For the hidden gems and rock monsters spawning, you can make something like that with the mentioned veins/clusters of hidden gem/boiling monster stone rock. When inhaled the miner will turn opposed_to_life, hide, transform into something that drops a bp, turns that bp into a stone monster OPPOSED_TO_LIFE miner then becomes normal once the OPPOSED_TO_Life wears off, and in the meantime there is a horride monster that will either roam around the fort killing everyone, or discover the miner kill him and move on to other people. (If you want the miner to leave hiding give him an interaction that fires a projectile at himself, that will exit him from ambush/sneak mode)
I think it's amazing that this spawning workaround was discovered at all, but is there a reason spawning requires a Rube Goldberg contraption? "Toady hasn't gotten around to spawning yet" is perfectly fine, but I was curious if there was some philosophical aversion to making critters appear without having them "wandering around the world" first.
Yeah Toady hasn't gotten around to Summoning or Spawning, just animation, transformation and resurrection. So a few of the other advanced modders (Di, Narihil) managed to find and abuse an exploit for the transformation and combined it with animation and resurrection.
If you really want a "spawning" monster vein/cluster I know Meph has that in masterwork or can PM me and I can write up the method of doing that, Hidden gems for sure are easier (gem clusters that look exactly like the rock they form in but drop the special gem)
That's good to hear. It means we don't have to worry about the current pseudo-spawning methods getting intentionally broken in the next release.
I appreciate the offer of help, though I'm moving pretty slowly on the mod due to a lot of bringing work home lately. The eventual goal is a "Strike the Earth... and the Earth Strikes Back!" mod something like this:
A regional interaction (like the evil-biome reanimation effect) awakens a small percentage of mined stones once in a while (maybe 0.5% monthly, to be tweaked for playability). Awakened stones drop a stone as their "corpse" when killed which may very well awaken again later. The Dwarves can carve the stones into blocks to prevent awakening, or a more permanent solution would be to construct a Tribute to that particular stone type. The Tribute (which was supposed to consume the Dwarf who constructed it) would make that particular type of stone non-hostile, or stop awakening altogether, whichever is feasible. An alternative would be requiring a valuable gem to make the Tribute.
If the awakening will really occur from specific clusters, it might suffice for the Tribute to make a Dwarf immune to the syndrome that causes spawning, or just immune to the [OPPOSED_TO_LIFE] portion. Since each type of rock creature is created by a different syndrome, hopefully this can be exploited to give immunity on a syndrome-by-syndrome basis. This would perhaps require a valuable gem
per miner to be made immune (acceptable to the stone critters).
To balance out the danger of mining ("very deep soil" should become a popular embark criteria), the layer stone contains hidden gems, has a few extra uses to be modded in as I think of them, and the presence of non-hostile critters helps a tad in defending the fortress ("The awakened granite stone bites the awakened gabbro stone and latches on firmly"). And what Dwarf doesn't want a magma-safe pet?