Hey Hugo, think you could help me out with some little problems i'm having as well as general brainstorming.
I've turned my attention to my undead fortress and things are... kinda iffy.
I wanted to have a single necromancer (and later went back to have a male and female necromancer to live together happily) with the rest of the fortress being a bunch of undead that basically take care of their needs as well as do all the menial labor.
I've done a LOT of cool stuff like made a new assignable position called "Necromancer" that replaces and fills the roles of expedition leader, manager, book keeper, and so on. Basically all the leadership and administrative stuff. The militia commander (which will be an undead) will handle the justice system as well as military stuff.
Anyway, everything basically worked how I wanted it to but then I decided I wanted the male and female necromancers to have their own unique graphics to really stand out, that way I gave all my undead little skeleton graphics (from ironhand set) and am using custom male and female graphics for my necros.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a simple way to accomplish that. I tried giving the necromancer castes (one for male, one for female) high natural ability in certain skills that I would otherwise never use on general undead, like diagnosis, and doctor-related things, then giving the custom graphics to people of that position (like chief medical dwarf) or DIAGNOSER and stuff like that, but it never made any difference at all, they always showed up as the default and standard graphics no matter what their skills or assigned positions were despite the graphic txt pointing to different positions and skills having different graphics. I couldn't really find any documentation on how these graphic sets work exactly and looked for hours.
Ultimately I had an idea that I thought would be clever. I gave the male and female necromancer casts an innate ability to transform into a whole new creature type because as their own creatures, I could assign them unique graphics.
And it worked. Their innate makes them change from skeletons into their custom graphics the first second the game is unpaused after embark. However, despite the creatures they turn into having intelligent, equips, etc and honestly just copy-paste of all the stuff their caste used, they seem to get naked immediately and unequip everything. Which i'm cool with, cause I really don't care if they do since they're just the nobles and rulers. However, it seems that while transformed I can't assign them to any furniture. I can still make them nobles, but I can't assign them offices, bedrooms, or anything like that. They simply don't show up on the list.
I can see no logical reason for this outside of transformed creatures simply not being allowed to be assigned things as a hard-coded thing, which i'm guessing is also why they get naked right after transforming.
So i'm rather stumped at how to proceed.
Any ideas on how to change their graphics without using transformation? That would be the easiest solution so they can just remain full blown members of the same creature, just different castes, but the graphics won't cooperate with me on that front. I've also been giving them [PET][COMMON_DOMESTIC] so I can embark with specifically 1 male and 1 female as well as additional undead slaves and it doesn't seem to interfere with anything as I can still assign them jobs via dwarf therapist. I use the undead caste with pop ration 10000 and male and female casts ratio at 1 so the world will actually gen but I don't start with any random males/females without expressly brining them with me.
As moddable as dwarf fortress is, I wish it were even more so. So many ideas that just can't quite achievee. After I get all this mess sorted out i'm going to try to figure out a way to craft corpses out of bones then trying to find a way to animate them. Already am able to bring back my undead slaves when they happen to die, but it would be nice to craft new ones out of the remains of other creatures. One problem at a time though unfortunately.