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Author Topic: The most common wild animal?  (Read 1358 times)

Sver

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The most common wild animal?
« on: February 03, 2021, 04:27:50 am »
Specifically, a non-vermin creature with the highest POPULATION_NUMBER values in the vanilla game?
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: The most common wild animal?
« Reply #1 on: February 03, 2021, 05:21:13 pm »
Remember Population_Number only gives you the max number in one world tile. Animals will be limited by biomes too.
Don't know the answer, but my current world's most numerous non-vermin creature is the raven (2125097 of them) which would seem a likely candidate. Followed by sparrow (1916380) and Wren (1267465). Followed by various birds, shellfish, etc.

My most common non-vermin, non-bird, non-aquatic animal is the dingo (105461) who have a population_number of 10:20.

Not the exact answer you were looking for sorry, you'll have to do that legwork yourself. Likely the dingo though.

--
(Unicorn is 15:30, but of course, not as numerous as a dingo as they're limited to good biomes, so all depends on what you're looking for).
« Last Edit: February 03, 2021, 05:30:22 pm by Shonai_Dweller »
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Sver

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Re: The most common wild animal?
« Reply #2 on: February 04, 2021, 02:51:04 pm »
Thanks!

I was looking for the Population_Number because all of sudden I've had an intense urge to compare the general availability of various resources for a token player fortress, which, as far as I understand, can only encounter a certain creature in an amount defined by Population_Number. As interesting as it would be to do a similar comparative study, but taking into account all the biome and stone layer variations, that would be way too big of an endeavor - and, frankly, not something that important, considering the player can put their fortress wherever they see fit.

In the end, it does appear that ravens are the most numerous "large" creature type, if talking single world tile population. They are right on par with most vermin creatures in that regard.
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Salmeuk

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Re: The most common wild animal?
« Reply #3 on: February 04, 2021, 10:57:02 pm »
Huh, I thought about making my own thread for this but maybe I'll ask it here - would it be feasible to edit the raws in a way to 'even-out' the total generated creature populations? The end goal is to encourage more animal encounter variety, however unrealistic that may be. IIRC the chance for animal spawns is correlated to their total pop in the biome (or region? or tile? unsure of the container here), so evening that out would produce even spawn chances, no?

I imagine you would remove biome restrictions, balance litter count and birth to adult rates, and perhaps age of death? You would never be able to guarantee survival of each creature, but those that did reach stable populations would ideally be more equally distributed, as opposed to the usual millions of giant mosquitos or little brown birds or whatnot.
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Sver

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Re: The most common wild animal?
« Reply #4 on: February 05, 2021, 01:30:36 am »
One of the important factors is FREQUENCY which is a weighted value that is used to build a hierarchy of spawns between the creatures in the same biome(s). Default is 50, but verming and some other creatures have 100, so you might want to set it to 100 for all.

POPULATION_NUMBER is a min-max range value of creatures of the type in a 1 worldmap tile. Most numerous creatures seem to have this set to 250:500. If you want all creatures in exactly the same amount, 250:250 is probably a good value.

CLUSTER_NUMBER is a min-max range value of creatures of the type per spawn. This is the parameter you can use to maintain a bit of realism, if you wish, as it doesn't affect the population size itself iirc - just the size of the pack.
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TomiTapio

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Re: The most common wild animal?
« Reply #5 on: February 05, 2021, 04:44:44 pm »
Vanilla: About 735 animals to inspect whether they are vermin or notvermin...
would need a multi-line regular-expression to get to the bottom of question.
Or combine three data tables in Spreadsheet, one having popnum search, one vermin search, one creaturename search.
(using ancient Crimson Editor)

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« Last Edit: February 05, 2021, 04:46:45 pm by TomiTapio »
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Madde

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Re: The most common wild animal?
« Reply #6 on: February 18, 2021, 02:34:40 pm »
Sorry if it counts as a bit of a necro, but I've lately went over the creature raws and modified frequencies and pop numbers because I was bored of having seemingly endless waves of ravens and crundles in every embark. The non-vermin creatures I've come across with the highest numbers are ravens, crundles, crabs, horseshoe crabs, giant horseshoe crabs, cave blobs (population ranging from 250-500) and hungry heads (pop ranging from 100-200)

The frequency of underground creatures varies, but the above ground ones and crundles all have FREQUENCY:100, so it's pretty likely that they make up over half of the game's total wildlife populations anyway. Considering that most creatures have a max pop number of around 30 to 50 and a frequency of 50 and below, it is useful to tone down the numbers so that you actually encounter the creatures that you mod in.


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Sver

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Re: The most common wild animal?
« Reply #7 on: February 18, 2021, 02:57:27 pm »
I was mainly going to use this for a comparative study of sorts, for which TomiTapio's answer was sufficient - as previously established with ravens, it appears that the most numerous non-vermin creatures all share the same frequency and pop numbers.

I apprectiate the more precise info on which creatures those are from you though. Especially your observations on crundles, considering they are a fairly unremarkable creature, mostly just being fodder for forgotten beasts.
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