Immigrants - when you don't actually WANT your job.

Things have been very good recently. Domas and I got to take a break at the same time and talk. A bunch of new people moved in yesterday, so I'm stuck making all the furniture except bed for their new rooms. That's a lot of work. Everybody is complaining about a lack of chairs in the dining room, so that's my job too.


--Inod Idensat
2nd Timber, 251


Ha! Remember how Kivish was like "You're our broker," and I was like "...Okay?" Well some guy Îton Dùstikobok came here yesterday, and he's a merchant! I gave him a big hug, because now I don't have to do that job. All I need now is a mechanic to show up so I can devote all my time to gem setting like I'm used to.


--Iden Oslankifed
2nd Timber, 251


These last eight months have been great. We have a grand dining hall and nice bedrooms. The water doesn't taste that good when we have to drink it, though. Inod and I got to have a chat while we were taking a break together. In this most recent wave of new guys, there was some lady who says she's really good at farming. That's really great news for me because I don't have to do it any more, and I can devote all my time to brewing.


--Domas Sazirimush
2nd Timber, 251


My wife Zulban and son Tun and I arrived here just yesterday. I heard they were looking for a hunter. I myself am a dyer, but my dad and I used to hunt when I was a young dwarf, so I'm pretty competent with a crossbow. Apparently that's the most crossbow skill anyone in the whole fortress has, and there's not exactly a huge textile industry at the moment, so I figure I'd better make myself useful. It'll be like an adventure! A nice safe adventure... hehe...


--Urdim Nishtholest
2nd Timber, 251

Timber! Also immigrants.

As I was finishing widening the fortress entrance, Deduk, our gem cutter and Craftsdwarf, reported to me that she had nowhere to do any crafting work. She seemed to be in a terribly good mood. Tomorrow I'll start digging out a room for the Craftsdwarf's workshop. We also have no meat in the fortress, so I will dig out another room for a Bowyer. Hopefully I can get someone to volunteer to hunt. The flies around here are something awful.

--Kivish Etascilob
22nd Sandstone, 251, 17:45


Dear Diar¤y,
Oh, I broke my pencil again. Anyway, I real¤/y like it here. I have a very nic¤. e cabinet in my room. The dining room loo¤= ks fantastic, there are some great tables in there. Right now, I don't ha¤\_ve a place to work. I asked Kivish if he could provide a room fo¤/r me. I¤`m going to sleep in my excellent litt¤/e room now because I'm almost out of pencils. Goodnight Diary!

--Deduk Lisidurdim
22nd Sandstone, 251


Seems we're getting a bit violent around here. I just got orders to make a crossbow and a bunch of cages for traps. I seen some guy running around with weird-lookin' mechanisms, and my friend Deduk says she's been told to make a bunch of arrows once she gets her new workshop. I s'pose it's either goblins or meat what we're after. Maybe there'll be some sloths out there. I love me a good sloth steak. In other news, eight new folks just showed up, so I gotta make 8 new beds to furnish the new rooms. Maybe they'll actually be able to sleep the night. My buddy Domas's room is right next to mine on one side, and his girlfriend Inod's is right on the other, so they sit in the hallway and talk all night right outside my door in the middle.

--Zulban Onshensarvesh
1st Timber, 251


Well, eight new dwarves showed up today. Three of them are children. I haven't the patience for the disorganized little ones. I'm glad I love my job, because on top of the new workshops, I have to carve out a multitude of bedrooms now. One of the new dwarves volunteered to be our hunter once we get him supplies.

--Kivish Etascilob
1st Timber, 251, 19:02

Well-oiled Rube Goldberg Machine

Today, I was looking at the trade depot, thinking about how great it looks. Then I looked down the entryway and thought: "Huh... that doesn't look wide enough for a caravan. I measured the opening and realized it needed to be three times as wide as it is. I immediately set to work resolving the issue with my pick.

--Kivish Etascilob, Expedition Leader/Miner
20th Limestone, 251, 17:52


My husband Nish and I moved here to Zustashmonom (which they call "Ancientpapers" here) about three months ago. He is a doctor, the best one around. Our 4 year old son Sodel is already so strong! Perhaps he will be a woodcutter like me, or maybe he will join the military. Anyway, I got up this morning and there was an order to chop down several hundred trees. This is going to be a long week.
--Edëm Kantekkud
27th Limestone, 251



This plase is grate! I love it heer so much. :) Im pretty shy, but peepol tok to me enyway. Thay are very nice too me. The onle thing we need arownd heer is mor chares.
--Mafol Cattensterus


My wife Dodók and I just arrived here a few months past. It's okay I guess. There isn't enough alcohol or chairs, and there's too many vermin. Something woke me in the middle of the night, too. The wife seems to be having a better time of it, though. Weirdest thing happened recently. Kivish comes up to me and says: "Hello there, Iden. We've been looking for someone to fill the position of broker, and we think you're the best candidate." Dunno what he wants me to talk to the traders for. I don't even know what any of this stuff is worth! I guess being a gem setter makes people assume you know something about how much your craft sells for. We haven't been doing much with gems yet, so I was also assigned to create mechanisms. Frustrating task when you don't know how the little buggers work. I ended up throwing a couple of them across the room.
--Iden Oslankifed, Gem Setter/Broker
1st Sandstone, 251


While I was out working on the trees, I was interrupted by a big green parrot. It looked like it wanted to speak with me...
--Edëm Kantekkud
10th Sandstone, 251

New format, now with less boring (for me)!

Okay, I'd really like to get back into the Dwarf Fortress blog posts, but I think I'll be changing up the format a bit. I really didn't like doing the bios, and they felt rather dry in comparison with the actual story. If I just left them out though, there wouldn't be much in the way of character development.

I think that I would like instead to do a "journal entry" format for individual dwarves, possibly in addition to the overall story, but more likely as the entire content of the blog. I believe this will not only make the series more personal, but will also allow me to add more detail as the story is looked at from multiple perspectives.

There will probably be several short entries from multiple dwarves in each post.

We Get Company

Inod and Zulban Onshensarvesh, the woodworker, made furnishings for all the bedrooms, as well as an office for Kivish to do his managerial stuff. Kivish mined out food-related rooms, like a dining hall, food stockpile, and kitchen.

Well, we had made furnishings for all the bedrooms. Then seven more dwarves moved in! We aren't complaining though. We can use the company and extra labor. These seven dwarves include not one, but two married couples. One of the couples brought their four year old son.

It's autumn now, and our food and drink supplies are dwindling. We're still doing okay, but Mafol has resorted to becoming an herbalist and gathering plants due to the lack of fish.

Summer time! But we're underground doing stuff.

Well, we've been here an entire season now. A whole three months. Kivish found some smoky quartz while mining out the area where the mason's workshop now sits. It isn't terribly valuable, but some gems are better than no gems. We also struck tetrahedrite, which is an ore of copper. We'll probably end up swimming in the stuff eventually, but for now it's quite handy. As mentioned, we built the mason's workshop, much to Inod's delight. We also have workshops for carpentry, gem cutting/setting, and mechanics. Mafol didn't find any fish in the central or western swamps. That's okay though, because we don't have any place to clean the fish, so they'd rot pretty quickly anyway. Kivish is mining out office space for himself, as well as bedrooms for all of us. Hopefully tomorrow we'll get all the rooms furnished. It will be nice to sleep on something that isn't the floor.

Domas Sazirimush - Bio

Domas is our woodcutter and farmer. He is 66 years old, born on the 10th of Hematite in the year 185. Like Mafol, he is built like a tank. Unlike poor Mafol, he has great intuition and a good memory. He is strong, slow to tire, rarely sick, tough, and agile. He can be very focused, and he has a good kinesthetic sense. He is slow to anger, easily moved to pity, and comfortable in social situations. He has little talent for art and cracks his knuckles when he's bored. He and Inod recently started a romantic relationship.

Domas Sazirimush, Woodcutter/Farmer

Moving Day

Today we got Kivish and Domas to take a break from their respective mining and tree-chopping, and we all stood around the caravan for a drink. I sense productivity in our future.

We (Domas) did manage to set up a small farm plot to grow plump helmets in. Plump helmets are purple mushrooms, grown underground. They're one of the most versatile and fast-growing crops known to dwarf-kind. We can eat them raw, stew them, and, most importantly, make wine out of them.

After a bit of administrative confusion, we got the wagon torn down and all the stuff brought in to the new stockpile in the fortress. Tomorrow, we'll probably dig deeper underground and set up some workshops, so we can do... workshoppy things...

Mafol Cattensterus - Bio

Mafol Cattensterus is our fisherdwarf. He is 65 years old, and his birthday is on the 22nd of Felsite, in the year 186. He is built like a tank, and roughly as impervious as one. He is almost never sick. However, he is rather clumsy. The unfortunate fellow has a large deficit of willpower, a poor memory, almost no talent for music, and a lousy intellect. In accordance with his willpower, he tends to do whatever feels right at the time, which leads to overindulgence. He doesn't handle stress very well, so he tends to be reserved in conversation, and really avoids people when he can. He's nice enough though, and we all like him. He chews his lips intently when he's thinking, and we all secretly wonder how he maintains any lips at all.

Mafol Cattensterus, Fisherdwarf

Kivish Etascilob - Bio

    Our expedition leader, Kivish Etascilob, is also our best miner. He is 86 years old, and his birthday is the 23rd of Limestone, in the year 165. He is well-organized and thrill-seeking, though he is easily discouraged. He is willing to compromise on issues when necessary. Very grounded in reality, he has little imagination.
    Physically, he is agile and heals quickly, but is also quick to tire. He has a lot of willpower and a feel for music, as well as a shortage of creativity and patience. He has auburn hair, and looks much like this:

Kivish Etascilob, Miner/Expedition Leader

A New Adventure

We are an expedition of eight (myself and seven others) from the dwarven nation of The Picks of Confinement. Our expedition is called The Purple Seal, and we are settling a new land called Zustashmonom, "Ancientpapers." We expect a caravan carrying fresh supplies shortly before Winter, but it is Spring now. We will need to produce food and drink of our own to survive until then.

Today, we began cutting down an area of trees and delving secure lodgings in the side of a nearby mountain. There are no fish to be found in the Eastern Swamps, so Mafol is sitting about on the caravan doing bupkis. Like me. Perhaps there will be more exciting news in a few days when we begin farming.

Strike the earth!

Linux, OpenJDK, Pulseaudio, Catacomb Snatch, and You!

When I first tried to play Mojang's Mojam game, Catacomb Snatch, I was immediately met with crashing and, consequently, my own sadness. Looking at the garbled errors, I saw that it had something to do with the audio. To make a long story short, it seems that OpenJDK has a bug in it which prevents it and pulseaudio from playing nice together.

I was able to resolve the problem by installing Sun's JRE. I recognize that this isn't a perfect solution, but if you just want to play the game, you might not care where your JRE came from. This is a very well written guide for installing Sun Java on a Fedora/RHEL/CentOS machine: http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/install-sun-oracle-java-jdk-jre-6-on-fedora-centos-red-hat-rhel/ It may be a bit heady if you aren't terribly familiar with Linux, but you should be able to muddle through alright. If you're on Ubuntu, check this out: https://github.com/flexiondotorg/oab-java6

Once I verified that I was running Sun Java, I attempted to run CS again. No crashing! Unfortunately, the sound wasn't working anymore. On a hunch, I tried running it with padsp. My sound now works perfectly. Running a program with padsp is really simple. Instead of typing:

java -jar mojam.jar

I just typed instead:

padsp java -jar mojam.jar

Enjoy playing Catacomb Snatch! (You will, trust me.)