Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[TheEqualsE]

I don't see myself adding arms in this experiment, but if I'm going to let these things into my fort, letting have the ability to haul sounds really useful.  Also some of these tags create the requirement to eat, drink and sleep.  So, just to survive they're going to need the grasp tag or they will all die of thirst.  Is my understanding of the situation.

I have nothing against saying giant animal paws or hooves, or in the case of snakes tails have the ability to grasp.

Any pointers on dropping the tags in the right place to make this work the first time?  Especially grasping paws or mouths I'm really past my limit technically there.

I'd have to do this for each individual giant animal species I want to talk, right?  I can't wait to see what a giant snake, a giant spider or a giant tiger would have to say.

[Fleeting Frames]

They could probably survive on "Give Water" and "Feed Wounded/Prisoner" jobs, which can be fulfilled even as the target is working on a different job (though not sure they'd want grasp), if you weren't going to add grasp.

I believe tags can be added whenever outside of caste section. More importantly, plan how to add them to all giant animals at once; you'll just tire yourself out doing them 1 by 1. Replace function with "[yourtag][variation - animal person thing]" would work, though would require going through each text file and doing that.

They would probably say "In a time before time, somebody killed someone."

EDIT: Did manage to find bunch of animal people getting to rule over a mead hall, instead, in a milennia-old world with but single hamlet.

Spoiler: image (click to show/hide)

So I guess mead halls are okay? Though weirdly, they don't stick around; hamlet had no animal people in 6548, despite a cockatiel woman lady 18 years prior. The animal people just seem to either die, sometimes going back to wilds, but complete emptiness is strange. Though a mead hall is not the same as keep.

[TheEqualsE]

I've been looking at it, and I can't find any information about how to apply the grasp tag.  It doesn't appear in dwarves or elves descriptions except as a combat move.

I'd be willing to pick maybe 20 creatures and add it to their front paws, mouths or in the case of snakes tails.  But in the grand tradition of technical things, the wiki says only that it can be done and give zero examples of how to do it.

Much easier would be to add

Intelligent - Equips - Canopendoors

to all giant monsters, but I can't figure out how to do that, either.  I spent a long time going in circles on the wiki.

A little help guys?

[Fleeting Frames]

1) That's because it is under body_rcp.txt for them.(See Modding on wiki)

2) I'm no modder, but tried adding [INTELLIGENT] [CANOPENDOORS] [EQUIPS] to every giant animal at once, right past their name?

[TheEqualsE]

I tried to see if there were any videos on modding DF.  Tons of stuff on installing masterwork or mods, but not what I was looking for.  So here's what I did.

I looked at the way animal people variation was handled and I copied some parts of it directly.  Animal people didn't use the intelligent tag so neither did I.  They use can learn and can speak.  I pasted it to the end of the giant animal description because that's how the animal people handled it.

I didn't try to make any giant animal civs although it would be funny to copy tigers or birds from elves because then the tigers and birds would live in trees.  I also didn't try adding grasp I thought I'm gonna have enough trouble making this work let's keep it simple for now.

In a future attempt, I think I will try giving maybe 20 giant animals grasp and make a few giant animal civs, but I'm trying something more basic to see if I can get that to work.

The world is generating now.  I'll export legends and report back.  It's possible my changes won't work, or that my changes will work fine but not really change the game much.  I'm expecting the latter.

[TheEqualsE]

Early results are in.  I haven't cracked open legends yet, just been  scrolling through historical figures.  There are not a lot more giant animals than you'd expect if I had not done this.  So far most giant animals have done nothing but die of old age although I've seen one that joined its local government.

I also found a giant kea that wanted to be immortal, had a master who was a goblin, and wrote a book.  There are aspects of this I had not thought of.

But hey, at least I know my changes did something.  Although so far it seems like - no, not really.  Didn't really change anything about the way the world turned out.  It seems to have a lot of fortress, but there were lot of mountains.

[TheEqualsE]

Here is some more of what happened.  Looking at entities I see some giant animals have joined civs, gotten jobs like farmers and dancers, even been apprenticed.  The problem is they live no longer than regular animals which is really limiting their ability to impact history.  Also, only elves have giant animals in their civs in any numbers.

No dwarf or goblin civ has more than a couple of giant animals out casts living with them at the moment.

Some giant porcupines write books and seek to extend their life by any means.  But, they only live 10 years or so.

With large animals and savagery turned all the way up the world does report that there are thousands of many kinds of giant animals out there, somewhere.

A giant rhino quit being a farmer to become a dancer, and became an apprentice.

[TheEqualsE]

Ok, that was a success in that I got it to work, but it didn't really do much to change the game. 

New idea: Giant monster world.  There are no giant animals, instead all giant animals are giant animal people.

So far as I can tell this would be really easy to do.  Just swap everything in giant animals for giant people up until the castes section, and then drop in the animal people details after that.  There's one thing to consider tho - to remove the Pets tag or not.  If you don't, then you could treat giant animal people like pets, tame them, breed them, get tame ones.  But they need training like other things.

The other option is remove the pets tag, let giant animal people behave like giant animals people and - what, hope they show up on the map and go to your tavern?  Some of them seem to be automatically hostile so far as I can tell - snail people, beetle people.  I don't have that much experience with animal people I'm not clear on what would happen.

[Fleeting Frames]

Neat idea. Regarding pet tag, there's vanilla creature like that: gremlin.

Otherwise....Well, maybe if they have kids those kids will be part of your site? Needs marriage, though.