I should have a look into modding myself, any tips on how I should start?
Hmm... Personally, I jumped right into it a little less than a year ago. Using the magmawiki as a crutch, I designed a custom race called "
scythods". After that, I started working on other things that never got released, including the infamous manamaids. Jumping right into it seems to be the way to go, I think. If you don't aim high, you won't get anywhere - but the wiki is your friend. On my old laptop I had a good number of the pages bookmarked. Creature tokens, entity tokens, body tokens, etc.
Contrary to what you'd expect, modding entities is a lot harder than modding creatures, simply because there's so much more that can go wrong, and it rarely gives you an error log for what you screwed up. However, it has a lot fewer potential variables... I'd still recommend starting with creatures. Or armor, or something similar. Modding armor gets old fast, though - there's not much you can do with it, and Toady's system doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
@Tevish Szat: Welcome to the thread.
I still don't like the idea of messing with the ethics too much - it impacts gameplay a
lot more than you would expect. For a non-player race, I wouldn't mind, but if we're having the first multiplayer
world, it would be unfair if we gave one side a major advantage. Butchering sapients actually makes the game ridiculously easy - there's literally no end of soap and food after the first siege (or ambush, even). You never have to worry about either of them again.
Then again, it's just my opinion. A lot of people seem to like the idea of dark dwarves being
technically evil instead of just flavorfully so.