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[Mobbstar]

Context

• Night Trolls are procedually generated creatures that abduct civilised creatures and transform them into their own species.
• At the beginning of a world, only one specimen of each species is generated.
• Reproduction occurs through abductions and subsequent childbirth.
• In Fortress Mode, Night Trolls never invade the player fortress.

• Megabeasts are legendary creatures that terrorise settlements.
• At the beginning of a world, only a few specimen are generated, and some species may not generate at all.
• Reproduction occurs very very rarely, and the total amount of Megabeasts is limited to their starting amount.
• In Fortress Mode, Megabeasts invade big player fortresses.

Idea

By making a creature that is both Night Troll and Megabeast, it should be possible to have them reproduce and attack player fortresses.

Credit where credit is due, this has essentially already been proposed by Valikdu. Here's the posts I could find, in case you want to read them up:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So, what will happen if I make a megabeast creature with a caste that has [NIGHT_CREATURE_HUNTER] and [SPOUSE_CONVERTER] and another one with [CONVERTED_SPOUSE], will they work?

As in, will the converter beast actively create a bunch of converted ones during worldgen before dying?

Related question: do they reproduce at all in worldgen?

Has anyone tried making a creature with several castes that have different megabeast status? For example, the main creature would be a megabeast with [SPOUSE_CONVERTER], and there would be several different [CONVERTED_SPOUSE] creatures with semimegabeast status, or no status. Will they reproduce with the converter?

Also, what does [NIGHT_CREATURE_HUNTER] do, exactly? Megabeast castes with Conversion seem to abduct people and turn them just fine.

1) You could add spouse conversion. Then the [spouse_converter] caste will abduct world inhabitants, turn them into the [converted_spouse] caste and breed. I had worldgen run for many centuries with a flourishing population of these megabeasts.

Findings

Unfortunately, and contrary to what Valikdus posts suggest, the [SPOUSE_CONVERTER] (= Night Troll) token does not work if the [MEGABEAST] token is present: In worldgen, the creature only goes on rampages but never abducts anybody.

Luckily, the tokens are all on CASTE level, meaning it's possible to have one caste be the Night Trolls and the other caste be the Megabeasts. The following findings have been constructed from that.

I generated a "smaller" world, with only one Megabeast ("Utast" the Bronze Colossus) and the custom creature (Harpy). There are no Semi-Megabeasts or other night creatures.

The Night Troll caste correctly abducts and converts people and produces offspring with them. The Megabeast caste correctly goes on rampages and also shows up as Megabeasts in Legends mode, with the Ages named accordingly. In this case, it went from "First Age of Utast" to "Age of Bronze Colossus and Harpy" to "Second Age of Utast" to "Age of Bronze Colossus and Harpy" to "Age of Three Powers" to "Age of Myth". Notably, two ages share the same name for some reason.

Despite the Megabeast cap of 1, this world now holds five Megabeasts, steadily growing.

The Night Troll need not be [INTELLIGENT] nor [CAN_LEARN] nor [CAN_SPEAK] for this to work: In another test world, the custom creature had none of the afforementioned tokens and nevertheless managed to abduct and convert people, and produce offspring. The spouses will still be referred to as "spouse".

Unsurprisingly, both castes can be the target of quests and fought in Adventure mode just fine.

Open Questions

I have not yet played Fortress Mode long enough to get Megabeasts to attack, so I do not know for certain if the custom creature will attack as intended.

I do not know if Night Trolls keep abducting people after worldgen.

Conclusion

The Megabeast token is not compatible with the initial Night Troll caste, but can be added to the [CONVERTED_SPOUSE] caste. This bypasses the megabeast cap and encourages the creature to go on rampages.

There is only limited roleplay application for this because the creature 1) abducts people, 2) can change other peoples species, and 3) makes children with the transformed people. This probably befits "corrupting" kinds of creatures.

Example: Harpy

The following is the custom creature I used. I replaced [MEGABEAST] with [SEMIMEGABEAST], but other than that these are the RAW files used in this research. Unrelatedly, the RAWs also include a "sing" interaction and a "kiss" attack, both with sleepy syndrome attached. I didn't want to remove them for the upload in fear of botching something.

Creature Definition
Interaction Definition

[FantasticDorf]

[CRAZED] creatures and lower megabeast distritubtion by [DOES_NOT_EXIST]'ing other creatures should raise the pool per instance of that creature to be less competitive. The more megabeast-monsters you have occupying a limited cap for single entities, it'll shoehorn greater odds against the particular caste of monster you want generating at the start and anything breeding eventually cause that gap to close until non-competitive monsters eventually die off.

Minotaurs are a great vanilla example, they charge headlong into duellists/civs/player forts not being physically imposing, becuase of their [CRAZED] token making them hyper hostile to anything other than other minotaurs. Changing their lairtype out of a labyrinth may also help to stabilize their numbers, since other creatures like giants offmap breed in lairs like natural wild animals without much trouble.

Night creatures are their own thing, with [NIGHT_CREATURE_HUNTER] attached being behavioural habits and further modified with [SPOUSE_CONVERTER] (and SPOUSE_CONVERSION_TARGET) to make the night-troll archetype, though as a distiction were creatures have their own invasion caps set in worldgen settings while night trolls do not.

When you peel back a wercreature's code you will find [ATTACK_TRIGGER:20:0:0] ((this is old data as its been moved up to 50 in recent vers or whatever the custom w.g is defined as)), so it may simply interact with [NIGHT_CREATURE_HUNTER] after removing night trolls from your world, then adding your own with custom defined defintions. Worth a try anyway.