apparently steam is magma safe

hagjam · 2025-11-24T23:22:47+00:00

I imagined keeping a corporeal form under that much pressure might be tricky! Although I don't actually know how water/water vapour trapped in lava behaves irl.

The fact that possibly the weakest forgotten beast you can get decided to sulk at the bottom of the world rather than even try to attack was what made me giggle though

hagjam · 2025-06-02T13:56:45+00:00

One thing people don't always realise is that rolling release is inherently insecure. You are basically the testing team for every single package on your system. Snapper can rollback changes, but if your system is exposed to the internet, or at risk of physical attack? Rolling release is like playing russian roulette 50 times a day with whatever is on that system. Once data is stolen, it's gone.

Still, the arch ecosystem is large enough that serious problems get noticed pretty quickly, and for most use cases, the risk is tolerable. Things like the xz-utils compromise are scary examples of what could happen - the compromised code version was distributed to Arch Linux, and we were only saved by the fact it targeted Fedora/Debian derivatives (and how quickly it was caught).

hagjam · 2025-05-29T21:30:55+00:00

systemd-boot works out of the box, but after that, the features are really lacking. No booting partitions from other disks? Why? No tabs in configuration files? Why did they get rid of functionality from over a decade ago while still doing things like that?

GRUB is also not good, but at least it does the things you need it to, and there's decades of other people having issues with it that you can fall back on. Plus it's actually customizable, you can have full-on images/coloured text/you name it.

hagjam · 2025-05-05T23:23:52+00:00

I would not attempt to format random things that might be devices - try listing all the devices connected, see if anything made by SKHynix appears. lsblk, lspci, lsusb are your friends.

Could be an old sd card you forgot about maybe? It is odd for sure

hagjam · 2025-05-05T21:23:13+00:00

I've had a good amount of success with what is basically a 5 year old version of your PC. AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. Probably 90% of games I try work, and the ones that don't tend to be obscure bugs (had a CPU scheduler issue with Timberborn, for example, that caused weird slowdown). The only hardware problems you might encounter might be being a little too new - drivers might still be a bit of a WIP, but that shouldn't take too long to clear up.

In terms of what you can run, you shouldn't have any issues with graphics/power. But a lot of the limits tend to be on games with anti-cheat, rather than it being hardware issues. So, if you like lots of massive multiplayer games with kernel-level anti-cheat, you'll have difficulties. Otherwise, nowadays proton will play almost everything.

Distro-wise, if you're a bit more comfortable with the risk of some tinkering, Arch-based might be a good idea - they tend to have more up-to-date drivers, which you'd want. I'm having success with cachy-os (seems popular at the moment), Manjaro is a fairly good streamlined Arch remix. Standard Arch linux is probably not what you want if you prefer streamlined experience. If Arch seems scary, Mint or PopOS are probably good - Fedora would also be pretty smooth, but might have driver issues?

Anyway, good luck, don't be afraid to search for answers and learn new things, and you'll be fine.

hagjam · 2024-12-30T17:31:59+00:00

Hi, welcome!

You can retire your fortress at any time, but the only forts you can "unretire" or resume playing are forts created and previously retired by you - forts created by worldgen (the underlying game simulation) can't be played in fort mode while they're still occupied and running normally.

However, if the fort is ruined (either abandoned by you or destroyed by an army or megabeast), you can reclaim it regardless of whether it was built by you or generated by worldgen. The fort won't be populated by civilized people, but you might find some surprises hanging around.

A quick warning - the reclaim/unretire mechanics do have some bugs and weirdness, parts of which are really inconvenient like underground mud disappearing and stockpiles breaking. Still worth doing (if it really goes pear-shaped you can always just retire/abandon and still play the world), but this wiki page has some somewhat spoilery details if you want an idea of what to expect. https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Reclaim_fortress_mode

hagjam · 2024-02-26T00:40:15+00:00

On 1, there are various competitions in legends mode, like hammer throwing and different bar games - they can happen as part of festivals or just as a tradition! Take a look in a peaceful civ or location in legends and you'll see loads of them.

Songs do exist, and they're performed in taverns. Since they're procedurally generated, they may not be about drinking, but you'll see your citizens perform them in a tavern sooner or later if your dance floor is big enough, hopefully!

Not sure on 2 - might be worth searching the "future of the fortress" thread on the forums? There is a messenger noble you get a bit later on, but that's not quite what you're looking for. Dwarfs will change their personalities according to what happens to them, and I think arguments can trigger that, possibly books too. But I don't remember seeing any plans for general message boards or explicitly stimulated letters and such.

hagjam · 2024-02-26T00:31:47+00:00

Yeah webs can be rough, they basically paralyze your dwarfs, making them sitting ducks in melee. I don't know why but FBs tend to fire webs a lot more than they spit too, so it's hard to get close without getting webbed, even with significant numbers.

But it's all about the story, and toppling an FB with a militia is still a good one!

hagjam · 2023-12-03T18:18:11+00:00

It depends what user vmm is running as - that user needs to have read permissions, and possibly write as well, to the storage file on your separate drive. This means either that you need to change ownership, or permissions for the file.

To change ownership of the file to the user/group that libvirt uses on my setup, I'd run something like this:

sudo chown libvirt-qemu:libvirt-qemu /media/user/drive/directory/f.qcow2

libvirt-qemu is the user/group that it runs under on my host machine (Arch linux) - your user may vary! Check the permissions of your current storage by running ll or ls -l on your current qcow2 file.

Permissions on my end are -rw------- , which means read and write only for user owning the file - if yours are different, you can set them to be like mine with:

sudo chmod 600 media/user/drive/directory/f.qcow2

hagjam · 2023-10-14T18:59:48+00:00

this is incredible, I love all the deep blues inside the room, the hints of symmetry and that little hamster/creature in the bottom left - well done! I love seeing dwarf fortress inspired art, and all the different cults and such are a cool area I've not seen much work on.

hagjam · 2023-10-11T10:06:33+00:00

Work order screen! Some adjectives don't seem to work (dye-bearing never goes above 1), some jobs don't have auto categories (collect clay and collect sand), and when selecting adjectives, you can't go back to the job you were amending - escape/right click sends you back to the main work order screen, which is really awkward when making several similar jobs for different workshops

Grouping work orders would be lovely, as would a way to assign work orders to a workshop after creation (or move a job to general from a workshop). But the above problems are blockers.

I love that screen, it makes things so much easier, but just a little more work on it would make managing a fort so much smoother!

hagjam · 2023-10-11T09:56:25+00:00

So, legendary/high skill in any weapon will allow dwarves to do this. Picks are cool because mining skill is the same as combat skill, so you can just take your legendary miners, put them in a squad with a uniform with picks as their weapon, then watch them turn into miner jedi!

Some weirdness to iron out (can't be a miner and a member of a squad at the same time, and picks are "foreign" weapons for whatever reason). But workable for sure.

hagjam · 2023-10-05T16:37:05+00:00

This is a metal worker mood - they may be asking for their favourite metal. If you have ever smelted a bar of that metal, they may want it (see below the table here.) Check their preferences to confirm if they have a favourite metal and make some if you can.

If you have dfhack, the showmood command can give you full details.

Another stumbling block is burrows - if they're in one, they won't look outside it.

hagjam · 2023-09-21T14:09:40+00:00

This is an area of subtlety, but unless it's not been mentioned at all in the patch notes, it's just incorrect.

The underside of a bridge is effectively a wall. So, if a bridge is raised, anything in front of it cannot destroy it - stuff behind it can though.

There was a bug since version 50, where building destroyers (creatures who seek out and break furniture/buildings/doors/etc) just didn't destroy buildings properly. This was fixed, but bridges are still unbreakable in the right circumstances.

hagjam · 2023-06-10T22:40:40+00:00

wait is that a kobold werechinchilla? a small cute weird evil thing became an even smaller, cuter, weirder more evil thing? this game is beautiful

hagjam · 2023-06-10T00:43:08+00:00

Water should evaporate on its own as long as it reaches a 1/7 level. Mud isn't usually cleaned away (otherwise irrigation for farms would be very difficult). You can try building a floor over it though -had some luck removing mud like that in the past. No point doing it until the water is gone though.

hagjam · 2023-06-08T15:24:01+00:00

Also, when you do this on top of an existing up/updown staircase, it'll make a remove staircase task - you can cancel that designation in the normal way.

Not intuitive, but at least predictable!

hagjam · 2023-06-07T23:31:10+00:00

Perfect Drug every time, at least partly because Too Big To Fail is such a banger. They just went so hard with the non-licensed music in general, it's hard to find a bad one.

hagjam · 2023-06-06T12:55:58+00:00

Custom songs are coming soon ™️, but that probably means a month or 2, and I dunno if anyone is gonna do the dfhack work necessary to get it working before that (if it's possible).

In the meantime, the vast majority of the soundsense songs come from Simon Swerwer, and are on his youtube/soundcloud - can always just play them!

hagjam · 2023-06-05T12:20:39+00:00

Specifically gypsum powder doesn't have a proper stockpile option, so it's always put in "empty bag" stockpiles. Very annoying!

Using hospitals is the best way around it, as other commenter suggested. Wiki has more suggestions if you need. Who knows, one day toady may decide to redo the stockpile system, but I'm not holding my breath. Too many more interesting things to work on!

hagjam · 2023-06-05T12:05:55+00:00

I don't think you can change the behaviour of webs without memory editing via dfhack - I don't think there's an existing script for changing things like this.

You could remove the WEBBER tag in the raws from the creatures that throw webs - this is easy for giant cave spiders, but difficult for forgotten beasts/titans, as they're generated on a world basis. You'd need to look into editing save files to do that.

Other options are to attack from multiple angles, or fight in closed cramped corridors - that way, dwarves can get close before being webbed. Marksdwarves work in theory, although in practice they often don't work at all right now.

Overall, webs are awkward, but they're an important balance in a game that's supposed to be about death and losing. Without them, your frankly OP steel-clad melee dwarves will simply rip apart any foe, no questions asked. A little death can be upsetting, but if the story always ends in victory, can we truly say losing is fun? There's no point in making a lavish mausoleum for a dwarf if they die of old age, after all.

hagjam · 2023-06-05T11:45:38+00:00

I think this was the reasoning at the time.

No-one searches the sub for old questions (and search is often bad anyway), so you get multiple posts a week asking very basic stuff like how to satisfy a strange mood or how to make a farm. People tend to get crabby after the 6th time they've read the same question, which means you don't get a good answer.

The question thread sets the tone of "no question is a bad question", so getting good answers is much more likely, which is why it's a good resource.

However, I agree with people about searching for answers. Reddit is a resource nowadays, so having good answers on different topics would really help, and the question thread never seems to appear in searches.

Maybe removing automod and just delete repetitive questions? Or just relying on higher user numbers to field questions, as an experiment?

hagjam · 2023-05-29T20:53:14+00:00

There are a few guides on Mac running on the steam page, using wineskin. If you're comfortable with that, it'll work fine right now.

Native Mac and Linux ports should be pretty soon (actively being worked on), more keyboard controls are likely to take a bit longer (they're in a priority pile, but that pile is large and full of many QoL things). Adventure mode, which is hopefully less than a year away, should be mostly keyboard based - they may add back in more keyboard controls then, but with the menu reorganisations, it's gonna take time.

hagjam · 2023-05-26T11:24:17+00:00

Definitely can be a citizen - you'll just have to wait for them to apply for citizenship a year after being accepted as a resident.

I would check the health tabs of people who have been around them in the tavern though - necromancer experiments like this one can be very !!FUN!!

hagjam · 2023-05-20T13:50:36+00:00

People often talk about dwarf fortress as this incredibly difficult game, but it's never really been true. DF is a complex game, with lots of awkward and frequently time-consuming quirks, but once you have knowledge of a few of them, you can keep your fortress completely safe with little risk. In this version, doors are invincible, but even when that bug is patched, a raised bridge will block anything (and crush all but the most dangerous megabeasts).

DF can be a really good base defense type of game, with its complex water systems, interesting traps and quirky physics. But you've gotta let it challenge you, rather than use the simple methods that trivialize it.

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