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Author Topic: Seasonal creature variation  (Read 514 times)

DwarfStar

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Seasonal creature variation
« on: July 01, 2021, 04:13:55 pm »

It would open up a lot of narrative possibilities if creature rarity could vary by season. A particularly valuable hunting target might only be available during certain months. Or, harvest season might come with the possibility of a horde of locusts, almost like a mini-siege. Maybe during the summer in hot, savage biomes, fire imps/men/snakes might start to spawn on the surface. Or, increase the chances of blizzard men and ice wolves during winter in savage glaciers and tundras. Mods could expand on this even more if it fit the theme.

Apologies in advance if this has been suggested before, but I searched for a wee while and didn't find it.
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FantasticDorf

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Re: Seasonal creature variation
« Reply #1 on: July 01, 2021, 04:42:59 pm »

Already doable in the current version of the game, from creature tokens there are game RAWS like [NO_WINTER] that exclude them from spawning offmap or appearing during the winter months in adventure mode, where wild animals will presumably recess back into the offsite wildlife counts.

This is used for bears, but many much animals typically don't retire but there's the tokens there also for [NO_SPRING] [NO_SUMMER] [NO AUTUMN] etc to complete the set (naturally putting them all on the creature makes them not appear at any point in time at all in the wild). There's other stuff too like determining when the creature is most active with dinurnal (daytime), nocturnal (night) and every day-cycle state inbetween including [ALL_ACTIVE] for all states at once without repeating tokens.

Seasonal changes in animals like deers growing and losing their antlers would be a nice natural touch for animals, or seasonal breeding patterns to encourage players to push their livestock together during a certain timeframe of the year.
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DwarfStar

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Re: Seasonal creature variation
« Reply #2 on: July 01, 2021, 08:55:50 pm »

Oh! Indeed that is pretty close to what I was talking about. Now I guess I have an excuse to try to make a mod, to try to see how much storytelling power I can squeeze out of those. Thanks!
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