Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[IndigoFenix]

So here's the current line-up for the trading races for Toads:

	Spring	Summer	Autumn
Level 1	Beans (weapons/armor)	Piantas (good-aligned pets/tropical fruit)	Toads (clothing and food)
Level 2	Bub-Ulbs (good-region fruits)	Nokis (tropical ocean products)	Moles (mining equipment)
Level 3	Frogs (special powerups)	Something else...	Doogans (evil-aligned plants/animals)

Goombas will start attacking between levels 1 and 2, Koopas and Bob-ombs around level 3.

Any ideas of one more race for the missing slot, and what they should carry?

Koopas and Shy Guys will have to fight Yoshis from the start, and will be attacked by Beans in the spring, Piantas in the summer, and Doogans in the autumn, all starting around Level 2 (although they have different appearance requirements, so they might show up in different orders depending on your playing style).

Craws? A bit like Doogans, but rather than animals they have moderately good metals.

How about Star Sprites?

Bowser's Inside Story shows that Star Sprites still have a moderate affiliation with the Mushroom Kingdom. Paper Mario shows that Star Sprites are born the ground and ascend up to Star Haven later on. Star Sprites can have infinite life spans and take a long time to grow up, but when they have kids it can be in groups of seven. They would have to be live in good-aligned biomes to keep the mystic quality they are supposed to have.

They could trade Star Pieces, an item made to be melted into a very rare metal or be a stone type that the Toads can work with. I think stone would be better and the Sprites could also possibly bring weapons or armor made from a metal that can only come from the Star Sprites. I like this because Toads can't really dig for the deepest metal, so giving them some kind of long term reward of this type seems like a nice thing.)

They could also trade other Star themed goodies even maybe trade young Star Sprites to act as a support pet. (Even better if it is possible for Toads to make wishes on the Star Sprites to give them power boosts, can interactions target allies? It seems like you can have it target specifically Star Sprites from the way the tokens look.) The other Star themed goodies could be like valuable plants that the player can try to grow or maybe a neat fabric or something.

And a Star Bit item that can be turn into a Star Cake.

On that note, Lumas could be a secondary caste for Star Sprites as the creatures are nearly identical anyway. (I know you like to stay away from castes, but here it is because really they could easily just be the same species with different names and they would hang out in the same place. This way they form societies together and live in Star Organism harmony.)

Edit: You could also add an interaction in good aligned biomes that causes it to rain Star Bits, Falling Stars, or Star dust or something. It would be neat bit of flavor for those areas.

I definitely want to put in star sprites/star spirits/lumas/starmen/whatever they're calling them these days, although I think they're a bit too special to be put among the regular trading races, unless they show up at level 5 or something (the highest level possible, which is also when the 'alien' races will start attacking).

There's a plan to completely convert certain particular biome combination types into some of the more exotic locations in the Mushroom World.  For instance, good temperate grasslands will have the Flower Fields type plants and creatures, savage temperate grasslands/shrublands could be Giant Land, savage tropical areas could be Dinosaur Land (in general, I'm using tropical climates for creatures that appear mainly in the Yoshi series, while temperate climates are the location of the regular series), evil forests become Forest of Illusion/Forever Forest type areas.  Using custom grasses it's possible to give a particular biome a very distinct look, although it's tricky to make them behave, especially when using good/evil/savage tags to try and make a very distinct looking area.

I've been experimenting with turning the rare-but-noticable good-aligned mountain ranges into Sky World/Nimbus Land/Coin Heaven type areas using a custom grass, but it's only halfway successful, most of the time I get a half-and-half mix of cloud-grass and regular grass, even when I make the two kinds of grass have a huge difference in frequency.

Turning a particular biome into a star-themed area (like Star Hill or Star Summit) is a great idea, I might just go with that for good-aligned mountains instead of trying to make it into clouds, as it would probably be a whole lot easier (not to mention less weird; mining clouds made of rock just doesn't seem right, although travelling over them in Adventure mode is quite fun).

[EmeraldWind]

I definitely want to put in star sprites/star spirits/lumas/starmen/whatever they're calling them these days, although I think they're a bit too special to be put among the regular trading races, unless they show up at level 5 or something (the highest level possible, which is also when the 'alien' races will start attacking).

There's a plan to completely convert certain particular biome combination types into some of the more exotic locations in the Mushroom World.  For instance, good temperate grasslands will have the Flower Fields type plants and creatures, savage temperate grasslands/shrublands could be Giant Land, savage tropical areas could be Dinosaur Land (in general, I'm using tropical climates for creatures that appear mainly in the Yoshi series, while temperate climates are the location of the regular series), evil forests become Forest of Illusion/Forever Forest type areas.  Using custom grasses it's possible to give a particular biome a very distinct look, although it's tricky to make them behave, especially when using good/evil/savage tags to try and make a very distinct looking area.

I've been experimenting with turning the rare-but-noticable good-aligned mountain ranges into Sky World/Nimbus Land/Coin Heaven type areas using a custom grass, but it's only halfway successful, most of the time I get a half-and-half mix of cloud-grass and regular grass, even when I make the two kinds of grass have a huge difference in frequency.

Turning a particular biome into a star-themed area (like Star Hill or Star Summit) is a great idea, I might just go with that for good-aligned mountains instead of trying to make it into clouds, as it would probably be a whole lot easier (not to mention less weird; mining clouds made of rock just doesn't seem right, although travelling over them in Adventure mode is quite fun).

I see. That makes sense. Though having them show up around the times the alien attackers does sound interesting.

As for naming, I think Star Sprites is the name for the denizens of Star Road and Star Haven as they seem to be parts of the same whole. Star Spirits I think would be titles given to leaders of the Star Sprites. Lumas though are definitely a different critter. Rather than living to grant wishes, Lumas grow into planetary bodies, like planets and galaxies. But because of their very similar bodies and preference for living space I figured putting them together wouldn't be much of a stretch.  Starmen though always seemed to be to be a simple power up.

That's pretty cool how you are recreating the lands from the games by using combinations of the biome tags.

Speaking of clouds though, what about the Nimbus Landers from SMRPG. They could provide cloth spun from clouds. Maybe even have a building material from clouds that can be made into constructions or beds (could be in the form of a wood log called a cloud roll). All their stuff can be very very light weight which help speed up construction since light weight items won't encumber the Toads or require wheelbarrows (though I don't know how much of a difference that will make in practice). They could also be a source of cloud based pets.

[IndigoFenix]

It was going to be the Nimbus Landers, but given how hard creating a cloud-themed biome is turning out to be...  I guess there could still be some of them walking around anyway, like as visitors or outcasts from the sky.

It's kind of funny including Star Spirits in this way, since they're basically the Mushroom World's pantheon and DF's system doesn't really support custom divine races.  That's why they were originally going to have the [DOES_NOT_EXIST] token and persist only in pictures.  Could be interesting to try out though... If I give them the [PANTHEON] token and remove it from other races, most of the gods will wind up being depicted as Star Spirits.  I think it's possible for some races to start worshiping another races' gods, or does that require them to also have a pantheon of their own?  Perhaps something could be done with spheres...

I put in a custom 'shooting star rain' for good-aligned mountains that gives intelligent creatures the ability to 'make a wish', which gives them a temporary boost to one or more random stats, and has a small chance of enabling them to regrow lost limbs or bring back the dead.

[EmeraldWind]

It was going to be the Nimbus Landers, but given how hard creating a cloud-themed biome is turning out to be...  I guess there could still be some of them walking around anyway, like as visitors or outcasts from the sky.

It's kind of funny including Star Spirits in this way, since they're basically the Mushroom World's pantheon and DF's system doesn't really support custom divine races.  That's why they were originally going to have the [DOES_NOT_EXIST] token and persist only in pictures.  Could be interesting to try out though... If I give them the [PANTHEON] token and remove it from other races, most of the gods will wind up being depicted as Star Spirits.  I think it's possible for some races to start worshiping another races' gods, or does that require them to also have a pantheon of their own?  Perhaps something could be done with spheres...

I put in a custom 'shooting star rain' for good-aligned mountains that gives intelligent creatures the ability to 'make a wish', which gives them a temporary boost to one or more random stats, and has a small chance of enabling them to regrow lost limbs or bring back the dead.

That's a cool idea making the star rain give the ability to wish. Brilliant!

Yeah, the Star Spirits will be a neat addition once Toady gets around to RAWable gods and RAWable planes of reality. At that point they could possibly work as the games intend them with young Star Sprites being born as shooting stars, growing up somewhere on land, and then later ascending back to Star Haven. Granted, that is probably 8 years down the line. So you could make them not exist.

[IndigoFenix]

Update time!

Changes:

Craws have been added as a trading race, and an attacking race on the bad guys side.  They might also start wars with Piantas, which could potentially get interesting as they both show up in the same season...

Due to the difficulty in getting civilized creatures to stay in their respective alignment biomes, Nimbus Landers and Star Sprites have not been added.  However, Good-aligned mountain biomes will experience occasional rains of shooting stars, which will give intelligent creatures the ability to 'wish', increasing one or more randomly-picked stats each week, and has a small chance of resurrecting deceased creatures.  Be warned that this bonus also applies to your enemies!

All races in Adventure Mode are now playable as members of their respective civs, and human Outsiders have been added to the list (no human civ added yet, unless you're still playing with the vanilla entities).

Cooking reactions, which now include pasta-making, egg-frying, and cake-baking, will actually work now, aside from the issue of consuming whole stacks for each reaction (which is just the way DF works).  Fortunately you should get out of the reaction as much as goes into it, with the exception of Surprise Cake.

Drawing inspiration from the seasonal crops mod, some of the more powerful powerup plants can now be grown over a period of several seasons.  To grow these valuable plants, plant them in their proper season, and then make sure that nothing is set to grow in subsequent seasons until their harvest time (otherwise, your citizens will destroy them to plant the new crops, wasting the seeds).  Super Mushrooms and Super Bushes are planted in the Spring and harvested in the Autumn, while Fire Flowers (and their new tropical variant, Fire Tulips) are planted in the Winter and harvested in the Summer.  Simpler food plants can still be grown in short periods.

More varieties of plants can be used for flour and sugar: Flour can now be obtained from wheat, rice, or iced potatoes, while sugar comes from sugar beets (in temperate regions) or sugar cane (in tropical regions).  Hopefully this will lower the chances of being stuck without access to one of these resources.

Whackas (finally) will yield edible bumps when hit in the head, which must then be knocked off of the Whacka with another attack.  They die without leaving regular corpses, so you'll have to harvest the bumps while the Whacka is still alive.  You wouldn't do such a horrible thing, though, would you?  Not even when a Whacka Bump is not only an excellent powerup food, but sells for a value of 800 apiece?  Ha ha...good luck finding one, though!

Some new creatures and plants have been added too.  Let's see... Blarggs, Burts, Beanlets, Clefts, Dayzees, Ravens, Tap-Taps, Unagis, Strawberries, Mega Mushrooms, probably some more things...

You might find some interesting objects underground, too... keep an eye out for buried treasures!

[IndigoFenix]

Also, some 'speech' files have been added for bragging about killing certain creatures, you can put them in the data/speech folder.  They don't really matter, but I did have some fun writing them.

[Putnam]

I don't think that your creatures will destroy crops…

[IndigoFenix]

I don't think that your creatures will destroy crops…

They'll plant over them, destroying the crops that are already there in the process.  Normally it's a non-issue because plants take less than a season to grow, but for those that take longer you have to leave the crops time to mature.

[IndigoFenix]

It's been a little while.  I've been busy with a project of my own, but still have a bit of free time for modding, so...

New update!

Toads have a building of their own now: the Warp Pipe!  Unfortunately you can't use it for travel, but you can use it to produce an unlimited amount of water, which can in turn be used to fill artificial ponds.  This should increase the versatility of the Toads by allowing them to build a fortress (and raise Yoshis) without the need for a settling near a river or digging into an underground lake.

New vegetation and creatures have spawned some new biomes - good forests are now modeled after Boggly Woods, and savage tropical areas are now full of dinosaurs.  There are a plenty of new creatures in this update, including as piders, rexes, scuttlebugs, ninjis, spikes, huffin' puffins, albatosses, flurries, and ostros.  The rare moneybag creature will show up too, and true to its name, can be butchered for a gold bar (because DF coins are basically worthless), but if you manage to catch one, it will lay gold bars as eggs!  Sadly they won't reproduce in captivity.  Nipper plants will show up too, and they will mature into stationary piranha plants after spending a few weeks on your map.  Deal with them accordingly!

Demon Koopas are now much tougher than before to put them on par with standard demons, and their personalities have been shifted to match.  They've been modified a bit so that (hopefully) they won't show up to your newly constructed fort.  I'm still a bit iffy on 'friendly' building destroyer behavior, sometimes they seem to destroy buildings, sometimes they don't, and sometimes they seem to do so but at a very slow rate.  More study is needed.

Two new megabeasts have been added: First off, three-headed firebreathing serpent Tryclyde, which can spit one fireball at a time for each of its remaining heads.  Second, four-eyed canine hunger god Belome will slurp you to death while attacking with 'scarecrow syndrome', an illness that will take away your ability to use basic physical attacks, but you'll still be able to move (slowly) and use any learned abilities.  Learning the Thunderhand technique will give you a huge edge against this monster, as it is extremely vulnerable to electric attacks.

A new human civ has been added.  Humans are a minority in the Mushroom World, living in small villages scattered all over the world, and they will not show up to your fort until late in the game.  In most other respects they are similar to vanilla humans.

Last and probably least, the 'animate corpse' reaction at the Magikoopa Sanctum now revives an entire roomful of corpses in a single move for free.  They will still attack your koopas on sight, but a clever contraption involving a wall of fortifications and a floodgate will allow you to produce a roomful of zombies that can be unleashed upon an invading siege at the pull of a lever.  As zombies seem to have a hard time killing even unarmed koopas owing to their ability to curl up and protect their vulnerable parts, this might be a useful defense strategy.  If nothing else, at least it will be !!FUN!!.

[IndigoFenix]

Update!

Not too much has been changed: Couple of new creatures, as well as a Vibe secret.  I can't really think of much else to add, so aside from gradual additions and tweaks, this mod is more-or-less complete, at least until Toady's next big update.

Post any ideas you have or bugs you find here.  I guess it's time to put this on the community mod thread now!

Enjoy!

[EmeraldWind]

I just noticed the pic on the front page. GENIUS!

Now we need a thread for pictures of our favorite video games DF style. J/K.

Edit: I found something pretty neat while adventuring. While at a night troll's lair I found two doses starman paste.

I saved it for later and used it to go invincible while attacking a yoshi bandit camp.
I wasn't sure if eating the starman paste would have an effect or not, but it worked pretty well. (BTW, yoshis are really brutal as bandits. Carry a shield. Or starman paste)

So that's something you can look for if you are adventuring in this mod.

[EmeraldWind]

You know what, I was trying to gen a world that took out all the vanilla DF creatures and civs.

After a couple a gens I realized secrets weren't being injected into the worlds properly.
I then realized that none of the civs in this mod have gods.
A couple of them have religious spheres pointing to the stars, but they don't actually worship anything (forces or pantheons).

Bul-ulbs are the only ones that actually get anything since they have a religion type and a religion sphere defined (force and nature).
No wait, Star Sprites work too. But they are fanciful creatures so they don't actually form civs...

Yoshis have a religion type of force, but have no spheres.

No religions form so secrets don't appear as slabs. Demons will occasionally write books about the secrets that match their spheres, but I haven't seen demon koopas do it yet.

[Pallbearer]

This is absolutely unreal, fantastic work!

[IndigoFenix]

Hm, is that why the secrets weren't showing up?  I've seen firebrand and polymorph secrets show up, but there are some that just don't seem to appear.  I guess it makes sense that you need to have a race worshiping a god before it creates a slab, since DF gods are apparently created by their worshipers.  Does that mean that you need to have a civ that has a religion aligned with the sphere of the given secret before a slab for that secret will be sent?

I was trying to get some of the races to worship star sprites, but since that doesn't seem to work I guess I'll have to revert them back to worshiping gods made in their own image.  Don't want all those secrets to go to waste, after all.

I doubt that Demon Koopas will create secret books - they aren't technically demons, but megabeasts, and I guess megabeasts aren't included in whatever procedure enables demons to generate secrets.

Nice find with the starman paste - I forgot that night creatures sometimes have mashed vermin in their lairs, and starmen are technically vermin!   On a related note, free bags of powerup plants can and do show up in random people's houses - I found a bag of about 60 super mushrooms once, which lasted me quite a while (given adventure mode's time frame, you can generally expect each powerup to last you one battle).  This wasn't a intended effect and I could imagine that finding a bagful of, say, mega mushrooms would completely break the game, but hey, it's not like they're particularly common, and it is something to look forward to, so let's call it a 'feature', shall we?

This is absolutely unreal, fantastic work!

Thanks!

[EmeraldWind]

Hm, is that why the secrets weren't showing up?  I've seen firebrand and polymorph secrets show up, but there are some that just don't seem to appear.  I guess it makes sense that you need to have a race worshiping a god before it creates a slab, since DF gods are apparently created by their worshipers.  Does that mean that you need to have a civ that has a religion aligned with the sphere of the given secret before a slab for that secret will be sent?

I was trying to get some of the races to worship star sprites, but since that doesn't seem to work I guess I'll have to revert them back to worshiping gods made in their own image.  Don't want all those secrets to go to waste, after all.

I doubt that Demon Koopas will create secret books - they aren't technically demons, but megabeasts, and I guess megabeasts aren't included in whatever procedure enables demons to generate secrets.

Nice find with the starman paste - I forgot that night creatures sometimes have mashed vermin in their lairs, and starmen are technically vermin!   On a related note, free bags of powerup plants can and do show up in random people's houses - I found a bag of about 60 super mushrooms once, which lasted me quite a while (given adventure mode's time frame, you can generally expect each powerup to last you one battle).  This wasn't a intended effect and I could imagine that finding a bagful of, say, mega mushrooms would completely break the game, but hey, it's not like they're particularly common, and it is something to look forward to, so let's call it a 'feature', shall we?

Yeah, gods need a temple to interact with their people. Slabs and curses both require temples to exist as far as I can tell.

You do also need to have gods that match the spheres of the secrets (and for that you need to make sure the civs have those as possible religion spheres).

Eventually Toady is going to allow for rawable god entities. He mentioned it in a Future of the Fort thread years back. When that happens, you can probably create a pantheon of custom star sprites and even give them the spheres to allow giving out secrets. That will be a while from now, so a normal pantheon will work for now.

As for the starman paste, it was actually pretty cool. I like finding stuff like the bags of a ton of items. It reminds of how older video games would occasionally throw a really useful item somewhere in the game. The starman paste is also a pretty good reason to hunt down night creatures. I was glad I had it when the yoshi ripped off my right arm in that battle. Then I proceeded to teach them how to fly hammer style.