Day 2.5: Migrants!

Hey guys.
I played the game a little bit without recording it this time.
I didn't make any large-scale changes, but one thing I was hoping for finally happened- migrants arrived!

That's right, we had 19 new migrants arrive from the Dwarven homeland at the end of Spring on the 2nd year of our fortress (year 202). You know what that means...19 people now get their own dwarf to follow. And we also get to appoint one lucky person as our Sheriff.

I'm thinking of playing again sometime tonight around 8pm. I hope everyone is having fun.
-Matt

Day 2: Hot Camel-Punching Action

Not much to report on day 2, other than this time I spent about 1hr 10min playing rather than a huge 2.5hrs like last time. We cleaned up a lot in this play session, made a few new bedrooms (hopefully to attract migrant dwarves to our awesome fortress), and even did some trading with the liason.

Taking a look at the fortifications from last time, it looks like the archer tower is almost completed.

Some new bedrooms being carved out.

We decided to smooth a lot of the stone walls to increase the value of the fortress. Brandon was very busy today, he had his work cut out for him (get it? stonecutting? pfft, whatever... jerks.)

The dwarven liaison visits our fine establishment, but there's no trade depot. :'(

Huzzah! Our new trade depot is finished. The liaison can now chat with Shay, our humble leader, about trading.

Some more bedrooms are being built south of the new ones. The ones we first built have been assigned to the lucky residents of our first expedition.

Some human merchants were nice enough to pay us a visit, unfortunately we didn't have anything good to trade them, so Shay sent them off on their merry way with a kind word and a warm smile.

As we later found out the human trader was actually a she, not a he, and she was doing something that I've never seen before after she left the depot.

A few minutes later, I saw this message about a camel being enraged. Thinking it was my own tame camel that came with us, hauling our caravan, I panicked and opened up the status window. No, he appeared to be fine...but when I scrolled down to the wild camels...

...I saw something quite disturbing- 3 deceased camels among the 2-humps.

Desperately trying to figure what was going on, I checked the map where the camels were grazing.

 That red colored dirt is blood...that can't be a good sign.

 What's this?! The trader appears to have run into the camels on their way out of our depot, and...they're beating them with their bare hands!

 This reckless camel-punching reminds me of something I've seen before in a similar fantasy-themed environment. Hmm...

And he's down...poor camel. A senseless killing that could've been avoided if I had made some crappy goods to trade. Oh well, time to collect some camel leather and make stew!

Dwarf Settlement Begins: The Nerdening

 Hey guys. Welcome to the first installment of my DF Play-Along.
 Last night I started a new game in DF mode and started creating a humble little fortress after striking the earth.

 Our world, Ceretecamade, The Infinite Realms.

After much deliberation and wavering, we decided to settle down on a nice, Calm piece of land in The Eviscerated Hills on The Continents of Swaying.

 Our caravan sets down in the center of our new plot of land. We are joined by Mike, Brandon, Elf, Phoebe, Shay, Nicole, and Alison. Our 3 dogs and cats eagerly scout out their new surroundings.

 Here are the list of dwarves and animals.

 The cats waste no time making quick slaves of Brandon (Olon and Ast) and Elf (Olin).

We start work on fortress level 1, almost directy beneath where our caravan came to a stop. We build a barracks that everyone can sleep in, a couple farm plots and a dining room/meeting hall where we can eat and meet up to discuss all matters dwarvish. Notice the dining room, boy that place is popular, cats and dogs, and even the camel and horse on the tables.

We continue with a lot more mining down to 6 levels below. There's a lot of mining work to be done in a fortress.

 What's this? It looks like we've already struck 4 precious minerals. Wow! Nice work Elf and Phoebe.
All that red text is confusing the heck out of me. It seems like the cats are injured while tring to move objects. On further inspection, it may be just a simple bug (missing descriptive text). It seems that the cats are just too weak to pick up what they want to move, they're not actually getting injured (or at least that's what appears to be happening).

 Also, it looks like Shay has created a masterpiece. Amazing! This doesn't happen too often this early in the game (at least not for me). What that item was, I do not know, but I'll find out shortly. What does matter is that masterpieces are worth an atomic crap-ton of gold.

Towards the end of the first season, I had Brandon start working on some basic walls and fortifications in preparation to make our fortress walls stronger and keep us save from intruders. Traps will be next after the walls are up.

Those cats are at it again...and the season has changed to summer. Wonderful! However, we don't have any migrant dwarves this season, so we'll have to wait until the next to invite some more friends to help us out. Oh well.

 Much thanks to the live stream viewers last night. It was a little boring at times when I couldn't remember which commands to do and where to find them, but it should get better now (or so I would hope).

You can find the pre-recorded videos our live play sessions here:
http://www.justin.tv/mjantonellis/all?kind=all&filter=all&order=most_recent

I'm still trying to figure out what the best time for streaming would be, so if you guys have any suggestions, let me know.

Until next time.

First!!!1@

Hey guys. Welcome to the pre-installment of my new experiment I like to call "Matt's Dwarf Fortress Play-Along" or MDFPA (or NAMBLA).

The goal of this play experiment is to have you, my friends, included in a single-player game I'm playing and watch me remotely via my stream on my Justin.tv channel. The game is quite detailed and hard to grasp for beginning players, so my secondary goal is to act as a translator for you, so you don't have to spend hours upon hours trying to figure out how to play the game, but still have just as much fun as I do when I'm playing.

In this blog, I will be covering on a screenshot basis, the highlights of my Dwarf Fortress play sessions, and including updates for you (the sideline players) in my game as the Dwarves. Bear in mind that I'm not an expert player, and we're just doing this for fun and our own amusement

Some background on the game:

Dwarf Fortress is an independent game made by a friendly local, Tarn Adams, in the same vein as various old-school rogue-likes, but with a very dynamic twist in the form of a god-game or simulation game. The player is essentially a pseudo hand-of-god, influencing the decision of the fortress inhabitants. The game is very deep in terms of AI and world creation, and personally, I think it deserves much more recognition than it has received.

It's still undecided when I will be broadcasting, but I will most likely send out an email 3-4 hours before I start. I will also be recording each play session so you can watch them later if you miss them or if you just want to re-watch something and the blog doesn't do it for you.

You can find link to my channel on the right hand side of the page. I'll be sending out the channel password to everyone as I am able to include you in the game.

Strike the Earth!
-Matt