I have difficulty wrapping my imagination around this creature, but I appreciate the differentiation.
The Pet Rocks are made of just stone, if that makes you feel better
My only personal dis-preferences with this mod are the 1) mass proliferation of gem types with the hidden versions, and thus clutter / etc (further cluttering with the layer-specific gem vine farming), 2) the tribute system feeling similarly cluttery due to its layer-specific design, and 3) the general uselessness of benign awakened stones (though lots of vanilla creatures are similar in their lack of explicit uses, so~).
There are some really neat tools for de-cluttering
raws (Rubble, PyDwarf, etc.) but I couldn't find any way to de-clutter the
interface. I made a single reaction that deftly handles processing every kind of gem cluster, but unfortunately I couldn't do the same for the Tributes. The alternative is to make a one-size-fits-all Tribute, but it would either need 72 distinct reactions or 26 and a heroic amount of micro-management from the player.
I made a suggestion to let modders reference the workshop's building material in a reaction, which would allow for a single Tribute workshop on the building menu that simply did different things depending on its material. Since this suggestion would benefit approximately one modder on the planet, I understand it's unlikely to happen. Though now that I think about it, I can probably achieve that with DFHackery.
The mod expands the types of gems by 20% and the types of underground plants by a lot. It did bother me hidden gems crowded out ordinary small clusters, but I was able to fix that in version 1.30. Now they are a rare random drop from mining a tile of layer stone. I was less worried about living stone crowding out ordinary single-tile clusters because no vanilla gems would compete for the same tiles, but the solution for hidden gems also made living stone spawn awakened stones more reliably (and who knows what other mod might be trying to add single-tile cluster gems?). The random drop method also slimmed down the mod by 24 materials and a material template.
The gem vines
do clutter things up a bit, and if you prefer you can delete
plant_tesb.txt to remove them. You'll end up with a redded-out menu choice on your still and the "extract gem seed" operation at a Tribute will simply destroy the rough gem.
Regardless, it's an excellent mod, and the scripts are more than high-five worthy.
Thanks, I appreciate that. The original motivation for the mod was to do something that hadn't been done before in DF. That means I've been learning a lot about how DF works, and that almost all of it requires DFHack sleight-of-hand (it is
possible to spawn creatures with raw modding, but it was so unreliable that I didn't release the mod until I'd duct-taped together a 0.40 version of spawn-unit.lua). Right now, the only feature 100% in the raws is the gem vine, and even that depends on you getting your hands on a rough hidden gem that can only appear due to a script.
Probably not in 1.31, but watch out for a single Tribute building to take on all of the Tribute functions.