Jesters of the Underworld | Dwarf Fortress Lore

[@DiamantDogma]

It should be mentioned that unique Demons can get captured during World Gen and if you raid a site and free that Demon it can seek Sanctuary and join your Fort (even become a Noble)

[@notsae66]

If you get enough demons moving in to your civilization to count as a "civilized" race, you can play as them in Adventure mode. This is very difficult to pull off for many obvious reasons, but that is a pretty cool reward for those that like both game modes.

[@arthurbarros5189]

Just once Once came as outpost liaison. It FREAKED THE HELL OUT of me.

[@alexistoran2181]

Well now I'm tempted to make a long-term DF world with no demons just so I can intentionally release the goblins through gameplay, that sounds like a fun bit of history for a world.

[@Darth_Insidious]

I just encountered my first clown, in the first cavern layer no less. They spread fun throughout my ill equiped fortress before being locked out when they reached the surface. Many seasons were spent under seige cleaning up after the clown's party before a brave scout went out onto the surface and discovered the clown dead on top of a human merchant's body, a copper crossbow bolt impaled into it's brain.

[@Riley-uy5pe]

I have no idea why, but I'm my first game after the game came out on steam I had a huge flying Demon come to my tavern and take up residence soon after joining my fortress. all they wanted to do was sing for the crowd

[@mchelpa]

Opening up the clown car is dangerous in more than one way. It can vastly speed up FPS death of a fort.

[@BlindiRL]

My recent escapades Into the underworld has cost 10-15 fps tops.

[@knightotu7764]

"Behold, mortal, I am a divine being. I know why you have come."

[@Ihnele]

Fun fact about slade vaults: If you use the interactive menu in the world map to look for artifacts around the world, you can select one of those slabs containing a demon's name. You can then (In fortress mode) send your squad to retrieve said slab back to your fort. I've pulled this off and my legendary squad of steel armored soldiers slaughtered the angels with no losses whatsoever. Though the slab is unfortunately useless in Fortress Mode as your civilians can't read anything that isn't a book or scroll, though even if they could it's not like you could just send them over to banish the demon or anything (And ironically the demon whose slab I took was already slain by me a few years earlier when I raided the goblins, making the slab double useless.) Another fun fact: If you somehow "guess" where the vault is located in the world (or use dfhack), and embark in fortress mode inside their boundaries, you'll pretty much have the vault in fortress mode for you to explore. Though unless you had already killed off the angels from a previous raid like me, you'll be pretty much killed from the start by them. However, if you ended up killing them earlier with another fort, and arrive at an empty vault, what you have as reward is far better than the slab. First, you got an insane amount of slade rocks (about 29k of them given my experience) through deconstructing the vault with your dwarves. Slade is unobtainable by any other means in the game, but it has some unique properties as a stone. For starters, it is extremely dense, weighing 20k tons, about 100 times heavier than any other stone in the game. This makes carrying them really tasking. However, another property it has is being immune to both magma and dragonfire, a property that no other stone has (bauxite being the only stone immune that's magma safe, but not to dragonfire), other than divine metal that is. The second reward, comes in the form of bars. You see, inside the vaults, you'll find some passages blocked by vertical bars, made of slade "bars". Normally in Adventure Mode, you're supposed to pull a lever to open those bars to pass through. In Fortress Mode though you can simply deconstruct them, and you'll have those slade bars for you to use. Now, there's not a lot of things that you can really do with those bars. namely build vertical/floor bars with them or walls/flooring. But, there's one thing that you can do that's very interesting. If you manage to build and thrive in that embark, with the empty, deconstructed vault looming about in your embark, you'll eventually have strange moods in your fort. If a weaponsmith ends up with a strange mood, there's a chance (which can be incentivized by forbidding all other materials) that they'll pick those slade bars and make an artifact weapon out of them. This is the only way to obtain weapons made out of slade, the heaviest material in the game. Now why would you go through all the trouble to do this? The way that weapons are categorized in Dwarf Fortress is in two types: Cutting weapons and blunt weapons. Cutting being all weapons with a sharp edge like swords, axes, pikes, etc. Blunt weapons are those that deal blunt damage such as warhammers, maces, mauls, and to an extent, crossbows, when used in melee combat. The thing about blunt weapons though, is that the damage they deal is based on the density of the material it is made from. Basically the denser the material, the more damage it can deal. So, with all that said, this makes slade maces and warhammers, arguably the most deadly type of blunt weapon in the game, by an absurd difference, being ten times denser than platinum, which was normally considered the best material for blunt weapons because of these properties. So if you really want bragging rights, you can have your dwarves birth a slade warhammer into your world, that'll take quite a lot of strength to wield, but will unquestionably turn any opponent into a bloody pulp of minced meat. I've done this myself, got a slade mace and a slade warhammer in a "forge" I built out of that same slade where the vault used to be. Now you could just retrieve said weapon with a squad from another fort if you want, or you could eventually take it with your adventurer once adventure mode comes out. Though I imagine the latter would be very difficult to carry around. (It's not actually THAT heavy, a slade mace weighs 160 tons while a warhammer just 80, so it's similar to wearing a full steel armor in terms of weight carrying.)

[@Ihnele]

For anyone curious I chronicled this in a sequence of images imgur (fill in the rest of the url) /a/2pmFRVQ (KZbin keeps deleting my comment)

[@boatoflol]

Insane. Slade Warhammers and Maces, a dream comes true. I also would love to just use some Angel Armor and melt it down into those awesome procedurally generated metals. I created a fort with over 200 Dwarves and like 170 of them being pretty okay Weaponsmiths I hoped to melt down Angel Metal Artifacts to make Legendary weapons, but yeah, Artifacts can not be molten. So it was all in Vain ^^

[@Ihnele]

@@boatoflol you can melt their armor too, if they're in metal form and not clothes that is. You sometimes find angels inside gem studded walls in fort mode, where they'll have divine armor equipped. Divine metal is definitely rare and hard to get in quantities, other than through the smelt dupe mechanic which still needs at least one bar to start it.

[@ponponpatapon9670]

"bauxite being the only stone immune that's magma safe" u old boomer, there's plenty of magma-safe stones now

[@KaptifLaDistillerie]

@@ponponpatapon9670 damn that was brutal

[@taffingspy]

Loving these lore vids so far, they're pretty cosy to listen to!

[@ovrsurge4689]

Regarding pronunciation, I recall a story of a woman who believed misled was pronounce like missiled, So she had been missiled her entire life. Usually it doesn't matter too much, but the fastest way to get a response or an answer is usually to be inequivocably wrong about something.

[@Torriotorres]

What about the dark forces entombed in the diamonds and obsidian? Some are introduced as forces that represent a sphere of influence, such as fear.

[@BlindiRL]

If they have weapons they are angels. I'll cover those in the next lore video. Angels are a lot like demons but they originate above ground and as defenders of the underworld. Similarly evil but can be aligned with any deity that exists.

[@Torriotorres]

@@BlindiRL Thanks! Makes sense, and I look forward to your next video on that!

[@ovrsurge4689]

I wonder what the other creatures surrounded by the obsidian are. Are they just minor demons or some other category of beast?

[@Laff700]

I have some questions about demon-proofing doors(which I can't test due to the building destroyer bug). If you have a wall with 2 ramps on either side with a door on top(which separates two regions), no demons should be capable of destroying such door, correct? If you have a similar layout but with the interior floor at door-height, and a demon thinks it has access to both sides of the door, it could destroy the door anyways despite the door being above the demon. At least according to the wiki. I'm wondering if the first layout I mentioned would be immune to this, as there is no place on either side of the door where the demon can destroy the door. Is that design safe from destruction? Assuming it is, we should move on to ghosts. Ghosts can open doors, potentially doors in front of demons. I think several layers of demon-proof doors could protect against this threat. I think if a ghost opens a mechanized door which is closed, a demon will be capable of passing through immediately afterwards. Is this true? If not, then mechanized doors would be demon-proof in this case. In which case, can ghosts flip levers? Thank you for any and all help.

[@rcultist2802]

These lore videos are fun!

[@BlindiRL]

Glad you like them!

[@boatoflol]

@BlindiRL Don't know where to write this, but a Video Idea: How to retire and reclaim fortresses without too many fuckups. What to prepare for retiring etc. How does retiring affect the further life/simulation in the fort. In my hundreds of hours in DF I never reclaimed a fort as I was afraid nothing would be working anymore (the wiki kind of scared me about that). I also almost never retired and kept playing in the same civ, the only times I tried it was back then where tantrum spirals still existed and only mad and really pissed dwarves came back to my new fort. So thought would really be nice to give new players and weird idiots like me an overview on another way to keep playing in the same world and actually use one of DF's greatest features: To build long legends and legacies over multiple Forts. Maybe throw in some World map shenanigans.

[@johnalogue9832]

Coming into this video, I'm looking forward to finding out what's left to spoil regarding the Circus, since it's seemingly pretty obvious to anyone who spends time around DF discussion.

[@JessopsBezar]

Thank you! We appreciate you😁

[@gascoinshairychest6380]

Great video blind! Thanks!

[@BlindiRL]

No problem 👍

[@sarasPP]

Thank you for the tasty lore

[@BlindiRL]

I like it crunchy.

[@sono_chi_no_sodium_chlorid7635]

Tbh I didn't care for spoilers that much cuz I would never found out how the hell should I get pass the magma without looking it up. And I still don't know how to do it

[@BlindiRL]

Dig into the gem studded walls and into adamantine.

[@MOISECRIMI]

👌

[@unceljeffy2716]

😮dang