https://3speak.tv/watch?v=oblivioncubed/ozilncte
Hello my fellow gamers!

Today we're back to complete the process we started a couple of days ago: it's time to ramp up our metal production and get to crafting ourselves some weapons and armor!

There are a few steps to getting metal production up and going, but it's actually pretty simple as far as a production process goes.

First, we need to get some charcoal, which means we need a simple furnace which we can use to turn logs into charcoal. We don't need much of that, because often, once you start down metal production you'll be running across enough coal-coke producing materials that you won't really use anything else.

Next, we need a Smelter, and then we need a Metalsmith's workshop.

Now, I like to make two smelters usually, as it ensures I can keep production up for both smelting the actual ores, and for creating coke for the smelter's fuel. We're not deep enough yet to use Magma Smelters which don't require fuel, so this is our best option.

Once that is set up, because our squads are 10-Dwarf squads, I like to create some default Work Orders gearing them up. 10 of any weapon type, then 10 shields/bucklers, then 10 breastplates... you get the idea. Through until they're fully geared except for flasks and backpacks. (Which are super useful, and you should consider making them - but aren't strictly mandatory for your success).

With this episode behind us, I would call this the end of the Brand New Beginner's section. If you've watched these 6 and followed along, you'll be doing well enough that you could survive for several years without worry I think!

Next time, we'll dig a little deeper by... digging a little deeper, and finding the first Cavern layer.

Until then, Happy Gaming!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=oblivioncubed/kruunpvf
Well, well, well. It's finally come to this. Our first invasion and we've been caught completely unprepared.

Things we need to successfully fend off an invasion:

Things we don't have:

So, that's obviously a problem that we have to solve in a big way!

Getting ourselves some soldiers is relatively easy, we just need to assign a new Administrator/Noble as our Militia Commander, which unlocks our ability to creat our first Squad!

Getting armor and weapons... that one is a bit trickier and will take some additional workshop creation. It's not time we have right now, so I cross my fingers and hope that in our default supplies we've been sent a sword or two. Maybe a shield if we're lucky. Maybe, if we're really lucky, some kind of low-tier armor.

It does turn out that we are slightly lucky. We have some T1 armor and weapons lying around in boxes from our Embarkment, so a couple of dwarves are able to suit up and with them charging in and the rest of the squad right behind to rain some punches, bites, and kicks on the zombies... we're able to push back this first, blessedly small, invasion.

That could have gone a lot worse for us. Thankfully, this seemed to be more of an expeditionary force meant to test our capabilities. Five undead aren't much of a threat without their necromancer there to constantly bring them back.

With the assault behind us, we ensure that a Chief Medical Dwarf has been assigned, and our Hosipital zoned and furnished, so that if we end up getting into future scraps that cause us wounds we can actually do something about them.

Dwarves are surprisingly resilient, and can take quite the beating. You can have dwarves without legs just motoring around on crutches just fine, as an example. Things only get really problematic when they loose their ability to grasp, since then they can't change clothes, eat, or drink. Thankfully, we haven't had to deal with that so far!

And that's going to be it for today. We covered a lot of ground fairly rapidly today. Next time we'll start trying to properly outfit our militia.

As always, until next time my friends: Happy Gaming!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=oblivioncubed/qwrzopaw
Hey folks! Happy Monday.

Today we're looking at another quick and easy way to keep our dwarves from getting depressed and angry - and that's by creating an undedicated Temple!

Like Inns/Taverns, to build a temple we first need to zone for a regular Meeting Place, and then update that to become a Temple. When we do this, it gives us the option to make this a temple for a specific diety, or to leave it undedicated so that it's available for anyone to worship any of the dwarven gods. I generally go with this undedicated route, particularly early on in my Fortress playthroughs.

Temples can be created quick and dirty by simply hollowing out a space, zoning it, and adding an Alter in the area... but if you want to get a bit of an extra boost to happiness, you could choose to make the walls out of fancy material, add a custom floor, and decorate with statues, pedestals to show off relics, and other neat stuff. That way, when the dwarves come into the Temple, they also spend time in a well designed space and that adds to their enjoyment. They'll recall being near well made items and well crafted areas, which provides them a mood boost.

For today, we don't go too far into making our space fancy, but we do smooth the floor, and add some specially built walls. Eventually we will upgrade this, but for now it does the trick. The little bit of decoration we do accomplish is to add Engravings to the floor and a few specific walls.

As soon as we've got our new space set up though... we also get a notification of our first Invasion!

Remember how I said in Episode 1 that we were going to keep going with our Fortress despite the notification that we were close to a Necromancer who might invade early? Well, they definitely invaded early! We don't even have a militia yet! No commander, no barracks, and you can bet your buns we have no weapons. So, this could be a very interesting event... but it's also an event that we'll get to next time!

Until then, as always, thanks for watching my friends and Happy Gaming!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=oblivioncubed/vczusflx
Hello gamers!

I'm back with another actual play/tutorial episode for you. Yesterday, we completed our goal of getting our Beds and Booze situation sorted out. It's always important to have a half-decent place for our dwarves to rest their heads, and a social spot for them to drink.

Today, we're going to look at improving the efficiency of our time as players, by setting up some Work Orders.

Work Orders are a series of build tasks that you can assign to be completed as single-time actions, daily events, weekly events, or even more rare than that. These will help automate a lot of tasks for you, such as ensuring you always have 30+ Barrels of Booze (on the wall).

To set up Work Orders, we need to start by adding a new dwarf to our nobility/administration team, and that is the Manager. For a Manager to do their job, they require at least a basic office. At this stage, that means they need a box with a table and a chair in it. As we get deeper into the game, your administators/nobility are going to make larger and larger demands... but for now, a simple room with a table fits the current requirements. With that built, they're able to sign off on new work orders, and your fortress is going to end up managing a lot of day-to-day production by itself.

Some things I highly recommend you create Work Orders for (in no particular order) are:

By building these as Work Orders, it'll ensure that you always have some on hand for when you need them. You can set conditions up within your Work Order to ensure that you're not oversupplying too. By setting conditions such as "If Number of Empty Bins is Less Than 10" you can ensure that as soon as you've only got 9 empty bins left, your dwarves will jump into action to add to the supply.

I honestly cannot overstate how important Work Orders are for your Fortress. If you plan to survive for any length of time at all, you're going to need to get a Manager and start setting up this automation within the first year.

The next thing we tackle in this episode is our very first Trade!

Like with Work Orders, we need a new Administrator/Noble to actually be able to make trades, and so we have to assign our second chosen administrator: the Broker.

Brokers are the folks who make deals with travelling merchant caravans and sell your items at your Trade Depot.

With these two tasks out of the way, it's time to take stock of our goods, and hunker in for a long cold winter, which will hopefully pass fairly uneventfully.

As always, thanks for watching and Happy Gaming!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=oblivioncubed/jidbkqto
Good day folks!

We're back with another beginner-friendly gameplay and tutorial video for you. Yesterday, we Embarked with our small clan of dwarves and did some initial setup:

In today's episode, we're going to deal with two more problems that I like to get handled really early in my Fortress plays:

Now, I realize I said "we need to deal with two problems" and then listed five things, but in actuality Bedrooms and Booze are the top-level problems we're solving, and to do that, we need a bit of additional infrastructure. So, while it looks silly all typed out in a list, it is correctly only dealing with two problems.

By handling these issues, we'll keep our dwarves relatively content, which will make our ability to thrive a little easier. Moody dwarves can cause problems, so solving those needs early is necessary for our future growth.

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=oblivioncubed/juijmhbl
Hey folks!

I had mentioned a while back in a prior blog that I'd been thinking of creating a Dwarf Fortress tutorial for my fellow Hive users.

A lot of folks I've talked to about DF have commented something along the lines of: "Isn't that the notoriously complex videogame that's been in development for like 20 years?!" and yes, it is. But, while it has a lot of nuance and depth, I don't think it's actually all that complicated. As such, I wanted to show off how I typically aproach a fortress in my gameplay.

If you enjoy colony simulations and building things, this is a really fantastic game. It's a lot more accessible than I think folks realize, and while you can get into some absolutely crazy depth... you don't need go to wild to have a good time. Building cool forts, fighting off monsters and giant animals, and making a thriving civilization is achievable for anyone!

In today's episode, I'm going to talk about:

I hope you'll take some time and consider watching this series of Hive-User focused tutorials, and maybe snag the game and join me in seeing how far we can push our Dwarven civilization before we dig too greedily and too deeply!

Until next time folks, happy gaming!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=oblivioncubed/tignxcfd
### Bandits rock my world

And by rock my world I mean that they fuck me up so badly I nearly scrap 30m of footage. But fear not friends, because instead of hiding my shame away and deleting the worst run of my Skyrim life... I learned some very basic editing just to splice all my many failures into this video for your enjoyment.

Because I'm kind like that, and I know you want to see me get wrecked like a noob.

So sit back, relax, and join me as I die a bunch and then we ramble a bit about random shit.

We do end up clearing the fort - which is actually super lackluster and is pretty much empty. I speculate that perhaps this is a quest area, but as I don't remember well enough... that will remain a mystery for now.

Afterwards, we kill some more bandits in some nice Dwarven armor, and we run into some Thalamor agents just standing around being aloof little shits.

So of course, we kill them.

Fuck the Thalamor, fuck the state. Anarchy in the Skyrim!

After that fun we head to town to sell some of our ill-gotten gains, where we end the episode.

So, as I say in the video... until next time my friends. Happy gaming!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=oblivioncubed/ycmrjswf
### Playing Vampire Survivors

I thought I'd showcase a game I bought a week or so back thanks to @pusen playing it a bit on his stream. It's Vampire Survivors, which is a $3 game on Steam that is 100% worth the money. It's honestly just so so much fun.

I've been playing a ton of this and thought I'd make a small video showcasing a recent run I did with one of the characters. This character provides a Curse debuff every 10 levels, which makes him one of the more challenging characters to use, and I've - until this run - never beaten a level with him.

The game itself is a kind of casual action game with rougelite elements. It has unlockable characters and items, and a handful of very fun and challenging levels. It's currently in an Early Access stage, and more work is being done it looks like... but honestly, for the hours of entertainment I've gained so far... I'm already super pleased with it.

We ended the run with the following stats:

Which, if I do say so myself, is a pretty stellar run. Our DPS with this build was amazing, and I definitely am going to be playing around with this character more in the future.

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=oblivioncubed/dxnmbedh
### Another night, another fetch quest.

In today's episode we decide to turn in the previous quest for Harkan, giving him his blood-filled chalice.

We find out as part of this that they expected us to get followed and attacked, and aren't upset at all that we fucked the faces of the idiots they sent after us. Take that, stupid uppity vampire faction.

We're immediately told upon turning in the quest to go out and find a Moth Priest, which will help read the Elder Scroll Serana has/had on her, as it is part of some plot to supress the sun? I think??

Which, I mean, as a human that sounds like a terrible idea (I've seen Highlander 2, thank you very much) but, as a vampire... heck yeah, fuck the sun! Lets extinguish that stupid ball of burning.

So, we're given that quest and Serana offers to come with us... but she doesn't trust Lydia. Well, fair, I don't either... so goodbye Lydia, we abandon her and tell her to fuck off home (which I think is maybe my player house but who knows!) and then we head off to recall how Serana fights by getting into a couple of minor spats.

Eventually, we end at Fort Hraggstad, which I had mistakenly thought was part of the Saints & Seducer's content in Anniversary Edition. It's not.

But that's okay, because it still had people to kill - which we do. After clearing the open area, we decide to call it a wrap for this episode, and next time we'll dive into the guts of the place to explore for some sweet loot and take out any survivors.

Until then, happy gaming!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=oblivioncubed/ydaeyecy
### Voidtrain; First impressions

We're taking a quick poke at Voidtrain today! It's a neat little game I picked up from the Epic Games store, and is currently in an Early Access state.

Voidtrain is a survival crafting game taking place (so far as I've seen) entirely upon a... uh... 'dimension hopping train'? I guess? I can't think of a better way to describe it. It seems like at least some of the game - if not all of it - is set in these little... pocket worlds? I believe they're described as the space between worlds, or perhaps the space between two points on the same world. I'm unclear on some aspects of the storyline / world here.

It's a fun little game though from my tiny amount of play. We build new workbenches with scraps we reclaim from the broken landscape of the void, and thus unlock further advances we can make. It looks like later we can expand the size of our train too, which is pretty cool.

This first bit of play is a lot of testing mechanics. Floating through the void is a unique experience, and our tether to the rail platform is something that takes a little getting used to. Collecting goods makes for a lot of stopping and starting the trolley, which I think has the potential to become pretty repetative... but we'll see. I plan to play this one more - if only to help answer some lingering questions I'm left with about the actual game.

Atmospherically, the game is amazing. There's some great sound work, and the broken chunks of worlds poking into the void - or comprising it - are super interesting.

I don't have a ton more to say here on this one, at least, not right now. It's a fun little game from the first ~30 min or so, and I plan to give it more time to see if we can a) expand our train further, & b) go through another portal. I think as far as long-term play, a lot hinges on if there are more unique voids or extra worlds for me to travel through. I assume there will be, because it feels like there's got to be more to the game than the single area we were in to begin with.. but we'll see!