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[Digganob]

I have been attempting to make a race of cave goblins, similar in many ways, but significantly less civilized, than regular goblins (and they also need food and drink, among other differences). As such, they appropriately live in caves.

However, the issue I have found, is that when a civilization's default site is caves, they do not expand. At all. Not even if they "like" other sites instead of merely tolerating them. I suppose they may inhabit little ruins, like how kobolds sometimes will take residence in necromancer towers, but they do not live in larger scale ruins like cities, so far as I can tell. Of course, they do not even expand to other caves, as was my intent to begin with. The [SKULKING] tag appears to have nothing to do with it, I have tested it.

Strangely, when caves are made to be one of their "liked" sites, and their default site is set to something else (like CAVE_DETAILED), they will begin to inhabit caves as one would expect.

No changes I have been able to think of seem to change this at all. Not changes to food sources (like adding the ability to farm or take care of animals), or combinations of liked and tolerated sites, though I have not tried them all.

I recall at one point trying to mod vanilla goblins to be able to inhabit only caves somehow, and somehow that seemed to work just fine. But I'm not sure if it was as I remember, or how I went about it if it did actually work that way.

Strange detail I noticed about Kobolds is that their default site is of course caves, but they also both like and tolerate caves. Though this is the case, they never expand to other caves, though they are said to hang out in outdoor camps, and in some ruins like I mentioned before, though they don't inhabit larger, populous sites.

Might anyone have any ideas on this? I am at quite a loss, at this point. It appears to be a complete, unassailable wall, which cannot be passed by any means.

Is there any way to limit sites construction for a civilization, so though the civilization will start in one type of site, they won't build any more, but still inhabit conquered/abandoned sites, as well as caves? Is there any kind of work-around?

[Eric Blank]

One trick that still works is making their default site CAVE_DETAILED, but don't give them any settlement biomes, only mountains as a start biome. They can't build sites because there aren't any valid biomes to build them in, but they can, occasionally, occupy or conquer other sites. If they like caves, cities and dwarven forts, they should occupy them if they can conquer them.

These civs still don't get very large, however. Usually only a couple sites.

[Digganob]

One trick that still works is making their default site CAVE_DETAILED, but don't give them any settlement biomes, only mountains as a start biome. They can't build sites because there aren't any valid biomes to build them in, but they can, occasionally, occupy or conquer other sites. If they like caves, cities and dwarven forts, they should occupy them if they can conquer them.

These civs still don't get very large, however. Usually only a couple sites.

Excellent, I was looking over the entity tokens and the biome placement tokens specifically, and that idea came to mind, but I didn't have a chance to test it yet. Thank you, I'll see what I can do with that. Hopefully with BIOME_SUPPORT tokens I'll be able to make them spread quicker, and therefore spread throughout the whole world.

My plan was to make caves much more numerous anyways as a standard way to use the mod, so I do not mind them not having too many other sites they can take over, as long as they inhabit a good number of caves. Though I suppose that's up to how whoever uses the mod would like to use it.

Any tips for how to use the other entity biome tokens?

By the way, interestingly, dwarven fortresses can be built in places other than mountains, which I found by giving my mod goblins CAVE_DETAILED as their default site, but with the kobold entity token defining their biome tendencies. A whole lot of fortresses built into swamps was the result.

[Eric Blank]

Last time I tried the no settlements thing off mountain ranges, the civ spread and made a ton of sites anyway, so it might not work to keep them under control.

However, since your new goblins are a bit less technologically advanced, maybe they're weak enough they can't spread far. My ork and gnoll civs don't tend to make it far either, usually the gnolls get pruned back to one or two sites. Being wimpy might be enough to keep the numbers down. It's entirely possible they'll inherit a few caves in worldgen but that those caves don't survive.

And I just looked, and making the starting site a cave does seem to just shut down the opportunity to build or conquer sites. It's probably a hard coded thing to keep kobolds in check. We might get more tools after the map rewrite, but that's going to be a while.

[Digganob]

Is that so? I should have some time to do some test today, so I'll see how it works with different biomes.

So far as I saw with all my other tests while they had both farming and the ability to build their own settlements, they expanded quite rapidly. They were regularly surpassing the population count of the dwarf civs I had in the same worlds. I suspect this is because I gave them the ability to give birth in litters, and made them mature at age 1... so, despite the fact they only have sharpened sticks and wooden clubs to fight with, they were able to hold their own quite well. Actually, come to think of it, their primary reason for survival was likely the fact they were made to be skulking, same as kobolds, thus preventing direct conflict, though beasts and that sort of thing still went after them. I don't know how their raids and thievery affect other civilizations yet, though, so I'm not sure if their high population is a really bad thing. However, I do want them to be ubiquitous, that is to say, spread all around the world.

[DPh Kraken]

You could get the behavior you want of cave-goblins living everywhere by changing them from a site-based civ to a layer-linked civ. I'm not sure of the repercussions elsewhere of changing them to do that, the mechanisms for cavern civs aren't something I've played around with even if they do share some behaviors with surface civs.

[Digganob]

Huh, now that is certainly an idea. I'll try it just to see, though I suspect it'll cause them to not spread so much as I'd like, as animal people tend not to.