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[nocker]

hey guys,

Recently I became interesting in DF modding. I want to add a custom civ to my game: A subterranean, amoral semi-insectoid race from my RPG games. They look like emaciated men with a pair of beetle choleoptera on their backs.

This race's "schticks" are:

1) heavy reliance on chitin/bone/skulls/shells for building materials. They use an special proccess to treat bone to a metal-like hardness, and then proceed to use armor like bone-mail and skull helmets, go to town with serrated bone swords and the like. Metal use should restricted to soft metals, and mostly for decoration. Secondary materials should be velvet and feathers made from subterranean cattle and fowl.

2) heavy on animal husbandry, light on agriculture: they herd several types of insects and subeterranean beasts for meat, milk, shells, leather (velvet), chitin and bones. (these animals should live on fungus, but as beasts don't need to eat in DF, I'm skipping this part). Also, they know how train most animals and insects to war-beasts.

3) necromancy: this I figure it's impossible to map to DF right now, but they also rely on reanimating their own fallen, besides some dead beasts, to serve as cannon fodder or sources of power (skeleton manned pumps, etc)

So, the questions for now are:

1) Is there a way to make more items out of bones? In special, can I make helmets from skulls and plate-like armor from bones or shells? Bone weapons should include the serrated swords (doing gore damage?), besides spears, maces and crossbows. Also, bone picks for them to dig with and bone mechanisms would be AWESOME.

2) Is there a way to make my critters to have bone preferences just as dwarves have stone, gem and metal preferences?

3) how to make my creatures' bodies so that they have two large, cutting wings-cases growing from from their shoulders, that can be used to cut (gore?) in close combat. They should hit as hard as fists (that's it, not hard at all), but do cutting damage. Ideally, their deadliness should improve together with wrestling proficiency (as DF seems to lack a "boxing" martial art centered on striking). Also ideally, they should be used to block some hits (like a shield, I figure).

4) how to make them drop their pair of wing-cases, besides bones and skulls when they die?

5) how to make them butcher and process their own dead, to use their body parts? (I said they were amoral!)

6) how to create velvet (from leather), feathers and eggs (from large fowl they herd)? Is a MATGLOSS enough for these? The objective would have clothing like: "velvet gloves" and "feather cloaks" and food like "egg biscuits".

7) If I mod their special pets/herd/pack animals, how to keep them unique to this race? at the same issue, how to make them NOT to bring vanilla cats, dogs and cows as pets? (at the same time that dwarves still have these as pets)?

finally: is there a way to make a race "undead-friendly" for now? The ideal would have skeletons manning pumps, and helping their military.

Any help would be much appreciated! I'll share my mods as soon I make them, for now I need to know what's possible and what's not.

[i2amroy]

Answers:
1) Probably the best way would be to create a reaction that took bones and turned them into a bone metal. Then just use the metal for everything. You could even set the damage percentage to 50% that way it would act like normal bone if you wanted it to.

2) No, unfortunately not.

3) Just add a body part called left wing case and right wing case to the body and then add cutting attacks for the creatures. Example: [BP:LWCASE:left wing case][CONTYPE:UPPERBODY]

and [BP:RWCASE:right wing case][CONTYPE:UPPERBODY]

, with the attacks being [ATTACK:MAIN:BYTOKEN:LWCASE:slash:slashes:1:3:SLASH][ATTACKFLAG_WITH]. As for the shield thing, you could increase the DAMBLOCK of the creature, but you can't block with a specific part.

4) At the moment this is impossible. If you gave them the [CHITIN] tag then they could drop it if butchered instead of skin, but thats it.

5) I am not sure if this works, but my best guess would be to find the ethics EAT_SAPIENT_OTHER and EAT_SAPIENT_KILL and change them to ACCEPTABLE.

6) Probably the only was to do these would be with reactions in the smelter.

7) Pretty much the only way to do this would be to do something like give all of the creatures you want the race to have the [EVIL] tag and then give their entity the USE_EVIL_ANIMALS tag. You would have to go and remove that tag from the goblin entity though. As for the cats and dogs, what I did when I ran into this problem was then to add the [GOOD] tag to all of those creatures and add USE_GOOD_ANIMALS to every entity I wanted to use them. Not a very nice or easy way to do it, but it is currently the best.

As for the skeletons and the necromancy thing, the answers are no, its not currently possible.

[blah28722]

1) Is there a way to make more items out of bones? In special, can I make helmets from skulls and plate-like armor from bones or shells? Bone weapons should include the serrated swords (doing gore damage?), besides spears, maces and crossbows. Also, bone picks for them to dig with and bone mechanisms would be AWESOME.

2) Is there a way to make my critters to have bone preferences just as dwarves have stone, gem and metal preferences?

3) how to make my creatures' bodies so that they have two large, cutting wings-cases growing from from their shoulders, that can be used to cut (gore?) in close combat. They should hit as hard as fists (that's it, not hard at all), but do cutting damage. Ideally, their deadliness should improve together with wrestling proficiency (as DF seems to lack a "boxing" martial art centered on striking). Also ideally, they should be used to block some hits (like a shield, I figure).

4) how to make them drop their pair of wing-cases, besides bones and skulls when they die?

5) how to make them butcher and process their own dead, to use their body parts? (I said they were amoral!)

6) how to create velvet (from leather), feathers and eggs (from large fowl they herd)? Is a MATGLOSS enough for these? The objective would have clothing like: "velvet gloves" and "feather cloaks" and food like "egg biscuits".

7) If I mod their special pets/herd/pack animals, how to keep them unique to this race? at the same issue, how to make them NOT to bring vanilla cats, dogs and cows as pets? (at the same time that dwarves still have these as pets)?

finally: is there a way to make a race "undead-friendly" for now? The ideal would have skeletons manning pumps, and helping their military.

Any help would be much appreciated! I'll share my mods as soon I make them, for now I need to know what's possible and what's not.

1) Yes and no. It's possible to make better items out of "bone", but they won't be "bone", per se. You could create a metal called "tempered bone", set, give it no cluster tags, and set its modifiers to the power of, say, steel. You can then create "tempered bone bars" from a smelter reaction from bones and use them at a forge. Once at a forge, you can make them into everything the race is allowed to make. Note that this would also allow dwarves to make tempered bone items, and would require your race to have the [PREF_METAL] tag.


Alternatively, you could also add modded items with the [BARRED] (can be created with bone) tag. Then double the stats, this would negate the 50% penalty from bone. This would work for all weapons, armor, and trap components. No bone mechanisms though.

2) If you use the tempered bone metal method, yes. However, they will also use iron, steel, and the like.

3) i2amroy is correct.

4) i2amroy is correct again.

5) i2amroy.

6) Velvet is possible from reactions. Eggs would be a bit tough. You could make a plant called "Egg", make it unplantable, and have it be dropped or creatable though reactions.

7) All signs point to i2amroy being correct.

You could rename the Pump Operator profession to "Skeleton" and give them a unique skeleton tileset (via graphics tileset), you can do the same for other less important professions.

They'd revert back to life if they rise high enough in other stats though.