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[Organised chaos]

While adding the new creatures for this release it seems the page has passed the limit of what the server can handle. When I drew attention to this problem Quietust said the following:

If you ask me, the Creatures page is currently being done all wrong - it should only list each creature once and include the relevant biomes, rather than copy/pasting it for every single biome (and introducing errors when one entry has different values from the others)

Which I think is a good point, especially after the addition of so many new creatures. So, I'm thinking the 'Civilised' and 'Special' sections stay as they are. The 'Above Ground' and 'Aquatic' have their biome specific tables collapsed into one table for each section. I think the 'Subterranean' section should have one table for the magma creatures and one table for the cavern creatures.

Before I start reorganising the page, can anyone think of a reason not to do this? Any other suggestions for how the page should be arranged?

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Why do those tables exist in the first place?  Who looks at it?  That sounds rhetorical but I mean it-- how can the information be presented more usefully, in light of who actually looks at the page, and why they look?


If I don't know a creature, I search the wiki by creature name, which gets me the relevant info, and is just as easy.  If you're trying to, say, figure out which creatures have the best pet value, shouldn't a few examples of high pet value be on the pet value page?  Even if you're trying to figure out where to embark to find creatures that are really big and lays eggs, the tables are a pain to use, because there's no way to reorganize them all, and too many interesting values are free-text.  A single uber-table, with more defined columns, would at least address this-- is that possible?

If a table of creatures is actually useful to anyone, the right way to handle it is with a script that reads from the raws.  Not volunteering though.

[King Mir]

The OP makes sense to me. Make sure you add the cavern layer to cavern creature biomes.

[Organised chaos]

Why do those tables exist in the first place?  Who looks at it?  That sounds rhetorical but I mean it-- how can the information be presented more usefully, in light of who actually looks at the page, and why they look?

Personally I use the Creatures page to answer questions such as "If I embark here what will I find?", just getting a quick overview rather than getting info on a specific critter.

...
A single uber-table, with more defined columns, would at least address this-- is that possible?

I would say it's possible, but having checked the medawiki docs it doesn't look like the tables allow sorting by sub keys. I.E. you can't say 'sort by biome, and within each biome sort by whether the creature will appear in temperate areas', the best you can do is 'sort by biome' or 'sort by temperate'. This will really limit the usefulness of additional columns.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Why do those tables exist in the first place?  Who looks at it?  That sounds rhetorical but I mean it-- how can the information be presented more usefully, in light of who actually looks at the page, and why they look?

Personally I use the Creatures page to answer questions such as "If I embark here what will I find?", just getting a quick overview rather than getting info on a specific critter.

I just made a program to read the raws and make a wiki table-- you can see its output at http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:List_of_creatures_by_adult_size.  I could use this to make an uber-table for creatures, if y'all think that'd be appropriate.  Ubertables are big nowadays.

I was trying to think of various ways to handle this-- what do you think about a creature listing on each biome page?  That way, sure, you'd have duplicate info, but at least it wouldn't be duplicated on the same page, and hopefully it would be useful for the sort of things you're talking about, organized chaos.

Dunno-- happy to keep out, but happy to make various tables if y'all think it's appropriate, too.

[Organised chaos]

Ok, Timrem consolidated the tables so I finished the updates so the page should be complete now.

I was trying to think of various ways to handle this-- what do you think about a creature listing on each biome page?

The idea has merit, at the moment all the biome pages have a list of creatures but that's just a link to the creature's page. Possibly this could be replaced with a a summary like the Creatures page.