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[squamous]

Noticed something you might want to look into. I see a lot of wild monsters with the INTELLIGENT tag. While this may be lore friendly, the game is currently a little bugged last I checked, and intelligent creatures will not attack the player while encountered and will often behave strangely in other ways. If an INTELLIGENT creature is intended to be a dangerous encounter, it would probably be best to just remove that tag and give it innate skill appropriate to its danger level.

[GoblinCookie]

Noticed something you might want to look into. I see a lot of wild monsters with the INTELLIGENT tag. While this may be lore friendly, the game is currently a little bugged last I checked, and intelligent creatures will not attack the player while encountered and will often behave strangely in other ways. If an INTELLIGENT creature is intended to be a dangerous encounter, it would probably be best to just remove that tag and give it innate skill appropriate to its danger level.

I know about this problem very well. 

All the intelligent creatures that are [INTELLIGENT] are also [BENIGN]; they should flee rather than attack the player.  The creatures that are intelligent are as a rule intended to not dangerous encounters.  A lot of creatures that according to the lore should be intelligent are treated as dumb predatory animals, the Chuul for instance ought to be an intelligent creature according to the lore but is instead are treated as nothing but a dangerous underground predatory animal by the mod. 

There is a balance in narrative potential.  A lot of creatures that really ought to be dangerous predators, the ettercap for instance are treated as lovely benign forest people because I see them as fundamentally compatible with civilisation, as in they have hands and an intelligent mind to go with it.  I felt their narrative potential was much greater as a pool of creatures that can join a civilisation than they would be as simply dumb predators. 

In any case after the elf release (which is nearly done at present) I will be making another beast release in which I will, along with adding more beasties in, go through the raws of creatures to make miscellaneous changes where that would be a good idea.  Problem is that I rather want to wrap this mod up so I can go mod Stellaris, but I am still tempted to go through the monster manuals to add more creatures.  Previously in the last beast release I annexed the D&D mod, but that was so full of bugs that I doubt it was less work than it would have been if I made the whole thing from scratch. 

An annoying element here is that the D&D canon contains a lot of creatures that blur the animal/human divide; but any attempt to do this in Dwarf Fortress merely results in animals that are theoretically also people which just makes them buggy animals without adding much.  A lot of things desperately need their own special form of entities, but present dwarf fortress entities not provide much options as regards creatures that are both fractious and predatory but also more intelligent than animals. 

[GoblinCookie]

So here it is, the long-awaited elf-release.  There are now such a thing as drow in the game for everyone who wants them to be in the game.  There are also the proof of the superiority of nurture over nature which are the Ondonti, the peaceful and nice orcs raised originally by priests of Eldath; before being enslaved by the Zhent's, because what better match for good orcs than evil humans.

Next up is a release focusing upon animals.  My general ambition is to make sure that there are animal people and giant versions of everything, except for sentient races derived from offworld.  This means we will probably be able to encounter our evolutionary ancestors the australopithecus and have human people with a taste preference for their meat, which really doesn't make them cannibals .  I also see a large number of animal related mods running about the place, I feel I will round them up and take the animals out (no sentient creatures) to add to this mod.  If I do not feel too impatient (this is unlikely) I may also do the same with various monster manuals. 

After that there are two other releases, both human themed before I will consider this mod essentially complete.  Both of them are about humans, the first will add humans of a mixed background in the sense of being of the general racial type (as opposed to a specific culture).  The second will add humans of specific cultural backgrounds, (like Baldur's Gate, Amn and so on) mixed in with both will be further non-human creatures and also cults that may be drawn from a number of racial backgrounds.  The first generic humans will have generated governments, because Toady One is headed to expand this feature of the game widely and will also be non-playable as a result.  A few of the specific human groups will be playable, but some will not be able to exist because of certain mechanics not being there (like magic). 

Once the second human release is completed I will compile a manual, draw out graphics for everything and then declare completion.  Having graphics will allow me to fit nicely into the Steam release when it comes out as well.

[Pvt. Pirate]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus#Inconsistent_taxonomy
maybe it would be wiser to do the cut between setient and nonsentient beings somewhere a little lower or leave a gap there. Also those beings don't appear in D&D Lore, so we could easily ignore their realworld existence.

[GoblinCookie]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus#Inconsistent_taxonomy
maybe it would be wiser to do the cut between setient and nonsentient beings somewhere a little lower or leave a gap there. Also those beings don't appear in D&D Lore, so we could easily ignore their realworld existence.

It is not about D&D lore, it is about the consistency of the Dwarf Fortress lore, (which itself is basically a D&D setting's lore ).  How the DF world seems to work as far as biology in general is concerned is that there is a basic creature, a giant version of that creature and a sentient version of that creature.  For some reason the civilized sentient races of the world seem not to follow the general biological rules, there isn't a dwarf, a giant dwarf and a superhuman dwarf.  Presumably what must have happened is that the dwarf was originally a some-animal-person and then both the animal plus the giant version of it died out, leaving only the dwarf alive.  This is fine for a single case, but why can we not have the dwarf animal root still alive as is the normal situation?

Australopithecus is basically in between we are in dwarf fortress terms, australopithecus people.  There are enough species of them to probably make real-life ancestors for dwarves and elves rather easily, but will need to make up fictional creatures for a lot of them because they have strange colors, like green and gold.  The problem is that nobody seems to know which species of australopithecus we actually evolved from.  They seem to be grouped into gracile and robust australopithecus, we certainly derive from the former rather than the latter, so it might be best just to gloss over the exact species differences and go for gracile VS robust australopithecus, the latter could be the ancestors of dwarves.  I would then make up some fictional ape-like creature for elves to evolve from, so only humans and dwarves would have [MUNDANE] ancestors.

[Pvt. Pirate]

okay, that way it makes sense again.

[GoblinCookie]

It is sort of predictable, I finish a release, I end up playing the game, I end up playing the game in adventure mode and then I spot things that need fixing.  I had noted that the new elves were being a little too successful, 'carpeting' entire continents with their settlements.  That was because I implemented the anti-carpeting measure of restricting settlement to rivers after I wrote the raws for the elves not before, then forget to implement them for the new elves.

I also did a shoddy job of my new 'wing' harpy entity (the default vanilla harpies) because while I transferred them to a forest retreat I still left a lot of tags as they were for a dark fortress. 

[GoblinCookie]

I noticed that a group of drow was naming itself after the dwarf god Berronar Truesilver, they can no longer use [GOOD] words to name stuff.

[GoblinCookie]

I noticed that the inferior norothor and thuldar's of the Duergar were missing their [SITE] tokens.  This was not a problem, except in Post-Gen when it is possible for empty caves to be colonised by cave civs which previously were 1-site only.

[GoblinCookie]

I thought that the drow and orogs had non-surface entities but was wrong.  I also thought that there would also be more than one sister of Synnoria.  These things are now the case.

[GoblinCookie]

When my world the Environment of Oxymorons stopped generating from it's seed with the last subrelease there was a lot of hair-pulling to be done.  The problem it turns out was that I had not given the orog and drow creature the necessary tags for a layer-linked creature.  This was causing crashes to happen, I can now manage to generate medium worlds again.  I also fixed some duplicate [ASSERTIVE] tokens in the Drow entity.  I think I will now go through all the layer-linked creatures in the game to see if they are all actually working to see if I can get large worlds working again, but that is tommorow.

[GoblinCookie]

As I said I would, I went through the [LAYER_LINKED] entities and found that a number of them, such as the Grimlocks were missing vital information.  Doing so SEEMS to have fixed the major cause of instability that had been bugging me for a while, I finally have managed to create a large world which I could not do for quite a while; it seems that having layer linked entities lacking the needed info about level and biome causes a major memory hole in the game, which causes it to crash. 

[GoblinCookie]

While trying in vain to generate more functional large worlds it dawned on me, where are the trolls?  It seems that I broke the entity that the trolls have, either by adding in a [CHAT_WORTHY] leader that isn't the big boss, by defining what site they would have twice or both.  That meant that only worlds with no trolls didn't crash, so all my worlds had no trolls in them therefore.

[GoblinCookie]

It turned out I hadn't fixed the trolls afterall.  The problem was that I left out the [SITE] token for the trollop (I keep doing this!) which would not normally crash the game but is still an error, except said token contains a [LAW_MAKING] and a dark pits civ cannot have two of these at the civ level, even if all but one are not [CHAT_WORTHY].  The problem with large worlds crashing on completion of world-gen persists, the problem is I actually need the seed of a world that will reliably crash to test it.  I wonder if Dwarf Fortress will accept words as a seed to generate a world?

[GoblinCookie]

Having spent weeks trying to track it down, I finally located the bug that was causing large worlds to crash.  I did it by reverting back to vanilla and adding more files from my mod gradually.  Using my own name as a random seed, I generated a world called the Mainland of Representations (with all the language files in) and kept generating it over again with more files until it stopped working.  The bug was in the creature_direforged_megabeast file and was actually contained in the walker in frost entry.  I had to recreate the whole creature raw from scratch to eliminate invisible file corruption, but it seems to have worked since when I copied the modified file into the main mod I was able to generate Mainland of Representations without it crashing.