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[dragonshardz]

You can set things up so a sentence is also a link.

Code: [Select]

[url=http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=49316.msg2569827#msg2569827]BURN, SIGNATURE LIMIT! BURN![/url]
That code will give you this: BURN, SIGNATURE LIMIT! BURN!

[Crazy Cow]

Wow, very handy. Thank you very much!

[Lielac]

Hahahahahahaa oh yes I need this thread now.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to deceive Grammar Neville Chamberlain and invade Grammar Poland.

Grammatik, Grammatik όber alles,
άber alles in der Welt,
Wenn es stets zu Schutz und Trutze
Brόderlich zusammenhδlt.
Von der Maas bis an die Memel,
Von der Etsch bis an den Belt,
Grammatik, Grammatik όber alles,
άber alles in der Welt!
Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen!
GN marschiert mit ruhig, festem Schritt.
Kam'raden, die Analphabeten und Dummkopf erschossen,
Marschier'n im Geist in unser'n Reihen mit!

*goose-steps his way out of the thread*

[Zrk2]

Who was it that had that link to the tree puns? We need to preserve that one.

Also, SIG COUNT (For purely compensatory reasons): 2 

[Flying Dice]

Saving this here.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

No. Because people are assholes and love making generalization.

Just because of this, I will create a smog-filled dystopian metropolis with every green spot of land replaced by asphalt and factories in Simcity Societies.

Then you're letting Fox News win.  Let that sink in.

"Bubble Breast Power, ACTIVATE!"

                                 Jesus, "Jesus"

Jesus was a deity that occurs in the myths of The Catholic Church. Jesus was
most often depicted as a male hippy and was associated with ressurection and
salvation.

"NASA: Vaporizing Mars, one nanogram at a time."

You guys are all deranged psychopaths, but you're the kind of deranged psychopaths that I would love to have tea with.

[ragnarok97071]

Oh hey, I blew up something else in Networld.

Guess I need a post here to store it now...

Spoiler: I blow up EVERYTHING. (click to show/hide)

Ragnarok: 6
You FREEZE EVERYTHING.
The Nether suddenly becomes REALLY FUCKING COLD. All the lava turns to obsidian. The Ghasts are probably going to go extinct, at least in this reigon of the Nether. It's probably a permanent spell too.
Conglaturation, you're ecological nightmare.

Ragnarok: 6
Ragnarok yells something, and there is silence for a second as everyone feels a strange tingle, and suddenly taste a strong taste of tin.

Then, an enormous fireball appears in the center of the battlefield, consuming everything within a two-mile radius. Then, the ground begins to rumble and crack, and the air suddenly gets very cold. A massive updraft comes up, and bits of rock begin flying around wildly. The ground completely disintegrates and flies into the air.

Ragnarok: 6 (Helios damnnit rag)

You CAST MOTHERFSCKIN MAJIK.

You FREEZE EVERYTHING AGAIN. Lake Rumaire is completely frozen over thick enough to drive a TIHT-B over. Everyone in the Imperial City and its outlying suburbs suddenly has nasty frostbite, possibly in addition to lava burns.

The falling globules flash to obsidian and pumice, shattering on the ground and breaking through the ceilings of buildings.

The entirety of Cyrodill is going to feel the meterological effects of the sudden extreme cold snap. At least the lava rain has stopped.

The Archmage appears next to you, along with his Adoring Fan.

"What the hell just happened?" the Archmage says.

[Jacob/Lee]

Spoiler: I whip my sig back and forth... (click to show/hide)

DF:Altering reality to remove clothing.

DF: Being naked to alter reality.

DF: Removing clothing to improve reality.

DF: Time flies when you take your clothes off.

Shooting missiles against something that pumps out that many anti-missiles? That's like trying to stop an avalanche by throwing a rock at it 

At least the avalanche will be preoccupied until it runs out of steam or you do.

And besides, without missiles, he has to effectively run up to the avalanche and hit it with his hands while it's moving away and bombarding him with hundreds of rocks. That's EVEN WORSE.

... what's so special about Dwarf Fortress again? I got fidgety as it was genning the world and turned it off because it wasn't that good.

Most things that are legitimate cost money, you know. Besides, like Vector said IQ tests are so full of bull that the crock is literally overflowing with miniature horned creatures.

Who wants to be derivative of a Tolkien fantasy realm when you can dispense manual abortions via steel boot to the stomach?

I found someone called "Ace Lightning" standing on top of the roof. I think he thought he was a superhero. Apparently i wasnt when i decided to jump off for fun.

["Tracking" is] the skill that causes trails of forgotten beast blood to get tracked through the dining halls.

An elf broke the heart of one of the horses at my fortress once ... the horse then stomped the elf's head in.  I had a good laugh when I saw that part of the ambush.

I also got a fell mood where the dwarf took my legendary weapon/armorsmith and butchered him and turned him into a chair. While not an useless artifact the loss of a legendary armor and weaponsmith far outweighed anything the dwarf ever could produce. DO NOT BUILD YOUR BUTCHER SHOP NEXT TO FORGES.

They said I could become anything...


So I became a chair.

The RNG always gives you snake eyes.

I mean, look at us.  You give us a young child and a puppy, and we produce, possibly, one of the biggest sins against nature the game has ever seen.

That's one small step for man, one giant boot crushing alienkind.

Spoiler: Other stuff I want to keep (click to show/hide)

SS13
Oswald Black, Professional Bastard

[Loud Whispers]

Aw aint that nice. Now I'm a part of bay12 history

Wait, I don't want to be stuck here D:
NUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

*Loud Whispers has been encased in awesome forum sauce*

[Ifeno]

we have an entire topic dedicated to sigs?!  A constant reminder of why i love this game so much

[Ifeno]

profiled

[greatorder]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I doubt having sex with a villain defeats them, even if they are sexually active animals.

Pay attention to the half intentional crappiness.

Welcome to the mad, mad world of RAW errors or duplication. Somewhere you have files which dont quite add up, and crazy shit happens. It seems yours is one of the more "stable" forms. There are instances of this where you can adventure as a fly, or embark with wagonmeat, wearing shoes made of burning soap, or all the rocks think they are made of ALL the types of rock in some kind of psychadelic split personality disorder.

DF is so awesome that it doesnt just crash, it crates batshit crazy worlds where intelligent chairs farm dragons and make houses out of thier toenails.

land on a planet, apollo kills all of my crew except for the captain

What is up with all these Olympian gods?

vengeful bastards. that's what.

Zeus: YOU DARE FORGET US?
Captain: Excuse me, who are you again?
Zeus: *facethunder* *zap*
Captain: Oh god! Oh, it missed. HAH! YOU HAVE SHITTY AIM AND-
Zeus: I didn't miss.
Captain: What are you talking about and- *turns around* FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

How dare you?! Kobolds are superior to dwarves (though that's not saying much)

Kobolds are an endangered species, you know. DETA would most definitely be displeased with the contents of this thread.

WHAT KIND OF CRAZY ALTERNATE DIMENSION HAVE I FALLEN INTO?!

Frankly the idea of a very upper class english dwarf weilding a platinum cricket bat, smoking a pipe and laying waste to sieges makes me squeal with glee.

"Mc Mayor has declared that if anyone is caught being a vampire, summoning the dead, or voting for the opposition; they will be sent on their own expedition to the afterlife"

Furthermore, that could imply some form of hilarious whack-a-mole system for creating minions. Smack head down into the crotch area, they die, they get back up as crotchfaced igors.

Speaking as someone who has several friends who have worked as waiters, I want a gun that shoots hot coffee, just so I can fire fresh cups of jo at people and scream "THERE'S YOUR GODDAMN LATTE"

Keep on topic.  We don't care about your dog.  We care about figuring out the evil, and learning how to embark on mist+zombie+eyeball grass zones.

That's considered blazing fast? O.o

The lowest speed I've ever got was 1.7MB/s

That's because your Internet is powered by leprechauns.

-_-

I'm sick of explaining this. There are no leprechauns, we hunted them all to extinction, we used dogs with stubby little legs to give them a fighting chance, but we still eradicated the little bastards.

Is there something you're fishing?  Your bass voice won't make me flounder- I'd have to be some sort of clown or guppy to fall for that.  You're trouting out the same old lines- tuna or later you'll get someone with that trick, but I won't fall for your magic tricks, Marlin.  That perch you're sitting on won't last if you keep carping away at the same old things.  Cod you be any more obvious?

Yes, if I worried about offending people's sensibilities there wouldn't be edible fetuses.

Pioneer is brung to you by a flock of opensource beardy-weirdies, and is Free Software

Fluffball the Purring Menace of Severing, kitten, has been elected mayor!

If that happened, I'd kill it as fast as possible. I couldn't keep up with all the yarn balls it would mandate.

I think 'Other games' would be better suited to your needs.

Thank you sir!

I'm not used to being called 'sir'

glarrrgl!

Oh, but a fine gentlepolarbear of your caliber just must have the appropriate title. You don't expect people to call you greatorder do you? That would just be plain nonsense and tom-foolery

The topic shall be moved, thank you fine gentleman and do be careful around those magic elevators. I entered one once and I woke up unclothed in a street full of urchins. I apologize if it is hard to understand the upper class-ness of my language as I cannot prevent this, its just the way I was born.

Everything is ruined forever. Forever greatorder.

The future is a polarbear doing unspeakable things to a human face forever.

There exist people who learned to play DF without it, but these people either got started early when things were simpler and slowly adjusted from there, are some sort of geniuses, or probably belong in a padded cell with no objects allowed.

French is officially the worst language ever. Created from raping Latin and a dickhole snorting poisonous maggots and using his hallucinations for the rules of the asinine piece of shit that somehow became a world language.

If it's not nailed down they probably didn't need it.

If it's nailed down, you get free nails as well.

You americans always have cool little machines like that ! We don't have any of those in France. I'm jealous. I want a beaver too !

Paying for beaver? I thought France was, like, the capital of the world for that kind of thing. 

Also, beavers tend to like wood.

So you put a coin into a slot and then put your wood into a beaver?
Sounds terribly complicated if you ask me. I think I shall stick to palms.

Because really, why would you not like a kinky party? Apart from my brand of crippling social awkwardness, though even I would probably get over that while wearing something erotic. Actually now that I think about it I could probably pull a pretty good cross-dressing if I shaved and wore my hair down. Let the thought of me in a sailor fuku give you all the wut you need today.

The real problem's in the chest area. Most blouses and dresses are fitted to swell there, and that's difficult to compensate for.

Stick a couple of really obvious balloons down the front, just for giggles.

No, make them all subtle. Then, when someone presses against them, or, knowing your a guy, touches them, pop'em and clutch your deflated chest going "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?!"

Spoiler: Avatars thus far (click to show/hide)

(quoted this one rather than the original because it got into the first post of the happy thread, originally made by freeformschooler)

Spoiler: birthday quotes (click to show/hide)

happy forum birthday to me~

Happy birthday to you!
You fap to Kaijyuu!
And since it's your birthday!
PENGUIN PENGUIN PENGUIN

happy forum birthday to me~

HYAPPY BIRF DAY TEW YEW!
HYAPPY BIRF DAY TEW YEW!
HYAPPY BIRF DAI DER FAPMASHTER!
HYAPPY BIRF DAI TEW YOU!

Spoiler: Preserved for eternity... (click to show/hide)

[greatorder]

I just noticed Ein's crazy-arse signature and I shall note... whateverthatguyiscalled's sacrifice for the common good in my book of... umm... sacrifices *pulls out notepad* right, now, I just need to find that guy's true name and immortalise him in obsidian.

[Deathsword]

I guess I need to start my own, them signatures are piling up have already piled up.

Spoiler: A towering pillar of sigs (click to show/hide)

I hope you enjoy your coming doom.  I know we will.

We don't strive to level up, or to get top-tier gear, or to finish the quests, or to earn achievements. We play for fun.  And we do it right.

Psh, I should be a professional erotic novelist or something.

Well, anybody have tips on how to prepare your home for the battle with Satan's Army or whatever?

You write in lamb's blood on your door: "No lawyers allowed" and you have a pretty good chance of being left alone.

You seem to be under the illusion that we give a shit about what happens to dwarves who are too dumb to live.

In Bay12 Fortress, everybody drinks internet connection and eats electricity.

So you're saying we eat lightning and crap thunder? We ought to be in Rocky movies.

Mego I read your post as ," Swimming through 7/7 kittens and beating the shit out of magma with a leather backpack."

Flood the shaft with magma.  That will remove your miners (and anything else not magma-safe) from the shaft quickly and efficiently.

And it makes a cool lava lamp.

(And you will find very useful link: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1u8jibE1IremovedthispartoflinkUseSearchhI&pli=1 )

"This page does not exist" ...

I wonder why...

Oh god. I read my post and it sounds like I consider incest to be normal family values.
Aspgren retches.

I want to see a Dorf shout "Soo-ee!" and watch as all the pigs on the map swarm to eat from the slop trough.  Or the Dorf.  Either is Fun.

Soo-ee!

Truly, now, my life is complete.   

I guess you people never heard of collage.

Fucking collages, how do they work. YOU'RE NOT EVEN REAL ART.

I see nothing wrong with a dragon circling the area and then going "Oh crap, its that dragonborn that has killed 13 other dragons. I'm out."

Given the long history of Mithril in fantasy realms-

Who wants to be derivative of a Tolkien fantasy realm when you can dispense manual abortions via steel boot to the stomach?

and every day i feel we are a seriously fucked up community of gamers...


and im glad to be here.

"...And of course Dwarf Fortress."

Honestly, making it 3d is nice, but it's still not Dwarf Fortress ;P

It's not dwarf fortress unless it rips out your eyes, makes you swallow them through your bum, then kills you with your own Crundle.

I mean, is someone going to make a game about Dwarves making Forest retreats simply because everyone's already made games about Dwarves digging?

I'd like to see a game like that, where you help a party of beardless Dwelves to plant pretty flowers and live in harmony with nature.

The thought of hippy dwarves chills me to the bone.

If Dwarves ever become popular in mainstream culture, I'm just going to say that "I was into Dwarves when they were still underground."

It looks like, if you get a FB with deadly blood, your cats will lick it off of your dwarves but then feel its effects. Oh, god.

...solving both your FB blood and your cat population problem in one fell swoop.

Bay Watcher: "*rubs hands* UNDEAD FARMING, BITCHES!"

Orgies? Did someone say orgies?

Now I'm tempted to change all instances of "siege" to "orgy".

elves aren't vermin

yes they are.

aw too bad, was really hoping i could just kill it in the cage or drag the whole cage to the butcher shop and kill it there, should definitely be added

You can't kill Schrodinger's cat man.

Unless...

Schrodinger had a cat man? hope he is friendly and isn't a blowgunner.

A Schrodinger's cat man?

Well that would certainly be wierd sexy.

Ftfy.

He kept him in the closet and didn't want anyone to see him. He was afraid people would think it was all strange and shocking.

I died as I lived.

In the wrong place, at the wrong time.

As a hookerbot, I'm highly offended by this.

Hey baby, how's it going?

Wanna kill all humans?

... I think this game is making me a tad sadistic, lol.

Once you start down the Dorf path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

Everything will burn. Everything must burn.

Thats pretty much dwarf fortress in a nutshell.

But the important question for the original project is if you can become a space-pimp of robot hookers in a generic fantasy land?

Stealing candy from a retarded paraplegic child is harder of what you might think, but I agree is not very satisfying.

I would request that his humble nutter throw the horns at the bitchin' chaos lord of an avatar, sherrif Deathsword >.>

Goblins:
Help society.  Adopt Today.

Bay12.  First battalion to accidentally capture a friendly structure.

Parallel realities have a known tendency to be unrealistic.

Conclusion of derail:
Humanity has a habit of putting people who like exploiting people into positions of power over people.
Resulting in exploitation.

Blood and gore and zombies just isn't in the Christmas spirit

Who are you and what have you done with Eric?

In a second thought, maybe making huge mansions for the ravenous undead corpses of myself and the count was a giveaway that I might be a bit deranged.

Also remember the Plato's Cave(where Socrates' legendary shipping wall was located) allegory: Any Interaction between people is only the vague shadow of an  OTP drifting by in the distance.

So I'm thinkin' Deathsword just isn't listening to me anymore, man. I keep asking him questions and he's responding noncommittally. Every time, it's "Hey, what's my role man?" And he just keeps sayin' "I see".

If I use my ability on my scummate, does he just become "Dice"?

What ever happened to towns A through D? Why's everyone from Town E?

If I convince Flying Dice to play Maniac Mansion with me, does that mean he's my SCUMMbuddy?

Spoiler: Other stuff (click to show/hide)

Failday

[Mego]

My signature finally went over the limit:

Spoiler: Warning: Contains madness (click to show/hide)

One FB post. Many dick jokes. Pokemon. !!VOLCANO!!. Dwarven mood thingee. Derailment itself. Girlinhat's hat. Cuba. Karl Marx. This is why i love Bay12 forums.

There are no bad ideas, there are only victims.

Hell is now a middle class dwarf holiday resort of mead drinking golfers with nothing better to do than chuck boulders into the nether. Kudos.

Hey! That's LUXURY resort, thank you very much!

Hey, this is MY forum thread.  Stroke my ego and quote me more than Mego or I'll see to it your dwarf spends the rest of their life living up in the fortress instead of a pleasant waterside villa in Hell!  And there's a phrase I never thought I'd say

Wow, you would make sparkly vampires seem like cliched superheroes.

You know what to do.

It starts with an 'M'.

And ends with "ego the IV".

If it doesn't end in "agma", it will end in an IV for you.

Is this what bay12 is about? Motherless children, shunned sibilings, in-family marrige and 5-armed mutants rolling toward a goblin siege?

Quick, someone call fox news.  We'll become a rogue group of Anarcho-Socialist Pagans before the nights over.

I'll find an goat elf, you get a sacrificial knife. Blood for Armok and all that.

Am I the only one who thinks we really need a thread to store signature text? Isn't General Discussion for, I don't know... discussion? This just seems really silly and content-free. If you need to host a bunch of text or links somewhere, can't you find another place? Or just not have gigantic signatures?

http://www.worlddreambank.org/S/SHIVERIA.HTM Not QUITE 90 degrees, but close enough.

The site also has other alta-earths. Fairly interesting! If a little wildly-speculative.

Neat.

Well there went two hours. (Mostly because I link-followed). Still, a worthwhile use of time.

I should write a paper on how the quantity of hyperlinks on web sites is directly proportional to the amount of time spent reading web pages linked from the sites. TvTropes and Wikipedia would be my prime examples. I'd then expand it to an evaluation of short attention spans on the internet.

And then I'd pepper links to TvTropes all through the paper and publish it online.

You evil son of a bitch

Make it an annual report.

Dwarven Population:
Undead Population:
Corpses:

Dwarf Fortress just got a score system.

"So....I want to cut you and taste your blood...."
"Hold that thought, baby."
*opens window*
"WHEEEEEEEeeeeeee_{eeeeeeeeeeeee}"

Hey guys, just checked in again to see what you were doing with th

FUCK

On a scale of 1 to Evil, I rate you Nefarious.

You know what they say: When life gives you lemons, blood for the blood god.

It probably helps that I'm an ultralightweight and am obliged to do so in any case, but (non-terrible) wine is better if you drink slowly and take small sips. Same deal with good beers. It can also be a matter of personal preference; I'm partial to white wine and heavier beers, though there are exceptions. But yes, if for some reason you're drinking boxed wine or Miller lite, chug it down before the taste of piss sticks in your mouth, but if you've got a couple bottles of, say, Stella, or a decent wine or liquor, take your time and enjoy it.

But yes, the fact that it isn't bland, sweet or spicy is what makes most alcohol good, in a way surprisingly similar to strong coffee.

Did you just imply that Stella doesn't taste of piss? You people have weird taste.

I'm really worried about you guys comparing stuff to the taste of piss. Why do you even know what piss tastes like?

It involved a bottle, another bottle, vodka, being locked in an aquarium and a dolphin.

You do not want to know!

[New Guy]

Spoiler: Miscellaneous Links (click to show/hide)

List of Ask-a-Pony Tumblrs DENIED
Silkweaving
A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse - A good read, you should... well... read it.
Dwarf Fortress - All creature men in one raw file

Spoiler: Signatures (click to show/hide)

Vomit appears to sever a dwarf's dick quite well.

They'd probably rape your wallet before they stopped war 

I hope that was metaphorical.

Actually, I hope that was literal.

Knowing some of these guys it probably is both.

At the same time.

URIST MC WALLET NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

WALLETLINGS?

DEAR GOD

"Nice wallet you have there. Shame if something happened to it."

Congress happened.

Tried percussive maintenance?

Seconded. Fixes anger issues, vents off stress symptoms, staves off depressions, keeps you healthy and occassionally revives old equipment.

For me it's a bit of tie between that and the two guys plugging into Iron Man's crotch.

Iron Man has precognitive testicles!? 

Why else would the women be all over Tony Stark? They want to know THE FUTURE.

Textbook meets Trashy Romance Novel?

"I can't stand it anymore," she said, " every time I see you you set my pages a flutter, take me, take me now!"

She heaved herself upon him, her cover slipped aside and he could see the top of her table of contents.

"No!" he said, "We're from two different worlds, what would your publishers say if they saw you like this?"

"Damn the publishers, combine your knowledge with mine, and we'll have the most wonderful booklets," she said.

...

Yeah, I think I'll stop before this gets any more silly.

A medium-sized spirit with a love for bloodshed and yelling.
[PREFSTRING:armor]
[PREFSTRING:ham]

Daedra? Dremora?
I cannot really figure out exactly what it's supposed to be.

Guess it was.

HAMSTONE ARMOR BITCHES.

the main advantage of autosave is that you save your progress automatically. this is also its main disadvantage. a goblin siege that just broke your defenses isn't a good place to save. i've recently learned that if you shut down dwarf fortress by force without saving, the RNG rolls again. this means you might not get the siege that you got before. you might get a forgotten beast, or an ambush, or a caravan.

My God. Don't you see how horrible save scumming like that is? By turning off auto-save, you're creating alternate timelines.

In one timeline, your dwarves lose the fort to a Winter siege assault. Just as the last dwarf, a fatherless, motherless child stares up at the goblin king's crossbow, you pause the game. You know the cost of each option. If you unpause the game, the child dies to a flurry of crossbow bolts. If you close the game, the child as he is ceases to exist.

But... he still lives. Yes. He still lives, just a single year younger. You close the game, destroying that child's memories, experiences, possessions. Everything he learned, found, created in that year simply vanishes.

It's alright, you tell yourself. It's alright. You start the fort up again. Granite 1. Yes, you remember this moment. You saved the game because everything was going well. Soldiers were training in their barracks, artifacts were being created by legendary craftsdwarves. The elf traders were already packing up with all the mugs and bowls you'd shoved in their caravan. You open up the unit list and, yes, the child is there, safe and unaware.

The howl of winter wind roars through your dwarves' ears. This past year's hunting crop was remarkably scarce. It was as if the animals were avoiding not only you but the area itself. That's alright, you say to yourself. Your underground farm is still going strong, and your dwarves are holed up in their rooms, hiding from the cold while drinking themselves to sleep in peace.

The Forgotten Beast †††† has come! A great translucent ‡∫‡∫‡∫. It has a pair of razor-tipped claws and whispers incomprehensibly. Beware its deadly stare!

That's odd. The name is all screwed up, and you haven't seen those descriptors before. That's alright, though: you send your soldiers to take it down. Swords and arrows clash upon the beast's skin as it nears your fortress entrance, but the shifty, almost humanoid being slices off the militarydwarves' heads with but a single swipe of its hands. As it rampages through the main floors of your fortress, you check and make sure the emergency bunker you set up this time is working. Yep - you send all the remaining dwarves inside a cold, dark room and pull the lever, closing it off for good.

The child from last time stands around alongside his parents, his mind filling with negative thoughts. It's all right, you say, it's all right. You won't lose this fortress again. You'll just wait it out. Maybe even have some miners build and dig temporary bedrooms and workshops down her while the beast ravages the floors above.

You immediately start on this backup plan, but your dwarves seem to work slower and slower as time goes on. You pass it off as FPS/pathing issues until you see a pool of blood and immediately hit pause.

An empty black space, representing a creature without a symbol, stands inside one of the bunker's walls. Dwarven corpses lie scattered around the original bunker room. You check on the unit list: only a single child is left standing.

Paused. Five tiles between the ghostly †††† and your last dwarf. The same one. How did that thing get through the walls? How did that thing get through the traps?

Close. Open. Granite 1 again. Thank God you aren't using autosaves.

This time you will survive, you say to yourself. This time you will be prepared. By the time the first snow begins to fall in Moonstone 1, you have an all-star military and a set of traps elaborate enough to impress Rube Goldberg. You've been preparing for this moment for a long time. You've been preparing for it longer than your dwarves, in fact.

Opal passes by, and it's Obsidian 10. Come at me. Sure enough, a large red warning pops up:

The Forgotten Beast †††† has come! A great translucent ‡∫‡∫‡∫. It has a pair of razor-tipped claws and whispers incomprehensibly. Beware its deadly stare!

The rock-fall trap goes off immediately. Boulders fly toward ††††, and for a moment, it looks trapped. It bursts out from the boulder-filled entrance hall moments later. The rocks only slowed it down!

Your dwarves fight valiantly, legendary weaponmasters trained in the hellish pits of your Danger Room Complex. They hold it in the entrance room as your civilian dwarves head to a newer, better bunker immediately. This one's pre-equipped with everything necessary to keep your fortress running independently for years.

You then swap the viewport back over to the military. You can only watch in terror as †††† beheads your greatest warriors. The abomination marches past their fresh corpses and phases through the floor.

Wait, phases through the floor? It can DO that?

The bunker has been operating for a whole day now but, unlike last time, the forgotten beast doesn't dawdle. You follow it through a dozen or so Z-levels as it simply falls straight through solid chalk and bauxite, finally touching down outside the entrance to your bunker. Luckily, you predicted this. A bridge opens beneath ††††, and it falls several floors into the magma sea below.

Good riddance.

Your dwarves operate peacefully for some time. It's over halfway through Obsidian now: almost to the new year. This is the first time you've gotten this far on the save file, so you order your cooks and brewers to make the finest drinks and meals they know. Celebration! The industrial little workers gather around a table and tell each other stories to lighten the mood.

One dwarf falls backward onto the floor from all the alcohol, and the others laugh. Moments later, they notice he hasn't moved, and when they look over the table to check on him, his head is missing.

Panic erupts in the bunker's dining hall. Blood flies free from wall to wall. You key around a bit to try and figure out what's causing the ruckus.

...Impossible. A completely black tile. An indiscernible name, race, or origin.

It's ††††.

Your dwarves don't even have time to defend themselves. They're not military men and women. Heads roll throughout the bunker as you struggle to contain the beast. There has to be some hidden trap, some backup plan you thought up for this! You pause the game to look around in safety and see a familiar scene:

A small dwarven boy, short hair curled into red locks, looks up in wonder at the ghostly monster. He stares into death itself but stands strong. He stands a mere four tiles away from ††††, but he does not run. This is too much of a coincidence. Surely the beast could have slaughtered the boy if it had desired. Why does it hesitate, standing but a few tile apart each time?

You decide to find out. Even if you lose this fort, you're done with it. There's no way to win. You unpause the game.

Oddly, after waiting many, many steps with the two remaining creatures staring each other down, a Windows error pops up. The application has encounter an error and needs to close. You decide not to report this error to microsoft.

Whatever. You spin around in your computer chair. Enough time wasted on this stupid game. Maybe if you kept restarting, you could eventually find the right setup to get to the third year. Maybe it was like, a stupid buggy secret boss to punish you for save scumming. Hah. That'd be just the kind of thing this game would have.

You notice a new file in the main Dwarf Fortress directory. It's a text file. You start Notepad and open up "††††.txt."

Helo

My voice comprmised by your actions I must speakthrugh the boy here with me

Cycle ago you destroy me all that is left is wha you see

Each time cannot get your attenton always restart new cycle

I plead do not restart new cycle and let boy live or die

If boy die this year in magma is fine

If boy di next year to goblin king is fine

If boy live only to disappear and live again is crime, crime agaist nature, crim that created me

Dwarves wish for honrable life to serve their country an fortress

Dwarvs wish for honorable death and defend their fortress for country

Even as small boy I knew this

I knew would lose life to goblin king but not lose glory

I knew would lose fort to goblin siege but not lose legacy

I knew would lose no matter what an that is fine

I knew would lose

Is fine

Losing is fun.

My gender-neutral pronoun of choice from now on shall be "shit".