Reported site of adventurer masterpieces correctly
  • Stopped manually-set low frame rate cap from being stuck
• 05/22/2016 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.43.03
• 05/18/2016 Continued along with bugs. Woodcutters shouldn't use training axes, and you should be able to make metal mechanisms from the job manager. It'll also show the mechanism material in the job's name. Embark profiles should load fish properly instead of cancelling them all. I made dragonfire affect metal items again after a long hiatus, though fire effects in general are still a bit odd. You can now dive in deep water correctly in adventure mode.
• 05/16/2016 Original DF meetup attendee Lightman has organized an event for the 10th anniversary of DF in Bellevue, Washington. There are free tickets for general admission, as well as dinner tickets. It's on June 11th, and Zach and I will be there. There are lots of details over at the event page.
  
  Bug-fixing has been underway. There was an issue with the material display when building adventurer sites -- it was still counting some objects you had already used, so be sure to check the material is actually on hand when you try to build. I also stopped mountains from incorrectly restricting actions like sleeping.
  
  I cleaned up some issues with restraints and cages vs. pastures that were causing animals to be moved too much or not often enough. I also fixed a few problems with mineral placement that screwed up native platinum veins in larger clusters and a few other configurations.
  
  I've adjusted how bone pain works to stop people from giving into pain and going unconscious when their toes are broken.
  
  "Gigantic" shouldn't occur all the time in animal descriptions now. Items placed on tables in adventure mode shouldn't duplicate. Bees should appear in temperate forests. Glazers will gain skill properly now and improvement reactions more generally will apply skill properly. And a few other small fixes.
• 05/11/2016 Smoothed out some rough areas in the adventure part of the release. We'll be continuing on with bug fix releases.
  
  Major bug fixes
  
  • Stopped zone corruption problem from adventure sites (caused crashes)
  • Stopped adventure camps from being aged by the age of the world repeatedly
  • Stopped certain site build orders from skipping the collapse check
  • Stopped prisoners in goblin sites from starting no quarter fights with their rescuers
  • Made people that join you stop personal/shared activities that might interfere them from following you
  
  Other bug fixes/tweaks
  
  • Stopped felling of trees in the arena, so you wouldn't be teleported to a weird hidden region map
  • Indicated child/baby state of prisoners during look etc.
• 05/11/2016 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.43.02
• 05/09/2016 A new version number! With the work order additions and adventurer-created sites, this one ended up with more new stuff and fewer bug fixes than expected, and my version calculator just tipped over at 0.43. You can use the new 'b' site building option in adventure mode to create a site (outside the bounds of other sites). For dwarf mode work orders, you can set conditions and details from the manager. You can also create orders tied to specific shops from their workshop profiles.
  
  A miscellaneous note: in order to retire at the adventurer sites you create, you'll need to name the site, create a main hall zone, and claim the hall during conversation (or while shouting to yourself).
  
  Next up we'll be doing more bug fix releases to make sure we have a vaguely presentable DF before we disappear into a new compiler and 64 bits.
  
  New stuff
  
  • Ability to build up new sites in adv mode, either yourself or by assigning companions
  • Ability to do carpentry in adv mode
  • Ability to chop down trees in adv mode
  • Ability to make stone axes in adv mode
  • Ability to pull branches from trees in adv mode
  • Can put start conditions on work orders (by amount of resources or dependence on other work orders)
  • Can specify materials/images/etc. in work orders
  • Can create work order from profile which is tied to specific workshop
  • Can set maximum number of shops that a general work order can task at once
  • Can set maximum number of general work orders per shop or disallow them by profession or altogether (note: this won't work for active old-save jobs)
  • Allowed perpetual work orders
  • Repeatable work orders, ability to set restart frequencies
  
  Major bug fixes
  
  • Stopped masterpiece trading from causing artisans to suffer effects of art defacement
  
  Other bug fixes/tweaks
  
  • Got rid of work order limit of 30 jobs
  • Improved work order filtering (respect partial vs. full results etc.)
  • Stopped work orders from taking more than one slot per workshop
  • Stopped non-citizens from being charged for violating production orders
  • Stopped mother from getting both her and spouse's miscarriage thought
  • Refreshed material list when deleting uniform item
  • XML export now has the exact site rectangle
• 05/09/2016 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.43.01
• 05/04/2016 I've finished adding the image/material specification options to work orders, so if you want to order up 20 identical granite statues of a dwarf laughing while an elf makes a plaintive gesture, you can do that now. That's as far as we're going with work orders for this time. Next up, I'll be cleaning up some existing bugs as well as a few issues that have cropped up in testing. Then we'll be ready to go!
• 05/01/2016 Here is the month's Bay 12 Report, and here is a Future of the Fortress reply. Here's a Roguelike Radio episode on Simulation.
• 04/25/2016 After finishing the resource-based work order conditions, I allowed work orders to be automatically restarted with different frequencies (always/monthly/seasonal/yearly), respecting any conditions. I'm currently working on allowing work orders to trigger other work orders upon activation or completion. I think that'll be it for conditions for this release. Then all we have left are work order job detail settings as well as some bugs to fix.
• 04/18/2016 Work orders can be created for specific shops from their profiles now, and the usual work orders can have a maximum number of shops set, so they don't clog up the works. I began doing start/restart conditions for work orders as well. Some of the most basic conditions you'd want are still pretty convoluted, like needing empty food storage items (barrels or pots), appropriate uncompromised plants and a lack of available alcohol for brewing jobs. In order to get around that, you can press a button to have the game try to guess what conditions you'd like based on the type of order (and then you can tweak the numbers). You can also build the conditions up manually... or you will be able to once I get it done!
• 04/13/2016 The illness won for the most part. I didn't get back to work until today, and I'm only eating full meals now, so I'm not quite myself yet. The maximum number of work orders a given shop accepts at a time can be set, and the shop can also ban work orders entirely or by labor type. Hopefully the coming days will just be super super normal and I can finish this off, maybe with a bit of rest.
• 04/06/2016 The 30 jobs per work order limit is gone. You can also set perpetual orders. It doesn't place more than one job per shop and instead of waiting to renew them it checks jobs on completion to see if they should stick around. So that works better all around. Of course, I'd have liked to be further along, but I'm not the only one working. Some friendly bacteria are doing a colony management sim in my head, and they managed to implement all sorts of impressive routines. Rapid temperature fluctuations without lag, top-notch eyelid closure mechanics, something reddish and growing... it will be fine. It will all be fine.
  
  Next up, we're going to do more with restricting orders from certain workshops and other such limits, some conditional work order stuff, and the job detail changes for them.
• 04/01/2016 And here is the month's Bay 12 Report.
• 03/31/2016 Here is a Future of the Fortress reply. I was also interviewed by Wes Fenlon from PC Gamer while I was down in San Francisco, and the interview is now online.
• 03/28/2016 Let's see... wrapped up adventurer site creation. They are claimable by player entities and retire-in-able, so it all seems to be working, but I'm sure it'll be an entertainly bumpy ride on this first release. The XML dump provides exact site rectangles now. Next up, I want to bring manager work orders into line with the last release's job detail settings, and a few other quality of life issues (removing the 30 limit, etc).
• 03/21/2016 I'm back from GDC (thanks to my co-speaker Tanya Short of Kitfox Games and their recently released game Moon Hunters for making it possible). The creation myth generator was very well-received, and I look forward to getting it into the game as soon as I can so you can all create worlds with this new foundation. First we need to get this release done! I'm continuing with the last steps of adventure site creation now.
• 03/13/2016 Here's a Red Pages Podcast episode where a Tarn occurs. The airport and a windstorm forecast up next!
• 03/07/2016 Yeah, this month'll be a little odd. I added zones to adventurer sites, so you can assign companions homes and so forth, but I've also been working on cleaning up the creation myth/magic system generator a bit in time for the little GDC talk. That's coming up on the 14th, so it won't continue to be a disruption for much longer, and all the work will make it into DF anyway, so it's all good. More primordial beast viscera washing ashore than I expected, but that's okay.
  
  In any case, the zones are almost done -- I just need to allow you to declare actual locations like the halls in human villages so you can claim your own site with a named group. Then a few more site tweaks, work order changes, bugs and done.
• 03/01/2016 And here is a Bay 12 Report.
• 02/29/2016 Here is a Future of the Fortress reply.
  
  I've cleaned up various issues that arose with adventurer-made sites. The main problem was that since the sites are larger than 1x1 at the dwarf embark map scale (they are up to 3x3 right now), they could cross world map tile edge boundaries, and that opened up various issues. Having fixed what came up, we are much closer to allowing dwarf embarks to cross world map tile boundaries as well, though there is still a bit to do there.
  
  I still have a few more adv site features to add for this time. I'll be doing the declaration of zones (so you can define your own room boundaries and entity-claim locations) and some material/worker assignment stuff. It's pretty close to where I need it to be. Then we'll move on to upgrades to dwarf mode work orders, which'll be the last major addition for this release.
• 02/22/2016 Here's a house. You can see the upper floor in the z-window on the right. The carpenter's workshop is outside, where I made a couple of doors, a table, a chest, a cabinet, a chair and a bed. You can now place items in unheld container buildings/items, and you can also put them on tables (where they become displayed as in dwarf mode, like my copper dagger in the image).
• 02/21/2016 Here's an image of what we've got so far for an adventurer's camp. The little bridge on the left is mine as well. The discerning viewer will notice through the z-window that I didn't give tops to the houses, but that can be done. Every tile takes a log as in fort mode, and the current rate is one tile per hour of work. Fortunately, you don't need to haul everything manually -- you can lay it all out on a blueprint screen and then set yourself and your companions to work (this one only took a few minutes and three in-game days to finish with my five buddies). When the work period is finished, it makes some of the constructions you've planned, in whatever order you set, watching out for collapses, according to the amount of workers and hours. We're going to do a little more with it before moving on, perhaps zoning and some furniture.
• 02/18/2016 We went ahead with chopping down trees in adventure mode with some important restrictions. It doesn't currently work on many sites from world generation -- the main issue is how it abstracts buildings and populations and so forth, which would be disrupted if there's a player-altered section of data in the middle of town. We'll figure it out eventually, but not this time. So you can't run around chopping down elf trees. Felling a tree also takes an in-game hour (kind of like the composition action, but a bit faster), so it's real work and you don't just make the forest go away instantly.
  
  Of course, chopping down trees isn't very interesting by itself. The reason we went forward with it now is that next we'll be using the logs for some construction options and finally adventurer-driven site creation to cap adventure mode features for this release. More on that as it is implemented!
• 02/16/2016 We're going to continue our smaller releases before we move on. What's up for next time is still under consideration -- while that resolves, I've fixed a few minor bugs and added a few more adv crafty bits to add on to the bone crafts (like helves and sharp rocks for stone axes). For dwarf mode, we're leaning toward finishing the work order stuff we mentioned last time. For adventurers, perhaps the new stone axe will chop down a tree and open up some more jobs that way, but map changes have always been trickier there, since the location isn't tied down like it is in dwarf mode.
• 02/10/2016 Here's the material and image specification release, along with several important bug fixes. There's more to be done with job settings -- we need to improve work orders and allow the decoration of specific objects, to name a few, but this should be a good start.
  
  New stuff
  
  • Can set specific job material in job details
  • Added jobs to construct the various specific crafts
  • Can specify images in statue, figurine, engraving, decorate jobs to varying degrees
  • Can specify group's symbol at embark
  • Can specify type of decoration
  • Added adv mode bone craft carving with image specification
  
  Major bug fixes
  
  • Counted exported wealth properly again (old saves will start counting w/ next caravan that leaves)
  • Flour, dye, seeds etc. not dumped out of bags into barrels
  • Allowed captured intelligent non-residents to be chained/caged/pitted again
  • Various useful objects like minecarts and goblets no longer ownable as personal possessions
  • Made ownable objects that aren't worn storeable again
  • Fixed problem causing some surface-underground sites to become disconnected
  
  Other bug fixes/tweaks
  
  • Allowed travel map to be shown even when you can't travel
  • "Really attack?" gives more information
  • Show adv companions by first name in announcements etc.
  • Used adjectives from physical descriptions for use in adv mode creature designations
  • Stopped premature elevation of wagons to historical status
  • Fixed missing space when reporting success on beast mission
• 02/10/2016 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.42.06
• 02/03/2016 Since we have an image-specifying interface now, I went ahead and let you set your official group symbol now when you embark. You can let the computer continue doing it if you want (and you'll continue getting "a shirt" and so forth). The new specifications for individual jobs and engravings are more or less ready now (a few loose ends left). The next major step along that branch of development is going to be allowing you to set details in the manager and otherwise improving the manager/workshop profiles, though I think in the interest of getting the finished bug fixes out we'll squeeze in a release before we start in on that, since there are possible time sinks lurking there.
  
  Here's a video of Armok Invaders in DF courtesy of BaronWable. It's always fun to see the DF computer projects.
• 02/01/2016 Here is a Bay 12 Report, and here is a Future of the Fortress reply. I've handled specification of wall/floor engraving images and decoration type/images now.
• 01/27/2016 I've got a fort that has an export industry centered entirely around little commemorative dacite figurines of the starting seven dwarves in different poses. Eventually we'll have to make the merchants more discerning, but we'll worry about that later. You can specify each of the image elements and all of their relationships/actions, or you can select a historical figure, site, civilization, etc. and leave the worker to decide on the final image. If you specify an exact image, it is saved so it can be used later (along with your site/civ symbols, which you can also use). There are lots of loose ends to handle on this, but it's working well so far.
• 01/24/2016 What's been happening... I made the "really attack?" button explain more about the circumstances. Then I added adjectives in the announcement names of people when you don't know their names, so the combat logs etc. aren't so ambiguous. It uses their most prominent feature (either the body shape or a specific part)... except for long hair, since I haven't made most people cut their hair yet. After that, it was time for something dwarfy. So I started on the ability to specify materials for tasks. This'll possibly include further specifications for details like the shape of statues and wall engravings, depending on how all the complications work out. There are lots of complications, but I'm going to push at it for a bit longer and report back.
• 01/19/2016 So far for the next release: I fixed the exported wealth count, made dwarves stop dumping dye/flour/seed/etc. bags out into barrels improperly, allowed intelligent captives to be moved around to other cages etc. again, and stopped dwarves from claiming objects like goblets and minecarts that you need to use around the fort. They should also store owned objects a little better. You can view the travel map in adventure mode even when you can't travel. I fixed a problem causing certain sites with underground layers to be disconnected from the surface.
• 01/17/2016 Here's another one! We're still going to be working through adventure reputation/quest/etc. improvements, so consider this a first stage. Other highlights are the fortress mode sparring and mug-carrying fixes. Enjoy your zombies.
  
  New stuff
  
  • New hearth orders for killing beasts and fighting outlaws
  • Added a hunter reputation and cleaned up reputation system around beast-slaying
  • Made citizens understand their relationship to bandits and added reputation for protecting people from them
  • A few lizards
  
  Major bug fixes
  
  • Made drunken dwarves spar properly again
  • Stopped dwarves from carrying mugs forever
  • Stopped adv goblin performance troupes from attacking strangers while traveling
  • Stopped reanimated corpses from being stuck on wrong side of conflicts
  • Gave underground populations zone assignments to stop them from erupting outward
  • Fixed inconsistent underground vegetation generation (which caused underground site maps to generate inconsistently)
  • Fixed various city vegetation clearing routines which were causing holes in the ground above sewers and catacombs
  
  Other bug fixes/tweaks
  
  • Zombies no longer dodge, parry, block, wrestle or run, and they do charging attacks whenever possible
  • Zombies don't get defense adjustments for body part type and they don't find or stop combat opportunities
  • Reduced zombie strength bonus (old saves will still be strong)
  • Made severing all non-smashed heads put down a zombie (can be reanimated if has working grasp, smashing heads already worked)
  • Made severing/smashing any working grasp put down a headless zombie (can be reanimated if has another working grasp)
  • Neck gets same combat chance adjustment as head
  • Made bandits that run off cancel town harassment goals
  • Bandits camps don't immediately send new armies to re-harass towns
  • Stopped camp bandits from being placed in trees so often
  • Allowed save/load in arena
  • Made creature object load bar page properly
  • Labeled xml encoding as cp437 instead of utf-8
• 01/17/2016 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.42.05
• 01/14/2016 A few more things happened... the dwarves shouldn't carry their mugs around forever. Bandits in camps shouldn't be placed all over the trees. I spent a long time hunting an inconsistent map problem -- the dwarf fortress site maps were being generated differently depending on the direction you approached from. Generally, when that sort of thing happens, it means that some piece of temporary mid-level world information is being used inappropriately in the local map generation process. In this case, the large underground mushrooms were being drawn from too broad a population pool that depended on which sections of map were loaded, and how the caps grew out influenced the map generation algorithms for the forts, sending it down different tracks. So that should be fixed now.
• 01/10/2016 It's going okay so far. There's a more specific reputation for defending settlements from outlaws, and new hearth orders for fighting off outlaws, clearing out bandit camps and fighting nearby beasts. Nothing interesting or dynamic or gray there, but at least you can be credited now for things we already had. Bandits behave a bit more sensibly when you fight them off -- they won't perpetually go back to the town over and over, either as a single army or as new groups from the camp. I'm going to do a bit more with this, and then I'll fix some more bugs before the next release.
• 01/04/2016 Getting back to bugsy stuff after the New Year. What have we got... some of the fighting in towns was caused by goblin performance troupes attacking people they didn't recognize. So that's stopped. I made underground criminal populations understand where they live a little better so they wouldn't crawl up and cause fights aboveground. I fixed holes in the ground caused by former trees in the town. And I started the reputation update with an easier case, hunting beasts. People recognize your accomplishments much better than before. Next up, the more difficult case of bandits.
• 01/01/2016 Here's report to start the year, complete with a few more numbers. Here is a Future of the Fortress reply. The server migration is nearly complete.

Current Log
2019 Log
2018 Log
2017 Log
2016 Log
2015 Log
2014 Log
2013 Log
2012 Log
2011 Log
2010 Log
2009 Log
2008 Log
2007 Log
2006 Log
2005 Log
2004 Log

Dwarf Fortress started October 2002, this log was started around the same time as the "back to the dwarf game" thread.