I'll look at it now. Thanks for letting me see it!
*Alright, I thought at first it might be the tileset, but running the game without it didn't change the result. Hm. It's also weird that simply encountering the ants in the world doesn't crash the game.
**I got a crash when I tried to embark. I wonder if the bug relates to spawning ants without a history. That doesn't seem right though, because adventurers can spawn fine.
***I tried giving them slightly more varied personalities, that didn't help. You say the bug relates directly to their sentience?
****Ok, so I was able to get bark beetles to crash the game by making them sentient. It's definitely something to do with that. Next I'll give them CAN_LEARN and CAN_SPEAK separately, to see which half of that is the problem.
*****They worked fine with CAN_SPEAK, but crashed when they had CAN_LEARN. Since the bark beetles crashed too, I'm thinking that the problem most likely relates to their XP collection.
******Hey, although it makes realistic sense, you might want to disable FLIER on drones for the sake of their pathfinding for now. Flying sentients tend to break. I really need to go back to Jawa Fortress and change that there too.
*******This is really confusing. I've just about stripped down the black ants to the bare minimum complexity necessary, and they still crash when they CAN_LEARN. It's not impossible to have sentient bugs, I checked Jawa Fortress' Geonosians to verify that. I wonder if they're missing something essential to being sentient, rather than having something added that's poisoning them.
********I went into another folder, and tried out giant cave spiders with the INTELLIGENT tag and no other changes. They worked fine.
*********Hey, now here's some progress! From what we've learned so far, the problem is something shared by every creature in the mod when it becomes sentient, but not by any vanilla creature. It's also not inherent to being a bug, since I tried giving one of the bird megabeasts sentience and it crashed too. I figured it might be the modded material and tissue templates, and reset those to vanilla. After that, I was able to spawn all the sentient black ants I wanted. Will research more.
**********Looks like you didn't change anything in tissue_template_default. That should narrow the problem down.
***********Hm. A new folder with only that change still crashes.
************And now the original folder crashed. Maybe I just got lucky before?
*************I had the idea to import a vanilla dwarf into the mod. The dwarf crashed the game too, which supports my theory that no individual creature is wrong. It's something else, shared between them all.
**************I have to quit for tonight. I'll come back later, if you haven't figured out the problem before me. To reiterate, the issue effects sentient creatures in this mod in particular. I was able to get most of the features working by moving the files one by one into a new folder, but that lost the tileset. I wonder if that's involved.