I found this just recently and have run some games with it, and just now recently managed to cage my first ''Collhe'' (random creature). I had high hopes to start taming and breeding this wonderful creation, but despite finding a pet value in the raws, couldn't do either.
Which tag would I have to add to make the animal tame-able and is the fact that it isn't a feature, a bug or an oversight(as in; do some get the ''correct'' tame-able tags, and some don't, or was this not a part of the initial aim of the tool?)
I've always aimed to do a roleplaying breeding fortress and this tool seemed to make that a 1000 times cooler, just kinda weary of having to manually edit 700 raws! Also; thanks lots for making it, so far besides the breeding thing it's worked wonders.
You can edit Randomdat.txt in your Raw/Objects folder to make it work... I'm not sure why it wouldn't let you tame it with the pet value, though. If you could post the raws for the particular creature, I might be able to figure it out.
To force the pet tag onto all of the creatures, open Randomdat.txt and scroll down to the second part, where it's defining the variables for the creature tokens. "((TAG DATA))" is about when this starts.
If you want megabeasts capable of being trained, add ";M" to the end of each of the following:
![PET_EXOTIC];1000
![TRAINABLE];1000
If you're fine with leaving megabeasts as they are, just copy-paste that in there... I would suggest immediately following:
![WEBIMMUNE];18
verb:cannot get caught in webs
Just so that nothing gets messed up. The 1000 gives it a 100% chance of being given to a creature. Then, just gen new raws and it should work. As you're adding tags I kept out of there for a reason, you may wind up with a few weird creatures. =P But I'll work on that if you find any issues.
At Argantyr:
But beyond all that, I love the results I get sometimes...alot of the time. Sometimes I get monsters that the generator has no clue how to describe.
If you get creatures that the generator can't describe (e.g. it says "An unknown, randomly generated creature" or something like that), send me the raws and I'll try to teach it to keep from doing that again.
I thought I got all of those out of there, but I guess not. It's absurdly difficult to accurately describe a creature with just a few short sentences. Toady gets around it by mainly using creatures that are well-known - all you really need is the name, and maybe the short description will jog your memory if you can't recall whatever it is right away.
I'll agree that metal on normal creatures would be difficult, but then again this is the same game where dying seems to be an inevitability. But then again, could save it for megabeasts, no? I havn't toyed around too much with metal tissue, I wonder if it could be used to gen more than just the whole body...like iron flesh, but squishy flesh underneath? I would however be far more interested in adding stone types, even if associated with normal beasties - just imagine a Baron's personal quarters decorated with the statue-like remains of a 6 headed, tusk-creature with 4 arms, each armed with two fingers each with a slug-like pseudofoot for their lower body with flesh made out of some dense type of stone that probably took weeks of hauling to set it up.
A lot of this would be really difficult to do.
Megabeasts can already be bronze (like a bronze colossus sort of thing), but creatures are limited to gabbro. I could make them out of metal, and I realize this would increase the game's difficulty... Creatures can be up to whale or dragon size, I think - it's rare to get one that large, but it's possible. If you had one of those made out of steel, and the generator generated them in packs of five, or, Armok forbid, ten... And they were automatically hostile... you would be screwed, plain and simple. I was trying to avoid this.
I do like the idea of stone creatures dropping statues, however. I could look into that.
Before of course, the room was flooded by lava due to ominous circumstances. I don't know, maybe in the future if you were still interested, you could make some basic menu to turn some randomization features on and off. Like Civs could be toggled off, on, or both, exotic features could give you the chance to have abstract critters that Lovecraft would approve of, stone, wood and metal could each be toggled (but have their own weighted generation values).
This is possible. Really, the language I used is pretty much worthless for it (I didn't expect it to get too much attention, so I was lazy and used an easy one) - I'd probably have to rewrite it in another language. But it's possible.
Edit: Just wanted to add that I think that a lot of metals SHOULD have syndromes attatched, perhaps special ones that could be averted through some sort of tag, enabling perhaps evil races to use them without suffering (Though woe to any human or dwarf that is assaulted by the Goblin's whip of lead with it's slow, painful, lead-poison-death syndrome. XD
Syndromes are coming, when I get the time for it. I've been very busy lately. One thing I don't want the syndromes to do is guarantee an instant death, because it's no fun encountering something in the wilderness that can oneshot you with a glancing blow to your pinky.
I mean... I guess it's "Fun", but it would be a real game-breaker. I have a decent amount of experience with syndromes, I think - I once modified Mr Frog's radiation mod to randomize the effects - basically, savage regions were marked as "radioactive", and if you settled there your dwarves would mutate with wonderfully grotesque effects. I don't want to put something like that in
here, but at least I have a little knowledge on it, even if I'm a tad rusty. But no - syndromes are something I would enjoy putting in.