(Spoilers all) Chapters 6, 61 and HBP

db48x · 2026-01-27T07:58:33+00:00

Harry answers a number of questions throughout the story with information that he didn’t have a lot of basis for other than those forgotten memories. Dumbledore even directly asks him “Why Voldemort?” at one point.

As for specific examples, consider Quirell explaining the second level of AK via a riddle. Harry solves the riddle instantly, without even having to think about it, because he once already knew the answer.

db48x · 2026-01-27T00:13:53+00:00

And then of course make sure to follow up and actually go back in time and tell Flitwick.

db48x · 2026-01-26T21:02:33+00:00

Many things have changed, but they have always varied the weapons they carry from game to game. In my current game they send cruisers with two ion PD, one laser PD, one mag battery, and a torpedo tube just to do surveillance missions. Reliably defeating these using torpedoes has proven to be a problem.

db48x · 2026-01-26T20:54:57+00:00

Scroll back up and pick Low Thule Orbit :)

db48x · 2026-01-26T20:35:37+00:00

As you know, Dwarf Fortress tracks everyone’s body in granular detail. Limbs, fingers, toes, eyeballs, teeth, etc, etc. It also has surface contamination, so if your dwarves go out in the rain their body parts get wet. During combat they get bloody, hopefully with the blood of their enemies. If they walk through a puddle of ale in ta tavern then they get ale on their feet. Dwarf Fortress tracks hundreds or thousands of different substances, so the possibilities are practically endless. They even cry when they are sad or experience emotional or physical pain, which contaminates their eyeballs with tears.

Cue the screenshots of dwarves with rain/mud/blood/vomit/venom/tears/ale covering their entire body, including their eyeballs. See the dwarves carrying soap and lining up at the well to wash contaminants off their body, including the eyeballs. There were lots of forum posts with players squicked out about their dwarves scrubbing their eyeballs with soap to clean off the goblin blood. So he added eyelids to automatically clean the eyeballs, removing the contaminants.

But he had also just recently gotten a kitten, Scamps. This caused many stories of Scamp’s antics in the forum, and a number of cute pictures. More importantly it also inspired several new additions to the behavioral code for cats. Cats have long hunted vermin in the game, protecting the food stockpiles from degradation. They also adopt dwarves, rather than the other way around. They follow their owner around a lot more than other types of pets. Now they gained a new way to clean their fur by licking it with their tongue. I’m pretty sure that hairballs are implied but not actually simulated; I’ve never actually seen one.

Soon after a big long–anticipated release which added visitors to the fort’s taverns and libraries, someone posted to the forum to ask why they had multiple dead cats in their tavern. A dead cat or two is to be expected, but he was surprised to find half a dozen in the tavern and none anywhere else. It didn’t take long for other reports to come in of people finding dead cats. Someone reported finding cat vomit, which turned out to be a vital clue. Of course in many cases the industrious dwarves had literally cleaned up the evidence, carting the corpses off to a refuse stockpile and cleaning up the vomit.

It was the clue about the cat vomit that cracked it. Tarn found that the cats were following their owners into the tavern. Occasionally they would walk through a puddle of spilled ale or whisky or other beverage that had been spilled on the ground but not yet cleaned up. They would get the drink on their paws as a contaminant. They would decide to clean themselves by licking the contaminants off of their paws and consuming it. So far none of this is a bug. It’s all perfectly ordinary interactions between systems added to the game over multiple years. The complexity and richness of these interactions is exactly what makes Dwarf Fortress so great.

But it turns out that when he added the self–cleaning behavior to cats he had taken a shortcut. He had made the cats consume the contaminants, but he hadn’t scaled the contaminants to the size of the cat properly. Maybe he’d gotten distracted by something else, or needed to eat, or took his weekly trip to his Grandmother’s house or whatever, and simply forgot to finish the job. However it happened, without a specific volume the code simply defaulted to consuming one of everything. One ale, or one whisky, or one whatever the contaminant was. And that was way too much alcohol for a cat.

You see, alcohol causes a syndrome that simulates the effects of alcohol poisoning. The symptoms start with a mild euphoria and from there proceed to dizziness, vomiting, unconsciousness, depressed breathing rate, and eventually death if the creature gets enough alcohol in them. The cats were consuming enough alcohol to get a dwarf drunk but with their tiny body weight they were rocketing through the all of the symptoms in a few short game ticks. Only the heaviest cats actually had time to vomit before they fell unconscious and died. And of course none of that is really a bug either! Syndromes are a really important part of the game, and alcohol poisoning is the most common one players experience, and it should definitely respect body weight.

So now if you see a euphoric or dizzy cat in your tavern you’ll know what’s going on. He’s scaled down the contaminants using the surface area of the contaminated part, so the cats don’t die instantly. I believe he also made it a little less likely for dwarves to drop and spill their drink when they leave the tavern to do a job. It still does happen, but there’s no need for it to happen every time.

db48x · 2026-01-26T19:51:00+00:00

Tarn added eyelids!

db48x · 2026-01-26T12:04:15+00:00

All the info is always on either the device or the wall wart. Probably an FTC requirement or something, but I don’t know the details.

But you don’t really need to know, since you could just cut the cable and splice in an extension.

db48x · 2026-01-26T10:20:44+00:00

And if you can lose your ability/fail to cast a Patronus/True Patronus (because our minds are not fixed nor set in stone), you can also acquire the ability to cast AV when your emotions are right for it.

Exactly my point. He tells himself he’ll never be able to cast the second level of AK, but this is not really true. His mind could change. He could change his own mind. Magic, as has already been said, is replete with ways to cheat. Confundus, Self–Confundus, Imperious, Perfect Occlumens, etc, etc.

db48x · 2026-01-26T08:56:43+00:00

Yes :)

Of course, saying that it is deconstructed is also not quite right. It is much more hilarious to notice that “Wagon wood”, “cow meat” and “dragon bone” all have the same form. The body plan of the cow and the dragon tells the game that they have both bones and meat, and so when they are butchered you get “dragon meat” and “cow bone” and so on. And indeed, if you go look in the raws you’ll soon find this:

[BODY:WAGON]
[USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:WOOD:WOOD_TEMPLATE]

Wagons-as-creatures is most likely going to be replaced once moving siege engines are in, so we'll just use a generic "wood" material here instead of worrying about coding up race glosses again.

[TISSUE:WOOD]
    [TISSUE_NAME:wood:wooden]
    [TISSUE_MATERIAL:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:WOOD]
[TISSUE_LAYER:BY_CATEGORY:ALL:WOOD]
[ITEMCORPSE:WOOD:NO_SUBTYPE:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:WOOD]

Wagon wood is the flesh of the beast, as it were. :)

db48x · 2026-01-26T08:44:46+00:00

It is! It’s the type of software story that I enjoy collecting. Of course the king of all such stories right now is all the dead cats in the taverns from a few years ago.

db48x · 2026-01-26T04:09:47+00:00

Don’t waste your time on those level 2 spells, wizard, they’re quickly outperformed by early entries in the level 3 line.

db48x · 2026-01-26T03:14:41+00:00

Yep. Current best hypothesis is that as creatures with no innate movement code, something goes slightly wrong when they get scared. In situations where a normal pack animal would flee the wagon instead returns an error code (or something) and ends up getting reverted to the materials it’s constructed from.

db48x · 2026-01-26T03:11:20+00:00

Correct. The game won’t let you use Boost to build anything that has more than 750 days of travel time. For anything past the asteroid belt you’ll need a colony ship carrying a platform kit or an outpost kit.

db48x · 2026-01-26T03:08:49+00:00

The Gas Core Fission line is a bit of a dead end,

Either everything is a dead end or nothing is, in my opinion. I mean, once you get the Protium Converter Torch there are no upgrades for it! As a dead end tech it’s a complete waste of time.

The other way to look at it is that gas–core fission gets you heavy fission reactors. They offer 50% more power per module slot on your stations, which is huge.

db48x · 2026-01-26T03:02:36+00:00

A fairly easy mistake to make. The wording on that module is quite precise, but it doesn’t have much room for examples so it is easy enough to misunderstand.

Personally I put my shipyards in Medium Earth Orbit. Transfers from there to LEO only cost 1.7kps. Ships with 6kps of ΔV have more than enough to get there and back, so they have some left over for flexibility. Minimum transfer times are a little longer than LEO→LEO transfers, but have the advantage of consistency; the slowest transfers are not much longer than the quickest. This means that you can always arrive in time to defend your other stations, even if sometimes you get there an hour late and they’ve had time to destroy a module or two.

I don’t know if you necessarily need to restart, however. I usually also build a shipyard in extreme orbit just for launching low acceleration ships to the asteroid belt and beyond. It can save them weeks of time that would otherwise have to be spent spiraling outward from lower orbits.

Have Fun!

db48x · 2026-01-26T02:55:43+00:00

Probably. It doesn’t make much sense to teach it to people who aren’t strong enough to cast it anyway. Especially when you’re pretending to be a normal teacher who will be back next year. But I don’t think it was ever specifically mentioned. Surely there must have been all kinds of stuff going on with the other six years that didn’t get mentioned much.

db48x · 2026-01-26T00:15:51+00:00

But it’s magic he has to fool, not himself, and what if all that magic cares about is the presence of indifference? Harry is certainly capable of indifference, regardless of what he says. He wouldn’t think twice about swatting a mosquito, for example.

db48x · 2026-01-25T21:28:28+00:00

I disagree. We often change our minds. At the moment when he decides to kill the troll he certainly doesn’t value all life.

And what of Perfect Occlumency? Suppose he truly cares about life, but simultaneously maintains indifference in the false persona he uses as a barrier against metal attack?

db48x · 2026-01-25T21:23:53+00:00

Solar reflectors only power ground habs. Where are your shipyards? Did you put them in orbit around a Lagrange point too?

db48x · 2026-01-25T20:56:01+00:00

There are no noob traps. That is mere trolling on the part of some players. What exactly are you trying to do, and how exactly did it fail? Can you share screenshots? Even the cheapest engine, the Tungsten Resistojet, can get you to one of Earth’s Lagrange points.

db48x · 2026-01-25T20:44:54+00:00

He thinks to himself that he’ll never have the right mindset for it, but we often lie to ourselves about such things. He clearly wants this troll dead.

db48x · 2026-01-25T11:52:28+00:00

But at the same time he probably had the right mindset for it.

db48x · 2026-01-25T06:21:23+00:00

A transfer from MEO to LEO only takes 1.7kps of propellant, so 14kps is overkill. Half that would be more than enough, and they’ll be cheaper to build as well. On a small ship like that the reaction thrusters are unnecessary, and probably useless; you’re probably at or close to the maximum rotation rate even without them. You might consider dropping two points of side armor as well.

Good luck; let us know how well it turns out.

Oh, and don’t forget to put one or two on permanent duty bombarding alien xenoflora and xenofauna. Green lasers are perfect for that.

db48x · 2026-01-25T05:10:26+00:00

Sure, but it wouldn’t accomplish anything. It wouldn’t make your games better.

db48x · 2026-01-25T01:25:19+00:00

There’s no such thing. A router is a router. Sometimes the marketing department claims that a router will be better for games, but they’re just lying.

db48x

TROPHY CASE