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[Shurhaian]

For a project I'm working on, I'm trying to make sense of biomes.

Specifically, I want a creature to appear in, say, any hot desert.

But from what I can tell of the biome tokens, they all work as a union. "ANY_DESERT" is stated in the Wiki as specifically including the freezing ones. "NOT_FREEZING" seems to suggest that absolutely any biome that isn't freezing will do. Putting the two of them together seems like it wouldn't make a critter appear in any not-freezing desert and that's all(that would be the intersection of the two), but in any desert, freezing or no, and anywhere ELSE that isn't freezing, desert or no.

So. From this I gather that the control mechanism is more to do with the HOMEOTHERM and/or LAYERING tokens.

Questions include:

• What are "average" temperatures Urist for freezing vs cold vs temperate vs hot vs scorching?
• How do the HOMEOTHERM and LAYERING tokens seem to interact? My guess was that a given creature is most comfortable in an environment whose temperature is its HOMEOTHERM value minus its LAYERING value, but I'm not sure.
• Is there anything else I can use to control the sort of environments creatures spawn in? Say, to give them a broader or narrower temperature tolerance?
• Do some of the biome tokens actually intersect rather than stacking The creature tokens such as BENIGN and EVIL seem to stack with each other but intersect with (and thereby restrict) the biomes.
  

Thanks in advance!

[Johnny Chthonic]

You are right, NOT_FREEZING and ANY_DESERT don't overlap, so essentially your creature would appear anywhere that wasn't too cold, and also a desert even if it was "freezing."

If you want a creature to appear in desert, then you'll want the DESERT_SAND tokens, or maybe the wasteland ones. I'm assuming you're looking at http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Biome_tokens.

For temperature, you may want to take a look at http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Temperature_scale. HOMEOTHERM defines a creature's body temperature (set high enough, it will ignite everything it touches, like magma men), and LAYERING influences the amount of heat a creature traps in. Humans have 10, and animals like polar bears have I think between 200 and 300. Set too high, a creature will be restricted to icy areas. Set too low, it won't be able to survive their.

I think your solution (for this example) could be to set your biome to any desert, but give your creature 75 layering or so. This will keep it out of freezing, and possibly even cold biomes.

Does this help? Other questions?

[Shurhaian]

I saw some of the basics of the temperature scale, I just haven't quite been able to parse that into a sense of how hot the climes are. Nor, on another look, does the temperature scale page really seem to give much answer there; nor does it cover seasonal variance.

I do, however, want to have creatures that can appear pretty much anywhere that's a given biome. For instance, if it's an ocean, I don't care if it's freezing or scorching, I want one of the critters to be able to show up in water. (Or, for that matter, any non-freezing lake, but putting the non-freezing there may be difficult, so I may wind up allowing them in any lake, and glaciers. Still a form of water, in a manner of speaking...)

[Johnny Chthonic]

Temperature is kind of weird, and I don't have much experience with it. I do know that homeotherm dictates a creature's overall body temperature, however what effect it has on which biomes/environments a creature can live in I can't say.

Biomes control what areas of the world a creature can *appear* in. Whether or not they can survive there is up to layering (and if you are talking oceans/lakes/rivers, whether it can swim.) The biomes are kind of gradated in terms of how specific you want something. ANY_OCEAN will allow the creature to *appear* in freezing and scorching oceans, but if you want it to survive you're going to need to add or remove layering as necessary.

The EVIL and GOOD tags work as additions to the biome tags, so unlike, say, ANY_DESERT and NOT_FREEZING (which will enable both of those biome types), having ANY_DESERT and GOOD will restrict the creature to good deserts.

The biome tokens aren't very good at dealing with hot and cold climates. There are lots of 'temperate' variations, and many of the colder biomes have specific names (tundra is freezing plains, taiga is freezing forest, etc.). Having a creature appear in freezing lakes is tricky, because there isn't a specific biome for them. Notice that the tokens only cover temperate and tropical lakes.

Then again, an aquatic creature living in a freezing biome is going to have a rough time, since almost all the water is always frozen. You could shoot for cold by putting the ANY_LAKE token in and reducing the layering so that they can only survive in colder areas.

Sorry I couldn't give you what you wanted. There might be a workaround, but I'm not really aware of one.

Edit: I was looking at some creature raws, and almost all of the freezing biome creatures still have homeotherm 10067 (same as dwarves), so this doesn't appear to be used that much for dictating where they live.

[Shurhaian]

Yes, I knew the good/evil and benign tokens worked separately from the biome tokens(see first post; the intersection of (union of good/evil etc) AND (union of biome tokens) seems to dictate where they spawn). As for the water, I'd intended the creature to be amphibious anyway.

Are there any creatures that have such a widespread distribution in game? That is, can be found thriving in cold and hot environments alike? Aside from the civilized races, which cope with clothing.

[Johnny Chthonic]

If you look through the raws, you'll see that most of the creatures are to some extent defined by the biomes in which they live. The only ones that are very widespread are in the creature_standard file, such as civ races and underground creatures (underground maintains a certain temperature), as well as mega and semimegabeasts.

A solution could actually be to have your aquatic creature be subterranean, since this would allow them to live in virtually any biome (albeit underground).

There's also a token called COLDDAM_POINT which dictates the temperature a creature can tolerate before taking damage. It's counterpart is HEATDAM_POINT, but COLDDAM_POINT (I believe) can be used to give a creature with no layering a resistance to things like frostbite. This would allow you to create a creature with the minimal layering one needs to thrive in a scorching biome, but would (I think) be able to manage in colder ones too.