Print

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

[leontas2007]

Hello people!

There are many thinks I want to create, what I really like with games rts or rpg in the quantity of the races. Well I want to create my own race. I have seen the wiki but.....I didn't manage to do something. Then what I did was to copy the dwarf race and then paste it on a new .txt and then modify it. The problem was that I didn't understand anything. So the problem here is that I have no idea how to create playable races for dwarf fortress mode and adventure mode.

At first I don't to create anything special, like a flying monkey, or a tentacle werepanda or anything weird like that. I want to create somthing simple to understand how modding works. I have races with backstory and so on (I have created them for my d&d sessions) but bringing them into dwarf fortress is a problem. So the questions are

How to create a race?
How to make races playable?

To simple questions with very big and time consuming answers. I hope someone has the time to explain or make an expample or can give me any clue to begin my quest to be a modder...

Thanks for your time

[smakemupagus]

I think most of us learned by studying/deconstructing their favorite mods that they use as a player, and using the wiki.

Start with working raws, from vanilla or other mods.  Change one thing at a time.  Don't change anything unless you understand what it does, using the wiki as a reference.

If you're really stuck on something, come ask for help.  If afterwards you look back and think the wiki description was inadequate, go back and upgrade it for the next person.

Reactions are a good place to start because (a) there a thousand mods with tons of working examples for you to look at (b) the wiki explains their structure pretty thoroughly (c) understanding them will help you learn the logic/structure of the "language" used throughout the raws.

[Greiger]

I learned most of my creature and entity modding by taking the vanilla humans¹ and looking through the creature tags page of the wiki and adding the ones I wanted my race to have while keeping an eye out for tags I didn't want them to have and making sure they were removed.  Then after adding and removing a few tags, running a test, making sure things worked as desired, then added more.

Testing was just a matter of duplicating the dwarf entity and putting the creature in it and changing the entity id.   Figured out what tags worked, which tags didn't, and kept a close eye on the errorlog for tags that I used wrong.  Then modified as necessary.  Once I got the race more or less acting as desired I moved on to the entity raws.  Doing the same thing as I did with the creature, adding and removing tags as seemed sensible. 

Nowdays you can use the arena test mode for most of the creature testing, without needing to create a test entity. but you'll wanna do some live world testing as well since not all problems show up in arena mode.  For example the [CARNIVORE] tag appears to work just fine in the arena, but when placed in worldgen the critters are unable to obtain enough food to expand or sometimes even survive.

And yes, if you have the opportunity starting with reactions is a good way to learn the raw structure.  But you also learn best when you are motivated and inspired, so there's no need to start there if you can't think of any reactions you actually want to make.

¹I used humans, but you want to start with a creature as close as possible to your desired race.  Only exception I can think of is animalmen.  Those use fancy shenanigans in vanilla, use humans or a similar modded critter as a base for them instead.

[pisskop]

Yup.  I literally copied the human creature for my first change.
  Then I shamelessly stole another mod's critter.

[Greiger]

It suddenly occured to me that maybe the two masters above and my dabbling self may be overthinking things as well.

Making a new creature (Which you need to do to make a new race unless yer just making a new race out of a vanilla critter) is simply a matter taking a block of text from creature_(whatever).txt copying the information in that block of text and pasting it at the end of the file (bad practice but fine til you know more about how the files themselves work) and then changing the name of the creature in the [CREATURE:(whatever)] tag to something unique after you pasted it.  It will act identicle to what it was cloned from and be pretty much impossible to tell the difference ingame, but that is a barebones new creature.

Making a new race or civilization is more or less the same thing, except the entity_default.txt.  Copy a block, like say [Entity:Mountain] paste it at the bottom of the file and name it something like [ENTITY:MOUNTAIN2] or [ENTITY:MY_FIRST_LAMPSHADE_MAN_RACE].

Making a civilisation use your customization is just a matter of changing [CREATURE:DWARF] (or what have you) in the entity block to [CREATURE:LAMPSHADE_MAN] or whatever the creature's ID in the creature_(whatever).txt file is.

To make a civ playable in dwarf mode, you add [CIV_CONTROLLABLE] to the entity file, adventure mode just needs    [ADVENTURE_TIER:#] (the number is just it's order in the adventure mode race list) and/or [INDIV_CONTROLLABLE]. of course if the block you copied already has these you don't need to add them again.

[Putnam]

The thing is that you don't need to understand until... you need to. Like, I still spend a very large chunk of my modding on the wiki, looking up tokens.

[leontas2007]

Everything is so complicated, now I see that ecery creature has body parts, you have to add their bones their brain.

How those work in the game!?

I am reading the tokens right now on the wiki and everything is listed with letters, not with categories.

What is this "caste"?

EDIT: I think I understanded how to create civilizations, its simpler than creatures

[Badger Storm]

"Caste" refers to variations within a creature species.  The most common ones are male and female, but others can exist as well: in addition to their male and female (queen) castes, ant people also have worker and soldier castes, which are functionally genderless and thus sterile (though they're called "ant woman" because worker and soldier ants are female IRL)  One hypothetical use of castes might be to make two kind of goats, one that produces milk (regular goats) and one that makes no milk but has fleece you can shear (angora or cashmere goats).

Just about all of my creatures have been altered from an existing base.  My bison, for example, was modded from a yak, and my first iteration of the dire wolf from a giant dingo.  Also, please do be careful - a small mistake could wreak all kinds of havoc on your game in places you wouldn't imagine!

[smakemupagus]

What is this "caste"?

Have you read yet
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Modding_guide


http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Modding_guide#Creature_castes
specifically for your question by the way.

In general i suggest you follow the reverse-engineering, trial and error approach, but this page is the best effort of  community to try provide a starting point for people.  I'm sure it's not perfect but it's unlikely anyone is going to just make a forum post that is as comprehensive as that guide.

[mineforce]

Is this a good place to ask questions?


I need someone to explain to me how the body detail plan thingy works. I'm making creatures from scratch.

[Putnam]

Is this a good place to ask questions?


I need someone to explain to me how the body detail plan thingy works. I'm making creatures from scratch.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=140015.0

Also, it explains it pretty clearly in the vanilla BDP file.