Sep 15, 2024

Zizaran’s Class Gauntlet Event Starts on September 26th

Path of Exile - CommunityTeam_GGG

Community streamer Zizaran is back with another 10-day Class Gauntlet Event which starts on September 26th PDT. Racers will level characters and kill challenging bosses to earn points and compete to find out how each of the classes fare against some of Path of Exile's most difficult encounters. The event will take place in a Hardcore Solo Self-Found Settlers Event League provided by us with a range of dynamic damage and life mods! The prize pool is funded by the community and Zizaran's event partners.

Information, Start Time and How to Join

The Gauntlet will be held as an Event League on PC that is available to all players during the event by clicking "Join" in the bottom right corner of the character select screen.

Players will receive points once per character based on their level, specific boss kills and select Maven's Invitations. Don't forget, to get boss kill points you must submit your kills in the Path of Exile Community Racing Discord which you can join by clicking here.

Start time: 3pm September 26th PDT. The event will last for 10 days. A countdown is available {LINK REMOVED}.

Prize Pool

The prize pool is crowdfunded by Zizaran's event partners and community streamers! In addition, streamers and their communities will be able to create a bounty with the money they fundraise for the event. Bounties are a custom prize that can be awarded to players for achieving a specified goal in the event. This Gauntlet will also have Flash bounties, which are bounties that will pop up in the Racing Discord during the event! Keep an eye out on their social media for announcements regarding when their fundraisers are taking place and what they will be!

Zizaran's event partners will match donations to the prize pool (up to $25,000).

The total prize pool minus bounties will be awarded as follows:
- Rank 1 Overall: 12% Bonus
- Rank 2 Overall: 4% Bonus
Witches
- Top Witch: 8%
- Second Witch: 4%
- Third Witch: Pestilence Weapon Effect & Project Labrador Pet
Shadows
- Top Shadow: 8%
- Second Shadow: 4%
- Third Shadow: Pestilence Weapon Effect & Project Labrador Pet
Rangers
- Top Ranger: 8%
- Second Ranger: 4%
- Third Ranger: Pestilence Weapon Effect & Project Labrador Pet t
Duelists
- Top Duelist: 8%
- Second Duelist: 4%
- Third Duelist: Pestilence Weapon Effect & Project Labrador Pet
Marauders
- Top Marauder: 8%
- Second Marauder: 4%
- Third Marauder: Pestilence Weapon Effect & Project Labrador Pet
Templars
- Top Templar: 8%
- Second Templar: 4%
- Third Templar: Pestilence Weapon Effect & Project Labrador Pet
Scions
- Top Scion: 8%
- Second Scion: 4%
- Third Scion: Pestilence Weapon Effect & Project Labrador Pet
Random Draw
Leveling your characters to certain thresholds will also make you eligible for the randomly-drawn prizes made up of both merchandise and microtransactions provided by Zizaran's event partners! The general prizes listed below will be randomly drawn from all appropriately leveled characters except for the Level 90+ Armour Pack prizes, which will be drawn per class. You can gain more than 1 ticket per account for the microtransaction/physical prizes, however you cannot win more than one prize per category below:

Where to Watch
You can catch exciting moments from the event by checking out Zizaran’s Youtube Channel where Skryah and OMGitsJousis are teaming up to deliver some epic highlights!

There will also be live casting on Zizaran’s Twitch Channel. More info on who will be casting to come!

Click here to learn more about joining the event, the rules in place, the point system, prizes, or to contribute to the event.

Special thanks to community members Faderon, MrMadakey, Ultimativ, Skryah, Kikis, OMGItsJousis and Viyro for their contributions to this event.

Good luck to all those participating!

Sep 15, 2024

To celebrate the release of Dragon Spirits 2, we've added Steam Trading Cards!

Dragon Spirits - Forharnia

Dragon Spirits 2 contains spoilers for the previous title! The stories don't rely on each other, except for some background info on the characters.
They are more like two works in the same universe. Despite keeping the core of the Dragon Spirits battle system, we have introduced many fresh ideas in other parts of the game. If you're curious about the new game, you can give the free prologue version a shot first.

When developing DS1, I completely outsourced the localization work, and I WON'T MAKE THAT MISTAKE AGAIN.
If the game mechanics of DS series are poorly translated, it'll be like playing Yu-Gi-Oh with Google Translation!
I did the translation on my own this time (300,000 characters! So much text! I double-checked the key parts), but English isn't my first language. Fingers crossed it's improved!

The main differences between Dragon Spirits 2 and 1:
1. Resolution improved, mouse supported, the UI focuses more on simplicity and ease of use. Controller is under consideration. The correspondence between mouse and controller is not as simple as that between keyboard and controller.
2. In order to achieve a 2.5D-like three-dimensional sense and enhance the visual effects of battle animations, the layout of the battle system was changed from side-view to front-view (by default, the layout can be adjusted to a certain extent).
3. The theme is urban fantasy, so the art style is adapted. Due to limited budget and game assets, the scene exploration is changed to VR-like first-person perspective horizontal scrolling (with encounter changed from random to symbol), and the plot performance is more similar to a visual novel.
4. Each Dragon Spirit has unique combos, with an increase in the number of exclusive skills. We try to avoid one Dragon Spirit being completely a higher substitute of another.
5. The maximum level is increased from 20 to 100. (The EXP curve has been adjusted accordingly, reaching the maximum level does not take 5 times the original) Leveling can suppress opponents with Stats to a certain extent, but the feature of Dragon Spirits series is to use build and tactics to outsmart opponents with high Stats. Level 100 still cannot form a significant suppress against level 90.
6. The EXP distribution system is changed to Cognition Mould system. A Dragon Spirit can be equipped with up to 3 Moulds to adjust its six Stats, preventing the need to distribute EXP repeatedly as Dragon Spirits' battle roles shift in various situations.

Future plans: I'll base the number of future updates on the situation post-release. First, I will adjust balance and add some new DS, gradually optimize the English translation and adjust game balance and difficulty based on player feedback.
It's just too much work to make a big dream game, and the risks and pressure are too high. I'd prefer to make some casual games like click games or simulation games (maybe Dragon Spirits Universe?) to chill out...
I made DS1 when I was in college. I had a ton of free time back then, so I took my time sketching out a complete series of world maps. Creating game maps takes a lot of time and effort. If I get fortunate and become really rich, I could possibly employ a few more people and start a game with a large number of maps to explore, and maybe even make it 3D.
Just kidding, it's not probable. Only big companies can manage the cost of such a game. Indie games still need to find ways to save money to get finished on time.

Sep 15, 2024

DFHack 50.13-r5

DFHack - Dwarf Fortress Modding Engine - myk002

On Steam, this release is available on the DFHack default "None" channel (for DF 50.13), the adventure-beta channel (for DF 51.01-beta), and the 50.14testing channel (for DF 50.14-beta).

This release is compatible with all distributions of Dwarf Fortress: Steam, Itch, and Classic.

Please report any issues (or feature requests) on the DFHack GitHub issue tracker. When reporting issues, please upload a zip file of your savegame and a zip file of your mods directory to the cloud and add links to the GitHub issue. Make sure your files are downloadable by "everyone with the link". We need your savegame to reproduce the problem and test the fix, and we need your active mods so we can load your savegame. Issues with savegames and mods attached get fixed first!

Highlights

Idle crafting

Dwarves will now have to option to go craft something when they have the need. The only thing you have to do is designate a Craftsdwarf's workshop as a place where dwarves can elect to go to do their crafting.

At the bottom of the "Workers" tab, you'll now see an option for "Allow idle dwarves to satisfy crafting needs". The option will only be toggleable if the workshop is not already assigned to a master. If you set this option to "yes", then you'll see crafting jobs start to appear as your idle dwarves figure it's time to go craft something. Feel free to trade those crafts away to the next caravan!

Although you can designate any Craftsdwarf's workshop as an idle crafting designation, this feature works best if you build a separate Craftsdwarf's workshop (or two) specifically for idle crafting. If you set the number of "General work orders allowed" to zero on the "Work orders" tab for the workshop then the workshop is kept free for dwarves to use in their down time.

If you have the "Permitted General Work Order Labors" customized for the workshop, the kinds of crafting jobs that dwarves will do there will respect the setting. Note that you must have at least one of Stonecrafting or Bone Carving enabled for the workshop to be used for idle crafting. You can also link the workshop to a stockpile to control which materials will be used for the crafts.

Room reservations

This is actually two features in one: a bugfix and a quality of life tool. The bugfix part takes effect automatically when a unit leaves the map. The most common situation is a squad going out on a raid. You may have noticed that when a unit leaves the map, they lose ownership of all their rooms. If you have carefully assigned specific bedrooms to your squad members, you'll be annoyed to see the rooms snagged by some random dwarf while your squad is away. This is even more impactful if you have nobility or administrators in the squad: their room requirements will be suddenly unmet.

Now, when your units leave the map, their room will be reserved in their names for when they get back. The room's zone will be disabled, and you'll see a message when you click on the zone telling you who the room is reserved for. You have the option of cancelling the reservation and making the room available for general use, if you want to. The reservation is automatically canceled if the owner is killed while away on their raid.

The second part of this feature is the ability to reserve rooms for specific noble or administrative roles. You can make a fine office and pre-reserve it for when a baron is appointed. The office will be disabled until a baron appears, and when the role becomes filled, the room will be automatically assigned to the role holder. You can even prepare for the situation where you have many barons. If you reserve 10 fine offices for the baron role, one office will be assigned to each of your 10 barons as they appear.

This is also very useful for administrative roles like managers. If you switch managers frequently, it can be a hassle to reassign the office each time. When you reserve the room for the manager role, the room will be automatically reassigned when a new citizen is appointed to the role.

Ethics violation warning

It is now much harder to accidentally offend the elves. To be clear, you can still offend them if you want to. It's just harder to do it unintentionally.

Elves will refuse to trade for any item that could have come from harming an animal or a tree. They'll then refuse any further trades and leave the map in a huff. It is not always easy to figure out which items will trigger their ire. If a stone craft has a wooden decoration, they'll notice. If you sell innocent sand in an animal leather bag, they'll notice. If your artifact warhammer menaces with spikes of yak bone, they'll definitely notice.

If you do select any of those items in the bartering menu (that is, when you are actually specifying which fort items to trade for which merchant items), you'll see an "Ethics warning" badge next to the Trade button. Clicking on this badge will list the offending items, and it will give you an option to deselect them. If you click the Trade button anyway, you'll get one final confirmation to make absolutely sure you know what you're doing.

Give it a try! Remember, happy elves bring friendly giant animals instead of hostile ones! : )

For elves, the check is for animal and tree ethics, but this feature also works on modded races that have any other combination of ethical requirements.

Matchmaking interface

By popular request by matchmaking role players, we now have an interface for assigning (or reassigning) spouses and lovers: gui/family-affairs. You can also initiate pregnancies with the partners of your choice, regardless of existing relationships. Go forth and meddle!

You can open the tool with the pregnancy tab pre-selected by invoking it as gui/pregnancy.

Announcements

PSAs

As always, remember that, just like the vanilla DF game, DFHack tools can also have bugs. It is a good idea to save often and keep backups of the forts that you care about.

Many DFHack tools that worked in previous (pre-Steam) versions of DF have not been updated yet and are marked with the "unavailable" tag in their docs. If you try to run them, they will show a warning and exit immediately. You can run the command again to override the warning (though of course the tools may not work). We make no guarantees of reliability for the tools that are marked as "unavailable".

The in-game interface for running DFHack commands (gui/launcher) will not show "unavailable" tools by default. You can still run them if you know their names, or you can turn on dev mode by hitting Ctrl-D while in gui/launcher and they will be added to the autocomplete list. Some tools do not compile yet and are not available at all, even when in dev mode.

If you see a tool complaining about the lack of a cursor, know that it's referring to the keyboard cursor (which used to be the only real option in Dwarf Fortress). You can enable the keyboard cursor by entering mining mode or selecting the dump/forbid tool and hitting Alt-K (the DFHack keybinding for toggle-kbd-cursor). We're working on making DFHack tools more mouse-aware and accessible so this step isn't necessary in the future.

Changelog

New Tools

embark-anyone: allows you to embark as any civilization, including dead and non-dwarven civs
gui/family-affairs: (reinstated) inspect or meddle with pregnancies, marriages, or lover relationships
idle-crafting: allow dwarves to independently satisfy their need to craft objects
notes: attach notes to locations on a fort map
preserve-rooms: manage room assignments for off-map units and noble roles. reserves rooms owned by traveling units and reinstates their ownership when they return to the site. also allows you to assign rooms to noble/administrator roles, and the rooms will be automatically assigned whenever the holder of the role changes

New Features

caravan:
- DFHack dialogs for trade screens (both Bring goods to depot and the Trade barter screen) can now filter by item origins (foreign vs. fort-made) and can filter bins by whether they have a mix of ethically acceptable and unacceptable items in them
- If you have managed to select an item that is ethically unacceptable to the merchant, an "Ethics warning" badge will now appear next to the "Trade" button. Clicking on the badge will show you which items that you have selected are problematic. The dialog has a button that you can click to deselect the problematic items in the trade list.
confirm: If you have ethically unacceptable items selected for trade, the "Are you sure you want to trade" confirmation will warn you about them
exportlegends: option to filter by race on historical figures page
quickfort: #zone blueprints now integrated with preserve-rooms so you can create a zone and automatically assign it to a noble or administrative role

Fixes

DFHack screens that allow keyboard cursor and camera movement while focused now also allow diagonal and Z-change keyboard cursor keys
DFHack state for a site is now properly saved when retiring a fort
prevent hang when buildings in zones are destroyed in the case where the buildings were not added to the zone in the same order that they were created (uncommon)
System clipboard: when pasting single lines from the system clipboard, replace newlines with spaces so they don't show up as strange CP437 glyphs in-game
buildingplan:
- improved performance in forts with large numbers of items
- fixed processing errors when using quick material filter slot '0'
deep-embark:
- fix error when embarking where there is no land to stand on (e.g. when embarking in the ocean with gui/embark-anywhere)
- fix failure to transport units and items when embarking where there is no room to spawn the starting wagon
empty-bin: --liquids option now correctly empties containers filled with LIQUID_MISC (like lye)
exterminate: don't kill friendly undead (unless --include-friendly is passed) when specifying undead as the target
gui/create-item, modtools/create-item: items of type "VERMIN", "PET", "REMANS", "FISH", "RAW FISH", and "EGG" no longer spawn creature item "nothing" and will now stack correctly
gui/design: don't overcount "affected tiles" for Line & Freeform drawing tools
gui/pathable:
- fix hang when showing trade depot wagon access and a trade depot is submerged under water or magma
- fix representation of wagon paths over stairs and through doors
gui/settings-manager: work details overlay no longer disappears when you click on a unit in the unit list
gui/teleport: fix issue when teleporting units that are not prone, resulting in later issues with phantom "cannot build here: unit blocking tile" messages
regrass:
- no longer add all compatible grass types when using --force without --new
- --mud now converts muddy slade to grass, consistent with normal DF behavior
rejuvenate:
- don't set a lifespan limit for creatures that are immortal (e.g. elves, goblins)
- properly disconnect babies from mothers when aging babies up to adults
strangemood: manually-triggered Macabre moods will now correctly request up to 3 bones/remains for the primary component instead of only 1
timestream: ensure child growth events (that is, a child's transition to adulthood) are not skipped; existing "overage" children will be automatically fixed within a year

Misc Improvements

Dreamfort:
- integrate with preserve-rooms to assign relevant rooms to nobles/adimistrators
- smooth tiles under statues and other large furniture that you can't easily smooth later
assign-minecarts: reassign vehicles to routes where the vehicle has been destroyed (or has otherwise gone missing)
buildingplan: only consider building materials that can be accessed by at least one citizen/resident
exterminate:
- show descriptive names for the listed races in addition to their IDs
- show actual names for unique creatures such as forgotten beasts and titans
fix/dry-buckets: prompt DF to recheck requests for aid (e.g. "bring water" jobs) when a bucket is unclogged and becomes available for use
fix/ownership: now also checks and fixes room ownership links
gui/control-panel: include option for turning off dumping of old clothes for tailor, for players who have magma pit dumps and want to save old clothes from being dumped into the magma
gui/family-affairs: you can start this tool by the name gui/pregnancy to start directly on the "Pregnancies" tab
gui/sitemap:
- show whether a unit is friendly, hostile, or wild
- show whether a unit is caged
position:
- report current historical era (e.g., "Age of Myth"), site/adventurer world coords, and mouse map tile coords
- option to copy keyboard cursor position to the clipboard
sort: can now search for stockpiles on the Places>Stockpile tab by name, number, or enabled item categories

Documentation

add documentation for dfhack.items.findType(string) and dfhack.items.findSubtype(string)
gui/embark-anywhere: add information about how the game determines world tile pathability and instructions for bridging two landmasses
modding-guide:
- added examples for reading and writing various types of persistent storage
- updated all code snippets for greater clarity

Removed

quickfortress.csv: remove old sample blueprints for "The Quick Fortress", which were unmaintained and non-functional in DF v50+. Online blueprints are available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WuLYZBM6S2nt-XsPS30kpDnngpOQCuIdlw4zjrcITdY if anyone is interested in giving these blueprints some love

API

DFHack :: cuboid: cuboid :: clampMap now returns the cuboid itself (instead of boolean) to allow method chaining; call cuboid :: isValid to determine success
Items :: createItem: removed growth_print parameter; now determined automatically
Units: new isWildlife and isAgitated property checks

Lua

Overlay widgets can now assume their active and visible functions will only execute in a context that matches their viewscreens associations
dfhack.items.createItem: removed growth_print parameter to match C++ API
dfhack.units.isDanger: no longer unconditionally returns true for intelligent undead
dfhack.units: isWildlife and isAgitated property checks
gui.simulateInput: do not generate spurious keycode from _STRING key inputs