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[Sizik]

I was reading through the Ark Project and the discussions along the lines of what to name animal species named after Earth places gave me an idea: What if this was done automatically during world-gen? For example, say you have deer in the raws. You would add a tag to the file that tells the game it can create derivative species of deer. It could do this in several ways:

• Tweak some/all of the size, appearance, and color tags to to create a "purple deer", named after their strange hue, or a "Masemina deer", named after the place in the world where they're found (Masemina, "The Amusing Forests")
• Change some/all of the size, appearance, and color tag to make a rather different-looking creature, but still looks somewhat like a deer, like a moose. (The game could give it a generated name, or name it like above)
• Copy some tags over from another animal to create a "bear deer".

This would create species unique to each world, and taking some burden off Toady and modders as they don't need to enter in hundreds of different species to flesh out the world.

Also, there could be a wildlife section in Legends mode that lists all of the different fauna in the world.

(This could be done with plants too.)

[Doomshifter]

This actually sounds like a pretty cool idea!

Of course, you do realise this will lead to some stupid random name generator animals, like Giant Cave Spider Magma Men. (Only if you put the tag on, and hell knows I'd do it to see this :3)

[Amalgam]

I like the idea too, I've read a few threads discussing different breeds of domestic creatures, so this would fit in well with that. Perhaps there could possibly be a way to have predefined certain special species and define sets of different characteristics that can be mixed and matched? For example, see this mockup:

[CREATURE:WOLF]
   [SIZE:5][SIZE:4][SIZE:6]
   [COLOR:BROWN][COLOR:GREY][COLOR:WHITE]
   [MARKINGS:BROWN][MARKINGS:GREY][MARKINGS:WHITE]
   [MARKGLOSS:STRIPES][MARKGLOSS:SPOTS]
   [BODY: ... WOLF_TEETH:TAIL][BODY: ... WICKED_TEETH]
   [BIOME:TUNDRA]
   [BIOME:FOREST_TAIGA]
   [BIOME:ANY_TEMPERATE_FOREST]
   [BIOME:SHRUBLAND_TEMPERATE]

That would give us different species all living in biomes wolves would normally be found in. Different species could be standard size, pygmy or large, they could be brown, grey or white with markings of similar coloration. They could have stripes, or spots. They could come in vanilla variety or be tailless and have needle-like teeth. If you wanted to define your own species, you could do something like this:

[CREATURE:WOLF]
 ...
   [SPECIES:DIRE]
      [EVIL]
      [SIZE:7]
      [COLOR:DUST]
      [MARKINGS:BLACK]
      [MARKGLOSS:PATCHES]
      [BODY: ... ]
      [BIOME:ANY_DESERT]

...And you would have a specific species of very large dust-colored wolves with black patches living in evil deserts. You could also define several sets for specific biomes, so you could have several varieties of white wolf in a tundra biome, for instance, or several kinds of pygmy wolf in a good biome. Or something.

[3]

We already have creature variations (via template) in the next version. This isn't quite as smoothly implemented as the feature being suggested here  - but then again, it doesn't require a re-write of the creature system to accomidate "species".

[Lord Shonus]

However, the suggestion is quite an elegant one, and the OP is to be commended even if it goes nowhere.

[Shurhaian]

Well, the creature system is ALREADY being rewritten; although we might not expect to see another such change soon, it's not as though Toady is proving himself unwilling to throw out an old system if it's no longer adequate. The current variation system is dramatic in its scope, but it's allowing for variation within a species that would normally lead to speciation.

Naming after hue, pattern, or region distinctions is a good thought. Something like magma men might even have different varieties of stone that they could be... though that's probably not speciation in the normal sense. Anyway.

A possible way to handle it would be to have a population that's sufficiently varied from the norm, and sufficiently pure in those differences(most are different in similar ways), to autogenerate a new entry in the raws for that save. Now, some critters you might want to be fairly static(the innumerable gibbons), but you could mark the specific ones you want to be prone to speciation(likely the ones with the widest variance) with a particular token, which might also establish how prone to it they are.

[Amalgam]

However, the suggestion is quite an elegant one, and the OP is to be commended even if it goes nowhere.

I agree

I think one thing that would be odd though is having so many unique species every time you generate a new world, yet having the same real-world species pop up every time. I've taken it for granted that all worlds have the same wildlife so I never thought about it much, but it might be a bit more obtrusive once we have random wildlife. Perhaps there could be an init option to include only predefined species (a simple [SPECIES] tag added to the creature entry I guess), randomly generated species, or both.

[alfie275]

Perhaps this could be combined somewhat with my evolution idea?
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=32911.0