Dwarf Fortress Tutorial: Part 2

In the last stream of Dwarf Fortress, we learned how to navigate the menus, dig into the mountain some basic rooms for us, and start production on our farm and other necessities. We still have a lot to do. I wanted to do this with a couple of days in between each stream so as to not have Dorfan every single night during prime time, but also, New Years is coming, so it'll be a few days more. Part two of this three or four part series will be on Sunday, January 2nd 2011, 8:00 PM EST.

(alcohol explodes with fire)

Also, if you took part in it, I ask that you leave a comment or two about the first part of the tutorial. Ideas to consider (but not limit yourself to): Did you learn a lot? Was the pacing good? Were my language and directions accessible? What can I do different for the next time? You can say whatever you want, things you like or some criticism for future streams, so part two is even better.

If you missed part one, it is on the On-Demand. My save from the end of this part can also be downloaded here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?q3brqt7jcb770h0

Just place the folder in DF > Data > Saves, and when you load up, load up from the name of the folder.

Strike the earth!

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"The Minecraft for people with class."

When one thinks of Dwarf Fortress...

...things can be pretty overwhelming.

That is why I am going to stream a Live Dwarf Fortress Tutorial. You can finally learn how to play this daunting game in an incredibly accessible way. I will be streaming purely for those who need instructions on how to fuck spaghetti play this game, beginning with navigating the interface and working up to overall strategies and things you need to know to be started on your way to a successful fort, and more importantly, on your way to fun.

Of course, as I am playing you are encouraged to ask questions through the chat. Here's the best part: Everything is already set up for you to play along. You will be using the same exact world that I will be streaming, so you do not need to worry about unforeseen consequences; you can even just follow along with what I do step-by-step if you'd like. Just download the following file pack:

http://www.mediafire.com/?3uzrpd24mfix4l5


A couple of guidelines:

1. A graphics pack is currently enabled. If you do not want to use a graphics pack, simply execute the DFInit.exe file, hit "load" to load my settings, and uncheck "use graphics" in the first tab. Some argue this gives the game more of an authentic feel and leaves more to the imagination.

2. To see the chat, my stream, and be able to see the game, I recommend setting up your screen to something like this:


...or if you're a rich motherfucker, just use one computer for the stream and one computer for the game.

That's all. I'll see you on Tuesday, December 28th at 8:00 PM EST.

Strike the earth!

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ElectricalBeast + Holiday Contest

Good news everyone! ElectricalBeast will be streaming here for his birthday, which is this Sunday, December 19th. He's thinking of streaming at around 8:00pm GMT which is 3:00pm EST. All of us are really excited to have him stream here; be sure to stop by, check out the stream and wish him a Happy Birthday!


Screencap Caption Contest

For Christmas, we're gonna have some contests and give-aways. This is the first announced contest, so get started early and start posting those entries! Rules:

- Play a video game of your choice and take a screencap of anything (characters, events, etc.)
- Add a caption to your screencap. It can be funny, witty, vinesauce related or any combination of the three.
- One entry per person.
- Submit all entries as a comment to this post. BE SURE TO INCLUDE YOUR CHAT NAME!!
- Entries are due Saturday, December 25th (Christmas Day hurr)
- The streamers will vote on the best entry!
- First Place: $20 Steam game of your choice.
- Second Place: $10 Steam game of your choice.
- Third Place: $5 Steam game of your choice.

That's it! It's a simple contest and one everyone can participate in. Good luck to all and stay tuned for more Vinesauce X-Mas news.

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It's a Kong Off!

Hello sauce friends, today's entry will discuss a few things I've been meaning to get to but haven't due to being sick. Let's start with the Kong Off. Today Tame and I began the competition and after our first full hour, Tame has a slight lead. For those that don't know, we're playing DKC at the same time, trying to see who can finish first. Both of us Game Overed once and had to start from the beginning, but fear not, we'll actually be saving from now on! Also, thanks to Exhorder for making the excellent Kong Off promo image!





Next up, you may notice that the Streamer List on the FAQ looks a little different. It was outdated and as such I decided to fix it up. Some of the streamers are no longer listed. For example, PurpleSawdust contacted me and told me to remove him as a streamer given the fact that he can't stream often, if at all. I removed a few others as well.

Basically, if I removed you as a streamer without telling you, it means you stopped streaming without telling me. At some point, you can get your streamer status back, but I want to make sure our list is accurate, so for now, I'd say relax and come back in a few weeks to reapply for your position.




It's also come to my attention that people advertise their streams during autopilot. Honestly, trying to find a solution to this is the most difficult part of being a stream owner. I relayed a personal story today about the early days of Vinesauce Vidya. When I first started up, the stream I was going to was more or less dead. The autopilot was deleted and there were barely any streams, yet 30 - 40 people stayed around and chatted, complaining about the lack of entertainment. I decided to link to my stream, which now had a full autopilot and myself streaming constantly. I was banned immediately for advertising my stream. As I gained my first few loyal viewers and streamers through persistence, I decided to try an underhanded move and advertise in other, larger streams. I was banned immediately.

My point is, it's heavily frowned upon to leech viewers from a stream, even if it's just autopilot that's playing. While I don't feel strongly enough to ban people about it, the fact of the matter is, if I wanted you to stream, I'd make you a streamer.

That leads me to another point. Say I'm planing on streaming GAME DICKS sometime in the future but haven't got to it yet. During some dead time a random dude from the chat boots up his stream, and links everyone to it. Say 30 people go to watch. Coincidentally, this guy is streaming GAME DICKS. Well, when I go to boot up GAME DICKS when I'm ready to play it, 30 of our viewers are bored because just a few weeks ago a member of the chat streamed GAME DICKS.

It's very tricky business.

While I'm on the topic of streamers, I know a lot of you want to stream for us. Every day I see at least 5 different people talking about how they'd like to stream a particular game, or movies at the movie page, or whatever.

I really hate disappointing people, but I can't do it. In my view, a stream packed with willing streamers can turn nasty. At the moment we have an almost perfect (notice I said almost) mix of streaming and autopilot. You see how disappointed streamers can get if they can barely get time to go live. Three or even two more streamers could make this even worse.

Also, I've heavily considered making a separate stream to let more people in on the action, but it doesn't work at all, and as the poor people over at Vinecraft are aware, I can't run more than one stream; I just don't have it in me.




I want to end with just a few things. You can see the little sidebar with the constant Twitter announcements. So far, they've been great and should give you reason to check the blog fairly often. Thanks Tame for keeping it updated.

We also now have a page for the SMBX campaign. Use it to collaborate with each other, post levels or even ask for help. I've been slacking a bit on the campaign, but I'm still serious about it. I'm very excited to see the finished product.

That's a lot of fucking typing I just did. Thank you all again for everything! Look forward to more contests and retardation in the near future.

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10 Million Get

It seems like I'm writing about our viewer minutes about once a week these days. It's incredible how quickly we hit 10 Million Viewer Minutes, but as I always say, it's you guys that did it. You may have caught us in a thread about Mario Corruptions or maybe you saw a link to us for a Campfire show. You could have found us through the Livestream guide, a link from another site or even from Facebook (you'd be surprised how many people are here from Facebook.)

In the end, it doesn't really matter how you found us. People are always clicking links then moving on, wandering the endless internet landscape of filth and wonder like some kind of wastelander from the Fallout universe. What really matters most to us is that you stayed. You made this YOUR wasteland, YOUR filth. There are now people who call this place home. That... is incredible.

We're probably not the best stream out there. We don't have the best looking page nor the most advanced looking livestream player. We don't all have the highest quality capture cards and we don't always play the most interesting games to watch. Sometimes we suck at video games, but mostly we're just OK at them.

What we do have is honesty. Honesty and a desire to do the best we can. I can speak for myself (and probably all of us) when I say that I love streaming for you guys. I've always liked sharing the experience of a great game with a friend. That's why I started the stream, and that's why I still do it. Thanks again for sticking around, here's to another 10 million!


- SMBX Contest Winners -

Most of you guys already know who won, but here are the winners:

1st - RichardRickson
2nd - PhantomDust
3rd - Suaig


Congrats guys! We'll start organizing levels for the campaign soon. For now, keep working on your maps and I'll get you more details soon.

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9 Million Viewer Minutes + Site Down Time

So guys, 9 Million Viewer Minute Get! This time, I think we should thank all the new viewers that have been watching. There's a lot of streams out there, so it can be tough to settle on one or two that you really like; so seriously, thanks for sticking with us guys!




As you guys are aware, we've had two separate occasions where our webhost went down. If this happens and you still want to watch the stream, here are some places you can go:

Our Livestream Page
Direct Link to our Chatango

Generally, the site should be up within a few hours if it goes down. Apparently our host was simply doing some site maintenance. Of course, you can always check the blog and see if anything serious is happened to the site.




To close off, we've decided to make our current Guest Streamers part of the stream team. Exhorder and StreamTrap are now Part-Time streamers! You guys loved their streams and so did the streamers; now they can be a part of our jabroni gym.


By the way, Jen has been up-keeping a list of games we've streamed since we started. Check it out and let us know if you think it's accurate.

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Super Mario Brothers X Level Contest!

Contest time again! This time we're holding a contest for best Mario Brothers X level. Here are the rules:


- Download the FREE Super Mario Brothers X here: http://www.supermariobrothers.org/smbx/
- Use the level editor to make the best, most creative level you can. We're not going for extreme difficulty, make it challenging, but doable.
- The level can have any theme you choose, and can be fairly long; but try to make it look nice and try not to make it too long. The length of an average Mario Brothers 3 level is perfect.
- You can upload the level to http://www.mediafire.com/ and post your submission as a comment to this blog post. Be sure to include your chatango name when posting your level.
- All good, non-troll entries will be added to the official Vinesauce campaign! I'll create a world map to tie all the levels together.
- The levels will be judged by the streamers and placed in order of easiest to hardest.
- The winner will receive a $20 Steam game of their choice.
- Second and Third place will spotlighted in the Vinesauce campaign.
- Due date is Saturday, November 20th.
- ONE level per person!


Basically, make this level as you were designing levels for Mario 3. Use whatever graphics, NPC's you'd like, but keep the level classy. Throwing a vinesauce meme or two in a level as a joke is perfectly acceptable. Also, NOT EVERY LEVEL NEEDS A BOSS!!

If you want to give my Zebes map a try, download it here and extract the "Zebes" folder to your SMBX/worlds folder. From there you can play it, or even edit it if you'd like.

So there you go everyone, have fun and make some cool levels!

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Put this on, and close your eyes.

Remember when it was so much simpler? Before the sex and the parties and the girls and the schoolwork and the jobs and the bills?

Remember when all Saturday was, was just sitting in front of your TV trying to beat Bowser?

Remember when getting every star was more important than getting the girl?

Remember when you didn't have to worry about anything? All you had to do was be a kid, and enjoy life.

Why can't we do that now?

Close your eyes.

Go back to that time.

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What Stream is Best Stream?

As you guys know, I can't stream all day errey day. My work schedule more or less leaves me with only night-time streaming as an option. While I'm busy at work, I manage to lurk a bit here and there. I've noticed that our viewer count drastically decreases when certain "factors" are in effect. I'll try my best to explain what I mean.

CHAT: I'm not a believer in telling people what to talk about. It's extremely easy for me to ignore dumb comments, so I have faith that others can do the same. I don't like when people try to moderate what others say in the chat, be it a streamer or ESPECIALLY a viewer; if people can't say whatever the fuck they want, we may as well not even have a chat.

I personally get annoyed when the chat turns into facebook, because after-all, we are a video game stream, but even that can't really be helped. I like getting to know people as well as chat video games, but drama need not apply. People don't come to Vinesauce chat to see us arguing with each other, and that's not an opinion.


GUEST STREAMERS: I'm giving this guest streaming thing a try so people from other streams can check us out and we can fill some dead-time (which, let's not fool ourselves, there is dead-time.) Remember we're giving them a try, so feedback is important. If you guys don't even like the idea of guest streamers, you HAVE TO LET ME KNOW. I'm an easily approachable person and I'm open to how you guys feel; viewers and streamers alike.


VINESAUCE STREAMERS: If the guest streamer has been on for a while and you want to stream something, ask them nicely, they'll get off and then you stream! It's easy as that. We only stream on one page, so of course, we're not all gonna get a chance to stream on a daily basis at the exact time we want. Sacrifice and patience are as important as being a great streamer.


SKYPE CLUSTERFUCKS: I really, really don't like skype calls with lots of people in them. I avoid them when I'm streaming as much as possible. My exceptions are Mario Retardy and drinking games. A clusterfuck can ruin the immersion of a single player game and it's been proven to drop our viewer count. Also consider the viewers from livestream, they join to see a game they like and the audio isn't even remotely related. Clusterfucks have a time and a place.


So these are the things I really wanted to get off my chest. Is this all too much? Am I being fair? Let me know in the comments.

PS: 8 Million Viewer Minutes Get!

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Updated Streamer List

To the best of my ability, I've put together a list of the part-time/full-time streamers. This is totally based on my own observation, so if I'm mistaken let me know by sending me a message on skype.


Full-Time Streamers
Vinesauce
Tame
MentalJen
m3ss (Ravi)
Fzuul (Fred)
Bombchu

Part-Time Streamers
ToxicToothpick
VicariousGaming (Darren)
SleepDeprivation
Spacebat (Adam)
RevScarecrow
KylieTheDorf
PurpleSawdust
TheBobito
Imakuni
KY

I'm probably wrong on a few of these; I don't really know what happens in the early mornings because I can't get up before the sun starts descending. Those that are on the very edge of being full-time, let me know what you'd like to do. Read the previous blog and tell me what works best for you. Also, I decided to make Bobito and Imakuni part-timers instead of guest streamers. They're great streamers, great viewers and great friends. If you see them in the chat, tell them congrats.

Next week we'll take our first "Guest Streamer." I am excite about this. Very much!

Also, expect lots of fun stuff for Halloween, including Campfire and a movie on Sunday night. There's now a link to the movie page at the top of the blog. Praise Bill Murray.

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